An Astronaut's Life

by Sonja Dechian

  I pulled the curtain over and we looked out. I motioned for Gina to step back so she wouldn’t draw their attention. She came in beside me and I kissed the top of her head.

  ‘I’m glad you’re okay,’ I said.

  ‘Me too. All of us.’

  We looked for a while but it felt weird to be glad or loving if cops were searching our property for a body.

  ‘Why don’t you get changed? I’ll get you something to eat,’ I said.

  Gina dropped Lucas at school, and then she slept most of the afternoon. Or tried to, anyway, while I sat at my desk and did not try all that hard to distract myself from what was going on outside. I had work to do: the business I’d mentioned to the two young cops was not so much a business yet as an excuse for having taken so long to find a job after I’d been laid off a year earlier.

  After almost twelve years in the same government department, I’d at least received a decent pay out. Forty-five of us were made redundant across the country, as well as some others on contracts that were never renewed. While I was better off than some, this was just six months after we’d bought the house—without my income we were in over our heads.

  Gina remained such a source of comfort during this period. Something would come up, she always said, let’s see this as an opportunity, etc, and I took her lead. I’m sure I tried to tell her that things would soon be dire, the job market was competitive and I had no special skills, certainly no ambition; I must have mentioned that, in fact, I was feeling more and more relieved to be out of the workforce all together. But something will still come up, she said.

  A friend of mine once told me you always know at the start of a relationship what it is that will cause it to end. I had not known with Gina, even though I’d thought hard about it before we bought the house. Was it my cynicism that would drive her away? Were we a mismatch? Maybe tensions over the child that was not mine, legally or otherwise, or once money started to become an issue—maybe that? But still I could not see how any of this would be enough to derail us.

  Not long into my period of unemployment, Gina began to take extra shifts at the hospital, although we did not yet need the money. Despite all her reassurances, she was preparing for me to fail.

  Still she encouraged me to be proactive. Maybe enrol in a course, she said. So I’d found one in comms planning and on the first day I rose early and dressed for work and caught the train, and although I was only going through the motions for Gina’s sake, for a short time it seemed as if the whole exercise might wake something in me, after all.

  Then I joined a room of unemployed strangers and for the next four-and-a-half hours we sat and watched as a series of amateur PowerPoint slides swam before us.

  At lunchtime I’d gone to the bathroom and the zipper on my pants had come off in my hand. I sat on the toilet for fifteen minutes trying to force the teeth back in. I didn’t even have a safety pin to hold it, so I tied my jacket around my waist and stepped out into the hall where I asked another woman from the course if she had one, but she didn’t. I explained quietly why, and she went around asking everyone until it became a sort of bonding exercise for them, the six women in the course rifling through handbags in a little hallway conspiracy. Someone handed me a pin, I fixed things up as best I could, but I did not return to class.

  I’ve come to see the space that had opened up when I lost my job had to be filled, but I hadn’t thought carefully enough about this. I was vulnerable to the wrong perspectives and obsessions. I could feel myself becoming unmoored from our relationship, from us, but I didn’t know how to stop it from happening.

  And I couldn’t explain this to Gina.

  ‘You’re not even trying,’ she said, which surprised me. I had not been trying for some time.

  The Friday before the arrival of the cops, we’d celebrated my very first contract. ‘The birth of your business,’ Gina called it, even though it was only one contract, and I’d won it with a quote that was much too low.

  Gina had picked up a bottle of bubbly on her way home from Lucas’ school and they came in from the car singing a sort of hip-hooray for Ma. Lucas had a postbag in his arms. It was stamped from Singapore—a package from his father.

  He sat on the floor and tore at it. Things felt festive; champagne and Lucas’s excitement.

  ‘School bag away first,’ Gina said, which was the rule. Lucas ignored her and she tried again until he took the package from between his teeth to speak.

  ‘No, but can I please? It’s from my dad.’

  ‘All right, but let me. You’ll break your teeth.’

  He wouldn’t let Gina take it so she went to the kitchen for scissors.

  ‘Let Mum help,’ I said, and he held it out for her. Gina snipped the top end of the package and angled it down.

  ‘Shake it out,’ she said.

  A card and gift in boyish wrapping fell to the carpet and Lucas squealed, scooping the present with such care there might have been a kitten inside and not just an ill-fitting item of clothing, like always.

  He put the present on his lap and picked up the envelope to do the card first.

  ‘Want me to read it for you?’ said Gina.

