I was a functional person with a job: I proved it to myself and dressed for the office. I collected a stack of pages from the printer. A skeleton from Vesalius regarded me with scepticism, one bone hand on its bone hip. A memento mori.
What I wanted was for the following weekend just to be normal: the new normal, the normal weekend of a couple with a part-time teenager. It felt like a double bind: any plans I made would feel like conspicuous avoidance of the anniversary. If I didn’t make any plans then there was the anxious possibility that I would find myself at a loose end and fall into melancholy, or snap with irritation under David’s watchful, concerned gaze. Plans were better. Janie was at her mother’s house on the Saturday; David and I could do something together, nothing conspicuously special, something normal. Dinner, theatre. Dinner, movie. Drinks.
*
Tess had convinced me to go with her to a cafe she was writing up, or more properly a ‘tea room’, in Kings Cross. The cab let me off not far from the Coca-Cola sign and I walked the last three blocks, through the afternoon stillness of streets that would come alive after dark.
‘What kind of tea do you want?’ Tess asked. ‘I’m having the Russian Caravan. Or do you want the Russian Caravan? Otherwise the Lapsang Souchong.’
‘You have the Russian Caravan,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind. I just want English Breakfast.’
Tess raised her eyebrows. ‘Can you choose something slightly less predictable? There are — how many are there?’ She peered at the menu. ‘At least fifteen teas. And we’ll get the good champagne. You don’t have to drink the tea.’
‘You choose then.’ I closed my menu. A waiter appeared and took it from the table as soon as I placed it down. He smiled at Tess. ‘Ready?’
She ordered with crisp precision. The waiter stood close to her chair and seemed to take a long time writing it all down.
‘Do they recognise you?’ I asked when he left. ‘Do people know what you look like?’
Tess shook her head. ‘Don’t think so. They might start recognising the two of us though. I should give you a joint byline one of these days.’
I remembered the tea room as a grimy cafe in a corner of the Cross, a place where I used to drink coffee and eat cake in the early hours after nights of drinking and dancing at bars and clubs nearby. I had come there with Tess, and once with Conrad, one of our first nights out together, and I remembered him drinking an Irish coffee, grimacing with disgust. The place was unrecognisable now, entirely painted over, linoleum taken up and wood floors polished, lava lamps gone and replaced with lights covered with Victorian beaded velvet shades. It now served ‘high tea’ all day. A group of men in beautifully tailored shirts on the other side of the room exclaimed in delight as the waiter delivered tiered trays of sandwiches and miniature cakes to their table.
‘Do you remember this place?’ I asked Tess. ‘From when it was a coffee shop?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘They were shut down because of rats. I saw one once.’ She gave a theatrical shudder. ‘Back then we thought it was part of the whole grungy vibe. That was years back. Same owners. They got great advice with the whole high tea idea. It looks a lot cleaner, which is good.’
‘I came here with Conrad once.’
‘He hated it, though.’
‘He hated Irish coffee.’
‘I know. Why would he drink that? He hated whiskey.’ Tess shook her head.
Our tea arrived in mismatched china pots, with two tall glasses of champagne. Tess lifted hers and drank, and checked her phone again. It was out of charge. She opened a small notebook.
‘Did he?’ I asked.
‘Did he what?’ Tess kept writing.
‘Did he hate whiskey?’
‘Of course.’
‘When did you come here with him?’ My voice sounded strange to my own ears, too thin, and felt tight in my throat.
‘This pen is fucked.’ Tess scribbled on the page but the pen seemed to be out of ink.
‘When?’
Tess put the pen down and poured her tea. ‘We all used to come here. I don’t know.’ Tess had known Conrad before me, although not very well. She had gone out with his older brother, Nick, for a few months. It was she who had introduced us, sort of; she liked to take the credit for it, but we had introduced ourselves, really, at a party she had taken me along to with Nick. A New Year’s Eve party at someone’s house in Birchgrove.
