A Little Peace

Every working day at 5.16 or 5.32 or, if the day had been a busy one, 5.46, Julie caught the number ten bus from the City interchange and got off near Aranda Primary School for the short walk to the four-bedroom house she lived in with her parents and her little brother, Joe. She had been doing it for almost a year. The drivers on the route had grown familiar and she recognised many of the passengers too. One middle-aged lady with flat earrings and a stoop prattled at full pitch to any nearby acquaintance and Julie sat as far from her as she could for the sake of a little peace to read her book in.

The man who sat beside her one particular Tuesday was not familiar and he did not prattle. Julie got on with her book as the bus swung through the outskirts of Civic and up the long fast stretch of Barry Drive towards Aranda. It was The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis; a friend had lent it to her. Absorbed in her reading, she noticed the man only from the corner of her eye, barely registering the movement when he took the place beside her on the second stop after the interchange.

The chime rang as the bus snaked along Bandjalong Crescent and the sign near the driver’s seat lit up to show that another passenger had requested Julie’s stop. Now she looked at the man. His hair was spiky-short and his skin blotchy, with a faded birthmark around the chin like an old strap. He wore a dark suit and sunglasses and he was listening to an iPod.

‘Excuse me,’ she said but he did not move.

She closed her book and half-turned, one hand gripping the seat in front. The man gave no sign of noticing.

‘I need to get out,’ she said, louder this time.

The bus slowed and stopped and three passengers alighted. Julie looked for a cane or a seeing-eye dog but there was nothing. The music leaking though the man’s earbuds was rap or possibly hip-hop.

‘Excuse me, please. This is my stop.’

The man’s head nodded in time with the beat from his iPod but the rest of him continued to block her in. People nearby refused to catch her eye and the driver stared straight out the front window, then the door closed and the bus began to gather speed.

At the next stop Julie spoke up again and reached halfway across the space between them before drawing back. Something about the man made her reluctant to touch him. An elderly lady making her way down the aisle looked sideways without breaking stride and a young guy in a denim jacket hesitated on his way to the exit just long enough for Julie to hope he saw what was happening and would intervene. When he did not she bit her lip in frustration and struck her knee with The Four Loves. The bus continued through Cook and Macquarie and on to Cameron Avenue. There was no point getting off now, she might as well go all the way to the Belconnen interchange.

She felt safe as long as there were other people in the seats around them. After eight more stops the bus reached its terminus, with the man still wedged beside her. Julie stayed in her seat as he left the bus and watched until he cleared the platform. Then she took out her phone and called Pip.

She didn’t want to call Pip because she was trying to quarrel with him. But her purse contained precisely one dollar and forty-five cents and her father worked late on Tuesdays and her mother’s car was being repaired and she didn’t want to put anybody else out.

Pip drove a black ute, polished so it sparkled in the slanting shafts of late sunlight. Julie asked him to hurry; she was nervous about standing, alone, by the side of the road. The man on the bus had done that much to her. When the ute pulled up in front of her she slid in through the passenger door and Pip reached over to squeeze her knee but couldn’t do anything more because of the traffic coming up behind.

‘You all right, baby?’

He was in denim jeans and an old T-shirt that drew attention to the width of his shoulders. One arm had tattoos that she thought of as Maori, though Pip wasn’t Polynesian. His parents were born in Ireland and Pip himself had red hair and the remnants of freckles.

‘Thanks for picking me up. I don’t think I could have walked home, not in these heels.’

He followed her into the house, where dinner was offered and accepted. Julie lost track of the mealtime conversation, wondering about the man, who had shown not a flicker of awareness. Could the music and dark glasses really explain that? After they had eaten she stacked the dishwasher and Pip sat down with Joe to play Call of Duty. She joined them for a while, watching the screen graphics of soldiers hiding in a ruined town and shooting or getting shot. Pip moved over to make space for her on the couch and nuzzled her during a lull in the conflict. A burst of machine gun fire drew his attention back to the controls, and noises from down the hall told Julie her father was home, reheating dinner in the microwave.

She felt unsettled the following afternoon as the bus made its way from the City interchange through the streets of Civic, but the feeling lifted after they passed the stop where the man had boarded. The next day was the same, as was the day after that. Then she forgot about it.

Looking back a few weeks later she could remember the anxiety but not how or when it stopped, like lying in bed at night unable to sleep one moment and waking up to the sound of your alarm clock the next.

