by Iris Lavell
‘Really?’ she says. ‘I might come over. I’ll see.’
‘I’ll come back in a while, then we can go back together if you feel like it.’
‘Okay.’
He decides he’s on a mission, to get them both out. They’ve both been dwelling on things that can’t be changed. Building new experiences, that’s the key. Yes, they need to get out more. They need to socialise.
Harry grabs a sixpack out of the fridge, and turns back to Louisa.
‘Come,’ he says. ‘It’ll do you good.’
‘I might come,’ she says, and though her voice lacks commitment, she adds, ‘I don’t suppose it matters what I bring really.’
‘Course it doesn’t,’ he says. ‘They’re good people. They don’t judge.’
‘I’ll see how I feel.’
‘No, don’t do that,’ he says. ‘Just come on over. Or like I said, I’ll come back in a while, and then you can come.’
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘I’ll see.’
Harry leaves the house. Bella is lingering in his thoughts. He drops the six-pack at Brian’s, makes some excuse to duck back to the house, and takes a walk around the oval to deal with it before he has too many drinks under his belt and starts getting maudlin.
Something happened to him after Bella was born. He has been permanently altered by the fact of her existence. It’s no less real than some sort of physical change in him.
A stone hits you on the head and you keep the scar; you fall off your bike and you skin your knee. Your body shows all the dents as evidence of the life you’ve lived. Bella is imprinted on him, as he must have been for his own father, or might have been but for the old man’s alcoholic disease. How is it that the two things go together? He has a flash – himself as a boy.
His mother always dressed him neatly and made sure he combed his hair. She kept the house immaculate. She stuck it out with his father until Harry and his sister left home, and then some.
Harry is thinking about degrees of separation, how pain spreads exponentially, accelerating as it affects more and more people, spreading outwards until everything is taken over. Before you know it the whole world is miserable and kidding itself that it’s how it has to be. He couldn’t be responsible for the world, but he could be responsible for what he did. That’s why he drove his wife and daughter out. Yasamine thought it was her idea, but really it was his. Everything came clear that day.
One day he saw himself as if he was standing on the outside. It was like a rehearsal, a story that hadn’t been written yet, something like that. He saw himself push Yasamine. He saw blood. He saw marks his hands left on her arms, felt his rising anger and his horror at his inability to hold back. He was sickened by how easy it had been, by how quickly it had happened, before he had time to think. He saw where the situation could lead, in spite of his best intentions, in spite of his determination not to go down that path, and from the bedroom he thought he heard the baby crying, his daughter learning that he was not to be trusted.
Harry has been circling the oval with his head down. He looks up to see a woman and a small girl walking towards him. The woman is carrying a plastic shopping bag and the girl is pushing a small pink pram. He stops and watches them. The woman glances at him suspiciously as they approach, and puts herself between her child and Harry as they pass. He smiles and nods, but she doesn’t catch his eye.
‘This is ridiculous,’ Harry says to himself. He puts it away and cuts back to Brian’s to sink a few beers.
By the time that Harry gets back to the shed, the party is in full swing. No one seems to notice his late arrival. There are no worries about formality here – the neighbours who make up the gathering drift in and out, as do their kids who span the various stages of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. People in this neighbourhood have started their families early, but they seem to have got the formula right. Their offspring look to be pretty well-adjusted. They’re not in any hurry to leave home. There is plenty of rough banter accompanied by laughter, a common language of what it is that constitutes acceptable humour. It’s hard-hitting, but never nasty. Life’s not easy, but with loud enough laughter you can get through just about anything.
One or two of the women have already turned up with food and are passing comment on the dart competition. Brian is winning, predictably, but no one seems to mind.
Louisa has fallen asleep in front of the television. She is drifting away from a small island in the middle of an ocean. It is one of those cartoon islands with a single palm tree and a castaway. Tom stands on the shore looking out to sea, getting smaller, but he is never quite lost from view. If she looks away the after-image remains and if she directs her attention there she can see him smiling and waving. She closes her eyes now and she can see him, but it comes to her with a grip of pain. She opens her eyes.
Time has done nothing to diminish the pain in her body, but even pain serves its purpose. It binds her like a steel cage, keeping her together. She closes her eyes again, prepared this time. Tom is a castaway and her boat seems to have stopped at a set distance with his small figure on the shore, and she is bobbing about at sea, stuck, with no way of getting back or going on.
After she wakes it takes her a while to get her bearings. There is a documentary on the television about parasites infecting crickets. It is disturbing and fascinating at the same time. It has just finished when Harry breezes in, full of good cheer and encouragement to come on over.
This is the kind of life she could have had if she’d made different choices, if she’d been a different sort of person. The men play darts. The women pass comment or sit around discussing their kids’ schooling, their new job, their philosophies on life and the inevitable demise of society. Other people. They drink beer or wine. One drinks only water.
Brian’s wife Lorraine wants to talk about the people who lived in the house before Harry and Louisa moved in.
