The Silence

by Susan Allott

The telephone poles fly by. “He’s volatile,” she says. “He was always like that. I was scared of him as a kid.”

  “You said they moved away before I was born.”

  “They did.” She glares at him. “I remember them. Mandy and Steve. I spent a lot of time with her.”

  “You can’t possibly—”

  “I do!” She looks away from his sensible, doubtful face. “I remember being scared,” she says.

  “I remember that too.” He says it softly. “I remember being scared all the time.”

  She doesn’t reply. Her certainty is slipping, and she can think of no comfort besides alcohol. The landscape has no distractions. Mile after mile of dry scrub. Stark white ghost gums lit up against the blue sky.

  “Will you come and stay with us? There’s plenty of space.” He accelerates. “I can come back to Bay Street with you now to collect your things.”

  She shakes her head. “No, thanks.”

  “For God’s sake, Isla. I’m scared for you, alone in the house with him.”

  “Don’t be. He’d never hurt me.”

  He checks the mirror and pulls back into the middle lane. “We all have a blind spot,” he says. “And he’s yours.”

  32

  Sydney, 1967

  Mandy found Joe on the doorstep, smiling nervously.

  “I noticed Steve’s truck was gone,” he said.

  His words took several seconds to make sense. She was shot through with desire at the sight of him. “He’s out.” She checked her watch, with its stopped hands. “Not sure when he’ll be back. Sorry.”

  “Any chance of a cold beer? It’s hot as hell out here.”

  “You’d best come in, then.” She allowed herself to smile as she turned her back. She’d had him in her head all day. “How have you been?”

  “Not so good. Haven’t made it into work for a day or two.”

  “What you been doing with yourself?”

  He shrugged. “Trying not to hit the whisky before lunch. Going ’round the bend. That’s about it.”

  In the kitchen she took the top off a bottle of beer and handed it to him. “How far ’round the bend did you get?”

  “All the way ’round.” He drank from the bottle. “I keep thinking I can hear a baby crying.”

  Her stomach lurched. The baby often slept for a couple of hours at this time of day, but still, she ought not to have let him in. “Must be Abigail Walker’s little one you can hear.” She sat down at the table. She was pretty sure Abigail hadn’t brought the new baby home yet, but Joe didn’t question it. He pulled a chair out and sat with his legs crossed, his foot resting on his knee.

  “Abigail had a boy,” she said, which was true; Roger Walker had told her the news just yesterday. She’d kept him out on the street, kept the conversation short, but he’d looked curious, like he suspected something. It was harder than she’d thought to keep a baby hidden.

  Joe threw his head back and drained half the bottle. She really should send him on his way. It was good to see him, but. He was thinking what she was thinking, and it was hard to care about much else.

  “You look great,” he said. “What’s happening with you?”

  “Nothing much.” She lit a cigarette and passed it to him. “Too hot to get anything done.”

  Joe’s eyes followed the length of her legs to the hem of her denim skirt, which stopped a few inches short of her knees. She let him take his time. The cigarette burned down in his fingers.

  “That’s true,” he said.

  She stood and opened a window, turned back to face him, and leaned against the countertop. She unbuttoned her blouse. He went to stand, but she held him in his seat by the shoulders and let him kiss her stomach, openmouthed, while she sipped from his beer bottle and watched a cockatoo land on the prop that held up the washing line.

  “Been much too hot for weeks now,” she said, as he lifted her skirt. She closed her eyes and gripped his collar.

  A kookaburra cackled throatily from the back of the yard and then fell silent.

  “Get the fuck out of my house.”

  Steve stood in the kitchen doorway with a shopping bag in each hand. His skin was slick with sweat, the hair on his arms darkened with moisture. He was gripping the bags as if they weighed five tons each.

  “Jesus.” Joe stood up. “Jesus, Steve, I didn’t hear you come in. I didn’t know you were there. I didn’t think—”

  Steve dropped the shopping bags. A child’s pacifier fell from one of the bags and rolled across the linoleum. Mandy hurriedly buttoned her blouse, pulled her skirt down. She was angry before she was shocked or ashamed. She resented Steve for intruding on this moment. She met his gaze and let him see the remains of her desire, her defiance.

  “Don’t just stand there,” she said to Joe. He gaped back at her. “For God’s sake, go home!”

  Steve strode toward Joe, who had backed his way almost to the door, and thrust the palm of his hand into Joe’s chest. “On second thought, mate, how about you stay right where you are and I send you straight through the wall. How about that? How’s that sound?”

  “Steve, look, I’m sorry.” Joe stepped closer to the door. “I’ve been in a bad way lately. It’s no excuse, I know that.”

  “You’ve been in a bad way?” Steve threw Joe against the door, which slammed shut behind him. “Pardon me if my heart isn’t breaking, mate. Pardon me if I’m not surprised you can’t hold on to your own wife.”

  Mandy stepped around the kitchen table, reaching for Steve. She felt dirty now that the pleasure had left her. She was horrified at what he’d seen.

  “Steve. Why don’t we—?”

  “Shut up, Mandy!” Steve held his hand up to silence her. “Keep your whoring mouth shut and don’t come near me until I tell you to.”

  Mandy stood still. She hadn’t known Steve was capable of speaking to her that way. She didn’t recognize him. She’d altered him; she’d sent everything bad.

  “Did you think you’d cheer yourself up by creeping ’round here?” He slammed his palm into Joe’s chest again. The glass shook in the door behind him. “Is that what you thought? Get her feeling sorry for you and see how long it takes before she lets you lift her skirt? How long did it take? An hour? Ten minutes? Five?”

  “Like I said, it’s no excuse.” Joe leaned away from Steve, holding his bandaged hand up. “I can’t defend it.”

  “How about I fix your face so she doesn’t like the look of you so much.” He grabbed Joe by his shirt and flung him backward with greater force than before. “How about that?”

  “Do what you like to my face.” Joe looked down at Steve, who was panting and fuming, his face barely level with Joe’s shoulder. “I deserve it. Go ahead.”

  “Don’t!” Mandy gripped Steve by the arm. “It wasn’t him who started it. I did. It was me who led him on.”

  Steve looked at her with disdain. “Are you sticking up for him now? Are you trying to save his bacon?”

  “It’s true. You know things haven’t been right between us. Let’s sort this out without him. Let him go.”

  Steve turned to her, gripping Joe’s shirt in his fist. “Don’t talk to me about sorting things out. Don’t even think about that.”

  A thin, discordant wail reached them from the hall. Joe tensed, looked around the room, tried to pinpoint the noise.

  “Bloody hell.” Steve clenched his teeth. “That’s all we need.”

  “I’ll get him.” Mandy ran from the room. She heard a scuffle as she rushed down the hall to where the baby slept. A cry of pain sounded behind her. She picked the boy up from his bed and stood a moment, panicked at the shouts and blows from the kitchen. What had she done? Why had she let that happen? She shushed the baby, gave him his pacifier, and to her surprise he quietened in her arms. The warmth of him calmed her.

  “I messed up.” She stood with him in the dark and tried to think what to do. “I really messed up this time.”

  The baby was calm and still again
st her chest as she walked up and down with him, passing his hair through her fingers. From the kitchen she heard another shout, a thud, a chair falling to the floor. Then quiet. She opened the bedroom door and listened, took a few steps closer to the kitchen. The only noise was a small gasping sound.

  She opened the kitchen door. Steve looked up at her from the floor. He sat astride Joe’s chest with his hand at Joe’s throat. Joe was choking, his eyes bulging, legs flailing.

  Mandy screamed, “Steve! You’re going to kill him! Let him go! For God’s sake, Steve!”

  Steve looked down at Joe and considered him for a beat before he eased his grip on his throat. “Get out of here.” Steve stood and Joe rolled away from him, retching. “Get out of my sight!”

