The Secret Lives of Men

by Georgia Blain

  ‘I’ll miss her,’ Clara told Sean, and she kissed him on the cheeks.

  In the car Sinead blew her nose several times, scrunching the last sodden tissue into a ball before dropping it onto the floor.

  ‘I’m not dead yet,’ Clara eventually said.

  Sinead took a deep breath. She looked at herself in the rear-vision mirror: her nose was red, her eyelids swollen and sore, her mascara had run, and she had a piece of food from breakfast still wedged between her two front teeth. ‘What a mess.’

  Clara reached out and put her hand on Sinead’s knee. Sinead rested her own hand on top, the first few liver spots forming on her skin and dried purple ink crusted around her fingernails. She thought she had washed it all off when she had finished teaching her printmaking class last night.

  ‘Shall we go to the wake?’ She turned to her mother, who nodded, taking out a fresh tissue.

  ‘But clean yourself up first, darling,’ and Clara spat on it, wiping Sinead’s face, before she could stop her.

  When lunch is served, Sinead and Clara both wish they’d ordered a burger and smoothie, rather than lentil patties and herbal tea.

  ‘Don’t drink it all,’ Zoe says, arm outstretched to take the glass back as Sinead takes a sip.

  ‘It is hers,’ Clara adds as Sinead keeps drinking.

  ‘It’s enormous,’ Sinead tells them both. ‘And I paid for it.’

  Clara has a piece of paper in front of her and she is jotting down figures.

  ‘We can do the first house or the last,’ she says. ‘But it means no trip to Europe.’

  Shortly after she was diagnosed with cancer, she had told Sinead and Zoe she wanted to take them both to Italy. Why not spend the money before she died, she said. Why not have fun? Sinead had been furious. It wasn’t practical to organise a trip now. They didn’t know how the operation would go, and how she would feel after the follow-up treatment. They were sitting in the kitchen at Sinead’s house, the night warm, the cicadas throbbing outside. Zoe had the television turned up so she could hear her program, but she had come in at the mention of overseas travel.

  ‘Can we go? Can we go?’ She jumped up and down, short sharp bounces that rattled the table and all the plates and glasses on it.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ Clara had replied, pouring herself a third glass of wine. ‘But then you and I have adventurous spirits, my darling.’ She took Zoe’s hand in her own. ‘We are alike.’

  After dinner Sinead had told her it was all very well to play a little ‘let’s go to Europe’ game with her, but not with Zoe. ‘You could see how excited she was. And you’re only going to let her down.’

  Why not be optimistic, Clara had insisted. They could book for six months after the end of her treatment and if she couldn’t go then, well, so what? The worst that could happen was that she might lose some money on the tickets.

  ‘No,’ Sinead replied. ‘The worst that could happen is that you might be dead.’

  The trip wasn’t mentioned again. Not until now, and Sinead pushes her plate away, leaving the last of the barely edible lentil patties untouched.

  ‘I’d rather go to Europe than rent a bloody dump,’ Zoe says, and realising her error, she grins. ‘Correction: a nasty dump.’

  Sinead is silent.

  ‘Well, let’s face it,’ Clara says. ‘If we’re assuming I’m going to be well enough to come for weekends away down here, we might as well assume I’ll be able to travel to Italy.’

  There is quite a difference between an hour’s drive down the coast and a twenty-four-hour plane flight, Sinead reminds her.

  ‘All I’m saying is it’s one or the other.’ Clara raises her hand, trying to catch the attention of a passing waitress. ‘I can’t afford both.’

  Later, Sinead swims out into the bay. The water is cool with the first autumn tides, but as she takes strong strokes forward she begins to feel the warmth of her blood, coursing throughout her body.

  Behind her, Zoe is holding on to a kickboard, making her own way a little to the left, while back on the beach, Clara dozes against a rock with Pepper beside her, her head tilted up to the afternoon sun, her eyes closed.

