Art by Alex Evans

 

He took the fucking furniture. Not the house—it was technically now Mel’s—nor the wine in the wine cellar, though Mel was sure he was going to send someone for it soon, so she hid one bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in the walk-in wardrobe in the downstairs guest room, and another in the pool house. Mark didn’t take the art either, though Mel supposed it was because she had been the one to buy it all, curate it meticulously, match it to the colour story of the rest of the room, hire the young men with their short shorts and laser levels and funny rectangular pencils to hang it all up. Just all the fucking furniture. Mark let Mel keep their bed though, as a courtesy, were the words that he used, because strictly speaking, the prenup says it should’ve gone with him.

“Courtesy my arse! He didn’t even leave one bedside table!” Mel said to Teny on the phone, laying in that bed. It was a king, the headboard an off-white boucle fabric. Mel felt very small in the bed and couldn’t decide which side to lay on. She had brought the Sauvignon Blanc from the guest room into bed with her like a second pillow, and sipped it slowly from the bottle.

“Well, Mark’s just such a nice guy,” Teny sighed over the phone sarcastically. It felt like a warm whisper into Mel’s ear. “Taking every stick of furniture. Very generous of him.”

Mel Hayes liked Teny Hess because she didn’t understand her. Not in a mysterious, spiritual way though. In fact, Teny was carefully assembled and completely knowable, Mel just couldn’t quite map out the shape of her. Teny wore linen trousers, button-down shirts, and leather sandals—items of clothing that looked like they could be casually picked up at an op-shop, but actually cost hundreds of dollars. She called everyone darling with an edged softness. She sometimes sent Mel poems by Frank O’Hara late at night without context. She flirted with waiters regardless of gender or age, but only really for the sport of it. She had a rescue dachshund named Bertie and a tiny gold key that she wore around her neck and never took off. Mel once asked her if it was meant to be metaphorical.

Teny said, “No, it’s just for my bike lock.”

Teny lived alone in a very large, converted factory loft in Surry Hills where one wall was all bookshelf, and another was painted Yves Klein blue. Mel had never met anyone who had chosen a paint colour like that before. She had never known anyone who chose things like Teny. Mel didn’t like people she couldn’t predict, but she liked Teny very much.

Mark Hayes didn’t like Teny Hess because he also didn’t understand her, but not in the same way Mel didn’t. He said Surry Hills was the Northern Beaches for hippies.

“I feel like I’ve been burgled,” Mel said to Teny.

Teny didn’t even pause. “Darling, you know what you have to do.”

There was a beat. One horrifying millisecond where Mel, completely consumed by Sauvignon Blanc, half-baked woe, and a looming sense of dread, sincerely wondered if Teny had meant kill him. Or perhaps hire someone to kill him.

“What?” Mel asked, just to confirm.

“Shop,” Teny said brightly. “You have to refurnish.”

Mel simply sighed into her phone—half-relief, half-disappointment—and hoped that her sigh had also felt like a warm whisper into Teny’s ear.

“What? You think it’s too soon?” Teny asked, concerned.

Mel didn’t really know if she thought it was too soon. She didn’t really want to shop. She didn’t really want to do anything at all. The divorce was quick and, boringly, not even messy. Maybe too quick. There were no screaming matches, no furious cross-table negotiations. Mel didn’t even cry much. It was all pre-sliced like deli meat. She signed where her lawyer told her to, and that was that. Mel did that often: as she was told. She thought that the break had been far too clean. Perhaps the kind of clean that people claimed to want, though Mel suspected that most people preferred something a bit stickier. At least then you’d have bruises to point at. Scorching proof that you had, at one point, indeed experienced something.

There had been a prenup, of course. It was drawn up by Mark’s father’s lawyer. Mel signed it because she did as she was told. She was twenty-four and believed that love meant not questioning these things. Mark came from old money. So old and so solid that no one really remembered how it even started. Something techy. Maybe logistics? It was definitely international, and definitely important. Mel came from a solid enough background—her father was a Crown Prosecutor—but not that.

