Where We Begin Read online

  About Where We Begin

  Seventeen-year-old Anna is running into the night. Fleeing her boyfriend, her mother, and everything she has known.

  She is travelling into the country, to the land and the grandparents she has never met, looking for answers to questions that have never been asked.

  For every family has secrets.

  But some secrets - once laid bare - can never be forgiven. A dark, deeply compelling, coming-of-age YA novel from the author of As Stars Fall.

  Contents

  About Where We Begin

  Title page

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  NOW

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  HERE

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  THERE

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  THEN

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  WHERE WE BEGIN

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  A note from the author

  Acknowledgements

  About Christie Nieman

  Also by Christie Nieman

  Imprint page

  For David and Wendy and Graeme

  Hi Mum,

  As you can see, I’m not here.

  I hope this isn’t a big shock to you – it shouldn’t be, if you’re honest.

  It seemed like the best idea to go now, while you were both still out of the country. Easiest for everybody.

  Nintendo is next door, and Anthony’s collecting the mail.

  When you speak to Dad, you can tell him I’ll let him know where I am in a week or two.

  I’m sorry, I guess.

  I do wish things could have been different.

  I wish you could have been different.

  Anna

  1

  The windows on the coach were fogged up on the inside and beaded with rain on the outside. Not that it mattered. When I used the long edge of my hand to wipe away the condensation there was nothing there but night and my own fluorescent-lit reflection looking back at me, all double-eyed and shadowy with the second thickness of glass. Behind me, no other bodies protruded into the aisle of the bus, no other legs or arms: the last of the other passengers had stepped off at the previous town, a half hour gone. It was only my shiny red suitcase that now slid about on the shelf above, a big crimson beetle, with its iridescent carapace, scuttling back and forth over my head. My large framed memento mori – a possession too precious to risk a drop to the floor – sat propped on my feet, pressed uncomfortably against my knees by the angle of the seat in front.

  The coach moved oddly, sitting so far above its wheels that even though I was in one of the lowest seats – only two seats behind the driver – it felt as though I was being waved about at the end of a stick. It was not helping my nausea. Not at all. I adjusted my earphones and turned up Adele singing ‘When We Were Young’, and leaned out into the aisle so I could look through the windscreen in an attempt to calm my queasiness.

  The driver caught my eye in the large rear-view mirror and motioned to me. I took out one earphone.

  ‘Coming up in five minutes,’ he said.

  ‘Okay.’ I replaced the earphone.

  ‘Seems a strange spot . . .’

  ‘Pardon?’ I removed Adele again.

  ‘I said it seems a strange spot to set a young lady down.’

  I always felt people who called me ‘young lady’ had mistaken me for someone else. Which suited me fine right at that moment. ‘It’s fine,’ I said.

  ‘You sure you don’t want me to take you into town? There’s a Best Western – I’m sure they’d have something, even this late. I got someone in there just before midnight a few weeks back, off this same bus. They’re not bad, those Best Westerns.’

  ‘No, it’s okay.’ I could tell he needed more. ‘I’m expected,’ I said.

  I hadn’t told many lies in my life. I hadn’t needed to. It had all been straightforward until now. Which was lucky, because even small lies, even to strangers, even when they had no business asking, could set my mind off on a spin-cycle. I looked down. I hefted my heavily framed picture onto my lap. I had grabbed it as I walked out of the door. Ridiculous. I didn’t know why I’d done it. I had lifted it quietly from the wall, not waking the sleeping body in my bed, and walked out the door with it in the early dawn – barely thinking, only feeling everything I was feeling. I’d reached the end of the street with it before I even thought about the fact that I had it with me and how ridiculous that was. And then I saw the bus trundling towards me and suddenly had to make a choice: get on the bus and bring it with me all the way here, or not get on the bus.

  ‘That’s a funny thing to be carrying around with you,’ the driver said. ‘I saw it earlier, what is it – a picture of a skull or something? You a Goth Girl?’

  So, I was going to have to converse. ‘Um, no. It’s instructive, actually.’

  ‘Instructive?’

  ‘It’s skeletally correct. Front, back and side view.’ He still looked confused. ‘I’m going to be a doctor. It helps me study.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, nodding like the world suddenly made sense. ‘My little boy wants to be a doctor. He’s only four though. And he actually wants to be a diving doctor, he was very clear about that.’ The driver’s eyes crinkled with warmth at the thought of his son. ‘But then on another day he said he wanted to be a space farmer, so maybe he’s changed his mind . . . Ha!’ I smiled at his story. Kids are great. Maybe I should become a paediatrician. The driver went on. ‘So, studying to be a doctor, eh? What uni you at?’

  I flicked my glance away to look again through the side window. ‘Oh, actually not at uni yet. I will be though. Final year of school. I’m going to study medicine.’

  ‘Studying to study.’ The driver laughed. ‘That’s why I left school early. Too much studying just to study more. I felt like doing.’

  ‘I can understand that. The HSC is pretty nuts.’

  ‘HSC?’ the driver said. ‘New South Wales then?’

