Chapter Twelve 2 December 2022 #2
“I love when you wear my shirt,” he said into my neck.
“You’re all foamy.”
He climbed out of my arms and went to spit in the sink.
I rarely spent the whole night at his place, though I had not allowed him in the barn since the morning Jack saw us.
Even after all these years, I was still paranoid that a photographer would snap me going into Ben’s building and lie in wait until I came out again at dawn.
“Hey,” he said from the bathroom, “I’ve got that conference in Launceston this weekend. Why don’t you come?”
I put the medical journal down on my chest. The collar of my shirt was wet with droplets that had fallen from his hair.
I imagined hiding in a Launceston hotel room so none of my senior colleagues would see me there, eating room service because it was too small a town to go anywhere without being spotted.
“This weekend? I can’t.”
“You’re not rostered on.”
It was riddling day at the vineyard that weekend.
The Jennings still did it manually, even though most growers used machines now.
They insisted you could taste the difference, so every season, we all filed into the shed to rotate row upon row of sparkling wine, each bottle requiring a quarter of a turn to coax the sediment up the neck.
I hesitated. “I promised to help on the vineyard this weekend.”
There was silence in the bathroom, and I waited for him to come out.
Choosing manual labour with Jack over a weekend in a hotel with him was bound to cause a fight.
Finally, I heard the light switch and Ben walked in, his trousers back on as if we weren’t about to go to sleep. There was a challenge in his eye.
“Just blow it off. I’ve got a nice room and everything.”
I sat up on the bed. “I can’t, I promised.”
He stared at me for a while and then he walked to the glass doors that led to the balcony.
It was too dark to see anything but our own reflection.
I usually insisted he draw the blinds at night, convinced a photographer would somehow get into the building across the street, Rear Window–style.
When the blinds were up, I could feel the shiny black lens of the camera trailing over my skin.
“I think we should stop doing this,” he said to his own reflection in the glass. “You’re too young.”
I was very still. He lived on a busy block in town, and we could hear people laughing and staggering out of the pub below.
“Okay,” I said. “Didn’t seem like I was too young for you three years ago, though.”
He turned to look at me, his hands in his pockets. He was wearing the same expression he did when he pronounced a patient dead.
“I know. But you’re not really getting any older. I think maybe you’re always going to be like this.”
I stared at him. Then I got off the bed. With my back turned, I took off his shirt and put my own clothes back on. Even as I had chased him, I always believed I’d be the one to walk away first. He was sleeping with his student, after all. I’d pursued him and then judged him for giving in to me.
“You shouldn’t leave this late,” he said quietly. “Just stay here.”
“My car’s downstairs, it’s fine.”
I knew his eyes were on me as I gathered my things: my favourite hospital shoes, Mum’s watch on the table, the toothbrush I left under his sink. I cleaned up like I was fleeing a crime scene, pushing everything into my bag.
“Are we really not going to talk about this?”
I hoisted the bag onto my shoulder and avoided his eyes. The beat of my heart was methodical but peculiar. “It’s fine. You’re my boss. It always had to end.”
He put a finger under my chin so that I would look at him. “Have you ever had a real conversation in your life?”
I squirmed away from his touch, hotly embarrassed. There was something about the silence that made me think of home. Mum and Papa’s unspoken rage over the dining table. Louis’s eyes glancing at the clock on the mantel again. My queasy heart.
“I’ll see you at work,” I said.
He shook his head, marvelling at me like I was a patient who’d rolled into the hospital with Living Statue Syndrome or Blue Skin Disorder or some other exotic condition we’d never see.
“I think you were with me because we had to keep it a secret,” he said. “That’s how you like it. You’d be incapable of living a real life, out in the open.”
My face was aflame as I left the apartment, but I didn’t cry. Whenever I saw people weeping at the hospital, I eyed them curiously, wondering what it was like to do that in public where anyone could see. Even Mum, with her enormous, unwieldy emotions, only shed her tears once the door was shut.
Outside, the pub’s patrons crowded the pavement, and I walked among them gingerly, keeping my face down so no one would recognise me. It felt good to be outside, even in the smoke and beer stench, and I breathed deeply as I walked to my Corolla parked under a single streetlight.
In the hushed safety of my car, I put the key in the ignition, but nothing happened.
I tried again and again, the lights on the dash flickering and the car giving the smallest pant before falling silent again.
I sighed, remembering Jack’s warning that the battery was getting on and would need to be replaced soon.
I rested my face against the steering wheel and ran through my options.
