House of Sticks (27 page)

She woke up sometime around dawn. The curtains were open, and the sky showed pale and pinkish. Birds were calling, rough, loud and exotic-sounding. A call she'd never heard before. Bonnie thought of claws gripping, solid bodies hung upside down from branches, big, curved beaks.

Her breasts ached, pushed against her bra. She could feel her pulse in them, and in her splitting head, her throat, her throbbing finger. She looked down at herself under the covers. All her clothes still on. Without sitting up she undid her jeans and wiggled out of them. Kicked them off the end of the mattress. She groped at the bedside table but there was no bottle or glass of water. She closed her eyes again, tried to ignore the dry of her mouth and the insistent fullness of her breasts. Breathed shallowly, drifted in and out of a hot, queasy doze. Started awake, turned to the other side, drifted again.

‘Bonnie?'

She opened her eyes. There was someone at the door — a shadow with dark hair. Just for a second she thought it was the guy again, come back somehow. Hadn't he gone? Didn't those doors lock themselves when they shut?
She covered her face with her arm, felt her throat fill with sick embarrassment.

‘You awake?' It was Beth.

‘Mm.' She kept her arm over her face. ‘Kind of,' she said, and the words rasped out brokenly.

Beth's soft English voice was apologetic. ‘It's almost eleven. The housekeepers are here. They want us to get out.'

‘Okay.' Bonnie lay still.

Beth moved away, pulling the door shut behind her.

She lay a moment longer in the tick of her thick pulse and the grip of her nausea and slashing headache. She didn't want to think about anything, but her mind was beginning to creep towards it anyway, to send out tendrils. Back to last night, poking at that nerve-end of exquisite shame, the details that lay waiting in their drunk, fogged shrouds. And forward — and she threw back the covers and hauled herself up, hunched over the threatening heave of her stomach, reached with shaking hands for her jeans, her boots, her bag — forward to the flight she was about to miss, to the new flight she'd then have to pay for, to the heavy hopeless guilt of home, and Pete.

She hobbled from the lift, pushing her sunglasses onto her face. Half dragged, half carried her luggage to the desk. Leaned at the high marble counter. Caught sight of herself in the mirrored door to the office — a drained death-mask of a face, scarecrow hair, the black lenses of the glasses with their promise of hidden damage. There was a moment of fascinated shock that registered in the receptionist's eyes before she was able to recover her air of professional composure, and it almost brought a laugh swimming up through the churn of Bonnie's pain.

Her voice wavered out in a croak. ‘Can you get me a cab, please? I'm running late.'

‘Certainly,' said the receptionist, picking up a phone. ‘Where are you going?'

‘To the airport.' Bonnie sagged at the counter. She looked down at her pale wrists sticking out of the cuffs of her jacket, the bulging blue veins on the backs of her hands. She put the left hand over the right, to hide the brownish streaks of dried blood.

In the taxi she tried to clean her hand with spit and a tissue. The cut was small and pink, swollen at the edges. Bonnie dabbed at it, and it oozed new, thin blood. She wrapped the tattered tissue around her finger, clenched it back into her fist. She kept having to stop and lean forward, hold herself taut against surges of nausea. Every movement seemed a mammoth task. Slowly and laboriously she prepared for the airport: checked the printout with the flight details, readied her driver's licence, checked her mobile phone — no messages — and switched it off.

‘I'm running really late,' she said to the driver, for possibly the third time.

‘Doing my best, love.' He made no change to his driving. His left arm lay slack, the hand resting on the gearstick. Bonnie tried looking out the window, away from his infuriating calm. But the grey concrete barriers that lined the road — tall, like walls, like battlements, with their rows of rectangular holes from which the occasional plant sprouted, wildly, clawing skywards — made her feel worse, and she turned her eyes back to the safer immediate view of the seat in front, and the driver's unsympathetic arm.

