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

Dear Ella-Louise,

I left you in the hotel room with my latest letter. I couldn’t stay in the same room so I’ve gone and found a cafe to keep writing because there are things I haven’t yet said in the letter you’re reading. I told you I would come to Sydney. I did not say why. I told you in that letter you could not come back to stay in Piper’s and didn’t say why.

Why am I not saying this to you face-to-face? Pen and paper are the medium I am most comfortable with. On paper I was safe, even though ink is indelible. The permanency of writing it down was always the way for me to communicate. Perhaps to the detriment of using my actual voice in person. In person it’s difficult and cumbersome. Silence is the default I have.

Why did I come to Sydney? I needed answers. I needed resolution. But I know I will not find them here. I came to Sydney to support you and protect you in your time of need. It’s a reaction to all those years ago when I never responded when you needed me, curled up at your Nan’s. It does not, in any way, make up for failing you.

Yet I had to lie to be here. I told Rebecca and Mum I was in Sydney for work. Is not unrealistic as I come to Sydney every once in a while, but the fact I have to lie about it makes me uneasy.

Sydney is not home for me and nor is it where I feel safe. Piper’s is my home, my refuge and safe place. Even though the storm is raging and it may look like a place of punishment and torture, is where I am anchored.

Over the weekend and during the trip to Sydney have thought about who I am, who I think I am, and who others think I am.

Who do you think I am? Does it matter who you think I am?

Nakedness is not the ultimate level of exposure in understanding who someone is. The person is revealed in how they touch, caress, look, taste, how they listen, how they give to someone and how they receive. Nakedness is still another level of understanding. We understand through the clothes someone wears.

If I was to lay out every event from my life like a display in a museum, who would I be? You can wander the exhibits, read the letters, hear the conversations and still not know who I am.

But I know where I come from and therefore who I am.

Remember how we walked the dunes and noted the shifts and changes in the height of shape, especially after the storms that chomped into the beach. But it always reformed.

I have been part of the dunes, shaped and reformed by the wind, waves and tempests.

And that is why you cannot return to Piper’s. I need to have the chance to reform after the storm.

I will help you in whatever way I can while I am here. For that you have my word. Beyond that, I don’t know. We will have to talk it over when we have a chance.

When I return home to Piper’s, I know I am returning to Mum and Dad and their past; returning to Rebecca and our present. This is what I have to return to. You can return to Coranderk with the knowledge of a clean start, free from the chains of the past except I know the memory will never disappear and that’s probably the hardest thing to live with.

I will always have the memory of the day you left on the bus to Sydney. I will always have the memory of our time together as kids. I will always have the memories of ecstatic bliss and wretched betrayal.

There goes my phone telling me you’ve finished reading. Time to deliver this one too.

Always and ever
Jude

Wednesday 3 April (Late night)

Dear Ella-Louise,

You hypocrite!

You accuse me of disrespecting you, unable to be a man and speak with you in person yet you’ve turned your phone off, denying me the chance to have the conversation. You keep telling me you’ll tell me everything but all I have is scraps falling from your hand when you choose to open your palm and let them crumble. You keep revealing parts of your life I do not know, have not known, have never known, and then expect me to be the same person you imagine me to be. You never came out and said anything straight from the beginning, hiding it all behind silence and reminisces.

And what right do you have to correct or amend my father’s wrongs? He is not some crusade to rally to, an icon to resurrect in the hope he will bring salvation to your cause. My father is my responsibility, not yours. Sometimes secrets and silence is the only response we have left.

And we are left hurling words at each other like stones, reaching into our shared and individual histories, looking for ammunition to cast the last stone.

Strike me now and be done with it; I’m laying down my stones.

1:45am

I went out walking for a while to clear my head and cool off. When I came back into the room my letter from today and what I wrote were on the bed. Scattered pages of words like a downed albatross spread out on the blue bedspread. Words and silence are all I have. They were all I had when we were children and it seemed it was all you ever needed. We never really talked in any depth about what was going on with your Mum. I think it’s because we had no idea what to say, no vocabulary to carefully explain the unnamed emotions we felt in the pit of our stomachs. The page is where we were deepest, shared most fully, and trusted wholeheartedly. It was our greatest strength and our most intimate weakness. We preserved each other in letters, artifacts of our existence, a sacred codex.

But today was the first day I saw the true power of spoken words. I watched from the sidelines as you were interviewed for television under the lights and in front of the cameras.

On the note stuck to the door, you wrote that it’s not all about me, that it was too much to expect me to be here for you. Maybe it is, and only because of what I left to come here and what I have to return to. You make it sound like we are still eighteen and single, unattached and unanchored to anything but each other. It’s akin to emotional blackmail, a petulant tantrum to get what you want when you know the solution is more complicated than ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’

If I have acted selfishly, I am sorry. If it’s not all about me, which it isn’t, it’s not all about you either.

However, today was the first time I understood what your past has done to you, how completely and utterly broken you were. I recognise in the scars on your back the wounds that will never completely heal despite the confession you made in front of the cameras. You were made to be the scapegoat, the sacrificial victim to satiate and appease the bloodlust.

When I arrived this morning in my ‘bag of fruit’ as Dad would say, I was very nervous, petrified even about what to say, how you would respond, what you would say.

