The Slap (33 page)

Gary hardly said a word to her throughout breakfast, and bolted out the door as soon as he finished his coffee. She knew exactly why he was pissed off: he never liked it when she accompanied Shamira on her house-hunting. He started bickering with her as soon as she’d got off the phone to her on Thursday night.

‘Why are you going with them?’

‘To have a look?’

‘Why?’ He had been immediately suspicious.

‘Sammi wants a third person there, another opinion.’

‘Where are they looking?’

‘Thomastown.’

‘What the fuck for?’

‘She wants them to be on the same train line as her mum. I think it makes sense.’

‘Thomastown is a hole.’

‘It’s an affordable hole.’

He had pounced. ‘Don’t get any fucking ideas.’

‘I’m not.’

He looked at her with fierce distrust. ‘I’m not having a fucking mortgage round my neck. It’s bad enough with a kid. I won’t do it.’

‘I know,’ she snapped.

‘Good. And I promised Vic I’d go around to his place on Saturday morning. He’s got some songs he wants to play me. You’ll have to get one of the kids to look after Hugo.’

Thank God for Connie and Richie. That had been the only good thing about that awful barbecue, getting to really know those kids. Connie had rung up the day after Hugo was bashed, to find out how he was. They were good kids—those kids were saving her life. Fuck Vic and his songwriting. It was on a par with Gary and his art. You are bloody tradies, just workers—fucking deal with it.

She stayed calm. ‘Fine, I will. I’ll call Richie—Connie works Saturdays. ’

But Gary had already stormed off, into the backyard. She found herself breathing rapidly, panting, really scared.

Hugo came to the door, staring up at her quizzically. ‘Did you and Dadda fight?’

‘Of course not.’ She picked him up in her arms. ‘We weren’t fighting.’

‘You were.’

‘No, I promise.’

His face scrunched up, his eyes wary, and suddenly he reminded her of her own father. She hugged him close.

‘I promise, we weren’t fighting.’

A fucking house, Gary. A house. I deserve a fucking house.

 

She had been sixteen when they lost their home. She still could remember everything about it: the wide Formica bench in the kitchen where she and Eddie would complete their homework; the slowly creeping crack on the wall above her bedhead which her father never got around to plastering; the out-of-control weeds and spindly, parched rose bushes that struggled to survive in her mother’s neglected flowerbeds, the soil dislodged by the heavy sand that continuously blew in from across the highway. It was a drab, late-sixties, cement-cladded house, the ceilings low, the walls thin, an oven in summer. But it had been her house, where she had grown up, and it was only a ten-minute walk to the beach. For most of the year she lived on the beach. Golden girl, they called her, because her tan never faded, her hair was bleached almost albino white from the sun and sea, and because she jumped the waves and rode the surf as if she was born in the very ocean itself. In Perth the golden sun—
her
sun—set on the calm, warm Indian Ocean. It was where the sea and the wind and the land all came together and made sense. The impossible blue of the Pacific was pretty but it did not contain the elemental harshness of
her
ocean, of
her
sea; it could never feel like home.

She often avoided the house, especially in summer, with the school year over and time stretching ahead. She had hated the toxic wall of silence between her mother and father. Later, older and experienced with men, she found a grudging respect for the way her lovers could scream at her, abuse her, make their venom and anger clear. She could never be like that—it was impossible for her to even form the words. She would shut down. She knew it wasn’t healthy. That was one thing she was teaching Hugo: to be clear, to express himself, to not be repressed. Every emotion is legitimate, that was a mantra she whispered to him even before he had mastered speech. Every emotion is legitimate.

That final year before her parents divorced their house was almost explosive with emotion, things unsaid. She couldn’t bear to live in it. Thank God for the beach.

We’re losing the house, Eddie had told her. It was so like Eddie; he had sounded offhand, indifferent. That was the reason Aish had given about why she and Eddie split up. Your brother has no passion for anything, I mean, not for one bloody thing. Not cars, not the beach, not a career, not school, not girls. He’s got no blood in him.

We’re losing the house, Eddie said to her, almost yawning, Dad’s gambled everything away. He’s lost his job—Mum didn’t even know. We’ve got nothing.

Where are we going to go? she asked him, terrified. He shrugged, jumped off the beach wall, picked up his surfboard and headed off to the water. Where are we going to go? she screamed after him. She stayed there, sitting alone on the wall, watching her brother paddle his board out to the thin line where the water and sky touched.

