‘Is he avoiding me?’ he asked Lisa, and she shook her head.
‘Have you told him who I am?’ But as he spoke those words, Matt was aware that even he, himself, did not know who he was.
‘I told him you were a friend,’ she said.
They were sitting on an old iron swing chair that had a tattered canvas awning overhead. Lisa had her knees drawn to her chest and she rocked her body gently, the swing swaying slightly with her movement.
She had aged, of course, but there were times when he still saw the girl he’d known all those years ago, despite the effects of the harsh Queensland sun. Her hair was still white blonde, and she kept it pulled back in a scraggly ponytail; the elastics she used at the ready on her wrist. She was slighter than he remembered; her body small and wiry, her skin reddened and coarse, the small tattoo of a feather on her shoulderblade now blurred beneath the straps of her bra, the silver bangles on her wrist clattering as she raised her cigarette to her mouth.
He had offered to stay in the local motel. In fact, he would have preferred that; it would have given them both some space, but she had told him there was room at her place, he should save the money.
The sleep-out was off the kitchen, his bed a single divan covered with a faded chenille bedspread. There was a desk in the corner and above it, her horse drawings tacked to the fibro wall. He was looking at them when she came in, and she smiled self-consciously as she told him she’d tried to get illustration work.
‘I thought I could do kids’ books,’ and she tucked her hair behind her ears. ‘I even sent them off to publishers. But I never had any luck.’
‘They’re good, you know,’ and he meant it. ‘Really good.’ As he faced her, the golden afternoon light coming through the Venetians, they could both have been the people they had once been. It was only a moment, but he would liked to have kissed her, gently, and held her, in a gesture that would have been an attempt to say all they seemed to be incapable of uttering.
Sitting outside in the swing chair, he tried to tackle what needed to be addressed. If he was the father, he wanted to make amends. He didn’t know how, and he was aware that this was an area in which they would need to find their way, but first, the question was whether he was or wasn’t the father of the boy. And he looked at her profile as she drew back on her cigarette and stared out across the cement to the strip of tangled grass at the rear of her block, the metal of the caravan glinting in the moonlight.
She stubbed out the end of the rollie against the arm of the chair and then tossed it into the ashtray at their feet. Her bangles rolled down to the end of her wrist and she pushed them further back up her arm.
‘He’s a good kid,’ she said, avoiding his question. She turned to face him, her eyes anxious, as she tried to explain. ‘But he’s growing up and I don’t have much control over him. I worry, sometimes. He’s out all night, misses school all the time. The teachers wanted him to have a psychiatric assessment. I’ve been trying to get an appointment with a doctor in Brisbane.’
‘What do they think is the problem?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s just being a teenager. Other times I worry it’s something worse.’
She stood up, picking up the ashtray and taking it inside.
‘Another beer?’ she asked from the window behind him. He turned to see her, standing in the light of the kitchen, holding a stubbie up in one hand, a glass of water in the other.
‘Thanks,’ he replied, and the metal screen door swung shut behind her as she came back outside.
‘I’m not sure,’ she finally said, in what was, he supposed, an attempt to answer his question about whether Lucas was his son.
‘Was there someone else?’ he asked, wanting to pin her down and hating himself for feeling this need.
Eventually she nodded. ‘Around the time you left. I don’t know where he is now.’
‘Hasn’t Lucas ever wanted to know?’
She was uncomfortable. Twisting a strand of white hair in one finger, she looked at him and then looked away again. Her long fine hands were covered in rings. There was even one on each of her thumbs and he reached out for her, awkward, uncertain as to how she would respond to his gesture. She just stared at the ground, her hand staying in her hair.
‘I lied to him,’ she finally admitted, and this time there wasn’t anxiety in her eyes, just defiance. ‘I told him his father was dead.’
Matt put his beer down on the concrete. It was only his second, but a wave of nausea hit him. It was, perhaps, accentuated by the heat, but he felt as though he was wading through mud, unable to find a way forward, and it was making him ill.
Her voice was flat as she tried to explain. ‘I didn’t want to lose him. I didn’t want to have to tell him I didn’t know who his father was, and then I didn’t want him running off trying to find out.’
Matt didn’t say anything, and she mistook his silence for accusation.
‘It was hard on my own. But he was all I had.’
Standing up, Matt wanted nothing other than to be at home, back with Freya and Ella where he belonged. He rubbed at the back of his eyes with his hand, breathing in as he did so.
‘What are you going to say to him now?’ When he finally spoke, the strain in his voice made it thin, almost high.
She turned away as she blew out a thin stream of smoke. ‘I don’t know,’ she answered.
The light from the kitchen window illuminated small frail moths fluttering through the blackness of the night sky. Her hair, too, was lit up, a silvery halo around the sharp tired lines of her face. In the heat of the evening, the patchouli she still wore mingled with the scent of the frangipanis – apricot, cream and lemon buried deep among dark green leaves. As she sat on the concrete, drawing her knees to her chest once again, he remembered the quietness of her room at the back of the house she had once shared with Shane. He had liked lying next to her, hearing the sound of the evening rain hissing as it hit the hot bitumen on the street.
He wanted to connect with her again.
