Fiction

Honeymoon

First published Best Australian Stories, 2005, Black Inc Press

The night they arrive at the house on the lake, Mandy slides open the door to the deck and a tiny grey possum clambers down a tree trunk, an arm’s length from the railing.

“Matt, look,” she calls. She takes a step onto the deck and another possum, bigger than the first, darts down the tree behind it and the two animals leap on to the wooden railing. Mandy stops. The possums fix their sights on her, lowering their small heads, eyes shining. She steps forward again – and then both the animals thump gracelessly to the wooden boards and pelt towards her feet.

“Jesus!’ She yelps, jumps back behind the screen door, slinging it shut.

The possums stop still for one long second, watching her again. Then they begin waddling about on the deck, sniffing. Matthew says from behind her, ‘Oh, wow.’ He reaches for the door.

‘Don’t go out there!’ She grabs his arm. Then feels her face colour. ‘They ran at me. Somebody must feed them.’

Matthew stands on the hairy orange kitchen carpet next to her, his new wife. He takes her hand from his arm, smiles down at her.

‘Mand, it’s just a mum and her baby.’ Then he puts an arm around her shoulders. ‘I’ll get them some fruit,’ he says. But he begins stroking Mandy’s arm in long, firm strokes. ‘It’s okay,’ he says, his voice soothing.

 She shrugs her shoulder away. ‘I’m all right.’

When Mandy came home from uni to her parents’ small town and told them she was getting married, Dad said, ‘Christ.’ Matthew was coming the next day. He said she should wait for him to be there too, that it was selfish not to. She couldn’t say she wanted to protect him.

Her mother said, ‘Heavens.’ Then, ‘That’s wonderful, isn’t it Geoff!’

Dad said, ‘You’re only twenty-one. There’s plenty of time.’

Mandy had put down her glass of champagne – she’d brought the bottle there herself, opened it while they watched on, nervous, expectant. She looked at her fingertips turning white from pressing the base of the glass, and said, ‘How old were you, Dad?’  Her mother twittered then, saying, ‘Wonderful!’ and sipping the drink, glassy-eyed already. But Mandy and her father locked gazes.

He said, ‘It doesn’t matter, because I wasn’t doing anything important.’

Mandy threw her head back. ‘Jesus! That’s great.’ She turned to Mum, who was blinking quickly, the way she did when she met someone new, or spoke to someone she thought important in some way – tilting her head back a little, smiling, but flitting her lashes so fast they were almost completely shut.

‘Sorry, Mum.’

Mum gave her head a little shake, still blinking and sipping.

Her dad growled, ‘You know what I mean.’

He meant university. Honours, maybe even a medal. Mandy stretched out her arms above her head, and closed her eyes tight for a second to force away the tears she could feel beginning.

‘I’m not an idiot, Dad.’

Then she lifted her glass, said, ‘Well, here’s to us. Thanks for your enthusiasm. You can congratulate Matt when he gets here tomorrow.’

She drank and stood up. Dad watched her, the glass stem dainty between his big fingers. ‘I'm thinking about your future,’ he said. Then he muttered, ‘I don't want you to limit yourself.’ He glanced towards Mum, and then quickly away again. But Mandy was already striding across the room, leaning down to her mother.

‘Thanks Mum,’ she whispered, and kissed her soft face while her mother began shuffling her body to get up from the chair.

