It took DB a couple of minutes to find the entrance to the kinder and he ended up following a harried-looking woman in a suit through an unassuming side gate. It had been months since he’d been here, he realised. Not since the day they had brought Rudy in for enrolment. The woman had entered through a second gate which swung shut behind her. DB realised it needed a code. He had been given it, he vaguely remembered, but hadn’t bothered to memorise it. He called to the woman ahead of him.
‘Sorry, but I seem to have forgotten the code. Are you able to remind me?’
The woman gave him an understanding look but shook her head.
‘You know we’re not allowed to tell other people. I’ll let one of the staff know you’re there.’
‘Thank you,’ he called, but she had already turned away.
DB waited, embarrassed. As he stood there, a man in jeans and an oil-stained polo shirt hurried past him, jamming the code into the little box. He held the gate open, beckoning to DB, and DB followed him through quickly, fearing that alarms might start going off.
‘Can I help you?’
Another woman was standing before DB, arms planted squarely on hips. DB wondered if he had met her all those months ago. She raised her eyebrows at him, equally warm and suspicious.
‘Ben Arnolds,’ he said. ‘Rudy’s dad.’
‘Rudy’s dad?’
The woman looked surprised, as if until this moment she had assumed Rudy had sprung fully formed from Sylvie’s skull like a Greek god.
‘This is a first, then.’
DB suppressed the urge to respond.
‘I’m here for my child,’ he muttered.
They drove eastwards accompanied by the chirpy trill of Rudy’s CD. Rudy sang along, his tinny soprano cutting over the music. DB watched him in the rear-view mirror every so often, watched his little eyes close as he swooped to high notes that weren’t actually there. Eventually they pulled into his parents’ driveway, coming to a stop behind his mother’s Prius. Rudy looked at his father questioningly.
‘We’re going to stay with Nana and Grandfather tonight,’ DB explained. ‘For fun.’
Rudy nodded as if this made perfect sense.
‘You’re staying with Nana and Grandfather, and Mummy is staying with Nonna and Nonno. And I’m staying with everyone.’
‘Yes,’ replied DB, and because he didn’t want his son to think he was about to cry, he gave him a toothy Cheshire grin instead.
His parents’ house sat comfortably in the middle of a spacious block, willows and other swooping deciduous things embracing the red-brick cottage. ‘Cottage’ was his mother’s term for the house, which had a faux turret, formal and informal sitting rooms and enough studies for every occupant. They had renovated it ‘old’, meticulously keeping with the heritage value of the area and engaging an architect friend famed for her knack at upholding tradition while ensuring the latest of technological creature comforts. DB let them into the house, jamming his leg across the doorway to stop the inevitable.
‘Stay, Woofer,’ DB growled, but the little white demon ignored him, valiantly trying to vault his leg despite its lack of height.
‘Bad Woofer,’ Rudy chided the dog, and DB felt a striking affinity to his son.
His mother was bustling about the kitchen, throwing cutlery on the table and bread into the oven.
‘Five minutes,’ she informed them, giving Rudy a quick cheek-squeeze and reaching to refill her wineglass. ‘Your father’s on his way back from the drycleaners. We took some of your shirts too because god knows what state they’re in. Anyone can see they’ve gone through the machine.’
DB ignored his mother, taking Rudy through to the bedroom the three of them would be sharing to dump his little bag.
‘Who sleeps here?’ Rudy asked, pointing to the crumpled, hair-lined bedsheets.
‘You, me and Woofer unfortunately,’ DB replied, watching his son compute this.
‘Woofer will die one day,’ Rudy replied. ‘Just like Malcolm.’
DB ruffled his hair affectionately.
‘Yes, he will.’
‘I’m going to tell Nana,’ Rudy added.
Often his nana gave him prizes like pencils when he told her something clever.
‘By all means,’ DB encouraged him, smiling as Rudy marched confidently out of the bedroom.
His mother had made some kind of exotic stew for dinner. This was what she had called it. An exotic stew from the Middle East that she had found on the internet. It had figs in it and tasted exactly like one would imagine a stew with figs cooked by someone with no experience in this would taste. Rudy poked at it with his fork, fascinated by the viscosity.
‘What’s this animal?’ he asked, stabbing at a piece of fig.
‘Fig,’ his nana replied, leaving Rudy to imagine what a fig would look like roaming the untamed savannah.
Unlike Sylvie’s family, DB’s family tended to eat in relative silence, consuming at least three-quarters of their meal before it was deemed appropriate to talk. His father cleared first his plate then his throat, settling his fork and spoon down in the middle of the empty dish.
‘How was court yesterday?’
Despite the long history of psychological disaster it had caused, DB was in that moment thankful for his parents’ inability to discuss matters either emotional or personal. Neither had mentioned Sylvie nor questioned his desire to not return to his own house.
‘Settled on the steps,’ he replied. ‘Consent without admission, limited order. Our client dropped the cross-application but she gets to see the kids. Not exactly a win.’
‘Strategically a good outcome, though,’ his father replied. ‘And not an absolute embarrassment for the firm. Well done.’
