I Give My Marriage a Year

by Holly Wainwright

  They drove the short distance home, darkness closing in.

  ‘I met this woman from the band outside the hall,’ Josh said. ‘She’s Umbert’s mum.’ He caught his daughter’s eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘He’s in your class.’

  ‘No he’s not,’ Stella said. ‘There’s no-one called Umbert in my class.’

  ‘Maybe he has a nickname?’ Josh suggested.

  ‘I don’t think I know them,’ said Lou.

  Josh frowned. ‘Maybe they’re new? She said he was in Stella’s class.’

  ‘Nope, we don’t have any new kids.’

  ‘Weird.’

  Josh turned into their drive, pulling up under the old tree in front of their house. ‘Another reason to chop this thing back,’ he muttered at the deep scattering of leaves carpeting the car space, although he kept his tone quiet, since he still hadn’t remembered to bring the bloody chainsaw home.

  ‘I’ve thought of a song we can sing at the concert,’ Lou said suddenly as they climbed out of the car and the girls ran towards the front door.

  ‘Oh, really?’ Great, thought Josh. She’s coming around. Maybe Eva’s plan is working. ‘Tell me.’

  Lou looked at him levelly over the roof of their old Subaru. ‘“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”.’

  Lou

  20 November, 2008

  Getting married at twenty-six had not been in Lou’s plan.

  That’s what she knew for sure the day she sat on the edge of Gretchen’s bathtub, smoking a cigarette, her hair in rollers and a white dress hanging on the back of the bathroom door.

  ‘Come on, babe,’ Gretchen was shouting from outside. ‘My landlord will kill me if you keep smoking inside.’

  ‘I don’t smoke!’ Lou called back.

  ‘Of course you don’t. But that’s the third one you’ve had this morning. Come the fuck on.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me,’ Lou shouted. ‘I’m terrified.’

  It wasn’t Josh. For more than two years now, Josh had been the best thing about everything.

  The attic flat in Redfern with the sloping roof had become their first home together.

  Lou had gone back to Broken Hill, back to her teachers’ accommodation, but she and Josh were never apart for that long again. He’d drive the twelve hours to see her more often than was sensible, and they’d pay for a room above a raucous pub just to get away from all her jeering teacher mates. They’d stay there for two days, leaving bed only to venture downstairs for cold frothy beers and hot chips with chicken salt, or to take the occasional drive out to watch the light glow and fade across the desert.

  And in the school holidays Lou would come back to the city and drop her backpack on the bed of the attic apartment and they’d play house – he’d cook for her and she’d shop for him while he was at work, and they’d go for drinks with each other’s friends and he’d take her to gigs and she’d take him to plays and they’d sit as close together as two people could sit, always touching, stroking, sniffing. Their friends rolled their eyes and made vomiting noises, but everyone was always smiling when they did it, including Josh and Lou.

  She’d told him she loved him for the first time outside the gate of her Broken Hill school at eight o’clock on a Monday morning. He was going to start the long drive back to Sydney, she was going to go and stand up in front of her twenty six-year-olds, and they weren’t going to see each other for a month or so.

  ‘You’ve got to go,’ he said to her in the front seat of the ute, after they’d kissed again, and again. She’d made as if she was going to open the passenger door what seemed like a dozen times, but somehow she was still sitting there. ‘You’re going to be late.’

  ‘I actually feel sad,’ Lou said. ‘I should feel so happy, but I’m sad. I think I might cry in front of the kids. And if I’ve learned anything . . .’

  ‘. . . it’s don’t show any fear in front of the six-year-olds,’ Josh finished. He smiled at her, and Lou loved it when he smiled at her.

  ‘It feels like,’ she started, but she looked out the window as she said it. ‘It feels like . . . how I’ve heard this stuff is meant to feel. You know – when you . . .’

  ‘Lou,’ Josh said, ‘I don’t want to drive home.’

  ‘Then don’t.’

  ‘Come on, I have to.’

  And she’d kissed him again and just bloody said it. ‘I love you.’

