Claustrophobia

by Tracy Ryan

  To her own surprise, Pen found she could not look Kathleen in the eye. It was unbearable, what she might see there.

  ‘May I ask why?’

  The words were no clue. Still Pen kept her eyes averted. That was less than ideal, but it was all she could manage.

  ‘I don’t feel comfortable. It just doesn’t feel right. It’s not what I want.’

  ‘I see.’

  Pen looked up now, but the eyes by this time were no clue either.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she added. It was lame. She must gird herself better for what would follow. Suddenly the sing-song words of some hymn she’d heard from street preachers in the mall: No turning back no turning back.

  But Kathleen merely laughed, a dry, humourless laugh that came from no depth.

  ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘When I saw the Vixen this morning, after all this time, I knew it was a bad omen! I always know these things.’

  ‘What? What do you mean, the vixen?’

  Kathleen looked at her with a crazed detachment. ‘Never you mind, it’s an old joke. An oldie but not a goodie. And the joke’s on me, it appears.’

  She stood up suddenly, her coffee untouched. The head on it gone cold, grimy as river scum. ‘That’s it, then?’ she said.

  Pen was taken aback. She had steeled herself for some sort of struggle, and it was as if the floor had fallen away just where she sat. It no longer felt like a seat of command. She could not speak.

  ‘I knew it was a bad omen,’ Kathleen said, and pulling her handbag gracelessly off the back of her chair, she strode out of the café.

  For a day or two Pen felt a weight had been taken off her, as if sandbags that had held her down were cast aside, and she floated somewhere in the upper atmosphere.

  She did not even want to think about what she had done. She wanted to go on floating, swelling balloonlike over the coming months, gliding into a certain future.

  In the morning she slept in. By afternoon, she drifted down the hill to Gatelands shopping centre – semiconsciously sticking to her own side of the city, as if it had some kind of force field to shield her from running into Kathleen. And in a way it did, because people from Kathleen’s part of town almost never set foot in places like this.

  Hills people did, rich or poor, because it was their nearest option. But however many new stores were brightly announced, or fast food venues sprang up, it still had the feel of grimy, dejected boredom cheaply assuaged.

  Vaguely she browsed for skirts and pants with elastic waists. Her belly was not even swollen yet, but she was paranoid about putting pressure on it with her normal clothes. And then there were baby items to price and compare, ideas to take home to Derrick.

  Pen had never really been a shopper. Partly because she’d never had the time; partly because goods were not what she desired. Unlike her dad, who’d had almost a fetish for beautiful things.

  ‘You see this suit,’ he’d say to her as a small, awe-struck child, adjusting his tie and cufflinks in front of a mirror. ‘This suit is Yves St Laurent.’

  He said it Wives St Laurent, and for years, before Pen learned French, she’d thought that was the way you said it. He said you had to have the right trappings if you wanted to mix with the right people; he said Jack was as good as his master.

  ‘A cat may look at a king,’ he’d say, ruffling her hair, and head off somewhere elegant, someplace where you had to impress people to get by, to move on up. Pen never knew who Jack was, or why the cat should look at the king. I’ve been to London to visit the Queen …

  He collected bits and pieces of bric-à-brac, old polished wooden furniture bought for a song. She’d imagined him singing to the sellers in his wavering, croony tenor, charming the items off people. Little Tommy Tucker sings for his supper … He was convinced they were undiscovered antiques that would bring him a fortune.

  When he left, these bits and pieces were all Pen and her mother had of him. Worthless.

  She’d never thought goods were the way to move on up. It was so much more complex than that. You could lose them in one stroke – fire, flood, one false move in your finances and then bankruptcy …

  No, what she’d worked for all this time could not be found in the plasma television screen or the limestone water feature or the backyard lap pool. Such things turned her stomach, like the smell of skewered meat coming from the shopping centre’s food hall, mixed with the reek of steaming curries and the unreal sweetness of those flavoured whipped coffees all the truanting teenagers and middle-aged ladies were sucking on.

