Three Hours Late

by Nicole Trope

  Ellen’s needles clicked in the afternoon quiet. The clock in the kitchen ticked away the minutes. Now Alex was twenty-five minutes late. Tick-tock, click-clack.

  Finally the silence of her mother’s unspoken thoughts scratched at Liz. She had watched her mother shake her head as she left her friendly message for Alex. ‘Don’t give me that, Mum—it’s easier if I keep him on side.’

  ‘Are you going to spend the rest of your life placating him, Liz? Are you going to jump every time he wants you to?’

  ‘I’ve left him, Mum, isn’t that enough? I don’t have to be rude as well.’

  ‘I hardly think asking him to bring his child back on time could be considered rude, Liz. What are you really worried about? If he tried anything here I would call the police and get his butt hauled off to jail.’

  ‘God, again with the police, Mum? It’s not the solution. Do you really want Luke to have a father in prison?’

  ‘No, of course not, but I think you should have gone to the police. You still could go and then at least Luke would know that some behaviours cannot be tolerated. Isn’t that important?’

  ‘I don’t need to educate Luke about right and wrong, Mum. He’s only three years old. He has no real idea what’s going on.’

  ‘Really?’ said Ellen, and Liz chose to look at the curtains. She wondered if she would seem completely crazy if she got up and moved them aside to peer at the front path.

  ‘What happened to your eye, Mum? What happened to your tummy, Mum? What happened, Mum? What happened?’

  ‘Look, Mum, I can’t keep going over this. It will get better with time. I’m sure it will. I don’t need to piss him off now, especially when he’s out with Luke. I need him to stay sane and calm when he’s out with Luke.’

  ‘I think I push him sometimes,’ said Glenda. ‘I make him mad on purpose.’

  The women in the group did not respond. Glenda had grabbed the words out of their own heads.

  ‘That’s no excuse,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Rhonda nodding, ‘no excuse.’ But she didn’t sound completely convinced.

  The logic of the words was hard to accept. Not all women got hit. If you were the one getting a smack maybe you deserved it. That’s what he said anyway. The ‘he’ who hit Glenda and Cherry and Rhonda and Liz and all the other women who drifted in and out of group. That’s what ‘he’ said.

  There were ways to avoid being hit. Degrading, debasing ways but there were ways to avoid it. All the women in the group had begged and pleaded their way out once or twice.

  Liz knew after all these years the things that triggered the rage and she could make sure she avoided them.

  Of course, each year the list of triggers got longer and longer and Liz had been able to see a future where everything she did, every breath she took and every sound she made, was a trigger. She had seen a time when there was no way to avoid getting hurt. Leaving had been her way of stopping the list from growing. Now she could control when she saw him, she could pay particular attention to the triggers. He hated to be told what to do, he hated to feel that someone was trying to control his choices, so she arranged her sentences accordingly.

  She cringed when she heard herself but everyone knew the truth about old habits.

  ‘He shouldn’t bring him back late. He’s just doing it to upset you,’ said Ellen.

  ‘He’s angry. He misses Luke. I might do the same thing if I couldn’t see my child.’

  ‘What rubbish—you’re still making excuses for him, Liz. You’ve never said no to him when it comes to Luke. Never.’

  Liz said nothing. She got up and moved the curtains aside, ignoring her mother’s ‘tsk’.

  Alex was thirty-eight minutes late.

  Her mother had let it be known when she brought Alex home that he was not a choice she respected. Now all Ellen’s fears about him had been vindicated. Liz knew there was no point in telling her mother that Alex now was different to Alex then. Her mother had heard it all before. She had seen the signs but she hadn’t known how to explain them to Liz. All Liz had seen was this beautiful, clean boy with hair that caught the light and gentle hands. The true Alex had been hiding, waiting for her to let her guard down. Everything he had told her when they were dating sounded different when looked at in the light of what she now knew.

