The Place on Dalhousie

by Melina Marchetta

  ‘So I’m up against “the one”?’ he asks, softly. Their eyes meet and she presses a kiss against his lips.

  ‘The strangest thing I’m ever going to say to you is that I wish you got a chance to meet him.’

  ‘Well, I can’t say the same about my ex,’ he says. ‘And to answer your question, no. My sister and Alana didn’t like the wives. They tolerated them. My father was heartbroken by the end of the first marriage. He loved Jeannie. Wasn’t as fussed by the second.’

  He links his fingers with hers. ‘So are we going to move our sex life to your home anytime soon now that scary Eugenia’s gone?’ he asks.

  ‘Her aura still lingers. Give me a couple more days.’

  Martha feels the intensity of his stare.

  ‘Is it his aura that still lingers?’

  ‘Well, Seb did rebuild the house so he’s part of every inch of the place,’ she says.

  It’s not what he wants to hear, but she can’t find the exact words to reassure him.

  In her kitchen she makes herself a cup of tea. The house already feels a touch lonelier, and Martha wonders how Eugenia and the activity she brought down the stairs became part of her normal.

  She hears a sound and looks up to see Rosie. Martha’s at a loss about how to make things right before they sell this house and never see each other again. Because Rosie is a link to Martha’s short and profound life with Seb. She feels a great sense of failure that there’ll be nothing to take away except for money that may purchase her bricks and mortar, little else. Deep down, she wants to find a better way of telling Rosie that Loredana wasn’t forgotten. There had been times, even after they were married, that Martha would come home early from work and hear Seb crying as he sanded the walls.

  ‘When’s that appointment?’ Rosie asks.

  Martha’s confused for a moment. Wishes she was better prepared for this conversation. She fumbles for her phone and looks at the calendar.

  ‘I made it for the fifteenth at two p.m.’

  She’s about to go into an explanation about why she didn’t cancel it, but Rosie’s already turned and walked away.

  Martha imagines this is what progress looks like.

  He arrives at Central, same time as always. Figures he’ll take a chance and just head out to Rosie’s. Except today she’s on platform twenty-three with Toto on her hip. At first Jimmy thinks it’s one big coincidence and that Rosie’s taking the train to the airport, but she’s peering over everyone’s heads and he knows they’re waiting for him. Jimmy whacks everyone he passes with his duffel bag just to get to them.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asks, taking Toto from her, and his voice sounds croaky because Toto’s chortling into his neck and at that exact moment Jimmy’s never loved anyone so much in his life.

  ‘Obviously waiting for you,’ she says.

  He wants to hug her too, but instead he hitches Toto up in one arm and his duffel in the other and they head out together.

  ‘Do you want to get a bite to eat?’ he asks. ‘My shout.’

  ‘Why not?’

  They end up in a beer garden on Glebe Point Road where Jimmy goes off to find Toto a highchair. It’s pretty crowded for a Monday night because of Trivia.

  ‘You want a beer or something?’ he asks. ‘A Coopers?’ Because it’s what she drank the night he met her. Rosie nods and when he returns with the menu, she studies it and then puts it down.

  ‘I’ll have the wedges.’

  ‘Naw. I’ll do the ordering.’ Jimmy doesn’t want to come across as chauvinistic, but he thinks she’s only picking the wedges because they’re the cheapest on the menu.

  When her steak and his pasta arrive she makes up a little plate for Toto and they take turns eating from each other’s plates as if they’ve done it all their lives. Trivia’s about to start and they’re interrupted a couple of times by some of the diehards asking for the spare chairs at their table.

  ‘Have you heard more from the paramedics?’ she asks.

  ‘Yeah, but it’s taking them forever to get to the next step.’

  Rosie gives Toto a taste of beetroot and he seems to like it.

  ‘What about your plans?’ he asks.

  ‘I don’t have an ATAR, but I can sit for a special tertiary admission test.’ She shrugs. ‘It’s pretty competitive, but I’m tossing up between a Bachelor of Nursing and Bachelor of Midwifery.’

  ‘You’re smart,’ he says. ‘You’ll get in.’

  ‘I don’t feel very smart at the moment.’

