Claustrophobia

by Tracy Ryan

  It was very unlike Derrick to use her work email, because he knew how her time was supervised. She double-clicked.

  Can you get time off this afternoon? We’ve had a crisis at school and I need to talk to you. Really urgent. If you could pick me up at three?

  Pen dashed off a confirmation, then deleted the email and signed off sick. She could just about make it to the college by three.

  She waited for ages in the college car park, the home-time crowd rushing, flowing, parting, then eventually slowing to a dribble around the Volvo. Windows up, to discourage anyone from stopping by to chat.

  Now the car park was virtually empty, she could see there was a police car up near reception. She tried Derrick’s mobile but it went to voicemail. Just as she was getting out to go and look for him, she saw him crossing the asphalt from the main office. She leaned back on the car door until he reached her and beckoned her to get back in.

  ‘Thanks. No, don’t start up yet, I think we should talk now.’

  Pen felt the old familiar chill in the lower legs. Fight or flight. What did Derrick know?

  But it wasn’t about her.

  He folded his fingers and lowered his gaze to the footwell.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s really awful news,’ he said. ‘One of the boys.’

  ‘An accident?’ Pen said. If Derrick was involved – her mind flicked over all possible outcomes. Duty of care …

  ‘No, worse. Hanged himself, in the boys’ change rooms.’

  Pen’s mouth fell open. Then she said, ‘Not Cliff! Cliff Eldridge?’

  Derrick turned to her in surprise. ‘How did you know?’

  She shook her head. Grimaced, nauseated with shock.

  ‘It’s just devastating. To think none of us saw it coming. I feel responsible. Like there’s something I should have been able to do.’ Derrick was agitated now. ‘Me, of all people, with what happened when … You know, I should have a radar for this sort of thing.’

  Pen took his hand. ‘It’s not your fault, Derrick.’

  ‘It’s everyone’s fault,’ he said.

  The house, strangely echoing with their day’s absence, had a vacant smell she’d forgotten since she’d started coming home later. Pen made tea; neither of them was up to eating. The afternoon was hot but they did not feel it. An intimate chill had descended and shrouded them both.

  ‘Does his mother – has she been let know?’

  ‘Straight away,’ Derrick said. ‘She was – well, you can imagine. I hope I never see anything like it again.’ He was slow now, agitation overtaken by some kind of stupor. ‘We all had to be – debriefed, they called it. Counselling for the boys from tomorrow. Principal may have to talk to the press, or at least fend them off. It’s all too much to take in, Pen.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She closed her eyes and felt the weight of all Cliff’s brooding, welling contentions.

  ‘Will there be an inquiry, an inquest, or whatever?’

  ‘I guess there will. You can imagine the dramas. How the school will be trying to play it down. It’s disgusting that it should even matter! A boy is dead …’ Derrick leaned back and looked at her. ‘Pen, he confided in you sometimes, didn’t he?’

  ‘It was a fair while ago. I thought maybe he was being bullied, but if he was he didn’t want to say so. He hated phys. ed., I know that for sure.’

  Derrick flushed. ‘I told you that was too bad, didn’t I? I remember that. Fucking hell, how could I be so callous?’ He banged a fist on the table.

  It was unlike Derrick to swear.

  ‘Pen, what else did he say?’

  Pen shrugged. ‘I don’t know – lots of things.’

  ‘He didn’t ever talk about me, did he?’

  Pen got up and put her arms around Derrick, wishing it didn’t feel merely the correct thing to do. Actually, she had no idea what to do.

  ‘You didn’t cause it,’ she said. ‘You just feel helpless because there’s nothing you can do.’

  Derrick stared off into space. ‘I certainly never meant him any harm,’ he said softly.

  Cliff’s funeral was a whole week later. Though it meant yet another day off, Pen knew Derrick needed her to be there.

  They spoke little of what had happened, but she sensed from the way he clutched at her arm, or held her a touch longer than usual, that Derrick was finding it hard.

