‘How much money?’ I wish I hadn’t jumped on that, because Matt winced, and looked away.
‘Coupla hundred. So far,’ he replied. ‘I told her she ought to go to rehab, and she wants me to pay for that. I had a word with Megan about it, but she jumped down my throat. No help there.’
‘Oh, Matty.’ All at once I felt so sorry for him. No wonder he’d been on edge. It sounded like a nightmare.
It also sounded ominous. Very, very ominous. I pictured guilt trips, ugly relapses, emotional labyrinths. I pictured financial crises. I pictured midnight phone calls, bedraggled waifs on the doorstep, and frantic visits to police stations. But I had to be careful about what I said.
‘So . . . what do you want to do?’ I inquired cautiously, and he took a deep breath.
‘Well, first off, she’s not comin’ here.’
‘Really? But—’
‘Nah.’ Another firm shake of the head. ‘Not yet. Not until I’m good and sure she’s not gunna come back and strip the place when we’re out, some time. It could happen.’
‘Oh, Matt,’ I said sadly. ‘You think so?’
‘It happened to Megan. You can’t be too careful. Not with junkies. I used to live with one.’
‘But some of them sort themselves out, don’t they?’
‘I guess.’ His tone wasn’t confident. ‘Anyway, she’s not really interested in you. Or the kids. She’s interested in what she needs, and she reckons she needs me.’
I could imagine. Big, gentle, genial Matt, with his rackety past and respectable job, his troubled conscience, his easy and expansive charm, his good credit rating, his new-found sense of responsibility (engendered and nurtured by two small offspring) . . . oh yes, he was a perfect father figure. Reasonably reliable but not overly uptight. Responsive but not controlling.
What more could a needy teenaged troublemaker want?
‘Um . . . I think you should try to help her, Matt,’ I declared. ‘I think you’re right about that.’
‘Yeah.’ He sounded resigned.
‘You can’t just walk away.’
‘No.’
‘The thing is, though . . .’ Dear oh dear, I didn’t want to come across as aggressive, cold-hearted and territorial. I could understand his position. Nevertheless, there was a point that had to be made. ‘She sounds like she’s going to want a piece of you, sweetie,’ I ploughed on. ‘And fair enough, because she is your daughter. Only, if her mother’s like she is, and Jo’s got all these problems—’
‘Yeah.’
‘—she might want a big piece, is what I’m saying.’
‘I know.’
‘If she’s got a great big hole inside her that needs filling, well fine. I’d be willing to make an effort myself, as long as it can be filled. You know what I mean? As long as it’s not one of those black-hole situations.’
‘Absolutely. You’re absolutely right.’
‘Because you can’t pour all your energy into a vacuum. You can’t. You’ve got two other kids—and me. We all need our fair share. That’s the bottom line, Matt. Sometimes the noisiest kid gets the most attention, and I don’t want that happening here.’
‘Shit, no.’
It suddenly occurred to me: would I have been better off if Josephine had been a brief, aberrant fling? As a long-lost daughter, she not only had rights—she had a lifelong and justifiable claim. The thought of what might lie ahead made me feel dismayed and exhausted. There would be a big shift, no doubt about that. An upheaval. I hadn’t yet got my brain around the implications . . . the possibilities . . .
But then Matt got up, and pulled me to my feet, and wrapped his arms around me. I could feel his mouth on my hair.
‘Thank God,’ he murmured. ‘Thank God for you.’
‘I’m sorry about the detective.’
‘It was my fault.’
‘I should have come out and asked, but I was so scared. Because of what happened to Jenny. When she came out and asked, her husband just walked away—’
‘Oh Hel, I’d never do that. Don’t you know me? Don’t you know I’d never do that?’
‘I guess. But it’s not you, it’s me. I don’t know what’s happened to me. I’m falling apart. All I do is snap and moan. I can’t seem to get it together . . .’
‘Are you kidding? Hel, you’re the one who holds it together.’
I thought about that. I thought about that as he rocked me to and fro. (God, it felt good.) I thought about the unpaid bills, the piles of dirty laundry, the unanswered letters, the shambles in the garden, the mad dashes for the train, the toy-strewn floors, the forgotten birthdays, the filthy car, the endless stream of sugar-laden bribes, and I had to disagree.
‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s the thing. I don’t hold it together. Everything’s a mess.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’ I looked up at him. ‘I try, but I can’t. In fact I shouldn’t even have to. I need help, Matt. Do you know what I’m saying? I need more help.’
He swallowed, and opened his mouth. Hesitated. Then he uttered a sharp sigh, and his shoulders sagged.
‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘We’ve got to work something out.’
‘I know.’
‘You were trying to lighten the load with Jo, and I appreciate that. You’ve got a lot on your plate. You’ve got a full-time job. Those lousy shifts. But if you could just—just . . .’ I took a deep breath, and grasped the nettle. ‘Baby, if you could just put your own underpants in the laundry basket, without me asking . . . well, that would mean a lot.’
It was an anxious moment. I didn’t know if I had overstepped the line, with Matt still reeling from the brand new burden of a long-lost daughter. In my opinion, blokes tend to think you’re being petty-minded when you keep harping on about underpants and garbage bins and toilet bowls. They hate it, they really do. And after all, what had I expected, when I married Matt? He had fucking tattoos, for God’s sake.
But he smiled. He smiled for the first time in—oh God, in ages. Days.
‘Deal,’ he said. ‘Dawn of a new era. Underpants in the basket, or they get hung on the front door.’
And he gave me a rib-cracking, spine-warping hug.
So there you have it: a happy ending. Major bonus. Total relief. A testament to my own good sense in marrying Matthew, when everyone else seemed to think that I was making a big mistake. It just goes to show that you can’t judge a guy by his tats or his missing tooth.
Let’s not forget, however, that life goes on—and on, and on. Roofs leak. Toilet-training hits a snag. Long-lost daughters break up with their boyfriends, get thrown onto the street, and need a place to stay. I should have seen it coming, of course, and I was lucky—very lucky—that Josephine’s domestic tribulations coincided with the complete gutting of our kitchen. We couldn’t have put her up even if we’d wanted to, because the kids and I were living with my parents for a couple of weeks while Matt imposed upon his old mate Ray (who has a sofabed in his front room). Thank God I didn’t have to put my foot down. Thank God Matt didn’t have to make a choice. We were saved from that, at least, though not from the crisis that ensued. Phone calls were made, counsellors consulted, relatives appealed to. A cousin of Matt’s, living in Punchbowl, nobly bowed to family pressure and allowed Josephine to occupy a spare room while Matt thrashed things out with Megan. I must say, I was impressed by the way Matt’s family stepped in. Some of them— the male ones—came all the way down to Sydney for a Muzzatti problem-solving conference, which took place in our disordered living room. I was touched, I really was. Especially when I saw the way Matt’s brother Ben played with Jonah, and the way all those big, bright, noisy Italian boys transformed our dingy, half-finished house into a warm, comfortable, cheery place. With the Muzzattis knocking around in it, our house assumed the smiling, well-worn air of a proper family home, with a banging screen door and nice cooking smells and everything. They do that, those boys. Like Matt, they have an aura. It made me realise how obsessive I’v
e become about our house, which really isn’t so bad.
It also made me realise that I ought to be making more of an effort with the Muzzatti clan. They might live far away, but that doesn’t mean I should be leaving them out of my equations. Now that Jonah’s older, we can visit them sometimes. On the weekend. And it will cheer us all up, I’m sure.
As for Megan—well, to her credit, she came to the party. Megan split the cost of a bond with us. So Josephine found herself a share house, and Megan agreed to an armed truce with Matt, and the two of them cautiously agreed that, while Matt may have been something of a feckless, self-absorbed fuck-up twenty years ago, Megan had perhaps been a little unfair to him since.
