Between a Wolf and a Dog

by Georgia Blain

  But at the river shack it was different. Maurie would run it hot, the steam rising into the open air, disappearing well before it reached the tracings of branches overhead — fine ghostly gums that cut white-limbed across the sky. She and Ester would take an end each, stretching out luxuriously beneath the trees, the smell of eucalypt sharp as leaves and twigs dropped down into the water, and they would make boats, sailing them forth from April-land to Ester-land and back again.

  More beautiful still were the night-time baths, the black-velvet, star-glittered sky, frosty in the winter, warm and soft in the summer evenings, the mournful cry of a bird, or the crackle of dried twigs as a wallaby ventured shyly forth, slipping back into the bush at the sight of two naked sisters lying in a canopy of white steam.

  April still isn’t fond of baths at home, but this morning, in Hilary’s house, she runs one, emptying a bottle of expensive salts into the water, and pinning her hair up on her head before stepping in carefully, the heat gripping her with a pain so tight she has to step straight out again.

  She runs the cold, trying to course it through the water with her hand, imagining it as a stream of silver twisting and turning through the fire of molten lava, waiting until she can step in again, one foot at a time, careful now.

  She’d lied last night when she’d told Hilary she’d just been having a drink around the corner. She’d been drinking in her apartment alone, the windows wide open to the rain, the great shaking deluge of it shimmering across the distant harbour, sparkling on the streets below, and then, as the wind had shifted and the rain had slanted into her lounge, she’d realised that Sam had no intention of showing up, and the faint chill of having possibly made a fool of herself burnt into her skin, slapped by the brisk breeze.

  He was too young for her.

  She’d known that.

  And so she’d sent him a text. Can’t remember if I asked you over tonight?? Sorry if yes — had to go out.

  She’d caught a taxi to Hilary’s so that she wouldn’t be waiting any longer.

  As she lowers herself into the bath, she feels the disarray of her life in every limb, a jangling switchboard, all wires knotted and unplugged. She does not want to cry. She is thirty-six now, alone, unable to write in the way she used to, and she has fucked up. Badly.

  She glances across at herself in the mirror, face pink from the heat, and then she rests her head against the cool of the enamel and closes her eyes.

  April has never really known loneliness until now; she has had small tastes of its dregs, like cold milky coffee curdled at the bottom of the cup, but she has always had faith in the fact that it would pass. Now, she is not so sure. And this loneliness is entangled with her failure as a musician, another certainty in her life that seems to have gone.

  Most days, she tries to write.

  She sits by the window with her guitar and picks idly at notes, strumming chords underneath, humming to herself as she does so. But nothing ever sticks, and she feels as if she is just pretending, playing alone outside a room she can no longer enter.

  When she wrote her first album, she didn’t even see herself as making a record. She just trimmed and cut and shaped the material she had been working with for years, the songs she had played in pubs and clubs, selected and honed with the help of the producer, until she had it: complete and whole. She had neither chased success nor expected it. To have recorded an album was enough.

  But success came. Her songs were played around the world. They are still played. The mark of that first album remains — in fact it has recently restamped itself, with a couple of the songs being covered by younger independent artists, their new versions faint replicas of the original. That collection of songs is who she is. The second album has been forgotten; the third has never eventuated.

  April lifts one leg out of the bath. The colour of the bruise is spectacular — mauve, crimson, yellow, and grey. She had been dancing at a party above Bondi three nights ago, the salt of the sea breeze stiff and sharp, everyone young and rich, with careers in film or television. She used to come to the same place in her early twenties when the building had been a run-down boarding house. A friend of hers called Dave had got permission from the owners to build a lean-to on the roof, not dissimilar to the kinds of structures Maurie used to build. Now it was a block of apartments, with a penthouse owned by someone who had only recently turned thirty.

  April danced and danced under the polar-white moon, occasionally aware of others around her, often not. When she noticed Lawrence drinking by the railing, she stopped. It had been months since he had told her Ester didn’t want her visiting when he had the kids, and she hadn’t seen him since.

