Cooee (12 page)

How can I describe that year? What can I say to give some idea of the change that came over me? It was not a change that I willed or welcomed. It was beyond my control. It was as if the molecules in my body quivered and melted and recast themselves in a new physical pattern.

I was a different person: that was what none of them could see. It was as if I had lived all my life in an invisible eggshell: my birth had been just one hatching; another was required. And as I broke through the eggshell I smelt different smells; I heard different sounds. I swear I saw different colours. It was like discovering that all your life you had lived in a vast deep shadow that was now withdrawn: suddenly you stepped into the sunlight. What were you meant to do? Creep back into the shadow again? Exchange the sweet fizz in your veins for the old sludge? Refuse to see the new colours? Turn your face away from it all?

My sister Zoë told me I had caused our mother's death by leaving Steve, by splitting the family.

‘That would be in addition to the cancer, Zoë?' I said.

I felt guilty enough: why should I be made to feel worse? She understood no more than anyone: I was helpless. What was I meant to do? Look my only happiness, all my happiness, straight in the eye and refuse it? It was as if I could see my old life only through the wrong end of a telescope — as a series of tiny black figures on a horizon. Steve was the tiniest, and his distant cavortings interested me the least. I could not focus on him. I almost could not see him at all.

Zoë pursued me with biblical enthusiasm, squealing sin and retribution and hellfire, screaming wreckage and mayhem. I hadn't ever realised she felt so strongly about the religious side of things, nor that she was so fond of Steve, about whom she had always been somewhat condescending. ‘Steevil the weevil', she'd called him, all those years ago when I became engaged to him and she had no fiancé. Now I reminded her of that and she told me I was being childish.

‘Excuse me?' I said. ‘I'm the childish one? You called him Steevil the weevil and I'm the childish one?'

‘Don't trivialise this issue!' she yelled at me: this is one of the admonitions people grab at when they are at a loss. ‘I don't know what's happened to you! You're infatuated, blinded! This man has changed you into somebody I don't know!'

And much more of the same, all emphatically punctuated.

‘It's the sex,' she said to me one day, with a ferocity that approached real viciousness. ‘I understand that, of course. It's just the sex. That'll fade away, sooner rather than later, and you'll look back and wonder what you ever saw in him.'

I didn't bother to reply, because it was such a foolish accusation. Sex on its own is terrific, but it doesn't finally matter as much as other things. Making love with Max was wonderful, but it was not for sex, nor for the glamour, that I fled to Max, curled in his embrace, hid under his protecting wings. It was for his kindness and gentleness, his ready responsiveness to me, his love and care. It was for his thoughtfulness and sympathy, his loyalty, his unending, unwavering support through everything we ever did together. I'd never had anything like it.

My family and Steve had always carped at me (
The trouble with you, Minky ...
), criticised me (
Lovely, why can't you just ...
), found fault (
Isabel, dear, couldn't you try a little harder ...
). Nobody had ever simply loved and sustained me as Max did. This was what I found I couldn't adequately explain, what nobody would believe or comprehend.

Imagine you had lived your life within curtains, in silence, and one day someone had lifted the curtains and immediately shown you, let us say, a Rembrandt painting, played you a Mozart symphony. Imagine you had lived your life in snow and then discovered fire. Could you glimpse it all past the curtain's quiver, hear its echoes dying in the distance, and turn your back on it?

When we revisit the past, we are told, we inadvertently change it; we crystallise it anew, altering the chemical structure of our memories subtly but inevitably, definitively. Just by selecting words, casting our net into retrospective waters, we catch different fish. We try to reconstitute the flavour of the original experience and in that effort inevitably mislay something. I am making it sound as if it was all instant and perfect. It wasn't: I've said, I didn't leave Steve for over a year. And it wasn't all ecstatic either.

As I try now to connect these days, to construct the narrative faithfully, it is like trying to make a necklace out of different beads. It shouldn't look like a string of pearls when I've finished. Some of the beads do indeed have a fine soft bloom to them, like a pearl; others are jagged and crooked; some are delicate and flowery; others glisten with a dangerous obsidian polish.

Years later, when I had sold the house called Rain and was living on my own again — or, rather, with Borrow — Zoë asked me if I regretted any of it. She still couldn't understand that it was an irrelevant question. I had no choice in the matter. I was out of control.

It was like asking me if I regretted World War II, or the French Revolution. It wasn't up to me to regret, because it wasn't possible for me at the time to make choices other than those that imposed themselves upon me, those that became historical truth entirely without my connivance or intention. A storm can't choose to do other than it does. I was caught in the storm, at one with the hurricane.

I'd gone feral.

And it went sharply against the grain for me: that was the other thing everybody failed to appreciate. I'd never been a rebel. I'd had my faint resentments about life, my lingering suspicions about unfair treatment and inherent worth. I was utterly happy when I married Steve. I was unawakened and ignorant; but I was pretty happy, too.

I came out of an uneventful childhood, from loving parents, from the unknowing shadows of middle-class endeavour and the circumscriptions of middle-class satisfaction. I wanted a career, certainly; but I wanted a husband, too, and children, and all the domesticity that went with those aspirations. It never crossed my mind, when I married Steve, that I would want one day to unmarry him.

Divorced people were other people. People who had affairs were other people. People who fell newly in love, people for whom the world glittered like bushland freshly washed after rain, people who did wild and unpredictable things were other people.

Yet I had always sensed that there was something extra and dangerous in me, a capacity to do something radically unstable, threatening. Zoë didn't have it: Zoë marched militarily down the road of her life, not consenting to be distracted or delayed or to whiffle off on a sortie to the left or right. Steve didn't have it: Steve was wedded to comfort and habit and regularity as well as to me.

