Australian Love Stories (32 page)

Natalie kicks off her boots and wrenches her jumper over her head. Ignoring the coffee, she circles the table and straddles him on his chair. He looks at her without expression. She presses her hands against his chest. He remains motionless momentarily, then sweeps aside his coffee cup, circles his arms around her hips, and pulls her into a hard fierce kiss. Their teeth scrape and her elbows protrude over his shoulders, like stunted wings. Without a word he lifts her, still straddling him, and carries her along the dim hallway.

It is primal rather than passionate, their sex, needy and gasping; hands that grab and push. His rhythm is determined, she bucks against his thrusts, wanting it to end and never stop. Within her the pain, and he groans, catches his breath. She loves this groan, it is his only show of surrender. He collapses onto the bed beside her and fights to control his breathing. Her heart pounds against her ribs as she stretches luxuriously, still joined to him at the groin. She always feels lithe after sex, sinewy and renewed, like a mermaid. He shifts and she feels him slide from her. Outside the prefab walls a breeze is starting, the ti-tree scrapes lightly against the house. He reaches beside the bed for a box of tissues, hands her some and begins to clean himself up.

From the kitchen comes the sound of a scuffle, and the clacking of dogs' claws on lino. A black nose pushes through the bedroom door, tongue lolling. Natalie rolls off the bed and walks
to the window. Far out to sea the container ship is now merely a speck, overladen but heading into the waves anyway. She begins to gather her clothes. In the cold bathroom she squats in the bathtub, and splashes water between her legs, rubs her face. She walks naked and dripping back into the bedroom, where he still lies on his back, his arms behind his head, watching her.

She stands in front of him. ‘Ask me to stay.'

He looks at her, then throws her jeans over. ‘Go home,' he says.

At home the shower is on. Russ pants into the kitchen and sprawls on his blanket. She makes tea and sits at the table waiting for it to brew. The shower stops, and Dale comes in, drying his hair. He looks worn, and his reddish stubble is thickening toward a beard. Crow's feet reach for his hairline. Shift work has aged him, the hours a slow, silent corrosion. She pours the tea.

‘How was work?'

A shrug. He slumps at the table, takes the tea. ‘Walking?'

‘Took the kids to school, Russ to the beach.'

‘Anyone around?'

‘Only Theo.'

He nods absently. ‘See John?'

She shakes her head no, directing her eyes into the milky hue of her tea. She still throbs, but it is subsiding into the dull echo of sensation. Outside the sun has burnt through the winter clouds; a muted blue sky ends abruptly at the thriving turquoise of the ocean.

Dale pushes his empty cup aside. ‘I'm beat,' he says. ‘I'm gonna crash.'

Alone again in his kitchen, he sighs and fills the kettle, gazing out of the window at the line of ti-tree bordering the yard. The morning's silence—discounting the thundering of the beach over the dunes—has resumed, but without its earlier peace. Natalie has jarred the winter quiet, leaving him heavy and empty in her wake. He hates even thinking about it; he doesn't know why he does it, why he keeps leaving his door ajar. He is making a godawful mess, but somehow it seems to be beyond him to stop. It has something to do with Selena leaving, it is as if she has taken his safety guard with her, his sense of control. And Natalie seems to hone in on this weakness, as though she has sensed this loss. He wouldn't even call it lust, more like a connection, a temporary bridge across the void that swallows his days now. They touched each other off like an electric spark, an ignition that needs more than his breath to extinguish it.

He takes her empty cup to the sink and leaves it on the bench to drain.

While Scott huffs over his homework, she tries to scrub the burnt egg from the pan. The remains of what should have been an omelette litters the kitchen around her. From the next room a huge cheer erupts from the
TV
. Someone must be close to big money.

She decides to forget the pan and just leave it to soak. She'll deal with it in the morning. Her wine glass is almost empty; as she carries it across to the cask the kitchen door is pushed open and a big black dog trots across the threshold, tail wagging.

‘Theo!' Her stomach lurches.

‘Hey boy!' calls Scott, pushing aside his homework and greeting the dog with enthusiasm.

Behind it a figure appears in the doorway. He enters the room quietly, showing no sign of the discomfort that is making her hands tremble. His apparent ease infuriates her, but also makes her think with longing of his kitchen, where everything is neatly stacked against the roar of the sea beyond.

In the mess of this kitchen he pulls off his beanie and rubs his sandy hair back into life.

‘Hey, Uncle John,' sings Scott, as Theo leaves him and returns, tail wagging, to his owner.

‘Scott.' He gives her the briefest of looks. ‘Nats. Dale in?'

‘Watching
TV
,' she answers, her back turned. Behind her he nods.

‘Been to the beach today?' he asks Scott.

