The Couple Upstairs, page 5
Every day back then Mel had started with an internal promise to do better. Today, she thought, when she woke up just before dawn. Today I won’t shout. Today I will breathe before I speak. I won’t sweat the small stuff. I will pick battles. I will walk away.
But every day, an hour later, her raw throat ached as she gulped down her cold tea.
‘Why is this so hard?’ she’d be bellowing down the hall, from the cluttered kitchen towards the living room. ‘Every day we eat breakfast. Every day we get dressed. Why does it always come as a surprise?’
‘Why are you shouting?’ Simon would shout, as Eddie and Ava ran up and down the hallway, getting further from being ready to leave the house with every step.
This was in the days when everyone really did leave the house in the morning. When Mel went to an actual office, for hours and hours, to deliver presentations and brainstorm projects in small, glass-sided offices, creating slides at a desktop computer and eating lunch out of a plastic container at her desk.
Simon had to be gone, too, before 8 a.m., to open up the shop for the people who needed new school trainers, an emergency basketball or a pair of yoga leggings. He wouldn’t be seen again until 6.30 p.m., when, drained from talking and selling and sorting all day, he was dead-eyed and clean out of words for his family.
And the kids – hustled into faded, over-washed uniforms, hair wrangled into something like smooth submission – were deposited to sit at their desks for six hours, and then on to the supervised carnage of after-school care for another three.
‘We’re never home.’ It was the self-soothing statement used to end every conversation Mel and Simon ever had about moving house. About finding some more space somewhere where every square metre didn’t come with a six-figure price tag. About the sanity-threatening proximity of apartment living with two growing children.
‘We’re so lucky,’ they’d end up telling each other, as she poured another glass, on one of those evenings when they were meant to be having ‘a talk’, a future-planning session.
They’d bought the apartment with borrowed money and the optimism of young people who never imagined a time when they wouldn’t want to live a chip-fling away from a glistening suburban beach, a busy strip of shops and two giant booze barns. Over the decade they’d lived there, the shops had become cafes all serving the same breakfast and the oversized pubs had morphed into ‘entertainment precincts’ that boasted kids’ pizza parties, eye-wateringly priced fine dining with a view and footballer-friendly rooftop cocktails.
Mel and Simon didn’t really resent these developments – who didn’t like dukkah-doused avocado on sourdough, or pubs where ignoring your children while you sipped over-priced rosé was encouraged? – but the neighbourhood had left them behind in other ways.
The little-kid years had halved their income and extended their debt, and by the time Mel and Simon lifted their muddled heads and looked around, they found they were definitively priced out of the suburb they’d made their home. And then, just as they’d begun to lift their eyes further to the horizon, to see where the family roots might be replanted, they realised that, actually, those roots were pretty rotten.
But it also wasn’t true that they were never home. Home was where every day began and ended, and no-one could argue that they were starting fresh or finishing strong. Not the way those mornings had played out.
For Simon, every day began with the intention to make every moment count. Every evening ended with his self-flagellation at having failed. He’d always been a man who put a lot of pressure on himself. When Mel met him, he had just given up on a professional tennis career, after years of training, travelling, disappointment and expense. He was done with it, but never defeated. Absolutely determined this would not be the beginning of a decline. Always practical, always busy setting new goals. Simon wanted to become a coach. And he did, but the tennis parents depressed him. Then he wanted to start a gym. He did, in a rented garage, with a friend. It went nowhere, so he switched dreams to having his own tennis store. And now, he was the franchise holder of a chain sports shop in a local shopping centre and he worked and he worked and he worked for every dollar that came in the door. It had all contributed, no doubt, to the shouting.
The yelling wasn’t why she’d asked Simon to leave, but now that he was gone there was less of it. The chaos was a different shape. Partly because the days were different. Mel didn’t have to go and brainstorm in her fifth-floor office every day now. She brainstormed at home, with her colleagues’ faces in little boxes on her screen, everyone politely waiting for their turn to take themselves off mute.
