The China Factory (5 page)

‘Have you thought about music lessons for her?' she asked me a moment later. ‘She could learn piano, or violin. She's old enough, you know.' Before I could reply she brought her face close to Robin's. ‘Would you like that, Sweetheart—would you like to play some real
mu-sic?'
Robin giggled and clung to Lucy like a little monkey. They sat on the sofa across from me. A bluebottle came from nowhere and buzzed above my head.

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘She's already got so much going on. And she's only six.' I watched the bluebottle zigzag drunkenly towards the uplighter and for a second I was charged with worry. Every day
insects fly into that lighted corner and land on the halogen bulb and extinguish themselves in a breath.

‘Don't leave it too late, Annie. She's got an ear, she's definitely got an ear. I said so to Don today.'

She carried Robin upstairs then and they left a little scent in their wake. It reminded me of the cream roses that clung to the arched trellis in our garden at home. No, it reminded me of Lucy. I think she has always given off this scent, like she's discarding a surfeit of love. I wonder if all that wood and rosin and sheep gut suffocates her scent. I think of her sitting among the other cellists, her bulky instrument between her knees, her hair falling on one side of her face, the bow in her right hand drawing out each long mournful note, the fingers of her left hand pressed on the neck of the instrument or sliding down the fingerboard until I think she will bleed out onto the strings. I watched those hands today as they passed Robin a vase of flowers. She has taught Robin to carry the flowers from room to room as we move.

I turn and tiptoe into Robin's room. The lamplight casts a glow on her skin and her breathing is so silent that for a second I am worried and think to hold a tiny mirror to her mouth, the way nurses check the breath of the dying. She is a beautiful child, still and contained and perfect, and so apart from me that sometimes I think she is not mine, no part of me claims her. Don has stayed home and is raising her and she is growing confident. Often at work I pause midway through typing a sentence, suddenly reminded of them, and I imagine them at some part of their day: Don making her lunch, talking to her teacher, clutching her schoolbag and waiting up for her along the footpath. I have an endless set of images I can call on. This evening as I pulled into the drive Don was putting his key in the door. The three of them, Don, Lucy and Robin, had been for a walk. It was windy, they had scarves and gloves on and their cheeks were flushed. Lucy and
Robin laughed and waved at me as I pulled in. I sat looking at them all for a moment. Now I have a new image to call on.

If I ever have another child I will claim it—I will look up at Don after the birth and say ‘This one's mine.' I have it all planned.

After dinner this evening Don took the cold-water tap off the kitchen sink. He spread newspapers and tools over the floor and cleared the cupboard shelves and stretched in to work on the pipes. He opened the back door and went out and back to the shed several times and cold air blew through the house. After a while there was a gurgle, a gasp, and a rush of water spilled out along the shelf onto the floor. He jumped back and swore. Robin was in the living room watching Nickelodeon and Lucy was practising in the dining room. I had been roaming about the house tidying up, closing curtains, browsing. I had stepped over Don a few times and over the toolbox and spanners and boxes of detergent strewn around him.

‘What's up?' I asked finally. His head was in the cupboard. ‘What are you at?' I pressed.

‘Freeing it up,' he said, and I thought of the journey these three words had to make, bouncing off the base of the sink before ricocheting back out to me. ‘Did you not notice how slow it's been lately?'

I leaned against the counter. The cello drifted in from the next room, three or four low-pitched notes, a pause, then the same notes repeated again.

‘Wouldn't the plunger have cleared it?' I watched his long strong torso and his shoulders pressed against the bottom shelf. He drew up one leg as he strained to turn a bolt. His brown corduroys were threadbare at the right knee and the sight of this and the thought of his skin underneath made me almost forgive him. The cello paused and then started again and I focused on the notes, and tried to
recognise the melody. Lucy favours Schubert; she tells me he is all purity. I have no ear and can scarcely recognise Bach.

‘Is that urgent?' I asked.

‘Nope.'

‘Can't it wait then?'