I hadn’t seen you since June but the tension quickly evaporated as you bustled about getting ready to leave for the interview. As we travelled into the city I felt the overwhelming presence of the buildings, an artificial claustrophobia brought on by the unnatural structures making jagged teeth indents in the sky as I looked up. Only the smell of the salt from the harbour sated the fear.

And then the awkwardness of Bryan’s arrival. Have never felt so uncomfortable around someone, especially knowing he read through my correspondence to you. But he was professional throughout our interactions, brief as they were. It was interesting to watch him orbit around you, fussing, trouble shooting, looking out for you and protecting you. He never appeared flustered, taking and giving direction, articulate in what he wanted and making sure you had what you needed. He observed throughout the interview, interjecting when he felt things were getting off topic or treading dangerous ground. He is your Superman – the man of steel, the man of action.

But there you were alone and naked under the lights, the camera a microscope to judge what you said.

I watched as you spoke, cloistered in the darkness beyond the illumination of the lights. From my position I could see you face. You answered the questions with honesty and candour, belligerence and aggression, humbled and broken. With every question another layer was removed, but only I saw it. While the media were out to make you their scapegoat you revealed just how broken you were. I imagined you laying out on a bed all the different costumes you wore during the past twenty years; different appearances to play a role, multiple roles as you ducked away to change and return. Each costume a skin shed or metamorphosis but at your core, a part of you that could never be changed. And as you continued talking I could see in my mind’s eye each outfit and costume disintegrating, decaying, patched and resewn until the cloth fell apart in your hands, wisps of fabric spun around you like cobwebs collect on neglected furniture and mantelpieces.

I have seen you physically naked but today I saw a true nakedness, one woven with words, a true understanding of the brokenness you have suffered through. You were branded as traitor and perpetrator, never as victim, yet the courage and hope within you never faltered.

In my mind I imaged the scars I traced across your back. I imagined the lines softening and reducing until your back was unmarked, untouched. But they will never heal and I am truly sorry for what you have been through for now I understand.

My only wish was that you had told me sooner. I understand why you couldn’t, what risk it would have put me in, but I still wish you could have said something, anything. Even just a hint of what you were going through so I could have been there for you like I was so many years ago.

When the camera stopped recording, after the last question had been answered I imagined you scooping up the threads of clothes laying on the bed, draping them over your shoulders and arms. You walked to the balcony of the hotel and stood there in the afternoon light. You stretched out your arms in a crucifix formation, the loose threads wafting in the air making them look like wings. As you raised your arms the light shone against you and you burst into flame. The clothes fell as ash and were borne away on the wind. You turned around, clothed anew in garments of your own choosing.

You were reborn from the ashes as you pushed yourself up from the interview chair. In your face was such a look of exhaustion; it drained the colour your face and eyes, weak as a newborn. The fire was there though slowly being kindled as you tested out your new legs. You looked at me and said, “Come along, Jude. We have things to talk about.”

Back at the hotel we sat in silence and drank tea. I knew there was no other time to give you my letter than now. I had to draw the line somewhere and it was here and now, as much as it hurt and pained me. I acknowledge your reaction is justified and appropriate, and I had hoped to talk it over with you. I even hid behind more words and pages while you read it.

I am not sure what I’ll do tomorrow. I want to be there for the other interview, to again be there for you like I promised; to give these letters and make restitution and gain absolution.

I wish you were here in this sterile hotel room, where I can catch a faint scent of you, to help you take the first tentative steps forward.

Always and ever,

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

Dear Ella-Louise,

As soon as I sent that text last Thursday agreeing to meet you in Sydney for the interviews I wanted to rescinded it. Since then I’ve been thinking through why I want to go to Sydney and see you. I need to put it down on paper to help me follow the trail of breadcrumbs we’ve dropped over the years. It means you’ll have this letter to read in person, which will be a strange sensation. We only ever sat and read letters in person once from my memory. We were sitting in the park down from the fish’n’chip shop. We sat on opposite sides of the tree but I found it hard to concentrate on what you had written because I was worried how you were responding to what I had written.

After I give this to you I will have to leave you alone to read it.

I’ve avoided your responses and calls because what you’re asking of me is overwhelming. You make it sound as simple as a walk along the beach yet we have been engulfed by flames. The match was dropped into the undergrowth of our relationship. At first it caught on, then smouldered, wisps of smoke curling before being swept away on the breeze. It lay beneath the surface waiting until we consummated it at the McCracken house.

Then the guilt consumed me and I waited for the flames to engulf me again, except this time it’s funereal.

I am here with limitations and restrictions.

I can come with you to see your father and I’m here for the interviews, to support you in whatever way I can.

But I can’t let you return to Piper’s Reach. For you to return there threatens more of my life than you realise. It begins with me and Rebecca, extends to my parents and children and then reaches out to the people who know.

I finally convinced Rebecca to speak with me two weeks ago, just before your letters arrived. I wanted to be able to speak with her and talk to her about you, about what happened between us. Not to justify or explain, because I knew it sounded foolish. I wanted to clear the air.

The kids were with me for the weekend so I left them with Mum and Dad and went home. Like when I went to tell Mum, I stood at the door and debated whether I should knock or use my keys. However the door was open and the screen door wasn’t pulled to properly, so I knocked before entering.

