Under the Influence

by Jacqueline Lunn

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Sam peered out the sheer curtain of the motel and felt like he was fifteen again. After a day of vomiting and dry-retching, Eve was desperate for a headache tablet and had gone to reception to try to beg, borrow or steal one. He watched her pacing beside a faded red four-wheel drive in the car park, and when she turned towards his window he quickly released the dust-impacted curtain from his grip and ducked to the ground; he didn’t want Eve to know he was looking. It was juvenile, but it made his pulse quicken, which was better than lying on a single bed in an old motel room counting the number of bricks running up the wall and wondering what he was doing here and who Eve reminded him of.

  She was different to the Eve he had constructed in his head from the stories Meg told as they lay on the couch exhausted from their fourteen-hour shifts, barely managing to fork instant noodles into the sides of their mouths. Once, he remembered watching Meg hold her noodles in the air above her mouth, letting them dangle there for too long, as she conjured up images of her and Eve lying on the floor of the boarding house doing up their skinny jeans with coathangers or how, when they travelled to India during university, it was Eve who had the iron stomach and Meg who was a glass guts. Meg was so ill she couldn’t eat. She was vomiting and had diarrhoea, and at one stage she could hardly walk. It was Eve who took them to the airport and told the Qantas staff about a dying mother and got them home on a plane early.

  And here was this Eve he had heard so much about in the car park in front of him. It didn’t seem to tally with Meg’s picture the way, last night at the pub, her no-man’s-land English accent became more pronounced when she spoke to the girl serving behind the bar, the way she leant so far sideways, nearly toppling off her stool, when the old man with hands like rocks stopped on his way to the cigarette machine and began a dissertation on the joys of youth. Squatting behind a blind in a motel room a day after Meg’s funeral on this hot afternoon in Gilgandra, Sam realised that perhaps now wasn’t the ideal time to get his red pen out and mark a personal report card. Meg and Eve had a history, and history made people believe in mirages. Boarding school, Sam imagined, didn’t help.

  Sam had his own version of boarding and hated it. When he was sixteen, after the bus was cancelled from Merriwa to Muswellbrook– a town an hour and a half away, which held the nearest high school – his parents sent him to a boarding house, a small, pale-blue weatherboard with three rooms for board on the New England Highway. Every morning, he would make his bed carefully with the thin sheets and do some chores for Mr and Mrs Bourke before heading out the door with the wonky dragon knocker and walking for forty-five minutes to school. In the evening, it was the same but reversed. He didn’t mind the long walk on the way home. On the weekends, his mum or dad would come and take him home.

  They never said as much, but he knew boarding at the Bourkes’ was costing his parents a fortune. He was eating an awful lot of rabbit on the weekends when he went home. When at the Bourkes’, Sam spent most of his time in his room studying or cleaning for them, or avoiding Warren Mendhelson, the drunk fifty-eight-year-old boarder in the next room. After nine months of boarding – when Sam told his dad that Warren kept walking in on him in the shower and, one morning, after a breakfast of cornflakes with milk that the Bourkes didn’t want to go to waste but was half an hour off being sour, Warren walked into the shower and simply touched Sam’s penis as though it was a photo frame that needed to be moved a little to the right – Sam was told he didn’t have to board any more. Sam’s mother borrowed a car and drove the three-hour round trip to school every morning and picked him up from the Muswellbrook library every night. Sam heard later that his father, who had never hurt anyone in his life, had never caused a fuss, walked up to Warren outside the pale-blue weatherboard house on the highway, trucks and cars whirring past, and punched him in the face. The next year, a new teacher starting at the school moved half an hour away from Sam’s place on a small but well-formed farm, and he caught a lift to school with her.

  Sam tilted his head like a dog hearing something peculiar and looked again at the woman pacing in the car park. The glare from the sun on the bitumen made him grab his sunglasses, and he watched as Eve took shelter from it in the shade of the manager’s carport. He tried to remember in more detail Meg’s long, winding stories. He could only grab their obvious edges; he had lost their fine delicacy.

