‘Aren’t we all? So are you,’ she replied, crushing out her cigarette.
He did not answer.
‘That session got to me,’ she said. ‘More than I thought it would.’
‘That’s going to happen, it’s better to admit it upfront. Do you have something you do when you want to unwind?’ he asked.
‘I go and sink myself in music. I can get lost in it for hours. I might do that when I get home.’
‘Probably a good idea.’
Silence.
‘Do you have anything you do?’ she asked.
‘If it’s bad, I go and see my son. He always makes me feel like I’m a human being again. If I want a real break, I go fishing down the coast. I like to hear the sound of the sea. Nothing very exciting.’
Once more, they sat in silence. Why are we sitting talking like this, he thought? Why don’t you let me ask you home? I’ve got a sound system of my own even if the last time I bought a CD was a year ago and I can’t remember what it was. I’ve got a comfortable bed upstairs in my bedroom. I would love to see you sitting naked on my bed with your hair out on your shoulders, your mind as far away from work as it can get. He shook the thoughts out of his head.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘I was just thinking about the work I’ve got to do,’ he said, slightly embarrassed, glad she could not see into his mind.
‘Yeah,’ she said, looking at him with that same sadness, ‘I won’t hold you up any longer.’
‘I wasn’t rushing you, Grace. Please don’t think I was.’
‘It doesn’t matter, I’ve got to go anyway. I’ve got work to do as well.
What do I owe you for the coffee?’
She was already on her feet, putting on her coat.
‘This is on me, I told you that. Why don’t you go home if you’re feeling low. Give me the tape and I’ll get it written up.’
‘Yeah, okay. Thanks.’
She set the tape on the table without looking at him and walked out, leaving him with his own company, an unfinished coffee and a half-drunk whisky, asking himself what it had all meant. If it had meant anything at all. He watched her through the window of the coffee shop as she crossed the street, thinking that he had made her a gift of his time when he had none to spare and she had not noticed.
He finished his whisky, left a note on the table to pay and walked out as well, going back to work.
Out on Oxford Street in the bright lights and the moving traffic Grace felt savage, emotional pain, just as she had in the hospital; the cold air woke her to its rawness. Whatever you want, Harrigan, I don’t want you to waste your time with me. I don’t need to feel anything for you that’s just going to go nowhere.
This was an old grief, wasted emotion, possibilities that die at birth.
She worked to put him out of her mind as she stood at the traffic lights.
She might keep Harrigan out of her head but the Firewall stayed on, hooked into her. Grace crossed the wide road with everyone else, pinned between the bright lights of the cars. Your father did rape you, didn’t he?
And your mother stood by and she let him. And then they cleaned you up when they needed to without even talking to you. I know how you feel, I’ve been there once upon a time myself.
This quiet whisper of fact in Grace’s mind nonetheless held the implication of its reverse: that other fathers did, something scarcely comprehensible to her in terms of her own experience. In terms of her work, it was a simple fact, like a piece of rock which for some reason had a particular shape. It was just the way it was.
At home, she stripped, washed, changed, shook out her hair, brushing it until it shone, but even so, in her tiny lounge room the walls closed in. She switched off the main lights and sat on her couch, looking out at the streets below, to the small scrape of beach in the near distance. On her lap, she held a red silk box fastened with an ivory catch. After a while, she opened the box and set out its contents on the coffee table. Saucers, miniature cups with elegant handles, an ornamental teapot, a sugar bowl, all removed from their pockets of faintly yellowing white silk. A tea set, her grandfather’s gift to her when she was nine, something pretty and delicate, bought in Hong Kong when he was twenty. The very first time she had taken these pieces out to look at them, she had cracked the fragile bowl. Her grandfather had comforted her as she cried. ‘Don’t worry, Gracie,’ he said, laughing at her softly, cuddling her, ‘nothing is for ever.’
Even in the soft light, this faintest of hairline cracks threw a shadow on the fine china, an indelible discoloration of age. If she turned the bowl towards a certain fall of the light, she could not see the crack, only a courtesan’s face and dark hair in a soft surrounding cloud. The bowl sat in Grace’s hands as she might have held a tiny living child, a child whose watching eyes looked out at the world from a perspective no one else could reach, but who could not speak. This was her own thought child, the child Grace chose not to have. Its brief existence lived on in her as an only twin might carry somewhere in her body the partially formed foetus of her brother or sister, knowing it is there, curled and sleeping, that it could have grown and separated but has not done so. A ghost fixed as a part its mother’s being, as something not quite living and not quite dead.
I am not sorry, she thought. I cried then and I think about it now but I am not sorry. All I felt when it was over was relief. That’s all I feel now.
Nothing is for ever. She set the pieces of china out in a pattern on the coffee table. Moonlight and streetlight streamed in through the windows. In this light, the fine white china was almost radiant, its delicate shapes formed into a pattern of partial shadows fitted against a pale transparency. Grace’s mind was making images, of a mother and daughter sitting side by side on a train or a bus, both of them silent, both of them looking straight ahead at nothing perhaps, the young girl uncertain of their destination and left wondering if she was going to live long enough to reach it. What would they say to each other, sitting side by side like that? Nothing. Nothing at all.
She could not stay in this room, it was too small. Grace phoned her old lover and asked him for sanctuary.
‘Come on around, sweetheart. You’re always welcome. I’ll put some music on. I’ll even indulge you in some Elvis Costello. Christ!’ he said.
Grace laughed.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Will I pick up some takeaway for us?’
‘Yeah, do that. You can help me eat it.’
‘Okay. We can share it with some apple juice.’
She heard him laugh on the other end of the line.
‘Not what we used to do,’ he said.
‘No. See you soon anyway.’
Grace binned her cigarettes and then dropped her beeper into her bag but made sure that her mobile phone was turned off for the duration. She stopped at a takeaway place, a glass window on the street that sold experimental mixtures of cuisine, and bought solace for herself and her old lover with the plastic containers. In her first months of abstinence from alcohol, the world had settled into a dry balance. Her mind had taken on something resembling clarity and she had rediscovered appetite and taste, qualities she had thought were lost for ever. Her brother, Nicholas, was a cook, an unexpected occupation for an army officer’s son. He had taught her how to eat in those first days, practising his cooking on her while they had shared a house together, where she had recovered and he had learned his art.
Now, if we were ever to have sex, Paul, I’d cook for us first, or I’d want us to eat somewhere nice, because food’s important. She and Harrigan would never do so, so the possibilities did not matter.
She drove up the coastline to the northern beaches, to Whale Beach.
The stars were distant out over the sea, made pale and small by the reflection of the city’s lights. She sang ‘Time after Time’ softly to herself as she drove.
By the time she arrived and could hear the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, she felt she could be herself. The outside light was on and the door was open and waiting for her. She didn’t come here often enough any more, not the way she’d used to. Another life was taking her over, pushing the old one to the side.
‘Hi, Frankie. How are you?’ she called out, walking in the door.
‘Hi there, Grace. Pretty good tonight.’
