The Other Side of Sorrow

by Peter Corris

  ‘I was afraid for you.’

  ‘Why?’

  I didn’t answer. I finished the coffee and wished I hadn’t finished the whisky. Geoff was outside, leaning on the car and smoking. I rapped on the window. He dropped the butt, stood on it, got back in and started the engine.

  ‘Where’re we going?’ Megan said.

  ‘To the hospital. To see your mother. Geoff, what’re they saying at the hospital?’

  I knew he’d phoned while I was getting the food and drink. ‘Annie says to come straight away. She’s pissed off at me for not being closer. She says it won’t be long.’

  We got on the road and a new set of questions began to nag at me. Should I have got the police in on it? Was I a bit drunk after most of a pint of whisky and not much to eat when I’d gone into the house? Could I have handled it better? Should I have shot Talbot in the leg straight away? What about his knife? What had happened to it? I wrestled with these things as Geoff drove, his face set like stone, back through the rain to Sydney.

  We got to the hospital by early afternoon and went straight up to Cyn’s room, Geoff and I drawing some looks for our muddy boots and clothes, tangled hair and unshaven faces. Anne was sitting close beside the bed holding her mother’s hand. She looked up at us and her eyes widened when she saw Megan. But she was too involved in what was happening in the here and now to care about the past or the future.

  Geoff whispered, ‘I’m sorry, Annie. I …’

  Anne, who looked a lot less glossy than when I’d first seen her, older and stronger, too, shook her head. ‘It’s all right, Geoffrey. You’re here. She’s almost gone. She can’t really see or hear much.’

  I heard Geoff draw in a deep breath and then he moved up behind his sister and rested his hand on her shoulder. Megan stood beside me. She was breathing heavily and her right hand was up, probing at the cloth around her neck. I wondered how she was going to cope with this after all she’d been through in the last few days. I wanted to offer her some comfort, physical support, but I knew better. She gripped the rail at the end of the bed.

  Cyn’s face was as white as the sheets and drawn in as if the bones had crumpled. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was just partly open. There was a slight rise and fall in the sheet over her body. Very slight. We stood there for what seemed like half an hour but was probably only a few minutes.

  It was their moment and I felt I didn’t belong. I was about to go out when Cyn’s eyes opened wide. She looked at her daughter, at her son, and then made an effort to see more. Anne, best equipped now to know what was happening, beckoned Megan forward. She moved like an automaton but got close enough for Cyn to see her. I looked down at the face of the woman I’d once loved so much and then fought with and hurt, and was glad that at least in the end I hadn’t failed her. Her sunken eyes fixed on Megan and then her head moved towards me a fraction and her pale lips, thinned out to nothing, formed in the shadow of a smile.

  Somehow, I found the ability to speak. ‘This is Megan, Cyn.’

  I don’t know if she heard me or saw me or understood, because she turned her head slightly to the side again and looked at Geoff and Anne. There was some movement of the two hands on the cover, but whether it came from Cyn or Anne I couldn’t tell. I backed away but not so far I couldn’t hear the soft hiss of her last breath.

  26

  I learned from Smith of Millennium Security that they found Damien Talbot’s van the next day and his body a day later. It was a couple of hundred metres from where he’d gone into the water and was battered almost beyond recognition. Almost.

  Unlikely as it seemed, Anne Samuels took Megan French under her wing. Accompanied by a lawyer, they went to the police and Megan told them basically what she’d told me—that she hadn’t been present when the guard was killed and had gone with Talbot under duress. She showed them the wound in her neck and claimed it had been inflicted some time before it actually was and that she’d got away from Talbot after that. The police closed the books on Talbot, putting his death down to suicide or accident.

  I learned this from Geoff. His computer duly turned up and he came to collect it. ‘Annie drilled her in what to say,’ Geoff said. ‘And it worked. No charges or anything. She’s a strange one, that Megan.’

  ‘Has she said why she ran off the rails? Why she took up with Talbot and why she stayed with him?’

  We were in my ratty back courtyard on a mild dry day with the leaves blowing around the bricks and catching in the sprouting weeds. I had a glass of wine and Geoff had a joint.

  ‘It’s weird,’ he said. ‘Annie’s not married and the bloke who’s the father of her baby isn’t in the picture. Would you believe it? She’s hired Megan as a sort of live-in nanny for when the baby comes. They get along fine apparently.’

  ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘Annie says Megan has told her but she says I wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘I wonder if I would?’

  Geoff puffed on his joint and didn’t say anything and didn’t look at me.

  ‘Geoff,’ I said. ‘Spit it out. What?’

  ‘Megan doesn’t want to know you, Cliff. She doesn’t like you. Doesn’t trust you.’

  ‘Does she know …?’

  He nodded. ‘She says it doesn’t make any difference. Maybe Annie’s right. Maybe we wouldn’t understand. My guess is child abuse. That’s the explanation for everything these days, isn’t it?’

  Maybe. I could believe almost anything of Rex French. But it looked as if I wasn’t going to get the answers to those questions, not quickly at least. I had difficulty sorting out my feelings about this young woman who, I now had to accept, was my daughter. How do you know if you feel paternal when you don’t know how paternal feels? Especially about someone you don’t know who doesn’t want to know you. All I could do was wait and stay in touch with the situation through Geoff. I was glad that Megan had accepted her half-siblings and been accepted by them. Maybe satisfaction over that was a paternal feeling in a way. I telephoned Frank French and told him that his niece was in good hands. He said he’d get the message to his sister-in-law. It was something.

  I went to Cyn’s funeral. It was a big affair with lots of people there from Cyn’s other life. People I didn’t know. Megan stayed close to Anne and I kept my distance.

  Smith orchestrated things perfectly. The police moved in on the Tadpole Creek protest and closed it down. Examination of the site revealed four bodies of elderly people, all women, buried in deep graves. All this was kept hush-hush until the remains had been identified from dental records. The common link between them was that they were former patients of Dr Bruce Macleod who was arrested and charged with their murder. Smith kept me out of it and claimed that his investigators had made the link between Macleod, the site and the financing of the protest. I understand Miss Cartwright is going to give evidence against Macleod who, apparently, had some black marks against his name back in Britain.

  For a supposedly smart operator, Macleod made some fundamental but understandable mistakes. Analysis of the remains showed that he’d apparently been experimenting with drugs and surgery designed to reverse Alzheimer’s disease. The old people were his laboratory rats and well selected because they didn’t have any attentive, caring relatives, and when the cops learned that these missing oldies were dementia cases their interest and energy dropped. So far, so good. Macleod knew that disposing of bodies in the big wide world is chancy. A controlled environment is the go; but his controlled environment slipped from his control before he could do anything about it. The protest he backed was a holding action. With the Olympic juggernaut held at bay and only the protesters to deal with, he reckoned to have a fair chance of correcting his mistake.

  Work at the site went ahead quickly and smoothly and the few press articles that attempted to make sinister connections between the Games and the ‘Tadpole Creek Graveyard’ were quickly forgotten.

  I tried to get in touch with Tess Hewitt but her phone didn
’t answer and when I drove out to Concord one sunny day with my explanations and a forty-dollar bottle of red wine at the ready, I found a For Sale sign and a neighbour who told me she’d packed up and gone to the north coast. A while later I got a postcard from her from Byron Bay with Mae West on it and the inevitable caption. I think I will go up and see her sometime.