New Australian Stories 2 (11 page)

And then, smoking on the garage roof, she showed me how to press the heated metal top of a cigarette lighter down on the skin near the inner elbow, leaving a burn mark like a grinning face, a curved U-shape and two small circles above it. Smileys, they were called. Kids did them at school, or at the train station, but not Bec. She did them only at home, ignoring my presence and my murmured protests. Screwing her eyes up, a cigarette hanging loose between her lips, she would hold the lighter there until I'd try to grab her arm, and even then she registered this disruption only faintly, with a flicker of her eyebrows. My smileys were barely a pale pink, and gone within a day. Eyes stinging, already sick from the smoke, I could only hold the lighter down for a split-second. But her arms inside her sleeves bore dark scabs that took ages to heal.

At the dinner table our mother commented on Bec's hands, on the way she chewed at the skin around the nails so the tips of her fingers were red and swollen. ‘Darling, your nails look terrible,' she said — or something like that. And Bec gave one of her usual brick-wall replies and did her piss-off flick of the hand, and the conversation was shut down. I sat across from her and wondered what other marks were there, under her clothes.

A quiet has fallen. The rain's stopped. Outside the windows everything sighs and drips.

Dixon rattles some cutlery. ‘Dinner!' he calls.

Bec puts her knife and fork together and checks the clock. She draws a hissing breath in between her teeth. ‘I should call a cab.'

‘You could always stay here tonight,' I say.

‘No.' She pushes her chair back. ‘I'm getting this nice hotel room for free. And anyway it's closer to Mum and Dad's. I said I'd have breakfast with them before my flight.'

We all go out the front to wait for the taxi. Everything — the raggedy wet bushes, the sky blown clear, the cold air — is clean and sobering, and we stand in silence until the yellow car swishes up.

‘Bye,' Bec says. She kisses us both quickly. ‘Thanks for dinner, Dix.' Her steps are light and quick down the path. She gets in and puts down the window. ‘So nice to see you both,' she calls. ‘Kathy — you should come to Sydney for a visit sometime.'

‘Yeah. That would be great.' I wave as the car drives off.

‘Bye!' Dixon and I both call again, even though she won't be able to hear us. And then we just stand there for a while, not talking.

I did try to visit her once, booked flights and everything. But she pulled out at the last minute, claiming something had come up at work.

Sometimes when I call or send a text message, and she doesn't answer or reply — which happens often — I picture the phone in her hand. Her watching my name light up on the screen. And then her putting the phone down again, still ringing or with the SMS unopened.

In the doorway of my study I stand and look at the piles of papers, the blank screen of the computer, the wobbly old swivel chair. There's a quiet in the house that feels solid, heavy. Immovable. I take my hand back off the light switch and close the door again.

Back in the living room I sit down beside Dixon. He pours me the last of the second bottle of wine.

I drain my glass as fast as I can. I feel too clear still, too sharp-edged and open.

We sit there, side by side. We don't look at each other.

‘Dix.'

He doesn't answer.

I wish I could cry because it feels like that would make this easier, whatever it is I'm trying to do. I turn to face him. ‘Dix.'

Dixon puts his hands to his face and rubs it. His glasses get pushed up to sitting on the top of his head. Then he takes his hands away but still he doesn't turn to me. ‘I'm tired,' he says. ‘I might go to bed.'

I wait, but he just looks into the fire.

‘Okay.' I blink. My eyes are still so dry they hurt.

‘Goodnight.' And now he does lean towards me, his face naked and weary. Without meeting my gaze he kisses me. A neat, chaste, goodnight kiss, but for a moment I feel his lips and taste him, and I smell him, his skin, his hair, his breath, and it's so familiar it's like kissing my own self, or a brother, or a sister.