  ‘He can read it,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

  He couldn’t quite, but he got most of it. It was more or less, ‘Dear son, happy birthday to you, love Dad,’ in what appeared to actually be his father’s handwriting this time.

  It was not Lucas’s birthday. The gifts had a way of turning up at random times that were so far from his birthday it was difficult to tell if they were early or late.

  Gina had explained that Singapore was very far away and mail took a long time and he seemed to buy this, for the most part. He had a globe of the world in his room and we’d find Singapore sometimes, and he’d already pointed out it didn’t seem that far away. ‘Maybe two or three days by plane,’ he estimated.

  He would soon piece this information together to form some sort of conclusion, and when he did, I’d told Gina, I didn’t see the point in lying.

  Not that I resented the man. We’d never met and in my better moments I even felt grateful to him for creating Lucas and the family I’d inherited. I’d never formally adopted the kid, though; Gina said it was complicated and unnecessary and she was probably right. But still, sometimes I worried what would happen if he returned, if he’d changed back to the man he apparently used to be and if he wanted his family again.

  Lucas unwrapped his gift with careful movements.

  ‘It’s okay, just rip it open,’ Gina said, but he continued to tear unbearably slowly.

  I could see how every strange thing he did brought her closer to the possibility that the wrong parts of the boy’s father had made it into him.

  ‘Oh wow.’ He’d torn the last of the paper away but he still didn’t know what the gift was. A T-shirt of some sort, he rolled it out to see. It was too big.

  ‘I love it,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s on it?’ Gina knelt beside him and spread the picture out.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  It was a topless tough guy with cropped hair and white tape around his fists.

  ‘Is it a boxer?’ She did not try to hide her disapproval.

/>   ‘Let’s look him up.’ I did a search on my phone. ‘Triple H. He’s a wrestler.’

  ‘Well that’s fine, then,’ Gina said.

  ‘He’s a world-champion wrestler,’ I said.

  He put the T-shirt on. It looked like a dress.

  ‘It is just a little big for you,’ Gina said.

  ‘But that’s how they wear them these days,’ I added.

  Lucas looked down at himself, patting the print against his stomach. We rolled up the sleeves and he flexed his biceps for us and gritted his teeth like the man on the shirt.

  ‘Take a picture of me now, doing this for my dad?’

  So Gina texted a photo, but I don’t know if his father ever replied.

  The morning the cops came to our door, work on my first contract came to a halt. By lunchtime, I’d managed to get about as far as opening a spreadsheet.

  My office was at the front of the house. I had positioned my L-shaped desk in one corner so my computer screen sat against a large window draped by two thick curtains. This arrangement kept the room dim, which I liked, and believed to be more conducive to work than bright or expansive views.

  Seated at the desk, I could see about half of the frontyard, including the driveway, but there wasn’t much to see until the cops re-emerged with their dogs and loaded them into the van.

  I stood up at this point. Could they be done already? I took myself off to the kitchen and put a pot of coffee on the stove to appear occupied. I positioned myself against the corner cupboards, between the stove and the sink, a spot where I could view the backyard without being seen.

  The cops had not finished. Instead they had started with shovels in an area beside the garden shed. They did only a light bit of digging before pausing to snap photos of their work, then they swapped the shovels for trowels and began to clear the soil with more delicate movements. It was going to take all day at this rate, and seeing this I considered heading back to my desk—until I saw a cop fall to his knees and begin to pull at the soil. They’d found something. They took more photos, then, with something like a pair of tongs, they lifted the object—it was fabric, or a torn piece of paper. I watched as they dropped it into a plastic bag. It was fabric, I was sure. I’d never seen it before. How long had it been there?

  I pulled my coffee from the stove before it could make any noise, then I went back to my desk and Googled How long fabric takes to decompose. The results were inconclusive.

  Gina got out of bed about an hour later. She came up behind me in her robe and wrapped her arms around my shoulders as I worked.

  ‘How much noise do they have to make?’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry. At least the dogs have gone now.’

  ‘But still, the coming and going, the voices. They must be almost finished.’

  ‘I don’t know. They found something.’

  ‘What?’ She straightened and I swivelled my chair to face her.

  ‘They’ve been digging out there for ages. I saw a piece of fabric.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘So far.’

  ‘It could be anything.’

  I hadn’t eaten lunch so we set to making sandwiches in the dim kitchen. Gina parked herself in a chair by the window and snuck the blind up a fraction.

  ‘It could be a body,’ she said.

  ‘It’s hardly even a hole in the ground.’

  ‘But the size of it, don’t you reckon?’

