Arms & Legs E-Book

Chloe Lane

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Vertigo
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 308

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A searingly intimate exploration of marriage, motherhood and desire from a bold New Zealand talent. Georgie's marriage has stagnated. But in a Florida almost claustrophobic with life, there's no room to attend to it: forests burn, termites abound, teeth break, and there's something in her husband's eye. Then she finds a body in the woods.As the repercussions of her discovery and a doomed affair come to land, Georgie is forced to confront her past, examining the often heartbreaking power of the things we witness and the scars they leave behind.

Leseprobe

Chloe Lane is a writer and the founding editor of Hue+Cry Press. She was the 2022 recipient of the Todd New Writer’s Bursary and a 2021 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellow. Her first novel, The Swimmers, was longlisted for the Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2021 Ockham NZ Book Awards. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and young son.

Praise for Arms & Legs

'Lane is expert at taking us deep inside the body, heart and mind of Georgie, showing us her most intimate desires with exquisitely agonising clarity’ Claire Fuller, author of The Memory of Animals

‘An astute, fine-grained novel about the fires we light to sustain ourselves – and what happens when they get out of control’ Emily Perkins, author of Lioness

‘This intense examination of a marriage with its rifts and sorrows had me spellbound. The images of fire give it an extraordinary brilliance, a moving subtle light casting brightness, shadows and a constant rising tension’ Fiona Kidman, author of This Mortal Boy

‘Arms & Legs zig zags between comedy and despair as Georgie seeks to understand her life, her son, the wilderness outside and inside of her. This perceptive, nuanced novel charts the murky, contingent boundaries we draw around our homes and hearts’ Kirsten McDougall, author of She’s a Killer

‘This beautifully crafted novel lights the story on fire, letting it cleanse as it burns, revealing in its wake things that cannot be erased' Gillian Best, author of The Last Wave

‘A gritty, sexy novel that will have you aching for its characters, for the things they can and cannot say to each other. Lane’s taut control of the narrative echoes the story’s fecund, humid Florida landscape – controlled burn-offs, nature’s relentless assaults on besieged boundaries of civilised urban life – and her ability to sustain suspense lasts well beyond the final page’ Sue Orr, author of Loop Tracks

‘Arms & Legs has a bright intelligence and intensity. Lane is a wonderfully attentive and insightful writer. It is also at times tartly funny with an eye not just for the quiet moments in life but also the absurd’ New Zealand Herald

‘For all the brooding unease of the evocatively captured Southern US setting, it is the risk that we pose, sometimes unwittingly, to ourselves and those closest to us that lingers in this accomplished and absorbing novel’ New Zealand Listener

‘Arms & Legs, more than anything, gives you the feeling of having witnessed something authentic, something palpable. Though it is fiction, there is an emotional resonance, an emotional truth, to Lane’s words’ Academy of NZ Literature

Praise for The Swimmers

‘Tackles the subject of assisted dying with wit and pathos’ The Independent

‘Lane’s unsentimental prose nails the strange enormity and mundanity of love and death with perfect piquancy’ Daily Mail

‘A powerful and intense debut’ The Sun

‘Exquisitely observed, harrowing yet surprisingly funny’ SAGA Magazine

‘Poignant and subtle with humorous elements as this disjointed family struggles to fulfil the final wishes of their loved one’ Candis Magazine

‘Darkly funny, desperately sad, brilliantly written. I absolutely loved it’ Claire Fuller, author of The Memory of Animals

‘This book is spectacular. A perfect blend of devastating humour and sadness’ Emily Austin, author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

‘Tragic, warm and darkly funny, The Swimmers left me breathless with sorrow yet also strangely hopeful. Lane’s prose is compelling and her insights into what makes us human are full of wisdom’ Hannah Persaud, author of The Codes of Love

‘A beautiful, heart-rending and totally absorbing narrative, a compulsive page turner from start to end … I wish I had written this novel; it’s a little masterpiece’ Fiona Kidman, author of This Mortal Boy

‘A tender portrait of indestructible family bonds and unrepentant, rule-breaking independence’ Bookanista

