Six Bedrooms (13 page)

The view of the night from Alex's room was of trees, their leafy tops, swarming around street lights, shifting in
a slight, hot breeze that came through the open window. Every so often the breeze would break the leaves apart and the street light would flash into the dark room. I watched them, and pulled the sheet around my breasts, and drew my knees up, making a tent.

Finally, I said, ‘Why did you tell him?'

‘What?' Alex said.

I could smell wine and sweat and semen.

‘Why did you tell Ben? That we had sex?'

‘I didn't. He guessed.'

I turned to look at him. His eyes were closing. ‘Did you come?' he said, and then he was asleep.

I gathered my clothes quietly and put them on. I could not see the tissues in the dark, but I was leaking; I used a hand to wipe myself and then wiped the hand on Alex's sheets. He was beginning to snore.

It was a night so hot that it felt like daytime. Walking alone felt safe, not scary, not isolated. People were in the streets or sitting on their verandahs, the red ends of their cigarettes like animals' eyes in the darkness. A man who bumped into me smiled an apology and kept walking. I carried my boots and trod carefully across the cracks and leaves and gumnuts that littered the pavement.

 

There had been a party a few months after I'd first had sex with Alex, at Marco Giordano's. His parents
were going away for the weekend. He lived in a huge pile down on the waterfront, bigger by far than Alex's father's, with grounds that reached right down to a little beach, and a boathouse that had couches in it, a bed, a fridge. Everyone was invited, and everyone was going, and Janice and Vicky convinced me that I should too. We would stick together, they said. We would get drunk.

We had been sitting by the water, drinking a mix of vodka, vermouth and Scotch filched from our parents, watching the moon rise in the sky. It had begun to seem possible that I could be remade into someone fresher, happier. I'd needed to piss, and left Vicky and Janice to head up the long lawn to find a bathroom, grinning as I passed people. The bottom floor of the Giordanos' house opened on to the lawn through huge glass doors, which were all ajar. It was a big room with a slate floor, and wooden walls like a sauna. It smelt cold, and musty, as though this was the first time the doors had been opened. I went down a corridor and there was another door, wooden this time, and there was Ben, leaning against the wall with his hands behind his back. We had not spoken in three months.

‘Is that the toilet?' I said after a moment.

He looked at me scornfully and said nothing.

‘Hello?' I said, made stupid by the mixture of alcohol I had drunk. ‘Anybody there?'

Ben made an explosive sound of disgust.

‘Well?' I said. It might as well happen now.

‘I've got nothing to say to you,' he said. I waited for him to say something more, but he looked away.

‘Come on,' I said.

I felt a sudden rush of warmth towards him. It had not just been three months since I'd had sex with his stepbrother, or three months since we had spoken. It had been three months since he had moved into his stepfather's house. I allowed myself to think about this now. He had been dreading it so much that he had rung me in the days before and cried, something I'd never known him do. His asthma had got very bad.

‘What's it like living by the river?' I said.

There was a long pause. I put my hands out to him, involuntarily, their palms up; a shrug, an apology.

‘You really want to know?' he said, looking at me now.

I nodded, and looked back, properly.

‘My stepdad keeps
The Joy of Sex
on the coffee table. Guess what my mum does all day.'

‘Drinks champagne?'

‘Exactly. She drinks champagne and she dodges me whenever I come into a room. Just like you.'

‘I don't think it's me avoiding you.'

‘And guess what,' said Ben, ignoring me, ‘the only good thing about the whole situation is Alex because, guess what again, or maybe you already know, he's nice.'

‘You said he was an idiot,' I said.

‘That was just to keep you off him.'

‘What do you mean,
off him.
'

And then Ben gave me one of those tongue-lolling, leering looks that I'd been getting from all his new friends down on the oval. It was meant to be me, crazed with sex, and so I did the 1950s thing, for the first and the only time in my life, and slapped him across the face. And he slapped me back, so hard that my head hit the wooden wall behind me and the tears rushed into my eyes. And then the door at the end of the corridor opened and a girl burst out whom I'd never seen before, a girl with her hair dyed blonde and the dark roots showing and her wrists clinking with bangles, a girl in full Madonna costume, stinking of dope smoke. She laughed and stumbled into Ben's arms and kissed him all over the face and neck. Ben stared at me over her shoulder and started to kiss her back, in a way that made me feel sick, as though he was a mother bird feeding a baby. I backed away, too proud and ashamed to hold my stinging face, and then ran out on to the lawn and around the side of the house, to squat and piss in the dark, where no one could see me.

