Mick came over, swaying slightly. ‘We’re going to go, mate. Thanks for coming, but we’re good.’ He looked back at his date, who was rummaging in her bag.
‘No worries,’ Josh said, summoning a smile that he hoped was encouraging. ‘Godspeed, my friend.’
‘You should try it, mate.’ Mick leaned in, beery breath in Josh’s ear. ‘I know you’re tall and everything, but even you could do with a bit of help meeting someone who isn’t . . .’ He trailed off, and Josh knew what the next word would be. ‘Nuts,’ Mick managed.
‘Piss off,’ Josh said, but he was still smiling at Mick, who nodded and turned back towards the rest of his evening.
Fuck this, Josh thought, I don’t want to be the sad guy tonight, and he sculled half his beer before putting the glass on the bar, pushing his hands into his jacket pockets and heading for the door.
The night felt sticky for spring, and the street was almost as busy as the pub. Josh’s house – or, rather, his room in someone else’s house – was a ten-minute walk away, towards Redfern and the city. Josh liked the walk, especially at night. King Street was never boring, everything was open, all human life was here. Wide-eyed teenagers who’d doubtless told their parents they were somewhere else were standing outside pubs trying to talk their way past the bouncers. Couples were making out against graffiti-scrawled brick walls. Twitchy kids in tracksuits were outside the station asking everyone who passed for a dollar.
And tonight, there was a busker outside the kebab shop three doors down from the pub, playing a Coldplay song, an old one, one of the ones that didn’t make Josh want to throw up.
The busker could sing. He looked young but worn out, and his feet were bare and dirty. Josh walked the few steps towards him to look at his guitar. You can never walk past a guitar, he heard Sinead saying in his head. What’s so bad about that? he heard himself responding.
Then, just beyond the kebab queue and the guitar, he saw the stranger girl from the Bank.
She was talking to a man wearing a red rag around his head, and a long black coat that seemed too heavy for the weather. Even from here, Josh could tell the guy was pretty solid and good-looking, and even from here he could tell that the guy was a complete prick. There was the way that he was pointing at the girl with his cigarette, which he was holding between his thumb and forefinger like he was some kind of old-time gangster, not a wannabe with something written on his trainers in white-out.
Later, Josh wouldn’t really be able to explain why he’d stayed there, several metres away, watching the way the man with the bandana was talking to the girl who’d kissed him at the bar. He didn’t want a kebab. He didn’t want a fight. He didn’t really want to give the busker any money, since the kid had a better guitar than Josh did, shoes or no shoes. But still he’d stood there, watching this couple arguing. And they clearly were arguing, because the girl was crying, and the bandana dick was alternating between shouting and laughing.
So Josh was standing there watching, with his hands in his pockets, when the girl drew in a big gasping breath and looked up and past the bandana guy, straight at him. And Josh felt himself smiling at her.
This is the person she was hiding from, he realised, and I don’t want her to go home with him. The thought shocked him, gave him a little jolt. What’s that about?
Coldplay was over. The busker started singing something by Ben Lee. Josh had spent way too much time the past winter working through this album on the bed with his guitar, and obviously so had the busker.
‘We’re All in This Together’.
The girl kept looking at him. Bandana kept talking at her. And then she looked back at Bandana for a moment, raised both her hands – she had a little backpack on her back, and a silver charm bracelet on her wrist, Josh noticed – and pushed him away, gently but firmly, and walked past him.
She’s walking towards me, Josh realised, as the girl passed the kebab queue and the busker and kept going, still looking at him. Shit. What now?
And then she was there, right in front of him, and Josh could see that her eyes were still wet and her nose was running, just a little. He was about to say something – he had no idea what – when she pushed her hair back from her face and said, ‘Pretend I’m with you. Let’s walk.’
He liked her voice; it was deeper than he’d expected.
The girl grabbed his arm, pulled it out of his pocket and grasped his hand. She gave him a tug. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Okay.’ As Josh closed his fingers around her hand and began to turn, he glanced back at Bandana, who was watching them, exhaling a cloud of smoke. The last thing Josh saw before he and the girl started walking away down King Street hand in hand was the bandana guy pulling his hand away from the cigarette in his mouth and giving them both the finger.
