Claustrophobia

by Tracy Ryan

  Pen was furious. At home she’d checked in the dictionary, and Jean was right. But it wasn’t Pen’s error. Where she came from, everyone said it ‘timber’, not ‘tamber’.

  ‘She means well,’ Derrick had said.

  ‘No, she doesn’t,’ Pen had growled. ‘She’s a snob. She’s always trying to expose … where I come from. She can’t stand the fact that a nobody like me is married to a somebody like you.’

  ‘Who cares what Jean thinks?’ Derrick had sighed. But Pen noticed he didn’t deny Jean thought it. Now Jean coughed and banged her fork three times to get the whole group’s attention. Pen made a face at Derrick, down the other end, to plead home time. Derrick made a face that agreed. With a few nods, gestures, and quick pats on the back to say goodbye, they slipped out of the restaurant before the brandy was brought in.

  All the way home Pen was quiet, watching the clouded stars, leaning her head back as she had done in her parents’ car as a child.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Derrick said.

  ‘Nothing,’ Pen said. She no longer felt obliged to share what was on her mind; in fact, she felt newly protective of it. She was thinking about murder mysteries, Agatha Christie, the binge reading she’d done from the public library when she was young. After a while it was like crossword puzzles, or as if you were reading formulas, maths problems.

  Her dad had been proud of her in those days.

  ‘Pen takes after me,’ he’d say to whoever was visiting. ‘I love a good crime story.’

  And she would cringe and try to point out that Christie was nothing like the true crime her father devoured – no seedy detail, blood and guts, forensic shudders. It was all about detection. And it hadn’t really happened. That was a huge difference.

  But it was as if he couldn’t hear her. He said the same thing to everyone.

  She was next door, eleven or twelve, pushing Sally Fearn on the swing.

  Sally was an only child but had a whole gym set, rings and swings and slide. They’d taken turns hanging from the trapeze until the blood ran to their heads and they had to drop groggily to the sand beneath. Sometimes they got sand in their hair or teeth.

  ‘Harder! I want to go higher.’

  Pen shoved so hard that Sally flew forward, face into the ground. Blood welled from the centre of her lower lip as if she were blowing dark bubblegum.

  ‘I’m telling on you!’ Sally never cried, but she could get angry. Throwing a maddie, they called it.

  ‘It was an accident. I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘Yes, you did. You’re sick,’ Sally yelled, stomping up to the house.

  ‘I am not,’ Pen said, running after her.

  ‘Yes, you are. Just like your dad. My dad says your dad is sick. Sicko.’

  ‘He does not.’

  ‘Sicko.’ Sally slammed the back door.

  Pen sighed, and turned for home.

  Years later, in their teens, she’d asked Sally what she meant about her dad. Sally just said, ‘Forget it. They were both sickos.’

  Now she wondered whether she was really that different from her father after all.

  She still hated true crime: in bookshops, she would cross the room to avoid that section. The lurid cover photos, the distinctive chill of the titles. Dad had been obsessed with them.

  But working out a whodunit – wasn’t that just the reverse side of the same coin, the same obsession felt by the one who plotted it? And wasn’t the plotter somehow just like the actual criminal, trying to make things watertight, leave nothing to chance?

  It struck Pen suddenly that her head was a huge repository of deftly imagined crime, however much she had always avoided real grisly news items. She’d spent her adolescence stocking up on these things without even realising it: undetectable poisons, obtainable weapons, clever disposal of bodies, wiping of fingerprints, concealing motives, rationalisations … She was almost an expert.

  But these things were fictional, she thought, and out of date too – nothing you could rely on. Not in tune with the way life was these days, with DNA testing and CCTV, things you’d have to factor in if you were plotting now.

  And yet … she thought, as it said in the old song: the fundamental things apply. It was still only a matter of covering your tracks. Leaving no evidence. Despite all those advances, many cases still went unsolved. People still literally got away with murder.

  ‘I don’t want to go on that murder train thing,’ she said to Derrick suddenly. ‘It’s just sick. Sicko.’

