A Hundred Small Lessons

by Ashley Hay

  Overhead, Venus was bright, and Orion pulsed out its cartoon-saucepan shape. As she walked the length of the yard, she felt the slip of the rain-sodden grass under her boots. She pulled the big container to the kerb. From down here, the house looked like a facade in a movie set—a little weatherboard thing propped up at the back of a stage, picture-book blue, with a pretty white trim.

  ‘Sky,’ Tom had said earlier that day, pointing to the colour of its walls. And he was right. It was the perfect shade to designate sky. She still couldn’t quite believe it was theirs—or the bank’s—but she loved it, loved the garden, loved the promise of the trees they were planting, and the cosiness of its small nest of rooms.

  Heading back across the grass, she saw the tracks her feet had made, and as she kicked off her gumboots and went up the stairs two at a time, she thought of those little footprints in the grass the week they’d moved into this house. Elsie, popping back to check on them: it felt like a benediction.

  The destruction of the photos still made her blush. She hadn’t been able to tell anyone and she swallowed now to think of it, a deep and awful shame. The collage shot she’d taken on her phone—maybe she should send that on to Elsie, to make good. Maybe there were tiny bits of detail that could be blown up and reconstituted. She’d have a look. She’d see what she could do.

  It took her just a few seconds to realise her phone was not where she’d left it in the kitchen.

  I must have plugged it in to charge, she thought, heading into the bedroom, where she knew she’d find its power cord hanging limp and disconnected.

  I must have left it in my bag—remembering, as she shook the satchel and felt its emptiness, that she had checked her phone twice, maybe three times, while Tom ate his dinner, just in case Ben was awake at some strange time of his night, checking in. She knew then that she had put it out of her own reach, behind her, just there, on the bench.

  And then she remembered the swinging back door, and her body lurched as though she’d missed a step.

  Tom—and she was through the house and into his room. Where he lay asleep, of course, curled up with his hand beneath his cheek.

  The kind of sweet pose Lucy might have tried to capture with her smart new phone. Her father had insisted that she buy it. ‘Text me everything—everything—my new grandson does,’ he’d said when the move north came about. ‘I don’t want to miss a moment of it by not living close by.’

  She reached for the house phone and called the police.

  ‘Is the intruder still in the house?’ the policewoman asked.

  ‘Of course not, no.’ Her own certainty sounded reassuring, but she darted into the different rooms, suddenly not so sure. ‘I’m here with my little boy—my husband’s away. We were in the lounge room, reading books. We were in the bathroom; he had a bath. Someone must have opened the door and just walked in.’ Her stomach flipped.

  ‘You didn’t have the door locked?’

  She heard it as an accusation, and she bit. ‘Do you always lock yourself into your house?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said the policewoman. ‘You can never be too careful.’ And Lucy saw herself from above, walking away from the gaping house to wheel out her rubbish, leaving Tom fast asleep and unprotected inside.

  I have taken great risks, she thought. I have placed my child in great peril.

  ‘Well, I’ll make sure I’m more careful now.’

  ‘Is there anyone you know who might have done this; anyone else who has access to the house?’

  ‘My husband’s away,’ Lucy said again, faltering a little. ‘I’m here with our little boy. There’s no one—there’s no one who’d come . . .’

  ‘And I see your property backs onto a park,’ said the woman. ‘You know it’s school holidays at the moment. This is probably a kid, probably a dare. There’s always a spike in thefts around the holidays. We’ll send someone in the morning—but don’t get your hopes up. Take down this number; you’ll need it if you have insurance you want to claim.’

  ‘I see,’ said Lucy, uncapping a pen and trying to sound competent and unfazed.

  She took down the number, repeating it calmly—although as she spoke, she was picturing footprints in wet grass, and Elsie, and all the pleasant things she’d imagined about the house’s former owner twisted towards something more sinister. And hadn’t she told Ben that Elsie would have a key?

  ‘Was there anything else, ma’am?’ The policewoman’s voice was crisp.

