by Anna George
Why had she been so determined to make it work?
Fleetingly, she thought of Sidney Lumet. In his book Making Movies, the luminary director talked about the early days of kitchen-sink television, when a flashback would be inserted into a story to explain the psychological underpinnings of a character. Bald and unsatisfying, those scenes were avoided by Lumet – and by Elle too, as a filmmaker. But in life? In life, that morning, she was foraging desperately for answers. But none came pat.
A breeze picked up and cleared the mist, dried her cheeks. Soon she could see the other side of the river. On the eastern bank was the barren flatland of containers. In the river’s brown midst she could make out the so-called island and its tanks of horrors. The island rose out of the water like an indisputable truth. A colony of toxicity: risk-managed. As she stared at the impervious, curved white walls, her emotions distilled. Humiliation, naivety and anger coalesced. Studying the beautiful, desolate landscape, she felt the magnitude of the compromise inherent in it as if it had been her own. Quite simply, it was too volatile and too close, as David had been, for too long.
As the last of the mist evaporated, she put her tissue in her pocket and turned around. She moved gingerly, as though the sediment in her blood had been stirred and was travelling through her system again – to unknown effect. But two things were certain: she was done with David and done with the inner-west.
It was barely 9 a.m. when she returned to Tennyson Street. Walking head down past Doris’s house, she ignored the gentle, concerned face at the lacy window. Once inside her own home she downed her blinds and snibbed her locks, secured her chains and crept into bed. The telephone rang and she willed herself to ignore it. It rang another dozen times. Though a few calls at least would be Mira’s, Doris’s, her agent’s, most – she knew – were his. Now that she’d seen his magnetic social persona, she didn’t let herself speculate on where he was, what he was doing, or with whom. She didn’t allow herself to wonder what he had to say. Every time her thoughts reverted to him, she changed the channel in her mind. The problem was her film, too, was now taboo, so her thoughts flitted from memories of her childhood to scenes from other people’s films. Soon, the memories and the scenes began to merge. She saw her parents on a bench seat, like the old couples in When Harry Met Sally. Her father was young and beautiful, before the struts in his face collapsed. Smiling, he explained they’d been high-school sweethearts, married just in time before the first baby came. But babies and love, her mother said, her smile slipping, pull you apart.
‘Cut,’ called a voice, perhaps her own. ‘Cut.’
Around dusk she heard a key in the lock, and the security chain straining. She heard him calling for her, heard him swear. And: bang. Afraid, she burrowed deeper into her mattress and clamped her eyes shut.
She stayed like that for a fortnight. When hunger came, she ate water crackers. Even tea tasted foul and she avoided it. She dozed, stirring occasionally to watch the light creeping across her walls.
She felt guilty, of course – hiding from Mira, ignoring Doris, abandoning her film. But there was nothing she could do.
The world’s first full-length, dramatic feature film was produced in Australia in 1906: The Story of the Kelly Gang. Once, she had relished her country’s film history and had been awed by her place in it. That her name was linked with Gillian Armstrong and Jane Campion had humbled and delighted her. Not so long ago, she’d been touted as a significant part of a fresh renaissance in Australian filmmaking; the beginning, perhaps, of a new wave of commercially successful yet intelligent cinema that would one day reclaim the Australian film industry’s mantel. To her regret, the Nasty Bastard’s words weren’t the only ones she’d kept. She felt as if she were spinning in the outer reaches of a tornado of her own creation, gradually slowing after months of needless speed. As she turned, she thought of Mira, and of their reputations. Who would ever ask her to make another film? She spun these questions until they became like a web; then, eventually, exhausted by the possibilities and encased, she rolled over and slept.