She ran, past smokers and trolleys, through automatic doors, over the buffed floor. A thickset teenager carrying some enormous piece of sporting equipment in a soft case moved with impossible slowness in front of her, and she skittered from side to side, arms wrenching at the handles of her own baggage, elbow joints aflame, head pounding. ‘Excuse me,' she hissed. ‘Sorry. Excuse me.'

Past him and past one of the check-in lines, darting in while the man at the desk was still clicking something on his computer, and two wheelie suitcases blundered along the conveyor belt.

‘Hey — there's a queue!' came a voice as she hefted her gear bag and guitar case onto the belt and slapped her licence on the counter.

‘I'm sorry,' she panted. ‘Melbourne. Can I still make it?'

The man gazed at her, then back at his screen. Then back at her. ‘It's about to board,' he said. He looked about twenty. His eyebrows appeared to have been waxed.

‘You can't just push in!' came the voice from behind.

Bonnie tried to swallow. Her mouth was so dry her tongue stuck to her teeth. ‘Please?'

He picked up her licence, turned briskly to the screen. ‘You'll really have to run.'

Through security, past the juice bars and coffee places, the doughnut shop, the displays of scarves and cosmetics. Dodging people, her overnight bag thumping on her shoulder, her full-to-bursting breasts shooting pain, the boarding docket gripped sweatily. The breath rattling in her chest.

‘Just made it!' The woman in her neat uniform took her slip of paper and scanned it, smiling cautiously. ‘You're the last one,' she said, and made a stiff, open-palmed gesture towards the empty low mouth of the boarding bridge.

Bonnie couldn't answer. Mutely she took back the docket and willed her legs to keep going, slower now but still an impossible effort, into the tunnel and along its airless length. Through the concertinaed entryway and into the whooshing hum of the plane. Down the aisle, wading through the false calm and the piped music, keeping her face upturned to the numbers, not looking at the rows of seated people, so close, giant blurred blobs. Reaching for the headrests as she went, hands shaking. Sweat prickling cold under the air conditioning. Her seat at last, almost at the back. She edged past someone's knees — a man, pants those light tan colour golfers wore — and sank down. Dropped her bag and pushed it under the seat in front with her foot. Clicked on her seatbelt. Leaned her head against the window. Jammed her trembling hands between her knees.

She could smell herself: stale and boozy with an acrid, panicky edge of sweat. Behind her sunglasses she snatched a look at the passenger next to her. Older, grey-haired, big and solid. A checked shirt, a newspaper. He appeared comfortably uninterested.
Calm down
. She closed her eyes. A recorded voice sounded, modulated politely, outlining safety and emergency procedures. She could hear the flight attendants going through their measured, purposeful demonstrations — the clink of seatbelt buckles, the rustle of lifejackets. The engines notched up their roaring. The plane began to move. She tried to steady her breathing, slow her heart, but the panic didn't recede. Instead a new terror rose, as if it had been waiting all along for her to stop, to sit still, to pay attention. Her heart knocked, the cold prickles broke afresh.
One hour and it'll be over. Just hold it together for one hour
. But up it shot, a vicious queasy dread. She couldn't sit still. Feverishly she shifted her legs and feet, crossed and uncrossed her arms. Twice she reached for the seatbelt, made to undo it, to get up, to barge out into the aisle and — do what? Scream? Vomit? Fall to the floor? She pictured the flight attendants rushing to her, calls for medical help or security, being led or carried back off into the airport. The rows of watchful faces, craning necks, papers and magazines lowered, whispers rippling.

The plane turned a corner, pulled out of its wobbling crawl. The sound of the engines built to open-throated gunning. She licked her lips, swallowed, took long, slow breaths. They were powering along the ground, swaying and jolting, and then with a surge they were up, climbing, the angle steep and sudden.

PETE OPENED THE DOOR. ‘HI,' HE SAID, HIS VOICE CAREFUL, NEUTRAL — NOT NORMAL AND NOT UNFRIENDLY — AND HE SMILED, A SMALL SMILE.
Then he registered her pallor, the mess of her slept-in make-up, and his expression faltered.

