The Best Thing Read online

  All weekend I’m walking on glass expecting the phone to ring again.

  ‘Come up to Newtown,’ says Mum on Sunday. ‘I’ll buy you lunch.’

  I make doubtful noises.

  ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘You need to get out of this house, out of your own brain.’

  ‘I suppose. Is there anywhere besides King Street, though? I get sick of going up there.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be there today to make it different for you. How about that?’

  ‘Oh, big treat.’ I feel so depressed and fatalistic I hardly even care that we might meet Pug.

  We don’t, and that depresses me even more. I try to eat a mound of salad and drink a milkshake (‘a big calcium pill for my grandchild’s bones,’ grins Mum) while I stare out the window, my eyes flicking from face to face.

  ‘Dave and I made a few decisions on Thursday night that you should know about,’ says Mum when her coffee comes.

  ‘Yeah? Like I go to Ricky’s place every second weekend?’

  She cracks up. ‘I hardly think! No, about the house.’

  ‘What, you can’t just draw a chalk line down the middle?’

  ‘Very big on the black humour today, darling.’ She pats my hand. ‘In fact, it could hardly be neater. The house just paid off, the child just flying the nest—’

  ‘I haven’t flown yet!’

  ‘Officially you have, not being at school any more.’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘For most purposes. You can stop being a dependent child just as soon as you apply for the single mother’s benefit at Social Security. Assuming that’s what you’re going to do. This is why I’m telling you this, so you can decide.’

  ‘What did you and Dad decide, though?’ I’m not looking out on the street any more. He could park himself with his nose against the window and I wouldn’t see him.

  ‘We’re selling the house, and splitting the proceeds.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘ASAP, as they say. Open for inspection next weekend.’

  I push the half-finished milkshake away from me. ‘What … what are you planning to do with your proceeds? Fly off overseas?’

  ‘Buy a house. One I like. I have to find it first.’

  ‘You don’t like our house? You don’t want to buy Dad’s half?’

  ‘I don’t, no, I have to say.’

  Long pause.

  ‘What if the house you like only has one bedroom?’

  Mum smiles, reaches for my hand. ‘I don’t know, Mel. What if it has?’

  ‘Then there won’t … then there’ll only be room for—for you.’ Tears spill down my cheeks. I pull my hand out of Mum’s and reach for a paper serviette.

  She watches me for a little while. ‘This is why, you see, you have to know. Who’s going to decide first? Do I factor you in or out of my house? Are you going to strike out on your own or plump for staying with Mum?’

  But it’s not even that I’m crying about. And I’m crying, I’m crying. When she stops talking I put my head down on the table and sob. After a while I feel her hand on my hair, stroking. Cry as long as you like, her fingertips say. So I do. I don’t try to talk for a long time.

  Finally I sit up. She offers me her serviette, mine being a sodden ball.

  ‘It’s just …’ I risk a look at her. She’s listening, sympathetic. ‘Feel like I’ve got no-one,’ I get out.

  ‘I don’t understand this. What happened to all your mates from last year? You had friends; did you give them all up for this Dino fellow?’

  In a tight, cold voice I tell her what happened to them, where Pug fits in, the way my HSC kamikaze’d. She listens without interrupting once. When I get to the bit about Brenner throwing the stones she turns her head aside for a second, her mouth a thin line. Still she says nothing, until I reach the end, the last time I saw Pug.

  ‘And that was the day I found out about the baby. I went over there thinking I’d tell him everything, but I only got half of it out, about Dad and Ricky, and then this headache got in the way.’

  ‘But you were there all day,’ she reminds me gently. ‘How long does it take to say “Dino, I’m pregnant”?’

  ‘I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do it.’ I shake my head and stare at the saltshaker, tears threatening again.

  She heaves an enormous sigh, as if she’s forgotten to breathe for the last five minutes.

