Behind

by Nicole Trope

  Dr Sharma taps her pen against her notebook, impatient to hear my sad story, my plethora of excuses, my flawed reasoning for why I did what I did.

  I could sit here in silence, I know that. No one can force you to speak, but I have to admit to a small amount of interest in Dr Sharma’s opinion of me, in how she will perceive the life I have lived so far.

  ‘I lost control,’ I say slowly to Dr Sharma.

  ‘Yes,’ she agrees, ‘you got drunk and almost beat a man to death, and when you were arrested, you threatened to kill yourself.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agree with her, ‘so shall we assume that you know why I’m here and I know why I’m here and go from there?’

  A flash of irritation breaks the neutral mask of Dr Sharma’s face but it’s gone as quickly as it appeared.

  ‘Would you say you often lose control, that you are often violent?’

  ‘That’s two separate questions,’ I say, because it is.

  ‘Okay, would you say that you are often violent? Are you a violent man?’

  I think about the word ‘violent’, about what it’s meant to convey about me and who I am. The word has always reminded me of the colour violet, and so when I hear it, I can’t help seeing that shade of purple. It’s quite beautiful really. I think about the things I’ve done and things that were done to me. I muse about what I have planned for those who I feel have betrayed me, about the justice I intend to get for myself, and then I give her the only answer that I can give her under the circumstances. I give her a lie.

  ‘No,’ I say. She hears the lie but makes no comment other than to lift one eyebrow slightly.

  ‘All right, and are you suicidal?’

  There is a quick, sharp pain in my chest and for a moment I think I may be having a heart attack, but it disappears, leaving something dark and gaping inside me. I’m aware that suicide would be an end to everything. I know that it would mean I’d never have to open my eyes to the morning sun with so much anger holding me down, it’s hard to breathe. Death would mean peace but I have no intention of leaving this world until I have meted out my own particular brand of justice.

  I allow myself a dry laugh and look up at the ceiling. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Let’s talk about that,’ she says.

  5

  Rachel

  ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ Ben asks for the tenth time.

  She bites down on her lip, trying to conceal a sigh. ‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘Mostly I’m embarrassed that I thought I heard someone, got you to come rushing home and dragged the police over here. I’m sure they had better things to do.’

  ‘That’s their job, babe. I’d rather you call them if you’re worried. They were happy to tell you they couldn’t find any evidence of someone being here.’

  ‘I know and they did a good job of looking around. Thank God they got here so fast. I was worried they wouldn’t find our street.’

  She pictures the faces of the two constables who had been standing on the doorstep when she flung open the front door. ‘I heard…’ she began and then she realised that she couldn’t say anything else, that she shouldn’t say anything else. ‘Something…’ she finished lamely, trying not to meet the bright blue eyes of the woman in the police uniform standing next to her partner with short spiky hair. They both had their hands hooked into their belts, their stances wide and shoulders back, ready for anything.

  ‘Is anyone else in the house?’ the constable with spiky hair asked, relaxing at the sight of Rachel, a small woman.

  ‘Oh, Beth,’ she said and she raced back up the stairs, followed by the police officers. Her daughter was as deeply asleep as she had been, much to Rachel’s relief.

  ‘Have you lived here long?’ the constable with the blue eyes asked after following her back downstairs. She looked around the entrance hall where boxes were stacked on top of each other and a rug was still rolled up, standing against the wall.

  ‘Two weeks,’ Rachel answered, hoping that was enough to explain the ‘just moved in’ state of the house.

  The constable nodded. ‘Why don’t you get yourself a cup of tea,’ she said kindly.

  Rachel obediently turned and walked to the kitchen to put the kettle on to boil, her heart thudding in her ears, as the constable and her partner walked quietly around the house. She listened to their footsteps, comforted by a sound that had, only minutes ago, terrified her.

  ‘No signs of forced entry,’ the constable with the blue eyes informed her.

  ‘Oh,’ she said because she had no idea what else to say. How did he get in?

  Ben laughs now, dragging her away from the way the constable had smiled at her, believing that Rachel would be reassured that she was safe.

