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CHAPTER THREE

  After drop-off, Tess drives across town. A month ago they moved her father into Assisted Living, and now the house she grew up in is for sale. A big billboard stands out the front. It says: 'Grand Family Home or Development Opportunity STCA.' It also says 'Harbour Glimpses' which Tess feels bad about because she knows they are only from the bottom corner of the left side dormer window in the attic. The board has photographs of the rooms inside the house taken with fisheye lenses, which make them look swollen, and a larger one of the whole house at dusk with all the lights on, looming like a twinkling old ship adrift on the lawn. It is the kind of house no one she knows of her generation can afford. Tess is meeting the real estate agent here—her friend Lizzie, just starting out in her new business. It is the first day of viewings. Tess has come early because she feels the house will cease to be hers not when a contract is signed, but when the first strangers step foot in it today.

  The wrought iron gate squeaks. The house is set back from the street, part-hidden behind an old magnolia. A wide verandah wraps around it on three sides, festooned with wrought iron lace. Tess walks up the path between the two palm trees which meet the earth with their gigantic elephants' feet. She knows their scales intimately, as footholds.

  Her phone beeps. A text message from Lizzie: running 5 mins late xx. She wouldn't be Lizzie if she weren't at least five minutes late.

  Tess walks through the rooms, each one of them opening with double doors onto the verandah, or with windows onto the garden. Without their furniture, they have shrunk into themselves a little. The house used to be alive with the smells of cooking and cat fur and wood polish, strains of her father's beloved Mozart over the hum of the dryer and a timpani of copper-bottomed kitchen pans hanging from a rail. Her mother's Persian carpets are all gone; she can hear her steps on the floorboards. But as Tess walks slowly through the empty rooms she also hears children's voices, her brother's and her own. She slides the glass door from the kitchen to the back garden, and glimpses in its light-bending moment all of them—Dad, Mum, James and herself at lunch at the table under the Tulip Tree. She is fourteen and that is her childhood and now it is being sold.

  The table is gone, but the old stone bench is still under the tree. Tess sits. In the clear morning light the pool is the palest blue. She stares at the gently ruffling surface of the water. Pools have always made Tess happy, particularly this one. Then the breeze stops and she notices there's something at the bottom of the pool. It is a single, improbably intact porcelain cup. Without being able to read them, she knows it has the words 'NSW Bar Association' on its side and a blindfolded figure holding a scale.

  Tess's father had been a good judge—very fair and never stepping too far outside the bounds of precedent so as to make sure he was rarely appealed. Outside of work though he'd left all decisions to her mother, as if he were sapped of making up his mind and also as if the running of a life and a house, and the children and their lives were somehow unreal to him, possibly even trivial, like the fleeting emotions of dogs.

  After her mother died—though her father had never credited her with this power—it was as if he'd lost an engine. He left her mother's greeting on the phone answering machine for a year and a half. Never a large man, he lost nine kilos. He sputtered forward gamely for some years till retirement. Last year he'd started to go for evening walks to clear his head but then the streets tangled and looked unfamiliar and 'louts' had defaced the street signs, either by graffiti or popguns. Twice he'd had to be brought home by police.

  Her phone beeps again but she doesn't move to get it. It'll be Lizzie, telling her she'll be another five minutes. Then Tess remembers she has children and should look to see if one of them has forgotten something or has been abducted and is calling from the back of a dark van driven by dim, tattooed cretins.

  Why does the motherly imagination curdle so quickly to horror? Dr Preston says it's evolution, but it feels more like a curse. Dan has tried to help things by putting a family tracking app called 'Life360' on the phones, which are kept in the children's backpacks (they aren't allowed to take them out at school). Hopefully then—her grim, motherly imagination continues—so long as their backpacks are abducted along with them, everything will be fine and dandy.

  She takes out her phone. 'Your monsters need feeding and changing!' It's a game the twins play. She taps it away.

  Footsteps click down the side path.

  'Hi-hi!' Lizzie puffs towards her in a snug skirt and heels, a small studded handbag over her shoulder. She has had her fairish hair dyed deep red and cut in a sharp, fringed bob. It sits perfectly of a piece like a helmet on her head.

  'Wow,' Tess says.

  'I know. I'm in character.' Lizzie smiles cheesily and does a wobbly curtsy, brandishing a clipboard in one hand and a stack of glossy leaflets in the other.

  'You look like a Lego piece.'

  Lizzie laughs. She pats the bottom of her bob with a palm.

