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‘We can’t live here.’
Chad slowly set his briefcase down onto the floor by the kitchen island bench. He didn’t want to ask the question, but knew there was no alternative. ‘Why not?’
Michelle leaned across the island. ‘Have you seen what it’s like here?’
Chad glanced around. The house was newly renovated, chic and modern, with white walls and sleek but comfortable furniture. It was airy and bright, with plenty of well-designed, open-plan living space. Unless you were a hidebound churl, you’d be hard pressed to find much to dislike.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s a different style from home but—’
‘Not here here!’ Michelle swept her arm in the direction of the kitchen windows. ‘This here! This neighbourhood! We can not live here!’
‘Mitch.’ Chad blew out a breath. ‘Could I just sit down for five minutes? Take off my jacket? Grab a bite to eat?’
‘Don’t you dare put the guilts on me!’ Michelle said. ‘It’s not you who’s had to spend the last three weeks in this hell-hole!’
‘Oh come on!’ Chad’s naturally ruddy colouring deepened with a rare flash of temper. ‘This is a nice neighbourhood! And it’s exactly — may I remind you — exactly what you asked for! Somewhere close to the city, somewhere families lived, good schools, parks, playgrounds—’
‘Have you seen the playground?’ Michelle’s voice was ominously even. ‘Or the school? Or the park?’
‘You know I haven’t.’ Chad’s temper had gone. What was the point in getting angry? Michelle was much better at fighting than he was. And experience had taught him that if he just let her rant, it would all be over that much faster.
‘The playground is up the hill,’ Michelle continued. ‘Up a hill so steep that the angle my body must assume to the stroller is so acute that my nose practically touches the ground! It is so steep that Harry cannot walk it and so I have to push them both. By the time we get there, I am not sure whether my inability to breathe is due to shoving seventy-odd pounds up a sheer cliff face, or to the lack of oxygen caused by the high altitude!’
Chad had managed to sit down on one of the stools that faced the bench. He was desperate for a drink of water, but the sink was behind Michelle and any move now out of her laser sights might shunt the rant off its track and into more dangerous territory. The most likely area it could swerve into would be the quality and quantity of his respect for her, a topic that filled Chad with a level of panic he suspected would only be exceeded if he were a victim of waterboarding. Best to sit tight.
‘And do you know how big the playground is?’ Michelle asked. ‘See the length of this room? No, not even that big. Three toddlers and it feels like Harrods on sale day.’
Michelle lifted a hand as if to forestall a question, even though they both knew Chad would no more ask one at that moment than fly. ‘I know what you’re going to say: what about the park? Doesn’t that have a playground too? Why, yes it does! It also, on warm days such as we have been recently experiencing, has a veritable wall-to-wall carpet of young, buff gay men who advertise their, admittedly admirable, wares by lying there on the grass practically naked!’
The length of pause suggested that this time she did expect Chad to comment.
‘Does that worry you?’ he said.
‘Am I a reactionary homophobic, do you mean, who thinks all gays are potential paedophiles?’
‘You know I didn’t say that.’
‘When Harry asks what they’re doing, how will you answer?’ Michelle demanded. ‘Will you tell him they’re angling for casual hot sex? That’s the truth!’
‘So were the young girls heading down our street into Charlotte on a Friday evening. Most of them are semi-naked, too. Not that I’ve noticed, of course,’ Chad added quickly.
To avoid conceding anything, Michelle took another tack. ‘It’s true that there are families here,’ she informed her husband. ‘Harry and Rosie and I met a guy at the miniature playground who also had toddlers in a stroller. Thing is, he had on a t-shirt that said: “I am my kids’ gay dad”!’
‘So?’
‘So I am not my kids’ gay dad! We have nothing in common!’
‘He has kids. You have that in common.’
‘You know what I mean! We can’t do girl talk. We can’t bitch about our husbands. Well—’ Michelle inclined her head for a moment. ‘OK, yes we can.’ She rounded on Chad again. ‘But it won’t be the same!’
Chad took a mental deep breath. He was weary, hungry, and his thirst had got to the stage where if he didn’t end this now, his kidneys might fail.
‘I understand if you miss your mothers’ group friends,’ he said. ‘I understand if you miss home. I do, too. But we’re here now, and you can rail against all the differences, or you can figure out how to make it work for you. Are those the only things that are wrong? The hill gradients, the semi-naked gay guys and the non-traditional families?’
‘Thanks for making me sound like a complete idiot!’ said his wife. ‘And no, those are not the only problems. The supermarket is miles away and has about three parking spaces, the local school looks like a prison and has not a scrap of grass, the only decent local pre-school has a waiting list of five hundred years, there are beggars at carefully spaced intervals up the length of the main street, there is a crazy man wearing a tank top and a whole bunch of turquoise jewellery who insists on talking to me and Harry at the coffee shop, the pharmacy has a plastic fish that sings Don’t Worry, Be Happy until you want to smash it from the wall, the clutch on the car is burning out from all the hill-starts, and I got a ticket for not having my front wheels turned the correct way when I parked on one of those insane slopes in the city! There are no trees here except, ironically, for a few scrubby New Zealand pohutukawa that I gather have to be uprooted because they’re causing havoc with the drains. There’s bugger all parking anywhere yet the public transport is always crammed full. I want space and trees and beggar-free streets and schools with real playing fields and shops that are easy to get to and—’
‘OK.’
Michelle paused. ‘What do you mean OK?’
‘Find somewhere else then. Work is paying the rent. We’re signed up here for a year, but I’m sure the legal team will have ways to get out of that. This place costs twelve grand a month, so—’
‘Twelve grand? You cannot be serious!’
Chad shrugged. ‘Property’s expensive here.’