‘An observational tragicomedy … traces the small panics, collaborative denial, and suburban antics that a family perfects in their attempts to keep their heads above dangerous emotional waters’ Foreword Reviews

‘Nuanced and beautifully drawn, complicated women in all their glory’ Alice Jones, The Debut Digest

‘An intense, moving and darkly comic story about unrepentant, difficult women’ New Zealand Herald

‘By turns touching, resonate, fiercely candid, and beautifully written’ Jill Ciment, author of The Body in Question

‘The Swimmers has the kind of intelligent and beautiful quiet that explodes a brightness deep within the reader … I can’t remember the last time I read a more generous book about care, courage and figuring it out’ Pip Adam, author of The New Animals

‘Strangely compelling … intensely moving’ Academy of New Zealand Literature

Arms & Legs

Chloe Lane

Pushkin Vertigo

A Gallic Book

First published by Te Herenga Waka University Press, New Zealand in 2022

© Chloe Lane 2022

Chloe Lane has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by

Gallic Books, 12 Eccleston Street, London, SW1W 9LT

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

No reproduction without permission

All rights reserved

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781805337980

Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro by Gallic Books Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4YY)

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Peter and Errol

1.

‘I can’t find the pieces,’ Dan said. ‘The broken pieces of teeth.’

‘They’re not on the floor?’ I said.

It was Friday afternoon and I’d just finished teaching for the week. I’d stripped down to my swimsuit and was about to get into the university pool when Dan had called to say Finn, our almost two-year-old, had tripped and fallen face-first onto the ceramic kitchen floor tiles, breaking clear both of his top front teeth.

‘Not skittered into a corner?’ I said.

‘What if he swallowed them?’ Dan said.

‘If you can’t find them,’ I said, ‘then I guess that’s what happened.’

‘Oh god,’ Dan said. ‘I’m so sorry, buddy.’

‘Do you need me to come home?’ I said.

The outdoor pool shimmered. I could feel the good familiar pressure of my goggles and cap tucked under the elastic of my swimsuit. I listened to Dan breathing sharply, worriedly. I pictured him standing in the living room, his eyes fast on our boy, trying to discern if the lost shards of teeth were busy tearing holes in Finn’s oesophagus and guts. I think he’d forgotten I was still on the line.

‘I’ll be on the next bus,’ I said.

It was the first time since Finn’s birth that I’d watched Dan carry the full weight of responsibility. Seeing Dan so worked up for once made me feel the opposite – calm and unconcerned. Before this incident I couldn’t have guessed what a paediatric dental emergency would have looked like. This was it: a falling, a breakage, the potential for infection or long-term damage, especially if those teeth hit the floor as hard as Dan said and as a result of the impact were pushed too far up inside their soft gums, drilling in via their own roots.

As we passed through the automatic doors of the clinic, which was hidden away in a satellite wing of the University Hospital, we were hit with a wave of air conditioning, bright lights and eerie calm sprinkled with a distant swelling of Tom Petty’s ‘Free Fallin”. Finn had been doing admirably, curious only to see where we were going together in the car at this unexpected hour. Now he became fearful. He cried throughout the examination, he shook and sobbed during the X-ray. That was the one shred in my calm: Finn in my lap, mouth full of plastic claws and film, the two of us pressed neck to knees by the weight of a heavy lead vest. As Finn howled through all that equipment, I felt myself wanting to cry too, my breathing growing jagged and shallow to match my boy’s.

The dentist was in his early thirties, a Florida cowboy, thin and tanned. After he explained about watching for bubbles on Finn’s gums – painful white specks that were a sign something was wrong – he laid out options for cosmetic repair.

‘Yeah, I don’t think so,’ Dan said, interrupting him.

Though the dentist and his graduate assistant remained professional throughout, the air between them was uncomfortably thick with sex. The temperature of Dan’s manner made me think he sensed it too.

‘I want you to know it’s an option,’ the dentist said.

