What Came Before

by Anna George

  She pursed her lips. ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘I guess,’ he said, ‘that was because I jumped the gun.’

  ‘Yes, in part.’

  Unsure of him, unsure of herself, she had nothing to add. What difference would words make to that hollow house? Silence fell between them, dense and bottomless as quicksand. She didn’t dare move.

  ‘And this morning with Mira, you mean?’ he said. ‘I wasn’t in the mood to be sized up.’ Onion sizzled and he tickled it with a wooden spoon. ‘One look at me and she’d made up her mind.’

  ‘Mira’s not like that.’ That was true: Mira was not so quick to judge. But Elle paused. She was reluctant to discuss his otherness. ‘And she’s my closest friend . . .’ Her script was tucked beneath the toilet paper; she picked it up. ‘The first reader of my scripts.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, you were rude. You have to at least make an effort with her,’ she said. ‘With all of my friends.’

  David paused over the wok. ‘I had things on my mind. Alex was in a spot and —’

  ‘You were reading the paper.’

  ‘I love you. I want to be with you,’ he told her. ‘I’m not that interested in your friends.’

  Elle stared at him in silence. Again she was wrong-footed. If he loved her, wasn’t that a reason to know everything about her, including her friends? Wasn’t it a reason to behave well and impress them? She thought the real reason behind his reluctance to meet her friends was shyness or caution. And that would change. She sighed. What did love mean to him?

  If only she had the vocabulary for these conversations. If love wasn’t driving his behaviour, what was? His red-brown eyes were on her, his wooden spoon in mid-air. He was waiting for her to reciprocate. This alluring, wounded man. Perhaps he was like her: afraid. Her right arm felt heavy and her elbow throbbed faintly. Regardless of its origins, his recent behaviour was disturbing. She hoped she’d seen the last of it. She adjusted the sling across her shoulders.

  ‘I don’t think making an effort is unreasonable,’ she said. She put steel in her voice. ‘We’ll have dinner with Mira and Troy next week.’

  ‘Okay, if you insist.’

  He kissed her cheek and began to whistle. He spun plates onto the table and juggled knives and forks. He opened a bag of potato chips and crunched. Wooden spoon in hand, he helped himself to white wine and filled her glass. In the small kitchen he was everywhere at once, like a benevolent octopus. Stirring, crunching, sipping, whistling, sizzling, pouring. As the minutes passed, he filled her space so completely, she found herself wondering how strange and quiet it would be without him. How empty and how wrong.

  As the day’s heat faded, he hired Doctor Zhivago and set her up on the couch. Amused by his ministrations, she requested extra cushions. When, midway through the epic, he called an intermission, offering to make iced chocolates, she laughed and took him up on it. Later, when he said, ‘Take off your sling, I’ll massage your shoulders,’ she acquiesced again – milking his grand gestures for all they were worth. Long after the credits rolled, he kept at it. Until she was on the cusp of sleep. And all was indisputably forgiven. Then, unasked, he carried her to bed.

  At two the next afternoon, Elle heard a toot and grabbed her bag. A moment later she was beside Mira in the old Saab. The day was hot again but the air was clean, the odour gone. With no air-con, they drove, windows down. They had twenty minutes to get into town. Perfect for an efficient meeting.

  ‘Thanks for your notes,’ Elle sang out above the airy thrum. ‘I’m glad you think it’s getting close.’

  Mira dodged Sunday cyclists on Charles Street. ‘Yeah, it is. Only thing is Freddie’s expectations make her seem overly fickle now. But you can fix that.’

  ‘Mm.’ One-armed, Elle hugged herself.

  ‘When Freddie asks, “What is true love?” at the midpoint, it gives the whole thing shape.’ Mira eased the car behind an idling bus. ‘I still think we can play with her transformation more.’ Mira’s glance Elle’s way was stealthy. ‘Show how hard it is to be vulnerable. Especially if you’re damaged goods . . . Make it more realistic. Most people like Freddie, in real life, can’t do it.’

  Elle frowned. ‘You want her to struggle more?’

  ‘Yeah. But she can’t be too broken. Just grappling to let her true self come out.’

  Elle was holding her breath now until the bus moved off. True self, false self: she was uncomfortable with that terminology today. Or perhaps she was merely lost in semantics. After a moment, she drew a breath and nodded. Mira turned right into Buckley Street.