  She felt faint, and pulled up a chair at the edge of the food court, resting her head on her arms. The tabletop was slightly sticky, and her stomach heaved again.

  ‘Pen! Pen Barber!’

  Despite the muzak and the crowd noise, she could hear her own name with perfect clarity.

  It was Jean Sargent, from Derrick’s school. But today she was laid-back, not in her teacher’s gear. Bermuda shorts and a tennis shirt; just a smudge of pale lipstick as if to smarten up her casuals.

  ‘Haven’t seen you for ages! Are you okay, Pen? You don’t look so good. I’d say morning sickness, but it’s afternoon.’ She laughed at her own joke.

  So obviously Derrick had talked at work. Everyone always knew everything at that school. ‘Except when a boy was suicidal,’ Pen considered grimly.

  ‘I’m fine, just a bit tired.’

  ‘A spot of baby shopping?’

  Pen nodded. ‘You’re not teaching this term?’

  ‘Oh, I am, I am. I’ve just got the day off. Actually it’s my leave, but I’ve opted to use it up as two days off per week. That way I keep my hand in – and keep an eye on my spot, as it were. You’ve no idea what backstabbers that lot can be.’

  She licked her lips and sat down opposite Pen, uninvited.

  ‘But perhaps you do. Derrick’s had a pretty swift rise, hasn’t he?’

  Pen pondered that. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Hasn’t he told you? About the deputy-headship?’

  Pen said nothing.

  Jean smiled a very small smile. ‘Well, it’s still only in discussion. But he’s certainly in line for it. Mellors has put in his resignation. Some say retiring, but it’s rather early for that. Personally I suspect he’s had enough of all the scandal lately.’

  ‘Are you referring to the tragedy?’ Pen said coldly. Strange how one choice of word could be such a clear signal.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’ Jean tapped the table. ‘Nice to be offered the position, but a shame it has to be on the back of something so nasty.’

  ‘Nasty.’ It was like speaking two different languages.

  ‘However you look at it. Still, I suppose if he takes it, the extra pay will surely come in handy,’ and here she gestured towards Pen’s belly, as if it were suddenly public property; an objective reality rather than an intimate part of her person. ‘You must be pleased.’

  ‘I’m sure Derrick will do whatever’s right in the circumstances,’ Pen said.

  But Jean was still on her own private wavelength.

  ‘And you’ll need that extra pay, having to give up work yourself,’ she said. ‘Do you miss the university?’

  ‘A little.’ Pen was cagey now.

  ‘My sister works there, actually. I don’t know if you know her – Alice Henley? She’s in admin. In the Arts building.’

  Pen’s heart quickened, but held steady. She didn’t know Alice Henley, and there was no reason Alice would know her.

  ‘No, doesn’t ring a bell.’

  ‘Well, it’s a small world. But then I guess you weren’t there very long really, were you? Are you having something to eat?’

  Pen shook her head. ‘I must get going, in fact.’

  Jean dispensed the usual banalities – you had to be grateful when it was just that, and not the veiled spite. Pen moved off swiftly, empty-handed. She’d get the clothing another time.

  She had not reckoned on the whole degrees of separation thing. Kathleen was in
another world – but how close, in some respects, that world was. Didn’t people always say, Perth is a small town, even though it was well on the way to two million people now, and stretched out over a hundred kilometres? True, Kathleen knew her only by a different surname. But a word here or there to the right person – the wrong person! – might conceivably bring her undone.

  Pen wished again that she could simply move away. Have the baby elsewhere.

  But that was even less likely now, if Derrick had the deputy-headship within sight.

  As she came to the huge glass exit doors of Gatelands, a sign caught her eye. Salon Paris-Chic. She thought with a pang of the Paris she would probably now never see. Certainly not with Kathleen. Sweet, generous Kathleen …

  But Pen had resolved against second thoughts: the baby made anything worth giving up. Family life, the sort she’d never had, was everything. It was only the business with Jean and her sister spooking Pen a little, thinking people would recognise, connect her. She had to put all that behind her.

