Ella-Louise Thursday, 11th April 2013

Thursday, 11^th April 2013

Dear Jude,

You write the week past is a surreal memory and I feel the same until I see the offending stain on Bryan’s feature wall. Tomorrow I’ll go out and buy the paint needed to fix it. And even though no one else will ever know it’s there under the fresh layer of paint—all three of us will know its there.

The final draft of the interview came through today. Like our conversations in the hotel room it is brutal but is as honest as it’s ever going to get in the mainstream media. All those close know the truth and the public will get the opportunity to read the best approximation of it. It’s bizarre to think I’ll walk down to the newsagent Saturday morning and it will all be there to be consumed alongside cornflakes, bacon and eggs, lattes, teas, at kitchen tables, café tables, on couches and balconies. I should be scared but I’m not…giving you the truth, answering every question you had, looking you in the eye and giving a voice to every difficult evil and painful part of my life… it makes a version of it in the public domain something of a cake-walk.

I decided not to go back to Coranderk this week. It seemed like an inordinate amount of driving for no reason. Ava express posted your letter from the 6th to Bryan’s—who is away in Melbourne and due back tomorrow morning. I’m grateful for the break. There is a lot to process, to decide upon but I’ve made a start. I’ve told Bryan I’m staying on in my cottage in Coranderk. Sydney is no home. I found a life again in Coranderk and I think it’s the right place to start the next revolution of my life. I bought a vintage typewriter and I’ve knocked out two chapters of the book. I decided that since I’ve had a chance to tell my story, it’s time to tell Charlotte and Jakob’s. Despite all the talking about ‘my life’ it feels like the easier path to take. The research will consume what the writing time doesn’t and I guess I’ll fall into something of a routine. Something that resembles real life. I also want to be close to Ava and Ellie.

After you left Friday morning and I went back to Bryan’s I was going through my bag and found the care package they’d put together. In all that happened I’d forgotten it was there. I took out the friendship bracelet and tied it around my wrist as best I could and wished I’d found it while you were still around, so you could have helped tie it on. Remember how we tried to make them in Year 10 but you were all fingers and the wrong sorts of knots…and I made you one with thick green and black stripes and you wore it until the sea and water bleached it grey and it disintegrated. There was a mix tape from Matt—the Frames, Nick Cave and a bunch of obscure bands only Matt would think to put together. No book from Ava though—she knew this was no pleasure trip…she’d written a quote from Alain de Botton: forgiveness relies on a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering not malice.

And I can see that in my words and actions—how my own pain fuelled decisions that were not mine to make. And I know I said I was sorry…but I want to say it again. But how do you say sorry and not have the guilt eat you alive? How do I say sorry to you, your Dad, to Rebecca and your kids. I remember the dream I had about Rebecca and I wish there was some way to tell her you are every ounce the man she thought you were. That you are every ounce the man I hoped you’d be. And that’s why you’ve gone back home to your family. And why I won’t be following. To be the man I want you to be means there is only room in your life for me on those two days a year at The Point…why the only place I can abide is that place in your heart where you’ve always had me. And it’s not about allowing or denying—Thursday night showed me that—it is about ‘being’…of existing, of revelling within the limitations of being, thankful for the opportunity. It’s not about unlocking or jettisoning but paying tribute to what is there. Not trying to fix the history broken or shoe-horn the future—but to just be in the present without expectations.

When you appeared at the café I felt the fragile calm from the night before break. To be the abandoned you must be abandoned…and there you were. The cycle began 20 years earlier broken. I only ever wanted you to step up and say, “I’m here” and there you were despite my best effort to push you as far away as possible. And the one thing I’d never done in front of you… I did. I cried. I let you see how deep the pain and vulnerability was. How deep the caverns of pain were. I let you see how broken and fucked up I was, how far the desperation dragged me down. And you turned the chair and held me and out it came.

Inana travelled the seven levels of hell and was left to hang from hooks through her flesh until her lover travelled to replace her. And in that café with everyone watching we found our way to the bottom of hell together. Only no one is staying there…though I know you are facing your own version of it now. At least it doesn’t (hopefully) involve explosive poo.

Lying with you on the bed, my heart pounding into your back, I wished there had been a better way to tell you everything. Wish I hadn’t gone so far to the end before realising what a load of shit my life was. You wanted to massage clean the scars on my back and I wished I could reach inside you and emancipate all the pain I’d caused you. But to lie there, with no words, just two hearts slowing, syncing; breathes becoming one single inhalation and exhalation, the past and the future were superfluous to the present. We know more than we realised as teenagers—we knew how to be. I feel asleep with an ease I don’t think I’ve been able to since a child. With you beside me in those first fragile hours, I didn’t have anything to be afraid of.

7:48pm

Ava rang to check the letter arrived and I got side tracked… walked down by the water with the echo of your companionship—could feel the ease of your hand in mine—by the time I got back the rest of the conversation had played out in my head and now the page looks and feels a bit barren.

I’ve gone and found Blur on YouTube and I’m sitting out here on the balcony lost in one of Bryan’s hoodies listening to it.

When I went to the bathroom to change I saw your t-shirt lying on the floor and I wanted to take it with me and wrap it around me like I used to do. Half your wardrobe was lost in the mess of my bedroom floor. But it seemed too much, too intimate almost, to wear your clothes and all the time you were watching and I was too wrapped up in the dilemma of misappropriating your clothes to realise.

I woke before dawn and slipped out under your arm, wrapped myself in the blanket that was bunched on the floor at the foot of the bed, opened the vertical blinds and curled up in the chair to watch you sleep. Just as I had at Nan’s that Easter, in my room the night of your 18^th and every other Saturday night when you fell asleep on the couch. The sun came up. Pale shafts of light came through and you rolled over, the sheets came away and the dawn painted stripes on your bare back. Jakob would have watched the same thing with me…and I thought how life is really book ends…the moment that inspired “Charlotte Coloured Dawn” was repeated here with the two people it was really about. Echoes finding their way back to the original source. Time rushing backwards.

And how we fill the shelves of our life with narratives small and large—the books we want, others that are lent us, bad gifts, ones that just find their way to our shelves. The ones we read and discard, the ones read over and over again, the ones we can’t bear to part with, the the ones we feel obliged to keep. And I knew when we woke we’d be throwing out the book ends, clearing the shelf of everything. But as long as you slept the day hadn’t begun. I dropped the blanket and gently eased back beside you.

“Ella-Louise,” you mumbled half-asleep and I stroked your cheek, rough with stubble.

“Shhhh,” I said, thinking of Jakob’s lyrics of the dawn reaching out to take what had been so patiently waited for and I wanted to close the blinds and hold the dawn at bay. Lying in your arms I wasn’t ready to give you up a final time, even though I knew it was time. The radio played on, the room got light and I closed my eyes and let the steady beat of your heart will me back to sleep.

You’ll have the letter I wrote by now and hopefully that changes nothing and you’ll be there at The Point on Monday for my birthday.

I’ll leave this with your Dad.

I know you said you’d be there to cast a stone with me at sunset but I understand if you decide not to come…it’s still early days.

You breathed life into the phoenix, set me on the path for this new incarnation of my life. Gave me everything I wanted when I teetered on the edge of staying or leaving Piper’s at the end of year 12… and now I can leave.

In case you’re not there Monday… be free Jude. A little piece of me will always be with you, as a little piece of you will be with me.

Thank you, for risking everything for me. Thank you for being there when it would have been easier and safer to stay in Piper’s. Thank you for standing by me so my story could be told. So we could finally find each other.

Thank you for being you; my best friend, lover and soul mate.

All My Love

<3 Ella-Louise

Jude Tuesday, 9th April 2013

Tuesday, 9^th April 2013

Dear Ella-Louise,

When your letter arrived yesterday I sat it on my desk remembering your warning. After work I took it to the park, bought some hot chips to sit and read.

I now understand your anger and frustration, that what I said had such an impact on you and how it broke you. You asked if you were good, if you should continue to fight. I believe you are good and that it is worth while to continue to fight. I’m sorry that it broke you but I am glad we had the chance to talk it all over.

And I also get why I couldn’t get in touch with you, considering your phone was doing its best reverse impression of a Transformer.

