by Steven Lang
Eugenie listening, but wishing he would stop. It was, as Lindl had said, just gossip, telling tales on each other. In this case she wasn’t even sure of the credibility of the complaint. Marcus and Geoff were very close, they’d known each other for years and tended to vote on things together. It seemed to her that Marcus might be using his friend to cover for his own agenda. It was all too exhausting to contemplate. Not that she thought herself necessarily any better than either of them, it was just she could see a better use for the time: she could be spending this stolen hour visiting Nick, dropping in and ravishing him on his sofa; hot with the idea of it, looking in Marcus’s direction but barely hearing the words.
Some years before David had accused her of being frigid. It was not long after Emily was born, when they’d all but stopped having sex. She’d thought it was mutual, an aspect of breastfeeding and lack of sleep. But then, in the middle of a fight about something completely different – something mundane like washing up or warming a bottle or leaving a towel on the floor – David had attacked her. All this resentment about their sex life bubbling up, culminating in this tirade which held at its centre the idea that she was the one in control, the one in possession of the key to the vault of their desire. David digging up this arcane word, this piece of nastiness exhumed from an archaeological site, from some ancient irrelevant culture, still, however, rich in virulence, capable of slipping into the flesh and spreading its infection – lack of feeling, lack of warmth, lack of sexual capacity – the latter seeming most unfair because how had her girls come into being if she’d been so unwilling, so cold? She could remember the love they’d shared when they first knew each other, and if it had got lost surely its absence could be laid, equally, at his feet. He who’d never been there, never engaged with his daughters, expecting the house to be just so on the basis that he was the one who was bringing in the money, as if she was a fucking maid, never mind that before she stopped work to have their children she’d been earning more than him. None of this helping to dispel the understanding that, deep down, she was the one at fault; if only because she was a woman. In the café, sitting opposite Marcus, it was finally evident the accusation could not be sustained. Just the thought of Nick’s body sent flushes of desire, no, call it what it is, she told herself, flashes of lust, coursing through her body; delicious, hot, revelatory.
Marcus, apparently oblivious, had left off Geoff to talk about Alt, the guy from the hippie camp, who, under different circumstances Eugenie might have been keen to discuss. She didn’t have the patience. She stood up.
‘I have to go,’ she said.
Marcus, broken off mid-sentence, looked up at her in consternation.
‘Of course,’ he said.
‘I’m supposed to be somewhere. I forgot. I’m so sorry.’
Finding the car and sitting behind the wheel to tap letters into her phone with clumsy fingers, trying to defeat the predictive text that wanted to communicate anything but that she would be arriving at his house any minute to fuck him. Sending the message but not waiting for the reply, driving up around to the hospital praying that he’d be there, that the message wouldn’t be read by some assisting nurse in one of the observation rooms, panicking at the thought, pulling up a little back from his house, across the road, seeing the lights on up in the kitchen, her heart shuddering with expectation. Nick’s flat being seriously weird. As if he didn’t live there. Having all the character of a motel room with, true to form, a kitchen built in the seventies, complete with wooden cupboard doors and orange rippled tiles. A mission-brown sink. A figure coming to the window. Nick. Not looking out. For him the window would be a mirror of the room. Holding up a wine glass to the light to see if it was clean. Handing it to a second person behind him, briefly glimpsed, a woman, dark-haired.
Starting the car, doing a U-turn. Back down into wide Peary Street, the angle parks with their bright yellow wheel stops empty now that the shops had closed their doors, only the late shoppers ducking into the supermarket for bread and milk. Telling herself that it could be anything. In shock. Realising, only then, that she knew nothing about him except that he was a doctor. Had been married but was now divorced, as much, he’d confessed, because of his own serial unfaithfulness; noting this at the time he’d told her as being of interest – that he had this awareness of himself – but disregarding its relevance to her who had no intention of marrying him. It was just part of who he was and who he was was of significance to her. That was all. Left into Leichhardt, back up the hill and left again into Hurley, right into Burke. Navigating a network of the world’s explorers for whom the town’s streets were named, except, that is to say, the few aberrations honouring local families like those of her husband’s: her own name now, too, of course, up on signposts so that everything she did in this town was always going to be writ large. The enormous stupidity of going from one man to another.
