Sudden lightness of the head. If May and he had had a child. He’d wanted to, she’d said she did too, but she’d put her career first, and didn’t want to hurry things. He remembered her telling him how her father, Mr Bandaranaike, had pierced her ears in his surgery when she was two years old. Ford saw a tiny bejewelled May, arms full of bracelets, earrings flashing. A flower in her hair. No use thinking such thoughts. No use. Hail clattered on the window. He watched a seagull turning, bright white against the black sky.
When they got back there were stacks of rubbish bags at the front door, the dull, lavatorial scent of cleaning fluids. Karen was shouting to Simon over the roar of the vacuum cleaner. They sat on the front verandah so as not to track mud onto the clean wet floorboards.
Simon emerged with a cardboard box of empty bottles and set it down. He said lightly, gazing off, running his finger along the verandah rail, ‘I hope you’re not drinking too much, mate?’
He was thinking of Aaron Harris. Ford gave him a hard glance, but his expression was guileless and open. As Simon had got older he looked more like their mother — short and heavy, with a thatch of hair, a round, honest face. When he was a toddler their mother used to get Ford to follow him about, pulling him down from fences, heading him away from roads. Ford remembered the way his brother’s hair grew in a sandy spiral on the back of his head.
Karen declared her work finished. Ford insisted on ringing for takeaways. Bustling around his gleaming kitchen he produced the dishes and cutlery they’d cleaned, set the table with a bright cloth, made everything nice. He poured out wine, drank moderately, helped fill the children’s plates. He was reeling with gratitude and shame. After dinner Karen sighed, rose from the table, gave her thighs a little slap with both hands and looked meaningly at Simon.
He saw them to the door. She gave a theatrical little shiver and drew her jacket over her shoulders.
‘Brr. You take care of yourself, now.’ Her expression was rich with virtue, with ‘good old-fashioned commonsense’. Ford had the urge to snarl, to say something atrocious, which he buried by shaking his head, compressing his lips and kissing her on the cheek, as if to say, ‘words fail me’.
‘Karen,’ he murmured.
Satisfied by this hammy show she laid her hands on her children’s heads. She and Simon gazed at the children in silent respect for something — innocence, family values. Then she clapped her hands, sending the little mites skipping out to the car: ‘Hurry, hurry, you’ll freeze to death!’
Claire pressed her white little face against the car window, making fish lips at Ford. Bloodless flesh under glass. Uncanny child.
Simon looked at Ford from under his pale lashes. ‘Thanks,’ Ford said. And then the sudden rush, all the blood concentrating in his face. He gripped Simon’s arm, pressed his forehead into his shoulder. ‘This cold …’ he said. It was all he could get out.
Simon went off down the steps, whistling. Ford thought of summers long ago. The bridge of brown freckles on Simon’s nose. That whorl of sandy hair.
The day after that, Sunday, Ford drove out to the Peninsula. Mrs J gave him tea at the dining table, in front of the streaming panes. Her hair was fastened on top of her head with a comb. She had a sharp nose, round cheeks and a pronounced gap between her teeth that made her look like a benign witch. Outside the sea gleamed silver and there was an unnaturally high tide. Rain drummed on the tin roof. Mrs J lighted her magic lantern and gazed out over the inlet. Her second daughter glided in and out carrying bundles of linen. Some effect of the light made the view framed by the window glow softly, a watery tableau of rain and silvery sea and luminous cloud. Ford wondered at Mrs J’s capacity for peace — admirable, unobtainable — he was not, could not be calm.
‘How are your parents?’ she asked in formal tones. She looked at her reflection in the back of a teaspoon and pursed her lips.
‘My mother and stepfather are fine. My real father is not well, he’s an alcoholic.’ Ford startled himself by saying this. He could not have told her while he was married to her daughter. They had always let it be known to the Bandaranaikes that his father was ‘overseas’.
She raised an eyebrow.
‘Not just a drunk, he’s mad, insane.’ (What was he doing? Why the reckless hyperbole? She would ask him to leave the house.)
