by Cate Kennedy
From the kitchen comes the sound of a scuffle, and the clacking of dogs’ claws on lino. A black nose pushes through the bedroom door, tongue lolling. Natalie rolls off the bed and walks to the window. Far out to sea the container ship is now merely a speck, overladen but heading into the waves anyway. She begins to gather her clothes. In the cold bathroom she squats in the bathtub, and splashes water between her legs, rubs her face. She walks naked and dripping back into the bedroom, where he still lies on his back, his arms behind his head, watching her.
She stands in front of him. ‘Ask me to stay.’
He looks at her, then throws her jeans over. ‘Go home,’ he says.
At home the shower is on. Russ pants into the kitchen and sprawls on his blanket. She makes tea and sits at the table waiting for it to brew. The shower stops, and Dale comes in, drying his hair. He looks worn, and his reddish stubble is thickening toward a beard. Crow’s feet reach for his hairline. Shift work has aged him, the hours a slow, silent corrosion. She pours the tea.
‘How was work?’
A shrug. He slumps at the table, takes the tea. ‘Walking?’
‘Took the kids to school, Russ to the beach.’
‘Anyone around?’
‘Only Theo.’
He nods absently. ‘See John?’
She shakes her head no, directing her eyes into the milky hue of her tea. She still throbs, but it is subsiding into the dull echo of sensation. Outside the sun has burnt through the winter clouds; a muted blue sky ends abruptly at the thriving turquoise of the ocean.
Dale pushes his empty cup aside. ‘I’m beat,’ he says. ‘I’m gonna crash.’
Alone again in his kitchen, he sighs and fills the kettle, gazing out of the window at the line of ti-tree bordering the yard. The morning’s silence—discounting the thundering of the beach over the dunes—has resumed, but without its earlier peace. Natalie has jarred the winter quiet, leaving him heavy and empty in her wake. He hates even thinking about it; he doesn’t know why he does it, why he keeps leaving his door ajar. He is making a godawful mess, but somehow it seems to be beyond him to stop. It has something to do with Selena leaving, it is as if she has taken his safety guard with her, his sense of control. And Natalie seems to hone in on this weakness, as though she has sensed this loss. He wouldn’t even call it lust, more like a connection, a temporary bridge across the void that swallows his days now. They touched each other off like an electric spark, an ignition that needs more than his breath to extinguish it.
He takes her empty cup to the sink and leaves it on the bench to drain.
While Scott huffs over his homework, she tries to scrub the burnt egg from the pan. The remains of what should have been an omelette litters the kitchen around her. From the next room a huge cheer erupts from the TV. Someone must be close to big money.
She decides to forget the pan and just leave it to soak. She’ll deal with it in the morning. Her wine glass is almost empty; as she carries it across to the cask the kitchen door is pushed open and a big black dog trots across the threshold, tail wagging.
‘Theo!’ Her stomach lurches.
‘Hey boy!’ calls Scott, pushing aside his homework and greeting the dog with enthusiasm.
Behind it a figure appears in the doorway. He enters the room quietly, showing no sign of the discomfort that is making her hands tremble. His apparent ease infuriates her, but also makes her think with longing of his kitchen, where everything is neatly stacked against the roar of the sea beyond.
In the mess of this kitchen he pulls off his beanie and rubs his sandy hair back into life.
‘Hey, Uncle John,’ sings Scott, as Theo leaves him and returns, tail wagging, to his owner.
‘Scott.’ He gives her the briefest of looks. ‘Nats. Dale in?’
‘Watching TV,’ she answers, her back turned. Behind her he nods.
‘Been to the beach today?’ he asks Scott.
‘Yeah, went down after school, but not much happening.’
‘Any surfers?’
‘Nah. Some guys floating on their boards, nothing major.’
The man and his nephew leave the kitchen together, with an ease so beyond Natalie that she feels she could choke. In the other room the television is turned down and she hears Dale come to life. She stands alone in the shambles of her kitchen, listening to the hum of their talk and laughter, and knows that this is the only possible result of the situation, that even in the fading winter light the horizon is still there, delineating boundaries. She closes the curtains against the sea’s rhythm, gulps a large mouthful of wine and sweeps the broken eggshells in front of her into the bin.
Need Gone Today
MEGG MINOS
‘I’m falling in love with somebody else,’ he says, drinking the tea she’s made. Falling in love. ‘I just thought I should be honest about the situation’, he adds.
This moment has been orchestrated, she thinks, to divide us. It’s a confession that requires no absolution. What have I done, she thinks, to hear him speaking these words.
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘is it really love, then?’
As if it can be undone, a mistake in the phrasing, not really love at all; just a chance encounter or a sexy moment, something that can pass and not carry with it the unbroken trajectory of falling.
‘She is my age, she has children,’ he says, ‘she understands me.’
The backyard moves underneath her, right there, under the concrete; she feels it. Their washing flaps on the line. I am rending, she thinks, I am coming to pieces.
She feels that she is cursed with seeing all the perspectives at once, like a climber on a mountain that feels the rumbling deep in the earth before the dogs start howling, a person who can anticipate but has no direct course of action.
