From Under the Overcoat

by Sue Orr

  ONCE UPON A TIME IN

  THE ANTIPODES

  Back in the beginning, Joe and I loved an argument. We’d debate anything, anywhere. In the school staff room, at drinks after work. It was exhilarating — yes, that’s the right word for how things were then. People around us started to notice. We’d be bickering about some terrifically important issue, such as whether teabag paper gave you cancer (me negative, Joe therefore affirmative). After a bit, everyone else would be grinning. There they are. At it again, they said.

  Eventually — at the pub one Friday night — someone said, Just get a room, you two. I pretended I had no idea what they meant, until Joe leaned forward and kissed me.

  That was five years ago, in London. A few weeks later, we moved in together.

  We were very happy indeed in our funny, contradictory way. What am I saying. We were crazy about each other.

  Then, one night, a terrible thing happened. I got drunk at a party and accidentally slept with someone. By slept with, I mean had sex. By accidentally, I mean there was no intention to do it and there was immediate self-disgust afterwards. A genuine mortifying accident, with drink totally to blame.

  I didn’t tell Joe, but somehow he found out. So he slept with someone too. Not straight away — but eventually that’s what happened. And he did tell me. Forlornly, with a great deal of dramatic sighing, a week later.

  ‘Retaliation,’ he said, his head hanging low over his coffee cup. ‘That’s all it was, Ellen. I’m ashamed to say it, but it was the only way I could cope with what you did.’ His lovely dark fringe flopped over his eyes. His face was an awful grey colour.

  ‘Fair enough,’ I replied. It wasn’t fair, not at all, but I wasn’t in a position to argue with the logic.

  Days and months passed. We soldiered on. Then one night, Joe slept with someone else. Not the same person he slept with before, which I suppose was something. Or not.

  ‘I thought we were already even,’ I said, when I stopped crying.

  ‘We were never even, Ellen,’ Joe replied. ‘Because you strayed first, your transgression was far greater than mine. All I did was catch up, the first time.’

  ‘But then we were even. One each,’ I said.

  ‘To be properly even,’ he said, ‘I had to inflict the same pain on you as you did on me. The pain that comes with being one down, the pain of having to forgive. Not the equitable pain of even stevens. Now, in fact, we are even, because you have to forgive me for one extra thing. As I did you, that first time.’

  ‘But the only way you said you could forgive me was by getting even. Remember?’ I said.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Joe said. ‘Doesn’t matter how I forgave you. You’re failing, Ellen, to see things from my perspective. Which tells me you never understood the hurt you caused in the first place.’

  ‘You’ve been unfaithful to me twice. I’ve been unfaithful to you once. How can this possibly be even?’

  ‘From where I stand, it’s even,’ he said.

  Time went by. Things were different between us. We still argued all the time, but the arguments segued effortlessly into hurtful insults. One day we had a really big fight. It started out as a discussion about recycling — whether it actually created more landfill than normal rubbish. This was exactly the type of delicious debate we used to get off on. But the argument took a sour detour into accusations of selfishness.

  We both said some terrible things. For example, I told Joe I had brought us back to level scores on the infidelity count. This was a lie; I hadn’t had sex with anyone else. But just letting Joe think I’d been unfaithful was enough to put me in pain deficit. Or was it credit. I had no idea.

  Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. He called me a slut and picked up the globe from the bookshelf. For a minute I thought he was going to throw it at me. But instead, his left index finger found England. He manoeuvred the globe so his right index finger was on the polar opposite. He held the globe aloft.

  ‘This is as far away from you as I could possibly get,’ he said, glaring at me. His eyes were red and the globe wobbled between his fingers like a speared puffer fish. ‘Any further, I’d be on my way back to you. This is where I’m going.’

  I could see the underbelly of the globe. Joe couldn’t. His destination was near the Antarctic. There appeared to be no land under his pointing finger. It was a huge globe and most of the little islands were marked on it. I bent down and looked closely.

  ‘Bollons Island,’ I read. ‘Fancy that. The antipode of home. Good luck to you there, Joe.’

