by Thom Conroy
‘Where?’
THE ANIMALS
Bruce and I meet in a café in an alley open only to foot traffic. We sit towards the back under a burnt-out bulb with a pool of grey light at our feet. Were the meeting not so despicable, the setting would be comic. But as I take my seat, I am overcome with the urge to laugh, and so I do.
‘This isn’t funny,’ Bruce says. He glances over at the dark slab of the bar, the row of cheap brown bottles. ‘Okay, it is maybe a little funny.’
We order lunch and beers. I’ve rung the man named Hamish Lippleton in the alley outside. He answered with a grave but cheerful ‘G’day’, and nearly hooted into the phone when I told him my name. I’ve arranged to meet him at 45 Tindell Terrace, my childhood home, in an hour.
‘I don’t see why you scheduled a meeting right after lunch,’ Bruce says. His knees are pressed against mine under the table.
‘I want this lunch to end with us promising never to see each other again,’ I say. ‘Not in a hotel room.’
‘That’s why I wanted to talk to you.’
‘So we could end up in a hotel room?’
Bruce puts his empty beer mug down on the table. ‘Course not,’ he says. ‘Don’t twist my words. Don’t do that.’
‘This is absurd.’ I might follow this line with a splendid exit, but lunch is still on the way and I’m starved. And then there’s the fact that I’m not entirely sure I’m opposed to this lunch ending in a hotel room.
‘I’m sorry,’ Bruce says. He lowers his voice. ‘I don’t understand it, this thing we have—’
‘It’s called grief, you arsehole.’
‘There’s more to it.’
I shake my head at this claim. More to it. There isn’t. I think. There can’t be. And if there was, what would it matter? For the second time I find myself wondering who Bruce is. Is he who I’ll find waiting for me?
We eat silently, quickly. For the duration of the meal, we are animals and everything feels very easy. When it’s over, I take Bruce’s hand across the table. I don’t mind when he looks around, nervous. In fact, it pleases me to distress him so.
‘You know what I just figured out?’ I say.
‘What?’
‘We don’t hold each other to any standard. We’re like animals who’ve outrun a bush fire. We’re standing on the edge of the ashes, and we’re panting … But the fire’s out, and now we’ve got to keep walking.’
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MEMBRANE
As I turn onto the dead-end that is Tindell Terrace, I pass through a membrane. It’s not that I re-enter my childhood, not exactly, but rather that I feel as if I’m reduced to a child’s understanding of the world. I’m nervous, vaguely frightened, and the ordinary details of the street seem to splinter into two layers. On the surface layer nothing is quite comprehensible. Trees and doors and letterboxes are muddles of colour. Sound seems to blend into colour, to be a part of it. Under this layer somewhere are the solid objects I believe in, but as I pull my car over to the side of the street, this knowledge recedes.
I have that feeling that I get. A premonition. Of what exactly I can’t say, but a feeling of dread begins to circulate.
My ankle turns on the strip of yellow grass beside the footpath, and I am flooded with panic. I giggle. I may even be a little bit drunk. The feeling of Bruce’s knees against mine remains, a shape on my skin.
And so it is that — drunk, giddy, and at least superficially guilty — I look directly into the eyes of our family’s old nemesis, Phillip Botage. He is in his usual spot, on the second storey of his villa in the right-hand side of the window, a good ten metres away, maybe more, but I look straight into his eyes. Botage recognises me, and he knows I recognise him, despite the distance. I only glance at him, a second’s look, and yet I can feel the malignant energy surging out of his gaze. But then I hear someone say my name, and I turn away.
Oh, I think, here is the sun on the footpath. Here is a breeze that threatens my dress.
Out of the corner of my eye, Botage’s window lingers. I don’t glance at it again, but it occurs to me how far away it is, how brightly the sun shines on the dark panes of all the houses. I could not have seen Botage from this distance. I simply could not have. And if I did, I could not have gauged the expression on his face, let alone been held by his stare.
