Love, Honour & O'Brien

by Jennifer Rowe

  short notice, but I have to leave. Something has come up.

  Don’t try to find me. Just forget I ever existed.

  Forgive me.

  Andrew

  Standing there in the kitchen with her handbag still slung over her shoulder and the champagne bottle in her hand, a few things occurred to Holly.

  The first, and most paralysing, was that her mother had been right.

  The second was that when she had called Andrew on Saturday, he had seemed slightly distracted, but she hadn’t wanted to appear clingy or lacking in confidence, so she hadn’t asked him if anything was wrong.

  The third was that she wouldn’t be surprised if the ex-receptionist, Aimee, had something to do with this.

  The fourth was that she wasn’t crying, and she should have been.

  The fifth was that it was sort of insulting that the note was on the fridge. It was as if Andrew had assumed that this would be the first place she would head for when she arrived. Well, he was right there, she had to admit. But the fridge wasn’t a dignified place for a farewell note. A farewell note should be stuck on a pincushion on your dressing table. Or placed on your pillow, under a single red rose. Holly couldn’t help but believe that the fact that Andrew, who valued style above everything, had chosen the kitchen as the place to bow out, said a lot about his opinion of her.

  Then there was the money. Forty dollars. Did Andrew think she would be too upset to go to the bank for the next day or two? Did he think she would need money for dinner? Or was it—could it possibly be—some symbolic thing?

  Facts absorbed in childhood flashed out of the murk of Holly’s unconscious. Forty days’ rain caused Noah’s flood.

  Jesus wandered in the desert for forty days. Lent was forty days long. (No meat in Lent. Her mother always insisted on that, though she only went to church once in a blue moon. Forty dinners of fish cakes, salmon mornay, macaroni cheese . . . )

  Could Andrew be hinting that his affair with Holly had been some sort of penance? Desperately she tried to think of another explanation. The Roaring Forties. Life Begins at Forty. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves . . .

  She was shocked, of course. She told herself that, later. Concentrating on details instead of focusing on the main issue. The main issue being that Andrew had gone and, presumably, wasn’t coming back.

  But that was crazy. The kitchen Holly was standing in was Andrew’s kitchen. The fridge was his fridge. The house was his house. She had disposed of her own scrappy array of household goods. All she had brought with her were her personal belongings, a bundle of bed linen, a feather and down quilt and the goose-shaped cookie jar.

  Andrew might have felt he owed her something for standing her up more or less on the registry office doorstep— ducking, right at the death, out of his promise to make what her grandmother would have called ‘an honest woman’ of her. But guilt wasn’t usually a problem for Andrew. He didn’t seem to have what most people thought of as a conscience. He never looked back, or regretted anything. He lived for the present.

  Holly had always found that exciting. In fact, she had envied it, since she herself was quite capable of groaning with shame about things that had happened when she was still wearing long white socks with lace around the tops, and going to Sunday School. It had never occurred to her that one day she herself might end up being a casualty of Andrew’s ability to move on. But even if, on this occasion, Andrew had felt guilty, she reasoned, there was no way he would leave her in possession of everything he owned.

  Well, as she was soon to discover, yes, he would. Because it turned out that Andrew had been living for the present in more ways than one.

  Holly had several visitors in the next couple of hours. They were all very polite, and they all apologised for not phoning, but it seemed the phone had been disconnected. She tried to make coffee for the first one, but by that time the electricity had gone too.

  Anyway, to cut a long story short, Andrew’s cute little house in Clover Road, with its fireplace, its broad polished floorboards, its original kookaburra leadlight front door and its elaborate ceiling decorations, was in fact not Andrew’s at all, but rented. The furniture was rented, too. And the fittings, glasswear, china, cutlery . . . even the fridge, which Holly thought was rather an irony. The rents, it seemed, hadn’t been paid for quite a while. Just like the lease payments on the Saab, which according to a note she found in the letterbox had been repossessed earlier in the day. Andrew, it seemed, had owned nothing but his clothes, his shaving gear, his laptop computer, his phone and his watch, and they had gone with him.