You have fought hard all your life, fought hard for yourself, and for your family. And you fought valiantly. And you won.

You’re still revealing the truth of your life, what happened 20 years ago, especially about your life in Sydney. And I’m sorry I never responded to you when you reached out and called for help. I have regretted that decision ever since. And I ask myself if I could have done anything. Torn as a young man, unable to articulate his thoughts and caught between his mother’s disapproval and his father’s sense of honour. She lied about me having a girlfriend when you called; and she never told me about the phone call.

Was it all a purge? Recanting the past and seeking to change the present, because I cannot change the past. It came from an understanding of who I am now. I know I tried to tell you about it back at the hotel; all about family, commitments, responsibilities. Stupid adult words, they get thrown around like a panacea. But they are words that take on meaning the longer you use them. They embed into your skin like the salt from the sea and become a favourite pair of jeans frayed at the hems and holes at the knees.

Yet, how easily they can be cast aside. I came back to the McCracken house on the Sunday for nothing other than selfish motives. I believed I was rescuing you, protecting you but all I did was take from you and gratify myself. I was being selfish, casting off family, commitment and responsibility. And the salt leaches out of the skin, forming a crust until you clothe yourself again with what you know is right. Selfishness is not the basis for a relationship, nor should it be the foundation of our friendship.

I do feel threatened by the thought of you coming back to Piper’s because I have to clean up the mess I made. It is a mess that involves Rebecca, Jordan, Harley and Flynn; it involves Mum and Dad and it involves you.

I had to make the call to be responsible for what I’ve done. Yes I’m wrapped up in my anger and guilt and covered in my own shit, but so are you. And just like you, I’m trying to sort it all out.

For all that has happened to you, I am sorry. For that all that you have done for me, thank you. Thank you for pushing me in the right direction. Thank you for being honest enough to speak the truth to me, to reveal to me what I had ignored and what I had forgotten.

I went and saw Dad this afternoon as I promised you I would. For the first time I saw the hollow shell of a man that was my father. The physical degradation can be repaired to a certain degree. It is the emotional and mental scarring that will take a long time to rejuvenate and heal.

My first words to him were, “I’m sorry.”

“Everyone gets a second chance,” he said. “Sometimes you have to see what the second chance actually is because it may not be what you were expecting.”

I told him about the trip to Sydney to see you and how we had talked through what had happened.

“I want to make it right with you too, Dad,” I said. “I’ll talk to Mum about getting you home and getting things right for you.”

Dad simply nodded. “And what about Rebecca and the kids?”

“I want to have a second chance with them too.”

Over the years I have found it hard to reconcile my perspective of my father, who he is and why, measured against firstly the adolescent mindset, then maturing into adulthood. If memory is perpetually adolescent then conscience provides a counter balance and helps bring wisdom. I see myself mirrored in my father’s physical state; decayed and decrepit through my own inaction, with hope of rehabilitation.

“Do you want to go and get some hot chips?” I asked Dad.

“What day is it?”

“Tuesday.”

“Damn right. Shepherds pie is on the menu. How you can screw up such a simple dish is beyond me. Let’s go.”

We sat in the park opposite our favourite fish and chip shop, The Point up to our right. In silence we picked at our feast throwing the occasional chip to the seagulls. There was salt all over our fingers and in the air around us.

“Do you miss surfing?”

“Without a doubt.”

“What do you miss about it?”

“The sensation of freedom you have coming down the face of the wave. It is a choice you have, which wave you will attempt to surf. Sometimes you choose poorly and it grinds you into the sand. For a moment there is peace, the muted roar of the surf in your ears but it’s too dangerous to remain.

“Sometimes you choose well and you get to harness the strength and vitality of the waves to propel you along. It’s bliss. Do you get the same feeling when you play music?”

“Something similar I guess,” I said.

We finished the last of the chips and threw the crumbs for the gulls, anchoring the greasy paper under my keys and wallet. I watched the edges bend in the sight breeze rising and falling like the sails of a ship and I thought of the survivors who washed ashore here imaging the torn sails of their ship trying to hold the wind.

Second chances.

I had a second chance with you, to be the friend you needed me to be, but I made mistakes.

I have a second chance with my father, to come to know and understand him better, to bring him back to health.

I hope to have second chance with Rebecca, Jordan, Harley and Flynn.

I have become not the man I necessarily wanted to be, but a man who understands the rights and wrongs of his actions in relation to you and my family. Now it is up to me, my effort to restore things to the way they deserve to be.

As the twilight faded and the shadows lengthened the light house to began to signal the danger of the surrounding rocks and the fishing fleet began to stir and bustle with activity. In every aspect of our lives we have our own lighthouses, our own reference points to guide us home and anchor us securely.

We stood at The Point under the lighthouse many times during our friendship. We stood there in all weather and at all times of the day and night. It has always been our point of reference and the dichotomy of our existence; a saving light and a perilous place to be.

Over the years we jettisoned many things into the sea and collected what the sea returned, fascinated with the miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam washed up and how the sea degraded it all. What has the sea degraded in me? What has the salt destroyed beneath the veneer? I will only know the answers by doing what I need to do for myself and my family.

I keep your letters in a box in my office. They stand as a testament to our friendship, but I feel afraid that I will have to close the box and put it away. I fear there will be a finality when I have read the last letter, folded it back along the creases, returned it to the envelope and placed it in order with the others.

Our recent history in letters, our silence measured and written in correspondence, a record of who we were, what we are and who we may become.

“You’ve been watching the lighthouse for a while now. What’s on your mind?” asked Dad.

“Beginnings and endings. That not every beginning has an end nor every end is the start of something else. Different threads stop, join others, become knotted or remain loose, but weave broad and diverse fabric.”

“Ella-Louise?”

“Yes. It is the same for you and Ginny?”

“It is the same, but in saying that sometimes you do have to close the lid on the box and put it away no matter how much it pains you.”

“Better get you home,” I said. I took one last look at the lighthouse as it winked its semaphore of warning, an invitation before wheeling Dad back to the car and the nursing home.

As I was leaving I reiterated, “I aim to set it right with you and Mum, and bring you home.”

“I know you will do it for Rebecca,” he said. “And whatever that outcome may be, but you also need to set it right with Ella-Louise.”

How do I set it right with you?

When we were young you gave me such a remarkable gift in your friendship. You gave me hope and purpose, a way of seeing and understanding the world, and you made me all the richer for it. As Bowie said, “We can be heroes, just for one day.”

You were my hero. The champion of everything I could never be.

You filled my life with joy, fun, madness, late nights and early mornings, with letters written in class and in the darkness of the night.

And for it all I am grateful, and say “thank you”  for you made me a better person.

Each time I walk the high tide mark or stand on the point and watch the storms roll in over the horizon, I will be reminded of you and all that you gave to me.

I hope that I have given back to you in some way, no matter how small. I will not forget the scars nor will I forget the phoenix rising from the ashes to soar above these momentary trials and affliction.

Therefore, fair winds and fair weather.

Always and ever will I love you,

Jude.

Ella-Louise Wednesday 4th April 2013 (Part 2)

Wednesday 4^th April, 2013

11:48pm

Dear Jude,

The blank page mocks me as does the scattered pages of your letter on the table in front of me. As does the missed calls and ignored messages on my phone… and the fact the phone is now in bits. The stain on the wall where I threw a glass of wine… the sound of glass shattering against the plaster as much a soundtrack to this evening as U2’s “One” as I drove through the dark streets crying, trying to find my way to Bryan’s.

But what mocks me most—more than the double and triple meaning of your words, like Bono’s lyrics…what gets under my skin and eats like acid… Bryan’s calm announcement that it’s a good thing. That all of this is good! How the fuck can that be?

It doesn’t look good for the pretty feature wall with the blood-like stain in the centre of it. Or the glass and it’s tiny missed shards waiting to strike flesh. Or my phone… a twisted collection of destroyed component parts. How is it GOOD for me to break?

I stormed into his apartment, brandishing your letter, babbling a tirade that hours of aimless driving hadn’t dampened. “Read it. Read it!” I demanded, slapping it down on the bench top.

And he was so calm. Almost comedic calm. He poured the wine and suggested we go out onto the balcony.

“I don’t want to fucking talk. I want you to read this. You read all the others. Now read this. Now.”

