The Accident, page 11
Emma sat. She gave Grace a look of contempt, one that extinguished, as effectively as water on a candle, any pleasure or pride or enjoyment that Grace might somehow still have had inside her.
Grace chewed her tomato and thought about what her own mother might have done. Honoured Emma’s personal path? Diffused some cedarwood oil? Talked about totem animals or crystal healing or affirmations? Grace missed her so much. And she missed those pleasant, logical methods of healing.
‘Just try for one bite at a time,’ she said. She fucking hated Traffic Light Family Management Plans.
It was very, very much later that Emma finished her salad.
‘Happy now?’ she asked Grace. She slung her fork onto the table and walked away.
*
‘Sorry to pop in when you’re just about to start, but you did say to let you know straightaway.’ Grace looked up in something like terror. Was it the school? Was it Emma?
She would end it with Ben tonight.
‘Wallie Chen’s owner rang, and he’s drinking well now, still off his food, though, and also, while I’m here, Renee wants you to call Derinya, it’s urgent, she feels. A-ga-in.’
‘Thanks, Maria.’ Grace exhaled.
She would just finish with him. She just would. She just would.
The trouble was that whenever you put ‘just’ in front of a phrase like that, the phrase usually meant doing something either technically complex or emotionally impossible. (Just catch it. Just be yourself. Just move on.)
She pulled the tourniquet a tiny bit tighter around the sick puppy’s forelimb. Felt for a vein. Flipped gloves on. She could do this much almost without thinking, certainly without having to decide anything.
Breanna, the nurse, hooked up a bag of saline and passed Grace a syringe, and her mind became completely focused. Sometimes when she anaesthetised a dog, she remembered the first time she did it.
‘This is an elegant way to induce anaesthesia,’ her supervisor had told her. He’d been one of those quiet, handsome older men, the sort who wore new-looking navy-blue jumpers on weekends; she’d automatically believed every single thing he said. ‘Not exactly standard methodology, but resolves the post-operative nausea issue nicely.’
Well. Surely, surely, surely, she could find an elegant way to resolve her issue with Ben.
*
The most difficult thing, that 1990s day, had been keeping her eyes in the right place.
‘He’s milking it for all it’s worth,’ Ben’s mum was saying. She was smiling, with the friendly authority of a woman who didn’t mind drop-ins from Ben’s new uni friends, who was in possession of every single thing required to handle drop-ins not only from first-year university students, but from anyone.
She led Grace through a kitchen, past a square china bowl of stone fruit, and an enormous pump pack of Aesop handwash, and three pristine grey tea towels on a brass rail. She waved a comfortable hand towards a set of glass doors that opened into what had to be the living room. ‘You’ll find him in there. Reclining in state.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Hutchinson.’
‘Call me Sue. Just don’t encourage him now, Grace, whatever you do.’ A twinkle, woman to woman: men and their colds. And there was no diffidence or deference in the twinkle, either, no concern that the young ones might not do that sort of thing nowadays. It was a long time later that Grace understood: Sue was simply certain of being respected and valued, and by all the right people. Her personal charm was based on the confidence that went with taking just about everything for granted, while being irreproachably kind to the many less fortunate.
Ben lay on one of three couches; thick socks stuck out from under a beige blanket.
‘Chemistry notes,’ Grace announced in place of hellos. She put the lecture pad – which felt like her admission ticket – onto the coffee table, next to a box of eucalyptus-scented tissues and a vase of poppies. ‘As requested.’
He said a genuinely gracious thanks from amidst his kingdom of cream carpet, of framed photos on side tables, of paintings with their own downlights.
She stood, uncertain. (She’d imagined sitting at his bedside, taking his hand in a casual way – the way Rachel on Friends did that kind of stuff – and cheering him with a hilarious anecdote about ending up in the wrong tutorial or accidentally agreeing to a date with someone’s estranged father. But nothing like that had happened to her.)
‘I actually had a decent fever this morning.’ Towards the end of the sentence, he realised how he sounded. ‘You know, these common colds. Very common, but very nasty.’
She laughed and sat down on an empty couch’s armrest. Hopefully that wouldn’t seem ill-bred, or whatever its modern equivalent was. Ben was telling her he’d watched an old James Bond movie – Sean Connery – that afternoon.
