by Liz Byrski
‘So, you have all Normie’s music?’ Sonya had asked as she and Marissa sat with him in the airport café.
‘All of it,’ he’d said. ‘And videos of some concerts.’
‘Wow! That sounds a bit obsessive.’
‘Probably.’ He looked at Marissa. ‘But we all have our weaknesses.’
Sonya flushed. ‘Sorry, that was rude and thoughtless. I didn’t mean . . . you seem more like an Eric Clapton or even a Pink Floyd man to me.’
He laughed. ‘Not a bad guess. Eric Clapton, certainly.’
‘And Normie? Sentimental reasons, I suppose.’
‘Bonds forged in battle,’ Marissa had said quietly, looking up at him. He had flushed and looked away, thinking that she must have known, must have understood.
He hit play and the music surged into the room. The first sound of that familiar voice was like some calming drug shot directly into a vein. Could Marissa have understood that the first step out of the darkness was triggered by the voice of someone who had also been there, someone whose arm he had gripped, whose fear he’d shared, who had seen what he had seen? This was the first time since Anna left that Frank had felt the urge to reach out to a woman for anything other than the fleeting comfort of sex. Marissa, he was sure, was also a survivor of some sort of trauma. Her apparent self-containment had a brittle, fragile edge that was familiar. The incongruence of the belly dancing and the Harley were also a part of it.
‘Why the Harley?’ he’d asked her. ‘How does it fit with the dancing?’
‘Maybe it doesn’t,’ she’d said. ‘At first it was because I was so afraid of bikes.’
‘Afraid?’
‘Yes. When I drove a car I was always scared of the way motorcyclists weave in and out of the traffic, cut across lanes. And the prospect of riding one was terrifying. That’s what made me do it. I remembered my father saying that if you take the thing you fear the most and confront it, then everything else falls into place. Anything else you’re scared of just seems trivial. So I learned to ride a bike.’
‘And did it work?’ Frank asked.
‘Partly. But I cheated. I was scared of bikes but there was other stuff in my life that I couldn’t face so I opted for the lesser evil.’
‘Why a Harley?’
‘Because it’s special, full of character. It just spoke to me in a way the other bikes didn’t. I learned to love the freedom, the solitariness of riding a bike, the open road, sweeping bends – a Harley is the right bike for that. Magic, really. It took forever to pay it off but I managed it eventually.’
He hadn’t asked about the ‘other stuff’ and he knew she would not have told him anyway, but Frank suspected that the unspoken awareness of painful survival was what had drawn them together, and what had kept them walking careful circles around each other over the last few months. He was not foolish enough to think that any woman could heal him, but he did think that love, if he ever found it, might help him to heal himself. And he wondered just how long it would take before he and Marissa trusted each other enough to disclose the darkness that haunted them.
FOURTEEN
They had agreed to meet at four but Gayle was half an hour early sitting at a café table in the shade of the palm trees, fiddling nervously with a pot of peppermint tea. She stared down the street, knowing it was premature but anxious not to miss the first sight of him.
Broome was busy with locals and tourists, a pleasant, relaxed busyness that reflected the nature of the town itself. Its charm had taken her by surprise; the picturesque streetscapes with their Chinese and Japanese influences, the wide, palm lined streets. The café hadn’t been Gayle’s choice; she would have preferred to meet Josh at the resort cottage, and Sonya and Marissa had offered to disappear for a couple of hours to give them some privacy. Her second choice was Josh’s own place, but he was more cautious.
‘Somewhere on neutral territory, I think,’ he’d said. ‘Let’s keep it cool, low-key first off, see how we go.’
She could hardly blame him for his caution. It was so long since they had seen each other he must be as nervous as she was, and this was his town, she was the intruder. She repeated that to herself over and over again, each time the words ‘cool’ and ‘low-key’ surged into her mind and left her insides turning to jelly. Of course he must feel anger, resentment, confusion – she should expect nothing less after all this time. Their occasional telephone conversations had seemed couched in an unspoken understanding that the appalling rift could not be discussed at a distance, and as time passed it had become more and more difficult to imagine the possibility of talking face to face.
