The High Places: Stories

Cara Mia

Cara’s mother was at her best on Saturday nights. On Saturday nights she lit long white strings of Christmas lights and little candles in tins. She took the rubber bands off the wind chimes, which otherwise kept her awake at night, and hung paper lanterns from the clothesline. The back screen door opened and shut as the children ran in and out of the garden, to see the lanterns and bat at the wind chimes; the door snapped and thundered and let in gusts of mosquitoes until Cara told them to stop it, and Cara was the eldest, so they did. But their mother, Rachel, didn’t care how much noise they made, because it was Saturday night. She was black-haired and red-mouthed, she wore a sharp scent and a floating white dress, and now she produced her purse from somewhere (she always hid her purse, with so many children and so many boyfriends, though for the moment there was only one boyfriend, only Adam). She sent Adam out for fish and chips. Now that he lived with them, he could be sent on errands. Cassidy went with him, because Cass was the oldest boy.

Cara set the long dining table while they were gone. First she bundled away last week’s dirty tablecloth. The younger children bumped and ran and offered their help, and Cara had to calm them — she let them straighten the new tablecloth, carry knives and forks, salt and pepper, and, in a confident mood, the cool pink bottles of sweet chilli sauce. But only Cara was allowed to open the cabinet in the corner and choose the platters for the middle of the table, the special glasses in blue and green and purple, and the vases in milky silver. The children trailed Cara into the garden and watched as she cut flowers (she had little shining scissors expressly for this task, they used to be her grandmother’s, and they hung in the kitchen from a piece of velvet ribbon); depending on the season, she cut freesias or ferns or squat yellow daisies, swags of Christmas bush or oleander, and whatever she chose Rachel accepted and turned into bouquets, perfect, without even trying.

The guests began to arrive: friends of Adam’s, friends of Rachel’s, people Rachel worked with and people Cara had never heard of before, not always young and pretty but always with some distinguishing feature — an electric-blue hat, a foreign accent, a vast cosy beard — and they brought bottles of wine or beer and sometimes sweet-smelling dishes covered with tea towels, and baskets of bread. The children were introduced: Cara, Wallis, Marcus, Elsa; Cassidy is out with Adam getting dinner, said Rachel, don’t worry about remembering their names, nobody does. The younger children looked at their mother, anxious. They were shy for a minute and wanted jobs to do.

Cara turned ice cubes out into glasses. She found bags of nuts in the cupboards and poured them into smooth wooden bowls; the kids could pass them around. Elsa was naked and it didn’t matter. Marcus had unearthed two old Christmas crackers; they snapped, people shouted and laughed, Marcus and Wally wore tissue-paper crowns for the rest of the night. Cass and Adam returned, laughing in the steam of their hot parcels, Cass self-important because he had been allowed to burrow into his for salty chips on the way home. Into the dishes on the table: piles of battered fish, potato scallops, chips, and lemons cut in wedges. Coleslaw out of a plastic container. Then the long meal, the arms crowded onto the table, everybody swinging plates and lifting drinks, using their fingers, kicking each other without meaning to. Apologies, jokes, music to which no one listened. Elsa spilled her drink; Cara mopped it. Cara found more lemons. Stains bloomed on the white tablecloth, the ice all melted. Send Adam for more! Adam went for more ice; Cara offered to go with him. Out into the dark streets, the running traffic, people walking to the pubs or walking their dogs or walking arm in arm and who knows where. The service station was only two streets away, and Adam smoked as he walked; he said very little, sang one time, turned his head from Cara to blow smoke. Cara hung back as he bought the ice. She watched as girls came into the service station swinging the keys to their little cars; she watched as they spotted Adam, looked again — some of them knew him and approached with cries and squeezes. Sometimes he would introduce her as ‘my Cara mia’, and these girls would smile and squeeze her too. Once, some girls from Cara’s school were there; they asked who he was and Cara said, ‘He’s Mum’s boyfriend,’ but she would have preferred to say ‘I’m his Cara mia.’ And the girls from school gaped and said, ‘I thought he might be your brother,’ which was a compliment, because he was so good-looking, but it also meant he was too young to be any mother’s boyfriend. The best part was coming home: the house lit up behind the trees, all the windows wide, and everyone inside quiet for a moment as the man with the beard told a story or the woman with the accent sang a song; then, just as Cara and Adam passed through the front gate, all the voices started up, sometimes applause or laughter, and the people walking on the street would see and hear and wish they could go into the house and be welcomed there; and Cara could.

