by Miriam Sved
They stood in the kitchen, the three of them, and in her shock Kate started being overly solicitous towards the boy. Would he like some juice or biscuits? she asked him. Maybe a sandwich? Did he want to watch cartoons? Should she call his mother? He stared at his feet until she mentioned his mother, and then looked up and gave himself away with a twitch beside his right eye. ‘Does your mum not know you’re here?’ Kate said.
He was saved from having to answer by Mick, who shoved him down at the table and started pulling a chair around the kitchen to reach juice in the fridge and biscuits in the cupboard, putting one glass down in front of his friend, talking the whole time about a big game on tomorrow. Kate didn’t know what kind of game.
After the boys had gone outside to play (Mick said they were ‘training’), she rifled through the kid’s bag and found a tag on his pencil case, neat adult lettering: JAKE DOOLEY. It took three phone calls to find his mother, a deep-voiced woman who sounded amused when she threatened to tan the cheeky fellow’s bum. Moira Lee-Dooley. She thanked Kate for calling and said she’d be around to pick him up in twenty minutes. Kate told her not to rush, that it was no trouble having him here – and then, remembering the way the little boy’s eyes skittered upwards at the mention of his mother, she said not to be too hard on him, she was sure it was all her own son’s idea, Jake probably got steamrolled off the bus at the wrong stop. Moira laughed and said, ‘Yeah, that’d be Jake, he’d follow after a serpent if there was a footy in its fangs.’
Moira arrived quicker than expected, in less time than Kate needed to prepare, and before she’d even told the boy that she’d given him up. Answering the door, the shame of her first response to Jake was still fresh – that flush of adrenalin at an unexpected element – and she was determined to be normal for Moira (God knew what the woman had to put up with from some of the locals). But Moira flipped her expectations again by being white. Or . . . whiteish. The time it took Kate to recalibrate was probably not as long as it seemed, but coming out the other side she felt freshly shamed – why had she needed to recalibrate? – and like she’d already blown it with this woman, who was the first adult company other than Dan she’d had in the house for months.
She took her through to the kitchen, trying to slyly clean small squares of the house as she went. ‘Sorry about this,’ she said. When they got to the kitchen she had to move a stack of old newspapers off a chair so Moira could sit down. ‘It was good that Jake could come over and play. I mean, it’s nice that Mick’s making friends at school.’
Moira sat, smiling slightly, and said nothing.
Kate tried again. ‘How long have you . . . have your family . . .?’
‘We just moved here last year. From Bendigo, where Donny’s mob’s from.’
Kate put the kettle on and surreptitiously wiped a bench. ‘Oh, so your . . . mob, where are they from?’
‘All over Victoria, really. My mother’s people were from over near Swan Hill. But she lost touch with them.’
She sounded distant, maybe bored, and Kate felt a rising panic; she was getting it wrong. Before she’d moved to the country she’d had no problem talking to other women. Chatting; small talk and large talk. She’d thought of herself as a sociable person.
The silence now was only partially relieved by the kettle boiling, and the journey from cupboard (cups, teabags) back to kettle felt long and self-conscious. Why didn’t Moira say something to help her? Kate was just deciding that once the tea was dealt with she would call the boys in and cut the whole thing short, when Moira said, ‘Jake told me about your boy last week. About how he can play.’
Kate smiled as if she knew what this meant.
Moira said, ‘Are your family into footy?’
She thought about this. Her father would watch football for hours, with the same sardonic half-attention he gave to all sports: golf and car races and the other kind of football with the round ball. Kate’s mother called these sports ‘your father’s games’.
Kate said, ‘I guess so. Yeah. Yes.’
Moira nodded. ‘Jake’s got it in his blood too. His dad played, and his uncle. It’s a good thing around here, sort of something to belong to.’
