Martha’s nerves were frayed. She wasn’t sleeping well, she never did in the heat, but this was worse. Sometimes she lay awake for hours. Mike’s breath came from the depths, while she twisted on the surface. Her back ached too, and she had other stabbing pains and tingling or numbness, which terrified her. Surely a deathly disease. The doctor told her it was her nerves. But what did a country GP know? She should see a specialist in Melbourne. And then there were the migraines. Martha dreaded them the most; the fear of a migraine could be enough to bring one on. She had to stop thinking so much. She was becoming anxious about her own anxiety.
As soon as they had all left in the morning, she strained to make the most of her free time. She had to decide quickly what would be the best way to spend it so that she didn’t fritter it away doing housework. She would ignore the fridge, which needed a clean out. Instead, she would practise her relaxation exercises like the doctor told her to. She lay down grudgingly on the floor and bent her knees. She closed her eyes, wriggled her shoulders and waited for calm, but she instantly felt agitated. Even relaxing felt like another chore, another thing that had to be done. She was annoyed at it, just as she was annoyed at the fridge for getting messed up again, for being in the way of what she wanted to do: that unaccountable thing. She wanted to do something that would add up to more than a clean fridge, something inspired and consuming, something that was hers and that would count. It was always like this. Always, the creeping fear that a part of her was unlived, uninhabited, and that life’s grand tide had swept her far away from her true self. And that self she’d never even tried on, was snagged back in her past—a frayed and shrunken old skin that would no longer fit her even if she did find it. Should she waste her time looking? How would she find anything as lost to her as that in just an hour or two? The flies were making it impossible to relax. The heat too. The whole house was stuffy and as dark as a hole. She would pull up a blind at least.
Martha stood up and began searching for the flyswat; it was that time of year when the small, sticky flies arrived in swarms. Their buzzing addled her; she was constantly swiping them from her body. She couldn’t hear herself think, let alone relax. She set herself upon the flies. Her neck hurt.
What had gone was the expanse of possibility, the space of unlived potential, the feeling of being hurled through endless days like a bird goes at the sky, unburdened, hungry, oblivious and free. And now all that energy had collected its wild momentum and unrolled itself into the sedate, solid form of a weatherboard-enclosed family. She’d rushed to get here and now nothing more would happen; life would just plod on, achingly downwards. More worrying, more cleaning and more sleepless nights. A life inside a house. A small life.
She could live that small life, if she’d only taken something with her from her youth, something like what Daisy Cavallo had. She envied Daisy even though Daisy was divorced and had that wild boy to rear on her own and was as ill-fitting in this country town as a black horse on a city street. Susie scathingly referred to her as ‘the whore on the hill’. She was convinced Joe fancied her. He probably did, but Joe would never act on any fancy; he was loyal for one thing, but also too morally upright, and he would pale in Daisy’s presence. Susie knew this, which was salt to the wound, and, perversely, she blamed Daisy for the infatuation. It wasn’t just Susie; other women didn’t like Daisy Cavallo either. ‘She’s aloof.’ ‘She doesn’t contribute to the school community.’ ‘She’s a terrible mother to that poor boy.’ It seemed that Debbie Rand, around whom similarly scandalous conjecture gathered, was Daisy’s only friend—the talk that followed them hovered above the Cavallos’ house where the barrage of opinion had hounded them into a friendship.
Martha doubted these opinions affected Daisy. Unlike Martha, Daisy had a passion that was unequivocally hers, and it lifted her above the sting of disapproval or made her impervious to it. Because of her talent, a creative talent (Martha imagined her always singing), no one could touch it; upon no less-than-perfect husband did it depend. Daisy Cavallo hadn’t thrown all her eggs into the thinly woven basket that marriage had proved to be.
It was at once a terrible possibility and a strange comfort for Martha to wonder if she hadn’t found her talent because she simply didn’t have one to find. Her heart shrank. She dropped the flyswat and wiped her finger over the dust on the top of the piano.
