At the vet, she sits in a sterile little room with Suki. Holds her for a while, whispers into her ear that she was the greatest consolation in her life on too many occasions to count. The vet’s lovely, reassuring Martha that Suki won’t feel any pain. Out in the foyer the receptionist speaks in a hushed tone as she tells Martha that it’ll cost her three hundred and fifty dollars. Martha takes out her Visa card and hands it over. She’s doing a good job of not crying. She lets Otto Neumann take over. There’s Otto emotion and there’s Lotte emotion. All her life, Martha’s chosen which of her parents’ personalities to use. Today, it has to be Otto.
Except Rosie’s idiot boyfriend is there. Standing at the lights on Ramsay Street waiting for her. She’s about to let fly, but this time he gets in first.
‘Mate, I’ll walk you home,’ he says. ‘Thought you might want the company.’
Martha bursts into tears because her dog is dead and this skinny guy with no sense of boundaries is here to take her home. He puts an arm around her, lets her cry some more. And once back at Dalhousie Street he makes a pot of English breakfast and finds a KitKat in the pantry and gives her half.
‘Do you think they mightn’t come back, Martha?’ he asks later, his voice low. ‘Because I keep going through it in my head and I know she wouldn’t leave Bruno. That time in the floods she almost refused to stay in the evac centre because they weren’t letting him in, so it’s freaking me out, mate. Honest. Because she wasn’t coping last time I was here and I didn’t make it easy for her and I should have.’
Since Rosie’s return, Martha’s tried to work out her movements of the past two years. It’s come to her in crumbs of information. Now she knows that Rosie was up in Queensland during one of the 2009 floods.
‘How long were you together?’ she asks.
‘Two weeks.’
‘What’s wrong with you kids? It never occurred to you to use a condom?’
‘It was a strange time,’ he says. There’s a wistfulness in his voice. He feels something for Rosie. Martha can see it.
‘She has a grandmother in Sicily. Eugenia. That’s all I know of her. A first name. I don’t know whether the baby has a passport. Rosie’s phone and her clothes and all the baby stuff is upstairs.’
‘What about her parents?’ he asks. ‘What happened to them?’
‘Her mum died when she was fourteen. Cancer. And then Seb was killed when Rosie was just about to turn eighteen.’
There’s a whole lot of information Martha’s left out. Fifteen-year-old Rosie nicking off to live with Seb’s mother-in-law in Sicily, refusing to return for more than a year because he got married to Martha. Rosie living with a boyfriend’s family when she was sixteen because she couldn’t stand the sight of Martha in her home. Rosie getting expelled from two schools. Rosie lying under her father’s coffin-stand at the funeral home the night before they buried him. Jimmy, in the floods, must have met a mess of a Rosie. Martha had lived on and off with all that adolescent grief and fury for three years. She’s lived without it for just as long, but Rosie’s absence now is frightening.
‘How did he die?’ Jimmy asks.
‘He stopped on the M4 to help a young guy change a tyre and some woman off her face on drugs swerved into the car and it crushed him.’
He reaches out and takes her hand and Martha wants to cry again because that’s what he’s turned her into. A sobbing mess. It’s people’s empathy that always gets her in the end. It’s how she bonded with Seb outside the cancer ward.
‘Do you know if Rosie’s got any friends around?’ he asks.
She shakes her head.
‘Then why haven’t you called the cops?’ he asks, and she hears the frustration in his voice. ‘Doesn’t this all make her a missing person? With a baby.’
‘Jimmy, I work with the cops. I know how they operate. If they go looking for Rosie and they figure she’s not coping with that baby, they’ll involve DOCS.’
He stands up abruptly. ‘Can I look around up there?’
Martha lets him because maybe he’ll see something she missed. But when the silence upstairs stretches out for too long, she can’t help thinking that he’s stealing something of Rosie’s. It makes Martha feel guilty to think of him as a thief, but she knows nothing about this guy, regardless of him sticking around today. She gives him a few minutes more and then goes to check out what’s keeping him.
He’s in Rosie’s room staring at the photo of the kid on the mantelpiece. It’s one of those studio shots and, despite having lived in the same house for more than a couple of weeks now, Martha gets her first good look at the baby.
