The Near Miss (10 page)

She pinched the envelope again, rattled it close to her ear with a playful smile. ‘Fifties?'

‘Hundreds.'

She whistled, but something trembled inside her. Her will, maybe. ‘Could pay for a lot of counselling for that boy. Could help cover a job he might never be able to do again.'

Van's face went cold. He stood up. ‘I thought you had money trouble. Sorry for giving a shit.'

The trembling thing stilled inside her, and became stone. Skip. How much dirty money was this? How much danger could this draw to them? ‘I don't have money trouble. I just don't have money. Give me
this
and I'll have trouble. Cop trouble.'

‘I don't care about robbing some multinational. They rob us blind all the time.'

‘Ah. An eye for an eye.'

‘So when did you get all full of virtue?'

She sighed, thought of Esme and softened. ‘Are you hungry? I could heat some lentils.'

‘Are you going to take my present or what?'

She laughed. ‘Van. Van, Van, Van. At least you've come back. I haven't seen you since, hmm, since Grace and Tom's dinner. Since you left me stranded for a lift home.'

‘Oh, is that what this is all about? You had to walk home? On your little feety-weety?'

She didn't like him like this. She wanted him gone. ‘Oh, please. Give me some credit. But
now that you mention it, you did turn out to be a hell of a dinner date. You sort of stole the show when you took off with another guy's girlfriend and vanished for a month.'

He laughed nastily at the thought of it. ‘Melbourne people. Easy to shake them up, isn't it? With their bloody dinner parties. Man.'

‘It was mean.'

He stared at her and she shrugged. ‘He's brokenhearted. Eddy. Her boyfriend.'

‘Oh, puh! Give a fuck! Not my problem. So are you going to take this money? It will keep you living well for another good six months, at least.
Very
well. Or not so well, for twelve.'

She looked at him, and at the envelope. Six months. Maybe twelve. It was a tempting stretch of time. She thought about the job she'd just applied for, parceling up letterbox numbers. She thought about the kindy mothers who had not invited her out to coffee.

She thought of Skip.

‘Nah. I'll get by.'

His face fell and she did not like the look in his eyes. But she had never been scared of Van, and she wasn't now.

‘What if I don't give it to you? What if I give it to Skipper?'

She pursed her lips and began to clear away the cups. ‘And why would you do that?'

‘Well,
you
tell
me
.'

She stared for a long time into the sink, where she ran her finger around the rim of a saucer. Then she turned around and dried her hands on a tea towel. ‘Look at the time. I have to pick Skip up from kindy.'

‘I'm leaving this money for him. I have a right.'

‘You think.'

‘I do.'

Why didn't he just ask her outright?
Am I Skip's father?
Maybe he didn't want to know, for sure. Oh, one drunken night. What a fool she had been. She took the envelope and pushed it back towards his chest. She raised her eyes and stared at him with all the authority she possessed. She jingled her keys with the other hand and moved towards the door. ‘You don't, actually. Have a right. Now I must go.'

‘I'll wait.'

‘Please don't.'

Van sighed and walked towards the door, the movement seeming to loosen him once again. ‘You're crazy, Melody. I know you've got no money.'

‘The universe will provide.'

‘You are such a fucking old space-cadet, you know that?'

‘Go and tell your girlfriend to phone home. To do the decent thing and stop everyone worrying about her.'

‘The
decent thing
? My, my. Listen to you.' They were outside now, in front of his motorbike. ‘And she's not my
girlfriend
.'

‘No?'

‘Why are you so stubborn? Why do you stay so . . . alone?'

‘I'm not alone. I have Skip.'

‘Maybe that's not enough. For Skip.'

Melody picked up her backpack and averted her eyes, keeping her breathing steady. She let that comment sail freely over her head, until it was safely in the past, and she suppressed the urge to laugh. Such a thing would not even be safe, at this moment.

He spoke gently. ‘Can I see you after pick-up?'

‘No. We're going out. Seeya.' She kissed him quickly on the cheek, and their eyes met before she turned away. Pain and hurt were in his eyes, and she and wished she had not looked. The angry roar of his motorbike cut through the air as she walked, and she breathed more deeply and hastened towards her boy.

