by Nicole Trope
Marni’s figures this month are a lot better than his. She’s been out on a lot more presentations than he has, and even though she’s been knocked back a lot, she’s managed to bring in two new companies who’ve been willing to give the software a trial. He’s been distracted. Too worried about losing his job to actually do his job. He’s also been on the phone far too much talking to the builder and the bank about the new house.
He takes his phone off his desk and leaves his office. ‘Just getting a coffee,’ he says to Marni when he passes her in the hall. She nods at him and strides on. She is only twenty-five and single. If she lost her job right now, she would be fine, he thinks. It’s not the same for him. It’s not the same at all.
Outside he looks around him, noting some smokers huddled in a corner out of the wind. He isn’t wearing his jacket and realises that he’s cold. He looks up at the grey sky and then feels a drop of rain land on his head. He squeezes himself into a small covered corner near the front of the building, wrapping one arm around his chest.
He bounces on the balls of his feet to keep warm as he calls Rachel.
‘Hey,’ she answers him, almost whispering.
‘How’s your mum today?’
‘She hasn’t actually woken up at all. She did moan a little and I thought she must be in pain so I called Sam and he’s upped her morphine. I hope it’s helping. I hope she’s not in pain.’
Ben swallows as he listens to her fight back tears. He feels like he shouldn’t say anything about the money to her, not now. It doesn’t matter. Nothing really matters except what she’s going through, and the fact that it’s something he’s even paying attention to makes him feel like an awful person. It’s just money. He hesitates for a moment and then he says, ‘Um, Rach… look, it’s no big deal but… I just wanted to ask you… I mean, you seem to be taking quite a bit of money out of the account and it’s fine, I mean, if you need it – it’s fine. I just… just wondered what it was for?’
There is silence on the phone and for a moment he thinks she’s hung up.
‘I’m sorry, I needed… some things for Beth… She’s grown out of all her winter clothes and…’
‘Okay but last week you took three hundred dollars and yesterday you took four hundred dollars. That’s a lot of money for clothes for a seven-year-old. And things are kind of tight with the new mortgage. I know you’re only doing what’s best for her but it is quite a lot…’
‘Some of it was for me,’ she says. He can hear she’s getting angry. ‘I needed some stuff.’
He sighs. ‘Rachel, I’m sorry to even say anything. I know you’ve got so much going on but could I ask you to cut back a bit? We need to be conservative right now… You never know what can happen and I just need to see that I can handle the bills and the new mortgage. Just until you get another job, you know.’
‘Why, what’s going to happen? Is something going on at work?’
‘No, nothing… nothing… It’s just…’ He doesn’t want to say the words, doesn’t want to admit that he’s a failure. He should be able to manage this while his wife looks after their child and her dying mother.
‘You said it was fine, Ben. You said we could afford the house,’ she says softly. ‘I didn’t know that we were in trouble. I would never have…’
‘Would never have what?’
‘I wouldn’t have bought anything. Are we okay, Ben? Is something going on that you’re not telling me?’
Ben sighs at the irony of her question. He was going to ask her the same thing. How has this distance grown between them where they are both watching their words and concerned about what secrets the other is keeping?
‘Nothing,’ he says, hoping that by saying it out loud he will make it true. ‘Nothing’s going on. Everything is fine.’
‘Yes,’ she agrees, ‘fine, it’s fine. I have to go now, Ben, sorry. Mum seems to be waking up.’
She ends the call and Ben stands in the street, staring down at his phone. What is he missing? She doesn’t have time to shop, much less spend so much money, and she’s never done anything like this before. Is she helping to pay some of Veronica’s medical bills? Why not just say so? He would never refuse to help.
‘Let’s always tell each other everything,’ he remembers saying to her on their wedding night.
‘Everything?’ she said. ‘You already know everything about me. What more do you want to know?’ She giggled as she struggled with the zip on the back of her dress.
‘You’re drunk.’ He laughed.
‘Drunk on you, Ben Flinders,’ she said and then she tripped over and landed on the bed. She turned over and stared up at the ceiling. ‘It was so nice of your mother and father to pay for the wedding. My mum was really grateful. I know she told them but I hope they know – I mean really know.’
