by Wendy James
On Thursday Ed stays back late, catching up, then has a drink at the Brookie Hotel with an old mate. He rings Susan first. ‘We’re having takeaway anyway,’ is all she says. ‘Say hi to Phil for me. Have fun.’
Phil – a college friend, now head of HR at a local telecommunications firm – predates Susan by several years and Ed has kept him up-to-date (for counsel – he’s a psych major – rather than gossip) on the Karen situation.
‘What worries me most,’ he tells him now, ‘is the effect all this is going to have on the kids.’
‘Mate,’ says Phil, ‘don’t worry about the kids. My guess is that like most healthy children they won’t give a stuff about your life as long as it doesn’t interfere with their television programs, birthday presents, or Saturday morning sport.’
‘But what about the indirect stuff? The subconscious emotional stuff.’
‘What subconscious emotional stuff, Ed?’
‘You know. With Susan. Can’t her internal traumas be transferred somehow?’
‘Jesus, Ed. You read too much. I’d say the main trauma here is going to be losing a shitload of money – I know that’d piss me off.’
‘But imagine how Susan must be feeling – having to meet some woman who’s appeared out of – well practically thin air, claiming she’s the sister that disappeared – the sister that’s been presumed dead for more than twenty years. And not knowing. Not being sure. Surely that’d be a fairly traumatic experience.’
‘Ed, it’ll be stressful, sure, and certainly unsettling. But traumatic? Come on. What’s Susan saying? Is she anxious? Stressed?’
Ed thinks for a moment. ‘Well, initially she was pretty shaken, pretty shocked. Now she keeps saying that nothing’ll happen, but she seems kind of excited. Expectant.’
‘There you go then. You’re overreacting, mate.’
‘But you don’t know Susan. She’s, you know, I guess she’s been through a lot.’ Ed is not sure that he really knows Susan that well, either. To some extent Susan’s internal life has always been a bit of a mystery to him, has remained opaque. He’s never quite certain whether she takes things as easily as it appears or is expertly concealing a seething pit of insecurities and unresolved anxieties.
But his friend has no such doubts. ‘Ed. Relax. It’ll sort out. Stop worrying about Susan, for Christ’s sake. She’s a big girl. She’s resilient. She’ll cope. Now have another drink, mate, and let’s talk about the football.’
Susan
Susan phones to invite her out to lunch. She follows the solicitor’s direction to meet somewhere neutral, even though she would be far more comfortable inviting her over to morning tea. Making it easy, making it casual; making it on her own turf. But there’s a saying, isn’t there, a proverb, something about never inviting an enemy – or is it a vampire? – over your threshold. She wonders whether she should perhaps, when they meet, carry a clove of garlic in her handbag, wear a cross around her neck, as a precaution.
Howard Hamilton has given Susan a telephone number – it’s not a home number, but the number of a Kings Cross hotel. She breathes in, makes the call.
‘Capital Hotel?’ She had expected a direct line, breathes out.
‘I’m after a Carly Taylor, I believe she’s...’
‘Putting you through.’
The transfer seems to take an age, but even so Susan is unprepared.
‘Hello?’
Susan seems to have run out of air. Gasps: ‘Is this Carly Taylor?’
‘Yes. Who’s this?’ There is nothing remarkable about her voice. It is low, pleasant. It is not at all familiar.
‘It’s ... it’s Susy.’ Susan’s voice is full of air now, the words burble out light and fast. ‘Susy Carter. Well, not Carter anymore, it’s Middleton now. The solicitor gave me this number ... I thought ... he said you’d be...’
‘Susan,’ she speaks slowly, almost caressingly. ‘I’ve been expecting your call.’
They make arrangements to meet for lunch the next day. Susan suggests a restaurant in Manly. Karen, Carly will need to catch a ferry over, but it is probably a little simpler for her than for Susan, with the kids to organise ... The other woman agrees, says she’ll enjoy the ferry ride anyway. The trip north. It’s been a long time. Susan is relieved – she hadn’t imagined it’d be this easy.
‘I’m looking forward to it, Susan,’ Carly says in her low voice. ‘Can’t tell you how much. I’ll see you then.’