The prenup protected Mark’s portfolio, but allowed Mel to keep the lifestyle in the event of separation, so she got to keep their home. But their daughter, Charlotte, had already left by then, so it didn’t really feel like she’d won anything. It was an enormous house in Mosman. A comfortable harbour suburb, but in truth, more of a peninsula of high fences and double garages, hemmed in by sea and staggering property values. It had been a wedding gift from Mark’s parents: a two-storey, five-bedroom sandstone facade, floor-to-ceiling glass in the living room and a sloping lawn that led to a plunge pool Mel had never once used. It was the kind of house that made real estate agents say architectural gem, and friends roll their eyes, shake their heads and draw out their vowels: God, you’re just so lucky! Even on the first day, there had been a sense that the house didn’t quite belong to her. Like she was borrowing a life. Like she was being hosted.

The furniture inside the house, however, was a different matter. It was purchased through a family trust that was in Mark’s name. It was technically never Mel’s. It was leased to the home under some bizarre tax structure that she never fully understood. When they split, he took what was his—which, legally, was the walnut credenza, the imported rugs from Berlin and the industrial bar stools. She got the shell. He got the staging.

Mel didn’t know anyone who had been divorced. Teny had never married. Her younger sister, Ellen, was still jollily ensconced in hers. Her parents were going on fifty years. She didn’t really know what she meant to be doing. There was no map. No one had given her a copy of Divorce for Dummies. Mel felt like a woman who’d woken up halfway through a play—unsure of the role she was meant to be playing, and too embarrassed to ask. Everyone else seemed to know their lines, where to stand, when to laugh. She just had to sit in the wings, blinking slowly and unconsciously into the stage lights, watching all the other people moving through their own lives.

Was she supposed to cry? Go out? See new men? See women? Mel had been walking around from empty room to empty room, carrying her laptop like a Victorian woman clutching a lantern, searching for signs of life. Divorce, as it turned out, was mostly just a slow, treacherous, unthreading. There had been no grand rupture. No final blowout. No smoking gun. It was just a cool, slow, melting icecap. One day they simply just stopped talking. She got an email from Mark after everything was finalised; a formal wishing you the best moving forward! which he even had the gall to sign off with an exclamation mark. And then he took the fucking furniture. Mel had not even realised she was no longer married, and the furniture was already gone.

Mel had to fend off the inevitable after that.

“I heard about you and Mark.” A woman in her Pilates class said it first. Her hair was slicked into an uncomfortably tight and high ponytail. One of her hands was gripping her drink bottle, the other, Mel’s arm. Mel couldn’t look her in the eye, so was forced to stare at the throbbing vein on her forehead that was graciously revealed by the tightness of her hairstyle.

Then someone she met at a charity ball. “Black tie, Sherman Foundation, remember?” He tilted his head and murmured, “I just admire your courage.”

A few days later, it was a woman in the produce aisle at Harris Farm who gave her a look of such intense, wincing sympathy that Mel assumed she must have been at the wedding, but she didn’t recognise the woman at all. They all said it the same way, like the bad news had reached them by courier. “I’m so sorry…” And then: the look. A fatal cocktail of reverence, curiosity and relief. The visible relief of not being her. Mel always smiled. Said she was doing fine. She didn’t know if she was lying. She had begun to understand that there weren’t many middle-aged divorcees on the North Beaches. Or any divorcees for that matter.

Mark had moved out a week before the paperwork was finalised. He left nothing behind. He had always been like that: definitive in strange, annoyingly specific ways. Mark knew how to be charming at dinner parties, and he knew the exact day in March you were supposed to change the filter in the heating system. He made very good risotto and very bad apologies. His job paid for things like midweek dinners with wine pairings, first-class trips to Croatia, and boutique hotels with concrete walls, and mood lighting, and matching tonka bean and sandalwood scented shampoo and conditioner. Mel didn’t hate him. She hated how thoroughly and undetectably he’d outgrown her without her even realising. She hated that when she’d first confronted him—when she’d asked, very calmly, if there was someone else—he had only blinked, as if trying to recall whether or not there was.

