Australian Love Stories (14 page)

The phone rang just as I picked up my keys. ‘I'll get it!' I said. It was unlikely to be for Jeff—three months with him had taught me why. That, and the bruise on my face.

‘Can you come over?' someone said.

‘What? Who is this?' I was having trouble holding the phone and putting my scarf on.

‘It's me. Carmelita. Can I see you?'

‘Oh, shit, I'm sorry. I'm late for the theatre.'

‘That's okay. Another time, maybe.'

‘Sure. I'll call you.'

I only just made it before they closed the doors. In the dark, I surveyed myself. What had I done? She'd not contacted me for three months, and I'd pranced off as if it meant nothing. The play was dull. I felt ill.

Two weeks later her mother called.

‘She's asking for you,' she said. What an odd thing to say, I thought.

‘I don't do hospitals.'

That's what I said to her mother, and that's what I said to myself. That was my excuse for a bunch of flowers that was ten times more generous than my visit.

I perched on the plastic chair by her bed. I hadn't recognised her at first, and only went in when I saw her surname on the door.

‘You look like you've seen a ghost!' she said. I thought that was exactly what I'd seen—what I was looking at still.

‘No, no! I just got lost on the way in, and I hate hospitals,' I said.

She patted the bed and said, ‘C'mon! Sit here! Let's do the couch thing!' She began to pull the sheet back, but the sight of the drainage tube disappearing under the sort of nightie the old Carmelita would never have been caught in was too much.

‘It's
OK
. I have to leave in a minute. I'll just stay here.'

‘Well, tell me about the world before you go,' she said.

What could I tell someone who'd been opened up, then closed again because it had all gone too far?

‘Um. There's a war in Sudan,' I said.

‘I don't even rightly know where that is,' she said.

‘Neither do I, exactly, but it's all over the news.' I pictured her and me, end to end on the couch, her in her old body, the
ABC
news on in the background.

‘What else?' she said.

‘Kelvin got fired,' I told her. I used to tell her about his misdemeanours in and out of the office. ‘And I bought a red dress last week.'

‘Well done you!' I'd never owned a red dress.

‘Have you had your pedicure yet?' She couldn't see my feet, on account of the cold weather and the boots I was wearing.

I thought of her little hand-drawn map. Where had I put it? The voucher was still on the fridge, under a Scotch magnet. Jeff often got freebies, he bought so much of it.

‘Not yet. I was saving it for a rainy day.'

We both looked out at the grey sky, the water running soundlessly down the outside of the glass, cut off by double glazing and the hum of air conditioning. We laughed, although nothing seemed funny.

‘So, what's really going on with you?' She looked at my face closely, and I recognised her at last.

‘Oh, nothing much. Routine domestic life and all that,' I said.

‘I suppose you'll be telling me you walked into a door by accident next.'

‘Oh, I'm sorry! I've got to fly,' I said. I kissed her cheek. It was too soft, too pale. ‘I love you,' I said, and fled.

I didn't bother with the umbrella out in the street. The rain felt good on my cheek, my hair. Like a cross between a benediction and a punishment.

I went to a bar and sat in the darkest corner. I had three Scotches, all with ice. They were vile. How could he drink this stuff?

When I got home he must have detected something in me because there were no jealous questions, no arguments.

The funeral was huge. I wished I could have worn one of those obscuring black fascinators they wear to funerals in the movies. I hadn't seen Carmelita again for the two months more she had managed to extract from life. One excuse after another had welled up every time I went to pick up the phone. Hating myself was no cure.

I recognised people from her work, some of them the men she'd dated. They looked grown up now. One of them gave a speech.

‘You always knew where you were with Carmelita,' he added to a little story about what a great girlfriend she'd been.

‘She never let me stay the night. Her relationship with her flatmate meant more to her than her relationship with me did. That might sound odd, but it was all part of the integrity of her and I loved her for it.'

He was laying it on with a large trowel, I thought. Carmelita's mother wouldn't look at me. In fact, no-one did.

When I got home I told Jeff I was leaving. ‘Don't ever touch me again,' I said, and he didn't.

I sat at the kitchen table and began drawing circles around To Let ads. The pen ran out. In the bottom drawer where I kept spare pens, little notepads and small otherwise homeless things I found a folded piece of paper. It was Carmelita's map. Her flat, where she wasn't, any more. The beauty salon, which I would never visit.

