The Children

by The Children (retail) (epub)

  It would be simplest to blame her job, of course. Enough people have intimated this—the unspeakable things she must have seen, the gut-wrenching fear she must have felt, these things must affect a person, mustn’t they? Obliterate some capacity for tenderness? One or two of their friends have even said, out loud, post-traumatic stress—but not to Mandy. Nobody is strong enough to contemplate the withering stare this would provoke, but it is tempting, so tempting, for Chris to agree.

  He has sometimes looked at women—in the office, or at someone’s dinner party—and thought, I’m going to have an affair. Sometimes the imagining has gone on for weeks, in mostly garden-variety sexual fantasies: one of the women greedily sucking his penis in the Barretts’ bathroom during a dinner party, for example, the soft sheet of her hair hiding her face. And then taking her home and doing it again in his and Mandy’s bed, her sheeny breasts jolting above him as he rammed upwards into her. But in the fantasies the women always long for him across the dinner table or the office desk with open, easily readable lust. In reality they either smile in a pitying way when they hear about Mandy’s job, or just switch off altogether and turn to speak to someone else.

  He would like to blame Mandy’s job for his own decay. But he suspects—he knows—it is worse, and more banal. For why would she have gone in the first place, if things were all right? He remembers his face turning hot, then cold, the day she’d told him of the offer to go to the Balkans as a field producer. A one-off. He had turned away to hide his humiliation, gone to sit on the toilet, staring at the floor tiles in shock. That his wife would go to a war rather than stay at home with him. And an hour later he had congratulated her, they had spoken of the opportunity. What sort of a man does that, if he has any balls?

  They had already, he supposes now, begun to grow apart. It is the kind of phrase his parents would use. The flat desolation of it makes him sick.

  This morning he noticed with a cold, nauseated shock—and has no idea how long it has been the case—that Mandy’s wedding ring is missing from her finger. This, he knows, should be the last straw.

  He trails out of the side door and calls out to Marg and Cathy that he’s off to the shops. Cathy yells back for him to wait, asking for a lift to the hospital. He stands leaning against the car in the driveway, facing out at the street. Some neighbours’ kids are playing tennis on the road; their shouts and muffled footsteps echo in the quiet air. And as Chris waits here in the soft sunshine, imagining that this could be the last time he comes here to Rundle, to this house, he must close his eyes against his tears.

  But in a moment he opens his eyes again, blinks the tears down. He knows there is such a thing as self-respect. Mandy taught it to him herself.

  ACROSS THE road from the hospital’s side entrance is a little milk bar and takeaway café, The Tuck Inn. Cathy slams the door of the car and Chris drives off. She crosses the footpath and steps in through the grubby clear plastic straps that hang across the doorway to keep out the flies. It is almost the same as when they were children. Same dank smell, the same wall of greasy deep-fryers and hotplates, a deep freezer against the wall in the same place it used to be. The counter is new though, and a sharp-lined modern glass food cabinet stands in place of the old rounded one. At the drinks fridge Cathy takes down a bottle of water, and then stands to wait behind the few customers before her.

  She hears the small whump of the freezer lid dropping and looks around; a man stands with a Cornetto in each fist. It always makes her think of Mandy now, that sound. The time she had jumped out of her skin when Cathy flung the freezer door shut once, in Chris and Mandy’s kitchen. Apparently it sounds like a fired mortar. Cathy still doesn’t get this—how could it? Such a benign, soft little thud—but she won’t forget that frozen second of Mandy’s jolt, her terrified expression. It is the only time Cathy has ever been able to glimpse a fraction of what goes on in Mandy’s life when she’s away.

  In front of Cathy, a loud male voice is braying at the young woman behind the counter.

  ‘Can’t believe you’re not married yet, with cookin’ like that,’ says the voice. It’s Tony from the hospital. A couple of waiting customers look at each other.

  ‘What?’ the girl says, leaning down onto the lid of a bulging plastic container on the counter. All the customers have turned now towards Tony’s booming voice.

  ‘I said, bein’ such a good cook you’d reckon you’d be married by now,’ Tony says again, leering. ‘Or at least have a boyfriend.’

