Joe checks the expiry date on the pills.
Bet they’re good for another couple of years yet. Best to play safe though.
He puts the packet back into the tartan zipper bag that sits in the little backpack with the book, the oven bag and the bottle of whisky. Pulls the notepad and pen out of the pouch he has taken to wearing slung around his neck, scribbles Fresh sleeping pills, and stows them away again.
He checks the velcro straps are gripping, and are still taped on securely, then starts blowing the oven bag up like a balloon to test it for leaks, when he hears Anne coming down the stairs.
‘Pop goes the weasel!’ he exclaims as she enters, making to slam the oven bag against the open palm of his other hand, as if bursting a paper bag; but he swerves away from the palm at the last moment.
The look she gives him!
This perpetual checking of ‘the kit’ has joined the list of his isms. Far less frequent than the head jerk, to be sure; but far more aggravating to her. Her theory is that it’s his way of asserting control and independence, even as the reality is that both are diminishing. He finds it a hard argument to counter.
‘You promised you’d put that damned thing away in the shed.’
‘I will.’
‘It’s not just Claire. What if James stumbles across it? He’s getting to that age now. You’ve got to watch him like a hawk. And not leave stuff like that lying around.’
‘You better. I’ll be checking,’ she tells him, as she heads through to the kitchen.
He has Dylan on the CD. ‘Mozambique’ gives way to the track he’s put it on for, ‘One More Cup Of Coffee’. He sings along as he packs the oven bag in with the pills inside the tartan bag, and stashes the whole kit into the backpack. ‘One more before you go, hey. You’re putting it off Bobby,’ he says, before he turns it off and heads out to the shed, where he hangs the backpack on a spare peg next to the saws on his pegboard of tools.
On the cribbage table an eight of diamonds is face up. The packet of sinkers is in front of Eric’s chair, so he sits there, turns over Eric’s hand.
Thinks.
No recollection of why he played the eight last night, or what the other three cards in his own hand might be. Blank. He drums his fingers and sings a line from Peter Gabriel’s ‘I Don’t Remember’. Another one on the Procrastinator’s Top Twenty that he is compiling. He pulls the notebook out of the pouch to double-check that he’s written it on the list. Yep, it’s there, along with ‘One More Cup Of Coffee’.
He looks at Eric’s hand of four cards and smiles. Rubbish. Pair of sevens, king and two. The seven’s dangerous, but if Joe’s planning on a six for the run of three, the king’ll give him thirty-one. He goes for it. ‘Seven makes fifteen, for two.’ He moves Eric’s peg, shifts the sinkers over to in front of his own chair, then takes a sheet of paper held down by the crib board, and puts another cross down for the Gabriel ‘Don’t Recall’ tally. The page is nearly full. He runs the numbers, flicks back to the previous page, compares. Not good.
Each evening he plays a card for himself or Eric, depending on the dictate of the sinkers. It’s always been the best part of the game; the sly, speculative combat of the turn-by-turn pegging. When the two rounds of four are completed—the eight days, the week plus one, the whatever it has become—he tallies each hand and the crib and pegs them too, bantering with ghostly Eric all the while.
The important thing is whether he remembers last night’s play or not. The cards the other fellow holds. If he does, he’ll ruthlessly take advantage, and put a stroke down for the ‘Gotcha’ tally. Its song is Blondie’s ‘One Way Or Another’. Though at some point he found himself twisting the words into a version that suits him better; ‘It’s gonna get me, get me, get me, get me, get me.’
Month by month ‘Don’t Recall’ is getting stronger in the battle with ‘Gotcha’. And Eric’s won the last two games, which is really annoying.
He’s planning to show his Blondie Gabriel Index to Dr Sykes on the next visit. For all the pain it causes, he’s rather proud of it. A more sensible test than any of the ones she’s inflicted, he reckons, though he admits it is not feasible for a surgery appointment. He’s no longer sure whether he’s doing it every night, or sometimes twice or thrice a night. He knows he should scribble the date down each time for scientific rigour, but that’s not how it started out, and he doesn’t want to change the vibe of this ism; there’s something about it just the way it is that gives him pleasure. He always has to resist the temptation to swap chairs, keep the game going; but that would destroy both the point of the exercise, and the rhythm of the ism.
