by Liz Byrski
Polly watches them for a moment. Clearly Stella has forgotten why she came, but it looked serious. Two minutes, she mimes to Alistair out of Stella’s sight and he nods and she knows she can trust him to keep her talking. Quickly she slips out of the room, out of the house, through the side-gate and in through Stella’s back door. Everything seems absolutely normal, there is no water running, no gas hissing, no forgotten pot burning on the stove, the iron is not plugged in, the front door is safely locked from the inside. Polly shrugs. Whatever upset Stella, and she was seriously upset, is not something in the house. She has seemed better since the stint on Cross Currents finished. Perhaps, with a bit more rest, a quiet life, there will be real improvement.
And with a big sigh of relief Polly goes back through the gate to her own house, and rejoins the conversation at the computer.
Chapter Nineteen
July
It’s the final day of the language course and Joyce is trying to balance relief with sadness that it is coming to an end. It has been a month of her life in which she has done nothing except study, learn, teach, eat and sleep, and it’s been amazingly satisfying and now, suddenly, it’s all over.
‘We’re all going to the pub when we finish,’ Jacqui says.
It’s four-thirty and they are waiting in the classroom for Ewan to arrive for what the school secretary has told them is a small informal closing ceremony. There is champagne, nibbles and their certificates will be presented. Interim certificates with their marks. The formal certificates will be sent in the mail during the following week.
‘We’re going to walk down to the Brass Monkey, you’ll come, won’t you?’
‘Wouldn’t miss it,’ Joyce says, ‘but I may not stay long. I need to go home and lie down for a long time in a darkened room.’
Of the original group who began the course six have dropped out and Joyce is proud of the fact that she’s stuck it out to the end. Barry, a former builder in his fifties, is still there too, and apart from him, Jacqui and herself, everyone else is very much younger.
Ewan’s speech is brief and amusing. He names each of them, noting something amusing or endearing about everyone that he has observed in their four weeks together. Someone’s insistence on washing and reusing the cardboard beakers from the coffee shop, Barry nipping out for a fag when things get too much, young Sophie’s constant doodles of snails, Joyce as the instigator of the lunchtime kip on the classroom floor. He is, Joyce thinks, the perfect man for his job, a leader who has kept them going, intervened when necessary, been generous with praise when it’s deserved. They fidget in their seats awaiting their results.
‘As usual most people got a B,’ Ewan says. ‘It’s an excellent mark and the standard that is accepted everywhere that you may want to teach. So – let’s go through these alphabetically. When I read out your name come up and get your certificate.’
Joyce leans back, waiting for her turn, and as each person gets their certificate the group applauds. When her turn comes she crosses the room to collect her certificate.
‘Joyce, congratulations,’ Ewan says. ‘You’re our only A student in this course, it’s a terrific achievement.’
There’s a moment in which she actually thinks he’s joking, and then the whoops and cheers kick in. Ewan leans forward and kisses her on the cheek, and with a smile so wide it could split her face, she walks back to her seat.
‘Well done, you swat!’ Jacquie says, hugging her. ‘I thought you might manage that!’
Later they celebrate at the pub, with the drinks flowing fast. Joyce orders a glass of wine, and takes only a couple of sips before realising she is just too tired to drink, and she pushes it aside and opts for water. Now that the pressure is off the collective relief and exhaustion mean that emotions are running high. There are more drinks and then they all begin to flag at about the same time. There are hugs and promises, email addresses and phone numbers are exchanged, they will be friends forever, wherever they are. There will be a reunion, every year.
‘Is it always like this?’ Joyce asks Ewan, who is sitting beside her.
‘Mostly,’ he says. ‘Once the tension is gone it gets very emotional. And then when everyone has recovered it usually just fades away. You’ll be a great teacher, Joyce. Have you decided what you’ll do now?’
