That’s how I got my first job. It was not teaching math.
It was counting gray kangaroos.
Chapter 82
Leo drives home at two p.m. on a Monday. It’s a revelation. Traffic is great at this time of day! He glides through green light after green light like he’s in a presidential motorcade. Sometimes rush hour feels like a personal attack, and he feels hatred toward every set of taillights blocking his way. He has to remind himself that every car represents another poor soul stuck in traffic, just like him.
“I won’t be back in the office after the site meeting,” he’d said, elaborately casual, to Kath, his office manager. “I’ll work from home.”
He is proving to himself and to Neve that he isn’t micromanaged, but Kath seemed annoyingly taken aback when he mentioned his innocuous plan for the day, and then she said, even more annoyingly: “Does Lilith know this?”
He feels like he’s losing his grip on what’s appropriate workplace behavior. Surely at his level he doesn’t need to ask Lilith’s “permission” to work from home after a site meeting. Does he? No. She’s interstate, speaking inspirationally at a Women in Engineering conference. It makes sense for Leo to plan his working day like this. But wait, is he being misogynistic? Would he ask permission if Lilith was a man? Surely not. He’s not a junior employee. He doesn’t need to clock in and clock out. Why is he even thinking about this?
Multiple safety issues had been on the agenda at this morning’s meeting and Leo had mentioned—he’s not sure if it was to entertain the team or genuinely to caution them—that it seemed he was destined to die in a workplace accident when he turned forty-three in a little over a month’s time, so could everyone please bring their A game when it came to safety? (Bring your A game. What the hell? Every time he leaves a meeting there is always one particular phrase that comes out of his mouth that causes him anguish.)
“I hope it wasn’t that plane psychic,” said the project architect. “Did anyone see that terrible video of the kid in the car accident?”
“Well,” said Leo, and he can’t deny he enjoyed the moment. Mouths dropped. The meeting went nearly an hour over schedule. Turns out a lot of people had seen the video and read about the plane psychic.
“I’m not coming within ten feet of you, mate,” said someone jocularly.
“If I were you, I’d give up work for a year,” said someone else.
“That’s what my wife wants,” said Leo, and no one seemed surprised. He wanted to say, “But come on, would you really resign from a good job on the word of a psychic? You wouldn’t, you couldn’t.”
He and Neve haven’t talked about it since that strange argument on the phone last week. She was calm by the time he got home. Maybe even embarrassed. Or probably not. She rarely gets embarrassed, which makes him envious. He’s been in a permanent state of embarrassment since he was five.
She’s probably waiting him out. She does this sometimes to him and the children: waits patiently for them to come to the “right” decision. This is why she thinks Lilith is “micromanaging” him. Takes one to know one.
He stands in the driveway next to his car for a moment, keys in hand. Seagulls soar and dive; he smells the salty air. It’s an easy walk to the beach. It’s not an easy walk back from the beach, because it’s all uphill—Coogee is so hilly—but still, it’s amazing that he lives so close to an amazing beach with white sand and crystal-clear water.
When he and his sisters finished school and all of them left Tasmania for the mainland, one by one, for study and work and opportunities, they all fell in love with different cities. Leo remembers doing the Bondi to Coogee coastline walk on his first weekend in Sydney and thinking, Imagine if I could live here. It felt like it wouldn’t be allowed.
But now he lives here. With his wife, his two children, and their cavoodle. Living the suburban dream. It’s true he can’t remember the last time he actually went to the beach, but it’s there, right there, minutes away, and Neve and the kids are there all the time, so it’s not like his family isn’t enjoying it.
He looks at his front garden, described in the real estate advertisement as “coastal desert–inspired style.” Palm trees and hardy native plants. Not much grass and little maintenance required, which is good, although sometimes looking at it does make him feel kind of hot and bothered. Sometimes he misses the misty skies and abundant green of his hometown. His mother is currently redesigning her backyard in Hobart “English cottage garden style.” He’s worried she’s being scammed by a dodgy operator. He needs to get back down there again soon, but when? It doesn’t seem possible. Lilith is always asking about his mother’s “health,” which feels like a subtle way to remind him of her benevolence when it came to that one day off, but she might have a problem with a future day off.
He pushes the edge of the key into the palm of his hand as if he can unlock the answer there, and studies his house, which certainly represents love and family, happy memories, home sweet home, yes indeed, but also represents a crushing debt.
They bought at the most recent peak, and probably overpaid, but everyone overpays for property in Sydney. The house is not huge, but it’s modern, with three bedrooms and a “study nook” (a corner), sleek pleasing lines, and was designed by an architect Leo knows who is becoming very successful.
If he dies in a workplace accident there will be a worker’s compensation claim. Neve will be able to use it to pay off the mortgage. That comforts him. He considers looking up what the payout would be.
He goes inside and finds Neve at her computer, headphones on, fingers racing across the keyboard, foot tapping in time to whatever music she is listening to. The dog is asleep at her feet, then lifts his head and lazily thumps his tail in acknowledgment of Leo’s presence but then goes back to sleep. The days of toddlers and puppies running excitedly to the door to greet Leo are long gone. Did he appreciate those moments enough? He knows he loved it, anticipated it as he walked inside, felt like a king.
When he first met Neve she was a primary-school teacher, but after Bridie was born she reinvented herself as a designer of corporate training programs. She works from home and her current project is a training program for NSW Fisheries. He can see a half-complete PowerPoint slide on her computer screen.
He keeps standing there like a creepy stalker, watching the words Illegal Use of Fish Traps in Inland Riv appear on the screen, at which point Neve senses his presence, pulls off her headphones at the same time as she swings her chair around, screams, and falls off the chair onto the floor. The dog jumps up, excited.
It’s generally accepted that Bridie’s dramatic tendencies come from Leo, but sometimes he really does wonder.
“What are you doing here?!” In typical Neve style, she doesn’t get up right away but instead continues to lie flat on the floor while the dog nuzzles her neck. “You scared the life out of me.”
“Sorry,” says Leo. “I was trying to work out how not to scare you.”
“Wait, you’re here.” She sits up suddenly. “Did you get fired?”
“Don’t look hopeful,” says Leo. “It would be a disaster if I got fired.”
“Mmm, not really,” says Neve airily.
“Yes, really,” says Leo. “We’d have to sell the house.”
“Oh, well,” says Neve. “We’d work it out.”
He can feel his back teeth grinding. The mortgage is not a concept. It’s a contract.
Neve shows no sign of getting up off the floor, so Leo takes her vacated chair, and as he cleans out crumbs and dust from her keyboard (unbelievable) he says, “Do you want me to leave work because you think the psychic’s prediction is going to come true? Or because you hate Lilith? Or because I’m a ‘workaholic’?”
“All of the above.” She sighs. “I mean, I go back and forth on the psychic depending on where I am in my cycle. When I read about the elderly couple dying, I panicked.”
His phone rings. He pulls it out of his pocket and confirms that it is, of course, Lilith. He looks at Neve. She opens her mouth and quickly shuts it again.
The phone stops.
Rings again.
“I guess it’s urgent,” says Neve dryly.