But it’s not as if we’ve all buried the hatchet. You won’t see Jo and Megan cosying up to us at any relaxed, suburban barbecues in the very near future. You won’t see Jo babysitting her little half-brother and half-sister, or Megan busily making coffee mug sets for my birthday. Owing to the fact that Jo’s prospects still look pretty dicey, there’s a lot of tension in the air. It’s like living on top of an earthquake fault; you never know when the tattered shreds of Jo’s stitched-together existence might suddenly blow apart. I haven’t even met her yet—not in the formal sense—so I’ve really no idea what she’s like as a person. (Matt’s not much good at descriptive character sketches.) To me, she’s still a kind of cipher: a fleshless family skeleton that’s suddenly fallen out of the closet. And I certainly haven’t told the kids about her. I don’t think there’s any point, until we’re sure that she won’t drop out of our lives as abruptly as she dropped into them. Anyway, I’m not convinced that she’d be a very good role model. I can just imagine what my mum would say, if I allowed Emily and Jonah to become infatuated with a heroin addict. (I know, don’t tell me—I’m beginning to sound like my mum.) As a matter of fact, I haven’t told my parents about Josephine yet, either. It’ll confirm all their worst fears about Matthew, so I’m putting off the dreaded moment for as long as possible. There are just so many things that a person can cope with at one time, and I’ve got enough on my plate at the moment.
Like Miriam, for example. Miriam hasn’t called me so far—I’m not really expecting her to—but she did transfer a large sum of money to her mother’s current account, to ensure that poor Mrs Coutts didn’t get stuck with Miriam’s mortgage payments. It was weird. Various interested parties are still trying to trace the source of that transfer, but no-one’s located Miriam yet. So I still receive calls from the Pacific Commercial Bank, and occasionally from the police, whenever some flummoxed investigator wants to ask a question about the contents of Miriam’s case files, or something. And when that happens I get worked up all over again, because I haven’t properly recovered from Miriam’s about-face. I don’t know if I ever will. God, it was a shock, that business. I’ll never forgive her for deceiving me with such flair; it’s made me doubt my own insight and intelligence. For all I know, she might even have poked around in my purse one day and stolen my credit card details.
Nevertheless, despite all my misgivings, I was still worrying about her for a while, there. I couldn’t help it. I asked myself: Has she settled down in Brazil or Thailand or somewhere like that, to live her dream of Paris clothes and marble bathrooms? Or is she being sucked into some drug cartel vortex, some intimate hell of regret and despair, abandoned by Giles and perpetually glancing over her shoulder? It was hard to imagine the fastidious Miriam in that sort of mess, but you know me—the eternal pessimist. I fretted and fumed, in equal proportion. And then one day I had lunch with Ronnie, and my fears were laid to rest.
It was one of those typical, pre-wedding get-togethers, scheduled for the purpose of discussing bridesmaids’ dresses and honeymoon plans. Veronica and I met in the usual subterranean coffee shop, sat at our usual table, and ordered our usual microwaved croissants. As we pored over fabric samples, however, I couldn’t help basking in the fact that, while in many ways this meeting was similar to our last, there was at least one glaring difference. This time I wasn’t eaten up with dread and suspicion. This time I could confront Ronnie’s wedding with equanimity.
This time I was a happy person.
‘Oh!’ Ronnie exclaimed, after we had settled on the coffee-coloured silk under the embroidered beige gauze, ‘I almost forgot! God! You’ll never guess!’
‘What?’ I could sense a Briony story heading my way. ‘Don’t tell me—what’s she done now?’
‘Who?’
‘Briony!’
‘Oh—well, yes, it is about Briony, but you’ll never guess who she saw!’
‘Who? Briony?’
‘Yes! ’ Veronica leaned back, eyes wide, as if she wanted a good, panoramic view of my reaction. ‘Samantha got an e-mail from her the other day, and apparently she’s dumped the Argentinian, and she’s back on the yachts with some ancient American millionaire. In Spain.’
‘She never could stay away from yachts.’
‘Yes, but guess who Briony ran into, when she was in Majorca?’
I tried. ‘Michael Jackson?’
‘Miriam Coutts!’
‘What?’ I gasped.
‘Miriam Coutts. Briony saw her drinking on some balcony. They saw each other, as a matter of fact, but Miriam pretended not to recognise Briony. And Briony—well, she was a bit confused. She’s heard about Miriam, you see. Samantha e-mailed her.’
‘Didn’t she go to the police?’
