Like a House on Fire (22 page)

The natural course. Nature's way. I'm baffled by it, I don't mind telling you. I've had a gutful of it. Carving its erosion gullies through us, whipping the rug out from under us, making us eat its dust. I'm waiting for something comprehensible to jump out of this garbled mess and make sense to me. Here is the natural course, now — calling my name. The radiographer with my file, scanning the faces from the door. Blue shirt, polite smile, male. Here it comes. I rise and walk towards the examination suite for what I know is waiting for me in there. I count my steps.
Ten steps to a new me. Ten days to a flatter stomach.

I know what Pete will be doing at home right now. He's making the decision to open the gate into the pasture with its desiccated, knee-high wheat. Can't stand its hopeful greenness struggling in that parched ground, knowing what three more days of this heat are going to do.

Let it go. Let the cows eat it.

He stands there postponing the moment when he lifts the catch on that gate, scrutinising the sky and the horizon one last time as the cattle cluster on the other side looking hungry and, oh, Pete, I know what you need and I can't give it to you; I can see it in the way you scratch the dog's tilting head just where he loves it, the thwarted tenderness of that gesture so familiar to me that I feel the heavy dish of water in my chest teeter and almost overbalance, and I ache with holding it steady.

I see it in the resigned way you take off your hat to wipe the dirt and sweat from your forehead and, with decisive and methodical force of habit, seeing what needs to be done, how you set it back straighter on your head, ready.

Static

‘Anthony,' says his mother, ‘what's this we're drinking?'

He'd known this was going to happen, the minute Marie showed him the punch recipe.

‘You know they're hyper-conservative,' he'd said. She'd rolled her eyes, put a post-it note reminder on the recipe page and added it to her list.

‘For crying out loud, what's not to like about melon ginger punch?' she'd muttered. The glossy magazine bristled with post-it notes, annotated painstakingly by Marie with dozens of clever and simple Christmas lunch suggestions for people with more to do than slave over a hot stove, et cetera.

Now his mother prods a perfectly spherical melon ball in her drink, and looks at him as if it was a floating dead mouse.

‘It's punch,' Anthony says, smiling hard.

‘Just something cool and refreshing,' adds Marie.

Anthony's father Frank puts his down and pulls himself off the lounge chair. ‘How about a beer, son?'

‘Sure, if that's what you're after.'

Anthony listens to the asthmatic wheeze of the leather chair his father's just vacated, sucking back air into itself as if desperate for breath, the only noise in the room for a few seconds. In the deoxygenated silence, he feels what he thinks of as Evil Rays, like something in one of his old comics, jagged lightning bolts shooting across the room. They're crackling from the fingertips of the archenemies seated on either side of him.
Take that, Ice Maiden! No, you take THAT, Bitch Crone!

Then both of them, his mother and Marie, turning the Evil Rays onto him, as if the entire thing is his idea, his fault, when all he's done is get out his credit card to pay for the whole bloody shebang: the punch and the Peruvian glass punchbowl it's in and the gourmet chestnut stuffing mix in the organic free-range turkey out there, rolled and boned for easy slicing — Anthony knows exactly how it feels — and the sighing, put-upon lounge suite still on the
interest-free nothing more to pay for ten months
plan, which Marie is already obsessing is the wrong shade of taupe. Are there actually different shades of taupe? It's news to him. Hell would be like that, he thinks, gulping punch. It would be shades of taupe that drove you screaming into eternal torment, not the flames.

‘Let's open the presents,' he suggests.

‘But the children haven't even arrived,' says his mother.

‘I meant just ours,' he answers feebly. True, for a few seconds there, he had forgotten the children were coming. His sister's offspring would dominate the day, though it wasn't the kids' fault — they'd be desperate to escape into the study as soon as they could to play with the Wii he'd bought them, the poor little buggers. No, they would be used, the children, as deflector shields against the Evil Rays, as ammunition against the day's parries and thrusts of emotional blackmail. Hannah and Tom. They'd have to be twelve and ten now.

Marie hadn't even wanted them to come; she made a big fuss about having to plan a special menu for them and how they'd turn the house upside down, but Anthony, ducking his chin and ploughing through a veritable snowstorm of Evil Rays, insisted that if they were going to have a family Christmas, his sister and her husband and kids had to be there, or his parents wouldn't show up.

‘I don't care if we have KFC,' he'd finally said, gesturing to the pile of magazines hawking sunshine and patios and people in uncrushed white linen shirts. ‘If we've agreed to do it, they have to come.' And Marie had slammed off into the study to channel her fury into pumping six kilometres out of the exercise bike. You could bounce a coin off her calf muscles, if you were game to try.

Rays, rays. One drills into the back of his skull as he leaves the kitchen, another counterattacks with a zap square in the solar plexus as he carries in a platter of smoked-salmon blinis. Marie's doused them with chopped dill, and his mother looks at them like they've been sprayed with grass clippings from the mower. She can get every secret weapon into those rays — contempt, accusation, disdain, puzzled faux-innocence, the works. Anthony is determined, fully determined, to thwart her with unrelenting good cheer today.

‘Pikelets, eh?' says his father, eyes swivelling back to the one-day match, luridly coloured on the plasma screen. ‘Well, well.' He folds one into his mouth to keep the peace while his mother refuses, mouth like a safety pin. Vol-au-vents, that's his mother's style. Cheese straws and a sherry.

Anthony starts eating the things so that when Marie comes back it will look like they've been a success. He's got four in his mouth when a stray caper lodges itself in his throat and forces him to cough a spray of ricotta and dill and masticated pancake into a Christmas napkin. For a second he's terrified he might actually throw up, and wouldn't that be a wonderful start to the day, but he swallows down a mouthful of punch and his stomach settles.

