Claustrophobia

by Tracy Ryan

  The place had an eerie magnetism, all sheer planes and gravity, as if some force could impel you to leap over the barrier, or to push someone over. Like that time she’d come here as a kid with Sally Fearn’s family, and Sally’s dad was playing the fool at the side of the walkway, and Sally said, ‘I wish he would slip.’

  Pen had said, ‘You don’t mean it.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Sally had said, and they’d stared at each other.

  ‘If he’d only had more patience.’ Mrs Stone gripped the edge of the barrier as she walked. She was talking about CY O’Connor, the man behind the pipeline that carried water hundreds of miles from this place out to the goldfields; that infamous suicide, on the coast, every child here learned about in primary school history lessons. Legend held that he thought his great engineering vision had come to nothing. ‘The thing wasn’t a failure at all. He gave in too soon.’

  ‘Shall we find a place to spread the rug and have our lunch?’ Derrick said, with a sixth sense for how much of this Pen could stand. It wasn’t just the clichés, no worse than you’d find in any sentimental tourist brochure. It was the way Mrs Stone repeated them, verbatim, no matter how long had passed since they’d last come up here together. No matter how often she was corrected with the facts. As if there were only so many scripted lines, so many available conversations, and they were stuck in a familiar pattern. As if nothing could be spontaneous.

  Mrs Stone sighed and nodded. ‘I just can’t imagine,’ she said, ‘how anyone could get to the point of wanting to take their own life. It’s so selfish.’

  ‘Here, Mum,’ Pen said, patting a corner of the blanket. ‘I’ve poured you some tea.’

  She tried not to catch her mother’s eye, knowing what the conversation was really about. So many years and still her mother wanted to harp, indirectly, on Derrick’s weaknesses. How could you marry a man like that? Pen had heard it often enough in the early days, and now it had gone underground. Mrs Stone saw breakdowns, suicidal thoughts, anything mentally negative, as a moral failing.

  It wasn’t so much an attack on Derrick as a snipe at Pen for choosing him. Her mother probably liked Derrick in spite of herself, Pen supposed, but thought his past was a pity. He was not quite what Mrs Stone considered a man, despite having got on his feet and made something of his life in the years that followed.

  Despite Pen having got him on his feet, and made something of their life together.

  And what would she say if she knew about the letter to Kathleen?

  Yet Pen knew too that if she’d married a big, blustery, insensitive type that had ‘go’ in him, to use her mother’s word, she’d have come under fire for that too.

  The type her father had been …

  ‘Now John Forrest, on the other hand,’ her mother went on, ‘there was a man who had not only the vision, but the wherewithal to carry it through. You can’t imagine him giving up, can you?’

  Derrick coughed half-heartedly. ‘You know, Vi, there’s mixed opinion on him these days. It’s all too easy to glamorise that colonial enterprise stuff, the great explorer and premier and all that, but there was a darker side to a lot of it.’

  ‘He’s being so polite,’ Pen thought.

  ‘I don’t see what you mean,’ said Mrs Stone.

  Pen wanted to say, He was a murderer of Aboriginal people, but she left the cause to Derrick, since he had engaged with it.

  Derrick said, ‘Only that the past, you know, it depends on your point of view …’

  But before he could go on Pen’s mother asked him for more tea, and the subject was dropped. ‘It’s not him she wants to argue with,’ Pen realised.

  Though the sky was a bright painted blue, it was chilly whenever you approached the shade. Pen thought, ‘The chill we make between us travels with us.’ She unpacked the picnic: soft ciabatta for the sandwiches this time, because her mother didn’t like the bread too crusty, and had carried on about it last time. There were olives, and hummus, and slices of Gruyère, and cherry tomatoes.

  ‘A bit fiddly, aren’t they?’ Mrs Stone said when she saw the tomatoes. ‘You can’t really put them into your sandwich. They roll around and pop out.’

  Pen said nothing. They ate in silence, just as they’d always eaten when she still lived at home, a silence so excruciating she could hear every movement of her mother’s jaw and tongue. Their homes had always been poky – ‘manageable’, Mrs Stone would say – and thin-walled, ruling out any privacy. She’d lived with her mother’s rhythms, the smell and sound of her, trodden on the heels of her every movement.

