Hugh can’t help himself. He moves closer, and now it’s the three of them bent over my kitchen bench, heads together, examining the evidence like they’re on a Boys’ Own Adventure.
‘These items are sold to enthusiasts all the time,’ Hugh says while the constable takes photos. I imagine the pictures being tendered in court as evidence and wish he’d let me tidy up a bit.
‘If you can just stand back, please,’ the officer says, pulling out a notebook. ‘It’s not going to explode if we don’t pull the pin?’
It’s unclear whether that’s a statement or a question. I place the pile of submissions on the distressed pine table, pull out a chair and sink into it. The sudden injection of testosterone in my kitchen fills me with nostalgia. I used to sit there at that same bench, sipping wine, eating cheese, flicking through the weekend papers and solving the world’s problems with Cam as he ad-libbed something incredible for dinner. A ghost of that memory seems superimposed on the image before me now of the constable, Hugh, and Justin, and I wonder how in hell I got from point A to B.
Stand back from Kate, everyone. Don’t pull the pin . . .
If I lost this house, I’d lose Cam all over again. His presence is cemented into the very foundations. It’s painted onto the walls and sewn into the fabric of the soft furnishings. He’s everywhere, in every room. Even in the tired sticky notes he used to obsessively label everything when he got sick, in a way that, years later, is helping Charlie learn to read. I trace one now, stuck to the back of the chair beside me, reinforced with tape. I flick the hot-pink paper where the edges have curled and faded in the sun. The word ‘chair’ is written in Cam’s solid handwriting, and I move my thumb across the individual letters, trying to sense the pressure of his pen on this inconsequential little note, made magical because Cam once touched it, too. It’s a thing his eyes once focused on, like mine are now, as I try to align us through time and space and somehow bring him back.
‘I’ve secured the weapon,’ the constable reports into his two-way radio. I’m not sure Peppa Pig is a suitable guardian for Cam’s grenade, but okay. Then he looks across the room at me. ‘What were you doing when your son wandered out with this?’
His question plays into every insecurity I hold as a parent. Well, Officer, my bestie and I were drinking wine on a school afternoon, translating Tinder acronyms and perving on the Adonis to your right.
‘Grace and I were in the front room,’ I answer.
Do NOT lie to the police.
‘We were just – looking out the window and . . .’
Don’t reference a Greek god, Kate.
Justin straightens, blond hair shining under the halogen down-lights, as if he’s presenting himself as Exhibit A.
‘We were birdwatching,’ Grace says simply.
It could be true? The suburb is surrounded by bushland and backs onto Mount Jerrabomberra. I wake to birdsong every morning, do I not? I don’t even get my 10,000 steps in spring, because I’m fearful of all the swooping magpies.
‘It’s like Hitchcock around here sometimes,’ I add, for emphasis.
Justin coughs, to stifle a laugh.
‘And you were where, exactly?’ the officer asks him.
‘Directly opposite Kate’s front window.’ Is it my imagination, or is he flexing his muscles? ‘Hitchcock Central.’
Hugh chuckles, and I have an uncomfortable flashback to my crush being revealed in front of the entire class in Year Nine. The police officer writes these details in his notebook, while the four of us stay silent. From mortification, in my case.
‘Note to self,’ Hugh says quietly, after a long pause. ‘Buy Kate binoculars for Christmas.’
My hand finds Grace’s abandoned glass of wine on the table beside me. I want to scull it, except, as irresponsible parenting goes, it’s probably bad enough that I seem to be harbouring some sort of bomb.
‘So, your son was playing with it?’ the officer queries again. He’s like a dog with a bone. ‘While you were occupied at the window in the other room. Birdwatching?’ He frowns at Justin.
Yes, yes. I think we’ve fully established I was in the grips of a galloping infatuation while my child played unsupervised with bombs.
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.