“He’s staying a while.” That was Taylor, and it had the effect of distracting Sam long enough that Damon got his arms around Sam’s knees and tipped him over. They both went down tangled with a couple of chairs, and Angus yelling at them to quit it.
He sat on the floor and laughed. It was good to be home. Sam hauled him up and half an hour later he was singing U2’s Beautiful Day just to prove it.
2: Sound of Alone
Georgia pulled the grimy wooden blinds closed and collapsed into the only chair not piled with boxes or other household guff. It would take hours to unpack and get sorted but she didn’t give a hoot that this tiny flat was grubby, messy and missing a connection to functioning electricity.
It was her private space. If she never unpacked a box, washed a plate, scrubbed soap scum off the shower curtain she’d yet to hang, no one would care. She sprawled in the chair and breathed deeply of dust and musty smells and they were cleansing. This was freedom, this was her new life and it was joyful. She’d start over with her old name, in this new space where no one could make her feel responsible, guilty, frustrated or angry.
She could wear all those emotions without judgement, without needing to cover them over with smiling patience and polite forbearance like cheeks that needed colour or eyes that didn’t pop.
She could be grumpy and slobby, flippant and silly. She could sing off-key without worrying about anyone’s headache, or dance like she was having a fit without complaints she was being juvenile. She could eat junk food till she packed on the weight and exploded in oozing fatty lumps out the seams of her clothing. She could cultivate bad breath till the scent of it permeated the whole flat and seeped under the door into the street, making dogs howl and cats drop dead.
Even better, she could lie in bed all weekend, or watch endless bad television, or play games on her phone all day, or take up a dorky hobby like scrapbooking. Or she could sit in this comfortable chair all day and read a book, if she could find one, and no one would need a meal, or a complaint heard, a pillow plumped, attention for their bitterness and misery, or an audience for their betrayal.
She was done with the need for attention most of all. When it had been necessary vigilance she’d borne it better, with sucked up grief and determination, with a constant ache in her chest. With love. But once the fear wore off, once a reasonable recovery was imminent, it was the attention that wore her down most of all, because it was always so opinionated and unforgiving.
And Hamish had never been that way before.
But whose fault was that?
She struggled upright and pushed a box of kitchen gear out of her way with her booted foot. There was enough space between the chair, the new old coffee table and the two suitcases to dance. She took her phone out of her hip pocket and thumbed through to her music, picked the Cyndi Lauper track Girls Just Want to Have Fun, and played it through the tinny phone speakers. It was her new anthem, except fun was taking this whole break free thing a little far. What she wanted was to be alone, to be uninvolved, careless and quiet. Not to be defined as a patient girlfriend, a caring wife, a nurse, a companion, a slave. Not to be the one who ruined it all.
Cyndi sang and Georgia faked a dance step that was more a sideways old lady scared of breaking a hip shuffle than a recognisable groove. Not that she had much dancer in her anyway, but somehow in all that time with Hamish she’d lost her sense of rhythm, along with the logic of who she was without him.
And without him was bliss, a deep hot bubble bath, a feather bed, a big mouthful of chocolate praline, endless coffee refills you didn’t have to make yourself.
So getting her hippy hippy shake back should be easy.
But maybe not today. She dropped into the armchair with a grunt. Today her back ached from humping suitcases and boxes up the stairs. Today was all about the savouring, and she could do that while slumping. It was the equivalent of a day spa appointment that was going to last the rest of her life. It was indulgence and choice, ease and relaxation served with real peppermint tea that was steamy and fragrant.
It was so weird.
She’d hadn’t been on her own, truly on her own, without someone in the next room whose needs she’d committed to meet, for eight years. And even before that, after Mum died, with Dad’s drinking, there’d been that need to be the one who cared, who was responsible, whose needs came last.
That realisation was probably why it was hard to get out of the chair. She felt heavy with the difference. Not that it mattered. She could rust in this chair and no one would mind. That was such a lonely loser thought it made her smile. Because that’s exactly what she wanted, to be alone, and if that made her a loser then bring it on, baby, embrace the lame, cultivate the nerd, and institutionalise the geek.
She swung a denim-clad leg over the arm of the chair and fist-pumped, feeling vaguely stupid for doing it. Because for all the sit in the chair till she fused with its second-hand distressed leather notions, she had to get at least part way organised. She had a new job to start Monday and in that particular sphere she had to show a whole lot of anti-loser characteristics. Which meant finding appropriate clothing to wear, sorting out the bathroom and working out how to manage without a power supply and still have decent hair.
The better casual clothes she needed were in the red suitcase. The confidence she needed had to be summoned, and it wasn’t going to be as easy as ringing for a pizza. But she’d managed to conjure cool, calm and professionally collected during the Skype interview a month ago, and that’d been a disconcerting experience, pitching her heart out about her experience to her laptop screen in a cubicle at the library while a man in a tweed jacket with actual elbow patches and a cloth cap scowled at her over the partition.
He was reading something that exuded old book smell and making increasingly aggressive shhh noises. She was reading the expression on the faces of two people whose Sydney-based recording studio she fervently wanted to work for and sprouting off about her Bachelor’s Degree in Audio Engineering.
At about the time she mentioned being a panel operator for Radio London Mode, tweed man stood up and glared at her. She ignored his looming presence and went on to talk about her stint as house engineer for the Little Shakespeare Theatre. Tweedy lost it and started complaining loudly while she grimaced and explained how she’d been the engineer for a variety of freelance contracts in the advertising and documentary m
aking industry over the last four years. It wasn’t the career she’d hoped to build, it was what she had to trade with.
But Tweedy was making noises akin to a human distress beacon so she’d been forced to acknowledge she was logged in at the library because she’d needed a private space. She didn’t tell them Hamish would’ve made life even tougher for her than Tweedy had. She did tell them she’d need time to relocate from London to Sydney. Then she expected to wait with all the pleasure of having a dead limb from pins and needles before the inevitable analysis of her résumé revealed her patchy work experience and killed the opportunity like catastrophic blood loss.
Instead she got a cheery text before she got to the tube. We’d love to have you. When can you start? That meant telling Hamish she was leaving was a pressing reality.
She got up and righted the suitcase so it stood on its wheels. If she dragged it into the bedroom and unpacked it would feel like progress and it might stop this senseless rehashing of the events of the last few weeks. They no longer mattered. The whole of the last eight years hardly mattered; it was scar tissue, a non-lethal brain lesion. She never needed to think about it again.
She thumbed to a David Guetta track on her phone and swayed in the space between the boxes, cases and badly positioned furniture. She couldn’t sing for nuts and no sooner krump, pop, lock or hip hop than she could get a basic side to side step, school disco à la 1997 going, but moving, no matter how randomly, felt better than remembering that night she announced she was leaving.
Hamish was seeing someone. He hadn’t bothered to hide it, staying out all night and leaving restaurant receipts and movie tickets on the kitchen counter. It was the act that pushed her to end things and look for a way to move home.
And it was the admission that made her announcement seem like retreat instead of advance. She’d expected him to fuss, cause a scene. He’d laughed and told her it was good timing.