Australian Love Stories

by Cate Kennedy

  ‘Get your own if you want to but I thought I’d spare the humiliation of another doctor’s visit.’

  He turns and looks at her. ‘Thanks,’ he says and gives her a small smile.

  ‘Not yours, you arsehole! Mine. The less people that know the better.’

  He looks back at the box, resumes turning it over.

  ‘But if you do want to go to the doctor today, you’ll have to go to the Medical Centre. Take your chances with the crowd. Our surgery’s closed till Monday.’

  ‘No. That’s fine. These’ll do.’

  She lies down and they both stare up at the ceiling for a moment. She watches the cobweb float and drift on some tiny whirlwind. She feels tears welling up. She doesn’t want to cry. Not right now. She wants to hold herself together. She leaps off the bed, walks out of the room and closes the door firmly behind her to give herself time to gather her emotions and bolster herself. She leans against the wall on the other side of the door. What a mess. What a fucking mess. Worse, she loves him. Adores him. The arsehole. She should have known it’d come to this. Karma and all that. But she’d actually believed him, gullibly, when he said he’d never felt this way for anyone else before. Now she can’t live without him. Pathetic. She blinks back tears, waits another minute then turns to go back into the room. When she opens the door, he’s there with his phone in his hand.

  She grits her teeth. This could go either way but she’s hoping the odds are in her favour. She looks at the phone then back at him. There’s a shimmer of sweat on his forehead.

  ‘Well?’ she says and looks at the phone.

  ‘I sent a text. To meet up.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Today or tomorrow.’

  ‘Today. It has to be today,’ she says. ‘I want this over with.’

  In her head she counts…one, two, three.

  ‘Or I’m out of here. I mean it! And you can go and live with her. Your decision.’

  ‘I don’t want her,’ he says, suddenly standing up, desperate. ‘I want you. Justine, I love you.’ His eyes shine with tears.

  She holds up a hand to ward him off. ‘Well then it has to be today.’

  He nods. Sits back down and reads the text he composes: ‘Meet you today at the Oaks at 1.00. It’s urgent.’

  A pub? He’ll need a beer in his hand when he tells her. They’ll probably sit in one of those small booths—nice and quiet, and discrete. A good choice.

  A reply comes back almost instantly. She sees his phone light up. It’s on silent, of course, as she would expect. He reads it to himself and nods. ‘Okay.’

  ‘It’s already 12.15,’ she says, knowing it will take almost all that time to travel there.

  ‘I know. I’ll make it.’

  She must live fairly close to the Oaks, she thinks. Her turf. He stands, throws the phone on the bed and starts to dress.

  He picks up yesterday’s jocks and crumpled jeans from the floor and slips them on. No shower. Good, he’s hardly likely to try for one-more-for-old-time’s-sake with her scent all over him. He grabs the t-shirt from the back of the chair and pulls it over his head. She sits down on the bed, slumps with her head in her hands and he sits next to her.

  ‘Sorry,’ he whispers. ‘Sorry. I’m an idiot. Never again. Promise.’

  She lifts her head looks him in the eye and the tears begin to fall. This time they won’t stop.

  ‘I love you,’ he says, pulling her gently to him. He strokes her hair and she’s reminded of the soft circles he traced on her back earlier.

  ‘I’d better go.’ He squeezes her briefly.

  She sniffs and wipes her eyes with her hands.

  ‘I won’t be long; it’ll be quick. Promise.’

  When the front door slams, she lets out a big sigh, leans over and picks up the box of pills. She wanders into the ensuite and studies her red-rimmed eyes as she rips open the box. ‘This is what you get,’ she tells herself, ‘for marrying an arsehole. You knew he was an arsehole.’ She pushes a little pill out of the foil, studies its smooth red surface briefly before tossing it into the toilet and flushing it away.

  Later that night they lie in bed both tired after the harrowing debrief about the conversation he’d had with Cherie. She wasn’t happy, of course. In fact, as Justine had expected, she was insulted. She said it wasn’t her. She was furious that he could even think such a thing. She blamed him for sleeping around and said she never wanted to see him again. Justine had listened carefully with her glass of wine firmly held, sipping constantly to numb the pain. By the time they’d exhausted the conversation, she’d consumed almost the whole bottle herself and was feeling quite drunk.

  ‘How often do I need to take these?’ Henry asks, shaking the little box of pills.

  ‘Morning and night. Till they’re all gone. One course will do it.’

  ‘Have you had any?’

  ‘Just one. If we take them at the same rate then we shouldn’t reinfect each other,’ she says astounding herself at her ability to sound so knowledgeable and trustworthy.

  He pushes one out through the foil, pops it into his mouth and swallows it down with a gulp of water. One step closer to superbug resistance, she thinks, feeling a little guilty but she quickly scolds herself. It’s worth it to save the marriage. He’ll never know. Like most men, he avoids anyone with a medical degree, so she’s pretty sure he won’t make a follow-up appointment. She looks up at the ceiling, the cobweb floats and sways on some unfelt breeze. She sighs; she’d meant to clear that away this afternoon but forgot.

  These Bones

  ALLISON BROWNING

  Enzo dreams of pink cockatoos and red rosellas. It wasn’t always this way. Before here, before this country, the smell of the Mediterranean tinged the edges of his dreams. He was a young man then. The clean and fresh air of his imaginings at night time was punctuated by the loud calls of the men in the markets selling their produce and by the whiff of over-ripe tomatoes they’d be selling off at a bargain price on Saturdays. They were the old familiar sounds—those of his boyhood. And now there is the screeching birds and the scent of freshly mown lawn. The new-familiar.

  In the night when Enzo wakes he becomes unsure of where he is and stretches out his arm for the glass of water his mother will have left him. But there is no glass. And when he reaches the bathroom he is affronted by the man in the mirror—the hair that has vanished in the night, the tinge of his skin that is no longer the deep rich olive it once was, more sallow than golden. He is no longer the young man he was moments ago, without lines and the notations that time leaves. At night the dark plays tricks of time.

  Enzo’s dreams moor him by dawn, they carry him through the night like the ship that brought him here many years before and anchor him tight. The screeching birds don’t let him down. They remember he is a man now, they know this when he does not recall. The rosellas and cockatoos carry him back here to Carlton, to the bedroom. And for a moment when he wakes, because of them, Enzo knows that he is Enzo; a man, not a boy; he knows that the earth here is not as good for growing; knows the sun warms the heart, yet dries the skin.

  On the nights when he dreams, when sleepy imaginings linger fug-like, thick and heavy behind his eyes, it is the Australian birds, the squawks and caws and tough beaks, that remind him, if only for the moment upon waking, that he is here in Amess Street and that the body beside him is Nev’s.

  Today, though, he wakes and Nev is not there. He is not there again. The room is a newer new-familiar, but not the one he wants.

  The day is bright, not like yesterday. Today the sun is a brilliant orange orb in the sky the colour of his grevilleas, the colour of backyard yolks. Enzo considers the weather through the window. Today is a gardening day, the kind of day where no gloves are needed because the earth is warm and kind to the skin and the dirt feels soothing on the flesh.

  Enzo makes his way to the chest of drawers and rummages. There is no gardening shirt in here, no pants that are worn at the knees from kneeling. The closet yi
elds nothing either. Enzo pulls on a pair of pants with a belt already looped through the waist. Presto. He whips a shirt off a hanger and throws that over the top of his sleeping singlet. He’ll only have to wash the lot later anyhow. His gardening shoes will be outside on the porch, under the pergola, so for now it’s the brogues. They go on, the both of them, hide against skin, but he can’t think what to do with the long things at the end, the spidery spaghetti annoyances. He shuffles into the ensuite and voila, the top drawer has conjured up what he’s looking for. He takes the sheeny nail clippers and bends, cursing as the sciatica punches him in the bum like a cattle prod and shoots down the length of his leg. But he manages all right—he nips the pesky strings away in a flash. On the bench to the right of the mirror is aftershave, located where he usually puts it at home. He sprays some on like always and makes his way to the door, grabbing his hat on the way out.

