‘You never just talk.’
The kids pull the ice-cream out of the freezer and spoon each other generous serves. She waits until they go into the front room, then says, ‘Charlie thought he was infertile. He told me he had all sorts of tests and the doctors —’
Bryant stands up and his belt buckle catches his plate and spills half of his food over the table. ‘Why don’t you come out and say it?’ His face is flushed, his eyes furious. ‘Instead of making these stupid inferences.’
‘Bryant, sit down and stop behaving like a child.’ Barbara moves his wine glass aside as though she’s expecting him to smash up the table. ‘I’m sure Julia just wants reassuring. It’s natural for women to get a bit emotional and jealous sometimes. Maybe that’s why Julia’s so cold towards you, she might think you’re seeing someone else. At one stage I thought your father was having an affair, but it was just my hormones playing up and making me paranoid. Anyway, my dear,’ she turns to Julia, and smiles, ‘having an affair of your own will do nothing to help the situation.’
Julia is furious with her body, it’s hot and she can feel her cheeks glowing red. ‘I am not having an affair.’
Does a kiss constitute an affair?
‘Do I know him?’ Bryant sounds amused.
‘There’s no one.’
He turns to Barbara. ‘Mum?’
Barbara gets up from the table and begins to clear the dishes. ‘Don’t rope me into it. You two need to sort things out on your own.’
He leans back in his chair and folds his arms. ‘Come on, Julia.
Let’s hear it then. Who’s the lucky man?’
‘I told you there’s no one.’
‘Tom?’
‘God, no,’ Julia says abruptly, but the heat from the lie travels up her chest like a flaming rash.
Barbara makes a fake cough from the sink.
‘Who then?’ He laughs. ‘You’ve gone all red.’
She leans forward. ‘What about you and Summer? You obviously knew her before we moved up here.’
For a moment he doesn’t speak. He tilts his wine glass on its side and contemplates the contents.
‘Bryant?’
‘I knew her when I worked at Forbes,’ he says. ‘Okay? We were colleagues, nothing more, and I certainly had no idea she was living up here.’
‘Bullshit.’
Another cough from the sink.
Julia lowers her voice. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you knew her before?’
‘You never asked me,’ he says. ‘That’s why.’
‘I shouldn’t have to ask you.’
Barbara tiptoes noisily over to them and begins to collect the kids’ cordial mugs. ‘Have you finished this?’ She indicates Julia’s wine glass.
‘No.’ Julia lifts the glass to her lips, drinks the lot but keeps her fingers wrapped around the stem.
‘That’s it, get pissed.’ Bryant hands his mother his own glass. ‘You can’t turn to drink every time something upsets you, Julia. It’s not healthy for you. God, your liver and adrenals must be shot to pieces with all the wine and coffee you drink.’
‘You should get professional help, love,’ Barbara offers. ‘No one will judge you for that.’
‘What about those yoga poses I showed you?’ Bryant says. ‘Have you been doing them? Cobra, that’s good for the adrenals.’
‘I’m fine.’ But she doesn’t sound fine. Tears are pressed up hot against the back of her eyes and there is a childish edge to her voice.
‘Suit yourself.’ Bryant pushes his chair back from the table and walks over to join Barbara at the sink. ‘Fantastic meal, Mum. You’re going to make me fat.’ He kisses her cheek.
‘You need a bit of meat on those bones,’ she says, puffing up with his compliment. Barbara takes Julia’s glass and gives her a cautionary look before turning back to the sink.
This is her cue, Julia decides, if she can’t escape now, she never will. ‘I’m going out for a while,’ she says and, although she avoids their faces, she can feel their disapproval following her out of the house, up the gravel drive and into the car like another person’s shadow.
Tom
Hidden deep inside me, tangled up with the grey cobwebs of my soul, lies a ghoul. It whispers about death and the disintegration of flesh. It points out all of the cancer’s victories; the pain that shudders through Dad’s ribcage with each cough, the translucent flesh that wilts against his bones. It tells me of the wars being fought internally too; how the air sacs in the lungs are consumed, and the leftovers are excreted in rivers of dark liquid which are later coughed up into one of Mother’s old mixing bowls.
