His Other House

by Sarah Armstrong

  The doctor asked, ‘How many laps do you swim?’

  ‘I don’t count. I just swim ’til I’m tired. You?’ She stepped into her swimmers and reached under her dress to pull them up.

  ‘Oh, a kilometre, more if I can.’ He stood at the edge of the pool, his back to the water. ‘I prefer ocean swimming but it’s not such a great idea at night. Although I did it plenty as a kid.’

  ‘Where did you grow up?’

  ‘Out there.’ He waved his hand towards the trees. ‘On a small Pacific island.’

  ‘Yeah? Which one?’ She was curious about him, despite her desire to get into the water, curious about the way he always seemed to hold himself back from being too friendly or enthusiastic. She had seen it in the way he related to her mother, as if he had to keep himself in check.

  ‘I’m not sure you would have heard of it,’ he said.

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Ocean Island. Banaba.’

  She laughed. ‘You’re right. Never heard of it.’ She shrugged her dress off and bent to pick up her flippers.

  ‘It’s pretty remote.’ He paused. ‘Well, have a good swim. Thanks for sharing your pool with me.’ He nodded at her and dived in.

  She slid her flippers on. The last time she’d been to the Pacific, she and Karl had made the mistake of going to an island resort filled with honeymooners. The first day they’d met a just-married couple, Canadian diplomats, and ended up eating a couple of meals with them. Ernst and Vera. Earnest and Truth, Karl had called them behind their backs. Rachel found herself seeking them out, guessing where they might be reading books or playing cards. On the third day she admitted to herself that she didn’t want just their company, she wanted what they had. She’d gone for a long walk to the other side of the island, weeping, and when she got back she’d said to Karl, ‘How long can we go on like this?’ He had replied, ‘We can’t,’ and he moved out of her apartment the day they flew home. As if he’d been waiting for her to say those very words.

  She crossed to the pool and couldn’t see the doctor. He hadn’t surfaced. She tugged off her flippers and ran along the pool’s edge. She imagined diving in and groping for him in the dark, then a shape appeared near her at the shallow end. He surfaced and sucked in a huge breath.

  ‘That was impressive.’ Her voice was hard.

  He turned to her, rubbing his eyes. Breathing heavily, he said, ‘Bloody hell. How much chlorine do they put in here?’

  ‘They pour it in ’cause the kids all piss in there. I do too, sometimes.’ Her heart still thumped in her chest and she turned and walked back to her flippers. What the fuck was he playing at?

  ‘You really piss in here?’ he called after her.

  ‘Old habits are hard to break,’ she said without turning around.

  The water had kept trickling from Scotty’s nose and mouth, as if it had taken over the husk of his body.

  She dived in and swam hard, arms slapping onto the water and breath bubbling loudly in her ears. Mindless, exhausting swimming.

  When she pulled herself from the pool, her legs rubbery, the doctor was sitting, rubbing his hair with a small towel. He pointed to the fruit bats streaming silently overhead. ‘Did you know they piss on themselves in summer to keep cool?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s why they pong.’ She dropped her flippers to the cement. ‘You know you scared the shit out of me with that underwater swimming malarkey.’

  His eyes widened. ‘Did I? I’m sorry.’

  She smiled. ‘Are your lungs the size of a small car or something?’

  He put his towel down. ‘Do you want to try it?’

  ‘Try what?’

  ‘Free-diving. Well, free-swimming.’ He grinned at her. ‘If you do it properly it’s like entering another dimension. Everything slows down and you’re aware of the smallest sensation.’

  ‘Why does everything slow down?’

  ‘Come on,’ he tipped his head towards the pool, ‘put your flips on and I’ll show you.’

  She sighed, dropped her towel and followed him to the pool’s edge. She’d swum underwater plenty as a kid. After training they’d dare each other to swim as far as possible and would surface with pounding heads and black dots speckling their vision. But she’d never done it the way he taught her: floating on the surface first, letting her breath slow and her muscles relax, imagining her heart rate slowing.

