Gravity Is the Thing

Jaclyn Moriarty

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781760870881
• eBook ISBN: 9781911630357
• Subtopic: Women in Fiction

'Clever and magical' - Women's Weekly 'Author Jaclyn is the sister of Liane Moriarty ( Big Little Lies ) and has the same talent for great plots. This unusual novel tugs at the heartstrings.' - Good Housekeeping Twenty years ago, Abigail Sorenson's brother Robert went missing one day before her sixteenth birthday, never to be seen again. That same year, she began receiving scattered chapters in the mail from a mysterious guidebook, whose anonymous authors promised to make her life soar to heights beyond her wildest dreams. These missives have remained a constant in Abi's life - a befuddling yet oddly comforting voice through her family's grief over her brother's disappearance, a move across continents, the devastating dissolution of her marriage, and the new beginning as a single mother and café owner in Sydney. Now, two decades after receiving those first pages, Abi is invited to learn 'the truth' about the book. It's an opportunity too intriguing to refuse - she believes its absurdity and her brother's disappearance must be connected. What follows is an entirely unexpected journey of discovery that will change Abi's life - and enchant readers. Gravity Is the Thing is a smart, unusual, wickedly funny novel - heart-warming and life-affirming.

part

1

1.

2010

A tall man at the airstrip took my suitcase.

He was tall in a long, lean, bony way, which he had tried to disguise with loose clothes. But at each gust of wind, the clothes clung fiercely, so that mostly he was out there on his own. A long, narrow flagpole of a man. He had a headful of curls, and these were unafraid. Crazed and rollicking, those curls.

‘Snow,’ he said, smiling, as he took my suitcase from me. I stared.

I’ll step right into my story at this point. Abigail Sorensen, but you can call me Abi, thirty-five years old, a Capricorn, a nail-biter, former lawyer, owner/manager of the Happiness Café on Sydney’s Lower North Shore, mother of a four-year-old named Oscar—and this day—the day that I’m describing right now—well, it had started at 6 am.

The taxi driver was twenty minutes late but this made him wild-eyed with excitement. ‘You’ll make your flight! I swear it on my mother’s life!’

Traffic was backed up right across the Bridge and his enthusiasm dimmed. He frowned quietly, moving his hands around the steering wheel. He’d been a little reckless with his mother’s life: he saw that now.

Then, just as we got into free, fast road and his spirits picked up, eyes wild again, there was an RBT stop.

‘Can you believe this?’ he said.

‘I know,’ I agreed. ‘Who’s drinking at this hour?’

But the driver’s face darkened. ‘Who drinks at this hour? You do not know the half of it!’

He was still moody when we pulled up at the airport. He’d lost all interest in my flight.

At the Jetstar counter, a woman with sharp edges typed at a computer in a slow, measured way, my breathlessness filling up the quiet around the tapping. Without looking sideways, the woman tagged my suitcase and sent it away on a conveyor belt.

So there went my suitcase—nervous, proud, excited—starting its journey alone, ahead of me.

In Melbourne, I met up with my suitcase again. It’s just your regular, black vinyl case that can stand on its own two wheels and roll along, but I felt close to it, and protective, anyway. We took the train across the city, my suitcase and I, to the smaller airport at Moorabbin.

The final leg of the journey made me uncomfortable, partly because I don’t like the expression ‘final leg’. Who started that, anyway? That dividing of rooms and people into feet, dividing of journeys into legs? The same person who tangled the ocean?

Also, it was the smallest plane I’d ever seen; I didn’t know they made them that small. My suitcase would never fit, let alone me and that big pilot.

‘My luggage won’t bring the plane down, will it?’ I joked.

The pilot turned a critical gaze on the suitcase. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘What’s in it?’

He tested its weight with one of his big arms, laughed softly, and got on with checking over the plane.

It seemed like the kind of thing someone else should do, checking the plane—if we have to divide a journey into legs, we may as well divide it into fields of expertise. As it was, the whole thing seemed very Sundayafternoon amateurish. He was saddling up his horse.

That plane is not a horse!

‘She’s a twin-engine Cessna,’ the pilot called, which was unnerving.

The letters OWW were printed on the aeroplane’s side, and I was thinking that this was a mistake when the other passenger turned up.

‘Don’t you think that’s tempting fate?’ I asked her, as she put her suitcase down beside me. ‘Or defining destiny? At some point, that plane is going to have to say oww.’

