Distractions (18 page)

TWENTY-FOUR

Emma hugged herself as the cooler breezes picked up and blew harder. She could see the rain coming. The grey sheet covering her view down the coast broadened very quickly, obscuring the headland then the beach. The drops were large and well spaced at first. They dropped down on her heavily, splashing on her face, on her legs, hitting the top of her head. A white flash quickened her senses even further and the bang that followed was so loud and sharp that she jumped in fright.

She backed up to the door and felt Sally’s arms envelop her. She welcomed the human contact,
rubbing her friend’s hands as they watched the rain come down in sheets.

Then flash! Bang! Each jumped again at the sound. The storm was right above them. The temperature had dropped ten degrees in two minutes, or so it seemed. The rain was pouring down in great big drops, creating a near constant flow. Sally let Emma go and slid the glass doors across so that they almost met, but still giving Emma enough room to stand. Water had been splashing on the floorboards.

Emma threw down a towel at the gap to soak up a puddle. She stood on the towel in bare feet, feeling the water squish between her toes, while watching the outdoor chairs moving across the balcony. The wind was a ferocious force blowing the rain across and sometimes up. The balcony windows were supposed to be protected by a slight over-hang from the balconies above, but the rain was swirling under this and streaming down the glass panes.

Emma saw the beauty and wonder of the storm. She felt exhilarated and opened the door just enough to squeeze through. She stood shivering in the deluge when Sally returned from trying, unsuccessfully, to close a little window above her
loo. Sally was about to speak, to call Emma in from the rain, but thought better of doing so. Surely Emma knew that she’d be wet through, that she might catch a cold.

Sally stood at the barely open doors, the rain speckling her skin rather than the floor. She too had been affected by the storm. She felt a certain excitement, which had no other cause but the violence of nature. The thunder pealed above them but the lightning was already more diffuse, far less startling, and preceded the crash by thirty seconds or more.

Sally’s maternal instincts went further than her concern to see Emma out of the rain. She worried about the boys on the highway. They must have passed through this on their way back to Sydney, she concluded. She went over to her mobile and sent a text message to both of them. Mark texted back:
All good. Already home
. David made no reply. She stood with her phone in her hand, staring at the brightly lit screen. Waiting.

Emma startled her. ‘Can you pass me that towel?’ she asked from the door. Emma was annoyed that she felt she couldn’t strip down naked in front of Sally. Little shifts in relationships can have immediate consequences in behaviour.
She no longer felt as free with Sally as she had before the boys had arrived. Her annoyance was with herself though. She wanted to stand nude in the rain and felt she couldn’t.

Sally walked slowly over to a towel that had been left on the back of a couch. She picked it up and, still apprehensive for not having received a reply from David, walked back to Emma.

Frustrated at her friend’s irritating sloth-like pace, Emma snatched it from her.

Sally’s phone buzzed.

Emma had begun towelling herself down. She was feeling increasingly crotchety. The thunderstorm had screamed at her. She hated feeling rebuked. She’d stood in the rain, the weather buffeting her body, in the hope of some reconciliation. But none came.

‘David is home safely,’ said Sally.

‘That car of his wouldn’t let him crash if he wanted it to,’ said Emma, casually, while wiping the rain from her legs. She almost added, ‘The car is smarter than he is,’ but she didn’t truly believe it. This response highlighted for her just how stupid her anger had made her. She asked instead, ‘Did you text him?’

‘I messaged both of them. They both made it,’
said Sally, still staring at the bright little screen of her phone. It read:
You’re lovely. Thank you for asking. Yes, I am home safely
.

Sally re-read the message and could not decide whether the words invited a reply or not. How was she to interpret
You’re lovely
? She knew how she
wanted
to interpret those two simple words. All of the fun they had had together that weekend was neatly edited and packaged in a sweet montage that played on a loop across her mind. Emma had been edited out, just as Stalin had edited Trotsky out of all the photos of Lenin.

Sally felt silly at her inability to make a decision. What would she write? She laughed inwardly at her crush. For that’s all it was, she told herself, a crush. She liked David, found his attention flattering … What a liar! Even she couldn’t carry on this wilful self-delusion. She truly believed that some mistake had been made. David was too good a man for Emma.

Sally believed she knew Emma so well. She would think about Emma in solitude, for she would never discuss her with anyone, how could she? Their lives were entwined. Emma had never been able to shift Sally’s moral centre. Whenever the two had shared some wonderful moment, Sally
was being naughty to do so, while Emma was just being herself. Other people’s sense of naughtiness excited Emma, true, but she rarely felt
she
was being naughty. The supreme egotist or the first honest individual?

Sally hadn’t understood this. Sally always believed Emma judged life by the same moral code. Years of these experiences had led Sally’s sexual life into perversion. Guilt and orgasm, shame and touch, crime and punishment till bad became her only true good. Being bad made her feel more than any sanctioned sexual behaviour.

Sally stood with the phone in her hand trying to push aside what was, for her, the obvious truth. She wanted to have David because she would derive so much pleasure from deceiving Emma and taking what she should not. (Emma would see it as Sally wanting David, who was a million times more valuable than her current lover.) Sally pushed it aside because to her this was an ugly motive, which in essence it was. She was right to admonish herself.

