‘Got that.’ Grace scrawled dutifully. And thanks for pointing out the verb. Like a degree in English wouldn’t have alerted her.
‘Hmm.’ Bunny tapped her fingers on her mouth and jiggled her legs. ‘Sounds good.’ She began to leave.
‘And said what?’
‘Sorry?’
‘What’s your stance on the Home and Away thing?’
Bunny considered it. ‘I’ll email you.’ She left.
Grace watched her go and let herself momentarily unravel. Oh, that woman. She ran her nails over her scalp, just to reassure herself she was still alive, and picked up a picture of her daughter from her desk. Lotte, captured one frosty Melbourne morning in her Incredibles nightie. Lotte with her legs bare, standing just outside the back door, breathing with purpose into the icy air, and raising her hands to touch the steam of her own breath. The visible breath had become invisible in the picture, and Lotte’s hands and eyes seemed to reach up to something godly in the silvers and greys of the winter garden. Grace stared at the picture, searching for anything new in it, and felt the tiny crack in her soul widen a little further.
That day, she was meant to finish the monthly newsletter, write a speech for the annual sponsors lunch on Friday, organise a new publicity photo for the Bunny (who felt she had lost weight since the last one was taken three months ago), and do some more work on the association’s application for a state government Good Works grant. The Good Works grant had taken on a new urgency since the association, incredibly, had missed out on the large, triannual Healthy Australia grant from the federal government that had been the cornerstone of its funding for the past decade, a snub that had favoured the newly enriched Black Dog Trust. Now, it appeared, Grace was expected to put all that aside and write a press release starring the Bunny which would go out by lunchtime, to hook into a story which was already yesterday’s news.
She fled to the kitchen, and ran into her favourite colleague.
‘I’ve got a client I’d like you to meet, a woman who’s got post-natal depression,’ said Josh Papps. Josh was one of the project workers, of a similar age as Grace, gently spoken and with a real compassion for the troubled souls he helped. He had a girlfriend, but Grace suspected he was gay, and didn’t know it.
‘Yeah?’ Grace feigned interest. As if it wasn’t enough working with and for mad people, and suspecting herself at times of being one.
‘Just because you did such a great job of pulling yourself out of the PND. I mean, you were amazing, all those herbs, and the exercise, and the counselling . . . and look at you now.’
Grace nodded distractedly. ‘Oh?’ Josh would ask this, in the week when Grace was secretly fighting the old symptoms, the old enemies, once again. Insomnia — every night since Lotte’s accident, the vast dark universe of the bedroom ceiling above falling into her open eyes. Loss of appetite, dislike for food. And a toxic, unending anxiety that was a taste in her mouth.
Grace shook her head. ‘I don’t know that I really got over it. Take now. One little mishap with Lotte and I’m a freaking mess. I can’t sleep.’
‘Really?’
‘What if something happened to her? She’s so crazy, so impulsive and wild. She just does things, and you can’t stop her, like running out into traffic. We’re going to lose her. I really . . . I know . . .’
Josh handed her a tissue. Grace put down her cup and pressed the tissue to her eyes. Josh rubbed her shoulder kindly.
‘It was a terrible thing. Anyone would be frightened.’
‘I haven’t slept for the past few nights. I wake up at two in the morning and I just obsess about it: what if the car had been travelling a tiny bit quicker, what if that woman had been a tiny bit slower? And Tom takes risks with her, I know he does. Lets her walk down to the neighbours on her own, even across a driveway.’ She searched Josh’s face for signs of horror, for indications he might go and alert Human Services this minute, but he just reassembled his eyebrows and mouth into a new arrangement of dutiful concern, like someone shifting from one hip to the other. He didn’t have kids. Maybe he hadn’t understood. ‘I mean, she’s four years old and he lets her walk across . . .’ She shaped her hands and made a face of exaggerated alarm, waving to denote a driveway the width of the Eastern Freeway. ‘Just straight over it to where . . .’
‘Poor you. Does Tom know you feel like this?’
