The Slap (8 page)

Aisha went to check on the children and came back. ‘I think they’re asleep.’ It was years since he had seen her look so sheepish.

‘We were quiet.’

‘No, we were not.’ She went to the kitchen sink and started clearing the remains of the salads into the compost bin.

He went up behind her and clasped her tight. ‘Let me do it. I’ll clean up.’

‘We’ll do it together.’

‘I’ll do it.’ He was firm. The drug, though less relentless now, was still in his blood and he wanted to move, to be active. The sex had re-energised him.

‘What am I going to do? It’s too early for sleep.’

‘Watch TV, read. I’m going to clean up.’ He’d pop the Valium, enjoy the comedown as he put the house in order.

She twisted around, his grip still tight on her, and she stared into his face. She was calm, a tremor of sweat still lay sheening her top lip. He licked at it.

‘What are you going to say to your cousin?’

Nothing.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Hector.’ She just said his name. There was an urgency and a potency in it. He wondered if he could manage to fuck her again, like this, her arse against the kitchen bench.

She repeated his name. ‘I want you to be kinder to Adam.’

Where the hell had that come from? He let go of her and fumbled for his cigarettes. Opening the sliding door, he stood under the doorway between the kitchen and the verandah. She followed him and pinched the cigarette from his hand. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen her smoke, it was certainly before she was pregnant with Lissie. It was as if that night he was seeing her and their life together in a different way. He wished he could confess, tell her about the last few months, how he had betrayed her, how he had almost come to be indifferent to her. He wanted to confess because he was, at that very minute, assured of his love for her, for all of her, for everything they had together. This house, their children, their garden, the still comfortable queen-size bed that had begun to sag in the middle from years of their bodies linking in sleep, his arms always around hers, shifting only when she, still asleep, nudged him, still asleep, to move and to stop his snoring. He could not bear life without her. His chest tightened, his fists clenching in determination. He would not allow her to see his fear.

‘I promise I’ll change. I won’t be so hard on the boy.’

Anouk
looked in the mirror and smiled wryly to herself. There were more wrinkles around the edges of her mouth, she was sure of it. You’re getting vain, girl, she lightly scolded. She flushed the toilet, switched off the bathroom light and slipped back into bed. Rhys protested in his sleep, then turned and wrapped an arm around her. He felt warm and sweaty. Anouk peered at the alarm clock: 5.55. No way she would get back to sleep now. She kissed Rhys’s arm, brushing her lips against the coarse hair and soft, boyish skin, tasting his salt as she slid out from under him.

‘You okay?’ he mumbled.

‘Yep.’

A moment later, she was throwing up into the toilet bowl. She raised her head and found Rhys staring anxiously down at her. His right hand was dangling protectively over his genitals and this made her want to laugh. She pointed at the towel and he bent down to wipe around her mouth. That’s very nice of him, she thought gratefully, and then almost immediately, and almost comically, He must be very much in love.

She got to her feet and kissed him lightly on the brow. ‘I’m alright. ’

His green eyes were still anxious.

‘Rhys, it’s nothing. Just a bit of flu.’

‘Take the day off work,’ he yawned.

‘As if.’

‘Go on. I’ll do the same.’ He was pissing into the bowl. She had not yet flushed her vomit away and his unconcern disgusted her. She suddenly wanted to wound him, to say that the last thing she wanted to do on a day off was spend it with anyone. She rubbed her belly and looked at her lover’s firm behind, the graceful curve of his back. There were probably hundreds of girls more than half her age around the country whose dreams of Rhys were about to be rudely interrupted by their alarms. Maybe thousands. Some of them would gladly tear her eyes out for the way she was treating their idol.

Rhys flushed and turned to her, smiling.

‘You’re really disgusting.’

He scratched his balls and ignored her. She pushed him out of the bathroom. She wanted warm water falling on her head and shoulders, she wanted solitude. She had a long, extravangant shower. She felt better after it. She felt she was herself again.

