She has survived worse betrayals, she tells herself, but that’s self-comforting bullshit. This is beyond anything. Much worse than when she found out that Tony had been getting blow jobs from a woman he worked the closing shift at Maccas with. Coming to pick Nic up, all tired and stinking of lard and her not knowing for months that his dick was coated in some middle-aged desperado’s dried spit. Worse than the feeling that time at work, the big staff meeting to say that Samantha—Nic’s best mate in the place—had been pilfering from the till and from staff lockers for years. Worse—and she would have until this day said nothing could be worse but here it was—worse worse worse than when Michelle had upped and moved to Brisbane and taken Lena. It was like having a piece of herself wrenched off and her not allowed to be angry or even sad because how pathetic would that be—crying like a bereaved mother just because your niece has moved interstate?
This, today, was that same betrayal playing out its endgame. Something had changed in Lena during those years away. Nic’s joy and gratitude at having her girl back was so great it had blinded her to the fact that Lena had turned into her bloody mother. Someone who thought she knew what was best for everyone else, who interfered in things that were none of her business. Someone who took it upon herself to do shit that no one asked her to do and then acted like a blessed martyr about it.
Like mother, like daughter! It wasn’t supposed to be that way. From the minute Lena slid into the world she’d been Nic’s girl. There in that miserable backyard, that drunk fool too busy performing disgust for his drunk fool mates around the fire to take his perfect baby, and Mum, now that the ambos had arrived, occupied with keeping little Will away from his gore-soaked mother, and so it was Nic who, seconds after the ambo had cut the cord and tied it off, took the squirming little wonder into her arms. Nic who kissed the terrifyingly soft head and rubbed the impossibly perfect little arms. Nic who opened her own shirt and held the baby against her bare skin in the back of the ambulance, just like the paramedic suggested. Nic’s skin that gave primordial comfort to Lena’s panicked newborn spirit, Nic’s heart that set the rhythm of Lena’s, her breath that dried Lena’s first tears.
They’re murmuring out there; the sound of it throbs through the space and burrows into her chest. She can’t bear it. Can’t. The pain of dragging her busted body up is better than sitting in this crypt letting their conspiring thrum through her.
She’s felt this one other time, her body knows, recognises this feeling of being alone in space, plummeting. Fifteen—old enough to wear a junior bra and shave her legs and walk home from school on her own and do her own laundry and cook dinner for the family three times a week. Fifteen, yet younger somehow than thirteen-year-old Michelle, who already had a proper bra and her periods, who had used her birthday money on a perm, who had been sneaking around with a much older boy and, now she’d been caught, let rip, screaming at Mum about her hypocrisies, all the men whose places she stayed over at, creeping back in before the girls got up, as if they didn’t notice she was wearing yesterday’s clothes and stinking of smoke and you know what else! Nic did not know what else. She had not noticed the day-old clothes or the smoke or the creeping. And while she was still taking in this new information and what it might mean, Michelle screaming, Imagine how Dad would feel if he knew! And Mum screaming back, Why do you care about how he feels? He doesn’t give a shit about you. When was the last time you heard from him?
Michelle, sobbing: He’s just trying to protect us. When he comes home he’ll—
Grow up, Michelle! I’m the one who protects you! Me! He left us with sweet fuck-all. I chased down the money he was owed and bought this house for you girls. You’ve got no idea the kind of things I had to do! No idea. And who do you think buys your food and clothes and shoes and everything? Who pays the bills? Me me me me! He’s a worthless piece of shit and it’s about time you girls realised that.
You’re a liar. He loves us.
Mum stormed into her bedroom, came back with a cardboard box. Dumped its contents onto the floor: so many envelopes, thick and unopened. Nic sat on the floor, sifted through them. Every one addressed to Dad in the correctional centre. Some in her neat, precise handwriting. Some in Michelle’s impatient scrawl. Older yellowing envelopes in the round, careful, childish hand of someone just learning to write. She remembered doing that: making neat pencil lines with a ruler, painstakingly copying the letters from the paper Mum had showed her, erasing the pencil lines and blowing away the rubber shavings. Wanting it to be perfect for him, to cheer him in that awful place.
