by Kim Lock
She tugged her hand away. ‘Far from it, I’m afraid.’
‘You’re wrong,’ he said, and he leaned in to her. The couch whispered as his weight shifted, his hand curling over her hip. Reaching her mouth he waited for her, an invitation in his pause, and she found herself drawn to him, moving those last few beats to kiss him.
When he broke away he whispered, his lips millimetres from hers, ‘We are going to be great for each other.’
She believed him.
ii
When he asked her the first time, he phrased it so casually that what escaped her lips was almost the truth.
‘What happened with your mum?’
His head rested on her belly; he was looking up at her in the dim light. They’d drawn the curtains against the late summer sun. Sheets clammy with sweat were tangled around her legs and his breath tickled the underside of her bare breasts.
The past two months were like a blur; Jenna felt consumed with a kind of fever, an almost out-of-body experience. Ark Rudolph had sauntered into her life and she couldn’t recall the breadth and meander of her days before him – like that irrevocable change he’d shyly implied at the pub a handful of weeks ago. She felt as though she was reeling, blissfully off-kilter, ecstasy-drugged and invincible.
‘She lied to me.’ The words snuck out before Jenna was aware of them. The ceiling fan hummed, stirring the temperate afternoon like liquid candy and keeping the flames of the candles he’d arranged across the top of his dresser in a lazy flicker.
‘What did she say?’
‘It’s hard to explain,’ Jenna said. ‘Just . . . she’s the most selfish fucking person on the planet.’
He remained silent as he gazed at her, drawing circles in the hollow of her elbow with a fingertip.
She took a breath. ‘Have you ever taken something for granted, known it so completely and without question, only to find out that it’s all . . .’ She struggled for the right word. ‘Fake?’ Her gaze settled on the grey-white stripes of the bedsheet. ‘I look back and it all looks like a sheet of rice paper. Transparent, brittle.’
‘What did you take for granted?’
‘Everything,’ she said. ‘Every single day.’
He didn’t say anything at first, his fingers moving to stroke the length of her forearms. ‘I know what it feels like to be hurt by someone you trust, if that’s what you mean.’
Jenna laced her fingers into his hair. ‘Something like that.’
‘Must be hard though. From what you’ve told me, you used to be pretty close.’
‘We were.’
‘Have you tried talking to her?’
Jenna listened to the rhythm of the fan, the gentle draw of Ark’s breath, the peaceful quiet of his house. They could be the only two people in the world.
What more could she tell him? What could she give him, this enigma of a man who heated her flesh like flames and somehow cupped her heart – what could she offer that would be enough? The whole story swelled inside her, pressed out from her bones. She wanted to tell him that, at first, she’d simply been too angry and bewildered to speak of it, desperate to make sense of it herself before she could speak to others, before she could find the strength to look her mother in the eye again. But with the pass of the weeks, and as Ark heated her from the outside, she found her mother’s revelations growing cold within her. She hadn’t intended for her initial silence to morph into complete severance – it had just happened. Could she tell him that she only wanted to hide, with him, and not to think?
Ark lifted to his elbows. ‘Move in with me.’
There. He’d said it. Wasn’t that what she wanted?
‘Why?’ she asked him, smiling.
‘I want you,’ he said, lips brushing her breast, ‘because you’re you.’
‘And what’s so good about me?’
Ark rose onto his knees, slid his hands beneath her hips and drew her underneath him, covering her body with his weight. He kissed her, and her own breath came back to her sweet and hot from the hollow of his neck. And as his skin burned the length of her, he rolled her over and pulled her astride him.
‘I can’t bear to be apart from you,’ he said. He gave a low groan as she slipped over him.
He dug his fingers into the aching muscles of her thighs and she knotted her hands over his, as though to anchor herself as the earth dissolved. She decided then that it didn’t matter, it really didn’t matter what either of them said.
Dear Jenna,
I need to backtrack now. I have begun this letter maybe a dozen times only to delete it moments later. But this part is important. I’m sorry. So, here goes.
