Under the Spotlight

by Bree Verity

  She reached out for a shelf beside her, gasping in panic. What if this was it? What if she was dying, right now? Marc had been right, she should have taken herself straight to the doctors. Or the hospital. Healthy people had heart attacks all the time - why didn't she pay attention to the warning signs?

  She wasn’t going to get a chance to tell her family that she loved them, or how their unintentional betrayal had changed her life. She would never be able to laugh again with her friends, who had been with her since childhood and who were as dear to her as family. Her eyes filled with tears which spilled over her cheeks.

  And then, just as soon as it started, it was over.

  Penny was left sucking air in, inhaling big gulps, thankful that her lungs seemed to be working again. Her heart rate slowed but she could still feel the beads of sweat collected at her hairline. Jim noticed her distress as soon as he came across her.

  “Jesus, Pen, what’s wrong?” he said, rushing toward her.

  “Nothing,” she replied. “It’s okay.”

  “Bullshit,” said Jim. “Look at you.” He took her arm and led her to the break room, where Penny gratefully sank into a chair. Jim got her a glass of water and silently watched while she sipped it, her color slowly returning.

  After a few moments he said, “Okay, Pen. Spill it. What was that?”

  Penny shook her head. “I think it was a heart attack,” she said, tears starting afresh. “I had a couple of little attacks yesterday, but this was by far the worst one.”

  Jim was on the phone to an ambulance in a second, despite Penny’s hurried assurances that it wasn’t necessary. He shushed her, almost angry.

  “Stop being an idiot. If it’s your heart, you need to be in hospital.”

  Penny just didn’t want the fuss. She felt fine now. There were way sicker people in the city that needed to go to hospital - she wasn’t one of them.

  But Jim insisted, forcing her to stay seated until they heard an ambulance come screaming down Murray Street, sirens blaring. Red-faced, Penny was strapped to a gurney, hooked up to a monitor, and lifted into the back of the vehicle. A crowd of people stood around - rubberneckers who were excited to see something outside the humdrum of their normal daily lives. Penny wished with all her heart that it wasn’t her at the center of this little bubble of excitement.

  Having said that, she found when the ambulance moved, and she was on her way to hospital, a wave of relief washed over her. It would be nice to find out what was wrong with her.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  The doctor came into the room in the hospital’s emergency ward carrying a clipboard with what Penny assumed was her results. A frown marred his brow as he flipped through the pages. “Your heart rate is fine, blood pressure is a little elevated but nothing serious, nothing showed up on the MRI and your echo-cardiogram is clear.”

  Before Penny could respond, her mother butted in. “But she’s had these attacks,” she insisted. “There has to be some reason for them.”

  Penny had called her mum as soon as she arrived at hospital. And her mum had dropped everything to come rushing to her side.

  The doctor nodded. “You could be having panic attacks. They’re very good at mimicking heart problems.”

  “Panic attacks?”

  The doctor shrugged. “Life can get pretty hard sometimes. We’ll ask your family doctor to refer you to a psychologist.”

  “A psychologist?”

  “Well, you do seem to be having phantom heart attacks, love,” offered her mum. Penny turned a disbelieving look on her mother.

  “You think it’s all in my head?”

  The doctor broke in. “That’s what the psychologist will work through with you. You don’t need to stay here any longer. I’ll get your discharge papers organized, and a letter for your doctor.” With that, he flipped back the curtain and strolled away.

  Penny shook her head in disgust. “It was real pain, Mum, in my chest.” She poked herself hard in the breastbone, as if that might prove her words.

  “Yes, but if there’s no physical reason…”

  “They didn’t look hard enough.” The tears started in Penny’s eyes.

  “Penny.”

  “Well, they can’t have, can they?” she insisted.

  Her mum was troubled. Penny could see it in her eyes, and she knew what she was about to say.

  “You know it’s coming up on the anniversary of your…”

  “It’s not that.”

  “How do you know? How do you know it’s not having an underlying effect on you?”

  Penny was silent. She didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to face the memories of that awful day that seemed to be swarming to the surface. She wanted to be able to push them back down, like she always had. Her tears spilled down her cheeks.

  “What’s wrong with me?” she whispered, and her mum gathered her up into her arms.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you love,” said her mum. “At least, nothing that can’t be fixed. You should go see that psychologist.”

  Penny pulled away to look her mother in the face. “Why?”

  “Because you’ve been shying away from facing the consequences of this since it happened.” Penny’s mum shrugged. “I cried for weeks. So did your dad. But you put on a happy face and just got on with everything. It was… well, it was unnatural.”

  “So now I’m unnatural.” Penny was unimpressed.

  “You know that’s not what I mean.” Her mum took a deep breath. “There was so much going on then. We were going off to France, and you were starting Year Twelve - but you never grieved, Pen.” She took Penny’s hand. “You’ve never let it out.”

  Penny pulled her hand out of her mother’s grasp. “Why would I grieve?”

  “Because it was your baby, Pen. Because you had an abortion.”

