His Other House

by Sarah Armstrong

  He turned slowly and smiled. ‘Mornin’, missus.’ He looked around at the trees circling the house and nodded. ‘Lucky you didn’t get a tree land on your house in the night. That wind at midnight was ferocious.’

  ‘A tree tipped over into the bottom waterhole.’

  ‘Soil gets real wet down there.’ He slapped one hand against the other. ‘Water gets trapped against the rock.’ He glanced up at her house again, rubbing his knobbled hands together. ‘Well, I came to borrow some fuel for my chainsaw.’ He opened the passenger door of his ute and pulled out a battered tin jerry can. ‘My fuel tank sprang a leak . . .’

  ‘Help yourself.’

  He flicked open the jerry can lid. ‘A couple of trees came down on my fence in the south-eastern corner. The bloody goats got out.’

  Quinn and Ned appeared from the trees, Ned on Quinn’s back, tanned legs swinging. He wriggled down as soon as he spotted Clarrie and ran across the lawn. ‘How are the skinks?’ His arms were goose-bumped and his wet hair hung in strings about his shoulders.

  Clarrie squatted on his wiry, sun-damaged legs. ‘You want to come and see them again today?’

  ‘Yes.’ Ned nodded, his grin wide.

  Quinn stepped beside Rachel. ‘Hi, Clarrie.’

  ‘Quinn.’ Clarrie nodded and looked away. He was always a bit awkward and formal with Quinn. ‘Early for a swim.’ He managed to make it sound like it was odd that Quinn would swim but perfectly normal that Rachel and Ned would.

  ‘Yeah. It was brisk. Do you ever swim in your waterhole?’ Quinn asked.

  Clarrie stood up and shook his head. ‘Nah. Are you on holidays? You’re not normally here this time of the week.’

  ‘He’s here all the time now,’ Rachel said.

  ‘Oh.’ Clarrie nodded and glanced around, anywhere but at Quinn. ‘Good-oh.’ He looked at Rachel. ‘Well, that’s good news, love.’ Clarrie had been one of the first people she’d told, even before Shaney. She’d needed to tell someone who wouldn’t offer advice or be shocked. Clarrie had just heard her out, nodding and drinking his tea until finally he’d said, ‘Sounds tricky, love.’ She got the impression that Clarrie was too caught up in his own pain – from some never-discussed tragedy years earlier – to pass judgement on others.

  Clarrie rested his big hand on Ned’s head. ‘Will you help me fill my can, young fella?’

  Ned nodded and skipped after Clarrie.

  ‘Let me look at your cut.’ Quinn stepped close to Rachel and touched her brow with a tender but professional touch. ‘It’s looking okay, ma’am, even if you disobey your doctor and get your wound wet.’

  ‘Oh, I forgot all about keeping it dry.’ She didn’t want his gentle touch to end, but he dropped his hands. In the shed, Clarrie and Ned clattered about.

  ‘I have to leave for Brisbane in a few minutes,’ he said.

  She wondered if he had the same awful sense as her that their relationship was on precarious ground. ‘If she hadn’t got pregnant,’ she said, ‘what would you have done?’

  He was watching Ned knocking on the side of the fuel tank as Clarrie fed the hose into the jerry can. ‘I would have left her for you.’ He kept his eyes on Ned.

  ‘Really?’ She wanted him to look at her. ‘So Adie means more to you than me?’

  ‘Don’t ask me to rank you with Adie. Or with Ned.’ Finally he looked at her. ‘You know what it’s like, the love for a child . . . They come first.’

  ‘Do they?’

  He touched her face with the same gentle fingers. ‘Well, that’s how it is for me.’

  Chapter Forty-two

  He sat in the car park and dialled the number that wasn’t his anymore, and imagined the phone ringing loudly through the house. He knew they were there, he had done a detour on the way to his rooms and glimpsed Adie jumping on the backyard trampoline. Marianna must have given her another day off school.

  Her recorded voice clicked on, warm and perky: Hello. You’ve reached Marianna, Quinn and Adie. Please leave us a message.

  ‘Hi. Adie, it’s Daddy, sweetheart.’ Tears rushed to his eyes. He should have thought through what he’d say. ‘I’d love to talk to you. And I’m really looking forward to seeing you soon. I’m thinking of you all the time, my darling girl, and I’m sending you a big hug down the phone line.’ He pressed the end button and closed his eyes. He had an awful image of Adie and Marianna sitting in the kitchen, listening to him leave his message.