In the kitchen Cathy was coming in the back door, breathless, in her school uniform, smelling of cigarettes. ‘Hi,’ the sisters both said, as Cathy slung her backpack to the floor. Mandy said, “I’m going out,’ and slammed the door.

~~~

At the lake house there is a garage with odd surfboards and plastic skis, and a tinny with a heavy, sluggish outboard motor. On the first afternoon they take the boat out. Matthew knows how to work the motor and sits next to it, hugging it one-armed while they putter across the water. ‘Let’s do this every day,’ he shouts as the green water slides beneath them.

But Mandy has seen the kayak. In the morning she eases herself out of bed without waking Matthew, and goes barefoot to the kitchen to make coffee. She frowns at the noise of the electric kettle as it boils.

She picks her way down through the prickly bush garden to the water and hoists the white and yellow kayak up off the grass, holding it across her hips, tilting herself backwards to balance the weight. She steps over the stones, and then lowers it – plop – into the water. She directs it between some rocks with her fingertips so it won’t float away in the mild slapping of the water. Then she wades ankle-deep to the furthest rock and sets down her coffee cup on the flattest part. She wades back and then lowers herself, rocking wonkily, into the kayak seat. She shunts her bum forward and uses the white plastic oar to push off from the stones, feeling the kayak grazing the underwater pebbles. She reaches for the cup and then, holding it aloft in one hand, digs a few one-handed strokes with the other, out into the deeper water. Then she lays the bar of the paddle across her lap and sips from the cup, letting the kayak drift, out into the vast grey sheet of the lake. As far as she can see ahead and to each side is the metallic water, its early morning sheen.

She sits back, closing her eyes against the sunlight, knees bent. The water shrugs beneath her. Then she drains the cup and sets it on the floor, and paddles a few neat strokes with the sun at her back. She drifts over to where she has seen some fish jumping and sits very still, listening for the tiny splash, scanning for the movement. Then there it is, the plish, the glimpse of small white fish arched in the air above the silver water.

Every morning she does this, paddling and drifting for an hour out on the silent lake, before Matthew wakes.

~~~

The wedding had been the usual thing in her home town. Ceremony in the park by the river (not Saint Mark’s, after several arguments with her mother). The celebrant was a woman in a cream nylon suit and an aqua blouse, they’d read something from Kalil Gibran. Afterwards, at the reception in the Corroboree Room behind the civic hall,  Mandy sat at the round bridal table with Matthew, her parents, and her sister Cathy.

She remembered the smell of the wood panelling in the Corroboree Room from when they were children and their father had supplied the sound system for football club functions. He had wanted, in his youth, to be a sound engineer. So he owned a mixing board and many long extension cords, he owned big stippled silver cases with snap locks, amps and various players, folding stands, large black speakers in scratched black chipboard casings, and three microphones with stands of varying heights. He didn’t need these things in his job at the gas company, but he liked to have them. While he spent Saturday afternoons of their childhood laying out cables and saying ‘check, check’ into the microphones, Mandy and Cathy had the Corroboree Room to themselves, sliding on the polished green lino and sitting in the crook of the one wooden step up to the stage.