“Ella-Louise,” he said and he reached a hand for me and I picked up the glass and hurled it against the wall.

He sat with me on the floor while I rocked and raged and cried. Bore witness to the pain and the betrayal and the lies and guilt and disillusionment and fears and grief and everything else I’ve held tight to for years. When it was over the told me it was good to see me finally break down, that he expected it at Christmas, then in Malaysia, then Byron Bay. He said he’d never seen someone push something down so deep and keep it there for so long. That he hadn’t been sure if it was my own personal brand of stubborn or my training or some monstrous hybrid.

He ran a bath and I lay there soaking…how is this good? How is this good when two minutes of writing and one note destroys everything?

How is that good?

How am I good?

How was I ever good?

The page is no longer blank and now my own black inscriptions mock me.

What’s the point?

Why bother?

Why fight?

And Bryan sits in the corner with a pile of briefs, quietly reading. He insists I read your letter again. Insists I step away and read it with professional detachment to REALLY see what’s written in it. To make an effort to understand it’s more than I think it is.

After months of jealousy…he insists I write…and keep writing until there is nothing left to say. He says only then can the pieces be put back together. He says if I want my story to be heard tomorrow, I have to do this…or it will mean nothing.

He says I can do this.

And in the silence the pages of the brief turn and turn…and turn.

1:14am

When I was a teenager I had this crazy idea that I could predict the future from the next song that came on the radio. The music…the lyrics would offer a snap shop, a keepsake or some kind of otherworldly insight into what was going on. Hope born on radio waves.

I’ve sat out here for an hour on the balcony in the chilled emptiness of the night listening to “One”, reading and re-reading your letter. Below the lights twinkle and Rose Bay is a promise hidden by the cloak of the dark moon.

“Is it too late, tonight?
To drag the past out into the night?”

It feels like a night that will never end as it speeds too quickly toward dawn.

Did you come to purge your guilt from 20 years ago when you didn’t come when I asked you to?

I didn’t go to my Nan’s when I arrived in Sydney. The house has too many secrets in the shadows…too many bad memories. Even sitting beside you on the couch, that Easter in Year 12, I could see the ghosts of the evening Carol became my Mum. I could feel the same horrific tear of my safe world coming apart at the feeble seams. I could feel the bite of the cold night air and the flap of my thin nighty as she dragged me down the path of the gate, to a waiting taxi. Sitting there next to you I could feel the icy dread fill my stomach when we walked into the house she was dossing in and how she slumped in a grotty arm chair, rolled the sleeve of her shirt up over her elbow and shot up in front of me. And how I huddled shivering in a corner crying.

Nan’s place, what had been my home…was just a building filled with broken people. Where the lost go and pretend everything is okay.

I stayed with my old friend Katrina and we talked about moving out but at the end of the first week the actual fantasy of moving out and the responsibilities of it wore thin for Katrina. Christmas was coming and her Mum took me aside at the end of the second week to tell me I had one week to find somewhere else to live…to go home to my grandmother who must be missing me. All that passive guilt Catholics are so good at piling on.

So I wrote to you, told you I’d made a mistake. Asked you to come get me. Gave you the number of Katrina’s and waited and waited, and at the end of the week begged my way into another friend’s house while I got a job. I hated working in a bar–hated the share house I lived in. I refused to go back to Nan. I blew off my uni place. I dreamed of going back to Piper’s…but there was barely enough money to cover my weekly expenses.

At Easter Nan told me Mum was coming back to Sydney. That she couldn’t be persuaded to stay in Piper’s she wanted to be close to me. We both knew Sydney was the last place she needed to be. Both of us afraid of what would happen if she came back. I rang your place—Nan didn’t have an STD bar–and your Mum answered the phone. She told me you were out with Adrian and your new girlfriend. She said you’d moved on and I’d do well to do the same. She told me I was trash and you were better off without me, just as she’d always said.

And the door slammed shut.

Then today the door opened and you were on the other side looking like you were facing a firing squad. I guess you were—neither of us knew what was on the other side of the knock. Your look reminded me of what your Dad used to say when I turned up at your place with a long face: Who died? It was out of my mouth before I realised and you laughed.

It occurs to me—now–we fought in silence and made up in silence, we fell in love and made our farewells in silence. Words are a veneer and when we try to use them for the ‘big stuff’ it falls apart. The way your body curled around mine at the McCracken house that Sunday, the way your head lay in my lap watching TV, the way we preserved ourselves in the brine of the ocean, the way you held me this morning in the hotel room before we left for the studio. All said better without words.

You used to smell of salt and cut grass in summer, and wool and wood smoke in winter. This morning you smelt of nerves and the neglect of a wardrobe and shaving cream.

You all talk about fantasy. This is no fantasy to me and it never has been. Just as everyone talks about lust and lack of control. Of lust feeding fantasy and fantasy feeding lust. It’s never been that way for me… and I wonder if it really is that way for you?

Lust was burning away 20 years of sexual frustration on the floor of the McCracken house. I don’t deny it. But what was Sunday? You knew what you were doing. You must have looked at Rebecca, looked at your children and KNOWN what you were doing. Do you gamble everything for an itch in your pants that’s already been scratched? You say you came to protect me. But you came to find something lost. Came to find what had been left behind.

You felt it today… we are better when we are together. I am a better person when I’m with you. You guided me through the fear and the nerves and the anticipation. You did it with the same natural grace and insight you always did. To calm me, to enable me to see the whole world and all of the potential. When my own fear drew in and gave me tunnel vision.

And then the letter.

A bitter slap after what had been a day of negotiating hard places and not just surviving but triumphing.

Have you come to make your own peace with the past or to give me what I need now so you’ve got a bargaining chip?

As though you can tell me where I can go, or what I can do, or where I can live because it threatens you. For you to finally move to do something because you feel threatened. When all the time my actual life hung in the balance, you were consumed with self-pity and guilt, too wrapped within your own mundane dramas to see anything else. Too angry and guilty to answer the phone at Christmas, too angry and jealous to answer my need for someone… and now you come to pay me off by holding my hand… to give me whatever I want to fill these holes so I’ll stay away once it is done.

Well, it might come as a shock, Jude. But it’s not all about you. And it never was. But you are so wrapped up in your own shit, so busy trying to protect your family, daring to suggest I am a destroyer, when you’ve abandoned the one person who’s needed you the most.

And I say Piper’s Reach has nothing to do with you when it simultaneously has everything to do with you…but not for the reasons you think.

2:26am

…I had to walk away. Had to go before my anger burnt through the page.

A note taped to a hotel door was not how I wanted you to find out about why I was coming to Piper’s Reach.

I’d been talking to your Dad about it since I got back from Malaysia. I wanted to do it as soon as possible—had intended to go straight down the coast from Brisbane to Piper’s Reach but Byron Bay showed me I had to go back to Coranderk and start making amends with the people I had lied to. To try and get our relationship back onto some common safe ground so I could come back to Piper’s Reach without there being a cloud over my reasons. Then there was a flood, and another. Then Rebecca found my letters. Then there was the pressure to face the press and I held off in the hope it would smooth out. And of course it didn’t. And I’m alone at Bryan’s dining room table and you’re alone in our hotel room. Only this time we can’t fight and make up silently.

You’ve spent a year watching your Dad decay without any insight as to why—why he had given up. I need to shoulder some of the blame for that—for how what’s happened with us shifted the focus… but would you have seen it anything?

A nursing home is where you wait to die. No one goes into a nursing home, like they do a hotel… for a short stay. It’s where you go because things are bad and they’re not getting better. It’s where you go to pray for death to release you. Where you are acutely aware the world has moved on without you. It’s where even hope abandons you. And that’s where your Dad is. And I know, because I’ve been there.

When my conditioned stabilised they moved me to another hospital and then a nursing home—but they didn’t call it that. It was ‘assisted living’ or some other PC bullshit like that. I had no choice. There was no one to come and care for me, take me home and get me back on my feet. No one to visit. No one to talk to. Even though I was physically strong before the accident—I withered. I’d been forgotten. Thrown out with the garbage.

