How the hell are we going to do Christmas like this? You need to talk to me, Josh.
That’s what was running through her head when Lou saw the woman standing next to her car.
It took her a minute.
Dana.
Dana was standing there, in denim shorts and a striped T-shirt and red sandals, her hair in a ponytail, sunglasses pushed back on her head. She’d been looking at her phone, but glancing up every few minutes, and when she saw Lou, she put the phone into her bag and smiled at her.
‘Dana?’ Lou said. It was a question. A question that meant, What the fuck are you doing here?
‘Hi, Lou. Sorry for the very random visit.’
‘I’m . . . going home.’
‘I know, I know – and I know this is weird, I do. I just . . . need to talk to you about something.’
Every single bit of Lou wanted to run away. She had this overwhelming sense that whatever Dana was going to tell her, she didn’t want to hear it, that her life would be better if she didn’t. ‘Dana, I don’t think . . .’ She jangled the car keys in her hand. ‘I don’t think I want to talk to you.’
‘I know, it’s really weird.’ Dana looked down, seeming embarrassed. Then she looked back up at Lou. ‘But I saw Josh today.’
You did? Why did you? Lou started to feel a bit sick. She didn’t say anything.
‘Marco’s gone,’ Dana went on, which seemed unrelated. Or maybe not. ‘He left. I’m glad.’
This was getting worse.
‘And I’ve been lonely, and I’ve been an idiot.’ Dana was always like this, Lou remembered, just blurting out brutally honest, inappropriate things. If absolutely everything in their circumstances were different, they might actually be friends.
‘But, to be honest, Josh hasn’t been entirely . . . fair with me, either.’
Not friends. Definitely not friends.
‘Dana, I’m sorry, I don’t know what you know, but like I said, I don’t want to talk about this with you,’ Lou said, and she went to step around her.
‘Lou, he’s so devastated,’ Dana said, reaching out for Lou’s arm. ‘And I’ve been a dick, but really, I would never, ever want to be with anyone who was so clearly madly in love with someone else.’
The smoke haze was in Lou’s eyes. The cicadas were started to chirrup.
Madly in love. Not the words you still thought about after fourteen years.
‘I just had to come here and tell you that,’ said Dana. ‘Because he hasn’t told me anything about what’s going on with you two, but . . . Look, I was really angry with him because I thought he was free, or at least on his way to being free. And I thought he was rejecting me. But he wasn’t free at all. And he’s not going to be.’
Lou blinked again. She still couldn’t think of anything to say. What did one say in this situation?
‘I just wanted to tell you.’ Dana let go of her arm.
They both stood there, looking at each other for a moment, the strange summer evening settling around them.
‘I’ve got to go and pick up the kids,’ Dana said eventually.
‘Yeah,’ was all Lou could manage. ‘Thank you.’
Dana looked around before she turned away, at the old building and the green gums of Bayside. ‘Nice school,’ she said. ‘You should send the girls here.’
Lou shrugged. ‘I’m here,’ she said, for some reason.
‘Yeah,’ said Dana. ‘They might like that.’
And she turned and, this time, walked away towards her car, her sandals flip-flopping as she went.
Josh
There was no-one on the road going the way Josh was going.
The traffic was bumper to bumper heading towards Sydney and the safety of the high-rises and the concrete, but the road heading north was empty.
But the journey north was fine, once you were used to driving slowly with your headlights glaring through the ever-present smoke, and passing the occasional smouldering stump. The road was open, the truck stop was still serving terrible coffee, everything was as it was.
Except that it was almost Christmas and Josh had no idea what his family was going to look like by then, or on Boxing Day, or on New Year’s Eve. He hadn’t felt so untethered since he was a teen, travelling up and down this highway in his dad’s Beemer, breathing in cigarette smoke with a constant soundtrack of racing commentary.
Josh thought about that as he took the Newcastle turn-off.
