The Spill

by Imbi Neeme

  She curled up on the couch and cocooned herself in the afghan blanket in the hope she might eventually emerge a different – maybe even fertile – person. She felt the same desperate loneliness she’d felt lying on that two-seater IKEA couch in Inglewood after her miscarriage.

  Down the hall, she heard the key in the front door and her heart lifted. Jethro was home.

  ‘I got halfway to work and I just couldn’t do it. I’ve rung in sick,’ he told her.

  Jethro never rang in sick. He was so dedicated to his work that the one time he had gastro, he still led a two-hour conference call, pausing only to put his phone on mute and vomit into a bucket.

  ‘I’d have rung in sick, too,’ Nicole said. ‘Except I’ve no one to ring.’

  Jethro lifted her feet up so he could sit next to her on the couch. He held her feet in his soft, warm hands.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Nicole said, eventually.

  ‘What can you possibly be sorry about?’

  ‘This is a problem with me. I’m the problem.’

  ‘No, no, no, you’re not the problem at all. You’re my solution,’ Jethro replied. ‘Do you know how lonely I was before I met you? Even when I was married to Suzette, I was lonely.’

  ‘That’s because she wouldn’t watch crap TV with you,’ Nicole ventured.

  ‘Yes, that. And many, many other reasons.’ Jethro paused. ‘Part of the reason I turned back and came home to you was that I couldn’t stand the idea of you sitting with this sadness alone,’ he said. ‘So I came to sit with you.’

  He began to rub Nicole’s feet, gently and slowly, and she found herself falling into the rhythm of his hands.

  ‘Also, I wanted to tell you this,’ he said, choosing each word very carefully. ‘Of course, I would love to have kids. But if it were a choice between having kids and being with you, I’d choose you every time.’

  Nicole felt her whole body relax. ‘I choose you back,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Then come up here and kiss me.’

  She sat up slowly and turned towards him. He took her face in his hands and kissed her gently.

  ‘Let’s go on a holiday,’ Jethro said, pulling back to look at her, his hands still cupping her face. ‘Let’s go somewhere beautiful and inaccessible, somewhere that it would be difficult to get to with a baby or a child. Let’s go to lots of music festivals, or take up paragliding or climb Mount Everest. Let’s buy a collection of extremely fragile and very expensive Fabergé eggs and put them on a display at knee height. Let’s renovate this place or buy a new one, with glass walls and staircases without banisters. And let’s buy a new couch, an impractical one, a white one. Made of suede or silk or even crepe paper.’

  Nicole was laughing now through her tears. ‘As long as we can watch crap TV on our white crepe-paper couch, I’ll be happy with anything.’

  ‘We can watch it with the volume up until 3 am every night.’

  ‘Okay. You’ve got yourself a deal.’

  Nicole realised then, that the thing she’d been bracing for was not the news about whether she could or couldn’t have children, but whether Jethro would leave her if she couldn’t. Every other important male in her life had left her. Her dad had done it twice: once when he left Tina, and then again when he’d taken Samantha to live with him. Darren had done it multiple times, but the worst was when he left her bleeding in a hospital all alone. Maybe finally, in Jethro, she had found someone who was going to stay with her despite all her imperfections.

  But instead of feeling better, she felt worse. She wondered if Jethro, like the piano in that little room, was only staying with her because he had found himself trapped.

  Piece #18: 2006

  Now that she was back at work again, Samantha was almost beginning to enjoy being a mother. While other mothers complained about juggling work and parenting, Samantha could not get enough balls in the air. Every weeknight was filled with one activity or another, whether it was taking Rosemary to netball training or dance classes, or attending meetings for one of the many school and social committees she had joined, or baking late into the night for cake stalls or stuffing envelopes for mail-outs or sewing sequins on costumes.

  It was only occasionally, usually on a Sunday, that the void would threaten to consume her again. She would wake to find nothing in the calendar, nowhere to be, nothing particularly urgent to do and her mind would turn to the bottle of vodka, still in its special hiding place in the wardrobe. But even then, she’d scrabble around to find something else to distract her from the thought of that bottle: a button on an old shirt of Trent’s that needed replacing, or a scrapbooking project she’d been meaning to get around to. She’d give each of these tasks the same weight and urgency as saving the world from nuclear disaster.

