His Other House

by Sarah Armstrong

  His dad came carefully down the steep stairs, holding a plate. ‘Adie sent these out to you,’ he said when he reached Quinn. ‘Brown sugar shortbread.’ He passed Quinn the plate and sat beside him. ‘I’m expanding by the hour with all these biscuits and slices and cakes.’

  ‘I suppose Marianna has told you?’ Quinn picked up a still-warm biscuit. Someone – Adie or Marianna – had pressed a fork into the top of it. He ran his thumb over the furrows left by the tines.

  ‘Yes. She told me.’ His dad looked straight ahead at the house.

  ‘I never meant for it to happen. Rachel and Marianna got pregnant at the same time.’

  His father sighed. ‘What did you mean to happen?’

  ‘I planned to leave Marianna.’ He put the biscuit back on the plate.

  ‘Oh.’ His dad nodded. ‘It would have been kinder.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He turned to Quinn. ‘So I have a grandson?’

  ‘Yeah. Ned. He’s five.’

  ‘Tell me about him.’ His father smiled.

  Quinn described Ned and his fascination with quolls. His baby skinks. Mighty Rock. The way he leaped barefoot from boulder to boulder up the creek.

  ‘When can I meet him?’

  ‘Soon. I’ll take you down.’

  ‘Thank you.’ His father’s sadness was palpable. Quinn wondered if he was thinking, Like mother, like son. But Quinn knew he didn’t get it from her. He suspected it was simply something in him, some switch he didn’t flick.

  His dad rubbed his hands over his thighs. ‘I was thinking about you and your mum. You know, she didn’t hang on to any ill feeling about that argument you two had before you left. I just want to make sure you know that.’ He gently laid a spotty hand on Quinn’s thigh. ‘She loved you. But you understand that, don’t you? Now that you have kids of your own. It doesn’t matter what they do, you love them.’

  •

  The day Quinn left the island she had held him tightly down at the harbour and said, ‘I’d say knock ’em dead but that’s probably not the right thing to say to a med student.’ She stroked his cheek and smiled and he looked away. ‘Don’t let’s part like this,’ she whispered. But he said nothing. He saw now that the leap of emotional courage was just too much for him. She had pressed her lips to his forehead for a long time. Thinking of it now, his throat filled, knowing how badly she would have wanted something back from him, some small reciprocation. But he had simply boarded the boat that would take them all out to the big BPC ship. He stood there on the deck, legs wide, while the other passengers leaned on the railing and chatted. The boat delivered them to the ship and his mother was still waving as the ship sailed south-west towards Australia.

  Chapter Forty

  Rachel’s house was dark and empty when he got there. It was crazy for him to drive all that way just to turn around and go back to Brisbane the next morning, but he wanted to see Ned, to hold him. He flicked on the kitchen light and saw a pile of vegies scattered over the table, clumps of dirt still stuck to the potatoes. A half-drunk glass of milk stood on the sink. It looked as though they had gone somewhere in a hurry.

  He dropped his bag in the bedroom. Rachel’s bedroom. The wrinkled sheets and pillowcase showed him exactly where she’d lain in the night, alone in the bed. Fear flickered in him. He hadn’t rung her to tell her he was on his way; he couldn’t have borne it if she’d told him not to come.

  He stripped off his suit pants and shirt and walked through the silent house to the bathroom. The French doors to the garden were open and the sounds of crickets and frogs echoed around the tiled room. In the dark he turned the shower taps on hard and stepped under the water, letting it flow over his head and face. He didn’t know how long he’d been standing that way when he heard a little voice. ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Is that you, Noodle?’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes.’ He turned off the taps and stepped out onto the damp bathmat. Ned stood in the doorway. Quinn heard Rachel in the kitchen.

  Quinn squatted, dripping, on the bathmat. ‘Come here.’ He reached his arms for Ned.

  Ned moved slowly towards him. ‘I’ve got mud on me. I came in to wash my hands.’

  Rachel appeared. ‘Hi.’ She turned on the hall light and he was shocked to see her bruised face. How could he have forgotten about it?

