When he left her alone to sleep for the night, the fever made her hallucinate. Whenever she opened her eyes, she saw lines connecting objects – from door to box to window; from chin to pillow to chest; from table to bookshelf to lamp. Even when she closed her eyes, the imprint remained. She was too weak to wonder why, but she was seeing triangles, everywhere.
Flashbacks, too. Vivid, colourful, and with texture she could feel: Noah’s Babygro soft against the crook of her arm in seat 17H, his lips soft too as she prised them open to kill him with the poison on her spoon.
Perhaps she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. She certainly felt unhinged. In the middle of the night, she emailed the blogger again.
I have word she’s in bed, she messaged. There is talk that she is hallucinating. She is seeing things!
Thank you for your message, the blogger replied. Please let me know anything else. I promise I will not disclose your email address to anyone.
*
Joanna still wasn’t strong enough to get out of bed two days later. She lay there, noticing things, examining the room. It was painted royal blue, with a large window overlooking the back garden and neat white blinds that had been closed since she collapsed. It was Alistair’s childhood room, still filled with his things. Cricket and football trophies were arranged with perfect symmetry on the chest of drawers. Books on politics and history and a collection of Stephen King novels filled the shelves. The Robertson clan crest was framed in thick brown oak – VIRTUTIS GLORIA MERCES – whatever that meant. Alistair’s father emigrated to Australia from Stirling at the age of twenty-three – hence the family crest and Alistair’s permanent UK residency and the red, blue and green kilt he wore to posh events in Edinburgh. They had lots in common, she’d thought when they met – the Scottish thing, the interest in politics, being only children, their family background.
What else? His grade-seven school shirt was pinned to the door, covered in the signatures of his classmates. There was a framed school photo on the wall behind the bed – Alistair must have been about fourteen years old, the same age as Chloe. He was identical to her, in fact: brown eyes with the same fierce intensity. Beside that was a shot of his father on a tennis court: a stern, traditional looking man – light brown hair and dark eyes. He was a GP; died of skin cancer when Alistair was thirteen. There was a lot of father-memorabilia – his medical qualifications, framed; photos of him giving a speech somewhere important; shaking hands with someone important. Based on the information in this room, a detective would surmise that Alistair’s father was significant and masculine, and that his son revered him.
Joanna and Alistair had bonded over their fatherlessness, because Joanna’s also disappeared off the face of the earth when she was a teenager. She came home from Kirsty’s one evening to find his bags and his guitar gone, her mother crying in the bathroom, and a note that read Joanna, I’m sorry. I’ll be in touch, Daddy, xxx. Being in touch turned out to mean three birthday cards: You’re thirteen! Happy fourteenth! I can’t believe you’re fifteen already! He never phoned her back after that one call she made with Kirsty’s encouragement. And she didn’t even have his address, somewhere in Canada with ‘that young cinematographer from the Iceland shoot and her two brats’, her mother said. She blamed her mother at first, as daughters do. Her mother took it on the chin, as mothers do. When Joanna’s mum died of lung cancer – six years ago now – her dying words were: ‘Find your father. Forgive him.’ She held her mother’s hand as she groaned her way through an un-peaceful death and thought, screw that, he can go to hell.
‘Do you think we have attachment issues?’ she joked to Alistair in a hotel one afternoon.
‘I think I’m attached to you,’ he responded.
When Joanna looked back on these cute moments, she couldn’t find the cute in them any more. When she pictured that hotel room, for example, she could hear Alistair’s phone buzzing in the background and him not answering it. She could see the near-empty bottle of wine on the bedside table that she drank too much of in order to feel okay about what she was doing, she could hear the workmen outside because it was daytime, feel the cheap nylon sheets of the grotty Laterooms hotel they’d snuck into, remember saying ‘Answer it’ and Alistair saying ‘Nah, fuck her.’
Nothing cute in that memory at all, then. Lying there on the hotel bed, she thought she was in love, but perhaps she’d have loved anyone who made her come three times in four hours.
