The Fence

by Meredith Jaffe

  ‘Although they do other things, babe,’ Brandon says. ‘Diane said they incorporate preparing food from the garden as part of the program.’

  ‘She looks a bit like you.’ Francesca’s eyes narrow. ‘Is she any relation? Slaughter, isn’t it?’

  Gwen tilts her chin. ‘Yes, she’s my daughter.’

  ‘Oh how lovely!’ gushes Francesca. ‘How nice of your daughter to find a way for you to be involved. Her little girl goes there too, doesn’t she? So that way you get to see your grandchild when you pop in to help with the garden.’

  Gwen’s brain shuts down. She has no idea how to respond to this woman. The gardening program at the kindy had been her idea. Admittedly, she had read about what Stephanie Alexander had achieved in Victoria and, whilst she was no celebrity chef like Stephanie, she was perfectly capable of creating a kitchen garden for the enjoyment of the under-fives. It had been a huge success. At the working bee, a couple of the dads had helped Eric build four small beds at just the right height for the littlies to reach in and plant their seeds and weed their rows. Once a fortnight they hold a cooking class where the children pick ingredients from the garden and bake something to take home for Mum and Dad to enjoy. Every season, all the families are invited to a meal and are served by their offspring. In the meantime, the children learn where real fruit and vegetables come from and what they taste like. Some of the mums have commented on how much less fussy their darlings are at meal times as a consequence. It brings Gwen immense satisfaction to be making a difference to this one small group of the next generation.

  She starts to say something polite and non-committal such as ‘I like to help out where I can,’ but then thinks, bugger it, and says instead, ‘It’s an integral part of their learning program. We incorporate lessons in science as well as practical skills like using gardening implements and kitchen utensils that build their fine motor skills. Plus it encourages them to work in teams as each age group has their own garden bed to maintain.’

  Francesca steps back, a haughty look shadowing her face. ‘Yes, I’m sure it does all of that,’ she says in a tone like ice. ‘Although I’m not so sure I like the idea of my four year olds wielding kitchen knives.’

  ‘The teachers are the only knife wielders at Gumnut. None of the carers at Gumnut would ever dream of endangering the safety of their charges.’ Gwen speaks as evenly as possible but she can’t help thinking, what sort of fools does this woman take them for?

  ‘Mummy, I picked you flowers.’ The little boy appears. In his grubby hand is a bunch of primulas that had the misfortune to flower early and have now paid the ultimate price. Their roots hang limp, dropping clods of soil, and he squeezes them so tight that some of the delicate stems snap, the flower heads collapsing sideways.

  ‘Oh, Silver, sweetie, that is such a lovely gift for Mummy,’ Francesca coos, bending to kiss his cheek and take the bedraggled bunch. The baby stretches out a pudgy hand and snatches at the flowers, beheading a couple more.

  Gwen pales. She had potted out the seedlings only a week before Babs died. She uses them to provide winter colour in Babs’ green garden and loves the way they bob up beneath the shrubbery, self-seeding along the drive in any nook or cranny that will have them. What they are not designed to be is a cut flower, or in this case, a plucked flower.

  The other twin arrives. If Gwen were to draw an inference about the competitive natures of the siblings, the proof is in the little girl’s hand. She has picked an even larger bunch of primulas, so big she needs two hands to hold them. Gwen feels faint at such wanton destruction. None of her grandchildren ever picked flowers willy-nilly. From a young age, she trained them to respect Nanna’s garden. Picking flowers is fine, as long as Mummy or Nanna are there to make sure they do it correctly. The little girl thrusts the flowers at her father.

  ‘Princess, that’s so sweet of you. You know how much Daddy loves flowers. Shall we go and find a jar to put them in?’ He smiles at Gwen, an electric smile that promises everything. He turns towards the house. ‘I’ll see you inside, Frankie.’