In at kindergarten, she pinned up a sign on the noticeboard.
Worried about the future? Need advice? Come to a qualified fortune teller. Experienced to the ninth level, Certificate from the Lismore Community Centre; can do tarot as well. Special packages available. Melody.
And a phone number.

Grace stood beside her and read it.

‘I'll do
you
an
extra
-special rate,' said Melody.

Grace considered it. ‘I don't know that I really want to know my future. At the moment.'

‘May be wise.'

‘Oh! Well!' Grace looked hurt and moved on to read a flier about a first aid course. Melody read the laundry roster. She had offended Grace, she could see. But it was true. There was a colour around Grace, something ominous heading her way. It was always difficult to be the bearer of bad news.

‘But the universe provides. Always.'

Grace rolled her eyes. Provides what? ‘Any word from Eddy? On his girlfriend?' She laughed falsely. ‘Maybe you can see
those
things in the cards?'

‘She's still not back.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Eddy rang me. He wanted Van's number.'

‘Did you give it to him?'

‘Of course.'

‘Oh, okay. I just thought maybe you might want to, I don't know, protect his privacy.'

‘God, no.' Melody shook her head. ‘I take the guy out for dinner and he nicks off with someone else's girlfriend. He gets no protection from me.' She took a pen and wrote her laundry duty date on the pale skin inside her arm.

Grace nodded. Over in the home corner, Lotte and Skip had set up a table and were playing dinner parties. ‘Some potatoes?' trilled Lotte, fussing over Skip like a waitress. ‘Sushi?' Little Clare Trapper came to sit and join Skip at his lonely table, and Lotte screamed at her. ‘No! No!
You're
not playing!' And pushed her off the chair and onto the floor, where she kicked her in the ribs.

Grace took a deep breath and closed her eyes. At this moment she really did not want to see into the future.

Grace arrived at work late. With a heavy heart, she sat down to begin work on the Good Works grant application. There was no question, the loss of the more lucrative federal grant was an unmitigated disaster for the association, and finding new funds would be essential for its survival. This was work she did feel was worthwhile, far more so than getting Bunny into the papers for her moment of glory. And Grace knew her writing skills were truly valuable here; she could persuade, she could cajole, she could mount a good argument and fill in pedantic paperwork as well as anybody. They were lucky to have her. She worked for an hour on the grant, and then went online to find a reference to mental health projects the association had worked on in the past.

Somewhere searching in the dusty library shelves of cyberspace, she started worrying about Lotte and her outburst at kindy that morning. Lotte had always had a difficult temperament, and Grace was gloomily familiar with the silent and watchful gazes of other mothers as she remonstrated and pleaded with Lotte over some public assertion of irrational will, or worse, like today, some childish act of violence. That morning Lotte had been wildly determined to keep Skip for herself, and to push away anyone who wanted to join in the play. Privately, Grace shared a kernel of understanding for her daughter; if women were having a one-on-one in a coffee shop, it wasn't like they were obliged to include everyone in the entire café. Imagine it: now everyone, including you, secretive post-Pilates ladies in the corner, and you, book-group baby-boomers by the window, pull your tables together. Let's all go through each other's handbags for interesting items, and then we'll swap phones and read each other's texts. There would be a riot. However, kindergarten world demanded absolute inclusiveness, and tolerance of Everyone, All The Time.

Grace looked at various childhood conditions that could be loosely connected to Lotte — ADHD, autism spectrum? — and suddenly realised forty precious minutes had passed. She needed lunch.

She was standing at the side of the road, watching a tram, when she realised she was doing it again. That thing she did, that thing that was a sign. It started as a fantasy, a small film clip unravelling in her mind, where she stepped out in front of the tram and it hit her. Then she was dead. In her fantasy. Which, to be honest, didn't make her feel as bad as it should have, although, being fantasy, it probably lacked a few elements, such as physical sensation. It was a pretty tempting prospect, actually. Like a sweet release, a black-hole-esque absence of stress, release from mortgage anxiety and job boredom, of the sheer juggle of working mother-ness. This fantasy of near-death came in various forms; once in chest pains which she had — it was summer and the
news was full of stories of midlife executives on holidays dropping dead from the cardiac stress of back yard cricket and negotiating with teenagers — anyway, she had attributed her chest twinges to pending or in-progress heart attack, and had proceeded hopefully to an emergency ward where scans had found nothing.

