His Other House

by Sarah Armstrong

  He flushed. It was true he hadn’t mentioned Marianna. But not for the reason Rachel probably thought. Not talking about Marianna meant he could imagine, for moments here and there, that things weren’t quite so fucking hard.

  She laughed lightly and ducked her head. ‘Perhaps it was wishful thinking.’

  What on earth could he say to that? ‘Well . . .’

  She picked up the lantern. ‘Good night, then.’ She nodded formally.

  ‘Good night. Thanks for the goggles.’

  She disappeared down the path in her pool of yellow light. He watched as she entered her mother’s house and light glowed from behind the curtains.

  He was flattered by her attention, of course. But it would be a thoroughly bad idea to flirt back, to get himself an easy little hit of excitement.

  He thought about phoning Marianna but she’d be asleep in their big bed by now, the fan ticking overhead. He wondered if she dreamed of their lost babies. That afternoon, after she had slid through his arms onto the grass, he’d sat beside her holding her hand, not knowing what more there was to say, until she rose heavily, as if she was stiff and cold. ‘Give my love to Bill,’ she said, blinking back tears. As she climbed the stairs to the verandah, he’d wanted to call after her and reassure her that everything would be okay. Except he wasn’t sure that it would be.

  He made his way across the dark room to Bill’s junk drawer and felt around for a torch. He flicked on a pencil torch as a car pulled up out the front, headlights illuminating the whole room for few seconds.

  ‘Hey ho!’ Bill called as he came through the door. ‘The whole town’s out. Before you go off to bed, my friend, I need your help with something.’ Bill gave him a strong one-armed hug, his other hand holding a big green garbage bag.

  ‘What kind of help?’ He took the garbage bag from Bill. ‘What’s in here?’

  Bill crossed to the sink for a glass of water. ‘A plant for the garden. You smell like chlorine.’

  ‘Yeah, I had a swim at the town pool.’

  ‘After hours?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m not going to ask how you got in,’ Bill said. He’d had a haircut that day and he looked like a private school boy again, his brown hair short at the back and sides and longer on top. Bill always radiated energy but tonight he was buzzing. He put the glass down with a clunk. ‘So, we’re going to fix that cover back on the hot water system.’ He unbuttoned his green shirt and hung it over the back of a chair.

  ‘Haven’t you got a solar hot water system?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re afraid to climb on the roof at night?’ Bill grinned. ‘We won’t have time in the morning. We’re leaving at five, remember?’ He disappeared into his bedroom and emerged pulling a t-shirt over his head. ‘And I refuse to pay someone ninety dollars to do something that will take us five minutes.’

  Quinn shook his head. ‘You’re mad. How much did you drink at dinner?’

  ‘I’m not drunk. Come on.’

  Quinn followed Bill up the ladder, the breeze shifting the branches of the tree beside them. Bill heaved himself over the gutter and onto the roof, tools clanking in his builder’s belt. Quinn climbed after him, staying low to the corrugated tin. He’d never been very good on roofs.

  On the ridge of the roof, Bill crouched and looked around. ‘I can’t tell you how happy I am to be leaving this town behind. Country life was Ces’s fantasy.’

  The houses in the street were barely discernible black shapes, the occasional window showing a faint glow. Bill squatted by the hot water tank and even in the dim light from his head torch, worked confidently and quickly. His granddad had been a mechanic in rural Victoria and Bill had always said that he could use a screwdriver before he knew how to walk. ‘Okay, press on this while I fix it down,’ he said.

  Quinn leaned his weight on the metal plate as the sound of the crying baby floated through the darkness again. He closed his eyes.

  Bill tapped him on the knee with the screwdriver. ‘Got the screws?’

  Quinn reached into his shirt pocket.

  ‘How was your day?’ Bill asked.

  ‘Busy. I was at the Mater.’ The cooling roof pinged around them.

  ‘And how’s Marianna?’

  ‘Not so great.’

  Bill stopped working and flicked his head torch up.

  ‘I told her I need to take a break from IVF,’ said Quinn.

