Chapter 43
BAND PRACTICE
Ronnie almost stepped on a Hercules moth under the porch light at Stone House. Another one clung to a window. They were light brown, approximately twelve centimeters across the wings, hairy, with long, feathery antennae.
She shut Nev’s front door behind herself, toed off her Blundstones and hung her leather hat on a brass hook. Nev hunched towards the music stand, pencil tucked behind one ear.
“The ceremony’s outdoors on grass?” Gunni asked.
Nev nodded. “They won’t be sprinting, either.”
Inside Stone House was cool. Peggy Collins’ wedding was the day after tomorrow.
Nev had set up three music stands in the family room instead of the usual two.
Gunni kissed Ronnie hello on the mouth, but Nev only hugged her. That was new. Ronnie didn’t like it. They sat down. Ronnie unpacked her guitar.
Gunni held his bass between his legs. Nev held her guitar, though she was not playing on this song. They had given the guitar part to Ronnie, who was also on backup vocals.
“The guests want it drawn out so they can take photos,” Nev said. “We’ll keep it light and airy.” She played the chorus through once on the guitar, then began to sing the chorus and play the fiddle. Ronnie attempted to copy the guitar strumming Nev had done.
She stopped when Nev and Gunni stopped. “That was good,” Nev said. “A little faster with the guitar.” They began again, Nev singing the verse alone in a Scottish accent, Ronnie and Gunni accompanying on guitar and bass.
Nev stopped again. “It’s not a dirge. Keep up.”
A minute later Nev stopped to drink water. “That time you were ahead.” Nev lifted something off the piano, set a metronome on the floor, opened it and turned it on. It clicked away, setting a steady pace.
“Are you serious?” Ronnie asked, offended.
Nev demonstrated the guitar part in time to the clicking metronome.
“My voice is the metronome,” Nev said. “You follow me. Guitar follows vocals, not the other way around.”
Ronnie flushed, aroused.
Nev was in a mood. “Also, it’s Mairi with a soft “r”, not a hard “r.”
Ronnie lost her patience. “I don’t see why it matters.”
“The hard “r” sounds Australian.”
“We are Australian.”
“It sounds better in a Scottish accent.”
“Says who?”
“Says I.”
Gunni was smiling, brows knit together. “You two out of sorts with each other?”
Ronnie pretended to study the sheet music. It had been Nev’s idea to teach her guitar.
Nev sang the chorus in her normal accent to prove her point.
Something inside Ronnie relaxed. “I love your accent.”
Nev frowned. “This isn’t your wedding.”
“It isn’t yours, either.” Ronnie swallowed, flushed. Her chest burned.
“At your wedding, I’ll sing it however you like,” Nev said. “This time I sing it my way.”
Ronnie excused herself.
In the bathroom she splashed water on her face. Her cheeks were pink.
When she returned to the family room Nev was hunched over, elbows on her knees, head between her hands. Ronnie shivered, feeling Gunni’s hand scratching Nev’s back. She wanted to be the one doing it.
“Everything good?” she asked.
“Peachy,” Nev said.
Ronnie hesitated with her guitar on her lap, wondering how to finagle it so that Gunni went home and Nev invited her to sleep over.
“Gunni, are you staying or going?”
The white-haired German looked at her and raised his eyebrows.
“Don’t talk to him like that,” Nev muttered.
Ronnie itched to tell her that she had dropped the course, wanted reassurance that she had made the right decision. Nev hid a lit cigar in one hand. She didn’t resist when Ronnie took it and dropped it in Nev’s beer glass.
“Fuck you,” Nev muttered.
Ronnie squeezed Nev’s shoulder before hugging Gunni. “Love you.”
“Love you,” Nev and Gunni said at the same time.
The fact that Nev had cold feet shouldn’t surprise Ronnie as much as it did. Every new thing had growing pains. Progress wasn’t achieved inside the comfort zone. Hopefully in the morning Nev would feel better and get over whatever mental block this was.
“Dress code: vest and tie,” Nev said.
Ronnie turned, guitar case behind one shoulder. “Can I raid your closet?”
Nev’s bedroom was dark. Ronnie felt the owl watching her as she touched the light switch.
The same ironed shirts, slacks, neckties, bow ties, and the new baby blue linen suit Nev had loaned to Mikey for the hearing.
She ran a finger down it. Soft as an old T-shirt.
She wondered if Nev hadn’t come to the hearing because she loaned her only formal outfit to Mikey.
That was something Nev would do. She chose a black vest that had been Nev’s father’s, then pushed the light switch.
She had to pass through the family room on her way out. Gunni tapped Nev’s arm. Nev looked up, guarded.
“Don’t you want to ask which one she picked?” Gunni asked.
Ronnie held up the black vest, feeling childish.
Nev glanced at it. “Don’t wear a black shirt with a black vest. That defeats the entire purpose of wearing a vest.”
Gunni chuckled. “She looks good in black.”
“Everyone looks good in black,” Nev said.
Outside, honeyeaters and rainbow lorikeets warbled urgency in the grevilleas. The avian chorus sounded like a mixture of nails on a chalkboard and a crowd shaking sleighbells.
The next morning Ronnie biked to the boat launch on the east shore of Lake Tinaroo near where they had done the crane count with her dad earlier that spring.
Nev swam in goggles and nothing else.
Ronnie piled her clothes on a rock before wading through waist-high grass to the water’s edge, then ran in, splashing.
The water grew colder farther from shore. Ronnie ducked under, then popped up. She treaded water while pushing wet hair out of her eyes.
Nev looked silly in the goggles. “That night in the strangler fig was magical for me.”
“Same,” Ronnie said.
