‘Hello,’ the man said. ‘Tony, right?’
‘Yes,’ I said, stupidly, since my name wasn’t Tony.
‘There’s been a bit of an accident,’ the woman said. ‘One of the kids knocked the aquarium over in the other room. Violet’s in there now cleaning up.’
‘Oh. Thank you,’ I said.
I headed towards the dining room. Violet was in there, squeezing a mop into its bucket. She was dressed like a cowgirl, with a vest and hat and even a gun holster and pistol. She looked good. There were towels all over the floor, all of them darkened with water.
‘Hey,’ she said when she saw me. ‘You missed all the excitement.’
‘Someone knocked over the aquarium?’
‘I managed to get all the glass, I think,’ she said, looking around the room. ‘There’s just water everywhere now.’
Around the room were drink glasses and plastic containers and vases with fish in them. Two cognac glasses on the bookcase each held a cherry barb. They were regarding each other through the glass. Claud’s lunchbox was on the table and I leaned over to see four zebrafish swimming around inside it.
‘I had to put the two catfish in the bath. Claud’s upstairs; she’s had a bit of a tantrum. Bill’s up there with her now. None of the fish died, so that’s a plus.’
‘I could go and talk to her,’ I said.
‘Sure, but maybe give them a few minutes,’ Violet said. She looked down at the ice-cream container in my hand. ‘And also maybe don’t give her that yet. Here, I’ll go put it in the study until later.’
She took the goldfish from me and walked away. When it had been me and Violet and Claud there hadn’t been a study. I went into the kitchen and opened the freezer, took out what I guessed were a couple of frozen hamburgers and threw them up onto the top shelf of the pantry, out of sight. I opened the fridge, took a beer and walked out into the backyard.
There were three women sitting at the outdoor table and a whole bunch of children running around on the lawn. I didn’t know anybody there and all the children were wearing costumes. They were dressed mostly as animals, though there was a boy whose costume only extended to a fireman’s hat. I sat down at the table with the women and introduced myself as Claud’s father. There wasn’t any sign of the couple who’d greeted me in the kitchen. After making brief introductions the women went back to their conversation. I drank in small sips. A gazebo had been built in the back corner of the yard. That was new. The pine looked fresh and naked, by which I mean it was un-varnished.
There was a hole in the other corner of the yard. To alert people to its presence, two bright orange witches hats had been placed on either side of it. I thought this gave the hole an official appearance.
‘What is that?’ I said to the women, nodding at the hole. ‘In the corner of the yard?’
‘A gazebo,’ one of them said without looking.
Before I could explain what I meant, Bill Casey walked out of the house and came over and hit me on the shoulder by way of a greeting. He was quite strong. He was dressed as a cowboy, but it took me a few moments to realise that because he wasn’t wearing a hat.
‘Hello Bill,’ I said.
‘I suppose you heard we had a slight incident,’ Bill said, ‘but I think it’s over now.’
‘I missed it,’ I said.
‘It was quite amazing. There was water everywhere. I couldn’t believe the tank could actually have that much water inside it. I guess it looks like less when it’s in a tank than when it’s on a floor.’
I nodded in agreement. Bill had a beard and it suited him. He’d had it ever since we’d first met, at university, and when he smiled he looked warm and familiar. I imagined him having had the beard throughout his whole life, even as a baby. I got up from the table and went and stood with him. I was pretty sure we’d still have been friends with each other even if he hadn’t taken up with my wife, though I had to admit that sometimes I found it hard to picture a different life than the one I was already leading.
‘Someone finished painting the house at least,’ I said.
‘And the gazebo’s new. After Vi and I built it, other people on our street started putting them in their yards too.’
‘It looks like a pretty good job.’
‘We were going to call you to help with the painting, but then we didn’t think we should bother you with it.’
‘It looks good.’
‘Maybe we could get some help when we do the inside. The study needs painting.’
Violet came out, with Claud in front of her. Claud’s eyes were still red from crying and she was wearing a giraffe mask that had been pushed up on top of her head, so it stared up at the sky. When she saw me she ran over and hugged me around my legs, which I was thankful for. I looked down at the giraffe’s face staring back up at me. Claud’s blond hair made it look like it had completely white eyes.
‘Happy birthday,’ I said.
‘Thanks Daddy,’ she said. ‘Lucien knocked over the fish, but none of them died.’
‘I heard,’ I said.
‘Violet mentioned you were on the news,’ Bill said.
‘He stopped someone from drowning,’ Violet said. ‘Claud, do you remember me telling you about Daddy on the news?’
Claud said, ‘Yeah,’ then let go of my legs and ran over to join the other children.
‘She’s been excited all day,’ Violet said.
‘What’s with the hole in the ground?’ I said.
‘We’re putting in a pond,’ Violet said. ‘Or at least that’s the plan.’
‘I need to go out and get a new fish tank,’ Bill Casey said. He turned to me, ‘You want to come along or are you right here?’
I looked at Claud playing with the other kids, and Violet going and joining the other women at the table. She and Bill were the only adults dressed in costume.
