His Other House Read online

  ‘It was only this big.’ Marianna held her fingers a couple of centimetres apart and pictured a tiny, fully formed baby hovering there in the air.

  ‘Oh.’ The girl studied Marianna’s fingers. Molly would be horrified if she knew how the baby really looked. Broken up.

  They were blocking the flow of traffic and people squeezed past with their baskets. Marianna imagined a tiny Molly when she was in Clare’s womb, the curly hair and blue eyes and rosebud lips yet to express themselves but all there, contained in a foetus a couple of centimetres long. Marianna would never know how her dead babies might have looked.

  ‘Why did it die?’ Molly asked again. ‘Do you have another baby in your tummy now?’

  ‘It was too small,’ she said. And, no.

  Molly nodded but Marianna could see that she was not satisfied. On the footpath out the front of the shop, the man with the baby was bending into the back seat of a station wagon.

  Clare ruffled her girl’s hair. ‘Well, Missy Moo, we’re running late again.’ She smiled at Marianna. ‘Molly’s doing circus these holidays. And we’re never there on time.’ Molly had turned away, and was practising a hand flourish over the Granny Smith apples.

  Clare squeezed Marianna’s arm. ‘Well, I’m thinking of you and if there’s anything I can do . . .’

  ‘Thank you.’ She watched Clare pass her basket of vegies to the soft-faced woman at the cash register. Marianna had an idea that the woman’s husband had died not long ago. The community of grief-stricken didn’t even recognise its own members most of the time. Wearing black mourning clothes or an armband for a year made perfect sense to Marianna. But she suspected that babies who weren’t even as big as an orange wouldn’t qualify you for an armband.

  •

  Outside the real estate agency on the corner, she paused in the shade of the awning, her two bags heavy. It was tempting to think of grief as an enlightened state, as if she finally had everything in perspective and could see the superficiality of most interactions. But grief wasn’t enlightened, it was mundane. It was everywhere, around every corner, its flavour permeating everything. It was just something that needed to be waded through, and if there wasn’t a baby for Marianna at the end of it all then it would make no fucking sense at all. A baby was the only way to give meaning to all this sorrow. Didn’t Quinn see that?

  Andrew said they didn’t know why the miscarriages were happening but she knew perfectly well that the default reason was always the woman’s dodgy eggs. Before the last pregnancy Andrew had suggested she consider whether, down the track, she’d be open to using donated eggs and Marianna had seen it as a last resort option. Now it seemed that the moment for the last resort might have passed without her realising.

  She climbed the hill, sweating under her cotton dress, and told herself it was only six months that Quinn wanted off. Only twenty-four weeks. When she reached her street, she saw her parents’ Audi parked in the driveway. Her mother stood up from the chair on the verandah and hurried down the high wooden steps and across the lawn. ‘Darling, there you are.’ She took both bags from Marianna. ‘Why didn’t you drive to the shops?’

  Marianna shrugged. She hadn’t intended to go shopping.

  Her mum disapproved of Quinn being down in Corimbi two days a week and made a point of dropping around on those days. ‘I bought you some rocket to plant,’ her mother said as Marianna slid the key into the front door. ‘I noticed your old rocket had completely gone to seed.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’ They stepped into the dim, cool house, Marianna’s sanctuary.

  Her mum slid the shopping bags onto the kitchen table. ‘You put the jug on, darling, and I’ll go out and plant them.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bad idea to plant seedlings in such full-on sun?’

  ‘No, that’s all phooey. They’re sun hardened. Better just to get them in.’ Her mother twisted her long silver hair into a knot and fastened it with a band from her wrist. She had her tennis gear on, neat white shorts and t-shirt.

  Marianna filled the jug and rinsed the teapot and stood leaning against the kitchen sink, watching her mother through the window. She imagined that was more or less how she’d look at sixty: big-breasted with long grey hair and elegant hands. Her mother bent over the raised garden bed, carefully removing the seedlings from the punnet. It looked like she was singing to herself.

