The Best Thing

by Margo Lanagan

  I shake my head to clear it. ‘I don’t know how I feel!’ I say weakly.

  ‘Well, you’d better find out before too long, my sweet,’ Mum says as I go to the stairs. ‘People are hurting while you make up your mind.’

  ‘Oh thanks, Mum. That’s so-o helpful.’ I stamp up the stairs. From the fireside, nothing.

  I’m testing myself, I guess. Walking myself like a dog, like the retired couples at Bondi walk themselves, I find myself heading over to Pug’s territory. I’m carefully not thinking about Pug, the way I’ve been teaching myself to. I push those little, strong pictures and scent-memories and skin-memories back into their boxes if they stick their heads out. So I’m doing that until I stand in front of the house, which of course is exactly the same, except that the frangipani is bare, the yard full of the dead leaves. I get paralysed there. He’s at training. But training’s nearly over; Joe might come home any second; maybe Pug’s not even at training but up there reading The Fist! He could sit up and look out that window any time! I’m stuck, looking up and kind of wishing, you know?

  In the end I do chicken out and go, gradually walking faster as I start coming back to the real world—God, what am I doing here?! When I get back to King Street and the crowd I wilt against a wall, having been so stupid and come so close.

  And now the house is stuck in my head, grey and run-down like the house of a dead person. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d moved out, unable to keep on coming back to the place. Even living with the raving Magninis would be preferable to that coffin, even tooling around the streets with brain-free Ed. I begin to understand, I think, some of Pug’s life, his urge to keep moving, to shape the days, to find a rhythm for them. It’s my urge too now, after all.

  Having gone through Newtown once, I’ve broken my resolve. Of course I don’t stay away. It’s too close and convenient, and that’s where I go, on a sunny clear winter morning when you’d never expect the worst.

  I’m standing at the lights to cross Erskineville Road when he touches my arm. ‘Mel?’

  ‘Oh!’ I stare at him in terror, in amazement at the reality of him, the actual, three-dimensional existence of him outside my mind. All this time he’s been breathing, growing, watching the world with those wide green eyes, thinking. God, what’s he been thinking? Inside I cringe.

  His face clouds and clears and clouds over again. We’re strangers. But remember all that—? But you pushed me away. Still, seeing you now … His eyes are really urgently trying to read my face. God knows what’s written there, but it’s as if my willpower is being vacuumed out of me, shloop!, and there’s only this puppet-body left behind, thinking, Of course I only sort of broke up with him! How could I face this and decide never to see him again?

  ‘How’ve you been?’ Not that I want to know, but I can’t stand gawping for ever.

  ‘Okay.’ I know an automatic response when I hear one.

  People are gathering around us for the next lights. He pulls me by the elbow out of them, not taking his eyes off me. And I can’t take mine off him, the winter sunlight on his skin, the little scab and bruise beside his eye.

  ‘You goin’ out with someone?’ he says.

  I shake my head quickly—I can’t bear him thinking that. But he has been thinking that, for weeks!

  ‘You on your way somewhere?’

  ‘Just walking,’ I say really faintly—it sounds so frivolous somehow.

  ‘To where?’

  ‘Nowhere. Nowhere important.’ I know exactly what’s going to happen. I’m weak with relief and wanting him, and confusion and resistance and God knows what else.

  He takes my hand and hurries me home, not looking at me or speaking to me the whole way. I only glance at him a couple of times, half-running along beside him full of scrabbling hormones and emotions.

  He shuts the front door behind us, kisses me against the hall wall. I nearly come right there, with the weight of him against me and him being so intense after so many weeks of starvation, of solitude—it’s as if he’s pouring fireworks into my brain. He’s holding me up by my head at the end; the rest of me is melted mush floating somewhere below.

  ‘Come upstairs.’ Feel like I’m flying, my feet reaching down to tip the stairs one by one, just to say hullo again.

  The room is the way I left it, except light and bright and exposed to the street without the frangipani leaves, a sunlit square on the unmade bed. He kicks stuff out of the way to shut the door, then unwinds my scarf. He undoes my coat buttons, fast and efficient, and I stand there like a doll while he hurries it off my shoulders and bends over to get my hands out of the sleeves. He’s still not looking at me. ‘Dino?’

