by Peggy Frew
Bonnie scooped up more rice cereal. ‘Try again, Lou,’ she said. ‘Use a big, loud voice and say, “Excuse me, Dad.”’
‘Excuse me, Dad!’
Pete looked up from the paper.
Louie put down his spoon.
‘Yes, Louie?’ Pete refolded the paper and put it aside.
‘What’re we doing today, while Mum’s on the plane?’
‘Well, that’ll be up to Grandma, I guess. If she ever gets here.’
Bonnie noticed the way he was narrowing his gaze to only see Louie, blinkering himself against her sitting there. There was a thin dryness in the back of her nose and throat, like that dizzy, ill feeling cigarettes always gave her.
Jess flailed an arm and caught the spoon. Rice cereal flicked over Bonnie’s sleeve. ‘Shit.’ The ill feeling swamped her, surged in a panic, tinged with hateful self-pity. She felt her lips shake. She reached for Jess, for the spoon trapped in the fat fingers, dribbling white mess, but then she stopped, dropped her hand and stood up. Jess raised the spoon and wiped it over the side of her head. Beads of runny cereal clung to the fine baby hairs. ‘Sorry,’ Bonnie heard herself say. ‘I can’t …’ She turned and left the room.
In the hallway Edie sat with socks and one shoe on but no pants, laboriously fitting the strap of the other shoe into the buckle.
‘Oh, Edie,’ she said automatically. ‘You’ll need …’
‘What?’ said Edie without looking up.
‘Never mind.’ Bonnie went into the bathroom.
‘But, Mum,’ called Louie, ‘Jess is getting that stuff all over her head.’
Bonnie caught her own frown in the mirror, her ugly resentful face. The surge of self-pity went careening into anger. The mouth opened. ‘Dad’s in charge,’ it yelled.
The taxi honked its horn, and the twins went running to the front porch. Pete followed with Jess, and they all stood watching as she lugged her things out to the car. The driver, a tall, impossibly thin African man, helped her put everything in the boot, and then she went back to say goodbye.
‘Bye, Mum!’
‘Bye, Edie. Bye, Lou. Love you. See you tomorrow, okay?’ Bonnie bent to them, felt their fast kisses glance off her face, both of them. She made do with pressing her lips to the tops of their heads, breathing their sweet, musty smells. It was cold. She pulled a tissue from her sleeve and wiped her nose. To kiss Jess she had to go right up to Pete. There was a strange, unbalanced moment as they, without speaking or looking at each other, juggled the baby between them. Then Bonnie took her, kissed her face, the round cheek, the springy flesh. One of Jess’s hands connected with her chin, the fingers closing and opening again in a brief uncontrolled pulse.
For a second Bonnie saw them all from a distance, as if on a movie screen: a scene where a woman leaves her husband and bewildered children, gets into a car and is driven away. The brave, uncertain smiles and waves of the boy and girl; the innocent baby; the grim-faced husband. The woman ducking into the seat, her hair hanging like a curtain.
‘You’d better go.’ Pete nodded at the taxi. She kissed Jess one more time and passed her back. Her hand and Pete’s overlapped on the small, warm body and slipped apart again with the politeness of strangers.
‘See you tomorrow.’ Her gaze was stuck at Jess’s jumper, the faint stain on its front. With an effort she went higher, up Pete’s chest, his neck, his stubbled chin, to his eyes.
They looked at each other. Pete’s face had absolutely no expression, like someone sitting on a tram, thoughts secured, turned inwards, or elsewhere.
Do you hate me? Bonnie wanted to say. Don’t hate me.
‘See you tomorrow,’ he said.
‘Mum.’ Louie pulled at her sleeve. ‘The taxi.’
Bonnie went down the path and out to the taxi. She climbed in the back, shut the door and turned to see them: the twins jumping and waving, Pete still with that no-one-home expression, Jess in her little halo of immediate focus, bent to a button on Pete’s shirt. The car began to move.
‘Sorry about that,’ she said. ‘Just to the airport, please.’
She lifted her eyes to the street ahead, and there was Suzanne’s little hatchback, her smile flashing, a wiggle-fingered wave. Bonnie raised her own hand as the two cars passed, dragged her lips back in an answering smile, but in her held-tight body there was no happiness, no softening relief. She pulled her tissue out again and started to cry into it. Hard, dry sobs like vomiting. The muscles in her brow and jaw aching. She hunched in the seat, swaying as the driver took a corner. Mercifully, out of courtesy or embarrassment, he didn’t speak to her or look around.
