‘About you and me, alone in that elevator . . . You’re only human after all.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ She started to feel claustrophobic, as though suddenly there wasn’t enough air in the room.
He was watching her closely. ‘Problem is, you’re not sure if it was a dream or not, are you?’
Jo feigned indifference, at least that’s what she was aiming for. She doubted she was pulling it off, especially as she felt like she was struggling for breath.
‘We could always try a re-enactment, see if that helps jog your memory.’
She shook her head in disgust. ‘You know what I do remember? That you seemed like a pretty nice guy, but clearly I was mistaken on that count,’ she said, walking past him to the door.
‘Oh come on, Jo, I was only kidding around,’ he cajoled. ‘Nothing happened. You passed out and then about two minutes later the cavalry arrived.’
She didn’t respond, grabbing the handle of the door and lurching it open. She could breathe again.
‘The way I remember it, you were a lot more fun yesterday,’ he muttered behind her.
Jo spun around, glaring at him. ‘Looks like we were both mistaken then.’ She turned her back on him and marched determinedly out of the room. That was probably a tad melodramatic, but she was pissed off. And she had to assert herself somehow.
She sat down at her desk and turned on her computer. There was one more thing she had to do before she filed Mr Joe Bannister away in the very back of her mind, along with the other occasional work colleagues who were of no particular interest to her. Jo opened Google, typed in his name and clicked on search.
Twenty-two thousand seven hundred results came up. She scanned the list with increasing dread. Walkley award-winning foreign correspondent . . . one of the most experienced journalists reporting on the war in Iraq . . . highly respected . . . erudite . . . informed . . . brilliant . . . insightful . . .
He was that Joe Bannister? No wonder the name sounded familiar.
She clicked on ‘images’, and sure enough there he was, with the three-day growth, the smart-arse grin, wearing khakis and a flak jacket in a war zone, then in a suit before a UN hearing on WMDs . . . a couple of head shots . . . no wetsuit though . . . Jo remembered the conversation now, the challenge. In hindsight it seemed rather obvious.
She returned to the list and clicked on the next page, her eyes immediately drawn to an entry for Joseph Bannister. Ah hah! So he did go by ‘Joseph’ sometimes. She clicked on the link which took her to Wikipedia. Foreign correspondent . . . blah, blah, gush, gush . . . winner of a Walkley Award for his stunning coverage of the Vietnam War . . .
What the?
Jo scanned the article to get to the biographical details. Joseph William Bannister was born in . . . that couldn’t be right. That would make him over seventy. Her eyes raced down the page where ‘Joe Bannister’ was highlighted . . . his son, also a highly regarded correspondent and Walkley Award recipient. They are the first father and son to have both received the award.
His father was ill. That’s why he’d come back. She remembered. Jo closed the page, feeling a little queasy. Karma and his mates, Fate and Coincidence, must be having a great big belly laugh at her expense right now. The fact that he was a foreign correspondent was just salt for the wound. She stared at his image on the screen. What was a big fish like him doing swimming in a little pond like the Trib, anyway? A Sunday paper was a bit lightweight for someone of his stature, she would have thought. They had their serious features, but Don and Lachlan took care of them, monopolised them, in fact.
Lachlan, what would he have to say about this development? Quite a bit, Jo imagined.
She closed the pages about Bannister, senior and junior, and glanced through her emails, clicking on one Lachlan had sent early this morning. When are you going to get that tasty little piece of arse down here? was all it said.
Jo stared at the words for a moment. The last thing she felt like dealing with was another man and his inflated ego. She promptly deleted the email, she wasn’t even going to credit it with a response. Instead she opened a document and began to type.
Why do you think this column is called ‘Bitch’ anyway? Because it’s opinion and it’s written by a woman, and if a woman has an opinion she’s immediately considered a bitch. Why are men never called bitches? I mean, never, unless one is being ever so slightly ironic.
