New shoes: $50
A stereo (second-hand would be fine): $350
Air conditioning in the car: $1500
Saucepans: $100
A couch: $700
She glances down the street, and forgets the total again. She can’t even remember what it is she thinks she wants.
‘Why?’ Liam asks her every time she brings home something new, and she used to attempt to answer him, to explain that they only had two plates left without chips or cracks, that their knives were all blackened from the days when they used to spot hash together after they moved back to the city, that the blankets are worn through, that it depresses her, all of it.
Liam, on the other hand, has always had next to no interest in possessions, and this has not changed. Caitlin, too, had the same irritating lack of regard for the material. She would not have cared if she had gone to school in dresses that were too small for her, or socks that did not match. As she got older, she would listen to their disagreements over money and side with Liam, not in words, but in her actions, in her clear preference for his company over her own.
When they first left Sassafrass, in all those months before Liam began to do the odd freelance job, there had been times when there was not even enough money for food. She had finished her schooling at night, and worked during the day, waiting in cafes, typing; she had taken whatever she could get. She had been horrified at how much money they needed just to survive. She would wake at night, anxious, and he would attempt to soothe her, telling her it was all right, it didn’t really matter, and, if the worst came to the worst, they could always borrow from Margot.
She had, at first, tried to blame Simeon for their poverty. She had gone to him before they left Sassafrass, hoping to receive some payment, even if it were only token, for the years of labour. She had been genuinely surprised at his harshness, his refusal to help her.
‘We housed and fed you. God knows what would have become of you if we hadn’t.’
She told him that she had thought they were friends, and she raised her voice slightly, both of them aware that she would be heard by the others in the hall should she choose to increase the volume a little further.
‘I mean, we’ve fucked each other.’
‘That doesn’t enter into it.’
‘Obviously.’
She looked around his room, at the Indian wall hangings, the books of teachings, the candles, his robes, washed daily by Mirabelle, and she shook her head in disbelief, both at his words and at her own stupidity for having had any faith in him.
‘You are not fair,’ she said, hating her childlike complaint. ‘I am not even asking for full payment,’ and she stared straight back at him as she told him she would have no hesitation in revealing their meetings to Mirabelle.
He didn’t even blink. ‘Tell her what you like. People only ever believe what they want to believe.’
It was Liam who had urged her to let it go, and she did as he asked because she trusted him then, completely.
Gradually that trust has eroded.
She remembers how she once wanted to go to university and she shakes her head at the recollection.
‘You should just do it,’ Liam would say, supportive as always, but eyes closed to the reality of their situation.
It had, of course, never eventuated.
Let it go. It is what he has always told her. Until now. Since she brought Essie home, there has been a change. He wants to take her back to Caitlin. When he first told her this, they had argued. She asked him to drop it, and she had expected him to do just that. But even though he no longer talks of taking Essie back, she knows that this is still what he wants to do. She sees it in his face, whenever she looks at him. She is afraid each time he leaves the house with Essie, afraid he will not return, more so this morning than ever before.
She stands now on the footpath, the blister on her foot sore from where one of Liam’s boots has chafed against her skin. Across the road the young guy who works the newsstand grins and waves at her, and she raises her hand in response. Normally she would go over there, particularly as she has not seen him for a while. On her good days she is still partial to a flirt, and he is always keen. He asks her out, and she tells him she has to get permission. ‘From my husband,’ she says, ‘and he’s a mean old bastard. Besides, I’m too old for you.’
He beckons her over now, but she pretends she hasn’t seen him, knowing she doesn’t have the capacity to summon up the light-hearted banter they usually exchange.
She can see Lou approaching, heavily pregnant. As she watches her coming closer, she knows that they will both laugh – ‘bloody Liam,’ they will say – because he has done this before, taken the keys, despite the numerous times she has told him that she is expected to open up.
‘You know what he’s like,’ she says when she recounts her stories of how impossible he is, stories that she edits to give the impression that it is still okay between them – that everything is okay, in fact.
‘Welcome back,’ Lou tells her when they get inside, and she grimaces as she points to the chaos of files that have been left by the various temps that were hired in her absence.
‘Jesus,’ and Sharn looks at the mess in horror, taking off her boots and rubbing at her heel before she attempts to clear the papers that cover her chair.
‘We’ve been flat out,’ Lou apologises.
There have been senate committees and commissions, as well as the usual caseload. The temps were hopeless. Most of them lasted no more than a week, and in the end they had simply given up, hiring no one in her absence. Lou helps Sharn gather the files into some kind of manageable pile as she talks.
Sharn knows how much work there is, she has coordinated it all for years, often stepping in to write submissions when the others are too busy, frequently helping out with the backlog of written advice, even preparing lectures to be given by the lawyers to law students. Ten years ago she was hired to do secretarial work (she had lied, telling them she had worked for a legal firm up north), and now she is the administrator.
‘You could have warned me,’ and she steps back to survey it all one more time. ‘I would have come in a day a week or something.’
‘You seemed like you had enough on your plate.’
