These summer mornings. I wake early to the jarring sounds of a wattlebird that has made its home in the bottle brush in my front yard. I lay in bed thinking about sandals smooth caramel brown straps. How funny my mind takes me there because these were not just any sandals but a handmade pair I purchased in Athens. My first time out of home, I was alone, backpacking in Europe. I was eighteen.
Well! Thirty-two years later, I have an adult daughter, Evelyn. She, too, has left home—our little house, sunflower yellow, snug, safe in bowerbird undergrowth. Seeking the independence that all young people crave, she leaves the familiarity and warmth of the familial cocoon she has come to rely upon, and all she knows unfurls around her--
I live in Dad’s childhood home, a weatherboard amongst much grander houses in a narrow inner-Sydney street, twenty or so footsteps from a walled sandstone park opening up to the bay. Two Moreton Bay Figs overlook the long-abandoned dilapidated shipyards. These towering, slumbering giants—Ficus macrophylla. Protectors, offering refuge to the maligned--
Fruit bats crowd, tucked into their canopies—bustling, swaying back and forth. Their folded wings like black umbrellas—their skies increasingly narrowing as they are displaced into smaller, smaller patches of sky. I have stood amongst their twisted, braided roots seeking guidance, knowing these guardians are not always transparent. You see, they lead double lives as stranglers.
Back before my existence was realised, Baba won the house in a poker game; he held, now I do, the truth within the yellowed layers of paper tucked inside his Bible. To everybody’s surprise, Baba gave the house to me. It didn’t surprise me. I have Bubbe’s face. There was no room in which one could question Baba’s words. They were the law. Little has changed—Dad knocked out a wall to open the kitchen to the garden—it frames the changing seasons. A place to watch the sunrise unwrapping slowly like flower petals. Baba planted a peach tree the year Bubbe died and laid her under it. And we did the same for Baba when he passed.
A peach tree that invites us to sit with it when we seek comfort.
A peach tree that endures the endless heat and grows strong.
A peach tree that observes, listens, and remembers.
Today, I tilt my head towards the radio; the news reports a woman has been found dead in a park near the bay. Jennifer … was just nineteen years. I look down at my hands with a guilty sense of relief. The relief, it was not someone I knew. Not my daughter. I thought about the faces of those offering condolences—with the same guilty sense of relief.
There were five girls I grew up with: Cath, Dina, Anna, Jules and Natasha. We have been friends since the start of first grade. Our lives have taken very different paths, but our history binds us. We were unafraid to venture into territories others avoided. Was it safer then? It is but a myth, a nebulous proposition that swirls around the generations.
I leave the house and walk along the bay, following the sea wall, past the children’s playground, people out walking their dogs. I wonder whether they have heard the news about Jennifer. Melancholia branches out into the air. There is a blistering tension in the city. In a furious flurry, summer arrived on the tail of a storm—it brought down trees more than one-hundred-years-old and crumbled houses in a catastrophic tantrum—and fires erupted from the earth like sprinklers on a lawn. Ash clouds billowed into the city, hanging low over the harbour and its bays. I feel the anxiety and anger—the fear is tangible; we breathe it in. It fills our bodies. The reporter said she texted her boyfriend.
I’m nearly home.
He texted back; I’ll come and meet you.
She said no.
Floral tributes are left at the park. I place three poppies tied with ribbon amongst the forest of flowers, scribbled notes—these are vessels of love and sorrow. I feel the pull of gravity, the weeping, and grief sung by these heartfelt messages. The stale air sits like bile in the back of my throat. I feel like I am falling, and there is nobody there to catch me, to cradle my fall. I carry the grief inside my body—a vessel carrying as much guilt as grief.
