Hold

by Kirsten Tranter

  I went inside to find the fridge still full of food that had gone uneaten the night before: triangles of cheese, containers of olives, a salad that had wilted under plastic wrap. I stared at the shelves for a while and pulled out a near-empty bottle of sancerre. Shutting the door, I thought about the women on their way out to the bar. Champagne would be good. Bright, harsh bubbles. The sofa seemed like something to celebrate. The phone rang and my first thought was of Kieran, and I wondered whether he might have left something behind.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s Tess.’

  ‘Tess, hi.’ What could he have possibly left behind, I reminded myself. He hadn’t brought anything except his phone and he’d taken that with him.

  ‘Don’t sound so shattered! Are you waiting for a call from your man in Melbourne?’

  ‘I’m sorry — no, I mean, yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘You haven’t forgotten our date, have you? I was just calling to make sure you have the address.’

  I had forgotten, and now I remembered, and how pleased David had seemed to be that I wasn’t going to spend the whole weekend alone.

  ‘No. I just — I was working.’

  ‘On a Saturday afternoon like this? Bloody freelance life. Wait, you aren’t freelance any more, are you? Why are you working on a Saturday? Oh — is it that cookbook? Will you let me see it?’

  ‘It’s not the cookbook,’ I told her. I listened as Tess talked, and murmured an appropriate sound in response every now and again, pouring wine into a glass with my free hand.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, winding down. ‘See you there at seven-thirty. Be ready to drink. I have to write three to four hundred words about this bar and there are at least five cocktails I want to try.’

  ‘I can’t promise to drink more than two.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’ll help.’

  We said goodbye. I finished my wine, wondering whether there would be any food at this place. Pre-dinner drinks with Tess often wound up taking over the evening so that dinner never happened.

  *

  Earlier that day the door to the room had kept swinging closed when I had tried to leave it open for the delivery. When I went to the closet now it was open, and I stepped through. It felt again like it was waiting for me, almost as if I wanted to greet it, like a new friend. Hello there, I wanted to say. It should have felt empty with just the one piece of furniture, but it felt something close to being finished. The sofa seemed complete, as though it had required the right setting to really show the beauty I had begun to see in the shop. It looked lovely in the dim light. The room would require a few more things, but they seemed like extras, finishing touches. With the sofa I felt as though the room would provide whatever it was I wanted from it. ‘Hello,’ I said, with just the room to hear me, and I touched the back of the sofa, smooth and firm.

  I liked it the way it was. The chandelier, the sofa, the shelves and the black painted mantel — there was a certain harmony to it that seemed almost as if it would be spoiled by adding anything else. But maybe that was just the effect of the newness of the sofa in the space, I thought, walking around it. Once I started using it I would need more things. A lamp, for reading. A table, for resting a drink. I should have thought about buying the table in the shop, the one Kieran had been moving when I had first seen the sofa. Maybe it was still for sale. I wondered whether the shop would still be open; many of the shops on the street stayed open late on Saturdays. It wasn’t exactly on the way to the bar where I was meeting Tess, which was just off Oxford Street, but it wasn’t all that far.

  The sofa showed an indent where I had sat earlier, a slight depression in the cushion. I smoothed it down with my fingers. Before the call from Tess, before I’d remembered our plans, I hadn’t really thought about what to do with the evening; keep working on the book design, perhaps, and watch another movie. Now I didn’t want to go out. I wanted to stay in the room, to lie on the sofa with a book or a computer on my lap.

  I hesitated, watching myself prepare to fall in love with the space, to make a place for myself there. I had had a room of my own once before, in my last house, a room I wasn’t in love with exactly; more like a place I was in grief with. Back when I was still painting, back when I stopped painting, around the time when two years had passed since Conrad’s death, the time when it all started to disintegrate. When I had started to disintegrate. This wasn’t the same, I told myself.

  The first year had been awful in its own way: I had gone travelling with Tess, not wanting to be in Sydney on the anniversary. She got the occasional job writing for the Travel section of the paper and we wound up in a resort for two nights in rural South Australia, a cattle station that was trying to survive hard economic times by offering a version of luxury eco-tourism: enormous airconditioned classy canvas tents on a sizzling hot plain that felt like the middle of nowhere. The silence at night had been terrifyingly deep, the sky huge and radiant with stars. We were far away from any body of water, and it seemed as though I could feel the dry land stretching out for empty miles around us. We rode horses around the station the first day we arrived and spent the rest of the time aching and sore and not sure the horse ride had really been worth it. On the actual date we drank a bottle of good brandy which I was sure Tess ended up paying for herself.

  Conrad’s brother, Nick, and his old friends were all in Sydney, drinking in Bondi at the Icebergs bar. Nick had wanted me to go with them but I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t face them all, knowing they were all saying to each other how well I was holding up, how I was being so strong, half of them pitying me, half of them suspicious that I might start moving on. I’d never been close to Conrad’s friends anyway, although I had liked Nick. He dropped over to Rozelle every once in a while, never calling beforehand, always bringing wine or food, something inadequate for a meal but nice all the same, a fancy piece of cheese or a loaf of olive bread from the expensive French bakery down the road. When I said no to the Icebergs he was disappointed but we made plans to do something together, the following weekend. He was moving to Melbourne the week after and part of me was glad, relieved at the idea that he wouldn’t turn up unannounced any more, bringing all those memories with him whether I was ready for them or not.

