5

They met Madeleine, Jack, and Ollie for lunch at the warungs. They joined them in the cabanas for breakfast. They sat around the pool at dusk and ordered cocktails and sipped them slowly, watching Ollie in the shallow end, on the tiles, as the sun finally slipped behind the tiered roofs of the private residence next door and the temperature dropped a few degrees. Madeleine and Clara had made a pact to try every cocktail on the menu at the hotel over their stay, one a night, and to order them everywhere else they ate, although often they were so bad Clara’s sat barely touched in front of her.

Tom found he was relenting. He had no choice. He was not escaping them. Clara and Madeleine’s friendship was deepening. He could see why. Madeleine was not like Emily in many ways, who was sunny, upbeat, while Madeleine was droll, but she filled the same space, somehow, took Clara away from herself; by dint of her strength of character, her forthrightness, her volubility, she made Clara forget herself a little — which was the only way Clara could enjoy herself, Tom thought, except when alone with him, when they sat within themselves but drew comfort from each other’s proximity. Trish had done this for Clara, too.

Clara was famed for her mildness. For a reticence that people took for meditative and therefore found calming, reassuring. She was the one wanted in an emergency, the one friends looked to when they disagreed on something, the authority that was appealed to, as if they were all children and she their unflappable matriarch. Paradoxically, this made her nothing like Tom’s actual mother, who, although wise and clever and often penetrating about things, was nothing if not flappable. Although she would have been wounded to hear it, and perhaps with good reason because in an actual crisis she could surprise them all and be calm and clear and crucial, no one wanted her in an emergency because they assumed she would be a mess. She was known to shriek with horror at the slamming of a door.

To varying degrees at different times, Tom had found this authority of Clara’s infuriating. It was an illusion, largely, he felt. A function of character. She was routinely accepted as an expert on subjects that in reality she knew no more about than most people, and on certain subjects, much less than him. But it was her calm judgement they appealed to, her equanimity. Her economy with words made the words she did utter seem more important, more deeply considered. Her take was often the longest to come, but, because of this, it seemed to carry more weight and was taken as some sort of final word. What was that really based on? How slowly her mind moved? A reluctance to express herself? Of course, when he wasn’t grumpy about it, he was proud of her, this status she held.

Madeleine had responded to this in Clara, saw that she took what one said seriously, gave things due consideration. That she was rigorously fair. It made Madeleine feel confirmed in her own feelings to bounce them off someone like Clara. And she enjoyed having an authority she could appeal to. She was always turning to Clara when Jeremy and she were having their little fights, over who had to pay for the drinks, or whose turn it was to take Ollie to the hotel bathroom — Ollie was scared of the bathroom, it was dark and hidden away behind the restaurant. The arguments were in jest, Tom was pretty sure. Jeremy certainly laughed along with them. But Madeleine was so deadpan and brutal it was sometimes hard to tell. But Clara adjudicated effortlessly. It’s Jeremy’s turn, she’d say. You’ve only just got out here after putting Ollie’s swimmers on. Or, Sorry, Mads, but he is right. You’ve been sunning yourself out here and doing fuck-all for ages. And they’d obey immediately. Pretend to sulk about it, like teenagers.

For her part, Tom felt Clara was a little too readily amenable to Madeleine’s takes on everything. Madeleine had strong opinions on global politics, for example, and Clara seemed to agree immediately with everything she said. Not that he found her opinions unreasonable most of the time. Her takes seemed clear-eyed enough. It was just Clara’s eagerness, her ready trust. It all seemed a bit quick. But Madeleine had come on strong. Clara’s approval, he could tell, flattered her. And maybe Madeleine did this — needed a friend on holiday, someone else to talk to. Yet Madeleine didn’t know everything about them. She didn’t know about Clara’s capacity for gloominess, how her hesitancy could turn to coldness, didn’t know about her silences.