‘How interesting,’ she said coolly. ‘Tell me about him.’
He shifted in his seat; awkwardness making him fidget. The wicker cackled beneath him. ‘He was mathematically gift ed, also musical. He became an alcoholic and was never able to manage a proper career.’ He sat back and looked at her, feeling helpless. This hardly covered the lurid creature his father had become. Ford himself found him hard to believe. His gaunt face, with its prominent cheekbones and Roman nose, the ravaged contours, the mouth set in a line of thwarted ambition, bitterness, spoiled hope. Ford saw him jerking along the street, pulling his coat around his emaciated body.
Mrs J looked out at the rain. ‘I know all this,’ she said absently. ‘May told me.’ She stood up. ‘Shall we walk down to the shore?’
They made their way through the garden. Ford went ahead, lifting wet branches for her, kicking aside bits of fallen brush, while she followed under a hot pink umbrella, sniffing the air and looking round alertly. The rain twanged on his umbrella and the long grass soaked his trousers. On the shore the water was swollen and still, the drops spiking into it. The high tide had covered the path, and a green soup of sticks and weed lapped against the sea wall. The city buildings were just visible through the watery mist. They walked on the grass above the path, around to the headland then turned back. He was absorbing what she’d told her: May had spilled the beans about Aaron Harris, ‘ages ago’, and Mrs J hadn’t demanded an immediate divorce or banned him from the house. A beam of light broke through the cloud and shone on a patch of sea. Gulls wheeled over it. How desperately one clutches at straws. It hardly mattered now what Mrs J thought of him, yet still he felt a stirring of hope, a lifting of the spirits. With a little show of courteousness and care he escorted her across a point where the bank had eroded. She lurched and gripped his forearm and something stirred in him; it was the sight of her small brown hand — May’s hand — on his freckly wrist. Oh, the ache in his eyes.
Later, he left the peninsula and joined the queue hurtling onto the northwestern motorway, the red tail lights shining malevolently ahead, the overhead bridges rising up and falling away behind. There was a tailback; soon he was crawling and as he passed the spot where May had died he saw that someone had put up a small white cross. He peered out at it, wondering who had put it there, but the flow speeded up and he drove on, the wipers swishing, the rain whirling round the orange lights. One of the skinhead youths had died in the crash too, a week after May. Perhaps the little monument was for him. Ford had received a letter from the boy’s family, a mixture of apology and justification that he had merely skimmed, before shoving the cheap pages of notepaper away in a drawer.
Driving, he was thinking about his niece, Claire. The previous day in the café she’d looked up from some pinching game with her brother to find Uncle Ford staring intently at her, brooding over her bony features, her wiry hair. She’d faltered, given him a quick, apprehensive glance, before turning back to the Chinese burn she was administering with her broad hands — Marcus, eyes watering, holding out but slowly disappearing under the table.
Something occurred to Ford then. He’d been studying the children for traces of Aaron Harris. Grimly, he’d identified them in her. That crazy laugh. Those raw cheekbones and expressive hands. The poor child.
He must stop this obsessing, must leave the phantom of Aaron Harris behind.
He had a piece of paper folded in his top pocket. When they’d returned from their walk he’d told Mrs J about the problem of the uninsulated house. She’d sat down and written him a list of tradesmen she regarded as suitable.
‘Because you don’t want to be dealing with any old crook,’ she said.
