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Chapter 11

Louise

I have a searing headache by midmorning. So much so that I have to down tools and go outside to get some air. Unfortunately, headaches are something of a professional hazard for me. It’s the combined effect of the close, detailed work and the residual smell of the solvent I’m using to remove the varnish. The gallery spends a lot of money on fume extraction, and we’re told to take regular breaks, but the latter is easier said than done. Progress is very slow, and it’s natural to want to keep at the job until you can see that you’ve made some headway. Ever tried to remove a sticker from a pane of glass using your fingernail? It can take forever, but something keeps you there, picking away at those gluey fragments.

Clutching a takeaway coffee, I cross the road to Hyde Park. It’s a hot, airless day, and I sit under the shade of one of the fig trees that line the main walking avenues. Some lunchtimes I wear my runners and go for a walk. There’s plenty to see: the Archibald Fountain, Sandringham Gardens and ANZAC War Memorial within the park; the Supreme Court, St Mary’s Cathedral and the Australian Museum along the boundaries.

My coffee tastes good. I’m yet to have a bad coffee in Sydney. In fact, the coffee here is better than the coffee in London or New York. Who would have thought? My phone rings and vibrates in my handbag, muffled yet insistent.

‘Hello?’

‘Louise, it’s Dan.’

Dan? I quickly search my headache-afflicted brain for a Dan. There’s one in the photography department, I think.

‘Joe’s brother,’ the voice prompts, and immediately I have an image: the barbecuing journalist.

‘Oh, yes, Dan, hello.’

‘Joe gave me your number.’

‘I assumed that,’ I say drily.

‘I hope you don’t mind … I asked him because I think I can help you.’

‘Help me?’ I seem to be a step behind in this conversation. I take a sip of coffee in the hope that it will somehow help me catch up.

‘Find your mother.’

Oh. Now I understand. That kind of help.

‘I don’t work that far from you,’ he continues after a heavy silence. ‘I’m in Park Street. Maybe we can meet for a coffee. Or a drink after work.’

A drink sounds like the better option. Dutch courage. For some reason I find everything about this call quite unsettling.

We agree on a place and time — outside the gallery, Thursday at 6pm — and I hang up, scared, nervous, warily excited.

Never, in all the years I’ve been looking for my mother, has anyone offered to help.

Is this a sign that things are about to change? That this time my search is going to be successful? Quite suddenly, I have the strongest feeling that she is in this city, and that it’s only a matter of weeks before we’re reconciled. Once all the tears and recriminations have passed, we could meet for lunch. She’d wait for me outside work and we’d walk through this park with linked arms and wide, happy smiles.

Reality intrudes as my phone beeps, a diary reminder popping up: there’s a department meeting in ten minutes.

Draining the rest of my coffee quickly, I leave my fig tree and hurry back to work. The foyer of the gallery is dark and cool but my thoughts are still outside in the burning sunshine. I feel confused, off-kilter, as I take the lift.

My head is in such chaos I cannot even tell if I still have the headache.

Sydney sizzles over the next three days, and the media declares it the warmest week on record. This I can believe. Our apartment isn’t air-conditioned. Joe maintains that there’s only a week or two like this each summer and it’s not worth the cost of installing air-conditioning. This morning, after a hot, restless night, I accused him of being one of those horrible penny-pinching landlords, hiding behind the guise of a struggling novelist.

At least the gallery is properly air-conditioned: it has to be, as excessive heat and humidity can damage the artworks. We’ve had record numbers through the doors, tourists seeking reprieve from the blistering heat. At lunchtime I join the tourists ambling through the Picasso exhibition that opened last week. My first walk-through was a hurried one before the exhibition opened to the public. Today I can take my time. The technique is exquisite, but I try to blot this out so I can respond to the work purely on an instinctual level. Sometimes it’s better to know nothing at all about art, I often say to Emma. I truly mean this, even though she thinks I’m just trying to make her feel better about her ignorance. When we first look at a piece of art, we shouldn’t be analysing the technique or the supposed uniqueness or even the materials used. We should be looking for one thing only: an emotional connection.