It was merely one day, in the scheme of things. The space of a few hours, really. But that was all it took to turn something that I fooled myself into thinking was harmless, beautiful and transient, into a series of events that wrenched apart so many lives, I wonder if I’ll ever forgive myself.
I was with him. In the afternoon light of his house – the time of day most easily snatched for us both. The weight and smell of him – so familiar and yet somehow foreign, exciting. You probably wish me to omit such detail, but I need to convey how happy I felt, how thrilled and alive and real I felt with the press of him. Is that so hard to understand?
He asked me when Stephen was returning home, and when I answered, ‘Tonight,’ he sighed and rolled onto his back.
‘Do you ever think of telling him?’ he asked.
In the beginning, I had assured myself that I didn’t intend for it to last, this thing with him. Whatever others might call it, the word ‘affair’ never rang true. An affair is a seedy, insidious act and its constituents lie and hide. I never thought of myself as doing those things. I look back now and see the heavy rose tint of the glasses I wore. How very naive! But I truly hadn’t meant for it to last; I hadn’t meant to maintain anything underhanded. It was just fun. It was just affection. It was just two people living moments of shared pleasure. In a world sorely lacking in love (and I reported as such to the community, every afternoon) I told myself that the expression of a little more could come to no harm, right?
What had begun as an innocent coffee together after a brief interview had turned into several balmy spring afternoons. Sometimes at my house, but later, more often, at his little place, a stone’s throw from the main corner. These afternoons were snatched under the guise of a late lunch break, before I’d return to work smooth-cheeked and poised, while my insides swam giddy. He had come into my life seamlessly. The first afternoon I had invited him home seemed so natural; as expected and sure as the sunrise.
So as we lay there, his question about telling Stephen dissolving harmlessly into the afternoon, what could I do but simply stare back at him, take in the beautiful contours of his face, the rich darkness of his skin, the lines of his collarbones.
How long had it been now? A year? More? It couldn’t be; it felt like weeks. But I knew the rough and soft of his body like my own. I knew he could never completely finish a tub of ice-cream – he always wanted to leave a little in the freezer, just in case. I knew that his mother had died young from lung cancer when he was only twelve and he had been returned to Adelaide to spend six restless years with his father. I knew that at eighteen he joined the police force and, as soon as he could, he moved back to Mount Gambier, his home, where his mother was buried.
He asked if I was bored with Stephen. Bored: he actually used the word. It irritated me and I drew away from him – he’d crossed a line. But if I’m honest with myself, I think the reason his flippant comment irked me was because it was rooted in some truth. Maybe I was bored. Never could I have the courage to face nor admit that, though, for isn’t that the most shallow and callous thing?
I argued that I cared for Stephen deeply. That I loved him. But then I grinned at him, and told him that I loved him, too.
He laughed an
d kissed me and said, ‘I’m going to make you choose, one day.’
‘Liar,’ I said. ‘You’d be too scared I’d pick him.’
‘You can’t have it both ways,’ he said. ‘Not forever.’
Why not? I wanted to know when monogamy become the rule. What ensued was a lengthy philosophical rant about love and affection and the narrow-mindedness of religion and how the sexual revolution would, ultimately, lead to a better world.
He told me to get out of my parent’s Kombi.
‘This has got nothing to do with Stephen,’ I told him. ‘This is about you and me.’
He pulled me close as he said, ‘It can’t be about only you and me – it doesn’t work that way, Evvie. He’ll always be in the middle.’
I told him that he was wrong.
But he was right.
Until next time.
Love, Mum
5
NOW
Her underwear spools up on itself, her skin sticky from the shower. Walking spread-legged across her bedroom floor, Fairlie plucks at seams that ride up and feels a wave of misery roll down from the top.
The mirror’s reflection regards her coolly, a familiar stranger. She puts her hands over her belly, cupping the soft bulge of herself, digging her fingers into the skin as she leans forwards and lets the weight of her flesh fall into her hands. The heft of it. Leaning forwards she has four breasts, two within and two spilling from the top of her bra. Calves curving like overgrown marrows. Tears glistening on plump cheeks.
