When they were standing in front of each other her mother ran the palms of her hands over her head, like she always did when she was nervous, smoothing down the fuzzy bits of her hair as if it were the fuzziness that was the problem. The sounds of men talking loudly next door crept in through the walls like there was a party they were missing out on at home.
Clare kissed her mother on both cheeks. ‘Where’s Dad?’
‘Home.’
‘Alone?’
‘With John Solomon.’
‘Who’s John Solomon?’
‘I don’t know. Some man. He showed up to help out your dad this afternoon.’
‘I’m not so sure that Dad is very helpable anymore.’
Her mum sat down on the little bench Lucy kept in the hallway.
‘He’s a nuisance, that man.’
That’s it. That’s all her mother had to say. Her husband was a nuisance, as if he were some kind of child that needed to be tamed. Sometimes all Clare really wanted was for her mother to be furious. At someone, anyone, if only to prove that she was really real and not some woman from a 1950s sitcom. Through the door in the alcove she could see Lucy sitting on the couch, turning on the TV. Clare sat down next to her mother, watched her fold and refold her hands over each other, the same way she had done all her life. Her mother had never been able to recognise her own significance. She wondered sometimes how it was that her mother had ever ended up with her father. She suspected it had something to do with them finding each other exotic; her father and his clichéd Italian swarthiness and her mother the Australian-born daughter of an English Rose. In the distance Clare could hear Lucy flipping through the TV channels; something about Tampa on the news briefly, more boats on another channel, then she stopped at Australia’s Funniest Home Videos.
Unlike her mother, Clare had no stamina for silence. After a couple of minutes watching her mother’s hands in the hallway she spat out, ‘And what now? What happens now?’
On her face her mother wore her ‘I’m thinking about it’ look a little too long, so Clare stood up as if this would achieve something. Rose looked up at Clare, tears in the corners of her eyes, maybe (or perhaps Clare just wanted them to be there), and said, ‘I don’t know.’ Canned laughter and the darkly comic sound of calamity swept out of the living room and into the hallway where they were sitting.
‘That Australia’s Funniest Home Videos is really funny,’ her mother said flatly. Clare held out her arm to pull her mother up. There was no point in asking sensible questions. She bit the inside of her cheek and tried to shut up because she knew that that was what everyone needed.
‘Let’s go watch it then.’
Lucy looked up at the two of them as they entered the living room and caught Clare’s eye. Clare could see she was dying to give her commentary on the situation. She was glad when Lucy said nothing, just cocked her head slightly, a little gesture from the implicit conversation she and Clare had been having since childhood. The gesture came out whenever she and Clare were agreeing that something her father had done should be met with disapproval. Her mother never joined in on their silent conversation, though Clare suspected she knew what was being said.
When the three of them were tight up against each other on the couch, warming themselves in the TV glow, Clare’s phone began to beep in her backside pocket. ‘U OK?’ the message on the screen said. It took her too long to work out what the letters stood for – obvious words, and that it had to be Paul.
‘Yep,’ she texted back. Then thought she better clarify – ‘Yes I am fine’, she texted.
‘At home?’
‘In Parra.’
‘If you give me the address I can put them in your mailbox later tonight I’m going that way.’
She thought about it for a moment and gave him the address of Lucy’s house. She knew she was here for a while, wedged between her mother who was looking at the wall towards their house as if she could see through it, and Lucy who was pretending to be engaged in the TV but was really trying to look at Clare’s phone.
‘Who is it?’ Lucy turned to say to her. ‘On the phone?’
‘Just someone from work. He’s going to drop my keys off later into your mailbox.’
She sat up straight and sighed before pronouncing, ‘Thought it might be your father begging for forgiveness.’
Clare looked over at her mother but she was still trying to stare her way through the wall. ‘Your man can come in, you know, if he wants.’
‘No, not today. Not my man either. Just someone I work with.’
How could she possibly ever explain it to Paul?
