I Give My Marriage a Year

by Holly Wainwright

  Josh had to stop himself from sighing. Lou wanted to have sex in the shower. After the kids were in bed.

  In theory, this was exciting. Lou looked like she was in such a good mood, and she smelled great and he could feel himself getting hard as he watched her pad around the kitchen in her denim shorts and bare feet. But sustaining this enthusiasm through dinner and dishes and the kids’ baths and bedtime stories? That was less exciting.

  Imagine a world before children, Josh thought, where I could walk into the house and see my wife looking sexy and I could just pick her up and we could make love right here on the sturdy kitchen table that I made with my own hands. Not even make love. Something rawer.

  That thought made him excited. The idea of what had to happen to get to the shower sex made him feel tired.

  Still, a deal’s a deal. ‘Okay,’ he said, and watched Lou smile back at him from the fridge. He grabbed Rita and threw her over his shoulder. ‘Let’s go and clean up just a little bit.’

  But he’d been right. By the time he was cleaning the kitchen after dinner and the girls were finally asleep, Lou had a completely different look on her face as she came downstairs from bedtime stories.

  She sat down at the table and rested her head on her hands. ‘Bedtime makes me want to go to bed,’ she said. ‘Or just lie on the couch and mainline bad TV.’

  ‘I know, babe,’ Josh answered. ‘Me too. Why don’t you go and chill out on the couch and I’ll go and hang out in the spare room for a while?’ The ‘spare room’ was code for where Josh kept his music and his guitars. He was not allowed to call it the ‘guitar room’; that would be tempting a re-evaluation of space allocation in their house. Something along the lines of: ‘Oh, it must be nice to have an extra room of your own. We’d all like that, wouldn’t we, girls?’ That was to be avoided at all costs.

  ‘We can’t,’ said Lou, lifting her head. ‘We’ve got to go and have sex in the shower.’

  Josh laughed a little. ‘We don’t have to.’

  ‘But that’s what we agreed.’ Lou’s voice was resigned. ‘You know. Mixing things up.’

  ‘Lou, this is stupid,’ Josh said. ‘I want to have sex with you when I want to have sex with you, not on some kind of enforced schedule.’ He knew he’d said the wrong thing as soon as he’d said it.

  ‘Well, how nice for you,’ Lou said, pushing her chair back and standing up. ‘Sex when you want it, never mind what I want? That’s such a selfish, male thing to say.’

  ‘Lou . . .’ Josh softened his tone and leaned towards her. ‘Be honest: do you want to have sex with me right now? Really? Do you?’

  ‘No, I fucking don’t,’ she shout-whispered. He knew she was aware the kids’ sleep was still at a tenuous stage. ‘But you know how this works. Every night. And it can’t be the same or it doesn’t have the same effect. I’ve read loads about this. Even if you start off not wanting to, you never regret it afterwards . . .’

  ‘Like a swim?’ he asked, angling for a laugh.

  ‘Or a workout.’ She was almost smiling, he could tell.

  ‘Lou, I’m knackered, you’re knackered. Just watch telly – it’s okay.’

  But it wasn’t okay. ‘We are having sex in the shower, Josh,’ Lou insisted, and she took his hand. ‘We’ll use the downstairs bathroom, so we don’t wake the girls.’

  Of course, it was fine. Great, even. The giggles at having to undress each other crammed into the tiny bathroom under the stairs had helped reset the mood. And he’d managed to recapture his earlier desire when he saw his wife lifting her T-shirt over her head and giving him the determined look he’d seen on her face at all the best moments in their relationship – like when she’d walked over to him outside the kebab shop, and when she’d told him that she was moving in with him, and when she’d told him that their next big adventure was having a baby.

  He didn’t regret it afterwards. It was, as he’d said, like a swim.

  Well, he didn’t regret it up until the moment he heard Stella calling out from upstairs. ‘Daddy! Mummy! Rita’s vomiting!’

  Lou’s face changed and she grimaced at him. ‘I’ll go,’ she said, grabbing her shorts from the floor and a towel.

  ‘Mu-u-um! It’s everywhere!’

