Loving, Faithful Animal

by Josephine Rowe

  She lays a hand over her stomach, wordlessly apologising to the something gaining mass there. No, she can’t. With or without him, she can’t have this one.

  She might tell Stell.

  And Stell will say: You little idiot, Evvie. After everything. You still let him put it in you?

  She won’t tell Stell, who is already bored, or uneasy anyway, just with being here. Moving bits of paper around on the table. Flipping through junkmail catalogues, the girls’ school exercise books, anything to keep her hands busy. There’s Ru’s report of space. Did you know …? And then the names of the moons of Mars.

  Where’re the girls today?

  God only knows. If you can find them you can keep them. Evelyn keeps hunting through the dishrack for a cup that isn’t grimy or hairlined with cracks. Was the drive okay?

  The drive was fine. Don’t happen to have anything stronger than tea?

  Bad news?

  No, no news. Only that it’s … It couldn’t hurt to celebrate a bit, could it.

  Oh, right. Well I think there’s vodka back there somewhere, if Lani hasn’t sniffed it out.

  That’ll do.

  Or no, it was rum maybe. White rum. Will it work with cordial?

  Whatever it is is fine. Estelle rummages in her paper-straw bag, producing plastic tubs of sugar-coated almonds, macaroons like little crescent moons nestled close to each other. Leftovers from her event-planning work, someone else’s Yarra Valley wedding. She snaps the lids off, as though to coax her nieces from hiding. As though they might come running in miaowing like cats do at the sound of a can-opener.

  The freezer is choked with ice, barricaded by captive packets of peas and beans, vegetable medleys. The rum, it’ll take some excavating, Ev says.

  Forget it. Tea’s fine. And Ev knows that it isn’t, isn’t fine at all, but she closes the freezer door and resumes her search for passable china.

  Whenever she visits, her sister brings word of their parents. Dispatches, Ev thinks of them as, because Stell knows better than to tell too much, to throw light into the gulf that separates their lives from hers. But she knows enough. She knows their father can manage stairs again, after cracking a hip in the least heroic of ways; not falling in the lunge pen but slipping in the shower, like an old man, though he isn’t one, really, not yet. Not far past sixty. (She had the girls write him a card, a get-well-soon, but if it got a response she never heard about it.) She knows, too, that their mother has finally won her twelve-year campaign to move permanently up-coast, to the country place; that they’d be shifting everything there after the summer rolled out of the way.

  Also through Stell: cards and small gifts for Ruby and Lani. Trinkets for the kind of girls their grandparents hoped they were or might be. Never money. They didn’t trust Ev, after the Corvette.

  Evelyn worries over the sort of news running back across the wire. What is broken. What is missing, presumed hocked. The state of the house. How wild the girls are. How tall the grass, how ice-locked the freezer. And so the cups. The cups, at least.

  She places a mug—unremarkable, save that it is undamaged—in front of her sister, whose fingernails immediately go to work on the tea tag. Sit down, will you please? You make me jumpy when you’re hovering.

  Evelyn sits, with paring knife and a sweet backyard lemon, cutting wedges and arranging them around a saucer to cover the fact of there being no milk.

  Estelle stares at her. You look better, you know.

  Do I? Knowing better than to ask, Better than when?

  I’d say. It’s always the same thing, when he leaves. You look absolutely harrowed for the first little while. As though he’s managed to belt you up from the inside as well. But after he’s been gone a few weeks …

  She leans in close then, holding her smoke, scrutinising. Reading Ev’s eyes, as though trying to peer through to some secret lacuna. Finally she sits back, satisfied.

  It’s like the lights come back on, she says.

  Evelyn feels an urge to bite into one of the lemon wedges, to feel the bright rush in her mouth, cutting through the unwelcome metallic taste. A desire for the burst of vesicles at the pressure of her tongue. She does so, peeling the yellow strip of rind away from her teeth, but if Stell thinks this odd, she doesn’t let it show.

