The Secret Lives of Men

by Georgia Blain

  Oh god, he was sorry. He was so sorry.

  She rubbed at the wound in shock. ‘No wonder you hate it so much.’

  He still had to inject Doris. ‘She’s never done that with me,’ he said. ‘I mean, she howls like the devil in pain, but not that.’

  Marnie checked her skin wasn’t broken. ‘For someone with a needle phobia, you’ve certainly had to deal with needles in the worst possible way.’

  He had told her about Kate, and Sophia — who was currently off heroin but relying heavily on methadone. He had told her everything, and she, too, had told him about herself — the marriage to a man who had left her for her sister, the split within her family back in the States, her relationships since. They had given each other their past in words.

  She sat opposite, her face still pale, her hair as kinked as Doris’s coat, her breath slightly stale. He took her hand.

  ‘Will it be easier for you if I’m not here?’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘I think it’s better if I do this alone. It might change. But just for now.’

  She was silent, her fingers rolling the syringe around on the table, and then she realised what she was doing. Next to her, the box was full of them. ‘God, there’s a lot.’

  ‘Two a day. Every day.’

  Doris was lying at their feet. She lifted her head as Marnie bent down, nervously, and stroked her.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I guess you could call that a bummer.’

  And although her voice was light, he saw that there had been a shift, a moment of stepping back and looking at him and this predicament.

  Six months later, Pete stands in his kitchen, watching Doris eat. He is breathing slowly, trying to still himself. He remembers therapists in the months after Kate had died telling him to be in the present, right now, step by step.

  On the night of her death, she had been alone. He had sat by her bed all day, finally leaving her at eight to pick Sophia up from her friend’s house.

  They had thought she would make it to the morning, but she didn’t. An hour after he left, he received the call at home.

  ‘She was in peace,’ the doctor promised him. ‘She didn’t even stir.’

  He had held Sophia close, trying to find the words to tell her.

  Friends had thought he was courageous, a wonderful father, extraordinary in his strength — ‘admirable’ was a word they frequently used. But he knew the truth. There had been months when he had barely spoken, fulfilling his duties — homework supervised, dinners and lunches made, excursion notes completed, house cleaned — with no notion of joy.

  Doris nudges her bowl against the back wall. She has not left a scrap.

  Over the last months, he has crept towards this day, moving like a man on a ledge. And now he is here, and it is not a moment he wants to be in.

  He picks the dish up and washes it under the tap, but doesn’t know where to put it. There is so much stuff, he realises — her biscuit tin, her bed, the bag that he takes with him when he walks her, her tennis ball, her lead, her water bowl — and then there is all the paraphernalia for her diabetes.

  ‘Unfortunately, there is a needle involved,’ the vet explained to him when he called yesterday to make the appointment. ‘But we can sedate her first.’

  And me? he wanted to ask. Could you also sedate me?

  Doris is sitting by his side, waiting for her treat.

  He smooths back the hair that grows in tufts, like bushy brows, above her eyes, talking to her as he always does, soothing with his words.

  Sophia promised she would be here by nine.

  There are still five minutes to go.

  Fifteen minutes later, he realises he is going to have to do this alone.

  He snaps the lead on Doris and takes her out to the car, still not sure if he will change his mind.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Marnie had told him each morning he had left her at her house, walking back through the empty streets to his own home. Sometimes he had tried to read her, to see whether it actually was still okay, but he had never been able.

  And then he saw it: the shift he had noticed that first morning in his kitchen had inched a little further, an almost imperceptible movement, an awareness that this was dividing them.

  She was offered a friend’s apartment in New York for a month. She needed to see friends she had lost touch with, perhaps try to reconnect with family; she would so love it if he could be with her.

  And he said no.

  It was the cost, he tried to explain. Eighty dollars a day for a vet nurse to care for Doris and administer her insulin. It was just impossible.

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  That night she didn’t ask him to stay. ‘I need to sleep,’ she explained. ‘When you leave at dawn, I wake.’

