Your second working week and the days have fallen into a pattern. You back the car out of the garage and drive to the office. You meet Chen in the car park, transfer into a state-owned four-wheel drive and head out to areas identified as likely or known koala habitat. Your body moves; you eat. You appear to be alive.
Chen makes you do all the driving and presents you with a list of tasks every day. At first you feel a vague prickle of resentment that he seems to be treating the time like a holiday. After a few days you realise it is deliberate: Chen is accepting boredom so you can stay busy.
He seems OK with looking across and finding you weeping. He doesn’t try to stop you; he doesn’t say anything about time healing. He doesn’t even offer you tea. So far he is the only person who can stand to simply be with you. You’ve never known, before, what a rare quality this is.
Today you bash along a rough bush track, and as you emerge on the steep side of the enormous caldera and look down at the tilted cone rising from its centre, you’re struck by the deep unfamiliarity of the place. The country of Toby’s death is obscenely fecund; you turn your back for a season in this place and a little shoot of a plant will be towering over your head. You once liked its warmth and fertility. But as fast as this land gives, it takes away again, snatches life back, tramples it, breaks it down, claims it. Anything dead is humus before you can blink.
At lunch you feel dangerous. Perhaps because you’re dangling your legs over the lip of an old volcano, perhaps because your fury at Finn is starting to bubble hot and deep. Chen has brought lunch, as always: rice paper rolls wrapped around chicken and noodles and mint; falafel and hummus in flat bread, expertly made, stowed in a small cooler with an ice brick so they emerge fresh and tasty. You can barely bring yourself to eat anything cooked by Finn, but thanks to Chen’s lunches you’re getting nutrition.
‘How come you’re not married?’ you ask, picking up a pebble and casting it overarm into the valley.
He shrugs. ‘Job plus PhD doesn’t equal much time for anything else. You know that.’
You make a rueful face. ‘Guess I was already married when I started mine, but six years of study was still a big ask for Finn.’
‘I got into the habit of being on my own.’ Chen glances sideways at you. ‘And then – well, the people I like always seem to be committed.’
Flirting with danger feels suddenly stupid and you back off. ‘Well, you’re a great cook.’
He picks up another rice paper roll and asks, more gently than you deserve: ‘Have you told your mother yet?’
*
The nursing-home matron comes out to reception to meet you, her face a picture of compassion, her arm outstretched to pat or grasp or hug. On the phone she’s promised to keep your secret about Toby. Agreed the news would be traumatic – and might have to be repeated to your mother many times.
‘We’re so sorry,’ she begins, and you back away, nodding yes, yes, to head her off.
‘No one’s slipped up, have they? She hasn’t found out?’
‘She doesn’t know a thing. The staff have all been briefed.’
‘Good,’ you say, turning away and setting off down the hallway. You can do this.
‘Bridget,’ she calls after you. ‘She’s drifting today.’
She’s seated by the window in her comfortable armchair, looking out into the garden. You stand for a moment at the door to her room, steeling yourself. You never know how she’ll be from one visit to the next. Never mind that you’re not the same person who came in a couple of weeks ago, simply tired from work and thinking that made for a bad day.
‘Oh hello,’ she says. You focus and find her looking up at you and smiling.
You force yourself to smile back, blinking back tears you weren’t aware of. ‘Hello, Mum.’
‘I’m not your mother, dear,’ she says, with a sympathetic nod. ‘Don’t you know where she is?’
‘No,’ you say slowly. ‘No, I don’t know.’
‘Never mind. Come and sit down and wait for her. I think she was just here.’
‘Thank you.’
You sit next to her and share the view. It’s pretty. This isn’t a bad place, not at all. You were lucky to get her in here.
Unstoppable tears slide down your face.
*
Someone wants to buy your house. Finn blurts it out as you climb the steps to the verandah, talking to fill the silence as you try to absorb his words. Have you even agreed to selling?
‘I know we haven’t talked about the price or anything, but she had someone interested and wanted to bring them around, and it just went from there.’
He tells you their offer. It’s insultingly low: far less than you paid. What kind of person wants to profit from your misery like this?
‘We should take it,’ Finn says. ‘Cut our losses. We could be back home in a month.’
You shake your head, more in disbelief than refusal, and walk past him into the living room, noting its sudden neatness and the absence of flowers. You throw your bag down, kick off your shoes, push into the kitchen and pour a frosty glass of sauvignon blanc.
The house feels hot and airless. Once upon a time you’d have swum after arriving home on such an evening. Now it’s become normal to act like you don’t have a pool at all, as if across the safety fence is no-man’s-land, mined and impassable. For the want of somewhere to go you head back out to the verandah, passing Finn and walking to the end furthest away, warning him with an upheld hand to keep away. You lower yourself into the creaking wicker armchair and allow a long mouthful of wine to slide down your throat.
Finn gets up and goes inside. You take another, larger, mouthful of wine. You’ve been waiting for it all day, thinking about it in the comfort and risk of working beside Chen for hours, counting koala scats, searching for scratch marks, peering up into trees. You want Chen nearby, and then you’re relieved when the day is over. Relieved until you step into your house and must confront Finn and your barely contained rage, and Jarrah, who seems to stay just out of your reach.
You need to make a decision. You need to think.
If you sell the house, Finn can lead the way back down south. He could find you somewhere to live, get things ready while Jarrah finishes the school year and you keep working until something turns up in Hobart. You and Jarrah could move out of Murwillumbah, take a holiday house at the beach for a month or three, drive into work and school.
But.
What if, once separated from Finn, you don’t want to rejoin him? The distance between you is taut and stretched, quivering. It holds you together, for now. Without that tension, you might collapse. Or escape. Doesn’t he sense the danger of leaving you?
The door bangs and Finn steps out with another beer. He looks at you, eyebrows raised, asking permission. You nod and he lumbers towards you and lowers himself into the adjoining chair like an old man.
You launch right in. ‘We can’t afford it. We’d hardly buy back into Hobart with the money we’d lose.’
He doesn’t answer but tilts his head back and takes a long swig. You know all this without looking at him directly, with your visceral awareness of how his body moves itself near you.
‘What about Jarrah’s school? We can’t take him out now. It’s only the start of term four. He’s got to finish the year at least.’
A parrot lands in the umbrella tree near the verandah. These things are weeds, you’ve learned this week – harmless in cooler climates but rampant attackers in the subtropics, invading the bushland, growing without reason or limit. The birds don’t mind; the noisy miners and lorikeets make the most of the free food bounty. Shyer birds, Chen tells you, are getting rarer as the brilliant extroverts take over.
‘Edmund would be the first to say you can’t bank on making money from your art. My job pays the mortgage, remember?’
His silence is unnerving. You expect him to mount a case, to challenge each of your reasons for not selling, but he says nothing, leaving your arguments to fall flat. Two can play that game. You go back to your wine and your contemplation of the garden. You’ll sit it out.
You’ve both finished your drinks by the time Finn turns to you.
‘I just can’t live here, Bridge.’
Your heart contracts. There’s so much pain in his voice and for a second that’s all you hear – the agony of this man you’ve loved, the father of your children.
‘It might be the only offer we get. I want to take it. I want us to go home.’
How can you argue against what is, clearly, Finn’s bottom line? You want another glass of wine so badly that your throat aches, but you can’t get up. The two of you sit in silence with your empty glasses. More lorikeets land in the umbrella tree and shriek their joy as they slash into the spikes of tall crimson flowers, shredding the petals and letting them fall to the lawn.
‘It must have taken you all day to clean up the house,’ you say.