‘I’m not sure yet,’ she says. ‘I decided to do it because the refugee support group said they needed people who could teach English, but I also needed to do something new for myself. And now it’s given me the urge to travel. China maybe, or Japan. But first I’m going to have a rest. My husband’s been down in Albany for a few months, and I told him he couldn’t come home until this was over. He wasn’t too happy about it but he gave in and now he’s driving back on Sunday.’
‘So how will he feel if you decide to travel for a while?’ Ewan asks.
Joyce grimaces. ‘Really, I haven’t a clue. But maybe he’ll just have to get used to the idea that things are different now. Anyway, I think I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.’
*
Helen is unstoppable; she feels it herself, the huge reserve of energy that was building when she was in Dubai has carried her home and driven her through every day since she arrived. She’s tried, unsuccessfully, to sack the existing agent but is legally stuck with her for the remainder of the contract. Meanwhile she has been searching for a replacement agent and viewing properties, and is living on Nurofen for the headaches which she’s sure will ease up when she has managed to sort things out. Dennis has said he will be home sometime soon – whether he is or not no longer bothers her. I’m dealing with this now, she tells herself, so he can just stay out of my way.
As for Joyce, Helen is still smarting over her rudeness, but she’s felt for some time that their friendship was cooling, even before Joyce and Mac had decided to embark on this ridiculous year of living apart. Although of course that doesn’t seem so ridiculous to Helen now, not since she’s started to relish the pleasure of freedom. ‘Hard luck, Joyce,’ Helen says out loud to the empty apartment, ‘I don’t have to put up with your tantrums.’ As she says this aloud she is crawling backwards on her knees extracting herself from the cupboard under the sink, which she has tackled as part of her effort to sort and clean out everything in readiness for a move. ‘Get over it, Joyce,’ she says again, straightening up, but as she attempts to get to her feet she is hit over the head by an iron bar and she reels backwards and slides onto her side on the floor in a black cloud shot through with daggers of dazzling pain. For a moment Helen lies there paralysed. Who has done this to her? How did someone get into the flat? She wants to get to her feet but is too dizzy and she turns her head cautiously from side to side, and realises that she is still alone, no one is there, and nothing, at least nothing external, has hit her.
Helen sits up slowly and, not yet game to try standing, she crawls towards the wall and leans against it. Drawing up her knees then resting her elbows on them, she drops her head forward, pressing the palms of her hands into her eyes, which feel tight and swollen, as if pressure inside her head is about to burst out through them. When she opens them again everything is as it was. The bolt that hit her seemed so colossal that it’s impossible to believe it hasn’t created any damage. The tiles should be smashed, shattered crockery scattered across the floor, the contents of the fridge disgorging itself, but nothing, not a thing is out of place except the sponge and the brush she had been holding when it hit.
Still dizzy, Helen attempts to get to her feet; the daggers are down to pinpricks now. I might lie on the bed, she thinks, but she slides back down as her head begins to spin faster and she begins to vomit, knowing that she is losing consciousness, feeling herself swirling downward into darkness.
When she comes to, she’s not sure how much later, she is lying in her own vomit. Dragging herself upright she is revolted by the soiling of her clothes, the vomit spattered across the floor, she e
ven feels it clogged in her hair. Still giddy but repulsed by her condition she knows she must get cleaned up as soon as she can. Helen hates any sort of human soiling; dirty nappies, babies’ vomit, blood and guts have always revolted her and the realities of motherhood and caring for the elderly have not diluted that disgust. She stands up cautiously, peels off her clothes and stuffs them in a bin bag. Then, dragging reams of paper towel from its roll, she mops up the worst of the mess, then fills a bucket with water, disinfectant and floor cleaner and proceeds, stark naked, to mop it. It’s unusually difficult because she can’t seem to make the mop work, she can’t coordinate her movements, and she trips against the bucket and realises she could slip and fall on the wet tiles, but she has to do it. She can think of nothing else until it is done. Finally she dumps the bucket and mop and the bag of clothes into the laundry and closes the door. Then, very cautiously, keeping one hand on the wall all the time, she makes her way out of the kitchen across the passage and into the ensuite bathroom where she steps into the shower and turns on the taps. The hot water feels wonderful coursing over her head and down her body and she stands there, one hand against the wall to steady herself, the other pouring shampoo onto her hair, wishing she had agreed to have the safety handles fitted in the shower as Dennis had suggested. For a two-minute shower woman she stands there for a very long time, waiting for the remaining pain and nausea to subside, and for the water to wash any dregs of vomit down the drain.