  The real estate agent, and the men from Home Comforts, the furniture and fittings rental place, seemed rather sorry for Holly. The agent, who had bushy black eyebrows and mournful brown eyes and whose name was Len Land— a fact that only added to Holly’s sense that all this must be some bizarre joke—even lent her his phone so she could try to ring Andrew. But Andrew’s phone was still turned off.

  Mr Land said it had been off, as far as he knew, for days. He said he didn’t want to upset Holly, but unless she could come up with the rent owing, plus another month in advance, she was out by the end of the week. Her name wasn’t on the lease, he explained carefully, so effectively she was squatting.

  And the furniture and fittings rental men were not prepared to wait. As they said, proffering a yellow form covered in indecipherable writing, they had their orders. They just took everything out piece by piece and loaded it into a truck.

  Holly stood there watching, clutching her cookie jar and surrounded by her suitcases, her quilt, neatly packed in its original zippered bag, the bottle of champagne, and a slightly damp bundle of sheets, towel and bathmat. She could see the men felt bad about it, but they kept on going until the house was empty. She supposed they saw a lot of desperate people like her in their job.

  2

  By the time the Home Comforts men had gone, it was getting dark and rather cold. Holly wandered around for a while, listening to the echoes and flicking at the light switches just in case one of them worked. Then she cried a bit. Then she put on the jacket she’d prudently packed at the top of one of her cases, wound a woollen scarf around her neck and went into the kitchen.

  The things that had been unloaded from the fridge were neatly stacked on a benchtop. Holly ate some yoghurt, some cheese, a gherkin and some leftover asparagus. Then she opened the champagne. The glasses were gone so she had to drink out of the bottle, but that didn’t matter. There was no one to share with, and no one to see her.

  I have to be calm, she told herself. She found the champagne helped. By the time the bottle was half empty she felt calm enough to wire the foil back around its top and walk with it, her quilt and a small overnight bag, to Andrew’s office in the town centre. There would be light and heat in the office. There was a sofa where she could sleep and a TV set, in case she couldn’t sleep. There was a bathroom. There were tea and coffee, and a fridge to keep the champagne cool.

  And there was a phone. She could ring someone, tell someone what had happened.

  But who could she tell? Who could she bear to tell?

  No one, she realised, feeling heat rise to the roots of her newly streaked hair. Because she had met Andrew so soon after she arrived in Sydney, and had spent every weekend since away, she had never made any friends—except of course her workmates at Gorgon’s, and they didn’t really count.

  She had liked Anne, Paola and Justine, and they had seemed fond of her, but in her clearer moments she had sometimes thought their friendship was a bit like the camaraderie that might develop among strangers trapped in a lift that had stopped between floors. She was fairly sure that Anne’s grandchildren, Paola’s girl-guide troop and Justine’s irritable bowel syndrome would not have the same conversational appeal for her outside the small, coffee-paper-and-plastic scented world of Gorgon Office Supplies. It was also unlikely that her love life would be of much interest to them in less claustrophobic circumstances. Familiarity and routine had boun
d them. Once Friday’s farewell lunch had come to an end, Holly had officially become part of Anne, Paola and Justine’s pasts.

  And there was no question of calling anyone in Perth. Closing her ears to her parents’ warnings of the muggers, druggies and warring gangs that swarmed Sydney’s streets, discarding a perfectly good job in a bank with an excellent superannuation plan, Holly had fled the safety of home, leaving dismay and irritation in her wake.

  Her old friends had been offended by her defection and shocked by her ruthless dumping of ‘poor old Lloyd’ after seven years. Holly had swapped emails with them since, of course, using the Gorgon computer in her lunch breaks, and had told them about Andrew McNish. But their replies had been guarded, relaxing with relief in the final paragraphs to give details of lives that now seemed totally alien.

  As for her parents . . . They had actually met Andrew, early on, when their visit to Sydney for an old friend’s funeral had coincided with one of Andrew’s rare trips to the city. They had disliked him on sight. During a stiff little meeting ‘for drinks’, Holly had read all too clearly in their faces their opinion of Andrew McNish, smooth-talking Sydney spiv, who had told them he could halve their tax bill by various ‘perfectly kosher’ means, who had told them he always went to a restaurant for Christmas dinner, who said ‘Skol’ instead of ‘Cheers’ or ‘Here’s luck!’ when he had a beer.

