34

The alarm goes off way too early.

We happen to be facing each other and we make eye contact.

Hi, she says.

Hi.

In case you’re wondering, a nine o’clock meeting is out of the question.

Yeah. It’d be funny though. The two of us looking as though we’d both had three hours sleep after telling them at five-thirty that we wouldn’t go out to dinner because of your headache.

Yeah. Very funny. I’ve got an idea. How about you call Shelton’s—someone’s bound to be there even though it’s really early—you call them and tell them my headache was a migraine, and it got worse and I have to sleep now. And can we have the meeting this afternoon. Then call and re-organise our flight home. Later I’ll make whatever calls I have to to handle the child-care issue. Dan has to be picked up by five-thirty.

So I sit by the bed, still naked, talking to someone who went in to work early to call New York. I think I can tell from the tone in his voice that he’s wearing a dark suit, though he may have taken off the jacket. I hope he can’t tell that I am sitting wearing only guilt and bodily fluids (particularly when the bodily fluids are a mixture of mine and my manager’s).

Changing the airline booking is easy. They can think what they like.

Then I lie down, and Hillary curls subconsciously back against me and I sleep.

She wakes me late morning.

We should eat.

She orders breakfast.

This is when we realise that we are naked and in the same room. That this is more than simply horribly incongruous, and that it really doesn’t matter whether or not it’s fine by the person who brings the breakfast.

We should get dressed, she says. We should have a shower. There is a pause. Showers. I should have a shower, and then you should have a shower. That’s what I meant.

She goes into the bathroom and leaves me sitting on the messy bed, facing a chair that has my today clothes thrown over it, looking like yesterday’s.

When she comes out she’s wearing a towel and the fact that she’s covered at all makes my nakedness feel very inappropriate.

I take my clothes into the bathroom and I shower using the one-use-only bottles of hotel shampoo and conditioner, and I shave with the hotel disposable razor. Today, I do cut myself shaving. I’m never good with new razors.

When I go back into the room Hillary is fully dressed and breakfast is on the table. She’s looking unsettled.

I just called Peter’s parents, she says. I told them I’d had a migraine. They said they’d love to pick up Dan from child care, so that’s all sorted out.

Good.

So come on, eat.

I sit down and face the unfamiliar choice of fruit, toast and cereal.

Wow, real breakfast.

What do you mean?

I tell her a bit about my diet.

Doesn’t that make you incredibly constipated?

Sure. I kind of hoped the popcorn maker would turn it around, but, you know, you’ve practically got to be in the mood to cook when you make popcorn, if you want it to have any kind of flavour. You’ve got to have a bowl and a utensil and butter and seasoning. It’s not as easy as you think. I tend to like the basics.

Like biscuits and chips and soft drink.

Flavoured mineral water. And you think this is why I’ve been a bit on the difficult side, down there?

Yeah. You should think about fibre.

So I eat the fruit, and the cereal, and begin my new plan to threaten my sluggish bowel with fibre.

We try to tidy the room, but there are signs of last night that won’t go away. The bed will tell no lies for us when we are gone.

You know, I say to her, they’ll probably think you had a wild night, and next door I slept so soundly I didn’t even crease the sheets.

I doubt it. I can already hear the sound of two and two being put together.

Only in this room, okay? Only hotel staff and only in this room. Whatever else happens is up to us. So stop staring at the wet patch as though your life’s about to end.

And the last thing we do before leaving the room is stop so I can take over from her unsteady fumbling hands and fasten her pearls.

She waits in the corridor while I put my shoes and socks on next door, in a room that smells as sterile as when we arrived.

And when we’re in the meeting it’s as though it never happened. A few polite queries about her migraine, and everything else seems totally normal. I’m watching her perform, effectively, confidently, and my mind’s only on last night. People are sitting round the table making notes, thinking up questions, and I have to be ready for them.

Hillary’s talking about how we might follow this up, the mechanisms we might set in place, who should be involved. She arranges for a group of business people from Singapore due in Sydney next week to visit us in Brisbane on the way. I’m beginning to realise I have more work to do.

She’s tense in the cab on the way to the airport. I tell her she looks tense.

It’s just the flying.

By the time we get to the airport she’s worse.

You’re quite small and about to become very crazy, I tell her. I think I’m going to have to kill you and take you as baggage.

