I looked closer at the latch, which was covered with thick layers of paint but appeared to be in the open position. Maybe it would be a good idea to call a glazier after all. When I switched on the light, the glow from the chandelier was so dim it was barely noticeable. The room would need a lamp.
Just for a few minutes, I thought. There was still time to call David and get dressed before I needed to leave. I lay down and rested my head on the arm of the sofa, and crossed my hands over my belly. My feet didn’t reach the end. The chandelier was almost directly above, but not quite. If it fell, it wouldn’t fall right on top of me. Not that there was any chance of it falling.
My phone started to ring, but it sounded as though it was impossibly far away, and for a moment I wondered whether the sound was coming through the wall adjoining the house next door. I looked up and saw that the door to the closet had swung closed again. The ringing had stopped by the time I stepped back into the bedroom. I went back down to the kitchen where I had left the phone on the counter, and saw David’s name on the screen.
‘Shelley? I’ve been calling you,’ he said when I called back, his voice faint against busy background noise; people talking and glasses clinking. He was at the reception, he explained, on his way to dinner; yes, the presentation had gone well, the whole thing was going well. I reminded him that I was going out with Tess.
‘Let’s get her over for dinner, or let’s go out for dinner with her sometime soon,’ he said. ‘Is she still seeing that guy, who was it, from the gallery?’
‘Liam,’ I reminded him. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if they were going out, exactly.’ We had met Liam just once with Tess at a book launch, months before. It had seemed clear that Tess had picked him up at the event itself or somewhere just beforehand. He’d recognised David and wanted to talk to him about his latest book, and we’d all wound up eating at an Italian restaurant afterwards. Tess spent half the evening smoking cigarettes outside, and I joined her because I didn’t want her to have to stand out there on her own, and got to hear all about the sex she had enjoyed the previous evening with one of the subeditors at work she’d had her eye on for a while.
‘Well, have a great time on your girls’ night out,’ David said. ‘I’m glad you have company.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ I said, and continued when he tried to interrupt. ‘I don’t mind being here on my own, it’s fine. I don’t mind staying in. It’s nice to have the place to myself. I’d rather stay home in some ways. You know what it’s like on Oxford Street on the weekends.’
There was a pause, and I wondered whether he could even hear me over the background noise. In the old days, the first few months after we started seeing each other, he would have asked me what I was wearing. The further away he was, the more detail he seemed to want to hear. Once he had called me from Auckland when I was just out of the shower, wearing only a dressing gown, and he’d asked me to get dressed and call him back just so I could narrate every piece of my attire. Making it up wasn’t as good, apparently; I had tried it once when I had been wearing shorts and thought that a skirt would be more exciting, but he’d guessed, and lost interest.
Then he spoke, his voice quiet. ‘I know. I just don’t want you to be bored.’
I waited for him to ask about my day, and felt a strange tug of reluctance to tell him about the sofa.
‘I’m sorry, darling, I have to go,’ he said. ‘It’s too loud to talk in here in any case.’
‘That’s okay,’ I replied. ‘I’m glad you were such a hit. No surprise.’
He laughed in a self-deprecating way. ‘Love you,’ he said, and the call dropped out, or he hung up, just as I was about to respond.
*
Dusk was falling as I left the house, the sky vast and cloudless, darkening to indigo in the east, streaked with smoky, fluorescent orange to the west. I stepped out into the middle of the nightly migration of the fruit bats from their nests in the Botanic Gardens by the harbour to Centennial Park: their distant black shapes filled the sky overhead like a river of floating ash fragments. A couple of them stopped in the big old Moreton Bay figs across the street, squeaking and bickering. Bits of fruit fell onto the asphalt and the bats flapped away, frighteningly huge as they flew past me and up to rejoin the migrating stream. I remembered reading somewhere that as the waterways that were their traditional directional markers disappeared, paved over and forced underground, they learned to navigate by arterial roads instead, echoing the flow of traffic on the ground below. It was one of those nights when the city felt a little like a jungle. I took a wide step to avoid a fat brown cockroach scuttling towards the gutter, hoping it would not decide to take wing like the bats. It was the time of year they seemed to like doing that: one cost of leaving the balcony doors open at night, apart from the mosquitos and flies, was the risk of cockroaches fluttering in. Even if we shut the doors they squeezed in easily through the gap between the door and the floor.
