Claustrophobia

by Tracy Ryan

  Not exactly something I can argue with. A baby changes everything: no contest.

  She lay back on the floor, staring at the ceiling, and began to laugh.

  ‘Pen? Are you all right?’ Derrick stood behind her. ‘What are you doing down there?’

  She turned to look at him, smiling, her cheeks bitterly wet.

  ‘I’m fine, darling.’ She got up groggily, and gave him a hug. ‘How did you get on?’

  He recounted his trip to Perth and back, but she did not really take it in.

  ‘Who was that in the silver car, darling?’

  Pen stared, wondering how long he’d been home before coming in.

  ‘Dunno,’ she said. ‘Mormons called by, but I didn’t see their car. I just said I wasn’t interested.’

  She no longer even noticed she was lying.

  ‘Send ’em to your mum.’ Derrick smiled. It was a longstanding joke between them, the way Mrs Stone would argue for hours with the Mormons, neither side budging an inch. ‘By the way, love, why are there spuds all over the drive? I nearly went head over heels.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry. I dropped them.’ Pen took one from his hand and tossed it like a juggler’s ball as they made their way to the kitchen.

  Two days later, Derrick had to run his German exchange students to the airport. Pen stayed home in the cool, watching a DVD and eating a bowl of strawberries. She still had a craving for sweet things, and the obstetrician said they were good for folic acid. Even if she had showered them with sugar.

  The DVD was one Kathleen had suggested, but they’d never ended up watching it. Total Eclipse. Pen had spotted it a few days ago in a Gatelands bargain bin.

  Derrick had read the cover and demurred.

  ‘What do you want to watch something like that for?’

  ‘I thought you’d be interested, since it’s French lit. And you usually quite like Leonardo DiCaprio.’

  Derrick had turned away, shrugging. ‘Sure. What people do is their own business, you know me. But gay stuff’s not my thing.’

  ‘Oh.’ Pen had smiled to herself. True, Derrick was mostly liberal-minded, so why did he blush? ‘Well, I can watch it some time by myself.’

  Midway through the film there was a knock and a rattle at the back sliding door. Outside: Kathleen’s wan face, pressed to the glass as if under a microscope slide. Pen jumped up, shooting the remote at the screen to stop the movie, and shoved the case under a sofa cushion.

  ‘Please let me in,’ Kathleen called through the glass.

  Pen could hardly stand there and say no. She opened the door and Kathleen bolted in.

  ‘What is it? Are you all right? You don’t look so good.’

  ‘Can I sit down?’

  Pen nodded. Kathleen took her place by the cold hearth, the long-disused fireplace. She knocked Derrick’s favourite floor lamp as she sat down, but caught it with her foot. The armchair sighed as she sank into it.

  ‘I just wanted to see you again. It’s been a lot to process, Pen.’

  ‘And?’

  Kathleen frowned. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘About the baby? Still?’

  ‘No,’ Kathleen said carefully. ‘The baby is one thing. I just don’t believe it’s over. I don’t feel it is. I think you are fooling yourself. Because you want to conform, you want to play happy families and have things ‘normal’.’

  Pen could sense her adrenaline rising.

  ‘I thought we agreed …’

  ‘Just hear me out, Pen. I don’t want to fight with you. I want you to consider. If I were a man –’

  ‘You’re not a man.’

  ‘My point is, what we had doesn’t just go away. You can’t switch it off like a – like a movie.’ Kathleen nodded toward the television screen. ‘I understand you want to do the right thing by your – your child. But how can you be sure it is the right thing? When it’s me you care for?’

  ‘It’s not,’ Pen said sharply. ‘Now I really think you should leave. We’ve had this out already.’

  ‘No, we haven’t. We’ve had you relying on me to pull out quietly, for the sake of your little ménage. It’s not doing either of us any good to plaster this over. In the long run it won’t be good for your baby, either.’

  ‘It’s my husband’s baby too,’ Pen said curtly. ‘You might sit in his chair, but you can’t fill his boots,’ she thought bitterly. ‘Just what do you propose, that you and I bring up a child together? How do you think that would work? It’s completely insane.’