  She could have stayed floating there for ages – water sloshing into the pool gutter and his easy voice beside her – but he told her to take one slow, deep breath then sink under and kick, using as little effort as possible.

  She still sometimes imagined Scotty’s last moments. For years she’d pictured animal panic, until she convinced herself that drowning was peaceful. Now, in water that was warm and somehow benevolent, she wondered if it would really feel so unnatural to breathe it in. Didn’t amniotic fluid flow in and out of a baby’s lungs in the womb? Halfway up the pool her lungs began to burn and she imagined her cells frantic for oxygen. Despite the burning, she was calm and she hoped this was how Scotty’s last moments had been, his eyes open to the brown river water.

  She made herself surface and when she sucked in air – the air that Scotty never got to – it tasted faintly of trees and dirt and tar from the road. She was more than halfway up the pool. Quinn popped up near her. Her head spinning, she breast-stroked to the end, rested back against the tiles and looked out at the line of fig trees, dark against the night sky. He would have thought of their mother as he died, she was sure of that. Who would her mother think of? Rachel was determined to be with her as she slipped away, to hold her hand as she left this life.

  ‘You swam quite a distance,’ said Quinn from the next lane. ‘Some people just have a greater lung capacity. Like the islanders. They could stay under for ages.’

  ‘Thank you for showing me that,’ she said. She meant it.

  ‘That’s okay.’ He pulled himself from the pool.

  They sat side by side on the bench and dried themselves. She wanted to ask if he ever thought about the three minutes. As a teenager she’d been obsessed with the idea that everyone had three minutes’ worth of oxygen in them at any one time; that everyone was effectively a few minutes from death. She’d tried to talk about it to a doctor she’d interviewed a few years back and he’d smiled patronisingly and made some comment about how close everyone was to death always, if only they knew.

  He pulled on his t-shirt and stood up. ‘I’m on foot.’

  She wheeled her bike beside him down the wide, quiet street and it struck her that he walked like an islander. It was the loose-limbed, easy thing she had noticed when he first came to visit her mother.

  ‘So where is this island of yours?’ she asked. The footpath under her shoes was sticky with squashed figs.

  ‘Up in the Kiribati group. Do you know it?’

  ‘I do. So it’s a coral atoll? What were your parents? Missionaries?’ She shifted her damp towel to the other shoulder.

  ‘It’s not a flat atoll like you’re thinking. It’s a big pile of bird shit like Nauru. Was a big pile of bird shit.’

  ‘So it was mined like Nauru?’

  ‘Yeah. Although mining finished long ago.’

  ‘Was your dad a miner?’

  She thought he wasn’t going to answer, then he said, ‘Yeah. He ended up Island Manager.’

  ‘So how long did you live there?’

  ‘About ten years.’

  A television blared with laughter and applause in a nearby house, doors and windows open to the hot, still night. They passed a row of timber cottages, barely two metres apart. The tip of a cigarette glowed red on one of the front verandahs and Rachel caught a glimpse of a face.

  ‘I was on the island until I was fifteen ’cause my mother refused to send us to boarding school until then,’ he said. ‘She taught us for the first few years of high school.’

  ‘And you got into medicine?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She must have been a go
od teacher.’

  ‘She was very bright.’ He paused. ‘And very lonely.’ He turned to her with a smile. ‘I can tell you’re a journalist.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The way you ask questions. It feels a bit like an interview.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her cheeks flamed. She’d been told that before, including just the other day by Kate. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay. It’s what you do every day, I guess.’

  ‘Not lately.’

  ‘Which newspaper do you work for?’

  ‘No. I work for ABC TV. I’m a producer.’ She hoped he wouldn’t ask about her work. Since she’d arrived in town she had almost managed to persuade herself that there wasn’t a job waiting for her in Sydney.

  ‘Would I have seen anything you’ve worked on?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Sounds like interesting work, though. You must get to meet fascinating people.’

