While you take Jaspar upstairs, Jed walks Kylie home, and later you return to the kitchen where Jed has poured two strong gins.
‘Kylie came running out to the shed yelling tourniquet, we need a tourniquet. You should have seen it,’ he says. ‘Blood was spurting out. I nearly fainted at the sight of it.’
‘How did she even know about tourniquets?’
‘God knows. I never asked.’
‘Would you have known how to apply a tourniquet?’
He puts his drink down and his expression has turned very slightly set. You are implying some inadequacy, when in his mind his actions were strong and good, heroic even. ‘No idea.’
‘Me neither,’ you say, trying to atone. Secretly you’re relieved not to have been home when it happened. You wouldn’t have known what to do, all that blood, but then again it might not have happened if …
‘I just grabbed a tea towel and pressed it down on the cut. Evie was able to drive us to A & E.’
‘Who’s Evie?’
‘Neighbour.’
‘Oh.’ Since when do we know our neighbours? You’re tired, and this makes you feel confused, as if you’ve been away on a harrowing trip and returned to your place of comfort only to find there’s been a small, disconcerting rearrangement of the furniture.
‘Where was your stepmother?’
‘It’s Tuesday.’ He sighs, and you try to remember what that means. Is Tuesday her mah jong club? Or is that the day she volunteers down at the hospice shop? ‘Where were you anyway?’
‘Offsite meeting, sorry. Had my phone off.’ You cannot meet his gaze, and move over to the kitchen sink, away from him. You dampen a cloth, crouch down below the bench top and begin swabbing at the dried blood on the kitchen floor and cupboards. ‘God, there’s so much. Why didn’t you dial 111?’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s what it’s there for,’ he says, on the defensive again.
In the same circumstances it mightn’t have occurred to you either. Heart attacks and the kind of serious accident where you’re not supposed to move the body – that’s what ambulances are for. A cut foot might be a stretch, might raise an eyebrow from the paramedic. You hadn’t meant to sound accusing, though. You put down the cloth and go over to him. ‘Thank you,’ you say, slipping your arms around his neck, ‘for coping so well. I probably would have fainted or something.’ You start kissing, gentle kisses at first, that quickly escalate into something more urgent and passionate. Disaster survivor kisses. Guilt-ridden kisses. Sinking ship kisses? He pulls at your clothes, but you push yourself gently off him. ‘I’ve just got to finish cleaning up first.’
‘Leave it,’ he groans.
‘I can’t do that.’ You pick up the cloth again. It is the first time in ages there’s been the promise of more than bedroom sex. But really what you can’t do today is have your clothes taken off in the bright light of the kitchen, because in your bareness he might somehow be able to see the shadow of a finger-bruise on your buttock, inflicted at exactly the time he was rushing your son off to the doctor. ‘Do you think we should do a course? A St John’s course or something?’
‘I dunno,’ Jed says before picking up his gin and leaving the room, leaving you to the scrubbing and the remorse.
When you go upstairs again, you find Jaspar playing a game on his iPad. ‘My foot hurts,’ he says. It is more a report than a complaint, and you give him some more liquid Panadol.
‘You know once when my mother was in hospital she had to have an operation and a few days later she decided the nurse was stealing her stitches. She made me count the stitches on her tummy and write it on a piece of paper and put it in her drawer.’
‘Why did she do that?’
‘Because she’d gone funny in the head.’
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Yeah, remember that time she said a giraffe had walked past the window?’
‘Poor old Nana. I wish she was still here, though.’
‘Me too. Even though she was a bit of a nutcase.’
‘Nutcase? You awful boy.’
He smiles. He loves to be thought of as bad. ‘At least I know how many stitches I have.’
‘How many?’
‘Nine.’
‘Nine? I thought it was ten.’
‘No, silly, it’s nine,’ he laughs.
You kiss him goodnight, and turn off the light. As you’re going out the door he says, ‘Did you think the nurse had come and stolen one?’
