Like a House on Fire (12 page)

She knows the doctor will say no if she asks him, so when he comes on his rounds the next morning, she just doesn't ask.

‘Milk come in yet?' says the midwife who helps her bath and wrap Jason, and she shakes her head with a bright smile.

‘Is he sucking, though?'

‘Oh, yeah, he's starting to.' Nodding until the midwife writes it down on her card and goes out.

By the time Des comes in, the two Panadols she's saved from last night are waiting with a glass of water and she's all showered and ready.

Des hands her a big bag, grinning. Inside, wrapped in a plastic sleeve, is a miniature leather motocross jacket, covered in outsized zips and logos. He stands there with that idiot chimp smile on his face, and for a few seconds she thinks she might punch him square across the mouth. Her money, her baby allowance, already gone into their joint account. A hundred dollars easy, it must have cost, when she hasn't even got a change table. She touches the cumbersome collar, imagines it chafing at Jason's soft neck. She pulls at her own shirt, which is itching and straining across her chest. Her boobs feel like two watermelons stuffed down her front. She should have bought a bigger size, she thinks, wincing as she pulls a cardigan over the top.

‘He'll be a little bikie,' says Des.

God, how could she ever have thought he was good-looking?

‘Yeah, but he'll grow out of it in a month,' she mutters.

He's not listening, of course. He's already unwrapping the baby, awkwardly wriggling his arm out of the cotton cloth to work the jacket onto him. Michelle wants to bat his hands away. She banishes the thought of Jason ever lying naked in the crook of Des's arm and methodically swallows the painkillers down, one after the other, to give them time to take effect before she has to walk across to the mall. Jason might grow out of it, she thinks, but Des never will, and there's nothing she can do about that now.
The let-down reflex
, she thinks fleetingly as she holds out her arms to take her son. Let-down is right. The story of her life: numb on the outside, and a burning ache inside.

‘You're not really going for that photo?' says the midwife disbelievingly at the desk when they walk past, wheeling the new pram.

‘Yes, we are,' says Michelle. ‘I'll be back at lunchtime.'

Let them give her those doubtful looks. Jason, in his doll-sized leather jacket, is tucked under the Winnie-the-Pooh rug; Des is with her and on time and with a decent shirt on; and now she's up and walking and the tablets are actually kicking in, she feels like she could keep going all day.

It's all set up at the front of the indoor supermarket complex when they get there: a corner like a stage set with lights waiting for a play to happen. Bales of hay, a wheelbarrow full of flowerpots, a pile of stuffed toys and dress-ups for older kids, props that look familiar to her from dozens of similar photos she's seen that contain them. The photographer's sitting waiting in a canvas chair, sipping on a takeaway coffee and reading the paper.

$12 Kids portraits
,
says a sign
. $12 Passport photos. SPECIAL: $5 FAMILY.

‘What are you after?' the photographer says idly.

‘The five-dollar family,' says Michelle. ‘The portrait.'

He gets up straight away at the tone in her voice, folding his paper with a snap. She can hear it too, the new hint of steel there.

She checks her face in a mirror, applies some blusher and brushes her hair out, then checks again. That'll have to do. The stitches are killing her and she eases herself gingerly onto the chair, sitting them the way she's planned it: Jason on her lap, Des with his arm around her. Dragging pain makes her face damp with perspiration; it's like a flush of heat goes through her, a tensed fist tightening.

‘Just like this, please,' she says, and the photographer leans into his viewfinder and holds up his hand.

As the flash goes off she blinks involuntarily, worried she'll look stunned in the photo when she needs to be alert and smiling, needs one image at least that looks right.

‘That's great,' says the photographer, ‘especially because your little man there just opened his eyes.'

‘Did he?' says Michelle, looking down at Jason. A tiny frown creases his curved red forehead, and she cups her hand around his head.
I pushed this head through my body
, she thinks distantly, marvelling, feeling the fragile bones.

‘Wait then,' she says hastily, ‘one without the jacket.' She tugs the thing gently off the baby's arms and throws it behind a hay bale.

‘Look up, and we're there,' says the photographer. ‘All three of you looking at the camera.'

Michelle can feel it — this will be the one she'll choose. She'll put it in a frame, up on the shelf next to the cards and miniature teddies. Make some copies for her aunties. The feeling sealed, at least, like evidence; a feeling that appears out of nowhere, thick and sweet and full of mysterious antibodies.

The second flash makes the room swim and shimmer. And Jason, poor little sleepy Jason lying crookedly on her lap, jerks backwards flailing his arms and legs, and she feels the surprising, determined strength in his sudden kick.

The startle reflex
, she thinks, the name dropping into her head from somewhere. Her baby gasps and his eyes widen in astonishment at the world he's woken up into, and he opens his kitten mouth. A wail pierces the air around them, a cry sharp as glass.

It sends her scrabbling ineffectually with her one free hand to pull her cardigan over her chest to hide her shirt, the spreading dark marks appearing there, the shocking flood of sodden warmth.

Milk. Unbelievable. It's as if the cry is pulling a wire through her, all the way up from the stitches. Her whole body bends to him, held tautly suspended by that wire, pulled forward by it, mesmerised.

‘What are you
doing
?' hisses Des, jumping up. ‘You're outside
Coles
.'

But his voice is like someone you're hanging up on, going small and high-pitched and distant as you put the phone down. It doesn't matter anyway. She's got everything this baby needs, now. And he's twisting his head, searching for her. He knows it too. She puts her hand to the side of his face and looks finally into his eyes — blue, like hers — and his say
it's you
and hers say
yeah, it's me
. Then her hand goes to her shirt, hurrying to get those buttons undone and out of the way.