There was a party when Pip’s sister turned twenty-one. Julie hung around for an hour then walked down to the local park and sat on an outcropping of rock and looked up at the sky. There was a half-moon and the stars were partly obscured by cloud. She drank the can of Bundy and Coke she had brought and settled it near the rock where she would not forget to take it with her later. The little breeze that had been blowing all day got stronger so she pulled the sleeves of her jumper down over her hands.

She had once really believed that there used to be more stars. A great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns and seven diadems on his heads; his tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. Revelation 12:3–4.

‘You missed the speeches,’ Pip said when she got back.

‘Whoops.’ She’d had just the one Bundy and Coke but giggled as if she were tighter. ‘Anything I needed to hear?’

‘I went looking for you.’

Julie ignored the subdued whine in his voice, half a demand for an apology and half a plea to be stroked. She shrugged. ‘Here I am.’

He turned away and Julie wanted to scream. How do you fight with someone who won’t throw a punch?

Pip had a one-bedroom flat in Page with a tiny 1990s kitchen and a flimsy yellow sofa with a tubular frame and perpetual mould in the shower recess. Julie drove the ute back there after the party because Pip had thrown himself too enthusiastically at the keg of beer in the back yard. He always did something like that when she was trying to engineer a quarrel.

‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘I’ll be right to drive you home in a little while. Want some coffee?’

And he was so lovely, measuring out two sugars for her and talking about his sister with genuine affection, that she wondered how she could have been such a bitch to him, even though she knew he would be in no condition to drive her anywhere that night and hoped she would solve the problem by staying over.

They started kissing and she leaned back into the sofa and loosened his clothing as he was loosening hers. His shirt was off and she was pressing against the muscles in his chest and feeling his hand move on exposed flesh: her back, her stomach, her thighs and hips. There was the smell of alcohol on his breath, and the deodorant he wore and a hint of sweat and traces of cigarette smoke, second-hand from the party. She liked these scents and the mix of them and the pleasure of touching and being touched, the ferocity of Pip’s desire and the nagging spur of her own—it was maddening how much she enjoyed it—but could not for a moment kid herself she was losing control. Whatever happened between them was her deliberate choice. His fingers tickled the clasp of her bra and she allowed that and his mouth roamed below her shoulders and she massaged the back of his scalp. Then a thumb hooked into the side of her underpants and began to tug: gentle, testing, insistent.

She pushed him away.

‘I should go.’

He did not argue but flopped on the sofa and closed his eyes almost as if he had fallen asleep, except one hand was clenched so tight the knuckles showed white. She was disgusted with herself: such a tease. Before she could say anything more he lobbed the keys at her—not angrily, more in resignation—and said, bring the car back in the morning.

At work she hung out with Chloe. They processed invoices and collected the mail and entered numbers into a database. On Mondays and Fridays they went for a run at lunchtime and if there was a let up in the afternoon they stole away for a few minutes to gulp beverages in the café in the lobby of their department’s building. It was easier with no business manager, the old one had resigned and they were waiting for a replacement. Chloe talked about doing forensic studies at Canberra University. Julie liked the idea of going to university but couldn’t think what she would study. Not forensics. She talked about business administration or urban planning.

Sometimes they talked about work and sometimes Julie managed to work the conversation around to God but it never stayed there long because she got nervous when Chloe pressed her on whether she really thought people would go to hell or that the world was made in six days. They talked more about their boyfriends than anything else. Chloe had split with hers and three aspiring replacements were already preening and fancying themselves.

‘You can have mine if you’re prepared to wait a little while,’ Julie said ‘I’m almost finished with him.’

Chloe laughed and asked, what could possibly be wrong with Pip?

‘Engine grease under his fingernails.’

Chloe laughed some more and put her latte glass down on the table and said they should be getting back to the office. Julie dabbed her mouth with a paper napkin and shoved the napkin into her empty coffee cup and they walked towards the lift. All her complaints about Pip had been half-jocular, the hours playing Call of Duty with her brother or the rugby he made her watch on TV. Chloe wouldn’t understand the real problem: Pip wanted it and she did too, but not unless they were married.

