by Nicki Reed
‘Yeah, Celeste is a total swinger.’
‘BJ…’
‘What? She is. It took me ten minutes to get her off the swing last time, and I’m not joking. Such a scene.’
BJ clears Celeste’s zoo off the armchair, sweeping the elephants, lions, tigers and bears into an old milk crate. Tertiary-educated people would be nothing without stolen milk crates.
‘That’s why I don’t take her to that park anymore,’ Peta says. ‘We go on nature walks instead.’
‘Isn’t that called avoidance?’ BJ smiles.
Peta sits on the arm of BJ’s chair. Those two are never more than three feet away from each other. It’s sick. And beautiful. If Mark were here we’d make a mirror image in the other armchair. Oh, well.
‘Beej, I prefer to call it showing her other aspects of life. Celeste, honey, who’s going to tuck you in tonight?’
I hope she says me but I pretend I don’t care.
‘Ooby!’
‘Yay!’
Celeste leads the way and we get into bed and there he is, The Sailor Dog with his hook for this and his hook for that. Her head becomes heavy against my shoulder, her eyelids droop, open, droop. I lower my voice and keep reading. She falls asleep. We sit for five minutes or so because there’s gold in moments like these. People think they want Porsches and Italian leather jackets, but they can have the good shit if they dial things back a bit.
I must be magic because I get out of the bed without waking her. I kiss Celeste’s smooth forehead, pull her blanket up around her chin, and stand there admiring her for another half-minute.
When I get back to the lounge room Peta and BJ are tucked up on the couch. The TV is off and they’re both reading. It’s as if there’s been a zombie plague and technology was the first thing to go. I sit on the coffee table, where I sit when I’m two minutes from leaving.
Peta closes her book, bookmark in, and looks up at me. ‘Rube, we’re pretty sure BJ was pregnant.’
‘What do you mean? Was?’
‘I think I had a miscarriage. I thought it was an extra painful and bloody period, but it must have been a pregnancy that didn’t take. So to speak.’
‘I’m sorry, girls,’ I say and sniff back a tear.
‘It’s okay, Ruby.’
‘It’s not that sad,’ BJ says. ‘Obviously something was up. It’s nature.’
When you’re upset because there was a baby and then there wasn’t, and you wish it was yours even though it didn’t survive, science-based common sense is the last thing you need.
‘Beej, can you go check on something that isn’t in here?’
I love the way our family talks.
BJ slides her bookmark into position. ‘Sure,’ she says. ‘I’ll have a bath.’
I watch her walk away. She doesn’t look like she was just pregnant, but I can imagine her hips wider, and a hand in the small of her back because of the weight of the baby.
‘Rube, it’s okay. I understand.’ Peta passes the tissue box.
‘You understand that I’m jealous and wish it was my miscarriage. How can you understand? It’s pathetic.’
‘It’s natural,’ Peta says. ‘I was jealous myself.’
I snuffle into a tissue. I’m still warm from cuddling Celeste. If it was daytime I’d be able to see strands of her dark hair on my T-shirt. ‘But you’ve had your baby.’
‘That’s why I was jealous. It would be lovely to feel a baby in my body again.’ She sits next to me on the coffee table, and slips an arm around my waist. I lean on her.
I’d really like not to say what I say next, but I’ve said it before I know: ‘I’d love to see what it’s like just once.’
‘We don’t know for sure that you can’t,’ Peta says. ‘In fact, I don’t even know why you think you can’t. You’ve been taking the Pill since you were sixteen, and stopped only eighteen months ago. Have you even had time to have trouble conceiving?’
True enough, I probably haven’t. ‘I had a super-heavy period last year,’ I say. ‘It sent me to bed, it was blobby, if you know what I mean, lumpy, and it was at the wrong time of the month. Wouldn’t it be great if it was a pregnancy that didn’t happen?’
When you’re as weird as Mark tells me I am, you think all kinds of things are great: separations, divorces, miscarriages.
‘Sure, if it happened to BJ, it could happen to you.’
