Yearning (28 page)

‘To spoil it that way – it would be a terrible waste.’

‘That’s really sad, Solomon.’

‘I know, babe.’

She realised he didn’t understand her. He thought she was talking about them, but she was talking about him. It was he who was sad; a loveless vessel too self-centred to give. A lump rose in her throat as an old grief stretched out to claim her. So much time wasted on him, so much useless hope. He was incapable of returning her love, and wishing for it had ruined her marriage and possibly her children’s future. The futility of it all welled up from within her and she began to weep – for the loss of Solomon, Max’s mistreatment, her wasted wedding vows, half a lifetime squandered on misplaced longing and the vacuous gap between herself and her parents.

Solomon’s forehead crumpled as he watched her cry. He waited for her sobs to subside before speaking again. ‘I came by to make sure you were safe,’ he said, ‘and to say goodbye. This time.’

She blew her nose noisily and fixed her gaze on him, enfolding him and begging him to be different, cursing him for his determined independence.

‘Don’t go home,’ she whispered. ‘It’s not safe. Max will be waiting for you. Promise me?’

He strode over to her side and bent to kiss her softly on the top of her head, taking a moment to rest there, breathing in the scent of her hair.

‘I kept your letters,’ he whispered. ‘All of them.’ Then he was out of the room, the front door closing quietly behind him.

*

Max was wound up and murderous when his car skidded into Solomon’s driveway. He thumped the front door until his fists ached. When he got no response he stormed the outside of the house, kicking the indifferent weather-boards, screaming for the cowardly bastard to show himself. But the house sat stubborn and silent.

Giving up he sank to his knees in the muddy yard and gripped his ears, squeezing his eyes shut against his tears. He punched himself in the chest and arms, grunting and swallowing the tight knot of pain in his throat. He wanted to pulverise this guy. Smear his guts all over his smart-arse lounge room.

Looking up, Max roared into the darkness. Waves of rage arced through him like lightening. Pain was everywhere, in his chest like he’d been stabbed, in his throat so he couldn’t swallow. He pressed his forehead against the cool ground, hoping to stem the rush of feeling.

He sat back on his heels and wiped his face with muddied hands. Where was this spineless prick? He wasn’t going home until he’d had it out with him. He’d show him what it meant to mess around with another man’s pregnant wife. Who the hell did he think he was? Max decided to get back in the car and wait. He had to come home sometime. He would wait all night if he had to.

Inside the car the night closed in around him. Wisps of mist blew ghostly across the car bonnet. Max zipped up his coat. The mud, cold against his knees, made him shiver. He felt damp and fidgety. He needed something to distract him. He opened the glovebox, pushed aside old
receipts and pulled out the car-user manual. He flipped through the pages. Hand-drawn consoles. Tyres. Tables. Ferreting through the rubbish he found a torch. He flicked the switch, a hint of light faded to nothing. As he threw it back it knocked an old penknife to the floor.

He picked the knife up and flicked out the blade, contemplating its shine in the thin starlight. He ran his finger along it the edge. It was still sharp. He gently pressed the blade against the pad of his thumb. How much pressure would it take to draw blood? He glanced at Solomon’s front porch. Dark windows glowered at him, square shadows in the darkness. He closed the blade and threw the knife back into the glovebox, roughly slamming the lid.

The grainy night deepened. Drizzle frosted the wind-screen as Joe’s words returned to him, ‘He got to her when she was only sixteen.’ How bloody stupid had he been? What kind of a fool had she made of him? All those lies, all those nights she’d been up, not because of the baby, but talking to that bastard. He wondered how long it had been going on and recalled a rainy evening when she’d got a ride home with an ‘old teacher’. That was months ago. Had that been the beginning of it? Had they touched then? Kissed perhaps? Max shook his head in disgust as he imagined him leaning over her widening belly to reach her lips.

And her. What was she thinking? Unfaithful bitch. After all her whining and complaining, after all the effort he’d made, how could she? He’d never thought she was capable of it. And he’d been trying so hard. It was true he’d been an arsehole before, but he was making it up to her, so did he really deserve this?

