We All Fall Down

MEG MATHERS

DAY 1

2019

My husband and I aren’t a part of each other’s anything. The elephant in the room neither one of us ever addressed floats like an overinflated balloon in the ceiling of every restaurant, theatre, bathroom or kitchen we walk into. A heavy, bloated beast, pregnant with problems I can’t bring myself to say out loud and Ian doesn’t want to confront. I think of him, the perfected poker face, the cogs quietly spinning the enormous wheel that houses all that brain matter.

How did we get here? Where will we end up? Who am I without him?

Like some twisted psychopathic bitch, I imagine how good it would feel to dismember him. Can you see you’re torturing yourself? I can hear him say. First, I take his right leg and pluck it from its socket much like I would a carrot from our dithering vegetable plot. Next, I remove his left arm with a lurch and place it beside his right leg. With my left hand I shake his right arm until it plunges pool-like from his shoulder into my waiting lap. I give and you take, says his unforgiving voice. I waggle a finger then take a hacksaw to his head. His left leg comes away with a tug. I ponder his parts on the kitchen counter, arrange the pieces into a patchwork I mount on the wall. I watch him mouth his final gripe, You’re mad, and to a future replete with framed men I raise my G & T.

I sat on the recliner facing the bed, my feet folded underneath me for warmth that wouldn’t come. No matter what I ate or didn’t, how much I exercised or didn’t, I was a cold woman. My circulation was non-existent.

At the sound of my best friend kicking at the covers, pale yellow waves pushed their way through the timber venetian blinds to attack the carpeted floor in diagonal stripes. It wasn’t yet Summer but already Ian and I had taken to sleeping with the air-conditioning blasting cool air until midnight. On a rare night one of us didn’t hit the on switch we’d lie awake naked under the fan spreading hot air to every corner of the room, pretending to ask each other about dreams I was too indignant to share and he was too unimaginative to come up with.

I wiggled my toes and watched the still body that was Hannah on the old king bed that was ours, Ian’s and mine. He loved the bed; me too, in the beginning. He had insisted we bring it when we left the apartment in Anembo Street on Chevron Island and moved to Surf Parade a couple of years ago. I’m not complaining, about the bed, or living in Broadbeach. It’s just that I never pictured it. A three-story house in Clear Island Waters, maybe. Never a four-story monolith squashed between three holiday apartment complexes with no front or backyard to speak of.

‘You’re going to love it.’ His first words after the silence that followed him telling me he’d found the perfect block on which to build our dream house.

It was supposed to be a compromise.

We looked at plots of land on weeknights for months. Ian wanted to build us a house closer to the golden sand beaches we never visited.

‘Is the beach a priority?’ I said crossing my arms across my chest. Ian had pretended not to hear me. The sixth plot we looked at in Mermaid Beach he liked. It wasn’t just the price that had me scratching my head though.

‘What about the fig tree?’ I said, pointing to a gorgeous, winding grey-white trunk. ‘She’ll be right’, Ian had said waving away my comment. ‘The one we had in the backyard growing up never gave my parents any grief.’

I started reading, to prove him wrong. Originally from Asia Minor, the fig was maybe the oldest cultivated fruit in the world. Evidence suggested that 10,000 years ago humans planted figs directly outside their caves so they could slip out for a midnight feast without concerning themselves with the likes of Mister Saber-toothed Tiger.

Then I found my point of contention.

According to Burkes Backyard, a fashionable fig in Australia was Ficus benjamina, the weeping fig. Pots of standardised weeping figs cropped and shaped into balls on sticks could be seen framing entrances and doorways all over middle-class suburbs on the Gold Coast. There were a tonne of new and improved varieties doing the rounds at Bunnings, including the pretty, and my personal favourite, Midnight Beauty, which boasted dense growth habits and dark, nearly black foliage. Best of all, was that weeping figs were easy to look after and could tolerate low light and neglect.

My point was that figs are a rooted species whose roots spread laterally and vertically. They send up suckers from the base of the tree that spread out and up to branches set low to the ground. Fig tree roots are highly invasive and if planted in optimal conditions (most conditions are optimal) spread their roots far and wide, choking out other plants, damaging sidewalks, driveways and any other structural foundations in their path. If a grower hasn’t planted a fig in a pot or put in place an underground system of retaining walls to keeps roots structured, sooner or later, they’ll discover their foundations are fucked.

Ian and I agreed to disagree about the fig-tree-plot. When a month passed I started googling residential real estate close to schools. I was convinced we’d start a family and that I could find us a suitable block of land in Miami or Burleigh or Robina. Something we would both love. A place to put down roots. To go deep, get entangled, start fresh.

‘I still prefer the idea of living by the beach,’ he said.

The one you’ve used twice in twelve months? I wanted to say.

