His Other House

by Sarah Armstrong

Quinn looked down at some papers on his desk, heart thumping. ‘I ran into her there once.’ He was a fucking fool to imagine he could get away with this in a small town.

  Jim ran his finger down the fancy trim around the door. ‘She’s a real fish, that girl. Trained like a maniac after her brother died.’

  ‘Really?’ Was Jim trying to tell Quinn that he knew?

  Carol appeared behind Jim. ‘Um, Quinn. I’ve got three people waiting for you . . .’

  ‘Yep. I’ll be right out. Thanks, Carol.’

  His mobile rang again. It was his dad. He let it go through to message bank and went out to retrieve his next patient.

  •

  Quinn walked to Bill’s for his car to drive to the hospital and visit Alice. He turned down the back lane where purple jacaranda flowers lay scattered over the gravel and cars had left two tracks of bruised blossoms.

  He wondered where his mother and Tebano had sex. In the house? Surely not. Somewhere in the scrubby mined-out bush? He remembered standing at his bedroom window looking down on them as they worked together in the vegetable garden: his mother weeding in her sunhat and cotton dress, Tebano bent to the spade, looking over at her with his broad white smile. They spent a couple of hours there each morning, weeding, watering, staking plants. They always spoke in Gilbertese. She had learned it as soon as they arrived, spending hours at the kitchen table with a Kiribati woman. The other wives learned it bit by bit from their houseboy or at afternoon tea classes, if they learned it at all.

  Tebano had been hired as their gardener and odd-job man when they’d first arrived on the island and Quinn had adored him. He still remembered the gentle touch of Tebano’s calloused fingers as he showed Quinn and Tom how to direct the hose into the ditches around the tomato and capsicum plants. If Quinn had sensed in those early days that his mother loved Tebano, it would have seemed logical because he loved Tebano too. It was when he was thirteen and watching them in the garden one morning that he realised they were lovers. Tebano had reached forward and brushed something from her cheek and she looked at him with a softness Quinn had never seen her show his father. At first he had assumed it was a terrible secret he must keep from his father. Then, when it was clear that his dad tolerated it, Quinn was angry at them all.

  He dialled his dad’s number.

  He picked up on the first ring. ‘Hi, son. I’ve got you in my system now. I know when it’s you.’

  ‘How’d you go with your doctor?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s happy.’

  ‘I missed a few calls,’ said Quinn. ‘I thought something might be up.’ A car came up behind him and he stepped to one side, into the dusty weeds.

  ‘He’s given me the go-ahead for the trip.’

  ‘Really?’ The car crunched slowly past.

  ‘Yep. He says I’m in good shape.’

  ‘Good on you. Hey, Dad . . .’ He pictured his father sitting in his lounge chair, the volume on the television turned down. ‘Why did you turn a blind eye to Mum and Tebano?’ Blood pounded in his ears. ‘To their affair?’ He’d never named it like that. ‘Why did you let it go on?’

  ‘Why are you asking?’

  ‘I know it’s none of my business.’ A dog wandered along the back fences, stopping to lift a leg every few metres.

  ‘Ah, well.’ His dad sounded unperturbed. ‘It kind of is your business. You were there.’ He must be better; his voice was stronger than it had been for a while. ‘Well, the reason is that I loved her. Anyway, what was the alternative? You think I should have put a chastity belt on her?’ Quinn heard ice chinking in a glass. ‘And we had good times, you know, even after him.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I loved your mother. But I wouldn’t particularly recommend doing what I did.’ He sighed, then said, ‘What’s going on, my boy?’

  Tears sprang to Quinn’s eyes. ‘Oh, I’ve just been thinking about Mum.’ He exhaled and watched the dog disappear between a gap in someone’s paling fence. ‘And life here is pretty complicated at the minute, to be honest.’

  ‘Ah. Life can be like that.’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The night was so warm that Quinn couldn’t quite tell where his body ended and the air began. That feeling of blurred edges was relaxing but slightly disconcerting. He dragged the mattress over the living room floor to catch the faint breeze.