“Mel, darling, I’d like you to know—I don’t think it’s too soon.” Teny said over the phone.

“Thanks.” Mel mumbled.

“I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning and we can go to that enormous homemaker centre in Artarmon. Home HQ.” Teny said cheerily. Teny was offering to pick her up because Mark had also taken all four of their cars. The BMW, the Porsche, the Rolls Royce and the Mercedes. She didn’t even drive most of them. They had really only been for show. For grand appearances. Now, appearances came with Uber receipts.

Mel didn’t say anything, just let her head fall back against the headboard with a small, theatrical thunk.

“They’ve got Freedom, Nick Scali, Plush,” Teny said in an intrepid attempt to fill the silence, listing the stores dutifully like ice-cream flavours. “Everything you need.”

For a moment, Mel wanted to argue. To say she was fine sleeping in an empty house, that she didn’t need Teny’s rescue mission.

“Alright,” Mel said finally. “But we’re just looking.”

“Sure,” Teny laughed. “Famous last words.”

That night, Mel couldn’t sleep. She stared at the ceiling in its beige blankness that bloomed slowly into shapeless thought. Somewhere in the house—a house she now supposed was hers, technically—something creaked. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the entire 500 square metre floor plan furnished. She couldn’t. She kept picturing the rooms as cold and hollow caverns of ghostly mid-century desolation. Everything was gone, and tomorrow, she would have to begin to think about replacing it.

Mel hated homemaker stores, and despised homemaker centres. Not the tidy, overlit IKEA ones—at least those had a sense of democracy, an order, a cafeteria. The ones she hated were the sleek, softly wincing gigantic showrooms with tacked-on store names and overly attentive staff. Stores like Nick Scali, where each piece of furniture was so wildly out of proportion with a real life that it felt desperately melodramatic, and comically deranged. Faux living situations arranged like stage sets under bleached lighting, meant to make you feel as if buying a side table might somehow fix your marriage or make you less lonely. The staff always appeared instantly, quickly gliding over like you’d rung a bell. Their lace-up leather shoes so soft and squeaky on the polished floors, their smiles so taut and annoyingly ready. Can I help you with anything today? Are you looking for anything specific today? And you’d have to say no—just browsing—which was already a lie, because you weren’t. No one ever went there to browse. You went because you needed something. A dining chair. A new beginning. A performance of adulthood, or stability, or taste, or money. Something to fill the space that had opened up in your life and was now joyfully humming like feedback; you needed so desperately to shut it up. To smother it. And the smell. Oh God, the smell. Mel hated that most. That manufactured newness—the scent of leather and glue and processed wood. Something plastic beneath all that musk, like they were trying to convince you this was real and luxurious and aspirational. It was nauseating.

Mel rolled onto her side and blinked into the dark. She felt resentful at the thought of pretending to care about ottomans. Teny would try to make it fun. She would say things like shopping is therapy. Mel didn’t want therapy. She wanted to walk into her own living room and see her life returned. She wanted to stop blinking into the dark. But she’d said yes. So tomorrow, she would go.

***

The next morning, Mel followed her usual routine. She made the bed, smoothing out the Egyptian cotton and carefully fluffing up the European down pillows, then stood in the corner of the very empty master bedroom to admire her work. She did her morning stretches as instructed by her physio because she had pulled her hamstring—repeatedly, and completely pathetically—by simply stretching her legs in bed. Mel thought there was something so humiliating in injuring yourself whilst lying down. She wandered into Charlotte’s old bedroom to check if the echo was still there—she said the same thing every morning: hello?  It was still there. Then, she crossed the hallway into a guest bedroom and tried again: hello? The echo, of course, replied obligingly. She brushed her teeth, got dressed and then stepped out onto the front porch, placed herself carefully down on the sandstone steps and waited for Teny to arrive.

