A Hundred Small Lessons

by Ashley Hay

  She closed her eyes and saw there one of the museums she’d visited that day. A pendulum swung through wide, clear space, a pendulum that etched out the spin of the earth. The near, the far, the in, the out of the plumb-bob’s graceful sweep.

  But that wasn’t what she’d loved about it. Not the arc. Not the motion. Not even the way it traced the earth’s movement, right there for her to see it on the ground. What she loved was the fixed point up above as the world turned below.

  Wherever I go, thought Lucy, blinking in the gallery’s deep darkness, wherever I am, this is here, and this candle is alight. She closed her eyes again, and the candle’s after-image glowed brighter still.

  Anchored. Centred. Safe.

  There had always been that point.

  Coming out, she found Linnea and they made their way to daylight and the last leg of her trip.

  ‘And when you come again,’ Linnea said, ‘when you bring your boys, we’ll take them up Mount Wellington and find another view to see.’

  Lucy kissed Linnea at the terminal, thanking her for everything, and suddenly embarrassed by the manner of it all.

  Linnea hugged her. ‘Any time,’ she said. ‘Any time.’

  From the plane, she called home.

  ‘Nearly there,’ she said to Ben.

  ‘Nearly here,’ he said to her.

  Then she tapped out an email to Astrid—out of the blue and the state I was in and after all this time and your mother, so kind—and heard the satisfying whoosh of it heading towards Kansas as the flight attendant closed the plane’s last door.

  Off we go, she thought, and realised she was excited.

  The plane pushed itself up off the ground and swung around, heading up, heading north, heading home. Lucy took three straws with her drink and laid them out across the tray table like fiddlesticks. One. Two. Three. Ben. Tom. Lucy. She straightened them, aligning their tops and bottoms as best she could.

  She’d have a clean-up when she got home—all those boxes, all those lives, and all those doilies. She didn’t need any of them anymore.

  And then she sat sipping her drink, occasionally moving one of the three straws laid out in front of her. The ice cube slid into her mouth with the last of the liquid and she held it there, savouring its coldness. She was in that summertime pub; she was in Paris. She was in one of those moments when something content and complete hummed through her body. She relished the edge of it now.

  As the plane nosed towards Brisbane’s runway, Lucy watched the clouds, fine stripes laid across the nightlight view like trails of gossamer spiders’ web. The spiders were still down there, spinning their proprietorial banners, as vast and as many as ever. The trees, the green was all still growing, although autumn was coming on now. The river cut the city with its capricious line of darkness, its snaking switchbacks winding in from the coast. It was a beautiful, beautiful thing.

  There were stars above, and dotpoint lights below—she was closer each minute to home. Then the plane’s wheels bounced against the tarmac and she had arrived.

  As the plane surged along the runway, the nocturnal landscape rushing by, Lucy tapped at her phone. There were two new emails in her inbox. One from Linnea, so pleased to have seen her: come again, any time. The other from Astrid, during the American night with a daughter—my partner’s, she said—who had a temperature.

  Amazing to have your message, amazing to hear from you. I’ve missed you—well, time flies, they say. Want to hear about you and your boys and your life. Can’t believe you saw Mum. She always was so fond of you. Take care of yourself back at home. And let’s not let it be so long.

  Outside the plane, the warm air of the tropical night wrapped around Lucy and the streetlights glowed. Back there, behind her, down south, the high cliffs still loomed and the candle still burned—where she wasn’t. Because she was here. When she was small and at home on a rare sick day, she’d never quite trusted that her classroom would be there, with the day and its lessons going on, if she wasn’t. Solipsism: nine letters. Of course Ben had known the word.

  It was how the rest of the world felt sometimes now that she was someone’s mum. As if almost everywhere and everything else had disappeared. Sometimes, that wasn’t so bad.

  Overhead, a few stars pocked the city’s glare.

  ‘No bags?’ The taxi driver stood with the boot of the car propped open.

  ‘No bags,’ said Lucy.

  ‘And where am I taking you?’

  ‘Home,’ said Lucy.

  She would go home. She would go in. She would hold them both—Ben and Tom—as close as she could. She would shut the door and fold them, safe, inside.