“Hello,” I called out.

“In the kitchen,” was the short reply. It sounded so familiar and normal.

Entering the kitchen I saw Rebecca at the sink filling the kettle. I stepped up to embrace her, kiss her cheek as I did every time I came home but I pulled myself up short, frozen in my movements.

Rebecca turned and frowned at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said taking a step back. “I was coming in to kiss you just like I normally do.”

Her frown softened slightly before she moved to plug the kettle in and I went and sat down at the table and watched Rebecca move about the kitchen as we exchanged small talk about the children, their homework and how they were getting along.

“Flynn has taken to wetting the bed,” said Rebecca. “Harley seems to be taking it in his stride and I’m finding Jordan in bed beside me some mornings.”

“The kids have been telling me you use swear words to your mother when you’re on the phone when you think they can’t hear.”

Passing volleys. Testing the strength of the defence. And I felt ashamed.

“Sorry,” I said. “It wasn’t meant to be critical.”

Rebecca blushed slightly and a small wry smile played on her lips but the tone cut through. “Choice words for a choice situation.”

Bringing the tea over we sat across the table from each other. But how to start? Where to start? And no outcome slated for the conclusion.

I opened my hands releasing the cup from between my hands, letting go of any security and anchor.

“I am truly sorry for lying to you. For cheating on you. For betraying you. For exposing you to shame and ridicule. For abandoning you and the children.”

A litany of apologies like so many links in a chain to become a garland she could wear or a weight to sink me to the bottom of the ocean.

“What do you want from me?” Rebecca asked.

“Forgiveness. Trust. A chance to repair the damage.”

“Why? On what basis? For what reason?”

Everything I thought of was a cliché, trite, a pat answer found in a sitcom. I could only answer with a truth, “I love you.”

“That’s shit. Do you love her as well?”

“Not the way I love you.”

Rebecca pushed herself into the upright back of the chair and looked away. She turned back and leaned forward, fire behind her eyes, a demand for honesty and a no-nonsense reply.

“Explain to me why it happened,” she said.

“Was there ever someone in your life when you were young and you fell in love with, but nothing ever happened?”

Rebecca nodded slightly, as if the memory made her uncomfortable, or fear of where this was going.

“That was Ella-Louise. We were good friends in high school but nothing ever came of it. Our friendship lasted until the day she left Piper’s Reach for Sydney. She became a memory after that.”

I went on and told her about your life here in Piper’s. The drug association, the fear, the family hang-ups (mine included). I told her about your life undercover, what you lost in terms of family and life. And that I only heard about it during the last year.

“Why did you hide it from me and keep it a secret? Do you not trust me?” Rebecca asked.

“I was embarrassed,” I said. “How do you admit a crush you had back in high school wants to reconnect and catch up? Especially when it’s someone you felt deeply for. There was nothing in it, just reminisces of our shared past.”

“So when did it change?”

“I don’t know.”

“You entertained an adolescent fancy but didn’t have the forthrightness to tell me about a long lost girlfriend.”

“Would you have done the same? Would you have told me about someone you once loved getting in touch?”

“Yes, I would have.”

“Even if what you were talking about brought up feelings of the past?”

“Yes,” said Rebecca. “You let your unresolved feelings dictate how you thought. Were you afraid I’d be jealous? Afraid I’d mock you for a teenage crush? Come on, where’s the credit?”

Memory is a perpetual adolescent, with a naivety, and innocence that clouds your judgement. You see the past as you want to remember it, stuck with an emotional immaturity you’ve forgotten about.

I wonder if I froze my mind when you left Piper’s, kept in the same pattern hoping for your return?

But the folly and fallacy of youth is no excuse for the mistakes an adult makes.

Rebecca spelled out in no uncertain terms that I was not to see you again, to have no contact with you. And then your letter arrived asking me to come to you. I decided to come to you so we could sort this out between us, and I can’t allow you to stay in Piper’s.

I said to Rebecca it was too hard, almost impossible to break all contact as we needed to resolve the situation between us.

“If she maintained the fantasy for all this time, she can keep the fantasy going for another twenty years,” said Rebecca.

I’m here to sort this through with you; to help you with what you need. You’ve spelled out clearly what you want, what you need from me, but there are parts you will have to go alone.

You want me to know about your past, to let me into your experiences, but you locked me out from the start. Were you afraid I’d reject you for what you went through? They were your choices; they were always your choices. You say you don’t want to shelter me from your past but I have no connection to it, no link. I am a stranger to the twenty years spent in the wilderness without a protector, with a light to guide you home.

You spoke of my need to protect you. Yes, I felt the need to protect you – the lost boy and lost girl trying to make a safe haven. You ran from Piper’s Reach because you had to; I couldn’t run away because of what was here for me.

And yet you return to ask me to try and change history, as if we can alter the faults and sins of the past. You went to Ginny – why? To make absolution of your past, to evoke your own memories of what she had? What were you trying to do? Change time, to make it right? How do you intrude upon Ginny’s life. She lives with her past, as does my father. I live with my past and you have you to live with yours.

What’s past is prologue.