She knows about Essie. They all know about Essie. Sharn has told most people a cut-down version of the story she told Liam on her return; Caitlin’s concern about her daughter’s health, and her offer to get help.
‘She’s involved in some nutcase cult,’ Sharn always says, rolling her eyes as she does so.
She clears a space on the desk, not looking up as Lou asks her how it’s all going.
‘Fine,’ she says, and then she admits that they are both a bit stretched, but it is basically okay. ‘Better than it was,’ she adds.
Essie had not been calm when Sharn first brought her home. Initially, she woke a lot in the night, crying inconsolably while she or Liam rocked her back and forth in their arms. (Liam had at first told her that he wanted nothing to do with it, that Sharn was on her own, but he had – as she had expected he would – soon softened, walking Essie round the house and singing to her until her eyes finally closed again, stepping in each time Sharn’s frustration with lack of sleep caused her to pace that little bit faster, rock that little bit harder.)
‘So you don’t know how much longer she’s going to be with you?’ Lou asks.
Sharn shakes her head.
‘Don’t know what I’d do if either of my kids had a baby and gave it to me. Particularly now,’ and she looks down at her swollen stomach ruefully.
Lou has two children, Christina and David, who are twins. Caitlin had once been friends with Christina, for a brief period only, and with so little attachment that using the term friendship was probably giving the relationship more weight than it deserved. It was Christina who used to ring Caitlin, who asked her out – never the other way round – and for a while, Sharn had wondered whether Christina had a crush on her daughter. Caitl
in had never had a relationship with anyone, male or female. Christina, from the time she had declared herself a lesbian at age sixteen, had had numerous girlfriends.
The calls had not lasted for long. Sharn remembers Caitlin coming home one night. It was the end of the school year and she had gone with Christina to a party. Sharn woke as the key turned in the lock. Liam was still up. He had asked Caitlin why she was home so soon, and Sharn thought, for a moment, that she heard the sound of crying from her daughter, but her voice was controlled when she spoke.
‘I don’t have anything in common with any of them,’ she said.
Liam had told her that kids got drunk, or out of it, it was part of growing up, it wasn’t such a big deal, and Caitlin said she knew that.
‘It’s just not me,’ she said again, certain in her response.
Shortly after that night, she stopped returning Christina’s calls. Shortly after that night, she met Fraser, and started going to meetings. And not long after that she had gone.
Sharn picks up the first of the files: the roster of volunteer solicitors for the children’s advocacy night. Outside it has started to rain, the pale wash of feeble blue sky now clouded, a sullen grey. She would like to call Liam, to check that he is okay, to reassure herself that he still loves her, but she resists the urge to pick up the phone. She knows what will happen if they speak, all her good intentions will disintegrate. She would be irritated with him for having taken her keys and he would tell her it was no big deal, and on and on they would go.
Lou unlocks the back door and tells her she has to get to her doctor’s appointment. The others will be in soon. Sharn is going to apologise again for having got her down here, but then she looks at the mountain of papers and decides against it.
She turns back to her work, and as she begins to enter the lawyers’ names into the system, she decides that she will call him after all. He may be able to collect Essie, letting her get a full day done. That is why she wants to speak to him, to make arrangements, and as she tells herself this, the anxiety she felt only moments ago begins to dissipate, not gone completely, but diminished by the possibility of talking to him.
There is no answer, just his voice on the mobile message bank, and as she listens, she tries, almost as a game, to remember. Closing her eyes, she searches for the person she once was, wanting to hear him as she once did, sure she can grasp that moment if she tries a little bit harder, so sure, in fact, that she hangs up without speaking and dials again, but this time it is his studio she calls, and she feels her fingers tighten around the receiver as she hears him speak: ‘Hi, you’ve called Liam, leave me a message.’
But it doesn’t last. She is irritated, or at least that is how she sounds as she asks him to call her, hanging up as she turns back to her desk, her now cold cup of coffee resting precariously on top of the files that need sorting.
LIAM IS NOT IN THE ROOM when Sharn calls. He is sitting under the eaves, smoking a cigarette and watching the rain drench the scarecrow in the community garden.
He remembers Sharn telling him about the place where she grew up, the rain that went on and on, a slow drizzle that could last for days. It was mining country, but the company had pulled out years earlier and no one had any work.
‘It was fucking dreary,’ she would say. ‘Depressing.’
He likes the rain. He always has. He leans forward, shaking his head at the impossible number of differences between them, and flicks the ash from his cigarette out into a puddle, the drops from the eaves falling onto the back of his neck.
He has had this room for over three years now. It is part of a row of studios owned by the community centre and rented out to non-profit organisations for only ten dollars a week. He managed to get one when a friend left, convincing the administrator (who didn’t really care) that he wanted the space to make his own films, an enterprise that would, as Sharn all too readily said, always remain non-profit.
