Trip of a Lifetime

by Liz Byrski

  ‘Do that,’ Shaun said. ‘And, meanwhile, I’ll talk to Denise.’

  NINE

  Roger, Director of Infrastructure and Services, was a bully. Jill suspected that Renée had already carpeted him about it at least once, maybe twice, and that he was on his last warning. It didn’t seem to be bothering him, though, probably because he was arrogant enough to ignore the warnings. She wondered what it would be like to be married to someone whose homecoming you feared, whose behaviour and reactions you could never predict or trust, who said they loved you but treated you with contempt. She had once met Roger’s wife at a Christmas function. She was a quiet woman, simply but elegantly dressed, with a permanent smile. She blinked a lot, and nodded in agreement when her husband spoke. But when she thought no one was looking, she drew her lips together in a tight line and swallowed hard several times, as though she were trying to rid herself of the taste of something unpalatable.

  Jill watched as Roger completed the presentation of the final section of his report, leaned complacently back in his chair and looked around the table in expectation of a response. The rest of them shuffled papers, crossed or uncrossed their legs and waited for Renée to move on to the next item on the agenda. There were obviously far worse things than living with someone sensitive, someone who cared too much about everything, and seemed to have an unhealthy sense of responsibility for his sister.

  ‘He could be depressed,’ Renée had said when Jill broke her self-imposed veto on discussing the situation with her.

  Jill shook her head. ‘He’s upset certainly but not depressed in the way you mean. There was the shooting, and Kirsty leaving home, and now this thing about Heather’s old flame turning up. There’s stuff going on that he won’t talk about.’

  ‘Won’t or can’t?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Maybe he should get some help.’

  ‘Last time you said it was me who needed a counsellor.’

  ‘Yes, well, this thing with Adam hasn’t just happened, it’s been building up for some time. You need to talk about it. It’s bound to make you feel weird.’

  ‘I’ve always felt weird about Heather,’ Jill said. ‘Almost from day one, but the shooting sort of brought it to a head. And now there’s this stand-off between them. I feel like piggy-in-the-middle. Sometimes I’d just like to bang their heads together really hard.’

  ‘So, have you met this Ellis?’ Renée asked.

  ‘No. Heather was in Newcastle for a week and she came back here again last week. I’m obviously not going to invite them for dinner with Adam behaving like a pork chop.’

  Renée closed the meeting and there was movement around the table as people gathered their files and headed back to their own offices.

  ‘Just a moment, please, Roger,’ Renée said, and Jill watched as he turned back into the room. His number was up. Renée was tough and decisive, skilled at cutting through the mind games and confronting people. Roger was not going to be easy but Renée would prevail.

  Jill closed the boardroom door behind her and walked back to her own office. It was so much harder to sort things out with the people you loved, to find your way through so many layers of unspoken sadness and resentment, to risk disturbing old hurts and misunderstandings. Jill remembered how she had felt the morning following the shooting, watching the TV coverage, listening to the various views on what had happened and why. She had peered at the screen wanting to catch sight of Adam, going into the hospital perhaps, or driving away with Barbara. She’d needed to see him because she had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach that this crisis would penetrate much deeper than the bullet itself.

  Jill gazed out of her office window. It was a full week since she had moved out of the bedroom, and neither she nor Adam had referred to it. Where did they go from here? Perhaps she should just say nothing, move back, let Adam and Heather sort out their own problems, and trust that eventually Adam would return to being the person he had always been. But then she would still be bugged by his disappearing into the music, and her own ambivalence about his relationship with Heather. Perhaps Renée was right and it would help to talk it through with someone else. But a counsellor? And then it dawned on her that there was someone else she could talk to. Someone to whom, for this and a whole lot of other reasons, she should probably have talked a long time ago. Taking a deep breath, she dialled Heather’s direct line at Parliament House.

  In a fitting room in the Market Street branch of David Jones, Heather was struggling with a size sixteen skirt which was stubbornly resisting her efforts to drag it up over her hips. She’d had a sixteen in this label before but the manufacturers seemed to be skimping on fabric these days, cutting things tighter. Discarding it, she reached for the eighteen she’d brought in with her just in case. It eased on all right but as she turned side-on to the mirror, it was clear that the zip was going to be a challenge. She pulled in her stomach, clenched her buttocks and tugged. The zip moved a couple of centimetres and stopped, and as she relaxed her muscles it ripped away from the fabric and stuck out at an angle as though poking fun at her. She swore silently, wriggled out of the skirt and sat down on the fitting-room bench, wearing only her bra, knickers and pantyhose. Surely she couldn’t need something bigger than an eighteen? A flush began its smouldering journey from her face, down through her whole body, flooding her with its smothering, prickly heat.