  The lights come back on, Stell says, again. And when they do I think, Ah, this time she’ll wake up. Maybe this time. You know, there was a while—okay, truth be told it was years. For years after you left. I’d go into your room and I’d go through everything, just because I could, just because you weren’t there to get miffed about it. Your books, even. I read The Living and the Dead two years early, out of spite.

  That’s a pretty industrious kind of spite; I never finished a page of that. Evelyn pushes the lemon plate forward. I thought we were okay friends, back then.

  Stell gives her a look. So did I. But you never even called. Anyway. I came around to realising that whatever was still in your room was only there because you hadn’t wanted it. None of it mattered to you, or not badly, anyway.

  I wrote. And it was only things, says Evelyn, not believing herself for an instant and probably not sounding like it.

  My point, though—I knew that. I knew none of it mattered. But for Mum, it was like you’d died or something. The way people get funny when kids die? It stayed like a fucking Evelyn shrine in there. It was only a few years ago that Mum decided, enough! Enough’s enough, and—

  Stell blows smoke at the ceiling, then sends her words up there after it. Look, if he’s gone for good. If he’s really gone for good, then why don’t you?

  Why don’t I what?

  Oh, don’t be thick. Don’t pretend to be, she hisses, grinding her cigarette into the shell’s iridescent hollow. They’ll help, if it means getting the girls out of this …

  Out of this what?

  This. Situation.

  Situation?

  I’m not saying. Jesus, don’t twist my words, will you? I’m just saying it’s an option. You do have options.

  After everything, would you?

  She spreads her hands at the room. In a heartbeat, is what she means.

  God, you’ve always been on their side.

  But Stell says she’s on no-one’s side. I’m Switzerland, she says, from the other side of the table.

  Ev shakes her head. No. I’m not crawling back, end of story.

  Though sometimes she doesn’t even have to close her eyes and she’s there. On that gate, hitching a leg over. Breathing air that smells of lucerne and sun-cracked leather. There’s the off-the-track mare who trusts her so completely she doesn’t even need a bridle, doesn’t even need to saddle her. Ev can just throw a blanket over her broad back and guide her by the flimsiest of ropes, the gentlest of tugging at the tough old mouth. Could almost guide her by thought alone, thisaway thisaway, down to the wide tannin river and right out into the middle, the mare wet to her flanks and the current sucking sweetly around Evelyn’s ankles.

  It’s all still going on, up there—the country place—her father’s horses still velvet-nosing his shoulder, and her mother going straw-hatted and cork-heeled to the Sunday race meets. On wet moony nights eels still migrate from dam to river, rippling through the sodden grass in grey droves, biblical. Yearlings still breeze circles round the lunge pen, Aemon turning them into bankers, spinning them into dusty gold.

  A horse is a stupid animal, when it comes right down to it. That was Aemon, his denim-philosophising as she watched him long-reining a blue roan.

  A horse’ll run itself to death, eat itself to death, drink itself to death if you let it. It’s the only animal that needs to be learnt restraint.

  Evelyn still doesn’t know if this is a true thing, or just idle talk, or idle talk with something edifying woven into it, idle talk she was meant to heed.

  But that roan. His colouring alm
ost birdlike. Blue Boy there in the near-dark, Aemon pivoting with him; Ironbark when he raced. And after him came Old Pardon, Kiley’s Run, Wind’s Message—their father named all his horses after Banjo Paterson poems, bush ballads, convinced the spirit of the gentleman gambler came down and touched their fetlocks, brought luck. Whether it was luck or whether it was Aemon, they could move alright, could earn.