  Francesca nods and looks at Gwen. ‘Don’t worry about the flowers, Mrs Hill. We’ve got big plans for this garden. Brandy’s done a course on permaculture and we’ll be getting rid of all the decorative plants to make the front yard sustainable. Wave bye bye, Marigold.’ She picks up the toddler’s hand and flings it up and down. The little girl giggles and a gobbet of green snot emerges from her nose.

  Gwen waves back – what else can she do? – and watches the family traipse through the sasanqua hedges and around the curving gravel path. The sound of the front door slamming shut startles her back to life and she makes the slow hike up her own driveway, thinking how she’ll convey all that has transpired to Eric. It is then it catches her eye, the large brown mass glistening on her lawn. She goes into the garage to fetch a hand trowel and sees Eric sitting on the step sanding a small piece of wood, humming to himself. At his feet lies the culprit, her brother flopped across her hindquarters, both dogs fast asleep.

  Eric glances up and smiles. ‘Look who found me,’ he says, delighted at the invasion and unaware of the crime committed. ‘Aren’t they handsome?’ He ruffles the golden dog’s ears. She opens one eye and licks his hand.

  ‘She is not cute. She, Butter, has just defecated all over my lawn.’ Gwen huffs, reaching for the trowel where it hangs on the masonite board.

  She swears Eric smirks but when she peers more closely at him his attention is absorbed by his sanding. ‘Take the dogs back to their owners, Eric. I don’t want them here. You should see the mess they’ve made and the children have already begun ruining Babs’ garden.’

  ‘It’s their garden now, Gwennie,’ Eric murmurs.

  Tears spring to Gwen’s eyes and she wipes them away. ‘They’re planning to level it.’

  ‘Level what?’

  ‘The garden. They don’t like the garden.’

  Eric looks up. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you can’t eat it. She, Francesca, first says she’s no gardener and the next minute starts going on about sustainability. They plan to get rid of everything. Don’t they appreciate how many years, decades, it took me to create that blasted garden? They can’t just flatten it.’

  ‘They bought the garden as well as the house, Gwennie. They can do what they like.’

  ‘No, they can’t.’ Gwen bangs the trowel against the side of the workbench, startling the dogs who spring to their feet and bark.

  ‘Oh shut up, you stupid mutts. You know what they’re called, don’t you?’ her voice rising with indignation. ‘Peanut and Butter. How stupid is that? And the children? The twins are Amber and Silver and then there’s Marigold and the baby.’ She tsked, ‘I heard him say it as he went up the stairs. Oh yes, that’s right Bijoux. What sort of names are those?’

  ‘Well, Marigold is obviously the name of a flower. Bijoux literally means jewel.’

  Gwen stares at him. ‘How on earth do you know that?’

  Eric shrugs. ‘Amber is called a gemstone although really it’s fossilised resin. Silver is self-explanatory.’

  Gwen collapses onto the work stool, which signals to the dogs to come over and nudge her legs. ‘Go away, you stupid mutts,’ she says, pushing them away with her knee as they lick her, wagging their tails.

  ‘They picked half the flowers in the garden. Between these dogs and those children, I don’t think we’re in for a very good time with these new people.’

  ‘Early days, Gwennie. Early days. Give them a chance to settle in. I’m sure they’ll redeem themselves in time.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  Eric’s right, she does have a tendency to get bent out of shape over things she can’t control. Perhaps she should give these new neighbours the benefit of the doubt.

  Eric struggles to his feet, stiff from sitting too long in one position. ‘How about a cup of tea? That’ll put things righ
t.’ As he climbs the stairs, he turns and asks, ‘Have we any of that caramel slice left over from Michael and Soo-Lin’s visit?’

  Gwen sighs and stands. ‘Of course not. That was months ago, Eric.’ She goes into the yard with her trowel, the dogs ­trotting at her heels.

  Frankie’s June

  Frankie stares out the car window, blocking out the noise of the twins squabbling over their tablets as they try to keep them away from Marigold’s sticky fingers. Baby Bijoux sleeps through it all.

  Brandon has a John Butler Trio CD playing on low in an effort to bring the kids down a notch or two. God, it will be good when they have a proper yard to run around in and burn off this relentless energy, she thinks.

