‘But that’s not how they saw it. They thought I was making trouble. They thought I was bitter,’ and she spat out the word.
‘Eventually I was asked to leave. For good.’
Sharn wanted to speak. She wanted to tell her that her shirt was still undone, that she could do it up now; she wanted to lean over and extract the material from the tight grip of her fingers and close it, gently, over the angry sadness of that scar. Please, she wanted to say, you can let it go now, but she said nothing.
‘And when I came back into the world – I suppose that’s how you’d describe it – well, I just didn’t cope. I didn’t know how to anymore. I was so used to being instructed, to only acting as I was told, that I had simply forgotten how to think,’ and Freya tapped the side of her head angrily, the tip of her finger hard and sharp against her short reddish hair. ‘It took me a long time,’ she waved one thin, pale hand around the room, ‘to get even this far.’ She smiled, a broad, ugly smile. ‘And this sure isn’t anything to write home about.’
They looked at each other in silence, until Freya eventually spoke, her voice harsh again, husky, brisk, just as it had been when Sharn first arrived.
‘Want another?’ She pointed to the cask, and Sharn told her that she didn’t.
She sat back again, her shirt gaping open even further. ‘What’s she like?’ she asked.
‘Who?’
‘Your daughter, Caitlin.’
The suddenness of the question threw her, and she responded without thinking, the words slipping out before she had even had a chance to remove herself from Freya’s story and come back into the reality of her own daughter. She sat opposite a woman she had only just met, and told her that she didn’t know, she had no idea, ‘a stranger’, she said; they were the words she used to describe Caitlin: she is a stranger.
And the emptiness she felt was deep and dark, because it was the truth, and she had always tried not to utter it out loud. She stared at it unflinchingly for a few brief seconds, holding it hard and solid in her hands, and then dropped it again, its weight too heavy for her to hold.
‘So, what are you going to do?’ Freya asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Sharn admitted.
‘Want my advice?’
Sharn did and yet she didn’t. There was something in the anger of this woman that repelled her, yet no one else seemed willing to tell her how she should act. (Liam’s counsel was not counsel, it was simply the way he was, the way he reacted to everything.)
‘I guess so,’ she eventually said.
‘Go and get her. Get her out of there.’
Sharn didn’t speak. Not immediately. She was not surprised by Freya’s words, they were what she had expected. She looked around the room for a moment, and then stood, slowly.
‘I have to go,’ she said.
Freya tilted her head back and swallowed the last of her wine, standing as she did so. ‘Well, hope I helped,’ and her voice was completely businesslike now, the slight slur in her words almost imperceptible. ‘Call me if you need me,’ she said as she showed Sharn to the door, and as she stepped back to let her out she knocked at the incense with her hip.
Sharn watched as the stick fell onto the carpet, the long trail of grey ash a smear across the floor, and as she looked back up again, she saw that Freya didn’t even realise what she had done.
IN THE COOL OF THE EARLY MORNINGS, Sharn would run. Not every day, but often. She did not do it for fitness as such, it was more a question of stress; tight, tense anxiety that built up in each limb and was relieved only by movement.
She had run as a teenager, going down to the school oval when the night was sliding in above the small cluster of houses that made up the town where she lived. The grass was usually wet beneath her feet, mud spraying up behind her as she circled the inside of the broken paling fence that bordered the field. Far off in the centre, the boys kicking the football would break off their game to watch her as she passed, wolf-whistling loudly. Sometimes she would ignore them, other times she would raise a finger in their direction. They didn’t bother her. Nothing bothered her; as she gained movement, her head emptied, reaching the freedom of clear, unsullied skies; a space that seemed to elude the rest of her daily life.
It was her mother who told her she was making a spectacle of herself. Her comment came as a complete surprise.
They rarely talked. Sharn was always out and her mother was always at work, leaving both of them with little opportunity for any attempt at forming a relationship with each other, a pattern that had begun when Sharn was very young and had then become entrenched. Exhausted, her mother would occasionally berate her about how little she helped around the house, and Sharn would just listen, arms folded, expression sullen.
On one of these occasions, Sharn’s mother told her that the way in which she ran was attracting undue attention.
Sharn looked bemused.
‘I mean, what do you expect?’ her mother said.
Sharn could only respond by saying she didn’t know what she was talking about.
‘Of course they all look at you. You don’t think they go out there to play football, do you? They’re there to watch.’
‘Watch what?’
Her mother didn’t know how to say it. It was Sharn’s breasts. If she insisted on not wearing a bra, that was the reaction she was going to get.
Sharn told her she had no problem with wearing a bra. She would wear one that very night, in fact, and she walked out of the room without another word.
That evening she went down to the oval as she always did. A light mist of rain was falling and the clouds were low, almost touching the tin rooves of the fibro houses. The single light that illuminated the grandstand flickered on and off. She stood under its intermittent beam and looked out to where the boys were kicking the ball to each other, waiting until she was certain they were aware of her presence, and when she knew they had seen her, she pulled off her windcheater and T-shirt, and set off on her first lap. The cheers were instantaneous: ‘Check it out, baby, give it to me now, you call them tits?’
