The Secret Lives of Men

by Georgia Blain

  When he took me home, my mother was in the garden, furious with me for not telling her, angry with him for being so irresponsible, again; and she knew she was sticking the knife in, she knew she was hurting him.

  He ignored her. Bending down to kiss me, he whispered that he would be back. ‘Soon,’ he promised.

  And he was. No matter how much my parents protested. He came each day, wheeling me down to the gully where we fucked and drank, the fallen leaves and twigs tangled in the sleeves of my coat and in my hair, the smell of the dope thick in my clothes and the scent of him buried deep in my skin.

  ‘Why don’t you like him?’ I once shouted at my mother. ‘He was just trying to get us away from the fight. He was trying to do the right thing.’

  As soon as I was out of the wheelchair, I stopped coming home, staying with him in the flat his parents had bought, living off his money, both of us out all night, in the few clubs and bars open late, or at parties held by people we didn’t know, where we were the wild entertainment, the ones who had gone off the rails, scary and too much for this place.

  ‘You’re a mess,’ Lara once told me angrily in a pub, and I could only sneer at her, a strange cocktail of shame and superiority coursing in my veins.

  But sometimes, when we would sleep in, sweaty and restless in each other’s arms, I would hate what we had become. I would wake in the early afternoon and see us both in that sharp light, Alastair still beautiful, eyes closed, skin pale gold, and I would wish that I was someone else.

  I would like to say I was the one who decided it was time to leave. But that wasn’t how it went. He left me. Dragging himself with an extraordinary will away from the inertia and mess of our life together, weeping each time I begged him to come back, he eventually checked himself into a private rehab clinic in Melbourne.

  And there I was. Alone.

  Standing outside Alastair’s empty flat, I saw myself reflected in the glass door to the building. Lank hair, eyes wide and scared, body too thin, acne across my chin, unsteady on platform shoes with scuffed plastic straps.

  I called my mother and she came and picked me up.

  Driving home, with the little I owned on the back seat, she told me she would always be there for me, but the time had come to take responsibility for myself.

  ‘I love you,’ she said.

  I didn’t reply.

  Outside the window I could see the streets of the town I despised, the shadow of my own face layered over the roads and houses and gardens.

  ‘It’s not like you were driving,’ she continued, nervous because we never talked about the accident. ‘I mean, he had every reason — after what happened to that poor boy. But you were just a passenger.’

  Keeping my eyes on the window, I tried not to listen. I’m not blameless. I mouthed the words, watching the shape of my mouth.

  I’d had them all in stitches that night in the pub. The fish-and-chip lady, accent broad, limp pronounced, stupid, worthless and ugly. And I had thought I was so funny. Until everything began to spiral, wild, fast and completely out of control.

  On the day before my flight back to London, I borrowed my mother’s car, telling her I wanted to drive through the hills. I knew she was teaching and wouldn’t join me. She handed me the keys, asking me when I’d be back, and I promised it would be in time for dinner, aware this would be our last meal together for some time.

  The day was cooler, peppery eucalypts and the sweetness of melted tar rich beneath the crisp air. I hadn’t come this way for years, not since I was at school and on a camp that involved chill morning swims, bush walks and tasteless food dumped onto our tin plates. Sneaking out at night, we would sit beneath the pale stars, the frost of our breath merging with the smoke from our smuggled cigarettes, our giggles hushed as we gossiped and bickered, telling lies about who we liked and who we didn’t.

  As I passed through one-street towns, sandstone buildings crumbling into the hills, some set up for tourists, others almost deserted, I knew where I was headed, although I wasn’t sure of what I intended to do when I arrived.

  I had found the address the evening after I’d heard of his death. He had a shop in one of the larger towns on the way to the Coorong, a place where people came to buy antiques on a lazy Sunday excursion. The website showed off a collection of Danish and Swedish furniture, sourced on regular trips back to Scandinavia, and I’d searched through the images, hoping to find a picture of him, perhaps even accidentally captured as his wife photographed a new piece in a back corner. But there was nothing.