Susan echoes the sentiment. Disconnects. Wanders about in a daze for half an hour or so. Collects Stella and Mitchell from school. Ferries them to their various after-school activities. Calls in at Coles to do some last-minute shopping. Retrieves the children, takes them home.
It’s not until much later, when she’s preparing dinner, chopping carrots into the sweet little scalloped shapes that Stella loves, that it occurs to her. Carly called her Susan. It was only when she went off to college (part of every adolescent’s quest to remake themselves, she guesses now), that she started to introduce herself as Susan, to be known by her full name. Before that, all through her childhood, her family – her mother, her father, Karen – called her Sukey. Occasionally she got Susy or even Sue. But never Susan.
She is helping the children with their homework when Ed gets home from work. He opens a bottle of wine, pours two glasses, sits down at the table with them. Susan smiles her thanks, goes back to Mitchell’s sums.
‘Well?’ Ed looks tired and anxious.
‘Well what?’
‘So did you talk to her?’
‘Uh huh.’ She can see that this conversation, like all their conversations lately, is taking on certain characteristics. ‘Sixty, Mitch. Half of sixty.’ Reluctant, half-hearted, frequently distracted on Susan’s part.
‘Well?’ Increasingly frustrated, even a little desperate on Ed’s.
‘Well what? Stella’s reading is coming along so well, Ed. Show Daddy, Stell.’ He listens patiently to his daughter’s halting, but enthusiastic, narration. Then, quietly, urgently:
‘Oh, come on Susan. Was it her?’
‘I guess so.’
‘What do you mean you guess so? Couldn’t you tell?’
‘I don’t know. We only spoke for a few minutes. She was just a voice on a phone.’
‘So what did you say?’
‘Nothing much ... We arranged to meet.’
‘Where?’
‘A restaurant in Manly. For lunch.’
‘When?’
‘Who are you going out with, Mummy?’ This from Stella, who misses nothing.
‘Just a friend, darling. No one you know.’
‘Oh.’ And is easily satisfied. Unlike her father.
‘When?’
‘No, Mitch. Count down properly. Seventeen minus nine. Seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight. The answer’s eight.’ It is becoming increasingly evident to Susan, even at this early stage of his schooling, that Mitchell has inherited her own stubborn resistance to all things mathematical, and is particularly obtuse when it comes to all but the most basic problems of subtraction. ‘You can use your fingers if you have to, darling.’
‘When, Susy?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Mum? I need help again. Eighteen minus twelve?’
‘Ask your father, Mitch. I’ve got to get dinner.’ It is not hard to find an excuse, easy to short-circuit any discussion. There are always things to do. Ways to keep busy.
‘Try counting up, sweetheart,’ she can hear Ed, patient man, contradicting her earlier instruction. ‘Count up from twelve, not backwards, it’s much easier.’
She realises, and not for the first time, that for Ed, everything – even absence – has its positive side. That Ed will always manage to find a way to count up instead of down.
Susan w
aits until Ed has gone to bed, pleads interest in a late night television show – she’ll be a little while yet, don’t wait up. When she hears him settle, the low growl of his snoring a guarantee of his unconscious state, that he won’t wander out with anxious enquiries, she carries a chair into the hallway, climbs up and drags the box from the top shelf of the cupboard where it has been stored for years. It is taped up, the cardboard sagging and faintly dusty. She untapes the box, there in the half-dark hallway, takes out each item, slowly, hopefully: the books and trophies, the certificates, the trinkets and the beanie – but they hold no answers, no memories, no meaning.
She takes out the manila folders. The first is crammed with yellowing newspaper cuttings, all dated in a neat hand, the page numbers noted. She reads through them carefully, every one. But they hold no surprises; she remembers all these details so well.
Teen Vanishes, shrieks the front-page headline from the Sun. Eighteen-year-old Karen Michelle Brown disappeared last night en route to her high school formal ... Searches are being conducted.
