by Meg Bignell
In other news, after school drop-off I was running back to the car when the school principal stopped me and asked whether I would please think about playing my viola for next year’s school musical production. I got all flustered and on-the-spot, and I think I might have said yes. Now I’ll have to work up to a no. Must do it soon; nos are like cheese. They get harder the longer you leave them.
MONDAY 19th JUNE
Three reasons why it’s ironic (or is it paradoxical, I never know) that I should have prescribed a sex break:
1) We have been known to go for fifty days without sex, so a sex break is not breaking new ground.
2) I have a cold. A proper, snotty cold, with a proper not-now-darling headache. And a fever. I should be in bed probably, but I’ve had to defuse a violent dispute between Jimmy and Mary-Lou over pencil cases. And Raffy needs collecting from choir (his latest whim).
3) Hugh has announced that he has to go to Melbourne tomorrow. For up to a fortnight. A pedestrian overpass collapsed in a university. Two people died and there’s a clamour for answers. Terrible. Those poor people. I’ll be suspicious of overpasses now. Another thing to worry about.
So a sex break seems, now that it’s thrust upon me, not such a good idea. Apparently vaginal atrophy is a thing. I know because I saw some vaginal atrophy cream in the supermarket. What the hell? It was between the feminine hygiene products and the nappies, as if to say, ‘Women, deal with your baby’s excrement, keep your vaginas clean and don’t let them waste away.’ Why wouldn’t they put the nappies next to the men’s shaving creams?
Atrophy sounds quite restful, actually. Vaginal retirement.
THURSDAY 22nd JUNE
The cold didn’t end up moving to my chest and causing mild pneumonia, which is a bit of a shame. I did get increasingly delirious, though, and had a horny dream about the school principal. Oh, dear.
Hugh didn’t delay his trip for the sake of my health. I’m trying not to feel begrudgey about that. Nor about the ease with which men can truck in and out of the house, with very little luggage and no flurry over who’s taking what shoes and where are all the hairbrushes? ‘I have to go to Melbourne,’ they say, and then they do. No agonising over babysitters or travel wipes or making casseroles to freeze. No phoning sports coaches or turning down invitations or writing down phone numbers. No guilt. All safe in the knowledge that the house’s noggins are suitably fortified by me, the reinforcing girder.
I wasn’t all that ill, really. But I would have liked someone to spoon me some broth or something. I still did the school runs. And Hugh has gone. I tried to do a very casual, ‘see you when I’m looking at you’ goodbye and not be needy. If I wasn’t in my jarmies with a cold, I might have left before him and gone for a nonchalant jog.
It might do us good to be apart.
SUNDAY 25th JUNE
The children are all over at Valda’s watching old films. They got bored by my frenzied tidying of the garden. I’m trying to arrange things so that when Hugh gets home he’ll be taken aback by how independent and capable I can be.
So, too busy to write. Trust me, there’ll be butterflies in our stomachs and fondness in our hearts after all this absence.
LATER:
Mum popped in this afternoon and found me up a ladder ruthlessly clipping the wisteria from the pencil pine. She peered up at me, and at the freshly weeded garden beds, and said, ‘Are you pregnant?’
‘What?’
‘When I was pregnant with you, I was suddenly offended by the honeysuckle vine over the terrace. I pulled it all out. I still miss the smell, and the finches never forgave me.’
I came down off the ladder and said, ‘No, I’d just like Hugh to come home and see how well I can manage without him.’
‘Well, don’t manage too well,’ she said. ‘He mightn’t feel needed enough. Always best to be a bit helpless without them. We should get Dad to tighten the lids on all your jars – men love being asked to open a lid.’
‘I don’t want to be helpless, though, Mum. I want to be capable.’
‘You don’t have to be completely useless, just a little in need of some masculine support. I never mowed the lawn, for instance, though I can, of course. Nothing like an unkempt lawn for keeping a husband at home.’
Is she right? When Hugh was in Antarctica I went to enormous pains to make everything immaculate for his return, even painted the skirting boards and had his suits dry-cleaned. He never knew that, a week prior, I was crying on the floor of the kitchen because there was an ant plague in the pantry, a dead rat in the ceiling and a fault in the chest freezer that had ruined all my preserved peaches.