  The lid snaps on. ‘It’s fruit salad,’ says the girl, looking at him in disgust.

  She bats the container into a brown paper bag, snatches up a plastic fork and napkin and dumps the lot up on the glass top of the cabinet beside another brown-wrapped bundle. ‘Seven-fifty,’ she says, resting her open palm on the counter alongside Tony’s lunch.

  Cathy moves aside for Tony to shoulder his way out through the shop. As he passes she notices his heavy silver bracelet, the bright contrasting patterns on his sneakers.

  A little later she is alone at her father’s bedside when the wardsman comes in. She sees him watching her while he talks to the nurse, and the sly way he looks around as he strides over to her.

  ‘Hi there,’ she says, smiling at him.

  ‘G’day,’ says Tony, then steps past her to stare with open distaste at her father. ‘Jeez, he’s still not lookin’ good is he?’ he says, wincing.

  ‘No,’ Cathy says. He’s like a child, she thinks. She remembers boys like him at school—no capacity for artifice, their compliments to girls always falling flat and them never understanding why. She feels sorry for him.

  ‘Your sister still ’ere?’ he says then.

  ‘Yeah,’ Cathy says. ‘At home with Mum.’

  Tony lifts his chin and gives her an open, appraising stare, as though he’s working out whether to trust her with some confidence. Then he suddenly dips his hand in his pocket and pulls something out.

  ‘Want one?’

  He holds two biscuits in his open palm.

  ‘No, thanks,’ Cathy says, grinning.

  Tony looks surprised. ‘Huh.’ He takes a bite from one of the biscuits and begins munching away, shoving the other one back in his pocket. ‘It’s a Kingston,’ he says warningly through the mouthful, as if this might make her change her mind. A fleck of biscuit spittle lands on her arm.

  ‘I’m right, thanks.’

  Tony only raises his eyebrows, swallowing the last of the biscuit and running his tongue around his teeth. Then he gives a workman-like sigh and turns to go. ‘Seeya.’

  ‘Seeya,’ Cathy says, watching him saunter over toward the door. He even walks like a kid, she thinks: hands in his pockets, staring at the ground with an open mouth, swaying as he goes. Near the door he falls into step with Nathan, the nurse who is back from his pig-shooting weekend in Mudgee.

  ‘So what are Mudgee girls like?’ she hears Tony asking, too loudly, as he whacks the button beside the automatic door. It opens and they turn out into the wide bright corridor.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  TONY PERCHES on a bar stool at one of the tall tables near the front door and hunches, both elbows on the table, talking to another man while he smokes. The second man is shorn-headed, wears an open-necked white business shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and grey trousers. They are laughing together, but not in the way of friends. Tony could be the man’s mechanic, or they might meet weekly on the soccer field. Tony looks thinner here, without the bulk of his blue overalls. He wears loose grey jeans and a navy-blue collared giveaway t-shirt, with CPG Western embossed across the chest in small yellow lettering. The town is full of these mysterious acronyms, of failing local businesses with obscure, joined-together names—Ad-Nu 65 or KGK Alliance or RundlePak System 300.

  The other man taps a packet of cigarettes once on the table with gusto and says ‘Anyway—’ in a clipped voice, snatching up his wallet. Tony has already turned to scan the room as he says, ‘Yeah seeya,’ and exhales a plume of smo
ke through his nostrils.

  THIS IS the pub where Cathy kissed Jim Galvin; where Mandy used to sit with her newspaper workmates among the first of the Friday afternoon drinkers (and where once, a few gin and squashes into the evening, one of the printers whinged to her about his marriage and had challenged her to tell him how often she had sex. She refused, but he kept going: twice a week? Once a fortnight? She’d said nothing, but her face must have given it away because he sat back, satisfied. ‘Yeah. Try twice a year.’ Her boyfriend then was a soft-faced footballer who left her tiny notes hidden in her sock drawer, that said in his tiny writing, I love you). It is the pub where Stephen had snuck in to see bands when he was under-age—Chisel had played here once—and where he played pool with the other apprentices.

  On this late afternoon the three siblings sit at one of the dark polished tables in the gloom, chins in their hands, watching Chris order drinks at the bar. He leans towards the barmaid, smiling, eyebrows raised in friendliness as he speaks.

