The Place on Dalhousie

by Melina Marchetta

  Martha’s relieved when her phone rings.

  ‘Don’t answer that, please,’ he politely requests, making eye contact this time.

  Finally, Healy.

  ‘Let me tell the Minister for Police that I’m doing squats and can’t talk,’ she says.

  When it’s over he goes out to collect the equipment and takes a phone call.

  ‘What a cranky bastard he’s turned out to be, Julia,’ Sophie says.

  ‘A lot on his plate.’ Julia is focused on her brother while fishing in her bag for keys. ‘We’ll drop you off, Martha.’

  Not quite an offer. More like an order. It’s one of the reasons Martha and Julia clashed so much in high school. Both refused to be a subordinate of the other.

  Ewan returns and he doesn’t look happy.

  ‘We’re taking Martha home,’ Julia tells him.

  A look passes between the Healys. ‘We’ve got to get Dad,’ he says. ‘Maybe someone else can take Martha home.’

  ‘I already offered,’ Julia says.

  As they walk to the car, there’s an uncomfortable silence. Martha doesn’t do uncomfortable. Or inadequate. Or not good enough.

  ‘I’ll take a cab.’

  ‘Don’t take a cab,’ Ewan says and she can hear weariness in his voice.

  They reach Julia’s jeep and the others insist that Martha sits in the front. Without asking for instruction, Julia drives around the Bay Run on Henley Marine Drive where Martha can see a few time-starved joggers hitting the track in the dark. In the back seat, Ewan and Alana sit in silence. Martha doesn’t know what it all means. The Healys and Charbels have lived next door to each other all their lives. Julia and Alana have been partners for half that time. It’s not exactly strained, but Martha can sense that things aren’t right.

  ‘How are the kids?’ she asks. Sophie has persisted in keeping Martha up-to-date on all their lives, whether Martha wanted the information or not. Julia and Alana’s kids have lived with them for four years now. Like most people caught up in the foster care system, the adoption is taking forever.

  ‘Marley’s full of attitude and Samuel’s the sensitive one,’ Alana says.

  ‘But he’s tough and she’s a softy,’ Julia says. She slows down to an almost stop as they’re about to pass the rowing shed and Martha can see the orange glow of the street lights illuminating a lone walker. After a moment Julia picks up a little speed again.

  ‘How old are they now?’ Martha asks.

  ‘Eight and six.’

  ‘Jules!’ Ewan says.

  Martha hears a seatbelt come off in the back seat and feels him brush up against her as he leans in between her and Julia, pointing to a hunched figure walking under the Iron Cove Bridge.

  ‘Is that your father?’ Martha asks. ‘He’s keen.’

  Julia stops the car and Ewan gets out, crossing the road, jogging towards him. After a moment, Julia follows. Because of her work, Martha spends too much time reading crime reports and can’t help being the alarmist.

  ‘It’s dangerous walking out on his own at this time of the night.’

  Alana doesn’t speak for a moment.

  ‘They’re both finding it tough,’ she finally says.

  Before Martha can ask what she means, Ewan and Julia are heading back towards the car with their father.

  The stench of urine is overwhelming. It reminds Martha of the old guys who live out on the streets close to the police headquarters in Surry Hills. She turns in her seat to say hello, surprised by the emotion that comes over her. She hasn’t seen Julia’s father in more than thirty years, but it feels like yesterday.

  ‘Do you remember me, Mr Healy? Martha Newman. You and Mr Charbel used to do the St Vinnies run with my father.’

  He smiles at her, but doesn’t respond.

  ‘Martha went to school with Julia, Dad,’ Ewan tells his father.

  ‘Who’s Julia?’

  There’s silence and Martha suddenly gets it. Feels for them all. The only relief that came from the death of her mother and father was that they still knew who she was until the very end. There’s a tap on her shoulder and she turns back to John Healy.

  ‘I’m off to see my son play footy down at Leichhardt Oval,’ he tells Martha. ‘Do you know he was chosen for the Balmain Juniors?’

