The Near Miss (12 page)

Melody had seen this before, had felt it herself, a spiritual giving up. Strange to see Grace
in this tranquillized state, instead of her usual highly-strung anxiety. Melody gently took the bowl and spoon from her, stirred the mixture herself, and found a baking tray to spread the mixture out on. She opened the door of the warm oven, slipped in the tray and closed the door. Outside, Skip and Lotte did karate, a sort of chopping, kicking dance where they circled each other and yelled Hah! Yah! Lotte kicked Skip in the tummy, predictably, and he folded over, crying. Lotte crouched to observe him, and after a few minutes they resumed rolling and laughing in the grass.

Melody made Grace a cup of coffee, and peeled the tea towel off a bowl, revealing the bread dough she had left to rise earlier in the day. She floured the wooden table, Grace appearing not to notice, and she tipped out the ball of dough, dusty with flour, and began to knead. Dough bubbles sighed and popped, and the dough shriveled into itself. She stretched it, took a sharp knife and sliced it into three pieces. She rolled each piece into a mini loaf, and covered the three pale hills with a clean tea towel. Still no response from Grace.

Was this neurotic woman her problem? Grace had chosen to test her husband's love for her, against his love for a dream. And what was a man without a dream, anyway — was he even worth having? Melody had spent the past five years in a world where everyone had dreams, and no one had money. Where ways of living — vegan, communal, freecycle, Montessori — were daily topics of fierce discussion and debate. The one point of agreement amongst the rainforest tribes of the north had been that chasing money was no way to live. All were refugees from that soul-destroying treadmill. And yet they were essentially non-believers, outsiders, and could believe in nothing for very long. People hated drugs, and then they started growing marijuana. Buddhists let go of meditation and dabbled in meat-eating, just like any dime-a-dozen lapsed Catholic, and then suddenly a baby was dead and the police were crawling all over paradise, sniffing at all the pot plants in the little school and pulling apart solar panels on ramshackle roofs.
Where did they bury the baby? She wondered. What was happening up there? Had the druggies taken over? Had the co-op owners finally thrown them out? Who had gone to jail? All she had cared about in the end was getting Skip out of there before the Department started vetting all the families and breaking them up. She could not lose Skip. And anyway, it got so she could not sleep one more night in the valley that had been her home for so long; where the ghost wails of a baby drifted through the lantana and she woke shuddering from dreams where she almost saved the baby, where she ran to put a bottle into his whimpering mouth, only to find he was stone-cold and staring-eyed.

So here she was, back in Melbourne again. Her old life, idyllic though it had been, had finally not felt real, like a loaf of risen bread waiting to be punched down to reality. And now here she sat with a woman whose rubbish bin was full of McDonald's packaging, who had a daughter with more life in her than a sunrise, a woman with the saddest eyes in the world.

The children clattered in, full of accusations and recriminations. ‘Skipper hit me!' Lotte glanced at her own mother, but seemed to realise she was non compis and redirected her complaint towards Melody.

‘Is that true, Skip?'

‘She wouldn't share the bike.'

‘Skipper, you never punch. What do you say?'

Skipper kicked a chair. ‘Sorree.'

Lotte flicked out a four-year-old hip. ‘Well that's
two
times he's done it.'

Melody sat before them. ‘Both of you know how to say sorry when you've done something wrong, don't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘But there's another part of sorry, and that's forgiving. It's like a two-step dance: I'm sorry and then I forgive you.'

‘No.'

‘It's very hard for some people to forgive. Even harder than saying sorry, sometimes. But you're young, so you can get good at it. If you practise every day.'

They stared at her doubtfully.

‘So it goes like this. Skipper, you say “I'm sorry” to Lotte.'

‘Sorry, Lotte.'

‘And, Lotte, you tell Skipper you forgive him.'

‘I for-GIVE you.' Lotte nodded patronisingly at Skip, her brown hair sliding forward, her little face suddenly lit with beneficent kindness.

‘Now hug,' said Melody. They turned to each other and embraced stiffly at first, frozen still. Then Skipper squeezed Lotte around the waist and jumped, and they squealed and jumped like little frogs. She shooed them outside and closed the door. A tear rolled from Grace's eye.