 

Richie turned up promptly at nine-thirty. As always, she was surprised at his punctuality, so unlike herself as a teenager. As soon as Hugo spied him through the screen door, he whooped and ran down the hall. It was so clear to her: Hugo needed a brother. They
needed
another child.

‘Yo, little man.’

Hugo was jumping, struggling to reach the latch on the screen door but it was just out of his reach.

‘Hang on, hang on,’ she laughed. Rosie slid the latch across and opened the door. She leaned in and kissed Richie on the cheek. The boy blushed. Hugo immediately took the older boy’s hand and pulled him along the corridor, heading to the backyard. Richie turned around and mouthed, Sorry.

She waved them on. ‘Go play,’ she called out.

 

It was a relief to get behind the wheel of the car, glance back at the empty baby-seat, turn up the volume on an old Portishead CD, to have the window down, to be driving. To be by herself. And the best part was knowing it wouldn’t last long. In a few hours she would be so wanting to be with Hugo.

Shamira’s sister, Kirsty, was going to look after Sonja and Ibby. Kirsty and her sister shared the same heavy-lidded eyes and pale Irish, oval face, but beyond that the contrast between the two women was staggering. Kirsty’s T-shirt was low-cut, the logo of a Balinese beer stretched tight across her ample breasts. She was wearing skin-tight black jeans, sandals, and her blonde-tipped dark hair fell messily across her cheeks and down her shoulders. Shamira claimed that Kirsty had long ago accepted her sister’s conversion, but the younger woman’s suburban trashy look seemed a deliberate and pointed protest. Surely the choice of a T-shirt advertising alcohol could not be accidental? What was clear was that Ibby and Sonja adored their aunt, both of them vying for her affection and attention, Sonja sitting on Kirsty’s lap, doodling in an exercise book, Ibby standing at her side, leaning in, seeking to be enveloped by her. Rosie sat down across from the trio as Bilal came into the room, holding a pair of boots in his hands. He nodded to Rosie, sat down and pulled on the shoes. He turned to his son. ‘You are going to listen to everything your aunt says, you got that?’

Ibby nodded purposefully, his boy’s face suddenly serious, determined.

Bilal winked at him. ‘Good fella.’

To Rosie, the boy’s answering smile was full of joy and pride.

 

She insisted on being in the back seat. As she was pulling the belt across her she glanced at Bilal’s face in the rear-view mirror, and then almost shamefacedly looked away when Bilal returned her gaze. She could hear Gary’s caustic rebuke. You’re so fucking uptight, Rosie, you don’t know how to be around a blackfella, do ya? You’re so scared of saying or doing or thinking the bloody wrong thing. You’re so fucking middle-class, aren’t you, Rosie? That, of course, was the worst insult her husband could throw at her, for it was both truthful and unfair. It seemed absurd to her that she should have no money, that she didn’t have a home of her own, that she should be so poor, shopping for her son’s clothes at op-shops and relying on one- and two-dollar coins to complete the end-of-week grocery shopping. But the worst of it was that she
was
so stolidly, boringly, stupidly middle-class. She did always experience unease around Aboriginal people, and had done so from when she was a young girl being taken into the city by her father, clutching tightly onto his hand when they passed any Aborigines in the street. She was scared that if she looked directly into their eyes something evil, something abominable would happen to her. She had no idea from where her fear had originated. Her own parents’ racism had been casual, was certainly never expressed violently or aggressively. Her mother pitied the blacks and her father had no respect for them; but beyond that they prided themselves on tolerance. Rosie’s fear had somehow seeped into her from beyond consciousness and memory, imbued from the very air of Perth. She certainly did not experience a similar anxiety around blacks from Africa or the Americas. She had not felt scared as a teenage girl when the US navy frigates docked in the harbour at Fremantle and the streets of Perth would be full of swaggering black American sailors. She loved their attention: the faint obscenity, the seductive illicitness of their stares; their wolf whistles; their pleas: Come on, baby, have a drink with me pretty lady. And Aish, her best friend, she was Indian. That was black, wasn’t it? But she did not risk another glance at Bilal.

