‘And you know all this how?’
‘She tells Eva stuff.’
‘You know the only thing your mother’s ever said about my writing, don’t you?’ Pippa plucked at her shoulders and Evaishly inflected her voice: ‘“I don’t understand, Pippa, I was taught that the simple past tense of ‘sink’ is ‘sank’ not ‘sunk’.” She just randomly opens a book that she doesn’t bother to read and—’ What Pippa really wanted to say was, Your mother is a woman who can’t tell her heart from her hat.
‘That’s got nothing to do with Rashida.’
‘Don’t start defending her as well.’
There was the time when Eva was telling Rashida about an NGO that promoted female literacy in Asia. A fundraising event was coming up. The Jesuit had suggested that Rashida would make a good speaker. ‘That man has such a genius for connections,’ said Eva. ‘What do you think, Rashida?’
‘No thanks. It’s not my kind of thing.’
‘But you wouldn’t have to speak for more than a few minutes, and it would be so wonderful to hear from a young woman like you about the importance of literacy in the developing world.’
‘Actually, I never want to speak for the developing world.’
Finding herself alone with Ronnie not long afterwards, Pippa said, ‘Wow! Rashida can be pretty abrasive, can’t she?’
‘Oh, it doesn’t do Eva any harm if her plans for the human race occasionally come unstuck.’
‘I just think Rashida could make a bit more of an effort to be likeable.’
Ronnie rolled her eyes. ‘Likeable’s overrated, if you ask me.’
‘It’s fairly crucial if you want to be liked.’
‘Why should Rashida want to be liked?’ Ronnie said, ‘Maybe she just wants to be.’
Out of nowhere a realisation arrived—or rather, not a realisation but that far more powerful thing, an intuition: Pippa saw that Eva had set out to bring Rashida and Matt together. (‘My Muslim daughter-in-law.’) Eva mentioned Rashida’s love of children so frequently that Matt couldn’t have failed to take it in. And Rashida was at it as well: always getting out her phone and showing Eva photos of her sisters’ children, or asking after Caroline and Becky’s kids. Pippa had heard her tell Caroline, ‘If you’re ever stuck for a babysitter…’
Another time, Rashida led the conversation around to Twitter in the most blatant way, asking Eva—Eva!—if she had thought about signing up.
‘You don’t want to go there, Eva,’ said Ronnie. ‘Trust me. Oversharing, ephemera, schmoozing and cats.’ Ronnie was addicted to Twitter, of course. ‘Not forgetting the transparently curated selves. And did I mention cats?’
‘People have always done that,’ said Rashida.
‘Shared photos of their chia porridge with the world?’
‘Presented selective aspects of themselves. Twitter’s also about connection,’ said Rashida. ‘And activism. That’s why I think Eva would like it.’
‘The advances in technology over the course of my working life have been nothing short of staggering,’ said Keith. ‘The things that imaging can do today—unimaginable even twenty years ago.’
Pippa looked at Rashida. ‘I didn’t realise you’re on Twitter. What’s your handle? I’ll follow you.’
‘Oh, I’m speaking generally, not from personal experience,’ said Rashida. ‘I don’t fit the Twitter demographic: it mostly appeals to people aged between thirty-five and fifty-five. My generation’s more Facebook and Instagram.’
That’s right, Pippa thought. Remind everyone you’re the youngest person here. Up to her thirty-fifth birthday, Pippa had always known immediately how old she was. These days she had to pause before she could remember her age—but she was still young, she was sure of that. Rashida was thirty-three, only five years younger than Pippa, but Pippa realised that they were five critical years. She decided that Rashida’s remark was aimed specifically at Matt. She was letting him know that, unlike his wife, she could still have two or three kids; or a whole battalion, given that twin thing that was going on.
Teaching kept Matt busy and unhappy; he had changed employers twice. Now he was at a school that wasn’t far from his parents’ house. He began arriving home late once or twice a week, saying that he had dropped in to see Eva after work.
Pippa said, ‘We spend practically every weekend with your family. Do you have to see Eva after work as well?’
‘She’s worried about Dad. Thinks he’s pushing himself too hard, working late, conferences, whatever. She wants him to cut back, maybe work four days a week, but he won’t hear of it. And yesterday he told her he’s going to spend an extra week in Vietnam this year. It helps if I have a glass of wine with her and let her natter.’
‘Isn’t that what she keeps a priest for?’ Pippa felt queasy. She could sense something shimmering yet precise: Matt was having an affair with Rashida, with Eva’s knowledge and connivance. She had agreed to provide her son with an alibi, should one be required.