‘The good thing is it means that the extraction worked.’ I take my sister’s hand and think about Celeste’s hand holding a little someone’s hand. There’s nothing like a sister. Mark is ace and he loves me, but he isn’t my other half that is Peta, and I’d love Celeste to have what we have.
‘That’s why BJ isn’t sad. It worked, so all the faffing about with syringes and timing might be finished soon. She says two more tries and she’s done—eight attempts will be enough. But I want her to keep trying until it works. It’s the only thing we argue about. That and how she leaves her undies on the floor.’
‘You too, huh?’ I stand up and stretch. My bum is sore from the coffee table. ‘I’m going home. Does Mark know about BJ?’
‘You can tell him.’
We’re at the front door. I call out, ‘Bye, BJ.’
From under the bath bubbles: ‘Bbbbye.’
I’ve got my keys in my hand. ‘Goodnight, Pete. And don’t forget, homosexuality is a sin.’
‘What are you going to do about your prank-caller?’
‘Lock my doors and keep a blunt object handy. That’s right, I was going to buy a whistle.’
It would be so easy to drop in and see Mark on the way home. Nobody would have to know. I hook a U-turn. ‘Yeah, nobody has to know.’ Then I remember he’s not home, he’s in Canberra on secret government lawyer business. I turn back.
When I get home the phone is ringing. I walk slowly up the stairs, mess about with my keys, take my time. The phone keeps ringing. People don’t become pests without having a fair amount of resolve. I let myself in, stand in the doorway, keys in hand, and listen to the phone. Soon the ringing stops. I double-check that the front door is locked, check the windows, and check the front door one last time.
I shower quickly, brush my teeth, dive under the doona and wait for Mark to call. Change of plan. I hop out of bed and turn the lights on all the way to the kitchen. I hide the knife rack under the sink, and go back to bed, switching lights off as I go.
Waiting.
Waiting for his call.
Waiting for Mark to call.
I hop out of bed again and go back to the kitchen. I take the knife rack from under the sink and put it in the fridge, right at the back, behind the bag of oranges I keep forgetting to open. Oranges are good but chocolate is chocolate.
I’m about to get back into bed when I have a better idea. Lights on. Back to the kitchen. I open the fridge, take the biggest knife out of the rack, stand in the kitchen, and feel the weight of the knife in my hand. I swap hands. Nod. Swap back. Make a few slashes with the knife, Z for Zorro. Thrust. Parry. Thrust. Errol Flynn on the terracotta.
I drop the knife into the drawer of my bedside table, lie back in bed and wait for Mark to ring.
Finally. ‘Boydy, how are you? I was going to break the rules tonight and come and see you; then I remembered you’re not home.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ he says. ‘I would have felt bad turning you away.’
‘You’d turn me away?’ I think of me standing on the doorstep, Mark not opening the screen door, my angry drive home. That’s it, no surprise visits. Finding out for sure that he wouldn’t let me in isn’t worth the risk.
‘Let’s not worry about hypotheticals,’ he says.
‘Speaking of hypotheticals. BJ thinks she had a miscarriage.’
‘Is that how you tell me? So sensitive.’
‘Sorry, Mark, I’m in a mood. It’s been a long day.’
‘I’ve had a long day, too. In fact, it’s still going.’ I can hear him at his keyboard, the keys are clacking, and w
hen he hits Enter he hits it extra hard. Tap, tap, tap, tap, TAP, tap, tap, TAP.
‘Poor you. I’m getting prank calls; if I visited, you wouldn’t let me in; and I have a big knife in the top drawer of my bedside table.’
At its widest, the blade of the knife is the width of my wrist. I sharpen it myself, the way Keith showed me, and it’s bloody sharp. Keith. Seriously, who goes for an around-Australia drive and doesn’t send a postcard? When Keith and Cath get back we are going to have words.
‘Why do you have a knife in the bedroom?’
‘Because somebody calls all the time, like they know my life, and it’s freaking me out. I mean, how do they know when to ring?’
‘I’m coming home, Rube. I don’t like the sound of this.’