  She didn’t think he’d been terribly close to Cliff, but Pen supposed it might be the similarity, a kind of identification. Derrick’s own thoughts of suicide at seventeen and eighteen – his breakdown – the disaster of his tangling with Kathleen.

  Pen tried now to conjure up those feelings of outrage – where had they gone? – that had driven her to track down Kathleen. In their place was a kind of hollowness, an inverted knowledge of her own utter solitude, as if everything else around her were something like a game. Not real. Perhaps that was the place Cliff had reached. Completely cut-off.

  Kathleen had been leaving messages for her now and then, but Pen couldn’t pick up. Least of all these last few days. Pen pushed it to the back of her mind and concentrated on the service.

  The minister was discreet: no direct reference to the means of death, but plenty of allusion to our failure as a society to hear our young people.

  Pen was keenly aware, though she avoided looking, of Cliff’s mother in a tired blue suit, staring stiffly ahead – estranged husband, for once, right by her side.

  No more than two or three fellow students in the pews. The Eldridges had asked to keep it small, so it was just the boys he’d grown up with, the close ones, if you could say close. Karrakatta Cemetery would be family-only. The teachers all sat together, as if bolstering one another. Six of them – Derrick included – were pallbearers.

  Afterwards, back at the house, Derrick, ‘You never think you’ll see off … he could have been our own son. Age-wise.’

  ‘Just about,’ Pen said softly. ‘It makes you realise …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  Derrick shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I mean, it’s not about me. I don’t want to sound – like some sort of egomaniac. But it does bring home – just how short it can be, and what matters. Sounds like a rotten cliché, eh? What everyone says at these times.’

  He turned on a fan and stood before it, moving his face from side to side. Pen noticed a trace of tears on his cheek.

  ‘Pen, what it brings home to me is how much my life is not where I want it to be. You and I – we used to be so close. Something’s just not there now.’

  Pen bit her lower lip, averting her eyes.

  ‘Darling, you’re just upset. Funerals do that to people.’ She made for the kitchen, teetering on the split-level edge, but Derrick grabbed her arm.

  ‘What is it, sweetheart? What’s happening with you? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with you becoming more and more of a stranger.’

  Pen didn’t even feel angry: she felt nothing. ‘I don’t mean to be a stranger,’ she said. ‘I guess since I started working full-time …’

  ‘It’s not the work,’ Derrick put in. ‘It’s something else, an attitude. You know I wouldn’t care if – if you had to go to Woop Woop for work – I’m not some sort of jailer. I’m happy for you to have … that freedom. But you feel different.’

  Pen sighed. If she simply kept denying it, they would go around in circles. So she said, ‘Actually, Derrick, I think I may be a little off-colour. Maybe that’s what you’re picking up on.’

  He sighed too and let it go.

  It wasn’t untrue. She’d been nauseous a few days now, and assumed it was her period coming on, combined with the distress of Cliff’s suicide.

  But her period hadn’t come. A cold wave swept through her now as she rapidly added up the days.

  Wait till you start menopause, Maureen had said … but she was only thirty-two, it couldn’t be.

  A shock could make you miss your period. Pen knew her mother had missed a few when her fath
er left. ‘The sort of thing you shouldn’t know about your own mother,’ she thought.

  She’d been taken aback by Cliff – but enough to be in shock? It didn’t feel as if that were the cause.

  Derrick hadn’t even remarked on it, though he knew her cycle. Maybe too distracted with all this … ‘all this death’, Pen thought. The glamour of death was such a lie – all those crime thrillers, the Christies, Chandlers, Simenons, the morbid forensic police shows – when what it really came down to was like this. A kind of blank: a mother staring stiffly, a father not knowing what to do. Nobody knowing what to do.

  ‘I tell you what,’ she said slowly. ‘That funeral really took it out of me. I’m going to nick back in to town and get some Panadol or something from the chemist. Then I might have a lie-down.’

  She knew the chemist sold test kits for pregnancy. Her heart was thumping. She had to find out for sure.

  ‘I think we’ve got Panadol,’ Derrick said.

  ‘Well, something stronger. I’m really a bit under the weather.’

