She must gather herself before Chris and the girls arrive. She flicks the indicator, listens to its slow tick. There is no creature in the car. Be rational. That’s what Geoff would say.
The traffic light turns green, and she waits for a space between the oncoming cars to turn right.
But she has been rational. For years she has been on the watch, for both of them: bowel cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart attack, glaucoma, stroke. She has listened to the warnings, trimmed the fat. She goes to Barry Manning at the first signs of anything, makes Geoff go too, for a yearly check-up. They have done all the walking, the crosswords. Geoff set up the computer so he could load things up from the Internet. Archaeology things, Words of the Day. He printed them out on the buzzing little printer and left the papers about the house. They have done it all: Rotary, gardening, tennis twice a week, art appreciation, Life Writing that one time. And she has been their vigilant guardian: sunhats, sunscreen, hard green vegetables. Margaret feels tears of fury pricking at her eyes. She had been on at him, always: watch this, don’t eat so much of that. And he had narrowed his eyes and looked more intently over the rims of his glasses into the fuse box, intoning, ‘There is nothing to fear but fear itself,’ in a deep, mocking voice. And she would nod, sighing—she bored herself, even, with the ninnying nagging of her voice.
But she had been right.
She turns the corner into their street. She had been right to be fearful—only, it was of the wrong things. This is the insult, the outrage of it. It has got them by surprise, despite all the wretched, braying watchfulness. She sniffs her tears back, swallows. She noses the car into their driveway, automatically looking up to the windows to wonder if Geoff is home yet, before catching the thought and letting it pass.
She turns off the ignition, pulls on the handbrake, and sits very still, waiting, watching for movement from the corners of her eyes. But here in the car the creature too is still, and silent, and nowhere to be seen.
CHAPTER FOUR
THEY TRAVEL in the small blue hire car through the hot, dirty suburbs, then reach the motorway, climbing away from Sydney and out into the flat, dry country, towards Rundle.
Mandy stares through the passenger window at the sliding landscape while Chris drives. Cathy slouches in the back, drinking from a can of Coke through a straw, as if she is their teenage child.
At first Chris, and then Cathy, make effortful conversation, asking Mandy about her flight, about Baghdad, but when her answers only come in tight monosyllables they give up. Chris dips a hand into the console for a CD among the stack Cathy has brought. He fishes one out and passes it to Mandy. She presses the button for the disc to emerge, inserts the new one. She glances at Chris, deals him a brief, polite smile, then looks away again.
Once she reaches over and lets her hand rest stiffly for a moment on his thigh, but she doesn’t look at him while she does it. Now and then, from her bag on the floor, her mobile beeps with messages. Each time, she pulls it out, peers at the phone’s screen for a moment, and either texts quickly in reply, her thumb expert on the keypad, or simply presses one button and drops the phone back into her bag. She says nothing about any of the messages.
Chris reminds himself that the first awkward day is always the worst. Usually she sleeps through that day and into the next, when the strangeness can ease, when things between them can take on a slow and gradual restoration. But this time is different and, despite his protestations on the phone, he is now secretly relieved that Margaret convinced Cathy to wait so they could all travel together. He thinks of Margaret’s high voice on the telephone, her suppressed panic. He feels the tears coming to his eyes again at the thought of her managing the last few days alone. He bites his lip and accelerates along a straight piece of highway, watching the speed ometer needle rise.
‘Why did they not fly him to Sydney?’ Mandy asks once, staring out at the flat yellow paddocks stretching away on both sides.
Chris and Cathy both start to answer, then Cathy explains about Rundle’s lauded new hospital wing, the new high dependency and intensive care units. ‘The specialist reckons the care’s better anyway. Because they’re not so busy, and they consult with Westmead and Royal North Shore all the time anyway, blah blah blah.’
Mandy only mutters, under her breath, ‘Huh.’
She is exhausted, trying to stay awake to fight off the jet lag to come. But for much of the trip she falls into a thick, syrupy traveller’s sleep, her chin on her chest, or her head resting against the vibrating glass of the window. In the moments when she can haul herself awake, staring out at the dry flat land, she is visited by fragments of memory, old and recent, all slipping and merging in the wash of her tiredness and the landscape, so familiar but from so long ago. Faces and shreds from Baghdad in the days before she left—the militia commander’s balaclava and dusty jeans; the bored young faces of the US soldiers at the checkpoint; packing her suitcase, stuffing some market trinkets alongside the flak jacket and helmet, some mini DV tapes and the sat phone—all this rushes into a pool of other images from years ago, to do with these paddocks, this sky, with childhood. A drive to Sydney with her first boyfriend when she was seventeen, drinking rum and coke. A mushroom-coloured, brushed cotton blouse she had seen, at thirteen, in the window of Rundle’s one department store and wanted so desperately. The bloody spectacle of sheep mulesing at a school friend’s farm when she was twelve, and afterwards dancing to Australian Crawl tapes in the girl’s airless weatherboard bedroom. The dribble of boiling water from that farmhouse bathroom’s chip-heater. All these stray memories, unthought of for decades.
She brings her gaze back from the paddocks to the whizzing bitumen before them. Occasionally the dark lump of a dead animal emerges up ahead—wallaby, or wombat—like fleabitten cushions squashed there on the roadside.
They drive north-west for hours, stopping now and then at a square dark brick public toilet in some abandoned small-town park, and once at Wollaroi for petrol and something to eat. Whenever they near a town with mobile reception Cathy dials Stephen’s number once again. He still does not answer.
Now Mandy’s phone beeps again, and once more she picks it out of her bag. Graham, the cameraman, has lost his mobile and wants all her phone numbers. And also the news desk want to know when she’ll be back. Fuck.
‘Have Mum and Dad got email?’ she asks Cathy, twisting around in her seat.
‘Yeah,’ says Cathy, nonplussed. ‘Don’t you get their emails?’
‘Oh yeah,’ says Mandy. ‘Sometimes.’ She can’t remember the last time she read one. They remain, subject lines in bold, piling up in her inbox beneath all the others. Mandy turns back to the phone, texts Graham—on road. will email—and tosses the phone back down into the cave of her bag.
She lets her head fall back into the soft plush of the headrest. And, lulled by the rhythmic hum of the car, sinks instantly back into sleep.
She is roused, eventually, by the slowing of the car. She lifts her heavy head, blinking, licking her lips. They are at the outskirts of Rundle. Chris slows the car again at the red and white speed sign.
The sisters straighten in their seats as their old home town draws them in. They are both wide awake now, but silent, sliding along the highway in the sinking afternoon, past the familiar clumps of industrial buildings, the caravan park, the disused skating rink. The first service station of the town, the Caltex, looms on the left.
‘It’s on empty, may as well fill up now,’ says Chris, and steers into its driveway.
A dry wave of heat meets them as he opens the door and gets out, stretching. He walks around to fill the car, and as the pump noise begins, Mandy and Cathy watch the service station attendant who has appeared and begun cleaning the windscreen. She is a skinny, girlish-looking woman of about thirty-two with a tattoo—and, Mandy guesses, at least three teenage children. Her blonde ponytail is darkening with the years, her black jeans fading, and a sharp corner of the tattoo rises at her hip as she leans over the bonnet, reaching
across the windscreen with the squeegee.
‘That’s Tracey Tessler’s sister,’ Cathy murmurs from the back.
Mandy recalls the Tesslers, from the schoolyard, from Mass, from that gaunt station wagon full of children and cricket stumps and netball bibs. Chris has finished with the petrol. He opens the door and begins searching down the side of his seat for his wallet.
‘Pregnant in Year 9,’ Cathy says in a monotone.
Chris looks up, sees them both watching the attendant. ‘Wow,’ he says.
They all watch the woman’s body for a moment, moving back and forth across the windscreen. This is the shame of the country town, Mandy thinks; that people can watch your first mistake and predict the rest, and they can sit in their cars while you lean your body over their windscreens and they can see for themselves the line of your bra beneath the cheap fabric of the Caltex polo shirt, see the sweat at your armpits. The woman catches Mandy’s eye through the windscreen as she yanks the squeegee back and forth. Something—recognition?—passes across her face and then drains instantly away, water into sand.