It was far too warm for a May morning. Mel’s calves prickled with sweat under the hem of her dress, and the air was blistering with a heavy scent of sea salt. The beach was not far from Mel’s house. You could only just see it peeking up from behind rooftops. In the evenings, if you were to sit in one of the large rattan chairs on the east-facing balcony, and listened very carefully, you could hear the waves. Their gentle waxes and wanes. The slow, monotonous breaths of the ocean. Hush, then pause, hush, then pause, then hush again. The sound arrived very faintly, softened by distance, but Mel liked that it was always there—constant and consoling. Mel enjoyed this activity—it calmed her. An activity which Mel now had to complete cross-legged on the tiled floor instead.

Teny’s car, a modest Range Rover, hummed slowly past the rolling gate, which she had a spare remote to, and pulled itself up the winding driveway. It came to a decisive halt just short of the sweetgum tree. The tree had begun to lose its leaves, and they were carpeting the edges of the lawn like soft pastel debris.

Teny rolled down the passenger-side window dramatically.

“Good morning,” she called out.  She was wearing very large sunglasses that covered most of her face, and from where Mel was sitting, they made her look vaguely insectoid. Like a ginormous blowfly you wanted to swat away. “Darling, that doesn’t look like a shopping face!” Teny squinted—at least, Mel only thought that she was squinting, because her glasses made her face painfully unreadable. Mel could feel her facial muscles contracting, she knew she had been grimacing while waiting for Teny. Mel lifted herself up off the steps, slowly, so as to not injure her hamstring any further, and walked hesitantly toward Teny’s car.

“What does a shopping face look like?” Mel opened the door and slid in.

Teny nudged her very large glasses further down her nose, looked over at Mel and began examining her face with false seriousness. “I don’t know. But not like that.”

Mel turned up the corners of her mouth.

“That’s better.” Teny smiled, and began to drive off.

The twelve-minute drive to Artarmon was very quiet. Mel liked silence. She liked silence with Teny. It was the sound of an inaudible, ever-present companion that followed two women who had known each other long enough to survive entire decades of each other’s choices. It didn’t press, it didn’t ask anything from either of them, it just sat comfortably and sensibly buckled into the back seat. It’s not that neither of them had anything to say—in fact, they had plenty—but more so that they were the kind of people who preferred to simply sit and think beside each other instead. Outside the window, Northern Sydney moved past in hurried fragments. Mel liked that—that beautiful, constant drone that dressed in soft cotton, and doused itself in Tom Ford fragrance, and pensively overlooked the harbour. But most of all, Mel liked that Sydney endured her detachment. The trees cast green shadows on lined footpaths, construction workers drank green juice from bottles, a woman was dragging a scruffy dog towards a café. Mel watched it all with the dimly removed gaze of someone who had not quite yet returned to the world.

They passed florists, chemists and offices before the Home HQ centre came into view. It was a large, glass, converted factory complex that stood pale and rectangular against the overcast morning.

Teny pulled aptly into the underground carpark and switched off the ignition. For a moment, neither of the women moved. The sudden absence of engine noise made the silence feel less companionable—now it was just quiet. Mel blinked at the entrance. The spell of the morning had been broken by the low ceiling, the smell of concrete, and fluorescent signs humming above them.

“Shall we?” Teny asked, but said it as more of a direction.

Mel nodded and opened the door, stepping carefully out of the car, so as to not accidentally shift the tectonic plates beneath her. They both walked slowly toward the lift, shoes clicking in unison, bags tucked under arms. Neither of them said much as the lift doors closed. Inside, Mel caught sight of their reflections in the mirrored wall—two women, perfectly composed, standing in suspended quiet. Mel thought that they looked like they had been painted there: one in very large sunglasses, one in linen, both carrying a sort of vague grace that was deepened by the mirror—not clean, though not exactly dirty either. It was more, foggy. Mel felt foggy too. She studied her and Teny’s images as the lift ascended; angled slightly apart, but still joined together in that intentional way in which women stand when they know they’re being watched. A tableau of mutual poise. It occurred to her that if someone were to take a photograph of this exact moment, they might look like they were about to walk into a gallery opening, or a funeral.

