No, Because Then It Is Mine

“No, because then it’s mine,” said Marianne.

“What?”

“If you ring Geoff tomorrow, then for the next twenty years, every single time you’re fed up — every time it rains in March, every time that idiot says bandwidth at you — it is the job I made you turn down.” She put the tea towel down. “You don’t get to hand that to me.”

“I’m trying to give you what you want.”

“You’re trying to give me the decision,” she said. “You’ve had the decision for eleven weeks. Now it’s gone wrong and you’d like to pass it over, and I’d have to take it, because you’re standing there being noble in a kitchen. No.”

“So what do you want?”

---

“I want us to make the decision we should have made in March,” she said. “Properly. Both of us. Knowing everything.”

“Fine.”

“And I want you to understand,” she said, “that you have spent eleven weeks making a decision about my life without me, and that is the thing we are actually talking about. Not Perth. If Perth vanished tomorrow we would still be having this conversation, and we would still need to have it, and I’d quite like you to stop thinking that a plane ticket is what’s wrong here.”

Ross sat down on the arm of the chair, which is a thing she has asked him not to do for twenty-six years.

“All right,” he said.

---

It took five weeks. It was not calm and it was not continuous.

She went to her mother’s for two of them. Not dramatically — she packed a bag in ten minutes on a Tuesday evening and drove eleven minutes and let herself in, and told her mother it was because of the boiler.

Her mother, who is eighty-one and not a fool, said “right you are” and made up the bed in the back room and did not ask a single question for fourteen days, which Marianne has since decided was the greatest act of love her mother has ever performed.

On the twelfth night her mother said, over the washing up, “Whatever it is, you’ll want to have said it out loud before you decide anything.”

“I’ve said it.”

“To him, or to the kitchen?”

Marianne dried a plate.

---

She went back because she wanted to, and she said so on the doorstep, which mattered, because the alternative was going back because two weeks was how long a person goes for.

They wrote things down. Actual lists, at the actual table, both of them, which Ross found excruciating and did anyway.

They talked to her mother, together, on a Sunday. Her mother said she would be absolutely fine, and then cried, and then said she would still be absolutely fine, and both of those things were true and neither of them was the whole truth.

Her brother was worse about it than anyone and got over it fastest, which Marianne says is the most him thing that has ever happened.

The practice took four days to come back with an answer she had assumed was impossible: part-time, remote, three days, with a review at six months. She had not asked before because she had known what they would say. She had never actually asked.

---

They flew out together in October for nine days.

Marianne hated it for four. She hated the heat and the size of the roads and the fact that everything was thirty minutes away and the specific, disorienting wrongness of the light. She stood in a shopping centre on the third day and thought, with total clarity: I cannot do this and I am going to have to say so.

On the fifth day they went to get milk at about eight in the evening.

It was still warm. She was in a T-shirt in October. The car park had those enormous lights on poles, and there were galahs going over, dozens of them, making a racket, and a man was loading a paddling pool into a ute and talking to somebody on speakerphone in a language she did not recognise.

She stood by the boot with the milk in her hand and found that she did not hate it at all.

She did not tell Ross for two days. She wanted to be sure it was not the weather.

---

They made the decision on the flight home, somewhere over the Indian Ocean, with the cabin lights off and a form from the shipping company on the tray table between them.

She said: “I want to go.”

He said: “Are you sure?”

And Marianne said: “No. But it’s mine now.”