  The silence in the car was deafening. Penny was so angry at her mother for mentioning the abortion, and her mum was angry that Penny didn’t want to talk about it. There had been no words spoken since the nurse came back to remove the indicator from Penny’s finger and to give her the discharge papers. Penny had put her clothes back on, and she and her mother had walked to the car in silence.

  Penny just wanted to forget the entire thing. She had been trying to forget it for the past thirteen years and, up until just recently, she thought she had succeeded.

  The pregnancy had resulted from a summer fling with Renaldo, a hot Italian guy who had been in Perth for the summer months. As soon as she had told him she was pregnant, he skipped town and, Penny assumed, went back to Italy.

  At just seventeen, Penny had initially decided to abort. Her parents took over the job of organizing clinic visits and making sure she got the mandatory counseling. To Penny, it all happened in a whirl - she felt as if everyone else was making decisions about her body and her future that she didn’t necessarily agree with. And while she loved her parents for honoring her wishes and making the process as painless as possible, she also hated them because they facilitated the death of her baby.

  None of her feelings made sense to Penny, so she pushed them all down until they were subdued under her Year Twelve workload, her friends, her part time job and her social life.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by her mum’s cool voice. “You’ll be home for dinner?”

  “Yes,” Penny replied, just as formally. “I don’t have theater tonight, so I’ll be home.”

  “Maybe we can talk about it then.”

  “No, Mum.” Penny turned to face her mother, whose face was hard.

  “You have to talk about it sometime.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Suit yourself.” She could hear in her mum’s tight voice that she wasn’t happy. “Maybe you could talk to your friends then, instead of us.”

  “They don’t even know about it.”

  “What?”

  Shit.

  At her mother’s aghast word, Penny turned back to stare at the ro
ad. “I never told them.” She colored. Lying to her friends had not been her finest hour.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it was done, Mum, and over with and I just wanted to forget it. Like I want to forget it now.”

  Her mum shook her head. “So, you haven’t opened up to anyone at all about this.”

  “Just let it go Mum.” Penny raised her voice a little. In her mind, she begged her mum to stop, to quit talking about it, to let it go. If she went there, if she opened the box of those memories, she was sure she would be submerged by them, drowned in them. She just wanted to put the lid on, tie it down and forget about it. She’d managed it for the past thirteen years. Surely, she could continue.

  Chapter Six

  Every Wednesday, without fail, Penny and her two best friends met for coffee at Greens & Co in Leederville. Lydia discovered the funky cafe nearly ten years ago now, when it first opened, and persuaded her friends to give it a try. Penny found the cake selection impossible to resist. Desiree moaned that the place had no class and that there were much better cafes to be had elsewhere, but still, from then on, every Wednesday the three of them met at Greens.

  The decor always greeted Penny like an old friend. The walls were literally plastered with posters from gigs - if a band had been to Perth in the past ten years, you’d find their poster pasted to the walls somewhere. It was an eclectic mix - Kylie rubbed shoulders with Flight of the Conchords, and Bon Jovi shared wall space with the WA Symphony.

  Penny loved going to concerts, so the walls of Greens were a bit of a trip down memory lane for her. Today as she sat down, she was reminded of an Eagles concert she went to a few years ago, when all the band members were still alive, and of a particularly awesome Foo Fighters concert she went to with the girls at NIB Stadium.

  Penny nudged Lydia, who sat beside her and indicated with her head toward the poster. “Remember that Foo Fighters concert? Your first mosh pit.”

  Lydia shuddered. “Never again. What a nightmare that was.” She was quieter than Penny or Desiree, and the crush of bodies in the mosh pit had been a little too much for her.

  Not so for Desiree, who said, “Are you kidding? That was a fucking awesome concert.”

  Penny nodded vigorously. “That was the one where I almost touched Dave Grohl’s shoe.”

  Lydia raised one eyebrow and muttered in a dry tone, “And isn’t that every girls dream.”

  Despite her crappy week, Penny had to laugh. The three of them were all so different, it was impossible to pin down what had drawn them together to be friends. Penny liked to think it was fate.

  It was busy in Greens today, so they all had to squeeze on to one low couch.

  “I wonder if anyone here has ever heard of personal space.”

  Pen smiled. That was Desiree. She had settled down so much in the past months - mainly due to a new and very different relationship for her. She was with Jack, a forty-ish Texan with three kids. Desiree seemed to blossom as she got to know them. Penny had been amazed. However, even if she had moved on from wearing just black, and even though she no longer scowled at everyone who looked at her, if something deserved sharp words and a caustic tongue, Desiree would still happily provide it.

  “What do you mean? It’s… cozy.”

  Lydia was Penny’s other childhood friend. She was always businesslike, her career highly important to her. She was a partner in a consulting firm that took on high end clients and helped them to improve their businesses. Penny’s head swam when Lydia started talking about work - each job had a hundred different aspects to it, and a hundred different spreadsheets and reports to wade through. And then Lydia had to persuade her clients that they should change, and then persuade their staff as well.

  Penny was content with her job at the sports store - the one she had started when she was fifteen. She knew the job inside out, loved the products she got to work with, and the faces of the kids when mum or dad brought them in to pick up their new footy boots or team jersey. And with the recent explosion in popularity of activewear, she was busier than ever.

