Now that Antonio wasn’t getting up early, neither was Rose. She wasn’t sleeping that well anyway. When her husband left their home late at night, a sense of absence woke her. He thinks she doesn’t know what he gets up to. She even followed him the other night, watched him throwing things into the windows of half-built houses. Once, she had had to collect Francis from a police station when he was caught doing the same thing. Antonio was disappointed that Francis didn’t grow into the same man he was, but he didn’t realise they were two sides of the same coin. She knew a lot of things her husband did not. This is the problem with men, her friend Lucy always said; they think women know nothing.
Other things he thought she didn’t know – that those letters just kept on arriving, the ones from WorkCover, from the bank, from the construction company, from the CFMEU, from the police, from some legal company that sent out envelopes printed with crushed cars and the slogan ‘No Win, No Fee’. He shoved them under the bed as if all this business would go away if no one read them. But Rose did.
From those letters she now knew they had three investment properties, not just the one she didn’t want in the first place: 12 Woodlands Drive, Villawood; 8 Blackheath Drive, Smithfield, and 67 West Fairfield Road, Fairfield. She predicted that the two new additions would be like the first – old sturdy brick of the 1960s era, a quarter-acre block. Antonio was more sure of these kinds of houses than he’d ever been sure of anything, but when the first one was set on fire they’d almost gone broke. She got it. They’d both come from nothing and he wanted something better than that. But at what cost? Mortgaging, remortgaging. He took imaginary money and put it into bricks and mortar, which must have looked close enough to his idea of real wealth.
It didn’t seem to make their real lives any better. Not that she’d had much to complain about until now.
While the morning crept into the early afternoon, Rose watched him sleeping. People didn’t talk about men having beauty, but her husband was a beautiful man, even at this age, more beautiful than she ever was. His body still had a lean, olive-coloured symmetry. In her mind, she’d had him hundreds of times, in the park, in the car, at work, before she’d ever had him in the flesh. She had met him at sixteen. She recalled being full of desire and invincible back then; remembered feeling exactly this: that if she married this man, she would always be this way.
She got out of bed, wrapped her nightgown tightly over her body and made her way downstairs. Her family had left evidence of their presence around the place: the half-moon imprint of Antonio’s thumb in the paint in the hallway, the floral blinds Clare helped her to sew, Francis’ shoes stranded in the middle of the hallway for the last twenty-three years.
But for now, she felt alone.
In the kitchen downstairs the dishes from last night’s meal were still in the sink. She stared at their soggy innards before plunging her hands into the now cold water and pulling the plug. Don’t think she hadn’t noticed his eyes looking at those dishes when she had just left them last night. If he could have put his plastered arm into the sink and done them himself he would have. The problem with Antonio was he’d mistaken her for some sort of domestic woman from the very beginning. Not such a hard thing for him to imagine – he had watched her for two years working in the industrial kitchen of the Villawood Migrant Hostel before he got up the nerve to ask her out.
But Antonio hadn’t looked at what she was doing closely enough. Rose was never afraid to lift heavy pots, chop pounds and pounds of vegetables, to stand in the summer’s heat under corrugated iron, in front of a stove. What she never liked was the cleaning, the feel of her arms reaching down into sinks full of murky water littered with the remnants of food, or kneeling on cold, tiled floors, scrubbing; the smell of harsh chemicals and the carbolic and bleach forever stuck to her skin.
When she’d been over the sink, up to her elbows in suds, she had often thought of her mother. Her mother had believed in very little other than that the Japanese were going to invade during the war, and that one’s home should always be clean and sanitary. Her mother hadn’t loved people so much as she kept them clean, which to her had probably been a kind of love in itself. Perhaps that’s why Rose’s father had left them. She didn’t blame him and her mother didn’t seem to care anyway – she just opened up her doors and turned the terrace they were renting into a boarding house for all those men, shattered and needing a cheap bed after the war. Together, they’d cleaned up after them. If she could go back in time she’d ask both her parents if it was worth it, up-ending their lives from one slum town in England for another slum town in Australia, but her mother was gone and she’d never found out what happened to her father.
So, because Rose loved Antonio, she cleaned for him.