The Way We Wed

ANNE JENNER

Back in the 1960s shotgun weddings happened a lot. You couldn't go so far as to say it was the fashion, but enough of my friends were doing it to make me see it as a reasonable lifestyle option. Anything would be better than my job as a mail clerk in a dim corner of the Department of Lands, where I'd ended up after flunking out of art school. And I had the means at my disposal: a young and healthy body, a willing boyfriend and a total lack of common sense or reliable contraception.

‘You silly, silly girl,' my mother said, between outbursts of weeping. Weeping tended to be my mother's instinctive response to life's dramas, one that gained her a lot of attention if nothing else. ‘You've ruined your life, I hope you realise.'

‘What do you think you're going to live on?' my father asked, not unreasonably since Doug was still at uni, and my earning capacity was clearly going to be curtailed. In those days they tended not to like pregnant women hanging around the workplace. Or hanging around anywhere much at all. You were supposed to cover your expectant state in a voluminous smock, so as not to inflict your fecundity on the world. Not like these days, where the baby bump has become a celebrity status symbol.

‘We don't need much,' I said. ‘Anyway Doug's getting a job.' I tried to ignore Dad's snort of laughter.

‘Doing what?' he said. ‘Donating sperm?'

‘That's not funny, George,' Mum said, dabbing at her swollen eyes. Someone should have told her the unfortunate effects of crying on the over-forties complexion.

These family councils took place around the dinner table after the plates had been cleared away. My younger sister and brother were excluded from the proceedings by virtue of their innocence, which they resented at first, especially as they got lumbered with the washing-up. Then they realised being in the kitchen gave them a chance to eavesdrop, which they did shamelessly.

‘Why did Mum say you can't be a bride?' my sister Jennifer asked one night. We were sitting in my bedroom out the back of the house, which, although neither Jennifer nor my parents knew, had been the scene of the crime. My bedroom was what would now be called an extension to the Housing Trust brick-veneer box that was our house. It was really a tack-on to the back porch, a sort of dog's-leg protrusion into the backyard. This meant that it was cut off from the rest of the house by the back door, the laundry and the no-man's-land in between, which served as a repository for brooms, shoe-cleaning utensils and chooks' food. Although my window directly overlooked the Hills hoist, I liked this arrangement because of its privacy. Once the rest of the family had retired for the night, an orgy could be going on in my room and no one would know. What did go on was Doug. When we got home from a date, he'd drop me off out the front and accelerate away, ostentatiously revving his muffler-challenged bomb, only to park around the block and creep down the side to be let in the back gate by me. From there it was but a short step into my bedchamber and regular episodes of teenage sex.

‘Mum has this idea that brides should be virgins,' I said.

‘Oh yes, we learned about those in school, in ancient history,' Jennifer said. ‘Aren't they sort of like angels?'

‘In a way, yes. Anyway I'm not one so I can't wear a long white gown according to Mum.'

‘Can't you even have a veil?'

‘No, I don't think so.'

‘So what will you wear then?'

This was a good question and was in fact becoming a real bone of contention between my mother and me. Mum was very sensitive about the whole issue of sex. In fact, if it hadn't been for the threefold evidence to the contrary, I could well have believed she was still a virgin herself. She was insistent that, as I was damaged goods, it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to appear in the holy portals of the church in anything remotely bridal. Perhaps she'd have been happy if I'd rocked up in scarlet satin. As it was, after a lot of unpleasant public wrangling in various dress shops around town, she got her way. The chosen creation was a cream-coloured lace affair quaintly called an
ensemble
. Contrary to what consumers of today may think, this was not a bed-base-and-mattress combination, although it may just as well have been. It comprised a shapeless dress covered by an even more shapeless coat sort of thing: perfectly acceptable for a matron of advanced years but absurdly and appallingly hideous on me. To top this off, in place of the forbidden veil, on my head was to sit a confection resembling a small inverted cabbage.

Once the contentious issue of what the un-bride would wear was resolved, my mother turned her attention to more important things.

