28

By the time she gets her first serious pay cheque, the job has really achieved something for her mother and herself. Louisa is able to leave Wolf Street and Anne will have her room.

Louisa finds a place in Windsor with Gary Turner, one of the other cadets. The flat is across the river, it’s full of nooks and looks down onto a road full of unceasing traffic. Gary’s looking to move from way out in Nunawading where he’s number four in a family of eight kids.

He’s short and gingery with speckled skin, a pinched face and pale eyes and he picks her up from home with her boxes and watches her saying her goodbyes to Anne and the kids. Says nothing while she weeps in the car all the way there.

In the flat, there’s a scungy old mattress on the floor, a chest of drawers and a sideboard. A tree scratches the window. ‘You haven’t got a bed, have you?’ Gary asks after they put down the boxes in her room.

‘Nah,’ she says, ‘not yet, can’t afford it yet. You?’

‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I’m taking the one from home.’

So she gets the mattress and that night they get Chinese food and eat sitting on the mattress but even the dim sims taste different from Footscray dimmies and she loses her appetite; and though he tells her about each of his brothers and sisters in long detail, she can’t even begin to speak of her family.

The first night the tree taps on the window and wakes her. She’s not scared, only relieved that she’s finally free of Emmett. The kind of peace she feels within her is so profound, it’s as if she’s stepped into another universe where you’re allowed to breathe deeply; but when she thinks of her mother and the boys and Jess she realises that guilt is the price of freedom. She’s abandoned them and knowing it doesn’t help, so most nights she runs down to the phone box on the corner to ring them but they can’t talk when Emmett’s home.

‘Hi Mum,’ she says the first night they do talk. It’s raining and the windows are waterfalls and she’s wet and shivering. ‘I’m good yeah, I miss you. I’m learning shorthand. Not very good yet. Gary’s great, says to say hi. I got a new Joni Mitchell record. I’ll take the train over on Saturday.’

Jessie clamours at the phone and says, ‘Hello Louie’ and then clams up and won’t let go of the phone and then, when it’s about to be snatched away, she says, ‘Frank’s good,’ and Anne takes the phone back and the child’s bitter crying engulfs everything until Louisa is weeping too. She manages to make out that Pete’s gone fishing and Rob’s not home either.

She wants to ask Anne if Emmett’s hit her lately, but she can’t bring herself to come out and say this and Anne would never tell her off her own bat so the question sits between them like a ghost. That night, she weeps, running all the way home down the dark street, passing through pods of light from the street lamps, the spare coins leaving circles in her hand.

With Gary she enters into a life of perfection. She imagines living with him and her mum and Jess and the boys and then things really would be perfect. They cook cannelloni and soak beans for stews with chicken and green olives. They listen to so much Dylan they are word-perfect. They read e.e. cummings and Virginia Woolf and every single newspaper they can find while they compete for by-lines. And keep tally. And they travel to work on the train looking over the pages of The Ant at each other.

She only discovers he’s gay one Saturday when he comes out and says it when they are building a bookshelf out of big grey bricks and planks hauled to the flat strapped precariously to the roof of his Beetle. It’s been going so well up until now. ‘Gay?’ she says, astonished, but retying her ponytail to gain time.

‘Yeah,’ he smiles, ‘I like boys, you know, better than girls.’

Louisa’s eyes are stretched wide. ‘But how do you know?’

He reaches his hand over to hers and says, ‘Louie, I’ve always known.’

She finds this impossible to believe. He looks abashed or something, she thinks, but then he’s laughing and she’s at least smiling because the truth is that Louisa is stunned at the very idea of people being gay. This has never been discussed at home but then she knows she didn’t learn much of use at home apart from how to spell ornithorhynchus (the biological name for platypus), what hedges are best for and how to stay clear of Emmett.

And she has harboured such strong notions about young Gary Turner that it feels awfully foolish to have missed something like this. Still, she must not show it. ‘But Rhett,’ she says grinning and bunging on a lame, syrupy Southern accent, ‘you still love me don’t you?’ And he smiles, relieved that she’s laughing and grabs her in a headlock, ‘Always, my dear, always.’

They talk all day with the planks and the books scattered around them and understanding settles into them and she reckons she could get addicted to peace. She might marry him whether or not he’s gay, not give him any damn say at all.

They finish the bookcase late in the afternoon and he goes off to the kitchen to make soup while she settles down to read about Gerald Durrell growing up in Corfu. Later, in the evening, they eat minestrone soup from blue bowls as the little birds settle into the tree outside the window.

On the train one morning, he calls her Mrs Turner and she calls him Mrs Brown. ‘You wish,’ he laughs and she finds herself thinking that yeah, she really does wish.