Stories Memoir Short piece
Take Two
You’re woken by a thud on the pillow beside you, then purring in your ear and the tickle of whiskers. Swearing softly, you lift the covers and she hesitates, then joins you in the warmth. It isn’t light yet; there’s time before the alarm. You roll over and she settles in the small of your back, her winter coat soft against your skin.
The alarm wakes you again with ocean sounds, in what feels like five minutes. You scrabble for the snooze button and lie there listening to the birds over the steady hum of the traffic. When guilt finally wins, you roll out of bed, take off your t-shirt and necklace, and pad into the bathroom. You wait, shivering, for the shower to run hot; then it turns and you step in gratefully, the heat up as high as you can stand it. You save your face for last, using the facial wash you keep buying in the hope it’s helping you to retain the last vestiges of 30-something youthfulness.
Dry now, you face the mirror and take stock of time and not nearly enough sleep. Moisturiser, hair wax, a fiddle with the fringe you know won’t survive the walk to the car. You shave carefully, fingertips reading for missed patches, careful of nicks, as smooth as you can be bothered being. A dab of aftershave — let’s be honest, it’s perfume — and then don your corporate costume: suit and tie.
The cat miaows, impatient, while you choose. Downstairs, Alex is still asleep, but Lachy’s been up half an hour and is installed on the couch under a rug, watching cartoons. It’s ten degrees down here. You put the heating on and start the morning’s assembly line: a peanut butter sandwich for Lachy, who won’t eat cereal; Nutri-grain for Alex, who will; the boys’ lunches; fruit chopped for playlunch; your own sandwich, made while you wish you could just buy something warm. Ten to eight. You climb the stairs to wake Alex, who arrives ten minutes later still in his pyjamas, and is instantly lost to the TV. It takes three increasingly loud commands to get him to dress for school. You check the clock and get the coffee on before it’s too late to drink it, breathing in the aroma of ground beans.
The boys go quiet as you eat your toast over the web forum. The resident bully has swept through, leaving her usual trail of invective — half amusing, half dispiriting. Some newbie has resurrected a thread from 2004, resulting in a score of scornful responses. A friend’s dry one-liners make you laugh. Nothing in your inbox today. You reread a message from a couple of days ago and catch yourself smiling at the hint of a weekend encounter, after dropping the kids off on Friday night. The start of your child-free week, something you simultaneously look forward to and dread.
It’s nearly time to go. Lachy’s ready; Alex is nowhere. You gulp the coffee and head up. He’s on the bedroom floor, completely naked, playing on his GameBoy. Swallowing the anger (and a little guilt), you ask him, calmly, to be dressed and downstairs in five minutes.
Ten minutes later you’re locking up and driving them to school. They want Green Day, so you give them Green Day, all three of you bawling “American Idiot.” A kiss for each of them, and you pull out into the traffic toward the station.
The station car park is full. You circle, irritation rising, though you’d still rather this than before-school care every day. Nothing. You weigh the cost of a fine against parking illegally — and then, there: someone pulling out of a spot right in front of the station itself. Thanking the Parking Faeries (they’re real) you take it, buy a ticket, and wait.
iPod time. Headphones on, you choose the ’80s playlist and Aimee Mann begins to sing “Voices Carry”, her voice riding a haunting synth lead. That hushed verse about lying in the dark afraid of what reading a lover’s mind might turn up. You take it into yourself, let it carry you away from where you’re actually going. Up next: “The Sun Always Shines On TV”, by A-Ha. Morten’s falsetto over sweeping synth strings, drums chattering from ear to ear. A LinnDrum or a Roland 707? Machines as architecture, human providing the morality.
On the train, a woman a few rows down locks eyes with you and holds your gaze a little too long. Something flickers, an exchange of sorts, and you feel the old reflex to look away. This time, you don’t; she does.