But Daisy Cavallo was all alone; she should feel sorry for her. And think of Glenda, without even a child to love. And then there was Imogen. When they were children, Imogen had been everything to Martha. Imogen with her pale freckled face and blinking eyes, her large house and the older brothers making model boats on the back step. That was where Martha had been happy: studiously ignoring the taunts from the brothers, even though she secretly marvelled at the boats they made. She and Imogen had a club, which enclosed them in a world Martha’s mother couldn’t touch. Nor could the big brothers rubbish it, or their boat-building feats compete with it. There were special rites of entry into that world, secret ones. They were elaborate and always expanding: there were lines to avoid on the footpath and others to jump on. And the invisible creature who lived in a crack in a neighbour’s wooden fence, acknowledged, worshipped with violet petals, cocoons, loquat pods. Words had to be uttered in all solemnity or whispered in code. A very particular magic illuminated and circumscribed it all.
What had become a vivid and enthralling game faded from their lives as they got older and turned to bottles of Lilydale Cider and dance classes with rows of boys in buttoned-up shirts. As soon as they left school, Imogen was instantly married. Martha did up the long line of cream cloth buttons on the back of Imogen’s wedding dress as they stood in her bedroom, the one they had grown up in, while Imogen giggled over a glass of champagne. Although it had once seemed impossible, their lives gradually separated. Imogen had two children, one with partial deafness. There were all the operations to fix it, and then later she divorced her husband. The children grew up and moved out, and Imogen went on a cruise, met a younger man and moved for a while to Argentina. And while Martha knew the basic plot of Imogen Ashton’s life—she’d even seen a photo of Luis the young boyfriend—whatever had been between them when they were at school had vanished. Martha’s life with Imogen was only something she remembered every now and then, like a house, a holiday, a season. Martha had put it down to Imogen’s light-heartedness, until her husband rang Martha and said Imogen was suicidal and had been hospitalised. Martha visited her, out of loyalty. Imogen had her own room. Her hair was pulled back and she sat in the bed in a pale-yellow nightgown as if she were ill, and Martha couldn’t tell what was wrong and neither could Imogen. ‘Are you happy in your marriage?’ Martha had asked. ‘It’s okay,’ said Imogen blankly. Her voice droned as if it wasn’t really her speaking but a recording of her. She didn’t once smile, even though Martha was there.
Martha wept afterwards. Imogen never even remembered the visit. She later laughed when Martha mentioned it. Imogen had suddenly invited her for afternoon tea and explained that they had zapped it all out of her and put her on medication and now she was happy again. She gave a hearty, brutal sort of laugh. Her eyes blinked happily, closing out any elaboration of thought. She had made a passionfruit sponge for Martha’s visit, but she wouldn’t eat any of it, because she was dieting. Martha had panicked. She felt desperate to remind her how alive they had been.
‘But you remember sitting on my roof, don’t you? When we stole the vanilla ice-cream tub out of the freezer and ate it with our fingers, clawing it like little cats? And the sky looked like a wave that was about to crush us. And we tried to watch the stars appear. And there was the sense that we weren’t just girls sitting there, we were just as real as the stars and just as tiny and just as much a part of the universe. Don’t you want that feeling again?’
Imogen gave a dead smile. They had zapped even this out of her. Martha clung to the memory of that feeling, as if Imogen’s loss of it imperiled everything, as if the root of all possible manifestations of that wholeness had been cut away—sizzled by Imogen’s electric smoke.
Imogen said, ‘You know I hardly remember anything. I don’t even read anymore. But Janie does. She is reading all the time. It’s such a relief that she likes books. You always loved books, Martha. I remember that.’
Martha didn’t want to remember, now. This was the problem with relaxation—in marched all the thoughts she had done so well to keep at bay. Better she accomplish something, feel the simple satisfaction of having cleaned out the fridge, turn her mind away from that creeping yearning. She was Martha Bloom, wife, mother, housekeeper and this was her life; she should step into it without resentment. But it was nothing; she’d achieved nothing. She didn’t even volunteer. She should clean out the fridge. No, she shouldn’t. She should make a pot of chamomile tea and write to Fiona in London, write a nice poetic whinge, which only Fiona would appreciate.