 

Though they both had to be at the studio this morning, Rhys drove while Anouk took the tram. She preferred public transport because it gave her time to read or to prepare notes or just gave her time to herself. Rhys argued his was now too public a face to risk taking the train or tram. She thought this was mostly affectation. It was certainly true that a few giggling schoolgirls could be annoying but Rhys’s upmarket rockabilly wardrobe was far enough removed from his alter-ego’s surfer style—especially when coupled with over-sized sunglasses and a musty smelling Bombers footy beanie—to allow him relative anonymity. And, as she often teased him, most people heading off to work in the morning aren’t going to give a toss about some soapie star. That made him grin but he insisted that she didn’t understand the ignominy of being fawned over—or worse, being humiliated—in public. She had to admit it wasn’t all affectation. When they had first got together a drunk had come up to them at a bar and inexpertly punched Rhys in the face. ‘Fucking poofter soapie wanker,’ he screamed as his reason for doing so, as the bouncers converged.

Fucking poofter soapie producers. She was not looking forward to the morning meeting. During the last month her writing had become florid, deliberately theatrical, and at the same time, self-aware and mocking. Her recent script had a young girl quoting Verlaine, both the poet and the rock singer. But this wasn’t why it was going to be a tense meeting. The producers and the network had been congratulating each other for introducing an incest scenario into the early evening soap opera’s storyline. They were being ‘brave’, ‘socially responsible’. Anouk had no illusions about what they were doing. It was basically a recycled child abuse theme which included an unspecified and vague sexual torment. The victim and her father were also secondary characters, newly arrived neighbours living next door to the central family. In this way, had the advertisers protested, it would have been relatively simple to immediately drop the storyline. Not that anyone had protested. As the executive producer kept reminding them, they had ‘managed to remain tasteful’. When she first heard this, Anouk had burst into laughter. Another of the writers, Johnny, told her a story about a friend who was working in Hollywood, involved in the production unit putting together a mini-series set in World War II. She’d sent Johnny a confidential email that had circulated among the writers. One sentence had been highlighted:
All scenes set in the gas chambers must be tastefully executed and not upsetting to the viewers’ sensitivities
. Anouk had stuck the copied email above her desk at home. If she ever fell into the delusion that her career was glamorous, or worse, important, she would remind herself of the email. She took her most recent script out of her bag, squashed next to a friendly old man on the tram seat, and began to read. She smiled to herself. They probably did want to kill her this morning.

She had made the supposed victim a liar, exposed her as a sadistic vixen. She had set a scene in a high school corridor where the fifteen-year-old asked her sympathetic teacher to kiss her. When the shocked teacher refused, the girl warned him that she could get him into trouble. That had been it. A jarring scene which she had written to confront the viewers and to make the plot more interesting. She was also bored with the sugary niceness of the girl. The soap was filled with wholesome, buxom blondes and that made Anouk feel decadent and amoral, made her want to fuck them up. She smiled again. He was going to kill her.

 

He screamed at her for ten minutes. She didn’t interrupt him, smirked superciliously throughout, tactics which she knew would infuriate him further. None of the other writers looked her in the eye or offered their support but this neither surprised nor annoyed her. This was commercial television: they would all be loyal to her at the pub afterwards. The script was trashed and he told her she would not be paid for it.

That was the only point at which Anouk answered back. ‘You have to pay me.’

‘You’re not fucking getting one cent for that rubbish, you useless bitch.’

She didn’t miss a beat: working in Australian television stank of the locker rooms.

‘And if you don’t pay me, you fat ugly faggot, I’ll shut this production down so fucking quickly that you’ll have advertiser dollars gushing out of your overstretched arsehole.’

It was a bluff. She doubted she could muster enough union support from the writers to shut down the canteen for an hour. But her bravado made him hesitate for a moment and in that moment she won.

‘Well, you’re not getting a fucking dollar more for the rewrite. And I want the rewrite tomorrow morning. Got it, sweetie?’

‘I’ve got plans tomorrow morning,
sweetie
. I’ll talk to Rhys.’ She usually avoided referring to her relationship at work. It had become public only a few months ago and, by now, everyone knew, but she did not want to discuss it with anyone at the studio. However, she had a hunch the producer fancied Rhys. It was too good to resist.

