His Other House

by Sarah Armstrong

  ‘All right,’ she said, her lips pressed tight. ‘Thanks.’

  •

  She didn’t flinch when he swabbed around the wound with Betadine. She closed her good eye and sat absolutely still in the square of sunlight coming through the kitchen window, her breath shallow.

  He examined the cut while he waited for the Betadine to dry. It was a deep, clean-edged split. He knew her face so well, loved it so well, her cheekbones and high forehead, the clean, austere planes. He rested his fingertips on her good cheek. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered but she didn’t respond.

  ‘What are you going to do next?’ Ned climbed up onto the kitchen table beside Quinn, eating a banana.

  ‘I’ll put these on.’ He held up the butterfly strips.

  Ned had tied his hair up so a fountain of hair sprang from the top of his head. His cheeks bulged with banana.

  Rachel kept her eyes closed as Quinn peeled the paper off the first strip. Ned peered at his mother’s wound, his brow furrowed.

  Rachel said, ‘Ned was asking this morning to see a photo of your other family.’

  ‘Of course.’ He smiled at Ned. ‘I’ll give you a photo, Noodle.’

  Ned spoke through a mouthful of banana. ‘And you’ll give them a photo of me.’

  ‘Yes.’ When Quinn had woken at 5 am he’d heard Rachel and Ned murmuring in Ned’s room. He’d drifted back to sleep and when he woke later they were still talking. Ned seemed more settled this morning and he wondered what Rachel had said. Quinn touched her brow lightly. ‘Lift your chin a bit.’

  Rachel tipped her head back. ‘Daddy hasn’t told them about you and me yet.’

  ‘They don’t know about me?’ Ned leaned forward to look into his father’s eyes.

  Quinn glanced at Ned. ‘No. Not yet.’ His phone rang in the bedroom. He pressed the edges of the wound together. ‘That okay?’

  ‘Yeah. Just do it,’ she said.

  He stretched the first strip over and Rachel winced. Ned slid along the table, close to Quinn. ‘You’ll still live here, won’t you, Daddy?’ The boy looked at Rachel as he spoke, not Quinn.

  ‘Yes, Noodle,’ said Quinn.

  Rachel said nothing and Quinn’s throat constricted.

  Quinn put the second butterfly strip down on the table. ‘Come here.’ He lifted Ned into his arms. ‘Everything will be just the same, darling boy. I’ll be here. You’ll be here. Mummy will be here. You and I will go up to Mighty Rock.’ Quinn pulled him closer. ‘Everything’s the same and I love you.’ Ned smelled of sleep and banana, and tears pricked Quinn’s eyes.

  Ned’s voice was muffled. ‘And what about Christmas Day?’

  ‘I hope I can be here.’

  Ned leaned back to look at him. ‘Give them the photo of me with Clarrie’s python.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Ned wriggled out of Quinn’s arms down to the floor and stood in the doorway to the verandah. ‘Can we go to Clarrie’s after breakfast, Mum? His skinks might have hatched.’

  Rachel said, ‘We can see him after we drive Dad to work.’

  ‘Okay.’ Ned disappeared out the door and Quinn heard him snapping twigs and stacking them in the wood shed. They already had a kindling pile to last years.

  Quinn washed his hands at the sink again and bent over her to put the second clip on. He could smell her blood and see right into her body, the tender, exposed flesh. He hoped that this small act of repairing her might help bring them back together.

  ‘You’ll need to keep your face dry.’ He put the scraps of paper in the bin. ‘Will you go and get your brake lights fixed while you’re in town?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I’ll call the insurance company,’ he said. ‘And the tow truck.’ He hoped the car hadn’t been leaking oil or petrol into the creek all night. She looked at him with her good eye and whispered. ‘You didn’t ask Ned to keep it secret, did you?’

  ‘No. I didn’t.’ He paused. ‘Please, will you let me deal with Marianna and Adie?’

  She closed her eye. ‘Why would I believe that you will tell her? After everything.’ A tear slid from between her lashes and she wiped it away with the palm of her hand. ‘I was lying in bed with Noodle this morning, watching him sleep, and wondering if the lies have poisoned not so much him, as us. You and me. Maybe we began on such shaky ground, built our family on such an insecure foundation that we can never really recover.’

