Like a House on Fire (18 page)

He walks along in silence for a few strides, digesting this.

‘Actually,' he says, ‘I meant you. This meeting.'

The tears swim in her eyes, hastily detoured. ‘Shit, sorry, Frank. I'm a bit … um, preoccupied. I thought you meant my little boy, at childcare.'

‘No, I meant …'

‘Yep, I get it. I'm fine, actually.'

‘Not nervous?'

‘Nope.'

‘You're sure you're right?' he says to her as they push open the door.

‘Of course.' Keeping her voice crisp and calm. But so rattled she can barely keep nodding and pretending to take notes, contributing nothing. She can't believe how the meeting drags, plodding ponderously through item after laborious item. Nobody in any hurry — it's like they've all been drugged. And when she does get out of here, when she can legitimately be released and grab her bag and keys from her desk, and leave, she will have just sixteen hours before she'll have to be back here again tomorrow, going through the same thing. The day yawning ahead with tiny variations, the endless clock-watching dreariness of it. The salary. Eyes on the salary.

Then finally it's ten to five, and she's walking, in a jerking, limping semi-run, back down the corridor, burning to be gone.

‘See you tomorrow,' she calls to Tim as she hurries past.

‘It's like you've never been away,' he calls back, which stretches her smile even more thinly across her face, as if her expression has been hammered flatter and flatter, growing flimsier by the second.

He doesn't run over when he sees her. He looks back to the blocks he's lining up in stacks on the carpet.

‘He was really good,' one of the workers says cheerfully. ‘He ate all his lunch.'

‘That's good,' she says. She's fighting a terrible nausea, feeling the sweat in the small of her back. What would she do, if nobody was watching? Shoulder her way over there, snatch him up, crush him in her arms, howl like a she-wolf?

‘Thanks,' she adds. ‘Thank you. I'm sure you've done a great job.' Clacks over there in her pinching slingbacks, feeling the button in her waistband strain as she crouches beside him to pick him up.

‘Let's go, hey?' she whispers. ‘Let's go home.' Her mind filled, entirely, with the smell of him and a corrosive wash of built-up tears like acid.

He seems dazed as she carries him out to the car and buckles him in.

‘Did you have a great day?' she asks him brightly, still smiling.
Stay positive
, her book had told her.
Positive but firm.
His eyes rest on her as she searches his face for traces of tears. Then he glances away, like this is one more perplexing event in an inexplicable day, his hands clasped tightly around his lidded cup — and that single gesture almost does her in, almost sends her over the edge.
Perspective
, she thinks shakily as she drives.
Be calm.

The second she's in her own driveway she's running around to his car door, scooping him out of the car seat, back onto her hip, feeling the weight she's been starving for all day. She's too needy and she knows it, wrapping her arms around him as she carries him inside, nuzzling her face into his neck, nudging him into place in the crook of her elbow, her hand spread like a shield at his back. She can't help herself. Then when she reluctantly puts him down and kicks off her shoes as hard as she can into the corner, she can't believe how casually her husband, Andrew, can take him and balance him on his knee as he asks her about her first day back.

‘What?' she says, distracted by his offhand nonchalance. How has she never noticed this before?

‘I said, how was it? Good to be back?'

She shrugs, mesmerised by the absent-minded kiss he plants on Daniel's head, the way his thoughts can already be shifting, complacently, to other things.

‘To tell you the truth,' she says, ‘I hated it.'

He grimaces. ‘I thought you were really looking forward to it. You said —'

‘I know,' she cuts him off.

Every time their bank statement's come in over the last year and a half, they've sat at this table and made a grim assessment of their down-to-the-wire mortgage. She's sick of talking about it and, anyway, she's willing Andrew to stop what he's doing and look, really look, into his son's face, feast his eyes on their boy, breathe him in. She folds her arms tightly together, still twitching with withdrawal. This can't go on, obviously. She's going to have to do this every day, so she'd better pull herself together right now.

Andrew's mobile beeps with a message and she watches, incredulous, as he reaches into his pocket for his iPhone, holding Daniel around the waist as he leans over, completely dispassionate and unruffled. Liz can see what it is, now. Andrew has always left Daniel, and come back to him like this, every day since he was born, just about. For him, this is normal.

He checks the phone's screen as he releases Daniel onto the floor, then puts it away again, glancing at her stiffly folded arms before getting up to go into the kitchen. Once behind the bench, he takes packets of stir-fry vegetables out of a plastic shopping bag and tips them into a bowl. It's his turn to cook and he likes to be doing something if he senses an impending argument, preferably something domestic which makes his position more defensible.

‘You said,' he says, ripping open a plastic tray of chicken strips, ‘I remember it was you that said we've got to start getting the principal down, not just pay off the interest every month.'

‘I know.'

‘Because we're just running on the spot, here. Treading water.'

‘You think I don't know that?'

He lights the gas under the wok. ‘I mean, Jesus, do you think I love every minute of
my
job?'

‘I know, I know, I know.'

‘You need to give it a few months,' he says, ‘at least, to re-adjust.'

‘Yep.' She's got to see this from his point of view. That's what he's going to say in a minute, that they're both locked in, that he wouldn't mind a stint staying home himself, just looking after Daniel, but they need the two incomes, there's no way she can deny it, and then she will answer, indignantly, that she's not denying it. Watching his back, she sends him an urgent telepathic message:
Please don't say it.

‘We agreed it was always only going to be a temporary thing, you staying home,' he goes on in a low, reasonable voice, his back still to her. ‘Because, you know, we're locked in to this.'

From behind, he's got a slumped look. Someone on a suburban peak-hour train, unfit and round-shouldered. Some stranger. She's got to try harder, she thinks. Be less dogged, put her head down and focus on the wage and the plan. Quell this feeling that threatens to roar silently out of control.