Hold on, what was that anecdote she’d heard about irony the other day? It had something to do with Alanis Morissette . . . Never mind, it’d come to her later.
Lately there’s been a movement to take the name on proudly. Just Google ‘bitch’ and see what you come up with. Everything from online groups with names like ‘Heartless Bitch’, to bitch blogs, bitch quizzes, bitch merchandise (of course), to supposedly serious academic discussions on feminists reclaiming the title for themselves.
But isn’t this just playing into the same sexist paradigm that says women clad in next to nothing and dancing like strippers is somehow empowering?
Councillors in the City of New York seem to think so. They proposed a symbolic ban on the word more than a year ago. They want people to think twice about using it so freely to replace girlfriend, wife or partner. The councillors went on to state that ‘bitch’ is as offensive and degrading to women as the ‘n-word’ is to people of colour.
Notwithstanding the name of this column, I get where they’re coming from. I mean, would men ever take on the title ‘arsehole’ proudly? No way, yet way too many of them could wear that name with ease.
That was an understatement.
Same as it’s only women who are ever accused of nagging. Men rarely ‘nag’ because they rarely have the need. Does a man have to nag his wife to help out around the house? To pay a bill, to call a tradesman, to tend to the kids? I think not. So women are called nags, yet they wouldn’t have to nag if men did what they asked in the first place.
Where was she actually going with this?
The thing is, it’s way too easy to label people. Sticks and stones will break your bones and get you charged with assault. Yet names, well, names can be bandied about willy-nilly. But don’t believe for a second that ‘names will never hurt me’. No one really knows what motivates a person, what their particular heartaches are. Yet we’re all too ready to smugly stamp them with a label. But what about not judging others lest you be judged yourself? Next time you’re about to slap a label on someone, stop and think for a second what label someone may be putting on you. It’s a sobering thought.
Jo read over what she had written. She wasn’t sure what her point was, or even if there was a point. Maybe she’d save it for a day when there was a libel case in the news. For now she’d just put it away in her file of column ideas. She had a feeling she was going to need them for a long time yet, with another ‘serious’ journalist on board, pushing Jo further down the ladder.
And that was a bitch.
2 pm
Joe settled his head against the window as the train lurched and listed its way out of suburbia towards the mountains. He was dog-tired; he still hadn’t caught up on his sleep, nor had he adjusted to the inverted time zone. It had been a while since he’d travelled across hemispheres, and he’d forgotten how it was a little tougher on the body clock.
However, he didn’t like his chances of getting any sleep now. His mind was too agitated; it had been agitated pretty much since he touched down in Australia. He had not got off to the most auspicious of beginnings. Joe had hoped writing for a Sunday paper would be relatively relaxed and free of the usual pressures, but he had failed to take into account what it would be like to work in a newspaper office again – the internal politics, the prickly egos, the constant compromise. It was why he tended to freelance these days; he could work to his own schedule and he didn’t have to mix with anyone he didn’t want to; he didn’t have to go to meetings, and he didn’t have to be careful about treading on anyone’s toes. Joe had an unfortunate history of
toe-treading, not that he meant to, but it seemed to happen regardless. He’d already managed to rub the lovely – if tempestuous – Ms Liddell the wrong way, which was a pity. He thought they’d clicked in the elevator, made a connection, he was hoping to get to know her better . . . at the very least he thought he’d have an ally in her. And he was going to need as many allies as he could get on the ground, because he had no doubt his appointment with the Trib was going to upset a few of those prickly egos.
Joe sat up straight and gave his head a vigorous rub to clear the cobwebs. Bugger them, he had as much right as anyone to call in favours and take advantage where it presented itself. Leo was an old friend of his father’s. He had started as a copy boy during Joe Senior’s heyday, and had even taken up an overseas post for a while in the hope of emulating his mentor. However, the life of a foreign correspondent was not for Leo and he returned to the news floor, slowly but surely making his way up the editorial ladder. He was much more suited to management, he never would have stuck it out as a correspondent, but that was not to say he didn’t admire those who did. That was the reason for Leo’s success: while he could be gruff and cranky and didn’t appear to possess the essential people skills for management, he could recognise talent, and in his own way he knew how to nurture it, or at least get the most out of it. Which explained why Joe found himself with a job his first day home, when all he’d intended was to establish contact, let Leo know he was back and freelancing. Now he had an office, and a deal to remain exclusive to the Trib, though he had stopped short of going on salary. He didn’t want to be tied down; he was home to be with his father, that was his priority and no job, no story, was going to come before that.
Joe Senior had been feeling the effects of his advancing condition for years before he was diagnosed, but he’d never said anything, never complained. The doctor said it was not unusual in late-onset motor neurone disease. The symptoms were so gradual that many people thought it was just age catching up with them. The hands trembled; muscles cramped after a bout of gardening or a long walk. But when climbing stairs became difficult Joe did mention it to his doctor. At his age, with a prior history of smoking, the regular battery of heart tests was duly ordered, but the results came back within the normal range. He was monitored after that, but it was only when the weakness in his limbs became more pronounced and he had a few falls that alarm bells started to go off. He was eventually diagnosed with a form of spinal muscular atrophy. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would decrease his quality of life to such a degree that death might almost come as a relief.
That was some years ago now, but Joe still remembered how distraught he had been by the news. Hilary had only just taken up her position at MIT, and Corinne was newly married and relocated to Melbourne. So Joe had promptly left his post in the Middle East to return home. He couldn’t leave it all to Mim in her honours year at uni, she’d certainly get nothing in the way of support from Will. He had bummed around since leaving school, wasted a ‘gap’ year, dropped out of two different uni courses, only to talk his father into footing the bill for Drama at UWS.
Although he had his flat in town, Joe worked almost solely from the house in the mountains, which was not so difficult to do, foot-leather journalism being largely an anachronism since the Internet had taken off. He could get in touch with anyone, any time, by phone or email; he had access online to government departments, company reports, statistics, whatever he needed. Of course, it curtailed his subject matter to some degree. He disseminated and analysed rather than reported breaking news, and while that had its frustrations, it meant he could be close to his dad. Joe Senior gradually became more disabled by his illness; he could not walk far, and had to reluctantly surrender to a wheelchair when they were out of the house. The weakness in his arms and the tremor in his hands made it an effort to type, but that didn’t stop him. He still had pieces published occasionally, and Joe involved him in whatever he was working on, running through ideas, getting him to proof final copy.
And then 9/11 happened and everything changed. His father could barely stand it; he insisted that if he couldn’t be there, then Joe had to be there for him. He wanted to know what was going on from a source he could trust. Besides, Joe had gained vital insight from his time in the Middle East, and his father said he had a duty to put it to use.
He emailed his son every day, and Joe replied almost as often, certainly as often as he was able. He initially went to the US with the paper he was working for at the time, commuting between New York and Washington, but when the war began he returned to the Middle East bureau. Soon after he took a post with Reuters so he could have more autonomy, and eventually he went completely freelance. Joe didn’t like being told what to write, what would fit into any given newspaper’s agenda. He wanted to report the stories that were happening in front of his eyes; he wanted people to know what it was like on the ground, for ordinary people like them whose country had been invaded, whose everyday security was constantly under threat, whose way of life had changed forever.
But that was variously considered too inflammatory, too sensitive, too confronting, not of interest . . . Joe was given as many excuses from editors as he had stories to tell. It was wearing him out, and once he could see the writing on the wall with Sarah, there seemed little reason to stay on one side of the world while his father’s life was dwindling away on the other.
Joe gazed out the train window, at the endless grey-green expanse of bush, the landscape so familiar and so comforting to him it tugged at his heart. It didn’t matter how often he was away or for how long, this always felt like coming home.
Mim was waiting for him at the station, Joe spotted her standing on the platform as the train pulled in. She didn’t look her thirty years, there was a translucence about her that made her seem ethereal, or fragile. Asthmatic as a child, Mim was perennially thin and pale, her huge blue eyes staring warily out at a world she didn’t quite fit into. But her family adored her, cosseted her, made it easy for her to stay within the sanctuary they provided. So she had stayed; through a bachelor degree, an honours year and a masters, she’d made the long commute from the mountains to Sydney University almost every day, never entertaining the possibility of living anywhere else.
As Joe stepped from the carriage onto the platform Mim spotted him and smiled. She stood where she was as he strode across to her, dropped his bag and scooped her up in his arms. He heard her soft little giggle as she returned his hug. They had formed quite a fearsome bond, the two of them, when Joe was back living at home. He had missed a lot of her teenage years, so it had been a good opportunity to get to know the adult she’d become. He read her poetry avidly; as someone who could only use words to explain and expand, he had great admiration for the way she used so few words to say so much.
Joe released her after a moment and smiled down at her. ‘Hey Mim, look at you. You never change.’
She set her head on an angle, considering him. ‘But you have, Joe. You’re starting to look older.’
He shook his head, grinning. ‘Thanks, Mim. You could have been a little more poetic about it.’
‘No, I don’t think I could,’ she returned, the faintest glint in her eye. Joe picked up his bag and Mim put her arm through his as they walked out of the station to the car. ‘Dad’s so excited to see you, he can hardly contain himself.’
‘How is he?’
She didn’t answer right away. ‘He’s pretty good, today’s a good day,’ she said, unlocking the car doors.
Once they drove out of the town centre and were on their way to the house, Joe shifted in his seat to look at his sister. ‘So how is he, Mim, really?’
‘He has good days, and bad.’
‘In what ratio?’
She seemed to have to think about it. ‘It’s a good day . . . whenever he hears from you, or Hil, or when Corinne calls and he gets to talk to the kids, he loves that . . .’
‘I meant his health, Mim.’
Of course she knew that’s wha
t he meant. ‘It’s a good day when he can manage to swallow an entire meal without incident. He gets game then,’ she added, smiling faintly, ‘and asks for a glass of wine.’
Joe frowned. ‘And what’s a bad day?’
‘When he has one of his episodes.’
‘Episodes?’
Her eyes didn’t leave the road in front of her. ‘Sometimes it’s an effort for him to breathe, he needs a spell on oxygen most days, that’s not a problem. But if he has a cold, or even just a case of the sniffles, it gets tricky. We can’t have fluid building up in his lungs or he’ll get pneumonia. But we have the coughing machine now, that’s made a big difference. We had a few scary moments before . . .’
Joe felt like he’d been whacked across the head with a cricket bat. ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Mim?’
She glanced over at him. ‘He asked me not to. Sometimes when he’s struggling for breath and he can barely speak, he still manages to say don’t tell your brother, don’t tell Hil or Crinny. I’m not allowed to call anyone except the doctor. As soon as he’s right again, he’ll point out how he got through that, and imagine if I’d called everyone and made a fuss and they started flying in from all over just to find him okay again.’
‘But he’s not okay at all, is he?’
‘Depends on your frame of reference, Joe. He has good days and he has bad,’ she repeated calmly. ‘I just thought you should be prepared.’
But Joe didn’t feel any more prepared when they pulled into the gravel driveway, though his heart lifted at the sight of the house. As he got out of the car, the pungent smell of eucalyptus hit him, mingled with the smoke from indoor fires, freshly lit. Much as he’d been waiting for this moment, Joe found himself hesitating, one foot paused on the step of the verandah while Mim unlocked the front door. This was it, he wouldn’t be able to pretend after this, he wouldn’t be able to kid himself that his dad was doing okay, that he’d be around for a long time to come.
Crossing Paths Page 10