The Secret Lives of Men

by Georgia Blain

  ‘I have to go,’ she said again, knowing she was going to be ignored.

  But Matthew heard her. ‘You don’t look well.’ He was staring right at her, his eyes dark and still, intent and focused.

  ‘I’m just tired,’ she said. ‘I have another show soon and I’ve been working long hours.’

  ‘I know,’ Matthew said. ‘It’s at Gallery 4. I’ve been looking forward to it.’

  In the car on the way home, she had asked David why he never listened to her, why they had to stay so long, it was insufferable, awful; and he had looked in the rear-vision mirror to where Evie was sitting, listening to everything they were saying.

  ‘Why was it awful?’ Evie had asked. ‘Didn’t you like Sienna’s dad?’

  ‘No,’ Ellen had lied. ‘I did like him.’

  ‘He certainly knew your form.’

  Ellen glanced sharply at David, who grinned back at her.

  At home, David took Evie straight to bed, dressing her in her pyjamas, while Ellen switched on the heaters.

  ‘She can’t wear summer pyjamas,’ she said when she came in to kiss Evie goodnight.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ David said.

  ‘It does,’ and Ellen began to unbutton the top, pushing David to one side.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ He refused to move. ‘You’re just going to get her cold if you undress her again.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Evie said, pulling the doona up over her chest.

  ‘You’re not,’ Ellen insisted, forcing the covers down. She could feel David’s arm on her wrist, holding her back, and she shook herself free. ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘No, leave her alone,’ he said. ‘Let her go to sleep.’

  But Ellen wouldn’t. With the flannel pyjamas under one arm, she continued to try to undress Evie, who kept saying that she was okay. It was only when David forced her away that she stopped, and she turned to shout at him, her mouth open and ready, only silencing herself as she realised where they both were. But outside in the hall, she hissed: ‘Why do you have to fight me?’

  ‘I don’t,’ he had said, perplexed.

  Now, so many years later, she and David speak occasionally and have dinner together less often, sometimes at his house, sometimes at hers. They talk about Evie, or work, or friends they have in common, and then they clear the table, and one washes while the other dries. It is almost as it should be, close to the way it might have been if she had never made that one particular choice. She opened the door, she thinks. She had a look.

  Escape

  My father liked to think of himself as an intellectual, a tad bohemian, handsome, a bon vivant and a raconteur. All admirable traits, but perhaps not so essential for the job of parenting — one that he managed to avoid for most of the year and then was forced to embrace each summer holiday.

  He picked us up in his frog-green Porsche Roadster, the engine throbbing in our suburban street. The fact that there would barely be enough room for our suitcases never occurred to him, let alone the problem of how we would fit into a car that didn’t have a back seat.

  ‘Both of you in the front,’ he would say, and my sister and I would squash, awkward and embarrassed, into the tiny leather bucket seat, straining to wrap the belt around our bodies.

  Our mother stayed inside for our departure, telling us she’d prefer to stare at the ceiling and pray we’d get there alive than witness his driving.

  ‘And off we go!’ Foot to the floor, gears sliding smoothly into place, the wind in our hair, Pink Floyd booming on the stereo, we were headed out of ‘Dullsville’ (my father’s word) and off to the land of pot, lissom young women, meals when you felt like it, and six weeks of parental neglect.

  Sass was thirteen that summer, and I was twelve. She rarely spoke to us anymore, hiding in her room as soon as she got home from school, listening to records and reading books. I missed her, and didn’t understand why she had withdrawn.

  ‘Good god, you’re a woman,’ my father said when we arrived at his house.

  She glared at him and then picked up her case and walked on ahead of us.

  My father’s house was a low-lying brick-and-timber building with more windows than walls, built alongside similar houses, each hidden from the next by tangled bush. There was no garden, just scrub: callistemon, hop bush, gold-dust wattle and yellow box, all pressed tight against each other, leaving no space to play, no lawn.

