The Same Woman (3 page)

She watched him retreat, and envied his peace. Don't panic, don't panic, she told herself. A sudden vision of her throat closing up — completely invented because she had no idea what the inside of her throat looked like — popped to mind.

She stood up quickly. Tariq was sleeping soundly through all this distress. Oh God, you
would
sleep through a panic attack, she thought as she stood over him, pulling her still too-hot jeans over her legs.

There were new things on the wall — a giant print of a prairie dog, nature maps, posters and postcards with revolutionary slogans: YOUR HEART IS A MUSCLE THE SIZE OF YOUR FIST. KEEP LOVING! KEEP FIGHTING! In the window, baskets of vines tangled their tentacles together to make a curtain of leaves dotted with strange white, spongy flowers. Sill boxes of colourful edible flowers hid the tops of three marijuana plants, which had been trimmed to hide them from the persecution of the street. Ruby moved in the get a closer look at them, temporarily distracted by how, if you could look at these plants independent of their dangerous status, they were quite pretty.

She rubbed the stems and smelled her fingers. Each plant was a slightly different shade of green from the next, and the famous finger-like leaves reached forward on stiff branches, like hands trying to cup the sunlight.

And then she wondered, did they ever have sex on the floor, right where I am standing now?

Ruby made a quick retreat into the kitchen, a fugitive from memory.

Nal had painted the kitchen the colour of blueberry yoghurt. Ruby stood in a pool of sunlight and tried to keep her mind empty of words.

Who did Nal like better, me or Frankie?

The house was haunted. Ruby could not go on.

There was a cordless phone sitting on the kitchen table. Ruby picked it up and dialled, even though it was early and she would be intruding on that most private time of day, when a person's voice is still weighed down by sleep.

“Octavia, it's Ruby.”

“Ruby?”Ruby could imagine Octavia's face, pink and puffy with sleep, in her cosy messy bedroom. “Why are you whispering? Are you back yet? What time is it?”

“I'm sorry to call you so early. Uh...” Ruby stopped and bit down on the squishy flesh of her bottom lip. “So how are you doing?”

“What? You have to stop whispering.”

Ruby pushed the back door open and winced at its loud creaking. She sat down on the stone steps leading down into Nal's garden, that were just starting to warm in the sun.

“I'm back, back at Tariq... or Nal's house.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I'm fine.”

“So you were just calling to say hello?”

Over the phone it is almost impossible to spot the minute indicators of anxiety, panic and nausea that people like dentists look out for. They would see a client with Ruby's clenched foot and bunched toes, with nails like hers digging silently into palms — they would not be fooled by the things that people like Ruby say when they're too bashful to admit that the sound of the drill, or the act of waking up, is terrifying.

“Ruby? What's going on?”

“I'm having a total panic attack. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know why I'm here.”

“You've changed your mind? You don't want to be with Tariq again?”

“No, no, I do, I just didn't think of how...” Ruby could neither finish thoughts nor sentences. “It's just happened so fast.”

“How did it happen?”

Ruby had not kept much contact with her friends since she'd moved back in with her parents. It had become easier to not communicate than to relate the sorry details of her own unravelling.

“I'm sorry I just turned up like this, Octavia. One minute I'm drowning in heartbreak, the next we're back together and I'm moving home.”

“I'm just glad you're happy! I mean, if you are happy.” Ruby could hear the sound of a running tap. She tried to imagine Octavia standing in her tiny, white bathroom.

“Yes, I'm happy. I'm just confused.” Ruby took a handful of hair and scrunched it in her stout fingers. She would begin at the beginning. “About a month ago, things were getting better, really they were. I was thinking about leaving my parents, about coming back here or going back to school. And then Tariq called. He called from a payphone in the middle of the woods of all things. It was bizarre. He was crying so much I couldn't understand him. He broke up with, that...” Ruby sighed, “...woman, and he left the city, with just a tent. I don't know what his plan was.”

“But he called you and said he wanted to get back together.”