  Her mother sat daintily, bit and chewed elegantly, but somehow loomed loud. She had been a beautiful woman in her youth, and was still striking now in her sixties, only a kind of hardness had set in, a sharp turn to her features that Pen feared would creep over her own face too, as if her mother were some kind of magic mirror. Didn’t they say you could see the daughter’s future in the mother?

  Verily by beauty it is that we come at wisdom. Pen thought of Kathleen again and looked at Derrick, oblivious, munching on his ciabatta as if nothing were any different from the last time they’d picnicked here. His tolerant good nature when it came to her mother; his constant solicitude for Pen’s feelings, making a gentle buffer between them.

  She could scarcely believe that years of this habitual comfort and kindness were based on deception. She dug about in herself for the feeling of shock, cushioned for months now, like seeking out a bad nerve to press in a wonky tooth, but as she gazed across she still saw only the day-in, day-out Derrick she’d always known. He smiled at her, and she smiled back.

  If she had never found that letter, she would have no idea. What difference, then, did it actually make? Yet … and this was the rub … why had he kept the letter? A kind of relic of his True Love, a touchstone, like keeping some horrible pornographic picture to look at when Pen wasn’t around? Maybe he even had photos of Kathleen somewhere.

  If so, Pen would find them and burn them, one by one, as she had those essay papers. And he need never know, and could never ask, if he did miss them. Not without owning up.

  But Kathleen herself would still remain. The one fly in the ointment, spanner in the works …

  Pen relieved her boredom now as they ate, ringing the changes on clichés for Kathleen. Der fünfte Rad am Wagen, as the Germans said: the car’s fifth wheel. Or what poor old Diana had said in her soggy tell-all interview: something about ‘three in the marriage’, and it was a ‘bit crowded’. And they’d got Diana in the end, hadn’t they? Pen wasn’t usually into conspiracy theories, but that one looked a bit obvious. Three in the bed, and the little one said: Roll over …

  ‘You all right, darling?’ Derrick said suddenly.

  Pen neutralised her face. She must be more careful; it was easy to forget you were watched as well as watching.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine. Just going to stretch my legs a bit,’ she said, and stood up and walked purposefully back towards the dam wall.

  She felt every stone, every twig, every gumnut her shoes crushed and rolled, like the princess with the pea under her mattress, or the little mermaid who trod as if on knives. Everything seemed vivid, highly coloured, speaking to her. Everything imbued with meaning, out to get her.

  She re-inspected the railing as she crossed: it was surprisingly low, no real protection. Derrick and her mother were out of range – she was alone on the wall, thinking: ‘How easy it would be …’ But she shook herself. Lately it was as if she could see only the world’s gaping chasms and sharp edges. All the ways it might allow you to do a little damage in return. The loopholes it might have missed, like a negligent or indifferent parent. They were like so many invitations. Pen grimaced ironically, thinking of her mother’s words: ‘the wherewithal to carry it through.’

  In her pocket was the cardboard coaster she’d picked up after Kathleen left the tavern. She took it out now and turned it over. It smelled faintly of spilled beer. She read Elle y vint! – folle créature! Nous sommes tou
s plus ou moins fou! Once home, Pen had googled it to see where the quote was from.

  Baudelaire: She came along! – mad creature! We are all more or less mad!

  It was when they were talking about the poet’s misogyny, she remembered. The poem was about a man pleased to have murdered his wife.

  Pen shook her head, glanced back to make sure nobody was watching, and threw the coaster down into the weir, where it would float and fade and disintegrate. An offering to the dark god of the waters.

  Taking one course with Kathleen looked appropriately random; taking another could be asking for trouble. It might draw Derrick’s attention in a way Pen didn’t want, and could, for others, put Pen too obviously in the picture as some kind of groupie, always hanging around, or at the very least someone curiously familiar.