With the help of the children, Cara carried the dishes to the kitchen. The greasy fishy paper curled in fantastic shapes on the floor beside the rubbish bin and flower cuttings littered the table. Cara washed and Cass dried. The other children wandered in and out — into the lounge room, where the adults drank and talked, and Rachel leaned into Adam on the couch; into the kitchen, where Cara clattered in the sink, where Cass might snap them with a tea towel; out into the garden, where the snails crawled on silver paths, until Cara told them again to stop banging the door. The adults made drowsy, wistful talk. Rachel lifted her arms to push the hair out of her face and her children heard the jangle of gold bracelets. The younger ones tiptoed in and volunteered for goodnight kisses, which they received from Adam and the woman in the electric-blue hat — Rachel blew kisses from the palm of her hand. Cara made the children brush their teeth before bed. She closed their bedroom doors herself. The candles were slugs of light curled in the bottom of the tins and the tablecloth was sticky wherever the chilli sauce had touched it. The guests called: Leave the table, Cara. Come and sit down, said the woman in the blue hat. Her hair was tightly curled, she wore yellow stockings. How old are you, Cara? she asked. Only fourteen? She looks older, don’t you agree? Adam agreed, and Rachel smiled with a yawn. Someone had brought a tray of pastries from the Greek café. Cara spilled icing sugar on the carpet, it didn’t matter. The children slept. Adam moved his thumb over Rachel’s forearm, up and down and slowly. The Christmas lights above his head were a crown of stars. Cara, shy, laughed when the adults did. One of them wanted to smoke. You don’t mind, Cara, do you? It isn’t cigarettes. Cara shook her head. Nobody told her to leave, but she went to bed. Now that Adam had moved in, Cara was the only person in the house to have her own bedroom. Outside, the palm trees shrugged and struggled in the wind. That was Saturday night.

* * *

They lived in a low wide white weatherboard house in a Greek part of Sydney, right next to an Orthodox church. On Sunday mornings the noise of chanting men rolled out over the ripe garden. Under the sound of it, Cara lifted a blue shirt against the clothesline and pegged it in place: now there were five Adam shirts floating on the line. She lay in the grass beneath them. It was November; the fierce magpie mothers were nesting in the gums and an ibis stood sentry in every palm. Cara thought Rachel looked like an ibis: long-legged, with a black curve of hair along the neck. Rachel and Adam were in bed. Every Sunday morning: in bed. All the children had shooed themselves from the house. The yellow bedroom curtains remained shut; the house was sweet, white, forbidding. Marcus and Elsa hunted lizards, Wallis stripped bark from a tree, Cass kicked at a ball. Cara lay curled in the sun with an arm across her face. She was too tall, with a rushed vertical look and no chest or hips to speak of. And black hair like her mother’s. She curled to hide her height.

The children began to complain, as they did every week. ‘We’re hungry,’ they said, not so much to Cara as to each other.

‘Cass, go in, get us something to eat,’ said Wallis. Wally knew she was named for a king’s girlfriend and liked to issue commands.

‘Shit no,’ said Cass, pleasant and slow, kicking his ball.

Cara lifted her arms above her head. A high laugh came from the house, which was worse than silence. Wallis sat on Cara’s legs; Elsa came through the garden and collapsed over Cara’s flat front. Cara could summon the girls like that, only by lifting her arms. Not the boys — but who cared? They only yelled all day and had a weird kicking way of walking. She used to love them blindly, with a vicious loyalty, but when Adam came she saw him size them up, laugh, and shake his head; then she knew their deficiencies. Sometimes she copied Adam’s way of reaching out to mess their hair — a soft skating cuff to the rough backs of their heads that made them duck and grin when he did it. With her they only scowled.

‘Cara,’ said Wally, and Elsa said it too. ‘Cara Cara Cara,’ they chanted, and slapped their small hands against her feet and legs.

‘How long will it be?’ asked Wallis. ‘It’s hot out here. Is it hot?’

