His Other House Page 7

  At the fence, he held open the gap in the wire. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘It’s no big deal. Forget it.’ Their feet crunched on the gravel of the car park. ‘Have you kissed many other women while you’ve been married?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t.’ He didn’t look at her.

  They turned onto the uneven footpath. She matched his long stride, her stomach hollow. Over the road at the tennis courts, the lights turned off with a clunk.

  Chapter Eleven

  He didn’t want to wake up.

  ‘Quinn.’ Her warm body pressed against his back. ‘It’s almost five.’

  He felt as if he’d just climbed into bed. His limbs still hummed with exhaustion and he couldn’t find the energy to speak. Marianna rolled away from him and out of bed. She pulled the bedroom door half-closed behind her.

  Quinn turned onto his back and listened to her clatter about in the kitchen. His guts gave an oily somersault. On the drive home to Brisbane last night, after a long, late day, he’d run through all the ways he could tell her about kissing Rachel. But even as he had rehearsed the words, he’d known that he wouldn’t tell her; he could imagine the look on her face and the way her body would collapse in on itself. And what was the point of telling her when it wasn’t going to happen again?

  She had been asleep when he got home and he’d crawled in beside her without eating the meal she’d left in the fridge. Then he lay there, trying to go to sleep, for an hour or more. His mind kept sliding sideways to replay the kiss and to remember the small smile that made Rachel appear amused by everything around her. He’d turned on his phone light to look at Marianna lying beside him. His wife. Even then, as he watched Marianna’s sleeping face, the rush of kissing Rachel lingered in his body.

  He got out of bed, pulled on board shorts and headed up the hall, mortified by how predictable he was: marriage under strain and man turns to the first woman who expresses interest in him.

  Marianna walked towards him, naked, an esky in one hand. ‘Ready?’ She set the esky down beside a plastic tub of food she must have packed the night before. He saw a packet of his coffee beans in the tub and felt a rush of love and guilt.

  ‘I’m almost awake,’ he said.

  She regarded him for a moment, eye to eye. He flushed and wondered if she could detect something. But her eyes were soft and she stroked his arm and said, ‘I’ll drive if you like.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She moved around the bedroom, slipping a dress over her head, roughly pulling up the bed covers and zipping the duffel bag. He picked up the esky and followed her onto the dark verandah. The city glowed in the distance.

  They always left on car trips at dawn. It was a tradition from her family; she reckoned it didn’t feel like an adventure if you left when the sun was up. The roads were empty and within minutes they were speeding alongside the dark river, heading south out of the city. Every second he didn’t tell her about the kiss, he sensed the gap between them widening. He was alarmed by how fast it grew, but he also felt a sort of exhilaration, almost fear, as if he was swooping down a roller-coaster. He wondered if his mother had felt the same.

  Marianna said, ‘Dad called last night to say the tank’s low at Diggers.’

  ‘Okay. So, no showers?’

  ‘Or really short ones.’ She adjusted her hands on the steering wheel. They were the only car in sight, the only car in the world. ‘Andrew called me with the test results yesterday.’

  ‘The karyotype results for the baby?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Right.’ Why hadn’t she called to tell him? ‘And?’

  ‘She was a girl.’ Marianna flicked on the cruise control. ‘And she had trisomy 15.’

  He sighed. ‘Well, that’s a relief.’

  ‘Why?’

  He measured his words. ‘Because there’s a reason for the miscarriage. The baby was . . . never going to make it.’

  Her voice was sad. ‘What would be a relief is our baby being born alive and well.’

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Can you pull over? Let’s not have this conversation at 120 kilometres an hour.’

  She slowed and pulled onto the narrow shoulder but left the engine running. She rested her forehead on the steering wheel.

  He put his hand on her warm back but he was careful, the way he’d touch someone with a broken bone. ‘What did Andrew say about trisomy 15?’

  ‘Not much. He reckons it’s not an age-related trisomy. And not likely to repeat.’

  ‘Oh, darling. I’m so sorry.’ As far as he could remember, trisomy 15 was not compatible with life. He stroked Marianna’s back. ‘I wish I knew how to comfort you.’

