by Peggy Frew
There was something furtive, something illicit in John’s enjoyment of the crackling, the gravy, the giant chocolate-chip biscuit with his coffee. This, the childishness of it, brought on in Junie a surge of tenderness, and an unbearable irritation.
They were the same feelings that had plagued her when he was doing his searching, that year he lived alone at Avoca Street, when the paunch went away and his hair became noticeably thinner and greyer. When she would ask, Dad, are you eating enough? Are you looking after yourself? And he wouldn’t even answer, just say something like, So I found this bloke who reckons Anna was camping with him and some other people in a tunnel near Spencer Street Station, in January. He reckons she caught the train to Sydney with someone called Luke.
Junie saw John through the window of the bad cafe, already seated. The cafe was busy, and some dirty cups and plates were being removed from John’s table by a waitress. John said something to the waitress and they both laughed.
An evening at Avoca Street, long ago. Helen and John in their work clothes, in the kitchen, cooking dinner. John had been out to a long lunch, a business thing, at a restaurant that was at the time very fashionable, and Helen had wanted to know what he’d eaten. It was a light-hearted conversation; there was a tone of festivity in the house, perhaps because of the lunch, because of John’s afternoon of fun, his brief escape from everyday life.
Oysters? Helen following John across the kitchen. Did you have oysters?
John, grinning, opening the fridge: I’m not saying!
Champagne?
Maybe.
Was it good? Was it French?
More grinning, eyebrow waggling.
Let me smell your breath!
And then Helen was grabbing his arm and they were scuffling, their grown-up bodies ridiculous and slightly frightening as they shoved and pushed and laughed.
Junie remembers listening from the table, looking up from her spelling book, a strong sense of a loss of bearings, of upset. Why was this? Were there already undercurrents in the marriage? Was Helen already having her affair? Junie is hazy on the timeline, having only the information given to her by John during his oppressively sad post-break-up monologues, to which she had tried not to actually listen. So it was possible that this high-spirited interaction had been laced with genuine tension. Or perhaps it was simpler, just a normal childhood revelation—that parents had their own, separate connection, and also their own, individual needs; that parents could want things from one another, and that these things could be withheld.
‘You going to eat those?’ John pointed with his fork at the soggy pieces of roasted capsicum and eggplant that had fallen out of the bottom of Junie’s toasted sandwich.
‘No. Go for it.’ Junie watched as he speared the rubbery morsels and put them in his mouth. ‘I don’t know how you’ve got room though.’ John had just eaten a huge chicken parmigiana.
‘I don’t.’ John groaned, wiped his hands, patted his stomach. ‘I’m so full. What a pig I am.’
Over lunch, he had told Junie about Toronto, where Kathy was from, the snow and cold in winter. I’ll get all my cold-weather gear over there, it’s cheaper and they have the proper stuff. The house Kathy owned, which had been rented out, but which was now empty and waiting for them. On a hill; Kathy says if you climb up on the back fence you can just see Lake Ontario! The job he had already got over there. The internet, tell you what, makes it all so bloody easy.
He had asked about Junie’s master’s, about her painting. Whenever this happened, she always tried to keep her answers practical, telling him how large or small the canvases were, what kinds of paints she was using, what her rented studio was like. But often he still insisted on asking what the paintings were of. This was difficult territory—John had never tried to hide his bewilderment at both Junie’s art and her desire to be an artist. I just don’t get it, he would say, screwing up his face.
Junie told herself that this didn’t matter—that she didn’t do it for him. Still, she couldn’t help but sense a stubbornness in his ‘not getting’ of her work, a refusal, as if what he was doing was in fact dismissing it. Also, she thought he might be embarrassed by it, and by her doing it. This was not helped by the fact that her art and her need for it were things Junie was herself embarrassed by.
But your work is about shame, she had been told by one of her teachers—her favourite teacher, a life-changing teacher. It costs you, but that’s why it’s good, why you must keep doing it. She held this close, this instruction.
