‘Grandie!’ The child at the door. And behind him his mother.
‘There you two are!’ To let Finn get close Ethan stepped back towards his wife, took her face in his hands and kissed it. As the child related tales of his day, Martin could hear Ethan whisper, ‘I missed you,’ in his voice a resolve that the day, everything in it, was behind him. It was, as Martin himself well understood, the only way forwards.
‘And Mum said when you’re better we can fish off the beach. Can we do that, Grandie?’
Outside it had started to rain and there was a plane passing overhead in the sky. The boy had asked a question, and behind him his mother talked about the crumble for dessert then opened her handbag and pulled out another packet of mints and put them down next to the others. Martin smiled, told the boy he could take the mints.
‘You keep them, Grandie. They’re your favourites.’
Yes, he remembered that. It was because they were chewy, and not hard. Still the boy was looking down at him like he was waiting for something. So Martin asked if he had told him about the garden, right there in the middle of the tenements, and around it all just rubble. ‘The strawberries go first, then the tomatoes. It is quite a thing, quite a thing . . .’
‘I’m sick of that story,’ the boy said, wincing when his mother pinched his arm. ‘Let’s do The Bear Hunt, Grandie. I’ll start: We’re going on a bear hunt, we’re going to catch a big one . . . Your turn, Grandie.’
The boy fixed him with a stare as he waited but it was the woman who spoke, in a lovely, fluid rhythm:
‘Long wavy grass.
We can’t go over it.
We can’t go under it.
Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!’
The boy squeezed his arm and prompted Martin by repeating the last line, and there, finally, they came, the words unleashed in a warm and welcome wave, clumsily gushing forwards: ‘Swishy, swashy, swishy, swashy, swishy, swashy.’ They laughed, because it was still a bit funny the way he spoke, and again when they came to the river, the deep cold river: ‘Splash, splosh, splash, splosh.’
When the story was finished and the family was tucked back into bed, Laini said it was time to go help Nana. Only Ethan remained. Like everyone else these days, he was waiting for something too. People would come and sit by his bed—in the hospital, and now here at home—and Martin would wonder what it was they were waiting for. It was like a little game, guessing what it was. Maggie called out that she was home, but it wasn’t that. Ethan’s phone made the sound of a car starting, then it stopped. And then Maggie came into the room. She said she wanted to talk about something.
‘I went to see the ambulance officer last week, before you came home,’ she said. ‘The one who brought you to the hospital. I wanted to ask him about the dog, and the boy in the paper.’ She waited, his worst kind of waiting, the one where he was meant to say something. When he didn’t she looked at Ethan again and continued. ‘He told me where they live, the house. I think I should go there, don’t you? And apologise . . .’
Ethan looked worried. ‘They’ll want money,’ he said. He asked questions about the accident and Maggie didn’t really know the answers. She just looked down and held Martin’s hand, but her eyes were elsewhere and her skin was cold.
Outside the window now it was dark; the ocean had disappeared and the rain had stopped.
‘Let’s let Grandie get ready for dinner,’ Ethan said. His voice was kind.
Martin wanted to tell him there was nothing to worry about, but he couldn’t. Even with a breath behind it he knew that the words would get stuck in his mouth.
Chapter 10
The plate slipped out of Ethan’s hand into the sink. He hadn’t meant to drop it, but even if he had, Laini’s question and the way it was hurled across the kitchen so early in the day felt like an entirely disproportionate response: ‘What is making you so angry, Ethan?’
As it happened, within the hour he would be in a position to give the question an answer. Let me give you a for instance . . .
Forty minutes after handling his breakfast plate with insufficient care, Ethan was in the lift at work, in the middle of sending a text, when Brad Styles slipped through the closing door. Ethan didn’t look up; he didn’t know there was a rule that said you had to. All he knew was that so far that morning he had ticked every box—he’d run the labradoodle he never wanted to get, squeezed Finn’s magic enzyme-enriched guava juice, apologised about the plate and now, with a potential client due in twenty minutes, he was sending a message to his wife to remind her about dinner with his dad—recent stroke victim now being forced into early retirement. Brad Styles stepping into the lift didn’t register on his Richter; he didn’t know the man was there—honest truth—and by the time Ethan was done with the message, Brad was tapping something of his own, head down, three levels up to twelve. The silence was mutual, that was a fair assumption, or not. It was only as Brad was walking away that Ethan heard him snarl: ‘And good morning to you too, Ethan.’
