The Near Miss

by Fran Cusworth

  Risk Being Alive. How nice to have this angry man, so straight he had probably waited for the green man all his life, as her apprentice on this mission. Risk Being Alive. A little present she was planning, for the half-dead commuters of the Hurstbridge rail line. She leaned around her son, traffic lights reflected in his eyes, and nodded at Eddy. ‘You right?’ she repeated.

  He walked his bike up alongside her, holding his legs apart as if the bike were on fire. ‘Where are we going?’ he whispered. God, don’t let him bail on her now, timorous soul that he was. Imagine him thinking he could punch Van’s lights out. Ha! She’d probably saved his life by stopping him trying. Whatever rage burned in Eddy, it was a dead match compared to the blaze in Van, whose switch could flick from languorous to insane in an instant.

  She looked ahead into the darkness and then back at him. So many people, they just had to know everything up front. ‘It’s a surprise,’ she said. ‘Trust me.’

  Eddy settled his backside on the seat of his bike, folded his arms and looked at her warily. He was pleasant-looking, in a straight sort of way. ‘Surprise’ might have been the wrong thing to say to him. ‘Okayyy.’

  He was the good-with-kids-and-animals type. A listener. She stepped onto the pedal and launched down a side street, down roads of mostly darkened houses. Ah, suburban Melbourne, all those millions of souls, sleeping at precisely the same time. She could feel their deep breaths, sense the loosening of their muscles, smell the enchanted forest of so many dreams, spooling like serpent-entwined smoke from the ashes of the day’s purpose and drive, winding their miasmic ways around the driveways and For Sale signs, the council rubbish bins and the empty cans in the gutters. Knitting the world together again, for the new day ahead.

  She pulled up at Victoria Park railway station and parked her bike at the foot of the grassy slope that led up to a factory, its pale orange wall facing the rail bridge high above. The trains wouldn’t start again until 5am; she had a clear couple of hours. She lifted the hood on her son’s head and studied his vacant, sleeping face. Perfect. She scooped him out of the bike seat and waited for Eddy Plenty to catch up, his face a mixture of curiosity and alarm.

  ‘Here.’ She thrust the sleeping child at him and he let his spanking-new bike crash to the ground as he hurriedly held out his arms and took Skipper. He sat them down on a low wall, under a street light, and Melody knew her boy was safe. She turned to climb a narrow maintenance ladder, to take herself up to the trestle bridge far above. ‘What . . . what are you doing?’ whispered Eddy, looking angrily aghast, his arms full of sleeping child. She climbed. At the top of the ladder she hopped out onto the empty tracks; two sets, one heading east, one west. There would be no trains for a couple of hours, she hoped.

  Below were the drab shop faces of the hardware store, a baby-wear shop, a petrol station. She picked her way along the track, shaking her can, hearing the quiet squeaking of fruit bats and the leathery flap of their wings in the sleeping, city night. She stood before the factory wall and reached high for the first letter, and worked her way through them: R, I, S, K . . . She stepped back after each one to regain her perspective. Once, she stepped back a little too far and fell over the girders of the track, almost falling off the ten-metre-high bridge. She crawled back from the edge, trembling, a sole car passing underneath, maybe someone going home from shiftwork. She went on through the letters, her heart beating too fast. RISK BEING ALIVE. By the time the moon had moved to centre stage, right above her, the job was done. A train hooted, far away. Sometime tomorrow she would feel the true satisfaction of it, but, for now, she just wanted to smell the neck of her child, to feel the inky night air as she rode her bicycle into it, to go home, put on the kettle and have a cup of tea. She lowered herself onto the ladder and climbed down, one rung at a time, to the dark shadow figure below.

  ‘Why the hell did you do that?’ said Eddy. ‘You could have killed yourself.’

  ‘Well, here I am safe.’

  ‘What if the police catch you?’

  ‘Well, they won’t now.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Risk being alive.’

  ‘Just . . . be alive. Take risks. Don’t press the pause button on living.’