Gayle’s anxiety made her weak and nauseous, her legs and hands trembling uncontrollably. It seemed impossible now that she could have done this, abandoned her son, failed to fight for him, to stand between him and Brian and hold her ground. Who had she been for all those years? How could she have done something so shameful and gutless, something so entirely at odds with everything she believed? It was a blur, but perhaps she had deliberately contrived to blur it, to take the edge off the pain and the guilt. Some moments remained with extraordinary clarity, though, especially the day Josh had brought Dan to the house for the first and only time.
‘So how did you and Dan meet?’ she’d asked Josh that evening.
‘Connections,’ he’d replied.
‘What sort of connections? Friends from work or something?’
‘Connections, Mum. It’s a club in Northbridge.’ He paused, looking straight at her. ‘A gay club.’
The minute the words were out of his mouth, Gayle wondered why she hadn’t realised it before, why, only a month from his twentieth birthday, she suddenly understood who her son was.
‘Don’t tell your father, Josh,’ she begged him, ‘not yet. Let’s take a bit of time to think about it . . .’
‘I have to tell him,’ he’d said. ‘I was going to tell you both together tonight but you beat me to it. It’s only fair to tell him now.’
‘But you don’t need to tell Brian yet.’
‘Yes I do,’ he said. ‘And I want him to meet Dan too. We’re in love – he’ll be part of our family.’
She had thought that Dan might just be a casual boyfriend and that somehow the truth could be kept from Brian, for a while, at least.
‘Are you sure?’ she asked. ‘How long have you known?’
‘From the moment we met, eight months ago,’ Josh said, his face lighting up at the chance to talk about Dan. ‘We’re both –’
‘No, I meant how long have you known about yourself?’ Gayle asked.
Josh shrugged. ‘Ages. Seven years, eight, maybe more.’
‘And you didn’t say anything to me?’
‘I wasn’t ready,’ he said, ‘didn’t know how.’
In view of her subsequent betrayal it now seemed insane to Gayle that she could for a moment have reproached him for not telling her earlier. She had abandoned him to his father’s prejudice and perhaps Josh had always known that would happen. Perhaps he had known it that day as she stood there hugging him, telling him it made no difference, that she was proud of him and loved the person she now knew him to be. Perhaps he already knew that it was the beginning of the end, that despite what she said, she didn’t have the strength or resolve for the battle ahead.
Brian’s outrage had been boundless; his demands that Josh never see Dan again, his threats of involving the police because the law protected men under the age of twenty-one, merged with her own protests and Angie’s tears.
‘Well, if that’s what you want, Dad, that’s what you’ll get,’ Josh said when his father told him to leave, told him that as far as he was concerned, Josh was no longer his son. A few hours later, his possessions in the car, he had driven off into a wintry night of torrential rain and wind that howled around the house, echoing Gayle’s misery.
Back then she had believed it was temporary, that somehow in the coming weeks, when Brian realised the enormity of what he’d done, she would be abl
e to change his mind, approach Josh, bring him back. But his intransigence continued alongside her own fearful ineffectiveness. It was so easy now to see what she should have done, and to see how ‘cool’ and ‘low-key’ might be just the sanitised tip of Josh’s feelings about this meeting.
‘Hi,’ said a voice behind her, and Gayle jumped to her feet, shaken by his arrival, confused that he had approached her from a direction she hadn’t been watching.
‘Josh!’
‘Yep. Hi, Mum.’
Instinctively she reached out to hug him but he stiffened, patted her shoulder awkwardly and broke away. The rejection was agonising and she steadied herself against the chair as he made his way to the other side of the table.
She had known a boy and he had become a man. A man she didn’t know. A handsome man, with a deep tan and hands calloused from his job. A serious man with sad eyes, even features and light reddish hair bleached blond and coarsened by the sun. Gayle, unable to stop the tears rolling down her cheeks, watched him, trying to fit the old Josh into the one who now faced her across the table.
‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ she said. ‘How to begin.’ Josh shook his head and looked away, his jaw tightening. ‘Let’s begin by ordering some coffee,’ he said. ‘We probably need it.’
‘It was fabulous,’ Sonya said, hauling herself out of the pool and lying down on a towel. ‘Dancing with those guys was the best thing yet.’
‘We’ve only had one rehearsal,’ Marissa pointed out.
‘I know, but it was just like you said – great, totally different.’
‘Yes, something happens between musicians and dancers. You’ll feel the connection even more strongly when we’re in costume and there’s an audience.’
Sonya nodded. ‘I’m looking forward to it now. I felt I was dancing better this morning.’
‘You were,’ Marissa said, ‘both you and Gayle, much better. Hate to say I told you so.’
‘But you’re going to say it anyway.’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, I don’t care, I loved it. So did Gayle – or she would’ve done if she hadn’t been so tense about meeting her son. And those guys are so great, I really liked them.’
‘Good,’ Marissa said. ‘Glad we’ve got one satisfied customer.’ She smoothed her towel and lay back. ‘How d’you think Gayle’s getting on?’
‘With difficulty, I should think,’ Sonya said. ‘It’s going to take more than tea and sympathy under the palm trees to put this right.’
Marissa sat up again. ‘I don’t really understand how she could have done it. I mean, I don’t have children, but I still don’t see how she could have just sort of abandoned him like that. After all, it’s not even as though she actually minded about him being gay, it’s just the husband. I don’t get it.’
‘You haven’t met Brian,’ Sonya said. ‘He’s totally unlike the sort of person you’d expect Gayle to be married to. If you’d met him you’d realise how amazing it is that she’s still married to him. Oliver thinks so too and he’s known her for years.’
‘It’s odd what happens in relationships,’ Marissa said. ‘But Brian can’t be all bad or she would have left him by now.’
‘I’ve only met Brian once,’ Sonya said, ‘but I’ve heard quite a bit from Angie and from Trisha, and if Brian has any redeeming features he keeps them well hidden. And I think she is leaving him now. She stood her ground, didn’t rush back when he demanded it, didn’t give in to Angie’s whining at the airport, and now she’s meeting Josh. She’s changed a lot just in the time I’ve known her. She’s said herself that dancing has changed her, and this is the result. If she does go home at the end of the tour, my guess is that she won’t be there long.’
‘I’ve seen this kind of thing before,’ Marissa said.
‘Of course, and that surely is what this tour is all about.’
‘It’s not about breaking up marriages.’
‘No, but it’s about health, self-esteem and confidence. There are bound to be casualties – relationships, jobs, lifestyles . . . whatever.’ Sonya rubbed sunscreen on her legs. ‘It’s the same for me, really. The dancing made me stop pretending to my parents. I kept putting it off but in the end I let them know I was doing something they’d find unacceptable. I guess I realised it would happen – maybe I even wanted it to.’
Marissa stretched her arms above her head. ‘It makes me thankful I’m single, and that my family ties withered decades ago. My parents didn’t want to know me after my disappearing act. I wrote to them many times but they never replied.’
‘What about your husband? I s’pose you got a divorce.’
Marissa laughed. ‘No. It must sound weird but we were still officially married when he died a few years ago. It didn’t bother me because I knew I’d never get married again, but I kept expecting him to divorce me. He lived with a woman for about fifteen years. I suppose it must have suited him that way.’
‘Relationships are so complicated,’ Sonya said. ‘I grew up thinking that it was all so straightforward: you met someone, fell in love, got married, and if you got that right everything else fell into place. And, you know, despite everything I’ve learned, despite the seventies and feminism and two brief but disastrous marriages and a career, that image of what women should do and be still gets to me.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Marissa said with another laugh. ‘I love my life, wouldn’t have it any other way, but a bit of me still feels I failed because I ran away from it. Someone once said “scratch any woman deep enough and you’ll discover a lounge suite”. I knew just what she meant.’
