Eva went away at last. Keith cleared his throat. He said, ‘The first time I met Bethany she was six months old. She had a turned eye. She’s twenty-seven now, and her eyes are perfectly straight. It’s immensely satisfying.’ He shifted on his pillows as he spoke.
Pippa said, ‘Are you comfortable? Can I get you anything?’
‘I’ve always felt a very strong attachment to the world. I’d prefer not to leave it yet. Then again, I’ve seen my children grow up and I’ll die in my bed with as little pain as medical science can manage. That’s more than most people on earth can say.’
On one of the cancer websites to which Eva’s emails linked, Pippa had read that patients sometimes experienced a foul smell at the back of the throat. You would think ‘a foul taste’; but no, it was ‘smell’. Keith’s face was the colour of mushrooms. He said, ‘How are you, my dear?’
Pippa patted her stomach. ‘He can kick like anything these days. I wonder if he’ll arrive early.’ There was a spot where her stomach was sore from the kicking—she could barely remember when her body had been empty and tight.
‘And your book?’
‘The marketing campaign’s already getting into gear. There’s even going to be this amazing Pippa Reynolds app. People will be able to download all this stuff about me.’
‘I’ve been wondering if the marriage worked out all right, in the end.’
‘It worked out just fine.’
‘I’m so pleased.’ Looking hard at the wall, Keith said, ‘You know, Matt takes after his mother: loyal through and through. It’s all you’ll ever have to fear from him.’
Pippa made a noise that could pass for a laugh. The little dog stiffened and began to shake.
Keith said, ‘Come here, boy.’ He shifted the dog to his chest, holding him close to his heart.
‘Look at that—he’s calmed right down,’ said Pippa.
‘Everyone just wants to be held.’
When she left Bellevue Hill, Pippa drove to Earlwood. It was a long drive. All the way, an excited whisper ran through the undergrowth of her mind, pointing out that Rashida no longer existed for the Elkinsons. There was only ‘poor Rashida’: a victim, pitied and without power. Stuck in traffic, Pippa turned her head and saw three tailor’s dummies in the window of a shop, each wearing an identical white dress. It meant the shop was holding a sale. Pippa had known that for a long time but now saw death in the three headless figures, in the folds of the crisp, white clothes.
In Earlwood, she found a cafe off Homer Street where she ordered homemade moussaka and salad. She checked her messages and did some other things on her phone. The food arrived. A real estate lift-out from the local paper lay within reach: ‘Colonial Mansion Has Twenty-Eight Car Spaces’. Pippa barely noticed. She was thinking about Keith: his ceremonial embraces, his light, decisive voice. It was easy to picture him roaring up Vietnamese mountains on his motorbike, smiling at everyone he passed. As she was leaving, he had said, ‘Cairo. I never got there, you know.’ His eyes had kept their X-ray intensity, but now their concentration was turned inward. Pippa guessed that he was following some prolonged, cottony thought, the consequence of illness or drugs. It was leading him to a river, domed buildings, a life running out over thick, sweet coffee in the lacy shadows cast by a cutwork brass lamp. There were pearls of sweat along Keith’s upper lip. Medical science had left only a sparse white garland around his head: a prefiguration of the wreath that would lie on his coffin. Tangled up in all this, somehow, was a memory of Pippa’s father, with whom she now quarrelled whenever they met: until she was nine, when her parents split, she had always run to meet him. He never entered the house without calling her name.
After lunch, Pippa went looking for a florist. Then she drove to the street in which Rashida lived. It wasn’t her first time there. In May that year, Matt had told Pippa that he was going to spend a couple of nights in Bellevue Hill. ‘Dad’s away in Canberra for a conference, and there was a break-in across the street last week. Eva’s nervous, although you’ll never get her to admit it. Caro’s doing a night as well, and so’s Ronnie.’
Pippa went out to dinner with Eva and Matt on the first day he was away. On the second, she was at work when a familiar itch started up. She called the clinic, and was told that Rashida was on holiday that week.
‘Has she gone to Melbourne?’
‘To be honest, I wouldn’t know that, honestly,’ said the receptionist. ‘Would you like me to schedule you for next week?’
The next morning, Pippa woke at five. Rain was pounding the roof. Fear rolled through her with the force of a flood. There had been a dream—in the dream Matt had been on a train in the company of a shadowy figure. Teeth were involved, and the ten of clubs. On her way to the kitchen, Pippa saw herself in a mirror: her jaw and nose had strengthened with age. She pulled a few faces to banish the one in front of her, but it persisted—for the rest of her life, she would look like a skinny man.