  ‘It’s just—when we bought this house, the old lady . . .’ But Lucy swallowed. It would sound ludicrous. ‘I’m sorry; no. Can I just check that number again?’

  When she’d hung up, she flicked the back door’s handle twice, three times, to make sure that it was locked. And then, coming back, she noticed the linen cupboard door was ajar, and the most paranoid part of her wondered if the intruder was still in the house, and was hiding there, folded in with the towels and sheets and quilt covers, or up higher still, with the bags, below the trapdoor—or higher, in the roof.

  Of course not.

  Still, she wedged the door shut with the laundry basket, and jammed a wooden spoon behind the door handles.

  I’m going mad, she thought. I should ring the insurance. I should ring Ben.

  But instead she sat at the kitchen table with one of Ben’s favourite CDs playing too loudly, as if that might make him manifest back on her side of the world. Staring through the locked screen door into the flat nothingness of night-time, her head ran through a loop of images—sitting with Tom on the sofa; in the bathroom while Tom had his bath; sitting with Tom in his bedroom, singing softly. And somewhere in this, somewhere while these quiet, gentle things were happening, some person—some kid; she reeled back—was coming up her stairs and chancing a dash across her kitchen.

  She stared at the darkness. Nothing stared back, although it occurred to her, for the first time, that anyone might have been standing on the outer edge of the balcony, leaning against the sky-blue rail, staring straight back at her in her safe, wide puddle of light.

  And she would never have seen them.

  She poured herself a glass of wine and drank it too fast. Here was another loop of images: all the things that might have happened. If I’d been standing in the kitchen when they came in. If I’d walked out of the living room to get Tom’s milk. If I’d come from the bathroom to pick up my phone. If I’d been carrying Tom through to his cot. If I’d seen them—if I’d seen them. She closed her eyes: she could remember Ben’s number—maybe her dad’s. Everyone else’s she’d trusted to her phone.

  ‘They’d have had some bullshit story about someone they were looking for,’ said Ben, when she’d finished another glass of wine and dialled his number. ‘It’s a shit, Lu, but it’s done now. It’s not going to happen again.’

  ‘But remember those footprints? All my jokes about Elsie coming back? I thought that was such a nice thing. What if it is her—or someone else casing the joint?’ She was almost whispering, crouched down in the doorway to Tom’s room where she could hear his every murmur.

  ‘What if all the Lucy Kisses had their phones nicked on the one night? A serial vardøger theft.’ Ben was looking for a joke to take her mind off it, she knew that. But she hated him for trying it just then.

  ‘This isn’t helping.’ Her words sounded like a hiss.

  ‘Come on, Lu.’ He sounded too far away and the connection crackled badly. ‘None of this is helping. I’m sorry it happened, but it’s over; it’s done. It’s not Elsie—it never was. And I’m on the other side of the Pacific. Ring the insurance; have a shower; try to get some sleep—I know you won’t, and I wish I was there. But it’s some kid who wanted the latest phone. And our place happened to be the place he tried tonight.’

  Our place happened to be the place. Lying in bed, in a room bathed with the light and the music she couldn’t bring herself to turn off, Lucy played out in her mind the choices she’d made that might have changed this story—as if by going over them, she
might find one with a secret catch that would rewind time to a place where the door wasn’t unlocked, or the phone wasn’t on the bench, or Ben wasn’t overseas, or she hadn’t bought a smart new phone, or they hadn’t bought this house. But she baulked at that one, and pulled herself up, literally, leaning back against the wall and looking around her bedroom.

  This house was the place that chose them.

  She felt as if she was just a kid again herself, and she wanted to stamp and cry and say that she wanted her mum. Her busy, competent, exacting, certain mother. Well, maybe she wouldn’t be so soothing. Whatever you do, you’ll be fine.

  She felt quite a long way from fine.