  The women who were desperate to be with him and who kept calling had never existed or, if they had, Liz knew that the relationship was the other way around.

  He was just so easy to believe. The stories he told about himself had always included some small failing of his that they could both laugh about. She had never had any reason to doubt he had been kicked out of school because he’d been defending himself against a bigger boy whose father donated the library. When he lost the first job he got right out of university she accepted that it was because his boss was a woman who had a thing for him. She understood that in the job he had now he was pressured to go out with the boys and socialise. It was how business worked. Everyone he worked with was ‘a regular idiot’ or ‘up themselves’ or ‘just trying to cause trouble for me’.

  He still looked exactly the same except for the hands. The hands weren’t gentle anymore, but if you just looked at him he was still the same boy she had met in the middle of a summer afternoon.

  The first time she noticed him the word ‘clean’ came to mind.

  His hair was clean, his clothes were crisp in the heat and there was a lovely smell of soap around him. His teeth were perfect and white and as she handed him his cup of coffee she just knew that here was someone who had never in his whole life been dirty. His nails were shiny and rounded. They could have been the product of a manicure. This was not the kind of man who had ever lifted a piano.

  He had come into the coffee shop where she worked. She was reading one of her textbooks and he had to clear his throat to get her attention. Tuesday was her day off from university. Neither of her parents had made it to university. Her father had let her know that she didn’t need to work, he would support her all the way through her degree, but Liz enjoyed the coffee shop. It was never busy enough to feel like a real job and she got to have as many cups of coffee as she wanted.

  Alex sat around in the coffee shop long after he’d finished his cup of coffee. He just sat at his little table staring at her and pretending to leaf through a magazine every time she caught him at it.

  ‘My manager says you have to buy another cup of coffee or leave.’

  ‘Did he really say that? I didn’t know it was the done thing to throw customers out.’ His voice was low and deep, as though it came from a man a lot bigger than he was.

  ‘Well you’ve been here an hour.’

  ‘When does your shift end?’

  ‘Um, I don’t really know.’

  ‘Sorry—I’m creeping you out, aren’t I? I’m Alex. I’ve seen you on campus. I’m studying engineering and I think we have a literature class together.’

  ‘If you’re studying engineering why are you taking lit?’

  ‘I know, stupid, right? It’s part of the course. They seem to think it will make us better communicators in the future if we have a few humanities courses under our belts. Besides, I kind of like it. I’m reading some good books.’

  ‘What did you think of this week’s choice?’

  ‘I’m not exactly a fan of Jane Austen but the good thing about her is that there’s a movie to go with virtually every book she ever wrote.’

  She laughed then. He checked out. He was in her class.

  ‘My shift ends now actually.’

  ‘Well, how about I buy you a cup of coffee or tea? Somewhere else, not here.’

  He had a beautiful smile and a deep dimple on his chin. He was shorter than she was and when they left the coffee shop together she rounded her shoulders a little to hide her height.

  ‘I love that you’re so tall,’ he said without looking at her. ‘I love tall women.’

  Liz stood up straight and smiled down at him.
He wasn’t that much shorter than she was.

  And that was it, just an ordinary meeting on an ordinary day.

  After they had been going out for a few months he told her that he’d first noticed her in class because of her black hair and the way she kept flipping it over her shoulder. Liz wasn’t used to being admired from afar. Boys had come and gone but they were only after the same thing. Sometimes she gave in and sometimes she didn’t. She was waiting for the one who would make her feel that who she was mattered as much as her large breasts did. She was waiting for someone who actually wanted to love her. And then there was Alex who understood what it was like to have one of your parents leave. Alex, who understood that being loved was not necessarily everyone’s right.

  And then there was Alex, who ran his fingers through her hair after they had sex and told her she was amazing and that he loved her with everything he had. There was Alex, who wanted to come home to a family. Alex, who needed her to make him feel safe again, the poor boy who had been abandoned by his mother. There was Alex, and Liz was swept up and swept away and she didn’t care what her parents thought. She was in love. She held a little bit back because there was no way that she was going to finish up like her mother.

