Claire
The room smells like dust and sour sweat. She stands up straight and rolls her shoulders back. Click. Doesn’t sound good. Maryanne, her mum, keeps telling her to stand up straight or she’ll end up like that hunched old lady with the blue eye shadow they sometimes see on Ruthven Street. She spits back that she’s an adult and can stand however she likes. Then she remembers she’s thirty and living at home in Toowoomba and having an argument with her mum about her posture, and swallows down the lump in her throat that says, You’re embarrassing, Claire. Your life is embarrassing.
The head of the vacuum cleaner hits the metal legs of the chair and she resists the urge to ram it into the stupid chair again and again and again until it falls over. The vacuum itself sits between her shoulder blades and the black straps holding it to her body are tangy with the body odor of whoever wore it last. By the time she leaves tonight, the smell will have stuck to her cheap black cotton T-shirt. The kind of smell that doesn’t really go away, even after you wash it.
She pulls her phone out of her pocket, checks the time, then stuffs it back in and keeps vacuuming. Forty-eight minutes until she can go home. Her shifts are only three hours but they feel longer than the minimum eight-hour days she used to work in an office. She blinks her eyes hard, trying not to think about those days. Trying not to think about how much a life can change in two years. Past Claire, who lived in a North London flat with a job as a sales manager in a glass skyscraper, would pity future Claire. She owed her an apology for messing it all up.
Back then, life had a rhythm that she felt nostalgic for even as she was living it. Monday to Friday was all soy cappuccinos and overflowing sandwiches from the bakery down the road and meetings where she felt useful and brainstorming sessions that went well into the evening though it seemed no time had passed. It’s funny how memories can trick us. They reflect back moments of our lives, but without the discomfort or anxiety, the sweat or cold hands. Memories are like well-framed photographs, where all the mess is just out of focus.
A buzz inside her pocket. She retrieves it without breathing—a habit she still can’t break. Her stomach sinks. It’s just Charlie, who wants to know how she’s doing and when she’s coming back to London like she promised. They were meant to do that Portugal trip. And Joel’s thirtieth is next month. She always said she’d be back for that. Claire ignores the message, annoyed Charlie would even ask, would pretend like nothing at all had changed. As she runs the vacuum along the dark gray carpet, Claire fantasizes about writing back: “Leave me alone. I’m obviously never coming back to London.”
Her thoughts race loudly through her head. When she’d first started this job a few weeks back, she’d thought she might listen to music and be transported someplace else while she wiped down glass doors and mopped the scuffed dance floor. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. But within minutes of having her earphones in, she’d begun hyperventilating, sure she was going to pass out before she made it to the bathroom. Her vision had tunneled and her mouth had turned to cotton. Her heart was thumping faster. Faster. Faster. Harder. She had breathed through it, trying to hurry the process along, repeating “Get it together” to herself. Telling the boss that she hadn’t quite got around to cleaning the bar because she’d had a panic attack wasn’t an option. It had been her first day of work in nine months. Glenda, a friend of her mum’s, had offered her some hours cleaning the clubhouse at Toowoomba Bowls Club a few nights a week, and as quickly as she had said no, her mother had exclaimed “Yes,” and now here she was. Completely on her own, except for a checklist of tasks to complete, unable to listen to music lest it make her feel anything.
As she pulls the vacuum cleaner off her back and balances it on the edge of a table, her phone vibrates again. This time it’s an email. Her body registers who the sender is before her brain does. The way the letters of the name curl sends an electric shock from her fingertips all the way down to her toes. Her thumb hovers over the notification. Eight-fifty on a Thursday night. Why now? What could she want? She looks around at the empty clubhouse, the mopped wooden dance floor and the L-shaped bar swarming with fruit flies even though she’s just sprayed all the metal surfaces. Imagine if she knew this is what my life looks like, she thinks, before quickly realizing that she probably does.
The phone is bright, her name clear. Maggie Stuart. No subject line. She clicks on the email and immediately wishes she hadn’t.
Ana
On matching wicker deck chairs, angled in such a way as to encourage conversation between the two people occupying them, sit Ana and, beside her, the wrong man. If I told him, she wonders, would it ruin my life?