‘I’ll get him to bring it in.’

 

She was meeting Aisha at a bar across from Federation Square and had arrived early. Her hand shook as she smoked. She had felt elated walking out of the meeting. She had not lost her temper; she knew she’d made the bastard feel insecure because he wasn’t able to intimidate her. Afterwards her colleagues had privately sought her out and congratulated her on standing up to him. But the feeling of triumph soon dissipated. There was bravado on her part, but precious little bravery. Bravery would have meant walking out, telling him what she really thought of him, of his laziness and rudeness and incompetence, of the contempt she felt for the imbecilic program they made. Her hand shook because she was confronting, yet again, her own weakness. She fingered the bracelet on her wrist, a helix of copper and silver that she had bought near Split when she was working with the Croatians on developing their version of the soap opera. She looked down at her fine leather sandals: she had bought them in Milan on a weekend off from work in Zagreb. She knew what she wrote was infantile and moronic. She knew that she assisted in exporting stupidity to the world. But she loved her shoes and her jewellery and her apartment that looked over the bay across to the skyline of Melbourne. She loved the money. And tonight, when she could be working on her book, she would be rewriting the script instead. And the good guys would be wearing white hats and the bad would be wearing black. She rang her GP to make an appointment for the morning, she phoned the library to extend her loans, and she was on her second martini when Aisha walked in.

‘How did it go?’

‘I hate my job.’

‘You like the paypacket.’

As Aish went up to the bar to order a white wine, Anouk laughed to herself. She loved her friendship with this woman because they knew each other so well. Aisha had known Anouk well before she’d become a successful, confident woman. Aisha had been there from the beginning, when Anouk was the gauche Jewish girl with vomit on her too-tight red dress at the end-of-high-school ball.

Aisha returned with the wine and sat down. ‘I still hate my job.’

‘Rosie and Gary have got the police involved.’

For a moment, Anouk had no idea what her friend was referring to. Then, with a groan, she remembered the incident at the barbecue.

‘You are fucking joking, surely?’

‘Harry hit their child.’

‘He should be given a medal.’

‘Hugo’s just a kid, Anouk.’

‘He’s a monster. I hate that bloody child.’

Aisha looked incredulously at Anouk, who took a deep breath. She didn’t want an argument but it was inevitable if the subject was going to be Rosie. They’d all been friends since they were teenagers in Perth, but it was an uneven friendship. Aisha loved them both but the truth was that Anouk and Rosie no longer had much time for one another. Not that Rosie would ever admit that—she could never acknowledge darkness or confusion in life. Rosie was always about the light and the good and the positive. That way she never had to admit to cruelty or malice within herself; she could always be the victim. Anouk thought of the plain-speaking burly Harry who had slapped Hugo at the party. She knew next to nothing about him but that he seemed decent enough, good-natured, probably insufferably dull and bourgeois except for the faint linger of a once-dangerous prole virility. He was definitely more of a man than Rosie’s Gary. Anouk also liked Harry’s charming, unpretentious wife and his good-looking son. The man probably liked his life. And now her unthinking friend, no doubt encouraged by her resentful alcoholic prick of a husband, was going to try and damage that life. She breathed out slowly and waited for Aisha to speak.

‘Hector’s furious with me. He thinks I am betraying his cousin.’

‘Why, what have you done?’

‘He’s so fucking Greek at times.’

‘Don’t evade the question.’

‘Rosie wants me to make a statement.’

Anouk exploded. It was as if all the tensions of the day had collided and found a release through her scorn for Rosie. No, it was more than that: she was furious that her good, smart friend could be led into making this mistake because of the self-righteous whims of a doormat like Rosie.

‘Don’t get involved.’ She would not let Aisha interrupt. ‘If you get involved not only do you fuck things up between yourself and Hector but you pander to Rosie and Gary and their paranoia. Hugo is a basketcase. He has no boundaries, he is uncontrollable. If she wants to act like some hippie earth mother, that’s fine, but Hugo’s no longer a baby and he’s going to have to learn about consequences. What happened on Saturday was a good thing.’