I Give My Marriage a Year

by Holly Wainwright

  So yes, he blamed Dana for the lasagnes.

  And for the fact that now, every time he caught a glimpse of the music producer onsite at the Camperdown warehouse, he felt a twinge of panicky excitement.

  *

  This morning, he was making the girls Vegemite sandwiches for their lunchboxes after he’d made them Vegemite toast for their breakfast. One minor upside of Lou not being around was freedom from the Vegemite police, he told himself.

  He was running late for his morning start, but on the days he had the girls, he always was. He’d told Mick he’d happily make up the time elsewhere, but Lou’s new job had changed and she couldn’t drop off every day at the moment. His old friend had looked at him through narrowed eyes and muttered about Camperdown’s looming deadline. The irony, Josh knew, was that if he told Mick the truth, his friend would happily change the whole shape of the job to help.

  ‘More Vegemite than butter, please Dad,’ said Stella as she came to stand in the kitchen doorway, already dressed in her school uniform.

  ‘More butter than Vegemite, Dad!’ said Rita, behind her, still in her pyjamas with her hair standing on end.

  ‘Reets! You’re not ready – we’ve got to go!’

  ‘I am ready,’ said Rita. ‘I’ve got my school shoes on.’ And she proudly stuck out a foot to show that, along with her unicorn pyjama shorts, she was wearing knee-high white socks and shiny black sandals.

  Josh looked up at the kitchen clock. Almost eight. By rights, he should have been at work half an hour ago. Shit.

  ‘Come on, Reets, let’s make that top half match the bottom half,’ said Josh, and he grabbed her hand and headed for the stairs. ‘Stella, can you finish those sandwiches off?’ he called.

  ‘Me?’ His oldest daughter, so like him around the eyes, looked genuinely horrified. ‘I can’t pack my own lunch, Dad!’

  ‘I think you can, Stell, I really do.’

  At the top of the stairs he looked into the girls’ room and saw the jumble on the floor where Rita had clearly been attempting to find her school clothes by pulling every last piece of clothing she owned out of her drawers and throwing them behind her. ‘Shit.’

  He scrambled around for her school polo shirt and skirt and threw them at her while he attempted to get the pile back where it had come from. Tonight was handover time; Lou would be bringing the girls home and he was heading back to Anika’s. He couldn’t have her coming back to this.

  Josh didn’t ever want Lou to walk back into the house and throw up her hands in disgust. If she was brooding about him in his absence, he refused to let it be because he made her life messier, harder. Not anymore. He wanted her to be brooding because she missed him.

  That was his plan. If he exhausted her with his presence, he didn’t want his absence to do the same damn thing. On his nights at home with the girls, he had come to realise the full impact of the evening shit show, the million tiny jobs that kept you busy till 10 p.m., from bath time to the endless bedtime rituals, tidying up from dinner and prepping for the morning, the bottomless washing. Alone, it was a lot. How much of this had Lou just got on with, while he’d been patting himself on the back for being an ‘involved’ dad? All this picking up and putting down and reordering chaos – it’s what Lou was taking care of when he was in the guitar room. Gently re-righting the ship, every damn night.

  He went to help Rita, who had her shirt on, but inside out. ‘Clearly, we do too much for you girls, if you don’t even know how to pack a sandwich or put your shirt on right,’ he muttered, and Rita gave him a big sloppy kiss for his trouble. As he straightened up, Josh saw a note pasted to Rita’s bedhead behind his daughter’s mess of curly black hair, which he was about to attempt to tame.

  Mummy loves you more than chocolate. Even when she can’t be with you. Lou’s writing, accompanied by texta-drawn love hearts and chocolate bars.

  Josh stared at it for a moment, wondering why he hadn’t noticed it before. A rush of emotion caught in his throat.

  Truth was, every time Josh walked into the house and Lou wasn’t there, it knocked the breath out of him.

  The place felt so much colder without her in it. He missed the shape of her in the spaces she always inhabited: standing by the kitchen bench; sitting with her legs outstretched on the sofa; bending down to one of the girls (‘Just one more hug, Mum’); reading in bed beside him; curled in a comma, sleeping.

