I Give My Marriage a Year

by Holly Wainwright

  ‘Do you still run?’

  ‘I do. I run most days.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Josh said, as she watched his bare bum and he reached up for plates. ‘How do I not know that?’

  ‘I don’t go on about it. It’s not very . . . cool.’ It was true. ‘Jocks aren’t big in the inner west.’

  ‘What about in the far west?’ He was spooning scrambled eggs onto the plates.

  ‘It’s a bit hot in the Hill, but there’s a gym. I can treadmill it if I have to.’

  ‘I don’t run,’ Josh said. ‘I’m a walker.’ And he walked towards her with the plates in hand, still completely naked.

  ‘Aren’t you . . . cold?’ Lou laughed again.

  ‘Nope,’ he said, and sat beside her on the doona. She sat up, took a plate, put it on her knee. ‘I am far from cold.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Lou took big mouthful of eggs. ‘You can cook.’

  ‘Of course I can cook,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking after myself for a long time.’

  ‘So old, you are.’ She smiled.

  ‘So . . . teaching?’

  ‘I didn’t know what I wanted to do after I realised I wasn’t going to be an athlete,’ Lou said. ‘I kind of messed around a lot in my last couple of years at school, much to my parents’ horror. Then’ – she picked up a piece of toast – ‘a friend of mine talked me into volunteering at a youth program . . . here in Redfern, actually. And I loved it. So, I applied to do English and education at uni, and I escaped my evil parents in third year, moved in with Gretch, and the rest is . . . geography, maybe.’

  Josh laughed. His laugh was low and gravelly. ‘So your parents are evil?’

  ‘Perhaps I exaggerate.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘They’re pretty . . . infuriating.’

  ‘Everyone thinks that about their parents when they’re your age,’ Josh said, scraping the last of his eggs off his plate. ‘You haven’t learned to appreciate them yet.’

  ‘Well that’s the most patronising thing I’ve heard in a while.’ Lou nudged him with her elbow. ‘How the hell do you know?’

  ‘Because I’ve only just started appreciating my own fucked-up family.’ He put his plate down on the floor and lay back on the doona, hands behind his head. ‘Well, my mum and my sisters. The less said about my dad the better.’

  ‘Everyone thinks that about their dad at your age,’ Lou told him. And she put down her own plate and lay down next to him, not sure if she should put her head on his shoulder.

  ‘What have you been doing for the last six months?’ Lou asked. She wasn’t sure what she was asking him. Probably: What’s between the lines of the letters?

  Josh kept looking at the ceiling, but their thighs were touching. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve been writing songs. I even sold a couple.’

  ‘That’s exciting!’

  ‘Yes, it is.’ He nodded. ‘I’ve been writing letters to this teacher in Broken Hill,’ he said. ‘I think it’s helped.’

  Lou felt her face flush and her stomach ripple with excitement. ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Yes. And I’ve been doing some cabinetwork for this big new store in Marrickville, which has helped pay the rent.’

  ‘So, things have been good, then,’ Lou said. And she nuzzled into his shoulder. She felt warm and happy. She was glad she was here. Glad he’d picked her up. This was the best kind of adventure.

  Josh swallowed. ‘And,’ he said, his voice a little quieter, ‘I’ve kind of been seeing my ex-girlfriend again.’

  Lou stopped nuzzling. She heard herself say, ‘Oh.’

  ‘Sinead,’ he said. ‘She was away. She came back.’

  ‘Oh.’ Lou felt suddenly ridiculous. Eating eggs on the floor with no clothes on. Having sex with a guy she hadn’t seen for six months just because he gave her a lift from the station. What the fuck was she thinking? ‘You didn’t mention that,’ she managed. ‘In your letters.’

  ‘I know,’ Josh said, still looking at the ceiling. ‘I wasn’t sure . . .’

  ‘Me neither,’ Lou said quickly. She felt a little sick. ‘I think I was right the first time,’ she said, rolling away. ‘I’d better go.’

  Now, of course, Josh looked at her. He seemed surprised. Which, Lou thought as she started picking up her clothes, must mean he really was an idiot.

