I didn’t really listen to the ceremony, I just sat in the pew with my arm against Harry’s shoulder and passed tissues from my handbag to the woman with the red face who cried noisily throughout.
Then we went to the reception at the hotel where I smiled and laughed and clinked my glass at the speeches, and danced with everybody and spent time with the older relatives and spoke about the flowers, and said, yes, they were lovely, weren’t they, and no, you couldn’t have asked for better weather.
I ate the food and the cake and had my photo taken again and again, and my champagne refilled again and again, and not once did I speak to Annabelle or Josh, because I was far, far too busy smiling.
Harry left early; he and Frank were not staying at the hotel, Harry because he needed to get home to Rose, and Frank because he said he needed to not be near the open bar.
So I made my way to my room alone, falling backwards on the bed when I got inside and sleeping in my clothes and shoes until a knock at the door woke me.
I got up and looked through the keyhole.
I opened the door.
‘Josh,’ I said, ‘what is it? Is everything okay?’
He swayed a little, and smiled a lopsided smile at me, and closed the door behind him.
Then his hands were in my hair and on my face, and I was holding his tie tight in my fist and not letting go when we sank to the floor. And I didn’t care that it was Josh, who shouldn’t have been there, or that Annabelle was somewhere upstairs.
I didn’t care because I felt his skin slip into mine, I felt the bite of his teeth and the breath from his mouth as he said, ‘Tallulah-Lulu,’ his hands retracing the path they had travelled so many times before, and somewhere in the aching I led him all the way home to me.
‘I’m really sorry, Ben.’
‘I know you are, Lulu, but it doesn’t change what happened.’
‘I know.’
‘It’s so, I don’t know, tawdry, or something.’
Ben and I were standing in our soon to be empty apartment, about a fortnight after the wedding, when he came home from Hong Kong.
After my lunch with Simone and Stella, I’d hidden out at Harry and Rose’s doing a few trips back to my city apartment to collect the belongings I knew could no longer stay there once Ben returned from his buying trip.
I’d wanted to stay in my old room at Harry and Rose’s forever, but I knew I owed Ben more than that.
Much more than that; at the very least an apology to his face, which I could hardly bear to picture.
I’d been waiting for him most of the morning, pacing the rooms of our apartment and letting my eyes fall on the life we had shared, coming undone at the ‘World’s Best Girlfriend’ mug still sitting in the drying-up rack.
When I heard the cab pull up, I watched him through the window and knew I was not the only one undone. Everything about him seemed different: the way he walked, the way he picked up his suitcase, the way he didn’t look up at the window, like he had always done, to see if I was there.
Now we were sitting on the end of the bed that was no longer ours and I was watching him let me go.
‘I know, it is tawdry, and so stupid, and I’m sorry, Ben, I don’t really know how to say how sorry I am.’
We sat still for a while, then he got up and started unpacking.
‘Where’s all your stuff?’ he said, opening the cupboard, seeing the empty spaces.
‘At Rose and Harry’s, I thought you’d probably want me . . . not here,’ I said, waving my hand in our bedroom. ‘So I’ve sort of half-moved there for a while.’
He nodded and sat down again on the bed, put his head in his hands.
I moved nearer to him, and put my hand on his back, felt him inch away.
‘Don’t, Lulu,’ he said, then, ‘have you got somewhere to go tonight?’
I nodded, thinking of Simone.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘because you’re right, I don’t want you here.’
He stood up and went into the bathroom, and the steam from the shower curled under the door while I sat on the bed and waited.
I could still hear the hiss of the water hitting the tiles when I left.
Later, we would sort out who owned what and who owed what, all the little unpickings of a relationship, and much later we would wish each other well, but for now I left him to it, standing under the shower rose, washing us away.
I didn’t see him again for months, until everything had changed and the guilt I felt over losing him would be diminished by another loss, one that cut right through to the bone.
*
‘Dear God, Lulu,’ Duncan rasped, opening the door a crack, ‘come in, come in, are there hordes of press behind you trying to get a shot of the Juniper Bay Wedding Shagger?’
‘Shut up, Duncan,’ I said, ‘and let me in.’
He did, and I noticed a spring in his step that I had not seen the last time I was there – nothing like a scandal to get Duncan going again.
‘You look well, Duncan,’ I said. ‘I should sleep with the bridegroom more often.’
Duncan sat down and peered at me.
‘You know, Lulu, when I said you needed closure, I had no idea you’d take it so literally.’
‘No, neither did I.’
We sat down on the couch, Barney under our feet, as Duncan threw his arm around me.
‘What happened?’ he asked eventually.
‘I drank too much.’
‘Always a good defence, not honourable, of course, but more than adequate for many occasions.’
‘And I wanted to.’
‘Aha.’
‘Aha?’
‘Yes, Lulu, aha, as in, now we get to the seed beneath the husk – go on,’ he said, ‘I’ll hold your hand if it helps along the way.’
So I told him.
I told him what I had not been able to tell the priest when he had said, ‘And why did you do that, my daughter?’, why I kept silent and began to pray instead, asking whoever was listening to forgive me for, apart from the obvious transgression, the sin of omission.