And another time: driving to the country, and Joanna asking Alistair to tell her about his father.
‘He was always at work,’ Alistair said. ‘I remember wanting to go fishing with him, but he put it off again and again. “Next weekend!” he’d grunt. “Stop pestering me boy!”’
Joanna reached over and stroked his leg. This was a special moment she told herself she’d always cherish: vulnerable Alistair, revealing himself. Looking back on it now, she remembered that she had to reach from the back seat of the car, where she was lying so no one could see her. As Alistair drove out of the city, she could only see the tops of things: trees, houses, street lights. She was on her back thinking that this was her world now: everything was decapitated, nothing was on the ground, nothing had roots. She remembered the car stopping in a country lane and thinking to herself: Limber up‚ Joanna, you have to shag him, on this seat, and you only have an hour. Quick, where’s that wine?
Of course, they both had daddy issues. Alistair had turned into his and Joanna had fallen in love with hers.
From her bed Joanna could see a box with ASCOT VALE written in thick black pen on the side. Alistair and Alexandra lived in this Melbourne suburb before moving to the UK. They must have stored the box here.
She was meeting past-Alistair, in-context-Alistair, for the first time. The room oozed him – competitive, driven, fatherless. She didn’t like the room, she didn’t like him.
Joanna swung her legs out of the bed to get up, but felt something sharp against her leg. The edge of a card. That’s right, she’d stashed some there days earlier. She reached under and began reading them.
One was from someone who’d gone through something similar. She recognised the grieving woman’s name immediately – who wouldn’t?
I know how you feel. People will say you’re not a real woman. They’ll say you’re a bad mother. They’ll say you’re a liar. They’ll dig into any mistakes you made in the past, point the finger at you. And all the while you’re dying inside because your child is gone, and all you need is to know. All you need is to find out what happened to him, to know where he is. I understand the terrible purgatory – no, hell – you’re in. If you ever need to talk . . .
Joanna couldn’t read it all: this poor, innocent woman, assuming that Joanna was in the same situation. She put it back in the envelope and slid it under the mattress.
There were several cards from strangers – prayers, thoughts, two cheques, one for a hundred dollars, one for twenty pounds.
There was a letter from a Ms Amery. ‘You probably don’t remember me,’ she wrote, ‘but I sat behind you on the plane from Glasgow. You dropped your case on my leg and felt bad about it. I can’t get the image of your baby boy out of my head. You had such a terrible flight. I wish I could have helped you more. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, here’s my telephone number – 555 78345. My address is 12 North Ambrose Street, Parkville, VIC. Anything.’
Joanna wished the old lady had helped more too. Perhaps if the arseholes on that flight had helped her more, Noah would still be alive.
She threw the card under the mattress with the rest, stood up, and almost fainted with dizziness. Steadying herself against the wall, she walked slowly towards the box under the window, opened it and took out two expensive heavy orange saucepans. Alistair said he liked cooking, although he always seemed grumpy when he was doing it. (Out of my kitchen! Turn that music off!) To be a good cook, he needed the best equipment, so he’d bought the same saucepans in Scotland. Underneath the saucepans were
two photo albums.
The wedding photos were painful to look at. The invitation at the front stated that Alexandra and Alistair were to be married on the old steam train that goes from Queenscliff to Drysdale, passing Swan Bay on its way. ‘Als Unite!’ was printed in gold leaf at the top. In the photos, Alistair and Alexandra were waving and smiling from the window, looking as optimistic and as in love as a young couple can be. Alexandra’s hair was shoulder length. Her dress strapless. Her figure perfect. Joanna didn’t like what she was feeling as she looked at the shots – Alexandra and Alistair saying vows inside the train, dancing to jazz on the platform at Drysdale, clinking glasses on the balcony of a grand Victorian Queenscliff hotel afterwards. Even the geeky looking best man seemed to be wildly in love with Alexandra – in almost all the photos, he was in the background, smiling and staring at her with puppy-dog affection. She wasn’t sure if it was jealousy, but it made her queasy. Als Unite! She put the album and the saucepans back in the box and took the other photo album back to bed with her.