Julie didn’t think Pip was interested in marriage. Not for a long time, and maybe not to her. He said he loved her. She knew he wanted her. Yet somehow that didn’t add up to what it should. It would be easier to break up if they could have that row. Then she could be Wronged or Abused, and he might even dump her.

They’d just had a pizza at a new place in Hawker—a pizza washed down with a glass of fruity red wine—and planned to see a movie. They got in the car and Julie buckled her seatbelt and Pip slid the key into the ignition. It was pretty dark, as they had parked near a large bush that screened the nearest streetlamp. Julie caught her breath. It seemed as good a time as any.

‘I can’t do this any more.’

Pip leaned back into his seat. The keys dangled from the dashboard. He looked out the windscreen at the darkened shrub and said nothing as a clock ticked in Julie’s head: one, two, three, four.

‘I suppose that’s it, then?’

Wind rustled the branches and waved a patch of light across his face, where Julie saw the glint of moistening eyes above stoic lips. She wanted to huddle up against him for comfort. It took a frightful effort to remain in the seat, pretending to stare out the same windscreen he was pretending to stare out.

He asked did she still want to see the movie but she said take me home, and he turned the radio up as they drove in case she did what her face threatened and sobbed.

Chloe said she was insane.

‘Pip’s crazy for you, and I thought you said you loved him.’

Julie made a helpless, almost exasperated, gesture with her eyes. ‘I know.’ How could she defend herself? ‘We were pulling in opposite directions.’

Somebody came to ask Chloe about a late payment on an invoice and Julie turned back to her screen, checking the morning emails. People moved along the corridor she looked into over a lemon-coloured partition. Chloe’s desk was behind her so they were back-to-back when both used their computers.

The intruder wandered out of earshot and Chloe squatted beside the desk and grabbed her arm. ‘It’s not a religious thing, is it?’

Julie’s blush answered for her.

‘Because that can be sorted out. Lots of people manage it. Maybe you’ll even convert him if you keep at it.’

‘It’s not that simple.’ Julie wanted the conversation to stop and was thinking how to end it when someone else did it for her.

‘Sorry to interrupt your tete-a-tete, ladies, but I thought you should meet our new business manager.’

They looked up at the assistant secretary looming over the lemon partition. He was wearing a grey suit and a green tie and a stupid grin and beside him was the man from the bus. ‘Dave Joyner, this is Chloe and Julie. They take care of procurement when they can spare the time from gossip and daydreams.’

They all shook hands and Julie felt sweat soaking into her blouse but the man—Dave Joyner, she reminded herself—didn’t react to her any differently than he did to Chloe. He was pleased to meet them and looked forward to working together. His green-blue eyes looked a bit bulgy.

‘I need the loo,’ she said as the men walked away, and rushed off to sit in a cubicle until at least some of her composure returned.

The man—Mr Joyner, Dave—had a small office in the corner. In addition to Julie and Chloe he supervised people who looked after budgeting and travel and accommodation. Six staff in all. He was quiet to begin with, emerging from his cave only to ask the occasional question then reburying his nose in the department’s protocols and procedural manuals, but a couple of days in he showed a dab hand at mimicry. He pranced between desks with the assistant secretary’s walk and working his eyebrows in the same exaggerated style, pausing after every banal remark with the expression of a trained seal expecting to be thrown a fish. Julie laughed and their eyes met and he smiled back. But the contact went too long and she was the one to break it, flushing and staring at her screen to block it out.

A few days later she was sitting with Chloe over a couple of half-drunk lattes and Dave Joyner appeared with a fresh-brewed pot of tea.

‘May I join you?’

He stood tall behind an empty chair until a small gesture of Chloe’s hand granted permission.

‘I hope this means the boss won’t clamp down on our afternoon breaks,’ Chloe said.

‘Shit no.’ He poured tea into a heavy white mug. ‘It helps keep the mind clear.’

Julie studied him, blowing on his tea and staring across the room at the lift shafts. He looked about thirty-five. None of them spoke for a moment.

‘Now, here’s something I’ve got to show you.’ He dug in his pants pocket for a phone and started pressing buttons. ‘My little girl turned three on the weekend and we had a party for her.’

‘She’s a real cutie,’ Chloe said.

And she was: a fair-haired, chubby-cheeked creature with a gigawatt smile. Dave Joyner scrolled through the pictures. Half a dozen kids looking cheerful and clumsy and gorging on cake, and in two or three of them a slim woman he identified as Karen.

