Lifting his hands from the keyboard, Duvall reflected that surely this sort of arrangement would be perfect for her. She would need money anyway, wouldn’t she, living away from home, needing a job to help pay her share accommodation and general living costs, not being able to rely on her mother?
The thought of losing her had already started to hurt. Sandy was as good as Glenda in the cleaning stakes, but if she hadn’t been it hardly would have mattered. And it hardly mattered that he was doing something he’d never really considered in all these years since Mary had passed away: paying for companionship. It wasn’t even a real companionship, only the opportunity to let his old eyes move over the half-graceful, half-functional movements of a young woman, of a girl, yet it was what he wanted.
He could have been an uncle to her; more likely, a kindly grandfather. With a combination of anxiety and desperation, Duvall sent the email anyway.
* * *
Sandy came to the house the following Monday, looking a little tired and drawn from her weekend. Well, what young woman wouldn’t, given a normal social life? Then she was there on the Thursday and the following Tuesday. She missed the Friday because of some sort of engagement that had slipped her mind (Omg 4got v sorry!) and made up for it straight after the weekend. Two weeks or so of modest cleaning, but each time Duvall had asked her to do a little more and more—nothing at all strenuous, just simple tasks to keep her in his home ten, fifteen, thirty minutes longer. She was always willing, and this had pleased him, but he was more than a little disconcerted that Sandy hadn’t offered a word of reply to his email. Nothing.
Dear Sandy, I’d like you to consider working for me into your university year. Is there some kind of flexible agreement we could come to that might give you ample time for your studies, and to care for my home? It would be such a pleasure to continue your employ. Warmly, John Duvall
He wondered if maybe he’d pushed things too far, if he’d revealed himself so much that now she was uncomfortable answering. Perhaps things were going from bad to worse for her mother, and Sandy simply didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to contemplate future plans. He berated himself for that email, and began to resign himself to Sandy’s imminent departure from his life—the start of the university year was just a week away—when, the following Monday, Sandy arrived to clean at the appointed hour, but was dressed differently. No baggy jeans, nor that mannish work shirt, her battered running shoes. She was still extremely modestly dressed, but her clothes were fresh and clean, new even, and they emphasised her figure. Nor was Sandy’s hair up in its usual severe bun. It hung over her forehead in a sideways fringe and was tied back in a ponytail. Her hair shone, with a little extra colour and highlights added. The mousy brown had been lifted with sun-tinged streaks. A few light strands fell across her cheeks, softening her features and making her look, well, what she was. Twenty-four years of age; she’d told him one day when they’d had a brief chat about what it was like to return to university life.
Duvall was physically taken aback. There was no hint of cleavage, no hemline to indiscreetly rise when she bent and worked (she was wearing ash-grey trousers, though these hugged her legs and hips more pleasingly than those old jeans had), and no explanation, of course, for her new appearance.
Duvall couldn’t help himself. The clothes, her hair, this softening difference, all of it gave him an ache, a physical ache in the heart plus an even more pressing ache somewhere behind his left temple—in his mind, Duvall imagined, deep inside that part of the brain which attempts to manages the conflict between bleak certainty and wild imagination. For him, it was the awful pain of desire married to the simple fact that Sandy, not to mention any young woman like her, was far beyond his reach.
Decades and decades beyond his reach.
In a sort of swoon Duvall lingered close to the rooms where Sandy cleaned, making what must have sounded to her—it did to him—inane small talk. Once and only once Sandy raised her head and gave him a direct look. An absolutely direct look that cut through him. What did she see? What did she perceive in him? The truth?
It only lasted a moment, and far too soon she was collecting her things and leaving. Duvall had the distinct impression that she’d wanted to say something to him almost as much as he had wanted to say something to her.
Sandy, come closer.
Mr Duvall, don’t you know that you are a disgusting and stupid old man?