Nearly there. Needing your spirits bolstered, you flick to Powerstation’s “Get It On,” and the crash of the drums sets you on your feet as the train slows. Onto the platform, a confident stride to the escalator that doesn’t entirely mirror your mindset. Up you go, remembering to look up as the old shot tower emerges, worn red bricks now protected by the glass ceiling. Out into the cold again and down the busy road to the office. Past the beautiful clothes that tease, the glut of coffee shops, the fashion victims in their Ugg boots. Up, and into reality.
Reality, today, is Sensis, the place that prints the phonebooks most people now leave in the linen cupboard gathering dust. A neon veneer of panache covers everything here as if to say, “we’re hip and creative and nothing like our parent!”
In the kitchen over tea and coffee and Bonox, the future is being confidently dismissed. Google. Altavista. Yahoo!. Someone says the internet on a phone will always be too slow. Someone else loves that the Scouts and local sporting clubs still make a few dollars delivering the directories, and why would that ever change. Picking up on the lead-in, a third offers an old gag: when you drop the White Pages on the doorstep with a satisfying thud, be sure to take two. One to leave behind, the other to fend off the growling dog. They laugh. You can see the whole tectonic shift from where you’re standing and not one of them can or will. But as a contractor, there’s no currency in being the one to point it out.
The day is meetings, then more meetings. Agendas breed more agendas; terminology is debated as scripture, ad infinitum. When is a ‘service’ more like a ‘capability’? Or is it better described as a ‘function’? Process admiring itself in the mirror. Between them runs the commentary: the easy certainties of comfortable middle-aged men, a joke about a female co-worker that you decline to laugh at, something contemptuous about the opposition and the election that’s coming. You keep your face neutral and feel your soul slowly diminishing.
Then the phone goes, and it’s the school: Alex has come off something in the yard and opened up his knee. Nothing serious, but he’s crying and someone has to come. You gather your things, and you can feel rather than see the judgement around the table — the verdict that you are not quite serious about the work. You pack your things and go.
Guilt keeps you company the whole way back. Through the window of the empty train, a billboard slides past: KEVIN 07, red and white and grinning. You wonder how Alex is, whether you should buy him a treat, or not make a fuss.
He’s fine, all smiles when you walk into the school office, wearing the bandaged knee like a medal now. Along the way home, there’s a stop at the supermarket for their favourite dinner — chicken satay skewers, broccoli, potatoes, carrots. Simple stuff, nothing to argue over.
The kitchen fills with the smell of meat under the grill, and the two of them share the Playstation — Lachy, ten and certain, needling Alex, eight and easily wounded — until it tips over into a fight and you put down the knife to referee, again, the oldest job in the house. The Playstation is both a godsend and source of angst for all. “It’s the only reason Lachy and Alex want to visit you,” spat your ex during one heated email exchange. The anger rises in your chest and you control it, exhale it, as your therapist taught you.
You eat in front of the news, the election noise and the world’s larger troubles reduced to a glow on three faces, Lachy shovelling his broccoli florets onto Alex’s plate while you pretend you don’t see. You stand over the dishes while they do them, which takes far longer than doing it yourself ever would, reminding yourself this won’t always be the case.
Baths. Teeth. The long process of getting them to bed. Reading stories. Then the house goes quiet and you move through it surveying the day’s wreckage, collecting toys, odd socks, a stray skewer stick, and setting it back to something like order.
The light of the computer screen fills the void when you finally retire to the den. You hit the forums first, reconnecting with the drama of the online world: the dry one-liners and running arguments. That warm feeling of being known by people you’ve never met. You look in on the dating sites, half hoping, half braced. You read the day’s news properly now, without the distraction of children. And there in the email, feedback from the student director on your screenplay. You read it twice — once fast for the verdict and once slowly for the truth.
Then bed. You lie in the dark and the day returns in pieces. The shot tower coming into view, the grazed knee, a line of someone else’s notes on your pages, Saturday night. Tomorrow you get to do it all again: take two.
A thud on the covers, the old familiar weight finding the small of your back, the purr starting up. You let her stay, grateful for the company. Sleep comes and takes you without ceremony.