A Short History of Richard Kline by Amanda Lohrey

of November, everything changed. Jim and Leni were driving home from the Midlands, where they had been visiting Leni’s children in boarding school. Their car skidded into the path of a bus on the M1 and Leni was flung out onto the road, dying within minutes.
    There was not, as Jim was to say over and over in the early weeks of his grief, a mark on her. It seemed characteristic of Leni that she should die with her beauty intact.
    Jim’s way of grieving was to work day and night, sleeping on a couch in the coffee bar and buttonholing anyone who was passing for a three-hour rave. It was exhausting. Furtively they began to tiptoe around him. Because they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, console him, Jim began to resent them, became sullen and withdrawn. For weeks he didn’t come into the office at all, and then one Friday afternoon he appeared with a sharply dressed guy in his late thirties – in a suit – and announced that he was taking indefinite leave of the company and installing McCarthy as his CEO.
    They were stunned.
    McCarthy was a Harvard MBA and the bottom line kicked in fast. No frills, no concerts, no coffee lounge.
    The place lost its heart.
    Mira took up an offer from a firm in Montreal and suggested, in her flip way, that Rick come with her. This surprised him. Maybe she cared more for him than she had revealed. Was he so insensitive that he didn’t know, couldn’t tell, when he was loved? Or could it be that she was apprehensive about going alone? Wanted him as a crutch? Although he was not in love with her, he was aware of how she might be a catalyst for him to lead some other kind of life; it was a time when scenarios began to scroll through his head like endless trailers from forthcoming movies, and it seemed, for a while, that he might go anywhere and be anyone he chose.
    One bitterly cold morning he drove Mira to Heathrow, enclosed her in a bear hug and said he might come and visit her at Christmas. ‘Sure you will,’ she said. Then he went up to the viewers’ deck and waved her off until the plane was out of sight. It was a sentimental gesture, and it was unlike him.
    Now, for the first time since arriving in London, he felt dislocated. On the day after Mira left, it entered his head that he might return to Sydney. For a day or two he thought about it, but idly, not with any real intent. The shameful fact was that he hadn’t once felt homesick. But then, as if something dormant had been activated in his brain, as if someone somewhere had flicked a switch, one Sunday afternoon asleep on the couch he had a dream. He was standing by a fence in a suburban backyard, and beside the fence a cluster of Cootamundra wattles floated in a haze of blue foliage, the grey-green, smoky blue of his childhood, a blue he had never seen in Europe … Beyond the fence he could see a beach, wide open and deserted, with steep white sand dunes that fell away to the edge of a sunstruck sea, and in a sudden rush he ran towards the water with an overwhelming desire to dive in, to break its glittering surface and be enveloped in its surf … He woke, flooded with nostalgia, and sat up abruptly, feeling dizzy, almost sick with a spasm of yearning.
    The next day, he got a call from his sister. Gareth had collapsed from a brain tumour and was on life support.
    â€˜You must come, Rick,’ Jane said. ‘You must come.’
    He booked a flight for the evening of the following day.
    At Melbourne airport he stumbled out of the plane like a zombie. Jane was there to meet him, and before long he was in his brother’s house in Ivanhoe, which overlooked a leafy park. The living room was a cruel tableau: on the couch his mother sat, ashen, holding the hand of his sister-in-law, Allie. Through the glass doors he could see his father alone on the sundeck, smoking.
    Jane knocked on the glass and Ned turned, saw Rick was there and walked in through the open door. They shook hands, and when