Small Mercies

by Richard Anderson

  Was she really going to leave him? He refused to believe it. What else could he do? If there was another man, he might have been able to confront him, warn him off or something before it was too late. But if Ruthie was leaving him, she was doing it for an idea: a possible life; possible men. Women did that. Of all the men he knew and had heard of who’d split with their wives, almost all of them had been having an affair of some sort. There was always ‘someone else’, even if they weren’t the cause of the breakdown. The men in his world traded one relationship for another; women did not.

  Ruthie continued, ‘It’s like you said before: what if we have another drought like this in, say, three years? And another one three years after that? Do you want to live like that? There are people, experts, who say we might be in the process of destroying the planet. There’s no turning back.’

  ‘I thought you were sceptical about those people.’

  ‘I was. I’m not so sure now. When I look around, I can’t see any goodness: not in the climate, or the people, or the politicians, or our systems.’

  ‘When did this happen to you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t feel it all the time. But sometimes I think this is the end of everything good. We’ve brought our sons into an awful world. So I think I must seek out the best I can.’

  ‘You mean we have to sell the farm. It’s the only way to avoid drought, as well as finance the way you want to live.’

  ‘I’m not insisting on anything. I’m just thinking about the future, because I can’t put off thinking about it anymore. We can’t.’

  The sound of the party in the bar rose up and drifted in through their open window.

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a work in progress, I guess.’

  ‘I think I’ll get some sleep.’ Dimple clicked his bedside light off, then rolled over and pulled the blankets to cover himself. He wasn’t going to sleep, and guessed Ruthie knew that. But he wasn’t ready to hear more bad news. He had always been aware that while she had chosen to come with him to this life, it was still his life. Even as he had joked about it, he’d known she’d done her time and now deserved a little more. But how to provide it without ruining his own life?

  She was crying now, her sobs stifled to small intakes of breath. He turned back and placed his arms around her, and she pushed her wet face onto his shoulder.

  ‘Just give it the 48 hours,’ he said. ‘Let’s not think about anything until then.’ He could feel her nodding against him.

  ‘I don’t want to leave you, but I’m afraid of not being alive.’

  He gave her a squeeze, and she sniffed and sat up. ‘God, I’m pathetic. Talking about being brave and living life to the full, but being pathetic.’ She got up. ‘I’m going to go to the bathroom.’

  She went out the door, and left Dimple wondering if the top of his head might blow off with all the stuff he’d been given to think about today.

  In the morning, they were awake early, as always, with first light finding its way through their lone window. Dimple got up and padded his way down to the toilets. There was no one else around. When he got back to the room, Ruthie was sitting up in bed, the sheet wrapped round her, her shoulders bare, and her smile suggestive.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you certainly keep me guessing,’ and got into bed with her.

  Six

  As they walked down the stairs to breakfast, she was humming in the way she reserved for her best days in the garden. She knew Dimple would not know what to make of it, but she had decided in her sleep to be impulsive — if she felt good enough to hum, she would hum.

  ‘Let’s find a coffee shop,’ she said almost gaily when they reached the ground floor. ‘Burraga would have a reasonable coffee shop, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘These days, everywhere has a reasonable coffee shop.’ He had expected she might be morose this morning after the night’s conversation. He was obviously mistaken.

  She took his hand and led him out the door. It was another perfect blue-sky day: not hot, and the breeze was light. They walked in the opposite direction to the one they had the day before, and within a block found two coffee shops that were just opening.

  ‘This one,’ said Ruthie, choosing the smaller of the two. They sat outside under an umbrella not far from the road. In a big town, it would have been a terrible choice. In Burraga, to Ruthie, it felt kind of convivial. The few cars going past added interest and some energy.

  Dimple ordered fried eggs and bacon, like they might at home. Ruthie tried to find something strange on the menu to signify she was being impulsive and ready to throw away the old rules and try anything. But then she realised she was doing it for the sake of it and that was being fake. So she elected to have the same as Dimple, with sourdough, which seemed funny and out of place. Even though the eggs and bacon weren’t as skilfully cooked as they would have been at home, they tasted really good. Without the weight of responsibility, she thought.

  Dimple had hardly spoken. Now he had a city newspaper to read, a real one, and was intent on privately enjoying an experience that mostly didn’t exist anymore. She liked that. It felt like so many good things were disappearing, it was important to savour them as they slipped through your fingers. And Dimple might even have thought that about her. As she watched him, engrossed in an article, his ill-fitting reading glasses sitting slightly lopsided on his head, she wondered if she could ever leave him. It would come with so much pain. And maybe some relief and even opportunity. How brave would you have to be? And did you ever really leave someone you had spent more than two decades with? Even if you moved overseas, they would still be with you in so many ways.

  And what would it be like to have sex with someone else? She couldn’t remember the few encounters she’d had before she took up with Dimple. The details, anyway. She could recall the boys and the men, and the sorts of things they’d done together, but the intricacies of the act, how passionate, how good, how big, were a blur. Maybe biology did that to your memory as a protective measure. It served no purpose to be remembering how good an ex was in the bedroom. Now she could hear him swallowing, breathing. Those noises got louder as you got older. She could live without the noises.

