The Near Miss

by Fran Cusworth

  And now all she wanted was to rewind the past, unsay the things she had said, and, please, bring on the robots, the plastic-bottle solar rubbish roof, if that was what it took. She felt lost without him, or was it partly, she had to admit, without her job, which had occupied her for four days a week all these years? What was the Bunny doing without her? Was her replacement succeeding better than she had in promoting a cause that, despite Grace’s cynicism, she knew to be worthwhile? Who was she without work, without a husband, without the money for the next mortgage repayment? Who was she now?

  Chapter 9

  As Eddy’s months of absence from the workplace grew, his employers began to fret. They needed him. To be honest, Eddy adored the world of risk management, and it loved him right back. His risk work the previous year had been impressive, with his tally of monies saved to companies worth millions. Spotting the fire risk in a processing plant where the fire protection was rated adequate, because the fire hoses reached all parts of the plant . . . but there were no smoke detectors — potential $10 million. Realising that a major chocolate-making firm held all of its packaging artwork in a derelict printer’s factory, risking loss of six months’ production — potential $3 million. A blue-chip CEO lowering his manicured hand to sign contracts on a massive stretch of industrial land in outer Sydney, halted in the nick of time by Eddy when his investigations revealed a history of toxic waste — potential $50 million in ongoing management and treatment costs. Et cetera. There were, of course, things he and colleagues had missed, which made him wince. All industries must have them. The publishers who knocked back JK Rowling, the mining company that built the mine on the wrong site. The poor soul in Atlanta who simply forgot to get a sponsorship deal for the gas to fuel the Olympic flame. Human error — he and his small army were up against it, time and again, Murphy’s Law engraved on all their hearts.

  When Eddy had used up all his holiday leave and Risk, Routing and Co still could not persuade him to come back, they sent one of their best performers to make contact. Alf Tankhouse, corporate lawyer, was secretly known by Eddy as Alphamale, and had been the subject of a running private joke between him and Romy for years. He was as tough as Eddy was tender, and it was ironic that RRC had sent him of all people to rout out their AWOL employee. Ironic because Alpha’s own marriage had crashed on the rocks just before Eddy’s, and may, Eddy believed, have helped destabilise his own, as it turned out, but hitherto unknown, perilously fragile relationship.

  Born to hippy parents, Alf Tankhouse had become the most acquisitive, materialist, competitive bastard around. Eddy knew other alpha males, and some of them he liked; their energy, their overconfidence, their wild testosterone. Their aggressive need to pay for everything. Alphamale, however, he was wary of. The man had bred six children in six years, an unheard-of tribe in this day and age, and his redheaded, laughing-eyed and quick-tongued wife seemed to have spent all of the time Eddy had known her pregnant, like a moving monument to Alphamale’s fertility. Alphamale was tall and broad, and would draw himself up even taller while talking, almost leaning over his opponent. He and Eddy had a mutual friend, who had told Eddy that Alf was notorious among his circle of friends for sleeping with his cousin’s wife, an achievement as yet unrelayed to the cousin. He had a short temper and had once kicked in the car window of a driver who had leered at Alf’s then girlfriend.

  Eddy generally, knowing this story, tried to avoid him. However, once they had landed at the same workplace, they had had various conversations in the lift, as one must, and these generally revolved around Alphamale’s chosen topics:

  1.How much he was earning now.

  2.The next triathlon he was training for.

  3.What their mutual friend was up to. Their mutual friend had now quit his job to stay home and care for his baby and toddler while his banker wife worked, a decision which both fascinated and repulsed Alphamale, as if the man had stepped off a cliff. After a few conversations about this, Alphamale apparently had purged himself of topic 3; in fact, he appeared to detectibly shudder if the man’s name was mentioned. This topic was then replaced on his list by:

  4.How great his renovation was going to be. And:

  5.What his house was worth. And:

  6.Sex.

  His wife, by contrast, appeared warm-hearted and kind, if understandably cranky. The few work events to invite family featured her shouting at the children, and yet the constancy of her shouting was not matched by any sense that she was close to losing control; the babies seemed happy in their eternal puppy scrum, growing up year by year. Alphamale came and went overseas on business trips, and talked importantly into his iPhone a lot. The office seemed to breathe a little easier when he was away. Eddy speculated that his family might, too.

