Страница 44 из 61
His mobile rings after midnight. No hello or how are you or this is what I’m responding to. Just straight into the conversation as if she’s sure he’ll know what she’s talking about.
“It all comes back to your family,” Tara explains. “On one hand, you’re frightened to commit to anyone because you’re probably thinking you’ll get her pregnant, like your father got your mother pregnant, and then one of you is going to have to give up something. On the other hand, you don’t want to move away from your security base because each time a family member has, something awful and tragic happened, like with Tom Finch and then Joe. So your way of dealing with the first is through casual relationships where you don’t let anyone hang around long enough, and your way of dealing with the second is not moving out of your comfort zone. Think about it. You moved four blocks away when you went to live with those dickheads and now you’re back at Georgie’s. Two blocks from home. You could draw a line around the parameters of your world, Tom, and I’m presuming that every girl you’ve slept with lives within that grid.”
He sits up for a moment.
“Is this one of those cheering-me-up phone calls that you specialize in, where you tell me to get on with my life?” he asks, torn between excitement and anger and trying to work out how far back he had asked for the character analysis.
“Sorry.” He hears the apology in her voice. She must have picked up on the anger in his tone. “Look, I’ll speak to you another —”
“No. No, don’t hang up. What time is it there?” he asks.
“Two hours behind you.”
There’s silence for a moment.
“So you think I’m a coward who sticks to my comfort zones?”
He hears her sigh. “No. I didn’t say that.”
“You did.”
“No, I didn’t, Tom. I said you stick to your comfort zones. Not that you’re a coward.”
“Doesn’t it mean the same thing to you?” he asks.
“No. I think the worst thing that ever happened to me was leaving home,” she says honestly.
“Why?”
“Because I miss it like you’d never believe, and then I go away from this place and I miss here too. I’m scared I’m going to spend the rest of my life in a state of yearning, regardless of where I am.”
He gets comfortable. He wants to hear her voice in his ear. In the dark. In this attic. In his bed. He wants to hear it for as long as he can.
“What do you miss most?” he asks.
“Winter,” she says.
He chuckles. She does too.
“Only you’d say that, Finke.”
“You would too if you didn’t get to experience one.”
If he had the guts, he’d ask her about that night in her parents’ house. It was in winter. He remembers how cold she felt. If he had the guts, he’d ask what she remembers.
“I love it getting dark early in Sydney and I love snuggling under my blanket and wearing tights and boots and sitting with you guys somewhere in Newtown or at Bar Italia and having a latte or lying in front of the heater watching DVDs.”
“Then when you come home, I’m organizing a winter’s day for you.”
More silence. Rein it in, Tom, he tells himself. Don’t scare her away. You’ve wooed her this way before and then you walked away.
“I miss you,” he says, failing to take his own advice.
She doesn’t respond.
“Why does it take forever between e-mails?” he asks.
“I don’t have regular access to the Internet, but I’ve made a deal with the Portuguese teachers and they let me use it up at their house.”
“Then give me a landline and I’ll ring you.”
“They decided to skip that technology and went straight to mobiles,” she explains. “But it only costs me forty cents a minute to ring.”
“How much does it cost me?”
“I don’t know. Work it out. Go to sleep.”
Logical Tom begs emotional stupid dickhead Tom not to ask the question.
“Are you alone?” he asks quietly.
He hears her breathing so close to his ear.
“Yes.”
“Good,” he says, his voice croaky. “I’ll sleep like a baby.”
They’re sitting in Lucia’s kitchen poring over brochures of holiday destinations for Christmas. Caravan parks down the South Coast are the only option for Lucia, who won’t unleash her children onto a resort. The subject moves to Georgie’s body, post-baby, in a cossie, and then maternity bras. Once in a while Lucia will stand up and hammer at the window, bellowing to her kids in the backyard to stop killing each other and Georgie reconsiders whether she wants to be part of that mayhem for the new year.
“I’ll take you shopping Saturday for maternity bras,” Lucia says.
Georgie can’t take her eyes away from the bushland surrounding the caravan park in the brochure. “I’ve already been,” she murmurs, having an Azaria Chamberlain moment where her baby gets kidnapped by either members of the savage animal kingdom or pedophiles who hang out in caravan parks. She tries to put it at the back of her mind as part of a twelve-point plan she’s devised after accompanying Dom to his AA meetings.
“With who?” Lucia asks.
“One of the ladies from my work.”
She doesn’t realize that Lucia’s angry until she hasn’t spoken for a while.
“What did I do?” Georgie asks.
“My counselor says some people don’t want to be happy.”
The caravan park and its promise of potential harm to her unborn child is pushed aside.
“You have a counselor?” Georgie asks. “Why would you need a counselor, Lucia?”
Lucia’s look has an edge. Like those martial arts movies where there are quick slicing sounds and the person stands there for a moment before crumbling into pieces.
“Why would I need a counselor?”
“Yes,” Georgie says patiently, “why would you need a counselor? You’re happy with your life. You’ve got a great family. . . .”
The look she receives is one of such anger that Georgie wonders what part of the last hour she missed. What part of the last two years has she missed?
“I’m going to a counselor because sometimes I’m pretty depressed. It’s what happens when your best friend is dealing with acute grief. My counselor tells me that I overstress. My best friend getting pregnant to her ex-partner, stresses me. Dominic, who is like a brother to me, going AWOL for over a year, stresses me. His marriage to Jacinta, the world’s most enviable marriage, I have to add, falls apart and it stresses me. Jacinta living in another state, miserable out of her brain, stresses me. Another friend — yes, Georgie, Joe was our friend too — well his death doesn’t just stress me, it devastates me. Not being able to offer my best friend any comfort, doesn’t just stress or devastate me; it kills me. That’s why I need a counselor.”
Lucia’s crying. There’s a hopelessness to it all and it leaves Georgie speechless. Worse still, the kids are at the glass door, staring at them as if they don’t recognize who anyone is anymore.
“I know this sounds cruel, Georgie,” Lucia says, “but grieving people are selfish. They won’t let you comfort them and they say you don’t understand and they make you feel useless when all your life you’ve been functional to them. And you couldn’t even ask me to take you maternity bra shopping?”
Anything Georgie says now will seem contrived, so she says nothing, just sits there while Lucia goes to the glass door and has a quiet word with the kids before they disappear outside again.
“Do you want me to be honest?” Lucia asks.
“What?” Georgie asks, frightened. “The counselor spiel wasn’t honesty?”
Lucia gives her a don’t-push-it look.
“Georgie, you were a write-off when Joe died. You still are. You won’t let any of us in. It’s as if everything we say seems inappropriate or dumb. This one time, Sam and Abe and Jonesy and Abe’s sisters were at my place, and we were all trying to work out how to deal with what you and Dominic were going through. And all I can remember is Jonesy. We always laugh at what an idiot he is and how he’s always text messaging and how young he is in the head. But I remember him that day, sitting around my kitchen table. He just broke down and said, ‘I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say to make Georgie better, and I want to.’ And out of everyone’s reaction, his gets to me the most when I remember it.”