  They had made no comment at the time, but afterwards, safely back in Perth, her mother had said quite a lot on the phone about ‘taking things slowly’, and about ‘people like us’ valuing integrity and plain speaking (versus, presumably, people like Andrew who valued neither). She said that she could see Andrew was very good-looking and all that, but Holly should remember that she and Andrew came from very different backgrounds, and not get ‘out of her depth’.

  Holly had defended Andrew vigorously. She had said she really admired the way he had made his own way in the world. She had said that Andrew was the most interesting, most stimulating man she had ever met, and she trusted him completely. How could she now ring up and admit that Andrew had left her a farewell note and forty dollars the day before their wedding?

  She’d rather die.

  Holly trudged up to the main road, and turned left. There was a bank on the corner. On an impulse that had nothing, really, to do with suspicion but was more to do with making herself feel in control of things, she stuck her brand new keycard into the hole in the wall and asked the machine for two hundred dollars.

  It said no. ‘Insufficient Funds’, it said.

  Puzzled, Holly tried for a hundred. Same result. She 18 tried for fifty. No luck.

  Holly stared at the machine. It stared back at her smugly.

  ‘Give me my money!’ she said to it. A passing woman smiled, her eyes flicking down to the half-empty bottle of champagne at Holly’s feet.

  Holly couldn’t blame her, didn’t resent the smile. No doubt it was odd to talk to a machine, but the woman just didn’t understand. Holly’s severance pay from Gorgon’s, and twelve hundred dollars of her savings, were in that bank. In the new joint account. Weren’t they?

  Her mind quite numb, she walked on to the office and let herself in with the key Andrew had given her. She tried the lights, and as they flickered on, bland and bright, found tears of gratitude sliding down her cheeks.

  The curved white reception desk was bare except for the telephone, and filmed with a fine layer of dust. The computer and printer had gone. Andrew’s polished wooden desk, behind its half-glass partition, had been similarly stripped. Holly checked the petty cash tin. It was empty. So were all the filing cabinets.

  Stiffly, like a hospital patient taking her first steps to the bathroom after an operation, Holly returned to the front of the office. On the wall of the reception area, directly above a tall vase of slowly fossilising banksias, directly opposite the black leather visitors’ sofa, the steel and glass coffee table and the television set, Andrew’s face smiled at her from the framed local newspaper article cribbed from his own press release and headed ‘From Abandoned Baby to Finance Whiz’.

  Holly lay down on the sofa, turned on the TV and pulled the wire off the champagne.

  She didn’t have a bad night, considering. She woke up in the morning to the sound of someone changing the locks. And before she had even lurched off the sofa, another real estate agent, Oriana Spillnek by name, was explaining to her, not very politely, that, whatever Holly might have thought, the office was not a flophouse.

  Ms Spillnek also said, her pale blue eyes on the empty champagne bottle rolling under the coffee table, that she, Ms Spillnek, had bent over backwards to be accommodating, but enough was enough. And that she would very much appreciate speaking to Mr McNish as a matter of urgency, because his cheque for three months’ rent—in arrears, mind you—had bounced sky high.

  Holly tried to be dignified but she was at an enormous disadvantage, because she had just woken up, and she was wearing only a T-shirt and panties. Furthermore, she had been so calm the night before, after finishing the champagne, that she had gone to sleep without taking her makeup off, so she knew that her mascara had almost certainly smudged under her eyes, making her look like a raccoon. And clearly her breath smelt terrible, because Oriana Spillnek kept turning slightly aside whenever she said anything, and her mouth felt, as her Great Uncle Tom would have said, like the bottom of a baby’s pram—all shit and biscuits.

  She told Spillnek about twenty times that she had no idea where Andrew was, but it was clear the woman wasn’t convinced. So in the end Holly told her about the wedding, and showed her the note. That worked. Spillnek’s pale, shallow little eyes, outlined so firmly in black that they looked as if they had been painted onto her face, stopped snapping and took on a superior, pitying look.

