by Liz Byrski
‘We’re nice. We’re all nice women. We are too nice. We’ve spent our lives doing what’s expected of us. None of us has really dropped out, committed crimes, been a drain on the community, churned other people’s lives upside down or done things to them from which they never recover. We’ve all done what our parents, the church, or some other authority told us we should do and be. And frankly I don’t think that’s been good for any of us. You can spend your life doing the right thing, being considerate, stitching up your opinions and feelings in order to support and protect and please other people. We’re like Reta in the book. We’re just too nice!’
‘Whoa,’ Ros says, rocking back in her chair, ‘that’s an awfully big statement, Simone. I don’t think anyone would, for example, describe me as too nice, or even particularly considerate. Nor as trying to protect or please other people. As you saw a few days ago, even grumpy old bat is a bit of a whitewash.’
Adele listens, realising that if this conversation had taken place a couple of weeks ago she would have been frozen with anxiety about what the outcome might be. Now she looks confidently across at Ros.
‘But that’s your view of yourself, Ros,’ she says. ‘It’s who you tell us you are, and then you act to prove it. I think it’s who you decided to be, especially after James died, perhaps as a way to manage your loss, make it bearable. Maybe you’ve always had a bit of it in you, and so it became a persona that would hide your vulnerability. And now that I can see that, I realise it’s actually not particularly convincing.’
She looks sideways at Simone and sees that she is nodding; meanwhile Ros is now the one with the stunned mullet expression. And alongside Ros, Judy takes a gulp of her coffee and puts her cup back down on the table.
‘I’d say that’s just about right, Ros,’ Judy says, turning to her. ‘I came here not really knowing what to expect from you; you’re so smart, so outspoken, sometimes so brutal. And then the first time I reacted you backed off – not completely, just enough to make yourself feel okay about it, I suppose. Since then I’ve thought that you’ve created this wall of defence, but the foundations are built on very fine sand.’
Adele has a terrible feeling that any minute now she might burst into laughter and thump Judy on the back. The expression on Ros’s face is extraordinary; it seems to be a battle between the fierce urge to be haughty, indifferent or angry, or letting go and working out what’s been said. She sees Ros draw herself up, look around at the three of them, search for a middle road.
‘Well that’s all very interesting,’ she says, ‘but I thought we were talking about Simone, and about the past. I suggest we put my shortcomings on hold and get back to that. What was it you were about to say, Simone? Something about us being too nice?’
‘Yes, too nice,’ Simone says. ‘I mean, there is a difference between being an essentially good person who knows when to draw the line and put themselves first, and a person who lumbers on doing stuff because they know it’s expected of them, and resenting it. That’s what we do, it’s the way most girls grow up, and we go on doing it, so what we really want and who we want to be gets pushed aside. I did that all my life with my parents. The one occasion when I broke out of that mould created a huge breach in my relationship with both of them and we never recovered from it. But I’ve still spent the rest of my life trying to be what they wanted me to be: responsible, law-abiding, hardworking, supportive of others, polite . . . And for a lot of that time I was also trying to be a good Catholic. Even when I was furiously angry and upset with my father I was still trying desperately to be the person he’d be proud of.’
Adele nods. Only now is she starting to see the parallels between herself and Simone and the different ways they have managed to live with those parental expectations. She glances across at Ros, who is looking a little more settled now.
‘I see what you’re saying, Simone,’ Ros says. ‘It’s a really good point and I agree with you. But you’re generalising, and I want to understand what has changed for you. Last night you went out to celebrate and you’ve come home very obviously upset and burdened.’
Simone nods. ‘Yes. I’m trying to find a way to talk about it,’ she says. ‘There was so much that I didn’t know . . .’ She hesitates now, dropping her eyes to the table again.
Adele can see and feel her pain, her struggle to actually say the words that will describe whatever it is she needs to tell them.
‘But what is it, Simone?’ Adele asks gently. ‘What did you learn last night that has left you so . . . so devastated?’
