Chapter 25 #2
Bridie lunged suddenly forward and upwards and grabbed something.
An almighty moaning, hoarse and wild, echoed up the hollow flue, followed by the frantic scrabbling of claws on steel.
Myra had both her hands to her mouth and Damien was by her side, transfixed.
Bridie was gently consoling the creature that was doing its best to escape her clutches in the chimney flue.
In time she had both hands in the fireplace, twisting and manipulating its limbs, unhooking its claws from holds, as she wrestled it backwards out of the tube.
‘Don’t be silly, now,’ she was cooing. ‘Come on. Come on. Come on, you big baby.’
The possum Bridie birthed from the chimney and dropped into her rescue cage was twice the size of a house cat, tawny-brown all over with black ears and the iconic bushy black tail.
Its huge orange eyes yawned in terror as it did a lap of the cage, throwing itself at the bars, standing on its hind legs and trying to find a way out the top.
Bridie clipped the cage closed with all the quiet elegance of a woman who had just plucked a piece of lint from her cashmere cardigan.
Her hands were free of scratches and bites.
She draped a towel over the cage and stood again, hands on her hips, the mortified rich couple and her unspeakably proud father watching her.
At the bottom of the driveway leading to Grevillea Lodge, Bridie took the enormous possum out of the cage, swathed its head in a towel and sat it on her lap like a teddy bear facing outwards, doing a series of checks while it groaned and hissed.
I supposed she was looking to see if it had been injured while doing its Santa Claus impression.
I sat nearby on the sandstone wall, now and then fielding texts about Chloe Lutz and watching as she plucked out the possum’s fleshy paws and inspected its sharply clawed toes.
‘I think he’s fine,’ she said, returning the squabbling, hissing creature to the cage and replacing the towel on top. ‘But I’ve got to get approval from the area coordinator before I let him loose.’
She started typing out a text, the gold glow of the ’Stang’s cabin lights making the tip of her ponytail look white and aflame. ‘Hey, Dad,’ she said as she worked.
‘Yep?’
‘I have a question for you.’
A sparkle of pain in my chest. I took a deep breath. ‘Okay. Go ahead.’
Bridie kept tapping. Eyes on her screen. Then she said, ‘When did you know?’
The darkness whispered all around me. The forest humming with life.
The question came like a slap in the face, even though I’d known it had to be in the works.
Had been waiting for it for years. I’d rehearsed my answer to my daughter about this question ten thousand times. Still, I found myself stalling.
‘When did I know I was gay, you mean?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Like, did I already know when I married your mother?’ I said. Struggling, flailing, clutching for wisps of time that dissolved as soon as I had them. ‘Was I faking it with her the whole time?’
‘Um, yeah.’
I nodded. Folded my arms. Told myself to make eye contact with her. Failed to do so. ‘It … It’s not a simple answer, Bridie. I mean, I … I’d had thoughts about other boys when I was a kid. Those thoughts turned sort of … sexual … when I was a teenager.’
Bridie said nothing. Waiting for more. Leaving me to squirm. I wandered a few feet away from the stone wall. Wandered back. Felt her eyes on me the whole time. Finally, she said, ‘We don’t have to—’
‘No, I want to. I want to try to explain it.’ I looked up at the stars. There were no answers up there, but I looked anyway. ‘You have to understand that, in my house … growing up with Dad. It was like, if you’re gay, there’s something wrong with you.’
‘Okay.’
‘Like, anyone who wants to do that kind of stuff with other men has got to have a screw loose. Something went wrong with them in the womb, the gays. That’s how they’d explain it to us, Mum and Dad both.
So, in the beginning, with me, it was about hiding the fact that there was something wrong with me.
From everyone. Especially Dad. Because if you had a weakness, he’d sniff it out and use it.
So if there was ever something going on with you, you had to do whatever you could to keep it hidden. ’
I glanced over. Bridie nodded.
‘And also, I mean, I didn’t sort of know that was a possibility. Being gay.’
‘You didn’t know it existed?’
‘I knew it existed, I just didn’t know it was common.
There weren’t a lot of gay men on TV in the seventies.
I mean, there were gay celebrities. And drag queens.
But they weren’t real people to me. There were no gay people in our town.
None that I knew of. I didn’t meet my first real-life gay man until I was in the police academy. So … eighteen?’
‘Oh, wow.’
‘Yeah. And there very much seemed to be something wrong with him. He was a miserable bastard. I mean, more of a bastard than I am, even. Aloof. Withdrawn. He was one of our instructors. Just before my intake class graduated—maybe the week before—he blew his own brains out in his office on campus.’
‘Jesus.’
‘They said it was a gun-cleaning accident.’
Bridie swallowed. Her mouth was so dry, it seemed, she made a clacking sound with her tongue trying to do it. ‘Did you ever have girlfriends?’
‘Oh, yeah. I always had girlfriends.’ This was getting easier.
I couldn’t believe it, but it was actually getting easier the longer I talked.
‘But I wasn’t, uh, attracted to women. If that makes sense?
Like, I didn’t go after them. They came after me.
They would just pop into my life and we’d end up as boyfriend and girlfriend. ’
‘But were you were faking it with them?’
‘No.’ I scratched my stubble. ‘No. I’ve never faked it with anyone, Bridie. Not your mother. Not anyone.’
