A Place Near Eden Read online

  Nell Pierce holds a Master of Fine Art in Fiction from The New School. She has worked at a literary agency in New York City and at the Family Court of Australia. A Place Near Eden is her debut novel.

  First published in 2022

  Copyright © Nell Pierce 2022

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76106 617 7

  eISBN 978 1 76106 434 0

  Set by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Cover design: Christabella Designs

  Cover photograph: Getty Images / Andersen Ross

  For Mark Bo Chu

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part II

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part III

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part IV

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  A STRANGE CONNECTION BOUND THE three of us, Celeste and Sem and me. When I think of them now, they are at the houses where we used to live. At the big house on Angel Street, sitting on the faded red couch out front, their bare feet resting next to dirty cups and plates from dinners weeks past, globs of tomato sauce sun-baked into the crockery. Or at the beach house near Eden, out on the squeaky fibro deck, the calls of bellbirds dissolving into the hot air. Or right back at the beginning, at the house on Carlisle Road, lying on blankets on the front lawn. Sometimes I wish I could go back to those houses. Ask them what happened in their rooms and under their ceilings and have them whisper my old words back to me, retell my conversations, and show me how their windows opened and their floorboards creaked as we moved about.

  I remember the local swimming pool. The insects we called flying saucers because they hovered over the water and zipped away. The sun blinking onto the grass through the shifting leaves overhead. Babies, held under their arms and dipped into the pool like cookies into milk. My bathers hanging around my crotch, the material thinned from summers of chlorine, Sem pinching the fabric and whispering, ‘Elephant butt.’ Acne by the corner of his mouth. That feeling when I plunged beneath the water, the world muffled, like I’d made myself disappear. All those things come back to me easily.

  I remember sitting on the lip of the wading pool, just turned thirteen, waiting for Sem and Celeste, the prickle of the concrete beneath my thighs. Little kids staggering about with floaties on their arms. Old women resting in the shallows, lifting their toes into the fountain spray. I remember the flesh on the bodies of those women, the skin that hung from their arms and under their necks. Blushing when I realised I’d been looking too long. This moment, sitting on the lip of the pool, I remember. It would be one of the days when my brother, Sem, vanished. I just didn’t know it yet.

  I remember the anticipation. Even now, when I go to my local swimming pool, a shadow of that feeling remains, soaked into the concrete, in the damp shapes where swimmers have lain to dry off. Expectation. We all felt it. Waiting for Sem and Celeste to come back from behind the changing shed, waiting for the girls to take off their shorts and lie down in the sun, waiting for the spray of the cannonball to reach our cheeks, waiting for the swimmer to feel the hand around her ankle tugging her beneath the surface.

  I can still picture the way they came back across the grass, Celeste and Sem, almost holding hands, the tips of their fingers touching, knuckles brushing.

  ‘Can you smell it on me?’ Celeste asked, leaning in, the ends of her hair tickling my face.

  I shook my head, not even knowing what I was meant to smell, and Sem smiled at me affectionately.

  ‘She’s just a kid,’ he said. Sem and Celeste were fourteen, almost fifteen.

  ‘But you do know what it is?’ Celeste pressed, looking at me with her flat grey eyes.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, though back then I hardly knew what pot was, let alone what it was supposed to smell like. To cover my ignorance, I pushed myself over the lip of the pool and charged off among the toddlers.

  ‘Watch it, Tilly,’ Sem called after me.

  Celeste was laughing. I heard the splash of her following me across the shallow pool. I think she laughed even harder when the little kid went down. I remember looking at him. He had colourful swimming shorts on. Red, maybe. Or blue. He got up and was quiet for a moment before he began to cry. Blood started to run from his head, where he must have hit it on the pale blue tiles beneath the water.

  One of the women who had been sitting in the shallows chatting now stood. She had grey hair gathered up in a ponytail and was wearing red lipstick. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked, looking first at Celeste and then at me. ‘Who’s supervising this child?’ She was intimidating, this woman who wore bright red lipstick even in the pool.

  Before we could answer, the mum arrived, holding a baby wearing a sodden nappy and a rashie. ‘What’s happened?’ she asked the woman with the lipstick. Then she kneeled down beside the boy in the water, taking his chin in her hand and turning his face to examine his head.

  When I look back on it now, I think I can remember bumping the boy. The soft pressure of his body against my knee. The give of him. How he looked when he fell. The blood coming from his head. I was scared of getting into trouble. That’s why, although I was the one who knocked the boy down, I turned and pointed to Celeste and said, ‘It was her. She pushed him.’

  So maybe that’s what happened. I pointed at Celeste to save myself. If it had not been Celeste standing there, but Sem, or a girl from school, I would have done the same.