  Part of her wants to put her hand on his thigh, an act of reassurance, but she dares not. Throughout the morning, as the removalists heaved furniture into the van, Brandon’s mood darkened. So much so that she had been grateful she’d promised the children she’d take them to the park. When the removalists left, Brandon came to fetch them, which he needn’t have done as she saw the truck rumbling along Johnston Street on its way to the leafy north shore.

  The other part of Frankie resents Brandon’s sour mood. Neither of them wants to leave Annandale with its cafes and bars an easy stroll from the house, the children’s future school within safe walking distance, not to mention the suburb’s proximity to the city. They are leaving their lifestyle behind. After the twins were born, the Annandale terrace had been Brandon’s pick. As the stay-at-home parent, its renovation had been his major project, in-between looking after the kids and screwing the barista.

  At least it wasn’t the nanny. Those people uncomfortable that she chose work over staying at home with her children could never resist the joke about trusting Brandon around the nanny. She laughed along, recognising the price of being different. That TV comedy about stay-at-home dads makes everyone a comic but, at Klaussman & Sons, Frankie and Brandon’s living arrangements are unique. Staff share a morbid fascination with her personal life more than the other account directors’. Because she’s the only woman? It’s a depressing thought in this day and age.

  Like any woman, she endured nine months of pregnancy and gave birth naturally, despite the snide inferences that Frankie Desmarchelliers was definitely too posh to push. She breastfed all her children and continued to do so on returning to work, alleviating herself in the disabled toilet on level four, the only place clean and private enough in which to do so.

  Although she did all this, in this new millennium it seems it is still frowned upon for a mother to return to work after a mere three months maternity leave and still considered somewhat unusual to leave her children in the care of their father. Somehow people hold two points of view in perfect balance. One, that there must be something wrong with Francesca that she can sacrifice raising her children for the sake of pursuing her career, and two, that Brandon is some sort of domestic saint forgoing his career to nurture his offspring.

  Frankie turns and checks on the children now. Bijoux sleeps on and the twins and Goldie have reached a truce, sharing their headphones, their eyes glued to the flickering images on their tablets.

  She loves her children as much as any mother but the truth is she just can’t stay at home with them full-time. It’s not the amount of energy and time they suck up. The majority of which is spent feeding them, cleaning up after them and ferrying them around to play dates and activities with just the occasional reward of them not whingeing about being bored or not getting their own way. She should know, her mother basically anointed her as the surrogate mother to her five younger siblings. Frankie has already raised one family. She simply couldn’t do it again. Whereas Brandon is a qualified infants teacher. Entertaining children with the attention span of gnats is second nature. He has filled their house with crates stuffed with pipe-cleaners, stickers and sheets of coloured paper, boxes of crayons, pencils, textas, and rolls and rolls of butcher’s paper.

  What’s so wrong with choosing work over that? Each day she arrives and her desk is the way she left it. She eats lunch uninter­rupted, has adult conversations and staff to do her bidding, not to mention that it pays well. Her money bought their first apartment, paid the mortgage on Johnston Street and will continue to do so on 18 Green Valley Avenue. Her hard-earned cash puts food on the table and clothes on everybody’s back, keeps the lights on and the hot water running. The groceries are delivered on a Friday, the cleaner comes on Tuesdays and Frankie always steps carefully around Brandon’s ego.

  For some reason it is acceptable to call a woman who stays at home a housewife but the same term cannot be applied to a man. The rare times they socialise, Frankie hears this in Brandon’s replies to the question, ‘So what do you do for a crust, mate?’ The answer is never ‘I am a house husband’ or even ‘I am the primary caregiver to our four children’. Brandon says he is taking time out to renovate the house. Once she heard him cite he was recovering from a back injury earned at soccer. Frankie cannot recall Brandon ever playing soccer or having a back injury. His palpable lie beds in her chest.