  Kathleen stood up suddenly, and stepped towards her.

  ‘I don’t know the answers,’ she said. ‘But you need to talk to him about us.’

  Pen had a vision of the three of them, reduced to stark pronouns: him, us. Names, personalities, histories dropping away like flesh to leave a skeletal geometry. The triangle.

  ‘I can’t do that, Kathleen,’ she insisted. What right had this woman, after promising to back off, to roll up again making demands?

  But had she promised anything? How foolish of Pen, to be so relieved after Kathleen had left last time. She should have known it would never be that simple.

  ‘Pen, if you won’t tell him, I will.’

  ‘You wouldn’t. Not now I’m pregnant.’

  ‘I will. Because I love you.’

  Kathleen grabbed Pen by the shoulders, her arms stiffly extended, as if she could squeeze or force compliance into her. Pen thought of ‘Oranges and Lemons’. Here comes a chopper, to chop off your head.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ she hissed.

  Kathleen laughed bitterly. ‘You used to like being touched. So what’s changed? Don’t you miss me?’ She leaned forward to kiss Pen.

  The kiss scorched her mouth, spot fire before a conflagration. Pen felt her revulsion and her fury rising, and pushed Kathleen away with an almighty thrust.

  Something on the floor caught Kathleen’s heel as she slid. She slipped backwards, arms flailing, and knocked her head against the stone mantel.

  Veering sideways, she snagged the edge of the step and fell into the sunken kitchen with a shocking thud.

  ‘Oh, Kathleen! I’m sorry. I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to do that.’

  The moment’s thrill, the rush of self-assertion, had faded as quickly as it flared. It had happened so fast, she could not move to stop it – could she? Pen’s arm trembled – surely she had not pushed so hard? Those bloody steps!

  But Kathleen lay limp in a way Pen had never seen, even in sleep.

  ‘Kathleen?’ Pen got down on the floor and shook her very gently.

  Pen had no first-aid training – she thought of what she’d seen on TV, on film: don’t move the person, feel for a pulse.

  How did you bring someone round? Smelling salts, a slap on the cheek? Everything whirled in her head. Don’t make a Wirbel, Derrick often said, German for whirlpool. Derrick would be here soon.

  Derrick would be here soon.

  There was no pulse. But Pen had always had trouble finding pulses.

  She ran to the bedroom and grabbed a cotton blanket, draping it over Kathleen, and then put her ear to her chest.

  Surely Kathleen had only passed out. Unconscious. Only, as if that were not bad enough.

  But blood was seeping from under her lovely hair.

  Wasn’t that blood on the edge of the Toodyay stone, where she had clipped it? Glinting along with the quartzite, like something warm and organic. And then the impact of the kitchen floor.

  Pen raised Kathleen’s head ever so slightly, and almost fainted at the gash she saw in the back of the skull. She felt her gorge rise, her own heartbeat a drastically loud contrast.

  She must call an ambulance. But if Kathleen was already dead … Did you still call an ambulance when someone was dead? Dead. Pen’s brain could not take it in. She knelt by Kathleen again and listened at her chest, but she knew nothing would change.

  She was still kneeling there, in a stupor, an hour or so later when Derrick appeared at the sliding door.

>   He stepped in slowly, halting at the sight of them.

  ‘It was an accident,’ Pen stammered. ‘An intruder.’

  Even now she could lie. Though it was partly true. Wasn’t it an accident?

  ‘She slipped, Derrick, and I think she’s cracked her head.’

  Derrick crouched and urgently checked over the body. ‘Have you called for help?’

  ‘Yes. No. I haven’t. I can’t.’

  ‘What? What happened?’

  Pen said nothing.

  ‘Why haven’t you called?’ Derrick said, standing again, helpless, looking around. ‘We’d better get an ambulance.’ Then he said, ‘But the car, in the driveway …?’

  ‘We can’t. Derrick, I pushed her. It was – it was self-defence. But they won’t believe me.’

  ‘You can’t just let her die.’ He felt again for a pulse, then for a heartbeat. ‘Oh Christ, Pen, I think she is dead.’