  Rachel stood at the kitchen sink pouring a glass of water, her long body pale in the street light filtering through the sheet over the window. She crossed to him and held out the glass. ‘I don’t remember it being this hot here when I was a kid. How hot was it on the island?’

  He finished drinking. Water was such a miracle when you were thirsty. ‘Hot and dry. And dusty.’ He lay on the mattress and shuffled over to make room for her. She smelled so good, salty and sweaty.

  ‘Do you miss it?’ she asked as she settled beside him.

  ‘Not the island. I miss the ocean there.’

  She lifted an arm into the air, as if to catch the breeze.

  ‘That very first night I saw you at the pool,’ he said. ‘You climbed up on the grandstand and jumped off the roof.’

  ‘Oh, you saw that?’ She dropped her arm and turned to look at him.

  ‘What were you doing?’

  She sighed. ‘I used to do it . . . when I was a teenager.’ She laughed. ‘It’s fucking scary. But you know you’re alive.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s why I do it.’

  ‘To risk death?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She paused. ‘It’s a terrible thing to think that you actually held your brother’s life in your hands.’ She cupped her hands. ‘And that you . . . tipped him out.’

  He wrapped his hand around hers and they lay in silence. He knew now that there was nothing he could say to reassure her. He stroked his thumb back and forth over her wrist and listened to her steady breath and the chirrup of crickets outside. He loved being here in this very place where she had grown up, listening to the same sounds she had heard as a little girl.

  He must have drifted off to sleep because he woke to find her gone. She appeared from the bedroom, pulling on her dress. ‘I better get back to Mum.’ She squatted beside him and drank from the glass.

  Outside a possum scrabbled up a tree trunk and onto the tin roof. She put the glass on the floor. ‘When I was little, Scotty and I used to think the possums were men in work boots on our roof.’

  He sat up. ‘Didn’t you wonder why the men were up there in the middle of the night?’

  ‘Not really. There are so many things you don’t understand when you’re a kid.’

  Moonlight coming through the door shone on the austere planes of her face, and he wished he could hold her all night, lying on the mattress, the breeze coming in the door, the possum stomping over the roof. He didn’t want to go home to Brisbane the next afternoon.

  She said, ‘I’m going up to the valley in the morning. Mum’s tenants at the farm have moved out and I need to cast an eye over things. Shaney’s coming to be with Mum.’

  ‘Did you ever live out there?’

  She stood and slipped on her thongs. ‘We were going to, but it never happened.’ She paused. ‘I better get back to Mum. She knows something’s different.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘In a lucid moment this morning she asked me if I was jittery because I want to get back to my job.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘That this is the only place I want to be. I hate that she thinks I don’t want to be here with her.’ She sighed. ‘Even when I’m sitting beside her, holding her hand, I have you buzzing around in my head.’

  ‘I know. Me too.’

  She took a breath. ‘Is this still a fling for you?’

  ‘I don’t know what to call it, but I guess . . . when you go back to Sydney, this will just become a mad . . . wonderful . . . moment in time.’

  She reached for the screen door and spoke rapidly. ‘You know, I’ve been thinking. I’ll stay up here, if . .
. if you leave her. If you want to be with me, I’ll stick around.’

  Something rushed down his body and his legs, as if scenes from his life with Marianna were shooting through him, spouting out over the floor. His breath caught in his throat. ‘You’d stay?’

  ‘That’s what I want to do. But you need to decide what you want.’ She opened the back door and was gone.

  He lay down again. You need to decide what you want. He had decided to kiss her. To let her into the house that first night they had sex. To see her again and again. To say nothing to Marianna. He had made dozens if not hundreds of small decisions already, each one compounding his betrayal of Marianna. It made him feel sick to think about it. He had, he realised, shifted allegiance. He and Rachel were no longer just fucking, they were making love. And every time they did the future became less clear and more painful to contemplate.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  She parked her mum’s Corolla at the bottom of the long gravel driveway. The tenants had thrown rocks into the deep ruts but she wasn’t going to risk bottoming out. She’d have to organise a grader and a few loads of gravel, or concrete tracks like Clarrie had at his place next door.

