The Three of Us

by Kim Lock

  Elsie crept up the side of the house. A car was parked at an angle by the front steps. As Elsie watched, the woman paused at the car and stared back at Aida’s house. She dashed at her face as though angrily swatting away tears, got into the car and drove away.

  And in the window Elsie saw the face of a woman, looking at her.

  Aida was back.

  The office of Harvey Greene, BPsych

  Recently

  The shrink set down his clipboard. Thomas noticed his surreptitious glance at the clock; they had about twenty minutes left.

  Forty minutes he’d been babbling to the psych and Thomas remained wimpy and clueless, barely a dent made in his story. Great. He imagined himself on the video recording from the CCTV camera, sitting like a has-been scarecrow on the brown couch, mouth opening and closing mutely, the time code rolling along and absolutely fuck-all else happening.

  ‘So Elsie had grown unhappy, quite early in your marriage,’ Harvey said.

  The psychologist was merely reflecting Thomas’s own narrative, but having it read back to him so matter-of-factly made him feel defensive. Had he really failed so swiftly in his marriage to satisfy his wife? Was that how it summed up?

  ‘She wasn’t “unhappy”,’ Thomas said, ‘we had a nice house and enough money and a whole life ahead of us . . .’ He looked again at the clock, and for the sake of brevity finished, ‘She thought she was a bad housewife. A bad wife. The miscarriage, and all that.’

  ‘The miscarriage, yes. And it sounds like she was bored, too. Dare I say lonely?’

  The muscles in Thomas’s jaw worked. ‘All right. She was unhappy. And yeah, maybe lonely, too. Although she met with other ladies in the community, I don’t reckon she ever clicked with them. Not like she thought she should. But then she became increasingly worried about the lady next door. Distracted, like she didn’t know quite what was what anymore.’

  ‘Aida. The pregnant one, who disappeared.’

  Thomas met his gaze. ‘Yes.’

  ‘That must have weighed heavily on you – knowing that despite how hard you tried, your wife wasn’t content.’

  He decided that given he had already spent the best part of two hundred dollars, there was no pride to be lost in concurring. What the shrink said was true – Elsie’s nebulous, inexplicable dissatisfaction that first year or so of their marriage had weighed on his mind. He had felt impotent, incapable.

  ‘Less of a man?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ Thomas said.

  ‘This is good, Thomas, because I’m sensing something here, and I wonder if you can see it too.’ Harvey settled his elbows on his knees. ‘Indulge me for a moment. I’m just thinking aloud. When your life began with Elsie, you – and her, from the sounds of it – had expected a certain something. Satisfaction, contentment: good old marital bliss. Don’t we all? I mean, isn’t that the social ideal we’re all sold? And you both felt those enjoyable senses of accomplishment, I don’t think you can deny that. But then came the loss of the pregnancy, and the disappointment and grief that heightened both of your growing sense of . . . well, impotence – that’s a good word.’

  Thomas could not conceive of an instance when impotence and good should ever appear in the same sentence.

  The psychologist suddenly switched track. ‘How did you feel when you were given your diagnosis?’

  Thomas didn’t have to tarry over the question. ‘Scared stiff, to be honest.’ Thomas had asked the doctor not to pull any punches, and the doctor hadn’t. She had delivered the news of his impending demise kindly and bluntly, and it was both hideous and also, a finality. That was that. Now it came down to one man, facing off with the finish line, left with the choice of what kind of a man he would be when he crossed it. He was confronting the pointy end of the stick, no doubt about it. But what was he going to leave behind? And how would his conscience be when he got there?

  ‘Is there a chance that you haven’t told Elsie about the cancer because it feels like that same helplessness? That there’s nothing you can do to change it, to stop her from feeling miserable?’

  ‘Feeling miserable because of me.’ Thomas was surprised at how easily it came to him, an effortless mental light bulb. Strike me down with a feather, he thought. ‘You’re right. I don’t want to do that to her again.’

  ‘But, Thomas, you’ve been married for more than fifty years. Happily married. That particular sense of unease for Elsie – it ended, didn’t it?’

  Pain was chewing itself into Thomas’s hips; shoots of numbness and prickles ribboned up and down his legs. With embarrassing difficulty, he humped his bony arse forward on the couch cushions, readying himself to stand.