She opens her mouth and closes it again. Picks up the glass of Riesling to her right and takes a sip. This moment is almost perfect. The southern New South Wales sky is fairy-floss pink and a warm breeze tickles her hairline. It’s starting to smell like summer—citronella and faraway traces of backburning. The kids—Rachael, seventeen, and the twins, eleven—are at their grandparents’ until seven. Billy, the dog, is curled up beside her, waiting for dinnertime. She lives in the house with the swimming pool and the French doors and the deck looking out onto dense bushland, just like she’d always wanted. The deck he’d built with his calloused hands. She looks down at the dark timber panels. Him. The foundation upon which her whole life has been built. He’d tell her that if you muck around with the foundations of anything, the structure will collapse. And you’ll have to start again. “Not very efficient,” he’d mumble, before climbing into his truck to tear down a perfectly beautiful cottage to make way for a lifeless monstrosity.
She hears him breathe a forced sigh from the chair beside her and fury rises in her chest. For a moment she thinks she might hate him, and then remembers, slowly, that she doesn’t.
If you asked Ana what her first memory was, she’d answer as if she’d been thinking about it. She’s in her baba’s backyard and there’s a hole in the fence and she can see a spider. It’s growing. Getting bigger and bigger. But the memory isn’t really about the spider. It’s about the people behind her. Her baba and deda. The way Baba always shook her head when Deda made her laugh. How she sat with her knitting needles and yarn, lost in her fingers, while he sat across from her, reading another book about World War II. And how one of them would look up, every so often, and smile at the other. As if to say: Even after sixty years, I miss you when you’re someplace else. That’s what love is to Ana.
Her parents were the same. And Ana, for most of her marriage, had been the same. Until it all went wrong.
Tonight, as tended to happen, the tone of the sky changes, a reminder that some things don’t stay good for long. Twilight falls and darkness envelops the bushland laid out before them. With her elbow propped up on the dusty armrest, her head resting heavily on her hand, she notices things she hasn’t before.
The breeze has begun to bite, its coolness snatching the color and warmth from her legs. The ice cubes in her Riesling have melted faster than she’d drunk—the remaining two mouthfuls will taste more like water than wine now. The glass itself is chipped, which she ordinarily wouldn’t notice, but the light has turned ugly and suddenly everything looks much worse.
In half an hour, the kids will be home and then she’ll serve dinner and yell at them to help her wash up while already doing it all herself. She’ll tell Rachael to have a shower and Rachael will lie and say she had one this morning and then she’ll say “No you didn’t” and Rachael will ask whether she is calling her a liar.
And then the kids will go to bed, closely followed by Paul, who has the sleeping patterns of a ninety-year-old man, and she will sit on the couch and half watch some late-night American show full of jokes she doesn’t understand.
And then she will turn it off, climb into the left side of a bed that never feels big enough, and think to herself, I married the wrong man.
And as she drifts into sleep, she’ll be given the space she’s desired all day to think about the one thing she isn’t really allowed to.
The right one.
Patrick
If this were a movie, he would notice her hazel eyes first. How they look like the big bang—brown matter spilling into a green galaxy. The beginning and the end of the earth. But this is not a movie. And they are not the first thing he notices.
The first thing he notices is that the person walking through the door is a girl. A black bag hangs over her right shoulder and rests just above the curve of her hip. Long hair falls over her narrow shoulders. He doesn’t want you to imagine her in slow motion, because she’s not. Time doesn’t stand still. No one trips over or runs their fingers through their hair. One person simply walks into a room and another person notices. All his eyes deliver to his brain, as though he is a caveman incapable of higher-order thinking, is: Girl.
In Patrick’s defense, he’s never seen one in the lab before. He’s not being sexist, that’s just a fact. It would be like seeing a polar bear wandering along St Georges Terrace. Nothing against the polar bear—he’d be welcome to stay, of course—but you’d be lying if you said you didn’t notice it.
He’s not proud of what his mind does next, but it’s probably best he be honest. He screens her from the ground up, like one of those full-body scanner machines at the airport. Narrow feet sit inside white trainers. Legs hugged by tight denim jeans. A loose red-and-white-striped shirt. Long, brown hair, almost to her elbows. He can’t tell you much more than that. Certainly not the color of her eyes. Just that there is a girl unpacking her things inside the software engineering lab and he would like to keep looking at her. It is enough for him to think, Hmm, that’s an unusual occurrence, and file it neatly away in his memory.
A few days later, he finds himself sitting opposite the girl in the library, his mind registering slightly more than Girl this time. Her bracelets, which look like pieces of ragged string you find tied around a leg of ham, circle her slender wrists. There are a dozen of them. All different colors, standing out against the bright white of the desk.
“Where’s Thomas?” Girl asks, checking the time on her phone.
“I’ll text him now,” the other girl says.
Yes. By this stage, there are two girls—and they’ve found themselves in the same group for this interface design assignment. Two years he’s been studying software engineering and he has never worked with a female on a group project. Now he has two.
He’s learned that Girl One—the one with the bracelets—is named Caitlin. Her cheeks are flushed from the heat outside and she keeps lifting her hair up, waving cool air toward the back of her neck. Every time he instructs his eyes to look elsewhere, they find her again, searching for he doesn’t know what.
Girl Two sits beside him and looks like the kind of person who went to a private school—modestly dressed in expensive-looking clothes, shiny hair finely streaked with a blend of blond and gold. Her skin is clear and fair, her big, toothy smile likely corrected by years of dental work. Patrick can’t tell you what it is exactly, but there’s something fundamentally different about these two women. One is Caitlin and the other—her name might be Emma or Emily, he forgot immediately after she said it—is not.
After she sends the text, Emma—he’s decided her name is Emma—begins to tell a story about her weekend. He’s always admired that about women. Their ability to pluck a story out of absolutely nowhere and decide that now would be a good time to tell it. He’d never been much good at small talk. When he tunes in again, she’s recounting how someone got so blind drunk they knocked their two front teeth out on the edge of a gutter. Her voice echoes through the library, all tapping keys and humming printers, and he wonders how she could be so unaware of how loudly she’s speaking. He glances at the students around him. One is highlighting a textbook, shifting in his seat. Another has taken out one earphone and is glaring at them.
Caitlin nods politely without asking any follow-up questions. She fiddles with her bracelets, avoiding eye contact as much as possible.
He is struck by a desire to know her. To ask her all the questions Emma is answering unprompted. Was she at a house party last weekend too? Where was she before this moment? Where will she be afterward? Who is she outside of these walls?
She begins muttering under her breath and he realizes she’s reading out the project outline. He leans back in his chair. Smirks. She sees it.
“Sorry, just trying to work out what we’re actually meant to do here.” She rubs her forehead. “I reckon we just split it up rather than all trying to meet…”
“That’s the point of a group assignment, though,” Emma snaps, looking at him for reassurance.
To be entirely honest, he’s never understood the point of group assignments, but he doubts it’s for four people to sit in front of the same computer screen and debate every step of designing an interface. He’s done enough of these to know that they’ll meet a few times a week for a month. Emma will tell her stories. Thomas won’t turn up. He doesn’t know about Caitlin. But one person—probably he—will actually do the assignment but will put all four names on it anyway. Thomas might pat him on the back as they leave class, utter a quick “Thanks, mate.”
“Yeah, I’m with you.” He tilts his head toward Caitlin. “I’ve got a lot on this week…” He trails off. Doesn’t know why he said that. He does not have a lot on this week.
Caitlin looks at him and nods. He realizes he likes it when he has her attention. It makes him feel like he exists.
It’s decided that he and Caitlin will design the web formats. The other tasks are divided between Emma and Thomas—even though, at this stage, Thomas might very well be dead.
“We’ll need to meet at the labs sometime this week to work out what needs to be done and then we can divide it up. Thursday works for me. I’m sure I saw you in there the other day, actually,” Caitlin says, he realizes after a beat, to him.
The top of his ears feel hot. “Did you?” he asks. Another lie.
Emma and her shiny hair have somewhere else to be, so she packs up her things and says that she’ll see them later. He watches her walk through the glass sliding doors into the warm, still afternoon.
“You off too?” he asks Caitlin, both of them still looking at their laptop screens.
“Yeah.” Her fingers play with her bottom lip. “I feel so rude … I’m checking that email to see what her name is.”
He laughs. Tells her he’s been trying to work it out too, but he’s fairly certain it’s Emma. Then she laughs. It’s not. It’s Alice. He makes her show him the email to prove it. He pulls a face. Guilty.
“And what’s my name then?” she asks. A test.
“Caitlin,” he says. Her eyes are hazel. Like the big bang. “You’re Caitlin.”
Copyright © 2021 by Jessie Stephens
