Chapter 6 — The Man at the Door

(Laura)

The Corolla takes two tries to start. I talk to it nicely and it forgives me. The after-school care program at the primary school shuts at six, and I pull into the car park with seven minutes to spare, which for me on a Thursday counts as early.

Chris is the last kid left. He’s at the craft table with Mia, one of the educators, and when I walk in he spins around on his stool and beams at me. He has drawn a curly black moustache on his top lip in permanent marker.

“Mum! Look! I’m Antonio when he was young.”

“Antonio’s never had a moustache in his life.”

“He did in the photo. The one on the boat.” He twirls one end of it between his fingers. “Mia said it’s art.”

Mia gives me an apologetic look over his head. “I said it was a choice.”

“A big choice,” I agree. “You know it’ll still be there for school photos next week, mate.”

He considers this with great seriousness and decides he’s fine with it.

He talks the whole way home. He tells me Lachie got sent to the office for licking a window, which was apparently a dare, and that Mrs Kaur has a cat with three legs, and that he got a merit award for his poster about echidnas, which is in his bag and which he promises to show me. Our house is a rented weatherboard two streets from the beach, with a frangipani by the front gate and a verandah that sags at one end. It isn’t much. It’s ours, though, and it’s the only home Chris remembers, and I painted his bedroom ocean blue myself over three weekends.

Dinner is fish fingers, mash and peas. Chris hides the peas under his mash, and I find them. It’s practically a Thursday tradition.

“How did those get there?” he asks, wide-eyed.

“Must be a pea burglar.”

“Must be.” He eats four of them under protest, which I count as a win.

Homework is a list of spelling words and a reader about a dog who becomes mayor. He reads the dog’s lines in a deep voice and the mayor’s in a squeaky one, and when I point out the author probably didn’t intend it that way, he points out the author isn’t here. We scrub at the moustache in the bath until his lip is pink and the moustache has faded to a grey ghost of itself. He gets into his shark pyjamas, which are getting short in the leg, and comes out to the lounge room to eat one of Antonio’s amaretti while I do the dishes.

“Rate your day,” I call from the sink. It’s our thing. We’ve done it since he was four.

“Eleven out of ten.”

“Eleven isn’t a real score.”

“It is if you get a merit award.” He crunches. “What’s yours?”

I think about Doreen in her church shoes, and Barry’s fly, and the moustache. “Eight and a half.”

“Why the half?”

“The Corolla.”

He nods wisely. The Corolla has cost a lot of people their halves.

I’m wiping down the bench when somebody knocks on the front door.

It’s twenty to eight. Nobody knocks on our door at twenty to eight. Mrs Henderson next door texts if she wants her casserole dish returned, and my friends know better than to turn up after Chris’s dinner. I dry my hands on the tea towel, tell Chris to stay put and go up the hallway.

Through the frosted glass beside the door I can see a shape, dark and very tall, filling most of the verandah. I open the wooden door and leave the security screen locked between us.

The man standing under my porch light is one of the biggest people I’ve ever seen. The top of his head is level with the light fitting, and his shoulders take up more of the verandah than the old cane chair does. He’s wearing a dark suit, beautifully cut, with a white shirt open at the collar and no tie, which in Port Merrin on a Thursday night makes him look like he’s arrived from another planet. The open collar shows a triangle of olive skin at the base of his throat, and for one ridiculous second I’m looking at that instead of his face. He has thick, almost-black hair with a shine to it under the porch light, a jaw dark with stubble that looks like it’s been fighting a razor since morning and winning, and deep-set brown eyes, and he’s looking at me through the mesh with a stillness I don’t like at all. What I like even less is the stupid, involuntary flicker low in my belly when his gaze drops for half a second to my mouth and comes up again.

He snags at the edge of my memory, like a face seen once across a crowded room. I can’t place it.

“Can I help you?” I ask.

His gaze moves over my face as if he’s checking it against something. When he speaks, his accent leans on the vowels in a way I’ve spent eight years forgetting.

“Laura Bailey? My name is Matteo Vianello.”