That’s what was unspoken, he knew it for certain, then Sandy was gone, driving away a little too quickly in the battered Ford Escort she shared with her mother—if poor Glenda could even drive anymore—and Duvall collapsed into his most comfortable over-stuffed armchair, feeling the walls of his clean home suffocating him.
* * *
Just ten minutes later his life changed. He heard the single-note tone of an email arriving into his inbox, and it took some not inconsiderable will to leave the armchair and see what it might be about. His heart sank a little further when he saw the message was from sandythesuperkittenbaby. Duvall simply expected the worst: Not coming back, or some variation.
Instead, he read something incomprehensible: cud uz xtra 00 or 2 per.
It was sent from her mobile phone of course. Why? And why just ten minutes after leaving the house? He knew the suburb where Sandy still lived with Glenda was at least double that time away.
She must have contemplated things, pulled over somewhere, then dashed this off to him before she could change her mind. Was this what had seemed to be on the tip of her tongue when she’d given him that naked gaze?
Duvall had to scratch the message out on a piece of paper using a pencil. She’d sent him something of a puzzle. Some of it was simple to decipher, some not.
cud=could
uz=use
xtra=extra
00=two zeroes, meaning what, Duvall wondered?
or=or
2 per=two of something per week? per item? per action or activity? per month, day or year?
All right, let’s see.
Sandy could use an extra something or two per something.
Two zeroes. Did that signify the number 100? It would make sense. Three zeroes would be 1,000, and so on. All right.
Sandy could use an extra hundred or two per something.
Well, Duvall transferred her wage on a weekly basis. Was that it? Perhaps Sandy was saying she could use an extra hundred or two per week.
Meaning?
Duvall slumped back, the beat of his heart heavier than he could imagine.
Meaning she had read his puppy-dog gaze correctly.
Two
* * *
So he’d done it, John Duvall had transferred two hundred dollars to Sandy’s account even though nothing was due and she hadn’t yet worked for it. Ought he to consider it payment in advance? If so, for what exactly, more cleaning?
No, it was extra. Something beyond the cleaning.
He received a text on his mobile phone, not his email account, the following day: Thx, when? Duvall sat almost the entire afternoon through considering this. Then he replied, carefully typing it out with the blunt tip of his index finger, Dear Sandy, do you mean to ask when should you come visit next?
He couldn’t tell if there was any irritation in her reply: When u want me. The regular shorthand, those stilted sentences of hers, and now this lack of a question mark—if the message needed a question mark—were all doubly frustrating. He didn’t know if she meant to say, When do you want me to come over? or I am available to you whenever you want me.
Almost exhausted by this process (he wished she would simply telephone; he wished he felt free enough to do so himself, but he didn’t) he tried to be more direct.
When would you be free, Sandy? earned the curtish response of: w/e.
All right, that meant she could come at either the ‘week’s end’, or ‘on the weekend’ itself. Wanting to inspire a little more clarity in her messages, he texted something very exact: Friday evening would be lovely, Sandy, and I can ma
ke us dinner.
Duvall soon read: F ok no dinner will be l8, which at first glance he thought meant ‘Fuck, no dinner’ plus something else, but, on reflection, he soon saw it for what it was: ‘Friday will be fine though not for dinner. I will be late.’ Duvall thought he might be getting the hang of this. It was as if Sandy had drawn him into an interesting word game, and he found he liked the complicity of it. These direct messages: her to me, me to her. It’s a conversation. No wonder the young exponents of this new art had so much fun with it.
What time should I expect you on Friday, Sandy?
10-11.
All right, let’s make that firm. Between ten and eleven in the evening. I will be looking forward to it very much.
A final reply came more than three hours later, as if she’d had something better to do in the interim. Duvall was sure she had.
WEG
He didn’t have the faintest clue what that one might mean.
