Too Close to Home

by Georgia Blain

  Anna had changed with Paolo.

  Wrinkling her nose, Freya would try to describe it. ‘She’s safer. In what she wears, in what she says, in how she behaves.’

  Money had killed her imagination.

  ‘That’s what it does,’ Freya would say.

  And he had to agree with her, although he doesn’t quite know why it so often has that effect. Perhaps it’s simply having more to lose. He looks at Anna now and remembers driving drunk through the back streets of Sydney, her dressed in an eccentric mishmash of clothes, the windows down, music blaring, as they sought out drugs, both of them trying every connection they could think of, neither of them having any success, until finally they gave up. Sitting in the car in a suburb they didn’t know, they rolled joints, passing them back and forth, giggling inanely, while night-time turned to day.

  ‘So,’ Anna asks, ‘what do you think of the landscaping?’ She winks as she speaks, mocking her own question and the place where she lives.

  He realises the courtyard and water feature are new, and he had failed to comment.

  ‘Very European,’ he grins. ‘Roman, in fact.’

  Paulo perches on the edge of a ludicrously expensive and frail-looking iron parterre chair, holding his glass up to the light.

  ‘What is Roman?’ he asks. ‘Apart from myself, of course.’

  As Matt waves his hand to indicate the courtyard, the phone rings and Anna picks it up. It’s her second interview. She takes it inside, leaving Matt to discuss builders and landscape architects with Paolo.

  ‘So, have you seen the film?’ Matt asks, wanting to change the topic from one that is too much like work.

  Paolo shakes his head. He is disparaging about most of the projects in which Anna is involved. ‘Australian cinema,’ he says. ‘It is so tedious. Infantile, underdeveloped.’ To be fair, he usually does praise Anna’s work, or the little he sees of it.

  ‘I am worried about her.’ Paolo leans forward.

  ‘Why?’ Matt asks. He and Paolo never talk about anything other than what lies on the surface.

  ‘She says she wants a child.’

  ‘A lot of people do.’

  ‘Not Anna.’ Paolo shakes his head. ‘This is new. She is worried about getting less work so she looks for something else.’ He rubs at his chin. ‘She knows I have Katrina and I do not want a family again.’

  Paolo’s daughter spends most of the year in Italy, coming out for brief visits.

  ‘We talked about this,’ he continues, ‘early. She, too, said she did not want children.’

  ‘She may have changed her mind,’ Matt suggests. ‘It happens.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I know Anna.’

  Well, Matt wants to tell him, if you know her, what advice can I offer? Instead, he pours himself another glass of wine, not because he wants it but because he doesn’t know what else to do with himself.

  ‘I guess you’re going to have to sort it out,’ he finally says. ‘Ultimately if that’s what she wants, you’ll both have to make a choice.’

  ‘But it is not what she wants,’ Paolo insists.

  Matt flicks a shrivelled jacaranda blossom into the pool of water next to him. It sits on the surface, and he watches it for a moment before flicking another and then another into the stillness. He stands and walks to where the stream spurts out of a stone lion’s mouth and he stops it with his finger.

  Paolo watches him.

  As he takes his finger out, the trickle continues, the sound irritating in the still heat of the early evening. He picks up his glass and drinks the rest of the wine, already slightly warm, in one gulp.

  ‘I’m going to have to go,’ he tells Paolo. ‘We were meant to talk about Freya’s birthday.’ He nods in the direction of the house.

  Paolo stands.

  ‘Don’t,’ Matt tells him. ‘I’ll just let myself out.’

  In the kitchen, Anna leans against the cupboard, one hand resting against the smooth enamelled surface of the Aga cooker, the other cradling the phone, as she tells the caller how wonderful the rest of the cast were. She looks up at him. He points to the door; he has to go, he will call her.

  She puts her palm over the mouthpiece and whispers, ‘Wait.’

  ‘Can’t,’ he says, and turns quickly before she can stop him with a promise that she will only be a few more minutes, truly.

  He walks through the wide expanse of hallway, glass wall on one side, a succulent garden pressing up close, until he reaches the door, and breathes a sigh of relief.