  ‘City boy,’ says Stephen. The sisters smile. The girl behind the bar only draws in her chin at Chris, and moves without a word to the beer taps. When she shoves the glasses across the bar, Chris is too friendly again as he pays, asks for a tray, says sorry, and thanks so much. The girl flat-eyes him in return.

  ‘He should tell her to get fucked,’ says Mandy idly. ‘Rude little bitch.’

  Cathy and Stephen smirk.

  ‘Look,’ says Cathy then, as Chris lowers the tray of drinks to the table. ‘There’s that ward guy.’ Then she calls, ‘Hiya, Tony,’ raising her glass at him across the room.

  Stephen says, ‘Oh yeah,’ and then calls too—‘How’re you going’—and nods across the tables.

  Mandy looks up and sees Tony staring at her. Chris is still preoccupied with the glasses and the tray.

  ‘Jesus, he’s not going to come over, is he?’ she mutters, looking down at the table quickly and taking a gulp from her beer. The others don’t reply, and Chris plonks down, looking around him. Then he too lifts his head in Tony’s direction, makes an oversized smile and raises his glass.

  Stephen turns to Mandy. ‘You could just say hello,’ he says.

  She blows out a sharp puff of breath.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I don’t like him.’

  ‘Why not?’ says Cathy.

  They’re all looking at her now, and she knows that when she glances away her siblings will roll their eyes at each other. She knows that she could answer the question, or just shut up and let it go. She takes another sip of beer. It has always been like this, the weighing up, the calibration, the reining in.

  But why should she always have to be the silenced one?

  ‘Because he’s intrusive, and he’s threatening. He gives me the creeps.’

  She hears her own snotty voice, its melodrama. But something flares through her. This town is no more their place than hers, she wants to shout. No matter their (occasional!) visits to Mum and Dad; their once-a-decade trips with a carful of city friends, the ironic tours to childhood schoolyards and cricket grounds. And her snitchy voice, her opinions, Cathy’s and Stephen’s eye-rolling at what they think is the great yawning distance between her present life and their childhoods—none of it is different from when they all lived here together, from every day at primary school or high school or her year on the newspaper. Her conceit, her refusal to accept what is acceptable to everyone else—this grotesque, shameful need for something beyond—has always been what separated her from here. And from them. She raises her head and stares back at them both.

  Chris looks from his wife to her siblings, and feels a sudden, surprising stab of love and pity for her, knowing Cathy and Stephen see all the defiance and none of the hurt, but he can do nothing to stop them all being swept apart on the unpredictable tides of their complicated, silent sea.

  TONY’s HEART moves. He feels the actual shove of it in his chest when he sees her across the tables. But he waits, watches the husband buy the drinks. Two Tooheys New and two Heineken. He swallows deep from his own drink.

  If they stay, if he can talk to her. Away from the old man—it’s too hard in there. After this morning Tony walked the hospital corridors, ashamed of his own selfishness, of putting his own need first. Dickhead. He wanted to go back and apologise, to tell her he could wait, till the old man, till she was ready. But he knew he’d made her nervous. He’d walked the corridors, saying fuckwit, fuckwit in his head, making himself breathe in deep to stop from bawling at the idea of upsetting her.

  But now. Relaxed. Have a few beers, go over.

  And now the sister’s seen him, the brother. His heart hammering again.

  ‘G’day,’ he calls back. His voice loud.

  She looks up. They lock eyes and he again feels it, the thick slide of his heart muscle, its slippery drop.

  The husband looks over now, the skinny poofter.

  ‘G’day,’ Tony calls again, lifts his glass. He licks his lips. Please, he thinks, waits for her to look up again. She doesn’t look up.

  He turns to face the video screen. A one-day match, the players coloured all over the field. He can wait. He breathes deep, in, out. Just wait. When she’s ready, they will talk, about that smoky morning, his heartbeat while he walked alone to the blackened car. How he and she became two halves of the same thing that day. And nobody else can ever understand. We are the same.

  He looks quickly over his shoulder at the table again, the four of them talking away. One more beer—not too fast—and then he’ll go over.

