Chapter 5

chapter five

Last September

Joy closed their bedroom door with a gentle, apologetic click, as if Savannah would overhear and know they were only closing it because she was there. They had always slept with their door wide open throughout their married life: so that small anxious children could hurtle straight into their bed after nightmares, so that they could hear teenagers crashing through the house, drunk but thankfully home alive, so that they could rush to administer medication, advice, comfort, so that they could leap from their beds each morning and run straight into the action of their busy, important lives.

Once, closing the bedroom door had been a signal that someone thought sex might be a good idea. Now it was a signal that they had a guest.

An unexpected guest.

Savannah was hopefully warm and comfortable in Amy’s old bedroom, wearing an old pair of Amy’s pyjamas. Amy, their eldest, their ‘free spirit’ as Joy liked to call her, their ‘problem child’ as Stan liked to call her, was turning forty next year, and she hadn’t officially lived at home for two decades, but she still used her old bedroom as a kind of permanent storage unit, because she never seemed to settle at one address long enough to properly relocate her possessions. It was admittedly strange behaviour for a nearly forty-year-old, and there had been a time when Joy and Stan had talked about putting their foot down, and friends had suggested they should do so, as if it were possible to use sheer force of will to mould Amy into a regular person. Amy was Amy, and right now she had a job and a phone number, her fingernails were generally clean and her hair (albeit currently dyed blue) did not look like it was crawling with lice, and that was all Joy wanted from her, although it would be nice if she combed her hair occasionally.

‘Is she in bed?’ asked Stan as he came out of the bathroom, wearing boxers and a V-necked white t-shirt, from which sprang white chest hair. He was still a big, muscly, overbearing man, but he always looked vulnerable to Joy in his pyjamas.

‘I think so,’ said Joy. ‘She seemed sleepy after her bath.’

She had insisted on running a bath for Savannah. The taps were tricky to manage. She’d added some of the peach-scented bubble bath someone had given her for Mother’s Day, and laid out two of the fluffiest guest towels she could find, and it had been so pleasing to see Savannah come out of the bathroom, pink-cheeked and yawning, the tips of her hair wet, Amy’s dressing-gown trailing on the floor behind her.

Joy could hear the rounded notes of contentment in her voice. It was the long-ago primal satisfaction of feeding and bathing a hungry, tired, compliant child, and then tucking that clean, pyjama-clad child straight into bed.

‘Amy’s dressing-gown was so long –’ Joy stopped. What the heck? Her mouth dropped.

‘Oh my word,’ she said. ‘You didn’t.’

A pile of random objects was crammed, higgledy-piggledy, on top of their chest of drawers: Stan’s ancient laptop that she was pretty sure was broken, her iPad that she never touched, their desktop computer, including the monitor, their ten-year-old television, a calculator, and an old jar of twenty-cent coins that probably had a total value of ten dollars, if that.

‘I’m just being cautious,’ said Stan defensively. ‘We don’t know anything about her. She could rob us blind in the night and we’d feel like real dickheads calling the police in the morning. “Oh yes, that’s right, Officer, we fed her dinner, ran her a bubble bath, put her to bed, and lo and behold, we woke up this morning and all our worldly possessions have gone.”’

‘I can’t believe you crept around the house unplugging all our worldly possessions.’ She ran her fingers over the snarl of dusty electrical cords that dangled off the chest of drawers.

Oh my Lord, there was his precious laminator, which Troy got him last Christmas, thus beginning Stan’s obsession with laminating anything he could find: instructions for using the TV remote (admittedly helpful), the article in the local paper about the sale of Delaneys, inspiring sporting quotes he printed out from the internet and wanted to remember. He’d laminate Joy if he got the chance.

‘Wait, is that the DVD player? Stan. She wouldn’t take the DVD player. No-one uses DVD players anymore.’

‘We do,’ said Stan.

‘People her age don’t watch DVDs,’ said Joy. ‘They all stream.’

‘You don’t even know what streaming means,’ said Stan.

‘I do so,’ said Joy. She went into the bathroom to clean her teeth. ‘It’s just watching Netflix on TV, isn’t it? Isn’t that what streaming means?’

He had no right to pretend he had superior knowledge about technology. He was a man who didn’t own a mobile phone, as a matter of principle and stubborn pride. He loved it when people were shocked to discover he had never owned one, never would own one. He truly believed it made him morally superior, which drove Joy bananas because, excuse me, he was not. The way he talked about his ‘stance’ on mobile phones, you would think he were the lone person in the crowd not giving the Nazi salute.

