by Minnie Darke
Her head felt cottony and she was aware that she was talking too much, and possibly not making a lot of sense.
‘You sound like you might write a poem about it.’
‘I just might,’ she said, pleased that he had noticed. ‘What about you? Did you have a good time?’
‘I had a really good time,’ he said, ‘and I still am.’
When he reached for her hand, she allowed her fingers to lace through his, and for the rest of the walk to the cottage they didn’t talk, despite the fact – or perhaps because – both of them knew what was coming next.
In the seven years he and Diana were together, Arie had come to know her body like the intricate, temperamental machine it was. He knew how to speed it up and slow it down, and where every one of its sweet spots was located. Every time he’d thought for more than a minute about how it would be to make love to another woman, he’d worried that it would be embarrassingly awkward, that he wouldn’t know the first thing about how to touch her. Maybe he’d do things she didn’t like. Maybe he’d do things too fast, too slow, too hard, too soft, too much, not enough.
But it wasn’t like that with Evie. At all. From the moment just inside the door when she dropped her shoes to the floor and turned to place her palms on the front of his shirt, he knew what her body wanted. They stood there for quite a long time, with the outside light sifting in through the glass to the otherwise dark interior of the cottage. She undid the top button of his shirt, and he kissed her. Another button, another kiss. When his shirt was all the way open, he easily undid the zip at her back and pushed the green fabric off her shoulders so the silky dress slipped down onto the floor, making a haphazard circle around her bare feet.
Arie wasn’t sure this was the right thing to do, but it felt inevitable now. When she stepped out of the puddle of her dress and moved towards the stairs, looking back over her shoulder to make sure he was following, he absolutely was. In the loft room, another pair of silver-wrapped chocolates had materialised on the turned-back covers of the neatly made futon, but they fell to the floor when Evie pulled aside the duvet.
Arie wasn’t worrying any more about knowing what to do; now he was worrying that this could all be over in a heartbeat, because he was beginning to understand that in one sense, it had begun hours earlier. Every time he’d glanced at Evie across the orchard, all the time he’d spent sitting beside her at dinner, while they’d danced together on the grass, as they’d walked back to the cottage – he’d already been partially here, lying beside her, feeling her bare skin down the length of his body, smelling her hair but also the warm scent of the dance-floor sweat that had dried on her arms and her chest.
He was right – it didn’t last. Before long, she took his earlobe between her teeth and said she was coming, and that undid him, too, but for the short time he moved inside her, her hips like liquid and her mouth tasting of wine, he didn’t think or worry about anything at all. While it did last, Arie lost every trace of the past or the future inside the raw tenderness of making love in the present tense.
THERE WAS NOTHING new, for Arie, about waking in the early hours of the morning with his heart beating too fast. It was something that happened to him most nights of his life, but this time there was no flickering television set at the foot of the bed to catch him as he fell from the world of sleep and landed in a reality where the first thing he had to do – every time – was remember it was true that Diana had gone. He felt it now, the sensation of his heart plummeting down through his body.
Arie sensed a stirring beside him. Evie. In a cascade of images and memories, his mind reconstructed her and everything he had ever thought or known about her. In the low light, he could see the lovely curve of her jaw beneath the dark shadow of her hair, and the jutting outline of her shoulder. He pulled the duvet up over her bare skin and pressed a silent kiss on her hair.
As quietly as he could, and with his heart rate not yet steady, he got out of bed. He put on his boxer shorts and went downstairs, trying to keep his footsteps light. When he reached the far side of the front door, the sensor light activated and Arie cursed himself for forgetting to turn off the switch. He glanced up at the window of the loft bedroom and hoped he had not disturbed her.
The night air was cool on his skin and the grass dewy underfoot. He felt the beginning of a headache at his temples, and in his gut was a feeling that was not precisely regret, although it was somewhere in its ballpark. Because here is the thing about moments of pure present tense – they come to an end.
Being in the present, and only in the present, is like standing between the two halves of a sea that’s been parted. By whatever species of divine intervention, grace or magic you happen to believe in, the weight of all that water is pushed back on both sides to reveal a pathway to the safety of the other shore, a new land. The past and the future, though, are powerful forces that can only be held back for so long, and Arie hadn’t quite reached the far side when they had come crashing back together, knocking him sideways, sending him tumbling in a turbulent ocean of thoughts and memories.
From the past, there came Diana – from a thousand different moments that he hadn’t known he’d stored away so perfectly. Diana: astride him in that bed in the sleep-out bedroom at her mother’s house, one finger across her lips warning him to be quiet and still while she moved her body against his, but only to the precise degree that didn’t make the bed creak. Diana: emerging from a bathroom in San Francisco, a white towel around her middle, which she then dropped before jumping on the bed with him, giggling. There was no sense or order to the memories. There was just Diana, Diana, Diana.
Meanwhile, from the future there came questions and fears. What if it was always like this? What if the past was always going to rise up in this way and swamp him? What right did he have to meddle with Evie’s heart, if he no longer had the ability to give his to her, whole?
