The Woman Next Door

by Liz Byrski

  ‘It’s been terrific,’ he says, leaning forward to kiss her on the cheek. ‘Had I been twenty, even ten, years younger I would have tried to seduce you.’

  She laughs. ‘I’m glad you didn’t, I’m really over all that.’

  ‘Oh, don’t kid yourself,’ he says, laughing, ‘we never get over it – if we do we might as well be dead.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ she says with a grin.

  ‘I am,’ he says. ‘We’re not all that old, you and I, Polly, there is much to look forward to. I’ll be in touch.’

  And putting his hand up to her cheek, he smiles, turns and walks away.

  Men, Polly thinks, are so full of shit. But he really was rather nice and the conversations were great. Outside the snow that had closed the airport for some hours the previous day is rapidly disappearing, washed away by torrential rain. Life is full of interesting encounters, that’s all it was, and she packs it away in her memory, and turns her mind to Paris, and then to Bali, to the house on the edge of the forest, to peaceful days, and equally good company.

  Chapter Three

  South Fremantle, Western Australia, March

  The stillness of the house is eerie. It’s odd really because Mac is not a noisy person, he doesn’t raise his voice or stomp around the place banging doors; he walks quietly, and his voice is well modulated. True he has an irritating humming habit, soft but entirely tuneless. Joyce feels that the house is in a state of uneasy stillness, as though it’s waiting for him to come back to breathe life into it.

  It’s only two weeks since he left and already she feels like a fraud. She’d wanted space to sort herself out. Now that she’s got all this space and silence she doesn’t know what to do with it. There is a certain pleasure in the tidiness, in not having to think about shopping, in being able to ignore mealtimes and snack when it suits her, but this sense of liminality, of being on the threshold of something without knowing what it is, is far from comfortable. The ideas she has toyed with for months, years even, seem pointless, silly, or just too hard. It’s as though the day that Mac drove away, the ute packed with his clothes, books, tools and god knows what else, the change became not only real, but challenging; her motivation disappeared, almost as though Mac had packed that as well. She hasn’t told him that of course, she hasn’t told anyone.

  ‘Gracious me, how exciting,’ Stella had said when they had told her about their plan over dinner on the evening after she got back from Albany. ‘How very modern!’

  And Joyce and Mac had laughed. ‘We guessed you’d say that,’ Mac said, ‘we would have put a bet on it had there been anyone to bet against us.’

  If they had done something like this years ago, Joyce thinks, Helen would have been the first person she’d have told; in fact she’d probably have talked to Helen about it before she and Mac decided anything. They would have sat together with mugs of coffee on the back verandah of one of the two houses, and talked about it. Helen would have been supportive, encouraging, a little too brisk but nonetheless understanding. But Helen has changed, and Joyce is still trying to work out quite how and why. Helen and Dennis had been living in the house next door for a couple of years before Joyce and Mac moved into theirs. Mac had seen it first and Joyce had been sceptical of his enthusiasm until he took her there.

  ‘It needs a lot doing to it,’ she’d said, ‘but I adore it. Can we afford it?’

  That was before the America’s Cup came to Fremantle and prices shot through the roof. A few years later and they couldn’t have dreamed of affording it. It was a lovely old federation home, which had been sadly neglected, and she knew it would need heaps of work. But she fell for it that first day and it has been a wonderful house for children and later for grandchildren. Ben had been ten and Gemma just eight when they moved here. Ben and Vanessa had met and married young, and their two daughters, Kara and Lucy, have both left home: Kara to study journalism in Sydney and Lucy, health sciences in Newcastle. Gemma, still single, is a research scientist, and has been working for the past seven years with a private foundation that’s affiliated to the World Health Organisation, in Geneva. Mac and Joyce have been over there several times for visits, but Gemma has been home only once. Sometimes Joyce wonders if her daughter has gone for good; Gemma loves the job and she has a full and interesting life in Europe.

