Under the Influence

by Jacqueline Lunn

  ‘You’re making me hard.’

  ‘Richard …’

  He undid his fly. ‘Pull it. Just pull it. You’re going away.’

  Eve pulled backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, gathering speed, and watched Richard flex and bend his toes over the edge of the bed. It was taking too long, so Eve began telling Richard how Natalie had sucked her tits one night in the bathroom at a dinner party. He loved it when she talked like this to him in bed, and as he came he pushed the red suitcase off the bed and all its contents landed in a little mountain on the carpet. Her sandals managed to escape to the side.

  ‘You know what I’ve been thinking?’ Richard asked, grabbing a tissue from the bedside table. ‘When you get back, we should go away together. Just you and me. No hordes of couples debating for three hours where to go to dinner. Somewhere relaxing. Somewhere we can just do nothing. Shall I book something while you’re away? It will be a surprise. You’ll need it after Australia. After this.’

  Eve was crouched beside the bed, squashing everything back into her red suitcase. She zipped it shut and stood it on its wheels beside the wall before reaching for her tepid cup of tea. She took a sip. ‘Richard, when you book somewhere, make sure it’s cold,’ Eve said, putting her cup of tea down. ‘Somewhere we can sit by a fire.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  By four on Saturday afternoon, locals and visitors browsing well-priced carrots and potatoes, ‘antique’ dressers and second-hand school readers on Duke Street were beginning to thin out. The part-time street vendors began the pack-up, organising their unsold wares into empty cardboard boxes or counting the few notes and bits of change from inside their bumbags.

  Away from the scraping of trestle-table legs on bitumen and the dropping of empty boxes on the main street of Tallow, Eve lay still on her hotel bed, trapped in that place between wake and sleep, where rational thoughts about Kat and Meg nearly formed in her head only to be replaced by a talking pig wearing a towel and, behind it, a man with a moustache carrying a suitcase. It had been twenty-four hours since she had sat around a table in an old garage in the middle of nowhere and heard Meg’s wishes.

  There was a knock at the door that was happening in real time and place.

  ‘Come in.’

  A gust of wind rushed down the corridor, catching the door on its peeled corners and slamming it shut behind Sarah.

  ‘Shit. Sorry. I didn’t know if you would be on the phone or …’ Sarah trailed off, examining the long body stretched out before her. On the outside, they were chalk and cheese. Sarah knew she was the cheese.

  Eve pulled herself up to a sitting position, groggy and hot. She grabbed a hairband and expertly put up her hair in a messy bun, using the industrious moment to take a quick glance at the clock – it was still too early to call Richard. She stretched and shook like a cat, before swinging her legs over the side of the bed. ‘I’m not doing anything. I mean I’m thinking,’ Eve corrected herself. ‘Sit down. Wherever you can. Shall I make a cup of tea?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Eve busied herself around the mini-fridge, put the kettle on and opened some long-life milk. She washed her face with a few fast strokes in the bathroom and then returned to pour two very small, very white cups of tea. Sarah stood by the wall watching, one hand resting on top of the TV. She stopped herself from tapping her fingers on the top of the old set and did an awkward dance with Eve when Eve tried to make her way past.

  ‘Sorry,’ Eve said. ‘You go first.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ Sarah replied, not knowing which way to go.

  ‘Do you want to drink it outside, on the verandah?’

  It was a rhetorical question as Eve was already opening the French doors leading to a long, wide, covered verandah encased by pieces of black iron lattice welded together as an intricate railing. The verandah gave shelter to the people on the pavement below, having a quick cigarette before heading back through the front doors of the pub. Sarah and Eve took a seat on two cane chairs that probably knew more about the town than Georgia and Albert, and plumped and arranged the cushions behind their backs. They were in the shade, sipping hot tea, occasionally being given the gift of a half-hearted breeze.

  ‘I’m sorry about yesterday, Eve, about yelling at the showground.’ They had all returned to their hotel rooms on Friday night after the reading of the will, had the briefest of breakfasts this morning, where they were all glad of the distraction of Georgia at the table, and had somehow managed to avoid each other until now. Eve had done it by sleeping. Sarah had changed her flight home so she could ‘sort things out’, she told Andrew.