Lucy raised her eyebrows at her mother’s back and declared, ‘Who needs a chocolate biscuit?’ before leaving the room without waiting for the answer.
Her mother turned and looked at her, gave a weak smile before shifting her gaze towards the television. Clare looked at her mother’s profile, trying to find someone in there, pushing her way back through to the present, to what she’d seen in her sometimes when she could be bothered to look: some kind of resistance like in those times her mother had left to stay with Lucy. But even then, she had only moved next door.
‘What?’ Rose said softly, still not looking her in the eyes.
‘Just…do something.’
It made Clare want to punch someone, just sitting there. Instead, she picked at the loose threads of her skirt. Inadmissible thoughts. Clare forced herself now to be someone else, the daughter with the nice personality who was visiting her mother from out of town. She slowed down her breathing, watched the loose threads on her skirt. It was stuffy in here. Almost hot. The weather was preparing to drift into summer. Her mother sank down into the couch and yawned. Lucy came back with a packet of chocolate biscuits, a bottle of cherry brandy and three small glasses. She watched Lucy pour the drinks, the ritual of these two women clinking small glasses together without even considering their action, same as she had all her life. Her mother exhaled cherry brandy breath beside her.
‘It’s too hot,’ Clare said suddenly, surprising even herself as the words she was thinking in her head popped out of her mouth without her permission. On the street outside – the sound of tires screeching, feet running. Someone screamed.
‘I’m going to go outside. Get some air.’
Her mother didn’t look up. Scoffed her brandy and poured another. Nodded her head. That was it.
Clare stepped cautiously on the porch as though it would help stave off any unwanted attention from people on the street who couldn’t care less about her. Somewhere between the lights of windows and street lamps and cars, she could see a twentyish woman in leopard-print pants being consoled by another girl with the same brown ponytail and gold ballet flats.
‘It’s alright,’ she was saying, ‘the paint will come out and besides it matches anyways. The paint and the leopard print.’
Mostly, everyone else seemed to be walking off down the road now, in different directions. She looked at the front pavement of her yard and quickly worked out why the show was over. Someone had thrown balloons full of white paint everywhere. They had burst on the fence and the concrete as if the front yard had been shot up with a giant paintball gun. One paint balloon sat like an oversized egg in the middle of the image her father had painted there. The word ‘Boats’ was largely wiped out in the attack, along with most of the image of a boat. ‘No More’ sat by itself underneath the top arch of a circle like an omen.
When she looked up someone was waving. Paul. Across the road. He pulled himself off the white van he was leaning against and walked over towards her with a set of keys in his hand.
‘I just saw the most incredible thing,’ he said. ‘These guys in a lowered Honda, they pulled up in front of your neighbour’s house and threw paint balloons at this giant picture of a boat in the front. I think it said “no more boats”’.
She looked past him to the van. ‘What’s in the van?’
‘Nothing. Rows and rows of racks that we put the bread on
in the morning before we deliver it places.’
He placed the keys in her hand and looked over to the house again where her father was creeping out from the left side, a great big plank of wood in his hand.
‘Man, you’ve got some fucked up neighbours there.’
It was too hot outside as well. The heat sat heavily on her skin. ‘Take me somewhere,’ she said when he was up close, startling him so that he almost fell back.
‘Where?’
She looked back at her father who was just behind the side gate now, peering cautiously over, picking up more loose bits of wood and rock, like he was getting ready to launch a one-man assault. For a moment when he looked up he caught her eye, and looked at her blankly until a small balloon flew by the side of his face, distracting him. Clare turned to Paul, ‘Take me anywhere.’
He ran his hand back straight through his hair and lifted it off his eyes so that he could really look at her. ‘Alright.’
In Paul’s van there was some kind of jazz playing. Not what she had expected. Clare would have pegged him for an R’n’B man like her brother – but he had layers, she was beginning to realise. People grow up, or maybe he was always more grown-up than she had given him credit for. At this moment he must have felt like more of an adult than she was.
