Too Close to Home

by Georgia Blain

  He offers her a glass of wine and she shakes her head in disgust. He hadn’t got drunk the previous evening and appears remarkably well, clear-eyed and handsome in the softness of the light from the kitchen. She is evil in her hangover, her whole body poisoned, her eyes stinging as she looks directly at him.

  ‘Is he your child?’ There is the faintest tremor in her voice.

  ‘She didn’t really say. Not directly. Just that yes, he could be – or something like that.’

  Freya is confused. It’s all so indefinite, and she hates the frustration of this.

  ‘I mean it was such a strange conversation.’ He is looking out to the lemon tree, its branches black against the dark. ‘I haven’t seen her for years.’

  A mosquito has landed on Freya’s arm and she slaps at it. The red welt is rising already and she itches furiously.

  ‘There wasn’t all that much between us.’ Matt’s voice is soft.

  ‘Well, there is now.’ Freya’s head hurts and she stands to get some Panadol from inside. He stays where he is, sitting at the old trestle table, back to the house, eyes on the night.

  He is leaving the day after tomorrow, flying to Townsville and then driving inland. He is planning on returning by the end of the week.

  She swallows the Panadol while she stands, resting against the doorframe; the pills a lump in the back of her throat. Without sitting down again, she asks him: ‘What do you want from this trip?’

  He doesn’t turn to face her as he answers. ‘I don’t know.’

  Later, when they lie in bed, Freya so tired she can barely keep her eyes open, he tries to explain with some clarity. It’s really a question of avoiding how he would feel if he failed to go. Because if he doesn’t at least try to find out whether this boy is his son, if he doesn’t attempt to meet him, he will always wonder.

  ‘And that would be destructive,’ he says.

  She knows he’s right. He’s doing what has to be done. But she wants it all to go away. She wishes that Shane had never come to the city, that Matt hadn’t bumped into him again; that he had simply never known. She wishes it with the fervour of a small child trying to will away the unpleasant inevitable.

  ‘What about Ella?’ she asks.

  He doesn’t see any point in talking to her about any of this. Not now.

  Again, he is right. She knew that before she even asked the question. She just wants to point out that this has potential complications, ramifications that are going to affect them all. Surely he can see just how big this is?

  He tries to reassure her once more. ‘It is big. I know that. But we need to take it step by step. It doesn’t have to be this huge disaster that comes crashing down.’

  She is silent for a while, wanting to believe in his words, and then her anger takes over again. Just as he is on the edge of sleep, she wakes him. ‘Have you ever thought that they mightn’t want you? If you are his father, why has she never got in touch?’

  He tells her to hush. He doesn’t want to talk anymore. Not like this.

  She opens her mouth to speak again but he gets up, leaving her alone in their bed, and goes to sleep in Ella’s room.

  Freya dozes fitfully, waking to a flat grey morning. Two old Greek women are talking outside the bedroom window. They are walking down to the park at the end of the street. She hears them at the same time every day. Their talk, in a language she doesn’t understand, is her alarm clock.

  Matt is not there. In the kitchen, his note tells her that he has gone to work early so that he can get everything done before he leaves. Freya screws it up and throws it in the bin.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ Ella asks, her pale hair mussed about her face as she wipes sleep from the corners of her eyes. She climbs on a chair to reach the cereal in the cupboard and pours herself a bowl while Freya makes a coffee.

  Freya looks at her daughter. She is a blend of the two of them, with Matt’s wide dark eyes and Freya’s pale skin and full mouth. She has Matt’s calmness and physical strength; her body is like his, centred, balanced in the world. Yet she also has Freya’s strange anxieties (the worry about falling into the gap between a train and a platform is just one of a string of fears that Freya has no trouble understanding), as well as Freya’s lack of certainty about herself.

  Freya kisses the top of her daughter’s head and helps her pour the milk into the bowl.