‘I can’t tell him. He’ll stop us trying.’
‘For a baby?’
‘Yes!’
‘Oh.’ Josh took a teaspoon and levered the lid off the International Roast. ‘Maybe you should wait a bit if you’re feeling like this again.’
He was too nice. Definitely gay. ‘I want another baby. I want to get out of this job.’
‘The Bunny?’
‘She’s . . .’ Grace grimaced, and Josh nodded and showed the tact of friendship. He didn’t talk anymore about the client he wanted Grace to meet, the one with PND. He didn’t point out that wanting to escape a bad job was not a reason to bring a child into the world. Grace sipped water from a bottle, and for the thousandth time calculated how much twelve weeks’ maternity leave on her wage would be. How many work-free days it would represent. Anything to get a rest from the Bunny.
Grace would wake at night and feel for Tom beside her, and find only flat sheets and blankets. She would then pad through the house and look out the back window towards the garden, where light would shine from along the joins of the tin shed, outlining it like a child’s line-drawing hovering in the dark. Night after night, Tom crept out there to work on his inventions. When she confronted him about it, he shrugged. ‘I went out for a piss, and I just thought I’d check on the shed.’ Or ‘I only popped out for twenty minutes’, when she knew he’d been out there for hours.
She rang him at work one afternoon, and got his colleague, an engineer called Deepak. ‘He’s asleep,’ Deepak whispered. ‘In the store room.’
‘He’s what!’
‘He does it every day now. What do you do to him at night?’
‘Nothing!’
‘He’s always exhausted.’
No wonder. How long had he been sneaking out to the shed to give the best of himself to his tiles, leaving the sleepy dregs for his day job, the one they relied on. Being a programmer for a global IT company earned good money, nearly twice as much as a media manager at a not-for-profit.
‘He’s taking nanna naps?’ said Grace.
‘Exactly.’
‘Bet his boss loves that.’
‘He doesn’t know,’ whispered Deepak. ‘We’re all doing our best to cover for him. But it’s getting too— Yes, thanks,’ he suddenly boomed. ‘Just send that order as requestedthankyouverymuchhaveaniceday. Excellent. Goodbye, sir.’ The line went dead.
‘We could always sell the house,’ Tom said that night.
‘Oh, ha ha.’
‘I’m serious.’ He stood in the bedroom and stripped off his business suit as if it were alive and crafted from reptiles. He dropped the jacket on the floor and wiped his hands of it. Kicked the pants into a corner. The cat kneaded the fabric with her claws. Lucky they were millionaires, with money to treat suits like they were disposable raincoats.
‘Hey, hang up your suit. The cat will wreck it.’
‘Good.’ He pulled a dirty T-shirt on above his jocks and stepped into his favourite khaki overalls. ‘I hate it.’
He had taken an entire year off work recently. He had pleaded with her for it: support us for one year and I will get the robot over the line. During this year, he had spent almost every minute in overalls. It was his uniform when he was working on the Oldbot, and he did everything in them — invent, drop Lotte to kindy, cook dinner. Finally, when that year had finished, there was the bitter disappointment of the Oldbot’s failure to sell, and once again Tom emerged in a dark suit, his hair newly cut, his grim jaw clean-shaven. He looked so handsome, despite that sullen work face.
Now, his whole body sighed in relief. He sat on the chair with his
legs spread and his arms dangling.
‘Sell the house?’ She recoiled.
‘I’m serious.’
‘You love this house.’ Every time he came home, he slammed the door behind him and shouted it to the peeling, leaky ceiling: God, I’m sooo glad to be home. He was a practical man who would pounce on small tasks; he would replace a washer before dinner, or oil a squeaky door, as if he were kissing his home hello, the way he did his wife and his daughter.
‘I want to quit my job.’