  Her house. Lucy’s house.

  Lucy’s home.

  25

  The planetarium

  He’d never heard anything like the sounds Tom made when Lucy left—they were profound: vast and guttural. They were pure anguish and abandonment, and it took all his focus and fortitude to stand in front of their barrage, let alone stop himself joining in, furious and unhelpful.

  Ben had no thought of running after Lucy. He thought: So, this is how people leave. The way his father had.

  But then there was Tom, and the bawling, and Ben stepped inside the noise and felt as frightened and as angry as his boy. He counted to ten, slowly, the way he knew Lucy did, drawing his breaths out a little further each time until they felt smoother and more free.

  ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘come here, love.’ And he gathered him into the circle of his arms. ‘She’s just tired, mate, and a bit cross. You know how you have a tantrum sometimes? That’s what Mum’s doing now, I reckon. But it’s all right—she’ll be fine, and we’re all right.’

  He could say these sentences, no problem, but deeper down Ben seethed. This mess, this stupid mess—and what business did she have making their boy so upset? Don’t ever scare him. Huh.

  Tom snuggled into his father, sniffing and wiping his snotty nose across Ben’s shoulder—the sort of thing he thought would send him spare before he had his own child. But he held Tom, and patted him, and shushed him. And the sky kept moving past the sun.

  He rang the office and told them Tom was sick—‘yes, Lucy too. Lucky it’s almost the weekend.’ And then he peeled away Tom’s sticky pyjamas, and his own snotted ones, and got the two of them under the hottest, strongest shower Tom could stand. ‘Wash it away, Tom, my man. Let’s wash it away and feel better.’

  They were in the shower when Lucy rang from the airport.

  Hobart, thought Ben, replaying the message. Well, there was no Ferdi Klim in that part of the world, as far as he knew. And no Elsie either.

  He found Linnea’s number in Lucy’s address book and made an uncomfortable call—‘My wife’s run away; she’s coming to you.’ You could rely on people to be polite about the strangest things. Then he built a complex train track with Tom—‘I reckon we could go three layers here, and how about a figure-of-eight?’—and watched the small boy loop and whiz his engines round and round.

  So this is parenthood, he thought. You behave better than you might for the sake of your kid. He wanted to shout at Lucy. He wanted to hate her. He wanted to hold her and demand the old Lucy back, the way she used to be. He wanted to tell her, once and for all, not to worry about every catastrophe that her busy mind could imagine—for herself, for Tom, for a baby possum. He wanted no more imaginary friends—nor long-lost real ones. Us. Here. Now, he thought. That’s all.

  He watched Tom select rolling stock for his favourite engine: his precision, all his care.

  The back door slammed.

  I do not hear you, Ben shouted inside his head at Lucy’s Elsie. This is our place. You do not belong.

  ‘Who there, Daddy?’ Tom’s trains were paused along their tracks.

  ‘It’s just the wind, love, just the wind,’ said Ben. ‘I’ll get you some toast now, Tom. Some raisin toast, and milk?’

  When the food was done—Tom, ravenous from no breakfast, ate three slices—they sat a while
and leafed through different books. Picture books. Atlases. ‘Where’s Mummy?’ asked Tom, and Ben pointed to the island hanging off the bottom of Australia’s distinctive-shaped continent. Nothing unusual. Make no comment. As if she always flew away. And then came home.

  And then: ‘Space book,’ said Tom, and trotted off to get it. It was a big book with heavy cardboard pages and so many flaps and foldouts—huge numbers, vast distances—and he dragged it across the floor to set it at Ben’s feet. They read about the Big Bang, those deceptively simple-sounding words, and a number it was easy to say. (‘Thirteen-point-eight billion years—that’s almost fourteen billion, Tom,’ as if rounding up those extra millions was neither here nor there). They read about the planets, which Tom practised naming, and the sun, which he told Ben was hot ‘like the toaster’. Ben read through all the bits of information, lifting all the flaps and unfolding all the foldouts. He held his phone up to the bright blue sky and showed his son where the constellations were, still there, hiding behind the daylight and ready to shine through at night.