  ‘I thought that our street wouldn’t be on their maps yet,’ he says.

  ‘Thank goodness it was a false alarm,’ she blurts out quickly to cover the slightly too-high pitch of her voice. It’s just one more lie, she tells herself even as she is aware that this lie is more than just a lie. This is the card right at the bottom of the house of cards, the card that could topple everything. She hates lying to him, has always hated it.

  I’ll never tell, I promise.

  She and Ben are speaking in the empty dining room, where one day they hope to put a large table and chairs. Beth knows nothing of what happened last night and they want to keep it that way. Their daughter is sitting happily at the kitchen table, chasing her Cheerios around her cereal bowl. Rachel can hear her singing to herself as she chews.

  ‘Let it da, da, da, da,’ she sings in between mouthfuls of cereal. Beth’s world has not been touched by what happened last night and Rachel intends to keep it that way.

  At seven years old, their daughter spends a lot of time immersed in her own imaginative world where monsters lurk under the bed and there are fairies in the brand-new park just a street away from their brand-new house. Rachel doesn’t want her to know that the monsters are real. She doesn’t ever need to know that.

  This morning as she brushed her little girl’s soft, glossy-brown curls, Beth wriggled away and came back again, making a game of it. Rachel wanted to cry at her daughter’s innocence, at the impossibility of always being able to protect her. She dropped a kiss onto her child’s strawberry-scented hair, inhaling the comforting fragrance. Beth wriggled away, impatient to be done.

  ‘Now I will brush your hair,’ Beth said after her mother had twisted the elastic, finishing off her ponytail.

  Rachel sat down on the chair in front of her dressing table and stared into her own green eyes as Beth’s little hands moved the brush through her hair. The child leaned forward and put her head on her mother’s shoulder, staring at the reflection of the two of them. ‘We look the same,’ she said and Rachel turned her head and planted a kiss on her daughter’s soft cheek. ‘We look the same,’ she agreed.

  ‘But now your hair needs to be brushed,’ Beth said and she resumed her slow, calm movement of the brush through Rachel’s hair. She found herself wanting to sit there for the whole day, just the two of them, safe from the world outside.

  ‘All done, my dear lady,’ she said after a few minutes, making Rachel laugh at her imitation of her own hairdresser.

  ‘I’m fine, I promise,’ she says to Ben now, and she leans forward and kisses his cheek, feeling the slight stubble that’s always there.

  Someone was in the house, Ben, she thinks, and you won’t believe who it was because I can’t believe who it was.

  I’ll never tell, I promise.

  She bites down on her lip to stop these words escaping and goes back into the kitchen to continue making her own breakfast. She won’t think about this right now. She won’t.

  After popping a piece of bread into the toaster, she wipes up a spill of milk on the counter, admiring the brown and gold threaded through the beige-coloured marble. The benchtop had been the more expensive choice but it matched the cream-coloured cabinets so well, creating an air of calm harmony in the kitchen. She loves this kitchen with
its soft-close drawers and swing-out shelves in the cabinets. It is everything she has ever imagined a kitchen should be. It was more than she had ever dreamed of really. It had never occurred to her that she would be able to look around a room like this and know that it was hers. She knows that her mother had a kitchen like this once. Her mother’s kitchen had a white countertop and white cabinets, giving the whole space an air of sterility.

  Rachel thinks about the succession of small, sticky, unworkable rental kitchens that she and her mother lived with over the years after they left the white kitchen behind. Her mother never seemed to mind drawers that stuck or stoves with burners that didn’t work.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she always said when Rachel complained, ‘don’t think about it – it’s just a kitchen and nothing more.’

  Was he in the kitchen last night? Did he walk through her harmonious space, tainting it with his presence? Did he touch the two boxes she needs to make time to unpack today? Did he run his hands over her counter, checking if it was clean?

  Rachel jumps a little when the toaster pops. She grabs the bread and looks over at her daughter. ‘Do you want a piece of toast as well?’

  ‘Maybe,’ says Beth, which Rachel knows means yes.

  ‘And would you maybe like some peanut butter on it?’

