The Best Thing (18 page)

‘Up half the night, yakking on.’

‘Yeah, was great.’ He pushes some coils of hair out of my eyes. ‘Should do it every night.’

‘You should come over. After training, I mean.’

‘Yeah, and you go and put your feet up. You right to get over there?’

‘It’s the best exercise for a pregnant woman, walking.’ I pick up my string bag from the foot of the bed.

‘Well, take it easy.’

‘Geez, get off my back. I’m fine!’ I smile to soften the words. ‘I’m only pregnant, not terminally ill!’

But it’s strange to be upright. After spending so long in that bed, in that room, with that man, I’m cast adrift, floating, off balance. The bleak light ripples like a wobble-board in the sky, and my eyes keep being drawn to gobs of greenish-white spittle on the footpath, smoking cigarette butts, dog turds. People waiting for the buses, walking to the station, all look primped and stiff and unhappy; their soaps and scents and aftershaves are nauseating against the background of diesel smoke. By the time I get to the park I’m sweating, panting from trying to resist it all. My legs are shaking with hunger.

When I close the front door behind me I realise this isn’t what I want either, this intense padded quietness. I turn the TV on as I pass, for the illusion of company, and go upstairs. I feel as if I’m covered in handprints, as if Pug’s left grooves in my head, pushing his fingers through my hair. I smell, of sex and mould, of King Street exhaust and unbrushed teeth. My clothes are crawling on me. I can hardly steady my hands enough to turn on the shower taps. I strip off, step into the steam, lather up shampoo, soap and scrub and rinse. Finally I can feel my own body, my own self, surface from the grime.

Jeff Fenech of trainer Johnny Lewis: ‘I really do love the bloke … Johnny has always been there. The day I met him at the Newtown gym was the greatest day of my life. He means so much more to me than just a trainer. I knew he’d never let me get hurt—in or out of the ring—if he could help it.

‘That’s why I always have my head resting on his back when
I’m going into the ring for a big fight. It’s him and me against the enemy and I always give him a little kiss on the back, just to reassure him.’

At the gym, Justin Silva sits next to me on the bench, plucking at his sweat-soaked T-shirt.

‘Dino says you’re havin’ a baby,’ he says to me under all the noise. He’s never spoken to me before.

‘That’s right. In November,’ I add, just to marvel at the fact myself.

He nods. ‘It’s really cool having a kid.’

‘Yeah? You’ve got one?’

‘I’ve got a boy, Paul. He’s just turned two. He’s ace.’ He can’t stop himself smiling. ‘Muckin’ around with your kid, there’s nothin’ like it.’ He glances at me to see if I’m listening. ‘Guys like, here, they can’t understand. You know, Friday night, get off work, you’re supposed to go out, have a few, party. Here I am runnin’ home to Paul, and Nina, that’s my girlfriend, fightin’ over who gets to put him in the bath! It’s crazy. I love that kid. He’s changed my life.’ He laughs at me. ‘I don’t give a fuck what other blokes think any more—and I used to be worried all the time. Just doesn’t bother me.’ He sits up and takes a swig of orange juice, stretches out his legs.

It’s a speech and a half. I’m actually getting a lump in my throat.

‘So what was the labour like?’ I hear myself asking. ‘Did you see him come out?’

‘Oh man, don’t start me off! It’s the one thing that
always
makes me cry. Yep, I was there. I seen him come out. Best day of my life. Just don’t ask me for the details.’ He bends down and re-ties both shoelaces.

‘What about for Nina?’ I say, laughing.

‘Well.’ He pauses, organising his thoughts. ‘It wasn’t too bad. She went six hours, which is … okay.’

‘Half the usual, from what I’ve read.’

‘Yeah. It’s hard.’ He wrinkles his nose. ‘Makes you glad you’re a bloke, face it. But after, she said it was fantastic. Especially when it wasn’t just pains any more and she could do some pushing, help things along. She said pushing him out was just great.’ He smiles into the middle distance, then at me. I make a scared face. ‘You’ll be right. It’s just the
best
thing. I thought it’d be shocking, the whole deal, not just him being born, but being, you know, stuck with one chick, stuck with a kid and that. And it does stop you doing some things, but … you know, it changes everything. Things you think you’d miss, you just don’t give a fuck about any more, can’t see why you used to bother with ‘em.’

‘You want a go, Justin?’ Jimmy calls from the ring where he’s finishing up with Pug. ‘When you’ve finished chatting up Melanie, that is.’ He winks at me without smiling.