  Now that Holly was an established victim, she thought she had a chance of being allowed to go to the toilet, and she was right, though Oriana Spillnek asked her not to be too long, because there was a meeting at the agency in fifteen minutes.

  Holly found her shoes, her jeans, her jacket and her overnight bag, and scuttled off. When she reached the little bathroom at the back of the office she locked herself in, leant her forehead against the door and stared at the green paint for a while. Then she went to the toilet, washed her face and hands, cleaned her teeth and pulled on her clothes.

  As she combed her hair, a pale, haunted raccoon with pink eyes and blond streaks stared back at her from the mirror above the washbasin. She cleaned off the mascara rings and smeared on some face cream and lip-gloss. The raccoon disappeared and a haunted white rabbit took its place.

  She wasn’t thinking about anything much, but the terror of her position must have begun to penetrate, because on the way back to the reception area she crept into the kitchenette and stuffed a coffee mug, a knife, a teaspoon and half a packet of chocolate chip cookies into her handbag.

  Then she left. The locksmith kept his eyes averted as she passed him. It was out of delicacy, Holly thought, rather than embarrassment. He was about her father’s age, and probably had daughters of his own.

  The streets were bright, and full of Springwood housewives pushing baby-filled strollers. Also old men in track pants and checked flannelette shirts, and men and women in suits, talking on their phones or to each other as they walked along. They were the same people Holly had been seeing at intervals for three months, she supposed. She had never felt exactly one of them, but now they seemed like members of another species. She would have bet half of her forty dollars that all of them had furniture in their houses, for example. And she would have bet the other half that not one of the women had a coffee mug in her handbag.

  Thinking of the forty dollars made her remember the bank again. She went back to it. Checked once more, over the counter this time, that the money in the joint account was truly gone.

  It was—except for ten dollars, presumably left to keep the account open. The rest of the money had been withdrawn the day before—just after opening time, ap
parently. About the same time, Holly thought, that she had handed in her apartment key, bought a cup of weak, sugary coffee, and chugged off towards the mountains in a car that was about to self-destruct. Tears stung her eyes—a bitter blend of rage, grief and shame.

  The gawky, doe-eyed teller behind the bulletproof plastic shield, her badge declaring that her name was Leonie, was defensive, scenting trouble. She said that the withdrawal had been quite legitimate, because the account was a joint account for which either party could sign. Holly said she knew that, but this didn’t stop Leonie from repeating the phrase ‘legitimate withdrawal’ twice more, as if it were a mantra that would protect her from despair germs.

  As Holly left the bank, her head determinedly high, the heat of Leonie’s doe eyes burning into the back of her neck, she remembered that the wedding—or, rather, the non-wedding— was scheduled for midday. It was unlikely that Andrew had bothered to cancel the registry office, or the celebration lunch booking at Angelo’s. Holly thought it was probably lucky he had bothered to cancel her.

  She bought a takeaway coffee and a phone card, then, near the post office, found a public phone cubicle that still had intact directories. She cancelled the registry office and Angelo’s. She said it was because of illness, but was sure that the woman at the registry office, at least, didn’t believe her.

  There was no one else she had to ring. She and Andrew had decided to get married quietly, without telling anyone until afterwards. Or, at least, Andrew had suggested that, and Holly had agreed. Given how her parents felt about him, a big affair was out of the question. Plus, though Holly had been careful to act very cool, so that Andrew would think that a casual, walk-in-walk-out wedding, with witnesses provided by the registry office, was as normal an idea for her as it obviously was for him, the thought of it had actually given her quite a thrill.

  It had seemed daring and romantic to just fill in some paperwork, show your birth certificate and do it, without worrying about bridesmaids, and cakes and lists and endless arguments about whether to have the creamed chicken puffs or the Thai fish balls for the entree. No one else in her family had ever done that, except her second cousin Marguerite, and that didn’t count because Marguerite was bipolar, and hadn’t been taking her medication at the time.