Too Close to Home (11 page)

He stands in front of her, eyes shaded by his hat, a rollie clutched between his thumb and forefinger. He tells her he has to go down to Canberra today, ‘meeting', could she get the kids?

She doesn't want to. It's Matt's last night before he leaves. She also wonders what Shane would have done if he hadn't bumped into her at the school gates.

‘I guess so,' she says.

‘Should be back 'round eight.' He drops the rollie to the ground, grinding it into the pavement with the heel of his boot.

‘Whenever,' she replies, and then stops. ‘Actually, if it's going to be later, I'd rather not. Matt's heading north tomorrow, and we need time, without kids, before he goes.'

Shane nods. ‘Eight it is.' He smiles. ‘Cross my heart.'

‘I guess he told you why he's going?'

Shane doesn't say anything.

Freya looks at the ground, wishing she hadn't spoken. ‘It's weird,' she says. ‘Being hit with this.' She is not sure
why she is trying to make Shane understand, to know her a little better. She wishes she'd never said anything.

He is rolling another cigarette, an action so automatic he doesn't even need to look at what he is doing, he just runs the paper around the tobacco, using one hand only, while he tries to respond. ‘Matt's a good bloke. Wants to do the right thing.'

‘I know,' she says, and she meets his eyes for one uncomfortable moment. Then she turns once again towards the laneway, telling him she'll see him later on tonight.

IT'S A BELL CURVE, Matt thinks, a graph with his distance from home on one side and his anxiety on the other. His fear and tension and worry creep up and up until he reaches the halfway point and then they begin to dissipate, sliding down in the heat of north-west Queensland, until he is calm on the open road, windows shut, air-conditioning an icy chill on his skin, a line of bitumen in front of him, a sharp blue sky overhead.

He'd called Freya from the airport, wanting to speak to her before he began the long drive inland to Lisa's. She was in an electrical store having an argument with the sales assistant about fans. She wanted something better, something that would last the summer out. She was fed up, eventually calling for the manager to lodge a formal complaint.

‘He was twenty years old and looked at me like I was an alien.'

Matt smiled. ‘Why have the argument?'

‘Because you're not here,' she said. ‘And I need to argue with someone.' Her voice was soft, and he missed her already.

‘I'll call you when I can,' he promised. ‘And I'll be home soon.'

The drive was longer than he expected, and arriving in darkness, he pulled into the dirt out the front of Lisa's. She was standing in the doorway, insects buzzing outside the flyscreen, her small frame a silhouette.

In the warmth of the Queensland night, he stood, uncertain, suitcase in his hand.

‘I'm here,' he said.

She smiled, her expression so familiar and yet she was a stranger to him, someone he could have passed on the street at any time and not known.

She was looking at him, her blue eyes direct and appraising, and he met her gaze for a minute and then apologised for arriving so late.

‘It's fine,' she told him, her voice deeper than he remembered, the Queensland accent broad. She held out her hand, and he clasped it, before taking a step forward to hug her, both of them laughing awkwardly.

 

Matt had wanted to be a sculptor. He remembers this and feels a wash of sorrow, sweet and heavy, for the loss of what he once was: young, hopeful, at the end of a five-year architecture degree, and determined never to practise.

‘I came north,' he tells the boy who may or may not be his son, ‘when I finished studying. To have some time alone. To find out more about myself and what I wanted to do.'

The boy, who is not really a boy – he is more of a youth on the brink of becoming a young man – is called Lucas, and they are having their first clumsy attempt
at a conversation, some days after his arrival. Rather, it's Matt who is trying to talk. Lucas just sits on the concrete slab at the back of Lisa's house, knees drawn to his chest, eyes squinting in the glare of the sun, while he flicks at nothing with a twig.

Oh God, Matt thinks. What the fuck am I doing here?

He's about to explain that he had to give up his vision of becoming a sculptor when he and Freya had a child, but fortunately stops himself. He has tacked into a wind that is dangerous; there are dark grey squalls everywhere.

Lucas is in his second-last year of school and wants to drop out. Lucas has not told Matt this; he hasn't told Matt anything. In fact, he hasn't spoken to Matt since he arrived. The little information Matt has comes from Lisa, their conversations often awkward, the strangeness of their situation making them both careful.

Lucas has been conspicuously absent. On the first night, he was out with friends, coming back during the day to sleep in the stifling caravan at the end of the yard, only to disappear again the second night; it was an absence that made Matt paranoid.

‘Is he avoiding me?' he asked Lisa, and she shook her head.