‘Really?' she had said, from the cool nest of the crisp white bed where she had dreamed of spending weeks and weeks, reading a pile of library books while kind nurses stroked her forehead.

‘You sound disappointed,' the doctor said, his fingertips on the pulse in her wrist. “No, that heart rate feels nice and steady. Your blood pressure's normal. ECG's perfect.'

‘I would have to leave my job, if I'd had a heart attack, wouldn't I?'

‘No, no, no! Goodness, we wouldn't have an executive left in this city if that was the case. Every corporate board would be deserted.'

‘But ideally—'

‘You don't need a heart attack to leave a job, you know. If you don't like it you can just, you know, leave.'

‘Oh, I know
that
!' Of course she knew that. What a stupid thing to say.

But who would leave a perfectly good job, just because they didn't like it?

The days cooled, the leaves fell, and Grace took out the cool-weather work clothes she had packed away last year. Like old friends from another time; the light wool cardigans, the leggings and boots that would turn summer clothes into autumn ones. She looked at her heavy coat and put it back. Not yet. She walked to work through the city's parklands and breathed in the scent of autumnal trees, and crunched her boots through drifts of dry leaves along the path.

One day she arrived at the office to find anxious faces. An email had gone around: the chairman of the board would visit that afternoon to congratulate the team on their recent winning of the state Good Works grant, and to meet the people behind the ‘really impressive work on the Teenagers Attack Depression campaign'.

This was immediately interpreted as the announcement of pending redundancies. Josh pulled Grace into the kitchen.

‘Do you think it will be me?'

‘Not at all,' lied Grace, deeply sympathetic. The lost federal grant had specifically funded project workers, and had underlined Josh's existence in the place. Josh was the best project worker they had; the most efficient and compassionate, and it stood to reason that in an organisation run by the Bunny, good people like Josh would be the first to go.

‘I hope it is. I want a redundancy.'

Grace was shocked. ‘You want to lose your job?'

‘I want to get a payout. I've been here 12 years. It might be enough for me to take some time off, do things I've never been able to.'

‘Like what?'

‘I don't know. Pottery. Train for marathons.'

‘But what about money? To live?'

‘I've paid off the mortgage.'

Grace could not imagine such freedom. She trailed disconsolately back to her desk, where the Bunny was waiting to announce she had finally graduated from her PhD. This was in something or other — perpetuating mental illness in the workplace, or pathological vanity, Grace had hardly paid any attention. Until now.

‘My thesis was on modern day electro-convulsive therapy for manic depressives,' the Bunny explained, flapping a piece of parchment. ‘And I'm prepared to offer myself for interview on this topic, and on the new research my team came up with.'

Grace was momentarily distracted by the idea of the Bunny offering herself up for ECT. ‘Oh! Interview. Right.'

‘With
all
three major metro daily newspapers.'

‘But—'

‘No buts, Grace! This is a sensational story we're handing them on a plate. If you can't put this exclusive yarn into their laps, then you can't honestly call yourself a media manager, can you?'

Grace sighed. She had had a tough morning getting Lotte to kindy. Skip was home sick, and without Skip, kindy was pointless for Lotte. She had just received a text message from Miss Laura:
Lotte says feels sick wants go home.
It was not the day for the Bunny's vanity to reach its Everestial peak. ‘We can't give it to all three newspapers and call it an exclusive. Why not choose one newspaper, and try to get the most out of it?' she pleaded.

Barbara narrowed her eyes suspiciously. ‘Do you think?'

That's what you pay me for, snapped Grace mentally. ‘Why don't I ring Jen Craigson at
The National Daily
?' she said calmly. ‘She writes some good features.'

‘I don't want it buried in the health supplement. I think they could get a feature
and
a news piece out of it!'

‘Do you?' Oh, Lord. Greece looked set to be thrown out of the EU and the Bunny thought it might make the news that she had finished her PhD.