This one was even harder to look at. The captions underneath were not in Alistair’s handwriting, must have been Alexandra’s.
The Als go hiking in Freycinet!
Look what we did! Chloe Elizabeth Robertson, 7’4”
Chloe’s first tooth!
Chloe’s first day of school.
Dad and Chloe building the best sandcastle in the southern hemisphere!
Mum, Dad and Chloe at her fourth birthday!
Chloe, 9, Queen of Stirling Castle!
Joanna mustered all the energy she had and walked over to put the album back in the box.
As she knelt beside the box, she noticed the small black suitcase she’d brought with her from Glasgow. She crawled over to the bed, hauled it out, and held it at her chest. She kissed it, opened the zip and inhaled the smell of the empty case. Could she smell Noah? No. But as she gently zipped it up again, she felt a small bulge in the inner front pocket. Alistair had emptied it, but he must have missed something.
Noah’s red bib, the one he was wearing on the plane. She held it to her face, feeling the crustiness scratch at her cheek. She knew what the crustiness was. The lethal medicine had spilled onto the bib when she gave it to him.
She could hardly breathe. She threw up on the floor.
‘Are you okay?’ Elizabeth had heard her and was standing at the door.
Joanna stuffed the bib into her pyjama bottoms. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Oh darling, no need. Let me take care of that.’ Elizabeth noticed the album on the floor. She smiled, came back to clean the mess, put the album in the box, then sat at the edge of the bed. She had a bowl of warm water and began wiping Joanna’s face with a wet flannel.
‘It upset you, the album?’
Elizabeth would have been a great nurse, Joanna thought. One with soft hands and a soothing voice. She nodded, her lip quivering with a suppressed sob.
‘Don’t give up hope. We’ll find him.’
The brittle bib was proof of what had happened: hardened, framed evidence. It was falling down the leg of her pyjama bottoms.
She stopped herself from saying the words that were pounding in her head: We won’t! Not alive, anyway. Instead, she said, ‘Were you surprised when he told you about me?’
‘I wasn’t . . . It wasn’t a surprise. He’s always been . . . is passionate the right word? Drama follows him, always has. Marriage, parenthood, I always worried he might struggle with it.’
‘Are you angry at me, for being a home wrecker?’
‘No, Joanna. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that we women need to stick together.’
‘He didn’t tell me he was married for a month.’
Elizabeth tutted.
‘Was Alexandra a good mum?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘Of course you’re a good mum,’ she said, wringing the wet flannel and dipping it in the warm water again. ‘It was all he talked about when he phoned me. How beautiful you were with Noah.’
‘No!’
‘Yes!’
‘What do you think about Alistair trying to get custody?’
‘I think a child should have a father and a mother. And she shouldn’t lose her other grandparents either, the little darling. She’s very close to them.’
Joanna looked around the room. ‘I’m not sure I really know your son.’
Elizabeth put the flannel in the bowl and the bowl on the floor. Joanna wished she could take back what she just said. She didn’t want to antagonise Elizabeth, but God it felt good to talk to someone.
Elizabeth took her hand. Thank God, she wasn’t annoyed. ‘Can women really know their men?’
‘I want to.’
Elizabeth took in the images Joanna had been examining these last days. ‘As a toddler he’d run off without warning, climb on rooftops and jump off, that kind of thing. I don’t know how many times I lost sight of him when out shopping. Had to call the police when I lost him on the foreshore once. He was impulsive, always getting up to mischief. But lovable, you know what I mean? Poor Alistair,’ she said, ‘losing his dad at thirteen. It changed him. Or, how should I put it? It brought some of his less admirable qualities to the fore. And you know what boys are like – I did my best, but they never take much notice of their mothers.’
Did the same happen to me? Joanna wondered. Did my dad ruin me by leaving? She didn’t dwell on this, never had. ‘I don’t want to take Chloe away from her mum.’ There, she’d said it.
