Start reading The Roadmap of Loss by Liam Murphy

Chapter 9

Removalists heaved my belongings into their truck. You don’t realise how little of the stuff you have until it’s packed up into cardboard boxes. The curtain fall of the roller door came down with a crash, and everything I owned went off to a storage shed in Footscray.

My mother’s bedroom door creaked open. I reached for the light switch and flicked it back and forth; the globe was blown. I opened the blinds. It was one of those days where the morning air and light turn into a sunset and you wonder if there was anything in between. Maybe most lives go the same way.

Her perfumes and jewellery went into boxes for donation. I figured it’s what she’d have wanted, and there wasn’t anyone to disagree with me. The living speaking for the dead is a dangerous thing. I slid the door of her built-in wardrobe open, and took down and folded clothes. When there was just her antique shoe rack in its corner remaining, I heaved and dragged it to the centre of the room and got to work. All her shoes were laid out in perfect order – tidy and precise like everything she did. Touching them made me feel ill. Each pair I moved became one less thing in the world that would remain exactly as left by her.

I wiped down the last pair and placed them in the garbage bag. Sitting against the wall across the room, I lit a cigarette and noticed a lone shoebox in the wardrobe that I’d somehow missed, resting between indentations left in the carpet by the rack. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I mumbled, climbing to my feet. Lifting the box to fling it at a pile of rubbish in the corner, the sound of contents moving within made me pause.

I looked from the box to where it had been in the wardrobe – too big to have fallen through gaps in the rack to rest beneath. I pried its lid, seized by dust and humidity that’d crept into the cardboard. It came free with a pop and I peered inside.

A pile of photographs, a beat-up flip lighter and an envelope. The lighter’s lid croaked open. I pressed down on the wheel with my thumb, harder and harder, until it twisted free, coughing sparks over a blackened wick. I spun it a few more times, each becoming easier than the last and the sparks more abundant, yet still no flame. I slid it into my jeans’ pocket.

The photographs seemed well preserved. Some familiar, but many I had never seen. All contained my mother and father, though, and most appeared to have been taken before I was born. I flipped through. They were not the type of photos framed and displayed around a house; they seemed more candid. Drinks toasted in bars, cigarettes smoked on park benches, lips pressed together. There was a shot of him reading with his head on her lap while she painted her nails. I’d never imagined the guy as being able to read, let alone picking up a book at will. One photo captured them on a bench at a beach I didn’t recognise. The light looked different there. They both looked happy. I placed the photographs down and fished out the envelope, drawing back its seal. Inside rested a wad of yellowed papers, thinned at their folds like worn hinges; flowing indentations of a pen tip showing through their other side. I opened them with care, as if unearthing some delicate, ancient tomb.

The first page began, ‘My dear’; ‘March 30th, 1977’ dating its top left corner. I ran fingertips across the words resting on the page, feeling how they’d been engraved so long ago. A collection of ramblings, signed with a name I’d grown to resent. A letter, written to my mother by the man who was supposed to have left without a trace, sent from the other side of the world twenty years earlier.

A few lines into the second of the letters, I broke from my trance. Slamming the pages down on the dresser, I stepped away, holding back the feeling I was going to be sick. I didn’t drink that day. The removalists took the remaining furniture and I sat on the floor of the empty living room with my back against the wall, staring at nothing in particular.

I’d been lied to, about her having no idea where he’d gone, about him never making contact. Answers I’d gone my whole life believing I needed had only resulted in more questions, and suddenly, my mother, the only real measure of goodness I’d ever known, had shown another side.

The Roadmap of Loss by Liam Murphy

A road trip across America, following in the footsteps of the father who abandoned him, leads young Mark Ward to new peace and understanding.