  ‘I miss Mummy,’ Rita said, as if the little five-year-old could read his mind. ‘And I miss you.’

  And Josh had to turn his head so he could control the tears that he was sure were going to come. Today, clearly, was not a day he could pretend not to be sad.

  ‘Come on, Reets, let’s brush this mop,’ he said, clearing his throat.

  ‘Daddy, it’s not a mop,’ said his daughter. ‘Mummy says it’s your hair. I’ve got your hair.’

  ‘You do, baby.’ He nodded.

  ‘She says that’s why she can never be angry with it,’ Rita went on, tolerating him tugging her this way and that way with the brush. ‘Even when it ruins her morning.’

  And Josh struggled to breathe again.

  Downstairs, Stella, clearly proud that she’d pushed the lunchboxes into schoolbags, was standing by the door. ‘You won’t be too late, Daddy,’ she said to him, and the tight look around her mouth gave him a painful jolt. His eldest was working hard to keep things even, he saw; to smooth this weird situation over. She, like him, didn’t want to be another problem.

  He pulled her to him and kissed her on the head. ‘You’re my star, Stell,’ he told her.

  Lou

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yes, Stell?’

  ‘Are we going back to normal soon?’

  Lou was driving Stella and Rita to a birthday party on a sunny Saturday morning. The traffic was as bumper-to-bumper bad as rush hour on a Tuesday afternoon. ‘What do you mean, normal?’

  ‘Me and you and Dad? In our house?’

  Lou swallowed. Paused. ‘I don’t know, darling.’

  ‘How come you don’t know?’ Rita asked. ‘You know everything, Mum.’

  ‘Not everything, Reets.’

  ‘But you must know this one!’ Rita said. ‘This one’s easy!’

  ‘It’s complicated, grown-up stuff,’ Lou said. She knew she was fobbing them off, she knew she needed to come up with some better answers. That they needed better answers. ‘All I do know, for absolute sure is that –’

  ‘Mummy and Daddy love us very much,’ said Stella. ‘Right?’

  ‘Stell . . .’ Lou looked in the rear-view mirror, could see her older daughter’s face hardening. ‘We say it all the time because it’s true.’

  ‘Right.’

  10. Put the girls first. Lou sat with her phone in the car, catching her breath for a moment, as the girls ran off towards the balloon-strewn picnic table in the suburban park. What’s best for them is best for you.

  *

  It had been a month of difficult questions.

  ‘Do you want to be his fucking mother?’ Ryan Harcourt’s mum had asked her loudly, as she’d grabbed Ryan’s hand. ‘Because he’s already got one of those. And I’m doing my best.’

  This was after telling Lou to stay the fuck out of her business after Lou had worked out a way to get Ryan into after-care two days a week for free.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest . . .’

  ‘We don’t need your bleeding heart,’ Ryan’s mum shouted as she walked off.

  ‘Thanks, though,’ called Ryan, as he was being pulled away, and Lou gave him a little down-low wave.

  ‘Overstepping,’ said Theo, who, of course, happened to be passing. ‘Told you.’

  ‘Piss off,’ she hissed under her breath.

  *

  ‘Why did you lie to me about that whole divorce advice thing?’

  At Gretchen’s place, JoJo was staying for some of the school holidays and was mortified that she was in the spare spare room, instead of the guest room where Lou had tak
en up residence.

  ‘I didn’t . . .’ But she did.

  ‘If you hadn’t tricked me into telling you to leave,’ JoJo had said to Lou, ‘I wouldn’t be watching Riverdale on my laptop.’

  ‘JoJo, that’s just not true.’

  ‘Sure it isn’t! Such a teacher!’ JoJo flounced off, slamming the door of the spare spare room behind her.

  *

  ‘So, why are you separated?’

  Lou and Rob were in a beige hipster cafe near Rob’s Paddington place. The menu was full of plant-based goodness but they had both ordered desserts. It seemed like that kind of day, the kind of conversation they were finally having. Giant coffees, bigger cakes.

  ‘It’s a good question today, since I’m not making anyone happy,’ Lou said to her brother. ‘I’ve fucked absolutely everything.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve been faking it all this time,’ Rob said, forkful of chocolate mush halfway to his mouth. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘You have enough going on,’ Lou said. ‘And Mum can’t know. Not yet.’