  He did remember clearly that when he last saw Meg, a few months before he left for New Guinea, at an inner-city bar in Sydney, she told him about her latest job and her frustration at the lack of resources and volume of paperwork.

  ‘We need doctors and nurses, human beings with time, not a new glossy pamphlet on ten ways to know he’s really beating the crap out of you.’

  She told him she liked locum work: dropping in to small towns, filling in for the doctor while he or she went on holiday to Bali or Norfolk Island or an extended sabbatical after years of seven-day weeks, or overseas to study for six months. They were easy placements to get – not many doctors wanted to work out in the bush.

  ‘Don’t you get tired of setting up, getting to know the practice and the people and then leaving?’ he asked. They liked discussing work. This was one of those rare times when the work became the personal.

  ‘No, Sam.’ Her voice was split with disappointment. ‘I like getting out there and working. It’s good for everyone. Some of the guys I’m replacing are wonderful, and some are so stuck in their ways it’s frightening. Do you know I had one old guy in Densen who refused to give out prescriptions for the pill unless the girl was over eighteen? Did the town have a higher than usual population of teenage mothers? Bloody hell, it did.

  ‘It’s good for these towns to have someone come through who does things differently, who’s new. I don’t know … someone who hasn’t known them for a million years and doesn’t care about their history, the town gossip. It’s important.’

  It was a Sunday afternoon, and the bar began filling up with small groups pretending they were going to have a quick drink – maybe two – and then go home. Sam and Meg started feeling the bodies behind them, stacking up in twos and threes. Some larger packs took long tables. Six men sat at a table to the right, all drinking Japanese beer, with four wearing the most interesting eyeglasses. Sam was conscious of their confidence, their loud voices, their surety when they ordered from the bar, the obvious sophistication that sat on the bridges of their noses. It made him like Meg more.

  ‘You must want to stay sometimes,’ he said. ‘It must get tiring moving.’

  ‘I love what I do. You know that more than anyone.’ Meg stopped stirring her drink with her straw and stared so hard at Sam it would have been rude if he looked away. A large burst of laughter crashed over them from behind. Sam turned. Meg didn’t. ‘It’s honest out there,’ Meg said to the back of Sam’s head. He turned around. ‘It’s hard sometimes, but it’s honest. It is what it is, Sam. You know that.’

  He nodded. A woman pushed past to order a bottle of wine and kept turning around to her friends and yelling how many glasses did they need, holding up her fingers as she did so. Every time she turned, she bumped Meg’s head with her elbow, seemingly oblivious to the connection.

  Meg hopped off her stool, ignoring the woman with elbows she didn’t know she had, and moved closer to Sam. She leant in. ‘Why is it so hard for people to believe that I don’t want to settle down on the …’ – Meg paused while she searched for the words and balanced a straw across her glass – ‘bloody North Shore or something and spend my days dealing with people who need sleeping pills for their flight to Paris?’

  ‘As if I would be saying that to you.’ Sam kept his eyes right on Meg as he spoke. He was not going to let her get away with saying that to him, of all people. ‘You know what you’re doing. I just thought it might get …’ He debated whether to say it, moved his small, square, white napkin-cum-coaster to the right and said it. ‘Lonely.’

  ‘You know what? I don’t reckon all of us were b
orn to be around people all the time. They can make you do strange things.’

  Then she leant over her stool to grab her handbag and ordered another drink for them both. She was drinking lime and sodas, and Sam deliberately made no mention of the alcohol-free beverage when he knew she wasn’t working that night. He waited for Meg to continue her thoughts, but she kept her eyes fixed on the rudimentary movements of the man pouring and mixing behind the bar.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, giving up. ‘What’s next for you?’

  ‘I’m off to the Territory for a while and then don’t know. We’ll see, I guess. We’ll just have to see.’

  It sounded like a riddle, but Sam knew not to push. When she wanted him to know more, she would tell him; it was simple. That was how she did it, out of the blue. You would ask if there were any spare batteries in the house and she would answer it was her father’s birthday today.

  ‘He would have been fifty-eight.’

  And Sam stopped poking at the back of his transistor radio, and he sat on the arm of the couch and looked at Meg.