  Derrick kissed her. ‘Of course. Do you want me to drive? I could go and get it.’

  ‘No, that’s okay. I won’t be long.’

  He looked confused. ‘But if you’re not feeling so good.’

  Pen thought fast. It did sound odd. She could hardly refuse.

  ‘Okay, if you want to run me up to the kerb – that way I can be quick, and you won’t have to find a parking spot.’

  She didn’t want to tell Derrick about the test kit, but she couldn’t bear to wait either. If it came up negative, if it was all nothing – she would feel small, foolish.

  And if it came up positive?

  12

  It reminded her somehow of the spirit level her father had used for carpentry when she was small. A little window that told true. In a little white box, in a little locked room, in a little tinderbox of a home where she could hardly breathe.

  The sharp blue line, like a divider between one half of her life and whatever was to come.

  Like a slap: Wake up. She’d been wandering around in a dream and only now woken up back in her life.

  What had been called impossible had been possible after all. And when she’d least expected it.

  Pen wrapped up the plastic wand and hid it in the bottom of her handbag, to be disposed of at work, or Derrick would see it in the garbage for sure. And if he didn’t recognise what it was, he’d soon figure it out.

  Of course he would have to be told. But first she needed time to think. And there was only going to be so much time now.

  She must break with Kathleen. The baby – baby! – changed everything.

  Assuming she got through these first three months without losing it.

  She could quit work. A month’s notice. As soon as she knew it was safe, not going to bleed away from her like that other … They might wonder why she didn’t just see out her contract, but that didn’t matter.

  It would be hard without the money, but she couldn’t see how else to get out of the tangle she’d made. She could not afford tangles with a child coming. Fear, even terror, muffled her joy. She would take no risks anymore. She would turn only to what she knew she could count on. Ten years of habit and trust were hard to cast off, even if you wanted to.

  She went to the library as usual next morning, pushing on through the nausea and the urge to stay home curled up in bed. Or to pull the car over and sit in the national park for a while, thrashing things out. As if she could bracket the day, mark it out as different, give it what it needed.

  Keep everything the way it is as long as you can.

  The air was hot already, thickened and fixed by the undulations of glinting cars and the stench of trucks descending the last hill into the city. The hills were like a medieval city wall, shutting out all that space pressing on them from the land’s interior. But they made you feel no safer.

  It was like having something ticking inside you – strange that no one around you could tell. She remembered from primary school when some youth theatre group had come to their class and put on Peter Pan. The crocodile that had swallowed a clock so you always knew when it was coming.

  Look behind you! He’s there!

  The children’s delighted terror. Akin to this nausea, a feeling of blissful encroachment.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Her workmate at the library counter was solicitous. Pen examined her – a new girl, probably a student doing part-time shifts to help fund her degree. Nevertheless, she had that carefree aura of life before adulthood fully set in.

  Pen had been like that once. Surely she must have been, only you couldn’t see it in yourself.

  It took all Pen’s mental strength not to blurt out, ‘Actually, I’ve just discovered I’m pregnant.’ Instead, she murmured, ‘Yes. Just didn’t sleep too well,’ and smiled.

  ‘You look white as a sheet.’

  ‘I’m always white. It’s just my colouring.’ (‘So much for maternal glow,’ Pen thought.)

  ‘Can you show me where these go?’

  She got caught up in the morning’s routine, showing the new girl around, and barely noticed when tea time came. Kathleen was peering through the glass doors, waiting for her.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ she said, leaning forward, but Pen pulled back from the imagined kiss.

  ‘Please, not at work.’

  ‘Right, okay … Can you come for a walk with me?’

  ‘I’ve only got fifteen minutes. There’s a new staff member.’

  Pen clutched the rail as they descended the curving staircase outside the library. The ground seemed vividly treacherous – as if everything would conspire to trip her up and rob her of her precious state. The moat beneath the stairs was empty of koi now, just black murk and scraps of garbage in the silty water. It seemed a bad omen, so she turned her face the other way.

