The Near Miss

by Fran Cusworth

  Tom appeared to register the sensation of wet plum through his pants, looked and wrinkled up his nose, and moved aside a little. ‘I knew you were out here somewhere.’ His only suit, now she could see it clearly, was dusty and smelled faintly of beer. The hem of his right trouser leg had come down, a thread trailing from the flapping material. There was a hole around the crotch. Close up, he looked like a street hobo. He settled and looked at her. ‘How’s things?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Just waiting.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For Romy to have her baby.’

  ‘Ah.’ He looked back toward the house. ‘I think she’s at the business end.’

  ‘Can you hear her?’ He had always had better hearing than she; they had joked that she would be the deaf old lady and he would be her ear trumpet.

  He cocked his head and nodded. ‘You can’t?’

  She shook her head and he smiled.

  ‘So, how’s Laura?’ she asked.

  He blinked. ‘She’s good, I think. She’s here, inside.’

  Grace nodded, bravely. ‘Right.’ Why was he suddenly so friendly? Then she realised. He was going to tell her about Laura. About their new love. He knew it would hurt her. This was why he was being kind. So unlike the last times.

  He took a leaf in his hand and tore it into small pieces, his forearms resting on his knees as he did. ‘I’ve got some pretty unbelievable news.’

  ‘Oh?’ she said stiffly. Her head spun. She was too high off the ground, to hear such news. ‘I might just climb down to the ground, actually.’

  ‘I’ve sold the invention. The roof.’

  She stared at him. She hadn’t expected that. ‘To who?’

  ‘United Materials Inc.’ He leaned close. ‘Eight. Million. Dollars.’

  ‘Eight million dollars?’

  ‘Eight million dollars.’

  She felt her stomach falling out of her body, down through the roof beneath her and into the earth. ‘You’re . . . You can’t . . .’

  ‘I signed the paperwork this afternoon. Eight. Million. Dollars.’

  She tried to take it in. Her mouth had fallen open; she closed it. He stared at her face, as if drinking in every change of expression.

  ‘Oh, Tom.’ She shook her head finally. ‘That’s . . . Well, congratulations.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You earned it.’ Grace felt a lump in her throat. She was so proud of him.

  He nodded, his eyes full of tears, his whole being focused on her. ‘Grace . . .’

  The screen door banged shut and Laura stood, hands in her jeans pockets, her face screwed up against the sun. Looking for Tom, no doubt. Grace had a dull ache in her stomach, in the place where her love for Tom lived. Guilt. Disappointment in herself. Not a new feeling, not at all. But all she could really do was watch Laura as she wandered closer, until she was standing right below them. Any moment now Tom would call out to her. But he kept staring at her, Grace.

  The door slammed again and Eddy strode out, urgent and pale, rubbing his face. Laura turned to him and, to Grace’s amazement, Eddy loped across his backyard to Laura and wrapped his arms around her.

  She turned to Tom. ‘Oh.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are Eddy and Laura . . .?’

  ‘Oh. Yeah. Apparently.’ He shrugged, not interested.

  ‘Eddy’s seeing Laura? Not you?’

  ‘Me? No!’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I haven’t seen anyone since we split up. All I’ve done is work on the solar roof.’

  ‘But my mother saw you with someone! In the IGA.’

  He frowned. ‘That’s right. She was a woman I used to work with. We had just run into each other when we were shopping and then your mother walked past while we were talking.’

  ‘It wasn’t Laura?’

  He looked incredulous. ‘What’s all this about Miss Laura?’

  ‘Nothing. Eight million dollars? Is that what you said?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t . . .’

  ‘I know. I can’t either. And Grace? I couldn’t have done it without you.’

  She shook her head. ‘But you did do it without me. I’m so sorry. I doubted you. You did it, and I doubted you. I’m ashamed of myself. Not just because you made it. I’ve been ashamed of myself for ages. I should have believed in you. Even if you failed a hundred times over, I should have believed in you.’

  ‘You did believe in me. I know you did.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I mean I did for a while, but then . . . I lost faith.’