They headed down Victoria Road towards the city and she wound down the window. Words had deserted her, finally. She did not feel any pressure to speak. Her hair slipped out of the clip she had tied it in, wisps of the blond streaks the hairdresser put in last week moved around her face in the breeze from the open window, distracting her, and suddenly she felt completely sure she had not remembered to button her pants. Everything was surreal. At one point in time, in some younger day, she had always meant to own a van like this with a mattress in the back so that she could drive somewhere, anywhere, out of here. She touched the crotch of her pants lightly. Everything was buttoned. Check. The van smelled of buttery pastry. She wanted to lick the air.
When they stopped it was in a side street underneath the Harbour Bridge. Paul got out and walked towards a small ferry pier there, across the harbour from Luna Park. So close to the city and it was quiet and still. They sat cross-legged on the planks of the ferry pier, only the heavy sounds of the water beneath them. Paul stretched out his legs.
‘I like it here. I like just sitting here, watching the boats come in under the bridge. Your neighbour would hate it, I suppose. Not a boat man.’
‘That’s my dad. The man next door. Except it’s my parents’ place. You picked me up at the neighbours.’
In the light, his face looked etched. People looked different when they were not moving. A small yacht sailed by, a woman on the bow waved at them sitting there.
‘Sometimes I have dreams about it, you know. Coming to Australia on this small overcrowded fishing boat. It’s totally like the whole boat-people story you see on the news. I see those incessant waves hitting the boat, people lying in the dark in the ship’s hull, clutching children, throwing up all over one another in silence. Actually, my family came on a plane when my mother was pregnant with me. We were one of the last Vietnamese refugee families to come here in the early eighties. But you know, I still imagine we came by boat.’
‘My dad, you know, he was a boat person. He came in at the end of the whole populate-or-perish thing in the late ’50s. Not as a refugee, but you know, still on those boats he seems to hate at the moment.’
‘What’s his problem?’
‘Don’t know, really, probably a lot of things. I just think, he’s old and he’s angry that he’s not in control anymore. He’s always had a thing about migrants these days not working as hard, not trying to fit in as much as he did but, you know, it’s nothing extreme, just the usual racism, I guess. His best friend died recently and he was forced to retire. That’s it maybe, he can’t handle change.’
Paul nodded his head, breathed deeply. ‘You going back to Surry Hills or Parra tonight?’
She watched the water. Parramatta. She couldn’t stand the thought of it. She could either be with her mother who had nothing to say, or her father who had too much.
‘Can you take me back to Surry Hills?’
This late at night the trip was quick. She was so tired and not tired at the same time. There were too many things going on in her head and she couldn’t make sense of them. She watched Paul flick the van into park and noticed for the first time that he wasn’t as frail as she had imagined he was.
His arms were solid-looking, sturdy. The muscle on his upper left arm stood out with the small flex required by the shift in gears. Outside, the weather was changing now; she could feel that cool wet in the air that comes after a sudden snap of heat. It was the kind of wet that brought you out of yourself again.
‘Clare? This is it, isn’t it? Your place?’ She looked at him again. Realised that they must have passed too much time in silence since they pulled up there, while she was looking at his arm.
‘Yes,’ she leant over and picked up her purse. There was a scar just underneath his chin. She couldn’t read him, couldn’t tell what he was thinking, he tapped his hands against the steering wheel and watched her like he was really trying hard to understand something about her. Maybe he was someone completely different to what she had imagined. Outside it was beginning to rain. The wet was creeping its way into her skin and she was starting to feel more awake than she had felt in a long time. She leant closer to him and said, ‘I think you should come upstairs.’
18.