 

My boots banged against my leg. My dress was still damp from my friend's tears and my underpants, from
the sex with Alex. Ben had never spoken to me again; had finished school, taken Vicky to the formal, moved away, all without a word. He was capable of this, while I, it seemed, was capable of nothing but acquiescence, stillness, a kind of insidious, destructive passivity.

I turned up a darker street, a long one, which I would have to traverse in order to get home. Most of the people in this street were asleep. The only light came from the street lights, which seemed a long way apart. It was cooler. The skin at my waist hurt where Alex had gripped it. This would be the last time, I said to myself, but it was not.

I
WAS
at the sea pool when I saw him. I was with Jimmy, my son; we'd been holding hands, walking down the concrete path, Jimmy saying, ‘Why baths? Why do they call it the baths?'

I will miss this exchange when he is older. I've been a mother long enough to know this. But it doesn't stop me from letting streams of gold run through my fingers, day upon day. I'm like a princess, so used to luxury that I simply let it fall from me as I pass through the rooms of my palace. He runs to hug me. He holds my cheeks and presses his strawberry lips against mine.

I was fumbling for my money in our swimming bag and not so gently elbowing Jimmy out of the way as
I did so, and saying, ‘From bathing, I suppose, they used to call it bathing, not swimming, so you'd bathe in the baths,' and I looked up, and there, across the faded wooden deck, was my brother.

He didn't see me. He wasn't facing me. He was sitting at a table with a woman who glanced my way, a woman who was wearing a bikini and a straw cowboy hat and big sunglasses. She didn't recognise me but why would she – she didn't know me. I could see James in profile. I knew every part of him, tall like our father, his face long and lean. His dark hair was silvered now. His arms and shoulders were very tanned. He was wearing a white singlet.

‘Come, come,' Jimmy was pulling at my hand as I stood there, staring.

I had a moment to decide. What I would do. What I would choose. What I wanted. Did I want to exchange the very palpable absence of James, which I had been living with for so long, for the real James? I didn't know.

‘You go.' I rummaged in the bag again and gave Jimmy his swimmers and his towel. He was too old now to come in the ladies' change rooms with me. ‘I'll meet you out here.'

He ran across the deck, past James and into the men's change rooms. I turned away to the ladies', and when I came back Jimmy was waiting for me on the sunny deck,
his clothes under one arm and his towel over the other, and James and his friend were gone.

Autumn is the time to swim. Autumn is when everyone in Sydney is planning anxiously for the cold to come, buying coats that are too heavy to be worn even in the depths of our winter, shutting doors against the newly cool breeze. But in autumn the sea is at its warmest and the sun is gentle, thoughtful. Jimmy and I sat on the sea wall with our feet in the water and watched a school of zebra fish speed past, propping and changing directions like sheep being herded by helicopter. In the midst of them a single electric blue fish, about the size of my little finger.

‘That's you,' I said to Jimmy.

He leant forward. ‘Which one's you?'

‘That one,' I said, pointing at a motherly-looking zebra fish.

All the time I was thinking about James, but not urgently. It was as though I had been given a shot of something – of possibility. I was allowing it to work its warm way through my body.

Later we walked down to the beachfront and bought some chips and sat on a bench to eat them. There hadn't been any real reason to take Jimmy out of school, and his father, if he found out, might not be pleased with me. It had to do with my mother. Soon she would be gone and
it would just be me. I think I believed that if I brought Jimmy over here, to the place where she grew up, the two of us would somehow be
where we came from
, or at least we would not be alone. And I'd been right, in a way – we had seen James. Now I was doing the old thing of scanning the crowd for him, a habit it had taken me years to shed. Jimmy was happy beside me in the loving autumn sunlight, eating, watching the people. Together alone; with each other but not, contained in ourselves but still connected.