Ethan halted, turned to see the slight swing of the hips and the slow shake of the head as Brad Styles strode down the corridor.
Good morning to you too?
With just five little words, it trickled into the frontal sinus behind his eye sockets.
Why am I so angry?
Take a step back, you fucking little moron.
Ethan closed his eyes, took a long breath; that was Laini’s suggestion for moments like this, and in the exhalation he put his mind to the possibility he had in fact caused some offence—the man felt snubbed—and that he was at fault. But try as he might to ingest it, his breaths became short, shallow, the taste at the back of his throat faintly acidic. No, he could not swallow it, because that would be giving in; that would be jumping into the cesspit of bullshit adolescent insecurities, jumping in and putting his head all the way under. It seeped through the pores of this place, from the top to the bottom, or the bottom to the top; whichever way, there was some game being played out in a foreign language behind office doors, in tearooms, over Friday night drinks and nibbles. As far as he could tell, the stage-one objective was to remember as many details about other people’s lives as you could: kids’ schools and sports were a big tick, postcodes, holiday destinations past and planned, favourite restaurants, parents’ ailments, mild, serious, life-threatening . . . Bingo for bringing something back to the table, the name of a naturopath or new tapas bar or mortgage broker, something that showed you paid attention and took it away. That would mean you were considerate, a good guy, one of the team, and that would take you into stage two. It wasn’t that Ethan had never tried, and at first it seemed benign enough. A few drinks, a couple of sushi trains, then dinners with wives, a Sunday brunch with the kids. But somehow he and Laini and Finn always seemed to be sitting around a table with people who had already clicked, and they never did. Maybe it was Laini, the way she acted after a drink too many, maybe Finn was too quiet, serious . . . It didn’t help that Ethan neither played golf nor watched rugby, and had—as a means of ditching his old uni mates (‘culling the fuckwits’, as Laini called it)—become actively averse to both. And it wasn’t that they never got invited anymore. It was just that they didn’t go. He had membership (albeit B-grade); he just didn’t have a lot of use for it.
‘Are you okay, Mr Field? Anything I can do?’ A secretary. Jenna. Or Janna.
Ethan smiled, shook his head, and felt the welcome return of indifference. Brad Styles was a senior associate vying for partnership in corporate leasing. Brad Styles was not his problem, though maybe it was in part a rebuke to him that on the way to his office Ethan made an atypical effort to wish a good morning over the top of the blue-rimmed partitions to anyone whose name he could remember. He closed the office door behind him and set up his laptop on his desk, checked his email, and confirmed the morning agenda: a meet and greet, three teleconferences back-to-back, and a one o’clock with Max. When his coffee came—the first of four for the morning—and the door was closed
again, Ethan left it on the desk and stood at the window that ran the length of the office. Closing his eyes, he put one hand on the back of his neck, held tight as he cupped his chin with the other, and cranked it over his left shoulder, all the way to crackle-pop. Once he had given himself a minute to savour the release, he moved on to the right. His chiropractor told him that cracking his neck was the worst thing he could do, but his chiropractor didn’t know how it felt to have your head in a vice. The blood flowed warm and fuzzy from his shoulders into his head and whatever lay outside his office door floated momentarily at a safe distance, like it was all just make-believe.
