Stephen turns to face her, and he looks as though he would like to hit her with a brick. He turns back to Geoff’s hand, examining it. But his foot begins to jiggle, there at the bedside, and he says in a low voice: ‘I’m not doing it for him.’
They drive back to the house in silence, along the wide, bright main street, past the optometrist and White’s Jeweller, past RLK Enterprises and Sloane’s Footwear with its racks of work boots and dark court shoes, past shady Jubilee Park with its struggling Bicentennial Heritage Rose Garden, past the Retravision and Eagle Boys Pizza and the Aboriginal Housing office, the Bi-Lo supermarket and Target, past Tooheys Newsagent and Abbott’s Amcal chemist. The streets lined with pale Falcons and Commodores and white tray-top utes, all neatly angled with their rears to the kerb.
At the top of Monarch Street they turn right into Fitzroy, pass the fire station. DON’T BE A BUNNY. They turn into Aurora Street, pass the low brick houses with their brick fences, their little squares of dusty grass, their cement-strip driveways.
They arrive at their childhood home, still not speaking, and Leia lollops up to the car from behind the house.
AFTER LUNCH Chris shifts about in the kitchen, opening cupboards, the fridge, and calls things out to Mandy to write on a list.
‘Coffee,’ he says. He picks up a bottle of oil and tips it from side to side, the inch of gold glazing the glass. He puts it back on the shelf. ‘Olive oil.’
Mandy looks down at the list. They have argued mildly about the need for more shopping; Chris is obsessed with groceries. There must be fifteen new things on the notepad now.
The ABC news mutters from the clock radio on top of the fridge. A young woman in a Bali jail will today find out if she’s to spend another twenty years behind bars. Mandy thinks of the television shots she’s seen since coming back to Australia: the girl’s expressionless, sweaty face; her slightly bulbous eyes, always staring out, blank, from behind the bars of that dirty tiled cell.
Nobody has asked Mandy how long she is staying. But here, alone in the kitchen with Chris, the weight of this unasked question presses the air from the room, and she knows his every addition to the shopping list is an attempt to anchor her here. She has not yet rung the news desk back, though they have left three messages on her mobile, and her phone beeps constantly with text messages from other reporters, from Graham, from her translator Jassim.
‘The Prime Minister has labelled a Greens senator’s t-shirt offensive,’ says the modulated ABC voice. ‘GET YOUR ROSARIES OFF MY OVARIES, the t-shirt slogan read.’
Mandy looks out of the window and suddenly wants, more than anything, to leave. To walk out of the back door, down the stairs, to get into the hire car and drive away from this house, this street, this town. She feels a wash of loathing for Rundle, for the whole country, with its caged refugees, its despair-bludgeoned Aborigines. Its cunning, passionless prime minister.
‘Mr Howard said the t-shirt was deeply offensive to Catholics and called it an undergraduate stunt.’
‘Fuckwit,’ Mandy hisses at the radio.
But even as she says this she knows it isn’t the prime minister causing this sourness, this loathing sweeping through her. It is closer, more basic—Chris’s hurt, her mother’s need, the ugly windowless hospital and its strange, horrible wardsman. This creeping dread. Chris has his head deep in the pantry now and does not appear to notice when she puts down the notepad and creeps out of the kitchen and up the carpeted hallway to the bedroom.
She closes the door and lies down on the soft bed. She thinks of Tony staring at her father’s head wound, but as soon as this image comes she slides it shut. In its place the boy comes to her again, his smooth glossy black hair cut close over his head. She imagines the feel of it under her fingers. If she had touched him.
When she wakes a while later she can tell from the hollow silence that the house is empty. Chris has gone to the shops, she supposes. The others are out, at the hospital, the supermarket, somewhere in the bright town.
