The train was late. He waited on the platform. He watched a car speed away from the city down Station Street. Its headlights shone on the train cables overhead. The light moved along the wire like an animated image of neural propagation he’d once seen. It was raining. He could smell the sea. When the train arrived, water glittered on the windows.
On the seat beside him was one of those free street papers, folded in two. He read it idly. There were mistakes in the copy that he, with his Form 5 Blackburn Tech eyes, could pick. It gave him a small, mean satisfaction. The horoscope section was titled Should I get out of bed tomorrow?
He shut the paper.
He watched two boys standing on the metal platform between the carriages so they could smoke their tailored cigarettes. The taller one stepped back inside the train, smoothed his hair like a young James Dean. There was an angry salvo of pimples along his shaved jawline. His eyes flicked over Wes and down the train.
Wes felt small. He wanted to be worth a fight.
Kirsten was waiting for him outside the theatre. She was wearing a dress that looked like a shirt and a black coat she’d had for years. As he got closer, she was finishing off a plait in her hair. She smiled at him. She did an absurd wave with her elbow as her hands worked away. It seemed impossible that he and Miranda could have produced this creature, blonde with hard, flat cheekbones. Viking daughter, early bloomer. When she was only eleven or twelve she’d had wide hips and long limbs and Miranda had said She’ll grow into it all.
‘Have you been waiting long?’ he asked. She shook her head. She touched her cheek to his.
He had been to the theatre before, but not for years. He’d forgotten how you had to go down into the earth. The thick carpet, the gold light, the brass rails, like a spiffy crypt.
They propped against a wall to watch the other patrons.
‘There were these kids on the train,’ Wes began. I don’t want to get old, he thought, and I am very lonely. Kirsten was looking at his face as if she expected the start of a story; something funny or awful. He touched his hand to his back pocket. ‘I’ll get us a drink before we go in, eh? Do you want a glass of champers?’
‘Whatever you’re having,’ she said. He lurched to his feet.
When he returned she’d found a sofa. They clinked their glasses together.
‘Kir,’ he said, ‘have you ever been to one of those places where you walk in and they do you a massage on the spot?’
‘Your neck still giving you trouble?’
‘There’s this new massage place near the Woolies,’ he said. ‘One of those walk-in joints. A leaflet came in the post.’
‘If your neck is sore,’ she said, ‘you could go to the chiro.’
Wes grimaced. ‘Don’t they crack you?’
‘Yes, but it feels wonderful. The whole purpose is realignment.’ He must have looked unconvinced. ‘I don’t know, I was sceptical but I started going for my back. Then I stopped getting tension headaches, too. Anyway,’ she went on, ‘there’s something sort of meditative about having someone just work on your body in silence for half an hour. You feel very relaxed.’
‘Half an hour,’ Wes said. She looked at him. They both recovered.
The play was different from what he remembered. He was shocked at how it turned in his guts, at the end, when Roo—or was it Barney?—was on his hands and knees, pounding his fist at Olive’s feet. He wanted to say something to Kirsten about it, as they emerged into the foyer with its gentle light, but he heard an older woman say, I certainly think she was miscast for the role, and he lost his nerve.
They went for a nightcap. They both ordered boilermakers. Wes did not drink often anymore, but when he did it was most always with Kirsten.
‘What have you got on tomorrow?’ he asked when she returned with their drinks.
‘Just jobs,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to do really boring stuff. Weed the garden. Mark some essays, clean the bathroom. Tomorrow night I’m going to Tom’s parents’ for tea.’
Tom was a good bloke. He worked in the courts, a juvenile liaison officer or something along those lines. He barracked for the Tigers. The first time they’d met, Tom had cooked dinner at Kirsten’s house, pasta with pippis he’d collected himself. He was Kirsten’s first boyfriend in two years, which meant her first boyfriend since Miranda had died. First Christmas since, first trip to Bermagui since, first birthday since, first parking ticket since, first flu season since. Wes had thought they were all over and done with, and then Tom came on the scene.
