The Secret Lives of Men

by Georgia Blain

  Her name was Cally. They had been lovers before he met me. He had told her it couldn’t continue some time ago. They were just friends now, but she still wanted more. And so she had kissed him, wanting him to come back inside.

  ‘Which you did?’

  Yes, he said. He did. But not to sleep with her. Simply to calm her down.

  ‘How many lovers do you have?’ I asked, incredulous.

  ‘Only you,’ he swore.

  ‘And your wife.’

  He stared at the ground.

  ‘Trust me.’

  I wished I could.

  Jaipur, Frans had told us, was famous for its Amber Fort.

  ‘Every city is famous for its fort,’ Anna had said.

  Sensing a possibility to stay in the safety of the hotel, Miles had been quick to join in. ‘We don’t want to see another fort. It’s been a fort a day.’

  ‘Well, I hope it’s been more than just one thought a day.’ Simon was always quick with the joke. Dad jokes, Frans called them. You should have been a dad, he would say. And he should have. We all knew that, and they had hoped for it once, trying with various women, including Sal, but always with no success.

  The bus drivers were waiting for us in the laneway. The immaculate press of their clothes and the perfect slick of their hair gave no indication that they had eaten by the side of the vehicle and slept inside.

  We took our seats, each of us choosing a window and to be on our own.

  Looking out, I watched the endless rush of traffic and people while behind me Anna listened to her iPod, also gazing at the street. I wondered what she would make of this trip, how she would frame it on her return, and I turned to talk to her, but she kept her eyes averted.

  As we pulled over into the carpark, Simon told us there were two ways up: elephant or foot.

  ‘Are you sure you’ll be alright?’ I asked Anna, knowing her tendency to pretend she felt no fear. I had seen it in her eyes as she watched the first of the huge leathery beasts lurch up from its knees, the passengers on top swaying against the deep blue sky.

  She brushed me aside. ‘Of course. I’m not like you. I’m not scared of heights.’

  Sal and I took what we thought was the footpath, only to discover halfway up that we had chosen wrongly: the wide stone roadway was used by the elephants and there was little room to squash ourselves against the walls as they lumbered up the hill, the hairs on their hide right up near us as they moved to avoid those coming down.

  ‘Jesus.’ Sal jumped back, only just missing a stream of sweet grassy shit. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’

  That morning, before the others had arrived for breakfast, she had apologised for being so harsh.

  Embarrassed by my own stupidity, I had told her it was fine. But as I laid out each of my pills (anti-malaria, Travelan and another probiotic), I had wanted to correct her. It had bothered me all night.

  ‘I’m not lying to myself,’ I said. ‘I do see it for what it is. But you’re wrong. It’s not going to make me suffer less in the long run.’

  She listened. ‘You’re probably right.’

  Now, as we tried to cut across the road towards the stairs that would take us out of the path of the oncoming elephants, we spoke no further about my confession.

  ‘There they are.’ Anna’s hair gleamed in the winter light, her two plaits hanging down the back of her T-shirt. She and Simon and Frans were on the first elephant, the others right behind them.

  ‘Was it fun?’ I asked as we were reunited in the huge entrance, the red sandstone already warm in the morning sun.

  It was, she told me, her eyes alight like a child’s again, alive from the pleasure of having made it, despite her fears.

  Around us, a group of men had begun to gather, wanting to be our guides. We were used to this now, ignoring them as they waved laminated cards in our faces, offering very good tours, very good indeed.

  ‘See, sir, I am accredited.’

  ‘I have special government pass.’

  ‘No need for audio. No, sir.’

  Frans once again took charge. Did we want someone to show us round? Jude always liked a guide, Aisla didn’t mind, the rest of us said we would prefer to take this last tour on our own.

  It was a public holiday and, despite the early hour, the fort was crowded. Most of the visitors were Indian, a large number of this season’s foreigners having been scared off by the terrorist attacks. Crushing through each of the gateways, they paused to take photos, group shots, family shots, portraits; digital cameras glinting as they captured aunties and sisters in saris, daughters dressed in the latest Western gear — tight little shorts, gladiator sandals and T-shirts with nonsensical slogans — and husbands proud in casual sportswear.

  Aisla was the first to peel off. She, too, was photographing furiously, intent on patterns and colours for use in her fabrics when she returned, using her charm shamelessly as she asked people to pose for her, giggling with them as they laughed at the mad Western woman interested in taking their image.

  Miles joined Jude, Frans and Sal as they headed down to the Sila Devi temple. ‘They sacrificed goats here,’ Jude read from his book. ‘One every single day, from the beginning of the sixteenth century until 1980.’

  ‘So how many altogether then?’ Miles asked.

  ‘Let’s work it out.’ Jude liked doing that. Working it out. During the brief period in which we were together, more than fifteen years ago, I had told him it simply couldn’t be done. ‘Us,’ I had said.

  ‘But we can work it out,’ he had replied, as though we were a problem that had to have a solution.

  Two years later, he had met Aisla, who had at first been self-conscious around me. Now, with a child and a house together and all that life between them, we were all simply friends. I rarely remembered the time I spent with Jude, but when I found myself right back there, I wanted only to flee.

