Just a Chat

"There's a point where you stop asking if something's right and start asking if you can live with it. Funny thing is, you don't know the answer till you've already done it."

Jenny's voice came in behind me and pulled me back out of wherever I'd gone. "Everything okay, honey?" Her hand settled on my shoulder, light, as she came in through the ensuite door.

The warmth of it went through what the shower had left on my skin, and I could feel the worry in it. She'd have had that off me without a word — she'd spent years reading kids who were coming apart behind a brave face on a stage, and I was no harder to read than any of them. That was the trade she was in. And for months now the thing she'd been reading, morning after morning, was a performance: the steady husband, the bloke who had it all handled, the provider with the books in order. Masks, the lot of it, and behind them the thing itself quietly coming apart.

"I think so, Jen," I said, and put the smile on for her in the mirror, and watched it come up brittle — tight at the corners, not reaching where a smile's meant to reach. She'd have seen that too, if she'd wanted to. She chose not to. Too kind to lean on me when I plainly wasn't ready to be leant on, or content to wait until I came to it in my own time. Both, likely. That was Jenny.

Something went through me looking at her — gratitude, near enough to hurt, big enough to shove the other thing aside for a second. Bed-hair, no make-up, the old cream robe with the frayed cuffs she wouldn't let me put in the bin because she'd had it since before Sammy and it had earned its keep. None of that mattered a bit. She could still take the wind clean out of me, standing in a steamed-up bathroom early on a Saturday morning.

She could have had anyone. I'd thought it more times than was good for me. The brains, the talent, the Hodgman name behind her — at university she'd had blokes round her with real prospects, clean futures, family money to smooth the road ahead. And she'd picked me. The tradesman's kid out of Sandy Bay who'd sooner have a tool in his hand than a book, who wanted to build the thing rather than sit about deciding what it meant.

Ten-odd years I'd been trying to be worth that. From the day I screwed the first Triffett Fencing Solutions sign to the door of a glorified shed in Mum and Dad's back garden, I'd put everything into it — not just for me, for her. To stand in front of her people, Wayne especially, with his professor's way of looking at a man and that quiet disappointment that his girl hadn't married into books or the theatre, and show them I could provide. That I could build something that stood up. That I was the husband their daughter had gone and chosen.

And for eight years it had. The business grew, steady and honest; the name got about; we had a good life off the back of it — nothing flash, but comfortable, safe. We bought the place in Fern Tree, small but ours. We took holidays where we didn't read the prices before we ordered. We had Sammy with money in the bank instead of dread in my gut. I'd built a thing that felt like it would last.

Then the last half-year had taken all of that and turned it over. The business that used to keep us was barely keeping its own head up now — and that was me being kind about it. Some weeks it wasn't keeping afloat at all. Some weeks it was more like going down slow, with the weights already tied on.

I'd always been careful with the money. Careful to a fault — Jenny used to rib me for it, the Saturday mornings gone on spreadsheets and receipts while she marked her essays across the table. And careful hadn't saved me. One mistake — one wrong entry I still couldn't properly follow, that the accountant had walked me through three times in that slow, patient voice that made me feel thick as a post — had opened up under the whole business and let the debt come pouring in.

The how of it was a tangle: expenses filed wrong, tax worked out short, the error breeding across quarters. But the what of it was simple as a hole in a boat. I owed money I didn't have. The Tax Office. The suppliers. The bank. A ring of them widening out, patient to begin with, then less so, the letters going from please to notice to the sort of language that comes just before a solicitor.

I carried it in my chest like a stone I'd swallowed. It sat in behind the breastbone and made every breath do a bit more work than it should, and I could not, for the life of me, hand any of it to Jenny. The words wouldn't come. I'd get right up to them — across the dinner table, lying beside her in the dark, the two of us in the ute of a Sunday — and my throat would shut over the top of them and I'd say nothing at all.

How was I meant to tell her I'd failed? That the house I'd promised was solid, the future I'd sworn was set — that all of it was a front, coming down quiet behind the both of us?

And she'd just come into something of her own. She'd taken over the drama department at St Michael's — a thing she'd wanted for years and earned twice over — and thrown herself at it the way she threw herself at everything. The school musical had her lit right up. Three weeks she'd been coming home wrung out and glowing at once, talking a mile a minute about sets and casting and some Year Ten girl who reminded her of herself at that age.

Only last night she'd sat up till midnight at the kitchen table working out the moves for the opening number, humming under her breath, her hands going through the shapes of it in the air. The look on her when she talked about that work was the same one I'd fallen for a long time back — flat-out joy in making a thing, in bringing it up out of nothing.

