Loving, Faithful Animal (4 page)

And you took off with my Polaroid!

Dad bought you a new one though.

That's not the point …

See! I knew he would.

That afternoon she'd driven as far as Yass, and there Jack took over. That Janis Joplin song on the radio every couple hundred ks and Evelyn la-da-da-la-na-nahhing along, tuning out the lyrics that didn't suit her, any words that didn't fit the thrill of flight, of freedom freedom freedom, and they reached Wangaratta by dark. That motel with its faded apricot carpet and stuccoed walls, where even the fake plants looked thirsty, and they'd fucked in a bed for the first time. Thin sheets and thinner walls, light from the hallway cigarette machine creeping under the doorsill. She didn't care. It was trashy as all get out but she was revelling in it. After those few times in Melbourne—shaking sand out of her clothes, or sneaking up to Jack in the bio box, or standing with her back against the Brighton breakwall, him pulling from her at the last possible second and turning to the ocean, pumping his cock towards the spray—after all that, this sagging motel bed felt
real
. (Though much later she'd catch herself missing, oddly, those hasty claustrophobic trysts of the bio box, the tattoo of film ricketing off the reel and the sound it made matching up to the stammering pulse of blood behind her eyelids, her hands greasy with his hair, and the theatre downstairs erupting over something Newman or McQueen had either won or escaped from.)

That night in the motel she lay on top of the covers and it felt salacious, indulgent, like they were trying on the lives of other people.

Jack had told her to go ahead and scream if you want, sweetheart. We're never going to see any of these bastards again.

Lani was born shaking into her arms in the middle of that decade, and would not stop shaking until the beginning of the '80s. Evelyn tries to remember this shaking whenever she runs in with the rangy, foul-mouthed creature who haunts the room at the end of the hallway, shut in there with a blurry sort of music. Tries to remember the trembling of the little spine felt through terry-towelling jumpersuits, the vulnerable blossom mouth, as she stares at the poster tacked up and torn at the corner nearest the doorknob. The band members look like they're all dying of the same disease. Behind the poster, Lani's door is all splinters and strips of packing tape. Behind the wrecked door, the throb of something dreary. She knocks and waits before trying the handle, knowing it'll be locked whether her oldest daughter is in there or not. No energy for a row this afternoon, she just follows the routine disarmament the two of them have fallen into over the last few years. These shitty locks; they're mostly cosmetic anyway. Won't really keep anyone out, will just slow them down long enough so that whoever's on the other side has time to get their pants up. She makes wordlessly for the kitchen. Rummaging the cutlery drawer, then padding back down the hallway to attack the snib with a butterknife. Lani's door swings open on an empty room, gauzy curtains drawn back to reveal the flyscreen with its escape hatch sliced into one corner. Gone then. Today and forever. Even when she comes back this afternoon, or tonight—tomorrow morning; who knows?—Evelyn will find no way of reaching her, no way of getting her to listen. Through threats or through fists, neither works now. Lately she's astonished herself with her own ferocity, how it closes over her, suffocates reason. How the marks on her daughter's body have begun to mirror her own. Lani that morning, reaching for a high spot with the paint scraper, and her pyjama top hiking up to show a familiar purpling at the hip, door-handle height. Law of Conservation. Absorption and emission. Ev tries to remember what she learnt in fifth-form science. How it all has to go somewhere. How light becomes heat and heat becomes—what? The science teacher's hand spiralling to show the chain of elements. Very tall, he was, very Dutch. His name was … But it doesn't matter; she knows this isn't what he was on about when he set up those tabletop experiments of pulleys and weights.

She stands in the bedroom doorway, butterknife held loose at her side. New Year's Eve. (
Happy New Year's, Eve
!
) There comes a point. There comes a point where you have to say, Here it is. Here is what life looks like. Where you stop turning your head away, cupping your ears—
la-da-da-la-na-nah
—because you finally understand it won't do any good.

For years now, she's been waking to the same knowledge: This is not my life. Grey eucalypts shaking out there in the stonewashed sky and Jack's loose copper change scattered across the veneer bedside table. No, none of this is right. None of this fits. There's been some hash-up. Someone else out there living her real life, running up the mileage on it the way you would a stolen car. But they'll own up eventually. They'll have to, with all the guilt and the worry wearing them down. The joyride can't go on forever. One day Ev will wake up and there it will be, her real life, parked gleaming in the driveway. Returned.

