‘Here,’ I said, handing him a glass of cold water. ‘Could it be any hotter, do you think?’
‘How’s your back?’
I made a rather deliberate face and with a hand over my kidney, stretched a little to test it, making the bulge in the shirt more pronounced. ‘Better than yesterday. Will the undercoat hold out?’
We looked together into the near-empty can.
‘Should be enough for the windows,’ he said. ‘I’ll start on the yellow this afternoon.’
I backed away to the single bed Mike had covered with drop sheets and lay on my side, the only position left to me by then. From there, I watched the muscles of his back working and the way the sweat formed beads that trickled in little rivers all the way to his waistband.
He’d been so good about everything – so good to me. Better than I deserved, because, try as I might, I couldn’t always keep my mouth shut when he niggled me.
‘There, finished,’ he announced, standing back with the brush still in hand and thoroughly pleased with himself. He looked so hot.
A bucket of water stood close to the bed, in case of spills and rogue strokes from the brush. I sat up and drew the bucket across the newspaper, until I could reach the rag floating on top.
‘Come here. You’ve got paint all over you.’
He sat on the edge of the bed and watched as I wrung out the rag and then made him turn away from me while I wiped away the broad smear where he’d backed into the wet wall. It was a powerful back, muscular.
When the paint marks were gone, I went on washing the sweat from his skin.
‘Lie down while I get the paint off your stomach,’ I said, and once the dabs of undercoat were gone, I went on smoothing the cloth gently, up over his chest and shoulders, too.
He’d closed his eyes to enjoy the sensation, but when I kept it up, longer than needed to wash away the perspiration, he opened them and watched me expectantly. He’d always been slow on the up-take.
He drew the shirt over my head and helped me slip off the sensible bra. He liked my hair to fall over his face, although he’d never said anything.
My briefs followed, then I stripped off his shorts and for a few sweaty minutes, we bucked up and down until he spent himself with a final grunt. The facial contortions had disconcerted me on the honeymoon, but after three months I’d decided they were the sign of a job well done.
‘That was fantastic,’ he said, still out of breath.
I lay down beside him, panting myself and put my head on his chest.
‘You can see why they call it making love,’ said Mike. ‘We made more of something, out of nothing. We’re Gods.’
‘You’re full of shit, Mr Riley,’ I said, laughing.
He seemed to drift into sleep then surprised me by speaking almost into my ear. ‘Have you thought any more about names?’
‘Well, Riley as a surname cuts out Kylie and Wendy, anything ending like that.’
‘You don’t really like those names, do you?’
‘No, I hate them, but I’m just saying . . .’
‘Any boys’ names yet?’
‘It’s a girl, Mike,’ I said, with a certainty that made him snort.
‘I don’t imagine the name Joyce is likely to get a guernsey.’
I slapped his chest, making him jump at the sudden pain.
‘If it is a boy, will you call him Terry?’
‘No,’ I said instantly, and the reason came out too quickly: ‘I’d think of his fath – of the other Terry every time I said the little thing’s name.’
My mind still went to fuzz whenever Terry came up between us. Not Mike, though. Things were already settled on that score, as far as he was concerned.
‘When will we tell her, or him, whatever. Do you want her to call me Daddy or Mike?’
It was a surprise then that I answered immediately and with the same certainty that I was carrying a girl. ‘Kids should have mummies and daddies. We’ll stick with that, except this one –’ I dropped a hand onto my belly – ‘will hear about two daddies. It’ll be like Santa Claus. Kids don’t question contradictions until they’re ready to know the truth.’
‘S’pose you’re right,’ he said, as though he couldn’t be bothered to put his own view. That annoyed me.
‘You don’t have to agree with me on everything,’ I said, raising my head so he’d see I was serious. ‘You’re going to be this thing’s father, Mike. What are you painting this bedroom for if you’re not?’
Settling back into the crook of his neck, I couldn’t see his face, but the silence showed he was thinking about what I’d said.
‘When I was little, they used to call me Thomas because I wanted to see things with my own eyes. I quite liked it. When I needed a confirmation name, that’s what I picked.’
‘Thomas Riley.’ I tried it on my tongue. ‘A bit formal.’
‘Everyone will call him Tom.’
When he didn’t say any more, I moved to get up.
‘No,’ he said, drawing me back to the bed. He squeezed out the rag and began to sweep it slowly over my belly. He’d told me that my body was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, not a bad thing to hear when you’re feeling every ounce of the extra weight.
Mike refreshed the rag and went on soothing my back, slowly, from under my hair all the way to my ankles. When it was done, he put the rag aside and ran his open palm over the slippery skin, into the cave of my back and over the outward curve of my bottom.
‘Up at Cedar Creek, and even when I saw you walking across the Great Court, I dreamed of doing this. The gods have whispered magic among the planets, just for me.’
‘Is that your precious Larkin?’ I asked. ‘Sounds more greeting card to me.’
He laughed and put his shorts back on.
TOM
I was born on 31 March, 1972, twelve days later than predicted. The obstetrician planned to induce me if I hadn’t appeared by the following morning, and, considering the baggage attached to my very existence, a birthday on April Fool’s would have been no joke at all.