Because I had omitted to tell the priest with the soft voice and the warm hand over mine that the real reason I had fallen to the floor with Josh Keaton was not because I loved him. It was not because, as Rose had offered, I had been ‘carried away’ by the emotions of the day, and not because, as a mad-eyed Annie had said on television, I had ‘always been pathologically jealous’ of her family. None of those things were Duncan’s seed beneath the husk.
I did it because I was tired of being the girl who brought the ships home to shore.
I was tired of standing over the stove in my school uniform cooking the family dinner and babysitting Mattie and Sam every time Rose had one of her Doris days, tired of keeping Harry’s books and ironing Rose’s dresses and trying not to mind as days then weeks then years went by before Josh or Annabelle came home, and pretending I didn’t mind when they did.
I was tired of looking after Duncan and making him meals he wouldn’t eat and telling him it didn’t matter when Barney moulted all over clothes I had just washed, tired of travelling back and forth on the barge with half my clothes on land, the other at sea.
I was tired of pretending to be interested in Ben’s work, and acting as if I cared whether or not wedge heels would be in this summer.
I was tired of being the girl by the river, at the skating rink, standing beneath a perfect moon as silent as the stars that hung beside it.
I didn’t want to be that girl anymore.
There it was.
‘Are you shocked?’ I asked Duncan.
‘No,’ he said idly, ‘not at all, not by that.’
‘What, then?’
‘Well, I was just wondering,’ he said, ‘what took you so long.’ Then he gathered me a little closer to him and rasped,
‘And now, my dear, we await the fallout.’
It didn’t take long.
While I had switched off the television before I could catch Annie’s ravaged face answering Maxine Mathers’s caramel-clipped questions about the wedding, and while my name had not been broadcast, it didn’t matter.
There had been a photo of me in my blue satin dress at the exhibition at Bloom, standing just behind Josh and Annabelle and beaming at the lens. They are looking straight into it, and I, although I had no recollection of it being taken, am considering them, my head cocked to one side – ‘Like the spectre at the feast,’ Simone had offered.
The interview had concluded with a still from Frank’s ‘Enchanted’ series, two little girls with their arms about each other, and at least one of them destined to become the Juniper Bay Wedding Shagger.
Annie’s appearance on Today, Tonight and Tomorrow would become a part of Australian television folklore, replayed again and again on ‘Top Ten Moments’ and anniversary specials, mostly Annie’s infamous ‘I fucked him’ comment, always bleeped out, and Maxine’s stunned expression following it.
It would, for a little while, not just be my undoing, but Annie’s also. There had clearly been something not right with her the night of the interview, drunk, or on something, or both, staring at the camera, tugging at her ear, staring into space, smiling her cat’s smile at the camera, as if she knew something that nobody else did, or ever would.
Poor Annie, that interview left more than one reputation in tatters.
Mine didn’t matter so much, and while for months afterwards people would see my face and wonder where they knew it from, my infamy was soon eclipsed by the ‘Moonlighting Minister’, a conservative politician caught soliciting at a well-known gay beat. I can still see his wife by his side in pearls and Laura Ashley at the press conference, her mouth a grim little line of public service.
But for a while I knew what it felt like to be the person strangers talked about on trains, and in the eyes of people who did love me, to fall from grace.
*
‘Hello, I’d like to speak to Tallulah de Longland, please,’ the girl’s voice said on the phone.
‘This is Tallulah,’ I said.
‘I have Dr Patrick Stephenson on the line for you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Hello, Lulu.’
‘Hello, Dr Patrick.’
‘Lulu, I’ve just left Duncan and he’s in a bad way. He won’t go to hospital, as you know, and frankly even if he did go I don’t know what good it would do.’
‘I see,’ I said, even though I didn’t.
‘He’s on his way out, Lulu,’ Dr Patrick said, ‘and he has made it known to me that at the time I feel it is appropriate, I am to ask you to let certain people know – he says you have a list.’
‘I do,’ I said, thinking of the big, brown envelope with ‘Duncan’s Death List’ written on it in my employer’s scratchy hand, with a skull and crossbones drawn underneath it, the skull with a knowing, leery grin on its bony face.
‘I do,’ I repeated, ‘I do have a list, Doctor.’
‘Well, it’s time to use it,’ he said crisply.
When he hung up, I stared stupidly at the phone for a long time, then ran up the stairs to my room and began throwing clothes in a bag, pulling out shirts from drawers and grabbing at hangers, and it was only when I sat on the floor with everything spilling out of the bag and tried to do up the damn zip that I realised my hands were shaking.
Rose came into the room, walking across the floor to kneel beside me, taking everything out of the bag and folding it, going to my cupboard and taking out dresses and shoes, and calling out to Harry for a glass of whiskey and milk.
‘For you,’ she said, ‘not me,’ then, ‘you know you haven’t packed any underwear,’ and then I was laughing and crying at the same time while she wordlessly took the whiskey from Harry at the door and closed it behind him.
‘Now,’ she smiled, handing the drink to me, ‘we’ll do this together.’