  There were afternoons, huge and aimless, when no-one else was in the house; no Jack, no girls. Just Evelyn sitting on the back steps with the paper, weekend supplements in loose sheaves sifting all around her, held down against the breeze by a coffee mug or sandwich plate. The raceform across her knees as she scanned for names she might recognise. It was only the once she went so far as to take herself into town, to place a meek each-way bet on Come-By-Chance. (No location was assigned it, not a thing to help one find it; she’d always liked that one herself, remembers the messmate burr of her father’s voice reading it.) Standing there in the fug of the TAB while leery dropkicks with nicotine beards watched her watching the screens. The colt was third-to-favourite and he came in right where he was expected to, and Evelyn made her money back to the dollar. She felt like breaking something. Like laughing and like breaking something in the same instant. But she went quietly to the window and ran the ticket through, collecting the few dollars that were neither losings nor takings—or were both at the same time—and spent them on a bottle of sweet cider along with a doughy eclair from the chain bakery. Both were sweating by the time she got them home to sit again on the back steps, licking slicks of melted icing from her fingers and chasing it down with starry mouthfuls of cider as Belle wriggled out from under the lantana, fur festooned with cobwebs and blossoms. Evelyn tore off bits of the pastry and tossed them up for the collie to catch, wondering: When had life become defined by lack? When had it started taking its shape from the things that were no longer in it?

  And now here’s Stell—on whose orders, exactly?—still waiting for an answer as though she hasn’t already had one.

  Look, Stell asks. What is it you actually want?

  But Evelyn can’t say. She wants, badly … There’s no way of putting it. It’s all back there somewhere, behind her. Irretrievable. She wants for the burnt-orange beginning. The Jantzen. The Corvette. Those things. But there’s no vehicle can get her back to it, she knows that. And there are public places where she wants to scream, Help. Where she might’ve even mouthed it once: Somebody, please. Pulling a bread bag down from a wire rack at the supermarket. But there’s never anybody.

  They never forgave me, about that bloody car. And it was just a car, after all. After that, all they ever gave me was ultimatums.

  You’ll put a crick in your neck, my love, looking back like that.

  Right. Lot’s wife. What was her name, even? Did she even get a name?

  Estelle shakes her head. No. Or if she did, well I don’t remember it. They never told us.

  Evelyn almost tells, then. About the child. Almost asks, What should I …? But as if to preempt that horror, Stell scrapes her chair back and says, Anyway. I’m sick to death of running over this same old mucky ground. You’re going to do what you’re going to do, and the rest of us will just have to—

  She pulls herself up then, sudden. Goes so far as to cover her mouth. Sorry, she says. Evvie. We do love you, you know?

  Evelyn nods, but there’s something about the way she’s said it, leaning so heavy on the word do, that makes it worse than the first, unfinished part, and Evelyn wants her gone.

  And soon enough, she is. Going, slinging her bag off the back of the chair and onto the crook of her slender arm, clamping a hand down over her cigarette packet, leaving the biscuits to go soft on the table. Creasing her eyes up in a way that looks like smiling, almost. And Evelyn venturing an arm around her, in a way that is embrace, almost, feeling her ribs there beneath the creamy silk.

  Next time.

  Next time.

  Almost. From the shade of the doorway she watches her sister back that zippy little Japanese number down the drive, hand fluttering out the window and a beep for goodbye. Back to Yuppieland. Jack’s voice there, in her head—he’s poisoned everything.

  It was meant to be a start-afresh, this place. A way of bricking over the squalor and damp of their early unsettled years together, when they’d jumped from house to house, running out on the rent once or twice, when they had to. Or when it seemed fair to. The roachy one-bedroom flat in Collingwood; the carved-up St Kilda mansion, where syringes sprung up in the garden like weeds; the dilapidated bungalow that backed onto the railway line in Fairfield. But she figures them happiest in that ramshackle weatherboard, with its moaning hot-water system, its peeling linoleum. Suspicious spills on the carpet—they’d laid their mattress over these and he’d used his rough hands to massage baby oil into her swelling belly, into her achey back and feet, aching himself from concreting jobs and shelf-stacking jobs and nightwatchman jobs, from dawn shifts and swing shifts and long overnights. And it wasn’t the coast, but there was water, close enough she could walk there. Or waddle there, after a fashion. Spread his old coat on the riverbank and doze there like a cat, belly pointed towards the late summer sun. Once waking up to find him standing over her, watching her snooze.