  The busier she became, the less often she thought of drinking. That had been Tina’s problem, Samantha told herself. Tina hadn’t kept herself busy enough.

  And then one day, Samantha got a call that changed everything.

  She was in the middle of arguing with Rosemary about homework while trying to get dinner cooked when the phone rang. She answered it on speaker so she could keep chopping.

  ‘Hello?’ she said, hoping it wasn’t Trent ringing to say he was late. She had a school council finance subcommittee at six-thirty.

  ‘Hello, Samantha.’ It was Donna-Louise.

  Samantha’s heart sank. Her immediate thought was that Donna-Louise was going to pull out of Rosemary’s dance recital on the weekend. She and Craig had managed to miss three of the four recitals since Rose began dancing. And while Rose never seemed to notice or care, Samantha took each absence as a personal affront.

  ‘Hi, DL. Are you still okay for Saturday?’ she asked cautiously.

  ‘There’s been a complication,’ Donna-Louise replied, her tone sharper than Samantha’s knife. ‘Your father and I are separating.’

  Samantha’s knife stopped mid-air. ‘You’re what?’ she asked.

  ‘Separating. I’m moving to the Busselton house this weekend.’

  Samantha put the knife down. ‘Go watch television,’ she told Rosemary, who gleefully threw her pencil down and ran off to the lounge room without question.

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’ she asked, taking the phone off speaker and holding it tight against her ear.

  ‘Samantha,’ Donna-Louise replied, her voice thin and tight, ‘people rarely separate for reasons that are easily explained over the phone.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’ Samantha felt smacked down. ‘Do you need help with the move?’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘And Dad?’

  ‘He’ll be fine, too. He always is,’ Donna-Louise replied in a way that wasn’t comforting in the slightest.

  Samantha finished the conversation feeling shaken.

  Her first instinct was to ring Trent, but the call went straight to voicemail. She left a message and then rang Craig, only to have that call go to voicemail, too. So she phoned Nicole.

  ‘Dad and Donna-Louise are splitting up!’ She was surprised to feel the sting of tears as the words came tumbling out of her mouth.

  ‘What? Why?’ Nicole asked.

  ‘What a ridiculous question. As if anyone could just answer it over the phone,’ she told her.

  ‘It’s a reasonable question,’ Nicole replied. ‘At least, I think it is.’

  ‘It’s ridiculous,’ Samantha insisted, blinking her eyes furiously in an attempt to fight back the tears.

  ‘Sammy, are you okay?’

  ‘I’m chopping onions.’

  ‘Is Dad okay?’

  ‘I don’t know. His phone is off. But Donna-Louise sounds okay, in case you were wondering.’ She knew Donna-Louise would be the last thing on Nicole’s mind and somehow that made her tears fall faster. ‘They’ve been together, what, twenty years? Donna-Louise has been like another parent to us.’

  ‘To you, you mean. She never liked me because I only ever messed up her stuff.’

  There was an awkward pause
, while Samantha sniffled.

  ‘Does Mum know?’ Nicole eventually asked.

  That stopped the tears. ‘I don’t think it’s any of her business.’

  ‘I’ll tell her.’

  ‘This isn’t idle gossip, Nicole.’

  ‘I’ll tell her,’ Nicole repeated.

  Samantha retrieved the vodka from its hiding place after she ended the call. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d pulled it out or even got close to pulling it out, but tonight was different. She needed something to settle the unexpected maelstrom inside her.

  She poured a large slug into a tall tumbler and filled the rest with lemonade and ice. As she went to take a sip, something about the clink of the ice cubes against the glass annoyed her, so she scooped them out with a spoon.

  The vodka felt soothing, like a warm hand on her cold chest.

  ‘Can I have some lemonade?’ Rosemary was at the kitchen bench, eyeing off the bottle of lemonade, but not the vodka.

  ‘With your dinner,’ Samantha replied, whisking both bottles away.

