The Secret Lives of Men

by Georgia Blain

  It’s only an hour’s drive to Bundeena, but Clara’s late arrival means they have to ring the agent and let them know they won’t be on time. Clara sees no need. ‘It’s their job to wait for us,’ she says as she opens her window wide to the dust and grit of the road. Sinead insists, and Clara eventually takes the mobile phone and makes the call.

  ‘They’ll be there all afternoon,’ she says as she hangs up. Pulling the sun visor down, she checks her lipstick, rubbing at where it has bled into the corners of her mouth. ‘What a glorious day. How many houses did you ask them to show us?’

  There are only four available for rent, and only one that appears to be suitable. The others are either too expensive or too run down, Sinead explains. Clara nods, flipping up the visor, then takes a scrap of paper out of her bag.

  ‘There’s a couple for sale as well.’ There are addresses scribbled across the crumpled page, torn from one of her many notebooks.

  Sinead sighs. It’s only talk; Clara has no intention of buying. Sinead’s plan is a realistic one. They will rent a place together, somewhere cheap that they can take it in turns to use. They could even get other people in on the lease as well, making it more affordable for everyone.

  ‘So long as it’s only one other person,’ Clara says. ‘I’d like to know I could have decent stretches of time down there if I need it.’

  When Sinead protests about the cost, Clara is no longer interested. She smooths out her scrap of paper. ‘We’ll just see the ones for sale then.’

  ‘Why?’ Sinead says. ‘You’ve seen them before. You’re not serious about buying one of them.’

  ‘You never know.’

  ‘The agents must hate you.’

  ‘It’s not their job to hate me,’ Clara says. ‘It’s their job to like me.’ She turns to wink at Zoe, who is quiet.

  Sinead glances in the rear-vision mirror. Her daughter has her cheek to the window, her eyes fixed on the blur of trees, houses and cars, rushing past in a stream of colour. Beside her, the dog is sitting up, panting.

  ‘Are you alright, darling?’

  Zoe remains silent.

  ‘Are you doing your boredom trick?’

  Zoe doesn’t answer.

  Sinead explains to her mother: ‘She likes to experience the boredom. She doesn’t want to read or talk or listen to music — it’s to see how long she can last just doing nothing.’

  Clara clearly thinks it’s marvellous. ‘You’re meditating, darling,’ she says to Zoe. ‘Do you know what meditation is?’

  Of course she does. Zoe’s best friend has an uncle who is a Buddhist. ‘He meditates. He says that if you can interrupt someone when they are meditating then they aren’t meditating.’

  ‘Then you weren’t meditating.’ Sinead laughs.

  Zoe just rolls her eyes and turns back to the window. ‘I never said I was.’

  As they leave the highway and drive into the national park surrounding Bundeena, the change is dramatic. They are the only car now, and out the window there is nothing but bush: blue-grey eucalypts, sandy scrub, delicate ferns, gnarled bottlebrush, and the last remaining stalks of Gymea lilies piercing the sky. The road narrows, twisting up and down hills, pressing in close to the rocky outcrops that delineate the roll of the landscape.

  ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ Sinead opens her window, breathing in the sharp air. She wants her mother to also appreciate the beauty, to show how much she, too, loves it. ‘And so close to the city. That’s what’s incredible. Less than an hour and you’re here.’ She needs Clara for her plan to work. She could take out a lease with friends, but if she has Clara on board, it’s one less person she will have to find, and she and her mother will have some flexibility in any timeshare arrangement they establish. It is the perfect way to have a holiday house, she thinks, visualising weekends swimming, relaxing in the garden, and having friends to stay.

  But as they turn into Bundeena, she finds herself disappointed. Just slightly. And as the disappointment descends, she is aware that this is how she usually feels when she comes here. It is more suburban than she wants it to be. There are brick veneer houses with huge extensions, and a new development on the main street, the construction noisy, the scaffolding high enough to threaten something substantial. But she says nothing.

  ‘It’s a perfect day for an ice-cream,’ she tells Zoe.

