Me Without You (14 page)

‘I just want to see you happy.’

‘I
am
happy.’ I pointed towards my chicken. ‘And hungry for fat-injected-food-like stuff. Can we
please
eat?

3
1 September

The night Haruto died, I sat right here on this balcony with a journal just like this one. It was the night I decided to start my pot-plant collection, and the night I first promised myself two things.

It was in a single heartbeat that I decided I’d ditch commercial law and take up his life’s work to actually do something for the earth. The environment wasn’t my fight then—but I felt I owed it to him. I enrolled in a postgrad environmental law qualification and within weeks I’d convinced Alan to let me found a new environmental wing to our firm when I’d completed it. Over time, I stopped doing it for Haruto and started doing it because I cared. But it did take time, and that first year I felt a fraud every single day.

The second promise was more a gift to myself than out of any loyalty or debt of gratitude to Haruto. I sat here with a bottle of fruit wine Nancy had made at the farm, wept my way through a box of tissues, and swore to myself that I would never let anyone build their future around me.

Haruto Abel was not my first serious partner, and if I’m honest with myself, I didn’t love him as much as I could, or maybe
should
have. He was a good man—once upon a time, he was a great man—but the love we shared was comfortable and convenient, not passionate and deep. We met at a difficult time in both our lives—I am sure he saw me as someone to rescue, and I saw him as a beacon of optimism and hope. Of course I gravitated to him; Haruto loved to stare down bulldozers and emerge victorious. He was an environmental superhero, seemingly invincible… until, of course, he wasn’t.

It’s only in hindsight I see how immature I was, how needy I was, how little of him I ever actually knew. He was not much more to me at the time than a reason to wake up in the morning when I felt I had none, and then a source of hope that there might be a future for me after all. He could have been anyone. Actually, I’m fairly certain that if we’d met at any other time in my life, I’d barely have spared him a second glance.

And in spite of all of that, losing Haruto almost crushed me. I didn’t anticipate the weight of the guilt and the loneliness I felt after he died. He had been sick for so long before his death, and I’d been more bedside nurse than lover, but maybe that made things worse. I had been so busy with caring for him and then he was gone and I was lost. The reality is I only found my bearings again by defining a new purpose for my life via his work.

I have been thinking of Haruto a lot over these past few weeks, which is probably strange given that I’m finally seeing someone else. I wonder what he would think of Callum, and then I smile to myself when I imagine how mortified he’d be. The companies Callum designs marketing campaigns for were the ones Haruto would coordinate letter-writing campaigns
against
. I abandoned animal products altogether when we came back from Mexico, but before then, Haruto had been violently outraged when I drank even organic cow’s milk in his presence. Callum’s diet probably had Haruto turning in his grave.

I am starting to realise that I’m wearing my own resolve down every time I see Callum. I keep promising myself that I will hold him at a distance, to protect him, because I know it’s for the best. It takes so little to weaken my good intentions with him though. The sight of that careful, pretentious haircut across a crowd at the wharf, or the jingle of my phone when he texts me, it’s just a flash of Callum into my day—my stomach turns to butterflies and somewhere inside I’m a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl with her first crush. Ludicrous and lovely, somehow all at once.

He tells me that day by day is fine and that he’s not looking for a commitment either. I know on some level he’s really hoping and expecting that the days will turn into decades and we’ll be clucking over photos of the grandkids together before we know it. I see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice, although if I ignore the subtext, he’s saying very convincing words to the contrary.

If I was a better person, I’d ignore his next phone call. Or better still, I’d sit him down and end it now. Logically, I know this situation is bad, but I keep wanting more and more. It’s the old head-versus-heart battle, and my heart keeps winning out every time.

It’s more than a silly crush, although that’s definitely a part of the problem. No, there’s something about Callum that drags me back to live in the moment. I
want
to make the most of the now, but lately I have such a tendency to be thinking about the future—when will I get sick again? How quickly will it happen? Is everything in place for when it does? Can I do any good for the world before I go? How much of life can I squeeze into these months or years or decades before it’s lost?

And then Callum enters the room and I’m just here, and it’s just now, and that’s entirely enough for me. He has this remarkable ability to look after me and to provide me with the kind of help and support I’ve struggled to accept from anyone in my life. Just being with him makes me feel healthier.

So just for now, I’m telling myself some lies. I tell myself that he understands that this is a temporary arrangement and we will just quietly go our separate ways when we have to. Hell, maybe the novelty will wear off with me and Cal will even end things. I tell myself that he needs me, that he’s starting to learn about his own capacity to care for someone, and he’ll use this time as a springboard onto something concrete later on with a woman who’s definitely going to stick around for a few decades. I tell myself that when he’s ticked off some of those ‘works-in-progress’ and lived a little, that I’ll quietly exit and leave him be with the memories of us.