But I'd always feared and cherished the knowledge that there was inside me something bright and resilient and exotic — a great vivid tropical tree, perhaps, with glossy leaves and gaudy parrots flashing and gabbling in the thick branches — something that could explode and change the course of my life.

Sometimes I had felt it within me, this thing, pushing upwards like the blind nubby eyes of potatoes; but always I had firmly squashed it, because I had been frightened of what would happen if I let it go.

And now it had sprouted and was growing wild. It was still frightening, but it was something also to grin about, to relish. I had been so docile, always. All my life, even with Zoë, except when her demands became truly intolerable, I had been compliant, submissive — a good girl. I had always acted within the parameters of people's expectations of me. Pliant, tractable, biddable, docile, meek: I had been a veritable thesaurus of obedience. But now I was supine no longer. Now I was living my life for me.

Steve and I were savage with each other, over that year. At first he was deliberately obtuse: he refused to understand what I was saying. Before I said anything at all, I tried to let him find out. I left a trail of hints, a long string of unanswered questions that he had only to ask himself, or me, in order to discover how his life trembled on a precipitous brink. I left a packet of condoms in the bathroom. (Steve had had a vasectomy.) He didn't advert to them. I left a compromising note from Max on the floor of the bedroom: he obstinately refused to pick it up. Even when I wasn't seeing Max I was late home from work, with specious excuses. I never explained incoming telephone calls; I did my best to make the most innocent conversation sound mysterious, dangerous. Nothing worked. He had to have his nose rubbed in it before he could catch any scent, pick up any trail.

And when I eventually hurled it at him so he couldn't dodge it any more, I wasn't interested in rational discussion. I tried to provoke him, I think. I didn't know that was what I was doing, but I think that's how it worked. I was guilty, and I was infuriated by my guilt, and I wanted him to behave badly in order to justify my own behaviour. I wanted him to hit me, to bellow at me, to cast me out.

At the beginning, he would simply sit at the kitchen table and stare at me with bloodhound eyes. It drove me mad. It took him at least a month to work out that I really meant what I was telling him; and even after that it was a while before he lathered up a true rage.

But then we were off. It was hammer and tongs. We'd wait till the children were out of the way, but only barely, sometimes. I didn't care. The children were as distant and tiny to me as everyone else. I couldn't even look at Kate. I persuaded myself Dominic was too young to understand, that when he was older he would forgive me, see my side of it.

Dominic was ten. Plenty old enough to understand, as it turned out; and not of a forgiving disposition or an elastic perception.

‘What's
wrong
with it?' Steve shouted bitterly at me one day. ‘What's wrong with the bloody marriage? We've been married more than fifteen years, for Christ's sake, and you never complained before. What the fuck's wrong with it?'

In a way I could see what he meant. I hadn't complained; there'd been nothing, in a way, to complain about. And yet, when I looked back, I thought I had been endlessly forbearing. About the snoring, about lots of things.

The main thing, it seemed to me, that I had been long-suffering about, was the boredom. It had come home to me quite rapidly, after marrying Steve, that there were to be no fireworks in life. I'm not quite sure, now, what I expected of marriage, although I wanted it so badly. I do recall thinking that Steve was a comforting, steady presence — in a teddy-bearish kind of way — and I think I believed he would provide stability. I suppose I was right about that.

The thing is, you might want stability but kick against sheer immovability. Steve was great on routine. All-bran and sultanas for breakfast. The 8.10 from the local station, Monday to Friday. If he missed it, he still got to work on time; but missing it up-ended the day into Steve's version of really significant cataclysm. Saturday afternoon for gardening and listening to footy on the radio. The news at seven. Ringing his mum on Thursday nights. Sex on Friday nights, Sunday mornings.

It wasn't that I minded any of it in particular. It was fine, really. It was irritating, a lot of the time, but it was safe. He was so safe. He looked after me so much: he took such good care of me it drove me mad. He discovered I had a fear of spiders: he was all concern. He would hear me screech or see me go rigid and he would come running. ‘I'll take care of it, lovely,' he would say. ‘Just a little old spider, is it? I'll take care of that. Don't you worry about a thing.'

After dinner, at night, sometimes he would sit and beam at me foolishly. If I asked him why he was looking at me like that, he'd say: ‘I'm just so happy to be with you, lovely. I'm such a lucky guy.' And that was comforting, and pleasant; and I became used to it, even if I did resist being called lovely the whole time.

Habit ensnared me, too. And it was better in the beginning, when we both had a routine: he'd go off to catch the 8.10 to the city; I'd hop into the Cortina and do the ten-minute drive to Bea's office. The business belonged entirely to Bea, in those days: I'd only just graduated when I started there. It was before she took me on as a partner; that came later.

And for two years or so, that was perfectly acceptable. But after I'd had Kate, it all changed. I'd decided to spend Kate's first two years at home. Steve and I had grappled earnestly with questions about motherhood and childcare, and we'd agreed I'd be a full-time mother for the first little while at least. We could afford it; and he'd be happier, he said, to think that his lovely was at home caring for the kids.

But then I found out about looking after children. I found out about the loneliness and the insecurity and the boredom and the worry, about the prison a tiny baby could build for you. I found out about being left alone in the house in the morning with a small child and the indescribable smell of damp toast crumbs.

It wasn't that Kate was a difficult baby. She was dead easy. Everyone kept telling me how lucky I was, pointing out how placid she was. She was sleeping through at nights within a couple of months. She was a cherub, a prodigy. Everybody said so, especially my mother. I asked her one day if she'd ever felt bored when she had Zoë and she looked at me as if I were a child molester, a monster.

Within six weeks I'd rung Bea.

‘I can't stand it,' I said.