On the white net curtain and the closed venetian blind are sharp shadows of the moving leaves of the lilac bush. She has been asleep long enough for the sun to move to this side of the house. A breeze carries occasional noises from the street, and she lies on the bedclothes and listens to the world outside. A car accelerates in a distant street. Boys, she thinks. An air-conditioner rattles somewhere. After a while two women—their heels clopping on the cement footpath—stop and admire the lavender down by the fence. ‘Simple planting,’ one of them says. ‘But striking.’ The other woman murmurs in boredom or assent. There are birds, their rhythmic chueek like the creak of a turning Hills Hoist. There is the trudge of a fast walker and then a slamming, heavy car door nearby. A few loose piano notes, unconnected, come from somewhere far off.
In lying here she feels some familiar, hollow staleness she does not understand. And then she realises that what comes to her through the open window is the crippling boredom of every weekend afternoon of her adolescence. The aimless trudging she would do through the empty town, sometimes with a school friend but more often alone. She would walk along Aurora Street, then slowly across town to the disused railway tracks, or the dusty dry grass of the oval when the netball and cricket and football games were finished; or she would wander up along the track through the bush reserve, smelling all the hot emptiness of her existence.
She supposes it could not have been like that, so lonely through all her growing up. She knows she had friends—she remembers their names, their houses, the smell of their bedrooms—but beneath each image is the feeling she always had through those years, of having to keep silent, to bite down upon her instinct for saying what she thought, lest she hurt someone’s feelings, or, more usually, be met simply with a blank stare of incomprehension.
She spent most of her teenage years staring out of windows, it seems to her now. Sitting jammed beside Cathy and Stephen in the back seat of the car on the way to Mass, or the rubbish tip, or the river, she would bring her focus to the spinning pink gravel of the roadside, making her eyes blur with its speed, and imagine flinging open the door and hurling herself out. She would count it out—one, two—with her hand on the door latch, enjoying the skimming pace of her pulse, feeling at last as if something might happen.
On her first trip to Sarajevo, as a field producer, she recognised that feeling. As she hurried with the reporter and the sound recordist across the stone bridge and someone told her where they were, she felt that same whizzing in her pulse again. At the end of the bridge she stopped for a second—it was dangerous to do but she couldn’t help herself—and put out her hand to touch the stone of the place where Franz Ferdinand was shot, and she thought, I am standing at the centre of history. And then she ran on, feeling her feet strike the hard street, the air cold on her skin. That night, as she lay in the dark listening to the crack of gunfire coming from the hills, the same words thrilled in her head, her blood. She was standing at the centre of history, and for the first time in her life to say out loud what she was seeing was not only allowed, but was her duty. Important things—lives even, perhaps—depended on her very willingness not just to observe, but to say what she had seen. In the years since, every time her courage has begun to fail, every time she loses her way, she says inside her head those words that have been large enough through history to bring down governments, to save lives, to give voice to those who no longer have their own. I am a witness. I am telling you what I have seen.
From outside in the street there is the throaty rumble of a car engine starting, then falling silent. It starts again, then stops. When it begins again it’s the constipated yerr-yerr-yerr of a motor that won’t start. Silence, then the straining, impotent motor again. Mandy sits up on the bed and turns to kneel at the window, making an aperture in the venetian blind with two fingers. Just beyond the fence a large orange Torana is parked, rear to the kerb. A girl’s forearm and hand extend from the driver’s window, and in the hand is a cigarette, trailing wisps of smoke. Th
e hand moves back inside, arm hinged at the elbow, and then out again. Eventually, on the downward arc the girl lets her cigarette fall to the ground. She tries the motor again. Nothing has changed: the motor’s yerr-yerring begins again, but through the rear window Mandy can see the girl clinging with both hands to the steering wheel, jolting in her seat, as if to force the car into motion with the thrust of her own hips. The motor is quiet again, and Mandy hears a muffled ‘fuck’.
She knows she should get off the bed, go out and offer to help the girl. But the idea fills her with exhaustion. The car door opens and the girl unfolds herself into the street. She leans her long body against the car and pulls a hot-pink mobile telephone from her pocket. Mandy lets the blind slats snap back into place, and slides to lie down again.
