She always slept with both the girls. One on each side. Lavender shampoo and sweet milky skin, warm arms and legs tangled around her own. She would wake to them chattering, sometimes to each other, sometimes to her, and she wanted to drink them up, all of them — their little white teeth, clear eyes, and their breath, as fresh as water.
No longer seeing them had hurt.
She clears the records to one side of the lounge room floor and spreads a deep red blanket across the ground, scattering cushions around the edge so that they can have a picnic.
Ester had once asked her if she wanted to have children of her own. April had told her how much she loved them, that looking after them was never a chore — and she had meant it. It had been a rare moment when they had sat and talked, the girls still having their mid-morning nap when Ester had come to pick them up.
April said she found it hard to imagine herself as a mother. It had never been a vision for herself.
‘But you’d be good at it,’ Ester had replied with what seemed to be genuine enthusiasm.
‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ Ester had continued, and she had looked around April’s apartment — last night’s dinner dishes still in front of the television, papers scattering in the breeze through the window, brilliant yellow daffodils stuffed into a vase with half-dead roses, a pile of clothes by the front door. ‘You’re so good with chaos.’
April shakes her head as she remembers.
Now, as Lara carries in two plates, one for herself and one for April — with two slices on it — she asks April if they should put Ester’s pieces straight in the freezer. She has milk around her mouth, a slender line of white fur across the pale pink of her upper lip, and chocolate crumbs along her fingers. Behind her, Catherine also waits for April’s answer.
‘Or we could just take it home with us and give it to her?’ she suggests.
April smiles at them both. ‘It might be a bit silly to freeze it,’ she eventually says. ‘Besides, I’m not sure if your mother even likes my chocolate cake. And as it was me who lost the phone, I probably shouldn’t win a prize for finding it.’
‘So can we eat her pieces now?’ Catherine asks.
April nods, her mouth full of cake.
‘Is Daddy going to pick us up?’ Lara wants to know.
He is, April tells them.
‘So we can’t stay the night?’
She shakes her head, knowing the questions are heading in a direction that should be avoided. And so she reaches behind her for a record and tells them that they are going to play a game. ‘It’s called disco queen,’ she says.
They wait for her to continue.
‘Follow me,’ she tells them, standing and beckoning towards the open door of her bedroom. ‘Your wardrobe and make-up await you.’
ESTER HAS BEEN seeing Sarah and Daniel for almost six weeks now, and yet she has surprisingly few pages of notes. Reading over the little she’s written just confirms what she knows. They’re stuck — the three of them, really — wheels grinding round and round, mud splattering on all of them. If she is truthful, she dreads these sessions. She doesn’t particularly like Sarah. In fact, to be more honest, she actively dislikes her.
It was Sarah who contacted her first, booking a session for herself and Daniel. Ester chatted to her on the telephone for some time, trying to get an indication of what it was they were wanting from counselling. Sarah talked a lot, breathlessly skipping from topic to topic, leaping from Medicare details to the intimacy of her sex life with no pause between the two, her words rapid, the link between each sentence so tangled that Ester felt like someone had upended a basket of toys in front of her.
‘We met in India. At an ashram,’ Sarah told her, turning up alone for the first session. ‘The attraction was like, how can I describe it? Red-hot? I mean, he was gorgeous, and we were both young, free spirits. You don’t have a herbal tea, do you? Love a tea when I chat.’
He was a recovering alcoholic learning to become a yoga teacher. She was a student. ‘A lot slimmer then.’ She laughed, adjusting her skirt in the chair, the cotton crushed up against the side of her legs to reveal the paleness of her thigh, white and dimpled.
She was nothing like the person Ester had pictured, imagining someone small, too light to settle anywhere, the rapid speed of her endless talk burning up whatever physical substance she might have had. But Sarah was large, dressed in bright, fun clothes, her hair hennaed scarlet, jewellery covering her neck, her fingers, her wrists, all clanking loudly each time she moved.
She was pregnant, she declared in the first session. ‘My fourth. I’m one of those women. Fertile as. You just have to look at me and I’m knocked up.’
Daniel wanted her to have a termination.
‘We live off a yoga teacher’s salary.’ She brushed a curl out of her eyes. ‘Doesn’t leave much after feeding all those hungry mouths. But I’m a mother. That’s what I am. This is what makes me sing. It’s what I love.’ She ran her hands through the air, following the shape of her own breasts, her belly, eyes widening as she leant forward. ‘He knows that. Telling me he wants to kill it,’ and she leant forward here, her words almost a hiss, ‘it’s like he’s striking at the very heart of my being.’ Her breath smelt of peppermint, her skin of musk.
Ester had to control herself from recoiling. She actively leant a little closer to counter all in her that wanted to pull away.
‘Do you feel you need my help in talking this decision through?’
Sarah laughed loudly. God no, it had to be her choice. It was her body.
By the end of the first session, Ester still found it difficult to determine whether Sarah wanted counselling with Daniel or to see a therapist on her own. Were there issues in their relationship that she wanted to address? There are always issues. That’s love. Was there a reason why Daniel hadn’t come?