  It is almost empty. Midweek, end of summer, and only a father and his son sit on the sand. In the distance, a woman in pink tracksuit pants jogs to the other end, her dog following her, chasing the stick she throws out into the ocean for him. Sinead lets herself float into shore.

  It is a beautiful beach, she thinks, grateful that this, at least, hasn’t disappointed her, and that she can still hope she might one day rent a shack down here, a place to get away and do some of her own work, have friends to stay. As the sea becomes shallow, she stands, looking up to where Zoe is jumping on the sand, agitated.

  ‘There are sea lice,’ she calls out, and it’s true, Sinead is also starting to feel itchy.

  They grab their towels and rub them over their skin until the sting begins to ease.

  ‘I’m not going in again,’ Zoe says.

  Sinead walks to the water’s edge. A cob of corn washes against her feet, and she steps back, irritated. It is the father and his son. They are tossing them out to sea as soon as they finish eating them, the gnawed ends floating straight back.

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ she tells Clara in a loud voice.

  ‘Sshh,’ Zoe urges, embarrassed.

  ‘I want them to hear,’ Sinead says.

  ‘Well, why don’t you just tell them directly?’ Clara tries to lift herself up, holding on to the rock behind her as she pulls her body onto her knees and then into a standing position.

  Sinead helps her. ‘Because I’m too pathetic,’ she confesses.

  ‘I’m a little like that myself,’ Clara says.

  The woman in the pink tracksuit walks past them, raising a hand in greeting. They watch her head over the rocks and up to one of the larger brick houses built right on the water’s edge.

  ‘I’ll probably never go jogging again.’ Clara sighs.

  ‘You never did go jogging.’ Sinead gathers their towels and tells Zoe to take the kickboard and Pepper. ‘Shall we just head home?’ she asks, and Clara nods.

  They walk back up the path to the car, Sinead leading the way, Zoe following, and Clara taking her time. Out on the street, they pass one of the original shacks, the paint peeling and the garden overgrown with grevillea and bottlebrush. Sinead turns back to Clara, who has also paused to peer into the yard.

  ‘Now that’s what I like,’ Clara says. ‘If that one was for sale —’ She catches her breath before she continues to where Sinead and Zoe brush the sand from their legs and arms, ready to pull their clothes over their still-damp swimmers.

  It is later than they thought, the clarity of the day softening into the cool of afternoon more quickly now that summer is ending. But despite the chill, Zoe still wants to stop for an ice-cream.

  At the local shop, Sinead buys three Magnums, knowing they will not go to the agent’s and fill out a rental form for any of the houses, nor will they look at the last of the places for sale. Instead, they will head out through the national park and back onto the highway that leads into the city, talking about how they might come back to see the last place again (‘not the first — it was a dump,’ Sinead will insist, and Clara will continue to disagree), while in the back seat, Zoe will sit, cheek against the window, wanting to experience only the boredom the whole way home.

  Flyover

  Sometimes, as I wait in a line of traffic near the turn-off to Glebe, I glance up to the three apartment blocks pressed tight against the tangle of roads. I wonder which of the windows in which of these buildings looks out from the room where I once spent the night with a man I didn’t know. I have no idea, although I think perhaps he was living in the first block, the one closest to the flyover.

  I had just turned
nineteen when I stayed with him. Sydney was new to me, and I had no work, little money and only two friends, both of whom had come from Adelaide as well. Each Friday night we went to a bar that had once been a funeral parlour. Upstairs the music was a deep thud in the smoky darkness, while downstairs it was quieter, and you could sit in armchairs and drink.

  He was the barman.

  He was certain he knew me, or so he said the first time he took my order. He leant across the counter, his black fringe falling over his eyes, his skin pale in the blue light from the mirrors behind him. He had given us double shots, he told me, and I could taste the bitter gin before I even had a sip, the inside of my mouth dry with the memory of what was to come.

  The next time, he asked me what I did, and I said I was trying to find a job.

  ‘Modelling? Acting?’ He slid the money I was offering back towards me, one hand still on top of it.