  And she said, ‘God. What would he think of me now?’

  That week, Meg was hiding from some guy who kept knocking on the door in the morning, in the middle of the night, at lunch, demanding his skull-engraved Zippo lighter back from Meg. He was obsessed with his lighter; it had sentimental value, the man opined from outside the front door. Sam could never work out how someone as smart as Meg could be so stupid. When they first lived with each other, they were flatmates. For two years, they lived side by side, and then one day they were friends. It was clear that Meg chose her friends carefully; her boyfriends she didn’t choose at all. At work, no one would have a clue of how chaotic her life became sometimes.

  ‘I don’t have his bloody lighter. I’ll give him money to get another one,’ Meg said.

  ‘I don’t think that’s the point.’

  ‘Dad wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry at me.’

  Sam had never met Bill. Bill had died before Meg let him in. He saw the framed pictures in Meg’s room and heard how Bill liked to call her Meggie, and how he used to eat her lamb chops and say they were perfect even when they were burnt, and he never missed visiting her during term when she was boarding. Not once.

  After a fourteen-hour shift at the hospital, when Sam opened a cupboard door and three glasses fell out and smashed all over the kitchen floor, Meg wandered out of the lounge room and helped him to clean it up. She told him, as they walked down the narrow side path of the house in the middle of the night to the rubbish bin, adjusting their eyes to the dark, that her dad got sick and he wouldn’t admit it, and by the time she discovered how bad it was, it was too late. Next to the bin with the yellow lid for recycling, a few stars above, the neighbour’s kitchen light was on.

  ‘You make decisions, the next day comes and you can’t change them. And they change everything.’

  Meg still had the dustpan and brush in her hands. Sam took them from her, emptied the contents into the bin and she let him. She didn’t move. The wind blew her hair in front of her face.

  ‘Everyone makes bad decisions,’ Sam said, not moving either. ‘He probably didn’t know how to tell you. No one’s perfect.’

  That was glib, and he wanted to take it back immediately. He may as well have started tap-dancing and used the dustpan as a jaunty hat.

  ‘He shouldn’t have had to tell me,’ she said. And she walked back up the side path in the dark to the kitchen door.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Eve said, throwing a row of tablets in a blister packet on the bed.

  She headed into the bathroom to fill a glass with water. ‘I hate drinking water from the bathroom tap,’ she called back to Sam. ‘Does it come from the same pipes? I bet they’re different pipes. Not drinking pipes.’

  Eve appeared from the bathroom, popped the tablets from the blister pack into the palm of her hand and threw them down her mouth. She drank the water quickly.

  ‘In twenty minutes, it should be gone,’ she said, leaning back against the wall and closing her eyes for a second.

  ‘You okay?’ Sam asked. He could not imagine one friend from school coming to his funeral. Most of his class were ditch-diggers now, except for Brian, who was a bouncer at the Cross in Sydney, and Allan, who became a colour consultant.

  ‘I’m fine.’ Eve moved to her bag and began unzipping. ‘Are you hungry? I’m starving.’

  ‘Yeah, I haven’t eaten since breakfast.’

  ‘Oh, god, that’s my fault. The woman with alcohol poisoning. I’m sorry. Is it too much to ask to have a shower before we go in search of dinner? I smell.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Eve pulled out some jeans, a short-sleeve white T-shirt, her cleanser and moisturiser and put them on the bed beside her, quickly shoving her underpants under her folded shirt. A veteran of public ablutions, she kept the conversation rolling on about what to eat and where to eat until she closed the bathroom door behind her. They agreed it had to be a walk away because they weren’t getting back in the car unless they had to flee the town. They also agreed not to cause any incidents in which they would be required to flee the town. Hungover and jetlagged, both funeral fresh, they felt it wouldn’t be a hard promise to keep.

  When Eve stepped out of the bathroom, she was all dressed from the waist up, just like a newsreader. A towel tied like a sarong was on her lower half.

  ‘Left my jeans on the bed,’ she said, crossing the room, not knowing whether to take them back to the bathroom or slip them on, without an obvious thought, in front of Sam.