One evening, when Matt was supposed to be with Eva, Pippa rang the clinic and was told that Rashida was ‘with a client’—who? She called Matt. He said that he was just leaving Bellevue Hill. How was Pippa to know if that was true? She looked through the folder where he kept his Visa statements—nothing. Nothing proved nothing. She went back to her laptop, deleted a sentence in her novel, then pasted it back in. @gloriahallelujah retweeted a list of the ten best pigs in literature. @pippapasses did the same. She tweeted, ‘So humbled by lovely email from reader about French Lessons. Favourite novel—aww!’ Her publishers had forwarded the email some weeks earlier. It began, ‘My book group did your novel French Lessons. We found it unbelievable and boring. Why…?’
It was Saturday. Pippa was reading the newspaper over breakfast, and Matt was watching Game of Thrones. The books section in the paper was largely given over to an ad for an opulent new residential development called Parvenu. A profile of a bestselling American novelist had been squeezed in: ‘He was raised by his father, a general, and has magical memories of childhood holidays in Panama, Haiti and the Middle East.’
Across the table, Matt was on to his second croissant. Birds sang loudly in the yard. Pippa noticed that her toenails needed cutting—she was way overdue for a mani-pedi. Was her marriage normal? she wondered. Was this how other people lived? The American novelist, bespectacled and cleft-chinned, brought Clark Kent to mind. Pippa imagined, idly, being in bed with him: their clumsiness, his soft lips. It would be mess, plunder, gambling, excess. It would be nothing like proficient married sex—the kind she could look forward to for the rest of her life.
She nudged Matt with her foot. ‘Ever think about having an affair?’ She had intended to add, ‘with Rashida,’ but the words refused to come.
‘Mmm.’
‘Matt!’
He took out his earbuds, but the screen still pulled his gaze. Pippa repeated her question.
He looked at her at last. ‘Bad writing week?’
‘Just say, will you.’
‘The answer’s no.’
It had the weakness of truth. At the same time, Matt had been sort of evasive. But the air between them felt clear; the invisible barrier that descended in the aftermath of an argument or the build-up to one wasn’t there. Pippa was the one who had difficulty speaking Rashida’s name: there seemed to be a kind of danger about it. She decided: He’s not actually on with her now, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be. Her friend Liz, who had plenty of experience to call on, always said, ‘If you really set out to get a married guy, you will.’ Pippa saw Eva’s hand pushing things along, its feverish blue stones. Afterwards, she would murmur, ‘I have such a genius for connection,’ beaming at Rashida and Matt.
There were new scatter cushions on Eva’s couch. ‘How great are these!’ said Caroline, picking one up. The fabric was handprinted with yellow leaves, stylised and black-veined, on a grey ground.
Eva said, ‘That shop in Woollahra is having a sale.’
‘Really? I’m
so ready for new cushions.’
‘These are down to eighty-five each.’
‘That’s so reasonable. I really need a couple of cushions. Do they come in red?’
A visor had descended over Rashida’s face. One of her recent Facebook photos had shown Iggy Syed with Rashida’s father. On a clothesline in the background, a bathmat could be seen: it was lime-green loop shag chenille. Pippa knew that bathmat: its purple twin was embedded in her past. Pippa’s grandmother had installed it in the bathroom when her daughter and the children moved in after the divorce. Her daughter ticked her off: such a waste of money, the household couldn’t afford it, there was nothing wrong with the old rubber mat. Pippa was only nine at the time and had no words for what she understood at once: the bathmat was an assertion of spirit. Every time she stepped out of the shower and felt that fluffy cosiness between her toes, Pippa knew that a four-room fibro box wouldn’t contain her for long. Her life was going to bring her everything anyone could ever want: an audience with Boy George, chocolates, a strapless satin dress, admirers, heaven, a long envelope containing a cheque, flashes going off.
When she moved to Sydney, Pippa and one of her new housemates had gone shopping at Kmart for stuff like tea towels and reading lamps. Spotting a cheerful pile of loop shag chenille, Pippa cried, ‘Look!’
The other girl looked. ‘Hilarious,’ she said. Her flat hair whipped as she turned away. ‘Genuine bogan.’ Pippa lowered her outstretched arm.
Eva’s three bathrooms, updated with floating vanities, contained nothing but thick white Egyptian cotton. Pippa pictured herself running into the nearest and returning with a snowy mat that she placed in the middle of the floor. Rashida and Pippa would squat on it together and urinate, supporting each other lightly under the elbows and laughing.
Caroline said, ‘These cushions are really great. I’m thinking it would make sense to get four.’
