by Kim Lock
‘Thanks,’ Ark says, turning away from Jenna’s faces. ‘Thanks for taking him. Where is he?’
‘He’s asleep, like I said. But,’ she hesitates, ‘don’t you think we should talk first?’ Taken aback by his look of helplessness, she steps toward him, feeling the urge to snatch up his hand in hers. With a start, she recognises empathy: she knows how it feels to be abandoned by Jenna.
He stares at her. ‘Why do you want to talk about it?’
‘Because I want to know why.’
‘There’s nothing to talk about, Fairlie. My wife just died. I’m sure you can appreciate that I’m not in the mood for discussion.’
In the centre of the room he stands motionless apart from that occasional, almost imperceptible twitch of his left shoulder; a slight lift and fall, as though tugged by an invisible string. Once, she’d asked Jenna about that shoulder twitch. Was it a nervous tic? An old injury? Jenna had shrugged and playfully answered, It doesn’t keep him from dishing out the good stuff. Fairlie had prodded for further details, but Jenna had winked and clammed up.
‘I . . . I should have seen it coming,’ Fairlie says finally. ‘I should have helped her.’ She aims her words at the carpet. There’s a little finger smear of peanut butter not far from Ark’s foot, and the sight of it makes her stomach curl. ‘I wish she’d said something – been more honest.’
Ark looks about to open his mouth but then seems to decide against it. He snorts.
‘We could have helped her,’ Fairlie goes on. It feels incongruous to be speaking this way, uttering grief clichés like a Department of Health brochure in the Medicare office. Anger stabs at her. Turning away from Ark to flop onto the couch, she finishes, ‘We have to tell her mum. We need to call Evelyn.’
He doesn’t answer. Somewhere outside, a galah screeches over the far-off drone of an exhaust brake on the highway.
‘Is this our fault?’
He is silent for so long, Fairlie begins to doubt she asked the question aloud.
‘No,’ he says eventually. ‘No. It’s not my fault.’ He shakes his head, finally unfreezing. ‘This is typical fucking Jenna, thinking of no one but herself.’ Ark takes two strides and stands before her. ‘Don’t make me blame anyone else. I can’t, Fairlie. It’s too hard.’
‘We knew she was hurting –’
‘And no, I’m not calling her mother. Have you forgotten what she did to Jenna?’
‘I don’t know what happened –’
‘No,’ he growls. ‘Just stop. Let me grieve – nothing else. Okay?’
‘Ark, I’m sorry. I know this is hard.’ Why is she apologising to him?
‘Leave it,’ he pleads. ‘If you want to go searching for answers, fine. If you want to blame yourself, fine. And yeah, maybe you should ask yourself some serious questions but don’t bring me into it. Let me grieve in peace. My wife just died.’
‘Tell me one thing: did you see this coming?’
‘Did you?’ His expression could cut glass.
Heat creeps up Fairlie’s neck. ‘She didn’t say anything, other than that you’d fought. She only stayed two nights, then she went home.’
Ark sighs and stuffs his hands into his pockets. ‘She’d been troubled for so long, with the postnatal depression. I tried to help her.’
‘Wait – the what?’
Postnatal depression? Her thoughts reel back over the past two years, dragging up scenes and snapshots. Jenna’s pregnancy hadn’t been easy, and after the birth she’d quaked a little into motherhood – but no more, Fairlie considers, than any other new mother. She recalls flashes of conversation over cups of coffee, text messages received at all hours of the day and night, typically amiable or mundane Facebook statuses.
‘Depressed?’ Fairlie echoes, her voice thin. ‘She told me she’d been to the doctor, but she . . .’ Fairlie looks at him again. ‘She kind of laughed. Brushed it off. Said she was tired and that her doctor was a notorious over-prescriber.’ Fairlie chews the inside of her cheek. ‘And I know that doctor. He is. So I . . . I didn’t . . .’ Her sentence dies on her tongue.
Ark pinches the bridge of his nose. ‘Fairlie,’ he says, ‘I appreciate you watching Henry today. But I know my wife.’ He steps back, looking around. ‘Now, I have to go. Henry and I need to be alone together to grieve. My family are supporting me at this time.’
