The Fall Ch. 05

She responded the next day, Friday, to let him know Cyril would be spending a few nights in Toowoomba Base Hospital. He had a chest infection and they didn't want to let him out. She asked him if she could visit him that weekend. There was nothing that needed doing at Cyril's place that she couldn't take care of on Saturday morning, and she'd like to come and spend some time with him.

It was the break he'd been waiting for. The weekend rolled around and with Kyle and Lydia's assistance, he finally felt like he was making headway. All of the jobs around the property were taken care of by Sunday morning. He could look around and feel not exhaustion, but relief.

They stood in the kitchenette guzzling water. It was still ridiculously hot and they were all dirty and sweaty.

'I'm going to go for a swim,' Lydia announced. 'I need to cool off. This heat is ridiculous.'

It was a good idea and they all ended up in the water. Dylan sat on a rock and watched Lydia standing waist deep, throwing a stick for Ben. The dog would paddle to the edge of the water, grab the stick, and paddle back in to return it to her.

She'd gone swimming in her shorts and old gray shirt and the water made the fabric cling to her body. Her hair needed to be coloured again, and her face was red with sunburn, but there was something so beautiful about her, so womanly and real, that he couldn't help but stare.

'Have you taken her to meet your parents?' Kyle asked quietly.

'No. Haven't had the time.'

His parents knew about her; his siblings had filled them in. They hadn't asked to meet, her though. In his family, you didn't take someone home unless and until you were very, very serious. And while Lydia qualified as someone he was serious about, he'd had neither the time nor opportunity to take her over.

'How was your trip to Brisbane?' Kyle asked. 'You said you were going to stay at Lydia's flat?'

'Um.' He hesitated. 'I'm still trying to process parts of it. It's not the sort of shit you can get over in a few days.'

Kyle looked concerned. 'Is everything alright?'

Lydia had had enough of playing with Ben. She waded over to the edge and announced she was going back to the shed to have a cigarette. She'd be back in a few minutes.

When she was out of sight, Dylan told Kyle about the abortion.

'Eighteen weeks is a good way through,' Kyle remarked.

'Yeah. I made the stupid mistake of looking up what it might have looked like at that stage. It was a baby, you know? A proper little baby. I don't know why she let her ex-husband get to her. He admitted in the emails that they'd been trying to conceive. He just didn't want to have to pay child support. He wanted the whole thing to go away and just kept hounding her. I don't understand why she didn't just cut off contact.'

Kyle mulled over the words. 'Some people are really good at picking your weak spot, though. They know how to make you react. Maybe he just got to her. Maybe something he said or wrote really hit home. What are her family like? Her parents, I mean. And her friends. Would they have supported her?'

'She doesn't really get along with her parents that well. There's no reason for it, they're just different sorts of people. She doesn't have any friends.'

'Really? Why not?'

Dylan shrugged. 'I don't know. She just doesn't.'

'Shit.' He laughed awkwardly. 'I could barely cope with my life at her age and I had family and friends to rely on. My parents weren't impressed at the number of kids I had, but they always helped me with them.'

'I'm scared of her,' Dylan confessed. 'I don't understand her a lot of the time. I feel like I need to protect her, but I can't be there all the time and even when I am, I don't know what to say to her.'

'Do you want to stay with her?'

He nodded. 'I do. When things are great, they're really great. We don't really fight, we can just hang out together, and we want the same things out of life. If it wasn't for that whole, dark side of her, it would be great.'

'Lots of people have secrets.'

Dylan snorted. 'I can only wish I did. Everyone knows all my fucking business.'

Kyle laughed. 'Yeah, me too. Even the bits I really, really just wish no one knew.'

Dylan glanced over at his friend. He figured - correctly - that Kyle was referring to his sexual preferences. They were weird all right.

'Does Cora do it for you?' he asked curiously. 'You know what I'm talking about. Is she into that?'

Kyle smiled, amused. 'No, but women never are. My mother pulled me aside before my first date with Cora, and had what has to have been the most awkward talk with me in all my life. She told me she'd heard rumours, and she hoped they weren't true, but in the off chance they were, I should remember that women appreciate a strong man.'

Dylan's blood ran cold at the thought of ever discussing sex with his parents. He knew he had six siblings but he preferred to think that they, and he, just spontaneously appeared and he assumed his parents felt the same about the arrival of their grandchildren.

'Holy fuck, I would have crawled off and died,' Dylan muttered.

'I wanted to.'

'So why did you do it? Why did you marry Cora?'

Lydia was coming back. They could see her in the distance, the sun glinting off her hair and sunglasses. Ben saw her and raced up to her, stick in mouth.

