Too Close to Home (9 page)

But, sitting by herself that afternoon, she'd realised that she was actually all right. It was a strange revelation, an almost sly happiness that crept through her limbs and made her smile to herself. This was the most solitary she'd ever been, a state that had always scared her, and one in which she was now immersed. She could look after herself, and with this realisation came liberation, whole new ways of existing peering out at her.

As she emerges from the tunnel and onto the tail end of the highway that leads to home, Freya tries to recall exactly how she had felt in that moment, because she wants the strength. Then she can deal with Matt's revelation in a way that is right.

‘Don't be silly,' Anna and Louise had reassured her after she'd spoken. ‘It's not going to take him away from you.'

But their words had felt like no more than the attempts at comfort friends always make to each other, a soothing pat that glides across the dirt, sweeping nothing away.

‘I know, I know,' she'd said, uttering her own banal words in response to theirs.

But if she thought about it, there was a truth to their condolences. Matt's reaction did not, by itself, have to mean he was going to drift from her. She, too, had a role in all this, and perhaps that was where the real anxiety lay. She wanted to behave well. Every day she woke wanting to be a good person who did the right thing, but like all people, she so often failed, forgetting to recycle, putting clothes in the dryer, uttering a sharp word to Ella, getting cranky with Matt when he didn't come home in time for dinner, not telling him she loved him – sometimes it was easy to see each day as no more than a dismal slide from the higher self for which she hoped. And here she was, doing it again, greeting this news with fear.

Her head hurt.

She wished she'd never spoken.

IT DOESN'T TAKE LONG before Matt realises that he needs to find Lisa. The realisation seeps in, its truth in stark contrast to the discomfort he feels at ignoring the news of the child.

At first he is cagey with Shane, hedging around any direct request for help out of a strange embarrassment, or perhaps it is more a fear that if he says he thinks the child could be his, Shane will correct him, leaving him feeling foolish.

Sitting on the front steps of Shane's place he tells him he might have to go to Queensland for work; it'd be good to catch up with a few people, and he throws in several names.

When he mentions Lisa, Shane shakes his head.

‘Not sure where she is.'

The last Shane saw of her was about twelve years ago.

‘She was having a bad time of it,' and he squints as he looks up into the harshness of the sun. ‘Livin' with some bloke who was no good.'

Matt manages to piece together a patchy history. The child is a son, and he was born in the year after
Matt came back to Sydney. Lisa had moved out of their house by then. She lived with some other friends, surviving on the single parent's pension and the odd job. She had a few boyfriends; none of them hung around too long.

Shane reckons there was a time when she might have developed a smack habit. But he isn't too sure.

‘Don't want to go saying things that may not be true,' he tells Matt. ‘She's a good woman. Just had it hard. Kid on her own. Bad bloke.'

As far as Shane knows, she then moved north and what little contact they had dwindled away into nothing.

When Matt remembers her, he knows he liked her but there was never any chance of falling in love with her. She was one of those slight, pretty, hippy girls who came from the mountains behind Brisbane. She sucked the ends of her hair and wore patchouli oil. She drew pictures of horses in pastels. But he resists the neat encapsulation of batik and sarongs. He remembers being surprised by her sense of humour; there was a steely dryness to it that seemed at odds with the rest of her character. And she had a strange independence he had admired. She'd met Shane at uni and moved into a house with him and other people she didn't know within the first few weeks.

The first night Matt slept with her, she showed him her horse drawings.

‘I was one of those girls who never grew out of it,' she told him wryly, laying page after page across the futon on the floor.

There was something wild in the images that had appealed to Matt, and a technical accuracy he admired.

She told him that she didn't know if she wanted to keep studying. Psychology had disappointed her, and she'd only taken English and Politics because she needed to have a complete subject load for the year.

‘I thought it would be about how we think and feel,' she smiled, ‘but it's just statistics.'

She admired Shane, although she thought he drank too much. ‘He's smart,' she told Matt. ‘Argues every point,' she said as she recalled the first time she'd heard him speak out in a Politics lecture.

She had seemed, and Matt remembers this with uncertainty, oblivious to the fact that Shane and the others who came and went were black. She simply lived there, her own room a neat, calm space out the back of a house that was often a scene of wild drinking and intense politics.

The curtains that she hung in the window were pale green. He sees himself lying on the futon and looking at them, almost lime in the early morning light, her hair white blonde against the pillow. She liked wearing jewellery, silver bracelets and turquoise rings that she said her mother had made. She never ate much, just white bread toast with Vegemite, or slices of pineapple, cold from the fridge. She had a cassette recorder in the corner of the room and she listened to Joni Mitchell.

