Too Close to Home (21 page)

Frank crosses his heart and swears to die. Freya just nods.

‘I'm pregnant.'

Frank is genuinely surprised. He raises his glass in a toast and kisses Anna on the cheek, telling her it's incredible, no wonder she's looking so gorgeous.

It's Freya's turn now. In fact, she should have spoken first and she's aware of this as she, too, kisses Anna's cheek and tells her how happy she is for her.

‘It's amazing,' she adds.

Anna looks at her. ‘What do you mean?'

Freya suddenly feels the hot intensity of the bar, the crush of people, the heat of the wine and low thud of the music, all colliding into one. She wonders whether she could faint. Anna's face swims in front of her. ‘Nothing,' she explains. ‘It's just always amazing when someone gets pregnant. Particularly when you were only recently saying Paolo was so against the idea.'

She shouldn't have spoken. The wide smile on Anna's face freezes, the glitter in her eyes crystallises. Freya doesn't know where she has stepped wrong but she is suddenly out on ice, cracks beneath her feet.

‘People can change their minds,' Anna tells her, her smile still fixed.

‘And obviously he did.' Freya raises her glass. ‘What a pity you can't drink. I'd buy you a glass of the most expensive champagne I could find. I will,' she promises, ‘as soon as you pop that baby out.'

But Anna has turned away. ‘It's why I didn't audition for Freya's play,' Anna explains to Frank. ‘I would so love to have worked with you on that piece, but I just thought it would be unfair. I hear you got Catherine White. Is she any good?'

Frank tells her that he thinks she'll be great. ‘She has no fear,' he adds. ‘Really willing to take it to some ugly places.'

‘And it's all going well?'

Again, he confirms that it is.

The alcohol tastes too sweet, Freya thinks, wondering what the wine was that Frank ordered. And she is drunk, which isn't good. She tries to rejoin the conversation, but Anna is already speaking.

‘So, you'll be heading back to Melbourne once it's up and running?'

Freya is surprised when Frank says that he will. There's no hesitation, and she wonders whether he is lying now or was lying earlier when he told her he still hadn't made up his mind.

‘You must miss them,' Anna says.

‘I do,' he replies. ‘More all the time. I can't wait to get home, in fact.'

It seems to Freya that the whole night has been swimming, everything fluid, darting, slipping out of her grasp as soon as she has got hold of it. She wonders how many lies they are all telling. She finds it hard to even start counting her own – there's her pretence to Anna that she didn't know she was pregnant, her lies to Matt about the evening and then she wonders whether she is lying to Frank. Or perhaps with Frank she's looking at something different, because what she needs and wants with him is impossible to grasp, floating in a way that leaves her reeling. She turns to Anna, who may well have lied to Paolo about contraception. And then to Frank, who is no doubt lying to Marianne. And then there's Matt. She shakes her head as she realises he may be the only honest one of them all, or – just as likely – lying in his ongoing failure to tell her where he is heading with this business with Lucas.

It is then that Frank mentions Marianne will be coming to Sydney with Lola, their daughter, next weekend.

Freya had no idea.

‘You'll have to bring them to Louise's baby shower,' Anna tells him. ‘I'd love to see her again, and meet the lovely Lola.'

She stands, clear-eyed, ready to return to her other friends who wait at the bar. ‘Did you get unbelievably tired when you were pregnant with Ella?'

Freya says that she did.

After she has gone, Freya wants to go home.

‘Back to my place?' Frank asks.

She shakes her head. ‘Home.'

They are out on the street, the air bracing after the heated crush of the bar, the road deserted and silent. Under the soft spill of the streetlight, Frank is pale and cool, silver-eyed and distant.

There is so much Freya would like to say, but she knows that embarking upon any sentence would only take her down an impossibly curved and tangled route. She looks at her feet, a crushed cigarette pack and a broken bottle swept into the gutter.

‘I thought you were going to stay,' he eventually says, although there is no real disappointment in his eyes.

It's all the same to him, she realises.

‘I'm sorry.' She wants the courage to continue with the one truth that she knows she should hold fast, a raft in this sickening sway of deep water:
I shouldn't be doing this. I need to work out things at home,
but these are not the words she speaks.

She smiles. ‘I guess I just thought it would be better if I left, that a whole night is something else. But maybe I should stay. To go home now – this late, having to explain myself –'

He looks at her.

She is hovering, pinned still, and it cannot be maintained. She could squeeze his hand, each bone rigid in her grasp for that moment, and then let him go, holding
an arm out to hail the first passing cab, turning her back on the foolishness of this, and returning home, although she knows it isn't the home she wants it to be. Or she could walk through the streets with him, careful not to touch, to the strange empty world of his apartment high above the city, hiding out there until the night dissolves into day, and she has moved even further from the place where she should be.