She thinks of Stephen and the kites. Her stomach tightens. She does not know why she has been so disturbed by it, but the leaden feeling in her gut remains. The kites were her thing, and Geoff’s. Even as she thinks this she knows how ridiculous it is, how childish. But she feels like a child here in her parents’ house, bickering with her siblings, thirteen again. Flat-chested, big-nosed and sallow-skinned. In this wallpapered room she had lain on the bed and howled at the injustice of her looks: her limp, badly cut hair; the nose, long and bulbous like a man’s, obscene in her narrow face. Once Geoff had come into the room and sat on the bed, listening to her hacking sobs. She had told him to go away, she didn’t want to talk to him. But he stayed, and this intrusion enraged her more, and she screamed into her pillow that she was ugly, that was the matter. Her nose. Her father had sat in silence, absorbing her rage and self-pity.
Then he’d said, did she know that Caesar would only choose large-nosed men to keep about him?
He sounded pleased.
Mandy’s sobs stopped, from shock, and from the drawing up of energy required to explode. Her father mistook the stunned instant for comfort, and he added with the relish of certainty, ‘Caesar thought big-nosed men were noble, and honest.’
He had not known what to do then, when Mandy lurched upright, convulsing with fury. She was a thirteen-year-old GIRL, she had shrieked into his face, in Rundle! Nobody bloody cares about fucking CAESAR!
He had sat in his own shock then, watching his howling daughter, and then he nodded sadly, sighed, and left the room.
Here in the same room now Mandy lies face down on the bed. She sniffs in amusement at the memory. And then her breath catches and she cannot stop herself from starting to cry, for her father, her beautiful father, too noble, too honest to call her ‘princess’ and tell her she was pretty.
CHRIS DOES hear Mandy walk up the hallway to the bedroom and shut the door. He goes and sits at the kitchen table with the notepad, looks at the list written in Mandy’s hand; the upright capitals, the emphatic lines of her pen. On the flipped-up previous page, Margaret has written a name and a telephone number in her soft, looping cursive. There is nothing similar about their handwriting, at all.
When Chris first met Mandy, her directness had unnerved him. He was used to girls who sulked, or who cried softly in bed with their backs to him rather than say what was wrong. Mandy was not like these other university girls whose every move, every expression was designed for effect. Those girls wore op-shop clothes studiously collected and paraded, but Mandy wore oversized t-shirts and one outdated style of jeans, oblivious of fashion. The obliviousness made her sexy. And her unchecked opinions were rare at university, where to Chris it seemed everyone—including him—made a furtive calibration towards irony before they spoke. To laugh too loudly, or to stomp across the library lawn with your head down; to argue using your own reasoning without defaulting to the student’s worn grid of left-wing opinions, was to expose yourself utterly. To Chris, the fact that Mandy didn’t know any of this made her more exciting still.
When she said she didn’t know who The Smiths were he was incredulous. This was at a party early in second year, when Chris had never travelled west of the Blue Mountains. He reddens now, when he thinks he’d boasted to her of that.
‘Morrissey,’ he’d said, taking the cigarette from his mouth and blowing a long stream of smoke. ‘The Smiths.’ But Mandy had just looked blank and unconcerned. ‘Sorry,’ she’d said, and exhaled her own smoke to the ceiling.
Chris liked to call her a country girl after that, and he liked to drive with her out to Rundle in the holidays. He’d found the town romantic in a way Mandy just scoffed at. He’d even talked about moving out here when they finished uni. Once he’d said it in the car with her parents, as they drove along Monarch Street and the trees were yellowing. ‘It’s quite beautiful here really,’ he’d said. ‘I could live here.’ And he didn’t look at Mandy but watched the back of her father’s head. Marg had made excited, approving noises but Geoff had stared only at the road.
Still at university, Chris and Mandy made a good couple. He softened her, nudging her at parties when she was in danger of offending someone. She would turn back to the person in shock, her face completely erased of its previous scorn, and apologise with genuine warmth. And Mandy made Chris tougher, braver. He learned to trust his own opinions, to voice them without embarrassment. He learned to shout when they argued, without quaking for hours afterwards. She taught him to stand up for himself. Once, during a fight of glittering ferocity, when Mandy’s yelling had suddenly swerved into tearfulness, Chris had begun to clap.