Despite Eva’s concern that he was overdoing things, Keith looked well: fit, relaxed. His hair was white now but still sprang closely all over his head. He had the kind of body that was unassertive but unyielding, the chest not hollowed out and no sausage of fat at the waist. A tiny grandchild racing around a table with elbows lifted and carroty locks flying was seized by Keith and kissed. The child put her hands on the places that would one day be her hips and spoke to him in a quiet voice: ‘No one is allowed to touch me without my permission.’
‘Quite right,’ said Keith, and sent her on her way with a soft smack. He noticed Pippa watching and asked about the progress of her new book.
‘Oh, you know.’ Pippa said, ‘I’m trying to write really honestly about a marriage. It’s tricky.’
‘I thought you did that very well in French Lessons.’
Pippa could have hugged him. Also, inexplicably, she might have cried. She said, ‘Things might have gone downhill since then. In the marriage, I mean.’
He said formally, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘What’s up with Rashida?’ Pippa asked, one Sunday. ‘I haven’t seen her for ages.’
‘I believe she’s been spending weekends in Melbourne. She tells me her father hasn’t been well.’ Eva smiled at her plate and changed the subject. The air turned into a sort of gel: slimy, veiling. Something was going on all around Pippa—it was everywhere but hidden—something shameful and mean.
She checked Rashida’s Facebook page every day, but found only links to Alexander stuff, or photos of Rashida’s family or of food. Rashida wasn’t a very active Facebook user, although she had almost six hundred friends there. Matt used Facebook just to keep up with Tess in Chicago, and with Becky, now working at an Indigenous health centre in Darwin; he never commented on Rashida’s posts.
Rashida posted a YouTube link: James Carr’s ‘The Dark End of the Street’. She wrote: ‘Can’t get this out of my head lately.’ Ferial commented, ‘Sending so much love your way.’ What Pippa saw when she opened her eyes in the morning was what she had seen when she closed them: Rashida pressed against her lover in a doorway, his hands inside her coat. Pippa was working on the final draft of her novel but kept returning to Rashida’s post. She played and replayed the song.
There came an evening when she jumped up from her laptop and went fast down the hall—the red curtain screamed on its rings. She said, ‘You were whistling “The Dark End of the Street”. I heard you.’
Matt was doing the washing-up in a dorky pose that Rashida had taught him: spine straight, legs bent at the knees, he was hingeing forward from the hips. With the po-faced, cultish sincerity that characterised all his pronouncements about the Technique, he had told Pippa, ‘Young children naturally assume the Monkey Position. It keeps the spine long and the neck free when carrying out everyday activities.’ The song and the stance now added up with arithmetical certainty to one thing: proof.
‘Why were you whistling that?’ Pippa repeated, ‘I heard you,’ as if he had denied it.
‘You’ve been playing it. Over and over.’ Pippa remained in the doorway, tight-faced, rampant. Wiping his forehead with a sudsy hand, Matt said, ‘What’s up? Is it your book?’
In bed that night Pippa told him, ‘I want to try again.’
‘Are you sure?’ And before she could answer, ‘Let’s wait till your book’s done, OK?’
Pippa’s veins turned to wire. She thought, He’s going to leave me. Matt and she had sudden animal clashes, sudden shared intuitions. One morning they discovered that they had dreamed the same thing: a large blond cow had leaped from a death truck and escaped along a city street. It was one of those strange, bright moments that illuminate a marriage. The first time they looked out at the view from the back door, Pippa had said, ‘Callan Park.’ In Callan Park, if you left the path that ran beside the bay and scrambled up the embankment to the oval, space suddenly opened before you. The soul widened too, responding to clarity and expanse. Matt had taken Pippa there in their first year together; it had been one of their places. Lying in bed, Pippa knew that no one else on the planet would have understood why she had looked out at the yard and said ‘Callan Park’. She thought, I’m impossible to live with. She rolled onto her back, away from Matt.
As it happened, Steve the poplar killer came down with bronchitis and pulled out of the lunch that was to bring Rashida and him together. Rashida wasn’t well either: she had caught a cold. Her face seemed to have shrunk into her hood of hair. She took a tissue from her bag and dabbed at her glazed nostrils. Her nails were painted a pale pink that matched her shirt: the colour darkened her face, her hands.
It was a breezeless day at the end of summer, the sky that firm Australian blue. They were having lunch on the deck, but Hank the Tank had to be shut inside because Rashida had announced that she didn’t like dogs. When Hank wished to complain, he neither barked nor whined but produced noises like grinding machinery interspersed with strangled squawks. All through the meal, he stood with his nose to the screen door and made his noises. They sounded prehistoric, said Will: ‘The sort of noises a wounded pterodactyl might have made.’ Rashida didn’t apologise, as Pippa would have done in her place, for bringing about the situation. She wiped her nose on the stringy Kleenex, and ate Pippa’s tomato salad tossed in pomegranate syrup without saying a word.