By this point, Finn’s unhappiness had simmered down to silent tears. I couldn’t help but imagine him with a mouth full of crowns, teeth big and smooth, the gaps between each sharp kernel filled in, a boy for a pageant. Though it had been almost six years since Dan and I had moved to Florida from New Zealand, I wanted to flirt with the idea for a moment simply because it seemed a very American way to respond to such a minor injury. Even after all this time, maybe especially after all this time, I was still interested in remaking myself in this way, as an American.

‘No, no options,’ Dan said.

‘We can do it in kids as young as this,’ the dentist said. ‘No problem at all.’

‘I’m sure you can,’ Dan said, ‘but we gotta get our boy home.’

Dan and Finn were already halfway out the door when the dentist calmly folded his arms against his chest, leaned back in his swivel chair, the lanky prince of North Central Florida paediatric dentistry, and gave me a look that said, Next time.

How did I respond? It matters not because the dentist would end up having any place in this story, but because as I returned the dentist’s look, I felt myself trying to communicate something wrong. Not for the first time, but this time Dan was right there. Finn falling, Dan shook up and shouldering it all, had resulted in an unexpected softening of my load that momentarily made me feel unworried, thrillingly careless. This was how I responded: Yes.

2.

Over breakfast the next morning Dan offered to get a vasectomy. Neither of us wanted more children and, in the past when this topic had been half-heartedly raised, I’d expressed support for Dan’s willingness to take charge and the freedom it implied. This time it bothered me. It felt like it came out of nowhere. I think it was the result of an internal panic Dan had been stewing on since Finn’s fall, about parenthood and responsibility. His role. The breaking of Finn’s teeth had made Dan freshly vulnerable and uncertain, maybe got him picturing the breaking of other things. I didn’t want to have children with any other man, definitely not Jason, nor did I want Dan to have children with anyone else, but for some reason at this time the loose strings of that possibility were comforting to me in a way that the image of Dan, Finn and me sealed into a circle wasn’t.

So, when Dan brought up the vasectomy, I said, ‘That’s okay, you don’t have to do that.’

Dan responded by quietly folding and sealing himself up like an envelope.

I suggested we go for a family walk.

*

An hour later I found myself standing in the flat heat of the prairie with Finn awkwardly hanging from me in a front-pack he’d long outgrown, looking at a bald eagle. The binoculars were heavy and I’d been regretting bringing them. Not now. My first bald eagle. It was sitting high in a pine tree preening its breast.

‘It sounds like a squirrel,’ Dan said, indignant beside me.

I also thought the eagle would have a bigger voice. That high shriek, more like the complaint of a nothing seagull, was not how I had imagined the majestic call of America’s bird.

‘I’m looking right at it,’ I said. ‘Wow. There you are.’

I understood the sounds coming from Finn to mean this: ‘Wow.’

‘Wow,’ I said, ‘that’s right.’

‘Can I see?’ Dan said. He reached for the binoculars. I handed them over.

The first time we visited the prairie, our first winter in Florida, I’d been stunned by the tall, dry and seedy grasses, so many shades of yellow and brown, some freckled with flowers, the sky hard and blue and cloudless, and except for the birds, the only signs of animal life droppings left by wild horses, shallow and cracked gator tracks. In summer, it was a completely different scene. Much of the track was flooded and everything was lush and wet – the Florida I’d always imagined. Back in New Zealand there were the pōhutukawa in December – every year it was a pleasure to see the first crimson blooms pop – otherwise, when I thought of the landscape of my homeland it was always the same, no matter what the season, though that couldn’t be right.

Finn began aggressively arching against me, while expelling a river of indecipherable sounds. I could make out one word: ‘Stuck.’

That day the prairie was somewhere in the space between winter and spring. There was a rustling in the surrounds, a feeling that things were ready to burst forth, but not yet, not quite.

‘I know you want to get out,’ I said, ‘but you can’t. It’s not safe.’

Again, Finn with his rush of noise – this time the wave cresting with: ‘Out.’

‘Would you like some water?’ I said. I clicked my fingers at Dan. ‘Bottle, please.’

