by Mel Jacob
‘I’m so, so sorry,’ she eventually said, grabbing my arm.
‘It’s okay, not your fault,’ I said, feeling even more shame and embarrassment than before I told her. I wondered if she thought Patrick might have hurt someone, so I said, ‘Luckily, no one was injured . . . but he broke the law . . .’ The group started moving forward but we stayed in our spot as it thinned into a single line.
‘I mean, I’m sorry because all this time I’ve looked at you . . . and it’s just that you look so calm . . . so together.’
‘Me, together?’ What a laugh that was. We started on the trail. Thick spiralled ferns brushed my legs.
‘Yeah, I’ve always thought you were perfect,’ she said. All this time I’d been riddled with insecurities about the shame of our situation, worried that other people were judging us, and now someone was telling me my life looked perfect.
‘Well, rest assured, it hasn’t been easy.’
‘Do you need any help? I could take the kids one afternoon . . . or we could meet for coffee?’
‘Thank you, that’s really nice, but we’re good.’
‘I still can’t believe it!’ Kerri said, shaking her head in disbelief. ‘I would never have known.’
I realised then that it’s true for all of us. We’re all icebergs, I remember thinking, so much deeper than what we appear on the surface. I’d looked at other people’s lives, thinking that they looked easy or perfect, or simply better than mine. But none of us can possibly know the disappointment, heartbreak or struggle in someone’s life unless we share it.
‘You know,’ Kerri continued, her voice suddenly a whisper, ‘my brother went to jail.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that—’ I said as Nick appeared at my side. ‘Nick! Hi, do you want me to walk with you?’
‘Nah, I just wanted to make sure you’re still here,’ he said and ran ahead to his friends.
‘It was a long time ago,’ Kerri continued. ‘Hardly anyone knows.’ She’d gone from being snide, to an acquaintance, to sharing her heart with me.
When Patrick first went to prison, I noticed the words ‘jail’ and ‘prison’ the way you notice something after it is brought to your attention. One day you’d never even thought about it, and the next, it’s everywhere you go: in conversations, books and TV shows. More often than not, the word ‘jail’ was part of a joke, a punch line. ‘Wouldn’t want to end up in jail,’ I’d heard people say. Or, ‘I’ve gotta see my parole officer,’ I’d heard one man joke to another. One night I went to a comedy club with friends and every single act had a prison joke.
For some people, prison is their line in the sand. ‘I can cope with pretty much anything else, but prison I could not do,’ a former colleague said to me one day about her teenage son’s difficult behaviour. And at a kids’ birthday party, a mother who’d heard about someone fostering a child whose parent was incarcerated said, ‘I mean, what hope does a child have if their father is in jail?’ Neither of those people knew about Patrick’s situation.
As time passed, and I shared my story with more and more people, some of them also shared their stories with me. About ten others told me they’d had a brother in prison at some point. My hairdresser told me her son had done time after becoming addicted to ice, and an acquaintance told me her husband did weekend detention after he was in a farm accident that resulted in a death. None of us want to come right out and say, ‘Nice to meet you, my husband [or my brother or my boyfriend] is in prison,’ but when we do tell our stories, we form a connection, a bond.
A woman I’d met at Mannus had told me that after her husband went to prison, she was forced to return to work in an entry-level position in order to support their seven children. Another told me that her side of the family completely turned against her husband, refusing to even shake his hand after he’d been released.
Of all the people who knew about our situation, there was only one who treated me differently because of it. I was at a barbecue in my hometown. All the guests knew about what had happened with Paddy, and when they asked me how I was or how things were going, I told them honestly.
I’d tried to start a conversation with Matthew—someone who’d grown up on the same street as me—and he promptly shut it down. His body language was brusque, and whenever I spoke, he turned away from me or swiftly changed the subject.
‘What’s up with Matthew?’ I asked Mum later at her place.
‘Why?’ Mum looked uncertain about what to say.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘He . . .’ she began and stopped.
‘Tell me!’ I insisted.
‘He told his mum . . . he doesn’t want to have anything to do with you anymore,’ Mum said, ‘because of Patrick.’
‘No!’ I said in disbelief. ‘Really?’ Though I hardly saw Matthew anymore, at one point in my life he’d been like a brother to me. His reaction was only one out of so many other generous and kind and graceful ones. And I told myself that it didn’t matter. That it didn’t hurt. But it did . . . it hurt like hell.
THIRTY-SIX
When I was a university student, a popular piece of graffiti was ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.’ At that time of my life, and in the first half of Patrick’s second year away, I began to think there was some truth in the phrase. It had come to feel like we had always been a little family of three. I’d settled into work and James continued doing such a fantastic job that he joked I almost had one of those businesses where I go in and pick up the cash. The kids were great, I was happier, and then, virtually overnight, our house began to fall apart. The oven stopped working, the dishwasher made the dishes dirtier than before they went in, the side gate fell off. The pool turned green. Possums moved into the roof and our chicken coop became infested with rats. Even though we living in a house, it began to feel as though we were battling the natural environment. Like it was relentless and impersonal. As soon as one thing was fixed, another broke.