Just like that? Fairlie thinks. Jenna dies; Ark disappears, and then returns with a dismissive leave us alone to grieve? She hesitates and her thoughts drift to the child sleeping in the bedroom, his body exhausted and confused. In the late afternoon, after Pattie had reluctantly left at Fairlie’s disingenuous urges, Henry had cried on and off, frustrated and bewildered, longing for his mother’s arms. Was he thinking of her soft voice, her familiar scent? Did he crave the comforting sound of her heartbeat?
Don’t let him take Henry.
The thought slips into her mind so clearly that she jumps. Her limbs tingle, and something like terror rolls over her. Ark is going to take Henry, her only link to Jenna. She can see that now as clearly as though it were printed on his forehead.
Fairlie falters, clearing her throat. ‘Are you sure? Do you need some more time?’
‘No, but thank you.’
If he takes the baby, Jenna is gone and you’ll be alone forever. ‘I know it’s hard right now,’ she says. ‘So much to think about. I’m happy to mind him for a while longer.’
‘Fairlie, look.’ He exhales. ‘I appreciate you babysitting Henry today while I took a moment to arrange a few details. It’s important to protect him from those sorts of things, he’s only a child.’
Fairlie wonders what the hell Ark thought she was doing today. Playing Mary Poppins?
‘But I need to go now,’ he continues. The mood in the room has shifted; Ark seems taller. ‘My family and I need to grieve.’
‘Henry’s in the spare room,’ Fairlie tells him with some reluctance. ‘Jenna’s old room.’
A pang twists in her chest when Ark returns a few moments later. Henry, still sleeping, is draped upon Ark’s shoulder, his small body limp and relaxed. Another brief moment of panic seizes Fairlie as she watches Henry’s face.
Ark says, ‘See you later, Fairlie.’ Then he pauses and adds, ‘I do appreciate your help. Really.’ Tears well in his eyes.
She can’t bring herself to respond. Instead she offers a weak smile and raises her other hand, as if to reach toward the child who looks exactly like his mother right now – skin like cream, closed crescent eyelids with thick dark lashes, small blunt chin tucked down. Sleeping so innocently. Her hand stays forwards, fingers outstretched as the door swings shut, and they are gone.
iii
The voice is thickly accented and the background is filled with the burble of other voices and the purr of telephone rings.
‘Can I speak to Ms Winter please?’
Fucking telemarketers. Fairlie inserts two corn chips into her mouth and says around the crunch of them, ‘Speaking.’
‘I’m calling from Telstra regarding the fifty-two dollars and eighty-nine cents outstanding on your account.’
‘Oh, right. Shit. Sorry.’ She isn’t sorry. She turns up the volume on the television and pops in another corn chip.
‘We need payment of the outstanding amount within the next twenty-four hours, otherwise this call is to notify you that your account will be disconnected.’
‘Yeah right. Okay. Thanks.’
Fairlie hangs up. She finishes the bag of chips in eight minutes. It’s a personal record.
iv
Although she walks past it almost every day, Fairlie has never been inside the Penola police station. A renovated old stone cottage with cream walls, sharply peaked Colorbond roof and the unmistakable blue and white Police sign jutting out above the front door that inspires the involuntarily jerk of passing motorists’ feet f
rom the accelerator.
Her thongs slap against her heels and her dress brushes against her ankles. A narrow concrete path lined with balls of dwarf diosma leads from the footpath to the door. A kookaburra mocks her from above. Glancing over her shoulder at the road, she wonders who will drive past and see her. What would they think? Fairlie Winter, drunk in public again? Or, Hey, that’s the nurse who wiped my arse that time I had gastro. Guess even nurses are fallible. Or more likely, Poor Fairlie, I heard about that girl who killed herself.
Inside, the station is quiet and smells of paper and air-conditioning and starched cotton. A young-looking officer with a crooked, pink-tipped nose comes to the reception counter. No smiles as he asks, ‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m here to see a detective,’ Fairlie says. ‘His name is Morgan – Dallas Morgan.’
‘You are?’
‘Fairlie Winter.’
‘He expecting you?’