  ‘Lawn belongs in Dullsville.’ My mother would imitate my father when I complained about having nothing to do there — no backyard cricket, nowhere to kick the football. ‘Don’t tell me you belong in Dullsville, too.’ She would roll her eyes. It was only six weeks: I had to grin and bear it, and before I knew it I’d be back in the suburbs in my dull house with my dull mother.

  Usually Sass and I slept in the den, a box-like room that faced south, our camp beds side by side, one end wedged in under our father’s desk, every surface covered in papers, books and recording equipment — headphones, a Nagra and several microphones — as well as metal canisters containing reels of tape: interviews he did outside the studio and off-cuts from edits.

  There was no reason to think there would be any change to our accommodation, and our father certainly hadn’t mentioned that he had another guest — not that we would have been able to hear anything in the car should he have taken the unusual step of attempting a conversation with us.

  But the room was different. Everything had a place in the shelves, and there was a neatly made single bed in the corner. We might have thought he’d gone to some effort if it wasn’t for how unlikely that would be, and the presence of only one bed also indicated otherwise.

  ‘Jen!’ My father’s voice echoed down the hall, bouncing off the bare boards and the many windows. ‘Jen! Your charges have arrived!’ He had his arms around us, and I could smell him, the garlic he must have eaten for lunch pungent as he pulled me closer than I liked.

  Sass had already stepped out of his grasp, and she stood there, case at her feet, arms folded, taking in the slender girl (who didn’t seem much older than she was) at the entrance to the kitchen.

  ‘Gidday.’

  Her accent was strange.

  She held out her hand. ‘Sass? Patrick?’

  I attempted one of my father’s handshakes, firm and manly. Sass just gave her one of my mother’s best death stares.

  Introductions done, my father removed his arm, intending to head straight out the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I said.

  ‘Work to do.’ He winked at us and reached over to ruffle my hair. ‘See you this evening.’

  Jen was from New Zealand. She told me this on our third day, when I had once again failed to understand what she was saying.

  ‘Christchurch.’

  ‘We’re atheists,’ I said, my mouth full of sandwich.

  ‘You are so embarrassing.’ Sass glared at me, her voice a low hiss. ‘It’s a city.’

  I refused to blush. ‘Well, we are atheists.’

  ‘With a father like yours, I’m not surprised.’ Jen’s eyes were kind.

  ‘It’s our mother,’ I told her. ‘She was brought up a Catholic and she hates anything to do with the church now.’

  Jen was brought up a Quaker. She bit into an apple, her teeth gleaming white against the dusty gold of her skin. ‘The jury is still out for me.’

  ‘That’s called agnostic,’ I said. ‘Dad says they’re lily-livered fence-sitters.’

  ‘Sometimes you get quite a view from the top of the fence.’ She nibbled around the core. ‘What about you?’ She turned to Sass.

  My sister shrugged. ‘I guess I’m an atheist. I mean, I don’t believe in heaven or hell or a god who sits up in the sky and watches everything we do. Sometimes you get caught out and punished; other times you get away scot-
free.’

  I stared at her. It was the most she’d said in months.

  We were in the lounge room, hot and bored, the windows open to tired puffs of scorching breeze carrying dust and blowflies. We had no car to go anywhere, buses were a half-hour walk away, and the house contained only newspapers, biographies and political books.

  ‘Let’s cook,’ Jen said.

  Sass and I waited for more, for some enticement to lift us out of our torpor.

  ‘A cake,’ she tried. ‘With as many layers as we can make.’

  There was, of course, so little in the kitchen, and as she put each of the potential ingredients out on the bench, trying to find poor substitutes for essentials such as sugar, I could see her enthusiasm waning.

  And then she had an idea. She sucked on the nub of a pencil before commencing a list.

  ‘Chocolate,’ Sass said. ‘We need chocolate.’

  She wrote it down dutifully.

  ‘Milk,’ I added. ‘And eggs.’

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘Does butter go in cakes?’

  I wasn’t sure. She put it on the list anyway.

  Sass opened the fridge and then shut it in disgust. ‘Who’s going to give us all that stuff?’

  ‘Stephanie,’ Jen said. ‘My sister.’

  I had to stop myself from giggling at the way she said ‘sister’.

  ‘You never told us you had a sister. Or that she lived near here.’ Sass sat on a stool and dipped her finger into the jar of honey.

  Jen folded up the piece of paper. ‘You never asked. She’s an au pair. At the Donaldsons’. I came to visit her and your dad said I could take care of you two over the summer.’

  Sass decided to stay behind and read, but I offered to walk with Jen, wanting to meet this sister. We trudged up the gravel driveway towards the road, waving at the persistent flies that clustered on our sweaty skin, and trying to shade our eyes from the flat glare of the day.

  It wasn’t like this in New Zealand, Jen told me. It was cool and green, and it rained for days on end. Misty rain on rolling hills.

  ‘I wish we lived there,’ I said. ‘I hate it here. I even like Dullsville better than this.’

  She glanced at me quizzically, and I explained that it was my father’s name for our suburb. ‘It might be boring,’ I added, ‘but at least it’s not as ugly as this.’ I gestured at the grey of the surrounding scrub, which scratched our legs and arms if we veered to either side of the narrow driveway.

  ‘It has its own beauty,’ Jen said. ‘You mightn’t see it because it’s so familiar to you, but to someone like me — well, it’s got something.’

  I didn’t notice the police car at first. It was parked off the road, half hidden by a wattle, the grille glinting in the sunlight. The windows were open and the front seat was reclined, the policeman lying back, eyes closed, mouth wide as he snored.

  ‘He’s going to swallow a lot of flies,’ Jen said.

  I giggled.

  ‘He’s also going to miss what he came to see. If it happens.’

  I didn’t understand her.

  ‘Dickhead.’

  The way she said the word, it sounded like ‘duckhead’.

  ‘Why’s he here?’ I asked.

  She contemplated my question. A fly settled on the tip of her nose and she brushed it away. Scraping her hair back in a ponytail, which she knotted at the nape of her neck, she kept her eyes locked on mine as she tried to think of the best way to answer.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘It’s like this: there’s a man and he’s called Les.’

  I waited for her to continue.

  ‘He’s escaped from jail.’

  ‘Is he near here?’ The alarm in my voice made an embarrassing squeak.

  She didn’t answer straightaway. Overhead the sun was burning fiercely, a white-hot halo bleaching colour out of the day.

  ‘Stephanie is his girlfriend,’ she said at last. ‘The police think he might try and visit her.’

  A magpie watched us from the branch of a river red gum, its talons gripped around the sheafs of rust-coloured bark, the sharp glitter of its eyes observing our progress.

  ‘What’d he do?’ I hardly dared ask the question.

  She’d been expecting it. ‘I thought you’d want to know. Everyone does.’ We turned right into another driveway similar to my father’s, although a little more kempt. She was staring straight ahead as she said the words. ‘It was armed robbery.’

  I can only assume my intake of air was audible. I felt sweat on my forehead, damp and cold, and I wiped it away.

  ‘Your dad knows him.’

  I had no idea.

  ‘He’s been interviewing him. He’s making a program about him and life in prison.’ She flicked a piece of dry grass off her arm. ‘It’s all top secret. Les calls with a number and then your father rings him, and they make a time and a place.’

  ‘Have you met him?’

  She hadn’t. ‘But Steph loves him —’ The driveway turned in front of us to reveal a house, so like my father’s, canary-yellow door wide open, the sound of children screaming inside. She beckoned me to follow, her last words (‘— and that’s enough for me’) swallowed by a howl as a girl, who could have been no more than four, tripped and fell, bone cracking hard on the slate floor.