  ‘Oh, um, yes.’

  ‘You’re a long way from home.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  I caught the coach driver frowning slightly as he drove on, looking back to the road. He wasn’t that old. Not as old as I’d first thought. Maybe thirties. I looked out at the road too. Through the front glass the headlights spotlit the hard bitumen as it stretched away into the dark, an artist’s canvas to the busy brushstrokes of falling water. The air on all sides of the coach cocooned the two of us in our sudden silence with a wet wool of driving droplets.

  And then the driver’s eyes were on me again in the mirror. There was thought going on behind those eyes. Concern, maybe. But all he said was, ‘Well go on then. Turn it around and give us a proper look.’

  I manoeuvred the object around: a print from an old anatomy book, three skulls – the front and back views with a profile view below, numbers and
labels and tags on each area. Printed large, heavily framed. The driver’s eyes moved back and forth from the straight road to the mirror as he studied the picture.

  ‘Cool,’ he said. ‘Yeah, cool. I like it.’ He paused. ‘But then,’ he went on, ‘I’m seeing it in the mirror so maybe I’m not getting the whole anatomical correctness thing.’

  ‘No, skulls are perfectly symmetrical, most vertebrate bodies are, so you’re getting the full effect.’

  ‘Ha!’ He shook his head. ‘“Vertebrate.” “Symmetrical.” Yeah, you’ll be a doctor alright.’

  I turned the picture back around and looked at it, and at the small handwritten inscription in the corner. Let’s touch now before it is too late. Let’s love now before the flesh leaves our bones. I touched it briefly with my fingertips.

  ‘It’s also a memento mori,’ I said.

  ‘Say again?’

  ‘A memento mori.’

  He laughed and looked back at the road. ‘Well that time I heard, but I still didn’t get it.’

  The coach slowed, and through the opposite windows a single house-light glided into view in the otherwise unpopulated darkness.

  ‘This it?’ he asked.

  ‘I . . . I guess so.’ I got out my tablet and matched our blue dot with my dropped red pin. ‘Yes. That’s it.’

  ‘And you’re expected, you say?’

  ‘Mm-hmm.’ I nodded assent.

  ‘Would’ve been nice of them to put an outside light on for you. Oh well. Here, let me help you.’ The pistons on the doors hissed and the cold air rushed into the cabin as the driver hefted my suitcase and picture down the stairs. ‘Well at least the rain’s cleared off,’ he said, stepping out into the darkness at the side of the road. ‘Just in time – I can feel a bit better about that at least. Though that’s when it gets really bloody cold around here, when the rain clouds clear and the stars come out. No hills anywhere to keep in the heat. My lord, bitter. You got a heater in your room over there?’ The driver nodded in the direction of the dimly lit window over the road.

  ‘I’m sure,’ I called down through the doorway, readying myself to step out into the cold.

  I hoped I had a heater over there. It was a surprise these last days, how cold my hands and feet had become, as if all the blood and warmth and sustenance was being drawn from my extremities and redirected elsewhere. Which I suppose it was. My body had changed its priorities, without consulting me, without my permission. I felt like a deciduous tree, the winter coming on, unstoppable, and all the green nutrients draining from my waving leaves in order to sustain the life at the core.

  The driver looked up at me standing uncertainly in the light of the bus. ‘I’m sorry, but are you always this pale? You don’t look well. You know, I can call ahead to the motel, it’s right next to the depot –’ I held up my hand and he held up his own hands in response and shook his head. ‘Alright, I’ll leave you here. I don’t like it, but I’m bloody cold, and you’re the boss.’

  ‘Yes I am.’

  I stepped out after him, down the mini spiral staircase out of the bus, feeling very much like a ‘young lady’ now, like someone from another time, alighting from a coach onto a lonely roadside. Maybe that was who I was now, someone who alighted from coaches. Standing outside of the bus, for the first time, I could see the sky. And it was breathtaking. Steady stars burned coldly without a flicker, not a breath of movement in the air. The only sign that it had ever been raining was the bitter cold and the slight splish-splashing of my feet on the road, and the way that the stars at the horizon were blotted out by the receding bank of cloud, back in the direction from which we had come. It was a wide open sky. The world was wide open.

  ‘Alright,’ the driver was saying. ‘And there’s your . . . what’s it called again?’

  ‘Memento mori.’

  ‘Right. And . . . what is that?’

  The cold of the ground crept quickly up through my shoes and the cold of the air worked on my nose and my ears and my fingers, numbing them into stiffness. I stamped my feet and looked back up at the wondrous sky. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I guess it is a kind of reminder.’

  ‘A reminder?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s reminding us that we’re all just skeletons, you know. We’ll all die soon. “Memento mori” means “Remember death”.’

  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘That’s a pretty bleak outlook you’ve got there.’

  I shrugged. ‘I didn’t choose it. It was a birthday present.’

  ‘What?! Some present!’ he said. ‘“Here’s a picture. You’re gonna die. Happy birthday!”’