Tess lifted my teapot. ‘This will taste terrible if you don’t drink it soon.’ I had forgotten what Tess had ordered for me; the tea tasted of smoky tannin.
‘Do you have plans for next weekend?’ Tess’s voice was gentler. ‘Nick will be in town.’
I shook my head.
‘We’re going to the Icebergs, a group of us. Nick would like it if you came along.’
‘Are you still doing that?’ I pushed my tea aside and drank the champagne instead. When Conrad was alive the Icebergs still had poker machines and carpet that smelled of beer. He used to like drinking and playing darts there every once in a while. Now it was an upscale restaurant and nightclub, capitalising on the views over Bondi Beach. I had never joined them since the afternoon of the funeral, when they wound up drinking there in a long informal wake. I had stayed just five minutes, sickened by the sound of the surf below. ‘I don’t know how you can do it.’
I could see Tess working to hold back the things she usually said, about how not everyone shared my issues and some people liked to celebrate the things Conrad had loved. She tried scribbling with the pen again. A blob of ink appeared on the page. ‘Never mind.’ I couldn’t tell if she was talking about the pen or the Icebergs. ‘Let’s go and have brunch the day after, Sunday. I’ll come over your way. Okay?’
‘Sure. David wants to see you anyway.’
‘Really?’ She concentrated on lifting a sugar cube into her tea with a pair of tongs, and another. ‘How is everything with you? How is married life?’
‘You know we’re not married.’
‘You know what I mean.’
The waiter appeared with a tiered tray, identical to the one he had delivered to the other table. Cucumber sandwiches. Miniature quiches. Little friands. Tess took a sandwich and ate it in a mouthful.
‘Why don’t you come over to the house?’ I asked her. Tess had visited only once, a Saturday soon after we moved in, when we were still waiting for the dining table and outdoor furniture to arrive. We had wound up sitting on the front verandah eating scrambled eggs, watching the weekend traffic of cars and people go by. ‘David likes having someone to cook for.’
‘Thanks,’ Tess said. ‘I’d love to. Chez Martin.’
‘What about me?’
‘Chez Shelley. That sounds awful! That sounds like a basement strip club. Chez Muir. No, wrong. You two would have trouble with a double-barrel name, wouldn’t you? Martin-Muir. Muir-Martin.’
‘We’re not planning to do that.’
‘It’s not in the works?’ She tipped the champagne flute up to finish the last of it. ‘He seems like the marrying kind.’
‘His divorce —’
She cut me off. ‘Yes, his divorce was awful, I know.’
‘I’ll make you my maid of honour if we ever do walk down the aisle,’ I said, trying to placate her. The conversation seemed to turn into an argument whichever direction it took, although I couldn’t tell what she was arguing with me about.
She gave a wry smile and shook her head. ‘Have a cake. You look like you need about fifty of these. Here, eat this little lemon tart before I beat you to it.’ She swivelled the stand around for me and I took the lemon tart.
*
When I arrived home I decided to ignore the weird electrical humming in the room and try again to get the window open; fresh air would reform the atmosphere in there, and sounds from outside would displace those others. I was struggling with the window latch when I heard the front door open. I left the room and went to the top of the stairs. ‘David?’ I called down. The latch had left rus
t marks on my fingers and I tried to brush them off on my skirt, where they left a brown streak.
Seconds passed. ‘It’s me,’ Janie said.
‘What time is it?’ I asked. ‘What are you doing home?’
She didn’t answer, and I went downstairs. Janie was sitting on the couch, kicking off her school shoes.
‘It’s so early,’ I said. She looked at me, and I saw how pale she was, her freckles standing out like they had that morning. ‘I felt sick at school,’ she said. ‘They let me come home. They called Mum and she said it was okay.’
I sat down in the armchair across from her. ‘Is it this stomach bug? Or food poisoning? Is that what you said it was?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. I felt bad for imagining she had been relapsing with the vomiting, although it hadn’t really been unfair. ‘How long have you been sick?’