His room faces north, looking out over the garden, past the Steiner kindergarten and beyond to the enclosure where injured birds are treated until they are well enough to be released. Sometimes he spends hours just watching the pink galahs working their way around the cyclone fencing, claws gripping the wire, tough beaks clicking against the steel, rough tongues tasting the unfamiliar metal. One screeches now as the volunteer clangs the gate shut behind her, and the noise is like an alarm, harsh enough to disturb him from his stillness and remind him that he should get back inside.
He hears Sharn’s voice from the window above him, only the last few words of her message audible in the heaviness of the rain as he stubs his cigarette out on the wet concrete: ‘… and thanks for taking my keys – great help on my first day back.’
He feels in his pocket and realises, guiltily, that he has, indeed, done as she said, and he sighs because she will probably still be angry about this when he gets home this evening.
He checks the entire message when he is inside, and is surprised to find that there have been two incoming calls he missed. Sharn asking him to get Essie, and someone he worked with almost a year ago, asking him if he would be up for a job, a good one, car ad, ‘call me back – but soon, we need to lock everyone down asap.’
Surprisingly he does not dial back straight away. He is going to, he has the phone in his hand and he is ready to press the numbers without even thinking, but then he stops.
The footage he has been viewing is still in the projector. He has not started editing yet. The boxes that he has gone through are to the left of the desk, the rest are still stacked on the shelves. He has watched about two-thirds now, and this morning it is Caitlin that he has been looking at, taking out whatever spools are labelled with her name. He wants to remember. Because when he left Essie this morning at Margot’s, when she cried and reached for him, he thought that he should not have been going through this, summoning up the love that a child demands and deserves; love that he had once given without hesitation to Caitlin and that she should now be giving to her child.
He said nothing, but Margot kissed him and told him that it was all right, that they would be fine, he was doing the right thing, lying without looking at him.
‘You are so like your mother sometimes, it infuriates me,’ Sharn would say, and she would invariably be referring to his vagueness, his evasiveness when it came to confronting the facts at hand, his ability to ignore anything that was difficult.
She was right, but he didn’t see why being like Margot (and not like Sharn) was so disagreeable. Sometimes, when he saw the chaos of his mother’s house, her jewellery work spread across the kitchen, her reading strewn across the bathroom, her clothes draped over the bannisters, he felt relief. This lack of order made sense to him, while Sharn’s increasing determination to keep their lives within a tightly orchestrated grid has become something he has grown to hate.
He has always done what she wants. He has always been loyal.
(No, you haven’t, she would say. Silently and surely, you have always done what you wanted, you have followed just as far as it suits you, and then you have simply stopped, impassive, immovable, infuriating.)
But now he does not know if he can continue.
He sits in the armchair in the corner of the room and looks at the blank wall. The rain is softer now. He has left the window open a couple of centimetres and he can see it coming in, the papers on the edge of his desk curling up with the moisture.
He remembers opening the door that night to find Sharn, standing in the rain with Essie in her arms. He had assumed that Caitlin was just behind her.
‘She came back?’ he asked, and he looked out to the car, but there was no one in the passenger seat.
‘She’s not well,’ she said, handing Essie over to him with no further explanation, and she had sat, exhausted, in the hallway.
‘Where is she?’ Liam asked, still uncertain as to what was actually happening.
‘She needs to be fed. We need to get her to a doctor. First thing.’
He had look
ed at this small child in his arms and then back at Sharn, shaking his head in confusion. There had been no discussion, no intimation even, that this would be happening. And he waited for her to talk, because she could talk, fast and furious when she had to, spinning words around and around so that it was impossible to discern the truth. He has heard her, with himself, with friends, with Caitlin, but that night she barely said anything.
‘Tomorrow,’ she promised. ‘Just give me tonight. I’m too tired.’
And he had let her off.
Sitting in the darkness by the river at Sassafrass, she used to tell him stories, presenting him with small pictures of her life. He remembers putting his arm around her shoulder when she told him about her mother dying, and feeling her flinch. Her mother’s death came only a year after her father suddenly dropped dead from a stroke. (‘God knows why,’ Sharn had said, ‘it wasn’t like he ever did anything.’) Her mother, on the other hand, kept working until she was too sick to get up. She had cancer. She died two hours after Sharn got her to the hospital. Sharn hadn’t even known she was ill.
‘I was sixteen,’ she told him. ‘And I was wild.’
She told him about driving out to the mines in the back of a panel van, six or seven of them crammed in, with only the headlights breaking the darkness, the rain and the cold making the windows fog up, the tyres spinning in the mud, and the music so loud you couldn’t even hear yourself think.
She used to drink more than any of them, she said. She could knock back whole flagons of cheap wine, and then they would drop them down the shaft, leaning right in after them, daring each other to see who could come closest to letting go and plummeting into the darkness.
And sometimes I wouldn’t have minded,’ she said. ‘Falling.’
It was little wonder she found herself three months pregnant shortly after her mum had died.
‘That’s what happened to girls like me,’ and she had looked straight at him, daring him to look away.
She kidded herself that she wasn’t really going to have a baby, that this wasn’t really happening to her, and she packed her stuff and hitched out of that town, headed for the coast.
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