Zones. Damien Broderick

There are stacks of other kids at school from single-parent families. Only it’s mostly their dads who’ve run off, not their mothers. God, you ought to hear their stories, some of them. It’d curl your hair. Actually it hasn’t curled mine, but then nothing ever seems to, despite hours down at the hair dresser three months ago when Mum wanted me to look beautiful for Aunt Vicky’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party. Ha!

      Mostly kids won’t talk about it, but sometimes, when they know you come from a single-parent family yourself, they talk and talk. Fights, smashed-up furniture, the police at the door so you could die of embarrassment, women’s refuges for the mothers and the kids, court orders, the lot. Even broken bones. Lots of bruises they can’t hide very well.

      Well, it wasn’t like that round at our place. No, it was like skating on ice, beautiful and smooth and techno music in the air—and then in one hit you’re flat down on the ice with your head buzzing and a nose full of blood. I got home from school one day and Mum was packing her bags, saying she had to go to stay at Vicky’s for a few days. “To sort things out,” she said. “Marriage is a funny business,” she said. “It has its ups and downs,” she said.

      Poor old Aunt Vicky, I thought, she must be having trouble with uncle Bill. Mind you, the way Mum hugged me and kissed me and told me I was the most precious thing in her life.... I should have realized something was going on. It was as if she was heading off to spend a year in Antarctica.

      But I thought she must be clinging to me like that because she was upset about her sister and that rotten no-good uncle Bill. Actually Bill is really an old sweetie and always gives good cash presents at Christmas and on my birthday, even if he is amazingly boring. He worked in provisioning for the Air Force or something equally dreary, never went near the jet fighters.

      You can be a real dweeb-head when you don’t want to look reality in the face.

      But hey, I still don’t want to think about the break-up. Maybe I’m a bit like the other kids at school after all, the ones from single-parent families, I hate thinking about it. Not that there’s that much to think about, it was so boring, all that on-again off-again stuff for a year. All those visits. All that “talking it over.” By the time Maddy and I first saw Mum and this Edward character in Bourke Street, I had come to accept that she and Dad aren’t going to live in the same house any more. After a couple of months Mum had come back from Ballarat and moved into a nasty little brick apartment in North Fitzroy, so at least I could go and see her every week. It might seem unusual for the girl to stay behind with the father while the mother goes off by herself, but I was in the middle of exams and besides Mum said she just needed to be completely alone for a while. We assumed that meant a couple of weeks. Then it was a couple of months, including the Christmas holidays. Then a year had gone by. It wasn’t as if I never saw her, of course. She wasn’t living very far from me and Poppa. All by herself, except when I stayed over for the night. I thought. But I could hardly keep thinking that once she shifted to the creep’s place in Kew.

      The first time I met Edward the creep it was more or less by mistake.

      At that stage, Mum hadn’t quite got around to mentioning his name in conversation. So Poppa and I didn’t know of his existence. I happened to be in the city with Maddy to see a movie. We were coming out of the cinema complex and there on the other side of the street, across the tram tracks, I see Mum and this guy in a dark suit carrying a briefcase covered in gold catches and combination locks and with this mobile phone in a leather holster clipped to his belt, although I didn’t notice that right away. He was explaining something to Mum, who was listening intently, her face turned toward him in a way that made my flesh crawl.

      Well, you have to deal with all sorts of people in this world, don’t you? Lawyers and accountants and all sorts of creepy wheelers and dealers, especially when you’re a woman living by herself because she’s walked out on her family, so I didn’t instantly think, God, who’s Mum’s repulsive friend? I just thought, Poor thing, she’s stuck there having to listen to some wheeler-dealer and be nice to him.

      I gave Maddy a nudge. “Hey, Mads, there’s my Mum on the other side of the road.”

      Maddy never misses a chance, so she says, “Well, let’s go and cadge a hot chocolate.”

      We’re standing on the curb and yelling at her, but it’s Bourke Street in the late afternoon, and even though the Swanston Mall blocks off most of the city through-traffic there’s a tram and a romantic carriage pulled by a lovely old horse with incredibly hairy feet and a few cars that look lost, and Mum doesn’t hear us. I still don’t think there’s anything weird about this. We skip across the road and get clanged at by the tram driver, and by the time we get to the other side Mum and the wheeler-dealer are a bit in front of us with other people getting in the way, and they’re walking slowly towards the lights.

      “Who’s the guy?” Maddy asks. “He looks as if he’s loaded.”

      “Dunno,” I say, a bit out of breath. “Never saw him before.”

      We’re hurrying to catch them up and you can tell, from the way Mum keeps leaning her head close to him, that she’s having difficulty hearing what the wheeler-dealer’s telling her, probably some doubtful scam with money, but her trouble hearing him is pretty much what you’d expect in the middle of the city at that hour, the traffic being what it is and all the other people swarming along, etc. I think to myself, What a nerd, why can’t he wait until they’re up in his expensive air-conditioned office before he starts explaining about stocks and shares or her income tax deductions, or whatever it is? Why does he have to give his client a hard time by trying to make her listen to this sort of complicated detail in the middle of the rush-hour traffic? All this goes through my head in a flash as we’re hurrying to catch up with them, and then Maddy tugs at my arm and pulls me to a stop. I shake off her hand, but she hisses at me in a conspiratorial way.

      “What?”

      “Let’s watch them for a minute.”

      Maddy’s my best friend, but she has some really dumb ideas sometimes. Why do we want to watch the back of Mum’s head in Bourke Street while she’s consulting with some ill-mannered nerd? I just say impatiently, “Come on, Maddy...,” and keep going.

      We catch up with them at the corner when the lights go red. I arrive alongside and say, “G’day, Mum.” And my mother sort of jumps, and takes a quick step away from the wheeler-dealer, and lets go his arm which I hadn’t actually noticed she was holding, and is really surprised to see me.

      “Jenny!” she squeaks. “Oh...er...hello, darling. What are you doing here?”

      “Been to the movies” I tell her, sneaking a sidelong look at the nerd. “We thought we’d hit on you for a hot chocolate or something. That is, if you haven’t got to do something else.” It looks by now more as if they’re on the way to the nerd’s office, rather than having just left it. Anyway, his office would be in Collins Street, wouldn’t it, or Williams Street? One of the business zones? But my mother says hello to Maddy, and then says to me, “Oh, what a good idea. Edward and I were just going to have a drink ourselves. I’m sure we can put off the alcohol for a bit. Let’s go to The Coffee Place.”

      Unbelievable. She’s been heading off to some bar with this nerd. First you go to see them in their office about something and then you have to go to the bar with them. I feel like I’m charging in here to the rescue, saving her from a long boring time with the boozy accountant. Maddy is making some sort of face at me and I don’t get it. I grab Mum’s left hand, which I never do, and clutch onto her. After a moment she pats my hand with her other hand, and smiles in a way that I can only describe as nervous. The light changes and we get swept across Swanston Street and into the Bourke Street bit of the Mall, and while we’re getting tugged along by the crowd Mum does these funny formal introductions. Apparently the wheeler-dealer’s name is Edward Thing, which is so ridiculous that I almost get a fit of giggles but actually I’m suddenly not all that sure it’s funny.

      “They keep changing the geography,” Mum says brightly to Edward Thing, and he says something about the Mall being an improvement to civic tone and potentially