  ‘She cheered up, yes,’ he said. Despite his discomfort he managed a smile at the memories that came flooding in. ‘She cheered right up and was happy again.’

  ‘Because that’s when things changed, for you and Elsie, didn’t they?’

  Thomas looked at the shrink. ‘Yes. Things changed for me and Elsie then. Things changed lot.’

  Part II

  Wife and . . .

  26

  At Elsie’s knock the door opened quickly.

  Aida said, ‘Hello, Elsie.’

  Aida stepped aside and Elsie entered the lounge room that looked so much like her own. It felt like an occasion for coffee, yet she daren’t trouble her neighbour when she looked as though she could barely stand. She couldn’t tear her gaze from the empty sack of Aida’s blouse, her deflated middle. Elsie noticed her right hand was bandaged. So as Aida sank onto the single armchair, Elsie prepared coffee, handed a cup to Aida, then sat on the carpet at her feet.

  ‘It’s so nice to see you,’ Elsie admitted, then felt mortified.

  But Aida finally offered a weak smile. ‘It’s nice to see you, too.’

  ‘Where is . . . ?’

  ‘Gone.’ Aida whispered it. ‘I couldn’t keep . . . they wouldn’t let me . . . they gave her away.’

  Her.

  Elsie had heard of it happening.

  Silence fell again, and in it Elsie felt the beat of Aida’s heart. It felt the most natural thing in the world to grasp Aida’s uninjured hand. And it felt the most natural thing for Aida to respond by gripping Elsie’s own hand in return.

  ‘Have you come back for long?’ she asked, tentatively.

  Aida didn’t reply. Her head dipped forward and a lock of oily hair slid across her face. She let out a single large sob.

  Elsie put her arms around her. She smelled of cigarette smoke and something acrid, like the damp inside of an empty flower vase. An idea abruptly filled her like an urge.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you in the bath.’

  She helped Aida to her feet, holding her elbow as they moved down the narrow hallway to the bathroom. Flicking on the light, Elsie winced at the rude glare of the bulb overhead. She set the water running hot into the tub and condensation ghosted on the mirror. When the tub was full, Elsie checked the temperature and turned off the taps. In the clammy quiet she turned to Aida; water dripped with a crystalline plink.

  ‘I’ll be in the kitchen,’ Elsie said, turning to the door. ‘I’ll make us something to eat.’

  ‘No.’ Aida was weeping. ‘Don’t leave me. Please.’

  Elsie said, ‘I’ll stay.’

  Aida lifted her hands to her blouse buttons and Elsie politely turned her head away. But after a minute of sniffling and cursing, Elsie turned back.

  ‘May I?’

  Aida nodded and lowered her trembling hands to her sides.

  Elsie unbuttoned Aida’s blouse, opening a pearlescent strip of skin from her throat to her navel and exposing the ivory silk of her brassiere. Aida shrugged her shoulders and the blouse slipped away; she stepped out of her skirt. At the sight of the loose flesh between Aida’s hips Elsie felt a strange churning inside. Stricken with
where to put her eyes, not wanting to turn away for fear of offending Aida with her prudishness, yet not wanting to appear to ogle, Elsie instead knelt and again checked the temperature of the water. Aida’s pale shins, scattered with hairs, gave off a warmth by Elsie’s face.

  Aida removed her underpants and bra and stepped into the water. She crouched, wrapping one arm around her knees and resting her bandaged hand on the edge of the bathtub. Elsie lowered herself so she was sitting on the tiles, and leaned against the tub. This would be how she would wash a baby, she thought to herself sadly. With Aida, bereft, beside her, Elsie couldn’t help but be reminded of the acute absence of a baby of her own.

  Aida’s gaze was faraway, somewhere beyond the tiles on the wall. Elsie soaked a cloth in the water and pressed it at the top of Aida’s back.

  ‘Is it too hot?’

  ‘No.’ Water trickled in rivulets over the knuckles of her spine. Aida dipped her head and sighed.

  ‘There, now,’ Elsie said. ‘Isn’t that better?’

