The Slap (55 page)

‘I’m fine. I don’t deserve you.’ Oh Christ, don’t let him start crying again. ‘I’m so ashamed, Aish.’

She too looked down at the menu. She had no idea what would be the right thing to say. She felt bereft, drained of any compassion or sympathy towards him. At the same time she felt him to be completely in her care. It was this distance between her intentions and her desire that was making her so weary. She would have been furious if he had not felt shame. But she did not want to minister to his grief, his self-pity and to his sense of failure. A cruel thought flashed quickly and guiltily in her mind: be a man, deal with your fucking mid-life crisis—it is so boring. She scanned the list of dishes. She would order the whole fish smoked in a banana leaf in nonya spices. She shut her menu.

‘I’m going to call Sandi when I get home, congratulate her on being pregnant.’ He brightened as soon as she said the words, his eyes widening in relief. She immediately regretted her impulsiveness. I will concede nothing else, she promised herself. Again she experienced a wave of weariness, a numbing heaviness to her neck and shoulders, to her very bones. This, finally, was love. This was its shape and essence, once the lust and ecstasy and danger and adventure had gone. Love, at its core, was negotiation, the surrender of two individuals to the messy, banal, domestic realities of sharing a life together. In this way, in love, she could secure a familiar happiness. She had to forego the risk of an unknown, most likely impossible, most probably unobtainable, alternative happiness. She couldn’t take the risk. She was too tired. And anyway, she scolded herself, the moon is hanging low and gigantic and golden over Amed, I am with my handsome husband who loves me and encourages me, who makes me feel safe. I am safe and that’s all the world wants, only the young and the deluded would want anything else, believe that there is anything more to love than that.

‘It’s fantastic she’s got pregnant. I know how hard she’s been trying.’

‘I know, it’s terrific, isn’t it.’ Hector was beaming, thrilled. ‘Harry told me at his birthday that if they hadn’t got pregnant by the summer they were going to try IVF. That would have been so hard on them.’

‘On Sandi, don’t you mean?’ Harry. He would be the cost of her concession; she and Harry would be forever partners in a strained dance of pretence and evasion. Her voice rose. ‘It would have been tough on Sandi. Harry would have been fine. Harry will always be fine.’

Hector caught the scorn in her voice and his happiness ceased, his smile evaporated. She couldn’t help it, it was spiteful, but she was glad. He beckoned Wayan over and they ordered.

‘People do change, Aish.’

She had been looking out to sea and was at first confused by his words. She laughed cynically when she finally understood his meaning. ‘Harry will never change.’

Hector groaned. ‘He’s apologised for hitting Hugo. They’ve dragged him through court, they fucked him well and truly. What else do you want from him?’

‘I’m not just talking about that. You know what I’m referring to.’

‘Jesus, that was over ten years ago...’

She snapped. ‘He bashed her. The bastard bashed her.’ She was glaring at him, coiled and alive and ready to strike.

He did not answer. She knew he was recalling the night as well. She had been pregnant with Adam. They heard the car’s brakes screech in their driveway and when Sandi had emerged, the blood thick and black on her shirt and pants, they had thought her drunk. Then they realised that her nose was broken, her lips split, her jaw so dislocated she could not speak. She fell on Hector and two teeth dropped onto the ground. Leave him, Aisha said, almost making it an order. But Sandi had not left him. Hector took her to the hospital on Bell Street and she told them she had fallen down the Fairfield Station steps. She and Aisha had never spoken about it since.

‘He’s never hit her again.’

‘So he says.’ Aisha lifted her head and looked her husband straight in the eyes. ‘I will visit Sandi, I will be a friend. But I will never forgive your cousin, do you understand? I hate him. I detest that he is in my life.’

Hector was the first to blink, to look away. ‘I understand,’ he mumbled, and she believed him. She breathed a sigh of relief.

Her anger dived back into the deep, straight under the waves, down to the depths. She smiled serenely. ‘It’s a heavenly night, isn’t it?’

