‘How’s Mum?’ she asked the child.
‘She’s crying,’ Lotte said tonelessly, staring into the middle distance. Melody had stroked the child’s silky brown head and Lotte did not pull away. Children’s shoulders were so absurdly small, one could be cupped in each palm. Too small for adult burdens.
A man on the train vocalised his haunted thoughts, while passengers glanced at him, embarrassed, fascinated. ‘Look at me when you speak!’ he barked into thin air. ‘Look at me when you speak!’ As if it was the last thing heard before he snapped. Something a mother might say, or a father. And yet maybe those words weren’t the cause of his malaise, maybe his psyche was trying to recreate the last time he had felt protected and safe. Melody squeezed Skip so hard he squeaked; she might never let him go. Maybe she would home-school him.
At Flinders Street station, Melody and Skipper held hands and she let him put the ticket in the slot at the gate. They walked over the bridge, peering through the gilt-painted slots at the river below, and slowly made their way to the little tent where the circus show would be. After the show, all trapeze artistry, and silliness in pyjamas, they walked up to the gallery, to put their hands on the water wall, and lie on the floor of the Great Hall and look at the colours. They bought a babycino from the kiosk and rode the elevator up and down a few times. Then Melody brought out the Vegemite sandwich she had packed. Skipper had been allowed to choose a one-dollar picture postcard from the gallery shop, and he had chosen a picture of four cherubs blowing trumpets. They looked not unlike himself, really, except for the wings.
The reverence of these days. Melody felt a love between them so perfect and pure, she wanted to capture it, pin it on a butterfly board and have it forever. She felt a wondrous and frightening certainty that these were the very best days of her life.
Stopping by the Hare Krishna restaurant, she picked up a flier for an Aboriginal dreaming camp, at the end of the year. A week in the country in teepees, Aboriginal elders, dreamtime tales, sacred rituals. She knew the group that were organising it, and she would know some of the people going, she was sure. There might even be some refugees from the commune, with children Skip knew. It would be late spring, when the weather was coming good. Skip would love it. Something to look forward to. She folded the flier carefully and tucked it down her shirt.
They rode the train home and once again she just missed out on seeing her graffiti, although she did look up in time to see it reflected as a blue flash in the windows opposite, and to see a few passengers’ faces arrested in the direction of it, reading silently. At home, she and her boy lay at opposite ends of the couch, their legs entwined, and watched each other, Skipper eventually falling asleep. Such tenderness, in this grotty apartment. Heaven could be no more than this.
Grace sat that night with Lotte, and ate the meal Melody had dropped over. It was a lentil curry, flavoured with sweet potato and sultanas, gently spiced enough that Lotte, finally bored with chips and takeaways, stirred it through her basmati rice and ate a few mouthfuls, and Grace, suddenly starving, wolfed down three helpings.
For a moment after the auction, when Lotte had brought the string of thank-yous from Tom, beloved Tom, Grace had thought that this was it. They would make up; he would forgive her. The cost had been the house sale, as she had thought. She hoped it tearily, even as she suppressed a flash of rage: how manipulative of you Tom! But then, after all the paperwork had been signed, she heard him leave the house, saw him arguing with his angry parents, and then he drove away. Grace had spent the next twenty-four hours in bed, only getting up to answer the door and find Melody’s steaming curry in a chipped pot on the doorstep. Melody was already sailing off on her bike, Skip on the back, and she lifted an arm and waved before she vanished around the corner. Grace had crouched, lifted the lid on the pot and blinked away tears at such kindness.
They watched television as they ate; Round Up, the current affairs show that had screened Lotte’s accident. And suddenly, she realised she was watching the accident footage again.
‘Mummy!’ squeaked Lotte, wide eyed. ‘That’s when I hurt my leg! That’s Skip’s mummy!’
There it was. The blistering hot day last summer, the ice-cream shop, Melody in her green dress amid the hot metal cars, snatching Lotte in her white dress, saving her from death. Grace stopped breathing for a few moments, only exhaling when Lotte, screen Lotte, was safe. She reached for her daughter, squeezed her tight.