  They waited for a car to pass before crossing the street. Her bike bounced and rattled down the deep gutter. ‘If a twenty-minute interview means meeting someone, then I guess so,’ she said. ‘We just drop into people’s lives, get what we need and take off again.’ She pictured the woman in Aceh standing outside her tent, waving, blank-faced, as Rachel and the crew drove away. Rachel couldn’t even remember her name.

  They had reached their end of the street where someone long ago had planted a line of poinciana trees that now arched over the footpath and road.

  ‘How’s your mum?’ He spoke in the doctor’s voice and leaned on Bill’s fence post, a pink handtowel dangling from one hand. She guessed it was something he’d grabbed from Bill’s linen cupboard.

  ‘She’s less drowsy. Thank you.’ She smiled. ‘Your change in dose did the trick, after all.’ She started towards her house and then turned back. ‘Would you like a pair of goggles for the chlorine? I mean . . . if you plan to swim again. I have a spare pair. They’re new.’

  ‘Okay, thanks.’ He smiled. ‘Especially if you’re going to keep pissing in there.’

  She laughed. ‘Like I say, old habits are hard to break. I’ll drop them over.’

  •

  Inside, she stopped in the doorway to her mother’s room. It would seem so unremarkable to others, an old woman asleep on a floral pillowcase. Rachel inhaled her mother’s smell and tried to store it away: that grassy, slightly dusty smell she had always known.

  She hung her wet towel in the bathroom and went to find the goggles. Through her bedroom window, she saw the doctor sitting at his dining table drinking a glass of water and reading something. He still wore his board shorts and t-shirt and sat very still, barely moving as he read. She remembered him stretching at the pool and the pale indent between the muscles on the underside of his upper arm. She knew how soft the skin there would feel and the precise way her thumb would drop into the indent. She found the goggles and pushed the drawer shut. When she’d first met him he’d struck her as a bit soft, a bit wet, but now she found herself thinking about him often and she knew all too well the reason why. Desire had always been the way Rachel distracted herself from anything difficult or painful. And wasn’t unrequited desire the very best distraction of all?

  The doctor stood and crossed to the fridge where he opened the freezer door. She imagined he’d be a relaxed lover. Gentle, maybe even a bit passive. Rachel remembered the way he held her mother’s arm and the tender way his broad fingers settled on her wrist and felt for her pulse.

  Chapter Seven

  He was poking around in Bill’s freezer when the lights went out and the fridge shuddered into silence. He carried the half carton of vanilla ice-cream to the front door to see if the whole street had lost power. After the blackout the other night he should have got himself organised; he didn’t know where a torch was, let alone the meter box.

  The street was dark and quiet; the kind of quiet he had craved as a kid. After school, he and Tom would race down to the beach and pick their way over the reef. Then Quinn would sink down to where it was cool and muted and let himself be carried out to where the sea floor dropped away into what was supposedly the deepest ocean trench in the world.

  He sat on Bill’s front step. The ice-cream had gone icy but he spooned it in anyway. If Rachel hadn’t come to the pool tonight he would have stayed for longer, free-swimming back and forth, slowly wearing down the tension gripping his throat and shoulders.

  That evening, before he’d left Brisbane for Corimbi, Marianna had come to stand beside him as he washed his windscreen in the driveway. ‘Do you ever think of that little brown-haired girl?’ she’d asked.

  He flicked the water on the squeegee away. ‘Yeah. Sometimes.’

  ‘But have you seen her? You know . . . Has she come to you?’

  ‘Not for a while, no.’ He used a rag to clean the windscreen wiper blades.

  ‘Maybe she gave up on us. Found herself some other parents. If you need a break from this then you need a break, Quinn. I understand that. But I feel so helpless. I’m thirty-eight and we don’t have six months to take off. Let me have one more cycle with the Sydney doctor I told you about and then we can take a break.’

  He swallowed and laid the squeegee on the car bonnet. ‘I need a break now, Marianna.’ How many times would she make him say it? His face heated up.

  She said, ‘The worst of it is that you seem to have given up. You’ve decided it’s not going to work.’

  ‘It’s not working, Marianna. All we have is miscarriages. I would rather not have a baby than risk another miscarriage.’