* * *
When he was very small, John Duvall had grown up in a green rural area, an expansive chicken and pineapple farm his father had inherited from his father before him. Little John had only eleven years on the property. His father was forced to sell up by the shrinking economies of trying to make a profit from a family-run farm in this new world of imported goods and mass-production.
His parents used the money from the sale with clear-eyed precision. They moved to the inner-city and purchased a number of run-down houses in good locations. It was well before the property booms of the later decades. Together, they set forth on a program of renovation and sales. After all, the only skills John Duvall’s parents shared were those that had to do with early rising, a tolerance—indeed, a predilection—for hard work, and the tremendous fear that one failure will generate of future failures to come. There would be no more.
Duvall didn’t very often think about his early years. His parents had worked tremendously hard, they were distant, and they prospered. As their only offspring, his inheritance at the age of thirty-nine—when his mother passed away just two years after his father—was very good indeed. By then he’d been running his own small business in land and property development, and though he’d lacked the ambition and hard-nosed cunning required for truly stellar success, Duvall had felt he’d done well enough. He and Mary were comfortable. They had a nice, expansive timber home in a leafy suburb, a penthouse on the coast that overlooked the crashing waves of the ocean, an annual vacation overseas, and private school education for Steven, their sole child. Steven had always demonstrated a head for figures and now worked on Wall Street, no less, a wife and three children of his own. Duvall was proud of him, and was pleased he’d done so well, but their regular communication had always been through Mary. After she was gone they seemed incapable of anything but the most perfunctory small-talk. Weather; sports scores; the latest scholastic achievements of the grandchildren. It had almost been a blessing when Steven had taken that first overseas transfer.
If there was one thing of the past that Duvall remembered with the greatest fondness, and sense of loss, it resided in those very early years. He didn’t dream so much about Mary, their first date, their wedding day, her final moments in a hospital bed too sedated to even return the pressure of his hand; he didn’t yearn for that first sight of their baby after it had been pushed out from its mother and lay all swaddled, crumple-faced and bawling in Duvall’s arms; and sometimes he barely remembered the way his grandchildren had so quickly changed from infants to toddlers to pre-teenagers with strange transatlantic accents.
No, what most often appeared in his mind’s-eye was that wide, almost never-ending expanse of rural landscape his family had once owned. He remembered being five years of age, then six, seven, eight, nine, and ten, finally eleven, standing on a hilltop with their dogs, quietly surveying the open country surrounding the farm. The forests at the edges of the fields and meadows. The irregular but beautiful line of blue-tinged mountains far in the distance.
And that’s where he was when he was dreaming of Sandy. Somehow this dream of her walking towards him, her hair loose in the breeze, was taking place back there. And he knew he was just a boy, and Sandy was as she was now, a young girl entering the prime of her life. The dogs were moving against his calves. He could actually feel them pressing to him, just as they used to do. He could smell the warm scent of meadows in bloom. Young John Duvall was on a precipice overlooking the long slope of the descent beneath him, a hillside running down and down and down until it met the start of hundreds of acres of untilled land.
And as Sandy came toward him with that serious-but-not-unkind expression on her lips, he’d felt that he would fall, he must fall.
* * *
So now it was the Friday night and he was too keyed up to make himself supper. He’d forced down a piece of grain toast with jam, but had been unable to touch the pot of tea he’d made. The hours seemed to tick down without mercy; he’d wanted time to slow so that he could take hold of himself, reason with his own thoughts, try to deal with the uncontrollable fear that made his blood into mercury. Duvall couldn’t sit in one place and think; he couldn’t read; he couldn’t stand the jabbering of the television. He simply couldn’t be.
What on earth had he set in train by depositing that unearned money into Sandy’s account—and who was she anyway, who was she really? Why did she want or expect an ‘extra hundred or two per week’, and what did she think she had to give in return?
For that matter, what did he want in return?
