Getting Home (3 page)

The ball is falling. Moya's eyes narrow against the brilliant sun. Impact speed of his racquet is estimated at 110mph. Then he sees her. The dark woman in the simple white dress in the front row. Or maybe the yellow suit with the ruffled blouse. Restless, sensuous, Belinda rolled over, trying to decide. The suit – it made her look thinner.

Moya sees her and he sees Becker recoil from the ball. As if from far away, he hears the umpire give out. The sheen of her full lips, the smooth softness of her throat, the unfathomable depth of her eyes, what tragedy is hidden there? He has to know. He must have her. In a dream, Moya sends up the second ball. Winning no longer matters. There is a bigger prize than the Open.

An uproar breaks out in the astonished crowd as the umpire calls double fault. Compelled by her mysterious allure, barely pausing to shake Becker's hand, he feels himself drawn across the court to her seat. ‘Wait! Please …' The ushers are already clearing the stand. She turns back to look at him, a look which stabs his heart like a knife. ‘Me?'

Or maybe ‘I?' Damn. The goddamn dialogue again. Why did her fantasies always fall apart when people had to speak? Belinda had pulled the quilt off her husband. He was waking up. His arm fell heavily over her waist, snapping off the image of Carlos Moya awed by her beauty. Damn. Catapulted by irritation, she got up and shut herself in the shower.

‘Good boy, Moron. Not far now.' Riverview Drive led into Elm Bank Avenue, where sun gleamed on the two brass plates outside the Carman practice. Josh Carman was always lecturing Ted about overtraining. It was OK to walk. Cool down, not walk. His goal now was to get home and get on the road before his wife finished her face. This was never before 8.00 am. There was plenty of time.

A brave ray of light slipped between the master-bedroom curtains, filtered through the thick air, silhouetted a full ashtray, touched a pair of smeared spectacles and streamed over the cover of the May issue of the
Journal of Paediatrics.
In the bed, Rachel Carman rolled away from the light towards the body of her husband.

She considered that sex was indicated at this time, given the facts about testosterone secretion cycles and behaviours affecting the duration of the marital bond. There were noises from the boys' rooms, but the bedroom door was locked. Manually, she verified that Joshua had a viable erection and that she was sufficiently lubricated to permit intercourse. She rolled her husband on to his back, kneeled over him and inserted his penis.

Gaining consciousness, Joshua Carman weighed the facts about hormone secretion cycles and the link between orgasmic experience and self-esteem in women. Sex would be indicated at this time. He thought of the stimulation achieved by handling Rachel's breasts against the effect of inhaling her morning breath, typically a distillation of Marlboro Lights, Famous Grouse, garlic and jalapeno chilli. He tried to remember if he had locked the bedroom door. He computed the possibility that he could convince Rachel that he had ejaculated if in fact he lost his erection. Then he held his breath and reached out with both hands.

Rachel positioned her mammary tissue within his grasp. This was quite good. She grunted to encourage him. Was it possible that the sensory messages from her nipples were overriding those from her vagina? Or was Josh losing it? If he was going to fake again, she'd have to go along with it. Raising doubts during intercourse – was inappropriate. The door handle rattled.

Unexpectedly, Josh had an orgasm, a non-event of half a dozen spasms and an estimated 2ml of semen which sneaked up so fast he didn't even have time to vocalise. Damn. And Rachel was only just warming up. He'd have to get her off orally. Surprisingly, his olfactory system suggested that the Scotch and chilli were in the bloodstream in sufficient concentration for some molecules to be present in the vaginal mucus. Was that biologically possible?

A small boot kicked the bedroom door. ‘Ma!'

‘Go away!' Rachel's voice rasped her dry throat. She was going to cough.

Violent kicking. ‘Ma, Benny's hungry!'

‘Get lost, you little creep. It's too early.' She was going to come. She was going to cough. She was going to come first. It was all a question of focus.

‘You have to get us pop tarts.'

‘Will you
fuck off
?' Her pelvic floor was well congested. A bronchial spasm propelled a huge load of mucus towards her pharynx. Josh pinched her nipples. It worked. She fell off her husband and into the pillow, coughing but satisfied.

The door shuddered from renewed kicking. ‘Get us pop tarts! We're starving.'

