‘Thanks, Molly. Anything I can do to speed things up, I’m willing to try. It’s frustrating to have more questions than I can figure out how to ask. You said before that Laith isn’t in our lives? But we use his jet?’
‘We don’t usually. And he’s not in our lives, but I still see him occasionally and I speak to Mum often. When I called to tell them you’d been injured, they told me to use the jet. It’s not such a big deal – Dad has a second one for the company anyway.’
‘I still can’t believe I got involved with you,’ Leo says, and when I laugh softly he hastily adds, ‘I just meant…’
‘I know what you meant.’ I glance at my watch and calculate the time difference in my mind. ‘It’s very early morning at home, but I did tell Anne you’d call her tonight. How are you feeling after all the tests today? Are you tired?’
‘I’m fine, Molly. I had a rest before the doctors came by. Why don’t you tell me something about yourself? I really need to get to know you a little.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘What’s your favourite colour?’
‘That’s where you want to start?’
‘Seems as good a place as any. And I can’t really tell from the clothes you’re wearing.’
I look down at my quasi-clown outfit and grimace. ‘Yeah, I was in such a rush to get back, I didn’t really look at these before I put them on.’
‘I wondered if fashion had changed in the last four years.’
Leo’s wardrobe consists of dozens of pairs of identical chinos and identical casual shirts. He has no sense at all of style.
‘As if you’d know what’s in fashion,’ and we laugh together. It feels good to laugh with Leo again. Once upon a time our life together was punctuated by easy laughter and shared smiles. ‘My favourite colour is yellow.’
‘Do you know mine?’
‘That’s a trick question. You don’t have a favourite colour.’
‘What’s your favourite food?’
‘I like anything I don’t have to cook. And you like simple food. You’ll eat pretty much anything, especially when you travel, but when you’re at home you crave simplicity. When we first moved in together, you came back from your first long trip and I was so excited to have you home I made you an elaborate four-course dinner. I don’t cook so that was quite a big gesture from me. You didn’t have the heart to tell me you had a little routine that I was getting in the way of so after I’d gone to bed, you snuck downstairs and I caught you at the table with a cup of tea and your precious vegemite toast.’
Leo laughs and nods, as if he knows immediately what I’m referring to. ‘It started off as a practical thing. I always kept some bread in the freezer and vegemite lasts forever, so it didn’t matter if it was stupid o’clock and I’d just come from the airport. Nothing feels more like coming home to Australia than good old-fashioned vegemite on toast. I never meant for it to become a ritual.’
‘Anyway, I learned not to bother you when you came home. I would just wave at you from the couch and wait until after you had finished.’
Leo frowned at me. ‘Surely I didn’t just ignore you until I was done eating my snack.’
‘That is pretty much what you did, actually.’
‘Didn’t that annoy you?’
‘I think it was about decompressing, actually. Yes, it annoyed me sometimes, but for the most part I understood that it was your way of compartmentalising your work. It was your pause before you came back properly into our home life.’
The truth is, the only way I could actually tolerate his stupid ritual at all was because right up until things between us really broke down, he always made it up to me. There was a second ritual that came immediately after the toast in the kitchen and that was long embraces with me on the couch, moments layered with affection and emotion. Even when he was exhausted, he always made such an effort to really come home to me. Leo never said sorry, but I interpreted every affectionate move in those blissful moments of reunion as an apology anyway.
‘What’s our favourite thing we do together?’ he asks me now.
I think about this for a minute, then say casually, ‘We love watching reality TV.’
‘Okay, now I know you’re lying. I do not watch reality TV!’ He’s aghast, as I knew he would be. I grin at him, and for a moment I’m lost in my own memories of nights on the couch with Leo’s warmth against my body through our clothes, our limbs entangled, his scent around me and the soft glow of the TV before us. That’s who we really were together when things were good – just me and Leo and the natural entwining of our hobbies and habits.
‘We usually sat together after dinner and I watched reality TV shows while you read next to me,’ I explain. ‘Every now and again you pulled your head out of your book to make disparaging comments about whatever show I was engrossed in. I usually pretended to be offended. It’s a bit of a game we played.’ Even the banter was perfect in the early days, tinged with tenderness and affection and a warmth that went all the way through the very layers of who we were as individuals.