After they had sex, she liked to tell him jokes – bad, corny jokes that used to go round and round the schoolyard, jokes that weren't funny, but somehow lying in that bed with her, the way in which she told them always brought a smile to his face.

This is what happens when he tries to recall her, small details come back, but the whole remains out of
reach. And it is not surprising. He never really got to know her.

A couple of days later, Matt tells Shane he could be the father of Lisa's child.

Freya has gone to a movie with Mikhala and he and Ella are eating chops. She has sauce smeared across her mouth and is in the middle of trying to explain an impossibly complicated game to him, when Shane turns up with the kids. They have brought three cakes with them, frighteningly white-looking creations with fluorescent pink jam in the middle and a smear of lime green icing on top. Ella thanks them, her eyes wide with wonder as they push hers towards her.

‘Can I eat all of it?' she asks Matt.

He tells her she can, and he's glad Freya isn't here to see it. Even he finds the potential toxicity of it a little too much.

Archie opens the fridge. He wants a mango. There's only one left and Matt knows Freya was saving it for breakfast. He's going to stop him eating it and then he can't be bothered, but Shane takes the mango from Archie.

‘You can't do that,' he tells him. ‘You ask your Uncle Matt.'

Archie glares at him, and then bites straight into the flesh.

‘I'll give you a walloping,' Shane says, hand outstretched, but Matt stops him.

‘It's fine. He can have it.'

Archie sticks his tongue out at Shane and hands the mango to Matt to be sliced.

While the kids lie in front of the TV, they sit out the back, drinking beer and smoking rollies. It's only now
that he has reignited this friendship that Matt realises how alone he had felt. If he does go out, it's with Freya and her friends. He likes them, in fact it's unfair to call them her friends as most of them are mutual friends, but lately he's felt there's been a divergence between his path and the path that many of them have taken. He has little interest in this phase of acquisition, he realises. They talk about property, art, even holiday houses, and he knows he and Freya are not exempt from this. They may have less than many of the people they know, but they, too, have been acquiring. Only a week or so ago, Freya had bought a new desk for her studio, showing it to him proudly.

‘What was wrong with the old one?' He hadn't understood her joy in the purchase.

‘I'd had it for years.' She'd rolled her eyes at him. ‘I bought it at Vinnies when I was in first-year uni.'

She gets hurt when he attempts to voice his dissatisfaction with this new direction they are all taking, translating his lack of interest into something larger. She has never forgotten his reluctance to buy a house. This is their home, she tells him. It's important. It is part of their life together. But the importance is not there for him; it never has been. It is a house, and he likes it, but he could live anywhere – and this doesn't mean he feels any less for her or Ella.

Normally he and Shane slot into the slow ease of talk with no hesitation, but tonight Shane is agitated. Awkward in a chair that is too small for his frame, he jiggles his leg up and down and drinks at a pace that is, even for him, a little alarming. Eventually he tells Matt there has been trouble at work.

‘Young bloke,' he says. ‘You know the type. Smooth as.'

Matt listens.

‘Blocks me on everything.' Shane wipes at the sweat on his forehead. He is tense, and gets up. ‘If I had my way, I'd just take him out the back.'

‘Can't you get rid of him? You're the boss.'

‘Connected to all the Board.' He walks up to the lemon tree, still talking, has a piss and then comes back. ‘I've been around a while. Lot longer than him.'

And he has. Matt is vaguely familiar with Shane's political experience, his involvement in some of the earlier housing initiatives and fights for land claims. He tries to reassure him that it'll blow over, he just needs to give it time.

Eventually Shane sits again. He leans forward and rolls a cigarette, his body relaxing slightly as he does so.

‘Reckon I'll say my piece and we'll go back to Queensland. Miss it, you know. And the kids, they like it here, but it's not their place.'

Matt doesn't know the country that Shane speaks of as home. It's north-west of Brisbane, and when he talks about it, it's always with a sense of the permanence of the land in his life.

‘It's there, you know,' he says.

On weekends he likes to take the kids to the outer suburbs where they can ride. He knows a bloke who charges twenty an hour for the horses.

‘They talk about their animals all the time,' he says.

The agitation has left him now; his breathing is slower.

It is then that Matt speaks. Helping himself to tobacco, eyes fixed on the pouch, voice soft and hesitant.

‘I want to find Lisa,' he says. He looks at the ground as he mentions that they slept together a few times. ‘When I stayed with you in Brisbane.'

Shane stares out across the darkness of the back garden.

‘And the dates, you know, they fit.'