But then there was new footage. The same day, she could tell — there was Mel in the green dress, Skip in his flapping shirt. They were in the supermarket. Melody reached for a bottle of something, reached into her handbag and her hand returned: empty.
Was she . . . stealing?
‘Mummy it’s Melody! What’s she doing?’
‘Shh! I don’t know. Listen.’
‘. . . viewers hailed this woman a hero earlier this year, when she snatched a child from certain death in traffic. But, tonight we have footage here that shows her engaged in activity that is less than heroic. Melody Chase was caught on film stealing from this grocery store, and when confronted by the owner about the theft minutes before the accident, denied all. We want you, our viewers, to decide: saint or sinner? What do you think? We want to know. Ring now to cast your vote: 1800 899 000 to vote saint, and 1800 901 000 to vote sinner. Remember, calls cost ninety-nine cents. Later in the show we’ll announce the verdict and we’ll interview Australia’s top forensic psychologist about why people shoplift. Come back after the break . . .’
No. Grace had been chewing a mouth full of food, which she suddenly found herself unable to swallow. She actually had to spit it back on her plate. Saint or sinner? Melody? Did she know she was being dragged onto television again; had she any idea? But of course not, she didn’t even watch television.
Grace set her dinner aside. Something came over her for the first time in weeks: a cold fury, a bitter determination. Shame at her own ambivalence towards Melody. In her kitchen sat three loaves of bread, a pot of curry and another of rice that would feed them the next three nights. A forty-litre bucket of phlegmy goop that would apparently see them through laundry washes for the next year; a bucket of muesli, a vase of fresh herbs, and a bowl of green veggies harvested from Grace’s own small wilderness of a garden, which she would never have noticed herself. A load of washing on the line. All contributed by a woman who was also living on a pittance.
Melody might be a little bit unusual, she might look slightly weird, despite her beauty, she might be friends with a man who was apparently a criminal, but she was not . . . this. No. At worst, she was a woman stealing food to make ends meet on a single mother’s pension. Okay, that was olive oil she was stealing, and it was admittedly an expensive cold-pressed extra virgin, but Grace could see her point: if you were going to steal something, why not the best? . . . But how many viewers did this show have? It was one of the nation’s most popular. This, this was a public crucifixion, of a single mother whose real crime was to be too beautiful for television to leave her alone, now it had discovered her.
Grace would not allow this. She would not. Suddenly filled with a righteous anger, she was on her feet, holding her phone and dialing. And with the smell of fresh bread and vegetable curry in the air, she dialed one number, over and over again. She sat there and dialed from her mobile for six hours, until voting closed. Damn the expense. For the first time in a long time, she was overwhelmed with an emotion unrelated to Tom.
In Eddy’s house, a kilometre away, a man sitting before a television dialed a phone, again and again. He had the landline as well as his mobile, and he carefully juggled the two, to make the most calls per minute possible. He took a moment to text Tom, so he could get calling, too. Then he returned to his mobile, and called until his cheek grew warm.
The next morning, Melody delivered Skipper to kindy, and that was where she realised something was wrong. It began when she casually greeted another woman, a sort of interesting-looking type she thought she had hit
it off with. And the woman didn’t seem to hear her.
‘Hi!’ Melody said brightly, again. Skipper stood in the middle of the room, his backpack sliding off one shoulder to the floor. He looked around, searching for Lotte. Little bags were being placed on hooks, short people and tall people moved around at their different levels. Melody ducked her head to catch her new friend’s eye. Had she had a bad morning?
The woman finally met her eye.
Melody froze.
It was A Look.
The woman finished delivery of The Look, and moved away. Melody stood in a pillar of salt, a zone of social shock. That had undoubtedly been, her own mother would have said, ‘a Dirty Look’. Had Skipper done something to her child? Had some four-year-old social faux pas been carried out?
‘Ah, Melody, the TV star,’ said another woman, in a tone like she was sucking on a lemon. Melody moved aside so a child could access her coat hook, feeling her pillar of cold air expand a little wider.
But it had been months since the screening of Lotte’s accident! And she had been the great hero anyway. She stared bewildered at the woman, as little raincoats rustled around at the level of her knees, and motherly heads bent to converse with children. Now she looked around, actually, those motherly heads seemed quite determinedly bent. When they were raised, their faces wore dreamy smiles, and they all looked straight ahead, no one meeting her eye. The air almost crackled with her sudden invisibility.