  ‘But she wants to start a new cycle straight away?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Bill tossed the screwdriver lightly in his hand. ‘She could probably do with some time to recoup strength . . .’

  Rachel’s bathroom window was just below them and Quinn heard a tap running. If she was in there, she would be able to hear every word. He whispered, ‘I just need some time off . . . I don’t know if I should be asking for it . . . but . . .’

  Bill’s voice was gentle. ‘You know there’s no rule book on this, mate.’

  Quinn looked up at the spray of stars and found the Southern Cross. ‘If the first baby had made it, he or she’d be three now. Imagine that.’ What a different person Quinn would be: the father of a toddler. That once-possible other life now seemed utterly unreachable. ‘It’s just too hard.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll feel differently in a few months.’

  ‘No. What I really want is to stop completely. Permanently.’

  The screwdriver clattered loudly down to the gutter. Bill said, ‘Why don’t you give yourself some time off and then see how you feel. Don’t close off your options yet.’

  Quinn nodded and watched as Bill scrambled down to retrieve the screwdriver. Bill well knew how badly Marianna wanted to be a mother.

  As Bill finished the job, the streetlight on the corner flickered and rectangles of light from the living room sprang out onto the lawn below.

  Quinn slid down to the gutter after Bill and as he edged over onto the ladder, he heard footsteps through the house next door and Rachel’s bedroom light came on.

  He remembered her face lit up by the lantern. Her features had a pared-back quality: a fine nose, high cheekbones and thin bow lips. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was about her directness that was so appealing. He’d met plenty of direct people in his time, but she had something else, a child’s transparency with none of the naiveté. As if she knew perfectly well that she was letting you see her thinking.

  The first time he’d seen her at the pool he’d been walking around the streets, his second night in town. He’d heard splashing and crossed to the wire fence, where he’d seen someone swimming steadily down the dark pool, slender arms dropping neatly into the water. A woman. He imagined her looking up and noticing a man’s shape at the fence and knew he should go. But before he moved away, she’d heaved herself from the water and crossed to the little grandstand and climbed nimbly up the support struts to the roof. Then she crossed the roof to the very edge and, without pausing, launched into the air, limbs wheeling. He had almost called out but she made it over the concrete strip between the grandstand and pool, and dropped into the water with a great splash. It wasn’t until he’d seen her at the pool again tonight that he had realised it was her. She was clearly a bit of a thrill seeker. All the more reason to steer clear of her.

  He’d never been unfaithful to Marianna. Once, at a conference in Wellington, he’d run into an old girlfriend, Isobel, and he’d been jolted by how familiar she was, her profile and the slope of her shoulders, as if a template of her body had stayed stored in him over the years. His old desire for her had flickered for a few moments. But a fleeting desire, not acted upon, did not make an infidelity.

  Chapter Eight

  Rachel unpegged the sheet from the Hills Hoist and pressed the cotton to her cheek. The damp twilight fell around her as the crickets started up their rasping. How many hundreds of times had her mother taken sheets off this line for Rachel’s bed? This was motherhood, she thought. Countless small, domestic acts of love.

  In the rainy
season her mother used to hang the sheets over the heater in the living room. Rachel’s father would walk into the fuggy room after work, unknotting his tie, and say, ‘It’s like a Chinese laundry in here. Open a bloody window, Emily.’ Rachel and Scotty would have dry fragrant sheets on their beds that night.

  She folded the sheet into a square and held it to her chest. Who would wash and fold Rachel’s sheets when she was dying?

  Heels click-clacked inside the house. One of her aunts. The tap ran and pots clanged. Whoever it was – Beryl or Shaney – was doing the washing up from lunchtime. Rachel already knew the disapproving smile she’d find when she went inside.

  Next door, the screen door slammed and a waft of clove smoke reached her. Through the bushes she saw Quinn sitting on the back step, leaning forward on his knees, blowing a steady stream of smoke.

  Why on earth had she told him last night that she wished he weren’t married, and what must he think of her now? She’d been emboldened by the dark and the sense of there being nothing to lose. An imminent death did that for you, she supposed. She pressed the sheet against her chest and inhaled the fragrance of her mother’s laundry powder.

