by Thom Conroy
Inside, all is as I remember it. The lounge has two desks along one wall, both crowded with screens in various states of display: screen savers and pie charts, blank pages and close-up photographs of neon fish. Wireless mice are glowing, power strips are blinking. There are many plain black boxes with little green lights on them. It could be an art installation.
‘We’re all in here,’ Miranda says.
I follow Miranda into the kitchen where Erin and Maddie are on a sofa in front of a kitchen island. Erin is sitting there, a smile on her small face, stringy blonde hair piled up on her head. A wide-screen TV is precariously balanced on the benchtop, and the acreage of its screen is glowing black and white. On it, Judy Garland as Dorothy is being helped out of the pigsty by her dear friends, the three farmhands.
Miranda sits on a stool, and I am shown to the sofa, where I am instructed to take Miranda’s place beside six-year-old Maddie, who turns to me, grinning as if something astonishing is about to occur. At the sight of her I feel a little twinge, and for a mad second I have the idea that she’s the child Harvey and I were meant to have, but then Erin reaches around behind Maddie and touches my shoulder with her hand. She tells me it’s good to see me. From then on I am entranced until at last I see Glinda’s pink bubble floating onto the screen and Dorothy is saying, ‘If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.’
The movie plays on, but none of us is paying attention any more. We’re looking at each other, all with wet cheeks. Erin is cuddling Maddie on her lap, and Miranda is shaking her head like she’s a little bit embarrassed, but none of us is really embarrassed. Maddie was right. Something astonishing did happen, and now that it’s over we feel swollen with emotion that we know is more or less fabricated, but what does this matter? We are, for the moment, moved. A circle of people in the throes of The Wizard of Oz.
After the moment is over and I explain why I’m there, and I receive the glass of wine I’m offered, I begin to wonder if this little fit of shared feeling was the moment of intimacy I had been anticipating on the steps. It doesn’t seem like it, but I can’t always be sure.
‘I just want to look through my stuff,’ I say. ‘If that’s all right.’
Erin looks from Miranda to me. I can see something is bothering her. She says, ‘You sure you want to dig around in there?’
‘I know just what I want.’
Erin leads me upstairs to a room at the end of the hall, taps on it, and touches my shoulder again. Once she is back down the steps, I put both my hands on the door to push it open, but then stop. I get this absurd idea that on the other side of this door Death is awaiting me. It’s laughable, but I don’t open the door. I step back. For a moment I wish someone was here with me. All right, not someone. Bruce. I wish Bruce was here. I have no real desire to see him, but he would understand what I’m feeling. And, thinking this, I find I do have a little trickle of a desire to see him.
I SPEND ABOUT FOUR MINUTES IN THE ROOM WITH MY OLD possessions. To my surprise, they are neatly packed and labelled. I have no memory of labelling boxes, but the handwriting is mine. I find what I’m looking for on the first try. A wicker box, a gift from Harvey, with letters and cards and a key ring with what looks like an Islamic religious figure on it. A prophet with a beard and a diamond stare. The key ring was a joke. Harvey bought it for me at a street stall in Sydney. But what I want is at the bottom of the wicker box. I recognise it by feel alone. Without looking at it, I slip it in my pocket.
In the hallway, I stop and go back for the key ring too.
What happens when I go downstairs and see the three friendly faces of the people who live there is harder to explain. I have spent my brief time upstairs in complete control of my emotions, but now in this kitchen I am becoming unwired. My mind races a bit and I feel fluttery in my chest. I am experiencing some confusion, but I am unable to say why. For a passing moment I’m not sure exactly where I am.
Miranda comes and stands beside me, my unfinished glass of wine in her hand. By the look on her face, I understand I must be making a scene. I have got something wrong, but what?
‘Stay for tea,’ Miranda says. ‘We’re having—’ She looks at Maddie, who is now sitting on the stool at the kitchen island, drawing. ‘Maddie, what are we having?’
‘Macaroni cheese!’