Grace followed him out to the back shed where his workshop was, and perched on a dusty chair in the pool of light that spilled from the doorway. Cicadas creaked gently around them; the squeaky doors of warm nights. Trains hooted lonely warnings as they rattled empty along the tracks, back to suburban railyards to await the morning’s office workers. Across the neighbourhood, doors and windows swung open to catch sea-scented southerlies after a hot day; the low rattle of television news voices told of bushfires and of children starting school; preps on their first day. That would be Lotte in a year’s time. Too fast, she was growing up too fast. Dishes clanked in sinks, children called from bed for glasses of water, a mother’s voice sailed over the fence: Don’t touch the fan.
‘Well, I hate my job, too, you know, Tom. I’ve hated it for fifteen years.’
‘I know, baby. You don’t seem to mind hating it, but I hate that you do. That’s my dream: to make the solar ceilings and we will never have to work again. Unless we want to.’ He knelt before her, his arms along her legs, dusty overalls brushing against her black suit. ‘You used to believe in me. In the Oldbot. In my inventions.’
‘Yeah, I know. I guess I got sick of being the other woman.’
She kept an ear out for Lotte, asleep. This was her first night since the accident to sleep without painkillers. The medicine and measuring cup sat at the ready.
The joke about being the other woman was an old one between them. Various incarnations of his last invention, the Oldbot, sat around the shed. She knew which one could speak back if charged up and addressed by a human. Hello Polly! (Lotte had nicknamed it). The dream of the robot had once been a solid part of their marriage; it had entwined itself around them like cement around bricks. They had sat up nights, talking and dreaming, and during the year Tom had taken off work it was a fantasy that lay behind everything they did. Tom refined the design and Grace planned the marketing. They collected news articles about similar inventions, they anxiously followed the progress of other inventors travelling down the same path of creation, who might cross the finish line first, they imagined a world where small robots with emotional intelligence could watch over lonely old people, and, worst of all, they imagined the money they might earn from such a creation. And even as they went backwards on the mortgage, they dreamed of a life of no debt. Oh God, the freedom. Annual overseas travel and nice cars and expensive hobbies. A proper workshop for Tom, instead of a little tin shed. Grace would quit her job and start some private marketing consultancy with a fancy website and prices so high she would only accept one job a year, and they would have to fly her to Paris for it, and then maybe Stockholm and Geneva. Oh, their dreams had once united them.
But then Tom got a couple of knockbacks from companies that had once been keen, and those companies bought instead from other inventors. Grace saw the time flying by, and the mortgage getting larger, and the robot not selling, and her chances of a second baby slipping away. She had never known how much she had wanted children until she had one, and then she never knew how much she wanted a second until everything seemed stacked against her.
She went to her doctor and the doctor said, are you trying? And Grace said, well no, my husband is not working, we can barely afford the house, we thought we would wait. And the doctor shook her head and said thirty-eight is too old to be waiting, there is a window. And it closes. And Grace felt cold all over, and she said but Cherie Blair? Carla Bruni? And the doctor said oh God, don’t think about them. Rich people. Lucky people. Just get on with it, Grace.
So Tom had reluctantly returned to his day job, just three months ago. But then, after trying the electromagnetic motor and discarding that, he had come up with the solar tiles idea, and her home had filled with old plastic bottles, and his passion for them grew every day, and she really didn’t like the direction in which this was heading.
She sighed now, and felt another day of her life passing by, tick-tock. The near-loss of Lotte had made everything sharper, keener, more exquisitely fragile. Even sitting here. It was one of her favourite places in the world, this chrome-legged kitchen chair with the torn vinyl seat that sighed when she sat on its cushion, puffing resignedly out of the foam-filled gash. Weeds clung to its legs, a pile of twisted metal sat off to the side. Leaf litter flapped against Tom’s workbench. Tom got up and closed his laptop, slapping it with loose fingers as if it had let him down. He turned and faced her.
‘So, we both hate our jobs.’
‘Well, big deal! It’s not the whole of our lives. And we like our house, and our jobs pay for our house. And for another baby, Tom. We can’t have another baby if you chuck in your job.’
