Plane Tree Drive

by Lynette Washington

  The retreat is in a bushland setting, and damn it all, there are trees everywhere, crowding up to the little barracks that we sleep and eat in. It’s supposed to be cosy, but it takes me straight back to the Drive, where the trees are like bars on my cell. I want to see the horizon, paint the horizon. When I suggest this to the instructor, a red-head called Maureen, she laughs and tells me, ‘I’ve seen your horizons, Jennifer. You need to challenge yourself. Paint a tree for a change!’ She’s right of course, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

  In groups of four we are sent into the bush to choose a small detail of some kind and paint it. The plan is that we compare the four visions of the same object and examine how four people can create something so different from a single object.

  Brock and I paint the burrow in the same terms. Our brush strokes are almost identical, the colours we choose cannot be told apart and the burrow looks as though it was painted by the same person. We share the same inability to see beyond the burrow and into its abstract nature. We are literalists. I feel certain that we see the world through the same lens and that we will have the most fascinating conversations. I feel completely exposed.

  That’s when I notice: I’m feeling something other than fatigue and boredom and guilt.

  That night Brock and I sit in front of the radiator with Maureen and the rest of the group, scrambling for heat like we’re on power rations, stomping our feet quietly to keep the blood flowing. Brock and I steal glances and smiles. I feel raw. My toes are tingling, the floor underneath them unstable and crumbling away with each stomp.

  Talking to the group, Brock is earnest, restrained and intelligent. I can see him holding back when someone in the group says something patently stupid. There is something else I see in him. It’s something I saw in Alexander – he’s constantly constructing himself, proving himself to the world. With Alexander it was his foreignness that made him scared of himself. I don’t know what it is with Brock, but I see it in him too. He’s presenting the Brock Who Is Acceptable To This Group Of People. It makes me want to deconstruct him, shake him up, the way I wanted to shake Alexander up when I used to pick fights with him.

  These thoughts are hazardous. I get up and walk to the kitchen. As the kettle boils a voice comes from behind me. Someone has followed me. I turn around.

  ‘What do you make of that “four painters four burrows” business?’ Brock says.

  ‘It’s nonsense. We like to think we are incredibly unique, but in fact our brains are pretty much hardwired by convention by the time we are three or four,’ I say. Brock is leaning on the kitchen bench that is between us.

  The kettle boils and I pour my cup of tea, holding the kettle up to Brock in a question. He puts his cup down and plonks a tea bag in it. I pour.

  ‘And here I was thinking you and I were cosmically bound by mirrored thought patterns or something. But really we were just being conventional. Buzz kill,’ Brock smiles.

  ‘Yep, that’s what they call me. Buzz Kill Jennifer.’

  I hold out my hand, a formal introduction. He takes it and we shake. We don’t let go. He holds my eyes and my hand and I feel perilously exposed.

  ‘It is a pleasure to meet you, Buzz Kill, and to finally find another person whose brain and brush understands my own brain and brush. I’ve been accused of being too literal, you know. Of not looking beyond the object and into its essence, but that’s just bollocks. The object is its essence, don’t you think?’

  We are still holding hands.

  ‘So you’re not a surrealist, I take it?’

  Brock laughs – throaty, deep, gruff.

  He looks at my hand, turns it over.

  ‘You don’t have painters callouses. Or paint under your nails. Are you a fraud, Buzz Kill?’

  ‘Afraid so. I’m a filmmaker. Painting is…stress relief.’

  I like how my hand feels in his. His examination of my skin is gentle, mostly done with his eyes. He traces lines with his left hand, which I notice does not have a wedding ring. His fingers find my wedding ring, a thin band of gold with a small diamond, and trace that too, then he lets my hand go.

  I notice his hands are deeply stained.

  ‘You’re no fraud, that’s for sure,’ I say. ‘Do you ever wonder what it’s like to be totally free? Not to be concerned with convention or social rules. Just to be.’

  ‘No, I don’t wonder. You’ve just described my life from the age of fourteen to about…oh, last year.’