‘You into the new guy?’ he said. ‘Pierce Brosnan?’
She shrugged. ‘I’m open-minded on the Pierce question.’
‘We should see one. When I’m better.’ Did he mean a James Bond movie? God, there’d be sex. Or another Pierce Brosnan movie? Were there any? Maybe he just meant a movie in general. And did he mean as a date? Or just a friendly outing?
‘Okay.’ It was so annoying, the way she was never spirited enough to ask any of her questions. Why couldn’t she manage a simple, flirtatious, Are you asking me on a date, Ben Hutchinson? But no. Of course she couldn’t. Those words would sound ridiculous in real life, or at least, in her life.
Sue stuck her head around the door just then. She had a tea towel over her shoulder and a clean apron on, and she asked Grace if she’d ‘be joining’ them for a ‘simple dinner’.
‘Oh! No, thank you, Sue.’
‘Can’t say I blame you.’ Another twinkle. ‘He’s not exactly sparkling company at the moment, is he? Bad as his father.’
Ben smiled, and stretched, and then coughed. He looked so gorgeous that Grace nearly shot a lust-edged isn’t he adorable? glance at Sue. Dear God. She had to get out of there, away from all that finely calibrated abundance, from these people who treated nectarines and apricots like apples and pears and who actually used their stain-free linen tea towels to prepare ‘simple dinners’. She had to go home, to her mum, who shared a lawnmower with two friends and who wrote pleadingly positive affirmations about universal abundance on electricity bills, and whose bedside lamp involved an op-shop silk scarf and Blu Tack. She had to work out how to be somewhere like here.
‘Grace should come for dinner when I’m better,’ Ben said to his mother. ‘Hey, Grace?’
‘That’d be nice,’ Grace said. ‘Thank you.’
The thankyou was mainly to Sue, but also – undeniably and unfortunately – partly to him. That was the problem. It was just very hard, amidst all that was so beautiful and new, to keep her eyes in the right place.
*
In a not-too-noisy pub, before the turn of the millennium and towards the end of her second year of university, Grace leaned both her elbows on the bar and looked into the mirror. Behind inverted bottles of Jack Daniels and Kahlúa were reflected the pale gleam of her own shoulder, the brown strap of her fake-velvet singlet top, several locks of her hair. Ben, next to her, caught her gaze in the mirror and raised his eyebrows.
‘You look very nice,’ he said. ‘That top. Suits you.’ She’d bought it from Supré for seven dollars. It would have been twelve dollars for two, except twelve dollars had seemed like a lot.
‘Is that so?’ She nodded – discreetly, euphorically – down at her beer.
Ben leaned closer. He said, ‘Hey, Gracey. Three o’clock.’
Of course, he didn’t turn that way. He sipped his own beer and stared ahead while Grace turned, flicked needlessly at the velcro-ed shut diary inside her calico bag, and then glanced up, towards three o’clock. The girl was long-haired and conspicuous in her synthetic attractiveness, and was wearing a tight aqua dress.
‘Mmm,’ Grace said, as she turned back to Ben. Their knees touched when she swivelled on the bar stool. Through the rip in her jeans, her skin touched his denim. ‘Just your type.’ The woman wasn’t his actual type, not at all. His actual type could be not only summed up, but entirely described, as ‘beautiful’. ‘I’m sure she’d be very susceptible to your charms. Poor foolish girl. I should go warn her.’
She made to stand up, but Ben put three fingertips on the side of her thigh. Their knees slid an enormous inch, so that one of his was between hers. Into her ear, he said, ‘But maybe she’s waiting to meet someone.’
Grace manoeuvred her head so their cheeks were almost touching; he would be able to feel her breath – her lips, almost – on his ear. ‘She’ll be meeting her friends,’ she said. ‘Betcha. Girls’ Night Out.’
‘You think?’ They were now touching at three points: their knees, their cheekbones, his fingers on her leg. They had spent that Friday afternoon in a chemistry lab, barely speaking. Even when she’d leaned a notebook against his back to scribble a random fact about sodium hydroxy-something, it would have been impossible to say whether or not they were flirting. But now it was after seven o’clock.