Perhaps I’ll throw a few ants in the sugar.
MONDAY 26th JUNE
My wedding rings smell funny. Smelly wedding rings are NOT a sign of anything, Susannah, so stop before you start. Other than questionable hygiene. I am taking them off now and putting them in soda water.
Hugh just called: he is distant. Distant and distant. No fizz, no butterflies. I might need to put myself in soda water too.
TUESDAY 27th JUNE
I’m listening to old music and missing Hugh. Missing is good for passion, so I’m working on increasing it by going back in time again. I found all our old CDs on Raffy’s bookcase. (How is it that children can’t seem to handle CDs without breaking all the covers?) Eloise tells me I am the only person in the world to still buy CDs and that all of my music is embarrassing and ancient. This is not true. One day she’ll understand that music doesn’t have to be cool. Van Morrison’s ‘Sweet Thing’ was Hugh’s and my ‘song’. Not cool by today’s standards, but I still love it. Hugh played it on the stereo when we moved into our first house, back when I still had champagne eyes.
Hobart, 1995–1999
After the towelling shorts day, it wasn’t all happily ever after. Hugh still had commitments. Hugh’s family, I discovered, had so many family traditions, events and dinners, picnics and lunches, all with their particular and complicated conventions that ensured they were almost impenetrable to outsiders. Alison is the sort of person who books the polo every year and expects everyone there with shined shoes, a plate of chicken sandwiches (with chives and white pepper), two bottles of French champagne, a carnation in their lapel and a medium-sized hat. As an only child, whose family traditions extended as far as dinner on our knees with Rumpole on a Sunday night, I was all at sea. I once went to the Dawn Service in a yellow polar fleece, with a hangover and no rosemary. Alison asked that I stand at the back ‘in case your fleece frightens the horses’. Hugh’s sisters looked very pleased with my disgrace. Laurence gave me a sympathetic smile. Hugh was completely oblivious.
There were moments of perfect happiness, though – like the hot midsummer’s night we left a Christmas party to go skinny-dipping in Lake Meadowbank. Or the time I took him to the Theatre Royal to hear the Southern Singers perform the Messiah. He couldn’t believe how much it moved him. Those moments came between times of wondering when he would do the natural thing and move on to someone normal. He was never a doting boyfriend but he was adventurous, loving, easygoing, gentle, never jealous … always casual about things.
I was far from casual. I analysed everything. Birthday cards and presents were scrutinised for commitment clues. Once he gave me a Huon pine, which take up to five hundred years to grow to full height. I was in raptures over that present. (‘We are definitely growing old together now, definitely …’) I had to give the tree to Dad, on account of share houses and no permanent address. He killed it with too much Magic Gro. And still hanging over me was the enormous question of whether Hugh loving my face was the same thing as loving me.
‘No way,’ said Ria bluntly a few months into Hugh and me being together. ‘He just said he loved your face so you wouldn’t feel bad about your madman scar. It’s much too soon for I love you.’
‘Is it?’ I said with a miles-away face. I love you had been on the tip of my tongue so many times.
‘Don’t you dare, Susannah.�
� Ria had read my expression. ‘You tell him that now and he’ll quit the Susannah popsicle stand in a heartbeat. Didn’t you learn anything from Sweet Valley High?’
So I didn’t tell him I loved him. I mostly mooned around, waiting for the next meeting, while he was off seeing his friends and family. Also, he landed a part-time internship with AbelTas Constructions so he was juggling that with studies and family and me. I tried very hard not to mind.
The sex, when it happened (a lot – two or three times a week seemed utterly drought-stricken back then), was incredible. All that sexual tension. Is that what’s missing? Not sex but sexual tension? Are we both too available? Is it too easy? Some of the best sex we’ve had was when we were staying at Mum and Dad’s and had to refrain entirely on account of our small house and the proximity of parental ears. Oh, the ecstasy of holding back! Once, the build-up was so great that we hid in a cleaning cupboard in the Engineering department and had sex among the brooms. I can’t think too hard about that now on account of Hugh being away and wasting valuable horniness.
