‘You’re not in your togs, George,’ Deidre says.
Valmai presses her tongue against her top molar. She moves it with a sawing motion.
‘Valmai,’ says Sandra. ‘Valmai, I don’t know if I mentioned …’
The giddiness again. Valmai plants her feet on the carpet, shoulder-width apart. She remembers playing Stuck in the Mud with George and Peter. Standing just like this in the sand. George crawling through her legs. Her spreading them so he could fit through. His broad shoulders knocking her over. Peter jumping on both of them.
‘I don’t think so,’ Valmai says. ‘Whatever it is that you think you may have mentioned. I don’t think you have. I don’t think you’ve mentioned that you are George’s patient. That he seems to have a … I don’t know, some kind of a joint disorder harem going on.’ Her malicious tone astounds her.
‘Oh gee, kiddo,’ George sighs. Deidre incy-wincys her fingers up his sleeve.
Valmai’s husband has strong forearms. The hairs on his arms are bleached. He has arched piano-playing fingers. Valmai wants him to hold her.
‘George has started Aqua Zumba,’ Sandra says, as though this is something to be proud of. Her voice has gone up an eager notch. ‘The bus takes them down to the baths. A crew of them go. George, Deidre. The salt water. It’s restorative. And we find … well, we find they’re calmer at night.’
Valmai has seen the Zumba ads on television. She pictures her husband and this oversized floozy gyrating together in the baths, performing some sort of geriatric salt water salsa with their pool noodles. She suddenly recalls the photo in the Seaside Sanctuary brochure. ‘George and Deidre,’ Valmai says.
‘No, no. About six all up, aren’t there, Deidre?’
Deidre shrugs and puts her hand on George’s spare hand. She’s wearing a wedding ring. It’s so tight it burrows into her skin. He drops his pen and rests his other hand over her painted nails. Her fingernails match her toenails. Pink. She has quite nice feet, Valmai thinks. Deidre moves her elbow back and forth as though she’s pulling on a bell, encouraging George to get up. ‘Upsy daisy,’ she says.
‘I think I’ll be heading off home,’ Valmai says. Home. What does that word even mean? She pats down her skirt. Opens then closes the clasp on her bag. Pumps her fingers the way they make you do before you give blood.
‘Valmai, if you’d like to come with me to the office …’ Sandra says.
‘No, no,’ she says. She is trembling. Trembling like a purple-skinned kid sitting poolside in winter. ‘I think Dr Bunt said it’s nothing really. Those were his words.’
George spins around to face his wife. He crinkles up his eyes. Deidre moves her arms with his so she doesn’t have to let him go. ‘Okay, kiddo,’ he says. ‘Catch you.’ He salutes her and then he puts his hand back on Deidre’s.
• • •
Rob stares out at the sprawling bitou bush, the gnarly banksias warped from years of battering winds. The ocean blasts through buried caves, sending up its salty spray and, out wide, a lone wave breaks. A juddering sound comes from behind Rob’s car and he glances in his rear-view mirror. He watches a ute loaded up with fish crates rattle over the corrugations. When it pulls up, Rob nods at the driver. The bloke is dressed in traditional fisherman’s garb – flanno shirt over a navy wife-beater singlet. There’s a cute blond kid sitting next to him. From this vantage, Rob can normally make out the ragged stencil of cliffs and bays all the way south to the city, but today a haze of smoke cloaks the land. The fisherman gets out of his truck and starts to yell into his mobile. Rob glances at the kid, who cringes and then jumps out of the ute. He clambers up onto the tray-back, squeezing his legs between the fish crates and checking the wet hessian sacks that cover them.
‘We’re stuffed then, aren’t we,’ the man says. ‘Traffic’s banked back for miles on the interchange. What do ya want me to do, then? Dump it? May as well stand here and lob fifty-buck notes into the ocean.’
The fisherman leans against the back of his ute and looks up at the boy. ‘Hey Oscar, don’t worry, mate. Road’s blocked. Looks like we’ll have to chuck it all back in the drink.’
