"The roses are dead,
The violets are too,
Don't mention romance,
You'll make me spew."
Francesca Burton knows all there is to know about love and romance. She knows that love is for the naïve and romance is for the delusional. Her parents taught her...
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"Frankie, I think you're having a panic attack. You need to breathe, okay. C'mon, deep breaths in and out through your mouth. Breathe in, two, three, four. And out, two, three, four. Try to follow my count. That's it, in and out. Okay, now find something to look at. Pick anything you can see and take note of as many things about it as you can – size, colour, texture, whatever.
Trav's voice is low and soothing. I follow it until my breathing starts to even out. As he crouches on the pavement in front of me, his left hand and wrist are resting on my bare knee. His fingers are long and strong and steady and sure. There's a freckle on the middle one. He's wearing a watch that I know was his Dad's. It's an expensive European brand with a black face and a chunky steel band.
Trav's thumb nail has a bruise under it which he got last weekend when he was trying to help his Mum hang shelves in her study. When he showed it to me on Monday morning the bruise was impressively black. It's starting to fade to a deep grape colour. The injured thumb is stroking across my knee cap in the same rhythm as Trav's breath count – up, two three four, down, two three, four – like both of them are trying to will me back to normalcy just by being there. Eventually, they do.
According to Trav's watch, it takes six minutes for me to calm down enough to actually be able to speak. It feels like hours. Some distant part of me is embarrassed to have fallen apart so completely in front of the steadiest person I know. The rest of me is too exhausted to care.
"How did you know that I was having a panic attack?" I ask him.
"My Mum," he says, moving from where he's been crouching to take a seat on the bench beside me. "When my Dad was diagnosed as terminal, she started having them quite a bit."
"Thank you," I say quietly.
"No thanks required," he squeezes my hand gently. "Do you want to talk about what triggered it."
For the first time in a really long time, I find that I do want to talk about it. With sentences that trip over themselves in their eagerness to escape, I share the whole sordid story.
I don't think my parents ever intended to tell me about my Dad's affair. I found out because the woman he'd been hooking up with somehow got hold of my mobile number and left a message on my voicemail. I guess she was angry that he'd called it off.
At first, I hadn't believed it. My Dad wouldn't do that to my Mum. He wouldn't do it to me.
About six months earlier, he'd started travelling a lot more for work. He's a partner in a law firm so he's always travelled a bit, but when I was 14, he won this big client in Sydney and he started being away a lot more. At first it was just during the week. But then he had to stay some weekends too. One time, he was gone for five weeks straight.
That year, we had to cancel our annual trip to the snow.
Mum and I did Sundays at the Market with the Burgesses by ourselves.
