The Children's Bach by Helen Garner

open. ‘What? What?’
    â€˜Come and open the front door, Thena! It’s me!’
    â€˜What on earth are you doing?’ Dexter was standing on the front verandah in his pyjamas with both hands clapped over his mouth and his eyes rolling. He scampered past her and dived on to the bed.
    â€˜He had her up against the fridge!’ he snorted. He giggled and thrashed his legs like a naughty boy in a dormitory. ‘I was on my way to the lavatory. I turned on the kitchen light and they were –’
    â€˜Who?’ She pushed the bedroom door to and flicked off the light.
    â€˜Him! The one with the tattoo! He had his trousers off, in the kitchen!’
    â€˜What? Is Elizabeth here!’
    â€˜No! It was Vicki! I had to come back round the outside of the house. They must have thought I was perving on them.’ He took a big quivering breath. ‘Is there going to be a scandal?’
    â€˜Isn’t she a little monkey,’ said Athena. ‘I hope she’s on the pill.’ She lay down, smiling to herself. The curtain moved on the air, settled, moved again. It was like waiting for a play to continue.
    An engine slowed down outside, a taxi radio quacked, a door slammed, heels clacked to the verandah as smartly as if it were broad day.
    â€˜Here’s your scandal,’ said Athena.
    They lay flinching on the bed. Her knocking shook the house. The neighbour’s dog began to bark.
    â€˜Open the door,’ said Athena. ‘She’ll wake the kids.’
    He scrambled into the hall. Elizabeth pushed past him and charged down the hall towards Vicki’s room.
    â€˜The back door wasn’t locked, Morty,’ Dexter sang out after her. ‘She’ll think it’s our fault,’ he hissed to Athena.
    â€˜Don’t be silly. Let them sort it out for themselves.’ She turned her back to him and he flung his arm around her.
    â€˜This is awful!’ he said.
    â€˜This must be what people do ,’ said Athena. ‘Go to sleep.’
    Dexter lay rigid as a board, braced for more sobbing, but Athena slept, and dreamed that she was in a garden, on a large, flat, well-kept lawn, where yellow leaves off poplars lay about in drifts. As she watched they began to rise off the grass and play in the air in orderly streams as if being squirted from a hose: they rose and fell and rose again, in a variety of patterns, and everything was beautiful and enchanting and as it should be.
    *
    They stood in the shade on the cool tiles of an arcade and looked into a shop window where an automatic photo printing machine was on display. Before their eyes it disgorged into the chute a single colour snap: a baby in a humidicrib. As one they turned away.
    â€˜I used to play my guitar all day at home,’ said Philip. ‘I used to think that if people could hear these certain notes played at this certain rhythm, then they’d understand everything and everything would change.’
    â€˜Do you feel horrible,’ said Athena, ‘when you’ve played less well than you ought to have? And exposed yourself?’
    â€˜I used to,’ said Philip. ‘I used to go looking for heroin or dope or a lot of whisky so I could get oblivious as fast as I could. Because of shame. And wanting to wipe out this person and be nothing. Not just after I’ve played badly either. When I’ve behaved like an animal. Hurting people. These last few mornings I’ve been shaving and I’ve looked in the mirror and thought, I could pull the razor across here like this’ – he drew a line from ear to ear – ‘except that it would hurt so much.’
    â€˜And make such a mess,’ said Athena. ‘I think of jumping off buildings.’
    â€˜Jumping, do you?’ He was alarmed.
    â€˜I don’t mean I want to die,’ said Athena. ‘I just get that feeling, when I stand on a high balcony, that I’d like to jump out into the air.’
    He