‘Hamish Lippleton,’ a man says. He’s taking my hand before I see him properly. What I notice first are shaggy sideburns, dark with new sprouts of grey. When I notice the face, I see his smile. Pink cheeks. A high forehead. He’s wearing an old pair of shorts, a dress shirt opened halfway. Looking at him, I feel put upon but also trustful. I think, I’m in the company of a friendly dog. Something large, something needy.
Hamish walks me along the footpath to my house. He doesn’t turn at the drive, where I would turn, but at the high hedge to the rusty letterbox and the lopsided footpath along which my father tried — uselessly — to grow sunflowers every summer. As we’ve been walking, Hamish has been explaining that he is not the tenant of my house.
‘Refugee Services.’ He points to what was the window of the spare room, and there I see the faces of two girls. They are about ten years old, pale brown and seemingly identical.
‘Kah and Bwe. Twins,’ Hamish says, starting up to the house. He stops when he sees I’m not following.
‘Why did you want to meet with me? I thought something was wrong with the house.’
Hamish winces. ‘Wrong?’ He motions for me to follow. ‘It’s more that something is right.’
A couple comes walking out to meet us. Both of them are thin, and smiling with a certain fierceness. This is a performance, it occurs to me. And what is being performed is courtesy. The woman is wearing an orange sarong and her skin is pale brown like the twins’, but the man is dark, his lips purple. He wears brown pants, a white shirt several sizes too large.
Hamish motions to the man. ‘Thein,’ he says. ‘Djuna, the owner.’
I put out my hand but Thein bows and takes a small step backwards.
‘This is Ka Be,’ Hamish says. Ka Be rushes forward and bows curtly. She does not step away, but I notice her eyeing my hand.
Now I am being ushered into the front door of my childhood home by strangers. My head is still reeling a bit from the beer and my skin is prickly. I’ve got Botage’s eyes in my head and, at the same time, I doubt that I’ve seen him at all.
Inside is an unsettling mix of cheap new furniture and some of my family’s framed pictures in the hallway. The smell of spices I don’t recognise is very strong. My impulse here is to run. What makes me sit, when offered a place beside Hamish on the sofa, is my mother’s voice instructing me to breathe. I sit, the full length of my leg against Hamish’s, but I cannot seem to take my mother’s advice no matter how many times I try.
‘We are so happy here,’ Thein says. I turn to him, slightly appalled. What I want is to tell him to leave. What I want is to be back at lunch with Bruce. I am, I understand, confused and somewhat irritable.
I turn to Hamish. ‘What do you want?’ This is not me speaking, I want to say. This is somebody I don’t especially like living in my head, and I’m sorry to be rude but you’re partly responsible for putting this other person there.
‘I don’t mean to upset you,’ Hamish says. He notices Ka Be approaching with a mug, and smiles, waits for her to hand it to me.
I take a sniff, expecting something exotic and slightly revolting like mudfish broth. It’s Milo. ‘Drink, drink,’ Thein says. ‘Are you hungry?’
‘I’m not.’ I put the mug on the floor, on the carpet my parents agonised over for nine months before purchasing.
The twins appear now, and, although they are smiling and giggling and talking to one another in crisp English, I take hold of the side of the sofa. Hamish looks at Ka Be and says something high and whiny, a series of sharp sounds. To me, he says, ‘Why don’t we get some air?’
NEW AT PLAY
An hour later I’m sitting on the fl
oor of Joanne’s lounge, dropping plastic army men into the trapdoor of a tower because there was a disease at the police station — which is really the hospital — and all the plastic army men — who are really children from the school — have died. And the dead go into the trapdoor.
Ella hands me a tiny piece of quilted blue fabric. ‘This is the pillow,’ she says. When I don’t answer, she takes the pillow back, leans across me, opens the door at the bottom of the trapdoor tower and places the pillow inside.
‘For the children to land on,’ she says.
‘The dead children,’ I say.
Ella smiles at me. She is trying, I can tell, to keep herself from looking condescending. I am new to play, and she is willing to make allowances.