  Her mother was superstitious too. But she happily told people about it, as if it were simply an amusing quirk that when she got out of bed in the morning she always put both feet onto the floor at the same moment.

  Marianna drank a glass of water and stowed the fruit and vegies in the fridge, then went to join her mother in the glary backyard. She picked up an empty seedling tray and tapped the remnants of dirt into the garden bed. Birds chirped listlessly in the hedge and a mower buzzed somewhere nearby. Suburbia somehow muted all feelings, sad or joyous. She said, ‘You haven’t told Dad about Quinn wanting a break from IVF, have you?’

  ‘No. I figured you wouldn’t want me to.’ Her mother turned on the tap and tested the temperature of the water coming from the hose.

  ‘That’s right.’ Marianna had learned not to give her father information he could use as ammunition later. She stepped over the pile of grass clippings that the mowing guy had left and picked a couple of creamy frangipani flowers from the tree. ‘That miscarriage you had, how often do you think about that baby now?’ she asked.

  Her mother shaded her face with her hand, silver bangles tinkling. ‘Well . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It wasn’t a miscarriage.’ Her mother’s face was blank, water sluicing onto the grass from the hose in her hand.

  Marianna waited.

  ‘You were only three months old,’ her mother said and brushed back a strand of hair that had escaped the hair band. ‘It was too soon.’

  ‘You had an abortion?’

  ‘Yes.’ She turned the tap down until the water trickled.

  ‘Why?’

  Her mother gave a crooked smile. ‘I’d just given birth, I had a newborn baby and . . . another baby so soon would have been more than I could handle . . .’

  Marianna thought of all the servants they’d had in Jakarta. Her mother barely had to lift a finger.

  ‘Was it you or Dad who wanted the abortion?’

  ‘Both of us. Don’t blame him. That would be unfair.’ She directed the hose onto a seedling then looked up, her eyes watery. ‘I did it partly for you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If I’d had another baby so soon, it would have been hard on you.’

  ‘So where did you have the abortion? Not over there?’ Marianna would always defend a woman’s right to safe abortion but her heart seized at the thought of a healthy baby’s life being extinguished. Her sibling.

  ‘Here. At a clinic in the city. When I brought you home to see Mum and Dad. You were about five months old.’

  Marianna could picture the photos from that visit. Her nan feeding her a bottle on the back patio, a wall of carefully tended staghorn ferns behind her. And her grandfather, who was about to die, bending down to stick his grinning face next to the baby’s. The first grandchild. And the second one being done away with. Marianna wondered if her grandparents had known.

  ‘Why did you pretend it was a miscarriage?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Her mother wiped a wet hand on her shorts. ‘When you were younger, I wasn’t sure you’d have understood and then . . . I don’t know . . . I’m sorry.’

  I’m not sure I understand now, thought Marianna.

  Her mother said, ‘It feels strange to be telling you this when . . . you’re . . . on the other side of things, but I didn’t want to keep lying about it.’

  ‘Yes.’ Marianna felt dizzy and wondered if she were about to keel over on the neatly mown lawn.

  Her mother stretched out her hand. ‘Come in out of the heat, my darling.’

  •

  In the late afternoon, after her mother left, Marianna
lay on the bed, her body heavy and still. Sounds from outside drifted in: crickets in the garden, the whirring of a distant train and the new kids next door calling to each other. The light in the room slowly faded and she knew she wouldn’t get up and turn on a light or make food. There was no one to cook for and nowhere to go.

  She thought of her mother, younger than Marianna was now, turning up at a clinic for an abortion. It should feel unfair that her own mother was too fertile, but all Marianna saw was an awful, heartbreaking equation. Babies being aborted every day while infertile women slowly went mad.

  The kids over the fence sang, Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques. Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?

  Maybe an egg donor was what it would take. She thought of her cousin Shelly with her three beautiful children and ovaries full of healthy eggs.

  Marianna knew that managing her hope and grief involved a corralling of emotions, a shoring up. She knew she came across as prickly – her father had told her so often enough and she could see it in Quinn’s eyes – but the truth was that she had finite resources and they were thoroughly spent on trying to bring a baby to them.

