Promise (2 page)

‘You keep it,’ said Anna. ‘That’s fine.’ She heard her toast pop. She had half an hour to get out the door and to the bus stop.

‘Did you know her?’ asked the woman. ‘The old lady who died?’

‘Helen? Yes, I knew her.’ Anna glanced over at the child, who was watching them and plucking at the grass. ‘Do you have a baby as well?’

The woman coughed. ‘God, no.’

‘Oh. I thought I heard a baby in the night.’

‘No, it was this one. As bloody usual.’

The girl appeared at her mother’s side and tugged hard on the woman’s t-shirt, dragging it off one skinny shoulder.

‘I want cartoons,’ she whined.

‘Just wait,’ the woman snapped, and pulled her shirt back over her shoulder. Her narrow fingertips were blue-ish, as if cold.

‘Hello,’ Anna said to the little girl. ‘My name’s Anna.’

The child looked up, pale eyes unblinking, her sticking-out ears pierced with garish green studs. Her short hair had been hacked at.

‘What’s your name?’ Anna asked.

When the girl didn’t reply, the mother swapped her cigarette to the hand holding the milk, and lightly cuffed the child on the back of the head. ‘Don’t be shy.’

The girl didn’t seem to register her mother’s words and Anna wondered if she might be a bit slow. Her voice and the crying in the night were very babyish. But then the girl spoke, her voice clear.

‘My name’s Charlie.’ She looked directly at Anna, who had the sense of being bluntly assessed in the same way she’d been assessing the girl and her mother. Any childish conversation Anna had in mind evaporated.

The girl reached her hand to touch the old, rough timber fence between them and said, ‘Do you have a dog?’

‘No. Not now. I used to, when I was a girl.’ Anna imagined splinters in that soft skin.
Don’t touch the fence
, she wanted to say. ‘His name was Buddy.’

‘What kinda dog was he?’ The girl’s small shoulders were badly sunburnt and peeling.

‘A bit of a mongrel,’ Anna said. ‘You know, a mix of different types of dogs. He ran away when I was ten. And I really missed him.’ She was shocked by the knot of tears that moved up her throat. She looked down at the ground for a moment and blinked back tears. Shit.

The mother said, ‘There’s no way we’re getting a dog. She has no frigging idea how much work they are.’ She drew on her cigarette and turned her head to blow the smoke behind her. Her hand shook a little and Anna wondered if she was sick. Was that why she was so thin? Or could it be drugs? Who were these people Oliver had found to move in next door?

The girl gazed up at Anna. ‘Buddy . . .’ she said, as if she sensed Anna had lost her train of thought.

‘Yeah. Your mum is right. Dogs are a lot of work. I had to walk Buddy every day and clean his water bowl . . .’

The girl looked away, down the yard, and picked at the peeling skin on one shoulder. Anna could guess what she was thinking, that Anna was a typical adult, siding with her mother.

The mother raised her eyebrows at Anna.

The girl turned back. ‘Nella had Percy Dog.’

‘Oh?’ said Anna. ‘Who’s Nella?’

The mother shook her head. ‘Will you stop going on about bloody Nella?’

Charlie marched over to the clothesline and disappeared behind the sheet that her mother had pegged up.

‘Well.’ Anna smiled and took a step backwards. ‘I’d better get ready for work.’ She wouldn’t have time for a shower now. What was she thinking, sitting on the step for half the morning?

‘What do you do?’ asked the mother.

‘I’m a graphic designer.’

‘Oh. Nice. I guess you were good at art when you were at school?’

‘Yeah, I was.’

The girl pulled on the sheet. A peg flew off.

‘And you go to work every day, do you?’ asked the mother.

Why was she asking that? ‘Sometimes I work from home.’

‘I’m Gabby, by the way. Do you happen to have a sprinkler, Anna?’

‘No. I don’t really have any grass.’ In the middle of Anna’s backyard was a big square of cracked cement, and Anna had planted up every inch of soil around it. ‘But Helen had one. Have a look over near the tap.’ She could just see the yellow sprinkler beside the hose reel.

Gabby turned. ‘Oh. Right. Good.’

Helen had barely used the sprinkler; she watered everything by hand, including the lawn, which hadn’t been mown since Helen died.

‘Thank you very much.’ Gabby raised the milk carton in a salute and turned to go inside. The girl walked over the grass towards her mother, placing one foot right in front of the other, as if she were walking a tightrope, her too-short green trousers slipping down her bum.

