Other Halves

by Nick Alexander

  “Really?”

  “Loads. Did you miss me?” he asked, reaching out to stroke my arm.

  I laughed sourly. “You have no idea,” I said.

  “Maybe we could have another bash,” Rob said. “I have more free time now, so . . .”

  “Another bash?”

  Rob grinned at me cheekily.

  “Why do you have more free time?”

  “Anne left me,” he said. “She went off with some arsehole from down the road.”

  “Really?”

  “Really!”

  “What happened? Did she find out?”

  “Nope,” Rob said. “That’s the best bit. She just fucked off one day. So I didn’t even have to tell her.”

  Though we started seeing each other again on the same Tuesday and Thursday nights as before, and though it was in every way as pleasant an experience, I refused to let myself fold into the relationship this time around. Rob had proven that whatever was given could be taken away without notice, and as he remained as closeted as ever – he still refused to meet Luke – I protected myself by remaining wary, by staying detached.

  Only once did I broach the subject of Rob’s lack of honesty with his kids, asking him if he didn’t feel that it was spoiling their relationship, inhibiting their ability to be close to him.

  “From a bloke who spent the last fifteen years lying to everyone about everything, that’s a bit rich,” was Rob’s reply, and I couldn’t really argue with that.

  Luke fell out with his friend Billy over Christmas, and then made up again in March. Karim moved away to Birmingham. Brenda, Billy’s mum, split up with Sue, her partner, got back, amazingly, with Billy’s dad, and then after less than a month went back to Sue again. Billy camped at ours throughout. Come springtime, Luke got back with Lisa then split up all over again. He dated Petra, then Kelly, then Petra again, and then a new dark-haired beauty called Laura, who bit her nails so much that her fingers bled.

  Hannah came and went, bringing gifts of Macadamia nuts and jars of Vegemite that no one ate, telling farm stories and occasionally even going up at the end of her sentences like a true Australian. She was still trying to tempt Luke out there for visits, and he still wasn’t going for the bait.

  Our old house sold, and the partnership I worked in was bought out by a big London firm; my boss was promptly fired and I was promoted to managing director.

  The seasons came and went, and the trees sprouted green, then turned to amber, and as Luke’s girlfriends came and went, and as everything around me changed incessantly, only two things remained constant: my relationship with my son, and the clockwork regularity of Rob’s visits.

  I had almost started to relax into the rhythm of our relationship, almost managed to suspend my disbelief, when one day, a week before Luke’s fourteenth birthday, I glanced at the clock and said to Rob, “You had better be going. Luke will be back at eight.”

  Rob shot me a strange, almost defiant glance, pulled a cushion to his chest and settled into the sofa. “I think I’ll stay tonight, if that’s OK,” he said.

  “But Luke gets back in half an hour,” I explained, frowning, thinking that he had somehow misunderstood me.

  “Yeah,” Rob murmured without averting his gaze from the TV screen. He fidgeted then slumped even further into the settee. “You said.”

  I watched him pretending to be engrossed in the television for a moment, then smiled vaguely and said, “Oh, OK then.”

  “That’s OK, right?” Rob asked, half-glancing at me. “You don’t mind?”

  “No,” I said, slipping into a wry grin. “No, I don’t mind at all.”

  “Good,” Rob said, then, “So what’s for tea?”

  POSTSCRIPT: HANNAH

  I spent most of my summer break cooking and cleaning and fixing up the farm house. I sanded down doors and repainted walls; I stuck back fallen bath tiles and made vast pots of stew for the men.

  I was missing Luke like crazy, but keeping busy helped, so I turned into a whirlwind of domestic efficiency. Every morning I would phone him, and after a few weeks this actually started to ease my pain rather than exacerbate it.

  For my birthday, James drove us to Cairns, a funny, two-storey kind of a town surrounded by rainforests and vast golden beaches, all of which seemed unusable for one reason or another. Some had salties (saltwater crocodiles) and others scorpions or snakes or jellyfish. “I know, it’s a jungle out there,” James joked when I complained.

  We smothered ourselves with mosquito cream and marvelled at the views. We wandered along the seafront and browsed the ubiquitous opal jewellery in every shop.

  On the final day we took a three-hour sailing trip out to the Great Barrier Reef where, with nothing more than a mask and snorkel, I saw the most beautiful fish I have ever seen in any TV documentary. It was like swimming in a fish tank.

  Afterwards, the crew cooked us all fresh fish and served it as we soared back over the waves towards Cairns, the sea spray lashing my face and salting my food. I had never felt so alive.

  By the end of summer everything had become clear to me. I liked my life on the farm, and I loved James more than ever. I had fallen in love with Australia too.

