by Liz Byrski
Helen flushes. ‘Well,’ she begins, ‘you know me. I like to be honest, I have to tell it like it is.’
‘No you don’t,’ Joyce interrupts. ‘I’ve seen you do this so often; you say “I have to tell it like it is”, well actually you don’t, especially not when it is none of your business. If you don’t like the idea you can at least treat your friends with respect. There is no virtue in thrusting your opinion down other people’s throats so that they choke on it. It’s rude and hurtful.’
The waiter arrives with a carafe of water, glasses and some cutlery and Helen takes a deep breath and draws herself up waiting for him to leave, struggling to mask her embarrassment with confidence.
‘Well if I’m such a horrible person I can’t imagine why you bothered to come along today,’ she says, hating the petty, self-righteous tone in her own voice. Joyce seems different, more assertive; she’s always been one to back down easily for the sake of a quiet life. She does it with everyone. Now, Helen thinks, she is behaving like a terrier.
‘I came because you’re my oldest friend,’ Joyce says. ‘We have a lot of history. I was devastated when you moved but it was what you wanted so I had to respect that. I knew something would be lost, and it was, but I never dreamed we’d end up like this. So I’m here to see what we can salvage, for the sake of the past and both our families, because it’s been precious to me, to all of us.’
Helen feels herself deflating, as though Joyce has suddenly loosened the pressure valve and all the steam that has been building up for weeks is hissing steadily out. She won’t risk saying anything, not yet, and they sit in silence, ostensibly watching the customers at other tables chatting, tucking into their salads, or soup, buttering their rolls, sipping their coffee. What did I want from this? Helen wonders. What did I really think would happen? What have I been doing all this time? To her dismay she, a woman who has never shed a tear in public since the age of thirteen, feels as though she might cry. She clears her throat and looks away, gazing down to the end of the courtyard and the open gate that leads back out through the garden to the street where the safety of her car awaits her. Helen tightens her lips, picks up her bag and starts to get to her feet.
‘No!’ Joyce says, and leaning forward she whisks the bag from Helen’s hand and puts it out of reach just inside the garden bed on the far side of her own chair. ‘Sit down, for goodness sake, Helen. I am not letting you leave here without sorting this out. Where would you go anyway? Back to that soulless apartment to open another bottle of wine?’
Helen freezes, caught between her chair and the table, stares at Joyce and sits down abruptly, rocking the table as she does so, making the water splash out of the glasses, and sending cutlery flying to the ground.
Joyce steadies the table. ‘Good decision,’ she says as the waiter appears beside her. ‘So sorry about that,’ she says, ‘my friend tripped. Could you mop this up for us, please?’ And they wait again, in silence, while he blots up the water, gathers the cutlery from the paving stones and disappears to fetch more.
Joyce leans forward and puts her hand on Helen’s arm. ‘We’re friends, Helen. At least we were. I want that back, that’s why I’m here. I’m sorry for what I just said about the apartment, but I don’t think you’re happy there, you haven’t been for ages, so our decision has just made it harder for you.’ She leans back again, moving her hand to allow the waiter to put Helen’s cutlery down and then her own. ‘Let’s nip this in the bud now, before it gets worse. Before it goes beyond the point of no return.’
Helen is silent. She feels her body unwinding, the tension of past months, years maybe, unravelling and the threat that she may well unravel along with it. Around her other women and a few men are talking and laughing, tasting each other’s meals, ordering wine. Such an ordinary scene with her at the centre of it, her life falling apart, and Joyce . . . who seems to be looking straight inside her.
‘Do you really think it’s soulless?’
‘Sorry, that was rude, it’s . . . look, it’s a beautiful apartment with amazing views but it’s so . . . so different, so not the life of Emerald Street which you loved. I don’t . . .’
‘It is,’ Helen says. ‘Soulless. That’s just what it is. I wanted it so much, wanted to escape from the house that seemed to be weighing me down, but I hate it. I feel like a tenant, living in someone else’s home with their things. So I keep buying more things to make it feel like home but it doesn’t make any difference.’