  He looked appalled. ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Do you really think that?’

  ‘Well, not literally, but—’

  ‘Hey, it’s Grace and Tom’s auction tomorrow,’ she said, swiftly changing the topic.

  ‘I know. Tom’s in a state.’

  ‘I thought I’d go. Wanna come?’

  ‘Ahh . . .’ Eddy shifted the little boy back into her arms.

  ‘I reckon Tom could use your help.’

  ‘Oh?’ Eddy looked surprised.

  ‘They both could. Grace, too.’

  ‘Oh. Well. Maybe.’

  She settled Skip back into the bike seat and wrapped a sarong around him, binding his sleep-floppy limbs to the seat back. Then, climbing aboard, she looked over at Eddy for a minute. In the shadows he looked quite dark and dangerous. Could she shag him? A thank-you shag? Maybe not.

  ‘I’m going to go. To the auction.’

  ‘To help Grace?’ said Eddy.

  ‘Maybe.’ They rode off into the night together, speaking quietly, sailing through the meagre patches of light cast by street lamps and the longer patches of dark shielded by trees and sleeping houses.

  ‘I’m a bit surprised they broke up. They didn’t seem . . .’ His wheels squeaked and the night air felt cool on Melody’s skin.

  ‘. . . at the dinner.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Grace thinks it’s because of the accident.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The breakup. It gave them both a fright. Made them assess their lives, shake everything up.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘These things happen for a reason.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I do. So, do you want to come to the auction tomorrow? I can ride past and pick you up.’

  ‘Can I really help? I might be intruding.’

  ‘We’ll help.’

  ‘Does Grace really think the breakup is because of the accident?’

  ‘Well, you know Grace.’

  ‘That would make it my fault. Sort of. And that’s why Romy met Van, too.’

  ‘It’s no one’s fault. It’s just the pick-up-sticks of the universe, falling in a certain way. Now we look at what’s there and work out how to make the best of it.’

  The bikes creaked as they pulled up out the front of his house. Melody yawned, and Eddy looked reluctantly at his front door and sighed deeply.

  ‘Do you want to come in for a hot drink?’

  She smiled. ‘I’d better get Skip home. I’ll come past tomorrow?’

  ‘Okay. Actually, I might take the car, and take some tools, just in case. Can I pick you two up? About ten?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Grace should have known how bad auction day would be, she thought later. The fact that she and Tom couldn’t agree on a reserve price for the house could have given her an inkling. (She wanted higher; he wanted to practically give it away.) Nor could they agree on whether to spend some money on the house first, on things like clawing the garden back from its wilderness, and getting the windows washed, and the roof fixed. (She wanted these things done; he refused.) On the morning of the auction they nearly had a standup fight over who would park in the driveway, until the agent came over and said that it would be better if the driveway was left clear. They had both come with their mothers, in their mothers’ cars — Dawn a crumbling Volvo, Maureen a red Commodore with Doncaster Holden stickers on the back. Dawn and Maureen each sat behind their respective steering wheels ignoring each other while their children fought it out on the nature strip. Dawn cried while Lotte patted her shoulder, and Maureen read a New Idea with shaking hands. As if divorce wasn’t bad enough — Grace noted that Tom had gone from calling it their separation to their divorce —
there was the enforced return to the company of their mothers. She knew she should be grateful for the help of her mother, but accepting her help was so humiliating she had to hold back her rage. Her only comfort was that she could see that Tom was in the same boat, and that his abrasive, opinionated mother was even more annoying than her own gloomy and frequently weeping parent.

  Right now, standing out on the footpath, she could see that down the side of the house Tom appeared to be in an argument with his mother. Maureen rested her hand on her fat hip and waved her right hand expressively, one moment towards the house (with a disgusted flick of her fingers) and then the next towards Tom, chopping the air in front his chest as if she were demonstrating how to slice bread. Lotte stood between them, and Grace urgently beckoned her daughter over to her.

