‘Are you spending any time together, just the two of you?’ Genevieve asked, but Nina’s answer was just another of those bitter half-smiles that she was starting to worry would become her signature facial expression, the one that would craft the set of her midlife face and the wrinkles of her old age.
A few weeks later, Nina and Lucas’s doorbell rang just after eight o’clock on a Saturday night. Nina opened the door to Genevieve who had with her an overnight bag, a rented movie and her dinner on a foil-covered plate.
‘Go and get a frock on,’ Genevieve said to Nina.
Genevieve found the remote control and flicked Lucas’s footy match to mute.
‘Take your wife out, man, and show her a good time. You’ve got until eight o’clock in the morning.’
Nina knew that Lucas liked Genevieve, even if he did mock her accent and bicker with her about politics. Genevieve sat at the other end of the couch from him, unzipped her long black boots and put her feet up. When he didn’t move, she prodded him with a stockinged toe.
‘And I’ll have a glass of wine before you go. White, if you’ve got it. And not horse piss, either. Open something decent, alright?’
‘Ja, baas,’ said Lucas.
Ten minutes later, they were in the street; Nina standing there with her clutch purse and wrap feeling light-headed with freedom but also vaguely locked out of her own home. Lucas opened the passenger door of the big black Val and Nina stepped in, not quite remembering the way she was supposed to look at him over the door frame, or if there was anything in particular that she ought to say. She flicked on the interior light and in her compact mirror checked that her hurried swipe of lipstick wasn’t on her teeth, that she hadn’t blinked her mascara all over her eyelids or her cheeks. The mirror gave her back only pieces of herself: a dark eye forked at its edges with crow feet, a pair of lips and the surrounding skin that was starting to pleat. She wished she’d had time—or insisted on the time—to have a shower. Her hair wasn’t so clean. She’d not shaved her legs for weeks and the stubble was pricking through her pantyhose. Even so, there was something familiar and sweet about the sensation of sitting in a full skirt on the ribbed leather of the bench seat, as well as in the old-car scent mix of rubber and oil combining with Lucas’s additions of Minties and dope.
In the beginning, Lucas had come to her with the Val, and the Val had come to her with Lucas. It was black on the body, but white on the roof, and the horizontal silver bands of the front grille echoed the lines of the venetian blinds that were fitted to the rear and side back windows and that could close you in, close you out. It was in the back of the Val that Nina had trounced Janey Cooper once and for all. She and Lucas had both been too drunk and stoned to remember much about the night they first made love but, in the morning, they woke under Lucas’s tawdry leopard-print blanket and once he threw that blanket off, it became apparent to him that Nina’s body hair was not dark like the hair on her head. It was several shades lighter, thick and curling, a lush triangle lit by dusty stripes of venetian sunshine: red, gold, red, gold.
She had giggled at the astonished look on his face.
‘That’s spectacular,’ he had said, then.
‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked now.
She knew, but it was no place you could get to twice. So they went to a movie, an art-house thing with lots of in-jokes about films Nina only barely remembered, throughout which neither Nina nor Lucas reached out to take the other’s hand. They ate, late, at a restaurant about which everyone who still had a social life had been talking, and the food was very nice. At midnight they got back into the car.
‘Well?’ said Lucas.
‘I don’t know the name of a single nightclub anymore. I haven’t a clue where’s good.’
‘You want to go to a nightclub?’
‘Let’s just go home,’ Nina said.
‘Think the baas will let us in?’
Nina shrugged. Lucas started up the Val and drove home. Their house was on the downhill side of the street and lately Nina had begun to suspect that it was inching further down the slope, sinking away towards the rivulet with all the weight of the world that occupied its four walls. Now she looked down at the cottage, the simple symmetry of its pitched roof, two square windows, rectangular front door. It sat there steadily behind its low, tidy picket fence and the idea of home settled upon Nina as if she had slipped on one of those leaden garments from an x-ray room; the heaviness felt almost right, as if her freedom from it had been nothing more than a delusion whose inevitable ending had come. It was Lucas whose senses rebelled. He turned the key in the ignition, lurched the big Val into a three-point turn.