  Aida didn’t answer. Beneath the surface of the water she was stroking her toes, absently, her cheek resting on her knees. A flake of grit lifted from her toe into the water. Fresh pinkish scratches surrounded one ankle.

  What had happened to her? Why was Aida back? What about the plan Aida had disclosed to Elsie all those weeks ago – that her baby would be raised as Aida’s sister? And would she stay here, or return to her parents? Elsie wanted to say something profound, to offer a piece of wisdom or comfort that might soothe, but the quality of the quiet between them had grown pensive, almost sacred. The air was balmy and closeted, the only sounds being the gentle lap and lick of the water.

  Again Elsie dunked the cloth and brought it to the nape of Aida’s neck, wetting her hair and making it dark and glistening. She rinsed away the soap, wrung the cloth and smoothed it over Aida’s forehead and cheeks, gently pressing into the corners of Aida’s eyes, stemming the tears because if she didn’t, Elsie might cry herself. And that wouldn’t do. There were red weals up Aida’s forearms – it looked as though she had torn at herself with her fingernails.

  Outside, galahs cried as they began to search for their evening roosts; a single fat drop of water plipped from the tap into the bath. Elsie hummed tunelessly. She soaped beneath Aida’s arms, where there was a dark mat of hair, and in her mind’s eye she saw herself in the mirror at home, elbow pointed at the ceiling, scraping away her own hair there with a razor like Thomas did to his jaw. It was a strange thing, she thought now, to have hair grow there only to remove it again, as though the skin there longed to be covered.

  Aida rested back and her breasts floated in the water, blue veined and looking painfully swollen. She covered her dark nipples with her forearm. Elsie let the cloth swirl in circles over the bones in Aida’s shoulders, down her sides. She studied the jagged stripes over Aida’s belly, shining purple where the skin had stretched and stretched from within and eventually torn beneath the surface. She washed Aida’s feet, working her fingers between her toes.

  ‘I can hear her crying,’ Aida said. ‘I don’t know where she is, I can’t go to her and stop her from crying.’

  The cloth floated away. Elsie dipped her arms into the water and drew Aida up with a wave that sloshed between them and soaked her sleeves and her chest.

  ‘I ran,’ Aida said. ‘I went looking for her, last night. I ran through the streets because I could hear her crying. She was everywhere: in the gardens, in the dark. But I couldn’t find her. So I kept running and I cried out for her. My baby. But the neighbours . . . my parents . . .’ she didn’t finish.

  Aida pressed her face into Elsie’s neck and sobbed. Water streamed down Elsie’s back and pooled on the tiles at her knees as Aida wrapped her arms around her neck, thrust her fingers into her hair and locked one hand into a fist.

  ‘I don’t know if she’s okay,’ Aida wept. ‘Is my baby okay?’

  Elsie pictured Aida running through the streets in the dark, calling out for her taken-away baby. Neighbours’ porch lights snapping on in yellow pools of scandalised curiosity; faces agog, peering from twitched-aside curtains. Her father, a man of importance. A name known.

  Elsie bit her lip against the sting and rocked Aida as she cried.

  27

  Pulling the keys from the ignition, Thomas glanced at his watch and clicked his tongue. It was after six; Elsie would be waiting with tea. He locked the car and hurried inside.

  ‘My love?’ he called, discarding his satchel and loosening his tie. ‘I’m so sorry I’m late, Mr Bagnoli –’

  Once again, Thomas found himself in an empty kitchen. From somewhere he couldn’t see, cool evening air was pouring in and when he went searching he found the back door wide open.

  ‘Else?’ He poked his head outside. ‘You out here?’

  In the fading light, a smudge of white marked the base of the washing line. He crossed the lawn and found two sheets still hanging on the line and one flopped half in, half out of the basket on the ground. The fabric was cold and damp to the touch. Frowning, he picked up the basket and turned back to the house, a flicker of anxiety pulsing through him.

  Then he saw the lights in the windows of the house next door.

  *

  Last time Thomas had knocked on this door, his wife had lain bleeding on the bathroom floor. He swallowed the frightening image away, straightened up and knocked.

  ‘Who is it?’ a muffled voice called from inside. With a jolt he recognised it as Aida’s. Elsie told him the neighbour had left weeks ago. When did she return? Was her husband finally home from the mines?