She folded her arms. ‘A few days.’
‘A few days, like three or four days?’
She didn’t say anything, and I saw a look of nausea cross her face. ‘I’ll get you a glass of water,’ I said. ‘Or do you want some lemonade? I don’t know if we have any. I can check.’ She leaned forward, one arm around her waist. ‘Or do you need a bucket? Are you going to throw up?’
‘No, it’s okay,’ she said. ‘Lemonade, that would be great. Or Coke. Diet Coke.’
I pulled a can from the bottom of the fridge and poured it into a tall glass for her, and added a couple of ice cubes. ‘Here you go.’
She took a small sip and placed the glass on the coffee table. ‘That thing you said this morning,’ she said.
I waited, and felt a sense of curdling in my guts. I had managed to dismiss the idea so successfully since the morning.
‘I did the test at school.’
‘A pregnancy test?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Yes.’ I pictured her there in a toilet cubicle, eyes on her watch, counting down the minutes, waiting for the line to show.
‘And?’
‘Yeah, it’s positive, what do you think? Or why would I be telling you?’
‘Okay, sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m just trying to keep up. This morning, I was just guessing, it seemed like a crazy idea.’ I worried about David, his reaction. I could only imagine him insisting it wasn’t true.
‘Not so crazy,’ she said quietly. ‘Or actually, yes, totally crazy. This whole thing.’
‘How long?’ I asked.
She lifted her eyes to the ceiling, thinking. ‘Four weeks? I mean, it must have happened four weeks ago.’
‘Four weeks,’ I repeated. I remembered that afternoon, when I had run into Kieran on my way home. Delivering chairs, he had said. An image of the room snapped across my mind, so sharp I could almost feel myself there, that day it had seemed to reject me. The little table, stark and delicate against the fireplace. That had been less than four weeks ago. But the horrible, stupid little piece of suspicion took hold of me. A crazy idea. Another crazy idea.
‘Who is it?’ I asked her. ‘The, um, the father.’ The panic came again, the one that took hold of my arms and hands. Let it not be him, I found myself thinking. I was willing to sacrifice anything to squash the idea. The room, I thought. I would give up the room, I would let it stay closed against me, I would do it. Just let it not be him. I had no idea who I was supplicating myself to: whatever power had opened the room to me in the first place, fate or whatever it was.
She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It matters,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’ The stiffness had left my arms and hands and I wanted to take hold of her, though I couldn’t tell if I wanted to plead with her or shake her.
She glared at me.
‘Why are you even telling me this?’ I asked. I tried to be patient, tried not to sound desperate.
She gave me a familiar look then, the contemptuous look that said she knew I was just a temporary fixture, a new purchase like any other new accessory or appliance that would soon be obsolete, deluding myself into thinking I was a person of significance. ‘I don’t want my mother to know,’ she said. ‘I don’t want Dad to know.’ The contempt lessened and her expression changed into a more depressed version of her usual blankness.
‘Janie,’ I said. ‘They are going to have to know.’
She shook her head.
‘You need to see a doctor. And you are going to have to tell them.’
‘I don’t want them to know,’ she said. ‘I’m telling you so you can help me.’
‘Help you?’
‘I need an adult to come with me to the clinic. I looked it up online.’
‘You can’t expect me to not tell your dad about this,’ I said, although for a short second the idea was horribly appealing. It could be our secret. Except it couldn’t be; it would never work. Janie could probably keep that secret, but I couldn’t. What I saw then was an image of such sadness, imagining how a secret like that could destroy a relationship, because I saw then, in a moment of truthfulness, how far along in that direction we had already travelled, how little there was left to save. I turned away from it and told myself it was just the guilt talking.
‘Please don’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t want them to know. You know what it would be like. I don’t want to stop ballet. They would make me stop.’
