A Hundred Small Lessons

by Ashley Hay

  How could you do that? The idea of not seeing Tom. It was beyond him.

  He’d looked forward to this trip, his assignment. Technology; science; the future and how it might change: it was still as exciting to him as it had been when he was a kid and he looked forward to writing these new stories. His was a dream job, he reckoned, but being away this time had been hard. Being away from Lucy and Tom—and then there was the mess with Lucy’s phone. It had seemed wrong to be so far from home.

  This was the longest he’d been gone since Tom was born, and for a split second he thought the boy mightn’t remember him. People came. People went. His own father: well, he’d gone without a trace.

  ‘Better off without him.’ That’s what his mother always said. And he’d believed her, young enough to take her at her word. It was only since he’d spent time watching Tom that he felt angry with his dad—and here they were, living back in Brisbane, where the man had disappeared. Sometimes he stopped in the middle of a crowded street, scanning its faces. He wouldn’t know his dad if he walked by, and he quite liked the safety of that.

  Safety. It felt different now there was Tom. Lucy had set great store on how safe their new home felt. Now that her phone had been taken, he wondered how she’d feel.

  The police had come and dusted the bench, the door handle, the stair rail for prints. And Lucy had fixed a hooksnib to the screen, to fasten it from the inside. But she woke, she’d told him, every night at every sound.

  ‘You’ll be right, Lu.’ The cheerfulness he mustered up from so far away. ‘There might be a rat in the roof.’ That was what she’d do if Tom was worried. She’d tamp it down, defuse it, make him feel things were all right.

  •

  Lucy and Tom stood on the porch as Ben’s cab pulled up outside the house. ‘You see, Tom? It’s all right now. Daddy’s here.’

  Ben shivered. Yes. She was reminding Tom who he was.

  But then he scooped them in, the two of them, and relaxed. It was so warm, so easy. Here they were. All together. He was home.

  That night, Ben propped his head up at the kitchen table, trying to stave off his jetlag a little while longer. He swallowed a yawn, flicking through a magazine to keep himself awake and wishing he was tucked into bed like Tom.

  ‘Did you see this, Lu—how did I miss this?’ Spinning the pages towards her as she came into the room. ‘The Iranians say they launched a rat, a turtle and some worms into space . . .’ He scanned the story. ‘Last February? I can’t believe I didn’t know. What was that dog’s name, the first one in space?’

  ‘Laika—there was that film.’

  ‘Swedish. We went to see it. One of our first dates.’

  ‘I loved that film.’

  They smiled at the memory shared and Ben turned the page. ‘I wonder how the turtle fared in orbit.’ If he could stay awake an hour or so longer, he’d have a better chance of sleeping through the night.

  Lucy filled the sink with hot water, squeezing the detergent in such a rush that a cloud of the smallest bubbles rose up towards her. ‘Imagine being married to one of those astronauts. Those guys on Apollo 13, or your guy, Glenn, cramped into a tin-can spaceship, honestly not knowing if they’d make it back or not. My imagination would run riot if you went and did something like that—and I say that now, when things are run by proper computers and not a handful of batteries and some toggle switches.’ She dropped the dinner plates into the sink so that the water surged onto the floor, soaking her sneakers. ‘Shit!’ Banging the side of the sink. ‘Shit.’

  From the table, Ben watched her shoulders heave: it seemed an enormous reaction to an insignificant thing. ‘Lu? Are you OK?’

  ‘I just . . .’ She was sobbing; she was actually sobbing. He stood up, pulled her away from the sink and cradled her head against his shoulder as she would have cradled their son’s. ‘And I think I cracked a plate.’

  ‘What is this? What’s going on?’ Trying to look at her, smiling and frowning at the same time. ‘I’m never going to get fired into orbit. I go to work and sit at a desk, doing nothing more challenging than making up sentences. I even cross at pedestrian crossings. And with the lights—’ He saw the woman step out with her pram, and gulped: not a story to share. ‘I live the safest life in the world . . . what are you worried about?’