By the middle of June, the empty days were threatening to flatten her. Her only commitment was to find a new gynaecologist. Not that it mattered now – her endometriosis and that stabbing abdominal pain. Interviews with the networks, broadsheets and radio had come and gone, without her; Doris had knocked and given up; Mira’s calls had risen to a climax and petered out. Her mother had even called once. Her lawyers would be scurrying . . . But it didn’t matter. By now her film’s run at the multiplexes would’ve begun and would soon be over. Gamely she’d crept twice to her laptop, only to have her suspicions confirmed. ‘Plodding and below-par, with spectacularly lacklustre performances,’ said The Age; ‘Diabolically unfunny,’ said The Australian, ‘and an awful title.’ Soon, her film would slip off the screens completely. Perhaps on DVD it might live a long and quiet life.
Late in the afternoons, when time was elastic and infinite, she found herself pining for Freeman & Milne. For the stupor of work gulped blindly and the allure of other people’s stories and poor judgement. As the hours stretched, she pined for a life beyond that of her own making. She was worn out by the effort it had taken her to fail so spectacularly. She knew that if she didn’t get up soon, her misery would become entrenched and she’d never get up again.
By early July, she felt herself restoring, regenerating: her skin clearing, her hair returning gradually. Her vagina lost its odour. There was no one with whom to discuss these anatomical shifts, the altered state that was her body. She told herself to accept that solitariness, for perhaps she would never know another way. So she charted herself and took heart from what she saw. Her anxiety, at least, was abating. And, slowly, in its wake was coming relief. Her fall, she thought, was over.
His calls continued to tempt her: eighteen times the first day, five times on the thirtieth. With each call, she debated. Despite her trepidation, the hard-headed part of her refused to admit defeat. Her hope was resilient and had been well-nourished, fed by the clichés of her genre. Always, at the climax, the dramatic rush – to the airport, the bus stop, the packed-up apartment; always, the hero running in the street, puffing and transformed. Perhaps it was possible, and David could do it. Perhaps she’d been right about him – despite the evidence. Then she remembered: what he’d done. What had come before this split. What, no doubt, would come again.
In a weak moment, she read his emails, half a dozen in all. They were jammed with concessions that he had made many mistakes, had a lot to learn, was seriously committed now to professional help – if she would take him back. He wrote that he missed her more than he’d ever missed another person, even Nat. He wasn’t sleeping or eating, didn’t want to drink. But his prose was contorted. It contained bitterness and recrimination, and only one apology – for that push and slap. Hunched over her laptop at two in the morning, it occurred to her that, sometimes, apologies came so late they were worthless. While his words were the ones she wanted, she didn’t hear in them a shift. The underlying melody was the same. And she found it unbearably sad.
At 6.10 one Monday morning, her mobile rang again. She could see that it was him and knew that she shouldn’t answer. But, perhaps because she was feeling stronger, or perhaps because her curiosity was growing apace, she succumbed. The contact was as tentative as a first date. Except this time, she suspected that his voice wouldn’t hold an invitation; this time, there would be a demand, as though something was due. Answering, she felt that hint of apprehension.
‘Hey, Elle Nolan, is that you? You’re actually there.’ His light touch, his masquerade, irked her.
‘What do you want?’ In her tone, she could hear disappointment and it unsettled her.
There was a bottomless pause. She felt drawn towards it, sucked into it. As if she alone was responsible for filling it. An ingrained habit, this desire of hers to overextend. She held herself in.
‘Guess what? I’ve finished up at Freeman & Milne.’
It was far too
late, she thought, and cruel. Once she would have celebrated and congratulated him. But today, it wasn’t his due; it was, most likely, Alex’s.
‘I was thinking of dropping in. Will you be there in twenty?’
‘No.’
Another pause. Again, she resisted its pull. And, to her astonishment, she saw into his furrowed brow and gleaned that he didn’t understand; he was searching for the true reason for her behaviour. As if the previous twenty-two months hadn’t been cumulative. As if every conversation she had tried to have was irrelevant, forgotten, a whim or passing fad, or a creation of her cycles. As if assault was something that could be overlooked, a minor trip.
‘Ginger, why haven’t you answered my calls? Or let me in? Don’t you think you’re overreacting here?’
She sucked in cold air. ‘I want your stuff out of my house.’