Anna wondered what they would do all day. Watch television? Unpack? Walk around Helen’s house trying to make it their own, wondering which room Helen had died in?

A few blooms on Helen’s roses were perfect for picking, their big, red, velvety buds just opening. For the two months that the house had been empty after Helen’s death, Anna let herself in the front gate every evening to water the garden. It was a little unsettling being on the other side of the fence uninvited, but she couldn’t let Helen’s roses die.

Anna was heading up the street, satchel on her back, when Dave phoned.

‘Hello there,’ she said. ‘I was going to call you when I got to work.’

‘I have a meeting now, and then court all day.’ On the phone his voice had more gravitas. ‘Just a quick call to say that the kids have finally chosen the restaurant for tonight.’ He was walking while he spoke. ‘Look up the Blue Monkey in Randwick. It’s Thai, unfortunately.’

A plane coming in to land roared overhead. She waited for it to pass.

‘You know . . . I actually think it’s best if I don’t come. I think it’s too soon for me to meet them.’

He was silent. Something
pinged
at his end. An elevator.

‘It’d be better when we’ve been together for longer,’ she said. ‘When they can feel how solid we are.’

She turned the corner and ran across the road; she’d miss her bus if she didn’t hurry.

He sighed. ‘Okay, okay. So . . . sounds like you don’t feel like we’re all that solid.’

‘Well, we’re as solid as we could be after six or whatever it is . . . seven weeks . . .’ She worried that he had some fantasy of their relationship. Which was strange, given he dealt with the law and its evidence and rationality all day long.

She saw her bus in the distance and picked up her pace. Then stopped. She couldn’t have this conversation while boarding the 310 to the city. ‘I’m not sure your kids would be dying to meet me anyway.’

He said, ‘Okay, if that’s what you want. But let me worry about my kids and whether they want to meet you.’

She felt a lurch of distance between them. There it was again, that faint hesitation she’d felt before.

Shit
. Being single was so much easier. ‘It feels like we’re
heading towards
solid . . .’ she said.

This was mad, all this talk of degrees of solidity. What the hell did
solid
mean anyway? She watched her bus pull in at the stop.

‘Look, I’m happy, Dave. I’m
really
happy with us. We’re just at the beginning of things, that’s all.’ She wanted things to work out with Dave. She hadn’t felt this way since Ben, which was all the more reason not to rush in and screw things up. ‘There’s no hurry, is there?’

‘Nah, no hurry. It’s all good. Don’t worry about it,’ he said. His cheerfulness sounded forced.

‘Have a good day,’ he said. ‘And let’s talk later. I’ve really got to go. My meeting’s about to start.’

She hung up and walked slowly to the bus stop, feeling a bit sick. Had she just fucked things up? Outside the halal butcher, she dropped onto the bench and fished in her bag for a clip. As she tied her hair up into a messy bun, she pictured herself from above, a 37-year-old woman sitting quietly and waiting for the next bus, her dilapidated rented house around the corner, and her neat desk, piled with work, waiting for her in Redfern. A woman without children and unlikely – it would seem – to ever have them, someone whose greatest pleasure came from growing a garden from cuttings and cheap plants she bought at the hardware store.

She was not ambitious. Anna knew that about herself and she knew that some saw it as a flaw.

This life is the rest of my life
, she thought. When she was twenty, anything had seemed possible, but she’d been certain she’d be a mother at some point. Even at thirty, she had sensed hundreds of different paths her life might take. Now, she guessed that this – more or less – would be her life. Maybe she’d always be on her way in or out of a relationship. Even so, this was a good, simple life, surely. Surely.

•

She was late to work and sat straight down to a phone call with a new client, Vita, a wellness blogger. Instead of taking notes, Anna found herself drawing the chives, their slender stalks and the small tightly packed buds that she knew would come. Anna made agreeable noises while Vita talked on and on about how clean and fresh the design needed to be, and she checked her phone in case there was a message from Dave. Nothing.

•

When she got home at dusk, the air was still balmy and the girl was running around the backyard, leaping over the sprinkler, her t-shirt stuck to her belly and back. Charlie skidded on the long grass and stamped on a pile of dark, wet cardboard boxes. The plastic milk bottle sat on the path, still half full. Anna’s heart skipped at the sight of red blobs in the grass, then she saw they were rose petals. All the blooms had been stripped from Helen’s roses and were scattered around the backyard.