Dr Joshua Carman got out of bed, unlocked the bedroom door, grabbed his sons by the hair; cracked their heads together, threw them on the carpet and yelled, ‘You little bastards, get your own fucking pop tarts.'

Rachel sat up and reached for her cigarettes. ‘God,' she clicked her lighter. ‘Kids – they're just so manipulative.'

Josh took the packet from her and shook out a cigarette for himself. ‘Do we have an eight o'clock today?'

Ted Parsons cut down Orchard Close, at the end of which a pedestrianised area, which an amateur might have called a path, led between the gardens into Maple Grove. Being screened by some immense chestnut trees, this route enabled him to walk without being observed.

The path meandered. Part of the special charm of Maple Grove was that all the streets curved. This also had been decreed by Jackson Kerr, the father of the community. Most authorities attributed Maple Grove to its architect, Tudor Wilde, whose inspiration it had been to take the steep-pitched roofs and homely gables of old Dutch farmhouses and reproduce them here in red brick and white weatherboard.

The Maple Grove Society held annual lectures on Tudor Wilde, and the Wilde At Heart bar in the Parade kept his name alive and the Art Nouveau tiles he had commissioned on the walls, but in the view of Ted Parsons it was typical of the chattering classes to credit the artist with the achievements of the entrepreneur. The man who really made Maple Grove was its developer, Jackson Kerr, who had dreamed of great profit bred by mating rural charm with urban ease, and ordered that his streets should wander peacefully like straying cows.

Ted squared up and sprinted the last fifty yards to his gate, which he reached at 7.23 am.

Aboard the
Dawn Treader
, Sweetheart watched her father pick up one of his headache pills. His eyes were almost closed and the way he was leaning his head on his hand probably meant he was feeling bad. The question would have to wait.

He had the pill on the palm of his hand and he was looking at it as if he expected it to move. ‘Sweetheart,' he said after a little while, ‘did I have these in my gym bag?'

‘They were in the cupboard.'

‘Didn't I lock the cupboard?'

‘Oh yes, it was locked all up.' Sweetheart started twisting her hair. There were these things that you found out were wrong only when you had already done them.

‘So how did you get these?'

She had lost the word. ‘Ummm … with the screwy thing.'

‘What screwy thing?'

In the end she had to show him. He stood there and looked at the medicine cabinet on the floor, the step ladder, the holes in the wall, the screws she had kept carefully in the top of the coffee tin and the packet of paracetamol on the draining board with two capsules removed and 98 remaining.

After a while he began to say something like, ‘You'll make someone a fine carpenter if you live to grow up,' but he started throwing up towards the end and had to dive for the sink. He stayed there, running the water, for along time.

‘Carpenters are nails. Screws are some other thing.' Sweetheart could not see his face. She really hated him to cry. ‘Don't be sad.'

‘I'm not sad.' He took some of the big breaths that made your stomach go in and out. ‘I'm going to be late for class and you are going to be late for school.'

By 7.45, Ted Parsons had showered, shaved, dressed and was driving

down The Broadway towards the 31, feeling optimistic because he

had avoided speaking to his wife, and his kids had avoided speaking to him. So far, a perfect day. No, a good day. Perfect would have been Gemma Lieberman naked at the window.

Ahead of him he saw Adam DeSouza run the red light at the junction of Alder Reach. Waiting, he could look down the side road in his wing mirror. A bunch of kids on bicycles. Gemma's kids? What kind of mother actually let her kids bike to school in this day and age, at risk from paedophiles and drunken drivers?

The houses in Alder Reach did not appeal to him. Pseudo cottages with half-timbered facades, they nodded to the Wilde style but lacked its generosity. Romance had been the downfall of Jackson Kerr. Leafy, clean, peaceful and only 20 minutes to Central Station by train from Westwick Green, before it was even half built Maple Grove became a model for the world. But uglier homes were cheaper. The beauty of the river was worthless, the notion that the land was damp and vulnerable to flooding was costly. Five years and four hundred houses towards his dream, Kerr and his Maple Grove Company had gone bust, and there went the neighbourhood.

Another developer threw up Alder Reach on plots which Kerr was forced to sell at a knockdown price. For a few decades, Westwick was abandoned to the two species who will always colonise cheap land – artists and immigrants. Grove House, Kerr's own home, was cut up into six apartments. Maple Grove was satirised in popular revues as the haunt of Bohemian poseurs.