  Handsome Lawrence, she used to call him.

  He still was handsome, with his short dark hair, olive skin, prominent cheekbones, and those dazzling white teeth. ‘Do you put those strips on them,’ she used to tease him, ‘or paint them each night before you go to bed?’

  ‘And each morning,’ he would reply. ‘Lunch time too, if I have time.’

  But that was so long ago.

  They were shy with each other now, careful, and she came up to him, smiling hesitantly. He introduced her to Sam as his sister-in-law, correcting himself immediately to ‘ex-sister-in-law, actually.’

  ‘So I’m an ex, too,’ she said, and he ignored her.

  Sam was a television-ad director with a short film that had gone to Cannes. ‘Are you a dancer?’ he asked her, and April laughed.

  ‘I don’t know what I am,’ she told him, shaking her head.

  ‘You’re a singer,’ Lawrence said. In the white spill of the moon, she could see the kindness in his eyes, and it had surprised and touched her.

  April just shrugged, and then, reaching into her bag, she offered them both a joint. ‘I’m also very old-fashioned,’ she smiled. ‘I still like to get out of it.’ She lit the match, shielding its flame against the breeze, and then offered it to Lawrence, who shook his head.

  ‘I’ve gone modern on you,’ he told her.

  ‘No drugs?’

  He nodded. ‘Well, most of the time.’

  She smiled sadly. ‘Exercise, too? Organic food? AFDs?’

  ‘That’s me, I’m afraid.’

  She snorted in disbelief.

  Sam took the joint, telling her he was happy to go old-fashioned for the night. He wanted to know about her singing, but she didn’t want to talk about it. ‘Let’s dance,’ she suggested, and she turned back to the music, Sam leading the way, Lawrence staying where he was.

  ‘I’ll just be a moment.’ She had stopped, thinking she would tell Lawrence how lovely it was to see him, perhaps kiss him lightly on the cheek because there was no gesture, really, that could express the layers of loss and sorrow, all attempts frail and sad, but she wanted to at least have tried.

  He had walked away.

  And Sam had reached back for her hand, pulling her into the throng, apologising as he misdirected her into a table edge.

  April dries herself slowly, rubbing Hilary’s moisturiser into her legs and arms, and then searches through the bathroom cupboards for some make-up. There is a tan-coloured powder, and a lipstick that is too orange. She rubs a little of each on the back of her hand, and then leaves them next to the sink.

  She tries on Hilary’s pendant, a great round dish of mother of pearl on a heavy chain, and admires it before wrapping herself once more in Maurie’s old dressing gown.

  She had planned on heading home. Outside, the rain continues, pouring down the rusted gutters in a great rush, and she watches for a moment before checking her phone messages. There are several from the friends she was meant to meet for drinks with Sam, none from him, of course, and then she checks her email — one from her publisher to let her know that there’s interest in one of her songs from a film producer.

  This is how she survives: small drips of income from sales of
that first album, and regular APRA royalties. She used to get asked if she were interested in writing, but after failing to deliver one time too many, those requests have stopped.

  She looks out to the studio. She can just see Hilary through the glass doors, her glasses down on the end of her nose; she is running her fingers through her white-grey hair as she talks to someone on the phone. The conversation finishes and she hangs up, staring out at the rain, oblivious to April watching her from the house.

  When April goes in to say goodbye, Hilary is still looking out at the rain.

  ‘You’re off then?’ Hilary wheels her chair out from her desk and over to the saggy corduroy sofa she’d brought back from the river shack. ‘Have a seat for a moment,’ she tells April.

  Sensing a talk, April begins to fidget. ‘There’s a bus in ten minutes,’ she says.

  Hilary laughs. ‘You’ve never checked a bus timetable in your life.’