  ‘If we go with Lucy now, everyone else will come on board. You give the script a quick tweak and I could make the next round of funding. If we get through, we could make a June shoot.’ Mira braked hard at a red light.

  ‘Why the rush?’

  ‘It’s Lucy’s only window this year.’

  Elle straightened her back, which was sticking to the seat. Before too long, she could see the industry of the port. Endless massive containers of goods needing homes. She let her breath seep out. Acclaimed London-based actor Lucy van den Berg was Mira’s first choice for Freddie. But Elle had enjoyed Daisy’s low-key cast of unknowns. Launching stars seemed more appealing than accommodating them.

  ‘What do you prefer again?’ She was, she knew, deflecting her anxiety. ‘“Can men and women just be friends?”, or “Why do men cheat?”’

  ‘I prefer Moonstruck. Fear of death.’

  ‘That’s right, and I prefer When Harry Met Sally.’

  She stroked her sling. A grin under-lit Mira’s face. The wholesale produce markets passed them in a blur. Sunday-empty. Elle exhaled silently, feeling the heat.

  Ten minutes later, Elle and Mira were cooling in the royal suite of the historic Hotel Windsor. And Lucy van den Berg was chatting happily: about the script, about Daisy, about being home in Australia. Balancing tea and a scone, Elle studied the 24-year-old. In each of Lucy’s films she was like a vision, straight out of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Fair skinned and black-haired, she had looked effortlessly beautiful, swanlike. Usually in corsets. But today Lucy was in cropped jeans and a black shirt. Her hair was messy and she’d had a fringe cut.

  Elle tossed a look to Mira. She’d been uncertain whether Lucy’s refined, historical beauty could be transposed into a contemporary, sexy comedy – albeit one with retro tones. But today, without a skerrick of makeup, Lucy was a fifties tomboy. Mira grinned back, and Lucy demolished a second scone. As they chatted, Elle focused on Lucy’s navy blue eyes, her clear, rapid-fire delivery, her subtle, masculine gestures. Apparently, Lucy particularly loved Freddie’s romantic idealism, her passionate independence. And she related to her quest for love. When Elle or Mira spoke, the young woman was all eyes: an active listener. An accomplished method actor . . . But was she Freddie?

  Lucy licked jam from her fingers.

  ‘A personal question,’ said Elle, ‘if you don’t mind?’

  Twin lines appeared in Lucy’s creamy forehead. Above her nose, like minute parallel bars. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Have you ever actually been in love?’ said Elle. ‘I mean, completely besotted?’

  Lucy hesitated, then her navy eyes became huge, erasing the lines. ‘Yeah. Scared the fuck out of me.’

  Mira laughed, Elle too. The answer: pure Freddie.

  Lucy stood to retrieve a parcel from her bag. ‘Here, I’ve laid down a few scenes for you. The one where Freddie meets Mike at the gig. And a later one, showing her softer side, where Freddie realises she’s found her “big love”.’

  ‘Oh.’ Lucy had pressed, agent to agent, for this ‘chat’. Rarely these days did she need to audition. Flattered, Elle took the DVD. ‘Thank you.’

  Back in her Saab, Mira was driving like a delighted demon: tailgating, slamming on the brakes, accelerating in bursts. Talking nonstop. They were at Mira’s in nine minutes. Pulling up in Hyde Street, Mira yanked the handbrake. ‘What’s your problem?’

  ‘I�
�m not sure I have one,’ said Elle. ‘Except . . . she’s a star.’

  Mira considered Elle as if she were speaking Mandarin. ‘Audiences love Lucy. Distributors, funding bodies – everyone loves Lucy.’

  In the hot unmoving car, Elle ruffled her hair, at a loss.

  ‘Not only is she a star,’ said Mira, ‘she was brilliant. And she looked exactly like Freddie.’

  ‘Mm.’ Elle tweaked her sling, which was digging. ‘She had her clothes.’ Truth was, with her mass of black hair and blunt fringe, Lucy looked like Mira: a taller, more beautiful, blue-eyed Mira.

  ‘But she wouldn’t be here for the auditions for Mike, didn’t her agent say?’

  ‘I’ll follow up on the actor she was raving about. The one she met last year at Tribeca. Jay someone.’

  ‘At least he’s not a star, I suppose.’

  ‘Okay, that’s enough. We have to watch this, now.’