To land my mess on top of all that felt like something close to cruelty. She'd earned the right to stand in her own good news without me walking in and pulling the shade down on it. I wasn't going to be the one to dim any of that. I couldn't be.

So I'd smiled. And I'd lied to her by leaving things out, day after day, and carried the weight on my own while it did its slow work on me.

"Well okay then," Jenny said, and there was a trust in it I wished I could stand inside, and it only made the guilt burn the hotter. She gave my shoulder a last squeeze and let the robe go from her shoulders and stepped past me towards the shower.

The robe pooled at her feet, and for a moment she stood there in the soft light coming grey through the frosted window, not a thought of covering herself, because why would there be. Ten years together, married three, a boy asleep down the hall, and she could still make my heart trip over itself — the line of her hip, her back, the fall of her hair off one shoulder. Familiar as my own two hands, and still, somehow, able to catch me out.

I went on drying myself and couldn't help the odd look through the steam. My hands did the towel on their own, arms and chest, while my eyes kept going back to the shape of her behind the fogged screen, blurred and unmistakable. She moved easy, unhurried, in no doubt at all about the morning she was standing in — Saturdays were for slow showers and a long breakfast and a walk later if the weather came good, and she had no cause to think otherwise.

She was humming again — I couldn't place it over the water, one of the numbers from the show, most like. Jenny was always humming. She carried a tune round with her the way I carried a tape measure; neither of us went anywhere without one.

And there I stood, in the middle of two mornings at once. One was this: steam, warm tile, my wife singing, the day laid out easy in front of us. The other was the one waiting on the counter at my back — the debt, the phone, the drive I'd already told a man I'd make. Same bathroom. I had a foot in each of them and no notion how they were meant to hold together.

For a few seconds I let myself have only the first one. Let myself be nothing more complicated than a bloke watching his wife in the shower of a Saturday, with nothing in me but the plain wanting of her and a bit of quiet.

Then the phone went off on the counter — the text, Luke's address — and the other morning came back in over the top of it.

I dropped the towel on the tiles and went through to the bedroom. Jenny's room, really — the soft blues and creams were her doing, her hand on every choice in it. The wall was hung with us: the wedding, Sammy's first birthday, a week down at Bruny, a cold clear morning up at Cradle Mountain. A row of better, simpler days.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and felt the near-side springs give under me, the ones we'd been going to replace for two years and never had, and Luke's offer started up again in my head and wouldn't stop, round and round like a bar of music you can't shake loose.

A hundred thousand dollars, in cash. Just thinking it set my pulse going and put a sweat on my palms. It pulled me two ways at once, hard, and both directions at the same time. It wasn't only the money — though God knows the money was the whole of it, enough to clear the Tax Office and the suppliers and the bank and buy the business room to breathe.

But it was more than the debt. It was a chance to put something good in front of Jenny and Sammy for once. A proper holiday, not another budget week under canvas where I made out we were choosing the simple life instead of dodging the price of a hotel.

I could take them somewhere that mattered to her. She'd talked about showing Sammy a real stage one day — the Opera House, or further out, London, the theatre streets, the ground Shakespeare's plays first stood up on. Money like that, and I could hand her the lot of it.

And then there was the cash of it. Not declaring money like that went against everything I'd done for eight years — every dollar through the books, every job dogged and documented, the tax paid to the day, all of it above board. It was half of why the accounting error had cut so deep: I'd done the lot straight, and straight hadn't been enough to save me.

And here I was, turning over a hundred grand in cash, under the table, off the books, hunting round for a way to call it something other than what it was.

It made me sick and it gave me hope in the one breath, and I couldn't hold the two of them apart. I knew what I'd have thought of another man for taking money like that. And I knew the other side of it just as well — that sitting on my hands while the business went down, letting my family go short because I was too proud to reach for the one rope that had come near me in months, was no cleaner a thing. I turned it over and over and it wouldn't come out even, and I couldn't put it down.

I got up and dressed, quick, my hands jumpy with it — work jeans gone soft and pale, a flannel off the shelf of near-identical flannels, blue and grey check, the boots scuffed and sound. The rig I put on every working day there was. It used to be a way of saying who I was, that gear. I got it on this morning and couldn't have told you for certain who that was anymore.

"I'm just heading out to get the details on a new potential job. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours," I called back through to the ensuite, where the steam still hung about like it hadn't decided to leave.

Which was true, near enough — true and hollowed out, and I'd had a lot of practice at that particular shape of true. It came out of me easy and ordinary, not a thing showing under it.