‘HELLO?’ SHE PUT THE KEY CARD DOWN ON THE NARROW HIGH BENCH OF THE LITTLE KITCHEN ALCOVE AND SET HER BAGS AND CASE ON THE CARPET. They made no sound. She went past them, further into the room with its familiar neutral comfortless calm — white paint, framed abstract prints, the couch in a beige faux-suede fabric, glass-topped coffee table, the floor-length sheer curtains and beyond them the bare boxy balcony. There was an empty can of Coke on the small table, and what looked like the plastic wrapping from a pack of cigarettes. The couch cushions were in disarray, and the TV remote lay on the floor.
‘Hello?’ Bonnie moved down the short hallway. The door to the first bedroom was open. A big soft bag lay on the bed, unzipped, clothes spilling out, jeans, t-shirts, a single not-too-clean sock. The bedcovers were rumpled. At the foot of the bed stood a long, metal flight case, bass-guitar size. It was covered in band stickers and Fragile and Handle with care labels, neon orange and yellow with black checks. A bristle of severed elastic ties sprouted from the handle. She kept going. There were two more doors. Another bathroom — in darkness, the faint gleam of tiles through the half-open door — and the second bedroom, empty of either people or baggage. A queen-sized bed and a single, covers smooth and impersonal. One whole wall taken up by a built-in wardrobe with mirrored sliding doors.
She sat on the nearer bed. Her reflection faced her — eyes, knees, feet. The mirror looked plasticky, like it would give if she pressed a finger to it. The dark circles under her eyes showed, and her cheeks looked hollow. She turned away. Pulled her legs up and lay back on the pillows. There was a smell of cleaning products, deodorisers. The air tasted recycled. She glanced over at the window. It opened, she could see. In a minute I’ll get up and open it, she thought, but she felt exhausted, wrung out. She shut her eyes.
At one point the thought of the show that night came drifting in, and she woke with a start and an eddy of nerves, but when she really faced it, tried to grip it properly with her mind, it seemed somehow like a job another person would be doing, something that wasn’t her concern, and the nerves drained away again. She still had her coat on and her boots, but she didn’t take them off or climb under the covers. She turned on her side and went back to sleep.
A door slammed. A voice called. ‘Bon?’
She opened her eyes.
‘Bonnie?’
She sat up and looked blurrily around. ‘Yeah?’
‘So she is here.’ There was a movement in the hallway, and then Mickey came in. ‘Oh, sorry. Were you sleeping?’
‘I guess I was.’ Bonnie ran her hands over her face, tried to straighten her hair.
Mickey sat on the end of the bed. She patted Bonnie’s ankle. ‘I’ve been trying to call you.’
‘Oh, sorry, yeah. My phone’s in my bag. I guess I didn’t hear it.’
‘Doesn’t matter. I was just wondering if you made it okay.’
‘Yeah, fine.’
‘Have you met Beth yet?’
‘No, I just —’
‘She’s great. Come and meet her.’ Mickey bounced off the bed again and grabbed Bonnie’s arm.
As they went out the door Bonnie caught sight of herself in the hostile mirror: her sleep-swollen face, her crumpled clothes, her mess
ed-up hair. She followed along behind Mickey out to the main room where a woman wearing tight black jeans and a leather jacket was smoking a cigarette in the doorway to the balcony.
‘Bonnie, this is Beth,’ said Mickey, and stood back happily.
‘Hi,’ said Bonnie.
‘Nice to meet you,’ said Beth. She had an English accent.
A phone sounded, and Mickey pulled it out, answered it and started pacing up and down the hall as she talked.
‘Tired?’ said Beth without smiling.
‘Yeah, I guess so.’ Bonnie could feel how puffy her eyes were. She ran her hands over her clothes, trying to smooth them. Her stomach felt hollow and her mouth dry. She went over to the kitchenette and took down a glass from the cupboard, filled it with water.
‘Don’t drink the tap water,’ said Beth behind her. ‘It’s really disgusting. There’s bottles in the fridge.’
‘Oh.’ She stood with the glass in her hand. ‘It’s just,’ she said, ‘you know, the minibar — I hate paying so much just for water. I usually buy some bottles myself from the supermarket …’ She trailed off.
