Under the Influence

by Jacqueline Lunn

  Meg had no assets to divide. The farm had gone long ago when Bill got sick. It was just Kat.

  ‘It will be okay,’ Penny announced, before telling them she would see them all later that night at the hotel. She turned to look at the three in a row and put her sunglasses on but still squinted behind them. ‘This is what she wanted. Meg always knew what she wanted. Well, she actually probably wanted to live a while longer and see her daughter grow up. That family, they’ve had no bloody luck. This is what the poor girl wanted.’

  Two optimists walked past the petrol station, discussing which mobile-phone carrier would eventually have the best coverage out here. The boy with a fleshy face and baseball cap pulled up his long shorts as he passed and then let them fall again past his underpants. Gravity always wins.

  ‘I don’t know whether Penny’s upset or relieved,’ Sarah said. ‘Not naming the father on the birth certificate – there was just Meg and Kat. She, of all people, knew that was risky.’

  ‘Maybe she had no choice but to take the risk,’ Sam answered. ‘There must be a father out there. Could we find him?’

  ‘Good luck,’ Sarah answered. ‘Think about it. If she didn’t name him, she doesn’t want us to find him. Maybe she couldn’t find him herself. Who knows now? If she doesn’t want us to find him, she would have covered her tracks. You know that. She made a will with a new baby, while most people aren’t even thinking straight. She was clear. Very clear. These are her wishes. It’s not the time to go on a wild-goose chase. We need to sort this out, concentrate on Kat for now.’

  Sarah felt a surge of command. Sam was looking at her, taking in what she was saying as though she knew what to do.

  Eve tried to fold her bulky set of A4 documents and shove them into a gold handbag she normally reserved for intimate dinners in London. Her floral dress caught itself on a momentary gust. She smoothed it down and wished she could catch the sun under it to warm herself up. It was thirty-five degrees and her insides were cold. When she spoke, she didn’t have a clue what she was saying. ‘We need to have a think and a talk and …’

  Someone began moving west, and they all walked west. In single file, they ascended the concrete steps of the covered stand, the Des Mullins Stand, which housed eleven rows of slatted wooden seats, until they came to the second-last row. Sarah sat on the bench below, and Sam and Eve sat together above, overlooking a greenish field dotted with signs explaining that the novel greenish tinge came from bore water below the earth. Fresh graffiti in giant letters on the wall behind them read ‘Skud is a Fag’, with a bubble penis sporting an eye on the tip of the shaft. The graffiti was the size of a man. Sarah patted her shining face with a hanky.

  ‘Eve? Eve?’ Sam looked at Eve and touched her shoulder to reinforce the attempt at connection. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes, yes. That grass is a strange shade of green. It’s not right. It doesn’t belong out here. Georgia will have plans to fix this place up. She’ll see the potential. Maybe a casino?’

  ‘Eve, what are you going to do?’

  A car drove past and hooted its horn. A boy stuck his head out the back window and yelled at the three figures huddled in the stands. ‘Save us some ganja, guys!’

  ‘I need to talk to Richard. He’s away skiing. I can call him tomorrow. Remember? Remember I told you? He’s away. Skiing. The snow is good there in January. Reliable. Powder.’

  Perched on a crossbeam high above, safely in the corner, was a bird’s nest, emitting screeches, frantic chirps and strange whistling sounds that pinged around the stand.

  Sarah looked up at them both. ‘Eve, you need to think this through. A five-month-old baby in London. Richard. Your work. I’m here. I have a cot. I have the boys. I don’t have any pink clothes.’ Eve’s head was down; she was tracing the lines in the cement floor with a stick. Sam was looking straight at Sarah. Eve was making herself small. ‘This is ridiculous,’ Sarah said. ‘Having a discussion in a garage over who walks away with a human being … Are you going to say anything, Eve?’

  A scratching sound from the stick on cement and the hungry chicks in the nest above answered.

