Other Halves

by Nick Alexander

  I considered my options. I could get something delivered. I could go sit in a restaurant, alone; in a pub, maybe. Or perhaps I simply wouldn’t eat. That would be a new experience. I wondered how hungry I would get if I didn’t eat at all. I might not sleep from hunger, but then I probably wouldn’t sleep anyway. I glanced at the boxes and wondered in which one I had packed the sheets and then if it would really matter if I didn’t bother finding them. I could turn the heating up a notch and sleep on the sofa in my clothes . . . Who would know? That thought, of no one knowing, and no one caring, produced a numbing wave of sadness.

  Hearing a noise coming from outside, I crossed to the window and looked down at the street where I saw Luke, not unchaining, but chaining his pushbike.

  When he re-entered the building, I crossed to the front door and opened it. He was standing on the doorstep grinning sheepishly.

  “Yes?”

  “Mum says it’s OK,” he said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Mum says I can stay over tonight so we can go do the bed thing tomorrow morning.”

  Tears of relief pressed at the back of my eyes. I pulled my phone from my pocket. “I’m gonna phone her to check, you know that, right?”

  Luke shrugged. “Jeez, I’m not lying.”

  Hannah answered immediately. “Yes?”

  “Hi, um, Luke says you told him it’s OK for him to stay?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s right.”

  “Oh, OK then.”

  “Just have him home by two. We’re going out tomorrow afternoon, so we need him back by two.”

  “Sure,” I muttered, trying to digest Hannah’s use of the word “we”.

  “Night Cliff.”

  “Night Han’.”

  I lowered the phone and pulled a face at it. “What did you say to her?”

  Luke shrugged.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “You must have said something. She never changes her mind. About anything. Ever.”

  Luke shrugged again, but this time explained. “I said you were a bit mizz,” he admitted. “I said you needed the company. ‘Cos it’s your first night and everything.” He stared at his feet both embarrassed and a little proud of the lie and I slipped into my first genuine smile for days.

  “That’s OK, right?” Luke asked, confused by something in my reaction. “I can sleep on the sofa. I don’t mind.”

  I shook my head and choked up a little as I said, “Sure. That’s fine. I was feeling a bit miserable actually.”

  “Can we order pizza then?”

  “Sure. Or we could just walk up and get one. The pizza place is just up the road now.”

  Luke nodded. “OK,” he said. “Can we get the one with the spicy sausage on it again? I liked that.”

  THREE

  Hannah

  The second Cliff’s loaded car pulled away, tears burst from my eyes. I hadn’t realised that it was going to happen, and only even acknowledged that it was happening when I noticed that my cheek was wet. I slumped onto the sofa and puzzled at this new development. I tried to take a deep breath, but my chest felt too tight. And then I thought, he’s gone, and let out a cry – half sob, half wail. Once I had started I couldn’t stop crying, and soon tears were dripping off my chin, soaking the neck of my blouse. At times I could barely breathe for sobbing, and I was still at it when James got home half an hour later.

  “What’s wrong, Han’?” he asked, ripping off his coat and rushing to my side.

  “He’s gone,” I said, simply.

  “But that’s good, isn’t it?” James asked, genuinely confused. “That’s what you wanted.”

  I shrugged and nodded and started to weep all over again.

  Eventually the tears ran out, leaving me feeling exhausted, as if every emotion had been squeezed from my body along with the tears. James asked me again why I had been so upset, and I told him that I didn’t know, but that wasn’t the truth. The reality was too complex, too multifaceted, too contradictory to be explained. Or perhaps I was just too tired to attempt it.

  I was feeling so many things at once, and they didn’t necessarily fit together in any meaningful way.