I left the next day, holding a basket of warm sultana scones for Duncan from Rose and with a slightly aching head from Harry’s two glasses of whiskey with a shot of milk.
‘He won’t eat them, you know,’ I told her.
‘I know,’ she smiled at me, ‘but he’ll smell them.’
I sat on the barge and thought about Duncan, and how tears were made of salt, like the sea.
Then I drove up the road to his house, and let myself in, finding him asleep on his bed, hands curled like a child’s under his chin, and tasted the sea on my lips.
Then I tucked the blanket in around him and told him what Rose had told me.
‘Now,’ I said to him, ‘we’ll do this together.’
*
We used a roster system, spacing visitors out, blocking in the ex-wives and children’s times when we thought he would be at his best, and leaving every afternoon free for a nap, which seemed to me, I thought, tiptoeing into his room late one day, to be getting longer.
Barney was lying, as always, at the end of the bed, ready to spring up at a moment’s notice if he smelt something vaguely edible, and Duncan was having a good rest, not like some days when he grimaced and cried in his sleep, yelling out random words and sometimes grabbing at his own throat.
When he was like that I would try to comfort him, stroking his forehead and whispering, ‘It’s all right, Duncan, everything’s all right, sleep now,’ until one time when he suddenly woke up, batted my hand away and said, ‘Jesus, Lulu, you scared the shit out of me, I thought you were Grammy McAllister coming to get me.’ After that I left him to fight his demons alone.
I was just tiptoeing out of the room again late one Sunday afternoon when I heard his raspy call.
‘Lulu.’
‘I’m here.’
‘I know, I can you hear you creeping around the room like a bloody ghost.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be – have the hordes finally left?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s just you and me,’ he whispered.
‘Yes.’
The sun wrapped its last rays around the room.
‘Take me outside.’
‘You sure?’
He nodded.
He stood up, shuffled into his slippers and I grabbed his dressing-gown.
‘Not that,’ he said, ‘not old man’s clothes.’
‘Well, you need something,’ I said, and took a jacket out of the wardrobe for him.
We walked slowly into the backyard and through the white, wooden gate onto the dunes, sea grasses clinging to their curves.
We stood there together for a little while, and I was just about to say that we needed to get back inside, out of the cold, when he touched my arm. ‘Look,’ he said, his fingers tightening on my skin, ‘the pipis are blooming.’
Duncan had told me about this, had told me again and again with the light dancing in his eyes about how not once but twice he had witnessed this performance: the first time as a boy, and the second time a few years back with his old fishing mate Jack Brearly when they were enjoying a few sundowners at Nelson Bay.
He had told me how people had laughed at him, said he and Jack had been at the rum, not believing in this strange, silent dance which began when, at the command of some unseen hand, all of the pipis that lay buried and dormant beneath the sand suddenly popped up at the same time.
They huddled in small groups along the shoreline, salty clumps of eugaries knotted tightly together like men gossiping on the corner, and then rolled together back into the sea, in perfect, tumbling unison, somehow knowing which wave would be the one to take them exactly where they needed to go.
Duncan called it a bloom, or in his more romantic moments ‘the Dance of the Eugaries’, and we stood there watching their strange water
ballet until they were all gone, leaving little pockets in the sand to show where they had been.
‘Bravo,’ Duncan whispered, turning on his heel.
We walked back through the house and I settled him in his bed, watching as he dozed, wondering where the morphine was taking him and knowing that there were some places I could not go.
‘Lulu,’ his voice surprised me, ‘Lulu?’
I leant forward as he patted his bed and whispered, ‘Barney.’ Hearing his name, the great dog jumped from his place at the foot of the bed and stood beside Duncan’s hand, trailing over the mattress. ‘Up,’ he rasped, ‘up, boy.’
In one movement, before I had time to say, ‘I don’t know if that’s a very good idea, Duncan,’ Barney was up and in, placing his head on the pillow beside Duncan like a very hairy, very ugly old woman.
I started to laugh at the two of them, lying there together, when Duncan patted the other side of the bed, and I realised he wanted me in there too.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘move over – but if this ends up in the papers – “Duncan McAllister found dead in bed with mad wedding shagger and dog” – I will never, ever forgive you.’
Duncan laughed a long, low, rolling chuckle, and Barney and I both curled our bodies closer to him.
‘Lulu,’ he whispered.
‘Yes.’
‘Your breath is atrocious.’
‘Shut up, Duncan, you know it’s Barney’s.’
‘And your legs are shockingly hairy,’ he said, each word an effort. Underneath the sheets, his hand found mine, and curled around it.
‘Well,’ he said, turning to look at me with eyes that still twinkled even as the fire in them was damping down, ‘I would have liked to lingalonga . . .’
Duncan never regained consciousness, and after five long days’ journeys into night, and people coming and going and pressing their lips against Duncan’s forehead, the eugaries danced on the shore, and rolled back to the sea, pulsing and quivering inside, safe within their perfect, imperfect shells.
‘Hello, Tallulah.’
Walking on Trampolines Page 19