‘Macaroni cheese,’ Miranda says. ‘And you can’t say no.’
Erin turns around, holds out her finger at me. ‘Remember, you can’t say no.’
‘I’m sorry. I can’t.’
Out on the flagstones the daylight dazzles me. I look up at the sky expectantly. When all I see are striations of cloud on blue, I am vaguely disappointed. I stop walking, take in my bearings. It feels as if I have been exercising or else I might be drunk. Of course, I am not drunk. And I have not been exercising.
Now someone is touching my thigh. Maddie.
Maddie hands me a paper. It is folded in two with my name, Juna, written in blue crayon. I kneel down beside her and open the paper. A stick figure with long dark hair is standing under a rainbow, and lots of little people are standing around her.
‘These are Munchkins,’ I say.
Maddie nods.
‘And that’s you,’ she says. ‘In the middle.’
I cuddle Maddie. It’s not until I let go and stand and wave goodbye that I realise the intimate moment is now past.
UNSPOKEN
It’s 7 a.m. and gently raining. Lois and I are standing in the large, oily-smelling space of her double garage, staring at the packed boot of my fifteen-year-old Mazda. There is something we have not said, I can tell by the way we stand here staring at my chilly bin, tent, sleeping bag and two large backpacks, but neither of us can quite put our finger on what it is. We have talked the logistics of things to death, so it’s nothing to do with that.
It’s not until I’m out of the sight of Lois’s house and rolling to a stop at the thickly pansied roundabout down the bottom of her hill that I know what I forgot.
To my relief it has nothing to do with Lois at all.
LYLE IN BOXERS, AGAIN
What I’ve forgotten is Lyle. It seems like I owe him a goodbye, at least, if I’m about to leave town. So I turn into the city and find the most unlikely of things: a free carpark directly under his bedroom window. All at once, my luck seems to accelerate like backed-up water under pressure. Sometimes it goes like this. I shut my door and turn around and the clouds part, the footpath is lit. Little spots of black chewing gum and a dandelion crawling through a crack become vivid. At the door to Lyle’s building, I glance at the row of unmarked buzzers, trying to recall which one is Lyle’s. For no reason, I try the door. Impossibly, it’s unlocked.
Upstairs, I knock on Lyle’s door with some ferocity. It’s the ferocity of mounting good fortune. I catch a glimpse of myself in the window at the end of the hall. I am medium height, and a little thick in the waist, but this morning I just look fertile instead of fat. In my reflection I can make out dark eyes and a long mane of dark, thick hair. For a moment I see myself as my father claims he sees me: beautiful and exuberant and possibly Middle Eastern or Native American. Then the door opens, only a crack, only enough to see Lyle’s face.
Lyle standing there holding the door slightly ajar is chilling. Neither of us speaks, but he must see on my face that I understand he has another woman in his apartment. In the next beat, as if he meant to do so from the first instant, Lyle opens his door all the way. He smiles, glances down at his boxers.
Behind Lyle, the flat is suffused with light. What I see at first is just this white box of a room with no detail. The moment stretches out, and I still don’t have the information I need to determine what it is I want to say. Only a few moments before, I had been imagining Lyle deciding to ditch his job and riding off with me, and now here I am thinking of what this other woman looks like. The two ideas are bad company.
&n
bsp; ‘Come in,’ Lyle says. ‘I — it’s — what time is it?’
‘I’m going,’ I say. I step inside as I say this.
On the other side of the threshold, the light changes and I see the woman I was trying to imagine. She is lying on the sofa where I was lying. The same blanket I used is covering her.
‘Lynn,’ the woman says, extending an arm. She looks coy and beautiful but, then, her make-up is smeared and she has lines around her mouth, and she may be neither coy nor beautiful at all. She may be friendly and plain-looking. God, you’d think you could tell.
‘Lynn’s a friend of mine from — she’s—’ Lyle stops and turns to Lynn as if he would like her to complete his sentence.
