by Nicole Trope
‘Well he agreed to have him back by two. I told him to have him home by two.’
‘I understand, but custody is fifty/fifty until there have been agreements made in court. So as I said there is really nothing we can do. He can keep the child past the agreed time if he chooses to do so.’
‘But that’s not right! He told me he would have him home by two.’
‘I’m sorry, ma’am. There is nothing we can do at present.’
‘Nothing . . . are you sure can’t you put out a . . . what do you call it? You know, ask them to look for him?’
The whole world thought the American cop shows were real life.
‘You could come in and make a missing persons report but I can’t simply tell the police to look for someone because he’s twenty minutes late.’
‘Don’t I have to wait twenty-four hours to do that?’
‘No, ma’am. If you have some concern for the welfare of the missing person you can make a report as early as you want. Are you concerned for your child’s welfare?’
‘He’s not really missing. I mean, I don’t really know where he is but he is with his father. I’m just worried about him.’
‘I understand, but we cannot do anything. It’s not illegal to be late.’
‘Oh . . . oh, I’m sorry, of course you can’t. I just . . .’
‘Ma’am, is there a reason you are concerned for your son?’ The woman on the other end of the phone sounded like she was getting teary. It was an extreme reaction to someone being a few minutes late. Lisa felt a small shiver run down her spine.
‘No . . . I guess not . . . It’s just that we had a fight and I’m, you know, I’m worried.’
Lisa could hear a whole other story behind the word ‘fight’ but it wasn’t possible to demand the truth from the woman. That only happened after things went pear-shaped, after the dad took the kid and . . . shit, now she remembered why she had left Melbourne. As if she ever needed reminding.
‘Look,’ said Lisa, knowing that she should just hang up the phone, knowing that the police weren’t there to chase up everyone who was a few minutes late, knowing that the woman was probably just an ex with a grudge. ‘Look,’ she said, because she knew how horrible it was to feel powerless and part of the reason she became a police officer was so that no one would ever make her feel powerless again, ‘maybe you can give me his number plate and I’ll keep an eye out for any accident reports. He’s probably just stuck in traffic. You know how traffic can be.’
‘Yeah, and his mobile is probably just out of battery. He never remembers to charge it.’ The woman laughed, comforted by these reasonable explanations.
‘I’m sure that’s it,’ agreed Lisa, conscious of the other lines lighting up. ‘You can come in and talk to one of the other constables, if you’d like.’
‘No . . . no, I can’t leave. He could be back any moment and then Luke might be a bit upset if I wasn’t here. So I can just give you his number plate and you can kind of keep a lookout?’
‘Okay,’ said Lisa. She would take down the number to make the woman feel better, but realistically there was not much she could do.
‘Um, his number plate is WVX 216—no, 217. Yeah, that’s it: WVX 217.’
‘Are you certain that’s correct?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. It’s a blue car—a Toyota sedan. It’s five years old.’
‘And can I have his name, your name and your son’s name?’
The woman on the phone spelled the names out slowly.
People liked to give you their details. They felt something was happening when they had to spell out their names slowly and clearly. At the end of each shift Lisa usually had a pile of names for the recycling bin. People hardly ever called back. Sometimes they just needed someone to talk to.
‘Okay, ma’am, we’ll look into it. Let us know when he comes in.’
‘Yes, thanks, I will.’
Lisa disconnectd and answered the next call. The woman wouldn’t call back. The ex and the kid would be home soon and the woman would be too busy with other stuff to remember she had called the station.
Every day there were calls like this. Husbands who came home late and kids who ignored their curfews. If they followed up on all of them they would never get any real policing done.
But there was something in the woman’s voice. Who got concerned when their ex was only twenty minutes late? As far as Lisa could tell, bringing the kid back late was standard procedure for divorcing parents. Bringing the kid back late was just another tactic in the guerrilla warfare of divorce.
After Lisa had told an old woman locked out of her house to go next door and call a locksmith and taken down the name of a missing cat, she looked at the number plate again. Something about it made her heart beat just a little faster.
‘It’s probably nothing,’ she told herself. ‘You’re just bored.’
She stared at the number plate for a few more minutes and then went over to the computer. She could look it up. It would pass some time.
Last year a mother had called in to say her husband was late coming back from a visit and by the time she filed the report and a recovery order had been issued, the guy had already left the country with their three kids. As far as Lisa knew, the feds were still looking for them.
The internet was full of stories of kids who never came back from their access visits. All over television and the movies people were always bleating about the needs of the kids when there was a divorce but no matter how much information was around, no matter how educated the parents were, there would always be those who stopped seeing their children and started seeing little negotiation hostages. People forgot themselves in a divorce. They were hurt and angry and mourning the loss of the lives they were supposed to have had, and if they could use the kids to get back at the ex that was just fine.
Lately, though, things seemed to be getting worse. There was that father who just drove his car into a lake and watched his three kids drown. He just got out of the car and swam away and watched the car sink. He didn’t even call the police or emergency services. He went straight to the ex-wife to tell her what he’d done. Of course he claimed it was an accident. His wife believed it had been an accident at first. She didn’t understand that he could hate her enough to hurt his own kids.