She had occasionally been able to see that John’s behaviour might come out of protectiveness, of a fear of seeing her fail financially, or suffer humiliation; that he wished for her a safe career.
‘They’re figurative,’ said Junie now, mumbling.
‘What does that mean?’ said John. ‘They’ve got numbers in them?’
‘No, figures. You know, people, and things. As in, they’re not abstract.’
‘Oh. Right.’
There was a pause. John looked around the cafe. He cleared his throat, worked his lips. These were signs that he was about to say something he found tricky.
‘I’m going to miss you!’ said Junie brightly, getting in first.
‘Oh. Yes. Me too. I’m going to miss you too, I mean.’
Junie felt herself flush. She’d got it wrong; it was something else he’d been preparing to say, a different tricky thing.
Again, the throat-clearing, again the lips. Here it came.
‘Junie, do you think about Anna, still?’
Junie swallowed. She hadn’t expected this. ‘Of course.’
John gave a short laugh. ‘Don’t worry.’ He put his hand, briefly, over hers. ‘I’m not going back into all that. This is different. I’ve had—a kind of breakthrough.’
‘Okay.’ Her heart sank.
John smiled, his eyes crinkling. ‘You should see your face. Not that kind of breakthrough. Don’t worry! I’m over all that, I promise.’ His eyes became soft again, and sad. ‘No, it’s a, you know, a personal breakthrough, in how I think about the whole thing.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I think she’s dead. Don’t look at me like that, Junie. I do. There’s no other explanation. She had no reason to leave us, to run away. To never be in touch—not in five years—just to let us know she’s all right. So, yeah. And who knows how it happened.’
Junie’s chest felt tight. Under the table she worked at a hangnail.
‘I know,’ said John. ‘It just doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? You could drive yourself crazy. Like I did! But here’s the thing. She’d gone out to the Dandenongs, on the train, right, with Grimmo or whatever he was called. On the Belgrave line. And she was always climbing things, remember? Even as a little kid, always jumping and climbing and falling off things. So I reckon she went out there again, another time, without Grimmo—he was on a camp, remember, the week she went missing—and she was trying some stunt, off the track, up on a cliff or something, and she fell. And she was on her own, or whoever she was with got scared and ran, and hasn’t ever reported it. And she’s never been found. The chances of someone coming across her up there, if she was deep in the bush, away from the tracks, well, they’re pretty much non-existent. I’ve done my research.’ He drank some water. ‘All I hope is that she didn’t suffer. That it was quick.’
There was a brief silence. Junie, feeling an expectation of agreement or even of approval and being unable to give either, also drank some water.
‘So,’ said John eventually. ‘That’s what I think. I’ve decided on it. She’s dead. It was an accident. If there was pain, it’s over now.’ He sat back and folded his arms.
She was walking away from the bad cafe, towards Bourke Street, when she heard him call her name. She stopped and turned and he caught her up, half-running.
‘I forgot to give you this.’ John held out a plastic shopping bag, from Myer. ‘For June the fifteenth, since we won’t be here.’
Junie took it and glanced inside. Department s
tore wrapping, weighty, anonymous. A card with his slanting writing on it: Happy Birthday Junie, with lots of love from Dad and Kathy.
‘I hope you like it,’ said John, making an apologetic grimace. ‘I had to ask for help, from the girl in the shop.’
She caught the tram back to her flat. She felt immensely heavy. When the tram got to her stop she could barely drag herself out of her seat.
The next week, the night before John was due to leave, she rang him, and was relieved to get the answering machine. She said that she couldn’t make it to the airport to see them off—something had come up, a meeting with her supervisor at uni, she couldn’t change it, she was sorry. She wished them a good flight, said she was looking forward to visiting. She switched off her own answering machine, and when her phone rang an hour later, and then three more times over the next hour, she didn’t answer it.
She was lying on the couch, having drunk almost a whole bottle of wine, watching a film on SBS about a girl in Turkey who had been sent to jail for a reason that either wasn’t clear or that Junie had missed, when she heard the clang of the gate from the laneway behind the shops and footsteps on the metal stairs that led up to her flat. Junie snatched the remote and turned off the TV. Then she scrambled over the back of the couch and lay on the floor behind it.
