The Near Miss (4 page)

‘Hey, hang up your suit. The cat will wreck it.'

‘Good.' He pulled a dirty T-shirt on above his jocks and stepped into his favourite khaki overalls. ‘I hate it.'

He had taken an entire year off work recently. He had pleaded with her for it: support us for one year and I will get the robot over the line. During this year, he had spent almost every minute in overalls. It was his uniform when he was working on the Oldbot, and he did everything in them — invent, drop Lotte to kindy, cook dinner. Finally, when that year had finished, there was the bitter disappointment of the Oldbot's failure to sell, and once again Tom emerged in a dark suit, his hair newly cut, his grim jaw clean-shaven. He looked so handsome, despite that sullen work face.

Now, his whole body sighed in relief. He sat on the chair with his legs spread and his arms dangling.

‘Sell the house?' She recoiled.

‘I'm serious.'

‘You
love
this house.' Every time he came home, he slammed the door behind him and shouted it to the peeling, leaky ceiling:
God, I'm sooo glad to be home.
He was a practical man who would pounce on small tasks; he would replace a washer before dinner, or oil a squeaky door, as if he were kissing his home hello, the way he did his wife and his daughter.

‘I want to quit my job.'

Grace followed him out to the back shed where his workshop was, and perched on a dusty chair in the pool of light that spilled from the doorway. Cicadas creaked gently around them; the squeaky doors of warm nights. Trains hooted lonely warnings as they rattled empty along the tracks, back to suburban railyards to await the morning's office workers. Across the neighbourhood, doors and windows swung open to catch sea-scented southerlies after a hot day; the low rattle of television news voices told of bushfires and of children starting school; preps on their first day. That would be Lotte in a year's time. Too fast, she was growing up too fast. Dishes clanked in sinks, children called from bed for glasses of water, a mother's voice sailed over the fence:
Don't touch the fan
.

‘Well, I hate my job, too, you know, Tom. I've hated it for fifteen years.'

‘I know, baby. You don't seem to mind hating it, but I hate that you do. That's my dream: to make the solar ceilings and we will never have to work again. Unless we want to.' He knelt before her, his arms along her legs, dusty overalls brushing against her black suit. ‘You used to believe in me. In the Oldbot. In my inventions.'

‘Yeah, I know. I guess I got sick of being the other woman.'

She kept an ear out for Lotte, asleep. This was her first night since the accident to sleep without painkillers. The medicine and measuring cup sat at the ready.

The joke about being the other woman was an old one between them. Various incarnations of his last invention, the Oldbot, sat around the shed. She knew which one could speak back if charged up and addressed by a human. Hello Polly! (Lotte had nicknamed it). The dream of the robot had once been a solid part of their marriage; it had entwined itself around them like cement around bricks. They had sat up nights, talking and dreaming, and during the year Tom had taken off work it was a fantasy that lay behind everything they did. Tom refined the design and Grace planned the marketing. They collected news articles about similar inventions, they anxiously followed the progress of other inventors travelling down the same path of creation, who might cross the finish line first, they imagined a world where small robots with emotional intelligence could watch over lonely old people, and, worst of all, they imagined the money they might earn from such a creation. And even as they went backwards on the mortgage, they dreamed of a life of no debt. Oh God, the freedom. Annual overseas travel and nice cars and expensive hobbies. A proper workshop for Tom, instead of a little tin shed. Grace would quit her job and start some private marketing consultancy with a fancy website and prices so high she would only accept one job a year, and they would have to fly her to Paris for it, and then maybe Stockholm and Geneva. Oh, their dreams had once united them.

But then Tom got a couple of knockbacks from companies that had once been keen, and those companies bought instead from other inventors. Grace saw the time flying by, and the mortgage getting larger, and the robot not selling, and her chances of a second baby slipping away. She had never known how much she had wanted children until she had one, and then she never knew how much she wanted a second until everything seemed stacked against her.