Cara wanted only to lie still and feel the sun and think about the church, which was white with a dome and a blue cross, and palm trees and ibises, so that it might be somewhere in the Mediterranean, and if that were true then Cara might be, also, somewhere on a foreign sea, maybe older, maybe beautiful, Cara mia. If Adam was out here, she thought, he would put Elsa in the laundry basket, or Marcus, and lift them high over his head. They would shriek and laugh and tumble into the grass. Then Adam would go away from them, from the garden and the house, to walk around the block and smoke. Rachel had told him never to smoke in front of the children. Cara thought of Adam smoking, the way his forearm looked as he lifted the cigarette to his mouth, the particular tense muscle that clenched in his golden jaw. She shivered in the grass. Wallis caught Cara’s shiver and hugged herself.

The singing quietened down next door. The doorbell was ringing — on a Sunday? And who ever rang the doorbell? The postman with a special package, Cara’s teacher the time she visited, men in suits who wanted to save everybody from hell. Didn’t they all know: Don’t make noise on a Sunday, not on a Sunday morning, and not with the doorbell, a real brass bell (brought back from India, from the neck of a sacred cow dripping with flowers, or from Switzerland maybe, a healthy Swiss cow in a high mountain pasture), so loud it could wake the dead. Cara lunged up from the grass so that Wally and Elsa slid and tumbled. She hurried around the side of the house, where weeks ago Cass had drawn a penis in blue chalk. The children followed. Who was at the front door, waking the dead? A girl with brown hair, a small wheeled suitcase, and an enormous belly. A pregnant girl. Cara pulled at the hem of her short blue dress. The other children pressed behind her, except for Cassidy, who was eleven. He slouched against the fence, pretending indifference. The church opened up behind him and people milled about.

‘Hi,’ said the girl, and Cara said, ‘Can I help you?’

Oh, the girl didn’t seem to know. She let go of her suitcase and began to cry. The crying made her red face redder, her hair damper, and there were rings of sweat under her arms and on the yellow T-shirt that stretched so far over her stomach; the rainbow on the T-shirt was twisted and wide.

‘Is this where Adam lives?’ asked the girl, and because she said his name — this was how it seemed to Cara — Adam opened the front door. He stood there for a moment wearing only a pair of shorts, his hair in all directions. Then he stepped outside and held the girl — his arms were long enough to reach around her, despite her belly, and she pressed her face into his chest with her hands knotted under her chin, crying, crying, until all the children ran away and only Cara saw him kiss the stringy top of the girl’s damp head.

Adam smiled at Cara after giving the kiss.

‘This is my sister,’ he said, and the girl lifted her swollen face. ‘This is Danny. And Danny, this is Cara.’

Cara could see in Danny’s soggy smile that she was more happy than sad; or that her sadness, now that she had been held in Adam’s arms, was complicated by joy. So Cara felt savage and said, ‘Does Mum know?’

Adam only laughed and stepped back from Danny, which made him disappear into the house. Danny followed. Cara pulled the suitcase behind them as quietly as she could. She eased the front door closed. The door to Rachel’s room was still shut, sealed by Sunday; Danny seemed to know to lower her voice. Adam didn’t, but his voice was never loud, although it carried. In the night and on Sunday mornings it carried and carried.

He looked at swollen Danny. ‘Johnno?’ he asked, and she nodded. In a shy way she seemed pleased with herself. Her face looked rubbed and sore but pleased. ‘And why’d you leave?’

‘Dad.’

Adam stood with his hands on his hips the way he did at barbecues and the beach.

‘Ah,’ he said, and Cara, standing beside the suitcase, felt all the tolerant history of that ‘Ah’ and hated it and found it lovely. Adam rocked back onto his heels. ‘You should sit down.’

Danny sank onto the couch in exactly the place Rachel had sat last night in her shining dress.

‘Well, here you are,’ said Adam.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Danny, crying again, and at this Adam knelt before her, he held her hands over her knees and kissed them, he said, ‘Hey, Dan Dan, Dannygirl, you’ve done the right thing, it’s good, I’m glad you’re here, it’s fucking amazing to see you, Dan. Hey, it’s beautiful.’

He pressed his face into Danny’s knees. She looked at Cara over the top of his head; her face was so naked with relief and self-pity, Cara turned away.

‘Want to tell me about Dad?’ asked Adam, raising himself as if to join her on the couch, but he paused before sitting. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘We need coffee. Coffee?’

Danny shook her head.

‘I’ll just duck out and grab one for me, yeah? I’ll be five minutes. Less.’