‘I think I’ll be fine here,’ I said.
‘Sure, have another drink. I’ll be back in fifteen.’
Deep down I’d always thought that Bill was a better person than me, even if he was a little dumb. When we were in our early twenties we’d come across a dead whale down on the beach. Bill wanted to do something for it. The whale was a dark grey colour and smelled like sea-salt. It wasn’t a huge one, but it was still about as big as a small boat and obviously dead. Its eyes were half-open.
‘Help me push it back into the water,’ Bill said.
‘Leave it, it’s dead,’ I said, but he didn’t, and when he’d tried to push it with the full weight of his body from behind its left flipper, his shoes dug into the ground. The whale didn’t move an inch. People stopped to watch us.
Bill said to me, and maybe to everyone else too, ‘I know it’s dead, all right, okay? Jesus, I just want to see if I can move it.’
I sat with my ex-wife and listened to the women talk. It didn’t take long before Violet told everyone at the table that I’d recently saved a man from drowning and I closed my eyes and nodded to try to show that it wasn’t a big deal. Thankfully the women didn’t ask me any questions about it and went back to their conversation about the coming school play and what roles their children had been cast in. I felt a bit out of step and stared off into space.
Eventually Violet said to me, ‘You know I helped build that gazebo?’
‘Yeah? And you also seem to have a study now?’ I said.
‘It was your old supply room. We pulled the cabinets out and now the walls look so bare. Did you check out the gazebo?’
‘I was telling Bill that it looks like a good job.’
‘Did you stand on it? It’s sturdy.’
‘Not yet.’
Violet stared at me and didn’t say anything else. I put down my beer, stood up from the table and went and climbed the gazebo’s two stairs. I looked at the r
oof, which had been made well, with metal joints where the beams met. I bounced up and down on the floor a few times, testing its sturdiness. It was a bright day and the sun was out. I looked over the fence, into both of the neighbours’ backyards. I couldn’t see any other gazebos. The four women at the table were all watching me.
‘Solid, right?’ Violet called out.
‘Yeah,’ I called back.
When I walked back down onto the lawn I decided to take a look at the unfinished pond. It was large and kidney-shaped and I could smell the richness of the soil, like the air before a rainstorm. It was about a metre deep. There was no sign of where the dirt had been ferried off to, there was just the brown dirt of the hole and the green grass of the lawn at its edge.
I wanted to see if I could clear it. I jumped from a standing position – I didn’t feel I needed a run-up – and messed up the landing. The toes of my shoes made it to the grass on the other side but my heels landed on nothing and I toppled backwards into the hole. I heard the women at the table go ‘Whoa’ like they were at a football game. I fit quite snugly into the hole, and I looked straight up at the blue, cloudless sky. For a second down there I found it comforting, I didn’t have to think about George Avery or Bill in his cowboy outfit off buying another aquarium.
Eventually Violet came to the edge of the hole, just above my head, and looked down at me. I could see up her cowgirl skirt to her white underwear. Two of the kids were standing beside her. One wearing a wolf mask, the other an elephant.
‘What on earth did you do that for?’ my ex-wife said.
‘I don’t know, thought I could make it,’ I said.
The dirt at the bottom of the hole was slightly damp, I could feel it on my hands and arms. Violet walked around the other side, down to where my feet were, and leaned over and put her hand out.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Come get cleaned up.’
In the bathroom I washed my face and arms. I had dirt in my hair. Violet was standing beside me, watching me in the mirror. The front of my shirt was dirty. I looked at the two catfish in the bathtub, swimming up and down, black with white speckles. They looked unhurt and happy to roam lazily back and forth in the clear water.
‘I found you a towel,’ Violet said, placing it beside the sink. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘My back hurts a little, but I’ll live.’
She reached out and touched my shoulder. I ran cold tap water into the cupped palm of my hand.
‘Thanks for coming,’ Violet said. ‘I know you’ve been having a hard time lately.’
I didn’t exactly know what she meant, but I nodded.
‘All that business about drowning too, it sounds horrible.’
‘It wasn’t so bad.’
‘Still.’
I thought of George Avery’s face, out of breath, his red-rimmed eyes. When I’d first seen him out in the water I’d thought, What kind of an idiot goes into an ocean like that? It had been a cold day and the sky above had been dark with clouds. It had taken me a minute to realise he was in trouble.
‘He grabbed on to me when I swam out to him, that man I saved,’ I said. ‘He looked insane. The waves kept hitting us, getting in our mouths and our eyes. The problem was, after he grabbed me, he started pulling me under so I kicked him as hard as I could. I got him in the stomach and he let go. I really was ready to leave him out there. I’ve been thinking about that a lot, how I’d made up my mind to do that.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Violet said softly. ‘You got him back to shore in the end.’
‘There was no one else around,’ I said. ‘Nobody saw us.’
There was a pause and Violet leaned over and kissed me once on the cheek. She said that she’d better be getting back downstairs. I nodded. Right then I could have said to her that I still loved her, even though I knew it was only true for about a second.