  Pen nodded.

  ‘The longer we leave it to call someone,’ Derrick said, ‘the more trouble … Didn’t you try to revive her? How hard could you have pushed her?’ He rubbed at his beard and looked around wildly, his gaze snagging in the living room. ‘Pen, is that her handbag?’

  Pen turned in a daze. She hadn’t even noticed Kathleen’s sleek little beige clutch bag, left beside the armchair.

  ‘This is someone you know, isn’t it? The car,’ he said suddenly. ‘I saw the same car …’

  Pen didn’t answer.

  ‘I think you need to tell me what’s been going on, and you’d better hurry.’

  Pen tilted back her head. Derrick took her face in his hands, an adult quizzing a child.

  ‘Is it something to do with that stalker – that card you got, by any chance?’

  Pen sat back on her haunches, wrapping her arms around her calves.

  ‘Don’t you recognise her?’ she said coldly.

  Derrick stared. ‘Should I? I’ve never seen her in my life before.’

  Pen considered that, blankly. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, of course I’m sure!’

  She sat a few minutes, rocking where she crouched, and groaning now and then. Finally she said, ‘Derrick? Derrick, you’re going to have to help me.’

  Surprisingly, the bald facts didn’t take that long to recount. Pen felt as if she were telling him the plot of some awful movie.

  She had no choice. But there were still some smaller options, nuances. She could leave some things out. Tell him how she’d hunted Kathleen down, harassed her, sent her emails, out of jealousy and possessiveness, all those months ago – but leave out the affair …? Leave out her thoughts of murder?

  Yet wherever she skipped over, or summarised, Derrick pressed until he had all the details. It wasn’t as deeply humiliating as she had feared. It was more of a relief, to let out all she had stored up.

  The worst of it was, Derrick didn’t stop staring the whole time. His eyes never once left hers. She watched for some change, some fluctuation in him that would tell her it was over between them, finally.

  But he did not so much as flicker.

  When she stopped at last he said, ‘And that’s everything?’

  She nodded.

  Derrick got up, went over to where Kathleen’s body lay, and pulled the blanket over her face, as easily as if he had done it before. Then he turned back to Pen.

  ‘Pen, I believe it was an accident. I don’t know why I believe it, after all these months of lies. Lies, my God! It may be that I don’t know you at all as I thought I did. But I do know you’re not a murderer.’

  He stopped, closed his eyes, then opened them again.

  ‘Having said that, I can’t see anyone else believing it. The way it all stacks up.’

  ‘I’ll have to go to the police,’ Pen said. ‘Even if I have to tell them about – about the affair … Derrick, I can say it was self-defence, it really was.’

  Derrick shook his head slowly from side to side in a way that unnerved her completely.

  ‘Pen, do you not understand they will look into everything? It’s not that simple. If you go to the police, you have to accept you will be arrested and charged, and it doesn’t look good. At the very least, you’ll end up having our baby behind bars.’ He hugged her absently, stroking her stomach. ‘If baby even survives.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘We have to face facts. Even if you pleaded – I don’t know – temporary insanity or something, which is what I think it must have been – God knows what you’d get.’

  He held her tighter and kissed her.

  ‘I can’t believe you would let things get so out of hand. Why didn’t you talk to me?’

  Pen shrugged, teary. ‘When I found that letter …’

  ‘I’d forgotten all about that stupid letter! Christ, Pen!’

  ‘But you kept it.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe – but only to remind myself how idiotic, how obsessed I’d been. Lost track of it years ago. Barely gave it another thought. That was another life.’

  ‘Another life,’ Pen thought. You could run through so many and they wouldn’t go away, but you couldn’t get them back. Not one of them. A paradox. The presence of the observer alters the nature of the observed. You can’t step into the same river twice. Her tired head was milling with maxims.

  ‘I couldn’t talk to you,’ Pen said. ‘I was afraid.’

  Derrick shook his head. ‘Well, there’s much more to be afraid of now.’

  ‘Don’t!’ She clutched at him.