  She started up the steep driveway. Early morning rain had left everything smelling fresh and damp. Thick forest had grown up on either side of the dirt track and she recognised some of the rainforest trees her mother had planted, their crowns now high above the thicket of lantana. Halfway up the hill, she stopped to rest, out of breath and a bit dizzy. She wasn’t getting nearly enough sleep.

  She bent to pocket a few fat blue quandong berries to take back to her mum. Emily used to drive Rachel and Scotty out here one or two afternoons a week. They’d park at the top and troop down to the waterhole, where Emily would produce a Glad-wrapped hunk of cake and a bottle of cordial and they’d sit on the rocks and have a picnic, the kids taking off their clothes piece by piece. Rachel had loved floating in the waterhole, listening to the din of the cicadas and taking in the trees and the sky. It was their own private world, encircled by the trees and the rocks, the forested hill rising up to the ridge. Emily would breaststroke across the waterhole in her black one-piece, her short blonde curls held high out of the water. ‘When we live here,’ her mother would say, ‘we can swim every day.’ Before they drove the winding road back to town in time for dinner, they’d fire up the pump and water the orchard.

  Rachel rounded a curve in the driveway and the cottage came into view. She stopped still. How run-down it was; it looked ready to slide off its high piers. She hadn’t been out here in something like fifteen years and the roof was brown with rust and the paint had peeled off the timber cladding long ago. Her parents once had plans to extend the cottage. They’d even pegged out Scotty and Rachel’s bedrooms at the back: big square rooms with windows to the north.

  The tenants had left a great pile of flattened, soggy cardboard boxes in the middle of the overgrown lawn. Rachel spotted a kid’s plastic horse on the edge of the pile and picked it up. The purple horse had ridiculous doe eyes and a tangled nylon tail, and she tossed it back.

  She was trying hard not to think of Quinn. She was mad to think he’d choose her over his marriage. Mad like every mistress in history, she supposed. She looked at the falling-down cottage on its stilts. Fuck, she’d miss him, more than she’d ever missed Karl after they broke up. She finally felt like herself in her home town, like her true adult self, and she knew it had to do with Quinn and how she felt when she was with him.

  A shout came from down the hill. It could only be Clarrie making his way through the long grass, a red heeler bounding ahead of him. When he reached her, he said, ‘I’m gunna slash this. Those buggers were hopeless. Your mum’s best shot of them.’

  ‘Hi, Clarrie.’ He’d got scrawnier and the skin on his face had a strangely thickened, red quality, but otherwise he looked the same. He still wore a felt hat and rumpled green work shirt. She’d known him since she could remember; Clarrie was an old friend of her father’s who’d retreated to the hills and let them know about the property when it came up for sale. He was the one her mum called on when tenants phoned with a problem. Clarrie could fix anything.

  ‘I saw your mum’s car down the bottom and I thought it might be her.’ He bent and rubbed his dog’s head. ‘How is she?’

  ‘Not at all good. I nearly didn’t come out.’

  He shook his head. ‘Send her my love. She knows I don’t go into town, but give her my love.’ He looked towards the sound of a distant generator starting up then nodded at the mountain of cardboard. ‘I’ll burn that rubbish for you when we get a few dry days. Just needs a splash of kero.’

  ‘Thank you. How are you, Clarrie?’

  ‘I’m doing well, love.’ He walked to the nearby tap and called to his dog. ‘Come here, you!’ The dog lapped water from Clarrie’s cupped hand. ‘So, do you want to come back and have a cuppa?’

  ‘No thanks. I’ll just have a quick poke around and see what’s what. I need to get back to Mum.’

  He wiped his wet hand on his pants. ‘Have you got new tenants lined up? I might know of a bloke. He’d look after it better than this last lot.’

  ‘Actually, I’m thinking I might live here.’ As she spoke, she knew it for certain. Whatever Quinn decided, Rachel would live here. She imagined a simple life, growing vegies and swimming in the waterhole every day like her mum had promised they would. She’d find some work she could do from home, like the proofreading she’d done at uni. She didn’t need Quinn as a reason to stay, this place was reason enough. She’d even build the pontoon she and Scotty had planned for the waterhole.