Strategically, yes, thought DB, but this didn’t make him feel any better. He could see Madeline’s face now, the way her whole body had shrunk at her own decision. His father topped up their wineglasses.
‘Your mother and I have decided that fifty dollars a week is sufficient for board,’ he continued.
‘I’ll transfer the money tonight,’ DB nodded.
‘No rush.’ His father smiled generously. ‘Tomorrow is fine.’
DB took a large mouthful of wine. This was the longest he had been back in his parents’ home since he’d first moved out during university.
‘Would you like Nana to read to you before bed?’ his mother asked Rudy, indicating a pile of books she had purchased from the Oxfam shop.
‘No, thank you,’ Rudy replied, and they went back to eating in silence.
‘Your mother also bought him some underwear,’ DB’s father added after a time, directing his conversation to DB. ‘We all have to grow up at some point.’
‘I’ll take that on notice,’ DB replied, avoiding his father’s gaze.
Later, once he’d tucked Rudy into bed and checked to make sure Woofer wasn’t smothering him as he slept, DB grabbed a towel and jogged down to the aquatic centre around the corner from his parents’ house. His parents lived in the affluent part of the north-east and apparently this entitled the area’s residents to exercise until late at night if they so desired. An entitlement they apparently didn’t action, because the pool itself was empty but for a bored-looking staff member pushing a broom around the locker area.
DB slid into a lane and spent some time adjusting his goggles. He hadn’t swum since the fight and his body was feeling it. His shoulders were tight, his neck strained, and there always seemed to be a constant, tender pang of pain behind his eye sockets. This may also have been a result of the lack of sleep, but who kept count of these things anyway? DB pushed himself into the first lap and tried to clear his mind. Only his mind wasn’t prepared to be cleared. As he touched the far end with his hand, he gave up suppressing things and let his mind start swirling.
It had been a terrible fight, the worst
they’d ever had. Things had never picked up again after the birth control incident and instead they’d niggled and picked and poked and stretched each other until it had exploded into a nuclear argument wrought from something tiny he couldn’t even recall now. Some poorly constructed sentence that had electrified the field of shallow buried landmines, and they’d hopped from one explosion to the next in a fraught choreographed disaster. They were like the scavenger birds in Rudy’s documentaries, picking away at each other until nothing remained but bleached calcium phosphate. And then things had gone ballistic and they’d both said all the things they’d stored away – all the things they’d never said for the sake of maintaining harmony – and now neither of them could unsay them, let alone look at one another. The next day Sylvie had texted him at work to say she was going to stay with her parents for a little bit and he’d managed two hours in the empty house before the silence had driven him crazy, and neither of them had been back since. And neither had really spoken to the other, apart from the minimum amount required to organise Rudy. Though, in fairness, she had texted him that morning, brief and succinct: Not pregnant, arsehole. So there was that.
The pool suddenly fell into darkness. As DB reached the end, he pulled himself upright and looked about blindly. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows he could see the darkness stretch out across the suburb and realised it must be a blackout. He paused, panting, then pushed himself off the wall and into a new lap. His heart was pounding in his chest but he continued pulling himself through the dark. Without light to contextualise the world around him, it felt like he was freefalling – gliding – drifting through a heavy darkness that pulled at him and buoyed him, and his head spun with the sensation of statelessness.
It was all meant to get better once the case had finished and everything was back to normal, but now that it was over, Madeline hung about him like a ghost. It had started when he’d first read through the affidavit, bringing to life that damaged, rotten marriage. He was nothing like Eric, he knew this, but it forced him to dredge through his memory for evidence of recent moments when he and Sylvie had been properly happy. When he hadn’t had half his mind on work – or else been physically at work – because somewhere it had become less about living and more about making a living. After Sylvie left he’d walked into that empty house and he’d been crippled with the embarrassingly clichéd realisation that he’d bought a big house and filled it with nice things and for the life of him couldn’t work out why this hadn’t worked. And he realised that if someone had asked his own wife to do the same – to put upon paper her own version of their marriage – he was not at all certain of what it would say. He could not, despite his efforts, shape the words she would use, the adjectives she’d rely on, the metaphors she’d fish from the bottom of her reserves to conjure their marriage in these last few years. When he tried to, all her words were his, said in his tenor and formed from his lips. And his child’s teacher had no idea who he was, and his parents had given his bedroom to the dog even though there were other spare rooms, and they’d settled on the bloody steps because this was the only way that poor woman would be able to see her children, and he’d gone and lost all the things he was lucky enough to have in his life because he figured they’d hold until he was ready to start living properly, which would never bloody happen because he was nearly forty and if his life hadn’t already started there was something worrying and esoteric about that. And he was angry with Sylvie for not being clearer about what she wanted, and he was angry with himself for not listening properly, and he was angry with his parents because there were other bloody spare rooms the dog could have taken, and he was angry with Madeline for accepting the impossible deal, but mostly he was angry with himself because he had a hand in so much of it, with the exception of the dog. And he knew that there was nothing he was going to do about any of it because it was all too hard and he didn’t admit defeat, and he wasn’t entirely sure of what he was supposed to do anyway, so he swam and he swam through the darkness and the uncertainty, until eventually they had to poke him with a pool noodle to tell him it was time to go home.