‘And don't forget to amend my name on
any
press release now to
Doctor
Barbara Boiler.'

‘I certainly won't forget.'

‘But
you
don't have to call me “Doctor”. I'm not that formal.' The Bunny screwed up her nose in a way that was meant to be friendly, but which Grace found terrifying. In these pre-press release hours the Bunny always veered between being threatening and too friendly, as she might have done with her hairdresser, Grace reflected. Like me enough to give me good service, and if you don't I'll eat you.

Grace slipped back out to her desk and rang Tom's mobile. Disconnected, as usual. Why did they pay for a mobile, when the man never turned the thing on? She rang his desk phone, which was picked up by a colleague, someone Grace didn't know.

‘Ah yes, the boy genius.'

Grace paused at the unmistakable sneering. ‘I'm just trying to track him down,' she continued politely.

‘So is his boss. He never turned up today. He missed a meeting with a client. A
big
one.'

Big meeting? Big client? Grace gritted her teeth, and did not ask. In that sardonic, unknown voice on the phone she could hear exactly how it was at Tom's workplace, without even setting foot in the building. If Tom got sacked, if he wriggled out of his working life down that passive-aggressive pathway . . . surely not. But right now, she had to get someone to pick up Lotte.

She rang Verity at home, the only person she really felt she could ask who wasn't working. Verity was out playing tennis and said gaily that she wouldn't be home for another two hours. No problem, said Grace grimly, envisioning a life of tennis and happy lunches. Deuce!

‘Qu'est-ce qu'il se passe?'
said Dr Bunny, jauntily. The Bunny liked to show off her French. She had changed into a T-shirt and leggings which hugged her large bottom. The toenails of her wrinkled bare feet were painted. She was off to the office yoga class.

Grace grimaced, the phone still to her ear, and waved at it to indicate she was talking. The Bunny gave her the thumbs-up and left, and Grace said a sheepish goodbye to the dial tone and hung up. She dialed and left a message for Jen Craigson.

Her phone rang as soon as she put it down, and she snatched it back up. Maybe it could be this easy, maybe it was a slow domestic news day, despite Greece, and Jen Craigson might gobble up an incendiary interview with Dr Bunny and Grace could race off early.

But it was Miss Laura from kindy.

‘Grace? Just wondering how you're going there. Lotte's temperature is up to 39 degrees and, well . . .' Laura paused. ‘She's complaining of a sore foot. The one she hurt in the crash.'

‘Oh dear, thanks for letting me know.' Grace silently uttered every profane word she knew. 'Well, I guess I'll come pick her up as soon as I can.' She hung up.

Dammit, where
was
Tom? Grace would have to go, if she couldn't find him. But maybe she could strike it lucky, and shop this story before she left, and handle the rest by phone. What the hell was the Bunny's doctorate in again? Electro-convulsive therapy for wilful employees? For men who wanted to slink away from their jobs? Grace couldn't read her own writing. She glanced over at the Bunny's office. It was empty; she was at yoga. Should Grace interrupt her there? Oh God, the thought of having to sidle up to the Bunny in her leggings, doing down-face dog, was too
much. And her newly minted PhD would be lying somewhere around there, in her office. Surely Grace could just find it herself in half a minute?

Inside the Bunny's office, feeling slightly guilty to be there, she scanned two desks and a shelf, all bearing piles of varying heights of reports, envelopes and documents. The Bunny was not a neat worker, and Grace later reflected that it was amazing that she had somehow focused through the chaos onto the one place that bore her own name: a fat yellow envelope. Labelled,
Grace Ellison
.

It looked so official! A pay rise, maybe, some commendation for good service? But then her blood froze. She crossed the room and turned the envelope over. Unsealed. She slid her fingers inside.

A letter of termination. Regrettable. No reflection on. Commendable work. A page of figures that were incomprehensible. It could not be. She was dreaming. She heard a noise and hastily slid the page back in the envelope and tossed it on the desk, her heart racing. An identical letter for Josh Papps. He would be pleased. Grace quickly returned to her desk, seized her pen and drew triangles all over her notepad, so deeply that the page tore in places. She breathed fast and hard, and kept drawing triangles until her vision cleared.