  She lifted her head from the wheel and looked ahead. ‘I’m not sure there’s comfort to be had.’ She flashed him a wobbly smile. ‘Unfortunately.’

  ‘I sometimes wonder . . .’ As soon as he started he wished he hadn’t, but she was waiting for him to finish. He took his hand from her back. ‘. . . whether you really want to be comforted. As if . . . you think it might somehow diminish the babies’ significance.’

  She was silent, then said, ‘You may be right.’ Her voice was tight. ‘I feel like I don’t know anything anymore.’ She took a deep breath. ‘How would you feel about egg donation?’

  ‘Egg donation?’ His heart sank.

  She nodded. ‘In six months’ time, I mean.’

  A truck sped past and buffeted the car. ‘It hasn’t really been on my radar.’ He steadied his voice. ‘You’ve never mentioned it before.’

  ‘I know, but surely it must have occurred to you? It might be the only way we can be parents. If it’s my eggs that are the problem, then someone else’s eggs might do the trick.’

  She was injecting a lightness into her voice, but he heard the strain. Shit. They were both going mad with this, they just had to stop. ‘Marianna . . .’ He spoke gently. ‘I need a break not just from the trying but from the planning, and the talking, the research . . .’

  ‘But if it’s the miscarriages that are so hard for you, then egg donation is the solution.’ She couldn’t keep the tremor from her voice.

  He reached for her and she leaned awkwardly over the gear stick for a half-hug. ‘I’ll think about it, I really will,’ he said. ‘But please don’t make me keep saying that I need six months off. Please.’

  ‘Okay. Okay.’ She pulled back. ‘But you know everything’s not going to magically be like it was before? Just because we stop trying. Or talking or whatever . . .’

  ‘I know that.’ But he did miss their old life, it was true. If they hadn’t decided to try for a baby four years ago, they would still have that life instead of this one.

  She smiled sadly at him. ‘Now I understand those crazy women who steal babies from prams.’ She pulled the car onto the road and Quinn leaned back in his seat. He tried to imagine making a baby with someone else’s eggs. Whose eggs? Some stranger’s? He closed his eyes and made himself concentrate on the rhythmic sound of the wheels on the road.

  When he woke, the sun was high and the road cut between lush green paddocks and a field of sugar cane. ‘How long have I been asleep?’

  ‘A couple of hours.’ She kept her eyes on the road.

  Outside, he caught a glimpse of the wide slow river. The air con was too cool and he flicked the vent away. ‘Do you want me to drive?’

  ‘No. I’m fine.’ They reached the outskirts of a sugar mill town and Marianna slowed the car. Quinn wound down his window and the hot heavy sweetness rushed in.

  ‘I’m just going to stop for petrol.’ She pulled over at a service station and turned the engine off. The conversation about egg donation hung in the air between them.

  He filled the car with petrol as she entered the shop and waited in the queue to pay. She lifted her arms and wound her hair up in a band – something he must have watched her do a thousand times, maybe several thousands of times, such a familiar, dear gesture – and he thought about the moment they’d decided to try for
a baby. Sitting on the front verandah a few months after they arrived in Brisbane, they’d agreed it was finally time to start a family and had grinned wildly at each other. That moment, that decision, had brought them here, to this awful place.

  She returned to the car. ‘Mum called while you were asleep. She and Dad have decided to come down for the weekend.’ She pulled the door shut and passed him a Paddle Pop. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh.’ Marianna’s parents were the last people he wanted to spend the weekend with, particularly her father. They lived just a few suburbs away in Brisbane and he saw more than enough of them as it was.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s not what I feel like either. But it’s their house.’ She pulled back onto the road, steering with one hand while she ate her Paddle Pop.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ he said.