Before their retirement he told people, ‘I don’t need a phone, I’m a tennis coach, not a surgeon. There are no tennis emergencies.’ There were so tennis emergencies, and more than once over the years she’d been furious when she couldn’t contact him, and she was left in a tricky situation that would have been instantly solved if he’d owned a phone. Also, his principles didn’t prevent him from happily picking up the landline and calling Joy on her mobile when she was at the shops, to ask how much longer she’d be, or to please buy more chilli crackers, but when Stan was gone, he was gone, and if she thought about that too much and all it implied she could tap into a great well of rage, so she didn’t think about it.

That was the secret of a happy marriage: step away from the rage.

She put on her nicest pyjamas seeing as there was a guest in the house and hopped into bed next to Stan. Her movements felt theatrical, as if she were being observed. They lay in silence for a few moments, flat on their backs, the quilt tucked under their elbows, like good children waiting for bedtime stories. The light was out, their lamps were on. There was a framed wedding photo on Joy’s bedside table. Most of the time she looked right through it as though it were a piece of furniture but sometimes, without warning, she could glance at it and feel the exact moment the photo was taken: the scratchy lacy neckline of her dress, Stan’s hand insistently, inappropriately low on her back, the casual expectation that this wild happiness would always be instantly available, because she’d got the boy, the boy with the deep voice and huge serve, and next would come trophies, babies, picnics and fancy restaurants on special occasions, maybe a dog. Everything at that time had rippled with sex: tennis, training, food, the very clouds in the sky.

For years she’d been so confused when people talked about knowing the day their babies were conceived. How could they possibly know? She’d blissfully, adorably believed that all couples had sex every day.

She knew the exact day that her youngest daughter was conceived.

By then she got it.

Joy waited for Stan to pick up his book or turn on the radio or turn off the light, but he didn’t do any of those things, so she decided he was up for a chat.

‘I’m glad I had that leftover chicken casserole to give her. She seemed starving.’

Savannah had eaten like a wartime refugee. Halfway through her meal she’d begun to cry – great convulsive sobs, but even as the tears streamed down her face, she’d continued to eat. It had been unsettling and distressing to watch. Then she’d eaten not one, but two bananas!

‘It wasn’t an especially good casserole. It needed more . . . flavour, I guess.’ Joy always overcooked chicken. She had a terror of salmonella. ‘I’ve still got enough left to give some to Steffi for breakfast.’

Joy preferred not to embarrass Steffi by offering her dog food as Steffi didn’t appear to know she was a dog. She chatted at length with Joy each morning after breakfast, making strange, elongated whining sounds that Joy knew were her sadly unintelligible attempts at English. The one time they’d taken her to the local dog park, Steffi had been appalled and sat at their feet with an expression of frozen hauteur on her face, as if she were a society lady at McDonald’s.

Stan punched his pillow and settled it behind his head. ‘Steffi would prefer a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald for breakfast.’

‘She makes me think of the little match girl,’ mused Joy.

‘Steffi?’

‘No, Savannah.’

After a moment Stan said, ‘Remind me who the little match girl is? What match are we talking about? Did she win?’

Joy snorted. ‘It’s a fairy tale about a little girl trying to sell matches on a freezing night. My mother used to read it to me. I think the little girl freezes to death in the end.’

‘Trust your mother to pick a fairy tale with a corpse at the end.’

‘I loved that story,’ said Joy.

Stan reached for his reading glasses and book. He wasn’t a reader, but he was trying to read this novel Amy had given him for Christmas because she kept asking, ‘What do you think of the book, Dad?’ Stan had confided to Joy that he had to keep starting again because he couldn’t make any sense of it.

‘It’s horrible to think of her boyfriend hurting her like that,’ said Joy. ‘Just horrible. Imagine if that was one of our girls.’

He didn’t answer, and she kicked herself for suggesting he imagine his own daughters in a situation like that. When Stan was fourteen, he’d witnessed his father throw his mother across the room, knocking her unconscious. It was, supposedly, the first and only time his father had done anything like that, but it must have been a terrible thing for a teenage boy to see. Stan refused to talk about his father. If the children ever asked questions about their grandfather he’d say, ‘I can’t remember.’ Eventually they’d stopped asking.

Stan said, ‘Our girls are athletes, and they grew up with brothers. They’d never put up with it.’

‘I don’t think it works like that,’ said Joy. ‘It starts out small. You put up with little things in a relationship and then . . . the little things gradually get bigger.’

He didn’t answer, and her words floated for too long above their bed. You put up with little things . . . and then the little things gradually get bigger.

‘Like the frog getting boiled to death,’ said Stan.

‘What?’ Joy heard herself sound a little screechy.