  The singing stopped next door and a child started crying plaintively. After a couple of minutes Marianna made herself get up and look out the window. There was a small child alone on the trampoline, leaning against the safety netting, sobbing and calling to his mother in the house.

  Marianna watched the woman moving about in the brightly lit kitchen, and wondered when she would hear her child calling. Finally she emerged from the house and lifted the child from the trampoline and carried him up the back steps. The little boy turned to look up towards Marianna’s place, his hair a blond nimbus in the light.

  Marianna had not lost hope, despite the pessimism of everyone around her. And standing there in the dark, watching that child being carried safely inside, she knew that it was still possible she’d be a mother.

  Chapter Ten

  On Wednesday, Rachel had been swimming for half an hour when she heard someone dive in. Her heart leaped. It had to be him. He passed her partway up the pool, underwater, heading the other way.

  At the deep end she hung on to the rope lane divider until he surfaced beside her and reached one arm for the metal bar the backstrokers used. He sucked in big breaths. ‘Oh shit,’ he gasped.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  He didn’t reply for a few seconds, but nodded. He pushed the goggles to the top of his head. ‘I’m not as fit as I think.’ He looked at her and smiled. ‘Hello.’ Even in the dark, it looked like an awkward smile. As if he knew exactly how much she’d been thinking about him.

  ‘Hello.’ She shrugged off the flicker of embarrassment and dived under the lane rope towards the steps, the water cool on her face. It didn’t matter if he thought she had been flirting with him. There were more important things. Her mother. The people in Aceh. ‘I tried your free-diving thing,’ she said when she surfaced near the ladder.

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘Peaceful.’ She had floated on her back, slowing her breath and relaxing her limbs, looking up at the stars. Then she’d rolled over into the foetal position he’d shown her and hung there, holding her breath and listening to her heart and the slosh of the water.

  ‘You should try it in the ocean sometime. That’s even better,’ he said. ‘Oh, and thank you for the goggles. They fit well.’

  ‘No worries.’ She took hold of the metal handrails and pulled herself out. Earlier that day her mother had told her that she wanted to die in her sleep. ‘Such an easy, painless way to go,’ she’d said.

  Rachel had nodded. ‘I want to be with you when you go, Mum.’ She was determined her mother would not die alone like Scotty had.

  Her mother’s eyes were kind. ‘Is that really the last memory you want of me?’ Rachel knew that Emily had watched her own mother die. And they’d both seen Scotty.

  ‘I just want to be with you.’ She’d wondered if any death was pain-free. Wouldn’t the body protest in some way? Mightn’t people wake for a split second with a bolt of pain or fear? Surely it must be a shocking moment for the body when it finally gave up.

  At the grandstand, Rachel changed into her dress and crouched down to buckle her sandals. She remembered her father’s pale, twisted face in the minutes after his first heart attack. She had never seen him in pain before. He even used to refer to himself as a stoic and she knew he judged plenty of his customers at the pharmacy. Malingerer was one of his favourite words and the worst thing she could be. She wondered how he had truly felt about her mother’s retreat to bed after Scotty died.

  She stood and looped her towel around her neck. Her father had taught her to swim at this pool. They’d walk down together on a Sunday morning and he’d hold her up the deep end and push her towards the edge.

  The pool surface was flat, the doctor under there somewhere. As she crossed the grass to the fence, Quinn pulled himself from the pool. He leaned forward, hands braced on his knees, water dripping onto the cement. ‘Oh. Are you going?’

  A frisson passed through her at the disappointment in his voice. ‘Yes.’ She stopped walking.

  ‘If you wait a moment, I’ll walk with you.’ He straightened and crossed to his towel.

  Rachel walked back over the grass and sat on the warm wood of the step near him. ‘My brother drowned when I was twelve.’

  He stopped towelling his head and looked down at her.

  She hadn’t planned to tell him, the words had just come out. ‘I was meant to be looking after him,’ she said.

