•
Marianne woke just after four, the bedroom in darkness, Rick snoring softly beside her. She couldn’t recall a dream, there was dryness in her throat. She carefully slid out of bed. Rick turned over, called out for her, and she whispered to him to go back to sleep. She pulled on a T-shirt and walked out into the kitchen. Let it go, she kept whispering to herself, let it go. But she couldn’t. The dirty word kept repeating itself in her head. Mong. Mong. Mong. Wog. Maco. Nigger, slope, bitch and cunt and slut and fag and poofter and dyke. She did not trust their ease with words that hurt so much. She refused to believe that they had been exorcised of their venom and their cruelty. She squinted, tried to make out the hands of the clock. It was four-twenty. She switched on the light and put on the coffee.
•
She got to the gym just as the morning staff were switching on the computers. She spent forty minutes on the treadmill, running on an incline at a tremendous speed. She did fifteen minutes of weights, swam twenty-five laps. Exhausted, she drove home and showered. She woke Rick and called out to Jack to get up. She dressed for work, brewed another coffee and, while Rick was dressing and Jack was showering, she went into her son’s room and looked around. The photos of Beyoncé and Gwen Stefani, of Harry Kewell and Ronaldo, tacked on the walls, the poster from True Blood, the shelf of soccer and swimming trophies, his books on a pile by his bed, his laptop on the desk, his clothes strewn across the floor. She quickly snatched up his soccer shirt, his socks, his track pants, lifted the lid off the cane basket, tossed the clothes inside. But not before she noticed the handkerchief rolled into a ball at the bottom of the basket. She jumped when Jack entered the room, a towel around his waist. The hairs around his belly button tracking down beneath the towel were wiry, thick and black. There was a sprout of thin curls around his nipples. When had they appeared?
Her son tightened the towel around himself. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I think it’s about time you did your own laundry.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I was not put on this earth to be your slave.’
‘No, but you are my mother.’
He thought he’d won, she could see a half-smile flicker across his face. She could smell the cologne he’d splashed on his face, under his arms, a cheap birthday present from Rick’s mum and dad. All-chemical imitation of spice. You’re so full of it, you think you’re God’s gift. It delighted her that the odour was so awful, that it revealed his ignorance, showed that he knew shit.
‘I’m not washing your clothes anymore.’
‘Oh, piss off.’
‘And that includes your handkerchiefs.’ Her eyes dared his. ‘I don’t want to touch them.’
That wiped the smile off his face; he dropped his gaze. For a moment she thought he might cry. And then he sneered and she flinched, as though he was about to strike her. ‘Get the fuck out of my room!’
She knew her son, she knew his fears, his shames, his strength. She had received a warning. She knew she had hurt him. She had hurt him more than if she had raised a hand to him. She was in a daze as she walked down the corridor. My God, she thought, a coldness settling in her, do I hate him?
•
At work she could forget. She joked with Aliyah and Siobhan, listened to Darren boasting about the woman from Jet Start Travel he had picked up at the pub on Sunday night, smiled at Aliyah making faces at her behind his back. It felt so good to laugh. She went to visit agencies in Elwood, Sandringham and Elsternwick. She had lunch on her own by the beach at Elwood, and took off her shoes and stockings and paddled in the freezing shallow waters of the bay. When Kalinda and Jack were babies, they had taken them down to this beach, stood with them as they fearfully entered the water, squealing at the cold, their eyes growing enormous with astonishment at the roll and pull of the waves around their little feet. Rick had never been a swimmer and it was she who had first taught them to swim. She’d been awed by their trust in her when they had first battled with the power of the sea — she had held them, released them, held them and released them, till they understood they could master the waves, the rolling of the sea currents, till they were able to laugh and relax and enjoy the water.
She loved Elwood Beach. On achingly hot Melbourne summer days, the whole esplanade would be filled with families from across the world: Greeks and Italians with baskets of food; Muslim families, the women in their heavy dresses and their veils, hoisting their skirts above their knees like strange black birds at the water’s edge; Tongans and Vietnamese, Turks and alabaster-white families like her own caking on layers and layers of sunscreen to protect themselves from the unforgiving glare of the Australian sun. Her kids had played in the water, in between the wading Muslim women and the beautiful young gay men cruising each other as they tanned on the beach. Holding them, releasing them, wanting them to be free and good in this world. Mong, mong, mong. Wog, Maco, poofter, nigger, faggot.
She met up with Joyce from Tourism Tasmania for an afternoon coffee in Richmond and they gossiped about the weekend trade show. Joyce worked with a man as conceited and deluded as Darren was. He too had boasted about picking up some bright young travel agent at the drinks session at the end of the trade show. I mean, do they honestly think we believe them? Joyce giggled incredulously over her coffee. Don’t they ever look in the mirror? They talked about work, then the conversation moved on to their husbands and then their sons. Marianne said nothing to Joyce about the word that had made her so contemptuous of Jack or about how she had humiliated him that morning. She listened as Joyce rolled out her usual complaints about her own son, how lazy Ben was, how absent-minded and forgetful. But there was no harshness in the complaints, no bile. Her love tore the sting from her words.
Marianne returned to the office though there was no reason to. She didn’t want to go home. She deliberately left at the hour the traffic would be at its worst, drove twice around the block to finish listening to an interview on ABC radio with the minister for transport justifying the terrible performance of the state’s public transport system. Round and round the blocks of her suburb: past young men with their ties loosened, swinging their backpacks as they trudged up the hill from the railway station, groups of Indian students waiting at the bus stops, the drinkers and the smokers crowding the café tables on the footpath of High Street. The sun had set by the time she got home.
Rick had phoned earlier in the day to tell her that he was going to be late, and there was a message from Kalinda saying she was coming over for lunch on Sunday. Marianne slipped off her work blouse and skirt, stretched out on the bed. She thought she might sleep but the silence of the house was too intense, created its own din. She turned onto her side, rolled her hands across the fleshy padding of her belly, looked across to Rick’s bedside table, at his jug of water, the clock radio, the book on the history of the Ottoman Empire that he had been reading for months. What if he didn’t come home? What if there had been an accident? She gave herself over to the shameful release of imagining the funeral, the never-ever again of having to explain herself, the run of an empty house. She reached for the table next to his side of the bed, touched wood, mouthed Rick’s name and lightly sketched a cross on the naked skin above her breasts.