  When Helen had announced that she and Dennis were selling and the estate agent’s sign would go up the following day, Joyce had imagined all that shared history of being next-door neighbours disappearing. The lives of their two families had leaked into each other in such an enriching way and she’d felt sick with despair at the prospect of the change.

  ‘What about Damian and Ellie, and the baby, and didn’t you say that they want another one quite soon? Wouldn’t they want to be near you? I mean I know both Damian and Ellie are younger than Ben and Nessa, but they can’t leave it too long if they want a second child,’ she’d said. ‘And Nick? If he ever gets fed up with counting bats in caves he might get married and have children.’

  Helen had laughed then. ‘What woman would put up with Batman? When he’s not in a cave with them he’s examining their dead bodies or their eating habits in the lab at uni. Remember when we thought he and Gemma might get together? Well that went nowhere. And Damian’s applied for a transfer to Sydney, he reckons it’s the next step towards a promotion overseas. If he gets that then he and Ellie reckon it’ll set them up for life.’

  ‘But wouldn’t it be somewhere in the Middle East?’ Joyce had asked.

  ‘That’s what they want,’ Helen had said. ‘They want to do several years out there. The lifestyle with those big companies is quite privileged: big money, big rent-free homes, swimming pools, heaps of perks.’

  Helen had been adamant that the move was what she wanted, and Joyce had felt selfish for minding that her friend could do this without even a dash of regret. Her sense of an ending was so acute that she had asked Mac to close off the gate in the fence. Something important was changing; something they’d never get back.

  ‘Besides,’ Helen had said, ‘you’ll still have Stella and Polly, and some other lovely family might move in next door.’

  Now Joyce believes that while she had always known that something would be lost in the process, Helen had assumed that nothing would change. With the closing of one gate she looks to the other side of the property, to the gate they’d created to Stella’s garden, and beyond that to Polly’s.

  Helen and Dennis had sold their house to a local architect, who had knocked it down, subdivided the block and built a large and elegant place for himself on one, and a small but charming house, referencing art deco style and incorporating recycled doors, and leadlight windows, on the block adjacent to Joyce and Mac’s home. This he kept as an investment property and since it was completed three years ago there has been a series of short term tenants, the latest of whom – both flight attendants – were pleasant, but so frequently absent they might as well not have been there at all. Since they moved out a couple of months ago the house has been empty.

  Joyce sighs and returns to the list of possibilities written on the blackboard that Mac had fixed to the kitchen wall when the children were teenagers. Some of the things she’d had in mind have now been crossed off: leasing a stall in the market, selling sarongs and scarves, maybe other clothes. That had been top of her list for a long time until she had actually looked into it and discovered the crippling rents for stalls, and the complexities of finding a source and importing stock. Getting a job at the Arts Centre, or a bookshop, was still up there, but taking a course in massage or jewellery making had for some reason lost their appeal. Enrolling at university is still a possibility, but what would she study? She has no particular strengths.

  ‘But you’d be going there to find and develop your strength or strengths,’ Mac had said when she’d mentioned this. ‘You love books and reading, maybe you should pick literature, or wri
ting.’

  ‘Definitely not writing,’ Joyce had said, ‘I could never do what Polly does.’

  ‘You don’t have to, you could do something very different, and you were always good at history.’

  So uni is still on the list, as is joining the local refugee support and action group. Joyce stares critically at her reflection in the bedroom mirror. She feels as though she is on the threshold of something: a new way of life, a new way of being herself, but she has no idea how to step into that. Would changing her appearance help?, she wonders. She has watched Helen’s metamorphosis from economical and conservative dresser to a conventionally upmarket, well dressed older woman style which must be costing her a fortune. It’s not a change that Joyce thinks she could make; hers is a more neutral, casual look and she rates comfort far too highly to return to short fitted skirts and heels. I’ve been stuck in a rut at home for so long, in the same job for so long, that I don’t even know a way to be different, she tells herself.