  They were a constant on the periphery of Eddy’s life, so he was stunned one day when Alpha, a pale shadow of himself, told him that his wife had left him, taking all the kids.

  Eddy got it at once, or thought he did. It was all he could do to stop himself rolling his eyes. This walking cliché of machismo had been discovered with a bit on the side. But somehow that seemed too small a thing to provoke all this. He couldn’t imagine Ginger-haired Girl even caring. Maybe in true alpha style it was a compound crime, a girl in each port. ‘What happened?’

  ‘She’s been fucking the kids’ swimming teacher. Says she loves him. She’s loved him for six months.’

  Eddy blinked. ‘Mate,’ he said in dismay.

  ‘Fucking should have noticed how excited she was when Lucia moved up to Crayfish. So fantastic! Swimming way beyond her age!’ He finished with a falsetto mimicry of womanhood.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Crayfish teacher. Uni student. Mature age.’ He kicked a table leg.

  Eddy shook his head, confused but profoundly sympathetic, and put his hand on the other’s arm. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Alf looked at Eddy’s hand, wearily incapable of his usual derision, although he did twitch it off. ‘She loves me, too. She says.’

  ‘Well, there you go!’

  ‘And she wants me to pay child maintenance.’ He showed Eddy a legal letter, demanding an annual amount of money that was slightly more than Eddy’s salary, and about two-thirds of what he last remembered Alf’s salary to be. ‘That’s what I’ve got to come up with every year. While she gets the kids and fucks the Crayfish.’

  While Eddy had been shocked, Romy had seemed pole-axed by the news. She couldn’t stop talking about it, telling her friends on the phone about these distant acquaintances. It seemed Ginger was part of an epidemic, according to Romy. She and her friends devised elaborate theories about women turning forty, women having midlife crises, women reaching their sexual peak, women with poor body image, neglected by their husbands, vulnerable to the encouraging eyes and near-naked body of a fit young swimming teacher. I’d like to discuss Lucia’s backstroke with you, can you come back for coffee at my place and we can talk about . . . strokes? Women having affairs was the common theme, as far as Eddy could see. Women cheating on husbands.

  ‘What if Alf had been the one having the affair,’ he had asked Romy one day, after one of her marathon analytical phone sessions, during which he had begun to ponder whether, if Ginger Girl were a man, she would be crucified as a macho pig, a symptom of man’s destructive and hateful tendencies toward his family, whereas because she was female, the sisterhood moved like a construction crew to start building the wall of justifications around her. ‘If it was him and not her, how would you feel about it?’

  Romy shrugged, pretending to give the matter thought for three seconds, before dismissing it. ‘Let’s face it, all those trips overseas. He probably was having an affair.’

  ‘In which case maybe he was having a midlife crisis, or suffering poor body image . . .’

  ‘Oh, please! That poor woman at home with all those children! She was the one struggling here!’

  Eddy felt doubtful about this. The redhead had always to him seemed cheekily, resoundingly, not like
anyone’s victim at all. It seemed a little unfair that she got to keep the children, the house, the renovation, the Crayfish, a very large chunk of the husband’s income, and the sympathy and support of the sisterhood, if not the community at large. But he said nothing of his bizarre outbreak of fraternal loyalty to the extremely annoying Alf.

  Romy had never really talked much to the woman before, but obviously there had been some connection there, with these people whom Eddy would have said were just like far-off trees in the geography of Romy’s life. Because after marveling, wondering, cursing and pontificating over the gross injustice of what had happened, after seeking reason or motivation or guidance within Ginger’s behaviour and reluctantly sympathising with Alf, whom she had always despised, Romy came home from a weekend yoga workshop with something to say, through gales of tears that rendered her unable to speak for a full half-hour. Eddy begged and pleaded; swore over and over, on his life, that whatever it was, he would think no less of her. Finally, she came clean.

  ‘I . . . I . . . slept with the yo . . . yo . . . ga instructor,’ she sobbed.

  Eddy wondered how binding his promise was.

  ‘How could you?’ he said finally.

  ‘I just . . . My body took over. I couldn’t stop myself.’