She wants him to make the decision for her. But he won't. There's no hold or weight or responsibility between them, no reason why he should step in and lift the choice from her, carrying it, as she shakes herself free.

MATT IS WALKING BACK from the park with Ella when Freya comes home. She sees them both on the street in front of her, hand in hand, Ella pausing to strip paperbark from the trunk of one of the few tall trees. Last summer a magpie made its nest in the branches, swooping each time they walked within a few metres of its base. Ella had been terrified, until Shane had told her to get a stick and hold it upright. ‘See,' he'd said, demonstrating to her, Archie and Darlene. ‘The bird goes for this and not my ugly head.' She'd liked it then, the whole ritual of finding the right stick to use as armour enjoyable enough to make her almost sad when the bird eventually left.

Leaning against a collapsed fence bordering what had once been a garden but is now a tangle of weeds surrounding a dilapidated cottage, Freya watches, unobserved. They are both in old jeans, canvas sneakers and long-sleeved T-shirts – Matt's navy, Ella's red. She puts her finger to her lips when Matt raises his hand in greeting. He is about to bend down and tell Ella to look, there's Freya, but he stops when he sees her gesture.

Ella is talking, telling Matt her plan. She needs
enough bark to build a house. ‘It'll have a downstairs and an upstairs, with a verandah and four bedrooms and a library full of books.'

‘You're going to need the whole tree for that.'

She looks up to the sharpness of the clear sky, and then down to where the roots have cracked the pavement.

‘I can't leave it nude,' she eventually tells Matt, who nods his head in agreement.

She isn't sure how to tackle the problem, and waits for his guidance.

‘We could just take a bit from this tree,' he tells her. ‘And then some from another, and then another. Until there's enough.'

Only a few feet away, and standing perfectly still, Freya overhears every word.

Ella nods in agreement. ‘So how much from here?'

Matt tells her that just a couple more pieces should do the trick.

‘And we'll save them?' Ella asks. ‘Till we find more?'

They will.

Freya is almost right next to her daughter, taking care to tread lightly on the scattering of twigs in her path. And then Ella turns, jumping and squealing as Freya pulls her in, kissing the smoothness of her cheek, and tickling her under her arms.

She wants to know where she's been, when she got here, how long has she been listening? Freya starts to tell her she'd spent the night at the theatre, but Ella cuts across the answers she'd been demanding.

‘I went horseriding this morning.'

Freya had forgotten that Shane had arranged to take them early.

‘This time I had a horse called Blaze. It was brown, like gold really, with a white stripe on its forehead, which is why it's called Blaze. And you should see Darlene and Archie ride. I want to do lessons. Can I? There's a place you can go.' She tugs at Freya's hand, wanting all of her attention. ‘We had to get up at like five or something; it was still dark. And I galloped.'

Freya smiles as Matt shakes his head, mouthing the words:
I'm sure she didn't.

They sit on the step that leads into their house, Ella now telling her that Darlene says they are all moving back to Queensland.

‘She reckons they miss their animals too much and Shane is going to take them home.'

‘You'll be sad to see them go,' Freya says, and Ella nods.

‘But maybe I could go up there and stay with them. In the holidays or something.'

Margaret, their neighbour, is calling in her cats, her voice shrill.

‘She can't find Boots,' Ella whispers. ‘I hope he hasn't been run over.'

Blackie slinks out from underneath a car, a slither of running silk as he slides in under Margaret's gate and up the stairs. Ginger follows. Margaret calls Boots' name again, her voice high and thin.

‘No Boots,' Matt says, looking out across the street, and they all wait, hoping to see the youngest of the three cats run across the road, paws a flash of white on the bitumen.

He tells Freya she must be tired. ‘Rehearsals went late?'

Freya only nods in reply. With her legs stretched out in front of her, she shades her eyes from the clear winter sunshine.

‘Are they in there?' she eventually asks Matt and he knows she's referring to Lisa and Lucas.

It's Ella who replies: ‘He is.'

The weight of it returns as she imagines him, lying on the couch or Ella's bed, his black jeans and T-shirt unwashed, his lank hair flecked with dandruff. It's wrong, she knows. She has made so little effort to talk to him or know him, never pushing past the barriers he has erected.

‘Lisa's mortgage came through,' Matt offers. ‘She's going to put the money in our account first thing next week.'

‘What money?' Ella asks, looking at each of them.

Matt tells her it's nothing, just some money he lent.

She lays her paperbark out in a row on the bottom three steps. ‘How much?'

‘Not much.'

Freya stares at him. ‘And have they found a house?' She hardly dares ask the question.

‘She's out looking as we speak. Shane offered to drive her when they got back from riding.'

He puts his arm around her, pulling her in close. ‘I'm sorry,' he tells her. ‘And I'm sorry to you too.' He kisses Ella on the top of her head. ‘You'll get your room back soon, I promise.'