  ‘You helped me,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘Truly. You and Lotte. You are the reason I kept trying. You believed in me for so long, I wouldn’t have got this far without you believing in me for so long, back before all this. Gracie, when I heard the news about the deal, after all this time, it meant nothing to me without you. It meant nothing until I could tell you, and share it with you. I don’t care about it, even, actually!’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘All I want is to be back with you. And Lotte. Like we were. I would give up all the money.’

  His face was ruddy with dirt; she could see dark specks in his pores. His eyes were wide and unblinking. She realised she had been waiting, through this whole conversation, for him to get up and leave her, head off to something or someone more interesting, more important. And yet here he was, totally focused on her, breathing quickly, staring into her eyes as if searching for something lost down a well.

  He was back.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I miss you, Grace.’

  ‘Oh, me, too. I miss you, too, so much.’ She pressed her fingers into her eyes, a sob rising from her chest like a bubble, embarrassing her with its noise.

  Laura and Eddy’s anxious voices rose beneath them, and there was a crash inside the house. Eddy squinted up at them. ‘Romy’s had a baby boy,’ he said. ‘Healthy. And Van’s here.’

  ‘Van,’ said Tom, massaging Grace’s fingers, and she raised wet eyes to his.

  Van. The baby’s father.

  Inside the house, Melody watched Van hold his brand-new baby son. He gently unwound the white flannel wrap and there was the tiny little boy, a peg on his umbilical cord, streaks of blood on his bloated stomach, and vernix in the creases of his rubbery doll legs. The baby’s eyelids parted, and the swimming black eyes inside seemed to float across the surface of his father’s face, as if digitally scanning him. He rested safe in Van’s tattooed and muscular arms. Van, who had initially looked as though he would run in the front door of the house and out just as quickly, gently lowered himself into a chair, as if he might, after all, stay some time.

  ‘Van, you shouldn’t stay,’ Melody murmured. Her skin prickled. The air was full of warning; the curtains rustled with danger, the wardrobe urged flight. Never had a domestic bedroom felt so loaded, as if it were the very innards of a gun, waiting to fire. Van had burst in the door, looking behind him as if the angels of Hell were chasing him, terror on his face. Melody had gently closed and locked the door behind him, her heart pounding faster and faster, even as Van and Romy grew utterly hypnotised by the small creature they had created. Romy picked up a little wrist and turned over the hand; Van leaned in to study the baby’s eyes, as if he could hear the baby speaking some language beyond the world, some message being passed from one life to the next.

  Melody heard a car roll to a gentle stop out the front of the house. She knew straight away; didn’t have to go look out the front to see. A shadow passed the window and she stared at it; heard the leaves rustling below the window.

  Police were surrounding the house.

  No, no, she was delirious. She was delusional, overtired from hours of watching a labouring woman; she should shut up and get out and leave Van and Romy alone with their new baby. What on earth was wrong with her?

  She left and shut the bedroom door behind her. She lifted a corner of the lounge-room blind. Just evening peak-hour traffic, cars passing in each direction. An ordinar
y suburban car was parked out the front; no lights. The roof was bare. In fact there were two cars of the same make. She was just lowering the blind when she glimpsed a strange black stick protruding from a grove of trees in the corner of the front yard. Then a black knee. A gloved hand was raised and a signal made across the yard.

  She had been right. The shadows were surrounding them.

  She ran on tiptoe back to the room, not wanting the floorboards to give away her haste. Opening the bedroom door, she took the baby firmly from Van and handed him back to Romy. She pulled Van to his feet and pointed to the window.

  ‘Police. They’re surrounding the house. Go out the back. Run.’

  Van met Romy’s eyes, and for a second Melody thought Romy might try to run with him, might drag her sorry body and her newly born fragment of flesh out into the world, to join him as the hunted, as the prey. But then Romy folded the bunny rug over the little boy and, tears rolling down her face, she put her fingers on Van’s chest, on his leather jacket and pushed him.

  ‘Go.’

  Outside, Eddy bit into a cherry, the rust from the roof of the garage scraping the backs of his legs. He and Laura had climbed the tree and onto the roof, to this perch which overlooked the yard, the road over the fence, and the back door of his home.

