Claustrophobia

by Tracy Ryan

  Pen shuddered. Afterwards was the worst bit.

  Derrick leaned forward and covered her hands with his. ‘Darling, try deep breathing. You’ve got to drive a fair way, and without drawing any attention. Don’t be tempted to speed.’

  ‘I never speed,’ Pen said.

  Derrick smiled. ‘That’s my girl. And we keep our phones off. Don’t even try to leave voicemail unless something goes entirely wrong, okay? We have to be intelligent about this.’

  He cleared away the plates and filled the sink.

  ‘I’ll just knock these off and then we’ll get going. I’ll wait for you at the corner, that big rose garden on the highway. Bon courage!’ he said.

  Afterwards, Derrick pulled the Volvo back into the drive and parked as near the glass sliding door as he could. He drew a deep breath and looked at Pen.

  ‘Halfway there,’ he said. ‘But at the risk of making a bad pun, we’re not quite out of the woods yet.’

  There was a near-hysterical edge to his voice that made Pen swallow hard. She thought, ‘Derrick’s as mad as I am. To crack jokes at a time like this.’

  The hour’s drive to return the Corolla, though it had gone smoothly, was enough time alone to give her pause. On the drive back, ensconced together, they had argued, with great civility under the circumstances, about where Kathleen should be buried. The thick bush of the national park would be ideal, but the ground up here in the hills was too hard at this time of year, even using a mattock.

  They would have to go further afield. Derrick knew of a plantation – ‘an alien forest,’ Pen thought – in sandier ground. They would need spades and torches. Pinus pinaster, Pinus radiata – she remembered learning about them in Year Five. Importance to the economy. Everything was in there, stored in her memory – that was the horrible thing. The boys at school had yelled Penis! Penis radiata!

  ‘I’m going out to the shed,’ Derrick whispered now. ‘Wait for me inside.’

  Pen crept into the house and kept the lights low, more for her own sake than from any fear of being seen. She couldn’t bear the idea of anything stark, true, bright just now. Muted and blurred meant it was all unreal. She sat on the sofa with her back turned to the study, as if it could be willed out of existence, a collapsed space, like a black hole.

  The phone began to ring. Derrick entered hastily.

  ‘At this hour!’

  ‘Don’t pick up,’ Pen said. ‘Let it go to voicemail.’

  He let the phone ring out, then dialled up to hear the recording.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, pressing down on the cradle. ‘Pen, I have to deal with this.’

  It was Peter and Uwe, the exchange boys. Their flight had been turned back – some kind of fault with the plane – and delayed till the following day, so they were stuck at the airport. They’d been trying Derrick’s mobile and the landline all evening.

  Pen started laughing in disbelief.

  ‘Can’t they go back to the host families, just for tonight? I thought airlines gave you a motel room when there was trouble. We can’t put them up here. For God’s sake, Derrick.’

  ‘I don’t know about the motels. There was only one host family, and they’ve gone east for Christmas – left this morning – that’s why I took the boys down.’

  ‘There must be someone else who can take them. We don’t have time for this,’ Pen said. ‘We’ve got to move.’

  Derrick shot a glance at the study. ‘I know. But this could work for us, you know. In case we ever need an alibi. We let them bunk down here, we wait till they’re asleep, then we slip out. We’d be back before morning.’

  ‘Leave them alone in the house!’

  ‘They’re not babies, Pen. And it’s better than being alone at the airport all night.’

  ‘But if they heard – or saw something.’

  ‘We’ll be careful. We have to be careful anyway.’

  ‘It’s crazy.’ Pen covered her face with her hands. ‘Absolutely crazy. And what kind of alibi could they give, once they’re back in Germany?’

  ‘You never know what will happen further down the track. Anyway, if I don’t at least ring them back, we won’t have any sort of alibi – it will look as if we were out all night. You have to think forward, look back from the future, as it were.’

  ‘As it were,’ Pen repeated.

  Derrick rang and arranged to collect the boys as soon as he could.

  First it was a matter of getting the body through the lounge room and out the sliding door, into the shed.

  ‘Are you sure there’s enough room in there?’ Pen said.