  I said that I wanted to be a journalist, ignoring the notes he had pushed across the counter.

  Cate was bemused by my refusal. ‘It’s not like we don’t need it.’ She examined him, eyes narrowed. ‘Not bad-looking,’ she decided. ‘But not my type.’

  She was the only one of us who had a job. As a production assistant on a television show, her wage wasn’t high, but she was earning, and had hopes of a rapid ascent to something better. Loene and I were staying on the floor of the house she was minding until the end of the month, nibbling away at the edges of our savings, anxious about each dollar we spent.

  And so I ordered for us again.

  ‘Where do you live?’ His fingers rested on the damp cardboard coaster, as he tilted his head to flick his hair out of his eyes. He shrugged away my offer of payment, and this time I accepted.

  We were looking for a place, I said. I reached for the drinks, unable to avoid touching his hand, his skin clammy.

  He told me I reminded him of someone. ‘An actor.’

  ‘That’s so corny,’ and I shook my head in embarrassment.

  ‘Want to do something when I finish my shift?’ His hand was on my arm. ‘It’s only an hour away.’

  I said I was busy, despite knowing it would soon be obvious I had no plans other than staying here and getting drunk.

  ‘I won’t give up,’ he told me.

  And he didn’t: the next Friday he asked me out again.

  ‘I have Tuesday nights off.’ He held his hands in prayer position.

  It had been a bad week. I had been called in by a magazine, only to be told by the editor that she had asked to see me not because she had work for me, but simply to give me some advice.

  ‘You’re wasting your time sending a CV like this around.’ She tapped my neatly typed pages with the tip of a long crimson fingernail. ‘You have no experience. None at all. Your whole approach is wrong. The way to get into this industry is either contacts, or you start at the bottom of a down-market publication.’

  She was right. It had been a waste of time. Worse, she had succeeded in making me feel small, but I thanked her for trying to help me.

  ‘I could take you out for a meal,’ the barman pleaded. ‘At least give me your number.’

  I could see the back of his head reflected in the mirror, obscuring my own face. In the dim lighting, my arms appeared to come from his body, and I smiled.

  ‘That’s a yes?’

  What would it hurt? It wasn’t like my life was particularly good as it was. I took the pen he gave me and wrote my name and number on the back of the coaster, the ink barely legible as it bled into the damp.

  A few weeks ago, when I was waiting in the airport lounge for the plane back to Sydney, I thought I saw him again. I don’t remember much about him — the exact location of his flat, his name, and the finer details of how he looked are all gone. There is only a vague sense of his dark hair and the white of his skin. But as I sat there with my work files unopened on the table in front of me, a plate of wilted salad on my lap, I found myself staring at a man two seats to my left. He glanced up, and I glanced away. Seconds later, he caught me staring at him again.

  Embarrassed, I half acknowledged him. He turned back to his magazine. He was pale and slightly overweight, his shirt stretched a little too tight around his waist, his hair still falling foppishly across his forehead.

  The announcement for the flight echoed through the lounge, and I stood, forgetting the salad on my lap. The plate slid onto the carpet, the contents leaving an oily stain as I tried to pick up the mess.

  I was one of the last on board, and in the cramped aisle I waited for another passenger to force her bag into the overhead locker. When I finally got to my seat, I saw that he was sitting by the window.

  I apologised while trying to extract my seatbelt from the gap between us. As he shifted his weight, I noticed the softness of his hands, a single gold band around his wedding-ring finger.

  I was forced to tug the belt out from underneath him and our eyes met. I wanted to say then that I was sorry for having stared at him in the lounge, and that I wasn’t sure if I knew him. The thought, however, of opening up what could be an awkward conversation, with no escape for the next hour, kept me silent; instead, I took the magazine out from the seat pocket and flicked through articles I had read on the way down a week earlier.

