adelaide sprawls

When Victoria rings – already she knows the number by heart - Jack is at the laundromat.

He calls it the laundrette.

Jack’s voice softens the ette, and Victoria pictures him. His shoulder is holding the phone up to his ear and he is lifting wet denim out of the washing machine. His shirt is tight, button undone, the curve of his neck is exposed. He has not shaved today and tomorrow he will need to wash his hair.

Victoria holds her phone tightly in her hand. She closes her eyes and she imagines that he leans in and leaves a kiss on her cheek, before his lips brush hers. Because – in her mind - he has not shaved, his cheek scrapes – but gently - across hers. And then he holds his fingers at the back of her neck.

His fingers are feather-strokes.

Victoria thinks of telling him all of this and more, but she does not. Instead, she opens her eyes, she sniffs, she clears her throat. She licks her lips and she scratches her head.

They talk.

‘I couldn’t stop thinking of you last night,’ he says.

‘I know.’ She giggles, stops herself, laughs.

She had gone to bed with her phone on the bedside table. She had turned off the lamp and watched for the glow of the telephone as his messages arrived. The sound of the phone was turned down, because it was too harsh in the night, made the house seem lonelier than it really was.

She had sent her final text at twelve. I’m going to sleep. Goodnight.

She had stopped texting, and he had too, but she had not stopped thinking of him, of the place where he was. A house with the lights turned down, the music up. She pictured him drinking beer, although with her, he had only ever drunk wine. She imagines that at parties, he spends his time leaning against the kitchen bench watching the flow and the ebb, that if she were there, they would leave early, and they would take the long way home.

She does not tell him any of this.

Victoria can hear the steady thrum of the machines at the laundromat. Laun-drette. Zips click against the dryer’s steel tube. She sees, in her mind, waist-high tables in the middle of the room. Square and sparse, laminated brown, they promise ordered piles of washing. Clean and dry. She wonders what Jack folds and what he irons. Are there things he doesn’t iron, but hangs all the same? Jeans or pants or shirts. Does he put his clothes on a chair at night or leave them strewn across the floor? And then she wonders: what does he do with his shoes.

They talk some more and the dryers drone.

Victoria thinks of the warmth of the laundry when the dryer has been on. She thinks of the laundry windows in the house where she lived as a child. They dripped with winter condensation and the panes were painted white. She used her fingertip to write boys’ names at night. I love Stephen, I love Charles, I love Pip. And then she flattened her finger out to wipe their names away. Before anyone else could see.

She puts the phone in her other hand, wipes her palm down her jeans.

She writes Jack on the pad she keeps by the fridge. The pen is black, the pad yellow. She draws a flower near the J, and then a star. Another flower, another star. And then she thinks I’m nearly forty years old.

Jack is telling her of his bike ride home as the sun came up, of seeing the car door just in time. She gasps, then laughs where she should, but she is thinking he stayed out all night. She has forgotten that it is something people do.

He tells her more of the story, then laughs. At the place where nobody got hurt.

His laugh makes her close her eyes again. She runs her fingers through her hair, her hand down the back, then the side, of her neck. She opens her eyes to listen.

He is working tonight, but not tomorrow, so perhaps they could catch up.

She says I can’t get a babysitter, not now and he says yes, I know, as if he really does, and there is a small moment before she says do you want to come here.

It is a question, not an invitation, but he says yes.

The beat of her heart has slowed.

She hears the kids outside, in the yard. There are loud shouts between them. Screams. Silence. Laughs.

Jack says I could cook. His is an invitation, with a tiny question mark.

There are other people at the laundromat. She can hear their voices, but not their words. They laugh strangers’ laughs.

Victoria thinks of Sunday nights. She thinks of washing dishes and wiping the table down. Of readers to be read and homework which should already be done. She thinks of ironing shirts and handkerchiefs.

Five of each.

Every week.

Jack says can you hold on a minute, I have to get some more coins.

Victoria thinks while she waits, if I have to wash his clothes, what load will I put them in? Whites? Colours, kids? Colours, hers? Sheets and towels? No, no, no and no. But would his be a load of their own?

Are you there? Jack asks. Sorry about that. I never bring enough coins. He laughs although there is no joke.

His voice is deep and his laugh is smooth.

Victoria closes her eyes. She reaches for the feel of his hand on her neck, and for the memory of feather strokes.

In the morning, Victoria writes milk, cheese, bananas, nappies, nappy wipes. At different times during the afternoon, she adds tissues, shampoo, napi-san, dishcloths, yogurt.

She keeps smoked salmon in her mind and thinks tomorrow she will have it for lunch and if she folds the packet before she puts it in the bin, Brenton will never know.

There are other things - toilet paper, vegemite, stock cubes – they will be needing soon, but she doesn’t have the money today.

She does her shopping at night, after Brenton is home and the kids have been bathed and tea has been served and parts of it eaten, and the table is cleared, but the dishes are still on the sink. She carries go-green bags, her purse and the keys to Brenton’s car.

The day’s restlessness has not emptied from her mind.

The rock-and-roll man is in the nappy aisle, although it is Tuesday tonight. She would have come here first if she had known. She throws the packet of nappies in the trolley, then she pats at her hair, bites at her lips, smooths the front of her shirt.

