Perhaps all decisions are founded on what came before. Perhaps if Penny’s father had not died young, perhaps if she had become a painter instead of a teacher, perhaps if she had not run out of courage, she might never have sat on the chair that was Pete when the music stopped. In later years, whenever Penny thought about her flawed decision at thirty-three to marry Pete, she had an image of a game, some sweet tune suddenly arrested, everyone sitting blindly down when the music ceased. She wanted a baby, and so she sat down.
It was not that she didn’t love him. She loved him all right; she loved his body, the way they fit together, lock and key. She loved the way he came inside her, breaking with joy. She loved Pete because of everything she had survived, the losses she had endured, all the commonplace, everyday disappointments. Doesn’t everyone look towards love as a kind of cure, an antidote to the grief of life? She was too smart to believe she was being rescued, but some part of her must have thought she was being saved, most of all from herself. Pete was so loving then, so willing, so full of tender, soft hope. She wanted a baby, he was happy to have one too, which was not the same thing as wanting a child, a significant difference she only came to appreciate later. Back then he seemed to want exactly what she wanted, but of course he did not. They talked and talked—only later did it become apparent that they did not talk of whatever it was that people getting married were supposed to talk of—money was it? Their attitudes to work? To children? They appeared not to have discussed some vital, necessary secret, those critical words that held the key to successful married life. In the end she was left aggrieved, and he was left aggrieved, by everything lost, unsaid. It was the typical story, the typical, everyday catastrophe, their unhappy marriage an alibi for their own separate, private despairs.
Marie was the miracle. Marie was the surprise. Look at her, learning about the divisions of the board, shareholding rights, buying departments. Look at her marching into the accountant’s office, the accountancy firm that had managed the firm’s books since McAlisters was established by Syd’s Scottish grandfather from Dumfries in 1898. ‘But you can’t do that!’ said Mr Roy Phillips, of TC Phillips and Sons, accountant to McAlisters Department Store for four generations. But she did: she sacked TC Phillips and Sons and hired a smart new Melbourne firm, with its Harvard Business School alumni. Gossip spread: they weren’t even from Brisbane! Penny, watching from the sidelines, felt older and more tired than her mother. She could not have said when her life began to seem not entirely her own but, increasingly, it did.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The voices of women
Jonathan’s mobile started pinging with messages as soon as the car passed into an area with reception. It was like re-entering the earth’s atmosphere from outer space. He felt as if he had been somewhere remote, far away, deep in a dark forest. He thought of The Landing, when he was away from it, as being like that magical village Brigadoon, which appears for a single day every hundred years. In his mind it was suspended in time, its residents halted in mid-speech, their bodies frozen. He supposed this was a failure of imagination, like a child away from its mother who is unable to imagine her existing, moving around a room without him in it. During his first years of school he couldn’t believe his mother was at home in the kitchen, filling the kettle, walking around. He suddenly missed her—now—all these years dead. He did not miss his father.
Unfortunately, unlike Brigadoon, his office—and the work in it—had not disappeared. He had an early-morning meeting with the Cardwell people, which extended to two hours; it looked like he would have to appear in a big case before the Planning and Environment Court. He found court exhausting; three, four hours in the morning—with only half an hour for lunch—then back again in the afternoon, and needing to keep his wits about him at all times. Then there was the matter of the probity audit on the tender process for a multi-million-dollar service contract to deal with; it was way past lunchtime before he got anywhere near following up his earlier email to Jerry seeking his advice on the proposed walkway.
Jerry was a Brisbane Greek, linked to many cousins, a member of that sprawling community with its origins among the colony’s first European settlers; indeed, it was a young Greek woman called Artemis from the tiny Ionian island of Zakynthos who was the first governor’s wife. Jerry was affable, a big talker, a lover of parties and lunches and dinners, one of the firm’s only two remaining original partners, the other being himself. Jerry had five kids, a deliciously plump, beautiful Greek wife, Eleni, and, like Jonathan’s best mate, Will, he had been exceptionally kind to him when Sarah announced she was leaving him for Cath. He was forever asking him to dinner during those terrible first few months, introducing him to lovely Greek maidens or middle-aged ones whose husbands had died, leaving them with elaborate brick mansions graced with Doric columns and no-one to cook for.