At the wedding Mandy wore a dress made by her university friends and her mother sat next to Matthew. Mum had secretly liked Matthew from the start. He played up to her, teased her in a way that made Mandy wonder if her father had ever done this, because her mother flushed and looked younger whenever she and Matthew bantered. Mandy imagined her dad, young, slim, broad-shouldered, teasing her mother about her hips, or her tea towels, the way Matthew did.

~~~

The second night at the lake they set the outdoor table for dinner on the deck, sticking candles in wine bottles, the candlelight making the trees flicker. Matthew has made a big bowl of spaghetti and stands over Mandy like a waiter, lifting the pasta with tongs on to her plate. Then there’s a noise, and they look up to see the big possum angling its way down the tree again, one side of its body moving forward, then the other, its snout lifting in purposeful, rhythmic nods.

‘Shit,’ Mandy says. Matthew stands, watching.

‘It’s okay, it won’t come near us,’ he says.

But the possum leaps on to the railing, stalking towards them. The smaller one has appeared now too, waddling behind its mother. Mandy stands, scraping her chair loudly and shoving it in the animals’ direction. ‘Shoo!’

The candle flames wobble. The possums stop. They stare at her, their dingy feather-duster tails held up in the air.

Mandy drags the chair again, looks around for Matthew, who has disappeared. She feels stupid. The dinner is getting cold. But the mother possum begins to walk again, delicately, along the railing, stretching her face towards the table. Mandy steps back, thinks of the possum’s mean little teeth, the tiny fleas and bacteria in its fur.

Matt appears with a long, spindly piece of eucalypt branch. He steps forward and whacks the stick down, hard, on the decking. The possums straighten, staring. He cracks the stick down again, harder, and the noise echoes up into the dark around the house. The possums turn and amble along the railing towards the bedroom at the end of the house, into the darkness.

Mandy pulls her chair back towards the table. ‘Thanks,’ she mumbles, glancing past Matthew into the gloom. She can’t see them. Matt grins and says, ‘I’ll put some music on.’

On the nights after this they each sit with a thin branch leaned against their chair. Every night the possums come, then retreat into the shadows at the cracking of the sticks. Sometimes Mandy looks up from the table to see their eyes shining out of the dark.

~~

Matthew was a city boy when they met at a party in her first weeks at university. ‘Never been west of the Blue Mountains,’ he’d said airily, lighting a cigarette.He wore a black suit jacket with his black jeans, listened to The Cruel Sea. When she said she didn’t know who the cruel sea were he was incredulous. ‘Tex Perkins. The Cruel Sea.’  

She was blank. ‘Sorry.’

He took the cigarette from his mouth and blew a long stream of smoke. ‘You really are a country girl,’ he said, and then he smiled, a wide, city-boy smile. Later they had sex in his room in the dark, the party babbling outside his bedroom door, beneath the mournful music coming from his battered CD player.

‘I like your body,’ he whispered, propped on his elbow in the gloom. He said breasts, as though it were not a foreign word for a boy. He drew a sharp line down her breastbone with his fingernail. She liked his spiky confidence. He switched on a lamp with a sarong covering it - he had been to Asia - and low orange light washed the room.. He sat up in bed and began rolling a joint. She lay naked on top of the sheets, feeling on her skin an echo of the line he had traced down her sternum. A corner of her future was opening up.

Long before the wedding, the first time she brought Matthew home, her mother made up Cathy’s room for him, with the good sheets, the new pillowcases. Mandy had snuck into the room after they’d all gone to bed, squeezed in beside him, snickering at his clump of black clothes and his motorbike boots heaped on the floor next to Cathy’s pale pink chest of drawers. She touched his nipple.

‘Don’t,’ he whispered. ‘Your parents.’ She laughed again, bent to lick it.

‘It’s not fair on them,’ he murmured, gently pushing her away. ‘They’re nice people.’

She stared at him in the dark, and then she stood up and padded back through the dark house to lie in her childhood bed, listening to her sister asleep, breathing slow and heavy on a mattress on the floor.

~~~

At the lake they spend the days sitting on the deck, looking out at the water through the trees, newspapers strewn about them, listening to seed pods dropping onto the corrugated iron roof. The house is full of ugly, comfortable furniture they sink into. Prehistoric-looking couches with the nap worn off the fake suede, with seat cushions so deep their feet don’t touch the floor. There is a smoked-glass coffee table with battered board games on a shelf beneath. Scattegories and Monopoly and obscure, failed board games: Payday, and How to Be a Complete Bastard with Adrian Edmonson’s face all over the box. The maroon milk crate filled with their uni textbooks and foolscap notebooks stays by the front door, untouched.

