Gotland Read online

I searched for the tag. Kate’s street name was that fierce, many-headed beast in The Odyssey, although typically she spelled it ‘Skilla’.

  ‘Not one of yours?’

  ‘No, Mum. But isn’t it the coolest thing you’ve ever seen? She’s caught it. How it feels doing this stuff. The freedom of it.’

  I studied the flying girl and told her I thought it was very good but what a shame it was so hidden away. ‘If it was hung in a gallery …’

  Kate groaned and threw up her hands. ‘The artist likes being anonymous. She doesn’t want to be famous or make money out of it.’

  ‘You think I don’t understand.’

  ‘I don’t see how you can if you say things like that.’

  I knew my role and I had to play it. I could hardly tell Kate what I really thought. That it had a certain nobility. I thought of how many of Kate’s school friends regularly posted their party snaps and their every mood and deed on Facebook. Or texted their naked bodies to one another. Yet Kate and her small group had discovered the thrill of not being known. Of being mysterious. And of making something that couldn’t be sold. You had to admire that.

  As for her own work, Kate said, I would have to find it myself.

  The air had gone dusky, the street teeming with birds, chattering and screeching as if holding some frantic, last-minute party before night fell. Life going on regardless. We’d been walking in silence when, a few blocks from home, Kate stopped. Something was clearly on her mind. What would happen now, she asked, with Dad and work? I didn’t want to think about it. I said I didn’t see why anything should change. But she knew very well everything would.

  I reached for her hand but she pulled away and started toying with her bracelets, shoving them up to her elbow and then letting them drop with a jarring clatter.

  I told her that I honestly didn’t know and that I’d tell her as soon as I did. There must have been something in my voice that pulled her up because she peered at me and said, ‘You all right, Mum? Are you angry with me?’

  It wasn’t Kate I was angry with. I was angry with a dead man. Angry with Gerald for dying. Angry with him for luring David into politics and then anointing him. Not that it really happened like that. Gerald had never pressured David to run, they had never done any deals. Gerald had simply planted the seed and smoothed the way.

  All those years ago, when Gerald raised the idea, David had laughed as if it was too absurd to contemplate and no more had been said. Then one day, without warning, David had nonchalantly tossed it, like a hand grenade, into a conversation with me. When I think about it, hand grenade isn’t the right form of munition. Is there a bomb that can detonate slowly over a period of years, wreaking internal damage but leaving the outside of things intact?

  I watched the idea slowly take hold of him and kept my doubts to myself. I wasn’t going to be the one to stop him. When David was made professor, I was happy for both of us. He’d got what he’d always wanted. Or what I thought he’d always wanted. There’d be no more talk of politics now. We went out to the best French restaurant in the city to celebrate.

  ‘Here’s to the end of the line!’ David said, raising his glass of champagne.

  I stared at him, dumbfounded.

  Instead of basking in his appointment, he brooded all evening. Said he couldn’t stand the thought of what lay ahead, the same old thing for the next twenty years. What he really wanted to do, he said, watching me closely, was to put all those years of thinking to the test. Gerald was right. Life in politics was the next logical step. He couched the whole argument in the sophisticated language of political philosophy, but this was what it boiled down to: Could you hold power and not lose sight of what really mattered? Was the problem the system or the people in it? Of course, no politician went into the game expecting to sell their soul. And the whole business was rarely about taking sides at a moment of truth. The real danger was death by a thousand cuts. All those compromises that left you hollow. But what if you approached it like a scientific experiment? If you treated yourself as a guinea pig? If you had nothing to lose? He could be so convincing when he wanted. By the time the meal was over, I almost believed it might be worth it.

  David won his seat, but the party stayed in the wilderness for seven years. It didn’t discourage him, though. Being in opposition only whetted his appetite. During our university days together, I had campaigned for David and loved it. We were a tight band of friends, all in it together. But the party was different. Too professional, too much like a machine. I knew I could do more good in the classroom teaching children to read, encouraging them to question and to think for themselves, than I could stuffing envelopes or sitting at his side on the campaign trail.