  Reckoned I might find you here.

  She’d sat up, sleep-sozzled. You’re off early. Tell me they didn’t …

  Yep. The arse again. Here’s your hat, hey, what’s your hurry?

  And still, that time was best. It wasn’t till later—towards the end of that year, or the beginning of the next—that he got rough. It might’ve started when he was loving her. His forearm across her collarbone, pinning her down. Thumbs working deep into her thigh flesh. With her lying there thinking that’ll bruise, that’ll bruise. Sometimes he played it like a game. Sometimes not. Letting her lift herself a little way from the mattress, only so far, then pushing her back down to it. Just like the way he spoke to her sometimes—talking her up and then knocking her back, flattening her.

  God you’re beautiful. You’re so fucking … when you wear your hair like that. Do other men like that? Those other men you screw around with? Do they like it when you wear your hair like that?

  And he hadn’t believed, she couldn’t get him to believe, at first, that Lani was his. He wanted proof.

  Proof? Well you could frigging look at her.

  I could look at her if she could shut the fuck up for a second.

  But the baby didn’t look like either of them then. When she was a tiny thing, Evelyn used to bundle her into the Corvette and just drive around. Anywhere. Any old where, in any direction. She’d had to, those early years, with all the trembling and the squall—Lani howling like the earth itself splitting open, and there was not a thing to calm her but to carry her shaking and tear-soaked out to the car. She’d lull right down then, being strapped into her carrier on the passenger side, and by the end of the street she’d be still. Then when Ru came along she was a sturdier creature but of course her too, doing Big Eyes from the carrier and Evelyn doing her best not to get pulled over, with Lani sitting propped up behind the wheel, her sleepy child-weight against Evelyn’s body like a kind of blessing and the seatbelt encircling both of them, safe enough.

  She’d drive until both girls slept, and sometimes longer, however far she could get on half of what was in the tank—god that thing just drank fuel—until the petrol gauge told her: Home now. And even then. She’d had to will her foot down on the brake. Because everything held and breathing in that small space was her own. Hers alone, it felt. And she’d thought about it. Whether or not Jack was back there at the house, sleeping off some poison, or disappeared again, or checked back into the repat, tranqued-out with neuroleptics and hobbycrafts, a different kind of stranger to her. She had thought about it. Ru dozing in the bassinet there, and her oldest curled against her not seeming to mind or to wake at the jostle of knees when Evelyn
switched between gears. Maybe twenty dollars in her purse and somehow a week until pension but if she left her ring and, fine, her watch too, as collateral—she’d done all that before—that might get her a full tank of petrol which would get them as far as … where? Not far enough. Not the full night of hours it would take to get in sight of her parents’ white bullnose verandah. But if she could. With the girls like limp sleepy kittens from the long trip. They wouldn’t be able to tell her—even if she didn’t say she was sorry—wouldn’t be able to tell her no.

  But she could never quite bring herself to. Run out on him like that. And it was never as simple as money. It was never as simple as pride, because she’s not sure she’s ever had much of that either. Or if she does, it hasn’t turned out to be worth much, not when it comes right down to it.

  Something else, then. When he’d brought Belle home, rescued her, you could see it. The good that was there. She could wait it out, she’d thought. The war in him. She could lie there beside him while he dreamed that whole mess backwards, thrashing out as he sometimes would, as he sometimes needed to. Step for step, just walk backwards through the rubber trees and come out the nearer side, the way he’d gone in.

  She’d thought of it like that—imagined it as being something like diving into water from a great height. You just had to make sure the water was as deep as the fall, or else you were cooked. A wheelchair case. He was still resurfacing. He’d come up eventually; she’d always believed so. Come up gasping, and she’d be there.