'Because I'm not like you,' Kyle replied, staring at Lydia. 'I've never had a relationship that lasted. There's never been any reason for women to put up with me. Cora likes the country. She wants this lifestyle. I look at it this way; if I can be what she wants, at least there's a woman around. For all my weirdness, I still like regular sex. I still like kissing someone, cuddling them, having someone to come home to. In return, she gets what she wants.'

It sounded sad and brutal and cold to Dylan's ears. It wasn't a marriage; it was a transaction.

'I've never had a relationship that lasted,' Dylan said weakly.

'Maybe with her you will,' Kyle countered, gesturing to Lydia. 'She likes you. She wouldn't go near you if she didn't.'

Dylan wondered if Kyle was right. He hoped so. Despite her drinking, and despite the abortion, he still loved her.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Lydia was tired. She'd woken up at dawn to go jogging, and had then spent the morning helping Dylan and Kyle. After a swim and a shower, she'd gone to Toowoomba to visit Cyril. Now Dylan wanted to take her to meet his parents? Did he need to?

'They want to meet you,' he said.

'Oh shit. Tonight's normally a drinking night,' she said.

The expression on his face was one of resentment. 'Why is getting drunk so important to you?'

She touched his face. 'I'm just kidding. I'm nervous.'

It was a lie, but he bought it all the same. She knew he didn't want to accept the truth. He still thought that if he worked hard enough, he could fix her.

'You have nothing to be nervous about,' he muttered. 'Just don't dress the way you did when you went to lunch at the O'Sullivan's the first time.'

She grinned. 'I did ask if there was a dress code and to be fair, it was the only dress I had with me. You'll be pleased to know I have more modest options available this time.'

He leant across the table and kissed her. 'Good. Do you want to get dressed and we'll go? They live out past Dalby.'

'Oh shit. I hate meeting parents.' She laughed awkwardly. 'Sorry. I'll get changed.'

She modelled two dresses for him and asked him which one he thought was most suitable. She was kind of hoping he might say 'neither, let's leave it for another night', but instead he told her they were both great, and she looked beautiful in both.

'I can kind of see why you hooked up with Ned Kelly, though,' Dylan remarked. 'You have that same sort of look going.'

'Ned Kelly?'

'Your ex-husband,' he clarified.

'How do you know what my ex-husband looks like?' she asked.

Dylan hesitated.

Lydia raised her eyebrows expectantly.

'I must've seen a photo around,' he muttered.

He was lying. She knew he was lying. There were no photos of Mark in either her flat, or at Cyril's house. She put her mascara wand down and repeated her invitation him to tell her how he knew what her ex-husband looked like.

'Cyril and I went around to see him,' he confessed.

Her blood drained from her face. 'When and why?'

'When we went to your flat. We found the emails he'd sent you. We had his address. We... well, Cyril really, he was worried that Mark would call the police... kind of beat him up.'

She laughed in shock. 'You did what?'

He shrugged. 'He deserved it.'

Lydia picked up her make-up wand and finished doing her eyes. She looked, if not country-like, less immodest than she usually did.

'Are you mad?' Dylan asked.

'No.' She laughed, despite herself. 'He fucking deserved it. I'll have to thank Cyril.'

'I was worried you'd be angry.'

'No. He was a piece of shit. He lost his temper with me one year because when we were doing our tax returns he found out I'd earned a thousand dollars more than him, and he thought I did it 'on purpose', to make him feel like less of a man. He never went down on me, because he said if I wasn't going to have anal with him I didn't deserve it. It took us just under a year to conceive, and he used to say I wasn't trying hard enough.' She shrugged. 'So, I'm not really feeling much pity for him.'

'Why did you stay with him?'

'I don't know. Why did you stay with Michelle?'

He shrugged. 'Good point. I don't know. It just... who else would want me? She was the only one who did.'

'I want you.' She ruffled his hair. 'The more I know you, the more I love you.'

He picked her up and squeezed her. 'That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me. I love you too, Lydia. I think about you all the time.'

She went to the kitchen and filled a water bottle with gin, tonic and lemon juice. She grabbed an ice-brick and a tea towel to help keep it cold, and put it in the back seat of the Charger so she could drink it on the way back. Dylan didn't comment.

They were both nervous. He drove far too fast, and she smoked three cigarettes and wished she could have a drink. She hoped his family weren't teetotallers. She needed at least a glass of wine to get her through the evening.

His parents ran sheep and grew, bizarrely, blueberries as a secondary income source. Their property was well out of Dalby and it was huge. They bumped up the dirt road in the Valiant, and parked out front. They weren't the only ones here. Dylan had told her his both family bred like rabbits and were tight-knit, and it appeared he hadn't been lying.

'Ready?' he asked her.

'No. I'll never be ready.' She checked her teeth to make sure there wasn't any lipstick on them. 'Please don't run off and leave me by myself.'

'I won't,' he promised.

He took her inside and introduced her. She tried to remember everyone's names, but it was hopeless. There were at least twenty people there.

