Too Close to Home by Georgia Blain

been hard, because she was lonely. Apart from her students and a couple of the other teachers, she didn’t really talk to anyone.
    But, sitting by herself that afternoon, she’d realised that she was actually all right. It was a strange revelation, an almost sly happiness that crept through her limbs and made her smile to herself. This was the most solitary she’d ever been, a state that had always scared her, and one in which she was now immersed. She could look after herself, and with this realisation came liberation, whole new ways of existing peering out at her.
    As she emerges from the tunnel and onto the tail end of the highway that leads to home, Freya tries to recall exactly how she had felt in that moment, because she wants the strength. Then she can deal with Matt’s revelation in a way that is right.
    â€˜Don’t be silly,’ Anna and Louise had reassured her after she’d spoken. ‘It’s not going to take him away from you.’
    But their words had felt like no more than the attempts at comfort friends always make to each other, a soothing pat that glides across the dirt, sweeping nothing away.
    â€˜I know, I know,’ she’d said, uttering her own banal words in response to theirs.
    But if she thought about it, there was a truth to their condolences. Matt’s reaction did not, by itself, have to mean he was going to drift from her. She, too, had a role in all this, and perhaps that was where the real anxiety lay. She wanted to behave well. Every day she woke wanting to be a good person who did the right thing, but like all people, she so often failed, forgetting to recycle, putting clothes in the dryer, uttering a sharp word to Ella, getting cranky with Matt when he didn’t come home in time for dinner, not telling him she loved him – sometimes it was easy to see each day as no more than a dismal slide from the higher self for which she hoped. And here she was, doing it again, greeting this news with fear.
    Her head hurt.
    She wished she’d never spoken.

 
    IT DOESN’T TAKE LONG before Matt realises that he needs to find Lisa. The realisation seeps in, its truth in stark contrast to the discomfort he feels at ignoring the news of the child.
    At first he is cagey with Shane, hedging around any direct request for help out of a strange embarrassment, or perhaps it is more a fear that if he says he thinks the child could be his, Shane will correct him, leaving him feeling foolish.
    Sitting on the front steps of Shane’s place he tells him he might have to go to Queensland for work; it’d be good to catch up with a few people, and he throws in several names.
    When he mentions Lisa, Shane shakes his head.
    â€˜Not sure where she is.’
    The last Shane saw of her was about twelve years ago.
    â€˜She was having a bad time of it,’ and he squints as he looks up into the harshness of the sun. ‘Livin’ with some bloke who was no good.’
    Matt manages to piece together a patchy history. The child is a son, and he was born in the year afterMatt came back to Sydney. Lisa had moved out of their house by then. She lived with some other friends, surviving on the single parent’s pension and the odd job. She had a few boyfriends; none of them hung around too long.
    Shane reckons there was a time when she might have developed a smack habit. But he isn’t too sure.
    â€˜Don’t want to go saying things that may not be true,’ he tells Matt. ‘She’s a good woman. Just had it hard. Kid on her own. Bad bloke.’
    As far as Shane knows, she then moved north and what little contact they had dwindled away into nothing.
    When Matt remembers her, he knows he liked her but there was never any chance of falling in love with her. She was one of those slight, pretty, hippy girls who came from the mountains behind Brisbane. She sucked the ends of her hair and wore patchouli oil. She drew pictures of horses in pastels.