  ‘Fuck. What is it with women and bloody exercise people?’

  ‘I know.’ She stared big-eyed at him, as if admitting to being caught in the grip of a national plague, over which she had no control.

  Anyway. Fast-forward some months ahead to now, and the cuckolded Alf Tankhouse appeared at the front door of the cuckolded Eddy, bearing a bottle of whisky from one of the managing directors, and a plea to return to work.

  ‘You gotta get over it, mate.’ He squeezed past Eddy and down the hall. Did no one wait to be invited in anymore? ‘Dave and Stanny sent this. Its good shit. Do you want some now?’

  Dalmore Highland Whisky, 15 years old, read Eddy. Matured in matusalem, apostoles and amoroso sherry casks, it proffers all those winter spice, orange zest and chocolate notes characteristic of Dalmore. ‘Where is Dalmore?’

  ‘Fuck knows. You want to drink some?’

  ‘They sent you to give me this, or to drink it with me?’

  ‘I just figure, seeing as you’ve got it . . .’

  ‘It’s 10.20. In the morning.’

  ‘It’s good shit. Over two hundred bucks in the shop.’

  ‘Well if it’s so great, maybe I’ll save it for a special occasion. Instead of weekday morning tea with you.’

  ‘Fair enough. Although now I think about it, I did hear Stanny say he got a box in duty-free. So maybe not two hundred bucks.’

  ‘And what, he keeps a box for messed-up employees?’ Eddy could remember riding his BMX around Bulleen, dropping resumés into shops and pleading for his first job. Incredible now that someone was sending him an expensive bottle of alcohol and pleading with him to get out of his pyjamas and return to work. He should be flattered. ‘I don’t deserve this.’

  ‘Well, you know. Employees market. Economy’s gone crazy. All these recruitment agencies, they’re always getting onto me through LinkedIn and asking me to go work for someone else. Let’s me know what I’m worth. I’ve been to Dave three times in the past year to give me a raise, and he’s said yes each time.’

  Eddy was shocked. ‘I’ve never asked for a raise. I mean, he raises my salary every year and it sort of embarrasses me, I wish he wouldn’t, but . . .’

  ‘Well, there you go, a two-hundred-buck bottle of whisky to get you to go back is actually pretty stingy, if you look at it like that. Believe me, you could ask for a raise now! They’re desperate to get you back. I mean, I could be charging out this time instead of sitting here in your kitchen.’

  Eddy turned the whisky bottle over. ‘They should be sacking me. I haven’t turned up to work in months.’

  ‘Yeah. But they’re not. How about I pour?’ Alf cracked open the bottle and found two Vegemite glasses in the cupboard. Eddy smelled the half-full cup placed before him and felt ill.

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Dave and Stanny, they feel sorry for you. They’ve both been there. Wives left them. And me. You’re part of the gang now, mate. Badge of honour.’

  Eddy groaned and put his head in his hands. He would consider going to work right at this moment just to get away from Alf. He didn’t want to be part of any gang Alf was in. Alf drained his glass and clanked it back on the table.

  ‘Okay, I’m going to go back to them and say you’ll come back if you get a ten per cent raise.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Okay, okay. Fifteen. You tough guy, you.’

  ‘Alf, I don’t want a raise. I don’t want to work right now. Maybe I should just resign.’

  ‘Wow. I’ll get you twenty per cent with that attitude. Hard ball.’

  ‘No. I . . .’ I want my girlfriend to come back. ‘I’m just not ready. Can they give me sick leave? Leave without pay?’

  Alf refilled his cup and looked at Eddy primly. ‘I’ll do you a favour and pretend I didn’t hear that.’

  Eddy sighed, and looked at his glass. Despite himself, he was struck by the kindness of this gesture, this filthy-smelling alcohol sent to him from two overfed, maritally dysfunctional executives via their arrogant and highly paid lawyer. His eyes filled with tears, and, rather than reveal to Alf this embarrassing turn of events, he lifted his glass to his mouth and drank.