"Okay hun," came back over the water.

She didn't ask a thing. Me heading off after a job on a Saturday was the most ordinary thing in the world in that house — it was what I did, what I'd always done, the steady bloke off doing the steady thing.

If she'd known what I was actually pointing the ute at, she'd have asked plenty.

Sammy was out in the hallway in his dinosaur pyjamas, the light-brown hair every which way, the legs of them gone short on him because he was shooting up faster than I was getting round to replacing anything — and every trip to buy the boy clothes was another cost I found a way to leave for later.

His whole face went up when he saw me. "Daddy!" — like I was the best thing that had turned up in his morning.

God, I loved him. Loved him in a way that put a fright in me sometimes, that sat heavy up under the ribs — the plain fact that I was the thing standing between him and going without.

I got a hand into his hair. Warm from the pillow still, and that kid-smell of sleep on him. "See you soon, little man," I said, and the words caught on the way out, just slightly, and I hoped he was too small to hear it.

He was already off me, though — his mind had jumped, the way it does at that age. Buffy had come round from somewhere, our young Dalmatian, all legs and daft with it, the tail going hard enough to clear a coffee table, spots thrown across her like someone had flicked a loaded brush her way. She'd got some game going that was mostly running at the back door and running back, nails clicking on the boards.

Sammy shrieked and went after her, little legs pumping, arms out, the pair of them belting for the back door and the bit of garden past it. Buffy felt the chase coming and dropped a gear, the whole back half of her wagging with it.

"Bye daddy," he threw back over his shoulder, careless and happy with it, dead certain I'd be there again when he got in.

I watched the two of them go through the door — boy and dog, not a care between the pair of them — and a smile got up on my face on its own, the first easy thing it had done all morning. That, there. That was the thing I was protecting. That was the why of what I was driving up the hill to go and consider.

For them. For this. For keeping the ground under a house where a small boy chased a dog round the yard of a Saturday and never once had to wonder whether he could.

The smile went as quick as it had come, and the weight came back in behind it and took its usual seat in my chest.

I shut my eyes a second and pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead, like I could push the muddle of it back out through the bone. It's just a chat, I told myself.

Just a chat. That was all it was. A drive up to Collinsvale to hear a man out. I wasn't signing anything. I'd listen, I'd weigh it, I'd make the call with my head like I'd made it on a hundred jobs before.

That was the story. That was the one I needed to hold.

And underneath it I knew I was telling myself the same kind of lie I'd been telling Jenny.

Because I wasn't driving up into the hills after a hundred thousand in cash for the conversation. Nobody hears an offer that size — that impossible, that neatly timed — and sits through it and gets up and walks away. Not when I was going under. Not when it was the first rope thrown to me in months of treading water.

I was going to say yes. Some part of me had said it already, the second Luke put the number in the air. All the rest of it — the care, the weighing, the sitting here telling myself I hadn't decided — was theatre. Me playing it out for my own benefit, so I could call it a choice made straight instead of one made desperate.

I took a breath and went out and got into the ute. My green Ranger, Triffett Fencing Solutions down the side with the number under it — one of the few things left that still made me feel like I'd made something of myself. Bought new three years back, when new was a fair call, when the business was still running the way it was meant to.

Another payment now, of course, the way all of it was another payment. But I couldn't let it go — it was the business out on the road, the thing that told a street I turned up and stood behind my work.

There was a bit of ordinary in the feel of it, at least. The seat had gone to my shape over the years of it — sites, suppliers, jobs the length of the state. My grip was worn into the wheel. There were coffee rings burnt into the dash that no rag would lift, and the footwell had a whole season of dirt and sawdust in it deep enough to dig.

I turned the key and she came up with that good even note a thing that's been looked after gives you. And I sat a minute with my hands on the wheel, looking back at the house through the windscreen.

A good house. Small and solid. The garden had got away from me — the hedge gone shaggy, weeds coming up through the beds Jenny had put in two springs back — because I'd been too flat out, or too worn down, to give it the time. But it was ours. Ours in another twenty-three years of payments, anyway.

If I could keep making them. If the business held. If I didn't lose the lot.

Just a chat. I held onto it like a rail in the dark. Drive up, meet Luke, see what it was, make a sensible call of it.

The words rang hollow and I hung onto them regardless as I backed the ute down the drive. In the mirror Sammy had turned up at the front window, face flat to the glass, a hand in the air, Buffy's spotted head beside him — her tail going too, I'd have put money on it, though I couldn't see it from there.

I lifted a hand and put a brightness into it I didn't have, and faced front.