  Sarah was sitting up straight, her head darting this way and that. Since the moment she had walked into the garage and the will was read, she had felt a sense of purpose she couldn’t contain. It was creating an energy inside her that was turning euphoric. ‘Eve, I can do anything that’s needed. What I mean is that I understand if you are unable to do this. This is big. This is a decision you have to make. You have to make it, Eve. At least we have each other. Eve?’

  Sarah patted her hair at the crown and tucked in an errant bra strap that had fallen down her arm. ‘Eve! Say something.’

  Still nothing. Sarah’s voice faltered, and its shiny tautness splintered into a million little sharp pieces. ‘This is about a baby. It’s about a new, little baby who has no mother, and you have been chosen. If you can’t do this, it’s not fair to …’

  An ant had been zipping up Eve’s calf, and she flicked it away with her fingers.

  ‘This is a gift, Eve.’

  ‘Oh, Sarah, it’s not a gift. This is a shitty, shitty situation.’

  ‘Don’t say that when there is a baby involved.’

  ‘Sarah, stop. You can’t fix this with some fairy floss, chocolate sprinkles and sweet words, and you can’t pretend this hasn’t happened either, so we’re all stuffed. She’s going to grow up never knowing her mother. Probably never knowing her father. Kat’s going to get the B team. You and me, Sarah, we’re the B team.’

  ‘Why would you say that, Eve?’

  Eve didn’t answer.

  ‘Why would you say that?’ Sarah screamed the words so violently that her face went red and three birds took flight from the nest, hitting the roof before shaking themselves off and flying away into the sky. A brown, furry hatchling fell and landed on the cement in the corner near the bin. It didn’t move. Sam stood up in front of the drawn penis, not knowing what he should do.

  ‘Don’t,’ Sarah said firmly, coming down a step before Sam could get near. ‘Don’t.’

  The energy that was propelling Sarah left her body with her scream, and she swiped for her handbag, grabbing it cleanly. ‘Where are you, Eve? What kind of person have you become?’

  Sarah didn’t expect an answer and started for the steps. Then she turned and looked up at Eve, who was still sitting with her knees together and her back hunched over and her head poking forwards like some kind of startled bird. Still with that stick in her hand. ‘If you do this, Eve, you have to be sure, because you have a choice. You have me. You have to know you can give Kat what she needs. That you can do this.’

  Sam stood between the two women, unsure of what he was standing between.

  ‘Maybe the best thing to do is for everyone to speak to their boyfriends, husbands, get away from each other, have a think, a rest, and meet tomorrow,’ he said in a tone that made them both want to hit him. He put out his hand to help Eve up. She didn’t move.

  A crow swooped under cover and perched on a beam above, its little eyes taking in the spider under the seat, the woman holding the stick, the crust of a sandwich swarming with ants directly below, and then the hatchling unable to move, lying near a cigarette butt. Sarah caught the black wings out of the corner of her eye, and it put her off balance for a second. Then she grabbed the stick out of Eve’s hands, surprising herself. ‘This is how it’s turned out,’ she said, throwing the stick down the row of seats. ‘We were always going to pay, Eve. Always. Hopefully, this is the end of it. Then we can start again. I’m going back to my room.’

  It took Sarah’s stout body two steps to go down each concrete landing, giving the impression she was incredibly uncoordinated. As Eve watched her walking away, she saw the glossy black crow spread its wings and arch its back on a perch above Sarah’s left shoulder. The crow paused as though it might change its mind, then it swooped past Sarah’s back, its wings making a full whooping sound, diving with such grace and strength, a
nd snatched the hatchling in its beak, turned and flew away into the blue.

  ‘Oh my god,’ Sarah said, stopping, putting her hand over her eyes and following the crow’s flight. ‘What did that crow have in its beak?’

  ‘A baby bird,’ Eve replied, her eyes on the disappearing crow too. ‘A hatchling had fallen over there.’ Eve pointed to a patch of cement that held no evidence of anything unusual other than that people couldn’t be bothered to use bins.

  ‘No,’ Sarah said, putting her hand over her mouth. ‘That is so cruel.’

  Eve remembered Bill pulling a stillborn lamb out of its mother. The mother was walking around the paddock, head down, nibbling on grass, with her dead baby, its long limbs slack and dangling, half-in, half-out of her body at the rear.