I’m sorry, Nicky, Mum said, rubbing her shoulder. I should’ve said something earlier. He started refusing delivery years ago. I couldn’t bear them coming back with a big government stamp on them so I just … I stopped sending. Kept them in case …
Nic gathered up the letters, took them to her room and shoved them in her school bag, too desperate to get away from Mum and Michelle’s screaming to find a better place for them in the moment. She zipped up the bag, pushed it under her bed and then walked out of the house. No one tried to stop her. Probably didn’t notice her leave. She walked and walked. The world had turned upside down and inside out and no one out here cared. As she walked, she found it got better, the feeling of being tossed through space. Seeing that the trees still grew upwards out of the ground, and that the sky was still very far away and showing no signs of falling any time soon. It helped to feel her feet connect with the earth, her lungs fill with air.
She will do that now. Not as easily, granted, but still. She makes her heavy way to the hallway, each clunk of the crutches on the hardwood floors reverberating through the house, shaking her bones. Clunk clunk clunk down the hallway, the promise of traffic noise, trees and shrubs and walls and garbage bins and telegraph poles and dogs and birds and cats and rats all filling the space, softening the blows, crowding her in.
The betrayer-in-chief and her assistant gape from the living room. Living room, but who could live there? It’s a tomb! They’re firing off questions and orders, telling her what she can’t and should do. She ignores them: clunk clunk clunk. The B-i-C stomps her way across, tries to bar the doorway, but she is a coward in the end. Nic doesn’t have to touch her, just keeps clunking forward and the girl moves, crying if you can believe it. Her, the cause of it all, the one who got her way, crying as if a grown woman leaving her own house for a walk outside is a personal attack on her. And him, well, he’s obviously chosen his side. He won’t even lift a hand to pull the axe from her back.
The door is already open; the children who have taken over her house have a bizarre obsession with fresh air, as if the place could hold any more of it. It’s all air. Nothing but. And yet they don’t want her to go out in it! Nonsensical. She would like to slam the door closed behind her, shut them up in the air-filled tomb of their making, but she would have to break her stride—clunking as it is—and risk falling, so she pushes on, grateful when the racket of outdoors drowns out their yowling.
Nic stops in the park where she found the bonnet last time she passed by. It feels so long ago. The jacaranda is in flower, serving its annual reminder to the slippery dip and swings that they are inferior installations. Small, hard and dull. Unable to regenerate or surprise. She positions herself in front of the bench, slides the crutches forward and eases back. The seat is lower than she expected and she lands on her tailbone with a thud. Pain is everything and then becomes only something. She can’t stop looking at her pale, chalky nails. Kon swiped off the chipped polish with an alcohol pad when he saw how much it was bothering her, but this is worse. Like when she had bubble gum stuck in her hair as a kid and Mum cut it out and then evened out the cut until she looked like a cancer patient. She remembers the deep, low-down sick feeling she got when she saw strips of her own raw pink scalp, the queasiness of touching flesh that should be untouchable. She’d wanted to rip her own head off to stop that sick, creepy feeling. Wearing her Tigers beanie helped with the dis-ease, but they wouldn’t let her leave it on at school and she would never, ever forget what it felt like to have to sit in that already hostile room, feeling the awfulness of it all sink right into her head through the unprotected raw skin.
Her nails are naked now the way her head had been naked then. Her mind flashes to the mole rat Facebook meme that was popular a couple of months ago. Did the mole rat feel like this all the time? Nauseated by its own disgusting bareness? Nic tries to shut her mind off from the horror, but it’s useless. The shuddering is well underway. Only thing to do is to force herself up and set off again.