It just didn’t fit, not with the woman he knew. She
seemed so innocent when they met, so sweet. He couldn’t believe she’d already been spoiled by this bloke. Or that she’d go back for more. She loved him exclusively once, or so he believed. And loving her had reinstated his faith in his own humanity. That gentle charm of hers had changed him, had transformed his heavy, granite soul back into a living thing, defrosting him against his will. He thought she could heal him. But that was before. Before everything dropped out from beneath them.

Back then she was excited to see him. She lit up when he came into the room. She covered him in kisses, read to him in front of the fire, toyed with him in bed. He remembered how she used to watch him working his wood, her eyes following his hands as he built the beautiful things he loved to build. There was security in her adoring gaze. He’d begun to believe he was no longer alone. When he was with her, for the first time in longer than he could remember, he felt safe in his own skin.

Max gnawed at a frayed fingernail. When had she escaped him? Why had he lost her? He searched for an answer, pressing his memory for insight. There’d been so many nights of silence, blurred by the fortress of cans he’d taken refuge in, it was hard to remember what happened now. There were good times, then there were bad times, and the only thing in between was Josh.

Poor little Joshie. He couldn’t imagine life without him now, but at the time a child was the last thing he wanted. It had been hard having a baby in his life. He knew nothing about kids. He’d given her what she’d wanted and then lost her to it. He couldn’t compete with their son. Josh brought a happiness out in her that Max had never seen
before. She’d never smiled at him like that, so openly and forgiving. He couldn’t help but resent it.

Being a dad hadn’t come naturally. He couldn’t manage Josh the way she did. As a baby he was always crying and fretful in his grouchy hands. It stopped as soon as he handed Josh over to her. He hated it. It made him feel even more useless. Booze was his only escape. It helped drive away the bitter self-pity eating at his guts, but in so doing it made him warped and mean.

Yelling. That’s what he remembered. Bellowing his bitterness at her. Blaming her. Screaming at her for the want of her love, fear and loneliness ripping him apart. Losing her. Losing himself. Resentment for their beautiful, blameless son who had descended into his life like some angel-devil, bringing everything familiar between them undone. It was a rotten desire, the need he felt to hurt her, the woman he was supposed to love. And a terrifying sound in the words he spat at her. The sound of his father.

No wonder she left him.

He’d become a monster.

No wonder she didn’t love him anymore.

Max stopped as the words passed through his mind. There it was. The thought he’d been too scared to think all these months past. He’d finally let it out.

She didn’t love him.

Was it possible, given this long-ago affair, that she’d never loved him? Had he just been second best, the one she’d settled for? Shit.
Never
loved him? Was it possible everything between them had been a lie? Had she always belonged to this other man and he’d never known it?

The thought of her being close to another man made bile rise in his throat. Where the hell was that bastard when she was sick, when money ran short, when she wanted a child? Where the hell was that bastard for the last ten years of her life? No-fucking-where, that’s where. Probably fucking the wife of some other poor bastard. And all the while Max had stood by her, loving her like an idiot and believing her promises. All that shit she made him say when they got married – what did that mean now?

He should have known when she tried to leave him. He remembered waking up the morning after she’d left, wandering around their home, his head crushed by a blazing hangover, seeing the empty cupboards and feeling the fear rising in him. Everywhere he looked, in all the cavities she’d left behind, he saw shadows of his past. It terrified him. Alone in that house, in the quiet rooms, he sensed the phantom of his father, a ghost waiting to tear him apart.

Max had panicked. He couldn’t have stayed in that house alone. Without his small family he was adrift. He felt transparent, like he was going to crumble. He’d needed to get out of there, save himself and his marriage. With his past clinging to his back he’d run to her, hoping she’d have him back. He’d been stupid to think an apology and a promise to be better was all it would take. It was never going to be enough. She was already lost to him.