Eventually, I found half an acre in Clear Island Waters Ian and I both liked. When I suggested we take a look he agreed then immediately purchased the block at Broadbeach while I was on a coffee date with my sister.

‘It’s fig-tree-free’, he said.

When I said nothing, he filled the space between us with assurances that it’d grow on me.

The build was goliath, the home anything but modest. He hadn’t wanted anything flashy, or so I thought. The place reminded me of a museum. Or a gaol. There was nothing quick about my adaptation to our new normal. The house has an elevator. An elevator for fuck’s sake.

My husband had said he didn’t like to show off but nothing else about his dislikes when we first met eight years ago. We’ve been married six years and I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I still don’t know his favourite food or whether he had a pet growing up. Which got me thinking, did he like me? Know me? Wonder what I dreamed about in my spare time?

‘You’re up early.’ Hannah pushed thin, golden arms above her head and stifled a yawn with a laugh.

‘Couldn’t sleep’, I said, moving to unravel my toes. Doug, the Chihuahua, let out a snappy bark telling me he wanted to go pee-pee. ‘I’ll see you in the kitchen. Put the kettle on, will you?’

Hannah, who stayed in our bed whenever Ian pulled an all-nighter, nodded like Ian always did and a wave of nausea shot through my stomach and up into my mouth. I retched where I stood doubled over in front of the recliner. Nothing but a bit of clear fluid. I wasn’t sure I could pass the morning sickness off as yet another 24-hour bug, but I’d heard there were a few going around and if pressed I’d try.

‘You alright?’ Hannah said, scrambling to get to my side and hold back my hair, ready for the next surge.

My turn to nod. I wiped my mouth on the sleeve of Ian’s sweatshirt and smacked my bum twice to let Douggy know it was time to go. Hannah watched us leave but said nothing else.

I’d worked as a legal secretary for almost five years and then got a different job. Doug was a gift from Hannah. A kind of trial run (she’d offered to take him back if things didn’t work out) while I settled in to work at The Lit Stop Café, Ian’s mother’s idea of a book shop and café in one and something she’d always dreamed of bringing to life before Ian and I had babies and ‘Nanny’ no longer had, in her words, ‘a minute to spare’. At least, that’s what Hannah wanted me to believe. I’m convinced the puppy was a decoy. Here! Look at me! Woof! Forget that it’s impossible for you to fall pregnant!

I met Hannah the day I started a diploma of legal services at Coolangatta TAFE. It was a month after my twentieth birthday and the same day I exchanged low-fat for no-fat and signed on for daily aerobics classes at the Palm Beach YMCA after The Australian Legal system 101 got out and before I showed up for an interview at The Landing Strip in Surfers Paradise.

Hannah and I started talking over Marlboro Lights. She’d moved north from Lismore to get away from her controlling parents and enrolled in the diploma because she didn’t know what else to do. I told her I dreamed of being a singer/songwriter and wrote myself affirmations encouraging my inner child to Be True to You! and other bullshit I wanted to believe would make a difference but didn’t. When Hannah asked me why songs, my face got hot and I started to cough. When she gestured for my cigarette so she could take a drag, I said it was because of the attention lyrics gives certain words in a certain order and something I’d read about their ability to help people explore their responsibilities toward the beings who shared our planet. Like poetry. She keeled over laughing and I joined in. Later, she said she understood. She was a poet but hadn’t mentioned it. We’ve been inseparable ever since.

Ian has never understood the bond we share.

He’d normally be back by now and I was expecting him to walk in the door any minute, black-eyed and bent out of shape from the annual Gold Coast Property Law Conference that saw him meet up with a bunch of crooked characters from interstate that liked to try to pass themselves off as his friends. It was a yearly 3-day bender Ian relished, despite never really buying into the banter and bullshit the conference inevitably brought with it. Or, buying in just enough to go a few rounds of Black Jack at the Star Casino and the other kind of Jack, enough to relax and play along but not so much he couldn’t take advantage of the latest gossip and industry secrets leaving the loose lips of Australia’s finest legal eagles and their trail of newbie arselickers.

My mobile started to ring on the landing between our bedroom and the stairwell. I walked past the elevator just as I hit ACCEPT a moment too late.

My mother-in-law didn’t ring back and I needed coffee. The call out of the blue like that took me back to the beginning. When he was five years old Ian’s grandfather came to Australia from Chennai by boat, an English lad orphaned in a foreign land, to meet his adoptive parents on Sydney Harbour. He grew up in Cronulla where he studied law at Sydney University and met his wife, a medical student from Ireland, on a study scholarship for a year that lasted a lifetime. The pair had two sons, one dark and lightly freckled, Ian’s (lovely) father, one light and heavily freckled, Ian’s (creepy) uncle.