In a few hours she’d have this place clean, full of food and full of guests. She knew Antonio didn’t want the retirement party, that he had in fact been forced into retirement, though he had never actually admitted that in front of her. But she also knew the party was a good thing. It always made him a stronger man, being the centre of attention.
She polished the wood on the kitchen table and laid out bowls of olives and nuts and glasses for the wine and beer. She was cutting cucumber sandwiches into small slivers when Francis entered the kitchen in his boxer shorts, his naked chest so broad at the top that he blocked the kitchen doorway. She watched him looking at the plastic-wrapped dishes of food laid out on the kitchen counter, surveying the card tables folded and leaning up against the kitchen wall, ready to be laid out in the lounge room; she watched as he put these things together in his mind and remembered what was happening today.
‘Welcome!’ she said, turning to him with a knife in one hand, a mitt in the other, her blond hair wrapped up in a scarf to keep it from getting dirty. Sometimes when she looked at her children like this, she got a glimpse of what she must look like to them. To Francis she must look like a housewife in a 1950s movie.
‘Ohhh…too loud this early in the morning.’
‘It’s twelve.’
Francis turned and removed the milk from the fridge and the Weet-Bix and sugar from the cupboard before sitting down on the bench stool in front of her, where he ate and grunted and watched her work.
‘I’ll need your help today. I need you to take around plates and fill up peoples’ glasses.’
‘Yep. Done.’
Antonio had slipped into the back garden. She could see him from the kitchen window pruning tomato vines with his one good hand. It had always been the place where he was most calm, pruning, picking. She never talked to him when he was in that space. She imagined, in his head, he was probably somewhere in the past. When she turned back to Francis he was gone, as always. The only evidence of his having been there was a half-eaten bowl of Weet-Bix.
At four the bell rang. Rose went to the door to answer it. Clare stood there looking fresh and confident in a red dress and brown suede shoes. She cut her hair in a bob these days, just like Rose did, with blond highlights in front. At these times Rose was so glad that Clare had gotten over trying to prove some point at university by having dirty dreadlocked hair and baggy shirts with no bra.
‘Hi,’ she said walking into the room and hanging her cardigan over a chair. ‘What can I help you with?’ This was Clare, always ready to go, mind on the task ahead.
‘Well there’s the quiches on the counter in the kitchen, they need to be put in the oven and there’s some more beer in the garage that needs to be brought in.’
‘Where’s Francis?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Honestly,’ Clare said, and Rose wondered if she’d ever get a child of her own to fuss over the way she fussed over Francis. Under her arm Clare carried a large rectangular object wrapped in gold paper. Another book, Rose supposed. Clare was always bringing books that no one ever read into the house. Clare left the package on the bench, rolled her sleeves up and headed straight out to the garage.
It had been Rose’s idea to have the retirement party. She wanted Antonio to be surrounded with men who spoke loudly and freely, filling the air with themselves. She wanted to bring Antonio out of himself again, to watch him become animated, to watch him talking football and construction and the future.
When she was shopping for the party she had run into Nico’s widow, Mona. She used to have a huge, curly head of hair. Now that she’d cut it short there was a fierceness in her face that hadn’t been there before. Mona didn’t look at her anymore. Not directly, not since the funeral. Rose had tried calling her several times, had left messages that weren’t returned. The wife of another builder had called her back eventually and told Rose that Mona couldn’t handle talking to her, couldn’t handle anyone else’s guilt about what had happened, didn’t want to feel like she had to make anyone else feel alright again.
It wasn’t alright, Mona wanted that specific message to be passed on, it wasn’t alright and there was nothing that Rose or the CFMEU or the guys from workers’ comp or any of those people who came around with flowers or endless trays of food could do about it. Rose and Mona had raised their children together, at all those union family days and barbeques. They’d cried together when their eldest daughters had moved out of home and made jokes about Nico growing fat in his old age and now she’d lost both of them.
Rose had looked through the window at the local hairdressers and seen Mona there. Rose had watched her staring blankly at the mirror in front of her while the woman cut her hair. Mona’s disappointment and rage seemed to seep out from her skin so that even a few feet away Rose could feel it. Rose wanted to go up and touch her, to say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry all the time.
But she didn’t.