Inside, Lucas is, as Freya had imagined, in Ella's room. The blinds are drawn and in the thick darkness
she can just see the shape of a suitcase open on the floor, Lisa's camp bed neatly made, and next to it the outline of his body, sprawled across Ella's sheets.

‘I brought some cake home. Would you like some?' she asks in what is a useless attempt to once again try to communicate with the boy.

He doesn't reply.

She switches on the light, the glare blinding, and he sits up, rubbing at his eyes. On the rug is a drawing, black ink scratched onto white paper. It shows a row of young men sitting, each with their knees drawn to their chest, their backs against a stone wall intricately patterned with what appears to be a snakes and ladders game.

‘Did you do this?' she asks.

He nods, and she's surprised he can hear her with the headphones still in.

Sitting on the edge of Lisa's bed, she picks it up. ‘It's good,' she says. There are others she can see, pages of them, their edges peaking out from under the suitcase, but she knows better than to pull them out.

She wonders for a moment whether he's been crying. There's a pinkish tinge around his eyes. Or perhaps he's simply stoned. He sniffs loudly, looking at her as he takes the headphones out, scratching at his hair before asking her where his mum is.

‘She's looking at flats,' Freya says. It's after three and she can only assume that most of the open inspections would have finished by now, and Lisa will be back soon. And then she asks him whether he's been in here all day.

He just nods.

‘You don't have to stay in this room, you know.'

He doesn't reply.

‘You could go for a walk down by the river, or there are shops up the road, or you could just come out to the kitchen and talk.' She knows that all she suggests is unlikely to offer any form of enticement, but surely it would have to be better than lying in a darkened room.

‘Mum said not to go anywhere.'

Freya wonders whether he's scared by his predicament. She searches his face for some clue as to who he is. He doesn't look like Lisa. He is considerably taller, his skin paler and his eyes darker. She can't see Matt in him either. There is a frailty to him that is nothing like Matt.

He twists the leather strap tied around his wrist, the stain of the suede a pale grey, and then he lets it go. His fingernails are black. She wishes he'd have a shower.

She opens the blind and window, the freshness of the afternoon cool on her face, the lemony sun flooding the room. When she turns around he is standing up. Like a bat, she thinks, blinking in the brightness, his black clothes a worn leathered skin hanging loose on his skinny frame.

‘Why'd he help us?' He asks the question without flinching.

Her throat dry, Freya says nothing.

He doesn't move.

‘He knew Lisa a long time ago,' she eventually replies.

‘Yeah. But it's not like he's stayed close. I'd never even heard of him. Or you.'

‘I guess he could help. And he wanted to.'

‘But you didn't want him to.'

She shakes her head, ready to utter words of denial and then finds she can't. ‘It's not like it's a lot,' she tells him, although she is really uttering the words to herself. ‘To lend the money to your mum and have you stay for a while.'

He's still looking at her, but then he drops his gaze to the ground and she, too, looks down at his feet, his big toe poking through the hole in his sock.

It's the slight tremor in his shoulders that gives his fear away. The shake is almost imperceptible as he sniffs again, before wiping at his nose with his wrist, the fall of his hair covering his face from her view.

She doesn't move. Then, wishing she were anywhere but here, she reaches for his arm. It stays hanging limp by his side.

‘I don't want to go to jail.' He brushes his fringe out of his eyes.

‘If you didn't do it, then you'll be okay. You'll go to court and tell them the truth and it will be all right.'

‘What if they don't believe me?'

She doesn't want to get drawn into this because if he was responsible, if he did bash that old woman … She shakes her head, knowing she wouldn't be able to continue with him under their roof. She has to believe he is innocent.

In the soft glow of the afternoon sun, she can see how young he is. The frame of the man he will become is there but it is not yet filled, there are just bones, waiting for the flesh and the life and all that hardens and ossifies and crumbles. If he were my flesh and I couldn't protect him? She again tries to drag herself to that place,
because he is terrified and she doesn't know how to offer any form of comfort.

‘You just have to take it one day at a time,' she says. ‘You can't worry about the court case and what follows now.'

‘The cops – in the police station –'

Freya cuts him off. ‘It really doesn't help to be in here by yourself all day.'

‘One said they'd give me at least ten years. I'd be old by then. I can't do that. I can't.'

‘Stop.' She steps closer, her hands on his arms now, squaring him so that their eyes meet, level, and she holds him perfectly still. ‘There's no point. You won't get through if you do. You need to come out of this room and be with other people.'

But he isn't listening.

‘I shouldna run away. I should've stayed with Mum, gone to school. I should've done what you're meant to do. But I couldn't. And it's all bad.'

And then he sobs, a heart-wrenching child's cry.

She is forced to hold him, there in her daughter's room, as the late-afternoon sun washes in, golden, and they stand, two people who don't know each other, closer than either of them want to be.