I carry Dad into the bedroom and I’m shocked at how little he weighs, barely as much as a bale of hay. Gently, I lift the sheet up to his neck and tuck him in.
‘I’ll be back on my feet in no time.’ But his eyes are closed and his words are too weak to hold the air.
Mother watches from the other side of the bed. She is silent and disapproving. I kiss Dad’s forehead while I try to think of something encouraging to say, to reassure him that everything is going to be restored, but I can’t think of anything and I can’t lie, so I pat his hand and walk out of the room.
‘You’ve done this to him.’ Mother follows me into the kitchen and stands like a stooped sentry beside the sink. Everything about her is sharp and tightly held like high-tensile wire on a fence. One snap and she will whip across the room and cut me to ribbons. ‘Until you were born everything was perfect.’
I wrap my arms across my stomach to protect myself. Her words are like blades.
‘I remember when we were happy. We went on holiday to Tasmania.’ A smile, like I’ve never seen before, spreads over her face and brightens her eyes. Even her voice has softened. ‘We took the ferry and stayed in a fancy hotel in Launceston. Your father was in his element, raving about the pasture and what kind of milk it would produce. We wandered all over the island, around all the tourist sites, pushing the pram up and down the old prison settlements, sitting in the cafés, enjoying a Devonshire tea. Oh, it was luxury.’
‘I wish I could remember that.’
She stiffens. ‘You weren’t there.’
‘But the pram?’
‘Ah, the pram.’ Then, she goes into the lounge and I can hear her moving things around in the huge buffet that belonged to Grandmother Enid and I’m not allowed to touch.
She’s teasing me that I wasn’t there. Of course it was me in the pram.
But something is building inside me. I can’t define it; I can’t quite see what it is. I only know that I don’t like this feeling, and I’ve had it before. It creeps into my dreams and holds me captive; it squeezes into narrow gaps between my thoughts and speech and makes me falter and forget what I was going to say. It always precedes the pain in my head.
And now it is like a wall of water behind me, a tidal wave of fear, that I am too frozen to turn and face. Something bad is about to happen, my hammering pulse, my quivering stomach and sweaty hands tell me so. I look at the back door; I can hear the blowflies knocking at the flywire screen. I could run …
‘Here it is.’ Mother holds up an old envelope. The flap doesn’t quite touch the seal because it is crammed with postcards, photos and tickets. An elastic band, cracked with age, snaps as she goes to remove it. ‘Let me see, I used to label the back of these once upon a time. Yes, this one is March 1978. She points to a harbour, a cloudless sky; boats huddled together in the water. ‘That’s Hobart,’ she says, and blows on the surface as though it was covered in dust. ‘What perfect weather that day.’ She smiles to herself and flips to another photo of Dad beside a pram, in front of a monument. ‘He was so proud,’ she says to herself. ‘He couldn’t keep that silly grin off his face; even though I told him you could see all the gaps in his back teeth and it made him look like an old man.’
‘But I wasn’t born yet, in 1978,’ I say.
She lowers the photos and stares at me with wide pooling eyes. ‘Go away, Tom.’
Inside, I can hear a ripping sound. I split down the middle; one part is out the door without looking back, the other pulls Mother up by the arms, brings her face close to mine and wrings her into pieces, screwing her up like a ball of paper. I waver uncertainly, my body swaying between the back door and where she stands.
She’s holding a photo of a baby, wrapped in blue wool, its face is loose in sleep and there is a large, weathered hand behind its head. Mother pulls out a chair and sits down. A tear splashes onto the envelope. She wipes it off against her breast, then flips to the next photo — a close-up of her with the same baby, their faces are pressed together to fit in the frame. She has her mouth open, as though she were about to laugh or talk. The baby is slightly cross-eyed and not looking at the camera.
It’s almost on top of me now, that wall of pressure. Building behind my eyes, pulsing with dots of light and red pain. With a stiff back I walk over to the stove and fill the kettle with water. It hisses on the stove top, a drop of water running away in bubbles before it evaporates.