Dan was standing motionless a few feet away, silently looking through the binoculars. When we first met, I was initially attracted to his tallness. He was six-three and skinny, with a presence that was close to apologetic – the result of spending his life trying to fold himself down to the level of his peers. Then he’d smiled for me and his snaggletooth had sealed it.

‘I can’t see it,’ he said. ‘It must’ve moved. You sure it was an eagle?’

‘I’m sure,’ I said. ‘Try taking off your glasses.’

Dan did as I suggested and hooked his glasses into the neck of his T-shirt. He removed his cap too. His hair had been down his back when we met, but since we’d moved to Florida he’d kept it short and floppy in a manner that betrayed his Englishness and was also not that dissimilar to the cut I regularly gave Finn – who had inherited his dad’s thick, dark and fast-growing hair – in our kitchen with the blunt craft scissors.

‘These binoculars are weird,’ Dan said.

‘Can you pass the bottle?’ I said.

‘They’re hurting my eyes,’ Dan said. ‘Now it’s all abstract.’

‘Come on with the bottle,’ I said.

‘Wait, yes,’ Dan said. He unzipped the backpack he was carrying and without looking at me he handed over Finn’s water bottle.

Dan was naturally low key, a people-pleaser. If I ever irritated him he almost never showed it. I wasn’t this way, but from the start of our relationship I’d taken his lead and learned to be less bothered by the little things, though that wasn’t the mode between us that morning.

Dan returned to the binoculars. ‘Just, why can’t I see it?’

‘It’s probably gone,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you give them back to me? You can carry Finn for a bit.’ I lowered my mouth to Finn’s ear. ‘Can I take your bottle, sweetie?’

Once Finn was secured on Dan’s front, I strolled off down the path on my own. The eagle had been sitting on the branch of a Florida pine in a wooded area at the south-eastern corner of the prairie and I went in that direction. I’d been carrying around an outdated map of documented nests in our county for nearly three years, thinking that, if there was an eagle nearby, I might at least be looking in the right direction. Just as I’d imagined the eagle’s call as powerful and haunting, I’d similarly pictured this impressive bird nesting in only the most monumental of settings – definitely not the bare branch of a ratty pine in North Central Florida.

The first time I saw a kiwi, I was standing as close to the exhibit barrier in the zoo’s dark Kiwi House as was practicable, and as my eyes adjusted, I saw a shadow shift, a slender beak, then the body of the bird as it emerged from behind a log. It was both smaller and more astounding than I’d been prepared for – that very round and fluffy body, beak thin and long like my nana’s crochet needles. I was next to two of my classmates and I could feel them vibrating with excitement too.

The bald eagle – it was a giant – had moved to a branch of a different tree. I didn’t know how Dan could have missed it. I wondered briefly if it was only an apparition, a high-pitched creature conjured from the cloudy vault of my exhausted mind. I blinked and the eagle called out again.

‘Was that it?’ Dan asked. He and Finn were standing directly behind me. Dan had put his glasses and cap back on.

‘I think it was,’ I said.

‘Can you see it?’

‘No,’ I lied. ‘I can’t.’

It was partially the thought of having to deal with Dan and the binoculars again, sensing how easily that might boil over, but that wasn’t all. I also suddenly wanted to keep the eagle for myself.

‘I want to look again,’ Dan said.

The eagle had returned to preening its broad, dark breast. I thought about how it would feel to push my fingers down through its coarse outer feathers, and wriggle my fingertips in till they reached the soft down beneath. The bird looked up then, its serious yellow eyes wide. I felt it looking directly at me. It cocked its head and said, ‘I see you.’ A lump formed in the back of my throat. I kept the binoculars to my eyes, as if they were plugs keeping something in.

‘Too late,’ I said. ‘It’s gone.’

‘I didn’t see it go,’ Dan said.

‘Believe me or don’t believe me,’ I said.

When I finally lowered the binoculars, Dan and Finn, the large and small figures of them bound together, had already begun walking back up the track and away.