  ‘Clarrie’s skinks have hatched. They’re this big.’ Ned squinted his eyes and held his fingers a centimetre apart. His arms were caked in mud.

  ‘Wow. That’s pretty tiny. How many are there?’ He pulled Ned into his arms and held him tight; he felt like a bird, with fragile bones and puny muscles.

  Ned hugged him back, a muddy arm hooked around Quinn’s neck. ‘You’re all wet, Dad.’

  Rachel stepped into the bathroom and bent to pick up a yellow rubber duck from the floor.

  Quinn spoke to her over Ned’s head. ‘I told her.’

  ‘Okay.’ Her voice was quiet. She sighed and he hoped it was with relief. She balanced the duck on the edge of the bath.

  ‘There were six babies,’ Ned said as he leaned back to look at his father. ‘Clarrie said that if they were in the wild not all of them would survive.’

  •

  A breeze rustled through the dark mass of bush just twenty metres from the verandah. Quinn leaned on the railing and took some long slow breaths.

  In Ned’s bedroom, Rachel and Ned murmured and laughed, then Rachel walked up the hall with her distinctive slow tread. She called to him from the kitchen. ‘You want some more wine?’

  All evening, every time she showed him some kindness, he was flooded with gratitude.

  ‘No, thanks,’ he said and sat on the sagging couch.

  She flopped beside him, wineglass in hand. ‘Bill called me today.’

  ‘Really?’ Shit. Quinn should have told Bill.

  Rachel sipped her wine. ‘Marianna phoned him before dawn this morning.’

  Before dawn Quinn had been lying awake at the motel, not even trying to sleep, while burbling all-night television came from the room next door. ‘What else did Bill say?’ Why didn’t he call Quinn?

  ‘That he told her everything she wanted to know, including where I live.’ She lifted her feet onto the low table in front of the couch.

  Where I live. ‘She won’t come here,’ he said.

  ‘Bill didn’t think she would either.’ She sighed. ‘He said that we took advantage of him.’

  ‘We did.’ He should have called Bill. He should call him now.

  ‘He doesn’t want to see you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She shrugged. ‘Just that. He doesn’t want you to contact him.’

  ‘Oh.’ He tipped his head back and closed his eyes.

  Rachel rubbed his upper arm. ‘So, how was it? Telling Marianna?’

  ‘Terrible. More terrible than I could have imagined.’ He pictured, again, her face at the moment he told her. ‘She wanted to tell Adie herself and I was in no position to bargain. I saw Adie this afternoon and she was . . . it felt like she was in shock.’ If only Adie had let him hold her.

  ‘She let you see Adie this afternoon then?’

  Was it really only this afternoon? ‘Yeah.’ He was fuzzy from too much wine. And so tired.

  ‘That’s good, isn’t it? You were always afraid she’d keep Adie from you.’

  ‘But you understand that Adie has lost me, don’t you? Her life will be divided into before Daddy left and after Daddy left.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘When they’re adults, will they just think of me as a coward?’ He reached for her glass and took a mouthful of wine.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you think? Was I a coward?’ He depended so much on her opinion now.

  ‘I think you were afraid.’

  ‘Aren’t cowards afraid? Isn’t that kind of the definition?’

  ‘I think you were afraid of hurting her. And I think you liked the life you had with her and all t
he . . .’ She waved her hands around. ‘. . . froufrou that came with it.’

  ‘The froufrou?’ What did Rachel imagine their life was like?

  She took her wineglass back. ‘I think you just wanted it all. You wanted both of us, both families, whatever the cost to the people around you.’

  He felt a flurry of heat in his chest. ‘So . . . the Entitled Doctor?’

  She didn’t meet his eyes. ‘Well . . . maybe. And I’ve said this before but I don’t think you did it just for Adie. You did it for you too.’

  He looked out to the trees. They even sounded like the sea. ‘Yes. I loved – love – being Adie’s father. I wanted to be there and have that.’

  ‘Or maybe you just couldn’t act, you couldn’t make the decision you needed to make.’ She turned to face him. ‘Is that it?’

  He felt sick. He wanted her to stop.

  She slumped back against the couch. ‘We need to be completely honest with each other now. No telling me what you think I want to hear. If we’re going to make it.’

  If we’re going to make it. ‘I’ve been honest with you. It’s Marianna I lied to.’ And Adie. And Ned. She was right, though, he always thought before he spoke and sifted through the options of what to say. But didn’t everyone do that to some degree?

  She dropped her chin and pressed her fingers into her eyes. ‘I have this terrible feeling that you will just keep denying us and minimising us, like some kind of reflex . . . or habit. You know . . .’ She drew a breath. ‘. . . every time you didn’t mention me and Ned, you denied us our aliveness, our very existence.’

  ‘I know.’ He’d thought of them like another world, a separate planet that he came and went from.

  ‘I’m just asking you to be yourself and tell me everything, even the shitty stuff,’ said Rachel.

  ‘Okay.’ The wind was picking up and the trees shifted restlessly at the edge of the clearing.

  •

  When he climbed into bed, she seemed to be asleep, curled on her side, facing away from him. He tucked himself behind her and reached around her waist. She took hold of his arm and pulled it close.

  At first he thought she might be speaking in her sleep or talking to herself, her voice was so faint. Then he heard the word Scotty. He lifted his head from the pillow and said, ‘Are you talking to me?’

  She cleared her throat but didn’t move. ‘The day I was meant to be looking after Scotty . . . I was up on the tree and I looked over to him at one point.’ She paused for so long that Quinn wondered if she expected him to say something.

  ‘And he was splashing around a bit in the deep water over near the mangroves, just by the boat ramp. Just a few splashes and he waved his arm about a bit, and the thought crossed my mind that he could have been in trouble. But I deliberately turned back to the tree and climbed up to the rope. I consciously didn’t look over at him. And I felt so powerful doing that. So grown up and mature.’ She was very still under his arm. ‘It wasn’t that I forgot about him. I let him drown. That’s the truth.’

  He pulled her close and pressed his nose to the back of her head. ‘Oh, sweetheart.’ He stroked her the way he stroked his kids, over and over. ‘Rachel.’ He pictured the young Rachel, who he would never know, swinging out on the rope, her head turned away from her brother. He knew that feeling she’d described: being charged with rebellion and defiance of whatever it was that you knew you should do. ‘You were only twelve.’

  She sat up. ‘Can you pass me the water?’

  He passed her the glass and she drank it all. She gave him the empty glass, slid back down under the sheet and looked at the ceiling. ‘What are you thinking about?’ she said in a quiet voice.

  ‘I’m feeling sad for you. Thinking about what a heavy thing that’s been to carry . . .’

  ‘You don’t feel sad for my mum and dad?’ Her voice was shaky.

  ‘God, yes. I feel sad for you all, and Scotty.’ His eyes filled with tears at the thought of a little boy, not much older than Ned, dying alone and afraid. ‘But mostly I feel sad for you. You were a child. Even if you turned away, it wasn’t your job to look after him.’ How did parents survive the death of a child? How did they go on with washing clothes and making meals and turning up for work when they would never hold their beloved child in their arms again?

  ‘Maybe it shouldn’t have been my job. But it was. I was the one person who could have made the difference between life and death.’ She pulled the sheet higher up over her shoulders. ‘I could have screamed out to Dad. I could have dived in and swum to him. I had three minutes.’

  ‘Have you told anyone else this?’

  She shook her head.

  He stroked her hair. ‘Give that kid you were a break. It was too much to ask of you. It was an adult’s job.’ Outside the wind made a roaring sound like a distant train and twigs rattled onto the roof.

  ‘You don’t get it. It wasn’t too much. I could have looked after him. And I chose not to.’ She rolled to face him and look him in the eyes. ‘That’s it. You know everything about me now. That’s the worst of it.’ She exhaled a long shaky breath and closed her eyes.

  He held her as she fell asleep and he thought of her as a teenager, every day going over and over that moment she turned away from her brother.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Ned scampered up the narrow path to Rachel. ‘Want some, Mummy?’ Smiling, he gave her a squashed segment of mandarin.

  He flung the bright peel into the bushes and raced back down the dirt track to his father, the t-shirt he had borrowed from Quinn flapping around his knees.

  Quinn had held her when they woke before dawn and she’d wanted to tell him that what she’d done was far worse than what he’d done. That’s it. You know the worst of me. Now she had told someone, the relief was immediate, but she felt raw and tender.

  She put the piece of mandarin into her mouth and swallowed the sweet juice. Ned and Quinn disappeared around the last corner of the track and she heard Ned whooping. When the waterhole came into view, she saw that another tree had fallen into the water, its thick pale trunk slanting down from the high opposite bank. Branches and leaves sprouted incongruously from the middle of the waterhole.

  Ned hopped about on the rocky beach, pulling his clothes off. He shouted back to his mother. ‘A new ramp!’ She’d asked him a few times how he felt about his father’s other family, but he clearly didn’t want to talk about it. He acted as if nothing had changed, but he had an awful strained quality about him, as if he were trying extra hard at everything.

  She climbed down the boulders to the little beach. On the other bank, the fallen tree’s root ball had been left exposed, a tangle of gnarled muddy roots.

  Quinn stripped off his shorts and t-shirt and picked up Ned’s clothes and laid them on a boulder. He’d lost weight and looked more like he had when they first met, more boyish. Quinn and Ned stood side by side at the water’s edge. ‘One, two, three,’ they shouted and launched themselves, yelping as they hit the water, their voices ringing out.

  Rachel stood in a sliver of the first morning sun. She knew she should be celebrating that finally Quinn was living with them, that finally they were all telling the truth. But she couldn’t help worrying that their relationship was fatally flawed after such a dishonest start. Or maybe, and worse, perhaps it was she and Quinn who were flawed. She couldn’t count the times she had taken herself back to that moment when she looked away from Scotty. She’d tried to track the steps that had led her to that point when she’d chosen evil over good. And it was not too much to name it evil. People were afraid of the word, but she knew that everyone had the capacity for evil; some people just resisted it more strongly.

  She stripped off and stepped into the cold water, stones clinking underfoot. Ned climbed up the newly fallen tree trunk and Quinn trod water, looking up at his son, smiling. Rachel sank underwater, eyes open to the murk, and swam slowly, her hair billowing against her shoulders and neck, the cut over her eye stinging.
r />   When she surfaced, Quinn was breaststroking towards her.

  Her legs pedalled underwater and she thought back to the incredible thrill she’d felt swimming with him in the town pool. It seemed like another lifetime.

  He trod water. ‘How are you going, after telling me about Scotty?’

  She nodded. ‘I’m okay.’ He was the only one she’d ever told. Looking at his handsome, tired face, she felt a rush of love and sadness.

  Ned called to them, ‘Hey! There’s a bird’s nest here.’ He was squatting high on the trunk, his lithe body folded as he peered at a fork in the tree branches. ‘Where do you think the birds are now, Mummy?’

  ‘How big’s the nest?’ asked Rachel. Ned held up what looked like a handful of twigs. A couple of sticks spiralled down and floated on the water.

  ‘Looks like a dodgy-built Tawny Frogmouth nest,’ said Rachel. ‘They would have flown away when the tree fell.’ She hoped they had. ‘They’re probably sitting on a branch somewhere watching us right now.’

  Ned turned to look towards in the direction of the driveway. ‘I can hear a car.’

  The sound of a car grinding slowly up the driveway reached Rachel.

  ‘Expecting anyone?’ Quinn asked.

  ‘No.’ She swam to shore. No one came to visit at six o’clock in the morning. Could it be Marianna? If she were Marianna, she’d want to know who the other woman was. She splashed her way out of the water and climbed the biggest rock so she could see the house through a gap in the trees. Clarrie’s ute pulled up.

  ‘It’s Clarrie,’ she said. ‘I’ll go up.’ Quinn emerged from the water as she dried herself roughly and pulled clothes over her damp, chilled skin. She followed the path to the house and found Clarrie standing in the open door of the shed, his back to her and hands on his hips. He wore his usual work shorts and shirt and old boots with gaiters.

  ‘Hey there, Clarrie,’ she called.