by Miriam Sved
Other than Kate, their main topic of conversation was football.
Somehow, just by talking about football, Kate came to feel that she knew Moira on a different level to other people. She started following the team that Moira’s family barracked for, hiding her new allegiance from Dan (who had tried and failed, in the early years of their marriage, to enlist her as a supporter of his team). Moira knew things about all the players: their histories, where they’d come from and what they’d overcome to get into the League; she could describe how their characters seeped through their play: the hungry ones, the smart ones, the leaders and the followers. Sometimes she told Kate about these things as they stood at the kitchen window watching their boys kick the ball around. Sometimes at these moments Kate felt a fleeting urge to hold Moira’s hand, but she wouldn’t have done it in case it was misunderstood.
Mick and Jake grew together into gangly kids, skinny with the distant promise of height. Jake got more comfortable in Kate’s house but never, it seemed, with Kate – he would speak if spoken to, he was always polite, but always behind his veil of shyness. With Mick he was different: he could laugh, unselfconscious and occasionally snorting. With Mick he showed off – hours of a game they called keepy-ups, crescendoing kicks from one foot to the other, not letting the ball touch the ground; and pantomime death throes when the ball whacked him on the head. Once Kate eavesdropped on the two of them, Mick playing keepy-ups while Jake described their city of the future, which would be staffed with robots who did everything except play footy. Later, when they came in for snacks, she said to Jake, ‘How’s your robot city coming along?’ But he just gave her a scared half-smile and escaped back outside. The person he was best with was little Hugo, Moira’s second boy, who played serenely under the table while Kate and Moira sat above him and Jake ran in from time to time to give him a hug and tickle him into fits.
*
Kate pays close, deliberate attention to small things on the route into town. Clouds of dandelions along the roadside, skid marks on the bitumen. She watches the verge of the highway, alert for the quick movement of kangaroos: they used to scare her senseless when she first moved here, their kamikaze enthusiasm for the roads. Now she doesn’t usually think about them much, although she has killed two over the years. Her foot twitches on and off the brake. She is almost at Moira’s house.
You can see the house from the highway, although only briefly: on a rise just before the turnoff into town, no view of the place on approach and gone as soon as she reaches it; just a flash of brown bricks and striped green awnings. It is a small house for all those people, all the boys and men in Moira’s life. That thought stings, a pinprick of guilt somewhere in the back of her mind. She refocuses on the road, the turnoff into town. She will go to the butcher and buy some nice sausages. She could drop in at Dawn’s. But the upturned faces of the regular customers at Dawn’s are not so gratifying, not as friendly a sight since the grand final.
The trials of a footy mum.
Kate had been at the game, of course, and she had milled in the club’s rooms afterwards with all the families while the players got fixed up in the inner sanctum of the locker room. In that space of waiting she had longed for Mick, to comfort him – but even then, before she saw him and felt the stiffness of his body when she gave him a hug, before he drove home the next night and she found out how he blamed her – even standing in the club rooms with all the other disappointed but resolute families, there had been a wedge of fear lodged behind her ribs.
She knew many of the families – footy mums and dads, brothers and sisters – from other games and club functions. It was a community of sorts, and their condolences and reassurances were probably genuine, meant to convey nothing but solace (all variations on the same theme as Dawn’s: how Mick would get back up from this, he’d had a great season and a great game overall, they wouldn’t have had a shot at it without him). Their words were probably well-meaning and true, but all Kate saw was the bright edge of their relief: that it hadn’t been their boy taking the kick, stranded in the blinding gaze of 100,000 people, just him and a ball, so small and lonely under the weight of the siren. She hated them.
Since he was fourteen years old, Kate has gone to almost all her son’s games, while footy was expanding into something that happened outside their home, then outside the school, the town, the state. Trips to city schools and training camps (one good school wanted to give Mick a footy scholarship, but he refused to consider it), weekend games in Melbourne, Geelong, a few times in Sydney. Kate went to all of them, and everywhere she went with him, the light of her son’s talent reflected onto her. She got used to people at the games approaching her: that same shy enthusiasm with which Alison Harper had trailed her around the supermarket. They asked her questions about Mick’s training, his height, his record in the under-18s. They never looked at her with pity.
Kate pulls into an angle park across the road from Dawn’s, and sits in the car considering the little building’s yellow façade through her rear view mirror. She can see the silhouette of figures at a few of the small round tables. Probably locals, but she can’t make out who they are. There is no promise of comfort in the dark shapes, or of anything other than embarrassment.
She gets out of the car and makes for the supermarket, slinking beneath the awnings.
She gets sausages off the shelf in the meat section rather than risking a separate trip to the butcher, and goes through the self-service check-out. It is almost like the lonely shame-faced days of her first months in the country, when she felt like such an outsider that every human interaction was longed for but terrible.
With two bags of shopping she forces herself to walk slowly back to the car, to delay her return to the quiet, angry house.
Jake is leaning against the car bonnet.