The flat was very small; there was a tiny bedroom and a tiny bathroom, and then there was a third room about the size of the other two put together, which was the kitchen and living room, where Junie was. This was the room the door opened into, the only door in or out. The door had a pane of glass in it, near the top. A dusty lace curtain hung over this pane, so that during the day the view of rooftops and the laneway below was mostly obscured. At night, if the lights were on inside, it was possible to see in through the lace. There was a lamp on in the room. If you were to look in the window you would see, to one side, the kitchen part, the bench and stove and the bar fridge, and to the other side, Junie’s wonky op-shop work bench against the far wall, and the couch, facing you. You wouldn’t see Junie, though, because she was lying on the floor behind the couch.
‘Junie?’ It was John. He banged on the glass. ‘Junes? You there?’
He knocked again, and called again, and then at last there were the sounds of him going back down the stairs and the gate clanging closed.
Junie lay on the floor for another minute or so and then she got up and sat on the couch again and poured out the last of the wine. It was cheap chianti, from the bottle shop two doors along. She drank that and then opened another bottle.
The gift, when she unwrapped it, was a scarf—a shawl really; large and square—of fine wool, deep grey with a paisley pattern around the edges in orangey-pink and soft blue and green. Junie didn’t like it. She put it away.
She forgot she had it, and when she came across it again ten years had passed. She was in her mid-thirties, and called herself June. By this time, she had visited John and Kathy in Toronto twice. She had seen Lake Ontario from the top of the fence and up close, and walked through Wychwood Park in the snow.
She had met John at Melbourne airport when he visited in 2007, a week before her thirtieth birthday, with Esther holding on to the hem of her coat and baby Maggie in her arms. And when John cried at seeing the children for the first time she had fought her tenderness for him—because she always did; because she couldn’t unharness tenderness from pity when it came to John—but something had ripped its way out and she’d cried too. The two of them crying, there in the loud and busy airport, with people passing close by, and Esther climbing on the trolley that held John’s bags. And then John’s quiet tears stopped, but June’s didn’t—they became uglier and more abundant, no longer tender, no longer pitying, but furious and grieving. And John gave her his hanky, and put his arms around her, and said, ‘Junie. Sweetheart.’
When she found the scarf after all this time she put it on and looked in the mirror. She thought of John in Myer, in ladies’ accessories, waiting for the attention of the salesgirl, awkward amidst all the sparkling femininity, the bright lights. She imagined the salesgirl holding up two scarves for John to choose between. It was up to June how she imagined John doing this, and so she made him do it with care.
She wore that scarf all through the rest of her thirties. It suited her.
GRIMAUX
He sits by the dam. He doesn’t fish, although there are fish in there—it’s full of trout, stocked with trout, like a shelf, a larder, a bar fridge. He has a folding chair. There are tadpoles in the shallows, sperming about. He thinks of nets and jars. He thinks of his son, whom he’s not allowed to see.
He is landed gentry, but only in so much as he has the land. He works, when the local council needs another set of hands in blue Hard Yakka and a hi-vis vest—he labours on roadsides, he sprays weeds, he replaces fox baits. He is thankful for it, for the occupation; the money doesn’t matter much, his living costs have become astonishingly modest. And the work is casual, and tends to happen in blocks of two or three days, leaving plenty of time for sitting by the dam. For reckoning.
He wonders sometimes what the other guys would think, if they knew about this undeserved inheritance of his, this picturesque and unloved investment, site of not one pastoral family scene, nor even, later, once true acrimony set in, refuge for either of its purchasers. Its rows of untended grapevines, its dam of gleefully breeding, uninterrupted trout. Its whimsical gate sign, grimaux. A fairy-tale name, as people have insisted on telling him his whole life. Was there ever a less apt association? The ‘grim’ part, he supposes, has proved fitting.