Sometimes they have sex, quietly, on the clean white sheets with the sun falling into the room, only the screen door between them and the cicadas and the chittering of the lorikeets.

~~~

The next time he went home with her was for Easter.

‘Do you want to go with them?’ Matthew had asked her at breakfast, while her mother scurried around the house before Mass, checking her handbag, putting on lipstick at the hallway mirror.

Mandy had only snorted, and poured another coffee. ‘Have you got any cigarettes?’ she asked him. ‘Shhh,’ he whispered, angling his head towards her mother, who was prodding at a solid white-plasticked chicken, defrosting on the sink.

Cathy grinned at Matthew over her weetbix. ‘Wuss,’ she said with her mouth full, spoon aloft.

‘Come on Cathy,’ called their mother. ‘And you shouldn’t be eating breakfast so late.’  Their parents never ate before Communion.

They went to buy Easter eggs and hot cross buns after collecting her parents from Mass. At the supermarket checkout they watched the coloured eggs and the plastic bags of buns moving along the conveyor belt.

Cathy said, ‘There’s Sue McInerney.’ At the next counter a thin girl from Cathy’s year stood with a lanky, slightly older boy, lifting things from a trolley, frozen food boxes and bags of corn chips and sheets of pale sausages.

‘I remember her,’ Mandy said. ‘Brainy.’

Cathy flicked a red egg spinning in circles on the conveyor belt. ‘Pregnant, apparently.’ The sisters raised their eyebrows at each other. Matthew took his wallet out, but Mandy’s father was standing ahead of them, a fifty dollar note ready in his hands. He was watching Sue McInerney too, until Cathy nudged his elbow for the waiting checkout girl.

As they were driving home Matthew looked out of the window at the yellowing trees. He said, ‘It’s quite beautiful here really. I could live here.’ He didn’t look at Mandy, but was watching the back of her father’s head. ‘When we finish uni,’ he added.

Dad looked only at the road.

After lunch that day the family drifted into silence. Dad was slouched in his armchair, reading a Thomas Keneally book with his glasses half way down his nose. Cathy was at the other end of the couch, with a little collection of nail polish remover and enamels and cuticle softener bottles arranged before her on the coffee table. She had a foot up on the table, rubbing a nail with a cotton ball. Their mother had put on Handel’s Messiah, as she did at every family occasion. Mandy lay on the carpet reading a magazine, propped up on her elbow. In quiet parts of the music she could hear her mother and Matthew chatting in the kitchen over the washing up. He was saying something about the local council and town planning jobs.

One morning out in the kayak she sees one of the enormous pale jellyfish they’d seen much further out in the deeper water, from the boat. Now it glides alongside her. She wants to touch its fleshy, globular tentacles, the huge thickened dome of its head. She strokes the water once with the paddle to keep up, following  its slow-motion dipping and surfacing. But after a while the jellyfish sinks deeper, and though she stares hard into the dark water as it lowers, it disappears.

The sun is hotter now. She turns to see the house in the distance, the shape of Matthew hunched over the railing of the deck, looking out across the lake towards her.
She waves, then dips the paddle straight down, feels the boat rotate, graceful as a dancer.