‘Yes, me too.’ Sonya stood up. ‘I think I’ll go back to the cottage and have a shower. It’s getting a bit too warm out here. I hadn’t thought about dancing in the costumes in the heat. It was so nice and cool down south.’
‘They are uncomfortable,’ Marissa said, ‘heavier than ever when it’s hot and every sequin and bead scratches. I’ll come with you. Gayle will probably be back soon.’
They gathered up their things and walked back along the path to their cottage.
‘So what did belly dancing do for you?’ Sonya asked, turning to look at Marissa. ‘Who or what was the casualty of your change?’
Marissa’s face flushed. ‘No casualties. It just helped me cope with . . . come to terms with . . . well, with some stuff that happened a long time ago.’
‘Relationship stuff?’
‘Something like that,’ Marissa said, looking away and increasing her pace. ‘It’s a long time ago – I don’t really want to get into it.’
‘Sorry,’ Sonya said, unlocking the door of the cottage and dropping her sunglasses onto the hall table. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude. I have a horrible habit of sticking my nose into things that aren’t my business.’
Marissa smiled. ‘It’s fine. Really.’ And she went to the sink and began to fill the kettle. ‘You have a shower first. I’ll make some tea. Gayle’ll need it.’
Sonya dragged off her bathers, dropped them on the bathroom floor and stood for a moment staring at the cascade of water. Clearly her question had touched a nerve and she couldn’t help feeling that while the belly dancing might well have helped Marissa, her reluctance to talk about it was probably a sign that whatever haunted her hadn’t yet been laid to rest.
Brian had flown home to Perth in very good spirits. His worst fears as he walked down the passage and into the Sydney boardroom had not been realised. Mal was at the head of the table and either side of him sat Rod Campbell and the US sales and marketing director. He had expected to see them rearrange their faces into expressions of false solicitude as they heaped the responsibility for the regulation board decision on him. He was tense and ready for battle but it didn’t eventuate. All they wanted was an update on his latest initiative and an explanation of a paragraph in one of his recent reports. He joined them at the table, was given coffee, provided the information and left half an hour later, his heart lifting, his stomach settling as
he made his way back up to his office. The danger had passed, and this weekend he would sort Gayle out and everything would be back on track.
The lunch on the flight to Perth was excellent, as was the wooded Chardonnay, of which he had several glasses. When the taxi dropped him at home he was surprised not to find Gayle there. She was due back from Bunbury by now. Brian went to the wine rack, found two bottles of the same Chardonnay he’d drunk on the flight, put them in the fridge to chill, and rifled through the mail. Then he went upstairs, had a shower, changed his clothes and considered where he should book a table for dinner. What would Collette have recommended? Somewhere really special, probably, or maybe he should ask Gayle where she’d like to go. Leaning back in his favourite chair he dialled her mobile and was diverted to the message bank.
‘What’s the point of a mobile phone if it’s always bloody well switched off,’ he demanded aloud, and dialled Angie’s office number.
‘Why are you at home, anyway?’ Angie asked. ‘Mum said you were going to the Vines with clients.’
‘Came home to surprise her,’ Brian said. ‘Thought I’d take her out, got her some flowers at the airport. Anyhow, her phone’s off so when’ll she be back?’
‘She won’t,’ Angie said, and Brian thought she sounded a bit strange. ‘They changed the schedule and flew up north a couple of days ago. She’s in Broome now.’
‘Broome?’ he said, putting on his glasses and looking again at the itinerary. ‘Says here she’ll be home today.’
‘Yes, well, they changed their plans,’ Angie repeated.
‘But she’s supposed to be here,’ Brian stormed. ‘It says so. She can’t just change it like that.’
‘You changed your plans,’ Angie ventured. ‘Anyway, you can have a rest and a nice quiet weekend.’
‘A quiet weekend? What am I supposed to do here all on my own, no food in the fridge, and what about my washing?’