  I was relieved that Cliff had gone, that was the first thing. The atmosphere in the house had been intolerable, and this had largely been my fault. I had wanted him away from me, but I wanted him to decide to go. So I had made his home life as uncomfortable as I possibly could. Every act, from not helping him find his keys (a regular drama) to leaving him leftovers from my meals with James had been, if not quite calculated, at the very least conscious. But these acts had been excruciating for me, perhaps almost as tough on my emotions as they had been on Cliff, and I had frequently vacillated, often considered capitulating. If there had been any other reasonable outcome to capitulate to, then I probably would have done so, but I could only envisage one future and that was with James.

  So when Cliff left, the war of nerves was over, and I felt an overwhelming sense of relief at that.

  I felt heartbroken, too. I had always been a true believer, perhaps one of the few remaining true believers in marriage left on the planet, and overturning that belief system, adjusting my worldview to the inevitability of divorce, felt like a catastrophic collapse of self. It seemed, suddenly, as if the last fifteen years had been lost, a pointless parenthesis of wasted days. As many of those years were extremely happy, and because the fruit of that marriage – Luke, our son – remained the best thing that ever happened to me, this was clearly illogical and melodramatic thinking but, all the same, it was how I felt.

  I felt guilty, as well. Horribly, numbingly guilty that I had so consciously manipulated Cliff out of the family home. Because although his own acts could have been said to justify any behaviour on my part, although he had been revealed as a liar and a manipulator of monstrous proportions, I understood why. I had been there right at the beginning of our relationship and whatever else might have been going on, I knew that the love had been real. I knew too that my seduction by his brother, just days before our wedding, had been, if impossible to resist from my point of view, entirely unreasonable from Cliff’s, and that somehow anything that he might do from that point on was in some way normal. Perhaps you simply can’t spend fifteen years with someone without becoming just a little of them, but for whatever reason, I understood Cliff. I comprehended everything that he had done. I got it.

  Cliff, by revealing himself a liar, provided a solution that I could cling to to justify my actions, to smooth the way, but to myself, I had to admit that he wasn’t the only cause. Deep down, I had to admit that I had simply never loved him properly, that I had never felt about him the way I felt about, say, James. So I felt horrifically guilty for using his weaknesses against him.

  Finally, I felt sick with excitement, in a way that I hadn’t since I was a teenager. I had spotted something I wanted: a way to change everything, and with single-minded selfish ambition, I had decided to pursue it, no matter what.

  And now, here we were. James and I were finally alone in the house, Cliff was living elsewhere, and I could see that from here on in, James and I were free to do pretty much anything we wanted. I felt intoxicated with the sudden breadth of possibility.

  “I don’t know what I’m feeling,” I told James, when he asked me again. “It’s complicated. A mix of stuff.”

  “But you’re happy?” he asked, pushing wet hair from my eyes with a stroke of his finger.

  I nodded. “Get me a drink, would you? I think I need a whisky.”

  “I can do better than that,” he said, and he turned and produced a bottle of champagne from his backpack. “I thought we might be celebrating tonight so I got this just in case.”

  It struck me in that instant that there was something heartless, something callous in his ability to celebrate, to plan to celebrate such a total victory over his own brother, and in truth I wasn’t in the mood to celebrate with champagne at all – I needed whisky to calm my nerves. But I acquiesced. “Lovely,” I s
aid. “Get some glasses and I’ll go fix my face. I must look like a road crash.”

  “You look lovely,” James lied. “And you’re mine.”

  That first evening with the house to ourselves felt so strange.

  I watched James wandering around studying photos from family holidays, or picking up ornaments that had been gifts, and realised just how stacked the house was with memories of my life with Cliff . . . Actually, stacked with memories doesn’t really cover it: the house, I realised, was a manifestation of my life with Cliff. I hadn’t realised, up until that point, just how much soul was contained in all this material accumulation.

  We sipped champagne, and nibbled the less-than-sophisticated Pringles that James had bought to go with it, and I struggled to appear convincing when I agreed that this was nice.