Sarah began then to talk about a rebirthing therapy Daniel had been doing. It was through an American who ran courses in the States and set up online support groups. Daniel had been three times. He spent a couple of nights a week talking to his group. He was very into it.
Was it causing tension?
It was why he didn’t feel he could come to see Ester. They weren’t meant to do two types of therapy at the same time.
Why did she want him to come with her?
Sarah paused for a moment then, her intake of air audible.
‘He has anger issues.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘And he needs to take responsibility for them.’
As she stood to leave, she paused, putting her hand on Ester’s arm, her voice hushed as she spoke. She had been abused as a child. A family friend had let himself into her room while her parents were downstairs having a party. She was fifteen, and he was forty. It had gone on for a year.
‘I thought I loved him and he loved me. But I was young, vulnerable, foolish.’
Ester hated it when patients did this at the end of a session. It forced her to dismiss the issue, to tell the client that this was something they could discuss at the next appointment.
She used to tell Lawrence that she had to find the ‘self of calm curiosity’ to do the work she did. A client would come in, and Ester would always feel that moment when an array of selves, each responding differently, would jostle for position. There could be compassion, anger, judgement, fear, boredom, frustration, very rarely indifference — though occasionally even that was there — and they were all possible.
‘I’m like a pack of cards,’ she said. ‘And with each client there’s an immediate response. I have to take a deep breath, push that response to the back, and draw the same card every time.’
‘Calm curiosity?’
She nodded.
If Sarah was without bounds, Daniel was tightly contained. He came to the next session, sitting on the other end of the couch to Sarah, silent as she talked.
She had lost the baby, she declared. A miscarriage after she came home from the session with Ester. She’d reached for Daniel’s hand to take it in her own, having to shift her entire body to get to where he sat. Her eyes were glassy as she looked at him; he remained staring at the ground.
Ester outlined her rules for working with both of them, one of which was a session with each of them on their own.
As soon as they were by themselves, Daniel told her Sarah had been lying. She was never pregnant; she made up stories all the time.
What made him think that?
They hadn’t had sex for months. He looked straight at Ester, his grey-green eyes cold, his pale skin dusted with freckles. He looks like a young boy, she thought for a moment, like a Daniel you might see in the playground. He shifted nervously on the seat.
‘She believes it completely,’ he said.
Ester asked him why he was here — what did he see as the key issues in his relationship with Sarah?
He shrugged.
Could he talk a little more about the lack of sexual intimacy in their relationship? Did he feel this was a problem?
He no longer loved her. He hadn’t loved her for years.
Then why did he stay?
He met Ester’s gaze for a long time before he spoke. ‘I don’t know how to leave,’ he eventually said. ‘I mean I do. But she won’t let me. It’s like she’s some kind of sinkhole, and I’m stuck.’ He almost sneered as he uttered the words, his loathing for himself, Sarah, and the situation they were in naked on his face.
Another time, Ester told Lawrence that she felt she spent most of her days talking to frogs in boiling water. ‘They come in, and I can see they are boiling,’ she said. ‘The water is bubbling. But they have been immersed for so long, and the temperature has been going up and up and up — it’s only when it reaches critical that they try and leap out. And I have to help them do that.’
‘Well, they’re idiots,’ he’d replied, putting his headphones back in so he could continue listening to music.
She’d remembered that conversation a month later, when he’d come home and told her he was in love with April.
She sits in her consulting room now with Sarah and Daniel, trying to banish all selves other than the calm and curious Ester. Sarah is crying, alone at her end of the couch, while Daniel remains impassive, looking only at the ceiling. He has been inching further away from her, his whole body pressed into his side of the couch, as she accuses him of not really trying, of not participating in these sessions.
‘What do you want from me?’ He glares across at Sarah.
The silence in the room builds, all the more pronounced with the steady hum of the rain outside. Eventually, Sarah tells him she doesn’t deserve his anger. ‘Jesus, darl, I love you. I do everything for you.’
‘You don’t fucking listen,’ he mutters.
She seems relieved he has finally spoken, her words coming out in a torrent. ‘Of course I listen to you, darl, but I’ve got a lot of people to listen to, what with the kids demanding attention all day. If you want to be heard, you’ve got to speak up,’ she turns and smiles at Ester. ‘It’s chaos in our house. No one could be heard, really. Even I have a hard time being heard above the din, and that’s saying something.’
Daniel’s skin is even paler than usual, the tension in his jaw revealing the sharp line of the bone. Ester knows she should intervene, but Sarah keeps on talking.
‘We need to make more time for each other. Get a babysitter, go out one night a week, talk about what’s happening in our lives. I know I could try and arrange a swap with some of the other mothers at kindy. Give you a chance to be heard?’ She turns to Daniel, reaching for him and smiling as she does so.
He presses further into the side of the couch.
‘Do you feel that would help?’ Ester looks at him. His hands are clenched in his lap, his top lip pressing down hard on his lower lips, the flesh white.
‘No. It wouldn’t help.’