Wes liked him, but he wanted to know what Miranda thought.
He said goodbye to Kirsten at the taxi rank. She folded herself into the back seat and waved at him from the window as the cab pulled away. He walked back to the station. His veins were warm and all the stars were out. He did not drink often any more, and when he did it made his head swim. Going home he watched the Richmond skyline flatten out as the train clattered away to the suburbs. A girl, a child, vomited onto the floor at the far end of the carriage. Her boyfriend covered it with one of the free street papers.
Wes put his head to the cold perspex and tried not to smell the vomit.
From Tom’s parents’ house, she sent him a photo from her mobile phone. It was a picture of her with their whippet. It looked up at Kirsten lovingly, ears cocked forward. Kirsten’s face was impassive, even sceptical. They’d never had dogs when she was growing up, because Miranda had an allergy.
It was a funny picture. Almost immediately after the image was transmitted came the caption: THE MALE GAZE. She’d done it to get a rise out of him, to make him laugh. He sent a text message back: Har har.
Wes didn’t mind feminists so much. He believed in equal pay, he just didn’t know why they needed to be so shrill about everything. Sometimes it seemed to him as if Kirsten saw everything as an attack. He didn’t understand all the talk about emancipation.
Years ago he’d said to Miranda, I thought it was something she’d get out of her system while she was a teenager. His wife had looked at him and laughed. She’d said, That is the system. Maybe he’d answered with something thick, because he remembered Miranda looking at him with something like pity or patience and saying, Darling, that’s the only way for women to survive.
He hadn’t thought about it in years. Remembering it now made him ache in a new, hot way; that his wife and daughter had shared it, that he couldn’t access it, that it wasn’t his to understand. He was sitting on the couch watching a Sunday night program on skyscrapers being constructed too hastily in Shanghai. He’d eaten pork chops for dinner. The plate was on the coffee table. Every so often he ran his finger around the rim, where salt and apple sauce had congealed. He kept his phone on the table, where he’d see it if it lit up or vibrated, but Kirsten did not send another message. It was probably good, he thought. It’d be rude to be tapping away at her phone in front of Tom and his parents.
He waited a few days, and then called her when he got home from work.
‘Are you free for dinner on Sunday? Bring Tom. I’ll do us a roast.’
The sliver of silence meant she was surprised, but she recovered.
‘We’re supposed to be going to a lunch down the peninsula,’ she said. ‘It’s my friend Naila’s birthday. At a winery down there. But we could swing past on the way back. We’ll just have to pace ourselves at lunch.’
‘All right. You just tell me what time suits you. It might be a step down from the winery, though.’
‘It’ll be lovely,’ she said. ‘How was your day?’
‘We’ve got a new kid. I had to take him for his first transfer today.’
Wes worked as an undertaker. It was a serious job, and it suited him well. He liked the quiet spaces and the ceremony and the driving. When Kirsten was four or five, she’d gone through a phase of being fascinated with death. Miranda had said most kids did. For months, she’d interrogated Wes not just about his job, but about all sorts of things. Will there be a light in my coffin? she’d asked. I need one for my
books. She’d told her kindergarten teacher she wanted to be an undertaker. The teacher, who only knew that Miranda was a nurse, was horrified. They still laughed about it.
‘Was it an old people’s home?’ Kirsten asked.
‘Hm?’
‘The transfer.’
‘No, it was at the Alfred, actually. This kid’s only been on the job for ten days. He’s nineteen. I was worried about respect,’ Wes said. ‘You know. I half-expected him to say, What does it matter, he’s dead, but he was very respectful.’
‘Kids aren’t animals.’
‘I know,’ he said, ‘but I was still waiting for it. It’s hard to teach that sort of thing.’
‘They’re not animals, Dad,’ she said again. ‘Or—we’re not animals. Whose side should I be on, anyway?’