  It wasn’t as exciting as Lydia’s job, or perhaps as immersive as Desiree’s job as a teacher, but she loved it just the same. It was a shame her friends didn’t understand. They thought she should find something better, that she should use her degree to get a job as a dietitian or a physio or something. Sometimes, Penny thought they looked down on her a little for her choice. But they didn’t seem to understand that all she wanted was to be happy, no matter what she did. And until now, she had been happy at her sports store.

  Desiree and Lydia had continued to bicker over the close confines of the couch as Penny’s thoughts had strayed, but they soon drew her into the argument.

  “Pen! It’s squashy, right? Squashy and uncomfortable and fucking embarrassing for three grown women.”

  “It’s cozy. And not embarrassing at all.”

  Both Lydia and Desiree turned to Penny, who said, “It’s squishy and cozy and if I have to snuggle up to anyone at all, I’d prefer it to be you guys.”

  “Aww,” Lydia cooed, but Desiree rolled her eyes.

  Penny grinned and continued. “But, if you’d looked around instead of just bickering, you’d notice that the couch across from us is now empty.”

  “Thank fuck for that.” Desiree pulled herself up off the couch and moved to the other side of the table. Penny had to laugh at the sight. Desiree was tall with beautiful long legs, but when she was trying to get up out of the couches at Greens, it seemed like her knees almost reached her ears before she could get up properly.

  “Shut up.” Desiree wrinkled her nose at Penny. “I can’t help it.” They had laughed over Desiree’s failed attempts to gracefully get up from the lounges enough times that it had become a bit of a running joke.

  “I know,” replied Pen, a twinkle in her eyes. “It’s still funny though.”

  Lydia barked a laugh. “It really is, Des,” she admitted. “You look like an awkward spider.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Of course, that only made Penny and Lydia laugh harder.

  Desiree sniffed, directing her next remark to Penny. “I see you’re still eating cake and drinking diet coffee.” Today, Penny had chosen a blueberry and ricotta cheesecake to go with her skinny cappuccino. Her friends teased her regularly over her choices at Greens - they thought it was hilarious that the health-conscious Penny would eat cake, and then choose a diet coffee to go with it.

  “Hell yes.” Penny picked up her spoon and dug into the rich baked cheesecake. “So good,” she mumbled through her mouthful.

  “I don’t know why I let you get away with telling me how many calories are in my mega vanilla cappuccino every single time I have one.” Lydia picked up a large cup and took a delicate sip, leaving a rim of froth on her top lip, which she licked off with a smack of her lips. There was no standing on ceremony between the three of them - another thing Penny loved about them.

  “I haven’t done it today.”

  “That’s because I got in before you could tell me.”

  Desiree agreed with a nod. “And now you won’t say, because it would be awkward if you did.”

  Penny sighed. She couldn’t win when the two of them were ganging up on her. She simply wasn’t smart enough. So, she turned the conversation to another topic. “Hey, did I tell you we have the new Nike Air in store?”

  Desiree groaned and closed her eyes. “Not sports stuff again, Pen. Every time we see you.”

  “What? Lydia talks about her clients, and you talk about your students. I don’t have anything else to talk about. Oh!” She recalled the barrage of cute guys she passed while out running. “Except there must have been sailors or footy players or something come into town - when I went for my run, I passed I-don’t-know how many hot bods. Pretty sure I was drooling.”

  “That’s more like it,” said Desiree. “Lyddie and I have to live vicariously through your love life these days - both of us are banned from looking at other guys.”r />
  “Speak for yourself,” said Lydia. “I’m allowed to look, but no touching.” She turned to Penny. “Anything particular catch your eye?”

  Penny was about to launch into descriptions of some of the pecs and abs she had been glued to, when she remembered what else had happened during the run. All her enthusiasm disappeared in an instant, replaced by a crushing despair. It felt as if all her muscles had sagged, except for her hands, which were bunched up into tight fists. “No, not really.”

  “What?” Penny was sure Desiree would have jumped up from her seat, if her long legs had made it possible. “Seriously Pen? You can’t dangle the carrot and then pull it away!”

  But Lydia had seen the change of expression come over Penny’s face. She put a hand over Penny’s and asked, “What is it Pen? Are you okay?”

  Penny swallowed, trying to keep the tears that were gathering in her eyes from falling. She didn’t want to go into this with Desiree and Lydia. They would only fuss and fret, and tell her to go to the psychologist, same as her mum had. Only, they didn’t know anything about the abortion. It had all happened over one summer break — Penny had been seeing Renaldo to the exclusion of her other friendships, and when she had her abortion, she and her parents agreed to say she had gone to her grandmothers for a couple of weeks. It was dreadful, coming back to school and lying to her best friends, making up what she had done at grandmas, and not being able to talk about her doomed relationship, or the doomed little life that was snuffed out, but it was easier that way.

  Penny figured her decisions were coming back now to bite her in the arse. And now, somehow, she needed to tell her friends about her health scare, without telling them the whole story.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I just remembered that I had really scary kind-of chest pains while I was running.”

  “What happened?”

  “The doctor reckons it was a panic attack, because they can’t find anything else wrong with me.”