Between a Wolf and a Dog

by Georgia Blain

  The rain drums on the awning, fat drops gathering in each dip of the colourbond, swelling and falling, a curtain of silver around him, as he puts his phone back in his pocket.

  Otto barks, loud enough to startle Lawrence.

  It’s an ibis — wanting the carcass. It flaps its wings and honks, and, for one moment, Lawrence thinks it may even try and fight the dog for the scraps, but Otto’s snarl sends it beating a retreat.

  This time he’d wanted to put in a question about leadership popularity. Who did voters like better — the Prime Minister or his Communications Minister? The editors weren’t interested. ‘No one wants a leadership challenge story at the moment.’ But he’d included it anyway. Perhaps he could play a little with the results of that question, drop it into his media release, make sure to mention it in each interview he does.

  He looks down at Otto, who has a piece of alfoil stuck to the corner of his mouth, and tells him it’s time to get going.

  ‘I have work to do,’ he says.

  Not that Otto cares.

  ‘Opinions to report.’ He whistles once, and Otto stands.

  They could make a run for the shelter of a tree and then a dash for the car, or they could not even bother trying and just get wet. He chooses the first option, Otto the second.

  LOUISA HAD THOUGHT she was going to have to bring Jasper with her. She tells Ester this as soon as she arrives, her words tumbling out in a rapid, breathless torrent as they often do at the beginning of a session.

  Her mother had called that morning saying the rain was too much. She was anxious driving when it was like this; she didn’t think she could come over and mind him after all.

  ‘She helps so little,’ Louisa says to Ester, and she glances around the room as though there is someone else there with them, listening to her betrayal and judging her.

  ‘So, what happened?’ Ester asks.

  ‘I told her that I really needed to go. That I wasn’t coping.’ Louisa sniffs loudly, and then bites hard on her lip. ‘I mean, I’m not, am I?’ Her anger is building now.

  This is the usual pattern, and Ester doesn’t reply, knowing there is more to come.

  ‘Anyway, she came, but she was pissed, said I needed to call the childcare centre again and demand a place. It was ridiculous how long I’d been waiting.’ She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘She has no idea. She thinks it’s just me, being hopeless.’ She looks out the window, the rain drumming down a hard beat behind their conversation.

  Ester moves her chair a little closer. ‘It’s difficult to hear,’ she says, smiling.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Louisa apologises. ‘Everyone tells me I speak too softly. Probably because I do. But if I let myself speak louder, it’d be a shout before you knew it.’

  It takes a moment or two for Louisa to continue; Ester can see her biting back the harshness lurking behind each word. ‘When I thought I was going to have to bring Jasper, I thought I’d just cancel.’ Her gaze is challenging. ‘You know why I come here? It’s just to get a couple of hours to myself.’ She has to look away at this point. ‘If I could just leave him with mum, go to a café somewhere, buy a pack of ciggies and smoke the lot of them …’ She shrugs. ‘Maybe I’d be fine.’

  Ester smiles.

  ‘Sometimes I imagine getting in the car and driving to the airport.’ Lousia’s voice drops. ‘I could move to London, New York. Or even bloody New Zealand.’ She grimaces slightly. ‘I’d send him mysterious birthday presents each year, and then when he was eighteen I’d fly him over to meet me. My son.’

  Ester’s clients always sit on the two-seater sofa. The room is clean and light, even on days such as this; the large wooden windows face north, overlooking the front garden and the street. There is a single Persian rug on the floor, a beautiful pattern of weeping willows woven into the thick wool, and only one painting on the wall opposite where she sits.

  Ester sits back in the armchair that had belonged to Maurie, the one she’d re-covered in deep-green wool. Louisa remains upright, looking ready to leave, while outside the branches of the trees press against the glass; they shiver and shake with each burst of rain.

  ‘It’s a cow of a day,’ Louisa says.

  Ester nods, acknowledging the comment before returning to the issue.

  ‘Last week we talked a bit about your lack of joy.’ Ester pauses for a moment. ‘In being a mother.’