  And the best thing was that he didn’t pull away, not from the kiss and not from the words. He just said it back and they kissed in the ute for so long that the students started arriving and Lou caught sight of the head teacher’s car pulling up ahead of them and she pushed Josh’s away and said, ‘This is not a good look, I’ve got to go.’

  And he said it again, ‘I love you, Lou.’ And, ‘Four weeks isn’t that long.’

  Which wasn’t true, because when you were as completely infatuated as Lou was right then, twelve hours might as well have been a year and four weeks might as well have been a decade. But fuck, it felt great to miss someone so much and know they were missing you, too. To call them just to hear their voice, and to shudder with a little charge of excitement when they called you. To count the days to seeing them again. To dream about a time when you wouldn’t have to miss them anymore, and for that dream to be perfection, untouchable, like a glittery snow globe of a tatty Redfern attic filled with laughter and love and sex and stories.

  And then it was real, because Broken Hill was over, she’d done her year and didn’t want to do another. And they decided she’d move in with him when she got back because, really, life was too short for them ever to be apart again.

  She didn’t have a placement at a Sydney school yet, so she registered to be a relief teacher, and spent the summer holidays running around Prince Alfred Park every day. And she’d meet Josh there at the outdoor pool when he’d finish work for the builder he’d started odd-jobbing for, and he’d be hot and have dusty smears on his face and they’d swim and then walk back to their flat holding hands. They’d cook dinner and eat on the floor because they didn’t have a table and they’d drink beers out of the bottle, and watch The West Wing and sleep on the futon.

  They decided that they were going to spend six months travelling in South America because life was an adventure, right? Lou started relief teaching, which was terrible, and Josh hadn’t sold any songs for ages so he went back to pub shifts on the weekends, which meant he was working days and nights. But it was still romantic, because they’d lie in bed and look at maps and talk about tango and Machu Picchu and how they weren’t going to do all the touristy things that everyone else did, they were too grown-up for that.

  And they’d gone and it had been incredible, just this overwhelming rush of difference everywhere they went, and she felt protected by him but also like she was in charge, because she had the language. They stayed in terrible little hostels and also in beautiful old hotels with mosquito nets over the beds and they did all the touristy things that they said they wouldn’t and they got into one screaming fight one night after too much booze when a man had touched Lou in a way that scared her and Josh had laughed it off. They ate strange food and they met a hundred other Australians doing what they were doing and they got super-lean and brown and they found some perfect beaches and they stayed there longer than they should have, reading passed-around books and drinking sour, limey drinks until they remembered they were there for a cultural adventure and pulled out their guidebooks again.

  When they’d come back of course the Redfern flat was gone, so they moved in with Josh’s mum just for a month while they found somewhere new. That was the worst, because Emma liked everything just how she liked it. But Josh promised they’d be out of there soon enough and they were, and now they lived in the ground-floor apartment of an old terrace in Erskineville and Lou had a proper teaching job at Newtown Public and Josh was getting his ticket to specialise in heritage renovation and they had a cat called Pocket and the backpacks were high o
n top of the wardrobe where they couldn’t reach them. And she was still happy to hear him moving around the kitchen when she came home from school every day, and she still always had a hand on him when they went out for dinner with family or to the pub with mates or sat watching TV on their new second-hand lounge. And they were getting married.

  So no, it wasn’t Josh that terrified her.

  Lou opened the door to the bathroom and Gretchen almost fell in, snatching the cigarette out of Lou’s hand and throwing it in the toilet.

  ‘What is wrong with you?’ Gretchen asked. ‘You want to do this. You’ve been telling me for months how much you want to do this.’

  ‘I know.’ Lou looked at the dress on the back of the door. It was vintage – ‘You mean second-hand,’ her mum had said – and simple, and exactly what she wanted. ‘I guess I’m just thinking . . . Why are we doing this? Things are fine exactly as they are.’

  ‘Well, it’s a good question,’ Gretchen answered, hustling Lou out into her bedroom. ‘But one that you should have considered a bit earlier than two hours before every single person you know is turning up at the park to see you do it.’

