The Best Australian Stories 2010 (35 page)

*

My wife phones and leaves messages on the answering machine. I can't work out whether her tone is apologetic or annoyed. I don't return her calls. Instead I dress in my suit and tie, for the first time in several weeks, and visit my bank manager and then my solicitor.

At night, I read into the small hours then fall asleep and dream vividly of my son. He appears as a boy of about ten, happy and boisterous, playing in the garden with a friend while I watch through the window. I can't hear them although I know they are shouting and screaming with laughter. I wake with tears on my cheeks.

For the first time, I investigate what my wife has taken with her and what she has left behind. All of her clothes, shoes and jewellery have gone, and when I notice lighter patches on the walls, I realise she has also taken some paintings and photos but I have no idea which ones.

In a cupboard in my study, I find an old framed photograph of Bernard and myself, after a muddy football game. We are grinning, victorious no doubt, covered in splatters of mud and grass. I hang the photo in the lounge on one of the empty hooks.

*

On Sunday, I bring my mother back to my house for lunch. She doesn't want to leave her fish at first, until I assure her they will be fine and I have some of my own.

When she sees my pond and waterfall, she claps her hands. I fetch a chair and a hat for her and she sits by the pond for half an hour, feeding the fish and watching them dart around.

After lunch, she walks around the house, admiring the furniture. In the lounge room, she stops in front of the photo. I panic. I should have hidden it from her. Then I think that she probably won't know who it is.

But her face shows differently. Tears fall silently down her face and she whispers, ‘Bernard was such a lovely boy.' She turns to me. ‘What happened to him? Why doesn't he come and see me any more?'

I don't know where to start. I say, ‘He can't, Mum. He's …' The word won't come. I search around for an alternative. Gone to God? Passed away? Left us?

She leans towards me and brushes a speck off my shirt. ‘How about a cup of tea?' she says. ‘Will the owner mind?'

‘Mind what?'

‘Us being in his nice house. We'd best not stay too long.' And she walks into the kitchen.

‘I'm sure he won't mind,' I say to her back. She just nods.

*

That night I finally find what I hadn't known I was looking for. The family address book. In it is the current address and phone number of my son. He is living in London. The other side of the world.

I wonder if he is married. I might be a grandfather. I pick up the phone and put it down again.

Bernard never was a very good swimmer. He told me once that he was scared of the water, especially at the beach where he couldn't see the bottom. But he was more scared of our father. Otherwise he would never have attempted to swim out to the buoy that day. No boy likes to be called a ‘gutless wimp,' least of all by his dad.

I pick up the phone again and dial. It will be breakfast time in London.

Griffith Review

The Wife and the Child

Louise D'Arcy

Lately Hugh had taken a liking to nursery food: crumpets, jelly, sausage rolls. Alex caught him in the pantry, his tongue in the palm of his hand, dabbing up hundreds-and-thousands.

‘Let's have rice pudding tonight,' he said, as if offering her a real treat, as if that explained his presence in the pantry. So she re-arranged her expression to indicate appreciation, already dreading the maggot slither down her throat. He took the rice down from the shelf and bore it to the kitchen bench.

And he made it with his usual single-minded focus on the task at hand. When she first saw him, he'd been bent over her essay in just the same way, as if her words were the most absorbing thing he'd ever seen. He'd made her blush then, blush for the sheer pleasure of his attention.

Now that focus was turned away like the passing of a searchlight that left her invisible. She'd had her hair cut. Nothing drastic, but different enough for the woman at the milk bar to notice. After two days he ran his hand through her hair, ‘We've got nearly the same haircut,' he said and she went out the next day and had it razored close to her skull.

‘Lesbian chic,' he said and went to bed without her.

Ten years together didn't feel so long. But when she looked in the mirror she saw a woman. She'd been waiting for it to happen, through all those ‘girl bride' jibes that made Hugh laugh and her clench her teeth. Now her eyes had become shrewd. They met her reflection frankly. So this is how we look, they said. She held a hand over her belly for a second and found herself imagining the swell, the queasy roll under her hand she'd felt on faculty wives' bellies.

‘You're too young to have babies,' they'd told her, boasting comfortably of thinning hair and wobbly teeth. They'd seemed like comic-book crones then, but now, ten years on, she wanted nothing more than to be one, too.

Hugh went to bed as soon as they'd finished eating. ‘I need my beauty sleep,' he'd said. But at sixty he needed less sleep than ever and was up at four every morning, reading and writing up notes. She scraped the remains of the rice pudding into the bin and remembered what she'd said in reply.

‘You'll be a shoo-in for early morning feeds.'

Hugh's face had closed over and she saw for the first time how his nose would become a beak, his forehead an immense portico presiding over the ruins below. She'd changed the subject, lightly and swiftly.

The next morning he woke her at four and they made love. It was the first time in weeks and she smothered her surprise.

‘You're all I'll ever need,' he whispered, holding her face, covering her ears with his palms. She read his lips and smiled but found herself unable to return the words as they were no longer true. He stared at her and she felt the old intentness of his gaze. He was holding her neck at an awkward angle and she shifted slightly. He rolled off her and left the bed without a word. When she woke up it was eight o'clock and the bed was cold.

The early nights became a routine. In defence she decided to go to bed early with him. It put him out, she could see. In a few weeks his routines had become set and she tripped over them, bringing tea where none was needed, turning on lights that should be left off.

‘I might use the spare room,' he said one evening, pausing at the door to give her one of his Patrician stares, the one that said ‘I am not to be countermanded on this issue.' She had to duck her head to hide the smile, remembering how it had impressed her at first. He could reduce her to silence mid-sentence with a turn of his head then.