Up and out he drove, through the steep outer suburbs to the bushy fringe of the city to a quiet place where you could see the big dark slash of the river between the light-jewelled hills. It wasn’t exactly a lovers’ lookout, or even a car park, just one of the many places where the city’s roads ended at a padlocked boom gate, beyond which they became gravel tracks for walkers and cyclists. Nina didn’t know what they were doing here and although she could tell that Lucas didn’t either, she wasn’t feeling generous enough to help him work it out.
He sat there for a while and then reached into his inside jacket pocket for the gloved-stitched leather tobacco pouch in which he always had at least a pinch of mull. He sifted out two papers, licked them together, laid out a bed of Champion Ruby and topped it with green. Nina watched his hands as he rolled: they were pale and freckled, the fingernails of his right hand long for plucking strings, those of his left bitten down to the quick, the matching stains between the index and middle fingers of both hands proving him an ambidextrous smoker. He lit up, passed to her. She inhaled, felt green smoke coil into her blood.
It was an old script, this one, and years since they had played it out, but at least they both knew it by heart. Turn by turn they smoked the joint down, Nina refusing at last, Lucas taking the burning roach between his fingers to inhale the dregs, scrunching his eyes and nose against the heat of the paper and tobacco on his lips. Then this hand went there, that tongue there; there was the same old slip and slide on the bench seat of the Val, the stretched sound of The Church on cassette tape in the stereo. Nina might have stopped there, but always it had been Lucas who decided when it was time to open the driver’s side door, come around to the passenger side and invite her out with a courtly half-bow, the other half of which he saved for the gesture with which he ushered her into the back.
In the starlight Nina recognised that awful old leopard print blanket but she lay down on it anyway, reached up to close the venetians on her side. She let Lucas unbutton her dress, clumsily remove her tights; the dope and the kissing in the front seat did for foreplay. At first, they lay tight together chest to chest, but after a while he withdrew and nudged the outside of her thigh, suggesting she roll over onto her front. It was the way she had always liked it best, once. But now that she was the way she was—half heart-broken and dope-fogged—doing it this way made her into a fox bitch, orange and nasty. She felt rufous and ruined, her loose tits and belly like the sagging, teat-lined undercarriage of an overbred sheepdog. There was something degrading about it, but she came quickly anyway and he did too, although he was careful to pull out first. Instead of feeling any kind of afterglow she just cried.
‘Do you still love me?’ she asked, after a time.
‘Of course I love you,’ he said. ‘Silly girl.’
Nina separated two dusty slats of the venetians and peeked out at a stripe of distant sky that might have been cloudy or just blurred by humans and all their vapours and foulness. She tried to imagine what it would be like to be with someone other than Lucas and it caused a painful twist inside of her. She knew she would always feel the nothingness where one of his qualities had been, or the something where there ought to have been a space. Yet it seemed to her that it was her ruination that bound her to him most tightly: the sagging and the stretching, the bitterness and the snappishness and
the readiness to truly bite. He made those, those made her his. She rolled over, back into his arms.
‘What’s the worst of it, of how things are?’ he asked her, and he sounded—or did she just want him to sound?—like someone wise, like someone who had the power to decide whether or not she deserved for the worst of it to be taken away.
‘It’s Henry,’ she whispered into the scoop above Lucas’s clavicle. ‘I’m losing him. I’m losing him a little bit more every day. I know that this is how things are. I know this is what we have to do, but I wish, I just wish that I could go to work knowing that he was happy.’
At six o’clock each night, the doors of The Cottage were closed and its lights switched off. Nina had no idea what the staff did if parents didn’t turn up in time to collect their children. She supposed that must happen sometimes. Unexpected things occurred in workplaces. There were accidents. There were parents who were no longer together and barely on civil terms; surely there must have been mix-ups when one or the other of them forgot whose turn it was. Even in this small city there was occasionally enough traffic—this night was a perfect example—to cause a delay.