  But then I remember Celeste walking back across the grass, her fingers grazing Sem’s. The way she had leaned in, almost mocking me, asking me if I knew. The heat of anger rippling through my shoulders as she laughed. I can remember it that way too. I turned and pointed at Celeste because I wanted to punish her.

  And then there’s another memory, one that comes just as easily: Celeste was the one who knocked down the boy. I turned to look back and saw her standing over him, laughter dying on her lips at the sight of the blood coming from his head. I pointed to Celeste because she was the guilty one.

  The more I think on things, one way or the other, the more real they seem. That I was afraid of getting in trouble. Or that I wanted to punish Celeste. That it was her fault, or mine. I can believe it either way.

  I think I must have gone to fetch my mum and Celeste’s mother Christina from the lap pool. By the time we’d returned to the wading pool, Sem was gone.

  There is a swimming pool in the town near where I’m staying now, and I like to
go there and sit in the bleachers by the lap pool. Watch the kids climb up to the diving board and walk out along its wobbling length. Sometimes, when I see a girl about the right age, fourteen or so, with even just one or two qualities your mother used to have—her hair, maybe, or her attitude, strutting along the board—I like to imagine it’s you standing up there, about to plummet into the water below.

  You’d be a year old by now, but I’ve seen a hundred versions of you at all different ages. Sometimes you’re a child, a little girl running into the ocean and gasping at the coldness of the water. Other times you’ll be a teenager, walking to school or sunbathing with your friends in the park. I see you as a young woman with messy hair getting out of a car. At the pool, you’re always the age of your mother that day when the boy was knocked down. And there really is a moment when I think I’ve seen you. A glimpse into your future. But then it passes, time snaps back and I remember you’re still just a baby. I realise that the girl I’m looking at is a stranger, and I can turn away.

  It’s funny. I see you everywhere. But I never see Sem. In the end, he really did disappear completely.

  Sometimes, I imagine you are all together again, living in a nowhere place, and if I crawled into a dark cupboard, or opened my eyes underwater at the pool, I might catch a glimpse of you all there.

  Part I

  Chapter One

  I HAD PLANNED TO TELL you everything that happened to Sem and Celeste and me when we were older. What happened out at Eden, and the events that followed. But I can see now that the story starts earlier, at least as early as the day Sem moved out. The day they took him away. Maybe even earlier. With the accident on the bridge, perhaps. Or maybe the story really began when my parents decided to foster Sem.

  The fact that my parents had chosen Sem made him even dearer to me. He arrived fully formed, thirteen years old, with a flop of dark hair and a pointed chin. I felt lucky to have him. But for my parents it wasn’t a matter of luck. Mum talked about the drawn-out bureaucracy of the foster system with such frustration, it was as if she deserved Sem, as though every hurdle was preventing her from claiming the son she was owed.

  We were the Holmans, our name written in cursive script across our letterbox. We lived in Canberra, in a suburb of long streets of single-storey houses with low front hedges and yellowed lawns. The air got so cold in winter that it hurt to breathe in. Summers were so hot that your skin burned just walking to the car and the sky was an eerie, saturated blue.

  Almost as soon as he arrived at our house, Sem started running away from it. When he wasn’t running away, he was angry. Most nights he got home from school and stormed straight to his bedroom, shutting his door with a bang, and wouldn’t come out until long after dinner was over, when he would eat the plate of now-cold food Mum had left out for him. But sometimes he didn’t come home at all, and Mum and I would sit in the car out the front of school for ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour, until Mum let out an anxious sigh and went in to see if any of the teachers could find him.

  Each time Sem disappeared was a fresh worry for my parents. Usually, he didn’t venture too far. Once a friend’s mother called up to say that he was at her house, and there was the night Dad found him down by the lake, shivering beneath a picnic table. But sometimes he travelled further. He took a bus out of town and the police had to be called. One time it was three days before they found him and brought him home.

  My mother, I think, felt humiliated. It was as if her love was not enough. And my dad, well, I don’t think Dad had been too keen on fostering Sem in the first place. In the days before he arrived, Dad kept bringing up all the ways in which Mum wasn’t prepared to care for a teenage boy.

  ‘What will you do when he comes home drunk, or smelling of weed?’ Dad asked one night over dinner.

  ‘I’ll have a mature conversation with him,’ Mum said, spooning more carrots onto her plate.

  ‘Good luck with that.’ Dad smiled mockingly.

  Or, driving past a group of boys standing around out the front of the newsagency, Dad announced, ‘He’ll be destructive. He’ll break things. Make a mess. That’s what boys are like.’

  Mum just shrugged and said, ‘We’ll deal with that when we come to it. Material things really aren’t that important anyway.’