As much as I try to sleep in the middle, like I’m on holidays, I’m on my same old side of the bed. There’s room for Mark. Yep, there’s a dip in the mattress that he’d slip into nicely.
Still.
‘You can’t come home unless you’re prepared to pretend we’ve split. You’d have to leave the house at different times and turn up from different ends of the street. Otherwise it’s not going to work. All this can’t be for nothing. What about the T-shirts? We just got them. Unmarryme has only just begun.’
Silence. Not the good I-love-her-so-much-I’m-speechless kind, but the what-the-fuck-am-I-going-to-do-with-this-woman kind. A sigh.
‘I worry about you walking around armed.’
‘I’m not armed.’ It’s a huge knife. I hardly ever use it because I worry I’m going to chop a finger off. ‘The drawer is armed.’
‘Put the knife back where it belongs, and go to sleep. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. It’s sort of good about BJ, that the extraction worked.’
‘I thought you’d be relieved.’
‘Very droll.’ He laughs anyway. ‘I will be relieved. I’m sick of the extraction routine. I was starting to think it would never work. Really, you Wheeler women. You want impossible things. She wants to make babies without having sex, and you want a divorce even though we love each other.’
‘What happened to me being the beans in your coffee?’
That’s from our vows.
‘What happened to running things by me?’
That’s from our vows, too.
‘Do you remember how we felt, Mark, under our tree? Like we were the only people on the whole planet? I still feel like that.’ I close my eyes and I’m in that garden, the tree, the flowers, the crowd, heat, and my hand in Mark’s.
‘Me too, Rube, it’s just hard. I’d better get back to it. Promise me you’ll put that knife away.’
‘I will.’ My ear is on the pillow and I can hear the blood beating inside my head. My eyes are closed. ‘I love you, Boydy.’
‘Sames.’ Tap, tap, TAP. ‘Nigh, nigh.’
17.
Justine’s article comes out in the colour section of the Saturday paper two weeks after I asked her to write it. There’s a page and a half of text and a photo of me wearing an unmarryme T-shirt. The photographer was talented, fantastic, and I actually look okay. Mark says I look like a total spunk. I would have loved it if Mark had been in the photo, too, but he said that, as much as he was a big part of unmarryme, he wanted to ‘retain his anonymity’. Lawyers.
I said, ‘You’re not anonymous, you dufus. Anyone can look you up.’
The only thing I don’t love about the article is that it goes on about marriage equality too much. I would have liked more about how shit it felt that day at the High Court.
Todd is thrilled about the article and has taken out a subscription to the paper. He’s better than I am: I read it online for nothing until I get locked out. I’m not paying for something I’ve been getting free for years.
‘We’ll get great coverage if any lobby groups pick the article up, and I can’t see why they wouldn’t.’
‘Todd, don’t you have somewhere to be tonight? A rave? Don’t you kids do Saturday nights anymore?’ I’m in my pyjamas, eating dinner in bed.
‘We do,’ he says. ‘But they start at ten. I’ve got time.’ I suppose he has. A guy like Todd just rolls out of bed looking great.
‘Okay, so now what?’ I say.
‘I’ve put it on Facebook, and we should get on Twitter.’
‘I hate Twitter.’ Nobody can eat hamburgers and hold a phone at the same time. I put my dinner to the side.
‘Ruby, how can you hate that little blue bird?’
‘It seems so dumb.’
‘It is dumb sometimes, but it’s good, too, especially for something like this. If we did any events we could tweet the locations and get all kinds of dudes along. If we stormed Parliament House, you could tweet the time and get back up.’
‘Who am I tweeting to? You?’ I can still eat French fries on the phone.
‘You just proved my point. We needed to be on Twitter before your Youtube story came out. We could have given them a link and kept the conversation going.’
‘Bloody hell. And I thought I was good at advocacy.’
‘I’m sure you are, you’re just not all that current. You’ve got to get with the tomorrow because the now is already gone. Anyway, it’s a great story, great photo. You’re going to be famous, Ruby.’
Famous means I can’t ride my bike without being hassled. Of all the places to meet an enemy: the phone box where I rest at the top of the biggest hill on my loop. I suppose it’s a nice metaphor. The bloke wheels his slick-tyred, pretend mountain bike over to me.
