by Ross Watkins
The neighbours joked that Mal and Glenda were permanently preparing for a jumble sale that would never happen. Jumbled was one word, cluttered was another; Glenda preferred eclectic. Mal had his garage but Glenda had her own paraphernalia. After retiring from nursing with a disability pension due to her terrible back, she took up crocheting patchwork blankets for the local animal shelter, and had collected elephant figurines ever since a friend from the shelter brought one back as a gift from Kenya. After then, people gave her elephants if they didn’t know what else to get. It was a collection grown by convenience rather than choice.
Ever since that day at the medical centre, she’d been feathering a new vision for her future, one without Mal, and winning a lottery house was a significant part of that vision.
She received the brochures in the mail, but she also used the internet to take virtual tours of these houses. She especially liked the furnishings – picture frames with the kinds of artworks she’d never choose for her walls at home. She couldn’t help feeling a strange attraction to somebody else’s taste. And the fact that these houses could be hers, with a handful of tickets and some luck, was the ultimate draw. Yet at heart it was less about her than about her children and grandchildren. People often asked what she would do with the house if she won, but it didn’t really matter if she sold it or moved into it because the outcome would be the same: she would live with Adrian and his family in her old age, helping out with meals and looking after Tam and any other little ones they might be blessed with. God willing. Whether that life was in a prize home or a home purchased with money from its sale was unimportant.
Glenda retrieved the brochure from the bin, then went inside to put the kettle on. Through the kitchen window she could see Mal at the back table, sipping grappa, doing sudoku. She filled the kettle, depressed the power button and was unfolding the brochure on the kitchen benchtop when the doorbell rang. ‘Are you expecting anyone?’ she called to Mal, out of habit. He shook his head.
The bell chimed again as Glenda walked towards it. Her intuition felt active again, her internal barometer indicating that change waited on the other side of the door. Through the glass she saw the figures of Tam and Nguyet, suitcases in hand.
ADRIAN
The cops dropped Adrian home in a police vehicle. He wasn’t cuffed, but that wouldn’t have made any difference. The damage was already written.
He had to knock on the front door because he was without keys. Noo answered. Beside her, in the doorway, was a suitcase. In the lounge room he could hear Tam playing a video game – the ping and kapow of stylised barbarism.
‘You said you’d wait it out with me,’ Adrian told her. No hello.
She was clearly confused.
‘Yesterday at the hospital. You said you’d wait it out.’
Noo was incredulous now. Of course she only meant she’d wait at the hospital. She hadn’t known, then, about all this. She’d had to get the female officer to explain as he was put into the back of the police vehicle. She’d had to lie to Tam. This is what she told Adrian as she picked up the suitcase and walked it out to the boot of the car.
‘Can’t I at least defend myself? In my words?’
But she wasn’t to be stopped. She called out to Tam, who reluctantly turned off the console. He came outside and put an arm around his dad’s leg, then got into the car. The engine kicked over and Noo reversed out of the driveway. She pulled up alongside the concrete path and wound down the window. Adrian walked over, hopeful, but she’d only stopped to tell him about the note.
‘What note?’
The note she found nailed to the door when she came home from the school run, after the police had finished going through the house, his study, taking things away. She’d put it in the kitchen, in an envelope.
Adrian nodded but his heart cleaved. From the back seat Tam waved his little hand, cheerfully, none the wiser. At least Adrian could feel grateful for that.
Inside, he found the note on the cutting board. It was handwritten. Crudely. But the characteristics of the writing belied the force that six words could create.
I’m coming for you sick fuck.
Adrian folded the note back into the envelope, then tore the whole thing up and put the pieces in the bin. He pulled a bottle of wine from the cupboard and poured a glass, drank it rapidly. He went to pour another but decided on his dad’s home-made grappa instead. He didn’t like it much but taste held no meaning at that moment. He poured, drank, poured another.
He sat at the dining table and stared at the bin in the corner of the kitchen.
You’re not thinking right, he realised. You shouldn’t have done that. You should keep it.
Then Bowman’s face came to mind and the name finally occurred to him: Danny. Danny Bowman. The recognition stirred Adrian to get up, retrieve the note and get a roll of sticky tape. He downed his grappa and poured another, and sat at the table to piece the note together. When he had finished he found a new envelope and put the note inside, sealed it and placed it in a desk drawer in his study. He could report it but he didn’t want the cops on his doorstep yet again. He’d keep it for the trial – if it came to that.
His study had been ransacked. The police had been orderly enough – there weren’t papers all over the floor and drawers upturned. They’d left neat piles of inconsequentials: the documentation they could access electronically, folders of curriculum papers, receipts, a stack of Tam’s drawings, other bits and pieces. But they’d taken what he had suspected they’d target. And although he’d resigned himself to this fact, he couldn’t help feeling violated, staring at the gap on his desk where the computer normally sat. He thought about the emails from Akker and those stories and his guts roiled.