‘They know,’ he said with a smile. ‘Now let’s get you out of this dress.’
‘Don’t tear it, I’ll keep it for our daughter.’
‘Our daughter,’ he said, ‘I like the sound of that.’
He is still waiting to learn everything about his wife, still trying to figure her out, and that seems to be getting harder and harder to do. What isn’t she telling him? He wishes he could simply call her back and ask, ‘What are you hiding, Rachel?’ Maybe he is blowing everything out of proportion. It was just a few hundred dollars, really. He’s reading more into it than he should because he’s so worried about his job right now.
He thinks about a conversation he had with Richard from accounts at the Christmas party last year after they’d both had too much to drink.
‘How long have you been married?’ Richard slurred as he stood next to Ben, who was waiting for his double shot of whisky from the young barman, despite knowing that it was definitely time to stop drinking and go home.
‘Eight years,’ he replied, standing slightly apart from Richard, who was swaying back and forth, his nose red and his large face pale and clammy. ‘How about you?’ he asked politely. The barman handed him his drink.
‘More for me,’ mumbled Richard to the barman after he handed Ben his drink. ‘Was… was twenty years. Twenty… twenty… years. Can you imagine?’
Ben had nodded politely, his attention drifting, as Richard kept talking about his wife and children. And then Richard had stepped forward, using a finger to poke Ben in the chest. ‘You can’t trust a… a… a woman. They make you think everything is fine… fine and then,’ he waved his hands, ‘boom. “What’s wrong?” I asked her when she got kind of… secretive and quiet… not like… like before. And you know what she said? You know what she said?’ Richard belched and Ben felt his hot breath and smelled the sausage rolls that were being handed out. His stomach turned over in disgust.
‘No,’ he replied, looking down into his drink, wondering how quickly he could extricate himself.
‘“Nothing.” That’s all she said: “Nothing.” I knew she was lying; I just knew it but what can you… say to that? She said nothing was wrong so I believed her.’
He didn’t know what to say. He stepped back from Richard, muttered something about needing to call his wife and escaped.
‘Get caught by Richard, did you?’ Angela asked, coming up to him as he stood behind a tall potted plant.
‘Yeah,’ he laughed, awkwardly.
‘He’s such a pig. If I were his wife, I would have left him as well.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Ben said, looking hard at Angela, who he had always known enjoyed gossiping. ‘Marriage is hard.’
‘Well, not for Mrs Richard, not anymore. He came home one day to find she’d taken everything. She’d cleaned out the bank account and moved all the furniture out of the house. She’d been having an affair with her builder.’
Ben remembers being overwhelmed then by a desperate need to get home, away from Angela and her enjoyment of the scandal of Richard’s marriage.
He sighs now and puts his phone back in his pocket. He isn’t achieving anything thinking like this.
H
e hears a burst of laughter from the group of smokers and bites down on his resentment at their snatched moment of happiness. He cannot imagine ever simply laughing with his wife again. How is this his life now?
He makes his way back to his office and sits down at his computer. He needs to concentrate on work. He slides his keyboard forward because it has somehow moved back on his desk and notices a piece of paper underneath.
When he lifts the keyboard, he sees it’s a photograph, torn in half.
He picks it up and looks at it and for a moment he doesn’t know what he’s looking at, but then he realises that it’s Rachel and her mother. If it wasn’t obvious that the photo was so old because of the faded colours and slightly sepia tone, he would have thought it was Beth and Rachel.
In the picture, Rachel and her mother are not smiling. At Veronica’s side there is half a head where the picture has been torn away, belonging – he thinks from the short hair and square jaw – to a man that he assumes must be Rachel’s father. He has never seen this photo before and has no idea how it came to be in his office or why it has been torn in two. He hopes Beth didn’t do it, imagining it was something she could play with. Maybe she dropped it into his briefcase as she has done once or twice before, sometimes leaving him a drawing to find when he gets to work. He knows Rachel and her mother don’t have many photos of the three of them so he’s sure she would be upset at the destruction of this photograph.