  ‘You want to . . .’ He could hardly speak. ‘You want me to move out?’

  ‘No. Oh, I don’t know . . . It’s all been so wrong.’ She looked right at him and tried to smile but started to cry, her poor, bruised face crumpling. She stifled her sobs. ‘It hurts to cry.’ He sat beside her and she let him put his arm around her just as Ned appeared in the doorway.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  He turned the hire car into the driveway. Marianna and Adie were in the front yard washing the dog, who crouched low to the ground, ears back. Quinn’s dad stood by the stairs and squinted over at the car as Quinn pulled up.

  The late afternoon sun soaked the scene in an intense flat light, and Quinn saw it all like a photograph, frozen in time: Marianna holding the hose, her hair loose, and Adie gripping the dog’s collar and grinning across at him.

  Marianna waved. It didn’t look like Rachel had phoned her. He had imagined pulling into the driveway and finding them gone.

  ‘Hello, Daddyyyy!’ Adie ran over the grass to him, grinning and lifting her shoulders as if she had a secret she was only just holding back. She leaped into his arms and wrapped her legs around his waist. His girl. His ache of loss sharpened to feel her strong thin arms about his neck. She put her mouth to his ear. ‘I’ve got a family of mice in my wall.’

  ‘Really? How did they get in there?’ He pressed his cheek to the side of her warm head. Stay here, stay here, he wanted to say.

  Marianna called, ‘New car, darling? Downsizing?’ She stepped back from the labrador. ‘She’s about to shake! Watch out, Evan!’ The dog shook, water spraying in every direction, then skittered away and rolled on the grass.

  ‘Daddy.’ Adie planted her damp hands on his cheeks. ‘The mice have a door.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Under the house.’

  He laughed. ‘They probably do.’ He looked over to his father. ‘Hey, Dad. Good to see you.’

  ‘Hi, Quinn.’ His father carefully placed the shampoo bottle he was holding onto the step and wiped his hands on his shorts.

  Marianna turned the hose off. ‘So what’s with the car?’

  ‘It’s a hire car. I’ll fill you in later.’ They kissed and Quinn squeezed her arm. He wasn’t sure how long to hold on to her arm anymore, as if their estrangement was leaking back from the future.

  Adie grabbed his shirt. ‘I told Mummy you’d get them out of the wall for me.’

  ‘The mice? Really?’

  ‘Come and I’ll show you. Then we can get under the sprinkler. I have it all set up.’ He picked up his bag and followed her towards the house. His dad had climbed the stairs and was bending stiffly to pick up plates and bowls from a blanket on the verandah. They’d had a picnic with chocolate cupcakes and strawberries and cream.

  His dad glanced up with a smile. ‘She’s been spoiling me.’ A strawberry tumbled out of the bowl onto the verandah boards. ‘I’m going home this evening after dinner, just in case you’re wondering whether I’ve moved in.’

  ‘Stay as long as you want, Dad. You’re always welcome here.’

  Marianna called up the stairs. ‘Adie, can you please help Grandpa take the plates and things in?’ She carried a wet towel around the corner of the house towards the laundry.

  Adie took the bowl of strawberries from her grandfather. ‘I’ll be right back, Daddy.’

  Quinn put his bag down and picked a chocolate cupcake from the plate in his father’s hand. ‘How are you going?’

  His father nodded. ‘I’m actually fine. She’s probably told you I’m desperately lonely.’ He smiled.

  ‘Are you?’r />
  ‘No.’ He looked out to where the dog was rolling on the lawn. ‘It was the anniversary of your mother’s death on Wednesday. It almost slipped my mind.’ He looked back at Quinn. ‘Do you remember it anymore?’

  ‘No.’ He spoke through a mouthful of cake. ‘I think part of me imagines she’s still alive somewhere.’

  His father raised his eyebrows. ‘Really? You should have come back with me so you could’ve seen her grave.’ He adjusted the cakes on the plate. ‘I’m afraid I may have spilled some beans.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Adie thumped up the hall towards them.

  ‘I mentioned Tebano to Marianna.’

  ‘Why?’ Quinn’s heart thudded.

  ‘He just came up in conversation. I thought you would have told her about it. Sorry.’ He shrugged.

  Adie appeared at Quinn’s side. ‘Daddy. Are you ready?’