Then I remember some tablets for jet lag left in my toilet bag since I last went overseas with Anna. I think they have some relaxant quality. And I figure my toilet bag might as well be of some use this trip, since I don’t think I’ve opened it yet.

I give Hillary the bottle and she looks at the label.

These things hardly touch me.

She takes three, washed down with a few mouthfuls of bourbon.

Don’t do the bourbon thing again, I say to her, detecting an unattractive nagging tone in my voice.

She just glares at me and sits sipping bourbon until we’re called to the plane. I have to help her out of the seat, and by the time we’re down the walkway, down the aisle and I’m buckling her in, she’s forgotten there’s a plane involved at all. By take off she seems to have passed out. So this time I have no need to speak of Bolivia and small vegetables.

It still surprises me how much I care for her as she lies unconscious next to me, her head rocking against my shoulder with the slightest of turbulence, saliva dribbling from the corner of her mouth and onto my sleeve.

I take a Who Weekly from the flight attendant. Helena’s back with Michael. Shoshanna’s back with Jerry. Clearly in this business windows of opportunity don’t stay open long. And somehow, despite the heroic pointlessness of the notion of Celebrity Partnering, this makes me feel even more crappy. Back when Jeff and I came up with the idea, there was a certain purity to my crappiness. Now I feel an overwhelming sense of seediness. Really crappy, really empty. I can’t believe what I’ve done.

Hillary is still almost unrousable in the cab, so when we get to my place I can see nothing else to do but to lift her out, load her into my car and drive her home. I can’t send her off with the cabbie with her address pinned to her jacket like some smashed Paddington Bear.

We drive through the post-peak hour traffic and she sits slumped and with her head to one side, her mouth open and snoring. All the time I’m hoping no-one will be home, and then I’m wondering what to do. Put her to bed and leave a note beside her? Dear Peter, don’t be concerned. Nothing of any consequence happened in Sydney. Your wife is only this way due to drug ingestion.

Whether he’s home or not, I don’t expect this to be easy.

No-one’s home.

I drag Hillary and her baggage up the driveway. She manages to tell me, Purse, purse, when I shout Key. So I lift her up over my shoulder and I begin going through her purse. Thinking of the contents of women’s purses (and wondering why the fuck the keys have to be the last things you find) it occurs to me that last night’s sex could hardly be called safe. Not that I think she’s a risk, and I’m sure I’m not (unless you really can get it from toilet seats or drinking out of the same glass), but I realise it needs to be addressed. Or rather, should have been at the time. I think we both thought it wasn’t really happening.

Just as I’m shaking her up and down on my shoulder and rifling through her bag and shouting various things about safe sex, a car pulls up in the driveway.

A man, a man I have met once before and know to be Peter, gets out and lifts a baby from the back.

Shit, bad migraine, he says.

Yeah. I think it’s the medication too. And the flying problem.

She told me she was over that.

Not really.

Is she all right?

Yeah, she’s fine.

He notices then that he’s standing with his baby over his left shoulder and I’m standing with his wife over mine.

Looks like mine’s lighter than yours, he says, and smiles. Do you mind bringing her in, since I’ve got Dan already?

He leads me down a hallway and into their bedroom. This is far too weird.

I put her down on the bed and he kneels beside her, stroking her cheek and saying, Hill, Hill.

Safe? Safe? she says. Of course it was fucking safe.

She begins to open her eyes, sits up suddenly opening them wide and looking around. She looks like she’s about to scream. Her face makes all the right movements but is then overcome by sluggishness. She gives in to the unmanageable weight of her eyelids and her head flops back onto the pillow.

The plane, I say. I think she was very concerned about the safety of the plane.

Oh, always. I’ve no idea where that comes from.

She’s been saying very strange things since she took the flight sickness medication. I don’t know who gave it to her. But she’s been speaking an amazing amount of rubbish, really.

Well, I’ll have to ignore everything she says till she sleeps it off.

While this has all the potential content of a veiled threat, I don’t think the notion of threat has occurred to him. He’s just giving me a cue to go.

To go and leave them here, this happy, mysterious family. To get back in my car, for the first time in two days responsible for only one person’s seat belt. I turn the radio up and I sing along as I drive back across town. To eat, play tennis. Just like normal, but all the way hoping they don’t play Nick Cave, ‘The Ship Song’.