Like I Can Love

by Kim Lock

  The traffic light bip-bips and Fairlie is rooted to the kerb. Her gaze is trained on the concrete strip of kerbing where Jenna had tripped when they were walking home to the flat one night, cutting her chin like a kid falling off her bike. Squatting, Fairlie touches her fingertips to the gritty surface and imagines she can feel Jenna’s warm blood there.

  Everywhere. Jenna is everywhere and she is nowhere.

  Fairlie goes left. Passing the coffee shop with the welded tin chooks out the front, where Jenna had always ordered a one-sugar latte, Fairlie holds the door open for Mrs Hurst from the quilting supplies shop, struggling out with a box of takeaway coffees.

  Mrs Hurst thanks her. ‘I’m sorry to hear about Jenna,’ she says, clucking her tongue. ‘How are her husband and little boy doing?’

  ‘I don’t know, to be honest,’ Fairlie admits.

  ‘I ran into Marg,’ Mrs Hurst says. ‘She mentioned she’d given you some time off.’

  Marg Dunbower, Fairlie’s nursing unit manager, has left several messages on Fairlie’s voicemail. We’re here for you. Come back whenever you’re ready. Fairlie has pondered the word ‘ready’. It means something proactive, something that puts you in control. How can she ever be ready?

  ‘They miss you at the hospital,’ the older woman is saying.

  Fairlie’s vision wavers. Although Jenna quit before Henry was born, she’s scared work will now remind her of Jenna. On the ward, or in the tea room, or in the halls, Fairlie will feel the ghost of her friend behind her, vaporous fingers counting the knuckles of her spine. Because it was Jenna who wanted to leave the larger Mount Gambier Hospital for somewhere quieter. It was Jenna who had found them jobs at the Penola War Memorial Hospital, and rented their little flat two blocks away. The flat where Fairlie now lives, alone.

  Mrs Hurst says, ‘You’ll look after yourself, won’t you?’

  Fairlie stares at her. How can Fairlie look after herself if she couldn’t look after her best friend? Who is Fairlie without Jenna? Jenna was the heritage, the history, that Fairlie has never known for herself. And now she’s gone and Fairlie is back to a rootless, unknown nobody, snipped at the cord, untethered.

  The woman squeezes Fairlie’s elbow in farewell and hastens into the air-conditioning of her store two doors down, disappearing behind the colourful bolts of fabric clustered in the windows.

  Without looking at the road, Fairlie steps off the kerb. Tyres chirp to her right but Fairlie doesn’t notice.

  Lace curtains pattern the glass of the lolly shop’s windows, ‘Sweet Treats’ painted in simple curling script on the door. The rich, syrupy scent of cocoa butter and powdered sugar greets Fairlie as she steps inside. Racks of glossy foiled packets line the walls, free-standing shelves piled with chocolate bars stand on dark timber floors in the middle of the room.

  From behind the counter, the owner’s daughter looks up to greet her. A silver ring glints in her nose; there is a new stud in one side of her bottom lip.

  ‘Another warm one,’ the late-teen says.

  Fairlie nods, back-handing sweat from her brow in answer. As she stands in front of a row of chocolate-coated liquorice, she can see the girl watching her from the corner of her eye. Deliberating. Desperate for information. After a moment, the girl thumbs something in to her phone. A hasty SOS to a friend, perhaps: OMG dead chick’s friend here. What do I say?

  Fairlie loads her arms and dawdles to the register, reluctant to leave the sweet, cool hush inside the store.

  ‘It’s Dottie, isn’t it?’ Fairlie asks, pushing white-chocolate-coated raspberry bullets and macadamia toffee across the bench.

  The sales girl nods and grins, showing a row of small white teeth like buttons. ‘You’re Fairlie, that nurse from the hospital.’

  ‘The one and only.’

  ‘You probably don’t remember,’ the girl went on, ‘but you bandaged up my foot a couple of months ago. I cut it on some tin in the backyard. Had to have a tetanus shot and everything.’

  It is Fairlie’s turn to smile. ‘I do remember,’ she tells the girl. ‘Obviously you came to an agreement with your mother.’ Fairlie thrusts out her lower lip and gestures to it with her hand.

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ Dottie touches a fingertip to the piercing. ‘Took her long enough but she let me in the end. But this –’ she sweeps her arm around the store and indicates her own presence in it ‘– is part of it.’ She punches numbers into the register with one hand as she flicks through Fairlie’s bounty with the other. ‘I promised her forty hours in exchange.’

