Early Sunday evening. The neighbourhood smelled of meat roasting over coal barbeques. Rose was standing in the back of Lucy’s garden at the far left edge of the yard near where Lucy had, years ago, built a discreet gate into the fence between their houses and Antonio had, after much debate, agreed to let it stay there.
Rose watched as Lucy painted the guttering of her house in a pale blue. She had watched Lucy build her place for years, watched it grow slowly from one room to five, watched its colour palette expand from white to include the creams and blues she used now. Lucy was the only woman Rose had ever known who never got married, who used a tool-belt, who just was who she was.
Blue. Cream. White. Lucy had gotten better at things over the years. Flecks of colour no longer ended up in the blades of grass on her lawn. Antonio could no longer find as many reasons to be critical.
Rose looked at Lucy and thought that in some other life she would like to be her, or at least to inhabit her skin for a little while. They had been at some point like half-lovers, the way that women can be when they are young. They had lived together way back when they both started working at the hostel.
For two years then, they’d shared a one-bedroom flat in a brown-brick rectangle of an apartment block behind the hostel. The walls had been white, they’d had a Bunsen burner, a kettle, a couple of mattresses and chairs, Rose’s prized poster of Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. They used to go to the dance halls in Fairfield on Saturday nights and they’d hung out with Lucy’s relatives at the Polish Club on Sunday afternoons. There’d been no place in the world more exciting than where they were.
Back then, Rose went shopping and ate dinner and gossiped and did everything with Lucy while she waited for a blinding and furious kind of love to arrive, like women always had in movies. She hadn’t met Antonio by accident: she’d moved all the way to the outskirts of the city so that she could be found like Cary Grant found Audrey Hepburn in Charade.
The first time she met Antonio he was standing out in the yard of the hostel.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked.
Rose had watched him hold words in his mouth until he let them come out fully formed. She’d liked the sweet formality of his speech. At first she’d thought he was one of those men that meant nothing by their talk but later she’d understood that he was reserved, that living in hard places had taught him to hold things back.
But now, she watched as Lucy climbed halfway down the ladder and paused to look up at her work from another angle. After all these years, Lucy still had hair the colour of butter, still wore it in a ponytail drawn tightly at the back of her head. She wore a loose collared blouse over grey slacks and petite brown loafers. Next to her, the house looked enormous.
When she got to the bottom of the ladder she turned around and looked at Rose as if she’d expected to see her standing there all along. She gave Rose the kind of weak smile you give another person when someone they know has died, and then said, ‘Right, come in.’
Rose followed her through the back door and into the kitchen where Lucy went through the same motions she always did. She got the black tray from the side of the fridge, filled a pot with tea and placed several biscuits onto a plate. Then they walked in silence from the kitchen to the front living room. Lucy still had that newspaper article sitting framed by the front door. She had pointed out the child she once was to Rose, but Rose couldn’t remember her amongst those masses of children smiling and waving from the deck of the ship. What a different person Lucy might have been back then, when she was a nervous child in a new country, a resident of Villawood Migrant Hostel herself long before she had worked there.
They sat out on the plastic chairs on the small verandah where they could watch the main street. This was how it went. They needed to talk, but talking always happened outside of houses. They sipped their tea, waited, watched those women with the knee-length skirts and the handkerchiefs on their heads walk their children down to worship at the empty house down the street.
‘He’s gone,’ Rose said, and Lucy nodded her head, shrugged her shoulders, took another sip of tea. Her gestures said this was expected.
On the street, a grown man rode a child’s BMX past them. He looked enormous and awkward on such a small thing. His bony legs extended like chicken wings with the meat eaten off on either side. Lucy looked at the man on the bike like he might have an answer and said, ‘Do you think there’s something else wrong with him? You know, like, more wrong than his usual wrong?’
Lucy had never hidden the fact that she thought Antonio was slightly unhinged. It had never bothered Rose that Lucy thought this way. It just made Antonio more attractive to her. It gave him a bit more of an edge. But the kind of edge it gave him wasn’t nearly as attractive in his older age. Not when you were looking forward to things finally becoming slower. Now it just made him surly and pensive the way he resisted going softly, giving in to age.
‘I don’t know. Retirement? It’s that thing that men go through, you know, when they don’t feel useful anymore.’
‘Hmmm…’ Lucy tapped her nail against the edge of her teacup and nodded. ‘But what about you? No good for you, him taking off in the middle of the night.’
Truth was, Rose still wasn’t so sure where he was, but she was sure he wouldn’t be that far away. These days, he just orbited the neighbourhood, he was out driving the streets or walking around the shops, or he was at one of the clubs or the library. He never invited her.
‘But what am I supposed to do?’ This was the question that no one seemed able to answer for her.
‘Talk to him.’ Lucy said it like it was that simple and then looked out to the street where the lights had just gone on and shrugged her shoulders at no one. Talk. They both knew Antonio wasn’t that sort of man. It was probably why Lucy and he had never gotten along very well. They both were who they were, and there was no talking them out of it.
‘Or you could move in with me.’
Rose had already done that a few times over the years. It always felt like going backwards. She looked away from the street and back into Lucy’s house through her front window to where the television she had left on silent was beginning to throw a weak coloured light against the lounge room walls. In the corner of the room Lucy’s image of the Black Madonna hung there staring at the television set. As soon as Rose forgot that Lucy had come from some different country, there it was again, same as the one that hung in the hall at the Polish Club where they had danced all those years before.
‘Look, look,’ she heard Lucy say, quietly, almost in a whisper. When Rose turned her head back to the street, there he was, Antonio, on the other side, walking slowly, leaning his good arm on his cane and pausing every once in a while to look off down the street. He didn’t look their way, not even for a minute.
Rose watched him walk in a diagonal across the street and to their house next door, watched him search his pockets for the key, same way he’d done for the last thirty years. He finally found it and opened the door.
Lucy and Rose just sat there on those plastic chairs until the sun had set, until the neighbourhood had settled itself for the night. Across the road, the red glow of lanterns came from everywhere and nowhere. The sky was almost full up with moon. This time of year the nights were meant to be getting shorter, but it felt like the nights out here got longer all the time.
‘I suppose I should go home.’ It wasn’t clear if Rose was asking a question or making a statement.
‘Up to you,’ Lucy pulled her legs up onto her chair, wrapped her arms around her knees. ‘I’m going to go inside though, make some dinner, you’re welcome to join.’
Really, Rose didn’t want to do anything. Mostly, she’d just like to sit there and not have to make any decisions about anything ever again.
‘No I suppose I should go home.’
Lucy got up, walked herself back into the house and Rose followed her through to the back garden. It was something of an unspoken habit that they both always entered and exited each other’s houses through the gate in the backyard. Lucy, with one hand on Rose’s back, opened the gate for her. ‘You know where I am,’ she said, and kissed Rose on the cheek before Rose walked through, silent and alone.
In her own backyard Rose looked at the house she had known for such a long time and thought that it looked unfamiliar. The back porch light she always kept on was off. The blue light that seeped out between the small cracks of the venetian blinds said that he was watching television.
There was the smell of overripe tomatoes in the garden. The watermelon vines were wrapping themselves around the lettuces and choking them to death. When the heat came there would be too many flies.
When she entered through the back door he was sitting on the recliner. The back of his head just slightly above the top of the chair, his left arm hung over the side, he held a bottle of beer loosely by the neck. Rose announced her presence by letting the screen door slam shut.
He turned around as she came towards him, gave her a half smile, nodded his head.
‘Where’ve you been?’ he said, as though she were the one who was prone to wandering, as if they would have connected more lately if it weren’t for their busy schedules.