~~~

At the wedding her father had talked into one of his microphones, huskily welcoming Matthew into the family, but looking at Mandy. She had smiled back at him. Later, father and daughter danced awkwardly together. She was a little drunk. She called, through a space in the song, into her father’s ear, ‘You’ve been happy, haven’t you Dad?’ He had grunted, ‘Oh, love. Course I have.’ Then he said, ‘I’m sorry about before.’ And she put her head into his shoulder to stop herself from crying.

~~~

Over the week she teaches herself how to control the kayak, experimenting by keeping her elbows at her sides or lifting them out, by shifting her grip along the paddle. Sometimes she moves through the water like a blade, smooth and fast, as though propelled by some force beyond herself. At other times she can’t wield the paddle; it only smacks at the water or bangs down on the side of the boat, setting it wobbling and rocking. But whenever she gets out there she spends much of the time simply drifting, gazing into the water. Sometimes she comes across a single patch of bubbles. She tries to stare through into the depths, but once again there’s nothing to be seen except the sliding, bulbous surface of the water itself.

One morning, at the end of the point in the distance, she sees the small red swatch of a kite high in the air.

When she and Cathy were small their father had had a brief kite flying craze, driving his reluctant girls to the highest of the bare hills near the town. He would lift his kites, delicate creations of dowel and bright tissue paper, from the boot of the car. Mandy would huddle in her nylon parka, hair whipping her face, in the freezing wind. ‘I told you to wear something warmer,’ her father growled while he untangled a cord. But Mandy had insisted on her pink tartan skirt and bare legs, and the wind was icy. The girls had to stand, each holding a skein of nylon line in both hands, while their father strode up the hill ahead of them. Then he would throw each of the kites up, and shout, ‘Run!’, and they had to run over the knobbly tussocky ground, holding the lines high above their heads. The kite would mostly swirl once and or twice and arrow straight into the stony ground. But sometimes, sometimes, it would lift, and the spool would whirl and tumble in her hands, the purple kite lifting higher and higher, and Mandy would begin to smile, and Cathy’s green box kite would lift and she would shriek, her head thrown back and mouth wide open, and their father would stand watching his children falling in love with the high space beyond that small town, with the possibilities of flight.

Now Mandy looks up at the distant red kite pressed into the blue sky above the lake. She remembers the rhythmic tug on the line, calibrating its pull against the weight of her own body, the pleasure of letting out the line, then resisting. She turns from it then, and paddles away out towards the centre of the lake. But all morning, it seems the red star stays with her, always above her, there in the outer corner of her sight.

The wind rises. She churns back through the water towards the house, breathing deep and rhythmically, pushing the high end of the paddle forward with all the strength of one arm as she dips deep and pulls the low end through the water with the other hand, the choppy little waves slapping over the prow of the canoe.

Afterwards she walks up the garden, her arms and legs pleasantly jittery from the last long stretch of effort. When she slides open the glass door Matthew is reading the paper at the table.

“I said was going to come with you,” he says crossly. “But you didn’t wake me up.”

The room feels small and airless after the wide gusty space of the lake, the bright blown kite stamped in the sky.

“Oh, sorry,” she says, as she passes his chair. “I forgot.”

At noon they gather things to go out in the boat for the afternoon. Matthew stands waiting on the deck, hands full with a fishing rod and one plastic shopping bag of bait, and another holding lunch things – a half-bottle of wine with a cork jammed into it, some bread and cheese. His straw hat dangles, sunglasses glint on his head.

Mandy puts a hand to the bench for the door keys, but they aren’t there. Matthew watches her from outside, shifting his weight while she scrabbles through the things on the bench: coins, unopened envelopes, a banana, a bottle of sunscreen, three pens, some national park brochures.

‘Hang on,’ she calls, moving to the other end of the bench where the owners keep a basket full of miscellaneous stuff. She peers into it. Fishing lures, magnets, pens, more sunscreen, a computer disk, some cassettes with the brown tape knotted in loops, a plastic tub of moisturiser.

‘Come on,’ calls Matthew, irritated.

She straightens. ‘I can’t find the keys.’ She walks to the door. ‘Did you have them or did I?’

Matthew groans. ‘You did, because when we got home you opened the door and I carried in the shopping.’

This is true. She turns back, hands on her hips, thinking, scanning the room. The keys have an enormous plastic Bananas in Pyjamas key ring. Impossible to lose. Suddenly she has a wave of dislike of Matthew, standing there ready for a picnic.

‘Are you going to help me look?’ she says, hands still on her hips.

He sighs, puts down the fishing rod and the bags, jostling them into a corner of shade by the door. She thinks she sees his eyebrows lift as he bends, pushing the things about noisily, but when he stands again he is smiling tightly. She wants, suddenly, to smack him on his smooth, shaven face.