It was very different at lunch at the O'Sullivan's, the only other large country gathering she'd been to. The house was older and less up to date, there were a lot more children here, and they served themselves food from the kitchen table and sat wherever they could find a seat to eat.

His paternal grandmother, who lived with his parents, was from Bangalore. Dylan had never mentioned that, and she'd never realised he was mixed race, but it was a welcome surprise. The scent of lamb was nicely hidden in curry and besides, she'd been to Bangalore six years ago and she was soon showing photos of her trip to the older woman who in turn told her how things used to look.

'You never told me you went to India,' Dylan remarked.

'You never told me you were part Indian. We could have had curry. I could have stopped pretending I knew how to cook a steak and made you dahl instead,' she retorted.

'Well, we can stop pretending you know how to cook steak,' he grinned.

He was happy. She was relieved. The odd coincidence of her having been to the place his grandmother was born and raised was enough to afford her some credit with his family. They talked about travel, and living out in the country, and the whole evening was not nearly as awkward as she'd feared it would be.

On the way home, she asked Dylan how he thought it went.

'Good,' he said confidently. 'Thank-you. I know you didn't want to go.'

She stared at his profile in the darkness of the car. She would never have picked him for anything other than white, although in hindsight, the brothers of his that she'd met had darker skin and hair. She thought about some of the comments she'd heard thrown around about race. Not the stupid, ignorant shit that came out of Cyril's mouth - it would have upset Cyril if he thought he'd offended anyone - but the nastier sort of statements that people made.

'What are you thinking about?' he asked.

'Kyle's wedding. The man who was sitting at our table who was talking about non-Whites.'

'Oh that.'

'Did it bother you?'

'Yeah, but there's not really any point saying anything, is there? I look white as white. If I say; 'my grandmother's Indian', those sorts of people either just say 'well she must be one of the good ones' or 'never mind, you can't tell, you look white'.'

'You sat there and let me argue with him,' she said.

'I didn't want to tell you it wasn't worth your time and effort.' He squeezed her thigh. 'I appreciated it, though. I could see who you are. Sometimes, just sitting back and listening tells you who a person really is. Does that make sense?'

She opened her bottle of gin and tonic and took a swig. 'Does that mean you agree with me that it's ridiculous how much the men out here baby their guns?'

He snorted. 'You've got to be kidding. A little part of me died when you said wild pigs were cute.'

She giggled. 'Cyril was horrified. He looked like he wanted to disown me.'

'Well, you can see why, can't you?'

She laughed harder and reached for her cigarettes. 'It's not that I have huge issues with guns. It's the fact that they crap on and on and on about them as if having a gun is the most important thing a man can have. Cyril made me take him to The Barn this week so he could get more ammunition.

I asked him why he needed six months' worth of ammunition, and he just glared at me and told the shop assistant I was a Greenie.' As she spoke, her voice got softer. What had started as a funny story was suddenly not so amusing. 'Oh fuck, Dylan. What am I going to do if he dies? What am I going to do about the guns and the bullets and cleaning his house?'

He'd sensed the change in her voice. Cyril's most recent hospitalisation had scared her. He was no longer just ill, he was visibly dying. Passing away in front of their eyes. Dylan pulled over to the side of the road, so he could give her his full attention.

'Have you discussed this with him?' he asked.

She nodded. 'Theoretically I know what he wants. I know what I have to take care of. It's just... I don't know what I'll do with myself. You think my drinking's bad now? You should have seen what it was like before I came here.'

'You can always come and stay with me. I know I live in a shed, but you're welcome to join me if you want.'

'I don't know. Michelle still won't even look at me. The property settlement isn't near complete. Won't I just make things more difficult?'

'I'll go and speak to her this week and try and sort it out.'

She lit her cigarette and took a draw. 'I don't want to cause you trouble.'

'Well, it's not you that would be causing the trouble,' he pointed out. 'On the other hand, if you want to move back to your flat, I'd like to come and visit you.'

She stared out the window. She couldn't imagine giving up city life, and yet she couldn't imagine Dylan giving up country life. What sort of conclusion would they come to? It seemed too hard a question to answer just yet.

'We'll figure it out,' she said. 'Can I just ask you one thing? When Cyril dies, please come and help me. My relatives are going to fight over his estate. They're probably going to blame me for not caring for him better. I don't think I can deal with that on my own.'

'Of course,' he assured her. 'You only need to pick up the phone, Lydia.'

The amount of comfort that gave her was colossal. As long as he was around, she'd get through it. Maybe, when it was all over, she'd even address her drinking. She glanced at her bottle of gin and tonic. Well, she thought, that might be taking it a bit too far. Giving up the drinking was still too awful a thought to contemplate.

She leant over and kissed his cheek. 'Thank-you. You have no idea how much that means to me.'