The Children's Bach by Helen Garner

bridge. Arthur stirs, flings up one arm, shrugs her off. The early wind brings a branch crashing down off one of the elms along the creek: she hears it rustle and thump. The same wind moves in the hall and turns over a page of the telephone directory. She sits at Dexter’s table. An orange rests on his papers to prevent them from blowing away. Under the round beam of the planet lamp she mends with stickytape a torn dollar note. At dawn Dexter stumbles in and stands looking at her. She thinks, I can’t be bothered fucking if it’s going to be obscure. But she does, they do, and the familiarity of his breathing by her ear brings up a rush of violence in her like vomiting: she pushes at his face with her flat palm, seizes a handful of his hair and drags at it, beside herself; but their torsos continue to move smoothly, their habit imperturbable, and just as she comes she sees a coin of sun on the puffing bulge of the lace curtain and bursts out sobbing.
    *
    â€˜You’re pretty crazy, aren’t you,’ said Philip. ‘I have to go to Sydney. Better come with me. I’ll pay.’
    Perhaps there was a world where people could act on whims, where deeds could detach themselves cleanly from all notion of consequences. Perhaps this never-quite-present Philip might be that mythical creature, a man who was utterly scrupulous and who was yet prepared to do anything. Perhaps she too might never apologise, never explain.
    The taxi came. She looked back as it drove away, and saw Dexter standing on the front verandah in his old tartan dressing gown, bare-shinned, holding the paper in his hand. Arthur was beside him. Their faces, shocked, floated after her like two balloons on a string. One could behave like this only by numbing something, and the skin of the body, as if to compensate, peeled back and laid bare the nerves.
    Even the route he took to the airport was new to her. They went by Melville Road and Bell Street, they came over the rise and rolled down the hill and there it was! the freeway flying away in all directions! Her own city was cracked open for her, as neatly as a nut opens at one tap of a hammer. From the plane window she thought she saw a rabbit tearing madly along beside the runway, but perhaps it was only the shadow of the wing.
    â€˜This hotel is a dump,’ said Philip. ‘I love it.’ He turned on the television and lay on the bed. She was ashamed of her motherly body, of the homely uses to which it had been put, of the marks of its unromantic experience. But then, in curiosity, she forgot to think, and when she rolled over, the sky behind her back had turned orange. They slept, they woke. ‘Fucking you,’ he said, ‘is like having a long and interesting conversation.’ His expressions changed, and changed. He laughed, he swore, he became distracted, he closed his eyes: tears fell from his eyes, he wiped them away impatiently. He seized her attention with his eyes, sucked her into his eyes. But late in the morning he drew himself together, neatly took his cock out of her, and got off the bed.
    â€˜Now I have to make some phone calls,’ he said.
    Everything was his idea: things he proposed they did, and he paid. He knew where places were and how to get there. He showed her: taxis, a rented Commodore to the ocean in the early evening. He wore a creased suit over a T-shirt, he spent money as fast as he got it, he slid the plastic card across counters with his wrinkling smile, tellers ate from his hand. They walked to the water where in sunny air metal clinked above moored yachts. They passed a beautiful house of Italian squareness and ochreness, and flatness of gravel and barredness of window and thickness of foliage by the gate.
    â€˜Will you ever have a house like that, Philip?’
    â€˜Nnnn . . . Yes. I will.’
    They walked along the watery edge of the Botanic Gardens; they looked at the nuns, the sails, the eggshells of the Opera House.