She makes her way to the corner and the universe rewards her efforts. Gifts strewn all over the nature strip: two pine chairs with woven cane seats, a squat footrest covered in pink and black polka-dotted fabric, a single-shelved bookshelf with Disney characters dancing over its sides and back, a cardboard box filled with glasses, coffee mugs and who knows what else. In her distress and haste she forgot to bring any bags, but never mind. Except for a couple of mugs, she wouldn’t be able to carry any of this on her own anyway. Not in this state. She’ll need help. Will might do it, if she can get him out from under the Betrayer’s influence. Or maybe she could get her hands on a trolley. Wouldn’t need the crutches if she had a trolley to lean on. Yes. She would push on towards the housing commission flats near the supermarket. There were always trolleys abandoned there.
A memory, sharp and bright, of walking this way to pick up Lena and her friend on a stifling summer afternoon. Lots of afternoons, wasn’t it? She’d walk around after work to collect Lena and the other girl, bring them home for fish and chips and ice cream. She couldn’t remember the girl’s name. Short and broad-shouldered with thick little legs, looked at Lena with total adoration in her wide-set eyes, which made Nic love her. Saw herself in her for that reason and more, if she was being honest.
For one, Nic had lived in flats like those as a kid. Another suburb, further from the city, but same deal: besser block, outdoor walkways that begged you to lean too far over, to splat yourself on the concrete below, leave others to wonder if it was an accident or what. Inside, vinyl sheeting over chipboard, walls so thin you heard every fuck and fight and fart from next door. Carpet that’d give you nasty burns if you forgot your life and rolled around like a kid on it.
Her bedroom had been nice, though. Her half of the bedroom, at least. Michelle was neat to the point of ugliness. Would rather a blank white wall than blu-tacked posters that might unstick at the corners when the humidity was high. Rather a bed made like in a hospital room than one with colourful pillows and friendly fuzzy faces. Sometimes Nic would attempt to interrupt the blandness, poke a single pink feather into the edge of Michelle’s mirror or thread a gold-sequinned ribbon around her bedhead. Michelle never commented, just plucked up the bit of beauty and tossed it in the bin in the corner. Nic would go to the bin and rescue it, find a place on her side where it’d feel properly appreciated.
When they moved into the Leichhardt house Mum threw out nearly all the decorations Nic had up around her room. She said it was a clean start. A home all of our own, girls! She said they could choose to paint their room any colour they liked, and for weeks Nic and Michelle fought bitterly about that. Pointlessly, too. There was never money for painting. No energy or will. The walls stayed the same dirty cream they’d always been. Nic could have painted it any colour she liked once Michelle moved out. She doesn’t remember why she didn’t. Nor why she didn’t paint Mum’s room after she died. It didn’t matter, though, because there was so much else to see. Who thought about walls?
Now she had to because they were all you saw when you walked in. Walls and floors. Naked, old and grubby.
A shot of pain up her spine. New pain. Not an intensification of the pain that’s been with her since she woke in hospital, not the already familiar tugging that came as the painkillers wore off. Altogether new, like a piece of amber glass from the gutter had leapt up and stabbed itself into her back. Stabbed her hard in the tailbone and then dragged itself towards her heart, digging in deeper as it went. Nowhere to sit and rest a minute here. Can’t provide a seat or ledge or anything at all that would encourage people to linger. You might accidentally give someone a moment of comfort. You might allow an injured and broken person a place to rest before continuing on her way in the world. Can’t bloody have that, can we?
So this is what you get then, concerned citizens wanting to discourage comfort for the undesirables. You get a mess of a woman collapsed on the bristly, bindi-strewn so-called grass of the nature strip. A mess of a woman, yes, she is aware. Used to walk this street briskly, looking out for forgotten things on the ground, and now she is one, too bruised and crazy-looking for even her own self to want to pick up and care for. Noisy, too, the pain making her mewl against her own will. She hears herself: a cat who’s caught her paw on a jagged tin lid.
I am a woman who needs rescuing, she thinks. I am a public nuisance. I am a matter of public health and safety. I am a danger to myself and my neighbours. I am in need of intervention.
