by Lily Malone
‘I’ll leave you to it, Ella,’ Jake cut in, hefting the sander, the cord and the spare sheets of sandpaper. He nodded to her, nodded to the man, said, ‘Henry,’ rather brusquely, then left.
Henry mounted the steps. He wore tan-coloured workboots under black jeans and a short-sleeved checked blue, grey and white shirt. Unlike Jake, whose every step Ella heard as he trudged to the gate, this guy moved quiet as a cat.
‘Henry Graham, Ella.’ He held out his hand and Ella shook it.
‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Have you had a lot of people through?’
‘A fair bit of interest, yes,’ Ella fibbed. ‘It’s a prime position. You can see how close we are to town here, and it’s a lovely view of the bridge, don’t you think?’
Obligingly, Henry turned to take a look at the bridge.
‘Please come in. Feel free to have a wander through. I’ll get you that glass of wine.’ Ella opened the front door and Henry entered Irma’s house.
Out on the road, Jake’s engine fired and Ella got a lonely little pang in her chest, knowing he’d gone.
CHAPTER
9
Ella burst through the front door of the rental house half an hour later, looking for someone, anyone to tell her news …
The house sat still and quiet.
She shoved her handbag in its customary corner of the kitchen counter, tucked the remaining half-bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge and pulled off her heels. The butterfly clip came next and she shook out her hair; it was growing longer now, almost long enough to plait.
Where was everybody?
A shout from outside tugged her towards the rear of the house. Through the windows, she could see Erik and Sam wrestling, and she smiled. Even with one arm, Erik had always been the master of the wrestle, but Sam was growing stronger. The contests were more even.
Sam had a huge grin on his face, and Sam’s grin was more important than her news about a possible offer on the Honeychurch house.
Ella left them to it. Her news could wait.
In her bedroom, she threw off the rest of her day, swapping the skirt and shirt for a tank top and shorts, before slipping a pair of flat sandals on her feet and heading back to the kitchen to take another look at the vastly improved state of her fridge.
There were all sorts of bags and packages making the shelves groan under the weight. German specialty ingredients. Sausage. Foods Ella and Sam hadn’t eaten in months.
Ella took a German beer from the fridge for Erik, poured a glass of lemonade for Sam and another glass of white wine for herself, then she took those out towards Wrestlemania currently in full swing in her garden.
‘Pinned you,’ Sam shouted.
‘Never,’ Erik threw back.
Both of them looked surprised to see Ella, as if they were wrestling in the backyard of a totally different house, one in which she didn’t pay the rent.
‘Who’s winning?’ Ella asked.
Both Sam and Erik shouted, ‘Me.’
‘Okay, I give up,’ Erik said, tousling Sam’s hair before he put his hand out for the beer. Sam dusted himself off and Ella passed him the lemonade.
‘So did you sell your house?’ Erik asked.
‘Can I watch TV, Mum?’ Sam asked as soon as the conversation turned to Ella’s work.
‘Sure, Sam.’
Ella told Erik all about Henry Graham and the house. How she thought she might have interest from her first genuine buyer. Then she told him about how Jake and the lady next door recognised them.
Erik listened, muttering the occasional ‘mhmmm’, as Ella talked.
‘Do not let it worry you, Ella,’ Erik advised. ‘So you will get people talking to you about their kid doing his freestyle at his swimming lessons and how he holds his fingers, and how he strokes his arms. This is not a problem.’
‘This town doesn’t even have a pool, Erik. I don’t think anyone will be quizzing me at swimming lessons.’
Later, as they sat around the outdoor table eating spaetzle, with Erik’s own-recipe warm red cabbage salad and German sausage, talk turned to Erik’s swimming squad and training programs until they’d polished their plates and Sam asked to be excused.
‘What did you two talk about all afternoon?’ Ella asked Erik when Sam had gone.
‘Not school or study or grades,’ Erik said, scratching his fingernail around the top of his beer bottle. ‘Time for this tomorrow.’
‘I know he’s stoked to see you here.’
‘He asks if I am staying. I think he means for always.’
