The Last Love Note(8)

Hugh is studying me closely. His scrutiny urges me to stand up and tip the rest of Grace’s wine down the sink. Such a waste! I straighten a pile of bills and other papers on the bench, then fuss over a clothes horse of washing drying beside him.

‘Use your time wisely and well,’ Mum always says. Might fold a load while we’re waiting for the Defence Department . . .

But that’s when it dawns on me that literally all my bras, minus the one I am wearing, are dangling off the clothes horse. All of them! Who needs to wash this many at once? And since when did I own such bland underwear? Not that I’m trying to impress anyone here. Not in that way, at least.

I must say, Justin is very collected in a crisis. He’s like an off-duty Bond, lounging against my kitchen bench. Perhaps he’s moved to Canberra to work at ASIO Headquarters. The writer in me would quite like to live opposite a spy. Hugh catches me staring, leans in close and whispers, ‘Give me advance warning if you’re going to swoon.’

The sound of his voice startles me so much that the clothes airer I’m fiddling with buckles and collapses against his leg. Ugly bras ahoy!

I drop to the floor and snatch my unmentionables right off his beautifully polished, black R.M. Williams boots. He doesn’t even flinch. And that’s when I decide that the five of us – me, Charlie, Hugh, Grace and Justin – are going to evacuate ourselves in the absence of any proper leadership from the establishment.

‘We’ll wait outside if that’s okay,’ I announce. ‘It’s safer.’

Charlie scoops up some Lego and I push him in the direction of the front door while I grab the pinboard off the kitchen wall and follow the others out into my front garden. The constable’s off-sider keeps an eagle eye on us, like we’re a newly minted terrorist cell.

If there are two things I couldn’t stand to lose if the house exploded – which is not a risk I’d seriously contemplated until this evening – it’s Cam’s notes, and our map of the world on this pin board. He’d left me in bed one rainy Sunday afternoon more than a decade ago and ducked to the shops, only to delight me later with an informal presentation on Kate & Cam’s Excellent Adventure.

‘Red thumb tacks for everywhere we’ve been,’ he’d said, pointing out cities with a drumstick from his nearby kit. ‘The obligatory Contiki tour through Europe – which we should re-do, Katie, and not be permanently hungover this time. Youth is wasted on the young.’

‘Twenty-four is still young,’ I argued.

‘There will be an opportunity for comments at the end,’ he said before tapping the drumstick on New Zealand, Thailand, Tasmania and the Great Ocean Road, along which we’d camped and hiked and fallen irreversibly in love, that first summer after we met at Melbourne Uni.

‘Now, for the audience participation section,’ he announced. ‘I need a volunteer to stick green thumb tacks on all the places we want to go.’

I crawled to the end of the bed and knelt in front of the map, while he dished out thumb tacks and I pinned them on New York City, Prince Edward Island and Florence. Technically we’d already spent a morning there, but I wanted a week. Then I took another one and pinned it on Norway.

‘I thought this might happen,’ Cam said, grinning, and he put the thumb tacks down and produced a sheet of gold and silver stars. ‘That’s for the aurora borealis.’

Always number one on our bucket list.

Still top of mine.





4





I surface from the memory and crash back into my domestic security incident, flushed with something that feels like homesickness, but can’t be. Justin is inspecting the half-constructed Lego set with Charlie. Grace is giving her details to Constable Wentworth’s partner, with Charlie’s backpack in hand. Hugh notices me blink back tears and pull myself together again. That’s the problem with grief. It’s not packed tidily in a box that you can bring out in appropriate, private moments and sort through. It’s threaded inconveniently through everything.

‘What have we got here?’ Justin asks Charlie, with genuine interest.

‘It’s the Minecraft Jungle Abomination,’ Charlie explains eagerly. ‘And see, this is the articulated plant and the enchanted creeper.’

‘This is an Iron Golem, right?’ Justin picks up some kind of creature. What is he? The Minecraft whisperer?

Grace walks over and nudges me, nodding at the two of them. I know exactly what she’s thinking. Charlie doesn’t usually warm to strangers this fast. Ever since his dad died, he’s been inherently wary of any strange men around me. I’ve been wary of that myself.

But thinking about Cam just now, and our adventure list, I sense the distant rumblings of a rather unwelcome epiphany. Ours was always an adventure list for two. Not one. Have I really lost all interest in living the big life we imagined together now he’s gone? Is the plan just to go to work and drag Charlie through every school week, pining for Cam, on rinse and repeat until we get from Kindergarten to Year Twelve? And then what? Charlie leaves too? Who will I be without both of them?

It’s only now, standing on my front lawn, adventure chart lit up by a disco of police lights, that something profound strikes me.

All the green pins were mine.

Cam grew up in the UK. His parents are in their eighties now and live in a town called Wallingford, between Oxford and Reading. They travelled a lot together when Cam was a kid. In our family, it was only Dad who travelled, until distant shores lured him away from Mum and me permanently. So, that rainy Sunday, when Cam had held out a handful of green pins, it felt like he was offering me the world.