  ‘Why not now?’

  ‘Because.’

  ‘But why are you allowed to have lemonade now and I’m not?’ Rosemary argued. ‘It’s not fair that the grown-ups get to have all the treats.’

  ‘You get plenty of treats.’

  ‘But not when I want them. And I want lemonade now.’

  ‘Well, you’re not having lemonade now.’

  ‘But why not? You’re having some.’

  ‘You’re just not.’

  ‘Dad would let me have some.’

  This last punch of Rosemary’s landed hard. Samantha always envied Trent’s easy relationship with their daughter. Even though he was a soft touch, Rosemary never quite dominated him in the way that she tried to dominate her mother.

  ‘Okay,’ Samantha said, giving in, and Rosemary smiled.

  The will of that child, thought Samantha. It was a miracle she didn’t drink every day just to deal with her.

  She finished preparing the dinner, occasionally sipping her drink and trying not to think about Donna-Louise and Craig. Instead, she thought of how sophisticated it felt to be drinking and cooking at the same time, like she was in a movie.

  She’d just slid the pasta bake into the oven when the phone rang again.

  ‘Hello?’ she answered.

  ‘Darling! Nicky told me the news. Are you okay?’ It was Tina, evidently ringing from the pub, judging by all the noise in the background.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be okay?’ Samantha bristled. ‘It’s not my relationship that’s breaking up.’

  ‘It’s just . . .’ Tina’s voice trailed away for a moment before returning. ‘It’s just that Donna-Louise was always like a mother to you.’

  Samantha drank the last dregs of her drink and threw the insult back. ‘Well, someone had to be.’

  If Tina heard the insult, Samantha couldn’t be sure, because at that very moment, there was an explosion of shouts in the background.

  ‘Sorry, darling! The game’s on. I don’t know which game or even which sport, but it’s all terribly exciting.’

  There was another shout. Samantha began wondering why Tina had even bothered to ring her with all that commotion going on.

  ‘Anyway, Nicole didn’t seem to know why they’d split up,’ Tina continued, raising her voice in an attempt to compete with the shouting. ‘Do you?’

  ‘No.’ There was no way Samantha was going to gossip with her mother about this.

  ‘I expect it’s down to another one of Craig’s broken promises,’ she said before she was drowned out by an almighty tsunami of roars. ‘Oh! We seem to have scored a goal, or a wicket, or something. I’d better go. Kisses!’

  And with that, Tina hung up, leaving Samantha with nothing but the urge for another drink.

  By the time Trent came home from work, she was three vodka lemonades down and had more vodka hidden in a Hannah Montana drink bottle in her bag for the walk to the finance subcommittee meeting.

  ‘I got your message,’ Trent said, kissing her lightly on the cheek. ‘What happened? Do you know why they’re breaking up? Is Craig going to keep the house?’

  ‘Donna-Louise said she’s moving to Busselton, but I don’t know if that’s forever.’

  ‘Yeah, that makes sense. She loves that house with all its white furniture. Of course, the real question is how they’ll sort out the golf club memberships. My guess is that Craig will keep the Mount Lawley membership and DL will keep the Busselton one. The Busselton club is very prestigious, you know.’

  ‘What are you, their property lawyer?’ Samantha was annoyed now, mostly with herself because her eyes were filling with tears again. ‘It’s too soon to be talking like that.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ Trent asked, looking at her properly for the first time since he’d got home.

  ‘No. Yes. I . . . It’s just . . .’

  ‘It’s just what?’

  ‘It’s just that I thought they would grow old together,’ she found herself wailing, like a three-year-old.

  Trent was clearly taken aback by her tears. ‘I’m sorry, Sammy. I’m being a dick about all this. Of course, you’re upset.’ He stepped in to hug her, but Samantha only momentarily surrendered before pushing him away, worried that he would smell the alcohol on her breath.

  ‘I have to get to that finance meeting,’ she said.

  The finance subcommittee meeting was at Dawn’s house, just near the school. Samantha paused outside to drain Hannah Montana’s remaining contents and then pop some chewing gum in her mouth.