  Now the government was on its last legs and the whole country was hungry for change. An election would be called in the next six months. I’d always assumed that, under Gerald’s leadership, David would be given a junior ministry. He was a relative newcomer. There were plenty of others more senior and more entitled. I quietly hoped that his outspokenness would work against him. But in recent months, things had begun to shift in his favour. He didn’t dissemble. People liked what they heard and saw. And Gerald, too, had become more bold in singling him out as the one to watch.

  We were a few streets from home when I was stopped by the sight of a vacant block that hadn’t been there before. All this space and sky. The brutality of it. Only a few days ago, a large Edwardian weatherboard – not unlike our own – with an overgrown garden and a fragrant lilac tree out the front had stood here. I had been fond of that house and that tree. Now there was nothing but a pile of rubbish and bulldozed dirt. How could it happen? Something so solid, so permanent, something that had housed so much life, gone into the void. I thought of Gerald and hot tears welled up in my eyes. I reached again for Kate. This time she didn’t pull away. It was a rare thing to be permitted to hold my seventeen-year-old daughter’s hand. I squeezed it gently, remembering the soft cushiony feel it used to have when she was a girl.

  Now it was firm and bony, like my own.

  2

  GOTLAND

  September 2010

  We are not taught, when we are young, that there are forms of love for which there are no names. Which do not fit into the existing compartments of romantic love, love for family, love for one’s homeland, love for friends, love of God. So many of them go unrecognised or are forced to fit conventional moulds because we lack the imagination to see them for what they are. That love for a person might be inseparable from love of the place where they live. And that if the person were transplanted, not only would they pine and waste away, but your love for them would wither too. You might even end up hating each other. Or that love for a place might be inseparable from your memories of a loved one who introduced you to it, who sensed that you were in need of it.

  This is why Gotland is for me a constellation of things: the place itself, its layers of history and myth, its farawayness and the memories of Ros and Sven that are now inseparable from it. Above all, though, it is a state of mind. A breathing space within this strange life I find myself leading, a space that keeps me sane.

  As for Sven and me, what we have is a bit like the myth of the island’s origins. Sometimes it rises above the water. Sometimes it disappears. An intermittent relationship that comes and goes like the tides.

  It was two months after David had been made leader of the opposition and seven weeks before the federal election. I was in a kind of limbo between my old life and the one I’m living now. My sister, Ros, had left the island five days before, so it was just Sven and me. I was to head for London that evening and we knew it would be hard saying goodbye. Sven thought it might help if I took back something I could carry around in my pocket and hold in my hands.

  We drove to the far side of the island where there was a beach known for its abundance of fossils, and finally reached a gate blocking the road. Sven jumped out to open it while I sat in the idling truck and watched him. It gave me such pleasure to wat
ch him do even the most simple things. Beyond him lay the grassy foreshore and some cows wading through the shallows. I will always remember those cows in the sea. How bucolic yet incongruous they looked. I have no idea what they were doing. Eating seaweed perhaps?

  As the truck crawled down the dirt track, I looked back over my shoulder to where a corrugated, stony field rolled out behind us like unbroken waves in the slanting, late-afternoon sunshine.

  I asked Sven about them. The ridges in the soil.

  ‘The rippling fields?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sven loved explaining things. He rolled his lips inward, thinking. His big shoulders braced as he held the wheel. After the last Ice Age, he said, the island was hidden beneath the waters of the Baltic. Over time – he wasn’t sure how long – the sea level began to drop and limestone cliffs rose out of the water. Storms threw up rocks and gravel, creating new beaches as the shoreline retreated, leaving in their wake these rippling fields.