Some women describe the let-down reflex as a tightening or tingling sensation
, the brochure had said. It's not, though — not for her. It's like a shiver rippling out of your control; the way tears will start when something makes you forget, for a minute, what you're supposed to be holding them back for.

Cross-Country

It's the language that gets you. The way it tells you you're through a portal, just when a portal, a doorway — something, anything — is exactly what you're groping around in the dark for. And the idea of links: such a sly touch, coming at the precise time you feel that every link in your life is sundered, every piece of the chain snapped apart. Links are what you're after; linked hands, connections, answers, the web like a big stretched safety net. So you point and click. After all, you've got all the time in the world now.

Peeled. That's how you feel, when it happens. Flayed. People who tell you to get out and move on, they're standing there in a thick layer of skin, cushioned and comfortable, brimming with their easy clichés like something off a desk calendar.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Living well is the best revenge. You were too good for him anyway.
There's a queue of their text messages on my phone.
Call anytime
, they say,
if you need to talk.

I don't know about you, but I don't need to talk. I need someone else to talk. I need answers. I wrap myself in the spare-room quilt, and watch the screen verify my password and let me in. Like a bouncer, taking pity on me, eyes sweeping my try-hard clothes and unclicking the rope barrier with nothing but disdain.

Live in the world, and there'll be a trail you leave behind you, even if it's a trail of crumbs. That's what they call them, don't they? Cookies. No matter how vigilantly you try to cover your tracks, they'll be there. The recorded minutes of a meeting you attended, some team you've been on; there's your name on the screen. Try it for yourself and see. Google your name, in one of these extended empty sessions of free time when the cursor's waiting like a foot tapping, and there's nothing else in the universe you can think of that you need to find out about. There you suddenly are, undertaking all the trivial pathetic things you think are hidden, so that anyone in the world can see you exposed.

My workmates ring me and pretend I'm on some kind of sabbatical or planned holiday, assure me that all I need is a nice long rest. Rest — here alongside the looted stack of cookbooks and the depleted pile of unwanted, rejected CDs.

It takes a special kind of thoroughness, a particular grim determination to sever all ties, for him to redirect even his superannuation statements and subscriptions to his new address. Even the mail he would have thrown away immediately never arrives now, suggesting that he'd do anything rather than leave a single excuse for re-contact.

So I am reduced to this: typing in his name. A man of forty-two, a successful man with a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, a man armed, let's face it, with the cream of the recipe books, kitchen utensils, bed linen (
I've only taken what I'm sure is mine
) and CDs he's picked through, a man unable to disguise the excess of his baggage — that man shouldn't be hard to locate. It's not as if I'm going to go over there, drive past his house, lie on his lawn drunk and make a scene, harass him. It's just a few shreds of information I want. I supported him for a year, after all; surely I have a right to know whether he's finally submitted that thesis and where, incidentally, the graduation ceremony is to be held. If he's joined a church group or a golf club, I need to paste that into my new identikit. I'll take any crumb, any trail, any vague lead.

What I really want is a chatroom. Under the cloak of the spare-room quilt, all I would do is eavesdrop, just for the sound of his voice. Well, not the sound, of course, but the cadence. Ideas expressed without that clipped and guarded reservation he abruptly adopted:
I think it's pointless considering mediation at this stage. I think it would be best to make a clean break. I think it's clear to both of us it's not working.

It's 2.30 in the morning when I enter the portal, stoop to the keyhole and whisper the name that turns the deadlock.

I don't know why they call it surfing. They should call it drowning.

Down through the layers of US family-tree pages and rambling travel blogs of dull strangers, I hit paydirt at last. My heart knocks in my chest. I find he's attended a conference, but not presented a paper there. Thesis still unfinished, then. Too many emotional upheavals. His thoughts too scattered after a traumatic breakup, distracted by guilt and second thoughts. I'm settling into this train of thinking, hungry for its possibilities, as I spoon up the dregs of the instant noodles from my styrofoam cup, grimacing at the taste of polystyrene that permeates them no matter what sachet of pseudo-flavour you sprinkle in.

I could of course tip this dehydrated space food into a real mug before I pour on the boiling water, but that suggests a familiarity with habitual loneliness that even I draw the line at.

See, this is the difference. Your partner dies, and everyone comes over with casseroles; they clean your house and hang out your washing. Your partner leaves, though, and you don't need nurturing, apparently; you need avoiding. Your washing grows mouldy in the machine, your friends who told you that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger look at you uneasily, taking in your greasy hair and unwashed pyjamas, and leave you to go back to bed at 5 p.m. Impossible to explain to them the humming, welcoming warmth of the screen later, the peaceful blue light, the endless possibility of an explanation that would make sense.

There's the full name, match sixteen of about three thousand red herrings. He's on some kind of roster.
Show cached text only
. A roster for a sporting club. Not interstate, then. Just the other side of the city, probably. One of those beachside suburbs he always said he'd like to live in. The banner across the top of the page shows that it's a cross-country running club.

I sit back in the quilt in my chair, staring at that page. Obviously no time for the doctorate. Not when he's decided it's time for some social contact, time perhaps to get fit, to shed academia a little, to make some new friends who don't know the disastrous details of the last few months. I picture him struggling up a hill, panting, grateful for the after-parties and barbeques, the light-hearted neutral banter of friendly competition. Or maybe punishing himself, pushing himself to physical exhaustion so that he can sleep nights. Running from something — that's it. Can't he see the symbolism?

It's ten past four. Jittery with caffeine and MSG, I snoop in the desk drawer Google has no qualms about throwing open for me. He's way down the ladder: coming thirty-fourth. That must be humbling. Thirty-fourth in a field of what — fifty or so? That would make anyone feel like a nameless nobody in a crowd, a face blurry in the back of someone else's photo, reduced to nothing but pixels.