When he occasionally remembers that moment—his slow, bitter applause, the thrill at his own callousness—he loses his breath. He cannot imagine them ever having such majestic fights again. Now their disagreements are stiff, low-toned, polite.
Their decision to marry was a shout of defiance in their circle of arts student friends. Their parents—especially Geoff and Chris’s own mother—agreed that they were too young, but stood smiling tightly in the wedding photographs all the same.
Chris tears the page from the notepad and folds it. He goes to the window and looks out to see Cathy unpegging clothes from the line, Margaret folding them into a basket. Their voices murmur but he can’t hear what they are saying.
He leans on the sink, watching his mother and sister-in-law, and it hits him, as it has sometimes over the years, that the kind of love he has for them is not normal. Other people complain about their spouses’ families; they roll their eyes and talk about Christmas as an ordeal to be survived. But Chris knows he feels more for the Connollys than for his own family, who seem held together more by his mother’s nervy energy than any real emotion. His mother Jeanette has a quick, anxious line of questioning, and her children’s achievements are too quickly reported to her friends. She is often to be heard on the telephone, exaggerating any mild success—Chris’s firm winning a routine contract, or a kindergarten award for his sister Fiona’s daughter—into a sort of triumph of her family over someone else’s. And with repeated calls to other friends on the same subject, the stories grow longer, more smug. Her body is wiry from her morning power walks, and whenever Chris sees her she hugs him too hard and too often. She’s forever organising some public family event—it used to be elaborate twenty-firsts, then weddings, and now it is Fiona’s kids’ christenings or birthday parties—designed to prove, it seems to Chris, how overwhelmingly loving the whole family is. And both she and his father speak of any ordinary human failing that might occur among their friends’ children—divorce, treatment for depression—with a terrible, reverent sympathy. Despite their watchfulness, it seems never to occur to them that their own children might at any time be struck by such disasters.
Compared to his own parents then, Margaret and Geoff have always seemed to Chris to be marvellously negligent, too busy with their own pottering lives to notice what their children are doing. He knows this isn’t true. But there are no weekly, hurt-sounding phone calls to any of their offspring, and they have none of his own parents’ habit of interrogation for snippets with which to impress their friends. In fact, the more successful Mandy has become as a reporter, the more baffled her
parents have seemed. Chris has thought sometimes that perhaps he should be offended on Mandy’s behalf—that Margaret accepts news of her awards or promotions or other glories with a surprised, ‘Oh!’ and does not rush to the phone breathlessly to tell her friends. Geoff is harder to read, but he too has seemed to suspect that taking pride in his children would be a sort of personal conceit.
Marg and Geoff have always seemed to accept Chris’s comings and goings at their home without surprise, without fanfare. One weekend years ago, after a slow and lonely week at Rose Bay, he even went to visit them alone, without even Cathy. They tootled about Rundle together, going to the orchard for apples, building a new compost bin, and somehow they seemed unembarrassed at the strangeness of this visit. Cathy—even Stephen, in the rare times they’ve shared a weekend or a Christmas—operates in this same benign way, seeming to accept him as part of the scenery, warmly enough but without remark. It feels to him miraculous and lucky.
And as he stares at Marg and Cathy now through the kitchen window, bent over their sheets and pillow-slips in a plastic basket, Chris knows, as plain as the faded floral laundry, that he loves them.
He turns back to the table, reaching for his keys, and he wonders if he has any love left for his wife.
Mostly he manages not to wonder this. When he senses the question looming in his mind he simply turns away from it. It has been easy enough, with the years of her absence. And whatever it is that has happened in their marriage happened so long ago, and in a manner so slow and undefined, that he has never been forced to articulate it to himself, let alone bring it into the light with Mandy.
It is a politeness concealing something harder and colder. Encased, is the word that comes to him now, staring at the folded shopping list in his hand. He used to think that something other than himself would make Mandy come home, would revive things—he used to think that they would have a baby—but now it is as though deep inside this marriage is a coffin, the lid forever nailed.
The Children Page 12