  Louisa stares at the window, not turning to look directly at Ester who watches her, kind, ready to listen. And then, glancing at her feet, Louisa reaches for one of the tissues.

  ‘I keep hoping that will change.’ There is a slight tremor in her voice. She has been biting her nails again, and she tries to hide this evidence of her distress by sitting on them.

  ‘How do you think it will change?’

  Louisa has her eyes on the floor, like a naughty kid trying to guess the correct answer. ‘Time?’

  Ester doesn’t respond.

  There is silence, space for Louisa to continue, which she eventually does. ‘Every day I wake up and I think I made the worst mistake of my life. I shouldn’t have had a kid. I was insane. Life was so much better before. I spend every waking moment when I’m not caring for him — and there aren’t many of those — trying to figure how I can escape.’

  She glances across at Ester, and quickly looks away again.

  ‘But you are continuing to care for him,’ Ester says gently.

  ‘I picked up my meds last week.’

  ‘And have you started taking them?’ This is what Ester has been trying to nudge Louisa towards. Actually getting the prescription filled is a significant step.

  Louisa shakes her head.

  She tells Ester she had stood in the chemist, feeling like such a failure as she handed the prescription over to the pharmacist. Another mother who couldn’t cope, and then she looks across at Ester, suddenly still, her pale gaze steady. ‘I bought them and then I don’t take them.’ She reaches for another tissue. ‘I mean, I don’t know if I’m depressed. I know I might look it.’ She blows her nose.

  Ester waits for her to continue.

  ‘But who wouldn’t feel like this? I don’t get any sleep. I spend all my time looking after someone else’s needs. I don’t see any grown-ups all day. And when Patrick comes home, I put Jasper in his arms and go to my room just to get away. So we never see each other.’

  Louisa looks up at the ceiling. ‘So of course I feel like shit. I reckon there’d be something wrong with me if I wasn’t feeling like this.’ She glances across at Ester, who is smiling, just slightly.

  ‘No one wants to spend great chunks of life feeling terrible, unable to cope,’ Ester says. ‘We need to identify some strategies to help you feel less overwhelmed. Anti-depressants could help with this. There are also practical things you can do.’

  ‘Did you feel like this when you had your children?’

  ‘I don’t think there would be many women who haven’t felt like this. But it’s not how others feel that matters. It’s how you feel.’

  Louisa stares at the ceiling. ‘I can’t be the only one who doesn’t …’ and she stops here, not wanting to utter the words.

  Ester waits.

  ‘Love her kid.’ Louisa breathes in before continuing. ‘I know lots of women talk about how difficult it can be, how hard they found it. But no one comes right out and says: “I made a mistake. I don’t love him.” I mean, why do you have to love your kid?’

  Ester waits until she’s sure Louisa has finished. ‘I understand you mightn’t think your response requires treatment, but what is it that makes you come here? Why did you pick up the antidepressants?’

  Louisa doesn’t reply, and Ester wonders for a moment whether she has taken a wrong step. ‘I suppose what I’m trying to say is that even if you aren’t “unwell” as such, you may still want some assistance in coping. T
he pills could help.’

  Still staring up at the ceiling, Louisa shakes her head. ‘It’s not just that,’ she says. ‘It’s how out-of-control anxious everyone else is around me.’

  Her voice a pitch higher now, she begins to tell Ester about the previous evening. She had told Patrick she was going to the movies. She had got into the car, the rain hammering on the metal roof, wet leaves sticking to the windscreen, each window misting up as she sat there, the back of her head resting on the upholstery. She had the keys in the ignition, but she didn’t turn them any further. She just stayed where she was, letting the heater warm her feet, the radio on softly, the outside world no more than a general blur. She knew she ran the risk of flattening the battery, but she didn’t care.

  She could see the light on in the lounge room of her house. Patrick would be watching television, sometimes turning to his phone to play a game, or check out a newsfeed. Jasper would be asleep in his bassinette, probably on his back, arms no longer wrapped tightly by his side, peaceful now. She knew she should be in bed herself, trying to snatch some sleep before she was woken just after midnight and then again before dawn.

