The Near Miss (17 page)

Over an hour later she was settled inside the lounge room, able to peek from the side of a curtain at the possibly two hundred people who had arrived. The auctioneer had never seen such a crowd in this area, he marveled. He was outside now, delivering a long speech about the merits of the house, the area, the land, the street, the spring sunshine, which apparently came with the house, to hear him speak.

‘Maybe we'll have a future,' Grace whispered to Lotte, who was running between Grace and the kitchen where Tom was sitting with his mother. ‘Mummy might start a business! Or maybe I could go back and study! Buy us some nice clothes! Maybe getting out of this huge housing debt and having some money to play with would help she and Tom relax, help them sort things out. Maybe Tom could come to Bali.

Finally, the agent threw open the bidding, in the horse-racing tone of an auctioneer. ‘Hut! Now! What Am I Bid! Let's start at eight hundred! Eighthundredeighthundredeighthundred! Hut! Who's got an opening bid for me? Eight! Hundred! Thousand!' He postured and pointed his rolled-up catalogue in several directions in quick succession, and people twisted and turned to see who was bidding.

No one, it soon became apparent.

Graced silently prayed for the bidding impulse to strike someone, anyone, as she stared anxiously at the crowds through the window. Her mother sat beside her, covering her eyes. Grace wrung her hands until her fingers hurt. ‘Why does no one bid?' Maybe they were waiting, as people did. It was a pulsing, heaving crowd, most of them craning to look for a bidder. Like some terrible, adult game of hide-and-seek.

The agent went back to his speech about the virtues of his house, and then he tested the waters again. ‘Hut! Give me seven-fifty! Bargain-basement price for this renovator's delight!'

Nothing.

Were the buyers foxing? The agent seemed to think so, too. ‘With no buyers, the house will be taken off the market,' he warned. Grace flinched: how
embarrassing
. ‘That's what is about to happen, people: this house will be going off the market in three.' He hit his palm with the rolled-up catalogue. ‘In two. Chance of a lifetime people. In—'

There was a rustle in the crowd. Someone had spoken. Thank God! The agent leaned forward to hear, and then reared back in horror. ‘
Six hundred and fifty
! Well, it's good to hear an offer, but let's have a serious one, good people.'

But there was nothing. The agent finally came in, and everyone clustered in the lounge room. The agent sagged, looking exhausted. ‘Wow. It's brutal out there.'

‘I want to take it,' said Tom. ‘That offer.'

‘No, you will not!' snapped his mother. ‘You'd be crazy.'

Tom's father had turned up, and he agreed. ‘Take it off the market, son,' he urged heavily.

‘Well it's Grace's house, too,' said Tom. ‘What do you think, Grace?'

Grace felt weepy with gratitude to hear Tom even say her name. She suddenly thought she couldn't bear the whole thing to go on a minute longer. The shame of taking it off the market. The dreariness of having to keep discussing it with Tom, having every discussion they had be about this house, which she could see he had grown to hate. It had become a millstone around his neck. It represented the strangling of all his creative dreams, the choice of a mortgage over life's purpose. It represented the end of their marriage. She should have realised it earlier. And she had a sense that after this rollercoaster of losing her marriage and her job, maybe, maybe if she could lose her house, too, she would hit rock bottom, and stop falling.

‘I'm with Tom,' she said bravely. ‘Sell it.'

Outside in the crowd, with the news delivered, a man punched the air in triumph, and then he hugged a pregnant woman who was weeping with joy. Grace let the curtain fall back and pressed her fingers into her eyes. Lotte ran back in the room, wriggled onto Grace's lap and prised back her fingers.

‘Daddy says to say thank you, thank you, thank you.'

Melody took a train ride into town the next day after the auction, and Skip chattered the whole way in, announcing the arrival of tunnels and bridges with delight. People stole glances at him as he swung his feet and peered out the window. Every station name was discussed with grave interest.

‘Westgarth,' Melody said.

‘West — GARF,' he repeated, eyes comically wide. ‘West-GARF!' An old man harumphed into his hand, eyes amused, and hid himself behind a newspaper. His wife watched Skipper with unashamed longing. Melody's graffiti flashed past while she was watching her son and she didn't even remember to look until it was too late — she liked seeing her graffiti around town, reminding her of late-night adventures. But suddenly she didn't really care about seeing it: what did it matter? She realised it would be her last big graffiti, and that, like the commune, that stage of her life was passing, and leaving. Really, so much of what she had cared about for all these years was falling away from her, she was not sure if anything would be left. Only Skip.