  She shook her head, leaning against him. ‘I’m just tired—that’s all—worrying—and the stupid phone, you know? And I missed you,’ as he kissed the top of her head. But he could feel tremors through her body, and she wouldn’t meet his eyes. ‘Of course your mum wanted you to be an accountant,’ she said at last. ‘No one wants their child to be blown up into space.’

  Ben kissed her again. ‘She did help me build a great spaceship out of cardboard boxes one summer holiday. Then I wrecked it by trying to launch it in the backyard. Nearly blew the place to bits.’

  ‘You tried to what?’

  ‘I made this gunpowder mix with stuff you could get from the chemist—the seventies; you could buy just about anything. I went into town to buy it—it was seventy-four, just after Brisbane’s big flood. We had an extra week of school holidays because of all the water and Mum let me go into town on my own. Not that I told her what I was buying. Well, cardboard, duct tape: she knew about that.’

  He’d spent the summer holidays modifying his design, and on the first sunny day in late January, he’d caught the train to the edge of the city, and walked around to the address she’d given him—an art supplies shop—and the chemist just down the road. Saltpeter. Sulfur. Charcoal. It was the first time he’d gone into the city alone and he could still remember the tightness he’d felt in his chest and how much longer it had seemed to take to walk anywhere—from home to the train; from the train to the shops—without his mum. As if he might never arrive.

  The way his voice had cracked as he asked for the cardboard. He was glad he’d bought that first. He’d cleared his throat and pulled his shoulders back before he asked for the stuff from the chemist’s—they measured it out for him without a second glance. And he carried it carefully home.

  ‘I packed the powder, buried it, and ran a fuse line along to my rocket. Probably lucky I didn’t blast myself to pieces. I didn’t know how hard you had to tamp it, see, so it never would have worked. But the smoke smelled terrible.’

  He could see Lucy’s face reflected in the kitchen window, the frown marks burrowing deep between her eyebrows.

  ‘What will I do if Tom’s like that? I wouldn’t know what to say—what did your mother say?’

  ‘Gave me the hardest slap I’d ever had and told me how much I’d frightened her.’ He squeezed his wife’s shoulders and smiled. But she was right: what would they do if Tom did a thing like that? Today’s was a different world. No kid got to do those things anymore—not even the trip into town on their own.

  ‘Here’s a thing,’ Ben went on. ‘When I got into the city, I met this girl. We were both looking for the art shop. It was her first trip to town too. She was buying blotting paper. Her grandmother’s photos had been inundated in the flood. And the weird thing was, where I was, on the hill, on the northside, I didn’t even know the place was flooding. I mustn’t have seen a newspaper, or the telly. This girl told me about it—her grandmother’s house had gone up to its windows, and whole suburbs were under water. It was like she’d come from another planet.’ He laughed. ‘I wanted to invite her to see the launch of my rocket, but I was too shy.’

  He could see the girl so clearly. They’d stood and talked—it felt like hours. She’d had the darkest rich red hair—he’d never realised before that that was Lucy’s colour too. He might just keep that part to himself. He kissed his wife’s forehead.

  ‘What was her name?’ Lucy leaned her head against his shoulder again.

  But Ben shrugged. ‘You know, I can’t remember. I spent ages on the lookout for her, any time I was anywhere new. But I never ran into her again.’ All these years; he’d never told the story until now. ‘Come on, let’s fini
sh this stuff.’

  He flicked at the dishes with a tea towel and they shuddered in the rack.

  ‘I see people I think I know without even looking for them,’ she said at last, as if she had a story to match his. ‘When we first moved up here, I saw people from our old life everywhere. Except none of them were really here.’ She shook a handful of cutlery so that it rattled under the water, and the metallic sound echoed and amplified. ‘I saw you in the mall the other day, while you were supposed to be off in America. You were running; you didn’t see me. You just ran by.’

  ‘I would always see you, Lucy Kiss—you know that.’ He smiled. ‘Do your other people see you, or do they run by too?’

  ‘They run by—the guy from that juice bar we used to go to. A couple of old friends . . .’ She laughed, then shook her head. ‘They’re always a bit messier, a bit less like themselves—like they’ve swerved away from who they really meant to be.’