  ‘Yes, sweetie.’ He wanted to ask his father how on earth Tebano had come up in conversation but he let Adie lead him up the hall.

  ‘We can make a little hole in the wall, can’t we?’ she said.

  Quinn dropped his bag by the study door. ‘I’m not sure the mice want to be disturbed, sweetie.’ Quinn’s mother had died before he met Marianna and telling her about his mother’s affair would have meant talking about the rift with his mother and he simply couldn’t bear trying to explain that to someone. He never knew if his father understood what had passed between Quinn and his mother before he left for Sydney.

  He followed Adie into her room. It had been turned into a giant cubby with blankets slung over ropes that stretched from windows to the door knob. In the middle, under the canopy of blankets, was a nest of quilts and cushions littered with drink bottles and clear containers of biscuits and cut-up fruit. He got down on his hands and knees and followed Adie through the cubby to the wall.

  ‘They live in here.’ She gently tapped on the tongue and groove boards and looked up at him beseechingly. ‘We can get them out, can’t we?’

  ‘Oh, sweetie. We can’t cut a hole in the wall.’

  She furrowed her brow. ‘I really want to see them.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He leaned forward to kiss her head but she wriggled away and ran down the hall and out onto the verandah where he heard her talking to her grandfather. He looked down and saw that he still had the chocolate cupcake in his hand.

  •

  Marianna peeled off her sodden pants and t-shirt. Quinn put the cupcake on the vanity and lifted the toilet seat to piss. ‘Thank you for looking after Dad,’ he said, then flushed the toilet and sat on the seat. Soap suds slid down Marianna’s body and he knew how slick her skin would feel. He imagined never making love to her again, all their sexual history stopped in its tracks.

  She smiled at him through the glass screen. ‘Are you okay?’

  He nodded. ‘Tired.’ He smelled her shampoo. She had used the same one ever since he’d known her. He remembered showering at her flat when they first met and washing his hair with it and the thrill of having her scent close to him all day. Everything about her had been thrilling and mysterious: the face creams she used, the books on her bedside table, her shoes lined up in the cupboard, the spicy milky chai she made herself every afternoon.

  ‘So what’s the story with the car?’

  ‘I had a prang. Not a bad one but the car’s a write-off.’ He used to lie easily, almost unthinkingly. Now it was as if part of him hovered near the ceiling, seeing the false words drop from him. Clunk, clunk.

  ‘What happened?’

  Through the window he could see Adie and his dad in the garden, tying something to the treehouse ladder. ‘The car came off the road.’ He made himself look at her. He pictured himself driving and veering off the road. ‘And hit an embankment and went into a sort of . . . little . . . creek and apparently it’s completely fucked, the chassis is fucked.’ He grimaced. ‘The upside is that I get a new car. In a week or three.’ He smiled at Marianna, who turned off the taps and smiled back. She trusted him. Over the years she must have created pictures in her head of the stories he had invented.

  ‘So you’re okay?’ she said. ‘Did you hurt yourself?’ She stepped out onto the bathmat and motioned for him to pass her a towel.

  ‘I’m fine. Look, I’m a bit embarrassed about it to be honest. It was just a stupid thing to do.’ He paused. What was he waiting for? For her to say she believed his bullshit? He looked down at the green floor tiles.

  ‘As long as you’re okay.’ She wrapped the towel under her arms. ‘Your dad said something the night he turned up here. He said your mum had an affair.’

  ‘Yeah. She did.’

  ‘You’ve never mentioned it.’ He could tell she was choosing her words carefully.

  ‘It’s something I’d rather forget.’ He wanted to leave the room, but he made himself sit there on the toilet seat.

  She leaned forward to the mirror and inspected something on her chin. ‘How long did it go on?’

  ‘Years.’

  ‘What? Two years? Ten years?’ She looked at him in the mirror.

  ‘I don’t really know. I was a kid. Maybe five years.’

  She turned to face him. ‘It’s no big deal. I just felt a bit silly not knowing this thing that would seem to have been fairly big in your family history. At least for your dad.’

  ‘Yeah. I’m sorry I didn’t mention it. It’s not something I think about very much.’ He stood up and walked to the door.

  ‘Do you want to take this with you?’ She smiled and pointed to the half-eaten cupcake.

  ‘Thanks.’