Rob checks his watch. If he goes home and Miranda’s moping, he’s going to head straight out again. Get away for a bit. Maybe he’ll hire one of those smut-scrawled Wicked Campers. Settle into some seventies music and head north. Smoke a joint. Ha. Who’s he kidding? He’ll go inside and make Miranda a tea. He’ll shovel down some stir-fry in front of the telly and then he’ll wrestle around on the floorboards with Bess until the dog tires of the game and gives him a warning nip on the nose. Miranda will watch a late-night movie so she doesn’t have to go through the miserable ordeal of fending off his advances, and he’ll head off to bed and nod off with his headphones on. In the morning, he’ll be jolted out of his dream by the magpie and, bleary-eyed, he’ll wander outside and piss on the lemon tree. After his morning walk, he’ll jerk off in the shower with his mind on Bella. He’ll do it all again.
Rob reverses hard over the pebbled verge and once he’s out on the road, he leans in to the steering wheel and hugs the curved bitumen until he reaches the car park above the goblet-shaped bay. Feeling reckless, he drives too fast up to the edge and slams on the handbrake with a jolt. There she is below him. Lovely-day-Valmai. Lovely fucking day. He gets out of the car and stumbles down the grassy slope. There’s a row of kids squealing and rocking over the uncharacteristic easterly swell. Millie’s lead is looped around the leg of the table and when the dog sees him it starts to yap and yanks on its lead till it’s just about choking itself. Valmai doesn’t even try to shut the thing up.
He’s almost on her now. She’s sitting perfectly still as though she’s meditating. She’s got her bottle of plonk on the table.
‘Valmai!’ he yells. ‘Valmai!’
He’s lost it. Gone mad. Mad as a cut snake.
She turns around and he takes in her face. Her skin is blotchy. Rutted like sand after a hail storm. Pale streaks course down the length of her cheeks and her eyes are bloodshot. He goes to speak and then he pauses. He has no idea what he’s doing. Valmai opens her mouth, fills herself up with air and then turns back towards the ocean.
‘My husband …’ she says and then stops.
So, she’s married. He’s never seen her with a man. He thought she was a widow. He’s probably coddled up in their duplex waiting for his dinner.
‘Yeah, tell me about it,’ he says. ‘Some days … some days I don’t know who my wife is anymore.’
Valmai turns back towards him and shakes her head. Then she makes a low groaning sound. It’s a sound he hears almost every working week but it stuns him coming from her. It’s the sound a person makes when their pain outruns their pride. She drops her face into her scrunched-up fists as if she’s begging.
Rob thinks he should leave. Leave the poor woman alone. He turns to walk back up the track to his car. Then he stops. He clears his throat as a sort of warning signal and then he awkwardly slides along the bench seat. He rests his hand on Valmai’s back. The sky spreads gaudily across the sea and he moves his palm along the hard knots of her spine.
Valmai doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t move at all. Against the waves, the kids hold their boards up like shields. They cleave through the water. Paddle clear of the breakers. Out past the slanting light.
An Almost Happy Ending
Harrison felt pressure. In his house. In his job. In his neck. The dun-coloured townhouse, the one he now lived in with his wife, Brook, and their son, Ethan, had been a mistake. Her mistake. He’d never wanted to live in the city, but he would have done anything for her. They’d been at the beach; Brook burrowed in the warp of his body while he formed himself around her like scaffolding. She’d been lying with her arms in the air, two fragile limbs, like tent poles, supporting the property guide.
‘Oh, it’s darling,’ she’d said.
Harrison had worked his head from side to side, feeling the pinch, moving his line of vision from the picture of the to
wnhouse to his son trawling toy trucks through a winding road he’d made from flotsam. The boy stared at his hands and then brought them to his face.
‘I think Eth’s eating sand,’ Harrison said, a diversion he knew would have no effect on Brook.
‘A pond, Harrison. Bonsais on the steps.’
‘God, now he’s rubbing it in his eyes.’ Harrison tried to get up but the weight of Brook’s head pinned him down. The afternoon sun had made him lethargic. ‘Ethan, Pa’s dog ended up half-blind from sand.’