Almost half of the page is taken up with Karen’s smiling face – a copy of the same school portrait Susan passed on to Howard Hamilton, but black and white, blurred, grainy. Friends and neighbours are being interviewed, reads the next day’s article – this time relegated to the second page. Grave fears are held for the girl’s safety. On the third day (page six), some new evidence has come to light: Mrs Edith Lamprati – an elderly neighbour who lives only several blocks from the missing girl’s home – recalls seeing a girl answering to Karen’s description at around 7.30 pm on the night in question. ‘Though it’s a little hard to be sure,’ she qualifies later in the report, ‘all the young girls look alike these days...’
On the fourth day more evidence: A school friend of the missing girl (who does not wish to be named) claims she had seen Karen with a man in a red car a few days before her disappearance. She is currently being interviewed by police.
After this, nothing but an occasional mention. New evidence comes to nothing (page eleven); Grave fears for missing girl. And a month later, the final report: a small paragraph (page eighteen): All leads to teenager’s disappearance go nowhere. Police say file to remain open. After that, nothing.
Susan slips the brittle clippings back and opens the second folder. This contains copies of the police files. She vaguely remembers reading through these reports years ago, and knows that they contain nothing of any interest, but at this stage Susan is willing to look for signs anywhere, everywhere, between lines if necessary. As she lifts the stapled sheets from the folder two photographs slip out. They are tiny black-and-white prints, two-inch squares, with a white rim, strangely old-fashioned. They look like cut up studio proofs, though neither one has been stamped or dated. The photographs both show the same baby girl, around nine months old, propped up to sit, dressed in a pale crocheted dress, her bootie-clad feet peeping out cheekily. In one photo she laughs, clutching a wooden elephant. In the other she is empty-handed, intense, one chubby finger under her chin. In both she looks plump and gummy and content – just as a baby should be. She is not at all familiar. Susan turns the photos over. Karen Michelle Brown, Melbourne, March 1958 is pencilled on the back in her mother’s neat handwriting.
Susan studies the photographs carefully, but the smudgy features, tonsured head, sticking-out ears, could belong to anyone. She opens the clippings file again, takes out the top cutting, with its grainy photograph. Karen at eighteen. She compares the two – but there’s no evident resemblance between toddler and teen. She studies the teenage Karen’s face carefully, she tries to imagine the girl in the photo twenty years on – but knows that from this point almost anything’s possible. Susan thinks of herself as a teenager: physically slight, dark blonde hair, regular, if unformed, features – her grey eyes a little too widely spaced; nose short and straight; lips with their hopeful upward curve. Her thirty-year-old self is consistent with her adolescent self, if not entirely predictable. And there’s no doubt she’s still reasonably attractive, if rounder. But she knows from experience that it could be quite different. She’s seen girls she was at school with become almost unrecognisable over the past ten years – some ravaged by all varieties of unhappiness and abuse, impossibly aged, others, ugly ducklings grown into unexpected grace, beauty. There is an almost infinite number of versions, possibilities for Susan to imagine. Karen’s blonde hair could have grown darker with age, or could have been lightened; her nose could have lengthened, been broken, could have thickened over time; her ordinary, perhaps slightly oversized, lips could be newly defined by outlines and lipstick, or could have developed a cigarette smoker’s pucker; her averagely sized, averagely spaced eyes could be tired and puffy, bloodshot, or could be kohled and coloured and mascaraed.
She could be anyone now. She could be anyone.
Ed
Routines give him pleasure. There is such satisfaction – no, it’s more than satisfaction, it’s almost a feeling of joy (but a peaceful, uncomplicated, steady joy rather than the eddying, unsettling variety) – in doing the same things, in the same way, at the same time. Take waking, for instance. Ed no longer needs an alarm clock; he’s been waking at six during the week for so long now that he wakes always on the dot, just in time to witness the changeover from 5:59 to 6:00 on his bedside clock-radio. He stretches twice, flexing his way up his body: legs, torso, arms, neck. Then kisses Susan on the back of her neck (occasionally, very occasionally elsewhere, if she’s so disposed) before bouncing, yes bouncing, up out of bed and into the day. He eats the same breakfast in the same order. Coffee fruit juice muesli toast. After breakfast, a shit then a shave – generally in that order. Kisses the kids twice on the forehead and a still-sleepy Susan hard on the lips. Squeezes her bum or tweaks a nipple, and then off he goes to the factory. Every morning he greets Moira with a coffee from the deli across the road and some cheeky, cheery banter.