  He walked through the car park to the lift, his legs heavy. He understood the term going through the motions now. Inside, there was only one patient in the waiting room and Sally sat behind the reception desk, working at the computer. The room smelled of the lavender spray that she said made people feel like they were in good hands. She glanced up and smiled. ‘Good morning.’

  He walked behind the reception area and sat on the chair beside her. ‘Good morning.’

  She stopped typing. ‘I brought in some muesli slice if you’d like some.’

  ‘Ah, thanks, but I’m well fed. I have some new contact details to give you.’

  ‘Okay. I didn’t know you were moving.’ She reached for a piece of paper and pen. ‘Fire away.’

  He dictated Rachel’s address and she looked up at him. ‘You’re living down there all the time?’

  He spoke quietly so the patient wouldn’t hear. ‘Marianna and I are not together anymore.’ It was the first time he’d said the words and the shock of them ricocheted through his body. He tapped the piece of paper. ‘And that’s where I’ll be living from now on. With my new partner.’

  She bent forward to scribble on the paper and he saw her neck flush. ‘Okay.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘I might as well tell you, because it will get around soon enough. I have a son with my partner down there.’

  ‘Right.’ She raised her eyebrows and gave the hint of a smile. ‘Life’s complicated, isn’t it?’ She sounded sad and he wondered what was going on in her life. As she turned back to her typing, she said, ‘You might need one of those muesli slices after all. They’ve got chocolate in them and they’re in the fridge.’

  At his desk Quinn picked up the phone to call Adie again, but there was still no answer. Last night he’d dreamed about losing her in the city and frantically running down alleys and into shops shouting her name. He made himself stand and walk across the carpet to collect his first patient.

  At lunch he tried to call her again. Marianna had changed the greeting and taken his name off. He left another message.

  Perhaps this whole thing had been his big moral test and he had failed it by not telling Marianna straight away. When he was a boy, his mother had told him about the Dutch and German people who kept Jews safe in their homes during the Holocaust. And Quinn – as an eleven-year-old living on remote Ocean Island – had felt sure that if he were in the same situation, he would protect a Jewish family. He’d risk his life for what was right. How certain he had been of his moral righteousness.

  He wondered what he did have an unshakeable moral position on. Murder. Child abuse.

  He picked up his keys and walked out through reception. He didn’t care about the patients waiting, he had to reassure himself that Adie was all right.

  He parked on the road and walked back along the footpath. Sweat sprang out under his suit pants and shirt and he stood in the sun and looked through the thick Lilly Pilly hedge that he and Marianna had planted their first spring in the house. Up the side of the house he could just see Marianna and Adie watering the vegetable patch. Adie stood very still, the hose in her hand. He hoped she’d turn so he could see her face, but a woman approached along the footpath and looked strangely at him peering through the hedge, so he stepped up onto the lawn and started up the slope towards Adie and Marianna. His footsteps were silent on the springy, newly mown lawn. He was waiting for Adie to notice him, willing her to turn and see him, but it was Marianna who saw him first. She turned to face him and shook her head. Adie saw him then and dropped the hose and
ran towards him, then stopped a few metres short of where he stood. She looked down at the grass.

  ‘Hello, Adie,’ he said and crouched down. ‘I wanted to see you. Just for a moment. I miss you so much.’

  She looked up, her eyes teary. ‘When are you going to come back and live here?’

  He swallowed. ‘I’m pretty sure I won’t live here with you and Mummy again. But I will still see you. I will always be your dad.’

  ‘But why?’ she whispered.

  ‘Why won’t I live here again?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Because . . . because I didn’t tell Mummy the truth about my other family. She’s pretty angry at me.’

  ‘She’s sad.’ Adie’s voice was matter-of-fact.

  ‘Sad and angry, perhaps.’

  Marianna’s voice was loud and abrupt. ‘Don’t, Quinn.’ She put her hand on Adie’s shoulder. There was dirt under her fingernails. ‘Why don’t you and Daddy finish watering the garden before he goes, and while you do that I’ll nick inside and finish doing a few things in the kitchen.’ She looked at Quinn. ‘You have five minutes. And don’t try and guess how I’m feeling, Quinn.’