That baby is me. I am the baby. I can almost remember a blue blanket, yes; there was one I used to carry around when I played in the yard with Shooter and the puppies. Those dogs eventually chewed it into strips.
I take Mother’s favourite cup down from the cupboard, the one with green houses on it, and put in a teabag, two sugars and a slosh of milk. The pain is purple now and fills my vision. There is no air in this cave of a kitchen, where has all the air gone? I pour the water into the cup, my hands shaking. I leave the teabag inside and place a digestive biscuit on the saucer and present it to Mother. I stand near her chair and await her approval.
‘Go away, Tom.’ Her voice is a whisper. ‘I never wanted you.’
Julia
He might not come. Julia checks her watch again. Eight minutes past nine. It’s moved three minutes on from the last time she looked. She doesn’t feel romantic or lustful, she feels ill. What if Bryant were to come past, or someone else they know? Or what if Tom’s parents were to come down their driveway and see her waiting here?
This is the spot where Bryant pushed the dog off the road.
And here she is, pulled up on the side of the road, in the shadows, with her stomach squirming and sweat prickling her underarms. She doesn’t want to be this kind of woman; the desperate kind, grasping onto the chance of some affection like a thin bird scavenging for crumbs on the outskirts of a picnic.
A car speeds towards her, its headlights lifting her shadow against the roof, making her squint against the brightness, exposed and ashamed. What excuse could she have for being here? Car trouble? She imagines telling the driver that the car wouldn’t start. But the driver might ask why she stopped in the first place; there’s nothing out here, except rows of gum trees and Tom’s farm. But the car doesn’t stop; it hurtles by so fast that she rocks slightly in its wake.
This is what her mother would do. Moira would sit here with a bag of lollies between her thighs, pressing them into her lipsticked mouth two at a time, eagerly looking out of the windscreen and in the rear-view mirror. She would rearrange her bra, spray on another layer of perfume, comb her hair, and press all that sugary rubbish into her mouth until her teeth were coated with it.
But the kind of lovers Julia’s mother attracted didn’t care what she looked like, or what she thought, or felt about anything. She allowed men to use her and then throw her away again, like the tissues Julia found wedged between the seats of the family car. Later, Moira would sob in the kitchen while Dad made her tea and reassured her that he still loved her and that she was beautiful.
Julia is disgusted by the memories.
Go home, she tells herself. Be the kind of woman who can hold her head up proud in public, who has no secrets, who can open her life up for inspection and feel no shame at what others may find there. Be a perfect wife. Be the perfect mother.
That bathroom needs cleaning.
She touches the key and turns it slightly until the radio comes on with a Coldplay tune, and the lights on the dashboard tell her it is sixteen minutes past nine. He’s not coming now anyway, she tells herself, it’s too late. She pretends to feel relieved.
Her fingers remain on the key, only one more click and the engine will start and she will have to reverse onto the hard shoulder, past Tom’s farm, drive through a country-dark town, back into her own driveway and wait there with the engine running, not wanting to go inside to see the disapproving eyes of her husband and motherin-law.
There is a sharp knock at the side window.
Tom swings in beside her and the seat creaks with his weight. His left shoulder is close enough for her to touch with her own. He smells of fresh hay. She takes a deep breath and leans back against the door. At the sight of him she feels instantly better. The air is humming, fizzing inside her head like lemonade. She turns off the ignition and removes her foot from the pedals.
Another car passes, its lights creating a moment of intense shadow and light. Tom’s face appears in front of her like a floodlit statue, something Michelangelo could have painstakingly chiselled. Then, he is in moonlight again.
She desperately wants to reach out and wind her fingers through his hair. If she can hold him and kiss him, then everything wrong in her world will be magically put right. If they make love, she will be a different woman.
He looks at her intently and she imagines he will say something romantic, or passionate, but his words, when they finally come, are not what she expects.
‘My father is dying.’
Instantly, the arousal and joy she felt at seeing him vanishes. ‘Oh, Tom.’ She rests her hand on his shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry. It must be awful for you.’ Her mind is blank for a moment, searching for some words, a quote perhaps to comfort him. But she knows, from her own experience, there are no words to soothe the pain, not when someone you love is dying. She squeezes his shoulder gently.