  I laughed. I felt so light standing there, practically weightless. ‘It’s supposed to make you cheerful actually,’ I said. ‘Make you feel kind of in the now. And humble. And focused. Or something.’

  ‘Or depressed.’

  I laughed again. I felt amazing. Suddenly. Inexplicably. ‘No, it’s not supposed to do that.’

  ‘Last chance for Best Western,’ he said, one foot on the first step of the bus. I shook my head. ‘You’re sure?’ He couldn’t quite let it go.

  ‘I’m sure,’ I said. I gave him the biggest smile, my best smile, one that said I know what I’m doing.

  ‘Your funeral,’ he said, and he climbed back up into his seat. But as he dropped the coach into gear and the engine powered up he called out through the open door, ‘Just promise me, even though you’re all about how great death is and all that, promise me you won’t die tonight, alright? I don’t want that on my conscience.’

  ‘I’ll do my very, very best,’ I said. ‘But if it’s my time . . .’ and I held my arms open in mock resignation. He laughed and pushed the lever forward, and the doors hissed shut and the bus moved away with the driver still smiling and shaking his head inside.

  I dropped my arms back to my sides and watched the twin red tail-lights of the bus recede for the longest time until finally they disappeared over an invisible black horizon. And then, as I stood alone in the darkness of the road, a deep twinging discomfort passed through my abdomen. I stood still and breathed through it. I breathed steadily – steadily, steadily, not thinking about it, breathing – until it was gone.

  2

  Day one of year twelve was going to be my life from then on. Start out as you mean to continue. Wasn’t that the saying? University was going to be hard. And long. Long daily hours, long years of studying; intense commitment for over nine years into the future. So this day one of year twelve I considered to be my first day of a decade’s work. Only it wasn’t my first day, of course. Of course I had already been studying. I had in fact already precised the first three chapters of my maths textbook, my chemistry textbook and my physics textbook. Biology seemed more immediately accessible, so I’d shifted it down the priority list and had only made bulleted notes.

  99.95

  This was the number that I kept in my head at all times.

  99.95

  I stuck it on the wall over my desk at home. I wrote it in the top right-hand corners of my notebooks, on the inside covers of my textbooks, on little stickers on the casing of my tablet and my laptop.

  Never relax, that number said. Anything lower was too risky. Last year’s lowest admission for medicine at the University of New South Wales was 96.20, but when you took into account the UCAT and the interview and special admissions criteria and university discretion . . . well, 96.20 wasn’t good enough. Not by a long shot. Even 99.94 seemed risky. Only a perfect rank of 99.95 would do. And I had every intention of getting it. There was no reason for me to fail. I was disciplined. It was simply a matter of choosing it and working for it.

  So on my first day I barely paid attention to my classmates. At lunchtime I sat slightly apart from them so that their conversation wouldn’t distract me from reading. My friendships with them were warm enough but I had always managed to hold them at a little distance – I wasn’t keen on any of them wanting to come to my house – so it wasn’t hard to quietly withdraw even further. I noisily munched an apple to
white-out the sound of their plans: social events, familial machinations, trysts and dramas.

  I was reading my English homework. English was the problem. I wished I didn’t have to take English. English was the subject least under my control. How I scored in maths and the sciences would be a direct reflection of how much work I did. But English . . . English was the subject that was most unpredictable, most like life, most like other people.

  So then, there I was, after lunch, in my first English class for the year, already worried that this would be the subject that would let me down. And there was Nassim, sitting next to me, talking with his friend on the other side, until he turned to me, looked at me, and then held out his hand and said, ‘Hi, I’m Nassim,’ and then, still holding my hand, he lowered his head to look up into my face, and a frown flickered on. ‘And you’re worried?’

  And I laughed. That’s what I remember most about that first day, that he made me laugh straight away. And I said, ‘Yes, actually. But my friends call me Anna.’

  ‘Ah.’ He let go of my hand. ‘Because that’s your name,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ I laughed again.

  ‘That makes sense.’ He nodded seriously. ‘So, worrying. That doesn’t seem like much fun.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘About?’

  I gestured to the front of the room, to the board, to the general surrounds. ‘English,’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ he said again. ‘Why?’

  ‘Medicine,’ I said.

  He leaned back in his chair with a sharp intake of breath through his teeth. ‘I see.’ He nodded sagely. ‘Medicine.’

  ‘Yes, Bachelor of Medicine.’

  He appeared thoughtful for a moment, and looked to the ceiling for inspiration. Then he frowned, puzzled.

  ‘But I’ve seen you,’ he said, ‘every year, up there on that stage at assembly, getting all your Outstanding Achievement for Being Brilliant at Everything awards, with everyone in the seats around me bitching about how much they hate you, and me in thorough agreement –’

  ‘Yes, but English is different.’

  ‘How so, Anna Krause?’

  The use of my full name caught me off-guard. ‘Well, Mr Nassim surname-as-yet-unknown, because maths and sciences are controllable. English relies on unreliable things, like insight, and sensitivity, the subjectivity of language, the ability to effectively and appropriately articulate an idea – what? What are you laughing at?’