  And because the mood in the car is heavy with sadness and she doesn’t know what else to say, Martha takes his hand and squeezes it.

  ‘Well, let’s hope it doesn’t go to his head,’ she says.

  After a moment she hears a laugh from the back seat.

  They pull up in front of her house a little while later.

  ‘A neighbour of ours used to deliver mail here on this street,’ Alana says, ‘and he’d go on about how the man who bought the hoarder’s place on Dalhousie Street wasted his money.’

  Martha had heard it all before. Most people would say that after eighteen years Seb’d never finish it. He used to be a joke, until he was a tragedy. But he didn’t care what people thought. Anyone who sees the house now understands why.

  ‘No such thing as wasting money on a house in this area,’ Julia says.

  Martha’s phone rings. ‘Thanks for the lift,’ she says, getting out and answering it.

  After thirty minutes of trying to avoid a media shitstorm concerning the part-time hours of a local police station, Martha stays outside in the dark changing the tyre. Teresa from next door comes out and offers her husband’s help, but Martha waves it off. Teresa leaves the light on and it’s not until Martha’s inside that it’s turned off. She doesn’t want to contemplate moving away from their kindness. Their inclusion. The quick night-time visits offering a leg of lamb they had just won up at the club, or a couple of tomatoes from their garden. Teresa and Marco have been Haberfield people all their lives, their families living within backyard shouting distance, their three children brought up between at least four households in as many streets surrounding them.

  Once inside, she heads to the kitchen, because that’s always her first port of call when she gets home. It’s where she places her keys, hangs up her bag and sits down at the breakfast nook for a cup of tea. Seb was adamant that the stairs leading to the attic would originate from here because the kitchen is the most communal place in any home. He wasn’t as interested in the front room, which accommodated a three-seater sofa and TV. He thought that people were more comfortable around a kitchen table. It was a place to be together. To break bread. And in Seb’s heart he always believed Rosie would return to live with them. After a trip out to Camden to tow a client’s car he returned with a second-hand timber butcher’s trolley that served as a main table and a sideboard made of a recycled barn door that accommodated her mother’s Hummel porcelain figurines and wireless. The space is the greatest reminder Martha has of Lotte and especially of Seb. Of how, back then, the house smelt of coffee beans and what she called peasant food. Soaked breadcrumbs, sardines, anchovies, fennel. Despite Seb refusing to romanticise the Sicily he left behind in the late eighties, he couldn’t let go of it either.

  From above she hears the screaming baby again. If the truth were told, Martha’s worried. The cry has been a constant since it arrived and she doesn’t think that’s normal. Sooner or later she has to climb those stairs, but when she fails again she takes a shower and watches TV because, to avoid the grouting and the backyard, and climbing up those stairs, Martha’s just got cable. She’s catching up on every movie she’s missed since marrying Seb and losing him. That covers six years and anything made since 2005. Last week she was engrossed in the Sex and the City movie, which did inspire her to go from blonde to brunette because the change of hair colour seemed to work a treat in the film. And she found herself watching it over and over again, just to get to the part where Carrie Bradshaw compares the loss of the unreliable Big, who stands her up at the altar, with the death of a loved one. Not even close, Carrie. Because men who stand you up at the altar still get to walk back into your life a year later holding a pair of Manolo
Blahnik shoes. Dead ones stay dead. This week she’s moved on to the foreign films. She’s given up on the French masterpiece Hidden, because the meaning of it was too hidden, so now she’s onto a Romanian one.

