The Near Miss (11 page)

‘Watching the game Saturday night?' In Tom's recent visits the two men had discovered a shared love of rugby union, which could divert the conversation from unwelcome topics. They could talk about the new team lineup, and who was favoured to win the Bledisloe Cup, and then they could slide into the past, to great moments like Stirling Mortlock's legendary try of the England Australia World Cup of 2002, when the great man streaked up the field and did the impossible. Not unlike Melody's magical rescue of all those months ago, he sometimes reflected.

‘If I can get out to a pub.'

Eddy mused. ‘Maybe I should just bite the bullet and get pay TV.' Romy had been opposed to it, seen it as fodder for bogans, but hey. She had not been seen for three months, except in the media wearing a cat mask. If that counted.

‘Yeah. I'd come watch it.'

‘How's the job going?'

‘Great,' said Tom. ‘I work with morons. I do moronic work. I get paid my super by morons. I catch the train in and out, with—' A man nearby glared and Tom lowered his voice. ‘It was a mistake to let myself get sucked back into it. I'm really getting somewhere with the solar roof. But I need time to iron out the glitches. I just wish Grace would be a little more supportive.'

Eddy nodded. He had heard the story before. It looked to him like Tom had it all whatever he did; lovely wife, sweet child, house, maybe even another little baby along the way one day. ‘Bummer,' he offered.

‘My mate, who's been working on his tree-lopping robot for ten years, he got a huge contract yesterday. Eleven point five million dollars.' Tom stared at Eddy, who blinked.

‘Really?'

Tom nodded. ‘Max doesn't have a family. So he's been able to get it over the line. Bastard. While I have to go be a wage slave.'

‘But it's been Grace who's been the wage slave, hasn't it?'

Tom shrugged and leaned towards the taller man, helped by the swaying of the train as it journeyed through the inner suburbs. ‘Anyway, guess what? I've written my letter of resignation. I left it on the boss's desk tonight. They'll try and make me stay. Throw more money at me. But I won't take it. I'll tell Grace tonight. She'll
have
to give me another year.'

‘You've resigned? Without telling Grace?'

‘Yup.' The train stopped and people poured out. Tom and Eddy sat down, freed now to peer out the windows at the spread of suburbia, the far-off Macedon Ranges, the city skyline in the other direction growing larger.

‘Well, that will surprise her.' Someone's phone was ringing. People started patting their
pockets.

‘Sometimes you've got to do these things. Fortune favours the bold, and all that. Put the bit between your teeth and—. Hang on, is that my phone? Ooh, bet it's my boss. Here we go! Game on! Hello? Tom Ellison, here . . .Oh, it's you.'

From Tom's disappointed tone, Eddy guessed it was Grace. Tom peered unseeingly out the window while his phone chattered away tinnily at him. Grace was in full flight about something, and Tom companionably rolled his eyes at Eddy and momentarily held the phone away from his ear, in the universal signal of mad spouse, before resuming the conversation.

‘She finished her what? Oh, she's such a cow . . . Oh I don't know how you put up with her . . . And then what did you say?'

His eyes widened and his voice turned to ice.

‘Sorry, did you say . . . Gosh I thought you said
redundant
then!' He laughed breathlessly. ‘Redundant . . . You
did
say redundant? Oh Jesus. Are you serious?'

More squeaking. Two commuters sitting in his sightlines edged away from him.

‘Oh shit, Grace. That's terrible . . . No, it's terrible. More terrible than you can imagine . . . My job . . . lucky we've got . . . Ah yes. Lucky we've got my job. I heard you that time. Sorry, you're cutting out now . . . tunnel . . . breaking up . . .'

A long silence, and then the angry chirping on the phone broke out anew and reached a crescendo of noise. Tom lowered the phone, grimaced at it and then very carefully, with the precision of a surgeon, used the tip of his forefinger to touch the hang-up key. The sound abruptly halted. Tom slumped back in his seat, pale and breathing fast. The train had stopped and he stared out the window, his breathing shallow, his face distorted in distress.

‘Well, that's it,' he said finally. ‘She can't argue any longer. We will have to sell the
house.'

Grace would marvel later that splitting up with Tom had begun with something so small. Sure, there had been the unfortunate conjunction of her redundancy and his ill-considered resignation, which his firm seemed only too delighted to accept; in fact, they refused to reverse it 24 hours later. These were not small things, and these were the things their friends and family used to explain the breakup. ‘She was made redundant and on the very same day his work told him they were letting him go! Or he resigned! Or something! Just a bad coincidence! Who would believe it? And then . . .' And then burble burble burble, the narrator would finish with something like ‘. . . financial pressures, fighting, all just fell apart . . .' The punchline was always: ‘Then the marriage broke up.'