At the beginning of last autumn, after I had only just moved into my new apartment, I felt the lump under my arm in the shower. I stood there with the water pouring over my face, my hand holding the breast Carmelita had touched that long ago night.

Feed With a Flat Hand

CANDACE PETRIK

Ben's dad comes round, some nights. Comes to watch the kid while the spaghetti gurgles on the stove, salad already wilting in the summer heat. Go on, don't worry about me. You girls have a good one. He has a smile for the both of them like it's okay, it's cool. We tried, he says, for Ben. But you gotta think about it, if that's the only reason, don't you? Eyebrows raised. You better not break Ashley's heart. For reals, though, I've got nothing against punching your lights out. I don't care that you're a chick.

Hurry up Claudia—and then Ashley has her pushed against the outside wall with a kiss, leading them away to the tram stop with the pull of her fingers against Claudia's wrist. Questions get the brush off. Met him in high school, before anything with girls. Seriously no, Claud, that wasn't why it didn't work. It just became a different love after a while. Like a brother. And to be honest, he was too young for this shit. So was Ashley.

Ashley kisses so she can stare at you and it would be comforting if it weren't so much easier to lower your eyes. Her world has babysitters. Bed times. Things that are too loud. Plastic stoppers on every cupboard, on the toilet so you have to press and touch and yank. You can't just piss. Things could be dragged down if not bolted to the wall. A kid got crushed in the States, was it last year? This year? Or was that Russia?

Reading bedtime stories, the kid's words are all vowels and grunts and sticky fingers reaching out. He likes you, Claudia.

It's been months and friends laugh and say you're an instafamily. Say you gonna move in? And get hers and hers matching towels? Say you go everywhere together, you may as well start from the same mattress. Look at you two, do you have the same haircut now? You even dress the same, don't you? Laughter.

The festival season starts and the dad is over even more, waving them off. All the nights are spoken for. Claud doesn't remember saying yes, didn't say no but there's poetry readings and music and screenings in the park and Ashley is good at it. At being around strangers—she waves and laughs and seems to know them all. Mutual exes are women they share a drink with, like it's been too long. Sitting together on the grass as they wait for the darkness to hit and the thrum of chatter to quieten during the opening credits. It's that same slow film Claud watched back when she realised boobs were something worth touching, worth finding ways to touch. Ashley reaches for her hand.

Claud thinks it was a couple of years back, maybe, since she bothered to head down on the number 96 to St Kilda in the middle of summer. Sweaty, and all the roads blocked, people muttering as the trams diverted. The same rainbow bits and pieces every year, the smell of beer and the yelps of people in roadside bars. It's not the biggest but the showing is good. Banners and bikes and wolf whistles, raised fists. A sunburn the shape of her sunnies when the day is done. Only she won't feel
it, not till the next day when she crawls out of the covers, head weighing her down.

The kid gets sick of waving and clapping. Ashley's mates are in the park just up that way, like everyone else. The lines to the port-a-loos stretch from one side right down to the food stands and the kid is making little grumbles that aren't really cries and aren't really words. Rubbing his face and saying no, he doesn't want to go pee. He doesn't.

Ben missed his nap, didn't ya?

That just makes him let out a long whinge. Ashley takes him to a tree, down away from the crowds.

Ashley's mates have their own little kids playing and running with rainbow ribbons on sticks. Back and forth they run, waving them. Making them twirl. Twelve bucks, but Ashley buys one for the kid anyway. He plays with it, but after a while he starts crying and chucks it to the ground. Don't
wannit
, face screwed up. Somebody's gonna have to go to bed the second we get home, isn't he Bennie? No story time. Don't give me that face.

Living near each other is enough. One suburb away, the kind that goes sideways and misses all the tram lines. Ashley doesn't drive, though. She has a bike with a little kid seat bolted on the back for Ben, and so Claud's car is something that complicates things. Or simplifies them. Pick this up, or pick that up. Or: don't drive; it's not even that far. We'll ride. We'll tram it. And Claud never finds the right balance. One house is too small, and the other is falling apart. Cracks in the walls, the kind that don't seem to be doing the structure any favours. Best not touch in case the dust crumbles out. Everything made in that era was asbestos.
No place for a kid. Roof leaks and the mould on the bathroom walls comes back no matter how much Ash scrubs. And she does, with Claud trying to convince her that no, there's no point. Who was that Greek dude? Sisyphus. And it's the wrong thing to say because that's a great attitude isn't it? It's not like you're doing anything, just standing there.