Under the Influence

by Jacqueline Lunn

  Now, to the fun part: her hair. She opened her drawers and pulled out two mirrors, hairspray, hairbands and a small container of bobby pins. She swore she felt a new one last night just as she was going off to sleep. She faced her back to the bathroom mirror and looked at the back of her head with the large, round mirror in her hand, taking her time to tilt it to the exact right spot.

  ‘Okay,’ she said to herself, parting her hair at the back of her head with her free hand. It was such a shame, it had always been her ‘thing’: her thick, titian hair. She used to wash it and walk out the door and everyone would admire it, thinking she had come straight from the hairdresser’s. Even Rebecca was jealous of her hair. She asked to cut it for her once and spent an hour giving Sarah layers and a fringe, cutting it all off to above the shoulders. It was the best haircut she’d ever had. Girls at school complimented her on it. Her mum loved it. When she first started working, the women would tell her how they wished they had her hair.

  Of course, Sarah thought as she parted her hair and found another spot, my one physical trump card is faulty. Sarah had alopecia. Some days, she would wake up and there, scattered on the pillow, would be fresh hair, and on her head would be a bald spot the size of a ten-cent piece, perfectly smooth and round, like pieces of a baby’s bottom stuck onto her scalp.

  She had five of them spotted over her scalp at the moment. It took at least half an hour to brush and hairspray and bobby pin and tie up her hair so that she could hide them. She couldn’t get her hair wet with the boys when they went swimming. She had to be careful to avoid the wind. She never let Andrew run his fingers through her hair. She hadn’t been to a hairdresser’s in years; she coloured her hair at home and cut it too.

  ‘Oh, shit.’ Sarah spat out the bobby pin from the side of her mouth and ran to the phone downstairs. Her mobile was by the bed. Who calls on the landline any more? she thought as she leapt down a flight of stairs and lurched for the phone in the kitchen, landing on the replica navy aluminium stool simultaneously. ‘Hello. Sarah speaking.’

  Sarah was still sitting on the stool when Andrew arrived home half an hour later to get changed into his suit. She had finished her conversation with Eve ten minutes earlier and had been doodling flowers and arrows and houses with working chimneys on the back of an envelope ever since. She followed him upstairs and sat on the end of the bed as he changed. She didn’t say a word but was shaking her head.

  ‘Has something happened?’ Andrew said to the mirrored wardrobe doors.

  ‘I just hung up from Eve, just then,’ Sarah replied, smoothing down the bedcover. ‘Meg has a baby girl.’

  ‘What? Meg?’

  ‘No one in Tallow knew. Not her great-aunt or Penny. Why would they? They hadn’t even seen her in years, and they were the go-to people for Georgia for the funeral arrangements. She was going to bring the baby – Kat is her name, she’s five months – to Tallow last Monday. Thought she was leaving her baby for three days. Three days with the nanny while she got a head start on the house. She’d never left her before.’ Sarah’s voice caught in her throat and she pushed it out with a cough. ‘Five months old,’ she repeated, tears forming.

  ‘That poor baby,’ Andrew said as he rubbed Sarah’s back. ‘That poor baby. Meg’s even doing it when she’s dead. Shocking the shit out of everyone.’

  ‘Eve wants me to go to Tallow, Andrew. Tomorrow morning. I need to fly to Dubbo and she’ll pick me up from there. Because there’s a baby involved, the lawyers are asking for swiftness in relation to the will. I could get out of it. Say one of the boys has a fever. I won’t be needed for much. They could send me the information.’

  ‘Don’t you want to go?’

  ‘It’s not a good time. I know that. You’ve got work. You’ve already taken time off work this week.’ Sarah nodded at the tie in Andrew’s hand as confirmation of his busyness, of his inflexibility. ‘I won’t have time to organise a babysitter. Mum and Dad are overseas. A baby girl,’ Sarah said to the palms of her hands. ‘Why did she get in that bloody car?’

  ‘You should go, Sarah. I’ll take the day off. I will be fine with work. I will be fine with the boys. Don’t use us to stay.’ Andrew uttered this last sentence as he leant down to the skirting board to tidy up some imaginary error by the painters.