Steve is with her again, as he was last time she was laid out helpless. He is reminding her that she will be fine. He nodded off or fell down in the street all the time in his final years and it never killed him. What killed him was being alone inside. No one to stumble upon him and call for help. No one to bash down his door and carry him out, humiliated but alive. She could argue, tell him death is preferable to shame and violation and betrayal. But she only means it for herself. For him, she wishes all the humiliation and agony in the world if it had meant survival. She wishes he’d OD’d right here where she lies and that passers-by spat and cursed at him, but only after calling an ambulance. She wishes he’d had everything taken away from him, been forced to stay in a huge, echoey hospital, prodded and patronised by people who couldn’t even be bothered to introduce themselves before fingering your wounds. She wishes, even, for his hatred, if only she’d earned it by saving his life.
A few metres along the nature strip a silver slingback sparkles at her. Too high for a long work day, but low enough you could wear it out to dinner and then walk home without stumbling. Shiny finish, probably fake patent leather. The inner soles would be cheap vinyl that smelt bad after a night of sweat. The sides would cut, the toes pinch. So pretty, though, gleaming out on this rough, unlovely patch of wannabe grass, a moment from a fairy tale fallen exactly where it is needed.
Mum had a pair of silver high heels once. Higher and more expensive-looking than this cheerful gal. Mum’s had a textured silk finish and creamy, real leather inner soles. When she wore them she was half a head taller and a million bucks more beautiful. Moving through the house on her way to the door, it was like little bits of glitter and sunshine and joy trailed behind her. Michelle once asked if Mum would leave her those shoes in her will. Mum had laughed and said, Sure, but I don’t plan on falling off the perch any time soon. They’ll be out of fashion by the time you get them. Michelle, who thought herself more sophisticated than anyone, said, Oh, no, Mum. Those are classics. They’re forever.
One morning Mum came home in bare feet, her eyes ringed with melted make-up, her dress torn at the hem and stockings gone. The blue veins on her shins were gruesome in the early light. What happened? Michelle asked and Mum shrugged and said, Rough night.
But where are your shoes?
Mum flicked the question away with her hand. They hurt my feet.
But where did you—
Enough. I need some quiet.
She trudged flat-footed through to her bedroom and Michelle went on a whispered rant about how careless and embarrassing and stupid their mother was. Nic agreed with everything she said, and when she seemed to be done with the rant asked her, Should we go and find her shoes?
Nic would never forget the look her sister gave her. You poor little idiot, it said. You don’t understand a thing that’s happening here. You will never understand the adult world. You will always be locked out. What she said with her mouth was, She doesn’t deserve those shoes.
What’s that got to do with it, Nic wanted to say, but the look had made her feel like she did at school when everyone else picked up their pencils and started writing. She’d thought she’d been paying attention, but everybody else had heard something different from her. They all knew what to do. She had missed it. Whatever it was, she had missed it. Again. Dumb slow retard.
Someone was saying those things to her now. Not with their words, but with their tone. ‘What’s happened here then? Let’s get you some help.’ (Dumb slow retard, risk to yourself, matter of health and safety.)
Sirens and then men lifting her and her own terrible cat yowl. When did she become a woman who couldn’t control the noises she makes? She manages to say, ‘The shoe.’ And someone says, ‘You’re wearing your shoes, darling, it’s fine.’ And someone else says, ‘Does she mean that one?’ And no one answers out loud, but she imagines the looks they give each other: She doesn’t deserve that shoe.
It is a good thing she didn’t get the shoe, she realises as they unload her from the ambulance. No matter how much she cared for it—and she would have, giving it pride of place on the TV cabinet, where its shine would be reflected by the trophies on either side—it wouldn’t be right. Shoes come in pairs and this one, when she thinks of it, looked more forlorn than fairy tale, there on the nature strip. Somewhere its mate lay just as sadly, waiting, waiting, waiting to be whole again.