He takes a deep breath and releases it. ‘Mother says it’s cancer, and that kills people, doesn’t it?’
Julia looks into his eyes, so wide and trusting. She wants to offer him hope, but what hope is there? Tom’s father is old. ‘Don’t give up,’ she says, lamely. ‘Have they tried chemo?’
He sighs and looks out the side window.
She follows his gaze to the drooping barbed-wire fence, a solitary pine tree with most of its branches covered with mistletoe, the faded sign to his parents’ dairy farm nailed to the trunk. ‘There are always new treatments coming on the market, Tom. New drugs perhaps?’
Abruptly, he turns and kisses her on the mouth, leaning his body against hers until she’s pressed against the car door. His hands reach out to touch her face, her throat. His fingers wind through her hair, desperately. But he’s crying too. Julia can feel his lips tensing, his chest deflating, his hands waver.
‘Tom, Tom. It’s all right.’ She holds him tight, and gently smoothes the dark curls of hair away from his eyes.
After a while, his breathing slows and he takes her hand and holds it. ‘Don’t go,’ he says. There are twin lines of tears on either side of his face. He doesn’t seem to notice.
She reaches out her hand and gently brushes her thumb across his cheek. And he closes his eyes. She imagines wiping his pain away, caressing the wounded places in his heart until they’re all healed.
The night is like a long sigh around them. The buzz of cicadas forms a dull wall, the trees a silent canopy.
Without meaning to, she falls asleep, and wakes to the sound of kookaburras. The sky is nearly blue and creased with pink. A mosquito buzzes close to her ear and she swats it away and straightens in her seat. Tom is slumped beside her.
Tom
I know she has to leave. I can see the urgency in her lips, the impatience in her fingers, which play with the keys swinging from the ignition. She is yet to meet my eyes and I feel anxious too, just sitting next to her.
‘Will you come back again?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I can�
��t believe I fell asleep.’
‘Can I come to see you?’
‘No! Sorry, I didn’t mean to shout. It’s just that I can’t think right now and I have to get home before the kids wake up.’
‘Meet me tonight,’ I say. She smells like flowers and vanilla and something secret and I’m getting light-headed from breathing her so deeply. ‘Please?’
‘Tom, I can’t.’
I have to let her go.
She slips the gears as she puts the car into reverse. Her face is tense and her smile is brief as she turns the car around. I wave, but she is too focused on missing a car hurtling towards us from the other way to see me.
It’s Wilson. He brakes to make gravel spray everywhere. The side of his ute misses my legs by an inch. ‘Was that your girlfriend?’ he says, leaning over the rubbish on the seat to look up at me. His bruises are almost gone, just a faint yellow smudge around the bridge of his nose. There are at least a dozen empty VB cans on the passenger side floor, Big Mac wrappers and a half-full Coke bottle.
‘She asked for directions.’ I start walking up the drive.
‘I should have known you’d never get a woman.’ He keeps the car in first gear and drives alongside me. ‘You’re still a virgin, aren’t you?’ When I don’t answer he sheers off with another spray of gravel and beats me to the milking shed.
Mother is waiting there, her arms folded, her cheeks white. She is talking to Wilson who is shaking his head. Mother nods towards me and Wilson goes to round up the cows.
‘You were supposed to watch them,’ she says as I approach, meaning the cows. ‘Last night, it was your turn.’ She points to the calving paddock with her outstretched arm shaking. ‘Looks like we’ve lost one already. Jesus, Tom, we can’t afford this right now.’
‘Milk fever?’
Mother nods. ‘Looks like it.’
‘I’ll fix it.’ I hurry into the storeroom for the bottles of calcium gluconate and needles.
She’s still standing there when I return, anxious, the energy of her fear seeping into the cracks of her face and down into the fists pressed at her sides. ‘Don’t let us down,’ she says, in a tone that is unusually frail. She wraps her cardigan across her narrow chest, and walks in jolting steps towards the house.
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