He went to Rachel’s door and opened it; the light swimming out of the room was green and murky, and Cara noticed the way he entered without hesitation. He said something and returned with a T-shirt and thongs. He took his cigarettes from where he hid them behind the piano, winked at Cara, and said, ‘Back in a mo.’ And left, shaking the coins in the pocket of his shorts. The house collapsed a little, emptier. The younger children crept to the doorway and peered at Danny, who peered back.

Now that she wasn’t crying, Danny looked like Adam, but wasn’t pretty: her mouth was too large, her eyes too small, and instead of his burning gold she was only an ordinary pinkish-brown. It was hard to think of her buckling under some loving man. She didn’t touch her belly the way some women do; she only looked at it as if someone had put a cushion in her lap without telling her why. She would endure the cushion for the sake of politeness.

‘Are you hungry?’ asked Cara, because she was hungry, and the girl said no.

‘Do you live near here?’ asked Cara, and the girl said no.

‘How old are you?’

Danny placed one hand on her stomach. ‘Sixteen,’ she said.

‘Mum was sixteen when she had me.’

‘I’ll be seventeen when it’s born,’ said Danny, which meant her birthday must be soon, because she was big: as big as Rachel had been right before she had Marcus and Elsa. Then Danny said, ‘Your house is nice.’

The house was messy from last night: the cushions crushed, the carpet dusty with sugar, the finished candles now just blackened tins. The big wooden windows poured with light that revealed the age of the furniture and the stains on the walls. Someone had braided half the fringe on the tall pink lampshade.

‘It’s my grandmother’s house. It was,’ said Cara. ‘Before she died.’

Rachel’s door opened and she came out in her red kimono: it had a bird of paradise embroidered on the back in blue, yellow, and white. Her hair was caught in her hooped earrings. She might have been beautiful once, Cara conceded; maybe even last night.

Rachel pulled her kimono around her waist and said, ‘Come into the kitchen.’

The children fled the kitchen when their mother appeared. They pushed past Danny and Cara into the lounge room, wanting to be invisible, but near. Rachel didn’t seem to notice. She stood by the sink drinking water from a green glass. Cara and Danny watched as she drank one cup and then another.

‘Have you fed the kids?’ Rachel asked, and Danny started a little as if she might be expected to do the feeding. Cara prised bread from the freezer. Rachel sat at the kitchen table, sighing as she sat and pulling her hair out of her earrings. Danny sat too.

‘Adam’s gone for coffee,’ said Rachel, as if this were news. She stabbed one finger into the top of the table and picked at the Formica while Cara rattled the toaster.

‘I’m sorry to just show up like this,’ said Danny.

Rachel only sighed in a hushing, regretful way, pressing down on the Formica she had picked. ‘Adam will be back soon,’ she said.

A tear oozed from Danny’s left eye. Cara saw it. Ah, then Danny knew Adam might not be back soon. He was out on the road somewhere, walking away, not thinking of any of them. Cara knew he didn’t think of them when he was gone. He had a smooth, untroubled mind, he liked ease and cheerful noise, and small things caught his attention: a woman walking away from church in a pair of very high heels, the line of people waiting for tables outside the Chinese restaurant, the body of a baby ibis beneath a palm tree, a man on his tiny balcony, three floors up, pouring coffee from a Turkish pot. And that would remind Adam he wanted coffee. So he would keep walking, looking for coffee, happy to be out of the house and on the move; he accepted every errand, he went cheerfully to buy fish and bags of ice, and he would take Cara or Cassidy with him if they wanted to come, he would take anyone who asked, but he didn’t care if he was alone or not. He might introduce Cara as ‘Cara mia’ or, when she met his sister, only as Cara. He wasn’t afraid of Rachel. He never hurried. He would take his time.

Occasionally a child would lift the heavy lid of the piano in the lounge room, consider the keys, and make an attempt at middle C; if Rachel heard, she’d cry out, ‘Who’s that? Who?’ It was only to hear her call that any of them ever played. ‘Who’s that? Who? Who?’ — like an owl. Today when middle C played Rachel only closed her eyes.

‘It was Marcus-Sparkus,’ announced Wallis.

There was a soft, upholstered punching sound, then a crying out. Wallis ran in on spinning feet.

