Too Close to Home by Georgia Blain Page A

But he resists the neat encapsulation of batik and sarongs. He remembers being surprised by her sense of humour; there was a steely dryness to it that seemed at odds with the rest of her character. And she had a strange independence he had admired. She’d met Shane at uni and moved into a house with him and other people she didn’t know within the first few weeks.
    The first night Matt slept with her, she showed him her horse drawings.
    â€˜I was one of those girls who never grew out of it,’ she told him wryly, laying page after page across the futon on the floor.
    There was something wild in the images that had appealed to Matt, and a technical accuracy he admired.
    She told him that she didn’t know if she wanted to keep studying. Psychology had disappointed her, and she’d only taken English and Politics because she needed to have a complete subject load for the year.
    â€˜I thought it would be about how we think and feel,’ she smiled, ‘but it’s just statistics.’
    She admired Shane, although she thought he drank too much. ‘He’s smart,’ she told Matt. ‘Argues every point,’ she said as she recalled the first time she’d heard him speak out in a Politics lecture.
    She had seemed, and Matt remembers this with uncertainty, oblivious to the fact that Shane and the others who came and went were black. She simply lived there, her own room a neat, calm space out the back of a house that was often a scene of wild drinking and intense politics.
    The curtains that she hung in the window were pale green. He sees himself lying on the futon and looking at them, almost lime in the early morning light, her hair white blonde against the pillow. She liked wearing jewellery, silver bracelets and turquoise rings that she said her mother had made. She never ate much, just white bread toast with Vegemite, or slices of pineapple, cold from the fridge. She had a cassette recorder in the corner of the room and she listened to Joni Mitchell.
    After they had sex, she liked to tell him jokes – bad, corny jokes that used to go round and round the schoolyard, jokes that weren’t funny, but somehow lying in that bed with her, the way in which she told them always brought a smile to his face.
    This is what happens when he tries to recall her, small details come back, but the whole remains out ofreach. And it is not surprising. He never really got to know her.
    A couple of days later, Matt tells Shane he could be the father of Lisa’s child.
    Freya has gone to a movie with Mikhala and he and Ella are eating chops. She has sauce smeared across her mouth and is in the middle of trying to explain an impossibly complicated game to him, when Shane turns up with the kids. They have brought three cakes with them, frighteningly white-looking creations with fluorescent pink jam in the middle and a smear of lime green icing on top. Ella thanks them, her eyes wide with wonder as they push hers towards her.
    â€˜Can I eat all of it?’ she asks Matt.
    He tells her she can, and he’s glad Freya isn’t here to see it. Even he finds the potential toxicity of it a little too much.
    Archie opens the fridge. He wants a mango. There’s only one left and Matt knows Freya was saving it for breakfast. He’s going to stop him eating it and then he can’t be bothered, but Shane takes the mango from Archie.
    â€˜You can’t do that,’ he tells him. ‘You ask your Uncle Matt.’
    Archie glares at him, and then bites straight into the flesh.
    â€˜I’ll give you a walloping,’ Shane says, hand outstretched, but Matt stops him.
    â€˜It’s fine. He can have it.’
    Archie sticks his tongue out at Shane and hands the mango to Matt to be sliced.
    While the kids lie in front of the TV, they sit out the back, drinking beer and smoking rollies. It’s only nowthat he has reignited this friendship that Matt realises how alone he had felt. If he