  I had taken my spot beside the stove again. I did think it could be a body, but that still seemed unlikely and, I wasn’t sure how it would affect Gina, or myself, to be honest, so I didn’t admit it.

  We watched the cops sift dirt through a sieve. They were building a mound beside the hole, which was now a few centimetres deep. I went back to constructing sandwiches.

  ‘That guy has sleep apnoea though,’ Gina said.

  ‘Which?’ I looked back out.

  ‘The one I met, who came to the door. The short one by the fence.’

  ‘Victor?’

  He stood with his arms crossed. I couldn’t make out what he was saying but he appeared to be frustrated.

  ‘Look at the size of his neck. He can’t even do his top button.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Red face—I bet high blood pressure. Plus the gut, obviously.’

  ‘I never get those guts that float in the shirt like that,’ I said. ‘It’s weird, how they can do that.’

  ‘I bet he’s a bitch of a boss.’

  ‘He seemed fine with us this morning. He’s just doing his job.’

  ‘Should I tell him?

  ‘Your diagnosis?’ I made a face but I didn’t say no in case that made her do it.

  I finished by toasting the bread in the pan the way she liked and then I joined her at the table.

  ‘You don’t look that flash yourself,’ I said.

  ‘I managed maybe three hours. I was having stupid dreams.’

  ‘I should have asked them to keep it down.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s a priority. Anyway, it’s not just the noise. It’s as much knowing they’re there, and what they’re doing.’

  ‘I had one this morning too. A weird dream.’

  I’d forgotten about it until then.

  ‘Mine was this guy looking over the back fence,’ Gina said. ‘He was big, like big shoulders.’

  ‘Like bulky, a weight-lifter?’ I said.

  ‘He made me think of one of those guys who chops wood.’ She mimed an axe.

  ‘A wood chopper?’

  ‘No, not the competition ones, the ones who do it for real.’

  The description stirred a memory from my own dream.

  ‘A lumberjack?’

  ‘He was standing behind the fence and looking over into our yard so I could only see him from the shoulders up. Standing there, completely still—and he was barking. Like his head back and woof woof woof.’

  ‘That’s weird,’ I said.

  ‘It was really creepy. What was yours?’

  ‘I can’t exactly remember. Something with a tennis ball. You going to finish that?’

  ‘You have it,’ Gina said.

  I took the last corner of her sandwich; she always left the last bite of her food. We sat by the window until it seemed nothing new was going to happen.

  ‘Well, I’d better shower,’ she said. ‘Want to join me?’

  ‘I don’t know. It seems too weird with them out there.’

  She pressed her hand over mine.

  ‘I hope they go soon. It feels awful thinking something might have happened here.’

  ‘I know. Me too,’ I said. But already part of me was caught up in the search, and I wasn’t sure I wanted them to go.

  By the time Gina was ready to leave for work the sun was low in the sky and the cops were still going at it outside. Lucas was in bed but not asleep. I sat with him as Gina went around the house collecting the things she would need that night and shovi
ng them into her handbag. When she was ready she came in to kiss us goodbye and he added a surprise into her bag, which Gina pretended not to see—a neat little scene that gave no indication of the hour of drama that had preceded all this.

  I’d made the kid’s dinner, coerced him into eating what amounted to no more than a few mouthfuls, then we’d renegotiated to get at least a cheese stick and some yoghurt into him. Gina did not approve of using the games on my phone as a bargaining tool, but he was going through a stage where he did not like to eat anything—the games were the only thing I had in my favour.

  Once she left, Lucas settled into his pillows. He pulled a coil of green paper from under his sheet, a practice run for the surprise he’d given Gina, a concertinaed snake that was supposed to spring up from her bag when she reached in for her lunch. We had been making these at bedtime all week.

  ‘What will we read tonight?’ I asked him, although lately it was always the Frog and Toad book, which he knew by heart.

  ‘The one about the dream,’ he said. ‘Are you your own right size?’

  I picked the book from his shelf and began, but he interrupted.

  ‘Did any of those dogs find objects?’

  He’d been disappointed to come home from school and find the police dogs gone.

  ‘I think so. I think they found a few things.’

  ‘Those dogs are my friends.’

  ‘I know. Do you want this story?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I read a bit. Toad woke up and found Frog standing by his bed.

  ‘Are you your own right size,’ we read together. ‘Yes, I think so, said Frog.’

  He interrupted. ‘But Ma?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Please check on me three times tonight?’

  ‘I always check on you.’

  ‘Yes, but three times?’