  ‘Sorry, I’m late,’ Samantha said, her breath all minty-fresh, when Dawn greeted her at the door.

  ‘Don’t worry. We’ve only just started,’ Dawn told her as she led her into the dining room.

  ‘Sorry, I’m late,’ Samantha repeated to the rest of the committee. ‘We had some bad news. Family stuff.’

  The table looked at her, obviously expecting her to elaborate on the bad news, but when Samantha didn’t say anything more, their eyes turned back to the print-outs in front of them.

  ‘Now, where were we?’ a man in a shapeless grey suit said. Samantha could never remember his name. Maybe Stewart.

  ‘We’re just looking at the draft balance sheet for Q3,’ Dawn whispered as she handed Samantha some papers.

  Samantha looked down at the pages in front of her but it was like the figures were flailing around in a sea of vodka.

  ‘I have to go to the bathroom,’ Samantha announced, standing up again. She did it so quickly that her chair fell backwards, making an almighty noise, like a gunshot in the quiet room.

  ‘Whoops,’ she said.

  ‘Those chairs are weighted strangely,’ Dawn said, helping Samantha pick the chair up again. ‘The kids are always knocking them over.’

  Samantha apologised and quickly made her way to the bathroom, her cheeks flushed. She was sure that the entire finance subcommittee now knew she was drunk.

  In the bathroom, she sat on the closed toilet lid and considered her options. She could make up an excuse to go home or she could stay and make even more of a fool of herself. Both felt like things that Tina would do.

  Samantha’s eye caught a book tucked into the magazine rack next to the toilet. She pulled it out and looked at the cover. The Secret. She closed one eye so she could focus on the blurb on the back.

  ‘You will come to know the true magnificence that awaits you in life,’ the book promised her.

  Maybe the vodka is my true magnificence, she thought. Maybe I can stay without being a fool.

  She stuffed the book into her handbag and re-joined the meeting, her head held high.

  While the others murmured about liabilities and assets and accruals, Samantha picked up the quarterly report, and, closing one eye again, looked at the page until a couple of numbers swam briefly into focus.

  ‘Why doesn’t the posted surplus from the profit–loss match the figure on the balance sheet?’ she asked, trying as
hard as she could to stop her words colliding.

  ‘That’s a good question,’ Maybe Stewart said and Samantha felt a huge wave of relief. Even if she was quiet for the rest of the meeting, she’d made a contribution and they couldn’t ask any more of her than that.

  ‘Would you like some wine?’ Dawn offered.

  ‘No, I’m good,’ Samantha said, still looking at the papers, even though the figures had now swum away again.

  ‘Samantha doesn’t drink,’ someone else said to Dawn.

  ‘That’s right. I don’t drink,’ Samantha said in a loud voice, looking up at them all as if daring them to contradict her.

  Nicole

  Mum had led such a small life in such a small flat and yet, after days of sorting and chucking, I was overwhelmed by how much stuff remained. Samantha still wasn’t talking to me and it felt too hard to do it on my own. But the thought of paying strangers to throw out the final remnants of my mother’s life felt harder still.

  And so the flat sat there, uncleared and untouched, for over a month.

  When the second rent bill came in, Jethro finally cornered me on the subject.

  ‘You know I’m happy to keep paying the rent for as long as you need me to,’ he said. ‘But you also know I’m happy to help, right?’

  ‘You’d help me?’ I said, surprised. ‘But you’re so busy at work.’

  ‘Work schmerk,’ he replied with a grin.

  We worked all day filling garbage bags with junk: unopened sugar sachets, Aldi catalogues, broken pencils, pen lids, odd socks and laddered stockings, single playing cards long since separated from their pack, and a large collection of almost-empty jars of night cream.

  ‘It’s like she wasn’t ever able to see a night cream through to the very end,’ Jethro remarked, but I was busy examining a piece of jigsaw puzzle I’d just found wedged under the skirting board. A piece of sky.

  ‘I’m glad Sam’s not here to see this,’ I said. ‘Mum’s blatant disregard for keeping jigsaws as complete sets used to drive her nuts. Which reminds me . . .’