  Gretchen was Lou’s maid of honour, of course. And she was wearing black. Since her time in Europe, she’d been going through what she called her sophisticate phase, and she was wearing her hair in a severe, black geometric bob. For today’s big occasion, a pretty good impersonation of a diamond was glittering in her nose, and a heavy jet necklace was around her neck. The cigarettes of hers that Lou had been nervously pilfering were Gitanes, naturally.

  ‘This is like every crappy rom-com ever made,’ Gretchen was saying, as she pushed Lou’s shoulders to sit her in front of her big Art Deco mirror and started unravelling the rollers. ‘Will they, won’t they? Well, I won’t let you be a cliché, Lou-Lou: they fucking will.’

  ‘I’m twenty-six,’ Lou said to her reflection in the mirror. ‘Is that too young?’

  ‘Well, obviously I think so.’ Gretchen was pulling out the rollers one by one and throwing them onto her bed. At this point, Lou thought that the version of herself in the mirror looked like a shocked clown. ‘But, again, you’ve been telling me for months that it’s not.’

  Lou stared at her chaotic reflection and let her mind go to all the places she’d been pulling it back from. What if she and Josh got bored with each other? What if they had kids and moved to the suburbs and became exactly like all the sniping couples they’d never wanted to be? What if they stopped having sex? What if they became . . . her parents?

  Lou thought about what Josh would be doing right now. If he was all ready and in his suit, Mick would be encouraging him to have a beer, but Josh would be too nervous to drink. He would probably be feeling exactly like Lou – terrified, uncertain, questioning. She could almost feel his anxiety rising in the same surge as hers.

  ‘I want to go talk to Josh,’ Lou told Gretchen in the mirror. ‘I really need to see him. It’s the only thing that will stop me feeling sick.’

  ‘Well, that’s stupid,’ said Gretchen. ‘I don’t give a shit about tradition, but logistically it’s a problem. Mick’s place is on the other side of the park.’

  ‘I don’t care, Gretch – I need to.’

  ‘But your mum and his sisters are going to be here in about twenty minutes to pick you up.’ Gretchen almost sounded stressed. Clearly, she was taking her duties seriously.

  ‘We’ll tell them to meet us at the park.’ Lou was standing up. Her hair was still all over the place.

  ‘I haven’t even done your face . . .’

  ‘Fuck it. Come on, Gretch, let’s order a cab.’

  Everything about marrying Josh was right apart from actually doing it. The world was changing. This month, she’d been teaching her class about the first African American president of the United States, who’d just been elected. Earlier in the year, they’d been studying the National Apology to Australia’s Indigenous people. The world was modernising, progressing, shifting. And here was Lou, waiting to be ‘given away’ to a man by her dad. She was too young and these traditions were too old.

  So Lou threw her dress over her arm and in her tracksuit pants and trainers with her hair all over the place, she climbed into a taxi with Gretchen – carrying shoes and a bottle of champagne – right behind her. In the car she put her head between her legs while Gretchen stroked her back and called everyone, and Lou took deep, gulping breaths. Her heart was smashing against her ribcage as she heard her best friend tell her mum, ‘I know, Annabelle, but she just needs a bit of chill time.’

  Lou could hear the response to that three feet from the phone.

  Bizarrely, when the cab arrived at Mick’s place in Surry Hills, Josh and Mick were sitting out on the front wall in their suits, looking for all the world like they had nothing else to do that day. Josh was fiddling with a guitar and Mick was smoking what looked like a joint.

  Lou saw a look of absolute shock pass across Josh’s face as he clocked her tumbling out of the car, her arms full of the lacy white dress. And then his face crumpled into a smile. And then a laugh. And Lou felt her breath slow down for the first time that day.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Mick asked, stubbing out his smoke and stepping towards them.

  Gretchen looked at Josh and shrugged. ‘Apparently, she’s not sure why you guys are getting married.’

  Lou saw Josh’s smile fade and he just looked at her, confused. ‘What?’