He hasn’t told Eric about the Index, despite his mate’s unknowing role. There was radio silence for a few weeks after that first ‘devastated’ reply from Eric. He’d quizzed Anne by email, but the next one to Joe was newsy chitchat about the Manica project and local politics. It seemed that ‘don’t know what to say’ was a statement of fact as well as sentiment.
He pushes himself to his feet and goes over to the workbench to contemplate the wooden puzzle he is in the process of making for James. It is shaping up nicely, but the intricacy of the work is challenging, which gives him the irrits. It would have been a piece of cake once upon a time. Not in the mood tonight.
Restless, he moves to the drafting stool. A rueful thought bubble reminds him that he doesn’t sit here often these days. He contemplates the sketch of Captain Whatsisname and the parking inspector. Anne had stumbled across it last night on a bottom shelf in the kitchen, as she was childproofing the house.
He can remember the night he folded the sketch up and put it away. Getting on for a year ago now, he calculates.
‘Are you still laughing at me?’ he asks it.
Nah, I don’t reckon. Just powerless to help. Which makes you a pretty poor fucken superhero.
Joe turns away from the sketch. Superhero, super doctor. There’s nothing any of them can do. The rot has well and truly set in. Dr Sykes insists he’s doing comparatively well, but the Blondie Gabriel Index tells him otherwise. He has his days of rage, his periods of despondency, but mostly it’s a sense of confusion, a gradual, erratic adaptation to the narrowing confines of his life.
He’d tried one more work gig, back at the end of last year. Designing an upward extension for a cousin of Mrs Scapides; virtually a replica of the job he’d done for her. Not a project to get excited over at the best of times, but the mojo was gone altogether. Silly drafting mistakes, missed deadlines, an unprofessional, snappy response to the cousin, a parting of the ways.
Not long after that Tony had come round for the first time in months. ‘I kept playing around with the arch,’ he told Joe, ‘but then I saw this.’ He slid across a printout from an online magazine. ‘We’ve been gazumped.’
Architect’s drawings for a major new stadium in the Emirates. Headlines about the stunning design breakthrough.
‘Do you want me to run you through it?’ Tony had asked.
Joe shook his head. Looked at the drawing again.
‘It looks beautiful, Tony.’
‘Yeah. The one I had in mind would be better though.’
‘I’m sure it would be lad.’
‘Something I’ve got to tell you, Joe.’ Tony looked at the ground. ‘I’ve got a new job … in Sydney.’
‘Be careful over there. They eat you up.’
But when Tony looked up, Joe was smiling at him, holding up a hand for a high five.
Tony gave a thumbs up instead.
‘Indeed Tony. No-one should live all their life in Perth. It atrophies the brain.’ He pointed at his own temple.
Tony seemed to be mimicking the gesture, but it turned into a salute.
‘Aye, aye captain.’
And then he was gone.
Joe gave a month’s notice on the lease of the Bayswater unit, and literally and mentally packed his architectural career away.
Joe considers the shed. Glances at the bag pegged on the wall. This space has always been his own, a place where he can let his mind rest and wander. But in recent months it’s become his refuge, too, in moments when the ferocity of his frustration scares even himself. Like that bloody Centrelink fiasco last year.
Anne had warned him and prepped him and begged him to stay calm for the interview at Centrelink. He almost managed what felt like an endurance test. But when the ‘jumped-up clerk’—he was ashamed for saying it—told him that due to Anne’s income he would be eligible for a part payment of twenty-three dollars eighty a fortnight if the claim was favourably assessed by the medical panel, he lost his rag.
‘Why the fuck didn’t you say that at the start?’
‘There is a process we have to work through, Mr Warton,’ replied Client Services Officer Pamela, in a coolly detached voice that gave him a flash of his first, hostile session with Vanessa Sykes. The next step, she informed him, would be an appointment with an Approved Medical Officer. After an inordinately long wait whilst she consulted her computer screen, without asking whether it would be convenient, she advised him of a date in nine weeks’ time. He threw his insult and stormed out, leaving Anne to apologise.