  ‘Good deal.’

  The girl hesitates. ‘You knew that lady, didn’t you?’ Pink rises in her cheeks. ‘Jenna Rudolph?’

  ‘I did,’ Fairlie answers. ‘We were friends. Very good friends.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, diffidently. ‘It’s real sad. Kinda hits home, doesn’t it, like we don’t always know people, do we?’

  Fairlie stares at her. ‘No,’ she says finally. ‘We don’t.’ Fairlie hands her a twenty. ‘Keep the change,’ she says. ‘Save up for your next piercing.’

  ii

  The knock at the door startles Fairlie and she bolts upright, pausing The Walking Dead. Yodel leaps from her chest and skitters across the floor, shooting her a glare of indignation before sidling away.

  The light coming through the windows is muted violet, and birdsong has been usurped by the evening cricket chorus. As she pulls open the door, the energetic chirp of a cricket bellows up at her from the flowerbox by the front wall. Fairlie shoves the screen door and it bangs back against the wall, startling the cricket into silence.

  There’s no one there, but a rich tomato-wine scent wafts up from a red enamel casserole pot on the doorstep.

  ‘Oh, Mrs S,’ she says. ‘You’ve outdone yourself.’

  Cradling the warm coq au vin she shuffles to the kitchen. Yodel leaps to mewl plaintively at the pot as she sets the food atop the counter.

  Fairlie brushes away strands of cat hair and sets out a single bowl, a solitary spoon. The items sit there on the benchtop, sad and pathetic. Stark evidence of a single woman living alone with a cat. Looking through the room she sees the dimness of twilight covering only her own things – a tumble of meaningless knick-knacks, the lone cutlery in the sink, the nothingness of being alone. A prickling tingle rushes up her limbs and her heart starts to bang beneath her ribs. For a moment she is overcome with a ferocious, pure terror. From somewhere far away, below the rushing in her ears, she hears a rational voice: This is a panic attack. Breathe. It will pass.

  So she breathes for her life. In, out. Hold. In, out. It’s all she can do. And when, after a while, the rushing of her blood slows and her fingers ache from gripping the countertop, she lets a few tears slide down her cheeks before she dashes them angrily away.

  Fairlie snatches up the casserole dish and presses the weight of it into her chest. She steps outside into the still evening and takes in fat gulps of warm air, almost tasting the tomatoes in the casserole prepared with thought and care. You’re not alone, she tells herself firmly. Her footsteps seem loud as she crosses the courtyard under a darkening sky, from the paddock across the street comes the mournful bleat of a sheep. Familiar sounds, the ordinariness of every day. She tries to draw some comfort from it as her finger trembles on the doorbell above the tarnished bronze numeral 2.

  ‘Ah, Fairlie,’ says a woman’s voice as the door is opened, the sprightly tone belying her age. ‘I’ve been wondering when you’d surface.’

  ‘Someone left me this lovely, huge meal.’ Fairlie’s words come in a rush and she forces a smile. ‘I can’t eat it all myself. It’s a shame to eat alone. Fancy a bowlful?’

  The octogenarian moves aside. ‘I had a gnat for dinner, that’s all I can manage these days. But for God’s sake, come in. You look like a dog’s breakfast.’

  Crossing the dimpled plastic mat in the doorway, Fai
rlie steps into Mrs Soblieski’s living room and her feet sink into thick brown shagpile carpet. Across the room, where shagpile meets faux-timber linoleum, the scent of more cooking floats from the avocado-coloured kitchen and Fairlie wonders if she will ever need to cook for herself again. The kitchen counter is swallowed beneath bunches of wilting-topped carrots, piles of potatoes like mounds of builder’s rubble and what looks like an entire side of lamb alongside a leaning tower of clean plastic containers. Mrs Soblieski runs an unofficial one-woman charity, nourishing all the locals incapable of cooking for themselves. Fairlie’s limbs still tingle, and she clutches the pot tighter to her chest.

  This week, Mrs Soblieski’s hair is an energetic shock of fuchsia-pink curls. ‘What a goddamn shame,’ her neighbour says, digging in the front pocket of a sagging hibiscus-print apron. The old woman withdraws a crumpled packet of cigarettes and offers it out – as always – giving her usual shrug as Fairlie courteously declines.

