His Other House

by Sarah Armstrong

  ‘Is this your usual evening drink?’ She came to stand beside him at the kitchen bench, where he poured tea into two of Bill’s blue mugs. ‘You’re sunburned,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah. I was a bit hopeless with the sunscreen on the weekend.’ He brushed the side of his nose and looked at his fingers. ‘Milk?’ he asked.

  ‘Just a bit.’ She leaned forward to watch as he sloshed in milk from the carton. ‘That’s good.’

  He leaned back against the bench and she stood by the fridge holding her mug in both hands. She said, ‘Sorry for barging in on you at the end of a long day. I just needed to know where things stand.’

  He nodded. ‘I understand.’

  ‘You understand that . . . ?’ She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘That you want to know what that kiss meant and what I’m thinking.’

  She closed her eyes for a moment and took a slow breath. ‘That’s exactly what I want to know. What it is you’re thinking.’

  He looked down at his tea. ‘I’m thinking that I really need to stay away from you because I find you . . . so attractive.’ He looked up. ‘And you know, that happens in life sometimes, and when it does you just acknowledge it and you don’t act on it and . . .’ He was burbling. He took a breath. ‘And that’s what we need to do.’

  She gave him a rueful smile and put her cup down, sloshing tea onto the bench.

  He needed to get her out of there. Why had he offered her a cup of tea?

  She reached for a cloth and wiped up the tea. Her hands shook as she squeezed the cloth into the sink.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. That bench has seen better days.’ He had a visceral sense of the precise distance between them. He turned away and lowered the heat on the pasta sauce. Sauce that Marianna had made for him and frozen and put in an esky for him to bring.

  ‘That smells good.’ Did her voice sound a little cool?

  He squatted and selected a white bowl from under the bench. He stayed on his haunches. ‘Oh, Rachel, I’m sorry . . .’

  ‘It’s okay. I’ll leave.’

  He stood up and put the bowl on the bench.

  She tipped the rest of her tea down the sink and looked at him with that clear, open face, everything written across it: her disappointment in him, her amusement at this sticky situation, her kindness, her aliveness. ‘You look really tired, you know,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘I’ve had some long days.’

  She held his gaze and he didn’t want to look away. Behind him the saucepan lid rattled. Everything slowed, the blood moving through his body, the breeze coming in the door, cars on the street outside. He had to resist the pull. Swim against it. He tipped his head back and looked at the ceiling. ‘Did you say you were going? I think you’d better.’ He couldn’t look at her.

  ‘Yes, I’m going. Sleep well, Quinn.’

  As she walked past him to the door, he reached out his hand, as if in slow motion, and took hold of her forearm. In that moment it was very straightforward: he wanted her more than he wanted to be a faithful husband.

  As they kissed, their breath ragged, he stepped them backwards towards the bathroom, pulling her, lifting her out of view of the street. She tasted like toothpaste and tea, her mouth warm and soft. He was surprised by how strong she was, how she gripped his upper arms and turned him so his back was against the cool tiles. God, he wanted to fuck her so badly. She hooked a leg around him and he took hold of her knee and unbuckled his belt and slid into her and they fucked right there, in Bill’s bathroom.

  Afterwards they sat on the tiled floor. He pulled his pants up and his belt flopped and his fly gaped and he put his head in his hands. Shit. Shit. The blinding rush of desire had gone, dissolved somewhere. What the fuck had he done? He turned to look at her and expected to see a stranger beside him but her face was familiar and friendly.

  ‘Bloody hell. What are we doing?’ He took her hand.

  She squeezed his fingers, her grip warm. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s okay. It’ll be okay,’ he said, not believing it.

  The saucepan on the stove rattled and voices from the street drifted in the open front door.

  •

  It was midnight and he had been awake for hours. He lay on his back, the sheet crumpled at his feet, his stomach tight as he pictured Marianna in their bed, sleeping on through the night. He sat up and swung his legs out of bed and even that motion felt foreign, as if his limbs were not his own anymore.

  He crossed to the window and slid it open. Distant cars droned along the Pacific Highway, heading north to Brisbane. He might be filled with remorse now, but he was kidding himself if he thought he hadn’t made a choice to do it. There had been a split second when he’d chosen to go with his desire for Rachel.