‘He’s all Seb Gennaro,’ she says, a catch in her throat. ‘Except that twisted smile. Seb’s was a grin. He always seemed as if he was having a joke on the world.’
Jimmy hasn’t spoken yet and when she finally looks at him, she notices how pale he is.
‘He was crying every time I saw him,’ he says. ‘I didn’t get to see the smile … but it’s all Gary Hailler.’
It takes a while to understand his mood. ‘You didn’t believe her, did you?’
Jimmy shakes his head.
‘She doesn’t lie. The exact opposite, really. She’s very blunt.’ Martha studies him. ‘Was Gary Hailler a nice man?’
‘No, not really. He was okay with me, but he was a shit husband and father, apparently. I don’t think he dared try anything with me. He knew I could beat him up.’
‘You don’t look the beating-up type.’
He laughs, and she can’t help looking back at the photo.
‘You’re wrong,’ she says. ‘His smile isn’t all Gary Hailler. It’s yours, Jimmy. You get to claim it.’
Sophie texts her that night with a Let’s catch-up, Martha, and because she runs a household, holds down a part-time job, checks in on her sick father every day and helps out at Scarlett’s school, Martha allows herself to be squeezed in to Sophie’s schedule. It means Saturday morning at Scarlett’s gymnastics class, viewed from the mezzanine level and being interrupted by every second person that knows Sophie. She’s collected people ever since she could crawl.
‘But I love you best, darling,’ she says often enough. It’d break Martha’s heart if she found out Sophie was saying that to anyone else. They chat about George and his long hours and his mother who’s just flown over to Greece for six months. ‘Thank God for the Peloponnesus,’ Sophie says every April. And then after she’s lulled Martha into the comfort of other people’s messy lives, she cuts to the chase.
‘What’s really going on, Martha?’
Martha’s furious with herself for walking into this trap. She concentrates on Scarlett, who’s just done a cartwheel on the beam, and it reminds her of when she and Sophie went through their Nadia Comaneci obsession during the 1976 Olympics, begging their mums to let them be gymnasts. When Sophie asks again, Martha figures it’s no use beating around the bush.
‘Rosie came back with a baby. I quit work for five months. Suki’s dead. Rosie’s disappeared with her baby.’
Sophie looks taken aback.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ Martha says. ‘I’m going to Bunnings to buy a tool belt.’ She stands up and gives Sophie a quick hug. ‘Tell your mum I’ll be at Greek Easter.’
That, at least, will placate Sophie for the time being.
‘Greek Easter was a week ago, Martha.’
Martha sits back down, stunned. No quick getaway for her today.
‘Is Voula angry?’ she asks.
‘Furious.’
‘How furious?’
‘My mother refused to freeze any leftovers for you except for the pastitsio, keftethes, yemista, spanakopita and tsoureki.’
Martha can’t help laughing, and when Sophie goes off to order banana bread to share, she doesn’t argue.
On her first day off in years, she goes to Bunnings and gets some grout for the tiles. Ends up buying at least two hundred dollars worth of other goods because that’s the effect Bunnings has on her. She dumps it
all in the laundry and makes herself a cup of tea. And then she hears the sound upstairs. A baby’s laugh. The relief she feels is beyond words.
Bruno comes to greet her, his moping gone. And then he plants himself on the fourth step.
‘Clever dog,’ Martha mutters.
But he gets a treat for being that smart.
Jimmy receives a text from an unknown number. It says, They’re home. He knows it’s from Martha, and in the housing on the site that he shares with three other guys he’s trying not to react, but his hands are shaking and there’s this part of him that wants to get on a plane and try to make things right. But he doesn’t know how. He’s brought a DVD with him. About an Italian kid who’s in love with films. Jimmy watches it because Mia told him that there’s a kid called Toto in it, so he figures it’s a good way of learning how to say his son’s name without making it sound like Dorothy’s dog. By the end of the film, he’s bawling. Jimmy shows a scene to Norm who drives the dump trucks with him. Asks if he’s got the pronunciation of Toto right.
‘Fucked if I know, mate.’
Norm follows it with advice Jimmy doesn’t necessarily ask for. ‘You owe her nothing.’
There’s a suppressed rage in Norm’s voice when he says the word ‘her’.
