Between a Wolf and a Dog

by Georgia Blain

It is eight o’clock, and Lawrence will be here to get the girls in half an hour. Their bags are packed by the front door.

  ‘Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing,’ Ester says, taking the red hair-tie out of Catherine’s hair and swapping it for the blue one in Lara’s. She does this for the teachers, to help them distinguish between the two of them, but it is probably useless — they are likely to switch as soon as they are out of her sight.

  ‘What are you going to do while we’re at Dad’s?’ Lara asks.

  Ester smiles. ‘Sit up late, eat pizza, watch bad television.’

  ‘Or go out with Steven?’ There is muffled giggling, nervous glances, kicks under the table, and Ester looks from one to the other, momentarily silenced by their audacity.

  They have been at her phone, checking the calendar she keeps separate to her work appointment book. She remembers putting his name in, fear making her fingers clumsy, just as her voice had felt unlike her own when he had called her, and she had answered, aware of who he was the moment she heard him speak, lowering her tone so that she didn’t sound herself. She became sensible, serious, dull.

  She had met him at a family-mediation course. She had been late on the first day, taking the last seat at the table. He had spent most of the morning session surreptitiously sending and receiving texts. When they were paired for a role-playing exercise, he had no idea what they were meant to be doing.

  ‘You’re passive and I’m aggressive,’ she told him.

  ‘I’m Steven, actually,’ and he held out his hand.

  A woman called Heather was their mediator. She asked them both to give her a brief précis of why they were here, the nature of their conflict. She was nervous and shy, her voice almost too soft to hear.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Steven said.

  ‘We’re negotiating a financial settlement,’ Ester told him.

  ‘Do we have much?’

  She smiled. ‘Aside from a house and pitiful savings, there’s anger, hurt, and pride.’

  His eyes were smoke, clouds, and soft winter sky. He looked embarrassed when his phone chimed again. ‘It’s work,’ he explained. ‘I’m so sorry. They’re sacking someone I’ve been working with. It’s messy.’

  He was a counsellor for executives, brought in by companies when they were concerned that their top-level staff were not performing to the best of their abilities. ‘It can be a tricky line. The company pays my bill, but the person is my client.’

  ‘Can we get back to the settlement?’ Heather asked, sniffing anxiously as she saw the other groups well into the scenario.

  In the break, he offered to make her a cup of tea.

  ‘I don’t drink it,’ she told him.

  ‘Well, there’s a first,’ he smiled. ‘Someone else who doesn’t like tea.’

  ‘I try,’ she said. ‘But it’s the tannin. Makes my tongue curl and my teeth feel like chalk.’ She grimaced.

  ‘Clearly, no one has ever made you the perfect cup.’

  ‘They’ve given it a go,’ she told him. ‘But it’s never changed my mind.’

  He asked her where she worked.

  ‘At home,’ she told him. ‘I’m a counsellor. I specialise in family therapy.’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Sometimes. On the good days.’ She smiled.

  ‘Do you have a family of your own?’

  She looked straight at him as she answered. ‘Everyone does.’

  He laughed, and for the first time she witnessed a flicker of nerves. ‘That was a clumsy way of trying to find out if you’re on your own.’

  She was embarrassed. She remembers and blushes even now. It is so hard to do this, she thinks. To laugh, and be light, and take those first steps. It is a wonder anyone ever does it — that extraordinary, shimmering fragility so delicate and open. There, high above the city, standing next to an urn, a fake teak box filled with teabags, and, next to the box, carefully stacked white china cups, both of them surrounded by counsellors, she had felt it for an instant — the sparkling brightness of the moment — and it had made her look down at the carpet, his shoes, her boots, the stolid ordinariness of them not quite enough to ground her.

  After the course, he suggested they have a drink.

  ‘I only have an hour,’ she told him.

  The girls were with Hilary, and she called and asked her to feed them. She was running late, she said.