  A familiar voice calls out from the garden and she walks through to the kitchen window and sees Stella, closing the connecting gate. Thank goodness, someone to talk to, someone sensible who won’t pull any punches. Although these days her judgement is not what it once was, and she is increasingly forgetful, she is always distinctively Stella, warm, generous, funny, frequently infuriating and with her own style developed from her love of op shops. She puts together things that on anyone else would look preposterous or simply messy, but which somehow work on her. Her spare bedroom is full of clothes from which she has cut the sleeves in order to attach them to something else, skirts that are being shortened or lengthened by the addition of a wide strip of fabric cut from another garment, jackets appliqued with a motif from something else, all delightfully unique.

  ‘I am a sartorial disaster,’ Stella had said once when Joyce had commented on something she was wearing. ‘A walking patchwork, it comes from working in the theatre for years, earning practically nothing and cutting up other people’s cast-offs. Now it seems to be a habit I can’t break.’

  ‘Come on in. Coffee?’ Joyce says as Stella makes her way up the steps onto the back verandah.

  ‘Definitely,’ Stella says. ‘Do you by any chance have . . .?’

  ‘Yes,’ Joyce cuts in, ‘a whole new packet.’ And she props open the screen door and gets the Tim Tams out of the pantry.

  ‘You’re not doing anything that can’t be interrupted then?’

  ‘I never do anything that can’t be interrupted these days,’ Joyce says. ‘I am the most interruptible woman in Fremantle, possibly in the whole of Western Australia. I haven’t even cooked a proper meal since Mac left.’

  ‘How is Mac?’

  ‘Fine, happy as the proverbial sand boy, sawing, chiselling, sanding, staining, and enjoying listening uninterrupted to Radio National. He’s trying not to sound as though he’s having too good a time without me but I’m not fooled.’

  Stella laughs and hitches herself up on a stool at the bench top. ‘Bet he misses you though.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Joyce says, pouring the water onto the coffee. ‘But he’s fine without me.’

  ‘And you?’

  Joyce grimaces. ‘Still working on it.’

  Stella looks across at the blackboard. ‘Mmm. Not much progress there. Why don’t you just go along to the refugee support group, see what it’s like. I bet you could do as much or as little as you want, depending on what else you decide to take on.’

  It sounds so simple, so easy, perhaps Stella is right, perhaps this is exactly what she needs – a cautious first step. She smiles. ‘Maybe I will. I just assumed that once Mac had left everything would become clear as crystal, but it hasn’t.’

  ‘And it doesn’t have to,’ Stella says. ‘Give yourself time. It’s only a few weeks. You’ll work it out, I know you will.’

  Joyce puts their coffee onto a tray with the biscuits, and they go out onto the back verandah. ‘Have you heard from Polly, is she still in Bali?’

  ‘She is,’ Stella says, ‘she’s having a wonderful time, resting, reading, flopping in and out of the pool. Decided to add on a bit of extra time there, she’ll be back on Friday.’

  ‘How’s Alistair?’

  ‘Not too bad, apparently, quite perky. He’s got some new medication that seems to be better for him. But that’s not what I’ve come for.’

  Joyce raises her eyebrows. ‘I thought you’d come for a coffee.’

  ‘Naturally that, but I just saw the sign next door.’

  ‘Next door?’

  ‘For goodness sake, haven’t you noticed, there’s a “For Sale” sign on the verge. So we’ll be getting new neighbours, hopefully interesting ones who’ll stay a long time.’

  *

  Ubud, Bali, Early April

  Stretched out on a sunbed in the shade by the pool Polly is pretending to be asleep, eyes closed, still as a lizard on a rock, listening to the gentle splashing of the water, the low voices, the occasional laughter. What does it take, she wonders, to spend every waking hour with someone who is dying very, very slowly? To get them up in the mornings, prepare their meals, help them move around, make sure they take their medication, fetch and carry . . . everything. Surely love alone is not enough to activate the sort of selfless devotion required to do this without resentment or irritation, and Alistair can be really irritating. As a younger man he’d had remarkable skills in pissing people off: relatives, friends, lovers, colleagues. But he also had that winning way of letting people know they mattered to him and so they always came back. The magic had not worked so easily on Polly; irritation was probably a fact of life between older brother and younger sister, and she knows there have been times that she has driven him to distraction. Having an older brother who is generally recognised as being a brilliant mind was always going to be something of a problem. She’s always loved him though, and probably more now than ever, now that age and illness have slowed and softened him, shaved off the sharp corners, enabled them to connect more deeply than they had before, to speak more honestly. As she lies there, listening, the weight of her love for him is disturbing. She will be bereft without him and yet she knows that she could never do what Steve is doing, never give herself – her life – over to someone else in the way that he has done.