Anne also handled the superannuation company. They decided they might as well try for a cash out, given his situation, and his ‘attitude’, as Anne called his obsession with the bag. It took some doing, but with an appropriate supporting letter from Sykes, Anne was able to harass the company into it.
That did something to alleviate their finances—they were now SINKs, he asserted: single-income no kids—and his sense of guilt about it.
Joe stands to stretch, and rub at the sore spot in his back. He doesn’t feel disabled. Just reduced, and unreliable. Physically he is better than he has been for a few years. He’s succumbed to Anne’s recommended regime of vitamins and supplements, with little interest in the specifics. They go walking almost every evening. At least twice a week, often more, he prowls the river shallows with his fly rod after she leaves for work. And since a friend told Anne about the golden raisins miracle cure—‘It’s just sultanas soaked in gin,’ he insists on pointing out—the stiff knee and sore joint in his back seem to have improved.
There have even been periods when he’s felt if not content, almost reconciled. ‘No, not reconciled,’ he said, when he was trying to explain it to Anne. ‘It’s just the patches when I’m not thinking about “it”. When it’s not looming, not hovering like some fucken eagle, and I’m the rabbit waiting for the swoop.’
The best such patch, by far, was the spell with Claire and the kids when Anne went to Ecuador.
Anne wonders whether she should poke her head into the shed to see how Joe is going; he seems to have been out there a long time tonight. But she can’t suppress a flash of annoyance at his performance with the oven bag earlier this evening. Instead she turns her thoughts to that list on the fridge. So much to do, with Claire and the kids arriving in three days’ time.
She’s worried about that girl. Claire has told Geoffrey that she’s just coming down to see them, and to sort furniture and what not for the house they have bought for their looming move to Perth. But—she’s sworn Anne to secrecy—she’s also got a preliminary job interview for a research assistant’s position at the uni starting in the second semester.
Claire’s last visit seems a lifetime ago—though it was only last year. It all started with the violet-tailed sylph.
Anne had been out of sorts for months. Ever since Claire had asked her to come up for Miriam’s birth. She made various excuses, but all three of them knew the real reason; she was scared to leave Joe on his own for extended periods by then.
The worst patch was that nightmare couple of months of Joe packing up his practice, and navigating the horrors of Centrelink and super companies. He was deep in self-pity, and failing to come to terms with his new realities. Some days she felt like she was drowning, between managing him and dealing with bureaucracies, not to mention staying on top of her job. It felt like it was only talking to Claire that kept her sane.
One evening Joe walked in on her as she was trying to mimic the sylph’s call from the recording on the website.
‘Birds’n’blues hey,’ he’d said when she told him what it was. ‘Still thinking about that?’
‘Just birds Joe. I’m not going to be escorting you through the Americas. If I ever make it to Ecuador it’ll be my trip.’ She felt awful as soon as it slipped out. The crestfallen look on his face.
Another door closed.
But she wasn’t about to let that hare start running. What she didn’t say was how much the idea had begun to consume her. An escape, an indulgence. A week or two without Joe in her head and on her hands.
The funny thing was, it would have remained a dream if he hadn’t whinged to Claire. ‘She wants to go to Ecuador without me.’ He’d winked at Anne as he spoke on the phone, making light of it, but the ‘poor me’ undertone was unmistakeable. The next day Anne got a call on her mobile at lunchtime. Claire wanted to know more. By the end of the call, her daughter was once again on a mission. It wasn’t long before Claire had Joe thinking it was his idea.
The night the super payout was confirmed they rang Claire with the good news. With the phone on speaker at their end, her first question was how much. Her second was, ‘How much is Ecuador?’ Armed with that, she got in quickly. ‘You owe it to her, Dad. That’s come from the business, and she did the books for you forever without ever drawing a cent.’ That logic made them both feel good about it, and by the end of that week Anne’s twitcher’s tour of Ecuador was booked.
Claire organised it all from Karratha, and told Geoffrey it was non-negotiable, her mother needed the break, and she needed to spend some time with her father.