‘What's in there?' she says, keeping her voice light, noticing a white paper bag on the bench.

‘Surprise to celebrate your first day back,' he says. ‘Cake.'

In Daniel's bedroom later, pulling his pyjamas up over each leg, she asks, ‘Was it fun today? Ready to go again tomorrow and play with all those blocks?'

Another thing: she's got to lose this inanely cheerful voice. She tries to sit on the bed in her slippery, lined business skirt and then stands up with an irritated click of her tongue, undoes the button and zip and steps out of it. Peels off her tights too. Better. He's on her lap now, leaning his weight into her, as she picks up his bottle and teddy. Then she feels his small hand rest shyly inside her shirt. She's spent weeks distracting him from this gesture, but the uncertainty of it makes her usual soothing speech stop in her throat. No, no, no, she thinks with a sinking, bruised sense of exhaustion. Be consistent. Pull that hand out gently, and explain again, in those fraudulent words recommended by the baby-care book.

Something is tearing inside her, slowly and deliberately, like a perforated seam. And even as she's admonishing herself that giving in will only make things worse tomorrow, her hands are functioning outside her own volition again, unbuttoning her shirt.

There is a slide between the two of them, a sigh, a caving in. She lets herself succumb. Daniel relaxes into her lap, stretching his toes as he starts to nurse, his hand dropping from her collar, the slump of secret relief. She hesitates, then wriggles out of her creased shirt altogether. Skin on skin, that's the cure-all.

She'll put him to bed soon. Just a comfort feed, that's all it is, and a chance to inhale the scent of him again. She won't lie down because if she does, she'll drift off to sleep and then Andrew will know she's broken her vow about the bottle-feeding. So she stays upright, listing slightly, eyes closed as she starts making a mental inventory. Put him down, put on a dressing-gown, back to the dining room, eat dinner then put on a load of washing. And then, finally, find thirty minutes or so to slip into the spare room to do the second thing she's been aching to do all day: log on to the net-banking site and see if she can do some figuring out. Play around with the mortgage recalculator. Check the interest against the principal.

For this moment, in this pocket of breathing space, she lets that tearing sensation go all the way down until it hits inviolable rock bottom; somewhere to push off from, back to the surface. Then she opens her eyes. She's in full command of her hands again now. She eases the left one from the back of Daniel's heavy head, and carefully, expertly, slips off her watch.

White Spirit

The woman artist, Mandy, tells me on the Tuesday they need another day to finish the clothing in the foreground of the mural. She's leaning against the table telling me this, rolling a cigarette. She's got a look I would call high-maintenance: hair with lots of startling colour, stiff with gel and arranged to slope here and there, multiple earrings up her ear, lace-up combat boots. It's a look designed to suggest she's impoverished yet bohemian and individualistic, and nobody round here wears anything like what she's got on. She and her boyfriend, the other artist, drive in each morning from another part of town, a suburb where you can get a double-shot latte early in the morning sitting on an upturned milk crate outside a cafe.

The residents of this estate took a few surreptitious looks at this pair when they first arrived, and have chosen to stay out of their way since. We'll have to invite some in specially, over the next couple of days, for the photo documentation we need. Some casual shots of the artists chatting and interacting with residents, facilitating important interchange. Community ownership. An appreciation of process. It's all there in the grant evaluation forms.

Mandy flips open some of the books she's brought and taps an illustration. It's of a couple of women in Turkey, standing at some festival in regional costumes, the embroidery on their blouses and hats and vests achingly bright.

‘That's what we're after,' she says, dragging on her rollie. ‘We're focusing on getting that design right. All the details and colours. See the women there?'

She gestures to the mural, where her partner's painting in the figures of three women. They're prominent, next to the four laughing Eritrean children, who are posing with a basketball.

‘Should that be a soccer ball?' I say, half to myself.

‘Sorry?'

‘Should those kids be holding a soccer ball instead? They've actually formed a whole team; they play on the oval on a Sunday afternoon. I think soccer's more their thing.'

I might be wrong. That might be the Somalis. But a furrow of concern appears on her brow.

‘Do they? That wasn't in our brief. But we'll change it, don't worry. We'll just paint over the orange and make it black and white.'

‘I don't want to put you out, or start telling you how to do your job.'

‘Not at all,' she says, grinning. ‘That's what we're here for. Cultural appropriateness.' She exhales smoke and calls. ‘Jake! The African kids — it's soccer, not basketball.'

He stops painting, stands up and stretches, and frowns at the mural. ‘Do you reckon we'll have to change their singlets then?'

They both stand silently for a few moments, considering the image before them.

‘Nah,' she says finally. ‘Leave the singlets. Nobody'll notice that.'

They'd said in their interview, these two, that meeting the local community was their chief interest in applying for the job. They'd done similar things elsewhere — one at the Koori health centre, one at the credit cooperative, a portfolio of photos from a wall mural at a community market up in Queensland — and they said what kept them doing it was the rich sense of connection you achieved working alongside the very people you were depicting in your mural, and the growing sense of community ownership through collaboration. When they talked about the celebration of diversity, and how excited they were about all the different cultural groups represented on the estate, I'd felt the centre director, on the interview panel beside me, mentally checking boxes.

Now I look in sometimes, on my way to teaching a class or driving the community bus somewhere, and I don't want to hang around. They don't seem too excited now. There's nobody there but the two of them, with their big paint-splattered tarps and their ghetto-blaster, music echoing round the empty basketball court as the mural gradually takes shape. Even the kids who usually come in here to shoot baskets after school are giving them a wide berth. It makes me uncomfortable, like I've let them down somehow, like it's our process here at the centre that hasn't worked. It's awkward, this silence; tainted with failure that no one wants to claim. We skirt around it, the three of us.