‘Right,’ Kate said. ‘Yes.’ Something to belong to: the choice of words was freakishly apt. It gave her a sense that Moira was looking right into her life, and for the first time since she moved out here to marry Dan she wanted someone to see it all: the long quiet days, how she could sink so easy and deep into a lassitude thick with resentment. How she didn’t know what she would do with herself now Mick was in school. She said, ‘Something to belong to could be good.’
The light was starting to fade when Moira called Jake in. Kate said to the little boy, ‘You’ll come back and play with Mick another afternoon, won’t you?’
Standing beside his mother in the afterglow of exercise he was a bit braver, raising his eyes to Kate’s face and mumbling something out the side of his mouth.
Moira prompted, ‘Say thank you to Mick and Kate for having you round,’ at the same time as Mick whined, ‘We weren’t playing, Mum, we were training.’ Kate met Moira’s eyes over the kids’ heads and they both started laughing, Kate so hard that she had to double over and cross her legs. Mick watched with a pinched, lofty dignity. She thought this might be a first for him: the first time she’d had a joke with someone who wasn’t him; the first time the line between the adults’ world and the kids’ had divided them. After Jake and Moira left he looked at her solemnly and said, ‘I don’t know why you laughed. Footy’s not funny.’
*
And it turned out he was right. If it seemed absurd at first, describing two little boys kicking a ball around as training, the absurdity quickly seeped away.
For a start, it changed things with Dan. Right from Mick’s first footy injury: the black eye, about which Kate couldn’t glean much information. Mick didn’t seem upset by it. When they were alone she insisted on pressing a bag of frozen peas gently into the eye socket for as long as she could make him sit still. He was more restless than usual, and more remote from her. It was probably normal, part of the exciting dislocation into the new world of school. And while she felt this with a background sense of abandonment she also registered relief, and the unexpected swell of a new kind of respect for her little boy, whose school shorts were so billowy they looked like a skirt around his twiggy legs.
Mick had always been a caring boy – not selfish like other kids, attuned to her needs and hurts, happy to be her little friend and helper. Dan had muttered things about giving the kid space, cutting the apron strings, and she knew that what he worried about was their son turning into a sissy-boy. When she’d met Dan – surrounded by earnest young intellectuals at uni, where he was taking a few arts subjects along with his agricultural science degree and flirting with the idea of abandoning the family farm – his hardness and country upbringing, his authenticity, had made him seem desirably rare. Kate had felt a combination of proprietorial pride in being the one to unfold the city for him and transgressive thrill in the unorthodoxy of her choice: a man’s man, who wore plaid shirts tucked into his jeans and held the door open for her on their dates and never said much about himself. Then Dan’s father died, and Dan decided to return to the farm, and Kate went with him without realising how much of her contentment had relied on the contrasting presence of those other boys: the pasty, bantering beanpoles and middle-class revolutionaries. Out here, where there was no-one to embody the range of options from which Kate had chosen her life, Dan was the dominant type: a quiet, internalised version but still, once you got down to it, the orthodox male and law of the land. She felt a stinging confusion about his insults against their sweet son.
Mick’s first football injury changed the family dynamics. When Dan came home he sat the boy down and asked him questions in a man-to-man voice that elicited the black-eye story in much more detail. It had happened during a footy game; Mick
and Jake had joined in with the big kids and Mick got elbowed during a tackle (after he took an excellent mark and kicked an excellent goal and another point that was almost an excellent goal). Like all the men around here, Dan was footy mad, supporting the team his grandfather played two games for in the 1920s or something. He scruffed the boy on the head and said, ‘Well, it’s a nice-looking shiner you got.’ As if a shiner was a nice thing for a five-year-old to get. She knew that later he would talk her out of calling the school to have a little chat about proper lunchtime supervision.
A subtle realignment set in around the house. Dan started watching Mick in a new way, paying attention, asking him about school and his mates. And he joined in with the training: out in the back paddock when he got home before dark, sometimes for hours on Sundays. Watching her husband and son in their shared communion with the ball (hold it like this, see, this angle; always keep your elbows close against your body for a chest mark) was the first big exclusion of motherhood, a thread pulled from the delicately stitched fabric of her identity. But the pain of this came with perks.