She reached out and gripped the doorframe. Time narrowed, and way off in the darkness she saw the tiny, lit-up circle of yesterday, shrinking even as she watched — yesterday, when the only thing between them was the whole business with the bet. Her legs trembled, and saliva ran into her mouth. She tightened her fingers.
He's ready to forgive you
.

‘You okay?'

But she was pushing past him, running to the toilet. A flash of Edie's surprised face in the hallway, and then Bonnie was flinging the door shut behind her, lurching to her knees on the tiles, gripping the cold seat with both hands, vomiting.

She slumped on the couch with the baby at her breast, the twins either side, jumping on the cushions and yammering at her.

‘Just go to bed,' said Pete, from the doorway.

‘But hasn't my mum left?'

‘Yeah, she's gone.'

‘But don't you have to …?' She couldn't look at him. She kept her eyes on Jess.

‘It's all right.' No anger in his tone, but something — or was she imagining it? — some strangeness, some hesitation. ‘Just go to bed.'

And so she did — dragged off her dirty clothes and sank into sleep.

When she woke up she could hear them in the kitchen. There was the smell of sausages. Bonnie lay staring at the wall, heavy and restless with guilt. She threw back the covers and sat up, but then lay down again. How could she face Pete? Look at him, talk to him?
Nothing actually happened
, she tried to tell herself.
Nothing serious
. But she could feel it still, as if her mouth was swollen, and her flesh tender where he'd touched. She bit her lips.
Act normal
. She cupped her hand between her legs and pressed.
Nothing happened
.

She showered, washed her hair. Put a bandaid on the cut on her finger.

Pete was sitting with his back to her when she entered the room.

‘I'm sorry,' she said, softly, as she passed him.

‘So you had a big night?' His voice sounded friendly, jovial — intentionally so — and she was unprepared for the flood of fresh guilt it brought, awful, coarse, as unbearable as physical pain.

She bent to put her arm around Edie, hid her face in the girl's hair. ‘Yeah,' she mumbled.

‘How was the show?'

‘Good.' She fetched herself a plate and cutlery. Her face was hot, her damp hair and scalp itchy. She glanced at Pete this time, as she sat down, but he was busy cutting up Louie's sausage.

She put a sausage on her own plate, and a mound of mashed potato, carrots, peas. ‘Thanks for cooking,' she said, eyes on the food.

Louie's voice rang out, like an actor speaking a part. ‘What happened to your finger, Mum?'

Edie sat forward. ‘What finger?'

Bonnie looked up. Their clear faces, waiting. She held up the finger, the fresh bandaid glaring under the light. The twins leaned in. ‘I cut it,' she said, her voice thick and stupid in her ears.

‘How?' said Edie.

‘On a guitar string.' She kept her eyes on the finger, Pete a shape at the edge of her vision.

‘But how?'

Silence from Pete, but she felt frozen under his gaze. ‘Well' — and even this little lie seemed to advertise itself in the way the words came out, misshapen, ugly — ‘you know how the strings of a guitar are wound onto the tuning pegs at the top?'

No answer from anyone.

Bonnie sat with her stupid finger upheld, her voice clanking on and on. ‘Well, the strings are wound onto the pegs, and then you cut them off, and the ends are really spiky and sharp.' Was anyone even listening? She couldn't raise her eyes to check. ‘And sometimes they can sort of stab into your finger. If …' She lowered her hand at last. ‘If you forget to be careful.' She stared down at her plate.
This is impossible
.
You can't keep this up
.

There was a pause, and then Louie said, ‘More tomato sauce, please.'

They ate. Bonnie couldn't stop. She bolted the food, gobbled it, everything on her plate and then a whole second helping of everything, and then the twins' leftovers. She ate until her stomach hurt, cramming in the mouthfuls, watching only her own hands slicing with the knife and loading the fork.