‘What are you savages doing in there?’ said Rachel wearily, as if somehow obliged, maybe because of Danny; Cara didn’t know. Danny sent a fuzzy smile in Wally’s direction. Proud, savage Wallis leaned against her mother.

‘Marcus hit me,’ she said.

Marcus sang, ‘Dip dip dog shit! Up your arse with a piece of glass!’ from the lounge room, wild with the strange visitor on a Sunday morning, brave and wild. Rachel stood and went in to him. Cara didn’t call out a warning; he deserved it. You had to know Rachel might be ready for anger and equipped, this morning, with her hard, low, violent voice. You had to know you might be punished, even with a guest in the house — if weepy Danny counted as a guest. Still, Cara’s chest ached when she heard Marcus crying, when he was banished to the garden and all the children with him, and no breakfast.

But Marcus, once outside, didn’t care; or pretended not to. Wally and the others cared for only a little longer. They were hungry, but Adam might come home with a bag of bread rolls, the way he sometimes did on Sundays, and maybe a barbecue chicken or a cardboard tray of baklava. That would be breakfast. Cara ate buttery toast at the kitchen window and watched the young ones roll in the grass. Cass was pressed to the back fence, where the Jouberts lived; they were South African and Cass liked their daughter, who sunbathed on the back deck in a bikini. Cara rolled her sickened eyes. Look what happened when you liked someone’s daughter: look at Danny, puffed at the table.

Having exiled the children, Rachel didn’t return to the kitchen; she went into her room, closing the door behind her. Danny seemed surprised by this and looked to Cara for assistance, so Cara fussed with a little silver toast rack that had belonged to her grandmother. Her grandmother had been a sensible woman who liked objects designed for specific purposes. There were those little silver scissors on their velvet ribbon, designed for nothing but cutting flowers. Cara’s grandmother must have stood in the garden with her scissors and observed the neighbourhood and noticed the Greeks moving in (Rachel said her mother was never happy about the Greeks moving in). But she liked furniture with multiple functions. You could lift the needlepoint lid of the piano seat and find sheet music: on top, The Well-Tempered Clavier. Cara thought of her grandmother as being well tempered. She died when Cara was seven. There had been a grandfather too, who lasted longer, but he only sat in the garden reading the paper and smoking; there was something wrong with his right leg and he couldn’t speak without wheezing. All he cooked were blackened chops and baked beans from a tin, and he didn’t count as an adult in the house at night — if Rachel was out you were scared lying in bed, even as he coughed in the lounge room. He died after Marcus was born. Then the house belonged to Rachel, and that meant Rachel had to live there all the time; no more India, no more Switzerland, no more going in and out at night. So she invited her friends home instead, nearly every night at first, and then, as she got older, as she ‘settled down’ (Cara used this phrase with her schoolfriends), only on Saturdays. There were plenty of rooms in the house, but the children filled them. When friends stayed over they slept on couches or the floor.

‘You’ll have to sleep on the couch,’ Cara told Danny. She was protective of her private room.

‘Will your mum let me stay?’ Danny was braver now that Rachel wasn’t there.

Cara shrugged, which meant yes. Why not? There were plenty of plates. There were already extra chairs at the table. Cara looked at Danny’s stomach and knew she would give up her room. Just until the baby came.

‘I have some money,’ said Danny. ‘For rent.’

And she began to cry again, so that Cara had no choice but to squat beside her chair, to hold her red hands and say, ‘You sure you don’t want some toast?’

Danny shook her head. ‘It’s just my mum,’ she said. ‘Should I tell her I’m safe?’

‘Maybe,’ said Cara. She was so exasperated by pink, dripping, pregnant Danny. ‘The phone’s on the piano.’

Danny, with some trouble, pulled herself out of the chair. She gave a little smile when this manoeuvre succeeded; then her face collapsed into tears and she said, ‘I can’t call while I’m like this.’

Cara shrugged. ‘We’ll be outside,’ she said. She took a half-eaten bag of salt-and-vinegar chips into the garden.

The children — even Cass — crowded around her. Their salty hands plunged in and out of the bag. Cara held it higher than their heads and distributed the remaining chips more slowly; the children accepted this ceremony and waited with their hands outstretched. When they dispersed, Cass took the empty bag, turned it inside out, and licked it all over.

