When that’s all the time you have left, he can’t see any reason not to bend the rules.
CHAPTER THREE
I pull up the driveway. A dozen or so of the paving stones wobble beneath the weight of the car, stones I wanted to cement back into place but never got around to doing so. I come to a stop in front of a garage with freshly painted black doors and shiny new handles. The house is fawn with black trim and a black concrete tile roof. I painted it. The garden is full of small shrubs surrounded by dark brown bark. I helped plant them. There are a few weatherboards at the bottom of the house that have rotted more since I last saw them. I never got around to replacing them. I wonder who will do it.
I kill the engine and sit with my hands on the wheel and tell myself I’ve done the wrong thing by coming here, and I agree with myself too, but that doesn’t make me start the car up and back out onto the street. I should. I should back out and never come back. Catch a plane somewhere. Things might look different from a pilot’s point of view. None of my problems would fade as we climbed toward the sun, but they wouldn’t get any worse. Most bad decisions you don’t know are bad until you look back at them, but occasionally you know it when it’s happening-and last night and today have been full of exactly those.
Staying is wrong. Leaving is right.
I stay.
I get out of the car. I walk toward the front door. I feel like I’m not really here, that this is all part of the same dream I’ve been having all day. I reach out and trail my hands along the weatherboards of Jo’s house. The wood is hard and smooth. It’s real. It’s no dream. When I reach the door I suck in a few breaths and bite down on my lip and give myself a last chance to leave, but don’t take it. I knock. My hand doesn’t pass through the wood. I don’t wake up.
Jo comes to the door. She has a smile that disappears when she sees me, and I feel an immediate sense of shame and rejection. She lets one arm fall to her side; the other she keeps up high on the side of the door frame blocking my entry. Her greeting toward me doesn’t include the word hello. She has this look on her face that suggests she has just eaten a bad piece of chicken. I can smell freshly brewed coffee.
“Hey, Jo, can I come in?”
“Oh my God, Charlie, what happened to you?”
“I need to talk to you.” She looks me over, studies the wounds on my face. The last time she saw me I also had wounds on my face. I guess I’m a wounds-on-face kind of guy. “Are you alone?”
“Have you been in a fight? You’re still hitting people, huh?”
Hitting people is why we broke up. Maybe I’m a hitting-people kind of guy too. “Please, I just need to talk to you. Are you alone or not? Can I come in?”
“I don’t know, Charlie. I don’t. . I don’t really want you here, not looking like that.”
“Come on, Jo, it’s important.”
She takes a few seconds to weigh up just how important it could be, then decides it’s important enough. She steps aside. “Come in.”
When I’m in she closes the door and leans against it as if to block my exit. Jo’s a few centimeters shorter than me, a couple of years younger, but twice as mature. She has hazel eyes, soft until she frowns at me, which she’s currently doing. The tanned skin of her face is sprinkled with light freckles. Her hair has been cut, stopping just above her shoulders. Her body is toned and athletic from her visits to the gym. She looks better than the last time I saw her, six months ago.
“So no How are you doing, Jo? or You look nice, Jo, or I’ve been missing you?”
“I didn’t think you’d want to hear it.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Look, I’m sorry about what happened.”
“I know,” she says. “You said that six months ago.”
“And I’m still sorry. I didn’t mean to. . you know. . it just happened. But you look good. I like the new haircut.”
“I haven’t had a new haircut, Charlie. So let me guess why you’re here. You have a new girlfriend and got jealous and decided to try and beat up the next guy who looked at her wrong.”
“Come on, Jo, it wasn’t like that with us. You know that,” I tell her.
“That’s exactly what it was like.”
“Bullshit. That guy at the bar was out of line,” I tell her. “He got what he deserved. You should be thanking me.”
“And I would have thanked you if you’d just gotten me out of there. But you had to make a point,” she says. “You could have been arrested. Or worse. You could have been seriously hurt.”
“He touched you,” I tell her. “Guys can’t just go into bars and touch whoever the hell they want.”
“I get that, Charlie, I told you that. But what you did-that scared me. You just kept hitting him over and over until I managed to pull you off. There’s something inside you that scares me,” she says.
“Ah, come on, Jo, don’t say that.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“At least it probably stopped him from doing it again.”
“And that’s your job now, is it? To go around teaching people a lesson?”
I knew this was going to be the kind of reception I was going to get from Jo. Six months ago everything had changed. It was a night out for dinner. Date night. When you’re married or have been with the same person more than a few years, then date nights become few and far between as life and work get in the way. We had Thai. Then we went to a bar for a few drinks. I had a gin and tonic. Jo had the same. There was a rugby game on TV and a bunch of people were caught up in it, getting loud, and when you get loud bunches of people watching their team lose, you’re always going to find the occasional asshole or two. In this case that asshole put his hand up Jo’s dress as she was coming out of the bathroom and he was going in. She shoved him away and he called her a bitch. I didn’t see it happen, but she told me. I’d never hit anybody in my life, but I hit him. I marched into that bathroom and Jo came with me, not to help me, but to stop me. I walked up behind him to bang his head into the wall, but he sensed me coming. He turned, pissing all over himself and over my feet, and took a swing at me. He got me in the cheek and split my lip open. His next punch got me in the chest. I stumbled back, and he came forward and slipped over in his own piss. Then I leaned down and hit him. The problem, as far as Jo sees it, is I kept on hitting him. One punch, I was defending her honor. Two punches was teaching him a lesson. But it turns out a dozen punches is ten too many. She had to pull me off him. We got out of there before anybody else came into the bathroom. We got out of the bar and nobody stopped us. We got back to our house and she didn’t say a word on the way home. We sat and waited for the police to arrive, only they didn’t. The assault didn’t even make the news. The following day she asked me to move out. The person I’d shown her the night before wasn’t somebody she wanted to spend her life with. It wasn’t somebody she wanted to help bring up the children we used to talk about having. I’m pretty sure the person I was last night isn’t somebody she’d want to spend her life with either.
“I’m in serious trouble,” I tell her.
“If it’s serious, go to the police.”
“I can’t.”