The one thing Anne was grumpy about was missing time with the kids. They had two days all together before they took Anne to the airport. Joe hadn’t seen her so excited and upbeat since he took her to the domestic airport to fly north for James’ arrival. This time though she did look back, blowing kisses to the four of them until she had to finally turn and step through the sliding doors of international departures.
James’ll be here in three days! First time since Anne went to Ecuador.
No doubt Anne’s getting things organised in the house. Should be helping shouldn’t I. Nah. I’d just be in her way.
Jamie boy. Three years and … How many months?
He tries to remember, but decides it doesn’t matter. It’s easier, and far more pleasurable, to sink back into memories of that last visit.
For twelve days he played with James. Took him to the tackle shop in Midland and made a fuss of selecting a miniature rod and reel. Went and sat on the little jetty at the river park, disturbing Old Frank’s peace with the palaver of teaching James how to fish. In reality the toddler was more interested in the pelicans, and not up to anything more than holding the rod for a few moments now and then. The two of them laughed a lot though.
Joe laughs again now as he remembers the day Frank actually caught a fish. James was completely entranced watching the undersized bream flapping around on the jetty, scales glinting in the sun. Frank tipped him a wink, and he distracted James from the sight of the fish being unhooked. And then the boy was given the honour of returning it to the river. He squealed in nervous delight as he held his palms out and momentarily felt the lithe, moist life of the fish before it slipped through his fingers back to the water. ‘You’re bringing me luck, young feller,’ Frank smiled. ‘You better come back tomorrow.’
‘I reckon so.’
When they got back home James burst through the door calling, ‘Mummy, mummy, mummy! Old Frank catched a fish!’
Miriam startled at the commotion, pulling away from the breast. For a moment Claire was going to try to quieten James, but she went with his joy, and instead passed the baby to Joe, as James exclaimed his story.
‘It was dancing on the jetty. Dancing.’ He flop-danced his imitation.
‘And then Old Frank gave me the fish. And I gave the fish back to the river, just like he said.’ He threw his arms wide.
‘All the billycans got frighted, and flap, flap, flap, they all flied away.’
‘Did they my darling.’ Claire enveloped him in a hug, but he broke free, there was more to tell.
‘Pop told me a song for the billycans!’
‘A song?’
She waited as James struggled for the words. They wouldn’t come. But then a big grin, as he recalled a line. He chanted, ‘His beak holds more than his belly can!’ And again, and again, he sang the line. The twinkle-eyed smile Joe exchanged with Claire is about as good as it gets, he reckons.
And every chance he could, every time the breast would not quiet her, or Claire was busy with James, he would gather up Miriam, inhale that glorious infant scent, and walk her. Left shoulder, right hand patting. Switch shoulders if she would not settle. Cradling her in rocking arms when she seemed happy, and drinking in her smiling eyes when they were offered. All the time cooing, humming, singing, imprinting his voice.
If only Anne would email, he’d thought, or even call, with some inexplicable reason to delay her return. Claire would not abandon him. She would ring Geoffrey and extend their stay.
Of an evening, once Claire had the kids down, they would sit and share a glass of wine. In smiley, conspiratorial silence as often as not; but some nights they talked. He tried to keep it bland. He’s not as good at subtext as Anne, but when Claire spoke of how much she wanted the kids to get to know him, to do more of this, he could feel her fishing.
She was trying to draw him out, to get him talking about what was going on inside his head. Subtext; the bag. He could read that clearly enough.
And it put him on edge.
The tic. The violent throw of the jaw to the right. Three in a row.
Claire winced. ‘Mum’s told me about that. Doesn’t it hurt?’
‘I’m used to it.’
They looked at each other.
‘Another glass?’ he asked, getting up.
Nothing was said, but he came to realise after a few days—and the realisation hurt—that whilst his little excursions with James were fine, Claire would not leave him alone with Miriam for more than a few minutes. They discovered the baby capsule wouldn’t fix properly to the car. So they were essentially housebound, walking to the shops when they needed. But Claire worked the phones, and one day she booked a kidsafe taxi and they made the trek to the university. She left Joe in charge of James on the lawns, and went in to meet up with a couple of her old lecturers. Claire was starting to suss out her options for their move back to Perth.