She didn’t know, either, how they lived. The state of their house. How, back in Melbourne, they lived in squalor. That the dishes got done, but rarely made it back into cupboards or drawers, or that Tom and Clara’s clothes lived permanently in two huge piles on the floor. Or that their whole house was grotty; nothing seemed to make it clean, no matter how hard they scrubbed at it. A structurally unsound Californian bungalow sliding into the grass, the house was almost comically dishevelled, and you warmed to it for this, but it also wore you down. A gap between the steps and the front door widened weekly, as if each shrank from the other, or as if the responsibility placed upon them was too much for them to bear. Most things inside the house were original condition or hadn’t been updated since the sixties — walls a sickly yellow, skirting boards Myrtle green, broken Bakelite chandelier light fittings, latch windows with frosted glass, and hardwood floors that were excavated some time ago and, after living under carpet for so long, were blackened in the corners with glue. The lino in the kitchen was deteriorating along the seam down the middle of the room, showing more blackened floorboards underneath, and the Formica benchtops were so stained and burnt that cleaning them only wore away further the patches of colour that remained.

The grot seemed to infect the atmosphere in the house. Their motivation to clean it only ever weakened, and they let things slip until they were living permanently with large cane baskets full of dusty, dirty clothes in the hallway, grimy recycling tubs overflowing in the corner of the kitchen, toilet rolls and beer bottles stacked up the walls, and, in the bathroom, a monstera with spiderwebs in its roots and spattered toothpaste on its leaves. It didn’t bother them until it did, and then they’d have cleaning days, and it would look okay again, for a week perhaps — grotty still, but pretty enough, with flowers on the table and benches clear, but it didn’t last. They were too busy to clean regularly, and anyway they were too disenchanted by the grot, they didn’t have the energy to face it. So they tried to ignore it.

Around the pool, among the remains of Ollie’s dinner crowding the small round tables — his half-eaten pizza, his mostly finished chips — Madeleine was talking again about motherhood. The subject seemed inexhaustible. Clara encouraged her, though, seemed curious about it all. She was asking her about childbirth.

You forget the pain, don’t you? she was saying. There’s some sort of biological response, a hormone, that makes you forget it all, so you’ll do it again? I heard that somewhere … Or is that a myth — the patriarchy telling us to shut up about it?

Absolutely it’s a fucking myth, Madeleine said. I remember every excruciating moment of Ollie’s birth. And she looked over at Ollie, sitting in the pool next to his father, his legs dangling over the underwater ledge between the shallow end and the deep.

I don’t, said Jeremy. It all feels very blurry to me. I was in shock, I think. He brought his long legs up slowly out of the water, scooping up Ollie’s legs with them, who giggled. But I’m glad, he said. I don’t need to remember all of that, thanks.

But that’s because you had nothing to do, darling, except stand around and watch, Madeleine said. Men are superfluous by that point. Not that you didn’t help me, mon cœur. Just by being there. Of course. But I was working, I was concentrating harder than I ever have on anything in my life. I remember every fucking second.

Clara was chuckling. Kind of bobbing up and down in her lounge. Oh well, she said, that’s better anyway, maybe. It seemed strange when I heard that, that the only way the human race survives, reproduces itself, can bear to go on, is through some kind of wilful forgetting.

Maybe we do do that, as a society, Madeleine said. Yes, that is true. But non, non, non. Merde. It’s not women forgetting how much it fucking hurts.

Jeremy shot her a quick look, presumably about all the swearing in front of Ollie.

That is a good phrase, though, actually, ‘wilful forgetting’, Madeleine said.

Thank you, Clara said.

Can I use it, maybe?

It’s yours.

They laughed.

Tom registered, while he tuned out Madeleine and Clara, that he only ever thought about parenthood abstractly, as if he was still in his twenties and it was a long way off. He had always taken it for granted that he would be a father, most likely, at some point in his life, but he assumed that, like him, Clara knew they were in no position yet to have children. Their jobs were too precarious, their incomes too low, their lives too disorganised, too full of things they were struggling to get done so their lives proper could still begin. They were barely functional. They could hardly clean up after themselves. They didn’t need another thing that made all that harder.