Clouds slithered across the stars. Weary, Max rested his head against the painful cold of the car window. He closed his eyes and dozed. Dreams nipped. He was in bed, sleeping. His wife lay next to him. He turned to hold her and found not his wife, but his mother. She was gazing at him, love and regret in her eyes. In an instant he
understood his father had died. ‘I’m sorry, son,’ she said, ‘I need you now your dad is gone.’ She leaned towards him to kiss him on the lips and he jolted awake, revulsion running in his veins. He coughed and rubbed his face vigorously with his palms, trying to force the disturbing image away.

Max hugged himself for warmth. His plain mother. By the time his father finally disappeared there wasn’t much left of her. The years of abuse had drained all the life out of her, left her grey-faced and empty. She’d tried so hard to protect his brothers and him, but his father’s moods had won out over all of them. He’d never told anyone how relieved he’d been when his father left. It didn’t seem right to be happy about it.

Had he done the same thing to his wife? God, he hoped not. He wasn’t like his father. He couldn’t be. His dad had been cruel. Max still cringed when he thought of his punishments, how he’d marched them out into the backyard and forced them to choose a stick from the wood pile for their own thrashing. He remembered the torture of standing there, his father hovering behind his shoulder, weighing up the size and weight of each stick with his gaze before he picked it up. He only gave them one chance. The stick they picked up was the stick he used. And if he thought it was too small he’d dish out an extra thrashing for being a coward.

Max had always wanted a dad to look up to. Her dad, Joe, was a man like that. There was a father you could respect. He had his faults, but he’d never dream of lifting a hand against his wife or daughter. Max’s father had been a straight-up violent prick, an angry ball of fists and ‘fuck offs’.

For all the trouble Max had coping with Josh, he didn’t want to beat him. He couldn’t understand how someone could willingly hurt something that small and vulnerable. If there was one thing he could do, he could protect his own son from the sort of shit he’d suffered in his own childhood.

His wife, though, she was different. He’d wanted to hit and hurt her many times, but had pulled himself up. He’d raised his hand a few times but stopped short of bringing it down on her, restraining the urgent violence racing through his twitching fists. A perverse, almost pleasurable, thought of creating fear, of inflicting pain driving him. He hated himself for it.

Max stared blindly into the blackness. He could see himself as a child, hunched against the kitchen cupboards, covering his head as he waited for the blow, his father like a mountain above him. He’d seen his wife cowering in the same position, with him towering over her like his father had done to him. He leant his forehead against the steering wheel, shaking, but not with cold. Damn it. He had become that miserable monster. Why hadn’t he seen it before? It was there in the way he cursed his life and blamed her for the bright burst of anger spinning at his core. It wasn’t her fault. It was his father’s. He was being his father all over again.

Shame filled him. Cursed by his bloody past, how could he be a decent father or a husband? He bit hard on his lip as tears came again. His father. His stupid fucking father. If he’d had any goodness, his father had poisoned it. He’d stomped all the love and hope out of him, made him an angry man. The man who should have protected him had broken him.

Max cried hard, pressing his palms against the steering wheel. He had driven his wife to this betrayal. He had abused her as he’d been abused. He was just like his dad, and probably deserved no better than a future alone in some remote place where he couldn’t hurt anyone.

As his sobs subsided Max closed his eyes. He heard a vague flurry of wings above him, followed by the hollow sound of an owl. He was exhausted. He wished he could disappear, smother himself and die in darkness.

The quiet thunk of a car door disturbed him. Looking up, Max saw a shadow moving across the driveway in the faint light. It was a lean shadow, striding with confidence through the thick grey dawn, its breath misting white in the frosty air.

His desire to lash out dissolved. Max’s hand was on the car door but he couldn’t find the will to squeeze the handle and open it. He slumped forward and watched Solomon pass through the front door, turn lights on and then off again. The house sunk back into gloom.

Max sat for a long time, staring at the black windows of the house. He shoved the key into the ignition and turned it. The car quietly growled to life. He thought he caught a movement in one of the front windows. He smiled, and pulled the old blue ute out onto the dirt road and drove away. He passed her parents’ home and the turn-off to his own house where she was sleeping, feverish, in their bed. He drove through the main street. The lights from the bakery and newsagent blistered the line of vacant windows. Max accelerated past them, travelling along the three-kilometre stretch out to the turn-off out of town.