  'Agent Red?'

  Tess laughs too. She is not sure whether her friend has what it takes for her new work, which would be a mixture of cheery confidence and steely overkill. Then she notices that Lizzie's nails are red, as are the patent tips of her shoes.

  Lizzie had been an actress but didn't get many jobs after the children were born. She has been working as a real estate agent since Terry left and became Terence, and that is a long story.

  In fact, Tess and Dan's friendship group is ridden by midlife crises of varying degrees of spectacularity and cliché, often starting with the acquisition of what Tess thinks of as 'getaway vehicles'—a Vespa, or a vintage Mercedes—which a husband suddenly realises he's been denying himself. Terry had been a kindly, elegant marketing executive for NSW Tourism. He came out as Terence in check miller shirts and driving a white Ute. Dan had been surprisingly unfazed. He'd put his arm around his friend and said, 'all you need is a cattle dog' but what it turned out Terence really needed was a nice construction lawyer called Mick Nguyen. Another friend, a long-time social activist and parliamentary researcher who wore Blundstone boots and drank Tooheys hadn't changed his sexuality or politics as far as they (yet) knew. But he had left his wife and taken to wearing cravats, drinking Pimms and to carrying, on weekends, a silent, beadyeyed Chihuahua named Coco in his suit jacket pocket. There were, of course, standard-issue affairs, where people seemed so relieved to be able to feel again the overwhelming love they'd felt when young for their spouse, that this feeling in itself made them feel young again—only with someone else's spouse. They traded a life of predictable comfort and trajectory for a more complicated one of child swaps and step-relationships and felt, if more exhausted, at least (they told themselves) more alive.

  'It must be hard,' Lizzie sits, pulling her skirt down over her thighs like a tube. 'So many memories.'

  Tess feels that whatever she is going through, it's nothing compared to what Lizzie has suffered. She admires her friend's practical courage, her daily, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, chin-up managing. Lizzie had always thought of herself as someone smiled upon by invisible fates and is now, Tess thinks, valiantly struggling to maintain this view. Lizzie frequently wins small amounts on scratch tickets, or is offered freebies from phone marketers (a car service, the chance of an island holiday). At restaurants when her dinner comes cold or underdone she sends it back with a big smile and is never billed. Lately, Lizzie has started to talk about herself as a character. She'll say, 'I'm the kind of person who's always forward-oriented,' and 'I've just got to get out of my own way,' as if saying it will make it so. Lizzie breaks Tess's heart. At the same time, though Tess knows that marital disaster is not contagious, part of her would prefer to pass it on by, eyes respectfully averted, like a car crash.

  'Oops—I forgot to put out the 'Open House' sign on the footpath.' Lizzie stands up. Her phone beeps. She sits down again. 'Sorry. Could be work.' She looks at its screen. 'Terence and Mick are at Ha Long Bay,' she says. 'Nice for some!'

  'He sends you messages?' Tess is tryi
ng to avoid what Charlotte calls 'tone' in her voice.

  'No,' Lizzie breathes in through her nose and blinks slowly. 'I follow him on Facebook. I get alerts when he posts something.'

  'You're torturing yourself.'

  Lizzie shrugs, not looking at Tess.

  'I just like to know where he is,' she says.

  Tess puts her arm around her friend. There's gone, she thinks, and then there's the afterlife bleeping in your bag. Then she can't think of anything except something silly to say.

  'Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.'

  Lizzie is making a dint in the gravel with the red point of her shoe.

  'You've got nothing to worry about,' she says. 'Dan is solid as a rock.'

  People say this kind of thing out of the habits of friendship: both Tess and Lizzie know they can't be sure how 'solid' anyone is these days, including oneself. Tess chews her cheek.

  They are at a hinge moment: between youth and age, between the life you thought you wanted, and the one you feel might, now, suit you better. They are like hermit crabs who outgrow one shell and need to leave it before they are trapped inside, emerging, for a moment, shell-less and pink, vulnerable to predators of every stripe.

  There's movement behind the glass: people coming into the kitchen.

  'Give me five minutes by myself?' Tess whispers, releasing her friend. 'I'll leave through the back gate.'

  Lizzie makes a sympathetic face and squeezes Tess's hand. Then she rushes in to greet the people, sliding the glass door closed behind her.

  The pool net has been tidied away along with everything else. Quickly, Tess takes off her shoes, her watch and her jeans. Then she steps down, slips underwater and souvenirs the cup.