Now he opened his office door, and his arms. ‘Filos! Ti kaneis?’ he said in his warm, booming voice, and Jonathan immediately felt better.
‘How are you, Jerry?’ he said. ‘Eleni? The family?’
‘Beautiful, oreo,’ he said. ‘Now, let me tell you the answers to all your problems.’
For the next half-hour, Jerry eased his fears, advising him of the myriad reasons why the walkway could not possibly be built. He had already sent one of the students down to the Titles Office to get the title deeds and other relevant documents and was constructing a case to do with riparian boundaries and the riparian rights of the owner of land adjoining water.
‘Basically, we’ll be arguing the common law principle that allows a boundary of land to shift if the natural feature forming that boundary shifts by gradual degrees. With rising sea levels and the movements of water over the course of a century, it’s almost certain that over time the lake has expanded beyond the original boundaries. It’s still your land, mate, even if it’s underwater! The state would have to resume your land to bloody build on it. It’s a beautiful case, filos, beautiful!’
He was in his element, away, man against the state. Jerry was a natural agitator, a red Labor lawyer in a sea of conservative blue, and loved nothing better than representing David in the fight against Goliath, even if in this case David was a private-property owner of considerable wealth.
That night, at home in his large flat overlooking Southbank, the new inner-city cultural precinct by the Brisbane River, Jonathan listened to all the messages he had saved from earlier in the day, intending to deal with them later. He’d responded to all the business calls immediately, now there were only the voices of women, women whose faces he could no longer remember. There was nothing from Sarah. ‘Hi, Dad,’ said Amanda in the middle of them. ‘Call me when you get a chance. Nothing urgent.’ Unlike Madeleine, his firstborn—independent, headstrong, out of home the first year she left school, refusing to accept any financial help for university fees or anything else and now working as a highly paid accountant for Deloitte in Sydney—Amanda had tried one year of a social work degree, six months of nursing, and was now half-heartedly pursuing an art-therapy course for children. This seemed to consist of him forking out large amounts of cash so she could establish Amanda’s Art House in Paddington, while attending part-time one of the many quack alternative therapy schools which had sprung up in Brisbane teaching naturopathy, acupuncture, reiki and various other cures for emotional and psychological health, including finding one’s inner goddess.
It was Amanda who had taken Sarah’s defection the hardest, as if her mother had run away in the middle of the night with her belongings tied to a stick. Amanda had been a dramatic child, frequently inconsolable for no reason anyone could fathom, given to melodramatic storms of weeping and sudden declarations of her intention to run away from home because nobody loved her. Amanda wasn’t even living at home when Sarah left, but renting a room in one of many consecutive shared houses peopled with various aspiring musicians, writers and filmmakers.
She was always in the throes of a disastrous love affair, but the chaos of her own love l
ife failed to make her more sympathetic to the chaos of her mother’s.
He was there for that terrible conversation, the your-mother-and-I-have-sadly-decided-to-separate conversation, when both his and Sarah’s enduring love for their children was professed, assured; each of them attempting to hang on to the ribbons of their old life, already floating away, never to be seen or felt or lived ever again. How sad he was, how sad the children were, how sad. He never knew what Sarah said in the months that followed, how she had told them about Cath. He knew only that late one night Amanda had knocked on his door, and when he opened it she fell into his arms, speaking in a rush. ‘Dad, I’m so scared. I don’t want to have a family there’s no category to describe.’ And she wept, inconsolably, for the first time since she was a small, dramatic girl.
He phoned her number.
‘Hello, sweetheart, it’s Dad,’ he said.
‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing much. Just back from The Landing. You called me, remember.’
‘Oh yeah. It wasn’t important. Sorry, I’m in the middle of something. Can I call you back?’
‘Sure,’ he said.