I imagined his slow blink. Next door Lucy turned a page. I sensed her pause and steady herself before raising her bow again. A single sombre note began to unfurl into the surrounding silence and when I thought it could go on no longer and she really would bleed out of her beautiful hands, it touched the next note and ascended and then descended the octave and I thought this
is
Bach, this is that sublime suite that we listened to over and over in the early months of the pregnancy, and then never again, because Don worried that such melancholy would affect his unborn child.

‘Can't you do these jobs during the day, when there's no one here?' I blurted. A new bar had begun and the music began to climb, to envelop, again.

He reversed out of the cupboard and threw the spanner in the box. ‘What the hell is needling you this evening?'

‘Shh. Keep your voice down. Please.'

It was Bach, and I strove to catch each note and draw out the title while I still could, before it closed in.

He began to gather up the tools and throw them in the toolbox. ‘Jesus, we have to live.' I stood there half-listening. The music began to fade until only the last merciful note lingered. I can recognise the signs, the narrowing of his eyes as he speaks, the sourness of his mouth when he's hurt and abhorred and can no longer stand me, and when the music stopped I longed to stop too, and gaze at him until something flickered within and his eyes met mine and we found each other again.

He leaned towards me then and spoke in a low tight voice. ‘What's wrong with you, Ann? Why're you so fucking intolerant?'

He slumped against the sink and stared hard at me and I looked
out at the darkness beyond the window. I heard Lucy's attempt to muffle our anger with the shuffle of her sheet music and cello and stand. I longed for her to start up again, send out a body of sound that would enrapture, and then I wondered if he had heard it, if it had reached him under the sink all this time, and if he'd remembered or recognised or recalled it.
What was that piece
, I longed to ask him,
that sonata that Lucy played just now, the one we once loved, you and I?

I thought of them, Lucy, Don and Robin at the front door earlier. They had all been laughing. Who had said something funny? Robin is sallow like her father, with long dark hair, and some strands had blown loose from her scarf. Don was laughing too but when he saw my car he averted his eyes and singled out the key in his bundle. There was a look on his face. I have seen that look before. It is a dark downcast look and when he looked away this evening perhaps he was remembering another day, the day that I was remembering too.

Robin was newly born and Lucy, having just finished college, came to stay for a few weeks, to relieve us at times with Robin. I had wanted a child for a long time and now, when I recall them, I think those early days were lived in a strange surreal haze. At night, sleepless, I would turn and look at Don in the warmth of the lamplight, his dark features made patient and silent by sleep, and I would want to preserve us—Don, Robin and me—forever in the present then, in that beautiful amber glow.

I had gone into the city that day and wandered about the parks and the streets, watching my happy face slide from window to window. Light-headed, euphoric, I bought cigarettes and sat outside a café and watched people's faces and felt a surge of hope. An old couple came out with a tray and sat down, hardly speaking but content. Young girls crowded around tables, flicking their long hair and chatting to boys. I lit a cigarette and bit off half of the
chocolate that came with my coffee, saving the rest for later, to disguise the cigarette smoke on my breath. I had not smoked for years and the deep draw spiked my lungs and the surge of nicotine quickened my heartbeat and made my fingers tremble and I closed my eyes and relished the pure intoxication of it all.

Suddenly I was startled by a pigeon brushing my arm and landing at my feet. It fluttered and hopped on one leg and then I saw the damaged foot. There remained only one misshapen toe and its nail, ingrown, coiled tightly around the leg, swollen, sore, unusable. I met the pigeon's round, black empty eye and thought of the word
derelict
and it seemed like the saddest word I had ever encountered. Two more pigeons landed close by and pecked at crumbs. And then a gust of wind—tight against the street—blew in and tossed napkins and paper cups and wrappers from the tables. My chocolate, half-eaten in its gold-foil wrapper, blew to the ground. My pigeon hopped over and pecked at it and I smiled at his good fortune and then, in panic, thought that Don would now smell the cigarette when I got home. I checked my watch and remembered Robin and her tiny clenched fists and her moist eyelids, and wondered why I had ever left her. I went to rise and a terrible racket of flapping wings and screeching started up at my feet. The others had come after the chocolate. They had cornered my lame pigeon. ‘Shoo, Shoo,' I called at them. I waved my arms and tried to rise again but with my shaking hands and my clamorous heart and the terrible screeching of pigeons, I fell back into the chair.