The door opened again and Lotte skipped in in her dress and sandals. Melody looked past her for Grace, and felt a sudden fear that this social chill would also have touched her, her one friend. Grace’s eyes met her own and she paled. Melody froze.
Grace glanced quickly around at the other mothers, walked straight to Melody and put her arms around her.
Now Melody knew something was catastrophically wrong. She stood utterly still for a few bewildering moments, her cheek against the shorter woman’s hair, her hands touching Grace’s light cardigan. Her skin rose in goosebumps. Grace had never, ever hugged her. Grace did not hug.
Melody pulled back and stared at the other woman, baffled.
Grace studied her face and whispered. ‘You don’t know, do you? You didn’t see the telly last night. No one’s told you?’ There was now apparently a stampede of mothers trying to escape the locker room.
‘What?’ Melody whispered back. ‘Did they play the footage again?’
After a few minutes frantically whispering with Grace, Melody left the kindergarten and went straight to the local library, where she sat at a computer in the darkest corner, bathed now in the light of the screen as last night’s current affairs show played before her. After the first couple of minutes, her heart sinking, she pulled the hood of her jacket up and over her distinctive hair, so she wouldn’t be recognised, and she turned the sound down low. Saint or sinner? squeaked the screen. Vote now! Have your say! She clicked the arrow back to the start of its ribbon, and watched the evil, hateful supermarket manager’s footage of her shoplifting, the lifting of the item, the casual searching in her bag, the withdrawal of her empty hand. She put in cans, olive oil, vitamins. Her on-screen face was calm and expressionless, except for one moment when her eyes slid sideways, checking she wasn’t being observed. How shifty she looked, like some low-life-trash robber. And how stupid, not to sense she was being not only watched, but filmed. Melody thought of her little boy, up there in the tender, innocent world of kindergarten, alongside children who might know that his mummy was a thief, a robber, a bad lady on the television.
She could feel a thousand eyes watching her, although when she looked around there were only Asian students focused solely on their computer screens. But she knew, when she walked out of this door, everyone would know her. She didn’t deserve to have a little boy as beautiful as Skipper, with his invisible friends and his squishy hands and his total trust in her. What had she been thinking all these years, that shoplifting was some form of protest against capitalism, some expression of abundance from the universe . . . Oh God, she was a fraud. Why on earth had she come down to Melbourne; just to endure this bitter lesson? Could the universe hate her so much? She had thought she lived by a policy of do no harm, but she may have harmed her son with this horror. Shamed him. She had harmed Eddy, by bringing Van into his life, Van who appeared to have turned to some life of petty theft; stealing fiancées, robbing shops. Not unlike herself, as it turned out.
She walked home, utterly lost. On the way she passed a café where a child’s birthday party was underway, children blowing bubbles to float through the coffee-scented air, while toddlers clapped sticky palms. She passed a front garden where a ladder leaned on a tree, and a circle of stones sat on one big flat rock like a message, glistening black after the rain. Safe in her ugly kitchen, she re-read Skip’s mother’s day card, made at kindy. My mum’s favourite food is . . . sauce. My mum loves to . . . wash the dishes. I love my Mum because . . . she has a beautiful love. A photo of himself on the front wearing a Bob the Builder hooded towel, staring out grave and passive as a druid. She ripped open a letter from the real estate agent. He demanded she pay the three months’ rent in arrears, or his agency would evict them.
She felt hot, and she ran to the toilet to throw up. It seemed a long time after that she stared into that bowl, at the disgusting insides of her disgusting self. She couldn’t even climb to her feet to flush, she just turned on her hands and knees and crawled out to the lounge room, where she curled up in a ball on the carpet and shivered.
Melody woke to voices, to touch on her body. She was hot and dizzy, and still on the floor, but Skipper and Lotte crouched over her, as if casting spells, flying their imaginary planes over the terrain of her head, her shoulder, down the dunes of her thighs. She heard the quiet brrroom of the pretend engines, and the swooshing of wings, like enchanted creatures come to stitch her up with thread so fine that only a child’s eyes could see the gossamer scar it left.