It was The Story, and, exhausted with answering questions and lying to her daughter and splitting up possessions, Grace herself would sometimes revert to The Story. It was an easy shorthand, to fob people off. The wiser among her listeners would frown and say ‘But . . .' as if realising there was a great chunk missing from The Story; for example, the thread that linked the job losses with the breakup, which was as frail as cobweb. Because couples endured such things, without ending marriages. But usually even the more astute of her listeners held back from asking too many questions. Because really, as everyone murmurs when filling in the sometimes vast gaps in relationship breakup stories, whoever knows what goes on in a marriage?

Grace would have agreed. Who the hell knew? She hadn't known what was going on in her own marriage, apparently. Of all the things she had worried about — babies, money, mortgages, leaking taps — she had never worried about Tom leaving. Maybe
that
was the problem. A bit of worry might have done the trick, headed it off. Stopped it happening and being reduced to a story.

Her own private breakup tale went like this. On the day after the mutual job losses, many angry words were said, but things in Marriage Land were still not destined to go any particular
way. And then Grace, staring at the blue sky, saw a tiny thread hanging from it, a blue thread, of course, because it was the sky, and, being a picky type, she gave it a little tug to see what would happen. What happened was that the sky around the thread unraveled like a woolly jumper, gradually leaving a ragged rip, through which she could see another world. It was a very different world, a frosty, dark world, with music that sounded more like a piano falling through the air than real music, threaded with the sound of, say, a drum kit falling off the back of a truck. There were people in it whom she knew, but with angry expressions, and a smell that made her stomach knot with fear. But she pulled Tom over to show him this world, sneeringly triumphant that she had discovered it, and, full of her own power, she used it to menace him. She threatened him with leaving, with an end to her marriage. She didn't really mean it. But in doing so she pulled the thread again, and the hole in the sky grew bigger, and bigger, and suddenly Grace couldn't work out how to stop her own dear, tender world from unravelling, and this continued quite quickly until the world as she knew it was gone. It sat at her feet for a while like a spaghetti pile of unpicked yarn, and she grabbed handfuls of it and tried to put it back in the sky, but it didn't work, not at all. Then, then they were all totally in the cold, sad, new world; Lotte, too, poor little Lotte who had never wanted to be there. Grace had no idea how to get back into the beloved old world — and only now did she realise how beloved it had been — and with a sick feeling in her stomach, she realised that that place was gone forever.

The house seemed bigger without Tom, and noises were louder, and his absence was everywhere. Tom would not even tell her where he was living now. In the new world there were many things they did not tell each other, although, sometimes unfortunately, there were things they did. While she loved Tom and wanted him back, she was also not sure she would ever be able to forgive or
forget some of the things he had said to her in recent weeks, as the world unraveled. In the new world, words were sharp and dangerous and history was always being re-written.
You never really believed in me. You wanted so bloody much. You're mercenary. Shallow. Selfish. You don't know what it is to have a dream. You're small-minded. All you can think about is yourself. What about that time six years ago, in that caravan park in that place with the ducks, when you . . .
While she had wept and pleaded to talk with Tom in the early days, a few new-world conversations with him had cured her of that. Enough had been said. Texting was fine.

It was time to pick up Lotte from kindy. There were very few threads of continuity in the new world, but kindergarten was one of them. And, of course, Lotte was one. Grace was crouching like a one-woman army over Lotte, prepared to do battle for her child, but as yet the battlefield was empty. Tom saw Lotte every week, but seemed too busy with his new life to demand much time with his daughter. For Grace, unemployed for the first time in fifteen years, life revolved around kindy. She spent an hour dressing for pick-up or drop-off. She arrived twenty minutes early. She let Lotte play as long extra as she wanted. She thanked Miss Laura for any small task the teacher granted her; washing hand towels, sewing on name tags, covering books with clear plastic. Other than this, she shopped for one day's food at a time. She wrote out figures on pieces of paper and reflected on her looming penury. She stared into space for long periods, like someone waiting to be struck by an idea, one which never arrived. For the first time in years, she did not know what came next.

Melody poured the saucepan of milk into the jar, Skip and Lotte watching as the milk rose up the sides. White steam swirled through the glass mouth, until Melody put the tin lid on and screwed it shut.

‘There.'

‘Can I have some?' Lotte jumped.