Tom sank in a little on himself, like a deflating balloon, and studied her for a long minute. He looked at Grace in the way he might look at someone he didn’t much like. He started to speak but the words puttered out, and he shook his head.
He tried again. ‘If we both hate our jobs, then let’s just quit. Sell the house.’ He shrugged. ‘There’s more to life than this. And I want to give myself a year, just one more year, to work on this and get it over the line. I know I can. This is a good one.’
‘Tom, I couldn’t bear to sell the house. To go back to renting, to feel like we had let things slide down that far. A house is everything. The security we need. And I want to have a baby. That was the deal: that if you had your year, you would go back to work and save enough to have a baby for my year. And you’ve been back at work three months. Three months!’
‘Yeah, three months. And I hardly ever see Lotte now. I’m lucky to get to say goodnight to her when I come home. If I was home she could do less time in childcare, and I could pick her up from kindy. Why would I have a baby when I hardly see the one we’ve got?’
‘You had lots of time with her last year.’ A little too much, thought Grace jealously. All the little rituals father and daughter had developed; milkshakes at the café with the bear sign, and chats to the old lady with the cat on the walk home from childcare, and Lego out in the workshop while Tom worked on the robot.
‘What about those people down the road? The Trappers? They have four little kids, they rent, they live on one income and they’re always happy. That guy’s always sitting on the front porch playing guitar, the kids are always running around, laughing.’
‘Darl, they’ve got a house that’s too cold in winter and too hot in summer, a car that breaks down every second day. I talk to Anna. Those kids couldn’t even afford to go on the three-year-olds’ kindy excursion last year.’ She stared at him.
‘No?’ he said mildly.
‘No. They had to take the day off and stay home with their dad.’
‘Oh. My. God. You mean they missed the Munich Children’s Opera, on its eighth Australian tour? Should we call Human Services?’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Mummy?’ The word trailed from a nearby window.
Lotte. They went inside and to her door. She sat up, a shadow in the darkness.
‘It hurts.’
‘I’ll get your medicine.’ Grace brought the little cup and sat on the side of the bed and stroked back her precious girl’s hair. The mattress sank as Tom sat behind her and took Lotte’s free hand in both of his. Lotte drank her medicine and her parents sat together on the side of the bed and breathed in her smell. Around them swirled the horror of the accident, the near miss, the knowledge of how close they had come to losing her. Nothing else mattered.
Finally, Grace spoke in the darkness. ‘Two years, Tom. If you c
ould just work for two years while I take time off for a baby, then you can have your year off. How does that sound?’
He sighed deeply, lying down to snuggle beside Lotte. ‘It sounds like hell,’ he murmured.
‘Oh.’
‘Would it include the three months I’ve already worked?’
‘Yes.’ She had to hide the sympathy she felt. Her clever man, full of passion for his clever dream. She did not want to be his jailer.
‘I guess I could keep working on the solar roof at weekends.’
‘And nights,’ suggested Grace. It was a peace offering; she was sick to death of him working out in the shed every spare minute of his life, but if that was what it took.
‘It would be nice to have another baby,’ said Tom. He stroked Lotte’s shoulder. ‘She’s so beautiful.’
‘If anything happened to her . . .’
‘We’re so lucky.’ That horrible luck that they had genuflected before since the accident. ‘When is the woman coming over, the one who saved Lotte?’
‘Saturday.’
‘I really want to meet her. And say thank you.’
‘I wonder if she’s vegetarian.’
‘Of course she’s vego. She has dreadlocks.’
‘It’s not the law.’
‘It is. Dreadlocks, vego.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Mm. Goodnight.’
‘Should I make the pilaf?’
‘Lovely.’
‘The banana curry?’
‘Hmm.’
‘I know, no protein. Vegos hate that.’
Lotte gave a little sigh, a puff, as if she had sunk deep through leagues of ocean and landed on the sandy floor of sleep, towing her father behind her on the seaweed strings of dreams.
‘What about the lima bean dish, but without the bacon?’
The Near Miss Page 3