Grace watched Melody's thin, strong hands knead the bread, and she wished someone would do the same thing to her heart and soul. She was thinking about the mini-crushes, as she called them, which had secretly plagued her life for the past year. Her sexual energy had sprayed forth like an ill-fitted hose. Was it some ancient reproductive urge that found her attracted to every second passing man? In the sunset of her fertility, was her body just ridding itself of lust anywhere, anyhow? There had been her old high-school friend Mona, who had come over with her academic husband Phil, and Grace had sat beside him at the dinner table and felt her body glowing with desire for this fairly ordinary man, had found herself almost speechless with the recurring fantasies
that he would follow her out to the kitchen, close the door and fuck her senseless against the bench. Then there was the road service man, who came to start the car after the battery died. There was even Tom's oldest friend, a man she knew to be a selfish commitment-phobe who would rather talk about himself than any other topic, and she had one day driven out of her way to his home, to return a jumper he had left behind. He had thanked her warily, no doubt wondering why she stood flushing and nervous at his front door, or why she had bothered at all when he dropped by every few days anyway. Nothing had come of these mini-lusts, and it was their nature to pass quickly through one man and onto the next. But with each one there was a moment where she vowed that if he made a move she would do it, willing it to happen, fantasising furiously, utterly vulnerable to seduction but unable to be unloyal enough to Tom to initiate anything herself. Oh, there had been looks, and gestures. Men were blind to so many things, but not to a woman's desire. There had been a thigh brushed against hers at a dinner, lingering too long; a stray lock of hair tenderly, inappropriately tucked behind her ear, a party where she and one man had talked too long, oblivious to anyone else, a footy game where another lent her his jacket and his masculine scent carried guilt and delight with every inhalation. Each crush was the work of a few weeks, each time she came dangerously close to exposing herself, to risking it all, and then the fever would subside and she would look coldly at the man and ask herself: Really?
Him
? Are you for real? Should you even be allowed out in public?

Still, she knew she wasn't the only woman going through this. She only had to see the glances the kindy mums threw at Tom. The baby years were consuming, years when women felt they had no more sexuality than The Wiggles, had no more right to deviancy than the Pope, and then suddenly they lifted their heads from the drudgery and their sexual energy flooded back like a wave, and you had to take hold of your battered marriage and rebuild it quickly, before that fragile
boat disintegrated. Other marriages had foundered, too. Her own husband she knew to be attractive, she still found him so, but there had been so much frustration below that lust. Why the bloody robot, why wouldn't he just be normal, so she could be normal, too?

And now all she wanted was to rewind the past, unsay the things she had said, and, please, bring on the robots, the plastic-bottle solar rubbish roof, if that was what it took. She felt lost without him, or was it partly, she had to admit, without her job, which had occupied her for four days a week all these years? What was the Bunny doing without her? Was her replacement succeeding better than she had in promoting a cause that, despite Grace's cynicism, she knew to be worthwhile? Who was she without work, without a husband, without the money for the next mortgage repayment? Who was she now?

As Eddy's months of absence from the workplace grew, his employers began to fret. They needed him. To be honest, Eddy adored the world of risk management, and it loved him right back. His risk work the previous year had been impressive, with his tally of monies saved to companies worth millions. Spotting the fire risk in a processing plant where the fire protection was rated adequate, because the fire hoses reached all parts of the plant . . . but there were no smoke detectors — potential $10 million. Realising that a major chocolate-making firm held all of its packaging artwork in a derelict printer's factory, risking loss of six months' production — potential $3 million. A blue-chip CEO lowering his manicured hand to sign contracts on a massive stretch of industrial land in outer Sydney, halted in the nick of time by Eddy when his investigations revealed a history of toxic waste — potential $50 million in ongoing management and treatment costs. Et cetera. There were, of course, things he and colleagues had missed, which made him wince. All industries must have them. The publishers who knocked back JK Rowling, the mining company that built the mine on the wrong site. The poor soul in Atlanta who simply forgot to get a sponsorship deal for the gas to fuel the Olympic flame. Human error — he and his small army were up against it, time and again, Murphy's Law engraved on all their hearts.

When Eddy had used up all his holiday leave and Risk, Routing and Co still could not persuade him to come back, they sent one of their best performers to make contact. Alf Tankhouse, corporate lawyer, was secretly known by Eddy as Alphamale, and had been the subject of a running private joke between him and Romy for years. He was as tough as Eddy was tender, and it was ironic that RRC had sent him of all people to rout out their AWOL employee. Ironic because Alpha's own marriage had crashed on the rocks just before Eddy's, and may, Eddy believed, have helped destabilise his own, as it turned out, but hitherto unknown, perilously fragile relationship.