  He said he understood. He suggested she stay at his house again. He assured her it would be fine, but the first time, he lost his nerve and failed to get the whole dose into Doris, and the second time, he dropped the bottle of insulin.

  He can do this.

  Doris leaps into the back, delighted at the prospect of a ride in the car with him. He has the keys in his hand, cold in his grasp. He cannot think about the act of walking her into the surgery, holding the lead in his hands, reassuring her it will be alright as she suddenly realises where he has taken her and refuses to take those last steps, through the swinging doors, with him.

  He has not told Marnie of his decision. Will she look at him with horror? Is he someone who can kill a dog just so he can go away with her? He does not know what he will tell her, or how. Perhaps he could say that Doris was hit by a car. He imagines attempting to lie, and he knows he will stutter and stumble, eventually confessing.

  He cannot do this.

  Opening his door, he puts one leg down on the road, the tar hot beneath the soles of his shoes.

  This is not who he is.

  His phone rings. It is Sophia.

  ‘Oh god, Dad.’ Her voice is slurred, sleepy, and he knows she is not even out of bed. ‘I’m sorry. But you’ll be okay.’

  He tells her it’s fine.

  ‘So, you’ve done it?’ she asks.

  He opens the back window, giving Doris some air, stroking her as he does so. He has to make a decision. Get her inside and give her the insulin, or start the car.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he says, and he stares up at the blank blue sky.

  Sophia is silent on the other end. She has probably nodded off.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says softly. He puts the phone down on the seat next to him, and he doesn’t know who he is apologising to: Kate, Sophia, Marnie, Doris? He has tried so hard to do the right thing and he has failed each of them.

  Doris is waiting patiently for their journey to begin, but his courage is leaving him. Soon he will get out of the car, and she will jump down after him. They will head back into the house, where he will inject her as he should have done hours ago, and he will work on an article he is writing, and later in the afternoon, he will take her to meet Marnie at the Bad Dog Park, where they will talk, both knowing that this hairline crack is widening, separating them as it grows, until they are no longer able to bridge a distance that he wants to close before it is too late.

  And so he shuts the car door, and buckles his seatbelt, hoping he can finally turn his back on the dutiful man that holds him too close. That man has served his purpose. What’s required now is a different kind of man, a man that can walk into the vet with his dog and say I’ve had enough, I want to put this dog down — he just doesn’t know if he can get there alone.

  ‘Marnie,’ he says when she answers. She waits for him to continue. ‘I’m sitting in my car with Doris.’

  She is silent at first. ‘Okay.’

  He breathes a little more. ‘Can you come over?’
/>
  When she finally speaks, her voice is quiet. ‘I’m picking up the morning shift.’

  She is walking the small dogs, the ones who behave. She takes them around the paths on this side of the tracks, delivering them home before she collects the bad ones for the afternoon. ‘Can you wait an hour?’

  He could delay the appointment until she can go with him. But he knows that if he puts it off now, he won’t get there at all and, besides, she shouldn’t have to be part of this. ‘It’s okay,’ he tells her, doing his best to sound convincing. He is about to hang up, when she asks him to wait.

  ‘I’ll be there soon.’

  He sits on the back seat with Doris, her warm breath in his ear, until there are only ten minutes left before he is due at the vet’s.

  He has to do this.

  He cannot wait any longer.

  He sends Marnie a text, telling her he will be okay. As he pulls out onto the road, he sees her in the rear-vision mirror, but he doesn’t stop. He has needed to get to this place for years, and he has to keep going because this frail breath of change that is so very terrifying must be fanned, enough to give him the strength to do what he should be doing. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says again, but this time he knows who he is talking to. He can see him, the man he once was, right there in the rear-vision mirror, and he is sorry to go against all that has bound him tight for years and years. But when this is done, he will go to Marnie in the Bad Dog Park and tell her he loves her and that he wants to wake up with her, in his bed and hers, or in a bed far away, somewhere else, just the two of them, for a month or two, or three or more.