  ‘It’s sad, girls, I know, but it is what it is,’ he said, his gloved hands covered in blood. Eve was standing behind Meg, clutching the back of her T-shirt. ‘That’s nature for you. Sometimes it’s not fair.’

  ‘That’s nature for you, Sarah,’ Eve repeated.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Two more boxes and three enviro bags and Eve would be finished unpacking her earthly goods into Richard’s flat. She could then officially say she was a resident of Marylebone. She had already found homes for the contents of two suitcases, a vanity, an overnight case, four boxes and her cello – not a huge amount for a thirty-two-year-old. She had left her bed, TV and dining table for the flatmate who was going to take her room in Notting Hill.

  Eve walked down the stairs to the kitchen and simply revelled in having to walk downstairs to a kitchen. There were three bedrooms over two floors. The kitchen was on the ground floor, adjoining a combined living and dining room, and a guest bathroom was discreetly tucked away nearby. There were French doors leading to a small courtyard with a bench seat and table and apple tree – the perfect reading nook this summer.

  Eve opened the first box and found piles of sheet music in cardboard folders, some hardback biographies, a few favourite novels, some travel brochures from Vienna and Stockholm, and two wooden spoons. She walked around the flat, inserting her novels and biographies in the bookshelves, pretending they had always belonged. She noticed a photo album that looked exactly like a book and pulled it out.

  There was Richard, standing in his ski gear in the French Alps. She could see the long, grey shadow on the white snow of the person taking the picture. The shadow had long hair and a small waist. It was a woman. Eve thought it must be Richard’s girlfriend before her: Danielle. She had heard about her at dinner parties. Her name would be included in stories and then swallowed when the storyteller realised he was mentioning a previous girlfriend in front of the new one or in front of Richard.

  Richard was with Danielle for over two years, and there were no photos of her anywhere, no evidence, no pieces of furniture that were hers or presents from her that were his. Three photos from the album had a person cut out of them. She flicked the plastic pages of holiday snaps and studied closely a photo at the back, which was of a group of people at a picnic charging their champagne glasses. The woman leaning back on her elbows in a white dress had her head cut out of the shot. That was her too. Eve just knew it. The mysterious decapitated Danielle. Eve had asked Richard about her, and he’d said she was delusional, she made things up. Then he’d said he didn’t want to talk about her again; she wasn’t worth it. She hated the idea of Richard with another woman and slid the album back in the bookshelf exactly where she had found it.

  Crossing her legs on the floor with a glass of wine tucked behind her knee, she peered into the final box. After this, it would all be finished; she would have moved in. She breathed in and out, in and out, and it made her feel giddy and victorious. She steadied herself and stared at the painting in the dining room of a horse, its neck straining, its mouth half-open, leaping over a hedge, its rider leaning forwards, gripping the reins, and made a mental note to get rid of it as soon as possible and replace it with something less … less … severe.

  The smell of roasting capsicum drifted in from the kitchen. Eve withdrew more music and a folder containing four-year-old bills and receipts. She put her hands around the bottom of the pile and felt three photo albums.

  She took a sip and turned a page, looking at herself six months after arriving in London, twenty-four years old, wearing a long, red sweater and a mustard-coloured coat over the top, with black jeans. She looked like a human dagwood dog. Her brother had bet her that within a year of living in London she would put on two stone and start smoking. All the girls from Australia did, he said. She didn’t disappoint, but within three years, and after giving up pints of cider because an evening swimming in its soft, amber glow had seen her somehow ending up in a church graveyard in Reading, rolling over four or five dead souls and laughing so hard she had to pee in a bush, the weight dropped off, and now she only smoked at parties when there was nothing else to do.

  She turned the crackling pages, and there was Meg. There they both were on a holiday in Vietnam in their second year at university. Both glistening and wearing singlet tops and shorts, drinking beer around a small table, tanned shoulders touching for the photo. Even Eve had a slight tan. There they were again; someone had taken this one when they were unaware on a boat on a river with rice fields in the background, just their profiles in the shadow, their features hidden, their noses nearly touching, deep in conversation. She would call Meg soon to tell her the deed was done and it was now official. Meg was talking about visiting, about how maybe they would travel to Turkey next year. Maybe then Meg would get that bug out of her system and settle in one place.