  He leaned his forehead against the cool glass and closed his eyes. He could picture Marianna exactly as she would be right now. She slept naked, even in winter, on her side, one knee pulled up, her long hair tangled over the pillow. At some point in the night, she’d get up to pee. Right this moment she might be awake, sleepily padding through their dark house.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Rachel knocked again on Kate’s front door but the house was silent, windows shut and blinds drawn against the heat. She walked around the side, gravel crunching underfoot, the afternoon heat radiating from the house bricks and the Colorbond fence.

  Kate was watering the garden just off the back patio. The smell of water on hot earth reached Rachel. ‘Hi,’ she called.

  Kate looked up and smiled. She flicked the hose and cool water scattered across Rachel’s arms and face.

  Rachel crossed the lawn and kissed her friend’s cheek. ‘Wet my legs, will you?’

  Kate directed the hose at her and the water flowed coolly down Rachel’s bare legs onto the grass. She flopped into a chair on the patio and watched as Kate picked yellow leaves from a gardenia bush and dropped them to the dirt. She and Kate had known each other since second class and she sometimes wondered if she knew Kate better than anyone.

  ‘How’s your mum?’ Kate said.

  ‘Oh, you know, getting steadily worse. Shakier, less mobile. She wants to go. She’s ready.’

  ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘I guess so. As ready as I could ever be.’

  Kate turned the hose on the small herb patch and the perfume of basil lifted into the air. She wore a white cotton smock top that Rachel remembered from years ago when Kate was pregnant with her son.

  Rachel said, ‘I need you to scold me.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Kate smiled. ‘Something to do with your mum? You making trouble, girl?’

  She took a breath. ‘I’m having a . . . a fling with someone and I need to stop before it does my head in.’

  ‘Ah well, you’ve come to the right person for a scolding.’ She moved the hose onto another bush. ‘He’s married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In Sydney?’

  ‘Here.’

  Kate looked at Rachel and laughed. ‘You’ve only been back three weeks!’

  ‘I know. I know. We’ve only . . . had sex once. But I . . .’ She found she couldn’t tell Kate how hard she’d fallen for him.

  Kate sighed. ‘Oh, Rach. This is not a scolding, this is just me. An affair’s messy shit. And there’ll be a mile-wide trail of wreckage, whether she finds out or not.’ The hose flooded the herb patch. ‘And I’m not saying his wife is your responsibility. Clearly he is the one doing the dirty on her.’ She narrowed her eyes at Rachel. ‘Do you know her?’

  Rachel shook her head.

  ‘Who is he?’

  She swallowed. This was why she’d come to Kate, to be shocked into seeing her own stupidity, to be dissuaded from this path, but Kate’s disapproval stung more than she’d imagined.

  Kate waited.

  ‘I’m not sure I should say,’ said Rachel. But she needed to tell someone, to say his name out loud.

  ‘Well, yes, that goes without saying. But tell me anyway.’ She smiled. ‘You k
now . . . Cone of Silence and everything.’

  ‘The doctor. Mum’s new doctor.’

  ‘The new, spunky everything-specialist?’

  ‘Quinn Davidson. He’s a general physician.’ She remembered the slick, hard slide of him into her. And how he had looked right into her eyes while they were fucking. She couldn’t call it making love. It was definitely fucking. She wondered if he looked that way at his wife too. Of course he did. What an idiot she was.

  Kate nodded, flicked her hat off and lifted the hose over her head, letting the water run down over her head and body. Her short blonde hair plastered itself to her skull and the cotton shirt stuck pinkly to her breasts. Kate turned off the tap and stepped under the shade of the patio, dripping onto the tiles. ‘If you want me to tell you that you’re behaving badly, then you know I can do that. But I’m worried about you. He’s married. Just end it, sweetie. End it.’

  Rachel wondered if she could have done it if she did know his wife. Shit, probably. Rachel had seen a photo on Bill’s noticeboard of Bill and Quinn and a dark-haired woman, all of them in their twenties, leaning against a brick wall, their arms around each other. Rachel presumed that the woman with the serene, oval face and long dark hair was Marianna.