When the busker, the kebab shop and the angry middle finger were a couple of blocks behind them, the girl said to Josh, ‘Nothing is going to happen. Between us, I mean. I just needed to get away from that guy.’ She let go of his hand and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her black jacket.
‘I know,’ said Josh quickly. You were the one who kissed me, he thought but didn’t say. Instead he said, ‘I don’t even know who you are.’
They stopped to cross the road and both looked back over their shoulders at the same moment, catching each other’s eye for a fraction of a second as they did it. And Josh felt suddenly ridiculous, because he was being rejected by this girl before he had even decided he was interested in her, and why was that such a familiar feeling?
‘Why don’t I just get you a cab?’ he suggested, turning towards her as a group of stumbling students fell past them into the road, crossing against the lights he was obediently waiting for.
‘I don’t live far away,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine.’ Then she looked up at him and said, ‘I’m Lou. I graduated today. I’m going to be a teacher.’
‘Nice.’ Josh wasn’t sure what else to say, so he said, ‘I’m Josh.’ I’m a . . . what am I? A musician? A carpenter? Whatever.
‘I just had a bad night,’ she went on in her deep voice, and her eyes, even behind the rings of smudgy black crap around them, had something like a laugh in them. She raked her hands through her long dark hair and shifted a bit in her sparkly little shoes. ‘And I just needed to get away from that guy. And I probably shouldn’t have kissed you.’
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I have weird nights too.’
She smiled at that.
The lights changed and they both stepped onto the road.
‘I’ll walk you home,’ Josh offered. ‘Make sure you’re safe.’
Lou laughed, and her laugh had a little gravel in it. ‘Look, that’s nice and everything. But I don’t know who you are either. I have no idea if I’m safe with you.’
‘You are,’ said Josh. ‘I’m one of the good guys.’
And as he said it, he believed it, even as he hated himself for it, just a little. His mum’s face suddenly came into his head, talking to him in the car on the way to every teenage party he’d ever gone to. ‘Girls are people too, Joshy,’ Emma would say. ‘I’m a person, right? And your sisters, they’re people, right? Don’t forget that when your body’s telling you girls are just things for you to take. Don’t be your dad.’ He could feel how much he’d wanted her to stop saying that. How it made his stomach clench and his teeth grind. Still, treating women like people had served him pretty well, as it turned out. They seemed to like it.
‘That is exactly what a bad guy would say,’ Lou said.
But she kept walking alongside him anyway.
Lou
Lou stood squinting into the sun, searching for Gretchen across a heaving mass of sandy, salty, barely clad bodies.
Rita was holding her hand and twisting forwards and backwards, straining Lou’s wrist with every turn, and Stella was standing two feet away, sulking because her mother had enforced a hat-wearing policy.
‘I’m taking it off the moment you stop looking at me,’ she huffed.
‘Then I won’t stop looking at you,’ Lou replied, her hand shading her eyes as she scanned the beach.
‘You’re not even looking at me now!’
‘I’m always looking at you, I’m your mother.’ Lou shot her a stern stare. ‘Stop moaning and help me find Gretchen.’
‘Will she be with JoJo?’ asked Rita, still spinning.
I hope not, thought Lou. Gretchen had broken up with Johanna’s father almost a year ago, but Barton still asked her to take his twelve-year-old daughter from a long-ago relationship for occasional weekends and holidays, and Gretchen, who loved the girl, was glad to oblige. Lou respected her friend’s commitment, but the presence of JoJo, needy and at a deeply observant age, really impeded adult conversation.
‘I don’t know, darling. Can you stop twisting my arm off, please?’
It was hot. Finding a park had taken thirty nightmarish minutes, with the volume of the girls’ complaints escalating in the back seat with every loop of the packed suburban blocks.
‘I just want to go swimming!’ Rita started twisting again.
‘There she is, Mum!’ Stella cried.
