The Near Miss (8 page)

‘No, thanks.' She sipped a can of beer and looked across the fire to where Alison and Peter were deep in discussion about agents and publicists. One was a writer, one was a painter, and they were both embarrassingly earnest about their success. Earlier, Romy had been a little dismissive privately in the car (only a
children's
author, she'd said), but she grew stiff and silent now as she eavesdropped. She and these two had been the group's three creatives, the ones destined to be artists. The writer, the painter, and the actor. She let go of Eddy's arm and moved closer to them.

‘So when's your exhibition, Peter?'

‘Next month. And you? Any auditions coming up?'

‘I just did the one for the photocopy paper ad,' Romy said, with studied offhandedness. ‘But you know how they are. They always want some blonde bimbo.' The photocopy audition had been three months ago now, and Eddy remembered Romy had already told Peter about it, and had
already made the dig at the blonde who had won the job. But Peter acted like he hadn't heard the story before. He expressed sympathy, again, and Eddy liked him a little better for it.

‘Bastards.'

‘Daddy.' A small figure appeared in the doorway of the farmhouse, clutching a blanket. Only Eddy heard her above the noise. Her father, Thomas, had his hand immersed in an esky of ice, a circle of blokes around him counting the seconds as he sought to break the night's record.

Eddy went over to the child.

‘Are you okay, Ella?'

‘It's too noisy.' She rubbed her eyes and glanced back inside, where sleeping babies and toddlers were scattered on cushions and crumpled blankets, their closed eyes all facing the television screen, like corpses circling a dried-up billabong. A finished DVD played its menu screen in ghostly rotation.

‘Come on, I'll take you back to bed.'

Inside, Eddy picked his way carefully amongst the small bodies to the vacant spot on the couch, still warm. The girl tried to curl up on his lap, a move he deftly dodged, telling her she was too heavy. He sat her beside him, put a blanket over her and tucked her in.

‘Can you tell me a story?' she asked.

He glanced outside; the child's father had now yielded his place at the esky and was chanting along another contender. No real reason to bother him.

‘Uh. Once upon a time a man loved a lady very much. So much, that he wanted to ask her to marry him.'

‘Was she a princess?'

‘Well, to him she was. Anyway . . .'

‘Was she a
real
princess?'

‘A suburban princess, let's say. Anyway, he wondered how to go about this task . . .'

‘He has to get a ring.' At their feet, a baby moaned and jabbed some unseen monster with a chubby fist before rolling over.

‘Exactly. So he went off to the shop and got a ring.' He tugged a blanket up over a curly blond boy, and pushed a pillow away from a sleeping toddler's face. Ella watched him until he sat down again.

‘And he has to do a mission,' she told him.

He stared at her. ‘What?' This may have been the wrong topic to choose; Ella's eyes were wide with opinion, and her wakefulness seemed to be gently sweeping the room. One toddler made a short, unintelligible but distinctly formal speech in his sleep, another kissed the air longingly and began to whimper. Eddy spotted a nearby dummy and hastily reinserted it.

‘You know, if she's a princess, he has to do a mission — like kill a dragon, or find a riddle that makes the sad king laugh . . .'

Eddy thought about bungy-jumping in New Zealand, which Romy had wanted them to do, and which he had wriggled out of. God, could you imagine the risk ranking matrix on that? The insurance premiums those people must pay . . . ‘Well, maybe he went to the king and the king didn't need him to do a mission.'

‘They
always
need to do a mission.'

‘Who's telling this story?'

She stared at him doubtfully. Man, little girls were being born hard-wired to want more, more, more. What was it, some genetic selection programme? Now that a diamond ring, the ability to vacuum and a willingness to take family leave when the kids were sick were commonplace, the
next generation would want all this plus a dragon slain, to say nothing of an act of undergraduate stupidity involving a steep drop and a massive rubber band. He pressed on.

‘Okay then, the king said you must go and speak to every frog in the land . . .'

‘Are you and Romy going to get married?' Like a flute, that little voice.

‘Maybe. Keep your voice down a bit.'

‘Well, are you?'

He blinked and consulted his empty hands. ‘Er, maybe. No. Well I don't know.'

‘Can I see the ring?'

Eddy regarded her. She stared back at him. She was scary. She could read minds. She had x-ray vision. It was time he left this nursery; went and did man things.

‘That's enough. Go to sleep.'

Next morning the air in his tent smelt stale and alcoholic, and he wrenched open the zipped door, gasping for oxygen. He fell back and stared at the polyester roof, tracing the lines of the seams, and finally Romy stirred and opened her eyes.

‘My head.'

He kissed her forehead and got up alone, the ring still in his pocket. He would make her a coffee. But out in the eucalyptus morning, where sun kissed dewdrops on every glittering green surface and the air was sweet, dirty urchins drifted upon him like a polluted tide.

‘I'm hungry.'

‘I'm thirsty.'

‘Can we have breakfast?'

‘Don't you have parents?' he muttered, as he built a fire, boiled water and crossly washed
bowls still caked with the previous night's dessert. He dried them and laid them out in a row. He found some Weetbix and rationed them out. Raided someone's esky and used up almost all their milk, saving the last centimetre for Romy's coffee. Washed spoons and then handed out a bowl of Weetbix and milk to each child.

‘Sugar?' A little one held her bowl up to him, baby legs bare below a too-big jumper. She belonged in a seventeenth-century orphanage.