  ‘How typical,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you would assume here to be home, and Bollons Island to be the antipode.’

  ‘Here is home. It’s where we live. And Bollons is therefore the antipode.’

  ‘Not if you live on Bollons Island. Here becomes the antipode.’

  ‘I doubt anyone lives on Bollons Island.’ I bent down and squinted again at the underside of the globe. It was hard to tell how big the place was. But it was a lot smaller than Gibraltar, going on the size of the dot.

  Joe spun the globe upside down (though he would probably say right side up). He traced a line north.

  ‘What have we got here?’ he said. ‘Bollons Island. Bracket New Zealand bracket.’

  I smiled. Joe was full of it. But there and then, while I swallowed my tears and tried to convince him I’d lied about my second infidelity, he picked up the telephone and bought a ticket to New Zealand.

  EMAIL SUITED OUR RELATIONSHIP, such as it was after Joe left. We got some of that old combative spark back, via smiley faces and the other emoticons available. We shared news of our day-to-day doings in real time — me hunched over the computer in the early evening, him half a day earlier, his time.

  I thought it was half a day later — you’d assume, wouldn’t you, that English time would be ahead of New Zealand’s. I’d always thought that was the point of Greenwich Mean Time. It turned out I was wrong about that; it was one of the few things we disagreed on that wasn’t open to interpretation. So yes. Half a day earlier. His morning, my evening the previous day.

  Joe lived in Auckland. He’d found a teaching job there. Some months on, he suggested I visit him.

  ‘Just for a look,’ he wrote. ‘Come and see what life is like down under.’

  I smiled when I read that.

  ‘Down under what, Joe? Prepositions require subjects and objects,’ I typed.

  ‘Fuck off you,’ he wrote back. My heart skipped a beat.

  I’D EXPECTED SOME SORT of passionate reunion, but it wasn’t like that. It felt as though we’d just picked up where we’d left off. Minus any kind of meaningful fighting.

  A pleasant détente is how you’d describe it. For the two weeks, we ate and drank and walked the hills and the streets around the harbour, arm in arm. To people passing, we would have looked like lovers. But I slept in Joe’s bedroom, and he slept on the foldout in his lounge. We avoided the topic of sex. We did not discuss it, and we did not engage in it. I would have liked to. A little antipodean affair, our own polar-opposite feet tangled under the covers.

  I wondered whether he’d found someone else. I snooped around the flat when he was out, but there were no signs of feminine influence. I decided to ask him. We were climbing one of the mountains — Mount Eden, Joe said it was. When he told me the name, I thought about Adam and Eve and then I thought, Just bloody ask him. But at the moment the words were forming in my mouth, I froze. I couldn’t say them.

  On the evening I left, when he was driving me out to the airport, Joe asked me what I thought of Auckland. I’d been dreading the question, dreading that he would ask it, and dreading that he wouldn’t.

  ‘It’s alright,’ I said. ‘A long way from home, though.’

  ‘It’s perfect, isn’t it,’ he said.

  I waited. He said nothing else. It was dark and raining. The car tyres hissed on the wet road.

  I assumed he would come inside the airport with
me. That’s when he’ll ask, I thought. That’s when he’ll suggest I come back and stay. But he pulled in at the dropoff zone, where there was to be no parking and no waiting.

  He said some lovely things to me, after he put my bags on the footpath. Some very nice things, about how much he’d enjoyed seeing me again, how glad he was that I’d had the chance to visit his new home. But he didn’t ask me to stay.

  Standing in the rain, watching his tail lights disappear around the bend, I felt the ground move under my feet. Not so much a slip, it wasn’t like that. More as though the earth had tilted ever so slightly on its axis.

  MY JOURNEY HOME SHOULD have taken me first to Los Angeles, then on to London. A total of twenty-eight hours, door to door, stopover time included. But the first announcement I heard, as I dragged my bag into the bright, noisy terminal, was that due to technical issues, the flight to Los Angeles has been cancelled.