Joyce nods. ‘I thought it might be like that.’
‘But you never said anything.’
Joyce raises her eyebrows. ‘And get my head bitten off?’
Helen sighs. ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake, Joyce, and I haven’t been able to face telling Dennis. He hates it, he’s said so, and he never wanted to move in the first place. It feels so bleak, and all the time I’m there I’m lonely. There’s nothing to do. At least before there was always something that needed repairing or pruning or cleaning. I miss Emerald Street, you and Mac and the others, the whole feel of the place – the neighbourhood.’
The waiter returns with their orders. ‘Anything else, ladies?’
‘No thanks, we’re fine,’ Joyce says and he fades away to clear other tables. ‘And you haven’t said anything to Dennis?’
Helen shakes her head. ‘I can’t, I couldn’t make myself admit it, but he knows. I’m sure he knows. But what can we do? The move cost us heaps, new furniture, practically everything new and the prices in South Fremantle have shot up recently. If we wanted to find a place and move back we’d really have to scale down.’
‘And would that be so bad?’ Joyce asks. ‘We’ve talked about scaling down. Since the kids left we’ve rattled about in that great big house like the last two sardines in a tin. We’re still thinking about what we’ll do after this year, but it might be a move to something smaller, if not down to Albany.’
‘So you might go away?’
‘Maybe, or nearby but just to something smaller.’
Helen is silent for a moment, picking at her salad with a fork. ‘Did you decide what you wanted to do this year?’
Joyce smiles. ‘I want to do the intensive English language teaching course, like Ben did. I’m just waiting to find out if I’ve passed the entrance test. Then I’ll try to help out teaching English to refugees.’
Helen nods. ‘Maybe I need to do something. Not that, obviously, but something interesting or useful.’
‘Better than sitting miserably at home swigging wine in the mornings,’ Joyce says with a smile.
Helen feels herself blush. ‘Stella told you?’
She nods. ‘You must have known she would. She was concerned. You know what we need?’
‘What?’
‘We need to eat our lunch, go back to Emerald Street and do what we used to do. Spend a couple of hours out on the back verandah with . . . well, I was going to say a bottle of wine but a pot of tea might be better, patching things up, and chewing the fat about the future. I want that back, Helen, what we used to have, and we might just come up with something useful.’
*
Hong Kong, May
Leo opens the door of the bar fridge and stands drumming his fingers on the top of the door, trying to decide what to choose from the array of miniatures lined up neatly on the shelves, and emits a huge sigh. Why the fuck does she need time to think about it? Why couldn’t she just have done what he expected and said, ‘Oh yes, Leo, it’d be wonderful to see you. I’m packing my bag right now.’ Picking up the hotel phone to call Polly had been a big decision because he’d wanted her to be the one to initiate the move from email to meeting again. But he’d become impatient, and then an odd collision of circumstances had left him in Hong Kong with a few days up his sleeve before he needed to be back in London.
‘I really want to see you again,’ he’d said. ‘I’ll be finished here in Hong Kong th
e day after tomorrow and I wondered if you’d like to come up and join me. We can spend a few days together.’
It was odd talking to her after the months of emails, and he’d been anticipating a gasp of pleasure, so her awkward pause had thrown him off balance.
‘Oh . . . I’d love to . . . I just need to think about this . . . my friend Stella’s not too good at the moment and I . . . ’
‘Well, I don’t want to disrupt your schedule of course . . . I wanted to see you but if you have other things . . .’ He’d recognised then that he was sounding not cool but sulky or petulant or something else he didn’t want to sound.
‘No, no! It is a great chance and I really want to see you. I can sort things out here. Look, I’ll call you back in the morning and let you know when I can get there.’
‘Okay,’ he’d said, ‘good, come soon.’