Not good. ‘I didn’t want your visit to confuse him, but I really needed to see you. I’ve missed you.’
‘I miss you too.’ Erik reached across the table to put his hand over hers. He rested it there for a moment, then gently slid his palm beneath hers and picked her hand up. He ran his thumb over her tendons, back and forth. ‘Will it be so terrible if we are a family again?’
His touch was pleasant, as always. Pleasant. Nice enough. That was part of the problem. Ella ached for passionate. Desperate. Mind-blowing. Frantic. ‘Please let’s not do this now. I really can’t.’
‘If you want to sell houses, you can do this in the Perth city.’
‘We’ve been through all this. I hate seeing you hurt, and I was only going to hurt you more if we stayed together. We know all that. You were there when I made my list after the last Olympics—’
‘Mhmmm. This crazy list of things you say you must do before next Olympics.’
‘They’re my goals. Don’t call them crazy,’ Ella said. ‘I made a list after Athens. I did it after Beijing. After London. Now after Rio. All the things I want to achieve before Tokyo.’
‘Sorry,’ Erik added, squeezing her palm gently. ‘You do not show me what is on your list. You guard this list like a Löwin.’
‘Like a what?’
‘Like a lioness,’ he said.
Ella tried the German term in her head. Löwin. ‘You know telling Sam about Marshall is on top of the list.’
‘I know.’
‘It was on top of the before-London list too.’
‘Mhmmm.’
Start a new career was point two. There had been a third bullet point on the page, but she’d never told it to Erik.
Stop leaning on Erik. Let him go. He deserves more from life than having a wife who loves him like a brother.
Those were the biggies.
It had never been a sudden thing, this sense of dissatisfaction with her life. It crept up on her, slowly, slowly, like a caravan park waking in school holidays. A tent zip here. A caravan door there. Then the whole park was up and the day had begun before you could blink.
Beijing Olympics came and went in 2008 and that was okay; Sam was just a baby and he’d kept her busy. Erik had gone to Beijing, coaching.
She hadn’t watched the 400m freestyle, her pet distance. She hadn’t watched the Aussie girls in the 4 x 200m freestyle relay. She hadn’t wanted to think about how a spot on that team could have been hers.
London passed in a flash, and Erik had swimmers on that Aussie team too. Those were busy years with an energetic toddler and growing boy, Ella helping with the coaching programs, and keeping corporations happy through the various sponsorship deals they secured. That’s when the bulk of their money came in.
But Rio 2016? When Erik left as part of the Australian swim contingent to the Rio Olympics, it made those 2006 Nationals seem so long ago.
‘When we get to Tokyo in 2020 it will be fourteen years since those National Trials, Erik, and I’ve done nothing with my life.’ Her voice broke. ‘Not like you. You’ve been to the Paralympics as a competitor and the last four Olympic Games as a coach. I’ve done nothing.’
‘No. No. No.’ Erik gave her one of his famous craggy-faced frowns, the one all his swimmers feared. ‘You have Sam. You have me. Now you have this new job idea and your real estate qualification.’
She gave her hand a tug and Erik let her go. ‘It’s not en
ough. Not anymore. I’m tired of feeling like an imposter in my own life. Ella, failed swimmer. Ella, Sam’s mother. Ella, Erik’s wife. It’s time to be, just, Ella.’
‘Mhmmm.’ Erik did one of his slow, drawn out German grumbles that Ella had come to learn meant he neither agreed nor disagreed, he was just considering every possible angle and taking his own sweet time about it. ‘It’s best for Marshall and for Sam to know they are father and son. But is it best for you? Hmm. This is what I don’t know.’
‘I have to do it. I have to contact Marshall. I have to try, at least.’
‘I always think Sam is my son. He is my son here.’ Erik slapped his forearm to his chest and a split opened in Ella’s ribs. Such pain in Erik’s voice.
‘Sam loves you, and you mean the world to me.’
He picked up the salt shaker and rocked it to and fro on its end. Shards of salt crystals shone where they spilled on the table. ‘But it is not enough now?’ he said.
