The Near Miss (18 page)

The door opened again and Lotte skipped in in her dress and sandals. Melody looked past her for Grace, and felt a sudden fear that this social chill would also have touched her, her one friend. Grace's eyes met her own and she paled. Melody froze.

Grace glanced quickly around at the other mothers, walked straight to Melody and put her arms around her.

Now Melody knew something was catastrophically wrong. She stood utterly still for a few bewildering moments, her cheek against the shorter woman's hair, her hands touching Grace's light cardigan. Her skin rose in goosebumps. Grace had never, ever hugged her. Grace did not hug.

Melody pulled back and stared at the other woman, baffled.

Grace studied her face and whispered. ‘You don't know, do you? You didn't see the telly last night. No one's told you?' There was now apparently a stampede of mothers trying to escape the locker room.

‘What?' Melody whispered back. ‘Did they play the footage again?'

After a few minutes frantically whispering with Grace, Melody left the kindergarten and went straight to the local library, where she sat at a computer in the darkest corner, bathed now in the light of the screen as last night's current affairs show played before her. After the first couple of minutes, her heart sinking, she pulled the hood of her jacket up and over her distinctive hair, so she wouldn't be recognised, and she turned the sound down low.
Saint or sinner?
squeaked the screen. Vote now! Have your say! She clicked the arrow back to the start of its ribbon, and watched the evil, hateful supermarket manager's footage of her shoplifting, the lifting of the item, the casual
searching in her bag, the withdrawal of her empty hand. She put in cans, olive oil, vitamins. Her on-screen face was calm and expressionless, except for one moment when her eyes slid sideways, checking she wasn't being observed. How shifty she looked, like some low-life-trash robber. And how stupid, not to sense she was being not only watched, but
filmed
. Melody thought of her little boy, up there in the tender, innocent world of kindergarten, alongside children who might know that his mummy was a thief, a robber, a bad lady on the television.

She could feel a thousand eyes watching her, although when she looked around there were only Asian students focused solely on their computer screens. But she knew, when she walked out of this door, everyone would know her. She didn't deserve to have a little boy as beautiful as Skipper, with his invisible friends and his squishy hands and his total trust in her. What had she been thinking all these years, that shoplifting was some form of protest against capitalism, some expression of abundance from the universe . . . Oh God, she was a fraud. Why on earth had she come down to Melbourne; just to endure this bitter lesson? Could the universe hate her so much? She had thought she lived by a policy of do no harm, but she may have harmed her son with this horror. Shamed him. She had harmed Eddy, by bringing Van into his life, Van who appeared to have turned to some life of petty theft; stealing fiancées, robbing shops. Not unlike herself, as it turned out.

She walked home, utterly lost. On the way she passed a café where a child's birthday party was underway, children blowing bubbles to float through the coffee-scented air, while toddlers clapped sticky palms. She passed a front garden where a ladder leaned on a tree, and a circle of stones sat on one big flat rock like a message, glistening black after the rain. Safe in her ugly kitchen, she re-read Skip's mother's day card, made at kindy.
My mum's favourite food is . . . sauce. My mum loves to . . . wash the dishes. I love my Mum because . . . she has a beautiful love.
A photo of
himself on the front wearing a Bob the Builder hooded towel, staring out grave and passive as a druid. She ripped open a letter from the real estate agent. He demanded she pay the three months' rent in arrears, or his agency would evict them.

She felt hot, and she ran to the toilet to throw up. It seemed a long time after that she stared into that bowl, at the disgusting insides of her disgusting self. She couldn't even climb to her feet to flush, she just turned on her hands and knees and crawled out to the lounge room, where she curled up in a ball on the carpet and shivered.

Melody woke to voices, to touch on her body. She was hot and dizzy, and still on the floor, but Skipper and Lotte crouched over her, as if casting spells, flying their imaginary planes over the terrain of her head, her shoulder, down the dunes of her thighs. She heard the quiet
brrroom
of the pretend engines, and the swooshing of wings, like enchanted creatures come to stitch her up with thread so fine that only a child's eyes could see the gossamer scar it left.

‘What's the time?' She tried to sit up, pushing aside the hands. The world spun, and she crumbled down again. Her clothes sat damp on her skin, her breath stunk. Grace was in the kitchen setting out cups and saucers, spooning dandelion coffee into a cup. Melody closed her eyes, wishing the spinning would stop. ‘Oh, no. Did I miss pick-up?'

Grace poured the boiling water. ‘Don't worry. We waited a few minutes, and then I brought Skip here. You were sleeping.'

Melody lay back. ‘Thanks.'

‘You seem to be running a temperature.'

Melody shut her eyes, the whole sorry mess watching over her. ‘I feel hot. Dizzy.' Dizzy with shame.

She listened to the sound of a teaspoon stirring, bumping in the sides of a coffee cup, and thought how much comfort that sound promised. The children had fetched the op-shop Prada bag with the red cross she had painted on it, and were playing doctors. Obediently, she submitted herself to the gravity and nurture of Dr Skipper, who was giving ejections with an empty syringe and poking his broken stethoscope into her breast. She held her breath and felt her own nurture coming back at her, through the divine medium of her son. He gave her a massage, his touch as gentle as a kitten's, his kind spirit flowing through his fingerpads. He squished her shirt against the flesh on her back.