I was twenty minutes late in the end, and my feet were aching from walking fast in high heels by the time I reached the address Tess had given me. The bar had been open for less than a month. I remembered passing the building a couple of weeks earlier and noticing the doorway and windows covered over with newspaper hiding the renovations going on inside. Downstairs used to be a Thai restaurant and was now a twenty-four-hour chemist that seemed to sell mainly perfume. Just around the corner was the storefront parlour where I had gone with Tess to get her first tattoo, in my first year of art school and the last year of her journalism degree. She had come close to getting a dolphin — we were drunk and it was late and she was toying with the idea of a hippie phase — but I managed to talk her out of it, and always looked with a kind of pride at the skull on her shoulder whenever she showed it, a sagging red rose held in its teeth. My shoes scuffed against the polished concrete stairs.
Tess was sitting at the bar on a tall stool with two drinks in front of her, both in tall glasses, one half full of ice and clear liquid and the other a bright neon pink that matched her dress.
‘Hello, sorry, I got caught up. David called.’ I kissed Tess’s cheek. She smelled of gin and Paris, the rose-scented perfume she always wore. The space was dimly lit, with industrial-looking candelabras attached to the exposed-brick walls. It was almost empty, apart from a table of young men in leather pants near the windows, and a couple at the other end of the bar who seemed to be in the middle of an argument. The woman was speaking in a furious whisper to the man, who kept his eyes on his glass and showed no sign of responding to whatever she was saying. I wondered whether Tess was right about this being one of the hot new off-the-strip destinations.
‘You’re hopeless, but I forgive you,’ Tess said. ‘And I ordered for you.’ She cared about being on time, and in some show of passive aggression I was always late to whatever we arranged to do together. Tess handed me the pink drink. ‘It looks like pink lemonade, doesn’t it? It tastes like it a bit too, but it’s supposedly full of vodka. Grapefruit infused.’
The drink tasted peppery and faintly bitter, nothing like the syrupy grenadine flavour its colour suggested. Before long it was gone, and I felt unsteady on my tall stool.
Tess inspected the list of cocktails, two densely printed pieces of paper attached to a steel clipboard. ‘I’m buying,’ she said, ‘but you have to let me choose.’ She raised her phone and took a picture of the menu. ‘Should I mention the fighting couple?’ she asked. The woman was crying now, her eyeliner running. One of the bartenders, a young woman with short hair and glossy red lipstick, passed her a fresh drink and gave the guy a dirty look.
I shook my head. The place had filled up quickly since my arrival, and as our drinks arrived we were jostled by a crowd of people at the bar vying for the bartenders’ attention. I turned to look around for a seat at one of the tables. A plaid shirt caught my eye, in a group of men and women heading towards the exit. It was him. His back was turned. I caught a glimpse of longish, straight hair, and then he was lost in the p
ress of people.
‘Here’s your drink,’ Tess said, pushing what looked like an old-fashioned milkshake cup towards me. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I thought I saw someone I knew. That’s all.’ It would look weird to go after him, I decided.
‘I can see a seat over there,’ Tess said. ‘Shall we move?’
We made our way through the press of people to a low table against the wall. I tried my drink, which tasted sweet and milky.
‘Careful,’ Tess warned me. ‘It’s full of Baileys. You can give me your scores out of ten at the end. Or maybe I should take notes now while you’re still capable. Here you go.’ She pressed a button on her phone and held it towards me. ‘Talk. No? Okay.’ She spoke into the machine for a minute, her voice low and professional, eyeing the menu to get the names of the drinks right.