  There is the god-almighty racket of morning tea in the dining room as Enzo nears it and he wonders what’s come over him, rising at this sort of hour. It’s those pills they give him, those little hard white pills that knock the zing right out of the morning. He’s parched but can’t bear the thought of facing the bustle so he heads for the foyer instead. He’ll go now, head off and chew a little, get the saliva working, and later the trusty garden hose will quench his thirst as always.

  Glinda isn’t at the desk today. She’ll be helping with morning tea. The timing is good. This is perfect. He remembers now that he had to wait. The pills, a little blessing today. Too many days he has forgotten that Glinda is always here at the desk until morning tea. And he’s come out before then to go to Amess Street and he’s been sent to the dining hall instead, off to that room with all the others to eat sugary biscuits that come from packets. But today Enzo has timed it like a trick. He makes his way to the sliding doors and the brilliant sun spotlights him, warms his skin—it’s heaven. He nears the doors, comes closer, closer.

  And nothing. They don’t open. How to complete the feat? Enzo backs up, looks upward at the sensor, moves forward, forward. Still nothing.

  Enzo, still in his patch of light, considers. He is a man who can fix things, there is always a solution. He shuffles backward toward the front desk and thinks of how Glinda exits. The doors open for Glinda always. But not right away. They don’t open quickly. Enzo picks up a pen from the counter and scribbles on a clipboard. The scribbling lubricates things, allows the cogs to turn to find their motion. Glinda always walks to the right, to the box on the wall. Yes. Glinda goes to the box before she leaves. She stands right there and pushes buttons on the box and then…

  He walks forward then veers to the right and ta-da!—the box. Enzo begins to push buttons. He has never been close enough to see this part of Glinda’s routine. He punches numbers and more numbers. The doors remain still. He thinks of the lock on his shed, the pin lock that Nev bought for him after the hooligans broke in and took his secateurs and paint. There were four numbers to put in. He needs four numbers here and there are too many numbers on the buttons for the simple job—typical of a place like this, everything the hard way, the long way.

  A shadow looms in the light of the doors. A man chewing gum stands on the outside to the left, the sun making his tanned skin glow. He wears overalls with heavy boots, good boots for hard work and he appears to do what Enzo is doing, pushing at the box out there. Enzo doesn’t know this man. He is not from here.

  A buzzer can be heard ringing on the desk. The noise is fat and rude. The noise sounds again. There is a click and then a voice. ‘It’s Dean about the blockage,’ the voice says. Enzo can see the man standing patiently in the stark light. He rests a toolbox on the ground and scratches his lower back. Marion’s voice comes out of the desk and echoes outside as well. When the man chews on that gum it looks like he is speaking in Marion’s voice. ‘Come on in and down the hall. Go to the right then take a left. First office on the right.’ The desk burps a, ‘right-o’ and the doors open just like that. The air bursts in and carries with it the overalled man who nods at Enzo as the two pass each other.

  Outdoors the air is sweet. It’s sweeter than in the courtyard where he’s allowed to go. Enzo thinks he can smell jasmine but it’s not even that time of year. Enzo follows the path to the car park where there are not too many cars and then heads past the black bitumen and white parking lines and toward the road. Decisions. Left or right. This is not familiar. Enzo looks in each direction and watches. There are cars passing both ways but this is not a busy road. There is a footpath on the opposite side and that side of the road is lined with houses with nice gardens. Enzo crosses the street—this is a start. Doves stand on the grass just there, pecking at this and that. Enzo watches them for a bit. Left or right. A flock of birds flies overhead and his eyes follow them left to the west, if he is right with the sun where it is. If left is good enough for them, it’s good enough for Enzo.

  The pathway is smooth and the concrete is a stark white, fresh and new and near-blinding in the bright. Onward. This is the weather for music, for the speakers to be out in the garden. That is what he’ll do. He’ll put the speaker out in the garden. He’ll play something to groove to. Some Nancy, some Nancy Sinatra. These feet were made for walking and that is what they’ll do, boom boom, he punches the air with his hips and points at the pavement as he sings, shaking his finger. And one of these days these feet are gonna walk all over you.