  ‘Kat, and the will, and then that bloody crow. I hate crows. They’re so sure of themselves. It’s all so, so …’ – Sarah searched for the right word – ‘pragmatic.’

  ‘It’s okay, Sarah. It’s all a shock. No one is thinking straight.’

  Clouds of steam played above their cups. They both watched the steam become nothing. Tea gave the two women sitting opposite each other a gift: an opportunity to break the mindless chatter by taking a sip and turning the cup to the left, or blowing ripples in the top. A place to curl fingers while assessing their opponent.

  ‘Do you know, when I was first in London, way before Richard, or any boyfriends for that matter, the first time Meg came and spent a few months with me, we went to this house in Surrey for lunch. There was a group of us – it was the parents’ house of one of the English girls I hung out with. It was all very proper. Like a scene out of A Room with a View. Low ceilings and a conservatory out the back, beautiful, lush, pretty garden. At the end of lunch, all the women sat down to have a pot of tea in the sitting room. I don’t know where the men went.’

  Eve put her cup of tea down and shrugged her shoulders as if the answer might come to her right now, ten years later. ‘There were fresh flowers in the corner and patterned china and a cake on a glass stand. The older women were wearing pearls and had their collars turned up and pretended they were anything but pale and delicate by talking about riding and walking every day no matter what the weather. It was too much. Meg and I kept looking at each other, wondering what we were doing there.’

  Eve shooed a bird from the railing and sat down again. Trucks began pulling up below to take away the goods that hadn’t managed to sell. Groups of two and three sat on the backs of utes or under the pub awning discussing a plan of attack for the next six hours. They weren’t in a hurry to decide.

  ‘Anyway, we drank our tea, added a bit to the discussion about dog training and the rise of gyms in London and suddenly this woman down the end said to us, “Excuse me, ladies. When one is in England, one uses one’s saucer.”’ Eve used her plummiest English accent, making Sarah smile. ‘We didn’t know what she was talking about at first, and then we realised we didn’t have our saucers under our teacups. You know, holding them both at the same time. I swear you could hear the tut-tutting and joy inside their heads at these stupid little barbaric Australian girls. They were delighted in our grave saucer error. It made us inferior.

  ‘I was embarrassed and grabbed my saucer from the table and put it under my teacup. Meg did nothing and kept on talking. Without her saucer. We chatted politely some more, and then Meg stood up, sipped the end of her tea too loudly and said, “That was good. I might have another.” Then she poured herself some more tea, picked up a biscuit and left the saucer behind. She pushed the saucer on the table towards those women with her fingertips. With her fingertips. You should have seen their faces.’

  The sun was falling in the sky, shooting across the street and under the awning at a mean angle. It was just turning from the hottest part to the next hottest, and they were mocking the English drinking tea, while drinking tea. Sarah could feel it, with each sip, the past coming back. The tea was growing colder. She put her cup down on the matching cane side table, hitting the glass top with a loud clang.

  ‘Meg didn’t take a backwards step,’ Sarah said.

  ‘If she did, she would have r
un right into us.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s fair to say,’ Sarah said. ‘We held our own. We just did it differently. Think about it.’

  ‘Are we different now, Sarah, or do we just think we are different? Sometimes, when I find myself with time to kill, and I often have time to kill, I rehearse the perfect line in my head for Rebecca and those girls. Maybe I could have made it all stop before it went so wrong. I didn’t have to want it so much. Want Rebecca to like me so much. Want to be back in that group. Why was I like that? I get so angry at myself.’

  ‘It’s easy to say that now,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s always easy when you look back. You were fourteen. We were fourteen.’

  ‘I just waited for Meg to come back from England and … and … I don’t know, wave her magic wand, and by then it was all too late. I just let it all happen. It was pathetic.’

  ‘You didn’t let everything happen, Eve.’ The tea was too white and too sweet due to the long-life milk, but Eve kept sipping as though it was bitter and warm. Sarah leant towards Eve, trying to ignore the beeping from a truck reversing on the street. ‘Eve, that’s in the past. What good comes from stirring it up? We are here, now, with decisions to make.’