My grand-father-in-law blended in Australia, unlike his experience growing up in India, and it suited him to merge into the background. Like him, his son, my father-in-law, also studied law, but in Melbourne where he met his wife, a theatre major (my mother-in-law the self-righteous snob), and Ian, as the story continued, was reared to walk the same path. Which he did.

Eager to outperform his parents, his peers and himself he put in 15-hour days to graduate top of his class. He was hardworking, resolute, disciplined and seemingly optimistic. When we first got together, I wondered for a long time, what he saw in me. Medium-working, disorderly, nervous and semi-pessimistic. When he proposed, it took everything I had in me not to ask him if he was joking.

I hadn’t understood what he wanted then, but I had a pretty clear idea now.

Ian’s mother, Ingrid, was the family firm’s principal legal secretary. At least, until I arrived, and Ian and his father, the firm’s legal counsel. I knew little about property law but the three of them welcomed me with smiling eyes anyway. It was a happy beginning. By the time Ingrid left to open the café in the ancient arcade with the graffitied walls on Goodwin Terrace, the office atmosphere was thick with strain, my mother-in-law having exposed her prickly underside. But by then, Ian and I had spent hours sneaking eyes at one another, trying to hide smiles that wanted to crack our faces apart. I couldn’t remember a time I’d felt happier.

*

Douggy ran ahead of me through the living room into the kitchen where Hannah, upon spying him racing toward her, placed the mug she was holding in her hand on the stone kitchen counter and crouched to meet Doug at his height for a mutual exchange of pats and kisses. When Hannah looked up she was wearing a frown, just enough concern to show she cared, but not enough to stick her beak where she knew it wasn’t wanted. Not anymore.

‘Better?’ she said.

We both knew I was holding back, but that nothing Hannah could say would change anything. I’d tell her in my own good time. I looked into her eyes, smiled and winked like my old man was fond of doing.

‘It was nothing. Probably last night’s dinner repeating on me.’

Hannah scoffed, picked up the nearest tea towel and hurled it at me. She’d cooked us Pad Thai. If I knew her, and I did, it was an excuse to use The Chef’s Kitchen as she referred to it. That and to put away two bottles of Church Block rendering her incapable of driving home to the three-bedroom flat she shared with her husband, their marriage not exactly the romance of the century.

I picked up the tea towel where it had landed at my feet and poured myself a glass of water. I glanced at the coffee machine, slick, shiny, still looking brand new. Ian had brought it as a housewarming gift hoping we would turn into one of those couples who got up early for a couple’s jog along the beach at sunrise before we trotted home for a couple’s coffee. We’d used the machine three times in two years. Even Hannah, who loved her coffee barista style, couldn’t be arsed with the assembling and cleaning and reassembling necessary.

The kettle went off and she raised it toward me blowing steam from her face. ‘Black or milky?’

My stomach lurched. I managed to hide my reaction, but I couldn’t face my usual cup of mercy. ‘I’ll have tea.’

Hannah’s eyebrows shot up but she stayed quiet. She opened a drawer below the second sink and plucked a peppermint teabag from a newly purchased container. She placed the bag in a mug, poured the water and laid a flurry of Who’s my good boy? on Douggy who had moved to sit by her feet where he could look up at her with pleading eyes and his Joker-like smile hoping such exemplary behaviour would earn him a treat. When he succeeded, Douggy strode off looking pleased with himself and Hannah and I took a seat at the kitchen counter.

I didn’t feel like talking, so I kept my mug close to my lips, focussed on the acts of sipping or blowing steam, wondering what state Ian would be in when he showed up. Out of the corner of my eye Douggy sat contented on one of his day beds concentrating on murdering some lamb lung.

Hannah took her mug to the sink and rinsed it under hot water. ‘Want breakfast before I go?’

The afternoon Hannah and I met, we snuck prawn and avocado rolls into the Burleigh library and Googled real estate while pretending to be good citizens. By the end of the week we’d found a share-house in Palm Beach we could afford with a couple of engineering students looking to fill two bedrooms. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I liked it, but it served its purpose. Food was trickier. It was never something Hannah and I had in common. Her diet (still) mostly consisted of left-overs, two-minute-noodles and Red Bull. She also put coriander on everything. My diet was more along the lines of starve, binge, purge, with a serve of self-loathing.

‘I’m good. I’ll grab something with Ian later.’

A nod, a kiss on each cheek and she was on her way. I watched her, a spring in her step, her bare feet at home on the travertine. I needed to get ready for work. I needed her gone.

‘Text me if you need me.’

She always said this as she was leaving. It used to bug me. Didn’t she think I could do without her help? These days I had other things on my mind and chose to let it go.

I nodded, waved, gestured the turning of lock in key so she knew to pull the door closed and when I was sure she was gone I picked up my phone and tried Ian.