Australian Love Stories (26 page)

They walked ten blocks, the soles of her feet blazing. Barefoot and braless. A goddamn hippy. Her shins started to ache, an old injury flaring.

Fleur shoved her poor stash to the back of their bedroom wardrobe and started on the house. It was never quite clean, never quite tidy no matter how hard she worked. Sometimes she felt like one of her children's computer games. You finished one level, only to start all over again.

She wiped the dining table, pretending not to notice the crumbs that fell to the floor. There was a pile of papers sprawled at the far end. A recipe torn out of the weekend newspaper. Unpaid bills. A voucher for cheap pizza. School excursion notes. Items that had no home. She shuffled them into a neater pile, wiped around them. In the centre of the table was a vase of dying lilies. She pulled out their slimy stalks and threw them in the bin. Their rotting vegetable smell lingered. As she worked she found herself sifting through the bones of her argument with Dean, embellishing her responses with cruel precision.

When they were still in that glowy stage of first love Dean bought her flowers every other week. On pay day he'd come home with trumpets of cheap cellophane, always different arrangements. Freesias were her favourite. An odd knobbly flower lacking beauty but with a perfume that left her quite drunk. Now she mostly bought the flowers herself, simple bunches pulled dripping from buckets at the markets.

She picked up dirty socks, shoes, an empty cracker packet, a multitude of toys. Next to the
DVD
player was a spoon furry with mould and a scrunch of passionfruit skin. Life with children was a weary kind of
deja vu
.

At midday she scoured the cupboard for something sweet. A reward. The best she could come up with was half a block of cooking chocolate. It didn't taste much better than cardboard,
but she finished the lot. She flicked on the telly and found herself watching a poor version of
Rage
. It took her longer than it should have to realise that these teenagers flicking their hair were singing about Jesus. A pastor cut across the last chord. He was wearing jeans and a casual t-shirt. Had a mo and a bald head. Is this how they're making them cool these days, she wondered. He said, When Jesus died on the cross he paid the ultimate price for our sin. He died that you may be forgiven.

Cornflake harrumphed onto Fleur's feet but she pushed him off. Lunged for the remote and closed the pastor down. She would not be saddled with the God Squad today.

How was school?

Fleur asked the obligatory question but as Harry launched into a blow-by-blow account of their lunchtime footy match her attention slipped.

Want a milkshake? she said when she realised he had stopped talking.

Sure.

How was art? she asked, trying.

We had to make chickens, he rolled his eyes. From his pocket he pulled a yellow pom-pom with barely attached bits of cut-up straws and googly eyes.

How cute.

It's terrible, he said. We had
RE
after.

Oh yes? she said.

She has regretted ticking the little box agreeing to religious instruction. She thought it might help her kids think about the big questions of life—kindness and honesty and forgiveness—but it was just brainwashing. The kids who opted out did colouring
sheets in the library. Terrible pseudo-Aboriginal designs of lizards and fish. But she'd be fine with that. Anything would be better than the guilt-laden rhetoric they came home with.

You're not a sinner, she said to Alfie once. Eight year olds can't sin.

Yes we can, he said. If we reject Jesus in our hearts. Or steal someone's pencil.

Murderers sin, Fleur said. God's got bigger things to worry about than a pencil. You don't have to believe it just because they tell you to.

But for once Harry's story made her smile. They had been told the resurrection story. Harry repeated the salient points, then said with a grin, So Jesus was like the undead. He was really a zombie.

When Dean returned from work he said hello to the kids, but not her. He poured himself a glass of beer. Fleur leaned against the kitchen counter and watched him. He smelled of aftershave and sweat and the stink of the city. She thought of forgiveness. She could almost kiss him.

D'you mind if I go out for a walk? she said. The kids are all ready for bed.

He turned away from her. Sure, he said.

She escaped into the twilight with Cornflake. She walked hard, feeling the muscles in her thighs, her calves. Cornflake trotted ahead, his tongue flapping. Stupidly happy just to be out again, sniffing the air, aging turds, telegraph poles. The sky was a swathe of gaudy lobster red. Fleur felt as if she could walk all night.

She thought, When I go back I will apologise. I will be a good wife, a kind person. And the thought of this lifted her. Why do I let them get to me? she thought. All these stupid little things.

Even as she walked up the driveway she could hear Harry screaming. Opening the door she saw Dean on the floor with Harry, naked from the waist down.

About time, Dean said. He didn't look up.

She felt her resolve leak away, that familiar snap of anger.

I was only thirty minutes, she said.

Harry's got diarrhoea. It's all over the rug.

He looked at her then, beside him a strewn roll of kitchen paper. The smell of shit and bleach was loud. Fleur felt her skin itch with the unfairness of it all. This was the kind of thing she had to deal with every day while he was at work.

Where's Alfie? she asked.

Dean thumbed at the courtyard. In the gloom outside Fleur could just make out Alfie carving away at a stick with a kitchen knife. He was kneeling, face turned to the side, head bent so far forward his body was a closed shape.

Fleur picked Harry up. He wrapped his legs around her waist, pushed his wet face into her neck. She'd go to Alfie later.

They lay on Harry's bed and he stroked Fleur's hair. Absently tracing a path behind the curl of her ear. It almost undid her. Fleur gritted her teeth and hoped he couldn't translate her heaving chest. Even when he stopped stroking and his breathing changed she remained under the press of him. She stared at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling until they faded into nothingness.

Those stars sent Fleur into her first labour. She was standing on a stool pressing them onto the ceiling, puffing a little, when she felt a tug in her belly. She thought it was just from the effort of stretching, but then it happened again.