  ‘I’m not using the boys. Don’t say that. Why would you say that?’

  Andrew sighed. ‘Sometimes, you have to live life, Sarah, not just talk about it, or read about it online.’ He looked over at Sarah on the end of the bed, her hair flaming around her untamed, two of her bald patches visible today, and he changed his course. Honesty can make a man a good liar. ‘I just thought you had some kind of bond. You and Eve and Meg. Something more than old friends. You three went through a lot together at school. I know if something happened to you and I wasn’t around, I would want Meg or Eve to be there, if you know what I mean.’ Andrew went to turn but changed his mind and walked closer to his wife. ‘It’s important, Sarah. I think you should go.’

  Sarah was used to Andrew accepting her decisions. Sometimes, he might shake his head or play Xbox for a few hours, but he left her decisions alone. She was always grateful that he was an accepting man. This time, though, his stance threw her.

  She scanned a trio of black-and-white photos of her boys on her dresser, remembering the morning she had to dress them in denim bottoms and white shirts for the professional photographer. Next to them was a picture of her mother and father at the Opera House at a party for the Lord Mayor taken at least twenty years ago. She was fourteen when they went to that. She only found out they’d gone three weeks later when she was in the school library supposedly researching Judaism for history. There was a copy of a weekly glossy magazine – maybe it was one of the librarians’ – on a seat, and she picked it up and flicked through it. They were in the back-page social section: a picture of them laughing next to a picture of two Neighbours starlets. They looked so happy. Her mother looked beautiful. Eve had leant over Sarah’s shoulder, glanced at the photo and said she thought they looked like they needed to pee.

  ‘It was never that simple, Andrew. Three doesn’t work with girls. It was always Eve and Meg, and then me tagging along. Me trying so hard, and no matter what I did it was never enough with those two. I could never quite … I did some things, Andrew. I wasn’t always a good girl.’

  ‘Oh, now you’re talking,’ Andrew said, dropping his voice and raising his eyebrows.

  ‘Andrew, I’m serious,’ Sarah said, busying herself by putting away some errant shoes, showing him that he wasn’t taking this conversation seriously enough. ‘I did some things I shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Sarah.’ He bent down on his haunches beside her near a pile of shoeboxes. ‘You were a kid. Kids get things wrong. That’s how they learn. That’s what happens to every kid.’

  ‘What if you don’t learn?’

  ‘Well, you’re an idiot.’

  ‘Men see life in black and white. They don’t look back.’

  Andrew ignored her appraisal of his gender. ‘Sarah, I will be fine if you go. So go … if you want to. Don’t if you don’t want to. But don’t make it about me or the boys.’

  But her world was the boys and Andrew. She was the centre of this world. Not on the periphery, trying her hardest to be invited in, contorting herself into any shape she could so she could squeeze in a hole when someone was kicked out. Here, they all came to her. To her bed, to her kitchen, to her on the back deck when she was reading. They would grab her skirt, and they didn’t even know it. She was the centre here. She thought Andrew understood this. She was the centre.

  Sarah was on the verge of issuing a more refined list of reasons against and letting Andrew know she was upset with him re. ‘sometimes you have to live life’ when he walked over to the bedside, grabbed her unruly hair and kissed her on the top of her head, half on a bald spot. On the one hand, it was sweet and unexpected. On the other, it was intrusive and she hated the thought of his lips touching her hairle
ss bald spot. What must that feel like to him? She could feel the wetness from his kiss on her scalp as he left the room. For a second, she enjoyed its messiness, then she remembered she still hadn’t done her hair.

  She had spent the last five years making sure she did her hair carefully every morning. Of course, Andrew knew what was going on, and it wasn’t as noticeable at first – just one small patch here or there, easy to hide. At the beginning, he asked all the time if it was getting better, or how the new dermatologist in the city was going. Now, her alopecia was a part of life, just like when teeth started to go a bit yellow or the backs of hands got small sunspots on them. The doctors kept telling her it was rare but not unheard of for women to develop alopecia in their late twenties. There were many reasons, they would say, as they patted the back of her hand, and it would probably go away as fast as it came.