  He stands up, unzipping his jacket. The warmth and the smell of him flow out and over me, so-o-o familiar, so summery I could cry.

  He pulls his black T-shirt off. He’s not smiling at all—his eyes are staring blank, like marbles. He grabs the bottom of my jumper. ‘Putcha arms up,’ he mutters.

  After a second I do. It’s a bit scary. He’s never been like this before; always before he was happy to let me lead things. We used to get the giggles when our shoelaces got knotted or our clothes tangled. This is serious.

  He drops my jumper on the floor and lifts my chin to unbutton my shirt. He puts his arms around me, peering over my shoulder to see the bra catch as he unfastens it. Small muscles in his shoulder move, millimetres from my nose. I’m really, really, jumpingly sensitive all over. When he bends and leans his cheek against one breast, undoing my jeans, I have to stop breathing so I don’t flinch. Then he pushes me back against the bed so that my knees buckle and I sit down. He kneels and takes off my shoes and socks, and wrenches the jeans off with my underpants caught inside.

  ‘Dino.’ I’m still scared, because I’m naked and cold and I can’t tell whether he’s being rough because he’s angry or just impatient. He pulls my knees apart and kneels between them, and presses his front against mine, moving his hands up and down my back. His face is in my shoulder and neck, and then a few centimetres away, the marble-y look all gone. Around his pale green-streaked irises are circles of darker green, solid like jade.

  ‘You feel great,’ he whispers.

  I’m embarrassed to look at him any longer. I put a hand on his chest. Then he’s stroking my hair off my face. His hands follow his eyes, stroking, down the insides of my arms, my sides, up my neck and all over my face. He lays his thumbs on my eyelids and kisses me, runs his hands up and down my cold legs. Everything he does makes me catch my breath. I force myself to keep my eyes open and not groan.

  Finally he pushes me down on the bed, the sun in my eyes, and lays himself on top of me. He drags a blanket over us, kicking off his shoes at the same time, and quickly works his jeans off. ‘Open ya eyes,’ he whispers, and he’s there watching as he slides into me. I feel very, very tight.

  Then there’s a pause. Every tiny sensation is brand new and fiercely familiar at the same time, shocking me with recognition and surprise. It’s been weeks! How did I last? How did I stand it!

  ‘I’m scared to move,’ he says, laughing a bit.

  ‘Why, will you lose it?’

  He nods. I listen to our breathing, watch his beautiful face. He shakes his head, shifts his body minuscule-ly, bites his lip. ‘Well, this is fuckin’ great, isn’t it?’ he mutters.

  I can’t stop grinning. ‘Yes, it is,’ I sputter. I link my ankles behind him. ‘Ah,’ he warns, closing his eyes. He bares his teeth, I move again, and he comes, giving me a little soft shaky kiss. Present but not present.

  And then I do, the shivers going right up to the top of my head and out through my toes as he keeps the kiss going. It’s one of the strongest I’ve ever had.

  And he knows it, of course. He’s staring into my face when I open my eyes, the sun in his hair, reflections of my sunlit face in his eyes. ‘Y’okay?’ he says in a half-whisper.

  I nod and he starts kissing and kissing me. Somewhere along the way I start crying, and by the time we begi
n to again my hair is wet and my ears are full of water. It doesn’t seem to worry him that I’m crying. He just keeps wiping the tears with his thumbs. It doesn’t worry me, either. It’s not that I’m sad. It’s not that I don’t want to be here. I’ve wanted to be here for so long, and not allowed it, for some weird reason. And now that I am, it’s more than the sex; the sex is just the first, blind layer of cells reaching out, contacting and welding together, just the (best) outward sign of the whole bodyful being tweaked forward into him, and the larger tugging, of that cloud of me that inhabits, floats above, is dragged around by my body, into the edges of the cloud-self Pug. It seemed so small a thing to withhold, and now the hugeness of giving it steals my breath, forces out tears.

  He lies down beside me and will not let go, will not relax his arms around me.

  ‘We gotta do somethin’ about this,’ he says.

  ‘About what, out of about a million things?’

  ‘We gotta get married or somethin’.’ Did he really say that?! ‘You’re not gettin’ outa here till we’ve got a place worked out, and a date, and a time, and a promise you’ll be there. I can’t hack you leavin’ and just disappearin’. You get me?’ Real anger jabs through the gentleness. He turns my head to face him, wanting an answer.