Ethan sipped the warm soy latte and cast his eyes now out the window, down to the people walking the paths of Hyde Park. He looked for one at his usual starting position, the fountain at St James Road. There we go: a plumpish woman in a red coat. She paused at the fountain and moved her bag to the other shoulder, and then continued straight along the park’s main path, disappearing under the fig trees. This was Ethan’s morning ritual: to pick a brightly coloured stranger to follow along the path to the trees where he would lose sight of them. The game was to find them again. At this point—the point when they entered the trees—it was a matter of waiting. From the main path there were seven arteries; only three of them would give rise to any likelihood he would spot her again, though in his favour was always the fact that those three led to the CBD. In his experience his chances were better than three in seven, better than half. So big red female had been two, three minutes. He skipped from the first path to the second and kept a lookout at the other end; if she’d picked up her pace she could be through it soon—sometimes he managed a glimpse as they crossed Park Street for the southern section. He sipped, waited. She might have stopped to make a call; he wasn’t throwing it in yet. There was this one time a guy in a yellow jacket did a one-eighty and Ethan caught the sneaky fucker coming back out at the fountain. He checked his watch. Sipped. And there she was, the red woman on the third artery, phone to ear, taking her sweet time . . . Spotto.
A double buzz. ‘Mrs McCarthy is here.’
On the dot. ‘Give me a minute.’ He brought up the email. The referral was a friend of Max, the managing partner. Mrs McCarthy had been polite about her first lawyer but not her first husband. There was a reason to fight, but Max didn’t say how much of a reason.
Ethan closed the email, gazed across his desk. ‘Morning, ya little maniac.’ In a fish tank against the opposite wall, suckermouth to the glass, Bob the Bristlenose Catfish gazed back. This was one dog-ugly fish, whisker-like tentacles sticking out of its spotted head, inherited—along with a Bolivian Butterfly fish called Lady—from Brian, the partner who’d landed a gig in London. ‘This guy’s pretty special,’ Brian had said in the handover, pointing at the catfish. ‘He just keeps at it, sucks his way round the glass. You never have to clean the tank. I figured he’d keep you company.’ It was sad to see Brian go. Brian was the one who brought Ethan in. He understood Ethan. He backed him up. He drank Drambuie. ‘I get it, mate, you’re not a social animal . . . but you’ve gotta pat a few backs around here.’ These were his last words before he got stuck into instructions on the tank: food, light, filter, you name it. And the plants, he had a list of everything in there, all different kinds: moss, ivy, lilies. There was a schedule and a checklist. When Brian finally shook his hand and left, Ethan turned to Moira, his secretary, and handed her the papers. ‘I hope you got all that.’ She had. Moira was great—with the fish, with everything. Then Moira left. Now there is Mia, sending out the wrong affidavits, doing fuck knew what to the fish. About a month back he came in to find Lady open-mouthed at the surface with her eyes all clouded over. That was when Ethan told Mia to bring him the fish papers. He read up on it himself, tested the water and fixed the levels, surprised to find it all strangely therapeutic. That night he read more, even cleaned the rocks and bogwood.
Brian was right about Bob. He was the soldier ant of the fish tank: hard-working, loyal, all-round good company. Whenever Ethan was there, Bob’s little goggle eyes stared back at him through the glass. Not Lady. Even after Ethan saved her life, Lady hadn’t given him a single glance. The oblivious Bolivian Butterfly: like the woman in red now waiting with strangers on the street for the light to change, never for a moment in her day did Lady get the sense that she was being watched.
Ethan tapped Spirulina flakes into the tank and returned to his desk as she danced up to the surface.
‘Give it a rest, buddy,’ he said to the catfish that kept on cleaning. ‘Have something to eat.’
And, leaning back in his chair as he gazed contentedly around at his own four walls, he buzzed Mia. ‘If you could bring in Mrs McCarthy . . .’
Tina McCarthy wasn’t ready to jump ship, Max had said; she just wasn’t happy with the way things were going at Marks and Bennet. Ethan knew better, of course. She was here in his office, and that meant she was ready. This was his favourite part: the catch and grab.
New business was the first agenda item at every partners’ meeting. While the rest of the groups in the firm had dipped or flatlined, family law had risen by forty per cent over the last two years. The law was a business. Ethan ran his well. He made good money, and five years ago he had made partner at the age of thirty-one.