As I sit at the table at Mum and Dad’s to write this, seeing the worn marks in the wood and think of my old bedroom, now a guest bedroom where I am sleeping, I wonder if I am stuck in an adolescent loop. No longer does the room resemble what it was like when I was a child. It is simple and efficient, with no personal touch. It has grown and developed, yet devoid of personality. Is this what I have become?

I am in an uncomfortable position, one with events have been placed on me, each with their own prerequisites and requirements, and responsibilities. My wife demands I cease and desist all contact. You asked me to come to you and to return to Piper’s Reach.

I chose to come to you so I can help you in this last quest but nothing more.

We have a storm to endure and a clean up in the aftermath to restore things not as they were, nor how we want them but how they should be.

Fair winds and fair weather

Jude

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

Thursday 7 March, 2013

Dear Ella-Lousie,

It has been six weeks since Rebecca found your letters and pushed me out.

Tonight I drove down to the beach and stood on the high tide line. I watched the waves chase each other up the beach leaving their whitewash reflecting in the moonlight before disintegrating, only to be replaced. Despite the coolness of the evening I took off my shoes and socks and walked into the edges of the whitewash. I let the water run up and over my toes, cascading over the arches of my feet and running behind to collect at my heels. As the water ran back to the ocean, it dragged the sand away, eroding where I was standing. The longer I stood with my feet in the shallows, the less stable I became as more and more sand was eroded from around me.

Everything I knew and believed in is slipping away from me. It’s being cast out to sea, churned and mawed.

After I left the house on the Tuesday I waited for a reply from Rebecca about seeing the kids. I heard nothing for two days and I hesitated to send another message. By Friday I sent another text asking to see the kids. It was their first week back at school (Jordan going into Year 4 and the twins into Year 2) and I missed the nervous enthusiasm of new uniforms, bags, pencil cases, lunch boxes, hair cuts (for the boys at least), new teachers and old friends.

I missed the controlled chaos of the morning, the search for the lost shoe or finding a pair of socks that match.

Rebecca finally responded late on the Friday night with a short note: “You can see the kids Sunday. Your place.”

I was a wreck on Saturday as I had no idea of what Rebecca had told them, nor what I was going to say.

Rebecca arrived shortly before lunch. I watched from the lounge room but kept out of sight. The kids got out, subdued and Rebecca stood next to the open driver’s door as if it were a shield between her and the house. Mum went out to greet them and the kids flocked around her like seagulls on a chip before she shooed them towards the front door.

Mum went around towards Rebecca who crossed her arms and remained behind the door. Coming around the edge of the door Rebecca edged back, arms still crossed, looking down. Mum stopped at the edge of the car door, hesitated and spoke to Rebecca. Rebecca continued to look down, not making eye contact. I watched Mum raise her hand in some gesture of comfort but paused mid air, hovering near Rebecca’s shoulder. Lowering her arm Rebecca uncrossed her arms but kept them in front of her, hands clasped together. Mum stepped forward and gave Rebecca a brief hug but Rebecca did not reciprocate, her hands clasped down by Mum’s arms.

When Mum let go Rebecca quickly got back in the car and backed out of the driveway. The kids were camped on the front step waving before being ushered inside. They came barreling in as they would normally do when we came to visit but there was a moment’s hesitation, an uncertainty about how to respond. I was as unsure as they were.

Flynn broke first and ran over. I knelt down to embrace him and soon it felt like a scrum with arms interlocked, entangled and me pushed off balance. As we picked ourselves up off the floor and came unstuck, Jordan said, “Daddy, I miss you not being at home.”

“We don’t get to wrestle because you’re not there,” said Flynn.

“Come and help Nanna with lunch and we’ll talk while we eat,”” I said. If I had been asked one more question or had to look in their faces I would have lost it. The flurry of activity in the kitchen helped subdue the rising panic in my stomach for a moment. The boys raided the fridge for margarine, jam, peanut butter and cheese while Jordan helped with cutlery and plates.

It all felt so routine and normal as they boys attempted to spread thick globules of margarine and strawberry jam on their sandwiches. Mum made me a cuppa and poured cordial for the kids. After that she slipped away and the vulnerability crept in.

As Ellie asked you questions with the innocence and trust of a child, I knew my own kids needed the same level of honesty, to know they were not in the wrong. Their concentration was fixed on sandwich making and I wanted the normalcy to last for as long as possible.

And the moment came in between mouthfuls when Jordan spoke up and said two words, “Mum cries.”

She was looking at her half eaten sandwich focused on the wedges of cheese and the teeth marks I could see scalloping the edges of both bread and cheese.

“She thinks we don’t see or hear it,” Jordan continued. “But we do.”

“And when she’s on the phone to Grandma she cries too. And uses those words you tell us not to use,” said Harley.

I was caught with half a mouthful of sandwich and swallowing but I started crying. Forcing the lump down I wiped the tears from my eyes.

“I’m so sorry” was all I could muster and speak. “I’m so sorry,” I repeated.

Jordan, Flynn and Harley kept eating, but much slower.

“What has Mummy told you?” I asked.

“She said you had done something very bad to her,” said Flynn.

Jordan had retreated behind her sandwich, her eyes no longer wanting to find mine.

“Mummy said it was like at school when you do something so bad you are sent to the Principal’s office,” added Harley. “Only much, much, much worser.”