  The next few flights to the States were already overbooked. There was a plane leaving Auckland for Sydney in a couple of hours’ time, the nice lady at the counter said. I had a choice — fly to Sydney free of charge and make the trip to Los Angeles from there, or rebook directly for Los Angeles in a few days’ time.

  I stood at the head of the queue, my heart beating somewhere near the top of my throat. No parking and no waiting. If he’d even offered to come into the terminal with me, I would have phoned him, asked him to come and get me.

  I left Auckland at ten o’clock on Sunday evening and landed in Sydney three-and-a-half hours later. Just as fog was closing in on Sydney airport. After two hours in a transit lounge, we boarded the plane for Los Angeles. We weren’t leaving any time soon, but the pilot wanted to take advantage of a sudden break in the weather. Seatbelts were to remain fastened. Departure, when it came, would not be announced.

  You’re vulnerable to a certain type of fantasy when you’re strapped down in one place for a long time. While we waited on the Sydney tarmac for the fog to lift, a joyous reconciliation between Joe and me was forming itself in my head. There was a new home, one minute a terraced house in London, the next an old wooden bungalow in Auckland. There were quite a few babies.

  Minutes passed, then hours.

  Outside, behind the fog curtain, the night turned charcoal. It was nearly dawn. I stared out the window, trying to spot exact moments of change in light. My head ached. Eventually I dozed off and dreamed of Joe and I getting married. I didn’t wake until the plane was taxiing for take-off.

  There were more delays in Los Angeles. I had a five-hour wait for my flight to London. I wandered around the food shops. The smell of curries, fried food and pastries enticed then repulsed me. My body didn’t know whether it wanted breakfast, lunch or dinner. I settled for strong black coffee.

  I’d lost count of travel hours long ago; I had got up at seven in the morning — some morning — in Auckland, that’s all I could remember. My eyes were gritty and my bones felt sharp and mean. Outside it was light, I could see blue sky through the windows. In spite of the sunlight, my insides felt frozen. I tried to imagine walking in the California spring morning, but after so many hours in confinement, the idea of open space was frightening.

  At the door of the London-bound plane, the flight attendant looked at my ticket, then pulled another piece of paper from his jacket pocket. He checked off one against the other. My heart sank.

  ‘Ellen O’Neill?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘You’ve had a bit of a rough journey, so far.’

  I nodded. ‘Not the greatest.’

  ‘To the left,’ he said. He gestured towards business class. ‘Seven D.’

  ‘Not funny, my friend,’ I replied.

  ‘We’re overbooked.’ He smiled.

  I shook my head, not yet prepared to believe him. ‘Thank you,’ I managed, in the end.

  I had never travelled in business class. There were only twelve rows, with seven seats per row — two on each side of the plane and three in the middle. The chairs were covered in soft chocolate-brown leather. They had padded headrests and plush fat armrests and there were big gaps between them.

  Seven D was the middle chair in a set of three, halfway down the cabin. The seats either side were still empty. I put my bag under the seat in front of me and sat down.

  Serene music played. A glass of champagne arrived. Other seats towards the front of the cabin were filling up, their occupants quietly stowing belongings. The atmosphere was reverent, like the beginning of a church service, nothing like the primal carry-on of economy class. I fiddled with the levers on the armrest and extended the seat as far as it would go. It flattened out to an almost horizontal position; a proper bed. I returned the seat upright, already imagining sleep.

  HE HAD SILVER, THINNING hair clipped neatly to short back and sides, and glasses with thick black frames. He wore a grey pullover and navy trousers.

  She reminded me of a small, wind-tossed bird, disorientated after a storm. Her head flicked left and right, twitching and scanning. Her face was creased and weathered by the sun. Her eyebrows had been plucked entirely off, replaced by two Harlequinesque pencil-drawn arches. Artwork also defined her mouth, a wobbly rose-coloured cupid lassoing thin tight lips.

  They stopped at every row, including the full ones, and the man stared at the numbers above the chairs.

  ‘Is it ours, Lionel?’ The woman’s voice was loud, east coast American. ‘Lionel, is it ours? What numbers are our seats again, Lionel?’