  But Alex needed her more than any other man ever had.

  Alex was afraid she was going to leave. She would watch him come up the front walk for a date and know that he had changed his shirt three times and shaved twice so his skin would be soft. For the first time Liz could remember she was in control and she preferred it to always being the one waiting for it to end. She would sit in class and right in the middle of a lecture she would feel her skin tingle like he was actually touching her. Those first few months were coated in honey.

  The first time she met his father she’d been somewhat taken aback. His father looked like Alex, with the same build and the same eyes, but there was a bitterness in his words that bothered Liz. He looked up at her just as Alex did and she saw him sneer when he shook her hand. ‘You’re a big one, aren’t you?’

  She had been too shocked by the open insult to respond.

  ‘Oh, Dad,’ Alex had said, and then he had laughed.

  Liz should have said something there and then, but it wasn’t polite—and at the time she’d just thought she had been insulted because of her height. She hadn’t noticed that Frank had simply declared her a thing.

  She told Alex later that he should have admonished his father but Alex had sighed and said, ‘My dad’s had it hard since my mum left. It can’t have been easy being a single father when the whole neighbourhood was still married.’

  Liz hung her head then, chastened for her lack of sympathy.

  She forgave Alex his few idiosyncrasies, like his perpetual need for order and his way of taking control of where they were going each time they went out and his jealousy when she talked to other men. She forgave him because he was so sweet and so in love with her and he had never had a mother to tell him right from wrong. He brought up the pain of abandonment constantly. If she had been more cynical she might have believed he brought it up a little too often. But she was in love.

  His jealousy was almost endearing. ‘Why do you and your manager spend so much time laughing?’ he asked after waiting for her at the end of a shift one afternoon.

  ‘What do you mean? He told me a joke. It was funny and I laughed.’

  ‘You seem to get on really well with him.’

  ‘I do—he’s a nice guy.’

  ‘So do you want to fuck him?’

  ‘Jesus, Alex, where did that come from? He’s about ten years older than me. Anyway, I have you; I don’t want to fuck anyone else. You’re being very weird.’

  ‘Sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just that I hate the idea of you being with any other man. I can’t help feeling that I’m going to lose you. I already lost one woman who I loved more than anything. I can’t lose you as well.’

  ‘You’re not going to lose me, Alex. I’m with you.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  His strange father was just one more thing to forgive Alex for and it wasn’t like they saw him that often. Liz could talk herself out of and around anything if she had to. When her parents’ divorce became public knowledge the best she could do was put a positive spin on everything. ‘Two birthday presents and two Christmas presents,’ she told her friends at school. Her father was a doting daddy who showered her with gifts and her mother was beautiful and so concerned about her that she would never marry again. There was no way she wanted to tell the girls at school who envied her beautiful new clothes and jewellery that her father was good at giving gifts but not at spending time with her or that her mother knocked herself out with whisky every night—sometimes before she cooked dinner.

  Alex’s father was openly rude to his new partner and refused to discuss his ex-wife. The whole dinner was surreal. Frank didn’t talk directly to Liz. Instead he spoke through Alex and he was not shy about his opinions. After the first frustrating hour Liz gave up trying to be included and ate her dinner. Alex and his father had obviously developed their own way of coping after his mother left. It was just the two of them against the world. Liz could understand that.

  When they went over to share the news of their engagement Frank had sighed and rubbed at his head.

  ‘You’re really young,’ he said to Alex.

  Alex kept quiet.

  Then Barbara said, ‘Yes, but you’re in love and it’s wonderful. Congratulations, you two. Let’s have a drink to celebrate.’

  They’d had more than a drink and they’d stayed for dinner and two bottles of wine later everyone was completely relaxed.

