Fiona McFarlane - The High Places - Stories

Cara found her toothbrush. Neither lover stirred.

She opened the bathroom door onto a hot puff of steam. Rachel rose up out of the bath, out of all that thick greenish water. Her kimono lay just out of reach, draped over the toilet; the bird of paradise was trailing on the hairy floor. The hair on her head wasn’t fully wet, but it pressed to her cheeks in damp curls, and hair erupted too from between her legs. Her thighs were brown and ribbed, and at the very top of her arms there was an unexpected slackening.

‘Sorry, Mum, sorry,’ Cara said, trying to pull the door closed, but it stuck on the tiles and would leave the smudge Rachel hated. All this time, while Cara tugged the door and the steam came out, exploratory, into the hallway, Rachel stood and stared. She squinted. She wasn’t wearing her contact lenses.

‘Leave it,’ she said, and Cara backed away as Rachel stepped from the bath; there was that particular pour of water back into the bulk of itself, all the amplified tides of a bathtub. ‘Come in.’

Cara came in and shut the door behind her. It swung easily when the tiles released it.

Rachel lifted the kimono, flashing red and yellow, and wrapped herself in it. The wet showed through in places. She had been in the bath so long her feet were baby-white. Cara began to brush her teeth.

‘Is it midnight yet?’ asked Rachel. She blew on the mirror to clear the steam and rubbed it with her towel.

‘Nearly.’ Cara’s pyjamas were too thick for the heated room. Sweat prickled in the roots of her hair.

‘Gone all day,’ said Rachel, with a funny laugh, and she turned to Cara with her hands spread out, with a smile on her face, and said, ‘What would you do, Cara? What would Cara do?’ She couldn’t say ‘Help me’ but she could smile like that, she could spread her hands, she could stand in the dripping bathroom and look the way a plaster saint looks, asking God for something.

Cara, rinsing her minty mouth, shrugged. She knew what she would do: lock and bolt the doors. Turn out the lights and plant thick trees. She would booby-trap the front gate and line the path with knives. Oh, but who would watch him when he smoked and that little muscle tightened in his jaw? Someone else would watch him. Some other girl.

But Rachel was waiting for an answer.

Cara spat into the sink. ‘He’s your boyfriend,’ she said, and went to the lounge room to set up her bed. She closed her eyes tight when her mother passed through the room. She thought, I’ll stay awake until I hear him. I’ll sit up in bed — I’ll call out his name, so he isn’t frightened — and tell him everything that’s happened. That way he’ll be prepared to face her. She heard footsteps in the street she knew weren’t his. Cara slept.

She woke to the noise of a person in the lounge room. It was Rachel, standing long and white above the makeshift bed.

‘Come and sleep in with me,’ she said.

Cara obeyed at once. She was half asleep, she was dreaming, she would remember every minute of this night. She followed her mother into the bedroom, where the yellow curtains were open and a bluish light fell onto the floor. Cara knew it was a streetlight, but chose to think of it as the light from the neon cross on top of the church. Rachel wrapped herself in all the blankets, so Cara lay down on top of the sheets on Adam’s side of the bed. She slept again, and when she woke it was because her mother was sitting up and squinting at the time on her phone.

‘Three twenty-four,’ she said; evidently she knew Cara was awake.

Cara was cold. He’d told his mother he’d be back in the morning.

Rachel laughed, her low, sophisticated laugh, which was mirthless. ‘And now I can’t sleep with you in the bed.’

‘I’ll go back out,’ said Cara, but soggily.

‘No, sweetie,’ said Rachel. ‘I’ll go out. I can’t sleep anyway. I’ll read or something.’

Cara could have reached out one arm — she almost did — and held fast to her mother’s hair or her T-shirt. She could have kept her there, in the bed; she could have talked her to sleep, or brought her tea, or said she didn’t mind a light on. But she had never been more leaden with sleep. Sweetie . That was an unfamiliar lullaby word. Cara tucked her knees to her chest. Then Rachel went, she was a gleam in the door and a shuffle in the lounge room, and Cara, guilty, rolled onto the other side of the bed, which smelt of her mother: that salty smoky perfume she wore, and a deeper note which Cara always thought of as a kind of fuzz, like the fuzz on a peach. She slept again, but woke as soon as Adam came. He came in the blue light from the window; he came in the solitary creak of a floorboard by the door. He blundered, but quietly. He pulled off his shirt and loomed up over the bed. His eyes were white, and his long loving throat, and his hands reached across the sheets to find her. To find Rachel. He buried his head in Cara’s middle.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said with his boozy breath, ‘I’m sorry, I love you, I’m sorry,’ and Cara held his brittle hair, she let him kiss her stomach, she breathed up and down as he kissed her. ‘I love you, I’m sorry. Please don’t be angry, please, please,’ he begged, and Cara felt for a moment the great holy fury of her mother, the height she stood upon, how easily she was disappointed, how much she was called to forgive, and how she must be spared the noise of life, and left alone, and how she must be loved. The blue light buzzed at the window. Cara felt how still she was compared to all the living heat of Adam, his warm head and hands at her waist. His face was wet; he was crying, but as if he didn’t know it. He was also falling away into sleep, or a version of it in which he might lie forever with his heavy head on her stomach. She could let him do that. She could also wake him. She knew where to touch and what to say. It was dark enough, and he was drunk enough, and the morning was very far away.

In the bed, in the streetlight, Adam’s golden skin was blue. He looked like Krishna. There was a picture of Krishna in the bathroom; he looked like that.

Cara breathed deeply to feel his head rise up, then pushed it off. She rolled out of bed and went to the lounge room, where her mother lay sleeping. Rachel wasn’t a messy sleeper like Danny and the boy. She was laid out, white and black, with her red mouth shut. Cara had to touch her twice before she woke.

‘He’s back,’ said Cara.

Rachel rose from the couch without speaking, went into the bedroom and closed the door. Cara listened, but could hear only the recycling truck, three streets away, lifting and pouring quantities of glass. Greek glass, she thought. It was nearly morning.

* * *

At breakfast, the children fussed and shouted when they heard Adam was home. They had to be reminded there were guests still sleeping. They dressed reluctantly for school. Cara bossed them into their uniforms, combed their hair, folded sandwiches into their schoolbags and into her own. They were ready to leave in a little flock when Rachel came out of her bedroom in her working clothes. She wore her hair up so her neck showed long and white and she smiled and laughed. She touched the children’s heads and straightened their collars. Starting with Cara, she kissed each child in turn, and their kisses came like wicks from their dry lips.

The children wanted to play Buttony.

‘All right,’ said Miss Lewis, and she clapped her hands five times in the rhythm that meant they must be quiet and copy her. They were quiet and copied her.

‘All right,’ she said with that smile she reserved for the sleepy, silly midafternoon. ‘We’ll play. Joseph, get the Button.’

The children approved the justice of this appointment; that was apparent from the small, satisfied sigh they made together. They watched Joseph walk to Miss Lewis’s desk. Joseph was a compact, deliberate boy, and his straight black hair fell to his shoulders. He wore his uniform in a way that seemed gentlemanly, but at the same time casual. He was both kind and beautiful, and they loved him.