‘Apparently.’ She fidgets, feeling guilty of an unknown crime. ‘He told me to meet him here.’
‘Take a seat.’ He gestures and leaves, and Fairlie perches nervously on the edge of a cracked vinyl seat. A bead of sweat trickles down her spine and she reaches back, awkwardly, to flap her dress away from her skin.
Postnatal depression. It’s needled at her since Ark left last night with Henry. How many times had she reassured Jenna over the phone, over coffee, late into the evening when Ark was away, that Jenna wasn’t doing anything wrong? How often had she winced, or frowned, or snapped with outrage at something Jenna quoted Ark had said in a burst of anger? Henry was healthy, it was normal to feel tired, and Jenna was doing the best she could – she recalls repeating those lines more than once.
But.
But then. It got worse – didn’t it?
‘Fairlie.’ Detective Dallas Morgan’s voice breaks into her reverie.
Jumping to her feet, Fairlie takes his outstretched hand. Today, the detective seems more ordinary, gentler.
‘Come through,’ he says, holding the door open for her. ‘How are you?’
When the detective smiles at her, it’s with a sympathetic warmth that constricts her throat. Two days ago this man had stood with Ark and watched Jenna’s body leave. He’d picked Fairlie up after she’d fainted in Jenna’s kitchen; he hadn’t flinched at the sight of her vomit.
‘Thanks for coming in so soon,’ he says. ‘This won’t take long, I promise.’
Fairlie follows Detective Morgan through the station. The back of his shirt is creased from sitting down. His footfalls are heavy onto his left foot, he swings his right leg outwards slightly, as though his knee is stiffened. His gait is awkward, but swift and practised and it doesn’t slow him down at all – a very old injury. He leads her to a small, cramped room in the back of the building.
‘Take a seat,’ he tells her, and they sit at opposite sides of a crowded desk. A tall filing cabinet presses towards the detective’s elbow, a towering tray of paperwork spills tongues of paper onto the desktop. On the wall, a decidedly amateur crayon rendition of a police vehicle is affixed with taped corners.
Fairlie gestures to the drawing. ‘Your grandkids?’
‘No,’ he answers, smiling. ‘From a school visit a few months ago. No grandkids for me yet.’
He takes her through a series of questions: the standard personal particulars of her full name, age, address and marital status, and it begins so benignly that the swift change of his next question catches her off guard.
‘Tell me about your relationship with Jenna.’
Fairlie’s head jerks up. He watches her, hands poised over his keyboard, reading glasses balanced on the end of his nose. ‘I’ve known her all my life,’ she answers at length. Dallas Morgan nods, smiles kindly, and begins to type as she condenses twenty-six years into a few sentences. ‘Our mothers are friends – since before we were born. We grew up just around the corner from each other.’
The detective looks interested. ‘Lucky, living so close to your mate.’
Blinking furiously, Fairlie is determined not to cry. ‘We were one hundred and fourteen steps from each other. It was shorter if we cut through the backyard of the Millers – they lived right on the corner of our streets – but Mrs Miller didn’t like that. Said we scared her Chihuahuas.’ The detective has stopped typing, but listens with genuine interest. ‘But we knew it had nothing to do with the dogs. It was because Mrs Miller once caught us laughing at her giant underwear hanging on her washing line.’ She flushes then, realising how similarly ample her own underwear is now. Perhaps that is her karmic payback for stealing an armload of Mrs Miller’s underpants that one day, that day she’d fought with her mother and wanted to do something bratty, something to be noticed, because a lady at the shops had bent down to her level and cooed, ‘Aren’t you cute? Little chocolate baby.’ And Fairlie, eight years old, definitely not a baby and definitely not a confection, had blurted out a sentence that had brought a feverish red to the lady’s cheeks and sent her stomping away with her hand to her throat as though garrotted.
‘We went through school together,’ Fairlie goes on, ‘then TAFE . . . we lived together for about a year, here in Penola, before she met Ark. And then . . .’ Fairlie trails off.
When she remains quiet the detective prompts, ‘So you were very close friends.’
‘Yes,’ Fairlie answers. ‘We are.’ Her eyes return to her hands knotted tightly in her lap. ‘We were.’