  After Eve finished putting the remainder of her possessions into hall cupboards or bedroom drawers, she carried the empty and flattened boxes to the communal bins downstairs, saying hello to a neighbour on her way. She busied herself in the kitchen peeling the blistered skin of the roasted capsicum, grating parmesan, chopping onion and chilli and garlic, blanching asparagus, breaking and beating eggs to make a frittata.

  The table was set, a few non-scented candles at the end, and Richard admired the colours in the frittata in the oven when he arrived home. Another glass of wine dangled in her fingers as Richard told her an amusing anecdote about his PA while opening his mail.

  He stood in front of his painting of a horse, creating the illusion that it was about to leap over his left shoulder and into Eve’s chest.

  ‘… and then George wonders why I didn’t take him to a meeting with Harrods this afternoon. It drives me nuts. He’s put on so much weight he doesn’t have an Adam’s apple. I’ve looked. I’ve studied his neck when he talks – he’s lost a piece of his anatomy and he’s okay with it. Just accepts it. Would you go on like nothing has happened if you couldn’t find your right eye?’

  ‘He’s a happy man, Richard.’ Eve laughed and placed a hand on his back, telling him that he should calm down and be seated for a dinner of frittata and salad.

  ‘Back to work tomorrow?’ Richard asked, finishing his dessert.

  ‘God, yes. It’s been lovely mooching around, taking my time to unpack and get sorted, cooking dinner.’ It had surprised Eve how much she had enjoyed playing house. Probably because she knew her playing had a limited lifespan. ‘I meant to say, I have a wedding to do next Saturday, so I won’t make it to Susan’s.’

  ‘That’s a shame. It’s going to be a good turnout. Anthony does a great lunch. He’s almost maniacal about it. I think he spends six months organising it, sourcing ingredients, deciding on the menu, working out the positioning of guests. Poor thing.’

  ‘I wish I could come,’ Eve said, meaning it. A few traffic noises made their way across the table, and, even though Eve had made a conscious decision not to eat all her ice cream, she looked down at her bowl and it was empty.

  ‘Well, you always could come. You don’t have to work so much any more, Eve. You’re not paying rent and the rest. You don’t have to work so hard.’

  Eve’s fingers ran along the side of the
walnut dining table, feeling the grain and the knots. It was so big and imposing for just the two of them. ‘I want to contribute, Richard.’ Once, in their six months together, Richard had let her pay for dinner at Thai Me to the Moon. ‘I want to pay rent and my share of the bills, and …’

  ‘Eve, you don’t need to. That’s one of the reasons human beings cohabit, to combine strengths and resources. It’s the old “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”. It doesn’t hurt that it makes things cheaper, too.’

  It had been a running discussion since Richard had asked Eve to move in with him: what Eve should contribute financially, how they would divide up the pounds, the income, in the new domestic setup. She had never done it before and was finding it hard to separate pragmatism from ideals.

  ‘We are a couple, Eve. I look after you, and you look after me. I’m not going to talk about it again. I’m paying a mortgage, and I’ve been doing it successfully for years. You just need to work out whether you really want to work all weekend and leave me all by myself. It makes me sad. I miss you.’ He stuck out his bottom lip.

  ‘Richard. Stop. You sound like a grown man who is about to bring a teddy bear onto the table and start stroking it. It makes me feel ill.’

  His voice straightened up. ‘Well, I do miss you. What is the point of sharing your life with someone if you tag-team?’

  Eve looked at her empty bowl. She looked at the man in front of her making sense, and she realised she missed him when she played in the orchestra at night and on weekends, and also at weekend weddings. They were tag-teaming in their relationship. Admittedly, there were only five booked weddings this year. ‘Okay, you know what? You’re right. I’ll do this one and then I’m out of the quartet. I’m sick of running around on weekends, playing at other people’s weddings. But I’m paying the bills around here.’