The home had a program with the local high school. Every Wednesday a small group of students would come and read, play music or just talk to the residents. I’d chosen to stop talking…first as a safety precaution then because I didn’t see the point. One Wednesday afternoon this boy came in with his guitar…he sang, “Throw Your Arms Around Me” and the flood gate on my memories opened. The next week, when he came back, I wrote down the songs I could remember from the mix tape you recorded for me for Christmas in Year 11. I wrote him a note and asked if he would play them. He played the ones he knew—and learned the ones he didn’t.

With my head full of memories, I decided to get well, to find you again. I got well, it hurt almost as mush as the original injuries, but I struggled and I learned to walk again.

When the Feds came sniffing around the home I ran. I opened the security box, took you and all the cash I’d saved and went north.

I reached out to you because you carried me through the hardest parts of my life, in silence… I wanted there to be more than silence. I wanted you to know.

I need to do this for your Dad, to give him a home he can get well in, to find the occupational therapists who can help him walk and talk again. To make the trips to and from Sydney to the specialists. We’ve made a deal…he gets well and I’ll finally give in and learn to surf.

This is my penance but it is also my gift…to give you back your Dad, for Flynn, Harley and Jordan to grow older knowing their Poppy is there to share in their lives.

I don’t care who questions my motives. I don’t care what is said about me. In the course of your Dad’s rehabilitation I’ll see you for the man you are now and you’ll see me for the woman I am now. And in due time I’ll know whether the man I hope you are, is the man you are and if it’s love or hope holding this together. You can decide whether to unpadlock that box or to jettison it to the sea.

This is my effort to restore things to the way they deserve to be.

<3 Ella-Louise

Jude Saturday 6th April 2013

Saturday 6^th April 2013

Dear Ella-Louise,

All the departures in our lives have been done in silence. A taking of leave without adequate explanation or the opportunity to set things straight. You Left Piper’s and I never asked you to stay and you didn’t ask for what you wanted. When our lives intersected again it was me who failed to say anything; at the McCracken house I came and went in guilty silence, leaving you without a word.

And despite your protestations, your anger nailed to the hotel room, I could not leave without a chance to speak with you one last time. I had to speak with you face to face regardless of the consequences. This had to be my action. I promised you I would help you in whatever I could and I meant it.

This week is a surreal memory, being back home in Piper’s makes it feel like a dream. The long drive back gave me hours of thinking time, not all of it productive or illuminating, or understandable. It is like when I take the kids for a walk along the beach or through the national park. They without fail, pick up something and the only answer they have when questioned is, “just because.”

On the Wednesday night I came back to the hotel room and found your note, I was gutted. I had hoped to speak with you so I wrote another and put them on the bedside and debated whether or not to turn up to the magazine interview on Thursday. I knew where you were going to be because I overheard Bryan talking about it on the phone.

I deliberately arrived late so I wouldn’t disturb the interview. I found the most secluded spot I could so you wouldn’t see me and I waited. The two letters on the table in front of me. Part of me wanted to tear them up, dispose of them, scattering the torn pieces to the wind. I came close to it, but I needed the words on the page to back me up, be the anchor we always used when things were buffeting us.

When I saw the interview had finished my stomach lurched, suddenly aware of the action I had to take regardless of the consequences. I felt like being sick. Bryan stood to leave as you sat at the table sipping form a glass of water. He walked off with the interviewer leaving you there alone. No matter how many times I wiped the palms of my hands on my jeans they felt damp and clammy.

Coming around the table I stood waiting to be invited to sit, or told to “Piss off” or both.

But I watched your face and break into tears.

The first words out of my mouth were, “I’m sorry.”

Crouching beside you, I turned the chair towards me and embraced you. The tears continued wracked from deep within you. I was surprised when you suddenly stopped, pushed against my shoulders, and straightened it up. You rubbed your eyes with the heels of your hands and wiped at your nose with a serviette, followed by, “I’m sorry too.” Then you proceeded to wipe your snot off my shoulder and apologised again.

“I’ve had kids,” I said. “Snot is the least of all humans fluids I have been covered in.”

You looked at me funny so I commented about explosive poo and nappies, to which you gave the universal response of, “Gross!”

We settled back into silence as you composed yourself further and I could see the conflict of what you wanted to say against what you had already said.

“I need to eat,” you said, so we ordered and waited. “I assumed you’d gone home to Piper’s,” you said.

“I needed to talk to you.”

“About what?” The tone was sharp, honed by the hurt of what I had said in my letter.

I pushed over the two letters I had written but you didn’t raise a hand to touch them, keeping your hands clasped in your lap.

“I have come to understand so much more of what happened to you,” I said.

“Watching you complete the interview yesterday helped me know who you are now and why you kept things from me. The letters there are my attempt to explain where I am coming from.”

“Do you want me to read them now?” you asked.

“No. I want to know about your life. I want to know the person beyond the page, behind all the words we use as a front. We’re adept at using words on paper; let’s see how we can do it, face to face.”

And so you talked. You talked for an hour about your life—the bands, the music, the secrecy, the anonymity, the brutality and the betrayal. And the quieter moments, the ones born from the terror and the pain.

This was no interview or interrogation, just two friends beginning to fill in the gaps. After seeing you go through the interview on Wednesday, the almost casual tone showed a massive change. I began to see the girl I knew and understand the woman she’d become. And it hurt me. It hurt me because of what you had lost.

After you finished speaking you drained the last of the coffee, sparking up like one of Adrian’s bungers.

“Right. Enough maudlin,” you said. “I need to walk. I’ll read these later.” And scooping the letters up we headed outside. Walking beside you I felt safe. You knew the city, knew its ins and outs and simply walked. I sensed an unspoken tour of places, like a final lap of the course.

“Where’s all your stuff?” you asked.

“Back at the hotel,” I said.

“Good.  Let’s go so I can read these. And this time you are staying in the room.”

Our course deviated and we marched back to the hotel.

“You make tea while I read on the bed,” you said.

I watched you kick your shoes off and flop onto the bed.

“Which one?” you asked holding up a letter in each hand.

Looking into the mirror on the bench I pointed one way and then the next before I had to turn around and leave tea-making duties.

“This one. And a warning, that one starts rather harshly.”

I made our drinks, set yours beside you on the nightstand and sat down in the chair opposite the bed.

“I feel like when Mum came across a copy of Playboy Adrian had given me,” I said. But you waved your hand and kept your eyes on the letter.

At the beginning of the second you looked over the top of the page.

“Ouch!” you said.

“Sorry.”

“It’s true though.” And you kept reading.

Putting down the second letter you picked up your cup and issued a decree. “Talk. It’s your turn.”

I had to explain to you how I felt, why I couldn’t do what you had asked for. And what I hoped to be able to do for you. But it felt like with everything I was saying I was dismantling everything you needed or wanted from me.

Eventually my words faltered and petered out. Sipping from my tea was the only thing I could do.

“Do you love Rebecca?” you asked.

The directness of it required honesty. “Yes.”

“Do you love me?”

I had so many qualifiers, limitations, excuses, restraints, constraints, reasons to affirm and deny, but you are my friend.

“Yes,” I said after a brief pause.

“You hesitated. Why?”

“Because my loyalties are divided. My first commitment is to my wife and family, to my parents and my friends. Each asks for something different, yet we call it ‘love’. I don’t love you any less than Rebecca, but the expression of it is different.”

“Would you come sit beside me here on the bed.”

I hesitated but in my mind drew some boundaries. As I came over you turned the radio on, surfing through the FM until you found something, I couldn’t quite make it out with the low level of volume.

Sitting against the bed head you turned back from fiddling with the clock radio and slid your arm around my front and the other around my back like a seat belt. Your head rested in the hollow of my shoulder.

I was transported back into the past, sitting on the couch at Mum and Dad’s snuggled together watching Rage. The smell of your hair hasn’t changed.

Sitting there with you wrapped around me made me feel 17 again. We let the silence take hold as the shadows lengthened and the room darkened. The sound of your breathing softened and fell into a regular rhythm and I guessed you were asleep.

I must have dozed off too, but woke soon after. The sound of your breathing reminded me of sitting on the beach at night and hearing the gentle hiss of the whitewash running up and down the sand.

On the radio the following lyrics washed like the waves.

Tender is the night
Lying by your side
Tender is the touch
Of someone you that you love too much
Tender is the day
The demons go away
Lord I need to find
Someone who can heal my mind.