  He was drying his hands, squaring the magazine up on the table. Her words echoed in the room like sirens.

  ‘Is that what it feels like, coming here? Like a crazy decision that took you away and made you some lesser version of yourself?’

  And Lucy was still then, and silent, for what felt to Ben like a moment too long.

  ‘Of course not, that’s not what I meant,’ she said, her head still turned away. ‘You know I love being anywhere new. I just think it’s funny the way my brain tries to make sense of strange places by imagining its people are all familiar.’ She didn’t turn. She didn’t stop sorting the knives from the forks.

  ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘I think having Tom—well, I don’t mean that was a crazy decision. But it’d make everything feel different, or new, wherever we were. Don’t you think?’

  From his bedroom, Tom let out a single cry, as if to punctuate his mother’s words, and Ben watched as Lucy froze, holding the cutlery in one hand.

  The house was quiet. A second passed, and another. Tom was still asleep, and Ben saw Lucy realise this, saw the tension drop away from her shoulders, saw her drop the last handful of spoons into the right place in the drawer.

  She was living on this level of alert.

  Make her laugh, he thought. ‘When you were pregnant, you never ate anything half as strange as I was hoping for.’

  ‘I did eat peanut butter and hard-boiled egg sandwiches,’ Lucy said, ‘but secretly, so you wouldn’t know.’ She glanced up and he caught her eye in the window’s reflection and he smiled as she poked her tongue out at him. ‘Three in the morning.’

  ‘Did you tell your midwife that?’

  ‘You should hear some of the things other people ate . . .’

  ‘I was dying to be sent out in the middle of the night to get Coco Pops with lime cordial and grated carrot. The modern man’s equivalent of a knightly quest.’

  ‘Did you just think of that combination then, or is it some secret breakfast fantasy of yours?’

  Ben smoothed the pages in front of him. From the corner of his eye, he could see Lucy wiping the sink with the same meticulous pattern of strokes and squeezes she performed every time she washed up—and every time he did too, for that matter, going back after him just to finish things off. The rhythm, the ritual of her—and now she will fill the kettle, Ben thought, as she did. He loved the certainty of these actions, as if he could predict her future.

  ‘I wonder what Tom dreams about,’ Lucy said, flicking the kettle’s switch, ‘when he cries out, just once, like that. I wonder what you dream about when you’re so small, and most things must seem wonderful and new.’

  The low whirr of the water, of the element: it made a warm and comfortable spiral of sound.

  ‘Some girl once read me a poem,’ Ben said after a while, as the kettle sang, ‘about all the things we can remember from all the other lives we’ve had, for forty days after we’re born. “Some great forty-day daydream,’’’ he pulled the line from the crevasses of his memory, and he wasn’t sure how, ‘“before we bury the maps.” Maybe it’s not forty days; maybe it’s all your dreams in childhood, bits of memory you can’t decipher because they belong to a person you no longer are . . . What?’

  Lucy had turned from the kitchen window. Her arms were tight across her chest; her face was grim.

  ‘What do you mean, “some girl read me a poem”?’ She was glowering. ‘That was me, Ben Carter. That was me, on one of our first dates. That is a poem by Michael Ondaatje. We were talking about dreams—don’t you remember? We were talking about dreaming, which you said you never did, and I had that book of poems in my bag. We were sitting on the floor of your place, and I pulled it out, and I read it to you:

  For his first forty days a child

  is given dreams of previous lives.

  Journeys, winding paths,

  a hundred small lessons

  and then the past is erased.

  ‘I used to recite it for Tom when I was rocking him to sleep—for six weeks after he was born.’

  ‘But the girl with that poem—that wasn’t you. I went out with her for a few weeks; that was all.’ The pounding of his heart inside his head was loud. It was as if he were watching a character talking in some bad film—and it was so bad that Ben himself was thinking, Why are you saying this? Mate, this isn’t going to help.

  But the night and its sounds were blurring around him; perhaps he was already asleep. As Lucy pulled a book down from the bookshelves, he felt the room sway, and he grabbed the table.