‘She probably did it on purpose to get money from you, so remember that you’re just as much a victim of this as she is.’
Not really, Jimmy wants to tell him. But the question of what he owes her is forever on his mind, even when he doesn’t return to Sydney on his week off. They fly down to Brisbane and Norm convinces him to stay and Jimmy’s on a blinder, listening to advice from a man who’s got six kids by four different women and refers to them as bitches and slags. In the middle of one of Norm’s rants, Siobhan rings him, like she always does when she’s pissed on a night out in London.
‘What are you doing, Jimmy?’ she asks. He can hear the slur in her voice. At school she was the crying drunk, sleeping around with the wrong guys. Nowadays, everything seems to be on her terms, including sex and relationships.
‘Same as you, mate,’ he says.
‘Not the same as me, Jimmy. Go home.’
And because Norm starts up again, and Jimmy can’t handle the mess of someone else’s hate mixed with grog, he finds himself at the airport spending too much money on a last-minute ticket to Sydney.
In the early hours of the morning, he wakes to a fight upstairs. Mackee and Tara aren’t the arguing type, so it surprises him. They’re not much into public displays of affection, nor do they talk each other up, or live in their own world of relationship bliss. But Jimmy thinks they’re solid most days. A couple of weeks back, he arrived late from hanging out at Frankie’s and they were lying on the couch with their feet in each other’s faces killing themselves laughing at something on TV. Jimmy sat with them and watched it and couldn’t for the life of him follow the humour. Frankie calls their house the Petersham Embassy. If they’re not entertaining friends from East Timor, they’re accommodating a couple of teachers from Kiribati who are trying to raise awareness about what’s going on in some of the low-lying islands battling climate change in the Pacific. It’s strangely believable that Mackee can switch from politics to sport to music in seconds while talking about the importance of letting wine breathe between courses.
Later that morning, he watches from the front window just to make sure they’re okay. Most days, Tara takes the train and Mackee the bus. Their usual practice is to stop at the front gate and exchange some sort of dialogue with their lips almost touching. Whatever takes place at the front gate seems sincere and Jimmy’s curious to find out what it is. Today’s no different but they seem tentative and he figures the tension is coming from Mackee. He’s not the same as he was at school. Moodier. Easily frustrated. Back in 2005 his uncle Joe died in the London bombings and after six years Mackee still carries it. Joe was a teacher and Jimmy knows that Mackee’s searching for the perfect teaching position because it has to mean something to him.
He showers and heads off to Rosie’s, rehearsing what he’s going to say. Jimmy doesn’t have much encouragement to go by, because she hasn’t responded to any of the texts he’s sent. At the house on Dalhousie Street he rings the doorbell and waits. After a couple of minutes he hears the sound of footsteps coming towards the door. Rosie doesn’t seem surprised, or impressed that he’s there, but she lets him in wordlessly. He’s relieved to see that she’s not in her pyjamas. Doesn’t realise until he’s following her up the stairs, that he’s angry.
‘Where were you?’ he asks. ‘Because I was worried and you can’t just nick off without telling people.’
‘Yes, I can.’
She’s lost the vulnerability of a couple of weeks ago. And the heat between them during the floods is packed away someplace, because it would be reckless to let it out. Jimmy has to play differently with this version of Rosie.
‘Where were you?’ he asks again.
‘I went to Tresillian.’
‘Who?’
‘You gave me the number,’ she says, irritated. ‘You said, “These people might be able to help”.’
Upstairs he notices that the sunroom is tidy. Cosy. She doesn’t invite him to sit down. Instead she picks up a few of the toys lying around and throws them into a big bright Elmo tub. When she bends, he can see down her top and he feels like a perve because she’s not wearing a bra and he can’t look away.
‘Is Toto okay?’
She rolls her eyes. Probably at Jimmy’s pronunciation. ‘He’s fine.’
‘Can I see him?’
‘Why? So you can pull out a piece of his hair and check his DNA?’
‘I know he’s mine so let’s not revisit that conversation.’
He follows her into the bedroom where Toto is standing up in a cot beside a leadlight window, clutching onto the rails and looking pleased with himself. He’s different to the crying miserable baby of a few weeks ago, and the moment Toto sees Rosie he bucks like crazy and his eyes light up. She picks him up and murmurs something to him and then puts him on the floor.