‘I will,’ she’d said, her voice more confident now. ‘I really want to see you. First thing in the morning, I promise. I’ll email, unless you’ve moved into the twenty-first century and got yourself a mobile.’
An email would be fine, he’d told her, but he also gave her the number of the hotel. Calm down, he warns himself now, have a drink, she’s just being cautious. He chooses a bottle of claret and a glass from the shelves above the bar fridge, draws the cork and carries both glass and bottle across to the sofa that faces the glass doors that open onto the balcony. He drops down onto the sofa, sets the bottle on the coffee table and, glass in hand, leans back, kicks off his shoes and puts his feet up alongside the claret. Women, he thinks, make everything so complicated. Strong minded, intelligent women are all very well but they are at their best when they are agreeing with him or conceding an argument to him. When he’d spotted Polly in the hotel corridor with the young soldier, he’d seen an opening for someone to play the good guy. But he’d also liked her immediately and been disappointed when she’d refused a drink later. But the silent walk through the snow had soothed him, and when they met again over lunch, he felt a sense of connection – political, cultural, emotional all meshed together.
In the shared taxi to the airport three days later he’d thought she was going to relent and stay on in London, but she’d headed off to St Pancras and Leo had recognised that he’d have to work harder if he wanted this to go further. He’d looked her up on Google and was convinced that she’d be worth the effort. He’s always liked being with women who have a certain cachet as long as it doesn’t surpass his own. He realised he needed to give it time, and that’s what he’s done.
Leo is not a man who really likes email for anything other than urgent or essential messages about work, appointments, interviews and so on, but it has proved useful with Polly. He has stubbornly resisted the constant state of availability that a mobile phone would create; the possibility that anyone can get hold of him at any time is horrifying. Distance, both physical and emotional, is important to him and personal involvement needs to be carefully managed. He’d come to this conclusion some years ago when Judith was first diagnosed. Preaching the gospel according to Croft gets complicated when it touches on the personal dimensions of one’s life. He has also been caught out recently by his own confusion about getting old. Having long been outspoken on the importance of positive attitudes to ageing, he now finds that his commentary is frequently at odds with the way he feels.
‘You’re hopeless,’ Judith had told him once she had got a grip on what was happening for him. ‘All mouth and no trousers.’ And he’d gone away and sulked for a long time. ‘Well,’ she’d asked, ‘sorted yourself out yet?’
‘I’m working on it,’ he’d said. And she had just rolled her eyes and said nothing. But then she’d gone on at him about getting a mobile phone.
‘It would make me feel safer,’ she’d said. ‘I’d know I could always find you in an emergency.’
And this, though he’ll admit it only to himself, is another reason for his resistance – he would rather be unavailable, he hates emergencies, especially medical or care-related ones. But he can see now that if this thing with Polly develops further he may have to submit to the tyranny of technology after all.
Chapter Eight
Albany, May
Mac has chopped up some chuck steak, an onion, carrots and potatoes and is dicing some celery when his mobile starts to ring and he jumps and cuts himself. He swears loudly, grabs the tea towel, wraps it around his bloody thumb, and picks up the phone.
‘Hi,’ he says. ‘I was so excited to see it was you calling I cut my thumb.’
‘I’m flattered,’ Joyce says. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘Yes, quite a lot. I’ve wrapped it in a tea towel.’
‘Sounds sensible.’
‘You’re not very sympathetic.’
‘Oh I am, but there’s not much I can do when I’m five hours’ drive away. Run it under the cold tap and wrap it in a clean tea towel while you find a plaster.’
He sighs. ‘Okay, I’m clearly not getting any sympathy from you.’
‘Don’t be a wuss,’ Joyce says. ‘You’ll survive. I’m ringing to tell you I passed the test and I start the course the week after next.’
Mac feels a sudden mix of pride and emotion that brings him up in goosebumps, and bounces his thumb down into second place. ‘Well done, darling, congratulations, that’s terrific,’ he says.