  ‘It’s a wonder you lasted as long as you did in the city.’ Clarrie crossed his arms. ‘You’ll fix it up, then? Your mum didn’t want to spend anything on it. But it really needs work.’

  ‘Yes.’ She turned to look at the cottage. ‘Will you help me?’

  He nodded and smiled. She had a flash of him helping her father work on the cottage when they’d come out on weekends. She’d once noticed Clarrie smiling kindly at her father’s ineptitude with a saw. Even as an eleven-year-old she could see that Clarrie had tried to save her father’s pride. Clarrie and Scotty used to sit together at smoko for intense conversations about the land mullet or blue-tongue lizards.

  Clarrie called his dog to heel. ‘So will it be you and . . . Your mum said you have a fella.’

  ‘Just me.’

  ‘Good-oh, then.’ Clarrie smiled. ‘Neighbour.’

  She wanted to hug him, but she guessed he’d hate it.

  ‘Give your mum my best. I’ll see you soon then, love.’ He turned and walked back down the paddock to the path he’d trodden through the high grass. The dog raced ahead, a red and cream streak.

  She climbed the steep steps to the verandah and fingered the quandong berries in her pocket. Her mum had loved how high-set the cottage was and the way you could look over the treetops to the distant ridge.

  She would like to take Quinn up the back hill to the other ridge where you could see all the way to the ocean, where she and Scotty used to light campfires and cook damper. She’d take Quinn for a swim in the creek and they’d stretch out on the warm grey boulders to dry off. She hadn’t planned to say what she’d said this morning – she’d planned to wait until after her mother’s death – and it had come out so clumsily. She’d seen the startled look on his face. But she couldn’t go on, feeling the way she did, with no idea how he felt.

  She opened the door and stepped into the kitchen. The laminate benches were greasy and dotted with mouse shit. Something thumped in the ceiling space and dust trickled down through the light fitting.

  The idea of losing him and her mother at the same time was terrible and she was afraid of what was coming. That small cottage on their land was the only place she could imagine riding it out.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Quinn knocked on the front door and rested his hand on the sun-hot wood for a moment. The street was quiet. Everyone was i
nside, out of the heat, except for a few kids yelling down by the river.

  One of his shoes knocked a small pile of blue berries on the top step and two of them rolled off into the garden. Every time he thought of what Rachel had said – that she would stay – he felt sick and excited.

  Rachel opened the door as he lifted his hand to knock again. ‘Oh good, it’s you.’ Her voice was hushed. ‘I was afraid it was Shaney come back.’

  He stepped inside. ‘How’s your mum?’

  She shook her head, tears filling her eyes. He dropped his bag and hugged her, there in the open doorway, for anyone to see. She held him tightly and he breathed in the citrusy, faintly chlorinated smell of her hair.

  She took his hand. ‘Come through.’

  In her mother’s room the curtains were drawn and Emily lay propped up in the special hospital bed, eyes closed and mouth twisted into a rictus, her breath loud and laboured. The air smelled of air freshener and faintly of urine.

  Rachel crossed to adjust something on the air conditioner and Quinn pulled a chair close to the bed and took Emily’s cool, light hand in his. The path ahead of her was certain, more certain an outcome than birth ever was.

  ‘Emily. It’s Quinn Davidson. I’ve come to sit with you for a while.’ The rhythm of the breath was so stark in death, a reminder of all the mindless, silent breaths taken in a lifetime.

  Rachel sat carefully on the side of her mother’s bed and laid her hand on her mother’s leg, twig-like under the cotton blanket.

  ‘Do you want me to stay tonight?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘Please.’

  He held Emily’s bony hand, her fingers long and elegant like Rachel’s, her gold wedding band loose. He thought about all that those hands had done. They’d bathed Rachel when she was a baby, brushed her hair, tucked her into bed. Those hands had held her drowned son and then had to carry on with life. And soon they’d be gone. He hoped that his father had held his mother’s hand as she died. But he also wondered if she wouldn’t have preferred the big warm work-worn hands of Tebano.