The Sea Sisters (15 page)

She wished she hadn’t come here, wished she hadn’t flown to Maui. But it was too late to rewind now. She had no choice but to go forward. ‘Who is he?’

Mick crossed his legs and set his hands in his lap. ‘His name was Harley.’

‘But you and Mum were married…’

‘Yes.’

‘She had an affair?’

‘Yes.’

Mia would never have expected that. ‘Did you know?’

‘Not until later,’ he answered. Then he added, ‘Although perhaps I always suspected.’

She looked beyond Mick, out to sea. A light breeze made ripples across the water that glittered in the sunlight.

‘Your father was a musician,’ he offered. ‘The front man of a band I managed, the Black Ewe.’

She straightened, remembering the photo she found in her mother’s belongings – Mick alongside a band called the Black Ewe. On the reverse, her mother had written the names of the men: ‘
Harley
’ had been written in the centre, beside ‘
Mick
’. She pictured the man with the black hair who stared intently at the camera. Or, as she now realized, at the person holding it.

‘You knew him, then. You were … friends?’

‘He was my brother.’

Her skin grew hot.

‘We both met your mother on the same night, after a gig. We were at the bar when she was introduced to us. I happened to offer her a drink first – and it was me, six months later, who married her.’ He shrugged. ‘But as it turned out, Harley was in love with her too.’

‘How did the affair start?’

‘Distraction and disillusion, I imagine. I was distracted by my career and Grace was disillusioned by her husband.’ He lit a cigarette and took a long draw, the ember glowing red. ‘Mia, back then I was a different person. When the Black Ewe took off, I was so fired up about the music and about success, family life took a back seat. I booked tour after tour and was out of the country more often than I was in it. Grace got left at home with a young baby. I think she knew my lifestyle on the road wasn’t entirely savoury – there were drugs and plenty of booze, and other women too.’

‘So she turned to Harley?’

‘Yes. I didn’t blame them for the affair. I hadn’t been a good husband. Or brother.’

‘Did he love her?’

‘Very much,’ he answered without hesitating. ‘But his love was too intense, obsessive almost. Grace’s feelings could never match his and I think the ferocity of his love scared her.’

Mick lifted the cigarette to his lips again and Mia shifted to avoid the drift of smoke. She levelled her gaze at the water, noticing white caps forming on the tips of waves. ‘When Mum was pregnant with me … did you know that the baby wasn’t yours?’

‘Yes, but Harley didn’t.’ He tapped the ash from his cigarette. ‘Grace said she’d end the affair and come back to me if I could accept Harley’s baby as my own. I thought of the alternative: her leaving me for him. Jealousy and pride are powerful emotions. I dropped the Black Ewe from my label, cut Harley out of our lives, and stayed.’

She wondered how her life might have been altered by that one decision.

‘It was so much harder than I expected. You were a constant reminder of what had happened between Grace and Harley. You were just a tiny baby – none of this was your fault – but every time I looked at you, I saw him.’ He stared at her closely. ‘You’re so much like him. God, your eyes! I should have seen it the instant you arrived. His were the same emerald green. Your mother always said how unusual Harley’s eyes were. You have his hair, too, but your mother’s smile.’

‘You left because of me?’

‘I realized that I would never be a good father to you. So, yes, I left.’ He held the memory of what that end point was in his gaze, but chose not to share it and Mia did not ask.

He stubbed out his cigarette.

Mick had left Katie and her mother because he didn’t love her enough. She felt as if she’d been tossed around in the ocean, buffeted by waves until she was exhausted and weak. She was desperate to leave but there was still one more thing she needed to know.

‘Harley,’ she said, the name feeling alien on her tongue. ‘Do you know where he is now?’

‘Sorry, Mia, but he died a long time ago.’

It was just another fact in a sea of things she’d discovered today. There was too much to feel – she knew there’d be plenty of time when she would feel all of this acutely. For now, she let it wash through her and asked, ‘When?’

‘Years back – he was twenty-four.’

Her eyebrows rose at that. ‘So young. What happened?’

‘It was such a long time ago,’ he said, as if that would be enough.

‘What happened to him?’ she repeated.

‘I’m sorry, Mia.’

A needling of anxiety began at her brow. ‘I need to know.’

He sighed. ‘My brother was complex. He had so much talent. He was a phenomenal songwriter – a poet, really. I’ve never heard lyrics that touch his. His fans saw this wild, irrepressible man on stage launching himself into the crowd or dancing like he was possessed – but none of them knew how much he had to drink before he came on.’ The breeze toyed with the edge of the parasol and blew a dusting of ash across the table. Mick brushed it away, smudging grey streaks into the wood.

‘Harley wasn’t always an easy person to get on with. He was very up and down. Things that washed off other people’s backs, ate Harley up. He thought deeply about everything. It made him insular sometimes, and he could go for days without speaking to anyone. Other times he was wild, completely out of control.’ Mick paused; thought for a moment. ‘If I’m honest, I’m not sure he ever truly liked himself.’

Mia felt a shiver travel along the nape of her neck: in a handful of sentences Mick had described her.

‘After Grace, he lost sight of everything, even his music. The band split up, I was gone, and he drained his money on booze and drugs. In a matter of months, he’d lost it all. He was a wreck.’ He sighed. ‘We were close, once. He was an astounding musician, but fronting a band never suited him. It was me that pushed him to do it. I had the business brain but not the talent. And I resented him for that.’

Mick wiped at a streak of ash he’d missed. ‘I knew him better than anyone, so I understood exactly how hard it would have been for him after Grace. I heard he was feeling low, but I never called him.’ Mick looked past Mia as if she were no longer there and he was alone with his memories. ‘I was his brother. I knew how deeply he felt things.’ His eyes were glassy. ‘It was my responsibility to look after him, but my pride got in the way. I’ll always be sorry for that.’