  So when Brandon asked if they could have a nanny two days a week so that he might do some casual teaching and generally have some ‘me time’, Frankie acquiesced. The nanny shared the workload – swimming lessons, toddler gymnastics, Silver’s speech therapy and play dates with their friends. Frankie cannot deny there were real benefits to having a nanny. For starters, she arrived home to a house bathed in serenity. The nanny cooked for the children and that meant there were always leftovers for her and Brandon to share – as long as she didn’t mind a rotation of organic chicken sausages and variations on mince. The nanny washed the children’s clothes, hung their swimmers and towels out to dry, packed the toys away, blu-tacked their daily output of artwork to the kitchen cupboards and had photos of their days marching across the fridge. There was a star chart recording their compliant behaviour (although it seemed to Frankie that it was a bit of a stretch to imagine how either Silver or Amber achieved a star for setting the table but who was she to argue?). There was a stoplight with stickers on it for bad behaviour, though fortunately none of the kids had gone beyond orange. Having a nanny was as close as Frankie was ever going to get to having a wife.

  From a cost-benefit perspective, she justified the expense on the basis that Brandon’s income from casual teaching would offset the cost of hiring a nanny two days a week because Frankie was only a senior account manager at Klaussman & Sons at the time, not yet head of the whole shebang. At first the arrangement worked well. Brandon picked up two days a week teaching without any problems, but over time two days often ended up being one because Brandon didn’t like working at the schools in the rougher neighbourhoods. Sometimes it seemed there was no work at all, especially as Brandon didn’t feel qualified to teach kids beyond Stage One.

  ‘Casual teachers are just glorified babysitters, Brandy. When I was at school, they mostly chucked on a movie or took us outside for a game of poison ball,’ she’d argued.

  Brandon, who was potty-training Marigold at the time, a job he was welcome to as far as Frankie was concerned, replied that he was not that kind of teacher.

  ‘But it can’t be that much harder babysitting Year Three kids over Year One kids,’ she said, holding her breath against the smell.

  ‘Primary teaching is a completely different skill set,’ he said, wiping Marigold’s bottom.

  Marigold beamed at her. ‘Look, Mummy, poo!’

  Frankie clapped her hands. ‘Clever girl, Goldie. And in the potty too!’

  Avoiding the developing argument, Frankie left Brandon to supervise handwashing. In reality, Brandon’s one day of teaching covered enough of the cost of the nanny and Frankie so liked having a wife as well as a husband that she let it slip. Everyone was benefiting.

  Until that fateful day, she thinks, as they drive over the Gladesville Bridge, past the mansions and yachts, when Frankie had a toothache and
went to the dentist. One injection hadn’t dulled the pain, so the dentist had given her a second which left her mouth numb to the point she was incoherent. Frankie had called her PA, managing to convey that she had to cancel her afternoon meetings because she sounded like she’d had a particularly long and well-greased client lunch. She even caught a cab home, which she rarely did, and arrived to find Brandon putting his ‘me time’ to good use by banging the Brazilian barista from the coffee shop around the corner.

  Frankie squeezes her eyes shut against the horrible image rising up before her. Her pulse hammers in her temple every time she thinks of it and, right this second, her urge is not to place a hand on Brandon’s thigh but to slap him and shout ‘Why?’

  At the door of their bedroom, she saw the wet footprints tracking from the ensuite spa towards their marital bed. There, on the thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets, was Brandon kneeling at the foot of the bed, his head buried between the thighs of a woman arching her back and oohing in ecstasy. Frankie noticed two other things about her. That she had no pubic hair and that there was make-up smeared over the sateen sheets. The baby monitor winked on the bedside table.

  Stunned, Frankie stepped back into the hallway and listened in horror as they finished in shrieking, arse-slapping rapture. When Brandon sauntered, sated and flaccid, to the toilet, he stopped when he saw her reflection in the wardrobe mirror. He glanced at the bed, as did Frankie, to see the barista checking for messages on her phone with one hand whilst searching the bottom drawer of Frankie’s bedside table for her secret stash of salted caramel Lindt balls with the other.