She'd seen it so clearly. This whole time, all these years, she could just about smell it—a salt breeze playing curtains into that bright, high-ceilinged room.

But this is it. The butterknife, the torn flywire, the cluster of dorsal pearls on someone else's souvenir handbag. This familiar taste in her mouth, like colloidal silver, which she understands and refuses to understand.

Outside, tyres churn the sparse gravel of the driveway. Estelle. Out of the blue, as always, as if to catch her out at something. Down the dark hallway goes Evelyn, past the sunsets and gorges and waterfalls tacked over fist-pocked plasterboard. The Kakadu gorge is her favourite of these, a big hole hiding a small hole; she knows no-one else who would find this funny. For Christmas she'd thought of buying Jack a stud finder. As if to say: Punch Here. But it seemed a lot of effort to go to just to humiliate someone. Or more likely enrage them. And it turned out he wouldn't have been there to unwrap it anyway; the shirt she'd bought instead is still tucked down into the bottom of the wardrobe.

The mottled shape of her sister appears at the sidelight, hullooing and drumming lurid orange fingernails against the glass.

Evvie? Home?

She opens the door. Stella in pale crepe de chine, looking like the heat wouldn't dream of wilting her. That false light in her eyes and a high arc of brow at the butterknife still dangling from Ev's fingers.

Oh my love … It'll take more than that to chase me off.

Come on, Evelyn says, already half-turning. Come on in out of that heat.

Her sister's face sometimes. When she comes into the house and takes in the dirty lino, the dishes stacked up in the sink, or any fresh violence wreaked in one of Jack's storms. Ev doesn't want to see her seeing it, the judgement she'll find there. She walks ahead, giving Stell a few moments to compose the neat diamond of her face. But by the time they reach the kitchen she still hasn't quite managed it, so Evelyn turns away again, quickly, running the tap into the kettle.

At certain safe distances, they are good friends. When there are a couple of hundred kilometres of Hume and a decent stretch of Melbourne between them, her sister is the best person she knows. But up close, sharing air … It's this house that does it, makes the two of them strangers. Perched on the fridge, the card Stell posted two weeks ago:
It Is Better To Have Loved And Lost …
above an illustration of an elegant woman shrugging, gloriously flippant. The easy stupid humour of other people.

Stell moves a stack of newspapers from one of the dining chairs, then sits and lights an Alpine, flicking her eyes around for Jack's abalone-shell ashtray, which has been emptied, washed and—for the first time in its post-mollusc history—put away. Evelyn retrieves it from the cupboard and clacks it down in front of Stell, who taps her ash and says, wide-eyed, So! He really is gone for good then?

Gone for good … With her shoulders Evelyn answers, Who knows? But she's thinking: If he is gone for good. If he's gone for good then maybe she doesn't have to tell him. Doesn't have to tell anyone. Is
exempt
from telling. Would he want to hear it anyway? Hardly. Would he say, Look, we're keeping it, and come running right back? Hardly. And what if he did and what—oh god—if it turned out to be a boy. He'd be harder on a boy, she knows it. The one she'd lost had been a boy. Too early to tell,
conclusively
, but she just knew. With each of the girls she'd gotten sun spots, and that time there were none, even though it had been well into summer.

Gone for good
. She tries to hold steady: the fist knuckled up and shaking under her chin. The near-constant throb of a door handle in the small of her back, the bruises that bloomed overnight, like casablancas, and even she couldn't say where half of them came from.

And when she looks at Stell on the other side of the kitchen, looking ten years younger instead of two. The taut, haughty structure of her face, and hair the colour that Ev's had once been, until it started falling out, inexplicably, after Ruby was born. Hanks of it in spite of the gentle pull of a wide-tooth comb, till there was nothing left. When it did come back, it came back white. Dandelion down, tic-toc fluff she imagined might blow away if the wind so chose. She wasn't yet thirty then. Now she pharmacy-dyes it herself to a pale honey. But somehow it always comes off looking brassy when she's next to Stell, as though they're standing in two different kinds of light, Evelyn always caught in the wrong kind.

