She smiled in sufferance. ‘You didn’t mean for me to hear.’
Maggie put her hand on Laini’s shoulder in a gesture of reparation.
‘I just thought I’d grab some ice for his foot,’ Laini said. ‘And look, to be honest, I don’t mind. I’m glad you care, Martin. I’m glad you have an opinion.’
‘It was different in my day, like Maggie said, that’s all. I was lucky if my mother asked how my day was; I was lucky if—’
‘Ah, here we go,’ Maggie cut in, ‘the poor neglected child in the Mosman mansion . . . Let me get out the violin.’
‘Well, I never played a violin, I can tell you that for certain.’
‘There you have it,’ Laini said. ‘And you could have been a concert violinist, for all you know.’
Martin mulled that over before speaking again. ‘So is that what this is about? To find out if he is good at anything?’
Laini closed her eyes, and when she opened them the humour had drained from her face. ‘For Christ’s sake, Martin, he enjoys it. I just want him to know what is out there. I just . . .’ There was a quiver in her voice. ‘I just . . .’ Ethan knew that quiver; the tears began to well.
Maggie shot daggers at Martin as she herded him out along with the melting ice cream.
Ethan put his arms around his wife. ‘Come on, babe . . .’
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Am I one of those crazy mothers? I don’t want to be that woman.’
‘You’re not that woman. You’re not crazy.’
‘I always said when he went to school, I’d start something then, but God, it’s been two years . . .’
‘What about your blog?’
She shook her head. ‘You’re working so much. I don’t have any headspace.’
What they had also planned on by the time Finn was at school was another baby, but this wasn’t the time to remind her again. He filled her wine glass. ‘You’ve got a lot on your plate. We’ll work it out, hon. You can go back to uni.’
After high school she had started a vet science degree then transferred into communications for a year before dropping out altogether to travel through South America. When Ethan met her she was thinking of starting a business importing Aztec healing clay. She was twenty-two. He was twenty-eight and had just been made a senior associate.
On her face now was a vacant look, like she was a world away. ‘Sometimes I get these thoughts, Ethan. And I think . . . Is it us? Is there something wrong with us?’
He held her face in his hands. ‘It isn’t us. It isn’t you. You are a great mother. I love you. Fuck Marty.’
Their eyes were locked. ‘I want another baby, I do, and I know you do, but first I’ve got to work out what I’m doing with my life. I need you to be okay with that.’
‘Sure, I am. I’m right behind you.’
Then she smiled. ‘I love your dad,’ she said. ‘But yeah, fuck him.’ And after a gulp of wine: ‘Let’s eat.’
Chapter 3
Laini put her salad down in the centre of the table, a large round dish of chickpeas and roasted tomatoes on a bed of rocket and mung beans. She scooped a spoonful onto everyone’s plate before filling her own, leaving no room for meat, wheat or dairy. Maggie admired her for her discipline, but had no interest in the theories behind it—blanket bans on food groups were to Maggie a form of sacrilege. For the rest of them it was a Hungarian Sunday lunch, one of Maggie’s mother’s best—chicken paprikash and spicy garlic sausages with bell peppers and fried potatoes.
Maggie asked Finn about school and he told her that a boy in his spelling group got sent out of class for telling the teacher she had fat ankles and not saying sorry.
‘Is the hall finished yet?’ Ethan asked.
Finn shook his head.
‘The builders haven’t been there all week,’ Laini said, rolling her eyes as Ethan began his rant against the faceless bureaucrats, but offering up no argument against it.
Maggie smiled at the boy. ‘Well, it’ll be wonderful when it’s done, darling.’
‘We’re going to have a special celebration assembly,’ Finn said.
‘Speaking of celebrations,’ Martin chimed in, ‘we’re up for one right now. It is our anniversary. Maggie’s made cake!’
Finn clapped and Ethan tapped his glass with his fork.
‘Finnegan, I bet you can’t guess how many years ago Nana and Grandie met.’
‘Eighty?’
Maggie laughed. ‘So how old would that make me now?’