He had never seen Clara clucky as such, although she was a good aunt to her sister’s daughter, Annie, and was good with children generally. They responded to her, her lack of condescension. She asked them questions that other people didn’t think to ask and listened carefully to what they said in reply. This was true with Ollie, too. She talked to him about things that mattered to him, tried to understand why he didn’t like the food when it was served to him, was it texture, colour, smell, and they had an ongoing thing about the scooters and bicycles that were around them all day, who could spot the most from any one position, what were their best ones, colours, styles, makes, decals. They had certainly never openly discussed having children, not since the early days, when maybe it was only a subject for discussion because it was hypothetical, and only really about getting to know each other. Maybe he was in denial about all that and she thought about it all the time — who knew? They were careful to avoid sex at certain times each month, he knew that much.

Madeleine was comparing French and Balinese attitudes to children, and admiring the Balinese’s understanding of consent and boundaries. Their own children have wonderful lives, she said, despite everything, and western children love the Balinese, you see grown men and women communicating with kids from across the room, silently, laughing, pulling faces. They adore children, but they don’t feel the need to touch them, ruffle their hair, bend them to their will. There is respect, real respect.

Tom looked over at Ollie, who was now watching his legs move under him through the water, treading only on the blue tiles as he waded backwards into the deep end, his fair hair dark as it stuck against his brow. But quickly, Tom stopped paying attention to what everyone else was doing. He was trying to empty his mind, breathe deeply, relax as much as he possibly could into the banana lounge, and see if he could locate and relax very specific muscles in his body. He was distracted by a song in his head — the refrain ‘These songs of freedom … all I ever had’ going round and round — and a host of other things he was thinking about, or trying not to think about: his tax, an email from a student he had yet to respond to about the extremely late submission of her final essay, ordering another drink. Also, a list he was making about his mother. All the things she was scared of, and which of these fears he had inherited, or maybe not inherited, but assumed: thunderstorms; flying; spiders; showing her body under any circumstances, but especially in a swimsuit (perhaps the only thing she had in common with Clara); socialising, especially if playing the host; death. Most of them reasonable enough, too, he would argue.

Although he didn’t have her astraphobia. In a storm, his mother would not only switch off every powered device in the house, turn off the power at the wall, and pull out all the cords or get his father to, she would also retreat to the safest part of the house — by her reckoning the hallway — and cower on the floor in the darkness with the dog, with whom she had a special affinity at such times. Like the dog, she would emit moans corresponding in volume to the intensity of the flash of lightning or the clap of thunder. This was one of her fears he had learnt to scorn while growing up, but, as she grew sicker and he grew older and his own fears loomed larger, he tried to be kinder to her about it. Still, he remembered swanning around the house with sweaty palms, trying to prove to himself that he wasn’t scared.

That night Tom and Clara watched the film about the tsunami. They found it in the hotel’s DVD library. It was a pirated copy, recorded on camcorder, the camera occasionally bobbing about, and it was greenish around the edges, which removed them a little from the action, but at the same time made it more dreamlike, nightmarish. The big scene was quite close to the start, the tsunami sweeping over the coastline and into hotel grounds much like theirs. It was a challenge for the filmmakers, because it seemed to move so slowly, and, in some ways, it was unspectacular. Just a mass of swelling water. Also, because it was so big, the scale of everything got strangely corrected in your head, as if you wouldn’t allow yourself to see it for what it really was, so you kept thinking they were tiny, miniature — those buildings, those trees, all that outdoor furniture.

Then the camera plunged under the surface of the water, and it all sped up, things whipping by, and the violence became clear. The sound effects helped, and you saw Naomi Watts being struck by various things churning around her in the water. Although the film became less engrossing after this scene, as it followed the aftermath of the tsunami, it was a gripping enough story, based on true events. Tom knew Clara enjoyed this kind of movie. He did, too, up to a point, but he didn’t want to be scared like she did. He had never liked horror movies. She seemed to want everything to be more intense in movies. Bigger, scarier. He was just glad he could laugh at it and pretend to be unaffected by the emotional family reunion at the end.

Afterwards, they turned off the light, and he put his hand on her thigh as they got comfortable in the bed. He thought she might be asleep, but then he felt her pick up his hand and clasp it in hers. After a few minutes, she put his hand back down on the bed between them and fell asleep.