The Near Miss Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t know it.
    â€˜Yeah?’ Grace feigned interest. As if it wasn’t enough working with and for mad people, and suspecting herself at times of being one.
    â€˜Just because you did such a great job of pulling yourself out of the PND. I mean, you were amazing, all those herbs, and the exercise, and the counselling . . . and look at you now.’
    Grace nodded distractedly. ‘Oh?’ Josh would ask this, in the week when Grace was secretly fighting the old symptoms, the old enemies, once again. Insomnia — every night since Lotte’s accident, the vast dark universe of the bedroom ceiling above falling into her open eyes. Loss of appetite, dislike for food. And a toxic, unending anxiety that was a taste in her mouth.
    Grace shook her head. ‘I don’t know that I really got over it. Take now. One little mishap with Lotte and I’m a freaking mess. I can’t sleep.’
    â€˜Really?’
    â€˜What if something happened to her? She’s so crazy, so impulsive and wild. She just does things, and you can’t stop her, like running out into traffic. We’re going to lose her. I really . . . Iknow . . .’
    Josh handed her a tissue. Grace put down her cup and pressed the tissue to her eyes. Josh rubbed her shoulder kindly.
    â€˜It was a terrible thing. Anyone would be frightened.’
    â€˜I haven’t slept for the past few nights. I wake up at two in the morning and I just obsess about it: what if the car had been travelling a tiny bit quicker, what if that woman had been a tiny bit slower? And Tom takes risks with her, I know he does. Lets her walk down to the neighbours on her own, even across a driveway .’ She searched Josh’s face for signs of horror, for indications he might go and alert Human Services this minute, but he just reassembled his eyebrows and mouth into a new arrangement of dutiful concern, like someone shifting from one hip to the other. He didn’t have kids. Maybe he hadn’t understood. ‘I mean, she’s four years old and he lets her walk across . . .’ She shaped her hands and made a face of exaggerated alarm, waving to denote a driveway the width of the Eastern Freeway. ‘Just straight over it to where . . .’
    â€˜Poor you. Does Tom know you feel like this?’
    â€˜I can’t tell him. He’ll stop us trying.’
    â€˜For a baby?’
    â€˜Yes!’
    â€˜Oh.’ Josh took a teaspoon and levered the lid off the International Roast. ‘Maybe you should wait a bit if you’re feeling like this again.’
    He was too nice. Definitely gay. ‘I want another baby. I want to get out of this job.’
    â€˜The Bunny?’
    â€˜She’s . . .’ Grace grimaced, and Josh nodded and showed the tact of friendship. He didn’t talk anymore about the client he wanted Grace to meet, the one with PND. He didn’t point out thatwanting to escape a bad job was not a reason to bring a child into the world. Grace sipped water from a bottle, and for the thousandth time calculated how much twelve weeks’ maternity leave on her wage would be. How many work-free days it would represent. Anything to get a rest from the Bunny.

    Grace would wake at night and feel for Tom beside her, and find only flat sheets and blankets. She would then pad through the house and look out the back window towards the garden, where light would shine from along the joins of the tin shed, outlining it like a child’s line-drawing hovering in the dark. Night after night, Tom crept out there to work on his inventions. When she confronted him about it, he shrugged. ‘I went out for a piss, and I just thought I’d check on the shed.’ Or ‘I only popped out for twenty minutes’, when she knew he’d been out there for hours.
    She rang him at work one afternoon, and got his colleague, an engineer called Deepak. ‘He’s asleep,’ Deepak whispered. ‘In the store