Time passed. The city bellied westwards. Westwick Green was no longer the railway terminus, merely another stop on the line. The airport was built by the 31. Time blew new merchant adventurers to the same shores, Ted Parsons among them. The foundation of his fortune, such as it was, had been laid in retrieving the vision of Jackson Kerr, evicting the occupants, painting it up, contriving a bathroom for every bedroom and selling it on for healthy profits.

When the euphoria of those early days was past, Ted took note of Kerr's history and identified the mistakes. Pride and passion between them had brought the dream down. A man would be a fool not to take the lesson offered. The green light flashed on and Ted Parsons drove on to the city, confident that pride and passion would never threaten him.

Stephanie planned the school run to start at 8.10. Max had his shoes, his shoe bag, his painting overall, his reading book and his lunch box. He was sitting on the stairs doggedly tying the laces on his new trainers, his little round legs boyishly decorated with scrapes and bruises. It was 8.12, they were due at the school at 8.30 and Stewart still had not called. Since Westwick was one of the most notoriously clogged nodes of traffic in the whole circulation system of the city, she had got into the habit of turning on the TV in the kitchen for the morning road report, reasoning that since they had to tolerate the noise of the helicopter overhead, they might as well get the benefit of its viewpoint. Sky High, the traffic reporter, a forceful black woman in a silver jumpsuit, fascinated Max.

To buy more time, Stephanie had cut a bunch of lilac and was tying the stems.

‘Mum, don't give me that,' commanded her son, getting up and heading for the door.

‘Don't you want to give your teacher something nice?'

‘No.'

‘But I thought you liked her.'

‘We're late.'

‘Well, if you like someone it's nice to give them flowers.'

‘No it isn't. It's weird.'

‘Max …'

It rang. The telephone rang. She grabbed it, so eager that her finger missed the talk button three times.

‘Hello, darling …'

‘Stephanie, I need to talk to you.' Stewart's partner. Maybe he could make only one call, maybe he'd asked Marcus to call her.

‘Are you going to be at home this afternoon?' Marcus had been born without social skills. She hated talking to him on the telephone, getting the words out was like pulling teeth. And it was worse when he was embarrassed.

‘Did you speak to Stewart this morning?'

‘Ah – no, no, not today. Listen, can I come over at around four?'

Disappointed, she agreed then, seeing the time, swept Max and his educational impedimenta into the car and hit the street. In Elm Bank Avenue she picked up Ben and Jon Carman, who had obviously been fighting so at least they were quiet. In Church Vale she pulled in behind the studio car waiting for Allie.

‘It's eight-twenty, Mum.'

‘Clever boy, telling the time.'

‘It's a digital clock,' Ben Carman sneered, kicking the seat in front of him.

‘Mum, we're going to be late.' Max was that kind of child, exceptionally anxious to do everything right. She did not like to go into the Parsons' house in the morning, Allie had a way of creating force fields, and at this hour there was always an invisible ring around her house repelling all intruders.

The door inched open and Chalice Parsons began to dawdle down the path, dragging her bag on the ground. Twice she turned round as if she expected to be called back. The ribbon from her wispy fair hair fell on the ground. When she got to the car, her bag fell open and two chocolate bars, a packet of frankfurters and a pencil fell into the gutter. Chalice burst into tears.

At The Magpies the sun had dried the dew on the climbing frame. Miss Helens came out and took Chalice firmly by the hand. Stephanie gave the lilac to the teacher herself. She knew enough about embarrassing mothers never to want to be one.

The plan had been for Stephanie to be a full-time mother until her children were of a proper age – maybe eight or ten or twelve – but when they came to Westwick they found that full-time motherhood was not quite the thing. A Westwick wife needed a job, the sort of job that embellished her husband's career, attracted tax breaks on the home and enhanced their family life, like Allie, of course, or Rachel Carman running her mother and baby clinic or Belinda DeSouza with her ski apartments or Lauren Pike with her counselling. So Stephanie was the sole proprietor of The Terrace Garden Design Studio, which allowed her to spend her mornings dreaming up treillage and water features for her neighbours.