  He thinks of the phone texts she was getting from some guy the last time he was in Sydney, and how dressed up she was for her date. Wonders if it’s that guy who doesn’t make her feel smart at the moment. Jimmy’s never been one to beat around the bush, so he asks, ‘Is it serious? The guy you’re dating. Not to be nosy or anything, so if you don’t want to talk about it, I’m totally fine. Although if you want to ask any questions about me, go ahead.’

  ‘Have you told your girlfriend about Toto?’

  He ignores half of what she says because Jimmy’s already told Rosie that he doesn’t have a girlfriend.

  ‘All of my friends know Toto’s my number one priority.’

  Rosie studies him. Raises her eyebrows in a challenge, as if he’s not telling the truth. She puts down her knife and fork.

  ‘Your number one priority, is he?’

  ‘He’s my number one, two, three, four, five, and I could count to a hundred and he’d still be on the list,’ Jimmy says.

  A smile appears before she picks up her knife and fork again. ‘His name is Lachlan,’ she says, ‘and he’s really funny and smart and sweet, but a bit immature and useless.’

  It’s a strange description for Jimmy to process, but it brings him hope.

  ‘No one seems to know how to do anything useful,’ she says. ‘Well, maybe you do.’

  ‘Good to know that I’m the least useless person you know.’

  ‘No, you’re the most useful person I know.’

  ‘Is there a big difference?’

  ‘Big difference.’

  Their eyes meet.

  ‘Do you want to come back to the house?’ she asks.

  And because the only way Jimmy and Rosie know how to connect is by having sex, he spends his first night under the same roof as his son, and they need to be quiet because Toto is in the cot and Martha’s downstairs and Rosie’s shushing Jimmy the entire time because he’s talking a hundred miles an hour. He can’t stop. Because home’s just had a whole new dimension added to it. Her and Toto and this house and a kitchen that smells of comfort food and a glimpse … a glimpse of how it can be, and she’s straddling him and he’s about to tell her that maybe in that top-one-hundred priority list Rosie’s there, but she’s just saying, ‘Shut up, shut up,’ and it’s muttered into his neck as they shudder together.

  And then life gets simple and complicated and back again. He learns to compartmentalise. Lies to Mackee, Tara and Frankie. Tells them he got into Sydney a day late. Lies to them again and says he has to look after Toto so he’ll probably spend the night on Rosie’s couch. On the nights he stays at Mackee and Tara’s, he tells Rosie that he’ll be working on the paramedics’ application and it’s all on Tara’s computer. There’s a voice in his head demanding to know why he’s not telling the truth, and Jimmy figures it’s because he’s never had to balance people before. He’s frightened that those he cares for won’t like each other.

  In his daytime world, life is more simple. Jimmy goes to swimming lessons with Rosie and Toto and she introduces him to friends with babies who are Toto’s age. He likes that Rosie has these women looking out for her when he’s away. One of them, Yolanda, comes from Moree, where Jimmy spent a couple of months back in 2008, so they end up knowing a few of the same people. On Wednesday night, he watches Rosie and Martha train for netball with a bunch of women who drink a lot of wine afterwards. Has a conversation with the guy Martha’s flirting with and it lasts five minutes. It’s not tha
t he doesn’t like Ewan. It’s that they have absolutely nothing in common. He gets an exchange of texts from Will on Thursday and he sends him a photo of Toto. Too good- looking to be yours is the response, and then a, How’s Frankie? Jimmy goes for the truth and texts, Missing you. Feeling underrated, and despite it all Will’s response makes him chuckle. I didn’t know you felt that way about me, Hailler.