I tell myself that I’m not doing any harm, that I’ve been upfront with him, and if he gets hurt it’s not my fault. I tell myself that I’ll do the right thing.

And then, when all of those lies echo in their own hollowness, I tell myself that I deserve happiness too, even just for this brief window of time.

E
very relationship has
its sticking points, and her refusal to consistently wear shoes was my biggest bugbear with Lilah. I could handle the dishes inevitably piled high on her sink, or the total chaos within her wardrobes, but I just couldn’t fathom how such an intelligent, socially aware woman could feel it appropriate to go barefooted in just about any circumstances.

On my lunchbreak one day, I happened to walk past a shoe-shop and had a sudden brainwave. When I met Lilah at the wharf that evening, I held a paper bag in my hands. I offered it to her with a grin.

‘What’s this?’ She seemed delighted and I made a mental note to surprise her more often.

‘Just something to make your commute more comfortable.’ I watched the delight drain from her face as she opened the bag and withdrew the expensive black sandals I’d purchased for her. ‘They’re flat… so you can carry them in that big handbag you take your laptop in, and if your work shoes are uncomfortable you can just swap.’

Lilah took a few breaths before she slid the shoes back into the bag and handed it back to me courtesy of a semi-violent slam against my chest.

‘Wrong size?’ I guessed, although I knew the size was right. I’d seen her remove her shoes so often that I’d inadvertently memorised it.

‘Don’t try to change me, Callum.’

‘I wasn’t—’

‘This is me. And me is often barefoot. Deal with it or fuck off.’

‘Hang on, Ly.’ I held up my hands as if that would placate her. The sharpness and the venom in her tone were completely new. ‘I thought this would be the best of both worlds. You can be comfortable, and you can have clean feet.’

‘It should be blatantly obvious to you by now that I don’t give a shit if my feet are clean or not. And frankly, I don’t care if
you
care if my feet are clean or not. You might also want to know that those overpriced shoes were made by teeny tiny little children in Bangladeshi sweatshops and I’ve come up against the parent company more than once in a courtroom displaying their gross disregard of basic environmental protection principles.’

Lilah was staring towards the harbour, apparently willing the ferry to hurry up and take her away from the odious gift I’d attempted. I tried to reassess the situation. Had I overstepped the mark? Caught her after a bad day? Both?

‘I’m sorry, Lilah. I thought it was thoughtful.’

She groaned and ran her hand through her hair.

‘It was thoughtful, Cal. But I have a feeling it was more thoughtful to
you
than it was to
me
. Are you embarrassed when I take my shoes off?’

I
was
embarrassed at that moment, given that she had been swearing like a soldier and the wharf was, as always, packed to the brim. But was I embarrassed when she kicked her shoes off day-to-day? There was some truth in that, but I was also sure that the gesture had come at least in part from a purer place.

‘Sometimes, a guy just wants to take care of a girl. Even if she doesn’t need it. And apparently even if she doesn’t
want
it.’ She didn’t respond, and I waited a long while before I prompted her. ‘Ly? I’m sorry I upset you. Are we okay?’

‘I don’t know.’

She was silent all the way across the harbour, and I wasn’t sure whether to push her or not. I thought about the outburst in the noodle shop all of those weeks earlier, and realised that although I didn’t see it often, my Lilah could be volatile. Like those hot Sydney afternoons when thunderclouds came from nowhere, she had trigger points that you’d never know of until you accidentally pressed one and felt the force of the explosion. I was gradually accepting that I’d probably overstepped the mark buying her shoes, but her reaction still seemed disproportionate to my crime. I just didn’t know how to point that out to her without reactivating her fury, which had at least settled to a fierce silence.

We stepped off the ferry and walked through the wharf, and although she was still in step with me, she hadn’t said a single word. It was only as we got to the entrance that it struck me how full her life was, how busy she was, and how little rest she got. She was always on: during the week she was entirely focussed on work; the weekends were all about these crazy days full of action with me. It was no wonder, no wonder
at all,
that her emotions were on a hair trigger sometimes.

‘Lilah, I’m sorry I upset you,’ I said quietly. I took her hand but it sat limply in mine. She looked into my eyes, her gaze impenetrable.

‘I’m sorry I flew off the handle,’ she said.

‘So we’re okay?’

‘We’re okay.’

I took the shoes back to the store the next day and got a refund. The only part of the whole event that I couldn’t erase was the nagging concern at the back of my mind, which I could only settle by promising myself that I’d try to find ways to help her slow down.

W
e were eating
at her house one night when her mother called. Lilah motioned towards me to be quiet while they had a brief discussion. From Lilah’s end, it was almost monosyllabic.