  ‘I thought you were staying,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, well, you said it yourself. It’s weird. I’m just going to . . .’ Lou’s arms were full of her clothes now, and she was walking backwards – why backwards? – to the bathroom. ‘You know . . .’

  ‘Lou,’ Josh said, sitting up. ‘You don’t have to go.’

  Lou shut the bathroom door. Rested her head on the tiles, which were remarkably clean for a man’s apartment.

  ‘Lou! I didn’t know . . .’ Josh was calling from the living room, but he wasn’t finishing his sentences. ‘I thought . . .’

  ‘It’s fine!’ she yelled through the door. But she felt like crying, and that had not been in the plan. Lou filled the tiny sink with water, splashed her face and then quickly washed with her hands, under her arms, between her legs, before starting to pull her clothes on.

  Where the fuck was she going to stay tonight?

  ‘I didn’t know if you were coming back,’ Josh was saying now, sounding like he was right outside the door.

  ‘Honestly, it’s fine!’ Lou yelled through the door. ‘Completely fucking fine!’

  And she buttoned up her coat and opened the door, pushing past Josh to the bedroom to grab her backpack.

  ‘Lou . . .’ Josh was still naked. Standing in front of the apartment door. ‘I didn’t . . .’

  ‘You don’t need to explain,’ Lou half shouted, feeling a bit dizzy, but suddenly very awake. ‘It’s all cool. Totally cool. Bye!’

  And she was out the door and running down the stairs, bumping her backpack behind her.

  Josh

  The next day

  Josh looked at the house through the window of Mick’s white ute.

  It was a big, squat, red-brick bungalow on a street full of big, squat, red-brick bungalows. He looked at the piece of paper in his hand. This was the right address.

  Josh hadn’t grown up in a house like this. He’d grown up in a beachside weatherboard twelve hours from here, and then a variety of high-rise tower blocks forty minutes from here. Two childhoods: the one before, and the one after.

  Women were the constant in both. Emma, his mother, trying to make things seem ‘normal’ wherever they were, always unpacking their toys and then their books, propping them up on shelves in poky bedrooms. ‘Look, darlings, all your things are here. It must be home,’ she’d say. And Anika and Maya and Josh all knew that it was Emma, really, who needed to believe that, so they’d nod and smile, and tell her it looked lovely, despite mould blooming on ceilings, or scary guys in corridors, or out-of-order lifts, or kitchen cupboards with doors hanging on hinges.

  Nope, Josh didn’t grow up in a house like this.

  But this was probably the house where Lou had grown up. It had a long-established look about it, with well-tended flowerbeds in the front garden and sun-faded curtains on the big bay window.

  Josh’s hands were a bit sweaty, his mouth a bit dry.

  ‘This sounds like a grand gesture,’ Anika had said to him on his new mobile phone that morning. ‘I like it a lot.’

  ‘I just want to talk to her,’ Josh said. And he did. He really did. ‘And she won’t answer the phone.’

  ‘Don’t be a stalker,’ Maya had said, having prised the phone from her sister’s ear. ‘If she wants to talk to you, she’ll talk to you.’

  ‘It’s just a misunderstanding,’ Josh said. But he sounded defensive. He was defensive.

  After Lou had left yesterday, Josh had sat on the floor, wrapped in the crumpled doona, for what seemed like a long time. She had only been in his apartment for two hours but suddenly it felt unbearably empty.

  What was that about? The em
ptiness was one of the things he loved about this place. And, really, he hardly knew her. This teacher, this runner. This funny, messy woman. This Lou.

  But he knew, as he’d watched her hurry down the stairs, that he wouldn’t be writing her any more letters, and he didn’t like that.

  Treat women like they’re people. He could hear his mother’s voice in his head. And in his head he answered, That’s what I was doing. That’s why I was honest with her. Yeah, no, he knew his mother would say. Go back a few steps.

  Sinead. Josh had written a lot of sad, terrible songs about Sinead in his early twenties. He’d met her at Sydney Uni on his doomed second attempt at getting a degree. She was the ethereal blonde he’d always imagined would break his heart, the kind he’d listened to music about his entire life. And for a while there, they were a couple – Josh and Sinead, Sinead and Josh – and at first he could hardly believe his luck.