In her half-sleep, Evie felt the warmth of the covers on her shoulder, and also the kiss that landed on her hair, but she came fully into wakefulness when she heard Arie’s footsteps on the stairs. At first, she assumed he was going to the bathroom, but then the brightness of the sensor light came through the dormer window. Had he gone to the car for some reason? Was he all right?
Evie rolled out of bed, taking the covers with her, and through the window she saw him standing a short distance from the house. He wasn’t doing anything in particular, just standing there in his boxer shorts, with his arms crossed over his chest.
She went outside, the duvet trailing her like a bridal train, and when she reached Arie she stood behind him and wrapped her arms and the coverings around him, feeling how the skin on his arms and back had tightened to gooseflesh. The honey-and-petrol scent of his cologne still clung to his skin, but it was changed now, made deeper by his own scent. He put his arms over hers, and Evie could feel that he was troubled.
Are you surprised? she asked herself, already knowing the answer.
Already knowing was perhaps the greatest of Evie’s unhelpful talents. When she had moved in with Dave Wright, she had already known it was a bad idea. When she had taken up residence in the cruise ship cabin of a married man, she’d already known she was asking for trouble. When she’d agreed to come with Arie on this journey, she’d already known – hadn’t she? That if he reached for her, she would fall for him. That if she fell for him, she could fall a long way while he was looking elsewhere. She’d known that when he’d asked her to step out of the car the other night, and she’d known it even before little Imogene had knowingly said, Oma says the right woman would have to be someone who knew how to share with Diana.
He continued to face away from her, looking out over a post-and-rail fence to a paddock where some donkeys stood quite still in the moon-glazed grass.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.
He breathed out heavily, but said nothing.
‘Was that the first time . . . since?’
He made a noise that meant yes.
‘We were engaged. For a long time, but never married.’
‘Why was that?’
Arie took a deep breath, and Evie felt his ribs expand inside her embrace. ‘I don’t fully know. I never knew whether she really wanted to . . . take that final step or not. I never really knew if I was totally, entirely what she wanted.’
Oh, I know that feeling, Evie thought, and she was visited by an image that made the poet inside her pay attention. There was Arie: fixing his attention on someone who could never, now, truly love him back. And there she was, standing behind him, doing the same. Perhaps one day, someone else would stand behind her in the same way, and someone else behind them, and on and on it would go in a conga line of misplaced desire. In order to break it, someone would have to turn around. But Arie didn’t; he just kept looking off into the distance while she held him.
All trace of tipsiness gone now, Evie felt clarity blow through her, cold and certain. In another time, another place, another world, she and Arie would have loved each other until they were the same tree. But it wasn’t going to happen here, or now, or in this one.
The long drive back to Melbourne was quiet. Heading north, Evie had felt buoyant and cheerful, but now she felt as if the gravitational pull of the earth was increasing with every kilometre they covered, making her limbs, her heart, her mind feel heavy and dull. She kept the music soft and mostly instrumental, avoiding anything from her library that was abrasively upbeat or too obviously heartbroken. Whether he was at the wheel or in the passenger seat, Arie was subdued and preoccupied, and the journey became an act of polite endurance.
The sun had set by the time they pulled into Tavistock Row, and when Arie switched off the Renault’s engine, he sighed deeply, obviously relieved to be home. He fetched both their bags from the boot and set them down on the pavement, while 12 and 12A faced the street with near-identical expressions on their near-identical facades. Arie stood directly in front of her and took her face in his hands.
‘Thank you for coming with me, Evie. Thank you for – everything.’
When he kissed her – gently, sweetly – she felt all his sadness and confusion flow through her own body.
‘I’m really sorry I’ve been so quiet all day,’ he said. ‘Last night, it . . . blew me away a little bit. I’m just kind of reeling. I know we need to talk. I know we need to work out what comes next, but I need to think. Would it be all right if we talked first thing in the morning? I don’t even know . . . what your plans are.’
But Evie already knew that they would not talk tomorrow. She already knew that she would be up before dawn to pack into the Beetle her boxes of books, her collection of notebooks and diaries, her sewing machine, her guitar, her two remaining suitcases of clothes, her backpack – all the things that she would take with her into yet another new chapter of her life. She already knew that by the time the sun came up, she would be at the ferry terminal, and that by the time this city had begun its Monday in earnest, she would be sailing out across the bay.
‘Goodnight, Evie,’ Arie said.
She kissed him one more time and wondered if he was really listening when she said, ‘Goodbye, Arie.’
Arie didn’t sleep any better that night. For several hours, he lay on his back watching with tired eyes as the television at his feet played its silent pictures. He didn’t turn up the volume, because the soundtrack interfered with the thoughts that were on endless rotation inside his head. He managed to get to sleep again just before dawn, and it was the distinctive sound of Evie’s Beetle pulling away from the kerb that woke him.
From the window of the piano room, he scanned the street; the little blue VW had already reached the corner. During the morning, he checked several times to see if the car had returned. He knew she was supposed to be checking out today, but he didn’t think for a moment – not yet, anyway – that she would leave without saying goodbye.
