His Other House

by Sarah Armstrong

  Marianna turned in her chair. ‘What did you just say? About a grandchild?’

  Her father paused, one hand on the door handle, his eyes wide. ‘Ahh . . .’ He looked away.

  ‘You forgot that I had another miscarriage?’

  ‘The next baby, sweetheart. That’s what I mean.’ He smiled and ducked his head apologetically. Then he pointed the penknife at Quinn. ‘Come on.’

  Marianna pushed her dessert away. He couldn’t have forgotten about the miscarriage, could he? Quinn put his hand on Marianna’s thigh and spoke quietly, ‘How’re you going?’

  She shrugged. She wouldn’t cry in front of her father. ‘You don’t have to play that stupid game, you know.’

  Quinn kissed the side of her head and stood up. ‘I’ll keep him out of your way.’ He followed her father out into the barely grassed front yard. The two men moved about in the light spilling from the double doors, casting shadows on the high paling fence. Her father – in his shorts and polo shirt, wineglass in hand – still carried himself like a privileged expat, straight-backed, gesturing to show Quinn where to stand. Quinn obeyed with a mock salute, dressed in a tattered t-shirt and board shorts.

  Gail stood up and hugged Marianna where she sat at the table, squashing Marianna’s cheek into the buttons of her dress. ‘Don’t be too hard on your dad, darling. He was terribly upset when you called us this last time.’ She smelled like perfume and sour wine.

  ‘Was he?’ Marianna wondered if her mother was embroidering the truth or if Marianna knew her father so little, after all. She remembered when Siti, one of the maids in Jakarta, lost her youngest sister to typhus. Marianna’s mother had given Siti time off and money for the trip home to her village. But a couple of weeks later, when the maid had returned and was struggling to do her work, Marianna’s father complained that she was taking advantage. Marianna had sided with her father, in the way that children do, and she remembered standing in the doorway of the living room watching the half-hearted way Siti polished one of the teak tables. Marianna wished now that she’d made some gesture of sympathy, but she had just walked through to the garden, no doubt conveying disapproval of Siti’s excessive grieving.

  A yell came from outside. Marianna’s father lifted his arms in a victory salute.

  ‘Oh, God. Look at them,’ said Gail. She shook her head. Brian was positioning Quinn so that they faced each other, a couple of metres apart. Then, without hesitation, Brian threw his open penknife into the earth near his own bare foot. From where Marianna sat, it looked as if it had hit him but she knew it would have landed right by his toes.

  Marianna’s mother collected a stack of dirty plates from the table. ‘One of us should go and distract them.’ But she headed to the kitchen.

  Marianna picked up the remaining plates and serving dishes. She stacked them high because she would never leave one plate on the table by itself. Her little rituals were not about creating good luck anymore; they prevented bad luck. Or worse luck.

  In the kitchen, Gail scraped plates into a bucket, looking out the window to the front lawn. ‘I thought he’d learned from what happened to Gary.’

  When Marianna was a child, her father made all visitors to the house play Mumble Peg; only children under twelve were exempt. Marianna’s Aunty Pearl would deliberately throw the knife far from her foot and scowl at Brian when he protested. Marianna used to try hard. She never hit her foot, but the terror of it always made her piss her pants a little. They’d stopped playing the game when her Uncle Gary had stabbed his foot, breaking a bone.

  ‘Lydia and Pearl and families are definitely coming at Christmas. We’re going to rent the Phillips’ and Mortons’ places,’ said her mother as she piled rinsed plates on the draining board, bangles jangling.

  ‘That’ll be a crowd. You remember we’re going to Quinn’s dad?’ Marianna tied the mussel shells in a plastic bag and dropped it into the bin. ‘We found out the baby was a girl.’

  ‘Oh, darling.’ Her mother turned, her eyes soft.

  ‘She had a chromosomal problem.’

  ‘What sort of problem?’ She frowned, her mouth always so mobile and expressive.

  ‘An extra chromosome. Sends everything haywire, you know.’

  Her mother sighed. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Is it something likely to happen again?’

  No! No! Marianna just shook her head.

  ‘Darling . . .’ Her mother paused. ‘You know that I so want you to have a baby. But if you don’t end up with a child you could still have a good life, you know.’