Next time she woke, she climbed to her feet, catching her toe on the hem of her pants and stumbling against the wall. She felt them all watching as she righted herself and walked down the hall to the toilet, where she threw up again. Then she staggered to the room she shared with Skipper, and subsided onto her bed, crawling under a pile of sheets and blankets and books. She did not speak to Grace — and was that Eddy she had also seen? — and she registered that she may have been rude, but she had no choice. She was dying. Every muscle pumped poison, every bone groaned. She could feel her brain in her head, sloshing in some toxic coating. Her breathing was fast and shallow, and she was hungry for air, but too weak to gulp it properly. Her pillow was cold and dry and that was all she wanted.

It went on for two days and two nights of heat and sweat and shivering and pain. She held her face to her pillow as if telling it a secret, as if it might hold the recipe for health within its poly-foam depths. Skipper came and went, each time with Grace and Lotte, and once with Eddy. In the eye of her own cyclone, the mother in her registered that her precious boy was in the hands of kind people, and she was cautiously reassured, and sank back into dreams.

Melody woke once in the night and the bed was empty — no Skipper. She panicked,
dragged herself up and along the hall to ring Grace. But when she turned on the lounge room light, there they were, Grace, Skipper and Lotte, asleep. Grace was on the couch, in an unfamiliar sleeping bag, Skipper and Lotte slept crossways on a foam mattress, their angel faces turned in the same direction. The lounge room was as fat and warm, with the gentle sound of their breathing, as her own room had been cold and terrifying in their absence. Grace opened her eyes.

‘Sorry,' said Melody. ‘I just wondered where Skip was.'

‘How are you feeling?' said Grace. ‘You really should drink something.'

But the effort of walking and talking had already exhausted Melody, and she just nodded weakly and turned off the light. Fell back into bed, bleached of all life.

The next day held more dreamy waking and sleeping, Grace and the children coming and going. Grace woke her twice and made her sit up and drink something sweet. Then Grace and the children were not there. Melody woke once to see Van and she nodded at him, or she thought she did, but then she woke later and he had gone, and maybe it had been a dream. She swam down to the place deep in her soul where she was troubled about Van, a place she rarely visited. Deep in this underworld yellow submarine land, everything was just as she left it. Her sister's funeral. Van's everyday presence after the death. Her decision to move up to the commune, his decision to follow. Or did he decide first? She could not remember. That night. That week. She touched all those old relics. She swam in one place for a while, staring at Van's love for Esme, and then Van's love for Melody herself. Was it real love, or mirror twin love? She had never been sure, and she pitied it, whatever it was, but she did not trust it. Then she stared for a while at the guilty fact of her non-love for him, swam around it a little as she had done so many times. Nup. There it was. Would have been much simpler otherwise, but whatever. Move on.

Melody swam to the surface and lay in cool sunlight for a while, dishes clanking from the
kitchen, voices chirping. It was all dreamy and yet jerky, the way children grew up, it occurred to her. You looked at them one day and they'd grown two inches overnight. Or they suddenly came out with a phrase you'd never heard them say before. She remembered the jerkiness herself from childhood, when she realised she had changed all over again. The world was anew, and the dimensions and perspectives around her seemed abruptly different, as if a cartoon had morphed into a film, developing shadows, dimension, pores on skin, flyaway hair.

She dreamed about a party in the commune she had been to the year before, a cold night not long after the Winter Solstice, a party to mark the burial of a child's placenta. Seven years old, the little girl was, and the question had not been fully answered, where had they been keeping the placenta these past seven years? She woke from this puzzle to find Skipper beside her, talking to Grace, telling her a long involved story about an UNO game he'd played the night before, apparently with Eddy. ‘Then I put down collect four! Then he had to pick up
six
!'

Finally she woke again, and the world was flat, cleansed, new. She felt cool and clean. The sheets and blankets were no longer in a pile on top of her, but had been neatly folded and tucked around the mattress. Her hair was damp against her head. She barely had the energy to blink, but she was better. She lay and stared out at the powerlines, out at the sky, and a little plane passed by with a sound like a far-off lawnmower on a Sunday afternoon. She felt very, very grateful.

Grace came in and sat gently on the side of the bed. ‘Better?'

Melody nodded. ‘Thanks for looking after Skipper. I don't know what . . .'

Grace shrugged it off. ‘Forget it. You've been so sick.'

‘And I think I was meant to do a reading for this guy . . .'

‘He came. I told him you were being rushed off your feet and I was your delegate.'

‘You what?'

‘I did the reading for him. Told him all good things. He's going to meet the love of his life. The money's on the kitchen bench.'

‘Oh.'

‘It's good money! You could really expand that business you know. Set up a website.'

‘Yeah.'

‘Guess what? I've got good news and bad news.'

‘Oh.'

‘Good news first. You were voted a saint! Overwhelmingly!'

Melody stared at her. The evil television show. ‘Not a sinner?'

‘Not a sinner.'

‘People really voted?' Was the world mad?

‘They did!
Thousands
voted. It was all on the telly the next night. You were sleeping.'

‘Should I watch it?'

‘Nup. Let it pass.'

‘And the bad news?'

‘Well, the bad news is that your real estate agent rang to say he's evicting you for not paying the rent.'