A dog barks in a neighbour's yard. The sound of the television is audible from inside, the kids silent. Matt looks up. He lights his cigarette, the sulphur from the match hisses, the smell pungent as the flame flares and then dies. He turns to face Shane who sits, long thin legs stretched out in front of him, eyes still fixed on some point in the distance.

Shane coughs, a hacking asthmatic cough, looks at the rollie in his hand and shakes his head before drawing back on it once again.

‘Wondered whether you thought that,' he finally says.

‘Yeah.' Matt runs his hand through his hair, embarrassed. He doesn't want to have to ask him directly; is it me? He feels like a fool. ‘If it is me, well, I need to do something.'

Shane doesn't say anything. It takes a while before it becomes clear to Matt that he doesn't know who the father is, and he feels uncomfortable making any kind of presumptions. As soon as Matt realises this, he feels even more foolish.

‘That's why I want to find her,' Matt says.

Shane just nods. And then he stands, awkward, stretching slightly before picking up his mobile from the table.

It takes him three phone calls to track down a number for her. Standing round the side of the house, phone pressed to his ear, he rings people, his voice a soft murmur as he extracts the information he needs.

Matt goes in to check on the kids.

When he comes back out, Shane is back at the table, rolling another cigarette.

‘There you go.' He's scrawled down a number on the edge of a piece of newspaper and he pushes it towards Matt. ‘Reckon you'll find her there.'

Matt looks at it for a moment and then folds it up, putting it in his pocket. He feels relieved, but also afraid, and he is surprised at the cold panic now that contacting her is possible.

‘Do you reckon I should?' he asks.

Shane doesn't respond at first, and Matt wishes he'd never asked the question.

Eventually, Shane shakes his head. ‘Don't know.' It's all he says. And then he coughs again. ‘Reckon I should give up the fags.' He draws back on the rollie, holding it between his forefinger and his thumb, the paper burning bright in the darkness of the night.

ON THE DAY AFTER Freya's birthday, Matt tells her that he is going north to see Lisa and her son.

‘When,' she wants to know, ‘did you arrange this?'

It has all happened so quickly. They've never even talked properly. But when she accuses him of this, he tells her that it's not because he hasn't tried.

‘You cut me off every time. You just say that he probably isn't mine. And then you walk away.'

She looks at him. ‘You made these arrangements in secret.' She is furious, arms crossed, eyes hard, and he doesn't know how to respond.

He has fucked up, but the truth is he'd become too scared of talking to her about it, anxious he would rupture the fragile peace between them, even if its construction was based on the pretence that none of this was really happening. And so he'd booked his flights with out telling her, waiting until the day after her birthday to reveal the details of his trip, and the clumsiness of the attempt to soften the blow only heightens the fact that the whole issue has become something larger than it should be.

They have been pretending, Freya thinks, and she turns away so that he cannot see the struggle to stop herself from crying.

She had woken early on her birthday, happy to be where she was.

‘I'm forty,' she had whispered, and Matt had turned to her, still warm from sleep, wrapping his arms around her and drawing her in close.

He and Ella had made her a present: a book of photographs and drawings that Matt had bound. Sitting up in bed with Ella, they looked through it together while Matt cooked breakfast. Ella was, of course, only interested in the pictures that included her, and in the drawings she had done for the book.

‘Which is your favourite?' she asked, and Freya gave her the noncommittal response that mothers always give, the kind of answer that used to irritate her intensely when she was a child.

‘I like them all.'

‘If you had to pick one,' Ella insisted.

‘But I don't,' Freya said.

‘Say you did. Say I was going to die unless you picked one.'

Freya seized Ella around the waist, tickling her into a frenzy of giggling. ‘It's my birthday,' she told her. ‘Let me off.'

But Ella wouldn't, so Freya did what she should have just done in the beginning – she picked out a drawing of Ella's and declared it the one: her favourite.

They had to leave for the country at midday. Matt was not supposed to tell her that Anna had organised a party. Freya thought it was just going to be dinner for
the four of them and Ella, but after breakfast, he told her the truth.

‘I thought you'd hate it,' he said.

‘Why would I?' She was surprised, and then she realised: he was the one who hated the idea, so much so he had been unable to believe she could have a different response. ‘Now I'm going to have to act.' She shook her head and laughed. ‘Jesus, I haven't done that since uni. And I was always so bad at it.'

‘I need a run-through,' she told him just before they left.

He didn't know what she meant.

‘You're Anna. I'm me – surprised. Very surprised.'

They were at the front door, the midday sun shining down the long hall, warm on the boards, golden and fine.

Freya took a deep breath. ‘Getting into character,' she said.