  Back home, Elle was grateful for some peace and air-con. In her kitchen, she lured David from his laptop with a smuggled scone.

  ‘I hate to agree with Mira,’ said David with a quick grin, as he logged off, ‘but Lucy van den Berg is a sensation. I saw her in the one last year, set in Paris.’

  ‘Yeah. She was great in that. Pipped at the post for an Oscar.’

  ‘Und zee vun about zee Russian Revolution.’ His accent was so dreadful, Elle laughed.

  ‘But,’ she said, ‘she’s nothing like the Freddie I’d imagined. She’s so . . . I don’t know. Young and striking. I saw Freddie as, well, short with freckles.’

  David swept Elle into his arms and waltzed her, gently if awkwardly, around the kitchen. ‘No one says no to Lucy Lu,’ he sang. ‘Having her would be a coup.’

  ‘I haven’t said no! Not yet!’

  ‘Gut, gut,’ he said, dipping her, more or less.

  Despite herself, she laughed. How did he do it? Get to be so incredibly silly and incredibly sexy?

  That night, Elle watched the DVD again, with David. When the first scene finished, Elle could see that David, like Mira, was irretrievably smitten. Lucy had captured something of Freddie – her swagger and fragility. She had a deft comic touch. And she’d taken risks. Made the young biographer’s flirtation almost rude. Lucy did it again in the second scene, this time revealing Freddie’s excitement at finding love. Yet softening her. A dozen times, Lucy was dazzling. Preposterously. By the thirteenth viewing, Elle, like Mira, like David, was sold.

  If only, Elle thinks now, she could put it in context. Back then, she had desired David more than she had ever desired any other man. Daily, he was enmeshed in her thoughts and nightly he was in her arms. Aged thirty-four and ripe for love, finally, she’d found it. He was her lover, her sounding-board and her new best friend. She reworked her script each day and, each night, he was beside her – reading, commenting – until the final draft was done. (‘Freddie’s pretty strident, Ginger,’ he said, not long after Mira lodged their funding application. ‘If you can, you might want to tone her down a bit. Got to avoid that overblown tag.’) Quickly he became an integral part of her process, and her life.

  But sharing her home was new too. And she was affected by every irksome change – the abandoned lace-ups mid-hallway, the endless washing of singlets, his nasty white bread. At times she panicked, confronted by his briefcase on her bed or his dictaphone by the bath. While she had craved intimacy and she loved it, it also terrified her. She had no idea how to do it. If only she’d been game to admit as much to Mira.

  7

  Dave is due at Reg’s in nine minutes. It’ll be tight, but he’ll make it. The southerly drive from Yarraville to Williamstown is only five kays along Williamstown Road, which runs under the foot of the West Gate Bridge and turns into Melbourne Road through Newport. Driving, he feels better. Clearer. That noise in his head has gone. Reasonable men kill sometimes, he thinks. When they’re pushed. It strikes him then: he didn’t kill that glorious woman. He killed an imposter. He curses his steering wheel. It’s fucking criminal – how she was when they began is so bloody unlike who she became. That shrew. She became so fundamentally other, she must’ve misrepresented herself from the get-go. There ought to be a law against misleading and deceptive conduct in love and romance. And a penalty: a big one.

  The narrow backstreets are surprisingly bare. There’s nothing but dim houses and parked cars. No chatting neighbours or homebound Friday night commuters. He thinks of Reg’s question about the fire. Tonight’s stink is sharper and more bitter than usual. It could be coming from any dodgy factory or storage site. It’s time, he thinks, to be off the road; he’s far too conspicuous. He weaves his way over Somerville Road and onto Williamstown Road. He’s putting his mind to his opener for Reg when he sees a car in his rear-view mirror. It’s about 100 metres behind him and gaining ground. It’s a Holden, late model, white.

  He accelerates. Ahead blue and red flashing lights whirl at the Francis Street intersection. Stupidly, he speeds towards them. As he approaches, he can make out barriers blocking the city-bound lanes. Police cars forming a road party on the bitumen. Two pairs of cops hanging about.

  Too late, he realises the lights are changing.

  Oh fuck. He thinks to spin his steering wheel, do a burn-out, until he remembers that car in his rear-view mirror. He plants his foot to run the red. But, at the last minute, he changes his mind and brakes hard. His car skids. Sweet Jesus, he thinks, what am I doing?