  ‘Oh, Mum.’ She closed her eyes for a moment. Even her mother thought it wasn’t going to happen.

  ‘I’m worried about you.’ Her mother caressed Marianna’s shoulder.

  ‘Yeah.’ She tried to smile. ‘Me too.’

  ‘Come out here, Marianna,’ her father shouted. ‘Show Quinn what you’re made of!’

  She went to the door. ‘You know I don’t play it, Dad.’

  Her father turned, the penknife open, blade pointing at her. ‘It’s a game, darling. A game. Come out and play.’

  •

  Later, in bed, looking up at the ceiling, she said, ‘How did he forget that our baby died? His own grandchild?’

  Quinn smelled of the Garam he’d smoked out at the cliff edge before bed. ‘Well, that’s your dad for you. Barely aware of what’s happening around him.’

  ‘You didn’t have to go along with him, you know. It’s a stupid, dangerous game.’ In the moonlight coming through the glass doors, she saw how tired he was and heard him picking at the skin around his thumbnail. At home he left small flecks of blood on the sheets.

  ‘I was just trying to stop things going completely pear-shaped.’ Quinn rolled over to face her. He stroked her back and trailed his hand down to her bum. ‘Come here.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m too tired.’

  He moved his hand to her hip and drew circles on her skin.

  She said, ‘Why don’t you talk about the baby?’ He didn’t reply for a minute and she made herself wait.

  His finger stopped moving on her hip. ‘I do.’ He sounded shaky.

  ‘It was only twelve weeks, but she did exist.’

  He rolled onto his back and rubbed his hands over his face. His voice was muffled. ‘I know. Our imperfect little one.’

  She heard tears in his voice and felt a rush of compassion and then a kind of vindication. God, she hated this way she needed others to feel the same pain as her. Sometimes when she saw a pregnant woman she’d find herself wishing for that woman to lose her baby too. Then the woman would know what Marianna felt.

  He sat up. ‘Come out with me while I have a smoke on the balcony?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Outside, he lit a cigarette and leaned his elbows on the railing. His naked body was silvery in the moonlight. She sat in the creaky director’s chair beside him.

  ‘Want one?’ He offered one of the three Garams that he’d bludged from her father.

  She hesitated. For four years she’d not had a cigarette and barely a drink. ‘No.’

  He blew a stream of smoke into the warm air and looked out to the ocean. She remembered climbing the stairs to this room when she was about eight. They’d flown from Jakarta for their first Christmas at the newly finished holiday house. On Boxing Day, Marianna had snuck upstairs to her Aunt Lydia where she rested on the bed after lunch, the same bed where Quinn and Marianna now slept. Lydia had been pregnant with Shelly and had been lying on her side with a pillow between her knees. Without a word Lydia had lifted her shirt and Marianna laid her hands on her aunt’s taut belly and waited for the strange slippery feeling of the baby moving. To eight-year-old Marianna, pregnancy had seemed easy and commonplace. All the family – the cousins and aunts and uncles – talked about the baby in Lydia’s womb as if she were a real person and already part of the family.

  Quinn ashed his cigarette into the garden below. ‘I imagine you have someone in mind for egg donation?’

  ‘I thou
ght I’d ask Shelly. She’s finished having kids and Johnno’s had a vasectomy.’

  He drew on his cigarette and nodded.

  She said, ‘I should at least look into it before the six months break is up . . . So will I ask Shelly?’

  ‘Sure. Go ahead and ask her.’ He flicked the cigarette down onto the sandy lawn and turned to her, his face impassive.

  ‘Do you want a baby, Quinn?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ His voice caught.

  ‘You really have given up, haven’t you?’ she said. ‘You don’t think we’ll ever have one.’

  ‘Not everyone who wants a baby ends up with one.’

  At the certainty in his voice she felt herself floating in the warm briny air, suspended there. ‘You can’t really know that about us, Quinn. Can you?’