  Josh wrapped the towel around his waist. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’

  As Lou ran to the stairs Josh picked up his dirty clothes and headed back to the kitchen to fill a bowl or a bucket with water to salvage the girls’ carpet.

  Lou’s phone was bleeping on the counter next to the sink. He didn’t deliberately look at the WhatsApp message from Lou’s friend Gretchen that flashed up on the locked screen as he bent down to the cupboard under the sink, but his eyes nevertheless took in the words.

  How good is the sex with your husband? Still 50-50?

  *

  Enzo was the same kind of arsehole he always was, refusing to speculate on where exactly Tyler and Josh might find the bloody Edwardian doors. ‘You find them and I’ll give you a price,’ he said with a shrug. ‘But no bastard’s done a sort-out for a while, so you’ve got Buckley’s chances of finding them together.’

  ‘We should split up, Jon Bon,’ Tyler said to Josh as they left the office. ‘Cover more ground.’

  ‘Sure thing.’

  Josh started walking towards one of the vast storage sheds that studded this sprawling, sun-blasted lot, then turned. He needed to ask his colleague a question that had come to him as they’d stood outside Enzo’s crappy office.

  ‘Tyler, how did you know Jodie was going to leave you?’ he asked.

  Under his Rabbitohs cap, Tyler’s face creased in surprise. ‘What did you say, mate?’

  ‘Sorry, I know it’s a bit random, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since we went for that drink. How did you know?’

  ‘Fuck off, mate,’ Tyler growled. ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’ He walked off.

  That was a dickhead thing to do, thought Josh, heading back towards the shed. Just as he reached the door, he heard Tyler shout, ‘She hated rooting me! That was a big hint.’

  As he walked into the dusty gloom of the warehouse, Josh could hear Tyler laughing his head off on the other side of the timber yard.

  Lou

  7 July, 2006

  If this was a movie, Lou thought, he would not be late.

  She was standing under the Central Station bridge at 6 am, and she was freezing. Her thin black coat was buttoned up to her chin, her bulging backpack was at her feet, and since it was still dark, her house keys – for a home more than a thousand kilometres west of here – were clenched between her fingers like baby claws.

  ‘I should have called Dad,’ Lou was muttering to herself when the ute pulled up.

  It was not what she was expecting, this long, white, flat-back truck, but when the window whirred down and she saw Josh’s smile, well.

  ‘You’re late!’ she yelled, but she knew she was smiling, too. Beaming, possibly.

  He jumped out, slammed the door and walked – too slowly for Lou’s liking – around the back of the ute to stand in front of her. ‘Welcome home,’ said Josh. And he bent down, and he kissed her. And kissed her. And Lou dropped her keys.

  Two months after the night Lou kissed the strange man in a Newtown pub, she’d left Sydney. For her first teaching placement, she was going west, where newly qualified teachers got extra points for taking a job at a ‘high demand’ rural school.

  ‘There’s no reason not to go,’ she’d told Josh, as she’d put books in boxes in the bedroom of the Erskineville share house she, Gretchen and two other student teachers had been living in for more than a year. ‘There’s really nothing keeping me here now Gretch is going to Europe.’

  Josh had been lying on her bed – really, just a mattress on the floor – with a guitar across his belly. If he was offended by this, he didn’t show it.

  ‘It’ll be an adventure,’ she’d said.

  He’d nodded at her, played a few chords, then beckoned her to c
ome back to bed.

  They’d started dating pretty soon after that Newtown night – if you could call what they were doing dating, Lou thought now, as she bumped along in the ute’s front seat next to Josh, her backpack in the tray behind them, driving to his new apartment. She hadn’t been sure what to call it, and she still wasn’t.

  She hadn’t gone home with him on the night she’d caught Luca having sex in the toilets. No, Josh had walked her home, just like he said he would, and he’d asked her for her number, which she laughed at because she hadn’t been thinking, just an hour or so before, that her graduation night would be the night she gave her number to some guy who wasn’t Luca and hoped that he was going to call her.

  He did call her, but it had taken a few days. Days when Lou had remembered the feeling of this strange guy’s hand in her hand walking down King Street, the particular weight of it.