  Rippling fields. His English was fluent but occasionally he would come out with phrases like this one that made me smile. Apart from the grassy ridges, the land was featureless and bare, except for a distant red lighthouse with two white stripes round its middle. We followed a track that petered out at a pebbly beach where we felt the full force of the wind off the sea.

  Sven walked ahead while I dawdled over the shingles, my eyes peeled for fossils. Near the shoreline lay a dead, bloated seal, its head thrown back and mouth stretched wide in a silent howl. Its tail twitched with the surge of the waves. Crouching at its side, I could see clusters of tiny shellfish on its flanks and belly. A seagull hovered near its eyes. I shooed it away, knowing what would happen when I turned my back.

  It didn’t take long to find something promising. A small cylindrical fragment of glittery pink segments around an interior column. Then another and then another. Every shingle, it seemed, was a shattered work of art. Sven had told me the beach was littered with fossils but I hadn’t quite believed him. Soon my coat pockets were bulging with them: rocks etched with ghostly shell-negatives or the traces of burrowing organisms; pendant-shaped stones with tubular stems in relief, like scraps of some ancient frieze; tiny cones in the shape of miniature cornucopias and domed pebbles of honeycombed coral worn almost smooth. Messages from prehistory. Messages I could take home with me. I have them lined up on my desk here at the Lodge and often roll them around in my hands for the comfort they bring.

  Every new place is a puzzle of one kind or another, but this island was more of a puzzle than most: a once-tropical, equatorial reef now marooned in a sub-Arctic sea. I tried to imagine the tectonic plates shifting and colliding until the island found itself washed up here, like those tiny shellfish on the flanks of the seal. I could vaguely understand the mechanics of it but the span of time defeated me: those hundreds of millions of years. Eons beyond all imagining.

  Sven called out from further up the beach, his silhouetted shape stark against the bleached shore. As I moved towards him, the wind belled out his coat, turning him into a hunchback, a character who had stepped out of a fairytale. Then he straightened up and looked normal again. When I reached him, he held out his palm to reveal a turban-shaped shell, perfectly preserved.

  I took it and turned it over and smiled. ‘Lucky you.’ I brought out my cache and passed each piece to him, one by one. ‘I could spend all day looking.’

  ‘All day?’

  ‘If there was time.’

  He passed the rocks back to me. ‘But there isn’t.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s always next time.’ His grin was lopsided.

  I stared out to sea and said nothing. I didn’t know how I would feel when I got home. How the island and everything that had happened here would look from that distance. All I knew was that right at that moment I didn’t want to leave.

  Sven gave a faint sigh and put his arm around me and we walked towards the rocky headland and the lighthouse that marked the end of the peninsula.

  Afterwards, we drove into the town through the medieval wall, the arched portal only wide enough for one car at a time, and up the steep cobbled road to Sven’s house on top of the hill. We sat side by side on the bench in the front garden, which overlooked the town. We had reached a point where companionable silence was preferable to trying to talk. The things we wanted to say were too big for conversation. Directly below us, at the bottom of the slope, people wandered the lawn and inspected the well-tended flowerbeds that surround the island’s sombre cathedral: a heavy structure of pale stone with curvaceous, Slavic-looking turrets of stained wood. It was something out of a fairytale: more impressive than beautiful. Sven complained that it blocked his view.

  Warmed by the midday sun, I peeled off my jumper and put my hands to my cheeks. ‘I think I got a little burnt.’

  Sven inspected my face. ‘You did.’ He touched the bridge of my nose, which is always the first spot to colour. ‘And here,’ he said, touching my forehead.

  With his face so close I was struck once again by the sheer fact of his presence. And of the island itself. And of all the years during which we knew nothing of each other. Down at the port, the ferry from the mainland had just arrived, its two red funnels emblazoned in white with the letter ‘G’. It was only a week ago that I had stepped off that ferry, a week as full as a year. And this evening I would board it again. I would watch the island growing smaller and smaller until it was no more than a teardrop in a hazy sea.