‘They were a young couple,’ she says. ‘Too young really. Not great gardeners. So the place was starting to bring down the property values a bit. Still, I reckon they should have been out having a good time, travelling or something. It was inevitable that they’d split up in the end really, which they did, and then she took off. But I’ve seen him still hanging around occasionally. He’s not a bad guy. He’s quite sweet really, but I don’t know that he’s over it after all this time. He always has that look, you know, sort of hangdog. He’s probably not quite the full quid, if you know what I mean, I mean smart enough, but a bit unbalanced. And some people really hang onto things way past their use-by date, don’t they?’
‘What would you consider to be a reasonable use-by date then, Lorraine?’ Louisa asks acidly.
Her tone cuts through the general chatter, and attracts a couple of sideways glances. Lorraine laughs.
‘Fair enough,’ she says blushing. ‘I’ve never really paid much attention to some of those use-by dates anyway. Where do they get them from anyway? I mean, like they say, how long is a piece of string?’
‘Yeah, I’ve always wondered that,’ Harry chips in from just behind them where he has arrived with a drink in hand for Louisa. He winks. ‘Just long enough to hang yourself apparently.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Christmas is coming and with Harry’s new job Louisa wonders if things will be different next year. They mark the passing of another year by taking out the old Christmas tree and the ancient angel whose thinning cottonwool hair is pleasing to them both, and Harry spends a day putting coloured lights around the outside of the house. When darkness falls he walks across to the park to see how they look from there. He will spend the next day adjusting them to maximise the festive effect for passers-by.
Each year he adds something new to the collection. This year he tells her that he is thinking of something big, like a sleigh for the roof. Louisa worries – she doesn’t want him falling – but the idea is strangely appealing. She imagines herself, Harry and Buster flying through the night sky on Santa’s sleigh. Tom could
sit up front, just like he wanted to when he was a little boy.
That first Christmas after the great escape, as she calls it, they were at Simon and Rhianna’s place, and Simon had decorated the entire house with lights for the children. Every year after that, Meri and Tom would beg for lights and Louisa would oblige. Somewhere along the line they grew out of it, but by that time Louisa realised that the lights were for her as much as the children. The few years without them seemed strangely empty.
The Christmas after Tom died she asked Harry to put up lights again, and she still keeps the practice for Tom, she says, as a kind of vigil. She likes to think that he is watching and that the opportunity hasn’t passed. He always wanted a sleigh on the roof but when she was on her own with the kids they never got one, because it always seemed too hard.
‘Get it,’ she now tells Harry. ‘We can figure out how to put it up there later.’
‘It’s not too much?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Not too kitsch?’
‘No. No, not at all.’
She finds it hard to tell these days. They have noticed their growing predilection for bric-a-brac with each year that passes. Perhaps it’s something to do with moving to the outer suburbs. Some people have started putting gnomes in their gardens again. They say it’s retro. She finds it strangely comforting. If she’d had grandchildren she would have amused them with her funny china ornaments. When they got older they could speak disparagingly but affectionately about their nanna and her stuff. She could have had bits and pieces from the two-dollar shop, tap-dancing dogs and spinning monkeys. She doesn’t have grandchildren, but she has Harry, and he humours her. Together they have the dog, but Buster has little appreciation for the purely ornamental.
A few years ago, Louisa bought Harry a singing fish, when they were appearing everywhere, and she imagined Tom as a little boy, playing with it. Or Meredith. The thought hurts.
‘Deal with it,’ she says.
‘What?’ says Harry.
‘What do you think of this parrot?’ she asks him, showing him a page in the catalogue she has been flicking through. ‘It says here that it says ten different things – affirmations to start your day off right.’
‘No, Louisa.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s popular culture.’
‘That is a bit much.’
‘It’ll cheer you up.’
‘The fish is enough for me. We’ll get him some new batteries for the barbecue.’
They are gearing up to have people over this year. The singing fish will feature as a talking point when things get too serious or quiet, or if someone starts talking politics or religion, because of the odd mix. The old man who walks his dog in the park. Carole and Gordon. His mother, and Louisa’s. Her boss.
Later Louisa notices Harry lingering over the picture of the parrot. She keeps her Christmas list on the right-hand television surround-sound speaker under the saxophone-playing frog. She writes the parrot down on her list followed by a question mark in brackets which she uses when she doesn’t feel confident enough to fully commit to a question mark.
At the end of the day Harry throws out the junk mail along with the page featuring the circled parrot, and she deadheads the roses. They sit, drink beer and watch Buddha and their newly acquired solar light as darkness falls, in an effort to catch the exact moment that it switches on.
They go inside prematurely and miss it.
Louisa has one more session booked with Lucy before Christmas. It’s always a difficult time for her. She wants to talk about pleasant things, but Lucy has set the agenda.
Louisa notices something here: a subtle change in Lucy’s expression. She has seen it before and wonders about it. There is something in Lucy’s own history. She allows her gaze to drift to the happy family picture that Lucy keeps on her bookcase. A younger version of Lucy is surrounded by three children and no husband. Her gaze drifts to Lucy’s fourth finger. She wears an elaborately decorated wedding ring. Lucy notices Louisa’s attention and clasps her hands together.