  They went to a bar, all warm wood and dark corners, and full of people younger than them. He asked her what she would do if she could start again, ‘if money and training were no option and you could do anything, anything at all.’

  She considered the question for a moment.

  ‘Maybe a gardener.’ But she was lying really, and she confessed as much. ‘I wouldn’t want to do the actual work; I’d just like to plan it, and then look at it once it was done.’

  He asked her about her family.

  ‘My mother is a filmmaker,’ she told him, ‘and my father was a painter.’

  ‘Siblings?’

  ‘A sister. She was a singer. She is a singer.’

  She didn’t want to talk about April, and she picked up the coaster, damp beneath her fingers, and then put it down again. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I like what I do,’ he said. ‘But if I could start again, maybe a surgeon. I spent six months in hospital. With a virus that went to my lungs and my kidneys. It was awful, but that whole world, the intensity of it, the drama, the fact that what you do matters,’ he smiled. ‘It was seductive. I could see why there are so many hospital soaps.’

  She liked him. A half hour passed, and then she called Hilary. An hour later, she called again. When she finally left, she was slightly drunk, and the softness of his lips on her cheek as they kissed goodbye had lingered, warm.

  It has been a year since she moved to this house, she thinks, two years since Lawrence sat in front of her and confessed. And despite being so tired of the taste of it, she has held his betrayal close.

  She looks at the girls now; Lara is uncertain as to whether they have gone too far, Catherine is nervous for her sister.

  ‘I am going out,’ Ester tells them. She smiles at Lara. ‘And what an extraordinary guess. I’m actually having dinner with someone called Steven. Clearly, you’re both geniuses or clairvoyant.’

  Lara giggles anxiously.

  ‘Will it ever stop raining?’ Ester asks them.

  Opening the front door so that she can hear Lawrence when he arrives, she looks out across her street, the trees bent low in the downpour, the gutters awash with stormwater, the sky low and sullen overhead. She wonders whether clients will cancel. She wonders if Steven will cancel, and she feels the push and pull of both relief and disappointment at the thought.

  And then Lawrence pulls up, his navy-blue station wagon idling out the front, the wipers going backwards and forwards, the headlights on, as he sounds the horn and she calls them — ‘Quick, your father’s here’ — asking Catherine to get Otto on the lead, kissing them and telling them she loves them. She buttons up their raincoats, not letting herself look towards the car until they are out the front door and running through the downpour to where he waits, back door just ajar so that they can get in straightaway.

  HILARY OFTEN FORGETS that Maurie has gone. When she wakes, she reaches across the bed, searching for his warmth, feeling the cool of the sheet before she shifts towards his side, stretching a little further out, her fingers certain they will touch him soon.

  He died in the middle of the night. She had got up, as she often did, finding her way down the stairs and along the corridor, her night vision never good, hands seeking the walls and then the door frames, not wanting to switch on a light because that would kill all possibility of getting back to sleep. In the kitchen, she had poured herself a glass of water, the plumbing groaning as she turned the tap off. />
  If she had heard anything — and she was never sure later whether or not she had — it would have been difficult to discern above the thump of metal pipes, the heavy clunk as the water ran down towards the drains. Sometimes, she is certain he called out. It was her name, she thinks. Other times, she is not so sure. Perhaps the pain, the massive heart attack he suffered, was just too sudden and swift — all life shut down before he even had a chance to register that this was happening to him.

  All she really knows is that when she returned to their room, he was no longer present. He was gone. It was not the shape of him. That had given no indication. It may have been the silence, the complete and utter stillness; no breath, no shift or movement, nothing. But she doesn’t think it was quite so prosaic. Maurie — all that he was and had been and could be and wanted to be, all that she had loved and at times loathed, the great space that he had filled — had left the building.

  As the realisation had begun to slowly disperse, cold tendrils unfurling, she wanted only to sit by his side until the first film of day washed across the walls, and the sounds of the street below drifted up: car doors opening and closing, a voice calling out, a dog barking.