Beth had swivelled to blow smoke outside. ‘Fair enough,’ came her turned-away voice.
Bonnie watched her. The sharp flick of her haircut, the dark polish on her fingernails, the soft-looking leather of her jacket. Without pleasure she drank down the sulphurous water and felt dislike welling, ready.
But then Beth stepped onto the balcony and stubbed out her butt in an ashtray, leaned on the wall and said, ‘Oh, it’s just beautiful out here. Come and see.’
Bonnie went and stood next to her, and there it was, the harbour of course, and the unmistakable curve of dark metal, but there was also all that lay in between. The unprepared, back views of buildings. Flat rooftops like mountain steppes. Rows of windows. Offices, apartments, low lines of shops along streets. So full of colour and scrambling life — cars, buses, people, birds. Trees that even from this distance seemed glossy-leaved and verdant. Almost directly below was some sort of halfway house. Narrow concrete steps up to a second-storey walkway and a series of brown-painted doors and barred windows. A group of men in tracksuits stood in the car park talking to a plump man in a uniform. One of them laughed and clapped the uniformed man on the shoulder.
‘You’d think it’d get depressing, wouldn’t you?’ said Beth. ‘Watching cities from hotel-room balconies. But I love it. I never get sick of it. I don’t know — it makes me happy. Watching people just — doing whatever they do.’ She spoke softly and unashamedly.
There was a silence. I like her, Bonnie thought with a throb of surprise. She watched the uniformed man below get into a car and the mob of tracksuit men slope out into the street on foot. Two birds came shooting up from a cluster of umbrella palms. She followed them with her eyes, and when they were gone she looked back down and watched people on the footpath. The tracksuit men had already moved off, but here came a group of high-school girls in green uniforms, and there the other way went a man in a suit with the jacket hung over his shoulder. An Asian man on a bike. A grey-haired woman holding the hand of a child, gripping it at the wrist in her thickened brown fingers.
Bonnie leaned on the bricks and watched their passing, the tops of their heads, their strange, foreshortened bodies, their varying airs of urgency or ease. She watched and somehow it all cushioned her, held her, loosened her.
‘Sound check.’ Mickey stood behind them. She clapped her hands. ‘Let’s go.’
Through the weary, dark room they moved, pushing amps in wheeled metal cases, lugging bags, instruments, boxes of t-shirts and CDs. The dusty chandeliers hung unlit, the floor sprawled emptily. The domed ceiling, swathed in shadows and deprived of an audience, failed to soar. A missed plastic beer glass lay on its side at the base of the stage. There was that smell, musty, closeted, of spilled drinks and, somehow, still hanging there in the curtains and carpet, old cigarette smoke. It smelled like the end of a night.
Every sound rang: the roll and clunk of the amp-case casters, the thud of cables as the mixer laid them out on the thin stage carpeting, the coarse wrench and rip of gaffer tape coming off the roll.
‘A-one, and a-one and a-two,’ went the mixer behind the desk, popping and honking through the PA.
‘Chips?’ Mickey held out a bag, and Bonnie dived her hand in gratefully, licked at the salt at the corners of her lips.
‘So have you met everybody?’ Mickey held a chip between thumb and forefinger and put her tongue to the underside of it.
‘Um …’
‘Everyone, this is Bonnie.’ Mickey put an arm around Bonnie and turned with her. She pointed with the chip to the drummer, a small man with thick straight dark hair that hung low over his forehead. ‘Henry.’
Henry and Bonnie exchanged nods and smiles.
‘Lloyd.’ Mickey aimed the chip at a guy with messy blond hair and a checked shirt who was setting up a keyboard.
‘Hi,’ said Lloyd.
‘Hi.’
‘And Beth you know,’ said Mickey. ‘And Tom of course you know.’
‘Yeah, of course.’ She waved to the mixer who waved back.
‘All right.’ Mickey pulled her closer. ‘I’m so glad you could do this show. It’s going to be great.’
‘Well, I hope so.’ She looked down at her feet, the toes of her boots. ‘It’s been so long. I hope I can …’
‘You’ll be fine.’ Mickey squeezed her again and then let go. She put the chip properly in her mouth at last and picked up her guitar, plugged it into a tuner and started twanging strings.
