Too Close to Home (3 page)

FREYA IS MEETING MIKHALA in a bar behind Central. She's early, and she takes a seat in a dark corner towards the back and looks around the room. It's Sunday evening but still relatively crowded. Most of the people are younger than her and as she glances across at a man leaning against the bar, he catches her eye. She wonders what it would be like to sleep with someone else again, the strangeness and excitement hard to imagine.

She picks up one of the free news sheets on the table in front of her and flips through until she comes to the pictures of people in a nightclub; faces pressed close to the lens, they leer in to the camera, features distorted. They are all having a Good Time. Was that what it was really like? She remembers how insecure she was when she first started university. She had studied Arts, majoring in drama with a vague notion that she would act. She was painfully shy, appalling on stage, but surprisingly confident when it came to devising productions.

She met Matt through the theatre group. He helped with set building and she watched him from a distance, unable to believe it when some months after he broke up with Anna, he kissed her, late one night at a rehearsal.

‘Why are you with me?' she would ask, and there was no reassurance he could give her that would dispel her doubt that she wasn't worthy.

She adored him. She smiles as she remembers the intensity of that longing, made all the more sharp by her fear of losing him.

‘Come on, if Anna wanted you back – would you go?'

Sometimes when he was out and she wasn't with him, she would be certain he had met someone else. It was like poison. Lying awake and waiting for him to come home to her place, her despair would no longer be imagined but would seep, viscous, through her blood. When he finally turned the key in the lock, gently, so as not to disturb her, she would be sitting rigid, fists clenched, accusing him of all she had come to convince herself was true.

And then, just as she had feared, as soon as he finished his architecture degree, he told her he was leaving. She still remembers that night. They ate dinner at his flat and walked along the beachfront. The warmth of the evening meant there were more people out than usual. A group of backpackers swam, the sea sleek and black, broken only by a line of white as a wave crashed into shore. She could hear them shouting, joyous, drunk, and she wished she were with them and not here with Matt, about to hear news she didn't want. Because she knew, before he'd even spoken a word, that he had asked her over to tell her what she'd always dreaded, and she'd looked at him, suspicious, angry when he suggested they go down to the ocean for a stroll.

‘Go on, say it. Just say it.'

And he had finally snapped. Yes, part of the reason he was going away was to get away from her. She suffocated him. He'd had enough. No, he didn't know how long he would be gone. He just wanted to travel. He wanted to be by himself. Freya closes her eyes momentarily and tries to recall the pain. Sometimes she likes to remember, to summon up a replica of that feeling, a ghost of its intensity. Kicked in the guts, reeling, nauseous. Everything had fallen apart. Her hands hold her stomach.

When she opens her eyes and looks up, Mikhala is there.

‘You all right?' she asks, and Freya tells her she's fine.

‘Just thinking,' she laughs, slightly embarrassed.

‘Sorry I'm late.' Mikhala sits opposite, her feet resting on the table between them, her beer perilously close to the edge.

Her hands are paint stained and she smells slightly of turps. She'd been working, she tells Freya, lost track of the time. She kicks the news sheet Freya had been reading to the floor and talks about her painting, the impossibility of capturing her vision.

‘You'd think it would get easier. But it's so fucking hard.'

‘Maybe it's the success of last time that makes it difficult.'

Mikhala sold out prior to the opening of her last exhibition, her work bought by several major collectors.

‘I can't believe it,' she'd told Freya at the time.

Freya had never seen anyone look so happy. That's what she remembers; looking at Mikhala's face and thinking:
So this is what ecstasy looks like
.

Now, Mikhala just shakes her head. ‘You know what I can't bear,' she says, as she sips her beer, ‘they'll buy my work regardless. They're lining up already. It's an investment. No one will care what it's like. I'll have no idea what anyone really thinks.'

‘Does it matter?' Freya asks. ‘Surely it's how you feel about it that's important.'

‘It matters,' Mikhala replies impatiently. ‘I know you say other people's opinions are irrelevant but you still want an audience to come and see it, to respond.'

