A Hundred Small Lessons

by Ashley Hay

  ‘And peaceful,’ said Elsie, shivering. ‘You must have been scared, Mrs Lewis. Weren’t you scared?’

  ‘Ida, please,’ said Ida, refilling her cup. ‘I was never scared, no. I was busy, always busy. But I made my first paintings of some of the men—soldiers, and so forth. Some of them I had to finish from memory when they were dead.’

  That awful war, thought Elsie. She couldn’t—she wouldn’t imagine it; had worked so hard to keep it far away from herself, from her children, from her world. And now it was sitting in front of her with this woman, in a quiet sunny room that was so safe. How had she borne being there, seeing that? Elsie thought. It didn’t feel like a thing she could ask.

  ‘I’d love to see your paintings,’ she said instead. And she curled her fingers tighter around her teacup, as if to draw in more warmth through her skin.

  ‘Oh, they were just my first attempts—I painted over lots of them.’ Ida laughed. ‘Which is good, I think. They’re not always the kind of things you want to have around the house. Now, shall we get back to it? Do you need the lavatory?’

  Sitting on the toilet with the bright morning light coming up through the cracks in the floorboards and in through the high, slanted louvres, Elsie swung her legs like a little girl and laughed.

  7

  The family

  Ben took a taxi to the airport, thinking Down the rabbit hole as the car drove into the tunnel below the river and the rain was immediately cut off. He wondered how old Tom should be before they read about Alice and her adventures.

  There was a catalogue growing in his head of which books he would read to his son, and this surprised him. He’d never really thought of having children, even as he watched his peers race on ahead through prenatal classes and daycare and swimming lessons and school runs and affairs. The idea of fatherhood seemed always at some remove, just as family life itself had always been beyond him somehow. He lived in the pinpoint focus of himself and his mum, with a card from his grandma at Christmas—none of the numbers and siblings and noise that he thought a proper family required. The noise and spread of family life: they were nothing to do with his world.

  Now here he was, after so many rational and hypothetical discussions with his wife about the two of them and whether there should be any more. Here he was in the thick of it, suddenly remembering things he’d loved about being young—books, games, wonder—and passing them on. These past weeks they’d been making their way through A.A. Milne’s poems, which his mum used to read him every night before he slept. He was surprised to find some of the verses about Winnie-the-Pooh so very familiar. He was remembering things about his mother he hadn’t thought about for years. He was wondering about things to do with his father—who’d shot through almost as soon as Ben was born—for the first time as well.

  Parenthood mushroomed the size of emotions, Ben thought as the cab came back into daylight—and the rain—and took the road that traced the river’s curve. It blew out the capacity for observation as well: he noticed every jacaranda tree they passed, recalling Tom’s exuberance—‘More purple! More! More purple!’—and wondered if there’d ever been so many bloom before.

  ‘You said international?’ the driver asked, stilling the windscreen wipers as the rain eased off at last.

  ‘International,’ said Ben. Just for work; just a story; just a long flight across the Pacific to sit in a conference bunker on the other side. He thought these were the perks of his job—the travel, meeting people, wining, dining, and then the tiny pocket of time that had to balance the creation of a story against its deadline. He flexed his shoulders and yawned; he could use the break. Lucy was evangelical when it came to Tom’s routine—it made Ben want to mess it up sometimes. Yet she seemed to believe the routine was magic. ‘You in a hurry, mate? We’re getting every red light here.’ ‘Tons of time,’ said Ben as the car slowed again. It was his habit to arrive at international airports hours early—he loved to sit near the arrivals gate with a coffee and watch the business of people flying in, flying home, flying on. A multitude of stories.

  ‘And another one,’ said the driver, slowing for another amber light. He flicked on the radio and the car filled with one of the songs Lucy had been playing over and over at home.

  ‘Ha!’ said Ben, before he could stop himself. There should be more dancing. It had felt good, twirling on, twirling around the kitchen. A long time since they’d moved together like that.

  His fingers tapped the rhythm of the song as he watched people on the footpath—a man jogging on the spot as the lights pulled him to a stop; a woman with an umbrella that had worked itself inside out; another woman with a baby in a pram and a toddler holding onto its strap. They were crowded around the stalk of the traffic lights, the little boy hitting its pedestrian button again and again and again. Ben imagined the rising pitch of the mother’s voice—irritation accelerating from caution to chastisement and on to rage. There was something primal about it, something volcanic. He’d watched Lucy do this, with Tom, over what Ben saw as the tiniest of infringements. It was always a short, sharp blast, like the slam of a yacht’s boom as its sail changed tack. Yet in all the years they’d been together he’d never known Lucy to have a temper. He slunk away from it now, squirming at its immediacy and its volume, never quite sure if he should ignore it, or endorse it, or call her on it. And then she righted herself, and went on.

  She talked of fear. She talked of catastrophe—she made it sound almost mythological, the ways a mother could divine it. But she never talked about these flares of rage.

