A month later, on a hot day in early November, the breeze was bringing the fertiliser pong straight into Thomas’s office. As though a giant vat of offal was stewing away right under his desk.
For a month, Thomas had continued to foam and froth on the inside, equal parts confused and angry and scared out of his wits. Four weeks since that fateful fishing weekend, and he was still no closer to straightening out his thoughts. Elsie. Aida. His marriage. His house. Her house.
What the hell was he supposed to do?
Frustrated with the way his insides were tumbling around, Thomas picked up his lunch box and strode through the warehouse. ‘Going out for a lunch break,’ he called to Watson on his way past. Thomas rarely left the store during the day; he didn’t linger to hear Watson’s surprised reply.
Thomas walked over to the river. The narrow strip of caramel-brown water shifted along its steep-sided bed, the Moreton Bay figs throwing shadows onto the grassy banks. The sunshine had drawn others – mothers and young children, working folk on lunch breaks, elderly couples clasping each other and shuffling along – in the same way it had drawn Thomas, and he wandered through the park before finding an unoccupied bench. He sat down and watched the pigeons strutting for scraps. The way their heads bobbed back and forth, plumage iridescent in the light, one wouldn’t think their shit was capable of stripping the paint from his car. Rats of the sky, he’d heard them called. It seemed unfair.
So was the discovery that one’s wife was in love with another woman.
‘Excuse me, sir – is this seat taken?’
Thomas was startled by the clerical collar. From above the white strip at his throat, a middle-aged man’s face peered at Thomas through thick bifocals.
‘Please.’ Figuring it prudent at this point to keep on the good side of any and all deities, Thomas gestured to the bench.
‘Thank you.’ The priest sighed as he sat down. Thomas wondered if he was hot in his head-to-toe black suit. He took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and, leaning slightly, offered the pack to Thomas.
‘No, thank you,’ Thomas said. ‘To be honest, I didn’t think you were allowed to . . .’ he gestured vaguely at the packet.
The priest raised bushy silver brows. ‘It isn’t a sin,’ he said. ‘In moderation.’ He laughed and added, regretfully, ‘Although now they’re saying it could be bad for us.’
Is that what defined a sin? Thomas wondered. Excess? He took a bite of his sandwich. Corned beef and mustard pickles – his favourite. He thought of Elsie at home this morning, lovingly and desperately making his favourite sandwich and his guts twisted.
‘Father Brian,’ the priest introduced himself in a cloud of exhaled smoke. ‘Isn’t this day delightful?’
‘Delightful,’ Thomas echoed, trying not to sound glum. ‘Thomas Mullet.’
‘Pleasure to make your acquaintance. Look,’ he laughed again, ‘everyone’s enjoying the outdoors. Ha ha, look at those little ones.’ He gestured to a swing set nearby, where two ladies crouched and pushed two toddlers back and forth. The children squealed with happiness.
‘So merry. Ha ha. Do you have any children, Mr Mullet?’
Thomas swallowed a mouthful of sandwich. ‘Not yet,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘My wife was pregnant, but she lost the baby.’ Saying the words aloud shocked him. He’d not told anyone about the miscarriage.
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ Father Brian said. ‘Are you newly married?’
‘A year ago.’ And now my wife is diddling the lady neighbour.
‘Give it time. Children are a blessing.’
Thomas dug into his lunch box and found two Nice biscuits wrapped in paper. Grains of sugar rained onto his trousers as he unwrapped the parcel. He looked at the sweet crystals dotting his lap, a gift from his wife, and couldn’t help but feel touched. Despite all this awful chaos, she had never stopped doting on him, caring for him. He offered a biscuit to the priest, who courteously declined in favour of puffing joyfully on his cigarette.
Other than his wedding last year, the last time Thomas remembered being in a church was at his uncle Terry’s funeral ten years ago. Before that, it would have been his mother’s second wedding, her marriage to his step-father, Bob, when Thomas was only a boy. That day he recalled as a blur of faces, sickly-strong scents of face powder, perfume and beer. His mother, Eliza-Jane, had told him how factions of her family never forgave her for remarrying after her first husband, Thomas’s father, died. But what was she supposed to do, Eliza-Jane would ask, lie down and give up on life?
Was he expecting too much of Elsie? To not fall in love with the woman next door? To love him only?
‘Can I ask you something, Father?’
The priest lifted his eyebrows again. ‘Of course you can.’
‘How do you know if someone is a good person? I mean, what makes someone good?’
‘That’s quite a question. What do you think?’
Thomas sighed. He wished he could take the last twenty seconds back; now he’d involved religious clergy, for heaven’s sake. How was he supposed to talk about this with a priest? He massaged the back of his neck, amending, ‘Maybe it’s easier to ask what makes someone bad.’
‘Maybe.’ Father Brian looked thoughtful. ‘Although let me ask you this, Mr Mullet. Is it quite that black and white? We are all human, and that means we’re all a little imperfect.’ He chuckled and leaned in closer. ‘Even me.’ He waggled his cigarette pack. ‘So is it a question of a person being definitively good or bad – or is it that sometimes we’re all guilty of having a flaw or two?’ He slid another cigarette from the pack and considered it. ‘Granted, some are more inclined to vice than others.’
Thomas pictured Elsie’s face: the soft curls of hair covering her sticking-out ears, the sweet curve of her bottom lip. The sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose that shifted upwards as she smiled – the smile that warmed him from the inside as though he would never know a rainy day in his life. Thomas shook his head. Imperfection, vice, badness – these were concepts incompatible with Elsie.
‘And let’s say you could know such a thing about a person,’ the priest added, ‘why might you need to know? To stay away from someone bad? Or to befriend someone good?’
Thomas recalled how happy Bob Smith made his mother. When his father died, grief had been their constant companion, hanging thick in their house like fog and robbing his mother of happiness. But time brought back his mother’s smiles and laughter, along with Bob Smith, and eventually, Thomas’s half-brother, David. And Eliza-Jane’s family could tut all the reproach they wanted: they were happy. They were whole again. What else mattered?
‘Maybe if I knew someone was a good person,’ Thomas said, ‘it would be easier to forgive them.’
‘Ah, that old chestnut.’ Father Brian smiled. A pigeon strutted close by their feet, cooing.
Forbidding Elsie to see Aida had been a knee-jerk reaction. It was what he had assumed would be expected of a slighted husband. Thou shalt not, and all that. He was punishing her. Holding the grudge that he – the man of the house – was expected to hold.
‘You know that forgiveness isn’t about the other person though, don’t you, Mr Mullet?’
Thomas looked at him.
‘It’s about you.’ The priest pointed his finger at Thomas’s chest. ‘You forgive, so you can be free. When we don’t forgive, we make any wrongdoing our own. We cling to it. With non-forgiveness – it’s only ever ourselves that we harm.’
Thomas loved his wife. He loved Elsie in ways for which he didn’t even have words. Didn’t that mean he also loved those whom she loved? Elsie claimed she did not want to leave him, that she loved Thomas and was devoted to him. Only, that devotion was no longer singular. It had also grown, extended, to include her friend – the woman next door.
Thomas said, ‘Wasn’t it Jesus who said something about loving your neighbour?’
Father Brian nodded. ‘That’s true. He did.’
One of the toddlers had fallen off the swing and sent up a howl. The child’s mother bent down and gathered it into her arms and the child’s sobs quieted. Like magic. Looking over, the priest chuckled. Thomas thought of Aida. Her kindness, how she had comforted and rallied Elsie after the loss of the pregnancy. He thought of how much Elsie had bloomed within their friendship, and he realised that he couldn’t condemn Aida for loving his wife in that way. Because he loved her that way, too.
Love thy neighbour.
Well, Elsie sure did. But could he?
*
Another month passed, and Thomas continued to ask himself that question.