  She took a shaky breath and pressed a hand to her mouth. He put his arms around her and she rocked her upper body against him. He’d tried to hold her more tightly, to stop the strange jerky movement, but she’d slipped down through his arms and onto the grass at their feet.

  A door clicked shut next door and Rachel walked down her path carrying a camping lantern, a towel still around her waist and a pair of goggles dangling from her hand. He hadn’t realised she was bringing them over tonight.

  She swung his gate open. ‘Special delivery,’ she called.

  ‘Hi.’ He stood up and stepped inside the house. ‘Come in.’ A baby cried thinly in the distance and a tight thread of sadness pulled through him.

  She followed, in her yellow circle of light, and passed him the goggles. ‘Here you go. Try these.’

  He fitted them to his eyes and they stuck there on their own. They smelled rubbery.

  ‘They’re new but they didn’t fit me,’ she said and rested the lantern on the dining table. ‘Something to do with my small eye sockets or something. You can keep them.’ Her own goggles had left red marks around her eyes.

  ‘Thank you.’ He smiled and plucked the goggles from his face. ‘I guess I’ve got perfectly average-sized eye sockets, then?’

  She smiled. ‘It would seem so.’

  He wondered if she had a partner in Sydney. She had the self-contained quality of a woman who was not on the lookout for a relationship. ‘Do you swim every night?’ he asked.

  ‘Most nights.’ She fiddled with the handle on her lantern. ‘You realise we’re not meant to be there? It’s probably Break and Enter.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He smiled. ‘I gathered that.’ He knew he should have a shower and get to bed for a decent night’s sleep but it was peaceful standing in the softly lit room, talking to her about nothing much.

  ‘We used blankets to climb over the fence when I was in high school,’ she said. ‘But the new fence is too high, so I had to cut it.’

  ‘You cut the wire?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Her swimmers emphasised how broad-shouldered and small-breasted she was; she had a classic swimmer’s physique. He’d watched her in the pool and her swimming style was effortless and efficient, but on land she had that slightly off-hand and embarrassed way of moving that he associated with teenagers.

  She glanced towards the open door. ‘Notice how much quieter it is in a blackout? As if the electricity creates noise as it pushes its way t
hrough the air.’

  ‘It’s not that all the TVs and stereos and air conditioners are turned off?’

  She smiled. ‘Oh, now that’s a much less romantic explanation.’

  ‘It is,’ he said.

  ‘But you’re a scientist, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Not given to romantic thinking, I guess.’

  ‘I don’t think of myself as a scientist, I have to say.’ He smiled and dropped the goggles onto the table.

  ‘What exactly is your specialty? I assumed you were a GP, but Mum says not.’

  ‘I’m a specialist, a general physician . . . a diagnostician, if you like.’

  She examined him for a moment. ‘So you understand an awful lot about what goes on in the body.’

  ‘Yes, and that there is so much we don’t understand.’

  Rachel re-tucked the end of the towel around her waist. ‘You asked what programs I’ve worked on lately. I went back to Aceh for a story on how they’re going a year after the tsunami.’

  ‘And this is where you felt like you just dropped in and out of people’s lives?’

  ‘People lost everything. Their entire family, their home, their livelihood, and a year later they’re still living in a tent. So we just pop in and shoot some sequences of them wandering around looking devastated and then fly off again.’

  ‘But isn’t that why you do it? To bring it to people’s attention.’

  She sighed. ‘No. Actually we only do it if it’s a good story. The humanitarian side of things is Bill’s job.’

  ‘You know he’s in town until tomorrow?’ Bill was at yet another farewell dinner, at a friend’s place up one of the bushy valleys outside town.

  ‘Yes. I had a cuppa with him this morning.’ She looked around the big open-plan room. ‘I hadn’t been in here since they split. He gave her almost everything, didn’t he? Ces must be living in that Brisbane apartment hemmed in by stuff.’ She glanced at him. ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘My wife’s name is Marianna.’

  ‘Kids?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t know why I thought you were single,’ she said.