They wait in silence and then Adele sees Simone draw in her breath, sit up a little straighter.
‘Last night,’ she says, ‘in the company of those dear friends, the trunk that contained the past got blown wide open. I found out that my father was not the hardworking, law-abiding, respectful man, the good Catholic father, I always believed him to be. He was a rapist, a bully and a thief who lied to me about a multitude of things and went to the grave doing so. He bullied Claire Marshall over a long period of time and finally raped her. And my mother colluded in that by doing nothing, presumably because she was also terrified of the man he had turned out to be. He intimidated Claire, stole from and manipulated her, colluding with a crooked local lawyer in an attempt to rob her of everything she owned, everything . . . including her home. And so now I have to question everything I thought I knew about my parents, our past together, everything I took for granted. And perhaps worst of all, my own complete failure to confront my father ever again after the night he threw that bottle at me. Never again through all those years did I demand an explanation that might have helped me to support my mother and perhaps to find the Marshalls again.’
Chapter Twenty
Ros, alone in the house on Saturday afternoon, is trying to read the paper but finding it hard to concentrate. Simone has driven over to see Doug and Geoff, and Judy and Adele have gone shopping in town and will probably stop for coffee. She’d thought reading the paper might distract her from thinking about some of the things that have happened this week, specifically those concerning her own behaviour. It seems that everyone has forgiven her for behaving so badly when Clooney went missing, but she still hasn’t forgiven herself. And on top of that there was the persona thing that Adele had suggested she’d developed to enable her to cope without James, to mask her vulnerability. Clooney looks up at her adoringly, thumps his tail on the floor and shifts his paws around, indicating that he thinks it’s time for a walk. Simone had taken him for a long walk before she went out but Clooney is an opportunist, something that’s clearly working for him rather better here than it does at home. Ros gives in and walks with him to the back door.
Clooney bounds out ahead of her into the luscious green of the garden where the sun and the warmth of the breeze combine to make it feel almost like spring. Ros walks cautiously to the bench, sits, and thinks of Simone struggling to come to terms with the awful reality of her father’s treatment of Claire Marshall.
There seems to have been some relief for Simone in the telling, but Ros aches with sympathy for her.
The morning after her dinner with Greg and Doug, once she’d told them everything over breakfast, Simone had sat for ages on the garden seat where Ros is sitting now. She needed to be alone, she’d told them, but all three of them kept watch on her in their different ways. Adele found an urgent bit of trimming and pruning that needed doing not far from where Simone was sitting, and Ros and Judy took their books and mugs of tea out to the back verandah from where they too could easily see her. Later Simone had disappeared to her room, emerging only in the early evening to eat a toasted sandwich made for her by Adele. She looked pale and drawn, and soon went back upstairs saying she needed to sleep again.
It was almost midnight when she knocked on Ros’s door just as she was falling asleep.
‘May I come in?’ Simone asked. And Ros had sat up and shifted across the bed to make room for h
er.
‘Do you need to talk?’ Ros asked as Simone, her eyes filled with tears, climbed in next to her.
Simone shook her head. ‘I just don’t want to be alone,’ she said. ‘I need to be with someone I trust, and I trust the others too, but somehow . . .’ She shrugged as the tears rolled down her face. ‘Somehow you got the short straw.’
Ros had held her for a long time until the sobbing slowly receded, and she could see the utter exhaustion in Simone’s face.
‘I should leave you in peace,’ Simone said, eventually moving to sit up.
But Ros stopped her. ‘Stay here, Simone,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty of room.’
And Simone had slid down under the doona, closing her eyes, obviously unable to keep them open any longer. Ros, who had not shared a bed with anyone since James died, slipped down beside her and lay stroking Simone’s hair until she was sure she was asleep. Several times in the night she woke and listened to her breathing and at seven, when the light sneaked in between the curtains, she slipped out of bed and stood watching her for a moment before going downstairs to let Clooney out and make some tea. Then she climbed precariously back up the stairs, a mug in each unreliable hand.