  Kate brushed wet hair off her forehead. ‘God, it’s hot. Let’s go inside to the air con.’

  Rachel stood up. ‘Let’s go and find a waterhole in the hills.’

  ‘Nah. I have to drive Liam to soccer training.’ Kate pulled her wet shirt from her stomach.

  ‘In this heat?’

  Kate shrugged. ‘We should go find that air conditioner for your mum.’

  ‘Okay.’

  They entered the cool kitchen through sliding glass doors as the front door slammed and a teenage girl appeared. ‘Hi, Mum. Hi, Rachel.’ She dumped her bag on the floor. ‘Netball’s cancelled, so I’m going to the pool. You’re dripping on the tiles, Mum!’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I put your sunscreen back on your dressing table.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Jemma opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of water. She was like a child in the unselfconscious way she drank from the bottle, her head tipped back and eyes closed. But she was not a child. Her short, blue-checked uniform – the same one Rachel and Kate had worn – revealed almost all of her smooth thighs. Rachel hated to think of the boys at school running their eyes over Jemma’s body.

  Water dribbled down Jemma’s chin and she wiped at it with the back of her hand. ‘Can I borrow some money for tonight? Ten dollars?’

  Kate nodded. ‘Take some from your dad’s jar.’

  As Jemma rummaged around in Kate’s bedroom, Rachel asked, ‘Has she got a boyfriend?’

  Kate looked up from where she was pouring lemon cordial into two plastic tumblers. ‘No.’

  ‘Not that you know of, anyway.’

  ‘I’d know.’ Kate was curt and Rachel regretted telling her about Quinn. Had she really wanted to be dissuaded or did she just want to say his name out loud to someone she trusted not to gossip?

  Kate pulled a water bottle from the fridge and filled the tumblers. She passed one to Rachel.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Rachel could see Jemma in her bedroom, sitting on the edge of her bed, listening to her iPod, shucking off her shoes. She was fifteen, the same age as Rachel when she lost her virginity to Sean McGilvray. Rachel wondered how much Kate really knew about what Jemma got up to.

  Her own mother had been completely blind. Rachel had run into Sean down at the park one evening when they were both walking their dogs in the rain. Sean McGilvray was a year older than her, good-looking in a blond, square-jawed way and a swimmer too. That evening in the park they had stood on the river bank, in the misting rain, their dogs playing and wrestling on the grass. Sean had made it clear that he wanted her and before she’d been gone from the house fifteen minutes, they were having sex – if you could call it that – up against a tree in the mangroves. She didn’t tell him she was a virgin and hoped he wouldn’t guess.

  She remembered walking home through the dark rain, her dog pulling hard on the lead, and she’d been buoyed and warmed by Sean’s desire. At school the next day he had flashed her the briefest smile but otherwise ignored her and she prayed he couldn’t tell that she’d assumed they were now going out. The next night, though, she took her dog down to the park again, hoping he’d be there, and he was. She never particularly enjoyed the sex, but she loved his warm, muscled body against hers and the intensity of his focus on her. He told her she was beautiful and they used to sit on the river bank afterwards and hold hands. He told her about his dad’s snake collection and one evening they sneaked into his garage and he showed her the tanks of red-bellied blacks and browns coiled under fluoro lights, smelling of sawdust and piss. Sean was the one who showed her how to use a blanket to get over the pool fence at night, and together they’d climb up onto the tin roof of the little grandstand and leap over the strip of cement below and into the deep end of the pool. She would make herself do it again and again, fear thudding through her body.

  Rachel drank from the glass Kate had given her. The water tasted as though it had been in the fridge too long. ‘Did you know Sean McGilvray’s dad used to threaten to put a brown snake into the bed with Sean’s mother?’

  ‘Jesus!’ Kate raised her eyebrows. ‘Where did that come from? Have you seen him?’

  ‘No! And I don’t want to.’

  ‘My mum saw him the other week when he was visiting his mother. Apparently he’s divorced and, to quote Mum, looking worse for wear.’

