Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain

Author:Georgia Blain [Blain, Georgia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2016-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

ACROSS TOWN, HILARY sits in her car, hands on the steering wheel.

The key is in the ignition, but she has not yet turned it all the way. Instead, she stares at the pearling drops of rain on the windscreen, each one clinging, poised to slide away, perfectly formed, the entire world held in its translucent beauty. Winding down the window slowly, she reaches out to touch one, chill on the tip of her finger, impossible to hold.

Her head aches. Her vision bends and warps. This is a bad morning.

On the radio, a woman talks about reconciliation and forgiveness, her voice rich and deep, soothing, as she speaks of work she has done with trauma victims, studies with people in countries such as Rwanda.

‘But sometimes forgiveness isn’t enough.’ The announcer speaks in brisk, friendly tones. ‘How do you learn to forget?’

‘Ah yes,’ the woman laughs. ‘There is forgetting as well. But the point I am making is that true forgiveness changes even the memory of the event. There is no longer anger attached to the recollection.’

Hilary turns the radio off. Attempts to simplify human behaviour, to rub it smooth, have always irritated her. But she had listened for longer than she normally would have because this is her anxiety, the frayed edge that threatens to unpick her plans. The lack of reconciliation between Ester and April makes her anxious, and it kicks her, hard, on these bad days. It is so easy from the outside, from the edge of a life, to see the mistakes people make and why — to see and understand. But from the midst it is different, and she knows that both her daughters are there, right in the middle, too close still to reflect.

She looks across to the blank face of Henry’s apartment building, the bricks washed in the rain, each of the windows the same and yet different: unadorned; grey curtains; crumpled venetians; a torn blind.

She wonders what made Henry turn to heroin — whether it was simply the foolish choice of someone young who wanted to experiment, or whether there was a deeper canker, a grit that had scratched and rubbed and needed to be soothed. She knew very little about him, really. His family were Queensland country people who had no understanding of who he was. ‘Maybe I was adopted,’ he’d said, a fantasy so many people hold at some stage of their life. ‘They probably regret their choice,’ he’d added, and then he’d slid away from talking about himself, turning to the music they were listening to, or the shadow of a branch on the window, remaining as private as ever.

Out the front of his building are two frangipani trees. Strange that she has never really noticed them before. The branches are bare; silvery knots streaked with rain arch over the entrance stairway, like a puzzle. Closing her eyes, she tries to recall the fragrant milkiness of a flower, peachy petals in her hands, star-like, scattered over summer pavements, bruised in the shiny sunlight.

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