  Patrick had been glad she was going out, wanting to see this as a sign that she was re-entering the world, that she was happier. ‘That’s great,’ he’d told her. ‘We’ll be fine.’

  He was a gentle man. A kind man, who tried to understand what had happened to her but couldn’t.

  An hour later, she was still in the car, the rain still falling, steady and cold, the street glittering, slick, and dark. She didn’t even notice Patrick coming out to put the bins on the street. She didn’t see him realising the car was still there, and heading over because something wasn’t quite right, peering into the window to find her slumped against the driver’s door, and when he opened it, the cold of the rain hit her like a slap, and she jumped up, screaming because she thought he was an intruder, a rapist, who knows what.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she shouted at him.

  It took a moment before she saw the shock on his face.

  ‘I thought you’d killed yourself,’ he’d told her, his skin blue from the light of the dashboard, his lips pale. ‘Come inside,’ he’d urged her.

  She’d wanted to ask him for just a little longer. Another twenty minutes, but she hadn’t. The rain soaking through her coat, she’d followed him, the hall light too bright after the dim quiet of the car, the house cold.

  ‘Why did you just stay out there?’ he’d asked.

  She’d opened her mouth to speak, and then Jasper had started crying, and she’d taken her wet coat off and gone to him, feeding him in the dim light of their bedroom.

  Later, as they’d lain side by side, the sound of Jasper breathing next to them, he’d made her promise that she would start taking the antidepressants.

  ‘I don’t think the therapy is enough,’ he’d told her.

  Louisa looks at Ester now. ‘He was shit-scared. He made me feel scared.’

  Ester meets her gaze. ‘Are you concerned for yourself?’

  Louisa sits back and shrugs as she closes her eyes. There are tears at the corner of her lids. ‘I don’t want to be like this. I don’t know if I’m sick. But I don’t want to be like this.’

  Ester watches her.

  Louisa leans forward. ‘You know what I’d like?’ she sniffs back the tears. ‘I want to fast-forward. That’s all I really want — not drugs or therapy. I want to see me loving him.’ And looking straight at Ester, there in the consulting room, the rain steady outside, Louisa waits for words of comfort, a promise that she will soon feel the way she wishes she could. ‘But I can’t, can I?’

  So many of Ester’s clients want this at one moment or another in their therapy. Often they reach for her, as though she can haul them out of the abyss they have fallen into and pull them up onto a land of joy, a mythical place they believe they should be able to reach. I want to be happy again, they say, looking to her to provide this emotional state.

  The words she gives them are careful. Often they don’t listen, the need glittering in their eyes, the desire blocking out anything she might say. Occasionally, they hear and they are angry — why can’t she give them what they want?

  And then sometimes they are like Louisa — bleak and far from home, asking her for a shortcut to the place they long for, all the while realising it doesn’t exist.

  Ester remembers her own despair after the girls were born. It was intermittent, but when it struck, she would lie in bed and — like Louisa — wonder whether she had made a terrible mistake that she couldn’t rectify.

  The isolation of living in Paris had made it worse. Lawrence had been offered a two-year contract, and they’d decided to go. There’d been no plans of a baby. She thought she might try to get some English-speaking clients, and, if that failed, she would learn French, cook, discover a new city, read the books she’d always wanted to read.

  The flat they were given was on the outskirts of the city, and it was ugly and grim. Two weeks after she arrived, she learnt she was pregnant with twins. She remembers ringing Hilary some weeks after they were born and just crying. There had been no words to describe how she’d felt finding herself alone in an apartment with two babies she felt incapable of caring for.

  ‘That’s what it’s like,’ Hilary had told her in her usual blunt way. ‘But it does pass.’

  ‘How quickly?’ she’d wanted to know.

  Hilary didn’t remember. ‘Everything feels so momentous at the time. But when you look back, you realise how brief it was. Insignificant, really.’