People lost their ability to feel anything but their own pain and sometimes they spread it around. Mostly it was the men who hurt their kids. That was just the way it was. You could argue all you liked that women did as much damage as men, but the facts were the facts. Women couldn’t kill their kids just to get back at their ex; that would be like killing themselves.
She looked at the number plate again. Then the phone rang.
‘Good afternoon, West Wood police station, how can I help you?’
5
Liz put down the phone. She was just being silly, she really was. The woman at the police station must have thought she was a complete lunatic.
She dialled Alex’s number again and left another message. ‘Hi, Alex, it’s me again. I just wanted to know where the two of you were. I hope you’re having fun. I may have forgotten to tell you that I wanted to put Luke down for a nap at two today. So if you guys could come home that would be great. Call me when you get this message. Thanks.’
She made sure not to nag or accuse or criticise. She kept her voice warm and friendly. When she put the phone down she felt a small stab of hate for the woman she became when she spoke to Alex. She was fucking pathetic. So cautious, so placating.
It reminded her a little of the way her mother sounded the first year after she and Liz’s father divorced. Ellen would call Jack and ask silly questions she already knew the answer to and she would make jokes and tell him that only he knew how to do certain things in the house. Liz had needed to leave the room during those calls.
Now here she was, working to keep her soon-to-be-ex-husband on side.
Sometimes you were so busy looking back at the person you didn’t want to become that
you tripped right into someone you had never imagined you could be.
He wasn’t going to come over and hit her. That was the theory anyway. She had removed herself from the situation and she was out of his reach but her body was having a hard time catching up with what she knew in her mind. Her body reacted with a racing heart and wet palms every time she heard his voice drop a note or saw his eyes darken.
Living in his house, the voice she used with him had been about survival, but now she wanted to grab herself by the shoulders and shake until she grew some balls.
At university it had been a standing joke that Liz Searle would dominate all tutorial discussions.
‘You just take over and don’t give anyone else a chance to talk,’ her best friend Molly had laughed.
‘I have a lot of opinions,’ said Liz.
‘You definitely are not short of opinions. You stomp all over everybody else’s ideas. Men don’t like women who don’t shut up.’
‘God, Molly, you don’t shut up either. Besides, who really cares what men think?’
And then she had met Alex and she had just disappeared.
Molly hadn’t understood the attraction. She had been especially negative about Alex’s neediness.
‘Christ, Liz,’ Molly had said. ‘They all need us. It’s like the oldest fucking trick in the book.’
‘It doesn’t feel like a trick,’ said Liz.
‘Of course it is. You’re being manipulated into loving him. Is that what you really want? Some guy who’s looking for another mummy? Give it a few more weeks and you’ll be doing his washing and making him soup when he’s sick.’
‘He’s not looking for another mother. His mother left when he was five years old. He was raised by his dad. And is it so bad if I do some washing for him or make him soup or take care of him? Isn’t that what love is about? People in love take care of each other.’
Even as the words floated into the air Liz had realised that she knew very little about love. She had drifted through high school mostly ignored or taunted, and first-year university had only brought men looking for conquests. At home she had only lived with the dissolution of love. The gradual fading away of something she had not been around to witness at the beginning and so could not even remember having existed.
‘Did he tell you that?’ said Molly, laughing. ‘Those words sound like they come straight from his mouth.’
‘What if he did? Why are you so against this guy?’
‘I’m not against him, Liz. I’m against who you are when you’re with him. You’re getting all soppy and sentimental. Washing a guy’s undies doesn’t get any better just because you’re in love. You’re still washing his underwear.’
‘Stop being gross, Molly. I really like him, okay? There’s something different about him. He’s had a hard life. How would you like to have grown up without a mother?’
‘Oh God,’ said Molly. ‘This is not a good sign. Now you’ll have to be his mummy. Dump him while you still can and let me introduce you to the guy in my physics class.’
There was a moment when Liz thought that Molly had a point, but it was only a moment. Molly had always told her the truth ever since the day they met, standing in line to register for classes. Liz had been busy taking in the other students, watching cute boys and embracing the smell of freedom, when she stepped forward into Molly and dropped everything she was carrying. ‘Well that’s just embarrassing,’ said the girl with curly brown hair and green eyes. Liz had looked up with a scowl on her face to find the girl smiling at her. She laughed with relief, ‘Yeah, it is.’
To Liz, her very existence was a constant source of discomfiture. She stood too high above the crowd. She looked down on too many young men. Now she looked down on the girl poured into skinny jeans and felt the relief of not being judged just yet.
‘It’s a good thing you bumped into me. I’m Molly Lavender Bright. Please don’t ask me about my name—my parents are leftover hippies and I’m going to change it by deed poll any minute now. I feel like I’ve been here all day. I’m thirsty, are you thirsty? I can show you the best coffee shop on campus.’