She let out a deep sigh. Shamira turned around, her eyebrows raised in question. Rosie shook her head apologetically, briefly patted her friend’s shoulder, and mouthed, I’m alright. It was the news of the imminent hearing, that was what had done it. She shouldn’t jinx herself, not doubt the inherent rightness of the decision she had made. She
was
a good person and her unease around Bilal was not just because he was Aboriginal. She remembered him as a young man—she’d met him when she first arrived in Melbourne. He always used to laugh then, a sing-song in his voice, an attractive, youthful wildness. But he seemed to be wound up all the time, ready to uncoil with ferocious violence. She had not liked him, had feared him, even. Now in his forties, Bilal seemed to have no connection with that youth. She trusted
this
man, she preferred him, but she rarely heard his laugh. She was convinced that he detested her, that he still saw her as the silly white girl who’d come over from Perth and couldn’t look him in the eye. In all that time they had barely exchanged a few dozen sentences. But now she was becoming friends with his wife, and she wanted to prove to him that she was no longer that silly, thoughtless
white
girl, that she had left all that a lifetime ago.

The unrelenting flat suburban grid of the northern suburbs surrounded them. The further they drove, the more Rosie thought the world around them was getting uglier, the heavy grey sky weighing down on the landscape, crushing down on them. The lawns and nature strips they passed were yellowing, grim, parched. The natural world seemed leached of colour. She thought it was because this world was so far from the breath of the ocean, that it was starved for air. She understood her husband’s resistance to even thinking about living here, to settling into this dreary suburban emptiness. But it was all they could afford. Unless they moved to the country. Gary refused to even think of it as a possibility, but it would be good for Hugo, good for Gary’s painting. But she knew he wouldn’t hear of it. She looked at Bilal’s reflection in the window. Here was a good man, a great father, an adoring husband. For a dizzying moment, the kind that took her breath away, she wished that she was the woman sitting next to the man in the front seat. She wished she was part of the couple going to look at a house. She shivered.

She leaned forward and placed a hand over her friend’s shoulder. ‘Are you excited?’

Shamira shrugged. ‘We don’t let ourselves get excited. We’ve been disappointed too often.’

Bilal’s hand reached across the gearstick to grasp his wife’s. ‘We’ll find a place, hon, don’t you worry.’ His voice was gruff, embarrassed. Rosie sat back in her seat. He didn’t want her with them, it was obvious. She shouldn’t have come along—this was an activity for husband and wife. But what other opportunity would come her way? She didn’t want to look for houses on her own, to look for a
home
on her own.

The street was a small cul-de-sac a few blocks back from High Street. There was a school around the corner; the kids would be able to walk to it. The house itself was a low-ceilinged, square brick-veneer built in the early seventies. An auction sign was hoisted above the wire fence: Family Convenience. Rosie chuckled to herself. How Gary would hate that phrase.
Family values. Working families. Family First.
‘Family anything’ he hated. Some neighbours were hanging over their own fences, looking on dispassionately at the steady stream of people walking in and out of the house. One of them was an old Greek-looking man, and further up the street a group of kids were playing soccer, chaperoned by an African woman, her head scarfed, anxiously keeping watch on the traffic. It would be a quiet street. She wouldn’t be afraid of Hugo playing outside in such a street.

The house itself was drab, there was no other word for it. The tenants had moved out and the place seemed like a shell to Rosie, devoid of personality or charm. The rooms were small, the carpet faded, and there was a distinct smell of damp in the bathroom and laundry. However, it was on a large block, with a decent-sized work shed perched precariously in the far corner. The yard had not been tended properly for years; the small garden beds were full of sickly looking weeds. But Rosie could tell that her friends loved the yard, the space, the possibilities. Quietly, she slipped back into the house, feeling like a fool, the only one on her own. The place was packed with young couples flushing the toilet, tapping the thin walls, measuring the dimensions of the rooms. She walked back out through the front door. When she had first walked in, the round-cheeked estate agent had offered her a leaflet and she had refused. He was still standing under the porch and he went to offer her one again, before recognising her, smiling, and dropping back. On an impulse she stretched out her hand. The photograph on it had a view of the residence taken from the most appealing angle, shot from below to give the house much-needed height and width. She turned the leaflet over and examined the plan. There were only two bedrooms; the kids would have to sleep together, but that was no different to the arrangement in the flat Shamira and Bilal rented in Preston.