  Derrick looked at her impatiently. ‘I know what my shed can hold.’

  The study’s new concertina door ran smoothly to one side. The swaddled tarpaulin bundle was hardening; nothing like a person. That would make it difficult to get into the car later, of course. Derrick planned to take out one side of the back seat if he could.

  They lumbered through lounge and kitchen, jolting at a huge clatter as they crossed the threshold. Pen swung her head around in the dark.

  One of Kathleen’s shoes had dropped onto the tiles.

  Pen stared.

  Derrick hissed, ‘Pick it up, don’t leave it there.’

  The shoe that had tripped her. That bore the familiar shape of her foot which Pen had even kissed. She felt the old frisson of desire and disgust. She thought of a fairytale in those books Derrick brought home from school, the Cinderella that Germans called Aschenputtel. It had a terrible refrain you didn’t find in English versions … Rucke di guck, Rucke di guck, Blut ist im Schuck. Turn back and look, turn back and look, there’s blood in the shoe. The shoe is too tight, the bride is not right …

  A wave of nausea nearly knocked her to the floor.

  ‘Pen, we have to hurry.’

  ‘Do I have to come?’

  Derrick looked at her sternly. ‘Some might say, if you’ve made the bed you have to lie in it,’ he said.

  Pen thought of her mother. Why should you get off scot-free?

  ‘You have to pull your weight,’ Derrick said. ‘Literally. Now let’s get this thing in the shed.’

  Thing. When the body was safely stowed, Derrick cleaned himself up briskly, and instructed Pen.

  ‘Put your dressing gown on over your clothes. Everything as normal as possible, okay? They’re good kids, these two – nothing to worry about. I’ll make them Milo or something and they can go straight to bed. You pull out the sleeping bags from the storeroom. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  Pen did as she was told, and set out mugs and a plate of fruit mince pies in case they were hungry.

  She picked up Kathleen’s handbag. Derrick of course would insist on getting rid of it. It felt warm and malleable and smelled of Kathleen. Pen stuffed it into the bedroom wardrobe. It could wait.

  Then she sat on the sofa. It was too warm for the dressing gown, and she pulled continually at the neck of her shirt for air.

  She was keeping vigil. She considered the German word, the French word, the Italian word for vigil. What did people do at a vigil? Pray, she supposed. ‘Vigil’, related to vigorous, full of life, she knew that from the root of the word; you could tune out anything if you focused on connections like this … and from vigour to rigour, and then rigor … she thought suddenly of Kathleen in the shed turning hard like that, all her soft suppleness in the chill grip of nothingness, stiffening to a thing, no longer a person. Empty of life.

  A shudder went through Pen’s spine, as if her own body would stiffen by association. Outside, something was hooting – a tawny frogmouth, perhaps, uncannily like a human sound.

  Then there were voices, real ones, on the doorstep, and Derrick fumbling with the key, so Pen ran forward to unlock the front door.

  ‘Darling, this is Uwe, Peter, and this is Mrs Barber.’

  The boys were tall, gangly, embarrassed but grateful to be there. They had that airport pallor that comes of standing or sitting upright for hours in sealed, air-conditioned halls.<
br />
  ‘Come through,’ Pen smiled, ‘I’ll make you some supper.’

  Derrick went out discreetly to make preparations. Pen sat with the boys in the kitchen while they munched on the little pies and drank Milo, asking them about life in Wuppertal, and what they would do for Christmas. As normal as possible.

  ‘You are lucky here,’ Uwe said. ‘Where I come from, if you want to get away, to live simply, there’s nowhere to go. Too many people! This is maybe the last place left on earth where you could still find a way. To invent – to reinvent yourself.’

  Pen thought, ‘He’s sixteen, and already he wants to reinvent himself.’

  Peter said, ‘Don’t worry about him, he’s a Menschenfeind! I like the big cities.’

  ‘You don’t like it here so much?’ Pen mused.

  Peter tried to be polite. ‘Here it’s beautiful, that’s true, but when I first came, I thought, with all this space, all this emptiness … It makes you so alone with yourself. I thought I would just zerfallen, break up, you know?’