  ‘What was stopping you, do you think? What’s stopping you now? Because, frankly, I’m not all that clear why you’re not with him now, sharing some of these changes with him. It’s not that you’ve got nobody, so much as you’ve cut yourself off, from some of these people, at least. From Dino, quite deliberately. Lisa—well, as you say, you gave her the ammunition, and Lisa, being Lisa, just went ahead and used it. She wouldn’t have the wits to do anything else. Brenner certainly abandoned you; Dad did the dirty on both of us, even though you actually forced the split, when it came down to it—’

  ‘What, would you rather not have known?’

  ‘Well, I certainly liked him a lot better when I didn’t know, and who knows, it might have blown over. He might’ve got over it.’

  ‘Mum! A year, remember, it’d been going on.’

  ‘True. But anyway, that’s not the point. You cut me off, too, that’s what I was getting around to saying.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘All this stuff you’re telling me now, all of this is new to me. Terrible, awful things, things I might have had some power to help you change if you’d only told me. Here I was thinking the HSC was getting you down, telling myself about the pressure the teachers must be putting on you, when the HSC was just about the last thing on your mind. I really … I’m really …’ She spreads her hands, shrugs.

  ‘Pissed off at me?’

  ‘No. No. Not angry. Well, angry in some ways, but not that way. I don’t—hey, let’s get out of this place, shall we? I need a bit of air.’

  We walk along King Street in the wind. It occurs to me that if we ran into Pug now I would happily introduce him to my mum. I would be able to do it so that he, she and I could all retain our dignity.

  Mum takes my hand and pulls it through her arm. ‘I’m really wondering where I went wrong, that you didn’t feel you could come to me, your mum—oh, Christ, I sound just like my mother trying to finagle intimate details out of me! But truly, I feel as if I must’ve slipped up somewhere, if you couldn’t trust me enough to say anything.’

  We walk up Church Street. I don’t feel the need to say anything. I’m just as confused as she is—worse, I’m feeling so woolly from crying, and so relieved at having told her, that I don’t really care why I didn’t tell her before.

  ‘Was it the abortion?’

  ‘I didn’t have an abortion,’ I remind her.

  ‘No, I mean the arranging of it. Was I too eager to suggest it or something? Is that why—that has to be—is it?’ She stops at the corner of the park and looks at me.

  ‘Is it what?’

  ‘That’s why you waited so long, isn’t it?’ she says softly.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘With this pregnancy. Before telling me. Twelve weeks, they said at the hospital, was about the cutoff point for having an abortion, and it must have been twelve weeks almost to the day that your little note came under the door.’

  Suddenly I feel guilty as anything, even though I know that—‘I didn’t even think of that! I didn’t know, till that day! How could you think that I’d be … plotting like that …?’ I’m outraged, panting.

  ‘Maybe you didn’t think,’ she continues slowly, ‘or know what you were doing consciously. Maybe something made you not think or know. Some part of you still curious about the baby that miscarried, about the whole process. How does that strike you as a possibility?’

  I drop my gaze. ‘I don’t know, but I didn’t work the whole thing out beforehand. As long as you don’t think that.’

  The park is wide and green, sliced into triangles by paths. It’s easy to bec
ome small, crossing it among the hooning dogs, the city spread out to the north. The distance makes my eyes strain, used to focusing no farther than across the street. Mum stays quiet beside me, walking, thinking, working things out.

  The working week is five times longer than the working day, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just numbingly, boringly, hopelessly long. When your own company is making you uncomfortable, it’s unbearable.

  Get out of the house. I do what I have to do. I have my first prenatal visit up at the birth centre. I go to Social Security and apply for the benefit; I cease being a dependent child. When I run out of official business I go into town and window shop, but the arrays of bright goods are beside the point, somehow. I walk beside the water watching the ferries and the tourists. All day I speak to no-one. Even at the railway station the tickets come from a machine. But at least the time passes as the city passes in front of my eyes.