‘We had a flood in our flat when we lived in Melbourne and a lot of our photo albums from when he was alive were destroyed,’ he remembers Rachel telling him.
As he goes to put it in his briefcase, he looks at it again and notices a hand resting on Rachel’s shoulder. It’s not a man’s hand so it couldn’t have belonged to her father, and it looks too small anyway. It could be her mother’s but he can see that Veronica, who is sitting down, appears to have both her hands around Rachel’s waist, although one is slightly hidden by the ruffled red dress Rachel is wearing. For a moment he tries to adjust his body to see who the hand could belong to but he can’t work it out. He will have to ask Rachel.
Looking back at his computer, he tries to concentrate on writing up a marketing pitch for a group of bakeries, but he keeps thinking about Richard, who has now left the company, and his wife and how he had no idea what she was doing.
He didn’t want secrets in his marriage. He wanted a marriage like his parents’, who to this day are best friends, but he can feel a shift in his own relationship and he doesn’t even know why. He’s keeping the trouble at work from his wife but she could be keeping something from him. Their daughter said there was a man who made her cry. She called him a monster but it might be a man. Is Rachel having an affair? Has Beth seen Rachel fight with her lover? Ben feels his body heat up with anger. And then he chides himself to calm down. Rachel said Beth had imagined it, and she wouldn’t lie about something like that, would she? He’s certain she wouldn’t. And it’s not as if she would have called him to come home, her voice shaking because of how terrified she was, if she knew the man in the house. He is jumping to conclusions.
He sits up straight. He needs to get back to work.
‘Ben, a word,’ says Colin. He has opened Ben’s office door without knocking, startling Ben, who is grateful that at least his marketing proposal is open on his computer screen.
He saves what he’s been working on and follows Colin back into his office.
15
Little Bird
Mummy is humming in the kitchen and I am humming with her. She is humming a song from the movie about the nanny. She is smiling today. Smiling and baking. I love it when she bakes. It means she’s happy. The sugary smell of chocolate chip cookies getting all soft and gooey in the oven makes me hungry, hungry.
When the cookies are done, she slides the tray out of the oven and puts them on the rack. ‘No touching now, they’re hot,’ she says. ‘I’m just going to the bathroom, and when I get back, you can have one.’
I sit on my knees on the chair so my nose is high up in the air and I can smell the chocolate. I know how good the sweet darkness of the chocolate chunks will taste and I swallow and count to a hundred while I wait for Mummy.
But before she comes back from the bathroom, Kevin comes in. He’s been at school where he had a detention because he was fighting. Kevin says that the boy said something mean to him and then he had to hit him because he had no choice and he gave him a black eye. The principal phoned and he wanted to speak to Mummy but Daddy said to Mummy, ‘I don’t think this is the sort of thing you’re capable of dealing with.’
‘It’s not appropriate behaviour,’ Mummy told him. Kevin’s eye was all black and his nose had yucky dried blood at the bottom.
‘Sometimes a person needs a good smack,’ Daddy said and then he smiled at Kevin and they laughed together. I hope no one ever thinks I need a good smack. I think it hurts a lot.
Kevin smiles at me now and I get a funny feeling inside like I always do because I don’t know if I should be happy or scared of him. Sometimes he’s nice to me, like one time, when Daddy was angry about everything in the house not being sparkling clean, he helped me get the paint off my hands from school before Daddy saw. But sometimes he’s not so nice, like when he goes into my room and pulls all the covers off the bed just before Daddy does his inspection.
I wait to see what he will do and I feel like the butterflies on my wall are all flying around inside my stomach. He looks down at the cookies that are getting cold on the rack and he sniffs. He also likes it when Mummy bakes.
‘Mummy says not to touch,’ I tell him. ‘They’re too hot. We can have one when she gets back from the bathroom.’
He comes over to me and grabs my hair, pulling it hard and messing up my neat ponytail that Mummy did for me this morning.
‘Ow,’ I say, and my neck goes backwards. I feel hot in my face and some tears come in my eyes.