It was cold enough that he didn’t worry about leaving the groceries in the car.
When Miranda was alive, she’d always bought a cooked chook for a homeless bloke who sat outside the Woolworths when she did the grocery shopping. Kirsten had mentioned it once, and that was the first Wes had heard of it. Where is he now? Wes said. Kir looked helpless. I don’t—I don’t know, she’d stammered. He might have moved on. By then Miranda was gone and he couldn’t ask her about it.
He locked the car again and walked back towards the lit strip of shops. He passed a travel agent, shut for the night. He looked in at the red-and-white poster advertising fares to Launceston, Coolangatta, Sydney. His only thought of Sydney was with Miranda, when they’d been newly married. It was hot. She’d worn these ridiculous sandals with heels, and he’d just about had to carry her around the harbour. In the photos they stood in front of the Opera House with shy faces. They looked embarrassed to be standing in such pulchritude.
He passed the newsagency, an opportunity shop, a brightly lit shopfront selling frozen yoghurt. The employees inside looked pained. They were wiping down the immaculate stainless-steel benches in rhythmic circles. It looked like a strange modern dance. Who’d be eating frozen yoghurt at this time of year, thought Wes. Then the massage place.
It was empty. Bunches of fake flowers hung from the ceiling in lurid blues and purples, suspended by their plastic stalks. Wes stood at the desk. The room was deep and narrow. On one side was a row of four chairs, all facing the window. A bright green curtain had been hung across the glass. Wes remembered reading once that green was calming, easy on the eyes. Maybe someone had told him—it could have been Kirsten or Miranda. Below each chair was a small plastic basket—for keys and handbags and things, he supposed. On the other side was a series of curtains in that same green fabric. It reminded him of the emergency ward at the hospital. The one nearest to him was open. He could see a massage table covered with folded towels.
‘Hullo,’ he called uncertainly. He was embarrassed.
A young man appeared from the back of the shop.
‘Good evening,’ he said, beaming. ‘What would you like?’ He pushed a laminated price list across the counter at Wes. The grid swarmed before him: he reached for his eyeglasses, and couldn’t find them. He pointed blindly at the page.
‘I’m just after a neck and shoulder massage, please.’
‘Of course. This way.’
He sat Wes down at one of the chairs. There was a series of posters on the wall above the window. One of them looked very old. It said REFLEXOLOGY in English at the top. Underneath was a foot sole, divided in cheerful colours and annotated in what he thought to be Chinese. Another poster showed a man’s body from behind, colours and lines streaming from it.
‘Sir, you can remove your glasses, if you want.’
For some reason he’d imagined a woman. The kid put a towel around Wes’s neck, a small one, the size of a dishcloth. It was velvety. Wes looked at the green curtain in front of him, blocking out the view of the street, the car park. There was music playing. Piano and panpipes. He could hear two young women speaking in a clipped-sounding foreign language in another room, maybe a television, too. He could hear tyres on wet gravel outside. He closed his eyes.
The kid ran his thumbs along Wes’s spine, the bit right at the top, beneath his skull. His fingers moved and made arcs below the shoulder blades.
‘Pressure okay?’ he asked.
‘Yes, yes, it’s fine.’
He’d imagined a woman. He’d imagined Miranda at his neck, her small, strong hands. She made him shiver.
The young man started high up. His thumbs pressed hard. They made circles. It seemed he was battling the muscle, or trying to get it to relinquish something with his stubborn hands. Once or twice Wes almost cried out at the strange pain. He felt his body tense. He knew the kid could feel it, but all he said was, Okay, sir? and Wes said, Yes, it’s very good.
