by Nicole Trope
How could she have been so utterly, utterly stupid? She wanted to tear at her hair and howl but her body was stilled by the shock of her actions.
‘Perhaps it wasn’t the best time . . .’ began Ellen.
‘I know,’ shouted Liz. ‘Don’t you think I know how stupid that was? Don’t you think I wish I had kept my mouth shut? I don’t know what happened. I just don’t know what happened.’
‘You’re worried,’ said Ellen. ‘It’s understandable.’
‘Isn’t that what you wanted me to do, Mum? I stood up to him. And now I’ve made a bad situation worse.’
‘I didn’t want you to yell at him, Liz. I know how unpredictable he can be.’
‘Actually, Mum, you have no idea at all about Alex. You don’t have a fucking clue.’
‘Please, Liz—there’s no need for that kind of language. The police will be here soon and I’m sure we can get all of this sorted out. You told the police you were calling your father. Why don’t you do that?’
‘You do it.’
‘He doesn’t want to hear from me, Liz . . .’
‘Please, Mum, could you just stop playing politics and call him?’
‘I’m not the one you’re angry at, Liz.’
Liz didn’t reply. She stood up and went to the bathroom, where she let the tears come. She had been determined to stay detached and cool and to be strong. She was a complete joke. She wanted to laugh at herself but her body was heaving with anguish instead.
‘I’m sure he’s just running late,’ called her mother.
Liz wished she would just shut up. She heard her mother head towards the kitchen for the fridge and the cubes of ice that made her drinking a civilised indulgence rather than a low-class problem. Liz sat on the floor of the bathroom and tried to figure out how it had come to this.
What had possessed her to yell at him?
She was not allowed to raise her voice to him.
That was one of the triggers.
She was not allowed to berate him.
That was one of the triggers.
She was not allowed to demand things of him.
That was one of the triggers.
She knew this. She knew all these things and yet she had done everything wrong.
Now she had no idea what was going to happen. No idea at all.
He could decide to drive straight over to the house and beat the crap out of her. She pictured him speeding along the roads, skidding around corners.
Please, God, don’t let him have an accident with Luke in the car.
She pictured him biting his lip and muttering to himself.
Please, God, don’t let him turn his anger on Luke.
She pictured him running up the front path, shouting her name, spitting his fury.
Please, God, let him come here and hit me. Let him come here and bring my boy and hit me.
But Alex was probably not on his way to the house. He knew she was here with her mother. He wouldn’t risk exposing himself in that way; he would find another way to punish her. Of that she was completely sure. He wanted her to feel the same pain he was feeling, that’s what he’d said.
How could she have been so stupid? When he had been holding on to hope that they would get back together he had been working hard to show her what a good father he was, what a good man he was. Now that hope was gone and there was no reason for him to be good at all. There was nothing holding him back—and she couldn’t smother the fear that he was capable of a great deal more than a punch to the eye.
Liz bit her hand to stop herself from screaming.
What was he going to do?
What was he going to do?
She had read the articles just like everyone else. She sat in front of the computer shaking her head at the terrible things men did to their children to punish their ex-wives. To break their hearts. To make them feel pain.
Until now she had always been a little alarmed by her own fascination with these stories. She read every piece written on the man who threw his daughter off a bridge and chided herself for being ghoulish. Now, in a moment of clarity, she realised that her interest was not merely voyeuristic; it was more a case of forewarned is forearmed.
There were signs that each article listed. Signs a woman needed to look for—although the signs meant nothing unless you viewed them in hindsight.
Plenty of men beat their wives but did not hurt their children.
Plenty of men were controlling but did not hurt their children.
Men could be depressed and not hurt their children, and they could hurt themselves but not hurt their children.
How could you ever know if you had a husband or a boyfriend who was going to be the one?
The articles listed new boyfriends as a problem so Liz stayed away from men altogether. She barely left her mother’s house at night.
The articles told of men not seeing their children enough so Liz made sure Alex saw Luke as often as he wanted.
The articles spoke of men feeling powerless and out of control so Liz made sure that Alex thought the decisions were his.
And still it was not enough for him.
What would be enough?
To Liz the most shocking thing about the man on the bridge was that he had showed no signs of being a monster. As she had scrolled through the articles she had come across a picture of the man and his ex-wife when they were still together. They were at a party of some sort, dancing. He was in a tuxedo and she was in a sea-green ruffled dress with a low back and a row of sparkles at the neck. They were laughing and embracing as they shared their joy with the camera.
All the pictures of the man since his horrifying act of revenge made him look insane. His hair was long and bushy and he stared at the camera with dead eyes, but in the picture from the party he could have been an accountant or a butcher. He could have been anyone, but now he was the man who had done this terrible thing.
Did his wife have any idea of who he would become? Was there anything she could have done to save her child?
Alex had all the signs, but having the signs didn’t necessarily mean anything.
Until they meant something.
