Too Close to Home by Georgia Blain Page B

does go out, it’s with Freya and her friends. He likes them, in fact it’s unfair to call them her friends as most of them are mutual friends, but lately he’s felt there’s been a divergence between his path and the path that many of them have taken. He has little interest in this phase of acquisition, he realises. They talk about property, art, even holiday houses, and he knows he and Freya are not exempt from this. They may have less than many of the people they know, but they, too, have been acquiring. Only a week or so ago, Freya had bought a new desk for her studio, showing it to him proudly.
    â€˜What was wrong with the old one?’ He hadn’t understood her joy in the purchase.
    â€˜I’d had it for years.’ She’d rolled her eyes at him. ‘I bought it at Vinnies when I was in first-year uni.’
    She gets hurt when he attempts to voice his dissatisfaction with this new direction they are all taking, translating his lack of interest into something larger. She has never forgotten his reluctance to buy a house. This is their home, she tells him. It’s important. It is part of their life together. But the importance is not there for him; it never has been. It is a house, and he likes it, but he could live anywhere – and this doesn’t mean he feels any less for her or Ella.
    Normally he and Shane slot into the slow ease of talk with no hesitation, but tonight Shane is agitated. Awkward in a chair that is too small for his frame, he jiggles his leg up and down and drinks at a pace that is, even for him, a little alarming. Eventually he tells Matt there has been trouble at work.
    â€˜Young bloke,’ he says. ‘You know the type. Smooth as.’
    Matt listens.
    â€˜Blocks me on everything.’ Shane wipes at the sweat on his forehead. He is tense, and gets up. ‘If I had my way, I’d just take him out the back.’
    â€˜Can’t you get rid of him? You’re the boss.’
    â€˜Connected to all the Board.’ He walks up to the lemon tree, still talking, has a piss and then comes back. ‘I’ve been around a while. Lot longer than him.’
    And he has. Matt is vaguely familiar with Shane’s political experience, his involvement in some of the earlier housing initiatives and fights for land claims. He tries to reassure him that it’ll blow over, he just needs to give it time.
    Eventually Shane sits again. He leans forward and rolls a cigarette, his body relaxing slightly as he does so.
    â€˜Reckon I’ll say my piece and we’ll go back to Queensland. Miss it, you know. And the kids, they like it here, but it’s not their place.’
    Matt doesn’t know the country that Shane speaks of as home. It’s north-west of Brisbane, and when he talks about it, it’s always with a sense of the permanence of the land in his life.
    â€˜It’s there, you know,’ he says.
    On weekends he likes to take the kids to the outer suburbs where they can ride. He knows a bloke who charges twenty an hour for the horses.
    â€˜They talk about their animals all the time,’ he says.
    The agitation has left him now; his breathing is slower.
    It is then that Matt speaks. Helping himself to tobacco, eyes fixed on the pouch, voice soft and hesitant.
    â€˜I want to find Lisa,’ he says. He looks at the ground as he mentions that they slept together a few times. ‘When I stayed with you in Brisbane.’
    Shane stares out across the darkness of the back garden.
    â€˜And the dates, you know, they fit.’
    A dog barks in a neighbour’s yard. The sound of the television is audible from inside, the kids silent. Matt looks up. He lights his cigarette, the sulphur from the match hisses, the smell pungent as the flame flares and then dies. He turns to face Shane who sits, long thin legs stretched out in front of him, eyes still fixed on some point in the distance.
    Shane coughs, a hacking asthmatic