‘I can tell these things,’ she said.
Each of them had a free hand curved around a beer; each beer had about two mouthfuls left.
‘The friends’ll be here any minute,’ she story-told, aware she was being bitchy, and aware she didn’t like that, and aware she was doing it anyway. ‘There’ll be a Nikki and a Ricki and an Allie and a Sally. Then there’ll be a Mel. There’s always a Mel. Or a Bel.’
‘But not a Grace,’ said Ben. He let go of his beer and put his coldish hand on her hip, where her top met her jeans. ‘Or a Gracey.’
‘We’ve talked about this.’ She insisted she was Gracey only to him, and only when they were alone, because, she said, Gracey sounded way too girly for everyday use. This was a ploy; she couldn’t care less who else called her what. It was just she loved having a private custom with him.
‘Gracey.’ He put his forehead on hers. She didn’t notice how he smelled; she didn’t notice anything except what she wanted to do. ‘Gracey. I like it when you’re Gracey.’
‘Oh, do you just?’ She kept her tone exactly right: sardonic and clever and wry. She wasn’t that tipsy. She also kept her hand on her beer, in her twenty-year-old self’s best semblance of an enigmatic woman who was hard to get.
‘Gracey,’ he breathed. ‘Gracey.’
A few beats passed.
‘It’s almost a shame I’m not completely stupid,’ she said, in the end. She leaned away, moved her legs, sipped her beer. God, it took a lot of effort. ‘You should go talk to her.’ She gestured with her head towards the pretty-enough young woman.
Whatever it took to stand out from the crowd.
*
At some point, one day during their third year of uni, they’d decided to use the word ‘spectacular’ every time they spoke.
‘Or maybe just lots of times,’ said Grace. ‘Let’s not be spectacularly pedantic.’
‘It’d be spectacularly annoying.’
‘Spectacularly so.’
He smiled at her and poured sugar into her coffee. The café had an impressive air of coolness on a shoestring; you got the feeling the owners had recently returned from Sydney or London or even Berlin. Ex-tomato tins held succulents; inverted milk crates were topped with stacks of Cosmopolitans and Gourmet Travellers; an enormous espresso machine pumped out steam and silvery noise in a way that suggested it was proud of itself and for very good reason.
‘Seriously,’ Ben said, nodding at her drink. ‘The coffee’s spectacular here.’
Grace took her first-ever sip of ‘flat white’, and waited to die of pleasure.
‘What d’you think?’ He was watching her face.
To be honest, she liked mugaccinos better. All those buoyant centimetres of choc-powdered froth. ‘I think I prefer instant,’ she said. ‘And you look awful. What did you do last night?’
He made a little face at his serviette-wrapped glass, in the way that meant he genuinely didn’t want her to know. ‘Nothing much.’ He’d already told her he was spectacularly hungover. ‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing much.’
They went back to their newspapers. A new study showed men had more fatal road accidents than women. People were burning OJ Simpson memorabilia in front of a US courthouse.
‘Thought you went out for dinner?’ Ben said, looking up. He’d remembered. It was stupid, the stupid way that gave stupid her so much stupid pleasure. ‘Last night. With The Baker?’
‘He’s not a baker. He’s a pastry chef.’ Too quick. Too defensive. She turned another page, and made herself see that someone somewhere was saying something about privatisation. ‘Which is a spectacularly different thing.’
Ben made a silly, over-apologetic face. If only the pastry chef was a fire-fighter who worked part-time as a Calvin Klein model.
‘So, how was it?’ He’d closed his newspaper. ‘Spectacular?’ He was raising his eyebrows right at her.
‘Certainly not. No spectacularing on a second date.’
Ben laughed. ‘Because I’d be spectacularly jealous.’ He rubbed his face and glanced around, and then asked a busy-looking waiter for another ‘long black’. ‘Christ, I feel like shit.’
He moved his foot so their ankles were touching. Only briefly. And maybe it was just an accident.