 

She did not feel normal again until they were home, until she walked out into Melbourne Airport and saw her children. She scooped them both into her arms, smelt them, Adam’s bracing, earthy scent, Melissa smelling girly and fresh, of the honey and almond soap that Koula used; they both smelt of garlic and lemon and of her in-laws’ home. She wanted to take them away, for them all to be together as a family. This was life, this was what mattered, this was what made all the concessions and compromises and defeats worthwhile. She could not let them go, held her daughter’s hand in the car, kept sweeping her hand across Adam’s hair. They chatted away to her, interrupting, arguing, calling each other names, telling her about school and sports and
Giagia
and
Pappou
and about the cat and about football and about dancing lessons and about
Australian Idol
and their friends and their trip to the cinema and she took it all in and wanted to hear about it again and again. She had missed out on two weeks of their young lives. The moon over Amed, the rich smells and succulent food, the hours lazing in the sun, none of that compared to the two weeks she had missed out of her children’s lives. She couldn’t help herself squeezing their knees, kissing them, touching them. Melbourne unfolded tediously and grimly as they drove down the freeway towards the city. It looked like a carcass that had been out in the sun for too long, stripped of life, of meat, of texture, of smell. But when Manolis dropped them all off in front of their house she had to stop herself from crying with relief.

Within a few days she was safely back in the warm hearth of suburban first-world life. Clean streets and fresh air. Bangkok, Bali, all of Asia receded and all that had occurred there began to be forgotten. She found too that being at work excited her again, for the first time in years. She was glad of her assured, practised skill with the animals. The questioning and hesitations that were an inevitable aspect of diagnosis had not changed but they no longer filled her with trepidation. Those fears belonged to a young woman. She was not that. Tracey baked a cake for her first day back and even Connie biked down from school to attend the lunch. She distributed the little gifts and souvenirs she had picked up for them in the stalls and markets of Ubud and Bangkok. Later that day, in a brief moment of respite from the solidly booked afternoon—her regular clients had taken every available consultation with Aisha for her first week back—Brendan came in with pathology and blood results from the lab. Aisha quickly scanned them, noting the client’s name. She knew the animal, a goofy, sad-eyed Alsatian called Zeus. The results were quite clear. Brendan had removed two small lumps from its right foreleg and they had returned, malignant. But there were anomalies in the blood results as well. Her hunch was pancreatic cancer. It was Brendan’s case but they had both treated Zeus and they had both been concerned about recurring abdominal pain and vomiting, the reason the animal had first come in for a consultation. The owners were good people, Greeks, both on pensions. They loved the dog but in the Mediterranean way, not as part of the family. Zeus’s function was to protect them and their house.

‘Should I book him in for amputation and maybe get Jack in for an ultrasound?’

He was a good dog, but already a good age for the breed. The owners could be guilt-tripped into more tests but the prognosis was not good.

She handed him back the path reports and shook her head. ‘They can’t afford it and the costs could skyrocket. I think it’s time to put him down.’

‘I missed you.’

She blushed, surprised. They worked well together but neither of them were demonstrative or affectionate within the workplace.

‘I’ve missed you too,’ she answered. ‘I’ve missed this place, I’ve missed being home.’

And it was true. She hadn’t missed anyone individually as such—except her children, and even with them it had not been missing her son or missing her daughter, she had missed
her
children—but she was glad for the familiar textures, rhythms and shapes of her life. Family, work, friends. Brendan was an excellent colleague, smart, capable; she could leave her business confidently under his care for a fortnight. She enjoyed work, she enjoyed swimming eighty laps three times a week at the local pool, she enjoyed the bitchy, honest camaraderie she shared with Anouk, she enjoyed being married to a man who still made women’s heads turn, she enjoyed—most days—the quarrels and mischief of her children. She did enjoy her life.

Nevertheless, something had changed. The first Friday back at work something snapped. She returned home drained, a slight pain at her temple; it had been a full schedule of consults with irritable, demanding clients. They happened, days when everyone seemed to be a shit. Hector had left her a message saying he was at the pub near his work in the city and could she pick up the kids from his parents’. She could hear him smooch a kiss to her on the message followed by a guilty, swift, ‘I love you, I’ll be home in time for dinner.’ She was meant to cook it, of course. She clamped her mobile phone shut and cursed. Fucking bastard.