  ‘I thought that was the most amazing thing when I was little,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘The stars are always there, you see; the stars are always there.’ He watched his son’s determination as Tom padded back into his bedroom and returned with a bucket of different coloured balls, a torch and a wide black towel.

  ‘Planets,’ he announced. ‘And night.’

  ‘Have you done this before?’ Ben asked, smoothing the towel across the back of the sofa, where Tom indicated it should go.

  ‘Mummy did,’ said Tom, pointing. ‘Universe.’ He placed the torch carefully on the sofa’s arm and clicked on its beam. ‘Sun,’ he said, pointing to its brightness. Then he went back into his bedroom and came out dragging a bucket full of spaceships, a bucket full of luminous plastic stars. ‘Rockets,’ he said, pointing at one bucket. ‘Milk way,’ pointing at the other. ‘Now we can play,’ he added, smiling.

  ‘Yes, we can,’ said Ben. This magic; this creation—this was better than a day in the office, no matter what story he might get to write. His rage and fury began to fold down into something that ached now for Lucy. As long as Lucy was all right; as long as Lucy was all right, everything else was all right too.

  And then came the idea of kindness. Just give her this break, this respite.

  ‘I’ll take the shuttle,’ he said, driving it along the runway of a stripe in the rug and then whooshing it high over Tom’s head and all around the room, while his little boy giggled and laughed.

  His mother had helped him make a cardboard rocket, Ben thought. But my wife made our boy the whole universe.

  •

  It took seven rounds of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ for Tom to settle in his cot that night; Ben had never had to sing for such a long time, and he could hear his voice croaking in the darkness towards the end.

  ‘Come on, mate,’ he said as he finished for the last time. ‘I reckon that’s enough starlight for anyone. You close your eyes now and think of all the nice things we’ll do tomorrow—might go to the planetarium: what do you think? The big room where you can see all the stars? Or we can just make another one at home together here.’

  ‘OK.’ Tom yawned. ‘And Mummy home?’

  ‘Couple of sleeps. And you and me, Tom, we’ll have an adventure while she’s away.’

  ‘OK.’

  Just say it’s normal, and it is, thought Ben. But he poured himself a whisky when he went into the kitchen, and he sat with it, out on the deck, looking out at the trees and up at the night.

  The house was awfully quiet.

  Wonder if Elsie’s husband sat here, waiting for Elsie, the two kids asleep in their beds. He took a long sip. Wonder if Elsie ran away?

  Perhaps it was always the same: the frustrations, the misunderstandings between people, and the noisy freight of family. Or perhaps Clem and Elsie would have looked at Ben and Lucy and wondered what aliens they were.

  ‘You think so much about things, you young folk,’ Lucy’s dad had said once, listening to them worry away at the pros and cons of some decision or another. ‘Us, we just got on and did it—I’m not saying that was right all the time, but we must have saved a lot of energy.’

  Ben took another sip of his drink and watched two possums spit and hiss, facing off on the high electrical wire. Spoiling for a fight.

  Another sip now while the possums shrieked, and he pulled out his phone, scrolling through the numbers he’d dialled that day until he saw Linnea’s. But he kept his thumb away from the imperious green button.

  ‘Give her time,’ Linnea had said. ‘You don’t sleep, you know, when you’ve had a kid. Not properly. No one ever tells you that. You’re always primed to wake up, in case someone needs you in the night.’

  He wanted his wife to come home.

  Flicking away from the keypad, he found his camera roll and worked backwards from his pictures of Tom’s galaxy earlier in the day, all the way to older shots, before his son was born. Lucy with her belly stretched taut and a smile from ear to ear. Lucy with her hands under her own weight as if she was cradling a melon. He drank again, and scrolled forward: Tom, so small, nestled in the crook of Lucy’s neck. Tom, so small, cupped safe in Lucy’s hands in a shallow bath. Tom, so small, fast asleep in a cot that looked huge.

  It was the one useful thing he remembered from the classes they’d had to take before they had him. ‘If you’re having a bad day,’ the midwife had said, ‘take a moment to flick through some photographs. You never take photos of your bad moments—so when you flick through some of the happy things, you let yourself remember there’ll be other lovely times.’

