was, to put it mildly, a bit of a challenge for Walter. Usually he enjoyed being alone in the car—it gave him at least the pretence of isolation from everything else, from other people, from other road users. Sure, in peak hour he was hemmed in amongst his fellow man, bumper to bumper, but at the same time he felt completely separate from them all, removed, like a child who puts his hands over his eyes in order to hide, because if he can’t see you, well obviously you can’t see him. That morning, after the incident at the train station, his car had been a welcome little cocoon for him, a hermetically sealed environment where he could control the climate at the press of a button, contact whomever he wished via mobile phone, listen to whatever music he liked. It was so gloriously private and isolated and, the word came unexpectedly, safe.
But now things were different. The window had been smashed, there was a gaping hole instead of a driver’s side window, and thus no way he could seal himself in. There was no CD player and no CDs, so there was no music. More, there was that smell—that foreign, dirty, alien smell of someone else, some unwanted intruder now gone, but who had left his stink.
He turned his head towards the open window and took a good long sniff of the outside air.
*
Maggie didn’t have a job as such. Well, she did, but it wasn’t the same sort of eight to five grind in the city that Walter endured. She worked in a fashion boutique on a small shopping strip in Fitzroy North, a suburb a good hour away from Wintergardens by car, an inner city suburb more wealthy and artsy. Her hours weren’t as prescribed as Walter’s and her income was erratic. Walter was never sure, to be honest, how often she worked or how much she made. It wasn’t, he thought to himself (very definitely only to himself) a real job, as the boutique was owned by a friend of hers from school, and he suspected the arrangement was more an excuse for them to spend time together and go on the occasional trip overseas. They called them ‘buying trips’.
Maggie’s closet was packed tight with clothes, although she usually seemed to Walter to be wearing the exact same thing. She looked stylish and very finished, but also sort of simple and severe. Black and grey featured prominently in her wardrobe, although that was not unusual for Melbourne women. She also wore small patterned scarves tied tight around her throat, a look that Walter had always admired—it seemed to him vaguely 60s and even a little bit airline-hostess. He hadn’t shared this with Maggie—he wasn’t sure she would appreciate it.
When Walter got home that night, Maggie was there, which wasn’t always the case, and was cooking dinner, something else that wasn’t always the case. Often she stayed late at work, or was out a little late doing errands or perhaps visiting with friends, or with Arlette, but the arrangement was that whoever arrived home first began dinner. It was usually him—he was a competent if unimaginative cook. It was a simple, common-sense, domestic understanding, but sometimes it felt to Walter as if their home life was slightly disjointed, as if their lives overlapped like a Venn diagram, rather than were lived together.
He told her immediately about the car being broken into, confessed it almost like a penitent school-boy. He was remembering her phone call of that morning—she had needed the car as her little runabout was in having body-work done. She had ticked him off about it. He expected her to say something about that, perhaps say that if he hadn’t taken the car it wouldn’t have happened. It would be the sort of thing she might bring up, but she didn’t. She was annoyed about the car being broken into, certainly, but nothing more. She was not dismayed as Walter had been. Her annoyance seemed to be about the inconvenience of fixing the car, the time it would be off the road, the bother of claiming insurance, not because she felt it in any way an affront or a worry. She seemed to be of the opinion it was just the sort of thing that happened, annoying of course, but a fact of life. Little bingles and scratches and fender-benders—they happened. She herself was the kind of driver to park by touch.
It was only later, during dinner, that Walter mentioned the smell.
Maggie stopped chewing and looked at him, really looked at him for the first time since he’d walked through the door. It made him realise how little she actually did look at him these days—only when he’d done something surprising, and perhaps he didn’t surprise her much any more.
‘A smell?’ she asked. ‘What smell?’
‘There’s a smell.’
‘Is there? What’s it smell like?’
‘I don’t know,’ Walter said. ‘I don’t … know. It just smells dirty … unclean. I don’t know …’
Maggie wrinkled her nose.
‘I thought I could smell something.’
Walter’s face froze. After a second he put his fork down, swallowed and tensed his neck muscles in his collar. His nostrils twitched. Was it still there? The smell? Was it? He couldn’t smell anything—but what if he had got used to it and no longer smelt it on himself?
‘Excuse me,’ he said, then got up from the table and left the room.
*
A couple of minutes later Walter was in the shower, the warm water streaming over him. He scrubbed his body with a face-washer that was foaming with too much soap.
In the middle of his shower the water went suddenly cold and he stepped gingerly out from under it, bashing his shoulder and forehead on the glass of the shower-screen.
Maggie must have turned on the hot water to do the dishes or something. Surely she knew that it affected the temperature of the water in the shower when she did that? Walter suspected that she knew alright, that she must know, and that she did it anyway, in fact on purpose, specifically when he was in the shower.
He adjusted the hot water, waited, tested the temperature, then stepped cautiously back under.
‘Bitch,’ he said under his breath.
*
A little later Walter came into the kitchen, freshly scrubbed, redolent of the smell of soap and shampoo, in his pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers—it was too early for pyjamas perhaps, but he wasn’t going to get dressed again now. He was, rather incongruously, also wearing rubber gloves.
Maggie was standing at the sink slowly drying the dishes. More accurately she was taking a break from drying the dishes, standing with the tea-towel over her shoulder, smoking, staring over the bench into the room beyond, watching television—some reality show she wasn’t really interested in.
Walter went to the cupboard under the sink, pulled out the bin and took the lid off. Then he picked up a partly full ashtray and held it towards Maggie, making a distasteful little face. Maggie looked at him for a second then butted her cigarette out in the ashtray with two big stabs, leaving it smouldering.
Walter made sure the butt was properly out then emptied the ashtray into the garbage bin, tied off the rubbish bag and lifted it out of the bin. Passing through the laundry, he picked up the clothes that he had worn that day—the jacket, trousers and the shirt, the underwear even—and took them with the kitchen rubbish to the wheelie bin at the side of the house. He threw the whole lot in there and took the bin to the nature strip. Then, after a moment, he took each of the rubber gloves off with a snap and threw them both in the bin as well.
‘There,’ he said to himself. ‘Done.’
He could almost have dusted his hands symbolically, but he decided against it—he wasn’t one for extravagant gestures.
4.