  Derrick grinned. ‘No argument from me! I think we’ve done our bit now, anyway. Jean can stop hounding us for a while.’

  The lecture course was to run for eight weeks, and for Pen they were eight weeks of the same sheer paralysis, as if she were a tongue-tied girl again, unable to act for herself. She absorbed, but did not contribute.

  She’d taken the precaution of enrolling under her maiden name of Stone, though it was tempting for a moment to wonder if Kathleen would ever have connected her married name with the Derrick Barber of so long ago. In any case, there were enough students that Kathleen might not really register their names, particularly as there was no assessment, no rollcall.

  By the fifth week Pen had been for coffee a couple of times with some of the other class members, so as not to draw too much attention to herself by always going it alone. Despite her initial reservations, they were not a bad lot. And like most students of whatever age, they were stupidly keen to discuss their teacher, which, Pen figured, might let her glean more information.

  Just what she would use this information for, she wasn’t sure. But everyone said knowledge was power, and she felt, little by little, she was gaining some of that power in this deadlocked situation, even if on the outside she seemed placid to the point of numbness.

  Each time, Pen simply sat in the group of seven or eight at two tables pulled together, and sipped her strong flat white. The café they chose was large and utilitarian, and a blast of cold air ran through each time the glass doors leapt open, so Pen huddled toward the wall, nursing the cup to warm her hands and give her a focus. It felt as if there were a glass pane between her and the others. She kept her own input to a minimum, and that seemed to suffice. They had plenty of talk among themselves.

  Frank, an older male student, was avid for details of Kathleen’s private life. The ladies shook their heads but tossed in whatever crumbs they had.

  ‘She had a big break-up a couple of years ago,’ said Delys, who was a part-time something in the healing professions, something a bit alternative. The sort of woman hard-headed Pen usually couldn’t stand.

  Delys had taken several other courses with Kathleen Nancarrow since, as she said, they were ‘guaranteed first-rate’.

  ‘What do you mean, a big break-up?’ Frank said. Pen averted her face but burned to know.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say more,’ Delys said, scraping the remnant foam from her cappuccino cup, ‘out of respect for her privacy, you know.’ Pen, spotting the smoothness of the lie now that she herself had entered that domain, realised Delys knew nothing more.

  ‘In any case,’ one of the other women said, ‘she certainly hasn’t let it get in the way of her teaching. But do you mean she’s single again? A woman like that?’

  Delys chuckled and raised her eyebrows; again, Pen thought, to avoid saying she didn’t actually know. ‘Well, she does live alone.’

  The group tutted. ‘You’ve been to her house?’

  Delys nodded. ‘I had to collect some papers, once. I didn’t go in. But the house looked lovely, and when I said so, she said, ‘Yes, but too big for one person to manage.’’

  ‘Why would she keep it, then?’ said Frank.

  ‘Close to the uni. And she has a lot of books, as you would expect.’

  Pen itched to ask where the house was, exactly – but she pulled herself up short, knowing how odd that would look, when she hadn’t said a word till now – and she wanted, for some reason, to appear indifferent.

  Besid
es, if she really needed to know where Kathleen’s house was, now that she knew it was close by, she could follow her.

  She had quite naturally and accidentally observed Kathleen’s car one day after class – a late-model silver Corolla. Usually Kathleen went back up to her office when the lecture was over, but on that one occasion, as Pen had been sitting in the Volvo choosing a CD for the drive home, Kathleen had walked right down into the car park and drove off.

  Pen even remembered part of the numberplate. It bore the letters arg, which made her think of argument, or aargh, both somehow fitting. The plate was not personalised – they were just random letters – but it stuck in Pen’s brain. Burned onto the backs of her eyelids from staring.

  If she kept a secret diary of all this, she could refer to Kathleen as Arg. Or she could write it in code, as she had when she was a kid and knew her mother was trying to snoop in her things.

  But Pen had decided not to write down a single scrap. Finding Derrick’s letter, the letter that started it all, had brought home to her the treachery of the written word. If you wanted to keep things to yourself, if you wanted real safety, total control, you let nothing outside your head.