‘Who—you mean Briony? Are you kidding?’ Veronica snorted into her orange juice. ‘As a matter of fact, Samantha wants to know who she should talk to about it. She asked me to ask you for a phone number. A police contact.’
I hesitated. It took me a minute or so to make up my mind, because sometimes I wonder if living in close proximity to the chaos of my life finally tipped Miriam over the edge. Did she look at the culmination of all my hopes and ambitions and think: So much for the Great Australian Dream—I think I’ll take the High Road, thanks very much, and bugger the consequences? I can’t help feeling guilty about the fact that she took off without warning. Without warning. How could I have called her my friend, and failed to see what was on her mind? How could she have called me her friend, and deceived me so completely? There was a terrible failure, somewhere, and I’m sure I had something to do with it.
So I was reluctant to play a part in her arrest, despite the fact that I was still uncertain about her motives in reporting to me her glimpse of Matt in the Oxford Street coffee shop. On the whole, I think that she was tying up loose ends. Sorting out all the nagging problems in her life before disappearing into the wild blue yonder. She wanted me to know the truth about something, even if it couldn’t be about her own criminal behaviour.
The trouble is, I also can’t help believing that she found a certain satisfaction in doing it—in screwing up my life before she totally screwed up hers. In demonstrating to me that my man was as imperfect as her own was. Schadenfreude, in other words.
‘I dunno,’ I sighed. ‘I guess you should tell Samantha to contact the bank. The Pacific Commercial Bank. Ask for a guy called Cliff Staines.’
Ronnie wrote this down as I sat there, feeling as if I’d finally turned a corner. It was tough, but I’d done it. I had distanced myself from Miriam and the code of concealment that she seems to have been living by. If only I had been able to grasp what was going on inside her head, as well! It disturbs me to think that I might have missed some screamingly obvious signs (through blatant self-absorption?) and that I still can’t be sure if she had my interests at heart or not. It’s troubling, being left up in the air.
Fortunately, I’m not up in the air when it comes to my old friend Jim McRae. Jim McRae has turned out to be a prime scuzzbag. First of all, he had the cheek to call me after Matt had asked him to please piss off. He maintained that he was checking to make sure that this decision to give him the heave-ho was genuinely my wish, or whether Matt had strong-armed me into making it. After I had assured him, very firmly, that he was no longer requi
red, he sent me a little note with his invoice (A great pleasure working with you. If you are ever again in difficulty, do not hesitate to call ), followed by a rather gooey Christmas card. All of which wasn’t conclusive, by any means. Taken in isolation, not one of these attempts to communicate could be described as suspicious. Two weeks ago, however, I received a typed letter from Jim, at my work address, alerting me to the fact that he possessed some information which I might care to hear, if I was willing to meet with him at a time and place of my choosing.
This, as you may imagine, was a most unwelcome blast from the past. And before I told Matt about it (knowing that he would absolutely hit the roof, when he heard), I rang Stuart. Remember Stuart? The guy who recommended Jim? I rang him and asked if this Jim McRae bloke was really on the level.
‘What do you mean?’ Stuart asked, perplexed. ‘What’s he done?’
‘Have you had much to do with him, Stuart? Do you know what his background is? Why did he leave the police force, anyway?’
‘Helen. What’s he done?’
‘He kind of … well, he won’t leave me alone. That’s all. It’s creepy.’
Silence on the other end of the line.
‘I don’t know if he’s touting for more business or what. I don’t know what to think.’ A pause. ‘Stuart? Are you there?’
‘I’m here.’ He sounded grumpy. ‘All right, I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Thanks, Stuart.’
‘I mean, I’m not a private detective. I can’t promise anything. But I’ll ask around.’
So he did. And he found out that Jim McRae had left the police force after an incident involving a policewoman. ‘I couldn’t get any details, really,’ Stuart apologised. ‘You know what they’re like. But I found out he was moved off the marital infidelity stuff by his former agency, after he had an affair with a client.’
‘Ah.’
‘Sorry, Helen. Nobody told me, as usual. I’m right out of the loop.’
‘In other words, he’s a bit of a sleaze?’
‘Could be. Looks like it.’ Stuart snorted. ‘Funny you haven’t run into him yourself, working where you are.’
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