by Kim Kelly
She said to Dan Ackerman: ‘I’ll never be over it.’
‘No.’ He said the word so softly, she could almost hear the stitching together of their souls, bound forever now with this secret shared.
She said: ‘At least all that might explain why I’ve been so weird – to you specifically, I mean. I’m not girlfriend material. I’m way too complicated. I should come with a warning label.’
She’d meant that as a joke, an acid one between mates, but he looked away, up at the bridge; probably disengaging from the remains of his own romantic fantasies, or so she presumed. She closed her eyes, rested her head on the back of the seat: relieved; scoured out, burnt out, devastated, and yet relieved. She told him again: ‘Thank you for being such a good friend, Dan. I can’t tell you how much you’ve helped, just by listening. I don’t know what would’ve happened if you hadn’t run after me tonight.’
He didn’t reply. Several minutes went by before he asked her: ‘What do you want to do now?’
That was a very good question. She didn’t want to go back to Flower Street; she wished she could click her fingers and be home with her dad right now, pretending that none of this had happened, as per usual, resuming the snug confines of denial. She wished she was curled up on the couch at Gallipoli Street, watching a late-night movie, she and her dad passing a tub of Neapolitan ice-cream between them. But she had to go back to Flower Street whether she wanted to or not: she’d run out without purse or keys; she needed to change – she needed to shower. She needed to sleep. She needed to think about maybe packing a bag and going home for a week.
She asked Dan, and she was only joking again: ‘You don’t feel like driving to Port Kembla tonight, do you?’
‘Where?’ He turned to her, grim frown seeming confused once more.
She said: ‘Port Kembla, home, as in Dad home – near Wollongong. And no, I’m not serious. I wouldn’t ask you to drive for an hour and a half —’
‘I know where Port Kembla is,’ he said with the deepest reaches of that baritone, so gentle, so pensive. ‘I’ve never been there myself, but that’s where my grandfather was born – Mount Kembla, anyway, his father was a miner there, when he first arrived from Germany. They lived at Kembla until – doesn’t matter. I just mean it’s a bit strange, isn’t it, like there’s some kind of echo going on between us, you and me.’
Time seemed to tilt; her chest tightened not with anxiety but with those threads of gold thickening, though she was too post-fraught exhausted now to know them for what they were. The ancestral footsteps that had brought them here together were as real and ethereal as the lights on the bridge, a line of electric stars leading to this very spot on the globe, though she wasn’t inclined to see them as such at this moment, either.
No. No more make-believe, she told herself.
‘I’m happy enough with the coincidence that made you walk in on the ape brigade when you did,’ she told Dan, words sharp from her aching throat; aching head. She steered back to practicalities: ‘Is it okay if you drive me back to Flower Street, please? If they’ve moved on, I’ll stay there. If not, I’ll call my brother and see if I can stay with him.’ Calling Nick was the last thing she wanted to do; though she was looking forward to seeing him tomorrow, to saying hello on the train without wanting to move carriages, she didn’t want to explain to him what had happened tonight, never mind what had happened with Alan Hadley – Nick would make a fuss, he would tell their dad, and her brother and father would both end up in prison then. She didn’t want to lie to him, either. She didn’t want to confront any more of anything, not tonight. Her epiphany just now at the source of all her fear hadn’t made her any less scared – of everything. She asked Dan: ‘Is it okay if you come into the house with me?’
‘Sure,’ he said, turning the key in the ignition. ‘Of course.’
He looked over his shoulder to check for non-existent traffic; she didn’t see how upset he was; nor did she see the effort it took him to hide it from her.
From the street, she could see a light on at the front of the house – Harriet’s room – lamplight soft through a crack in her curtains, but otherwise all was dark and hushed. It was only a little after half-past nine, yet it felt later, quieter, as if the police had just been through to break up a party.