The sun has dropped by the time I leave work, taking away the scorching, relentless heat and leaving behind a balmy evening. Dan is waiting outside, as arranged. He’s wearing a blue shirt — open at the neck, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows — and charcoal trousers. His skin is a shade darker than Joe’s, a light golden colour that’s particularly attractive against the blue of his shirt. There’s a slight sheen of perspiration on his forehead.

‘Maybe we should go for a swim instead of a drink,’ is the first thing he says to me.

‘Once you can find a corner of the harbour that doesn’t have any sharks!’

The city has been setting records in relation to shark sightings as well as the heat. Apparently, the warm water has been luring the sharks closer to shore. We both laugh, and I forget how anxious I’ve been about this meeting, how the thought of it has kept me awake at night every bit as much as the heat has.

We talk about the circling sharks and other deadly Australian creatures as we walk through the park and some streets, the names of which I am beginning to remember. We end up in an enormous outdoor pub, pulsing with people and music. Dan takes on the crowd at the bar, while my lightning-quick eyes spot a group preparing to leave. I negotiate — through gestures, nods and smiles — permission to take their table, and I’m perched on a stool with a smug smile by the time Dan returns with two bottles of beer.

‘I’m impressed.’ He nods at the table and flashes an approving grin.

‘I’m well trained. This place is virtually empty compared to the pubs in Dublin.’

He laughs again, and so do I.

Then there’s silence. I know what’s coming, and I can feel my mirth draining away.

‘Tell me about your mother,’ he invites.

‘There’s not much to tell. She was there one day, gone the next.’ Suddenly, my mouth is dry, and I take a long drink from my bottle. ‘She took her purse and some clothes. She didn’t leave a note.’

The facts are basically that. Quite straightforward, really. The complexity was in the feelings, my feelings. The terrible confusion I felt in those first few days. What had just happened? What had I done to cause it? Was Simon to blame? Had he done something to her? Could I trust him? Maybe this was all a horrible dream, the people and the setting distorted yet chillingly realistic. Or maybe Mum had made a simple mistake, forgotten to tell us something, a missing fact that would explain everything. Or maybe it was the police who had made the mistake, who had neglected to follow up an important lead, or missed some other vital piece of evidence. The confusion was followed by hurt, embarrassment and shame. Nobody else’s mother had done this. Why had mine? It had something to do with me, any fool could see that. Standing in the school yard, hanging onto Ann-Marie’s hand for dear life, everyone knowing my name and the terrible thing my mother had done to me: See that girl over there? She’s the one whose mother ran away from her.

The confusion and shame morphed into anger, and by the time I reached my teens, rebellion. If she didn’t care about me, then I didn’t care either. If she could do what she wanted — with no thought for other people’s feelings — then so could I. Emma seemed to feel everything to the same degree as I did, even though her own mother was very much present. We clung to each other, first as nervous little girls who had lost their trust in grown-ups, later as reckless teenagers who thought — wrongly — that the worst thing possible had already happened, so why not push the limits as far as we could?

‘Were there domestic problems?’ Dan asks now.

‘You could say so, yes.’

Memories flash behind my eyes. Screaming arguments. Shattered crockery, picture frames, dreams. Long periods of hostile silence, strangely more bleak and ominous than the shouting.

‘And you think she’s here, in Sydney?’

‘I have no idea, really.’ My beer is almost empty, and yet I’m still desperately thirsty. I wet my lips. ‘I know she’s not in Ireland: the police searched extensively for her. And I know she’s not in England. That’s where she grew up, so it made sense to look there before anywhere else.’

‘Is her family still in England?’

‘There’s an uncle, Bob. He has a farm in Dorset. My grandparents died a long time ago.’

I managed to track Bob down when I was working in London. He was astounded to meet me, to find out that Janet had a daughter, and he had a grand-niece. My mother ran away from home when she was sixteen, and apparently my grandparents never got over the heartbreak. Unhappiness and bitterness ate at them until their health deteriorated. My mother, by Bob’s account, had wrecked her parents’ lives before going on to wreck mine.

‘I can’t believe she left you, too,’ he said, shaking his grizzly head in disbelief.

Dan is still asking questions. ‘So how did you know for certain that your mother didn’t return to Dorset, or another part of England?’

