Olivia kept pulling out vegetation, indiscriminately yanking anything obstinate enough to still be attached to its moorings, transforming the remaining patch of grass bordering the fence into a well-tended mini wasteland, another small flat scratch of dusty, dry, drought-stricken earth.
‘Mummy says or you say?’ repeated Nathan, eyeing his daughter as she laboured over the denuded parcel. She bore the same surly frown as her mother, what he thought of as her defining expression, having popped out of the womb like that, with that same pinch between her brows. It was as though she had been born preoccupied. While other babies cried, she was unnervingly quiet – her minute body almost lifeless in the delivery nurse’s arms, suspended like a question in the room, a hovering doubt, so that for a long beat he actually wasn’t sure if she was alive.
The girl continued digging, her attitude one of rapt attention as she attempted to dislodge a stone.
‘Olivia,’ Nathan said again, somewhat sharply this time, because his eldest daughter also shared her mother’s infuriating knack for ignoring him – not out of malice, Joannie assured him. Sometimes she simply forgot he was there, that was all, busy as she was with the cooking and cleaning, trying to keep up with the dusting and laundry now that she’d returned to work three days a week, leaving Nathan to wonder if it was possible that Olivia ever reminded anyone of any part of him when she so unequivocally took after his industrious wife.
The child looked up, squinting into the bright sunshine, then raising her hand to shield her eyes.
‘You think I don’t love Mummy enough?’ he repeated, examining her scrunched-up face for clues to some conspiracy they might be hatching, an uprising he was unaware of, fomenting at bath times perhaps or other shared moments of mother-daughter intimacies, occasions he felt increasingly unqualified to attend. ‘You know that’s not true. I love Mummy a lot, a whole lot, of course I do, there’s no doubt, but sometimes Mummy needs some space. That’s all. It doesn’t mean we don’t—’
‘What’s space?’ asked Olivia, closing one eye now, as though the strain of concentrating on him was too much for her small body to sustain.
Space?
Nathan shifted his weight from one foot to the other as images of orbiting planets shot through his imagination (a poster from childhood?). ‘Space is the shopping centre,’ he heard himself say, aware of how ridiculous it sounded almost as soon as the words left his mouth, grateful that Mick from next door was out of earshot for once, off on an errand instead of lurking on the other side of the fence, roughhousing with the dogs or whatever it was he always seemed to be doing out there, ever attuned to the temperature of their domestic life.
It was akin to living next door to a priest, he imagined, or a retired primary school teacher, he and Joannie unable to indulge the simplest argument without feeling that Mick was quietly auditing their conjugal fitness through the adjoining walls, latching onto their petty disagreements as evidence of their unsuitability. Though for what? Marriage? Parenthood? Everything? Nothing? When he wasn’t being paranoid he knew it was ridiculous. Mick certainly had better things to do than eavesdrop on a couple easily ten years his senior, not that their bickering would have yielded anything particularly interesting even if he didn’t, but this unease stayed with Nathan, dogging him whenever he ventured out into the garden, as though Mick, with his ute and feisty brood of blue heelers, was somehow the family man exemplar after which he, Nathan, should attempt to fashion himself.
‘The shopping centre?’ queried Olivia.
‘Yes, well it’s not just that,’ Nathan said, correcting himself. ‘It’s the nail salon and lunch at the food court and seeing her friends, having a bit of a laugh. It’s somewhere to hang out, a place where adults play, like you with your friends at the park. But I love Mummy a lot. We all love Mummy. You know that.’
Olivia picked up the mangled garden claw and resumed her ardent foraging.
‘So, you say or Mummy says that I don’t love her enough?’ he asked again, determined to pry some kind of formal concession from his offspring.
The child kept digging at the stone.
‘Olivia!’
She looked up at him, more curious than startled, unused to hearing him raise his voice.
He held her gaze, set on eliciting a response, something to appease his sense of unease, to distance himself from the suggestion that he might be responsible for any hint of marital disharmony or pending familial insurrection.