‘I'm too young to be a grandmother,' she said one night, seated again at the empty dinner table. ‘Why is this happening to me?' A couple of sniffs portended another descent into lachrymose lament, so I refrained from saying it wasn't happening to her, but to me. If she insisted on taking credit, who was I to argue. Not getting any satisfactory response to her question, she turned to me with a worried look. ‘You know what really bothers me about all this, Jane?'

‘No,' I said. ‘Apart from the fact that I'm ruining my life, and bringing shame, ruin and destitution on myself and my nearest and dearest.'

‘Don't be smart, my girl. I don't think you even love Doug. Do you?' She looked at me, her eyes a watery rebuke.

‘I'm not sure I even know what love is,' I said, telling the truth for once. ‘Besides, I haven't seen a lot of examples of it around here recently.' At this there was another outburst of weeping, which diverted my father's attention from the newspaper he'd been reading under the table.

‘Come on now, Jane my girl,' he said. ‘That's not fair. Doug's not such a bad bloke.'

Did he know something I didn't?

So the family drama raged on while I buried myself somewhere inside my hormones and gestated. I was eating for two now and thinking for no one. According to Doug, similar histrionics were playing out at his house, except that his mother was beating her breast about him having to drop out of uni. As though he was some sort of academic ivory-tower material, when in all the time I'd known him I'd never seen him pick up a book. That's when she wasn't railing against him for marrying someone she considered sluttish. This was not, as may be supposed, because I was clearly a non-virgin, but because I'd turned up at the breakfast table once, when I was spending the weekend at their house, wearing eye make-up. She could have done with a bit of cosmetic assistance herself but apparently regarded all such debaucheries as instruments of the devil.

Of course one of the worst aspects of this gauntlet I'd so inconsiderately thrown down before my parents was how the hell were they going to pay for a wedding? Mum was brilliant at budgets and each payday religiously put aside, into small labelled plastic containers, allocated amounts for all the foreseeable household expenses. A wedding for her eighteen-year-old daughter was not one of these. Therefore, the whole thing had to be done on the cheap.

‘Well, we can get the church hall for nothing,' Mum said. ‘Seeing as I'm on the church ladies' guild. And we can get the CWA to do the catering; that won't cost much.'

‘But the church hall's a dump,' I said, remembering the last time I'd been in there. It resembled nothing so much as a large public toilet: freezing in winter, sweltering in summer, and smelling of mouse droppings.

‘It'll be nice once we put a few floral arrangements around,' Mum said. ‘Beggars can't be choosers, my girl.'

‘But flowers cost money, don't they? Unless you're planning to strip the neighbours' gardens.'

‘We can probably run to a bouquet for you and a couple of corsages,' Dad said with breathtaking extravagance.

‘Yes,' Mum said. ‘And we can use the flowers left in the church from the Sunday services. In this cold weather, they should last a week.'

I could see it was pointless to argue. What did it matter anyway? I should have, though, over the photographer, who turned out to be an old army mate of Dad's who took photos for a hobby. He hadn't yet progressed to colour film so he ended up hand-tinting the photos — badly. I am well nigh unrecognisable in the resultant creations, having somehow been rendered with jet black hair and eyebrows when I am in fact a honey blonde. Still, who was I to complain?

Finally the wedding day dawned. From childhood I'd had a fantasy of getting married in Westminster Cathedral, possibly to Prince Charles. What I got was Doug in a prison haircut, and a nondescript suburban church. The musical accompaniment was a wheezy electric organ and a wobbly rendition of ‘O Perfect Love' by my great-aunt Mabel.

It was one of those grey days in midwinter when the sky droops over the landscape like a public servant's cardigan. Sad is the bride the rain falls on, they say, but sadder still the bride who hangs about under a threatening sky that does nothing more than emit a constipated drizzle. Just enough to turn her fine hair into rat's tails. Coiffure, however, was the least of my worries. In the grip of morning sickness, which consumed each morning in a single gulp and spat it out all afternoon, evening and night, I looked like death.