(Someone was French, back on his father’s side—memories of his father’s study with its poor choice of deep pink paint, so you felt as if you were inside a cut-open body; the plasticky smell of photo albums, a family tree with confusing vowels. This was early on, when his father would show him such things, consider him worthy. Before he proved his unworthiness, and proved it again, and went on banging down hard on the nail of proof with a million deceitful hammers.)
What would Omran think? Of this dam, these vines, this unearned landed-ness? Omran in his hi-vis, with his bored dark eyes, who lost it once as the two of them tried to unclog a public toilet that some genius had wedged a shoe into, and cried out, his teeth flashing white: ‘Before I come here, I am engineer, I am greatly valued, my parents are proud, and women desire me!’
He sits by the dam, not diminishing its stock of trout, and not catching its tadpoles in jars with his son, who in any case is probably too old now for such things. He sits and knows that he is fortunate, and cursed with ingratitude.
He was smart, at school. And his parents were wealthy, and busy, and seemed to have simply lost interest in the whole idea of a family. He turned fourteen with two sisters already grown and gone, and understood his home to be a place in which time was somewhat bitterly being marked. He grew quiet, and began to get quietly into trouble.
He has it roughly divided into sections, for ease of riffling. Home, parents, early life. That’s pretty boring—and generally leads to unadulterated sadness, which he’s not a fan of. He prefers blends, such as shame and regret, or horror and remorse. These are more broadly abrasive, but less intense. So, there’s Early Life: Lonely Bowls of Froot Loops and Hello Dad’s Liquor Cabinet. And then there’s Secondary School: Booze, Pot, Rubbish Speed and Rubbish Acid. Then Early Twenties: Better Speed, Better Acid, Further Adventures in Psychedelics, and Introducing Heroin. This is followed by Mid-Twenties: Heroin, a Love Story; Late Twenties: Heroin, O Heroin!; then Early-to-Mid-Thirties: Still here, Heroin?
Sometimes he uses a colour-coded system. It’s more direct, and also expansive—impressionistic. Green for psychedelics, fun times: Belgrave, looking down on furry hills, green shade, green moss, green fans of ferns opening; Dee, with her hair dyed green, her nose-ring, her springy flesh, her round child’s face, unsullied. (Okay, there’s a bit of mild tragedy in green too.)
White for smack, the good times: white sugar in the bowl, coffee
in the mornings before the first hit, the teaspoon of many uses, the early, needful wakening, white dawns in the sleeping city, holding off just a moment longer, the white buzz of possibility, Perhaps I won’t today; a fat white moon over a backyard, Dee’s white limbs on a blanket, dry grass, the white surge in his veins; a road trip, white dust, white clouds over a river, Dee white and naked in the water, white bark of trees, a white eternity of stoned-ness under a white sky.
Black for smack, the bad times: black bruises, black scabs, black under Dee’s eyes when she cries, their ugly black dance of begging and blame; black streets, black doorways, black waiting; a quick search of the glove box for his father’s black wallet; rotten black finger of a dealer on the edge of going under.
Yellow for getting clean: shaking yellow afternoons, yellow sweat, yellow eyes in the mirror, yellow light globe on all night, yellow of his son’s hair, imagined.
Red for damage (rarely used, too awful to go straight into): red spray of blood on tiles; red ambulance lights; red ribbon on flowers at the funeral; red scratch marks on his face, red under Dee’s mother’s fingernails, her face red raw.
Pink is for hope (often visited): the pink face of his newborn child; the pink tulips beside the bed; pink curtains framing Chloe as she gave her pink nipple into the tiny pink mouth.
He believes this to be his work, his real work, these reckonings by the dam. He understands that to someone like Omran this would seem an inconceivable, disgraceful luxury. But he has, for no apparent reason—all right, for the kid, for that sweet pink hope—resolved to stay clean. And, in order to do so, to as best he can untangle the vast and rigid mess of his motives, reveal and dismantle the tripwires that are his misdirected hankerings. To tough it out, to stare himself down.