She wondered how Grace was feeling this morning. She had seen Tom leaving after the auction with an elderly couple who must be his parents, both of them hissing and remonstrating with him. She knew the house had been sold very cheaply, although to her it seemed like a fortune. More than half a million! Melody had turned to see Lotte watching, her face impassive.

‘How's Mum?' she asked the child.

‘She's crying,' Lotte said tonelessly, staring into the middle distance. Melody had stroked the child's silky brown head and Lotte did not pull away. Children's shoulders were so absurdly small, one could be cupped in each palm. Too small for adult burdens.

A man on the train vocalised his haunted thoughts, while passengers glanced at him, embarrassed, fascinated. ‘Look at me when
you speak!' he barked into thin air. ‘Look at me when you speak!' As if it was the last thing heard before he snapped. Something a mother might say, or a father. And yet maybe those words weren't the cause of his malaise, maybe his psyche was trying to recreate the last time he had felt protected and safe. Melody squeezed Skip so hard he squeaked; she might never let him go. Maybe she would home-school him.

At Flinders Street station, Melody and Skipper held hands and she let him put the ticket in the slot at the gate. They walked over the bridge, peering through the gilt-painted slots at the river below, and slowly made their way to the little tent where the circus show would be. After the show, all trapeze artistry, and silliness in pyjamas, they walked up to the gallery, to put their hands on the water wall, and lie on the floor of the Great Hall and look at the colours. They bought a babycino from the kiosk and rode the elevator up and down a few times. Then Melody brought out the Vegemite sandwich she had packed. Skipper had been allowed to choose a one-dollar picture postcard from the gallery shop, and he had chosen a picture of four cherubs blowing trumpets. They looked not unlike himself, really, except for the wings.

The reverence of these days. Melody felt a love between them so perfect and pure, she wanted to capture it, pin it on a butterfly board and have it forever. She felt a wondrous and frightening certainty that these were the very best days of her life.

Stopping by the Hare Krishna restaurant, she picked up a flier for an Aboriginal dreaming camp, at the end of the year. A week in the country in teepees, Aboriginal elders, dreamtime tales, sacred rituals. She knew the group that were organising it, and she would know some of the people going, she was sure. There might even be some refugees from the commune, with children Skip knew. It would be late spring, when the weather was coming good. Skip would love it. Something to look forward to. She folded the flier carefully and tucked it down her shirt.

They rode the train home and once again she just missed out on seeing her graffiti,
although she did look up in time to see it reflected as a blue flash in the windows opposite, and to see a few passengers' faces arrested in the direction of it, reading silently. At home, she and her boy lay at opposite ends of the couch, their legs entwined, and watched each other, Skipper eventually falling asleep. Such tenderness, in this grotty apartment. Heaven could be no more than this.

Grace sat that night with Lotte, and ate the meal Melody had dropped over. It was a lentil curry, flavoured with sweet potato and sultanas, gently spiced enough that Lotte, finally bored with chips and takeaways, stirred it through her basmati rice and ate a few mouthfuls, and Grace, suddenly starving, wolfed down three helpings.

For a moment after the auction, when Lotte had brought the string of thank-yous from Tom, beloved Tom, Grace had thought that this was it. They would make up; he would forgive her. The cost had been the house sale, as she had thought. She hoped it tearily, even as she suppressed a flash of rage: how manipulative of you Tom! But then, after all the paperwork had been signed, she heard him leave the house, saw him arguing with his angry parents, and then he drove away. Grace had spent the next twenty-four hours in bed, only getting up to answer the door and find Melody's steaming curry in a chipped pot on the doorstep. Melody was already sailing off on her bike, Skip on the back, and she lifted an arm and waved before she vanished around the corner. Grace had crouched, lifted the lid on the pot and blinked away tears at such kindness.

They watched television as they ate;
Round Up
, the current affairs show that had screened Lotte's accident. And suddenly, she realised she was watching the accident footage again.

‘Mummy!' squeaked Lotte, wide eyed. ‘That's when I hurt my leg! That's Skip's mummy!'

There it was. The blistering hot day last summer, the ice-cream shop, Melody in her green dress amid the hot metal cars, snatching Lotte in her white dress, saving her from death. Grace stopped breathing for a few moments, only exhaling when Lotte, screen Lotte, was safe. She reached for her daughter, squeezed her tight.