She went to her doctor and the doctor said, are you trying? And Grace said, well no, my husband is not working, we can barely afford the house, we thought we would wait. And the doctor
shook her head and said thirty-eight is too old to be waiting, there is a window. And it closes. And Grace felt cold all over, and she said but Cherie Blair? Carla Bruni? And the doctor said oh God, don't think about them. Rich people. Lucky people. Just get on with it, Grace.

So Tom had reluctantly returned to his day job, just three months ago. But then, after trying the electromagnetic motor and discarding that, he had come up with the solar tiles idea, and her home had filled with old plastic bottles, and his passion for them grew every day, and she really didn't like the direction in which this was heading.

She sighed now, and felt another day of her life passing by, tick-tock. The near-loss of Lotte had made everything sharper, keener, more exquisitely fragile. Even sitting here. It was one of her favourite places in the world, this chrome-legged kitchen chair with the torn vinyl seat that sighed when she sat on its cushion, puffing resignedly out of the foam-filled gash. Weeds clung to its legs, a pile of twisted metal sat off to the side. Leaf litter flapped against Tom's workbench. Tom got up and closed his laptop, slapping it with loose fingers as if it had let him down. He turned and faced her.

‘So, we both hate our jobs.'

‘Well, big deal! It's not the whole of our lives. And we like our house, and our jobs pay for our house. And for another
baby
, Tom. We can't have another baby if you chuck in your job.'

Tom sank in a little on himself, like a deflating balloon, and studied her for a long minute. He looked at Grace in the way he might look at someone he didn't much like. He started to speak but the words puttered out, and he shook his head.

He tried again. ‘If we both hate our jobs, then let's just quit. Sell the house.' He shrugged. ‘There's more to life than this. And I want to give myself a year, just one more year, to work on this and get it over the line. I know I can.
This
is a good one.'

‘Tom, I couldn't bear to sell the house. To go back to renting, to feel like we had let things slide down that far. A house is everything. The security we need. And I want to have a baby. That was the deal: that if you had your year, you would go back to work and save enough to have a baby for
my
year. And you've been back at work three months. Three months!'

‘Yeah, three months. And I hardly ever see Lotte now. I'm lucky to get to say goodnight to her when I come home. If I was home she could do less time in childcare, and I could pick her up from kindy. Why would I have a baby when I hardly see the one we've got?'

‘You had lots of time with her last year.' A little too much, thought Grace jealously. All the little rituals father and daughter had developed; milkshakes at the café with the bear sign, and chats to the old lady with the cat on the walk home from childcare, and Lego out in the workshop while Tom worked on the robot.

‘What about those people down the road? The Trappers? They have four little kids, they rent, they live on one income and they're always happy. That guy's always sitting on the front porch playing guitar, the kids are always running around, laughing.'

‘Darl, they've got a house that's too cold in winter and too hot in summer, a car that breaks down every second day. I talk to Anna. Those kids couldn't even afford to go on the three-year-olds' kindy excursion last year.' She stared at him.

‘No?' he said mildly.

‘No. They had to take the day off and stay home with their dad.'

‘Oh. My. God. You mean they missed the Munich Children's Opera, on its eighth Australian tour? Should we call Human Services?'

‘Fuck
off
.'

‘Mummy?' The word trailed from a nearby window.

Lotte. They went inside and to her door. She sat up, a shadow in the darkness.

‘It hurts.'

‘I'll get your medicine.' Grace brought the little cup and sat on the side of the bed and stroked back her precious girl's hair. The mattress sank as Tom sat behind her and took Lotte's free hand in both of his. Lotte drank her medicine and her parents sat together on the side of the bed and breathed in her smell. Around them swirled the horror of the accident, the near miss, the knowledge of how close they had come to losing her. Nothing else mattered.

Finally, Grace spoke in the darkness. ‘Two years, Tom. If you could just work for two years while I take time off for a baby, then you can have your year off. How does that sound?'

