‘Your mother seems to think differently,’ Lauren said to Haley.
Haley hung her head and said in a very quiet voice, ‘It’s because I won’t tell her whose it is.’
‘Why not?’ Lauren asked.
I risked a glance at Jed, who was looking passively alert, almost benign, letting Lauren handle this now. Probably that’s how their marriage worked – him always throwing stuff up to the winds, his wife actively juggling their predicaments in that assuming, privileged manner of hers. Although I was beginning to see that Lauren might not have always been like that. Perhaps when you marry someone like Jed that’s what you become – he leaves a space for others to step into and she does it either because she’s that sort of person or because she must.
The girl hadn’t replied.
‘Why not?’ Lauren said again.
‘Because. I don’t … because I can’t …’ the girl said.
‘Because?’
An answer was not forthcoming.
‘Because?’ Lauren said again, more insistently.
I wasn’t sure that Lauren should push this too hard. There could be a truly terrible answer at the end of that because. Some kind of horrible forced sex?
‘I just can’t,’ the girl said.
She reminded me of the girl I once was. Not a bad girl, just one who got herself in a bad situation, maybe.
‘But you’re having it?’ I asked gently, hoping to alleviate some of the sharpness coming from Lauren.
‘I don’t know. I think so. It’s just … I looked up pictures of developing babies online and now … it’s just I don’t think I could kill it.’
For a few moments none of us knew what to say, but Lauren, obviously determined to get a solution, began to take a more relatable tone. ‘Look, Grenville was reasonable about it. I’ve convinced him that your mother’s assertions are untrue and defamatory. He’s not going to publish this right now, but they are investigating it. I think we’re just lucky that he and Jed’s father are … acquainted … anyway, what they need is some sort of evidence that Jed didn’t get you pregnant.’ She paused for a moment to let Haley take this in. ‘So you see you’ll have to front up. It’s probably easiest if you name who it is, or something. He’s not really interested in a story about a young girl that got pregnant. He just wants to know it’s definitely not Jed’s. So do you think you could do it? For Jed?’
Still Haley said nothing, and Lauren’s reasonability wore thinner. ‘And to shut your reckless mother up, for that matter,’ she added. ‘Could you maybe pull yourself together and name the real father?’
Haley had her head bent, staring at the ground. There was a long silence through which we all observed her big, wet tears dropping into the season-browned grass at her feet.
She looked up at us, the three adults around her, and said pleadingly, ‘Isn’t there another way? A DNA test or something?’
‘Don’t think you can do that until the baby’s out,’ Lauren said. ‘Bit hard for us to hold this all off for nine months or whatever. It’s probably best if—’
‘Actually,’ I intercepted, ‘there is a test. It’s newish. They can do it now, a pre-natal test—’
‘From amnio?’ Lauren asked. ‘But that’s—’
‘No, a simple blood test. For paternity elimination, you just need that and a sample from the alleged father. I think.’
Lauren looked at me. Alleged.
‘I saw it somewhere, you can probably google it,’ I continued vaguely.
‘I’ll do it,’ Haley said. ‘Let’s do it that way. If it’s possible. When can we get it done?’
As if one DNA test would make it all go away – but for her it was everything she wanted right now. She wouldn’t have to say whose it was – just that it was definitely not Jed’s.
Lauren took the girl back to the house to find an agency online. ‘How old are you anyway?’ she asked as they walked away.
‘Sixteen,’ the girl replied.
‘Sixteen. Well, that’s … something, anyway.’
Jed and I watched them walk up to the front door. The rigidity of Lauren’s back could’ve been simple dignity or it could’ve been stiffly withheld exasperation. Haley looked even more childlike and surrendered from behind. Neither glanced back at us.
The sun had shifted now, had topped the trees, and was blaring down on the grey wood of the bench seat. Jed stood, looking briefly at the place where we usually sat, then he turned his gaze and looked into my face, showing his struggle to know what to make of what just happened. We locked eyes for a moment and then he sat down, staring ahead of him, thinking and scratching through his hair with his left hand. I was momentarily powerless to come up with the right thing to say. After a couple of minutes, he reached into the biscuit tin on the seat beside him and took out a macaroon. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said.
We sat there for a moment and then, all at once, a spontaneous laugh came bursting out of us. There was nothing else to do. The laughter was much bigger than Jed’s exclamation. We knew that. The bigness of the laughter was definitely guiltily felt. But then this laughter was just a contagious, escalating, clubby sort of route to a nice, sweetly relieving oblivion.
Steadfast, I am.
Waiting …
The kit was expensive and arrived the day after we ordered it on the internet, and then Jed and Haley went separately to a lab to have their blood extracted. The result will be back in seven days. Seven long days.
Jed came home looking pale, and with a small bruise around the site. He said the woman who took his sample obviously recognised him, and carried out the whole procedure with a pursed mouth, stabbing the needle into his vein. You wish now that you’d gone with him and given that bitch a serve … and whoever it was that used their finger to trace the word Pervert into the dust on the back gate of his ute while he was out. You brushed it off before he noticed, but he had driven all the way home with it there. He doesn’t look on Twitter, so isn’t carrying around the full burden of the awful things people have been saying. That environment in particular seems to bring out an unleashed viciousness in some users. You look at it, monitor it, and if you could you would destroy it, but all you can do is refuse to allow it any further light within your household. Sometimes it feels so thinly hidden, it’s as if it’s all just swept under the living-room rug.