  ‘This too shall pass,’ Lucy had murmured.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said the midwife. ‘Not the parenting; that never stops. But whatever noisy mess you find you’re in.’

  Back inside, he turned on his computer, opened the folders of photos and moved through them until he found Lucy before Tom—without even a hint of Tom, or an idea he might come into being. Lucy years ago, when there was just the two of them, beginning to be themselves. The years they’d been together now—almost spoilt for time together on their own.

  God, she was beautiful—she still was, of course, with her red hair and her lovely olive skin. He could remember being astonished by her when they first started dating. She’d seemed radiant, so full of life and certainty. He could remember the first time he kissed her; it was the only first kiss he could recall.

  ‘Well, there you are then,’ she’d boasted, a little bit proud, when he’d confessed that, after years of them together.

  Here they were, their first New Year’s together. Someone had a place with a view of Sydney Harbour. There was champagne. There was seafood. There were fireworks. There was Lucy, part of a group of pretty young women leaning in towards each other with their glasses, all of them doing more in their lives than they’d ever imagined, and loving it.

  Lucy had never been more glorious. There she was, smiling, wearing a dress that left her beautiful back bare. If he thought of her out of nowhere, he realised, he thought of her on that night; she’d buzzed with some potent combination of contentment and potential.

  ‘It’s so arbitrary,’ she’d said at one point. ‘Who says it’s December thirty-one that the year flips? Who made these decisions? Some pope somewhere? A king? An astronomer?’

  ‘Either way, it’s a good excuse for kissing.’ Ben heard this sentence as clearly as if it had been said in the room with him now, and turning in his mind’s eye to the man standing next to him on that night, more than a decade back, he knew who had said it. Ferdi Klim, a woman on each arm and another one trying to find a handhold.

  ‘Should’ve been an octopus,’ he’d said, catching Ben’s eye. ‘So you’re the new boyfriend?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Nine letters,’ said Ferdi. ‘I heard you think you’re good at this. A. R. S. E. C. Y. O. T. T.’

  ‘Astrocyte,’ said Ben, taking them both by surprise.

/>   Now, Ben shook his head. How did I even know that word? Moving back and forwards between the photographs, Ben found Ferdi’s sleeve here, his shoulder somewhere else, the back of his tall frame, stooping down, talking to someone or maybe kissing them.

  He was there; he was there all the time.

  He closed his eyes, trying to draw more detail from the darkness of his mind, and he remembered Ferdi and the three girls somehow hailing themselves a taxi a few minutes before midnight, disappearing up the road in a flurry of honking horns. At the last minute, Ferdi had turned to kiss the eponymous Lucy—‘how can I not, with that name?’—and they’d held on to each other for a few seconds.

  ‘Of course I’m staying here,’ Lucy had said, one hand hanging on to Ben’s. ‘I’ve done my time—you’re going off. You’re over there.’ The taxi; the girls.

  The power of being chosen: he’d forgotten that great glow.

  I am lucky, he thought, looking at his pictures again. We’re together, and we’re lucky. Draining the last of his whisky, he watched the screen change through its slideshow, watching one Lucy dissolve into another one, and stay much the same in each. He made the usual list of resolutions—to be more patient; to be more present; to be more kind. They were easy to make on his own.

  There was a crash from the cavity above the ceiling and a possum poked its nose out from the top of the linen cupboard. Ben in his haste leapt for the ladder and the towel he’d left nearby.

  ‘You’re all right; I’ve got you. You’re all right.’ The possum’s body quivered as he wrapped it close and carried it outside. One less thing for Lucy to worry about. Ben crawled into bed and slept soundly, with the sense of a job well done.

  And when Tom cried out the next night—after more trains and excursions and more food than his father had ever seen him eat—Ben was up in a moment, ignoring all the edicts and directives as he transferred the boy to Lucy’s empty half of the bed. Where he slept beside him, settled and deep, undisturbed by his mother’s late call.

  When Ben woke that Sunday morning, they’d slept through the birdsong, he and Tom, and the morning was heading for seven.