‘When did you last see Jenna?’
There. Right there. The guilt drops a claw into her insides and twists her innards like a skein of wool.
‘A few weeks ago,’ she tells him.
‘How did she seem?’
How can she answer that? If she tells the truth, she may as well admit responsibility. As though she’d been there in the bathroom with Jenna, handing her the razor. The claw in her gut twists harder. ‘I hadn’t seen her as much of late,’ Fairlie says, evasively.
‘Why not?’
‘She always had excuses – Henry, or something with Ark.’
‘Why do you think she was making excuses?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘So, if I can take you back to the last time you saw her,’ Detective Morgan says, gently. ‘How did she seem to you?’
Fairlie’s mind races. In the early years of Ark and Jenna’s relationship, she had watched the gradual metamorphosis of her friend into someone she wasn’t sure she knew so explicitly. Over the years Fairlie had tried to pinpoint the moment Jenna went from Jenna to . . . not Jenna. When had she gone from the woman who’d flipped the bird at a carload of men wolf-whistling at her, to the woman clutching Ark’s hand and gazing up at him fondly?
The day she’d met Ark in the pub.
Fairlie shakes her head. Hadn’t she always told herself that those feelings of discomfort towards Ark were an offshoot of her own envy, a symptom of some kind of unhealthy attachment to Jenna? Was a lot of Jenna’s most recent detachment Fairlie’s own fault? Had Fairlie been unable to allow her friendship with Jenna to evolve into an accommodation of Jenna as a wife, and a mother – and not just her childhood friend?
And when Jenna had walked out that last time, only a few weeks ago, what had Fairlie done to make up with her? Nothing. Can she tell the policeman that? Can she admit that despite twenty-six years of friendship, despite watching her friend change from afar, she’d stood by like a useless, gawking bystander and done nothing? And equally frightening, how can she smear Jenna’s memory? If she tells the truth, it will affect Detective Morgan’s notes, paint his impression of Jenna. Recorded forever for the coroner. She can imagine the look on the detective’s face: a sad nod of knowing. Poor girl, he’ll think. Yet another statistic for mental illness.
‘She was fine.’ Fairlie looks directly at the detective and delivers the untruth. ‘Perfectly happy.’
The detecti
ve thanks her, and as he explains that her statement is done, Fairlie knows that his opinion to the coroner will state unequivocally that on a sunny Thursday in summer, with her bathroom door locked from the inside and twin purposeful, surgical scalpel slashes opening her forearms from wrist to elbow, Jenna Rudolph committed suicide.
As he walks her back to the reception, Dallas Morgan says, ‘Fairlie, I am truly sorry for your loss.’
It catches her off guard, the way he looks at her then. Like he knows her. Like he really is sorry.
‘Yeah,’ Fairlie says, taking his outstretched hand again. ‘Me, too.’
He clasps her hand tightly, then lets it go. ‘Take care,’ he tells her.
She waits until she is out in the sunshine before wiping her knuckles across her cheekbones, her hand coming away wet and shining with tears.
Dear Jenna,
I’ve never told you the story of how I came to buy those teacups. You know the ones that sit on the dresser in the hallway? As a kid, you always wanted me to get them down and use them. We did sometimes, for special occasions; we once used them for a picnic under the oak tree on your birthday.
They came from a new store tucked into an alley off Commercial Street. It was owned by a woman whose ladies-wear store had recently folded after twenty years of dressing the gentlewomen of South Australia's southeast. I’d heard that the owner of the store had divorced her husband, that he’d taken off with a much younger woman – a kindergarten teacher – also taking with him most of her money and forcing her to sell up. I stood in the cramped space of her new store and gazed around at the collection of scented candles, tiny blown-glass figurines and whimsical ladies’ hats and scarves, feeling a pang of sympathy. It was all tainted with rumour and scandal. Shoppers would go in to poke their noses amongst the knick-knacks and hope to glean a scrap of gossip they could feed on, like a magpie with a rind of bacon. That’s how it works in this town, that’s how people live their lives – always knowing, always talking. Very little personal information is sacred – especially if you’re well known or successful.