  Because it was a weekday, and the school holidays were over, the main street was empty. Wide verandahs shielded the footpath from the increasing heat of the sun, and nearly every shop was closed, only opening for business when the Saturday and Sunday visitors came. I was anxious that his would be shut, too, yet there was also a part of me hoping to find it locked up, so I could simply peer through the windows, feel disappointed and drive home. And at first, this was how it seemed to be, the doors pulled to, a lack of light inside indicating emptiness, but as I pressed my nose to the glass, I saw a woman at a desk, her face hidden by a sweep of auburn hair.

  She looked up as I pushed on the door, waving her arm to indicate that no, they were closed, she was sorry — but it was too late, I had already stepped inside and I, too, was apologising as she stood, tall and elegant in a pale blue cotton dress.

  ‘I thought I had locked the door,’ she said.

  I held out my hand towards her, saying that I hadn’t come to buy, I was in fact an old friend of Alastair’s. As I uttered my name, her eyes widened in recognition.

  I told her I’d been overseas for some time now, I only just heard of his death the other day, quite by accident.

  ‘I was so sorry,’ I said. ‘It must have been a terrible shock.’

  She nodded, still not speaking, and I continued in a rush of words, saying that I wished I’d been able to go to the funeral, to have marked his passing in some way, and that was perhaps why I had driven down here, to try to somehow reconnect with him; and I wondered if I should head out the door and leave her, because I felt foolish and intrusive.

  She turned the key in the lock and asked if I wanted to sit, perhaps have a drink.

  ‘I was just trying to cancel the last order he made, but he kept such terrible notes.’ She led me through to the kitchen at the back of the shop. ‘I want to close up, to get back home, you see. I don’t want to live here anymore.’ She glanced out the window at the wide, empty street.

  I told her I was surprised that Alastair had chosen this place to settle.

  ‘He didn’t want to be in town,’ she explained. ‘Near all the people who knew him and what had happened.’

  ‘Why didn’t he leave? Live in another city or country?’

  The room was large, with white walls, transom windows to let in light and air, a high wooden ceiling and heavy stone flaggings on the floor. She put a jug of iced water on the table between us and sat across from me, saying she often asked him that question herself.

  ‘But I never had an answer.’ Her face was tired. ‘And then when he died, I finally got it.’

  Outside I could hear a mother talking to her child, and from across the road the turn of a car engine and the gunning of an accelerator, motor throbbing in the noon stillness.

  ‘Every Tuesday he would drive to the city,’ she continued. ‘He told me he had an NA meeting he liked to go to. And I never presumed otherwise. But it wasn’t the truth.’ She poured us both a glass of water from the jug.

  Her voice was quiet when she spoke again. ‘They called me when he died. He had just left the home, and was outside in the garden, walking towards his car. He collapsed on the pavement. It was instant.’

  I didn’t understand.

  ‘He never went to NA meetings. He went there. Each Tuesday, to visit
him.’

  I stared up at the windows, the chain heavy and well oiled, and beyond the glass, a slice of sky, flat, blue and hard.

  ‘They said he came at the same time every week and sat with him for an hour. Sometimes he read to him; other times he just stayed by his side and held his hand.’

  A clock in the showroom struck the hour, sonorous and slow. ‘How long?’ I asked her.

  ‘Since the accident,’ she said. ‘Most weeks. Apparently he had become the only visitor. The mother and father died about two years ago, and no one else came.’ She looked down at the table. ‘It’s an awful fate, to be left like that. Completely alone.’

  I wondered at all the times he would have gone there in the brief period we were together.

  ‘I never knew,’ I said.

  Her eyes were kind. ‘Nor did I.’

  ‘He was ashamed.’ I studied the worn sandstone at our feet, uneven and pale. ‘He thought it was his fault. But Johnny wasn’t sitting in the car properly and I —’ There were so many factors. There always are. I glanced up at her. ‘Alastair walked out of there without any injury and he never forgave himself.’