CHINA
Dinner is fish and chips, and Ella insists on sitting beside me. She offers me chips, invites me to use her tomato sauce, and then asks Joanne if I can read her bedtime stories. I tell Joanne I’d be happy to. And I mean it. Ella is dear. I enjoy my time with her. No, more than enjoy it — I hunger for it. Her presence provides me with something I don’t quite understand but which I know I desperately need.
Ella’s books are nothing like the books I remember as a child. In her books, children are coy, intellectual. Their parents are sad cases, flustered, obese, often drawn from the knees down. I read her three books, cover to cover, and she requests a fourth. A fifth. We run out at seven, and she asks for the first one again. When the lights are finally out, Ella grabs hold of my neck and pulls me harder than I would have thought she was able.
‘Stay with me,’ she says.
Joanne has warned me that this is a ploy. I will be asked to stay so I can talk and prolong bedtime. Joanne has advised against falling for this ploy. This is sound advice, too, am I sure of it. And yet there is nothing I’d rather do.
Lying beside Ella, I tell her that she has to be quiet. That it’s time for sleep, not talking. In the interest of making myself very clear, I say that I will leave if she begins to talk.
‘All right.’ A moment of silence passes, and then she says, ‘Do you want to have children live with you?’
The question catches me off-guard. My mind is still full of plastic army men and the black horse with the oversized pink saddle called Muckle.
‘I don’t know, but, yes, I guess I do.’
‘I want have to three,’ Ella says. ‘Their names will be China — she’s fourteen — Milkshake — she’s six — and Peanut, who is a boy who is six. Those are their nicknames, but everyone will call them by their nicknames so it’s okay if I only tell you their nicknames.’
‘You’ve got it all sorted.’
‘Almost all. We’ll live in a house on a jetty where there won’t be any sharks.’
I chuckle. Put my finger to my lips. ‘You’re supposed to be sleeping.’ But then, because I’m curious and I have the feeling she has an answer, I say, ‘Who will the daddy be?’
‘He will be a man who has to go far away for his job and to live in another place,’ Ella says. ‘That’s why the girl is called China, because that’s far away.’
I stroke a lock of Ella’s hair away from her face, and feel her breath on my arm.
‘That’s sad, for the daddy to live in another place.’
Ella makes eye contact with me, as if she’s searching for something. As if she wants to make sure I mean what I’ve said. Once she’s satisfied that I do, she smiles at me.
‘Yes, it is sad.’
TO HAVE SOMEONE
Earlier today, when we went outside for a bit of fresh air at my house, Hamish Lippleton shuffled me off to the lemonwood in the side garden where my mother had once hung a mobile made of paua shells, and he asked me if my family would consider donating our house to the Burmese Refugee Foundation.
After Ella is asleep, I tell this to Joanne.
‘My God,’ she says, ‘does he think you can simply give away your house?’
‘Mrs Craigge, next door, is donating her house. It’s in her will. Apparently, the Burmese like the spot. It’s got good energy or something.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I told him the house wasn’t for sale or for donation or anything, but he just smiled and kept talking. He said there was more. Just below the terrace, there are other Burmese families recently relocated. A bunch of them, I guess. All of them Muslim refugees from someplace in Burma, I can’t remember. He said that they also wanted to have Botage’s property.’
Joanne takes a long sip of her wine, swallows it and laughs. ‘They want to make themselves quite a commune here.’
‘Not a commune,’ I say. ‘A mosque.’
‘A mosque? What?’
‘Because the property is on the terrace. You’d be able to see the tower thing from the neighbourhoods below.’
‘The minaret.’
I finish the wine Joanne has poured me and accept a second glass. I know I need to be out of the house before Bruce comes home, but the truth is I need to talk to someone.
‘Hell of a day,’ I say.
‘Sorry to get it off to a rocky start.’