Dean drove Fleur to the hospital and dropped her on the doorstep. She took herself inside while he parked the car. He was in such a rush to get back that he smashed his foot on the kerb, arrived limping. The midwife fluttered around him, offering ice packs and Panadol while Fleur tried to concentrate on the Ujjayi breathing technique she'd learned at yoga. The fact was she couldn't speak through the pain, but in her head she was screaming, Get over it, you selfish arsehole.

The labour went on and on. There were hot packs for her lower back, sickly sweet Gatorade and barley sugar to suck between contractions. She vomited nine times. She rolled on an exercise ball, walked the hall, squatted like an animal, and cried in the bath. She needed Dean so badly she forgot the foot business.

Then they lost the heartbeat. They rushed her to theatre, Dean holding her hand and limping along beside the gurney. They put a needle in her back, sliced her open with a knife and wrenched the baby out. Alfie. Gulping at life.

As his little frog body lay on her chest Dean leaned in close to them, all grin. And Fleur thought it the happiest moment of her life. But no one warned you what a baby did to a marriage. There was all that love, yes. Love so fierce it was frightening. But suddenly a scorecard ruled the relationship. Whose turn it was to change a pooey nappy, get up to settle the baby at 4 am, clean up the puke. Recently Fleur learned that the parents of Harry's best mate kept an actual score card, recorded every minute they spent looking after the kids. So that it was always clear who
was in credit, who was in deficit. The concept horrified Fleur; that the children were so openly considered a chore. But then in the middle of the night when Harry had wet the bed again and she was peeling off his sodden pants and shoving bedding into the washing machine while Dean lay in their bed snoring, she thought perhaps it was the ideal solution. Perhaps it diffused all that resentment. She could just mark it up on the chart and spend a guilt-free Saturday night getting drunk with her girlfriends.

By the time she came out Alfie was already in bed, face to the wall. Fleur sat down beside him, stroked his hair.

Sorry about before, she said.

He moved away from her hand.

Can you go out now, he said. I'm tired.

She kissed the top of his head. Closing the door gently behind her, she pushed down welling guilt.

Then it was back to the interminable wiping, stacking, sorting. Dean helped in an ineffective way, shuffling things into a more orderly kind of mess, but not actually putting much away.

They didn't speak. Fleur wanted something from him but she couldn't articulate even to herself what that was. An apology, perhaps. Or a touch, a hug. But even if he were to offer these things she wasn't sure how she'd respond.

And then she found the bags.

So they broke up over plastic bags. It sounded ridiculous, but these things always were. Something was always the tipping point.

Dean left before the Bunny arrived. Took his books, leaving a bookcase full of flawed colour. Took the iron that she never
used. Every item of his clothing, including dirty things from the laundry basket. A handful of fruit. The toolbox.

On Sunday morning she woke in darkness, crept into the laundry. With the toolbox gone there was nothing to hold back the tide of plastic bags. They spilled out across the tiles, crackled under her feet. As she reached for the back door handle, she pretended she couldn't hear them.

In the cool moonlit air she hid bags full of cheap eggs, one by one.

Finished, she waited for the children to rise.

It Used to be His Eyes

NATASHA LESTER

She is still fresh-skinned, soft as avocado. Pliable.

This is what I think when I pick Georgia up out of her cot and hold her, squeezing her tightly so she feels the force of my love, but careful not to squeeze her as hard as my arms want to. My body wants to bring her back inside me, so she is wrapped in my blood again. As close as two humans can ever be.

‘I'm home!'

His voice makes me jump. The baby's eyes, which had been closing as she settled into our embrace, fly open. She begins to wail.

I pat Georgia's bottom and walk out into the hallway, pressing the smile back on my face, the smile that was an impulsive, reflexive action when I was with the baby and which is a controlled and conscious effort now.

‘That was loud,' I say.

‘What was?' he asks.

‘Your voice.'

‘I was saying hello.'

‘Loudly.'

He shakes his head and puts his pile of important papers on the coffee table.

The baby's wails quieten and I kiss the top of her head.

‘I'm going to get changed,' my husband says. He walks off to our bedroom.

I sit on the couch and open my shirt with one hand, saying, ‘Hello my darling, are you hungry?'

Georgia smiles at me, all wet, pink gums with baby drool shining her chin. Her fists jerk, her feet kick; she begins to chatter in baby sounds, a string of ah-goos, but I know what she means—hurry up!

At last my breast is free and her mouth is latched around my nipple. I rest back against the cushions, letting my arms loosen. My shoulders drop down from the position they had assumed around my ears. I watch Georgia as she feeds and she watches me, eyes locked together. It's astonishing the way love can be spoken of and understood without words, with only a fixed gaze. It's astonishing that our bodies possess an unlearned language, a language that we are born speaking fluently, that my three-month old baby has reminded me exists.

‘How was your day?' He is back, wanting to chat.

‘Okay. Same-same,' I say.

He watches for a moment as the baby's fingers stroll across my breast, finger pads gentle, exploring. Marking her claim over my body.

It used to be his fingers. It used to be his eyes.

Before the baby goes to bed, I clean poo away from every crevice of her bottom, and from the base of her spine right up to her shoulder blades. Then I kiss her, hold her and sway with her for a moment, before I leave her in her cot to sleep. I take her clothes and put them in a bucket in the laundry to soak. Then I go into the bathroom and wash my hands.

While I am there, he comes in. He has changed into a pair of faded shorts and a crumpled t-shirt. He pees in the toilet. I wrinkle my nose at the smell and leave the bathroom.

The next morning, he jumps out of bed when the alarm shrills. I have already been up for an hour. Feeding the baby.

He shaves and showers. Urinates and farts. Puts on a suit with a crisp blue shirt and silvery tie. His hair is combed, he is wearing aftershave, he is dressed in expensive clothes. Then he goes to work and spends the day talking to people, people who see him in his suit, smelling of the Orient, fresh and crisp as a new-picked apple.