Lyrebird Hill Read Free Page A

the world, Margaret. Ruby speaks so glowingly about your paintings that I had to see them for myself. Very impressive they are, too. Good thing I brought my chequebook,’ he added, patting his pocket.
    Mum linked her arm through his. ‘Then I must show you my favourite piece before someone else snaffles it up. It’s a still life, the subject is a wonderful old Singer sewing machine I inheritedfrom my grandmother. It dates to before the first world war. Are you interested in family history, Rob?’
    His smile smouldered. ‘It’s one of my passions. In all honesty, I can’t think of a more fascinating topic.’
    I softened at his words; Rob loved history, all right – other people’s history. He never spoke much about his own family. He’d tried once and got all choked up.
    In the first chapter of Let Go and Live Rob described his childhood. A mother too smacked-out to care if he went hungry. A string of violent ‘fathers’. Stints in remand homes. And then, life on the Sydney streets. Drugs, car theft, destitution. One stormy night, huddled under a bridge in a sea of mud and shattered glass and syringes, sixteen-year-old Rob had felt himself crushed by hopelessness. The pain of his existence threatened to swallow him. He picked up a broken bottle and pressed it against his wrist, thinking death would bring relief . . . but then a voice had spoken softly to him through the haze of his despair.
    Let go, Rob. Let go of the pain and find a way to live.
    He felt a spark of hope – he later wrote – as if a light had winked on in his heart. He dropped the bottle, got to his feet, and walked through the long night, letting the rain wash away the mud and blood and loneliness. After that, he turned his life around. He’d gone to uni and majored in psychology, but then branched off with his own radical ideas. Contrary to popular opinion, Rob believed that dredging up old wounds was counterproductive. His resulting book, Let Go and Live, was an overnight hit.
    The trick is not to resist your fear , he’d written. You have to smell it, taste it, embrace it, allow it to overwhelm you. And then simply let it go.
    Rob’s sexy laugh lifted above the babble of voices, followed by my mother’s musical trill. I sighed and turned away from the crowd. Mum’s cool reception of me hadn’t been a surprise; she was always aloof when we met, which I supposed was howshe protected herself from my nagging curiosity about the past. But sweeping Rob away and leaving me standing around like a wallflower – well, that hurt.
    Did Rob even care? Clutching my bag against me, I thought about the tangle of black lace crammed beneath my usual layers of dross. Tonight, I silently promised, I would confront him and learn the truth.
    I headed for the outskirts of the room.
    Bright halogens illuminated Mum’s paintings, making them focal points in the otherwise dimly lit gallery. A quick scan told me they were all interiors, but it wasn’t until I’d approached the first one – a large room furnished only with a bay-fronted 1940s desk – that my breath caught. The huge canvases were eerily beautiful, their jewel colours seeming to breathe under the intense illumination, as though they’d been rendered from living light rather than mere paint. There was a stillness about the rooms they depicted, a sense of quietude and desolation that drew me in.
    I wandered from image to image, spellbound. The gallery around me faded. The chatter grew muffled, the clink of glasses ceased. I might have been alone, moving through those familiar rooms in silence.
    There was the kitchen where Jamie and Mum and I had eaten breakfast. And there was our old lounge room. Years ago, it had been cluttered with tables and a piano and a wrought-iron day bed upholstered in brown linen. In the painting, it seemed almost bare; the clutter had been cleared away, the only furniture was a lonely pair of ornate chairs.
    Further along was a smaller canvas showing the bedroom