Bonnie took her own guitar across the stage. As if from some sunken internal hidey-hole she watched as her hands opened the case, took out the instrument, tightened the strings, tuned them, slung the guitar around her body, plugged it in, flicked switches and twisted knobs, moved over the fretboard. Sounds rose from the amp, full and certain.
‘Okay, and snare,’ came Tom’s voice from the fold-back wedge, filtering through the fractured, busy garble that was everyone getting sounds. ‘Okay, thanks, and now some more kick drum … Okay, keys?’
One at a time they turned to him, straightening, looking out at his face above the desk, way off there in the gloom, down the back near the bar. One after the other cycling through their sounds, loud, soft, effects on or off. Waiting for the nod, the ‘Okay, thanks’ through the speaker before sliding once more into the tangle of noise.
‘Shall we do a song?’ Mickey went out to the mic at the front of the stage. She strummed a few chords, and Henry started up a shuffling beat. Lloyd pressed some buttons and began to send long, wavering organ drones floating out into the people-less room. Alongside Bonnie Beth swung her hips and rolled out a bass line that swaggered and swayed, climbed up the drums, jumped off, flew back down and began to climb again. And from Bonnie’s own telecaster, from her fingers that seemed not to belong to her, in and then out of the amp and through her own numbed body came spangles of notes, notes that hovered like points of light, that trembled and merged, that ran into riffs that rippled and sang. And even though it didn’t seem to be her that was doing it, even though it swelled through her like she hardly existed, at the same time it was like listening to the throb of her own blood.
It was only six o’clock when they finished, but Mickey wanted to eat so they all went to a Greek place. They drank beer and ate small whole fish, fried, and dolmades and salty lamb and olives and cucumber. The ceiling was low, and the paint peeling and dark. A framed tourism poster hung behind Mickey’s head — square white buildings, harsh light and blue sea, boats lined up on a rocky shore. Outside there was sun still, low and late.
The beer lifted Bonnie, and she ate and drank and watched the others, their hands, their fingers, their lips shiny with oil, their mouths biting and chewing and talking. The coming show hovered. Everything seemed intensified, sharp-edge
d with nerves.
‘Good we’ve got this show,’ someone said. ‘Good warm-up for the tour.’
Lloyd smiled at Bonnie. ‘I love your guitar playing. You were in Need Police, weren’t you?’
‘That was a long time ago.’ Bonnie felt a shaft of embarrassment. She lowered her eyes to her plate. ‘It was a pretty dumb band.’
‘No, it wasn’t — you guys were great. You were one of my favourite bands when I first moved to Melbourne.’ Lloyd sipped his beer. ‘I moved from Adelaide and I just couldn’t believe how many great bands were playing all the time — like every night. It blew my mind. I used to go and see Need Police all the time. Such a great band. You and that other guitarist — I’d never heard anyone play like that.’
She drank, tried to make a humble shrug.
‘Who wrote the songs?’ said Lloyd.
‘Richie, mostly, the singer. I wrote some.’
‘So did you ever have your own band?’
‘No.’ Bonnie looked at the tide-line of foam on her glass. Better not drink too much. Inside her head, blurred and dim, she saw her battered old box of four-track tapes squatting on the workshop shelf, furred with sawdust. Those long-ago sketches of songs, guitar and makeshift drum kit, borrowed bits and pieces, her unadorned voice. Lyrics that were still catalogued somewhere deep in her mind. Lonely, shy bedroom songs that she’d cringed to listen back to, even at the time. But still she’d written them, still she’d laid them down. And kept them. She drained the beer. Reached for an olive and bit into the salty flesh.
Back at the hotel Beth flopped onto the couch and switched on the TV. Bonnie sat at the glass-topped table, on one of the hard white plastic chairs. For the first time that day she checked her phone. Only the two missed calls from Mickey. It was eight o’clock. The kids would be asleep by now anyway. She let the phone drop back into her bag.
Under the shower she expressed milk by hand. Creamy runnels washed across the tiles, swirled with the water down the drain. She kept going until her hands were sore and her breasts felt eased and softer. Then she shaved her legs, using the little plastic bottle of shower gel. It smelled like coconut and something else, some tropical flower. She stood in the shining room drying herself. In the spotless mirror she turned her head to one side and then to the other. Wrapped the towel tighter. Stood up straight. You’re only thirty-four.