Jed is eating a bowl of ice cream in front of the television. In the kitchen you discover he’s forgotten to put the container back in the freezer, leaving it on the bench with its lid off and its contents melting. But is it forgetfulness? Or is there, perhaps, an urge to irk you? You’d rejected his advance. You hadn’t answered your phone. Is he baiting you now? Does he want a petty marital fight in which he can ultimately take the high ground? You re-attach the lid and as quietly as possible slip the container back into the freezer.
The thought occurred to you, as you were rushing towards the hospital, that if Jed had seen you that afternoon, if he knew about any of it, he might stop loving you completely. You aren’t even sure that you haven’t already stopped loving yourself.
Occasional texts had been arriving, suggesting times to meet. Delete. But lately you’d been telling yourself that you just needed to know something about the man. The curiosity wouldn’t settle. You had dreams about him as if he was the Brando character, cruel, uneasy, but with an unsettled backstory that had made him that way. You convinced yourself that you needed to know something personal, something more humanising than what was in your head. You didn’t know anything about him – he could be a crude supporter of his country’s old regime, a reformist, a liberal, an intellectual, a very ordinary citizen – you didn’t know, and not knowing made him the worst of those possibilities. It wasn’t that you wanted to be tied to a chair. It definitely wasn’t a case of going back there for more. Or so you told yourself. You should’ve known you wouldn’t get what you expected when you knocked on his door.
When he saw it was you, he laughed and said, ‘Ha! About time. Come for your medicine?’
‘No.’
‘No?’ he replied. There was a gameness to his smile.
‘I …’
‘I what? I want more? I’m here to be fucked? I’m a bad girl in need of a little something?’ He was in a merciless mood, you could see.
‘Bad girl? More role-playing? Doesn’t that just make this whole thing all the more reductive?’
‘Reductive?’ Now his expression contained a hint of disdain. ‘So what have you come for? Intelligent conversation?’
‘No, I … well, sort of.’
‘Sort of?’
‘I thought we could talk a little. I feel like I need to know something about you.’
‘Huh!’ he replied and you caught a whiff, then, of whisky. His features seemed more crudely ugly than you remembered. ‘But that’s not in our narrative, is it?’
The way he was scrutinising your face felt like a search for vulnerability.
‘Why don’t we start with you telling me something about you?’ he said.
‘No, I … it doesn’t matter … I shouldn’t have come here. I’ll go.’
You took a step back and he grabbed your wrist. ‘Okay then, let me tell you something about you.’ He pulled you closer to him, and speaking in a harsh voice said, ‘Let’s see. You’re a bright girl, you think too much, you’re all about the thinking, you like to think you’re the most intelligent person in the room, you like to think you can think your way out of anything, that you can outwit the whole world with that tidy little brain of yours.’ You tried to flick his fingers from your wrist but he had you in a strong grip and pulled you even closer to him, to his face, to the ethanol quality of his breath. He was dangerously drunk, you realised now. He moved his lips to your ear, placed a hand on your buttocks, squeezing so hard it brought water to your eyes, and whispered, ‘But really you’re just like anybody else with your b
ase little needs and your prim little desire to be wicked, and underneath you are what? Some bored housewife who’s not getting enough from your boring husband and now is so consumed with guilt that you tell yourself that you want to come here and have a nice wine and a nice conversation and make nice but really what you want is to put that tidy brain of yours aside and be fucked stupid.’
‘No!’ you said. ‘No.’
‘No?’ he replied. He pulled you in closer, gripped you more fiercely, bruisingly.
‘Please …’ You fought the urge to struggle because you had the feeling that would excite him. ‘This isn’t right.’
He gave up then, taking his hands off you, freeing your wrist. ‘You’d better go then.’
You fled, running down the stairs, and down the street, and when you got around the corner from his apartment you stopped and a big racking sob came flooding out. ‘I’m not a bored housewife,’ you wanted to shout at his building. ‘My husband is not boring.’