  ‘Disintegrate,’ Pen said. She felt as if they could read her mind, see right through her.

  The boys laughed. ‘Yes, exactly,’ Peter said. ‘And I don’t like that feeling.’

  ‘I do,’ said Uwe, laughing and looking conspiratorially at Pen. Then in a low voice he said, ‘I am glad we got to meet you. We didn’t think you were real.’

  ‘Why on earth not?’ Pen was amused.

  Uwe looked at Peter. ‘Well, the other boys insisted you used to work at the college. But we did not expect you would be like this.’

  Pen said, ‘What do you mean?’

  But at that point Derrick stepped back into the kitchen, and Uwe shook his head with a smile. Pen inhaled deeply, pondering.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, gathering up the mugs, ‘we’d better let you boys get some sleep.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Uwe. ‘We’ve got a hell journey ahead of us.’

  Pen nodded. ‘So have we,’ she thought.

  Derrick sat upright on the bed to make sure they stayed awake, but it wasn’t necessary; Pen couldn’t have slept for the world. She lay on top of the sheets in her clothes and stared at the ceiling. They had to keep everything down to a whisper.

  Fortunately, the room the boys had bunked down in was easy to close off. After they’d settled, Pen and Derrick crept out to transfer the body the short distance from shed to car.

  Spades and torches were already packed. They would bypass the city on the northern side, still largely unlit and quiet at this hour.

  Derrick put the car in neutral and let it roll carefully, half walking it down the drive to minimise noise. Pen dragged the wheelie bin to the kerb to give her a feasible story in case the boys did hear something outside. She stumbled on a loose potato, forgotten from the afternoon that already seemed many lives ago. A dog down the street yapped three times. But nothing else stirred.

  It was like an anti-burial. You felt the urge to mark the spot, to place some token of remembrance that would differentiate it as sacred ground. Even when pets died, people did that. Not to acknowledge the site – that was the obscenity. To flatten the earth again and spread over it a covering of dry pine needles, a baffling against the cries of the dead. Pen thought of Rottnest, the outrage of building a holiday resort upon a mass grave. Generations of daytrippers oblivious or indifferent. As walkers or riders might traipse right here, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

  There was a strong wind lifting now, and the tops of the pines began to knock together, a ghoulish percussion, like a death march.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Derrick said, brushing off his gloved hands and carrying his tools back to the Volvo, parked on a nearby roadside.

  En route he said, ‘Pen, there are some more things I need to know, and we’d better discuss them before we get back to the house.’

  ‘Okay.’ She felt passive and calm now, willing to take direction.

  ‘This woman – Kathleen – is going to be missed pretty quickly. I mean, right on Christmas, you know. It’s not going to be long before someone reports …’

  He drove smoothly, waiting, but Pen did not know what to say.

  ‘She must have family?’

  Pen shook her head.

  ‘But there’ll be friends, neighbours. Colleagues. Everyone has someone. How strongly – I mean – will people expect you to know where she is? I’m trying to get the lie of the land here. What we’re up against.’

  Pen adjusted the air vents but still she could hardly breathe.

  ‘What we’re up against,’ she said. We. It occurred to her now that there was only we. There was no Pen apart from Derrick, because Derrick knew all. If he had not loved her, he could have turned her in.

  She stared at him now, imprinting his expression on her very retina, like a newborn creature that has to remember in order to survive. If Derrick chose, even for a moment, to let go … She must never, never alienate him. There was no longer anything to hold back. Pen tugged at her collar again; again she could barely breathe.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said finally. ‘She wouldn’t be expected back at work till February, when teaching starts again. But as for friends … I never met them, Derrick. She was planning to go to Paris.’

  ‘To Paris.’ Derrick swallowed. ‘On her own?’

  ‘To stay with some people. But maybe she cancelled, or she would have left by now.’

  ‘Well, that may work for us, if her neighbours think she was going away. Was she a talker?’

  So clear-cut, practical. But you had to keep a level head.

  ‘She might have said stuff. Though I asked her not to.’

  ‘You were discreet,’ Derrick murmured. ‘Of course you were.’