Jean-Baptiste’s street populated by disintegrating little weatherboard houses on stumps, former workers’ cottages, stepping up the slope, some in better condition than others, a couple knocked down and replaced by townhouses.
Her father renting a room in one of the cottages, owned by another musician. Moved in there after she’d kicked him out of her house a couple of years before.
Parking the car on the hill. Pulling the handbrake on hard. Going into the house to get the girls. This being all she was capable of, a terrible vacancy in her belly, the sense that she’d made the worst kind of mistake, the repercussions of which were only now becoming apparent but which would, surely, destroy her utterly, could reach out and destroy, even, her daughters.
She needed, simply, to get home, to be away from town, the buildings, the cars, these houses tumbling one on another, crowding thoughts that were already cramped. Music inside. The house, small from the outside, still somehow managing to contain a hallway, three bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen/living room in which a practice session was underway, Jean-Baptiste standing by the bench with his alto sax in his hands, still wearing that stupid hat, while Simon, the pianist, worked his way through a solo on the keyboard. The singer, Kat, a dark streak in t-shirt and pants (no bra) at the open glass doors to the deck, a cigarette held out into the open air. How fantastic it must be to have this lot as neighbours. This was something she’d not understood about her father when, as an adult, she’d encountered him again, living in Paris with his mother (her grandmother, for whom her elder daughter Sandrine had been named). She’d been naive, she’d thought the living arrangements a European thing, something an intellectual or an artist from a different culture might do. But if it was so, it was also because he was the archetypical muso, endemically unreliable, still carrying Bene Gesserit and that whole generation’s sense of entitlement wherever he went – the conviction that the very purpose of their lives was play; little changed by a changing world. After she’d gone to find him in France he’d come back to Australia to visit her a couple of times, staying with them, but never for very long. He and David never having quite seen eye to eye.
Winderran, though, with its vibrant music scene, was his type of place and after Sandrine’s death – when it turned out her grandmother hadn’t owned the flat where she lived in Montmartre, was, in fact, as penniless as him – he’d come back again, this time more permanently. Moving in with them, without formal discussion or appreciation of the different schedules two young daughters might impose – playing music to all hours of the morning, smoking cigarettes and dope, sleeping till midday with a variety of different women, offering regular critiques of her mothering. Infuriating her as much as David so that she had, in the end, asked him to go; her own father. Now somewhat reformed, less dope, more meditation and yoga but still the cigarettes and wine. Another burden to be borne.
Sandrine at the kitchen bench, doing homework. Unwashed dishes piled next to the sink. No sign of Emily. The room decorated according to a seventies model that was almost baroque in its own way – paisley patterned throws over the armchairs, pottery
water-cooler, dark red walls bearing original art that appeared to have been created under the influence of hallucinogens, but not in a good way. Wind chimes on the veranda. A Persian rug. Realising that it might not be as simple to get the girls out of there as she might have wished.
Sandrine, twelve years old, short boy’s haircut on her long face, jumping down from the stool when she saw her, calling out, ‘Mummy!’
Simon stopping with the piano mid-chord so suddenly everyone was looking at her. Required to give an explanation as to why she was so early which, she saw, now, she would have to say had nothing to do with having seen Nick at his kitchen window with another woman, was to do with Geoff Steever and a couple of others not being able to make the meeting, except that all this seemed to have happened a long time ago, on another day entirely.
‘Fantastic,’ Jean-Baptiste said, ‘you can have dinner with us.’
‘No, really,’ she said, ‘we have to be getting home.’
Sandrine, by her side, her arms around her waist, objecting. ‘But, Mummy, we’re—’
‘We’re going home,’ she said, as if she seriously believed this would be the end of it, that Sandrine wouldn’t use the presence of the beautiful skinny Kat to embarrass her into doing whatever it was she wanted. The whole parenting conundrum unspooling around her in public once again when she was least equipped to deal with it so that all at once she thought she might burst into tears. ‘Where’s Emily?’