Sharn just raised her arms in a victory salute and continued on her way, wearing nothing but her old denim shorts and the first and only bra she had ever bought.
The running came to an end when she was pregnant, and did not start again until she had left Sassafrass and come back to the city. The very first time she went out, through the back streets of Margot’s suburb and down to the track that wound around the harbour, she felt as though she had returned to her body. Her speed and stamina were not what they had once been, but it didn’t matter. She was moving again, and she was alive, and as she ran she remembered her public display on the football field all those years ago and she laughed out loud, exuberant and joyous at being Sharn.
Over the years running, like all other aspects of her life, had changed. Like a drug she had grown used to, it no longer provided her with a high. It was simply a matter of maintenance, a necessity for her to function.
The morning after she had visited Freya, Sharn had no energy. The bitterness and anger Freya had expressed had disturbed her. She let herself back into the flat, aware that her run had made no difference; it had failed to ease the anxiety she had felt as soon as she had woken.
Liam was asleep. He had come home late, and she had not been able to talk to him. He was stretched out diagonally across the bed, the blanket pulled up to his chin. The curtains were drawn and the room was dark.
She wanted to tell him about Freya; she wanted him to know she had every reason for anxiety, she was right, it was some loony cult (dangerous, at that), but there was a part of her that found it hard to completely believe and trust all she had heard. She had not liked Freya. That was the truth. And it made it hard for her to accept her story.
She pulled the blanket back from the warmth of his body, and he grinned.
‘Bit brutal.’
He had misjudged her action as one of playful humour, and she did not let the misapprehension co
ntinue.
‘Don’t you have to get to work?’ She knew it was more than likely that he didn’t have to be anywhere and that he could, if he wished, stay in bed all day. She wanted him to admit it, either by actions or words, wanted this admission most mornings, in fact; wanted it, but didn’t.
Liam did not jump to the bait. Ever. He stretched lazily and stood slowly, staring out the window without moving.
‘Nice out?’ he asked, and she didn’t answer.
He made breakfast for her while she was in the shower and she made the bed while it was his turn. It was a routine they had followed for years, one that never needed discussing. She went first because she was quick, he went second because he was slow, prone to standing under the hot water for up to fifteen minutes, not even aware of how much time had passed. Caitlin had always slotted in between them, never taking Sharn’s place but occasionally juggling turns with Liam.
As Sharn turned off the coffee, Liam turned off the shower. The steam crept out of the bathroom, and he dried himself in the kitchen, sitting on the edge of the chair and rubbing the towel between each of his toes with a deliberation that had, at times, come close to sending her insane.
These are the habits that I have no patience for, she thought, and she listed them mentally, one by one:
– this toe-drying business
– the way in which you always take your shoes off in the movies and then take so long putting them on again (way past the rolling of the last credits)
– the toast on the plate in the car, the plate always left on the front seat
– the way in which you pull everything out of the fridge when you make a meal, and don’t put anything back (she slammed the fridge door shut as she thought of this particular irritation)
– the towel hung over the bathroom door …
This last one was happening at that moment, and as she looked across at him he turned to face her, pulling the towel down guiltily as he came back to the kitchen table, and not – as she had expected – heading straight back to the bedroom. He leant against the table, still nude, and she was about to inquire as to whether he was going to go to work without clothes when he spoke, his eyes slightly averted, his expression one of awkward discomfort as he told her that he had seen her, last night.
‘Who?’ Sharn asked, not sure what it was that he was trying to say.
‘Caitlin. That’s why I was late.’
Sharn stepped back. ‘How did you find her?’
Leanne had called, last night while Sharn was out. ‘She saw Caitlin working in a video place,’ he said, ‘a while ago. She had no idea we didn’t know where she was. And after I spoke to her, I went straight there.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
She’d left work and he hadn’t known how to find her.
‘But last night when you came home?’
‘You were asleep.’
She was dumbfounded. ‘You could have woken me.’
He stood up and tried to hold her, but she moved away. ‘I’m telling you now,’ he said. ‘She was fine. She looked well. She said she was happy. It’s not like there was anything alarming to report. Truly. I thought it could wait until morning.’
Sharn looked at him. ‘What was she doing there? In a video place?’
‘I guess she has to work.’ Liam shrugged.
‘Was she pleased to see you?’
He looked perplexed for a moment. He didn’t know, she hadn’t said, but she had seemed like she was.
‘Does she want to see me?’ Sharn hated the vulnerability in her voice, she could hear it cracking at the edges, naked and raw, and she wanted Liam to lie to her, to tell her that Caitlin had inquired after her.
He was not good at reading these things. He never had been. She knew that and as soon as he opened his mouth to speak, she wished she hadn’t laid herself open to a truth she didn’t want.
‘She said she didn’t.’
