The Slap (35 page)

 

She was shocked the first time she met her future father-in-law. He had only just turned fifty but his skin, his body, his carriage, belonged to that of a dying old man. His liver’s fucked, Gary had warned her, but she would have known that at once. His skin was corpse-grey; raw red and purple sores marked his arms. He wheezed when he spoke and every few minutes his body would double over in racked, tortured coughing, resulting in thick, globby phlegm he would spit onto the ground or into a tissue. Even so, a cigarette was always in his hand. Rosie stopped smoking right then. That is what smoking did, what alcohol did. They did indeed kill you, and the body did exact revenge for the poison it had been subjected to. It gave you death with no dignity. Gary’s mother, only forty-eight at the time, was grossly overweight. Drink had given her a bulbous nose, criss-crossed with fine red veins. Deep furrows ran from the side of her lips. Gary’s sister had been there as well, always with a fag in her hand, a beer in the other.

They had horrified her—the two nights they spent there had seemed endless. The house was tiny, a commission unit at the edge of Sydney’s western suburbs, not really urban, but not country either. There had been nowhere to go, nothing to see, only the local pub down the road. They had gone there both nights for dinner and for the first time she had seen Gary really drink, compulsively, to the point of oblivion. Lying next to him in bed both nights she could not sleep for the snoring and farting and heavy wheezing. It had terrified her, and on returning to Melbourne, for the first time, she questioned whether she should marry this man.

 

It had been the proverbial whirlwind romance. He had proposed, and she had accepted, within the first month of their meeting. One of her treasures that Hugo would inherit was Gary’s self-portrait on a small, stretched canvas, no bigger than a photograph, with the words, Will You Marry Me? stenciled in black ink across his face.

She had not long been back from London when they had first met. Like so many other Australians, she had wasted eight years of her life there on temp jobs, partying, riding the crest of the house, techno and rave wave, falling stupidly, conventionally in love with a married older man. She referred to it as love but her feelings towards Eric had never been passionate. She had certainly never truly felt joy with him, certainly never experienced anguish. They had both been aware of the reasons they stayed together, why he was prepared to be adulterous, why she was content to remain a mistress. Eric had a beautiful young girl to fuck; she got to stay in the apartment he rented for them, that great flat with the view of Westminster. He bought her beautiful clothes, paid for the marijuana, the ecstasy and the cocaine. They looked remarkable together, fashionable and sophisticated; Eric knew how to wear a suit. He was a good lover, prepared to indulge every fantasy, she liked his maturity, was happy to surrender to it: Daddy, can I fuck you? He took her to the opening of David Hare’s
Racing Demon
and had scored prime seats for Madonna’s Girlie Show at Wembley. And most importantly, to give him his due, he had never once offered to leave his wife for her, had never made that ignoble promise. There was another reason why she had stayed with Eric for so long: because it would piss off her mum. But in the end she was sure that she would have returned back home, returned to her friends, even if Eddie had not made the call. Rosie, I’m sorry, Dad’s dead. He hanged himself.

She had cried on leaving Eric but they both knew the tears were not for the relationship, that they had both been playing parts in a late-twentieth-century soap opera that needed to come to an end. They were bored with each other. Always the gentleman, he organised her ticket, helped her to pack up the flat, drove her to the airport, and with his final kiss slipped a Valium in her palm for the interminable flight home.

The funeral had been organised for the day after her arrival in Perth. Her mother did not attend, and to spite her, Rosie stayed with Eddie for a week, putting up with the scattered pizza boxes, the filthy toilet, the mould-caked bath. She then hired a car to drive across to Melbourne. She wanted to feel Australia again, to immerse herself in the enormous open canvas of the sky and the desert and the soil. She drove in ten-hour stretches, seeing nothing but the burnt scrub and the infinite blue firmament, parking the car in isolated service stations and braving the freezing cold of that emptiness while she willed herself to sleep. By the time she arrived in Port Augusta, avoiding the deadened stares of the Aborigines as she sat in a cheap café to eat hamburgers made with stale bread, she felt that she had washed Europe off her, that the eight years had disappeared.

