March 7th
The light is soft and golden this morning. You’re asleep when I step over the snake still curled at the threshold of your old room, ants feasting on the flesh. I know I should remove it, and the ants. They’ll only find a way into our bedroom and attract more dangerous creatures. I should be sweeping it all outside, like I did with the debris. I should get back to fixing the house. You fix the car, and I fix the house. The perfect couple. But it’s been days now since I came back, since you started to heal, and the snake remains.
I find binoculars hanging on the cupboard door in your old room. Like everything in this house, they have a new skin of dust and cobwebs, which I brush away. I should go and look from the top of the Separates, but for now, I just stand on the veranda. Even through the binoculars, I can’t see any mine sites. I can only see the access track I took, cutting a straight gash through the land as it continues somewhere else. I scan the scrub on this side of the track, stretching back to our house. The other side of the track is flat, red dirt. The mine site must be beyond that.
If you do get the car going again, could we return to Perth, like you said, pretend this never happened? Has that everbeen possible since the day we got here? I could drop you at a McDonald’s in the outer suburbs. You could make up some excuse to your lover, or your sister, or whoever the hell she is, about being on a bender, being so out of it you don’t remember a thing. The police might buy that too. And meanwhile I slip back, unnoticed, check out of my hotel, get on the plane, go home. Nothing changed.
But I no longer have a hotel booking.
And I’ve missed my return flight.
People will be getting suspicious. My mother, for one. The hotel staff.
It’s too late to return.
‘So, what else have you lied about?’ I say.
‘You mean this time we’ve been here, or last time?’
‘I mean all of it.’
‘Since the day I was born? You’re in for a long night.’
We’re on the bed again, in the vanishing light of dusk. I’m staring at you and you’re staring at the ceiling. Tonight, I found tinned tomatoes and mushrooms and mixed them together.
‘Getting adventurous,’ I said, handing it to you on a china plate I found in a set in the shed, rather than straight out of the tin.
You didn’t smile and didn’t eat all your food. Neither did I. We’re both sick of the tins.
You glance across at me. ‘Go on then,’ you say. ‘Which lies you want in particular?’
‘I want all the lies.’
You laugh, a deep bark. ‘No one can remember all theirlies. Could you tell me everything you’ve not been truthful about?’
We’re more relaxed with each other tonight. You sigh as you turn on your side so that we’re face to face. I force myself to look at the wrinkles in your forehead and around your mouth, the puffy pockets below your eyes. I’m not attracted to you, not when I see you like this. You look so much older than Nick, than me. You look older than you are. I shift on the bed, and look at the disappearing sun instead.
‘Did anyone try to hurt you in prison?’
‘All the time.’
That isn’t a lie; I can imagine it. Men behind bars for what you did always get it worse.
‘Did you ever think you’d return here?’
You frown, clenching your jaw. Perhaps I should be warier of you now that you are stronger. Or maybe, wisely or not, I’m starting to trust you. We’re starting to trust each other.
‘I didn’t want to return,’ you say. ‘Not after that court case, how they treated us.’
‘But what you said, when we left—you promised you’d find me. Was that a lie?’
‘I changed, Gemma. I had to.’ You shut your eyes. ‘Haven’t you?’
I study you in the dusty light. Your hair is clean from bathing in the pool, lighter from the sun. I can believe that I’ve changed, but why is it so hard for me to let go of the you I want to remember? Is one’s own memory a kind of coercive control too, constantly reordering into the familiar, gratifying narrative? I watch a line of sweat roll down your neck. Then I turn and watch the bright knives of sunlight on thewooden floor, the swirling dust motes.
‘The Ty you were before,’ I say slowly, ‘with me, was that all a lie?’
You sigh. ‘I don’t remember him like you do.’