Silver

Chapter 52 - then

In the morning, I checked the sheets. My mother was wrong. I hadn't bled.

Jarvis called the airline and moved his flight back so we could spend more time together. We fell asleep finally, and slept the light sleep of lovers skating on thin ice.

He woke me with a gentle kiss, 'Come on, it's past checkout time, we've got to go.' We showered hurriedly, we had no bags to pack, and left the hotel as we'd arrived the day before.

I missed our cocoon already. The sun seemed harsh and the traffic was noisy. We drove in his vintage hire car, and I watched his hands on the steering wheel.

'Take me somewhere strange and amazing,' he said.

'Sure, I know the perfect place.'

I directed him up to the Dandenong Mountains. It was more rugged out here, natural, like it used to be. There was no rubber lining the roads. The car wound up the mountain and sometimes there were gaps in the steel fencing along the cliff face. This area was full of desperates, people who'd chosen their own life partners. Many of them didn't work in a corporate job. They were labourers, childcare workers, cleaners. Many of them came down off the mountains to work closer to town. I'd heard some of them didn't even have an identity card, they lived off the grid.

When I was younger, mum used to warn me that if I didn't do my homework I'd end up in the Dandenongs, like it was a terrible place to be. But it looked beautiful to me. There were trees greeting the sky, ferns veiling the undergrowth, natural waterfalls trickling down rocks. There was the smell of pine and eucalyptus in the air and my ears popped as we travelled so high up the mountain.

I took Jarvis to William Rickett's Sanctuary. Dad had taken me there years ago. We walked around and looked at the clay sculptures of Indigenous people moulded into the rocky landscape. William Rickett had admired the Aborigines' relationship with nature and spent a lot of time in an Aboriginal community in the 1960s. This park was his statement that we are all custodians of the land that we live upon. There was something mystical and otherworldly about the sculptures, the way their busts emerged out of the rocks, the way their heads became gateways along the paths. Moss had spread around the sculptures and they were glazed in mist.

'It's beautiful here,' Jarvis marvelled. 'It's strange and amazing.' He squeezed my hand, appreciatively. 'You totally get me, Miss Sylvie.'

'You totally get me too.'

A family of four walked past. The parents looked older, maybe in their late thirties. They were holding hands. They were clearly desperates, he had that sun-stained worker look, from long days outdoors. They'd been blessed with a daughter and a son. The kids were chatty and playful. It was unusual to see two parents on an outing with their children. In my area, I only saw nannies accompanying children to the playground or the beach.

The little girl tripped over a rock. She cried as her father picked her up and sat her on his knee on a wooden bench. The mother rummaged in her handbag for a tissue. The brother looked over his mother's shoulder, as she dabbed the tissue on the little girl's knee. For some reason I couldn't stop staring.

'What is it Sylvie?' Jarvis asked, steering me away from the family.

'They look so close, don't they?' I said. 'The parents, they're completely present with their children. There's no zaplet screens, no work commitments distracting them, they're both there. How come we're brought up to believe that it's terrible to be a desperate? How come they're even called desperates? Isn't that a terrible name? Because in my view, they're luckier than us.'

'I haven't really thought about it before,' he said.

'What if I want to have children and bring them up myself, instead of having a nanny? Like they used to do in the olden days. What's the point of having children if you never spend any time with them?' We were walking up a path, winding our way up a hill. We paused by a sculpture, of an Aboriginal boy with wings like Cupid. 'Maybe we've lost the plot, maybe this is never the way it was supposed to be. Think about the Aborigines before the British arrived, the families used to do everything together. They'd hunt together, create art together, eat together, dance together. Everything Aboriginal children learnt was from their parents, or their grandparents, or their aunties and uncles. Now we're sent off to school, while parents work, all the time, no one does anything together. Is this civilization? I don't think so. This is separation. I'm talking without thinking really ... it's just this feeling I get, I can't really explain it ...'

'I think I understand what you're saying ... I just haven't thought about it that way before.' He grabbed my hand and pressed it against his lips.

'It's just ... say ... if I was with someone like you. If I had the choice to be with someone like you ... I think I'd want to be with you all the time.' I stood on my tippy toes and kissed him like I was searching for infinity.

It started to drizzle the soft rain of the rainforest. Mist settled into the mountain, the clouds floated low. A nearby stream gurgled.

'What if I don't want to work? What if I want to stay at home and raise my kids? What if that's the most important job there is? Why is everything in our society, and I'm not talking about the desperates here, about productivity?' I stamped a small stone out of my shoe. 'We're asset rich, but we're disconnected. I'd rather be poor and connected.' A sigh escaped from my lips. 'Alistair is such a weirdo. He locks himself in his room day and night. I never see him. He works. Then he comes home and plays video games with people from all around the globe and ignores his wife. His life is in those games, not in the real world. It's insane. We don't even eat meals together.'

Jarvis put his arm around me.

'What kind of a father is he going to make? What kind of an efficiency have I been forced into? It's awful.'

'If you were my wife, I'd want to stay in bed with you all day long,' Jarvis said. 'We'd have breakfast in bed, and lunch, and dinner, we'd get bed sores. It would turn into a health risk. The government would have to come and take one of us away.'