  ‘Sweetie! Are Daddy and Nanna having a little argument?’ she whispered.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What are they saying?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Of course you don’t.’ Grace straightened up. She kicked the ground casually and tried desperately to eavesdrop on the argument. She couldn’t hear anything, but after a few seconds she got it, by some effort of wilful osmosis and reading of body language. Maureen was agreeing with Grace; they should set the reserve higher, hang out for more money rather than cave in for a low price.

  ‘Maybe it’s possible, maybe we will get a decent amount,’ Grace murmured to her mother.

  Dawn looked worried. ‘Ooh, I hope so, love.’

  ‘Lotte and I could take a little holiday. Maybe Bali.’ They could do their hair in silly braids and buy fake watches and lie on sun-loungers.

  ‘Ooh, not there, love. Terrorists.’

  A car pulled up, and Melody and Eddy climbed out. Grace stared at them. Had they come to watch the misery of it all? To gloat? They hadn’t seemed the types. Lotte ran to extract Skip from the car.

  ‘It’s still early,’ Grace said. ‘Another half-hour before they start letting people through.’

  ‘You know the gutter,’ said Eddy awkwardly. He rubbed his nose and waved toward the guttering that had fallen down over the western window.

  Grace looked at it. ‘Tom and I couldn’t agree on whether to pay someone to fix it.’ They had fought just the day before over that very gutter, shouting for almost an hour.

  ‘Would you mind if I . . .?’ He waved again towards it. ‘It would only take a . . .’ He shrugged, to indicate that it would be little more than a minute’s work.

  As in fact it was. Eddy sort of streamed up a tree, Melody handed him tools and the guttering, and the whole thing was fixed while Grace stared. Then the two of them grabbed a rake and clippers and in ten minutes’ work the garden had gone from bedraggled to presentable. The real estate agent was almost prostrate with gratitude at Eddy’s feet. Melody persuaded the agent to let her in the house, and she took out a small bag with an oil burner, and lit some essential oil that Grace had never encountered in her life, with a smell she could not have described. A smell of warmth, and welcome, and some faraway place and time which Grace could not remember, but which had been the best time of her life, whatever it was. By the time people arrived to start inspecting the house — mostly neighbours and kindy mothers — the smell had wafted through every room and the first thing everyone said was ‘Mmm! What is that divine smell?’

  Grace went outside to sit in the car and let her hopes rise, as more and more people arrived. She had been applying for jobs for two months now, and had received approximately zero responses, except occasionally from computer-generated emails. Even they were negative. We have received your application along with six million others, they warned. We will not be able to contact all applicants personally, so if you have not heard from us in a period of time, please consider yourself unsuccessful. She would steal a march on them and consider herself unsuccessful already, she figured. All the marketing ads now wanted a knowledge of SEO and HTTP and an embrace of social media, including obscure things she had never heard of and was not convinced anybody used. (I am excited about the potential of pintagram, she had written to one, only realising after mailing the application that she had fused two forms of social media into one that did not exist.) She had thought the fact she had a Facebook account which she checked monthly meant she was on-trend with new media, but apparently not. A windfall from this auction could be fantastic.

  Over an hour later she was settled inside the lounge room, able to peek from the side of a curtain at the possibly two hundred people who had arrived. The auctioneer had never seen such a crowd in this area, he marveled. He was outside now, delivering a long speech about the merits of the house, the area, the land, the street, the spring sunshine, which apparently came with the house, to hear him speak.

  ‘Maybe we’ll have a future,’ Grace whispered to Lotte, who was running between Grace and the kitchen where Tom was sitting with his mother. ‘Mummy might start a business! Or maybe I could go back and study! Buy us some nice clothes! Maybe getting out of this huge housing debt and having some money to play with would help she and Tom relax, help them sort things out. Maybe Tom could come to Bali.

  Finally, the agent threw open the bidding, in the horse-racing tone of an auctioneer. ‘Hut! Now! What Am I Bid! Let’s start at eight hundred! Eighthundredeighthundredeighthundred! Hut! Who’s got an opening bid for me? Eight! Hundred! Thousand!’ He postured and pointed his rolled-up catalogue in several directions in quick succession, and people twisted and turned to see who was bidding.

