Leanne’s face turns instantly red. ‘Oh, of course! I’m an idiot!’ She is shaking her head in embarrassment.
Chris, expressionless, watches Leanne’s fluster without comment, and then he turns and looks down the length of the street, and for this long second Mandy hates him. She should change the subject, but instead she says, smiling, ‘Well, nearly all the blokes who do this job have kids, so it’s an entirely reasonable question.’ She looks at Chris, then back to Leanne. ‘It’s just that they have wives who stay home and do all the work.’
Leanne sees a lifeline, leaps at it. ‘Ha!’ she says, relieved. ‘Then it’s just the same as normal people, isn’t it!’ The sound of her children’s fighting grows louder. ‘Anyway,’ she says with a big grin, jerking her head towards the car, ‘Why would you want that?’
Chris turns to watch the children for a moment. When he turns back his face is softer, and he smiles at Leanne. ‘Doesn’t look so bad to me, actually.’
It’s Mandy’s turn for silence, and Leanne’s smile stiffens.
‘Oh,’ she says, glancing from one to the other. ‘It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, let me tell you.’ It’s clear she wishes she was somewhere else. She flips her keys in her hand again, and leans forward to kiss Mandy goodbye, offers to help Margaret.
As Leanne steps away to her car Mandy sees that in the passenger seat is the same old boyfriend, still waiting.
Chris and Mandy start walking again. Mandy says, ‘You didn’t have to be so rude to her.’
Chris does not look at her. He’s walking fast, so she has to trot to keep up. When she reaches his side she sees that his eyes are glistening with fury.
‘Where’s your wedding ring?’ His voice is strained.
Mandy gasps. ‘Oh, shit. Chris. I meant to tell you before.’ She puts a hand out to touch his arm, says, ‘I’m sorry.’ She wants him to slow down, but he keeps striding along, not looking at her.
She struggles to keep pace. ‘I’m really sorry, Chris. I gave it away—it was in a hospital, a nurse. I know it’s terrible, but I knew you would understand. I thought about it, and I knew you would have done exactly—’
He lets out a sound to stop her talking; a cough, or a snort. Or, Mandy thinks with horror, the start of a sob. He has stopped now. Beside them is a milk bar, with a large ice-cream advertisement on the window. When Chris finally turns to her his eyes shine and he says in a hard, bitter voice: ‘I would never give away my wedding ring.’
Mandy swallows. She stares at the poster. A tanned girl’s profiled face is puckering her lips around the rounded tip of a long yellow ice-block. The background is a bright, bare blue. Mandy hauls herself up, squares her shoulders as she opens her mouth again to plead, explain.
But the truth is that in that noisy, crowded moment in the Yarmouk hospital with the exhausted young nurse, she did not think of Chris at all.
She remembers the screaming and the shouts, and running feet as they brought in the bodies—‘another roadside bomb in Baghdad’ is all she says later in her reports—and she remembers pressing herself back against the cold tiles of the wall to keep out of the way as she watched the young woman running between beds with bags of saline and syringes, shouting instructions, and she remembers the lumpen white dressings clamped over so much blood. The dazed, stilled faces of the injured, and she did not know if they were alive or dead, and the noise from outside. The high, endless screaming.
None of this is explicable here in the subsiding evening heat of an Australian country town, beside an enormous picture of a thin, rich, white woman fellating an ice cream. It is not explicable that in the alien fluorescent light of the dingy hospital later that night, she had listened to the nurse say in her dead voice that she was supposed to be getting married, was supposed to be going to university, was going to study medicine. Her boyfriend had gone missing though, she said. Mandy had stood there with her and held her hand while they both stared, unseeing, at a blood-smear on the floor tiles. And then the nurse had moved her index finger to touch Mandy’s wedding ring, and said, ‘You married.’
Mandy nodded, and then out from the dark street there came another siren, and the girl’s whole body began to shake, and Mandy pulled her own hand away and removed her ring, and pushed it onto the nurse’s finger. ‘You’ll find him,’ she had said into the girl’s ear while the doors banged open again and the sirens whined, and she had held tight to the girl’s hand and called through the noise and both their tears, ‘You will get married, you will go to university, you will have beautiful children,’ and the girl had held Mandy’s hand to her chest and nodded, unable to stop crying.