  The man ignored her. He looked hard at the numbers, then adjusted his glasses once more and read his boarding pass. He looked up at the numbers again to double-check, then he shuffled further along the aisle to the next row. Little bird-woman hopped along behind him.

  On he went, looking, checking, looking.

  ‘Lionel, how hard can it be? Would you find our seats?’ The woman’s voice was close to a screech. She fixed her stare on the man and craned forward, as though she was going to peck him. ‘You’re a useless waste of flesh, Lionel Jipson. Can’t you count?’ She spat the words out. The skin on her neck wobbled under an expensive-looking scarf.

  ‘Give it a rest, Mia.’ The man kept looking at the seat numbers. ‘You’re making a scene.’

  ‘You’re the one making a scene. Life with you is one long bad scene. Where are our seats?’

  ‘Patience, woman.’

  ‘Would you hurry up, already. These bags are killing me.’

  ‘Whose fault is that, Mia? Buying up the entire duty-free shop …’

  You reach a point, when you’re sleep deprived, whereby you disassociate yourself from your surroundings. Unable to engage, you sit back and follow things as best you can. That’s how it felt, watching the man and the woman. Their bickering crescendoed and subsided to vicious muttering.

  I couldn’t stop looking. I closed my eyes, rubbed them, and when I opened them the man and the woman were standing over me. A stewardess hovered behind.

  ‘Ms O’Neill, Mr and Mrs Jipson here —’ she gestured to them — ‘have seats on either side of you.’

  Of course they did.

  The woman leaned across the empty seat and let a gnarly hand rest on my arm. ‘Honey, we were wondering … would you be okay about moving across one, taking the aisle seat just there? So that we can sit together?’

  Up close, her face was terrifying. The creases in her skin were clogged with tiny wedges of make-up. False eyelashes clung bravely to her eyelids. But there was something else in those dark bird eyes, something other than the loathing I’d seen directed at her husband earlier. She blinked rapidly, as though she might be about to cry.

  I looked at the man, half expecting a frantic, silent gesture forbidding me to move. But he was nodding, with the same pleading expression as his wife. ‘If it’s not too much trouble?’ he said.

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘Would you like another glass of champagne, Ms O’Neill?’ The stewardess proffered her sympathy via alcohol. I accepted it.

/>   A lovely business-class meal arrived. I ate it watching a movie and wearing headphones. I was determined to avoid any interaction with Lionel and Mia Jipson. I was worried the sniper fire next to me would continue into the night, or whatever that cavernous black space outside was, thirty thousand feet above the earth. As soon as dinner was over, the cabin lights dimmed. Everyone pushed their seats flat and settled down for the long flight to London.

  I was on my side, with my back to the couple. They’d stopped their bickering, but there was a quite a bit of scrabbling around in bags going on.

  I knew I was not going to fall asleep. Maybe it was the champagne. More likely, I’d simply forgotten how. I had never felt more awake in my life. After a time, I rolled over to face the old couple. Peeking first, I opened my eyes just enough to watch.

  SHE WAS UNDER HER blanket, sitting upright. He was still sitting as well. In one hand he held a little bottle of pills, and in the other a glass of water. He dropped a tiny pill into her mouth, waited as she took water and swallowed, then gave her another.

  ‘Make it enough, Lionel,’ she whispered to him, pushing her seatback to horizontal.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mia. I know how many.’

  Her twitching and shuffling under the blanket continued for a few minutes, then her body settled as she drifted off to sleep. It crossed my mind that he might have overdosed her. I was aware that I should do something about that. But I was mesmerised. I had no choice but to watch.

  In the semi-darkness, he took her hands in his own. I looked at the silhouette of her blanket, saw it was rising and falling under her breathing.

  He leaned over and kissed her on the mouth.

  She didn’t respond. Her appearance was changing. Her face relaxed. The wrinkles slipped away. The ridiculous eyebrows settled down to less severe angles. Her lips formed a girlish pout. In the strange flickering light of the dimmed cabin, with years of marital sparring pared away, I saw Lionel Jipson gaze upon his new bride.