Bridie shook her head. ‘I don’t get it, Dad.’
‘It’s like … these women would turn up. And we’d grow close, you know?
Become friends. Really deep, sort of … intimate friends.
And then it would turn sexual. I mean, months later.
Months and months. Guys used to make fun of me for it.
Like, I’d never have a one-night stand. They’d say “Oh, Russell, he needs to meet the parents before he’ll get with a chick.
” But it wasn’t that. It was just that I was …
growing an attraction to these women, I guess.
Based on who they … who they were?’ I palmed sweat from my hairline.
‘Not like … them as women. Does that make sense?’
‘Maybe.’
‘That’s how it was with Georgia. When I was with her I was with her, I wasn’t with a woman.’
Bridie was watching me. I eased a breath out slowly.
‘So … you’re not bi?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘But you were okay to be with these women, though.’
‘I wasn’t just okay with it. I liked it.’
‘So that’s bi, Dad. That’s bi.’ She put her hands up. Let them flop in her lap, exasperated. ‘And if you are bi, why did you have to leave Mum?’
‘I’m not bisexual, Bridie.’
‘But …’ She sighed. Had no words.
‘Bridie, all I can tell you is that when I was ever alone or single or whatever, I thought about men. Only men. And I only want to be with men now. That’s how I see things going.
From now on. I see myself being with a man permanently one day.
Maybe. If I can find someone who will tolerate my never-ending bullshit. ’
‘But how do you do that for twenty years?’ Bridie asked. ‘Be with Mum but have this crazy secret hanging around in the background? This future that you’re fantasising about with some guy?’
‘It wasn’t hard in the beginning. It was just a …
like a voice that I got into the habit of ignoring.
It was like living under a flight path. Your brain just sort of blocks out the noise of the planes going over.
And I—you’ve got to understand, Bridie—I wasn’t unhappy in my marriage to your mother.
I wasn’t starved for affection. And I enjoyed making love to her because I was attracted to her.
To Georgia. Your mother is my best friend, Bridie.
I mean, she was. Not anymore, obviously.
I’m not hers, that’s for sure. But she …
she’s still mine. I don’t have a friend in my life who I care about as much as I care about Georgia.
And I hope you believe me when I say this, that I wasn’t sleeping with your mother and pretending in my mind that she was some random guy.
I didn’t want to leave her at all, Bridie. ’
‘What?’
‘I didn’t want to leave her. I had to.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I was lying to her. And you don’t lie to the people you love.’
‘Did you ever cheat on her?’
‘No.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’ I looked her in the eyes. ‘Really.’
‘Not once in twenty years? Not, like, a kiss.’
‘No.’
‘Nothing. Not a moment.’
I exhaled, stared at the stars again.
‘There was a moment,’ I said. ‘So I ended it with your mother. Maybe two or three days later.’
‘What happened?’
The silhouettes of the forest moved all around me. The gold lights on the hill. I held my face for a moment or two.
‘It’s so stupid.’ I had to laugh.
‘Try me.’
I talked myself out of, and then back into, my next words. ‘He was a dentist.’
‘What?’
I tried to explain. How I’d gone to see my regular dentist in Ryde about grinding my teeth at night, because the sound of it was keeping Georgia awake and I was worried about cracking a molar and having to spend our end-of-year holiday money getting it fixed.
Instead of the regular woman who did my teeth, I’d ended up with some big handsome bear-sized guy with a silver-grey buzz cut and dark-rimmed glasses pushed up on top of his head.
He’d had a look around in my mouth, listened to my complaints and then asked if he could try to loosen up some of the muscles in my jaw and temples to see what that did to the alignment of my molars.
I’d resisted a bunch, of course. Tried to get up.
He’d tugged me back down into the chair by my shoulder, and I let him talk me into it.
Being the guy that I was pretending to be—the intimidating, ultra-masculine straight guy—the most physically intimate I’d ever been with another man until that point was to begrudgingly accept a hug from Evan once a year at Christmas.
And now, here was a guy taking the weight of my head into his hands.
Pushing on overworked muscles. Raking his fingers up through my hair.
Extracting pleasure and pain in equal parts while I lay there with my eyes closed and let him do it.
Bridie was so rigid as she listened, she didn’t even seem to be breathing. Her silhouette was black against the car’s interior lights, so I couldn’t see her face at all.
‘So, a …’ she began. I was unsure at first, but I thought I heard humour in her voice. Desperately hoped that I did. ‘So a head massage kind of … blew up your entire life?’
I nodded. ‘In a sense.’
Bridie was silent for a while. Then she said, ‘That’s some fucking head massage.’
I blew out a laugh. She laughed, too. Alone in the woods on the edge of nowhere, we laughed together for the first time in years.
A text message interrupted the chuckling. Bridie pulled her phone out and looked at it. She had approval to let the possum go.
I watched her carry the cage to the base of a nearby tree, remove the towel and unclip the top.
She lifted the lid off the cage like she was taking the cloche off a fancy dish.
The possum gazed around, hunched and slow and wild-eyed.
Then it spotted the tree and shot up through the open door of the cage, scaling the trunk in a series of hitching leaps, its limbs hugging the girth, claws embedded, jumping upwards.
In less than three seconds it was thirty feet up on a branch and staring down at us.
Bridie waved at it before she walked back to the car.