Mandy had looked for her the next morning. She saw her asleep on a chair in a corner, her smooth face tilted upward, the dark thumbprints under her closed eyes, her shoulders slumped. On the fourth finger of the girl’s left hand she wore Mandy’s ring.
Through the doorway of the milk bar a young woman in a red uniform is visible, laughing with a boy, standing on the single kitchen step at the back of the shop. She’s holding on to the door frame with both her hands, raising and lowering herself, on and off the step, in small flirty movements toward him and then away and back again, her cap stuck sexily into the back pocket of her trousers.
Mandy says, ‘I’m sorry, Chris.’ Her voice flat. ‘I thought we could buy another one together.’
She does not expect an answer, and does not get one, as they begin walking again towards the car. Chris takes the key tag from his pocket and points it at the car; its lights flash once as Mandy walks around to the other side.
Chris says something, muttering across the roof of the car. Mandy looks at him.
‘What? I can’t hear you.’
He leans toward her, his eyes moist. ‘I can’t stand this anymore,’ he hisses. ‘When this is over—’ he gestures to the street, towards the hospital—‘we have to do something. I can’t fucking stand it.’
He falls miserably into his seat and slams his door.
Mandy stands there, not moving, with her hand on the warm roof of the car, and she looks along the roofs of the other cars in a pale silvery row all the way up Monarch Street, and she remembers all the Saturdays of her childhood, sitting on the hot bonnet of the car in the main street, waiting for something to happen, for their father to come back from wherever he was and drive them home.
She’s still standing there staring when she hears the friendly peep-peep of a car horn and turns automatically to raise her hand. Leanne is talking animatedly to her husband as she waves. The husband is smiling, and the children’s little blonde heads bob up and down as the silver car carries the family away.
ONCE, IN Sydney, Mandy had looked after her friend Susie’s daughter for an afternoon. Susie had crept out through the house while Essie, who was three, was crouching at the water feature’s pond, her hands clenched into little fists on her knees. When Essie realised her mother had gone she stepped back, staring at Mandy in terror. Then she’d stood with her small solid feet planted on the bleached paving and opened her mouth to howl.
It was astonishing how instantly the tears came pouring down her face, and her cry became a rising, convulsive shriek. She backed away from Mandy as she screamed, casting wildly about her with her arms out from her sides. She stumbled against a potted shrub, eyes wide with horror. Soon she could not breathe properly; she began to drag in the air in arrhythmic gasps, awful croaks and shudders as she screamed.
Mandy tried to speak calmly, then began begging Essie to calm down, but her voice was only a murmur beneath the noise of the girl’s screaming filling the air, the street. Mandy put her arms around Essie then, and wondered for a moment if she should take her to hospital—her whole body was jolting and spinning in Mandy’s arms, she spluttered liquidly for breath, and the screaming would not stop. And soon, held fast but still struggling, it was as if she had lost consciousness of Mandy, of where she was, even of her own mother’s absence. It seemed she had burrowed a deep tunnel inside herself, bre
ath by gasping breath, and was now a prisoner there, inside this catastrophic, hypnotic trance of screaming from which she would never, ever emerge.
Mandy remembered the pram then, and carried Essie’s tough little body, still twisting and jerking and screaming, to the hallway and lowered her into the pram. It was like trying to capture a vulture—the flapping, the clawing—but eventually by keeping her forearm and her flat hand steady across the girl’s body, she managed to bend her in the middle and snap the fastener shut. She grabbed her keys, heard her own pathetic voice, Shhh, shhhh, it’s all right, baby, over and over.
After she had pushed the pram for a block, Essie’s shrieks became rhythmic, and an exhausted pattern emerged; the jolting had stopped. Block after block they walked, and Mandy’s slamming heart slowed, and she could listen then with a kind of fascination to the waves of Essie’s rage slowing, retreating into a mournful, self-pitying howl. And then—Mandy held her breath, praying for it to last—the remnant spasms stopped altogether and she fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.