He closed the door and went back to the kitchen. Over more grappa he wondered why he wasn’t that upset about Nguyet, or worried – but there were few places she could go, and the mostly likely was his mother’s. Glenda would always welcome Noo and Tam with open arms, regardless of their awkward cultural differences, like Noo’s refusal to cheek-kiss, and Mal’s doubt about Adrian’s choice of wife. His father had never said anything, but words weren’t necessary.
Mal had been at the back table doing sudoku the day Adrian told his mother about the Vietnamese girl he’d met on the internet; he realised Mal had been listening when the old man’s laughter burst through the kitchen curtain. Adrian knew the words ‘mail-order bride’ had been on repeat in his father’s head ever since. It wasn’t long after that Adrian left for Vietnam during the term break, to discover whether their relationship would be as promising in person as online. They’d been Skyping for almost a year by then, so it wasn’t impulsive. Adrian had known there was a good chance he would return married, but he didn’t tell his mother that before he left. He couldn’t recall ever lying to her during his adult life, but there was a difference between lying and not volunteering information. She simply had to ask the right questions. She rarely asked the truly hard ones.
They held an unofficial wedding ceremony when Nguyet arrived in Australia several months later. A modest celebration, with a mock exchange of rings and iteration of vows. But a slight shake of the head during the ceremony was all it took to make Mal’s impressions clear. Adrian didn’t know why he’d even looked at his father at that moment, but it occurred to him that perhaps, in some masochistic corner of his heart, he desired his father’s approval. How predictable. How sad. Especially considering that when he’d first introduced Nguyet to his family, Mal had joked about her being flat-chested and wondered if she was ‘one of them Asian girly-boys’. He couldn’t pronounce her name easily so he persisted in calling her ‘Lim’ when she was around, or ‘Lim the Shim’ when she wasn’t. Adrian always pulled him up on that but to no effect. Tam’s arrival didn’t change much. The boy’s name was a source of confusion for Mal, who, when it was announced, gave nothing more than a derisive ‘rightio’.
Y
ep, they’d be with Glenda and Mal now, suffering the indignities of his father’s racism, his mum getting cross, telling him to stop it. She was an accepting woman when it came to most things, and Adrian often sensed her empathy when it came to Mal’s brusqueness. She too knew what it was to endure him.
Adrian put the glass on the kitchen sink and turned on the light. It was evening now and he knew he had to make the call. The thought crossed his mind that the home phone might be tapped, but he wondered if that was just something that happened on television shows to increase the drama. It didn’t matter, though, because calling Glenda was no longer a choice. There was a decent chance she already knew.
He picked up the phone and dialled the number he knew so well. When he heard the dial tone, he realised he was hoping that Noo had already done his dirty work.
‘Mum.’
‘Hello, darling.’
‘Is she there?’
‘They’re both here. They’re fine. And they can stay for as long as needed.’
‘Okay, but hopefully it won’t be for long.’ He tried not to slur his words. The grappa was taking hold.
‘I don’t know why she’s chosen to do this right now, though,’ Glenda said. ‘Surely you need her support.’
‘So she told you.’
‘Well, I suppose so.’
‘About the accident.’
‘Yes.’
He heard an intake of breath. He knew this feeling. This breathing it through.
‘And the rest of it,’ she said.
And now he was the one breathing it through. Just like when he was a teenager, confessing to her something wholly humiliating. And yet this was far grimmer than admitting to his first drink or trying weed.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, though he didn’t know whether he was apologising for not being the one to tell her or for something harder to think about. Perhaps it was for everything – for all the things he’d never shared with her, the things he knew would rock her to the point of … if not heart attack, then at the very least a heartache so great it would dismantle her understanding of her family and the disgrace they had succumbed to.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter who told me.’
Guilt.
‘It’s my fault you found out that way.’
Then she referred to him by name and said that she loved him. This, he knew, was the beginning of her undoing.
‘But I’ve got so many things wrong,’ he said. ‘I should’ve handled it all some other way.’ He thought of Fielder’s questions.
‘What’s the school doing about it?’
Zilch. ‘They’re doing what they have to,’ he said.
‘Are they on your side?’
‘I’m sure they’re trying to keep a lid on it.’
‘But who’s on your side?’
He should’ve asked himself that already. Now Adrian realised he needed to talk to someone from the school – someone on staff with an ear for student chatter. He thought of a couple of people.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t been home all that long, and the police took my mobile and computer. I’ll make some calls, though.’
‘So you’re not still teaching?’
‘I’m suspended with pay until the police sort it out.’
‘And what did the police say?’
‘There isn’t enough evidence to charge me yet. But they said not to go anywhere.’ He considered making a joke about bussing it to Queensland.
‘We can lend you a car. Not to leave, of course. Just to get around.’
His mother knew him better than he knew himself sometimes. ‘It’s okay. I’ll be fine.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘But …’ Here was the hardest question of all. ‘What are you going to tell Dad?’
Again, her intake of breath. Adrian held his.
‘I’ll tell him the truth. I’ll tell him that you’ve had an accident and you need to borrow our car. There’s nothing else to say at the moment. You’re not guilty, are you?’