Lou’s eyes followed her daughter’s pointing finger and there was Gretchen, in a broad straw hat and a polka-dot one-piece, her sailors’ tatts on full display under the shoulder straps and peeping from its boy-legs. She was leaning back on her arms surveying the beach, headphones in, nodding her head to a silent beat.
She’s looking for us, too, thought Lou, and a surge of love for her friend welled up inside her. God, I’m happy to see you, she thought. And God, I need to talk to you.
‘Come on!’ Stella ran towards Gretchen as Lou hoisted her giant beach bag onto her shoulder and bent down for the sun umbrella at her feet, Rita still clinging to her.
By the time she’d picked her way through pinkish backpackers and toddlers wielding giant plastic dump trucks to Gretchen’s tasteful palm-patterned towel, her friend and Stella were hugging.
‘My favourite nieces!’ Gretchen was shouting.
‘Gretch, you have actual nieces,’ Lou reminded her, as Rita let go of her mother to join the embrace.
‘You know I like your girls better.’ Gretchen looked up at Lou. ‘Hello and happy new year to you too, lady.’
Lou smiled and started setting up camp. ‘You alone?’
‘For now, yes. JoJo is up the coast with her mother, so I’m off the hook until the weekend.’
The girls began peeling off their T-shirts and shorts to reveal their bright swimmers underneath.
‘Can we go swimming with you, Aunty Gretch?’ Stella was pulling on Gretchen’s hand and it touched Lou to see the excitement in her older daughter’s face.
‘Swimming? In this cossie? This is a posing cossie, Stell. This is an Instagram-only cossie . . .’ But Gretchen was allowing herself to be pulled up and away by the will of Lou’s daughters.
Twenty minutes later, the salty-sandy girls were digging a hole a few feet away, in sightline but out of earshot on the crowded beach, and Gretchen, her Instagram cossie dark and damp, was lying beside Lou, panting lightly.
‘Those girls are dynamos,’ she was saying. ‘So much bloody vim.’
Lou laughed. ‘Who says vim anymore?’
‘I’m bringing it back,’ Gretchen said. ‘I’m hoping JoJo might catch some. Anyway, how the hell are you?’
Lou inhaled and raised herself onto her elbows to check where the girls were. They were piling sand on their legs, entirely involved. Stella’s hat was off.
‘I’m giving my marriage a year,’ she said.
*
That morning, Lou and Josh had sat at the kitchen table with an iPad between them. On it was a contract she had written.
SEX CONTRACT
I, Louise Emily Winton, pledge to engage in energetic sexual activity with my husband, Joshua Mika Poole, every day for 30 days.
If, for any reason, unforeseen circumstances prevent the fulfilment of the terms of this agreement, the agreed amount of quality sexual intimacy will roll over to be claimed on a date agreeable to both parties.
‘So we sign it,’ Lou said when she’d finished reading it aloud. ‘And we start.’
Josh had both hands around his coffee cup. It was an oversized white mug bearing the words: I look like I’m listening, but in my head I’m playing guitar. He rarely drank out of anything else. Stella had bought it for him, with Lou’s help, for Father’s Day a couple of years ago, and Lou had come to hate it because, well, it was mostly true.
‘You want me to sign it?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow at her.
‘Don’t do that,’ Lou said, more sharply than she had intended. ‘The eyebrow. Don’t do that.’
The eyebrow went down. ‘You want me to sign an iPad agreement about sex?’
‘Yes, Josh, I do.’
‘Where did you even get that?’
‘I copied it from the internet.’
‘A sex contract? With the word “energetic” in it?’
‘Well, I might have edited just a little.’
He raised the eyebrow again, took a slug of coffee.
The annoying bastard is ageing well, Lou thought, looking at her husband looking at her. His curly dark hair was retreating a little, but in a symmetrical way that made him look intelligent and kind of rakish, somehow. It was Rita’s hair too, now, which Lou tugged a brush through every morning to little effect.