They had gone for coffee and discovered they were both going to be primary school teachers. Molly was completely certain of her place in the world so Liz was happy to defer to her opinion in social matters just as Molly was happy to trust Liz’s ideas in class. Molly had spent high school flirting and dating and breaking hearts. Liz was glad to be pulled from her books and into the social whirl that was Molly. There were parties and dinners and nightclubs, and Liz managed to lose her stubborn virgin status and see it only as a step towards finding the right man.
Molly copied Liz’s notes and they both waxed lyrical over small children and minds that could be shaped.
Liz left the remembered terrors of high school behind and shared her dreams with her new friend. She felt herself to be a completely different person, no longer hemmed in by the things she heard at school or the words her mother threw at her. It was late to tread the path of self-discovery, but Liz had spent her teenage years dealing with her mother and the bottle by her mother’s side.
Only Alex divided them. Molly kept telling Liz to let go and move on.
‘Sometimes he’s a little bit creepy,’ said Molly. ‘He has this weird way of looking at you, like he’s obsessed. I bet he’s covered his whole bedroom in pictures of you so he can watch you all night.’
‘Rubbish, Molly, you’re just making that up,’ said Liz.
She liked the way Alex looked at her and she hoped he did have pictures of her in his room. She carried a picture of him in her wallet.
She liked that he was completely in love whereas she was holding a little back. Just a small piece of herself was being kept safe in case. In case it all went wrong. Liz didn’t mention this to Molly. It was too weird a concept to share with the world.
‘If you love him so much, take a little time away, get some perspective. Come with me to London for a few months. Your dad would spring for a ticket and we’ll have the best time.’
A trip to London was right at the top of Liz’s wish list. But she couldn’t take time away and she couldn’t let go because he needed her. He needed her more than anyone had ever needed her. She couldn’t explain to Molly what it felt like to have someone who checked in with you every day, who cared what you thought and who claimed to only be functioning in class because of you. Liz knew what it was like for a woman not to be needed or even wanted by a man, and she couldn’t explain that to Molly. Molly wouldn’t understand because she came from a family that was still glued together.
Mum and dad and two brothers and Molly, all living together in one big happy house. Molly was needed by everyone in her family. Her mother needed her to babysit her brothers and her father needed her to help him with the computer and her brothers needed her to play with them and the whole family needed her to be home at dinner so they could discuss how everybody’s day had gone.
Alex was the first person who had ever needed Liz.
Even later, after they were married and he hurt her, she knew that he needed her to survive.
Molly’s inability to put aside her dislike of Alex bothered Liz. A good friend should just be happy for you. That’s what Alex said. He was not immune to Molly’s antipathy.
Sometimes Liz would step outside the relationship. She would take a few steps to the side and watch herself and Alex together. In those moments she admitted to herself that it was possible that Molly was right.
Alex told her Molly was ‘trashy’. Molly told her Alex was ‘strange’.
Liz felt herself pulled both ways and eventually took to keeping them apart. Molly told her she felt ‘left behind’ and Liz laughed and told her they would always be best friends, but Liz was in love. She stopped needing to shout her opinions in class. Alex didn’t like loud abrasive women. She stopped needing to go out and party because it was better when it was just the two of them.
Alex became her world and the little piece of herself
that she was keeping safe was chipped away a little bit at a time until Luke was born, and then it was gone forever.
And as the years passed she held on to who he had been but she forgot to hold on to who she had been. She felt herself shrink. She was such a tall woman and she took up a lot of space and yet there were times when Alex would walk into a room and call her name because he couldn’t see her sitting right there on the couch making herself small.
‘At least I’ve left him now,’ she comforted herself.
‘The important thing to remember, ladies, is that you’ve taken the biggest step to free yourself. You’ve left the abuser and you’ve moved forward with your life. Don’t think about how long you stayed. Don’t worry about who you were then. Celebrate the woman you are now. Celebrate the strength it took to walk out that door.’
‘Should we all get out a mirror and study our vaginas?’ said Glenda.
‘Yeah, let’s find the source of our power,’ laughed Rhonda.
‘You people are sick,’ said Cherry.
‘It’s better to laugh a little,’ Liz said to Rebecca, whose face was flushed with anger.
‘I just think we need to stick to the subject,’ said Rebecca.
‘We live the subject, Rebecca,’ said Rhonda. ‘No one knows how to stick to the subject more than we do.’
Rebecca had given her a strange look then, like she had something else to say, but then she just shook her head and moved on. Liz had wondered why she was running a domestic violence group at the time. She hardly seemed the type. She blushed a little whenever someone said ‘ fuck’.
Liz toyed with her phone and tried not to look at her mother, who was on the couch knitting a jumper for Luke. It was navy blue with red stripes. Luke only wanted Bob the Builder jumpers these days, but Liz would take the gift and hopefully convince Luke to wear it once or twice.
The knitting kept Ellen away from the whisky. She had cut down on the number of times she went to the bottle standing on the antique wooden trolley but she could not give it up entirely. Everyone had their own ways of getting through the day.