She knew you weren’t supposed to say so, but Mel didn’t hate the new reality. Not the new mornings, at least.
So, Flynn, if you think there’s a lot of noise floating up from downstairs, you should have been here months ago, mate.
Mel replaced the empty recycling bin and rubbed at the marks on her long-sleeved T-shirt with a licked finger.
It was a home-learning day, and she knew that nine-year-old Eddie, sitting at the round family table in the sunroom with a borrowed laptop open, was not really listing all the countries that had hosted the Olympics since 1952. She knew he would be watching some pale, scrawny YouTuber playing video games and shouting excitedly into his headset mic. She knew that Ava would be writing lists in her scrapbook rather than working on the Pobble story her Year Two teacher had set through a static smile and gritted teeth via video this morning.
Ava was really into lists right now: 10 Things Ava Can’t Live Without, 10 People Ava Thinks Are Awesome, Ava’s Favourite Foods, Things About Eddie That Annoy Ava. She was always neatly printing out misspelled columns of words, punctuated by tiny felt-tip drawings of cupcakes, doughnuts and milkshakes.
He smels like toe-jam. Werst brother ever. (Ice cream with sprinkles.)
If Mel checked on them she’d have to correct their course, and she wasn’t sure she was up to it this morning. She had a conference call about the new influencer strategy for a kombucha-infused immunity tonic in fifteen minutes and she needed a strong coffee to face that.
Families working together around messy tables – everyone on a different screen. That was now normal.
On her walks, Mel saw that every house was doing the same. Everyone was home. Everyone’s worlds had downsized. Computers set up on ironing boards, on sofa arms. Couples sitting opposite each other with back-to-back laptops, Ugg boots touching under the table. Taking turns to talk. Kids chalking on front pavements, playing handball in the skinny, high-walled gaps between unit blocks.
At least she and Simon had never had to be together all day, every day.
The thought of it made her shudder.
When Mel was little her grandma had given her two gerbils for Christmas. Mel had loved them, at first. But two gerbils became sixteen in an alarmingly short space of time. And the cage, and then the additional fish tank, and then the other cage, weren’t big enough for the ever-expanding gerbil family. One day, Mel, who must have been around seven, like Ava was now, had woken up to check on her furry friends and found that one of them had been murdered by his siblings. He was lying on the sawdust floor of the cage with his feet chewed off.
That’s what would have happened to Simon and I, she thought, if we had been forced to stay together in this flat, for months. I would have bitten off his feet.
As it was, everything exploded about a week before the city’s doors closed. The first days of isolation were also the first days of Mel’s life as a newly single mother.
Single mother. The ghost had one. Mel reminded him of her.
She heard the ever-so-faint tinkling theme tune of one of Eddie’s favourite YouTube jerks.
‘Kids,’ she yelled down the hall. Take that, ghost. ‘I’m going on a work meeting in my room. I’ll come and check your work afterwards. Twenty minutes!’
Eddie’s immediate and enthusiastic ‘Okay, Mum!’ confirmed that he was doing something he shouldn’t be.
Ava’s silence meant her list-making was getting heavy. 10 Things Ava Wants To Do When The Virus Is Gone.
Mel unscrewed her little mocha coffee-maker, the one she’d bought herself as a cheap present after Simon took the fancy espresso machine, the one she’d once bought him as a not-so-cheap present, two Christmases before the end.
She spooned the coffee into the tiny pan and pressed it down with the back of her spoon. Clicked on the gas. I should be making a list, she thought, as she headed into the bedroom to make sure the laptop was set up for the meeting.
10 Reasons Mel Needs To Get Her Shit Together.
It wasn’t like her to be so unsettled by the ghost upstairs. To be rattled by his unfounded parenting critique, his over-familiar sharing, his ability to bring up all these feelings, these memories, that she’d almost forgotten she had. Gina, for God’s sake. When was the last time she’d thought about Gina?
Everyone’s losing it, duck, she knew Izzy would say. You’re not so special. Stop beating yourself up for being normal. Most people are.