  But somehow having run away from Sydney, from the beach, from the city, made it feel all the more present and real. There was no way to not think about it. Tess was wary around me as if I were a dog prone to biting, until we had both had several brandies. Then she insisted we spend an hour talking about Conrad, a whole hour, after which we would change the subject. She wound up doing most of the talking, which was fine with me, while I went through the DVD collection, half listening. Yes, that time he did karaoke and wasn’t wearing his contacts and couldn’t read any of the lyrics and Tess finished the song for him. I remembered. It was a Joan Jett song. His terrible cooking, the legendarily bad omelets. His skills at poker.

  I couldn’t share with her the things I remembered, the things that haunted me and broke me down every time they arrived in my head. The way he would never sit still long enough for me to finish drawing him, but loved looking at the half-finished drawings anyway, complaining that his nose didn’t look like that, or his hair, always vain in an unembarrassed way. The shape of his body, relaxed in the armchair in his living room at Bronte, the picture window behind him full of water and sky; the way he called me over to him with just a lift of his chin, his hand reaching for me once I was close enough. The neat, assured way he fitted the coffee maker together every morning at his house and leaned on the counter while he waited for it to start burbling and shaking on the stove; the way it never felt like there was enough time in those mornings before I had to leave for work, and I scalded my tongue on the hot coffee and kissed him goodbye with a burnt mouth. I told Tess things that didn’t mean so much. How he couldn’t tie a tie without help. His pathetically ancient sneakers that literally fell apart as we were walking to the beach one day, so he carried them to the nearest garbage bin and
walked back home in bare feet. The routine Friday complaints about his boss at the courier company he worked for, the way he had been planning to leave and get a new job ever since I had known him. Comedy. The safe parts. We wound up watching a bad French film filled with incomprehensible extended family dynamics and no one dying.

  The second year I stayed in Sydney. I was still in the Rozelle house, but I was on my own. Ruby hadn’t moved in yet, and my original housemate, a pharmacy student, had moved out before Christmas. It had been months since anyone had congratulated me for holding up so well, thank God; I was expected to be well past the debilitating phase of grief, and I had passed into a kind of numbness that most people seemed to mistake for acceptance. Once the end of January rolled around I couldn’t stop thinking about the approaching date, the fifth of March. I had a different day job then, freelance design and illustration work for a magazine, and they didn’t seem to notice when I started answering emails late or not at all, forgetting to respond to offers of work, not answering the phone. I had been seeing David for a while, close to half a year, and he was away for several weeks on a vacation with Janie, the promised American trip intended to compensate her for the divorce. Ballet at the Lincoln Center.

  Once a week I would walk up the road to the little supermarket, and by the middle of February that was the only time I left the house. I knew that things weren’t right when I ran out of paint one day, Parisian Blue, and had a hard time facing the trip to the art store, just a few blocks down from the supermarket. I made it eventually, and returned carrying enough supplies to last me for months. It was such a relief, coming home that afternoon, closing the door to the outside. My energy was all focused on the studio, a room at the back of the house with big, wide, cheap aluminium windows. The room was a recent addition to the cottage, and I liked the way it felt so provisional, barely attached to the main structure. The little world in there felt bright, in a way that obliterated everything else.

  I painted the water and the beach. I knew it was obsessive, but that had never seemed a bad quality in an artist. For years I had wished for something to be obsessed with. I had it now, and occasionally I would grimace at the irony of it. If irony was the right word for this state of getting what I had wished for by losing what I most cared for. It seemed paradoxical, but the painting relieved the pain and drove away the difficult thoughts — almost all thought. In a slightly different form, this kind of absorption could have been interpreted as meditative immersion in art. If I reflected on it at all, I told myself a story like that, although I knew it was simply an anaesthetic, and that the cursory gaze I cast over the finished canvases was far from critical. Few of them were finished before I started painting another. When I was painting the water I thought only about painting it, not the sheer cold force of it on skin and scalp, the indifferent salty slap of the waves, the burning in the lungs. On the canvas it was just a flat piece of colour. I made it and unmade it.

  My hands were always covered in paint, and once a day I cleaned them, scrubbing at the skin with a turpentine rag until my fingers were raw. There was always a slice of sharp, stinging pain when the turpentine hit a piece of broken skin, a torn nail I couldn’t stop worrying. It felt almost like a release for a moment, until it became a menacing door, an opening onto other feelings that loomed over me like a wave, ready to crash. That was when I turned on the tap and let the clear water run over my hands, turning everything back to a simple, tingling cold.