‘I guess I was talking about the creative process. I can't let how others might feel interfere.' Freya looks at her empty glass and decides she will have another.

‘I'll get it,' Mikhala offers.

At the bar, Mikhala chats to the man Freya had glanced at when she first arrived. He moves in close and grins as she jokes. Slim hipped, boyish and confident, Mikhala is attractive and men are drawn to her. There is always someone new. It begins with an intensity, Mikhala is in love, this is the one, and her eyes sparkle as she goes into detail about their sex life, how fabulous it is. And then it ends as rapidly as it commenced. He leaves and Mikhala just doesn't get it, her eyes welling with tears and then anger as she recounts the last scenes. Yes, he had told her he was heading overseas, or perhaps he'd just come out of a long relationship, maybe he found it impossible to stay with anyone; the words had been said, loud and clear right at the beginning, yet Mikhala had somehow failed to hear them, and Freya would comfort her, reassure her that she would meet someone again and that this time it would be right.

Freya listens now as Mikhala tells her about the latest, a man who has a partner, although she's sure he will leave her.

‘He's different from the others. For a start, he's an adult.'

Lately, it seemed that all the men Mikhala had met had been at least ten years younger. She rolls her eyes at her own stupidity, now well in the past, and then continues to talk about this new man because it's going to be one of those nights, an evening where Mikhala dominates the conversation, awash with the excitement of love in her life.

And then, surprisingly, she stops. ‘You know I really want this one to last.'

‘It will,' Freya reassures her. ‘But just go easy. Let it breathe a little.'

‘You don't know what it's like,' Mikhala replies. ‘You've always had Matt. You have no idea how hard it is to be on your own and how much hope you invest each time you meet someone.'

Freya is irritated now. ‘I do remember being on my own. I was just trying to tell you that a bit of space can sometimes do wonders, even in the early stages.'

Mikhala doesn't flinch. ‘Grumpy?'

‘No,' Freya tells her, and she edges back on the couch.

Mikhala's gaze remains level. ‘Everything okay? With you and Matt?'

She remembers Matt talking to Mikhala outside the restaurant only a few weeks earlier, telling her he was bored, and how she had shied away from associating that comment with their relationship, despite knowing
that he, like her, would have times of feeling they had become stale. They live together, they have a child they both love, they bicker frequently, the same arguments that toss around and around, their sex life is okay, and then sometimes, when she least expects it, the love she once felt returns, filling her, carrying her with a strength she thought had gone. They know each other, and it is a private realm, a place that cannot be described in words. She wants to change the topic.

‘Can't we talk about you?' she smiles. ‘We're just dull and suburban. I'm on the brink of joining the P & C and he may even become a member of a dads' soccer club.'

Mikhala smiles. ‘Really?'

Freya doesn't reply immediately. ‘Actually, he's perpetually dissatisfied but I've learnt to live with that – most of the time – and I'm quite content. Which he probably hates.' And then she shakes her head. ‘I'm sorry,' she tells Mikhala. ‘I'm just out of sync with the world. I've been spending too much time writing.'

It's true. Since she has taken leave from her part-time job to try to finish her thesis, she has been alone every day and it makes her strange.

‘And Ella?' Mikhala asks.

‘Ella is wonderful,' Freya tells her. ‘She starts school tomorrow, which will probably turn me into a nervous wreck.' Freya smiles. ‘I hated being a kid.'

At the entrance to the bar, as they kiss goodbye, Mikhala holds her hand for a moment, and then as Freya is about to pull away from her friend's hold, she speaks without thinking, her words sharper than she intended. ‘Why does everyone think Matt and I represent a perfect
happiness?' She stares straight at Mikhala, who takes a step backwards.

‘Well, a lot of the time it looks pretty good from where I sit.'

Freya shakes her head and attempts to smile. ‘I think you see what you want to see. We're just people. Of course we're not happy all the time. No relationship is.'