  ‘The last thing I need,’ Lou said to Gretchen, as they sat on the floor of their living room surrounded by piles of placement applications, ‘is to meet some other guy.’

  But on day four, Josh did call. He asked Lou if she was okay, then told her that one of his band friends had something cool happening at the Hopetoun Hotel on Thursday and did she want to go? And Lou had pretended that going to gigs at edgy muso pubs like the Hopetoun was the kind of thing she did all the time and said yes.

  ‘Just a distraction,’ she told Gretchen.

  When Lou saw Josh again – all tall and quiet and older than her (by a whole five years), with his lopsided closed-mouth smile and his sparkly eyes – she knew that yes was the right answer. And he hadn’t made her feel stupid for not understanding the experimental music that shook the pub’s walls, and afterwards they’d shared a bowl of Vietnamese noodles at midnight, and she told him she wanted a life of adventures, and he told her that was a noble ambition, and that night they had slept together, on her mattress on the floor. And it was incredible, and it chased away any memory of Luca and his world-class cunnilingus.

  Afterwards she’d lain with her head in the crook of Josh’s neck as he slept, and she walked her fingers across his collarbone and hoped they would do it again when he woke up.

  They did.

  And they’d just kind of kept doing it, right up until she left for Broken Hill.

  *

  ‘This is it,’ Josh pushed open the front door of his unit with his hip, Lou’s backpack in his arms.

  His new unit was almost exactly how Josh had described it to Lou in his letters – the attic of an old Federation house, a bit dark and dingy, but with sloping ceilings and a skylight above the futon. Gretchen’s eye-rolls over Josh’s insistence on writing actual letters, with paper and pen, were all over her emails from Spain: He’s either a Luddite or a pretentious dick.

  But Lou liked the letters. She liked the wait for them, and the distance they had to physically travel to get to her and then hers back to him. She liked that, while she was discovering a whole new world in this strange, brown town in the middle of the desert, she was also discovering him, as Josh seemed more comfortable writing his stories than telling them. She understood that.

  Also, she liked to think about him thinking about her while he made the time to sit down to write them.

  He’d written about how sick he was getting of living in a room in his old friend Mick’s terrace near Macdonaldtown station.

  I’m 27, he wrote, and the charm of share house life is fading fast. Last night I got home from a gig and Mick and three of his mates were playing strip Trivial Pursuit in the lounge room. I literally walked in the door to see Macca’s bare arse wiggling around the coffee table because he didn’t guess the capital of Australia. He thought it might be Melbourne. It’s time to go. Or fumigate the sofa . . .

  His letters were funny, and honest. And sometimes ambiguous.

  I’ve been meaning to write to you for three days, but I haven’t been home. It feels good to be reunited with my guitar and my own bed and, yes, my notebook, so I can send a missive across country to this trainee teacher I know who needs a taste of city life . . .

  And sometimes they made her tingle.

  So the advantages of my new place are many, Lou. There’s no Mick or Macca here, for starters. My guitar can hang out in the living room without fear someone’s going to sit on it or use it as a cricket bat. And when you come back for the school holidays, there are four whole new rooms that we’ve never had sex in before. We can fix that. That includes the kitchen, by the way, which is kind of a cupboard, but you’re small . . .

  And here she was. Tomorrow she was heading out to Ryde and her parents’ house – they were celebrating Rob’s qualification as a GP – but today, and tonight, there was nowhere else to be, no-one else to see, other than her sort-of boyfriend in his very own boho Redfern attic flat.

  ‘It’s so weird to be back in the city,’ she said, standing on tiptoes to look through the small, high window in the lounge room. ‘It sounds different, it smells different.’

  ‘Well, Redfern smells like demolition and gentrification right now,’ Josh said, coming back from the bedroom where he’d put her backpack down. ‘I can only afford this because there’s a building site next door.’

  ‘Oh, the serenity . . .’ Lou suddenly felt very awkward. Their kiss at the train station felt very far away. Despite the letters, and the plan for Josh to come and get her today, right now she wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen here. What she wanted to happen.

  When the moment of silence had stretched a little too long, Josh said, ‘I’ll put the kettle on. You must be . . .’