‘Take your time,’ Lucy says.
‘Yes all right.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘You’re interested in the very first time? It’s hard, Lucy, because these things don’t seem quite so defined. I mean, of course there was a first time that he hit me, but somehow there seemed to be a kind of logic to it. A progression.’
‘That’s interesting. Can you explain that a bit more?’
‘I’m not sure. I was shocked, I suppose, and angry, but not surprised somehow. I mean somehow in my own mind I had separated the sexual – um – behaviour from just raw violence, I suppose, because I think that there were certain social attitudes at that time about not getting yourself into certain situations. Which I had. I was young of course, but still. And also the assumption, which I bought, I must have bought, about domestic violence: that it only happened to other people of a certain class, and then if the woman nagged or provoked the man in some way I suppose. But as it turned out, that wasn’t actually true.’
‘No.’
‘At least I couldn’t think of anything I’d done, although something had been brewing for a few days. So I wasn’t really surprised as such, but I was shocked, if that makes sense. I was shocked not only that it happened, but at the way it seemed to be almost inevitable.’
Louisa feels compelled to protect her midriff, but this is as much to guard her from what Lucy must think, as it is from the memory of the winding punch that sent her to her knees before that first real onslaught.
Lucy sits. Louisa collects her thoughts.
‘And then there was the overpowering force of my own feelings. I hated him. Such an awful thing, and unusual for me. I don’t tend to hate people. But I was angry: I’d never been so angry. I started fantasising about getting revenge. I thought – I thought he has to go to sleep sometime, and then we’ll see. Then we’ll see.’
‘You thought of attacking him?’
‘I wanted to kill him. That’s terrible, isn’t it? Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘What?’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Are you serious? You’re not serious are you?’
‘Self-defence. He might have killed you.’
‘Well yes, there’s that. I don’t believe in hurting people.’
‘And yet...?’ Lucy is persistent. She stares directly into Louisa’s eyes.
‘Oh well, you know. You have these impulses, you think these extreme thoughts in the heat of the moment, and I think with all the adrenaline rushing through the body you don’t realise how badly he has hurt you. After he calmed down, the next day he seemed so terribly sorry. And then someone had called the police and they came when Victor was at work and asked if I wanted to press charges, but I felt they were just going through the motions really, talking down to me, and giving me the hint that it might do more harm than good. What was the point? To be honest, I felt ashamed, as if I should never have got myself into that situation in the first place. I kept searching through my actions for a reason. Sometimes I could sound a bit blunt. Tactless. I thought that could be it. You trust people to let you express yourself without getting offended. I used to anyway, before that.’
‘You have a right to speak honestly. Yes.’
‘Yes. But people do tend to blame the woman.’
‘Not always.’
‘No? People judge you. You probably judge me, don’t you, deep down?’
‘I don’t at all.’ But there is uncertainty in her voice. Lucy on the back foot.
Louisa is annoyed at her now. It’s time to move on. It’s not fair that Lucy should pry: there’s a fine line, and some things are too private, even for therapy. Nevertheless she feels compelled to explain herself.
‘I did think of retaliating, of course. But part of me was thinking about my baby, and who would take care of her if something happened to me. That was before Tom was born, of course. So in
the cold light of day it wouldn’t do. Those thoughts are fuelled by emotion, and by the time I was actually capable of doing anything I didn’t have the emotional power any more. Anyway, I’m not like that. I wouldn’t ever hurt a fly really. But that was the scariest thing of all: being so angry.’
‘Why didn’t you leave, Louisa?’
‘It’s not that easy. People deserve a chance.’
‘Well, yes. So did you.’
‘Yes, but he wasn’t as emotionally strong. I thought. Physically, yes. And I do believe in giving people a chance. I didn’t know if it was just a one-off. I suppose I told myself it was a one-off. I suppose I’d already been backed into a corner and he was my whole world by then. I couldn’t see the bigger picture any more. He and Meredith were my world. Also divorce wasn’t a big thing then. I mean, not many people did it. No-fault had come in, but still. My family had always been quite conservative, I suppose.’
‘Were you frightened for Meredith’s future?’
‘Well no, not really then, because I thought it wouldn’t happen again. I thought he was genuinely sorry and that he’d exercise restraint next time he got frustrated about work or, or whatever.’
‘Can you talk a bit about Meredith?’
Louisa feels her face tightening. She glares. Lucy persists.
‘What about your daughter?’
‘I don’t know. What would you have done, Lucy? He probably would have killed us if we’d left. I didn’t want to die. Not then. I didn’t want anything to happen to my baby. What would you do if it was you?’ Louisa hears the sarcasm in her own voice.
‘Honestly? I don’t know what I would have done. I don’t know. He put you in a terrible situation. Just awful. He took enough from you, Louisa. Don’t let him take any more.’
Louisa crosses her arms. Lucy presses on.
‘I just feel that there’s something stopping you from getting close to your daughter. That’s all. I could speculate that you’re punishing yourself, but I don’t know. You probably do, at some level, which is why you’re not reaching out more.’