  I had been covering a conference on global warming, filing stories on a regular basis and working on a feature for the weekend edition. As an industrial reporter, this was not a job I would normally have taken, but in the last month Jason had decided to return to his wife and children. It was a decision we had discussed for some time, moving from a bleak awareness that his wife’s illness meant this could be necessary, to realising that this was, in fact, the inevitable place to which we had come. At first we had talked constantly, picking over and over the decision until, weighed down by the inadequacy of words, we had pared back all discussion to the cold practicalities. This was the week he was going to pack and organise a truck to clear out all he owned from our house. It would be easier if I wasn’t there and he could just get the job done.

  Now, at the end of what had been a busy five days, I was bracing myself for the return to Sydney. Ultimately I would be alright. But there was first the space between now and a time, somewhere in the future, when we would have either let each other go, or negotiated some form of friendship. That was what made me anxious.

  Once again, I glanced briefly at the man next to me, wanting to distract myself from the thought of my homecoming. I was careful to keep my head lowered and my eye contact barely noticeable. He was gazing out the window at the tufts of cloud that wrapped us, grey and insubstantial, drifting like floss around the plane. I wished I could remember his name but I couldn’t, and I knew I had no hope of guessing what it might be. Nothing out of the ordinary, that was all I could recall. Robert, perhaps? His hands were resting in his lap, fingers curled tight into the palm. As he turned, I glanced away, careful not to be caught out again.

  Robert, and I will call him that because it is a name as good as any other, phoned me the morning after I gave him my number. I had woken, my sheets pulled back to reveal the bare mattress on the floor. The lounge room where I slept still smelt of cigarette smoke and the cheap perfume we’d put on before heading out the previous night. Through the gap in the curtains I could glimpse a sliver of sharp light that hurt my eyes.

  When I first decided to move to Sydney, I thought I would find work almost immediately. I saw myself in my own house. I envisaged friends. Lately I wanted to go home, back to South Australia, but this never developed beyond a general desire to return because there was, in reality, no family house to go back to, no work there, just a few friends who would welcome me but would probably not shift or adjust their lives to fit me back within the fold. I had my sister, who lived with her husband and children in the foothills. They went to our church each week, and spoke a language I had nev
er understood, one of Christ and heaven and hell, and absolute rights and wrongs. My mother was in the granny flat at the back of their house, although she would soon have to go to a home. Sometimes she knew who we were, sometimes she didn’t. She sat in the lounge room and called the grandchildren over to sit on her lap, making up different names each time and wondering why they never answered. She was only sixty, but she seemed so much older.

  Next to me, Loene stirred, snorting as she rolled to one side, her hand flung out onto the floor; while upstairs Cate slept in the one bedroom, a narrow white chamber with a broken window that looked over the back lane.

  In the courtyard, I sat on the step and drank a cup of tea, staring at the gate, loose on its hinges from drunks and junkies trying to break in.

  We were meant to be inspecting a house for rent in less than an hour, and I knew I should wake the others, but I wanted to shower first, ensuring that I got some of the hot water. I tiptoed into the lounge, careful not to trip over the mattress, lurching for the phone as it rang.

  Robert — he is becoming that name as I use it more frequently — wanted to meet me at a café in Glebe. I wrote the address down on a scrap of paper, although I knew the place he suggested.

  ‘What are you up to today?’ he asked.

  I told him we were house-hunting. ‘It’s what we always do,’ I said.

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Darlinghurst, Newtown, Glebe.’

  He wished me luck. He said he was looking forward to seeing me. ‘Tuesday,’ he reminded me. ‘Seven o’clock.’

  I hung up and crumpled the paper in my hand.

  ‘Who was that?’ Loene wanted to know, and I blushed as I admitted it was the barman. But she didn’t wait to hear my reply. She had pushed past me, closing and locking the bathroom door behind her before I had time to protest.

  When I arrived the following Tuesday, he was already at a table. I could see him through the window, and I only wanted to walk away and go home, but I stood there watching him turn the menu over and over, the plastic coating slipping between his fingers. He saw me and stood, beckoning me inside.