Later, after she had come home and moved the sleeping child, Mandy too fell heavily asleep on the bed beside Essie. She woke in the gloomy afternoon, her mouth sticky. She opened her eyes, and right there—closer than her own skin, it seemed—were Essie’s huge brown eyes. Mandy froze for an instant and closed her eyes again, feeling Essie’s little soft breaths on her cheek. Then she opened her eyes and stared back. They lay there in the silence of the afternoon, perfectly still, observing each other’s pupils, the flecks in each other’s irises, the soft, soft rings delineating brown from white.
After Essie’s mother came to collect her in the evening, Mandy wandered through the house collecting strewn cushions, a plastic dinosaur, some hairclips. When she recalled the hour of screaming, it was as though from an afternoon many years ago. Instead, when she thought of the day, the only image was those round, dark eyes staring into hers in the cool bedroom. This is why people have children, she had thought, there in the gloom. Because they could watch you like this forever, staring right inside you, without flinching.
* * *
AFTER DINNER Mandy wanders through the backyard in the soft evening, hosing the garden beds for her mother.
She and Chris have moved cautiously about each other, as if bruised, since they got home, hiding themselves in the blurred noise and movement of the family, careful not to touch. If they have met one another’s glance they have held it for only a half-second before looking away.
She directs the spray of water into the hard dry soil beneath the oleander, watches the water shifting the grains of earth. The quiet work of the men in Hatra comes to her, their scraping and brushing and dusting at the dry sand. She had squatted on her haunches, watching the ground deliver them up. A man dusted and brushed the dirt and with one movement of his hand an eyelid opened there in the ground. With the next sweep, a lip curled. A little further away the flap of an ear unfolded; a man’s jawline appeared. Then the ground became all faces, all the sand-coloured faces of the dead, and Mandy squatted, listening to the camera shutters and the silence, and the sweep sweep sweep of the uncovering. The sun shone down and she stood, surveying the ghastly emerging eyes and lips and teeth of the ground beneath her feet.
When she finally goes to the bedroom Chris is already asleep, hunched into a ball. She wants to take a sheet to the couch, or the floor, but instead she gets into the bed in the dark.
A smell wakes her in the night. Something rotting and dangerous. She sits up full of dread, and then hurries barefoot through the dark house. But by the kitchen she is awake, and she knows the only smell is the lingering dinner, the greasy bolognese Margaret had made, still clinging to the air. It’s raining a little, and there is no sound but the dripping of water in downpipes.
She goes back to bed and lies there, listening to Chris’s steady sleeping breath. He’s on his stomach, his arms bent beneath the pillow, face hidden. In the dark his body has the strong elegance of a landscape. The planes of his shoulders are beautiful. His bent legs mirror his arms; in sleep, even, he is measured.
She tries to think whether she loves him, what kind of love is available to them now, whether it is possible that he loves her.
A gunshot cracks the air outside.
Mandy jolts at the sound—the single, unmistakable reverberation. Chris’s body has contracted. ‘Whatsa-matter,’ he murmurs through sleep, pushing a hand across the mattress to her.
‘A gun. Outside.’ Her voice is loud in the dark.
He’s awake now, on his back. ‘What?’
Mandy lies rigid, listening, waiting for another shot, for sirens, for breaking glass or screeching tyres. Chris puts out his hand to touch her stiff body. She allows herself to be pulled into the shelter of his chest. She can feel the ricochet of her own pulse against his skin.
‘Must be a car,’ he murmurs, but she can hear tension in his voice.
‘No,’ she whispers back. ‘It was a gun shot.’
They listen, their hearts beating, watching the ceiling. The gunman walks the wet streets beyond the house, in running shoes, breathing silently. Watching the windows, deciding, choosing theirs beyond the branches of the lilac bush. Would he aim low, gauging the height of the bed? She thinks of Martin Bryant, his slow, cool walk.
There is no sound. Chris shifts and she moves so that one of his arms can stay beneath the crook of her neck, the other soft across her chest. They listen to the silence, the dripping water, for a long time.
‘Okay?’ Chris whispers eventually, his lips at her temple.
She nods. ‘Thank you,’ she says. And then she tilts her head to kiss his soft, shaven cheek, and whispers, ‘I’m sorry.’ She kisses him again, and he moves and makes a sound that might be relief or pain or fright, and she turns to press herself hard against him, pushing herself into him, into their lonely, sorrowful desire.