I tried to deal with some things myself. I replaced the screw in the side gate, which lasted, at most, a couple of days. I bought and set traps for the rats, enticing them with peanut butter and bread. I managed to catch two on the first try and then had the unpleasant job of killing them. But my other repair attempts proved unsuccessful, and I finally conceded that I needed someone else to fix things for me. I didn’t care who it was, but every single contractor turned out to be a man.
Had Patrick been there, he wouldn’t have been able to fix most of the things either, but he would have helped to book and coordinate the jobs. Our friend Simon fixed the side gate; another friend, Rob, replaced the faulty kitchen tap, and the flyscreens that possums had ripped apart; and Dylan, a qualified carpenter, made some repairs. And I was grateful for their help, but when it came to the pool and the oven and the dishwasher, I needed to call the experts. Which was, it seemed, a full-time job in itself.
It was one thing to book in a contractor or a technician and quite another for them to actually turn up. When I described the problem to the pool man, he advised me to turn the pool pump off, and, after a spate of rain and then hot weather, the pool turned into a green swamp. He eventually came and fixed it, and almost as soon as he left, the pool and the vacuum stopped working and I had to call them out again. And, sod’s law, when they returned to inspect, the vacuum was working again.
Soon afterwards, a shelf broke, a kitchen drawer got stuck, and a tree fell down in the backyard. Simon and Rob were both away, so I called various handymen. Some never showed, and others quoted but I never heard from them again. Then a friend told me about Hans, a young man who had started his carpentry apprenticeship in Norway before coming out to Australia.
Hans, like most other tradesman I’d encountered, was not interested in small, quirky jobs. So, my friend asked my permission to tell Hans about my situation, in the hope that he’d have some sympathy for me and complete the work. I agreed and Hans came over the following day.
‘What’d ’e do?’ he asked, his voice m
uffled by the screw in his mouth.
‘Linus didn’t tell you?’ I asked surprised, as I held his coffee, watching him work on Nick’s bedroom shelf.
Hans was now holding several more screws in his mouth and just shook his head. It felt strange, I knew next to nothing about Hans, and yet he knew the beginnings of something so personal about me.
‘It’s to do with prohibited weapons,’ I said. The words no longer carried the sting they first did. I thought that would be the end of Hans’s questions, but my answer piqued his curiosity.
‘Two years is a long time,’ he said.
‘Yeah, but you get used to it,’ I said, clearing some of Nick’s comics from the floor.
Things were quiet for a while as I gave him a hand holding the shelf in place.
‘So when you see him . . . when you visit . . . is there a place where you . . . ?’
I knew what Hans was driving at—he, like many other people, wanted to know if we were able to have sex.
‘I’m not sure what you mean?’ I said, feigning confusion. It was a very audacious question, considering we were strangers. If he wanted to know the answer, at the very least he could say it.
‘When you visit, is there a room where you can . . . you know?’ Hans, a tall, burly man, who, by the look of his biceps, spent every waking hour at the gym, apparently could not bring himself to say the word ‘sex’.
I continued to play dumb, so Hans resorted to the universal language of gesture. There he was, a strapping grown man, moving his index finger in and out of a circle he’d made with his thumb and forefinger.
‘I take it you’re referring to conjugal visits, sex? Unless that’s some weird thing you do in Norway?’
He nodded sheepishly.
‘No, we don’t,’ I said, ‘not that it’s really any of your business.’
He gave another abashed smile before shaking his head and saying, ‘Man, how is he surviving?’
How is he surviving, what about me? I thought. ‘You’re single, aren’t you? What do you do?’ I asked.
The tables being turned, he wasn’t keen to discuss his obviously non-existent sex life either.
Hans was still working when I returned from picking Nick and Lexie up from the bus stop. They wanted to watch him work and loved his ‘funny’ accent. Inspired by the show Horrible Histories, they made up a chant that went along the lines of ‘The Viking way, the Viking way, the vicious, vicious Viking way.’ Under normal circumstances, I would have told them to stop, but I figured he deserved it.
Hans completed his repairs and the electrician repaired the oven, but the dishwasher and the pool remained unfixed. Then the toilet cistern broke, and that’s when I started to really resent the house. It wasn’t just the maintenance, which was part and parcel of being a homeowner, it was the memories. The good memories of Patrick being in the house had all but faded away and the bad ones were magnified.
When I had first walked into our house, I’d been taken by the feel of the place. I liked the way the kitchen and dining area opened out onto the backyard. But now, after all that had happened, when I stood in the kitchen I remembered the policemen looking down at me. It was impossible for me to answer the front door without remembering the police standing on the porch. Sometimes, even a knock at the door brought back the feelings of intimidation.
And it wasn’t just those places in the house, it felt as though all of the hurt and anger and grief had soaked into the walls. Being anywhere in our house except for the newly renovated bedroom just depressed me.
‘Why don’t we move?’ Patrick suggested one afternoon at Parklea, after I told him how I’d been feeling.
‘Maybe, when you get out,’ I said, holding his hand. We would have to sell our house to buy something else, and it seemed like an overwhelming task to get our place ready to go on the market and then to move. The kids weren’t with us on that visit, and I hardly knew what to do without them there to correct and coax and bribe.