  Luke phoned to ask if he could stay over at Cliff’s, and because I realised that I was far from ready to see this new situation reflected in my son’s eyes – my entire life as before, but with his father replaced by James – I agreed.

  James and I reheated a ready meal, and then snuggled up on the sofa to watch a film: Groundhog Day. When we realised that neither of us was enjoying it – James had seen it, and I didn’t much like it – we abandoned the film and went to bed to make love instead.

  As I fell asleep in his arms that night, I dreamt unnervingly that he was Cliff, and then that he and Cliff were somehow the same person, and finally that the events of fifteen years ago had transpired in such a way that I had been living here with James all along. The really freaky thing about this last phase of the dream was that my life with James had been identical in every way to my life with Cliff. We had lived these fifteen years in this same house, had the same arguments, taken the same holidays, and ended up in the same stasis of predictable domesticity.

  I awoke in the morning with a terrifying sense of inevitability, a knowledge I couldn’t shake, that everything that had ever happened to me had been entirely my own doing, and that I was stuck in a Groundhog Day of my own creation that I would never be able to escape for the simple reason that no matter where I went, or who I was with, I would never be able to escape myself.

  Watching James eat breakfast out of Cliff’s bowl the next morning only magnified the feeling, and I wondered just what I would have to do to really change my life, and realised that whatever the solution was, it was going to involve living somewhere other than here. If James and I were to build our own story it would have to be somewhere different, somewhere preferably far, far away. And with an adolescent son, engineering that escape was going to pose a whole fresh set of problems.

  That first morning, James looked up at me from his bowl of muesli and said, “Make me another coffee, would you Han’?” and without thinking, I paused eating my own cereal to do just that. It wasn’t until I was standing over the kettle that the request struck me as cheeky.

  When James finished his breakfast, he stood and started to leave, his bowl and mug still on the table.

  “The dishwasher’s empty,” I told him with a big forced smile, and James just laughed.

  “Right,” he said, leaving the room.

  And the problem now was that I had noticed, and once you start noticing it’s impossible to stop. I had already begun to do what I suppose was inevitable: I had begun to compare the two brothers.

  I had been married to Cliff for so long that I had ceased to really see him, but I began now to realise at least what a benign presence he had been to live with. Where James would “order” a fresh cup of coffee, Cliff would have made one just for me. Where James would refuse my hints at using the dishwasher, Cliff would fill and empty it without my even noticing. If we were watching a film, James was perfectly capable of heading through to the kitchen and returning with a beer without it even crossing his mind to ask me if I wanted something.

  None of this is to say that I was in any way regretting the loss of Cliff from my life: our marriage had been beyond stale, and for all his faults I still found James to be novel and exciting, to be challenging and sexy. But I was starting to see that I had taken Cliff for granted too. I was beginning to realise that I had been asleep for much of the last fifteen years, and that, in a strange way, it had required someone precisely like James to wake me from my slumber. Whether I was feeling aroused or irritated, in love or furious, I felt awake; I felt alive.

  Luke, who had momentarily loved James during our French holiday, now seemed to see him with nothing but hatred. I knew this was to be expected; I knew that the child who doesn’t resent a parent’s new partner is a rarity. I could do nothing but batten down the hatches and hope that it was a passing phase.

  James’ rugged independence, his lapses into Aussie outback vulgarity, his, dare I say it, flashes of selfishness, did nothing to make life easier though. Within days, Luke was protesting everything from tidying his room to stacking the dishwasher with a new standard refrain: “Why? He doesn’t.”

  “James is a guest,” I would tell him repeatedly, but I knew that this explanation wasn’t going to wash for long. I knew that, for Luke’s sake, for all our sakes, I was going to have to house-train James.

  For days I dropped hints: I tried witty remarks and I tried bitchy asides. I tried setting an example, and commenting on it loudly as I did so: “I’ll just clear my plate away then,” or “Hum, this dishwasher looks full. I’d better switch it on.” But none of these had the slightest effect on James. He seemed entirely impervious to my training techniques.