‘Filigree. Victorian. I could write,’ Brook said. Their son was now heading towards a stormwater drain that was dribbling God-knows-what into a natural watercourse. The tract of water was separated from the ocean at low tide, strands of algae streaming across the surface like entrails. Harrison had carried Ethan across it earlier, wading through the tepid shallows, taking in the arc of detritus ahead of him with a low sigh. Now his boy was about to wallow in it.
‘Son, dysentery isn’t on our list of things to collect at the beach today.’
Brook shifted her head. It made his bladder hurt. ‘He’s three, Harrison.’
‘Butts, sludge, poo, Ethan. It all goes in there. How’s that, honey? Have a paddle in the ocean. Down in the sea.’ He was shouting it out now. There was no-one else on the beach, but he doubted it would’ve made a difference. He’d turned into one of those parents too tired to wander down and negotiate. The sort he’d scoffed at only years earlier. ‘Jesus, Brook. Can you see what he’s doing?’
‘A typewriter. At a market. Ethan, sweetheart.’
She’d spoken in sound-bites even then, but it was only recently it had come to frustrate the hell out of him. Words out of nowhere, illogical to anyone but her. She no doubt had the whole sentence in her head, but he was only privy to part of it. She was like a nautilus shell, her thoughts spiralling in iridescent chambers, hidden from view. She’d told him he was losing his hearing, but he’d had it checked. His mind perhaps, but his hearing was perfect.
• • •
The townhouse purchase had happened through a series of inspections and deceptions and arguments. Harrison had tried to steer Brook towards the back lane that reeked of urine, but she’d smiled, dumbstruck, at the real-estate agent’s practised gesticulations. She was not the flirting type, but in the presence of the agent, her voice had risen a couple of octaves and she’d run her fingers through her shaggy bob more frequently. She didn’t raise her eyebrows when told the property had potential off-street parking. He watched her swoon over the weeping fig that the agent suggested would benefit from some fairy lights. ‘Huge roots,’ Harrison said. ‘Roots and pipes. Roots and foundations,’ he continued, while the agent and Brook looked at him with sympathy yet detachment, as they might respond to a wino.
The shower in the kitchen was quaint. The huge gaps in the stucco, authentic. The outdoor toilet, charming. On their third inspection, Ethan tottered up the staircase and got a splinter in his foot. The agent and Brook were now on a first-name basis. His name was Ahmed. Each time Brook fingered her hair, Harrison wiped his fist over his brow and paced across the unpolished floorboards picturing toast crumbs settling into the grooves.
‘Hear that, Brook?’ he said, raising his eyebrows and nodding towards the stairs. ‘Up and down Eth’ll go. Every bloody morning. Doohm, doohm, doohm.’
‘This place has something,’ she said, oblivious. She had a glazed, Stepford Wife look in her eyes, but she wasn’t looking at him; she was smiling at the agent. ‘The history, Ahmed.’
Ahmed placed a copy of the contract in her upturned palms, flicking past the heritage-overlay section. ‘I know, Brook. I know,’ Ahmed said.
• • •
That was three years ago. They were still paying interest-only, wading in a leaky boat as the steady current of gentrification lapped around them and dragged them slowly under. Ethan started school. The weeping fig destabilised the neighbours’ paving, costing them thousands. Harrison caught the bus to his job as a chartered accountant and Brook went back to complete the degree she’d previously abandoned. ‘This is my time now,’ she told Harrison, fresh from an induction, full of enthusiasm and French pastries. She felt as if she was on the cusp of something. Something momentous. She made notes from books and paused often, looking at a spot in the distance. She started to put Ethan on the school bus to make more time in her day. She changed her enrolment from communication studies to arts, then distance education. She bought a kaftan.
Sometimes, when Harrison and Ethan were chatting at the dinner table, she would hold up her splayed fingers as a sign of silence, close her eyes, and then say, ‘It’s gone. That thought has gone, and it’s not coming back. Wasted.’ Harrison would suggest she finish dinner and go back to it later and she would suggest that her role in the evening was over. She would position her knife and fork due north and leave her half-eaten meal, the voluminous material of her outfit trailing behind her as she thumped up the staircase. ‘Doohm, doohm, doohm,’ Harrison would say, staring at his plate.