Jordan posed the question at me through her sandwich, “What did you do?”

An honest inquiry that needed an honest answer: some understanding of why their father and mother were no longer living in the same house. But how do you explain an affair, a fling, a lustful weekend of passion? How can a child possibly grasp the intricacies of human interactions and relationships?

And yet they do. They understand more than we give them credit for. They only lack the vocabulary to express their awareness and understanding.

“Daddy broke a promise to Mummy; a promise he made before you were born and a promise he should never have broken.”

“Like when you promised to take us bike riding one day and didn’t do it?” said Flynn.

“Yes.”

“But you made it up to us. Can you make it up to Mummy? Flynn was sincere in his request.

“It will take a lot to make it up to Mummy,” I said.

“It’s serious, isn’t it?” asked Jordan. “How serious?”

“Very serious.” The temptation to hold my tongue and leave the details vague was strong but Jordan needed answers. She had been with me and Dad many times; I don’t know what she had heard but she grasped there was a problem. I had to hold my cup between my hands, keeping the last of the heat form leaching out now it was empty.

“Do you remember my friend Ella-Louise? She came to Piper’s Reach last year for the school reunion. I spent some time with her that I shouldn’t have. And I kissed her like you’ve seen Mummy and Daddy kissing. It was a very wrong thing to do, breaking the promise I made to Mummy. That’s why she is very upset with Daddy and why he is staying here at Nanna’s.”

It was out there but I didn’t know if it had registered.

“When are you coming home, Daddy?” asked Harley.

I merely shrugged. That was six weeks ago and I’m still here.

Rebecca came back a couple of hours later and again stood by the driver’s door and refused to come in. hugging the kids I didn’t want to let them go. Their faces were a mix of sadness and uncertainty and joy at seeing their mother.

Since then Rebecca has refused to speak with me except via text. She drops the kids off here and we go about our regular business of being a family. In the back of my mind I know it’s a falsehood, a broken image.

I have offered the idea of going to counseling but it has not been replied to one way or another. I’ve tried apologizing via text but it is met with coldness. When I push at the silence Rebecca responds with vitriol, disgust at my actions and duplicity. The strongest response was aimed towards you: “She was silent for twenty years, and you speak of me being silent. You were silent about your affair and you dare push me about being silent. And she can be silent for the next twenty years for all I care.”

You came home to Coranderk after having made peace with your past. You came home and made peace with the present. Right now there is no peace for the immediate future.

I’m sorry you cannot come here. Autumn is just around the corner and the storm season is not too far away.

Please be at peace in Coranderk. You deserve a new start without the fallout happening here.

Fair winds and fair weather

Jude

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

Dear Ella-Louise,

I’m sorry for the long silence but I felt it was necessary. Thing are still very far from fair winds and fair weather. At the moment the coast is being lashed by a severe storm. And it’s not something I intend to leave at this moment, but weather it out.

I’m writing this from the same place you and I spent many hours at with our books and our homework. I can still feel the divot in the dining room table where I dropped Mum’s cut glass vase that afternoon back in Year 10. All that water sloshing over our science assignment research: the ink running like streams and forming blue and black puddles. I’m so glad the vase didn’t break but the clean up was a shocker. You were pretty ticked off your work was ruined but you eventually saw the funny side of it.

All these years later, the indentation is still here and I can rub my finger in the groove; even under the tablecloth it’s evident. No matter how careful we are in our lives, we leave a mark, an indentation, a scar, not only on ourselves but on the people around us. I can rub my knee and feel the skateboard scar from all those years ago – self inflicted, and I can feel the scar within myself from what I have done to you and Rebecca.

Then there are your scars – the physical of your womb, your back, your tattoo, and the emotional and mental scars from you life under cover. And the one I’ve inflicted upon you.

You spoke of your own fear, of your touch, your brokenness bringing a good man undone. I think you sell yourself far too short – you always had a goodness I could not quite understand. It’s a goodness to fight for those who cannot. At times it’s ugly and black and frightening but it’s a goodness that never fades. You are still a good woman. In comparison my goodness is a charade, a falsity, built on others’ perception and understanding of who they think I am. I was “good” because I was compliant, not because I stood firm on something.

It wasn’t your brokenness and darkness corrupting and infecting; it was my own. And for that reason I cannot accept your offer to go to Coranderk. The chance to remove myself from this storm and be in a peaceful location is tempting but the storm will only come with me. The tangled mess we have weaved will take some sorting but I can’t do it removed from Piper’s Reach. Thank you for offering to be for me what I was for you but it will have to be from a distance.

The irony is not lost on me, that I have returned to Mum and Dad’s house, sitting at the same table we sat at, where I wrote notes to you.

Ava is right, too. It wouldn’t be right for you to come to Piper’s. As much as I would like you to, to have you here, to speak with you face to face, to sort everything out, but it can’t happen yet. Right now it feels like I’m back in the surf, ducking under the waves. I can hold my breath and submerge to the quiet peacefulness and the gentle push and pull of the waves. I cannot hold my breath forever and must return to the surface where the waves crash over your head. It would be almost too easy to slip beneath the waves into silence and solitude.