  ‘Well, now I’m offended. Why would I tell Mum?’

  ‘It might . . . slip out. The more people in her world who know, the greater the risk.’

  ‘Like Mum and I are having all the fireside chats.’ Rob rolled his eyes. ‘So, tell me why.’

  Lou wanted to put her head on the table. She felt so far from that choice, now. How to explain it?

  ‘Fourteen years happened,’ she said. ‘And I didn’t know if I wanted to play the role of being Josh’s wife for another fourteen years. And maybe another fourteen years after that. All this crap builds up, all these things that you’ve done to each other. It takes you so far from where you started, you can barely even see each other anymore. Who is this person I’m doing all this work for, taking care of every day? Is this what we signed up for? What I signed up for? And . . . do we even like each other after all of this shit?’

  ‘I always thought you and Josh seemed to really like each other,’ Rob said, chewing. ‘More than most married couples I know.’

  Lou actually did put her head on the cafe table for a moment. Then lifted it up, pulled a ‘yuck’ face at her big brother. ‘I sound so spoilt, don’t I?’

  ‘No, you don’t. But you look sad, Lou.’ Rob reached across the table for her hand. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘You can tell me I’m not the world’s worst person for doing this to my girls.’

  ‘Of course you’re not, Lou. Kids need a happy home, not just any old home.’ Rob lifted Lou’s chin. ‘And you’re an excellent mother.’

  ‘Thank you, Rob.’ Lou grabbed his hand, kissed it, shoved it back at him. ‘And I gave myself a deadline – it’s the end of the year.’

  ‘Well, we’re nearly there. But if the suspense is killing you . . .’ Rob said. ‘I’m sure it’s moveable.’

  *

  ‘What do you want from your career, Lou?’

  Two days later, on a strangely hot spring afternoon, Lou found out that she’d got the job.

  When she went back to work after the summer school holidays, she would be the head of year one at Bayside. She would still have a class of her own, but there would be a lot of extra duties, a pay rise, and a chance to try to change things that had been frustrating her for years.

  Gabbie Scott had told Lou the news and congratulated her. ‘I’m delighted you’re open to this possibility, Lou. I’ve always thought you were a very intuitive teacher, with buckets of leadership potential. I’m only sorry it’s taken this long for you to make this move.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you to say,’ Lou had said. ‘You really don’t have to.’

  ‘I do,’ Gabbie said. ‘We can’t let the shouty people get all the attention.’

  ‘Well, no,’ Lou said, smiling. ‘That’s true.’ They both knew who they were talking about.

  And then Gabbie asked her: ‘What do you want from your career, Lou?’

  Lou didn’t know what to say. When was the last time anyone had asked her that question? Had they ever asked her that question? Or had they assumed that a teacher was a teacher, labouring under the quaint illusion that it was a great job for a mother because the hours were school hours (ha!) and the holidays were long? What do you want from your career, Lou? Had she assumed the same thing about herself?

  Annabelle had always wanted Lou to marry a principal. But if Lou was honest, wasn’t she much more interested in being a principal?

  ‘I want to make a difference,’ she said. But she knew that sounded empty, clichéd. That Gabbie was already looking down at the notes for her next meeting. ‘I wouldn’t mind your job one day, now my kids are getting older.’

  Gabbie looked up, smiled. ‘Well, Lou, I’m confident you’ll get there, if that’s what you really want.’

  *

  ‘Do you want to meet me at therapy?’ Another question. From Josh, on the phone. They didn’t have an appointment scheduled. Lou had assumed he’d be calling to organise the girls’ trick-or-treating. ‘There are some things I want us to talk about.’

  Interesting. They’d been avoiding each other as much as possible, avoiding the confusion of being in the same space for too long. ‘Is it a therapy conversation? Not a kitchen conversation?’

  Josh laughed softly. ‘Not a kitchen conversation. Let’s get the next available.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll call Sara.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Josh. ‘I’ll call her.’

  Josh

  The house at Camperdown was finally finished. It had been one of the longest jobs Josh had ever worked on for Mick, and he and Tyler had delivered a beautiful result if he said so himself, which he didn’t.