But what happened to the children? Did the staff draw straws to see who would stay behind at the centre and wait until a parent, speeding and panicked and sorry, at last came hurtling in to the car park? But how long would the staff wait? And what would happen after that amount of time—however long it was—had elapsed? What if the parents couldn’t be reached, found? Would Beverly eventually strap Henry and Gracie into her own car and drive them to the outer suburbs, take them into her home and sit them down on her couch and make them mugs of lukewarm Milo? Or would she at last put in a call to Children’s Services, or the police?
Nina wondered and worried about all of this as she watched the bright green numbers on her dashboard clock spell out 6.10, 6.11, 6.12. It was spring by now and the days were lengthening; the evening sky, not yet fully dark, was pulsing with the flashing lights of emergency vehicles somewhere up ahead. Although Nina had remembered to plug her mobile telephone into its charger the previous night, she had somehow neglected to turn on the power point and by mid-afternoon the phone’s battery was spent. She couldn’t call The Cottage, she couldn’t call Lucas; there were cars on three sides of her and a solid concrete crash barrier on the fourth. She thought of Henry and Gracie and wondered if they were sitting by the front door of the centre with their packed bags, waiting.
Slowly, slowly, infuriatingly slowly, the cars on the highway merged into a single lane and filed past the remains of the accident. Nina saw a bald man sitting on the rear step of the light-filled ambulance, his hands on either side of the bloodied gash to his scalp. Other people stood beside and between the two crumpled cars, talking on their mobiles or waiting with an air of suspended panic, their evenings having veered violently away from all expectations and plans.
It was 6.42 when Nina reached the centre. The car park was empty and the place looked blank and unfamiliar. No light came from the reception area, nor from any of the rooms whose windows faced the street, and yet the low, brick building somehow gave off the sense of a light still burning within. Nina hurried up through the avenue of toadstools to the glass doors. When they opened easily, she felt herself let out the breath that she had been half-holding for the past hour.
The light was coming from the end of the corridor, from one of the pre-kinder rooms that would next year be Henry’s. Nina hurried past the pegged-up finger paintings and leaf rubbings and mosaics made from pasta bows, lengthening her stride as if she might outpace the thoughts that trailed her in a hectoring cloud. Henry would be four next year, the thoughts reminded her. It would be his last year before school. His early childhood was all but gone and it was she who had given it away. She would regret her choices, the thoughts said. She might have answered back that she already did, if it were not for her lingering suspicion that her regrets, like Henry himself, would never again be as small as they were today.
Nina rushed into the room through its wedged-open door, past the fridge that held the lunchboxes, past the low banks of open-faced lockers all marked with children’s names, past the lost property trug brimming with hats and orphaned Tupperware lids, jumpers and odd socks. Beverly—it was Beverly who had waited—stood over by the sink in her navy pants and navy polo shirt, holding Gracie in place on her slightly out-thrust hip with one of her pale, doughy arms. Henry was sat on the sink-side bench, a plate strewn with crumbs and empty fairy-cake cases on his lap. He was the first to see Nina, the only one to look at her with reproach. Gracie smiled at her mother, unperturbed, and returned to her game of trapping in her hands the glossy beads on Beverly’s spectacle chain, then pulling them into her little wet mouth.
‘Henry. Sweetheart, I’m so sorry, the traffic . . . there was an accident . . .’
Nina reached out for Gracie, knowing that it was she herself, and not the little girl, who wanted and needed comforting. Beverly gave the child over, cleaned the glass of her smeared spectacles with the hem of her shirt.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Nina said to Beverly. ‘I couldn’t call . . . and it was gridlock . . .’
‘These things happen,’ Beverly said, with a smile and a shrug. ‘And you’ll get a bill.’
‘I would have called but my phone . . . the battery was dead . . .’
Beverly was almost stubbornly calm and it made Nina feel foolish for the state she was in. Beverly turned to Henry as if demonstrating to Nina that he was, ought to be, their first and only concern.