‘I say,’ she finally admitted, the stubborn rock still adamantly refusing to budge.
The following afternoon at Sherbrooke Forest, Joannie said that she and a couple of her girlfriends had been talking about going away next weekend. ‘Just one night, to Daylesford for a spa treatment. There was that article about it in the weekend magazine. Where Carol went last year, after her father’s funeral. She swears it saved her life. And the food’s meant to be out of this world.’
Nathan’s pants were too tight; he was putting on weight. Joannie kept riding just ahead of him on the path, her toned form comfortably up to the task (all those spinning classes), so that periodically he’d have to rise up out of his seat and pedal faster to catch up to her. The children were well ahead, tearing up the track in some kind of race.
‘Olivia thinks I don’t love you enough,’ he said, panting slightly as he pulled alongside her again, as though that had anything to do with spas in Hepburn Springs. ‘At first she said you’d said it but I pried the truth out of her.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Joannie, the canopy of mountain ash trees shading them from the brilliant sunshine flooding the rest of the countryside.
‘She thinks I don’t love you enough. She told me so this morning.’
Joannie stopped riding. ‘What’s that got to do with me going away next weekend?’
‘Not much,’ answered Nathan. ‘I just thought it was interesting, that’s all.’
‘Interesting,’ Joannie repeated, as though it was an unfamiliar word and she was eager to hear it said out loud. ‘Of all the things to say.’ She laughed to herself as she reached down to adjust her socks, pulling the elasticised cuffs back up over her thick ankles (peasant stock, she always maintained, her unhappy lot).
‘But why would she say such a thing?’ persisted Nathan. ‘What sort of thing is that for a child to say?’
Joannie stared hard at her husband, her brows closing in so that Nathan knew he wasn’t mistaken about Olivia – it was definitely the same expression, she was her mother’s daughter, the frown still almost cute on his daughter’s young face, though quickly hardening into an inflexible ferocity, he feared. Perhaps he could train Olivia out of it, help her to recalibrate her reactions before they set into the mean-spirited wrinkles Joannie was always so diligently abrading?
‘What are you suggesting?’ said Joannie. ‘You think I said something?’
‘I don’t know. No. Did you?’
‘Jesus, Nathan, I can’t believe this. She’s a ten-year-old girl. Who knows what goes on in the mind of a ten-year-old girl. She probably heard someone say something at school. Did you ask her? There might have been a simple explanation. You should have asked her.’
There was a thought. He could have asked her, he supposed, not that asking necessarily guaranteed a straight answer, not even from his ten-year-old daughter, people being inclined towards fancifulness from an early age, he’d found, particularly when they were trying to get away with something.
His thoughts drifted to his vegetable garden and the problem of what to sow where, there being little value debating the issue with Joannie now, not after his having affected the appearance of such indifference. Lately he’d been reading up on companion planting, the seeding of different species of complementary plants in close proximity to aid growth and facilitate natural pest control, discovering (amongst other things) that carrots were a good foil for tomatoes (they encour
aged insects that destroyed damaging bug larvae), but were no good for parsnips, apparently, even with their physical resemblance, and they attracted wasps, which was a definite no-no around the kids. Parsnips on the other hand didn’t seem to attract any insects, good or bad, and they were so delicious. But were they easy to grow, he wondered. Could you stick parsnips side by side with tomatoes?
‘Perhaps we could get your mother in to help?’ Joannie suggested. ‘That way I could take two nights.’
It took Nathan a moment to realise Joannie was waiting on his answer. ‘What do you mean, two nights?’ he said, shifting his attention back to their conversation. ‘I’m not following you.’
‘The spa,’ said Joannie. ‘My weekend away. I just told you!’
The girls disappeared around the next bend. Nathan called after them but they were too far off to hear.
‘Race you to the turn,’ said Joannie, and she tore off in their direction, her beige capris streaked a deep dirty brown, a fine dust of desiccated forest duff trapped in the dampened cotton creases.