‘Do you think I care what she says?’ he spits at me. He sounds like Daddy when he talks. Daddy also doesn’t care what Mummy says. He lets go of my hair and I rub my head where it hurts. He goes over to the cookies and puts one in his mouth and chews it up. It must still be hot because he opens his mouth and lets in some cold air but he doesn’t spit it out. I sit quietly and watch him. I don’t like it when he hurts me and I don’t want him to think I need a good smack.
When he has finished it, he picks up the other cookies one by one and crushes them in his hands. Steam from the hot cookies rises in the air but he doesn’t stop. I feel my tears in my nose and my throat but I don’t want to cry in front of him.
When Mummy comes back into the kitchen, she looks at all the broken cookies and then she shakes her head and says, ‘Oh, oh, why would you do that?’
He doesn’t answer. He just smiles at her and steps towards her. He is much bigger than she is now even though he’s not a grown-up yet. He looks down at her and Mummy steps away from him and looks down at her feet. I can see that sometimes when she talks to Kevin, she also has butterflies in her tummy. I remember when I was smaller than seven or six or five and Mummy used to call Kevin ‘my little man’ and he would hug her all the time. But now he doesn’t hug her anymore, and even though she says, ‘Boys are difficult when they’re teenagers,’ I know it makes her sad.
Kevin doesn’t say anything to Mummy. He just laughs and walks out again.
Mummy looks at all the crushed cookies and a few tears come out of her eyes because she is sad about her beautiful cookies being all crushed up.
‘Don’t cry, Mummy,’ I tell her. ‘They’ll still taste good.’
She nods and sniffs. ‘I’m sure they will. We’ll put them on ice cream. That will be nice, won’t it?’
I nod my head and she smiles at me with teary eyes and goes to get the ice cream. The cookies still taste nice and I eat and eat, keeping the sweetness in my mouth so I don’t think about how sometimes I hate Kevin and I’m not supposed to hate him because he’s my brother and you have to love your brot
her even if he’s not nice to you.
‘Are you going to tell Daddy what Kevin did?’ I ask Mummy after my whole bowl of ice cream and cookies is gone.
‘No,’ Mummy says. ‘No, and you mustn’t either, Little Bird. It’s our little secret, okay?’
‘Okay,’ I say but I feel hot and angry at Kevin. Only Mummy and I have our little secrets. But now he has one too and I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all.
16
Kevin
‘So, I would like to talk about your father today,’ says Dr Sharma.
‘Straight for the jugular, eh?’ I laugh.
‘Look, you’ve been here for a week now, and I understand that you’ve been through this before but I’m sure you’re aware that you have serious assault charges against you. You are a highly intelligent man and I know that you know that the only two choices you have before you are prison or a stay with us for a long period of time until we deem you are no longer a threat to yourself or to society.’
‘I am highly intelligent,’ I agree, ‘and I’m well aware of the charges. I didn’t kill him.’
They measured my IQ at school once. They wouldn’t tell me the number but they did tell me I was in the genius range. I knew that already. School found me difficult to deal with because I was at the top of every class but I never paid any attention. Instead I liked to make jokes, disrupt things, see how far I could push a teacher before they went running for the principal.
My mother was always whining at me to try and behave. At first my father thought it was funny, and the funnier he thought it was, the worse my behaviour became. But then out of the blue he would decide that it was enough, and a detention one week that merited only a set of raised eyebrows meant a fist to the ear the next week. His mercurial nature kept us all on our toes. We were his dancing monkeys.
I have, in some of my many therapy sessions, speculated – along with whatever psychiatrist is treating me – on what my father’s childhood was like. Abusers aren’t born, they’re made. It takes a lot to turn a baby into a monster. I think I was a relatively sweet little kid. I have memories of my mother and I playing hide and seek, building block towers, cuddled up in bed reading books. Good memories from before I turned seven and everything went to shit. She used to call me ‘sweet boy’ and ‘my little man’. I know that I liked being near her all the time. I felt safe with her, sure that I was someone worthy of being loved. At some point I stopped being worthy of being loved. I know that.