‘I’ll see you next week, Lach,’ said Jo.
‘You’re sure you don’t want me to come over?’
‘Quite sure.’
There was a pause. Lachlan did not like being turned down, he wasn’t used to it. Jo had to admit to a secret thrill knowing she had the power to disappoint him.
‘I’ll miss you, Jo-bloh,’ he said finally.
‘You’ll survive,’ she returned breezily.
‘Sleep tight.’
She intended to. One smart thing she had done was pack herself an overnight bag with toiletries, an outfit for work tomorrow, pyjamas and bed linen, and bring it along separately with her. Very clever thinking. She surprised herself sometimes. Not that she wasn’t an organised person. Jo was highly organised, focused, disciplined, but generally only about one thing at a time. When she was working on an article she was not conscious of anything else. She’d run out of clean clothes, not answer the phone, the place could collapse around her ears. Then once she’d submitted, she’d suddenly notice the mess and go into a frenzy, not resting until it was hospital-grade clean. Angie said she was obsessive, but Jo wasn’t the obsessive type. She had focus. Single-minded focus. Lachlan said she was a bit like a man in that way.
Jo pushed some boxes out of the way to clear space in the bedroom so she could make up the bed. She was too tired for a shower and the water would only be lukewarm at best, so she just changed into her pyjamas and climbed in between the sheets, smiling indulgently. Bugger, she hadn’t thought of pillows. She frowned, considering the boxes marked Bedroom. They were sure to be in the last box she’d open, so Jo decided not to put herself through the frustration. She went back out to the living room and grabbed the seat cushions off the sofa. They would have to do.
Sitting propped up against the cushions, still swigging the champagne from the bottle and munching away on pretzels, Jo sighed contentedly like a self-satisfied cat. Maybe she would get a cat. She’d call it Apostrophe or Metaphor or something writerly and witty like that.
What was she thinking? She wasn’t going to get a cat. She didn’t even like cats. This whole home ownership thing put funny ideas into one’s head.
The best part about it was living in the city. All the way in. She had hovered on the fringes for a long time; the bohemian, cheaper, grotty regions, because Jo had always had the feeling if she dared to live right in the city, it would up and evict her, like a hapless competitor on one of those survival shows, the first to get booted off because they so obviously didn’t make the grade.
But now she felt so goddamn urbane she could spit. This would put her in the thick of it. Jo intended to spend so much time at the office, Leo was going to get sick of the sight of her. Sooner or later he had to start giving her real assignments, important stories. Not the fluffy ‘human interest’ pieces he considered fitting of her abilities. He treated her like a cadet. Despite consistently impressive results, it had taken Jo years longer to finish her degree, due to interruptions and delays beyond her control. So when she finally started working as a journalist she was a few years behind her peers, and she felt as though she’d been playing catch-up ever since. Okay, she had her column, but even there she was censored. Write your opinion, Leo had told her. But heaven forbid she had an opinion about anything that mattered, like government policy or police corruption or global terrorism. No, being a woman she should only have an opinion about things that supposedly mattered to women. The length of skirts this season. The price of real estate. The demise of cooking. The rebirth of knitting. But since when was that all women cared about? And besides, who said because she was a woman no one except women would read what she had to say?
Leo might have been a fossil, but he was also her boss. Jo knew she had to find a way to appease him and get what she wanted at the same time. She had started at the Sunday Tribune as a real estate writer, then environment, then science, which had bored her stupid. It was like swotting for an exam in a subject she had no intention of pursuing after she finished school. She even had a go at sports; in fact, Jo took to it with relish. She had visions of becoming Sydney’s pre-eminent sportswriter, perhaps even Australia’s. Men would have to concede to her spectacular wealth of knowledge. She would be cool. There was just one little problem. Jo didn’t like sport; she thought it was stupid.
‘That’s because you don’t understand it,’ Lachlan had once made the mistake of saying.