Cara lay in the grass. She noticed a fantastic, bell-like lift to the sky, a pealing quality to the light, and she peered into this high, rising brightness hoping she might burn her retinas, just a little — just enough to see something different when she looked out at the world. She drummed her heels into the ground. If I sleep here, she thought, the day will pass by, and no one will notice. It’ll be like a fairy tale. And like a fairy tale, her belly swelled the way Danny’s had; she felt it rise, a fat loaf, and she rubbed at it as if she were pregnant. Then she let out her breath and flattened again. She felt the way she did in bed at night with no one looking or asking questions or needing her. She lifted her arms over her head and expected Wally or Elsa to fall onto her legs, but they were waiting by the door for Danny to come out.

When Danny came, she was no longer crying. She was prettier. There was a gravity about her, a sense of permission, and she shone with some other thing, some sweet sadness. It was sticky, and the children stuck. She knelt down to them. She let them take her hand and lead her through the garden, and she knew how to part a curtain of leaves so that the space on the other side became important. Cara was scornful of this indulgence. She never played with the children. She was for climbing on, for comforting, for giving orders, for hiding behind; but Danny knew how to play.

Cara closed her eyes. She was in the Mediterranean. Adam was there with her in some hazy form. He wasn’t a body, a lover, or even a ghost, but she could touch him and he belonged to her. There was something frightening about this belonging; it took on strange geometric shapes, so that she and Adam were only lines on a bell-shaped sea. But these lines fitted together. They were double, the two of them; they were like a solution written on clean paper. Cara’s eyes had been closed for hours, she thought. Perhaps, if she opened them now, there would be nothing there. There would just be nothing.

She opened her eyes. The garden was there, and the washing on the line, and Danny with the children. Also Rachel, unexpectedly, lying on her kimono in the middle of the lawn. She wore a green bikini and her stomach was flat and pale with little pleats of shiny pink. Her black hair funnelled into the grass. She was so white and red in the midday sun, and indestructible.

Cara made sure to raise her voice. ‘I didn’t know he had a sister,’ she said.

Rachel said, ‘He has three.’ She shifted her hips. ‘Three little sisters in a pretty little town.’

But none of this could be right — the sisters, the mother, the little town. Rachel formed Adam when she brought him to the house. She found him and formed him at the same time. The sisters and mother and the father who made him say ‘Ah’ didn’t exist when he was with Cara and Rachel and the children, just as Cara and Rachel and the children didn’t exist when he was with other people.

‘She doesn’t look like someone who’d run away from home. Or get pregnant,’ said Cara.

‘Anyone can get pregnant.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Don’t be so sure.’

‘I don’t have my period yet.’

‘Lucky you,’ said Rachel.

Cara closed her eyes again.

‘What do you think they look like?’ asked Rachel. ‘People who run away?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Cara. ‘Like you.’

Rachel laughed. She lay on the grass in the garden she grew up in, surrounded by the children she had made, and raised one hand to her forehead to block the sun. Cara saw black stubble in the armpit and was disgusted and this disgust felt righteous; she pulled a handful of shiny grass and scattered it in the hope it would fly across to annoy her mother, and when it didn’t she went inside and walked with purpose into Rachel’s room. She stood for some time looking at the messed bed, as if it might relate in some way to what she had seen earlier: the clean white paper and she and Adam, solved. And it might have, in a minute, except that the doorbell rang again, not so insistently this time; Cara thought they might not have heard it in the garden.

Two men stood outside, fuzzed a little by the flyscreen. They had earnest expressions, they stood with their shoulders pushed back, and they seemed surprised to see her. Cara thought this must be some kind of church door-knocking thing. It was Sunday, after all: a day on which people might actually expect to be saved.

‘Excuse me,’ said the man closest to the door. He had the hopeful look of a visiting teacher. His lips were very wet in his brown beard. ‘I’m looking for my daughter — Danielle.’

The word ‘Danielle’ prompted the man behind him to take a step forward. He was revealed, then, as a sweet-faced tattooed boy, red-haired, with a reef of acne scars on his lower jaw. His expression wasn’t so much hopeful as pleading.

‘Danny,’ said the boy.

‘Come in,’ said Cara, and she even smiled, because they would take Danny away.