  I missed Luke so much that at times it was almost unbearable, but it was a pain I was learning, through force of circumstance, to live with. He seemed happy and contented living with Cliff, even, I suspected, happier and more settled than before I left. Being forced to alternate between the two of us had been difficult for him, I now realised. So yes, it was painful, but for my new life, for James, for Cliff and yes, for Luke too, that pain was a sacrifice I felt that I had to bear.

  When I got back to Surrey that September, the divorce decree was waiting for me on the doormat. I had dinner with Cliff, Luke and Jill in a swanky Italian restaurant, and we managed to enjoy ourselves, even managed to laugh, if a little wryly, about our disastrous holiday in France.

  I spent a final week closing bank accounts, changing forwarding addresses and preparing a final packing case of belongings to ship to Australia before another heartbreaking departure. Only this time, I had no doubts. This time Jill didn’t need to push me into the car.

  When I got back to Brisbane with my divorce papers, James immediately asked me again if I would marry him and this we discreetly did at the Brisbane Registry not two weeks later. We asked a single person, James’ employee Giovanni, to be present as witness. Both of us had been married before, and neither of us wanted to make a fuss. The simplicity of the ceremony didn’t stop it being one of the most beautiful days of my life.

  My life in Brissie, as I now called it, was full of new experiences, which, though unexciting to some, seemed wonderful to me. I got a part-time secretarial job with a local fruit wholesaler, helping with his accounts, and I worked around the farm whenever I could. I became an Indigenous Community Volunteer and ended up helping out at a women’s resource centre, fundraising and even giving sewing classes to Aboriginal women. If I couldn’t undo the harm that had been done by my ancestors, I could at least try to ease their pain; I could at least resist becoming yet another white person who “didn’t think much” about indigenous Australians.

  I watched James birth cows and hand rear a rejected calf. I worked, stickily, alongside the men when the mango harvest came around and smothered myself with insect lotion in the evenings so that I could sit outside and read. Life was busy and physically exhausting, but full of cuddles and laughter and sex, and with every day that passed, I felt surer that I had made the right decision.

  The human brain isn’t, I think, that good at capturing change. We’re unable to sense ourselves getting older, so we notice it in steps, when birthdays hit multiples of ten, or when we’re suddenly too old for a young person’s railcard or when a young girl in a nightclub is suddenly shocked that we are still able, at our great age, to dance.

  Equally, we don’t necessarily notice when we’re demolishing and rebuilding our lives. It all seems like chaos and mayhem as everyth
ing is pulled apart, and then like a series of tiny, exhausting steps as something new is built.

  One day I received a postcard from Luke addressed to myself and James at the farm, telling me excitedly that he had finally met Rob, Cliff’s partner, and that he was “very cool”. Seeing my name there associated with James and the farm and Australia in my fourteen-year-old son’s hand made me realise that I had made it. Step by step, I had built a whole new life for myself. Those steps had involved pain and sacrifice and joy, but everything was now as it should be for everyone concerned. All seemed right with the world with one exception.

  Though missing Luke got easier with time, and sometimes his absence no longer hurt at all, on other days I would see a child who looked like him or catch the tail end of The Simpsons and remember watching it with him, and the distress would intensify and, again, feel crippling – like an actual hole through my heart.

  At such times, I did my best to force a smile and carry on. I threw myself at farm tasks and cooked two-gallon pots of stew for the men. But if we hadn’t found a better solution, I think something within me would have died. I don’t think I could ever have been whole again without my son in my life.

  Luckily, as a result of persistent coaxing and a constant stream of luscious photos sent to Luke’s e-mail address, he eventually, after two years, capitulated and agreed to come out for a visit.

  I involved everyone in my plan to ensure that he would want to return, and in the three weeks he stayed, he drove tractors with Giovanni, went horse riding with Charlie, climbed the Glasshouse Mountains with me, learned to ride a motorbike around the farm, and went wind surfing with James.

  By the time the holidays came to an end, I thought, looking at his sun-tanned face and his relaxed smile, that we had cracked it. With Luke being an adolescent, I couldn’t, of course, be one hundred per cent sure.

  Right now, here I am, standing in Brisbane Airport, and sure enough, here he is, my flesh, my blood – my Luke – coming through passport control and pointing me out to his new girlfriend, Charlotte, at his side.

  A visit from time to time isn’t enough, of course, but it’s so, so much that I can barely stand the emotion. I squint at Luke through blurry tears of joy, and James, beside me, says, “There he is!” and squeezes my hand, and I know, finally, once and for all, that everything is as good as it can be.

  “Mum!” Luke shouts, and I cry and smile and wave.

  “Hello, son,” I say.

  COPYRIGHT

  This electronic edition published 2013

  by Black & White Publishing Ltd

  29 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh EH6 6JL

  www.blackandwhitepublishing.com

  ISBN: 978 1 84502 767 4 in EPub format

  ISBN: 978 1 84502 764 3 in paperback format

  Copyright © Nick Alexander 2013

  The right of Nick Alexander to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Ebook compilation by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore