Martin was in chambers after a few too many at Friday night drinks. ‘And she turned up—Kayla. It was just after he’d breached his bail. Someone let her in, brought her into my room. She said she had something to tell me about the case. I told her another barrister was looking after it, but she said he didn’t want another barrister, and they could pay me; they’d find a way. I agreed to take it, I told her I’d do it without a fee—I’m sure I told her that—and she left.
‘It was just chance—I thought it was—when I saw her again, later that night, in that same bar in Surry Hills. Rodney was back inside, she said . . .’
‘You said that. I know that. What happened then?’
‘His mother gave evidence at the sentence. She said he had seen terrible things . . .’
‘Not in court, Martin—the bar in Surry Hills. What happened there, with Kayla?’
‘She started crying.’
‘Why was she crying?’
‘She hadn’t any money, her purse had been stolen, I think that is what she said. She had no money to get home. We went outside to the street so I could put her in a taxi and pay for it, but it was raining and there weren’t any taxis, so we went to my car, and we drove . . .’
‘Up the hill.’
‘Yes, up the hill.’
‘Into that street . . .’
‘Yes, that street. There was a house with a yellow door.’
‘And you went inside.’
Told simply, it sounded like a story from a children’s book.
‘The mattress was leaning up against the wall because the roof leaked,’ he said, and shaking his head: ‘She was such a skinny thing . . .’ He stopped there, jolted back into the present. ‘I don’t seek to explain. I don’t pretend I can. Not my part in it, anyway. As to the girl’s, you have surely guessed it already. In any event, the postscript will explain.’
And he completed the story.
The end was this: the week after Martin drove up the hill and had sex with his client’s girlfriend, the matter was listed for mention. Kayla was sitting in the back row of the courtroom. From the dock Rodney pointed her out to Martin and asked if he had talked to her about his fees. ‘That’s Kayla, my missus,’ he said. ‘She’s the one who’s gonna make sure you get paid.’
Outside the courtroom Martin was talking to the prosecutor and Kayla walked up to him and shook his hand and introduced him to a cousin as Rodney’s lawyer: ‘the best that money can buy’. They never spoke again.
‘And there we have it. It seemed without knowing it I had received payment for services rendered.’
Martin went to rise from his chair but sat back down again. ‘You know, I thought about giving it all up then. After what had happened, and day after day putting on the wig and the gown like a galah. I felt like such a terrible fraud . . . I didn’t think I could keep it up. But then, of course, the matter was taken out of my hands.’
Maggie stared blankly.
‘I was appointed a couple of months later,’ he said. ‘That was the year I became a judge.’
‘So why did you go back up there?’ Maggie asked.
He said he didn’t know; he didn’t remember. He said there was nothing more to tell. And then he said: ‘She was the last.’
It took a moment for the words to settle. Again, what Maggie had expected of this conversation and what she got were two very different things.
Martin did not look at her, but at the empty cup in front of him, which he began now to move in circles, slowly at first, then in a sudden motion he picked it up and turned it upside down on the table, like he was trying to catch a bug. She didn’t stop him. She watched the dribble of milky tea run over the edge of the table onto the floor.
Martin watched too, then he turned away from it towards the empty seat at the table, and nodding his head in agreement with a silent shadow: ‘The worst till last,’ he said. ‘I never did go for skin and bone.’
And he walked out of the kitchen, down the hall and into their room, where he closed the door behind him.
Maggie didn’t move from the table.
She sat with the missing piece—or the pieces—until the information began to trickle down, drip by drip, not as something toxic or fatal, but as something stale and, yes, ordinary. What it left her with was the feeling she had eaten something that she shouldn’t have. To relieve it she poured a thumbnail of scotch, looked into the glass and downed it in one before pouring another.
The pieces. The house up on the hill with the yellow door . . . He had been revisiting the scene. She remembered back now to the first time Martin had driven and got lost and called her from the service station. Then the day he hit the dog, the day of his stroke.
And she remembered the year he had spoken of today, the year he was made a judge. Maggie had been commissioned for a public work and was painting night and day all through the winter. She remembered his moods and his drinking, how some nights she’d look up and see him standing at the door to her studio and staring down at her. Sometimes he turned away without saying a word; when he did speak, she wished he hadn’t:
‘How long have you been there?’ she asked one night.
He was holding on to the door. ‘All these symbols of yours—this secret code . . . I’m never meant to get it, am I?’ And then: ‘Why don’t you ever paint something erotic?’ More belligerent than curious, more accusation than question.
‘Would it help?’ she asked.
He shook his head as he turned, his answer trailing behind him: ‘I don’t know.’
She let herself believe him when he said it was about work. If New York had been about stepping outside his comfort zone, it seemed to Maggie that the rest of his working life had been lived with a view to staying inside it. She went on with her painting, that night and the weeks that followed, refusing to be dragged down with him. (It was in October that she started to swim her daily laps.) Then the appointment to the bench, a raft thrown to a drowning man. A purgation . . . a fresh start.
What haunted him now, Maggie thought, staring into the glass in her hand, was not the infidelity but the insult, the assault on his manhood. Payment for services rendered . . . This morning she had heard how the woman slumped in the doorway laughed at the memory, and wondered if Martin had heard that same terrible sound.
The woman in the doorway: there was one more question in Maggie’s mind. Her grey skin and sunken eyes must have made her look older than her years, but Maggie could see that even now she was still young. Ten years ago when Martin drove her up the hill and went into her house, how old was she then?
With the drink in hand, she opened the bedroom door, but found him fast asleep and strewn across the bed, mouth agape and palms out to the side. Even then, he did not look weak; he was not weak. Weakness was no explanation. To remain faithful to her there had been no internal fight that had been lost. It was his want and his way.
And the others? She remembered now the night Annie had been upset at the cocktail party; Maggie had suspected she had seen something, something Martin had done with one of the drunken wives, and Maggie had let herself believe his explanation.
Then Sonia Kirby and the arse that was bruised like a peach . . .
She stepped closer and studied his sleeping face as she sipped her drink, measuring the distance between his eyes and between his mouth and nose, assessing its proportions, looking down as though she were seeing it for the first time—without attachment. His mouth closed, and from time to time, his eyelids quivered and she wondered what projections his mind was making beneath them, what story was being told to make sense of the one that had just now ended.
When she had finished her second drink, Maggie walked outside into a blustery afternoon and got into Martin’s car. When she arrived at La Perouse she was relieved to find that her friend was at home.
Maggie untied the blue string and pulled the portrait from its sleeve.
‘Should I look then?’ Iris asked.
‘Please.’ Maggie slid it c
loser and Iris looked down at the painting for the first time. Maggie watched as her eyes moved over the page.
‘My mum always said I had a big head,’ she said finally.
Maggie laughed.
The old woman stared down a while, expressionless, then squinted as though to look closer. Shaking her head, she smiled and looked up at the artist. Her eyes welled with tears. ‘I ain’t ever seen anyone do that in a painting,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how you done that . . .’ And when she saw that Maggie was blinking back tears of her own, she pulled her chair closer to the table and placed both hands on her forearm. ‘You seen me, Maggie, these last months sitting up there in my room; it’s right here on the page, that big head right there,’ she said. ‘And I seen you too. I don’t pretend to know what it is that’s been chasing you all this time, and I don’t ask. But I reckon now you been ducking it for too long. I reckon it’s time you let it catch up . . . That’s all I’ll say.’
She looked down at the painting again. ‘What’s the rocks for then?’ In the bottom corner of the painting, against the wall made of stones and shells, was an outcrop of rocks.
‘There’s something hidden,’ Maggie answered. ‘You have to find it.’ She smiled. ‘I call it The Lost Cat.’
The old woman smiled with her. ‘It’s a shame your pigeon lady ain’t here to see it.’
‘It’s enough that you are, Iris. It is more than enough.’
Across the park the next morning, Maggie stepped over the platform of rock, grateful the sea was calm and the pool empty. The temperature had dropped the last few days, unseasonably for December; yesterday it was down to seventeen. Raising her arms above her head, her body remembered it and rebelled, the lungs compressing to strangle the oxygen mid-breath even before she hit the ice-cold water. For the full length of the first lap she repeated an underwater curse against the cold with every outstretched arm, then, as she turned into the second, came the relief of numbness, and halfway back there it was: the rhythm in her stroke. As she turned about a second time and a third, her mind functioned only to recognise her senses, the taste of salt, the flow of blood, the glimpse of sky. The events of yesterday, her mind permitted them only fleeting space. Today the sea was calm; other days the waves crashed over the wall and she swallowed the water to battle them. It took more from her, more of her will. But not today; today, once she had adjusted to the cold, it let her be. Today there were moments as Maggie completed her thirty laps that she felt almost graceful.
As she walked back to the house the cockatoos took flight. Heading north, but not far, she thought, and not for long, certain it was the same flock that returned daily through the winter.
In her studio, Maggie picked out some fresh paper, and started sketching, just as she had done as a child after taking the photograph from Martin’s mother’s kitchen, and again when she had come home from New York. At first the sleeping man: seven sketches with his eyes closed. She opened them gradually, moved through pages of half-open eyes, to the moment when the world was at last perceived again, anew, the moment of revelation: Martin staring into the vast and inglorious unknown.
Over the days that followed Maggie worked in her studio, morning till night; it was the shortest period in which she had ever finished a picture. Three days. And there it was, completed but not delivered, the portrait that Martin had always wanted, with a secret code all of its own.
‘What are you working on?’ he asked her, for over those days she had barely emerged from her studio.
It was not out of spite that she did not tell him or let him see it. The act of withholding was an act of healing. Eventually she would have showed him, she later thought. Had he lived longer, on a chosen day she would have sat him down in the studio and let him see his final portrait.
Chapter 30
Martin heard Maggie open the door to their bedroom and then close it again.
The place he went to then was not the place he wanted to be. As it turned out, he had no say in it; it was the same unseen force that had led him there months ago, up the hill and to the house with the yellow door. The undercurrent . . .
Now he understood. This was the place it had been taking him all along.
They are alone inside her house. Outside it rains.
Ask yourself, Martin: What are you doing here?
It isn’t a place he would usually take them. He can’t dim the light because there is no light—there is no globe—but still he flicks the switch back and forth as his eyes adjust to the murky dark.
‘Why is the mattress against the wall?’ he asks the girl.
‘’Cause the roof leaks.’
‘You live here alone?’
‘With Rodney—like I told you: I’m his missus.’
‘You look too young to be anybody’s missus.’
She said she was old enough to be anything she wanted to be. ‘You want some speed?’
He laughed. ‘I haven’t had speed in a long, long time.’
There is a moment then, after he has pushed the mattress down onto the floor, when he takes her tiny wrists in his hands and he wonders what is in it for her.
‘That’s a fancy watch,’ she says, and he knows then she’s never had a man like him in her house, never had a man like him at all.
He wishes he’d worn a fake one so he could give it to her.
‘You’re real strong,’ she says.
Afterwards, streetlight through the window casts a line across the bubbling plaster on the ceiling and the darker patch of mould. He is staring up at it and cursing the drugs: it was the speed that had messed with him . . . In the end he’d given up on trying to come. But it is only when the first drop of rain hits the edge of the mattress that he realises his real mistake, the reason why this is different from the rest of them—all the way back to the woman at the bar the night of Maggie’s big award. (Something about that whole hoopla had made him want to jump off a cliff, and jump off the cliff he did.) After that there were others like her, women he had never met and would never meet again (crimes without trace), but others too, those who had their own reasons to keep a secret—because they were married (Sonia always said it was safest to stick it to the other judges’ wives), or in the case of dear Annie because she knew Maggie, because she loved Maggie, and she couldn’t bear for her to know.
Martin and Annie: neither had planned it, both had regretted it. She was having a horrid time with Jack and Martin had given her comfort, and then for four months they had been the most careful of all: a hotel room, and only once in a while. Then, like the idiot he was, he drank too much at the cocktail party and grabbed her outside the bathroom, grabbed and wouldn’t let go . . . She cried and said that Maggie was her best friend in the world. Of course, she was right, her eyes steady and clear: ‘We are terrible people.’
And then: ‘Why do you do this, Martin?’
As for the girl lying next to him, Martin thought as he waited for the sound of the next drop on the mattress, this was different; this would be a big story (a Queen’s Counsel in my bed, the Rolex . . . ), a story she could tell to anyone who cared to listen. He turned to her, watched her as she slept. Too young, he thought, and worse, worst of all, she might want him to come back; Christ knew with these young ones . . . He started framing the conversation, the directions he would give her when he shook her gently out of sleep. He would keep it vague but authoritative in a paternal kind of way, how it would be best if this was all forgotten . . . He reached across to touch her shoulder, and just as his hand made contact, there was a sound in the next room. Her eyes opened. The sound was a cry.
In a room down the hall behind a door that had been closed . . . ‘Hush, Tyson,’ she whispered. Martin got a glimpse of the baby sitting up in a cot (the grounds of the bail application coming back to him: Rodney had a son)—just a glimpse before Kayla closed the door again, and before he had the chance to say a word, she had said it all.
‘You should go home now, Martin.’ The voice was different from the one tha
t an hour earlier had told him he was strong; the voice was different, and the message. ‘We are done here.’
Elsewhere, under a faraway sky, it was a different time of day.
The earthmover lunged forwards and the birds screeched as they fled from the walnut trees. There were still posters on the surrounding walls protesting what was about to be done, the demolition of a community garden to make way for more buildings. The driver looked at what was in front of him, the staked vines and cornstalks, and thought in his mind, It is a shame. He knew downtown kids who used to play here and take cucumbers home from the garden. He was just glad the people had stopped with their pickets so he could get his job done, which he did, levelling the entire block within an hour and fifteen minutes. The last to go was the big one in the centre, the Chinese Empress tree.
‘Greetings,’ he says, ‘my name is Dave . . .’
And he laughs. It is not the first visit, but the last. He is sitting at the window by his friend’s hospice bed and with the weight inside even then Martin knows he will never feel for another friend the love that he feels in this moment. Where once the lesions had raged there are now flakes of skin like silver scales, and beneath the surface, a maze of capillaries. With the pale light falling across his face, Dave’s skin is luminescent, like the venation in the wing of an insect.
‘The circles will bump into the building,’ he says, ‘and the buildings will come down. Waves of energy will seep through the city, through the whole fucking world. It is everything . . . You feel that, Marty?’
He nods then, as he nodded when they were back in the garden between the tenements, and then, as now, he wishes that he understood.
Chapter 31
This Picture of You Page 24