  ‘Yeah, I get you,’ I say, sniffing.

  ‘I mean it. You can’t just fuckin’ walk off, right?’

  I feel myself going red.

  He gives me a little shake. ‘I think you like me. I think you like doing this with me, anyway. And maybe more, I don’t know.’ He’s watching me as if he’s trying to read some very small writing on my eyeballs. Then he pulls the blanket up over us and really snuggles in to me.

  ‘When people get together, like us, you know?’ he says, right next to my ear (I nod, wanting to smile, and knowing I mustn’t, at his seriousness), ‘Well, they start off, and then they sorta go along together for a while, and then … they get to some place where they both know it’s gotta end.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying’—he takes a deep breath—’that you say it’s gotta end, but you’re wrong. You don’t really reckon it’s over, and I don’t either. Nothin’s happened that I can see, that means we have to finish it. Unless you’re having me on and you really are seeing some other bloke.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ I’m trying to think fast. ‘It’s like I told you, about my parents going off at me.’

  ‘Well, isn’t it all—like, he knows now. So maybe we could go on, only with him knowing, like it shoulda been first off.’

  ‘Oh, my dad doesn’t care. He’s gone now.’ I curl my back against him under the blanket.

  The bed shakes, and Pug’s head hangs above me. ‘Huh?’

  ‘He’s gone. He left home. He’s living with that woman I told you about.’

  Pug tumbles down in front of me and claims some blanket, staring. ‘What, did he clear out because of you telling him about us?’

  I breathe deeply. The truth feels like an express train about to rush out of a tunnel, horn blasting, lights blazing. I can’t meet his eyes. ‘I don’t know. I was over here when he left. That day I was sick, last time I saw you.’

  He lies thinking and watching me. ‘So that time I called you on the phone, he’d already gone.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So what you were sayin’, like, they were watchin’ you like a—’

  ‘It was all bullshit.’

  Pause. ‘Right.’ Pause. ‘So what was really happenin’, then? Your mum and dad did know about us? Didn’t know about us?’

  ‘Sort-of knew.’ Pause. Pug is obviously getting confused. ‘I told them it was finished.’

  ‘But it wasn’t.’

  ‘But I wanted it to be.’

  A snort of disbelief. ‘Why’dja wannit—’

  ‘I don’t know!’ I nearly shout. I can’t stand it any more. ‘It was—hormones, or nervous tension, or—Christ, I don’t know! Now that I’m here, with you, I just do not know. When I was there, thinking my life over, working out what to do with myself, it just seemed like the right thing—you know, it didn’t seem like we—’ What a performance! Pug is watching so closely I’m sure he can tell I’m covering up something. ‘Seemed like we weren’t compatible, you know?’

  Lo-ong pause. Go on. Spring me. Say you don’t believe me.

  ‘But now’s okay?’ he says carefully.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘How do we seem now, to you? Are we, like, “compatible” now?’ He moves his face in close to mine.

  ‘Oh, yes. Now we are.’

  Pause. Breathing.

  ‘Reckon you’d better stay here, then. Where you know what’s what, eh.’

  Finally I look him in the eye. I don’t know what’s what. I don’t. The path forks right here and now in front of me—tell him now or keep on lying. I stare for a long time down both paths, but both lead straight into the identical dark forest. Bugger it.

  He kisses my forehead. ‘What’s goin’ on in there?’

  ‘Too much,’ I say. ‘Too much.’

  ‘Looks like it.’ He watches. He waits. A long time. Then he says, ‘You look all different,’ touching my face.

  ‘Different how? Don’t tell me. Fatter.’

  ‘No, not fat! It’s … you don’t look like you’ll blow away in the wind any more, like you did.’

  ‘That’s because there’s someone else holding me down.’ He doesn’t understand. ‘There’s actually not more of me, there’s more of someone else.’

  He takes his hand away. Utter confusion. ‘You said there wasn’t someone else—’

  ‘Not someone else like that, you dope. Someone else like—’ I try to catch his hand but he pulls it away, aghast at me. ‘Like—’ I get hold of it and push it under the blanket, down to my new solid, anchoring, slightly curved belly, hold it there until he stops resisting. ‘Someone else like that.’

  ‘Like what?’ The baby is swirling against the back of his hand. Can’t he feel it? I’m so glad. So terrified. Glad, terrified, glad …

  ‘Like that. Inside me.’ I can’t make it any clearer.

  Time stops. The baby swirls and swirls. Pug turns his hand over. His eyes never leave my face.

  ‘From … us?’ A voice can tremble, saying two short syllables.

  ‘Yes.’

  His other hand is behind my head, gripping my hair hard. ‘Mel. You know me; I’ll believe anything you fuckin’ say. Don’t say yes if it’s not yes, okay? Tell me straight.’

  ‘It’s yes,’ I say, looking straight at him. ‘There hasn’t been anyone else. It can’t be anyone else’s but yours.’

  I see him decide to believe me, the fear easing off his face. Pause. He gives a mad chuckle. Pause. ‘You’re blowin’ my mind here, girl. Dead set?’ He stares. ‘It must be—to be moving—’

  ‘Beginning of November.’

  ‘Fu-uckin’ hell. Beginning of November. Fu-uck.’ His voice drops to a whisper and he listens to the baby under his hand. ‘Aw, man! You feel that?’

  I nod and grin. ‘Somersaults.’

  He pulls me to him, his face ageing ten years. ‘How long’ve you been feeling it?’

  ‘A couple of weeks, maybe.’ I try to make it sound like nothing. Fat chance. ‘Oh God, don’t look at me like that.’

  ‘If I hadn’t seen you today, but.’

  ‘But you did!’

  ‘I still wouldn’t know!’

  ‘But you do! You do know. You do know.’

  ‘Would you’ve gone through the whole thing not sayin’?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ That’s one thing I can say with complete sincerity. ‘I really, really don’t know.’

  We stare at each other, all shaken up.

  ‘Ah, mate.’ He scoops me up, pulls me on top of him, hangs onto me. I drop my head beside his and two tears roll up into my eyebrows. ‘With any other girl this’d be a fuckin’ disaster, you know?’

  ‘You mean to say it’s not?
’ I have to laugh a little.

  ‘It’s great. It’s great. You’ll never get rid of me now. A kid’s gotta have a father, right?’

  ‘Hmm, I guess. I guess it doesn’t hurt to have a father … well, it can hurt, but it doesn’t necessarily have to.’

  ‘I thought you were gone,’ he says into my ear. ‘I thought you’d never see me again, the way things were goin’. Now I find out I’ve gotta stick around you for another—what? Sixteen, eighteen years? Shit, eh?’ I can hear him grinning.

  ‘A life sentence, pretty well.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says wonderingly.

  Harding might also have disposed of Giovannini more quickly, having decked him in the 3rd round with a crushing right hook and punished him remorselessly with hooks and uppercuts from then onwards, losing only the 7th round in addition to the first … Giovannini sprang out for the 11th round in search of a knockout. For 50 seconds, the two boxers slugged at each other like a couple of street fighters. Then Harding connected with a telling left hook and Giovannini slowed. Another left and his knees buckled. Still another and, mouthguard protruding, he was destined for the canvas. Harding gave him one more to ensure he wouldn’t get lost on the way.

  It gets dark early, these nights. King Street is cold, and sweet with petrol fumes. I ring Mum from the phone box by the post office.

  ‘Oh, hullo. Where are you?’

  ‘With Dino. I’ve been breaking the news.’ He’s here with me; I’m wearing him like a cloak.

  ‘Oh, yes? How did he take it?’

  ‘Pretty well, pretty well. He’s quite happy about it, actually.’

  ‘Now who would’ve suspected that?’ she says drily.

  ‘Oh, shut up, Mum. Anyway, I’m just ringing to tell you I’ll probably spend the night over here.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I guess you two have got a lot to, um, talk about, hey?’ She didn’t even miss a beat!

  ‘Yes, we have. Lots.’

  ‘Is the boy there with you? I’d like a word with him if that’s okay with you.’

  ‘She wants to talk to you! I hiss at Pug.

  ‘Shit. Hullo? Yeah, hi. Yeah … I’m pretty rapt, yeah … Well, thanks, I guess … yeah … geez, you don’t have to say that … oh, that’s nothin’. You should meet my folks … yeah … that’s okay … that’s okay … right, yeah. Bye.’