In the kitchen you wipe over all the surfaces with spray disinfectant before going to join Jed, who is sitting on the sofa watching some television programme. ‘What are you watching?’
‘Nothing. Just some shit. Wife Swap.’
You look at the screen and he is actually watching an episode of some sort of Danish cop show. What is he trying to say? You won’t ask him. Sometimes you can’t put any questions out in the universe without preparing yourself for the consequences, and this is definitely not the right day. You prefer to accept right now that this is what marriage is, mostly – you skip together towards the void, and then lose each other. But the length of contract means that with effort and trust, the weight of history, and an eye on the longer game, you’ll probably come together again at some point.
Effort and trust?
Trust?
‘What happened to Evie?’
‘What do you mean?’ he says, his eyes not moving from the screen.
‘At the hospital? Did she just drop you off?’
‘She came in for a while, but once you texted to say you were on your way there was no need for her to hang around.’
So is that what the doctor had meant? Oh, but I thought that other woman, Evie, was your … Exactly how familiar does this Evie behave around your husband?
‘Is Evie married or anything?’
‘What is this? You’re not having a jealous fit over our neighbour taking us to the hospital, are you?’ Jed says, as if the idea is ridiculous, but there is a tiny amount of vehemence there too, just in the way he pronounces the words jealous fit.
‘No, I just wanted to thank her,’ you say very evenly, very sweetly. ‘Invite her over for dinner or something, that’s all.’
Jed shrugs. ‘She was fine. She didn’t mind.’
Suddenly you like the idea that you are sitting next to him with a dull bruise on your right buttock. It is your dark secret, your tragic little something for yourself.
‘Do you think I should stay home from work tomorrow? Look after Jaspar?’
‘If you want.’ Jed is still keeping his gaze on the screen.
‘It’s just that this producer is flying in from Sydney for the day, and—’
‘So don’t then. Go to work. I can take care of him, you know, if you have a meeting that’s more important.’
Now you feel like you’ve lost ground again, already. Indifference is the most challenging thing to cope with. You’d almost rather he raged at you. But that would be dangerous today, and besides he never rages. Does he just sit there, telling himself he can go off and be in a band again any time he wants?
Haley
In third period Mrs Bonner says, ‘Class, this is a high-profile school project, so let’s make it good.’ Her eyes travel over all the other faces and then land on mine as she adds, ‘I have expectations.’ Might have made a mistake recently, after Mrs Bonner wrote something nice about my writing style on one of my essays, by confessing I’d like to be a writer some day. Knowing one made it seem more of an achievable ambition, even if the one I knew was actually Marty. Since then Mrs Bonner often sends comments like that in my direction.
Sas decides she’ll ask a famous fashion designer her mother knows, and another girl in the class has an uncle who’s an MP, so am feeling the pressure to come up with something great.
‘I want to see these interviews conducted in a journalistic style,’ Mrs Bonner says. ‘Imagine it in your favourite magazine.’
I know who I want to do it with, but I’ll need the dog.
Have been finding excuses not to walk Rochester some days. Marty’s getting weird. The other day I bent down in my denim skirt to attach the lead to Rochester’s collar and I heard a sound behind me and turned round just in time to see him slip his cellphone back into his pocket. Another time he was sitting opposite me, sending a text, but holding up his phone so its lens was facing me and I’m pretty sure I heard it click. When I try to imagine what Marty might be doing with those pictures I feel like I’m entering the land of sleaze, just being around him. But also he goes to such lengths to capture me in this way – it’s a kind of passion, a weirdo strength of feeling. I’m always fighting against my instincts to be okay with it. In a sicko way, it’s exciting, no safe path.
The trouble with Marty is that just when you’re starting to think he has his okay side, he does something so tricksy that you’re right back to square one with him again. Like when you go into his toilet. It’s only a place you would go if you were really in need, because like everything in his house it’s not all that clean. And then when you close the door you see that pinned to the back of it are a whole lot of pictures of Rochester when he was a puppy. Playing with a ball, snuggling under a blanket, wearing a headset, just being cute, and you realise even people without people need love in their life. People without people have dog-people. And just at the instant you feel a little heart-squeeze towards Marty, a memory of those pervy photos he’s snapped off rises up and you wonder what he does with them.
