Too Close to Home

by Georgia Blain

  ‘And have you started at the job?’ The rat-a-tat of her questions was at odds with their stoned languor.

  Shane nodded. ‘Could do it with me eyes closed. Still, it’ll do us for now. Till we head home.’ He shook his head.

  Matt told Freya that Shane had won a land claim.

  ‘Two hundred acres,’ Shane added. ‘Took us ten years. But it’s ours now. Beautiful land.’ He reached across the table for another can of beer, the sharp crack of the ring pull breaking the momentary silence that had descended upon them all. As he put the can down, he looked across at Matt and grinned. ‘Told the kids you were a good bloke,’ he said. ‘Uncle Matt. Used to call him the Christmas angel. Found him in a pub, dressed up as a bloody angel, playing a recorder.’ He laughed, breaking into a coughing fit at the end.

  Matt glanced at Freya. ‘I’ve told you that story,’ he said.

  She couldn’t remember.

  ‘How I had no money and tried to do some busking?’

  He had told her. Years ago.

  ‘Shane found me. Took me back to his place in Brisbane and let me stay. Must have been there over a month.’

  ‘Longer than that.’

  ‘That was when you were finishing your law degree,’ Matt added.

  ‘And I got it.’ Shane sat back, arms crossed.

  ‘Jesus.’ Matt grinned. ‘I never saw you do any study. I was sure you were going to fail those exams.’

  ‘Practice. I was usin’ it all the time. Defendin’ everyone. Didn’t need to do any study.’

  Freya stubbed her cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray, the grey rubbing into the tips of her fingers. She stood slowly, stretching as she told them both she was going to bed. ‘I want to get some work done tomorrow.’

  Shane looked up at her and nodded.

  ‘I’m sure I’ll see you round. Maybe at the school?’

  ‘Night.’ Matt glanced in her direction as he poked at the fire with a stick, the sparks glittering against the darkness.

  In the lounge, she carefully extracted the sticky mango stone from the girl’s fingers and drew the blanket up closer around her body. She didn’t know what to do about the boy lying in the hall. She could lift him and put him at the other end of the couch, but he seemed comfortable enough where he was, deep in sleep, thumb in his mouth. In her room, Ella also slept, one long, thin leg sticking out from under the quilt. As she brushed her hair off her daughter’s face, Freya looked at her, wondering for a moment who she was and who she would become. It was a question that always hollowed her out, and she bent down to kiss her on the softness of her cheek.

  On the way to school that morning, Ella tells Freya she likes those new kids, Archie and Darlene.

  ‘They’re cool,’ she says, ‘and Darlene has her own TV, in her room.’

  It is hot. Workers from the council are using whipper snippers to trim the strips of grass along the pavement, and they have to close their eyes as they pass; needle-sharp offcuts fly through the stillness of the air, stinging as they swirl against their arms and legs. The rubbish bins are out, not collected yet, and the smell is overpowering in the heat – rotten meat and vegetables, sickly in their decay.

  Ella holds her nose. ‘Can I go and play there?’ she asks.

  ‘Probably,’ Freya tells her.

  ‘This afternoon?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’d have to arrange it.’

  She wants to know how Matt knows Shane, and Freya says that she’s not really sure. They met in Queensland a long time ago. ‘Before you were born. Before Archie and Darlene were born.’

  It’s not a concept that holds much interest for Ella; the time before she existed, a grey mass, dull and without definition.

  It’s recess in the schoolyard, the noise of children ringing out across the asphalt. A Year Six student greets them at the gate with instructions to follow her to the kindergarten rooms. Freya looks for anyone they recognise from day care, wanting to find some child that will ease Ella’s transition into the strangeness of this new world, because here in the playground all Freya’s old anxieties about school have returned.

  ‘No one ever liked me,’ she always tells Matt. ‘I was one of those kids that never got paired off when you had to find a partner.’