  Mrs Soblieski scuffs across the floor and pushes open the back screen door. Fairlie knows better than to try to help as Mrs S bends awkwardly to prop the door open with an upturned terracotta pot. In the kitchen, Fairlie searches for a place to set down the casserole dish. Beef stock bubbles on the stove, shining thick knuckles of white bone the size of her fist.

  In the doorway, Mrs Soblieski draws deeply on her cigarette, blowing the smoke out into the night. After a while she asks, ‘You surprised?’

  Fairlie glances at her, pulling a bowl from the shelf. ‘I – of course I am.’ She slops mashed potatoes into the bowl. ‘I can’t believe it. Why,’ she pauses, ‘aren’t you?’

  Mrs Soblieski exhales softly. ‘I couldn’t say. I’ve rarely seen her past couple of years. The odd hello in the car park and that. But even that got rarer and rarer.’

  Dark red sauce drips from the ladle as Fairlie lifts it in a wordless question; Mrs Soblieski shakes her head, her pink curls bouncing.

  ‘Course I understand why she disappeared,’ Mrs S goes on mildly. ‘She stopped coming over not long after she moved out.’ The old woman crushes her cigarette into a sand-filled pail and the screen door closes with a bang. ‘People change. She changed when she met that wine-making man.’

  Fairlie feels instantly defensive. ‘She was pretty busy. Work, renovations, the baby and all that.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Mrs Soblieski shuffles past her and disappears into the pantry, before reappearing with a dark glass bottle. ‘Guess the husband took up a lot of her time, too.’

  With the back of a spoon Fairlie smacks a well into the centre of her mashed potato. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘She was so happy.’

  ‘Obviously not.’

  It thumps into her chest like percussion. ‘Obviously.’

  Mrs Soblieski pours three generous fingers of brandy into two crystal tumblers. ‘You’re angry at her,’ she says, handing one glass over.

  ‘Of course I’m angry,’ Fairlie replies, dumping chicken over the mash. Sauce splatters onto the counter. ‘How could she do this? Leave everyone? Abandon Henry?’ Fairlie blinks back hot tears; she wouldn’t want them to fall into the coq au vin and taint the lush sauce with her lousy grief. ‘It’s so selfish. Why didn’t she say something?’

  ‘Don’t let yourself feel guilty.’ Mrs S sips her brandy. ‘He was poison to her from the word go.’

  Fairlie picks up her drink and gazes into the amber liquid. ‘At the start, she was happy,’ she says. ‘Ark this, Ark that. His love and his generosity. His big house in the vines.’ She waves one arm as though painting a huge canvas in broad sweeps. ‘But then . . .’

  ‘Things changed,’ Mrs S says, matter-of-factly.

  ‘I know they argued sometimes, and she would beat herself up for it. Said she had “unrealistic expectations”. That she’d been damaged by her mum. And then one day . . .’

  ‘How many times did she leave him?’ Mrs S asks, gently.

  ‘Twice,’ Fairlie whispers. ‘That I know of.’

  Mrs Soblieski moves to a well-worn armchair and sinks down with a laboured sigh. ‘You’re blaming yourself. With grief, that’s as normal as cow dung in a cow paddock. But you shouldn’t. Nothing you could have done.’

  Fairlie props her palms on the counter. ‘Maybe I couldn’t see things were so bad after she’d talked up all the hearts and flowers for so long.’

  ‘You didn’t like him.’

  Fairlie doesn’t answer.

  ‘You didn’t think much of him.’

  ‘At the start, she was deliriously happy.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then . . .’ Air whooshes from Fairlie’s nose. ‘I don’t know, exactly. They fought. She faded away.’

  ‘So why are you blaming yourself, and not him? Or her, for that matter?’

  Fairlie pauses, chewing the inside of her cheek. ‘She loved him. I took her on her word. He was that great guy you always hear great things about – his name in the papers, his successful business, people always drawn to him. But I couldn’t help but think . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That the distance that came between Jenna and I was caused by him. Somehow.’ She digs her fork into the ­casserole. ‘I was jealous. That’s really it. I have abandonment issues, don’t I?’

  The older woman looks at her with furrowed brows.

  Fairlie grabs the brandy bottle. ‘Or maybe I was bitter? Clearly I was blind.’ She lifts the glass again, downs it in one hit and coughs.

  ‘You drifted apart. That makes being vigilant a little difficult.’