It was a beautiful song and spoke so much of our relationship as teenagers. I waited for the DJ to back announce the song—Tender, by Blur. Look it up and have a listen.

I left you asleep and went to the bathroom. I sat in the chair opposite where I sat while you read my letters and waited for the kettle to boil. While my tea drew I folded the bed cover over you. You looked at peace, and not just because you were asleep.

The downside of booking a hotel room for one is the lack of sleeping places. And I didn’t fancy sleeping in the chair. I was scared getting into the bed beside you but I took over the edge of the mattress.

I have a small confession to make. You remember that time I saw your bum in high school, but I said I didn’t. Something similar this time.

I felt you wake up and head for the bathroom where you turned on the light. You undressed taking off your shirt and jeans, the phoenix tattoo appeared to dance and take flight as you reached behind and undid your bra. Reborn of the ashes and with each day gaining strength. I watched the phoenix disappear under a t-shirt before you went to the toilet.

Rolling over before you came back I heard the click of the light and felt the mattress sink slightly as you laid down. Your hand came up to my shoulder as you moulded your body against my back. The gentleness of your lips on my neck above my t-shirt felt like the lightest touch.

The Friday morning was the first time we had the opportunity to be present at a farewell. We were awkward teenagers again, each waiting to say something first but not necessarily wanting to have the last word either.

“Just to let you know, there will be a letter arriving for you next week,” you said. “I wrote it while at Bryan’s. It’s a little, shall we say, angry in parts. Will you do one thing for me? Talk to your Dad. It will make sense when you read it, but please for me, and for your Dad, talk to him.”

I’m waiting for the letter to arrive, a little frightened, a little unsure, but you wouldn’t say anything more. And then we had our first official farewell. The chance to say why we were leaving, where we were going and having to catalogue and label the emotions we were feeling.

Every parting should involve a transaction of giving and receiving, some small token be it a word, a look, an affection, a fragrance, a touch. It is an investment into the friendship, a memory forged into a medallion worn over the heart and archived in the mind.

“I’m going because I have to return home and take care of my family and whatever the consequences might be.”

“I know. I have my own things to take care of too.”

The kiss surprised me, like it was a reflex action. I imagined like it was like the one you would have given me on the day you left for Sydney. And I returned the kiss on your cheek the way I imagined I would have on the same day.

And then we went our separate ways.

Fair winds and fair weather.

Always and ever,

Jude

Ella-Louise, Wednesday 3rd April, 2013

Jude,

Go home! You don’t want to be here. It’s obvious from your note you can’t be here. I don’t want to see you.

I don’t want pages long epistles detailing the conversations you have with your wife. I don’t want to be your confessor. Take your guilt elsewhere.

I asked you here to support me but you don’t get it. I’m sure you don’t want to get it. You want to swaddle me in the memories of Ella-Louise, circa 1992.

You’re here for your own reasons. Guess it was too much to expect you to just be here for me.

I’ll talk to you in Piper’s Reach when you are able to be a man and treat me with the same respect you accord your wife and have this conversation in person.

You said I didn’t need your permission to stay in Piper’s all those years ago…and I don’t need your permission to return.

I tried to talk your Dad into coming with me to Coranderk but he’s adamant about staying close to his family. No bloody idea why when you have all left him to rot in that nursing home. So Piper’s Reach it is.

It’s not all about you Jude. I’ve been through two lots of exile, a trial, a media witch hunt, two floods and more guilt than one person can stomach but I never lost sight of Dad left in that nursing home. Maybe if you spent less time indulging in self pity you’d have been able to see the world beyond.

Getting your Dad back on his feet is my penance for my part in this. And you will have to live with it.

Ella-Louise

PS: our room is paid up for tonight and tomorrow. I’m not coming back. I’ve gone to Bryan’s to prepare for tomorrow’s interview

Ella-Louise: Thursday, 14th of March, 2013

Thursday, 14th of March, 2013

Dear Jude,

Ava has Kate Bush playing and every word of “Running up that Hill” cuts like the words in your letters. To see your pain, to read of the destruction, to read it from afar, without the ability to reach out and touch you, to buffer the impact–this is my punishment. I spent my professional life lying, cheating, manipulating, engaged in any number of shady activities, but the fact I played on the right team means I’m good…I never felt good, like a dog chasing it’s tail, round and round, the temptation and lure of success spurring me on.

You see one side of me…the side I wanted to find again, to remember, to feel a better version of…to know she existed. At what cost Jude? My love for you has destroyed you. I blew on the small flame, carefully hidden away, and it became a fire that burnt away everything.

I feel sick. I want to be there for you but I was the one who did this to you.

The last time I saw you, you were naked in the shower with me. You opened the door and disappeared behind the fogged up glass. If I knew that was the last time I’d see you, I’d have held on tighter, I’d have kept you there with me, committed every contour of your body, the sound of your breath in my year, the feel of your fingers curled through mine, to memory.

Now, when I think about it, the memories, what is left of them, come like a stilted conversations full of uncomfortable pauses and silences that crawl up the back of the neck.

Do you think of me and hate me? If you were to give up the need to protect me–what would be left? Is that all we ever were: a lost a girl and a boy who built a safe haven? I’m not that girl any more. You are not that boy. But something comes after this. I just don’t know what it is.

New nightmares have added to the litany. This time I’m lost in Ginny Laine’s house. There’s roses growing out of the walls and as I move through, they get thicker, the thorns tearing at me. And there’s a knocking. The closer I move to the knocking the more impossible it is to pass down the hallways. Then I’m at the front door. I open it and it’s Rebecca standing there with a hammer. There is ‘cease and desist’ notice nailed to the door. The cease and desist is written in old English calligraphy, but I can’t read beyond it. I turn to Rebecca and she’s wearing my mother’s favourite lavender cheesecloth dress. “Let me explain,” I say and she spits on me and walks down the stairs. I run after her and the gate becomes the beach, an endless stretch of sand and and I’m yelling Rebecca’s name. She turns and it’s my mother. “I told you he was no good,” she says. “Look what he’s done,” and she starts screaming at me and torn photos fall from the sky and I’m scrambling to collect them and she keeps screaming at me.

We were always at our best when we were together. We braved all the storms but one… and that storm’s come back. I love you–as awful as it makes me feel. It never died. Please, please let me back in to sort this out. Don’t cut me off like your dad did to Ginny and leave the heart strings attached.

I’m treading water in what looks like a peaceful pond, but the waterlogged clothes are pulling me down and am tiring. At some point and we’ll both go under. Please, let’s stop going around in circles.

I’ve agreed on dates for the interviews in Sydney: Wednesday 3rd and Thursday 4th April. I need you there with me. I’ve booked a motel in Eden for Monday 1st. You have two weeks to pull yourself together to come with me.

I’m off home to rinse clean the last of the sweat and salt from my run and swim and then I’m ringing your dad to discuss things with him. I’m sorry he’s been caught between us, perhaps he’s always been there: wanting us to be happy and simultaneously trying to protect us from being hurt. How much of his tirade is because you’ve hurt me? How much is the tirade against himself?

There’s a time of silence, but it’s not now, I’ve been gagged for too long.

I’ve never pushed you. Only ever danced around the edges hoping you’d catch the beat.

I know you are at your lowest, I know it is selfish to ask all of this now…but it’s time to come up for air and face the storm. My past isn’t a closed book, but I’m not going to shelter you from it any more. It needs closure and to have it, I need a voice.

I need you, Jude. Not as my protector. I need you to believe in me, need to know I am good, you need to help me face down the past…and at the same time, face down our past, because there is no future until we do.

<3 Ella- Louise

Ella Louise: Tuesday, 12 March 2013

Tuesday, 12 March 2013

Dear Jude,

Summer has all but gone and with it the month of silence. The breeze carries a chill that whispers, “winter is coming” as the sun forces its way out from behind the ever-present clouds unwilling to concede defeat.

I admit to having read your letter once and filed it away in my bottom drawer. As though I can, for a little longer, pretend there is good news making its way out of the silence. Before the next letter arrives and before I return to this latest letter, I need to say a few things. I fear if I don’t say them now the opportunity to do so will be gone.