After Violet left I wiped at my face with the towel and walked back downstairs. Instead of joining everyone again in the yard I went into the new study. There was a desk in here now, and instead of the cabinets on the walls there were bookcases filled with books. I thought I could still smell the paint cans I used to store in here, but maybe I was glumly imagining it, the way amputees sometimes feel their missing limbs. Claud’s goldfish was sitting on the desk, next to a lamp, in its ice-cream tub. Compared to the other fish it looked kind of dull. The lid was sitting underneath the container and I put it back on and carried the goldfish out of the house.
Most of the time when I’m at my worst I’ll picture how I want to die. I’ve never shared this with anyone, but when it happens I want it to be like in one of those old paintings, where I’m old and white-haired. I’m sitting up in bed and sunlight is coming through the window, illuminating me. The sunlight is supposed to be God, or maybe even heaven, and there are people in the room standing all around me, my family and close friends, and they’re looking sad and holding their hands to their faces because they can’t bring themselves to stop crying.
Snow on the mountain
Caroline was sitting in the passenger seat while Eliot sat behind the wheel, trying to get the engine to start. She tried not to show it but she was freezing; her hands were pressed between her legs for warmth. She was wearing a scarf and a large coat because she knew the heating in Eliot’s car didn’t work. The coat had belonged to her ex-boyfriend Tom, but when he moved out he left it behind, sitting in his side of the closet, flanked by empty coat hangers. Caroline liked the way the coat was too big for her. When she stood the sleeves hid her hands.
‘It just needs to warm up,’ Eliot said. ‘Give it a minute.’
Eliot lived with his parents across the street. Caroline had asked to borrow his car because she didn’t own one anymore. It was early and there was frost on Eliot’s well-kept lawn. She could see their footprints on the frozen blades of grass. Tom had always made a big deal about keeping their own front garden in check and now, in his absence, Caroline had let things go.
‘The engine sounds broken,’ she said.
‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘It just wants the attention.’
Apart from the sound of the car engine the street was quiet and still. Eliot was eighteen and had bought the car, an old Volvo station wagon, from his uncle. Caroline pressed her hands together tightly, then released them to rub at her nose. The engine coughed and started.
‘Okay, my dear,’ Eliot said. ‘Are you ready to go on our mystical adventure?’ He said it in a flat voice and Caroline couldn’t tell if he was being serious.
She smiled at him. She was thirty-five and often wondered if Eliot was her closest friend. She’d once mistakenly said this to Tom and he had nodded in a way that had made her feel naive. It had been the same when he’d left her: Tom had presented the information like it was the most simple thing in the world, and that she should have known it was coming all along. Caroline had nodded because she’d felt like she ought to agree, even though she hadn’t been completely sure what was happening.
When Tom had left he’d said, casually, ‘See you around.’
Eliot drove through the empty streets of West Hobart. In the past Caroline had ordered firewood from an old man and his grandson, both rake thin and surprisingly strong, who would turn up and throw logs to each other as if they were fruit, but this winter she’d wanted to try and save the money. She’d asked to borrow Eliot’s car to collect the wood herself. She’d been trying to cut back on expenses. Last winter she and Tom had burned through at least five tonnes of wood, but she felt she could reduce that, at least for a little while. As soon as the temperature began to drop Tom would start angrily pacing around their living room, rubbing at his arms like he’d been attacked. The way she remembered him, he only ever smiled when he was upset. When Eliot had heard Caroline’s plan he’d insisted on coming along.
None of the stores they passed were open. Eliot was
wearing jeans and a wool jumper and Caroline wondered if he was cold too. He was wearing a bright red woollen hat. Eliot looked at her for a second before turning his attention back to the road.
‘My grandmother knitted it for me,’ he said.
‘It suits you.’
‘Did I ever tell you that when I was around four I was with my grandmother in her car. I think we were driving across the bridge and we hit a patch of ice. The car spun around in a complete circle. She never told anyone else in my family about it.’
‘Have you told them?’ Caroline said.
‘No, she swore me to secrecy.’
The tape player in the car was broken and a cassette was stuck inside it. Now and then Eliot pulled at it absent-mindedly when, Caroline liked to imagine, he was deep in thought. It was endearing. She wondered if she would still spend time with Eliot if he didn’t live across the street.
It wasn’t long before they’d left the city and were in the national park that headed up the mountain. When they didn’t talk Caroline felt comfortable, like they were a married couple. It wasn’t like her house, where the silence was like someone holding their breath. She wondered if she was in love with Eliot.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘any wood up here is probably going to be damp.’
‘That’s true,’ she said.
‘Maybe we should have tried the beach instead. Driftwood burns pretty well, that’s all we ever use when we’re camping.’
Caroline shrugged, but wasn’t sure if her movements were visible under the coat. The road climbed steadily past small trees and rocks. There was snow, she knew, towards the top of the mountain. She’d seen it from her house.
‘I brought a thermos of tea,’ Eliot said. ‘When we pull over I’ll pour you some.’
We Are Not The Same Anymore Page 2