She put the coffee on, opened the back door and switched on the outside light: rain was falling over the edge of the roof in an unbroken sheet. Pippa slid her hand under her sweatshirt and scratched—between her breasts, her flesh was still warm with sleep. She was sure that she was pregnant but every day she put off confirming it. Every day Matt didn’t ask. His not-asking deafened Pippa. She crossed her arms over her chest and wondered, What have I done?
The air in the kitchen felt solid on wet mornings: Pippa had to dig her way through. Tess had drawn up plans for renovations ages ago, but Matt and Pippa still hadn’t even taken down Mateusz’s grotty curtain. Now there would be a baby; the work would have to be postponed again. The espresso machine shuddered, and Pippa knew that she would always look for reasons to keep these rooms as they were. When they disappeared, a door that had remained ajar would swing shut. Pippa didn’t want to walk through that door, but she wanted to preserve the landscape that lay beyond. Otherwise, there would be only this life: willed into being, shipshape and all around her.
She took her coffee back to bed, and Hank ambled along with her. Pippa told him, ‘I think I should tell Matt today, don’t you?’ Hank leaped up onto the bed, which was forbidden, collapsed against Pippa and began to purr. No one was able to decide whether Hank was incredibly stupid or incredibly good. When Pippa had proposed adopting a dog, a long time ago now, Matt agreed at once. Months after Hank arrived, they were waiting for the bill in a restaurant when Matt said, ‘A dog isn’t what we need.’ He was never unkind to Hank, but their relations were without humour.
Pippa texted Matt: ‘Happy news. Love ya.’ His tracksuit pants and a T-shirt were laid out on his side of the bed like clothes whose owner lay in a morgue. A different dream rose to the surface of Pippa’s mind, one from earlier in the night: she was in a deli, buying a kind of cheese that cured jetlag. That would make an excellent tweet: #middleclassdreams. @warmstrong said, ‘A detailed, non-ironic review of a colouring book. *face-palms*.’ Someone had a video of a kangaroo pushing a man into a billabong. Someone else asked whether Norwex cloths were worth the $$. @gloriahallelujah tweeted, ‘So blessed to represent @JoshKapoor. Stunning food memoir out next June! Form an orderly queue.’
By half-past six, Pippa and Hank were dashing through the rain to her car. When she returned from France, Pippa had finally conceded that the Peugeot had to go. Leaving the car dealership, she began to cry—Aidan had spent entire Saturday afternoons lying in the driveway with his head under that car, and now the Peugeot was cowering in a corner of a car yard, a defeated animal destined for the slaughterhouse. The tedious red Honda she had traded it for never failed to start: its meekness still took Pippa by surprise. Wipers dutifully manic now, it was carrying her through the early-morning traffic, heading for Earlwood. Hank breathed hotly on the back seat. He experimented with his harness, stepping to the left and to the right. He made pitiful noises: why couldn’t he lay his head in the beloved female’s lap—why, why? If a different human had been present, Hank would have loved her too. His love
was God’s love: it overlooked no one, and the specific could not be expected of it.
The silhouettes of cranes rose all along the manipulated suburban skyline: giant fingerposts directing This Way To Megabucks. The names of property developers were offered to the sky like modern prayers. Pippa had reached Marrickville when her phone rang—that would be Matt. She took a wrong turn and ended up heading down a hill towards the river. On the far side of the valley, the brick-and-tile ranges of Earlwood loomed in charcoal shapes, their brightwork of windows hellfire yellow, like a sinister allegory of city life. A text came through; Pippa knew that Matt had guessed her news. She drummed her fingers on the wheel and said, ‘Bye bye, Rashida!’: a grim, happy thought.
When she turned into it, Ashmead Place was black with rain. It was a short street, a dead end, with only one apartment block; Pippa slowed as she drew near. She pictured Rashida luxuriously awake, watching her streaming, beaten windows. She saw herself running up the stairs. Rashida’s door swung open at her touch, as had the one to the street. Pippa switched on every light she passed. In the bedroom, she dragged Rashida from the bed where she lay folded into Matt. Rashida didn’t offer any resistance: she was guilty, and Pippa was invincible. Grasping her by a hank of hair, Pippa slammed her head into the wall: once, twice. The repeated thwack of Rashida’s skull against the bricks, the sludge of her blood and brains on the plaster—how satisfying!