‘Tell us the story about the toast and honey,’ Finn said.
Martin leant in over his plate towards Finn, and over Maggie’s plea that he didn’t, he did: ‘In the olden days, at least a century ago, in a faraway land, there was a young man who was minding his own business while cleaning his kitchen sink when there was a bang on the door, a loud bang. He opened it, expecting the sound to have come from a giant fist, but instead he saw a pretty girl who told him she was hungry and demanded to be fed . . .’
‘I did no such thing.’
‘And in she came and ate the last of the poor young man’s bread.’
‘I had four bits of toast.’
‘The last of his bread and his honey, which he was happy to share because though pretty, very pretty, the girl was a bit pale and had spent all her money.’
There were jokes then—‘Hungry from Hungary’—and boasts from Finn that he himself could eat eight pieces of toast and a whole jar of honey. ‘You should see how much maple syrup I can put on my pancakes.’ But when the boy finished his lunch and left the table for his computer games, so went any fond reminiscing around the story of Martin and Maggie. As had become the family custom, it had been presented in its best light. The day they met: Martin was living in New York, Maggie was travelling. It began with a visit to the Japanese pigeon lady and ended with a sleepover in a garden that grew out of a rubbish heap. Ethan and Laini knew better than to probe into what happened next, into the logistics of long distance and the birth of Ethan. It wasn’t until now that Finn was old enough to ask that they told this story about toast and honey. Like so much of adult life, the truth was no story for children’s ears. It had been packed up and put away, the simpler version wheeled out this same day every year.
Only this year, it was not just today; it was yesterday and it was last week. In a feat of blinkered nostalgia, Martin was cheerfully retelling the story as though in his mind he had managed to extract it from what came after. Even this morning: ‘I knew it then,’ he had said. ‘I knew you were for me.’
The garden between the tenement buildings that used to be the rubbish heap—yes, they had marvelled at that place, but he hadn’t known then. Given what came after, it didn’t make sense. And yet this morning she had watched him sip his tea, and she had listened to him savour a memory, a memory or a re-creation; either way, she could see no point in correcting him. She understood the lure of the lie, the reason to craft a story out of a larger, less manageable truth. And hearing it again over lunch, she asked herself the question: What did it matter now? After all this time, what did any of it matter?
‘Maybe it’s time he went to a private school,’ Ethan was saying.
‘Why, because the school hall isn’t finished?’
‘No, Laini, not because of the hall, because he would have an art teacher and a science lab and a swimming pool.’
Maggie put a hand up to stop him.
‘I’m fine, Maggie, really,’ Laini said. And to Ethan: ‘Just give me until high school . . . Then you can feed him to the dragons.’
‘Three years they’ve had that money. You’ve got to admit, they are fucking hopeless. That headmistress is a complete idiot.’
With that it began again, the grumbling: the waste of public money sector by sector, the bloodless knifing of a sitting prime minister and the despicable vote-grab from all sides as the election loomed—and with the grumbling, the same dinner-table tendencies Maggie had observed—at the Johnstons’ on Friday and last S
unday at their friend Annie’s. People were quicker to empty their glasses, she’d noticed, when listening in disagreement, as a method of self-soothing, or in preparation to do battle. And when the disagreement was most vehement, the more exaggerated the nodding became—clearly not in response to what was being said, but to the argument formulating inside the combatant’s own head. Perhaps that, she mused, was the reason for the drink: they were toasting themselves in anticipation of a point well made.
‘Leading the world?!’ Ethan shouted across the table at his wife. ‘You think China’s going to give a damn what we do with our emissions? We are pissing in the wind, end of story.’
Laini began her retort with the first of a series of dot points, each prefaced with a number. All in all there were six, through which Martin nodded and emptied his glass. And Maggie listened, shuddered, not at the criticisms that were being made—politicians were manipulating the uncertainty, no question—but at the way the convictions, once voiced, were held like property, hoarded and protected. What was it they said? The older I get, the less I know. Though once a participant, more and more she felt the only role she could manage these days was that of observer, her perspective anthropological more than anything else. Why bang on and on with all the reasons you were right and someone else was wrong? Why count the ways? Surely there was a time to give it up, to shut up and plant some trees . . . and to stop your family from ruining another lovely lunch.