  Mandy locked eyes with her husband. His lip was cut and his nose was dripping blood. “You’d have killed him,” she said.

  “Get William out of here, would you?” He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “What did you bring him in here for?”

  She clutched the baby to her, half aware that he was howling in her arms. At the back door, Joe pulled himself to his feet. He glanced across at her, taking in the baby, and she tried to show in her face that she was sorry.

  “Why are you still here?” Steve shouted at Joe. “Get out of my house! And keep away from my wife!”

  Joe stayed where he was. He looked from Mandy to the baby and back. Steve ran at him, sending him into the yard, and he walked backward toward his own house, coughing and spitting. Steve kicked the door shut behind him. A long diagonal crack appeared in the glass, fracturing the pane.

  Mandy sat down at the kitchen table with the baby in her lap, soothing him as best she could, glad of the distraction, the noise. Steve stood at the door awhile with his back to her. She had no idea what he would do or say now. She’d believed, until today, that Steve would never physically hurt anyone, not deliberately.

  She spoke before he could say anything. “I’ve been unhappy for a while. It’s not your fault.”

  He crossed the room and leaned over her, his hand flat on the kitchen table. Blood oozed from his bottom lip. “A while?” he said. “What do you mean, a while?”

  “Since we started trying for a baby. I never really wanted it.”

  William sucked rhythmically on his pacifier. Mandy let him take her finger in his hot, damp hand and shifted his position in her lap. She could feel the fright in his body.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Steve wiped the blood from his mouth. “How long’s it been going on? You and lover boy next door?”

  “Not long.”

  “How long?”

  “Since Louisa left,” she said. “A few weeks.”

  He straightened up, knocking a chair sideways, startling the baby.

  “I should’ve known.” He kicked the chair across the kitchen, where it collided noisily with the stove. “I should’ve known you were seeing another bloke.” He walked across the room and back again. “Do you love him?”

  William started to whine. She held the pacifier in place with her finger. “No,” she said. “It’s not like that.”

  “What’s it like, then?” He bent over her. “Come on. What’s it like?”

  She shifted her chair away from him. She couldn’t lie, now she needed to. She was too exposed before him, after what he’d seen. But there was no way to tell him the truth about it either. She’d never seen anger like this before in her life.

  “It’s nothing serious,” she said.

  “Nothing serious! What’s that meant to mean?”

  The baby began to cry and his pacifier dropped to the floor. She held him closer, rubbing his back. “Don’t make me say it,” she said.

  “It’s just sex, is it? Is that what you mean? Just sex in our kitchen when I’m not home?”

  Keeping her eyes on the boy, she nodded, once.

  He went to the window and looked out at Joe’s house, breathing hard. “God help me if I see his bastard face. I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  A cupboard door beneath the sink stood ajar and he kicked it shut, so hard it sprang open again. He stood back, kicked it again, harder, and then again, until it swung loose from its hinges. In her arms the baby wailed.

  “I know you don’t want me in bed.” He took a beer from the fridge and lifted the lid off with his teeth. “You don’t want me that way, not anymore.”

  “I felt under pressure to get pregnant,” she said. “It changed things between us.”

  Steve drained the bottle and slammed it down on the counter. “Is that why you fucked the bloke next door?”

  She looked at his face and saw pain behind the anger. She felt it as if she’d been hurt herself, the awful agony of it. It would be more than he could bear.

  “Is it?” He was close to tears. “Is that why you fucked him?”

  “Don’t, Steve.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “I’ve never heard you use that kind of language.”

  “No?” He put his hands flat on the kitchen table. “I guess it’s a day of firsts, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, you’re not. I know you’re not sorry because I saw you.” He pointed to a spot on the linoleum. “You stood right there with your eyes shut and you grabbed that bastard by the neck. And when you saw me, you took your time letting go of him. D’you know that?”

  She looked away, flooded with shame, and he held her by the chin, turned her face toward him.

  “You’re just sorry I interrupted you,” he said.

  “That’s not true.”