Jennifer’s family reach out … people gather for a night-time vigil by the bay. A place that still gives love despite everything. Anna and I are two. A stream flows from hundreds of wells that bear the coins of the broken-hearted—mourning Jennifer. Like many here, we didn’t know her, but still, we mourn her death. We stand on the grass, gazing over, thinking, and waiting, hearing lost voices in the sinking sunset from the bay's depths. Candles are passed around, the light from the flames splintered the water into glittering beads, eyes burning. It was rather beautiful. Yet--
Four days after Jennifer’s murder … I attend a protest march with Anna, Cath and Natasha. We are joined by thousands holding up placards
WE DON’T DESERVE THIS WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED
others were drumming, and another through a handheld loudspeaker, chanted
‘WE HAVE THE POWER … WE HAVE THE MIGHT …
THE STREETS ARE OURS … TAKE BACK THE NIGHT’
The energy was electric. We are encouraged to show our anger, be outraged, and demand justice.
‘I wonder does he think about what he has done?’
‘What! Are you kidding?’, said Natasha.
‘Is a bloke like him capable of thinking?’ asked Cath.
‘I don’t know ….’
A month after Jennifer’s murder, the police have yet to catch her killer. Anna and I meet at the Rose Pavilion to remember her daughter. Sarah. It has been four years, and Anna has died over and over again. Today she wants to remember her daughter as the bright and beautiful twenty-four-year-old woman she was. Not the victim of a man who had long lost his grip on reality. Not as a tragic consequence of systemic failures in the justice system.
‘I’m tired, Bertie.’
‘I know.’
‘I just want to find a place to curl up into where I can forget all the stories that make me cry. Do you think such a place exists?’
‘Yes, somewhere. And you will find that place. It will put its arm around you, and you’ll be comforted, safe. And you won’t be afraid to call it home.’
I put my arm around her, and our heads fall in together for a moment—until Rosie, Anna’s five-year-old granddaughter, breaks it. She climbs up onto the bench between us. Little Rosie was not yet old enough to understand grief. Instead, she wants to know why rainbows appear in the sky. Too young to ponder how one restricts the hyoid bones nor the physical proximity one takes to steal another’s breath away. Rosie wants to know how to swing from one bar to the next on the monkey bars—too young to articulate what a dysfunctional world it is for your mum to be murdered by your dad.
Every day this summer, an article is written about Jennifer. I read them all. I take in the details because I’m trying to understand what led to her murder. I needed to know. Is there something identifiable in their appearance, in their behaviour? Is there something I could tell my daughter to avoid? But there was nothing. There were no rules.
My daughter Evelyn, my only child, applied for university places in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth—not Sydney. She said she needed to find her own space to spread her wings away from me. She hugged me, she told me I love you, Mum, but I have to do this—what can I do but accept?
It is late February, summer is turning to autumn, yet the heat has not diminished. The police have arrested a man. We sit around a handmade table my dad built out of an old door. I decorated the door’s panels with items discarded by the tide: a mermaid purse, cuttlefish bones, whelk shells and mermaid fingernails, starfish skeletons and sponges—it reads like something out of a fish tale. It is my dining table, and I am about to serve lunch.
How did the police end up finding him? asks Cath.
They had footage of him stalking her along the road leading into the park. Says Natasha.
Shit— says, Jules.
Cath said, I never thought I’d say it, but thank God for all the cameras--
Yeah, said Dina, the reporter described him as having a unique tread--
Huh? What does that even mean? asks Jules
He was skulking in the shadows--
He moved in a predatory manner--
Ha! well, I heard, said Dina, that another two women had come forward since his arrest.
Yeah,me too, I added; one of the women said she was lucky to survive the attack; he was interrupted or something. And the other woman’s, too frightened to publicly speak. That late summer afternoon, I sat with my friends in my favourite room, looking out the window at the peach tree that Babu planted all those years ago. The solid peach tree has remained faithful and reminds us to love. Cath has shared the happy news that she will be a grandmother for the first time. We relish in the preciousness of life.
If you feel like this story deserves a little more, this is a great way to show your support to the author. Learn more about tips here.