The city in which we lived – and that was what it called itself: The City of – was a university town. Our neighbourhood was situated a mile from campus in the city’s historic district, which meant a lot of two-storey wooden houses, some that had been lovingly restored and were mostly lived in by professors and their families, and some that were rentals occupied by grad students or working folks and that looked as if they were begging for a sinkhole to swallow them down. On the drive home from the prairie our late-nineties-model Honda came to a not wholly unexpected spluttering stop on the side of the road. We were still several miles from our neighbourhood in a part of the wider town that reminded me of where I’d grown up in New Zealand, where the only signs of municipality were a lone bus stop, recently repainted road markers, and letterboxes pinpointing a scattering of driveways.

‘What’s going on?’ I said.

Dan was sitting silently behind the wheel.

‘I said, what’s going on?’ My tone was immediately accusatory.

‘That’s not good,’ Dan said. He turned the key twice more. Each time, nothing.

‘What does that mean?’ I said.

Dan dropped his hands into his lap.

‘I’ll call Triple A,’ I said.

‘Go for it,’ Dan said, ‘but it’ll be a waste of time.’

‘Why?’ I said, though I knew why. Our Triple A membership had been one of the expenses I’d suggested we cut once Finn arrived.

Dan was slumped and staring out the front windscreen, the soft swell of a middle-aged chin visible, a single bold nose hair peeping out. It had been a while since we’d had sex, or even moved towards each other in that way. Dan was an enormously quiet man. By the time we met, both of us in our later twenties, this was what I’d wanted. I was ready for a relationship where I could just exist, kindly and calmly, and in no time at all we had moved in together, got married, and were packing our bags for Florida. None of these things had felt big because more than that they had felt right, and for several years we’d been happy. Then Finn had arrived, and Dan had proceeded to slide away from me. I’d been prepared for this, and already I thought I could feel him returning, but his drift – I was certain that was why I’d slid towards and then finally, as of last night, fucked Jason.

I looked out the front windscreen too. It was filthy. I couldn’t remember when either of us had last cleaned it. It might have been after we returned from our road trip to West Texas, the occasion we had to bump up our Triple A membership to the premium level. That was several springs ago, so a lifetime ago.

Finn was starting to grumble.

‘You’re okay,’ I said. ‘We’ll be home soon.’

‘Hmm,’ Dan said.

‘What about one of these places?’ I said, nodding at the few letterboxes visible on the road ahead of us. ‘Maybe someone could give us a jump-start?’

I could see Dan thinking this through. Asking a stranger for help, walking home, getting an Uber, calling a friend for assistance – which option would be the least expensive, which was the favour that would annoy the least number of people, the favour he might not have to return unexpectedly down the line when he didn’t want to? Dan wasn’t ungenerous, he just liked to do things on his own time, and he didn’t like to be in debt.

‘Yeah, all right,’ he said.

I didn’t bother with the pack, instead carrying Finn on my hip. No one was home at the first two houses. As we ventured down the longer, sandy driveway of the third address, where an enormous rambling bungalow rose in the distance, we came upon a dead squirrel. It was lying on the verge on its back with its arms stretched above its head, not so different to how Finn liked to sleep. It would prove to be a bad omen, though right then we had some fun with it.

‘How do you think it died?’ I said. ‘Do you think it fell from a tree? Got hit by a car? Was it sick? Did it fall while trying to mate?’

‘Probably sick,’ Dan said.

‘It didn’t look sick.’

‘How do you know what squirrel cancer looks like?’

‘I’ve seen a squirrel with bald patches all over its body and tangled up in Spanish moss. Like the one I fished out of that bucket of water.’

‘That you fished out?’

‘Maybe it died of old age,’ I said. ‘Or a heart attack.’

‘It looked fat.’

‘It probably ate too many nuts,’ I said.

‘Too many honey-roasted nuts.’

I snorted at Dan’s joke. I glanced in his direction and saw he was smiling too. The silly back-and-forth about the squirrel filled me up. I remember thinking in that moment that it had been days since I’d seen Dan smile properly. The fresh warmth between us was proof that my suggesting we go for a walk together had been correct.