Earlier that week Mick had popped his mug over the fence as Nathan was assembling the girls’ bicycles, attempting to adjust the gears with an oversize monkey wrench (it being the only hardware in his do-it-yourself arsenal, along with his saw and Phillips head screwdriver – the bikes had come with one allen key, but it could only do so much), as Heidi rehearsed ‘Advance Australia Fair’ on her recorder, torturing everyone within a five kilometre radius, he expected, but what to do? The child had to practise. Still, he braced himself for the request: could Heidi, would she mind please taking the instrument inside?
He bent his head further over the derailleur, uselessly applying his wrench to the limit-stop screws, assiduously avoiding the possibility of eye contact as Heidi discordantly clambered towards the chorus, grateful at least that she wasn’t singing.
The bike was a glitter-speckled shocking pink, Heidi’s official seventh birthday present. It had been much coveted for over a year (closely followed by a puppy, though she’d settle for a rabbit she’d informed them one evening over reheated macaroni and cheese), Joannie finally deeming the child old enough to have a bike of her own now that Heidi could tie her own shoelaces (a developmental benchmark requiring both manual proficiency and a maturity advanced enough to process basic yet crucial life-affirming instructions such as always wear your helmet and don’t ride on the road ). Had it been up to Nathan he would have capitulated months ago, the little accidents of youth being rites of passage, he believed, necessary for shaping a child’s burgeoning sense of themselves. After all, wasn’t that the point? The falling and bruising, the blood, scratches and tears, all coalescing into a series of physical and psychological scars there to propel us each into our own unique battered adulthood?
But it wasn’t up to him. And Joannie was much less likely to change her mind. She liked to think of herself as a rough and ready parent, the kind able to deal with anything, but with Heidi having already cracked a rib in kindergarten (the unfortunate result of a jungle gym fall), and breaking her left arm barely a year after that (a handstand gone horribly wrong), for her the brakes had been well and truly applied. Not that Heidi appeared clumsy or ungainly. Quite the opposite. She was a contained child, as petite as Olivia if not more so, her fair hair adding an ethereal quality, but it was as though her limbs didn’t understand the bounds of her own skin, were yet to learn where her body gave out and the rest of the world began, making her a potential danger to herself and a likely risk to others.
Nathan had purchased a bike for Olivia also (a slightly larger frame in a pleasing shade of pastel lime) – there being little point endowing one child and not the other, not if he didn’t want World War III on his hands (though he’d been careful to explain to her that it was an advance on her Christmas present, that she’d be receiving something substantially smaller than her sister come December this year, a caveat he wasn’t sure he was going to abide by even as he laboured the point, the child nodding and swearing she understood, that she accepted the terms of the contract, though of course she hadn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t, not when the time came, at ten years old as if she could) – so now the whole family could go out riding together, he and Joannie already being in possession of two fine matching metallic blue his-and-hers Dunlops.
He adjusted the wrench and tried another angle on the screws, but the sliding clamp slipped, pinching Nathan’s thumb. ‘Oh shit,’ he said, quickly withdrawing his hand, the wrench dropping to the ground, making a hollow clang on the concrete as he shook his injured fingers.
Heidi’s eyes nearly popped out of her head, her sharp tuneless notes halting mid phrase. ‘Um ah. Daddy said a rude word,’ she exclaimed in Mick’s direction, latching on to the expletive faster than Nathan could summon the composure to regret it. ‘I’m telling Mama. A dollar in the potty box.’
Mick laughed. ‘The potty box? Are you sure you don’t need any help?’
‘No, thanks mate, I’ll be right,’ Nathan insisted, his contempt masked by his easygoing allusion to the close friendship they didn’t (would never!) share. In other circumstances he would be the first to admit that when it came to nuts and bolts he had no idea what he was doing – but he was hardly about to confess as much to Mick, whose sole purpose in life it seemed was to ensnare Nathan in displays of his own inadequacies and then to rub his nose in them in front of his children.