And somehow, with the busy screen of her eating, and the demands and noise of the children, the meal passed with no further talk between her and Pete.

Then there were the dishes, and the bath, and pyjamas and reading books and bedtime, and Bonnie lumbered through it all with her head down, riding the sawing waves of guilt, feeling like her every movement, her every interaction with Pete — ‘Did you brush Edie's teeth?' ‘Do you know where Louie's pyjamas are?' — groaned and strained with the same falseness as the bandaid conversation, and the heavy certainty that Pete must know something had happened, he must be able to tell, there was no way he couldn't. She could feel it hanging anyway, waiting — the moment when they would be alone together, and he would look at her properly, when she could no longer hide from him.

‘Did you see my new lucky charm?' said Louie, as she sat on the edge of his bed to kiss him goodnight.

‘Lucky charm?'

‘Yeah.' Louie sat up and reached into the shelf beside the bed. ‘See?' He held out a small dark object. Bonnie took it. A wooden carving, some kind of warrior with popping eyes and bared teeth, jagged hair, arms akimbo. Between the sturdy legs a little penis and testicles.

‘Wow,' she said, handing it back. ‘Where'd you get that?'

‘Doug.'

A coldness stirred in her chest. ‘Doug?'

‘Yeah.' Louie reached into the shelf again and set the carving carefully down, as far from the bed as possible. ‘Edie's got one too. It's meant to be good luck, but I'm a bit scared of it.'

‘Look at mine, Mum,' said Edie, sliding down from her bed and coming over. ‘It's a woman one.'

Bonnie held the carving in her palm. It had the same staring eyes. Round breasts this time, wide hips and a triangle between the solid thighs. An etched grin that seemed lascivious, knowing.

‘I'm a bit scared of mine too,' whispered Edie, leaning over Bonnie's legs.

‘They are a bit scary,' said Bonnie slowly. She closed her fingers over the carved woman's face. ‘So … did Doug … come over?'

‘Yeah.' Edie climbed up onto her lap. ‘While you were in Sydney.'

‘Yesterday? During the day?'

‘It was night-time. We were in bed, but Dad let us get up.'

‘Oh.' She pulled Edie close, kissed her hair. ‘So he's back from his holiday.'

‘He gave Dad a bottle of wine or something,' said Edie. ‘Booze. But he didn't have a present for Grandma.'

‘Guess what he did?' Louie bounced on his knees on the mattress. ‘On his holiday?'

‘What?'

Louie put his face close to hers, eyes wide. ‘Rode on an elephant!'

‘Did he? Wow.' She stood up, sliding Edie from her lap. ‘Okay, into bed and lie down now, you two. It's late.'

She still had the carved woman in her hand when she left the room and went out to the kitchen. She stood on tiptoe and tossed it onto the top of the fridge, right at the back behind all the other junk.

She waited while Pete said goodnight to the children. She stood in the middle of the room, not knowing what to do with her hands, and then at the last moment when she heard him coming she scuttled to the bench and started wiping the dishes and putting them away.

He came up behind her, and when he reached around her in a hug she jumped.

‘Oh.' Her voice was high and breathless. ‘You gave me a fright.'

‘Sorry.' Pete loosened his grip and rubbed her arm. ‘You okay?'

She gripped a plate inside the tea towel. Her fingers felt weak. ‘Yeah. I just — I'm really tired.'

Pete kept touching her, his hand moving slowly up and down her arm. He leaned into her. ‘I'm sorry about yesterday,' he said. ‘I was just so pissed off that your mum was going to be late.'

Bonnie lowered the plate carefully to the bench. ‘Did she … was everything okay?'

‘Yeah, it was fine.' Pete kissed her on the neck. ‘She was quite good actually. She cooked a nice dinner. And she did Jess's bottle at six this morning, and made breakfast and everything.'

‘That's great.'

There was a pause. Pete's breath tickled her neck. ‘Doug came round.' His voice sounded easy, normal.

‘Oh.'