  I had a calendar, and every day I made a deal with myself that I would look at it only once. Any more frequently would be unreasonable: it was not going to change, I wasn’t going to forget the date. By the end of the day I would have stopped counting, would have given up after five or six or seven times checking it. The day when it came was like the days that preceded it, minus the calendar check. I skipped that without even thinking about it, and painted through the light of a bright, hot morning and sultry afternoon. Tess came to the house two days later, worried when I hadn’t answered her calls. I hadn’t seen her for weeks. She cradled my face for a moment in her hand after she kissed me hello, and my cheek felt strangely thin under her touch. ‘You are wasting away!’ she told me, laughing about it. She tried to hide her concern with all her usual busy talk. She straightened the sheets on my bed and washed a few dishes. ‘Come shopping with me,’ she said. She needed a dress for some fancy event. I told her no, I was in the middle of painting, I didn’t want to break my concentration. She tried to persuade me for a while, then gave up and came back over later that evening with pizza and a bottle of wine. I protested but she didn’t let me make any excuses, and watched me eat and drink.

  ‘What’s happening with David?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. ‘He’s only just got back, I think. I don’t know.’ My phone showed five unanswered calls from him over the past week. At that point I felt indifferent about whether or not he would call again.

  Tess just nodded. When David knocked at the door the next afternoon I knew that she had spoken to him, although I never asked him. I didn’t feel the indifference I had expected when I opened the door and saw him standing there. The sun was behind him, and it flooded the hallway, warm on my bare feet, and I felt myself smile like it was the easiest thing in the world. He hesitated only for a second before stepping forward to embrace me, and I had forgotten the strength of it, how his arms wrapped fully around my ribs as though he was preparing to hoist me up. He strode through the house, not looking too closely at my untidy bedroom and the messy kitchen where the pizza box sat open full of crumbs on the table. He stopped when he reached the studio and didn’t go in, just looked around at the canvases. After a few seconds he turned around and faced me. ‘You need to get out of here,’ he said.

  I had a short burst of anger. ‘You don’t know what I need,’ I said. It didn’t seem to make any impact. He didn’t want to fight. My anger faded, replaced with a quiet, treacherous sense of being glad that he had come to take me away, a willingness to hand myself over.

  ‘It’s obvious, Shelley,’ he said. ‘Come on then. Do you want to change? Are you ready to go?’

  We drove to the markets nearby — it was a Saturday, the sky glary and overcast — and wandered around the stalls close to closing time, eating bacon and egg rolls and drinking strong coffee while David bought vegetables and fruit and chatted with the man at the goat’s cheese stall as the market packed up around us. His hand rested on my shoulder, his arm around me as we walked, and I leaned into him. He took me back to his Glebe flat and made things for me: tea, sliced mango, salad and cheese for supper, as he called it. His suitcase was open at the end of the bed, still half full of clothes.

  ‘Did you just get back?’ I asked, wondering whether he had been calling me from New York and San Francisco this whole past week.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Just terrible at unpacking.’

  He took my clothes off carefully. I almost expected him to fold them for me but he let them lie on the floor. By the time he made it to my underwear I was impatient and pulled them off myself, and took hold of him. His body was familiar and at the same time strange after those weeks on my own, not talking to anyone much, not touching or being touched by anyone, and I found that I loved the weight and pressure of it, the feeling of breath crushed from my lungs. His carefulness gave way and he entered me quickly, meeting my eyes with a question, and I said, ‘Yes,’ before he could ask anything.

  ‘I’m glad you came over,’ I told him afterwards.

  ‘I’m glad you’re okay,’ he said. I laughed. I hadn’t laughed for a long time and it felt good, even though I wasn’t sure what I was laughing at. So many things seemed wrong and absurd about what he had said: surely I was not exactly okay; surely he was to some extent glad to be rescuing me, although that was unfair of me and I knew it.

  I told myself that I would have snapped out of it without him, made it out of the house, started looking after myself again. I wasn’t really sure. I hadn’t been waiting for him, that I
was certain about. I had been waiting for whatever it was to run its course, for the obsession to fade. I would have run out of money, eventually. I would have had to have gone back to work to pay the rent soon enough. It was too easy to imagine having stayed like that for months. ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

  ‘I like worrying about you,’ he said. He must have sensed the way I stiffened at that. He propped himself up on his elbow, resting his head in one hand. ‘You know what I mean,’ he said. ‘I mean, I care about you.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  I took my pills out of my bag and took one when it was time, and put the bottle in the medicine cabinet, label facing out.

  Four

  The sky through the window was just starting to lose its brightness. It wouldn’t be dark for another hour or more. I crossed over and tried again to open the window, but it was still stuck. I should have asked Kieran to try it, I thought, and then felt embarrassed at the idea of demonstrating my own inability and weakness. David would be back on Monday and I could ask him. Then I remembered what he had said about the door and the screwdriver and pulled back from the idea. In so many ways David was like a stereotype of an old-fashioned academic, divorced from any knowledge of how things worked in practical terms in the world. Or like a wealthy person, actually, used to being able to call on other people to repair or install things. His response would be to call a glazier if the window didn’t respond to a simple push. In his old apartment, one of the first times I had stayed the night, a fuse had blown when I tried to toast a piece of bread for breakfast. He had returned from fixing it with a look of having performed an action far beneath his dignity, and washed his hands for a long time at the kitchen sink. It had been my fault, in a way: putting the kettle on and the toaster at the same time as the espresso machine was warming up.