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.It has happened to both of them at the same time, like an anniversary.The jeweller is a friend of Andrea’s and has agreed to cut the rings off at his house and add another section of gold.They are late.The jeweller lives in a mud-brick house at the end of eight kilometres of dirt track.Dave searches the boot for a spare fanbelt.He shifts a roll of carpet underlay Andrea has picked up off a skip for controlling weeds and a bag of chook pellets, feeling the rain saturate his back.His ring finger itches and burns around the cut on his knuckle where he tried this morning to lever the ring off with soap and a crochet hook.He swears as he shifts stuff around, feels the edge of his underpants get wet just as Andrea’s left hand comes out the window holding the new fanbelt as if it were four aces.Of course — the glovebox.In the SBS movie, Dave thinks grimly, this would be a fairly comical image.He changes the belt, tops up the water, and gets back in the car, wiping his hands on an old T-shirt and feeling his wet clothes paste themselves to him.He blows his nose and looks sideways at his wife chewing the inside of her lip, and after a moment she looks back at him.‘Let’s just get this over with,’ she says in the long-suffering tone that annoys the crap out of him.Andrea has had a dream the night before that her friend the jeweller had a tiny circular saw and started cutting through the gold band, then kept going and went right through skin and bone and gristle, cutting off her whole finger.Best to amputate, he’d said, flattening the rest of her hand out on a kind of operating table.Fine, she’d thought in the morning.Whatever.Dave pumps the accelerator, double-clutches to find first.The Holden’s shift column protests.It’s like a metal grinder in there.Andrea jammed it between first and second once and he’d fixed it with a hammer, explaining to her about the slipping clutch until she’d suddenly leaned on the horn and he’d cracked the back of his head on the bonnet.‘A slipping clutch,’ she’d said when he’d got back in, a strainer-wire of tension between them.Her voice had been heavy with sarcasm, and something else.‘Yeah, right.’ And she’d smirked — a private joke with herself she didn’t think he’d get.He’d driven the car on their first date.She’d liked it then, said it was like being in an ad, an old romantic 1950s ad, searched the dial on the big, old radio for something atmospheric.He was in awe of her.There was no bullshit about Andrea.She wore those op-shop dresses with aplomb, bossed people round when they wouldn’t give her student concession.Making love in the back, his first euphoric inhalations of her had swirled with old leather, petrol, oily rags.Herbal shampoo.He inhales now — nothing but wet jumper.Down the dirt track it’s like Andrea blames him personally for every rut, as if he’s providing suspension with his own body.Dave winces, thinks of the time he pranged the car and felt something in the driveshaft crack with a terrible finality, like a spine.It’s welded back together now.Patchily.Andrea’s gearing up for some tight-lipped blame, but the jeweller’s forgotten they were coming anyway.Her marshalled energy hangs awkwardly in the calm.The jeweller makes coffee, and to cut the rings off they sit at a work table slung with an apron of leather.In the leather, Dave sees a dust, a sifting of gold specks and filings.A deep, exhausting sadness fills him.He can’t explain it; it’s the filings and Andrea’s proferred finger, swollen with the ring’s confinement, the others so fine and tapered.The jeweller holds her hand as he cuts as if he’s fashioned it himself, as familiar as a lover.‘Thank God for that,’ Andrea says, flexing.Dave’s cut burns as his ring gets filed off; the relief and release are draining.He sifts through the gold filings and they powder his fingers.He compares this table with their own, a wedding present from a carpenter friend seven years ago, littered with bills and notes and lists, a bowl of brown-flecked bananas, cups rimmed with tidemarks of coffee.Andrea is talking to the jeweller as she never talks to him; he hears news and opinions from her he wasn’t aware of.At home she sits mired in long bouts of silence, sometimes glaring at the TV with something else, some other narrative entirely, racing away behind her eyes.He’s given up trying to find out what; he’s sick to death of being cast as the one meant to guess.Dave follows the conversation now, baffled, hearing only enthusiasm and laughter.He stares at the tiny files and awls on the workbench.A screwdriver with an end no larger than a needle, some microscopic precision-clamping device that looks like it could clench together two single synapses in the human brain.Dave listens to his wife’s vivacity and the jeweller coming awake under her wit and energy, listens to the movie unspooling.He’s missed a connection somewhere, he thinks, some subplot, some richer underlying symbol that would throw light on the whole.With a sort of horror he realises he’s close to tears and turns and stares out the window, feels himself floundering, fighting off a heavy pointlessness with revulsion, as if it were a jellyfish or a piece of looming dead flotsam.The jeweller finds a device bored with holes of different sizes and Dave and Andrea both push their ring fingers through.As they stand — the jeweller jotting down a figure and explaining how he will rejoin the rings and repolish the surfaces — Dave finds he has to stare out the window again.Their hands are so close, making room for each other, not touching.He feels numb.As they are leaving, Andrea puts her hand on his arm and mechanically he gets out his wallet.‘Oh, pay me when you come and pick them up,’ says the jeweller.The moment stumbles, then rebalances.Andrea looks at Dave.She has only meant to touch him, he realises, not command obedience.It makes him catch sight of himself, shake himself awake.There is recognition in her eyes, shame, a stricken glimpse of something emptied, a gulf of ragged edges and constriction.‘Sorry,’ she says.He feels the moment heat up, become molten.Andrea struggles with the car door, gets in and manoeuvres it closed, for once not swearing at it.The jeweller disappears back inside; his garden blurs and runs through the streaming windscreen.The heat is in Dave’s chest now.They sit there, breathing.He knows as soon as he starts the car there will be a cooling again, a loss of this strange fluidity, so he floats in it, feeling it rearrange him, before turning to look at his wife.There is her, and there is everything after this; her transforming face, her naked fingers, her precise choreography.He can no sooner think of not having her as pulling a layer out from under his own skin.She leans over and kisses him on the mouth, pulls back and grins.The heat spreads, stretches.He fears for a moment the join may not hold.There aren’t tools small enough for this.There aren’t subtitles.‘How’s the swelling?’ he croaks.On her cheek there’s a glitter of metal where his fingers must have brushed her.He can smell her hair.‘Going down,’ she says.He steps on the clutch and finds first gear, feeling the calibrations gnash like teeth momentarily then drop into place, lubricated, fitted together like bones in a hand.The Testosterone ClubI have left my husband: rolled up my wedding linen around my wedding crockery, packed it all into the back of my car wedged safely with my wedding towel set, and left
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