  It had been a great relief to Lucy when she realised she wasn’t anything like her mother. She admired her incredibly; she knew her work was amazing. She’d watched her sisters make their own ways into medicine—a nurse, a GP, a pathologist—and then realised that she didn’t have to do that. She was eighteen then, and she and her mother stopped fighting. They went along quite nicely after that. There was the odd rankle about a point of difference, but mostly each left the other alone.

  She’d fought with her mother twice while she was pregnant. The first time, exhausted by morning sickness that didn’t let up, she’d stopped work early. ‘It’s archaic,’ said her mother, ‘giving up your job to be supported by your husband.’ The second time, she’d objected to being manhandled towards an obstetrician when she wanted to stay with midwives. ‘I just think that at your age, Lucy,’ her mother’s growl was even more pronounced, ‘you’d not want to take any risks.’

  ‘If anything goes wrong, the midwives send me to a doctor. Honestly, Mum, I thought you’d be on my side, the great GP for women. You didn’t have a problem when my sisters all did this.’

  ‘Your sisters were a damn sight younger than you are,’ said her mother. ‘I just want this to be all right.’

  ‘Fine.’ Lucy heard the snap in her own voice. ‘And I want it to be all right too. And to be right for me I want nothing to do with obstetricians—they make me think of men playing golf. I want to do it this way, and this is how I’ll do it.’

  Such a long silence then; she thought her mother might have hung up. Then she heard a long intake of breath.

  ‘I will say this once,’ her mother said. ‘You can put your foot down about this. You can have your tantrum. But get used to the fact that you’re going to be a mother—and no matter how much you’ve been in control of all the other parts of your life, you’re about to enter into a thing that you can never control entirely. Ever.’

  ‘Hypocrite,’ said Lucy, and hung up.

  Although she saw, now, that her mother was right.

  Outside, a herd of curlews shrieked and called, and a possum seemed to reply. Two frogs passed the percussion of their noise between themselves, and a car took a corner too quickly, skidding a little, and revving its engine as it sped off.

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Lucy, louder than she’d intended, but she didn’t know if she meant the too-fast driver or the kid sitting somewhere wiping all her photos, her little films, her screens of messages. There was a knock on the other side of the wall as Tom rolled and hit the side of his cot, and for a moment Lucy thought the sound had come from the linen cupboard, and she froze.

  I said, ‘Fuck you’, she thought, her innards shaking. She’d always pegged herself as someone who’d drown if they saw a shark—‘no fight, all flight’.

  ‘But if Tom was there,’ Ben would say, ‘you’d be formidable. If Tom was there, you’d take on all comers.’

  The curlews called again, so melancholy, and from way off down the river, Lucy heard the chime of the last CityCat, ready to slip from its wharf.

  Take me, she thought suddenly. Take me somewhere else.

  12

  The astronaut

  In a window seat of the fifty-ninth row of a jumbo jet heading westward on the overnight trans-Pacific haul, Ben closed the book he kept trying to read and stuffed it into the pocket in front of him. He should know better than to think he could concentrate. All the white noise of the engines: there was no space for your mind to stretch out. He pushed up the window blind and looked at the darkness around him. As above, so below: a quote from somewhere but he couldn’t place the source. There were stars too, and closer than usual, or so it felt. A trick of the light or a misplaced reflection, and it looked like they surrounded the plane.

  He hated the red-eye, fourteen hours from Los Angeles to Brisbane. You lost an entire day crossing that line that kinked between a hundred and sixty and a hundred and eighty degrees east: the spectacularly arbitrary thing that made sense of time everywhere. It felt like magic—‘pff,’ as Tom would say when his mother threw a towel over one of his toys and made it disappear.

  Pff, thought Ben.

  He leaned his head against the thick perspex and looked at the stars again—as above, so below. Lucy would remember where that quote came from. She did their remembering—although he was better now at remembering to snap pictures. Tom on a swing. Tom on a slide. Tom fast asleep.

  ‘And who is remembering me?’ Lucy had asked once, scanning through the photos on his phone.