And when was the last time she’d thought about how, one hundred years ago, a young Australian man called Dominic had lifted his glass of English beer, swallowed a mouthful and put it down on the bar?
‘Who are you?’ he’d asked her. And Mel had rolled her eyes.
10
October: Mel
The bar had been busy, and she was moving on to the next person, and the next, and the next. People who needed their glass filled and their money taken and a smile from the bar person who was their equal in every way but this one, the way that they were drinking their way through college, and she was working.
But Dominic Rolff hadn’t moved away from the bar. Oblivious, apparently, to the push around him. To the irritated looks from the undergrads who tutted at the man standing between them and their pint. He’d stood there and sipped his beer at a pace that marked him as different again. Not a guzzle, not a swig. A slow sip.
Mel kept moving but her eyes came back to him. He didn’t look like the other men in the bar. He was sturdier, less pale. He was tall but not towering, broad-shouldered but not imposing. He had a strong, angular nose, high cheekbones, a full mouth. He looked, Mel would marvel many times in the coming weeks, months and years, like a beautiful woman and like a masculine man. Not for everyone, this unusual combination. Not for everyone, the way that he looked at her that night, his eyes appreciating and teasing at once.
He’d just stood there, at the bar, sipping his beer, watching Mel move from pump to till to bottle to till to wipe-down, rearrange, back to the pump, back to the bottle, smile, take the money, change, back to the bottle, back to the till. She must have walked thousands of steps a night in that job, all within a few square feet.
‘I’d like to help you,’ he’d called, over the noise of another incoming crowd.
‘What?’
‘I’d like to help you. Can I come back there?’
‘No!’
Of course he couldn’t come back there. The manager of the Student Union bar, Keith, would have a conniption if he saw a strange, adult man behind the bar.
‘It’s too busy for one.’
And Dominic Rolff had slid his hand underneath the counter, found the serving hatch and opened it, breaking the barrier between the controller and the controlled.
At the time, Mel hadn’t known what the hell to do. The bar was packed because there had been an impromptu meeting to vote to change the name of a study hall, from its tribute to an old white benefactor to something more relevant, more ‘now’. Tuesday was usually a quiet shift, but not today, not when there was a vote on.
‘What can I get you, mate?’
Mel watched as this strange person stepped into a role he had no right to assume. She had never seen him before, and she had seen everyone who drank in the Student Union bar. There were never any surprises in the clientele, or their overtures, their problems, their stories. At least, that’s how it had seemed to her. Even though a lot of the people whose drinks she poured daily were her friends, she wasn’t like them. Mostly, because she lived two suburbs over, with her sister, Izzy, round the corner from their mum. She hadn’t parachuted into another city to study, like most of these kids. She was a local. It set her apart, and it made her the perfect, incorruptible Student Union barmaid. Until now.
‘Get out!’ she’d hissed at him. He’d ignored her.
The stranger knew his way around a bar, though, that was clear. He knew to tilt a pint glass when you were pouring lager, how to pump a bitter to get a foamy head, how to tap-tap at the spirit measure to make sure you got the last tiny drops customers would complain about missing. And when he spoke, it was obvious he was most definitely not a local.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she asked him as he cheerfully took the money from a young woman who’d ordered a snakebite and black, and placed it next to the till, for her to enter.
‘I’m helping. Rush will be gone soon,’ he said, like he’d stepped off Neighbours. He smiled at her, sideways, as he turned to the next customer.
‘I don’t need your help.’
Mel laughed to herself every time she thought of her young self spitting that at Dom, simmering with anger as she grabbed a bottle of Sol from the fridge.
She didn’t laugh because she’d been wrong to feel that way, bulldozed by a man with a saviour complex who might just cost her her job. She laughed because the man she thought Dom was that night wasn’t who he really was.
He’d moved around that small space with the grace and wisdom of a hospitality professional. He never touched her, or ‘accidentally’ brushed her body, or let their hands collide. It had been like a dance. Like they were spinning around each other, choreographed. Destined.
