Lyrebird: Beautiful, moving and uplifting: the perfect holiday read

‘You ask a lot of questions.’

He thinks about it. ‘I do. It’s how I make conversation. How do you make conversation?’ he asks and they both laugh.

‘I don’t. Apart from Tom I never have anybody to talk to. Not people, anyway.’ Somebody at the table around the corner stands, pushing aside the bench, which screeches against the ground. She imitates the sound. Once, twice, until she gets it right. The bar girl clearing the table beside them gives her a funny look.

‘I have fine conversations with myself,’ Laura continues, not noticing the look or not caring. ‘And with Mossie and Ring. And inanimate objects.’

‘You wouldn’t be alone in that.’ He smiles, watching her, completely intrigued.

She makes a new sound, one that makes him laugh. It sounds like a phone vibrating.

‘What is that?’ he asks.

‘What?’ She frowns.

And then suddenly he hears the sound again and it’s not coming from Laura’s lips, though he has to study her closely. He feels his phone vibrating in his pocket.

‘Oh.’ He reaches into his pocket and takes out his phone.

Five missed calls from Bo, followed by three messages of varying desperation.

He puts it face down on the table, ignoring it.

‘How did you know Tom?’

‘More questions.’

‘Because I find you intriguing.’

‘I find you intriguing.’

‘Ask me something then.’ He smiles.

‘Some people learn about people in other ways.’ Her eyes sear into him so much his heart pounds.

‘Okay.’ He clears his throat and she imitates the sound perfectly again. ‘We – me, Bo and Rachel – made a documentary about Joe and Tom. We spent a year with them, watching their every move, or at least that’s what we thought. You seemed to elude us. My experience of Joe and Tom is that they had no contact with anybody at all, apart from suppliers and customers, and even then it was rare for it to be human contact. It was just them, every day, all their lives. I’m not sure how Tom would have met your grandmother.’

‘She met him through my mum, who brought them food and provisions. She cleaned their house.’

‘Bridget’s your mother?’

‘Before Bridget.’

‘How long ago are we talking?’ Solomon asks, leaning in to her, enthralled, whether she’s spinning bullshit or not. He happens to think it’s the truth. He wants to think it’s the truth.

‘Twenty-six years ago,’ she says. ‘Or a little bit more than that.’

He looks at her, slowly processing. Laura is twenty-six years old. Tom did her grandmother a favour. Her mother was a housekeeper at their house twenty-six years ago.

‘Tom was your dad,’ he says in a low voice.

Despite knowing this, him saying it aloud seems to unsettle her and she looks around, imitating the clink of glasses, the smash of bottles in the recycling bin, the cracking ice. All sounds overflowing and overlapping each other as a sign of her distress.

He’s so shocked that his summation is true. He places his hand over hers. ‘I’m even more sorry you had to learn about his death like that.’

She imitates the sound of him clearing his throat, even though he hasn’t made the sound; she has linked it to his feeling of awkwardness, is perhaps telling him she feels uncomfortable, is trying to show him how she feels, connect it to those moments when he feels like that. Perhaps there is a language in her mimicry. Perhaps he’s losing his mind completely, investing such time and belief in someone that Bo considered unsophisticated, or developmentally delayed. But there doesn’t seem to be anything unsophisticated about the woman who sits before him right now. If anything she operates and communicates on more levels and layers than he’s ever experienced.

‘Laura, why did you ask for me tonight?’

She looks at him, those bewitching green eyes. ‘Because, apart from Tom, you’re the only person I know.’

Solomon has never ever been the only person that someone knows. It seems to him to be an odd thing, but a beautifully intimate thing. And something that isn’t to be taken lightly. It’s something that carries huge responsibility. Something to cherish.

6 (#ulink_302500a5-e655-53fd-b1ec-efeda2e57626)

The following morning the film crew are in Joe’s kitchen. Joe is sitting silently in his chair. Ring is by his feet, mourning the loss of his friend.

Bo has revealed to him, as gently as she could, that Laura is Tom’s daughter. He hasn’t said a word, made absolutely no comment whatsoever. He’s lost in his head, perhaps running through all the conversations, all the moments he could have missed this information, the moments he was possibly deceived, wondering how Tom could have lived a life he never knew about.

It breaks Solomon’s heart; he can’t even watch him. He holds the boom mic in the air, looking away, out of respect, trying to give Joe as much privacy in this moment as he can, despite three people invading his home and a camera pointed at his face. Of course Solomon was against revealing this news to Joe on camera, but the producer has the final say.

‘Laura’s mother, Isabel, was your housekeeper over twenty-six years ago.’

He looks at Bo then, coming alive. ‘Isabel?’ he barks.

‘Yes, do you remember her?’

He thinks back. ‘She wasn’t with us very long.’

Silence, his brain ticks over, sliding through the memory files.

‘Do you recall Tom and Isabel being particularly close?’

‘No.’ Silence. ‘No.’ Again. ‘Well, he’d …’ He clears his throat. ‘You know, he’d do the same as with Bridget: pay her for the cleaning and the provisions. I’d be out on the land. I’d not much to do with that.’

‘So you’d no idea about a love affair between them?’

It’s as though that expression occurs to him for the first time. The only way for Tom to have become a father was to have had a love affair. Something they both had said they’d never had. Two virgins at seventy-seven years old.

‘This girl is sure about that?’

‘After Isabel died, her grandmother revealed to her that Tom was her father. Laura’s grandmother, who was ailing herself, made an arrangement with Tom for Laura to live at the cottage.’

‘He knew about her then,’ Joe says, as if that’s been the burning question the whole time but he was afraid to ask.

‘Tom only learned she was his daughter after Isabel’s death, ten years ago. The cottage was modernised as much as was possible, by Tom, though there’s no electricity or hot running water. Laura has been living there alone ever since.’ Bo consults her notes. ‘Laura’s grandmother Hattie Murphy reverted to her maiden name Button after her husband’s death. Isabel changed her name too, and so Laura calls herself Laura Button. Hattie died nine years ago, six months after Laura moved to the cottage.’

Joe nods. ‘So she’s on her own then.’