La-li-la.
The effect of these emotional shifts on my music was pretty incredible too. I worked extremely hard, not just because I was trying to think about things other than Hugh, but because I really loved it. I really did, didn’t I? I did.
I wrote a career-launching song with viola riffs for Alison Mills, a contemporary singing student. She lives in Nashville now, making fortunes, her name changed to Albright. She still sends me Christmas cards. I got invited to collaborate with the Conservatorium’s head of strings. We wrote some really good pieces … It was probably the height of my career, actually. Which is pathetic given I was still at uni … I can’t think about that either.
I never quite believed that Hugh would stay with me forever. Even after the time I forgot my bike and accidentally walked to uni wearing my bike helmet and he said, ‘Oh, Susannah. I love you.’ For a moment I felt a surge of joy, except that he looked a bit stricken, as if it was a fatal slip of the tongue. So I just did a laugh and pretended he’d said, ‘Oh, Susannah. You’re such a loser,’ which seemed more apt.
‘Well, you never know when you need protection from something accidentally falling on your head,’ I said, blushing.
Then there was some awkward silence and I looked at the sky in case there might be something falling, or at least something I could use for a bit of indifferent conversation, when he took my face in his hands and said, ‘Or for when you accidentally fall head over heels – in love.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Then helmets can’t save you. Nothing can.’
‘Well, good,’ he said. ‘Because I don’t want to be saved. I love you, Zannah.’
‘I love you too.’
‘He said he loved me, he said he loved me, oh my God he loves me,’ I yelped at Ria later.
‘Oh, God,’ said Ria, peering suspiciously at my glee. ‘Tell me you didn’t get all gaspy and say it right back. There’s so much more rooting in broom cupboards before that.’ (There wasn’t much I kept from Ria.)
‘Ummm,’ I said, remembering the breathy ‘I love you too’ that I’d posted into Hugh’s ear.
‘Fucken oath, Susannah,’ she sighed. ‘We discussed this. Upper hand.’ She raised a beautiful piano hand. ‘Up. Per. Hand.’
I’ve never had the upper hand. I did manage to relax a bit, though. I stopped wishing I could be small enough to ride around in his pocket every minute of the day. We settled into what we and all our friends accepted as a ‘long-term relationship’. Mine was an uneasy settlement on account of lower hand. Mum and Dad adored him, to the point that I’d pop in to visit them and find Hugh under the car with Dad, or having a cup of tea and sharing dirty jokes with Mum. ‘I think they love you more than me,’ I said to him and he took me in his arms and said, ‘Can’t blame them, really, but don’t worry. I love you more than me.’
Meanwhile I carved myself a niche in Hugh’s family as ‘the hopeless one’ and they all (minus Alison, whose disdain has a very long shelf life) started doing exaggerated eye rolls and calling me cute. I didn’t mind. Alison eventually gave up asking us to all the things, and that suited us – we were so busy … I probably hammed up the role, really: made myself clumsier, my cooking more disastrous, my clothes less stylish. Did I? And if I did, when did that caricature turn into reality? How long does a method actor immerse herself in a role before she occupies it completely?
It was three years before we had our first proper argument. Ria was in Sydney by then, having been offered a scholarship at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. I was doing my honours in composition and working casually for the TSO; Hugh was finishing his degree. I was happy, if a little diminished by Ria’s absence. (I was always braver with her on hand.) I moved my things from college into a crumbling, crazy share house in Davey Street that we named Bedlamshire. It was home to a fine arts student who painted boots, a reluctant law student who left branches of marijuana on the windowsills to dry, a geologist we’d never actually seen and a fisherman who brought impossibly huge shells home and left them stinking in the courtyard. And me, sometimes, when I wasn’t at Hugh’s.
My music was quieter, lighter, more experimental; a lot of off-string bowing and whispery sul tasto. I was all about showing what the viola could do beyond doubling a bassline, taking the middle voice or wrenching hearts. And getting Hugh and me a double pass off the island. My thesis was titled ‘New Frontiers’. Hugh and I secretly subtitled it ‘Get Me Outta Here’.