‘Please, no, I want to talk to you about Bruce—’ It occurs to me that I’m about to casually confess to Joanne that I’m having an affair, and I stop short. It’s the word affair that stops me. After all, it’s not an affair. It’s … What is it? Random episodes of grief-fuelled sex. But even if it isn’t more, there’s more to it than I’ve let on. What’s odd is that it’s only now, at this very moment, that I comprehend this.
‘Bruce?’ Joanne says. ‘What about him?’
I’m not sure, moment to moment, what it is I will disclose. ‘Bruce,’ I say. I make a little shrugging gesture and picture myself running out of the house without my suitcase. ‘He seems like he’s in a bad place.’
Joanne takes a long, solid drink of her wine. ‘Christ,’ she says. ‘You don’t know the half of it.’
No, I think, you don’t know the half of it.
ON A ROOF
At quarter past ten that night I’m climbing a roof in my sundress. My car is parked behind the rubbish skip for which I know my father will have cancelled collection. At the crest of the peaked roof I’m climbing in a window that does not lock. Or at least at one time it did not. My legs are black with grime, my dress strap is torn and my ankle is leaving behind a dribble of blood.
I come to the window and push on the sash. It doesn’t move. But I’m not discouraged. It hasn’t been opened since I last broke in here when I was fifteen. I heave again. Nothing.
This is where I pause and review. Take a look around me. I see a carpark lit by fluorescent lights along one side. The other side is blocked by trees, and a third side is lined with the road leading south out of town … And what is this? A car is turning off the road into the carpark. AMS Security Services. I lie down on the roof, one hand still touching the locked sash as if for good luck. What I need now is to stay completely calm. A quick circle and security will be gone. And then what? Then, it seems, I am back to being trapped on a roof in a torn dress.
Lying down, I can see the headlights of the security car turn and illuminate the skip, behind which my car, I see from this angle, is not quite as well concealed as I had thought. The security car slows, its brake lights turning the line of trees scarlet. It idles for a moment, and then moves slowly along the driveway just beneath the roof. Just before it’s passed, I hear a jangling sound.
My phone is into its second ring before I have it out of my bag. It takes a half-second longer to turn off than it does to answer, and, inexplicably, I must know this as I press the green button to answer it and put it to my ear.
‘Djuna? Hello? Are you there?’ It’s Joanne. Her voice is meagre, trampled.
Below me a car door closes.
‘I can’t talk.’
‘What was that?’
I can hear footsteps in the gravel. They take a few calculated steps and then stop.
‘Hello?’
I wait. The silenc
e waits too. I hold my breath, and it feels to me like whoever is below must be holding their breath as well. Not a car passes. The river is a few hundred metres away, and only a moment ago it was raucous with squawking and honking and interminable nocturnal mirth. Now all is quiet, except for the pitiful sound of Joanne saying my name.
In the distance, I hear the merciful whooshing of an approaching car. With this sound, the spell cracks. Joanne hangs up and I hear footsteps below. This time they walk without caution. In a moment, a car door closes, and AMS Security is back on the road.
What I should do now is something I can’t quite divine. I should what? Drive to a motel and splurge? After all, it’s my parents’ money card. Or maybe I should stay here the rest of the night and await the dawn. Sleep in my car. Simply start driving north — hey, there’s a plan! Or wander back to 31 Wharenui Street and tap on the glass of the master bedroom until Bruce is unlocking the laundry-room door.
What I do is pull my dress over my head, wrap it over my shoe and drive my foot through the bottom pane of the locked window.
A CALL ON THE MALTESE FALCON-STYLE PHONE
Fifteen minutes later, I’m sitting at one of four desks in my father’s musty but spacious office with Beckett and my notebook both opened in front of me. I’ve got a piece of glass embedded in my knee and a sore calf from the impact, but otherwise I’m fairly settled. I’m not in jail or bleeding from a major artery. I haven’t slept with anyone’s husband for about twenty-four hours, and I have a dry place to sleep, should I ever feel ready. It seems to me as if I might make it to morning and put this day behind me without another episode, until I come to this sentence in Beckett and, without warning, all hope is lost: Unfortunately, our concern here is not with Moll, who after all is only a female …