  ‘It’s Thomas Mullet, I’m sorry to bother you so late, but my wife –’

  ‘It’s open, Thomas.’

  Elsie’s voice.

  Relief came over him. Pushing open the door, he found Elsie seated on the floor alongside Aida. Both women were wrapped in robes and had towels around their heads.

  Thomas faltered mid-stride. ‘Uh, good evening.’

  Getting to her feet, Elsie came to him and smiled. She kissed his cheek; she smelled of soap and there was the stale hint of coffee on her breath.

  ‘I couldn’t find you, for a while there I thought you’d been abducted,’ he said with a small laugh.

  Elsie tittered – an odd, fake sound. ‘Nothing like that,’ she assured him, ‘time got away from me.’

  ‘Good evening, Aida. It’s lovely to see you again. Did you take a holiday . . . ?’ The question faded in his mouth for two reasons: firstly, he noticed the terrible red puffiness of Aida’s face, contrasted with the stark emptiness of where her enormous belly had once bulged, and secondly, because Elsie gave him a sharp and hard pinch on his forearm. Confused, he rubbed the skin. There would be a bruise there tomorrow. Why was his wife silencing him?

  ‘My love,’ Elsie said, ‘we’re having a little visit. Catching up as ladies do. Listen.’ She put an arm around his shoulders and to his dismay Thomas realised she was leading him towards the door.

  ‘I won’t be much longer,’ she said. ‘Forgive me for being late for tea. But there’s leftover roast beef in the fridge, if you’d like to help yourself.’

  Help himself? Thomas opened his mouth to ask more, but he found himself abruptly outside. Elsie blew him a kiss, and the door clicked softly in his face.

  28

  Mid-morning shadows dappled the headstones, gravel crunched as they walked. Aida was quiet, morose and lost in thought. Wanting to lighten her heart, Elsie maintained short bursts of conversation. Aida laughed softly at Elsie admitting her disenchantment at the invitation she had received to afternoon tea at Mrs Brown’s tomorrow and the face the ladies would make over the dryness of Elsie’s tea cake; Aida smiled as Elsie described the breakfast she prepared for Thomas every morning, without fail: two rashers of bacon and two fried eggs, one slice of buttered toast, sweetened black coffee.

  ‘A
nd he always praises me when I set it in front of him,’ Elsie said. ‘“Boy oh boy, what do we have here?” as though it’s something new and wonderful every morning.’

  ‘As though compliments negate you having to do it every single day.’ Aida paused to set a wilted bunch of flowers that had blown astray back onto a grave. Elsie let her comment sink in, and was unsettled to find it struck as strangely accurate. It wasn’t for praise that she cooked her husband breakfast every day – it was simply her responsibility now. Her assumed role. Did she feel obligated? Surely not. Elsie pushed away the discomfiting line of thought.

  They walked on further, to the base of the hill and the ancient pine tree. Beneath their feet the sappy scent of pine stirred. As they rounded the base of the tree the old headstone revealed itself, listing towards the tree trunk.

  Here he lies.

  Fear not, dry your tears.

  Aida tilted her head and her eyebrows drew together. There was a loveliness in her expression and the way a thick lock of hair fell across her cheek that reminded Elsie of oil paintings in an art gallery. All romance and timelessness and sentiment. A strange, disconcerting stir shot up her insides and she asked, too brightly, ‘Do you know who this is?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Aida replied. ‘You say no one else knows, either?’

  ‘I’ve asked around and no one can tell me. Plenty of rumours though.’

  A cool breeze stole down the hill and Aida pulled her cardigan tighter.

  ‘Rumours,’ she murmured. ‘How people like to talk about other people.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Elsie said.

  ‘Don’t be.’ Aida gave her a brief smile. ‘I’d never come to Gawler much, before moving here,’ she said. ‘So I’d never heard anything about this mysterious grave. My dad might know.’ For a long time she stared at the gravestone, her chest rising and falling softly. She knelt and twisted a sow-thistle from the base of the stone, shook the dirt from its roots and tossed it aside. A drop of waxy white latex beaded on the tip of her finger and she wiped it on her skirt. ‘Not that I’ll be speaking to him ever again.’