Out of Time

by Steve Hawke

‘I mean I’m not going to start taking drug cocktails and living on false hopes. I’m not going to have doctors and psychs and neuros micromanaging my life. The books say it’s usually eight to ten years from diagnosis to death, no matter what they try. And if it’s early onset—which this would be—it can be less than that. When … if … the truth is … unavoidable, I’ll make the calls … I, you. We.’

  ‘But let’s keep hoping Joe.’

  She coils her fingers through his and squeezes tightly for a long moment before withdrawing her hand.

  ‘Will I open another bottle?’ he asks.

  She shakes her head.

  ‘I might get myself a whisky,’ he says, getting up.

  ‘We’re not finished yet. Part two, remember. You’ve got to tell me what’s going on inside that head of yours.’

  ‘Can I get a whisky first?’

  ‘Go on.’

  The noises of Joe making his nightcap are so familiar to her. The clink of bottle on shelf as he gets it down, of bottle on benchtop. Freezer door. Ice cubes rattling as he squeezes some out of the tray. She goes back to the window and this time slides it open, despite the chill it creates. Breathes in the scent; jasmine, with a hint of wattle.

  ‘Let’s sit outside Joe,’ she calls. ‘D’you need a jacket?’

  ‘I’ll be right.’

  TERRIFIED

  They try the swing seat slung under the liquidambar, but on the cold clear night it is already damp, and they settle into the more familiar and comfortable verandah armchairs.

  ‘So?’ She raises her glass of water.

  He tips his glass in her direction, takes a slow sip, holds it and rolls it for as long as he can, delaying the moment.

  ‘I am completely, deeply, abjectly terrified.’

  ‘That’s what I figured.’

  ‘Am I supposed to feel better for saying it? Cos I don’t.’

  ‘No Joe, of course not. But isn’t it some sort of relief to have it out there on the table? To share it, instead of bottling it all up?’

  ‘Dunno. Things aren’t going to be the same between us now, are they. They can’t be with this elephant in the room.’

  ‘They haven’t been the same for months. You’re not the world’s best actor mate, whatever you might think.’

  The silence that follows is almost comfortable. A sudden chorus of magpies carolling in the moonlight makes them both smile.

  ‘I am terrified in so many different ways.

  ‘You remember me cracking that line about better dead than demented? Of course you do, she who never forgets. It wasn’t really a joke. I meant it with all my heart. Still do. Still fucken well do.

  ‘I swear that I will not let myself lose my reason. My self. Like I said, there’s a line out there somewhere that’s not to be crossed. But it was hypothetical then, wasn’t it.’

  He drinks again, but there is no savouring of the taste this time.

  ‘And I swear too, on our lives together, that I will not put you through witnessing it. For year after ugly year.’

  ‘Not even if I choose it?’

  ‘Not even if you choose it. Look, I stuffed up this test thing. I’m sorry. But don’t take it the wrong way. I’m still working, aren’t I. Johnson’s dropping hints about another gig, and I’m going to be doing this research on the Ficus with Tony. There’s good stuff happening.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘The point is, I’m not spending every waking hour thinking about doing myself in, Anne. Which is one of the reasons I don’t want to do that fucken test again.’

  ‘Ah Joe. That makes more sense to me than anything you’ve said for ages.’

  ‘But there’s the flip side isn’t there. It mightn’t be every waking hour, but it’s never that far away. There’s lots about life that’s still good, my darling.

  ‘I’ve always thought—maybe I’ve even said it, I don’t know—but I’ve always thought “better too soon than too late”, but there’s too soon, and really too soon, isn’t there.’

  ‘Not every dilemma needs to be resolved. Can’t you just let things unfold?’

  ‘You were just insisting that I do another round of tests.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘It’s alright. I’ll do it. But it sets us on a course, my love. If Uncle Georgeness lies ahead, I refuse to go there.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘D’you mean that?’

  ‘Not happily, but yes, I mean it.’