‘Keep an eye on him,’ she says, disappearing into the ensuite.
Toto manages to get himself onto his feet and Jimmy realises that he’s learnt to walk these past couple of weeks. It’s a tiptoeing sort of walk and the kid’s pleased with himself again, chuckling as he heads straight for Jimmy, who’s used to people walking away. So he’s hesitant when Toto gets too close. Holds out a hand to steady him, but he doesn’t let their fingers connect and the kid falls, surprised for a moment, before he picks himself up. There’s the flush of the toilet and Rosie’s out again, and Jimmy spends the next hour watching her with Toto, trying to steer his eyes away from her tee-shirt every time she bends. He wants to ask her questions, but it’s stilted between them and he doesn’t know how to break the ice. He doesn’t know how to go back to that place where they connected during the flood.
‘Do you want to go for a walk?’ he asks. She doesn’t answer, but disappears into her room and comes back in a different tee-shirt.
They venture out just as Martha’s walking into the house. There’s a guy with her, about Martha’s age. Fit-looking, in long shorts and joggers.
‘Hey, Martha,’ Jimmy says.
‘Ewan, this is Rosie and Jimmy,’ she says.
Jimmy holds up a hand in acknowledgement, but Rosie ignores them and keeps walking, pushing the pram past. She reaches the front door. ‘Bruno!’
Bruno hurries after her, just in case Rosie’s going to change her mind.
The Ewan guy looks taken aback.
‘Wow, she’s a charmer,’ he says to Martha.
Outside Jimmy catches up with Rosie.
‘You’re on first-name terms with her, are you?’ It’s an accusation.
‘Martha was worried about you and –’
‘Don’t involve yourself in stuff you know nothing about.’
‘I know about being worried.’
Toto is shrieking out to anyon
e who passes them by and an elderly lady with tight curls and drawn-on eyebrows tries to engage with him, but Rosie doesn’t stop for anyone.
‘I think she wanted to see the baby. Do you know her?’
‘None of your business.’
She struggles at the lights with the pram and he helps her steer it back in place as they cross the road.
‘Can I do that?’ he asked, indicating to the pram.
‘No.’
At Algie Park she takes Toto out of his pram and puts him on the grass, which he seems to enjoy. Bruno’s all over him and he loves that even more. Close by, a group of little girls are being trained in ball games and Toto is fascinated by the sound of their laughter. The kid is already a speedster, and he goes tottering past Jimmy and falls. It’s Rosie who picks him up and Jimmy can feel the accusation in her eyes.
‘Why are you here?’ she asks, and he doesn’t know how to respond, so the question goes unanswered.
He visits Frankie and her family later because being with them is effortless. Not that Mackee and Tara’s place isn’t welcoming, but the shouting he heard during the night has unnerved him. Frankie’s interviewing her grandmother in the same way that she seems to be interviewing every Italian person over seventy that comes through the front door. She’s talking PhDs and going down to Canberra to do some research at the National Museum, and they plan to go together on one of Jimmy’s weeks off.
He does the taxi driver rounds with her. Dropping off both her nonnas and also Will’s at the Leagues Club in Ashfield that puts on a seniors buffet every Tuesday night. Then they drive over to Darlinghurst and hang out at one of the cafés on Victoria Street until it’s time for senior pick-up. They’re interrupted frequently. Frankie’s worked in a couple of the bars up and down this strip and seems to know everyone. She’s one of those people that the rest of the world genuinely want to be around. It could be because she’s beautiful, but Jimmy puts it down to her energy and warmth. Most of those who stop at their table ask about Will and she uses the standard line. ‘He’s thriving over there. Doesn’t want to come back.’ And then she laughs and asks them a plethora of questions. Jimmy’s known her long enough to work out that Frankie’s fascination for other people is also a way to fob off talking about herself. Since they left school she’s got herself a history degree and a masters, formed a band with Mackee and Justine, worked in pubs, made wedding dresses with her grandmother. Hard work has camouflaged her lack of direction. And her anxiety. Jimmy was like that in high school, minus the hard work. Back then he was perceived as a weirdo. Other kids were put off by the attention he paid them, but at least it stopped them asking questions about his life.
The Place on Dalhousie Page 8