Emma was safe for now; the fires had backed away from the fringes of her estate. She didn’t want Josh to come up, but of course he was ignoring her wishes. He needed to know that his mum was okay and still with him while everything else was floating in space. He needed to bring her home.
But first, he had something else to do.
Josh found a seat at the back of the old, dingy pub, facing the door. He felt awkward, being here in the middle of the day, alone. He looked around at the men who didn’t feel awkward, the day drinkers and the shiftworkers and the people who hadn’t yet been shamed into moderation. He played with a middy, wondered what the hell he was doing.
It’s your turn to have a midlife crisis, he thought. Questioning everything, looking for answers.
The night Lou had told him the truth about Theo, something had shifted in Josh. He had run until he was exhausted, and then he’d flagged down a taxi and asked the driver to take him to the beach. He had no idea why, but he needed to sit there, at the edge of things, and breathe in some air that wasn’t thick with toxic dust and wonder how the fuck he’d let this happen to his life.
He was almost embarrassed to think of it now, but Josh had jumped into the ocean pool at Coogee surf club at two in the morning and floated there, in the black, among the burnt twigs and the singed leaves and the seaweed. And he knew what he had to do. But he had no idea how.
He had to stop hiding.
How the hell had he avoided that name, that detail, for so long? That night, in the cool, dirty water, it felt as if Lou’s confession had changed everything he knew about his wife and what she was capable of. That night, he actually hated her.
He’d climbed out of the pool, after what seemed like a long time, and pulled on his black jeans and his new blue shirt, and he’d walked to the other end of the beach and up onto the headland, and sat on the clifftop. A bedraggled middle-aged man having some sort of clichéd epiphany in the face of the sunrise.
Time to face things, Josh, he’d told himself.
And here he was, waiting for the door to swing open and reveal some answers.
There was a small commotion, and there she was. Christine. The woman who’d been by his dad’s side when he was breathing his last. The woman Josh had barred from his wedding. The woman Len had been fighting with when a car hit him.
She was loud, Christine, and she called out in her broad Irish accent as she came in – to the barman, to the day drinkers and then, when she saw him, to Josh. She was older, and slower, but just as loud.
‘Hey there!’ she said. ‘I never thought I’d see you again!’
Josh stood, and she hugged him, and she was short, her face pushing into his chest. ‘Buy an old duck a drink, won’t you?’
They sat there, at the back table, and Christine talked. About where she was living now – with her eldest, but she didn’t get on with his missus so that was never going to last – and about the little dog she wanted to buy when she got herself settled with her own place one day. And about Josh’s dad, and how much she missed him.
‘Such a stupid old bugger,’ she said. ‘Such a temper. Always bloody right.’
‘Yeah.’ Josh drank the last mouthful of his middy, flat on his tongue now. ‘That sounds like him.’
‘Miss him, though. I bet you do, too.’
Josh shrugged. ‘I didn’t see him much.’
‘Still,’ Christine said, looking out the window, ‘you don’t have to see someone to miss them. At least you knew they were there, hey?’
That was true.
J
osh had come here to ask Christine something specific, but now it seemed grossly inappropriate, in the face of this tired, tipsy woman, someone just looking for a bed and a puppy, as she had been now for years.
She was still talking – about a friend who had made her fortune on eBay – when Josh interrupted to ask what he’d come to ask.
‘Did my dad step in front of that car, Christine?’
And she stopped, mid-sentence, and turned to look at Josh properly. ‘Of course he didn’t!’ she said. ‘Why would he do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Josh, and he dropped his head to his hands. ‘I’m still thinking about his last minutes, all these years later, and it’s just something I need to know, for me.’
Christine cocked her head. ‘You having a hard time, love?’ she asked.
‘I am a bit, if I’m honest,’ said Josh. ‘It’s not been a great year.’
‘Well, we should definitely have another drink then, love, because misery loves company,’ said Christine. ‘But first, let me tell you something about your dad that you need to know.’
Josh waited while Christine seemed to think about what it was, this thing.
