‘No, you did the right thing. I’m just adjusting to the reality that he had a whole other side that I didn’t even see,’ Molly said. She glanced at me. ‘Dad was mortified when he started bringing you to our place, you know. He and Dec used to fight about you all of the time.’
‘He was trying to protect his son,’ I said quietly. Defending Laith twice in the one day? God, I’d lost my mind. ‘Maybe he was right to do so.’
‘Why on earth would you say that? You can’t seriously blame yourself for the decisions Declan made about his own life.’
‘It’s not about blaming myself, I’m just a realist.’ I was suddenly finding it difficult to look at Molly again, so I turned my attention to the centrepiece in the middle of the table. ‘There’s surely a good chance he’d still be alive had our paths never crossed. I never intended it of course, but he was exposed to that world through me.’
‘That is complete bullshit,’ Molly said. I raised my gaze to her and shrugged.
‘Perhaps.’
‘Look at my father, Leo – he’s sixty-four years old and he hasn’t taken a day off work since he left school. When Dad had that heart attack last year, the doctor told him that if he didn’t slow down, he was going to die. So he fired that doctor and found a new one who prescribed medication instead of rest. Dad’s every bit as addicted as Declan apparently was – his drug of choice is just work. If it wasn’t heroin via your cousin, it would have been something else through one of his wealthy friends instead. It sounds like what you actually did was to provide my brother with a soft, private place to land whenever he crashed, and I can’t even imagine how much that took out of you.’
She reached across and placed her hand on my wrist and squeezed gently, and I was startled by the contact. I didn’t expect her to touch me – and I certainly didn’t expect to find myself immediately distracted by the softness of her hand against my forearm.
I couldn’t have missed Molly’s beauty if I’d tried, but up until that moment I’d observed it with a sense of detachment. Her skin against mine changed everything because suddenly, she wasn’t just a beautiful woman, she was a beautiful woman who was touching me and staring intensely into my eyes. Something shifted in the conversation with that contact. The vague curiosity and sympathy I felt towards her faded until I was simply aware of her. It was as if my pulse had grown loud within my body, and with each thump of my heart against my chest, that awareness grew. I noticed her scent in the air and the gloss on her lips. These things were all innocent, but suddenly my thoughts towards Molly were not. There was an undercurrent between us – hiding deep beneath the nostalgic conversation and the drama of what she’d discovered about her brother. Did she feel it too? Her hand lingered on my wrist.
‘You have a lot of tattoos,’ she murmured suddenly. Her gaze lingered on the place on my forearm where her hand rested. ‘Do they mean something?’
I realised that her fingers now rested right beside the tattoo that I’d had made immediately after her brother’s death. I’d never explained my body art to anyone before, but I felt a sudden compulsion to. The meaning behind my tattoos was intensely personal, but the only reason I had never shared it aloud before was that I’d never actually wanted to – it was my truth, and only mine. What did it mean that I wanted to share this with her? I barely knew her but I knew one thing: she had lost Declan too, and she would understand my grief for his loss.
With the fingers of my sling-bound hand, I awkwardly pointed to the symbols on my forearm beside her hand – two heavy arches around a series of circles – and I said quietly, ‘This tattoo was actually for Declan. It’s a dot painting – it represents two men sitting together – it signifies friendship. Do you know what “sorry business” is?’
She shook her head.
I said softly, ‘There were hundreds of Aboriginal nations here in the past and each had their own sort of culture, but death was always a time of ritual. That’s what “sorry business” means. It is different ways of remembering and commemorating a person lost. All of my recent ancestors were city people and most of those traditions are lost within my family, so what I learned about traditional customs mostly came from books. But Declan’s death was the first time I’d been scarred by grief, and I didn’t really have a framework to understand how to deal with it so I made my own ritual.’