‘I got ninety-two per cent,’ she says. ‘They called me just now – honestly, I’m over the moon, I thought I’d scrape through at best. And guess what? I had lunch with Helen the other day, and it’s just as we thought, she hates that place, is desperately unhappy and doesn’t know what to do.’ She tells him more about their conversation. ‘But she’s not ready to say anything to Dennis yet.’
‘From what Dennis has told me he’d be more than happy to get out of there, even if they lose money in the process,’ Mac says. ‘He hates it too, but doesn’t want to start some sort of drama with Helen.’
‘Oh well, they’ll sort it out eventually, I guess. Have you sorted things out for Charlie?’
‘I have, Carol came back . . .’
‘Carol?’
‘Remember, I told you, we were at uni together?’
‘Oh yes, sorry, so she came back?’
‘Yes, and we signed all the papers and he’s mine, well ours, now. Anyway, love, I’m standing here talking to you and bleeding to death. I need to go and clean up my hand.’
Mac stands at the basin in the bathroom holding his thumb under the cold tap while he reaches into the bathroom cabinet with the other for Betadine and a plaster.
He thinks he should have mentioned to Joyce that when he went for his swim this morning he’d bumped into Carol at the beach, and they’d ended up having breakfast together in the café. But Joyce seemed to be in an unusually brisk mood, and his thumb was giving him the shits. It had been weird sitting across the table from her after all these years. They’d hung around in the same crowd in their uni days, and Mac had liked her, but he’d just met Joyce at the time and it was getting serious. But Carol, as she was then, was smart and confident, edgy – and he liked that. And somehow they had ended up together that one hot January night in Mandurah, when everyone was either drunk or stoned, and crawling in and out of each other’s tents. He remembers now that the sensual memory of that night had haunted him for some time: the sound of shallow waves, the moonlight and the sweaty heat inside the tent had all seemed exotic after a couple of joints had done the rounds. He’d been sitting beside Carol, watching the way she held the joint to her lips and drew deeply on it, not just taking little pretend puffs like some girls did. It’s all a bit of a blur in his memory now, the shifting shadows on the sloping canvas above them, their bodies moving together, slippery with sweat. Was that really me?, he’d asked himself this morning, as he’d watched her eating scrambled eggs, and listened as she’d told him about her life since uni, her marriage, and how it ended. Sh
e’s improved with age, he thought, still confident but not needing to shove it in your face. And she’d worn well.
‘This was fun,’ she’d said eventually, getting up from the table.
‘It was,’ he’d said, ‘just like old times.’ Except of course that it wasn’t; she’s in her sixties, he’s nearly seventy-two, whole lives have been lived, and he couldn’t recall any occasion on which they had ever talked over a meal, just the two of them. But it had felt good, had transported him back to his youth, made him start to rethink himself, rethink the distance from then to now.
Mac turns off the tap and wraps a clean towel around his hand. It’s still bleeding but he manages to get the plaster on it and then two more on top at different angles to cushion it a bit. Charlie appears in the bathroom doorway with an expectant look on his face. Mac scratches the top of the dog’s head with his free hand. ‘Hello trouble,’ he says, ‘what’s that face for? You’ve already had a walk.’ Charlie follows him out of the bathroom into the lounge and leaps up onto the sofa. ‘I should’ve told her, mate. Should’ve told Joyce, but she was all excited about her test. Next time, I’ll tell her next time.’ Charlie gives him a very long look. ‘I will,’ Mac says. ‘I promise I will, I’ll tell her next time.’
*
‘Shall I park and come in with you?’ Joyce asks once the airport is in sight.
Polly shakes her head. ‘No need, thanks. I’ve only the one bag. It was lovely of you to drive me.’
Joyce takes the drop-off lane where the traffic crawls along as passengers drag their bags from cars and say their goodbyes. ‘We have so much in common, but our lives are so different, aren’t they?’ she says suddenly. ‘You dashing off to Hong Kong to meet your lover, me doing the same old thing still.’