This was often how snatched moments with Natalie began: Trixie sliding into the crowded front-passenger seat of Nat’s untidy Mazda, arranging her feet among the discarded parking-meter receipts and disposable coffee cups, as Nat leaned over to plant a thigh-melting kiss on Trixie’s cheek.
“Where am I taking you today, Trixie m’love?” Nat peered over her sunglasses at Trixie, tapping her French-tipped nails eagerly on the steering wheel.
She seemed twitchier than usual, and Trixie squinted back at her. “You OK there?”
“Course!” Nat flapped a hand at Trixie, then returned it to rest on the wheel. Everything she did was so delicate. Trixie had even watched her eat a kebab elegantly, which was something she’d previously thought impossible. “So, any ideas?”
Trixie sighed. “Don’t mind, really. Just somewhere outside.”
It had been a week of absolutely disgraceful weather – so bad Trixie had barely left the house, except to sprint to and from bus stops, the front door of her apartment building and the bookshop. She’d felt yesterday evening, as she’d sat on the balcony with Stef – both of them wrapped in threadbare throw rugs and watching the rain leak from the gutters on the balcony above – that the rain had seeped into her very skin, her bones. That it had taken residence inside of her.
That the first day of sunshine in the last eight had coincided with a phone call from Nat was like being thawed from the inside out. (Natalie insisted on calling, rather than messaging, just like Trixie’s father did. Trixie had very quickly had to unlearn the habit of turning her phone screen over whenever she saw an incoming call, though Natalie had gamely suggested she could try texting. Trixie put this down to Nat’s resolute eagerness that everything should happen as soon as she’d thought of it.)
“Outside?” Nat dipped her head to her shoulder, thinking. “Think we can manage outside.”
Trixie gestured at the stereo system, which, right now, was a low hum of voices discussing the weekend’s most exciting upcoming pub gigs. “Can I . . .?”
“Oh, go on,” Nat said, grinning.
She reached over Trixie and knocked at the glove box, which sprang open and spewed out a haphazard collection of peeling plastic CD slipcases. Trixie got to work sorting through them as Nat pulled away from the Kingsville flats and joined the stream of Saturday traffic inching down Geelong Road.
By the time they’d passed the West Footscray Bunnings, Trixie had made a selection. She pressed eject, and the CD player spat out Hi-Five: It’s A Party. Nat looked down at the CD and snorted. “You’re saving my life right now,” she joked. “Do me a favour and chuck it out the window. We’ll say Mummy lost it.”
Trixie laughed, but inside her stomach sank a little. The kid. Olly. There he was again. Trixie dreaded the inevitable moment he’d come up – when she’d find something of his wedged in the front seat of the car, or when Natalie would tell Trixie about some disturbance in her meticulously planned “Mummy week” – the weeks she spent with Olly before his Saturday with his father, Steve. Nat seemed to have sensed, very early on, that Trixie was uncomfortable about Olly, and she was careful not to discuss him often.
Trixie knew how much Nat held back about her son, and it made her feel something like shame for behaving like such a child herself. “How about I just put it at the very, very back of this case,” Trixie quipped back, trying to keep the mood light.
“What’d you choose?” Nat asked. She’d stiffened a little, and seemed to be concentrating a lot on the road, considering she was simply navigating the quiet backstreets of West Footscray.
“Here.” Trixie slid the CD into the stereo and Tkay Maidza’s “U-Huh” rolled out of the speakers.
“Nice.” Nat smiled to herself. “I saw her just down the road from here, really. At Laneway.”
“In 2015?” Trixie yelped. “I was there!”
Nat laughed, throwing her head right back. “How amazing! We could’ve been standing right next to each other.”
“It was a fairly big crowd.”
“Oh, you know what I mean,” Nat said. “Imagine – how many times could we have run into each other before we met at the bookshop?”
“Probably a million,” Trixie agreed. “Melbourne is annoyingly small.”
“Yes.” Nat laughed again. “It is that.”
They were deep into suburban west Melbourne by the time Nat pulled the car over and turned off the engine. Trixie looked around: on one side, brush-buried brick houses; on the other side, flat dry grassland and drooping eucalypts led down toward, she guessed, the Maribyrnong.
“Where on earth are we?”
Nat shook her head. “I swear, Trix, the second we leave Footscray you just have no idea.”
“Well,” Trixie shrugged. “I am a Sydneysider by birth, mate.”
“Excuse me!” Nat pointed at herself. “Far-north Queenslander over here.” Nat opened the car door.
Trixie grabbed her elbow. “Natalie.”
“Avondale Heights. We’re just going for a little walk. Come on.”
Trixie rolled her eyes, then followed Nat out of the car and across the road to a malformed old metal gate. The pair of them slipped through the space between it and the fence post – considerably more difficult for Trixie than it was for slim Natalie – and began to track a dirt path, which lead down to thicker bush and appeared to have been worn into the yellow grass simply by a few dozen footsteps.
As they approached the first thatch of grey, shedding gums, Nat reached out for Trixie’s hand. Beyond the treeline, flat grassland dropped to dramatic decline: a steep line straight down to the river, littered with fallen trees and green–brown overgrowth. So, hand-in-hand and mostly silent, Trixie and Nat picked their way down toward the water.