But then there was new footage. The same day, she could tell — there was Mel in the green dress, Skip in his flapping shirt. They were in the supermarket. Melody reached for a bottle of something, reached into her handbag and her hand returned: empty.

Was she . . . stealing?

‘Mummy it's Melody! What's she doing?'

‘Shh! I don't know. Listen.'

‘. . . viewers hailed this woman a hero earlier this year, when she snatched a child from certain death in traffic. But, tonight we have footage here that shows her engaged in activity that is less than heroic. Melody Chase was caught on film stealing from this grocery store, and when confronted by the owner about the theft minutes before the accident, denied all. We want you, our viewers, to decide: saint or sinner? What do you think? We want to know. Ring now to cast your vote: 1800 899 000 to vote saint, and 1800 901 000 to vote sinner. Remember, calls cost ninety-nine cents. Later in the show we'll announce the verdict and we'll interview Australia's top forensic psychologist about why people shoplift. Come back after the break . . .'

No
. Grace had been chewing a mouth full of food, which she suddenly found herself unable to swallow. She actually had to spit it back on her plate. Saint or sinner? Melody? Did she know she was being dragged onto television again; had she any idea? But of course not, she didn't even watch television.

Grace set her dinner aside. Something came over her for the first time in weeks: a cold fury,
a bitter determination. Shame at her own ambivalence towards Melody. In her kitchen sat three loaves of bread, a pot of curry and another of rice that would feed them the next three nights. A forty-litre bucket of phlegmy goop that would apparently see them through laundry washes for the next year; a bucket of muesli, a vase of fresh herbs, and a bowl of green veggies harvested from Grace's own small wilderness of a garden, which she would never have noticed herself. A load of washing on the line. All contributed by a woman who was also living on a pittance.

Melody might be a little bit unusual, she might look slightly weird, despite her beauty, she might be friends with a man who was apparently a criminal, but she was not . . . this. No. At worst, she was a woman stealing food to make ends meet on a single mother's pension. Okay, that was olive oil she was stealing, and it was admittedly an expensive cold-pressed extra virgin, but Grace could see her point: if you were going to steal something, why not the best? . . . But how many viewers did this show have? It was one of the nation's most popular. This, this was a public crucifixion, of a single mother whose real crime was to be too beautiful for television to leave her alone, now it had discovered her.

Grace would not allow this. She would
not
. Suddenly filled with a righteous anger, she was on her feet, holding her phone and dialing. And with the smell of fresh bread and vegetable curry in the air, she dialed one number, over and over again. She sat there and dialed from her mobile for six hours, until voting closed. Damn the expense. For the first time in a long time, she was overwhelmed with an emotion unrelated to Tom.

In Eddy's house, a kilometre away, a man sitting before a television dialed a phone, again and again. He had the landline as well as his mobile, and he carefully juggled the two, to make the most calls per minute possible. He took a moment to text Tom, so he could get calling, too. Then he
returned to his mobile, and called until his cheek grew warm.

The next morning, Melody delivered Skipper to kindy, and that was where she realised something was wrong. It began when she casually greeted another woman, a sort of interesting-looking type she thought she had hit it off with. And the woman didn't seem to hear her.

‘Hi!' Melody said brightly, again. Skipper stood in the middle of the room, his backpack sliding off one shoulder to the floor. He looked around, searching for Lotte. Little bags were being placed on hooks, short people and tall people moved around at their different levels. Melody ducked her head to catch her new friend's eye. Had she had a bad morning?

The woman finally met her eye.

Melody froze.

It was A Look.

The woman finished delivery of The Look, and moved away. Melody stood in a pillar of salt, a zone of social shock. That had undoubtedly been, her own mother would have said, ‘a Dirty Look'. Had Skipper done something to her child? Had some four-year-old social
faux pas
been carried out?

‘Ah, Melody, the TV star,' said another woman, in a tone like she was sucking on a lemon. Melody moved aside so a child could access her coat hook, feeling her pillar of cold air expand a little wider.

But it had been months since the screening of Lotte's accident! And she had been the great hero anyway. She stared bewildered at the woman, as little raincoats rustled around at the level of her knees, and motherly heads bent to converse with children. Now she looked around, actually, those motherly heads seemed quite determinedly bent. When they were raised, their faces wore
dreamy smiles, and they all looked straight ahead, no one meeting her eye. The air almost crackled with her sudden invisibility.