‘Mum,’ said Cara.
‘Yes,’ said Rachel, without opening her eyes.
‘Mum.’
Rachel propped herself on her elbows, glorious in green, almost naked. Marcus disentangled himself from Danny and went to join the other children, who watched from the rim of the garden with shut faces.
The man stepped forward. His shadow fell across Rachel’s legs and she moved them.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ he said, but this seemed not to have been the way he wanted to begin, and he shook his head a little, as if clearing it. ‘Greg Armstrong,’ he said. ‘And this is Jonathan.’
‘Johnno,’ said the boy.
Cara felt that more might be required. ‘Danny’s — you know — Johnno,’ she said.
Johnno wiped his feet on the lawn and Rachel’s head fell back as if in exhaustion. Her narrow neck seemed to spring out sunless from the grass.
‘Adam’s not here,’ she said.
‘I’ve come for my daughter,’ said the man, his hands spread like a salesman. He looked at Danny and said, ‘Danny,’ and she kicked at the grass with one foot and didn’t raise her eyes. ‘Danielle,’ he said. His voice was louder this time.
Rachel sighed and turned onto her stomach. Cara thought for a moment she might undo her bikini top and make them all endure her loose white breasts.
The man now gave off a beleaguered air. He was winding himself into complaint. He was lost in the garden, and frightened of Rachel; he might be the kind who felt most aggrieved when outmatched. Possibly he loved Danny and would be persistent in that love, although he had done something to make her leave home.
‘Danny, come on now,’ he said. ‘You don’t belong here.’
Danny moved closer to Rachel, as if for safety, and Cara saw that this was wise. Probably there was no safety at all in the garden, but if there were any, it would come from Rachel; she was its only possible source. In order to win, the man must make himself calm and purposeful, show no fear of Rachel’s nakedness, take his daughter and run from the garden. Cara wanted to push him in the small of his back. She wanted to counsel him. She wanted to help Johnno too, because she liked the way the holes in his earlobes meant she could see through them to the other side.
But now Rachel was moving. She was pulling the kimono up from the grass. This seemed to give Danny courage. ‘I’m staying here, Dad,’ she said. ‘With Adam.’
‘Adam!’ said the man. He spat it — Adam. Cara had never heard an ‘Adam’ like this. She stepped away from the man to further study his face, but it was hidden by beard and age and seemed ordinary enough, just a father’s face. He wore pale jeans, loose at the knee, belted, with a tucked-in short-sleeved shirt. His back pocket bulged with wallet. He was the father of brown Adam, who went down the front path with his coins ringing loose. The man’s ordinariness now seemed a great failure.
‘I’ve had just about enough of this,’ said Adam’s father.
Rachel stood, wrapped in red.
‘This is my house,’ she said, with her most precise smile.
‘No one’s denying that.’
‘And Danny is welcome here.’
‘She belongs with her family.’
‘Adam is her family,’ said Rachel, so reasonably, thought Cara, with such settled purpose in her pale face. She wasn’t arguing with the man, didn’t care if he spoke again; she had made her decision and would now enforce it.
‘Get the children inside,’ said Rachel to Cara. Cara didn’t move, but the children, even Cassidy, went into the house, where they let out a shout or two, and one high-pitched whistle.
‘Danny,’ said Rachel, and held out her hand. Danny took it.
‘She’s eight months pregnant,’ said the man.
‘Exactly,’ said Rachel. She moved over the grass in her gold sandals, taking Danny with her. They were going to the house — inside — they were going to disappear inside the house, and Cara would go with them and leave the man and Johnno in the garden to huff and puff. But Johnno, with his tattoos and freckles, looked as if he would cry.
‘You stupid bloody selfish child,’ said the man, and Cara checked to see who he might be talking to. But he was looking at the sky, in the direction of the church’s cross. It was hard to see in the daytime, but at night it lit up in neon blue. Cara drew a line between the top of the cross and Adam’s father’s face.
‘Do you have any idea what you’re doing to your mother?’ he said. ‘Tell her, Johnno.’
Johnno folded his arms over the top of his head. His body was inclined almost tidally toward the house. ‘Sorry,’ he said, and ran over the grass to Danny, who accepted him: she pressed her face, briefly, into his shoulder. Rachel opened the door to admit Danny and Johnno, and finally she turned to Cara. Cara stood too long, not moving, and Rachel closed the door.
The man dropped his head as Cara approached.
‘She can sleep in my room,’ she said.
The man swayed a little.
‘And she won’t like it here,’ Cara said. ‘She won’t want to stay. Come around the side way.’
She led him past the faint blue penis and into the front garden. He knocked on one of the windows with his fist as he passed, but nothing happened.
‘It’s her funeral,’ he said into his beard.
‘She won’t want to stay once she’s had the baby.’
‘The baby,’ said the man — he spat it, the way he had Adam.
‘And she’s got Adam here.’
This made the man laugh. ‘You know, he just went out one night. He said to his mother, “See you tomorrow.” Next thing we know he’s in Sydney. Not a word to us. Never came back.’
Cara nodded. She watched as the man got into a small grey car with awkward movements, as if he were dismantling himself in order to fit, and she watched as he drove away. Then she walked to the front door, rang the bell, and waited to be let in.
* * *
Adam wasn’t home by dinnertime. He had never been gone this long before. Cara changed the sheets on her bed and took her school uniform and pyjamas out into the lounge room. She heated up meat pies and Johnno helped her by mashing potato. He was a serious boy who hardly spoke. He was the kind of boy who might go from door to door asking if he could clean people’s gutters or mow their lawns, and when they said no he would thank them and walk away with his hands in his pockets. Rachel ate in her room, watching television. The children were in love with Danny, but she was less attentive to them now. She watched Johnno and held onto her belly. He liked to pull at her earlobes as he walked past her, and they went to bed early.
Cara had homework to do. She sat at the kitchen table while the children watched something on the lounge-room TV. Sunday nights always felt this way: subdued, companionless. But this evening was worse, with Adam gone all day. Nobody spoke to Rachel when she came out of her room. She went into the bathroom, ran a bath, and stayed there so long the children had to use the toilet in the laundry before they went to bed. Cara read in her history textbook about a foolish English king. She thought she heard Adam return, but it was someone else opening doors and walking the wooden floors of the house. Probably Rachel, finally finished in the bath.
Cara realised she had left her toothbrush in her bedroom. She kept it there because if left in the bathroom someone else would use it. She knocked quietly on the door, and when there was no answer, stepped with care into the room. Danny and Johnno were asleep on Cara’s bed. Johnno was bent around Danny’s belly with an arm under hers as if it might be the only thing keeping him from rolling off. The bed had never been so full. The quilts twisted at their feet. They were close to naked: Johnno wore underpants, and Danny wore a long thin singlet that rose above her bump. They were both asleep with their mouths open, with formless faces and loose hands, so pink in the blue streetlight, so bundled, that Cara was embarrassed for them, but also fascinated by the ease of their limbs, by the damp fan of Danny’s hair across the boy’s shoulder, by all the ways their soft, sweet bodies rose and fell and fitted together. It was as if a curtain had been pulled away, some heavy velvet churchy curtain, and behind it were these two humans, who suddenly seemed so young to Cara — younger than she was, children really, sleeping around the child they had made. The curtain should be allowed to fall again. Cara looked and breathed and felt that she knew nothing at all about love, or fright, or whatever it was that held them there, tangled on the bed; she was meek and deferential before them, and aware for the first time of the shapelessness of her longing, how wide and open it was, how enormous in her body and in the world.