  “I think it is.” He stepped away from her. “I think you want rid of me and you don’t have the decency to say it.”

  She stood, settled the baby on her hip, and tried to find the right words. He looked at her like a drowning man. She didn’t know if she could hold on to him now, or if she should.

  “I did feel that way for a while,” she said. “I started to think I’d stopped loving you.”

  He dug at his eyes. “I knew that. I felt it.”

  “I started to think maybe I couldn’t love anyone.” She took a step closer to him. He didn’t move away. “I’ve always had this fear, that I’m like my mother.”

  He shook his head at her. “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I’m selfish and cold.” She felt tears coming. “What if we had a baby and I didn’t love it enough? What if I felt nothing at all?”

  “I must have told you a hundred times you’d make a good mum—”

  “That’s because you’ve got me on a pedestal. You worship me and I don’t deserve it.”

  He considered her, scratching the dry blood on his lip. “I can’t argue with that.”

  “You always loved me too much.” She rocked the baby, who was quiet now. “I do love you. You might not believe it, but I do, in my way.”

  Steve stared down at the shopping bags, spilled over on the linoleum where he’d dropped them earlier. “I ought to walk straight out of here, Mandy. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t get the hell out of here.”

  “I don’t have one,” she said. “But I’d like you to stay.”

  “Would you?”

  She nodded, and he sobbed with undisguised relief. She reached out to him and he shook his head, turned away from her. He was dry-eyed when he looked at her again.

  “I want you to respect me.” He picked the chair up from the floor and slammed it down. “Can you manage that? Is that asking too much?”

  She shook her head. The baby stirred and she lifted him up. He was drowsy, half asleep. She kissed his eyes, his cheeks.

  “I’ll help you raise him,” she said. “If you still want that.”

  Steve looked at her guardedly. “Do you mean that?”

  She nodded. “We could adopt him, like you said. Stop hiding him away.”

  “I thought you didn’t want the baby. You said it was a crazy idea. He’s not ours, you said.”

  “I want to give you what you want.” S
he stepped closer to him. He took the boy from her and rocked him until he settled in against his chest. “I know how much you want a family.”

  “He has a mother,” Steve said. “A family of his own who love him.”

  “He’ll have a better life this way, won’t he? Isn’t that what you promised his mother?”

  “I promised that to a lot of people over the years.”

  “This time it’ll be true,” she said. “We don’t know where he’d end up if we let him go, do we? He might get taken to one of the Homes.”

  Steve fell quiet and Mandy stood beside him, watching the baby sleep. She had a whisker of a chance, she figured, to hold on to her marriage. She’d said things in the past few minutes that she’d never have said, if not for the shock and regret, the honesty that came with pain. It might have been the scare she needed.

  “I’ll give it my best shot, Steve. If you think you can forgive me.”

  He kept his eyes on the baby. “You mean the world to me, Amanda. I don’t suppose I can stop feeling that way.”

  “Let me make it up to you, then. Let me try.”

  He gave a small nod. She took William back from him. His little face was hot against hers.

  “I’ll murder that bastard if he comes near you again. I’ll kick him all the way back to England. He’ll wish he never came to this country. I’m bloody serious.”

  She swayed with the baby in her arms. The yard was falling into darkness. The tea trees were misaligned through the broken pane in the back door.

  “He’ll stay away now. He doesn’t want me really. He wants his wife and child back.”

  “And what about you? Will you stay away from him?”

  She nodded and reached out to him again, took his hand in hers. This time he didn’t move away.

  33

  Sydney, 1967

  Joe sat down on the deck and caught a burst of birdsong from the trees at the end of the yard. A myna bird, he thought, catching sight of one, its black head and brown body. He wasn’t sure how he knew the name. Louisa liked birds; she was always pointing them out. Maybe that was it. Or Isla might have told him; she was clever that way, remembered everything. He loosened his tie. Every thought in his head took him back to his wife and child. Not to mention that baby crying next door. A man could lose his mind.