My mother…she never used in the three and a bit years we lived Piper’s Reach, though everyone thought she did – a combination of the hippy clothes, scars on her arms and often bizarre behaviour. But I swear – she was never shooting up. She would crawl into my bed and cry and I’d hold her like she was a child. She’d tell me it felt like beetles or insects crawling under her skin. She told me the pain of withdrawal was what kept her using before she found the guts to face it. I don’t remember her going into rehab the last time – before we moved to Piper’s. We didn’t visit her. There was just a sense of relief for six months: no visits from her, no fights, none of the tearing inside me of wanting to give her what she wanted but being terrified of what was at the end of it. Wanting to believe her hollow promises that it would be different this time.

Every time I went…to make her happy. Every time but Pipers Reach – I fought, I refused to go, I didn’t want my world turned upside down again, far away from Nan and Papa. I never gave her the benefit of the doubt – underneath everything was a seething resentment. I found out after she died that she chose Piper’s Reach because she’d gone there with Nan and Papa as a kid and it was full of good memories.

I’ve been thinking of Mum lots. Wondering if she would have been better sometimes, just being high. She was clean, but the heroin never really left her – it was like she was an echo of the better version of herself…a few badly glued together pieces of a shattered whole. She swung from being overly permissive to a fascist. And while part of it was fear of history repeating itself, part of it was a bunch of bad wiring. I’d see glimpses of a different woman, of who she might have been, who we might have been, what she might have done.

Between the two floods I dug out the box I took them Nan’s storage shed and slowly went through it. My mother was born Brigitta Aniko…they all changed their names, Anglicised them, before I was born. Do you remember me saying Nan had circled a name in the yearbook and had written my father’s name on the back of formal photo. In a box there were a handful of letters he’d written to my mother. Nothing special…not really…a lot of the same kind of crap we wrote, but he always signed: love Billy, at the bottom.

I need to find my Dad, Jude. I need to go to him and find out why he abandoned the love of his life. Why he abandoned me. Why he abandoned my mother.

Which brings me to the first item on my list. I’ve never come out and directly asked you for anything. Now I need three things from you:

1. To come with me to see my dad.
2. To accompany me to Sydney the two interviews – you won’t be interviewed, but I need you there.
3. I need you to give me three months in Piper’s.

I’ve explained one, two is mostly self-explanatory but three…

I went to visit Ginny. You’ll probably be angry with me for going and your dad too. But I had to go. I needed something in the silence, something to salve the unreturned phone calls. So I drove down and arrived early afternoon. She has a lovely old-style home with an amazing garden. My heart beat so fast, my chest hurt and I stopped to smell the roses along the path to try and hold it together. It would of been so much easier to have just run. I tried to imagine I was back on the force. How many doors did I knock in uniform? But that made it worse. It’s only ever bad news when the pigs come knocking on your door.

It was a heavy, metal knocker and I knocked twice and waited. She opened the door and looked quizzically at me – looking for a clipboard or something to mark me as a salesman. I couldn’t say anything, not even hello. She opened the door wider and quietly said: “Helen?”

I shook my head trying to find my voice.

“Ella- Louise,” I finally said and she looked confused. “But it’s about Bill.”

She closed the door behind her and led me around the side to a seat in the sun. And all I could think was, it’s bad news, I’m bringing bad news. She motioned for me to sit and then excused herself to make tea. On the tray she brought back was a photo of your dad and her. I told her what happened to your dad… kept it to the facts – until she slowly drew my story out of me and our two stories unravelled and rewove.

This is why I’m asking for those three months in Pipers. I don’t want to be Ginny Lane – when you walk away and leave me – because let’s be honest – you’ve been telling me for months you won’t leave your wife and family…when you leave me behind, the last time, I need it to be because it didn’t work out between us. I need to be able to set aside how I feel about you and know it doesn’t live in a world beyond these pages. I need three months to know it can’t and won’t work so I can get on with my life, so I don’t spend the rest of my life like Ginny – alone and waiting for the time to be right.

If you love me…if you ever loved me – you will give me these three things. You’ll give me the support I need to face up to the last malingering pieces of my past and give me certainty – a known reality – so that I can move on, so we can move beyond being hostages of the past.

Forever your,

Ella-Louise

Ella-Louise: Saturday, 2nd February 2013

Saturday, 2^nd February 2013

Dear Jude,

I’m sitting here alone in the café, the keys on the table next to your letters, another pot of tea empty, “City of Angels” soundtrack playing and a tangle of thoughts knotting me up as surely as a fishing net.

I got home to both your letters last night. I was dead on my feet after days of worry and stress and the physical effects of sandbagging and shovelling mud once the waters had retreated. I was numb reading them both, as though I was already too shell-shocked and exhausted to process any of it.

And I lay awake all night unable to sleep trying to reconcile myself to the role I’ve played in bringing all of this down on you.

I could feel the raw pain in every word…of a good man undone. My fears from Piper’s Reach manifest…that if I touched you, that my brokenness and corruption would infect you too.

My head swims in and out of the vertigo of sleep deprivation and the enormity of what’s happened to you.

I searched out my phone. It was dead and my power was off. I charged it up here this morning. Saw the call from you at 4am on Thursday morning and tried to ring back. My credit had expired. I rang on Ava’s phone but it went to message bank. It will take a day to get a letter to you. But I will keep calling.

I’ve talked to Ava about this. She says the immediate concern of my own inability to drive aside, going to you in Piper’s in possibly not the best course of action. She suggests it would be like throwing petrol on a fire—that your wife kicks you out and your lover rolls into town. But it’s not even that clean up—as you wrote. The weekend of the reunion was the culmination of years of history between us—it wasn’t as though we got drunk and fucked a stranger in a moment of lapsed judgement.

If you want me there—with you now—in Piper’s, I’ll come. I’ll find a way to sleep and be safe behind the wheel of a car.

What Ava has suggested is you come here…for a long weekend or however long you need. You can have my cottage and I’ll stay with Ava and Matt. I want to give you a safe space to be in while you sort through stuff…with people who won’t judge you. I’ll listen, I’ll hold a space, bear witness, whatever it is you need from me.

It doesn’t matter you missed being there for me at Christmas—I’d never turn away from you in a crisis to punish you. I’d never do that.

Remember when you taught me to dive under the waves? I was terrified and you laughed and said it was more terrifying to be slammed by the waves. The swell crested and under you went and came up laughing on the other side, and me cursing, because the wave had torn at my bikini. So I dived under the next one. It was this weird sensation like a peaceful pull—put I could swim against it and come up further from the shore and we swam out into the deep chilly water, diving beneath each set until we were beyond the break.

There is no quick, easy salve for your pain. The waves will crash against you if you stay where you are feeling the way you are. Coranderk isn’t the solution but perhaps it’s the path toward calmer waters.

Whatever you need of me—I’ll be it for you. You just have to ask.

There is no lighthouse here, no Point, none of the markers of our past. A new beginning.

Come here and walk the high tide mark with me and let us untangle what we have spent decades weaving—but this time without the fears, without the pressures and frustrations and without all the things unsaid sitting silently between.

Let me have a chance to at being for you, what you have always been for me.

Forever Your,

<3 Ella-Louise

xxx

Ella-Louise: Tuesday, 22nd January 2013

Coranderk Bend

Tuesday, 22^nd January 2013

Dear Jude,

I’m sat in the back booth of Ava’s café and I could almost pretend the last four months were all just a bad dream. Then I see your pile of letters next to the teapot, look across and a sea of strange faces greet me. It’s like one of those dreams where you recognise it as familiar and foreign. I read once those dreams are the product of dreaming outside of deep REM sleep.

Ava reserved the back booth for me and has just placed a fresh pot of tea in front of me. Before she walked off she gave me a hug and a look that said, “Everything’s going to be okay.”

I’ve just finished reading your most recent letters: the 3^rd January from the beach an 16^th January from the office. I don’t know what to write Jude. I look at the scraps of letters written at Bryon and wonder if I just slip them and this inside an envelope and leave it at that for now. I realise you don’t have the letter I wrote in Malaysia and wonder if there’s any point in crossing letters any more.