His mind kept moving to thoughts and images of sex. The idea of sexuality, a part of being so far removed from his life as to be non-existent. It pained him to recall that he’d ejaculated perhaps a dozen times in the nine years since Mary had passed away, and each instance had not involved the presence of another human being—except on his computer screen, where he’d let himself become inflamed by pornographic images of such lurid and breathtaking clarity that he’d felt his consciousness actually shiver. Duvall hadn’t enjoyed those images and he hadn’t enjoyed his ejaculations, either. For he was a man who’d lost the only woman he’d loved or wanted. It was true. There’d never been anyone else, he’d even lost his virginity to Mary, and now he was entering and quite bitterly embracing his twilight years. This material, this stuff so freely available on one’s computer screen, it was for far younger spirits than his own, wasn’t it?
Younger spirits such as Sandy’s. Younger spirits such as her boyfriend’s, if she had one—or ten.
That day he’d constantly checked his little phone for texts, his computer email for a new message. There was nothing from Sandy to say she was too busy, that she couldn’t make it after all, had forgotten something important.
It was only with a shot of Tullamore Dew whiskey, taken neat in a shot glass, that Duvall could find a way to take stock of himself. A second shot glass of the stuff burned pleasantly in his stomach and down into his legs. His own anxiety had left him weary, but at least now he was calming down. Three or four weeks back he’d reflected that he’d soon be paying Sandy to come to the house not so much for the cleaning but for the company. Now he had to tell himself that this ‘companionship’ simply was being formalised. Between them there would of course be no funny business. None at all. He wasn’t capable of it and he was certain that Sandy would not be offering it. He’d let his imagination and fears go; all right, he could relax. They would talk. Maybe she liked chess or Scrabble; Duvall certainly did, and he spent many nights with friends—friends his own age—over a board, or with a deck of cards, playing without aggression or too much competitive spirit, chatting and sharing a bottle of good port or Muscat.
So much calmer now, Duvall put ice into a tumbler and splashed in three fingers of the good Irish whiskey, then he took his chess set, the checkers board and the Scrabble game out of the cupboard. He placed them in clear view on the formal dining table, his immediate signal to Sandy that he neither expected nor wanted anything untoward. It had moved past 9 p.m. An hour or so
to go. He sat down, he drank, and he waited. Duvall even felt himself nodding off from time to time—and yes, when the sound of a car door slamming came from outside, and there was a rather hurried knock at the door, Duvall’s chin was on his chest and his mouth hung slack, and he was transported away from that hillside once again, coming back to reality. He’d touched the edges of his dream of being ten or eleven and about to fall, then the whole thing was gone.
As he blinked awake, Duvall was aware of just how heavily he breathed. Sleeping. Panic in his sleeping. What a thing.
Duvall tried to straighten himself before he approached the door, but the combined effect of his slumber and the whiskey had left him slightly disoriented; as he opened the door to Sandy he barely noted that she didn’t much look like the young woman he knew.
‘Mr Duvall, could you pay the cabbie?’
He trudged automatically down the path to the dark street, where a taxi driver was keeping his light shining on the front of the house. Duvall felt in his pockets.
‘How much is—’
‘Thirty-three seven-five. You want receipt?’
By the time he’d returned inside Duvall was more himself. Sandy was standing by the kitchen table moodily looking down at the chess and checkers boards still in their boxes, plus the Scrabble set. She knew his home well enough to understand these games weren’t always so openly displayed. Duval thought that in the set of her shoulders there was an arrogance he’d not seen before. She was dressed for a Friday night out and her hair, previously only streaked with highlights, was now fully blonde. It wasn’t pinned back or tied in a ponytail, but hung loose to her shoulders. When she turned her head the curling locks caught the light. Duvall thought she had made herself into an attractive young woman without trying too hard. Her eyebrows were finely drawn, and as she looked at him, for the first time he thought about the colour of her eyes. He’d never contemplated this before, but he saw that Sandy’s eyes were grey-green and rather sad. At least for tonight.
Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 2, Issue 5 Page 2