  He tosses back the last of his whisky and pushes himself to his feet, paces.

  ‘There’s a step in it all that I shrink from when I try to think it through. Not the reality. I can handle the bag and pills routine. And I know you got snarky about this before, but I have thought about you in this scenario, and you know what, Annie girl, I reckon you’re tough enough to cope with it if that’s how things pan out. You do realise that’s a compliment don’t you?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘The bit that freaks me out is the when. The when, the when, the when. Having the capacity—and the courage—to recognise it.’

  ‘Oh my darling.’

  ‘I’m angry too. We deserve our bloody dotage. I want to go back to the Kimberley with you. I want you to admire my enormous barra when I finally catch the fucker. I want to be there when you come back to camp all agush after you see your bloody Gouldian finch.’

  He has become increasingly worked up, and is leaning with both hands on one of the verandah’s brick pillars, trying to stop himself from breaking into sobs. Anne gets up, and starts to knead his shoulders from behind.

  ‘None of that’s ruled out.’

  ‘I want to tease James when he gets his first girlfriend.’ He sniffs violently. ‘That’s a dozen years away, or more.’ Sniffs again. ‘I’m not ready for this.’

  She turns him round, draws him close. Nestles her head into his shoulder and strokes the back of his neck with butterfly fingers as they gently rock, and the tension begins to ease out of him.

  She knows she shouldn’t, not now. But she can’t help herself. She whispers, ‘When are you going to talk to Claire?’

  She feels him flinch, but at least he doesn’t pull away. ‘Not yet,’ he murmurs, ‘not yet.’

  Gradually the rhythm of their rocking changes, as his hips begin to press, and she feels him harden. ‘Kiss and make up?’ he whispers in her ear. She gives him one groin thrust back, and is almost carried away. She pulls the collar of his shirt back to plant a kiss on the soft flesh above his collarbone, and feels the quickening in him.

  But she steps back. ‘Just the kiss tonight.’ As if to emphasise the point she zips up her jacket, and after one stroke of his cheek, puts her hands in the pockets.

  ‘I’m going to be ratshit at work tomorrow, between the red wine and the emotional overload. Next time you pull a stunt like this try and make it a Saturday night will you, so I’ve got the Sunday to recover.’

  ‘The timing’s down to Eric.’

  ‘Fair call. Listen, I need to settle a bit Joe, or I won’t get any sleep at all. I’m going to walk down to the river.’ She sees his look. ‘On my own. Grab yourself another whisky and go to bed. If you’re still awake when I get back I’ll slip in for a cuddle.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting.’

  ‘A cuddle I said. And that’s all tonight. You’d be better off going to sleep.’

  She stands up on tiptoe to kiss him on the lips, and then is off down the path towards the front gate. The movement triggers the sensor light. He watches her go, entranced as always by the sway of her bum.

  ‘You’d pass for twenty-five from here,’ he murmurs, reaching down to readjust the softening cock in his pants.

  She doesn’t hear him, but she knows she is being watched, and as she pauses at the back gate she gives him that mysterious shimmy of the hips that he has loved for as long as he can remember; and without turning she reaches a hand back and gives him their friendly two-fingered ‘fuck you’ sign.

&nbs
p; AFTERMATH

  Anne makes it into the laneway and out of sight. She can take off her brave face. A shudder. ‘You fucking arsehole!’ Though she wants to scream it to the heavens, it comes out as a shouted whisper that none of the neighbours will hear.

  Deep breaths. She walks. Brisk walks. Faster. Half runs, arms flapping. Chest tightening, panic rising, she reaches the riverside park, a bench out of sight of any of the neighbouring houses, and lets go. She’s held it together as good old, understanding, ever loving Anne only by the most supreme effort; now she can surrender to the horror of the sight of Joe with his head in a bag.

  She tries to listen to the night birds, the splish of something in the river. But the awful vision will not be denied. How could he do that to her with so little … little … tilling of the ground? Something to prepare her! He has always had the capacity for moments of emotional illiteracy, but this takes the cake.