‘May as well look,’ he said, ‘you never know.’
The week after our conversation, as I was about to throw the papers into the recycling bin, the real estate section caught my eye and I flicked through. I wasn’t expecting to find anything but there, taking up half a colour page ad, was the house I’d always wanted. It was old but it had good bones, and a separate studio. It was in need of updating but that could wait. I rang the agent and he told me that the contract for the house had been signed that morning. I couldn’t believe it. He took my details and said he’d let me know if the sale fell through during the cooling-off period. In an instant, I had gone from absent-mindedly flicking through the real estate section to feeling as though some other buyer had swindled me out of what was rightfully mine.
‘It means there’s something better out there for you,’ my friend Jen said over lunch one day.
‘You’re right,’ I said, but I didn’t believe it for a second.
‘Picture what you want,’ she said. ‘Close your eyes and picture it, and it’ll come to you.’
Later, when I closed my eyes and thought about what I actually wanted, I couldn’t see a roofline, or doors or windows, or a shed, or any particular style of house. All I could see, all I wanted, I was surprised to learn, was somewhere completely surrounded by trees.
Several weeks later, Hamish, a real estate agent, was sitting at my kitchen table. He’d come to appraise our house. On the off chance the other house fell through, we would be ready to put ours on the market.
‘Do you have acreage? Anything backing onto bush? Doesn’t have to be a house, just something with trees,’ I asked.
‘Blocks are pretty rare these days, it’s mostly built out,’ Hamish said.
When he left, I started searching a real estate website. I scrolled down through a number of listings to one I hadn’t seen before. It was a block of land in Warrimoo not far from where we lived, and it was listed with the agency Hamish worked for.
I drove straight there. It was located at the end of a cul-desac, backing onto the national park which was almost completely covered in trees. Eucalyptus gums, turpentines, banksias, and so many other types that I hadn’t yet had the pleasure of acquainting myself with. The block itself was steep, mountain-goat country, but it was beautiful. I drove into the national park and down to a lookout.
There was a large boulder that connected to a big escarpment. The view was magnificent. As far as the eye could see extended a deep valley filled with trees, and a creek that snaked around the bottom of the mountain. I was used to looking up at trees, but standing on the rocky outcrop, I was seeing them from high up. The way birds do. The canopy was a patchwork of green, as thick and comforting as a blanket.
I thought back to that day at Silverwater, to the moment when we’d all been transfixed by the sky. I’d thought then that the sky was the polar opposite of a prison, but I realised then, in the park, that the sky was only one element of it. It was nature: the dirt beneath my feet, the rocks, the trees, the birds and the bugs. Everything untouched and untamed.
Due to the incline of the block and the fact that services weren’t connected, it was reasonably priced—approximately half what our house had been valued at. I called James to ask his advice, and he told me that if I thought it was what Patrick would want, I should make an offer. I did and, later that night, Hamish called to say it had been accepted.
Then, several days later, he called me to tell me that there were several other interested parties, so if I still wanted the property I would not only have to increase my offer but sign the contract immediately. And therein was the problem: Patrick wasn’t able to sign the contract straightaway.
I called a solicitor to ask how to proceed. She told me that to secure the property, I would have to sign without a cooling-off period, meaning the purchase was locked in. Until we sold the house, I would need to use the equity we had in it, but if we didn’t get the financing for the sale approved, we would stand to lose the deposit.
The real estate
office was tiny. It had a large purple feature wall, a table and two round chairs, which Nick and Lexie sat on, eyeing off a large bowl of M&M’s.
‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’ I asked when Hamish appeared in reception.
‘It’ll have to be here, I’m afraid,’ he said.
I looked over at the young receptionist as Hamish thumbed the belt loops on his trousers, hoisting them up to his waist. ‘Okay, look, um, I don’t know the first thing about you and . . . so I’m going out on a limb here . . . my husband can’t sign the contract just yet . . . because . . . well, he’s in prison.’
Like every other person I’d told, Hamish recoiled, and the receptionist looked like she’d just witnessed a car accident, but I’d come this far. ‘I know I could have lied and told you he’s overseas or that he’s been deployed with the army, but I wanted to tell you the truth, because it’s connected to why I love the property so much.’
‘The last couple of years have been really tough . . . and going to see him . . . in there . . . made me realise just how much I love nature . . . I’m guessing from your facial expression you’ve never been in this situation, and, believe me, I never thought I would be either . . . which is not to say you will,’ I added quickly, ‘but I’m hoping you can remember what it feels like to be disappointed or to have your world fall apart . . .’
My monologue ran out of steam because of the disturbed look on Hamish’s face. I’d obviously made a fool of myself and of him. At least the kids were okay. They were focused on eating as many M&M’s as humanly possible.
It’s not meant to be, I thought.
‘What did he do?’ Hamish asked, hoisting up his trousers again. It was a pretty valid question under the circumstances. I imagined he wouldn’t call in any favours for a cold-blooded killer or a man who blows up buildings.
‘Yeah, sorry, I should have said.’ For some inane reason I started thinking about the worst possible thing I could say to Hamish and I started laughing.