*
Even by the end of that year, nobody seemed to know what was appropriate at someone’s mum’s funeral. After the service, Grace’s university friends stood in ferociously polite clusters: the boys quiet and terrified; the girls talking and horrified, as if they’d accidentally arrived way too early at a party. And now, at the wake, they were all off in a bedroom that one of her mum’s friends had designated ‘Peace-Full Space’. Grace could hear them talking – in semi-restrained voices – about the World Cup.
Grace stood alone in her mum’s kitchen. Well. Inside the kitchen of the house her mum had rented for the last three-and-a-bit years. On the fridge was a pastel drawing of her mother’s guardian angel, as visualised by a purportedly psychic artist. For Tess, the artist had written, in curly writing that made Grace think of the elves in The Lord of the Rings. She reached out and touched the angel’s lemon-pastel heart with her forefinger.
Whatever anyone might think, twenty-one was far too young to lose your mother. It didn’t matter that at least Grace was through her teens, or that at least she had a good solid science degree, or that at least she could support herself. Maybe there was never an old enough age – or a solid enough degree – but twenty-one was definitely far too young.
‘You okay?’ Ben was in his dark suit, his tie off, a mug in his hand.
‘I’m—’ She couldn’t, of course, say how she was.
Ben crossed the little kitchen. He put his mug near the draining board and his arms around her. Ben, it seemed, did know what was appropriate. She let her head thump against his chest.
Sad laughter gurgled out of the womyn’s sacred circle in the lounge, where her mother’s friends were drinking cask wine from a motley collection of vessels. She heard Eve D’Alberto say, ‘I always feel that song right here.’ Eve would be indicating her heart, her fingertips – bunched together as if to pick up lint – pressed to the centre of her chest.
‘Want to go outside?’ Grace said.
The two of them sat on the cracked driveway, one on each side of a rectangle in which the concrete had been replaced with pebbles. Weeds were regrowing. Her mother had once weeded properly, with an old metal tool that made it easy to extract the roots. Down on her knees on her rented concrete, occasionally standing to counsel the neighbour about her challenging adult son. Tess had been doing that only four months ago!
‘She was sweet, your mum,’ Ben said. He passed her his mug. She drank (red wine) and passed it back.
Grace nodded. ‘I just found out she gave twenty bucks a week to the women’s shelter, even though . . .’ She made a gesture around the garden, the homemade circle of rocks, the leaning letterbox. Her poor, foolish, chemotherapy-refusing mum. ‘She’d say she was blessed to have enjoyed all this.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Really sweet.’
‘She wasn’t dumb.’
‘I didn’t—’
‘She was not sweet or dumb!’
‘Settle down, oh grieving daughter.’ He screwed up his face and added, ‘Sorry. Should I be nicer?’
She shook her head and held out her hand for the wine again.
Ben assumed a joke-serene expression and a joke-holy voice. ‘Because I am here for you, Gracey. Should you need to release your sorrow or unburden your spirit or simply go out and drink large amounts of alcohol, I am here.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Seriously.’ Normal voice. Meeting her eyes. ‘Any time.’
‘I know.’
She moved closer to him, onto the pebbles. He settled the mug between his feet and put an arm around her.
‘What about your brother?’ he said.
She explained that her brother was somewhere between here and Townsville. He’d said not to hold off the funeral for him in case he got delayed.
‘I see,’ said Ben, clearly not seeing at all.
‘He’s hitching.’ That was part of it.
‘Right.’ To conceal his bewilderment, Ben handed her the mug. She drank, and imagined what Ben’s own mother’s funeral would – one day – be like. The caterers, the champagne, the impossibility of a son not being present. The ease and authority with which airfares and suitable clothing would be purchased, the magnetic pull of that family’s expectations on even the blackest of sheep. At Sue’s funeral, there’d be a phalanx of siblings, of good suits and blow-dries and meticulously blended eyeshadow. Hard-cover guest books, ushers, maybe a children’s choir. Not Eve D’Alberto singing a Native American song about soaring eagles in a too-passionate voice. Not someone shouting, ‘Trust in the Universe!’ into the ensuing silence. There’d be bittersweet anecdotes and admiring speeches, a shiny hearse, separate gleaming black cars for the family. People in the street would look. It would end up seeming as if Sue’s life had been worth more than Grace’s mother’s.