  How much could you really know another human being? It was a tiresome question, but suddenly pertinent, wasn’t it? She knew him so well, but not completely. She didn’t know he could write a love letter to Ellie. He had never written her one, nor written anything else much, except business letters and an occasional speech. But she knew he was capable of inebriated flights of fancy — to a childish level — so his confession wasn’t a shock. And there were male rules and insecurities that guided him and prevented him from doing things, which she would never understand. He hated to show weakness, of course, but he fought against showing it, even in things he was obviously weak at. He didn’t like to look soft, except when men in general thought it was okay to be soft: the death of a child; a crisis in the career of a significant sportsman; the loss of a good dog. She didn’t care to understand these things, but acknowledging that he held them tight was part of understanding her husband.

  It meant there were things about him she would never know. Not big things, but secrets all the same. And things that were big enough, such as did he care more about her or the farm? When it really came down to it, would he rather have her or the place he loved so much? At this age and stage, she didn’t begrudge him loving the farm. It was important to know what mattered. She would like to know what he would put first. If they both lived on, she would be around long after the farm was no longer part of their everyday. Her problem was that she loved the boys first and foremost, but they had better things to do than put her first. After them there was Dimple, her friends, the farm, and the animals, and she wasn’t sure where they aligned in the hierarchy. She was no better than he was. Except she loved him, and her childhood friend Aila, who had never married but wa
nted to, and was always surprised when she a heard that a ‘mature’ couple had separated. ‘Why?’ she would ask Ruthie. ‘Do they think it’s that good on your own? All nightclubs and buff Italian men? Serious-minded afternoon theatre with all the other grey-haired ladies? Watching the TV programs you want to watch? It gets old very quickly, as we do. Stick with whoever you are with, I say.’

  Aila was most likely right, but didn’t you have to appreciate every day of good health you had?

  Very often, the first area that a cancer spreads to is the lymph nodes in the underarm area.

  Ruthie asked the young woman serving them for another coffee, which seemed the height of indulgence. But when she asked Dimple if he wanted another, too, he shook his head impatiently.

  Being with someone else was something she had thought so little about. When she fantasised, it normally didn’t include sex. She dreamed of exquisite dinners, exotic places, and riding horses in a gallop with unknown men through endless stands of pine trees. Sometimes Dimple was nearby watching, or just there for protection if she needed it. She presumed her imagination was constrained by her age and her stage. Young women probably fantasised about sex and different partners, and had as many affairs as the men did.

  But she knew of middle-aged women who had found a new partner and rediscovered desire. It was an exciting thought, even if somehow unfair. Not that she denied Dimple very often, but she knew he always wished for more. Men just did, and there was nothing she could do about that fact. But now, in the broad, main street of Burraga, as her second coffee arrived and a ute with pig dogs in a cage on the back parked a few spaces down from her, she could feel a flush around her cheeks and her neck. ‘Typical,’ Dimple would have said if he knew. Typical that she would be horny in the most unlikely place, where gaining satisfaction was impractical. She took a deep breath, and decided to keep it to herself and not examine what it might mean. Another thing to not think about for one more day. Because thinking about the possibility that a kind of gilded cage had been dismantled would ruin the time she had with Dimple.

  ‘Do you think we could stay another night somewhere?’

  He put his paper down flat on his lap, and looked over his glasses at her as if he were deliberately imitating the cliché. ‘Sure. Where will we go?’

  ‘Maybe somewhere with a dam? Or with a mountain?’

  ‘Well, that narrows it down.’ He smiled in a pleasant, uncomplicated way. ‘Isn’t Willow Dam south-east of here? Wouldn’t be much of a detour.’ He took out his phone and tapped on it. ‘It’s an hour out of our way.’ He tapped again. ‘There are cabins there to stay at. Not far from the water, either.’

  He stretched out an arm and offered his phone, which held a photo of the cabins.

  ‘Seems fine.’

  He took the phone and looked pleased. ‘Right, then. The day’s organised.’ He picked his paper up again, gave it a little shake to straighten it, and went back to reading.

  His movements were as familiar to her as were the movements of her boys: the way he walked heavily with his chest slightly out; his habit of patting his hair when he thought a comment was too personal; the ritual of smacking his lips after something sweet; the look downwards to his right when he was thinking about something; the swearing under his breath when someone, including himself, disappointed him. She would be surprised if he knew her movements that well. He couldn’t have missed seeing them, but his brain probably didn’t record that sort of thing.

  He was a man, she reminded herself, who could murder a tube of toothpaste. She might have wasted a year of her life if she added up all the time she’d spent getting toothpaste tubes back into shape. Toothpaste had to be squeezed from the bottom up so the tube was always flat at the empty end and full at the cap end. It was simply civilisation, she’d told him, but he pretended he always squeezed from the base so he didn’t know what she was going on about.

