by Joan London
Why, when Tod was so kind to her, showed her how the trains worked, took her on drives to the Dandenongs and to his favourite restaurants and bars – entered smiling, waving at people who didn’t see him – was she, soon after she moved in with him, so desperate to get away? There was something increasingly intense about his chubby hands as he cooked and put down plates for her. Instinctively she swerved away so he wouldn’t touch her when he opened the car door for her. She stopped running past him in a towel. Once she saw him bringing in her washing when it started to rain, tenderly gathering and folding her scrappy underwear. People often rang and cancelled outings with him. He chewed gum non-stop for his breath. Sometimes he was so tense he roared off in his MG for a drive. There was a devastated look in his eyes when he watched television at night, gnawing on his fingers. She wanted to write a letter about him to someone, a cruel letter about being sexually repressed. She wanted to feel free here, not trapped by pity.
Once, in the middle of the night in his spare bedroom, she woke gasping, surfacing for air. In her sleep, Miriam Kershaw’s words had come back to her, in her English accent, from her bed with her eyes closed. Her last words.
Tod means death. Don’t go with that boy.
After the interview with Maynard – he told her she could start straight away – she had a coffee at the corner espresso bar and copied down Cecile’s phone number from the notice board. Cecile happened to be home that day and told her which tram to catch to her house. That evening Maya went back to Tod’s home unit and told him she had to live closer in now, for her new job. She was starting work tomorrow. Good old Tod put her bag in the boot of the MG and, his jaw working overtime, his hi-fi turned up full blast, drove her to Cecile’s.
It was night again and she was still wearing her old trackies. Was it because she was so alone that she found it hard to get a grip on things? There was nobody she could possibly write a letter to about this. If she did, where would she begin? The Flynns’ house. The house of the dead.
She lay back on her bed. What sort of family lived in a house like that? A man who wasn’t interested in home. A woman without joy. Why wasn’t Dory happy? Miriam Kershaw said that was why you got cancer. Loss of hope. Had Dory been homesick? She was a teacher, and went to church and had friends. Why hadn’t Maynard made her happy? Or she him? Maya asked him once if he’d had any affairs before Dory was sick and he couldn’t help laughing. Many affairs? she corrected herself, hating to seem naïve, but by then he had his coat on and was blowing her a kiss.
But Dory had Andrew. Is there anything I can do for you? Anything at all? As if the whole world was in mourning for his mother.
Each time she thought of Andrew’s face she held her breath for a moment. The underlids of his eyes were swollen like little ramparts to hold in grief. His dark hair had reddish glints left over from childhood and his clothes were loose and crumpled on his tall, thin frame. He must have slept in them all night beside Dory’s bed. When he smiled she saw that something which was guarded and cloudy in Maynard, in him ran clear.
He had strong, narrow fingers. She could feel them now, holding hers.
He was forever out of bounds for her. She had done something to herself which cut her off from him, as well as from her past, and most people her own age.
Perhaps she should quit, just not ever go back.
She woke late to a rainless day and the smell of something reassuring. Toast! She sniffed the air for another human presence. Cecile! She stumbled to the top of the stairs. Down in the kitchen Dieter was sitting on a stool at the bar, munching toast and sorting through Cecile’s mail.
‘Dieter!’ She was even glad to see him. Usually they kept to the unspoken pact between them to ignore one another. ‘How are you?’ She came down into the kitchen.
Dieter waved his buttery knife at the open packet of bread on the bench. ‘Help yourself.’ He must have brought the bread with him. He kept his own jar of cherry jam in the fridge, a Swiss brand. Dieter never smiled and never had been heard to say hello or goodbye. It was restful when you got used to it. If they needed to communicate they always got straight to the point.
‘Do you know when Cecile will be home?’ She pulled her coat on over her stale old tracksuit. Her hair needed washing. There was sunlight on the bamboo leaves in the courtyard. She felt she’d been away in a dark land and had just come back.