Pippa turned her car around at the river end of the street and drove slowly back the other way. The thick sort of day that was breaking obscured as much as it revealed, but there was no mistaking the powder-blue Beetle parked under a dripping tree.
Now, six months after that morning, every jacaranda in the street had lilac hair. Pippa peered through massy blossom at Rashida’s building: its brick bulk looked as composed and still as a ship that had pitched through a storm and lay serenely in harbour at last. In Rashida’s Facebook photo, part of a word, printed on her doormat, showed beside the pork ribs: ‘ME’. Pippa parked and walked up to the entrance of the building. She was carrying a colossal bouquet—roses, carnations, wax flowers, stock—that she intended to leave on Rashida’s mat: obliterating, scented flowers that would cry, ‘Welcome! Welcome!’ But the thick glass security door was locked. Pippa buzzed a few apartments but got no answer. It was very frustrating: the flowers would have made a spectacular photo on social media. Seeing it in their Twitter feeds, people would think: Pippa Reynolds is such a warm, generous person!
The bright afternoon had relaxed into warmth. The river was an invitation at the bottom of the street. Pippa left the flowers in her car and made her way down to the water. She followed a path that led to an avenue of blurry she-oaks. A mild contraction brought her to a standstill in the shade of three Moreton Bay figs, and she thought, as she had thought every day since that rainy May morning, I didn’t have to do this. Now having a baby was something there was no going around, only through. Pippa felt as she did when she had spent days cooking a meal, and the guests were about to arrive: anticipation, a light euphoria and the wish to be transported to a hotel with excellent room service where she could remake her life. During her first, brief pregnancy, she had asked Keith, using a flip sort of voice to mask fear, ‘What if I don’t love this baby?’ Everyone else on whom she tried that out had answered, ‘Of course you will!’ Keith said, ‘That must happen sometimes. But in my experience people suffer much more from the promises they don’t make than the ones they can’t keep.’
The last time Pippa had seen both Keith and Rashida was, as usual, over Sunday lunch in Bellevue Hill. It was a celebratory occasion: Pippa had announced her pregnancy, and Caroline had embarked on a new career. The previous year, she had decided to resign her partnership: ‘I’m fed up with commercial law. I want to live differently, get some of that edge back.’ Now she had gone into investment banking. Ronnie said, ‘So here’s my sister’s idea of living dangerously: she’s swapped the Beemer for an Alfa Romeo.’ Pippa barely noticed the joshing: she was watching Rashida and Keith. They ignored each other, pretty much, but not in a pointed way, just as they had always done. Rashida looked up and saw Pippa inspecting her—her grey eyes looked straight back. She was wearing her trashy earrings: they shone like frozen rain against her hair. A beat later, Pippa realised, They’re real. Keith, of course. Pricey bling would be exactly his notion of a gift that would appeal to the primitive mind.
Rashida turned to Eva: ‘These cabbage rolls are your best ever.’ Pippa thought, Wow! You’re good at this. She hadn’t told Matt what she had discovered—how to explain what she had been doing in Ashmead Place? Running alongside that difficulty, and not entirely acknowledged by Pippa, was a desire to protect Keith. The secret, held close, felt potent and dangerous, a magic amulet—it lit up inside Pippa from time to time, delivering a small, shocking thrill.
Keith touched her wrist: ‘May I trouble you for the bread?’ He smiled at her: a buffoon, a cheat. Pippa realised, You’re good at this. Rashida’s learned from you. She remembered, ‘When that man wants something, he wants it violently.’ Pippa picked up her glass of sparkling water—she felt wobbly inside. As it turned out, it would be the last lunch of its kind. Two days later, Keith consulted a doctor about the pain in his chest.
As Pippa made her way along the river in Earlwood, she saw trees hanging their heads, sodden with blossom. Bougainvillea had dragged its hefty, coloured swags over fences; honeysuckle wandered between gardens, perfuming and strangling as it went. A cyclist rode past with a hound coursing beside her, and Pippa resolved to bring Hank here one day soon. She had left the path and was strolling along the broad grassy verge. It was the time of year when the light—even in squalid Sydney—was a pure, inquisitorial gold. It laid bare the world that Keith was leaving and Pippa’s child was entering: the world of the ‘Minuet in G’ and Game of Thrones, the world of sarcomas and adult colouring books and full-throttle spring afternoons. In that world of appetite and detail, Matt got a son and Pippa got a bestseller and Rashida got a slab of pork ribs, and to be honest, honestly, Pippa was neither wholly glad nor wholly sorry about any of those things.