Lynn and I speak at the same time. She says, ‘I didn’t — if you two—’
I say, ‘I just wanted to stop by — if you’re—’
‘No,’ Lyle says. He’s backing away towards his room now. He looks terrified, but also as if he might begin laughing. ‘I’m just — I — does anyone want some coffee?’
A minute later I’m back down on the footpath. I did not take Lyle’s coffee, although I now think I should have. I did not shake Lynn’s hand. Why not? I never even managed to say where I was going. Why? She spent the night on the sofa, after all, not in Lyle’s room. What I want to know is this: has anyone here done anything wrong and why can’t it be easier to tell?
As I’m merging into traffic on the highway the sun disappears and a rattling downfall begins. It looks, for a moment, as if someone has spilled marbles across the surface of the road.
IN HARVEY’S CHILDHOOD BEDROOM AGAIN
The next morning I wake up in Harvey’s childhood bed, my notebook open on the duvet. I fell asleep with Bruce in my head, and on the subject of him I feel entirely depleted, all thought out. When I sit up, I am surprised to find that I have slept soundly. And last night with the Wells was fine, all things considered.
Nothing too terrible was said. Irene and Gary were trying very hard to be positive. Irene has medication that helps her, and she did not weep when we spoke of Harvey. I sat there with the thing I meant to give her in my handbag, and it seemed as if we would have an easy time of it after all. Irene, Gary and I had mugs of tea in front of us, but just as I was about to mention that I’d found something of Harvey’s, Gary’s voice broke. He apologised and left the room. Irene did not comment on this, and I did not see him again that night, but suddenly it did not seem like the right time to give Irene a token to remind her of Harvey. If, in fact, that was what I was doing.
Now the rain drums and dribbles in the spouting outside, and this should be a comfort. It is a comfort, until I think of Bruce. Of his larger nose and his balding head. He looks like Harvey, but less attractive, less sarcastic and quick with his wit. Still, the resemblance is unmistakable. But it’s hopeless, entirely. Even as I consider this, a thought flickers on, a little burst in the back of my head. It’s not even a fully articulated idea, just a questioning inclination. Bruce? I think. What I mean is, there isn’t any chance with him, is there? There’s no way anything could stick between us, is there? Surely it isn’t Bruce who’s waiting to be found. It can’t be Bruce who will be the ending to what I’m determined will not be a story of loss.
So what is my reason for continuing with this affair? I think of Bruce’s wife Joanne and their eight-year-old daughter Ella, and I find I just can’t say what my reason could possibly be.
WHAT WAS TAKEN
After breakfast, Gary excuses himself to go and work in the study. As far as I know, Gary is a building inspector and, to my mind, this would imply that his job might involve getting out there and inspecting buildings. But once he is absent from the room, Irene lowers her voice and says, ‘He works from home, mostly.’
Although there is nothing in the content of Irene’s message to indicate that she is referring to Gary’s display of emotion last night, I understand by her softened tone and the way she leans forwards over her coffee that she is giving me an explanation, setting up a context to justify her husband’s behaviour. As soon as she says this, I smile, but the smile comes across as false, even sickeningly so, and immediately I am sorry for it.
While I’m sitting there mulling over this false smile, Irene does something inexplicable. She smiles back. Her smile, if it’s possible, is even more false than mine, and in this exchange everything has altered between us.
It seems impossible, or at least unlikely, that this little exchange of faked smiles could undo the genuine and protracted bonding that followed on from our mourning, but somehow this is exactly what has happened. In this moment a transition has occurred. Without either of us meaning to, we have let each other go a little. We are people who have seen the worst of life and shown the worst of our grief to one another, and now we are just far enough past it to feel ever so slightly ashamed at our mutual knowledge, though I don’t think either of us would ever put it this way.
I reach into my handbag, withdraw the little yellowed jewellery box and hand it to Irene. She accepts it slowly, holding it with both hands, as if it may try to escape. Then, as an afterthought, she takes off the lid. Inside are two long blue and white ceramic earrings. They are set with eye-shaped bits of paua shell.