  Sarah was starting to feel heavy, like it was hard to lift her feet and cross her legs; it took effort. ‘What are you going to do, Eve?’

  ‘I’m going to go downstairs and show that person how to reverse a fucking truck.’

  ‘Eve?’ It was an ‘Eve’ straight from her mother’s mouth.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Sarah tried her attentive, ostentatiously concerned listening skills but they weren’t working, and, with legs crossed, she started shaking her right foot like her grandmother did when she had lined up the grandchildren and was waiting for one of them to admit they had taken the last iceblock out of the freezer. She needed to keep alert. The heat, the long day, the creature opposite who could turn into anything. ‘Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but surely it’s something you feel, Eve. I feel it. I feel like I could do this. I could look after Kat. It’s not about logic. It’s about feeling. This is one of those things that comes at you from nowhere, maybe for a reason, maybe not, and the first thing you have to do is know you want to do it. There’s nothing else.’

  ‘I need to know, Sarah.’ Eve was leaning back in her chair, her legs straight out in front like she was sunbaking. ‘Why did you let Rebecca do those things to me? Why did you pretend it was all fine?’

  ‘Eve, I don’t think this is the time.’ Sarah discovered as the words left her mouth that everything she firmly believed in could be an illusion. She believed she had been waiting for this question since she was fourteen years old. She believed she would be relieved when it was finally asked. She believed she had a solid answer. ‘It was more complicated than that. Right now, we need to work out what to do.’

  ‘We will, Sarah. We will work out what to do. But I’ve been waiting to ask you for twenty years, and now that we are working out which one of the members of the insipid little B team should bring up another woman’s baby, Meg’s baby, I think it is as good a time as ever. Or maybe you should give me lessons in avoidance, Sarah, so I don’t need to ask.’

  Sarah pulled herself up straight and sucked in her stomach. It was hard to look righteous when you were soft and fat. ‘Jesus, Eve, you’re so, so, full of contempt for everyone. Just the way you speak. The way you don’t speak. One minute, you’re Eve, I can see you, and the next you’re gone. It’s amazing how we’re all so flawed and you have become an angel. An angel that doesn’t touch anything.’

  Eve flexed her fingers upwards on the cane arms of her seat, splayed them and then let them fall. ‘I’m asking a simple question, Sarah. Answer the question.’

  A shirtless man down the verandah came out his French doors and stretched, resting his hand on the awning above, his torso to the street below. He nodded hello and saw two women sharing an afternoon cup of tea in silence and retreated back into his room.

  ‘Eve, you seem to have landed on your feet. You don’t even have to work. You have a partner who treats you like a princess. You take cooking classes and go to the gym and do exactly what you want. You don’t have money problems, work problems, man problems … What does it matter what happened twenty years ago?’

  Eve said nothing and waited as patiently as a spider.

  ‘I was weak, Eve. I was fourteen and weak and made mistakes. It was always you and Meg. You and Meg.’ She dropped her chin and looked straight at Eve. ‘And then, if you remember, it was you and Rebecca. I was never enough.’

  ‘Sarah,’ Eve said, shaking her head.

  ‘If I could take it back and do it differently, I would, but I can’t. I did a terrible, terrible thing. We all did terrible things. I didn’t think it was going to go as far as it did. Every day, I thought this will be the day that it gets better. But it was too late. It got too big and I couldn’t … I couldn’t …’

  ‘Do anything?’ Eve finished the sentence.

  ‘I didn’t know how to handle things. Rebecca, she …’ Sarah stopped. Then she wiped a trail of sweat running down the side of her neck with her hand and took a moment to look at the sheen on her fingertips. The two women weren’t accustomed to face-to-face combat. It made Sarah so heavy that she could feel the cane slats under her cushion, her feet flat on the floor about to push through the decking and make it split apart. It made Eve so light, so thin and brittle, that her long fingers fell over the arms of the chair and pointed lazily to the floor. A slight wind pushed her dark hair off her face, and a few strands sailed in the air. Eve looked as light as a feather – untethered and ready to float away.