He is at the other end of the aisle, a pallette of boxes in front of him. He uses a stanley knife to slice the box. He pulls the knife towards him and she thinks they are probably taught to slice the boxes side to side. It is not safe the way he is doing it.

His grey hair is swept from his face, Elvis-style, and his skin is that of a man who has smoked too long. His white shirt is crease-less, tucked neatly into his trousers (black and tight and she wishes he would turn around). He is wearing gold cufflinks, filled with a black stone.

She pulls gently on her earlobe and remembers the onyx earings she used to wear to parties on Saturday nights.

When he looks up, Victoria smiles at him.

He smiles with his mouth and she thinks if he blinks slowly enough, she could kiss the lids of his eyes and rub her hands across his skin.

Victoria would forgive him every flaw and he would not mind that he was fifty years old and working at a job made for adolescent boys.

When Sophie went to uni, she fell in love with Sid before she fell out of love with Pip and she wrote about it in her journal as if it were the greatest romantic tragedy never suffered by anyone before.

Sid walked around the university barefoot and everyone knew his name. His hair was blonde and it fell in long spiral curls. He was in third year, doing law arts and he filled his academic transcript with credits and distinctions. He was going to do French honours then he would get a job in the Department of Foreign Affairs. He had been to France several times, mostly for the skiing, and he read French novels without looking at a dictionary or the notes. He wrote a column for OnDit and directed the Comedy Revue. Renate and Lucy and Nicola were all in love with him, and when he was doing matric at his all-boys school he took Nicola’s friend Victoria to the winter ball. Victoria told Nicola that his kisses were like fire. Sophie knew all these things without talking to him once and without ever mentioning his name.

By her second day on the sandstone campus, Sophie knew that the world was not as she had thought. She was not as clever or as beautiful as she had believed herself to be and people did not need her for a friend.

She carried her new textbooks in a yellow canvas bag from the army surplus store. She used black texta to write quotes on it by Einstein and Ghandi, and she pinned small round badges on the straps. She wore a pair of blue jeans and a cotton shirt which was printed like a comic strip. Her hair was cut short and it had been streaked in shades of blonde and red. She carried a packet of menthol cigarettes and bought a lighter made of the same clear purple plastic she had used in tech studies three years before. She used mascara, blue eyeliner and strawberry lipgloss which she spread across her lips after each cigarette. She had a bus timetable and a monthpass in her purse. She had her own bank account.

In her first French tutorial Sophie discovered that all the girls who carried Country Road bags and wore Laura Ashley print skirts had been to France. Their fathers paid for trips to say well done for passing matric. And these were girls who had not just passed, they got scores like 98 and 99. Sophie had not believed her mother when she told Sophie that those scores were possible and even her mother had not known that some people are issued passports the week they are born and that aeroplane tickets can be slipped into Christmas cards.

Sophie sat on a vinyl chair in the tutor’s office, and listened to everyone introduce themselves. She wondered whether everyone’s legs felt as wet with sweat as hers. The tutor’s name was Monique. She was doing Honours French, and had been to France. Her mother was French.

The office had a bookcase stretching the length of the wall, but it was only half filled with books, and the other half was frames of photos, and the photos were Monique in front of the Eiffel Tower, and Monique under a tree eating a long bread roll, and groups of people hugging each other and making rabbits ears and poking out their tongues for the camera.

There was one boy. His name was Peter and Monique called him Pierre.

There were six girls, including Sophie, and their names were Renate, Caroline, Katherine, Lucy and Nicola. They had neat bobs and spiral curls. Sophie used her 84 percent French to say my mother is in New York this week, although she lives in Mexico City. Sophie did not say ‘she has dedicated her life to the underprivileged children of the world’ because she did not have the vocab, and because she knew it would not interest anyone else.

At uni, everyone, it seemed, knew everyone. Sophie knew no one and she wished she had enrolled at Flinders where Jacob Humphries had gone.

People went places together, and they all had busy social lives. They went to pubs on Thursday nights. Sophie just had spaces. She found simple routines which helped the time between weekends to pass when she could catch the bus home to go to that week’s backyard eighteenth and she could pretend to know things that the others did not.

During the week, she bought ham salad sandwiches from the Refectory and spread her books along a table and looked carefully at her notes while she ate. She wore her glasses although she could read anything without them. When she had finished eating, she would pack her things into her bag, put her rubbish in the bin and go to the library to find a seat far from the Undergraduate Reading Room. That’s where the Laura Ashley prints sat.

She found a regular spot on the second level where she could look through a window and see green kentia palms. She wasn’t far from the 400s and 800s which is where, she had discovered, the texts for English I could be found.

The notes were left on the top of her books. She found them when she got back from the toilet or from another search in the stacks or from a trip to the reserve collection. The first one said you’re beautiful and the second one said come and have a drink and the third one was suggestively lewd.

She threw them all into the square bin which rested against the concrete column. The paper lining the bottom of the bin was green and the piece of pink gum stayed there day after day after day. She did not screw the notes up or rip them in halves. She did not look around.

The next week, the notes were signed.

Sid.

Sophie did not believe that it was him.