Susan was going spare, apparently, until Aunty Diane told her babies were more trouble out, than in. The birth required four hours of painful pushing on the part of my mother, who screamed every curse known to woman and invented some new ones the midwife hadn’t heard before. That was one piece of news she was happy, even proud, to tell me. Dad had been sent home: no husbands present in those days.
‘What did you think when you first saw me?’ I asked Dad once, when I’d pestered him for every baby photo he could find from among the boxes still stored at Grandma Riley’s.
‘Your head looked like a sucked mango seed.’
‘Love at first sight then.’
He nodded and blessed me with one of his unrestrained smiles. ‘All babies are beautiful to their parents.’
‘Even Mum?’
That was the first time I’d referred to Susan, and not Lyn, by that fraught word. Dad stared at me for a long moment and said, ‘She loved you then, she loves you now, Tom. No matter how you ask the question, my answer will always be the same.’
‘Sorry, Dad. Stupid of me to say anything. Did she think I looked like a sucked mango?’
He went on checking me over as though he didn’t trust my instant capitulation, then told me things I had heard before: ‘She searched for Terry in your little face. She didn’t say so, but I could see her doing it. You had Kinnane colouring, though. I don’t know whether that made it easier or harder for her. But you’ve quizzed your mother about all this, I know, because she told me last time she rang up to check on you.’
‘But you were there, too, Dad. Just trying to get another angle. It’s hard sometimes to sift the truth from the myths and the bullshit. She says she wouldn’t relive the day you brought me home from the
hospital, not for a bucket of gold.’
‘Ah, that was Diane’s fault. Told your mother to stick with four-hourly feeds like you were a robot. You started yelling the house down ten minutes after we walked in. She walked you, I walked you, we changed your nappy and still you cried. After an hour we were out of our trees, and, of course, Susan would rather cut her tongue out than ring Joyce for help.’
‘So you rang a neutral party.’
He laughed at that. ‘An interesting way to put it, but yes, I rang my own mother, who said, “For God’s sake feed the little thing.” You were fine after that.’
‘You kept going into the room to check on me, didn’t you?’
‘Ah, I see more myths have been embroidered.’
‘But it’s true.’
‘That one, yes. You were the most wonderful thing I had ever seen. Worth a few lines of unpublished poetry, too. How did it go? Dependent flesh, with eyes and waving hands alone to conjure love.’
Alone in my room afterwards, I wondered whether my mother was ever truly happy as Dad’s wife. She had given me conflicting answers over the years. The older she grew, and the greater the lapse of time since those short years, the more inclined she was to say yes, or perhaps it was simply because by then she was happy. It wasn’t a topic we discussed in the Fitzgerald days, when I was a teenager, and more fragile inside my First xv jersey than I wanted to admit. Any version of her marriage she might have given me then would have been distorted by the rollercoaster of the Inquiry.
It was later, when I started spending time with her in Sydney, that I worked up the courage to ask whether she’d been happy with Dad, and for my pains received a curt ‘no, not really’.
Was it the truth, though?
She brought the matter up herself during my first year at university: ‘If I had days, even whole weeks when I was happy, it was because Mike ticked all the boxes for what a husband’s expected to do.’
‘That’s not exactly a heartfelt endorsement,’ I said.
At the time, I was sitting with my first glass of Scotch in hand and gaping at the view of Sydney Harbour behind her. Perhaps it was the alcohol, but I suddenly pictured her with clipboard and pen, marking Dad on his performance.
Yard kept tidy – tick
Helped with the housework – tick
Got the baby up so I could sleep longer in the mornings – tick
Came home on time, never raised his hand to me, marshalled our money prudently, remembered my birthday – tick, tick, tick, tick
‘The best thing Mike did was get me back into study,’ she declared, after she’d poured me another centimetre. ‘I’d had this idea that I would do a subject part-time in the semester after you were born, but well . . . you proved more of a handful than I’d bargained on.’
She stopped there and smiled to herself, some private joke I guessed, because she looked down at her wine glass for a moment before speaking again.
‘You didn’t sleep through a single night until you were six months old.’
‘Dad says I was a tyrant.’
‘You just weren’t your cousin Rosanna, that’s all, and I’d assumed all babies would be like her. Christ, what did I know, and the way Diane talked, you’d think it was a piece of cake. Anyway, I wasn’t in the best frame of mind, but Mike said I had to have a degree. It’s the only time he pushed me into something, or the only time I let him. Since you’re asking, Tom – yes, I had a life. Best of all, I was out from under my mother and at the end of that year, the alp swept into office. God, those were fabulous days. Mike started teaching soon after. First time he got paid, we sat on our bed with you in the middle and spread the notes out like Bonnie and Clyde.’
She didn’t have to tell me there were happy days, not when she let stories like that slip out.
‘It was a bit like an arranged marriage,’ she said another time, when she was in a more thoughtful mood, and entirely sober. ‘You don’t have to be in love to feel affection for someone. Mike tried so hard, and look at him now, with Lyn. All he needed was someone who loved him back.’