Both men wiped their feet before stepping through the door. They shuffled into the lounge room; the boy in particular looked bereft, as if he were used to carrying large objects and was startled to find his hands empty. The father didn’t seem the kind of man to make you run away from home, though Cara recognised in herself a tendency to be fooled by the kindliness of beards. She wondered what would happen if she offered herself instead of Danny. What would her life be like in the little town, with the fairy-tale sisters?

‘This way,’ she said. She led them through the kitchen and out into the garden, which she presented with a flourish: long Rachel on the long grass, Adam’s five shirts buoyant on the line, Elsa naked as usual, Cass furtive at the Jouberts’ fence, Wallis running, Marcus clambering over Danny, whose abdomen seemed larger, more obscene among the passion-fruit vine and the rusted wheelbarrow and lidless washing machine, and all the small grassy nests of cans and chocolate wrappers and junk mail that gathered and grew. Everything in the garden was moving, except for Rachel; but when Cara and the men came out onto the grass, all that movement stilled. Danny held Marcus tight against one leg and touched her belly. She looked at the top of Marcus’s head, but the way she looked at it was for the sad, red, tattooed boy.

‘Mum,’ said Cara.

‘Yes,’ said Rachel, without opening her eyes.

‘Mum.’

Rachel propped herself on her elbows, glorious in green, almost naked. Marcus disentangled himself from Danny and went to join the other children, who watched from the rim of the garden with shut faces.

The man stepped forward. His shadow fell across Rachel’s legs and she moved them.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ he said, but this seemed not to have been the way he wanted to begin, and he shook his head a little, as if clearing it. ‘Greg Armstrong,’ he said. ‘And this is Jonathan.’

‘Johnno,’ said the boy.

Cara felt that more might be required. ‘Danny’s — you know — Johnno,’ she said.

Johnno wiped his feet on the lawn and Rachel’s head fell back as if in exhaustion. Her narrow neck seemed to spring out sunless from the grass.

‘Adam’s not here,’ she said.

‘I’ve come for my daughter,’ said the man, his hands spread like a salesman. He looked at Danny and said, ‘Danny,’ and she kicked at the grass with one foot and didn’t raise her eyes. ‘Danielle,’ he said. His voice was louder this time.

Rachel sighed and turned onto her stomach. Cara thought for a moment she might undo her bikini top and make them all endure her loose white breasts.

The man now gave off a beleaguered air. He was winding himself into complaint. He was lost in the garden, and frightened of Rachel; he might be the kind who felt most aggrieved when outmatched. Possibly he loved Danny and would be persistent in that love, although he had done something to make her leave home.

‘Danny, come on now,’ he said. ‘You don’t belong here.’

Danny moved closer to Rachel, as if for safety, and Cara saw that this was wise. Probably there was no safety at all in the garden, but if there were any, it would come from Rachel; she was its only possible source. In order to win, the man must make himself calm and purposeful, show no fear of Rachel’s nakedness, take his daughter and run from the garden. Cara wanted to push him in the small of his back. She wanted to counsel him. She wanted to help Johnno too, because she liked the way the holes in his earlobes meant she could see through them to the other side.

But now Rachel was moving. She was pulling the kimono up from the grass. This seemed to give Danny courage. ‘I’m staying here, Dad,’ she said. ‘With Adam.’

‘Adam!’ said the man. He spat it — Adam. Cara had never heard an ‘Adam’ like this. She stepped away from the man to further study his face, but it was hidden by beard and age and seemed ordinary enough, just a father’s face. He wore pale jeans, loose at the knee, belted, with a tucked-in short-sleeved shirt. His back pocket bulged with wallet. He was the father of brown Adam, who went down the front path with his coins ringing loose. The man’s ordinariness now seemed a great failure.

‘I’ve had just about enough of this,’ said Adam’s father.

Rachel stood, wrapped in red.

‘This is my house,’ she said, with her most precise smile.

‘No one’s denying that.’

‘And Danny is welcome here.’

‘She belongs with her family.’

‘Adam is her family,’ said Rachel, so reasonably, thought Cara, with such settled purpose in her pale face. She wasn’t arguing with the man, didn’t care if he spoke again; she had made her decision and would now enforce it.

‘Get the children inside,’ said Rachel to Cara. Cara didn’t move, but the children, even Cassidy, went into the house, where they let out a shout or two, and one high-pitched whistle.

‘Danny,’ said Rachel, and held out her hand. Danny took it.