  ‘I think he did,’ she said.

  Later, as I drove home across the hills with the afternoon light holding back the darkness, I wondered whether she was right.

  She had shown me photographs of him and their two daughters, pictures on her phone and prints that hung in the back rooms where they lived. He was as beautiful as he had always been, tall and slender, skin like honey. Their girls were called Ingrid and Christina, both in school, one like him and one like her. He was a good father, she had said, gentle and attentive, and she had started crying then, quickly brushing away her tears as soon as they fell.

  At the doorway, I told her I was glad I had come, and I gave her my address in London, although I knew it was unlikely she would ever contact me. As she wrote it down, I took in the house behind her one more time, his coat in the hall, and beneath that his boots, his bag at the bottom of the stairs, traces of him everywhere, a life that still lingered, held on to by those who were left behind.

  Enlarged + Heart + Child

  Wednesday is dog day. Or dog afternoon, to be more precise. In fact, it’s only a twenty-minute distraction, but when you have so little to cling to, you take what you can get.

  This week Shelly and Annie are dressed in their PAT volunteer tracksuits, and they have brought both the dogs to the children’s hospital. Shelly has Max, a quiet brown labrador, and Annie has Lulu, the poodle. Leone and Ruby have seen them both before, and it’s depressing to count back and realise they’ve now been in ward 3C South for four dog days, which equals four weeks, which is close enough to a month — a length of time too sad to countenance.

  Ruby is sitting up next to her bed, cheeks still a high pink from the fever that is only just starting to abate. She takes Leone’s hand as soon as she notices Lulu just outside the ward entrance — Lulu is her favourite, and she wants Leone to stay and watch Lulu’s tricks again, rather than going to get a cool drink from the fridge.

  ‘Who’s met Lulu before?’ Annie asks, and Ruby is the only one in the ward to raise her hand.

  The others are all new. Bed 4 came in last night and has complained continuously, shouting at her parents not to touch her, to get her food, no she doesn’t want that, why can’t she go home, why did this have to happen to her, why not someone else?

  Ruby’s eyes widen with each outburst, and she turns her head so that only Leone can see her mouth the words: She’s got a broken arm, that’s all.

  Leone would like to tell the girl to shut the fuck up, but of course she doesn’t, and each time Bed 4’s mother apologises for her daughter’s behaviour, Leone is appropriately sympathetic.

  Now, as Annie brings Lulu right into the centre of the ward, Bed 4 tells her to stay away, she doesn’t like dogs, keep her back; and her mother is once again saying how sorry she is, her daughter is just scared.

  ‘She’s only a little poodle,’ her mother tries.

  Bed 4 is having none of it. ‘I don’t want her near me.’

  Bed 1, opposite Ruby, has been lying flat on her back since she came up from surgery two days ago. Cerebral palsy and an operation on her knees to try to keep her out of a wheelchair. Her dad sits by her side, doing the crossword, rousing his daughter from her morphine haze to see the dogs.

  ‘She does tricks,’ Ruby explains, more to the father than Bed 1 because Bed 1 has not yet been able to lift her head and talk.

  He is the joking type and he ruffles his daughter’s hair. ‘Tricks, hey?’ He raises an eyebrow. ‘Can she read and write?’

  Ruby shakes her head.

  ‘Not interested then.’ He winks and folds the paper.

  Bed 2 is empty and Bed 3 has the curtains drawn. This morning there were social workers with her, and their talk was hushed but still loud enough to catch certain words. An overdose. Second attempt.

  There is weariness in the mother’s voice each time her daughter begs to be allowed to go home.

  ‘You hate me,’ Bed 3 cries out. ‘You don’t want me to come back.’

  Leone knows Ruby listens to it all, the drama disturbing and better than any of the young-adult books she has been trying to read in between bouts of fever.