She noticed something new in the town, where she had never before made much social headway. No-one had been unfriendly to her, exactly, but no-one had taken her in. Dawn McCready, who ran the diner on the main road where travellers might go if they got blown off course on their way from Broken Hill to Melbourne or Melbourne to Sydney, had never stopped giving her coffee in little white cups with ineffectual handles. Kate saw her pass steaming, chipped mugs to other locals, whose conversation seemed to lapse when Kate entered the diner. When she’d moved here she’d had expectations of a particular kind of country folk: handmade clothes and friendly local gossip; they would be open-handed and open-hearted, a bit parochial but with a warm-bodied common sense. But the women in Dawn’s diner seemed, if anything, more closed in around their own business than city folk, and there was nothing handmade about their clothes: collarless and synthetic, probably from Shepparton Target. They occasionally made polite conversation with Kate, never much beyond the weather and the length of the day. They seemed a bit suspicious of her.
One day in the supermarket, two weeks after Mick started school, Kate got the feeling that she was being followed. It was Alison Harper, who had an older boy at the school, shadowing her from the deli section to toiletries to fruit and veg. Eventually she fell in step with her trolley. Their boys had been playing together, she said, and, ‘Good right foot your boy’s got. Darren reckons he’s the best one with a footy even though he’s only in prep.’ She asked whether Kate had got Mick in Little League yet, and seemed to hang on Kate’s description of her husband and son practising kicks behind the house. ‘You’re raising a strong one there,’ she said. ‘Come for a coffee at Dawn’s?’
In some part of her self unbowed by the years of loneliness, Kate judged these women for taking her in because her son could kick a ball a long way. But it felt good to go to Dawn’s with Alison, to be handed coffee in a large mug printed with a fading stamp of the Valley Ravens and to hear about Dawn’s great-uncle Shane who’d played for that team. She told Dawn the same things she’d told Alison about Mick’s training, embellishing with details she hadn’t realised she’d picked up. (‘His overhead marking’s already strong but Dan’s working on his kicking accuracy.’) With the small, rough talisman of football under her tongue she felt her face unclench from the strained permanence of a forced smile. She smiled genuinely, magnanimously. Secure for the first time in a respectable role she knew she could pull off: raising a strong one.
*
With Dawn McCready safely off the phone, Kate turns the soup down to a simmer and goes out to water the front garden, her insides twisting on her way past Mick’s room. The garden beds in front of the house are important: her small patch of nature on a graspable scale, a sliver of human agency reclaimed. She has planted a new bed of tulips. The first hopeful buds are just emerging from the earth, but Kate’s attention keeps being drawn from the green shoots to the driveway. That smooth dirt ribbon runs off towards the road and into town, past several small acreages and farmhouses, including the one where Moira and her family live.
Kate has never been inside Moira’s house. Mick and Jake’s training kept them in a tight orbit around the farm: the grass out the back, perfect for 50-metre kicks. Moira’s house is on a town block with very little land. But still, there must have been something wrong for Kate never to have visited, in all those years. Some fundamental imbalance.
The strong pull exerted by the driveway has to do with escape, and also with that house. She would like to see it now, if only fleetingly: the place where Moira spends her days. And she could use some groceries. And perhaps a trip into town would do her good.
The ground around her tulips is barely damp, but she moves quickly before she can think her way out of this small decision: turning off the hose and skirting back into the house, not quite tiptoeing past Mick’s room to get her handbag and take the soup off the stove.
In the car, down the driveway, her stomach lurches with the uneven gravel. The thought occurs to her: she could stop at Moira’s; she could just park out front and wait for something to happen. She accelerates out onto the road, sailing on the brief lift of this possibility, even though she knows she will not stop. The time to introduce herself to Moira’s house has passed.
