Too Close to Home

by Georgia Blain

  ‘You’d think it would get easier. But it’s so fucking hard.’

  ‘Maybe it’s the success of last time that makes it difficult.’

  Mikhala sold out prior to the opening of her last exhibition, her work bought by several major collectors.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ she’d told Freya at the time.

  Freya had never seen anyone look so happy. That’s what she remembers; looking at Mikhala’s face and thinking: So this is what ecstasy looks like.

  Now, Mikhala just shakes her head. ‘You know what I can’t bear,’ she says, as she sips her beer, ‘they’ll buy my work regardless. They’re lining up already. It’s an investment. No one will care what it’s like. I’ll have no idea what anyone really thinks.’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Freya asks. ‘Surely it’s how you feel about it that’s important.’

  ‘It matters,’ Mikhala replies impatiently. ‘I know you say other people’s opinions are irrelevant but you still want an audience to come and see it, to respond.’

  ‘I guess I was talking about the creative process. I can’t let how others might feel interfere.’ Freya looks at her empty glass and decides she will have another.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ Mikhala offers.

  At the bar, Mikhala chats to the man Freya had glanced at when she first arrived. He moves in close and grins as she jokes. Slim hipped, boyish and confident, Mikhala is attractive and men are drawn to her. There is always someone new. It begins with an intensity, Mikhala is in love, this is the one, and her eyes sparkle as she goes into detail about their sex life, how fabulous it is. And then it ends as rapidly as it commenced. He leaves and Mikhala just doesn’t get it, her eyes welling with tears and then anger as she recounts the last scenes. Yes, he had told her he was heading overseas, or perhaps he’d just come out of a long relationship, maybe he found it impossible to stay with anyone; the words had been said, loud and clear right at the beginning, yet Mikhala had somehow failed to hear them, and Freya would comfort her, reassure her that she would meet someone again and that this time it would be right.

  Freya listens now as Mikhala tells her about the latest, a man who has a partner, although she’s sure he will leave her.

  ‘He’s different from the others. For a start, he’s an adult.’

  Lately, it seemed that all the men Mikhala had met had been at least ten years younger. She rolls her eyes at her own stupidity, now well in the past, and then continues to talk about this new man because it’s going to be one of those nights, an evening where Mikhala dominates the conversation, awash with the excitement of love in her life.

  And then, surprisingly, she stops. ‘You know I really want this one to last.’

  ‘It will,’ Freya reassures her. ‘But just go easy. Let it breathe a little.’

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ Mikhala replies. ‘You’ve always had Matt. You have no idea how hard it is to be on your own and how much hope you invest each time you meet someone.’

  Freya is irritated now. ‘I do remember being on my own. I was just trying to tell you that a bit of space can sometimes do wonders, even in the early stages.’

  Mikhala doesn’t flinch. ‘Grumpy?’

  ‘No,’ Freya tells her, and she edges back on the couch.

  Mikhala’s gaze remains level. ‘Everything okay? With you and Matt?’

  She remembers Matt talking to Mikhala outside the restaurant only a few weeks earlier, telling her he was bored, and how she had shied away from associating that comment with their relationship, despite knowing that he, like her, would have times of feeling they had become stale. They live together, they have a child they both love, they bicker frequently, the same arguments that toss around and around, their sex life is okay, and then sometimes, when she least expects it, the love she once felt returns, filling her, carrying her with a strength she thought had gone. They know each other, and it is a private realm, a place that cannot be described in words. She wants to change the topic.

  ‘Can’t we talk about you?’ she smiles. ‘We’re just dull and suburban. I’m on the brink of joining the P & C and he may even become a member of a dads’ soccer club.’

  Mikhala smiles. ‘Really?’

  Freya doesn’t reply immediately. ‘Actually, he’s perpetually dissatisfied but I’ve learnt to live with that – most of the time – and I’m quite content. Which he probably hates.’ And then she shakes her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she tells Mikhala. ‘I’m just out of sync with the world. I’ve been spending too much time writing.’