  He had no memory of his mother being frustrated or angry. Only once that he could remember had she shouted at him, when he’d made a mess of the backyard with the wild idea of launching a rocket with a cache of homemade explosives. Her stern words then had felt pretty justified. He rested his head against the window: the more he saw the way that Lucy sparked off Tom, the more he admired his mother’s equanimity.

  •

  He was twenty-one years and a day old when his mother died: a massive heart attack. He was a year shy of the age she’d been herself when, a new bride and already pregnant, she’d sailed from England to Australia with her husband, Alec. So charming, so gregarious, Alec was the life of any party—although all the flirting he’d done with her before the wedding, before the ship sailed, seemed now perpetually directed at anyone else. She gave their son his name—Alexander—and then Benedict. Never used his first name once that Ben recalled.

  ‘You were three months old when he came home and told me he’d fallen for the woman who brought the tea round at his office,’ his mother explained. ‘I told him to go. Well, I’d never been able to make his tea the way he liked it.’ The only version of the story that she told.

  Only once had he heard her speak of being lonely. She was talking to a woman at the butcher’s counter while Ben wound around her legs, four or five years old, waiting for the butcher to notice him and hand over the prized treat of a free red frankfurter wrapped in smooth white paper.

  ‘Oh, we get by, we cope—and he’s lovely, Ben, he’s a lovely little thing. After his father left I let myself have one good afternoon of crying. Took a train over to the south side and sat in a park, somewhere I’d never been before and would never go again. Ben was only a few months’ old, and sound asleep in the pram.

  ‘And then this bird came swooping down at me—it swept down and tried to peck my head; I could hear its feathers flapping and its horrid beak clacking. And I howled and howled, and thought, no one likes me in this country—not even a bloody bird, pardon my . . .’

  Her hands, belatedly pressed over Ben’s ears, stayed there, so that he didn’t hear the butcher’s usual question—‘Tempt you with a frankfurt, Benny my boy?’—and didn’t notice the offering, so deliciously smooth-skinned and bright, until he saw it being taken up again, and swept back onto the other side of the counter.

  ‘Mum! My frankfurter—the frankfurt.’

  ‘Thought you didn’t want it,’ the b
utcher had said, handing it to him with a wide smile. ‘Thought you might’ve grown out of such a treat.’

  ‘You could go back, Mum,’ he’d said over and over, as he grew older. ‘You could go home.’ All through the rush of his cadetship, the first rounds he got to cover, the excitement of seeing his own name in print, he’d squirrelled away money ahead of the day when he could buy his mother the fastest trip back to England.

  And then, twenty-one years and a day through his life, he’d had a call at work in Sydney from his mother’s neighbour. The two women had been due to take the bus together into town, and when his mother hadn’t shown up, the neighbour let herself into the house rather than call him right away. ‘Oh, Ben, I hope you don’t mind,’ she said.

  ‘I was about a month away from having the money for her airfare,’ he’d said to Lucy the first time he told her the story. ‘Not that she knew. It was going to be a surprise.’

  And Lucy had taken his hand and kissed it. ‘Oh, Ben. On your own.’

  It was a nineteenth-century sort of word, orphan, but there it was. He shrugged. ‘I’d already moved to Sydney, got this place in Darlinghurst—I went home to Brisbane, sorted everything out, came back and got on with my job. I did think about finding my dad, telling him what had happened. But I didn’t know what I’d say after that.’ He shrugged again.

  The flat in Darlinghurst: more than a decade he’d lived there, with girlfriends coming and going, before this impossibly bright thing with the impossibly pretty name—Lucy Kiss—moved in. Nearly a decade younger than he, and as pretty as her name as well. She wanted to hear all his stories. It took him years to believe in his luck.

  Lucy Kiss was the least-orphaned person in the world, with her big, loud family of long-divorced parents and three sisters, already loaded up with husbands and three kids apiece, and everyone with an opinion. Now, he was sure, Lucy liked life beyond their cacophony as much as he did.

  It hadn’t been bad, moving north again; he even took a certain pride in the idea of Tom coming to know the air, the light in this place as if it was a kind of heritage. And no matter how many people had told him it would be a disaster, what with Tom just a year old, Lucy herself had never baulked, laughing at the terrible predictions people made. ‘Come on, it’ll be an adventure.’

  She always made a game of learning their new places, set herself to revealing special things that made them all feel preordained. His favourite obscure beer in the bottle shop closest to home. A street with a strangely apt name.

  This fixation she had with Elsie Gormley, the previous owner of their house; even that made him smile. Trust Lucy to find an uncanny new friend. Everywhere they’d lived, she’d hunted for connections, for something extraordinary. ‘There’s a reason we chose this place or it chose us,’ she’d say. Well, whatever helped her settle in. She went anywhere his job happened to take them and made the place her own, while he hid behind the safety of the same job, just at another desk.

  She was braver than him, he thought, and especially with Tom. She had been from the get-go: doing what she was told through all the hours of labour and standing up against the disappointed comments of her mother, her sisters, when it came to a caesarean in the end.

  But this new Lucy, this sometimes enraged Lucy: it was as if some deeper, more subterranean version of her had emerged. Perhaps it happened to every woman who had a baby—he didn’t know, and he wasn’t sure who he could ask.