  But even in her fury, as she wrestled the cap off the wine bottle, she’d realised that he was in his own way trying to reach out, to bust through the wall he’d been hiding behind for god knows how long; that she had to play this game, for now at least, on his terms, or risk having him scurry back behind the wall again.

  And so she did put on her brave face, and was glad she did; to reconnect, to hear him speak truly at last. To begin a new conversation. The bag is a harbinger, she feels sure; she prays not one of doom.

  In the cold night air she hugs herself and does not try to fight the anger. She does not want to see him again tonight, will stay here long enough to be sure he has drunk himself to sleep. She’ll be a zombie at work tomorrow, but she can handle that.

  AFTERMATH #2

  Joe grins in relief as he subsides into the armchair. It went better than he feared it might. Even a shimmy and fuck you fingers on her way out.

  A grimace at the unbidden recall of the sensation of claustrophobia as the bag pulsed with his breath, the heavy plastic sucking against his cheekbones despite the dust mask and basketball cap.

  He goes in to top up his drink as per her directions, his initial relief already dissipating.

  It was going to be a bastard whichever way I did it.

  You, not it. You were going to be a bastard.

  He goes for a triple shot. The splash of water to fill the glass is merely a token. Tosses half of it back and tops up. He can still justify the deceit, the deceits, to himself if not to her. But after all this time, all the lies and omissions, there was no way to do it nicely or gently. Whatever the rights and wrongs, he tries to forgive himself by insisting that the gnarly bits of life, by definition, never go smoothly.

  Still doesn’t justify what you did to her tonight you prick.

  The flash recurs. The pulse of the bag. The plastic sucking at his cheekbones.

  What did it look like to her?

  Enough to have her throw the book at me, he thinks wryly.

  He still tells himself it was the right call to hold back. If he’d fessed up earlier the trip north could never have been as magical as it was. They’ve only been back a week, but already it feels like another time. It is just as he’d divined instinctively, the day of the first big lie, when she rang from Karratha after he’d recovered his lost car. Once the truth was out there, nothing could ever be the same.

  Would he ever have told her of his own accord? There was a strange sense of relief mixed in with the shame and fear when she called his bluff.

  Joe has always had the male talent for repressing that which is painful to remember, and the process has already begun as he sips on his whisky, waiting for Anne to come back from the river. In time he will remember this day differently, but right now he knows that he bullied her into tonight’s exercise.

  Not exactly bullied, he argues internally. But his insistence, and the implied threat of retreat back into his shell, gave her little choice, he knows. And why? Why did he do it this way?

  Because she bloody insisted on knowing what I was ‘really thinking’.

  He can feel the defensive anger that he is unable to control rising again.

  And there’s no point in gilding the fucking lily anyway.

  He deep-breathes to slow himself down, determined to not be in that headspace when she returns.

  But Anne outwaits him. He is asleep by the time she slips into the house.

  November 2005

  LOOPS

  The months that follow bring a cycle of anger and recrimination, then reconciliation and sorrowful loving.

  She cannot forgive him. For the lies. For the bag.

  He takes it as validation. Tell the truth and nothing can be the same, all is ruined. Better to have held his tongue, he thinks at times, though he knows it to be nonsense.

  ‘You will not tell Claire!’ he shouts. ‘I will not have her looking at me the way you do now!’

  ‘You’ll put her through what you’ve put me through, you selfish bastard! And you say you love us!’

  ‘“Stop shutting me out.” That’s what you said my darling. Well welcome into hell.’

  ‘Joe! You know that’s not what I meant.’

  He stalks away from her with an angry ‘Aarrh!’ And then back towards her, shouting. ‘You will not tell Claire! I will not have her looking at me the way you do now!’

  The look on her face brings him to a halt.

  ‘What?’ Belligerently. ‘What?!’

  ‘You just … You…’

  He realises. ‘Oh fuck.’