He thought of twilight sleep. He thought of Kirsten, aged five, standing on his back, walking up and down while he lay face-down on the floor. He thought of his wife in the surf at Bermagui, bobbing to the surface after being pounded by the ocean, the water dripping from her hair and nose. The hands went all over. Wes thought of the play the other night. There’d been a scene inside the house, but with fireworks out on the street. Somehow it had all been constructed so that the shadows and blaze of the pyrotechnics were suggested through an open window at the back of the set. He thought of his wife hanging from the monkey bars at the local playground, teaching Kirsten how to swing from rung to rung. He thought of rain sound machines. He thought of a place he and Miranda had once gone for lunch to celebrate something or other. It had been high summer. There’d been tall windows over green lawns, expansive gardens, hydrangeas. Miranda telling him about the flowers. Their colour changed according to the acidity of the soil. You can bung a couple of nails in, she’d said, and get a crop of really blue ones. Damp, heavy splendour.
The hands changed. Suddenly they were like hard, flat rain. Fingers pelting down his neck, his shoulders, his arms. Wes felt the skin there jumping under the kid’s fingers, rapid-fire. He was waking up.
At last the young man clapped him on the shoulders.
‘Okay?’ he asked.
Wes cleared his throat, came to. He opened his eyes. The light was stunning. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
At the counter he opened his wallet and saw the flyer inside, advertising twenty-five per cent off. The special opening rate. With his specs on, he looked at the price list again. He saw that his massage had only cost twenty dollars. He didn’t want to use the discount anymore.
He kept saying thank you while the young man handed him his change and receipt and loyalty card. He staggered out into the night. His car was in the Woolworths car park, where he’d left it, groceries in the back seat. The milk was still cold. He exhaled. His breath hung before him.
The tree in the backyard was heavy with lemons. Wes had a mind to make a cake with them. Miranda used to do something she called lemon bread. It was dense. She’d served it with clotted cream and berries. When he found the recipe, though, it called for separated eggs and glacé lemon, and he’d never done any of that. He sat down at his computer and found a recipe for a lemon pound cake instead. He found a converter to change all the American measurements to metric ones he could make sense of. He set all the ingredients out on the bench.
He was on his hands and knees beneath the lemon tree. He was singing to himself—And did those feet in ancient times walk upon England’s mountains green? And was the holy lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen?—when he saw a flash of colour at the back door. His daughter’s boots, blue dress. She stood on the back porch with her arms crossed, looking down at him.
‘Hullo.’
‘Hullo, love.’
They were both embarrassed. He didn’t know why he’d been singing a hymn.
‘I know we’re early,’ she said. He saw Tom standing behind her. ‘We were driving back from the peninsula. It seemed silly to go back to the city, then come all the way out again.’
‘Well, it would’ve been silly. I’m glad you’re here. You can help me grat
e these.’
He stood with his hands full of lemons. His knees were damp: the wet ground had soaked through his trousers. He kissed Kirsten’s cheek. Shaking Tom’s hand was an impossibility while he was still holding the fruit, so he grinned and said, How’s it going, mate, and Tom said, Good, mate, let me take some of those for you.
Inside Kirsten handed him a bottle of shiraz. ‘We brought you this from the winery.’
‘It was what we had with lunch,’ said Tom.
‘You didn’t have to do that,’ said Wes. He turned the bottle over to examine its label, but he couldn’t read anything without his glasses. He set it on the bench beside Kirsten’s handbag.
‘The chicken’ll be another hour,’ he said.
‘Oh—take as long as you like. We had a huge lunch—’ Kirsten said. She looked at Tom and laughed. Wes turned to check on the vegetables.
After they’d eaten Kirsten and Tom washed and dried the dishes standing side-by-side at the sink. Wes inspected his cake. It had cracked on top, but it smelled good.
‘Mum would’ve just put icing sugar on it,’ Kirsten murmured, looking over his shoulder. They did shy smiles at the cake.
‘Oh, no,’ Wes said. ‘I forgot the bloody cream.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Tom said. ‘It smells amazing. We don’t need cream.’
‘Oh, no,’ Wes said again. He was paralysed. ‘Hang on—I’ll run down to Woolies and get some. We’ve got to have cream.’
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