There was more, then and afterwards, when I coaxed her into grinning anecdotes for those years, yet, in the sensitive and intensely personal stories of her happier days, I didn’t seem to play any part at all. I realise now I was waiting for it, I was waiting for her to look straight into my face and say, ‘Tom, I had you, and you made me happy, no matter what else was going on in my life.’
She never did.
SUSAN
1973
I knew what the doctor was going to say from the complacent way he’d gone about the examination.
‘Nothing to worry about, my dear. Your gp was quite right. Be patient a couple of years and his eye will straighten. Perfectly normal.’
My dear! Where did he get off, patronising me like that? It had been Mike’s idea, anyway. He’d insisted I make the appointment with a specialist, which meant taking Tom into the city when I didn’t have the car because Mike drove it to work.
The damage began earlier when we were too late for the bus because Tom had dirtied his nappy just as we were heading out the door. That meant a taxi if we were going to make the appointment on time and money was tight.
‘I’ll have to drop you up a little further,’ the cabbie had said when there were no spaces at the kerb in Wickham Terrace, and, in the fluster of payment and extracting Tom, I hadn’t realised where we were until I looked up and found myself standing on the very spot where those bastard police had charged onto the footpath.
Then the doctor was running forty minutes late, so I could have waited for the next bus after all. Did the receptionist apologise? Don’t be stupid.
The coffee table offered only tattered copies of House and Garden, and Women’s Weekly.
‘Bloody garbage,’ I said, loud enough to make the receptionist look up.
I retrieved the Courier-Mail from a seat opposite, and, in a sign that my day might be picking up, I found a picture of Donna Redlich on page five. Hers was one of four faces, all women, and all looking dreadfully important despite the obligatory smile for the camera.
Team to Establish Shelters said the headline. The Federal Government was setting up a women’s shelter as a refuge for battered wives and Donna was to be assistant to the group’s leader.
A women’s refuge was just the kind of work I would have thrown myself into, and I immediately pictured myself arguing our case at meetings, defying public servants twice my age to demand justice for disempowered women. The film in my head rolled on until I glanced down at the newspaper, still open and with the familiar face staring up at me. It wasn’t my face. If things had been different, if I’d been able to apply, I would have landed that job ahead of Donna.
I brooded all the way home to Taringa, even though I scolded myself for being so childish with every lurch and turn of the bus. Tom was fractious on my knee and it didn’t help that the bus was crowded with boys in the red and black of Mike’s old school. They’d surrendered a seat to me but with nowhere else to go, they hung from the straps directly above. There was no ill intent, but I felt intimidated by their size, their proximity.
Closer to the driver and well out of earshot, a blond All Hallows’ girl talked with another Gregory Terrace boy. His mates had noticed and began to make adolescent comments, all bluster and ribaldry.
‘Do you reckon she’s a natural blonde?’ said one.
‘He’ll never find out.’
‘Neither will you.’
From the rumble of sniggers, it dawned on me they were discussing the girl’s pubic hair.
My mind was still planning refuges where women could escape from the misogyny that fed such jokes. Tom began to whinge. By the time our stop was close, he was whimpering with tiredness and drawing the eyes of other passengers.
‘Excuse
me, I’ve got to get off at the next stop,’ I told the closest boy.
‘This is my stop, too,’ he said. ‘I’ll carry that for you,’ and he’d picked up the bag at my feet before I could decline.
So there I was on the footpath, having to say a polite thankyou to a smiling schoolboy, who only moments before had been making sexist remarks about the girl I could still see now, oblivious to it all, through the bus window.
I wanted to scream!
At home, I’d just got Tom off to sleep when Mike pulled into the driveway. I hurried to meet him at the front door with a finger to my lips and led him through to the kitchen where it was safe to talk.
‘Hey, I had a breakthrough today,’ he began immediately. ‘I finally connected with the too-cool crowd in Year Eight. I’ve had them reading—’
‘I don’t want to hear about it,’ I said.
He stopped, but couldn’t hide the mild offence.
‘I’m sorry, Mike,’ I said quickly. That was all I needed to say, but my bloody tongue had a mind of its own. ‘It’s just that you come home every second day with a story like this and I’m a bit tired of it, okay?’
I should have stopped at the apology.
His eyebrows lifted. He shrugged. ‘Okay, I’ll give it a rest.’
No, that wasn’t what I wanted, yet I couldn’t name what I did. No wonder Mike looked mystified.
‘When you get all excited about your work, it reminds me that I’m a million miles away from having a job myself, one I can throw myself into the way you do,’ I said, knowing that this was reasonable, an explanation that made sense and at the same time didn’t really tell why I was angry.
‘Tom’s a job on his own. You’ve told me often enough.’
‘Don’t, Mike,’ I warned, and he let that angle drop, thank God.
I told him about Donna Redlich.
‘Yeah, I saw it in the staffroom copy. Isn’t it great?’
‘Yes, it’s fucking great – for Donna!’
Now I’d raised my voice. For fuck’s sake, shut up, Susan! ‘I’m sorry, Mike,’ I said again, determined to leave it at that and then said, ‘It was a pain getting Tom into town for the eye specialist.’
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