‘I understand it, I just don’t see the point of it,’ she’d retorted.
‘Explain the rules of cricket then.’
And so she did, in such meticulous detail that Lachlan was forced to concede to her spectacular wealth of knowledge, if only to shut her up.
Jo had continued to bump around like a pinball from one section to another, till the day she submitted a feature piece about the leader of a minor political party. She’d worked on it for weeks, in her own time of course. That was the only way she could do it. The first time she’d handed Leo an article he’d dismissed it without a glance. ‘It’s not your job, Jo. I have senior journos who know what they’re doing writing this stuff. Can you imagine how Don McAllister or Lachlan Barr would feel if I said, “Here, the lass from real estate has written an analysis on the economic summit.”?’ Somehow, Jo had prevented steam escaping from her ears long enough to assure Leo that she wasn’t expecting him to run her pieces, not right away. But how would she learn if she didn’t try? And it would mean so much to her if he could give her feedback. She needed a mentor, and a mentor of the stature of Leo Monaghan would be – take a deep breath – more than she could ever hope for. That got him. Men were so vain. And so predictable.
Of course, he rejected one article after the next for about a year. Good effort, kid. But –
‘No room this time.’
‘Don’s just finished a piece on this.’
‘Lachlan’s researching the very same as we speak. In fact, pass on your notes to him, would you?’
Then she submitted the article on Andrew Leslie, who, despite being highly qualified, was leading his party straight into the political wasteland of irrelevance. Jo had constructed a whole Macbeth allegory, with Leslie’s wife a kind of Lady Macbeth who had pushed her husband so far that he had overreached himself. Leo loved it, and then proceeded to pull the guts out of it. Gone was the analysis of the man’s political contribution and instead the focus became entirely on his wife. He turned it into a catty hatchet piece. Jo had felt conflicted for a while, until she saw her by-line. By Jo Liddell. The response when it was printed was astonishing; the floodgates opened and suddenly everyone was attacking them. Jo never forgot the press conference where he announced his retirement from the leadership and the party, and then crossed directly to his wife, took her hand, and together they walked from the room.
Jo had gone home and got drunk, very drunk, and proceeded to pen a wordy, self-righteous resignation, berating journalism, politics, the Tribune and herself. But when she arrived hungover at work the next morning, Leo had offered her the column. It had come to him overnight, apparently.
‘Bitch! We’ll just call it Bitch, as in having a bitch, but it’s a clever play on the word, don’t you think? Subtle.’
As a sledgehammer.
She didn’t hand in the letter of resignation.
Jo drained the rest of the bottle and dropped it down next to the bed, and then twisted the top of the foil packet of pretzels and tossed it on the floor as well. Snuggling down under the sheets, she gazed up at the ceiling. Her ceiling. She turned and looked out the window. At her view. She was bristling with the feeling that things were going to be different now, that her time had finally come . . . that she was verged on the precipice, about to fly . . .
But that was just champagne-fuelled nonsense. She had moved house – of course things were going to be different. That wasn’t extraordinary, it was to be expected. She should write a piece on this, how people con themselves into believing that normal, natural feelings are loaded with significance, al
most mystical. Jo had learned the hard way that life was not mystical, or magical; it was hard and grey and cold most of the time. Much better to see it for what it is than to be perennially disappointed.
Thursday
Joe decided he was getting old. He used to be proud of the fact he could fit everything he owned in the world into a backpack and an overnight bag or two. He had vowed never to have so much stuff that it would weigh him down. But it was certainly weighing him down now as he trudged up the final flight of stairs to his flat.
As he arrived at the top floor landing, he experienced no surge of sentimental feeling at the sight of his front door, only relief that he could put these bags down. He dumped them on the tessellated tiles and crouched down to check under the mat. No key. Bloody useless Will. He’d offered to pick him up from the airport, but Joe had argued that the flight was arriving too early and he didn’t want to inconvenience anyone, though it was really because he knew his younger brother all too well. The chances of Will actually showing up at the airport were slim to highly improbable.