Maybe I need to slow down a bit, she tells herself, find time to see the doctor about the headaches. Eventually, out of the shower, dry and wrapped in her towelling dressing gown, she makes herself a cup of tea. But despite the utter exhaustion and weakness that has overtaken her she feels her fingers drumming on the worktop, and can’t stop her right foot tapping. Helen takes some long, calming breaths, carries her mug into the bedroom and slides wearily into bed. It’s ten-thirty on Sunday morning and she’s been up since five. Her body is exhausted but her head is still spinning with images of Dennis standing with his back to her on the day he told her he was leaving, obdurate estate agents shaking their heads at her, Damian’s face as he told her to pack her bags, endless open homes, and spreadsheets and Nick – where is Nick? In some cave full of bats under the Nullarbor probably, and Joyce standing by the open door waiting for her to leave. She gropes for the image she had of herself as she flew out to Dubai: a single woman, a free woman, with a single life of substance, a future; a confident woman, happy to be alone.
*
It’s almost ten o’clock on Sunday morning when Mac pulls in to the roadhouse; he’s been driving for well over two hours and is about halfway home and desperate for coffee. He and Dennis had left the cottage at the same time, him to drive straight home to Fremantle, Dennis stopping off to call in on a former colleague in Mount Barker. They had locked everything securely and stood facing each other, both wondering if they’d forgotten anything.
‘Well thanks for all your help, mate,’ Mac had said. ‘I’d never have got those fences finished without you, nor the laundry painted.’
‘My pleasure,’ Dennis said. ‘It was the least I could do. Thank you for putting up with me, listening to me whingeing on for hours. I came for a couple of nights and stayed for a month. Any other bloke would have kicked me out weeks ago.’ He bent down to take Charlie’s head in his hands, rubbing his ears affectionately. ‘And thank you, old mate, for making me walk more, my knees feel a whole lot better for the exercise.’
Mac strolls across the forecourt towards the café and the irresistible smell of sausages frying and, throwing gastronomic caution to the wind, he orders sausages, eggs and fries and lets Charlie out to stretch his legs while he waits for his food. It’s strange to be driving back home and he can’t help wondering what might have changed; he realises suddenly that it really matters to him that things are just the same as when he left. It matters that everything in the house is the same, but more than that it matters that he and Joyce are the same, and that this sense of disruption dissolves when they are back together again.
The waitress, whose expression is remarkably sullen, pushes open the swing doors and dumps his meal unceremoniously on the table.
‘That all?’
‘No, I ordered a long black coffee as well,’ Mac says.
And with a huge sigh she turns back into the café.
As he sits there now, tucking into his food, passing on little bits of sausage to Charlie, Mac’s stomach churns, and it’s nothing to do with the food. Sometime this weekend he will have to tell Joyce about Carol.
‘I thought you said you’d told her when we met,’ Carol had said when they’d walked on the beach yesterday morning.
‘I did. But I never got around to telling her that we’d been having coffee or breakfast or walking together, several times a week.’
Carol had raised her eyebrows. ‘Why ever not?’
He’d shrugged. ‘Joyce has had a lot on with the course, and then there’s our neighbour who’s in her eighties; she’s really part of the family and she seems to be losing it a bit . . . dementia . . . maybe Alzheimer’s, although none of us actually says that word.’
‘Well, you should tell Joyce,’ Carol had said. ‘After all, we’re not doing anything wrong. But the fact that you haven’t mentioned it doesn’t look too good. I wouldn’t be happy about it in her position.’