‘You can’t always work together in the traditional way, like I did with Alistair’s father. We met on Ward 2-South in Geelong Private. I dropped a clipboard and he picked it up! Afterwards, I was the homemaker and hostess, he the well-respected GP. The old-fashioned way worked for us but it can work in all sorts of different conditions. I just hope there’s some way for Chloe to keep both her parents.’
‘But Alistair doesn’t want that,’ Joanna said.
‘He’s angry, that she ran off. He might come round.’
‘You think he’s the kind of man to come round?’
Elizabeth shrugged. They both knew Alistair was not this kind of man.
‘Where is he?’ Joanna asked.
‘At the police station. We didn’t want to excite you, but there’s been another sighting!’
‘Has there?’
‘Yeah, this one sounds . . . look, sorry, I won’t raise your hopes.’
‘You haven’t.’
‘Oh, dear Joanna.’ Elizabeth took a hairbrush from the bedside table and began brushing Joanna’s hair.
‘Elizabeth, the calendar we made for you. Can I look at it? I don’t have any photos here. I need to see his face.’
She brought it in straight away, placing it gently on Joanna’s lap. ‘Do you want me to stay?’
Joanna shook her head and waited till the door was closed. She retrieved the bib from her pyjama leg, placed it under the mattress with the letters, and touched the first picture. January – Noah wrapped in a white sheet in Joanna’s arms in the hospital. Joanna’s smile was genuine. She was happy. Noah wasn’t crying. She stroked his face with her trembling finger and turned to February – Noah in his pram at the front of their flat, sleeping, wrapped in the blue bunny blanket he died in. She kissed the photo and her mouth distorted into a howl that lasted hours, and only stopped because Alistair came into the room and tore the calendar from her.
She heard him yell at his mother in the kitchen. ‘What were you thinking of? Didn’t I make it clear what she needs right now?’
She heard Elizabeth defend herself. ‘The girl needs to cry.’
‘She needs rest! And to not be reminded!’ He banged something, probably a door.
Joanna curled herself into a ball, moaning as she kneaded her soft breasts in an attempt to will back the painful tingle and the hardness. She pinched at them, squeezed, but they were nothing now: useless, soft, nothing.
Scared she’d be caught, Joanna typed a
hurried message without correcting the mistakes.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Why would a bresstfeeding mothert need tampons?
Why did they wash the buggy and car seat covers?
The police never searced the mother-inlaw’s housew. They shld.
Anonmyous1
*
Alistair woke her for the morning briefing session by shaking both arms quite roughly.
‘What? What is it?’
Pale and angry, he placed two Valium in her mouth, then calmed himself by fluffing pillows and helping her sit up so she could listen comfortably. ‘Are you feeling okay?’ he asked.
‘You’re scaring me. What’s happened?’
‘All plans change,’ he said, offering her the cup of tea he’d placed on the bedside table before waking her. ‘I just need a backup.’
‘Talk sense, Alistair.’
‘I’ve been suspended. That fucking James Moyer is all over the internet again: “Suspicions rise over Labour guru and mistress.” The arsehole! He goes on to mention this blog. Whoever’s writing it is on to us.’
Alistair was pulling at his fringe. Be careful, Joanna thought, or that’ll fall out too. ‘How can they suspend you?’
‘Richard Davis phoned from London an hour ago. He has inside info that the police were tipped off by an anonymous source who says there’s something in this house to incriminate us. Add that to the shit this Lonniebaby blog’s been printing and we’re suspects. Not officially yet, but soon. Maybe someone else knows. Someone close. What could be in this house? What would the police think might be here? I’ve been searching everywhere. I can’t find anything. Can you think of anything?’
‘Um . . .’
‘Please, think!’
‘I am thinking.’ Very hard in fact. She could end it all now, leave the bib where it was, and end it all.
‘This will ruin our lives, Jo! As if they’re not already ruined. Help me look. Please get out of bed and help. Mum’s out. We’re together in this, in everything. You have to think! I’m going mad. I’m scared. I need you!’
The Cry Page 13