  He stood beside Adie while she waved the hose over the tomatoes and wilting lettuces. In his dream, he had seen girls who looked exactly like Adie from behind who then turned to him with a stranger’s face.

  ‘Daddy, when can I come to your other house?’ She looked up at him, the hose in her hand, water pouring all over his suit pants. He steered the hose back onto the garden.

  ‘Soon. Mummy and I can talk about it and make a time for me to take you down there.’

  ‘I want to go today.’ Her voice was small.

  ‘Not today. But soon.’

  Marianna called from the house. ‘Okay, Adie, time to come in. We have to get ready to go to the shops.’

  Adie stood stiffly as he hugged her.

  ‘Bye, my darling.’ Quinn walked away from her, down the hill, without looking back. His whole body was leaden, as if it were not his own. His shoes squelched and his soaked trousers flapped around his shins.

  On the footpath, he turned back and she’d gone. The hose lay abandoned on the lawn. He climbed into his car and sat, hands resting on the hot steering wheel. He was filled with a swirling anxiety that it was the last time he’d see Adie.

  Chapter Forty-three

  Marianna found herself counting the days until Quinn arrived home on Friday evening, then caught herself and almost welcomed the jolt of pain because most of the time she felt so numb.

  Adie squatted in front of the oven, her apron brushing the floor. ‘They’re nearly ready!’ she called to her mother.

  ‘Are they golden?’ For two weeks Marianna had been a puppet: shopping and cooking, chatting, laughing even, washing and ironing, moving her limbs around like a normal person.

  ‘They’re a little bit golden.’ Adie looked up at her mother.

  Inside the oven, the shortbread sat in neat forked rows on a tray. ‘Let’s give them just a little bit more.’ She stroked Adie’s hair.

  Marianna could tell that most people didn’t believe that she’d really had no idea. They thought she must have been wilfully blind. Even her mother had said, ‘Oh darling, I guess there must have been clues that we missed. But who would think to look for them?’

  ‘They’re ready now. Look, they’re going brown,’ said Adie.

  ‘Step back, sweetie.’ Sugary buttery heat billowed from the oven and Marianna slid the tray of shortbread onto the wooden table.

  Ever since he’d left, Adie had been wetting the bed. Marianna had brought her into the big bed, but Adie had fallen out onto the floor and cried to go back to her own room. So Marianna had dug out the waterproof cover for Adie’s mattress and slept on a mattress on the floor beside Adie. Most nights she’d wake to Adie stumbling over her, sobbing and wrenching off her soaked pyjama pants.

  Then Lucy the dog came to sleep in with them and Adie’s room smelled of dog as well as piss.

  Now Quinn was coming to spend his first weekend at the house with Adie. Marianna planned to drive into the city and find a quiet, bland hotel room where she could lie in bed all day and night.

  Adie stood at the table, filling a hexagonal cake tin with the jam drops they’d made earlier, carefully cutting greaseproof paper to put between the layers. Since Quinn had left, Marianna and Adie had thrown themselves into baking: lamingtons, passionfruit sponges, Anzac biscuits. Comfort food. And the silent reassurance of doing this familiar thing together.

  Marianna let Adie stay home from school if she wanted, which she did at least two days a week. Evan came every few days for dinner and moved about the house with gentle solicitude, and Marianna’s mum turned up twice a week to fold washing and vacuum the floors and make pots of tea. After their initial expressions of sympathy and shock, neither of them brought up what Quinn had done; Marianna figured they were afraid of opening the wound. So she existed in a kind of dream world, where no one talked about what had happened.

  She went to bed late every night and always followed the same routine. She turned the answering machine back on and listened to the messages. She locked the front and back doors, then checked every window lock. For a few days she’d abandoned her small rituals because the worst thing had happened. Then she realised that the worst thing would be losing Adie, so every night she did the locks and lights in the same order, then, in the dark, she stepped over Lucy and onto the mattress on the floor and lay between stripy pink sheets, listening to Adie’s steady breath.