; Using Mrs J’s list he acquired builders: Jayden, Curtis and Shane. Shane was an enormous, silent Viking with pale blue eyes and a mullet haircut. Jayden and Curtis were his pimply, tattooed boys. Their associate, Vince, skulking, cadaverous and with a rattling cough, installed the underfloor heating. Whenever Ford walked in on them, pale Jayden and Curtis would start and exchange stony, significant looks, as if he’d interrupted the plotting of a drug deal or bank robbery. Vince, too, had a prison whiff about him. When they huddled out in the barbecue area for smoko he paced, as though used to taking the air between high walls. Shane was their leader, and spent most of his breaks with a cigarette clamped in his teeth and a cell phone wedged between his ear and his burly shoulder. Ford dubbed them the Nazi bikers, and became almost irrationally fond of them. They tolerated him following them about, rubbing his hands and asking impractical questions. He got quite inventive, and asked them to do all sorts of extras. It cost a fortune, but the house was transformed. No longer the faint acrid tang of damp, the delicate tracery of mould on the sills. As a masterstroke Ford had Mrs J recommend him a weekly cleaner, and was sent two elderly Russian ladies, Galina and Galina, who turned up swathed like twin Russian dolls in cardies and shawls and fur-lined booties. They smiled and apologised frequently, spoke rudimentary, comical English and polished everything until it shone.
On the afternoon when they’d finished the renovations, Ford treated the Nazi bikers to a beer, which turned into an extended session at the kitchen table. At a late stage Curtis and Jayden were sent for more booze and Shane, who had grown melancholy, told Ford that his wife had joined a cult that worshipped a deity called Ramtha. She wanted to leave Shane and their teenage daughter Shanae, and to travel to a commune in Colorado, there to await Ramtha, who would arrive in a spaceship to rescue his chosen ones.
‘Good God,’ Ford said, thinking of his own departed wife. There was a sudden howl of wind across the roof. They were in the middle of an easterly storm. Rain splattered against the windowpanes and there was a smell of ozone in the air. Space. The ether. Like her mother, May had had round eyes, cherubic cheeks, a full mouth and a little gap between her teeth. Ford saw her among gold-rimmed clouds, eyelashes lowered, diligently blowing a puff of wind across a ceramic blue sky. Shane rubbed his great fists over his eyes and sighed, ‘Women, eh. Can’t live with them … pass the beer nuts.’
Ford laughed. It came to him how lonely he’d been. Then the boys came crashing back and the session carried on until they reeled away and he fell into bed and dreamed uneasily — spaceships, May flying, a great void of black space, vibrating with sound.
That morning he came out to the warm kitchen and panicked. Something had been wrenched loose and was spinning inside him, throwing him off balance. There was a moment of reeling fright, as if, after weeks of preparation, he was about to set out on the most difficult venture he’d ever faced, and had realised, with sudden dreadful certainty, that his groundwork was incomplete. He walked to work (legs like rubber, disconcerting twitch under his eye) through streets strewn with the detritus of the storm. Sticks and leaves littered the pavements, cars threaded through a slalom of plastic cones where lines were down and sections of roads were flooded. He spent the day in an agitated state, not helped by some tricky issues (a feud between secretaries, a student accused of plagiarism).
He walked home, cooked a meal and ate it at the table, trying to still whatever it was that had come apart in his mind. He felt somehow weightless. He got through the evening, and the next. Strange days went by. He found himself jumping up to straighten curtains and polish surfaces — setting things in order kept him calm. He’d become, not so much houseproud, as fanatically superstitious. The house represented the state of things. He must not let things slide. He took to thinking aloud. Don’t panic, he told himself (and Ticket the cat). One day at a time. Let’s just get through this. That kind of thing.
He’d been so busy battling the cold that he hadn’t had time to think of much else. Now he faced other things. Days. Nights. Life.
Ford holds on to the memory of those early days. The first year without May. How he fought his way back. The panic. The fear.
The days and nights continue. He has no choice but to go on.
THE NIGHT BOOK
Karen wanted to have another baby but she didn’t get pregnant. She thought about trying IVF but then she changed her mind. She talked to her friend Jenny Francis, whose family ran the Francis Foundation for underprivileged kids. She decided she wanted to foster a girl.
Simon said, ‘Why don’t you go back to nursing.’
Karen said she could do that any time. They had money and plenty of space. She wanted to give something back to the community.
Simon mentioned her idea to Ford.
Ford was dubious. ‘I don’t know. Someone else’s kid in the house. It’s bound to be difficult. High maintenance. But Karen’d do it well. She’s got all that energy.’
The way he said it suggested something negative about Karen’s energy.