Born to hippy parents, Alf Tankhouse had become the most acquisitive, materialist, competitive bastard around. Eddy knew other alpha males, and some of them he liked; their energy, their overconfidence, their wild testosterone. Their aggressive need to pay for everything. Alphamale, however, he was wary of. The man had bred six children in six years, an unheard-of tribe in this day and age, and his redheaded, laughing-eyed and quick-tongued wife seemed to have spent all of the time Eddy had known her pregnant, like a moving monument to Alphamale's fertility. Alphamale was tall and broad, and would draw himself up even taller while talking, almost leaning over his opponent. He and Eddy had a mutual friend, who had told Eddy that Alf was notorious among his circle of friends for sleeping with his cousin's wife, an achievement as yet unrelayed to the cousin. He had a short temper and had once kicked in the car window of a driver who had leered at Alf's then girlfriend.

Eddy generally, knowing this story, tried to avoid him. However, once they had landed at the same workplace, they had had various conversations in the lift, as one must, and these generally revolved around Alphamale's chosen topics:

           
1.
    
How much he was earning now.

           
2.
    
The next triathlon he was training for.

           
3.
    
What their mutual friend was up to. Their mutual friend had now quit his job to stay home and care for his baby and toddler while his banker wife worked, a decision which both fascinated and repulsed Alphamale, as if the man had stepped off a cliff. After a few conversations about this, Alphamale apparently had purged himself of topic 3; in fact, he appeared to detectibly shudder if the man's name was mentioned. This topic was then replaced on his list by:

           
4.
    
How great his renovation was going to be. And:

           
5.
    
What his house was worth. And:

           
6.
    
Sex.

His wife, by contrast, appeared warm-hearted and kind, if understandably cranky. The few work events to invite family featured her shouting at the children, and yet the constancy of her shouting was not matched by any sense that she was close to losing control; the babies seemed happy in their eternal puppy scrum, growing up year by year. Alphamale came and went overseas on business trips, and talked importantly into his iPhone a lot. The office seemed to breathe a little easier when he was away. Eddy speculated that his family might, too.

They were a constant on the periphery of Eddy's life, so he was stunned one day when Alpha, a pale shadow of himself, told him that his wife had left him, taking all the kids.

Eddy got it at once, or thought he did. It was all he could do to stop himself rolling his eyes. This walking cliché of machismo had been discovered with a bit on the side. But somehow that seemed too small a thing to provoke all this. He couldn't imagine Ginger-haired Girl even caring. Maybe in true alpha style it was a compound crime, a girl in each port. ‘What happened?'

‘She's been fucking the kids' swimming teacher. Says she
loves
him. She's loved him for six months.'

Eddy blinked. ‘Mate,' he said in dismay.

‘Fucking should have noticed how excited she was when Lucia moved up to Crayfish.
So fantastic! Swimming way beyond her age!
' He finished with a falsetto mimicry of womanhood.

‘What?'

‘Crayfish teacher. Uni student. Mature age.' He kicked a table leg.

Eddy shook his head, confused but profoundly sympathetic, and put his hand on the other's
arm. ‘I'm so sorry.'

Alf looked at Eddy's hand, wearily incapable of his usual derision, although he did twitch it off. ‘She loves me, too. She says.'

‘Well, there you go!'

‘And she wants me to pay child maintenance.' He showed Eddy a legal letter, demanding an annual amount of money that was slightly more than Eddy's salary, and about two-thirds of what he last remembered Alf's salary to be. ‘That's what I've got to come up with every year. While she gets the kids and fucks the Crayfish.'

While Eddy had been shocked, Romy had seemed pole-axed by the news. She couldn't stop talking about it, telling her friends on the phone about these distant acquaintances. It seemed Ginger was part of an epidemic, according to Romy. She and her friends devised elaborate theories about women turning forty, women having midlife crises, women reaching their sexual peak, women with poor body image, neglected by their husbands, vulnerable to the encouraging eyes and near-naked body of a fit young swimming teacher
. I'd like to discuss Lucia's backstroke with you, can you come back for coffee at my place and we can talk about . . . strokes?
Women having affairs was the common theme, as far as Eddy could see. Women cheating on husbands.

‘What if Alf had been the one having the affair,' he had asked Romy one day, after one of her marathon analytical phone sessions, during which he had begun to ponder whether, if Ginger Girl were a man, she would be crucified as a macho pig, a symptom of man's destructive and hateful tendencies toward his family, whereas because she was female, the sisterhood moved like a construction crew to start building the wall of justifications around her. ‘If it was him and not her, how would you feel about it?'

Romy shrugged, pretending to give the matter thought for three seconds, before dismissing
it. ‘Let's face it, all those trips overseas. He probably
was
having an affair.'

‘In which case maybe he was having a midlife crisis, or suffering poor body image . . .'