‘Are you Ruby Wheeler?’ He spits it out and I almost look at the ground to see where it landed.
‘Who wants to know?’ I’m trying to get my breath back, remembering the first and last time I went running with Mark. It’ll be fun, he said. You were right, he said when we got back, it wasn’t fun.
‘Nice T-shirt,’ the bloke says.
‘I can get you one if you like.’ He doesn’t want a T-shirt, but if I have to be here, on my own, with some guy on a crap bike with an attitude to match, I’ll be friendly.
‘What gives you the right to push gay marriage onto people?’
I stand up, slowly, keeping my bike between him and me. ‘Mate, I just want my sister to be able to marry.’
‘Then what?’ He’s getting redder with every question and it’s scary. Nobody is around.
‘Then what, what?’
‘It’s against God,’ he says.
I’m on my bike now, my mouth is dry and my stomach clenches. I start pedalling. ‘See you later.’
‘Wait, get back here,’ he says. ‘Wait.’
I pedal my guts out until I’m off the trail and into traffic. I don’t look back. I don’t check in the reflections of car windows. When I hit the intersection, I look both ways super quick, and use the truck rolling through on the last of the red as cover.
When I get home—not the usual way because I went around the block in reverse—I’m exhausted. But more than that, I’m still scared.
The T-shirts are good, I feel part of something when I wear one, but the T-shirts also tag you. Mark was smart to keep his face out of the paper. When you’re famous, semi-famous, or famous for one day, people want a piece of you.
Next day, after work, I’m busy looking out the train window and thinking of nothing but clotheslines, cubby houses and back fences, and the occasional chicken coop, when the grey-haired woman sitting opposite me speaks.
‘Are you Ruby Wheeler?’
It crosses my mind to do the what-have-you-heard routine, but she has a kind face. By that I mean she has smiley eyes and she’s not holding an axe. ‘Do I know you?’
‘My name is Elsie Farrelly. I read about you in the paper.’ She may not be holding an axe but she could have one in her bag.
I don’t want to judge, but I will because I’m tense, and missing Mark, and our fake-separation isn’t as fun as it said on the label. But it’s often older people who have a problem with marriage equality. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘that was me.’
&nbs
p; She leans forward. She has blue-grey eyes, the colour of Blu-Tack but a lot prettier. ‘I think it’s marvellous what you and your husband are doing.’
I’m so relieved I think I’m going to cry. ‘Thank you, thank you.’ I sat at the end of the carriage so I could see everyone. I do that now. And I know that, of the twelve people in the carriage, at least four of them would hate the idea of gay marriage. But which four is hard to say. Probably not the guy wearing the rainbow badge.
‘Most people don’t have a lot of empathy until they have had some personal experience,’ Elsie says.
True. I may have been a fence-sitter if it wasn’t for Peta. But then, I hate unfairness, so unmarryme may still have happened. ‘I know what you mean,’ I say.
‘When I married my late husband, he was Catholic and I was Protestant, and very few people came to our wedding. He lost half his family when he chose to be with me.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘It was a different time, Ruby,’ Elsie says. ‘Peter never got over losing his family, but we did make a wonderful family of our own.’
I’d forgotten marriage inequality was something people have been dealing with forever. ‘How many children do you have?’
‘I have three sons and two daughters, and twelve grandchildren with another on the way. Lucky thirteen. I suppose you’re wondering why I’m telling you all this?’
People tell me all kinds of things, often stuff I don’t want to know. That they’re having an affair. That they stole their jacket: that they walked right out of the department store with it on their back only ten minutes ago. That they can’t stand Muslims because their granddad fought the Japs, even though that doesn’t even make sense. ‘Maybe,’ I say.
‘Ruby, you keep twisting the spot on your finger where I suppose your wedding ring was. I just wanted to say, don’t give up. You’re making a difference.’
Only Peta cries on public transport. What’s happening to me? I wipe my eyes on the back of my hand. ‘Thank you, Elsie. It’ll be okay in the end.’