*
Moira brought Jake over to play (train) every Monday and Wednesday throughout primary school. The second time she came was just as revelatory as the first, and followed a similar pattern: Kate initially awkward and anxious, and then disarmed by a direct question. They’d been sitting in the kitchen for a few minutes and she had exhausted the conversational opportunities afforded by the tea, the weather and the dry season, and was starting to feel the constriction of social panic across her chest.
Moira, apropos of nothing, said, ‘Why’d you not have any more children, Kate?’
The directness of this question, which she’d imagined lurking behind some of the silences of the women in town (among whom the offspring average was three to four), was so far from causing offence that Kate came straight out with it all: the horrible pregnancy, varicose veins threatening to expand into bubbles of sludge and block up her circulation, the operation the doctor had recommended after Mick’s dangerous birth; and she went on to answer the follow-up question, the one she seemed always on the point of posing to herself: no, was the answer, she wasn’t really sorry about it, if she was honest. God help her and her lapsed Catholicism but she wasn’t really sorry to have to stop at one.
Moira smiled: discreet sprigs of wrinkles around her eyes and a row of white teeth. ‘I don’t blame you,’ she said. ‘But too late for me to hear sense.’ She put her hand on her belly. The bump was hardly visible through her thick jumper.
‘Oh shit, sorry,’ Kate said. ‘I mean, congratulations.’
Moira laughed and waved it aside. ‘People always say congratulations, like you’ve done something special, you know.’ She nodded towards the kitchen door, the back of the house where Mick and Jake were training, the occasional shout of kick it here, usually from Mick. ‘No-one says congratulations once you’re doing it, actually bringing them up, you know.’
Kate knew – with a bone-deep appreciation for Moira’s casual profundity she knew – and again she felt a physical pressure edging her towards self-revelation, a bubble of words rising in her chest which this time she didn’t clamp down. She told Moira everything about herself: her old life in the city before Dan, her comfortable parents who were always bemused by her dissatisfaction with the hollowness of it all. She told her about the first year she moved here, the silence that seeped into the house, the hostility she felt from and towards nature; the first time she went on a long lone ramble and came face to face with a brown snake. And the first time she turned on the TV in the morning, for some company to help fight the silence; and the gradual steps by which the TV came to stay on all day, until an ho
ur before Dan got home from his work and then the hasty shaming clean-up, searching through the kitchen for something to cook quickly that would look like it took hours.
And Mick – the terrifying miracle of him, which made parts of the loneliness so much worse by denying her the possibility of an out, the calming option of an impulsive death over the bathroom sink or down a bottle of pills with her favourite scotch. Mick was her Reason to Live – she heard herself say it with embarrassment, thinking that she would never have said it at all to any of her old friends in the city. With the watchful spur of Mick she tried to learn some domestic arts: they baked together, and went on long walks to pick wildflowers or examine a nest of baby birds, and nature was not so hateful at all through his eyes.
When Moira left – extracting Jake sweaty and glowing after the long kick-around – it occurred to Kate that she might have dominated the conversation, and should have asked Moira more questions about herself, about the baby and so forth.
The next visit she said, ‘Is your husband excited about the . . .?’ Nodding towards the well-concealed bump.
‘Oh yeah,’ Moira said, ‘Donny wants a big family.’
But then she asked about the inner-city Melbourne suburb where Kate grew up, and at the end of the visit Kate again found that she had spent the whole time talking about herself. She had an out-of-context mental flash of Father O’Callaghan, the priest at a high-school friend’s church where she had submerged herself in a heady conversion. Her sudden religious enthusiasm was probably geared towards surprising and confounding her secular Jewish parents, but she quickly came to genuinely love Catholicism, or at least the idea of it – or at least the idea of confession. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned, and then the slow release of poison as she revealed her sins, not looking forward to the cleansing of penance (she never really got into the Hail Mary stuff) – it wasn’t absolution she craved from the box; the step before was enough. Understanding. To feel comprehended, grasped, by a single other person. That was the great luxury of Catholicism, which she never rediscovered when she abandoned her conversion. Until Moira.