In Melbourne she first stayed with Aisha and Hector, learned to change nappies on Melissa who had just been born, got work as a receptionist for a boutique clothing company in Fitzroy, and found a flat in Collingwood. Two months later she met Gary at an art opening in Richmond. He was the only one with balls enough to denounce the hopelessly outdated postmodern bricolage of the artist’s work. Back then he wore an industrial grey wool suit, a thin black tie, and pale crimson button-braces that he’d found in an op-shop in Footscray. She had noticed him at once, even before he began to insult the artist, because he was the only man in that crowd who dressed as well as Eric. But unlike Eric, Gary was not born to elegance. Gary’s flair was instinctive, his style his own. He was not handsome like Eric, but that didn’t matter. His features were distinctive, extravagant, the sharp chin, the steep cheekbones, the intense eyes. Honesty was his God. She thought him thrilling, dangerous. She’d had none of that with Eric: for charm, like that her father possessed, and politeness, like that of her mother, were evasive qualities that concealed the truth.

She had gone straight up to Gary and objected that he was being unfair to the artist, that an opening was meant for celebration, not criticism. He’d scoffed at that—was that the first time he had accused her of being
bourgeois
?—but they had both been smiling. He asked for her number and called her the next day. They went to dinner that Friday night and he had thrilled her with a conversation that encompassed music and film and art and the challenge of evolutionary psychology on the dogmas of feminism. She loved that he read widely but had never been a student, that he had left high school at sixteen, took on carpentry as a trade and left that as well to move to the Cross in Sydney and transform himself into a bohemian who would finally remove all traces of his previous life. He kept nothing from her. He had been a rent-boy, had pimped a girlfriend, wasted three years on heroin, had fled Sydney owing thousands. She hardly said anything all night, dazzled by his skill with narrative, his assuredness, by the seductive power he already had over her. She wanted to fuck him that night, but she did not invite him in. He rang again next day and they spent Sunday afternoon on the banks of the Yarra. That night he stayed, and the next morning, after he had left, as she was getting ready for work, she rang Aish. I’m in love.

From the beginning Gary was defensive around her friends. He thought Aisha cold, Anouk arrogant and, most of all, detested Hector’s attempts at fake mateship. He thought them all stuck-up and, overcompensating, Rosie found that she fell into a gush of talk when they were together, dominating conversation so that no conflict could emerge. They are so fucking middle-class, so dull, Gary would holler when they returned home to her flat, how the fuck can you stand them? She defended her friends but secretly, surprisingly, she found that she was elated by his resentment of them. Her friends no longer seemed so successful, so assured, so
perfect
, when viewed through Gary’s eyes. When she had returned from visting his family in Sydney she said little to Aisha about them. She said nothing about her doubts. She was going to marry him. She loved him. Fuck them, fuck all of them and their disapproval. In the end her friends were loyal. Anouk was there at the wedding, and Aisha and Hector had been their witnesses.

 

She softly kissed her child on his cheek. He smelled of caramel, of childhood. Hugo stirred, whimpered, then turned over. She knew that it was an awful thought to have, but she was glad that both his grandfathers were dead. One quickly, by his own hand, the other slowly, by grog. His grandmothers might as well be dead—one was a drunk and the other refused to love. It was her and Gary and Hugo. And her friends. That was all that mattered. That was family. Everything will be alright, sweetheart, she whispered, everything will turn out fine.

Next morning, when she found Gary passed out on the back lawn, neither of them mentioned the argument. She cooked an omelette for Gary and herself, made toasted sandwiches for Hugo, and they watched
Finding Nemo
together, Gary making his son laugh, mouthing all of Dory’s lines.