She lays a hand over her stomach, wordlessly apologising to the
something
gaining mass there. No, she can't. With or without him, she can't have this one.

She might tell Stell.

And Stell will say: You little idiot, Evvie. After everything. You still let him put it
in
you?

She won't tell Stell, who is already bored, or uneasy anyway, just with being here. Moving bits of paper around on the table. Flipping through junkmail catalogues, the girls' school exercise books, anything to keep her hands busy. There's Ru's report of space.
Did you know …?
And then the names of the moons of Mars.

Where're the girls today?

God only knows. If you can find them you can keep them. Evelyn keeps hunting through the dishrack for a cup that isn't grimy or hairlined with cracks. Was the drive okay?

The drive was fine. Don't happen to have anything stronger than tea?

Bad news?

No, no news. Only that it's … It couldn't hurt to celebrate a bit, could it.

Oh, right. Well I think there's vodka back there somewhere, if Lani hasn't sniffed it out.

That'll do.

Or no, it was rum maybe. White rum. Will it work with cordial?

Whatever it is is fine. Estelle rummages in her paper-straw bag, producing plastic tubs of sugar-coated almonds, macaroons like little crescent moons nestled close to each other. Leftovers from her event-planning work, someone else's Yarra Valley wedding. She snaps the lids off, as though to coax her nieces from hiding. As though they might come running in miaowing like cats do at the sound of a can-opener.

The freezer is choked with ice, barricaded by captive packets of peas and beans, vegetable medleys. The rum, it'll take some excavating, Ev says.

Forget it. Tea's fine. And Ev knows that it isn't, isn't fine at all, but she closes the freezer door and resumes her search for passable china.

Whenever she visits, her sister brings word of their parents.
Dispatches
, Ev thinks of them as, because Stell knows better than to tell too much, to throw light into the gulf that separates their lives from hers. But she knows enough. She knows their father can manage stairs again, after cracking a hip in the least heroic of ways; not falling in the lunge pen but slipping in the shower, like an old man, though he isn't one, really, not yet. Not far past sixty. (She had the girls write him a card, a get-well-soon, but if it got a response she never heard about it.) She knows, too, that their mother has finally won her twelve-year campaign to move permanently up-coast, to the country place; that they'd be shifting everything there after the summer rolled out of the way.

Also through Stell: cards and small gifts for Ruby and Lani. Trinkets for the kind of girls their grandparents hoped they were or might be. Never money. They didn't trust Ev, after the Corvette.

Evelyn worries over the sort of news running back across the wire. What is broken. What is missing, presumed hocked. The state of the house. How wild the girls are. How tall the grass, how ice-locked the freezer. And so the cups. The cups, at least.

She places a mug—unremarkable, save that it is undamaged—in front of her sister, whose fingernails immediately go to work on the tea tag. Sit down, will you please? You make me jumpy when you're hovering.

Evelyn sits, with paring knife and a sweet backyard lemon, cutting wedges and arranging them around a saucer to cover the fact of there being no milk.

Estelle stares at her. You look better, you know.

Do I? Knowing better than to ask, Better than when?

I'd say. It's always the same thing, when he leaves. You look absolutely harrowed for the first little while. As though he's managed to belt you up from the inside as well. But after he's been gone a few weeks …

She leans in close then, holding her smoke, scrutinising. Reading Ev's eyes, as though trying to peer through to some secret lacuna. Finally she sits back, satisfied.

It's like the lights come back on, she says.

Evelyn feels an urge to bite into one of the lemon wedges, to feel the bright rush in her mouth, cutting through the unwelcome metallic taste. A desire for the burst of vesicles at the pressure of her tongue. She does so, peeling the yellow strip of rind away from her teeth, but if Stell thinks this odd, she doesn't let it show.

The lights come back on, Stell says, again. And when they do I think, Ah, this time she'll wake up. Maybe this time. You know, there was a while—okay, truth be told it was years. For years after you left. I'd go into your room and I'd go through everything, just because I could, just because you weren't there to get miffed about it. Your books, even. I read
The Living and the Dead
two years early, out of spite.