Jaspar keeps nagging to get back the free use of the computer, and that has its own tension. You’ve been actively monitoring his access, have taken back his iPad. He’s been inclined to take this as a punishment for what he said at the dinner party and understandably can’t quite accept the logic that it was taken away from him for his own good.
‘Why?’ he’d demanded, as he sat at the computer, stabbing at the keys, repeatedly trying to guess the new password you’d put in. ‘It’s not fair …’ – as much upset about the limitation of his access as he was about whole injustice of the situation. His face has started to acquire a sense of how he will be as an adult. Mostly weighted and serious, though he has also developed an encouraging capacity for good-humoured resilience. While you sometimes see traces of his uncle’s focused obsessiveness, it’s at least braided with that saving strain of levity. He reported that a boy had come up to him in the library at lunchtime and said, ‘Your dad’s a deviant.’
‘And what did you do?’
‘I said “That’s slander”.’
‘Slander? How do you know about slander?’
He shrugged. ‘I dunno. Just do.’
‘And what happened then?’
‘Well, Kylie was there and she told him to go away and used a bad word.’
‘A bad word?’
His face took on a mischievous look. ‘Well, the first part was mother and the second part started with f.’ He was daring to be asked so he could legitimately say it out loud.
‘Yes, that’s a very bad word,’ you said and turned back to the dishes, but couldn’t help smiling a little. You were proud of him, and pleased with Kylie too. Good on he
r.
At least the online comments have stopped being quite as excitable. The attention-span in that arena is short and already there is a perceptible drift away. Not responding has turned out to be a strategy in itself. The pack moves on, hoping to find somebody who will react, who will be provoked. Only a few last stayers remain behind to sling their threats and insults in language so extreme it hardly feels personal anymore.
To have put out a formal statement, you can see now, might have given the story more impetus, and perhaps seen it cross platforms from a speculative online environment to the six o’clock news: ‘Former rock star Jed Jordan denies … PERVERT.’
Now that the heat is dying down it’s possible to envisage a calmer time in the near future when Jed can talk plainly in an interview about being caught up in a misrepresentation.
Your conviction has shifted enough to let your husband back in your bed. Last night you made love under the sheets in a gentle and slightly abashed way. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered in the dark. Two simple words, many ways to accept them. Afterwards you let yourself feel the pleasure of him curving his naked body warmly around yours as you both aimed for sleep.
‘How did you even meet Jed?’ you’d said to the girl when you’d sat down together at the computer, looking at how the tests worked.
‘I just got a job dog-walking and went up to the reserve, and he was there with the same sort of dog, so, you know, we talked a bit,’ she said, adding a brief justification: ‘People do that all the time up there. Just get talking about nothing much.’
She was clearly intimidated and you couldn’t quite tell if she was making an effort to minimise it all or if it really was that simple. ‘And going up in the bush? Whose idea was that?’
‘It was cos I asked him to do that stupid interview. We just went there for a place to sit down.’
‘Into the bush?’
‘I know. It seems like a bit of a crazy idea now, but at the time it was just an idea.’
‘And you just talked? Nothing else?’
‘Didn’t he tell you?’ Her eyes widened at the implication that anybody could still think something else went on. ‘I’ve put the interview online. You could read it if you want.’
‘I’ve already seen it.’
‘Oh,’ she said, and seemed confused that you might not have been totally convinced by it, that you had to ask. After a moment she added, ‘Sorry if you thought anything else. I just thought he was nice. He was always nice to me. And this has been awful.’
Her eyes shone, tears gathering again in the corners.
‘And now you have a baby on the way?’
She fidgeted for a moment, and then, reluctantly: ‘It was this boy I knew. My first time. It wasn’t very nice and I never should’ve done it. That’s why I don’t want to …’
‘Does he know?’
She shook her head as if that was the last thing she would ever do.
‘You don’t have to have it, you know. Have you thought about what it would do to your life at your age? There are other options.’
‘I know,’ she said, and one of those tenuously held-back tears streaked down the side of her face. ‘But … could you feel the baby inside you when you were … ?’
You didn’t say yes, but her words reminded you of that early drawing sensation, even before the kicking, before any activity, like your body’s energy was circling back on itself, doubling the forces around what was germinating within. You handed her a tissue from the box kept in the computer drawer for cleaning Jaspar’s dirty finger marks from the screen. She blew her nose, dabbed her eyes. For a moment you felt torn that the situation with Jed might have caused her to get distracted from the importance of her decision. ‘It will be all right,’ you said gently, but were thinking it might not. She was so young, and was going to need a lot of help.
‘And your father? Is he—’
She shrugged. ‘Don’t have one.’
