Australian Love Stories (33 page)

She wonders at any other kind of love.

She tells him what she thinks about hearts, how they sit inside the body and hold love inside them, growing full, bigger, sometimes breaking. It's bound to be a strong sensation, a feeling that rends the chest open and lays bare what is inside, makes the person breathe more deeply and laugh more loudly. It beats, this big love-filled heart, like something that wants to break its cage.

She tells him that she thinks love is like building a nest or a house, with each person contributing to the structure, discussing aspects of how it will be made, building something that is for the benefit of both and that can contain these big jumpy hearts, but she knows he is past this and remembers only the discomfort.

She realises that she was furnishing an idea of love that made each object flawed in its placement. While she was building a world to live in, he was suffering from claustrophobia.

‘It was getting a bit, you know…toward the end,' he says, ‘we were fighting.'

In the weeks that pass, they continue to share the house. She packs her things with resentment, unable to visualise where and how she will live. There is no home that she can imagine filling with her things, they have no relevance anymore and her own body has no margins. She is all at sea.

As she packs away her things, he begins to replace them with new things of his own and for a while, the familiar and the unfamiliar live together. She gets to take what is old and has been used and as each new object arrives in the house, she finds herself becoming jealous.

Spitefully she packs away the toaster and he brings home a new one.

The first postcard is in the letterbox when she arrives home from work. Sent from Italy, it shows a stout church on a piazza and the stamp depicts an unnamed ruin. The content heaves with ‘passion' and ‘courage' and it signs off with,
I am the luckiest woman alive
. In curling handwriting there is the anticipation of return, reunion. There are many kisses; the X's crossing the bottom of the card like barriers erected to hold back a riot.

She leaves it on the kitchen table for him to see when he brings his children home from school. They can all see it for all she cares. I am being written out of history, she thinks as she packs her books, by a woman with a purple pen.

Another arrives showing a pockmarked Roman arena surrounded by a midden heap of modern apartment buildings, declaring,
you have been a little earthquake in my life
, and she hears the dogs howl in the distance, the rumbling.

He makes no attempt to help her move, he calls it her ‘process'. He dreams for himself a new future. He starts learning Italian and talks of villas and
EU
passports, of waiting for his children to be old enough to travel, eventual migration.

The postcards continue to arrive, lodging in her letterbox like eviction notices addressed to an overstaying tenant, oozing passion and
amore.
She photographs these postcards and shows them to her friends, wanting to crack open the shell that encases an affair, the secrecy that gives it power, but she knows that she has lost.

The house is already occupied by the other woman's intentions and the man who has claimed it is already living another history.

‘You have to move,' he says, playing his final card, ‘this is home to the children.'

Outside, there are refugees, other women on the move clutching the broken pieces of their hearts. She finds them in the supermarket, at parties, in shops. Tears well up and spill. They speak of regrets, revenges, hopes dashed, custody battles, psychotherapists and lost friends.

‘But,' she asks, ‘how do you move?'

You just move, they tell her, pack up your stuff and go, and she imagines the echo of movement in empty passageways.
Hauntings in every house, traces left of relationships that once were. Clean rectangles on the walls where paintings once hung.

She moves.

She paints the walls of her new house, rips up the carpet.

She wipes it clean of what she imagines it once housed. It must be sterile to accommodate her wounds, for healing to take effect.

The things she can't move she leaves in the old house with him. She places an ad on Gumtree offering them for free, listing each piece.

NEED GONE TODAY
she heads the advertisement and attaches his phone number. Let him deal with it, these strangers coming in and taking things away. Let him explain this flotsam, the pieces that have come away from this wreck, this broken boat that came apart when the earth moved and the tide shifted.

Let them visit Pompeii, with it's frozen time, the dog straining at the leash, the loaves on the table, all turned to ash, and wonder quietly what happened and who survived.

Indian mynah birds have moved into nest in the side of her new house. During the day they crouch on the Hills Hoist, tormenting her dog with swoops and raucous cries. He barks and snaps, maddened by the intrusion into his yard.

She thinks of the warm eggs that were laid by other birds, the blind, tiny chicks being rolled out of the nest to fall helplessly down. The new birds have moved in and sit calmly among the disturbed natural order of things.

She lies low in the heat on the plain boards of her lounge room floor, thinking about how these birds have found a cavity
to make their lives in that which belongs to someone else. They stalk across the yard on prehistoric legs and regard her balefully from the fence through the curtain-less windows, as if waiting for her to leave.

She listens as they slip into the side of her house, under the metal flap; their sleek bodies climb into the nest with oily fluttering. In the evening she can hear the chicks peeping an incessant morse code.

In the back shed of the house is a tangle of objects, left by tenants from the past. It is the last place she strips bare, dragging everything out into a pile in the yard. There are rusty tools, lurid green nylon strings from long gone whipper snippers, gas bottles, jars of rusting screws and nails, a pile of hessian sacks eaten through by rats.

The mynah birds perch on the line, shuffling back and forward and diving to catch the slaters that spill from the pile. She is offended by their opportunism and their greedy feasting and feels her heart pulse with resentment.

She pulls a sack from the pile and folds it until it forms a wedge of cloth and fetches a broom from inside. Balancing the sack on the end of the broom handle she pokes it into the narrow opening, muffling the cries of the chicks, smothering them until they are still and quiet.

A Mouth Full of Heart

LISA JACOBSON

Note to self. Getting up at 6 am every morning to watch
The Wiggles
does not mean I'm losing it. Finding Captain Feathersword sexy, ditto. He has muscles and he's in uniform. Check him out. At 6 am, the house is cold with autumn. Almost all the leaves on the plane trees in our street have turned the colour of rust. My baby daughter kicks at the high chair with her feet and squeals at Murray and Greg, who are dancing with Captain Feathersword and Wags the Dog, smiling, smiling.

‘Goggles!' she says, pointing to the screen. ‘Ah, Goggles!'

All day I am a woman doing a lot of things at once. I am boiling the water to sterilise my daughter's milk bottles. I am changing her nappy and applying cream to her angry red skin. I am mixing rice cereal with water and testing the temperature on my wrist before spooning it into her baby bird mouth. After lunch I peg little terry-towling jumpsuits in pastel colours on the line and, when they are dry, bring them back inside. I let our golden-eyed labrador into the kitchen to lick the floor clean. I play a game of stack the blocks on the rug, beyond which my daughter has begun to crawl. I watch her sway back and forth on plump haunches, testing her legs and the floor for solidity. In the evening I walk up and down the corridor, rocking her in my arms until her eyelids flicker into sleep. And all of this is repeated more times than I can count as the sky deepens over the city into a cerulean, lamp-lit blue. At midnight, or at 2 or 3 am, I wake to her animal cries as she lies hungry and wet in the cot my
ex-husband and I bought for her and assembled long before she was born. My feet stumble without much of an argument down the corridor to her room.

My daughter's hair is auburn and curls delicately at the nape of her neck while my own hangs lank and mousy—it used to be blonde until pregnancy leached the pigment from it. A week after my marriage ended, I had my hair cut really short and dyed it blue. I bought a red push-up bra to lift my breasts, which still hang soft as bags of flour from their brief stint of breastfeeding. I bought lime green covers for the couches and hot pink cushions. Taste returned to toast and tea. It's been eight months since then. When I drop my daughter off to her father's for access on weekends, my stomach churns like a washing machine. I still need meds for sadness, and sleep.

In August, my brother's fiancé invites me to be matron of honour at their wedding in Sydney. It's been a long winter. My ex-husband installed the central heating in this house himself, but I've closed off the vents in his study and the spare room to save on bills.