He sat with the phone in his hand. Did he really want to ring Charlotte, the foxy widow? Or Janice, whose face he could hardly remember? He was tired; he was too old for this stuff. He wanted nothing more than to be stuck again in an old familiar marriage, wearing loose trousers, openly licking the foil lids of yoghurt pots when he opened them, not having to worry about keeping his farts in or getting fat or losing his hair. He didn’t want to keep going to the gym, as if he might one day catch up with his fleeter, younger self; he didn’t want to be charming, to keep polishing himself so that he resembled a sort of fussy, elaborate canapé, offered hopefully. He wanted someone who knew everything about him. In fact, he wanted Sarah; he wanted everything to be the same as before, so he didn’t have to try, so he didn’t have to think. Was Sarah right in believing he had lost the habit of asking himself what he most deeply felt or thought? Was she right that he didn’t want to know? Whatever the case, he knew he didn’t want to go through the same tired old motions of courtship with Charlotte or Penny or Anna or anyone: he wanted to lie in bed and do nothing but sleep, not even make love. Now that he thought about it, he just wanted someone to cuddle. He didn’t give a fig about the moan, the ecstatic moment, the muscles of the arching euphoric back.
He and Will met regularly for lunch at the Brisbane Club. Will was his oldest friend from university, an engineer, married to Lucy since before Jonathan married Sarah. Jonathan had been Will’s best man when he had just started going out with Sarah; she had accompanied him to the wedding and he remembered being transfixed by her, by her crooked smile, her exuberance, her shout-out-loud, life-affirming froth. He remembered standing intoxicated beside her on the green lawns running down to the river at Riverside at New Farm, which had disappeared once beneath the great Brisbane flood of 1974, and would disappear again beneath another great flood almost forty years later. The river rose, as did love, fulfilling its inherent nature, set to sweep everything away.
They always sat at the same table, tucked in the corner. Will’s manner was careful, considered, and seeing his kindly weathered face again reminded Jonathan how much affection he had for him, his oldest friend. Possibly because he and Lucy had lost their first baby son to cot death, Will had an enlarged capacity for empathy, for suffering of any kind. Unlike some, he did not consider Sarah’s abandonment of Jonathan for a woman amusing and sat, stony-faced, when the scandal broke and the gossip and the jokes started, when supposed friends claimed to know the inside story. ‘Oh yes, and what’s the real story?’ Will asked, challenging Michael Carr, who was entertaining the bar at the club one night with outlandish tales about juicy ménage à trois. Will set about putting out gossip as if extinguishing small grass fires: Jonathan himself was bisexual, didn’t you know? Or the other woman in the ménage à trois was a novelist who was writing a roman à clef about the whole thing. Did anyone know if Jonathan was going to sue?
‘You don’t have to ask her out, you know,’ Will said now, before stuffing his mouth with excellent eggs Benedict.
‘Of course I don’t have to,’ he said. ‘I want to.’
‘Four husbands sounds like trouble. She’s not even divorced yet is she?’
Jonathan shook his head. ‘She’s just left him.’ He knew this was not strictly true.
Will looked at him, his cheeks bulging.
Jonathan put down his fork. ‘I know. I know.’
•
Will was the only person who ever asked him directly whether he thought Sarah was gay all along. ‘No way,’ Jonathan said. He did not know how he knew this, but he did. He remembered their joyous early days, the hours spent in bed as if in a delirium, the way they breathed into each other’s mouths. ‘I want to eat you,’ Sarah said, and she did; his lips, his ears, his cock. He believed Sarah when she said she fell in love with Cath—who happened to be a woman—not because she was a woman but because she was Cath. He’d met Cath once, a small, plain, middle-aged and otherwise unremarkable person he might pass in the street and never take for someone with superheroic powers capable of destroying entire lives. It was an awkward, terrible experience and one he never wanted to repeat: everything he had rehearsed came out wrong, so that he ended up being unable to extricate himself from the subject of transport policy, Cath being a policy writer for the Department of Transport and Main Roads. Afterwards, he wondered if Cath—with her uncanny powers—would be capable of picking up signs of Sarah’s distress, or her unhappiness, all the things Sarah said he was too blind to notice. He would never forget the night she left, how she had uncharacteristically raised her voice to say she’d been waving a red flag in his face for months, for years, that he either ignored or failed to see.