When we reached the bungalow, we were met by a sleek young pit bull. The dog was straining on his rope so it was taut, and barking and furiously wagging his tail. I could tell he was still young by his paws – those feet, he was still growing into them. Before we could take a single step back, the screen door of the porch opened and a man in his sixties wearing belted cargo shorts and a short-sleeved button-down shirt appeared at the top of the steps.

‘He comes from royalty,’ he called out, ‘but don’t mind him, he won’t do a thing to you.’

‘Our car’s broken down,’ I said, over Finn’s head, which was resting heavy on my shoulder.

The man, who introduced himself as Gray ‘with an A’, whistled to his dog. The dog, who he introduced as Ernie Boy, immediately stopped straining on his rope and trotted across to Gray and sat down at the foot of the steps.

Dan chimed in now. ‘Wondering if we could get a jumpstart?’

‘It’s the battery?’ Gray asked.

‘Honestly,’ Dan said, ‘I don’t know.’ He sounded crushed.

‘Hold on then.’ Gray disappeared inside the house for a minute. When he returned he was wearing a pair of scuffed leather loafers and a blue trucker cap. He untied Ernie Boy, attached a short lead to his collar, and the two of them joined Dan, Finn and me in the middle of the yard.

‘Your accents,’ Gray said. ‘You’re from somewhere in the South Pacific. I wouldn’t like to venture a guess, wouldn’t want to cause offence.’

‘New Zealand,’ I said.

Gray nodded, as if he knew this already. ‘I have a cousin who moved down your way in the nineteen-eighties. All I know of New Zealand is what this cousin once wrote me about the state of the wind there. That being that there’s a lot of it and it’s big.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘Cool.’

This was my standard response whenever someone told me they knew someone who either lived in New Zealand or had once visited there, followed by this kind of anecdote. The questions that usually came next – the ones about what we were doing in Florida, to which I would reply, I was studying at first, yes at the university, a Masters in Education, yes I’d finished, yes I was adjunct teaching, technical writing to engineering students mostly, yes Dan worked too, no he was also a Kiwi, yes we had green cards now, from the lottery, yes we were lucky, yes we loved it here, yes even with things as they currently were, no really this was our home – Gray didn’t ask.

‘Ernie Boy and I will follow in the truck,’ was all Gray said. ‘Lead the way.’

It wasn’t the battery, but a bolt-like part that needed replacing, and which Gray miraculously had a spare of. ‘And why did I have this?’ Gray said to himself while inspecting his work. ‘No clue, no clue, no clue.’ He shook his head with pleasure.

‘How much do we owe you?’ Dan asked.

Gray looked up, incredulous. While maintaining eye contact with Dan, he reached into his back pocket and withdrew his wallet. He removed a black-and-white photograph, which he held out for me to see.

‘That’s his great-granddaddy,’ he said.

The photograph was of a pit bull that looked identical to Ernie Boy but with the muscular silhouette of a ten-wheeler.

‘What a dog,’ I said.

‘That’s fighting dog royalty right there,’ Gray said.

While Gray had been making the repairs, Ernie Boy had remained sitting in the passenger seat of the truck. For the most part, he had been sitting quietly. Now he started to bark.

‘Quit it,’ Gray said, over his shoulder.

‘He wants to get out,’ I said. ‘Stretch his legs.’

‘Two hundred and thirty-five pounds,’ Gray said.

I could tell by the look on Dan’s face that he thought this was what Gray wanted in payment for the repair.

When neither of us immediately responded, Gray added, ‘That’s a pit bull’s bite strength. Not the most powerful of the Canidae lot, but still something.’

‘Did you hear that, Finn?’ I said.

‘I’ll demonstrate for you,’ Gray said.

‘Hmm,’ Dan said.

This ‘hmm’ thing was a recent addition to Dan’s purse of noises. I didn’t know if he even realised he was doing it. I could sense that he was getting antsy, but I didn’t see how we couldn’t follow Gray back down his driveway. Anyway, I wanted to follow him.