  Outside in the quiet of the street, he stands against the cement wall in front of the house. It is still warm from the sun, despite the fact that twilight is becoming night, the sky purpling overhead, the lights on. In the distance, there is the click of a car door being opened remotely, and the gentle purr of an expensive engine as it starts. A cat rubs up against his ankle and he shoves it away, its weight warm and heavy, its body curled around his leg only moments later, and he pushes it a little harder this time, the cat hissing as he sends it towards the gutter.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ he tells Freya when he gets to the car, but it is not her that he is speaking to, only the voicemail. (She rarely picks up the phone, and he can see her, oblivious to its ring as she gets dinner ready, Ella lying in the lounge room, watching a DVD, also quite capable of ignoring the phone anytime someone calls.) ‘Give Ella a kiss for me,’ he adds, unsure whether he will be back before she goes to bed. He is about to hang up when Freya speaks.

  ‘How far are you?’ she asks and he can hear kids screaming in the background.

  ‘Half an hour,’ he says.

  She tells him to get a move on. ‘Archie and Darlene are here.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, nothing.’ She sounds exasperated. ‘I don’t know where Shane is.’

  ‘Call him,’ he suggests.

  She tells him he isn’t answering. ‘I’d better go.’ There is a particularly loud shriek, and she shouts out to the kids as she hangs up.

  The telephone beeps in his ear. He turns it off, pulling out from the kerb and flicking the lights on in a series of swift movements as he turns and heads for home.

  SKIN COLOUR CANNOT BE ignored.

  As soon as Freya allows herself to realise this, she wants to deny it. Because it makes her sound like someone she’s not. But it’s there, with all its history, part of the barrier between them. She knows she’s been careful and polite the couple of times they’ve talked (but isn’t she often this way with people she doesn’t know?), and then he calls her the missus, and this is not who she is, although it seems to be how she behaves.

  I am Freya, she wants to tell him, loud and clear. I am not the missus. I am just me.

  He arrives to pick up the kids and he is pissed. She opens the door to him, tall, dishevelled, smelling of cigarettes and beer, his shirt open to reveal a barrel chest. Archie and Darlene come running up the hall. Archie leaps and Shane catches him, wheezing with the effort.

  And then he turns serious. ‘Hope you haven’t been too much trouble.’ He runs his hand through Darlene’s hair, and she giggles as she shakes her head. ‘Get your shoes and say thank you.’

  Archie wants to go home barefoot. He sits on the floor, arms folded, bottom lip sticking out in a parody of a pout as Shane tells him to get his shoes now, or he’ll get a walloping.

  Freya picks up his runners and hands them to Shane.

  ‘Do you want to come in for a drink?’ she offers, hoping he’ll say no. It’s late and she just wants to get Ella to bed. ‘Matt’s not back yet,’ she adds, knowing this will act as a disincentive to him staying.

  ‘Nah, thanks. Better get these two home and off to sleep.’

  She feels like he’s saying this to pander to her white middle-class sensibilities, and she hates this: class and colour embedded in even the most mundane conversations.

  As he turns to walk down the stairs, he stumbles slightly and she realises how pissed he is. They only live around the corner, but he s
houldn’t be driving. She says nothing.

  She had walked the kids up there earlier, Darlene taking her hand and chatting the whole way.

  ‘That’s my favourite house,’ she told Freya, pointing to the largest of the three new brick mansions on the rise of the hill. Four storeys high, the building took up most of the block of land. At the front was a small paved courtyard with a fountain in the centre. A white Pekingese yapped viciously from behind the fence.

  Freya looked at Darlene and grinned. She remembered liking similar houses when she was a child, much to her mother’s horror. The house in which Freya had grown up had been modest. A brick and timber building, with large windows, it had been modern for its time, built to nestle into the bush that surrounded them. Inside it was open plan (a concept that was very new), with one large living, kitchen and eating area on the northern side, bordered by a corridor with their three bedrooms and a bathroom on the other side. She remembered her friends asking why they didn’t have carpet (no one had bare boards and rugs then) and she hadn’t known how to answer.

  Her father had designed the house in consultation with an architect friend. A history professor, he had been to a conference in Denmark and had stayed with a colleague who lived in a place that was similar to the one he wanted built for his family. He’d brought home photos, showing them the house, describing it as a work of art, a new way of living. As he flipped through the pile, Freya caught a glimpse of one that he tried to hide; a beautiful long-legged woman lying on cowhide, legs kicked up behind her as she gazed into the camera and ate a strawberry.

  It wasn’t really the house that Freya’s father had fallen in love with, it was the woman who owned it. Maybe he knew that all along, maybe he didn’t. In any event, it became very clear to him and to his family some months after they moved into their newly completed home. There were letters discovered, arguments at night, silent meals, and then he was gone.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Freya’s mother had said, and she hadn’t. Ever.

  ‘Do you miss your home?’ Freya had asked Darlene as they rounded the corner into Shane’s street.

  ‘Kind of,’ she said. ‘I miss our animals.’

  She told Freya about the horses and the dogs, and her favourite, a pony called Minty, while Archie and Ella ran ahead, both of them climbing over the low cement wall that bordered the house.

  No one was home.

  ‘Do you know where your dad went?’ Freya asked the kids as they stood in the overgrown front yard. She’d knocked on the security screen and called out, her voice echoing in the emptiness of the hall.

  Archie shrugged and picked up his bike from where it was lying in a clump of weeds. He took it out to the pavement and rode it down to the corner, only stopping when Freya yelled out at him not to go any further.

  ‘I can get in,’ Darlene told her. ‘I know where there’s a window open.’

  Dropping his bike with a clatter at the front gate, Archie said that he wanted to climb in. He shimmied up the wall before Freya could stop him and moments later he was inside, there on the other side of the screen.

  ‘Can’t open it,’ he grinned, rattling the door with one hand and wiping the snot from his nose with the other.

  ‘I’ll leave your dad a note,’ Freya said, ‘and you’d better come back to my house.’

  Ella was thrilled. ‘They can stay and have dinner?’

  They could.

  She made them all spaghetti while they lay on the couch and watched TV.

  When they’d finished, Shane turned up. Apologetic, he explained that he’d just been having a beer next door.

  ‘They’re bloody rascals. I told ’em not to go anywheres.’

  It had been no trouble, Freya reassured him, silent about the fact she’d been vaguely worried about where he was and when he’d come back.

  Later, as she sits in the kitchen with Matt, she tries to explain.

  ‘We’re uncomfortable with each other,’ she begins cautiously.

  ‘You don’t know each other.’

  She looks across at him. ‘He drinks a lot.’ She holds her hands up. ‘I know I’m being judgemental.’

  ‘You’ve only seen him twice.’

  She is aware of that. ‘It’s complex. I’m judgemental when anyone drinks too much, I suppose. But with him it’s loaded. If he wasn’t black and went next door and got pissed and left his kids on their own, what would I think?’ She shrugs her shoulders. ‘I’d probably still be judgemental.’ She glances up at the ceiling and then affirms her statement. ‘I would be.’

  ‘Maybe if he were affluent white middle class, and was drinking expensive wine, you wouldn’t.’

  ‘I don’t know. But the point is, I am judgemental and then because of who he is, I try not to be because I don’t want to bring all those white middle-class judgements to the way I think of him.’

  Matt just looks at her.

  She smiles. ‘And then it’s made worse by the fact that he calls me the missus.’

  Matt clears his plate and puts it in the dishwasher.

  ‘Did he always drink that much?’ she asks.

  ‘When I knew him he did, but then we all did.’ He sits back down again. ‘I know he stops at times. He used to be an athlete.’

  She remembers his barrel chest. ‘I’m just trying to understand why we are the way we are with each other.’ She furrows her brow.

  It’s easy to espouse all the right principles, to talk about racism when she reads particular books to Ella, to rail against a political climate that uses immigrants as a political wedge, but to truly analyse her own heart in the face of reality is hard.

  ‘If I can’t speak honestly to you, who can I talk to?’ She looks at Matt, who remains silent. ‘I’ve never had much to do with Aboriginal people. That’s just the way it is.’ She wishes he’d say something rather than sit there. ‘And the few I’ve met work in the arts, they live in the inner city, they’re not so different.’

  He continues looking at her.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  Still he doesn’t speak.

  ‘I’ve never met anyone like him before.’

  Finally Matt responds: ‘He’s educated. He works in high-powered jobs. He probably earns more than either of us.’

  Freya sighs.

  ‘Don’t worry about it all so much. All you can do is get to know him a little more.’

  She knows he’s right. She is ashamed, and it’s not the way she wants to be.

  She remembers a time, some years ago, when they had gone to a friend’s wedding at a church in Redfern. The friend was a Catholic and her family had a long connection with the priest, a radical maverick. The church was packed, filled with family and friends, and also with a group of local Aboriginal people who wandered in and out of whatever service happened to be on. It was hot, she remembers, and inside the church, the cool was a relief, the thick stone walls sheltering them from the summer’s day.

  She and Matt had been late, and in the crush of entering, she’d been separated from him and the rest of the wedding party. She had found herself in another part of the church, the only white person. Surrounded by old men and women, she sat on the end of a pew, acutely aware of her difference.

  At the end of the service, the priest asked them all to stand, to turn to their neighbours, to go to them in greeting. She remembers feeling paralysed, not knowing what to do, surprised by her fear. She’d analysed it then as she did now, perhaps with too much complexity. Was her anxiety simply a result of the fact that this was what she was like with strangers, awkward and unsure of herself, or was it something more, was it years of history, a divide that split her from those around her? She didn’t know.

  She looked around at the others, toothless grins on the old women as they shuffled towards each other and hugged, watery-eyed men reaching for the hand of another, and she stood on her own. On the other side of the church, the wedding party greeted each other. She could try to make her way over. She moved care
fully, apologising as she almost trod on someone’s toes, her face fixed in a smile that was wrong. And then she was stopped. It was one of the old women. She held out a thin, black arm, her hand touching Freya’s shoulder. Beneath a football beanie, she had clouded eyes and a shy smile. They hugged, and Freya, whose body was stiff, pulled away first.

  Outside in the glare of the sunshine, she and several friends cried.

  Matt had thought it was the wedding. He was surprised at her response. This was not what she was like. She said nothing to correct his misunderstanding. Taking his arm, she’d wiped her tears away, and they’d gone on to the reception.

  Now, in their kitchen, she asks him if he loves her. It is not a question she asks often (she used to, all the time) and she smiles warily as she does so.

  He reaches across the table and takes her hand.

  ‘Well, do you?’

  ‘You know I do.’

  She looks at him, eyebrows raised. She stands slowly and comes over to where he is sitting. Thinking she is going to give him a hug, he moves his chair back and unfolds his arms, but she just punches him, playfully, in the ribs.

  ‘You’re a hard bastard, you know.’

  ‘Me?’ He smiles in mock innocence.

  ‘You look soft,’ she tells him, and she takes in his eyes; they still get her, right there in the guts. ‘You seem like you’re here with me. But there’s always this unreachable centre.’ She grins. ‘You never give me an inch.’

  ‘That’s why you love me,’ he says.

  She shakes her head. ‘No. That’s why you give me the shits.’

  ONCE MATT HAS LEFT for work and Ella has gone to school, Freya is alone. She’s sent an email to her agent, wanting to know if there’s any response to her new play. There’s always an anxiety in waiting for this first feedback, and the thesis is no distraction. She sits in her workroom at the other end of the garden and reads articles online or essays in books she has borrowed, knowing she’s not really taking in any of the words. She is simply putting off writing.

  She decides to cut the grass, only to find the mower she bought a month ago was, as she’d feared, not built to last. The plastic wheels fall off each time she pushes it, and she swears loudly, knowing she is likely to chop her finger off if she keeps trying to fix it without unplugging it from the power socket.