Free The Point by Marion Halligan Page B

The birds hang about, still hopeful. The child sits on the back of her legs with the skill that children so soon lose and pokes the sand with a stick. The mother sits on the wall, tips her head back to the cool sun and shuts her eyes. After a bit the child hoists herself up, walks along the sand. He on his own piece of wall sits up straight. The child stands near him, elaborately ignoring him. Until she says, I’ve got two mummies.
    That’s lucky, he says. His voice sounds rusty in his ears.
    Yes, says the child. This one’s my tummy mummy.
    I see. He wonders how long the mother will allow her to talk to this stranger.
    My other mummy is my egg mummy.
    Oh. And have you got a daddy?
    The daddy. He’s just a sperm. Gary was a good choice.
    Benison! calls the mother. She comes up and takes the child’s hand.
    Good afternoon, he says. A fine day.
    It’s getting cold, she says. Come on, Benison. Time to go.
    Goodbye, he says, and the little girl gives him a quick wave. He thinks he can’t look too bad if this mother who’s a well-dressed woman in new jeans and boots, and the pusher a fancy affair with three-part wheels and a parasol, lets her daughter talk to him for this long. Maybe he could go to the library, and look up Spenser.
    She’s right, it is cold. There’s a sneaky wind and the sky has suddenly filled with thundery clouds blocking out the sun. He pays a lot of attention to the sky and the clouds these days. Their scale is grand enough for his eyes to see. There’s an enormous expanse of them above this lake; they demand notice. He wonders if there are patterns in life, so that in the long run, and – this is important – it could be a very long run, time is given to all things necessary. In his other life he had never looked at the sky. Almost never. Except when it was exceptionally demanding. He remembers one evening when they were having people to dinner, friends they would have said but of course they were business friends and quick to disappear when the business wavered, and he came into the dining room with bottles of red wine to open and sit breathing on the sideboard. He hurried in with that efficient preoccupied speed that was the way he did everything in those days, and stopped short so that the bottles clanked and for a moment he feared the ten-year-old Penfolds (the poor-man’s Grange, people called it, though hardly for the poor) feared the bottles might have broken and spilled, for the room was awash with red. The sky was filled with puffy clouds and their swollen underbellies were stained with a bitter crimson sunset which spilled into his dining room and smeared the glasses, the cutlery, the white linen with colours of wine and blood. If I were superstitious, he thought, if I were a medieval person, or a credulous man who believes in signs, I would be filled with terror, but as it was he was filled with admiration for this dreadful sight, and paused and without looking at them uncorked the bottles and watched as slowly the blood faded to rust and then to pallid grey, when he pulled the thick velvet curtains which were a tasteful oyster colour and shut him inside more pallid greyness, and even switching on the lamps didn’t dispel the coldness to his eye. Next day he read in the paper that there had been bushfires fifty kilometres away that had filled the air with smoke and that was what caused the sunset reflections to smear themselves so luridly across his dining room.
    Later still he thought he should have seen it as a portent, when he couldn’t keep up the credit card merry-go-round any longer and he borrowed from the trust fund and didn’t get it paid back in time and disgrace came and everything was lost, his wife his children his grandchildren, you understand, don’t you, Dad, it’s better if they don’t see you, if we all don’t really, better if they just don’t get to know you, now while they’re too young to remember, let alone house and friends, business or otherwise, and