  It’s true, and she sits reluctantly, tapping her fingers on her knees as she waits for her mother to speak.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about Ester,’ Hilary says, and she reaches to still April’s hand. ‘I’ve told you I can’t say anymore about that. I can only hope time will bring some kind of healing, but I don’t know.’

  April looks down at the ground.

  ‘I want to talk about you.’

  Outside, there is a strange silence, a tentative shift in the day; it’s too soon, though, to tell whether the change will last for more than a few moments or whether it will be smothered by a new roll of dark clouds, unable to gather any real force just yet.

  ‘I know you are struggling.’

  April bites her lip.

  ‘Creativity is unpredictable. Some people have to make sure they don’t waste a drop, while others have it in great armfuls, so many riches that a lifetime isn’t enough. Maurie was like that. Most of the time. But he could struggle, too. There were periods when he couldn’t paint, and then he would have to turn to other outlets,’ and she waves her arm around the studio. ‘That was when he built. You know I also painted before you girls were born?’

  April can feel Hilary looking at her, and then her mother cups her chin in her hands and lifts her face so that she is forced to look into her eyes. ‘I need you to listen to me,’ she says.

  ‘I am,’ April replies.

  ‘I gave up. I had years and years before I found filmmaking. And they were hard years. I doubted myself so much. When I made my first film, I was like you — I not only managed to create something special, I was lucky. It was the right work in the right place at the right time, and it had so many blessings showered on it.

  ‘And in some ways, I was even more fortunate than you are. I didn’t have to deal with fame. Not in the way you did. And I’m a little tougher. A little more bloody-minded. Perhaps through having kids, perhaps not.’ Hilary shrugs.

  She looks at April, her grey-green eyes deep and kind, focused and sure. ‘I don’t know if you’ll write another album. You may not. You may start again next week, or in fifty years’ time. But you have to let all that go. You have to return to a place where you don’t even think about that, you just reconnect with the joy you had in music. You have to forget all this current mess, you have to search for other things that feed you. Get out, read, garden, work, help others, be part of the world.’

  And she kisses April, who is crying now, not in the way she usually cries, with none of the drama that April usually gives to tears, but with a sadness and shame that makes her wipe her eyes as soon as she feels the sting.

  ‘I have to go,’ she tells her mother.

  Hilary tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘I love you,’ she says. ‘I don’t want you to ever forget that.’ Then she smiles, standing close to April, and holds her palm out. ‘Pendant,’ she tells her.

  April touches the silver around her neck. ‘Could I borrow it?’ she asks.

  Hilary looks at her, the look of someone who wants to soak in the other, drink them up and hold them, precious and close.

  ‘Of course,’ she tells her, with a tenderness April had never expected.

  ESTER HAS LEFT her desk lamp on, as well as the overhead light, but still the room feels dark and gloomy. She sits with her back to the window, Jenny and Damon opposite her on the couch. She can smell the dampness of wet wool, a soupy smell she has always hated. It is resignation and despair, old men in boarding houses, school jumpers, slippers and dressing gowns.

  Jenny is agitated, but this isn’t unusual. They have had three sessions so far, and each time she sits on the edge of the sofa, her slender legs crossed, neat dark hair short and boyish, dressed for work, ready to race straight into an appointment with a client. Today, she looks particularly tense, pale and drawn, her eyes darting from Damon to Ester and back again.

  She is a solicitor, a partner in a large law firm. ‘It was never what I wanted to do,’ she’d told Ester. ‘It just became too hard to leave.’ She’d picked at a small sore on the back of her hand. ‘I don’t have time to think about an alternative. I thought having children might give me that time. I kept having them, but no solution came.’ She’d shrugged. ‘I seriously considered having a fourth the other day. But I wouldn’t, of course, not with the way things are with Marlo.’

  And Marlo is why they are here.

  ‘He has school refusal disorder,’ Jenny explained at the first session, doing most of the talking, her sentences clipped, always to the point.