  She was studying art, because of course she was. And she was from a big old-money sandstone mansion in the eastern suburbs, and she found everything about Josh’s gritty inner-city student life fascinating. The bedsits and the roll-ups. The milk-crate bedside tables. The novelty of meeting him at the end of a late-night pub shift – ‘I told my friends I had to leave the party because my boyfriend’s finishing work,’ she’d say, delighted, as he, stinking of beer after a sweaty night behind the bar of the Oxford, got a sharp thrill from seeing her waiting for him at the door, wrapped in an oversized fisherman’s sweater, long blonde hair hanging down, eyes wide.

  Sinead liked to party. That was the euphemism everyone used then for taking a lot of drugs. Josh didn’t – he’d been surrounded by the chaos caused by drugs for much of his childhood – but he knew plenty of people who did. So he got used to being the watchful one who gathered up his girlfriend and brought her home when things got too messy. And he got used to wild fights and sudden absences. He got used to panicked calls from her father, who hated him, and tearful calls from her mother, who thought he would be the one to rescue her. He sent himself broke following Sinead on a backpacking trip to Europe to spend three months fighting in museums and picturesque piazzas. They had an abortion. She had intense flings. For a while there, they split up almost weekly.

  It was exciting. And then it was exhausting. And then it was just sad.

  It had finally ended a year ago – she had moved to Melbourne with a guy who was happy to bankroll a new start – and, honestly, it had been a relief. Five years of high drama had left Josh tired, bruised, wary. He’d needed it done.

  And it had been. Right up until a few weeks ago, when she’d called him.

  ‘How do you know,’ she’d asked, ‘whether something’s destiny or just a bad habit?’

  He’d laughed at her line, and she’d laughed too, and said she was back in Sydney for a weekend and would love to see him – you know, just to see how he was doing.

  And Josh had a head full of letters to Broken Hill, but also overwhelming curiosity about what it would be like to see Sinead after their longest-ever time apart.

  ‘Dangerous,’ Mick had told him, panting as he helped Josh carry a second-hand lounge up the stairs to his attic. ‘Very, very dangerous. You’ve finally cleaned that shit off your shoe; why would you step back in it?’

  ‘That is not a cool analogy,’ Josh panted back, ‘for an actual human.’

  ‘I’m not talking about the human,’ Mick had replied. ‘I’m talking about your fucked-up, co-dependent relationship.’

  And it turned out, of course, that life in Melbourne with the new guy wasn’t so shiny anymore. Sinead was staying with her sister in Mosman, working out what the universe was trying to tell her. Really, she wondered, was it trying to tell her that still, after all this time, her destiny was here, in Redfern, in Josh’s attic?

  ‘Don’t we owe it to ourselves,’ she’d said, when a quick ‘hello’ drink had led to the front door of his building, and the bottom of the stairs to his flat, ‘to test that theory?’

  It was three weeks until Lou’s holiday visit. And Sinead looked frail, like her pale skin was pulled tighter across her features, and the skin under her eyes looked purplish, and her voice had a shake in it that wasn’t there before. Josh had felt protective. And nostalgic. And like somehow he was always going to say, ‘Yes, come up.’

  But now he was here, outside Lou’s house. And he was fucking furious with himself. Because he didn’t have to say that. The moment Sinead was back in his bed, he knew that he’d been right a year ago. He needed this done. It was done. She and he had their old scripts that they could run through over and over, in bed and in the kitchen and outside some seedy pub that he was trying to pull her out of, but the motivation was gone. So why was he still going through the motions?

  He wasn’t treating Sinead like a person. He was treating her like a memory he revisited to make himself feel strong. Yeah, Mum, I got it.

  Josh looked at himself in the rear-view mirror. Maybe Anika was right, and this was a grand gesture like in Say Anything, that John Cusack movie. Or maybe Maya was right, and he was a creepy stalker who was about to get kicked out on his arse. Either way, it was time to change something.

  As he was looking in the mirror, trying to flatten his hair with his hands, he saw a red car pull up behind the ute. A man about his age, but with something of Lou about him, climbed out of the car and walked around to the passenger side to open the door. Another man got out, younger, taller. The look the two men gave each other when he stood up, the way the first guy reached out and straightened the second guy’s collar, instantly told Josh that they were a couple.