Instead of going to the office, he worked at home, so that when Evie got back, he would be able to go next door and tell her all the things he’d been thinking on the drive, and all the things that had been circling his head in the night.
I’m still a bit broken. I’m still going to need some time. I’m going to need your help. But if you can put up with me, if you can be patient . . . I’m not sure, I don’t know for certain, but I think, I think, I think . . .
He thought she would understand. Wherever it was she decided to go, they could keep in touch, maybe they could meet for the occasional weekend.
At last there was movement next door, though the car that pulled up outside was not a Beetle but the small red hatchback belonging to the cleaners. They gave him a neighbourly wave, then went on with the business of getting out their mops and buckets and armloads of white sheets. As they let themselves into the house, Arie understood that she’d gone, and that he didn’t have the first idea where.
‘WILL YOU BE all right?’ Felix Carter asked the small version of Beatrix Romero that he held in his hand. FaceTime couldn’t quite keep up with the way she tossed back her mane of curls, so for a moment the screen of his phone was filled with a swish of blonde-brown pixels.
‘How many days did you say you’re going for?’ she asked.
‘Three.’
It was early morning his time, mid-afternoon hers. The pair of them were too young to consider it amazing that they could, from their respective homes in London’s Winchmore Hill and Vancouver’s West End, pour so much data about their lives directly into each other’s palms, but they were young enough to know that nobody in the history of the world had ever loved anybody quite so much as they loved each other.
Around the edges of Beatrix’s hair, Felix could see aspects of the room he had come to know through digital means. He had mapped it in his mind, so that when he thought of her – which was pretty much all the time – he could picture her doing homework at her desk, or getting ready for school in the morning, or lying amid the large and unsmoothed quantity of quilts she kept on top of the bed, which featured particularly prominently in his dreams.
‘Three days? That’s for-fucking-ever! And, what, no phone at all?’
‘Father–son time. Dad’s intense about it. The phone doesn’t even get to go in the car.’
This trip was an annual event in the Carter household, and every year before this one, Felix had itched to spend three days alone with his dad – rock-climbing, camping or hiking. This time Henry Carter had decided on a sailing weekend, but for Felix it was complicated: he still wanted to go, but he didn’t know how he was going to go for three whole days without a single text.
If everything went according to plan, he’d see Beatrix again in the summer holidays; he was stashing away just about every penny of his busking takings to pay for a flight to London. But it was still only March, and for the next few months the telephone would be their lifeline.
‘Felix!’ his mother called. ‘Time to get in the car.’
‘Gotta go, babe,’ Felix said with a sigh.
‘Love you,’ she said.
‘Love you too,’ he said.
‘Love you more,’ she said.
‘Love you to the max,’ he said, and this went on for some time, but at last – after his mother had yelled again – Felix ended the call and bounded downstairs. Out front his father was waiting, the car already loaded with provisions and brightly coloured waterproof bags. In the driveway Cassie Carter hugged her husband goodbye and stood on tiptoe – this hadn’t yet ceased to strike her as strange – to kiss her son.
‘Have an awesome time,’ she told them both.
It would have been an exaggeration to say that Cassie went up to Felix’s room the moment the big 4WD backed out into the street. In truth, she gathered her supplies first. Garbage bags, a plastic carton, the big vacuum cleaner for the carpet, the hand-held vacuum cleaner for the skirtings and other poky places, bucket, cloths, disinfectant.
Although Felix was aware that his mum usually did a bit of tidying up while he and his dad were out of town, it would be some years yet before he understood that giving his mother the opportunity to do an annual spring clean in his bedroom was the unspoken underbelly of the father–son bonding trip.
Cassie had enough good humour to imagine herself swaggering into the war zone of Felix’s bedroom, snapping her rubber gloves against the insides of her wrists in readiness, spray-wipe holstered at her waist. But again, the truth was that the first thing she did was sit on the end of his unmade bed and pick up the phone he’d been forced to leave sitting on his desk.
One of the rules of Felix owning a phone was that Cassie was kept informed of his access code, although he remained blissfully unaware of how often she used this information. She punched in the numbers and scanned through his recent messages and photos, including the hidden photos file that mercifully still contained nothing more alarming than a few pictures of Beatrix Romero’s cleavage and some shots of Felix’s muscled torso that had been taken in the bathroom mirror. She found a bit of talk about weed from one of his schoolfriends, an exchange with his cello teacher about a forthcoming recital, and a lot of lovey-dovey mush – nothing much to worry about. Cassie, digital tour of duty over, put the phone down and readied herself to tackle the room.
She found a crusty bowl lined with the remains of a spaghetti bolognese dinner from several weeks earlier, and a breakfast smoothie that had been left on a shelf to grow inventive patterns of mould. She scooped up the clothes and shoes from the floor and went through the wardrobe like a dose of salts, throwing out holey socks and past-their-best underpants. Beneath the bed there lay an accretion of stuff: loose papers covered in musical notation, essay plans, bent-open novels, socks, a Rubik’s cube, and many other dusty and long-forgotten things.