‘How about some good news?’ she said. ‘Dad and I are going to Morocco.’
‘You just got back from . . . where were you again?’
Copenhagen. They had been in Copenhagen for a judicial conference in April. ‘We’re not going until March. But we’ve settled on it.’
‘It’s fantastic the way you two travel,’ Laini said.
They had always loved it, and every year since Martin was appointed a judge they’d taken an overseas trip.
‘How’s the centre going, Mum?’ Ethan asked.
‘We’ve got a new coordinator, an ex-lawyer from Melbourne.’ The centre was the youth centre in Newtown; as a barrister Martin had given them some pro bono advice and now Maggie volunteered there in the office once every so often.
‘Ha, you didn’t tell them how they nicked your wallet!’ Martin hooted, sufficiently well oiled to slam his glass down on the table. And when Ethan asked who the culprit was, he pointed his finger in the air: ‘One of those kids.’
‘Those kids?’ Maggie interjected. ‘We don’t know who it was. It could have been anyone—a cleaner, for all we know. I was stupid and left it out. My fault really . . .’
‘Here we go.’ Ethan rubbed his eyes as he spoke. ‘It’s your fault . . . You give them your time for nothing and they steal your money—that’s their thank you. That’s just priceless, that is.’
‘Listen to you both! What’s happened to you? And you, Martin, of all people . . . If that’s the sort of mindset you have as you sit on the bench, heaven help us all.’
‘Oh, come on, Mum—we’re just having a bit of fun.’
She stopped herself, took a breath. This was their argument, hers and Martin’s. Ever since Ethan was at university, they had shaken their heads at their son’s conservatism, but even Martin now, something had crept into his thinking, sitting on high in a red gown with a gavel in his hand, day after day, year after year. It was inevitable, she supposed. His job was to pass judgment on the masses. His job was to be right and to be righteous.
‘Not conservative,’ he would argue, ‘just clinical.’ He had taken emotion out of his deliberations.
‘And with it your ideals.’
‘Well, those that spring out of emotion, sure. Guilty.’
And so they would argue about the events of the day, and more and more he would find a way to shut it down. What became clear to her was that over the years his disdain for politics had come to match his disdain for religion. And perhaps in this, perhaps now, they weren’t so different after all: along different routes they had arrived at the same place.
Today she had been drawn back into the ring, and now she would step out. ‘Ethan,’ she said, ‘tell us, how is work?’
‘Fine. Busy. Fine.’
‘Busier than usual?’
‘A little. Moira left. It’s taking her replacement a while to get the hang of things. You don’t realise how much someone does until they’re gone.’
‘Moira was a godsend,’ Laini chips in. ‘This one’s a dill.’
‘Well, I don’t know . . .’
‘She sent out the wrong affidavit.’
‘It was a bit of a disaster.’
‘And Ethan just kept his cool.’
Martin, without looking up from his stacked fork: ‘Well, I’d imagine that’s the best way to deal with it.’
‘She only just started,’ Ethan says. ‘I mean, if it happens again . . .’
Laini: ‘You’ll slap her wrist.’
‘Well, no. She’d have a claim if I did that.’ He looked at his mother and father. ‘And on the scale of personality defects in the office, hers aren’t so bad.’
At this Martin’s ears pricked up. ‘Tell us about the other defects.’
‘Come on, Dad—I’m not going there.’
Ignoring him, Martin went on. ‘I’m sure you’re right about that, Ethan. I wonder if it’s not the nature of the beast.’ And in an audible whisper to himself: ‘It is family law, after all . . .’
Maggie put her hand over his. ‘Stop it, Martin. There’s nothing the matter with family law.’
At this Martin shook his head like a child refusing to eat. ‘Don’t tell me about the law. What are you doing there, son? That’s a place you go to die.’