‘What’s the time?’ She tried to sit up, pushing aside the hands. The world spun, and she crumbled down again. Her clothes sat damp on her skin, her breath stunk. Grace was in the kitchen setting out cups and saucers, spooning dandelion coffee into a cup. Melody closed her eyes, wishing the spinning would stop. ‘Oh, no. Did I miss pick-up?’
Grace poured the boiling water. ‘Don’t worry. We waited a few minutes, and then I brought Skip here. You were sleeping.’
Melody lay back. ‘Thanks.’
‘You seem to be running a temperature.’
Melody shut her eyes, the whole sorry mess watching over her. ‘I feel hot. Dizzy.’ Dizzy with shame.
She listened to the sound of a teaspoon stirring, bumping in the sides of a coffee cup, and thought how much comfort that sound promised. The children had fetched the op-shop Prada bag with the red cross she had painted on it, and were playing doctors. Obediently, she submitted herself to the gravity and nurture of Dr Skipper, who was giving ejections with an empty syringe and poking his broken stethoscope into her breast. She held her breath and felt her own nurture coming back at her, through the divine medium of her son. He gave her a massage, his touch as gentle as a kitten’s, his kind spirit flowing through his fingerpads. He squished her shirt against the flesh on her back.
Next time she woke, she climbed to her feet, catching her toe on the hem of her pants and stumbling against the wall. She felt them all watching as she righted herself and walked down the hall to the toilet, where she threw up again. Then she staggered to the room she shared with Skipper, and subsided onto her bed, crawling under a pile of sheets and blankets and books. She did not speak to Grace — and was that Eddy she had also seen? — and she registered that she may have been rude, but she had no choice. She was dying. Every muscle pumped poison, every bone groaned. She could feel her brain in her head, sloshing in some toxic coating. Her breathing was fast and shallow, and she was hungry for air, but too weak to gulp it properly. Her pillow was cold and dry and that was all she wanted.
It went on
for two days and two nights of heat and sweat and shivering and pain. She held her face to her pillow as if telling it a secret, as if it might hold the recipe for health within its poly-foam depths. Skipper came and went, each time with Grace and Lotte, and once with Eddy. In the eye of her own cyclone, the mother in her registered that her precious boy was in the hands of kind people, and she was cautiously reassured, and sank back into dreams.
Melody woke once in the night and the bed was empty — no Skipper. She panicked, dragged herself up and along the hall to ring Grace. But when she turned on the lounge room light, there they were, Grace, Skipper and Lotte, asleep. Grace was on the couch, in an unfamiliar sleeping bag, Skipper and Lotte slept crossways on a foam mattress, their angel faces turned in the same direction. The lounge room was as fat and warm, with the gentle sound of their breathing, as her own room had been cold and terrifying in their absence. Grace opened her eyes.
‘Sorry,’ said Melody. ‘I just wondered where Skip was.’
‘How are you feeling?’ said Grace. ‘You really should drink something.’
But the effort of walking and talking had already exhausted Melody, and she just nodded weakly and turned off the light. Fell back into bed, bleached of all life.
The next day held more dreamy waking and sleeping, Grace and the children coming and going. Grace woke her twice and made her sit up and drink something sweet. Then Grace and the children were not there. Melody woke once to see Van and she nodded at him, or she thought she did, but then she woke later and he had gone, and maybe it had been a dream. She swam down to the place deep in her soul where she was troubled about Van, a place she rarely visited. Deep in this underworld yellow submarine land, everything was just as she left it. Her sister’s funeral. Van’s everyday presence after the death. Her decision to move up to the commune, his decision to follow. Or did he decide first? She could not remember. That night. That week. She touched all those old relics. She swam in one place for a while, staring at Van’s love for Esme, and then Van’s love for Melody herself. Was it real love, or mirror twin love? She had never been sure, and she pitied it, whatever it was, but she did not trust it. Then she stared for a while at the guilty fact of her non-love for him, swam around it a little as she had done so many times. Nup. There it was. Would have been much simpler otherwise, but whatever. Move on.
The Near Miss Page 16