  When Adie was a baby, Marianna had wanted her to sleep in the bed with them but Quinn had convinced her that it was not safe, citing studies and stories he’d heard. So she had laid Adie in the bassinet beside the bed and would reach out and touch her small, swaddled body through the night. She wondered if Rachel had slept with their baby, if she had allowed Quinn to talk her out of it. No. It was Marianna who was the gullible, malleable one.

  Bill had told her that Rachel was an earth mother who grew her own food and even made her own bloody butter. Bill had turned up on Marianna’s doorstep the evening after Quinn left, full of apologies and tears. She had asked him in, only because he could tell her what she needed to know. When he’d told her how Rachel and Quinn met, she had a flash of memory: the pregnant woman she’d spoken to over Bill’s fence that day. That must have been Rachel. Marianna tried to remember her face or what they had spoken about but all she could remember was the curve of the woman’s belly and her washing: a small pile of neatly folded baby clothes.

  She’d quizzed Bill about Rachel’s family and where she lived, and Bill was all too eager to tell her. It offended Marianna that he thought telling her all this and sharing a meal made everything right again. She didn’t ask him to stay and he left at about 2 am. She’d stood in the bedroom window and watched him reverse down the driveway and it had felt like cutting off a long-dead limb.

  Adie took off her apron and hung it on the back of the door. She spoke quietly. ‘I want to give Daddy some shortbread to take home to Ned.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Marianna. Home? How could Adie adapt so quickly to the idea that his home was elsewhere? Marianna started stacking shortbread in a Tupperware container and said, ‘You can give him these for Ned.’

  ‘I want to see his other house,’ Adie said. She stood very still, her hands resting on the back of a chair.

  ‘I know. One day, but not yet. It’s too soon.’

  ‘Too soon for what?’

  ‘For me.’

  Adie scowled at her mother.

  ‘Adie, I’m not ready to meet them yet. I’d feel too sad.’

  ‘But I want to. Daddy said I could.’

  ‘You could go with him if you want. He could take you and bring you back.’ As she spoke, her heart clenched at the idea of letting Adie go alone into enemy territory and she regretted making the offer.

  ‘No. I want you to come.’

  ‘Okay. One day.’ She knew she was constructing a
kind of show life for Adie, following all their old routines even though the routines felt empty now. And part of the show was clearly going to be taking Adie to his other house.

  ‘Was I born first or him?’

  ‘You were, darling. His birthday is two weeks after yours.’

  Adie nodded. ‘Can we please go and buy some of that rope Grandpa says we need for the pulley?’

  ‘Why don’t you do it with Dad?’

  Adie’s face dropped and she whispered, ‘Because I want to do it with you.’

  ‘Okay. We’ll duck down to the hardware store.’ Marianna glanced at the clock and snapped the lid shut on the plastic container. ‘Get your sandals on.’

  When she remembered Adie’s birth – and she often did – she saw it like a movie. She sat in the hospital bed holding Adie, the camera hovering at an objective, nostalgic distance except for those moments when it zoomed in on Quinn’s face. And when it did, she looked hard for a sign. She remembered him thanking her for the extraordinary gift of fatherhood, or was that just what she wanted to remember him saying? Perhaps her memories were as fabricated as the life he had pretended to live. Flimsy like a film set.

  She’d once seen a street dog bitten by a snake outside their house in Jakarta. Bony and mangy, it had sunk to the ground by a drain and hadn’t moved for hours. She’d thought it was dead, but her father’s driver had said that no, it was trying to stop the toxin from moving around its body. Marianna knew that going back over her life with Quinn and looking for all the hints and signs she’d missed was just spreading the toxin around, but she couldn’t help it.

  •

  When they returned with the rope, Quinn’s new car was in the driveway, a shiny white Subaru, the driver’s door open.

  ‘Daddy!’ Adie unbuckled her seatbelt and tried to open the car door before Marianna pulled to a stop. Adie dashed to his car and he picked her up into a hug.

  ‘Hi,’ he called to Marianna. Adie had her legs wrapped around his waist and her head resting on his shoulder.

  ‘Hi.’ She kept her voice neutral and didn’t look at him as she walked past. In her bedroom, she kneeled on the carpet and zipped up her overnight bag. He appeared in the doorway. ‘Can we talk?’ He was tanned and wore clothes she’d never seen before: rust-coloured canvas pants and a light blue shirt. She felt a surge of resentment to see him looking so well.