Sharn turned away. ‘She actually said that?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he told her.
Her eyes stung, and she tried to rub at them with an action that did not betray her, some casual swipe of her hand that could have followed a piece of grit lodging in her eyelashes.
‘Did she tell you where she was living?’
Liam shook his head. ‘She said she’d stay in touch.’
Sharn laughed, a little too loudly, a laugh roughened by the same edge of anger that had tinged Freya’s attempts at ‘who gives a fuck’ amusement. ‘With you, I suppose,’ and she didn’t like the sound of her own voice as she spoke.
‘It’s not about us. It’s not a competition,’ Liam told her.
‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I’m not an idiot.’ And she turned and walked out of the kitchen.
Later, she would wonder at the fact that she hadn’t told him about Freya then, that she had kept her visit a secret. She had once told him everything. She needed to tell him, no matter how large or small the news, because in telling, the event became real. It was no longer something that Sharn alone had seen, heard or felt, something that she could bend or manipulate to suit her will; talking to Liam brought solidity to the experience. She would ring him several times a day from work with mundane details of a discussion she had had over lunch, an idea she had for going out together, a remark made by a client; she told him and he listened.
This shift to withholding was slow, the erosion almost imperceptible in its beginnings, gradually building, until it seemed that the links between them had all but crumbled away, the rubble and dirt that lay between them too hard to traverse. He no longer saw the world in the way she did. She did not speak of Freya because she knew how Liam would react. He would tell Sharn that they couldn’t take Freya’s word as gospel, that she sounded like a bitter old drunk, and that hers was, after all, just one opinion. But that was not the only reason she didn’t tell him about the visit. Her withholding of information was punishment for the hurt she felt. Caitlin did not want to see her, had not even asked after her – and if she wanted to be left alone, she would leave her alone.
Fuck them both, she said to herself. Fuck them both.
But as she closed the door behind her and headed off to work, the tears that she had tried to hold back began to form, and she wiped at them angrily, stopping them before they had a chance to fall.
IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED Liam’s meeting with Caitlin, the hurt Sharn felt did not dissipate.
She had fought in the way she always fought, directly, vocally, and it had got her nowhere. Now she would cut off. Caitlin did not want to see her. She would let her have what she wanted. Liam wanted her to drop it. She would do that too. But she did so hoping that one of them would leap to fill the void she had created, that Caitlin would call, that Liam would act, that confronted with her manifestation of the passivity they both seemed so fond of, they would realise that this was not what they wanted. She would show them.
She stopped talking about Caitlin. Even when Liam showed her the note, a scrawl in Caitlin’s writing that told him of her departure, she only shrugged her shoulders. The note was addressed to him alone and she felt the rejection. Caitlin did not want her.
‘What can I do?’ she would say on the few occasions that friends asked if she felt okay about what had happened. ‘If this is what she wants, let her have it.’
At home, she and Liam lived in what appeared to be a newfound harmony. He had a job, editing a package of educational videos, and he left early each morning, coming home as she was getting into bed. When the alarm went off before dawn, she pretended to be asleep. She resisted the urge to nudge him, to tell him that he had to get up, that he would be late. She had given herself a task and she undertook it with determination. If she was going to let go about Caitlin, she would let go about it all. The bigger the gesture, the sooner it would force a change. It had to.
But if Liam was aware of what she was trying to do, he did not comment on it, not at first.
‘You seem good.’ He said it casually
, the realisation finally dawning one weekend, and she looked across at him. It was after nine and they were both lying in bed. ‘More relaxed.’
She did not reply.
‘Are you?’ He sat up and she could see the sudden mistrust that had immediately followed his previous comment.
‘I’m no different,’ and she averted her gaze because it was not easy to lie when she felt so angry at how slow he was to realise the change, and worse still how obvious it was becoming that he was not, in fact, going to stir into action as she had hoped.
He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close, but she turned her back to him and looked out the window. She could feel his hands running down her body and she did not move, neither pushing him away nor inviting him to continue.
‘I miss her too, you know,’ and his mouth was close to the back of her neck.
She turned to face him and she saw his sadness.
It had always been the three of them, and the absence of Caitlin scared them both. In the softness of the morning light they kissed, and she felt afraid for what would become of them as a pair.
That night they went to Margot’s for dinner. Normally she would have made an excuse, arranged to go out with someone else, or told him she was too tired, but the fear that had crept into her heart that morning made her want to try.
When they arrived, it was clear that Margot had forgotten she had asked them. She was sitting on the couch, a cask of wine on the table next to her, journals strewn across the floor, the television too loud. Her glasses were perched low on her nose and she was leaning forward, taking notes as the interviewer asked questions.
They had let themselves in, and they sat on the couch next to her. She smiled at both of them, and told them she would only be a moment.
Half an hour later, Sharn considered leaving. Liam was also engrossed in the program, discussing it in detail with Margot during each commercial break, and she sat at the back of the room, wishing she had never agreed to come.
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