  She went to the bathroom and found the smooth spot she had first discovered last night. This one was going to be harder to cover; it wasn’t near a part and was behind her ear, all hairless and white and smooth. She pulled out the hairspray and some bobby pins and went to work, twisting, placing delicately and then spraying like crazy.

  ‘I don’t want you to be mad at me,’ Andrew said from the bathroom door.

  ‘I’m not mad. I’m doing my hair.’

  ‘I just want you to … to … not feel you are stuck here. To understand that we love you and we understand you have to go out, out there,’ he said, pointing in the direction of the main road outside.

  ‘I don’t feel stuck. This is what I want,’ Sarah said, pushing the nozzle of the hairspray down for one last blast. ‘Some of us don’t want to blow up the world. I’m happy with what I’ve got, Andrew.’

  ‘I know you are. I just don’t want you to miss out on stuff.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Sarah said, confused. She thought hard about what she was going to say next, because she wanted to keep talking like this. It had been a long time. ‘I’m going to Tallow, Andrew. I should be there to help Eve and for Meg. Life can be a shit. A baby without a mother is shit. I’ll go tomorrow. I know you will be fine … better than fine with the boys.’

  Andrew hugged her and she noticed her breasts pressing hard against his chest. He lifted her up onto the bathroom vanity and kissed her fiercely, pushing her shoulder blades into the mirror. Legs apart, hands on the cold, stone benchtop, Sarah watched Andrew walk away, and for the first time in years she felt like having sex.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  At 3.30 on Friday afternoon, the two women were holding hands, and Eve was wondering how much longer she would have to stand outside the petrol station on the gravel and keep Sarah’s pudgy hand in hers. It was like dough, like wet dough wrapping around her fingers and palm. She noticed that Sarah had done her fingernails in a tasteful pale pink, but her fingers were stubby and practical below the windows of gloss, and they gripped hard onto Eve. It felt so forced and dramatic, so childlike and obvious that twice Eve bent down to fix her sandal strap to break the grip and twice Sarah reclaimed her hand when Eve returned to standing. Eve could feel a fury growing inside her. She felt like a fool, holding hands with the needy fat girl.

  Every time the small group heard the hum of a car engine, they would all turn expectantly, hoping to see the lawyers or the father. The father hadn’t arrived in Tallow yet. Eve had been sure when she woke up from her afternoon sleep the day before that he would have checked in and be staying in a room down the hall – some tattooed, skinny, shirtless idiot smoking a cigarette out on the verandah and later at the pub conveniently being the last to offer to buy a round of drinks – but no such luck.

  Her uneasiness grew when Sarah released her hand and they met the lawyers from O’Connor and Swift. Their makeshift office was inside a garage attached to the petrol station because Timothy O’Connor, the lawyer in the grey suit, was in his seventh year at AA and a born-again Christian and refused to meet in the pub at 3.30 pm. This was the best that Georgia could do.

  The cavernous makeshift conference room had been given a sweep, but the cement floors were still dotted with oil stains, and pushed and stacked in the corner was a mound of rubber strips, bolts, screws, metal frames and other debris from sick cars and tractors. An old Ford was suspended on a hoist at the back, and there was a wall of orderly tools stuck to a board in the front. There was the aroma of burnt oil and cold steel. The garage door had been lifted open in an attempt to let some fresh air circulate.

  In the centre of the room, a large ping-pong table, covered with two pale-blue sheets, could fit fourteen adults around it but today only needed to accommodate six. There was no father figure in the room. White fold-up plastic chairs fitted low under the table, reminding Eve of family get-togethers when she was a child and the top of her head was the only part of her body above the table, so she couldn’t see what was on her plate.

  There had been many times in Eve’s life where she felt like a fraud, like someone was going to tap her on the shoulder and tell her she didn’t belong, could she please leave now: when she started studying at the conservatory; when she was asked to play in London; the first time she joined in a conversation after rehearsal at the Royal Opera about the vision of the concert master; when Richard took her to a party and she spoke earnestly about real-estate prices in Marylebone. Sitting close to the floor around a covered ping-pong table with some A4 sheets in her hand, Sam to her left, Sarah to her right wiping her face with a hanky, Eve was waiting for the tap.