  It’s true. Since she has taken leave from her part-time job to try to finish her thesis, she has been alone every day and it makes her strange.

  ‘And Ella?’ Mikhala asks.

  ‘Ella is wonderful,’ Freya tells her. ‘She starts school tomorrow, which will probably turn me into a nervous wreck.’ Freya smiles. ‘I hated being a kid.’

  At the entrance to the bar, as they kiss goodbye, Mikhala holds her hand for a moment, and then as Freya is about to pull away from her friend’s hold, she speaks without thinking, her words sharper than she intended. ‘Why does everyone think Matt and I represent a perfect happiness?’ She stares straight at Mikhala, who takes a step backwards.

  ‘Well, a lot of the time it looks pretty good from where I sit.’

  Freya shakes her head and attempts to smile. ‘I think you see what you want to see. We’re just people. Of course we’re not happy all the time. No relationship is.’

  Going home on the train, Freya glances idly at the newspaper on the seat. There’s an article about global warming, another group of seemingly very conservative scientists urging action in the face of the government backing down on any immediate carbon trading scheme. She pushes it aside, overwhelmed as always by how depressing she finds the news, largely because she reads with anger and then frustration at her inability to act.

  She stares out the window at the grey bulk of the factory buildings, the landscape slowly changing to small cottages with overgrown gardens tumbling down to the train tracks. In the months prior to moving to their new house, they had spent a long time looking around this area. With her inheritance from her mother, they could finally afford to buy somewhere. They didn’t have enough to stay in the east where they had rented for years. They also hadn’t liked the changes that wealth had brought to the places they knew, but when they came out here, Freya’s certainty in the move faltered. She’d looked at the treeless streets baking in the harsh summer sun, she’d heard the aircraft low overhead and she had seen the rows of houses with security bars on the windows, small toilets out the back in concrete yards, choked with asthma weed.

  ‘It’s bloody ugly,’ she’d kept saying to Matt, and it was. ‘It’s also dirty.’ There was no sea breeze and the pollution hovered, gritty, in the air.

  Matt had seemed less distressed. ‘That’s the suburbs for you.’

  He’d lived out here before, shortly after he returned from travelling north, during the time they’d been slowly finding their way back to each other. He knew the factory outlets for olives, the best Asian markets, and the parklands that stretched for miles along a polluted stretch of river.

  ‘See, it has its own charms.’

  She’d resisted, baulking at the last minute, insisting that they try to get a small flat in the east, near where they currently lived. He’d refused, unwilling to sign up to a mortgage on a place he didn’t want. In fact, when the arguments became particularly intense, he admitted to not wanting to buy anywhere at all. He wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment.

  She didn’t know what he meant. ‘But we are together. We have a child. It’s a bit late to be talking about commitment.’

  They fought frequently, occasionally making attempts to keep their voices down so that Ella wouldn’t hear, but often shouting at each other and slamming doors in fury.

  Eventually the rage began to subside. He wanted to buy somewhere together, he told her. It was just accepting the reality of a mortgage an
d being tied to a job he didn’t like.

  She tried to reason with him. He needed a weekly wage regardless of whether they rented or not.

  He knew that. But owning a place was different. This felt like the last step in giving up, and he didn’t want to do that, but he would. For her. And for Ella.

  They started looking again, and the next weekend they found their house. There had probably been many others that had been right. There was nothing particularly special about the place they chose. It was just a matter of being ready. Strange, she told friends later. It was all so much harder than I had anticipated. More frightening for both of us than I’d expected.

  Looking out the window now, she is glad they moved. The ugliness no longer affects her in the way it once did. For the first few months, she walked the streets, exhilarated by the change. Greek delicatessens, Vietnamese restaurants, African hair braiding salons; she would sit in a seedy Brazilian cafe and watch the deals taking place, while out on the street the whole world seemed to pass under the heat of the summer sun.

  Matt, too, seemed happy. He rode his bike along the river, past swamplands and strange toxic dumps, finally emerging on the coast. On the weekends they planted a garden, painted rooms, put up shelves and made a home. Neither of them dared admit how much they enjoyed the domesticity of it all. Sometimes she feared they had become what they had both always sneered at: suburban. Occasionally they laughed about it, secretively, furtively.