The morning after. Rose stood on Lucy’s front porch in an old red silk slip that Lucy had lent her to sleep in, and the felt overcoat she was wearing when she came over the previous night. In her hand there was a mug of tea, strong to make the hangover fade quickly. This morning she was the only person in the universe. The cars were gone, Lucy was asleep, the street had stilled itself. Her daughter left with a man last night without even saying goodbye.
Clare didn’t think Rose knew what she got up to, but she had seen it, the desire. She knew Antonio had seen it too. Rose watched them both from the window of Lucy’s house last night: Clare getting into a van with a young Asian man, Antonio, plank in hand, standing at the side of their house watching Clare.
Her daughter had had lots of men, or men had had lots of her. Rose was not sure, but she had watched these boys come and go over the years. Clare never seemed to like anyone enough to want them to stick around. What Clare did not understand was that you had to give a bit, and you had to stay a bit, and sometimes you just needed to be quiet for a while.
And sometimes you needed to get away from someone for a while if you were going to stay with them. Rose had done that too, done it more than Clare realised. That was, after all, why there was such a large age gap between her children, because she had moved next door with Lucy for a couple of years in between having Clare and Francis. Clare hadn’t seemed to notice. She had just waved at her absent father over the fence and gone back inside the house to play with Lucy and Stone.
Lucy and Stone. She had not thought of Stone in a very long time. What was her real name? Something like Samantha. It was the early 1970s and everyone had to be someone slightly different from themselves to make a point about something. Stone made Rose realise that she could fill an ocean with the things she did not know, like for example that women could be lovers, or that they were fighting wars over in Vietnam with chemicals that made your skin melt off your bones.
If you turned on the television back then, everyone was moving and shaking, everyone knew a lot of things and had a lot to say about it. Rose and Lucy knew so much about how to make cheap meat off-cuts into a giant shepherd’s pie, and which industrial cleaners didn’t make your skin itch so much, and how to rub lavender into the sweaty spots on your arms and legs so that you didn’t smell like you’d been working in the kitchen of a hostel all day when you went for a dance at the Polish Club after work.
Lucy had met Stone in those first couple of years when Rose was absent.
She had not been absent in any real sense; it was just that after Clare was born, she had trouble being completely present. It was like, one moment she could be there sipping a cup of tea, rocking Clare’s bassinet, and everything was sharp-edged and bright, and then she was in a fog again and it was as though she was speaking through plastic.
Rose looked over to her own front yard where Antonio had emerged. His thick cargo work pants rolled neatly up past his ankles, his black boots on. In his right hand he was carrying a bucket with several objects inside. Above him, two of the construction workers looked down from the balcony of the apartment block and watched him. Antonio obviously saw nothing but the concrete on the ground before him. She watched him put his cane down on the ground gently, watched him lean over and support his descent to the ground with his good arm. He pulled a sponge from his bucket and started to scrub the ground.
For a moment she saw Antonio as those two construction workers would have seen him. His skin had that leathery tan of old age, still with muscles protruding from beneath his saggy skin. His white hair was unclipped, wild, but there was something in the efficiency of the way he moved that said this man meant business – he had a plan.
She would talk to him about all this business when the time was right – Antonio, her lost lover, her husband, was disappearing into something, she did not know what. She pulled the belt of her overcoat tightly in around her waist and stepped into Lucy’s yard barefooted. As she crossed over from Lucy’s yard to her own she knew that she was entering something, the beginning or the ending of a chapter in their lives, she did not know which.
She watched him for a while, from the other side of their front gate, until he looked up and smiled at her and she got caught there not knowing how to respond. Yesterday morning she had asked him calmly, rationally, to remove the paint from their front yard and just when she’d almost returned him from some irrational argument about Nico turning up in their front yard, this guy John Solomon had showed up at their door from some kind of political organisation, saying that Antonio was a hero. He’d shaken Antonio’s hand firmly, gripped his shoulder and squeezed it in camaraderie, as if he was a lieutenant welcoming back his most prized soldier. Then the logical world she had tried to pull Antonio back into began to fall apart again.
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