  After spending way too long trying to put her legs somewhere under the table where they didn’t bang into anyone else’s, Eve discovered how short major life events could be. The funeral had been six minutes; the reading of the will was barely ten. Time elapsed should at least come close to marking the gravity of the event, Eve thought when it was over, smoothing down pieces of white paper with neat black type on them on the table and uncrossing her legs carefully.

  ‘Okay, then,’ Griffith Swift said, standing up, collecting the papers in front of him.

  Meg’s cousin, Penny, pushed her chair out, and the sound of plastic and cement scraping together made everyone look her way. ‘Sorry, I was just getting my handbag,’ she said, stretching her lips downwards into a physical ‘Oops’ apology to the heads turned her way.

  ‘Can we call you later when we have had a chance to talk, think?’ Sam asked Griffith Swift moments later as they all stood near the exit. Behind them, the heat shimmered on the bitumen road, beckoning, flirting and forming mountains and valleys, rolling its way nowhere.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ he said in an avuncular tone that matched his grey moustache. ‘Logically, I think the best course of action is to come back to me with a response in the next three days. Everyone needs time to work out the right course of action for themselves, but there is a baby involved and it’s best she starts her …’ – he paused, looking for soft words in the garage – ‘new life as soon as possible.’

  Sam nodded in agreement. Sarah’s head darted from the A4 pieces of paper to the old man offering wisdom. Eve stood off to the side and wished Griffith Swift had worn longer socks. Then she wouldn’t have seen his ankle hair when he crossed his legs, and maybe then she would have had more confidence in him. Maybe then she would have believed that what he was saying was real.

  Georgia, who had been waiting patiently outside the makeshift conference room, walked the lawyers down the road back to their car and waved them off as if they were on their way to Bali. Eve, Sarah, Sam and Penny stood in a row between two petrol bowsers that had bright-red tops and cream bodies. The car that Sam had to leave beside the highway, causing him to miss Meg’s funeral, was parked outside the garage near the fence.

  They all watched Georgia march back up the footpath towards them, a crimson dress today, just so she never blended into the landscape. Her little feet came to a stop in front of the straight line. ‘Obviously, this is a personal matter, so I will leave you all to it. If you need me for anything, anything,’ Georgia said in
a suitably concerned tone to the line of people squinting against the cloudless blue sky and not moving, ‘just ask.’

  ‘Penny. I’m sorry.’ Sarah was the first to speak. ‘I’m sure there’s something you can do. You’re family. We’d understand.’

  Penny took a step back and put her hand over her eyes to shield them from the glare of the sun. ‘I’m fifty-six, Sarah. My kids are grown up and have kids of their own. I’ve seen Meg twice in the last ten years, and before that we would catch up at Christmas. Our parents weren’t the closest of siblings. We weren’t the closest of cousins. Who is, these days?

  ‘She grew up with you. You knew her, and she obviously knew you. You were her family too. I respect her wishes, and I know I will be part of Kat’s life like I was part of Meg’s.’

  Meg had made a simple will when Katherine Laura Patterson was two months old. The ‘Laura’ was after her grandmother; the ‘Katherine’ was because she liked it. There was just the two of them, and Meg knew you had to be extra careful when numbers were so small they were unable to hold you up.

  There was no father on the birth certificate. Meg hadn’t offered any details. Not one. Whether he was dead or alive. Where he was from. Ben Heeley, it had turned out, was a shearer who had shown unswerving loyalty to Meg’s father in his final years. He hadn’t been able to make it to the reading, and Meg had left him her father’s 1807 edition of The Complete Grazier, as well as a leather-bound copy of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, plus an old biscuit tin her dad used to keep keys and odds and sods in. It must have been a private joke. ‘For his loyalty and love of Bill’, it said on the will.

  Meg had asked Eve to be Kat’s guardian, and Sarah was nominated if Eve was unable or unwilling to fulfil these wishes. Only the second time the language strayed from legal terminology and it was clear that Kat wasn’t a car or a piece of jewellery was when Meg used the phrase ‘my beautiful daughter’. Three words. My beautiful daughter.