  Lou shoved the dress at Mick and ran to Josh, who put down the guitar and let her fall into his arms. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked, his mouth in her hair as she burrowed into his neck.

  ‘I’m scared,’ Lou said. ‘I’m really scared. And I knew you would be too. I thought we’d be less scared together.’

  ‘Lou,’ Josh said, ‘I’m not scared.’

  He pushed her away a little, so he was looking at her. Mick and Gretchen started backing away into the house. ‘I’ve never been more sure of a decision.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘You don’t think we’re too young?’

  ‘We made this call together, right? For lots of very good reasons.’ He pulled her into his arms again. ‘And’ – he was talking into her messy hair – ‘I’m not that young.’

  Lou laughed, stood back and wiped her face with her sleeve. Josh, she noticed, looked good in his suit. ‘I want to go with you to the wedding,’ she said. ‘I want us to go together.’

  ‘Of course,’ Josh said. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Um, because my mum, your mum, your sisters, our friends. There are all these rules . . .’ Lou was beginning to feel a bit silly. Like she’d made this big fuss about nothing, and now phone calls were pinging around Sydney’s inner west like there was some kind of crisis. When everything was going to be fine.

  ‘Fuck the rules,’ said Josh. ‘I think that’s what young people are meant to do.’

  Lou and Josh looked at each other for a minute, and Lou thought she felt a moment of real fear when she thought about what they were asking each other to do: stand by each other no matter what came, when neither one of them had the imagination or experience to know what that actually meant.

  ‘I’d better go and get dressed,’ said Lou. ‘Why the hell are you out here anyway? Shouldn’t you be inside playing Xbox or drinking down the pub or something?’

  ‘Nah.’ Josh looked down at his hands. ‘I’m waiting for my dad.’

  ‘Your dad is coming?’

  Lou had never met Josh’s dad. Not in the two (and a half, depending on when you start your count, she always said) years they’d been together. She didn’t even know where he lived.

  She’d heard about him, of course. From Josh, in those early days when they’d been pouring out their stories to each other, to be picked up and held to the light and examined like clues. And from Emma after a couple of wines. And from Josh’s sisters, when she’d asked. And what she’d heard was that he was terrible. Mean. Abusive, even. That he�
��d blown up the family and left them with nothing. That Emma would have been a whole lot of things if he’d never fucked everything up. Partly, the insinuation went, by fucking everything.

  ‘Why is he coming?’ Lou asked Josh. Behind him, she could see Gretchen in the front window of Mick’s house, beckoning to her madly and waving the wedding dress.

  Josh shrugged, looked at the ground. ‘I invited him.’

  ‘But your mum . . .’

  ‘. . . is going to lose it.’ Josh had seemed so relaxed just a couple of minutes ago, while she was hyperventilating, but now he looked twitchy.

  ‘This seems like something we should have talked about,’ Lou said.

  Josh nodded, put his hands in his pockets. ‘I didn’t think he’d come,’ he said. ‘Turns out he’s a romantic.’ And the word came out of Josh’s mouth sounding sour, like limey South American drinks.

  Josh

  The same day

  Josh had never proposed, as such.

  After South America, he and Lou talked about another trip, but even as they did, roots began to unfurl beneath them.

  Their place, the one they’d moved into together – putting tatty bits of furniture here, hanging framed postcard pictures there – felt as much like home as anywhere he had ever lived. Josh’s work started early and finished early, and he loved being home and hearing Lou’s key turn in the lock. She always kind of fell into the house, with stories spilling out alongside her school books and folders – what this kid had done or that kid had said, what a parent had complained about, the idiotic decision that the head had made. She was a whirlwind of energy in his quieter existence, and it worked.

  The whole wedding thing had come up because of Lou’s mum. Annabelle didn’t really approve of Josh, even when it became clear that he was sticking around. It was his work that appeared to be the problem. A musician-tradie hybrid was not what she had in mind for her daughter.

  Every question asked at their first Christmas as a couple hinted at this, with Annabelle coming at Josh from slightly shifting angles under the cover of a sunshade in the baking-hot backyard.