  She would have to find some other way of keeping tabs on her. There was no question of forgetting Kathleen. Simply putting her out of mind. Leaving it alone.

  Pen thought of her father, when he’d been angry at her mother, all those times before he walked out. He used to say, ‘Give it a rest. Leave it alone. Why can’t you learn to leave well alone?’

  ‘Because I’m not done yet,’ her mother would say. ‘Why should you be let off the hook? Why should you get off scot-free?’

  Pen, as a child, had looked it up in the dictionary – scot: a payment, a contribution, a reckoning.

  ‘Who made you a little tin god?’ her mother would scream.

  The words rang around and around in Pen’s head. Like that sign on the Head of Faculty’s door at the uni, a funny cartoon card that said: Who died and made you Elvis? It must have been put there by colleagues, taking him down a peg or two, tongue in cheek. Just weird enough that it stayed with Pen.

  Who do you think you are? The School motto: Know Thyself …

  The best way, Pen thought, would be to do something else that allowed her to be on campus, but that had no direct connection with Kathleen. Keep at a safe and innocent distance, which was nonetheless closer than anyone else would notice.

  So she put in for a job at the university library.

  ‘You want to work full-time?’ Derrick exclaimed. ‘I thought you enjoyed having the afternoons free. You’d be burning your bridges a bit.’

  It was a challenge, Pen pointed out, and she’d grown fond of the uni environment, and it might – if she studied alongside – lead to something better, rising through the ranks … whereas in the job she already had, there was nowhere else to go.

  ‘Sure,’ Derrick said, with that noncommittal tone he had, meaning he would think it through and make himself arrive at the same conclusion, since it was what she wanted. He was always accommodating.

  Pen knew exactly how the pattern of his inner reasoning would run. He would not want to restrict her freedom, to insist that she keep working at the college just because he worked there. He would applaud the sense of forward movement. He would probably even offer to help with the application.

  So she filled out the form, got some discreet references altered to show her maiden name, and kept her fingers crossed. She didn’t really expect anything would come of it. But if this didn’t work, there would be other avenues. You just had to think creatively.

  In the interview room, some weeks later, there were three well-dressed women, one of whom was only young but clearly the senior figure, as she spoke first and directed the whole thing. She was lean and serious, her smooth hair cropped, her shoulders padded. Only a smudge of plum-coloured lipstick said, I am still female …

  ‘Ms Stone,’ she said, biting her glossy lower lip and tapping a pencil on the desk, ‘We don’t normally take on people who haven’t completed Year Twelve. I imagine you would have seen that on the criteria page when you applied.’

  Pen nodded vaguely.

  ‘I have to confess,’ the woman went on, ‘I was curious to ask you in, just to see who you were. I have read a lot of job applications, but I have never seen marks like these in anyone’s school records. They are astounding. You could have gone anywhere you wanted, you know.’

  Pen blushed, and said nothing. She was not the sort for special pleading, to play up her hardships; that she’d had to leave school because of family upheaval, that she’d done it tough. No: she would see what fate served, and hit back accordingly, always with another move up her sleeve. She was not a cringer.

  It paid off.

  ‘Having met and talked with you, and looked through your work history, we’d be prepared to take you on and see how it goes. Fixed-term, you know, on a contract. But perhaps you wouldn’t want to leave a permanent post for that.’

  Pen shook her head and explained all about her enthusiasm for the university, about wanting to better herself, knowing immediately she had tapped into this woman’s current.

  ‘Then we’re on the same page,’ the woman said, and within ten more minutes of details about giving notice and references, the matter was settled.

  Everyone back at the Boys’ College seemed to think Pen was going to be a librarian, as if that were a generic term for anyone who worked in a library. Teachers should have known better, but perhaps it was just verbal laziness. At any rate, after two or three attempts to correct them Pen gave up and let it slide. Librarian sounded so much better than assistant, anyway.

  In fact, the duties were banal, the pay lower than she would have had if she’d gone full-time at the college, and the prestige non-existent.