After I heard the camera click at the table that time I said, ‘Why did you want me to walk your dog again?’
‘I told you,’ he replied defensively. He waved his crutch in the air and said, ‘Isn’t it obvious?’
There’s never anything glamorous in the clothes Jed Jordan wears to the park. His style is almost anti-style. Khaki shorts, workman boots, thick socks, one-colour singlets that often have smudges of dirt and holes in them, and a checked shirt over the top. He never wears anything to catch attention, and yet he does.
Have chosen my outfit with maximum care. Favourite short denim skirt, the tight white singlet that makes my tan look good, a recently shoplifted yellow bikini top underneath, matching yellow thong and summer sandals. Some mascara. Some pink lip-gloss. Put together, I hope, as if not even trying. Along with these clothes, have put on a new persona. Will look him in the eye. Have something to ask him.
Start with my interesting story. ‘Do you know what I heard about today?’ He hasn’t been in the park over the weekend, so have actually been saving this for three whole days.
‘What?’ he says. Draws his arm back to throw a tennis ball, suddenly getting the attention of every dog in the park as if they recognise he’s the best thrower around, or maybe even the alpha male. A lot of days he is the only male. When he tosses the ball across the length of the park, about ten dogs take off after it.
‘Do you know who Alexander Graham Bell was?’
‘Telephone inventor, wasn’t he?’
‘Exactly. But did you know that when he was a kid his family had a terrier called Trouve and he taught it to growl continuously, and then he would manipulate its lips so it sounded like it was saying, How are you grandma?’
Jed laughs. Made him laugh. ‘No, I didn’t know that.’ Then he says, ‘The dog my stepmother had before this one got really old and it sometimes used to do these terrible farts. One day he let off a really long rumbling one and my stepmother said, “Did you hear that? It sounded like someone was saying
brontosaurus.”’
Now it’s my turn to laugh. Comes out as a short ha-ha. This is what I like about him: just says whatever.
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Sure,’ Jed replies.
‘It’s just that we’re doing a project for sc—’ Don’t want to say the word school. Don’t want him to think of me as some stupid young school thing. Should’ve prepared this better. Could have said ‘tech’, pretended I’d graduated. But why would they do this kind of project at tech anyway? Already it’s falling apart.
Before I can get the rest of the question sorted, we are interrupted by the poodle lady.
‘Sorry to accost you in the park like this, but I was hoping to see you today. I’ve got your CD with me and I was wondering if you could sign it?’ She’s super-intense. Has a discoloured filling in the front of one of her teeth.
‘Okay,’ Jed says, shrugging as if he couldn’t care less whether he did it or not.
The woman hands him the CD and a pen, and he slips the paper cover out from under the plastic so he can write on it.
‘Who is it for?’ he asks. ‘What name?’
‘For me. Gwenyth,’ she says. ‘You know, back in the day your songs really helped me get over the end of my first marriage.’
‘Glad I could help,’ Jed says, but with a flat tone, and it reminds me of the day we decided she was a Scroogler.
The woman’s eyes flit to me and then back to Jed. ‘Is this your daughter?’ she asks. ‘I’ve noticed you here together quite a lot lately.’
‘This is—’ Jed says, and looks to me to fill in the gap.
‘Haley.’
‘Haley?’ she says, half-questioning, as if that’s some kind of coincidence.
Jed hands the CD back. She reads what he wrote before tucking it into a plastic bag. ‘I’ve got my phone here, would you mind? A photo of us?’ Before he can reply, she stands in close to him and, holding her phone out at arm’s length, snaps off a couple of shots.
‘I’m a musician too, you know,’ she says. ‘Well, just amateur really.’
In the Neighbourhood of Fame Page 12