A
fter watching the news, Anna made herself a chicken salad and poured a glass of wine. She imagined Dave at the restaurant with his kids. She’d seen photos of the eleven-year-old twins, a girl and a boy, both white-blond like their mother. He’d pointed her out once, jogging along the water’s edge at Bondi Beach. From a distance, in her black exercise gear, the ex-wife had looked very serious, and beautiful in a bony kind of way. Anna tossed the dressing through her salad, and thought that she should have just gone to the bloody dinner. Maybe she would have done a perfectly good job of appearing warm and witty to a couple of teenagers. As she dropped onto the couch in front of the television, there was a quiet knock on the back door.

The girl from next door stood on the top step in pink shortie pyjamas. She offered a small, tight smile as Anna slid the glass door open.

‘Charlie!’

The backyard behind the girl was completely dark. She must have climbed the fence or come in the gate from the back lane. ‘Come inside.’

The girl tiptoed barefoot across the doormat and stood on the lino, arms pressed close to her side, thin shoulders slightly hunched.

‘Are you okay?’ Anna crouched beside her. The girl’s small feet were muddy and she smelt of cigarette smoke. In one hand, she gripped a small plastic doll with purple hair.

‘I’ve lost Bunny.’ She looked straight at Anna with that unblinking, unsettling gaze.

‘Is Bunny a toy?’

The girl nodded.

‘Where’s Mummy?’

She didn’t respond.

‘Who’s at home with you?’ Anna pictured Charlie’s mother asleep in front of the television, unaware that her child had drifted out the door and into the night.

Charlie rubbed a finger on the wooden tabletop. ‘Have you got any biscuits? I’m hungry.’

‘Yeah, sure. I’ll get you one.’ Anna stood up. ‘Who’s home with you?’

‘Mummy’s gone out and I can’t find Bunny.’ Her bottom lip wobbled. ‘Can you find him?’

‘Let me get you that biscuit.’ She found an unopened packet of Iced VoVos her dad brought the last time he visited. Charlie took a biscuit and examined it before taking a huge bite. Shredded coconut dropped to the floor. She chewed steadily, her eyes fixed on Anna. Her tufty short hair was a similar shade to her skin, which gave her a strangely washed-out appearance.

‘Where’s Mummy?’ Anna asked again.

‘She’s home soon.’

‘And Daddy?’

The girl shrugged as she finished the biscuit and took another two from the packet. ‘Do you have any fruit tin?’

‘Like tinned peaches, you mean?’

The girl nodded, chewing steadily.

‘No, sorry. I don’t.’

‘That’s what Nella always has.’

‘Let’s go and see if we can find Mummy.’ She didn’t have any choice, did she? She had to go next door. Anna had a horrible vision of finding the mother dead. She was thin enough to be a junkie. ‘Come on,’ she said to Charlie, and grabbed her phone.

‘What’s that?’ The girl pointed to the table and the sketch of the chives Anna had brought home.

‘A little drawing of a plant I have out there.’ She nodded towards the backyard.

The girl touched a finger to the drawing and followed Anna out the front door. Anna slipped on her sneakers and set off down the path. The girl lagged behind, taking small steps. Anna waited, then reached for the girl’s hand. Charlie didn’t hesitate. Her hand felt dusty and so small in Anna’s, like a doll’s.

The front gate creaked and the sensor light snapped on as they climbed the steps. Anna hoped that the man wouldn’t be there. She hadn’t seen or heard him since the night before.

Anna knocked on the door and called out, ‘Helloooo? Hello, Gabby, are you there?’

Charlie stood very still by Anna’s side. Around them, on the front porch, was a pile of flattened cardboard boxes and a rolled-up disposable nappy. Was the girl still in nappies?

Anna peered in the window. In the glow coming from the television she saw the outline of an armchair, and in the hallway, light shone from what must be Charlie’s room.

She really did not want to go inside. But what if the mother was in there, sick? What if she’d overdosed or something? Anna’s gut clenched as she tried the front-door knob. It was locked.

‘Which door did you come out?’

‘Back door.’

‘Okay. Let’s go around the back.’

The back door was wide open. Anna paused at the bottom of the steps. The hallway was dark but for faint light coming from the girl’s room and the flickering TV. She climbed the steps and leant in through the doorway.