  She’d found the term on Google. ‘I google everything. I hope that one day I’ll phrase my question in just the right way to bring up the answer to every worry I have.’ She shifted in her seat. ‘Computer gaming addiction, disassociation, lack of empathy, hatred — I’ve googled it all.’

  Ester had turned to Damon, asking him to tell her a little about himself.

  He brushed his hair out of his eyes. ‘I’m a mathematician.’ He smiled shyly. ‘And I’m a father and a husband, and a person who loves his work and his students. I’m not sure how to contain myself in a simple description, or what you need to know.’

  Ester had smiled back at him. ‘And your relationship with each other?’

  It was like a funnel. This arms-wide gathering of information, the slow sifting through to the grains and grit that remained stuck.

  It was Damon who answered, glancing across at Jenny and then back to Ester: ‘We love each other.’ He squeezed Jenny’s hand. ‘I’m the luckiest man alive.’

  There was something of the child in him, Ester had thought at the time, and it was an impression that had remained. There was an innocence, a wonder at the world, a dust that faintly glittered.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he’d said about Marlo, and he genuinely didn’t. ‘All that time shut up in his room, playing those games in the darkness by himself — I can’t fathom it.’

  They had taken Marlo to a specialist, Jenny had explained. ‘Greg Mahony.’

  Ester had heard of him. His work with addiction and adolescents was world-renowned.

  ‘I pulled favours to get that appointment,’ she’d said. ‘I didn’t think he’d come. I was immensely relieved when we got him in the car without protest.’ She’d rubbed at a tic in her eye, all the sharp brightness in her face collapsing into pain as she recalled the moment when Greg Mahony had told them there was no point in seeing Marlo unless he actually wanted to be there. And so he’d asked Marlo directly, and Marlo had looked delighted.

  ‘The smile on his face,’ Jenny said, ‘when he realised it was up to him. He just got up and walked out.’

  Sitting now on the couch, Jenny tells Ester that she and Damon are at odds.

  ‘I don’t see the point in us being here,’ Jenny says. She has a single gold ring, with a pearl setting, on her middle finger. It is curiously old-fashioned for someone who wears, as Jenny does, well-cut suits and little make-up apart from mascara and a
deep-red lipstick. She twists the ring, looking directly at Ester as she speaks. ‘Everything we try makes no difference. Last week started well. He was helpful, he even talked with us. He went to school on Monday, and then Tuesday came. I discovered he’d run up a $600 bill on my credit card buying new games. I accused him. He locked himself in his room and didn’t come out until the weekend.’

  She tries to still her hands, one clasping the other in her lap. ‘I’m tired of talking about him. I’m tired of thinking about him, and it never improves. I can come here and tell you how terrible he is, how worried I am, but what will it achieve?’ She glances at Damon.

  His fringe is in his eyes again, and he brushes it back. ‘I’m not so sure that you’re expecting the right things from this. I don’t want to speak out of turn, or for you, but it feels as though we need to find a different way of living with this situation because we are not doing that well.’

  Damon has a hole in the elbow of his jumper, and one in the sole of his shoe. He’s taken them off to dry his socks, explaining when he arrived that buying clothes isn’t something he’s very good at. He sits now, resting an ankle on his knee, only to discover that there’s also a rip in his sock. ‘That’s embarrassing,’ he says. ‘Two poor items of clothing was more than enough.’ He puts his foot down, his smile apologetic.

  Ester waits for a moment, unsure whether he has finished speaking.

  He hasn’t: ‘We’re not here to find out how to change Marlo, or fix him, but just to try and …’

  She looks at him, expecting him to continue. Jenny, too, is waiting. But when he opens his mouth, there is no sound.

  ‘Not …’ The word he utters breaks down into a sound that is animal, guttural. It is a sob of elemental pain and fear, and in the darkness of the room, it is chilling.

  Ester opens her mouth to speak, but Jenny holds up her hand. She leans into her husband, all of her focused on comforting him, Ester a silent witness as the rain falls and Damon cries. He cries as Jenny rubs his back, and Ester hands them her box of tissues.