‘Sweetheart, we had a fight, all couples fight, it’s —’
‘Everything will be delivered to Head Street on Friday morning.’
‘This is crazy; why are you being so unreasonable?’
‘Someone will need to be there, to let the removalists in.’
A pause. ‘Okay, okay, listen, I’ll get it myself – on Saturday, we can have breakfast —’
‘No. I’ll email you the details.’
‘Fuck you, then!’ he said, his voice rising, as though caught in his throat. ‘Fuck you.’
As he hung up on her, she laughed at his outed panic. Within the hour, the phone rang again and she hit the red button. She imagined him hearing the harsh repeating beep of the engaged signal, imagined it bouncing off the white walls of his mansion like squash balls. She stood up and opened the blinds. The phone rang again but she didn’t answer it, didn’t end it; and it rang again, until, finally, she leaned across her bed and turned it off. Lying on the mattress with the phone in her hand, she was on a boat, lifting the anchor from the seabed, to let the insistent current take her.
After that, David desisted. A hiatus, as it turned out. Still, a shard of her was disappointed that he had stopped. And that in itself was disappointing – that her delusions lingered even now. It set her back a day or two.
Around that time her mother rang again, and she ignored the call.
On Wednesday, she finally finished Katharine Hepburn’s autobiography. After almost three decades with Spencer Tracy, the great Kate hadn’t known why she stayed with him. She hadn’t known his feelings for her. But she’d tended to him happily and tried hard not to ruffle him. She’d even tried to forsake some of her best qualities because she suspected he didn’t like them. Because what they had, for her at least, was bliss.
Shutting the book, Elle felt unsettled, but also comforted.
On Thursday, she decided to get up.
Upon leaving her bedfellow, misery, on her pillow, she found anger awaiting her in the shower. It coursed through her as she washed and she felt it prick her skin as though it were alive in the scorching water. Fully dressed for the first time in weeks, she strode through her house and realised that this anger of hers needed to get out.
She took to walking.
Her first day outside was arctic and windy and the sea at Williamstown was broken into peaks. It reminded her of a blanket of meringue but more ominous – poisoned meringue, perhaps. The temperature compressed the air from her lungs. She walked with the wind in her eyes and felt an empathy with the brewing sea. The water was carved up by forces she couldn’t name but knew, and she sensed that she was heard and understood. Reflected and refracted by what her eye could see, all the way to the black inky line.
She packed him into boxes scavenged from the supermarket. His orange sneakers, his misery memoirs, all that Latin jazz. She sealed them with tape, as if to leave the flaps open was a sign of ambivalence. As she packed, she was fuelled by remembered images and sensations. It was not the fiasco in that laneway beside the Regent Theatre that fuelled her most. It was the rest: the on-off, hot-cold sensibility of his moods; the way his face snapped shut. How, watching television, he could create pure menace. How, naked on the couch, he engendered such extreme and warring emotions in her.
She hated him so intensely that it scared her. She spent her waking hours reliving humiliations in disbelief, like tracing wounds, trying to fathom how they came to be so deep. Gradually she cobbled together a theory: when a body is dealt a series of blows, it falls into shock and doesn’t feel pain – just as she had, lashed by him over the months, lost the ability to feel rage. And rage, like pain, was crucial. A part of her body’s natural self-defence.
Tossing his belongings to the removalists, she shouted at herself: How did I get him so wrong?
22
There are cars on the West Gate Freeway now, travelling from Melbourne, and Mira is heartened by them, even if they’re going in the opposite direction. As the bridge curves ahead of her, she veers off the highway onto Williamstown Road. Passing the roadblock on Francis Street, she feels a nervous sense of homecoming. This is Yarraville, a place she loves, a place, after tonight, she won’t view the same way again. The slender streets and rear lanes, the picket fences and lattice work, the bustling cafes and retired Italian men in the parks; all will now be tinged grey in her memory. Shrouded in soot.
Please, she thinks, approaching Seddon, don’t make tonight any worse than it already is.
