But he was already back and driving. He stopped off Glenferrie Road at a house with a modern extension in the front. Darcy’s mother parked the Austin behind a station wagon and they watched him carry four cartons up the drive. Then she picked her teeth nervously with paper she’d folded into an edge.
If he’s leaving he’d take more than eggs, said Darcy.
I’m going in, his mother said.
She disappeared up the drive and Darcy decided he should follow in case she got into trouble. But in the street he felt embarrassed, fourteen in his flannel pyjamas, his bare feet in the rain, tender on the gravel. He spied his mother at a window, around the side past a garden of collapsing wet lilies, and he wondered if she’d been there before. She stood on a fruit box and motioned for Darcy as though she were watching a cat having kittens. But it was cold without his shoes on. She stepped down when Darcy got there, sat on a bench by a small pond and lit a cigarette.
Darcy stood on the box like she had, looked in between the orange pots and leafy hydrangeas. His father sitting at a table drinking tea with a woman, his legs crossed to the side. He looked handsomer than usual, the woman smiling, a clasp in her brown-grey hair, her eyes on Darcy’s father. A ray of light appeared through a skylight above them, from a sky that seemed full of clouds. A house so clean it made Darcy’s house seem dirty, the kitchen big as their living room. The egg cartons there on the bench, the teapot had a green cover.
Darcy’s mother threw a small rock and Darcy turned. She pulled her coat around her, motioned him away with a flick of her head. Enough, she whispered, the weight already in her face. She dropped all her cigarettes in the woman’s fishpond and smiled sadly to herself.
Darcy’s feet were freezing as they walked back down the drive to the street. His mother pulled out her lipstick and wrote on the window of the kombi: Careful Daddy. Letters that looked like a child’s.
What do you reckon? she asked.
Darcy didn’t tell her he thought his father had looked happy. He drove home in his bare feet and she smoked her Virginia Slims. You’re old enough to smoke on weekends, she said. He could hear from her voice she was crying. He didn’t mention he’d been smoking since he was twelve, she never noticed him gone, riding his bike down the street where Benton lived, just to be near him, or to Fin’s dorm, returning to the gully. When the Austin overheated Darcy didn’t stop; his mother put an apple core in front of the temperature gauge.
At home they left the Austin steaming. His mother closed the curtains and went to bed. Darcy sat in his damp pyjamas on the wattle branch that ran along the edge of the single garden bed. He reached down and pulled out a capeweed. The soil smelled stale and sweet from the compost and chicken manure his father brought home. He knew in spring the capeweed would have a bright yellow flower like a daisy. He wondered who decided which were the flowers and which were the weeds, who decided whether his father would come home.
Then he heard the burr of the kombi and wasn’t sure he was pleased. His father pulled in and parked under the trees, a red smudge on the window where the lipstick had been smeared. He leaned on the steering wheel for a moment before he got out, looking more spent than usual, then walked over and sat on the branch with Darcy, the sleeve of his shirt stained from where he’d wiped the glass. His good blue Arrow shirt. What did you get up to today? he asked.
Driving, said Darcy. He leaned over and yanked out another weed, shook dirt from the roots. I followed you. He didn’t look over at his father. I saw you with the lady in the kitchen off Glenferrie Road.
Where was your mother?
She never got out of bed, said Darcy, but it was harder to lie when his father didn’t believe him. And now there weren’t enough secrets to keep things together.
His father looked over towards the house, the drapes drawn shut, clasped his knotty fingers. You’re as stubborn as her, he said. He brushed at the smudges on his sleeve, kept watching the house as if it held an answer. Everything looked smaller than it used to, the dark brown weatherboard and green canvas awnings. The incinerator smouldering with the wet leaves from yesterday and the faint smell of smoke; the fresh innards of a cantaloupe and eggshells on the compost.
What’s her name? asked Darcy.
Ranita, his father said.
Darcy leaned down and touched the grass, felt it damp against his fingers. Does she have a husband?
She used to, he said.
Darcy thought how easy it was for people to leave each other. The way Fin had gone, Benton dumping him without saying anything. Darcy stood and brushed the seat of his pyjama pants, took the capeweed and replanted it, pushed at the soil with his fist. She looked like she was from somewhere else, he said.
She’s Israeli, his father said. From Tel Aviv. Her name means joy.
Darcy somehow doubted that; he’d never met an Israeli. Will you become Jewish? he asked.
I don’t expect so, his father said, but as Darcy looked over at the lines in his father’s weathered cheeks, he sensed this answer as a confirmation. His father would be disappearing soon.
They turned as Darcy’s mother opened the curtains, the wooden rings scraping along the rod. She looked out into the distance as if the two of them weren’t there.
Don’t leave me alone with her, said Darcy.
Boyarski Prospekt
Thursday night
The wind whipped off the snow and bit Darcy’s face as he got out of the taxi. He covered his mouth with his cold gloved hand and looked about. The banya seemed innocuous enough, even though the windows were cemented up, but no one entered or left, just hurried by in the dark with their heads down. It was nine forty-five, he was early, alone in Aurelio’s coat in the gaze of a thousand frosted windows over Lermontov Square, a towering ministry skyscraper lit with a galaxy of eyes. Lost in thought on the couch, he’d noticed an envelope under the door. It had his name, not Fin’s, pencilled on it, a note that read Meet me tonight at 10 pm. Banya opposing the metro at Lermontovskay. Look forward on Boyarski Prospekt. Your passport is with me. Your friend always, Aurelio.
Darcy braced himself and slipped between parked cars towards the scraped iron door. He knew a banya was a bathhouse. A ticket out or a ticket in deeper, he wasn’t yet sure, but Fin had left him little choice. He opened the door.
Inside, a taste of sulfur settled on his tongue as he gazed at an old Tartar woman in the vestibule, her hair pinned up like a second set of ears. There was no caviar or salmon, no crowd to surprise him in the blue mosaic entry hall, to tell him it was all an intricate joke, life hadn’t turned on him really. There was just a bluestone floor and steam wafting through walls where algaed tiles had fallen. No Aurelio.
The woman searched Darcy’s face as if she’d seen pretty boys here before and knew they were trouble. As he gave her a handful of kopeks she gestured warily to a stack of grey towels in a basket, to a locker room where the bench was covered in Astroturf. A row of pigeonholes and an elderly comrade wrestling with the elastic in his underpants. He cast covert glances as Darcy pulled off his boots and socks. The floor scunge was familiar from afternoons spent in public showers. He should have been comfortable here, but naked in the towel he felt a sickening uncertainty. Gingerly, he pushed open the steamroom door.
A young boy threw a bucket of water on a barrel of piled rocks and a wave of steam billowed. A plump-bellied Russian appeared through the vapours, his backside on the concrete; he was scrubbing the back of someone in front of him, leaning as if sanding furniture. For a moment Darcy thought it was too hot to stay; he shielded his eyes, beads of hot sweat coursed down his brow, salty and burning, scalding water dripped from the ceiling. There was still no Aurelio, no men on all fours being lashed with bunches of wet juniper leaves. Instead, apparatchiks with paunches lay about on raised concrete benches like beached seals. They noticed him but barely.