Teny was adjusting something in her bag. Mel was adjusting nothing, but pretending to. She wasn’t nervous, but she had the sense that she was about to perform something that she hadn’t rehearsed.

The lift dinged, and the doors opened into two-storeys of endless, light-drenched homemaker storefronts. This was the threshold, Mel thought, and she stopped there for a moment in that rare limbo.

They started at Nick Scali. The store was hushed, harshly overlit and sprawling. Light bounced off lacquered furniture. Every living room had been arranged like it was waiting for guests who would never come. Every available surface boasted a sign that declared names like Harlow, Banksia and Quinn. Teny marched confidently toward the dining sets. Mel wandered blindly, her hands brushing against fabric that felt either too clean or too cheap. She never roamed too far from Teny. She made sure she was firmly anchored to Teny’s gravitational pull.

Teny walked up to a dining table. It was plainly wooden and ridiculously large. Light-coloured but strong. Mel pulled up a chair on one of the ends. Her bum dropped in sorrow into the wicker seat. It was soft and worn, and Mel felt as though she had just sat on a deflating whoopee cushion. Teny picked up the acrylic sign and unfavourably squinted, like she had just read a bad tabloid about herself. 

“Kennedy, this one’s called. Kennedy is made from natural Australian oak,” she giggled. “Kennedy costs nearly four grand.” She put the sign back on Kennedy. 

Kennedy reminded Mel of a table that she had sat at during a dinner party at a holiday house in Byron Bay. That table, like the jog Mel had taken on the beach early that morning, was impossibly long. The dinner party had been fine, lovely even—and so had the dinner itself. Expensive wine, cream coloured charger plates, heavy glass candle holders and white fish in green sauce. Lou and Simon’s Byron home had a balcony that overlooked the bay. That night had been low and unseasonably warm. The breeze had died down in the evening, so the folding glass doors had been left open. Mel had found herself staring out into the darkening sea rather than into her plate of fish or into anyone’s eyes. She had felt the whole night slipping under her skin—a kind of persistent wrongness that disguised itself in charming affability. The candles had smelled of bergamot. Someone had complimented her earrings. Mark had made a joke at the table, Mel couldn’t remember it now, but it had elicited the kind of laugh that people give to jokes that are not exactly funny. 

There had been a woman at the table—blonde, shiny, very off-the-shoulder. She was sitting opposite Mark and mirrored him so exactly that Mel thought, absurdly, that they looked like matching salt and pepper shakers. The woman asked Mel what she did. Not what do you do, but more like what do you doooooo. As if stretching out the word could draw some of her own interest or care into it. Mel had answered that she worked part-time as a director for a small art gallery, which wasn’t really a lie, though it wasn’t really true anymore either.

The woman smiled, “That must be so lively and fulfilling.” Mark laughed at this. Just once. Just ha! It was the same sharp and dismissive sound that he made when she suggested they get a dog, or when she’d asked if they could spend Christmas somewhere other than his parents’ house just once.

The gallery had demoted her a little over a month before this trip to Byron. Laura’s email arrived on a Monday morning. It was raining that day. Not dramatically. Just enough to make everything feel soggy and pathetic. The email had an ominously vague subject line, which Mel knew was the kind of email that you had to open immediately.

 

Dear Melissa Hayes,

After a period of thorough review, and rigorous consultation, the board has decided to transition you into a new strategic administrative role effective immediately. We value your contributions, and this change reflects our evolving structural needs. You will no longer be listed as Director, but will remain integral to our curatorial and cultural identity moving forward.

Take care,

Laura Ingles

 

Mel had stared at it for a full minute before reading it again. And then again. And again. And again.

“In an email?” She’d said aloud to herself. “Not even a phone call?” Mel buried her head into her palms and considered the state of idiocy she’d found herself in. In that moment, Mel thought of that phrase that people used far too often: I’m not angry, just disappointed. She thought it was a ridiculous saying because she now understood that one person could definitely be both of those things at once—that they were certainly not mutually exclusive. Although, she was mostly angry. She clicked reply, then closed the tab. She didn’t send anything. She went down-stairs, stood at the floor-to-ceiling window and watched the rain make ripples in the pool. Later, Mark asked why she was sulking, then offered to open a bottle of white. Mel said no, but he opened it anyway. That was the kind of thing he did.