‘Rots your teeth.'

Back in the tent, Romy sat with her head in her hands. She accepted the coffee and huddled over it.

‘There's no sugar?'

‘Romy. You could say thank you. I did have to wash up and feed half a dozen children out there before I could even get to the coffee.'

‘Thank you.' She sipped sadly. ‘You're not having a good time, are you? You don't like these guys.'

‘That's not true. They're okay, it's just their parenting skills leave a bit to be . . .' He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘I mean, if they're going to bring their kids, it might be nice if they actually looked after them.'

‘Mmm.'

‘They're fine, they're fine, these people. They're your friends, I know. It's just . . . you get different around them. You're not you.'

Romy put down the coffee and stared thoughtfully out of the tent's flaps. ‘I feel like I
am
. Sometimes I feel I'm more
me
with these guys than anyone. And then I go home and I wonder just
who
I've become? Who
am
I?'

Eddy sighed. They would drive home today, and Romy would be deflated. ‘You'd be a better mother than any of them.'

She made a face. ‘I don't know about children.'

He smoothed her hair, and cupped her jaw. ‘We could make one, you know. I've heard it's quite easy.'

Romy put her forehead between her fingers and rubbed desperately. ‘I think I'm going to be sick.'

There was a knock at the front door, startling Eddy from his memories. He inhaled sharply; he would not answer. He checked that his pale blue pyjama top was buttoned. He rolled the navy piping that edged the jacket between his fingers. He froze; there was the ghost of a face in the window. He stared at it for a full half a minute before realising that it was his own reflection. He was losing it. More knocking. Who was it? He could not speak to anyone, he felt too close to weeping. Real men didn't weep. Was it his mother, maybe bearing a plate of hot roast? He was kind of hungry. But he wanted to see no one except for Romy, and Romy would not knock. This was her home. Or was it, in her eyes? Maybe it
was
her, maybe the knocking was an apologetic overture, an acknowledgement that she had betrayed him. He stood and reached the door in giant steps, his heart bursting for terror that she would creep away again, into the mysterious world of Missing.

He threw open the door, but it was not Romy. A man stood before him. The little girl's father. From the road accident. From the dinner. Tom. He was momentarily unrecognisable in a navy suit and white shirt, although he had loosened his tie and was holding a six-pack.

‘G'day, brought some beers. Wanna drink?'

Eddy looked down as if feigning surprise to find himself in sleepwear. ‘Uh. Okay.' At this time of morning? But then he saw the time: it was well after lunch.

Tom had flowed inwards by now, like a liquid. Eddy could not remember whether he had gestured his guest inside or not, but Tom roamed through the house swigging his beer and checking out the décor. Patches of mud and grass stuck to the back of Tom, on what looked like a good-quality suit, but Eddy decided not to mention it. He did not really think Tom would care. Was he drunk? Not very. The school children would walk past again soon. He felt ridiculously sad at the prospect of missing them, and anxious to return to his window. ‘Shall we sit in the front room?'

‘Here in the kitchen's fine.'

‘But I need to . . . it's nicer up there . . . this way . . .'

‘Sure. Are you sick?'

‘No.' Eddy declined to offer any reason for why he was wearing pyjamas at three in the afternoon. ‘And you? Not at work?'

‘Nope.' Tom offered no excuse either, and so the two men sat in harmony at the front window, cautiously free of explanations, and drank beer. The women drifted back along the street, their faces ambivalent as they left behind the private pleasures of the day and took on their mother-selves again. Eddy looked at Tom nervously; his own isolation had given him a queer, dislocated feeling, as if he was speaking through fifty layers of soundproof glass.

‘She hasn't come back,' he said, too loudly. And then he shrank back from himself; all wrong, all wrong. Being human was too difficult.

Tom nodded as if he knew. He took out a newspaper, and flicked through it, then folded it and held it before Eddy. ‘Seen this?'

Eddy read it reluctantly, without touching it. He did not like this particular newspaper, and
had not read it in ten years. Big pictures, small articles, lots of supermarket specials and erectile dysfunction ads. Tom pointed at a large blurry picture, a stock-standard image of a security camera's perspective on a store robbery. Eddy had seen similar pictures a hundred times. The caption of this one indicated it had taken place in the early hours of the day before. A small grocery store, with the shadow of petrol pumps in the corner, and rows of chocolate bars and advertisements. A slim hand reached from one side of the picture, behind the cash register, offering — one could almost see the tremble of the fingers — a bundle of cash. Clear also were the two thieves, one close to the counter and one a step behind, darker images against the tinsel and glitter of busy rows full of products. And what was that on the robbers' faces?

           
Pirate and Cat get the Cream in 7/11 Hold-Up

           
Two thieves believed to have robbed a series of petrol stations in the eastern and northern suburbs have been dubbed Pirate and Cat, due to their unusual disguises.

           
Police are hunting a man and woman believed to be in their thirties who have gleaned close to $55,000 in cash from grocery hold-ups. Security cameras show the woman wearing a cat mask and the man in a balaclava with a red patch on one eye, and a tricorner hat. The woman is estimated to be 170 centimetres tall, of medium build with dark hair and olive skin. The man is possibly part Asian in appearance, estimated 190 centimetres tall and of muscular build, police say. Both have Australian accents, and left the scene of each crime together on a motorbike.