Hold

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘I promise.’

  She smiled then, a not happy smile. ‘It’s my teacher. It’s one of the teachers. Ballet teacher,’ she said, seeing my confusion.

  I felt a short moment of relief before a sense of absurdity overtook me. It could never have been Kieran, I told myself; I was a total fool to have suspected it. The suspicion went away, and with it came a wide breath of relief — those offers to give up the room counted for nothing now, I didn’t owe fate anything — but it left a strange, ragged pain in its wake.

  ‘Which one?’ I asked.

  ‘You don’t know any of them.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Victor,’ she said flatly, after a pause. She was right; I didn’t know any of them. The name didn’t mean anything to me.

  ‘Well. It’s up to your dad to decide what to do about him. Is he still teaching there?’ She nodded. ‘Do any of your friends know about this?’

  ‘No. I mean, Elise knows about Victor because she saw us once and asked me about it, and I told her, but no one else. I didn’t tell her about this, about the test. She knows I’ve been sick though.’

  I felt bad for her, having no one to tell except me.

  ‘I’ll call the doctor. See if we can get you in later this afternoon.’

  ‘You’ll need Dad’s Medicare card,’ she said. She had thought it all through.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You can go on Monday.’

  ‘I don’t want to see Doctor Carr,’ she said. He had seen her through the bulimia the previous year; she had been seeing him since she was a child.

  ‘You should probably talk to your dad about that. Or your mum,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I mean it, I want to see someone different. I don’t want it to be someone I know.’

  I went to a doctor over in Lilyfield whom I had started seeing when I was a student: Doctor Redfern. Over the years I’d moved further away from her office but still made the trip to see her when I needed to. She had a voice like a heavy smoker though she never smelled of cigarettes, and beautiful hooded eyes like Charlotte Rampling. I could imagine her having the right combination of kindness and sternness with Janie. But it felt like a sacrifice, letting Janie into that part of my life. If I walked into the surgery as a stepmother, bringing my teenage stepdaughter for a pregnancy test, I would travel further away from the person I had been when I had first starting going there, a first-year art student with talent and potential and no money. There would be no way of finding my way back to that person after that. I looked around me at the carefully renovated and decorated living space, the pile of art books stacked so carefully on the coffee table, the linen-covered couches. I was far away from that person anyway, but I didn’t want to give up the connection in my own mind, the sense that I was something more than this, that I exceeded this new role, this new life.

  Janie was waiting for me to say something. She wanted me to take care of it. I gave in. ‘I could get you in to see my doctor, if that would be okay with you,’ I said. ‘I’ll talk to your dad about it.’

  She relaxed. ‘You’re coming with me, right?’ she asked.

  I had never put my arms around Janie; she had always been either openly prickly or indifferent to me before now. I didn’t want to hug her. I wanted to escape upstairs and lie on the sofa and spend the rest of the afternoon in denial of the conversation I would need to have with David when he got home. But it seemed like the right thing to do, and I found that I did want to offer her some kind of comfort. I moved from the armchair and sat down next to her.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. It wasn’t a big embrace: I put my arm around her shoulder and she leaned her head so that it rested against mine for a moment. She had never thanked me for anything, ever, and I thought for a moment that she might decide to thank me now, but she didn’t say anything more. I touched her hair where it lay over her shoulders, smooth and pale, the colours of wheat and gold. We sat together for just a few seconds before we went upstairs to our separate rooms.

  Eight

  I stood in front of the closet with the image of escape in my head that I had cherished a few minutes earlier. I didn’t reach through to the door. Janie was shut in her bedroom and I didn’t expect to see her again until later that evening when I would drag her downstairs to talk to David, but that didn’t matter: the house was tense with her presence. The sliding closet door was still open from when I had come back through earlier, when Janie had arrived home. I straightened the clothes on their hangers and slid the door closed.

  So far I had been able to avoid getting involved in any aspects of parenting. Becoming a stepmother to younger children would have been different, children who were truly dependent, unable to take care of themselves, who needed to be taken to school, to have lunches and breakfasts and dinners made for them, playdates and birthday parties planned out. If Janie had been younger I would have felt more pressure to take on more of those responsibilities, to really act as a parent. I had never thought about what that would have meant. Now it occurred to me that it could have been an obstacle to getting involved with David from the beginning, or at least it might have made me think harder about moving in with him. I had assumed all along that Janie was for all intents and purposes a young adult, able to take care of herself, waiting impatiently until she could get away from under her parents’ different roofs. I saw now that this had not been entirely true. The boundary between childhood and adulthood that she inhabited seemed so treacherous.

  Janie’s chest was still as flat as a girl’s, and she had a girl’s narrow hips and thin calves: she was a girl, stretched out to the tall proportions of an adult. She kept her body so minimally nurtured, provided with only just enough calories to support herself, that it seemed impossible she could have found the energy to conceive and support another life.

  I didn’t think too much about the ballet teacher, Victor; that seemed like a field of outrage that would be fully occupied by David and Gwen, and I had an unfamiliar urge to protect Janie from the full force of their anger. I couldn’t quite believe that he could have imagined that he would get away with it. He’d told her he was thirty; maybe he was even older. Maybe it wasn’t the first time. Maybe picking up teenage girls was something he made a habit of and had so far been lucky in going undetected.