I was never good at these things. I had forgotten to renew my roadside assistance.
I didn’t carry jumper cables because I didn’t know how to use them.
Late in a small city, a cab or an Uber would be hard to find.
And even if I flagged one down, the driver might tell the press he’d picked me up looking rumpled and frazzled in the middle of the night.
I was out in a world I barely knew how to live in, and now I was on a dark street near a footpath full of strange, drunk men.
I could go back upstairs. But if I did that, we would end up on the bed, my teeth scraping his shoulder, my hair wrapped around his fist. In the morning, we would pretend the previous evening had never happened and limp along for a few more months until he found another defect in me that he could no longer ignore.
I pulled my phone from my bag.
U awake? I texted Jack, sure he wasn’t. It wasn’t a proper night’s sleep if he hadn’t already completed his first REM cycle by 10 p.m.
I could walk to the hospital and crash for the night in the on-call room, I decided.
My phone buzzed in my hand. Yep what’s up?
Fifteen minutes later, the silver headlights of his ute swept into the street.
His hair was mussed from his pillow and Ragu was with him, curled up asleep on the back seat.
Our cars parked nose to nose, he strung the cables between them.
It was like jumpstarting a heart, though mine refused to stir.
He killed his engine, came over and leaned his forearms against my open window.
The dressing on his hand needed changing, I thought to myself.
“I think it’s dead,” he said. “We’ll buy a new battery in the morning, and we’ll come back and I can change it.”
I nodded, gazing out the windshield. Something dripped from my jaw, landing wetly on my collarbone.
“Lex,” Jack said softly. He reached through the window and brushed the tear off my cheek. By the time he had the door open, my forehead was pressed against the steering wheel again. I felt a warm hand on my back. “Come on. Let’s go home.”
I was silent in the passenger seat as he drove back to the vineyard, the roads black under a canopy of bush. The gums were lit up by headlights in the dark, frightening and beautiful. Ragu snored in the back.
“You sure you’re okay?” Jack asked again.
“Yeah. Thanks for coming to get me.”
“Of course,” he said, stealing a glance at me. I’d lived with him for seven years and he’d never seen me cry before.
“Do you think I’m incapable of living a real life?” I asked.
He looked at me again. “Did Ben say that to you?”
I stared ahead, unable to speak. The road’s centre line passed beneath us like Morse code.
I suddenly felt very far from home. The grey Atlantic skies.
The trees in St. James’s Park that made me feel small when I walked beneath them.
The enormous marble statue of Barbara that stood outside the palace to protect us.
No one wanted me there, I remembered. I’d made sure of that.
We rumbled up the long drive and he parked his ute under the poplar trees. Out on the gravel, Ragu swooped into a deep stretch, yawned and trotted towards the cottage. We followed him in silence.
At the door, Jack paused. “Do you want to come in? We can sit up for a while. I’ll make you a drink.”
I shook my head and managed a smile. I could feel a bout of tears coming on and fought to hold them back. I knew if I started crying, some long-term debts I’d never settled would demand to be paid as well. “I might try to sleep. But thank you. Again. For everything.”
Wearily, I walked down the porch, knowing that he was watching me go. Ragu plodded along the sandstone path beside me. I was the only one who let him up on the bed and, consequently, he spent his life trying to get into my barn. I waited for Jack to call him off.
“Lex,” he said, and I turned. A moth careened into the verandah light, casting fluttering shadows over his face.
“I don’t know what happened tonight. But I meant what I said the other day.
What you did—starting your life over, becoming a doctor—no one ever tells you how brave that was.
You made yourself a real life. You’re living it. ”
I knew my eyes were wet and shining, and this time I didn’t try to hide it. We stood under the dark stars, smiling at each other, believing there was still more time.
Somewhere in the Swiss Alps, flurries fell on a steep slope, snowpack quietly accumulating.
“He can sleep with you if you like,” Jack said, gesturing at Ragu, who leaned against my legs. “For tonight.”
In my barn, I slipped gratefully into bed. Ragu nosed his way under the covers and pressed the length of his warm body against mine. I was smoothing his velvet ears when my phone rang. I opened the line, tethering us, even as the wall stood sentry between our beds. We said nothing for a while.
“Are you working over New Year’s?” he mumbled.
“No, somehow I got the whole week off.”
I suspected Ben had arranged the roster that way, but there was no point wondering what he might have had planned.
“I was thinking we could go camping. Maria Island maybe? Can’t beat the sunrise there.”
A new year, a new chance.
I smiled. “Yes please.”