  ‘Don’t let her take over the whole wedding, Alex,’ said Frank, pointing his fork at Liz. ‘It’s your day too. If you have to wear that stupid suit you get involved.’

  ‘It’s not really my thing, Dad. Liz can have whatever she wants.’

  ‘Oh, it always starts out that way. Now you’re in love and you think you’ll never have an argument, but mark my words, boy—put your foot down now.’

  ‘He doesn’t have to put his foot down, Mr Harrow,’ Liz had said, rousing herself from her alcoholic daze. ‘We discuss everything. I respect Alex’s opinion and he respects mine.’

  Alex’s father had looked at her like he was bewildered that she could even speak.

  ‘I put my foot down with this one,’ he said, pointing to Barbara, who was stubbing out her second cigarette and refilling her glass with wine. ‘Best thing I ever did.’

  Liz had raised her eyebrows at Barbara but got nothing back from the woman. She had her wine and cigarettes and Liz could see that Alex’s father could say whatever the fuck he liked as long as she had those.

  It was another one of those signs she should have noticed.

  She wanted to tell her mother about the dinner but she couldn’t find a way to talk about it without making Alex look like a dick for not standing up for her, for laughing along at his father’s jokes about women.

  Ellen’s reaction to their engagement had been a tight-lipped smile. Jack had asked her how much the wedding would cost. Alex hadn’t been embraced by her family so she reasoned she should expect the same attitude from Frank and Barbara.

  In the months leading up to the wedding she occasionally had to bite back the words she wanted to share with her mother. The concerns she wanted to voice didn’t gel with the positive image of Alex she tried to present.

  Even before she married him Liz knew she had to present the side of Alex she hoped to see rather than the Alex she occasionally worried about. She wanted everyone to have a good opinion of him, even if that meant telling outright lies.

  ‘His father doesn’t exactly seem fond of women,’ Molly had said after the rehearsal dinner.

  ‘I know, weird, right? I think it’s because his wife left him and Alex when Alex was so young.’

  ‘I know, Liz, you told me the story, but his father seems to really dislike us—all of us—and Alex j
ust nods and smiles whenever he spouts his misogynistic bullshit.’

  ‘God, Molly, I’ve been known to nod and smile when my mother talks crap as well.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘Come on, Molly. I’m getting married tomorrow. Let’s have a drink.’

  The wedding was perfect although Alex was really angry with the photographer for turning up late. He had been close to hitting the man when his father pulled him away and took him for a drink.

  ‘He just wants everything to be perfect,’ Liz told her bridesmaids.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Molly. ‘He’s really into perfect.’

  She hadn’t wanted to think about it. Alex gave her a pair of diamond earrings and they were going to Bali for their honeymoon. She hadn’t wanted to listen. He was so charming, so caring, so concerned about her it was addictive. He was so interested in everything she had to say. If they weren’t together he would call her before he went to sleep because, ‘I need to hear about your day.’

  How could he be anything but perfect for her?

  6

  Alex told her when they came back from the honeymoon that he thought Molly was a bad influence. Molly wasn’t a serious married woman like she was. ‘She’s always out looking for the next big cock,’ he said. Liz could see his point. Molly was all about the parties and who she slept with. When Liz started talking about having a baby Molly had been horrified. ‘You’re only twenty-four. You’ve only just got married. You guys need to get to know each other, travel the world. Do stuff.’

  Liz had only been able to shake her head at her friend. She wanted a baby. She and Alex wanted a baby. She wouldn’t have minded travelling or even working for a few more years but Alex was so into the idea of them being a family. He pointed out babies wherever they went and he had even had a T-shirt made in Bali that said: Mum and dad went to Bali on their honeymoon and all they got was me.

  At the resort where they were staying he was happy to lie at the pool and just watch families.

  ‘That will be us soon,’ he said to Liz whenever some child did something particularly cute. Liz had nodded and smiled and sipped her drink. She was more interested in her magazines.