‘Ha ha,’ said the woman beside me. Two words: ha ha. Difficult to interpret.

‘It’s going to fall out of the sky,’ I elaborated. ‘Or a missile’s going to hit it.’

‘Hm,’ the woman said, non-committal.

She was maybe thinking that missiles were unlikely. This was just a flight to an island in Bass Strait, the stretch of water dividing the mainland from Tasmania.

I will be honest with you: I had never once turned my mind to that stretch, nor to any islands it might contain, until just last week, when the invitation arrived. Turns out there are over fifty tiny, windswept islands in Bass Strait, including King Island (which I already knew: the cream and the brie) and Flinders (where, in 1830, they exiled the last of Tasmania’s Aboriginals). Taylor Island, where I was headed is south-east of Flinders, has a population of three hundred, a lighthouse, and is ‘renowned’ for its tiger snakes, muttonbirds and yellow-throated honey eaters.

After a moment of silence, the other passenger started talking.

She was oblong-shaped, this passenger, dressed in a tangerine suit, and she said that her name was Pam.

‘Just plain Pam,’ she explained, ‘though wouldn’t I have killed to be called Pamela?’

You wouldn’t have to kill someone. You could just change your name by deed poll.

But I let it pass.

Pam, it turned out, was a local of the island heading home after a holiday.

Easily, her favourite part of her trip had been the Chinatown in Melbourne, because Pam was a lover of steamed pork dumplings, and a collector of bootleg DVDs.

It was a four-and-a-half-hour flight, and we all fitted into the plane— the big pilot, me, Pam, the luggage—no trouble.

Sometimes the pilot spoke into his radio: ‘Oscar Whisky Whisky, how do you read?’ his voice cool and low, and ‘how do you read’ forming a single word, ‘howdoyouread’. Each time he said it, I would think: How do I read? Well, I turn the pages, my eyes scan the letters, I . . . even though I tried to stop myself. Even when the joke got old.

Pam kept shouting stories the whole way, only pausing when the pilot asked how to read. Pam told stories about chopsticks, and how she learned to use them, and strawberry farmers, and how they have bad teeth. (‘Oh, the stories I could tell!’ But you are, I thought.)

It’s funny the way relationships can shift. Originally I had been the queen bee—making my humorous remarks about oww, while Pam was demure. But right away she had stepped up to take over the role. Maybe doubting my ability.

At first, I ranged around for matching stories, but the effort of shouting them over the roar of the plane—or maybe the air outside was roaring?—either way, it made my stories increasingly pointless— unworthy—so I stopped talking, the way you do at nightclubs, and it was all just reaction: smile, frown, exclaim, or laugh at Pam.

Pam seemed happy.

But now here I was, standing on the airstrip on Taylor Island, and the tall man was saying, ‘Snow!’

Just confusion, that was all I had left.

‘Snow’ could be a command. All visitors, on arrival at the island, are required, please, to snow.

Or it could be the tall man’s name. In which case, I should shake his hand and say, ‘Sorensen. Abigail Sorensen.’

There was a long, formal pause. The tall man’s smile faded. Creases settled into the edges of his eyes. Something seemed to cross his face—a mild incredulity, I realised, at the fact that I was standing there, staring at him.

Then the tall man found his smile again and pointed to a sky that was heavy with cloud: ‘Snow,’ he repeated. ‘Any time now.’ And he turned away, still smiling.

He swung my suitcase onto the back of a golf buggy, and gestured for me to climb aboard.

I called goodbye to Pam and to the pilot. But Pam was crouching by an open suitcase, drawing out a long, black coat.

The pilot was scratching at the plane’s fuselage. Maybe he’d seen sense about the OWW and was scratching off the letters.

The path left the airstrip behind right away, leaning into curves like a yacht on a choppy sea. It carried the golf buggy through fields, sharp winds, and late afternoon.

We passed a letterbox encrusted with dried starfish. A general store with an axe leaning up against its doorframe. A café with a chalkboard: Fish Stew and Mashed Potatoes.

The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• part 1
• part 2
• part 3
• part 4
• part 5
• part 6
• part 7
• part 8
• part 9
• part 10
• part 11
• part 12
• part 13
• part 14
• part 15
• part 16
• part 17
• Acknowledgements