  Under the salon’s sign was chalked, in a most un-chic manner, Walk-ins Welcome.

  A colour change would make her almost unrecognisable, but she was pretty sure the dye wouldn’t be safe for the baby. Still, there were other ways of looking radically different. So Pen walked in and asked the girl to cut her hair really short.

  It was just a little more weight lifted. She felt so light now, she was floating again. And cutting off your hair was a sign of commitment – like nuns entering the convent – she was re-entering her marriage. No turning back no turning back.

  14

  The house was a flurry of hired workers over the next few days, an intrusion Pen could hardly stand, but there was no other way the place could get finished with her pregnant and Derrick in his last weeks of term. Pen had spent hours on the net tracking down eco paints that wouldn’t give off fumes and harm the baby, but even so, Derrick was adamant she mustn’t do any of the work.

  She was clock-watching now, waiting for him to pick her up for a lunchtime appointment with the obstetrician.

  ‘I could drive myself.’

  ‘I want to be there, darling. I’ve got some free time at the end of the lunch hour, and it makes sense.’

  He wanted to do everything with her now. On the one hand, Pen was grateful; on the other hand, she’d grown used to having a bit of her own space. Hadn’t that been their plan all along, to open up to other people, not to be so fused with each other that they shut out the rest of the world?

  All she wanted now was to be by herself, and shut out the rest of the world …

  But it was his child too, of course. Even if in some bizarre way, she sometimes dreamt it had sprung from her passion for Kathleen. Passion: the very word made her feel sick now. Pen blocked it out of her mind – ridiculous.

  ‘Why now?’ she’d said, the first time, to the specialist. ‘After losing one, and trying for so many years? I thought I just couldn’t conceive.’

  The specialist was a woman of her own age, with a sharp angled haircut and expensively cut summer trousers. She crossed and uncrossed her knees each time she made a statement, as if self-conscious. Then Pen realised, ‘She’s flirting with Derrick.’

  Derrick seemed oblivious.

  ‘Well,’ the woman said, ‘sometimes it’s the anxiety that prevents it happening. The more you think about it, the more you can’t conceive. Without going into personal details, I once knew a woman who had so much trouble conceiving that she adopted a child, and then immediately fell pregnant.’

  ‘Because she’d stopped worrying,’ Pen murmured.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Like a china egg,’ Derrick said. They both looked at him. ‘I mean, when a hen won’t lay. It seems to work.’

  Everyone laughed.

  This second visit, the specialist was even more flirtatious, Pen thought. The woman wore a low-cut blouse, just a little less than professional, as if she’d dressed for the specific appointment. Surely not – maybe she just affected that manner to make the husbands feel included. To put them at ease with her handling of their wives’ bodies.

  Derrick was like a little boy again, perched on his stool, nodding at the doctor’s every pronouncement. Pen could hardly get a word in.

  ‘Is it going to be all right?’ she said finally.

  The doctor sat back; her smile gleamed faintly patronising.

  ‘At this stage, everything looks fine. But you know, Penny, there are no guarantees in this business. We’ll just take it month by month.’

  Pen stiffened. ‘You mean everything’s not all right.’

  Derrick intervened. ‘Pen, the doctor said everything looks fine. She’s just speaking generally.’

  He smiled and nodded at the woman again.

  ‘We just do the best we can, Penny,’ she said. ‘There’s no need to be fearful.’

  Afterwards in the car, Pen was disgruntled. She wanted to be annoyed with Derrick over the flirting, but in truth it hardly bothered her anymore. Once it would have outraged her.

  ‘I didn’t like that no guarantees business,’ she said to Derrick.

  ‘Lighten up, darling. They just have to be truthful. She didn’t mean there was anything wrong.’

  ‘It was cold. She’s so cold.’

  ‘That’s her job. You want a cool head when you’re giving birth, don’t you?’

  ‘Cool, maybe. Not cold. And she keeps calling me Penny.’

  ‘They can’t remember everything, darling.’

  ‘It’s not everything,’ Pen said. ‘It’s my bloody name!’