A thick rope had been tied to a branch of a live oak in the corner of Gray’s yard, about forty feet up. At the bottom of the rope was a large knot dangling some five feet from the ground. Gray handed Dan the knot and told him to swing it. Dan pulled it back a few paces and let it drop, and Ernie Boy took a running leap and latched on to the knot with his strong jaw.

Gray stood back and crossed his arms against his chest like a proud dad.

‘That doesn’t hurt him?’ Dan asked.

Gray shook his head.

‘You see that, Finn?’ I said.

I understood one word from Finn: ‘Dog.’ Once he’d got it out, he made a noise, a snort that somewhat resembled a woof. It came out of his nose, quietly, his mouth open enough to reveal his broken teeth.

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘A dog. Woof-woof.’

Finn made the sound again but louder and more confidently this time.

Gray wasn’t watching us, but when I glanced in his direction, I could see him smiling in a way that suggested he was listening. Finn hadn’t met any of his grandparents. Dan’s mother had died just over a year after Dan and I got together. My parents and Dan’s dad were all in New Zealand, and no one had come to visit since Finn’s birth, and we hadn’t been back since before I was pregnant – the trip that coincided with our green card interviews. I felt sad about this, though maybe not sad enough.

As we watched Ernie Boy swinging back and forth, his eyes darting to keep Gray in his line of vision, I looked casually around Gray’s property. I saw a sliver of swimming pool poking out from behind the house. A pair of swimming trunks and a long-sleeved swim shirt were drying draped over the back of a lounger. Propped up beside it was a water-walking belt.

‘Is your pool heated?’ I asked.

‘Only to eighty,’ Gray said, almost as if he couldn’t believe I hadn’t already known this. ‘I turn on the heat as soon as the nights dip below seventy. Soon it’ll be warm enough not to have to bother with that.’

Dan was standing close to me but we weren’t touching. Finn’s bare legs were swinging where they hung either side of my hip. Dan reached out and took one of Finn’s soft feet in his hand. These days, this was the closest Dan and I got to holding hands. Until Jason had pressed his arm against my arm for the first time last month, the two of us leaning against the issuing desk on the children’s floor of the library, it was an absence I’d started to get used to – it was an absence that had taken up space. Though in this moment I felt it for what it was: just air.

Now Dan hoisted Finn from my arms. The weight and warmth of him had been keeping me grounded. I started thinking about Jason. It wasn’t the right place to do it, but as the four of us stood in silence and watched Ernie Boy swing, I allowed myself a moment back there.

It had taken Jason no time to open the door yesterday evening. Framed by the dim light in his hallway, he’d greeted me barefoot in black cut-offs and a black T-shirt. The way Jason had presented himself to me is, I knew, how Dan would present himself if he were opening the door to another woman. It wasn’t that they looked startlingly alike, Dan tall and thin, Jason shorter and denser, but from the outside they weren’t that different either. They were a similar kind of man. Jason though. Before he’d spoken, he’d reached up and absently raked his fingers across the greying buzzcut that either gave him a sweet, boyish air or the bluntness of a petty criminal. Then he’d said, with a nothing friendliness, as if I’d arrived to give him a clarinet lesson or repair his fridge, ‘Hey, Georgie.’ He’d lived in Alabama till after he’d graduated college and his voice killed me. Hey, Georgie. My name in his mouth. As soon as we heard the door click and were alone, it was as if something was loosened, a ribbon pulled free of itself, and we stepped in, no time to think before I could feel the heat of him and his lips against mine, his tongue teasing my mouth open. He tasted like nothing. He smelled a bit of toothpaste – a lone peak above the plain of his own scent. I couldn’t lean in far enough. I felt him grunt, a little satisfied click in the back of his throat, which I mirrored.

These memories swarmed up over me like an organisation of fire ants, sharp and diverting. It was a different kind of grounding. I didn’t yet feel any guilt. This beginning sequence, Jason and me both still clothed, thinking about it made me feel extraordinary. It was as far as I got into remembering that evening, before I clicked back to where I was – Gray’s yard, the sun warming the top of my head, the scrappy grass beneath my feet curling up around my ankles, the sudden red swoop of a cardinal emerging from a nearby shrub, Dan anxiously tapping the fingers of his free hand against his leg.