  There should be dancing, he thought again. Her fury, her fears: these were not things he knew from before. He knew music. He knew brightness. He missed that.

  When Ben was small, his mother sang him songs every night before he slept—‘Summertime’, ‘Unforgettable’, bits and pieces of the Beatles as the sixties folded into the seventies. He went to sleep for an entire year with ‘Here Comes the Sun’ in his head. It was a talisman, his mother’s voice. It was security. He saw Lucy sitting with Tom, singing softly, lulling him to sleep, and he knew the power, the protection of what she was doing. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps there was magic in all these routines. The messy things: perhaps they fell away.

  ‘I think I was ten when I asked my mother to stop singing me to sleep,’ he’d told her not so long ago. It now seemed a mean thing to have done.

  Lucy was leaning back against him in the armchair made by his body against the wall—the last day before their furniture arrived.

  ‘Sing something for me now,’ he said, his chin resting on the top of her head.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m saving them all for Tom.’

  ‘Ha!’ said Ben. ‘He’ll never tip like I do.’ Making light of it, while some part of him wanted to contest his son’s new primacy.

  They had talked vaguely of children for a decade, all the way out of Lucy’s twenties and on, closer and closer to the end of her thirties. Her youth was his excuse to avoid making a decision. It was interesting, Ben thought sometimes, that she never called him on his fears. She listened patiently to his red herrings about their nice life, his own complete lack of any knowledge of fathering, their nice life, his job, his age, her age (increasingly), the nice life the two of them had. Together. It was only when she said one day, her voice an odd combination of sheepishness and elation, that she was pregnant—‘I guess even the best safeguards fail’—that he wondered if she’d been as terrified as he was and had hidden behind his anxieties too.

  Was it really a failure, he’d asked her once, later, when it was too late to do anything about it, ‘or did you decide to play the odds?’

  ‘I thought we should give it one shot,’ she said. ‘That was all. Here we are.’

  There they were.

  They were lying in the sun when she said this, the sections of the weekend paper spread between them, Lucy’s belly breaching like a whale.

  ‘You were probably right not to say,’ Ben said. ‘I’d have tried to talk you out of it again.’

  ‘I know.’

  He was holding her hand, not conscious of the tightness of his grip.

  ‘Ben—’ She had to use her free hand to loosen his fingers. ‘You’ll be great. And we’ll be fine.’

  ‘What?’ He shook out his hand. ‘Give us the nine-letter word?’

  She passed across the puzzle page, shaking her own fingers light and free.

  He glanced at the sheet and shut his eyes. It was his party trick, the speed with which he could rearrange nine muddled letters into a word. He’d done ‘abhorrent’ in an instant, he liked to boast.

  ‘Entrapment!’ he said almost at once. ‘Pretty close to the record now.’ He was trying to make a joke of it, and he knew that she could tell.

  Lucy pulled the page towards her as she lay on her side, her belly ballooning and round.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s ten. You’d need another t.’ She squinted at the paper, her lips sounding out the letters. She pushed the sheet away and grinned.

  ‘Had to happen, Ben Carter, but it’s the first time you’ve been beaten. It’s “permanent”—look. It must be.’ She laughed at him, rubbing his arm.

  •

  As the song began to fade on the radio, Ben heard the taxi’s engine rev and felt it pull forward for the green light. Just as the woman with the pram and the toddler stepped onto the road in its path.

  The world slowed. The driver swore. The jogging man reached out to grab the pram while the woman with the umbrella let it fly off with the wind as she grabbed at the mother, striding forward.

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ the driver shouted and swerved. And then the cab was away and there’d been no impact, no collision. ‘What the fuck was she thinking?’ As the car surged on and away, through the next amber light.

  ‘She wasn’t,’ said Ben. ‘She was shitty with the kid about the button.’ He’d felt his heart stop, felt the floor of his very being drop away. He strained his neck, trying to look back—were they still there, the jogger, the other woman? Were they saying something smooth, something calm, something that had no expletives?


  He couldn’t see, and he rubbed at his neck where he’d pulled it, somehow annoyed by its pain.

  ‘Fuck me—I don’t need that.’ The driver took the turn onto the freeway and the car sped up again.

  ‘I reckon she didn’t either.’ If it had been Lucy. If it had been Tom.

  If it had been me.

  He had felt it for the first time, the terror that Lucy talked about—felt it swell and stretch the middle of himself to pure tautness, and then collapse back into nothingness.

  He’d need a double-shot of coffee to sort himself out before he flew.

  8

  The photographs

  Lucy was standing on a stepladder, rearranging the emptied suitcases on the highest shelves of the linen cupboard, when she heard a noise above her head—a possum? a rat?—and almost lost her balance, bracing herself against the trapdoor that led into the roof above.

  The cover shifted, and as she righted herself, she knocked it aside altogether. She poked her head into the roof space for the first time and saw, in the shadows, a single grey box, its lid held down with tape. The air up here was even warmer and thicker than the air outside, as if the house held an extra dose of tropical summer in reserve.