  ‘Magnum?’ Zoe immediately seizes on the offer.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Sinead says. ‘We’ll look at the houses, have lunch, maybe a swim and then decide.’

  ‘Bloody hell. Do we have to do all that first?’

  Clara frowns as she opens the door to the noise of the construction. Her chiffon scarves float, flimsy in the stiff sea breeze. ‘I do wish you wouldn’t say “bloody”,’ she says.

  Sinead grins. ‘Oh, for god’s sake. There are far worse things she could say.’

  ‘Well, I don’t like it.’

  ‘So how many bloody houses are we going to see?’ Zoe asks.

  ‘Four,’ Sinead tells her as they walk up a set of stairs.

  ‘Bloody hell. We’d better start then or we’ll be here all day.’

  Clara pointedly ignores her, concentrating instead on the pictures of properties for sale outside the real estate agent’s office. She taps on the glass, and the agent recognises her and waves.

  ‘Kevin.’ She greets him enthusiastically and introduces him to Sinead and Zoe.

  ‘So, which ones are we interested in today?’ he asks, and Clara runs through the list of shacks for sale.

  ‘But first we want to inspect the rental houses,’ Sinead adds, handing him her own list before frowning at Zoe, who is flicking stones at car tyres. Clara’s dog hangs its head out the window, a sticky thread of saliva running from its teeth down the glass.

  ‘Pepper,’ Zoe calls to her, and she barks. ‘Pepper,’ she calls again, and the dog barks a little louder.

  Across the road a group of teenage girls walk down towards the ferry. Their clothes are too tight, their skirts too short. One has a T-shirt with Sex kitten written in hot pink across her breasts; another has Foxy across her backside. Zoe watches them, and exchanges a look with Sinead.

  Girlie girls, she mouths.

  Sinead nods, the sight of the teenagers only deepening her sense of disappointment. Joining Zoe by the car, she glances up the street at the supermarket and bottle shop and across to the construction site, before finally turning to the sliver of blue water at the end of the road.

  With a map clutched in one hand (in case they lose Kevin en route), Clara makes her way down the stairs towards them. She holds on to the railing, and places one foot carefully in front of the other. It has only been three weeks since her operation, and she has recovered remarkably well. In another three weeks, she will start the chemotherapy, and Sinead knows this will be hard. She has seen Clara’s friends go through similar treatments and how ill they have become.

  When the cancer was first diagnosed, Sinead went with her mother to the surgeon’s rooms, ready to take notes.

  ‘I won’t remember anything,’ Clara had said, and Sinead had promised she would be there, keeping a record of all he said.

  The doctor’s office was high above street level. Sinead could see out across the city, awash with rain, trees sodden and swaying in the wind. In front of her, the surgeon turned his pen, point down, point up, over and over again, as he listened to Clara tell him how she understood the situation to be.

  When she finished by saying that she hoped it would just be a lumpectomy and not a mastectomy, he became impatient.

  ‘You have been reading too many Women’s Weeklys,’ he said. ‘There is no such thing as a lumpectomy. What we do,’ and he drew a breast on the paper in front of him, ‘is take a slice of the pie.’ He outlined a triangle in the corner of the breas
t. ‘We need to get out the cherry, but to do so we have to take an entire piece of the pie.’ He pushed the paper across the desk, and Clara pushed it back to him.

  The surgeon ignored it. He reached for his file and told her he needed to ask her a few questions.

  ‘Medication?’

  Clara listed them all: blood pressure, HRT, Epilum and antidepressants. Sinead had no idea about the last one. She glanced sideways at her mother.

  ‘Menstruation?’

  ‘Not for years.’ Clara sounded surprised.

  That was not what he’d meant. When did she begin? he asked.

  ‘When I was about thirteen.’

  ‘And stop?’

  ‘Late forties.’

  ‘Pregnancies?’ The doctor scrawled notes without looking up.

  ‘Four.’ Clara hesitated. ‘Well, two I carried to full term. And two I terminated.’

  Again, Sinead hadn’t known.

  ‘Breastfeed?’

  ‘No,’ Clara told him.