  Thankfully, the road-side cops scarcely consider him. They’re deep in conversation, on the other side of the barriers. But that white car pulls up and its driver stares at him. He trains his eyes ahead and locks himself in. He finds a cigarette and smokes, Mr Casual. He doesn’t look at the stains on his shirt or the scratches on his arms. But his gaze drops to the dictaphone on his dash. It’s only half-done, his defence only half-baked.

  He’s not ready yet for the boys in blue.

  He peeks at the driver and briefly his panic abates. It’s a woman; alone, in uniform. She’s in her mid-twenties, a ponytailed blonde. Pretty for a cop. He waits. Her car seems to be floating next to his. In the long moment, his cigarette hurts his throat and he longs to toss it. He takes another drag and eyes the lights stuck on red. A fire engine zips through the intersection on the wrong side of the road, followed by two more cop cars. He studies the tip of his cigarette. All the while, the others – all men – talk heatedly while the woman gawks at his profile. His right eyelid jiggles.

  His is the only normal car on the road.

  When she looks across to the small uniformed group, he senses she’s dithering. But what will tip her hand? His thoughts scurry until he has a good-enough idea. With his left hand, he finds his phone’s earpiece and puts it on. He speaks. Chuckles. After a moment he glances at her openly and she’s gawping again. He grins. This one can talk, say his eyes, or so he hopes. She frowns then, understanding, smiles. Seeing her wide, white teeth, he’s encouraged by something he learned in Evidence 301, more than twenty years ago. The looks of an accused can be decisive. As if ending his call, he murmurs his goodbyes and taps his earpiece. Then he makes his smile to the girlie cop natural, genuine, interested. If he can count on one thing in his life, it’s his ability to attract. At least, at first.

  He waits, and she looks to the sky. He copies her. The sky is closer and heavier, more like smoke than cloud. That fire is nearby and nasty. She focuses ahead, and he sees then the whirling lights at the entrance to the bridge. And that’s when it hits him: he’s as good as stranded. Stuck in the west, with the bridge and who knows what other roads closed. Stranded, maybe permanently.

  Thank God for Reg.

  But he’s not there yet. Abruptly, the men trot from the barriers to one of the two parked cop cars and further away from him. The girlie cop watches them. What, he wonders, is she going to do? What if she follows him and pulls him over? Then what? He doesn’t have a plan. That’s been the story of his night, maybe his life. The lights turn to green and he waits. She glances his way.
He gives her a salute. When she drives off, she has a teeny smile on her lips.

  He shakes his head: for a moment, he actually had his doubts. But he’s still got it. He drops his window, flicks his butt. Silly bitch.

  Dave sits in a front room in Reg’s renovated Edwardian. In centre place is a billiard table. A game is underway but God knows Reg isn’t playing. Reg is not the man Dave remembers. This Reg Priestly is shrivelled and grey from the tip of his peanut-shaped head to his crumbling chin. A walking frame had greeted Dave in the foyer, dusty and derelict. At least there was nothing wrong with the Queen’s Counsel’s hearing. As the doorbell chimed, Reg had bellowed and Dave had snuck in.

  ‘You need to brace yourself, Reggie,’ he’d said.

  ‘Pull up a pew and shock me.’

  Dave had sidled into the well-lit sitting room and said, ‘I’ve killed my wife.’

  With the words uttered and heard, he’d felt more resolute. Reinforced. This much he’d rehearsed. He hadn’t planned on much more. The old man had said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I thought you were settled.’ Then he’d gestured to an armchair, and offered tea. To Dave, it felt as if the burden he’d shed was threatening to boomerang. Was the QC’s detachment merely professionalism? He couldn’t tell. He’d never been good at detachment. At Freeman & Milne, his clients had soon learned that no matter how valuable their business, he wouldn’t pussyfoot around them. He told them when their cases were screwed and their decisions idiotic. And they liked it. His unrestrained reactions, so unwelcome in his private life, were the makings of his legal career. For a time, at least. In that games room, Dave understood why his own irreverence had worked. Who didn’t want their load shared?

  ‘Intimacy is a dangerous thing,’ says Reg, pouring tea from a pot. In the warm room, Dave stares at a steely piece of hair high on Reg’s part. Badly, he wants to pat it into place.

  ‘Well, obviously it was for us, we —’