Simon told Karen he hoped it wouldn’t upset their own kids, Marcus and Claire. But he went along with it. He signed forms and sat through interviews with social workers. He and Karen were vetted and subjected to police checks. They had to take a special course that went on for days at a very slow pace. Simon thought he could have taken the material home and swotted it up in a couple of nights.
He suppressed the fact that he wasn’t all that keen. Karen was seized with the idea. There was no stopping her. He thought, it’s not a permanent thing. If we can’t handle it, we can opt out.
They brought Elke home. She was eight years old, thin, undersized, with freckles and a sharp face. The information on her was straightforward: her mother had been a teenage alcoholic and her father’s whereabouts were unknown. Before she’d been taken into care she’d had an itinerant life with her mother, for some periods in a garage, and then in a car. She’d been to four different schools. She’d been malnourished but was developmentally normal. They were spared contact with her mother, who was working as a prostitute and didn’t want to see the child.
She was a quiet and placid girl, not a horror to deal with, but she couldn’t stick to normal sleep patterns. She got up almost every night and prowled around the house. Karen tried to get her to stay in bed even if she was awake, but it was hard to get her to break the habit. If she woke, she couldn’t stop herself getting up. Karen worried she would go outside, and once they did find her out on the deck. She said she was looking for the cat.
When Simon came back late from the hospital he often sat at the table and wrote journal notes. One night he became aware there was someone standing right behind him. He turned quickly. It was Elke.
‘What are you doing? You should be in bed.’
She edged along the table. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m writing in my journal.’
‘What you writing?’
‘Notes. Go to bed. Here, I’ll take you.’
‘I can’t sleep.’
He hesitated. With the other kids, he would have insisted. He wouldn’t have allowed them to defy him, and he would have made them get a good night’s sleep.
‘Why do you get up all the time? Aren’t you tired the next day?’
‘Nah.’
He sighed. She’d obviously never had a regular bedtime. No routine laid down. Not habituated.
He made himself a cup of tea and her a hot chocolate. ‘You have to clean your teeth after.’
‘What’s in your notes?’
‘I had a woman patient; she’d had four babies over the years. Big ones.’
‘And what?’
‘She had some damage from the births. So I fixed it. I was there when the last baby was born and as it was being born I saw the damage. Whereas when I’d examined her before, I couldn’t see the problem. I’d thought she didn’t have really have one. It was only when she was giving birth that I saw … You don’t need to know all this.’
She looked
at him steadily.
‘Anyway, it was a kind of lesson. That’s the kind of thing I write up in my journal.’
‘I seen someone having a baby.’
‘Have you? When?’
‘I dunno. We went there.’
‘In a hospital? Did you see the whole thing?’
‘From the side.’
‘The side of the bed?’
‘Yeah. It was gross.’
‘Was it your auntie or something?’
‘I don’t know.’
He got used to her silent entrances.
She looked at him levelly, boldly, as though there was an agreement between them. She sat down and watched him write. He was aware of differences. If it had been Marcus or Claire, he couldn’t have tolerated the sitting and watching. Parental irritation and dutifulness would have had him shooing them into their bedrooms, tucking them in. He didn’t love this kid. He hadn’t spent years setting the best possible routine for her. He hadn’t watched her growing up, every step of the way. Karen would have sent her to bed, but Karen was deeply, exhaustedly asleep, as were Marcus and Claire. Elke sat and watched him and he let her.
Sometimes they talked, quietly, so as not to wake anyone.
She said, ‘If you make me go to bed I won’t sleep.’ She said, ‘I always wake up in the night. My night’s two halves. First and last and there’s a waking bit in the middle.’
All through the winter she sat next to him while he wrote in his journal. When he’d finished he saw her to her room and assumed she slept after that. She never seemed tired. (Not that he saw much of the kids during the day. He worked long hours.) He felt guilty that he didn’t try harder to get her to sleep. He knew it was because he didn’t care enough. He had so much to worry about already — he worried about all the things that were really his.
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