‘Have you told him who I am?' But as he spoke those words, Matt was aware that even he, himself, did not know who he was.

‘I told him you were a friend,' she said.

They were sitting on an old iron swing chair that had a tattered canvas awning overhead. Lisa had her knees
drawn to her chest and she rocked her body gently, the swing swaying slightly with her movement.

She had aged, of course, but there were times when he still saw the girl he'd known all those years ago, despite the effects of the harsh Queensland sun. Her hair was still white blonde, and she kept it pulled back in a scraggly ponytail; the elastics she used at the ready on her wrist. She was slighter than he remembered; her body small and wiry, her skin reddened and coarse, the small tattoo of a feather on her shoulderblade now blurred beneath the straps of her bra, the silver bangles on her wrist clattering as she raised her cigarette to her mouth.

He had offered to stay in the local motel. In fact, he would have preferred that; it would have given them both some space, but she had told him there was room at her place, he should save the money.

The sleep-out was off the kitchen, his bed a single divan covered with a faded chenille bedspread. There was a desk in the corner and above it, her horse drawings tacked to the fibro wall. He was looking at them when she came in, and she smiled self-consciously as she told him she'd tried to get illustration work.

‘I thought I could do kids' books,' and she tucked her hair behind her ears. ‘I even sent them off to publishers. But I never had any luck.'

‘They're good, you know,' and he meant it. ‘Really good.' As he faced her, the golden afternoon light coming through the Venetians, they could both have been the people they had once been. It was only a moment, but he would liked to have kissed her, gently, and held her, in a gesture that would have been an attempt
to say all they seemed to be incapable of uttering.

Sitting outside in the swing chair, he tried to tackle what needed to be addressed. If he was the father, he wanted to make amends. He didn't know how, and he was aware that this was an area in which they would need to find their way, but first, the question was whether he was or wasn't the father of the boy. And he looked at her profile as she drew back on her cigarette and stared out across the cement to the strip of tangled grass at the rear of her block, the metal of the caravan glinting in the moonlight.

She stubbed out the end of the rollie against the arm of the chair and then tossed it into the ashtray at their feet. Her bangles rolled down to the end of her wrist and she pushed them further back up her arm.

‘He's a good kid,' she said, avoiding his question. She turned to face him, her eyes anxious, as she tried to explain. ‘But he's growing up and I don't have much control over him. I worry, sometimes. He's out all night, misses school all the time. The teachers wanted him to have a psychiatric assessment. I've been trying to get an appointment with a doctor in Brisbane.'

‘What do they think is the problem?'

She shrugged. ‘I don't know. Sometimes I think it's just being a teenager. Other times I worry it's something worse.'

She stood up, picking up the ashtray and taking it inside.

‘Another beer?' she asked from the window behind him. He turned to see her, standing in the light of the kitchen, holding a stubbie up in one hand, a glass of water in the other.

‘Thanks,' he replied, and the metal screen door swung shut behind her as she came back outside.

‘I'm not sure,' she finally said, in what was, he supposed, an attempt to answer his question about whether Lucas was his son.

‘Was there someone else?' he asked, wanting to pin her down and hating himself for feeling this need.

Eventually she nodded. ‘Around the time you left. I don't know where he is now.'

‘Hasn't Lucas ever wanted to know?'

She was uncomfortable. Twisting a strand of white hair in one finger, she looked at him and then looked away again. Her long fine hands were covered in rings. There was even one on each of her thumbs and he reached out for her, awkward, uncertain as to how she would respond to his gesture. She just stared at the ground, her hand staying in her hair.

‘I lied to him,' she finally admitted, and this time there wasn't anxiety in her eyes, just defiance. ‘I told him his father was dead.'

Matt put his beer down on the concrete. It was only his second, but a wave of nausea hit him. It was, perhaps, accentuated by the heat, but he felt as though he was wading through mud, unable to find a way forward, and it was making him ill.

Her voice was flat as she tried to explain. ‘I didn't want to lose him. I didn't want to have to tell him I didn't know who his father was, and then I didn't want him running off trying to find out.'

Matt didn't say anything, and she mistook his silence for accusation.

‘It was hard on my own. But he was all I had.'

Standing up, Matt wanted nothing other than to be at home, back with Freya and Ella where he belonged. He rubbed at the back of his eyes with his hand, breathing in as he did so.

‘What are you going to say to him now?' When he finally spoke, the strain in his voice made it thin, almost high.

She turned away as she blew out a thin stream of smoke. ‘I don't know,' she answered.