‘We were alright, weren’t we, Henry?’ Beverly said, her elbows on the bench beside his skinny little legs. ‘We had fairy cakes, didn’t we? And we said, didn’t we, that Mummy would be alright? Didn’t we say that Mummy would be along just as soon as she could?’
‘No,’ said Henry, to Beverly, clearly surprised she had forgotten. He looked to his mother, his face serious. ‘I telled her you had forgot us.’
What use were any of the platitudes? Mummy would never leave you, Mummy would never forget you, Mummy will always be there.
‘Told,’ whispered Nina. ‘You told her.’
‘All finished, mate?’ Beverly asked, reaching out for his plate. ‘Come on then, down you pop.’
‘Thank you,’ Nina said to Beverly, as she took Henry’s hand. ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t mention it. Bye, Henry. Bye, Gracie possum.’
They reached the door leading out into the corridor before Henry broke his hand away from Nina’s, ran back to the sink to throw his arms around Beverly’s legs. He smiled up at her. ‘Goodbye, Bevelly.’
Beverly leaned down to his height. ‘See you tomorrow, Henry,’ she said, touching a hand to his cheek.
‘Promise?’
‘You bet.’
Next morning before school when Nina frisked Henry on the front doorstep, she found not a single item stashed in any one of his many pockets.
Quite some time has passed since then. Autumn has been—bringing with it Gracie’s second birthday—and gone. It is early winter and soon Henry will turn four. The shortening days mean that it is already dark when Nina finishes work, cold and dark by the time she reaches The Cottage each evening. This night she sits outside the centre with her gloved hands on the steering wheel, listening to the stock market report she doesn’t care about. For a while it is warm in the car. But not long after the engine has stopped, the warmth begins to leak out through the car’s metal flanks, or the cold begins to seep in. Nina can’t tell which. Perhaps both.
‘Right,’ she tells herself, breathes in.
There is already frost on the tiny hills and valleys of the gravelly path and as she steps onto it Nina can see herself in the dark of the double-glazed doors ahead. Surely it’s a trick of the glass, and the distance, that she looks so thickset in her black coat and high-heeled boots. Could her end-of-the-day hair really be so tangled and skewed? At the sound of her step, a plaster bunny startles in the glow of a solar light; a hedgehog cowers beneath his
toadstool.
‘Look on the bright side, Nina. At least the mornings are easier,’ Genevieve had said when Nina told her how things were now. Nina hadn’t wanted to tell her. Genevieve’s response had been deliberately droll, but the humour misfired.
‘Come on, lovey,’ Genevieve had said, when she had noticed the tears pooling in Nina’s eyes. ‘You’ve got to laugh or you’d spend your whole life crying.’
Nina knows that it is usually best to delay gratification and do the hardest job first, but when it comes to her evenings at The Cottage, she never does. Always, these days, she goes first to Gracie’s room, and holds on for longer than she might otherwise when her daughter comes to her with her sticky little hands outstretched. Together they collect up drink bottle and lunchbox, spare clothes and the day’s works of art, and zip them all into Gracie’s ladybug backpack, which Gracie herself can carry on her back as she follows obediently behind Nina down the corridor to Henry’s room. They do not hurry.
Soon enough Nina will get home with the kids, and a little after that Lucas will arrive, and husband and wife will resume the effort of not speaking to each other. Over the past months they had managed to get just a little way ahead, to chip from the debt a few small but honourable chunks. It was down to Nina, really, and Lucas would have admitted that. It was Nina who had sat up late at night writing blog posts for a pittance, and Nina who’d squeezed the grocery bill with her insistence on the no-name butter and cheese and the cheap nappies with the useless tabs that always wanted reinforcing with sticky tape. All that effort to be chimed away, all of it, in ten dollar bids the night Lucas was late home from work, and didn’t answer his phone, and still wasn’t back when Nina woke at 2.00 am with her heart trying to bash its way out of its cage. She’d put the kids in the car and covered them with bunny rugs, driven the usual haunts, until at last she’d found the big black Valiant in the car park of the Casino. Gracie had slept through the whole thing but Henry had sat in the back with his eyes wide open.
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