  For just a moment they stare at each other with terrified eyes before they fall upon each other, scaredly, fiercely.

  The loops, as he comes to call them, are worse than the forgetting. The awful realisation that he is repeating himself; that moments—god knows how many—have just disappeared from his consciousness. The terror of uncertainty, and the certainty of embarrassment. At first they are rare; at least he thinks so, but how can he be sure. Anne swears there have not been more than half-a-dozen, when they report the phenomenon to Dr Sykes at Joe’s next visit. They both catch the flicker of concern as she scribbles a note.

  The doctor gives Joe a discreet but definite smile of approval when he shows up with Anne, and is more than happy to have her sit in on the consultation. Joe shows none of the aggression of last time, but there is tension thick in the room as they confer, and then Joe works his way through the battery of tests. At the wrap-up, Dr Sykes insists that it is still far too early to reach any conclusion. But she acknowledges that on three of the tests he has not done as well this time as last, and that the talking aloud to himself, and the loops as he calls them, on top of the continuing memory lapses, all add up to cause for concern. Another session in six months will give them a line she says, rather than two points in time. She talks down Anne’s idea of an appointment in three months rather than six, and promises to post out her report in a couple of days.

  He can feel the torrent of questions waiting to burst from Anne as they make their way back to the car. But he is not ready yet. He puts a hand on her arm. ‘Give me a bit of space before we analyse this to death.’

  ARE YOU WITH ME?

  ‘Are you with me Joe?’

  A quick jerk of his head. He pulls his hand away from his shirt pocket where he’d been feeling to check the bit of paper is still there. He knows where the car is—the side street one back from Hay, two blocks up from here—but he’s written it down just in case. He’s never going to go through that debacle again if he can help it.

  ‘Sorry Tony, can you just go back a couple of screens.’

  It feels like it’s been a long day. Johnson had asked him to come in for the brainstorming session. JKH is one of three firms invited to develop concepts for the new arts complex. Too big to mess around on public tenders, this project, but the rave reviews for the civic centre, starting to approach completion, have got the firm onto the selected tenderers invite list. It is right up his alley—an integrated complex with a big, central statement building.

  He’d grumbled and prevarica
ted when the invite came. At the time almost all he could think about was the looming second appointment with Vanessa Sykes. It was only Anne’s urgings that got him to agree to go in.

  Everyone in the room had been waiting for something from him; a comment, an insight, maybe even an idea. But he’d offered nothing. Nothing more than mutterings meant to indicate that his mind was ticking over.

  Just when he thought he could escape, Tony had grabbed him with an excited, almost conspiratorial air, to come and review the first feedback from the engineers on the broad-span arch documentation. He feels again at his pocket as Tony recaps, and can hear the edge of doubt now behind the eagerness in the young architect’s voice, the question in the rising inflection of his last sentence before he pauses.

  ‘Good work, Tony, good work. Whooh. It’s been a long time now since I thought too much about this. Any chance you can print this out. I like to pore over this sort of stuff at my desk before I say too much.’

  ‘No worries Joe. I’ll have it for you Monday.’

  ‘Thanks Tony.’

  ‘It’s a good start though, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. A good start. I’ve got to get going mate. Family dinner. Ring me Monday.’

  ‘Will do Joe.’

  There is an uncertainty in Tony’s handshake as they part.

  Joe sits in his car in the Subiaco side street, hands on the steering wheel, taking short, rapid breaths.

  No loops at least.

  He’s pretty sure not, anyway.

  It’s gone though.

  His confidence.

  Vanished.

  Sure, there was half an idea began to form during the brainstorm. And he could see the glimmer that Tony was so excited about in the engineers’ report. He is looking forward to poring over it himself, at his own pace.

  A year ago such inklings would have had him in a state of nervous anticipation; expectation of that flash of intense insight that has given birth to all the best work he has done. It might still be in him. On his good days he still believes in his ‘gift’—that is how he has always privately labelled the mysterious mix of talent, graft and inspiration that gives rise to the flashes.