*
Adrian was severely fatigued and drunk and wondered how he would continue to manage the run of emotion, but he needed to talk to someone from school. He thought of Witmer. As head of English, Witmer would be across it all. He had the personality to see through the politics, to know the black from the white. Some savvy student had nicknamed him Mr Meek, and while it wasn’t unjustified, he was also adept at strategy. He was a mover – people just didn’t suspect it. Adrian could count on him for some inside knowledge.
He picked up the phone, dialled.
‘Witmer.’
‘Adrian?’
‘Yeah, look, I was hoping we—’
‘I’m sorry, Adrian, but I’m not comfortable talking to you right now.’
‘Can I call back?’ He knew his was the voice of a desperate man, but he didn’t care.
‘No, you don’t understand. I’m not comfortable talking to you at all. This is wrong. What you did to that boy is wrong.’
Adrian tried to think of some meaningful rebuttal. He had nothing.
‘I’m sorry,’ Witmer said, but Adrian was already hanging up.
Next he tried Rafiq. Rafiq was a good friend. Sometimes the two of them played squash on Thursday nights, and he and his wife had come around for dinner twice. They were decent people, progressive. Amy was a new Muslim. They had two boys, eight and six. If he couldn’t count on Rafiq, then he couldn’t count on anyone.
He dialled the number. It rang out. He tried again, and this time the ringing cut short, like the phone was abruptly switched off. Like what someone does when they’re rejecting a call.
Adrian put the phone down and rubbed at the wadding on his nose. He peeled the bandage off, looked at the gauze and placed it blood-side-up on the edge of the kitchen sink. He put a fingertip to the laceration and pulled it away to see fresh blood. He’d removed the bandage too early and torn some of the clotted blood away. He had to be more patient. This wasn’t going to be resolved so quickly.
‘Control yourself,’ he said aloud.
He then picked up the glass from the sink and pitched it against the wall.
*
He lives only a ten- or fifteen-minute drive from the old house. He sometimes imagines going back there to have a poke around, to see what recollections still haunt the place. The good ghosts, the not-so-good ghosts. He wonders what he would discover there, though. The bricks and fibrocement are still in place – he knows this, has seen this from a distance, the startled face still there, its eyes wide open – but Adrian has come so far since then that the memories have become stretched. He feels the tension in them – the fraying of smell and sound and touch and taste. The visions are the strongest yet time has uncoiled them as well. These memories, they are fraught.
Yet there are certain knowledges etched in his physiognomy. His skin might renew itself every few weeks but that does not alter its grain, and the imprint it leaves. He knows things, even while he does not know how he knows them. And this was always his difficulty: by the time he came to realise what had gone on, what he had done with his own hands and lips and fingertips and tongue, five or six years had passed. It was a revelation that arrived with puberty.
Since then, he has wondered if there is some science behind this, a connection between pubertal growth and the tapping of stored information – via new synapses perhaps, linking the effects of the past, the unfamiliar sensations felt by a young body, to the developing logic of a twelve-year-old. But then again, a muscle doesn’t have to know that it’s made of tissue and blood vessels, tendons and nerves in order to flex. It just is and does. And that is precisely how those memories came to inscribe themselves on Adrian Pomeroy. Like writing on his skull. Like words his blood flows over, but still he cannot read and thereby know. Not for sure.
If o
nly a word of truth could be uttered, by someone.
*
Adrian let himself slip with remarkable haste that first night alone.
He sat on the front steps and drank more grappa and half a bottle of wine, watching the street go about its business. City workers pulling into driveways. Shoppers. Night-time dog walkers. A kid with a backpack, probably coming home from a mate’s place. Thoughts of these other people and their homely lives distracted him from his own sudden loss of normality – but only for a short while. Despair had wormed its way into the meat of him and the booze only emphasised its bite. He resisted any urge to cry, though, because his anguish was seeding anger, not surrender.
Yet this antagonism was not for a particular person. Not Akker, not Fielder, not Noo for leaving, not even himself for breathing life into this zombie-like scenario – he almost laughed at the realisation that he had become the walking dead. No, this anger was less defined, more liberal, in both senses of the word. His seething was a nondescript, dormant energy; almost an apathetic hatred of the fact that these circumstances had become him.
All there was left to do was drink and pop a couple of 5-milligram diazepam tablets, prescribed by his dentist. ‘You’ll crack a tooth one day,’ the guy had said; Adrian was grinding so hard in his sleep that grooves were worn into the enamel. ‘Something stressing you lately?’
What a question … And what a fucking answer.
ALEX
Michaela and Danny separated in the summer after Year Seven, and thoughts of Mr Pomeroy drifted to the back of Alex’s mind.
The separation brought him both relief and confusion. Michaela didn’t cry when she kicked Danny out, and Alex knew why. Her mum had visited the day before, while Danny was at his cleaning job, and they’d sat and talked. They talked through the afternoon and into the evening, keeping Alex and Shannon out of the room, though the two sat in the hallway from time to time, listening, the women only pausing to give the kids some dinner.