It’s the first time he’s acknowledged me. I wasn’t even sure he knew my name, this god of Pug’s, director of his life. Suddenly I’m visible—whoa! I just wish I could crawl off quietly under the bench to enjoy it.

Loosening the glove laces with his teeth, Pug sits beside me.

‘You didn’t waste any time, spreading the news around,’ I mutter at him.

‘Only Justin, and Jimmy. You’re lucky I didn’t take out an ad in the paper.’

‘You don’t want to spread it around. What if I miscarry and lose it?’

He puts a taped hand on my knee. ‘Nah, we’ll just make another one. Easy.’ He laughs and kisses me under the ear.

‘Pu-ug! You’re not supposed to
laugh
in here, or
kiss
people!’ I hiss at him.

‘Why not?’

‘It’s a holy place, isn’t it? Sacred ground? Look, no-one else is smiling.’

‘That’s ‘cause no-one else is
happy.
Now give us me windcheater and let’s get goin’.’

Selling a house is more complicated than I thought. The agent’s busy playing one potential buyer off against the other, and Mum’s on the phone to Dad nearly every night keeping him up to date with ‘developments’. She’s always very brisk and businesslike during those calls, even though when she’s telling me about what’s happening she’s practically rubbing her hands together with glee. She’s really into the whole process, tells me every little detail, not noticing that I really don’t want to hear, that I just sit like a lump not asking any questions, waiting for her to get on to another subject.

It takes a week and a half to eliminate one of the buyers, and then Mum and Dad go and sign the contracts at the agent’s. ‘Our last date,’ says Mum as she straightens herself up in front of her bedroom mirror. It’s nearly two months since I found Dad with Ricky here, and it seems like no time at all. She meets my eyes in the mirror and I can’t read hers. Then Dad arrives, also looking too neat and combed, and they go off together, careful not to touch each other.

Then there are six weeks to wait until ‘settlement date’, which is the date we’ve got to be out of here, the date ‘I actually get my moolah,’ Mum says.

‘And Dad gets his,’ I remind her. ‘What’s he going to do? Buy a red Ferrari?’

‘Don’t know. Haven’t asked. There may come a time when I care two hoots, but right now it wouldn’t bother me if he flushed the lot down the toilet.’

This conversation takes place at the fruit and vegetable market, Mum checking over every cauliflower.

‘You never act really upset about all this separation business, Mum.’

‘“Act” upset?’ She finally chooses the perfect cauliflower and starts pulling a plastic bag around it.

‘You know, floods of tears, screaming. Breaking things.’

‘You’d like that, would you?’ She raises an eyebrow.

‘No, but I sort of … I think I keep waiting for it to happen
and it doesn’t. It’s like you had a game plan for if you and Dad split up all along, and now you’re just going from step to step. Almost enjoying it.’

She gives me a smile that’s not a smile. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve been doing my tears-and-screaming routine, just not when you’re around. And as for breaking things, enough’s already been broken, if you ask me. I’m more interested in trying to build things up.’ She crosses the aisle to check through the herbs. ‘I’ve seen a few people split up, and I know the damage it can do. I’m not about to let it ruin my life, or yours.’

‘How could it ruin
my
life? It’s your relationship.’ I know that’s not what I want to say, but I want to reassure her somehow.

She puts a thick bunch of rosemary sprigs into a bag. ‘Don’t be daft. He’s your father. We had a family. Now it’s—it’s not gone, it’s just … rearranged, fragmented? No, let’s not fool ourselves. It
is
gone. What it was is gone. Nobody’s quite the same person now.’ Her hand comes to rest among the celery stalks.

I stand there with the trolley, not moving, hearing her speak my thoughts, my fear.

‘You seem the same,’ I say, ‘only happier. More lively.’

‘Well, those are big differences, I guess.’ She smiles at me, then picks up a bunch of celery, weighing and turning it in her hands. ‘I mean, not that I was
un
happy before, but I certainly feel better about myself after all this than I did before. I just don’t want you to think you can’t trust anyone, or any relationship. No, it’s any
man,
I’m thinking about. Your dad’s your dad; he’s just one person.’

‘That sounds like a contradiction to me.’ I nudge the trolley forward and we move along the aisle. ‘Fathers can’t ever be
just one person
to their kids, I don’t reckon. When they start behaving like
just one person
—like, any old person—like, well, having it off with your mum’s best friend, it’s … it’s so insulting, like somehow they’ve just
forgotten
they’re your father. Fathers don’t do that kind of thing, if they’re doing their job properly.’