Joe gets up to pin the Captain Whatsisname sketch up on the board above the drafting table. Rubs at his sore back again. Notices the bag hanging above his workbench next to the saws.
What’s it doing there?
Remembers. It was only half an hour ago. Or something like that.
Had to stop Anne hassling me.
Aggravated now, he prowls the shed. He looks at the cards and crib board. Sees the sinkers are by his chair. Sits down.
‘Now what did you play last night, Eric.’
He peers at the face up cards. ‘Mm, seven, for fifteen two.’ Thinks. Drums his fingers, murmurs the ‘Don’t Recall’ line from the Peter Gabriel song. He picks up his own hand. Smiles. Plays the nine. ‘Nine for twenty-four, and that’s a run of three.’ He moves his peg, saying, ‘You better not have a six you bugger.’ He takes the sheet from under the board, puts another stroke in the ‘Don’t Recall’ column, and moves the sinkers over to Eric’s side.
Anne thinks about the list again. She could make up the beds and the cot for Claire and the kids.
Later.
She settles back down to scrolling through the pictures from Ecuador. She does it often, just to get lost in the beauty of the birds and the tropical bush; but tonight there’s a purpose. Birder magazine has expressed interest in the outline of an article she proposed to them. She’s almost happy with the sixth draft. Nearly all the goo and gush has been pared out, but there’s still a sense of the sheer excitement of her adventure, as well as a serious discussion of the birds and the threats they face.
She has written the odd piece for the English Teachers Association journal over the years, but they don’t count in her mind. She can’t help being excited at the thought of getting published at the age of fifty-seven. But she also knows that if she doesn’t send it off before Claire arrives, the chance may slip away. One more read-through of the article and maybe a tweak or two on page three will do, she reckons.
What she’s stuck on is the photos. She is keenly aware that hers are not professional quality, but Birder said the two samples she sent would be usable. Now she has to provide eight for them to choose from. The agony! Of culling, and of wondering if they’ll pass muster.
She knows which one she’ll ask them to feature if they take the piece. The violet-tailed sylph. She still feels a thrill every time she looks at her photo. She didn’t have the equipment or the expertise to capture it in flight, hovering motionless except for the blur of wings as it sucked the nectar from a lurid flower. But she had fluked a snap of it poised on a branch, in all its iridescent glory.
There are ten photos in the selections folder. The sylph and five other definites. There are four contenders for the last two spots. She’ll do the final cull when she checks the text; hopefully tomorrow. She saves and closes, and gets up from her desk, stretching. She has lost track of time, but it feels like it’s getting late.
He’s still not in? I better go down and check.
‘Pop goes the weasel!’ She hisses it out loud, surprising herself.
How she’s come to hate his damned kit. She shudders every time she sees him with it.
And now sick jokes!
She tries to be ever patient and understanding as she witnesses his shrivelling. And mostly—nearly always—she succeeds. But sometimes it is too hard.
I should chuck the bloody thing.
But she knows that the backpack is one thing that he would notice, should it go missing.
They may have got past the days of denial and deception, but he is still Joe: holding himself in, holding himself back. The confessions, the fears, the sharing are always tortuous. And in between he is as hard to read as ever.
The bag has become some weird talisman. Sometimes she thinks of it as his security blanket, like James’ bunny rug.
She goes to make up the beds instead of heading down to the shed.
James is engrossed in the sandpit with an array of toy cars and a plane. Joe is reminded of Calvin and Hobbes, and wonders what is going through the youngster’s head. Miriam is dead to the world. Claire idly rocks the pram every now and then with her foot. They came down to the park just after Anne set off for work, and they have the place to themselves. Not even Old Frank with his fold-out stool and fishing rod yet.
Joe is biding his time, watching the birds on the water. It is Claire’s call where she wants to take the conversation, after last night. Maybe she just wants to sit in the morning sun.
Claire and the kids had flown in from Karratha yesterday. She was frazzled from the flight, with a screaming baby with addled ears, and a whining three-year-old. But once they made it back to Bassendean the day had slowly settled, and then turned joyful as they all revelled in each other’s proximity.
But once the kids were down, and there were only grownups in the room, Claire had spilled the beans on all the fears and doubts that are swirling through her. And for a short while, she’d also let loose the anger she has been suppressing.