  Her eyes had slowly adjusted to the light and she saw him then, his face contorted with pain, and she had to look away.

  Strangely, it had been April she had called — despite the fact that Ester was calmer and better in a crisis.

  ‘Maurie’s died,’ she had told her, and April had done what Hilary had known she would do. She had cried, a great outpouring of grief, a wailing, interspersed by questions, her voice still husky from sleep as she had asked how and when, only to sob over Hilary’s attempts at answering.

  ‘I’ll be over,’ April had promised.

  Hilary had heard the muttering of a male voice from the bed, and then the flare of a match as April lit a cigarette, the intake of nicotine.

  ‘Don’t go anywhere,’ she had said.

  ‘Where on earth would I go?’ Hilary had asked, only to realise her daughter wasn’t actually talking to her but to the man lying next to her.

  The bedroom she had shared with Maurie was the only under-furnished room in the house. When the girls had left home, Maurie had knocked two upstairs rooms into one, opening the space up to the northern light. They had painted the walls white, and put their bed in the middle. On the floor was a patchwork kelim. Nothing else. All their clothes were in the back bedroom, along with the spare bed.

  It had been Maurie’s idea. An empty room to help her sleep. And for two people who had always lived in clutter, it was a strange space, one that surprised her whenever she opened the door. It was like stepping into someone else’s room, she thought, and she never quite knew how she felt about that.

  She also hadn’t slept any better; she still didn’t sleep any better, but now that he was gone, she didn’t even attempt to for long, often turning on the light to read, or getting up well before it was light to go and work in her studio, only to return to her bed when everyone else was eating breakfast.

  This morning, as the rain pours down, April is sleeping inside, the door to the spare room still closed when Hilary went into the house for a coffee. There was something ominous about April’s presence, like having a grenade or landmine in the house, or harbouring a criminal; it was enough to send Hilary back to the studio, rather than upstairs for her morning nap.

  She closes the doors to the deluge — the sound is disturbing — and pulls the heater close. She has one copy of the film in a postbag, a version uploaded onto Vimeo, and one on her computer ready to show the girls. Like all her work, it is made from fragments — old pictures, images from Maurie’s notebooks, archive footage, and film she has shot over the years. She works in collage, layering images on top of each other in order to untangle larger ideas about life. Her work is often called autobiographical, and she resists the term, hating how confining it feels. She prefers to see her work as teasing out complexities that affect others as well as herself, sometimes using her own life as a springboard but never staying there.

  This one is called Keepsake. She struggled to define it in her notes for the festival. Yes, it is about death, but it is also about living — about what we cling to and what we relinquish — about how we remember, she supposes.

  The final footage she shot four years ago, shortly after Maurie died, when it rained like it is raining now. She had gone to their shack on the river, wanting a few days there to help her decide whether it should be kept or sold. She had simply filmed, with no particular project in mind. The swollen river was brown, murky, and ugly, the peak right at the top of the banks. Sitting on the step at the bottom of the path, her raincoat pulled over her head, she had filmed the flow, the swirl and eddy, the relentless rush and then, there, under a knot of tree roots, she had seen a fallen branch, heavy enough to create a small dam — a pool where the flow was stopped, and the leaves and twigs swirled helplessly, with nowhere to go.

  Maurie had built the shack when Ester was one and April three. He had gone there every weekend, often with several friends, leaving her at home alone with the babies. When she complained, which she did frequently, he would brush her off, telling her to come with them, oblivious to how impossible it would be to sleep under a tarp with the two girls, let alone to keep them away from nails and tools while he built.

  When he took them to see the end result of his labour, he made them all wear blindfolds. Ester in one arm, he led her and April down the track, the smell of eucalypt sharp in the air, the crushed leaves of the lemon-scented gums underfoot, the burn of the sun on her skin, and the tickle of an ant as it trailed its way across her ankle, while overhead there were bees, a soft drone that ebbed and flowed with a hypnotic rhythm.

  ‘The family palace,’ he announced.