“It gets more ridiculous. He just started calling me every night from that payphone. We talked for weeks. I wanted to tell him to shove it, but I couldn't. I realised that, well,” Ruby turned and looked over her shoulder. The house seemed peaceful and normal and not haunted at all. “Even though I began to feel better about life, the separation never stopped being terrible. And everything he said, it was everything I'd ever wanted him, anyone, to say to me.” Ruby scrunched her shoulders up around her ears. “I can barely get this story out, it's so silly and cheesy.”

“Do you trust him now?”

“I didn't right away. But I wanted to try.”

“But you don't anymore?”

“I do! I just can't stay here.”

“Why?”

“Uhh, I'll tell you later.”

“Do you want to stay here? Where are you going to live now?”

“I don't know. I think Tariq and I might try and find a place together.”

“Where are you going to stay until you find a place?”

“I don't know. I obviously didn't think this through.”

“You can stay here if you want.”

“I think that would be really good.”

“Yeah, it would be fun.”

“I know. Can we have pillow fights and paint each others' nails?”

“Definitely. Are you still panicking?”

“No.”

“Hang on, Isi's here.” Ruby could hear Octavia's girlfriend talking in the background. “She's really excited to see you.”

“I'm excited to see you guys too.”

“Okay. Buck up buttercup! Things are taking a turn for the better.”

Ruby hung up the phone. She got up and replaced the phone on the kitchen table, careful to put it back exactly in the spot where she found it, inexplicably compelled to behave like a cat burglar. She padded back down the long hallway to the front room. Tariq was still asleep. Ruby sat down cross-legged on the edge of the flowery sheet.

“Mmff,” Tariq said, and put his arm around Ruby's waist, gently rolling her body towards him. She stretched out next to him, and pressed her face against his neck and felt soothed. She breathed in his comforting smell, a mix of maple syrup and old t-shirts kept in dark drawers.

In Nal's garden they ate quinoa porridge with dried berries, peaches and almond slivers. Ruby didn't really like porridge but she made a show of eating it, scooping little bits of quinoa on to her spoon. She examined the grain's soft wheat-coloured hairs, and admired how the colours of the berry and the peach bled together as Nal and Tariq talked about Nal's garden.

“Well,” Tariq said, “I like what you've done with it. In fact it looks like you haven't done anything with it.” The three of them surveyed the wild landscape that had replaced Nal's perfect lines of carrots and brassicas and bean poles.

“Mm,” Nal said, “I'm experimenting with permaculture. I'm letting the land make its own decisions.” When Nal spoke she used the side of her hand to cut through the air, making sharp swipes which gave her words decisiveness. She always spoke like this, whether she
was giving a speech at a rally, or talking about pigeons. You could not help but listen to her and believe her, because she was sure.

“I think the land is making the decision to look darn ugly.”

Nal rolled her eyes expertly.

“You see that?” Nal pointed to matting of giant green leaves where her raspberry bush had been. “That's comfrey. It's moved in, and choked the raspberries to death,” she recounted brightly.

“Who's Humphrey?” Tariq asked.

“Comfrey is a medicinal plant that has been used for thousand of years to stop bleeding, to heal wounds, to fix broken bones. It's way better than raspberries! But by far the most prolific plant is lamb's quarters.”

“I used to spend hours pulling those out in my grandma's garden,” Tariq said.

“I know! I pulled a lot of them out before I learned to live with them. But did you know that it's related to spinach, and the raw plant actually has more nutrients than spinach? It's the most common weed in the garden.”

“Well,” Ruby had always been intimidated by Nal. She always felt worried about saying the wrong thing to Nal. Was the question she was about to ask stupid? Obvious? “Why don't people eat lamb's quarters then?” But Nal was delighted with this question. It was the one she had been waiting to answer.

“I think people have just learned to trust the things they can buy, much more than the things they can find on their own. For hundreds of years, even longer, we looked for our own food in our own backyards. Now it doesn't even occur to people that they could eat what grows by the sidewalk. Food is political.”