  Pen strained for traces of sarcasm, but there were none. He reached left and squeezed her hand.

  ‘It’s all right, Pen. You don’t need to doubt me. I’m the same as I’ve always been. Except more so.’ He laughed. ‘You might as well tell me everything – you can’t escape me now, can you?’

  Pen wanted to laugh too, but she wasn’t sure he was joking.

  The orange light of the streetlights flashed every now and then across his ginger beard.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘the facts. Who else might know?’

  ‘There was one woman she mentioned me to, on the phone,’ she continued. ‘But I don’t know how much – at that stage she didn’t know where I lived … There’ll be an investigation, won’t there? And if Kathleen could track me down, she must have talked … oh, Derrick.’

  Derrick clutched her shoulder. ‘Don’t panic, Pen. We will get through this, I promise you. You’re a capable woman, and you’ve taught me how to be capable too, over the years. Look how far we’ve come! And we have a very strong incentive now,’ he said, sliding his hand down to rest on her belly. ‘In any case, if they don’t find the body they have nothing.’

  ‘That’s a very big if,’ Pen whispered, her throat dry.

  Derrick smiled. ‘I can handle a big if. And so can you. So long as we pull together.’

  His voice was soft and sure. Before long, Pen was drifting into a numb and bobbing sleep, as if in the lightest of boats, a halcyon’s nest.

  She woke to the smell of pancakes and maple syrup, and the warm cadences of male voices carrying from the kitchen. She didn’t remember getting to bed, but clearly Derrick had matters under control.

  She thought, ‘Now I am permanently under his control.’

  If she could lie here forever, and not let the day begin …

  But it would begin, and it was only a matter of whether you let it crash over you like a king wave, or caught that wave and rode it to safety.

  She showered, dressed brightly, as Derrick had suggested, in a loose cotton sundress and slingbacks, and dug Kathleen’s handbag reluctantly out of the wardrobe. It must be dumped in a bin somewhere – on the way back from the airport, perhaps. But first she would have to remove any sign of identification.

  The bag was clean and tidily ar
ranged inside, as Pen knew it would be. There was a purse with a small amount of cash, a booklet of cards, a chequebook, a comb and a lipstick. The lipstick said Café au lait on the base. Pen wound it up and touched the tip, angled and slightly curved where Kathleen’s mouth had taken its stroke. She went to the mirror and watched herself paint a perfect cupid’s bow where her own dull mouth had been.

  Then she tucked the lipstick into the soft patch pocket of her sundress. Cards and chequebook and comb would be burned; the cash she could drop into one of those airport donation bins. The idea of spending it seemed indecent. But the lipstick she would keep until it was worn down, eaten away. There had to be something she could keep.

  The boys were still at breakfast when she came out. Uwe’s blue eyes opened wide under his grassy blond fringe. His mouth was shiny with syrup.

  ‘Mrs Barber,’ he exclaimed. ‘You look lovely.’

  Pen smiled. ‘Thank you, Uwe. Did you boys sleep okay?’

  ‘Like a stone,’ Peter said.

  ‘In English,’ Pen corrected, ‘we say, like a log.’

  The boys laughed.

  Uwe said, ‘I kept dreaming and then waking. There was an engine, very early – maybe someone goes to work?’

  ‘Probably the rubbish truck,’ Derrick said, catching Pen’s glance and pouring her a decaf.

  Uwe pulled a chair out for her, and sat gazing as she drank. ‘You will be a beautiful mother,’ he said.

  Pen blushed. It felt good to have a compliment, but slightly sickly coming from one so young, though he was already taller than Derrick. Uwe was as wide open as a flower, and the way he’d said beautiful made her tingle. He was rather beautiful himself, in that girlish stage some boys went through. She averted her gaze, not knowing how to answer.

  ‘Oi, stop embarrassing her,’ Derrick said, ‘or we’ll have to pack you off to Wuppertal.’ He got up to run the sink, patting Pen gently on the back.

  ‘Now eat up, darling,’ he said, yawning and stretching with satisfaction, ‘and we’ll get this show on the road.’