  She walks up the emptiness of the street towards home, looking forward to seeing Matt, surprised by the keenness with which she still misses him each time she goes out. She will tell him about Mikhala, how she spent the evening talking about herself and there will be no need for further explanation; he will know what she’s like. Any trace of the bleakness she had felt earlier has gone. She is not sure why it had arisen in the first place. She is lucky, life is good.

  With her key in the lock, she pushes the front door open and is surprised to find a child, a small boy, asleep in the hall. Curled up, with his head on a pillow from their bed, he doesn’t move, and as she bends closer to look at him, she realises that it must be one of those kids Matt had been talking to when she left. Archie, she thinks. That was his name.

  Tiptoeing past, she heads to the lounge where the other one, the girl, is also asleep. Stretched out on the newly covered sofa, she lies on her back, arms out, small body draped in the blanket that had belonged to Freya’s mother when she was a child, a sticky mango stone still clutched in one hand.

  And from outside, Freya can hear Matt talking to someone, his voice taking that certain pitch that it always has when he is stoned, slightly deeper, slow, broken by a laugh she does not recognise, cigarette husky with an asthmatic wheeze.

  ELLA’S BED IS WARM. Through the chinks in the blinds, Freya can see that it’s another perfect day, slashes of pure blue sharp against the white wooden blades, the faint chirrup of a bird as it alights on the olive tree the only sound in the stillness. She lies perfectly still, waiting. And then there it is, the low rumble of a plane, deep and menacing, followed by the beep of a car being unlocked out on the street, the imprint of the day gradually marking her consciousness.

  Next to her, Ella sleeps. Burrowed under a quilt, only a strand of her pale hair emerges and her elbow, small and sharp, the acute angle of the crook belying the complete abandonment of her body. Freya breathes in the muskiness of her daughter, and then turns to look out through the chinks to that harsh sliver of blue.

  Unable to sleep last night, she had got up at three and come to Ella’s room. She had been restless, her mind too active, churning over her work, her irritation with Mikhala and then her anxiety about Ella starting school. Sitting on the floor, she’d sent Mikhala an apologetic text – can’t sleep, so sorry I was out of sorts – receiving a reply almost immediately – insomniacs have to forgive and forget.

  Smiling, she’d climbed into bed with Ella. There was a smear of tomato sauce across her cheek, dirt ingrained in her fingernails, and Freya had kissed her gently on her forehead. In the distance she could hear the goods trains screeching along the tracks, a sharp grind in the stillness of the night. Several streets away, a car accelerated up a hill, the roar of the engine faint, while across the road a dog yapped, and a male voice called out.

  There was a whole world out there. A nocturnal life that existed, separate and complete. On their first night in the house she had woken to the dull throb of a souped-up car in the driveway opposite, the sound of voices, doors swinging shut and then the building pulse of the engine as the car backed out of the drive and disappeared up the street. Half an hour later, the whole scene was repeated.

  ‘Jesus,’ she’d whispered to Matt. ‘Is this going to happen every night?’

  Parting the curtains with her fingers she had looked out into the darkness. She was behaving like a middle-aged busybody, she thought, peering, spying, snooping; there was a range of words to sum up what it was that she was doing and all of them were equally unpleasant.

  ‘Asiatics,’ the old woman two doors up had told her the next morning. ‘Drug dealers. Called the police on them.’

  She’d relayed the conversation to Matt and both of them had laughed.

  ‘Haven’t come across that word in a while,’ he’d said.

  ‘That’s the burbs for you,’ she’d replied, using what had grown to become a catchcry between them.

  Hearing him in the kitchen now, Freya gets up, aware of how tired she is as soon as she stands.

  ‘I’m cleaning up,’ he tells her, hands up in mock surrender.

