Страница 45 из 61
Georgie’s too tired to cry anymore. “There’s nothing you could have said,” she says quietly. “I promise you, Lucia. There’s nothing at all you can say to make us feel better.”
“I know,” Lucia says. “And Sam got that, Georgie. He understood your silence and he got how you wanted to talk sometimes and not be interrupted, and he got how some days you didn’t want to talk at all. For those little moments of calm he’s brought you, I will forgive him for anything.”
Georgie thinks for a moment.
“If you like, I’ll make a list . . . of all the things I should be doing . . . with your help,” she says with a bit of humility. “You can be in total charge,” she adds, knowing that she just sold her soul to the devil.
She can tell that Lucia is coming around to the idea and watches as she shuffles through a kitchen drawer, taking a pen and paper out. “I’m scribing,” Lucia says firmly.
Georgie curses herself for teaching Lucia the art of list-making. Now she makes lists of the schools she’d like to send her kids to if they had x amount of money and then a list of the ones they can afford. She makes lists of jobs she’d love if she wasn’t doing the following things, and then she makes a lists of those following things, and her lists become hybrid and feral. In the end, they make Lucia paranoid about all the things she’s supposed to be doing that she doesn’t have time for because she’s making lists.
“What’s the first subheading?” Georgie asks.
Lucia clicks the pen into action. “Sam.”
She volunteers to go to Callum’s soccer game because it’s part of Lucia’s idea of normality.
“Football,” the kid corrects as they cross the road toward the playing field. Sam reaches out to take her hand, and she lets him because it’s on her list to allow him to show affection without getting snippy.
“Football is rugby league as far as I’m concerned,” she says to Sam after he gives the most inane advice to his son about how to kick the ball.
Once they hit the park, Callum’s ru
The suit is here with her boyfriend. He’s a pleasant-enough-looking guy in a north-shore-rugby kind of way, and Georgie can tell he knows the history of the situation because he’s trying his best to fill in the spaces with chatter rather than awkward silence.
“Hi, Georgie.”
“Leonie.”
A very chirpy soccer/football coach runs around the field with Callum and his team, and then the game begins. Callum isn’t much of a soccer/football player and runs to the sideline constantly to confer with Sam or his mother, negotiating time out, because the last place he seems to want to be is on the field. The suit deals with it by saying, “Sweetie, off you go. Two more minutes,” while Sam huffs and puffs as if his masculinity is being put to the test by his son’s ability to play the game. Because Georgie keeps the list in her pocket that states rule number five is to refrain from negativity toward Sam, she swallows her irritation. So what if the kid wants to spend all his time hugging his teammates as well as some of the opposition? At one stage, Callum sits with one of them at the goalpost, deep in conversation. Georgie would love to know what two six-year-olds are talking about with such intensity.
“Last game of the season, Callum. Try to kick the ball,” Sam says firmly once they get ready to go into the second half.
“It might even go in.” This from his mother. “Wouldn’t that be great, sweetie?”
“Ice cream for the one who gets the ball closest to the goalpost,” the boyfriend says.
Everyone seems to look at Georgie for her encouragement, even Callum.
“Tom says he wants a photo of you ru
“But you don’t have a camera.”
She holds up her phone.
Chest puffed out, the kid sprints up and down the field, miles away from the action of the game and she can’t help smiling, can’t help seeing for the first time, not Sam’s kid with another woman, but the older brother of her unborn child. The closest he comes to the ball is when someone kicks it to his head accidently and then it’s over for Callum. Nothing’s getting him back on that field. He has a bit of a cry and his mother zips up his jacket. “He didn’t do it on purpose, sweetie. He didn’t do it on purpose.”
Later, Georgie exchanges good-byes with them politely and she feels Leonie watching her as Georgie shakes hands with Callum, who will get dropped off at Sam’s later tonight. It’s an intense look and Georgie realizes the truth. The suit’s not threatened by Georgie. The suit is frightened by her. Although there are things about her that Georgie hates, she understands the need to want your own looked after. She learned that from loving Joe and Tom and Anabel and Lucia’s kids and even the children of strangers who walk into her office every day. Georgie crouches at the kid’s level and shows him the photo she took of him on her phone. “I look like I’m fast,” he says with wonder.
“I’ll put it in the baby’s room for when he’s born,” she hears herself promising. “So I’ll know he’s safe.”
She feels like the whore of birthing class. She wonders what stories they tell about her in their homes. She’s already been to the class with Tom and Dominic.
“Why’s everyone looking?” Sam asks.
He can’t keep his hands off her stomach and she realizes that he’s been dying to touch her there, to allow his fingers to linger.
“What are we going to call him?”
“What makes you think it’s a him?” she asks.
“Tom said the woman at the pharmacy says it’s a him because you’re carrying it all at the front. And didn’t Abe’s mum say it was because of the chain?”
She cranes her neck to look back at him, amused.
“You? Believe that stuff?”
“I think it’s a boy. Shit, just say it’s a girl. Just say it’s a little Georgie?”
She laughs and his arms tighten around her and her heart’s beating fast. Not because of the breathing methods or her blood pressure; her heart’s beating fast because Sam’s teasing her. She hasn’t heard that tone for years. And then they don’t go straight home. They go to a Thai place on King Street and they’re talking about everything, in the middle of Sam saying, “No MSG. No MSG,” pointing to Georgie’s stomach. Their conversation seems strange at times, because years ago when she was with Sam and he spoke about work, it would be about people in his office cheating about their call sheets or how they were tossers, and it would be about insurance litigation and how much he hated his job and how much he hated the people. Now they’re talking about the James Hardie campaign the year before and there’s a fire in him as he speaks about how they’ll get rid of the new industrial relations laws and if they can get these fuckers out of Canberra in November, there’ll be dancing in the streets. He’s giddy beyond comprehension about the possibility of a new government, spewing out his fury at the culture of greed and social indifference under a leader who traded on the fact that people stopped thinking, a government that carefully nurtured an alarmist culture. She tells him about the DNA funding by the Danish government in the Balkans and the anti-mortem data project and how sometimes when she can’t get her clients talking about what happened over there she’ll get a map of the country, an appropriate map for their world, and pinpoint where they last lived, where their family went missing. Sometimes they would be reluctant to talk, but when they saw the map they would point to a place and say, “There. My village,” and that’s how their dialogue would begin. With a sense of place.