‘Just put a key under the mat,’ Joe had told him on the phone from Boston a couple of days ago.
‘No way,’ Will had protested. ‘You can’t arrive in the country after nearly two years away and not have a familiar face there to meet you.’
‘Honestly, Will,’ Joe persisted, ‘I’ll jump in a cab and I’ll see your familiar face fifteen minutes later. Leave a key under the mat and I’ll wake you when I get in.’
There had been a pause. ‘You don’t trust me, do you, Joe? You think I’m not going to show.’
‘It’s not that –’
‘Well, I just might surprise you.’
But of course he hadn’t, which was no surprise either. And although Joe had emailed from his stopover in LA only yesterday, urging him once again to leave a key out, Will hadn’t managed it. His brother was all good intentions with no follow-through. Joe put it down to his being the youngest of a big family; he’d had too many people looking after him so he’d never learned how to look after himself, much less anyone else.
Joe knocked lightly on the door and waited. There was no response, not a sound coming from inside, or from the entire floor it seemed. He glanced either side of the landing at the doors of the adjacent apartments, reluctant to knock too loudly at this time of the morning, given their close proximity. It was only a small block, a three-storey walk-up, one of the last of the liver-brick Art Deco buildings still standing this close to the city. So it did have some charm, unlike the stark apartment towers that had sprouted up all over the city in his absence.
He hadn’t planned to buy the flat; his job involved way too much travelling, as well as the probability of extended posts abroad. Owning real estate equated to settling down in his mind, staying put, and Joe was not resigned to staying put anywhere at the time. Besides, when he eventually did settle down, it would never be in a city. Though by necessity he spent a lot of his time in cities, his dream was to settle somewhere up in the Blue Mountains, the only place in all the world he truly considered home.
‘You’ve always got a room here at the house, and you always will,’ his dad had assured him. ‘But you need a place close to town, close to work, where you can hang your hat between trips. And you won’t have to worry about it while you’re away. If you take an overseas post, you can rent it out and forget about it. But for godsakes, son, you’re earning decent money now and you need to spend it on something more substantial than beer and smokes.’
He was right of course. Joe had quit the smokes when he turned thirty, cut down on beer in favour of a good red with dinner, and he had come to appreciate the convenience of having a place in the city. But it had never felt like home. Joe knew he would only feel like he had come home once he made his way up to Leura. He would have liked to have gone there directly, but he wanted to sort work out first so that he could spend at least a few uninterrupted days with his father.
At this moment, though, he’d just be glad to get inside the flat, have a shower, change his clothes, maybe grab a quick nap. Joe generally travelled well, but he’d had to share the plane with the Australian water polo team and they were a rowdy bunch. He was yet to come across an Australian sporting team that wasn’t.
Joe knocked again, not loud enough to wake the neighbours, so it was unlikely to wake Will either. He considered his options. He couldn’t even phone Will because the SIM card in his mobile wouldn’t function here. He could go back down onto the street, find a payphone, maybe grab some breakfast. But he felt grimy and tired and not up to schlepping around the streets hunting for a phone. Right now he just wanted to rest his weary head. Joe stared at his luggage, thinking. He crouched down, stacking the bags on top of each other and wedging them into a corner of the alcove. Then he propped his backpack up against them, and lowered himself onto the floor, sinking gratefully into the padded backing. This would do; he’d slept in worse conditions, a good deal worse. He just hadn’t expected he would have to once he was home in Australia.