  She slipped them on under her towel, unable to muster the expertise of a surfer straight from work changing into swimmers beside his car. Before Sam looked intently out the window at the car park that hadn’t changed, Eve’s towel opened briefly at the front as she turned to face away from him, and Sam caught a glimpse of fine marks across the top of her thighs.

  ‘Fell out of a tree when I was ten,’ Eve said, unable to miss his reactive inhale. She stuck her bottom out in a vain attempt at anchoring her towel around her waist and pulling up her jeans in one motion.

  ‘Must have been a bad accident.’

  ‘I was trying to keep up with my big brother. Misjudged a tree. Came off second best. Lucky I didn’t break an arm. Usual story.’

  Eve neatly folded and packed away her clothes before blow-drying her wet hair. As always, it didn’t take long. The smell of lavender filled the room and so did Sam’s voice, filling in Eve about the fact lawyers were meant to call and send documents in the next few days. Eve was on a plane back to London in ten days. She was spending a few days with her parents, catching up with some old friends in Sydney, then it was home and back to normal life. Sam seemed like a very capable man who could handle the details. She’d never been any good at details – she was always being told that.

  When Sam moved the conversation on to Georgia Thomas and how she was keen for him to start as soon as possible in what was passing as a part-time medical practice in Tallow, Eve was mentally pulled back into the motel room. She swallowed hard. ‘She’s full-on,’ she said. ‘She took over all of the arrangements, and Meg had only been in town for a few days. I think she loved the drama of it. Acting as though Meg meant something to her. People like that drive me nuts.’

  ‘I suppose someone had to do it, but she’s a strange one,’ Sam agreed. ‘She called me and told me about Meg, and only when I had hung up the phone did I realise that I had agreed to help her out with the medical practice until they sorted something out. Maybe I was still on Papua New Guinea time. I spent more time on arrangements for the job than I did talking about Meg. I missed Meg’s funeral and Georgia met me as I came to the wake, and she was straight on about arrangements again, and it gave me the shits, actually. She’s called five times this afternoon, but I just can’t deal with her at the moment.’

  It was good to have someone alive to be angry at.

  By the time Eve and Sam shut the door of their motel room, it w
as just after 7 pm, and the sun had lost its vicious streak. The air was fresh, and everything was standing still: the houses, the trees, the worn row of shops on the main road.

  ‘Chinese? What do you think?’ Eve said.

  ‘I’ll eat anything.’

  ‘Do you ever eat in restaurants by yourself, Sam?’ Eve asked as they took their seats in an empty Chinese restaurant that boasted a menu that included Chinese food, Thai food and steak and chips.

  ‘Yeah, when I travel I do. I take a book or just look at people. I suppose you would do it all the time when you are on tour.’

  ‘No, I don’t. I was just thinking that. I always organise to eat with someone, even if I have nothing to say to her, even if she is Sienna the flute-playing cow who always makes me feel like I should be teaching five-year-olds the recorder rather than having a seat on tour. If I can’t find someone, I’ll get room service and eat by myself.’ Eve was surprised but not silenced by her honesty. ‘I can’t believe it. I’m thirty-four and I ate in a restaurant by myself for the first time two nights ago at the pub in Tallow. First time. I never have a drink in a bar by myself either, unless I am waiting for someone to arrive at any minute, and then, I don’t know, I make it clear I am waiting. When Meg …’

  Eve took a good look at Sam and stopped herself mid-sentence to complain about the smell of the carpet. ‘It smells wet or like dog or something,’ she said, sniffing.

  By now, the waiter was hovering. She was sixteen and not yet aware of those five minutes where she should give customers another five minutes. Eve was glad of her inexperience or inertia, whatever it was that made her stand next to the table and look down at them so they had to stop talking. They ordered two glasses of lemonade and the safe option of fried rice with no prawns, and Eve changed the topic to the much more benign waters of returning to Australia after living overseas, their work, their families. Sam had gone to school at Muswellbrook High; Eve’s dad had a chemist at Muswellbrook. There could have been some old family friend, some young friend, they had in common who needed a lot of cough medicine.