  Chapter 10

  The one entertainment Grace could draw from her new status of abandoned wife was the way it shook the security of every married person in her world. She had at first mistaken the stricken looks and introspective silences from friends and acquaintances as sympathy. However, she gradually realised that they were not reflecting on her sorry state, as they sat dumbly, but rather on their own. They were scrutinising the state of their own marital nation and mulling over harsh words, long absences between sex, episodes of blame and neglect, resolutions for regular date nights that had gathered dust. Am I next? You could almost read the question across their foreheads, like a text ribbon of news running across the telly screen. Could people’s unions be so delicate that the shattering of one threatened to chip and crack those around them?

  It seemed so.

  ‘But I can’t believe it!’ cried Verity at morning coffee, for the eleventh time.

  ‘Why not?’ said Grace wearily, although she still couldn’t believe it either.

  ‘I don’t know. You guys seemed to me like the perfect couple.’

  ‘Really?’ Grace folded a serviette into squares, until it became a ball. ‘Why do people say that?’

  ‘Do lots of people say it?’ Anna Trapper asked. Anna Trapper, who was now living a life Grace could only dream of.

  ‘Well, some.’ She heard it said a lot in general when people broke up, just like the way when people died they became all fabulous at their funeral. Although, come to think of it, she hadn’t heard it a lot in her and Tom’s case.

  ‘Oh, I don’t exactly mean that you were perfect,’ Verity hastened to correct herself, and Grace felt a little sour. Why, exactly, hadn’t they seemed perfect? Even a little? ‘It’s just that you guys seemed good enough. Getting by okay.’

  ‘We were okay. But Tom was obsessed with his invention, he didn’t want to earn a living in a normal way, and I . . . well . . . I guess I wanted him to change.’

  ‘Oh.’ Anna Trapper reached over and rubbed Grace’s forearm, and Grace resisted an urge to collapse weeping into her arms.

  ‘And I wanted a baby.’ It was like confession: where was the priest? I wanted. I dreamed. And the greatest sin of all: I tried to change him.

  Verity looked aghast. ‘But I feel like that, too, with Stephen! Not about a baby, cos you know, two girls are enough and what are the chances we’d get a boy next time, but, you know, other things. Like the way he hangs out my shirts so I get peg marks on my nipples! Jesus! And the way I have to write all the thank-you notes to his relatives, cos he’d
never bother, and, you know, the snoring, which is not his fault but, shit, it’s so pig-like. I married a farm animal! Sometimes I think, Jesus, get me out of here. There was this moment about a week ago, where I asked him to fill in a school excursion form for Poppy, and he was doing it and he asked me when Poppy’s birthday was. Can you believe! I mean, I carry all that stuff in my head like four hundred unwinding reels of cotton, and he drifts in and out like a tourist. And I had this dream of leaving him — that passed in a minute, but it freaked me out. Because maybe if I think it, I could do it. Maybe that’s the start of it.’

  ‘We think all sorts of things,’ said Anna comfortingly. ‘That’s what I tell the kids. Just because an idea occurs to you, it doesn’t mean you follow it. Things blow across our minds like, I don’t know, like leaves on a windy day. Most of them mean nothing.’

  Grace thought of that blue thread, hanging from the sky. Anna would have let it go, she could see that now. She would have folded her hands and kept them neatly in her lap.

  ‘You never think of leaving Damien?’ said Verity.

  ‘Oh, never seriously. Just like I say, like a leaf blowing across a field. And now he’s such a big deal in the movies, I’d be mad to leave him, wouldn’t I?’ She laughed uproariously.

  Grace studied her. ‘Damien got work?’ She was ashamed to note her heart sinking at the possibility of good news for this kind friend and neighbour. What was wrong with her? Bad human.

  ‘A one-year contract with Fox, as a casting assistant. It doesn’t earn much, but it’s a foot in the door.’

  Grace was amazed, and horrified. ‘That’s fantastic. Go, Damien! Why didn’t you tell us before? You must be ecstatic.’

  Anna shrugged. ‘It’s good.’

  ‘But aren’t you rapt? I mean, all these years of him waiting for a break. Will you work less?’

  Anna seemed coolly resistant to euphoria, just as she had been immune to despair. ‘Hmm? Oh, actually, yes. I’ll probably quit one of my jobs. He was trying to get me to quit both, but I quite enjoy the call-centre one. The girls there are nice.’