Later I fled the city, trembling, and drove fast towards the suburbs, with Robin on my mind and a sinking feeling that I might not see her again.

At the front door I reached into my pocket but found no key. I looked in the living-room window. Robin was asleep in her Moses basket. She was there, safe, and she was mine.

I walked around to the back of the house. The old fir trees were pressed flat against the sky and everything was still. The neighbourhood was silent and the birds and the dogs and the children's street play were all absent, or that is how I remember it, as if all living creatures had sensed danger and fled, as they do on high Himalayan or Alpine ground before an avalanche. The back door is half glass and Don had his back to me. I raised my hand to knock on the glass and then I saw Lucy, in front of him, wedged up against the counter. He stood over her, leaning into her, with an arm on each side of her and his palms flat on the counter. He was spread-eagled; he had her cornered. Her body and face were hidden from me; her hands moved on his shoulders, and then her fingers touched his neck, and her legs in jeans emerged from between his. I looked at the back of his head, at his thick black hair, his square shoulders. He was wearing a check shirt I had given him at Christmas, and his dark brown corduroy trousers. He moved his hips and his thighs, grinding her, and I thought: she is too small for him, he will crush her. But I underestimate Lucy.

And then he stopped moving and tilted his head, as if hearing something. He turned his face to the right and I slid back. All he would have caught was a shadow, like a bird's, crossing the back door. I walked lightly around to the front and sat in the car. Later I rang the doorbell and pretended to search for something in the boot. And things started to come out and move again. A jeep drove into the cul-de-sac and a child yelped and cycled his tricycle along the footpath. An alarm went off at the other end of the street. Finally Don opened the door.

‘I forgot my keys,' I explained quickly. He looked at me, that too calm look.

‘You should have come around the back. Robin might have woken with the bell.'

‘Did she sleep the whole time?' I asked, and we looked at each other for a terrible moment and neither one of us heard his reply.

*

Now I hear his movements below and I become anxious. He is locking the back door. I have a sense of being in both places now—there, below with him, and here in the bed. My heart is thumping and I am far from sleep.

And then suddenly I am exhausted from the effort of tracking him. My bed is too warm, too familiar, like a sickbed. I am agitated, and I twist and turn and lie horizontally and try to use up all the space and I remember a childhood illness, a fever, and my mother's voice in the darkened room, saving me. And now I want Don here, I want the memory of him here. I want him beside me so that I can find the slope of his body and lie against it. I want him to reach across the wide bed and draw me into his arms. I want him to lay his large hand flat on my belly and press gently and feel desire flood through me. I want to be silent and dreamy and view this room, this sky, everything, from a different angle. I want to be shielded by trees and lie against him and sleep.

‘You asleep?'

I did not hear him come upstairs. He has stolen upon me before I am prepared. He approaches my side of the bed but stands back a little. His voice is soft and defeated. I open my eyes and look at him. I am waiting for some sound to rise out from inside me, a few words to send across this short distance that will not disappoint. He waits too and a long look passes between us and I know something has spoilt, and then he moves away and starts to undress. And for the first time his undressing, piece by piece, is too intimate and crushing and revealing and I close my eyes and weep.

He goes into the bathroom and closes the door. In a moment I hear the flush and the brushing of teeth. When he returns he walks around the room and hangs up his clothes, unplugs the hairdryer, tidies away his shoes. Now and then he clears his throat in a precise, emphatic way. He does this when we argue—he appears
occupied in his task, untouched, untroubled, aloof. He does it to distance me, to reduce me, to make me think,
This is nothing
. And I am left wondering—do I magnify everything, do I magnify the words and the pain and the silences? Do I?