‘Are you okay?’ Jean-Baptiste said, demonstrating more awareness than she normally gave him credit for. Perhaps his shift towards the spiritual wasn’t all crap. ‘You look a bit, I don’t know, pale.’
Turning back along the corridor and into Jean-Baptiste’s room to find Emily watching a cartoon on his computer, earbuds in her ears. Putting her arm around her younger daughter’s shoulders, asking her what she was watching and telling her they’d have to go at the same time as Sandrine came in loaded with her arguments for staying, that Kat had made this or said that. Jean-Baptiste coming in behind her without his instrument to add his weight to it so that she no longer wanted to cry but to scream.
‘No,’ she said. ‘We’re going home now. Mummy’s had a difficult day.’ And, although she hadn’t raised her voice, something in the tone must have communicated her state because Jean-Baptiste said to the girls that he thought she meant it, but they’d seen that too and within minutes she had them gathered together, school bags and shoes and hats and empty lunch boxes.
Full dark outside. The girls strapped into their seats. Back up Peary again and out to the west of the town; allowing a certain relief to fall on her. At least until her phone began pinging.
‘There’s a message for you,’ Sandrine said, helpfully. ‘Shall I check it?’
‘No!’ she snapped. ‘Leave it alone.’
The business of getting the girls sorted granting a level of calm. The evening routine a balm to the storm inside her, but something that could only really hold until they were in bed and she was by herself again, taking her phone out to the far corner of the veranda, where a signal might be found.
Which was, of course, so much shit because she’d seen him at the window with another woman, the lie meaning there really had been cause for concern. Meaning, in fact, that she was deeply seriously fucked because somehow or other she’d allowed herself to become infatuated with a man who was totally inappropriate. Worse, she’d acted upon it, been to his house and had sex with him all over the place like some deranged person, tangling him up in the abandonment of her marriage as if that wasn’t messy enough. Although, of course, it could be said, thinking this, seeing this, that the marriage had been ready to be abandoned and maybe Nick, Doctor Nicholas Michael Lasker, he of the barren household, had been no more than the vehicle with which she might achieve escape velocity from it, a thought which provoked this picture of herself shot into the upper atmosphere, dropping bits of rocket behind her as she went, rising up and up until she could attain an orbit distant enough from the gravitational pull of not just her husband but the entire Lensman clan, indeed from that whole stretch of her life since she’d been a child in the eucalypt forests of southern New South Wales, wandering amongst the grey-barked trees that stretched infinitely across the slopes of the hills, her hand held by Yvette who was telling her stories about what it was she was seeing, filling her tiny mind with a vision of the world which she had never been able to support after Yvette had gone away to wherever it was that sisters went when they got burned up in fires. What sort of orbit could grant her freedom from such influence?
Out on the veranda in the night, her own two daughters asleep, curiously sensitive to her throughout the evening procedures – dinner, television, baths, stories – unusually protective of their mother as if they sensed that she was close to some abyss. The trouble with being shot into the upper atmosphere was that there was nobody there but her, no guides, none of Jean-Baptiste’s handy angels to spread their wings around her frail body and carry her through the vast emptiness. Just her, alone, subject to her own recriminations, because who would ever have thought what she was doing with Nick Lasker could have ended well, not just the deceit but also the joy, the sheer fucking pleasure she’d taken in fucking him, in being by his side. There had to be a price for that sort of thing, surely? Her Stanmore grandmother’s rulebook seeming, astonishingly, to have made it up into stellar orbit along with her, requiring, sooner or later, to be jettisoned along with everything else, only that she couldn’t find the release switch to quite let it go, would have to spin up there with it for companionship a little while longer.
