Free The Near Miss by Fran Cusworth Page A

steely underside to her, a lack of compassion. ‘Damaged people are dangerous — they know they will survive,’ she had quoted to him. He never believed her, always wondered whether a steady-enough love would stop the bouts of sobbing, the neediness, the despair. Had hoped his constantly applied warmth and kindness could thaw her occasional coldness. She was such a strange mix. She could maintain a silent rage over something as small as running out of coconut milk for a week, exhibiting an icy disdain worthy of a nineteenth-century headmistress. And then he could find her in the garden under the moon, singing in the dew, eating a whole box of ice cream. An artistic temperament, without the art.

    Eddy went to bed, got up in the morning, made a tea and returned to his window. He didn’t bother getting out of his pyjamas. He had spent the past ten days in them, and nothing had been lost. The world had kept turning. Outside, now, his neighbour walked briskly east along the street, his tie flapping over the shoulder of his white business shirt as if waving Eddy farewell. The man and his tie were heading off to catch the 8.08 train from Meadowview Station, express from Clifton Hill to Jolimont. Eddy double-checked his watch: no doubt about that, the man was definitely aiming for the 8.08. It was 8.01 now and it was about an eight-minute walk to the station. He, personally,would have left nine minutes for the walk, and always did, but he knew that his neighbour, the father of a baby and a toddler, was a man who arrived running and breathless at the station platform each morning, often with the stain of creamy baby-sick on his left suit shoulder, sometimes too late and only seen looking desperate on the wrong side of the window as the train pulled away. Why don’t you leave two minutes earlier, he felt like suggesting to the man: George was his name. Your whole life might change. And yet George was married with children, an achievement, it now appeared, beyond Eddy. If you had only stayed two minutes later each day, George might say back to Eddy, if you had only lavished those milligrams of extra attention, if you had only sometimes missed a train, if you had made more mistakes, if you had been more fun, and less you . . .
    Eddy studied branches of trees. Surprising, the little things that changed from day to day, if you spent long enough just sitting, and looking. This was what it must be like to be old. Maybe he was old. He watched a black bird with a long black beak, and a more delicate grey one with yellow wattles under a yellow beak. After a long pause, where his mind went pleasantly blank, the school children started wandering past, with backpacks that yawned open like clowns’ mouths, holding mothers’ hands and chattering up to the sky where their mothers’ ears were: and then we . . . and then she . . . what’s your favourite . . . but why ? The child traffic dwindled away and there was the faintest chime of a bell. Eddy had rarely, in all his years of living in this house with Romy, heard the local school bell. After another pause the mothers reappeared, walking past on their way home, some in happy clumps, swinging bags and laughing and waving; others grimly tapping on iPhones while they half-walked, half-ran. Things to do. Nobody busier than a working mother, they all knew that. Pillar of the nation. Unlike him, sitting there in his pyjamas, in a daze.
    He roused himself. Maybe Romy’s departure was not a spontaneous thing; maybe it hadbeen coming for weeks, and he, obsessed with getting the right ring and making the right proposal, had missed the signs. Eddy carefully sent his mind scurrying back through the weekend before The Dinner, the last weekend he had spent with Romy before her dramatic departure.
    It had been a long weekend, a public holiday. They had gone to the country, a place called Ten Mile, with Romy’s friends. Eddy had been leaning back, quietly looking at the