She gave Dan a deep-breath shrug of, Here goes, and knocked on the door, calling out, ‘Hello, Harriet? It’s only Addy – forgot my key.’ When I ran from this house. How can I live in this house anymore? She’d avoided pretty much the whole small city of Wollongong since the night of her school formal, except for the necessity of the train station; she wasn’t going to be able to avoid the University of Sydney so easily, even if she did find somewhere else to live. She tapped on the window, too: ‘Sorry!’ Then she waited a few moments; if need be, she would get in the back way, ask Dan to give her a leg up onto the kitchen roof and break in via the dodgy lock on her bedroom window above, but she’d rather not do that if she didn’t have to – it would mean dragging herself half a block around to the back lane and wrestling with the old gate. After a second tap on the window and an, ‘Are you there, Harriet?’ she finally heard a murmur inside: ‘For God’s sake.’
A thump and creak of floorboards and the door flew open: Harriet, not quite looking herself. With dishevelled bed hair but still wearing jeans and blouse, she had evidently retired early to pass out.
‘Thanks,’ Addy said, from the doorstep, Harriet standing in the way, perhaps grasping the edges of the door and the frame for balance, her face like melted wax.
‘Hm.’ She looked Addy up and down, eyes red, still drunk, but sober enough to know what she said next: ‘You’re going to have that laundry door repaired.’ She humphed and glared: ‘I’m not paying for it.’
‘Yes, you are.’ Addy was beyond too tired for this; she was five miles past petty anger and bitchy spats; she couldn’t know it yet, but she’d never cop anything like this again. ‘Excuse me.’ She stepped forward, forcing Harriet to move back and let her through, as she added: ‘You invited those animals into the house, you can clean up their mess.’
Halfway down the hall, she heard Harriet say to Dan, ‘I don’t know what you see in her.’
Dan said nothing; he’d barely said a word on the way back here – not that Addy had noticed. Her mind had been ticking over what she might do in this case or that case, backwards and forwards and round and round. And now, in the lounge, she saw a chaos of records and tapes scattered across the floor, half of them hers; her telephone book had been knocked off the top of the piano and its contents of takeaway menus, random notes and cards spilled everywhere – her last appointment reminder from the Women’s Clinic looked up at her as a final violation of her person.
She bent down to gather it all together again, consumed by the idea that tonight must be a kind of goodbye, in every sense. She could not continue living here. But where will I go? How will I move? How will I get my wardrobe back down the stairs? I don’t want to leave Roz. Will she come with me? Or will I find a little flat by myself? With a writing window. And No Name. Can I do that? I’m too scared. It was all too overwhelming to think about.
‘I’ll do this.’ Dan began stacking the pizza boxes that were lying about open on the coffee table, half-eaten slices of garlic and mushroom, marinara, supreme – they were the best pizzas, piled high with topping, now a small, sad monument to uncaring, to waste. It looked like a neutron bomb had gone off midway through their feasting, vaporising all trace of humanity; rats scurrying off to destroy someone else’s place after running out of grog, she thought more reasonably. ‘You do what you need to do, Addy,’ Dan said, somehow gentle and firm about it at the same time. ‘I’ll stay here. At least until Roz gets in.’
Was there a more decent guy on earth? Indeed, what on this earth did he see in her? This used-up, screwed-up thing that was all she could see of herself. He was still in his work clothes, and under the harsh light of the overhead bulb she could see now how grubby he was from hi
s day; how washed out he looked, near as grey as his overalls.
She said: ‘You’re having a fun Saturday night, aren’t you.’ I’m so, so sorry. ‘Thank you for caring, but you really don’t have to stay.’
He said: ‘If it bothers you that I’m here, I’ll go. It wouldn’t seem right to leave you alone, though. I’d prefer to stay.’ The tone said he wasn’t going to argue about it.
She almost gasped at his kindness: ‘That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.’
‘Yep. Nice.’ He took the load of pizza boxes out to the kitchen. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ he asked her as he went; she could hear his boots crunching through the soap powder on the floor there.
‘No thanks,’ she said. Although she’d have eaten live spiders for a warm, milky tea right then, she needed a shower more; she told him, already turning for the stairs: ‘I’m going to get myself cleaned up.’