  As he descended the stairs, telling Miles how to work out the equation, Anna, Simon and I began to wander.

  I was, by then, like the children, tired of forts and I walked around, aware of the magnificence of all I saw but unsure how to receive it. I had not read my guidebook the night before, and I dipped in and out of listening to Simon explain what he knew to Anna.

  High at the top, you could see the lake, framed by the chalky pink of the walls, and we paused there for some time, none of us speaking as we looked out across the water and the desert beyond. Behind us, passages led in and out of different rooms, sometimes narrow, sometimes wide, the size of the palace so large that it was possible to find yourself alone for an instant, only to be startled by the flap of a bird’s wings.

  It was an hour or so before we all met up again, quite by accident, but also with a certain inevitability. There were, after all, only so many passages to take. And so we found one another sitting, obvious among all the Indian families, dazzled by the silver and mirrors in a hall that offered a thousand visions from all angles, each one glittering and true.

  It was Jude who told me to look at the marble panels. I did not leave Anna for long, less than a minute, just to wander around the closest of the intricate carvings. I could see her the whole time, and I kept watch, returning when the man sat next to her. Overweight and sweaty, he leant in close, wanting his photo taken with the Western girl.

  It was just a flicker of doubt — or perhaps anxiety was a better word — but I quashed it, telling myself it was harmless. After all, hadn’t Aisla wandered around taking photos of them, wanting to capture the strange exoticism of the mix of Western and Indian, the clash of colour and culture?

  Sitting on the other side of Anna to let her know I was there, I squeezed her hand. Opposite us, the man’s friends had gathered in a group, all male, all laughing at the sight of him pressed close, mouth wide open in a leering grin.
r />   It would be over in a minute.

  One took the photo.

  ‘Another,’ the man said, and I felt Anna inching towards me, wanting to get away from him.

  It was enough, but stupidly, I didn’t speak.

  He put his arm around her, so close that his hand touched my shoulder on her other side, and I could smell his skin.

  One of his friends started making kissing noises.

  Another photo was taken.

  He held her tighter, pulling Anna’s mouth towards his, and I felt her struggle to push him away, as I also pulled, standing up, to give her the room to move.

  ‘Enough,’ I shouted at him.

  Simon, who was right behind me, also shouted: ‘Let her go.’

  Laughing, the man ignored him, reaching for Anna again, but I had her now, and I held her, dragging her away from him and his friends, a row of men surrounding us, ugly grins across their faces.

  Later, when we had finally left the fort, and had returned to the hotel, I tried to talk to her.

  My attempts after the incident had gone wrong. I had veered between trying to comfort her, venting my own anger, and shouting at Jude.

  ‘It was just a misunderstanding,’ he had said, wanting to calm me down.

  ‘A cultural thing?’ I had glared at him.

  He shrugged. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘What?’ I stepped closer. ‘So, by analogy, every time a man treats a woman like shit, every time there is sexual harassment, gang rape, whatever, it’s just a cultural thing?’ I had clenched my hands, fingers in my palms, my rage red-hot in the marbled hall, sharp as the hundreds of tiny mirrors around us. I would have slapped him. And then, as I heard Anna still crying behind me, I knew I had to let it go.

  Back in our hotel room, I wished that Michael and I were still together and that he was here now. I wanted her to feel the world was safe. Overhead, the fans ticked round and round. In the gardens, they were setting up for our New Year’s Eve gathering, laying a special table for us, white cloth, glasses, silverware. We would eat and make a toast to Frans and Simon and their twenty years, and we would begin to reminisce about this trip even though it was not yet over.

  I took the headphones out of Anna’s ears and told her I wanted to talk to her.

  ‘What he did was wrong.’

  She kept her eyes on her knees.

  ‘And you shouldn’t feel ashamed. He should be ashamed. And you should be angry.’

  Her glance in my direction was furtive.

  ‘You know,’ I said, taking her hand in mine, ‘the worst thing is that I knew the situation wasn’t right.’

  ‘Me, too.’ It was the first words she had spoken about the incident.

  ‘From the minute he sat next to you. But I thought that if you just played it nice and let him have his photo, it would be over and done with.’

  Her voice was soft. ‘So did I.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should have intervened.’

  Sitting on the edge of her bed, I wanted her to look at me.

  ‘You have to trust it,’ I told her. ‘It’s called intuition, truth, inner sense, whatever — but if it’s telling you something, don’t ignore it. Because there are going to be difficult times in life, hard times, scary times, and you need to listen to that sense. Get away if it’s telling you to get away — don’t stay there being nice in the hope that everything will be okay.’

  Too many words. She reached for her headphones, but I put my hand on hers.

  ‘It’s important,’ I said, and she rolled her eyes.

  I had to let her go.

  From the balcony of our room, I could see the garden, darkening in the oncoming night. It was New Year’s Eve, I told myself, the start of another year. I would be home in a couple of days, back in the city where Lewis lived, and was, no doubt, celebrating now, kissing someone, his wife or his lover, with a languorous pleasure that had turned me inside out.

  As I drew the curtains to our room and told Anna we had to get ready, we were late, she turned on the television, wanting to see the New Year’s celebrations from around the world. With the volume down, I, too, watched until the cameras showed us fireworks lit up across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, midnight already there, and as the colours sparkled across that faraway sky, I heard the ping of my phone.

  He had sent me a message. I paused, hoping for the strength to ignore it.

  He was only ever going to make me sad. I had known that for quite a while now. Yet sometimes the knowledge was just not enough, or perhaps it was, in itself, just too limited. Maybe the intensity of the longing and the excitement and the desire were what mattered, and this was what I should be looking at, my gaze fixed there and not at the end.

  And so I reached across the bedside table, telling Anna not to wait for me but to go down to the garden, where the others were no doubt already gathered, old friends wanting to toast a love that had lasted and a year to come.

  I would join them soon.

  Murramarang

  ‘I’ve been composing a letter to Margaret in my head,’ Eloise said. She had paused, each foot balanced on a boulder, shading her eyes with her hands as she wondered what was the best path forward. Out at sea, a cormorant plunged beneath the surface and re-emerged with its feathers ruffled. ‘Every time I come on this walk, I find myself thinking about what I want to say to her.’

  The slabs of black rock had broken into smooth pebbles, and those that had been submerged when the tide was high were slippery, a fine pelt of moss covering their perfectly rounded curves. Eloise was heavy-footed and had little balance. When she was in her teens and felt she had to keep up, she would find herself anxious on walks such as this one; now she just took her time, sometimes half sitting as she made her way around to the bay opposite Brush Island, not liking how ridiculous she must appear but not caring enough to pretend she was capable.

  Taking Hamish’s hand, she stepped down from the last boulder, her feet sinking into the wet sand.

  ‘So,’ Hamish asked, ‘what would you say to her?’

  She was surprised he wanted to know. She’d talked so often about Margaret, and he usually did little to hide his lack of interest in the topic.

  ‘It’s not so strange,’ she said, ‘that I’m thinking about her all the time. Being here reminds me of her — even more so than usual.’ She let go of his hand as they continued to walk along the edge of the ocean, picking their way between clumps of glistening black weed washed up with the previous evening’s tide.

  This was their first holiday at this beach without Margaret and Justin. They had been coming here since Lila turned one, hiring the same house together, while Holly and Andrew, and their three boys, took the house next door. Eight years later, they only had one house. She and Hamish slept upstairs, while Holly stayed downstairs with the kids. Holly and Andrew had separated, and Eloise and Margaret no longer spoke. They had never actively made this decision; rather, Eloise had stopped ringing Margaret, wanting to see whether Margaret would ring her, which she never did. Sometimes she wondered whether it had been the other way round: Margaret had stopped calling her, to see whether she would telephone. Which she hadn’t. She had asked Hamish for his views on this several times, and he never answered, probably because it didn’t actually matter. She knew that the undoing had happened last summer, and when she came on this walk, she found herself picking over it, aware of the tender spots and uncovering them carefully.

  When she tried to talk to Holly about it, Holly would tell her to let it go. Her tanned legs sticking out of the shade of the umbrella as she kept one eye on her boys, the other on her book, she would say it was just the way it was. ‘Go with Hamish and have a walk,’ she would urge, despite Eloise protesting that it was too much to leave her with all the kids.

  But this morning she’d given
in, knowing they’d had little time alone.

  ‘There’s a lot I want to say,’ she told Hamish as they rounded the headland to where the rocks were flat enough for Eloise to feel safe, so much so that she strode a little faster than she would have liked, in an attempt to make up for how clumsy she had been earlier.

  She stopped at the grassy track above the rock ledge. Hamish was just behind her, staring at the waves.

  ‘It’s a good swell,’ he said. ‘Might get the board and head down to Racecourse when we get back.’

  He hadn’t been listening.

  ‘I miss her,’ she said, and she was surprised at the sadness in her voice.

  ‘People go.’ Hamish stepped up onto the track and turned her to face him, both hands on her shoulders. ‘You’ve got to let it happen.’

  Holly was the one who first brought them all here. She had come to this beach when she was at school, and she knew it well. In the years when she came with Andrew, she woke Eloise early each morning and together they walked along the windswept stretch of Murramarang, over the grassy headland and down to Bull Pup, a small bay that was calm and clear.

  The previous year, when Margaret was still with them, Holly had to take the house next door on her own. She had those two weeks with the kids; Andrew had the next.

  ‘It’s all good,’ she insisted when Eloise offered any form of sympathy, deftly deflecting any attempts to discuss the fall-out.

  Eloise wished that Margaret and Justin had gone next door and that Holly had stayed with them. Margaret had been in a bad mood from the first day, spending hours in her room with the door shut. When she did come out, she sat in the corner, staring out the window at the stretch of beach, giving monosyllabic answers to questions directed at her. She was premenstrual, she said, when Eloise cautiously asked her what was wrong.

  On the third night she threw a dish at Justin. ‘Why am I doing the fucking dishes again?’ she shouted as the china smashed on the ground.

  ‘Because you can’t let them sit there for two minutes unwashed.’