  The bells of the cathedral began to toll. A jangly, interminable melody followed by twelve pure, solemn chimes. After the last note had faded, Sven patted my knee and stood up.

  3

  MELBOURNE

  November 2012

  Not long ago, I was invited back to the school where I used to teach. It’s only two years since I left but when the driver pulled up outside the grounds, I was amazed by how much had changed. It’s a small school, just the two original red-brick buildings from the 1880s. Or it was in my time there.

  I don’t often get back to Melbourne. Our house has been rented out and – as I regularly tell the students I speak to in the schools I visit all around the country – most of my time is spent in Canberra at the prime minister’s official residence, the Lodge. No matter how many times I say this, it still feels unreal, as though I am talking about someone else, telling the children a bedtime story. If I am asked, I admit that no, the Lodge doesn’t really feel like home. I’m always aware that I am just one of many who have passed through. I don’t tell them that I have no desire to put my stamp on this house or refurbish it in any way, as many other prime ministers’ wives have done. It has always been my belief that the road to hell is paved with renovations. I think of myself as a house-sitter. I am, however, thankful for the front fence which one of the wives had built in the late 1960s to shield the Lodge from the traffic and peering eyes along Adelaide Avenue. You spend enough time on show in this position without living in a display home. I sometimes wonder whether the previous occupants ever resented the heaviness of the architecture, or longed, as I do, to be back in their own homes. And whether they, too, felt like a fraud.

  As for the changes at the school, the big, obvious ones were the oval – once a dust-bowl in summer and a bog in winter – which was now a sea of dense, brilliant green artificial turf, and the smart new hall that stood where the toilet block used to be. The school day was over but the children who went to aftercare were still racing around, doing all the things kids do when let loose from the classroom. Playing soccer on the gleaming new synthetic oval, shooting for goals on the basketball court, chasing one another around the peppercorn trees. Shouting, screaming, laughing. I recognised most of them and was struck by how they’d grown: got lanky or curvy or quieter or more boisterous. Darting among them like sparrows were smaller children I didn’t know, the new intake of preps who would have been my students if I’d still been there.

  Although I’d taught all levels up to grade six, I’d made a specialit
y of teaching preps. Because most had not yet learned to disguise their feelings, you knew where you stood with them. And when something clicked, when something sank in, you saw it immediately on their faces. I particularly loved the way they would say whatever came into their heads. Sure, it was hard to get them to concentrate for any period of time but there were plenty of rewards. At the beginning of each year, most of them could barely recite the alphabet and by the end, they were starting to read.

  As I watched the preps walking arm in arm with their friends, ogling the older kids and clamouring around the teacher on duty, it came back to me how they were always bursting. Bursting to go to the toilet, bursting for a drink, bursting with something to say, bursting with curiosity. Until I stopped teaching and found myself mostly in the company of adults, I hadn’t realised how much I’d thrived on this restless, explosive energy; how it awakens the forgotten child who lives inside you. Now, when I do talks at schools, it is all very formal and restrained. I am a visitor, painfully conscious of my role as the prime minister’s wife. There is no sense of connection with the place or the students.

  For a few minutes I sat behind the tinted windows of the government car and watched, surprised that I felt so choked up. I hadn’t anticipated that coming back would affect me like this. I’d worried about how my colleagues might treat me, whether their behaviour would be strained or snide, but I hadn’t thought about what it would be like to see the children again and be reminded of who I had been, and how at sea I am now.

  The car must have been spotted by someone in the office because the next thing I knew, Nikos was hurrying down the front steps and heading towards us. When Joe, my driver, saw him coming, he jumped out of the car and opened my door. I knew that I had to let him, much as it embarrassed me. This deference goes with the official position. It’s got nothing to do with me. But I can see how you could, very easily, come to believe otherwise. How you could start to think you were something special; that you really were more important than other people. How you might come to believe it as a defence against the hollowness you felt even though you appeared to have everything.