Michelle eyed him beadily. ‘So I have a monthly rent budget of twelve grand?’
‘Let me check. Can you wait until I do that?’
Chad glanced at the clock on the wall. In Charlotte, he’d been home every night by seven on the dot. Since he’d started working his new job, he’d been coming home later and later. But Michelle knew his new job was more demanding. He’d warned her he’d be putting in extra hours. The clock told Chad it was now eight forty-five. He was starving, and that made it harder not to resent the fact his wife had decided to put a further half hour between him and dinner by ranting at him about things that were not technically his fault. All right, yes, it had been his idea to move them here, but the topography of the area had been established before dinosaurs roamed. Chad had no power to make the hills less steep.
His wife had obviously seen his eyes travel to the clock. She muttered a quick word at the bench top, an action Chad recognised as an apology. Michelle wasn’t good at those.
She raised her head, her mouth tight. ‘I just don’t like feeling powerless. I don’t like worrying about whether the kids will be safe and happy.’
Chad rose from the stool and came around to where she was standing. He dropped a brief kiss on top of her head.
‘I know,’ he said, quietly. ‘Neither do I.’
DARRELL: Are those trees actually growing through your deck?
LADY MO: Yes! How awesome is that! They’re heritage redwoods and cannot be cut down, so everyone builds around them. They line the street, too, so big that in places they make it one-way. Can lead to much urgent braking and polite yielding, which would normally annoy the crap out of me. But strangely I adore the fact that preservation of ancient trees has been put before motoring convenience. Landlord says he wishes they’d shoot the freaking deer, though.
DARRELL: No! Why?
LADY MO: When I first arrived here, I wondered why everyone had such tall fences. Worried that meant neighbours were anally uptight privacy freaks, but no — all they want to do is prevent deer eating all garden plants down to the nub. Velvet-eyed Bambi bastards can jump more than eight feet! Good thing I have no garden. Only deck penetrated by giant trees.
DARRELL: Could be worse wildlife issues, though. I read that a mountain-biker got eaten by a cougar in that mountain up behind you.
LADY MO: Landlord says that was a very rare occurrence. Normally, cougars go for hikers, not mountain-bike riders. Easier to catch. The coyotes are more of a worry. Landlord told me people who stick lost cat notices on power poles have not hope in hell. Puss-Puss and Fluffykin have almost certainly become coyote chow.
DARRELL: Landlord is a mine of useful, if somewhat ghoulish, information.
LADY MO: He is a mad Spaniard. From Barcelona, like Manuel in Fawlty Towers. His first name is Angel and his middle name is Fausto. He says his parents were hedging their bets. He arrives here either in an ancient Porsche convertible or on one of those recumbent bicycles that only the mentally unhinged prefer. He is very tall and thin with mournful hang-dog face, like Don Quixote. Except that he is not sad sack, but joker who does Groucho Marx impressions that make both Harry and Rosie collapse in fits of laughter. I think I’m in love. Shame he is over sixty and married.
DARRELL: Not to mention that you, also, are married?
LADY MO: (making sound spelled ‘Harrumph’) May as well not be. Have not clapped eyes on Chad for weeks. He could have grown a beard and started wearing powder-blue seventies disco suits for all I know.
DARRELL: Not weeks, surely?
LADY MO: Feels like it. Probably why I have developed pash for landlord. He is the only man paying me any attention at the moment. But everything in the house is working perfectly now, so have run out of reasons to bring him around. May be reduced to plotting sabotage.
DARRELL: You sound just like me when I first moved to London! I, too, had loneliness and temporary pash for landlord, who was very tall and married. Still is, bless him.
LADY MO: And how is landlord’s cousin, aka Anselo, your studly boyfriend? Note how polite I am being in asking after your life, when all I really want to do is keep on talking about mine.
DARRELL: He’s good.
LADY MO: Even though we are on chat and not on FaceTime because like a slattern I have not yet bothered to get out of my pyjamas, I can FEEL your reluctance! Why so? What’s up?
DARRELL: Nothing! He’s good!
LADY MO: Don’t make me come over there! I’ll bring the children!
DARRELL: Oh, OK! (Put-upon sigh) I think he wants me to marry him.
LADY MO: And this is a bad idea why?
DARRELL: It isn’t a bad idea. But now it’s become less of an idea and more of a probability. It’s like there’s a marriage proposal constantly in his mouth, like one of those boiled sweets that stay intact for eons no matter how hard you suck. Many times recently I could tell he desperately wanted to spit it out but instead decided to swallow despite threat of choking. (You can tell I’m a writer, can’t you.)
LADY MO: Not one going to win a literary prize any time soon but don’t let that stop you. Why is he deciding to swallow and not spit? Are you shrieking whenever he opens his mouth? Scrambling to the safety of a high tree and pelting him with bits of fruit?
DARRELL: You’ve been to the zoo recently?
LADY MO: Did a few touristy things when the kids and I were scoping out places to live. San Francisco doesn’t really have what I’d call the ’burbs unless you cross one of the big bridges. Berkeley was nice. But the Bay Bridge that goes over there is not a patch on the Golden Gate, which makes me gasp with wonder every time I drive across it. Which is why we are here in Marin County in a tree house. (Note how deftly I switched conversation back to my life.)
DARRELL: Helps that I don’t want to talk about mine.
LADY MO: Just because you lost one husband doesn’t mean you’ll lose another.
DARRELL: You make them sound like pairs of sunglasses! Is that what I’m afraid of, do you think? Tom died, so Anselo might too?
LADY MO: Either that, or you’re not sure he’s really the man for you.
DARRELL: Great. Thanks. Such a comfort.
LADY MO: Well, you know me. If I’m not in a good mood I don’t see why anyone else should be.