One year in early primary school a new playground had been installed on the edge of the oval. Ecstatic children had swarmed over monkey bars, a swing set with four swings, a tunnel slide that curved like a snail shell. And set off to one side, firmly dug into the mounds of pine chips, was a seesaw. Long and painted red, like a giant pop stick. Derek Shannehan, a boy who killed flies with his ruler and kept their tiny, papery corpses in his pencil case, asked Fairlie to play on the seesaw. Having already given up on the monkey bars, flabbergasted at how the other kids were able to propel themselves along hanging by fingers, and fearing the tunnel slide with visions of corks in bottlenecks, Fairlie had agreed eagerly. She mounted one side and Derek the other and she kicked off, again and again, but Derek couldn’t reach the ground. He began to laugh, swinging his legs, then three other boys had popped from the bottom of the tunnel slide like a SWAT team – one after the other, pop, pop, pop – and grabbed at Derek’s legs, dragging him back to earth. As Fairlie had shot into the air the boys had leapt away and Fairlie had crashed, her teeth clacking and the sharpness of blood on her tongue. Jenna had chased Derek with handfuls of pine chips, hurling them at the back of his head and calling him a stupid wussy boy.
Staring into the mirror, Fairlie swipes a hand beneath her nose and sniffs, hard. A glance at the clock reminds her that her mother will be here any minute. Pulling open the wardrobe, she yanks the simple black dress from its hanger and steps into it quickly; her mum will zip it up for her.
*
Fewer people are here today for Jenna than at her wedding.
Sunlight falls from a blue-white sky in columns through the trees, burnishing the lawn and the headstones. The breeze tugs at Fairlie’s curls, dragging the desiccated scent of summer from across the country.
Fairlie squints behind her sunglasses; a strand of hair alights upon her lip and she bites at it. The air is hot, filled with the ghosts of the bodies turning to bones beneath her feet.
Six days have passed since Jenna died. Let’s get this over with, Ark said. Now, Jenna’s body is lowered into the earth where she too will disappear into the dirt. Fairlie is struck at the knees by the waste.
She has tried to acknowledge everyone, tried to offer smiles, but what’s the point? Although she told herself it shouldn’t matter, earlier in the chapel she couldn’t help but take a head count. Twelve. There are only twelve to mourn Jenna. For the first time in her life Fairlie wishes that she and Jenna had siblings. Perhaps then, there would be more people here, more living bodies pulsing with blood and murmuring, ‘What a loss,’ and crying tears onto the grass. More people to remind Jenna what she’d left behind.
Beneath a spray of white lilies and roses, Jenna lies in a slick mahogany coffin – its glossy polish seems like an obscene contradiction. Across the other side of Jenna’s coffin, a green-faced, dressed-in-black Ark sways on his feet. His gaze seems singularly focused on his shoelaces and he gives off an air of both wretchedness and stupefied terror. Between the celebrant and Ark is Ark’s mother. The woman seems small and faded, but she appears to have a shield around herself, hard lines around her mouth, elbows locked at her sides. Fairlie has only encountered Ark’s mother twice before, and now she tries to recall her name. Margarita? Margarita Rudolph? Hidden slightly behind Ark’s mother is his younger sister, a diminutive girl who looks to be in her teens. A wisp of a thing with bright orange hair raked back, a black slip dress and bowed legs. Next to her towering older brother, it’s hard to imagine they’re related. But they share the same eyes – clear, wide-set and so softly blue beneath prominent brows and that pale, pale skin. The girl clutches her mother’s arm with both hands.
The rest of the meagre crowd have their faces lowered, hands clasped decorously. Self-effacing sniffs. A colleague – a nurse from the hospital – dabs at her eyes with a crumpled tissue. A little way from the nurse, Abbey Manfried alternates between sobbing and silence. Damon couldn’t make it – he had to take his mother to the doctor.
Detective Dallas Morgan is here; he catches Fairlie’s eye and gives her a nod, reflective sunglasses glinting. At her side, her fingers twitch in a wave. The detective wears middle-age competently, effortless in neatly pressed clothing and comfortably occupying his space.