  Soon after, they turned off the highway and entered the National Park. They drove in silence and he remembered that they’d once stopped at that same town not long after they met; they’d driven from Sydney to Brisbane for him to meet her parents and had stopped by the river for a nap. And when they woke they’d jumped into the murky water and let themselves drift downriver with the tide then walked back through town in their swimmers. Marianna had had such a blithe confidence about her in those days. He reached over and stroked her leg, the skin cool from the air con. She laid her hand briefly on his then the gravel road topped a crest and the ocean appeared over the low coastal heath. ‘Look at that,’ he said.

  The first time Marianna had brought him there, to Diggers, he’d felt such a thrill at that great slab of blue, generous and inviting. She eased the car over the speed bump at the start of the village and they cruised slowly up the narrow road, past the fibro shacks and sparse, sandy gardens. She pulled into the driveway of her parents’ higgledy-piggledy two-storey holiday house and climbed out.

  Quinn sat for a moment as the briny air and sound of the waves flooded in the open car door. She reached up to the verandah post for the key, her dress lifting high on her thighs. He wished he could just hold her like he used to, lying in bed in the afternoon, legs entwined, breathing in unison, holding hands. Perhaps it was he who wanted comforting.

  Chapter Twelve

  Sand plumed up from the seabed. He floated face down, arms and legs hanging. The goggles Rachel had given him had fogged up but he could see a school of tiny silvery fish flashing by. He loved just hanging in the water, surrendering to the current, the fish gliding around him as if he belonged there.

  The rip was stronger than he’d imagined and was pulling him to the end of the point and towards the open sea, but he knew it would peter out soon.

  He lifted his head and pushed the goggles up. Back on the headland, a tiny Marianna appeared on the top-storey balcony of the house and hung a rug or blanket over the railing.

  He knew they’d have to talk about egg donation again soon. For him, the excitement of trying for a baby had been the idea of the two of them creating someone together, a person with DNA from each of them, an embodiment of their love.

  Marianna’s parents’ car pulled up out the front of the house. Her father sprang from the Audi and up the steps to the front door. Brian would be wearing well-ironed canvas shorts and yachting shoes and would have brought tools to repair things around the house. When Marianna was a girl, he had built the house during their annual holiday back in Australia. Apparently Marianna’s job had been to bring him tools and make cups of tea. The old man’s mark was all over the place, in the initials scratched into the concrete bathroom floor, in the doors which all seemed to open the wrong way, and in the notes he had pinned to the knotty pine walls: Short Showers! Turn Off Lights!!! Check Gas Bottles Before You Leave! Even the family paraphernalia around the house – fishing rods, flat soccer balls, sun-faded life jackets – seemed to be his rather than Marianna’s or her mother’s.

  The rip sucked Quinn around the point and the water cooled. He sank under as a small shark cruised by. He swam down after it, kicking his flippers hard to keep up. The shark disappeared just as Quinn reached that point where swimming stopped being hard work; he had that magical sensation of sliding into the deep water. He remembered his first experience of it as a boy. He’d been following the lazy flick of Tom’s new fins as they descended, looking for an octopus they’d spotted earlier. Suddenly he was gliding towards the sea floor, as if the texture of the water had changed or the molecules altered in some way, and he swam effortlessly, exactly as he had always imagined fish did.

  The small shark turned back and passed close to Quinn, who swam back up, broke the surface and took a lungful of air. He was completely around the point now and out the back of the next beach. He thought of Rachel’s brother taking in water and imagined the shock of drawing solid, cold water into the airway. He wished he’d found better words to persuade her that she was not responsible for her brother’s death. He pictured her: a lanky girl in wet swimmers, standing by her drowned brother as adults frantically tried to revive him, and Quinn hoped that someone there had possessed the sense to go to her and hold her.

  He swam towards shore, head down, waiting for a wave to pick him up. He rode a messy breaker in, unhooked his flippers and for a moment let himself remember kissing her. She had softened against him without hesitation, her lips parting, her hands sliding down his back.

  He trudged up the soft-sand beach, the sun hard on his face, his the only footprints. He kicked at the sand. What a fool he was to have kissed Rachel, to have given in to the madness. Of all the things he didn’t need in his life right now . . . He should never have let it happen. He’d have to apologise to her, make things clear and not let himself be alone with her again.