  ‘If you’d asked me, I could have told you all about it. The Kathleen I knew wasn’t remotely like – like that woman.’

  ‘I don’t understand. It had to be her.’ A chill descended through Pen’s limbs. ‘I have killed a woman, and not even the woman I thought she was.’

  ‘Well, it’s not. And in any case it was her married name, Nancarrow. And she was much older. Pen, I was in a bad way back then, I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.’

  ‘I thought you loved me. I believed you,’ Pen said.

  ‘But I did! I always have. I knew it in my bones when we met. I just – had a lot to work through. You should have trusted me.’ Derrick ran his fingers through his hair, pulling at the ends in agitation.

  ‘You’ve made a terrible mistake, Pen. But that mistake is beside the point, God knows. Even if it had been the same woman … What did you think you were doing?’

  He was almost in tears now, but he wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand.

  ‘And I don’t believe this lesbian thing, either,’ he said. ‘I’m not a bigot, or a prude, but you’ve never shown any inclination that way. You’ve always been – normal with me! I think you just got led – led astray, up the garden path, whatever.’

  Pen did not contradict him. She no longer knew what was true. Normal, she whispered bitterly to herself.

  ‘What am I going to do?’

  ‘You mean, what are we going to do.’ Derrick took a deep breath and stretched back his shoulders, as if testing his strength. ‘We’re in this together, Pen. We always have been, even if you didn’t fully understand that. Wait here.’

  He went outside and after some time reappeared with a roughly folded tarpaulin that must have been in the shed.

  ‘First we’re going to move the body somewhere out of sight,’ he said, ‘and then we’ll work out a plan.’

  The body. It was already a body, not Kathleen.

  Derrick wrapped the body swiftly and dragged it up the steps, across the living room and into the study, then shut the concertina door.

  16

  Cover of darkness would mean a long wait, since the sun wasn’t setting till quite late now. But they could see no other way. Derrick said it would take two of them to lift the body into the back of the Volvo (Pen thought bitterly, ‘Pregnant women are not supposed to lift things’) and two to take it out at the other end.

  The other end was still a matter to be settled.

  Then there was the question of t
he silver Corolla. Dumping it somewhere would only draw attention.

  ‘I assume you’ve been to this woman’s house,’ Derrick said, neutrally.

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘Just wait. I think the best thing is to take her car back to her house. Nobody has any reason at this stage to think she’s missing, do they? If I drive down separately in the Volvo … I can pick you up afterwards. At night, nobody’s going to notice who parks the car, especially if it’s a woman as usual. Whereas they’ll soon notice if the car doesn’t come home at all. Yes, I think that’s the way to do it.’

  He was talking as much to himself as to Pen, who let everything wash over her with an irresistible force.

  ‘You’ll have to wear gloves when you drive,’ he said. ‘No doubt your fingerprints will be all over things at her house, but that’s not a problem in the way the car might be. You’ve never been fingerprinted for anything, have you?’

  ‘No,’ Pen said. Schools in the last few years had discussed fingerprinting for using the library or office equipment, but thank goodness Boys’ College had never agreed with it. All the things you had to think of …

  ‘Now, go and take a shower,’ Derrick said. ‘You’re going to feel very tired by the time this night is over, and you’ll need all your strength. I’ll make dinner.’

  Pen winced. ‘I don’t think I can eat.’

  ‘Rubbish – you have to. You can’t just think of yourself now – food is vital for the baby. Just do as I say, and I’ll take care of it.’

  It was appalling how much better she felt after the shower. She even washed her hair.

  She dressed in a clean pair of navy cotton jeans and a black shirt, as Derrick directed. Blending in with the coming darkness, like a puppeteer. It would be a starry night – but would there be a moon?

  Derrick had swiftly grilled lentil burgers and opened a can of veg ravioli.

  ‘It’s a bit of a mishmash but it will do,’ he said. ‘Get that into you … Then as soon as it’s dark, we get the car thing out of the way first, because that’s the most visible. Otherwise, someone will spot it in our drive eventually. Besides, we’ll need to get the Volvo up close to the house – afterwards.’