  It was made worse by the fact that she knew how the dynamics worked. She spent most of her childhood studying them, and as she watches the kids now she can see how little has changed. A group of girls skip, and in their centre is the powerbroker, perfect in her ordinariness. She is flanked by her two offsiders, each of whom continually vie to be the chosen best friend for the day. Other girls watch, clustered together, and slightly further away there are the ones on their own, who do not join in.

  Ella suddenly waves. Freya looks behind her and sees Shane, a rollie stuck to the edge of his bottom lip, one hand in his pocket. He’s wearing jeans and a freshly ironed cotton shirt, his tie askew. Archie clutches his leg with a tight fist, kicking idly at the dirt and staring at the ground.

  Freya drops back to tell him they are all meant to be following the Year Six girl.

  Shane nods. ‘Brought Darlene up here this morning.’ He points to where she is part of the group skipping. ‘Settled right in. Now, I’ve gotta convince him school ain’t so bad.’ He tries to extract his leg, but Archie only clutches tighter. ‘Got a meeting with the local member. Late already.’

  Freya offers to look after Archie if he needs to get going.

  Archie wipes at the snot running from his nose and refuses to take Freya’s hand. He hides behind Shane’s leg.

  ‘You’ll be right,’ Shane tells him as he pries himself loose. And then he apologises. ‘Stayed a bit late last night,’ he says. ‘Told Matt he’d be in trouble with the missus.’

  Freya tells him it was fine. She waves goodbye as he heads back to the street, before turning to both the kids.

  ‘Isn’t it lucky?’ She smiles brightly. ‘You won’t be alone now. You’ll have each other.’

  They haven’t heard her. Walking off together, Ella and Archie are already chatting, and Freya just follows, the sun burning the back of her neck.

  ANNA RINGS MATT AT work. She wants to have a surprise party for Freya’s fortieth birthday, a weekend up at Paolo’s place.

  He’s running late for a site inspection, and because of this he’s terse when he tries to explain that this isn’t something Freya would enjoy.

  ‘Why not?’

  She doesn’t like big gatherings, he says, and when Anna tells him they can keep it small, he starts to feel trapped.

  ‘The whole weekend – with lots of people. She likes to be able to get away from everyone. You know her, she’s always the first to leave.’

  But Anna doesn’t listen. ‘Leave it to me,’ she tells him. ‘I do know her.’

  He was young when he was with Anna. It feels so long ago that he rarely recalls their relationship, and when he does, he is unsettled by the fact he had once thought he was in love with her. She was (and is) beautiful, but not in a conventional way. Fine boned, with wide-set green eyes, set off by short black hair, she was like a pixie. Her limbs, hands and feet were too long, and her mouth too large, but this only added to her charm. Her clothes took her outside fashion but looked right; heavy platform shoes long before they came back into vogue, thigh-high striped socks, short denim skirts and silk blouses, combinations that came together as art.

  He saw her often – dancing, drinking, laughing and flirting until the evening had faded into morning – and they would smile at each other, the very fact that she had noticed him and he had noticed her bringing all the rush of life to a standstill. He wasn’t surprised when they finally talked, when she came up to him at a party and took his face in her hands, kissing him on the mouth and telling him she had always wanted to do that.

  ‘Always?’

  She had nodded vigorously. ‘Absolutely.’ And then she had kissed him again.

  Her grip on life and those around her was ferocious. It was thrill
ing and exciting and then wearing and exhausting. He remembers a morning when he’d watched a dog take a shoe in its mouth and shake it furiously, and he had thought, that is what Anna is like. She has me like that, and I’ve had enough. He began to extract himself, telling her he needed to study and earn money, and it was all too much. He remembers how bemused she had been by his protest, and then how bored. The practicalities of life should be left to take care of themselves. They were dull. And then when she realised he was serious, it hadn’t taken long before she’d left him alone – to his relief.

  Which isn’t to say he doesn’t like her. He does. He still admires her vitality, even if he is also a little wary of it, keeping enough distance to ensure that any grip she manages to obtain is easily released.

  He is out on site when she calls him back.

  ‘Don’t tell her,’ she warns him.

  ‘Tell her what?’

  ‘About the party.’

  He’s at a loss in the face of her persistence. He wants to ask her why she called to ask if he felt Freya would like a weekend away, only to ignore him when he told her that no, she wouldn’t.

  ‘I’m busy,’ he tells her. ‘Can we talk about this later?’

  ‘Let’s have a drink,’ she suggests. ‘Stop by my place. After work.’

  He walks down to the edge of a rock platform and looks out across the block of land, the slope steep and dense with silver grey eucalypts. In the distance he can see a sliver of Pittwater, dancing sharp and bright between the crooked branches of tall gums, white scribble against the blue sky.

  He sits in the shade of a tree, the breeze bringing slight relief from the heat, and watches a thin black line of ants weave their way through specks of lichen on the rock. As he lies back and shuts his eyes, he tries to envisage the house he would build here if he could do what he wanted. He knows what the client wants, he has been to their home, a stark concrete cube that is striking but austere. This is the kind of building that Simone, his boss, is renowned for; this is why people come to her. And his job is to replicate, despite the fact that she’s now sending him out on his own, letting him handle clients and build up his own practice.

  But, if he were left to his own devices, it would be quite different. Opening his eyes to the canopy of leaves, he imagines a canvas tent. That would be enough, he thinks. The site is perfect in itself, and he can only view any act of building as desecration. He smiles at how ludicrous his position has become. He is in the wrong profession, and it is not as though the realisation has suddenly dawned. But they have a child and a mortgage and this is the way in which he can make money.

  Standing slowly, he stretches his arms overhead, and then turns to the northern boundary of the site. There is a small creek that runs along here; dry now, it is nothing but twigs and stones clogging a trough in the dirt. Reaching down, he pushes a finger into the soil, checking for any moisture. It is sandy. Down to the east of the block, there are ant hills, red mounds with open mouths, and he avoids walking across them. The incline to the west is the steepest, and he looks up, shading his eyes against the afternoon sun. His hangover is not as bad as he’d expected but it’s there nonetheless. It’s the cigarettes he regrets: there’s a thickness at the back of his nasal passages, a polluted lump in his throat, and a heaviness to his headache.

  He had told Freya that the surprise of the evening had lifted his spirits, and it had. He’d felt alive this morning, as though he had shaken off the constrictions of his life and was once again young and without plans.

  When he’d met Shane, he’d been completely broke. He had hitched his way north, surfing and picking fruit on the way, finally stopping in Brisbane where he’d registered for the dole. It was warm, still hot days and afternoon storms, the clouds swelling, hanging low and heavy with no breath of air, until finally the rain came as the day eased into night, steam rising from the pavements. He’d thought about going home for Christmas. In fact, he’d even written to Freya, a card scrawled in the post office, telling her that he missed her (which he had) and that he was thinking of coming back.

  He’d slept out for the first couple of nights, waiting until he could pick up his first dole payment. He smiles when he remembers dressing up as an angel, putting plastic holly around his hair and wearing a pair of wings he’d found outside a department store. His plan had been an idiotic one, but he was young and even less adept at being entrepreneurial then than he was now. He thought that playing a tin whistle in the pubs might earn him a bit of money from the drunks.

  Shane had been playing pool that night. The pub was at the end of the street where he lived. He’d told Matt that times must be as tough for angels as they were for blacks if they were sending blokes like him out to earn a buck, and he’d bought him a beer and a meal.

  They’d ended up at his house at two in the morning, pissed and talking politics, lying on saggy couches, broken louvres wide open to let in what little air there was, mozzies whining all through the night. He had gone to sleep in the living room, waking to the stillness of another hot Brisbane morning and the heavy clunk of the plumbing as water groaned out of the taps in the bathroom.

  In the kitchen he met Lisa. Wrapped in a sarong, wet hair in a towel; she looked at him, dishevelled and hungover.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  The directness of her question was at odds with the shyness in her eyes. She was slight, with honey brown skin, white blonde hair and pale lashes, her gaze slipping away from him whenever possible, although she smiled when he explained how Shane had rescued him from continuing to make a complete fool of himself in the pub.

  He asked if he could have a shower. It had been a few days, he added, apologising if he smelt. She sniffed at the air, wrinkling her nose, her blue eyes quickly returning to the plate in front of her, burnt white toast spread thickly with Vegemite.

  She was gone when he came back into the kitchen. He made himself a cup of tea, and put some bread under the griller. Cockroaches scuttled across the blackened stove. The pile of dishes next to the sink threatened to topple over as he extracted a knife and rinsed it under the tap.

  He ate and then did the washing up, piling relatively clean crockery and pots across the kitchen table, leaving a note balanced on the top. He was going to pick up his dole cheque and then he would be back to collect his stuff. Thanks, he added at the bottom. The couch and a shower were a welcome change from the park bench he’d slept on for the last couple of nights.

  As he remembers, he stands at the highest point of the site, looking out across the block. He had forgotten so much from that time, and last night he and Shane had leant in close to the fire and talked, bringing up places and people that had slid into a part of himself that had been closed off. Names had returned slowly and he’d asked after each person as he recalled them; Shane had mentioned others who had been there and he could visualise some faces, not all. He shakes his head. Strange, he thinks, how Lisa had popped into his thoughts just then, yet neither of them had mentioned her last night. He wonders what became of her and where she is, smiling as he does so. They had only had a month or so together, but there’d been an ease between them that had made it seem much longer.

  He takes one last look out across the bush and then jumps off the boulder, feet landing in a carpet of dry eucalypt leaves, the sharp smell astringent in the breeze.

  Anna is on the phone when he stops by her house on the way home. She holds the receiver away from her ear as she opens the door, signalling that the person to whom she is talking holds absolutely no interest for her, and then she laughs loudly at something the caller has said.

  She is doing an interview. She has a film coming out in a month and is on the publicity rounds, she explains, hanging up.

  ‘There’s another call booked in half an hour,’ she apologises as she opens a bottle of wine and pours him a glass. She sits opposite him, and then nods in the direction of the courtyard. ‘Shall we go outside?’

  ‘What makes it hard is that it’s s
uch an unbelievably bad film,’ she continues as they take a seat next to the stone water feature. It trickles into two long pools that border the courtyard, each filled with waterlilies. ‘The director was an inexperienced idiot and I have to praise him. The script was awful and I’m expected to describe it as brilliant.’ She slumps slightly and he can tell that her dislike for this aspect of her job is genuine. ‘It will probably last two weeks on the screen. Thank Christ.’ She pauses for a moment and takes a look at him.

  ‘You’re a bit worse for wear.’

  ‘I drank too much last night.’ He glances at the glass in his hand with some wariness.

  ‘Hair of the dog.’

  ‘Never got that expression.’ He takes a sip, and it is, of course, excellent wine.

  ‘Paolo keeps us stocked,’ she tells him, and at that moment, Paolo comes out into the courtyard, still dressed in a suit, immaculate as always.

  Anna reaches out one long pale arm to him and draws him close, kissing him on the lips as she does so. ‘You’re home early,’ she says, and he tells her he’s going to get himself a glass.

  Matt has never really known what Paolo does. None of them do. He raises capital. He has a lot of money. Beyond that, the details are too uninteresting to pursue.

  Anna has been with him for about three years now. They met at a charity benefit; one of the events she is often asked to attend because she gives the evening glamour. She chooses carefully, knowing that an occasional appearance in the right social pages benefits her as well. In the days before Paolo, she used to sometimes ask Freya to go with her. Freya would come home pissed on expensive champagne. If he were asleep, she would wake him up, wanting to talk (alcohol often makes her chatty), to tell him about the rich and famous, the gossip she had heard in the loos, the food they had served; finally curling up next to him, saying that she was glad she was who she was.