I had to remind myself not to slurp the whole thing down too fast. The retro drinks seemed out of step with the rest of the look, a disjunctive mix of polished concrete and steel industrial aesthetics and shabby chic.
Tess settled herself into an armchair covered in pink floral fabric. ‘So how’s your weekend been so far, all alone in Paddington?’
‘I bought a sofa.’
‘Will the furnishing of the new house never end! You are single-handedly keeping the Design Factory in business.’
‘No, it’s not a new sofa, it’s old.’
‘I thought David hated old things. Doesn’t he have that modern design obsession? Which does seem kind of bizarre in a historian, I have to say.’
‘He does. I know, I guess he’s thinking about old things all day, he doesn’t want to look at them or sit on them at home. I don’t care.’
‘You had to get rid of that wardrobe of yours.’
‘It had that smell,’ I reminded her.
‘Oh, right! You do smell so much better now.’ She smiled. ‘Sorry. Joking. Tell me about the sofa.’
‘You remember that place on Oxford Street, the antique shop? The one that’s been there forever, at the end near the new deli you like?’
Tess frowned. ‘The one on the corner? I didn’t think it was still there. I mean, I thought it had shut years ago.’
‘No, it’s still open. I went in there the other day and I just fell in love with this thing. I never feel like that about furniture. David chose everything for the house — well, you know. Anyway, I loved it and I bought it. They delivered it this afternoon.’
‘Cheers,’ Tess said, and raised her glass. ‘That’s wonderful. It’s so good to see you — I don’t know — to see you being enthusiastic about something.’
I set my glass down. ‘Don’t.’
‘What?’ Tess blinked.
‘Just don’t. You sound so patronising. David’s the same. Stay busy, don’t mope around the house, get yourself a fucking project.’ For some reason he had imagined that I would be happy to have a garden to work on, our tiny slice of earth. It must have had something to do with the jasmine plant, the one I had poured a glass of water onto every now and again and managed to resurrect, and brought to Paddington with us. We had gone to a nursery together one afternoon, a week after moving in, each thinking that the other would have some idea of what to do, what to buy, where and how to plant things. We left with a range of implements and bags of potting soil that sat untouched in the small back shed. David arranged for a pair of gardeners to come a couple of weeks later and they tidied up the garden beds and planted a few native shrubs and succulents that needed very little looking after.
I arrived home when they were finishing up and went outside to admire the new, tamed courtyard. The two of them, young men in matching King Gee shorts and work boots, stood and looked at the massive gum with grudging admiration.
‘You’ll never get rid of it,’ one of them said to me, barely turning his head.
‘But it’s tearing down the back wall,’ I said. David had called the local council already, and they were meant to send around a tree inspector the following week.
‘Doesn’t matter.’ The other one shook his head. Pieces of grey bark curled off the trunk and sagged, revealing the pale smooth surface underneath. Around the roots some of the paving bricks were lifting, pushed upwards by the slow eruption. ‘You’ll need a new wall sooner or later,’ he said.
They had showed me how to switch on the sprinkler system they had installed, but it was on an automatic timer so I wouldn’t need to do it myself, probably. They had scraped off the green moss that had covered the paving bricks in patches; they looked bald and too clean without it. As they’d left I’d glanced over towards the neighbours’ yard, the metal heads of the sculptures half glimpsed over the tall fence.
I had thought about telling Tess about the room, but now I wanted to keep it to myself. To her it would be another project to occupy me safely, a decorating project. I saw it as she might see it and it looked just like the hobby of any other eastern suburbs wife, a reason to buy home design magazines every week. It spoiled my own idea of it, my desire to make the room conform with the ideal in my imagination, to bring it to life as it seemed to ask me to, to make it mine.
Tess fished a piece of pineapple out of her glass and placed it carefully on a coaster. ‘You don’t make it easy.’
‘Why should I?’
‘Look. I can imagine David being like that a bit — he does love to be the white knight, doesn’t he? I think he’s just not sure what to do.’
‘You sound as though you’ve talked this over with him.’