  She would like to have delivered a long-distance slap.

  Ester picks up the tissues Louisa left behind and takes them out to the kitchen. She always keeps the bin in her consulting room empty, clearing up after each client before she runs through the session notes, quickly adding in a few details so that she has all the information she needs to write them up later.

  What Louisa really needs is sleep, Ester thinks, and practical help. It’s what most women with new babies need. That, and time to adjust. But the antidepressants could help shift the state she’s now stuck in.

  When Ester had the girls, she’d had no family or friends nearby. She remembers the relief of finding a student who came each day for a couple of hours. She’d booked herself into French conversation classes, and although her memory had been severely limited by tiredness, simply going out and talking to an adult had been such a respite. She’d also been glad of the Parisian disregard for small children. In Paris, she was encouraged to bottle feed, to leave the babies to cry, and to hand them over to someone else whenever she needed a break. In Australia, mothers were expected to put all their own needs last.

  Still, she’d not been happy there. Neither of them had been. Lawrence had disliked his job, and she’d been bored and lonely. That was where the fighting had begun, the first sowing of a grit that became more and more abrasive.

  ‘I’ve fallen in love,’ she’d told April shortly after meeting Lawrence, barely able to do more than whisper the miraculous words, the sheer glow of them dancing lightly on her tongue.

  ‘Who? Who? Who?’ April had asked, pouring them each another drink, the burn of whiskey on ice crackling in the glass, the flare of a match as she’d lit up the joint she’d just rolled, taking a long drag before passing it to Ester, lipstick-stained and soggy to the touch.

  As soon as Ester uttered his name, she wished she’d held it back.

  ‘Lawrence!’ April had thrown her head back and laughed, raucous, loud, slamming her glass on the table as she’d sat up. ‘That sly old dog.’ She’d reached across the table for the joint, taking it straight out of Ester’s fingers, and shaken her head in disbelief.

  He’d played in bands — one of which occasionally appeared on the same bill as April. On the night she’d met him, Ester had been standing at the back of the bar, her beer warm in h
er hands, wondering if she could leave. It was hot and still, the oppressive air in the room making her feel ill, and she’d edged closer to the door, looking out at the shine of the street, headlights, street lights, the silvery freshness of the evening so enticing.

  She’d liked him straight away, the spark in his eyes, the warmth of his smile, as he’d looked at her and said he was sure he knew her. ‘It’s not a line,’ he promised, stepping back slightly. And then his grin had widened. ‘Pyschology. I was in your tute for a couple of weeks and then I had to shift. I was more of a stats man — different timetable.’

  She didn’t remember him. But she liked him even more when he said he was happy to give April’s performance a miss, and go somewhere a bit cooler and quieter.

  They’d ended up sitting on the beach, the sea a great black heaving beast, sighing and rolling under the white light of the moon. They’d sung all their favourite songs, replacing the word ‘baby’ with ‘monster’, and then when he’d suggested that she came back to his flat, he’d confessed. ‘I’ve taken a trip. I might be up talking — for quite a long time.’

  ‘He’s a drug pig,’ April had told her. ‘So unlike you. But he is devastatingly handsome. Also charming when he puts his mind to it.’

  And he had talked. For 24 hours. Kissing her in between each roll and lilt of thought. Slow kisses that were like breathing in air. When they both woke, a day and a half later, he’d looked straight at her in the soft light of the room. ‘If you survived that, we could survive years together.’

  ‘Everyone thinks they are in love with Lawrence,’ April had said.

  And Ester had just poured herself another drink, and said he was coming to pick her up soon. She had to get ready.

  She had finished her undergraduate studies by then, and was hovering between either really trying to paint as a career, or accepting that she didn’t have the fortitude, and continuing her studies to become a practising counsellor. She still had a studio space in Maurie’s warehouse, and she would go there in the mornings, sleep-deprived and hungover but languorously happy, her whole body warm and still wrapped in the memory of Lawrence’s skin.