  She set the volume in front of him—a slim paperback, well thumbed. ‘Open it,’ she said, nudging it forward. ‘He signed it for me. I carried it with me for months, like treasure. Even though you laughed.’ Her voice was cold and she leaned against the doorjamb, as if to keep her distance.

  Ben felt a lump in his throat as he folded back the cover and saw the minimal inscription, To Lucy, and the signature: a flourish, then a long line, straight, like a horizon. He would have sworn he could remember everything to do with Lucy Kiss, everything to do with the time he’d known her. So how had it happened, this one memory slipping and recasting itself—and landing him, floundering, here? Because he could hear it, now, the poem in her voice; he could remember her reading it, her voice younger, the room lighter, the two of them not much more than forty days together.

  ‘Oh, Lu,’ he began, swallowing the bad taste. ‘How could I forget?’

  ‘I depend on you.’ Her voice was quiet, ferocious. ‘I depend on you to remember who I am. How we are—or were.’

  He blinked at her, a band of pain tightening around his head. ‘Would you read it for me now?’ he said, clutching at some kind of reparation. ‘I miss the way you used to read; I miss the way you used to sing.’ In for a penny, he thought. ‘And of course I remember.’ He could see that she didn’t believe him. ‘Of course I remember that afternoon.’

  She glared again. ‘I’m going to have a shower.’ She closed her eyes as another cry, short and sharp, came from Tom’s room. But instead of moving towards it, she turned away and went into the bathroom. ‘And if he wakes up and wants something, you deal with it. It’s your turn now that you’re home.’

  She slammed the door. Tom cried out, and Ben waited, so tired that time seemed to stretch.

  There was a lull.

  Go to sleep, Tom, he thought. Please. Just go to sleep.

  He opened the book of poems wherever the pages fell, his eyes catching lines here and there. He just wanted to be asleep himself, the weight of his lost day suddenly tripling the weight he felt himself to be. Another cry—awake and sustained. Ben let the book drop and walked into his son’s room.

  ‘You’re all right, sweetheart,’ he said, the way he knew Lucy said it. ‘You’re all right, I’m here.’

  But the child cried longer and louder, his eyes screwed tight against seeing where he was or who was there.

  ‘She’s in the shower, Tom.’ Ben’s exasperation was immediate and total. ‘Come on, come on, come here.’ Picking him up, which Lucy always
said he shouldn’t do. ‘It’s all right, Tom. Come here.’ Nestling the boy’s head against his shoulder and rocking him gently.

  ‘Mumma?’ said Tom then, once, and non-committal.

  ‘She’s in the shower, sweetheart. You’re all right. I’m here.’ Maybe there was magic in it, parenthood. Maybe there were words that worked like spells or incantations—said the right way at the right time. He stood and rocked Tom quietly back and forth, and he felt his son’s weight thicken as the boy slid into sleep. Whatever the spell was, he’d got it right this time.

  ‘There,’ he said again, and repeated it a few times. He laid the little boy back in the cot, smoothing the covers around him.

  What do you dream? he wondered. What do you see, that you can’t describe? And how could I not remember it was your mother who read me that bloody poem?

  The small boy snuffled a little as he turned onto his side. In the dim nightlight that Lucy kept on for him, his rich brown hair glistened and shone.

  That girl after the flood: what was her name?

  Ben let his hand rest gently on his son’s body, then he crept out of Tom’s room and slid the book of poetry back into its place on the shelf. Lucy was right, of course. She was always right. He’d misplaced something essential. There was work to be done but he couldn’t see what, when or how. And with the next yawn, he felt his mouth open so wide that his skin seemed to stretch too far.

  From behind the bathroom door came the noise of the water dropping and gurgling. Before now, before there was Tom, he would have opened the door, walked into the steam, stripped himself off and climbed in with his wife, holding her, caressing her, trying to make things at least better, if not right. The water dripped and trickled. Lucy used to sing in the shower, but she didn’t anymore. And as Ben listened to her silence, he realised he hadn’t even noticed when she’d stopped. He heard a louder splash and another, and guessed that she was cupping the water in her hands and splashing it onto her face. She was as routine in a shower as she was with the dishes, and if she was up to this cupping and washing, she had less than a minute to go.