  ‘You need to know I’m not weak now,’ Sarah said, catching Eve with her certain words. ‘It’s now that matters, Eve. I can take Kat. I can look after Kat.’

  ‘How do you know you’re not weak now? Isn’t that something, by its very nature, you are the last to find out about? There aren’t many self-aware weak people out there, Sarah.’ Eve picked up her teacup and took a sip, despite its being empty. Crowds had gathered now in the pub downstairs and were drinking on the footpath. Bits of their stories made it upstairs. Sarah and Eve caught words such as ‘cracker’ and ‘fuck’ and ‘chickpea’ and ‘Tooheys’.

  ‘Just ask Andrew. See if he thinks I’m weak. While you have been working and taking weekends in Spain and France with Richard, I have been having babies, getting up for them when they are sick, being bored by them when I have to read Spot for the four-hundredth time in a row, making sure they eat right, keeping them away from bodies of water deeper than four centimetres, strapping them into car seats, putting plastic covers over electric sockets. They are wonderful boys, and for all my mistakes I am doing something right. I am doing something right,’ she repeated. ‘I’m stronger. Meg knew Andrew. She liked Andrew.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I just mean she never met Richard. I’ve never met Richard. You’ve been with him for, what, two years, and we’ve only ever seen email pics of you both having the time of your lives. You stopped coming home. You stopped returning calls. You have a different life over there, and you didn’t want us in it. Meg knew Andrew. She knew the world we created. She didn’t know Richard, the man who will be like a father to her child.’

  ‘Yes, and she chose me first.’

  Sarah’s hands started shaking. Eve poured herself another tea and offered, with an upward eye gesture, to do the same for Sarah. The passive returned to stand in front of the aggressive.

  ‘I should go,’ Sarah said, standing up, touching the back of her hair to plug a hole. She resisted the urge to walk over to Eve, lean down and put her mouth right near her ear and whisper ‘Bye, Rebecca’.

  Instead, she looked at Eve and wondered if it was just history – just days, hours, minutes spent together because they had no choice – or something more that connected these two people having a cup of cold tea on a verandah in the middle of nowhere. As Sarah put he
r hand on the French door, her heaviness lifted. She turned and, for once, smiled at Eve sitting in her chair not because she was trying to make things better but because she knew and Eve didn’t. Eve didn’t know that children were magnanimous beings; they even gave the weak and pitiable strength.

  ‘This is something you do because you have to,’ Sarah said. ‘Nothing can stop you. Not Richard, not anybody. It’s inside. We’re not going to find Kat’s father – there’s a reason he’s not on the birth certificate, and god knows what that reason is. The reality is it’s going to be one of us. One of us will raise her, brush her hair at night, lie with her when she can’t sleep, worry about a rash on her neck, tell her she’s cold when she’s not. One of us.

  ‘If you can’t do it, Eve, there’s nothing wrong with that. If you can’t do it, let me have Kat.’ Sarah opened the door. ‘And, Eve, babies don’t care if you’ve fucked up in life. They don’t care who you are. That’s the tragedy – they love you anyway.’

  Sarah closed the door behind her, and Eve looked out at the horizon. A change was coming: the birds were getting louder, more impatient; the temperature was starting to cool slightly; the streaks of light at Eve’s feet were fading. None of this mattered until Eve spoke to Richard.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Eve pulled out a pen from her handbag and searched through the nooks of her hotel room – drawers, the high shelf in the cupboard where the spare pillow was kept, inside the vinyl room-information pack – along with the hiding spots on the insides of her two suitcases stacked in the corner on the floor, but she couldn’t find any paper.

  ‘Typical,’ she said to no one.

  She settled for the white space on the inside cover of a self-help book on authentic living she’d bought at Heathrow Airport along with spearmint gum, a travel pack of headache tablets and a bottle of water. She took the slim manual that promised the reader a new life full of love, fulfilment and happiness to the desk by the wall of her room and wrote some notes: ‘Kat’s age. Meg’s family history – no brothers or sisters, no parents, two much older cousins. No father on birth certificate. It’s Meg, good luck finding him.’