  He had never seen his house from this vantage point before. He really needed to clean the gutters. And then he raised his eyes further.

  Why was there a man all in black standing on his next-door neighbour’s roof, with a gun trained on his garden? In fact, not one man, but two?

  The back door suddenly flew open to release Van, a streak of black leather legs and black T-shirt, a streak of red and blue tattoo on his upper arm, where the leather jacket was falling off his shoulder, and a belt which glinted in the setting sun. A face still young, too young and tender for the fierceness upon it, the bitter focus, the fear.

  Eddy looked back at the two men on his neighbour’s roof and realised all. He could hear but not yet see an approaching helicopter. Pirate and Cat had finally been cornered. He and Tom and Laura and Grace inhaled and clambered to their knees and their feet, rising like the crowd at a football game.

  It happened so quickly. Van fled across the back yard and one policeman fired, missed and fell, sliding down the roof and dropping on his back into the bush. The other cop crouched to one knee and fired wildly, but Van had ducked behind the barbecue and was now leaping up the cherry tree to their eyrie, making it shake as he landed on it with his biker boots, and crossed it in two strides, for one moment agonisingly open to fire. Grace and Laura shrieked and dropped to the roof, covering their heads. Van stepped from the roof to the fence, teetered along it for a moment, like a cat, and jumped off it, down to the footpath and the road, out of sight and away.

  Eddy held his breath, watching the cop on the roof swivel with his gun. Only the copper’s trained eye on the gun’s sights told him Van had recovered from the jump, was winding his way through traffic that they could hear but not see, and that he stood a chance yet of making it to the other side. The police helicopter was overhead now, beating the air with its blades.

  And then, a massive crash. Not a gunshot, but cars colliding. The cop on the roof froze for a second and then loosened up, and slung his rifle over his shoulder. He began carefully and methodically making his way down from the roof. These things told Eddy the end of the story. A woman screamed. More cars screeched to a halt, and there was a second smash, then a third. Eddy was thrown back to the moment at the beginning of that year, when little Lotte had also made a dash for freedom, throwing herself into the river of traffic like a bomb, changing his life forever. Running. Running. Running for dear life. Running for the joy of life, for escape, for running.

  Romy appeared at the back door of his house, a bundle in her arms, and screamed.

  ‘Van! No!’

  Skipper appeared behind her, a camera held to his eye, and in the silence after Romy’s scream, Eddy heard the camera click.

  Chapter 22

  Qantas today laid off four hundred employees, in the latest mass jobs casualty to hit Australian workers. Unions said the cuts would bring to sixteen hundred the number out of work in the aviation industry this year, and accused the airline of using the global financial crisis as a Trojan horse to bring in low-service air travel. Meanwhile, Qantas shares jumped two point five per cent at news of the cut . . .

  Melody shut her eyes and submitted her face to the last-minute ministrations of the makeup artist. The air on the back of her neck felt strangely cool, and carried too much of the world in it. The brush dabbed intimately into the corners of her eyes, beneath her jaw, behind her ears. Lights flashed, glinting across black metal and glass, sliding on silent wheels. Men in sagging jeans and torn runners pushed million-dollar machinery about. She felt thin, stripped naked without her dreadlocks, lost within a low-cut red dress, and, most of all, hammered and crushed beneath the weight of Van’s death. She had died a little with him the day before, she knew, had seen a part of her own soul fly up above the snarls of twisted metal on that road, a bumper bar clanging as it fell on the bitumen, that last car skidding into place as if it were hurrying to complete a puzzle. It turned side-on and smashed into the other three already piled up in a mess of spinning wheels and smoking engines. Even as Van flew up in the air like a doll, gone before he fell back onto the car which had hit him, she had felt part of her soul leave her, fly off with his own as it parted with his body and ran for whatever heavenly hills it could see.

  Can we cut your hair? the television people had asked, when they rang soon after. The weather presenter had gone into early labour and they needed a fill-in. Sure, she had said dully.

  We might have to change your, er, image a little. Dress you differently. That’s fine, she had said.