I turned my face up to the sun. My mother was dying and life was flowing past us, pushing past us, racing on. It was as though I'd never properly understood the inexorable turn of the earth. My mother moving away from me felt like continents pulling apart, two landmasses separating. It had been happening all my life but only now could I see it. Now, if I looked, the gap between us was becoming too wide to leap.

 

When I walked into my mother's ward she would look up at me and a brightness would come over her face; a ripple of light or electricity. I didn't like to think about all the time in the day when she didn't have me to sit by her. I sometimes had trouble believing that she was not continuously sad, grieving for my absence and for
the absence that she herself was about to inhabit. But it isn't true. She didn't mourn all day. She passed the long hours mostly sleeping, sometimes re-reading her books. Her friends came to see her and they were just as funny and rude as they had ever been. The nurses came and went like bees, buzzing into the wards with their pollen of opiates. Sometimes, I suppose, she had one of those moments, as I did, when the stomach lurches and you seem to be looking into the abyss – for her, the loss of everything. For me, the loss of her.

It had been more than twenty years since I had seen or heard from James. He had disappeared not long after our father died. I was sixteen then, and James was twenty-six. He had looked after me when I was very little, in the time when my mother was giving herself over to a kind of tantrum; a tantrum that lasted ten years, left her an alcoholic, and perhaps had brought her to where she was now, dying of cancer in an inner-city hospital.

When James left, he did not ring my mother, he did not ring me, he wrote no letters, he asked for nothing. At first I had accepted it, accustomed as I was to these storms of feeling in our house, thinking that it was legitimate, right even, to cut yourself off from your family when racked by grief and the wrongs of the past. But the time stretched on, and I was at university, and then I was working, and I still had not heard from him. I went
through an undergraduate stage of searching for him in a very public kind of way – signs and advertisements in the paper. I made a little film; myself going to places of public record, visiting old schoolfriends of his, my voice charged and wobbling as people opened doors, showed me old photo albums. My mother refused to be in the film. He was a grown-up, she said, and could choose for himself. Every so often news of him came to us like a parcel passed from hand to hand. He did nothing that surprised me. He worked on board a container ship. He taught English in Japan. He sailed to Timor, crewing for a billionaire adventurer.

On idle afternoons, the days when Jimmy was with his father, I lay on the bed with Mum, her hand in mine, and we drifted and dozed, listening to the sounds of the hospital, telling each other stories from our lives. It was not a reckoning. We had long since given that up. It was a comparing. We reflected on things. Now was perhaps an opportunity to see the real meaning of things, now that my mother's life had arranged itself into its final composition. But it was also a time not to mind about the significance of things, simply to turn them over, to observe them from every angle while we lay there.

It was on one of these afternoons that she told me about a trip my father had taken as a boy to the town of Burragorang, before it was flooded to make Warragamba Dam.

‘Everyone was going there,' she said. We did not look at each other as we spoke, although we were not deliberately looking away. We lay side by side, and looked at the ceiling, at the pictures on the wall, at the other visitors, at the view to the north. ‘There was a sort of rush. Because the town was going to be underwater soon.'

She told me that my father had gone with a youth group, a church group, which was common enough in those days. She herself had belonged to a church group, even though her parents had been socialists, opposed to any kind of religion. ‘They went with a priest, a young priest, which I suppose sounds suspicious to you now.'

It did, of course.

‘But I don't think there was any trouble. And they had such fun. They had adventures. They had so much fun that the whole group, all twelve them of them, decided to meet again, in seven years. When they were twenty.'

She moved her hand in mine, but did not take it away.

‘On a particular day, at a particular time, on the steps of the Town Hall. They would all meet again.'

There was a silence. I could hear the lady coming down the hall with the coffees and teas, and her shoes squelching on the lino.

‘What happened?' I said finally.

She gave a little start, rousing herself. ‘Oh! Nothing. He didn't go. He went on the next day, or the day
before. Or he went but not all the way there. I can't remember.'

‘Huh,' I said.

‘Funny, isn't it,' she said after a moment.

‘Funny that it was important enough to nearly go,' I said. ‘Important enough to deliberately get it wrong. He didn't just forget.'

‘Yes. He might have even stood around a corner, watching them all meet. It made sense to me when he told me. You'll have to ask him about it.'