‘But, darling,’ he cried, ‘if I’d known, I would have done something!’
‘Oh, Johnny, you’re so hopeless,’ she said, her voice deflating. ‘I wish I didn’t love you.’
‘Then why are you leaving?’
‘Because I need to find out who I am without you. Because I need something more.’
She crossed the room and took his hands. ‘Because I have to,’ she said sadly, unwillingly, as if someone was making her do it.
TWENTY-NINE
A free pass to heaven
‘What do you mean she’s been bitten by a red-back?’
‘She’s been bitten by a red-back, that’s what I mean,’ said Penny.
‘How?’
Which part of this conversation did her sister not understand? Was it the middle of the night way over there on the other side of Australia, which might as well have been India it was so fucking far away?
‘Earth to Rosie,’ she said, because her sister was driving her mad. It was a mystery to Penny how her own life was so crooked, how often she was knocked flat, and how Rosie—from the same crooked family—lived with such unblinking confidence. ‘Look, Marie’s recovering well,’ she said. ‘But we’re going to have to do something about where she’s going to live. She can’t stay here.’
‘Why not? I mean, really, Penny, why not? Scarlett’s made a scarlet woman of herself and you’ve given PP the flick; the house is empty, apart from the red-backs.’ She guffawed.
‘Your house is empty too!’
‘I’ve got Russell. He’s worth at least two Maries.’
Penny could hardly speak, she was so choked with rage. Was she going to live out the rest of her years with her mother, two old bats taking their regular afternoon constitutional around the lake? Why couldn’t Marie go quietly into that good night like the rest? Why couldn’t she settle down to daytime television and the Women’s Weekly and be like every other old woman, worrying about whether the pretty new Duchess of Cambridge was going to make a suitable Queen of England? Of course she wouldn’t, not Marie, who had never cared for the Women’s Weekly or the trials of the English monarchy. Marie required fast internet connection and a computer
in her room, so she could do her online banking and monitor her share portfolio. Her mother showed no signs of flagging; she was indefatigable, formidable as an octogenarian media baron! Indeed, she showed every sign of living until she was a hundred and three, like a media baron’s mother, full of dash till the last. Apart from her old legs, her health was excellent. Recently she’d had her sugar levels checked, her cholesterol, her heart; the doctor said that everything was in such good nick she could easily pass for a woman fifteen years younger. At this rate, her mother would outlive her; Penny would be the one who died, killed by the rage of exhaustion.
‘Are you still there?’ Rosemary asked.
‘Barely,’ she replied.
‘It’s obvious she can’t come to Perth. She doesn’t know anyone here.’
‘She doesn’t know anyone in Brisbane either! Or here. All her friends are dead.’ Penny did not think it was worth mentioning Wendy O’Brien, that poor put-upon soul, a widow who had nursed her ailing husband, Ken, for some years before his death. In fact, Penny was due to pick Mrs O’Brien up soon from Pomona station; the old dear was coming up from Brisbane to see Marie, her voice trembling on the telephone, hoping she wouldn’t be putting Penny out by asking for a lift from the station.
‘Well, we’ll just have to find another nursing home,’ said Rosie.
‘You mean I will. I’ll be the one schlepping around for the next six weeks trying to find one that’ll take her. I’ve got to go back to work next week.’
‘You’ll get a free pass to heaven, sweetie.’
Penny breathed out, hard, through her mouth.
‘The Chinese are very dutiful towards their elderly, aren’t they?’ Rosie went on. ‘I suppose it’s a facet of ancestor worship. Did you see that thing on the 7.30 Report about that German guy—or maybe he’s Swiss—who’s establishing luxury resorts in Thailand for Alzheimer’s patients? It costs a fortune for in-house care in Germany apparently, but in Thailand the old folk get their own personal nurse, who lives with them day in day out for a fraction of the cost. They become part of the nurse’s family. You know what the Thais are like, so amazingly warm, so friendly.’
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