  ‘Knackered.’ She nodded. ‘Not a lot of sleeping on the sleeper train, as it turns out.’

  She watched as Josh ducked his head a little to fold himself into the kitchen nook and fill the kettle under the tap. Tea? Really?

  ‘So, what’s it like out there?’ he asked, stepping back into the lounge room.

  It was a weird question, because he already knew. Lou had been writing letters too. She’d described how terrified she’d been walking into her classroom on day one, in this town where she knew no-one. How she couldn’t quite believe that she was going to be allowed to stand here, on her own, and teach twenty six-year-olds. How, two terms in, she still couldn’t believe it, but the fear was a little easier to live with. She’d told him how the air in Broken Hill was always a little bit gritty in your mouth from the dust, and how the weirdest thing about the place was that the last line of houses in town – ordinary, neat suburban homes, with gardens and Hills hoists and kids’ scooters – back onto nothing: just desert. Endless red-brown nothingness, stretching out to a horizon that, on a hot day – and there were a lot of hot days – shimmered where the dirt met the sky, just like in a movie.

  And she’d told him about her little room with a single bed in teachers’ accommodation in town, with a big shared kitchen and a TV room, and an internet cafe downstairs. She’d met some great people, mostly young women like her, and on many nights their lesson-planning had devolved into swigging cask wine with Australian Idol blaring in the background. Some nights – Thursdays and Fridays, mostly – the young teachers would all go to the pub together (safety in numbers), where the female trainees were treated like fresh meat by the locals and the male student teachers were generally called poofters.

  ‘It’s wild,’ Lou said. ‘It’s like I’m learning to be a teacher on Mars.’

  Josh smiled. His hands were in his pockets. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said, shifting a little on his feet.

  ‘Same. Thanks for picking me up.’ Lou’s stomach felt weird.

  ‘I’ll . . . do the tea.’ Josh turned back to the kitchen, although the kettle hadn’t whistled yet.

  Had this been a mistake? Lou felt a bit sick now. What the fuck was she going to do if this wasn’t right? Maybe the kiss at the train station hadn’t felt the same from his side, and he was trying to work out how to ask her to leave.

  Where could she go? Not to her parents’ house; there w
ould be too many questions. In her head, she began to run through a list of friends whose couch she could possibly sleep on tonight.

  ‘This is weird, isn’t it?’ Josh had come out of the kitchen again. ‘Are you feeling weird?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Maybe this was a bad idea.’

  Josh’s hands were still in his pockets. But he was looking right at her, and she had to tilt her head back to look up at him.

  ‘I haven’t seen you for six months,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe I should go,’ Lou said. ‘Too much pressure or something.’

  He didn’t ask her not to. He didn’t say anything for a minute.

  Then, ‘Do you think you’re going to move back?’ Josh asked.

  ‘To Sydney?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Lou could hear the kettle bubbling now, and see the steam filling the tiny kitchen.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen.’

  Josh smiled that lopsided smile and shrugged his shoulders a little. ‘Me neither.’ And then he took his hands out of his pockets, put his arms around Lou’s waist and he lifted her up so her feet left the swirl-patterned carpet.

  ‘I think we should get this out of the way,’ Josh said, before he kissed her again. ‘Let’s see if it still feels weird after the living room.’

  And the kettle whistled its head off.

  *

  ‘Did you always want to be a teacher?’ Josh was making eggs and asking questions.

  The sex had done its job and cleansed the weirdness, at least for now. And Lou felt like maybe she had landed in that movie after all, because she was lying naked on the floor of Josh’s living room, wrapped in a doona, with little piles of discarded clothes all around, and he was in the kitchen, naked, making her food.

  ‘No,’ she answered. ‘I wanted to be a runner. Like, a Cathy Freeman kind of runner.’

  ‘Really?’ He looked back over his shoulder at her, an eyebrow up. ‘Were you good?’

  ‘I was great.’ Lou laughed, laid on the sarcasm. ‘Little Athletics had never seen anything like me. Right up until I was fourteen, when I did my knee and it never really got better. I peaked in my teens, Josh – it’s a tragic but familiar tale.’