  ‘No. I can’t.’ He reached for her and she stood up and let him hold her and stroke her hair. She rested her face against his warm, familiar shoulder and thought of that baby she’d seen on the net. There had been a small smear of blood on the sheet under it and Marianna had wondered over and over about the mother, whose blood that surely was. Was the mother watching as people photographed her baby or was she in another room, sinking like a stone? Did she know that strangers like Marianna – voyeurs, not scientists or doctors – would look upon the face of her newly born, newly dead baby girl? Marianna’s eyes had filled with tears thinking of that woman, but she couldn’t stop herself returning to the page to look at the photos again and again.

  Nor could she tell Quinn that ever since seeing those pictures she kept seeing an image of a lifeless baby in her own arms. She listened to Quinn’s heart, wondering if she would ever find her way back to normal.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Her father was fiddling with the coffee machine as Marianna came down the stairs in her dressing gown. In the morning light coming in the kitchen windows she could see through his white hair to his scalp.

  He looked up. ‘Coffee, signora?’ He had bought an expensive Italian coffee machine for the Diggers house and made a passable café latte.

  ‘No, thank you. I’ll have tea.’ She flicked the jug on and looked out the window. A big ship sat on the horizon. Her dad was trying, so she should try too. She turned back to him. ‘Would you like black coconut rice for breakfast, Dad? Like Narti used to make.’

  He was busy at the coffee machine, rubbing coffee grounds between thumb and forefinger. ‘Do you make it often?’ he asked.

  ‘A few times a year. It’s never as good as hers. I think I’ve got her fish curry down, though.’ A group of kids were playing footie on the green outside, yelling in high voices.

  ‘Thanks, but I’ll stick with toast. We brought a loaf of Sol sourdough down.’

  ‘Okay.’ She would make the coconut rice anyway. She didn’t have a pandanus leaf or fresh coconut milk but it would still be sweet and comforting. She bent to get a tin of coconut milk from the cupboard. Overhead there was a scrape, the sound of Quinn getting out of bed.

  ‘Dad.’ She held the small tin in her hand and watched him tamping the coffee. ‘Did you really forget that our baby had died?’

  He took his time to finish tamping before he looked up. ‘I’m afraid I did. It slipped my mind.’ The edge to his voice told her that he was hung-over.

  ‘Right.’

  He sighed and leaned back against the kitchen bench with a tight expression. ‘I’m sorry.’ His jaw muscles worked. ‘To be technical, it’s not a baby at that stage, it’s a foetus. Maybe it would be easier for you to think of it like that.’

  Her heart pounded and she was faintly aware of cheering coming from the kids outside and Quinn’s footsteps upstairs. She squeezed the tin in her hand. ‘Why would that make any difference?’

  He tilted his head. ‘Ask Quinn. He’ll tell you it’s true. I understand it’s a hard process, darling, the IVF thing. But you need to keep perspective.’

  ‘I guess you thought that about it being a foetus and not a baby when you arranged to dispatch your second child?’ She regretted it as soon as she spoke, because she knew he’d repeat it to her mother.

  ‘What?’ His face dropped.

  ‘Mum told me.’

  He shrugged, his tone dismissive. ‘Well, that’s our business.’

  ‘And our baby is our business.’ The jug boiled and clicked off behind her. If her parents had let the second baby live, she’d have had a sibling. It wouldn’t have always been two against one.

  ‘Yes, well, you make that abundantly clear, darling.’

  ‘Don’t call me darling using that tone.’

  ‘Fine.’ He turned back to his coffee.

  ‘You’ve always wanted me to be different from the way I am. Do you even like me?’ Her stomach plummeted. It was the question she had always wanted to ask.

  He turned to look at her and she could see him considering what to say. ‘You’re not always an easy person to be around, Marianna. That was true even when you were a child.’

  She froze, standing there in the kitchen, a tin of crappy coconut milk in her hand, waiting for him to say more.

  ‘And yeah, it’s true to an extent that I wanted you to be different. Yeah. But it doesn’t mean I don’t love you.’

  ‘Loving someone means you love them as they are, so what the hell does that mean: that you love me?’

  ‘Oh, Marianna!’ His voice was exasperated. He turned back to the coffee machine.

  He didn’t like her. And she didn’t like him. ‘You know what, Dad? I didn’t have a choice when I was a kid. Now I do. And I don’t want to spend time with you anymore.’