Simone stirred, stretched and dragged herself into a sitting position as Ros put a mug down beside her and walked around to her own side of the bed.
‘I will always remember this, Ros,’ Simone said, reaching out for her hand.
‘Me too,’ Ros said.
Ros thinks now about what Adele had said to her; about her having a protective grumpy persona. What do you think about it? she asks James now. Everyone seems to think it’s right, everyone except me. Do you not have one single word to say on the matter? I’m sure you’d have plenty to say if you were here. But I suppose sitting up there at a safe distance you’re watching what I do with it. I can almost see that crooked grin of yours just before you say, ‘This one’s all down to you, sweetheart.’ Ros wonders if Adele is right, if they are all right. What would Leah say? she wonders – after all, she knew Ros when James was still alive. The other person she could ask, of course, would be Donald from the quartet. But then he’d probably tell her anything he thought she wanted to hear.
Clooney, who has been rummaging around among the trees, comes to join her and surprisingly jumps up onto the seat beside her. ‘What do you think?’ she asks him.
But really she knows the answer, because when she remembers the time after James’s death, during that long and lonely flight back to Australia, she’d wondered how she would cope with other people’s grief, as well as her own. James was a man with a lot of friends, who went back a long way, colleagues as well as former students, people from his own schooldays. Her mother once told her that when her own mother died she couldn’t cope with people coming too close to her in her grief. ‘It made me prickly,’ she’d said. ‘You probably don’t remember, but I was very prickly for a long time.’ But Ros, who had been in her thirties at the time of her grandmother’s death, did remember, and prickly was just the right word. Is that what I’ve done? she wonders now. Because if it is, it’s well past time I stopped. But how am I supposed to cope with all this grief?
*
‘Now that I am fully restored to health,’ Judy had said to Adele earlier, ‘I think I should take my turn doing the shopping.’
‘Oh, I thought I was the chief shopper,’ Adele said. ‘Are you trying to muscle in?’
‘I am,’ Judy says.
‘It’s only a few days since you pinned Ros down on the couch and sat on her. I think that’s equivalent to several shopping trips.’
‘Well maybe, but you know what I mean. And it’s also weeks since I drove a car – I may have forgotten how to do it. Anyway,’ she lowered her voice, ‘it’s all a bit of subterfuge because I was going to ask you to come with me. I just want to chat about the business stuff away from here.’
Adele smiled. ‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘Let’s do that. I’ll be ready in ten minutes. Can we go for coffee first? I haven’t had anything to eat this morning and I feel a croissant moment coming on.’
‘It feels really weird,’ Judy said later, cautiously driving the hire car onto the side street leading to the main road into town. ‘It’s amazing how quickly you get out of the habit.’
Now, as they walk out of the car park, she is feeling strong and purposeful. It’s not simply that she’s getting her health back; indeed, she knows that physically she’s still got a way to go. What’s changed is all in her head. Since the news of Maddie’s death and the moment when she and Ros had talked about conserving emotional energy as a way of conserving themselves, she has felt some of that energy coming back to her. This morning she felt that it was like rising up from under the sea to find herself floating easily on the surface, no longer struggling to survive.
She parks the car and they choose their café. It’s a cool but brilliantly sunny day and warm enough, they agree, to sit at a table on the pavement.
‘I’ve made up my mind,’ Judy says when the waiter has taken their order. ‘And this is the day we agreed to talk it through.’
‘So it is,’ Adele says. ‘I didn’t think you’d hold out this long.’
‘Nor did I, but I’m glad I did. I’m still convinced that I want to sell the business, but I need to be sure I do it the right way. Just like you said. So would you still be okay to come back to Mandurah with me when we leave here?’
‘Of course,’ Adele says. ‘Time is not a problem for me.’