You turned back to the website and explained to her that you would pay for the test. All she would have to do was provide a blood sample, and you’d deal with the media. She was not to talk to any journalist, no matter how hard they tried to get something. She nodded sweetly, willing to do whatever she was told. You tried to explain to her that they might try to trick her, pretending they knew more than they did, and her eyes widened in fear at the thought of such unscrupulous types pursuing her.
After she left, you could accept it as more logical that this young girl might want to stand in a paddock full of dogs and talk to some man old enough to be her father.
There was one more task to be done. You picked up the phone. Jed’s father had to be called out of a meeting, and answered with the sort of brusqueness that indicated he was still in deal-making mode. Not the ideal moment to start this explanation, but you stumbled through the details. He asked questions as if he was assessing risk: How long will the test take? You are sure the girl knows not to talk? Who else knows? Is the neighbour trustworthy?
After a few moments he remembered to ask how you and Jed were coping.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll make the call.’
Half an hour later, he rang back. ‘Grenville can’t promise that they will never publish anything, but this business about the girl’s baby is excluded, unless of course there’s definitive proof. There won’t be any, will there, Lauren?’
‘No, there won’t be.’
‘One hundred per cent?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good girl.’
The business of men – what else is kept out of the pages of the newspaper in this way? Some frustrated young journalist is probably sitting in the newsroom right now, considering other more insidious ways to leak their little scoop. MOTHER SAYS JED JORDAN GOT MY DAUGHTER PREGNANT.
A bond made over secret goings-on in a Lodge feels like thin insurance.
Jump cuts
Some privileges have been withdrawn at Sas’s house. The basement room has been reclaimed by her mother who is setting it up as a studio where she’ll host parties for her friends to swap designer clothes. The computer’s been shifted into the living room. Sas is allowed to have the spare TV in her bedroom, but NO BOYS.
‘So anyway she sits me down and says she’s really disappointed in me and she thinks I’m too young but if I’m doing it with Wolf then we’d need to think about me going on the pill,’ Sas is saying, sitting on the end of her bed, scrolling through a DVD of the first Hunger Games to show me this thing. ‘And I tell her I’m on it already and her face falls and she seems really shocked, and she says but, but, don’t you need to get my permission or something, shouldn’t I have had to sign something, and I say, no Mum, Family Planning just, like, give it to you, and she goes all quiet for a while and then she says, well I suppose it’s good you’re being careful, the last thing we need is a teenage pregnancy, and I go course, Mum, I’m not that dumb. Okay nearly there now.’
Am propped up against the pillows behind her, with my knees up under the man-size hoodie I found in an op shop. You can’t keep a secret this size from a close friend for long. Either you lose the secret or you lose the closeness. But if I tell her she’ll freak, and she might drop me, and she’ll definitely tell Wolf and he’ll probably tell Dylan and I’m not ready, and for now it’s mine, my own, my private thing, my private dumb thing. I really wish I could tell her about the dream I had last night, though, in the hospital with all these people around me, yelling things, and then it was done and the nurse handed me the baby, all wrapped up in a white blanket, and inside was a purring thing with the face of Grumpycat.
She looks back over her shoulder and says, ‘Maybe when she’s set it up down there we should sneak down and pick you up a few new clothes. She won’t miss them. Cos what’s with what you’re wearing?’
‘It’s a new look I’m trying. Oversize.’
‘Yeah? Not sure it’s working for you.’
Secret-keeping = swallowing small humiliations: ‘Jennifer Lawrence is so amazing. Wish I was her
.’
‘I know! Anyway this is the bit. It’s got to do with the point of view. See, in this scene Katniss is on the right and her sister is on the left. And then they go closer in. Same thing, Katniss on the right and her sister left. Now cut to this shot of the hands. Primrose is handing her the Mockingjay pin …’
‘Oh yeah. That’s confusing. Whose hands are whose? It’s like it’s the wrong way around.’
‘Exactly. It breaks this thing they call the 180 degrees rule.’ At the moment Sas loves the rules. She’s all about the angles, the tracking shot, focal length, the framing these days. Her path is all laid out. Film School. Short films. Internship in a production company. Feature films. Working her way up to assistant camera operator and then DOP. Become known as one of the most famous cinematographers in the world. Ain’t no unplanned thing getting in the way of that. ‘Because you notice it, it gives you a kind of jolt. You think, wait a minute, whose hands are those? Where are we? Suddenly we’re on the opposite side of the room. See, I’ll go back and show you again.’
As she’s rewinding I sneak a look at my phone. The email has come. Am not going to open the attachment here in Sas’s bedroom.
‘I wonder why they did that. Is it a mistake?’
‘I don’t think so. It’s a technique thing, I think. So here it is again. Katniss on the right. And then this shot. Katniss on right. And then hands, and see the blue sleeve. That’s Katniss. Like you’re looking from the other side. They do it in some other places too. I think they used it in an intentional way to make you think about how there’s this unseen audience that watches The Hunger Games and by using that technique they make you feel like you’re part of that audience too, watching it all from all sides.’
After a moment she has another thought: ‘It’s kind of like what happened to you when that photo got put up. Strangers watching you from the sides.’
In the Neighbourhood of Fame Page 19