Too Close to Home

by Georgia Blain

  Freya hadn’t known. She doesn’t know what to say, and she feels guilty and ashamed; her own riches heaped around her in abundance. She looks at them both and then speaks to Anna.

  ‘You didn’t tell me you’d changed your mind.’

  Anna smiles and once again her beauty seems to get in the way of the sentiment that the smile conveys. It swallows it, so that all that is left is that face, but Freya knows her well enough and the rueful tone to her voice is sharp.

  ‘Stupid of me,’ she says, ‘to leave it this late. And to wait until I am with someone who has always been quite clear about the question of children.’

  She holds up the wine bottle and offers them both another drink.

  Freya puts her hand over the top of her glass. ‘I seem to have more children than I know what to do with.’ She hadn’t intended to speak in front of Louise, but it is too late now. ‘Matt has just told me that he thinks he has another kid. Up in Brisbane.’

  The words have come out, blunt and harsh. In their first utterance outside the small space of her own home they give a solidity to what until now has felt impossible to grip. She is holding the reality and she doesn’t know how to approach this thing that sits, squat and ugly, in front of them all.

  Anna looks at her.

  Louise shakes her head. ‘Who with? And when?’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Freya tells her. ‘It was years ago. Someone he barely knew.’ She pauses, wanting to articulate the unease she feels because this is her first attempt to name it and it’s important that she gets it right. ‘I am more anxious about what it’s going to do to him now.’ She looks to Anna. ‘You know Matt. He doesn’t like his work, he always feels adrift, never quite satisfied with what he has, although if he didn’t have us, I know he would miss us terribly.’

  ‘Of course he would,’ Anna reassures her.

  ‘I’m worried he’s hoping this will give him the something he feels he lacks.’ Surprised at the sting of tears in her eyes, she wipes at them.

  Anna takes her hand.

  ‘And he’s someone who will take it all so seriously. He will feel responsible, like he has to welcome this child into his life. And I don’t know if I want that. I want it to be just the three of us.’

  Louise looks at her. ‘Of course he has to take it seriously.’

  Freya glares at her. ‘I know that. I’m not an idiot. But it doesn’t stop me from wishing it had never happened, and even hating him for it. Wrong as that may be.’

  Later, as she drives home through the darkness of the streets, she feels ashamed at her words. She remembers them and shakes her head.

  The wind is stronger now, a southerly coming up from the coast, and the trees bow to its force, the street signs clattering harshly in its wake. There will be rain, Freya realises with relief. It has been dry and hot for so long, and the entire city is lying parched beneath the sky, waiting for the change that seems to be arriving at last.

  She takes the turn off into the tunnel, a stretch of freeway that lies beneath parklands, buildings and a tangle of roads, following it in the direction of the airport and her own suburb. She has turned the music up loudly, but it does not drown out the memory of her blundering statement of fear, and she blushes slightly as she recalls what she said. She should have been concerned for the child (who is actually a teenager), or even for Matt. But instead, all her worry had turned back upon herself. She has learnt to live with Matt’s remoteness. In fact, she has been learning to live without him ever since she met him. And she has hit a baseline, she realises, aware that she doesn’t want to accept any less.

  She remembers the wintry afternoon in Portugal, years ago, when she had decided she could return home and see him again. She had been sitting in a cafe in Lisbon after a morning of teaching English in a faded palace that was now a school. Vendors were roasting chestnuts in the street and the smell made her hungry even though she didn’t particularly like them. The first of the Christmas decorations had been hung from awnings, stars and snowflakes, glittering and delicate against the blank grey sky. It had been a couple of weeks since she had moved out from the apartment in which she had been staying with Joanna and her boyfriend, Nick. She didn’t know whether Joanna had found out about her and Nick; she hadn’t contacted either of them since she had left. Each time she had considered calling she had contemplated the possibility of conflict and she had changed her mind. It was cowardly, she knew. It had also been hard, because she was lonely. Apart from her students and a couple of the other teachers, she didn’t really talk to anyone.

