Chapter 95
AGAIN I CAME upon Jed Chatt’s house without meaning to, and I pulled in to the driveway with horror, realising I’d probably been under the gaze of his rifle for the last kilometre without thinking about it. The crosshairs trained on my face. I wiped at my cheeks and found tears. This wasn’t good. I got out and walked up the rocky slope, still arguing with Glen in my mind. Digger the dog burst into a sprint from where she had emerged at the side of the porch, barking happily at me.
‘Oh, you.’ I wiped my nose. The dog jumped and pawed at my waist and I rubbed her furry head. ‘I’m sorry about before.’
Jed Chatt came out the front door of the house and stood watching me, a general look of disapproval on his face.
‘I told you to rack off,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ I said, leading the dog towards him. ‘People do that.’
He rolled his eyes, weary, and strode back into the house, letting the screen door slap shut. I noticed how remarkably the house had changed. The porch had been swept bare and the old barbecue was gone. The dog followed me inside.
The lanky, long-jawed man was sitting on the faded couch now with an assortment of plastic parts in front of him, tiny screws and brightly coloured joints. A baby’s play gym half-assembled, some of it still in the shipping box beside him. There must have been so much of this activity in the time since I had seen him last. Gathering up, sorting, squaring away his own things. Making room for the new life that had joined him.
Beside the couch on the floor the infant reclined in a fluffy pale-blue bouncer. Now and then Jed extended his leg and pushed on the bouncer with his big, bare toe, causing the baby to bob gently up and down. The man seemed mildly irritated by my presence, but not curious. I might have stood there an hour without either of us uttering a word.
I didn’t fully understand the ease I felt around this man, but I knew then that unconsciously I’d been planning to flee here the moment Glen started attacking me. What was it about this man and this place that compelled me?
‘You’re a strange one, you,’ Jed said after a time.
‘I get the feeling you might be the same.’
I looked at the infant in the bouncer. An awkward, gummy smile playing about perfect lips he couldn’t yet control.
‘Can I?’ I asked. Jed said nothing. I extracted the child carefully from his bouncer. He was heavier and warmer than I’d imagined. The baby swiped at my chin, my lips. I kissed his fingers.
‘His mother is my niece,’ Jed said eventually, glancing at the child’s chubby hand encircling my finger. ‘I don’t know her that well. Or I didn’t. Her parents died some years back, and I never was real good at keeping in touch. She wrote me a couple of months ago. Couldn’t call me. I don’t have a phone.’
Jed left the construction of the mobile and sat back on the couch, rested a bare foot on his knee.
‘She grew up over Bandelong way. Even harsher than this, Bandelong. So when she got to the city she was real surprised, and so was everybody else, to tell you the truth. She did her degree, did the extra bits and pieces that come afterwards, whatever they are. And then, to top it all off, she got accepted into this … this extra-special legal program. Always wanted to be a lawyer, and this program, she says … There are something like three people in the whole country who get in. Well, she got in. First blackfella in the history of the world to get in. Kind of thing that usually goes to white boys from private schools on the Sydney Harbour there. The other two candidates were just that. They were pretty upset that they were up against her for the position that you get at the end of it. The … partnership, or whatever.’
The child had gone to sleep in my arms. Wisps of his soft black hair, finer than cotton, shifted in the breeze from the window.
‘Same morning my niece was due to go in and sign her big important contract, she finds out about this one.’ He nodded at the baby in my arms. ‘Everybody has a good laugh at her then. The two other candidates, they reckon they’re shoo-ins for the partnership at the end of the four-year program. One of the big lawyer types running the thing, he wants her chucked out of the program straightaway unless she gets an abortion. So she writes me asking what she should do. I’m about the last bit of family she’s got. And she doesn’t know me from a bar of soap. But she needs to talk to someone.’
‘What did you say?’ I asked.
‘I told her to do the program. And I told her to have the baby. I’d take him until she was through with it, until she found her feet. And if she never found her feet, well, that was OK. I figured if she’d dropped out, she’d have been all broken up about it. If she’d had an abortion, she’d have been broken up about that, too. This was the only way I could think of that she could get out of it without tearing herself in half.’
The infant grizzled. I lifted him higher against my chest and patted his nappy-covered backside. Put my cheek on his head.
‘It’s not the best place in the world,’ Jed said, looking at the walls, still stained from years of neglect, the blazing desert sun rolling by the windows. ‘But it’s a solution to a problem.’
Jed stood. I guessed it was the signal for me to go. I didn’t seem capable, at first, of giving the child back. Some ludicrous part of me saw this place as a solution to my problem. To every problem.
I handed back the child. He held the tiny boy and looked at my eyes. Seemed to know I wanted to stay. Here was a safe place, deliberately constructed on the edge of nowhere, too far into the wild for problems to reach. The kind of place they sang about in sad songs. All the hurt, all the badness, all the worry a person had could be sent here to be swallowed up by this man.
I felt the cruel sense that I belonged here tugging at my chest, even as I headed for the door.