  Other girls at my school had shared a crush on one of the teachers, a young substitute who taught every once in a while and wore fashionable tight jeans. Mr Roberts. I didn’t share the crush: there was something slightly pathetic about his obvious vanity, and something disturbing about the harsh punishments he seemed to like dealing out. Detentions issued with a smug lengthy lecture. Horrible rumours started circulating about him after a while, that he had a girlfriend he forced to dress up in a school uniform and scold him in bed. It was ridiculous, there was no way it could be true, and yet it was completely convincing. The rest of the male teachers were middle-aged and unattractive, apart from a music teacher who never taught me, who everyone agreed was gay and it was a waste because of how gorgeous he was, although I couldn’t quite see it.

  The general idea wasn’t a mystery to me, though; it seemed obvious that a teacher like Janie’s could command her attention and compel her to secrecy. David would blame himself, I knew, in his narcissistic way, however much fury he would direct at the teacher. It would be the affair, the separation, the divorce, the difficulty of living between two houses, the broken home. The inadequate stepmother: that was one element that hadn’t yet entered the balance, but I wondered if this would be the moment he decided to bring it out. This was my own insecurity talking, probably, but it didn’t stop me wondering.

  I found my phone and scrolled through to find my doctor’s number.

  I knocked on Janie’s door a few minutes later. She opened it just a few centimetres and put her face close to the gap.

  ‘I made an appointment for you, for Monday afternoon,’ I told her. ‘But it depends on what your dad says. And your mum. It’s up to them.’


  ‘Okay,’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ I repeated. Her golden hair was down, covering half her face so I could only see the shadow of an eye through the gap. I wondered whether she had been crying.

  ‘Do you need anything?’ I asked, but she cut me off before the question was even finished.

  ‘No, I’m fine.’ She closed the door.

  *

  I had taken a jar of green curry paste out of the fridge and started chopping up vegetables when I heard David open the front door, talking on his mobile as he set down his bag and kicked off his shoes. He would be peeling off his socks next, leaving them balled up in the hallway. He liked to keep the knives extremely sharp, and I sliced a zucchini with slow care.

  He finished the call as he came into the kitchen. ‘Hello,’ he said, smiling and surveying the counter. ‘What are you making?’

  ‘Don’t sound so concerned,’ I told him. ‘Curry.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  I poured a glass of wine and handed it to him.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said, and I lifted my own glass, took the last sip of wine. ‘It’s a beautiful evening,’ he remarked, not looking at me, probably trying to keep his gaze away from what I was doing to the food. He wandered towards the back of the house, opened the glass doors and stepped out into the yard. The little cairn of quartz was still there at the foot of the monstrous gum, dismantled now to a flat pile. The stones seemed to stay strangely clean, as though they repelled dirt. The pressure inside the house changed as the evening air floated in, a cloud of warmth carrying the smell of eucalyptus and smoke from some neighbour’s barbecue.

  I hadn’t been able to decide whether to tell him right away, or after dinner. Now it seemed clear that it would be impossible to sit through a meal while holding the information back, especially if Janie joined us, although she probably wouldn’t want to. I sliced a capsicum into uniform diamonds. The rice cooker steamed and chirped on the counter behind me. I checked to make sure it wasn’t some kind of error signal, an alarm, but it seemed to be just one of the random sounds it made as it worked.

  I looked up to see Janie there by the fridge, an empty glass in her hand. She pulled out a new can of Diet Coke and poured it, adding fresh ice.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked.

  She didn’t answer, and looked over to where her father was standing in the yard, inspecting the gum tree’s slow destruction of the back wall.

  ‘I think it’s pushed another couple of bricks out,’ he called.

  ‘I just want to get it over with,’ Janie said quietly.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Bring him inside.’

  She walked over to him. I admired her for holding herself as upright as she did, in her practised ballerina position. There was no sense of apology in her posture, or of asking for sympathy or pity.

  I didn’t hear what she said to him, but the two of them came back inside, and all I could see on his face was distraction and mild confusion. I went through to the living room, making them follow me, and sat on the couch.

  ‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘Janie has something she wants to tell you.’ He paused for a moment before he sat next to me, and I could sense him sorting through possibilities. I caught his eye when he didn’t expect it, and the look there was something new. He didn’t trust me, and he was angry at being ambushed. This wasn’t what he had in mind when he imagined whatever kind of modern family we might become.

  Janie held her glass in both hands and slumped forward a little, her confident dancer’s pose slackening. But she looked right at him. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.

  Seconds passed before he repeated the words. ‘You’re pregnant.’ Not like a question, just like an echo. She nodded.

  ‘And you knew about this.’ He turned his head towards me.

  ‘Only just today.’

  He couldn’t look at Janie, or talk to her, so he talked to me, staring hard at the coffee table.

  ‘And how long have you known about this?’

  ‘I just found out this afternoon.’

  ‘For hours, in other words. All day.’

  I edged away from him. He went on, all indignant anger at me knowing before he did, and holding the information back, and it was completely wrong. I wished for it to slide off me, but it stung. I tried to shut away the part of me that could be hurt or angry, upstairs somewhere, safe on the sofa in the little room.

  We had argued before. There had been one time that he had shouted at me, in the first week after we moved in to the new house, before everything had been straightened out into its hotel-like order, when the remnants of boxes and mess were driving him crazy. It was something about my medication, was I taking it, was I lying about it. I knew at the time that I was in the right, and he was being unreasonable, and I was patient. The words had seemed to bounce and disappear into flat echoes in the big, open-plan space; it hadn’t got under my skin like this. His glance grew closer to mine, his face beginning to redden. It was just a displacement of something, I told myself, although I wasn’t sure.

  ‘David, let’s talk about all that later,’ I said.

  ‘Right. Okay,’ he said, as though he had been expecting me to cut him off, grateful for it in some way, and turned back to Janie, still furious. ‘Does your mother know?’

  Janie said she didn’t, she had only told me.

  He shook his head. ‘How did this happen?’ he asked her. And then before she could answer, he wanted to know how she could be sure, had she seen a doctor, maybe she was wrong about it.

  I stood up and went back to the kitchen. His voice stayed low until I heard him questioning her, and her silence, and then he exploded.

  ‘Who is it?’ he shouted. She stood her ground for a few seconds but then she told him.

  ‘Him?’ he asked with contempt. ‘Fucking hell. Right. You. Upstairs.’ I looked up, half expecting him to be addressing me, but he was speaking to Janie. I heard him dial the ballet school and leave a curt message asking them to call him back immediately, repeating his number twice. Then he called Gwen to ask where she was, and could he come over with Janie, there was something they needed to discuss. ‘I’ll tell you when I get there. Look, how soon can you be home?’

  I should have expected it; I’m not sure why I didn’t, why it was so surprising.

  ‘Get your things,’ he called up to Janie. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he said to me, putting his glass in the sink. ‘I’m taking her over to Gwen’s.’ It seemed like a long time since he had said her name.

  It felt weird to be saying goodbye with a knife in my hand and I put it down. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,’ I said. I wasn’t, but it seemed like the only thing to say. ‘I thought Janie should tell you herself.’ But his keys were in his hands and he didn’t seem to be listening. Janie closed the door quietly on the way out.

  I finished making the curry and ate it sitting on the balcony with the bottle of wine. The food tasted bland. I drank too fast, thirsty and anxious in the heat. If we had herbs growing in the yard I could have put basil in the curry, I told myself, adding to the list of things I ought to get around to doing. I liked the idea of growing things although I had never managed to do it, apart from that jasmine plant and a patch of mint that grew wild in the corner of the courtyard I had in Rozelle, which almost died once I started trying to take care of it and watering it.

  One of the neighbours across the road was having a party and I watched guests starting to arrive, alone and in pairs, carrying bottles of wine and six-packs of beer. They left the front door and windows open and music spilled out onto the street, a remixed Kylie song. The sky went from purple to dark blue, aeroplane lights winking here and there, then grey and black as a massive set of storm clouds moved in. The pressure in the air fizzed and dropped. A few straggling fruit bats flew overhead, and I slapped away mosquitos.

  I wondered when David would return, and whether he would bring Janie with him, and when I ought to tell him about the doctor’s appointment. Or ask him. Janie would probably mentio
n it. The rain started to fall hard all at once, and the air broke with a flash of lightning followed in seconds by a crack of thunder. I watched the water fall in sheets from the sky, stuck my hand out over the balcony railing and felt the stinging drops hit. People kept arriving for the party across the road, coming to the door with their clothes wet through, until I wondered how the small terrace managed to fit them all in. Maybe there was a horde of them in the backyard, getting soaked. I went inside and crossed the darkened bedroom to the closet. As I stood in front of it I noticed a trickle of water seeping out from under the door; it came close to my bare toes and I pushed the door, worried. It jammed at first, as was becoming its habit, and then opened.

  The floor of the room was awash with water. I went to switch on the chandelier and stopped, worried that water might have leaked through the ceiling and into the wiring, which was probably ancient. I stood there in the dark, trying to see where the water was coming from, and went to the sofa. It felt damp, as though water might have been dripping onto it. I crossed to the window and felt water on the inside of the glass; when I touched the wallpaper my hands came away wet. I pushed my hair from my face and was surprised to find it damp to the touch; my clothes were damp, too, as though they were soaked in sweat. The window stuck as usual when I tried it, and then opened with a shudder that jarred my wrists. I looked out, eager to see the view from here at last, but the night was so dark it was impossible to tell; the lights were out in the houses across the lane and next door, and all I could make out were a few of the sculptures in next door’s backyard. A swift blaze of lightning illuminated them for a fraction of a second; they seemed surreally tall, their faces terrifyingly close to the window.

  After the lightning the night felt doubly black. Rain fell hard through the open window and I struggled to close it. By now my feet were wet; it felt like a full centimetre of water had collected on the floor. I worried about the sofa, the lamp, the delicate wallpaper. Water dripped down my face, wet from facing the window, and I tasted salt in my mouth.