‘But you are the character,' Matt reminded her.

Ella sniggered as Freya shrieked: ‘Oh my God, oh my God,' like she had won
The Price Is Right
.

‘Bit OTT?' Freya raised an eyebrow as Matt backed away from her, arms held out to ward her off.

‘Just a little.'

She punched him in the shoulder. ‘You shouldn't have told me.'

‘I know,' he said. ‘The performance is going to be scary.'

They arrived in the early afternoon, pulling up at the end of the dirt driveway under the shade of the poplars, the leaves rustling, silvery and pale in the sunlight. High above them a flock of birds wheeled and darted,
skimming low before swooping off in an orchestrated formation.

‘See.' Freya pointed them out to Ella.

Anna and Paolo were lying toe to toe on the long cane lounge. He was reading the paper, and she was flicking idly through a script.

‘Looking bloody casual,' Matt whispered, winking at Freya.

‘Where is everyone?' Ella asked and Freya had to remind her again that they weren't meant to know, they had to pretend to be surprised when everyone jumped out shouting, ‘Surprise!'

‘Unless you're playing some kind of double trick on me.' Freya narrowed her eyes and looked at Matt. ‘There is a surprise and it's no surprise.'

‘Now you're getting much too complex for me,' and he raised a hand in greeting as Paolo and Anna sat up to welcome them.

After they had put their bags in their room, Anna insisted that the three of them go down to the river for a swim. It was, Freya supposed, part of the plan, so she put up no argument.

She took Matt and Ella's hands as they walked through the overgrown blackberry bushes, the sticky leaves humming with insects, and then down the track to the river.

In the shade it felt almost too cool to swim, the sand damp and silty between her toes. She bent down and scooped up a handful of water. It was pure and sweet, clear and sparkling in the light. Matt and Ella were already wading out to where the bank dropped away, the water deep enough to float on their backs and stare
up at the silky blue sky. She unzipped her dress, an old Marimekko shift that had belonged to her mother, and placed it on top of a log. Standing there, looking across to the other side of the bank, she braced herself for the plunge, her long pale limbs already feeling the cold as the water lapped over her toes.

‘Come on,' Ella called out.

‘Come on,' Matt echoed.

And Freya waved to them both before knotting her hair high on her head, and tiptoeing delicately into water that wasn't really as icy as she had thought it would be.

Floating down to the bridge, side by side, the three of them sang songs. Ella, like Freya, had no ability to hold a tune, but Matt had a beautiful voice. Soft and husky, it underscored their own flimsy trilling, bringing a sweet yearning to their music.

‘Sing to me,' Freya used to say when they first started sleeping together, and lying next to her, he would croon a slow version of one of her favourites.

Now, in the cool of the water, he sang her old Cure songs, songs she used to love; snatches of ‘Boys Don't Cry', ‘Love Cats' and ‘Fire in Cairo', all blended together, his voice rich and mellow in the stillness of the afternoon.

Walking back across the garden that surrounded the house, Ella was the first to see someone, a flash of a red dress as whomever it was dashed across the room and then slunk low to the floor in hiding.

‘They're all there,' she whispered.

‘Now I wish it was just us,' Freya said to Matt. ‘It's been such a lovely day.'

He squeezed her hand.

The ‘Surprise!' was loud, loud enough to make her jump and appear genuinely startled. She didn't dare look at either Ella or Matt once the initial shock wore off and she had to go through what was probably a slightly dubious performance, culminating in a tight embrace with Anna and a whispered ‘I had no idea'.

‘Really?' Anna looked at her and then across at Matt, who leant against the doorway.

‘Really,' Freya protested, knowing she was blushing. She was a terrible liar.

It was a small group: Louise, Mikhala and her new boyfriend, Max, Clara and Julia, and an old friend of Freya's, Frank, who worked as a theatre director in Melbourne.

‘You look wonderful,' he said, kissing her, before stepping back because she was still wet from her swim.

She looked at him and grinned. ‘It's so good to see you,' and it was; he was the genuine surprise. They had spent a couple of months together three years ago. He was directing one of her plays and she had gone down to Melbourne to do some further work on it during the rehearsal period, staying on for the start of the season. They'd known each other at university, but it was during that time in Melbourne that they became close. She had flirted with the idea of an affair, knowing she would never act on it, but enjoying the possibility, and on the night before she had left there'd been a moment, an instant of looking at each other when she knew that he, too, had considered something other than friendship. He was married now, she and Matt had gone to his wedding, and he had recently had a child.

‘Marianne wanted to come too,' he said, ‘but it's too hard with Lola.'