‘If I’d thought of it this morning I could have brought some cake. The kids left more than I expected, but the birthday girl picked all the Smarties off it.’

He was on Julie’s bus again that afternoon, with his earphones and dark glasses. She was seated first and tensed at the prospect of having him beside her, but he walked right past and took a place four rows back. Perhaps he really did become oblivious with his music pounding.

The first couple of weekends without Pip were lonely, even when she was not alone. She met friends for drinks in Kingston and then went dancing at a nearby club, but it was like standing next to a fire without getting warm. On the dance-floor she bobbed in the middle of a group or stood face to face with one or other of the unattached guys who had come with them. Neither interested her. Not that she thought of herself as likely to interest them either. She was too absent: dull as a sparrow.

After morning service on Sunday she clutched a hot mug of milky tea and wandered around the hall scavenging conversation. Not just with friends but with elderly ladies who had taught her Sunday School as a toddler and middle-aged couples with kids starting high school and the Indonesian family who were in Canberra for a year while the wife studied international relations at ANU. They warned her off holidays in Jakarta; the traffic, apparently, is beyond enduring. Her habit before had been to hot-foot it to Pip’s flat within five minutes of the benediction.

One after-service conversation was with her pastor. She desperately tried to remember what his sermon was about that morning but her mind had wandered so vigorously there was no hope of recall. The effort proved unnecessary because Karl was telling her, for some reason, about a Solvay Conference he had been to in Cologne (it sounded like a convention about soap powder but it was about physics; Karl had been one of those before he was a pastor).

‘I broke up with Pip,’ she said.

‘Oh.’ A few extra wrinkles appeared on Karl’s face­—he didn’t have many, and there were only a few grey hairs hiding in the still respectable mat of brown on his scalp. ‘I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard.’

‘It’s recent.’ She bit lightly on her tongue before continuing. ‘We struggled with purity.’

Her eyes widened in panic as soon as the words were out. What a thing to say and what a person to say it to. It wasn’t a lie, but some truths are just wrong, at least when you speak them. Karl didn’t seem to notice. He had that faraway look associated with contemplation or daydreams. ‘The church can take a narrow view of purity,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it does more harm than good.’ Julie grabbed his empty mug and said she’d take it to the kitchen and got away before he said anything more. A narrow view of purity: what did that mean? She knew she would never ask him.

What she wanted was to get home.

Work got busier as the end of the financial year approached: earlier starts, later finishes and no prospect of coffee in the afternoon. Julie was happy to pick up scraps of overtime when she could. For a whole week it was just her and Chloe and Dave Joyner in the office long after all the others had left. On Friday night Dave bought them drinks at the Wig and Pen.

‘Almost there,’ he said and insisted on buying a second round, and then a third.

Julie made an excuse when he suggested round four and Chloe extricated herself with equal transparency. Dave Joyner went back to the bar and Julie wondered about Karen and the little girl. Didn’t he want to get home to them? The last she saw of him that evening he was studying a group of women sitting around a table near the side of the room.

Chloe had to leave early on Monday for a dental appointment that could not wait. Julie told her not to worry, the last of the paperwork would be finished by seven thirty and then they’d finally close the books.

Dave Joyner stayed in his office as others drifted off home. From time to time Julie saw him peering out at her through the frosted glass, and once she turned to catch him standing in the doorway, from where he had been studying her back for she did not know how long. He rubbed his chin when she saw him and went back behind the desk.

Julie worked faster, but she was nervous and made mistakes. One column of numbers had to be checked four times before she got it right. She heard the door of the assistant secretary’s office close and the key turn in the lock. Julie looked over her shoulder and saw him walking towards her with his briefcase in one hand.

‘Good night,’ she said. ‘I’m just about finished here myself.’

So now it was just the two of them. If not for all the errors, Julie would have been out of there half an hour ago. Dave went to the kitchen and walked back with a mug of coffee. He had removed his tie and undone three buttons on his shirt and when he sat back down behind his desk he spread a newspaper over it. Sound from his office carried to her across deserted work points: the rustle of pages turning, a cough, the thunk of a coffee mug placed on a ceramic coaster.

She waited until he was not looking and, without shutting her computer off, ran into the stairwell, down three flights and into the street, where she grabbed her phone as if it was a lifebuoy and summoned Pip.

© John Higgins