‘He doesn’t want me to work. He reckons he earns enough to keep his family well, and my responsibility is to the kids. No child of his is going into childcare. He actually said that, would you believe. Not as an opinion. As a statement of fact! If I try to talk to him about it he just says it’s not God’s way. Clams up. End of story.’ There is a bitter sadness to her tone when she says, ‘I sometimes wonder if we’re praying to the same God.’
They had let her vent, and heard more than perhaps they wanted to. But she kept coming back to the job. It would be perfect for her. Part-time. An on-site crèche. The research is exactly in her field, even if she is a bit out of touch now. Her favourite professor as the team leader. Who knows where it could lead. ‘I’m not going to let him stop me,’ she’d said.
But then she turned the tap off. The effort was visible.
‘The kids.’
It was almost a whimper.
On the river a duck bobs under the waters of Derbal Yerrigan.
‘It’s just a sprinkle isn’t it? Not the full body immersion thing?’
‘What?’ Claire is puzzled.
‘The christening.’ Joe sounds annoyed, as if she is wilfully misunderstanding him. ‘I’ve said I’ll come. I just want to know what I’m in for.’
Shock seizes Claire. She buries her head in her hands, totally at a loss.
‘What?’ he demands.
She shakes her head. There are no words.
‘Tell me.’
She can’t look at him. ‘You were just asking about James’ christening.’
‘Yeah.’
She points at the boy in the sandpit. ‘Dad, it was three years ago.’
The head jerk. A desolate, ‘Oh shit.’
She slides a hand towards him. He grips it tightly, and sits there beside her on the park bench, rocking.
When he eventually speaks again, it is barely a whisper. ‘Loops are one thing, but coming back out in the wrong place! The wrong time. Fuck. I don’t think that’s happened before. But I don’t know. That’s the thing, Bear, I’m not sure about anything any more. Remind me to ask Anne tonight. Fuck.’
They walk home in silence, Joe pushing the pram, Claire hugging James to her.
Joe retreats to his shed, leaving Claire to see to her children.
It is not until Claire has put Miriam down for her afternoon nap, and settled James in front of the TV, that they find themselves in silence together.
‘D’you remember the fights we used to have?’
‘You always told Mum they were spirited discussions.’
‘I’m thinking of starting one now. We’ve been tiptoeing around each other all day. It doesn’t feel right.’
‘Maybe it’s because we’re both feeling a little bit fragile? What with one thing and another … Any particular topic in mind?’
‘Don’t think I’ve got any bones to pick with you I’m afraid. Wouldn’t mind a ding-dong blue with your other half though.’
‘So last night’s rant registered hey?’
‘Every word.’
‘If you say I told you so, I’ll throttle you.’
He puts his hand up in surrender. ‘I’ve got traces of empathy still.’
‘I know you’re thinking it though.’
He says nothing rather than lie.
‘It’s good in Karratha. Mostly. There’s something real about the place, for all its mining town strangeness. I love the church there. We’re all—I don’t know—engaged. We pray together on Sundays and get on with our lives. But something’s shifted since we started talking about coming back down here. Head office. Big house round the corner from the in-laws. Different congregation. It doesn’t feel the same, Dad. It’s like Geoffrey’s moving along this preordained path. Sometimes it feels like I’m just another box ticked as his life plan falls into place.’
She gets up, wiping the corners of her eyes with the back of her hand. Checks on James in the living room, still happily watching Sesame Street. Gets a load of nappies from the dryer. She snaps and shakes each nappy hard, two times, three times, before she folds it.
‘His bl–… His parents. Esme’s ok mostly. She’s basically kind. Just cowed I reckon. But Geoffrey’s dad … I don’t know, he’s not just stern, he’s hard. Harsh. I’m scared of what I’m in for when we move into that mansion we’ve bought. I’ll have to play the loving daughter-in-law day in, day out instead of twice a year.
‘I’m having doubts, Dad.’
‘So I gathered. That’s the human condition.’
‘It’s not the same in my world. I haven’t lost my faith. But I’m questioning everything else.’