  ‘But the horoscopes? You’ll need your dreadlocks for that,’ Grace had said, panicked.

  Anthea Schulberg had cleared her throat. ‘Well, I was going to tell you next week, but horoscopes have actually been axed,’ she had confessed. ‘The board didn’t like it. So this weather gig could save Melody’s job.’

  Melody couldn’t care less. Suck me into the future, life, because this pain of separation, violence and loss has left me for dead. Let me hand this body over to the ghouls of television, because if Van has been crucified, so have I.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Anthea leaned before her, and smiled warmly. ‘Not nervous?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Melody. There was not room for nervousness in her soul, aching as it was. She could see the headlines of the stories as they passed on the monitor, and rose to her feet, gently stopping the makeup artist, as the words began.

  A three-car smash on Manning Hill Road last night has marked the end of the police hunt for known thief and drug trafficker Van Nguyen-Anderson, half of the Cat and Pirate armed robbery team. The wanted criminal was fleeing police pursuit when he leapt off a roof and into traffic yesterday, throwing himself into the path of oncoming cars in his attempt to flee. Witnesses said vehicles skidded to avoid him, and multiple smashes ensued. Police had surrounded a nearby suburban home where Nguyen-Anderson was believed to have taken shelter, when he unexpectedly burst from the back of the home and made his deadly dash. His accomplice, known as Cat, has not been arrested, although a thirty-year-old woman is helping police with their inquiries.

  A mirror was held before Melody. A stranger looked back at her. Anthea popped past to see her. ‘Two minutes! Wow, look at you!’

  Melody stared. She could not recognise herself. The nose ring had been taken out, the piercing easily covered with the makeup caked on her face. Her eyes had been unnaturally enlarged by skilful shading, her lips coated in red lipstick. The dress highlighted her square shoulders, and clung to her lean frame. Her hair was a silvery blonde pixie cap on her head that made her look ten years younger. Her bitten nails had been carefully painted in a neutral polish. She held a clipboard someone had handed her, and for ten seconds she stared into t
he mirror, a breath away from dropping the clipboard, stepping out of the high heels and running for the door.

  And then she heard laughter and it was Van, over near the door. She turned, and it wasn’t Van, just a big comfortable sound guy with the same laugh, but when Melody turned back to the mirror, she found she was smiling. There would be a time for running, but it wasn’t now. She turned to see Skipper, waiting over to the side with Grace and Tom and Lotte, and her little boy caught her eye and waved madly, pressing his face against the glass between them. Tom gave her the thumbs-up and Grace waved both hands, and pressed them against her mouth, her eyes wide. A crew member led Melody towards the set where weather charts flashed high and low fronts, with cloudy swirls over a green and brown Australia. Melody took one last look back at her friends, and turned and walked onto the set, her footsteps firm, her heart full.

  . . . and Victoria can expect warm northeasterlies as a trough in the west moves across the state. There will be isolated afternoon showers, and a coastal waters wind warning has been issued for Victorian waters between Lakes Entrance and sixty nautical miles East of Gabo Island . . .

  It was a strange way to grieve for someone. But everywhere she looked, every teleprompt, every map, every camera’s square black eye, she could see Van’s face, the way it had looked bathed in the light beaming from his newborn baby; Skipper’s half-brother. It was a face of joy, and she felt her face crease in the reflection of its love and hope, until the weather became like the horoscopes, a communion with all those she loved. She read the words and laid them at the feet of Van, of Skipper, of Grace and Tom and Eddy and Lotte and Miss Laura. She had not felt a glimpse of the divine in that rainy, fraudulent dreaming camp. Yet here in this jungle of technology and people and face paint, the words of sunshine and rain poured forth from her like a sacrament.

  Chapter 23

  Two months later, Eddy cradled baby Minh and walked back and forth across his lounge room. With great care, he tilted his arm to check the time. Only ten minutes since Romy had left to meet her parole officer. A thirty-minute meeting, a ten-minute walk from Eddy’s to the station and another ten back, fifty minutes, he did the math for the eighth time and it worked out the same.