And he was home to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. He didn’t want to leave his dad again until . . . well, he didn’t want to think about that. Joe was aware the old man had deteriorated significantly since he’d last seen him, but it was hard to imagine. In his almost daily emails he was still as sharp and quick-witted as ever, but it was the mind that went last with this sadistic disease. His muscles would gradually atrophy to the point where he would be unable to swallow or, ultimately, even breathe. But his brain would still register every helpless, painful moment, even though he’d no longer possess the ability to communicate it. He had assured his son over many philosophical online exchanges that if it had to be this or losing his mind, he’d choose this. Joe didn’t agree with the premise: why did it have to be anything? Why couldn’t his father just pass away peacefully in his sleep in his nineties? They’d already lost their mother too early; she was only fifty-nine when the aneurism burst in her brain, killing her instantly. At least she hadn’t suffered, which was the only solace the family had throughout the shattering grief that followed.
Joe had often wondered how his dad had been able to bear her loss. Joseph and Nancy Bannister were an extraordinary couple by any estimation. They met when they were both covering the Vietnam War. She was a feisty reporter from New Jersey who didn’t take crap from anyone; she wouldn’t have got to where she was otherwise. Joseph was a senior correspondent for a Sydney newspaper, still single pushing thirty, and he fell hopelessly in love with her. Though she took some coaxing, according to him, he eventually won her over. Nancy told it differently. In her version, she fell hard from the get-go for the laconic Australian reporter who hid his intellect under a bushel but let it shine on the page. As Vietnam collapsed into an unholy mess after the Tet Offensive, Nancy discovered she was pregnant. She knew she had to get to safer ground, and though Joe would have followed her anywhere, Nancy couldn’t abide Nixon and didn’t want to live in the US under his presidency. They married in the embassy in Singapore on their way back to Sydney, where they set up home. Over the years Joe travelled back and forth, their anniversaries forming a timeline of the conflicts throughout south-east Asia during the seventies and eighties, each pregnancy a marker of his sabbaticals home. When baby William made five, Nancy decided they needed room to spread out, and she moved the family up to the Blue Mountains while Joe was in Cambodia covering the fall of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh. She wired him their new address so he’d know where to find them next time he came home.
Nancy was fiercely independent and self-sufficient, but the bond between his parents never waned. Joe was happiest when his dad was home, and he’d hang on every word as his parents debated the state of the world. They had intellects to match, but his mother was fiery, perpetually frustrated, always worked up about injustice and inequality, while his dad was quieter, considered, calling himself a ‘compassionate realist’. When Joe was old enough to twig, he realised their differences only served to fuel th
e passion between them. Despite all the places he’d travelled and all the people he’d met, he’d never come across a couple quite like them.
Which Joe reckoned was the reason he was still single pushing forty. He had a tendency to regard his own relationships through the prism of his parents’ marriage, so they always came up wanting. It probably wasn’t fair, but he didn’t know how to avoid it. His sisters suggested that he had to let a relationship develop on its own terms, give it time, but he’d been with Sarah for three years and their relationship had simply run its course. In fact, it had probably been over for a while, given they were apart more than they were together, so it took them longer to notice. That’s why he’d found it hard to get too upset about their split. But it hadn’t stopped Sarah putting on the usual histrionics. She said a few bitchy things about wasting her time, the tired old biological clock sore point. Joe was so over it. He wanted to have kids, but he didn’t treat every woman he dated as little more than a prospective incubator and therefore a waste of his precious time if it didn’t work out. Okay, he realised men had a few more years up their sleeves than women, but surely if the relationship wasn’t right, then it wasn’t right to bring kids into it, no matter how loudly the blasted clock was ticking.
Joe sighed heavily, rubbing his eyes. His brain was firing in odd directions; lack of sleep didn’t help, but he knew it was more than that. He felt restless and on edge, and not just because he was trying to take a nap on his doorstep. It was coming home and everything that went with it. He hadn’t worked steadily in Australia for years, he hadn’t lived in this flat for an extended period ever. He hadn’t spent enough time with his dad, and now he had no say in it, the time had been apportioned and this was all he was going to get. And then what? Back to more of the same? Joe wondered if he had it in him any more.
Crossing Paths Page 2