She knows the shape of him so well, almost as well as her own son’s, although it has changed in the year she hasn’t seen him – even as blood rushes to her face and her throat thickens, she is registering how changed he is: whittled down in some places and broadened in others. The way he holds himself too, leaning against the car: there is something more confident than the old Jake in the set of his shoulders, his upturned face. He is shielding his eyes with a hand and looking in the other direction, and Kate’s guilt, which until now has seemed inconclusive – something arguable, something she might even shout back at Mick about if she’s given another chance (what did I do?) – now slams her in the face. She knows what she did to Jake. The blood pounding through her head and her thick, dry throat are physical manifestations of her guilt.
There is a moment where she could devise a coward’s way out: duck into the pub, or turn and walk back towards the supermarket and pretend she never saw him. But she is frozen on the spot, her neuronal response not fast enough to take her through the shock of seeing him, and of processing an undercurrent of hunger – she wants to stand and look at him and take in all the changes – before Jake turns his head and they are looking directly at each other.
Kate raises a hand in awkward greeting and forces her feet to move forward. Jake levers himself off the bonnet of the car and stands waiting with hands hanging by his sides, the new bulk of his body even more obvious square-on. He is like an apparition of someone who has died. He has only been back in town a few times since he got picked up in last year’s rookie draft, and on those times she has had no trouble avoiding him. And of course she hasn’t seen him play. She went down regularly for Mick’s games, but Jake’s year in the VFL has been merely theoretical – although recently, of course, she has heard how well he has done.
Because of his physical absence she has been able to think of him for the last year – when she had to think of him at all – in frozen pockets of the past: Jake as a gangly adolescent or wiry little kid. And all the time he existed in the world, a grown man.
She tries to smile as she reaches him but her face and throat still feel tight.
>
‘Hi, Mrs Reece,’ he says. So formal and old-fashioned; Kate can’t remember if he always addressed her like that. Perhaps he never addressed her directly at all. She cannot stop her stupid staring. ‘I was running some errands for Mum,’ he goes on. Mum. Moira. ‘And I saw the car.’
He swallows the end of his sentence awkwardly and looks down at the ground. His awkwardness loosens Kate; it connects her with those younger, callow versions of Jake, a history not dripping with guilt.
She puts down the shopping bags. ‘You thought it might be Mick?’ she says.
He looks up at her. ‘I heard he was maybe back in town.’
The town grapevine snaking between them all. The absurdity of it touches her: the boys grew up together, they saw each other almost every day of their lives. Now connected only by the spiky social tendrils of Dawn McCready. The wrongness of this cuts through her self-consciousness, and she surprises herself by reaching out to touch Jake on the forearm, and saying, ‘Come over and see him.’
He meets her eyes in a way she doesn’t think he used to. ‘If you think it’d be alright.’ So open-faced in his appeal to her judgment that fresh guilt creeps over her. But with the idea of Jake coming over there is also a new thing, or an old thing she had forgotten about this past year: a bubbling undercurrent of something fortifying. Almost like love. She would like to have Jake, little Jake, back in her house.
She says, ‘I think it would be good.’
*
He has his uncle’s ute parked a few stops away; they pull out together and Jake follows her down the main road (she hopes Dawn is looking out the window and catches sight of the two vehicles in formation – give her something to tell the drop-ins today).
Out on the highway the route home seems changed, somehow unfamiliar. She can’t stop looking at the ute in her rear-view mirror.
When they pull into the driveway the house looks more closed up and hostile than she left it. Mick’s angry presence inside radiates such a force field that she wonders if Jake can feel it. They go in quietly. Although she has told Jake nothing about the warfare conditions, they stay silent all the way to the kitchen, Kate walking behind him. His stride looks longer, his legs slightly bowed in a way she can’t remember from before.
In the kitchen, which is noisy with echoes of the past, Jake sits at the table and puts his hands on the wood.
‘Can I get you anything?’ Kate says. ‘Some juice?’ And then, remembering that he is grown up, ‘Or a coffee, or a beer? Actually I might have a beer myself.’
Jake gives a small nod.
‘Dan bought some Coronas last week, they’re nice with lemon. Luckily the lemon tree’s already started fruiting.’
She feels jittery with the knowledge of Mick’s presence so close by, so unwieldy. The problem is how to get them in a room together. If this was a normal house and she was a normal mother she would just knock on Mick’s door and say, Jake’s here to see you. An unthinkable thing to do.
Jake comes to her rescue. While she is cutting lemon for their beers he gives a small cough behind her and says, ‘Maybe I could take Mick one, too.’
She doesn’t respond, not wanting to risk any spillage of her gratitude and fear out onto Jake, but she cuts another sliver of lemon and goes to the fridge for a third beer. She puts two of them on the table in front of him and steps back with something like awe. He takes both bottles in one long-fingered hand, gives her an awkward little salute with them on his way out of the kitchen.
Kate stands in the doorway to watch: she watches him walk to Mick’s door, which has blared at her with such violence this past week and now is rendered harmless as Jake gives a gentle knock. He goes in without waiting for a response.