She felt mean as she left him, but she couldn’t help it. The soap powder that had gone down the neck of her uniform had begun to irritate her skin – she had to wash it off this minute. She needed the heat and thrum of the water on her back, its arms around her, predictable, steady – clean, clean, clean. She couldn’t have said how long she stood there – as long as it took – she didn’t care. She scrubbed and sudsed every inch of herself; she shampooed and conditioned her hair. If she could have fallen asleep inside this warm-ball cocoon of steam she’d made of the bathroom, she would have. But she wanted that cup of tea, too. And she needed to get that damn washing done – it was still growing a new life form down there in the machine.
Back in her room, she stood dumbly for a moment, wrapped in her towel, her damp skin slapped by the cold, wondering what she should wear. It didn’t seem appropriate to put on a nightgown – she never wore a nightie of any sort beyond bedroom or bathroom – but her mind had turned to such mush she couldn’t make sense of the other options. She opened her wardrobe doors and all her frocks stared back at her, each one a historical document, of a woman and her time. She saw them more clearly for what they really were now, though: a longing for her mother, a need to have her near somehow. A need to know the unknowableness of her. Not since Addy was fifteen and earning enough at part-time work to buy her own clothes, had she bought any frock off the rack. True, the cheaper dresses in places like Town Hall Variety and other department stores were so repulsive she wouldn’t want to wear them, anyway, but that wasn’t why she had obsessively collected so much apparel from the decades, the days, of her mother’s existence.
How she wanted real arms around her. Loving arms. The last person to hug her had been Max Kovacs, half a hug with one huge arm, crushing her at the boxing last night, the same pulverising hug he gave everyone. Before that, Roz had hugged her drunkenly on their way to the winos’ bottle shop the Saturday night before last, and that was really only because Addy had tripped up the gutter in the dark and stubbed her toe.
The chill had no more time for idle melancholy, though, and it forced Addy to find what she needed more immediately: some warm clothes. She chose thick black tights and a skivvy – her favourite skivvy, a purple one. Then she found the hair dryer as well, where she’d left it, in Roz’s room; she flicked the switch to give her wet head a quick blast. The whine of the hair dryer brought a soothing ordinariness, of doing the simple things that needed to be done, and she hummed along tunelessly with it – wrrrrrrrrrr, wrrrrrrrrr, wrrrrrrrrr. After a minute or two, she imagined she could hear a piano accompaniment: the bass notes of the Moonlight Sonata, the sorrow-tinted wistfulness of the first movement in particular. And she did allow herself a smile at that: madness had its compensations, didn’t it?
But when she turned off the hair dryer, the music continued. Someone was actually playing the piano. It couldn’t have been Harriet, who was no doubt at present still incapable of the hand–eye coordination required; and she never played Beethoven. Is it a record? Addy wondered. No, it surely wasn’t – she knew every note and every whisper of her own copy, and hers was the only copy in the house. It was either Dan, or No Name, or someone Addy didn’t want to converse with, whoever it might have been. She lingered on the landing, half annoyed at the intrusion, half comforted by the music. While it wasn’t the happiest piece ever written, it was so perfectly formed; a wordless essay on beauty that always brought her butterflies, it was impossible not to be lifted by it. And whoever was playing, they were good at the job; these were practised hands.
She took a few steps down the stairs; she had to know who it was. And she saw it was Dan. At the piano seat. Playing with no music on the stand.
What? But he plays the guitar, in a post-punk jingle-jangle band, she thought. Rhythm guitar – the workmanlike jangle to the jingle … Evidently, not this night.
She looked at her own hands, touched her still slightly damp hair, looked at her toes curled round the edge of the stair: she was here.
He played on, slowly, deliberately, letting those final chords of the movement drift; and before she could even think to make any sound of appreciation for it, he was into the second, a kaleidoscope shift, butterflies dancing, beginning to break free. She realised she’d heard him play this sonata before – sometime in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Oh, please – really? She let the delight of it take her for a moment, a laugh escaping. He kept going a few bars more, but he fumbled, laughing too: ‘And I jiggered that up, didn’t I.’ Then he turned in the seat to look at her: ‘Hi.’