The plates are shifting; she is losing ground and stares into the middle distance looking for balance.
It’s already happened, she thinks, and we are being forced through the motions. Each phrase will be as clichéd as the next and my heart will break, from loss and shock and insult. I am older, childless and I don’t understand him.
She already knows this other woman. She has been everywhere, the obvious woman, present at every turn, effusive and laughing, angling her face to catch the light. Interested in him.
She knows the woman’s husband and her children. She visualises the handsome face of the husband and the air of contentment he has with his wife and family. She wonders why she would want another man, risk the aftershocks of an affair, the questions of the children.
Watching him breathe tightly over the rehearsed words she thinks about his children, the elastic world of family that they have shared and their own potential children. She kisses them goodbye, those possible children, on each of their airy heads, and sends them away.
She thinks about the years of shared history, laughter, journeys, plans. I am so alone now, she thinks, I have been untethered. What I have and who I am is not wanted.
‘Do I know her?’ she asks, artfully, to gauge his reaction, remembering the introduction out the front of the dance many weeks before.
‘Yes,’ he says, looking away.
It was a night when he was performing with his band and she had waited for him in her good black dress and dazzling earrings by the stage. Waited for him to come off the stage and kiss her, buy her a drink and ask her what she thought of the show.
Instead she had to search for him, through the crowds until she found him out the front, grinning goofily at the woman. She suffered the introduction, seeing the ebullient look in the woman’s eyes. Over his head a little victory flag had been planted. They held their cigarettes like teenagers caught smoking behind the shelter shed.
So, then, she’d foreseen this day, this conversation about love and somebody else. It had begun that night and was now being voiced. Bowing her head and weeping, she acknowledges she’d heard it even before he had.
‘You always said I’d be better off with someone else,’ he says, finishing
his tea.
The other conversation, the one about who will stay in the house, is left untouched. She feels that if he could, he would make her magically disappear, that she is an obstacle standing in the way of him and the momentum of his new life. Somehow it is assumed he will stay, after all, he is in a relationship and she is in flight.
The packing. Does it start with books, bed linen, gardening tools? The cutlery drawer is full of shared decisions, the ideal garlic crusher, what type of teaspoons. It is hard for her to tell who owns these things and painful to acknowledge the thought that has gone into their selection. The thought that this history can be ended so glibly makes her dizzy.
‘You are getting rid of me,’ she says to him.
‘No I’m not,’ he says, ‘a person is not like a toaster, I don’t just get a new one if the old one breaks.’
As insubstantial as she has been deemed, there is the solidity of her possessions to consider. They too have shared other histories, have been moved from house to house; it’s just that this time she had thought they’d come home to roost, and now they were weighing heavily on her. Over time each object has become linked to a memory, a shared experience, a moment in time.
As she packs each object, it becomes heavier with these histories and she becomes lighter, a non-person, marginalised. She feels that she is disappearing, not being seen. Her voice quavers and fails.
When she is in public she feels that the wrong thing is visible in her, some sign that tells people she is no longer loved, that she is a person who once laid claim to a home and a lover but has been replaced and is now cast out.
‘When I am in a relationship,’ he says, ‘it’s like a big thing growing inside of me, pressing out from inside—it’s painful and I don’t want love to be like that.’
She wonders at any other kind of love.
She tells him what she thinks about hearts, how they sit inside the body and hold love inside them, growing full, bigger, sometimes breaking. It’s bound to be a strong sensation, a feeling that rends the chest open and lays bare what is inside, makes the person breathe more deeply and laugh more loudly. It beats, this big love-filled heart, like something that wants to break its cage.
She tells him that she thinks love is like building a nest or a house, with each person contributing to the structure, discussing aspects of how it will be made, building something that is for the benefit of both and that can contain these big jumpy hearts, but she knows he is past this and remembers only the discomfort.
She realises that she was furnishing an idea of love that made each object flawed in its placement. While she was building a world to live in, he was suffering from claustrophobia.
‘It was getting a bit, you know…toward the end,’ he says, ‘we were fighting.’
In the weeks that pass, they continue to share the house. She packs her things with resentment, unable to visualise where and how she will live. There is no home that she can imagine filling with her things, they have no relevance anymore and her own body has no margins. She is all at sea.
As she packs away her things, he begins to replace them with new things of his own and for a while, the familiar and the unfamiliar live together. She gets to take what is old and has been used and as each new object arrives in the house, she finds herself becoming jealous.
Spitefully she packs away the toaster and he brings home a new one.
The first postcard is in the letterbox when she arrives home from work. Sent from Italy, it shows a stout church on a piazza and the stamp depicts an unnamed ruin. The content heaves with ‘passion’ and ‘courage’ and it signs off with, I am the luckiest woman alive. In curling handwriting there is the anticipation of return, reunion. There are many kisses; the X’s crossing the bottom of the card like barriers erected to hold back a riot.
She leaves it on the kitchen table for him to see when he brings his children home from school. They can all see it for all she cares. I am being written out of history, she thinks as she packs her books, by a woman with a purple pen.