It was surprisingly hard work, and Trixie forgot she was mere kilometres from the highway and her home. It felt rather more like she was out in the middle of the bush somewhere, for they’d lost the path and were climbing over the husks of old trees that looked like they’d fallen centuries ago. When they got closer to the river, however, the spell broke: drifting over from the other side, the trill of bicycle bells and the bubble of cheery voices. She stopped and peered across the river’s greyish surface.
“It’s the trail,” Nat explained, lifting her free hand to point at a spot of neon Trixie was surprised she’d not noticed yet – a cyclist shooting past along a gravel trail on the opposite bank. All of a sudden she could see dozens of them: lycra-ed up and racing along the path, dinging their bells to alert each other to their passing. A family of four, each of them plodding along in a line of brightly painted bikes and sporting matching chunky helmets, seemed to notice Trixie and Nat watching from the distance. They waved, and Nat waved back. Trixie merely watched as, across the river, they continued to jolt forward together – a disjointed conga line.
At last, they reached the bank of the river: Trixie puffing a little and feeling beads of sweat roll down the back of her neck and out from under her bust line; Natalie looking cool and collected as ever. A line of large, bowing red gums separated them from the river’s edge, their crisp green fingers stretching down to brush the surface of the grey water. When Trixie attempted to find a way through them, right up to the riverbank, Nat held her back, and settled them both on an overturned trunk. “Let’s just sit,” she said, and Trixie saw that, in fact, she was a little worn out from the bush-bash down the hill.
It was much darker and quite musty down near the edge of the river, closed in by trees. Trixie felt the sweat sitting cold on her neck and brow. Nat pushed her sunglasses up to her head, and Trixie gave her a long look.
“Are you – you look a little . . .” Trixie didn’t know how to go on without sounding rude. Nat looked exhausted, in a way Trixie had not seen before. She was always so well put-together. Now, her eyes seemed small and sort of thick, like the skin around them had puffed up and sagged. She seemed, well, old.
Natalie looked at Trixie, her gaze sharp, as if deciding whether or not to say what she wanted to say. “Ah,” she sighed, “it’s been a shit of a week, to be honest with you, Trixie.”
“Oh.” Trixie didn’t know what else to say. Oh. So bloody inadequate.
They sat in silence for an uncomfortably long time, listening to the raw, uncanny sounds around them – from bugs Trixie was sure would look monstrous in person, from intensely loud birds, and from the irritatingly chirpy weekend cyclists across the river.
“Sorry about that,” Trixie said at last. “About the shit week. And about the – the ‘Oh’. I mean, that wasn’t a very useful response.”
Natalie chuckled. “No, it wasn’t.”
“I just – I don’t ever really know what to say about . . .”
“My life?”
Trixie swallowed audibly. “Well. Yeah.”
“I don’t imagine it makes much sense to a 28-year-old.”
“Look,” Trixie said, “I have friends who are married and have kids, and all that stuff. I’m not a baby.”
“I know you’re not, Trix.”
“I’m just—”
“Not really up for it?”
“No!” Trixie picked up Nat’s hand again. She held it so tight Natalie flinched. “No. I’m just not very good at it right now. But give me a minute to get, you know, good at it. I’m very clever, you know.”
Natalie smiled. “I know you are.”
“People have told me, in fact, that I’m quite intelligent.”
“Oh really?”
“Yes, really.” Trixie was grinning too, trying not to laugh. She took a breath to steady herself. “I want to try and be good at this stuff. This whole – I don’t know – You’re A Proper Adult thing.”
“You’re an adult too, Trix,” Natalie said, putting her other hand around hers and Trixie’s intertwined fingers, drawing them up to her lips. “And you don’t have to be that, like, into this part of my life.”
Trixie shrugged. “I don’t know how any of this is going to fit together for us. I just know you’re very pretty and I want to kiss you a lot. And lots of other things. I want to, you know, lots of things with you.”
“Lots of things?” Nat teased, kissing Trixie’s fingers.
“Lots of sexy things,” Trixie said. She shuffled closer to Nat.
“I think I’d be OK with that.”
Nat ducked her head in to kiss Trixie, but Trixie drew back. Nat laughed, dropping Trixie’s fingers, and threw her hands in the air.
“Sorry!”
“Trixie!” Nat groaned.
“Sorry – but, look.” Trixie put her hands up to Nat’s cheeks, trying to radiate her most serious, grown-up gaze. “Don’t not tell me things because you think it makes me uncomfortable. I want to know if you’re having a shit of a week.”
“OK, Trix.”
“OK?”
Nat kissed Trixie. Trixie felt her face warm up. Her hands moved around to the back of Nat’s head and neck. She felt Nat’s hands slip down to her hips. Then Nat drew back for a breath, and gave Trixie a playful peck on the nose. “OK, Trixie, my love. I’ll tell you anything and everything.”
“Well, I mean, maybe not everything . . .”
Nat yowled in frustration, pushing Trixie back until they both tumbled off the tree and into the damp grass behind. Nat began to pull up Trixie’s t-shirt, and she tried not to think of what could be lying in the grass beside them. Seconds later, the thought was the furthest thing from her mind.
The Broken-Heart Brigade is released via weekly e-newsletter instalments through Substack. It is supported by Matilda’s generous subscribers, Melbourne City of Literature, and the City of Melbourne COVID-19 Arts Grants.
The Broken-Heart Brigade is made in Naarm (Melbourne), on stolen Wurundjeri land that was never ceded. Matilda pays respect to the rightful Aboriginal owners of the land on which she lives and works, and hopes the readers of her writing do too.
Loving it! Looking forward to the next chapter. x