  The camera moves slowly around the cricket field, the players. The camera lands on Katich where he stands scratching his balls and then lifts his arms up like he’s going to hug something and twists his torso, yanking, side to side. Then it’s Hussey, arms folded, white nose pointed in the air, waiting.

  We are all waiting, Tony thinks.

  He hears a voice mutter his name then, and Nathan from the hospital has brushed past him towards the bar. Tony glances back at the table where Mandy still is with the others. He’s got time. He shifts on his bar stool, swiping his smokes away to allow room at the table for Nathan’s beer, checks with a kick of his foot that the other stool is still there. But when he looks up again Nathan is walking away, carrying his beer down to the far end of the bar. Tony sniffs. Doesn’t matter. Probably wants to watch the cricket. They yarned this arvo anyway. Nathan said he didn’t know about the Mudgee girls, but Tony thinks he probably lied. Doesn’t matter.

  He looks back towards her table, and his heart starts yammering again. What matters is, she’s still here.

  Now. He tips back his head and finishes his beer in one long double gulp. Have a piss, then two Tooheys New, two Heineken. He breathes out. He clears his throat because it’s like the heartbeat is filling up his windpipe, his mouth.

  He feels his legs move, he dumps the empty glass on the bar, and pushes himself to walk past their table. He doesn’t look down at them but he walks close, fast, by her chair. He thinks one of them looks up at him but he doesn’t look at her, though he can smell something nice, some shampoo or perfume smell, as he passes. It might be her, that powdery female smell. And then he’s swinging open the toilet door and it’s all gone in the piss-stink.

  He closes his eyes. Thinks, if he was ever to touch that hair. Just a single smooth stroke, the hair falling between her shoulderblades. He wouldn’t touch her, but if he did.

  He takes his time, washes his hands slowly, pushes open the door and then walks back into the gloom, walks back to the front bar the long way round, through the back bar with its circus of pokies, past the little hallway counter with its narrow rack of racing forms and the pencils. Two Tooheys New, two Heineken. Past the stairs to the cocktail bar, and past the bistro door, wishing to fuck his heart would slow down.

  They’re gone.

  The chairs pushed out and the four glasses on the table. Tony’s guts churn and he wants to shit and cry suddenly, at the same time. The beer glasses empty and
the chairs opened out from the table like a crashed abandoned car.

  But she looked up for him once. She looked.

  CATHY AND Stephen have gone in his car. On the way to the hire car a short blonde woman steps toward Mandy and Chris, smiling. She has a stocky, muscular build, and Mandy suddenly recognises her as Leanne, a girl she had been to high school with. She remembers Leanne darting around a basket ball court, leaping into the air and scoring lots of goals. Leanne had had a footballer boyfriend who had already left school. Mandy remembers wondering why Leanne—athletic, bouncy and popular—would be friends with her. Whenever Mandy and the other girls from school saw Leanne’s boyfriend he would be standing apart, waiting—at the school gate, or next to his big car. He wore sunglasses, all the time. He gave Leanne Valentine’s Day presents, large teddy bears and heart-shaped balloons.

  ‘Leanne!’ Mandy calls now, bending to kiss her cheek. She says, ‘Chris, this is Leanne. We went to school together.’

  Leanne smiles at Chris. ‘Nice to meet you,’ she says, then glances aside to a nearby car, where Mandy can see a couple of blonde kids scowling from the back seat. Mandy forces surprise into her voice: ‘Are they yours?’

  Leanne laughs. ‘Yeah, the little fiends.’ She calls out to the children, ‘I’ll be one second.’ She flips keys in her hand. ‘Amanda, I’m so sorry to hear about your dad.’

  Mandy nods. ‘Thanks. You don’t have to call me Amanda. Nobody but the TV calls me that.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Leanne, looking confused. ‘Why do they, then?’

  Mandy feels a blush, murmurs that she’s not sure.

  The children begin fighting over something between them in the car, but Leanne, unfazed, ignores them. She asks about Geoff, about Margaret and Cathy and Stephen. Then she smiles at Chris. ‘So do you two have any kids?’

  Chris doesn’t return the smile. Instead he shakes his head. ‘Bit hard with Mandy’s job.’