A Hundred Small Lessons by Ashley Hay

Author:Ashley Hay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2017-02-25T05:00:00+00:00

14

The flood

No matter how much Lucy wiped the kitchen bench, the door, the handrail on the stairs, she couldn’t quite remove the small puffs of fingerprint powder the friendlier policeman had dusted about as he looked for non-existent prints. It lay like a shadow, dulling the different surfaces.

‘Our house has a layer of frost,’ Ben joked. ‘Perhaps that’s what’s on the bathroom door as well.’

‘How many robberies do you think have happened here?’ Lucy was appalled.

‘Well, now, I don’t know. Is this a robbery?’ He was serving Christmas dinner as the rain drummed on outside. ‘Maybe it’s just a fact of modern life—the loss of an expensive phone.’

‘Well, I don’t like it.’ Lucy pushed the wet cloth once more along the laminex, frowning at the powder that it caught. She thought: tarnished. She thought: residue. She thought: pall. Her safe new house: she couldn’t bear this breach.

‘My kind of festive,’ Ben said, setting out the food. The three of them together at the table. On their own.

Lucy brushed imaginary dust from her hands. ‘It’s certainly one of the calmest we’ve had.’

‘Calm, wet and not too hot. I told you it was best to work through.’ Ben was scooping potatoes onto his plate. ‘We can take a holiday when the sun shines, hey, little man? And these duchess potatoes, Lu—you’ve made them just like Mum’s.’

Tom was moving his potatoes with a spoon, separating them into discrete and fluffy lumps. ‘Clouds!’

His parents smiled.

‘Remember that Christmas we had in Helsinki?’ Ben poured a little gravy for his son and leaned close to scoop the food onto his fork.

‘Of course I remember,’ said Lucy in a flat voice. She watched her husband’s sudden discomfort at a clinical remove.

‘I said I was sorry, Lu. I was so bloody tired, you’re lucky I could remember who I was, let alone anyone else.’

She had laid it out for him like this: his forgetting that it was Lucy who read him the poem was as if she’d forgotten the first time they met.

At which he’d shrugged and said, ‘You know, I think it’s not that big a deal.’

‘Like the phone?’ she’d batted back.

‘Yes. Like the phone.’

And it had festered from there.

•

On New Year’s Eve, they popped a bottle of champagne at nine o’clock, the city’s early fireworks croaking like thunder in the distance. It was a clear night—the first, it felt, in forever. They sat on their back deck, their feet on its rail as if they were on a plush ocean liner, steaming south. They’d played at making resolutions, played at saying they were fine. But still it niggled. Lucy felt a jag in her throat every so often, somewhere between disappointment and a threat.

‘I love you,’ she said out of nowhere. ‘But I’m going to bed.’ It was barely ten o’clock.

‘First year we’ll have missed it.’ Ben grabbed at her hand, trying to keep her by his side.

She shook her head. ‘Don’t care; too tired. I’m ready for my new year, Mr DeMille.’ The in-joke from their earliest days, when everything had felt as glorious as a production number.

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