The light from the kitchen window illuminated small frail moths fluttering through the blackness of the night sky. Her hair, too, was lit up, a silvery halo around the sharp tired lines of her face. In the heat of the evening, the patchouli she still wore mingled with the scent of the frangipanis – apricot, cream and lemon buried deep among dark green leaves. As she sat on the concrete, drawing her knees to her chest once again, he remembered the quietness of her room at the back of the house she had once shared with Shane. He had liked lying next to her, hearing the sound of the evening rain hissing as it hit the hot bitumen on the street.

He wanted to connect with her again.

‘What was he like as a boy?' he asked, hoping they could talk about him in some way other than the fraught manner that had left them both floundering.

She looked up, her chin resting on the top of her knees and her expression softened.

‘Come inside.'

He followed her into the smallness of the lounge room at the centre of the house. The floor was covered with an old Axminster carpet square, floral on soft grey, worn in patches, and not reaching the edges of the room. There
was little furniture, just a cane sofa and coffee table, and a bookshelf made from planks and bricks. She'd hung white muslin in the window and the effect was pretty, dainty, as it floated, ghostly, in the night air.

She opened up a photo album. The early pictures were small square snapshots, taken on an old instamatic. The colours had distorted, the blues yellowing and the reds fading. Lucas looked up at the camera, golden curls, big hazel eyes, a one-toothed grin as he reached up for his mother who was behind the camera. In others he crawled across thick green grass, he played in a plastic wading pool, and he sat upright blowing bubbles in a deep bath; they were familiar images, like those Matt had taken of Ella when she was small.

As Lisa turned the pages, the plastic protector sheets brittle in her hands, she told him a little more about her life.

‘We were living with my mum and dad then,' she explained, as he leant in to examine a picture of her next to a horse. She was squinting anxiously; Lucas was next to her, back turned to the camera. ‘I'd had a bit of trouble.' She sniffed as she spoke and he glanced up at her.

She wasn't crying. He didn't know why he thought she might have been because it wouldn't have been like her. ‘It was a bloke,' she explained, and then didn't elaborate further.

She continued turning the pages. There was Lucas on his first day at school, skinny knees covered in scabs, skateboarding, swimming; the gaps between the images began to lengthen. In the few more recent ones (which were probably at least a couple of years old) Lucas' glance at the camera was hostile, angry at the invasion; his eyes
were red and glazed, his face marked by traces of acne.

She closed the book abruptly, several plastic sheets coming out at a sharp angle. She didn't attempt to right them as she put it back in its shelf.

‘Don't judge him,' she said. ‘You haven't had a teenager. You don't know.'

‘I wasn't,' he assured her, appalled that she could think this of him. ‘I'm just at sea here.'

She nodded, looking at him momentarily before turning to the window, the night dark. He was about to speak, to try to fill the silence, when she suggested they go for a walk. ‘I could show you the sights of the town?' Her smile was slight. ‘I'm sure there must be one or two.'

He grinned, and her smile broadened.

They walked out into the deserted street, taking the track through the scrub that led into the town centre. Her dog, a mangy mongrel, followed at a respectful distance, occasionally disappearing into the long grasses, never gone for long.

‘That's where I work,' and she pointed out a fibro house two streets back from the main road. The sign out the front described it as a community centre, the hours limited to Monday to Thursday, mornings only.

He asked her what she did and she told him that she referred people on to other agencies. ‘You know, they come to us with a problem, maybe housing, work, a neighbour thing, and we tell them where they can get help.' She looked across at him and smiled. ‘Most of the time they just come back again.'

‘Because there's nowhere else to go?'

She nodded. ‘Most people fall through the gaps. They don't fit this criteria for that service; their income
isn't low enough, they're not in the right area –' she shrugged. ‘They know what it's going to be like. They pretend they'll take our advice but then we just see them again. I guess they know we'll listen. Over and over again.'

As they rounded the corner into the main street, Matt asked if she wanted to stop and have a drink at one of the pubs.

She didn't. ‘I'm an alcoholic,' she told him, without flinching.

He was surprised. He didn't remember her as a drinker.

‘It was during the bad time – when it got out of control.' She was holding a stick in her hand and she tossed it a couple of yards ahead. The dog stirred herself from her lethargy and trotted forward to pick it up in her mouth. She dropped it at Lisa's feet, and when it was ignored, she picked it up again, following, hopeful. ‘My mum and dad took Lucas to live with them. They wouldn't let me get him until I went to AA.'