‘…yep, thanks… soon… no, I’m well… yep, just work…’

When she hung up, I raised my eyebrow at her.

‘Someone’s keeping a secret.’

I was shooting for the same teasing tone she seemed to use on me every five minutes, the one I was becoming familiar with but that still made me feel like I was somehow the centre of the universe and a loveable larrikin all at once. I missed the light-hearted lilt to it though, and it came out as an accusation. In spite of her porcelain complexion and the fiery hair, Lilah almost never blushed. That night was a rare exception.

‘I haven’t mentioned you to her,’ she admitted. ‘Mum wouldn’t understand.’

‘Your free-spirit, hippy mother, wouldn’t understand your non-boyfriend?’

Lilah cringed and rose from the dinner table, her salad half-eaten.

‘She’s still Mum,’ she said softly. She’d picked up her phone and was staring down at it, almost absentmindedly. ‘Her relationship with Dad wasn’t as
Mills and Boon
as your parents was, but it was still intense, and she’d have followed him to the moon. She wants that for me, I know she does, and if she knew I was seeing you, there’d suddenly be this immense expectation, and I’m too close to her to deal with that shit.’

‘Surely you’ve told her about boyfriends in the past.’

We hadn’t swapped detailed romantic chronologies, but there were photos of Lilah with a few different men on her walls. One stocky Asian man seemed to feature a lot, in various exotic locations, so I knew she’d done some travelling with him. Surely if they were together long enough to travel the world, her mother would have been aware of him? Lilah turned back towards me and sat the phone down.

‘Of course I have. She knows about all of them. You’re different.’

I could sense
blunt Lilah
was winding up, and I braced myself.

‘I didn’t mean to be an arsehole about it, Lilah. Forget I said anything—it’s up to you what you say to your mum.’ The reality was, I hadn’t told anyone about her either—only, of course, Karl. But I barely spoke to my brothers, and my social life had been achingly hollow since I got my promotion. Somewhere along the line I suppose I’d accepted that and had just stopped fighting it—so in my case, I had kept Lilah a secret only by virtue of the fact that I had pretty much no one to
tell
about her.

‘This relationship is
exactly
what she’d want for me.’ Lilah ignored my semi-apology. ‘It would be so easy to misinterpret—if she met you, and saw how we are together, she’d never understand.’

‘You’re forty years old, Ly. Does it really matter if she understands? We’re happy with how things are. That’s enough.’

When Lilah turned to me with a frown, I could see the pent-up energy in her, a palpable frustration that I wasn’t grasping her point.

‘Come for a walk with me?’ she asked softly.

Spring was in full force and the cold in the night air was starting to fade. We’d left the balcony doors open after Lilah’s nightly pot-plant watering ritual, and the breeze that floated through was pleasant rather than startling. It would be a good night for a walk, but she already looked so tired, and I knew that if we went for a walk we’d then go for ice cream and when we came home she’d sit at her laptop to work.

‘Why don’t we stay in tonight? We can cuddle on the lounge—maybe there’s a movie on?’

She shook her head.

‘I just need some fresh air.’

I decided to try a more direct approach.

‘You look tired, Lilah.’

‘I am tired. But a walk will help me sleep better.’

‘Ly…’ I suddenly felt helpless. ‘I know you’re a busy woman; I know you juggle at least a dozen tasks at a time and you like life that way, but you seem exhausted to me lately. Can’t we just take it easy, just for one night?

Sometimes I’d catch these moments of determination in her, where she was sure that she was absolutely right to be making whatever decision she was making at the time. This was one of those moments. There was a flare of pure doggedness in her expression.

‘Cal, that’s not how I do things.’

‘But it is how
I
do things,’ I said. ‘I
need
downtime, and I want to share it with you. Just tonight, how about you curl up next to me, and make helping
me
relax your mission instead?’

‘Maybe tomorrow?’ she suggested. ‘The night is just gorgeous; I really want to go out. If you’re that tired, you can stay here.’

How could I refuse her? As I rose to don my shoes, I knew that I was stuck. For her own sake I needed to find better techniques for dissuading her when she defaulted to constant activity. In the meantime, all I could do was to go along for the ride.

T
he next morning
, Lilah woke me with a vigorous shake at five a.m.

‘Come to the coast with me,’ she said. There was no greeting or preamble, and the roughness to her voice told me she’d fought an internal battle over the issue while I was asleep. Bleary-eyed, I tried to figure out if I
was
still asleep and having a nonsense dream.

‘Why?’

‘Meet Mum. See the house and the garden. Meet Nancy and Leon.’

She was leaning on her elbow looking down at me, wide awake and beautiful. I cupped her face with my hand.

‘If that’s what you want.’

She hesitated, but then nodded curtly.

‘I think it is.’