The bathroom at Lou and Martin’s home was upstairs. She had pretended she was looking for it by accident, wandered off between the caviar bumps and the dessert. Mel flicked on the light and saw her own face in the spotless mirror; foreign and glazed over. Her mouth looked like it had forgotten how to hold shape. Her eyes sunk into her face like caves that have those signs out the front; ‘TURN BACK NOW’ or ‘STOP! PREVENT YOUR DEATH! GO NO FURTHER!’ but of course, nonsensical thrill-seekers went in anyway. She stared at her reflection and thought to herself that she wanted more than this. She had made a decision. The relief had been so immediate she’d started crying. Mel didn’t make any noise. She didn’t sob or flinch. She just leaned forward over the marble sink with its matte black tap, pressed her hands firmly into the counter like she was bracing for something, and let two ridiculous, fat tears fall straight into the sink. Then she took a towel off the matching matte black towel rack, dabbed her eyes with it, and walked out of the bathroom.

When Mel returned to the table, Mark reached out and tucked a stray hair behind her ear. Then he turned back to the blonde woman and asked if she’d ever been to Toulouse. Mel drank the rest of her wine. It took her eight more months to do it. Eight months of Mark’s practiced charm at dinner parties, his way of finishing her sentences with better words, his assumption that her gallery job was a hobby rather than real work. Eight months of him saying we should when he meant you will, and let’s not when he meant I won’t when Mel suggested anything that required him to change.

“I don’t think Kennedy is for me.” Mel said, standing up from the sagging seat.

Teny nodded once, as if that were all the truth that needed to be spoken.

“This one seats fourteen.” A sales associate appeared. “Are you looking for a dining table?” He asked evenly, grinning.

“We’re looking for something that doesn’t remind us of awful people,” Mel said pleasantly.

The man’s smile flickered. “I—perhaps I could show you some other options?”

“No, thank you,” Mel said, already walking away. 

“Thanks, darling. We’ll find our own way,” Teny finished.

They visited nearly every store in the homemaker centre, each equally as disorientating as the last. Bright. Glossy. Cold. None of the layout made any spatial sense, as if dozens of rooms had been lifted by crane from different houses and dropped carelessly into one giant warehouse. They wandered through office furniture, bed displays, rows of desks that stood in quiet anticipation, ottomans that recoiled under the lights, couches that were accessorised almost identically. The last store they entered was on the first floor of the centre. It was completely empty, more experimental and avant-garde than the others. There were no customers and very few furniture displays. The walls were bare apart from a couple strategically placed frames of black and white photographs of New York or Paris. The hush that followed Teny and Mel around the store was absolute. It was brighter here, but the lighting less hostile, diffused across concrete floors and high ceilings that made the furniture look smaller. There was no music playing. Just the faint, architectural whir of the ceiling vents and the quiet creak of Teny’s shoes against the floor. Mel had been here before, a couple years ago with Mark. She thought, even then, that there was something so refreshing about this kind of emptiness—the way it became very intimate very quickly. The absence of people made her feel like she was at the art gallery. Like it was all normal. She was talking to contractors and clients, organising events and openings. And in that moment, Mel felt strangely visible. Like if someone were to pass by the window just then and look in, they would see her not as a woman shopping for furniture, but as a woman standing at the edge of something much bigger.

Teny, ahead of her now, turned back and pointed to a large couch near the back.

“Ugh,” Teny exclaimed. “Imagine this in your living room!” She said, waving her arms excitedly.

Mel nodded and walked towards it. It was the kind of couch that expected you to stay a while. Deep, wide-seated, too large for any apartment. Mel stopped in front of it, slowly lowered herself down, and let her body disappear into the cushions. Teny sat down beside her and dug up a couple of old Minties from her handbag. She popped one into her mouth, and offered the other one to Mel, who declined.