Still, whatever the level of success, he knew the practice was underappreciated. It wasn’t just his father. (Even when he made partner Martin had asked him if he was sure it was what he wanted to be doing.) Family lawyers ranked as bottom feeders. Spinning money out of misery, all that—though say what you like, there was an art to it only few possessed. Clients dredged up their muck and Ethan waded through it and determined in the shortest time what belonged on file and what didn’t. Ethan’s clients quickly learnt not to argue when he interrupted mid-sentence to tell them: ‘I understand that this is important to you, but it is not important to me.’
What they needed was for him to sift and to simplify; they needed him to break it down in their favour. Ethan had drawn up his own little list. Marriage was a structure with basic rules for set-up and maintenance. The size of the tank determined the space in which to swim. Take out the pretty plants and rocks and your players were bored to death. Forget to change the water and they just floated right up to the surface. And needless to say, introducing new fish, particularly the fancy, striped ones, was a risky business.
Ten minutes in with Mrs McCarthy.
A lapsed interior designer—fleshy, early forties, pale-skinned, mouse-blonde streaked with ash-blonde, and a slight hook in the nose she never got fixed. He smells deodorant not perfume. Except for the watch she doesn’t wear her wealth. Maybe she’s a hoarder: all well-bought, well-kept pieces—the leather coat is vintage, but he suspects she was the one to buy it new. She has an eye and a brain, no question. She has come through the worst of the rage, but there is something still stuck between her teeth.
‘You might have gathered from what I’m saying, Ethan . . . Sorry, I shouldn’t presume to know what you’ve gathered. Perhaps I should stop prattling and you should tell me.’
‘You don’t prattle,’ he said.
‘Oh, I do. I know I do. Stewart used to say that. I know I can go on a bit.’ When she smiled her shoulders lifted in a ‘what can I do?’ sort of way. ‘I just didn’t know it was such a big crime.’
She coughed. He caught a whiff of last night’s wine and this morning’s cigarette.
‘I suppose in a way I just want a second opinion, a pair of fresh eyes,’ she went on. ‘I want someone to say that signing off on all this is the right thing to do. I mean, we have a three-year-old child. And I’m not saying this lawyer hasn’t done a good job. I’m not saying that at all.’ She stopped there, grimaced. ‘You know what he does? He keeps congratulating me on my “retreat from animosity”. I admit that is starting to sound a little patronising. I just got this sense I was getting pushed out the door so someone could press print on the final account . . . He gets his thirty grand for sending a few l
etters back and forth and Stewart gets on with his life, case closed. Painless. “Retreat from animosity.” Tell me what the fuck that means when a man is leaving you with a three-year-old child?’ More coughing. ‘Sorry, I’m prattling.’
So far: Tina and Stewart—a fifty-five-year-old sports nut who owned a chain of startlingly profitable surf shops—had been together for five years, and had a three-year-old son. The relationship between Stewart and Tina had ended over arguments about having a second child. The first pregnancy was the result of the seventh IVF insemination. The hormone injections had played havoc with Tina’s mental health, and in turn their relationship. After a year of swimming around in it, the tepid water turned toxic. When Stewart told her he wasn’t prepared to do it again, she hurled a jade statue of Buddha across the kitchen and it carved a third eyebrow at the centre of his forehead. Stewart jumped; swim for your life . . .
Given the length of the relationship and the fact that his wealth had been accumulated prior to its commencement, the offer on the table was a generous one: she would keep the five-million-plus Mosman home and would receive 150K a year until the boy was twenty-one.
‘Sure, I mean, I agreed with the lawyer, the offer was good; I admit I was surprised how good, how quickly it came—too quick, you know, not enough thought. He never cared about giving Timmy a brother or a sister; he said he did but it was like he ticked a box when Timmy was born, job done. I was a lonely child, I told him, it isn’t easy, but he didn’t listen. He pretended he did, but he didn’t listen.’
And as long as that lingered, the dregs of what should have been, Tina wasn’t keen to sign it away and set him free. She didn’t want to cut the cord because it was all that was left to bind them.
This Picture of You Page 8