‘What was he like as a boy?’ he asked, hoping they could talk about him in some way other than the fraught manner that had left them both floundering.
She looked up, her chin resting on the top of her knees and her expression softened.
‘Come inside.’
He followed her into the smallness of the lounge room at the centre of the house. The floor was covered with an old Axminster carpet square, floral on soft grey, worn in patches, and not reaching the edges of the room. There was little furniture, just a cane sofa and coffee table, and a bookshelf made from planks and bricks. She’d hung white muslin in the window and the effect was pretty, dainty, as it floated, ghostly, in the night air.
She opened up a photo album. The early pictures were small square snapshots, taken on an old instamatic. The colours had distorted, the blues yellowing and the reds fading. Lucas looked up at the camera, golden curls, big hazel eyes, a one-toothed grin as he reached up for his mother who was behind the camera. In others he crawled across thick green grass, he played in a plastic wading pool, and he sat upright blowing bubbles in a deep bath; they were familiar images, like those Matt had taken of Ella when she was small.
As Lisa turned the pages, the plastic protector sheets brittle in her hands, she told him a little more about her life.
‘We were living with my mum and dad then,’ she explained, as he leant in to examine a picture of her next to a horse. She was squinting anxiously; Lucas was next to her, back turned to the camera. ‘I’d had a bit of trouble.’ She sniffed as she spoke and he glanced up at her.
She wasn’t crying. He didn’t know why he thought she might have been because it wouldn’t have been like her. ‘It was a bloke,’ she explained, and then didn’t elaborate further.
She continued turning the pages. There was Lucas on his first day at school, skinny knees covered in scabs, skateboarding, swimming; the gaps between the images began to lengthen. In the few mo
re recent ones (which were probably at least a couple of years old) Lucas’ glance at the camera was hostile, angry at the invasion; his eyes were red and glazed, his face marked by traces of acne.
She closed the book abruptly, several plastic sheets coming out at a sharp angle. She didn’t attempt to right them as she put it back in its shelf.
‘Don’t judge him,’ she said. ‘You haven’t had a teenager. You don’t know.’
‘I wasn’t,’ he assured her, appalled that she could think this of him. ‘I’m just at sea here.’
She nodded, looking at him momentarily before turning to the window, the night dark. He was about to speak, to try to fill the silence, when she suggested they go for a walk. ‘I could show you the sights of the town?’ Her smile was slight. ‘I’m sure there must be one or two.’
He grinned, and her smile broadened.
They walked out into the deserted street, taking the track through the scrub that led into the town centre. Her dog, a mangy mongrel, followed at a respectful distance, occasionally disappearing into the long grasses, never gone for long.
‘That’s where I work,’ and she pointed out a fibro house two streets back from the main road. The sign out the front described it as a community centre, the hours limited to Monday to Thursday, mornings only.
He asked her what she did and she told him that she referred people on to other agencies. ‘You know, they come to us with a problem, maybe housing, work, a neighbour thing, and we tell them where they can get help.’ She looked across at him and smiled. ‘Most of the time they just come back again.’
‘Because there’s nowhere else to go?’
She nodded. ‘Most people fall through the gaps. They don’t fit this criteria for that service; their income isn’t low enough, they’re not in the right area –’ she shrugged. ‘They know what it’s going to be like. They pretend they’ll take our advice but then we just see them again. I guess they know we’ll listen. Over and over again.’
As they rounded the corner into the main street, Matt asked if she wanted to stop and have a drink at one of the pubs.
She didn’t. ‘I’m an alcoholic,’ she told him, without flinching.
He was surprised. He didn’t remember her as a drinker.
‘It was during the bad time – when it got out of control.’ She was holding a stick in her hand and she tossed it a couple of yards ahead. The dog stirred herself from her lethargy and trotted forward to pick it up in her mouth. She dropped it at Lisa’s feet, and when it was ignored, she picked it up again, following, hopeful. ‘My mum and dad took Lucas to live with them. They wouldn’t let me get him until I went to AA.’
‘That was when you were with that man?’ Matt asked.
Lisa just nodded.
They crossed the road, taking a turn-off that led them away from the hotels at the far end of the street. Matt could hear the noise, men out on the pavement, a car engine revving, doors slamming.
‘This is our cinema,’ Lisa told him, and she pointed out a crumbling deco building, white paint peeling, cement cracking, weeds growing out the front.
The last session had finished, the doors were shut, the lights were off. Matt looked up to see what had been playing; it was a film he didn’t know.
‘Don’t know how much longer it’ll stay open,’ she said. ‘Most people just go to the DVD shop now,’ and she indicated the Blockbuster across the road. ‘A couple of friends are trying to keep it going as some kind of art-house cinema club,’ and she smiled again. ‘I’d be surprised if it worked.’
They turned back towards the track that led to her house, the dog still ambling along behind them, its stick forgotten.
‘Why did you come to live here?’ He looked across at her, by his side, a long switch in one hand, her bangles jangling as she waved it back and forth.
‘After my parents died, I had a bit of money,’ she explained. ‘Not much, but enough to get a house for Lucas and me. I had a friend who lived here. Someone I met at AA. We work together,’ she added. ‘She talked me into it. There was the job going, a place I could afford. It seemed like a good idea at the time.’