  He walked down the hall and opened the fridge. It was another lie, of course, to say that he didn’t think about his mother’s affair. How many times had he wondered if what he was doing was some fucked-up skewed apology to her or whether he was just his mother’s son who found it easy to betray his vows? Over the years he had told himself that he was just trying to do the right thing by everyone, in an impossible situation, but this afternoon, looking into Marianna’s eyes, he had known that the moment to do the right thing had passed years and years ago. He had to tell her tonight.

  As he twisted the top off a beer, the house phone rang and Adie ran to the hall table to answer it. ‘Hello? This is Adie.’ She paused. ‘Okay,’ she said. Then she yelled, ‘Mummy!’

  Quinn closed the fridge. Could it be Rachel? Would she really do it?

  He heard Marianna walking down the hall. ‘Thanks, sweetie.’

  ‘It’s the horse-riding man,’ said Adie.

  Quinn took a long swig of beer and stood at the bench to sort through the mail. Tom had sent an invitation to his fiftieth birthday party at a restaurant in Perth. Quinn was scanning the invite for the date when he saw a small piece of paper on the far side of the bench. A child’s drawing of a four-legged animal and the words QUOLL and NED.

  He picked it up just as Marianna swept into the kitchen carrying plastic boxes of food from Adie’s room. ‘Oh, that was in your pants pocket when I did the washing.’ She dumped the containers on the bench. ‘Adie’s been desperate to do the sprinkler thing with you for days.’

  ‘Okay.’ Quinn folded the drawing along the fold lines that Ned had made and tucked it into his pocket.

  Marianna stood at the sink rinsing containers. ‘You said on the phone that Bill’s selling the house?’

  ‘Yeah. No buyer on the horizon though.’

  She turned the tap off and turned to face him. ‘You’ve given them six years, Quinn. That’s enough. You’re missing out on seeing Adie grow up.’

  ‘I know.’ He put his beer on the table as his dad appeared in the doorway with something in his hand, holding it away from his body like a dangerous object. ‘Your phone keeps ringing, son.’ He peered at the screen. ‘All these people calling you. I thought it might be important. It says here that Jim and Rachel both called twice.’

  •

  Quinn stood in his study and dialled Jim’s number. Jim’s voice was subdued.
‘Oh. Thanks for calling back. Ellen and Noel Clark were in a car accident and choppered to the Mater. And I was calling you to see if you could remember if she was on any medication, because her GP is on holidays . . .’

  ‘Oh,’ said Quinn. ‘I don’t think –’

  Jim interrupted him. ‘But it doesn’t matter now. She died.’

  ‘Oh.’ He sat down on a chair. ‘And Noel?’

  ‘Still critical.’ Jim was as quiet and flat as Quinn had ever heard him. He wondered if Jim was thinking about Noel’s meningococcal meningitis all those years ago and the awful moment when Jim realised he’d got the diagnosis wrong.

  As he hung up, Adie appeared in the door in her red swimmers. ‘I’ve been waiting for hours to do the sprinkler with you, Daddy.’

  •

  He lay back on the wet lawn beside Adie, the sprinkler sweeping back and forth over them. A small stone or stick dug into his bare back, but he didn’t move. He just wanted to lie there beside his girl in the shade of the poinciana tree.

  Adie rubbed her finger over the scar on his upper arm. ‘Did you lie under the sprinkler when you were a kid?’

  ‘No.’ He opened his eyes to look at her. ‘We had the ocean and the pool up at the club.’

  She lifted up onto one elbow and pressed her finger harder onto his scar. ‘You should have had stitches.’ Water dripped from the end of her nose.

  ‘Yes.’ This was a conversation they’d had before. When he was nine he’d crashed his bike down at the harbour. Adie knew the story behind every one of his scars. He hadn’t imagined that she would be interested in the small quirks of his body like he was in hers. She liked to run her fingers over the smooth pale skin of his inner arm and exclaim at his squashed little toe. The sprinkler swept over them, the pat pat pat of the drops like the touch of her baby fingers.

  Adie said, ‘Was she very sick? That patient who died.’

  ‘Yes. She had a car accident.’ He should have asked Ellen Clark more questions. She had come to him for help.

  ‘Oh.’ Adie lay back down and lifted her legs into the air, her feet covered in grass clippings. ‘Mum would never crash our car.’