When she comes it is with an enormous force, a vast, expelled breath.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Day four
STEPHEN IS at the dining table, a piece of toast with peanut butter held in one hand. His father’s kite books are spread over the table and he’s writing in pencil on an envelope beside him as his mother comes into the room. She wears a yellow floral nightie with a white nylon lace trim. The nightie is gathered across the bust and a white ribbon loops into a little bow at her freckled chest.
‘Hello, love,’ Margaret says, her voice croaky with sleep. She walks stiffly past him, her feet a little swollen in pale green towelling scuffs.
‘Hi, Mum,’ Stephen mumbles. He’s looking at a picture of a birdman kite, made from bark and cloth and leaves by a Maori tribesman.
Mandy comes in from the kitchen, stands behind Stephen with a coffee cup in her hand. ‘What are you doing with them?’ she says, nodding at the books.
Stephen keeps making his notes on his envelope. ‘Nothing,’ he says. He looks around. ‘I told you. I’m going to make one.’
Mandy sniffs, then takes a swig from her cup, looking at the books over Stephen’s shoulder.
Cathy comes in wearing a red satin kimono too big for her. She bangs her cereal bowl onto the table and slumps down opposite Stephen, the gown gaping open to show the flat bony centre of her chest.
‘Please,’ says Stephen. Cathy grins through her mouthful of cereal and milk, shifts to close the gown. She waves her spoon at Mandy in greeting.
‘Did you guys hear the gun shot in the night?’ Mandy says.
Stephen and Cathy look at one another.
‘Nup,’ they both say at once.
‘Well, there was a gun shot.’ She sees them not looking at each other now. ‘Chris heard it too.’
Stephen tilts his head back, giving her a bare, amused look. ‘Sorry. Didn’t hear a thing.’
Mandy sighs. ‘Well, there was one.’ She looks at Cathy, who only raises her eyebrows and shrugs, her mouth full of cereal.
When Mandy leaves the room Stephen and Cathy widen their eyes at each other, but
then Cathy stops herself and Stephen bends back to his book. He can hear the crunching of Cathy’s cereal. Margaret and Chris and Mandy are talking in the kitchen, there is the clank of dishes in the sink.
‘What’re you doing with them?’ Cathy slurs, tilting her chin at the books in exactly the same mannerism as Mandy’s.
‘Reading ’em,’ he says.
Cathy reaches out and swipes away his envelope before he can pin it down with the pencil, and reads silently. ‘Huh.’ She puts the list down, flips it back across the table to him. ‘Dad’s having another scan today.’
‘I know.’
‘So why are you making kites?’
He shrugs. Cathy hunches over her bowl, and then shifts to read a newspaper lying on the table.
They are silent, companionable.
Stephen had been one of those lean, wiry teenagers whom, were he not her brother, Cathy would have found attractive. He would occasionally give her a cigarette in the schoolyard if he was in a good mood. Most of the time, though, he just looked at her with a pained expression if she came near him. Mandy had already left school by then.
When Stephen was in Year 11, Cathy was in Year 9. His presence at the school brought her a kind of muted respect among the girls in her class; while he was not one of the desirable boys, nor was he among the dorks. He was gruffly nice to Cathy’s friends on the bus, or if they came to the house. Once when Jane Bourke walked into the kitchen behind Cathy, Stephen made her a cup of coffee without asking if she wanted it, and remembered how many sugars she liked. He slid it along the bench to Jane and said, ‘There y’go, coffee girl.’ Cathy was secretly proud of him in that moment, of the way Jane’s neck briefly mottled red. But at school he mainly hung around in the slope-shouldered group of boys who muttered among themselves and kicked things along the cement in front of them, swinging heavily into bus seats without seeming to notice if anyone was noticing them.
Here at the dining table, the siblings have slipped back into the time of their adolescence where the two of them could be together without speaking, each appreciating the other’s desire not for solitude but for silence, anticipating one another’s small needs, passing things or moving their feet out of the way without looking up. These moments where each privately loved the other, and knew they were loved in return.
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