‘I know, but frankly, things were a bit awkward, tense really, while Joyce was on the course.’
‘One big reason why you should have been open about it,’ Carol had said. ‘Anyway, I’m sure you’ll work it out.’
‘Yes,’ he’d said. ‘Yes, I’m sure it’ll be fine.’
But as he sits here now, offering a chip to Charlie, Mac is not convinced that fine is what it will be when he tries to explain it to Joyce.
*
Joyce is sitting with her legs draped over one arm of the big chair in the kitchen, reading the weekend papers that arrived yesterday but she didn’t open until today. Yesterday, glorious lazy Saturday, she slept late and then wandered through the gate in the fence for lunch with Stella and Polly. Polly had made chicken and vegetable soup and they had sat around her table to eat it, tearing lumps off a fresh baguette. To Joyce it had felt like a joyful return to normal life, but a life inevitably changed by the past four weeks. She needed to find a way to make this experience, and what it has taught her about herself, part of her normal life, not just have it as something that she once did for a few weeks before she returned to life as it had been before. And at lunch she’d felt Helen’s absence, although to some extent Helen had always been an outsider, and that largely seemed to be of her own making. She preferred to spend time just with Joyce, or with her, Mac and Dennis.
‘It’s different when it’s just women,’ she’d once said. ‘Not as important, not quite the real thing.’
Joyce had thought of this often, because those friendships were so precious to her, so much a part of the way she chose to live her life, she couldn’t understand how Helen could feel that way. Now she chucks the weekend magazines on the floor and picks up her book. A novel, at last! No more books on language interference or verb tenses, no pressure to compose lessons and try to come up with new and interesting visual aids for a class just a day away. She closes her eyes for a moment.
It will be weird to have Mac back, weird but good. This is the longest they have ever been apart and now that the pressure is off she knows how much she’s missed him. Missed his wonderfully reassuring presence, his sense of humour, the special quality of Mac-ness that he brings to the house, and she realises that she is also quite nervous about how it will be. Will he expect her to slip back into her domesticated self? Because she’s not sure she can. In fact she knows she doesn’t want that anymore, that routine of thinking what to buy and what to cook, the expectations about who will do what and when. When they’d embarked on their year of living dangerously they had ne
ver discussed where it might take them. She has changed in their time apart. What if he expects her to be the same?
She hears the sound of a car on the driveway and swings her legs off the chair arm and gets to her feet. How will we be different?, she wonders as she pauses at the front door. Have we unravelled something that can’t be reassembled?
Mac, seeing her at the door, waves and leans across to open the passenger door. Charlie, who seems larger in life than in photographs, bounds from the front seat, stopping only to pee on the roses before heading for Joyce and screeching to a halt in front of her, head tilted to one side, tail wagging furiously.
‘Hello, Charlie,’ she says, bending down to take his face in her hands, ‘aren’t you just gorgeous!’ He licks her hand in agreement and heads past her into the house, his legs splaying out at angles as his paws slide over the polished floor.
‘He’s a little short on manners,’ Mac says, coming up the steps, ‘but he’s big on charm.’
‘So I see,’ she says. ‘He’s even bigger than I imagined.’
They stand in the doorway hugging each other, neither of them ready to let go, as though, Joyce thinks, they’re recharging each other’s batteries. And then they walk slowly into the house, and she sees Mac looking around him as if to check that nothing has changed. He seems uncertain, a little awkward perhaps, and this makes her uncertain too.
Charlie, having checked out the kitchen, has made his way out into the back yard and is discovering amazing new smells, and taking a serious interest in the swimming pool.
‘Wait there,’ Mac says, ‘close your eyes and don’t open them until I say so.’
Joyce stands there, in the middle of the room, eyes closed, and hears him go back out through the front door to the ute, and return more slowly and put something heavy down on the floor.
‘Not yet,’ he warns, shifting whatever it is in the direction of the old fireplace, which they had long ago converted to a wood-burning stove. ‘Okay.’