‘By tomorrow morning it will be yoghurt. You can have some then. Now,' Melody turned and pretended to consult her list, while actually checking Grace's expression. The other woman had not moved to look at the yoghurt-making; she just stared vacantly out the window, into the bare black branches of a persimmon tree. The orange fruit hung like lanterns against a grey sky, and Grace seemed overwhelmed by them. She chewed her bottom lip and gazed out into the world.

Melody summoned some energy into her voice. ‘Let's make laundry detergent!'

‘Yay!' shouted Lotte.

Grace's gaze shifted momentarily to her daughter, and she studied her for a long second, like an almost-dead mountain climber might have contemplated the Himalayas.

Melody had come with a list of things to make from scratch. She brought yoghurt-starter and Borax and rolled oats and seedlings. She had been frightened at the tone of Grace's voice on the phone the night before. It was a dead voice, like the zombies had moved in. Grace was barely conscious with grief; couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, her voice a limp whisper. The money was draining away, she said; her redundancy vanishing into the mortgage repayments and takeaway food. She and Tom had no job between them now; there was only the single mother's benefit, yet to arrive.

‘That's what I'm living on,' said Melody.

‘How?' Grace had asked, without much interest.

‘I'll show you,' Melody had said. And here she was.

She found a big soup saucepan and filled it with soap flakes and water, and boiled it until the soap had all melted. She stirred in washing soda and Borax, and then carried it to the laundry
and poured it into a big plastic bucket with a lid, and added cold water. In an hour it would cool to a slimy sludge and Skip and Lotte could take turns stirring it, squeezing it through their fingers. Grace reluctantly came to see.

‘Oh.' Grace folded her arms and squeezed them against herself.

‘Ten litres of washing liquid, for less than a dollar,' said Melody triumphantly.

‘Oh.'

Melody sighed. ‘Grace, you've got to get a grip. Tom might come back, or he might not, but in the meantime you've got to . . . survive. Be a mum. Keep a house going.

Grace's eyes filled with tears. ‘I feel so useless. Thank you.'

‘Don't thank me. Just help. Next we're making muesli.'

Grace had a photo of herself on a top bunk bed, hunched over in thick brown glasses with lank brown hair. She had once scratched the surface of the picture, over her face, a deliberate vandalism. It was a photo of her first-year school camp and she was in a room with her three best girlfriends, who had decided for that week, as teenage girls can, that they hated her.

There was lots to hate. Her gappy teeth, her thick glasses, her quick answers to questions in class. Her mounting insecurity, her hunched shoulders. She couldn't remember the details of the camp. Time had mercifully scratched away most of it, like her nails had done to her face in the photograph, but she could remember enough. It was at a place called, fittingly, Nhill, on the edge of the Little Desert in northwest Victoria, and her memories of red sand, sharp black desert plants and flaming sunsets over endless horizons were tinged with aching loneliness and self-hatred. Maybe those girls hung around in a group of three and left her out, maybe they mocked her in front of the others. Maybe she ate alone. Maybe they spat on her, left a urine-soaked towel in her bed,
maybe she spent a night in a tent with the teachers because of this, she simply couldn't remember. But in that photo, sitting on her top bunk, she knew she was feeling the misery of not just being truly
hated
, but having to
sleep
in a room with the people who hated you.

Tom had loved this vandalised photo, even before she told him how sad she was in it. He loved it with a furious protectiveness, as if he was reaching one strong, muscular arm back through the years and putting it around those puny, thirteen-year-old-girl shoulders. She had imagined him striding through time to give them all a piece of his mind, and somehow removing the scratches from that photo until she was whole again.

Once, that was how much he had loved her.

Grace's hand shook as she applied lipstick and tears ran down her face. Her lips were chapped and the colour left tiny crusts where it gathered on the flaky skin, in lines that went out from her mouth. She looked about sixty. Maybe now Tom could see what it was that those girls hadn't liked. Like in that photo, she was once again truly alone.

But a jarring clatter of slamming drawers disrupted her coma of self-pity. She was not actually tragically alone at all. No, there was Melody, taking her biggest bowl and filling it with oats, seeds and bran, and drizzling honey over it all. Melody handed the bowl to Grace, with a wooden spoon.

‘Stir,' she instructed.

Grace stirred dully, turning her thousand-mile stare deep into the oats. Melody watched as the other woman feebly pushed the wooden spoon against the oaty mountain range below her, honey glistening gold on the peaks. The effort seemed to weary Grace, to make her expel air in little puffs, as she lifted the spoon from its bog and stabbed it back into the mixture.