‘What happened?’ she asked, nervous now.

He looked at her and she saw the sadness in his face. ‘Harley was found dead in a hotel room.’ His voice didn’t hold as he said, ‘He hanged himself.’

*

Dazed, Mia returned the way she had come, but everything had changed.

She wasn’t Mick’s daughter.

Her father had committed suicide.

Her mother had kept it a secret.

Katie was her half-sister.

The sun blazed down against the crown of her head as she hurried along the pavement with her eyes to the ground. Her breathing was ragged and she could hear the blood pounding in her ears. Everything she believed had been a lie.

She had to call Katie. She needed to hear her voice. There was a payphone near the edge of town and she began to jog to it. Her legs felt disconnected from her brain. She ducked around two teenagers slurping milkshakes, then crossed the road, barely glancing to check the traffic.

The front edge of her flip-flop caught on a crack in the concrete and she stumbled forward, stubbing her toes. She bent and snatched off both flip-flops and, clutching them in one hand, she ran, the pavement rough and hot beneath her feet.

When she reached the payphone, she pulled her credit card from her wallet.
Speak to Katie. Tell her everything.
She lifted the receiver and slid the credit card into the slot.

She heard the dialling tone and screwed her eyes tightly shut, trying to remember the international code for the UK. When it came to her, she stabbed in the numbers with trembling hands.

A few seconds later, Katie answered. ‘Hello?’ The line crackled and fizzed, and Katie’s voice sounded distant, as though the two of them were already separated.

Half-sisters.

Half.

She hated the term being applied to her and Katie, as it nailed a divide between her and all that remained of her family.

She wanted to let the tears that were damming her throat flood free. She wanted to hear her sister, who would be both pragmatic and loving, tell her she would be okay, that she loved her. But spiky doubts crept into her thoughts. Might Katie love her just a fraction less? Hadn’t she always noticed how different Mia was from her? Wasn’t Mia the reason why Mick had left?

‘Hello?’ Katie repeated.

Mia clamped her teeth over the words she couldn’t say and placed the phone lightly back in the receiver. She couldn’t tell her.

Mia had needed to come to Maui to find out if she was a reflection of her father. And now she would have to live with what she’d discovered.

T
he heat was inescapable and the flies ferocious, yet there was a rugged beauty in the vast, barren landscape of Western Australia. Katie had spent a month riding the backpacker bus south, following the entries in Mia’s journal. The endless stretches of flat, scrub-lined road became a kind of comfort as she rested her head against the bus’s sun-warmed window and was lulled and rocked into mindless oblivion.

Now she had reached Lancelin, a small coastal town north of Perth where crayfish boats docked at the jetty each afternoon to unload their catch. She lay beside a concrete pool in the shade of a sun umbrella, the journal open in front of her. It was before ten but already the heat was fierce, the wind having not yet arrived.

She glanced up as a plane cut a sharp line through the cloudless blue sky. It left behind a trail of white vapour, which she watched until it gently feathered away. Mia had once told her that jet trails were clouds that had been inhaled by a plane, then expired in a long white whoosh. Katie hadn’t corrected her. She was intrigued by the magical places Mia’s imagination wandered to and thought if she followed closely enough, she might glimpse those places, too.

Half-sisters
, she mused. Could you only be
half
when your
whole
lives were inextricably linked?

She pushed a loose strand of hair away from her face, thinking how she minded the term. She and Mia had always been very different – but now those differences had been given a label: half-sisters. She wished Mia was here to talk to. She wanted to be back in their flat, curled into opposite corners of the sofa, talking with mugs of tea in their hands. Together they’d have been able to make sense of it, perhaps eventually have laughed about it. But Mia was gone and learning this now only stretched them further apart.

Tracing a finger over a sentence in the journal, Katie tried to feel the indentations of Mia’s words. Her entries no longer sparkled with descriptions of places she’d travelled to, the way they once had in California; now they simmered with a quiet fury. Her anger was initially directed at their mother for concealing the truth about Harley. The moral code she’d taught her daughters had been grounded in truth and honesty, so her transgression from these rules cheated Mia of her beliefs.

More concerning, though, were Mia’s later entries, which showed a growing fixation with Harley. The page in front of Katie now was a transcription of song lyrics Mia had found on an obscure internet site, and she’d circled words and verses to find a connection to a father she’d never known. The adjoining page was dotted with questions: ‘
What was he like?
’
‘
Who did he care about?
’
‘
Where did he think of as home?
’ It seemed to Katie that the unwritten question around which the others orbited, was:
Am I like him?
Harley had committed suicide at the age of twenty-four: Mia’s age. That cold fact must have torn at Mia’s thoughts, just as it tore at Katie’s. She tried not to pay attention to the voice in her head that whispered of history repeating itself, but she couldn’t deny the disturbing symmetry.

There was a sudden rushing of feet over concrete and then she felt cold fingers gripping her waist. She cried out as she was lifted up, the journal slipping through her fingers and landing with its pages splayed on the poolside, like a hastily erected tent.

She heard Ed’s laughter, loud and close to her ear, as he held her against his wet body and began jogging away from the pool towards the beach. Sand flicked up as he ran, stinging her dangling legs. His grip was too tight, his wrist bone pressing painfully against her thighs. Her bikini top had become twisted and she could see the dark pink edge of her nipple exposed in the harsh light.

The shore was only feet away and she kicked and swivelled in his grasp, which made Ed laugh harder, delighted by her resistance. He waded into the sea and the smell of salt stole her breath. Water splashed and slapped at her skin. Suddenly she was flipped backwards and the world swivelled. Glaring sunlight seared off the water and she blinked, disorientated. The ends of her hair brushed the sea.