  Jen scooped her up. ‘Rosie, Rosie, Rose.’ She danced her round until she was sufficiently distracted, the watery smile on her face gradually dissolving into peals of laughter.

  ‘Steph,’ Jen called out, and an identical young woman came out of the kitchen, carrying a baby, his nose dripping with snot.

  I turned from one to the other, and then back again.

  Jen winked at me. ‘Forgot to tell you we’re twins.’

  The kitchen was chaos — kids’ toys scattered across the floor; cereal bowls with dried food on the table and flies buzzing around them; a milk bottle open, the smell sour and thick.

  ‘Police still there?’ Steph asked, putting the boy on the ground, where he began to bang a wooden block on the quarry tiles.

  Jen nodded.

  Steph sniffed, breathing in deeply before she spoke, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘I wish they’d leave.’

  The little boy crawled across the floor and pulled himself up by holding on to her leg. She reached down for him, an action that was automatic and worn out, her hip adjusting to his weight, her slow movement soothing him.

  The young girl, Rosie, pulled at my hand. ‘Come and see my room,’ she demanded. I wanted to stay where I was, listening to their conversation. Finding out about Les was the only interesting thing that had happened this summer and I didn’t want to miss a second of it.

  ‘It’s been two days since he’s called,’ Steph said.

  Rosie continued to insist on my attention, standing up now and using all of her body to try to pull me up, too. ‘Come on,’ she said, over and over again, and I gave in.

  Later, as we headed home, I had more questions for Jen.

  ‘Will my dad get into trouble for not telling the police where Les is?’ I wanted to get this one out of the way before we once again came in range of the officer in his car.

  Jen told me she didn’t know.

  ‘Will he ever be forgiven? I mean is there an amount of time that you can be escaped for and then everyone says, okay, you’ve been out for long enough now, we give up on putting you back in jail?’

  She picked up a dead branch and began to swish the flies away from her face, occasionally slapping it on her back, glossy black bodies and silvery wings rising and dispersing, only to settle again. ‘No,’ she finally said. ‘I don’t believe there is. I guess you have to spend the rest of your life running.’

  ‘That seems so unfair.’ I wanted to be on Les’s side and Steph’s side
and her side. ‘It’s not like he would’ve been in jail forever.’

  She handed me the bag of ingredients and bent down to dislodge a piece of gravel from her sandal. The bag was heavy, but the milk was cool against my skin, and I offered to carry it the rest of the way home for her.

  ‘You have to be quiet now,’ she warned me as we came out onto the road where the police car was still parked.

  The officer was awake, sitting on the edge of the bonnet and watching us as we walked side by side, neither of us uttering a word.

  ‘Heard from your boyfriend?’ His eyes were fixed on Jen, and his face was expressionless.

  She stared him down. ‘I don’t think that’s any of your business.’

  ‘When he’s on the run, we make it our business.’

  I glanced in his direction. His skin was blotched from the heat, his mouth tight and mean. He wiped his forehead and took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, offering one to her.

  She didn’t even acknowledge the gesture. ‘You have the wrong person.’ She raised her chin, staring straight at him, and I admired her terribly. ‘As I’ve told you before, my name is Jen and I know nothing about the person you’re looking for.’

  He sneered. ‘So, they make you all the same over there in sheep country?’

  It wasn’t even vaguely amusing.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I believe it’s the same as here. Identical twins are — as the name suggests — identical. Everyone else is as unique as you are, Constable.’

  I couldn’t keep the smirk from my face and so I fixed my eyes on a line of bull ants weaving their way through the red dust to a scattering of rocks near the side of the road. I hoped one of them would bite him on the ankle.

  The crunch of his boots on the gravel was harsh, and I could smell him — the perspiration on his nylon shirt, the leather of his holster and a high sweet aftershave. He came one step too close, his boot right near the open toes of her sandals. Jen didn’t flinch.