  I spend the next few days walking out from home, trying to get beyond the area I know, into other people’s streets, shopping centres, lives. Best is being freed from the cramped streetlets of Camperdown and Newtown into the big-blocked silences of Haberfield and beyond, lulled by all the walking into forgetfulness of where I am and how I might get home, wandering through some light-industrial warren of streets with hardly so much as a footpath to walk on, through strange metallic and paint smells, clashes of machinery, past men in overalls loading boxes into delivery trucks, worn signs and skiploads of mysterious rubbish hulking in carparks.

  I begin to spend all day out. My mission is just to go, to keep moving, to stupefy myself with all those steps. That’s my work. I come home when it starts to get dark, when Mum’s there to fill the house. Then we talk and eat together. Then I sleep, long and deeply, without dreams.

  Message from inside. I’m lying awake in the moonlight, and I put my hand on where it should be, and it is. Like underground tapping from a cave miles and miles away. It seems so lonely somehow, that it’s in there, not knowing anything much, just being. My first memories are from when I was about three—that’s so much time to get through before it starts interacting like a normal person. What is it before then? Kind of like a moving, crying, excreting doll?

  But you can’t think like that about that little moving ghost, that movement so small I had to concentrate and be so still myself and listen to it under my own heartbeats and digesting dinner. Well, of course you can—people kill babies when they’re inside them and quite large, and when they’ve been born, and sometimes when they’re half grown up, with cruelty or murder. But I’m just mad curious, busting to know, busting to see. In one way. And then, if I look into its face, and see Pug there … what then? My brain ices over, my thoughts gridlock. I can’t handle it.

  The day of the inspection we buy the Saturday papers and go to Leichhardt to wait it out. Mum is calm enough, but it gives me the creeps to think of people tracking through our house, viewing it as an investment.

  We do our fruit and vegetable shopping and then adjourn to Via Veneto, where Mum settles to the papers and I brood at the window. Part of me really wants to tell her about feeling the baby move last night, but I can’t find the right words, the right tone—I don’t want to sound coy, or too rapt, or offhand about it, I don’t want to blurt it out. In the end she’s so focused on the papers that I can’t bring myself to say anything.

  I’m a stranger to myself, tall, sore-legged, an invisible planet in my middle. I feel as if I’ll never smile again.

  ‘G’day, Mel!’ It’s Luciano coming in with a friend. ‘How’s things?’

  ‘Oh … fine. Mum, this is Lu, Dino’s brother. This is my mother Jan.’

  ‘G’day, Jan.’

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ says Mum, perfectly friendly.

  ‘You okay these days?’ Lu looks at me, quite seriously for him.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘How’s the studying?’

  ‘Oh, you know, moving along.’ I’m embarrassed, Mum sitting there knowing I’m lying.

  ‘Good on you. See you round, hey?’

  ‘Yeah. Bye.’

  Mum has a smile and a frown on her face at the same time. ‘I suppose you know what you’re doing?’

  I lean my chin on my hand. ‘Nope. No idea.’

  She gives a rueful laugh, shakes her newspaper into position. ‘Nice-looking boy. What’s Dino like?’

  ‘Nicer.’

  ‘That came back pretty quickly.’

  ‘Nicer looking, nicer person. About the same IQ, though—well, maybe a point or two more.’

  She reaches for the sugar for her second espresso. ‘Well, you know my feelings about this. I don’t know what you’re waiting for.’ Her eyes are already moving across the newsprint.

  His tolerance to all head blows is reduced. After being struck on the jaw he remains dazed for a longer period than formerly and is more likely to be knocked out (‘glass jaw’). After a blow on the head his legs will be a little shaky and feel numb. His timing begins to fail and the fighter is no longer as dangerous on the offensive as he had been. His defence, which had been steadily improving with each encounter, becomes less effective, and the pugilist, who previously had been adroit enough to go through a career unmarked, now begins to develop a flat nose and cauliflower ears. Later, his knees tend to give way after a head blow, and a slight dragging of the feet may be noticed, although often only as the contestant is walking to his corner at the end of a round. The fighter still boasts of feeling fine and capable, but now loses engagements which formerly he could have won with ease.

  There are two people interested in buying our house. We spend the rest of the weekend poking around other people’s houses and flats that are open for inspection. Mum’s full of energy for this, but I drag along behind her. I don’t want a new house, I don’t want everything picked up, moved, rearranged. I want something to stay the same. Please?

  I catch two trains and a bus to Bondi beach. It’s a grey day; a cold wind blows in gusts off the sea. I walk up the cliff path and I’m glad that the wind’s there—it’d be a real problem trying to throw myself off the edge.

  There is just the wind fluting across my ears, and the planes barging overhead. Hardly anyone’s around except old people and dog-walkers. I pass a girl- and boyfriend jigging school(s) together, feel so old—the uniforms, and their nervous look, self-conscious. I feel like patting them on the head and saying ‘Make sure you use a condom, dears.’ It’s the one good moment of the day, knowing I’m free of all that.

  The rest is numbness. Monday, and a Siberia of empty days ahead. Our funereal house where everywhere I turn I’m saying goodbye to something. You get to know a house when you grow up in it. You can walk through it in total darkness without bumping into anything. You get the restfulness of belonging somewhere. Instead of that I’m like a person being tossed up in a blanket—all around me people are gripping the edges and laughing and throwing me up, getting right into the game, while I fly and fall above their heads, too scared to tell them to stop.

  ‘Your young man came by.’

  Mum’s sitting in front of the fire. I close the door behind me, take off my scarf. ‘What for?’

  ‘To see how you were. To see if you were okay. To find out why you’re suddenly incommunicado.’

  I’ll bet he didn’t say incommunicado! But I’m not going to go into all this with Mum, not again. ‘So what did you think of him?’

  Mum pauses, looks into the fire. ‘I thought he seemed like a really nice person.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes. He wasn’t what I expected at all.’

  ‘No?’ I don’t want to hear this, I realise. But I was the one who asked, so I guess …

  She looks at me with a glint of amusement. ‘Sometimes you talk about him as if he were … well, mentally challenged, shall we say.’

  ‘Well, he isn’t an … an Einstein or anything,’ I mumble.

  ‘But who is? Only Einstein was Einstein. There are other ways of us
ing your brain. I thought he was very together, for a boy his age. Very mature.’

  ‘Mature?’ I really, really don’t want to stand here and listen. This is starting to throw me. Mum’s obviously feeling sharp and clear-headed, while I’m stunned and stupid with wind and sea and train-rattle.

  ‘He was also very upset.’

  Suddenly I’m terrified. ‘You didn’t tell him, did you, about the baby?’

  Mum smiles up at me, so calm and serene I feel sick. ‘Would I do that? Would I do that kind of dirty work for you, Mel?’

  ‘It’s not dirty work! You think I want you to? Well, I don’t!’

  She just keeps looking, and smiling, the firelight in her new short haircut. I can’t imagine Pug in here, confiding in her. I want to ask her where he sat, what he was wearing. Did he cry? What exactly did he say? ‘You’re not making this all up, are you, just to make me feel bad?’

  ‘Give me a break, Mel!’ She’s laughing, with an edge of bitterness. ‘You think I haven’t got enough on my mind without dreaming up ways to make Mel feel bad? You loon!’ Then she stops laughing. ‘Do you feel bad?’

  I feel disgusting. He came here. He couldn’t stand the silence any longer. He wants to know. He’s very upset.

  He was supposed to disappear! He was supposed to not exist any more! I know it’s unreasonable, but I’m still angry. Angry and scared. After all, what does a boxer do when he’s very upset? I can’t imagine Pug upset—it’s everyone else around him who gets upset. He’s the one who calms them all down, makes them think straight again, keeps the Magnini family running smoothly instead of going up in smoke.