9
Liz stared at the ceiling for awhile and then she pulled her mobile phone out of her pocket and called Rhonda. She needed help to get her through this. She could call Molly—she and Molly spent a lot of time together now—but Molly wouldn’t understand. Molly was busy planning her own wedding to a nice doctor who never raised his voice.
But she needed someone else here now. If she was left alone with her mother they would begin playing the blame game and Liz didn’t need anyone else to tell her that she had fucked up. So she called Rhonda because Rhonda knew what it felt like to fuck up.
Liz sat next to Rhonda at group and sometimes when she spoke Rhonda held her hand. Rhonda’s skin was dry and peeling and her nails were bitten short but her hand gave Liz the certainty that she would not be judged. At the first group meeting Liz had slunk into the room trying not to feel like a fifteen-year-old terrified of her father’s reaction instead of a mother with a child of her own. She had hung back when they’d taken their seats, unsure and unwilling.
‘Sit here, darl,’ a thin, ropey woman who could have been her age or her mother’s age said.
Liz sat down, grateful to be included without having to say anything. The woman’s name was Rhonda and as it turned out she was only a couple of years older than Liz.
Rhonda sucked furiously on one cigarette after another all meeting and didn’t seem to care when she dropped ash on her faded jumper. Under her eye a bruise was in the yellow stage, and her wrist was wrapped in plaster.
‘Kicked him out last year, but that doesn’t mean the bastard doesn’t still come back every now and again,’ she said without waiting for any questions from Liz.
On nights when Luke wanted his daddy and Liz wanted to kill her mother she could call Rhonda, who had walked all the same paths before her.
‘You have to look at
this as phase one,’ said Rhonda. ‘Phase one is when you get away from the dickhead and find a place to lick your wounds. That’s where you are now. Don’t rush it, Liz. Wait until you’ve figured out a way to deal with him. Wait until all the papers are signed and maybe he’s found someone else to get him through the night. Phase two is when you get your own place, get a job and start living your life without worrying about him getting around you.’
‘And what’s phase three?’ Liz asked.
‘Phase three is when you’ve got enough money to live your life and get your hair done and there is some lovely man warming your bed.’
Liz laughed. ‘Where are you, Rhonda?’
‘Well, it’s been a while for me so I would say I’m in phase two—unless of course I let him talk me back into bed like I did a couple of months ago. Then I fall right back into phase one, ’cause the moment he pulls out he gives me a smack.’
‘Oh, Rhonda,’ Liz said.
‘Yep: oh, Rhonda,’ Rhonda replied.
They were so far apart in the world that they never would have met without the group. Liz had travelled a few suburbs and a good few levels of society—the levels that weren’t supposed to exist in Australia—to find the group. When she’d called the number from the notice board at the shopping centre a woman on the other end had given her a choice of locations. There were meetings close to where she lived with her mother but she didn’t want to go there. Imagine the horror of turning up and finding the next-door neighbour in the circle, sipping her cup of coffee and waiting to tell her own tale of woe. Instead, she found a place where she could just be Liz, and if she wanted to talk she could, but if she kept silent she would simply be the woman in group who didn’t say anything. She would not have to be Elizabeth Harrow whose father made all that money and then left his wife or Liz Harrow who married that lovely polite Alex and had a little boy who went to school with our little boy.
Rhonda came from a family where getting hit by your husband was something that just happened to you. Her father hit her mother and her brother hit his wife and everyone hit the kids. As a child Rhonda had watched things go round and round and vowed she would never find herself trapped and spinning the same way. She wouldn’t let anyone touch her kids, and once she figured out that her husband was as full of shit as the other husbands who said they were sorry, she kicked him out.
She and Liz had coffee after group every week and when Liz told Rhonda where she lived and who she was Rhonda hadn’t even blinked. ‘There’s a lot like you that come every now and again. Sometimes a woman named Bethany comes. Her husband is a plastic surgeon and she drives the prettiest car you’ve ever seen. You wouldn’t believe anyone could look so perfectly together unless they were standing in front of a camera. But once she opens her mouth she’s just as sad and pathetic as the rest of us. Dress it up how you like, but a smack from a rich man hurts just as much as a smack from a poor one. I don’t care where you come from. We’re all in the same place right now, aren’t we?’
In the bathroom Liz was staring at her mobile phone. She pressed her fingers over the buttons the way Luke did.
‘Click clack, Mum. Did you hear dem go click clack?’
‘I’ll be there as soon as,’ Rhonda had said. She hadn’t even asked any questions.
Rhonda was coming and maybe she would have something different to say and give Liz something different to think about.
‘You were right to call the police but I know it’s all going to blow over,’ called Ellen from the kitchen. She didn’t even know if Liz could hear her but she had to keep talking.
‘I think it will be fine, I think . . .’ but Ellen didn’t know what to think anymore. She sipped at her whisky, letting it burn its way slowly down her throat. She wanted to find the right words to comfort Liz but every time she opened her mouth she messed up.
She was still waiting to get to the part where she had all the answers. As a child the magic of the teenage years promised clarity and control and then her twenties beckoned with freedom and her own decisions.