  Chapter Thirteen

  From the kitchen, Marianna listened to them laughing around the dining table. Her father and Quinn were getting pissed. As usual, her parents had turned up with a dozen bottles of wine.

  She’d expected Quinn to baulk at the idea of egg donation, but he’d sounded open to it. She’d just have to give him his six months; she’d shut up and pretend she didn’t think about it every single bloody second of every day.

  Another burst of laughter came from the dining room as she crossed to the oven. Her mother appeared at the kitchen door. ‘How’s it going in here, darling?’

  Marianna hadn’t been alone with her mother yet. While they’d chopped the fish and vegetables for the paella, her father had hovered around the kitchen checking the cupboards for out-of-date tins and setting up cockroach baits.

  Marianna wanted to tell her mother about the test results. The night before, she’d looked up trisomy 15 on the net and read that most of the babies died in utero. Then she’d found photos of heartbreaking misshapen little faces. She had clicked on a series of photos of a dead newborn girl, her sad puffy face and curled body photographed from every angle.

  ‘We’re ready.’ Marianna opened the oven and slid the tray out. The Bombe Alaska wasn’t browned, but she didn’t care.

  ‘Anything else need to be taken through?’ Her mother put her wineglass on the bench and screwed the lid back on a jar of olives.

  ‘The bowl of berries, thanks, Mum.’ Marianna carried the platter to the table. ‘Sorry, guys. The freezer’s not cold enough and the oven’s not hot enough.’

  Her father moved wineglasses and bottles and bowls of mussel shells to make space on the table. ‘Fantastic, darling!’

  She set the platter down, poured brandy over the meringue and lit it with a match. As she stood watching the blue flame flicker and fade, Quinn stroked her back and slid a hand down to cup her bum.

  Perhaps he was right that she didn’t want to be comforted. The only comfort would be if he felt the same as her and she wouldn’t wish that on him. She had walked to the headland when he was down at the beach and she’d cried as she watched an old man and his thin dog making their shaky way along the road. She had wept often when she was pregnant this last time, as if she were skinless and permeable to all the sadness a
nd tenderness around her. She had thought of herself then as open-hearted. Now she was broken-hearted.

  She pushed a knife through the pale meringue and ice-cream oozed out. ‘Eat it quickly, it’s more cream than ice,’ she said. She passed the first plate to her mother, who handed it on to Marianna’s father.

  Quinn poured more white wine into his glass. ‘Top up, anyone? Gail?’ He hovered the bottle over Marianna’s mother’s glass.

  ‘No. I’ll rest for a moment, thanks.’

  ‘Marianna?’ said Quinn. ‘More wine?’ He smiled at her, his nose and cheeks red and his hair stiff with salt.

  ‘No, thanks.’ Marianna finished serving and sat down. ‘I didn’t bring any Berocca, you two.’ She smiled. ‘Be warned.’

  ‘Ah-hah!’ said her father. ‘But I’ve got some here somewhere.’ His chair scraped loudly on the floor and he disappeared down the hall into the bathroom.

  ‘Oh, Dad, come back and finish this before it melts off the plate.’ She took a mouthful of the too-sweet, too-milky dessert.

  There was the sound of him rifling through the bathroom cupboard and he emerged with an old tin tube of Berocca that he dropped onto the dining table. ‘And look what else I found.’ He sat down and opened his palm to reveal a red Swiss Army knife. ‘I thought I’d lost it.’ He turned to Quinn. ‘I’ve had it since I was a boy. It’s an absolute beauty.’ He opened the knife and drew the blade lightly over his thumb. ‘Oh yeah. Look at that. I’ll show you the game we used to play with it, Quinn, until Gail made me stop. The front lawn’s perfect for it.’

  Marianna turned to Quinn and shook her head.

  Brian finished his dessert in two big spoonfuls. ‘Come on.’ He picked up his glass and the penknife. ‘You have to know how to play Mumble Peg.’ He opened the glass door to the yard. ‘Before long you’ll be father of my grandchild, so we have no choice but to initiate you, Quinn.’