  Derrick looked surprised. ‘Calm down, sweetheart.’ He leaned over and squeezed her hand. ‘You know, that short hairdo really suits you. It’s taken me a while to get used to it. I kept thinking there was a stranger in the house. But it actually looks quite pretty.’

  ‘Buying me off with flattery,’ Pen thought. ‘After the flirt.’

  ‘Can you call in at the shopping centre on the way through?’ she said finally. ‘I’d like to pick up the mail.’

  It would save her a trip after school, since Derrick had the car today, and it wasn’t on his route home.

  ‘If you can be quick.’

  Funny how he always said that, as if the time it took were wholly at her discretion, and not dependent on the crowd or the queue. Derrick sat in the Volvo with the engine humming while she went up the brick steps, her walk permanently cautious now, her movements studied and slow. She unlocked the box and pulled out a pile of bent envelopes and junk mail slips.

  Among the bills and bank statements, she saw at once a letter addressed to Pen Stone.

  There was no return address, but she knew the handwriting was Kathleen’s.

  No time or privacy to open it now – if that was even the right thing to do. Pen shoved the envelope down to the bottom of her handbag, shuffled the other letters together, and turned back to the car.

  ‘Anything I should know about?’ Derrick checked over his shoulder and swung out into the traffic again.

  Pen shook her head.

  ‘What was that one you put away?’

  He said it lightly, as if it really didn’t matter and had only grazed the edge of his curiosity. But how surprising that he’d noticed. He must be watching closer than she thought.

  ‘Just a library overdue,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve already returned it.’

  Derrick looked at Pen, and then smiled, in sequence. The infinitesimal lapse in between chilled her. He was opaque; perhaps he had always been.

  For a few seconds it seemed as if all other people were opaque, like aliens, or automata. The big trucks, cement mixers, road trains grinding before and behind them, groaning up the highway to cross the hills and head east with their pointless greedy loads, endlessly coming and going – all seemed to be running by daemonic order, unrelated to human beings. Pen could hardly breathe, and it wasn’t just the carbon monoxide.

  ‘I wish you didn’t have to go back,’ Pen said as Derrick dropped h
er home. She would have liked to lock the doors and draw the blinds. She felt enormously tired. Wanted someone else to do it all for her.

  ‘It’s only a few hours till school’s out,’ Derrick said.

  When he had gone, she pulled out Kathleen’s letter, turning it over twice, three times, as if the outside could tell her anything. It was a fat letter; it had been posted the day before.

  She feared reading it, in case it shook her resolve. Kathleen might have been abrupt on the day they split up, but clearly she had a lot to say now. The temptation to read it – just to read it, not to respond – was huge.

  Yet it could only be anger, or pleading. Neither of which Pen felt up to facing.

  She couldn’t cross it out and say ‘Return to sender’, since there was no sender’s name. Though that would have been the best way to tell Kathleen it was futile – just as Kathleen herself had done to Derrick, more than a decade ago.

  Neither could she write ‘Not at this address’, or the thing would go back to some dead-letter office, she supposed, until someone figured out how to find ‘Pen Stone’, or else binned it. But still not a good idea, in case it ever fell into curious hands.

  She opened the Bushman stove: it was musty and foul from disuse, even though Derrick had cleaned out the ash at the end of winter.

  At first the letter, sealed and compact, wouldn’t catch, so she scrunched up some newspaper and thrust it in to build a little pyre.

  To crown the pile, she went into the former study and reached down the old letter Derrick had sent to Kathleen, the letter that had started everything. Now was the time, if ever. Pulled open and torn into pieces, it punched the air at once into lucid flame.

  Pen sat carefully by the glass door, and pulled the handle back into locking position.

  ‘You shouldn’t use the fireplace in this weather, you could send up burning ash and set off the whole bush out there.’

  Pen turned, incredulous. Her mother stood just inside the glass sliding door, untying a large-brimmed sunhat and patting her hair.

  ‘It’s not the fireplace,’ Pen said, standing up, ‘it’s the stove.’ But she knew her mother was right.