Being back here is like having a connection again and it throws our disconnection into stark relief. It was your early letters, when I first moved here, that gave me relief and hope. Relief from the life I’d left behind. Hope I could find myself again. When I opened my safety deposit box a year ago and saw all your stuff in there, I couldn’t believe it was all in there. Couldn’t believe how successfully I had sealed you up. I should not have been reaching out and making new connections while I was in hiding. It was utterly selfish… but I needed a lifeline. I needed you to help me remember who I was. Who Ella-Louise was.

It was selfish. And my selfishness has destroyed the person you were.

I dreamt of you in Malaysia, one of the few nights when sleep came to claim me. We were naked in front of the fire at the McCracken place. You told me to turn around and traced the outline of my tattoo, your lips pressing against the scars. It got hotter with each touch, like someone was turning up the thermostat. You said you had to stop. You were burning. I turned and held your hands, tears on your cheeks evaporating in the flames rising up from the floorboards. You screamed and said you couldn’t do it. “Just don’t let go of me,” I begged. “It will only hurt for a bit.” Then you caught on fire and the flames devoured you. Your hands turned to ashes in mine.

And I sat there crying into the ashes that had been you, begging you to rise up.

And I woke up screaming, covered in sweat. I sat in an armchair by the window watching dawn creep over Kuala Lumpur. I wondered would I take it all back if I could, never go to the safety deposit box. Never contact you.

Would I have made it to the trial if I hadn’t? Given what happened there, would it even have mattered if I didn’t?

3:17pm

I’m back from the beach with Ellie. It was low tide so we searched the rock pools, swam. Even though I hate the feel of sand (didn’t you used to have a field day with that… and I remember Adrian teasing you once, when he thought I was out of earshot, that if you were ever going to pop my cherry you’d have to get a room!)… I let Ellie bury me. Then we swam out beyond the breakers, in the really cold water and floated on our backs, the salt water drying into a crust on our faces.

She was stoked to discover my real name is Ella-Louise. When she says, “Aunty Ella-Louise” it makes me sound very grown up. Makes me realise how grown-up a sounding name ‘Ella-Louise’ actually is. And how, unlike Adrian and the rest of them, you never abbreviated it. Never gave me a nickname. How I used to melt and cry inside in equal parts when your Dad called me “Ellie”. It was like I didn’t have to be responsible or have adult worries as ‘Ellie’.

You said in the hangover letter:

“If I try and backtrack our history, our paths, all I see are missed opportunities, mistimed chances, crushes out of sync and in-sync without the impetus to make something happen.”

I was never brave enough to make the first move because I stood to lose everything if I misjudged it…your family were my family and I’d lose them. Back then I had everything to lose and I couldn’t do it. Now I have nothing to lose. It’s like we could swap stones at the lighthouse. Twenty years on you want to be free and I want you to stay.

Ellie asked me where I went and why I was gone so long. I said I had to go away for work. “But you don’t have a job.” I tried to explain to her that it was a secret job. “You could tell me but then you’d have to kill me,” she said and I waited for her to giggle at her joke but she looked at me dead serous. I nodded. “I’m glad you came back”. She threw her arms around me. After a moment she said, “Bryce said you did bad things.” I held her out at arm’s length. “There are people who aren’t happy with what I did and they need someone to blame. I’ve always tired to do the right thing and if you always try to do the right thing and do it with a generous heart then that’s the best anyone can ever expect of you.”

She hugged me and then picked up her towell and said, “Does this mean you can get married now?”

The look on my face made her laugh. “Don’t you want to fall in love, get married, gross your kids out kissing in the kitchen?”

“The man I love is standing in his kitchen grossing out his kids kissing his wife.”

Ellie looked confused for a moment. “Is that why he writes to you? Because he can’t visit you? It is him, that writes to you, yeah? I nodded. “Does he love you?”

“He wrote this time and said he does. But I don’t think he does.”

“Does he make you happy Aunty Ella-Louise?”

“A long time ago we made each other happy. Now we just make each other sad and confused.”

“Why didn’t you marry him?”

“Because I left where we lived and I waited for him to come and rescue me. I had to rescue myself first though.”

“Is that what you went away to do?”

“Sort of?”

“So you can be together now?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so?”

“I heard Mum say she just wished you would be happy now. You’d been through shit loads.” She blushed. “You won’t tell her I swore?”

“It’ll be our secret?”

“What’s his name?”

“Jude,” I said, “Jude Smith.”

“Jude can be our secret then.”

I nodded and collected all our stuff up.

“Do you think he wishes he’d married you?” she asked as an after thought.

“Then he wouldn’t have his kids.”

“But you’d have your own kids.”

And a cold emptiness grew in my abdomen and my scars started to itch.  I distracted her with talk of a milkshake and plotting to go to Coffs to see a movie.

What do we do now, Jude?

I don’t love Bryan. I went to Malaysia with him because I had to do something after the trial. I needed to be with someone who understood what I’d been through. It wasn’t like I could turn up on your doorstep Christmas Eve and ask for a room in the inn. If you’d picked the phone up Christmas Day and given me a chance to say I needed you, would you have come to me? Would you have sat there and held a space for me, listened to me scream in the middle of the night. Would you have given me two weeks of your life to help me find my equilibrium again?

You were always my protector. You were always there for me and I know it’s been hard for you to understand this and I haven’t helped. And I know it must be hard to see someone doing for me what you’ve done in the past.

I don’t want to be with Bryan. I am grateful for what he’s done for me…but he’s a friend, a good friend who was there at the right time.

I can’t come back to Piper’s yet. I need a few weeks to find my feet before I can face having the rug pulled out beneath me again.

Matt has some ideas for how to deal with the immediate present. He’s suggested I give one T.V. and one print interview to tell my side of the story.

I need to decide if I do that before or after I come to see you and your Dad.

Seeing you say you love me… see it written in ink should bring solace, but I don’t know. Let’s let the lines of communication reopen properly. Let’s give the future a chance to come into focus.

I’m sleeping by myself, like I’ve always been…wishing you were by my side.

Always Your,

Ella-Louise

PS: I’ve collected up all these fragments to put in the envelope and its reminds me of the letters I would write to you from Sydney…in technicolour. I remember Nan saying in complete exasperation one holiday, “Ella-Louise please! Can you not go without that boy for more than a few hours? Lord knows what you’re saying when you spend all your time sitting writing.”

PPS: I’m sorry I did a terrible job of answering your letter. Let’s hope this is the end of correspondence chaos.

PPPS: Divorce papers arrived this afternoon. Bloody Bryan must have known about them last week. There was an unopened note inside form Dario:

Your Freedom. If you ever need a safe place, you know where to find us.

I think he’s going to do a runner with the kids once the divorce is finalised. I thought it was a contingency against the law – but perhaps it was a planned escape all along.

Ella-Louise: Friday, 19th January 2013

Post Marked: Coranderk Bend, 23rd January

Byron Bay
19^th January 2013

Dear Jude,

This is sheer madness to think I can write to you on the beach I need one more hand—either to hold my hat or keep the page from flying away. Doesn’t help either that I’m leant up against the back of my book.

The slow trip south has begun in earnest and while part of me is glad there will soon be an end to months of living in anonymous hotel rooms, the other part is scared of what comes next. I thought I would be able to lay to rest all these other versions of myself and return to the beginning to start again…but anyone in Coranderk who has seen Ruby-Rose’s face splashed across the internet…well, what am I saying…it’s not the clean break I wanted.

Bryan’s told me to stop reading what they are writing about me—that I know the truth and I can tell those close to me the real story. But oh my God Jude—the unmitigated lies and sensational half-truths. Bryan says there’s always a scape-goat…and this time it’s me. Because I obviously haven’t paid enough. Sacrificed an adequate amount of myself.

The lines from ‘Don’t Give Up’ keep playing over and over in my head:

I changed my face

I changed my name

But no one wants you when you lose.

I don’t want to go back to Coranderk to stares and whispers. To questions. To friends who will feel betrayed, as you do, by my unwillingness to let them in. To tell them about my past.

But I can’t see how sharing the past would’ve changed anything. Had I told you everything, it would have made you vulnerable. In the world I’ve come from sometimes it is safer to know nothing. I was only trying to protect you.

Bryan says I need to talk—I need to start processing everything so I can find peace. HE needs me to talk. I’m content in the silence. You’re the only one I want to talk to but even we have a history of not saying the important stuff.