  They sat on a bench in a nook between huge palm trees, cooler and more private. Parrots arced among the foliage, their cries momentarily deafening. Wattlebirds looped through the clearing back to their own trees. It was an enclave, a moment apart. Nobody could see them.

  Kathleen peeled open a Mars bar and offered Pen a bite.

  Pen shook her head.

  ‘Go on, it won’t hurt to eat something sinful for once,’ she said. Pen sighed and took a mouthful. It stuck to her tongue and palate, cloying, but she forced it down. You’re eating for two now.

  ‘I’ve got something else too,’ she said. ‘Now don’t be cross, because I thought one of us has to take the plunge.’

  She opened her raffia basket and pulled out an envelope.

  Jetset, the logo said.

  ‘I took the liberty of starting to arrange the trip. If we leave it any longer, it will be too late.’

  Pen slipped a finger inside and saw: Perth International Airport to Paris-Charles de Gaulle. December 15. A revised itinerary for Ms Kathleen Nancarrow, estimated costs for two persons. Limited seats remaining. Pen’s heart leapt, then sank.

  Kathleen grinned. ‘It’s all just provisional right now. It’s not paid up yet, and I’ll need your details for that – your full name, and at some stage your passport number and so on.’

  Pen swallowed and looked at the ground.

  ‘And your actual address,’ Kathleen went on. ‘I checked the enrolment file but it’s only got your PO box …’

  ‘She’s been researching me,’ Pen thought, stiffening.

  ‘And what is your middle name, anyway?’

  ‘My middle name? I don’t have one,’ Pen lied.

  ‘Okay! When we’ve got that sorted I’ll charge the tickets. I said to myself, ‘If Pen won’t take it as a gift, she can reimburse me.’ But I hope you will take it as a gift. It would make me very happy. I like being happy – I haven’t had that feeling for a long time, but I have it with you.’ Kathleen was excited.

  ‘It’s too generous. I can’t.’

  ‘Then you can pay it off – whenever – no hurry! I won’t take no for an answer.’ She took
Pen’s hand and chafed it softly. ‘I want us to do this – it will be marvellous. One of us has to take the plunge,’ she repeated. ‘I want you to understand that you mean a lot to me. This is something I can do to show you that.’

  Pen was dizzy, and didn’t know whether it was morning sickness or shock. She stood up, uncertain what to say.

  ‘My break,’ she said. ‘Have to go back.’

  Kathleen laughed. ‘Have I reduced you to monosyllables? Poor darling,’ and she leaned over and kissed Pen on the mouth. Pen put her hand to her mouth, as if words would start spilling out in response.

  ‘I really must go,’ she said. ‘Let me think about this, okay? It’s a big surprise.’ And then she added, as if suddenly remembering her manners. ‘But thank you.’

  Kathleen squeezed her hand and released it. ‘Give me a ring, won’t you?’

  Back in the library, Pen found herself doing the same task two or three times over. ‘The new girl must think I’m loopy. Or premenstrual. Or menopausal.’ Pen grimaced to herself. It was like a warped fairytale. A beautiful woman appears out of nowhere, falls in love with you and offers you a holiday in Paris, wants to live happily ever after.

  Only she hadn’t appeared out of nowhere. Pen had conjured her up.

  Up out of Derrick’s past, a very specific time and place – and that was where she belonged. But how to put her back there?

  At all costs, Kathleen must not buy those tickets. Or not with Pen’s name on, anyway.

  The new girl said out of the blue, ‘Is she a friend of yours, Prof Nancarrow?’

  Pen was startled, as much by that ‘Prof’ as by the question. It gave her an outside view of Kathleen again, the fact that she mattered elsewhere, in a bigger world than Pen’s own crowded head.

  ‘No – who do you mean? The woman who came to the door there?’ She was sure she was blushing – where was her usual lying composure? Maybe pregnancy made you florid like that, outside your control.

  The girl nodded.

  ‘No, not personally,’ Pen said, and went off abruptly to return a file to Closed Reserve. She felt like Peter denying Jesus, afraid and ashamed.

  ‘She’s wonderful,’ the girl gushed. ‘I had her in first semester.’