  This must be Lou’s brother. He was a doctor, she’d told him in her letters. He was fairly certain she’d said today had something to do with that.

  Josh opened his door, climbed out of the cabin and called – he hoped it wasn’t a shout – ‘Hey! Excuse me!’ to the man who resembled Lou.

  Lou’s brother turned around. ‘Yes,’ he said, surprised.

  ‘I’m Josh. I’m a friend of Lou’s.’

  ‘Oh.’ The brother exchanged a quick look with the other man. ‘Hi. I’m Rob, Lou’s brother. And this is Peter.’ He nodded at the man beside him. ‘Come in.’

  ‘Thanks.’ And Josh walked with them towards the gate of the red-brick bungalow. He noticed that Peter was carrying a foil-topped bottle and suddenly his hands felt very empty.

  ‘I didn’t know Lou was bringing someone,’ Rob was saying. ‘Are you a Broken Hill friend?’

  Josh looked down at his black jeans and what he hoped was a decent shirt – checked, done up to the top button. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Sydney friend.’

  ‘Oh.’ When they got to the front door of the house Rob pressed the doorbell, and turned to look at Josh again. ‘Well, it’s Peter’s first time here, too. So, you know . . . good luck.’ And the twitch at Rob’s mouth let Josh know that this was a joke, but also not.

  Josh remembered what Lou had said about her parents the day before. ‘They’re pretty . . . infuriating.’

  ‘Ha, got it.’

  ‘Rob!’ The woman who opened the door was clearly Rob and Lou’s mother. Fiftyish, taller than her daughter and shorter than her son, with dark hair cut into one of those neat shoulder-length styles with a fringe, good posture and wearing what Josh’s mum would call a tea dress. ‘You’re only a little bit late.’

  The woman’s eyes had rested solely on her son for the first seconds of the encounter, genuinely excited to see him. And then they slid to the left, to Peter. ‘And you brought your friend Peter,’ she said, her accent obviously English. To Josh’s ears it sounded a little bit forced, like it was a bit posher than it should be, but what did he know?

  ‘Yes, Mum, although you know Peter’s not my friend . . .’

  ‘And who’s this?’ Her eyes had settled on Josh, standing behind the two men at the door. ‘Another friend? I do hope we have enough steak, darling.’

  ‘No.’ Rob looked momentarily confused. ‘This is Lou’s friend,
Josh.’

  ‘Lou’s friend?’ Lou’s mother’s eyebrows met in a tiny frown. ‘Oh, well I didn’t know we were having Lou’s friends too.’

  ‘She is . . . here, right?’ Josh heard himself ask, then he shook himself. Rude. ‘Sorry, yes, I’m Josh, Mrs Winton.’

  ‘You can call me Annabelle,’ she said, and she took his proffered hand and shook it lightly. ‘Yes, she’s here. Come in.’ She turned back inside and called in the direction of a closed door down the hall, ‘Louise! We have company!’

  Josh’s palms were really sweating now. He rubbed them together and again wondered why he’d come empty-handed for this grand gesture. John Cusack would have something. Wildflowers, a mix CD, something.

  As Rob and Peter-the-Not-Friend followed Annabelle down the hallway, Josh stayed standing, two feet over the front step, focusing on the door where Lou’s mum had directed her shout.

  It felt like a long moment before the handle turned and Lou came out. She saw Josh immediately and, even in his nervous state, her double-take made him smile. She was wearing baggy tracksuit pants and a T-shirt with a half-peeled banana on it, and her hair was in a messy pile on top of her head. And of course, when she settled on what she was looking at, she said to him, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you,’ he said.

  Lou suddenly touched the top of her head, as if checking that her hair was still there, looked down at herself, and then over her shoulder to where Rob, Peter and Annabelle were disappearing through a door. ‘This is my parents’ house,’ she hiss-whispered.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How did you find it?’

  ‘Gretchen.’

  ‘Gretchen? No way. She wouldn’t have done that. Not without telling me.’

  Josh took a step forward. ‘I had to write the email of my life to get it from her,’ he said.

  Lou almost smiled. ‘You wrote an email?’

  ‘What can I say?’ Josh thought it could be time for levity. ‘I’m growing as a person.’