  Alistair and Steve have been together for more than thirty years – it’s inconceivable to Polly that people can live so intimately together for so long. They are like Joyce and Mac – so closely attuned to each other that you can’t imagine one without the other. Polly believes she lacks that capacity, that if she ever did have it she has squandered it in her unerring ability to fall for the wrong men – men with whom she is unable to be herself, men she has tried to rescue from themselves, until she has had to escape from them in order to rescue herself. She opens her eyes, watching now, as Steve steers Alistair towards the shallow steps at the end of the pool and pushes him gently down to sit there, waist high in the water, leaning against an inflatable cushion, encouraging him to gently move his legs as though he were still floating.

  Polly sits up slowly, gets to her feet and strolls over to sit beside them, dangling her legs in the water.

  Steve smiles. ‘Ah, sleeping beauty wakes. Could you stay with Al for a while, Polly? I’ve got some stuff to do indoors, just make sure he doesn’t drown.’

  ‘Christ,’ Alistair says, ‘don’t leave me here with the Red Queen, she’ll have my head underwater the minute your back’s turned!’

  Polly laughs, swings her foot and splashes him. ‘Too right,’ she says, ‘I’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this since I was about twelve.’ She slides off the pool side into the water to sit beside him on the steps.

  ‘Were you asleep?’

  ‘Dozing, and listening to you two,’ she says. ‘I was eavesdropping on love.’

  He smiles. ‘I’m so lucky, all these years, and he’s stil
l here and still loves me. God knows why; anyone else would have left me before I got sick, let alone sticking with me from diagnosis until almost death.’

  She grasps his hand under the water. ‘I hate it when you talk about death.’

  ‘I know, but I have to. It has to become part of the life that’s left. It has to feel like the most normal thing in the world, which of course it is. Pretending it’s not happening makes it harder.’

  ‘Yes, but you’ve been a pain in the arse most of your life and now you’ve become cuddly big brother and you’re going to leave me.’

  ‘Yep, life sucks. You could come and stay with us more, you know. I don’t mean just because of me dying . . . but for you, for yourself. This place is good for the soul – or at least it’s been good for mine.’ He pauses, looking at her, narrows his eyes. ‘But it’s not what you want, is it? You want libraries and bookshops, the cappuccino strip, the university, grotty film sets, all that crap.’

  ‘I do,’ she laughs, leaning against him. ‘Just not the crappy film sets these days. I love coming here, being with you guys, but it’s not my sort of life. Besides, it’s too hot and humid, and I have the wrong sort of hair for Bali. How come you got Mum’s lovely tanned skin and thick straight hair and I got Dad’s pale English skin and this gingery frizz?’

  ‘Well at least you haven’t gone bald like Dad,’ Alistair says, ‘but I suppose there’s still time for that. I’ve always liked your hair.’

  Polly rolls her eyes. ‘That’s because you’re not stuck with it.’

  ‘Maybe. But seriously, I know you’d go raving mad here, as I would have done had this not happened to me. I watched so many friends die in the eighties and nineties I thought I was somehow immune. But, there you go, things change.’

  ‘Do you never miss your old life?’ Polly asks, remembering the time when they were both living in Sydney, when they couldn’t walk down Oxford Street, or sit in the café by the El Alamein fountain, without him constantly being greeted by people he knew. He was always busy in those days, always on the go, in demand for social or cultural commentary for some newspaper or radio station, invited to all the best parties.