I pushed him away. ‘Is it serious?’ I asked.
He touched my forehead where tiny red jewels of windscreen glass still slipped through the skin. He smiled without embarrassment and dug into his bag and took out a small diamond ring. ‘But you’ll always be the one for me,’ he said, and he glanced up the stairs and pocketed the ring.
I knew my children were an issue for him. He wanted his own.
‘Thanks,’ I said and pushed him out the door.
I walked through the house full of old-fashioned features like glossy green tiles around the fireplace and space for bookshelves. The doors were solid panelled wood. The laundry was a shed outside and there was an old apricot tree in the middle of the fenced back yard. I set up the stereo and put in a Van Morrison tape.
My ankle and my back ached all the time. But I took a pillow and held it tight, and danced around and through the two small rooms, out to the kitchen and back again. I was home.
20
Clarence Street forever
Apart from my children, 89 Clarence Street was the first good thing that had happened in my life, the perfect house in the neighbourhood I dreamed about. At night the streetlamp caught the leadlight windows. White gauze curtains billowed in the breeze. The stairs creaked, the house speaking to me in the sleepless dark. The girls found friends on the street and they played in and out of each other’s homes.
In my memory, it was always summer on Clarence Street. The washing line full of dry sheets, the front porch bathed in the early morning sun. We had a succession of disappearing cats and, for a short while, a too-large dog Hampster had acquired and discarded.
Bruce was a teacher by then, quickly becoming the head of an English department. He kept his word and refused to help us beyond the minimal government-mandated child support. There were days with not enough food. But I learned to budget and save, and somehow the kids didn’t notice.
One evening we walked past the bright lights and laughter at Prego. We stopped to read the menu displayed on a stand outside. I went back to my budgeting. If I ate before we went, we could afford a large pizza with everything on it for the girls and a glass of wine for me. It became our monthly ritual. We’d walk through the Tole Street park, the girls running down the sides of the skate bowl and up to Ponsonby Road. We always ordered the pizza. ‘You’re the richest poor people I know,’ a mother from the school said when we took the table next to her.
A friend of Hampster’s assembled a group of women and invited me to lunch. My generalised anxiety kicked in. Everything else about my life felt inadequate. My op-shop clothes and lack of education, my divorced-single-mother status. I walked to the café and watched from across the road. The women arrived in a group. With their film industry careers and expensive handbags, they were confident and assured. I almost turned and left. But one of them saw me and waved, as if she already knew me. Meryl sat next to me. She put a hand over her breast and I knew she had a baby. I liked her and wanted her to like me. We exchanged addresses and she paid for my lunch. I left the restaurant and caught the bus to the library, ready to break my promise to Jeannie.
The man Jeannie said was my father featured in dozens of books. There were photos of Jo Bonnier at racetracks, with famous drivers and beautiful women. In one he was standing on the sweeping lawn of a large house on the shores of Lake Geneva. There was a photo of an apartment with a racing car on the wall. And another of his wife with a scarf around her head, her eyes hidden behind large sunglasses. They were such beautiful people. I could not imagine myself in their world.
I took home a documentary on VHS. The Speed Merchants followed drivers like Mario Andretti during the 1972 season. I sat in my living room in Ponsonby and watched the grainy images from Le Mans. The filmmaker had captured the crash that killed the man I now thought of as my father. They were racing at 180 miles an hour down a long, eerie straight. And then Jo made a mistake. His bumper clipped another on a slight bend, catapulting his car into the trees. In the film, the other driver jumps from his burning vehicle. He runs across the racetrack towards the billowing smoke. The narrator, Vic Elford, says he saw Jo’s car spinning in the air like a helicopter. ‘It hurts when you lose a friend,’ Elford says. ‘And on Sunday morning, we lost Jo.’20 For many years I dreamed of that burning car in the forest and the burning plane on the tarmac.
It took me months to gather the courage to call the international directory. ‘I’m looking for an address in Stockholm,’ I said. There were a dozen listings for the Bonniers, but no private addresses or phone numbers.
‘I imagine they’re unlisted,’ the operator said. I was about to hang up when she suggested looking elsewhere in Sweden. ‘I have a Kim Bonnier in Malmo.’
My same-age brother. Today they might describe us as twiblings. Siblings born at the same time to different mothers who share the same father. I lay on the floor, in front of the fire, the children sleeping upstairs, writing and rewriting to Kim. It was not the same as writing to my mother. I did not want to give too much away. Instinctively, I knew money would