‘Tell me who it is, who’s the father,’ I said, ‘and I’ll think about it.’
She narrowed her eyes, sensing that I meant it, that it was possibly a real offer. It wasn’t, I told myself. I just needed her to tell me. ‘Do you have a boyfriend? Is it a boyfriend?’
‘No,’ she said, vaguely scoffing.
‘You’re under age,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said fiercely. ‘So I can’t tell you. I don’t know why you fucking care.’
‘You weren’t . . .’
‘No, I wasn’t raped,’ she said. ‘God.’
‘Okay. But guys can’t just do that, you know?’ I said, suddenly angry. ‘They can’t have no consequences while you have all the consequences. He needs to know that. He needs to have some consequences.’ I tried to remember fifteen. I knew a lot of girls at my school were having sex, although I wasn’t, not for another couple of years. ‘Does he know?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said.
‘I mean, does he know it’s a possibility, does he know you were worried about it?’
‘Sort of. I haven’t talked to him for a while.’ She picked at her skirt. I thought of the empty room that afternoon, how desolate it had felt. I thought about all the days that had passed when I hadn’t heard from Kieran, the times I had wanted to call him or hoped that the phone would ring, and I felt sorry for her even through the haze of suspicion.
‘Are you going to tell him?’
‘I don’t know. I guess so.’
‘So he’s not a boyfriend. Is he a friend?’
‘Yes,’ she said, with a spark of radiance. ‘I mean, he’s more than a friend. He’s not a boy. He’s not at school, he’s older.’ She spoke with reverence and pride. She was protecting him. She didn’t want to tell me, but I could see that desire warring with its opposite. I thought of her fingers closing around the lock that afternoon, the day the table arrived, her interrupted shower. Just let it not be him.
‘Why haven’t you talked to him for a while?’ I asked.
She chewed her lip. ‘No one knows about it.’
‘So it’s a secret?’
She nodded.
‘Why?’
‘Like I said, he’s older.’
‘How much older?’
‘He’s thirty,’ she said, and she looked me in the eye. ‘It’s the same difference as you and Dad.’ She was so delighted with the comparison, she presented it like a trump card.
Conrad was thirty when he died. I had told myself that Kieran was older than thirty, but I had never asked. I didn’t know. He could be thirty. He could have told her that he was thirty, however old he was. He could have told her anything.
‘You’re fifteen,’ I said. ‘It
isn’t the same. Anyway, he should know better. You’ll need to see a doctor. Not just to confirm the pregnancy test. You’ll need to get tested for other things too, for STDs.’
She crinkled her nose in disgust. ‘I don’t have an STD.’
‘You could have one and not know it.’
She shook her head.
‘I’ll help you,’ I told her. ‘But I can’t lie about it, I can’t lie to your dad.’
‘I could make things really difficult for you,’ she said. That idea must have been behind her decision to tell me, the idea that she had some kind of power over me, but she sounded as though her heart wasn’t in it.
I smiled. ‘You have already tried to make things really difficult for me,’ I said, although I knew she could probably make them a lot more difficult than she had so far. ‘Can you imagine what that would be like, if he found out later that I knew you were pregnant and hadn’t told him?’
She looked puzzled. She didn’t care. Maybe that would be a victory from her point of view, to create something unforgivable between us.
‘I’ll talk to him about the ballet,’ I said.
‘Mum would say no.’
‘It isn’t just up to her.’ I thought I would be able to talk David around. He used to think it was bad for her, that the whole ballet culture encouraged eating disorders in every girl who danced. But it had seemed to help her recovery: the discipline seemed to soak up some of her more obsessive tendencies. She had been coming home straight from school though, I realised, for a while now, when she would normally be at class. ‘I’ll talk to him. But you have tell me who it is.’
She had given up trying to convince me not to tell him. Her body slumped and she looked younger than fifteen, with her skinny arms crossed over her chest. ‘You promise?’
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