  He sat down beside her. ‘Oh. That’s hard.’

  ‘I just forgot about him. I was playing.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Eight.’

  He leaned forward onto his knees, looking down at the cement, as if he was really taking it in. ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Scott. Scotty.’ Her throat squeezed and she looked over to the fig trees, just like the ones that lined the river. ‘Dad found him,’ she said.

  She had swung out on the rope over the river and was rushing through the warm air when she heard her father’s shout. As she let go of the rough rope and dropped, she saw Scotty and his halo of hair, face down in the deep water near the muddy mangroves. Right before she hit the water, her father staggered fully clothed into the river and her mother sprinted over the grass from the picnic area. It had taken Rachel a few long seconds to surface, her eyes wide to the silty water.

  Quinn was still looking at her. ‘Are you the only child now?’

  ‘Yes. I’m it. Do you know if drowning is a peaceful way to die? What happens to the body?’

  ‘Well . . .’ He shifted on the seat to face her. ‘Essentially the body’s starved of oxygen . . . and that stops the heart.’

  ‘Would it hurt?’ she asked.

  He let out a slow breath. ‘I’m . . . not sure. Once you’re low on oxygen you might feel quite confused and dreamy . . . I’ve heard it said it’s a peaceful way to go.’

  ‘I can’t bear to think he was scared or in pain.’ A familiar nausea clogged her throat.

  ‘Did you see him afterwards?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘He looked asleep. But very pale and his lips were blue.’ She didn’t talk to people about this. Ever. But she had been waiting decades for reassurance about how Scotty died and she trusted Quinn with the awful details.

  ‘So he looked peaceful?’ he asked.

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘I tend to think that in that time just after someone dies it shows on their face if they were afraid.’

  ‘I really want to think that you’re right,’ she said. ‘But I suspect you’re trying to make me feel better.’ She was exquisitely aware of his arm so close to hers. His solid, alive, near-naked body.

  ‘Yeah, that’s partly true. But I also believe that.’ He reached for his t-shirt. ‘Which is why I think about my own death sometimes. So when it happens, I won’t be afraid.’

  ‘I don’t think eight-year-olds think abo
ut their death. Not in this part of the world, anyway.’ She was glad to talk about something else.

  ‘Really?’ He pulled the shirt over his head. ‘I contemplated my death at that age.’

  ‘Why?’

  He didn’t respond for a few moments and she wondered if he regretted steering the conversation in this direction.

  He said, ‘Maybe I just became aware of what death meant, that it was inevitable, and I tried it on for size. And now I contemplate others’ deaths.’

  ‘Yes.’ She pictured her sleeping mother.

  ‘I imagine it’s been very tough. Losing your brother that way.’

  ‘Yes. It’s always there. It’s just all through me, always. I don’t talk to people here about it. They all know I was meant to be looking after him.’

  ‘But you were twelve. You were a child yourself.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Oh . . . eccentric. He had grand passions. For praying mantises and hot air balloons and bread making . . .’ She saw Scotty setting his bowl of bread dough to rise in front of the bar heater, laying the tea towel over the big yellow bowl with such care.

  A breeze scuttled leaves across the cement in front of them and a car throttled along the street. In the few seconds before he leaned towards her, she knew it would happen and she wanted it.

  He kissed confidently, his warm lips muscular. When his hand cupped the back of her neck, desire ricocheted through her. She leaned into him and he pulled her tight against him for a few beats then pulled away. ‘Sorry.’ He stood up. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’ He smiled at her, a lopsided, brief smile.

  ‘We better forget it ever happened, then,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  The intimacy of the kiss and their conversation evaporated in a second. He was just a stranger stepping into his shorts and slinging a towel over his shoulder. She wished she hadn’t trusted this stranger with her fragile, secret fears about how Scotty had died.

  He tilted his head to the fence. ‘Shall we go?’

  What a fool she was. Would she spend the last days of her mother’s life distracted by a teenage crush on a married man? She wanted to run away from him, across the grass, down the street, all the way home.