“You know Mel, sometimes I think you’re the most capable woman I’ve ever met,” she said with her mouth full, pausing just long enough. “And then I remember you let that man just take all of your furniture.”

Mel only smiled, thank you.

“You’re being very quiet,” Teny said, chewing.

“Sorry,” Mel replied. “I’m trying to picture things in the house. It’s not really working.”

Teny kept chewing. “You know, you don’t have to if you don’t think you’re ready yet.”

Mel nodded slowly.

There was a long pause, where all that was audible was Teny’s chewing.

“I think that’s what I want,” Mel said finally.

“What?”

“Quiet,” Mel sighed, “Not silence,” she clarified, “just—calm.”

Teny tilted her head and smiled slightly, “You want peace.”

Mel considered the word. It felt too final. Peace was what people found at the end of something, not in the middle. Mel was still very much in the middle. She thought—and not for the first time—that she wanted softness. She wanted calm like an ocean. Like a sea on a windless evening when the waves didn’t wade higher than your ankles, and pulled steadily out from the shore not out of force, but out of memory. Calm like the water stirring in its sleep. Hush, pause, hush, pause. She wanted to be near that, just kept afloat.

“Mm,” Mel answered finally, not quite committing to agreeing with Teny.

“You ever think about how weird it is,” Teny said, “that furniture’s just ... always there? Like, you never think about a table. But then it’s gone, and suddenly it’s a crisis.” 

Mel’s mouth twitched slightly at this. 

“Sorry—not that you’re in a crisis or anything. Just that you don’t have anywhere to sit,” Teny added.

“It’s okay,” Mel said quietly. “That was accidentally profound, actually.” Mel continued, smiling.

“I didn’t mean it to be,” Teny laughed.

“I know.”

The longer Mel sat on the couch, the more her body settled into it. It got comfortable. They both sat there for a while. Both out of need for rest—because they had done a lot of walking—and out of something to do. The couch wasn’t really remarkable. Taupe, maybe. Or some other shade of beige invented by marketing teams who feared specificity. It had little wooden legs that made it look like it was trying to levitate. But it was wide, and soft, and when Mel leaned back into it, her body settled in easily. Their couch at home had been different—a different colour, a different aspirational comfort. You kind of had to fold yourself into it. Mel felt like a very expensive paper towel when she was sitting on it: soft, absorbent, disposable.

She sat there on the couch with Charlotte one afternoon, after Charlotte had already moved out, when she announced to Mel, very plainly, very casually:

“I’m moving to Melbourne.”

Mel had looked up from her phone. “What?”

“I got into that Masters course I wanted.”

Mel blinked. “You applied? You didn’t even—”

Charlotte had shrugged. “It’s not a big deal.”

That day Mel stared at her daughter the way one might stare when passing by an old street they used to live on—something quietly rebuilt in one’s absence. She looked at her hair—blonder than hers had ever been—and the way her face had grown so confidently into itself, like it had always known where it was going. There was no trace of the small child who once asked to sleep in her bed during thunderstorms, or played mermaids in the pool. Charlotte had become someone with a forward-leaning life. And Mel, absurdly, felt like she ought to thank her for still telling her things at all.

 So yes, it was a very big deal. But Mel had swallowed that reaction, like she swallowed most reactions around her daughter: whole, unseasoned, slightly dry. She remembered looking down at the email Charlotte had opened on her phone—the word Congratulations tauntingly stared back in aggressive dark blue. The cushion Charlotte was perched on inflated very slowly as she stood up. It wasn’t something someone would notice, but Mel noticed. She noticed the soft shift in balance—the correction of weight. The silent signs of departure that always happen before someone actually leaves. Mel noticed all these things the same way she noticed that after Charlotte left, it was just her and Mark again. 

It was a month or so after that that Mel had decided to say it:

“I think we should talk,” she said, shuffling herself across that same couch closer to Mark. Of course, Mel didn’t know what Mark was thinking, but she had hoped his stomach was tightening, that he was pleading, please no, don’t say it. But Mel had said it: “I think we should separate.”