‘Not anymore, Erik. I’m so sorry.’
He gave a big sigh and another ‘mhmmm’, flicking salt flakes one by one.
Ella took sips of her wine; Erik drank his beer. Very faintly from inside they could hear the sound of the cartoon Sam watched on TV, and a magpie scratched a beat across the iron roof. The sun was going, going, but not quite gone.
Erik drained his beer and burped gently. ‘Shall we go inside? There will be mosquitos invading very soon.’
‘Good idea. There’s a movie on tonight that Sam wants to watch. You up for some dinosaur action? It’s Jurassic World.’
‘How can I wait?’ Erik said.
* * *
Ella scrubbed cleanser into her nose and cheeks, lifted her face to the shower water and let the jets wash the foam away. There wouldn’t be enough hot water for Erik if she didn’t get out soon, but oh, how incredible the heat felt as it drummed on her shoulders. She could stay in here for hours.
She’d given up on the movie, and what with the constant replay of her conversation today with Henry Graham in her head, plus the noise of the television, it was hard to get invested in her book. She’d flipped through a magazine for a while, but in the end all the thoughts in her head demanded attention.
She didn’t swim anymore, but water was still the place where she felt most at home. Water was about solitude, and having time to think.
She leaned her forehead into the tiles, feeling the spray hit her shoulders, and sighed. You could cry in a shower, too, and no one ever knew.
She’d made it hard for everyone when she’d married the man who was her swimming coach and friend, but wasn’t Sam’s father, and she was still trying to pick a path through the rubble of that earthquake-sized mistake all these years later.
When Sam had been four, he’d come home from day care and told her that another boy asked why he didn’t call his dad, Dad, and why he called him Erik.
‘And what did you tell him, Sammy?’
‘I said I called him Erik because that was his name, silly.’
It was such a little thing in the scheme of things, whether Sam said Erik or Dad, but it made a difference to Ella.
Sam had spent so much time at swimming pools with them when he was small, not swimming—the pool was about doing the work, not having fun, and Ella rarely took him in the water—but poolside while Erik barked orders at his squad. Ella would pace beside him, taking notes and recording times and splits, writing skin-fold measurements in her book when the squad lined up for those loathed things, plus anything else Erik wanted noted about a swimmer’s program or progress.
All the swimmers called Erik, Erik.
And Ella always called Erik, Erik, not Dad, when she was talking to Sam.
When Sam started kindergarten, Ella explained it was like having a mum or a dad who was your teacher in school. You couldn’t call the teacher Mum or Dad in front of all the other kids, so you called her Mrs Robinson or Mr O’Neill. He’d been satisfied with that.
When Sam started primary school, they sat him down and told him Erik wasn’t his real father and that his real father lived a long way away. That had been fine until a cameraman shooting a commercial asked Sam to climb on his dad’s shoulders in the pool. Sam, of course, solemnly advised the cameraman he couldn’t because his daddy lived too far away.
Ella would never forget the confusion on the man’s face as he jerked out from behind the lens. She’d covered it by picking Sam up herself and arranging him like a clinging monkey on Erik’s back. ‘Erik’s not too far away. Jump on,’ she’d said.
The cameraman glued his eye back to his lens, but it was Erik’s face that had come unstuck, and that hurt Ella more. Erik didn’t deserve to suffer for something that was Ella’s mistake.
Not long after the photo shoot she sat Sam down and told him who his father was was nobody’s business except theirs; but it made Erik sad to talk about him, so maybe we just won’t until you’re older. Okay, Sammy?
‘How old?’
‘Just … older than you are now.’
Ella turned the water off and let herself drip dry in the cubicle before stepping out and drying herself properly with a towel.
She put her shorts and tank top back on, combed her hair and brushed her teeth. The television was off and Erik sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, reading the same magazine Ella had earlier shelved.
‘Sam went to bed,’ Erik said.
‘I’ll go say goodnight to him.’
Ella moved quietly to Sam’s room and opened the door a crack. His window was open and the faintest eucalypt-scented breeze stirred the air.
‘Still awake, Sam?’