He shrugged. ‘Today, I hope. We have bills to pay.’
Dieter’s status in the house was uncertain. He was a partner in Cecile’s company, Prodigal Films, and there were periods when he was around for days on end, watching videos, making phone calls, engaged in long intense discussions with Cecile. The living room filled up with his clothes and papers, became his personal office. He left his video collection here and a stash of ganja in an empty 16mm canister on Cecile’s desk. He stayed up very late. Sometimes he was there in the morning, asleep in his clothes on one of the couches.
He had thin-lidded eyes, very sharp, and a tight-closed mouth. At first sight Maya thought he looked hostile, even spiteful, but she soon found out that he wasn’t interested in the personal. Cecile said he was like a scientist about life. When he was working with Cecile he despised all interruptions, as if what he was doing was all that mattered in the world.
He had a room somewhere with a bunch of musicians. Although, like Cecile, he had a day job at NuVision, as a telecine operator, he never seemed to have any money. It was always Cecile who bought their meals. He had the traveller’s mentality, Cecile said, unworried, he was always saving up to go somewhere else.
So far Prodigal Films had made a music video for the band of one of Dieter’s housemates, and a corporate video for Cecile’s father which they were still editing. Cecile was the director and Dieter the cinematographer.
‘You are not at work?’ Dieter said ‘v’ for ‘w’. His ‘verk’ had a driven, obsessive sound. It was a word he often used.
‘My boss’s wife died. It was her funeral yesterday.’
‘So? You are not needed in the office?’
All at once she thought of mail spilling out of the brass letterbox, faxes scrolling across the floor, the answering machine overloaded with urgent calls. What if Maynard was too grief-stricken to work and did not come back for weeks? What would happen to Global Imports? How could she desert him at a time like this? She was not holding the fort.
She peered at the clock on the microwave. ‘My God, is it really eleven?’
Coffee roared through the percolator on the stove. His arm shot out at once to turn off the gas. Fresh, perfectly timed coffee was another of Dieter’s obsessions.
‘Black?’ Dieter said. ‘You buy no milk, I think.’
It was nearly twelve o’clock by the time she hurried down the street to the office. The Global letterbox in the hall had already been cleared. Strong chemical scents seeped out from beneath Mimi’s door as she passed, perhaps a Paraffin Treatment was in full swing. The dusty smell of the staircase made her heart lurch. He wouldn’t have come in, she told herself, not yet.
She could see the dark shape of his head through the frosted glass of the partition. He was standing at the table and further back against the window was another shape. Somebody was with him. She hung her coat up and walked in.
He was photocopying a pile of documents. In a black suit and tie and a white shirt, as if he were still dressed for the funeral. He looked handsome, well-groomed, in control, with the little smile fixed on the corners of his lips as he turned towards her.
Standing behind him was a very short, broad Asian man in a well-cut black coat.
‘This is Mr T, my good friend and new partner. His full name is much too hard for us Westerners.’ There was a twinkle between the two partners, a nodding and showing of teeth. Mr T was in control, which meant he had the money, she could tell that from Maynard’s readiness to please.
‘And this is Maya.’ A little pause made her wonder if he’d already spoken of her.
‘Yes yes yes,’ s
aid Mr T.
‘Maynard, I’m sorry …’ Her voice went creaky. There was so much she was sorry about, Dory, the flowers, her lateness, not being there for him. ‘I wasn’t sure whether …’
‘Best to carry on, I think.’ He went on photocopying, quite stern, not looking at her. ‘Thanks for the bouquet, by the way.’ Far from being slowed by grief, he seemed energised. There was a sleek, glittering look about him that she’d never seen before. His whole presence had changed. Was he in shock? Or did he feel relief? He was pretending not to care.
He gathered up the documents, knocked them straight, slid them into a new briefcase. ‘We’re off to eat.’ He spoke lightly, blinking, as if to bat away her gaze. ‘There’s going to be some changes. I’ll brief you after lunch.’
