I distinctly remembered that when Rebecca and I first began our relationship we were possessed by the need to maintain spotlessness in our dealings with one another. As soon as a smear or mark appeared we cleaned it up, and although it was usually clear which one of us had, by error or accident, put it there, there was no sequel of recrimination or blame, merely the mutual desire to reinstate order. We were like two people running their separate businesses out of shared premises. I don’t know precisely when this decorous era ended, but by a certain point our modest, hopeful square footage had been abandoned for a different, more sprawling joint enterprise. I remembered that when Hamish was a very small baby Rebecca became distraught with him one afternoon, actually angry, and I was surprised that after six weeks she thought she knew him well enough to carry on like that. It suggested to me that her good conduct at the same stage in our own relationship was the result of a great and uncharacteristic exercise of self-restraint, an exercise that could be considered somewhat fraudulent, given that as far as I knew it was repeated nowhere else in her history. Rick and Ali were always pleased to fill me in on the parts of that history that predated my arrival. It sometimes occurred to me that Rebecca had seen in me the possibility for reform, if not outright escape from herself; that she saw me as some new, prosperous, unhistoried country, like Australia, to which she could emigrate and forget her problems. She discussed those problems with me, which mainly had to do with her childhood and her family, and owing to my inability to solve them, or perhaps merely to hear and respond to them correctly I soon superseded them and became the problem myself; leaving her, I suppose, with strong but muddled feelings of what appeared to be homesickness for the original problems, compounded by the sense that in allying herself with me she had effected some sort of betrayal of the things she loved. The real problem, in the end, seemed to be that I wasn’t related to her. If I had been her cousin, or even some old family friend, she would not have suffered so from divided loyalties, nor found herself to be carrying the disease of my difference from her, my innate hostility to the organism that was her life. That was as close as I could come to solving the problem — or rather diagnosing it, for there was of course no actual cure for this particular difficulty.
‘Where have you been?’ I said. I said it with lively curiosity rather than accusatory grimness, but there was only so much camouflage the words themselves would accept.
‘At mum and dad’s,’ she replied, somewhat stonily. She didn’t say anything else. Again I had the sense of two unambiguous meanings combined to make a force of highly systematised confusion. This time it appeared to me as the coloured tubes of copper filament, one live, one neutral, that lie side by side in the white plastic vein of an electric flex. Either she had gone to her parents as a place of refuge from me; or she had gone there and been made unhappy by them. Or both: her refusal to elaborate left the question charged.
‘Did they give you something to eat?’ I said.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘They were just in a complete state.’
‘What about?’
There was a second of tinny silence.
‘Mum found a lump on her breast. Or rather, dad found it, as he kept telling everyone. I’m sure it’ll turn out to be nothing.’
‘When was this?’
There was another pause. I heard Rebecca take a drink of something and swallow.
‘This morning. They went down to the hospital and had some tests done on it.’
‘When will they get the results?’
‘I don’t know. A few days, I think. I’m sure it will be nothing.’
‘I’m really sorry,’ I said.
‘I’m sure it will be nothing,’ said Rebecca again. ‘Anyway, they’ve gone completely wild over it. They’ve really gone for the amateur dramatics. There’s no, you know, let’s wait and see what the test says. Dad won’t let her out of his sight — he even followed her to the toilet and stood there talking to her through the door. They sat there all evening holding hands as though mum had just been told she’d got a week to live. What’s really annoying,’ she continued, ‘is that dad’s already wanting to scale things down at the gallery so that he can look after her. He’s even saying he wants to cancel Niven’s show.’
‘That’s a shame,’ I said.
‘I told him, you know, wait until we’ve actually got a diagnosis before you start cancelling things! Whatever happened to, you know, positive visualisation?’
‘I’m sure it won’t come to that.’
‘Oh, they’re still in the dramatic phase, you know, big statements, big gestures, the whole roadshow. But that’s exactly when they can decide to make an example of someone. It’s right when they’re in the middle of an emotional trip that they suddenly need something to bite on, you know, just to show that they’re not all talk. What I hate,’ she continued, ‘is the fact that they think their world is more real than anyone else’s. I know we all think that in a way, but with them it’s all about other people. It’s in being witnessed that their life becomes real for them. Have you ever noticed,’ she said, ‘how they’re always losing friends and making new ones? Everywhere they go they find more people. You turn your back for a second and they’ve collared someone else and started telling them about their sex life. Then when they’ve done that they tell them about your sex life. Then eventually everyone gets into the habit of this frankness thing and they all start to behave badly, and then they fall out. People like that shouldn’t have children. All they want children for is so that they can have more material, more life, more things to talk about, more actors in their pathetic domestic drama —’
‘I think you’re being a little hard on them.’
‘It’s no wonder that none of us have had children of our own,’ said Rebecca. ‘We know what they’ll be made into — victims, food for the predators!’
‘Except you, of course,’ I said.
‘What’s that?’
‘You. You’ve had a child.’
Rebecca gave a strange little laugh.
‘I was thinking about something else,’ she said vaguely. ‘Anyway, they’re sort of down on Niven at the moment.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, something to do with dad giving him money to get something for him and him not getting it and not giving dad the money back. It was grass, I bet. They make a big point of never mentioning drugs in front of me. They think it atones for something.’
I said nothing. I steadily extended my silence forwards like a hydraulic arm with which I intended to push Rebecca over the precipice of enquiry.
‘How are you, anyway?’ she finally said.
Now that she’d asked, I found that I didn’t want to tell her anything about myself. I found myself thinking about Ali’s lump, identifying with it almost, with the lump itself. Wrongly, I suppose, I attributed to it qualities of vulnerability that I felt myself in that moment to share. I realised presently that it was the prospect of its excision that caused me to feel this.
‘I miss you,’ said Rebecca.
Still I did not speak. A little surge of adrenalin caused my heart to thump. This did not signify excitement exactly, more a feeling of fear. I did not in that instant make a native connection between Rebecca’s missing me and the possibility of mercy or benevolence or love. It seemed, rather, to hint at the possibility of violence.
‘Though I think it’s good,’ she continued, ‘for us to be apart.’