  Big Dreams

  John Anderson Welles, or J.A., as he is more commonly known, has two personal assistants, Felicity and Fiona. They are waiting at the entrance to the seminar room, one with a mobile phone pressed to her ear, the other with a laptop open on her knees, both dressed in pencil skirts, short jackets and crisp white blouses.

  ‘You must be Sylvie,’ F1 says, closing her computer with a smart click. She holds out a slender hand, adorned with a simple diamond engagement ring. ‘J.A. isn’t far off.’

  ‘He’s taking a stroll,’ F2 says, pointing to a man-made lake in the distance; it shimmers pale and still through the circle of bare birch trees. ‘It’s what he does. Before any event,’ she explains.

  Sylvie suggests that she might get herself ‘set up’. She nods at the door behind them. ‘Before the crowds arrive.’

  ‘It’s all done,’ F1 says. ‘J.A. likes us here early to make sure everything is in place.’

  They are right. Chairs have been put out in neat rows, and there is a table with two piles of books: her own newly published novel alongside J.A.’s latest, simple one-liners with humorous photographs of babies’ expressions to match the text. Behind the table there are boxes, filled with From the Mouths of Babes, and she wonders at his optimism. It is unlikely, she thinks, that a university audience will buy his work, but then who knows?

  At the front of the room is a microphone on a stand.

  ‘For you,’ F1 says. ‘J.A. never uses one. He likes to move around the room.’

  And behind the microphone is a banner, with So, you want to write? across it and an image of another baby, this one sitting back in a chair, expression thoughtful, one hand rubbing its chin, the other poised above a keyboard.

  Sylvie has pamphlets from the Writers’ Society with her, but as she goes to place them on the empty seats, she discovers this, too, has already been taken care of.

  ‘It seems there’s nothing for me to do,’ she says, and she glances at the clock on the wall, which tells her there is still half an hour to go. ‘Perhaps I should have a stroll as well?’

  This is not a good idea. J.A. likes to be alone on his walks.

  He is due to finish in ten minutes, F2 promises.

  ‘I might get myself a water and something to eat then,’ Sylvie says, because she is hungry. There was no time for breakfast this morning. Her son has a cold and woke several times during the night. She felt as though she had only just settled in to a deep sleep when the alarm cut through the quiet: she flicked it off immediately, dozing past the time she should have got up, leaving only a few minutes to get herself showered and dressed. She gave him Panadol, hoping it would last to when she would be back to pick him up from the centre. And then, after dropping him off, she sat in the warmth of her car, the sunshine through the windscreen causing her to close her eyes, uncertain as to whether she should try to sleep or cry, knowing she ran the risk of being late if she chose to do either.

  Now that she is here, with time to kill, she wishes she had tried to rest after all.

  F2 offers to come with her to the canteen. She needs to buy J.A.’s lunch.

  ‘I can get him something,’ Sylvie says, but F2 tells her it’s fine.

  ‘I know what he likes,’ she explains.

  It’s protein. After midday, that’s all J.A. eats, and F2 panics slightly as she realises it’s not going to be so easy to come by in a university cafeteria.

  ‘You could try the sushi,’ Sylvie suggests.

  The rice is a problem.

  ‘He could just take it off himself, I guess.’ F2 is anxious. Time is running out. A decision needs to be made. Eventually she sighs and piles four of the sushi packs in front of the register. Sylvie has ordered hot chips and a lemonade.

  ‘Together?’ the woman asks.

  ‘Separate,’ F2 says. ‘With a receipt,’ and she taps the plastic on the top box with a perfectly manicured fingernail.

  ‘Have you worked for him for long?’ Sylvie can’t quite bring herself to say ‘J.A.’ out loud. In any event, her question is mumbled as she tries to eat as many of the chips as she can before they return to the room, ashamed that her attempt to finish is purely to avoid feeling embarrassed by her choice of food. She offers F2 the bucket, her fingers greasy and salty.