Emma had dried herself down. She now wanted a warm shower. The violence of the storm had subsided but the volume of water falling heavily from the dark grey sky seemed only to increase.
The wind had died and the rain looked like it was there to stay.

‘Look at all that water,’ said Emma, interrupting Sally’s reverie.

‘What?’

‘The rain.’

‘Yes … Shall we watch a movie?’ asked Sally.

For two days the rain came down. Emma read large indulgent chunks of her novel while Sally went stir-crazy. Emma’s foul mood lifted. Cups of tea were drunk, toast was eaten, Emma wrote an essay and a short story.

Sally had nothing to do. No further correspondence was shared with David so she retreated to the old patterns of behaviour with her husband. The hour-long nightly calls continued. These were the only break in Sally’s monotonous days.

On Tuesday night Sally snapped. She had only come away for Emma. Now she had no reason to be there. Her life in Mosman was going on without her at the helm. She was missing regular hair, nail and beautician appointments, and her weekly yoga classes. She hadn’t been to the gym at all. All of the lunches she’d missed and the last-minute
stops for coffee, and the accidental meetings with friends that always led to further engagements. Emma had never embraced the life Sally loved to live, so she didn’t understand the sacrifices Sally had made for her friend.

Sally decided they were going back the next day.

Wednesday morning was one of the finest and warmest days they had yet experienced on their little holiday. Emma was for staying but Sally had decided to go. She had packed her bags the night before and had made Emma vacuum every room. The house was cleaned and tidied and looked perfect. They were going.

Emma checked Sally’s face as they drove down the highway. She was thinking about the week they’d spent together, wondering at the variety of emotions this beach break had thrown up. She could hardly remember the way she had felt on Thursday night. They had been lovers, hadn’t they? Before the boys had come up she had truly expected that a new phase of her relationship with Sally had begun. Hadn’t it begun?

But now there was not the slightest hint from either of them that there had been any shared intimacy the previous week. Emma was less saddened
by this than amazed. Another source of amazement was she had begun to miss David again. How could it be? Was this what love was, a perpetual renewal?

All of these details occupied her for the hour-long trip home. Barely a word was spoken between the two women. Though there was nothing uncomfortable in this. The silence was more akin to the silence brought about by exhaustion.

As they entered suburbia, leaving the highway behind, and winding their way through Wahroonga, Pymble, Gordon and Lindfield, Emma’s thoughts left Sally and the beach house, and returned to her husband and home. No matter how she thought of herself, no matter how free she seemed, she too lived in a house on a street lined with other houses and represented just another part of the great whole that is suburbia. She was fortunate to live by the harbour but this did not make her life any more meaningful, did it? Her first impulse was to say I am not part of this. But she knew that in time a baby would come. She felt a powerful pull towards David, there was no denying it. She had the house, the diamond and gold rings, a husband, neighbours – her life had already begun to resemble everyone else’s. Soon
she would be woken every morning at five and spend her days knee-deep in baby shit.

She recalled a joke Paul had told her. What is the difference between a battery hen and a suburbanite? A battery hen’s life is not pointless. It was a sad kind of joke, she thought, it cut too deep. Her life
would
have a point. She knew her purpose in life was to find meaning in life. If needs be, to create it. She’d write novels, or plays, or screenplays. She’d do something creative. She would never voice this plan to anyone. Not to David or Sally, not to Paul or her parents, she was well aware her goal was a long, long way off. She wanted time to digest life and her reading. She wanted a firm voice, like those writers in days now long passed. She had no desire to be hurried by the expectations of her friends and family.

By the time she reached her home she was feeling feisty and excited again. She kissed Sally on the cheek, thanked her for the time they had shared, lifted her bag from the boot and strode up the stairs to her front door.

David was taken completely by surprise by Emma’s return. He had come home later than usual, having taken up a colleague’s offer for a quiet drink at the pub. He wasn’t late, he wasn’t
drunk, he had done nothing since returning to be ashamed of, and yet when he saw the front door open and Emma standing framed by it, his heart skipped a beat, like the villain who turns a corner and walks into the arms of a policeman.

He stopped and stood on the steps. He looked up at her. She was smiling at him and appeared to be in good spirits.

‘I love you,’ she said, enunciating clearly for there to be no mistake.

‘Do you really?’ he asked.

‘Truly,’ she replied.

‘I love you,’ he said, and hurried up the last few steps into her arms.

TWENTY-FIVE

And then everything seemed to snap back into the shape it was before. It was as though the threesome had never been attempted, as though she had never slept with Sally, as though she had never seduced their neighbour’s son. Emma was back at the computer writing essays. Life was normal again. David couldn’t keep his hands off her. Sally bugged her about not making the yoga classes they’d both signed up for. Jason mowed his father’s front lawn with barely a glance at Emma’s house.

But a silence had fallen over Emma and David. The house seemed too big, the nights too long. To
fill the silence the two had sex. More sex than they had had at any other time in their year-long marriage. The grinding physical fucking wore them out, helped them to sleep, and silenced dissent.

But Emma knew it was symptomatic of their failure to talk, to broach the subject at hand. She was a glutton so she welcomed the sex, but she thought little of their orgiastic excesses. She was fucking David, but he might have been anyone, so little presence did he have. He was not at home.

And for once in her life, Emma had no idea what to do.