  He shifted and shielded his cigarette with a cupped hand, like the boys used to do at high school. He sat very still, his head hanging. He wasn’t thinking about her, she felt sure. She, on the other hand, had been replaying their conversations in her head all day. It was horribly familiar, this pattern of hers: pouring energy and interest into the unavailable – and usually uninterested – man. She’d wasted three years on an infatuation with her first boss, who had taken her out to lunch just often enough to keep her keen. Karl might have been available for a relationship but was emotionally distant. His reticence to talk had made him seem rather enigmatic at first, then – after he’d moved in, after they’d bought a car together – she’d just felt exhausted and deflated by how hard it was to get him to talk about anything even vaguely heartfelt.

  She suspected that one of the reasons she found Quinn so attractive was that he didn’t come back at her with teasing, defensive repartee like Karl used to, like most people she knew in Sydney. She imagined lots of women found that attractive in Quinn and, given the way he looked, he no doubt had a long line of female patients half in love with him.

  Inside she heard Beryl or Shaney trotting around. She unpegged a pink pillowcase and hoped her aunt wouldn’t come looking for her. She didn’t want Quinn to know she was there, just over the fence.

  After talking to him about Aceh she’d lain awake, remembering. She’d worked on automatic pilot during the day over there but at night, on the hard sleeping mat, with Pete the cameraman snoring nearby, she had wondered if this was how a nervous breakdown felt: not dramatic or sudden, but as if the stitching that held her together was being slowly, steadily unpicked.

  Every day that she spent in Corimbi, she felt more and more certain that she couldn’t go back to her job. She wasn’t committed to her work the way most of her colleagues seemed to be. And for all the things she hated about this town, she felt some measure of belonging, or perhaps being there simply meant she could take herself back to a time before Scotty died. In Aceh, she had thought a few times of their land up in the hills – the acreage where her parents had intended the family to live – and figured that it had come to mind because that land was the most peaceful place she’d ever known.

  Quinn’s phone rang inside the house and he stood and stubbed out his cigarette on the cement steps. The smell of cloves lingered after the screen door slammed. Rachel unpegged the last pillowcases from the line and picked up the cane washing basket. It was time for her mother’s pills.

  ‘Hi Dad! Bloody hot!’ He was clearly one of those people who thought you had to talk extra loudly on a mobile. ‘Yeah, he should be in Lae by now.’

  Rachel carried the washing inside. She could still hear him as she walked through the back porch. ‘I had a swim in the town pool last night . . . No, got in through a hole in the fence.’

  She wondered if he knew she’d overhear him. But of course that was part of her crazy fantasy, the idea that he’d given her another thought after she’d left last night.

  •

  Inside, Beryl was drying the plates and called down the hall to where Rachel stacked sheets in the linen press. ‘Double sheets on the second shelf.’

  ‘What?’ said Rachel.

  ‘Your mum puts the double sheets on the second shelf.’ Beryl wore a green and purple dress that emphasised her big bosom.

  ‘Right.’ Rachel left them where they were. Her mother wouldn’t be making any more beds.

  Beryl bent to put plates away. ‘I brought you a pineapple upside-down cake, love.’

  Rachel walked down the hall to the kitchen. ‘Thanks, Aunty Beryl. That’s very kind. Would you like a slice with a cuppa?’

  ‘No thanks, love.’ She swung the tea towel over her shoulder. ‘How’s your mum been today?’

  ‘Much the same.’

  Beryl sighed. Emily was the youngest sister and Beryl had once said that she couldn’t bear the idea that Emily would go first. ‘Well, she’s sleeping so I’ll head off. I want to talk to her about giving your dad’s tools to Mike. He saw them when he put the roof back on the shed the other day. They’ll just rust out there and of course Mike needs to be set up all over again.’

  ‘I want the tools,’ said Rachel.

  ‘Oh.’ Beryl moved the Tupperware cake box so it lined up with the edge of the bench top. ‘I just thought . . . given that Mike’s tools were stolen from his ute and all . . . When do you use tools, darling? I mean . . . aren’t you in an apartment?’

  ‘They were my dad’s. I want them.’

