The applause that followed him back to his seat was warm and generous. Anna’s claps were the last to die out. Saverio looked over at Julian, who was walking onto the dais. Thank you, the younger man mouthed. It was Julian who spoke at the end, and he spoke simply about love. There were no hymns, there was no religion, no prayers. The service finished with Lou Reed’s voice singing ‘Perfect Day’.
•
Rachel was waiting for him at the airport and as she folded him into her arms he submitted to the sweet calmness of their life together.
At home, as he unpacked, she sat on their bed, took Leo’s painting of their kids and scrutinised it closely. ‘I always liked this painting.’
She took it and walked out of their bedroom.
He followed her into the lounge room where she held up the canvas against a stretch of blank wall above the stereo.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘I think it will be perfect here.’
Sticks, Stones
MARIANNE HAD WORKED ALL WEEKEND AT a trade fair in town. She’d risen just after dawn on Saturday morning, and detoured to collect Darren and Aliyah on the way so they could help her set up the stall at the exhibition hall and make sure that their brand-new cyan and white T-shirts with the dark blue company logo had been delivered and were available to give out to any potential clients. As usual Darren had left the women to set up and staff the stand and had spent both days ‘networking’, slipping out for beers with Arnie from Northern Territory Travel, Marty from Travelworld, and whoever else he could find to ensure he spent as little time as possible actually working. It had been exhausting but Marianne enjoyed the fair, chatting with colleagues, catching up on gossip, making contacts. Her effusiveness, her straight-talking honesty, had as always made her popular. Unlike Darren, she never pretended to be able to offer more than was possible. Aliyah found it hard to step out from behind the table; her attempts to overcome her timidity made her voice sound shrill and unconfident. On the Sunday, Siobhan, the head of sales and their immediate manager, had come to see them. Darren had butted in immediately to tell her about the deals he had nearly struck, the contracts just about to be signed. Siobhan had smiled politely and told the three of them they could take the Monday off. Then she had whispered to Marianne, ‘You can take off the Tuesday as well; just keep your phone on, okay?’
Marianne had smiled to herself. Siobhan could tell a bullshitter.
•
Now it was Tuesday afternoon and Marianne experienced a frisson of guilt over how much she had enjoyed her time off. All Monday she had worked in the garden, pruning the apricot tree, weeding, spreading compost on the vegetable patch to prepare the soil for its slow-brewing hibernation and regeneration. She had put on and hung out two loads of washing, and on Tuesday morning had woken up just before six to take a long walk down to Darebin Creek along the path that ran by the back of the high school, and finished off with a coffee at Carmen’s. She was back in time to wake Jack for school and to make another coffee for herself and Rick before he headed off to work.
He had looked at her with a bemused grin when she brought in his work shirts off the line and piled them on the redwood dining table. ‘You going to iron my shirts?’
‘Mm-hm.’
He pulled her close to him and kissed her. ‘But it isn’t my b-b-b-b-b-birthday.’
She flicked her finger at the snub of his nose, made a face. ‘Just this once, boyo.’ She stretched, arched her back. ‘But I am enjoying being a lady of leisure. I think I might quit my job.’ The quick flush of panic that crossed his face made her collapse into laughter.
He began laughing as well and slid up behind her, placing his large long-fingered hands across her shoulder, his left hand slipping underneath her gardening shirt, under her bra strap, his thumb lightly brushing her nipple. ‘Maybe I should take the day off as well.’
‘Mmm.’ Please don’t, she thought, I want another day just to myself. They heard Jack slam the bathroom door and Rick jumped back and sat down again to finish his coffee.
‘Mum, I can’t find my laptop.’
She winked at her husband and called out to the hallway, ‘It’s in the lounge where you left it last night.’
‘Thanks, Mum.’
No, she thought wickedly to herself, thank you.
•
She liked working, appreciated her job and the freedom it gave her. Most days she was on the road, visiting clients, travel agencies and tourist bureaus; once a month she would fly to Adelaide to take agents on a tour of the South Australian wine districts or beaches. She hadn’t worked for five years while Jack and her daughter, Kalinda, were preschoolers; by the end she was bored and unhappy. It had been just before Jack started at primary school that she’d mutinously informed Rick she was not ever going to iron his shirts again. More than any other of the myriad household chores, it was the ironing she had focused on to distil her rage. Rick hadn’t put up a fight, an anticlimax that had annoyed her no end. It had been the worst period of their marriage — they had just taken out the mortgage on that first house in Watsonia, Kalinda had been diagnosed with dyslexia, and Jack, not adjusting to kindergarten, was still wetting the bed. Her life seemed a constant cycle of washing, cleaning, drying tears, intervening in squabbles, driving, driving, driving. She had come to hate the family car, the smell of it, the metallic trace of Kalinda’s vomit that they could never seem to wash out of the back seat, the stereo trapped forever on Classic Hits FM. There had been three months back then when she would wake up every night from a nightmare in which Australian Crawl’s ‘The Boys Light Up’ seemed to be playing endlessly on an infernal loop.
It was Rick who had suggested that she go back to study, and it had been great advice. In the short term, the two evenings a week at college had seemed only to add to her exhaustion, but she had completed a diploma in tourism in three years and by the time Kalinda had started high school she was working full-time for Harvey World Travel. She and Rick could now joke about her aversion to ironing; for the last few years Rick would bounce out of bed on his birthday and announce, taking off Cartman from South Park, ‘It’s my b-b-b-b-b-b-birthday, you have to iron my shirts.’
She didn’t want to retire, didn’t even want to think about it, but these days she appreciated the rhythms and meditative pace of housework, the pleasure that came from cooking and organising the running of a home. She and her girlfriends would chuckle and complain about the laziness and unreconstructed apathy of their suburban husbands, but she was always a little annoyed when Rick wanted to cook or thought it a good idea to reorganise the lounge or bedroom. No, damn you, she would think, that’s my terrain. She went to the gym twice a week, had recently joined a Pilates class. Housework was part of her relaxation. It had ceased to be a job long ago.
She had baked an upside-down pear and caramel cake, washed the dishes, scrubbed the stove top, got rid of the out-of-date bottles gone grey at the back of the pantry, when she glanced at the clock and realised it was time to pick up the boys for soccer. Her hair, unwashed, silver at the roots, was a mess. She quickly stripped off her gardening shirt, put on a blouse, tied a scarf around her head and ran out to the car. She knew the boys would be waiting for her outside the school gates, checking the time on their phones. As she waited at the lights, she texted her son a quick message, keeping her eyes out for the police. The woman in the four-wheel drive in the next lane beeped her horn at her and Marianne threw her a tight grimace. Come on, lady, you’ve got kids, you know what it’s like. The lights went green, she pressed send and took off.