‘What’s that parked beside the pool?’ Dan said.

‘That’s my fire engine,’ Gray said. ‘We’ll start burning as soon as we get a good frost.’

‘Burning?’ Dan said.

‘Correct,’ Gray said.

The two men continued talking. I departed again. I could sense the weight and curve of Jason’s body pressed against mine, my back pressed hard against the hallway wall. I was trying to recreate the feeling of being in that moment, the rapid pace of my pulse, the radiating ache of my pelvis, my brain turned to cushion stuffing. What came after was a different thing. This, the bridge to what came after, felt like everything and where all the answers lay.

As Dan, Finn and I were walking back up Gray’s driveway to our car, which was still parked on the side of the road, I thought about what Dan and Gray had been discussing.

‘Where do these prescribed burns take place?’ I asked.

‘All over, I guess,’ Dan said, absently. He appeared lost in his own thoughts now.

‘All over where?’

Dan gestured around him with a sweep of his arm, taking in the trees, shrubs and grasses that surrounded us on all sides, cut through only by this long sandy driveway.

The summer I was five, I learned to swim in my primary school pool. My older brother Gerard had shown me how to grip the side of the pool and kick furiously, how to float on my back like a felled log, how to dive to the bottom of the deep end to retrieve his dropped goggles. This was the same summer the pine forest burned.

The fire was started by a group of teenagers smoking amongst the dry pine needles. Our house sat on top of a cliff that overlooked the township, the forest an amphitheatre surrounding the town and the beach. I would come to mark a loose time by the forest’s long seasons of growth, felling, replanting and growth. That summer, though, we stood on our front lawn and watched it all go up.

The local volunteer firefighters were at the front of the attack for the first terrifying day till they were joined by professionals from the city. When it looked as if the fire would never be contained – it had spread in mottled patches of heat – the rain rolled in. Storms were rare in those dry January days, and the brief but unexpectedly heavy rainfall was enough to slow down the progress of the fire and for the folks battling it to get it under control. Every adult who came to our house in the days following exhaled in relief and in the same breath said, ‘We’re bloody blessed, bloody blessed,’ or, ‘Someone was watching out for us, eh?’ None of these people were God-fearing, unless you meant the gods of the sea, surfing and boozy barbecues. When it was over and the clouds and smoke lifted, there was the hillside, a puzzle of bare and black earth with areas of trees still untouched. The landscape looked horribly deformed, sick.

I’ve often wondered about the teenagers who started the fire and how they must have felt when they saw the first line of smoke rising from the dry, needly undergrowth. Did they try and stamp it out with their flip-flops? Did someone remove their sweater and try and beat back the fresh licks of flame? Did they curse and point fingers – whose cigarette butt was at fault? And how long before they realised they could do nothing but run? As they watched the fire grow and spread over the hours that followed, what hell they must have endured.

During this time, every night after I’d put on my pyjamas and brushed my teeth, I packed my best clothes and toys into two plastic shopping bags and my school backpack, and arranged them in a line by the front door. If we had to leave in a hurry, I was ready. When I eventually slept, I dreamed of scorched earth, waking at a chilled hour prickled with sweat, and unable to find a way back to sleep. This continued well after the fire had been extinguished. I turned tired and pathetic. I stopped eating. It probably never occurred to our family doctor to prescribe me anything more than letting me eat whatever and whenever, and to otherwise keep me occupied.

After a while, the nightmares did fade, and I eventually stopped packing my bags at night, but my big uneasiness about fire never completely went away. Until I was well into my twenties, I refused to cook on a gas stove, barbecues made me nervous, and fireworks were a straight-up no-go. The first time I saw Dan slide his lighter into his jeans pocket, I thought: Great, now I can never love this man.

Finn had wanted to walk up the driveway on his own. He put a few feet between us before he came to a halt, his attention caught by something in the ground.