  When the doorbell rings, she’s hesitant at first. Perhaps her tyre slasher is getting bolder, but she can see the shadow behind the glass and knows who it is. And all Martha wants to do is go back to that day a month ago. Because it changed everything she had started to work out about going forward. Hadn’t she finished with a certain part of her life? Men? Sex? The bullshit that comes with it. But Charlie P’s funeral changed everything for more reasons than one. He hadn’t just been a work colleague; they’d been friends forever. Over the years Martha had lost a lot of male friends to their relationships. Catching up one-on-one had either stopped, or changed to group drinks. But Charlie’s wife Astrid had never felt threatened, had never felt the need to crash the friendship or even be part of it. Martha and Charlie had the same taste in music so she was his gig date. At his wake, Astrid had asked her to speak because the family didn’t want it to be all cop talk. Martha hadn’t been able to speak at either of her parents’ funerals, or Seb’s. At her mother Lotte’s funeral, she couldn’t even open her mouth to mutter thanks to anyone. Sophie had taken care of that. Had organised the eulogies, made sure they played ‘Befiehl du deine Wege’ for the procession, had enlisted the Kolotos tribe to prepare the food for the wake and had written the thank-you cards. Seb’s funeral was even more of a blur. But Martha had to be present for Charlie’s funeral. So at the wake she told a story of being at a David Gray concert with him and how they spoke about what they wanted sung at their funerals and his choice was ‘Babylon’. Later, Ewan Healy approached. Martha had seen him once or twice on sport segments in the news, mumbling in that testy tone most football coaches seemed to have post-game.

  ‘Nice,’ was all he said to her. A simple word, but loaded. In the past couple of years, Martha had slipped into that invisibility that belonged to a woman of a certain age. She hadn’t let herself go, but it was as if the world had let go of her. It wasn’t just men. In pubs and bars and the non-virtual world of socialising, a reminder from the age-police that strappy shoes belonged to the younger generation. Skinny jeans did too. The words ‘age appropriate’ were reintroduced into her life. It was different with her work team because Martha had been there long enough to count. But outside her job and home, she couldn’t quite grasp what her place was. Ewan Healy’s ‘nice’ changed that. In high school, he was crush material for the simple fact that he was someone’s older brother. And that he was male. Which meant everything to the daughter of strict German migrants who had never been allowed out.

  ‘Do you remember me?’ she had asked. ‘Martha Newman.’

  A blank look.

  ‘Julia’s friend from school.’ Martha grabbed another glass of wine off a tray that was doing the rounds. ‘You asked me to dance at the Year Ten St Pat’s school dance.’

  ‘Yeah, course,’ he said, but she could tell he was lying. Not that she was heartbroken, but there was no harm in letting him suffer slightly.

  ‘What was the song?’ she asked.

  ‘What song?’

  ‘The one you asked me to dance to?’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking.’ And she saw the hint of a grin. ‘Am I supposed to remember that?’

  She shrugged. ‘I remember.’

  ‘Are you going to hold that against me?’

  He had eyes that were kind and a smile that still had clout and, after all these years, she realised that it hid shyness. That’s what his good looks and sporting ability had done back when they were teenagers. What his post-game mumbling meant. It hid a sort of awkwardness with the world. And in the corner of that function room, beside the floral wreaths and amongst drunken cops, they covered everything. Grief. Humiliation. Family. She even found herself telling him about the step-demon who was twenty-one and had gone AWOL. And then they ended up on the balcony. She was drunk. He wasn’t. But he let her talk, because that’s what Martha was good at. Talking. About singing ‘Babylon’ with Charlie P at the top of their voices at a David Gray concert in 2009. Ewan had known Charlie since his days in the juniors. When he got sacked from his club, Charlie was the first to reach out to him. Martha could see Ewan’s eyes water as he told the story. And that happened more than once. She liked that about him. She liked his mannerisms. The scratching of his bottom lip with his thumb when he was about to laugh. The habit of touching her hands as they spoke. It was intimate, not accidental. It’s how they had first kissed that night. Talking, and hand lingering. And then they were in his car making out like bloody stupid kids. Martha couldn’t compare it to what she had felt with Seb, because that relationship was about grief and companionship before it was romantic. Working on the house had brought them solace. But with Ewan Healy, it was about the giddy buzz of attraction and suddenly in that car she felt inhibited.

  ‘I wasn’t prepared for this,’ she had said after they came up for air. ‘I’ve got a Bavarian forest down there and I don’t want to be doing a Brazilian or whatever’s needed to keep a man interested.’

  Too much information, Martha.

  And here he is, weeks later, on her doorstep.

  ‘I thought I’d look at your car,’ he says. ‘Jules said you had a flat tyre.’