For right now I need to take stock and work things out with Rebecca. There has been many conversations going on in the month since it all happened, with Dad, Mum and Adrian.

I called you that Thursday on a whim but found the words were blocked in my throat, jammed tight to the point of choking. I wanted to speak with you, even though it was four in the morning. I couldn’t sleep, had tossed and turned all night while too many things fought for attention in my mind. When you’re left alone with no one to talk to, no outlet to decant thoughts and ideas, you run the risk of temporary insanity.

Where do you go to confess your faults and adultery? In the first few days I stayed in the office, a recluse with the benefits of technology but no desire to use them for they require a human connection and it was the one thing I feared. To speak, to confess or divulge made the reality even more crushing so I basically hid in my office for the long weekend, slipping out for food and coffee. I avoided the usual places and normal times so I wouldn’t be seen. Each time I felt naked and branded with a sign reading “Adulterer.” Back at the office I felt safe again having disconnected myself from people. Mum tried to ring a couple of times on my mobile but I ignored them. I was too embarrassed to talk, feeling like the little boy caught playing with himself.

Late on the Monday afternoon of the long weekend I called Mum after I had driven past home to see if Rebecca was there with the kids or if they were still at Mum and Dad’s. I parked a little down the street, away from the house but could see the boys playing in the backyard.

I called Mum and said I wanted to come over and have a chat. She was curt in her reply but assented. As I went to pull away Beth arrived, pulling into our driveway. I turned the car around and watched Rebecca emerge from the front door, embrace Beth and wipe at her eyes. Their shapes became indistinct in the rear view mirror as I pulled away.

Standing on the front door of Mum and Dad’s I vacillated between knocking and opening the door with the key I’ve had since I was sixteen. To open the door of my own accord would have been presumptuous given the circumstances yet we do it all the time, each time we come over. Here I was, a stranger in a familiar place, like breaking curfew all over again.

Mum opened the door before I could knock and left the door open as she returned towards the kitchen. No greeting, no response. I followed her in and sat at the dining room table, fingering the divot in the table.

“Tea?” Mum asked.

“Yes, thanks,” I said.

Nothing else was said as she made two cups of tea and brought them to the table. I scalded myself with the first sip. Mum sat in the chair, straight backed, lips thin and tightly compressed.

“Rebecca told you what happened?” I asked.

Mum nodded.

“What has she told you? I asked. The question sounded stupid, as if I had some defense to mount, to put my name forward so I could be in the clear.

“That you have been unfaithful physically, emotionally and spiritually,” she said. “With Ella-Louise.”

When she said your name the guilt was a sudden slap across the face. I felt fifteen again, when she found one of your first notes to me. I had hidden it like it was a treasure and felt the embarrassed exposure of a teenage boy when she produced it, having found it in the pockets of my uniform. But now there was a bitterness and venom in her tone, not the lighthearted mocking she first employed.

“It wasn’t Ella-Louise’s fault,” I said.

“You’re both at fault,” Mum retorted. “But you even more so because you betrayed Rebecca, Jordan, Flynn and Harley.”

She bit her lower lip as if holding in something; stopping herself from speaking her mind.

“Say it, Mum.”

She shook her head.

“Say what’s on your mind.”

Again she shook her head, so I said it for her.

“You’re upset your son had an affair with a woman you never truly liked. You were tolerant of Ella-Louise, but never totally accepting of her. You always thought she was never good enough, the daughter of a junkie and would lead me into trouble. She became a cop because of what happened to her mother, sacrificed years of her life under cover to fight against the evil that consumed her mother. We hadn’t spoken in twenty years and she was looking for a friend to help her through the darkest and toughest part of her life.

“I was the only one from her past she could trust. She had lost everything: her family, her job, her life.”

“But you never thought of telling your wife. You kept the whole thing a secret from her.” Mum went on the attack. “You were so caught up in your boyhood dreams you were blinded to what was happening. She seduced you.”

“She did not seduce me.”

“Then how do you explain what happened?”

I knew it would be impossible to argue against Mum; she had made up her mind that you were guilty. I was guilty too, but not for the indiscretion. I was guilty for betraying my family. This is what she blamed Dad for – the betrayal of family. Even though he was innocent of adultery, he was guilty of focusing on someone other than family.

I pushed at the topic with a question. “Is this why you blame Dad?”

“What do you mean?”

“The whole thing with Ginny Laine. Even though he was never unfaithful to you, you treat him as though he was simply because he was looking out and caring for someone else. He was being compassionate and caring for someone in need and you treated him unfairly. It’s easier to blame the other woman for the fault than to see your own misgivings and faults. It’s easier to blame Ella-Louise than to see I was at fault. I was. I gave in to lust, something Dad never did. I’m at fault because I let down my friend who needed me and trusted me. And I’ve broken trust with Rebecca, my children, you and Dad, my friends.

“You were too self-righteous to see Ella-Louise’s Mum needed help, needed a friend, but you chose to judge her instead.”

I stopped the tears welling up in my eyes. Mum held her cup in a gesture that made it look like it was an anchor as what I said buffeted her like a storm. She steadied and launched her own counter attack.

“You cannot deflect the guilt and wrong doing of another by simply taking it all on yourself. Ella-Louise is in the wrong, too. She reached out to you, taking advantage of your caring nature and compassion. I doubt she hid from you exactly what it was she wanted and you bought into her needs.