  F2 declines. ‘This is my first year,’ she says. ‘Fiona has been with him for three.’

  ‘And you like the job?’ She is foolish in hoping for a conspiratorial moment.

  ‘J.A.’s wonderful,’ F2 tells her. ‘There’s never a dull minute. You know he was on the 100 Richest Men list in the latest Business Review Weekly? It’s the first time a writer has made it. He’s very proud.’

  Sylvie crushes the lemonade can in her fist and aims it for the nearest bin, the clatter of aluminium ringing out as it bounces to the bottom. She follows with the chip bucket, wiping the grease from her hands onto the side of her jeans as she hurries to catch up with F2, who is talking on her phone. It is F1. J.A. is waiting for his lunch, F2 explains; and with the sushi boxes stacked on top of one another, F2 picks up the pace, not stumbling once despite her heels, which have the frailty of needles.

  J.A.’s donation of $100,000 to the Writers’ Society had only one condition. He wanted a Society member to come to each of the talks he was giving to university students across the country. It wasn’t a condition as such, he explained. Access to an audience of potential members was more akin to an extra gift.

  ‘What’s he getting out of it?’ Sylvie had asked when the Society had rung to see whether she would do one of the events.

  ‘He wants to be taken seriously,’ Hamish, the executive director explained. ‘He’s angling for a spot on the board, so that people will think he’s a proper writer.’

  Sylvie rolled her eyes. ‘Takes more than that.’

  This is her third novel, and although it has only been available in the shops for a week, she can already feel it beginning to plummet. There have been no reviews, only a few requests for interviews with local papers and country radio stations, and in two of the bookshops she has been into, it has already begun to slink its way to the back shelves.

  She tries to joke her way out of the despair she feels, but in her bleaker solitary moments she
knows the failure of this book is likely to signal the end of her publishing career.

  ‘Why on earth does he need to be taken seriously?’ she had asked Hamish. ‘He’s got the sales.’ The slight rasp in her voice did little to hide her envy.

  Despite being certain she will not like him, Sylvie is still nervous at the prospect of meeting J.A., and this irritates her.

  He is in the seminar room when they return, his back to the couple of audience members who have arrived early, his gaze fixed on the neat sweep of university grounds, as he stretches his arms overhead and limbers up.

  His handshake is firm as F2 introduces them, discreetly placing the sushi boxes on the book table.

  ‘It’s so good of you to do this for the Writers’ Society,’ Sylvie says, her palm aching from the pressure of his grip.

  He tells her it’s nothing. He wants to give back. He knows how important effective networks are from all the years in which he struggled, living on nothing but hope.

  Sylvie tries to nod convincingly.

  J.A. glances at his sushi and grimaces. ‘God, I can’t bear this pre-packaged stuff.’ He picks at a piece, holding it between thick fingers as he examines it, and then puts the whole lot in his mouth. A grain of rice falls onto his navy cotton drill jacket, and he flicks it off impatiently.

  ‘Country Road,’ he tells Sylvie, although she hadn’t asked. ‘They sponsor me — dress me from head to toe.’ His teeth are startling white when he smiles.

  Sylvie finds herself trying to picture him naked. It has been so many years since she has had sex with anyone that this has become an alarming habit with all new men she meets, one that usually leaves her blushing as she attempts to continue a conversation. J.A. must be at least six foot three, broad-shouldered and manly, with a square jaw, an even tan and thick dark hair. The thought of him without clothes is a disturbing one, Sylvie realises, because she has never actually slept with a manly man, and she winces at the memory of some of the more sensitive types who have found their way into her bed.

  J.A. is asking her whether Felicity or Fiona has gone through the running order, and Sylvie nods, before correcting herself. She will go first, J.A. tells her. If she could explain what the Society does and introduce him — he gives her a sheet with his biographical details, and as their hands touch, Sylvie notes again how warm his skin is — he’ll then speak for about thirty minutes.