‘Yeah, went down after school, but not much happening.'

‘Any surfers?'

‘Nah. Some guys floating on their boards, nothing major.'

The man and his nephew leave the kitchen together, with an ease so beyond Natalie that she feels she could choke. In the other room the television is turned down and she hears Dale come to life. She stands alone in the shambles of her kitchen, listening to the hum of their talk and laughter, and knows that this is the only possible result of the situation, that even in the fading winter light the horizon is still there, delineating boundaries. She closes the curtains against the sea's rhythm, gulps a large mouthful of wine and sweeps the broken eggshells in front of her into the bin.

Need Gone Today

MEGG MINOS

‘I'm falling in love with somebody else,' he says, drinking the tea she's made. Falling in love. ‘I just thought I should be honest about the situation', he adds.

This moment has been orchestrated, she thinks, to divide us. It's a confession that requires no absolution. What have I done, she thinks, to hear him speaking these words.

‘Oh,' she says, ‘is it really love, then?'

As if it can be undone, a mistake in the phrasing, not really love at all; just a chance encounter or a sexy moment, something that can pass and not carry with it the unbroken trajectory of falling.

‘She is my age, she has children,' he says, ‘she understands me.'

The backyard moves underneath her, right there, under the concrete; she feels it. Their washing flaps on the line. I am rending, she thinks, I am coming to pieces.

She feels that she is cursed with seeing all the perspectives at once, like a climber on a mountain that feels the rumbling deep in the earth before the dogs start howling, a person who can anticipate but has no direct course of action.

The plates are shifting; she is losing ground and stares into the middle distance looking for balance.

It's already happened, she thinks, and we are being forced through the motions. Each phrase will be as clichéd as the next and my heart will break, from loss and shock and insult. I am older, childless and I don't understand him.

She already knows this other woman. She has been everywhere, the obvious woman, present at every turn, effusive and laughing, angling her face to catch the light. Interested in him.

She knows the woman's husband and her children. She visualises the handsome face of the husband and the air of contentment he has with his wife and family. She wonders why she would want another man, risk the aftershocks of an affair, the questions of the children.

Watching him breathe tightly over the rehearsed words she thinks about his children, the elastic world of family that they have shared and their own potential children. She kisses them goodbye, those possible children, on each of their airy heads, and sends them away.

She thinks about the years of shared history, laughter, journeys, plans. I am so alone now, she thinks, I have been untethered. What I have and who I am is not wanted.

‘Do I know her?' she asks, artfully, to gauge his reaction, remembering the introduction out the front of the dance many weeks before.

‘Yes,' he says, looking away.

It was a night when he was performing with his band and she had waited for him in her good black dress and dazzling earrings by the stage. Waited for him to come off the stage and kiss her, buy her a drink and ask her what she thought of the show.

Instead she had to search for him, through the crowds until she found him out the front, grinning goofily at the woman. She suffered the introduction, seeing the ebullient look in the
woman's eyes. Over his head a little victory flag had been planted. They held their cigarettes like teenagers caught smoking behind the shelter shed.

So, then, she'd foreseen this day, this conversation about love and somebody else. It had begun that night and was now being voiced. Bowing her head and weeping, she acknowledges she'd heard it even before he had.

‘You always said I'd be better off with someone else,' he says, finishing his tea.

The other conversation, the one about who will stay in the house, is left untouched. She feels that if he could, he would make her magically disappear, that she is an obstacle standing in the way of him and the momentum of his new life. Somehow it is assumed he will stay, after all, he is in a relationship and she is in flight.

The packing. Does it start with books, bed linen, gardening tools? The cutlery drawer is full of shared decisions, the ideal garlic crusher, what type of teaspoons. It is hard for her to tell who owns these things and painful to acknowledge the thought that has gone into their selection. The thought that this history can be ended so glibly makes her dizzy.

‘You are getting rid of me,' she says to him.

‘No I'm not,' he says, ‘a person is not like a toaster, I don't just get a new one if the old one breaks.'

As insubstantial as she has been deemed, there is the solidity of her possessions to consider. They too have shared other histories, have been moved from house to house; it's just that this time she had thought they'd come home to roost, and now they
were weighing heavily on her. Over time each object has become linked to a memory, a shared experience, a moment in time.

As she packs each object, it becomes heavier with these histories and she becomes lighter, a non-person, marginalised. She feels that she is disappearing, not being seen. Her voice quavers and fails.

When she is in public she feels that the wrong thing is visible in her, some sign that tells people she is no longer loved, that she is a person who once laid claim to a home and a lover but has been replaced and is now cast out.

‘When I am in a relationship,' he says, ‘it's like a big thing growing inside of me, pressing out from inside—it's painful and I don't want love to be like that.'