Garry Disher
Blood Moon

1

On a Tuesday morning in mid-November, late spring, the air outside the bedroom window warm and pollinated, Adrian Wishart watched his wife urinate. He happened to be sitting on the end of the bed, dressed, comb tracks in his hair, tying his shoelaces. She was in the ensuite bathroom, perched naked on the loo, wearing the long-distance stare that took her so far away from him. She didn’t know she was being observed. She tore off several metres of toilet paper, patted herself dry, and as the water flushed it all away he came to the doorway and said constrictedly, ‘We’re not made of money.’

Ludmilla started and gave him a hunted look. ‘Sorry.’

Folding in on herself, scarcely moving, she opened the glass door to the shower stall. He rotated his wrist, tapped his watch face. ‘I’m timing you.’

Little things, but they cost money. No one needed a long shower. No woman needed that much toilet paper. No need to leave a light on when you go into another room. Why shop for groceries three or four times a week when once would do?

Adrian Wishart watched his wife turn her shoulders under the lancing water. It darkened her red hair and streamed down her body-a body a little heavier-looking in the thighs and waist, he thought. She was doing her daydreaming thing again, so he rapped on the glass to wake her up. At once she began to work shampoo into her hair.

Wishart slipped out of the ensuite, out of the bedroom, and made his way to the hallstand where she always stowed her handbag. Purse, mobile phone, tampons, one toffee-so much for her diet-diary and a parking receipt that he checked out pretty thoroughly: a parking station in central Melbourne, maybe from when she’d attended that planning appeals tribunal yesterday. He unlocked her phone, scrolled through calls made, stored text messages, names in her address book. Nothing caught his eye. He was running out of time or he’d have fired up her laptop and checked her e-mails, too. Then again, she had a computer at work, and who knew what e-mails she was getting there.

Her little silver Golf sat in the carport, behind his Citroen. The odometer read 46,268, meaning that yesterday she’d driven almost 150 kiLornetres. He closed his eyes, working it out. The round trip between home and her office in Waterloo was only seven kiLornetres. That meant one thing: instead of driving a shire car up to the appeals tribunal in the city yesterday, she’d driven her car.

Their house was on a low hill above the coastal town of Waterloo. He stared unseeingly across the town to Western Port Bay and fumed: They were not made of money.

He checked his watch: she’d been in the shower for four minutes. He ran.

Ludmilla was towelling herself, skin beaten pink by the water, slight but unmistakeable rolls of flesh dimpling here and there as she flexed and twisted. She was letting herself go. He scooped the scales out from under the bed, carried them through to the bathroom and snapped his fingers: ‘On you get.’

She swallowed, draped her towel over the heating rail, and stepped onto the scales. Just over 60 kilos. Two weeks ago she’d been 59.

Wishart burned inside, slow, deep and consuming. Presently his voice came, a low, dangerous rasp: ‘You’ve put on weight again. I don’t like it.’

She was like a rabbit in a spotlight, still, silent and waiting for the bullet.

‘Have you been having business lunches?’

She shook her head mutely.

‘You’re getting fat.’

She found her voice: ‘It’s just the time of the month.’

He said, ‘At lunchtime on Friday I called you repeatedly. No answer.’

‘Ade, for goodness’ sake, I was in Penzance Beach, meeting with the residents’ association.’

He scowled at her. The Penzance Beach residents’ association was a bunch of do-gooding retirees intent on preserving an old house. ‘Your car, or a work car?’

‘Work car.’

‘Good.’

They breakfasted together; they did everything together, at his insistence. She drove to work and he walked through to the studio and arranged and rearranged his architectural pens, rulers and drafting paper.