“It was more magical for me.”
“Pretty fucking magical for me too, babe.”
“I don’t want to do it again.”
Ronnie’s heart fell. “Why the hell not?”
Treading water made Nev pink. “The way you trust me and ask me for things makes me feel like I’m worth something.”
“You are,” Ronnie said.
“If we slept together again, it wouldn’t be casual for me.”
“Me neither.”
“I don’t want to date you, Dain’y. You’re a shitty girlfriend, no offense.”
“None taken.”
“I would be jealous and miserable,” Nev said. “We would drive each other crazy.”
Ronnie wanted to say that was paranoid, but Nev was right.
Ronnie would anticipate sex and be disappointed if it didn’t happen.
She would feel annoyed when Nev didn’t invite her to sleep over.
She would start to read silence as rejection, and make it a personal challenge to get Nev to orgasm every time they hooked up.
If Nev didn’t, Ronnie would feel like a failure.
She would try to cheer Nev up, to fuck her depression away, to be the drug that mellowed her out at night instead of the gin, which wouldn’t work.
It would never be as magical as it had been the first time in the hollow tree.
She couldn’t solve Nev’s problems with sex.
It wouldn’t fix anything that was broken, but it might break something that was whole.
“You’ve never had a healthy relationship,” Nev said. “I haven’t had one that lasted longer than three months. We don’t have the skills to date each other. Maybe someday we will.”
“It’s not rocket science. We’d figure it out,” Ronnie said. “People do this all the time.”
“People break up all the time. I can’t break up with you. I would rather...”
“Don’t be melodramatic.” Ronnie sighed, exasperated. Come here and stop talking. The idea of never touching Nev again felt like a tragedy.
Nev looked sympathetic.
“Don’t get in your head about it,” Ronnie said.
Nev chuckled, out of breath in the dark lake. “I live in my head. It would be more mental work for me.”
“Live a little.”
Nev treaded water. “You’re bigger than me on the outside. I can’t lift you. Along those same lines I wouldn’t ask you to lift what I have going on up here.” Nev touched her head. “I’m bigger on the inside.”
“That’s insulting,” Ronnie said, “and frankly not true.”
“I have twenty years more life than you do. What do you think life is? That’s twice as much shite to process. Twice as much stuff going on up here.”
“I’ll text you my therapist’s number.”
“Are we good?” Nev asked, reaching out and touching the side of Ronnie’s neck where the tattoo from juvie had been.
It wasn’t what Ronnie wanted, but maybe it was what she needed.
“You don’t have to be in control all the time,” Ronnie said.
“Feelings are the one thing I can control.”
“You’re repressed.”
“Good talk.” Nev disappeared under the surface and reappeared a few meters away.
“Pain and pleasure have always been linked for me. I don’t know if that’s other people’s experience.
The way I feel about you is better than sex.
Feelings are the only thing you own at the end of the day, the only thing that belongs to you,” Nev said.
“You can’t keep anything else. You can’t take anything else with you. ”
Back on the boat ramp, they dried off and shrugged into comfy clothes. Ronnie lifted her bike into the bed of Nev’s silver truck and snapped up the tailgate with a satisfying thud. Nev drove with one hand on the wheel. Ronnie resisted the urge to touch her.
They rode uphill past a local family that was hauling a motorboat full of inner tubes. “Is the possibility that you might be a carrier of that gene the reason you don’t have kids?”
Nev watched the back of the car in front of them. “No.” At the intersection she signaled and looked both ways before turning onto the Gillies Range Road.
They didn’t know if Nev had it. Maybe she didn’t. “How old was your mum’s mum when she died?”
“Fifty-one.”
“Was it…?”
Nev nodded.
Ronnie swallowed. “Right.” So it ran in the family. That didn’t mean Nev had it or that she would get breast cancer. “Has Taylor been tested?”
Nev nodded. “She’s negative.”
Ronnie sighed. “Thank god. That’s a good sign, right?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Oh, I’m going to worry about it.”
Nev ran her hand through short, wet hair. “I don’t lose sleep over it. It’s not one of the top ten things I lose sleep over. There’s nothing I can do about it.” Ronnie knew about white noise, how it faded into the background. You get used to not knowing.
“It’s not the death sentence it used to be.” A white T-shirt was a good look for Nev.
“I wish you didn’t have to deal with this.”
“Everyone has something.”
“Carpe Diem, right?”
“I happen to like living alone.”
“You get what I’m saying though? You’re a catch. Seriously.”
Nev’s ears turned pink. “Enough.”
“You should go on dates. If not with me, with someone else. Put yourself out there.”
“I’d rather not.”
“You want to end up like Kazi?”
“Best-case scenario.”
“You’re not an old man.”
“Not yet.”
“I want to be an upstanding member of the community, like my dad. I want to stand for something. I want people to know who I am, and faces to light up when I walk into a business downtown. I want to be the one people call when shit hits the fan. I want to get married and have more kids.” Ronnie hadn’t meant to say that, but realized it was true.
“I want a home like my dad and Blaise’s place, with open doors and relatives coming and going, but with fewer wallabies.
” She wanted to be a leader. An all-around decent, regular bloke.
Unpretentious. Aggressively middle class, with thick skin and good humor for armor.
Nev parked in front of Stone House. “Sounds like a plan for you.” She patted the front pocket of her shirt where Ronnie knew she used to keep an emergency cigarette, but apparently there was none.
Ronnie rested her hand on the knee of Nev’s sweatpants. “What about you? What do you want?”
Nev hesitated. “I don’t know, Dain’y. I guess I’d like to be the person you think I am.” She parked in front of Stone House, got out and shut the door.