  No one, it soon became apparent.

  Graced silently prayed for the bidding impulse to strike someone, anyone, as she stared anxiously at the crowds through the window. Her mother sat beside her, covering her eyes. Grace wrung her hands until her fingers hurt. ‘Why does no one bid?’ Maybe they were waiting, as people did. It was a pulsing, heaving crowd, most of them craning to look for a bidder. Like some terrible, adult game of hide-and-seek.

  The agent went back to his speech about the virtues of his house, and then he tested the waters again. ‘Hut! Give me seven-fifty! Bargain-basement price for this renovator’s delight!’

  Nothing.

  Were the buyers foxing? The agent seemed to think so, too. ‘With no buyers, the house will be taken off the market,’ he warned. Grace flinched: how embarrassing. ‘That’s what is about to happen, people: this house will be going off the market in three.’ He hit his palm with the rolled-up catalogue. ‘In two. Chance of a lifetime people. In—’

  There was a rustle in the crowd. Someone had spoken. Thank God! The agent leaned forward to hear, and then reared back in horror. ‘Six hundred and fifty! Well, it’s good to hear an offer, but let’s have a serious one, good people.’

  But there was nothing. The agent finally came in, and everyone clustered in the lounge room. The agent sagged, looking exhausted. ‘Wow. It’s brutal out there.’

  ‘I want to take it,’ said Tom. ‘That offer.’

  ‘No, you will not!’ snapped his mother. ‘You’d be crazy.’

  Tom’s father had turned up, and he agreed. ‘Take it off the market, son,’ he urged heavily.

  ‘Well it’s Grace’s house, too,’ said Tom. ‘What do you think, Grace?’

  Grace felt weepy with gratitude to hear Tom even say her name. She suddenly thought she couldn’t bear the whole thing to go on a minute longer. The shame of taking it off the market. The dreariness of having to keep discussing it with Tom, having every discussion they had be about this house, which she could see he had grown to hate. It had become a millstone around his neck. It represented the strangling of all his creative dreams, the choice of a mortgage over life’s purpose. It represented the end of their marriage. She should have realised it earlier. And she had a sense that after this rollercoaster of losing her marriage and her job, maybe, maybe if she could lose her house, too, she would hit rock bottom, and stop falling.

  ‘I’m with Tom,’ she said bravely. ‘Sell it.’

  Outside in the
crowd, with the news delivered, a man punched the air in triumph, and then he hugged a pregnant woman who was weeping with joy. Grace let the curtain fall back and pressed her fingers into her eyes. Lotte ran back in the room, wriggled onto Grace’s lap and prised back her fingers.

  ‘Daddy says to say thank you, thank you, thank you.’

  Chapter 14

  Melody took a train ride into town the next day after the auction, and Skip chattered the whole way in, announcing the arrival of tunnels and bridges with delight. People stole glances at him as he swung his feet and peered out the window. Every station name was discussed with grave interest.

  ‘Westgarth,’ Melody said.

  ‘West — GARF,’ he repeated, eyes comically wide. ‘West-GARF!’ An old man harumphed into his hand, eyes amused, and hid himself behind a newspaper. His wife watched Skipper with unashamed longing. Melody’s graffiti flashed past while she was watching her son and she didn’t even remember to look until it was too late — she liked seeing her graffiti around town, reminding her of late-night adventures. But suddenly she didn’t really care about seeing it: what did it matter? She realised it would be her last big graffiti, and that, like the commune, that stage of her life was passing, and leaving. Really, so much of what she had cared about for all these years was falling away from her, she was not sure if anything would be left. Only Skip.

  She wondered how Grace was feeling this morning. She had seen Tom leaving after the auction with an elderly couple who must be his parents, both of them hissing and remonstrating with him. She knew the house had been sold very cheaply, although to her it seemed like a fortune. More than half a million! Melody had turned to see Lotte watching, her face impassive.