‘Yeah — he's back. He's looking for a flat I think, so he can finally get out of that shed or whatever it is. He's going to try and get a business going, fixing up vintage furniture.'

She felt a stirring of the old irritation. ‘So he's not coming back here? To help finish off the Grant job?'

‘No.' He kissed her again. ‘But we'll be all right. We'll get through it. I had another look at the books last night and it's not as bad as I thought. The debts … it's not impossible, it'll just mean a few lean months. I just … you know I don't like owing money.'

She tried to pick up the frying pan to dry it, but Pete's weight over her shoulders made it awkward. She stopped and just stood, holding the tea towel, her head down. ‘I'm …' She put her hands up and over his. ‘I'm sorry about today,' she said. ‘Sorry you had to give up your afternoon to look after the kids.'

‘It's all right.' He pulled her closer. ‘So what happened? You were a mess. Did Mickey take you out on the town?'

Bonnie felt her throat go thick. ‘Yeah.'

‘Where'd you go?'

She closed her eyes. ‘Just to a bar.'

‘Oh yeah. Was it fun?'

‘Not really.' Her heart thrummed. How could he be so unsuspecting? Couldn't he feel her strangeness, her nerves? She bent her knees, tried to ease herself out from his hold. ‘I mean, it was okay … I don't know how I got so drunk. I guess I'm just out of practice.' She moved forward, away from him. ‘I'm so tired.' She picked up the frying pan. ‘I'm just going to finish these and then I have to go to bed.'

‘Really?' He moved in again, arms around her waist this time.

She wiped the tea towel over the pan. The thought of sex with Pete, of being close, their two bodies, their faces, kissing, set her jangling with fear. He would know then, for sure — see it in her. She could picture him, drawing back, his gentle, questioning frown. ‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘I'm just exhausted.'

‘Fair enough.' He yawned. ‘Wish I could go to bed.' He kissed her quickly one last time, reaching round to her cheek. ‘I'll be in later. Sweet dreams.'

His footsteps over to the door, the chime of the bells, the rush of cold air, the door closing, and he was gone.

She stood twisting the tea towel, wringing it in her hands.
This is crazy
.

She finished the dishes. She checked the children and brushed her teeth. She moved slowly — her body numb and clumsy, like a car with bad steering and worn brakes. All she wanted was to sleep, to get to bed and to sleep, to shut herself down.

In the bedroom her clothes still lay on the floor — her best jeans and the tunic top. The zipper of the jeans caught the light from the hallway, open in a grin. She stepped over them and then turned and kicked, her foot hooking under the denim. They flew out of sight, behind the door.

She woke in the night, woke herself up talking aloud, speaking out from some black dream.

Quiet. Pete's even breathing beside her. The hallway light through the gap in the almost-closed door. Their house, its smell, everything the same, but inside her this insistent balloon of guilt straining, bringing her out of sleep. She put the heels of her hands to her eyes and pressed. Circles of silver and blue burst and faded, and from them an image swam up: Pete, all those years ago, sitting at a share-house kitchen table on their first morning together. The happy jolt she'd felt when he spoke those words like a child.
I wish you could stay
. As if he was presenting her with an offering — the gift of his honesty — and the coming-home feeling, the recognition she'd felt in accepting it.

She turned to him sleeping beside her. She could see the rise of his cheek, the line of his brow. She could smell him, sweet wood, sawdust, and his own warm smell, his skin.

Under the covers her thumb sought out the sore finger, picked at the bandaid, pushed it down. With her thumbnail she dug at the cut, brought pain flaring bright in the darkness. There was no hiding. Even if he never noticed, if her guilt never showed enough to alert him — and he wouldn't be looking for it anyway — she couldn't keep carrying it around like this. She curled on her side with her knees up, tucked her hands in together against her chest.
You'll have to tell him something
. She trawled for words.
I was so drunk … there was this guy, and
… She mashed her lips between her teeth.
I just, I was so drunk. But, Pete, Pete — nothing actually happened
.