  Lulu the poodle waits patiently in the middle of the ward for Max to do his rounds. Max has no tricks: he is just a gentle labrador, with dark eyes and a thick chocolate-brown coat. He wags his tail, back sunk low as he makes his way over to where Ruby sits, eager to run her hands through his hair. She reaches out, her arm too thin now, the veins blue against the white of her skin, and sinks her fingers into the warmth of his fur. Max rests his head in her lap, and Ruby breathes in deeply.

  Leone kneels by her side.

  ‘He’s beautiful, isn’t he?’ Leone whispers, not quite trusting herself to talk.

  Every day for the last four weeks, Leone and Jacob have texted photos of Ruby’s dog to her. He is called Harry, and he is large and hairy, ridiculous in the outfits that they dress him in for the daily shoot. Jacob borrowed a child’s stethoscope and sent in a picture of Dr Harry; Leone has draped pink cloth over his head, transforming him into Nurse Harry; on other days they leave him just as he is and label their messages Harry In The Raw.

  They have plotted sneaking him into the hospital carpark and getting Ruby down there, but she always refuses, scared he will knock her over in his enthusiasm, or pull her cannula out.

  ‘I’ll wait,’ she tells them.

  And that’s what she’s been doing.

  When the GP first told them that Ruby had an enlarged heart, Leone did what she knew she shouldn’t. She went straight home and googled: enlarged + heart + child. The results were alarming.

  The next day, the diagnosis was made by the specialist. Pericarditis, or the collection of excessive fluid between the two walls that surround the chambers. Pictures of Ruby’s heart were shown to them on a computer screen. Leone held her breath as she watched it beat beautifully, the valve opening and closing, opening and closing, with a steady rhythm. The doctor examined it from each angle, capturing shots every few seconds. There were times when the heart was like a gorilla’s nose, Leone thought, black and wet, the nostrils breathing in and out.

  The doctor pointed out the fluid, and the build-up of fibrous strands, like jellyfish tentacles. The walls had thickened. He told them it was surprising the function appeared perfectly normal.

  ‘The danger is the movement of the heart will be constricted,’ he explained. ‘And that’s why we need to operate.’

  ‘I must have a very strong heart,’ Ruby said after he left.

  Leone could only nod.

  That night, Ruby was wheeled into theatre. Jacob stayed with her as she went under. Leone couldn’t do it.

  He joined Leone
in the windowless waiting room off intensive care soon after, his face pale. ‘It was like watching her die,’ he said.

  She held his hand as his shoulders heaved, and together they waited.

  The surgery went well. An hour later Ruby was brought into intensive care, bleary and complaining about the oxygen mask, her skin waxy, and her hair tangled around her face.

  ‘I didn’t feel a thing,’ she told them, before lapsing once again into a deep sleep.

  Four weeks later and they are still here.

  Leone looks at Ruby now, Max’s head resting in her lap, and she wonders how much longer they can bear this unexplained deterioration. When she washes her in the shower, she can see each bone, her skeletal frame delicate like a bird’s, pressing against her taut skin.

  Everyone had thought she would be heading home within a fortnight of surgery, but a week after the operation, the fevers began. Two or three a day, each reaching forty or forty-one degrees, and no reason to be found. There were teams of doctors, and they gave her new tests all the time — the wall of her heart, fluid from her lungs, blood from her veins, sputum and urine, all extracted and analysed.

  Her body never gave a clue.

  ‘A fever can only last so long,’ one of the nurses said, ‘before another symptom appears.’

  And so they continued to wait and see, not knowing what it was that they were waiting for, what they were expecting to see, while Ruby grew weaker, and the days of hospital routine ground the three of them down into splinters and grit, pieces that no longer held together.

  Max the labrador thumps his tail against the floor as Ruby scratches behind his ears.

  ‘He likes you,’ Shelly tells her.

  Shelly is a grey-haired, tough old woman, who only has time for animals and children, and even that is limited. She lets Ruby pat Max a little longer and then, conscious that the clock is ticking, she leads him over to Bed 1.