  ‘I might,’ says Beth and then she giggles. She is imitating the way her grandmother speaks. Veronica never commits to anything, instead using ‘maybe’ and ‘might’ and ‘perhaps’.

  Rachel gives the piece of toast to her daughter and makes another one for herself.

  Ben joins them in the kitchen and slumps onto a chair. He already looks tired. He begins his usual scrolling through his emails, checking what has come in overnight. He absent-mindedly sips a cup of coffee. He hates eating breakfast but he likes to sit with his wife and his daughter in the morning. He is often still at work for dinner so breakfast is the only meal they are all together for. Rachel would like to tell him that if he’s on his phone, he might as well not be here at all, but she can see his eyes narrow and his brow furrow as he reads an email. Things are not good at work. He hasn’t said anything to her but she can see that something is up. In the last few weeks he has developed a wariness when she asks about it. His usual reply of ‘yeah good’ when she asks him about his day has been replaced with ‘fine’ or simply a shrug of his shoulders.

  She could push him to tell her what’s going on, but right now she knows she doesn’t have the energy to deal with anything else. Not after last night. Someone was in the house, Ben, even though the police found no one. Someone was here.

  He looks up from his phone and catches her gaze, giving her what she knows is a hopeful smile. He wants her to be okay. Her husband is worried about her, even more worried after last night. He keeps stealing glances at her, as though he’s waiting for her to do or say something. She is worried about him and he is worried about her and yet they are both sitting here in the kitchen, acting as though nothing is troubling either of them.

  Beth continues to sing and Ben rumbles the next line as he reads an email. The song has become as familiar to her and Ben as anything they have ever listened to.

  ‘That’s not where I’m up to, Daddy,’ laughs Beth.

  Ben is one of the good guys. He’s always been one of the good guys. The kind who escorts a drunk girl home from a party and makes sure she’s safely tucked up in bed. The kind who brings you soup when you feel sick and listens, really listens, when you talk. He’s one of the good guys but she has wondered every day since she met him if he is good enough to handle the truth about her, about her life. She’s never had the courage to test him. And she made a promise – a promise to never tell.

  When they met, he was studying marketing and IT and she was studying early childhood education. They wouldn’t have met if his twin sister Louise hadn’t been taking Rachel’s course. She had found herself drawn to Louise, to the only other student with as serious an approach as she had. She was so grateful to be at university. She loved the idea of shaping young minds, of watching and helping as the fundamentals of reading and writing became clear. Louise loved children as well but she had a plan, an ambitious one for her life as a teacher. She wanted to change the way things were done. She wanted to run things. ‘The whole education system needs a shake-up,’ she liked to say.

  They gravitated towards each other, both disliking the general culture of drinking and ditching classes that seemed to pervade the first year of university. They met in a tutorial on dealing with aggressive behaviour in young children. It was held early on a Monday morning and they were the only two who paid attention, who asked questions and got involved, and eventually they found themselves in conversation only with each other as the rest of the students stared at them, dazed and hungover. Rachel hadn’t wanted it to end, was almost afraid she would never see the intense woman she was speaking to again.

  ‘Want to compare notes from the lecture?’ Louise asked Rachel as they left that first tutorial.

  ‘Um, sure,’ Rachel replied, wondering as she looked at the young woman with pixie-cut dark brown hair and chocolate-brown eyes if anyone ever said no to her. While Rachel had looked around the room as she spoke, concerned that she was irritating the other students, Louise had simply carried on, only stopping to try and force someone else to get involved.

  Louise was dressed casually in leggings and what Rachel was almost sure was a pyjama top, as though it didn’t matter to her at all what people thought. Rachel couldn’t help comparing her own curated outfit of jeans and a light pink T-shirt, matched with small pink studs in her ears and strappy sandals that she had laid out on Sunday night. ‘I like to see my girls looking pretty,’ she had heard more than once when she was a child, striking fear into her about whether she was pretty enough. She couldn’t imagine not caring how people viewed her, not watching others carefully to note how she was being looked at or listened to. It was so easy to say or do the wrong thing.