  ‘I was married to a mechanic for three years,’ she says. ‘First thing he taught me was how to change a tyre.’

  He goes to speak, but she stops him.

  ‘The whole sleeping-with-a-guy-and-waiting-for-him-to-call got old when I was in my thirties. So I’m going to say a no thanks to you coming inside, and see you next week at training.’

  But then her traitorous dog comes outside, acting as if she’s never received affection from her owner. Suki ignores Martha and cries, pressing against Ewan’s leg. He crouches for a play before looking up, a sad smile on his face.

  ‘Lost mine last year,’ he says.

  She nods, knows the old girl is ready to die, but Martha’s not ready to let go.

  ‘You didn’t tell me your dad was that far gone,’ she says, because maybe she doesn’t want him to leave just yet.

  He nods. Doesn’t speak.

  There’s a cry from upstairs, then another round of barking. Ewan looks up at the window, surprised, before sending her a questioning look.

  ‘The step-demon is back,’ she says. ‘With child and dog.’

  ‘I thought you said she was a kid.’

  ‘She’s twenty-one.’

  ‘How old’s the baby?’

  ‘Who knows. We don’t engage in conversation. All I know is that she disappeared two years ago with Seb’s dog and a dropkick, and came back last month with a baby and the dog.’

  Martha knows the baby is about to walk because her stunning banister has been fitted with an un-stunning child gate.

  When there seems nothing left to say, Ewan turns to walk away, but stops.

  ‘Actually I lied,’ he says. ‘I didn’t come about the tyre. I just want to say something and you’ve got to let me say it.’

  Martha stays silent. So does he. She points to her watch.

  ‘I’ve got a Romanian film about genocide I’m dying to get back to.’

  Still more silence. He’s a pause man. Martha isn’t.

  ‘I’m having a bit of a fucked year,’ he finally says, ‘and to top it off, I’m contemplating putting my father into a nursing home, and that makes me feel like a prick because John Healy’s been a hero all my life, and the last thing he remembers about the son he gave everything to is that I’m a failure who got sacked from a dream job because I wasn’t good enough.’

  Martha gets a sense that it’s the most he’s said in a lifetime.

  ‘But last month, I went to an old mate’s funeral, and that day was something better than it should have been. Because of you, and that speech, and the fact that you didn’t stop talking, after I’ve spent years with two different women who had nothing to say. A
nd I know I’m wanting this at a time that I don’t have much to give in return, Martha, but if you’re interested I’d really like us to go out sometime and, who knows, I might get to see Bavaria again –’

  ‘Let’s lay that analogy to rest.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  Martha nudges Suki towards the door, but this time she stops.

  ‘The way I see it, the last thing John Healy remembers is that his son was good enough to get chosen for the Balmain Juniors,’ she says.

  And his smile has more than just clout so she nudges the dog inside before they both invite him in.

  ‘I’m going to remember that song, you know,’ he says. ‘The one I asked you to dance to. I’ve been going through all my LPs so I’ve narrowed it down to something from Elvis Costello or The Cure.’

  ‘Dream on that you were that cool back then,’ she says, shutting the door.

  But she can’t help smiling herself.

  He’s home, and he knows he’s home because they’re here and that’s the way it is, just the certainty that one of them will always be around, and it feels like everything’s going to be okay in a way that it hasn’t since that phone call, and he’s hugging the three of them because he’s become the sort of person who goes straight for the clinch, because once that hug came from Frankie Spinelli years ago he knew his days of holding back were over. And everything looks the same and different, and he has one of those epiphanies in front of the clocks outside Central on Elizabeth Street next to a guy selling The Big Issue. That regardless of where his car took him and what he didn’t end up finding, he’s part of this city too and he realises that they’re all laughing and that he’s said it all out loud.

  ‘Shut up, Jimmy!’

  And the girls link their arms with his and Mackee takes Jimmy’s duffel, and he’s so overwhelmed by them, and the city, and being home, that he forgets why he’s really here, and just lets it all settle in. That he’s home.