‘The potty box, the potty box,’ Heidi sang, dancing around, refusing to let it go now that Mick had shown some interest.
‘You tell him, Heidi,’ said Mick, chuckling more to himself now, visibly internalising the mishap as a private joke, something to be resurrected later for the mild amusement of his friends.
Nathan winced, an involuntary response, instinctively recoiling from the prospect of serving as the butt of one of Mick’s anecdotes, knowing without a second thought how he’d be portrayed, the useless dickhead from next door. At least he’d had the sense to turn down his neighbour’s ‘help’, he thought, seeing that bargain clearly for what it was (less an offer than an exchange, Mick’s expertise for Nathan’s eternal subjugation), there being no end to the ways that loan might be serviced, from bringing in Mick’s rubbish bins to collecting his mail when he was away on holidays – Nathan foreseeing a lifetime of mowing his neighbour’s nature strip as payback for one half-hour’s use of Mick’s comprehensive box of spanners.
‘I think I can manage,’ Nathan repeated, wanting to be sure that Mick had understood: he wasn’t borrowing anything, no business had been transacted, there was no debt to be repaid.
Mick winked and shot his finger like a gun. ‘Well, I’ll be around if you change your mind, old man. Always happy to loan out the toolkit.’
Nathan smiled – his annoyed toothless smile – and waved Mick back over the fence just as Heidi came over to inspect his handiwork up close. She was still holding her recorder in her left hand, but had forgotten about it, letting it hang down beside her so that it almost scraped the cement.
‘Heidi,’ he said, using his head to indicate the trailing instrument. ‘Off the ground, sweetheart.’
She promptly obeyed, automatically raising the recorder to her mouth again for another tortured round of the national anthem.
The Thomson River Dam supplies the Silvan Dam via the Upper Yarra Dam. In 1996 the dam was said to have triggered a magnitude 5.0 earthquake, the second largest in the state’s recorded history. The children had been eager to eyeball the fault lines, some teacher having convinced Olivia that they extended east into the Dandenong Ranges, but at four o’clock Nathan and Joannie pulled the plug: that was enough for today, at this late stage of the afternoon, the sun now dimming into early dusk. The dirt track they were on had become increasingly steep and rutted beneath them so that it was near impossible to push the bikes. Neither of them had the energy or inclination to keep going. ‘Right, girls, time to head back to the car,’ said Nat
han. They hadn’t stumbled upon the fabled drunken forest (a copse of trees so called because of their odd angle, having adjusted themselves back to a vertical position in the years following the earthquake), but doubtless it would be a futile exercise with the kids. If he really wanted to find it he was going to have to come back by himself another time.
Heidi dutifully turned on her heels, worn out from their day exploring the forest floor (there’d be no additional bedtime stories for her this evening; he was quite certain she’d go out like a light), but Olivia wasn’t having it. ‘No,’ she bellowed. ‘I don’t want to go home. I want to stay here, here, here,’ the outburst triggering its own diminishing echo.
Another day and it might have been funny, but Joannie and Nathan were exhausted. ‘Enough,’ said Joannie. ‘You heard your father. We’re going home.’
‘But you said we could play in the fault lines.’
‘What do you think you’ve been doing all day?’ said Nathan. ‘This whole area is a geological tinderbox.’
‘I’m not finished.’
Joannie looked to her husband, shrugged her shoulders. ‘All right. Five more minutes. But that’s all.’
Heidi stood beside her father, balancing her sister’s bike, as Olivia about-faced up the sheer of the hill, determined on some path only she was sensible of, head bowed, her small clenched fists tolling in stride, making a much smarter pace than either Nathan or Joannie had anticipated. ‘Hold up now,’ called Joannie as she clicked down the stand on her Dunlop and took off after her, the two of them at once engaged in a tense scramble across the rocks, pressing through overhanging branches and debris in a manner that from Nathan’s vantage appeared more like a training exercise than anything one might do for fun.
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