The lines around his eyes made him look like he was laughing, and she’d always loved that his eyes were pale blue and, as her mum would say, ‘twinkle like the devil’s Christmas lights’. One of those northern English things she couldn’t shake, clearly. They were Stella’s eyes now.
Her husband was still attractive. Objectively, there was no doubt about that. Still tall and lean with only the slightest push of a beer belly against the old shirts he wore in the workshop. The other week she’d turned up to find him sanding a table wearing the now-grey and tattered Ramones T-shirt he’d been wearing the night they’d met. ‘For God’s sake,’ she’d said. ‘Don’t you throw anything away?’
And he’d looked down at it, holes and all, shrugged and said, ‘It’s my favourite.’
But today his crinkle-twinkle eye thing was making her irritated rather than excited, which rather went against the spirit of this agreement.
‘Yes,’ she said, looking around to make sure the kids weren’t close. ‘I want you to sign the iPad sex agreement.’ Lou pointed at the line at the bottom of the screen. ‘You can do it with your finger.’
Josh looked at the screen, then up at her. Why was he looking at her like she was insane?
‘It’s going to be fun,’ she said, tapping the screen.
‘Contractually obligated fun?’
Lou let the iPad drop to the table and sighed. A rush of fury was surging into her chest.
I’m trying to fix things. I’m trying.
She stood up from the table and went over to the sink, where an eggy pan was sitting, soaking. Lou fished around in the tepid water for a scourer and started going at it.
After a few beats, Josh spoke, as she knew he would. He hated it when she went silent, always had.
‘What’s all this about, Lou?’
The girls were upstairs, supposedly getting their swimming things together for the beach, but Lou, unconsciously tuned in to wherever they were, could hear the telltale squeak and thunk of them jumping on Stella’s bed.
‘Stella!’ she yelled, without moving from the sink. ‘Stop jumping! You should know better!’
The faint noise stopped, then started again, more softly.
‘And you, Rita!’
She pulled the pan out of the water, ran it under the cold tap, put it upside down on the draining board. Drying her hands on the tea towel, she turned around.
‘It’s about us getting –’
‘Are you going to say “our spark back”?’ Josh cut in, still sitting, still cradling his coffee, his face set in something like a sneer. For a secon
d, she wanted to slap him.
‘I was going to say “back in step”.’ Lou leaned against the sink. ‘I know you’ll roll your eyes, but we need to reconnect and I . . .’
‘I know what happens when you’re feeling disconnected.’ Josh stood up, pushing his chair back with a scrape.
Lou flinched at the force of that comment, but she could sense what Josh was thinking right now; she knew him so well. He was silently debating whether to throw petrol on this fire or let it die down.
She hoped he couldn’t read her mind quite so effectively. Because with ‘disconnected’ hanging in the air, Lou had a flash of a pair of firm hands on her hips, moving them slowly forwards and back again. Two nights ago.
She sighed, shook herself a little. ‘Josh, I’m trying to stop us from fighting, not make things worse,’ she said. ‘So, please, humour me. Let’s start this year differently. Let’s try to shake things up.’
Josh brought his mug over to the sink. He stood right in front of her, close enough to kiss. ‘I didn’t know we needed to shake things up,’ he said softly. ‘I thought things were better.’
‘So, then . . .’ Lou decided to disarm. She looped her fingers into the waistband of his jeans and pulled him in to her. ‘Why don’t you want to have sex with your wife every damn day?’
Josh bowed his head into her neck. ‘I do,’ he whispered, ‘you know I always do. I just don’t like contracts.’
‘Think of it like role-play,’ she said, as her handsome husband kissed her neck and she felt nothing.
He was leaning into her now and her bottom was pushed up against the edge of the sink. As Josh sighed an ‘okay’ in her ear, she heard the clunking footsteps of Stella on the stairs and gave him a gentle shove.
‘Sign it,’ she said. ‘And tonight, we’ll pick things up right there.’
*
The beach noise filled the silence while Gretchen considered Lou’s statement. Waves and yells and gulls and a distant pulsing beat from an Irishman’s portable speaker.
I Give My Marriage a Year Page 3