Sarah shakes her head, mouth pursed. ‘You see? This is the problem,’ she says. ‘Every time I try and come up with a solution — and it’s always me doing that — you just reject it outright. Like the time I told you to go and have a holiday. When you were so depressed and miserable, which you probably don’t remember because you’re depressed and miserable most of the time. It’s hard to be around. Honest. But I told you to take a week off, get away, I’d take care of the kids, I even found you somewhere to stay, but no. You just told me that a holiday wasn’t the answer. Fine. But how am I meant to help if I don’t even know what the problem is?’ She crosses her arms across her chest and shakes her head.
Ester wonders whether Daniel will shout; she can feel it, the great bulk of all those unsaid words right there, the danger of them being dumped all at once in a truckload. She turns to him, breaking the silence before it builds any further.
‘How do you feel about Sarah’s response?’ She keeps her voice low, even, and she focuses her gaze straight on him, willing him to lift his head and look her in the eyes.
‘I don’t want a holiday. I don’t want a night out. I don’t want to be here.’ He stands, shaking.
Sarah tries to pull him down, her hands reaching up, her bangles jangling as he shoves her away.
‘I don’t love you. I don’t fucking love you.’
Sarah’s eyes widen, and the whole world flickers across them: disbelief, anger, denial, blink, blink, blink, grief, horror, fury, each so fast, and then, last, there is the need — bottomless in its depth, rapacious as it swallows all else.
He doesn’t love her.
I don’t love you.
The love has gone.
Every time those words are said, there is so much pain, Ester thinks. She has seen it before in this room — the utterance ripping through lives like a gunshot, a bomb, hollowing out the centre and leaving an all-consuming ache. You go to sleep to it, you dream of it, you wake to it; food is dry and tasteless, air is difficult to breathe, colour bleeds away. She knows this.
But there is also relief and the possibility of change, waiting just off centre-stage, hovering and ready to be allowed to tiptoe in. Not straight away, never straight away — in fact, those emotions cannot even be acknowledged for quite some time. But they are there.
Daniel is still standing, leaning against the wall now, and Ester talks, knowing she needs to bring this moment to some kind of resolution so that they can step out of her room and face each other alone.
She offers the box of tissues, but Sarah doesn’t even see them. She puts her head in her hands, and her whole body heaves. This is what’s been at the edge of all of Sarah’s talk, Ester thinks. Sarah has known that it was there. It is always there. The layers and layers of words, even the fantasies, if that is what they are, had done little more than cover the knowledge that love would soon be ripped away.
Ester turns to Daniel, who has one single tear, perfect in its form, building slowly. He wipes it away.
‘What you’ve just said is very difficult to say,’ Ester tells him. She looks at Sarah. ‘And what you’ve just heard was very difficult to hear.’
She talks to them calmly about the impact of this moment, and the need for them both to navigate through this with an awareness of their children.
As soon as she mentions the kids, Sarah loses the last semblance of control. She sobs loudly, she says she can’t bear it — we’re their parents — her plea is to Daniel, and it’s terrible in its despair.
‘We’re still their parents,’ he says.
‘No, we’re not,’ she replies, and she begins to hit him, beating him across the shoulders with her fists, shouting that he is a liar, he has always been a liar, they are a family, he has to love her, and as Ester tries to reach for her, to get her to stop, Daniel stands.
‘Fuck this,’ he tells them, and he is gone, the sound
of the door slamming behind him followed moments later by his boots on the gravel as he walks off through the rain and around the corner.
ALONE IN HER HOUSE, Hilary knows that once she speaks to Lawrence, she will have begun to put into place a plan that grips too tight each time she lets her mind alight on it. The call to Henry, or perhaps the visit, could also be seen as first steps, but articulating her decision to Lawrence will be harder. She’s scared he will lose his nerve and talk to the girls; April, most probably. And then they will beg her, and that’s something she could not bear.
She has to stay calm. She has had to break it down. Step by step. Moment by moment. And if she falters, she only has to contemplate the alternative — the failure to act — and she finds she can lift her feet again and move that little bit closer.
She opens her bag, wanting to see the packet of heroin one more time: fine white powder in plastic. She holds it for a moment, surprised by its lack of weight. And then she puts it away.
She sits on the lounge, a faded forties couch covered in deep-red cotton, and sinks into its softness. She has never appreciated the comfort, she thinks, the joy of just sitting here. This is a beautiful room. The kauri boards are a deep honey, scratched and worn in places, covered in rugs that she and Maurie had bought over the years. There are bookshelves on either side of the fireplace, with paperbacks jammed up against each other, some in small piles on top of others, many of their covers now yellowing, the cardboard dog-eared or torn.
She has always been the reader — no one else in the family is that interested. She had carted her books from house to house as a student, the boxes growing in number each time, keeping them because she could not imagine doing otherwise, and because she thought that there was something permanent in a book, that it lasted forever. But now, when she takes an older paperback out to reread or loan, she is surprised at how fragile it has become, the paper threatening to tear in her hands if she turns the page, tiny black specks embedded in its tissue pages; bugs, probably. She should have cleared them out, she thinks. Packed them up in boxes for recycling. No one would want them when she was gone.
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