He throws together a meal from what’s cluttering up the fridge and old stuff in the pantry: pasta with tomatoes and a few herbs he yanks from the garden, some forgotten cheese, capers, bacon, stock cubes. It tastes like something from a restaurant, at least compared to Finn’s cooking.
Jarrah stumps into the kitchen and slouches down, sullen and unfriendly, but even he softens a little as you eat, as if Chen’s kindness overflows, washing over you all like the good food and the wine. It makes you warm. It lets you forget for as much as a few minutes at a time.
Jarrah’s eyelids droop again at the end of dinner. You’re worried at how tired he is; you hope it’s still the surgery aftermath. You send him back to bed, and when he’s settled in the lounge room you press a kiss to his forehead and switch off the light.
Back in the kitchen Chen is quietly stacking the dishwasher. You wipe down the benches and, without asking, empty the rest of the wine into your glasses.
‘Let’s go outside,’ you whisper.
Without words you agree that the couch on the verandah is too close to where Jarrah has just bedded down. Chen leads the way down the steps onto the lawn, crosses to the patch of light furthest from the house. Sits.
‘We’ll get eaten by mozzies,’ you whisper.
He shrugs and you sit. Not too close. Not too far off either. You can’t be sure if you’re out of sight of the lounge room, though you think it probable. Hopefully Jarrah has fallen asleep fast, the way he usually does.
‘How’s the survey going?’ you ask.
‘I’ve got a graduate helping now. We’ll finish the fieldwork this week. It’ll take a couple of months to analyse and write it up. But … you know how it goes with these projects.’
‘How?’
His smile is sad. ‘I’ve never seen a report stop a highway from going where it wants. Bureaucrats don’t understand the subtlety of genetically distinct populations. Koalas are being culled in parts of Victoria because there are too many of them, so why worry about the ones here dying out? How many koalas do you need, after all?’
You once cared about the koalas too, but in truth you now wonder the same thing. What will it matter if this small local population, hanging on by a thread, doesn’t survive? Perhaps it’s better to let them go rather than building koala crossings, overpasses and underpasses, trying to protect tiny patches of habitat, creating little oases that become traps surrounded by human development.
It’s better to dwell on these questions than to look at the shape of Chen’s shoulders. That’s one thing you mustn’t do. Dwell on the way his slender bones lean slightly towards you, the way his leg folds up under his arm with a flexibility Finn could never manage.
He slaps away a mosquito. ‘Are you going to tell me about Jarrah?’
You point at the gum tree towering overhead. ‘The branch broke when he was climbing.’
‘Bridget, it’s me.’
You take a deep breath. ‘He says he changed his mind about hanging himself and was trying to get down from the tree.’ Recounting it to someone else, your voice begins to break. ‘But he already had something around his neck, and the branch broke and fell on him and I nearly lost him.’
‘Oh, Bridget.’
You gulp a cold mouthful, wipe your mouth on the back of your hand. Repeat the mantra that gets you through the days: he’s alive. You have one son still alive.
Chen is looking at you with soft eyes. ‘I wish you’d let me help.’
‘You’ve done so much already.’ You choose a stock phrase to keep him at a distance.
‘I wish I could take the pain away.’
A bat lands in the tree with a leathery flap of wings, shaking the leaves and squealing, and you’re grateful for the cover because you nearly say, ‘There is.’ It would take the pain away, you know it. Perhaps only for the duration, perhaps only for a matter of minutes, but those minutes would be something.
You could take him to your bed. Make sure Jarrah is asleep, make sure no one will find out. You could take Chen to the studio, rather than risk doing such a thing in the house. Hell, you’ll be leaving the house soon enough. It may even be that Finn never comes back here – not if he goes to jail.
Chen’s skin is so smooth you want to run your hands down his hairless arms. You imagine feeling his small firm biceps, cupping the back of his neck and pulling him towards you. Your breath comes faster. You stare at the grass, because if you look at him, meet his gaze, you’ll fall.
The crickets start up in a sudden chorus and a frog croaks invisibly nearby and bats overhead call out and the first prickle of stars begins. You can feel the wine thrumming but you can’t blame it. The desire would be there without the wine, you know it. The desire for just one thing that isn’t laden with grief or fear or fury.
You don’t know how long you sit there, neither of you moving, but it’s dark by the time you lift your hand from the grass. You feel the glass tumble gently to one side, the rest of the wine soaking into the lawn. You raise your hand and extend it towards him. Your fingertips find the cloth of his T-shirt and slowly, slowly, you press your hand until your palm is where you’ve longed to place it, over the centre of his chest. His heart thuds against the spread of your fingers.