  He wanted to clarify the names of each of the medications she was on, and Clara searched for where she had written the information.

  ‘You can email me,’ the surgeon said, as she covered his desk with scraps of paper.

  Shamefaced, she gathered them together, crushing them into her bag.

  ‘Now let me explain,’ he sat back in his chair, head resting against the leather, ‘the exact procedure.’

  This was when Sinead was expected to start writing, and she opened her book and waited, pen in hand.

  ‘Ah, the little scribe.’ The doctor turned to her. His eyes were amused. ‘Shall I speak slowly?’

  She stared back at him. ‘We’ll tell you when we need you to slow down.’

  ‘It’s important that you listen to me, and to me alone. I don’t want you reading those women’s magazines, or going on Google or talking to your friends. You would be amazed at the misinformation people manage to latch on to, vulnerable people, vulnerable women, in particular.’

  ‘And who else, may I ask, do you see other than vulnerable women?’ Clara rose in her chair. She had been a beauty once, strong, fine-featured, with a patrician nose and dark eyes. Beneath the smudged make-up, caked powder and those endless chiffon scarves that were always slightly grubby at the edges, there was a glimpse of her old dignity. Sinead reached across and took her mother’s hand, but Clara brushed her aside and stood.

  ‘This is not going to work,’ she told the doctor. ‘Thank you for your time.’ The shake in her voice was barely evident.

  Following her mother’s lead, Sinead also got up, nodding hastily at the doctor before she, too, turned to the door.

  Outside the surgery, they walked quickly, and silently, to the lift. It was only when the elevator doors closed that Sinead finally spoke. He was a pig. She was so proud of Clara. How dare he treat her like that?

  ‘Oh god,’ Clara said. ‘I left my X-rays in there. I need them.’

  She wanted Sinead to go up and get them for her.

  ‘I need them.’ She was panicked now. ‘I’m going to have to find someone else and get this out.’ She touched her breast. ‘And I don’t want to waste time messing around with getting the scans from one person to the next.’

  The doctor was in the reception area when Sinead returned. Neither of them acknowledged the other. Hating herself for blushing, Sinead reached across the desk and whispered her request to the woman who answered the phones. Without a word, the surgeon handed the envelope to her, nodding at his next patient as he did so.

  Downstairs, Clara was sitting on a vinyl bench by the elevator. Her whole body had shrunk, her scarves were tangled around her neck, and her make-up formed a dark circle around her left eye. She looked as old and as ill as she was.

  ‘I’ve got them,’ Sinead reassured her, holding up the X-rays.

  Clara didn’t even seem to notice. ‘You would think that all my years as an active feminist, a woman who had a seat in parliament as an independent, all of that …’ She waved her arm and then let it fall to her side. ‘You would think I would have found it easy to tell him where to get off.’

  ‘At least you did it,’ Sinead said, and she led her mother slowly towards the carpark.

  The first house they inspect is the cheapest place for rent. It’s an old fibro shack on the corner of a busy street, with a lantana-choked garden that drops away down the side of a cliff. A Moreton Bay fig obscures any light, and the recent rains have caused fat fingers of mildew to creep up the walls.

  Kevin tries the key and then kicks the door open, stepping over a moth-eaten blanket on the worn linoleum. ‘The very best in security.’ He laughs. ‘A lick of paint, bit of furniture, and who knows what you’ll have.’

  ‘I like it,’ Clara says.

  Sinead rolls her eyes. ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘I do, actually.’

  There are holes in the walls, and two of the windows are smashed. The rooms are dark and cramped, and the garden is unusable. Sinead points all this out to Clara. Zoe, who has been outside with Pepper, stands at the front door, takes one look, and tells them both it’s a bloody dump.

  ‘Well, I think it has charm,’ Clara insists.

  They drive straight past two of the other places after Clara pronounces them ‘suburban’, and by the time they get to the fourth, which is opposite the RSL, Sinead is ready to give up. She winds down the window to let Kevin know that they won’t bother with this one either, but Clara stops her. She wants to go inside.