  It makes sense now, the construction I saw as Brock talked to the group. He is creating himself, building himself up from the rubble of some kind of life.

  ‘What happened last year?’

  ‘I decided it was time to grow up.’

  ‘I’ve been grown up my whole life. Trust me, it’s too hard and it’s overrated,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, it is. I’m discovering that’s true.’

  ‘I could do with a little grown-down for a change,’ I say.

  ‘Grown-down? That’s a thing?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s what adults do when they are sick of rules and responsibility.’

  Brock leans forward and takes both my hands and this time I know we are approaching a line.

  ‘I like the sound of that. Feel like being grown-down with me?’

  Every sensation hits like I’ve been given a new body, one that’s never felt anything before, one that’s never been touched, never been hurt, and never been loved. None of this belongs to me. He flattens my fingers between his two hands so that there is no space between where we touch and where we don’t. He curls his fingers through mine. It is soft and careful.

  I shut my eyes and when I look again, Brock’s question still hangs between us, papering his eyes. There are only two possible answers. He takes my wrist, where I have a small tattoo of a hummingbird that reminds me of being free, and when he kisses it, he snaps the last part of me that’s holding onto the reigns of my life. I’d never noticed before how intimate the inside of a wrist could feel.

  Brock is untying me.

  From around the radiator in the next room we hear the others rise and chairs scrape as they say their goodnights and go to bed. It’s been a long day of hard work, where we have all been eager to achieve more than we would normally achieve in a week, keen to prove that we are serious about our work, that the people who are waiting for us back home did not sacrifice their time with us for nothing. We are exhausted with the effort of proving that we are more than the sum of the parts of our daily lives.

  We wait for the commotion next door to die down and skip our eyes across the room. My attention is on everything else.

  Finally there is silence from the other room and we are alone. I nervously reach for my tea cup. Words are beginning to congeal in my mouth and the spell is broken. He searches me for eye contact, which I avoid. He takes my hand, fiddles with my wedding ring, and says, ‘See you tomorrow, Buzz Kill,’ before walking out of the kitchen.

  In bed, I curl into the unfamiliar sheets and try to get comfortable on the too-soft pillow. Restless, I pick up the book that I brought, Tender is the Night. I read until Fitzgerald’s words swim on the page and my brain gets stuck on a sentence and won’t read any further: ‘I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight.’

  Somewhere inside of me will always be the person who loves a man she cannot have, who time and circumstance and fear, mostly fear, conspired against.

  BRUCE

  Lottery

  Wednesday: I put on my rain jacket and slip off my leather Florsheim work shoes in favour of my waterproof boots and drive to the newsagent.

  She greets me the same way each time. Hello Bruce. How’s the rain? How’s the sun? How’s the wind? We never have anything more to say to each other. It’s always the same girl. I feel her contempt, she acknowledges mine with her paperback smile. She takes my eight seventy-five, chucks it in the till and runs the machine. One of these d
ays it will spit something decent out. She hands me the ticket and I take it without smiling. I feel her eyes follow me, and it’s still raining, bugger it, and I step into a Goddamn puddle the second I walk through the door. I look back at the girl, still watching me and I scowl. ‘Fix this damn footpath!’ I yell to no one in particular.

  She looks back at her counter and starts straightening magazines.

  My rain jacket is slick when I get back to the car and sitting in my bucket seat makes it wet too. I just cleaned it last week. Another pointless task I’ll have to repeat for no decent reason.

  At home, I stick to my routine and attach the ticket to the fridge in exactly the same spot with the same Gold Coast magnet – the one with a sun-filled beach scene that my sister gave me when she came back from a holiday. Funny the way my brain works, because every time I stick that damn ticket up, on Wednesday and Saturday, I always wonder to myself if I should change my routine, because clearly, it’s not bringing me any luck. But I never do. I’m not superstitious. I know it’s all out of my control.

  I don’t cook dinner on Wednesdays. I eat toast and baked beans, imagining it’s my last meal in this life. I sprinkle grated cheese and cracked pepper over the beans to make it seem more interesting (sometimes I try barbecue flavour instead) and I sit in front of the TV waiting for the two-minute interval in some crappy show that will give me the magic numbers. A bottle of beer is waiting by my side, but I won’t crack it until I win. I change the bottle each year, to make sure it’s fresh. Can’t imagine anything worse than finally winning this bloody lottery and drinking stale beer to celebrate. If it was Saturday, I’d be sitting there with the real estate pages too, planning the mansion I would buy when I could finally afford to leave this shitty street.

  Of course I don’t win.

  At work the next day I know that if I’d won I wouldn’t be at this job that I hate, talking to people I can’t seem to get along with and feeling my blood pressure rise with each hour that passes.

  They tease me every Thursday morning.

  ‘Pity, Bruce. I’d hoped we wouldn’t see you in today.’

  Cheryl says this with a nasty edge and a false smile. I know she’s pretending to make a joke. I know what she really thinks, too.

  ‘Baz, maybe Saturday, hey mate?’

  I hate Darren for calling me Baz like I’m some sort of brickie out on the tools, but at least he’s not nasty.

  ‘Wonder who got it this time? Wonder what they’re gonna do with it?’ Darren says.

  ‘They’re not at work, that’s for bloody sure,’ I say, as I make my way to my cubicle.

  I turn on my computer and stare at the screen as the black zaps to Microsoft blue and then the icons pop pop pop like numbers dropping into an electronic barrel.

  Emails file into my inbox and Cheryl throws my mail onto my desk.

  I think about saying thank you to her and decide against it.

  Each email is a problem I have to fix. Me. No one else. And none of them are fixable. This is my job description: fix this, sort that, but don’t forget your hands are tied behind your back.

  Most nights I’m there ‘til eight or later; it’s only on Wednesdays that I go home on time, so that I can settle in for the draw. That means on Thursday mornings there is always an unusually high stack of problems to sort through.

  I pick through the emails, choosing the problems that have some small hope of being resolved and putting them aside. I look at the demands that will never be fixed and I reply to them. Sorry, read your contract. My hands are tied.

  I get up for coffee, returning the silent half smiles of my colleagues as we hover around the coffee machine like the twitchy addicts that we are. Finally, it’s my turn at the hissing machine and I take my drink back to my desk to think about the energy expended/outcome returned trade-off of trying to fix those problems that might not be fixable after all.

  When Saturday comes around I go to the newsagent again and have the same conversation I always have with the young girl. The Saturday girl is a little less obvious in her condescension than the Wednesday girl. She occasionally asks me how my day is going. ‘Don’t know yet,’ I always reply.

  Once I asked her a personal question. What do you do when you’re not working here? I saw the disgust cross her smooth-skinned face as she tried to decide whether I was about to ask her out. She realised I wasn’t – of course – and told me she studied. Economics.

  I never asked her a personal question again, although I always want to, just to see that awful expression cross her face and make her ugly for a moment.

  Today she seems to be in a good mood and she asks me about my day.

  I wave the ticket she’s just given me in the air and tell her she’ll know by next week.

  A thought shadows her eyes for a moment as she tries to decide whether to say what’s really on her mind.

  ‘You know if you saved the money you spent on tickets each Saturday you’d be better off. Because in ten years you still wouldn’t have won,’ she whispers.

  ‘And Wednesday,’ I say absently.

  ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this, you’re a customer after all. But you know…’

  I look at the ticket and know she’s right. I’m not stupid. I went to university too. I get paid well above the average. On paper, my life is good – it’s just that living it isn’t.

  I put the ticket in my pocket.

  ‘See you next week,’ I say, and walk out of the shop.

  I get to the footpath and change my mind. I turn around and walk back to her.

  ‘It’s hope,’ I say. ‘A small price to pay for a little bit of hope.’

  Maybe one day she will understand.