  He glanced over his shoulder at her. ‘If that’s what you want, Marianna.’

  ‘It is.’ Tears clogged her throat. Quinn appeared at the bottom of the stairs in his pink boxer shorts, his hair tousled.

  She met his eyes. ‘It’s time for us to go home.’

  Quinn glanced at her father and then back to Marianna. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I need to go.’

  He paused, then nodded. ‘All right, I’ll go pack.’

  ‘I’m making you a coffee, Quinn,’ her father said.

  ‘No thanks, Brian.’ Quinn disappeared up the stairs.

  Marianna started after him, then turned back to her father. ‘Where’s Mum?’

  ‘Oh, you’re talking to me again, are you?’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Out walking.’ He opened the fridge and pulled out a carton of milk.

  ‘Tell her I’ll call her later.’ She could hear Quinn zipping up their duffel bag.

  Her father shook his head and shut the fridge door. ‘Don’t be melodramatic, Marianna. This is what I’m talking about. You don’t need to overreact like this.’

  She placed the tin on the bench and walked up the stairs. When she was seventeen and visiting her parents at their new posting in Singapore, a friend from boarding school had died. The girl had a horse-riding accident at her farm on the first day of the Christmas holidays. Brian had come to sit on Marianna’s bed a couple of weeks later and said to her, ‘You’ve got to learn to toughen up, kiddo. For your own good. You can’t go through life with such a thin skin.’ She had tried to toughen up. One day she saw a dog hit by a car and made herself walk on, leaving it writhing in the gutter. She went home and told her father. And he had laughed and said, ‘What? Why are you telling me this? You funny girl. You should have got someone to put it out of its misery.’ She had lain awake for nights thinking of the dog.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Quinn sat in his car in the hospital car park watching the sun set. Finally he turned the key in the ignition and headed out into the hazy dusk. What he’d really wanted to do was stay there in the car park where he didn’t have to think and didn’t have to relate to anyone. At the traffic lights his phone buzzed. It was Marianna.

  ‘Hi, darling,’ she said. ‘Have you left yet?’ He heard dishes clanking in the sink and knew the exact way she’d be leaning against the bench, her shoulder hunched to
press the phone to her ear.

  ‘Just heading home now.’

  ‘Could you do me a favour and go and feed Mango? I meant to do it at lunchtime and I forgot. Sorry.’

  ‘Yeah. Sure.’ He accelerated through the intersection.

  ‘Thanks. See you soon.’

  The traffic was slow and it took him twenty minutes to reach her parents’ yellow timber house with its manicured subtropical garden. Mango the cat came down to meet Quinn and wound herself around his legs. He flicked on the lights and found the hidden key. In the garage he opened a tin of cat food and forked the fishy muck into the cat’s bowl.

  While the cat ate, Quinn opened the pool gate, stepped over a twist of cat shit and unbuckled his belt. The big oval pool glinted in the light. He dropped his clothes onto the warm pavers, dived in and let himself sink until he was sitting on the floor of the pool, looking up at the choppy silvery surface. He remembered swimming beside Rachel the evening he taught her to free-swim, the dark shape of her body undulating through the water beside him. He’d managed to avoid thinking of her most of the day, but the few times she had drifted into his thoughts he’d been shocked by the rush of heat and desire that coursed through him.

  He pushed to the surface and floated on his back. Palm fronds rattled in the garden and the cat’s bell tinkled as Mango picked her way along the side of the pool. Quinn focused on his breath, each one marking a small increment of life. That’s why free-diving felt so timeless, so serene. There was nothing to measure time passing.

  He climbed out, found a towel in the pavilion and wrapped it around his waist. Over by the garage, he topped up Mango’s water bowl and squatted to give the cat a stroke. As a kid he’d always wanted a cat, but his mother was allergic to them. He turned off the lights and carried his clothes down to the car and tossed them onto the back seat. Then he drove towards home, towards the rain sweeping across the city from the west.

  He let himself think again of kissing Rachel, the feel of her lips and tongue, her skin under his hand. For a fleeting moment, as he drove along the leafy streets, he considered pulling the car over and masturbating, then he imagined someone coming across him, dressed only in a towel, wanking furiously in a side street. What a fucking fool he was.