‘You wish you hadn’t?’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I just don’t know if it’s been that good for Lucas.’
Later, as he lay wide awake in the small single bed she had made up for him, he wondered about getting up and going into her room. Along the darkness of the track, her face had been softened by the night, her voice had been gentle, cigarette husky as they talked. To call it a reconnection would have been wrong because he wasn’t certain that there’d been any bond in the first place. But that evening, they had taken the first tentative steps towards a tenuous link with each other.
He’d reminded her about the jokes she used to tell him, and she’d looked at him quizzically, straining to remember, smiling slightly as she began to recall.
‘I never remember them now,’ she said, and there was, in her eyes, a momentary regret for the loss of the person she had once been.
He could get up and tiptoe through that small lounge room to where her door was shut. He could tap on it gently, wait for her response. He would lie close to her, his arms around her, his lips on the feather tattoo; a Matt he did not remember. As he lay there, contemplating the possibility, he heard the clatter of the caravan door opening, the metallic slamming as Lucas pulled it closed behind him, no doubt locking it, and then the music, loud thrash, tinny and grinding, making it even harder to sleep than it had already been.
And so, the next day, when he finally gets to talk to Lucas, he is even more out of his depth than he has been since he arrived, the tiredness rendering him unable to take any firm hold on a situation that floats around him.
As he talks about his desire to be a sculptor, he wonders what has induced him into this embarrassingly ridiculous territory. Is it an attempt to offer some kind of worthless fatherly advice about the practical necessities of life? If it is, he’s ashamed. Or perhaps it’s simply that he wants to appear interesting to a boy whom he would like to believe has an interior life that has not yet emerged.
In the white-hot heat of the morning, Lucas is pale and pimply. He smells stale, his black T-shirt and jeans sticking to his sweaty, thin limbs. There’s a slight infection around the piercing in his lower lip, a scab that he picks at. He glances across at Matt, red eyes glazed, and then looks down again at the stick in his hand.
The dog ambles over, slumping heavy and tired on the cement at Lucas’ feet. The boy runs his fingers through her hair, scratching at a spot on her neck, as she raises her hind leg and itches her belly in a reflex response.
Standing slowly, Lucas flicks the stick out across the yard. The dog eyes it and then decides against moving.
‘Mum,’ Lucas calls, his voice cutting over Matt’s feeble attempts at conversation.
‘She’s gone to work,’ Matt tells him.
Turning to face him, Lucas seems to take in Matt for the first time, his eyes registering his presence momentarily and then, deciding against any further interaction, he looks away again, walking across the yard to his caravan, slamming the door shut behind him.
FREYA IS WORKING AT home when she gets the call. Wedged, a new and well-funded theatre company to whom she had submitted her play, want to include it in their next season. It’s her agent who gives her the news, telling her that the artistic director, John, wants to meet with her in the next couple of days.
She calls Matt immediately, knowing she’ll get no answer. Since he arrived at Lisa’s he’s usually been out of range. They’d spoken the previous evening when he’d rung her from a phone box, the call hurried and unsatisfactory. It was strange, he’d told her, awkward and difficult, and as he’d begun to run out of coins she’d quickly put Ella on so that he could speak to her.
The message she leaves now is brief. She has had good news about her play, and she asks him to ring as soon as he can.
Anna is delighted. They should celebrate, she says. When Fre
ya explains that she’s alone with Ella and can’t go out, Anna says she’ll come over. Moments of success should always be marked, she says. She will bring the champagne, even some food.
As Freya cleans up Ella’s dinner dishes, she wonders whether Anna will try to get the female lead. She’d like it if she did – although she worries she is perhaps a little too beautiful for the role, her looks too distracting. Anna doesn’t do much theatre, but every so often she takes a stage role in an attempt to boost her credibility, not so much with the public, but with her peers. The character is the right age for her, and Wedged is the most fashionable and critically acclaimed group performing at the moment. They’ve already been booked for several major overseas festivals in the latter half of next year. Her agent had told her that her play was being considered as one of the pieces they would take with them; she was sure John would discuss it further with her.
When Anna knocks on the door, Ella jumps out of the bath, her skin silky and damp as she runs naked up the hall.
‘God, it’s a nudie,’ Anna shrieks, ‘a beautiful pink and white nudie.’
‘Look what I got today,’ and Ella leads Anna into her room, eager to show her the AFL showbag that was given to all the kids at the school in an attempt to find new recruits for the sport.
Standing at the door, Freya watches Ella take everything out and line it up across her bed, while Anna gives a shining performance, appearing genuinely interested in each item.
‘I brought you something,’ she tells Ella and as she reaches into her bag, Ella jumps up and down.
‘What is it?’ she asks, over and over again.
It is a doll, dressed in designer jeans, boots and a sliver of a sequinned top. It was a giveaway from fashion week and Anna has been keeping it for her. Ella loves it.
‘I reckon it’s the best doll I’ve got,’ she tells Freya and she props it up carefully on her bedside table, where it sits next to the Bratz and Barbies.
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