Later, he’d sit on the front step of his house behind the cast-iron gate, gazing into their miniature fish pond while a lone Gosanke did aimless laps.
• • •
Harrison had felt, for most of his adult life, that things were preordained. A series of alignments. But now he wasn’t so sure. He no longer got the satisfaction he once had from a job that was so certain it had its own cliché. When he started out, things were different. A lot of it was manual. Rows of numbers on a clean, lined page, supplementary paperwork. He liked the finality of stapling the evidence together and filing it in his cabinet. He’d progressed rapidly. Now he had his own office, sometimes even a column or two in the monthly financial newsletter.
July each year delivered a flurry of people wanting their annual bonus from the tax man. There was a joke about that. He’d cut it out of a magazine. Taxaphoria: the momentary feeling of elation you get from a refund before remembering it was your money in the first place. He had that hanging on his door. Most people assumed accountants didn’t have a sense of humour.
Sometimes they came in as a couple, and over the years he was able to witness the steady disintegration of many relationships. It always came out in the spreadsheet. A secret bank account here. An unknown bonus there. Now that all the government departments were linked, it was impossible to hide anything. It was there in black and white on the computer, attached to their tax file number. That’s how he kept track of Brook’s mounting study debt. He had his own little profit-and-loss sheet just for that. Loss: nine thousand in fees, textbooks and transport. Profit: three hundred dollars she’d won from a writing contest. She’d called it a step on the stairway to success. He’d called it half a power bill.
At times Harrison was reluctant to enquire about the figures he had on the screen. He’d ask if there was anything that the client had perhaps forgotten. The husband would shift his gaze to the ceiling fan. The wife would flick through her paperwork one more time, saying she didn’t think so. Now he kept a box of tissues on his desk next to the paperweight and pen holder, as if he worked in a funeral parlour.
Death and taxes. Since starting in the job, Harrison had taken comfort in an inevitable conclusion. Things had changed. Every now and then he would alter the figures. Perform a readjustment. Just to witness, for a few moments, the thrill of an improbable outcome.
• • •
The lack of social contact Brook experienced as a self-imposed distance learner was mediated by her involvement in a writers’ group. Each week a different member was responsible for accommodating the event, which involved critical analysis, close readings and tasting platters. On the nights Brook hosted, it encompassed frenzied cushion-plumping and Harrison’s treasured bottles of Côtes Du Rhône Les Cranilles. It also impinged on his day. Brook had him photocopy the readings in his office to save a trip to the university. He would print them (double-sided, pre-holed, stapled) taking in random sentences as the pages flipped into collating
trays: ‘A real writer should outsource superfluous tasks that don’t translate to words on the page.’ She’s perfected that one, he thought. ‘Deconstruction, aesthetic response, paradoxical, metafictional.’ He logged off his copier code. ‘Tossers,’ he said.
To start with, Harrison was, he thought, a perfect host. He offered wine. He drank quite a bit himself. He set up the DVD player in Ethan’s bedroom and let him watch movies, propped up in bed with a mug of Milo. He listened from the kitchen as the group discussed their work, and put on the coffee percolator fifteen minutes before the scheduled finishing time. He eavesdropped on discussions about endings and beginnings, first- and third-person, revision and the search for truth.
Each week it was someone’s turn to be verbally thrashed. Harrison paid particular attention to the evenings his wife presented the stories she’d been working on for months. There was always one guest who’d wait for a pause in the conversation, then speak about Brook as though she wasn’t there: ‘The writer has not convinced me with the dialogue. To me, it is a trifle affected.’ Then it was on. A husband-and-wife team once spent half an hour debating Brook’s colon usage with the tenacity and precision of laparoscopic surgeons. She’d nodded and made frantic notes in her margin, then thanked them for crucifying her. Harrison copped it later. Moodiness. Rewrites. New beginnings. Unrealised endings. Brook had a problem with endings. Her office was covered in half-finished projects, crumpled pieces of brown paper abandoned like cicada shells; the smooth surface of her writer’s desk burdened by moments of fragility and emptiness.
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