  She had wanted a child long before Ella was born. In fact, she had been pregnant before she conceived Ella. It was in the first year of her return from Europe, when she and Matt had been tentatively finding their way back to each other. She was wary, but this time her anxiety that he didn’t love her hadn’t made her cling to him in the way she once had. She was more distant, careful.

  He lived in a house not far from the place where they now live. It was run-down, with ornate Victorian balconies collapsing onto the large lush garden below. There were three mango trees, their twisted branches heavy with fruit throughout the heat of summer. The corrugated-iron fence threatened to topple over under the tangle of a passionfruit vine, and the grass was never mowed, but left to grow tall and sweet under the shade of the trees, insects buzzing around, and lizards flicking their tails as they disappeared into the dense growth.

  They were picking mangoes when she told him that she was pregnant, feeling almost ashamed of her confession, and hating herself for this because she had nothing to be ashamed of.

  ‘God,’ and he had looked at her, unable to speak, at a loss as to how to react.

  She supposed she had some hope he would throw his arms around her and tell her it was wonderful news, they should move in together, have the baby, stop all this pretending and just get on with it. But of course this wasn’t going to happen and, if she were completely honest with herself, she knew that such a reaction (beautiful as it might have been) would only have led to trouble. They simply weren’t ready. But that didn’t stop the pain.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked, and he appeared helpless in the hazy afternoon heat.

  Why did it have to be her decision? she wondered, although again she knew that it couldn’t have been any other way. In fact, if he’d made any assumption that she was going to act in a particular manner, or should act in a particular manner, she would have been furious. His options were limited. He knew this and was behaving accordingly.

  ‘You know I’ll support you, no matter what you decide.’

  Standing there in the thick, oppressive humidity, any temptation to pretend soon evaporated.

  ‘I want to have a baby,’ she told him, ‘but we can’t.’

  The momentary apprehension followed by swift relief was unmistakable; it was only a flicker in his eyes, but she saw it.

  ‘Oh God.’ And then she cried, bending her head forward, her hair falling over her face, her entire body sagging with the final relinquishing, because no matter how inevitable it was, it still hurt.

  ‘I always thought we would,’ she said, and she didn’t meet his eyes.

  ‘We still can,’ he told her.

  She didn’t look up.

  ‘Just because it’s not right now doesn’t mean it won’t be right in a few years’ time.’

  The night before she went to the clinic, she stayed at his house. With no money, she was living at home with her mother at the time. She was working in pubs and trying to write her first play. Only Matt knew this. Although the precariousness of their relationship had been a major factor in her decision, her desire to write was just as important. She had kept scraps throughout her year in Europe, scenes, snippets of dialogue, the bare skeleton of a story about an old man who cannot feel, and wants more than anything to do so once again. She was excited as these threads drew together. This was what she wanted to do. If she had a baby, it would be impossible.

  In the darkness of his room, Freya had tried to explain this to Matt. She didn’t want him to feel guilty, she wanted to make him understand that the reasons why she had chosen not to have the child extended beyond the bounds of t
heir relationship.

  The next morning he took her to the clinic. He kissed her solicitously and told her he would be back to collect her. She was interviewed by a nurse and then an anaesthetist. Last, she saw the doctor, and she sat opposite him while he asked the questions he was required to by law. She can barely remember them now, but they involved querying whether she fully understood the impact of what she was about to do. ‘Yes,’ she told him, and although she did understand that she was about to terminate a foetus, she suddenly wondered whether this was what he had meant. Perhaps he was asking whether she understood the impact this would have on her and Matt. If that was the case, she had no idea. How could she? Her answer had been a lie.

  It didn’t matter. The doctor wasn’t looking at her. He just ticked the appropriate boxes on the form and told her to go through to the upstairs waiting room.

  Behind a curtain, she had to change into a robe and put her underpants in her pocket. Her name was written on a sticker and a nurse asked her to put it on just above her chest.

  Sitting in a plastic chair in the corner of the room, Freya looked tentatively at the other women, each with their name on their robe. They had been in a group all morning: Cassy, Melita, Freya and Amanda. Cassy was the first to be led out to the surgery, and through the open door, Freya watched as a teenager from an earlier group was led to a further room at the end of the building. Stumbling from the anaesthetic, she leant on one of the nurses, her gaping gown revealing her large thighs and buttocks. Freya could hear the nurses trying to calm her as she cried the whole length of the hall.

  I will not be like that, she thought to herself, and she quickly looked around the room to see whether the others had also witnessed this. If they had, they gave nothing away.

  When it was her turn to be called, Freya clutched the back of her robe as she followed the nurse through to surgery. She remembered nothing other than lying on the operating table and hearing the faint strains of Vivaldi from a cheap cassette player in the corner as a gas mask was placed over her mouth and nose.

  She woke some time later in a strange bed, with three other women asleep in the room. She wanted to tell the nurse she needed to vomit, but no one was around. As she tried to get up, she slipped on the lino floor, pulling the sheet off behind her. Someone helped her.

  ‘I need to be sick,’ Freya whispered, her throat parched and close with nausea.

  As the nurse led her through to the bathroom, Freya was aware for one moment of how she must have looked, stumbling, gown gaping, down that hall. Then she vomited and slid to the bathroom floor.

  She woke again, in the same bed, feeling all right this time. A nurse told her to dress and go through to yet another waiting room. There she was given a cup of tea, but no biscuit. ‘You’ve been ill,’ the nurse explained and then, misinterpreting her dazed expression for disappointment, she relented. ‘Just one.’

  It was a Milk Arrowroot. Still clutching it in her hand, Freya went down to where Matt was waiting for her. He’d brought lunch, he said. He would take her on a picnic, and he led her out to where he had parked the car, under the shade of an elm tree, gold leaves against the blue sky. She sat in the front seat, the door still open, and told him she wanted to go home. Where? he asked. My place? Your mother’s? She could see he was concerned, wanting to do whatever she needed, but she was incapable of even answering this question.

  He took her back to his house. He made up his bed for her, and she lay, grateful that he was no longer trying to talk, on cool, clean sheets. The wooden blinds clicked against the window frame with the softness of the afternoon breeze, and next to her, Matt read, the slow turning of the pages the only other sound in the quiet.

  Years later when her play was produced and then made into a film by Louise, she told Matt she sometimes thought about what she had given up.

  ‘I don’t regret,’ she hastened to explain. ‘I just wonder whether I would have got here anyway, even if we’d had the child.’

  She waited for him to look at her, but he didn’t.

  ‘And then I think about what that child might have been like.’

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘Don’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ and he shook his head. ‘I’m sorry but I don’t.’

  She didn’t know what to say. She supposed she just had to accept that it was different for him, but this didn’t stop her from feeling disappointed. She had believed that he, too, had been affected, but he hadn’t. And her disappointment came from the realisation that he was not, and never would be, all she liked to imagine, and from her own sense of foolishness for still trying to believe, despite the constant evidence to the contrary.

  Now, as she kisses Ella goodbye at the entrance to the school, remembering the child they didn’t have, she wants to sink down onto the pavement and cry. She waits until Ella has disappeared from sight and then she turns, slowly, to walk home.

  Shane is on the other side of the street. Archie and Darlene are some metres in front of him, careful to avoid looking like they are with their father. He waits while they cross at the crossing, and then, seeing Freya, raises his hand in greeting.

  He stands in front of her, eyes shaded by his hat, a rollie clutched between his thumb and forefinger. He tells her he has to go down to Canberra today, ‘meeting’, could she get the kids?

  She doesn’t want to. It’s Matt’s last night before he leaves. She also wonders what Shane would have done if he hadn’t bumped into her at the school gates.

  ‘I guess so,’ she says.

  ‘Should be back ’round eight.’ He drops the rollie to the ground, grinding it into the pavement with the heel of his boot.

  ‘Whenever,’ she replies, and then stops. ‘Actually, if it’s going to be later, I’d rather not. Matt’s heading north tomorrow, and we need time, without kids, before he goes.’

  Shane nods. ‘Eight it is.’ He smiles. ‘Cross my heart.’

  ‘I guess he told you why he’s going?’

  Shane doesn’t say anything.

  Freya looks at the ground, wishing she hadn’t spoken. ‘It’s weird,’ she says. ‘Being hit with this.’ She is not sure why she is trying to make Shane understand, to know her a little better. She wishes she’d never said anything.

  He is rolling another cigarette, an action so automatic he doesn’t even need to look at what he is doing, he just runs the paper around the tobacco, using one hand only, while he tries to respond. ‘Matt’s a good bloke. Wants to do the right thing.’

  ‘I know,’ she says, and she meets his eyes for one uncomfortable moment. Then she turns once again towards the laneway, telling him she’ll see him later on tonight.

  IT’S A BELL CURVE, Matt thinks, a graph with his distance from home on one side and his anxiety on the other. His fear and tension and worry creep up and up until he reaches the halfway point and then they begin to dissipate, sliding down in the heat of north-west Queensland, until he is calm on the open road, windows shut, air-conditioning an icy chill on his skin, a line of bitumen in front of him, a sharp blue sky overhead.

  He’d called Freya from the airport, wanting to speak to her before he began the long drive inland to Lisa’s. She was in an electrical store having an argument with the sales assistant about fans. She wanted something better, something that would last the summer out. She was fed up, eventually calling for the manager to lodge a formal complaint.

  ‘He was twenty years old and looked at me like I was an alien.’

  Matt smiled. ‘Why have the argument?’

  ‘Because you’re not here,’ she said. ‘And I need to argue with someone.’ Her voice was soft, and he missed her already.

  ‘I’ll call you when I can,’ he promised. ‘And I’ll be home soon.’

  The drive was longer than he expected, and arriving in darkness, he pulled into the dirt out the front of Lisa’s. She was standing in the doorway, insects buzzing outside the flyscreen, her small frame a silhouette.

  In the warmth
of the Queensland night, he stood, uncertain, suitcase in his hand.

  ‘I’m here,’ he said.

  She smiled, her expression so familiar and yet she was a stranger to him, someone he could have passed on the street at any time and not known.

  She was looking at him, her blue eyes direct and appraising, and he met her gaze for a minute and then apologised for arriving so late.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she told him, her voice deeper than he remembered, the Queensland accent broad. She held out her hand, and he clasped it, before taking a step forward to hug her, both of them laughing awkwardly.

  Matt had wanted to be a sculptor. He remembers this and feels a wash of sorrow, sweet and heavy, for the loss of what he once was: young, hopeful, at the end of a five-year architecture degree, and determined never to practise.

  ‘I came north,’ he tells the boy who may or may not be his son, ‘when I finished studying. To have some time alone. To find out more about myself and what I wanted to do.’

  The boy, who is not really a boy – he is more of a youth on the brink of becoming a young man – is called Lucas, and they are having their first clumsy attempt at a conversation, some days after his arrival. Rather, it’s Matt who is trying to talk. Lucas just sits on the concrete slab at the back of Lisa’s house, knees drawn to his chest, eyes squinting in the glare of the sun, while he flicks at nothing with a twig.

  Oh God, Matt thinks. What the fuck am I doing here?

  He’s about to explain that he had to give up his vision of becoming a sculptor when he and Freya had a child, but fortunately stops himself. He has tacked into a wind that is dangerous; there are dark grey squalls everywhere.

  Lucas is in his second-last year of school and wants to drop out. Lucas has not told Matt this; he hasn’t told Matt anything. In fact, he hasn’t spoken to Matt since he arrived. The little information Matt has comes from Lisa, their conversations often awkward, the strangeness of their situation making them both careful.

  Lucas has been conspicuously absent. On the first night, he was out with friends, coming back during the day to sleep in the stifling caravan at the end of the yard, only to disappear again the second night; it was an absence that made Matt paranoid.