I carried the letter I wrote in Malaysia around for days before I could bring myself to post it. So much stuff unsaid—for years—who am I to be the one to say it.

When I came out of the water earlier I had a memory of us in Year 11 Ancient History. You said I could be Persephone, so I said you’d be Apollo. Adrian wanted to be Bacchus, until you reminded him, he was Roman. Adrian shrugged and said a god was a god, wasn’t it.

A traitor is a traitor…doesn’t matter why you did what you did. No one’s interested in why. All that matters to them is you did.

I think constantly of the future and a chance to live a life without running, without fighting, without regret, but it seems the past has different ideas.

I’m hoping there is a letter in Coranderk for me tomorrow.

If I fear the worst there, will it mean it can never be as bad as I imagine? I’m not sure if Coranderk is where I want to go back to permanently, but I know it’s a good place to start.

I have some more travelling to do before I go back there to sort out what the future is.

Sorry my thoughts are all over the place.

I miss you. I miss you so terribly.

The wait is almost over.

Always your,

<3 Ella-Louise

-xxx-

Saturday, 19^th January 2013

2:14am

I’m back in the embrace of insomnia again.

When I got back from the beach my letter fell out of my book and dropped near Bryan. He bent down to pick it up and it was like someone pulling the pin on a grenade. “This is it,” I thought. “The argument that’s been building since we got in from Malaysia.” He stared at the folded pages and then handed them back to me. I expected him to say something but he just walked off, back out to the balcony to his computer. I shouldn’t have followed him, but I did.

“So, that’s it,” I said.

“What do you want from me? Do you want me to fight for you? Is that what you want?”

I didn’t know what to say. That moment epitomised my entire life…what did I want?

“You don’t get it, do you? I’ve been fighting for you since you first stepped into my office in June. And what’s he done?”

“You told him to stay away. I told him to stay away.”

“Don’t you see. He was never coming. He’d rather wallow in his own pathetic guilt than actually do anything.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Damn right I don’t understand. You shut me out and pour everything out to him. Who is here with you Ella-Louise? Now. Who’s here?”

“You,” I said.

“Do you even know what you want?”

I shook my head and sat down opposite him, at the same table I’m writing at now. Before I could stop it, it all came out: my family, your family, you and me, Jakob and me. At the end of it, the light had gone out of the day and the night had swallowed us both.

“If you drive me back to the Gold Coast in the morning I’ll fly back to Sydney. You need to go on alone and sort out what you want.”

I’ve rung Zeke, Ava and Matt to let them know I’m coming home tomorrow and asked them to come over for dinner. Regardless of the heat I’m cooking moussaka and I’m going to sit them down, like I sat down with Bryan, and tell them everything.

I keep thinking of Persephone stolen into the underworld…and how she was kidnapped. I went willingly…but I wonder, would I have even wanted to if Mum hadn’t been a junkie. Now it’s all over and I wind my way out of the underworld…what do I want to find at the top? What next?

Baby steps. Get home. Cook for Zeke, Ava and Matt. Get the past out of the way. Put clean sheets on my bed and sleep for a week. I don’t remember what it feels like to be truly relaxed but I’m sure there were moments even hours of it in Coranderk. And I know there was relief and release for a few hours in the McCracken house with you…the fading memory of a safe harbour in the tempest.

Sitting here, watching the sky fade into daybreak, I try and remember what it felt like for you to hold me. Try to remember how our bodies fit together. I close my eyes and I’m opening the door that Sunday and you’re wrapping me up in your arms before the door even clicked closed and I’m trying to remember where my arms were and where yours were. All I remember for sure was you brushing the hair out of my eyes, tucking it behind my ear and saying, “You’re here. I was afraid you’d be gone.”

Of all the mistakes we’ve made, of all the questions we’ve raised and answered, the stories we’ve shared, the souls we’ve bared…I still don’t know why you came back that Sunday.

I wish you were in my cottage….waiting for me.

The only certainty I have for my future: I don’t want to wait any more.

Always your,

<3 Ella-Louise

Sunday

Late

Everyone has gone home. The candles are burned down in the kitchen, there’s a sea breeze blowing in through the window bringing the slow crash of the surf with it. Edith Piaf is playing on the record player and I have enough champagne left in the bottle for a final glass.

Saying good-bye to Bryan at Coolangatta Airport ended up a bit weird. With the decision made it was like we were both in a hurry to get it over and done with. At the gate he hugged me and said, ‘Get some sleep, Ella-Louise. Promise me that.” I nodded wanting to say thank you but the words caught in my throat. “And keep your Christmas present charged up. I’m not much of a letter writer.” And he was gone without a backward glance.

I filled up before getting back on the highway and drove without stopping. The other side of Ballina I realised why I was expecting the worse in Coranderk. It’s like a default setting from years of living with Mum. Good news was always greeted with an expectation of me having done better: an ‘A’ in English, why not an ‘A+’. The twisting of innocence into guilt. And the few times I did the wrong thing, a sighed resignation—I was living up to her ideas I’d never amount to my full potential. So I’ve always assumed people will think the worst of me.

And I was wrong. Wrong about how everyone would treat me.

I was picking eggplants in the supermarket and I heard, “Well hello stranger.” And it was Raf. He asked me if I was home for long enough to do a few nights up at the surf club. Like no time had passed. Like I hadn’t sold myself out, carried the burden of the failed court case as my own sin. He clapped me on the shoulder. “Come on down when you’re ready. The young fella’s keen to get over to see you so I won’t keep you.”

I opened the door to the house and it smelled better than I remembered it smelling. In an art deco glass vase on the kitchen table were fresh cut roses and jasmine. I raced out to the garden and the jasmine vine was huge, healthy and weighed down with flowers. The rose bush was three times the size and had new buds. The smell was incredible and I remembered Matt on the phone saying Ellie had been caring for the garden. Her influence not just the healthy blooms but a collection of concrete fairies.

I dragged everything out of the car and dumped it in the lounge room. I’d expected to come in and not recognise my house, but it looks pretty much as I left it. Whatever Zeke has done is hidden. In my room the bed was made up with fresh sheets, the red embroidered doona cover on. The window open and the sea air blowing in. Your letters on the pillow.

The record player cranked out loud music while I got the fire lit. I read your Christmas card while the fire revved up. I put it up on the mantle piece in the lounge room and my house felt like a home. I was home, safe…. just as you’d hoped in your card. Your blessing had got me safely back here.

Zeke arrived first, with the champagne and looked uncomfortable and I wasn’t sure how much he knew or how to put him at ease. I thanked him for taking good care of the house while I was gone. The Hudson’s arrived soon after and the most amazing festive feeling filled up my house. After dinner Bryce and Ellie were shooed into the lounge room to play their DSs and we went outside… and I told them everything. When I was done Ava took Zeke inside to do the dishes and Matt and I talked about my options now. He says there’s room in his business if I want to go back to law-mongering.

I sit here still unbelieving they didn’t judge me. Not for any of it. Zeke hugged me tight when he left and I wanted to say sorry, sorry for not being honest with him all along. I don’t know which hurt him more—knowing I had purposely withheld my past from him or allowed myself to get involved with him after the reunion.

Matt took the kids home and Ava and I built a little fire out the back. I took all the clothes I’d carried around with me all these months, along with the suits and burned them. The only things I kept were the LPs and the portable record player. I felt stripped of the past.

We sat side-by-side drinking wine and watching it all burn.

“Did you bet for or against me,” I asked her, watching the flames devour a tie-dyed shirt.

“Both.”

“Both?”

“You were a closed book Ella-Louise, with good reason I guess.”

“Are you angry with me?”

“We could have helped you.”

“That’s what Jude says.”

“Are you going to let us help you now?”

“If—”

“It’s a yes or no answer.”

“Yes. Okay.”

“Good,” Ava said and stood up. “You gonna walk me home or what.”

I walked back via the beach. Sat for ages watching the moon drenched waves. You said about the salt leaching in from an early age. There must have been enough barefoot escapades in Piper’s for me to get a life long dose. I feel better here by the sea.

Once I’ve slept for a week, I’ll open your letter and write.

The only thing that would make this moment perfect… you taking the glass from my hand and leading me to bed.

<3 Ella-Louise

…TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK