At Chris and Mandy’s, Chris had the little courtyard garden done by an expensive landscape designer from a television show. The sisters have joked to each other in whispers about the naff paving, the mondo grass and clipped little evergreens that are supposed to be natives.
‘Holy shit, a water feature!’ Cathy had yelled out the first time she saw it, clutching a champagne glass to her stomach and flicking cigarette ash towards the pool, into which a stone lion’s pursed lips drooled water. The pool was filled with tiny green round leaves; it was cool, and the sound of it secretly pleased her. She put her hand into the water and then took it out, a stippled green glove of tiny leaves.
Cathy still loves going to their house, with its thick carpets and glossy floorboards, its acres of bench space, the white, white bathrooms and the water views. Whenever Chris travels to meet Mandy somewhere, Cathy stays at their place alone, catching the bus from the pharmacy across the city after work, not minding the trip because as soon as she arrives she can thump up the stairs to run a bath, then pour a big glass of gin and sink deep into the water.
Sometimes she stays on for a day or two when Chris comes home from the extravagant week-long trips to meet Mandy at some luxury hotel—in Sri Lanka, or Petra in Jordan, or Istanbul or Dubai—and the two of them watch DVDs, or sit on the balcony together watching the boats in the falling evening, not speaking much.
Chris is always quiet when he comes back from seeing Mandy.
Once Cathy said to him, ‘Doesn’t it ever piss you off, her being away all the time?’ She had her feet up on the railing, rocking gently back and forth on her chair. The boats tinkled below.
Chris stared out at the water. ‘Course it does.’
Cathy had been surprised. ‘Oh. I thought you must be all right about it.’ They had sat in silence. ‘So,’ Cathy said eventually, ‘you should tell her that.’ And then Chris had turned to face her in the dark and said in a tight, bitter voice: ‘What makes you think I haven’t?’
Later that evening Cathy flipped through the photos of him and Mandy smiling out from the lobbies of grand hotels, the tables at fancy restaurants, and then she patted Chris on the shoulder and left him to his lonely view, padding up the hallway to the wide, soft bed in the spare room.
A wardsman is walking from bed to bed, emptying the white garbage bags from their stainless-steel frames next to each bed. The bags are almost empty, Cathy can tell from the way they puff with air as he swings them.
Jim Galvin is back from lunch. He calls out, ‘Tony, the cleaner is supposed to do that.’
Tony calls back, ‘Doesn’t matter, I don’t mind.’
Then Jim Galvin drops his head, directing a mischievous look at the other nurse, a dark-haired young woman sitting at the long desk with a telephone receiver hunched in the crook of her neck, clicking the end of a pen over and over while she waits for someone to answer. Jim winks at her as he calls out to Tony, ‘Well, if you want to do it—just don’t let Gordon Bright see you.’
At the mention of this name Tony wheels around, and points a finger at Jim Galvin. The woman ducks her head beneath the ledge above the desk, laughing silently.
‘I’ve told him, and I’ve told you,’ Tony says, angrily, ‘I don’t believe in unions and Gordon can’t bloody make me join.’
‘Okay,’ Jim Galvin says, nodding with mock sincerity, while the other nurse snickers, still out of sight, and Tony bends to the next bin.
The ward is filling up. This afternoon, two beds from Geoff, a man aged about sixty sits in his white gown and pyjama pants in the plastic chair next to his bed, a nebuliser mask strapped to his face. He looks exhausted. His chest rises and falls once—quickly, shallowly—and then he slumps motionless for a few long seconds before the next breath. Cathy can see his tired eyes following Tony’s progression along the beds, and how he purposely drops his gaze to his lap as the wardsman approaches.
When Tony reaches the far side of the man’s bed he takes his time, unrolling a new bin liner, leaning to try to catch the man’s gaze. But the man has closed his eyes now. Tony stands waiting, slowly punching the billowing plastic bag into submission. Then he walks around the end of the bed and stands over the man.
‘You’re a better colour today, mate,’ he calls to him through the hiss of the vapour and the nebuliser’s low drone. The man opens his eyes and nods wearily. He breathes, the little rise and fall. Tony leans to see the man’s name on the card above his bed. ‘David Levak,’ he reads loudly.
The man’s gaze curves upwards, then he slowly blinks and moves his head in a tiny nod. The machine drones.
‘Dave Levak. Hugo’s brother!’ Tony crows. ‘Hugo the Yugo!’ The man nods once again, exhausted.
The dark-haired nurse calls out from the desk, ‘Better just leave him, Tony; he’s just got to be quiet there.’
Tony does not acknowledge the nurse’s voice, but after a moment puts up a hand before him, as if to stop the man from speaking. ‘You just relax, mate, okay? That thing’ll fix you up.’
The man closes his eyes again. Tony moves on then, looking up and grinning as he approaches Geoff’s bed. But when he sees Cathy sitting there his smile drops off, and he looks down at the floor and walks on, swishing his fat bouquet of white plastic along the ground.
LATE IN the afternoon Mandy and Cathy walk along the corridor of the new wing of the hospital, and out into the car park. Chris has come and then gone again, dropping Margaret at home on the way, then driving off to shop for a few dinner things he couldn’t find in the supermarket.
While Cathy rummages in her bag for the keys to the hire car, Mandy looks back at the new intensive care unit. Its clean bright bricks, its aqua awnings and guttering are a shock beside the shadeless, faded yellow fibro panels and grubby brickwork of the old part of the hospital. But the new unit, too, is blocky, virtually windowless and unadorned. As with the rest of the Rundle Hospital building and the treeless car park and strips of concrete pathway, it is as if any more generous aesthetic, any concession towards human comfort or beauty, might be unhealthy.
Cathy follows Mandy’s gaze. ‘Bloody ugly, isn’t it?’ she says cheerfully, and then ducks, nimble as a child, into the car.
Mandy is buckling her seatbelt when she sees the wardsman emerge from the entrance and walk along the footpath. He moves slowly, as though without aim, his hands deep in the pockets of his overalls. Unaware he’s being watched, all the needy eagerness of his expression from this morning has gone. He walks with his head down, frowning out from beneath the shelf of his brow. His thick, bluntly cut dark brown hair in a straight fringe across his forehead. Mandy can see that beneath the looseness of his overalls he has narrow, teenager’s hips, no bum, a slight torso. His hands-in-pockets stance gives him a leaning profile as he walks, moving off to a red ute several car-lengths away from theirs, finally taking a hand from his pocket; silver keys flash, dangling, from his fist. Mandy watches him unlock the ute’s door and drop into the driver’s seat.
You don’t remember me, do ya. As she watches him Mandy thinks hard, casting back through the years—to school, sport, then her time after leaving school, on the local paper. The hot afternoon sun on the venetian blinds in the newspaper office. Other images flit. A dead, rotting bird she saw wedged between some rocks at the creek, the day she left for university. The endless Lions Club giant-cheque presentations, a Hoof and Hook prizegiving where she stood with her camera, freezing among the waxy hanging carcasses in the abattoir. Maybe that was it. Perhaps he was one of the grinning men in white gumboots and puffy shower-caps, sloshing noisily through the bloody water on the cement floor.
‘D’you know that guy?’ she asks Cathy.
Cathy glances over her shoulder, then bends forward to the ignition. ‘He’s the wardsguy. I think his name’s Tony.’
‘Yeah, but do you remember him from when we were kids, or after you left school, or whatever?’
The motor of the red ute chiggers into life. On the rear window is a sticker,
white letters on black. AUSTRALIA: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT. But though the engine has started, Tony sits for a moment staring ahead, expressionless, his hands limp over the steering wheel. Something stirs in Mandy’s mind, then is still. She doesn’t know him.
Cathy backs the car out of the parking space, twisting to see over her shoulder, her left hand on the back of Mandy’s seat. She changes gear and the car moves forward, slowing down as they drive closer to the ute. She squints to look at Tony’s face.
‘Dunno,’ she says. ‘School, maybe?’
At this moment he turns his head and sees them. His eyebrows shoot up and instantly the needy grin spreads across his face. His hand jerks in a wave as they pass.
‘I don’t know either,’ Mandy says. ‘He’s sort of creepy, though.’
Cathy shoots her sister a sly look for a second, but says nothing, only flips down the sun visor and accelerates out of the car park onto the highway. Mandy folds her arms, saying nothing more, and stares out of the side window.
Cathy can still be amused by Mandy’s dark instincts, her pride. She bites the inside of her cheek as she turns into the main street, considering this endlessly intriguing matter. Through the years Stephen has always been ready to explode into exasperation at the first glimmer of righteousness from Mandy, but Cathy has always simply found it curious.
Mandy has always had a gift for disagreeableness. It’s as though without some constant irritation, some stone in her shoe, she is not properly herself. As though she enjoys—but how could she?—the hardening of other people’s smiles in her presence; their gritting teeth as she begins her inevitable argument, when all they’d said was that they liked some movie or hated George Bush. Cathy can still feel a pang for Mandy in these situations, at the same time marvelling at this missing aspect of her sister’s perception. Because the truth, Cathy knows, is that Mandy does not enjoy it; she simply cannot help herself. And although by now, in her forties, she seems resigned to being the killjoy, the puncturer of other people’s blithe, ignorant pleasure, Cathy can still see in her eyes the bewilderment at their cooling expressions while she corrects their understanding of US foreign policy or begins to lecture on the political undertones in a crappy Chinese martial arts film. Her rigid inability to let things slide; her poignant, stubborn pride.
Once when they were girls sharing a bedroom, Mandy, in a fit of fury, threw a glass tankard at Cathy and hit her square on the cheekbone. And although the glass, solid as lead, did not break but only bounced softly into the bedclothes, at the instant it struck her both girls knew Cathy had won. Her eye swelled beautifully, fungal and purple, and stayed that way for a week.
The monstrosity of Mandy’s crime was repeated among Cathy’s friends with awe (Glass! She could have been blinded!) and Cathy almost felt sorry for her sister, but pushed away the feeling whenever it threatened to pall her victory, instead imagining with a thrill the shattering glass, the brave rush to hospital, the life-threatening surgery.
But at school—with her blackened face in full public view—the telling of the tale flew from Cathy’s control. Some kids she simply told to mind their own business, and others received a shortened, toned-down version. She maintained, within her circle of particular friends, the elaborate version of the incident, complete with the frisson of the various heightening factors (the fact of the nearby window, for example; or that the glass was hurled from the top bunk). But without the luxury of that judicious selection, Cathy’s pleasure in her injury evaporated. The eye hurt if she bumped her head, and the whole area of her face throbbed with an insistent ache. And then she did feel sorry for Mandy, clumping glumly past her in the corridors, her eyes fixed on the floor while older boys stopped Cathy to examine her hideous face.
It was when Mandy’s favourite teacher leaned down to Cathy during assembly on the second day and whispered, ‘What happened?’ that she did not pause, but replied coolly that she had slipped over at home and landed on one of her brother’s metal Matchbox cars. The teacher looked doubtful, but flinched in sympathy anyway at the idea of the vicious lump of metal.
Cathy did not tell anyone, not even Mandy, that she had lied on her behalf. She was simply miserable, and prayed for the bruise to fade. The crunch came when the family was squeezed inside the station wagon after Mass, and a neighbour put her head in the window to talk to Dad. Catching sight of Cathy in the back, the neighbour was aghast.
‘Oh my God, Cathy! What happened to you?’
The car went quiet, and each member of the family turned to look at Cathy. The moment stretched. A flush began at Mandy’s throat as she sat on the other side of Stephen, awaiting the shame of exposure, her legs jammed together and her fists two clubs on her knees. Cathy cleared her throat and looked the neighbour in the eye.
‘I fell,’ she said. ‘And hit my eye on one of Stephen’s Matchbox cars which was on the floor. In the living room, next to the heater.’
Stephen’s eyes were enormous. Mandy stared too, her face bright with shame and astonishment. Their parents sat twisted in their seats, stunned.
Then the moment cracked open. ‘Oh Cathy,’ their mother said kindly. And she could not be stopped from saying, ‘You don’t have to lie, honey,’ and turning back to the neighbour and murmuring sibling spat. The neighbour saw Mandy’s and Cathy’s faces and said Ah, in a gratified way.
Nothing more was said in the car on the way home. Mandy—who could not be spared, and so was shamed even more by Cathy’s attempted rescue—simply bit her lip, folded her arms and glared out of the window.
Exactly, Cathy thinks as she waits for an oncoming car to pass along the main road, as Mandy is doing now.
LATE IN the afternoon Tony sees the mother’s white Corolla in the street—he knows the number plate, the cracked tail light. Only an hour ago he saw Mandy in a different car, with the sister, yet still his heartbeat skimmers as he follows the Corolla for a few blocks, up past the chemist in the main street, left into Slough Street. She could easily have had time to go home, then discover some reason to head out again.
The Corolla slows, then reverses into a parking spot opposite the library.
Tony slows the ute and then he parks too, easing backwards into the gutter half a block from the Corolla, watching all the time. Thinking what he will say to her about the thing that happened way back, binding them. Witnessing, maybe he will say. It is a good word. Full of power, full of what nobody else can understand.
But when the door opens it’s the husband that gets out. Tony’s pulse goes sludgy. He stays put, watching the husband fussing with keys, with pockets. Tall, scrawny, with a neat, clipped little poofter’s beard. Homosexual’s beard, he corrects. Women like her, he has realised, love blokes that look like homosexuals. He learned this a long time ago but the fact of it still mystifies him.
Tony had a beard himself once, but he shaved it off. His was thick and bushy, not shaped or clipped like that. People called him Ned Kelly. They gave him the shits, so he shaved it off.
The husband has gone into the corner shop. Tony waits. Then he gets out of the ute and lets the door slam, walks to the shop’s cool doorway. The husband is at the counter already. Tony passes within inches of him. He’s smiling a lot at the checkout girl, calling her by the name he must’ve read off her tag. ‘Hi, Jordan,’ he’s saying, all friendly and appreciative.
Tony waits in line behind a kid in a baseball cap, watching the husband gathering together his little bags of lettuce and lemons on the counter. The husband is asking the checkout girl if she’s got any coriander, smiling at her.
Tony folds his arms, sees that the kid in front of him has his folded too. The checkout girl looks at the husband for a bit, and then says, firmly, ‘No, we haven’t.’ But you can tell she doesn’t know what coriander is. Tony clears his throat.
‘Fruit Barn, mate. Wesley Street.’
The husband jerks around, surprised. Then he smiles at Tony in recognition, a big broad smile. ‘Oh hi. Thanks. I’ll try that.’ Then he hesitate
s a second while he gathers up the bags, shifting sideways to let the kid move to the counter.
Tony says, gesturing toward the street, ‘Straight down there, right, then left. Closes five-thirty.’
The husband is all grateful, clutching his plastic bags in his skinny fingers, nodding at Tony. ‘Much appreciated, thanks. See you soon,’ he says in his girly way, crinkling up his face in another smile. He goes out through the open door into the street.
‘Longbeach twennyfives,’ the kid mumbles at the check out girl. As she reaches up to the smokes rack she and the kid and Tony all watch through the door the husband flapping at the car with his plastic bags, putting them on the roof, fiddling in his pockets for keys again. The girl tosses the packet of cigarettes on the counter, and she and the kid smirk at each other then, about the useless knob out there in the street.
Tony says, ‘He’s all right.’
The girl and the boy glance at Tony in silence. She takes the boy’s money, and then as she gives him his change they flick a knowing look at each other. The kid grunts his thanks, stepping aside as he puts his cigarettes in his pocket and folds up his wallet.
The girl is staring at Tony in a bored way.
‘Packet of Dunhill Blue thanks,’ says Tony. She reaches above her head again, fingers trailing along the rack, and tilts out a packet.
‘He’s Mandy Connolly’s husband,’ Tony says, looking out again at the husband, who is finally folding himself inside the Corolla’s open door.
The boy and girl just stare at him again, blank-faced.
‘On television? War reporter?’ Tony says, gruffly now.
They keep staring.
The Children Page 7