‘Your sister called him, you know, about the baby,’ said Christine. ‘I remember it.’
‘Stella?’
‘Must be. Anyway, he was so delighted, Len, he was carrying on, so pleased. And your sister got all upset on the phone because he was so excited. Because you were his son, you know; he had a special bond with you.’
‘He did?’
‘He did,’ said Christine, tapping out a smoke from a battered packet and tucking it behind her ear. ‘And I couldn’t stop him from coming down there to see you, even though I knew his knee was dicky and he shouldn’t be driving. It was his knee that folded on him that night, you know, when he didn’t get out of the way of the car.’
‘His knee,’ Josh repeated. Really?
‘It was his bloody knee. We had a blue, but he was just being dramatic, stomping across the road, and he turned to yell something at me.’ Christine looked like she was almost enjoying this awful story. ‘And his knee, it just went, and there was a car, and . . .’ She looked back at her hands, fell quiet.
Josh swallowed. Waited.
‘Anyway . . .’ This time Christine reached over and took his hands. ‘He couldn’t be stopped. And he loved you, your dad, in his own way. He was all about wetting that baby’s head, even that night. He loved you, but he couldn’t really tell you. That wasn’t his way.’
There it was.
Josh felt better. And worse. His dad was not so bereft and lonely that he’d ended it all. Also, his dad had loved him, and never bloody showed it.
‘I don’t think that’s your problem, is it?’ asked Christine.
‘What?’
‘Not showing people you love them.’
Josh considered this for a moment. ‘No, I don’t think that is my problem.’
Christine smiled. ‘Buy me another?’
*
Josh spent that night at a motel near the highway. He wanted to be alone, in some space, before he drove on to pick up Emma.
He lay on the cheap floral bedspread and drank a beer, clicked through the TV’s digital channels, and he thought how easy it would be for him to keep hiding now, to keep moving, keep drinking, keep dodging the difficult parts. Like his old man.
And he thought about how, yesterday, he’d gone to find Dana to apologise to her for the night in the cab. How hard that had been, and how much simpler it would have felt to avoid it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said at her front door, with the noise of the kids fighting deep in the house. ‘I think I led you on.’
‘Such a quaint phrase,’ Dana said. ‘But I suppose it’s possible I didn’t want to hear what you were telling me.’
It had felt good, afterwards, as he walked down the path to her front gate. It felt good to have dealt with something.
Was that how Lou had felt after she’d told him absolutely everything under the tree that night? She’d given their marriage a year, and now it was in pieces. Didn’t you have to believe in something to hold it together?
His phone beeped. It was Lou. What timing. Maya would say she must have known he was brooding about her.
Are you safe up there?
He turned his phone over. Not now, Lou. Now it’s me who needs a bit more time.
It buzzed again, and he ignored it.
That giant man at that awful party and Lou in her red-rust dress.
The phone kept buzzing.
His girls and their beautiful eyes, and Lou and her laugh.
Buzz, buzz.
Her face when she’d watched him leave, that night under the tree.
Zzzzz. Zzzzz.
He reached out and grabbed the phone, ready to turn it off. But it was Emma calling.
‘Joshy,’ she said, ‘they say the fires are coming back. Maybe you should come and get me after all.’
Lou
24 December, 2019
I give my marriage a week.
Bold. Underlined.
I give my marriage a week.
If I still have a marriage.
Lou was at the kitchen table, surrounded by the brightly coloured chaos of Christmas. Mince pies and panettone – food that no-one would eat at any other time of year – and more chocolate than her girls would have set eyes on in the past twelve months. Bottles and bottles. Rolls of cheap wrapping paper, cards received and not returned.
It doesn’t matter what else is happening on Christmas Eve, Lou wrote. If you have kids, the show must go on.
She could hear Annabelle and Gretchen next door in the living room, helping wrap the last of the presents in front of the TV. This was always Josh’s job, wrestling to find the end of the sticky tape after a couple too many beers. But Lou’s mother and her oldest friend were not going to let her be alone tonight after her giddy girls finally fell asleep.