DB made his way carefully into the darkened house, navigating from memory the passages and steps until he doubted himself and opened the torch app on his mobile. Shielding the light, he gently opened the bedroom door, and his heart dropped suddenly to his stomach. The sheets were tucked in as he had left them, Woofer curled up in one corner, and Rudy was nowhere to be seen. DB rushed into the room, pulling up the sheets as if he might find his son underneath their taut surface. He crouched down, the light of his mobile illuminating the emptiness beneath the bed, then he straightened, terrified. Perhaps Rudy had awoken to find DB gone and wandered off in search of him? Or he might be with his grandparents, though DB knew this was unlikely. DB crashed out of the room then stood in the hallway trying to decide which way to go. He turned towards the front door and had set off at a great loping speed when there was a flush from the darkness behind him. He turned, tripping himself up, then looked down the hallway to see Rudy wander casually out of the bathroom, his pyjamas pants askew and his eyes lit up like a dozy rabbit in the light of DB’s mobile. DB pulled himself upright then half-crawled towards his son, who allowed himself to be swallowed up by DB’s hug.
‘I did it on my own,’ Rudy informed DB, his voice muffled in fabric. ‘The toilet. I was very brave.’
They lay in the bed side by side and Rudy pressed his body into the cave of his father’s.
‘I wish Mummy was here so I could tell her,’ Rudy sighed, burrowing against DB’s chest. ‘She would care the most.’
As Rudy’s breathing became measured with sleep, DB realised his son was right. Sylvie would care the most because that was what she did for them. She cared for them both in a way that no one else did – individually and as a family – and this capacity for genuine love had been one of the reasons he had fallen for her in the first place. Had been the reason he had worked and saved and accumulated around them this fortress of possessions because he knew no other way to match this unwavering love she had for them. As he stared into the darkness, caught between the shudder of Rudy’s sleep and the whimper of Woofer’s slumber, DB worried that this realisation had come far too late to matter.
28
Nell
Reference: 3284/16BA
Williams & Williams
Queen Street, Melbourne 3000
16 September 2016
Dear Ms Madeline Murray,
Re: Closing your case
Thank you for allowing Williams & Williams to represent you in this matter. Your case and our representation of you are now concluded. As explained at our last meeting on 15 September 2016, we are closing your file and will take no further action on your behalf. We are returning all original documents and papers you gave us in connection with this case. We will also retain a copy of your file for a period of seven (7) years, after which the file may be destroyed at our discretion, provided there is no action on it, in accordance with rule 14 of the Legal Profession Uniform Law Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules 2015 under the Legal Profession Uniform Law 2015. You are advised to keep all your information concerning this matter in a safe place in case you need it in the future.
If we may be of assistance in the future to you or to your friends or family members who may need legal help, we hope you will contact us.
Yours faithfully,
Helena Swansea,
on behalf of Benjamin Arnolds, Williams & Williams
Nell reviewed the letter, the same letter sent to each of their clients when things were complete. Of course, it was missing something, something along the lines of an apology or a supplication, but these were all empty platitudes, as DB had told her so many times. A selection of words bundled together that offered no real balm or absolution. Scanning it a final time, Nell printed the letter then sealed it in an envelope and placed it in the mail tray to be sent the following week. She co
llected her things then left the quiet office.
The tram was near empty as it rattled its way out of the city, too late for the post-work rush and too early for any homeward-bound Friday night revellers. Now and then a passenger or two boarded, but never more than alighted, making it feel as if Nell had survived some kind of apocalyptic event and existed now alone in this empty, barren world. She and the elderly woman in a salwar kameez who had fallen asleep and the young man with facial piercings who was cradling a basket full of dirty laundry. The tram pulled to a stop yet again, its doors opening to expel the young man and his sodden laundry. A woman stepped inside and it took Nell a moment to recognise her as Madeline. Gone was the makeup and jewellery of yesterday. Her hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail and she was dressed casually in jeans and an old T-shirt. She looked around, noticing Nell, and offered a small wave. As she approached, Nell shifted her handbag, knocking it to the floor in the process. Its contents spilled everywhere, mints and hair ties and empty chocolate wrappers fluttering about. The bookmarks too, a feminist rain shower all over the sticky public transport floor. Nell had never given them out, completely forgetting they were in there. Stooping to help Nell shove things back into her bag, Madeline seized one. They settled back into the seats and Madeline reviewed the bookmark.
‘“Where are all the women?”’ she read aloud.
‘My mother,’ Nell offered by way of explanation.
‘She made all these bookmarks?’
Nell nodded.
Madeline squinted at the bookmark in her hand. ‘This one has a typo.’
‘Where?’ Nell pictured her mother’s embarrassment when she found out she had sent forth into the world error-ridden statements. ‘Oh, no. She’s spelt it like that on purpose. Gets rid of the word “men”, see?’
The Book of Ordinary People Page 31