  Rachel really did not want to see Sean. She didn’t want to come face to face with evidence of how one-sided her relationships had been right from the start. At least they had used condoms, which was more than she and Quinn had done. Sean would slip them from his back pocket and have her roll them on in the dark. Afterwards he’d tie the condom in a knot and put it in the plastic bag he brought to pick up dog shit.

  ‘I kept seeing him, you know,’ Rachel said.

  ‘Who? Sean? You mean after we talked to him?’

  Rachel nodded. Kate had been outraged that Sean ignored Rachel and confronted him at swimming training one morning and asked him how he liked meeting Rachel down the park. He’d looked horrified for a moment then laughed it off. Rachel had watched from the side, her towel wrapped around her shoulders, sick and humiliated.

  Kate drained her glass. ‘Why did you keep seeing him? He was such a creep.’

  She shook her head. ‘When we’d meet down the park, he was nice to me. He really was. I just couldn’t bear to lose that.’

  •

  Driving home through town, Rachel turned up the air conditioning and wondered how many people on the street were having affairs. How many of them went about their business – shopping, chatting to the butcher, waiting in the queue at the hardware store – while they held their secret close? She imagined it like a warm river stone tucked inside their shirts, something they returned to finger and touch when they had a private moment. And how many wives or husbands suspected something but said nothing? When she travelled for work, infidelities were common: the cameraman fucked the fixer, the sound guy fucked the barmaid. One drunk night in Tel Aviv she’d ended up in the bed of a married producer from the BBC and the next day both of them had acted as if nothing had happened and by lunchtime she almost believed it hadn’t.

  She was sure that her experience with Sean had somehow wired her for illicit sex. There had been the same flaring heat with Quinn last night and afterwards, the familiar yearning shame of being with someone who was not wholeheartedly there. She had wanted him to ask her to stay the night so she could lie with him on his bed and stroke his body; she loved the way his skin felt so fine and dense under her fingers, as if the cells were tightly packed. But he had served her a bowl of overcooked spaghetti and they’d eaten it sitting on the floor in the living room.

  She had said, ‘This sauce is amazing. You’re a real cook.’

  ‘Ah . . . I didn�
��t make it.’ He paused. ‘I brought it from home. Marianna made it.’

  ‘Oh.’ And she’d known that he didn’t want her there, that he’d just been polite when he’d asked her to stay and eat. She had put her bowl on the floor.

  He’d put down his bowl too. ‘I better get some sleep. I’ve got another long day tomorrow.’ He’d leaned over and kissed her briefly but tenderly on the lips. ‘We’ll need to talk about this, about . . .’ He waved his hands around in the air between them. ‘But I can’t do it now. I need to get my head straight and I’m practically sleepwalking.’

  ‘Okay. Yep. Good night.’ She could sense what would come. He’d call a stop to things but he’d keep flirting with her. And she realised – with a relief that almost justified what she was doing – that she’d go along with it because it made her mother’s dying a little less unbearable.

  •

  She parked at her mum’s place and lifted Kate’s air conditioner from the boot. Inside, she stuck her head around her mother’s bedroom door just as her mother hung up the phone. ‘Hi, Mum. I’ve got it.’

  ‘Thanks, darling.’ Her mother’s voice was a whisper and her face was grey.

  ‘Are you okay?’ She put the boxy air conditioner down and squatted by her mother’s bed.

  ‘No, not good.’

  ‘It’s time for another lot of pills. That might help.’ Rachel shook the pills out of the bottle and passed her mother a glass of water. ‘What are you feeling? Where?’

  ‘Just feel awful.’ Her mother swallowed the pills, her eyes closed.

  ‘Should I call an ambulance?’

  ‘No. No.’ Her voice lifted. ‘Nothing like that. He’s coming by at five. I rang him.’

  ‘Jim Stanton?’

  ‘No. He was out. The receptionist put me on to Dr Davidson.’

  ‘Oh. Okay. Good. I’m going to set up this air con. I’m sure the heat’s not helping.’

  Her mother nodded. ‘How was Kate?’

  ‘She’s well. She sends her love.’ She plugged the air conditioner in, stomach fluttering at the thought of Quinn turning up in an hour. She stuck the hose out the window and ran a tissue over the dirty blades.