  Beryl nodded jerkily, her face blank. ‘Of course.’ She walked to the front door. ‘I’ll come over tomorrow to see if she wants to do the crossword.’

  ‘Okay, thanks.’

  ‘You’ll tell her I dropped by?’

  ‘I will. Thank you for the cake.’

  Through the front window, Rachel watched Beryl stop on the path to pull a weed from the garden bed. Beryl had always been in Rachel’s life: capable, generous, interfering. Rachel’s cousin Mike probably had more right to the hammers and chisels and screwdrivers than Rachel. In the days before Rachel knew how sick her mother was, Beryl and Ted and Mike had brought her mother food, taken her to doctor’s appointments and played endless games of rummy with her.

  In the kitchen, Rachel held the folded, clean tea towels to her face. They smelled of the sun. She imagined sunlight captured in the weave of the linen and had the absurd idea of taking them to her mother and laying them on her pallid skin.

  She quietly opened her mother’s bedroom door and found Emily awake, propped up on pillows. ‘Hello, darling.’ The tremor made her sound as if she reconsidered everything she said.

  ‘Hello.’ Rachel sat gingerly on the side of the bed.

  ‘Would you mind getting me a new nightie? I’m quite sweaty.’

  ‘Do you want a wash?’

  ‘No, just a nightie.’

  Rachel stood and lifted the top sheet off her mother. Beneath the cotton nightdress her mother’s body shook. If Rachel forgot for a moment that it was her mother, then the delicate motion reminded her of a butterfly’s quivering wings. Rachel worked the nightie over her mother’s hips. ‘When I saw Kate this morning she said she’s got a spare air con. A portable one. I know you said you don’t want one, but it’s baking in here.’

  Her mother sighed. ‘If it will make you happy, sweetie.’

  ‘It will.’ Rachel peeled the nightie over her mother’s stiff back and arms and tossed it into the washing basket. ‘Beryl came by with a cake.’

  ‘Yes. I played possum, I’m afraid.’ Her mother slumped back and regarded her own body, naked but for the big white nappy. Her tremulous hand pointed to her wrinkled belly. ‘This body that can barely get me out of bed once did such a wondrous thing as grow two humans.’

  Rachel found a fresh nightie in
the dresser. ‘Did you want another baby?’

  ‘We tried. But I was forty-four. It’s probably just as well. Imagine growing up knowing you were a replacement for your brother.’ She closed her eyes.

  Rachel slipped the neck of the nightie over her mother’s head, wanting to say, Imagine growing up knowing you were responsible for your brother’s death.

  Chapter Nine

  Marianna reached for an orange and weighed it in her hand, running her thumb over its dimpled skin. On the other side of the shop a man jiggled a tiny bundle of baby. Marianna turned herself bodily away from them. The orange seemed alien now, an object from outer space that had come to rest in her palm.

  Someone laid a hand on her arm and spoke quietly, ‘Marianna.’ It was Clare, who she used to job-share with at the high school. She looked like she’d just got out of bed, her hair messy and face pale.

  ‘Oh, hi.’ From the corner of her eye Marianna saw the man hoist the baby onto his shoulder with one arm and reach for a bag of apples.

  Clare dipped her head to meet Marianna’s gaze. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ Marianna shrugged. ‘So-so.’

  Clare nodded and Marianna could feel her pull back a little. She put the orange back on the neat pyramid of fruit as Clare’s little girl, about five years old, with a mess of blonde curls, approached from the other side of the shop. The girl beckoned her mother down and whispered in her ear.

  Clare looked up at Marianna and grimaced. ‘Molly asked me if it’s you that’s having a baby.’ She swallowed. ‘I’d told her, because we are . . . giving you our Moses basket.’

  Marianna nodded. It seemed like years ago, that conversation about the straw bassinet.

  Clare glanced at Marianna as she spoke, ‘Marianna had her baby but the baby was too small and it died.’

  Marianna felt a wave of gratitude for the fantasy that her baby had been born instead of sucked out of her while she lay spreadeagled on an operating table.

  Molly squinted up at Marianna. ‘Why did it die?’