  Pearl Hass had put on drinks for the tradies to mark the house’s completion. Most likely she wasn’t going to be there, Josh had thought, as he’d changed out of his work shirt in the ute, and the long-suffering foreman would be the one offering up the tinnies around the newly filled pool.

  But she was there, along with her girlfriend and their tiny newborn son in a sling. And there were no tinnies. Just big timber buckets of icy-cold bottles of craft beer, kombucha and green juice (which mostly went untouched), and trays and trays of meat and vegan sliders, tacos and artisan pies. He hadn’t been to a party like it.

  Josh had hung back with Tyler and watched Pearl and her family diligently go around and speak individually to the army of (mostly) men who’d transformed the giant warehouse space, some of whose roles had finished weeks or months before.

  ‘She’s a class act,’ Tyler said, motioning his bottle towards Pearl. ‘You’ve got all that money, you don’t need to be this nice to people.’ And Josh had to agree.

  The resentment he’d felt when he’d started the job still raised its toxic little flags sometimes. He’d told Lou and anyone who’d listen that he was a simple man who loved his life, but this . . . well, this was an alternative he really wouldn’t have minded.

  He was by the beer bucket, looking for a lite one, when it was his turn for an audience.

  ‘You’re one of the carpenters, right?’ he heard Pearl say at his shoulder. ‘You and your mate did the deck we’re standing on.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Josh, suddenly feeling nervous, turning around to look down at Pearl, a tiny, neat person in overalls that looked expensive, a blunt-looking mohawk and almost certainly vegan trainers. ‘And the stairs, and the mezz.’

  ‘It’s exactly how we imagined it,’ said Pearl. ‘We didn’t want it to look new, and it doesn’t. It’s beautiful work, with soul. You guys are artists.’

  It was the perfect compliment, and an opportunity. Was he going to take it?

  ‘I am an artist,’ Josh found himself saying quickly, cringing about how boastful it sounded. It was a sentence he’d never used before in his life. Here we go, here we go . . .

  ‘I know. It shows in your work.’ Pearl nodded and gestured to the oval edges of the pool deck, which had been fucking difficult to pull off, actually, thought Josh, a
nd he hoped they were going to re-sand after all these idiots in greasy work boots had trampled all over it.

  But he said, ‘No, I mean I’m also a musician.’

  And just as he’d feared, Pearl Hass’s face fell, just a little. ‘Oh, great,’ she said, but she also looked left and right for a saviour, and he knew one would be coming. People like Pearl had minders at hand for moments like this.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I know you must get that all the time.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘But, you know, there are worse things.’

  ‘Oh? Like what?’

  ‘Everyone in LA,’ Pearl Hass said, rolling her eyes. ‘It’s why we want to spend more time at home. Fewer grasping fuckwits.’

  And Josh laughed a little; she was warmer than he’d thought. ‘Apologies for upping the grasping fuckwit quota of Sydney. What do you say to all the musicians who come up to you with a song?’

  ‘I say send me something,’ she said. ‘And then I get someone else to listen to it. Or . . . not.’

  Honesty. Admirable. Josh nodded.

  Then Pearl added, ‘You’re not the usual demographic for that approach.’

  ‘Too old?’

  She held her thumb and forefinger close together, up near her face. ‘Li’l bit.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Josh was rolling the cold beer bottle between in his hands. ‘Well, look, this party is great. Most people don’t give a fuck, so, thank you for the . . . tacos.’ Shut up, you idiot.

  ‘I appreciate all this skill,’ Pearl Hass said, as her saviour, in the form of her partner and the baby sling, arrived at her side. ‘Char, this is . . .’

  ‘My name’s Josh.’ And Josh wiped a cold, wet hand on his pants and offered it to the beautiful Indian supermodel. ‘I’m a chippie.’

  ‘He’s an artist,’ Pearl corrected, and she smiled at him as Char accepted the handshake.

  ‘Good luck with the baby,’ Josh said, still feeling like a dick, but one who’d been granted more time than he should have been allowed. ‘This early bit is hard, but it’s like falling in love turned up to a million.’