  On Saturday, Mackee convinces him to bring Toto along to a birthday party at his aunt Georgie’s house. The guy Georgie’s married to has a son, Callum, from a previous relationship, who’s turning ten, a wrestling fanatic and devotee of his step-cousins Tom and Anabel Mackee. They’ve set up a wrestling ring in the backyard and Anabel’s wearing Viking horns while Mackee’s got a pair of tights on, his jocks on the outside. They’re both a comedy act waiting to be discovered, and when they put on a show, the roar of laughter from the kids is matched by the adults. Jimmy has never seen Tara crack up so much, her arm around Mackee’s mum. He can’t help thinking how some families break and can be put back together again. Others, like Jimmy’s, cave. Four years ago the Mackees were a mess. Scattered across two states. Grief-stricken, angry at the world and at each other. What he’s worked out about other people’s families is that the lifeline can come from any direction. He figures that the key to it is a good foundation to begin with. The Haillers were doomed from the start. They didn’t even have a grip on reality. Their lives were fuelled by alcohol and drugs and unemployment and failed relationships and bad luck and stupid decisions and a lack of faith in each other. His grandpop lied about everything. One day he’d get a job. One day he’d stop gambling and drinking and smoking and flushing the pension down the toilet. Jimmy spent his childhood being sent into pubs or the TAB or down to the greyhound races. ‘Tell him there’s no fucking food in the house,’ Jimmy’s mum would say. She, at least, was truthful about ‘one day’. One day she was going to leave. One day she’d get out of this shithole of a family.

  It was his nan who had made some sort of difference when she was alive. A martyr to the parish, volunteering to organise flowers for weddings, typing up the minutes, cleaning up the sacristy. The reward was that it got her grandson into St Sebastian’s on a community scholarship. It’s where Jimmy spent four years known as the school crazy guy until Frankie and the girls came along in Year Eleven, dragging Mackee in with them. Standing in Georgie’s backyard, holding his son and watching the Mackee lunacy, Jimmy wants to believe he can be like all of them. A lifeline to himself, so he can be one for Toto and Rosie.

  Mackee joins him with a plate of assorted God-awful kids’ party food. He holds a devilled egg up to Toto. ‘No? Are you sure?’

  ‘He’s more than sure,’ Jimmy says with laugh, putting Toto down because he’s beginning to squirm.

  Mackee introduces Jimmy to a whole lot of people whose names he won’t remember, but they seem to know about him. Either because Jimmy had helped out the Finch-Mackees in Walgett, or because they’re somehow connected to Martha, of all people.

  ‘Abe’s sister is friends with her,’ a woman called Lucia tells him, pointing to her partner who he figures is Abe. ‘Alana? They’re in the same netball team.’

  ‘The school principal?’ Jimmy says, pleased he remembers being introduced to Alana earlier that day at the game.

  ‘Anabel reckons she spotted you there this morning,’ Mackee says. ‘Just babysitting Toto while his mum plays,’ Jimmy says. ‘Vicious, vicious game.’

  ‘I’ll join you next time.’

  Toto stumbles and falls and Mackee’s father, Dom, picks him up.

  ‘I was younger than you when we had Tommy,’ Dom tells Jimmy. ‘I miss them at this age.’

  ‘Any advice?’ Jimmy asks, because someone like Dom Mackee had seen the dark side, but managed to get his family back.

  ‘Yes,’ Dom says. ‘Don’t be scared to ask for help.’

  That night he goes out with Rosie. Ewan is at the house and Jimmy attempts small talk in the kitchen.

  ‘It’s sort of our first date so I wanted to put thought into it,’ he explains, after telling Ewan that they’re going to the drag races up at Eastern Creek.

  ‘Your first date?’

  At the netball, Martha had introduced Jimmy as Toto’s father so the first date thing doesn’t seem to make sense to Ewan.

  Rosie has organised for the Italian woman across the road to look after Toto. He figures from the body language that Signora and Rosie have attitude between them, but the woman seems to love Toto, so it’s an easy handover.

  ‘She’s a bitch,’ Rosie says as they walk up to the bus stop.

  ‘Then why are you leaving him with her?’

  ‘Because she’ll never let anything happen to him.’

  At the speedway, they eat hot dogs and chips and Rosie talks about adrenaline and noise, and how sometimes it’s just Toto’s crying, or the feeling that there’s no one around that gets to her. She looks sad when she says that, and he senses it’s about missing people, so he asks about her father and Rosie tells Jimmy that he used to fix racing cars and most of their Friday nights were spent at the speedway.

  ‘I’m sorting through my photos with Teresa next door, so once I’m finished, I’ll introduce you to my family,’ she says.

  When they go to pick up Toto, Signora sends them away because he’s sleeping, so Rosie lets Jimmy stay again. Later, she’s lying on him and he feels like he’s under inspection.