He sighed deeply, lying down to snuggle beside Lotte. ‘It sounds like hell,' he murmured.

‘Oh.'

‘Would it include the three months I've already worked?'

‘Yes.' She had to hide the sympathy she felt. Her clever man, full of passion for his clever dream. She did not want to be his jailer.

‘I guess I could keep working on the solar roof at weekends.'

‘And nights,' suggested Grace. It was a peace offering; she was sick to death of him working out in the shed every spare minute of his life, but if that was what it took.

‘It would be nice to have another baby,' said Tom. He stroked Lotte's shoulder. ‘She's so beautiful.'

‘If anything happened to her . . .'

‘We're so lucky.' That horrible luck that they had genuflected before since the accident. ‘When is the woman coming over, the one who saved Lotte?'

‘Saturday.'

‘I really want to meet her. And say thank you.'

‘I wonder if she's vegetarian.'

‘Of course she's vego. She has dreadlocks.'

‘It's not the law.'

‘It is. Dreadlocks, vego.'

‘Maybe.'

‘Mm. Goodnight.'

‘Should I make the pilaf?'

‘Lovely.'

‘The banana curry?'

‘Hmm.'

‘I know, no protein. Vegos hate that.'

Lotte gave a little sigh, a puff, as if she had sunk deep through leagues of ocean and landed on the sandy floor of sleep, towing her father behind her on the seaweed strings of dreams.

‘What about the lima bean dish, but without the bacon?'

Tom snored and Grace smiled. She was pretty sure a deal had just been struck.

That night, Eddy breathed in a steam of peas and gravy, and watched his mother stab another slice of overcooked roast lamb and shake it off onto his plate. He nodded to his father's offer of wine, a startlingly bohemian turn on the part of his parents in recent times, who had drunk beer or Coke with their meals forever, and then he picked up his knife and fork and assembled his most incredulous face.

‘This looks
fantastic
, Mum!'

Merle beamed. ‘Oh, phooey. It's nothing.' She flicked him one last potato quarter.

Romy raised her knife and fork cautiously. She had two microwaved Sanitarium tofu burgers on her plate; the same as every time they went to Merle and Ray's place for dinner. Merle must have a sack of them stashed in the deep freeze. To the side of that, Romy had four dry roast potato pieces, with no trace of the Gravox and chicken-fat gravy, and a tablespoonful of rehydrated peas. In addition, as if to acknowledge and apologise for her paltry understanding of what on earth a coeliac vegetarian did eat, Merle had added something new; a little flourish which might be an attempt to be a bit interesting, artistic. It appeared to be pineapple which had been sliced and then fried, in a mix of breadcrumbs. Or something. Eddy followed Romy's stricken gaze and saw where it rested. Surely that could not be . . .

Merle leaned between them, her kind eyes turning back and forth reassuringly. ‘Do you like pineapple, Romy? I just wanted to make you a little something . . .'

‘Is that bacon?' Romy poked at it with her knife. Ray rose across the table to join the examination, his face full of a sullen threat that was not directed at the plate.

Merle nodded encouragingly. ‘It's a Pacific dish. I got it from the
Women's Weekly
cookbook, because you were talking about Pacific foods last time you came over, remember?' Her tone turned instructional. ‘You just mix a bit of all-spice and a handful of bacon chips . . .'

‘I don't eat
meat
.' Romy made the statement, its contents only too well known in this household, with apparent satisfaction. Gotcha. Nowhere did she cling to her vegetarian principles quite as firmly as in the home of her boyfriend's parents. She had been known to scoff the odd sausage roll in the wee hours after a night of drinking; she would sometimes absently take a marinated drumstick from Eddy's hands and gnaw off the crispy exterior as if she were in a trance-like state, as if eating your boyfriend's meat would not count before a jury of the great
meatless. But at the Plentys, her state of ecological, gastronomic purity was complete. Here in this suburban home of plastic plants and macramé owls, here she was as meat-free as the Dalai Lama.