Going back to the city. Clare was relieved by the prospect of a journey that would probably take her close to an hour and a half in the middle of the day on a Sunday. She’d gone to the party. She’d fulfilled her duty. She’d stayed up until the late hours with her mother cleaning up after Francis had gone out with Jesús and her dad had disappeared. Her mother didn’t say anything about what had occurred. Her mother was like that. Pretend it didn’t happen and it would go away.
It’s not that she didn’t love her family, it’s just that she didn’t care for the drama of them very much. She was sure that other families didn’t feel the way that hers did – all that pent up frustration sitting heavy between the walls until it broke out at the moment you had the least emotional energy for it. She wanted to get back to the city. She sat on the bench at Parramatta Station. The train was at least ten or fifteen minutes away. Teenagers threw hot chips onto the railroad tracks. A young mother in an oversized puff jacket pushed her child in a stroller. Clare was tired. It was the sort of day when she would spend the whole afternoon in some kind of internal fog.
On the train she picked a seat close to the window. She was ready to sit and watch places shift by through the glass. She was ready for some quiet space but she only got it until the first stop. At Granville, Paul came down the stairs into her cabin. She looked at him and looked away but he’d already seen her seeing him. There was that awkward moment when he floated around in the aisle near her seat as if he was waiting for permission before sitting down. And then, that was it. She was stuck.
Clare didn’t know where to look so she looked out the window. Still, she could feel his presence there beside her, the heat off his skin. He smelled like bread and butter pudding. She watched the industrial estates of Clyde as they appeared and disappeared through the train window. She picked at the dirt underneath her thumbnail. She noticed he was doing the same. He was the first one to speak.
‘So, did you have a nice weekend?’
It took her too long to answer his question but eventually she got there. ‘Yeah, just family stuff you know. My dad had a retirement party. Everyone was there. Kind of got out of hand.’
She looked out to the huge rectangles of lawns in the backyards of houses somewhere near Auburn. She liked these glimpses into the private lives of others; a man smoked, staring out at the sky, a woman hung her lingerie, a kid rode in circles on his tricycle, a horse – there was always a random horse hanging around unnoticed in someone’s backyard in these neighbourhoods. And what else? Brick ovens for bread-making that reminded her of crematoriums, small alleyways between houses you could only see from the train.
‘You on your way to work or you going home?’ Paul asked. He sat back in his chair, cracked his knuckles. There was an easiness to him, he had a more comfortable way of being in the world than she had originally thought. She had a tendency to get so uptight about things sometimes, she had to remind herself that it was a feeling beneath her own skin. It wasn’t shared by everyone else in her proximity.
She realised she had forgotten to keep the conversation going. She should have asked a question in response to his question. This is the way that conversation worked. She knew that, but she frequently forgot. Outside the sky was overcast. Perhaps it would rain soon.
‘Sundays are my day off. I think I’ll go do some shopping, walk home from Central.’
The truth is she imagined she just wanted to wander around the streets for a while to shake the Parramatta off her. Maybe she would see a movie on Oxford Street and buy salty liquorice to eat alone in the dark, or beg one of her teacher friends to come and have a beer with her in the afternoon.
Clare remembered she was meant to ask a question. ‘Are you rostered on today?’
Paul flicked the hair out of his face by jerking his head back slightly. Up close his skin was more uneven, there was the slight scarring of acne on his cheekbones.
‘No. Just going in to meet some friends.’
She noticed for the first time that he was carrying an enormous backpack like the Year Sevens she used to teach would, bags so full they were bigger than the kids carrying them. He reached into the top of his backpack and pulled out a plastic bag full of the flat bacon-and-cheese pizza rolls you buy at bakeries.
‘Want one?’ He put the bag down on her lap and opened the top, grabbing one for himself and leaving the rest there. They sat awkwardly on her lap feeling damp and warm against her skirt and inched slowly forward towards the seat in front. It was exactly what she wanted in her semi-hungover fog. She took one and put the bag between them. Strathfield slid past the window.
The pizza roll was just as good as it looked. ‘Thanks.’
‘Welcome,’ he said biting into one of his own, ‘I made them this morning.’
‘You made them? You make your own bread?’
‘You don’t remember. When I was in school I used to bring you stuff from my parents’ shop in Granville. I brought you Vietnamese breakfast from their shop, hot sugared dough sticks, you remember? In the mornings. You said it was the best thing you’d ever had. I thought you would remember.’
The train stalled at Redfern. He searched her face with the one eye that wasn’t covered in hair. ‘Yeah,’ she was starting to realise now why she looked at him and always thought – bread. ‘I do remember now. Sorry it’s just that those first few years of teaching, you know, they’re kind of a blur.’
‘Yeah. I know. You couldn’t really cope.’
Clare wasn’t expecting that. He was right, but it was still unnerving to be handed such a declaration so quietly and without malice, just like that, a clear statement of fact that was so true but so unsaid before that she felt like he had just taken her clothes off. She looked away from him. The remnants of the pizza roll were still in her hand. She shoved a too-large chunk of it into her mouth to stop whatever words might come out without her thinking.
The train pulled up at Central. It was her stop. She gathered her purse and her overnight bag up close to her chest and stood. Paul got up too, moved out into the aisle and paused a moment before walking to the front of the carriage and out through the door in front of her.
Outside it had started to storm and although there weren’t so many people on the platform everyone was crowded close together in the middle to avoid the rain that was now beginning to bypass the roof and come in horizontally from the sides. Paul stood next to Clare, not moving, with his giant backpack hiked up high on his back.
‘Was it that obvious?’ She needed to know.
‘To me it was.’