Sometimes I corrected her and sometimes I did not. Now I just said, ‘I suppose he never saw them again. And that set the course for his life. Somehow.'

‘Yes, I suppose so.'

I had not been meaning to say anything. I could promise nothing; there was no reason to believe he would be at the baths again. But I found myself saying, ‘Would you like to see James?'

I turned to look at her and her face closed up, eyes and mouth. She nodded, tightly, once. Then a sniff of tears.

 

Sometimes when I came in to switch off the light Jimmy wouldn't be reading, but would be lying, looking at the ceiling, thinking. I'd busy myself around the room, pull the curtains together, put the books in a pile, and as I
came to sit on the bed his question would have risen to the top, ready to be asked.

This evening it was, ‘When will I die?'

I'd expected something like this and prepared myself with an answer that was probably not a lie.

‘Not until you're old. Really old, and ready to die.'

‘But who will kill me?'

It's easy to follow the thread of your child's thought; you pick it up and it pulls you through the rooms of their reasoning. He saw me nursing his grandmother and I suppose expected that it would be my responsibility to dispatch her. But if I wasn't there when
he
was old and sick, whose job would it be? Who was his person? Who was waiting for him, with the merciful axe raised?

Jimmy is so substantial when he is upright, a ball of muscle and laughter. Lying down he was flat, still, quiet.

‘No one will kill you,' I said. ‘It's something that just happens.'

This was enough for him, but I went on. ‘You just get older and older, and tireder and tireder and then you lie down, and then you die.'

He'd already turned on his side, away from me. I leant over and put my face in the nape of his neck. I said, ‘Goodnight,' and he reached a hand behind him to pat my head. I kissed him, and got up to switch off the light.

Jimmy's father, Tim, had come to see my mother in the hospital a few times. We had all been reasonable with each other; in better times my mother would be looking after Jimmy and then she would drop him at Tim's, rather than at my house. Sometimes they'd met in the city to exchange him, adored gift.

It was mostly my fault that we'd broken up. I didn't learn fast enough that what I thought was the absolute end – right there, in the midst of the screaming, the undone washing-up, the cot never slept in – could have been the beginning of something new. So that when Tim said, of our relationship, ‘You don't seem to know how to do this,' I couldn't hear him, or I couldn't hear that there might be truth in what he said, and the possibility of change, too. Change – what a blessing it seems now, what a relief.

Instead, I could only defend myself. I was too busy advancing the reasons why I was right, and in the defending lose myself, and lose him. We played that terrible game that all new parents play –
who is more tired?
– and in all the noise that followed I was left with the baby. For a time I thought that was all I wanted.

Tim did not take Jimmy from me immediately. At first he came to our flat, every day, and the only cruel thing he did, or what felt like cruelty, was to ask me to leave so that he could be with Jimmy on his own.
And then we began to share him, and that was when I started to understand that in all that screaming there had been some truth. In all the hours I had for reflection it started to become clear to me that if I was criticised, my opponent had to be beaten down with tears and tantrums until he admitted that he was wrong. That it was not just
not getting on.
And that I might have been harder to be with than I thought.

 

Things were progressing at the hospital. The lull we had been in gave way to change, to the need for more medication, for pain, for sleeplessness, for anxiety. I found myself following nurses around, asking, when, when? My mother needed to be transferred to palliative care but no one could tell me the date that this would happen. I needed to make arrangements, phone calls: I needed to start marshalling myself for the end. Time looped out in front of me, elastic. I would be assailed by the sense that I was being rushed towards my mother's death long before I was ready – and at the same time, that she was not dying fast enough, that I could not bear for it to go on a minute longer.

I went back to the sea pool on my own. The first time the sea was high, rushing the walls, making the pool itself like a bath held by two gods, swung to and fro.
I swam twenty laps in the swinging water and emerged feeling so euphoric it was frightening, as though I could live on sunlight and sea air and nothing else, as though I glittered as I walked.

The second time, James was there. He sat in the same place he had before, with the same woman, still wearing her cowboy hat and big sunglasses. They were playing chess. They looked like actors between shoots: tanned, louche, untrustworthy.

I took my own sunglasses off and walked up to their table, and when James turned round to look I said, ‘It's me.'