‘Oh,
please!
That poor woman at home with all those children!
She
was the one struggling here!'

Eddy felt doubtful about this. The redhead had always to him seemed cheekily, resoundingly, not like anyone's victim at all. It seemed a little unfair that she got to keep the children, the house, the renovation, the Crayfish, a very large chunk of the husband's income,
and
the sympathy and support of the sisterhood, if not the community at large. But he said nothing of his bizarre outbreak of fraternal loyalty to the extremely annoying Alf.

Romy had never really talked much to the woman before, but obviously there had been some connection there, with these people whom Eddy would have said were just like far-off trees in the geography of Romy's life. Because after marveling, wondering, cursing and pontificating over the gross injustice of what had happened, after seeking reason or motivation or guidance within Ginger's behaviour and reluctantly sympathising with Alf, whom she had always despised, Romy came home from a weekend yoga workshop with something to say, through gales of tears that rendered her unable to speak for a full half-hour. Eddy begged and pleaded; swore over and over, on his life, that whatever it was, he would think no less of her. Finally, she came clean.

‘I . . . I . . . slept with the yo . . . yo . . . ga instructor,' she sobbed.

Eddy wondered how binding his promise was.

‘How
could
you?' he said finally.

‘I just . . . My body took over. I couldn't stop myself.'

‘Fuck. What is it with women and bloody exercise people?'

‘I
know
.' She stared big-eyed at him, as if admitting to being caught in the grip of a national
plague, over which she had no control.

Anyway. Fast-forward some months ahead to now, and the cuckolded Alf Tankhouse appeared at the front door of the cuckolded Eddy, bearing a bottle of whisky from one of the managing directors, and a plea to return to work.

‘You gotta get over it, mate.' He squeezed past Eddy and down the hall. Did no one wait to be invited in anymore? ‘Dave and Stanny sent this. Its good shit. Do you want some now?'

Dalmore Highland Whisky, 15 years old
, read Eddy.
Matured in matusalem, apostoles and amoroso sherry casks, it proffers all those winter spice, orange zest and chocolate notes characteristic of Dalmore.
‘Where is Dalmore?'

‘Fuck knows. You want to drink some?'

‘They sent you to give me this, or to drink it with me?'

‘I just figure, seeing as you've got it . . .'

‘It's 10.20. In the morning.'

‘It's good shit. Over two hundred bucks in the shop.'

‘Well if it's so great, maybe I'll save it for a special occasion. Instead of weekday morning tea with you.'

‘Fair enough. Although now I think about it, I did hear Stanny say he got a box in duty-free. So maybe not two hundred bucks.'

‘And what, he keeps a box for messed-up employees?' Eddy could remember riding his BMX around Bulleen, dropping resumés into shops and pleading for his first job. Incredible now that someone was sending him an expensive bottle of alcohol and pleading with him to get out of his pyjamas and return to work. He should be flattered. ‘I don't deserve this.'

‘Well, you know. Employees market. Economy's gone crazy. All these recruitment agencies, they're always getting onto me through LinkedIn and asking me to go work for someone else. Let's me know what I'm worth. I've been to Dave three times in the past year to give me a raise, and he's said yes each time.'

Eddy was shocked. ‘I've
never
asked for a raise. I mean, he raises my salary every year and it sort of embarrasses me, I wish he wouldn't, but . . .'

‘Well, there you go, a two-hundred-buck bottle of whisky to get you to go back is actually pretty stingy, if you look at it like that. Believe me, you could ask for a raise now! They're
desperate
to get you back. I mean, I could be charging out this time instead of sitting here in your kitchen.'

Eddy turned the whisky bottle over. ‘They should be sacking me. I haven't turned up to work in months.'

‘Yeah. But they're not. How about I pour?' Alf cracked open the bottle and found two Vegemite glasses in the cupboard. Eddy smelled the half-full cup placed before him and felt ill.

‘I couldn't.'

‘Dave and Stanny, they feel sorry for you. They've both been there. Wives left them. And me. You're part of the gang now, mate. Badge of honour.'

Eddy groaned and put his head in his hands. He would consider going to work right at this moment just to get away from Alf. He didn't want to be part of any gang Alf was in. Alf drained his glass and clanked it back on the table.

‘Okay, I'm going to go back to them and say you'll come back if you get a ten per cent raise.'

‘No!'

‘Okay, okay. Fifteen. You tough guy, you.'

‘Alf, I don't want a raise. I don't want to work right now. Maybe I should just resign.'

‘Wow. I'll get you twenty per cent with that attitude. Hard ball.'