Page 65 of Kiwi Gold
I stood up, maybe because I thought better when I was moving, and maybe because I wanted to hold her, and I couldn’t. Instead, I started prying loose flamingo-pink tiles carefully off the wall around the tap, fortunately the only spot where they were loose. “Why do you imagine,” I said, “that you’re not those things? That you’re not every bit of that?”
It was too soon to say it. It was too soon to think it. I did it anyway.
She said, “Come on, Lachlan.” And laughed.
Suddenly, I was furious. “Why do you let him live in your head like that?”
She looked startled. “Who?”
“Kegan bloody Ashford. Just because he didn’t love you enough, why do you assume nobody would? Sounds to me like he couldn’t love anybody. Obsessed. That’s the word you didn’t say. And I know,” I went on, when her mouth opened to answer, “that I’m a fine one to talk.”
“What?” Now, all she looked was confused. “What do you mean, you’re a fine one to talk?”
“Single,” I said. “Unencumbered. Somewhat famously. Exploration geologist.” Thinking of my sisters, this morning, and how little I’d wanted to uncover the layers of whatever was going on there, and how certain I’d been that I was going to have to do it anyway. Thinking of Mali out there, its hidden ore deposits beckoning me.
“Lachlan,” she said. “You held Yasmin. You went to help your sisters last night, and your mum.”
“This morning as well,” I said, prying a tile loose and grimacing as it cracked under the pressure. “But full disclosure—I didn’t want to.”
“But you did it anyway. Sometimes I think …” She hesitated, then shook her head and ran a hand over her hair.
“What?” I asked. “What do you think?” I had all the loose tiles off now. Most of them had broken, but fortunately, she’d bought another box. White instead of pink, and I’d bet they’d been on some sort of final discount, but I couldn’t imagine there was a huge demand for this exact shade of pink, and she didn’t seem like the type to get too fussed over matching her tiles.
It was time to start getting rid of this grout, but I didn’t do it. Instead, I waited, and I thought about that first night, when her hair had been down and she’d seemed so startled about it. She’d taken it down, maybe trying to be different, to find another way to live, and had ended up running.
She was too conflicted for me, and too complicated. Not nearly far enough down the road to her future. And yet here I was, standing in her bath with an oscillating tool in my hand.
It was that mass of hair, maybe, so unfashionable and so unabashedly feminine. Her pride and her defiance, the part of her that was still saying, “This is who I am,” and refusing to compromise. The look on her face last night as she’d woven her Scheherazade story, and the fatigue on that same face today, when she’d had so much to do, and she’d stopped anyway and sat down with her girls, because that was what they needed.
I didn’t want to care. I couldn’t help it.
She said, “I’m not sure it really matters why you do things. Whose motives are pure? Not mine. So if you want to help me today, knowing that I don’t know how to date somebody, I guess … have at it. I’ll take it, and I’ll give you a pretty average dinner,” she added with that irrepressible spark of humor returning again, “and tell myself it evens the scales. How’s that?”
I said, “Works for me. Shut the door behind you. Going to get dusty in here.” And put on the safety glasses.
I’d heard my mum called “strong” for most of my life, I thought as the tool whined and bit into the grout, sending the chips flying. As a kid, I’d wondered how anybody could think that, because I’d heard her crying in the shower on too many nights. Those racking sobs had scared me, and they’d made me furious, too. At Peter, for leaving, for drinking, for failing. And at her, for putting us in this situation in the first place, for having four kids at once.
It had seemed to me, back then, that there must be somebody to blame. I hadn’t known yet that sometimes, life just happened. I was guessing that Laila might cry in this shower sometimes, too, hoping that the running water would hide the sobs from her kids. At least after this, a tile wouldn’t fall on her head while she was doing it.
I’d also thought, back then, that my mum’s wry, funny posts, the image she’d built up in the mind of the advertisers and her public, the only way she’d been able to think of to support five kids, were all one gigantic lie. I hadn’t been able to sort out how everything I saw could be one person. Not one genuine person, anyway. There was the sobbing, frightened, defeated woman I heard at night, and the determinedly calm, confident one negotiating on the phone for more time to pay the rent, the electric bill, the phone bill, her thumb obsessively clicking the end of her pen and the dark roots visible in her blonde hair, all the anxiety and imperfection that she hid from everybody else. And, finally, there was the cheerful, funny mum narrating the script she’d written as she spooned cereal into four open, hungry baby-bird mouths. Some part of that, I’d thought, had to be a lie, and it wasn’t the crying. The crying was real.
Now, maybe, I knew a wee bit more. I knew something about the quiet heroism of women who’d never stand on a medal platform or have their name in the newspaper or ski down a mountain, who got on with things because they had to be done, who found a way. Women who spent the days after their husband’s death filling the holes he’d left in the walls, even though they cried while they did it. Who adopted three-legged dogs, probably because nobody else had, and they couldn’t bear to leave those pleading eyes, that barely-hoping wagging tail behind. Women who took their hair down and waltzed in a nightdress, because they were trying to be somebody new. Even if it scared them. Even if it made them run.
And, it seemed, I was a sucker for a woman like that.
Unfortunately.
29
DATE NUMBER TWO. SORT OF
Laila
I had a crier on my hands.
Not one of my girls. They hadn’t cried all week, though Yasmin had kept Monk stuffed down the front of her shirt ever since Saturday, which gave her an odd sort of bumpy look. No, this was a nine-plus-pounder with an extremely healthy set of lungs, one of those big, bouncing babies who should be jolly and good-natured and instead are so sensitive, you spend more time getting them to sleep than they spend actually napping. He was emitting those startlingly loud, thin, newborn wails right now in Oriana’s arms, three hours into our session, no doubt causing Violet to draft a stern letter to the council. Meanwhile, the woman on the couch looked like she was about to cry, too, while unbuttoning her shirt as if that was now her automatic reaction to any vicissitude of life. A week could seem like an eternity to a new mum, her life before the birth hazy and indistinct, and her life in the future about the same, but with more dirty nappies involved.
I said, trying for “voice audible over the shrieks” but also “still calm and cheerful,” “I don’t think he needs to feed. He’s fed four times already. Oriana will walk him and settle him down.”