Beyond a playground the trees ended, and the way ahead ran open and radiant beside the varnished membrane of the river. Pippa was about to turn back when a procession appeared in the west—at least, a procession was what she thought of at first. The sunlight, shining into her eyes, seemed to warp around the figures, who now brought pilgrims to mind; and then formality and purposefulness gave way, and Pippa thought of a carnival troupe. Each successive impression was of something archaic because the scene before her seemed to have fallen out of time. Something cold crawled between Pippa’s shoulders. But the strangers were closer now, and she saw that they were just people enjoying a walk along the river. It was their gaudy clothes that had confused her—they were like costumes borrowed from a different age. Five men led the way, in bright shirts that reached to the knees of their baggy cotton trousers. Some wore flat-topped skullcaps bordered with embroidery; one had on tracksuit pants, and a waistcoat woven with metallic threads. A dozen or so women followed, dressed in ankle-length skirts and loose shirts in flamboyant combinations of colour: pink and emerald, purple and mustard, turquoise and clear red. Like the men, they wore sandals or chunky runners, and walked nonchalantly, swinging their arms. Their speech, by turns piercing and watery, carried messages from the world. They cried out to each other and to the men, who answered over their shoulders. One woman held up her palm and snapped her fingers, another hurried forward and tugged at a sleeve—the whole scene was emphatic with gesture and talk. Pippa saw flat, golden-brown faces. They were old and young, and they had square, unAustralian teeth, some of them broken. Strung out across the path, the men and women surged past Pippa as if she were invisible, their raucous exchanges passing through her. They flowed on and vanished into the trees, and Pippa remained where she was. The heat pressed about her like a pelt; she glanced down, lightly aware of her beating heart. When she looked up, a troll ha
d materialised in the punishing light; the squat figure approached, half skipping, half running, waving his arms. He called out, and a burst of laughter floated back from the trees. The child pranced on: a fattish boy of about ten, wearing an orange T-shirt over those baggy trousers. Unlike his elders, he paused when he drew level with Pippa, and his lively eyes passed over her. Then he laughed in her face and lolloped away.
It would become a story that Pippa told her son (and, in time, her step-grandchildren): the story of how she went for a walk one afternoon and met a band of strangers, passing through Sydney on their way to curious lands. ‘You were there with me,’ she would say to her son. ‘We were keeping each other safe. But you were invisible.’
The river story proved a favourite with Pippa’s son, and she added to it with each telling: an embellishment of high, clear music, symbolic fish leaping in the water and a kookaburra whose cracked laughter was a code. One of the strangers played a flute, said Pippa, and another beat a drum, while a girl with a wing of black hair juggled three silver cups. Men and women alike wore broad bangles of beaten metal, set with flashing stones, that reached halfway up their arms. The people on the river path had left an impression of earthy coarseness, but in Pippa’s account, they seemed to have been spun from music and gold. Their sleeves flared from their elbows like flags. A dog with a round head and a square chest ran forward to inspect them. Hank was dead by then; Pippa’s son remembered him only as a sort of threadbare shadow, but he loved the dog in the tale. Hank was persuaded by the golden people to join their band, said Pippa, and saw wonders in their company. According to the vet, Hank’s kidneys had given out, but Pippa knew that he had died of a broken heart. Long after they buried him under the orange tree she went on hearing him, separated from the human companionship he longed for, pleading outside the back door to be allowed into the house. Hank became the hero of her story, a gallant adventurer. He visited kingdoms deep under the sea, and tucked away in the bush, and hidden among the starry lanes of outlandish galaxies. His new friends could be fierce, but Hank kept them from quarrels and steered them into gentle ways. As time passed, Pippa came to believe that he really had been with her that day, moseying along in the bold urban grass. Her life had leafed out; it wasn’t always possible to see past the experiences it carried like obscuring blossoms. No memory of that meeting by the river could match the confusion of the event, and gradually her mind reworked it so that everything—the boisterous strangers, the judgmental light—took on a kindly tint.
The Life to Come Page 23