  ‘Why?’ Sinead says. ‘You’d hate the noise.’ She points at the club opposite.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t.’

  ‘I’ll stay in the car,’ Zoe informs them.

  Inside, the shack is in slightly better condition than the first place they saw. But there is, at least, light in the rooms, and the windows around the sunroom are the old wooden ones that slide open to let in the sea breeze. Out the back the lawn is freshly mowed, and there is a rusted Hills hoist that squeaks as it turns. Perhaps, Sinead thinks, they could have a table out here, people for lunch? She knows she is stretching the possibilities to a point that may not have much grounding in reality, but it is better to cling to some hope than to completely give up.

  In the kitchen, Clara is telling Kevin that she is planning on using this or some other place as a retreat. ‘A bolthole where I can write my memoirs,’ she says. ‘And a way of deciding if I ultimately want to buy down here.’

  ‘Well, it’s yours if you want it.’

  ‘I propose we have some lunch and a think,’ Clara announces. ‘We might also drive ourselves around and have a look at the outside of the houses for sale.’

  She seems tired now. It happens quickly, a sudden fading in her eyes, a drop in her shoulders, a certain slowness in her speech, and she needs to rest.

  ‘About bloody time,’ Zoe says, when they eventually give up on finding the last of the places on Clara’s list and pull up outside the café in the main street. ‘I’m starving.’

  There is a chill in the air, but they take an outside table so they can keep an eye on Pepper, who is tied up and barking.

  ‘She’ll quieten down soon.’ Clara sits back in the chair and closes her eyes. ‘Just ignore her.’

  Zoe wants a hamburger — ‘not the kid’s size, the grown-up one’ — and a banana smoothie.

  ‘If you have the smoothie, then you can’t have an ice-cream,’ Sinead says.

  ‘Bloody hell.’ The agony of the choice makes Zoe frown. ‘What about a small smoothie and a cheap ice-cream, like a Paddle Pop?’

  ‘One or the other.’

  ‘But that’s not fair: you said I could have an ice-cream.’

  ‘If you don’t stop the bloody whining, you’ll have nothing.’

  Zoe glowers.


  ‘I’ll get you an ice-cream, darling,’ Clara tells her. ‘If you stop saying “bloody”.’

  Sinead begins to argue and then can’t be bothered.

  Zoe promises, most definitely, that she won’t utter another ‘bloody’. ‘Can you get me a Magnum?’

  At this point Sinead says she’s going inside to order — she’s had enough of both of them. ‘You’re bloody awful, the pair of you.’

  ‘Don’t forget I want a large burger,’ Zoe calls out. ‘And a smoothie.’

  Two weeks after Clara came out of hospital, her closest friend, Kathryn, died. She, too, had breast cancer, the cancer recurring three years after she had finished her treatment.

  At the funeral, Sinead sobbed. She began as soon as she sat down, unable to stop as each person spoke, and continued after the service had finished and family and friends gathered out the front of the church. She knew she had to go and speak to Sean, Kathryn’s son, and she tried to get her tears under control.

  Clara was laughing with one of Kathryn’s other friends, and rubbed at the edge of her eyes as she put her sunglasses back on.

  That was a lovely service, Sinead wanted to say to Sean, but she managed no more than the first two words before she began sobbing again. ‘I am so sorry,’ she said when she could finally speak. ‘This is so inappropriate.’

  She could see he didn’t know how to respond. He had always been uncomfortable with her since they had sex, once, when they were both seventeen. For a brief period afterwards, Sinead thought she was madly in love with him, while he was quite certain that it had been no more than a very bad mistake. Now they rarely saw each other, and she never thought of him, although Clara had always kept her up to date with his news — a marriage, children, partnership in an accounting firm, an affair, a divorce. He probably knew about her as well — her relationship with Luka, Zoe’s birth, and their separation when she had decided that she was perhaps more interested in women.

  ‘It was a lovely service.’ Sinead tried to sound like she was, in fact, okay now, it had just been a minor aberration, and then, as she began to cry once more, Clara came over and took her by the arm.