‘She’s eight months pregnant,’ said the man.

‘Exactly,’ said Rachel. She moved over the grass in her gold sandals, taking Danny with her. They were going to the house — inside — they were going to disappear inside the house, and Cara would go with them and leave the man and Johnno in the garden to huff and puff. But Johnno, with his tattoos and freckles, looked as if he would cry.

‘You stupid bloody selfish child,’ said the man, and Cara checked to see who he might be talking to. But he was looking at the sky, in the direction of the church’s cross. It was hard to see in the daytime, but at night it lit up in neon blue. Cara drew a line between the top of the cross and Adam’s father’s face.

‘Do you have any idea what you’re doing to your mother?’ he said. ‘Tell her, Johnno.’

Johnno folded his arms over the top of his head. His body was inclined almost tidally toward the house. ‘Sorry,’ he said, and ran over the grass to Danny, who accepted him: she pressed her face, briefly, into his shoulder. Rachel opened the door to admit Danny and Johnno, and finally she turned to Cara. Cara stood too long, not moving, and Rachel closed the door.

The man dropped his head as Cara approached.

‘She can sleep in my room,’ she said.

The man swayed a little.

‘And she won’t like it here,’ Cara said. ‘She won’t want to stay. Come around the side way.’

She led him past the faint blue penis and into the front garden. He knocked on one of the windows with his fist as he passed, but nothing happened.

‘It’s her funeral,’ he said into his beard.

‘She won’t want to stay once she’s had the baby.’

‘The baby,’ said the man — he spat it, the way he had Adam.

‘And she’s got Adam here.’

This made the man laugh. ‘You know, he just went out one night. He said to his mother, “See you tomorrow.” Next thing we know he’s in Sydney. Not a word to us. Never came back.’

Cara nodded. She watched as the man got into a small grey car with awkward movements, as if he were dismantling himself in order to fit, and she watched as he drove away. Then she walked to the front door, rang the bell, and waited to be let in.

* * *

Adam wasn’t home by dinnertime. He had never been gone this long before. Cara changed the sheets on her bed and took her school uniform and pyjamas out into the lounge room. She heated up meat pies and Johnno helped her by mashing potato. He was a serious boy who hardly spoke. He was the kind of boy who might go from door to door asking if he could clean people’s gutters or mow their lawns, and when they said no he would thank them and walk away with his hands in his pockets. Rachel ate in her room, watching television. The children were in love with Danny, but she was less attentive to them now. She watched Johnno and held onto her belly. He liked to pull at her earlobes as he walked past her, and they went to bed early.

Cara had homework to do. She sat at the kitchen table while the children watched something on the lounge-room TV. Sunday nights always felt this way: subdued, companionless. But this evening was worse, with Adam gone all day. Nobody spoke to Rachel when she came out of her room. She went into the bathroom, ran a bath, and stayed there so long the children had to use the toilet in the laundry before they went to bed. Cara read in her history textbook about a foolish English king. She thought she heard Adam return, but it was someone else opening doors and walking the wooden floors of the house. Probably Rachel, finally finished in the bath.

Cara realised she had left her toothbrush in her bedroom. She kept it there because if left in the bathroom someone else would use it. She knocked quietly on the door, and when there was no answer, stepped with care into the room. Danny and Johnno were asleep on Cara’s bed. Johnno was bent around Danny’s belly with an arm under hers as if it might be the only thing keeping him from rolling off. The bed had never been so full. The quilts twisted at their feet. They were close to naked: Johnno wore underpants, and Danny wore a long thin singlet that rose above her bump. They were both asleep with their mouths open, with formless faces and loose hands, so pink in the blue streetlight, so bundled, that Cara was embarrassed for them, but also fascinated by the ease of their limbs, by the damp fan of Danny’s hair across the boy’s shoulder, by all the ways their soft, sweet bodies rose and fell and fitted together. It was as if a curtain had been pulled away, some heavy velvet churchy curtain, and behind it were these two humans, who suddenly seemed so young to Cara — younger than she was, children really, sleeping around the child they had made. The curtain should be allowed to fall again. Cara looked and breathed and felt that she knew nothing at all about love, or fright, or whatever it was that held them there, tangled on the bed; she was meek and deferential before them, and aware for the first time of the shapelessness of her longing, how wide and open it was, how enormous in her body and in the world.

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.