55

It was a cool morning in September 1961 and the fishermen on the sea wall at Deloitte Avenue, having been lured from their beds by clear skies and bright sun on their whiskered faces, now found themselves replacing their soggy baits with numb fingers. A breeze had sprung up from the south-east; you could hardly call it a wind, but it was thin and penetrating none the less and the fishermen drew their coats around themselves and clenched their soggy cigarettes between their lips while they waited for the tide to turn.

There was, however, no weather in Charles's office, nor any sign of it, unless you count the creaks and groans of the old building as it weathered the sea of commerce, as ancient floorboards adjusted to the shifting weight of the staff or anticipated the arrival and departure of customers. Because it was still early you could hear the squeaking wheel of the old pram they used to carry the trays of food to the pets. There was the distant whine of the floor polisher. Somewhere a shop assistant with a high nasal voice was relating a joke from thePerry Como Show but, because of the eccentricities of the building itself, it was impossible to tell where he stood. The cash register, having rung once (to have its change checked) and rung a second time (as its drawer was shut) was now silent.

There were no windows in Charles's office, although there was a frosted-glass panel in the door which bore the legend, "Knock and Enter". Charles sat behind a large cedar desk, the surface of which was obscured by a great many papers, some flat, others crumpled. He wore a single-breasted navy linen suit and a striped navy tie. If you saw him in a photograph, Leah thought, you would see the image of a powerful business man and you would think him cruel and efficient, a cold ally of Gulf amp; Western, a smuggler of threatened species, a briber of customs officers. You would see the pouches beneath his eyes and you would not understand them; you might not even think about them but they would guide you, just the same, to the conclusion that he was debauched; it would not occur to you that the bags were caused by weeping.

His hands were still shaking as he tried to get a Viscount Kingsize from Leah's pack. His fingers were too big and – because it was a new pack and the cigarettes were still tight and his nails were clipped short- he had difficulty. She wanted to take the pack from him and do it for him, but he was upset enough anyway, so she waited.

"There are times", he said, when he had at last lit the cigarette, "when I could kill her."

Nothing changes, she thought. We have the same battles over and over. He forgets how many times he has said this to me. She wondered if passion, like pain, was something that could not be truly remembered, that one could only remember that one had felt the pain but one could not remember the pain itself.

"Kill her, really kill her."

Perhaps he did remember. Perhaps he was trying to tell her that this time was really different, just as he had tried, on all those other occasions, to stress how different they were.

"Murder her." He held up his two hands. The right one held a smoking cigarette. "I can imagine how her neck would feel between my hands."

He was not capable of killing anything, Leah thought, and it would do no good to tell him that he would soon smother his anger in the warm roundness of Emma's belly.

"I keep her, I feed her, I do anything she wants. She wants to send her sister a koala bear, I do it for her. I could go to gaol for it, but I do it. But now I ask her to do something for me, what does she do?"

He sucked on the cigarette and exhaled it, Leah thought, just like a little boy blowing out a candle.

Leah Goldstein was nearly fifty years old, and although she had put some weight on her backside she normally presented the world with a thin, dry, nicotine-stained cynicism. She flicked open the Viscount pack and when she lit her cigarette she revealed her liar's lump, the callus where her HB pencil fitted against her finger.

They sat there then, the pair of them, in silence, smoking. A yellow shadow came towards the frosted door, hesitated, then turned away. Has he really forgotten, Leah thought, is he capable of forgetting the number of times she has stoked him to exactly this point?

And then, because she was Leah Goldstein, she looked for parallels in her own life, and found them in the number of times she had left the comforts of the pet shop and returned to them again, the number of times she had immersed herself in Labour politics and then become bored and impatient and given them up for the pleasures of beer on Bondi Beach where, beneath that fool's blue sky she had sought the company of flash characters, racecourse touts, used-car salesmen, and each time, through each cycle, she had been like Charles, like a person waking from dreaming and forgetting that she had been through all these things so many times before.

And here she was, back living in the pet shop, amongst the fatally flawed Badgerys, and here was the nicest of them feeding off his own rage.

"How many times", she asked him, although she had intended not to, "do you think you have had rows like this one? A thousand? Two thousand?"

Charles put out his cigarette, not neatly, but so the paper was torn and its warm tube of tobacco was exposed, lying ruptured amongst the dry ash. "This is different."

"Oh yeah?" You could see in the smile, in the softness of the voice, that the dry cynical tone was a pose and had no more connection to the real Leah Goldstein than her black turtle-neck sweater or her brown desert boots.

How many times had she hated Herbert Badgery and then forgiven him? And why was each time so new, her feelings so fresh as if they had never been unwrapped before?

"Look," he said.

"I'm looking."

"Look, if Time magazine wanted to write you up for one of your crummy books…"

"Thank you."

"You say they're crummy."

"Only about some of them. Some of them are very good."

But he was too obsessed to detour and discuss her work and even if he had not been, he had no feeling for the subject and would never see what their author now saw – that the real subject of Goldstein's work was not the people, but the landscape and its roads, red, yellow, white, ochre, mustard, dun, madeira, maize, the raw optimistic tracks that cut the arteries of an ancient culture before a new one had been born.

"If Time magazine were coming to interview you," Charles said, "you wouldn't want them to see the circus on the top floor. How would you explain it to them?"

"I'd say, this is my wife and this is Mr Lo who won't go home. Please excuse the mess."

He laughed then, at last, but soon he was serious again.

"All I wanted was for her to make an effort. For one day."

"Simmer down, chum. Have you got an ashtray or are you going to hog it all to yourself? Nothing catastrophic has happened. You've been like this before and it'll pass. Every time she rubs the stupid goanna's belly…"

"It's not its belly she rubs."

"Every time she does it you want to kill her. That's why she does it. You even know that's why she does it. And you can stop enjoying your temper, it's a nasty habit."

"I can really imagine killing her."

"I bet you can," she said, watching him prolong his feelings, like a man getting the last drag out of his cigarette before he burnt the filter and made himself ill on the taste of burning synthetic.

"I can feel my hands wanting to go round her neck like you want to put your arms to hold someone and…" He stopped suddenly, blushing. He hid his confusion by picking up a pile of papers, vets' reports for the month of August. "Pneumonia and trauma," he read out, as if this was something to do with it. "Trauma, Air Sacculitis, Too Decomposed, Trauma." He read belligerently, as if these were Emma's fault.