  He wasn’t much of a snorer, at least. She had to give him that. So many of her friends’ husbands snored at a volume that would scare children. She knew that from the times they had been away camping in groups and staying in other odd places.

  She had often talked with her friends about the future, about what they might be missing or what they weren’t brave enough to reach out for. But it had only ever been a half-drunk game of fantasy. Her friends were very sensible, reliable people. They took their responsibilities — their children, their parents, their husbands, their farm businesses, their communities, their animals — very seriously. They were not the sort of people to leave those things behind. She liked them because of it, but their sense of responsibility was a silly notion. If anyone had a right to say ‘enough’, it was her friends. She wondered if she could possibly be the person to show them how.

  Dimple looked past his newspaper at his wife. She was looking into the street, deep in thought, which resulted in small smiles lightening her face. He hoped she wasn’t thinking about new lovers. That was a real turn-up for the books. How long had she been thinking about other men? Since she’d kissed that fuckwit Loman? No. Sex was never uppermost in her mind. And last night was clear proof that she wasn’t giving too much thought to other guys. Or was she? While they were doing it? That was a topic he was certainly not delving into.

  He was pleased she wanted to stay another day. He was enjoying being with her, on holiday with her — because that’s what it was, no matter how it had started out. Looking at her this morning, smiling to herself, after last night, after yesterday, she was a magic woman. He was feeling like a teenager losing his first girlfriend and knowing it was confirmation that she had never been his and was way too good for him.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ he said under his breath, causing Ruthie to direct a bent eyebrow at him, which he ignored, making out that something in an article he was reading had annoyed him.

  He had been with this woman so long, he couldn’t remember half of it. She had a right to feel unsettled and nervous about the future, and it was his job to stand by her — not moon about like a reality-TV romance contestant. But was she unsettled, or was this a crisis? It felt close to crisis, but he knew a week could be a long time in a marriage. Sometimes you just had to hang on until things improved, even when you were almost certain they wouldn’t.

  It was comforting to have a newspaper. There was nothing in it worth reading anymore, but at this moment it was good to have the feel and the protection of it.

  He remembered how amazing she’d been over Finnie. How she’d known from the earliest days. Or, at least, known there was something different about him. She had had so little prejudice about it, she hardly ever put her understanding into words. Dimple would not have known until the minute Finnie announced it, if Ruthie hadn’t guided him towards accepting the possibility. J was the sensitive one, the caring one. If Dimple was going to suspect that one of his boys was gay, it would have been J. And then it took Dimple a long time to accept the fact of Finnie’s homosexuality. He had prided himself on being broadminded about these sorts of things, more so than his mates. But gay men didn’t stay in the country for long, even now, so it was easy to keep it in the abstract. There was nothing abstract about Finnie and Finnie’s boyfriends, though.

  When his son came out, Dimple was able to say all the right words and smile to show that, like Ruthie, he had just been waiting for Finnie to share it with them. But, really, he hadn’t been waiting at all; he had almost been praying that Ruthie was wrong. When he had let slip that he was still feeling that way, it was the one time Ruthie really went for him. She had accepted that he would take time to accept who his son was, but she would not tolerate him wishing Finnie was something he wasn’t.

  Finnie was big and strong and beautiful. He was tough and physically gifted. Dimple loved to watch him play football. He had the kind of talent that Dimple wished he’d had when he was a young man. And he was modest. People loved him. Still did. There were girls, too, of cou
rse. For a long time. But Ruthie never paid much attention to them. She was nice, and enjoyed a laugh with them, but they never got the focus that J’s girlfriends did. Dimple wondered if she was a bit ashamed that Finnie’s girlfriends were being duped or something, or whether she knew they could never matter that much to Finnie. It was the sort of thing that no one else would have noticed, not even Finnie’s girlfriends. Of course J noticed, and had once mentioned it to Dimple, knowingly, as if he was giving Dimple a heads-up on something. At the time, Dimple declined to take note.

  Finnie had been unable to talk about it with his father, and Dimple knew that was only partly Finnie’s fault. His elder son knew his father well enough to know he wouldn’t handle it very well. They had spent a lot of time together, just the two of them, on football trips and athletics camps. Though they had talked about everything, and shared it all, Dimple had never asked about that. It was shameful, a feeling that was still with him. If he’d had the courage or the fortitude to toss the topic around a bit, he was sure he would have saved Finnie and himself a lot of pain, and they wouldn’t have had to go through those two years of coolness — two years when they were still friendly and in contact, and ostensibly everything was fine. But Dimple was only halfway down the track to acceptance, and Finnie knew it. Ruthie never intervened. ‘I just tell him that you love him,’ she’d said. ‘You two have to work the rest of it out for yourselves.’ She was right. If Dimple wasn’t genuine, he couldn’t be forced into it. He had to find his own way there — or not. Finnie would understand his father’s reluctance, but Dimple knew he was in danger of losing him. No one wanted to spend time with people who judged them. There were plenty of other good places to be, and good people to be with.