Murmurations by Carol Lefevre

Author:Carol Lefevre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spinifex Press
Published: 2020-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Lives We Lost

The rooms Jeanie sleeps in now are all the same – crammed with the excess baggage of people’s lives, the belongings they can’t bring themselves to cull, and the remains of childhoods, abruptly abandoned. She never lets on how the clutter, with its sifting of dust, presses around her in the dark. Jeanie is grateful for a bed, and for the reticence of people who would rather she moved on.

The latest room is as cluttered and ugly as its predecessors. The second bedroom in a second-floor, two-bedroom flat; its window overlooks a side fence and a busy bus stop. The curtains, a dull rust that might have once been red, have shrunk in some long ago spring-cleaning wash so that they no longer touch the sill. At night, the exposing width of darkened glass troubles Jeanie more than the towers of plastic storage boxes. Before dressing or undressing she fills the gap with two rolled-up bath towels.

The flat belongs to a cousin she has scarcely seen since primary school. Sue Hawe is the daughter of Jeanie’s mother’s youngest brother. A rift between their families, which neither of them can remember or explain, means they share a few vivid early memories, and then nothing, until Jeanie called and asked if Sue could put her up.

“Oh, sure! I’d love to see you,” Sue said. “So what, a couple of days? A week?”

Jeanie has slept in Sue’s spare room for almost three months, to her host’s mounting antagonism.

Until her thirty-fifth year, Jeanie’s life had followed its expected curve, from childhood to marriage and motherhood, with a few years in between as a dental hygienist. At her wedding to Rob Tarrant, luminous in a pearl-white guipure lace gown, exhilarated beneath a mist of veil, Jeanie had felt an almost holy sense of purpose. Her life’s trajectory had been clear: she’d had no doubts. That certainty would last until their second child Madeleine was about to start school. By then Jeanie and Rob had settled into their house on the new estate, which when the gardens and street trees matured, would be as enviably leafy as the suburb where Jeanie had been raised. Their son and daughter had both been born healthy; they were bright. Jeanie had believed her cup of happiness was full.

And then in bed one night in the thin summer darkness, at a moment of unguarded emotion that owed something to a long, boozy dinner with friends, Rob blurted out that he hadn’t been in love on their wedding day.

“But I love you now, Jeanie,” he moaned. “I love you so much.”

Pressed into the mattress, Jeanie had become deathly still. Could what Rob had said be true? All these years, wouldn’t she have known if he had been pretending?

“What do you mean?” she breathed into his ear, softly, dangerously.

Rob peeled damply away from her and rolled onto his back. “I’m saying I love you,” he said. “That’s all.”

“What about when we were married?” she persisted.

In the dark he found her hand and squeezed it.

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