  ‘I should have told her to make up with her mum. God knows, she must have wanted to. It was years they hadn’t spoken, in the end,’ Fairlie says, reproachfully. ‘Idiots, both of them. I should have told Jenna to pick up the phone and put an end to the stupid stand-off.’ Her voice goes quiet and she adds, ‘I saw Evelyn a few times. Maybe I should have said something to her, told her to call Jenna.’

  Fairlie tries to recall how long it has been since she spoke to Evelyn Francis – weeks? Months? Fairlie had run into Jenna’s mother briefly over the years: at the supermarket in Mount Gambier, a glimpse of her face in the car on the street, and once or twice passing her in the driveway or through the front door of her parents’ house.

  ‘Stop torturing yourself,’ Mrs Soblieski says.

  Fairlie stares at her bowl of casserole. Her mouth is watering and she's not sure if it’s from hunger or the brandy. ‘But then Jenna had Henry, and she seemed . . . well, life went on.’

  Fairlie tucks the bottle of brandy under her arm, collects her bowl and sits into the second armchair. Its cushions are firm, less used. She sets the brandy on a small glass-topped table between them, and the older woman refills her glass as Fairlie shovels in a few mouthfuls of chicken and mash. It’s delicious; she wants to cry.

  A moment of silence passes before Mrs Soblieski says, ‘It can be a hard thing to admit – that you were wrong about someone.’

  Fairlie wonders who she’s talking about. Jenna and Ark? Jenna and her mum? Or her and Jenna?

  ‘Try not to blame yourself.’ Mrs S swills the brandy in her glass. ‘And don’t worry, the fury hurts now – believe me, I know – but it eases with time. Try to accept that you might never know.’

  Fairlie picks up her glass and tosses down the rest of her drink, welcoming the flame of it in her throat.

  *

  Hours later, out in the courtyard, the black sky drapes above her, strewn with diamante stars. Spreading her feet, Fairlie tips back her head, her jaw loose, a plastic tub filled with chocolate cake clasped under her elbow.

  ‘Jenna, you dickhead,’ she whispers at the stars swirling above. ‘I’m sorry.’ She doesn’t know why she’s sorry but she is – she’s so very goddamn sorry.

  Her face falls and the world tips. To re-balance herself she stretches out her hand before she staggers across the cou
rtyard. Setting the chocolate cake on her doorstep, she fumbles for her keys before remembering she’d fled her flat carrying only the casserole dish – the door is unlocked.

  As she swings the door wide, the far-off sound of raucous male laughter mingles with the twang of country music from the pub on the main street. Stumbling backwards, Fairlie lets the door swing closed. She wheels around on unsteady feet, her vision blurred at the edges, and blinks furiously to clear it up as she sets off. It’s only a short walk to the pub. The pub will have more brandy.

  The Heyward’s Royal Oak Hotel is brightly lit, yellow light pools onto the street through arched windows. Four men stand on the kerb outside, red dots of cigarettes glow and bounce in their shadowed faces. As she approaches, their voices grow quiet.

  ‘Evening,’ she calls, holding up a hand as she passes and heads for the bottle shop. ‘Nice night for it?’ She’s never understood that saying. Nice night for what, exactly? Because it isn’t, Fairlie, it isn’t a nice night. It’s a very shitty, shitty night and tomorrow you’re going to feel even worse.

  ‘Fairlie?’ someone says. ‘Fairlie Winter?’

  Mid-stride, she stops and spins around. ‘The one and only. Who’s asking?’

  One of the men comes forwards, stepping into the light. He walks with a bit of a swagger and is smiling widely, fine blond hair pulled into a low ponytail.

  Fairlie thinks he might be the hottest bloke she has seen in a decade.

  ‘It’s me, Brian,’ he says with a grin. ‘Brian Masters. Remember? We were in Mr Overoy’s homegroup together in year ten, I think it was?’

  ‘Little Bri-Bri!’ she crows, rocking on the balls of her feet. ‘From Mr Ovaries! How the hell are you?’ Then she slaps a hand across her mouth. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbles from beneath her palm, ‘not so little anymore.’

  Brian laughs. ‘What are you up to?’

  ‘Brandy,’ she fills him in. ‘I need more brandy, Bri-Bri Masters.’

  His face goes serious. ‘I heard about Jenna. I’m sorry. You guys were still friends, right?’ His mates have fallen into an amused silence and watch him, nudging one another, from behind his shoulder. When Fairlie bites her lip, he apologises again, and offers to buy her a drink at the bar. Deciding that she can always buy more brandy afterwards, Fairlie praises Brian for his clever idea.