The weeks stretched out endlessly to the hearing, but the days seemed to fly by. There wasn’t a minute in which the thought of the upcoming trial did not loom. Her keenest desire was to shield Hugo from what was happening. She gave herself over to the house, an enormous spring clean, scouring the oven, attacking the cobwebs in every corner of every room, rearranging the kitchen shelves. She planned menus for the week, shopping at the market, walking with Hugo to the shops on Smith Street every second day. She was attuned to Gary’s mood. If he arrived home brooding from work she remained silent until his first beer, allowing him to relax. She badgered Margaret on the phone until she was given another appointment at Legal Aid; and even though there was nothing the lawyer could tell her except to remain calm, she was heartened by it. Margaret reiterated that Rosie and Gary were doing the right thing, that an assault against a child could not go unpunished. Rosie wished Gary was not so suspicious of the young woman. He thought her immature, anti-male. But they were getting her services for free, and Rosie thought they should be thankful.

She was grateful for the assistance of Connie and Richie over those weeks. They looked after Hugo together, or took turns minding him, while she allowed herself the opportunity to go to the pool for a swim, to do yoga, to give herself over to fantasies. Though Margaret had explained the unexciting, bureacratic workings of the hearing process, Rosie allowed herself the luxury of daydreams. She imagined herself in the dock, passionately, convincingly detailing the crime that monster had committed against her child. She swam fifty laps a time lost in those thoughts.

Shamira too proved herself a true friend, calling every day, bringing her kids over to play with Hugo on the days she wasn’t working at the video shop. One afternoon Shamira invited her to a park in Northcote where a group of mothers whose children attended the same school as Ibby would often meet to watch their children play. Rosie appreciated her friend’s efforts to keep her occupied but she found the afternoon tiresome. The other women were all Muslim and, apart from Shamira, were all born to Arab or Turkish parents. They were welcoming, polite, but Rosie was aware of a subtle distance between herself and these women. It was not the religion itself that created the barrier. Only a handful of the women were scarfed. But their easy camaraderie, their teasing of each other and their parents as ‘mussies’, as ‘wogs’, their disinterest in her life, her marriage, her world, pissed her off. She wondered if Shamira too felt some of this estrangement—would she always be ‘that Aussie girl’ to these confident, loud wog chicks? Would she always be an outsider no matter how many times a day she prayed? Rosie watched Hugo try to join in a game of soccer with the other boys and he seemed so fair, so
white
. She fell into silence, watching her child. He’d given up on the soccer game and was climbing on the adventure playground on his own. Shamira, noticing, called out sharply to Ibby to let Hugo into the game.

Don’t do that, thought Rosie bitterly. Don’t shame my son. She rose to her feet, smiling. ‘It’s been lovely to meet you all but we’ve got to get home.’

Shamira started to rise but Rosie stopped her. ‘It’s alright. It will be a nice walk home.’

The truth was that she missed Aisha with an almost blinding, childish indignation. This was the time that her friend should be by her side. This was the moment in her life when she most needed her friend’s support. She knew that she was being unfair. Aisha—and Anouk—had supported her through her parent’s divorce, the loss of the house, had looked after her the first time she moved to Melbourne. They were there when she returned from London, when her father killed himself. Aisha had come to the funeral. Yes, it was unfair but that was how she felt. Shamira was kind but they did not share a history. Connie was generous, supportive, but she was only a teenager. I’m lonely, thought Rosie, holding her son’s hand as they crossed Heidelberg Road. Since having Hugo her life had contracted to her family and a few friends. It must have been over a year since she’d seen the girls she used to work with. You’re my life, Hugo. She did not want to give voice to this thought, and he definitely did not need to hear it. But it was true. He was her life, her whole life.

So she felt joy and relief when they got home to a message from Aisha. Rosie, how are you? Do you want to meet Anouk and me for a drink on Thursday evening? Give me a call. We’re both thinking of you. Love you.

 

It felt like going on a date. She had been wanting to visit her hairdresser before the hearing and after ringing Aish back she called Antony and made an appointment. It was exactly what a girl needed. Antony made a fuss of her as soon as she walked through the door, shoving her into a chair and complaining loudly that she had let herself go. She giggled at the banter. He asked about Hugo and she told him that the hearing was in a week.

‘Fuck the hearing, fuck messing about with lawyers. Why don’t I get my cousin Vincent to deal with the prick? He’ll cut off his balls.’

Antony turned to his assistant. ‘Do you know that this prick just went up to Rosie’s child and slapped him? Just like that.’