  Inside your head, you could go where you wanted.

  She remembered a song Derrick had taught her when she was first studying German: Die Gedanken sind frei … ‘Thoughts are free, who can guess them? They fly away like nocturnal shadows – nobody can know them, no hunter shoot them down …’

  If she wanted to follow Kathleen home, just to see where she lived, it wasn’t stalking or anything like that. Surely it wasn’t. It was to understand, really, to get the full picture of a woman like that, a woman whose existence had shaken the very foundations of her marriage, as if she were an unseen fault line.

  Pen thought of the terrible lopsided gash in the earth near Meckering that she’d visited on a school outing; the houses that had vanished, the little signs pegged in the ground that marked where each family had once lived.

  The worst thing about a fault line: disaster could strike again at any time. And yet people always rebuilt, refusing to believe the worst. Was that what Pen herself was doing, stubbornly believing life with Derrick could go on as normal? Without ever telling him what had changed?

  If she wanted to follow Kathleen home … she would have to be patient, because Kathleen probably stayed on campus for hours – all that marking, Pen thought, suddenly remembering the burnt essays. Pen blushed. She would have to be patient and discreet, a real nocturnal shadow. Unobtrusive, and with all the time in the world.

  But she did not have all the time in the world.

  All too soon it was the last day of the extension course. After this, Pen would be without excuse. No more reason to hang around the campus, drive to the city each week. She sat through that last lecture with a dull disappointment like a lump in her stomach, barely following anything Kathleen said. Glued to the spot, staring, as if trying to memorise Kathleen’s image, for whatever good that would do. If you stared like that at someone, eventually it gave them a halo, flaring against the white wall, the overhead screen. You felt as if you were leaving your body. Pen was so numb that when Delys and the others nudged her at the end, she didn’t at first understand them.

  ‘She’s going to come for a drink with us,’ Delys said. ‘Being the last day, you know.’

  ‘She’ was Kathleen.

  Pen’s heart thudded. ‘I don’t drink, really,’ she said, wondering why this immediate battle inside, this for-and-against.

  Delys laughed. ‘You can still have a lemonade or something. Come on.’

  They all walked down-campus to the student tavern, Pen lagging behind, eyes to the ground, stealing a glimpse of Kathleen now and then: her long, mesmerising skirts, her sharp-heeled boots – Perth was on the verge of spring, but the campus was still a cold place. Overhead, wattlebirds looped in and out of branches, indifferent to their presence as the women’s heels rang on the brick pavement.

  Kathleen had not walked with the group outside class like this before. There was always a kind of detachment or distance. But today was different, because it was ending.

  Just once, Kathleen turned around, as if to check who was straggling back there, and smiled at Pen. Pen could not smile, but only nodded.

  The tavern was noisy and beery inside, and full of young people who paid them no attention whatsoever, after an initial head-swivel. Not that much older, Pen thought, than Derrick’s own students. The air was thick with the odours of chip fat and burgers, and the clamour of desperate straining for amusement. The group found themselves some seats, and Kathleen brought a couple of carafes to the table.

  ‘It should be the other way around,’ Frank said. ‘We should be shouting you.’

  ‘No, it’s a bit of a tradition,’ Kathleen said. ‘Aren’t you having any?’ she asked Pen.

  Pen hesitated, not wanting to make herself stand out. The one killjoy, the wowser. ‘Thanks,’ she said simply, and proffered her glass. There was no law against it. One wouldn’t make any difference, she supposed, to driving home. One wouldn’t tell on her breath if Derrick should kiss her.

  It might even make things easier …

  Pen could not help looking at Kathleen. Being so unused to the wine, Pen was all the more under its sway, all the less inclined to stop staring. Of course Kathleen became aware of this, glancing back now and then, but Pen guessed she was used to being looked at. Professionally as well as personally. It almost hurt your eyes to see her, because there was no flaw. Like a sculpture.

  Pen thought dimly of something she had read about the perfection of statues, of a likeness between the acts of murder and making love. Fixing someone to absolute stillness, complete possession. It was in a Patricia Highsmith book. At the time it had chilled her, and she had put the book aside; now, as she gazed at Kathleen, the idea wouldn’t go away.