Finally, she packed the contents of her desk into a box, emailed all her personal files to herself, and checked her handbag one last time. Then she wrote an email.

           
Dear Dr Boiler,

           
My little girl is sick at her kindergarten and I have had to leave immediately.

           
Grace

Out at the taxi rank, her heart raced. She felt the city sharp and new around her, as if a fog had lifted from her vision. A woman in a skirt, sunglasses and bike helmet, directly over the road from her, leaned her thighs into a parked bicycle and wriggled her fingers into gloves. A labourer pushed a wheelbarrow into a construction site, making his way through city workers in expensive suits. How old a tool was the wheelbarrow, this ancient device? A stiff-legged man on a mobile phone marched back and forth across the pavement, while a woman on a phone nearby stood still and smiled, a waterfall of curves, the phone raised to her ear like a cup. A weathered woman with purple hair stared at Grace and held out her hand.

‘Gotta dollar?'

Grace carefully counted out three, as a taxi pulled up beside her. She put them into the woman's claw, and then she climbed into the back seat. She wasn't sure she had enough to reach the kindy now, and she may regret her generosity at the other end. And the woman hadn't even said thank you. But somehow Grace needed at this moment to believe— what was it Melody had said? — that the universe would provide.

Eddy felt the tears sliding down his face and let them fall. Who cared if he was on a peak-hour train, with weary commuters in shades of grey filing on all around him, setting off from Flinders Street. No one was looking at him anyway; he was just another nondescript middle-aged man, holding a briefcase. There were dozens of him everywhere; he was a clone, except for the tears. No one would ever look at him again for the rest of his life. He looked over the shoulder of a mature woman with a tortured perm, who had opened her briefcase and was scribbling down a list.
Washing x 3. Tell kids: no Wii til homework done. Cake for fête. Call Tracy re: breast cancer, how
is??? Flowers. Tape Farmer Meets Wife. Mum: call re dr 5pm Friday. Set mouse traps!!
(This last underlined angrily.)
Call Geoff, tell him—

Eddy waited, his tears drying on his cheeks as he gazed absently around the carriage at people taking out newspapers, jabbing fingers at phones. Tell Geoff what? Still nothing. Another woman pulled a tangle of headphones out of her handbag, accidentally dragging a lipstick lid and a receipt and a tampon out as she did, grabbing at the receipt with a look of shock and swearing under her breath at it. A nearby man inserted two fingers into his chest jacket pocket and slid out a circular box. He opened it to reveal earphones perfectly coiled around a pair of pegs custom-designed for the purpose. He unwound the thin white cord slowly, with no tangles, and then planted the clean ear buds in his hairless ears. Eddy sighed, a little comforted by such homage to order and hygiene. Everywhere, people were inserting headphones. One man held his iPhone face-up, and ran his forefinger around the surface like he was drawing lines in sand. Eddy waited a couple of minutes and then risked another glance down at his neighbour's list.
Call Geoff, tell him—

Tell him what?

The woman gazed out of the window now, her fingers slack around the pen. She stared unseeingly out at the city buildings; rows of rectangles stacked up on their sides, cars snaking between them all below. Then suddenly they were in a tunnel and the window went black and Eddy's reflection, a man in a suit, stared back at him, and the air rushed out of him at how ordinary he was, how boring, just one of a million amoebas crawling the Earth. No wonder Romy had fled. How long had she been dreaming of doing so? He wanted to flee from himself, too.

The train stopped and a seat became vacant. He glanced at the bulbous belly of a pregnant woman swaying near him. He gestured towards his seat.

‘Please. Before it goes.'

The woman sank into the seat and smiled gratefully, but he could do nothing to acknowledge her. He would never smile again. He maneuvered awkwardly through the commuters to get away from her, before she too realised how boring and awful he was. Someone plucked at his sleeve and he turned.

‘Eddy!'

‘Tom.'

‘You've left the house.'

‘Dentist.' Even in his grief, Eddy could not miss his six-monthly check-up. The receptionist had called three days earlier to remind him, and like a robot he was obeying the call. He had put on a suit because that was what he always wore to the city. It had been weeks since anyone had asked him to go anywhere, except for his parents.