I missed Ria terribly and was very unsettled by the fact that she had achieved our goal of leaving Tasmania well before me. But she was studying under a madly brilliant piano virtuoso, moving from strength to strength and sharing all her achievements with me via phone calls and letters and emails. Hugh and I spent quite a few weekends in her tiny Surry Hills flat, where we drank beer and dreamed of one day living and working abroad. At least I thought that’s what we were all dreaming of.
One evening I got back to Bedlamshire to find Hugh had packed up my things into boxes. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked. ‘Are we being evicted?’ I was thinking of the smelly shells.
‘Nope,’ Hugh said with a mysterious smile.
I narrowed my eyes at him.
‘I’m getting you outta here.’
‘What? But I’m not nearly finished my thesis.’ Already my thoughts were flying over Bass Strait. ‘And these guys need the rent.’
‘I found someone for your room. She’s a comedian. They’ll love her.’ Then he held up a set of keys. ‘And I bought us a house.’
‘You what? Where?’
‘Newtown.’
‘Newtown, Sydney?’
‘No. Newtown, Hobart, you dill.’
‘Oh.’ I felt my face fall. I picked it up again. ‘Well, that’s a good place for an investment. How can you afford it?’
‘Coralie. She left me enough for a decent deposit, and AbelTas have offered me a job on their design team as soon as uni finishes. So I just sort of jumped in.’
‘But we haven’t left yet, Hugh. We’re meant to go off and find ourselves in Central Park or in grimy London flats. We’ll come back one day probably, but we can’t just not leave.’
‘Why not? This is home. Everything’s here. Our families, work, your orchestra. We can have holidays away.’
‘But we can find work on the mainland, overseas. This is what we dreamed about.’
‘You dreamed about it, Zannah. You and Ria.’
‘You were there too, Hugh, in those dreams.’ I felt desperate. ‘Rent the house out and we’ll come back to it in a few years.’
‘Live there with me for a few years and we’ll rethink then.’
‘Rent it out for one year.’
‘Live with me for one year.’ He took my hands. ‘Come on, Susannah. I’ll never get these responsibilities anywhere else. Being in a small state is an advantage, and I can’t afford a three-bedroom house in Sydney. It’s sensible.’
‘Did you get yourself some slippers a
nd a La-Z-Boy too?’ I was getting shouty. ‘I don’t want to be sensible. I want to be young! How dare you just pack up all my things and assume my life away as though I’m your kept woman.’ I started wildly unpacking boxes.
He put his palms up. ‘Zannah —’
‘What if I say no?’ I yelled. ‘What if I say I got a job with the SSO? Would you come with me?’
‘Have you got a job with the SSO?’
‘No, but what if I did?’
His face hardened. ‘I wouldn’t shout about it.’
‘Where have you put all my music books?’
He spoke calmly. ‘I’ve put them in the house already. It has a music room. That’s what sold me in the end.’
I eventually agreed to a year. And then the TSO offered me part-time permanency, Hugh got a promotion, musical theatre productions picked up in Hobart and I had more work than I needed. We tumbled into what I think must have been the bit before the middle of love.
And now he’s the one kicking career goals on the mainland while I’m in a West Hobart wardrobe rocking myself to sleep. He’s only called twice. Once was to check I’d paid the water bill. I’m going to stop calling him. Upper hand.
I am miffed. Miff, I realise, is on my shoulder so often these days that I hardly notice it. It’s probably left a permanent chip.
FRIDAY 30th JUNE
Eloise and I took Valda a new lipstick. I made the mistake of calling out, ‘Yoo-hooo?’
‘I do dislike yoo-hooing,’ came a voice from the bedroom. Valda appeared behind it.
‘Oh, Valda,’ I said. ‘Look at you go with that frame. Well done. That’s terrific!’
She eyed me for a moment and said, ‘It’s not terrific, not one bit.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I know.’
‘How can you know? I don’t see your frame.’
There was silence, then Eloise said, ‘Right. Good chat,’ and I said, ‘It’s a lovely day.’