‘Hello.’ Her head swam off with her heart: who would not be in love with him? Playing Beethoven in grey overalls. After tidying up the lounge room. For real. But it was the wrong, wrong time. She reached out for the bannister, dizzy.
‘You okay?’ he asked, getting up, moving towards the stairs, towards her, concerned.
‘I’m all right.’ Liar. She felt her balloon loosening; she sat straight down, on the step. Breathe.
‘You don’t look all right,’ he said, moving closer, leaning a hand on the step below her. She tried to focus on his eyes: they weren’t completely brown but flecked with gold and blue; unusual.
‘I just need that cup of tea, I think.’ Her voice had sounded far away, trapped in a bottle at the bottom of the ocean. I will never be free of this.
‘Sure. I’ll put the kettle on. Stay there.’ He left for the kitchen; she listened to the clank of cup on bench, the pop of the lid on the teabag tin; the swift whistle of the kettle boiled not long ago. ‘How do you have it, Addy?’
‘Just milk, please.’ Don’t care.
He brought it up to her, there on the step; he even gave it to her handle outwards: so thoughtful. He said: ‘Maybe you want to take it up to your bed?’
She shook her head: ‘I’m all right. Really.’ I am only a small load of multiple disasters. Load? ‘I’ve got to get a load of washing on.’
‘I don’t think so,’ the smile-frown said. ‘Not now. It’s past ten o’clock.’
‘I can’t leave it as it is,’ she told him, panic regrouping around this nearest triviality. ‘It’s already stinking – I left it in the machine yesterday. And I’ve got to get up early in the morning, for the train home. I have to do it now.’
‘I’ll deal with the washing,’ he said, so mildly, but in that same no-argument way.
Why are you so kind to me? She was just like a stray cat being coaxed to trust; like No Name had been when she’d first met him, hiding in the tall tin-fence shadows of the back yard. She couldn’t yet see herself for what she was: how worthy she was of kindness. And love.
His loveliness did calm her, though; he helped her tether that balloon again just by holding her there with his eyes, wanting to help. He said: ‘You can have a sleep-in in the morning, anyway.’
‘No, I can’t.’ That brought her back with a jolt; she wanted to touch his face, to touch something of his many sweet thoughts. But she wouldn’t do that; she gave him the nuts and bolts of it: ‘I’ve got to get the eight o’clock train.’
‘No, you don’t.
I’m driving,’ he said, eyebrows raised somehow smugly, before he explained: ‘Your brother called, when you were in the shower. He wanted to check the train time or something. We got talking and, I don’t know, I just offered to drive. I said I’d pick him up on the way through.’
‘My brother called?’ Addy didn’t know what was more unbelievable: that Nick had actually picked up a phone to call her; that he would need to check the time of the train they always caught; or that he and Dan had had a chat. That last seemed so out of the realms, she had to ask: ‘What did you talk about?’
‘Not much, not for long,’ he said quickly, a little awkward about it. ‘Just the fight last night, said he’d cracked his cheekbone, had a concussion and all that. And that’s when I offered to drive.’
She did not believe that at all, but she couldn’t have said exactly why. It was just beyond odd – like the front door was about to burst open with men in white coats come to take her away, papers signed by a Dr Ackerman, charging in on a zebra. Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad idea. She sipped her tea: that was real enough; in fact, it was excellent, just the way she liked it, though he’d never made her a cup of tea before. She asked him, testing: ‘And you play the piano, too?’
‘Ah. Hm.’ He blushed; he was so beautiful, the way his cheeks filled with rose-coloured gorgeousness. ‘Yeah. Bit of fancy maths, that is. I’ll do anything to try to impress a girl.’
The tenderness he sent with that gave her another jolt; she caught a glimpse of her own power, its wayward tail; she couldn’t decide or dismiss whatever it was he felt for her. And she couldn’t deny what she felt for him, either. That wasn’t fancy maths. It was quite simple, really.