Another arrives showing a pockmarked Roman arena surrounded by a midden heap of modern apartment buildings, declaring, you have been a little earthquake in my life, and she hears the dogs howl in the distance, the rumbling.
He makes no attempt to help her move, he calls it her ‘process’. He dreams for himself a new future. He starts learning Italian and talks of villas and EU passports, of waiting for his children to be old enough to travel, eventual migration.
The postcards continue to arrive, lodging in her letterbox like eviction notices addressed to an overstaying tenant, oozing passion and amore. She photographs these postcards and shows them to her friends, wanting to crack open the shell that encases an affair, the secrecy that gives it power, but she knows that she has lost.
The house is already occupied by the other woman’s intentions and the man who has claimed it is already living another history.
‘You have to move,’ he says, playing his final card, ‘this is home to the children.’
Outside, there are refugees, other women on the move clutching the broken pieces of their hearts. She finds them in the supermarket, at parties, in shops. Tears well up and spill. They speak of regrets, revenges, hopes dashed, custody battles, psychotherapists and lost friends.
‘But,’ she asks, ‘how do you move?’
You just move, they tell her, pack up your stuff and go, and she imagines the echo of movement in empty passageways. Hauntings in every house, traces left of relationships that once were. Clean rectangles on the walls where paintings once hung.
She moves.
She paints the walls of her new house, rips up the carpet.
She wipes it clean of what she imagines it once housed. It must be sterile to accommodate her wounds, for healing to take effect.
The things she can’t move she leaves in the old house with him. She places an ad on Gumtree offering them for free, listing each piece.
NEED GONE TODAY she heads the advertisement and attaches his phone number. Let him deal with it, these strangers coming in and taking things away. Let him explain this flotsam, the pieces that have come away from this wreck, this broken boat that came apart when the earth moved and the tide shifted.
Let them visit Pompeii, with it’s frozen time, the dog straining at the leash, the loaves on the table, all turned to ash, and wonder quietly what happened and who survived.
Indian mynah birds have moved into nest in the side of her new house. During the day they crouch on the Hills Hoist, tormenting her dog with swoops and raucous cries. He barks and snaps, maddened by the intrusion into his yard.
She thinks of the warm eggs that were laid by other birds, the blind, tiny chicks being rolled out of the nest to fall helplessly down. The new birds have moved in and sit calmly among the disturbed natural order of things.
She lies low in the heat on the plain boards of her lounge room floor, thinking about how these birds have found a cavity to make their lives in that which belongs to someone else. They stalk across the yard on prehistoric legs and regard her balefully from the fence through the curtain-less windows, as if waiting for her to leave.
She listens as they slip into the side of her house, under the metal flap; their sleek bodies climb into the nest with oily fluttering. In the evening she can hear the chicks peeping an incessant morse code.
In the back shed of the house is a tangle of objects, left by tenants from the past. It is the last place she strips bare, dragging everything out into a pile in the yard. There are rusty tools, lurid green nylon strings from long gone whipper snippers, gas bottles, jars of rusting screws and nails, a pile of hessian sacks eaten through by rats.
The mynah birds perch on the line, shuffling back and forward and diving to catch the slaters that spill from the pile. She is offended by their opportunism and their greedy feasting and feels her heart pulse with resentment.
She pulls a sack from the pile and folds it until it forms a wedge of cloth and fetches a bro
om from inside. Balancing the sack on the end of the broom handle she pokes it into the narrow opening, muffling the cries of the chicks, smothering them until they are still and quiet.
A Mouth Full of Heart
LISA JACOBSON
Note to self. Getting up at 6 am every morning to watch The Wiggles does not mean I’m losing it. Finding Captain Feathersword sexy, ditto. He has muscles and he’s in uniform. Check him out. At 6 am, the house is cold with autumn. Almost all the leaves on the plane trees in our street have turned the colour of rust. My baby daughter kicks at the high chair with her feet and squeals at Murray and Greg, who are dancing with Captain Feathersword and Wags the Dog, smiling, smiling.
‘Goggles!’ she says, pointing to the screen. ‘Ah, Goggles!’
All day I am a woman doing a lot of things at once. I am boiling the water to sterilise my daughter’s milk bottles. I am changing her nappy and applying cream to her angry red skin. I am mixing rice cereal with water and testing the temperature on my wrist before spooning it into her baby bird mouth. After lunch I peg little terry-towling jumpsuits in pastel colours on the line and, when they are dry, bring them back inside. I let our golden-eyed labrador into the kitchen to lick the floor clean. I play a game of stack the blocks on the rug, beyond which my daughter has begun to crawl. I watch her sway back and forth on plump haunches, testing her legs and the floor for solidity. In the evening I walk up and down the corridor, rocking her in my arms until her eyelids flicker into sleep. And all of this is repeated more times than I can count as the sky deepens over the city into a cerulean, lamp-lit blue. At midnight, or at 2 or 3 am, I wake to her animal cries as she lies hungry and wet in the cot my ex-husband and I bought for her and assembled long before she was born. My feet stumble without much of an argument down the corridor to her room.