Clearly, if Gretchen and Annabelle could form an alliance, things were bad.
And they were.
Josh was cut off two hours north. He and Emma had been told it was too late to leave, the fires had closed in and the roads were locked down. Phone signal and wifi were out. All Lou knew came from the TV and her fucking fires app, and that seemed to be flashing more emergency red diamonds at her every time she looked. The last she had heard, they were safe. They must be safe.
It seemed unthinkable, here in suburban Sydney, where the worst of the smoke had cleared days ago and the summer holidays were attempting to unfold as usual, with beach days and pretty young people drinking in short dresses and manic prawn shopping and late-afternoon meltdowns from tired kids. It seemed unthinkable that beyond this bubble, everything was burning. People had died, lost their homes. People were isolated, alone, terrified.
Pebbly Beach, their honeymoon place, was burning.
Get it together, Lou told herself at the table. Put the phone down. Go and help Gretchen.
It’s not like Josh would be here if he wasn’t there.
He still hadn’t spoken to her since her confession under the tree. She’d seen him once since Dana’s bizarre visit, when he came to say goodbye to the girls before he went to pick up Emma, but he still couldn’t look at her. His face was pinched closed, his eyes lowered to Stella and Rita height. She’d tried to reach out and touch his arm, to get him to talk, but he wouldn’t. He shook her off with a shrug and kept moving.
Madly in love? Really?
Lou couldn’t cry. She’d cried a hell of a lot that night under the tree, in Josh’s white shirt, and plenty since. It was all gone. And somehow it felt self-indulgent, when a collective dread was creeping across the whole country, to be focusing on the mess splattered on the walls of her own, still-standing home.
Before communications were cut, Josh had sent Lou a message.
They’re closing the roads, he wrote. I don’t want the girls to worry. I’m with Mum. Stuck but safe. Might lose phone reception.
&n
bsp; Lou had wanted to write: Are you still angry? But that seemed trite. I love you. But that seemed too small. Can you forgive me? But that seemed unfair.
Get home safe x was what she’d gone with. There had been no response.
Get it together, Lou. Put the phone down. Go and help Gretchen. Come on.
Gretchen was still tanned from Iceland. How was that a thing? She looked clear-eyed and light on the floor of Lou’s lounge, even as she tried to work out how to wrap a pair of rollerblades in brown paper. Annabelle was sitting in an armchair with a glass of white wine, offering directions.
‘You have no skills in this area, do you, love?’ she was saying. ‘You’re wrapping as if you have no thumbs.’
‘Not something I’ve had to focus on, Annabelle, to be honest,’ Gretchen replied. ‘Rollerblades haven’t featured much in my life since the Boogie Nights fetish blew through my teens.’
Annabelle gave a tight-lipped smile, took a sip of wine, looked up at her daughter.
‘Any word, Louise?’ she asked.
‘No, Mum. Looks like phone reception is still out.’
‘Typical of Joshua, really,’ Annabelle muttered. ‘If anyone’s going to get stuck . . .’
‘Mum, don’t,’ said Lou sharply.
‘Look on the bright side,’ said Gretchen, triumphantly sticking down the last corner of the rollerblade parcel. ‘Closed highways mean I can’t go to visit my dad tomorrow, which is good news for everyone. Including you, because you’re stuck with me.’
‘What about Kim? Where will she be?’
‘You mean the love of my life? The song in my heart?’ Gretchen really was working hard to lighten the mood.
‘Honestly, Gretchen,’ huffed Annabelle. ‘Pick a side.’
‘Mum!’
‘It’s okay, Lou.’ Gretchen laughed. ‘My dad’s just as confused as you, Annabelle. I may have finally chosen – I’m pretty mad about Kim. But she’s in Aspen. Back before New Year.’
I Give My Marriage a Year Page 35