Fairlie’s mother and father flank her. Growing up with white parents, in a white community, Fairlie never felt black. As a young child she thought she had been painted – that she was a white girl dipped in brown ink. Her parents’ friends called her cute and fuzzy and patted her head and talked about the problems with Aborigines: drinking and stealing and welfare-bludging. That wasn’t her: she wasn’t one of them. But she didn’t feel white either.
‘Okay there, love?’ her mother murmurs. The celebrant’s voice drones in the background.
‘They’re going to bury her,’ Fairlie whispers. ‘No. I’m not okay.’
After ten miscarriages, Fairlie’s mother had stopped counting. Some months the blood arrived on time, other months it would come late – three, four, even five weeks belated. Long enough to have known, long enough to have hoped and for plans to begin to unfurl like flower buds. Pattie Winter was tall, trim and squarish with long bones and broad hips: a robust, strong woman. Medicine could not explain the frailty of her womb.
John Winter, her father, stood over six foot yet his pants were always belted and scrunched at the waistband and his arms were wiry. So while her parents flank her, tall and white like football goal posts, Fairlie hunches between them, short, black and rotund. Oddly out of place yet with the ordinary familiarity of child and parent.
Pattie murmurs something about the weather. Her father’s reply is inaudible.
Chubby for as long as she can remember, Fairlie recalls the first time she was referred to as fat. In her late teens, at a sink-hole that doubled as a popular local swimming spot. The water was blue-black and bottomless. Rutted, ancient limestone cliffs eroded away in one section to the water’s edge, where brownish reeds sprouted from submerged earth and rock. Atop one of the lower sections of cliff, Fairlie had stared down at the shimmering water with a dry mouth. Where the sun bolted straight down the water looked green, shifting and sentient, impossibly far away. It hadn’t looked this high from down there. A shout had come up from below: ‘Take cover! Fat boong incoming!’ A smattering of adolescent male laughter; Jenna had taken her hand and whooped and they’d leapt together, hitting the water with
a smack and roar of white-water in her ears.
Fairlie brings a knuckle to her teeth and bites down hard.
The occasional mutter has filtered through to her: ‘Poor Ark’, ‘He looks utterly awful’ and ‘Is he going to be sick?’
He’s afraid, Fairlie wants to shout. Mortality is terrifying – don’t we all feel it? Don’t we feel the terror creeping into our pores? The horror of being alone?
She realises that she is hoping to see Evelyn. Anger surges within her at the poignant absence of Jenna’s mother. Surely, whatever had happened couldn’t be so bad that she would not come to say her final goodbye? Looking up, Fairlie thinks of Jenna’s father. Throughout her childhood she had only seen Stephen Walker a handful of times in person – on Jenna’s weekend or school holiday visits – but she knows him well, from a lifetime of Jenna’s stories. Genuine smile, a voice assured and intelligent but Jenna always recalled it was never raised, no matter how angry he was. Where is he?
Henry is not here. Fairlie thinks of Jenna’s child, back at that big house. Who is looking after him? Who is feeding him crackers and wiping his chin and whispering to him that, despite all this, his mother loves him so dearly?
And then, it’s over. Clods of dirt are heaped into the black hole in the earth that gapes like a grotesque mouth. Fairlie is overcome with an impulse to leap forwards, screaming, to clamber into that hole and cleave open the coffin and lift Jenna out, shake her, breathe her back into life and call her stupid and inconsiderate and tell her that she loves her like nothing else and that she’s sorry, so very sorry, and she can’t breathe right now, she can’t even breathe. Doesn’t Jenna realise that?
But she doesn’t. She walks forwards, grasps a handful of damp dirt and drops it into the hole. She hears it scatter and tick across the top of the wooden box, a hollow sound, like the scurry of beetles.
Someone hugs her. Abbey squeezes her shoulders, says she’ll meet her at the café. Damon is on his way. Her parents murmur, ‘See you there.’