Ethan smiled wearily, the terrain too well trodden. ‘That isn’t why I go there. Dad, let’s not do this today. Let Mum have a good day.’
‘Quite right,’ Martin said. ‘And a special day it is: it’s our anniversary.’
‘We did that already.’
‘We did the cake?’
‘No, Dad. We haven’t done the cake.’ Ethan looked from Martin to Maggie. She shrugged. ‘I think that’s enough wine for you . . . How’s that appeal matter coming along? The people smuggler?’
‘They are trying to introduce fresh evidence. He is an interesting fellow, not what you’d expect.’ Until the judgment was handed down that was as far as conversations about cases generally went around a lunch table.
‘Well, you can bet he made a pretty penny out of it,’ Ethan said. ‘It’s bloody criminal the sort of sums these people are charging.’
‘Well, I suppose that’s what I’m there to determine. I’m not sure it’s always the case.’
Ethan shook his head. ‘Come off it, Dad—kids in leaking boats . . . This isn’t the time to go soft.’
Martin looked perplexed by his son’s words, perplexed and then concerned. ‘Well, there were no children on this boat in particular. There is evidence, in fact, that this fellow gave cheap passage to a mentally disabled man. If that man was not here, he’d be sitting in a camp in Indonesia.’
Ethan threw his hands in the air. ‘There has to be some sort of process. You know that as well as I do. And what, it’s all okay because he gave some guy a cheap boat ride? I’m not buying it.’
Maggie could feel Martin stiffen as he listened to his son lament the inequity of queue-jumping. Finally he cleared his throat, leant his weight into his hands at the edge of the table as though preparing to stand. But he did not stand; he sat back in his chair and waited for Ethan to finish. When he had, Martin folded his arms and posed a question: ‘Do you know, Ethan, what they do with a mentally ill man in Indonesia?’
‘Sorry?’
Martin repeated the question.
‘No, Dad,’ Ethan said, wary now. ‘What do they do?’
‘Once he has become enough of a public nuisance, they take him to some out-of-the-way place and tie him to a tree, or to a post, and they leave him there to eat the food that is thrown on the ground
and to piss and shit and sit and howl in his piss and shit, and . . .’ His eyes glazed over as he spoke, staring at the centre of the table. Ethan went to speak, but Maggie shook her head, held up her hand. Martin fell silent, lost in the mire of his thoughts.
When he looked up, he squinted across the table at his son. ‘What on earth am I talking about?’ And before anyone could answer, he turned to Maggie. ‘I am tired,’ he said. ‘Do you think I could have a little nap?’
‘Of course, darling.’
Laini jumped up. ‘I’ll clear.’
‘We’ll take a walk down to the beach,’ Ethan said.
Maggie went with Martin to their room, and lay down with him on the bed. She rested her head on his chest and felt its warmth on her cheek as it rose and fell.
‘You know, when I close my eyes,’ he said softly, ‘I see you in younger skin. You are standing at the wall in the loft, studying my face, a piece of charcoal in your hand. And I can see the picture that you draw. Strange to think of it now buried beneath layers of paint. Perhaps we could go and find it, peel it back.’
The arm cradling her shoulder went limp. Maggie sat up and kissed his cheek, this man she had spent a day with thirty-seven years ago, this man who fed her toast and posed for his portrait and took her on a walk to a garden between the tenements on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
He was stressed about these last judgments, and he hadn’t been sleeping and he might have had one wine too many—that was what she said by way of explanation when she caught up with the others on their walk.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ethan said. ‘I went too far.’
Maggie put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Don’t you worry. He can be a grumpy bugger.’ And she repeated it, the answer to his outburst—‘a grumpy bugger’—as much to convince herself as to convince Ethan.
Chapter 4
Martin opened his eyes.
He had left the lunch table, and before that he had said things he shouldn’t have. He hadn’t meant for Laini to hear in the kitchen. As for the table, he couldn’t be sure now what had sparked the outburst—if that’s what one would call it. Whatever it was, I am fine, he thought. All is well.
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