Tess inspected her glass again and prodded a piece of lemon with her straw. ‘Don’t be paranoid,’ she said. ‘Now, what are we going to do? Did you want to get dinner? This weather kills my appetite.’
It would be dark out there by now, and the air would still carry that trace of ash from the fires, that trace of salt from the ocean. The streets would be coming alive with people wandering and drinking and going out together, full of desire and unpredictability, the edge of mania that came with long days of heat unbroken by the southerly. It would still be warm, but my skin shrank from the idea of going outside as though it were a chill winter night. I thought about the jungle-like aura of the city as I had left the house, the sense of it as home to so many millions of uncontrollable animal lives.
‘You don’t have to decide right now,’ Tess said, and leaned back in her armchair.
‘Sorry for snapping,’ I said.
‘Snap away,’ she said, smiling, and reached over to clink her glass against mine.
I settled back and held my drink, enjoying the sense of being secreted away in our airconditioned place above the street, like a nest in the trunk of a great brick tree, protected from the empire of creatures outside.
*
My phone gave a soft buzz a few hours later as I turned the corner into my street. When I took it out the screen was illuminated with a new message. I read it, expecting it to be from David.
Hows the sofa? K
I smiled.
Good. Thank you, I typed. It was just before midnight.
It may require some further adjustment.
My phone buzzed again. I am available to provide adjstmentt assitance.
I felt a spike of adrenaline, dampened by the alcohol, but still enough to make my heart thud. I stopped walking. The soles of my feet started to hurt. When I looked back at this moment later, that was what I would remember, a sense of the blood returning and hurting. A couple passed by, two men with their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, walking unsteadily. I tried to picture where Kieran might be; at the pub still, wherever it was, putting his hand into his pocket and finding my card there.
When I had left the bar earlier and put Tess into a taxi, the streets had been in the full swing of a late January Saturday night, the holiday atmosphere still present, just a bit more languid than it would become in a few weeks’ time. Cigarette smoke was in the air, clouds of sweat and drink and music drifting from the open doorways of pubs. I left them behind when I turned off down the hill i
n the direction of home. Now, looking at my phone, I sensed that odd pressure in the air, the salt tang of the sea that I had wanted to avoid earlier, when Tess had suggested dinner and I had wanted to stay inside. My bare arms were cold, my feet were still hurting and I had a sense of vulnerability to the elements. The couple ahead of me paused in a shadowy part of the street and leaned into each other in a way that could have been a loving embrace or sheer exhaustion.
I remembered David’s false smile the morning before, and realised I was still reorienting myself to the shift in the world it had prompted. I suppose I had expected it, with his history. The affair that ended his marriage hadn’t been the first. Still, I felt a bruise inside, injured pride, disappointment. All evening I had been keeping it pressed down, far away from the surface so that when Tess asked me how things were going I would be able to quickly and smoothly say okay. Something in me loosened like a slowly uncoiling spring come unmoored from its place in a gear. The part of me that was bothered by the smile presented a familiar face, troubled and jealous and suspicious. In its shadow was the thing that bothered me more, the thing I wanted to press even further down: the numb core of me that observed those other reactions and remained unmoved.
I had never been unfaithful, unless I counted one drunken kiss at a party, years earlier. Conrad and I had argued about who was driving and who was drinking; he spent the night getting stoned and flirting with the girl whose house the party was at, and I drank too much and got bored and wound up on a couch with some guy I had once gone out with in art school. Conrad saw me; he appeared in the doorway and met my eyes, and disappeared. When I went over to his flat a few days later he acted as though nothing had happened. We had fierce, deliberate sex like we sometimes did after an argument, sealing things back together with our bodies, and we didn’t talk about it.
A cockroach ambled by, identical to the one I had encountered earlier. They were an insect army of seeming clones. It was close enough and slow enough to squash with a short, decisive step forward, but I stayed where I was and let it go into the shadow of the dark house where it probably had its familiar entrance through a crack in the wall.
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