Something had changed for her in Asia and it had been brought back home. That change, she was sure of it, had more to do with her husband than it had to do with her. She had come to take it for granted that marriage was a state of neutrality between herself and Hector, that all the accommodations, negotiations and challenges had been met. Of course, there was accident, illness, tragedy; all that was still possible. But she had no idea that the properties of their very marriage could be altered. She had taken her husband for granted. She wanted what she had, she wanted him to remain a young, charming, attractive man. She wanted him to be content, with her, with the children, with his work. She was disturbed to find that the long nights of tears and confessions in Ubud and Amed had not led to resolution.

A few nights before Hector had scared her by talking about leaving the public service, finding new work, gaining new skills; he wanted to return to study. She had been encouraging but the words that she dared not utter were these: What about the mortgage? Are we never going to move to a bigger house? You’ve got a great job, security, fantastic pay—are you expecting me to look after us all? She could not say it. He was sleepless, anxious. He rarely joked, made her laugh—he always looked exhausted when he got back from work. And it was true, he no longer was a heavy sleeper. How had she not noticed that before Asia? He barely communicated with Adam. Their exchanges consisted of a series of surly and suspicious grunts. This scared her. What resentments would a teenage Adam act out in the near future?

Her husband hardly listened to music anymore, and of all the changes, this was the most disorientating. Their home had always been filled with music; their study, two walls of the dining room were packed floor to ceiling with the thin spines of CDs. In the past she had resented the amount of money he spent on his passion. But now she wished he would come home with the tell-tale canary-yellow bag from JB Hi-Fi, the thick paper package from Basement Discs or the garish plastic bag from Polyester. Hector rarely switched on the radio anymore. Aisha distrusted his unhappiness, she believed it to be a pose. But she dared not reveal her doubts. Instead, she was tender, tried not to snap at him. Just the other day she had read the music reviews in
The Age
—she never did!—and had slipped out from work to the small music shop in the plaza and bought Hector a CD from a band called Yo La Tengo. She was sure he had earlier records by this band and the reviewer had claimed that the CD would be one of the albums of the year. She had brought it home and he had been grateful, playing it immediately. But just that once. The disc remained in the stereo, the sleeve sat empty, desolate on top of the glass case that protected the turntable. Hector seemed unable to sustain happiness. That was what was unusual, what she had taken for granted. That is what she wanted back in her life. Let her take him for granted, let him do the same with her. This was marriage.

Fucking bastard. She had tears in her eyes as she drove the few short minutes to her in-laws. She could not bear Koula to know she had been crying. She fixed her face in the rearview mirror, breathed slowly and deeply three times. She was ready.

She kissed her mother-in-law on both cheeks. Melissa dragged her over to the kitchen table and they sat together while her daughter, with a conceited cock to her head, proudly showed off her maths homework. She was so much like Hector. Aisha walked into the lounge room. Manolis was asleep in the armchair and Adam was watching some silly reality show on television. She kneeled and lightly brushed her lips on the tips of his hair. He smelled of olive oil, of his grandmother’s food; and there was a slight putrid stink, mangy, animal, boyish, that made Aisha wrinkle her nose. Adam neither recoiled nor accepted her kiss. He was becoming something that was not a boy anymore. She felt the world crush down on her. Everything was changing. Manolis let out a sudden harsh gasp and she quickly turned around. He was stretching his arms out, yawning. She kissed him. Manolis smelled the same as always, the comforting odour of the garden, the lemon and garlic and oregano: like her kids he smelled of his wife’s cooking. She smiled down at him. His eyes analysed her cooly.

‘How are you, darling?’

She felt a pang of guilt. She still had not rung Sandi and it had been over a fortnight since their return. She had promised her husband. ‘I’m fine.’ She hesitated, then promptly lied. ‘I’ve lost Sandi’s number. I really need to ring her . . . and Harry,’ she added hastily.