‘I hired a private investigator.’ The investigator — Kenneth Duckworth, such an English-sounding name — cost an absolute fortune, all my savings. He tried, really tried, and was as disappointed as I was when we didn’t find a trace of her. ‘He thought she must have gone overseas. He suggested America and Australia as two of the more likely destinations.’

Dan looks doubtful, and I really can’t blame him.

‘Did she ever mention Australia?’ he probes. ‘Can you recall any special connection she might have had with this country?’

He’s a good journalist. He knows what questions to ask, how to peel back the layers. The problem is that very little lies beneath.

‘Only that I seem to remember her saying something once when Home and Away was on the telly: “I want to go there some day.” I’m sure that’s what she said, or the gist of it anyway. But maybe she wasn’t being serious. Or maybe I misheard her. It’s all so long ago now.’

I laugh, embarrassed by the sheer flimsiness of this ‘connection’. But flimsy or not, it’s all I have to go on: Kenneth’s best guess on immigration patterns in the 1990s, and the vague memory of a comment my mother may or may not have made while watching an Australian soap opera. Pathetic.

‘How about America? Any connections there? Friends? Family?’

‘Not that I know of.’ No American friends or family, not even a tenuous connection with a particular TV show. ‘I took up an assignment in New York last year, specifically so I could investigate the possibility of her being somewhere in America. I trawled through all the phone directories and whatever online records I could get access to, but found no trace of her whatsoever.’

Dan takes a while to think. ‘So you take on assignments in countries where you think she might be …’ He offers this as a statement of fact rather than a question.

‘Yes. My work is good like that. There aren’t very many of us — conservators, that is — so contract positions are often filled with international candidates.’ I emit another short, bitter laugh. ‘Going to a new country isn’t a problem, it’s where to start when I get there. Getting my head around the different records and processes and laws. And it doesn’t help that everyone everywhere is completely obsessed with privacy.’

He takes my hand. Just like that. As though it’s the most natural thing in the world. ‘It must be really difficult. Living with this.’

The understanding, the knowing, in his eyes is every bit as astonishing as his touch. If I hadn’t seen his larger-than-life mother for myself, I would think that she had absconded just like mine did. I nod, unable to speak. My mouth feels as though it’s on fire.

We stay like this for a few moments, my hand loosely in his, the music swelling around us.

‘I’ll get you another one of those.’ He nods at my drink, lets go of my hand and slides off his stool.

Though he has disappeared into the crowd, his empathy is still here. It comforts me for a short while. Until I begin to resent it.

‘Tell me how you can help.’ I’m abrupt when he returns with two more beers. I pick up the bottle he has assigned to me, gulping almost half of it down.

‘I’m an investigative journalist. I know how to access information, particularly in this country. I have contacts in government departments, and access to newspaper records and community notices and any number of other resources where your mother’s name might turn up.’

I look at him through narrowed eyes. ‘What’s in it for you?’

‘First and foremost, the satisfaction of helping you out …’

‘And?’

‘And I wouldn’t be entirely honest if I didn’t admit that I’m intrigued by the story.’

I’m stunned. ‘You want to write about it?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know yet. Would you let me write about it?’

I pause. ‘Maybe.’

Our eyes meet. Dan Connelly. Brother to Joe and Samuel. Son of Mary and Richie. Investigative journalist, working in Park Street. Knows what questions to ask, how to get to the bottom of things. Shows extraordinary empathy. I can’t help wondering if the empathy is part and parcel of his nature, or if he learnt it on the job, from all the sad, hopeless cases he’s investigated over the years.

His gaze doesn’t waver. His brown eyes are soft, evoking trust.

Do I have a problem with the possibility of him writing an article about this? No, none that I can think of. In fact, I would love a fresh perspective: a clear clinical analysis of the ambiguity I’ve lived with all these years.

If I put aside everything that I know about Dan Connelly so far — his family, his profession, his personality — and rely solely on my instincts and nothing more, when I look into those warm and quite lovely eyes of his, I feel an unmistakeable attraction. Rather like the elusive pull I sometimes feel when I first look at a work of art.

An emotional connection.