  Brogues on hard pavement feel good. They are a little loose but they make a solid sound, not a thin little clack like the lino back there. Too much slippery floor lately, way too much. That shiny floor is only good for socks and slipping. And Glinda hates it when he does that. The path leads around the bend and up the hill a little. Up the hill is hilly but not impossible. Enzo works those muscles, feels the steps in his bottom, in his calves. This is what walking feels like, not courtyard strolls. This is real walking. Some breaths are needed outside the front of number 244 Whatever Street but Enzo keeps going. Keeps going up and then bingo, bingo, snap and yahtzee all at once—just up to the left are the shops. Yes indeed. A mandarin is what is needed in this situation. A mandarin will give the energy to make a surprise for Nev. Enzo will appear full of mandarin zing at Amess Street and someone here on this street will tell him the way, he’s sure of it. Sunny days ba ba ba…cares away. Will you show me how to get, how to get to Amess Street, how to get to Amess Street. He remembers the early morning song for the children after the news. The song with the Snuffle-upa-gus and the Big Bird.

  Enzo nears the shops on the high street. There is a deli that he can see, a café, a fancy-pants grocery store with slick shelves and boxes of things on display and there is a fruit and veg shop with the old roller door up. Enzo lets his bottom find its way to the bench seat out the front of the fruit and veg and he digs his hands into his pockets. There are no coins and he doesn’t have his jacket with him to check there either. There will be no fruit. If this was Gemeldi’s he wouldn’t need coins. Gemeldi would hand over a half orange or mandarin the moment Enzo appeared.

  A young woman is in the shop with a basket filled with fruits and a bunch of leafy kale on top. The shop is small and so is she. For her there is plenty of room in the narrow aisle but the owner, who is piling up apples in the other aisle, is a large man with a belly that is full and happy. He looks like he might knock over his produce with that beach ball out front.

  The air is mild and it’s nice to be sitting, but what next? What what what next. Rathdowne Street. Enzo smiles at the young woman, who has picked up a bunch of grapes, and she smiles back. Enzo stands and the grocer glances his way. Enzo gives a nod that’s returned by the grocer’s big head, it’s a nod with enthusiasm, the kind used to encourage a potential customer.

  ‘Can you tell me the way to Rathdowne Street?’

  ‘Driving or…’

  ‘No I walk.’

  ‘You need the bus. Number 68. The stop’s right on the corner there.’

  The woman with the smile who is laying her
vegetables and fruits on the counter looks at Enzo, considers him for a moment. ‘Would you like a lift? I’m headed in that direction.’

  ‘To Rathdowne Street?’

  ‘I’m going back to Nicholson so I can take you past on the way.’

  She smiles again, the freckles on her nose bunch up—a small, kind, bunny nose she has. The woman pays. ‘This way,’ she says, directing Enzo to her hatch back that is a green shade of the ocean. ‘You remind me a bit of my pop,’ she says.

  Enzo offers to help load the groceries into the car. She hands him the lighter bag and he places it in the boot and smooths his hands over his chest. Inside, the car is toasty, like a cocoon.

  ‘You don’t live near here?’ she asks.

  ‘I live on Amess Street. That is where I live, but I stay in the prison.’

  ‘The where?’

  ‘In the place where they don’t let me cook. They are all dying there, all dead in the head already.’

  ‘And you live on Amess Street?’

  ‘I live there usually but not recently.’

  ‘Do they know you’re gone?’

  ‘They know nothing. This is our secret.’

  ‘A secret? Okay.’

  Magnolias line the unfamiliar streets and their pink blossoms make a blur out the window. Enzo watches, trying to catch sight of something he knows.

  ‘Is there someone you want to visit, where I can drop you off?’

  ‘I will make a surprise with my Neville.’

  ‘And he lives on Amess Street…’

  ‘He lives in our house. He has my garden but I am going to fix it today, but first I will get some fruits on Rathdowne Street. I will visit my friend. He has a shop.’

  ‘That’s why you didn’t get fruit just now?’

  ‘This is why I go to Gemeldi. He is my fruit guy.’

  ‘Do you think we should call where you’re staying to let them know you’ve gone out for a bit?’

  ‘No we don’t call them because they don’t know that I need to go home today. They always say I go another time.’