“She came back to Piper’s for you and nothing else. She came to have and consume you and now you are left with nothing but a bitter taste in your mouth because you were used.”

I took my cup and sculled what I could, enduring the pain from the too hot tea. Setting down my cup I said I was off to see Dad. Half joking I said I’d see if there was a bed spare at the nursing home.

“Where are you staying now?” Mum asked.

“At the office.”

“Come back here after you’ve seen your father.”

An offer of somewhere to stay despite her anger and misgivings.

I found Dad in his room sniffing at a cup of coffee.

“You want this?” he asked. “It’s pretty brutal but I couldn’t be bothered with it today.”

I took it from him, poured milk and added sugar and downed the tepid concoction.

Dad waited patiently for me to say something. I tried reading his face but it was impassive, the disappointment hidden but I knew it was there.

“I’ve screwed up.” It was all I could say.

“You screwed up the day you bought into the fantasy of Ella-Louise again. I’m not blaming her but the moment she wrote to you and you responded. Your groin stood to attention at that instant while your brain looked for an opportunity to make it happen. You soiled your own bed and when you had the chance to make it right, whatever the consequence, you told yourself the lie that it didn’t matter, no one would find out.

“Your mother is very angry with me that I told her nothing about what I knew. I told her that you had to fix up the mess you’d made. I told your mother she would have only made it worse if she knew and waited for you to do something.”

“Is that why she won’t bring you home?”

“Too many reasons, Jude. Too many reasons.”

“What do I do now?” I was the young punk asking for advice, not the adult making decisions.

“You make it right. Somehow you make it right with Rebecca and your children. You tell them you screwed up and ask forgiveness even if it’s not forthcoming and pay penance.

“And you have to decide what’s to become of you and Ella-Louise. Until you make that decision, you will not be free to do anything else.”

“What did you do about Ginny?” I asked.

Dad grimaced slightly and he looked away.

“I gave her up. Severed all ties for the sake of my marriage.”

“Do you ever think of her?”

“Did you ever stop thinking about Ella-Louise the moment she left Piper’s Reach?”

Touche.

Even with the distance of a month the pain is still raw and I am still processing everything.

I went back to Mum’s and crashed out in my old room. I went back home on Tuesday and collected what I needed. Walking through the house was an unusual experience. No one was home but everything was left as it was: plates on the table and cereal bowls in the sink, a half-drunk coffee sitting in a splashed pool of liquid. It was a museum to memory, vacated by my presence and I was the visitor observing a still life recreation of the twenty-first century.

This was an exhibit of my life; life as it was four days previous. It was the little things that broke my heart: Flynn’s colouring book, Jordan’s iPod and Harley’s favourite Buzz Lightyear.

I found a pen and paper and left a note on the table for the children, before texting Rebecca I would like to have a chance to talk to the Jordan and the twins. Slipping the phone into my pocket I collected what I came for and headed back out. The click as the front door closed behind me caused me to stop. I wanted to turn around and unlock the door, leaving it ajar to know I could return again some day soon.

It was too soon to know, and even a month later, everything is still up in the air. I am emotionally and mentally exhausted and am not at peace. There is still so much to tell you but the rawness of the conversations and events are still exposed to the salt air.

I’ll write again very soon as writing it down helps me put things into an order, whether it’s chronological or alphabetical or some other codification I’m yet to decipher.

I’m going to make a cup of tea and watch this storm blow itself out from the back verandah.

Fair winds and fair weather,

Jude

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

Dear Ella-Louise,

I have something to tell you but first I have to respond to your letter because it will all make sense afterwards. It seems like we wrote on the same day but I posted mine later so you should receive it early in the week. And hot on its heels this will arrive.

Firstly, I am glad you are safely home in Coranderk and have told, Matt, Ava and Zeke what happened. I hope you can gain some balance and equilibrium as you recover. It must be a unique sensation to not have to run and hide anymore, to shed all the layers of the past, destroy then even and rebuild yourself.

I understand your need whilst first in hiding to reach out to something familiar and secure. Each time I walk the high tide line or wander around the base of the lighthouse I have reminders of you. You locked me away for safety and returned, like in your dreams, to the point of protection you knew best.

But it has destroyed me. The lighthouse is a point of reference, a signal of danger. It draws you towards safe passage and a secure harbour but one false move and your stomach is torn open by the rocks jutting up, hidden under the surface of the storm.

I am that lighthouse – both protector and destroyer. I came back to you on the Sunday at the McCracken house out of a desire to protect you. During our time at high school our lives revolved around each other, protecting each other from the challenges and difficulties of life. When you left I felt alone and without purpose because who was I to protect? You had sailed beyond my reach on a bus headed for Sydney. I didn’t know how to protect you from such a distance, believing you had found a safe harbour with your Nan. Now you recognise the need to have rescued yourself first.

And in recent weeks we have asked so many questions, hypothesising and guessing, postulating scenarios about our past. If one thing had changed, where would we be now? If we could exchange stones all those years ago, or rewrite new ones, how different might it be?