“Everything is political,” Tariq said, but not as a rallying cry, it was an obvious, sorry fact about the inescapability of our home values and their prejudices.

After breakfast Tariq was reading the newspaper in the living room.

“Hey buddy,” Ruby came in from the bathroom. Her curly hair was flat for once and her fingers smelled of toothpaste.

“What should we do today?” He smiled at her.

“I think I'm going to take my stuff to Octavia's.”

“Oh. You're not staying here?”

“No, I just think it will be more comfortable for everyone if I stay with Octavia.”

“But Nal doesn't care if you stay here. And there's more than enough space on this floor for the two of us, though I will admit that you were hogging the floorboards last night.” Ruby laughed.

“No, it will hurt my back to sleep on the floor. It'll just be for a few weeks. We'll still see each other every day.”

“Oooh-kay.” Tariq looked down at a picture of world leaders smiling gleefully at each other. He watched Ruby from behind the floppy curls that fell conveniently into his eyes. She zipped away her toothbrush, and pushed grubby underpants into empty air pockets in her backpack.

“Hey Ruby,” Tariq said without looking up from the wide inky pages of war and catastrophe.

“Mmhm?”

“You're not leaving because you're upset are you?” His voice came out small and worried. She sat back on her heels and stared at him.

“No. What could I possibly be upset about?” She asked, and batted her eyelids coyly.

Tariq made a scoffing noise.

“No, I'm fine! Everything's fine. Don't be silly.”

“Would you tell me if you were upset?”

“Tariq...”

“It's just, I know there's going to be times when you're angry. And I just want you to know that, it's okay.”

“You don't have to patronise me.”

“I wasn't —”

“It's okay. I'm fine. Look, everything's going to be great. ” She sat down next to him on the elephantine couch and he squeezed his arm around her. Neither of them believed her cheerful words. She pressed her lips against his cheek over and over in a rapid release of kisses and what she really should've said and done began to separate itself from what was actually happening. She talked about the future while all she could think about was the past that was still on-going, still toying with her and rolling her around in unbearable memory as she and Tariq sat exactly where it had all gone wrong.

It had happened six months earlier and four days before Christmas. Tariq had called Ruby on the phone to tell her that he had been seeing somebody else. She had been gone four months. She was coming to visit in a week and he couldn't put off telling her any longer.

On the phone, he had sounded strange, like he was nervously meeting a stranger for the first time.

“You know how you wanted me to see other people?”

“Yes?”

“And I said no?”

“Yes?”

“I guess I changed my mind.” Ruby had said nothing for about eight seconds. And then she had tried to pretend it was okay. She had asked him friendly questions about her. She already knew who it was. They had met in a photography class. He had mentioned her before lots of times. In the depths of her belly something had moved in distress every time he had said this woman's name. But Ruby had not let herself articulate that distress to him. It had seemed that, after
that last night in the bar, it was too late. Now that it really was too late she felt sick.

He had been seeing her for two months already.

He had sent Ruby confusing emails after their phone conversation, saying how he was looking forward to seeing Ruby. He had said, “You know how, when you have a crush on someone, you can't think about anything else? Even though I can't stop thinking about her, I'm still excited to see you. I'm happy about that.”

Ruby had spent Christmas Day pushing food around her plate, smiling brightly and hiding baked fish under banana leaf wrappers so that no one would notice that she couldn't eat.

Gripped by romantic insanity, Ruby hadn't been able to bring herself to change her plan to visit Tariq. That would be admitting that it was over.

When Ruby walked into the airport arrivals lounge, Tariq was waiting at the wrong exit. She had come out of a door down the hallway from where he was and had walked up to him from behind. He was standing, loving and attentive, his coat folded over his arms, facing away from her.

He had been bizarrely sweet to her. He'd decorated his room with streamers and dollar store balloons with “Happy Birthday Dad!” printed on them. He'd crossed the birthday greetings off and written funny things over them with black marker. Nal had come in with a bag of onions to say hello to Ruby but her greeting lacked lustre and Ruby knew that she knew. Everybody had known before Ruby.