She is braced for something. Some dramatic denouement. But of course there is no cacophony, no shouting or throwing of furniture. It makes her feel silly for being scared of her son, whom she has been thinking of as volatile based on one shouting scene and the proof of her own guilt. Mick and Jake have never been volatile; certainly not together. Their friendship has been quiet and dependable. Until this last, damaged year – which, from what Mick has told her, has mostly been silence.
And now. She edges down the hallway, straining to hear something from Mick’s room. There is a low murmur of voices. Silence. Another murmur. Impossible to hear what they’re saying, and it doesn’t matter: somehow Kate arrives at the knowledge that they are not talking about much of anything – not talking in the dramatic way you’d think they would have to after all that has happened. They are drinking a beer together, maybe exchanging a few innocuous words about the season just past, and about the gruelling season to come, when they will be playing together. Maybe they are talking about the robot cities of the future.
Kate returns to the kitchen and forces herself to do sane things – she spoons the chicken soup into a plastic container and puts it in the fridge, drinks some more of her beer, sits at the table with a magazine and flicks through it, unseeing. She keeps looking up at the clock. The terrible thought appears: she should be keeping this vigil for the boys with Moira.
Imagine calling Moira now, out of the blue. Jake dropped by to see Mick. And maybe, Come and have a cup of tea.
Reality rushes back into the room, chilly and grey. She has to stop imagining.
She hasn’t spoken to Moira since last October. The topography of this silence is mapped against the football draft: she and Moira both went to the last game of the under-18s championships and they sat together to watch the boys, both of whom played well. The club made its first approaches, and by then the silence had begun to work its way into some empty spaces. Then the school’s Best and Fairest award; the draft combine; the game.
Mick had come to Kate rather than Dan when the club started courting him. He was worried it might upset Dan, who took his allegiance to the team of his youth almost as seriously as his son’s career. It was Kate who took the initial calls from club reps, and arranged for all three of them to go to Melbourne so Mick could tour the training facilities and meet with some of the coaching staff. It was widely known that the club had deep pockets, and didn’t scrimp on talent.
Mick was thrilled. He played it down for Dan’s sake, pretending to be disappointed that it wasn’t the other team, the one his dad cheered for all his life. But you couldn’t get higher profile than the club that wanted him, and they did seem really, passionately to want him – their talent scout came all the way out to the house, a fast-talking, smarmy and attractive man who drank a beer with Kate and Dan, and praised Mick’s speed, his reflexes and ball skills, until Dan got overwhelmed and left, muttering something about fixing a fence. They wanted Mick with such gratifying enthusiasm that it took Kate a long time to notice the clause in their wanting. The Jake clause. Moira gave her the first clue, saying something off-hand about the man from the big club – it wasn’t Moira’s beloved club either – and about what order he’d visited Mick and Jake in: on his way into or out of town. Kate poured tea from the soupy dregs in the pot, her hand twitching momentarily.
Mick and Jake. Mick or Jake. Mick versus Jake.
A couple of weeks later Jake won the school team’s Best and Fairest award – an award which was clearly weighted towards fairest rather than best, a merit badge for effort and nothing to think twice about. Except that, unnervingly, the talent scout from the club showed up for the award ceremony. He seated himself at their table, which Kate found reassuring, but over the course of the night she watched him talk to Mick and Jake in almost equal turns, and when Dave Fulton, the school footy coach, said Jake’s name and held out the trophy, she turned and saw the scout at the bar deep in conversation with Jake. Mick harried his friend onto the stage, graciously stage-managing the applause from the crowd. Kate watched the club man watch Jake take that garish trophy, and felt a cold apprehension creep over her skull.
She could not be friendly with Moira that night. The
re were always people milling between them – fawning neighbours wanting to shake Jake’s hand and congratulate his family – so that Kate didn’t have to speak much to her friend.
But the next afternoon was Monday, one of Mick and Jake’s training days, and it didn’t occur to Kate until too late that she could make up an excuse and cancel.
Moira brought Jake around as usual, and as usual they sat in the kitchen with a pot of tea. Kate was stiffened by resentment and a dread of exposing herself, quiet until she realised that silence exposed her even more. She started congratulating Moira with heavy, dead phrases: ‘You must be so proud of him,’ and, ‘He deserved to win,’ and, ‘We’re all really pleased for him.’ Moira barely cracked a smile. She knows, Kate thought. She sees. And a horrible certainty that Moira would not let this pass: truthful, clear-sighted Moira would not sit under the stream of lying niceties and pretend not to know. When Moira looked up without making eye contact, Kate stopped speaking and waited for it: Moira’s judgment, her excoriating vision.
Instead, Moira said, ‘Sometimes I think I made a mistake, letting Jake get so far into footy, you know?’
Kate did not know. She nodded.
‘Watching him get that trophy, I thought, Shit, maybe he’s gonna make it. I sort of saw it all working out for him in a flash. And then it’s like all of it came crashing back down on me. What he’s gonna have to face, a black kid living by himself in the city. But the disappointment if he misses out. I wish Donny was here to talk to him.’