  ‘I don’t even know how to describe you,’ she says, grabbing at his face, pinching at his cheek, checking out his hairline. ‘What colour are your eyes?’

  ‘Murky grey. And my hair is murky brown and my skin’s pasty white.’

  She places her head on his chest and stays there and Jimmy knows he loves her. Is frightened to say it because he’s scared the words will come out lame. Knows there’s a cruel side to Rosie who’ll react badly because she doesn’t know how to trust anymore.

  ‘We don’t even have a photo of us dating to show Toto one day,’ she says. ‘Everyone else does. Just a little glimpse of us together so we can say, “This is who we were before you came along.”’

  ‘Is that important?’ he asks.

  ‘My favourite photos of my mum and dad are those from before I was born. Because they were so into each other and I can see this love in her eyes that says, I trust this guy to fucking bits.’

  After dinner at Frankie’s the next night, Mia and Bob Spinelli take Toto for a walk while Jimmy works on the next phase of the paramedics application with Frankie.

  ‘The good behaviour bond won’t go down well,’ he says. He’s sitting on her bed studying her walls as if seeing them for the first time. Loads and loads of photos. She must be the only person left alive who still gets them printed. He thinks of Rosie working with her next-door neighbour to get the family photos organised. Jimmy has none. A few on his phone of Toto. One or two of these guys when they were in high school.

  Frankie is reading the criteria and shakes her head. ‘I disagree about the good behaviour bond. They’ll want good character references and they’ll want to know how you feel about the charges, but there’s nothing here that says they’ll discriminate.’

  ‘Can you copy some of those photos of us at school?’ he says.

  She looks to where he’s pointing and there’s a soft smile on her face. ‘I remember in Year Eleven when it was just the six of us,’ she says, wistfully. ‘We were sort of losers who found each other. I miss that a bit. I love every one of my friends now, but I miss us. I feel as if Siobhan is never going to live in Australia again and I wish Justine was here, and I even miss the double Ts. They just know so many other people and I don’t get to see them as much as I want to.’

  ‘They say the same thing about you and Will.’

  It’s Will who dominates Frankie’s photos. Jimmy thinks of what Rosie said earlier and knows there’s enough evidence on these walls to say that Frankie trusts this guy to fucking bits.

  ‘How do you get eight year
s together to work?’ he asks.

  She thinks for a moment.

  ‘We let each other keep our own friends,’ she says. ‘We respect each other’s families. We have the same values. We want the same things. We’re best friends. We don’t get turned on by fights or drama.’

  ‘You need to be over there, mate,’ he says, because he knows how much Frankie misses Will. ‘You know that. You promised him.’

  ‘Do you want to know a secret?’ she asks. ‘I could live with my parents for the rest of my life.’

  ‘That’s not a big secret, Frankie,’ he says. ‘I could live with your parents for the rest of my life. I haven’t even questioned where they’ve taken Toto.’

  She holds up a red plastic folder from one of the trays on her desk. ‘ANU has an exchange program with the University of Milan so I’m thinking of working on my PhD over there,’ she says.

  Jimmy spins the globe on her desk. Studies the proximity and points.

  ‘You can have a dirty weekend in Liechtenstein whenever you want. It looks halfway between Milan and Stuttgart.’

  She takes a ragged breath and Jimmy thinks she’s going to cry.

  ‘I’m not angry because Will stopped asking me to marry him, you know. As if he has to. I’m angry because he stopped asking what I want to do with my life.’

  When he leaves, Mia helps rug up Toto for the bus ride home, and because he asked Dom Mackee for advice he asks her the same. She hugs them both.

  ‘Guilt is a burden, so forgive yourself for the mistakes.’

  Jimmy and Rosie sit together on the bus to Central with Toto on his lap. He can sense her looking at him and when his eyes meet hers, Jimmy feels tenderness beyond anything. He’s never used that word in his head to describe the longing for anyone in his life. Not even with Frankie, because maybe tenderness belongs to lovers or kids, not necessarily your own. He can see a resigned sadness in Rosie’s expression and he figures they both want whatever this is between them, but it’s not as easy with Toto in the picture. Yet unfathomable without him there.