  She wasn’t sure what she had expected. She never was with Maurie. Perhaps a one-room dwelling, a caravan attached. He called it a shack, they all called it a shack — then and in the years to come — but it was so much more than that. An Indian pavilion, she thought: the play of the roof, pitched and falling, pitched and falling, the graceful sweep of the old windows that he had salvaged from a demolition site, the delicate turns and curves of the wooden columns, and the generosity of the deep, wide verandah looking out on a row of poplars, their crinkled-paper leaves on slender branches shimmering beneath the sky.

  Inside there were two rooms: a huge open living room, and, behind that, a place to sleep, a curtain to divide them from the girls. The floors were old planks, some wide, some thin, the walls a mixture of tin and gyprock, and the ceiling was patched together, painted sky-blue.

  ‘The kitchen,’ Maurie showed her proudly, waving in the direction of an outdoor oven and a sink, both sheltered by tin walls and a tarp, and then, beyond that, the bathhouse — an old enamel tub, deep green, under the shade of a cottonwood.

  It was one of his finest works.

  She had looked at him with tears in her eyes and told him it was beautiful beyond imagining, and, holding the warmth of his face in her hands, she had kissed him, there in the entrance to their shack, while a swallow darted in through the open door and wheeled and turned under that crazy roof — the angles leaning seemingly without method, yet creating a kaleidoscope of pattern that had an order so intricate it made her head reel.

  When she told Ester and April that she wanted to sell the shack, it was Ester who begged her not to, although Hilary knows she feels differently about it now, that she now wants the place gone, all memory of it having been tainted. But at the time, Ester had been upset with Hilary’s decision, and Hilary had been surprised. Ester was the only one of them who regularly threw out clutter, who sorted old clothes and gave them to the charity shops, who admired the children’s art and then surreptitiously slipped it in the recycling bin, who put the lidless Tupperware out with the plastics, and who liked just one work of art on a wide expanse of white wall. Ester let things
go — or so Hilary had thought.

  April, on the other hand, had told Hilary it was a good idea. She was the one who had gone there as an adult, trying to write her last album in the heat of the summer, only to give up after a week with just one song and mosquito bites covering her long golden limbs. Her voice had trembled slightly as she confessed that she had spent most of the time sitting on the verandah, bored and wanting to come home — a fact she soon forgot when she returned there some time later, only to wreak pain and havoc in all their lives.

  April was a hoarder. She would open her handbag to search for cigarettes, and the chaos of her life would spill out: bills scribbled on, broken lipsticks, books she had borrowed, a singlet, a restaurant menu, all spread across the table. Her apartment, bought after the success of her first single, looked out over Rose Bay. The top floor of a grand art deco building, the rooms were magnificent in their sweep, seemingly impossible to fill. She had covered the walls with Maurie’s art, selling off paintings as she needed the money, and then replacing them with images that she liked: drawings from the twins, pictures from Hilary’s films, even sketches she herself had done. The floors were layered in rugs, her clothes were strewn across the furniture, and the windows were draped in badly hemmed curtains she had made. But when you first walked in, when you first saw the dance of colours and textures, it was alluring, the messiness beneath not evident to the new visitor, only the thrill of such complete disregard for order.

  Hilary had thought April would be the one to beg her not to sell the river shack. But she hadn’t. Feet up on a chair, coffee cup in one hand, she had barely looked up from the paper. ‘Sure. It’s up to you.’

  And so she had put it on the market, travelling up there to see what needed to be fixed, Lawrence offering to go some months later to do the work.

  It had failed to get the price she wanted. In retrospect she was foolish not to take the first two offers, but she hadn’t, possibly influenced by her own sadness at letting go of the place. She had taken it off the market, telling the agent to only show people who were genuinely interested, but not to worry about advertising it. No further offers were made until the most recent one — which was a third less than the figure she had initially rejected, but one she would be foolish to let go of, the agent said. Unlike the city, the country was a buyer’s market apparently.