There was mail to sort, a bit of filing, an invoice to prepare. She worked furiously, though her hands shook and her eyes blurred. In fifteen minutes everything was finished. It sometimes crossed her mind that there wasn’t enough for her to do. If his computer skills were up to scratch he could have run the show himself. He didn’t really need her. A suspicion which she’d always dismissed now came back to her. That he’d planned all that was to happen between them even before he met her and that was why he’d hired her. Office hours, the only time he had to himself. And you know what young women are like these days.
It was Tod who fixed him up.
She could hardly breathe.
He didn’t need her anymore. In fact, now that she’d strayed out of the office into his private life, he wanted to get rid of her.
It was clear he was going to sack her.
Leave now, a voice kept telling her in her head, just pack up and go, but she sat rigid at her desk, looking at the spire.
She heard him let himself in. His face was a little flushed as he took his jacket off and slung it over his chair. He came towards her at her desk smiling, smelling of alcohol, loosening his tie. Swivelling her on her chair to face him, he pulled her up, and kissed her in the ear in a semi-humorous way. He was strange, she felt afraid for him. Then he was holding her close, closer and she felt his need for her, his lips cold and desperate, she tried to warm him with her mouth. She heard their breath in the silence, the little gasps from their lips. He bent her back over the desk, and they laughed a little, their eyes meeting as he ran his hands up her legs, pushing up her skirt, his hands smoothing and diving. Her whole body came alive again to meet his, soft with relief.
Something, a mouse scrape, made her eyes fly open and she turned her head a fraction and caught a movement, a glitch on the known horizon of the frosted glass of the partition, a blur that rose up and became an eye peering over the top, startled to meet hers. Mr T, on tiptoe.
If he’d just arrived, she would have heard the roll of the handle of the door from the corridor, the click of its closing. Even lying back like this, she would have registered the brief suck of new air. She knew by heart the full repertoire of sounds of this place.
They must have come in together.
‘Don’t look like that,’ Maynard was saying, smiling wide, consciously, like a celebrity, holding the glass of water for her. He helped her sit down on the chair. Everything looked different, as if the light had changed. His skin was thin and dragged across his bones. A half-smile she’d never seen before hovered on his face, top teeth resting on bottom lip. Eyes flickering with nerviness and deep down knowledge of himself. He was saying something about closing the office, that he and Mr T were starting a new venture up north. ‘Don’t look like that,’ he said again in a low voice. ‘I just asked him to wait while I spoke to you. Then one thing led to another. I’m sorry, I’m a bit pissed. I didn’t know he’d watch.’
But he’d been about to make love to her. He would have.
He went into the waiting room and shut the door behind him.
She’s going to pieces, she’s going to make a scene.
The door to the corridor slammed closed.
Maynard came back into the office. ‘He’s gone, Maya. He’s waiting downstairs.’ He crouched down beside her. ‘Listen, why don’t you come with us?’
She could keep her job, he said, and have a bit of a holiday in a warm climate to boot. Whatever that old boot was, he said, trying to make her laugh as if she were a kid. Could she leave at once, was that possible? He’d call to see if there were still seats on the plane. Just come as she was. She could buy what she needed when they got there. He talked cheerfully and fast, helping her up by the elbow. And all the time, in the shine of his eyes, like tears, there was regret, that made her even sadder.
OK? he said. He fetched her coat and helped her put it on. He seemed like a friend, but he was not a friend. Everything had slowed and darkened. There was a drumming in her ears. Strange to see the brightness outside the windows, like a world she’d just left.
He put on his jacket and picked up his briefcase. Did she want to leave a message for her housemate? Celia, was it? He wasn’t very good with names. Often called her Myra in the beginning. She couldn’t focus, her mind looped and slid away from something she had to remember. Something important. He ushered her out ahead of him. Her legs went one after the other as if they didn’t belong to her anymore.