  But the beauty of the library, Pen decided, was the night shifts, the flexitime, the cover it afforded for saying one thing and doing another. Because that was the way it had to be now, if she wanted to get back some control. It wasn’t really a matter of wanting to ‘better herself’. It was about getting to the bottom of things. Things that needed tossing out like excess ballast, if she wanted her life, her marriage, to stay afloat.

  There was the college send-off to get through, in the staffroom, Jean Sargent full of smiles that barely covered her curiosity.

  ‘This is a big shift in thinking,’ she said, opening cardboard wine casks for the do, after school on Pen’s last day. ‘How are you going to get all those renovations done, eh, when you’re a full-timer?’

  She made it sound like prison, like doing time.

  Pen just smiled and said, ‘Slowly.’

  ‘Make a bit of space for you in other ways,’ Jean added. ‘I mean, you and Derrick both working here, you’re in each other’s pockets a lot, aren’t you? Don’t you ever want a bit of – you know, time out from him?’

  Pen stared at her. She’d always found Jean rather in-your-face, but that was just a personality thing. She’d never considered whether there was any more to it than that. Was it jealousy, or something else? Pen knew she had to stop taking people at face value. Surely she’d learned that the hard way …

  ‘Not at all,’ Pen said. ‘Why would we be married, if we didn’t like each other’s company?’

  Jean raised her eyebrows, and then nodded toward the principal, calling for their attention by tapping a spoon on a glass. The principal made a little speech, and presented Pen with a lovely bouquet – roses, tulips and baby’s breath – as well as a delicate pair of opal earrings.

  There was a pile of small gifts and cards from students, too.

  All the best, Mrs B.

  See you when I get to uni.

  You’re the hottest office lady we’ve ever had.

  Pen laughed: they’d only ever had two. And a special card from young Cliff in Year Nine: I’ll miss you, you’re our Galadriel! Pen felt a pang at that one: nobody to stand between Cliff and the dreaded phys. ed. now.

  But it was too late to get emotional – she couldn’t afford to.

  Pen hadn’t expected any fuss yet they were all there, tired but cheery in their cardigans, floral dresses and court shoes, their knee-length twill shorts with socks unevenly hitched. Surely it wasn’t for her sake. It must be the free nibbles – somebody had laid out platters on the coffee-stained laminated benches. Or the
excuse to avoid going home for a while …

  Crusty old Leon Masters, to her surprise, gave her a squeeze that was almost a hug.

  ‘You’ll be well rid of us,’ he said. ‘Onward and upward, or whatever the motto is. Haven’t you got something like that in Latin?’ he asked, turning to dig Derrick in the ribs. Derrick looked bemused.

  ‘But seriously, Pen,’ Leon said, ‘I hope it goes well for you. It’s about time you took your own part against the world,’ and he raised his glass of cheap wine to her.

  She stared at Leon, thinking for a minute he had seen right into her.

  ‘How do you mean?’ she said.

  ‘Well, I have this theory,’ he said. When Leon did talk, it was to expound his theories, pithy and unpopular, in the staffroom or at meetings. Probably to the students, too. Pen smiled.

  ‘I reckon that men,’ he went on, ‘take their own part against the world. Whereas women always seem to take the world’s part against themselves.’

  ‘Sounds like the vino talking,’ Derrick put in.

  ‘In vino veritas,’ said Leon drily.

  ‘So you think we women are passive defenders of the status quo.’ Pen was laughing now.

  ‘That’s not quite what I meant. But it will do.’

  ‘Well,’ said Pen, ‘I’ll have to rise to the challenge, then. Cheers.’

  And with a glance at Derrick, she picked up a glass of red from the table and drained it.

  6

  In the basement of the multistorey library building there was a small café. It was really for the public – students and teaching staff, people the library called ‘users’, which struck Pen as funny.

  My ex-boyfriend was just a user, the girls at school would say, when Pen was a teenager. Meaning he only wanted you for what he could get. Meaning he didn’t love you.

  Maureen, who was on desk shift with Pen and had showed her the ropes for the first few weeks, said, ‘In the old days, in the public library, we didn’t say users, we said readers. But it’s got nothing to do with reading anymore.’