‘I know they were yours,’ I say. ‘Harvey gave them to me.’ Irene is staring at the earrings. She looks pained, bewildered. ‘He took them,’ I say. ‘I know you didn’t know he did. He took them years ago, he told me, when he was still living at home.’
Irene’s voice breaks and she fumbles with the lid. She looks at me, her whole face misaligned with grief, eyes open very wide, as if I might mean to strike her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I thought … I don’t know what I thought.’
‘I—’ Irene starts, but then she cries. I reach for her, but she stands, moves quickly into the kitchen. I stand, too, wondering if I should follow. I decide that I should follow, but at that moment the door to the study opens and Gary comes out. He looks at me. His expression is acidic, wounded. I would not be surprised if he asked me to leave. He doesn’t ask me to leave, but instead goes into the kitchen after his wife.
Now I’m standing in the living room of my dead boyfriend’s parents, feeling ashamed and angry and on the verge of tears which I vow not to shed.
Lois. The name comes into my mind. It is sinister, the hiss of a snake.
SOUNDTRACK COURTESY OF HARVEY
I’m wearing earbuds and driving much too fast, dipping and turning with the road. I recognise that I may be courting harm, that there’s some rich wisdom of psychological truth woven into my behaviour — maybe I’m punishing myself for Harvey’s death, maybe I’m looking to punish everyone else. This occurs to me, but I shrug it off. Let someone else weave the tapestry of my intentions. Right now I’m indulging in the pleasure of motion.
I’m sitting in the driver’s seat, yes, but it feels more like I’m running alongside the car, or more like I’m riding it, whooshing north through the paddocks. The music in my ears is from Harvey, which means it’s everything. Elvis Costello, Bach and The Black Seeds, John Lennon and LCD Soundsystem, waves of anonymous electronica, a hole that just keeps flowing and flowing with music.
My parents and I had a running joke that no matter how sunny a road trip it might be, the sky would always darken when you got near Palmerston, but on my drive up there the sky is rain-sodden and awful, the colour of a bleached-out corrugated fence, until not far outside of town it is rent by blue, and tiny sun-showers skitter along the road in front of me, running across the bright black surface of the tarmac like shore waders.
Now the sky is coruscations, all rainbow and brilliant flecks. It looks artificially piecemeal. In a glance I take in azure and black and soppy grey. A cow stands in full sun. The knob of a hill sinks under fog. The white teeth of the ranges gleam.
I come to the sudden green of the university grounds and I think briefly of my parents’ old friend Steve Cynzk. There’s something sullen playing in my head now, and it
occurs to me in passing that everything might be Steve’s fault — my parents’ separation and Harvey’s death and even Lois’s friendly hauteur might have followed on from some reckless chain of events dating back to a Christmas twenty-four years ago in my parents’ lounge in America.
Then I’m passing the business park where my father’s office is. The place was once upscale, fussily landscaped and happy with its new skylights, but now the untrimmed hedge blocks my view of the carpark and the skylights are mossy smudges as I zip past. I cross the bridge spanning one of the world’s most polluted rivers. The loose metal rails are all ringing like they used to when I walked this way as a child, but it is not until I turn on to Bruce and Joanne’s street that I understand anything.
Then, all at once, I understand everything.
AN ECLIPSED EPIPHANY
I pull over, take out my earbuds. I have driven here with all my things, not packed for a night but for a month. I’ve even got the Swiss army knife my dad insisted on buying me for my thirteenth birthday. I have packed all this, I only realise this moment, because I am going to take my father up on his invitation. I’m going to drive up to the Cape. What’s more, I have no place to stay in Palmerston, nor have I contacted Hamish Lippleton, as I promised my father I would.
All of this knowledge at once puts me off, but my heartbeat races because I understand there is more still to know.
I start up the car, ease back into the street. There cannot be more, there can be nothing more at all. Whatever else I thought I was doing, I’m now not doing. I will not stop at Bruce and Joanne’s. What’s more, I will try to forget their house number.