At Roselea she parked in the shade of the big fig, going straight down to the old milking bales where they squatted below the road, rusting tin-roofed, still boasting the row of narrow doors along the back wall where cows had once gone in, now permanently shut, the unpainted hardwood washed grey with age, brushed with red lichen. Around the side she found the entrance, a new-made door with a wooden latch, a piece of dowel which you slid to move a fillet of wood, Marcus’s handiwork, the kind of thing he did for relaxation when not doing the thousand other jobs the property demanded. Surprised to find the interior all but empty, the walls painted a startling white. The only furniture a couple of chairs, in one of which Lindl was sitting, the big glass doors open in front of her.
Eugenie had never been inside before, had been aware of it as a private space away from the house, hadn’t really expected to be invited in, for all their friendship harbouring the lay-person’s awe of an artist’s workspace. On the basis of a single black and white photo she’d seen of Lindl when she was both young and an active printmaker – standing amongst the equipment of her trade, work benches, pots, brushes, scrapers, prints drying on makeshift washing lines; dressed in a frock and wearing a rolled scarf tied around her head, like a working woman – she’d anticipated a crowded paint-splattered room. But this place was empty, the only sign of any art being a stack of blank canvases leaning against the wall.
Lindl stood, gave her a kiss on the cheek. ‘Welcome to my studio,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’
Eugenie unsure how to respond.
‘I had a man come in to line and paint it for me, get rid of the rats,’ she said, making a sweeping gesture to embrace the whole empty space, talking about it with a fierce and breezy lightness. ‘For literally aeons it was full of stuff, old bits of Mar’s farm equipment, boxes that came from the shop, but I got it all moved into one of his sheds.’
‘It’s lovely,’ Eugenie said. ‘But …’
‘A bit bare? Yes, it is, isn’t it? I had Ian Illchild over here yesterday. I’d promised him some of the canvases left over from the shop. He told me I should spread some colour around. He said it would help. It was one of those things, you know, build it and they will come, I thought if I made the space my art would come back … there being nothing to stop it anymore now my daughter’s left home, the shop’s closed. The thing is, nothing’s come. Well, not nothing. I sit here. Thinking. As if
what I really needed was a space for that. Who’d have thought?’ She laughed, a fluttering, dismissive, embarrassed laugh which covered, Eugenie thought, more than just the empty space. ‘But come, sit with me. What’s going on?’
No point in dissembling. ‘You probably guessed,’ she said. ‘I’ve been seeing another man. Although, in my defence, the last time we spoke it hadn’t started.’ Saying this to Lindl who, at the time, had disappointed her by advocating the sanctity of marriage when what she’d wanted was permission to see Nick, something, in the event, she hadn’t needed help from anyone to do. Now, though, she had to talk to someone, the prospect of another long night of tormented thought being more than she could bear. Lindl the only person she could trust not to judge her too harshly, never mind her earlier reticence.
Beneath the present issue of Nick and whatever he was up to – the text messages that had come in during the night, the attempted calls to her mobile that morning (which she’d ignored) and all her conflicting desires (including the need, above all, to know, as if knowing more about who he’d been with might help) – beneath those immediate issues lay the need to end her marriage, and the impossibility of that … by which she meant the practicality of it; how one might even begin to approach such a thing. What her girls would think, how to protect them from harm; but then, also, the question of where she might live, where David would live? Not to mention their finances: they had joint accounts. How David would respond, the terror of that, the fear he might become vicious, take it out on her, or on the girls – there being precedent. It’s not that she thought he was happy in the marriage but she knew he was in love with the idea of family, in the same way she had once been (what happened to that?), except in his case there was also the factor of his place in fucking Winderran and the humiliation he would think she is visiting on Lensmans by what she had done, or wanted to do. And opposed to all these anxieties the deep awareness – which she supposed she had to thank Nick for – that the marriage was already over, had been for some time, and the painful discovery which accompanied it that she was, in fact, a person in her own right, who needed … well, this was another problem – she didn’t know what she needed – but she needed something and her lack of certainty about what it was contributed to her guilt at requiring anything. All of it informed by a sense of irrevocability and dread at what she’d invoked and, by concurrence, imposed on all those around her by having the temerity to suggest that she was someone important enough to have a say in anything at all.