I would have always been your protector, whatever happened to us. Whether the stone in our hands reads “Free” or “Stay” I would have protected you. I didn’t answer the phone on Christmas Day because I was angry: angry at Bryan, at you, at myself. Had I answered the phone we could have talked. I could have offered you a place at the table, to be a part of the family again, to be included, loved and protected. I would have listened to all that you had to say; listened to everything you’d been through without judging or commenting. I would have been there for you because I wasn’t there when you needed me in Sydney.

I was meant to be your protector but I have been the cause of your destruction and the instigator of my own demise. You spoke of your dream, where I touched your back like I did that night at the McCracken house. As I touched the scars I was consumed by fire and reduced to ashes. Except there was no rebirth, no rising from the embers.

Your dream came true. I am consumed and destroyed. This is what I have to tell you: Rebecca discovered the letters. She exposed my infidelity and unfaithfulness.

I am toying with my mobile, bringing up the number in the call log, the one you called from. My thumb hovers over the button; how hard  it is to press, to call you and hear your voice and tell you everything that happened.

In my guilt I throw my phone across the desk. I abandoned you when you needed to talk so how can I expect you to do the same for me?

It happened on Friday. I had gone back into the office to get ready for this coming week when we go back into full swing. Dave was the only other person in the building. I had left in the middle of the afternoon to run some errands and didn’t intend to go back into the office. I planned to be home a little earlier than normal and take the kids out to the beach before dinner.

I came home to a quiet house, no tv, no video games, no music but Rebecca’s car was in the driveway. I expected some noise but everything was silent. I called out as I went in the front door but had no reply.

Moving into the kitchen I saw Rebecca. She was seated at the dining room table, her eyes red and blotchy. In her hands a ragged handkerchief was twisted between her fingers.

At first I thought someone had died. Then I saw your letter from Malaysia on the table in front of her. The pages were spread out, sheets of incrimination and guilt.

I sat down opposite her, put my hands on the table and waited. Rebecca did not look up. Her voice remained even, but quiet as she sat there; her hands twisting the handkerchief before waving over the papers.

“I’ve read through this,” she said. “The first time I didn’t believe it. The second time it glanced off me. On the third time my stomach felt I had been punched so hard I wanted to vomit.”

Rebecca closed her hand together, paused in their conjuration over the papers. Her eyes kept glancing over the words.

“I came into the office this afternoon, but I must have just missed you. I came over to your desk to leave you a note and this was on your desk.

“Did you screw her?” she asked.

I could deny nothing, omit nothing if she asked. “Yes,” I said.

“Why?”

I had no answer. No return of reply. I can’t even answer this question when it is asked by you. I couldn’t hope to explain a history so entangled in one another in a short response. To answer the core of Rebecca’s question required an admission of fantasy, of long lost and unrequited love, of asking those hypothetical questions. And at the core of her question is a focus on herself – why have I betrayed her? The question “Why?” is not just about an explanation of what lead to my actions but a heart wrenching plea to explain the most intimate of betrayals.

“Did you try and absolve yourself by making love to me? Were you sanctified by sex with me?” Rebecca asked. “Did you think of her as you sucked my breasts? Were you imagining her as you looked at me? Did screwing me take away your guilt?”

With each question she stared at me, wiping at the tears with the back of her hand. My mouth was dry and my heart pounded like the surf in a storm. The hurt and pain in her eyes ripped me apart. I wanted to speak, to console, to offer my apologies but there were stones in my throat.

“Do your parents know about this?” she asked.

“Only Dad,” I said.

There had been a pause before she asked, almost five minutes. When I said only Dad knew, the silence descended again. After a while, Rebecca became agitated, fidgety. She finally broke her silence.

“Tell me what happened.”

She was wrestling with the torment of either not knowing and guessing or knowing and living with the knowledge of the specifics.

I told Rebecca what happened between us on the weekend of the reunion without omission or embellishment, no begging for forgiveness or pleas for understanding and clemency.

There were so many other things to say, to tell Rebecca about our history growing up, about what happened when you left Piper’s Reach and all the suffering you had been through. To some how understand that you were not to blame. There will be time for explanations later. For now it had to be factual and clinical.

When I had finished, Rebecca collated the letter in front of her into one pile and slid it back to me across the table.

“Take this back to your office. You can stay there,” she said.

Rebecca anticipated my questions.

“The kids are at your mother’s. At this stage I won’t say anything.”

I stood to leave, collecting your letter as I rose. Walking past Rebecca I reached out to touch her shoulder but she flinched, recoiling as if struck.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Standing beside her I felt the true bitterness of guilt, the acid taste in the back of my throat when I saw just how much I had hurt her. Would it have been like this if I had told her before she found out?

I had to ask a question. “Will we have a chance to talk about this at a later stage?”

Rebecca shrugged.

“I love you,” I said, “and I’m sorry for hurting you.”

From the door to the kitchen I looked back at her as the afternoon sun began to fade. She remained at the table, eyes focused at a point beyond and through the surface of the table. Never has a moment in my life hurt so much.

This is now the second day at the office where I have set up a temporary home. I haven’t spoke to Mum or Dad or the kids.

I do not know what happens from here. All I know is that the weather has closed on, bringing wind and rain in destructive waves.

Would you have traded your life for something else? Would you have traded your life for someone else?

Fair winds and fair weather

Jude