‘Okay, thank you. Because what I’ve decided is that I should ask Melissa and Pam to stay on for six months until February. If they agree it would be a relief and a safety net, time to sort things out, make new plans. It also means that I could do something else in the meantime, go somewhere different, not even be there for the Christmas rush, because by then it will all be nicely streamlined and easy for them to run. And I can put it on the market next year.’
‘That’s a really good plan,’ Adele says. ‘Wish I’d thought of it! You’d still own it but not really have to go back into it. Just one thing though: do you think you can be there while we sort things out, and let them run it without constantly interfering? I have an image of Melissa and her mum rolling their eyes in frustration as you turn up at the shop every day and change everything they’ve done. I think if you do that you’ll lose them, and they are very good people to have in there while it’s on the market.’
‘Adele, I am so over anything at all to do with knitting at the moment. I’m suggesting this based on your advice that if I want to sell it I should take time to get it all sorted, with a transparent system that any buyer can see and feel confident about.’
‘Okay, if you’re sure.’
‘I am,’ Judy says. ‘The other thing I think I should do when I’m back there is dismantle that stupid knitted town. Get it out of my head. Chuck it in the bin.’
‘What!’ Adele says – almost shouts. ‘Have you gone completely bonkers?’
The waiter, who has just arrived with their coffee and croissants, steps back sharply.
‘Whoops, sorry,’ Adele says. ‘My friend just lost her marbles.’
‘No worries,’ he says with a genial smile. ‘She looks quite sane to me and you only knocked about a year off my life expectancy.’ Laughing, he unloads the tray and walks back inside.
Adele turns to Judy. ‘Why ever would you do that?’
‘Because it means I’m stuck in the past,’ Judy says.
‘Not necessarily. I think it means you treasure the past. If you want to get over a feeling that you’re living in the past then there are better ways of doing it.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, you could use some of that free time to go back there for a visit, for a start. That would be one way. But whatever you decide, you should not ever destroy your work. It’s unique and beautiful. It’s a work of art, women’
s art, which as you say, quite rightly, is underrated and dismissed. And now that’s what you’re doing with your own work. Move it out of your house if you want, but give it to some sort of gallery or something. Or better still, send your video of it to the council or the library or the arts centre or whatever in the town – tell them why you created it. I bet they’d be interested; they might even want it for the town. Honestly, Judy, I can’t believe you even imagined dumping it!’
*
Simone is sitting on the verandah at the back of Geoff’s house watching a cluster of red wattlebirds arguing in the branches of a nearby tree. Geoff is in the kitchen making coffee and Doug, who had been sitting here with her, has got up to take a call from his partner and is talking to him out on the lawn. It feels good being on their territory, silently waiting and observing. It evokes memories of childhood, of sunny days sitting on the front steps of the Marshalls’ house watching the boys kicking a ball, or scrambling up the biggest tree in the garden in a race to the top. How blissful it seems in retrospect.
‘So how are you feeling now, Simone?’ Geoff asks, putting the coffee pot and cups on the table. ‘We’ve been thinking about you a lot. We both felt we handled it badly, dumping everything on you like that. It must have been such a shock. But you took us by surprise.’
‘In what way?’ she asks.
‘We’d taken it for granted that in the years since we last saw each other you would have learned more about Carlo, perhaps seen evidence of who he was, or what he had become.’ He hands her a mug of coffee and she holds it in both hands, relishing the warmth of the steam on her face and remembering the warmth she had felt the night she slipped into sleep next to Ros, the comfort of Ros’s body close to her, the sound of her breathing, and the knowledge that, for both of them, sharing a bed was no small thing.
‘I suppose I always sensed that something in him might explode,’ she says, drawing herself back to the present. ‘That was the controlling factor in my childhood, the knowledge that by being good, making him proud of me, everything would be okay.’ She thinks again of those years, of the tightrope walk of being good and staying out of trouble at home, of the rewards when it all worked and the tense silences or fierce outbursts when it didn’t.