When Keith had reappeared at the back of the room, Mel had muttered, ‘My boss is back!’ and Dom had ducked beneath the bar hatch and disappeared. Like he was never there.
A knock at the door and the smell of toasting coffee pulled Mel back to her kitchen, to where she was supposed to be.
The only people who knocked on her front door were already in the building. So it was likely to be Ainslie, who lived downstairs, and liked to complain about the kids leaving their bikes on the front path.
‘Mum!’ Eddie was yelling from down the hall. ‘Door!’
Was it the ghost? Offering more of his services? Or another parenting judgement?
‘Mum!’ Ava was suddenly at her side, list in hand.
10 Reasons Why Mum And Dad Should Get Back Together.
‘Sorry, darling,’ Mel was pulling the door open as she spoke. ‘Shit,’ she said.
It wasn’t Ainslie. And it wasn’t Flynn. It was a young woman she’d never seen before.
She was short, and sort of honey-coloured. Frazzled around the edges, both in the way she looked and the energy around her. She was dusty, tangled, twitchy.
She was smiling a dazzling smile that was unfamiliar to her pink-edged eyes and she was sagging just a little, because over one shoulder she carried a heavy-looking, scuffed and muddy backpack. Her short denim overalls were faded. Her feet were bare, and her head was bobbing, trying to peer behind Mel, into the unit.
‘Hello?’ It was a question.
Mel had others. Where’s your mask? Where are your shoes? Why do you look so scared?
‘Are you okay?’ she asked.
‘Oh, yes.’ The girl put a flat palm up to her forehead, as if she was feeling it for warmth, a motion that made Mel take a step backwards, her arm down across Ava’s chest, gently pushing her backwards, too. Then the girl dropped her hand. ‘Sorry to bother you, I’m looking for Flynn.’
Of course.
‘He does live here, right?’ Her accent, Mel had recognised a beat ago, was English. Southern. A little posh. Her ‘sorry to bother you’ had shown her manners. The tone of this question, and its expectation of a quick answer, had shown her privilege.
‘No,’ said Mel, wondering how this young woman might imagine that the ghost lived in the same house as her and this little girl at the door. She watched confusion, and then disappointment, pass across the girl’s face.
‘He lives upstairs,’ said Ava, from two feet below. ‘Right above us.’
The honey girl was inflated again, the smile spreading across her clear young face, her head turning to look up the stairs to her left.
‘We can hear him,’ Ava went on. ‘Mum says we shouldn’t listen too hard, that we might not understand what we hear.’
The girl smiled at Ava, and reached out a hand to . . . what? Pat her on the head? Mel instinctively batted the girl’s hand away from her daughter’s head. You can’t just touch people.
The girl looked up at Mel, surprised. ‘Sorry, I was just –’
‘It’s fine,’ Mel said, but it clearly was not. The girl pushed her hair back from her forehead, a little flustered.
‘I’ll go find him,’ she said, and immediately turned away.
Clearly she was so keen to get to the ghost she felt the backpack would slow her down. The girl abandoned it outside Mel’s door and bounded up the stairs, two at a time. Those cute little overalls. Her smile. That hair. Mel could feel what the girl was feeling. Butterflies, fear, roiling excitement.
Upstairs, the click of a door and the ghost’s voice saying, loudly, plainly, ‘What are you doing here?’
And the honey girl saying, ‘I came to find you. Thank God.’ Something in her voice was frightened, shaky. Mel felt inexplicably queasy.
‘Come here,’ said the voice from upstairs. Firm. Hot. And then there was a silence that could only be a kiss.
11
October: Mel
Mel’s work call was punctuated by the sound of the ghost and the honey girl having sex.
She sat on the bed in the corner she’d set up for maximum professional backdrop. Just in frame behind her was the rounded edge of a pleasing mid-century shelf – the bookcase was the only other furniture there was room for in the tiny space. A succulent – a money plant that had long failed to fulfil its promise – was visible behind her, next to a pretty book, a clever book, and a picture of Mel and the kids on a Queensland beach two years ago, in a tasteful metallic frame.
