Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [39]
A great tide of savage, bitter envy swept through Wendy.
She got up from the table and wandered away from the balloon of light, leaving the man from Oxford to turn his droning voice to Derek, who sat stone-faced and drunk in his chair.
She picked her way across the gravel and the pebbles in her bare feet, and then she reached the water’s edge, her feet sinking to the ankles in the clean grey grit. She stepped back and sat down on the pebbles.
She did not want to be this maudlin old woman, tearful in the dark at weddings. This afternoon she had seen another woman, very briefly, in the mirror. But that was the terrible thing she had done. She had wanted to be that other woman. Renewed. And because of that she had let poor, beloved Jim—for it was actually him she had disregarded—be left behind. Thrown away.
She burrowed her two hands up to the wrists into the sand beside her, put her head to her knees, and cried.
Then someone was staggering up from the far end of the beach, calling, ‘Wendy! What are ya doing?!’
She didn’t answer.
‘Are you being sick?’ called Ruth, who was drunk.
Wendy stood up. ‘Of course not!’
But she did feel a little drunk now, having rushed to stand upright, and the sea slurping back and forth.
‘Oh,’ said Ruth. ‘I did.’ She giggled sheepishly, and wiped her mouth. ‘Think I drank too much of that wine.’ She burped. ‘Sorry,’ she said solemnly. They stood looking at the sea.
Then Ruth, her voice full of emotion, cried, ‘I miss Alan!’
The swell of bitterness inside Wendy crested, and crashed down. She turned on Ruth. ‘Alan! He could have come but he couldn’t be bothered. You’ll see him next week! You have your children. What could you possibly have to miss!’
Ruth said nothing, but looked out at the dark water. She sniffed.
In a little while she said, in a simple, peaceable voice, ‘I’m allowed.’
She sat down, dumpily, in the sand.
Wendy stayed where she was. The sea heaved and moved. Jim was dead and gone, and she had no children. She had made her life; now she was lying in it.
This is all that’s left, she thought. And it’s Ruth.
She stood over her sister and they both looked at the water. Music from the wedding came in drifts from behind them.
One day soon, watching the water on the swimming pool in Ruth and Alan’s backyard, thinking back to the wedding in Greece, Wendy would be suddenly tired of being secretive and complicated and alone. She would be tired of her disdain for Ruth. She would be tired to the bone of Jim being dead, but even more tired of missing him, of the watchfulness and diligence it demanded, the effort and duty of it. She would go home and tip the last of the ashes from the cricket palace into a small dip in the garden bed, and press the earth down with her fingers.
But now, here on the beach with Ruth, she simply stood.
Eventually Ruth got up from where she sat, letting out one of her long, old-people groans as she rose, and Wendy put out her arm to help her sister steady herself while she brushed the damp sand from the back of her trousers, and they turned and walked back towards the party lights.
FAMILY RADIO
Roger McDonald
A dust storm blew until it reached the riverbank, where it stalled in the sky, a cliff, purple-bruised, highlighting one side of the Louth road as red, the other as green. A steam pump made from an old boat’s boiler drew water from the clay-smelling river, irrigating lucerne in leaky sweeps and flooding lanes of an orchard, where oranges hung in the trees.
At the Watsons’ ‘Blindale’ on the river road, Tony Watson lay around on the shady verandah boards like a bog-eye lizard waiting for a fly, turning the pages of a Marvel Family comic and feeling sick with a malaise without name. Happiness was a sensation so rare that it was unrecognisable when it came. Now he had a name for it: Blindale.
After a shower under the tank stand Tony wiped a sweaty mirror, stared into his grey eyes between the cracked splats of silvering, and made his voice into Churchill