 

Going home on the train, Freya glances idly at the newspaper on the seat. There's an article about global warming, another group of seemingly very conservative scientists urging action in the face of the government backing down on any immediate carbon trading scheme. She pushes it aside, overwhelmed as always by how depressing she finds the news, largely because she reads with anger and then frustration at her inability to act.

She stares out the window at the grey bulk of the factory buildings, the landscape slowly changing to small cottages with overgrown gardens tumbling down to the train tracks. In the months prior to moving to their new house, they had spent a long time looking around this area. With her inheritance from her mother, they could finally afford to buy somewhere. They didn't have enough to stay in the east where they had rented for years. They also hadn't liked the changes that wealth had brought to the places they knew, but when they came out here, Freya's certainty in the move faltered. She'd looked at the treeless streets baking in the harsh summer sun, she'd heard the aircraft low overhead and she had seen the rows of houses with security bars on the windows, small toilets out the back in concrete yards, choked with asthma weed.

‘It's bloody ugly,' she'd kept saying to Matt, and it was. ‘It's also dirty.' There was no sea breeze and the pollution hovered, gritty, in the air.

Matt had seemed less distressed. ‘That's the suburbs for you.'

He'd lived out here before, shortly after he returned from travelling north, during the time they'd been slowly finding their way back to each other. He knew the factory outlets for olives, the best Asian markets, and the parklands that stretched for miles along a polluted stretch of river.

‘See, it has its own charms.'

She'd resisted, baulking at the last minute, insisting that they try to get a small flat in the east, near where they currently lived. He'd refused, unwilling to sign up to a mortgage on a place he didn't want. In fact, when the arguments became particularly intense, he admitted to not wanting to buy anywhere at all. He wasn't ready for that kind of commitment.

She didn't know what he meant. ‘But we are together. We have a child. It's a bit late to be talking about commitment.'

They fought frequently, occasionally making attempts to keep their voices down so that Ella wouldn't hear, but often shouting at each other and slamming doors in fury.

Eventually the rage began to subside. He wanted to buy somewhere together, he told her. It was just accepting the reality of a mortgage and being tied to a job he didn't like.

She tried to reason with him. He needed a weekly wage regardless of whether they rented or not.

He knew that. But owning a place was different. This
felt like the last step in giving up, and he didn't want to do that, but he would. For her. And for Ella.

They started looking again, and the next weekend they found their house. There had probably been many others that had been right. There was nothing particularly special about the place they chose. It was just a matter of being ready. Strange, she told friends later. It was all so much harder than I had anticipated. More frightening for both of us than I'd expected.

Looking out the window now, she is glad they moved. The ugliness no longer affects her in the way it once did. For the first few months, she walked the streets, exhilarated by the change. Greek delicatessens, Vietnamese restaurants, African hair braiding salons; she would sit in a seedy Brazilian cafe and watch the deals taking place, while out on the street the whole world seemed to pass under the heat of the summer sun.

Matt, too, seemed happy. He rode his bike along the river, past swamplands and strange toxic dumps, finally emerging on the coast. On the weekends they planted a garden, painted rooms, put up shelves and made a home. Neither of them dared admit how much they enjoyed the domesticity of it all. Sometimes she feared they had become what they had both always sneered at: suburban. Occasionally they laughed about it, secretively, furtively.

She walks up the emptiness of the street towards home, looking forward to seeing Matt, surprised by the keenness with which she still misses him each time she goes out. She will tell him about Mikhala, how she spent the evening talking about herself and there will be no need for further explanation; he will know what
she's like. Any trace of the bleakness she had felt earlier has gone. She is not sure why it had arisen in the first place. She is lucky, life is good.

With her key in the lock, she pushes the front door open and is surprised to find a child, a small boy, asleep in the hall. Curled up, with his head on a pillow from their bed, he doesn't move, and as she bends closer to look at him, she realises that it must be one of those kids Matt had been talking to when she left. Archie, she thinks. That was his name.