For some reason all she could think of as she went down the stairs was the little back room that she hadn’t cleared out for her parents.
2
The House
The key was under the little Buddha by the fishpond, where Maya told them it would be.
The house was a surprise, a narrow brick townhouse, wedged in between two nineteenth-century cottages. Its weathered, slatted wooden fence stood right on the footpath. Looking up, through fronds of bamboo, you could glimpse French doors opening onto a small balcony. Inside the gate was a dwarf courtyard jungled over with bamboo, and it was somehow comforting to make out, amongst the matted trunks, the little fat familiar figure meditating beside a swampy pool.
Inside, putting their suitcases down, they both said oh at the same time. They were looking out from a landing into one large, high-ceilinged room, set lower than the entrance, three steps down. Behind its economical façade, this house expanded into family-sized proportions, as if it had been hollowed out.
Light from the courtyard filtered in through a plate-glass window and cast a pattern of dipping bamboo over the rough brick walls.
A staircase to the floor above half-bisected the room. To the left was the kitchen, marked off by a bench and bar-stools. To the right, down a couple of shallow steps, was a sunken floor surrounded by three black built-in couches, like ringside seats at a swimming pool or theatre in the round. In the middle was a bare coffee table and on the fourth side was a TV. No mess anywhere.
What had they expected? Cramped student digs? Grungy suburbia? Not plainness as style. Not open plan. Although it had the stripped, shabby look of a rented house – the worn black leather of the couches was splitting in places, the varnish of the coffee table was stained with cup rings, the floorboards were dull and scratched – in the play of light and sweep of its proportions, it had a grace that still drew attention to itself. Like good bones in an old face.
‘I went to parties once in rooms like this,’ said Toni.
They stepped down into the living room. ‘Isn’t this what we used to call a conversation pit?’ said Jacob. It reminded him of youth, sex, aspirations to sophistication. All a little dingy now. Nothing here was bright or new.
Then he spotted the gleam of contemporary hardware in the gloom beyond the kitchen. On a bench against the wall was an impressive line-up, brushed aluminium laptop, scanner, printer, a see-through perspex speaker coiled like a model of an alimentary canal. Technology he didn’t know how to use. He shuffled through a wire mesh rack of CDs. Contemporary, jazz, Latin, electronic. Whose ear and eye? Most of the musicians he’d never even heard of.
‘She’s done well for herself,’ he called out. He sank down on the black couch opposite the television. Almost by itself his hand reached for the remot
e control on the coffee table and began to channel-surf the afternoon programmes.
Toni went to the kitchen and filled the electric kettle. They’d left Warton at three that morning to drive to the airport and they needed a cup of tea. She found teabags and cups on the bench, but apart from a few packets of spices and noodles, the cupboards were empty. None of Maya’s comfort foods. Were she and her housemate on some sort of diet? Some wrinkled apples in the fridge, a jar of jam and a packet of coffee grounds. No milk. A trail of ants was trekking across the vast white steppe of the bench.
All at once she left the teacups and ran upstairs. She opened the first door onto a still life of Maya’s tracksuit and ugg boots lying tumbled on the floor. The bed was crumpled, the doona thrown back. She must have been running late. There was the usual pile of magazines and books beside the bed, and a few skeletal apple cores scattered about. Maya couldn’t sleep without reading and couldn’t read without eating an apple. The Chekhov paperback was on top. Jacob had given it to her, he was always trying to get the kids to read Chekhov. The Lady with the Lapdog and Other Stories, with a photo of Magnus and Winnie as a bookmark, just a few pages in. She wasn’t doing much reading here.
The room was a lonely little tower, bare brick walls with a long thin window overlooking the roof next door. The air was cold and stale. Did Maya wake up here this morning? Toni resisted the impulse to pick up the tracksuit, pull up the doona, open the window. Maya resented anyone setting foot in her domain.