Mum smiles sadly. ‘Nor do husbands, you’d have thought. But it’s not just him.’

‘No, it’s Ricky,
parading
around our house in skimpy clothes and no bra—’

‘I was going to
say
…’ She waits for me to cool down. ‘Maybe I wasn’t working all that hard on my relationship with your dad. Maybe with that, and with you getting to the age where of
course
you’d look beyond the family for stimulation, he felt that our family hardly existed anyway.’

‘Well, he should have
told
us, then, if he wanted us to lift our game.’

‘And we would’ve said, “Sure, Dad, no worries”, without taking offence?’

We look at each other. Our guilty laughter brims and spills over.

‘See?’ says Mum. ‘You look at it one way and he’s the devil incarnate. Another, and the poor guy didn’t have a chance, living with two stubborn cows like us. Oh, I don’t know.’ She starts picking over the green capsicums. ‘We all got a bit smug, I think. Tried to ignore the big changes. In you, him, all of us. We just sat there while the ol’ lemonade went flat, doing nothing. Who wouldn’t want out?’

‘I still think he should’ve tried.’

‘Maybe he did. Maybe we didn’t notice.’

I’m disconcerted. ‘You reckon we’re that bad?’

‘It’s not a question of good or bad.’ She puts the bag of capsicums in the trolley. ‘It’s just, I don’t know. Life, human nature—those big things nobody understands. Now, go and get in the queue at the deli section. I’ll be with you as soon as I’ve got the cucumbers.’

Another fight night.

I was a bit nervous about seeing Pug’s parents after the baby news, but I needn’t have worried. They’re over the moon about it. His dad gives me strict instructions to have a grandson, and
his mum hugs me over and over again, smiles up at me, hardly able to speak for imminent tears. Then Oriana pulls me aside, alight with curiosity, wanting to know what it feels like, bursting out ‘Oh, it’s so
exciting
!’ every minute or so.

‘I thought everyone would be angry with us,’ I tell Mrs Magnini later when we’re out in the auditorium waiting for the match to start.

‘Ah, no. I have my first baby Luciano before we get married. Seven months after the wedding, here he is—nice big baby, can’t be early! Everybody know! Anyway, today is different: people live together, no marry, have babies, no marry.’

Pug’s team comes down the aisle to the ring, Pug in the middle, a splash of hot red in the middle of a motley crowd. His mother puts her hand on my arm.

‘I always know Dino have the first grandchild. I always know. Looking at Luciano—’ She shakes her head, her bottom lip stuck out. ‘At Oriana—’ Same shake, same face. ‘Then Dino come along and I think “This is the one. This boy the steady one, the family one.” Always very good with the children.’

Her son looks out at us over the foaming applause, his face rigid with pre-fight tension. I feel as if, if I just knew the right words, the right
spell,
I could snap us both out of this odd, vicious dream and back into the real world, somewhere where he could move slowly, without calculation, somewhere where he could spend his days being ‘very good with the children’, away from the glare of all these people, their obsession with this game, their hanging out for blood, anyone’s blood.

In the month we weren’t together, this was one thing I didn’t miss, being made vulnerable by Pug’s being vulnerable, this naked, feeble hope that he
won’t get hit
this time around.

The crowd chills to silence. The team melts off the ring. Two pugs hover there, super-brightly lit, clean, dry, mouthguarded. I close my eyes and lock my brain until the bell sounds; then I have to watch.

Women have been excited by the spectacle and occasionally have swelled the audiences for certain fighters … but their participation has always been peripheral, even discouraged … Few fighters’ mothers and wives have been enthusiastic about their menfolk’s trade, they prepared too many soups for bruised and battered mouths, changed too many dressings on lacerated faces. The women have always provided newspaper copy for anti-boxing articles.

‘It’s me.’

‘Did he win?’

‘Of course he
won,
Mother!’

‘Of course! Is he okay?’

‘Not a scratch. The other guy lasted one and half rounds. Of eight. It was almost insulting.’

‘Wouldn’t like to be
his
girlfriend, eh?’

‘No.’ I laugh, in relief. Relief at Pug’s victory, relief at being able to just ring Mum and
say,
tell her
straight,
what’s happening. ‘So we’re heading back to his parents’ place for supper. By the way, they want to meet you, now that you’re practically related. Sunday lunch, his mum suggested.’