‘Yeah.’
Ella eased inside and stood over her son’s bed, bending to kiss his forehead. The light from the passage was bright enough for her to see his dark eyes peeking up from the pillow but his blond hair blended with the pillow slip.
Her son’s colouring was all Marshall. It never ceased to amaze Ella why more people didn’t see it.
‘Goodnight, Sammy. Love you. Moon and back.’
‘Trampoline.’
In ten-year-old boy-speak, ‘trampoline’ meant right back atcha.
His sleepy voice mumbled, ‘Goodnight, Mum,’ as Ella shut his bedroom door.
* * *
‘Here you go,’ Ella said, dumping sheets, a rug and two pillows on the couch, turning off the wildlife documentary she’d only been half watching while she day-dreamed about how she’d handle negotiations on the Honeychurch house.
She’d say this.
Henry would offer that.
Jake will accept … what exactly?
How much would Jake think equalled a good deal?
Erik glanced up from where he’d been reading in the kitchen. ‘Your bed will be much more comfortable.’
He stood and crossed the kitchen floor to her, and Ella’s tummy fluttered because she didn’t know how to handle this moment. She didn’t think she’d ever be ready, and now here it was and she had no idea what to do.
Except say no, and mean it.
She ducked her chin, avoiding Erik’s eyes. ‘It won’t solve anything. You know that.’
‘Mhmmm. I do not know that.’ He caught her around the hips, tugging so she fell across the arm of the couch and into his lap. ‘I do not know that at all.’
His arm came around her shoulders and it was the hug she needed. A squish that offered friendship and asked nothing, and if it could only stay like that … but no. Erik’s lips touched her forehead and his fingers played with her hair and Ella heard his heart thumping clear as day where her ear lay on his chest.
Erik had the biggest, most generous heart of any man she’d ever known and she couldn’t use that generosity now. It would be cruel to him, and it wasn’t the right thing for her.
She pushed up gently. He resisted, but only for a second, then he let her go.
‘I’m sorry, Erik.’ Ella kissed his nose. ‘Thank you for coming. Is there anything else you’ll need? You should be warm enou
gh and there are more pillows in the cupboard if you need them.’
‘This is a terrible waste of a comfortable bed, I think.’
‘It’s a very comfortable couch.’
‘Mhmmm. I see you in the morning.’
‘Sleep well.’
Ella poured herself a glass of water and took it to her room. Erik moved about in the lounge: gentle vibrations and white noise, the whump of air as sheets and rugs got spread.
She undressed and pulled a singlet nightie over her head. Flicking on the bedside lamp, she climbed into cool sheets.
It took a long time for sleep to come.
Perhaps because she knew Erik was there, tossing and turning on the couch. Perhaps because she half wondered if he might knock on her door in the night and ask again to come in.
Would that be so bad? Ella asked herself, staring up at the ceiling. Would it be so wrong?
The answer was yes. It was wrong for both of them.
Ella rolled over on her pillow and swept her hair out from where it was stuck under her cheek. When she closed her eyes, the movie tape starring Henry Graham and Jake began playing again in her head.
She’d say this.
Henry would offer that.
Jake will accept … what exactly?
Jake’s answer danced dollar signs in her dreams.
* * *
‘Ella?’
Ella burst out of the most beautiful dream to find Erik by her bed. ‘What’s wrong?’
The mattress caved beside her as Erik sat. ‘You called out. I hear you.’
‘Are you sure? I’m fine.’
Erik put his hand over her brow. ‘You’re hot.’
‘I’m fine,’ Ella said, trying to sit. Erik’s weight over the sheet made that near impossible and she gave up.
Already the dream receded, draining into the sieve of her mind. It had been about Jake, and flying. They could both fly, like cockatiels. Flitting and flirting through the trees.
Ella’s cheeks flamed. What had she called out? Dear God, not Jake’s name? ‘I promise you. I’m fine. Go back to bed. I’m sorry I woke you.’
The white figures on her beside clock glowed 1:07 am.
‘I did not sleep. I will sleep better if I will be here with you,’ he said.