‘I don’t know where the fucking things are,’ she says viciously, and begins striding about the room, flipping cushions and snapping pieces of paper.

‘Don’t worry, we’ll find them,’ he says. But making it clear, in his tone, that the delay is her fault.

They each begin to wander the house, bending and straightening as they search, and he calls out questions. ‘Did you take them out of the front door?’

‘Yes.’  She hurries to check. Not there.

‘What did you do then?’

From the hallway she can see him now in the bedroom, lifting shorts and shirts to shoulder height, listening for keys in pockets.

‘I don’t know.’ 

He keeps yelling out questions, which she doesn’t answer.

She moves, her body bent, through the rooms, lifting every cushion again, running a hand beneath each one. When she comes back to the kitchen he’s standing in front of the rubbish bin below the bench. ‘I guess we should empty it. They could have fallen in.’

She does not think the keys could have fallen in. They would need to fall at a 45-degree angle, backwards and under the lip of the bench top. But she has nothing better to offer. ‘Mmmm,’ she says.

She can feel her temperature rising, a headache beginning. They have been looking for twenty minutes. Matthew is still standing at the bin, hands on hips, his back to her. She is beginning to feel a panicky pain beneath her ribs. But Matthew is quite calm, standing there watching the bin as though it were a view.

It is her fault. This fact makes her angrier.

‘Where the-’ she lifts a pile of heavy books and then lets them fall from a height, slamming on to the table ‘– fuck are they!’ She falls into one of the chairs, grabbing shoes from the floor, shaking each one.

She looks across at Matthew. ‘What if we don’t find them!’

She hears her voice, the sound of her own panic. He doesn’t turn around, doesn’t answer.

‘What are we going to do, Matt?’

 Then as she watches him she sees his hands in his pockets. He turns around slowly. She stares at him, and he smiles.

He’s got them.

‘It’s okay babe, calm down, we’ll find them.’ He takes his hands – carefully, it seems now - out of his pockets, steps towards her across the orange carpet that reminds her, suddenly, of pubic hair. He leans down and puts two hands on her shoulders. She feels her body stiffen, her head is hot. 

‘Are you sure you didn’t put them in your pocket accidentally,’ she says slowly, keeping her voice even, looking him in the eyes. He rears back, making a face. ‘Course I’m sure!’ he says. But his hands stay on her bare brown shoulders. She glances down at his pockets, trying to see any possible shape, but he moves off, soundless, back into the kitchen, and bends to open the fridge door. ‘My flatmate once put keys in the fridge,’ he says, squinting into the square of light, reaching in to shift jars and bottles.

Mandy goes to the bathroom. She feels sick. She remembers the possums, his stroking her arm. Breathe. It’s ridiculous; of course he doesn’t have them.

They have just gotten married.

She hears the fridge door close and then another noise, his voice. She runs into the kitchen.

‘Ah, shit. Sorry, nope. My car keys.’ He holds them up.

But he’s still smiling that odd little smile. She sees him glance back at the rubbish bin. Mandy’s heart begins to jolt in her chest. She walks to the bin.

‘I’ll do that,’ Matthew says, but he stays where he is, running a hand lightly along the top of the fridge.

She feels all the blood has gone out of her somehow, she is suddenly exhausted. ‘It’s okay,’ she murmurs. ‘I lost them, I’ll do it.’

He says, ‘Babe, don’t be like that.’ But he doesn’t move.

She hauls the heavy, thin plastic bag out of the bin, across the carpet and over the sharp lip of the metal frame of the sliding door. The bag tears and liquid begins oozing out. She grabs newspaper from the outdoor table and crawls around on the deck, spreading the pages about. She does not care that Matthew is standing there, watching her.

On the hot boards of the deck she crouches, upends the sweating black plastic, and the thick, foetid smell springs up at her as the garbage, the chicken bones and rotted fruit and oyster shells and nameless bits of sludge slide out. She lifts the bag away and a last wad of prawn shells falls wetly on her bare foot. The pink shells, and now her foot, are covered with tiny crawling ants. She kneels then, in the rubbish, not bothering to flick off the ants, picking through the stinking garbage with her fingers, feathering them through the sodden remnants like a blind person, knowing she will not find the glint of metal there in the coffee grounds and onion skins and band-aids, among the screwed-up tissues and the black plastic trays dripping with red meat juice. She thinks of her father’s warm, rough hands over her own seven-year-old ones, holding the whirring kite spool. She thinks of all his disappointments.

She does not look up when she hears Matthew cry out triumphantly from the living room. He appears in the doorway, holding up the keys on their huge blue and yellow plastic glob. ‘Would you believe it, under the bloody magazines! I’ll just have a piss and then we can go.’

And smiling his smile, he tosses her the keys where she kneels.

She catches them in her two hands, cupped against her chest. She feels the sharp edges hit her breastbone.

© Charlotte Wood 2005