  I came to realise that I was going to have to deal with the issue head on; I was going to have to sit him down and talk about it. And yet every time I opened my mouth to do so, I closed it again, because I could never find the right combination of words that would express the problem without being confrontational. I had never been very good with forthright discussion.

  In the end, it was Luke who forced my hand. It was a Saturday, and he was eating his lunch. James, who had wolfed down his own sandwich, was reading a newspaper. He leaned back in his chair and rested his feet – encased in worn suede boots – on the corner of the table. His legs were positioned so that his boots weren’t actually in contact with the surface of the table, but all the same – going against all of the rules he had had to follow himself – this clearly shocked Luke.

  With his spoon in mid-air, he froze and looked from James’ boots to me, and then back again. I shook my head gently and blinked slowly at him. The gesture was supposed to communicate “Not now,” but Luke had had his fill of James’ special rules. He placed his spoon in his bowl, shuffled his chair back from the table, and put his own socked feet on the table.

  “Luke,” I said, sadly shaking my head.

  “Yes?” he asked, folding his arms defiantly.

  “Take them off.”

  “My socks?”

  “You know what I mean. Take your feet off the table.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I asked you to.”

  “And what about him?” Luke said, nodding at James.

  “Luke!” I said.

  He lowered his feet, spluttered, “I hate living here!” and stomped from the room.

  I took a deep breath and turned to James, ensconced in The Guardian, and seemingly unaware of the drama.

  “James,” I said. “We need to talk.”

  “Um?” he asked from behind the paper.

  I reached for the edge of his newspaper and pulled it downwards so that I could see his face. “James. We need to talk,” I said again. “We have a problem here.”

  He lowered the paper, glanced at me, then frowned and folded it up. “Sorry,” he said. “Just reading about the bush fires in Tazzie. Bloody awful.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “So, what’s up?”

  “Did you catch any of what just happened there?”

  James pouted and shook his head.

  “I had an argument with Luke?”

  “OK.”

  “He had his feet on the table.”
r />   “OK . . .”

  “He’s not allowed to have his feet on the table.”

  “Fair dinkum. Your house, your rules.”

  I glared at him now. “James,” I said. “For God’s sake. Stop being obtuse with me.”

  James laughed. “Obtuse? Me?”

  “I can’t tell Luke not to put his feet on the table if you’re sitting there with your boots in his breakfast bowl, now can I?”

  James was wearing a strange expression, a mixture of a frown and a grin. “So you want me to take my feet off the table,” he said, glancing at his boots. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “Yes.”

  He shrugged and removed them, then folded his legs beneath his chair. “Better?”

  “Yes!” I exclaimed, exasperated.

  “All you had to do was ask.”

  “Ask?”

  He nodded and smiled at me. “I’m not a bloody mind reader, Han’.”

  “Right, but . . .”

  “And I don’t get why you never say what you want.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I said. Why don’t you ever say what you want? Why do we have to have all these bloody games?”

  “I do not play games.”

  “Oh, you do. You’re the biggest game player I’ve ever met, girl. And we’re all supposed to sit around second-guessing you. Well it’s not my thing.”

  “I really don’t know what you mean,” I said.

  “Yes you do.”

  “Example?”

  “OK. You say, ‘Oh there’s no room on the table,’ and you mean, ‘Please clear your stuff.’ Or, ‘Oh, I’ll walk all the way up there to meet you then, shall I?’ when you mean, ‘Can you come and pick me up?’ ‘I can’t tell Luke not to put his feet on the table,’ means, ‘Don’t put your feet on the table.’”

  “So you understand perfectly what I mean,” I said. “You just choose to ignore—”

  “Because it’s bloody annoying,” James interrupted, an incongruous smile on his face. “OK? I ignore it because it’s a stupid way to talk to another adult. And I’m sick of trying to guess what you really want.”