Mel had repeated the phrase ‘I think’ because she suddenly wasn’t certain of anything. She had been up without a wink the night before trying to settle this certainty, calm it down. Gently stroke its ugly, rearing head to try and put it at ease. Mel was playing out the lines in her mind as she lay there against the boucle. Should she say ‘divorce’ or ‘separate?’ She had planned to use the word ‘divorce’ because she thought it sounded more certain, but when the time came, ‘separate’ just slipped out. She hated that she used that word; like her and Mark were conjoined twins or recyclable plastics.

He didn’t say anything right away. Didn’t cry. Just blinked, once, twice. Mel thought he looked like a wounded baby animal. A fawn or a lamb. Something small and fluffy with big hopeless, sorry eyes, and twitchy, bony limbs that flinch when you got too close.

“I don’t think I love you anymore,” she added, trying desperately to put him out of his misery. Stupid certainty. “Not the way I used to.”

Mark just blinked again. “You used to love me?” He asked, too brightly, like Mel had just hit a punchline.

Mel sighed. “Can we not—”

“No, no, it’s fine,” he said, waving around his arms like he was swatting a fly, or trying to explain a maths equation. “I’m just wondering when you did. So that way, maybe we can get a photo framed, and you can hang it up next to the Del Kathryn Barton.”

Mel left the living room. Mark stayed seated on the couch. She hadn’t waited for him to follow. She’d learned to stop waiting for Mark Hayes to catch up.

“I think I’ll buy this couch,” Mel announced to Teny now.

“Are you sure? We can keep looking,” Teny said, raising her eyebrows.

Mel ran her fingers against the armrest. “I like it.”

They stood. The sales associate appeared the way sales associates always do—like he’d been summoned by intent rather than movement.

“May I please get your name?” He asked, with trained politeness.

“Melissa Hayes,” Mel replied, and watched him type it out—one key at a time on his little iPad thing, like each letter mattered.

His expression changed, brightened. “Ah yes,” he said. “Will that be on the same account as last time, Mrs. Hayes?”

Mel glanced over at Teny, who was already looking at her. They both waited, briefly, for the other to speak. That split-second of shared recognition, a sort of private frequency only long-term friendship can transmit. That day with Mark a couple of years ago came to her again. They bought bedside tables. The ones Mark didn’t leave her. They must have kept his card on file.

“Yes,” Mel said smoothly, smiling. “Exactly the same.”

***

All of the furniture arrived slowly over the next week. It came in staggered deliveries in oversized boxes that only just fit through the front door. Delivery men swore gently under their breath, and Mel offered them water, because it felt like the kind of thing a person with a fully furnished home might do. By Friday evening, the house had begun to resemble a house. Mel scurried into the pool house for the second bottle of Sauvignon Blanc that had been waiting for her patiently, and carried it, along with a glass, out onto the east-facing balcony. She’d bought an enormous, overpriced armchair and placed it out there. It was linen and deep-seated. She curled herself into the cushions, tucking her feet beneath herself and dialled Teny.

“Hello. The last few things arrived today,” Mel said.

There was a rush of noise on the other end. Running water, a distant splash. A pause. Then Teny’s voice, bright and echoey: “Oh, darling, terrific!”

Mel swirled her wine. “Are you free tomorrow?” She asked.

“I am.”

“Maybe you can help me arrange everything?”

“Of course,” Teny said amongst the splashing—like she was rinsing shampoo, or exfoliating her legs, or doing something else definitively hygienic. Neither of them spoke for a minute. The sky over Sydney was turning lavender. Somewhere below, a neighbour was hosing their garden.

“Okay,” Teny said eventually, spluttering faintly. “Talk tomorrow?”

“Yep.”

Mel hung up. She took a sip of wine and leaned her head back against the cushions. She could hear the ocean breathing. Hush. Pause. Hush. Pause. Hush. Pause. She wasn’t listening to be calmed—she was calmed by talking with Teny—she was listening because it was hers to hear. Mel let herself be held by the furniture she had chosen, and closed her eyes.