  ‘I’ve got you safe and sound right here, Lu.’ Tapping his head. ‘Best and brightest version there is.’

  In front of him, the map on the screen showed his slow progress across the vast ocean—what he wanted, he realised, was a map that showed him where the plane was in relation to the constellations. This was probably the closest he’d get to outer space, more than a kilometre above the ground—which wasn’t even out of the troposphere. He gazed at the blackness: there were satellites out there, always. No shuttles now until next year. But somewhere was the International Space Station, whizzing around the planet sixteen times a day.

  When he was a boy, he’d wanted to be an astronaut. He wanted to shoot away from Earth and into outer space where he could see the stars, all the time, and all around. His mother had given him a book about the universe one Christmas when he was five or six, and he’d pored over its pictures—the rainbows made by the spectral images of stars; the time-lapse pictures that turned them into lines of light; the spooky darkness of the sun in an eclipse.

  He still had the book—it was almost fifty years old, a milestone he was rushing towards himself. Not that he felt it. He thought of himself and Lucy as the same age rather than more than ten years apart. He was always genuinely surprised to realise that his memories predated hers and the soundtrack of their childhoods diverged.

  Tom loved looking at the old book’s pictures while Ben tried to explain how much more was known about the universe now, and how much more of the universe there was.

  ‘You see, Tom, this book thought the cosmos had a radius of thirteen billion light years; and now they reckon it’s something like forty-five billion light years.’

  ‘Million billion,’ Tom would repeat with a grin as if it was part of a tongue-twister.

  Ben was seven years old when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. He had watched it, like everyone else he knew, through the crackling static of a big old cathode-ray television set, black and white of course, so that for years, without realising, he had believed that the only colour that existed in the universe must exist on Earth, and that anything that might exist anywhere else was a kind of monochromatic fuzz.

  ‘It has a stark beauty all its own,’ Armstrong had said. ‘It’s different, but it’s very pretty out here.’

  Well, thought Ben, of course there was no colour. Because colour meant life—humans, or animals, or plants, with their different petals, their changeable leaves, the way their chlorophyll pulsed bright and vital with the warmth of the sun. Photosynthesis: that had been his second favourite word when he was seven. His favourite: luminescent. Even if they both had more than nine letters.

  His mother was suspicious of big words—she thought them pretentious; a bit too fancy.

  He was born on the twentieth of February 1962, as John Glenn’s Friendship
7 passed over Australia’s east coast. For years, his mother had told him the story as he waited to sleep.

  ‘When he crossed over Perth, everyone turned on their lights—it must have looked so beautiful from all the way up there.’ She let him sleep with the blinds open, so he could look out to the stars. ‘After John Glenn had crossed Australia, he headed out across the Pacific. He thought he was flying through a field of fireflies—thousands of them, he said, streaming towards his spaceship. Imagine, Ben, imagine how beautiful that would have been. “I am in a big mass of some very small particles,” he said. “They’re brilliantly lit up like they’re luminescent. I never saw anything like it.’’’ And she’d pause a little, stroking Ben’s hair, smoothing his quilt.

  ‘And you know what he said then? “They look like little stars. A whole shower of them coming by.” I’d never heard anything like that. There you were, this tiny person I had to take care of, and I was hearing these things that some man had said, way up in space.’

  Ben had known, from the youngest age, that she had found this wonderful.

  Now, remembering her words, he felt he could have reached out to touch her happiness—so bright, it always felt precious. ‘That line in Shakespeare, you know: “there was a star danced, and under that was I born,”’ she’d once told him. ‘That’s the only Shakespeare I remember from school. And that’s why I put Benedict for your middle name, love—Beatrix, I planned, if you were a girl. And there you were, my little one; there you were.’

  Alexander Benedict Carter: his own ABC. She’d called him Ben from the moment his father left them, she always said, and even now, almost fifty years later, Ben smiled when he saw his own byline—by Ben Carter—to think his father wouldn’t know that this was him. He’d be looking for an Alex, if he looked at all.