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ Kathleen said to her, and Pen lowered her eyes a moment. ‘What’s your name again?’

  Pen told her, at once aglow with the attention and yet coldly irritated that the woman didn’t even know. The disproportion of it. The lopsidedness of the relation between them. Could she not even understand …?

  ‘And how did you like the course?’

  Pen gushed suddenly now – she was all words, and some of her fellow students turned in surprise, having heard so little from her till now.

  ‘I could almost worship Baudelaire,’ she said, and though she saw some of the others smile into their drinks, she couldn’t stop herself. ‘I don’t think it’s at all true that women can’t take pleasure in reading him; I think it’s more complex than that. Yes, it’s misogynistic on the surface, but you have to see it on a larger scale …’

  Kathleen nodded, excited, flipping open a book to show Pen a particular page, and scribbling lines out on a beer coaster.

  ‘And Mallarmé: don’t you think every translation is inadequate? No translator has really managed that honed, chiselled turning of his lines, the way the white space seems to gape at you after them.’

  Kathleen refilled Pen’s wine glass and sent back a volley of her own. For the next quarter-hour they were no longer themselves but a live dialogue, a disembodied argument. It was like a blowtorch.

  Kathleen said, when Pen quoted a poem, ‘You speak French very well, where did you learn it?’

  Pen said awkwardly that she had taught herself.

  Kathleen stood up, nodding. ‘Well, perhaps we’ll see you here again, on another course,’ she said, and then her attention was turned back to the group, as if Pen had never existed, and she said her farewells, gathered up her bag, and left.

  ‘Well, you’re a dark horse, Pen,’ Frank said, to break the sudden silence. ‘You wouldn’t say boo to a goose all winter, and you come out with all that on the last day. Talk about teacher’s pet!’

  ‘Mixing your metaphors, aren’t you, Frank?’ said Delys, and everyone laughed. Discreetly, Pen pocketed the beer coaster Kathleen had written on,
stood up, and excused herself.

  She slipped outside and surveyed the paved area. Kathleen was nowhere to be seen now, though if Pen hastened her step, she might catch her up. But for what, exactly?

  Pen ran all the way to the parked Volvo, got in, and locked the doors with one snap. Brightly scarved and coated students went by, brushing the sides of the car in their haste, laughing and shouting. She covered her ears and closed her eyes. What was she doing here? She had embarrassed herself, enthusing like that – it was not what she had meant to do. Not at all. She rested her head on the steering wheel, but could not think. Thinking was not enough – she was as bad as Hamlet, she could not act. She could not even cry, though that was what every cell of her tired body wanted to do.

  Now the course was over, it was back to scratch. She would have to come up with a new plan. If she had ever had a plan in the first place.

  5

  ‘Every time I come here,’ Pen’s mother said, ‘I can’t help but think of that poor man.’

  ‘And you say it every time, too,’ Pen thought. They’d come up for a Sunday picnic at Mundaring Weir, because Mrs Stone had wanted to visit, and it was easier that way than having her at the house. Now that they were planning renovations, there was an excuse, but it was really because Pen couldn’t bear having her mother in her so-called ‘personal space’.

  ‘I do love her, but …’ Pen often said to Derrick privately, and he would interrupt: ‘You don’t have to say any more. I understand.’

  Derrick thought Mrs Stone meant well, but there was only so much of her people could take. Pen wasn’t even sure she meant well.

  ‘What a tragic waste of a life,’ Mrs Stone said now, leaning over the edge of the walkway and gazing into the vast body of water as if it were no more than a puddle.

  Pen couldn’t bear to look down into the depths – it made her dizzy. She always had the feeling, looking at the great dam wall, that it was about to fall, the way you sometimes felt the sky could fall. Or that a chink might suddenly appear and before they knew it, they’d be swept away. Pen both feared and desired it at the same time, a sensation she did not like. It was like the belly of the earth, or as if you were teetering on the edge of a giant’s cradle.