Nappies done, she moves over to the kitchen bench and starts preparing a snack for James. ‘We’re shopping for new curtains and linen tomorrow. That’ll be fun.’ Her tone gives lie to the words. ‘Esme’s picking us up at ten.’
‘You don’t want to leave the kids with me?’
She doesn’t look up from spreading the vegemite. The silence and body language say it all though. That is not an option.
Another door closes.
‘She’s entitled to some time with the grandkids too, Dad. You can take charge on Wednesday. I’ve got to shut myself away upstairs then and prep for this interview.’ She passes him the plate. ‘Here, take these through to James while I check on Miriam.’
Miriam is still asleep. Sesame Street has given way to junk cartoons, but that’s ok today. Claire takes the cuppa Joe has made, and they settle back down.
‘That’s the first time is it? That you’ve … you’ve, what did you say … come back in the wrong place?’
‘Is that what I said?’
‘Yeah. What’s it like?’
‘It’s scary as all fuck, Bear. Scary as all fuck.’
‘And that’s the first time?’
‘I think so.’
‘Oh Dad.’ She is quietly weeping, and not trying to hide it.
‘I might be getting this wrong—I think the last time I read Alice in Wonderland was to you, twenty years ago—but I get this mad image in my head that I’m like Alice in this long corridor, getting bigger and smaller, with the vials and keys, and trying all these doors, and they’re all closing, closing in on her, on me, and the light at the end keeps getting further away, and dimmer, and smaller. And I want to fucking scream, and I want to kick a door down, but I’m an old man, and far too weak to do that. It’s closing in on me, and I’m trapped.’
He is gasping. She is sobbing. He reaches across and takes her hands. ‘I’m sorry.’ Breathlessly. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No!’ she cries.
A hand to her cheek. ‘I’m sorry.’
She lifts her head. Looks at him. ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘I don’t know.’
They disengage their twined fingers, ease back, breathe deeply.
‘I don’t know,’ he whispers.
‘Good luck darling.’
‘Thanks Dad.’
Joe can hear the nerves in Claire’s voice. He puts on a smile as he waves them off, but it fades the moment they pull out of the driveway. The plans have been made around him. He gets it, but it still pisses him off. Neither of the women are willing to leave both or either of the kids with him for the time it will take to get into the uni for the interview and back. So Anne takes the day off to take Claire in and mind the kids.
He spends the hours cleaning his rods and reels, sorting through his tackle box, and checking out lures online. He is determined to catch that Bullfrog Hole barramundi this time round.
They’ve locked the trip in. The urge to get back there is strong in both of them. Both the urge, and a sense of urgency. Their lives seem to have become a race against time in which they have no idea how fast their opponent is travelling. Calculations, predictions, estimates and guesses; some of them discussed openly, some assumed by one or the other, or sometimes both. But when they started talking about doing Bullfrog Hole again there was a sense that if not this dry season, it may well never happen.
Timing is the issue. The three of them had talked about it last night. Anne is adamant that they will be in Perth when Claire makes the big move down, especially if—she had stopped mid-sentence. ‘Let’s see how the interview goes tomorrow,’ Claire had said. ‘I won’t get an answer there and then, but the picture might be a bit clearer.’
‘It’s just too perfect. It’s like they designed it for me.’
‘Maybe they did,’ Anne suggests. ‘Once they knew you were interested.’
‘It’s only as a research assistant, but it’s exactly the same territory as I was exploring in my own third-year research. I’d be working under Jillian. Remember her? She was in the same year as me. Really clever, really nice. Two days a week—that’s got to be manageable somehow doesn’t it?’
‘When will you find out?’ Joe asks.
‘Not sure. But it’ll be fairly soon.’
As she has four times already this evening, Claire flips from excitement to terror. ‘What am I going to do, Mum?’
‘It’s your call girl, but you know what we think.’
‘Geoffrey’s got no idea. How am I going to tell him? What will he do if I say yes?’
‘All we can say is we’ll be here for you. Won’t we Joe?’
‘Of course.’
‘The Kimberley can wait if needs be.’
Joe looks at Anne, startled.
‘No way!’ Claire exclaims. ‘You guys are doing that trip, whatever happens.’