She thought when she married Jack and he seemed to be doing so well that she had achieved the holy grail of existence. She was in love and she was married and there was enough money for the bills. Life was under control. She wanted a baby and she had managed pregnancy without a hitch and then of course it had all fallen apart in her thirties. She wasn’t sure when she had discovered that Jack had stopped talking to her, touching her or even wanting to be in the same room with her. When Liz was born she had been so absorbed by the baby that she hadn’t noticed, not really. You could sit around and discuss it all you liked but the truth was that no one was really sure when a marriage started to die. It could have been the one big moment when he confessed his adultery but it could also have been a thousand little moments when she missed what he was trying to say and he missed what she was trying to do.
It could have been too much television and too little sex or it could have been the towels on the bathroom floor and a forgotten anniversary. Even now Ellen couldn’t pinpoint the moment that the wall of their marriage started to chip away. Perhaps it was the responsibility of parenthood or maybe it was because they had little to discuss after, ‘How was your day?’
Ellen had no idea what happened and then the more he ignored her the more she clamoured for his attention and Jack had hated that. She had felt like a small child asking to be picked up.
She had never, for one moment, imagined he would find someone else—especially not someone like Lilly. She was so round. She oozed out of tight skirts and giggled behind her hands like a child. How could she be the right woman for Jack?
Alex was wrong from the day Liz met him. He was too small, too contained and then when he opened his mouth to speak she knew that he was still more child than man. Well, most of them were, weren’t they?
Alex wanted to play happy families but he had no idea that there were always going to be times when things got difficult. Ellen had sensed this but there was no point in trying to convince Liz of anything. They had reached that stage where everything she said was met with a contemptuous snort from her daughter. It was fair enough. She remembered being the same way with her mother. But Liz’s responses had an edge to them, something razor sharp that spoke of Ellen’s failures as a mother.
She had seen Alex as the wrong man for her daughter but at most she’d seen a strained existence similar to her own followed by a divorce. Alex was so small compared to Liz, there was no way she could have predicted that he could possibly hurt her so much.
And now here they were. She couldn’t find the right words to comfort her daughter because she couldn’t find those words for herself.
It could be nothing. Alex could walk through the door and there could be some shouting and screaming and then it could all just go back to the way it had been. Or—and the ‘or’ made Ellen take another sip of her drink—or they could find themselves in the middle of some front-page news story. They could become that family, that mother, that grandmother.
People got in their cars to make a quick trip to the shops and never came back. People went in for routine tests and received a death sentence. Things could change in an instant.
Ellen shook her head. It was all going to be fine. She couldn’t think of it any other way. Where would Alex take Luke anyway?
He couldn’t get on a plane to another country but he might leave the state.
Who would she and Liz be without Luke? How would they be? If Alex disappeared into the middle of Australia with Luke how would she and Liz survive?
Luke had been the way back for them. He had forced Liz into a place where she needed the lifeline of a mother, even a mother as flawed as Ellen.
She was pleased that the police were coming although it did seem to be a bit of an overreaction. Didn’t the police have better things to do? She looked into her empty glass and thought about pouring herself another drink, but it would not look good to have the police arrive and find her slowly on her way to oblivion
. She filled the kettle instead. After this afternoon was over she would fill her glass to the brim and sleep off the afternoon in a dreamless rest.
And then after a few weeks it was probably time to tell Liz that she needed a place of her own. She loved having Luke in the house but sometimes Liz made her feel the same way Jack used to. They both looked at her like she was clueless. Perhaps she was clueless? Ever since the day Jack left she had been a spider hanging on to a thin line of web swinging in the wind. It was inevitable that the web would break, inevitable that she would find herself free falling with no hope of being saved. Was this the day then? Was today the day when her whole world fell apart in a way that couldn’t be rosily viewed through a whisky glass?
Ellen opened the bottle and poured herself just half a tot more. She would think positive thoughts instead. Alex would walk through the door any minute now and they would all get a stern lecture from the police about wasting their valuable time.
She would call Jack now and get him to come over and maybe they could discuss him buying a place for Liz and Luke. Heaven knows the man had enough money.
Rhonda arrived ten minutes later. ‘I was at the big shopping centre. My ex’s got the kids. I thought I’d give myself a treat. I called Rebecca. Hope you don’t mind.’
Liz shook her head. She didn’t mind. Right now she would tell the whole world if she thought it would get Luke home.
‘How long have they been missing?’ asked Rebecca when she arrived.
‘Over an hour now,’ said Liz.
No one said, ‘It’s only an hour—what are you worrying about?’ or ‘Are you completely crazy to be dragging us away from our lives when he’s only an hour late?’
No one said that.
‘I suppose he’s not answering his phone,’ said Rhonda, talking more to herself than anyone else.
Liz shook her head and ran her hand across her face, catching a stray tear she thought she had finished with in the bathroom.
‘I’m really scared for Luke,’ said Liz.