But Martha didn’t do that. There was a ‘Yoo-hoo’ at the kitchen door. Susie Layton poked her head in.
‘Oh good, you’re home. It looked so quiet I thought everyone was out.’
Martha smiled wanly at Susie and struggled to swerve her energy towards graciousness. Susie looked as if she had dressed for an occasion. Was it her hair, had she done it differently?
‘How funny. I sent Ada off with Tilly. They’ve gone to your house. I’ve got a bit of a headache.’ Martha rubbed at her temple for effect. It was unusual for Susie to drop over unannounced, especially lately. Martha had vaguely wondered if she had offended Susie in some way. Susie had cancelled swimming twice. Martha would have to offer her a cup of tea, now she would have to waste her precious Martha time chatting.
‘Cup of tea?’ she said. Susie looked agitated. She fiddled with the Indian bangles on her wrist. Her eyes—Martha now realised what it was—were rimmed with eyeliner and her gaze roved distractedly from one corner of the room to the other.
‘Oh, I don’t want to interrupt? Especially if you’ve got a headache. I’ve just barged in…’
‘No, no, it’s lovely to see you,’ said Martha, improving her smile and silently bidding her hour away as Susie wriggled onto the kitchen stool.
‘So, where’s Mike?’ she said.
‘Playing tennis.’ Martha rolled her eyes. She poured the tea. ‘It’s Sunday, his one chance to do something with the kids and instead he plays tennis.’
‘At least it keeps him fit, though it’s wasted on you, darl. Joe, gawd, well you know, he’s so flabby now, he’s past the point of no return, even if he did take up tennis, which I can’t imagine. He’s not the sporty type.’ Susie smiled and picked at her tooth.
Was Mike wasted on Martha? He was still physically attractive; it was just that he had turned out to be so very self-centred, and small-minded too, that she had stopped admiring him long ago. Once the admiration had gone, everything about him had lost its shine. He had become ordinary, a man who took out the rubbish, who made irritating sucking sounds and didn’t care to think about the drought or the Third World. And yet she was beset by feelings of obligation. Even if she could smother all that disregard and throw it out of the bedroom, his desire was always there, like an open mouth waiting, and she never had a chance to want him. Sex had become yet another wifely duty and the bed another battleground, so that she climbed heavily into it, her mind set like a fortress door against him, against what he wanted from her. Nothing he did could open her and the more he tried, the more pressure she felt and the harder she had to close. Yet in closing him out, she’d blocked her own access to desire too. This dismayed her. She wanted to feel it. She wanted to feel what Susie obviously felt. Every now and then, when he wasn’t pressing her, when he was up a ladder and reaching to pull pine needles out of the gutter, his shirt lifted, revealing a place on his body that she liked without even realising it, and it caused a puzzling glimmer of attraction. Or was it just that for once he was doing something helpful, so he seemed capable?
‘The holidays just do me in,’ she said. ‘I’m exhausted.’
‘Darl, you look exhausted. Why don’t you go take a nap while the children are out? I’ve got to get going, anyway.’ Susie stood up to leave as suddenly as she had arrived, gathering her bag onto her shoulder.
Martha was surprised. ‘That was a short stay.’
‘Yes, it’s…’ her hand flew to her mouth. ‘The heat, it tires you out and, you know, I should get home to Joe. I think he’s still depressed. Everything makes him sad. It’s so frustrating.’ She closed her eyes, as if to give a moment’s respect.
‘Oh, god,’ said Martha, rubbing her own brow as she searched her mind for the right words of solace. ‘Life…’ This was hopeless. She couldn’t explain what she meant.
Susie nodded as if she’d gleaned something from it. Was she even welling up? This was so unlike Susie that Martha felt a sudden rush of sadness, as if she might cry, and she went quickly to the sink to stem the emotion.
‘Anyway,’ Susie said shakily, waving her hand, bracelets jangling at her wrist. ‘What you need, honey, is a little trip away, just on your own. Promise me you’ll think about it.’ She forced a grin and patted Martha on the arm, before she swept herself out.