  ‘I’m Louise,’ she said with a grin. She had a lovely smile and perfect, even teeth. Rachel found herself thinking that she was the kind of girl that got described as handsome when she was older. She would always have an air of elegance about her, even in a pyjama top. She was taller than Rachel, more solid, as though she was more tethered to the earth than Rachel was. Rachel’s fine brown hair, light green eyes and pale skin always made her feel slightly invisible. Sometimes she looked in a mirror and felt like she might be disappearing. She understood that feeling had little to do with her looks. She had always felt as though she wasn’t as connected to the world as everyone else was, probably because she had never lived anywhere long enough to put down roots that would hold her to the earth.

  She had been amazed when Louise introduced her to Ben after a couple of weeks. They were sitting in a coffee shop, moaning about how many assignments they had, when he walked in. Outside it was supposed to be autumn but it was still as hot as the middle of summer.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing to just take off our shoes and go out there onto the cool grass under the fig tree?’ Lou said.

  Rachel looked out of the window of the café at the rolling green lawn. ‘Yes,’ she sighed, ‘but Professor Hendricks needs a 2,000-word essay on contemporary perspectives of childhood development by Friday.’

  ‘Don’t you hate the way he keeps digging in his ear when he talks?’

  ‘Yes.’ Rachel laughed. ‘It’s so gross.’

  Rachel glanced towards the door because she saw Lou’s gaze stray there and then she immediately looked back at her friend. ‘That guy looks—’

  ‘Just like me?’ Lou laughed. ‘Over here, Benjamin,’ she said, waving at him, and he came over to their table, his smile as wide as hers, his eyes the same shape and colour.

  ‘This is Rachel. She’s the one I told you about in my course.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ He dropped into a spare chair at their table. ‘Louise thinks you and I should go out.’ He was wearing a tight blue T-shirt and jeans that hugged
his hips. He smelled strongly of wood and spice.

  ‘Benjamin!’

  ‘No sense in beating around the bush, Lou. I agree. And call me Ben, everyone does except my sister. She thinks I sound more intelligent if she calls me Benjamin.’

  ‘As if,’ snorted Lou.

  ‘Ben,’ Rachel had repeated. Just the word, just his name and her stomach flipped. She wanted to lean closer to him, to inhale his scent.

  ‘So, do you want to? Go out, I mean? We can have dinner or see a movie, whatever you want.’

  ‘I’m… Yes, yes I would like that.’

  ‘You can say no, Rachel,’ said Lou. ‘You can just tell him to go away.’

  ‘Yeah, you can tell me to go away. I’m fairly easy like that. Lou tells me to go away all the time. I don’t take it badly,’ Ben said with a grin.

  Rachel laughed. ‘No… I don’t want you to go away. I want to have dinner. I really do.’

  ‘It’s a date.’ He smiled. ‘And now the complex world of IT calls. Rachel, I have your number because Lou gave it to me already. I’ll call you.’

  Rachel was unable to stop her cheeks from flaming red.

  ‘I knew you would be perfect for each other,’ Lou said with a smile, ‘and now I get the last bite of this chocolate cheesecake because I have made the perfect match.’

  Rachel was only able to laugh.

  Lou has never found her perfect match. ‘I’m married to the job,’ she likes to say but sometimes Rachel wonders if that’s the truth or bravado. There is still time for Lou to find someone and have a family, she’s only thirty-five, but at a joint birthday party with Ben last year, she confessed that while she loved teaching young children, she wasn’t sure she ever wanted one of her own. ‘I’m happy being the best aunt in the world. I feel like being child-free allows me time to look after all the kids under my care.’

  Ben was Rachel’s first serious boyfriend but she’s never admitted that to him, not even after all these years. They never stayed anywhere long enough for her to make real friends or find a boyfriend, and with each move she grew quieter and more reserved in each new environment. By the time Rachel felt she had settled down enough to start relaxing, they had to move again. She never knew when they were going to leave. They would move into a new apartment and she would begin a new school and Veronica would find a job and everything would drift calmly along for a few months or even a year and then her mother would start looking worried. ‘I think someone’s been asking about us,’ she would tell Rachel.