He knows that most people find such routines unbearably depressing – proof of their own inconsequence, their mundanity, their mortality. But not Ed. Ed likes the idea that when he grows old, these days will be almost indistinguishable from one another – that such insignificant rituals will provide a history, a continuity, in much the same way that the seasons and their endless cycles provide humanity with a framework for the passing of time.
He has often thought himself lucky that he and Susan – an organised woman – have been able to so comfortably coordinate their separate schedules. They generally have dinner around seven o’clock, and get the children into bed by eight. Most nights they share a bottle of wine, talk, watch television, read. Some nights they play cards, or a board game, maybe even attempt the Herald’ s cryptic together. Once or twice a week they hire a video. Most nights, at around ten-thirty, Ed will yawn, stand up and stretch. ‘Big day tomorrow,’ he’ll say. ‘See you soon?’ Usually Susan, absorbed in a movie, book or whatever, will just nod absently. ‘Uh huh,’ she’ll murmur, ‘G’night.’ And he’ll clean his teeth, and cross off another day on his bedside calendar before sliding into bed and just as easily into sleep.
But sometimes (he’s averaged it out to be 1.6 times a week over the past twelve months – down a little from the previous year’s average) his wife will look up and give him a certain look (how to describe it: tender? Lascivious? Suggestive? Inviting?) and on these nights he’ll wait until that particular, most enjoyable ritual has been executed, before crossing out, marking off another ordinary extraordinary day.
But tonight is different. Tonight Ed has lain awake, waiting for his wife. Ed has read somewhere that admitting uncertainty, particularly before the uncertainty develops into something more serious, is a sure way not only to clear your own conscience, but to open a relationship to new meanings, potentially better ways of being. He has, he thinks, discovered the source of his anxiety, and has decided to gird his loins, make a clean breast of it. Who knows what positive outcome might result.
&n
bsp; ‘I have an admission to make,’ he whispers when, at 12.55 am, Susan finally climbs in beside him.
Susan turns towards him, sighing.
‘What is it, Ed? This admission.’
‘I hope it’s not her, Susy. I really hope it’s not.’
She sits up. Fumbles in the dark for the bedside lamp. Switches it on. Ed screws up his eyes, momentarily blinded.
‘What do you mean you hope it’s not her?’
‘Well, it’s going to be messy, isn’t it? Emotionally, I mean. If it’s really her. For you.’
‘It’s going to be messier still, Ed, if it’s not her, don’t you think?’ Susan pulls the blankets up around her shoulders. From Ed’s angle she looks lumpy, neckless.
‘Why don’t you just admit it Ed – it’s the money you’re worrying about, isn’t it?’ Her face is puffy and sour.
‘No, Susy, really. It’s you. It’s not just the money.’ He touches her on the shoulder. She turns away, switches off the light.
He lowers his voice, makes it sorrowful, pleading. ‘Hey,
Susy. Sweetheart.’
She lies down heavily. Sighs.
He tries again. ‘I just don’t want to see you get hurt. That’s all.’ He stretches his arms out, goes to pull her to him, but she has moved too far away. He murmurs her name one last time, rolls over, closes his eyes, counts sheep.
On the afternoon that Susan is to meet her sister, Ed takes Mitchell and Stella to Taronga Zoo. They are Zoo Friends, so it is no big deal, they visit the zoo regularly, have done since the children were babies, but still, zoo excursions with their combination of pleasure and learning are, to Ed’s way of thinking, a first-class outing. They did the African Animals last month, so this visit (and it’s about time) they’re doing Australia. Ed gives Mitchell the map.
‘It can be your responsibility, Mitch, to lead us to the platypus.’
‘But I don’t want to see the platypus, Dad. And you never get to see them, anyway. They’re always hiding. It’s a dumb exhibit.’