  HAL, GLADYS AND JENNIFER

  How’s Your Roof?

  I don’t bother to clean the window sills, although Evelyn always did. If anyone ever came here these days, it might be different. Visitors, I imagine, give you motivation.

  But now there’s a knock on the door and I have to make a decision: let them leave, or let them in. What if I open the door and see the recoil on his/her face when they see that I’m the worst kind of lonely?

  The knock comes again. I don’t have any friends anymore – dead, the lot of them, mostly in the war. I scan the room and realise it’s futile. There is nothing I can do to fix it up for guests. I smooth down the t-shirt I’m wearing over saggy grey tracksuit pants and slippers and open the door.

  The face smiles at me. He is well-dressed. Hair slicked back with some sort of gunk. His suit is clean and his tie is straight. He’s a hundred years younger than me and I can tell this is his first job. He has a freshness about him that will evaporate with time.

  ‘Hello, Sir. How are you today?’

  His voice is so bright it’s like tulips.

  There is one pimple on his left cheekbone. His only physical imperfection, and it’s temporary.

  I don’t answer him, I’ve forgotten the protocol.

  ‘Ah, well, I’m Rory. I see that your roof needs a bit of TLC, Sir.’

  I look around behind me searching the room for the mysterious Sir he’s referring to. Of course, he means me.

  ‘Name’s Hal, not Sir. Yes, yes it does. Would you like to come in?’

  ‘Thanks, Hal.’ He looks into the room behind me. Senses the shambles. ‘We can do this right here, Hal, no need to put yourself out.’

  My eyes narrow into cat-slits. What would Mitzy do now, if she were still here? Turn away in disdain or give him a warning blow, a slight scratch and a meow?

  ‘I need to sit. These old legs, you know.’

  I walk back towards the loungeroom and he follows.

  ‘Sit down, Rory. I’m sorry about the mess. I wasn’t expecting visitors.’

  I move a pile of papers to make space on the couch and see Rory hold his breath as a smell wafts in his direction.

  ‘Hal, I’m here as a representative of Sheridan’s Roofing, we are a local business, no gimmicks. I noticed that the capping on your
roof is cracked. And several tiles are also cracked. There is a disturbing slump in the middle of the south-facing pitch that might indicate structural problems. We have a special on at the moment. If you have your roof restored or replaced this month we will throw in a flat screen.’

  ‘A flat screen?’

  ‘A TV. Fifty inch screen! Digital, remote control. You wouldn’t have to leave your couch and you’d have access to all the free to air digital channels, right here in your own home. And no worries when it rains, you’ll be snug as a bug in here.’

  I have to admit he’s got me pegged: he’s sniffed out my loneliness, my desperation for company and my desire to never leave this house again. Maybe he’s not as green as I thought. Or maybe he got lucky with me – perhaps that’s his sales pitch at every house.

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Well, Hal, all I have to do is get your signature today – just to authorise us into your roof to get a quote, no obligation – and you’re on your way. Is next Tuesday okay for the boys to come along and measure up?’

  He holds out a single sheet of paper with the word ‘Agreement’ in bold on the top. I see some future in this. I can drag this out, maybe get ‘the boys’ here next week, and then the lad back again the week after to explain some misunderstanding with the terms and conditions, and then ask for the manager to come along to inspect a troublesome issue. The next thing you know, I’ve got People In My Life. Conversations to be had. No more looking out the window watching for the postie to pass me by. No more imaginary conversations with a cat that died fifteen years ago. No more looking at Evelyn’s urn on the mantle wishing and wishing that she hadn’t died too.

  I sign.

  ‘And if you make a successful referral,’ Rory says, ‘we can give you a discount too!’.

  He grins, his teeth as white as icebergs.

  The Support Group

  I pull my chair in tighter and lean over the Formica-covered table. My hearing hasn’t been any good since 1945. I squint at Jennifer, trying to follow the movement of her lips with my rheumy eyes, but those eyes haven’t been any good since 1998, and the lighting is bad in Gladys’ house.