  She sits at the table and watches him bringing in the plates from the previous night, tomato sauce dried to the edges, sausage fat congealed in the middle. He looks as bad as she feels, his eyes puffy and his skin reddened from drinking too much. As he empties an overflowing ashtray into the bin, she asks him to take it outside.

  ‘It stinks,’ and she looks at him accusingly. ‘How much did you smoke?’

  ‘Only one or two,’ he lies.

  ‘What time did you get her to bed?’ Freya nods in the direction of Ella’s room.

  ‘About nine-thirty,’ he confesses.

  ‘It’s her first day at school.’

  Matt apologises. ‘They start them later today, and she was having a good time.’ He smiles as he waves his hand at the mess. ‘It’ll all be gone in a jiffy.’

  He leans forward to kiss her on the cheek and Freya can see that, despite the hangover, he is happy.

  ‘You’re in a good mood.’ She observes him for a moment.

  Leaning against the cupboard, he pauses to consider her comment. His eyes are slightly bloodshot, but there’s a glint, and when he smiles again it’s even more pronounced.

  ‘You know, I reckon it was seeing Shane.’ He looks at her. ‘Just sitting around and talking, the kids running wild, the barbecue, the fact that it was such a strange surprise.’ He turns back to the plates. ‘It made me feel alive again.’

  Freya looks out the back door. The cardboard from the slab of beer lies on the concrete. The cans are still on the table.

  ‘You drank a lot.’

  Matt glances outside and shakes his head. ‘Mainly Shane,’ he tells her.

  When Freya had come home, they were sitting close to the Weber barbecue, planks of old wood burning, the smell of incinerated paint acrid in the night air. Passing a joint back and forth, they’d been unaware of her presence, and she’d leant against the doorframe watching them; Matt in particular, legs stretched out, hands gesturing as he spoke softly.

  ‘You’re back,’ and he had looked up to see her, holding his arm out to draw her close. It was the dope. He always loved her when he was stoned.

  ‘G’day.’ Shane had glanced up, his face barely visible in the darkness, the long dreadlocks obscuring his eyes. He shifted in his chair, hunching further forward as he drew back on the joint and then offered it to her.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Reckon your missus is going t
o have the shits with me,’ and he turned to Matt, grinning ruefully. ‘First time I come here and it’s all drinkin’ and smokin’.’

  Freya shook her head and smiled awkwardly. Matt pulled out a seat for her and she took it although all she really wanted was to go to bed. It was Sunday and it was late. She needed a good day of work tomorrow.

  ‘So you’re from Queensland?’ she asked, her voice bright and clear in comparison to the hushed tones they’d been using only moments earlier.

  Shane nodded. ‘That’s where I met him,’ and he looked across at Matt. ‘Couldn’t believe it. Comin’ down the street after all them years and there he is. What do you reckon?’ He shook his head at the wonder of it.

  ‘And you’re living here now?’ She sounded like a mother, she thought, trying to make conversation with a child’s boyfriend.

  ‘Got a job and came down with the kids.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the house, where they both lay, sleeping. ‘Runnin’ the Aboriginal Housing Service. No work at home, not with the drought. Had no choice.’

  ‘They’re going to the same school as Ella,’ Matt told her.

  ‘Startin’ tomorrow.’ Shane nodded and then stood, unsteady on his feet as he paced up and down the small courtyard. ‘Ay,’ and he leant in awkwardly to Matt, ‘all right if I have a piss?’

  Matt waved his hand in the direction of the toilet. ‘Or in the garden if you want,’ and he pointed to the lemon tree.

  Freya watched as Shane lurched into the darkness, eventually clutching onto the trunk of the tree as a steady stream of urine hissed into the dirt.

  He rolled a cigarette as soon as he sat back down.

  ‘May I?’ Freya reached for the pouch, and he pushed it towards her, nodding as he ran his tongue along the edge of the paper.

  ‘So what do the kids think of the move?’ she asked.

  ‘Darlene’s into it,’ he told her, wheezing as he drew back on the cigarette. ‘You know girls. Born women they are. Loves the shops and all that shit. Archie – well he’s not so sure. Misses his mates, I reckon.’