  So when Sem arrived only to keep trying to leave, Dad probably felt vindicated, in a way. He liked to say that Sem was ‘trouble’ and ‘troubled’. When he found a pack of cigarettes under Sem’s bed. When Sem helped with garden work and tore the end of the drainpipe away from the roof. When Sem swore at the dinner table, didn’t do his homework, tagged his name on his desk in white-out, touched all the expensive and breakable things when we were shopping. Dad had a special tired voice that he used when he talked about Sem. It was a tone of accusation too. Directed not at Sem but at my mother, who had brought Sem into our lives.

  When I think about it now, I’m surprised it didn’t occur to me at the time that Sem was running from my dad and his disapproval, his obvious reluctance to have Sem in the house. But then I think of Mum. Maybe it was her he was trying to escape. The moment she met him, Mum already loved Sem like she’d had him for all of his thirteen years. Maybe that was what he wanted to get away from: the great weight of her love and the expectation that went with it. Like she’d given so much to him—carefully packed lunches and home-cooked dinners, freshly washed clothes and lifts home from school—now she was waiting for him to give something back.

  But then I think maybe he wasn’t running away from my parents at all. Maybe he was running towards something. Looking for a certain place or person, or trying to get back to family or friends that he loved.

  Or maybe those were the things he was running from. Something that happened with his mother, or later, at one of the other foster homes. Running away from things in his past. Now, I can understand that kind of running. To escape your history, you have to escape yourself. Whether it’s under a picnic table or on a bus out of town or plunged into the alien silence underwater, you have to find a way to somehow, even if just for a moment, make yourself disappear.

  Maybe, I think now, Sem was running away from me.

  Mum and Sem and I moved to the house on Carlisle Road the week after the big storm. I guess this was when my parents officially separated, though I’m not sure I was entirely aware of that at the time. I thought we were moving to the Carlisle Road house because it was close to the hills, and Mum needed a break from the city. Like we were on a kind of retreat, while Dad stayed back in the city to work, and soon we’d go back to our real life.

  The storm was so bad it was in the news. When we got to Carlisle Road, we saw the evidence of its destructive power. Part of the downstairs sitting room had been reduced to rubble by a thick, bleached-blue eucalyptus and, around the back, the orchard was a wreck of fruit and broken trees.

  When I think of those first days at that house, I think of Celeste. The pale skin on the underside of her foot, her leg extended as she read in bed, the first time I saw her, glimpsed through an open door.

  A family of five had once lived there—a doctor and his wife, their two daughters and a son—but by the time we moved in the doctor was dead, his wife in a nursing home, and it was the grown son who was renting the top floor of the place to us and the bottom floor to Christina and her daughter Celeste, with whom we shared a kitchen. It was only going to be for six months or so before the sale went through and the new owners came to demolish and redevelop the lot. I suppose Mum was in such a hurry to find somewhere for us to stay after we left Dad’s house that this was probably the best she could find. Somewhere to hide Sem away and protect him from what she feared was coming down the line.

  Mum had met Christina at the library where she taught her evening community English class. Christina was the children’s librarian, though really she wanted to be an artist. She used to work on her sculptures in the back garden, standing barefoot in the grass in clay-stained jeans and an old T-shirt, frowning in concen
tration. Mum and Christina were already friends, so moving in together was pretty easy. It made sense.

  In our first few days at Carlisle Road, we helped Christina collect the fruit from the peach trees on the property that had been destroyed in the storm. The peaches were small and so thickly fuzzed that after a while they started to hurt my hands. We sorted them into baskets by their quality and size. Now when I see peaches in the supermarket, fat and ever-ripe, it’s hard to believe they are the same fruit.

  Looking back at that time, I find it difficult to trust my memories. It was a long time ago, and there was so much happening all at once. Sem lived with us for two years, but so much occurred in those last few months, after we moved to Carlisle Road, that it’s hard now to keep track. For example, which came first: Sem’s accident, or my visits to the counsellor? I think it must have been Sem’s accident at the bridge.

  The bridge spanned the creek that ran by our school, swelling when it rained and drying to a trickle when it was hot. On the day of his accident, Sem and I were walking home from school. It must have been a Friday, because Monday through Thursday Mum usually picked us up, but on Friday she taught her class at the library and Sem and I made our own way home.

  It was raining hard, and we’d missed the bus because I wanted to go back for my maths book, which I had left in my locker. That year, I was enamoured with maths. My teacher was new to the school, and he was young. Early twenties. Just out of uni. There was a nerviness to him, standing in front of the class, that would make his voice suddenly go soft in the middle of explaining an equation and a slight flush would rise up in his pale cheeks. He was so sincere. Easy for a thirteen-year-old to fall in love with.

  By the time I splashed back through the rain with my textbook, the bus had gone and Sem was in a mood, because my delay had meant we would get cold and wet. We’d have to trudge in the rain to the next stop to catch a different bus.