‘An aversion to dogs is a cultural thing,’ said Liz, an athletic-looking woman with a long, soft face in whom Pippa had confided her matchmaking hopes. On finding only one eligible man present, Liz had grown confused and now believed that Pippa was trying to set Rashida up with Will. It was necessary, therefore, to embellish Rashida’s bald statement about disliking dogs. ‘It’s Islamic. Like not drinking alcohol.’ She radiated ecumenical understanding and upended the prosecco over her glass.
‘No, it’s me,’ said Rashida. She blew her nose. ‘My parents have a poodle that my little sister rescued. And the reason I’m not drinking’s because I’ve got a cold.’ She repeated, ‘I just don’t like dogs.’
Matt said, ‘Who does when they carry on like Hank?’
Rashida smiled at him and dropped what was left of her Kleenex onto her lap. At least she didn’t laugh or touch her hair when Matt spoke to her: infallible signs of sexual electricity, according to Liz. Nor had Matt given Pippa any unexpected, expensive presents—jewellery, for instance, was tantamount to a confession of adulterous love.
Will asked, ‘Why don’t you eat meat? Muslims do.’ His long neck gave Will a high-up stare, which he now bestowed on Rashida. It informed her that she was either a fake Muslim or a fake vegetarian, and that either way, she had been found out.
‘I don’t eat meat because I don’t like the taste. Most things I do aren’t related to being a Muslim.’
Liz, continuing to exude benevolence, said, ‘I think what Will was getting at was that we’ve learned from other cultures and are all eating less meat these days.’
Will was preparing his smile that was really a glare. Before he could unleash it, Pippa told Rashida, ‘I bet you picked up that cold in Melbourne. I came home with one the last time I was there.’
‘Melbourne!’ said Will, glaring around. ‘Can you believe that place? They wear black to the beach.’
‘How did you know I’ve been to Melbourne?’ asked Rashida.
Unable to answer, I’ve been Facebook-stalking your relatives, Pippa said, ‘Eva mentioned that your dad’s been ill. I’m sorry to hear that. I hope it wasn’t anything serious?’
Rashida looked down. She shook her head. Somewhere in the depths of her hair were dangly earrings set with stones that glittered when they caught the light. Their tackiness, like the nail polish, was at odds with her muted style. Pippa thought, She’s dressing with someone in mind.
Liz began talking about the digital marketing guy at work. ‘Ever since he went to Burning Man, he starts every meeting by giving everyone a hug. I end up stinking of his beard oil for the rest of the day.’
Pippa gathered up the salad dish and empty bottles, refusing help. All the knives flashed in the sun. Inside, the kitchen was black—it was amazing how much darkness could collect in a room on a bright day. Hank placed himself in her path and gazed. He had the square chest and round head of a dog on a gatepost. ‘It’s not fair, is it?’ said Pippa. ‘Have a tomato.’ She checked her phone: there were a couple of texts that could wait, and a missed call, also unimportant. Pippa arranged zucchini fritters on a platter, poured a herby yoghurt sauce into a shallow bowl and lined them up for a photo. She would post it on Facebook and Twitter to show her support for vegetarianism. It was important to show it. When it came to domestic violence or gay marriage or climate change, Pippa knew, unequivocally, that she was on the right side. That was the side of people who drank fair trade coffee and attended vigils for murdered asylum-seekers and had rescue pets and shopped at farmers’ markets and said No to plastic bags. It was not the side of Pippa’s father, who blamed feminism for the breakdown of his marriage, and believed that Australia was for Australians, by which he meant people who looked like him. He held these opinions not meanly but casually: his bigotry was the laid-back Australian kind. Choice by choice, his daughter planted her flags on the highest hill—they proclaimed her distance from him. But now and then that sunlit peak dwindled to a little mound, and a shadow fell. Vegetarians were Falun Gong to Pippa’s Chinese embassy: they just stood there with their lives. To counter the criticism that no one offered, she sought out ethical butchers and tweeted about it at least once a month—the shadow shrank and the peak rose again, shining. What was more, if Pippa had vegetarian guests she catered for them magnificently, as she was doing with this meal. Long before the advent of Rashida, Becky had brought a man who didn’t eat meat to dinner at her parents’ house. As she laid his plate before him, Eva said, ‘We are having grilled fish and steamed vegetables, and you are having steamed vegetables.’ Pippa watched the poor guy fill up on slice after slice of limp white bread. While here was she, piling a feast onto trays: as well as the fritters, there were butter beans with feta, and a salad that mixed ancient grains and nuts.
The Life to Come Page 20