She commiserated, remembering how difficult it had been when Ella was young.

He confessed that he and Marianne had not been getting on. ‘But I don't want to tell you about all that now.'

He had come to Sydney to discuss work with a few people, bumping into Anna at an opening night. ‘She made me stay on, so that I could see you,' he said, and she told him how glad she was that he had.

Getting changed in their room, Freya was aware that she took a little more care with her appearance than she would have otherwise. She wore a pale green dress and dark red lipstick. She brushed her hair into a long sleek ponytail down her back, and then finished her outfit with a pair of high-heeled silver sandals.

‘You look good,' Ella told her. She was lying on the bed, thumb in her mouth, as she watched her dress.

Freya kissed her on the nose and apologised once again for the fact that there were no other children for her to play with.

Out on the verandah, the smell of citronella was sharp in the night air, and the flames from the torches made them all look younger than they really were. They drank champagne and ate from the platters of food that Paolo had prepared.

Louise announced that she was pregnant and everyone congratulated her. If the news had any effect on Anna, she didn't show it. Raising her glass high, her other arm around Paolo, her smile was bright.

Standing at the entrance to the house, Matt was talking to Max. Freya had always admired his ability to
start a conversation with anyone. He remained himself no matter where he was or who he was with, a simple trait that always put others at ease.

‘Pretty cute, hey?' Mikhala grinned as she looked across at Max. ‘He left his wife three weeks ago.'

He was staying with Mikhala until he found his own place. She was happier than she'd ever been.

‘Told you he was the one,' and she lit her cigarette from the citronella torch.

Freya resisted the urge to point out that Max was not the first she had described as ‘the one'. She looked over again and told Mikhala that he looked nice.

‘Not nice,' Mikhala laughed. ‘Gorgeous.'

They sat on the edge of the steps next to Clara and Julia. At the other end of the verandah, Louise was talking to Frank. She leant close to him, intense, waving her hands in the air as she no doubt disparaged another director's work or bemoaned the cowardice of the funding agencies. Freya shook her head; she didn't want the darkness of mean thoughts this evening. The night was clear and cool, she was happy, and as she leant back against the post, she helped herself to one of Mikhala's cigarettes.

‘How's it feel turning forty?' Clara winked. At forty-seven, she was older, and had little patience for any complaints about the coming of this new decade. ‘It's so young,' she laughed, when she wished Freya a happy birthday. ‘Wait till you're looking fifty in the face.'

‘It's good,' Freya said. ‘I'm fundamentally happy in my life,' and as she uttered the words she realised they were true. ‘I have love, a child, work that I enjoy.'

‘Here's to you,' Clara replied.

Freya grimaced and looked up at the sky. ‘I list all my blessings and then I get deeply anxious.' She smiled. ‘It's the state you want to attain, but as soon as you do, you realise the inevitability of change can only bring loss.'

Clara looked at her and, as Freya met her gaze, she wondered where her words had come from. She was not unhappy.

‘I think you need more champagne,' Mikhala told her and she leant across to fill up Freya's glass.

Dinner was, of course, superb. Paolo had excelled himself. After the platters of antipasto, they sat at the long table to eat risotto, followed by lamb, and finally there was the cake.

‘Made by me,' Anna exclaimed.

Matt's speech was slightly drunken and confused, Anna's was witty and charming and Freya's was a shambles. She leant back in her chair and suggested they all go down to the river for a swim. Matt laughed.

‘You're completely pissed,' he told her, which she was.

No one took her up on her suggestion.

Louise went to bed, Clara and Julia sat on the verandah and rolled joints, Matt, Anna and Paolo began to clear the plates.

‘I'll come with you,' Frank offered and Freya smiled weakly at him as she confessed that her desire for a swim had passed as quickly as it had come. And then she thought, why not? It would be good to go for a walk, to sober up before she tried to sleep.

It was difficult to find their way in the darkness. Frank followed her because she knew the path, but as
she led them both into a patch of blackberries, she had to stop and turn around, holding her hands up in helplessness.

‘I think this is going to be dangerous,' she warned him, giggling slightly as she looked at the confusion on his face. ‘Would you settle for a stroll around the garden?'

They lay in the hammocks under the peppercorn trees, swaying gently as they talked.

He'd been busy with a company that had received a large amount of funding from uranium mining. ‘They agonised briefly about whether to take it, but it didn't take that long before they made their minds up. Unfortunately, the work they wanted to do was incredibly dull.' He smiled. ‘Staid, old-fashioned drama – sitcom style. I loved the regular wage and being near home but I couldn't do another one.'