Mandy looks over at Chris, still rummaging for his wallet. She says, ‘I’ll get it,’ and gets out of the car.
She arches her back in a stretch, and rolls her left, then right shoulder, following the young woman into the bright glass shop. Mandy pays with her credit card, watching the woman’s expressionless face as she slides the card through the machine and waits, fingers poised, for the receipt to emerge. Mandy takes it, signs the docket, and the woman slides the credit card back across the counter. Mandy walks out to the car—but halfway there she turns, marches back in through the automatic sliding glass doors.
The young woman’s head jerks up, and she looks suddenly alarmed, as if Mandy might have returned to say something to her, to challenge her.
‘A packet of Benson & Hedges Extra Mild please,’ says Mandy. And a relief, a till-now withheld energy, seems to flood the woman’s limbs. She leaps off her stool and flips the cigarettes onto the counter with one hand, the other expertly blipping the green numbers on the till. ‘Thanks,’ Mandy says, and without meeting the woman’s eyes, steps out again into the black concrete expanse and the smell of petrol. She is conscious, as she walks, of her clothes, of the sound her expensive shoes make as her heels strike the concrete. She sinks back into the cool, cushioned quiet of the car and seals herself in with the closing door.
‘Oooh good,’ says Cathy, seeing the cigarettes.
‘I thought you gave those things up,’ says Chris, turning the key in the ignition. Mandy shrugs. As the car moves off she sees the girl in the service station watching them leave.
I am not like her, Mandy tells herself as the car curves out onto the main street. But she feels the young woman watching from her little glass box.
THE OLD black dog, Leia, comes haring around the corner of the house as the car pulls into the driveway. She follows the car to the backyard and when the doors open, drops to the ground, scurrying low and sneaky, weaving in and out, waiting to be cursed.
The sun has disappeared below the trees at the end of the yard, the sky a pale, washed yellow.
‘Princess Leeeia,’ croons Cathy from the open back door, one bare foot planted on the ground and leaning out, low, to grab Leia by the collar as she passes. But the dog ducks and slinks around to the other side of the car, tail wagging.
‘Stupid as ever,’ Cathy sighs, and leans back along the seat to drag her bags out behind her.
Mandy looks up at the kitchen window, sees her mother waving with her whole arm, and then disappearing from view. Mandy stands on the driveway in the still, hot air, a confusion of childhood smells and sensations swelling up at her—the green acidity of broken geranium stalks, the metallic taste of concrete. The silty red dirt, the quiet of the streets, the rubber of bicycle tyres. All the long hours of all the flat, empty afternoons.
Leia pushes at her legs, and Mandy bends, stroking the old dog’s shiny head, murmuring, ‘You still here, old woman?’
Their mother appears at the top of the red concrete steps at the back door, calling out to them, hurrying down but holding all the time to the railing. She looks very small, in her neat khaki trousers, her blue cotton blouse tucked in at the elastic waist, bright white sneakers on her feet. They move quickly towards one another with their arms out, and Margaret says, ‘Oh,’ and at the same moment a rush of pressure seizes Mandy’s chest, forcing tears into her eyes.
‘Hi, Mum,’ she murmurs, and they stand wrapped together for a moment, Mandy’s chin over her mother’s shoulder, smelling her familiar, sweetish smell. They release each other.
The pain of not crying has gone now, swallowed. Mandy glances into her mother’s face and looks away again, but not before seeing that Margaret’s eyes are glassy with emotion. Margaret only sighs out a word—‘Well!’—before turning to Chris and Cathy.
Mandy drags her suitcase over the gravel with a grinding noise. Halfway up the steps she glances back across the roof of the car, where Chris is still holding her mother by the shoulders, though they are untangled from their hug now. They are murmuring together and looking into each other’s faces. Her mother has a child’s concentration as she listens to Chris, nodding and biting her lip and blinking slow, heavy blinks, as though his voice might now be the only thing keeping her from collapsing to the hot white gravel of the drive.
Cathy stands just beyond them, clutching a hat and a large black overnight bag, waiting for them to finish talking. As Mandy turns to step inside the back door it occurs to her that a stranger watching this scene might assume Cathy and Chris were the married ones, that Margaret was Chris’s own mother. In her slurred tiredness she lets the thought rise and sink away, then pulls her suitcase over the ridge of the low step and pushes inside, the screen door banging behind her.
Soon Cathy is hauling her bags down the hallway to her old bedroom. ‘Smells weird in here,’ she calls out. In Mandy’s own childhood room a new double bed sits squarely beneath the window.
‘When did that get put in here?’ Mandy says as Chris comes in.
Chris shrugs. ‘Ages ago.’
At the far side of the bed Mandy sits down heavily. With a foot she levers off one shoe, then the other, and lies on her back on the quilted nylon bedspread. She wonders what her mother has done with the old crocheted bedspreads from the two single beds that used to be in here, one parallel to the window, the other nearer the door. From either of those beds you used to be able to see the big lilac bush outside. But from its new position the only view is of the louvred sliding doors of the builtin wardrobe, slightly apart, showing the shelves of stuffed shopping bags and boxes of unused things Margaret keeps in here now.
Mandy draws up her knees, making a swishing sound on the bed cover. The telephone rings. They hear Margaret’s slow footsteps on the hallway carpet, and her nervous telephone-answering voice, same as it has always been, whispering into the gloom, ‘Hello?’
Chris turns and leaves the room, closing the door quietly behind him.
Mandy sits up, feeling her body sinking further into the springs, listening to the voices of her mother, then Cathy and Chris, in the hallway. Then there is a silence, and then she hears them further away, down in the living room. She is staring at the bedside table when beneath a saucer holding hairpins and a tube of hand cream she sees a red, sticky pool. Her heart bolts—once, twice—until she makes out the glistening splotch as a wide, beaded red bracelet. It must be Cathy’s, from an earlier visit. She reaches over and extracts it from beneath the saucer, winding it around her own wrist, concentrating on the tricky fastener. She holds up her arm to see it in the mirror across the room.
The deep bracelets of blood at the boy’s thighs, the nonsensical arrangement of trouser legs and torn sandals in the dust, and her own heartbeat, whoomp whoomp whoomp as she ran with her arms hugging her head.
Cathy told her that on the first night when their mother got home from the hospital she had stood hosing their fat
her’s blood into the ground beneath the gravel.
The bedroom door clicks open and Chris comes in, stepping across the thick carpet. He sits down on the other side of the bed. He looks, puzzled, at her garlanded wrist for a second, but says nothing about it.
‘Are you ready to go to the hospital?’
CHAPTER FIVE
TONY WARREN drives along the rutted track from the gate to his house in the sinking evening. It’s a long time since a grader has been through, and he has to drive slowly, shouldering the ute up and over the road’s ridges, lowering into and then easing up from the dips.
He stops in front of the shed and gets out, listening to the ticking of the car’s engine and the dogs’ barking. The fibro house is a grey hulk in the gloom. He feeds the dogs, tipping the yellowed pellets into the wide metal bowls as the kelpie lurches, gasping, on her chain. Her feet scrabble on the scraped earth, she makes a high grizzling whine. The collie stands stiff-legged, shoulders erect, as Tony shakes the food out. As soon as he moves off the dogs dive to their bowls, snouts turned sideways, long wet tongues flapping in and out.
Tony goes inside, switches on the kitchen light and waits for the fluorescent hum and the delayed flicker—on, off, on. In the living room he turns on the television. There is a game show, people grinning and blinking in the studio lights. He walks up the dark hallway, past his mother’s dark, long-empty room, to get changed.
Later, in tracksuit pants and socks, his blue t-shirt hanging out, he sits with his legs stretched along the couch. The dinner plate with its sheen of butter, the three prongs of chop bones, lies on the floor. As he snaps open a can of beer and pours it into a glass he keeps his gaze on the television. Another car bomb has exploded.
The Children Page 3