Stan kept looking at his book. He flipped a page in the wrong direction and for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer her, but then he said, his eyes on the page, ‘You know that theory: if you put a frog in warm water and keep slowly turning up the heat, it doesn’t jump out because it doesn’t realise it’s slowly being boiled to death.’

‘I’m sure that’s an urban myth. I’ll Google it.’ She reached for her phone and glasses.

‘Google it quietly,’ said Stan. ‘I need to focus. This bloke just spent three pages yabbering on about his memory of someone’s smile.’

‘Let me read it,’ said Joy. ‘I’ll summarise it. Give you the gist.’

‘That’s cheating,’ said Stan.

‘It’s not a test,’ sighed Joy, but Stan seemed to think it was a test, set by Amy, to prove his love. There had been a lot of tests set by Amy over the years to prove their love.

Joy didn’t bother to Google the poor boiling frog. She flicked through her text messages and thought about texting one or all of the children to let them know that a stray girl had turned up on their doorstep, but she had a feeling this news might be met with disapproval or even dismay. Since they’d sold the tennis school, their children had become increasingly vocal about how they thought Joy and Stan should be leading their lives. They dropped suggestions about package holidays, retirement villages, cruises, multivitamins and sudoku. Joy tolerated this intervention while never once mentioning the conspicuous lack of grandchildren in her life.

There was one new text from Caro sent earlier in the night: Have you done your homework? She meant the memoir-writing course homework. They had to do an ‘elevator pitch’ where they wrote their life story in just a few paragraphs. She would have to do it, even though she wasn’t going to complete the course. She didn’t want to hurt that peppy little teacher’s peppy little feelings.

No point answering Caro now; she’d be asleep. Savannah would never have chosen Caro’s house as a safe haven because all the lights went off reliably at nine pm each night.

Instead, Joy clicked on an article that her phone predicted would ‘interest her’: Forty Sweet Father/Son Moments between Prince William and Prince George.

She was on the seventh sweet moment between Prince William and Prince George when Stan gave up on the book with a heavy sigh and picked up his iPad, which Troy had given him as a birthday present a few months back. Everyone assumed Stan wouldn’t use it on principle because wasn’t an iPad pretty close to an iPhone? But apparently not. Stan loved the iPad as much as he loved his laminator. He read the news on his iPad every day because he could make the font nice and big, which he couldn’t do with a newspaper. Troy was inordinately pleased by the success of his present. It was important to him to always win the competition for best gift.

Joy looked over Stan’s shoulder to see what he was reading and scrolled through the same news site on her phone, so she would have read the same articles and would be prepared to set him straight if he attempted to set her straight on a particular issue.

‘Stop mansplaining, Dad,’ Amy once said at a family dinner.

‘He’s Stan-splaining,’ Joy had said, and that got a good laugh.

Her thumb stopped.

That specific combination of letters was so familiar it jumped out from the screen as if were her own name: Harry Haddad.

She waited. It took ages. She wondered if he was going to miss it. But then, finally, his body went still.

‘You see this?’ He held up the iPad. ‘About Harry?’

‘Yes,’ said Joy. She kept her tone neutral. It was important to maintain the pretence that their former star student, Harry Haddad, was not a touchy subject, not at all, and that she wasn’t trying to change the subject or, God forbid, offer comfort or sympathy. ‘Just saw it then.’

‘I knew it,’ said Stan. ‘I knew this day would come. I knew he wasn’t done.’

‘Did you?’ If this were true, which Joy doubted, he’d never once mentioned it, but she didn’t say that. ‘Huh. Well. That’s going to be very . . . interesting.’

She waited a moment and then carefully placed her phone facedown on her bedside table, next to her headphones. Her glittery metallic phone case, also a gift from Troy, shimmered like a disco ball under the bedside lamp.

She yawned. It started out fake and ended up genuine. She stretched her arms above her head. Stan turned off his iPad and took off his glasses.

‘I wonder what time Savannah will wake up,’ she said as she switched off her light and turned on her side. Thank God this poor young girl had chosen to knock on their door, tonight of all nights. She would be a distraction from Harry bloody Haddad. ‘Did she seem like a morning person to you?’

Stan said nothing. He put down his iPad, switched off his lamp and rolled onto his side, taking the covers with him as usual. She wrenched them back as usual. His back was warm and comforting against hers, but she could feel the tension that gripped him.

Finally he spoke. ‘I don’t know if she’s a morning person or not, Joy.’

*

Down the hallway their unexpected guest lay flat on her back in the neatly made-up single bed, wide awake and staring dry-eyed at the darkness, hands clasped like those of a corpse or a good little girl, her bedroom door pulled wide open as if to show she had nothing to hide from anyone.