Sex at least was safe. Their coupling was just that, the smooth interlocking of bodies. He cried out and clutched her and then slept, one hand on his chest, inviolable and quite separate. Alex lay beside him, willing his sperm along the way, cheering them on like a coach on the sidelines. Her pill packet lay on the bathroom shelf. Not to fool him, she told herself. Yes, to fool him in actual fact – the packet was empty. But he never asked, did he? He'd always assumed it was her job. Well, it was time to take a bit of long service.

Then the lovemaking stopped. Custard appeared on the menu but sex went out of season. His belly flourished and hers remained flat. When she tried to seduce him he looked at her, just looked.

‘That's not your style at all,' he said eventually. But it was his style that it wasn't, she realised. He had always initiated sex and that was the way he wanted it.

Her period came and she cried. She shut herself in the bathroom and sobbed silently while he watched television with a bowl of ice-cream in his lap. She heard his companionable comments to the newsreader and doubled over the pain in her gut.

The next morning he brought her breakfast in bed and sat beside her like a hospital visitor.

‘How are you feeling?' he asked and she wanted to cry again.

He'd noticed last night, he'd felt her distress, she reached her arms for him and the breakfast ended up on the carpet. For the next four days he was insatiable. He looked exhausted but she was light-headed with the power of it all. They'd make a baby in no time, and he'd come round to the idea. He was such a young sixty, after all.

But the lovemaking stopped. She lay in bed beside him but received a kiss as chaste as a nun's before he rolled over and slept. She held the alarm clock over his face and studied him in its bilious glow. The lips were just closed, fluttering a little. The eyelids papery and pulsing slightly. Hair sprouted from his nostrils, dark and thick, in contrast to the moustache, now more white than black. His ear was a plasticine creation that gaped, the hole deep and wide. She put the clock back on the bedside table and lay stiff and still beside him, banishing the unloyal thoughts, overlaying them with memories of the man, the oh-so-masculine man she'd fallen for, the alpha male among the pale willowy students in her tutorials.

They had bread-and-butter pudding that night when she came home from work. He met her at the door with news of it and she had to hide the carrier bag behind her back, with its guilty hoard of lace and elastic straps. She stuffed it behind the giant vase that served as an umbrella stand. They ate the pudding in silence. He took second helpings and she slipped the remains of her first to the dog. She rescued the carrier bag and dressed herself later but he was fast asleep before she emerged, awkward and stiff. It was a relief to strip off and put on her nightie.

Three weeks on he laid siege again. There were flowers, jewellery even. It confused her. They'd never had that kind of relationship, had they? She'd never been a woman to price her affection. It was insulting and furthermore, his timing was off. Ovulation was long past. They eyed each other for a long second over their glasses of wine.

‘More trifle?' he asked, delving the spoon into what looked to her like a car smash. When he leaned across to serve her his new belly knocked his glass over and the wine was a blood splash on the white linen. She felt a tingle in her belly and took his hand.

It turned out Hugh did like stockings and teddies. He liked them very much. He kept them in his drawer and brought them out every now and again, handing them to her with the quiet dignity of a ruler bestowing a great honour. She wanted to laugh and had to turn her face away but the sex was so good it took her mind off the joke.

Hugh made jam tarts that weekend. He was wearing her apron, the apron he'd bought her for a joke the Christmas before. It had frills around the edge and a big pocket at the front. He looked ridiculous.

‘All you need is a pair of pompom slippers with kitten heels and you'd be perfect,' she said, leaning on the kitchen bench behind him.

‘You're a naughty girl,' he said and turned round with a wooden spoon in his hand, ‘and you know what daddy does with naughty girls …'

There was bile in her throat and in her mouth and she backed away from him, flapping a hand in distress to fend him off. At the door she turned and ran, ducking into the bathroom and just reaching the toilet in time. She tried to retch away the memory of his face, his grandfather face set in the wrong lascivious smile.

She went to bed before him that night. He was staying up to watch the football. Or was it soccer? Or cricket? He'd never shown any interest in sport before. She didn't want sex with him anyway. Possibly not ever again. She rolled on her side and curled tight, her hand tucked under her chin, thinking. From the lounge came the sound of an over-excited commentator. She lay awake until the sound stopped and he crept in to join her. She feigned sleep then, holding herself still as he stroked a hand down her back. Then the bed rocked until silence fell again, briefly, before he began to snore. It felt like the start of eternity.

Of course she fell pregnant. She didn't even bother with the pregnancy test: she knew. When had they made love? When she looked back, she could see a cycle of feast and famine, based on a calendar of Hugh's reckoning. Perhaps one he'd read in one of his thousand-year-old texts, the ones he had to read with white gloves on, the ones he kept in airtight boxes, the ones she wasn't allowed to touch.

She didn't tell him, not for weeks. The lovemaking cycle continued and Hugh became more and more loving, more attentive. She wasn't sick and he noticed nothing. He was away on a conference when her first period was due. When the time for the next one came she feigned a temperature and slept in the spare room, hiding his proffered painkillers under her pillow. When at five months she began to show it was winter and she wore baggy jumpers. In bed at night she kept the light off.

Hugh brought Candice round one Friday night when tiredness threatened to overwhelm her. In the bathroom where she fled to brush her hair she noticed a white hair in her eyebrow and the start of creases beside her nose.

Candice was twenty and one of Hugh's star students. She was peachy and perfumed with small, high breasts. Alex looked down at hers, bigger now, somehow acquiring a life of their own. Candice didn't say much and nor did Alex, and when she walked into the kitchen later to find Hugh with one hand cupping a hard high breast, the other clutching a tea towel, she simply backed out again without a word.