She’s been gone three hours. A dangerously long time . . . But Elle’s a fighter, she tells herself, and hardy. Hardier thanks to her time with him.
She tries Elle’s phone again. But again it rings out. Oh shit, she thinks. Next, though it was to be her last resort, she calls the police. So what if they are busy or dismiss her fears? To her bemusement, she’s placed in a queue. I can’t bear this, she thinks. Surrendering her position, she tries Elle’s phone again but it gives her nothing.
Parking on Gamon Street, Dave leaps out of his car and bolts across the corner. He runs the length of Elle’s street. There’s no fleeing now. He’s running, in the mad hope he might somehow save her life and maybe redeem his.
Until tonight, he’d only seen one other dead person. His dad had been dead barely a minute when Dave arrived in the South Caulfield hospital room. His mum was bawling at the icy window. His dad, on soiled white sheets, was a weathered but intact shell. Dave could see he’d gone and was glad. He hadn’t wanted to sit by his side, as his mum had done, and count his last breaths. That death didn’t fit a man of quick temper and fiery exits. His dad would’ve hated it, raged at it. ‘Hold his hand, say something to him,’ his mum had said. ‘He’s still here in the room.’ But Dave had shrugged. Their conversation had never started.
His Elle, though – she was something else.
Outside her darkened house, his run crumbles. He rubs his forearms as if to warm them. Takes a step forward, then a step back. With no streetlights, the night’s too dark and he’s spooked. Somewhere, a dog’s bark is answered by sirens. He steps forward again. Stops. Swears. Maybe he can’t face it, doesn’t have the balls.
He lights up. Come on, he thinks, she could be alive. He takes a step across the road. Now he’s here, he should call the cops. Own up to the lot. No mitigation, no justification. She deserves that much. Once on that path, he should continue. Make up with his mum. Set up a trust for Natasha and Amelia. Accept the end of his legal career. Talk to a male shrink in the fucking slammer. Draw.
He exhales in shudders. Living like that’s going to take a lot of stamina. Guts. And that sort of responsibility’s the opposite of the intensity he’s been craving. And destroying. His chin trembles. Whether she lives or dies, that intensity’s gone. It occurs to him the intensity he felt the night they met has been unmatched – until tonight.
A shitty thought.
He hesitates. Her house rises up before him. Its porch is covered in that tangled, flowerless vine. Its bay windows like two closed eyes. Between them, that door behind its screen. If he were agile, he could climb in her bedroom window. But he’s not agile. He’s spread over the l
ast two months; his drinking has poured over his belt. Someplace along the path of losing her, he’s lost his health. The least of his worries now is constant head pain. Most likely, he’ll have to smash a window.
He watches his cigarette burn. He sucks hard, drawing the ember close. Once the heat bites, he flicks the butt. It lands in the gutter among a puddle of other butts, like those left by office workers. Except these others are his. A dozen times, he’s stood on this spot, in the early hours. Is she asleep? Is she dreaming of me? The stubby remnants of his wasted hope taunt him. Whatever he does, it’s always too late.
When he’d arrived that afternoon, it’d been 4.30, cool and sunny. A typical wintry Melbourne afternoon. He was late for a meeting in the city with his lawyers. He’d been late a lot lately, forgetting his phone, losing his keys. He’d been living those moments that other people only dreamed about: the unprepared student sitting the exam; the near-naked actor on the stage. He’d been stumbling through his days, hungover, unslept. Four times already that week, after midnight, he’d taken a drive and found himself in Seddon. And, at 4.30, braving the daylight for once, he’d been there again, dreaming of reunion.
The secrets of that blind spot come to him then. The plunge of the blade. The puny resistance of her flesh.
Awash with shame, he doesn’t move. His courage pisses away. He’s been here before too. But why can’t he do it? Why can’t he redeem himself ? Or save her? He groans. What would it fucking take?
Somewhere in the shrubs is the kitchen knife. He should find it. Since using it he’s been improvising, badly. He thinks then of Reg – poor, kind Reg. Jesus. Maybe Elle was right. He is sick in the head.