  But, sitting by herself that afternoon, she’d realised that she was actually all right. It was a strange revelation, an almost sly happiness that crept through her limbs and made her smile to herself. This was the most solitary she’d ever been, a state that had always scared her, and one in which she was now immersed. She could look after herself, and with this realisation came liberation, whole new ways of existing peering out at her.

  As she emerges from the tunnel and onto the tail end of the highway that leads to home, Freya tries to recall exactly how she had felt in that moment, because she wants the strength. Then she can deal with Matt’s revelation in a way that is right.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Anna and Louise had reassured her after she’d spoken. ‘It’s not going to take him away from you.’

  But their words had felt like no more than the attempts at comfort friends always make to each other, a soothing pat that glides across the dirt, sweeping nothing away.

  ‘I know, I know,’ she’d said, uttering her own banal words in response to theirs.

  But if she thought about it, there was a truth to their condolences. Matt’s reaction did not, by itself, have to mean he was going to drift from her. She, too, had a role in all this, and perhaps that was where the real anxiety lay. She wanted to behave well. Every day she woke wanting to be a good person who did the right thing, but like all people, she so often failed, forgetting to recycle, putting clothes in the dryer, uttering a sharp word to Ella, getting cranky with Matt when he didn’t come home in time for dinner, not telling him she loved him – sometimes it was easy to see each day as no more than a dismal slide from the higher self for which she hoped. And here she was, doing it again, greeting this news with fear.

  Her head hurt.

  She wished she’d never spoken.

  IT DOESN’T TAKE LONG before Matt realises that he needs to find Lisa. The realisation seeps in, its truth in stark contrast to the discomfort he feels at ignoring the news of the child.

  At first he is cagey with Shane, hedging around any direct request for help out of a strange embarrassment, or perhaps it is more a fear that if he says he thinks the child could be his, Shane will correct him, leaving him feeling foolish.

  Sitting on the front steps of Shane’s place he tells him he might have to go to Queensland for work; it’d be good to catch up with a few people, and he throws in several names.

  When he mentions Lisa, Shane shakes his head.

  ‘Not sure where she is.’

  The last Shane saw of her was about twelve years ago.

  ‘She was having a bad time of it,’ and he squints as he looks up into the harshness of the sun. ‘Livin’ with some bloke who was no good.’

  Matt manages to piece together a patchy history. The child is a son, and he was born in the year after Matt came back to Sydney. Lisa had moved out of their house by then. She lived with some other friends, surviving on the single parent’s pension and the odd job. She had a few boyfriends; none of them hung around too long.

  Shane reckons there was a time when she might have developed a smack habit. But he isn’t too sure.

  ‘Don’t want to go saying things that may not be true,’ he tells Matt. ‘She’s a good woman. Just had it hard. Kid on her own. Bad bloke.’

  As far as Shane knows, she then moved north and what little contact they had dwindled away into nothing.

  When Matt remembers her, he knows he liked her but there wa
s never any chance of falling in love with her. She was one of those slight, pretty, hippy girls who came from the mountains behind Brisbane. She sucked the ends of her hair and wore patchouli oil. She drew pictures of horses in pastels. But he resists the neat encapsulation of batik and sarongs. He remembers being surprised by her sense of humour; there was a steely dryness to it that seemed at odds with the rest of her character. And she had a strange independence he had admired. She’d met Shane at uni and moved into a house with him and other people she didn’t know within the first few weeks.

  The first night Matt slept with her, she showed him her horse drawings.

  ‘I was one of those girls who never grew out of it,’ she told him wryly, laying page after page across the futon on the floor.

  There was something wild in the images that had appealed to Matt, and a technical accuracy he admired.

  She told him that she didn’t know if she wanted to keep studying. Psychology had disappointed her, and she’d only taken English and Politics because she needed to have a complete subject load for the year.

  ‘I thought it would be about how we think and feel,’ she smiled, ‘but it’s just statistics.’

  She admired Shane, although she thought he drank too much. ‘He’s smart,’ she told Matt. ‘Argues every point,’ she said as she recalled the first time she’d heard him speak out in a Politics lecture.

  She had seemed, and Matt remembers this with uncertainty, oblivious to the fact that Shane and the others who came and went were black. She simply lived there, her own room a neat, calm space out the back of a house that was often a scene of wild drinking and intense politics.

  The curtains that she hung in the window were pale green. He sees himself lying on the futon and looking at them, almost lime in the early morning light, her hair white blonde against the pillow. She liked wearing jewellery, silver bracelets and turquoise rings that she said her mother had made. She never ate much, just white bread toast with Vegemite, or slices of pineapple, cold from the fridge. She had a cassette recorder in the corner of the room and she listened to Joni Mitchell.

  After they had sex, she liked to tell him jokes – bad, corny jokes that used to go round and round the schoolyard, jokes that weren’t funny, but somehow lying in that bed with her, the way in which she told them always brought a smile to his face.

  This is what happens when he tries to recall her, small details come back, but the whole remains out of reach. And it is not surprising. He never really got to know her.

  A couple of days later, Matt tells Shane he could be the father of Lisa’s child.

  Freya has gone to a movie with Mikhala and he and Ella are eating chops. She has sauce smeared across her mouth and is in the middle of trying to explain an impossibly complicated game to him, when Shane turns up with the kids. They have brought three cakes with them, frighteningly white-looking creations with fluorescent pink jam in the middle and a smear of lime green icing on top. Ella thanks them, her eyes wide with wonder as they push hers towards her.

  ‘Can I eat all of it?’ she asks Matt.

  He tells her she can, and he’s glad Freya isn’t here to see it. Even he finds the potential toxicity of it a little too much.

  Archie opens the fridge. He wants a mango. There’s only one left and Matt knows Freya was saving it for breakfast. He’s going to stop him eating it and then he can’t be bothered, but Shane takes the mango from Archie.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ he tells him. ‘You ask your Uncle Matt.’

  Archie glares at him, and then bites straight into the flesh.

  ‘I’ll give you a walloping,’ Shane says, hand outstretched, but Matt stops him.

  ‘It’s fine. He can have it.’

  Archie sticks his tongue out at Shane and hands the mango to Matt to be sliced.

  While the kids lie in front of the TV, they sit out the back, drinking beer and smoking rollies. It’s only now that he has reignited this friendship that Matt realises how alone he had felt. If he does go out, it’s with Freya and her friends. He likes them, in fact it’s unfair to call them her friends as most of them are mutual friends, but lately he’s felt there’s been a divergence between his path and the path that many of them have taken. He has little interest in this phase of acquisition, he realises. They talk about property, art, even holiday houses, and he knows he and Freya are not exempt from this. They may have less than many of the people they know, but they, too, have been acquiring. Only a week or so ago, Freya had bought a new desk for her studio, showing it to him proudly.

  ‘What was wrong with the old one?’ He hadn’t understood her joy in the purchase.

  ‘I’d had it for years.’ She’d rolled her eyes at him. ‘I bought it at Vinnies when I was in first-year uni.’

  She gets hurt when he attempts to voice his dissatisfaction with this new direction they are all taking, translating his lack of interest into something larger. She has never forgotten his reluctance to buy a house. This is their home, she tells him. It’s important. It is part of their life together. But the importance is not there for him; it never has been. It is a house, and he likes it, but he could live anywhere – and this doesn’t mean he feels any less for her or Ella.

  Normally he and Shane slot into the slow ease of talk with no hesitation, but tonight Shane is agitated. Awkward in a chair that is too small for his frame, he jiggles his leg up and down and drinks at a pace that is, even for him, a little alarming. Eventually he tells Matt there has been trouble at work.

  ‘Young bloke,’ he says. ‘You know the type. Smooth as.’

  Matt listens.

  ‘Blocks me on everything.’ Shane wipes at the sweat on his forehead. He is tense, and gets up. ‘If I had my way, I’d just take him out the back.’

  ‘Can’t you get rid of him? You’re the boss.’

  ‘Connected to all the Board.’ He walks up to the lemon tree, still talking, has a piss and then comes back. ‘I’ve been around a while. Lot longer than him.’

  And he has. Matt is vaguely familiar with Shane’s political experience, his involvement in some of the earlier housing initiatives and fights for land claims. He tries to reassure him that it’ll blow over, he just needs to give it time.

  Eventually Shane sits again. He leans forward and rolls a cigarette, his body relaxing slightly as he does so.

  ‘Reckon I’ll say my piece and we’ll go back to Queensland. Miss it, you know. And the kids, they like it here, but it’s not their place.’

  Matt doesn’t know the country that Shane speaks of as home. It’s north-west of Brisbane, and when he talks about it, it’s always with a sense of the permanence of the land in his life.

  ‘It’s there, you know,’ he says.

  On weekends he likes to take the kids to the outer suburbs where they can ride. He knows a bloke who charges twenty an hour for the horses.

  ‘They talk about their animals all the time,’ he says.

  The agitation has left him now; his breathing is slower.

  It is then that Matt speaks. Helping himself to tobacco, eyes fixed on the pouch, voice soft and hesitant.

  ‘I want to find Lisa,’ he says. He looks at the ground as he mentions that they slept together a few times. ‘When I stayed with you in Brisbane.’

  Shane stares out across the darkness of the back garden.

  ‘And the dates, you know, they fit.’

  A dog barks in a neighbour’s yard. The sound of the television is audible from inside, the kids silent. Matt looks up. He lights his cigarette, the sulphur from the match hisses, the smell pungent as the flame flares and then dies. He turns to face Shane who sits, long thin legs stretched out in front of him, eyes still fixed on some point in the distance.

  Shane coughs, a hacking asthmatic cough, looks at the rollie in his hand and shakes his head before drawing back on it once again.

  ‘Wondered whether you thought that,’ he finally says.

  ‘Yeah.’ Matt runs his hand through his hair, embarrassed.
He doesn’t want to have to ask him directly; is it me? He feels like a fool. ‘If it is me, well, I need to do something.’

  Shane doesn’t say anything. It takes a while before it becomes clear to Matt that he doesn’t know who the father is, and he feels uncomfortable making any kind of presumptions. As soon as Matt realises this, he feels even more foolish.

  ‘That’s why I want to find her,’ Matt says.

  Shane just nods. And then he stands, awkward, stretching slightly before picking up his mobile from the table.

  It takes him three phone calls to track down a number for her. Standing round the side of the house, phone pressed to his ear, he rings people, his voice a soft murmur as he extracts the information he needs.

  Matt goes in to check on the kids.

  When he comes back out, Shane is back at the table, rolling another cigarette.

  ‘There you go.’ He’s scrawled down a number on the edge of a piece of newspaper and he pushes it towards Matt. ‘Reckon you’ll find her there.’

  Matt looks at it for a moment and then folds it up, putting it in his pocket. He feels relieved, but also afraid, and he is surprised at the cold panic now that contacting her is possible.

  ‘Do you reckon I should?’ he asks.

  Shane doesn’t respond at first, and Matt wishes he’d never asked the question.

  Eventually, Shane shakes his head. ‘Don’t know.’ It’s all he says. And then he coughs again. ‘Reckon I should give up the fags.’ He draws back on the rollie, holding it between his forefinger and his thumb, the paper burning bright in the darkness of the night.

  ON THE DAY AFTER Freya’s birthday, Matt tells her that he is going north to see Lisa and her son.

  ‘When,’ she wants to know, ‘did you arrange this?’

  It has all happened so quickly. They’ve never even talked properly. But when she accuses him of this, he tells her that it’s not because he hasn’t tried.

  ‘You cut me off every time. You just say that he probably isn’t mine. And then you walk away.’

  She looks at him. ‘You made these arrangements in secret.’ She is furious, arms crossed, eyes hard, and he doesn’t know how to respond.