Where's Marie? If there's one thing those magazines kept promising, it was that even though you were a hostess you wouldn't need to be tied to the kitchen all morning; with your new fresh and fun easy-peasy celebration menu you'd be relaxing with those you loved on this special day.

He can't go back out to the kitchen yet. It wouldn't look right. ‘Who's winning, Dad?' he says.

‘The Pakis.'

On the screen the tiny bright figures move as if they're underwater. Bowl and deflect. Go back, wait, run up slowly, bowl and … block. Christ, it's like watching paint dry.

‘I got all my shopping done early and out of the way this year,' says his mother. ‘And what a relief that was. I can't stand having to shop when the place is such a madhouse just before Christmas.'

‘You're right. It's crazy, isn't it?' He recalls going to Safeway just the night before, running up and down the aisles searching for cranberries in syrup. The person ahead of him at the check-outs was buying four barbeque chickens, salad mix and a big tub of choc-chip ice-cream, and Anthony had felt an overwhelming, childish longing to follow them out and curl up in the back of their car and go home to their place.

‘And I got everything boxed,' his mother is saying, ‘just big square boxes. I'll never forget the terrible problems we had wrapping that rocking horse for Tom.' Seven years later, and she's still talking about it.

‘What did you get him this year?' says Anthony. He can see the packages under the tree — all the same red paper with identical bows.

‘A walkie-talkie set.' She looks at him shrewdly, and Anthony does his best to simulate admiring delight.

‘Oh! He'll … Was that something he said he wanted?'

‘You know how much he loves all his electronic games. He'll be able to play police games with this, with his friends. You know, hiding round the house.'

‘Terrific.'

She's on to him in an instant. ‘What? Don't you think it's a good idea? Lord knows it cost me enough. I just try to keep up with what the children seem to want; I don't know all the latest gadgets. I just do my best.'

God, where is Marie? ‘No, no. It's a great idea. He'll love it.'

When Tom sees the Wii, Anthony knows, the walkie-talkie's going to get dropped like a dud Tamagotchi.

‘I'll just see if Marie needs a hand,' he says, weaving through the lounge chairs to the kitchen.

‘Honestly,' he hears his mother tut as he exits, ‘how hard is it to roast a turkey?'

Listless applause sounds from the TV as someone finally hits something, and the lounge chair exhales a gust of weary depression.

Marie's face, as she glances up, is murderous.

‘Pit those,' she snaps, flicking her eyes to some cherries. ‘If your father cracks a filling on a cherry pip I'll never hear the end of it.'

She's — what the hell's she doing? Anthony stares at his wife's hand, vanished to the wrist inside a Christmas ham.

‘I'm getting the fat and skin off. I'm not going to drop dead of cholesterol even if they all want to.' She extracts her hand like a doctor completing an internal exam and peels back the great flapping layer of fat. ‘Look at that. Disgusting.' She wraps it in a plastic bag, shuddering, and drops it into the bin. ‘We'll just have this ham cold, sliced and arranged on the platter with some rocket garnish and a scattering of cranberries.'

Anthony grimaces. He can hear the pitch rising in her voice, the manic brittleness that has nowhere to go but up, up, up into hectic hysteria. It will break later, after everyone has gone, and the tic that's jumping now under her eye will somehow afflict her whole face and pump itself down her arms and legs.

‘Try not to get upset,' he says as calmly as he can. ‘I'll do all that before we eat, just come in and sit down for a while.'

She's scrubbing ham grease off her hands in the sink. ‘I hate that lounge suite,' she mutters. ‘I told you it was the wrong colour.'

Anthony scrabbles in the cutlery drawer for the cherry pitter he remembers buying at Ikea. ‘So I'll just do these cherries then.'

‘I'm not going back in there by myself,' says Marie, who fronts a whole courtroom five days a week.

‘Well,' says Anthony, keeping it light with everything he has, ‘I'll bring this bowl in, and do them in there.'

‘Are you serious?'

‘Sure. It'll give my mother something to correct me about. Make her happy.'

She flashes him a smile as she heads for the door. The ghost of an old smile, one he misses; she's trained herself not to do it because it shows the tooth she's convinced is crooked. He's told her he loves that tooth, but she just rolls her eyes. In every one of their wedding photos, stored over there in the hand-tooled leather albums, she has on the other smile, the trained one — lips closed and chin raised like a model of cool serenity, a perfected study of herself. But somewhere in a drawer, Anthony has an old photo of her, pulling off her mask and snorkel at the Great Barrier Reef, just out of the water and her grin broad and unselfconscious. Years ago.

‘I don't have any explanation for it,' she'd told the fertility specialist last week when they had their first session. ‘I'm doing everything right: diet, exercise, monitoring ovulation …'

How reasonable she'd sounded, how level-headed. That lawyer's tilt to her head, the voice pleasant and determinedly non-aggrieved. And the specialist nodded and said, ‘Sometimes these things take more time than we expect,' and she'd replied, in a voice a shade or two firmer, that she'd done her own research and was ready for the first stage of conception enhancement.

That was the term she'd used:
conception enhancement
. Like they were joining the Scientologists rather than trying to make a baby.

Anthony takes the cherry bowl and the Ikea pitter and an extra saucer into the lounge room and sits at the end of the dining-room table. Marie is at the stereo, riffling through the stack of CDs for something suitable, his mother pointedly brushing dill off a blini she holds in her palm.

‘Aren't you the domestic one?' says his mother when she sees him, and he waits, counting tiredly to himself, and getting to seven before she adds, ‘Just watch you don't splatter that shirt with cherry juice because it's the devil's own to get out.'

He starts on the first cherry, and his mother writhes with the discomfort of not interfering.

‘Would you like me to do it?' she blurts when she can no longer endure it after ten seconds.

‘No, thanks but no. I'm enjoying the challenge.'