  Was there no end to the horrors of ageing? Extra weight, loss of concentration, hot flushes . . . Bugger this stupid thing about power surges, there was nothing less empowering than finding yourself bathed in sweat day and night. Just that morning she’d read an article about glamorous, sexy older women: Helen Mirren, Candice Bergen and Raquel Welch, all over sixty and looking forty. So being old was cool, but only if you actually looked twenty years younger. Men could go grey or bald, acquire wrinkles and paunches, their jowls could drop and hair sprout from their ears, and they were still considered sexy and attractive. But heaven help the woman who was found guilty of not attempting to hold on to youth.

  ‘Bugger it,’ Heather muttered, ‘I’m so totally sick of this.’

  ‘Are you all right in there, madam?’ the sales assistant called, tapping on the door. ‘Do you need any other sizes?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Heather said, fanning herself with a sale catalogue, ‘I’m fine.’

  The woman’s footsteps trailed away and Heather stared at the offending skirt. Suddenly she wanted to cry, to howl with disappointment at the unfairness of being fat, menopausal and having bad hair. And now she’d have to pay for a useless skirt. A very expensive useless skirt, unless . . . Cautiously she pressed her ear to the door. It was early and the store was quiet. There was no one else in the fitting rooms. She clambered up onto the bench, and over the top of the door she could just see through to the entrance to the fitting-room area – not a soul in sight. Jumping down she opened the door and, still in her underwear, ran to the end cubicle, hung the offending skirt on the wall, and fled back to her own.

  Her face was blazing with the flush and with guilt about her bad behaviour, but there was enormous satisfaction in not doing the right thing. It was liberating, although not as liberating as getting into a size sixteen with room to move would have been. She struggled back into her clothes, hating the sight of herself in the mirror. She had worn her favourite olive green suit with the cream silk shirt, because she thought it made her look slim, and because she was meeting Jill, who always looked as though she had been born with the casual elegance gene. But all she could see now was an untidy, shapeless mess topped by a beetroot-coloured face. Turning away from the mirror she buttoned up her jacket and gathered up the clothes.

  ‘Any good?’ asked the sales assistant when she emerged from the fitting room.

  ‘No thanks,’ she said, gracing the woman with her most generous smile. ‘All a bit on the big side. I probably need a fourteen, but I don’t have time now, got to get to a meeting.’

  The woman took the clothes from her
and cast a surreptitious glance at her hips. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘We do have a range for the fuller figure on the next floor. You might like to try there.’

  Heather resisted the urge to punch her, and made her way down to the ground floor, surrounded by real and airbrushed images of young, slim and beautiful women. Had she looked like Helen or Candice, perhaps Ellis would have made a move by now. It was par for the course that older men fancied younger women, but presumably she was no longer young enough. And he clearly thought she was not paying him enough attention, not like she did all those years ago. Just this morning they had had an awkward conversation in which she told him that she wasn’t free until the evening. She needed to go shopping, she had meetings and parliament, and Jill had called and suggested that as she was in town they should meet for lunch.

  ‘It’s important to me,’ she explained to Ellis. ‘I’ve always wanted to be closer to Jill but she seems so . . . well, complete as she is. Almost as though there’s no more space for anyone else. So this is something different and I don’t want to say no.’ She’d felt intimidated by his curt reaction and resented it, fighting her instinct to be accommodating. She longed for tenderness and affection and, not for the first time, someone to indulge and make a fuss of her. Despite his reassuring presence and his talk of romance, Heather suspected that physical affection outside of sex was not part of Ellis’s emotional repertoire.

  She reached the bottom of the escalator and walked out into the street, heat prickling her armpits and beads of sweat crawling down her spine. She reminded herself that she was not necessarily the fattest person on the streets of Sydney that morning, and that menopause and trauma were bound to be a challenging combination. She knew she should walk the short distance to Parliament House but her feet hurt and her mood had sapped her energy. Ignoring her guilt she slipped into the back seat of the first taxi at the rank.

  ‘Where to, love?’ the cabbie asked.

  ‘Parliament House, please,’ she said, and began searching her bag for a cab voucher.

  They pulled away from the kerb into the traffic moving down Market Street. ‘Aren’t you the one that got shot?’ he said, looking at her in his rear-vision mirror.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Shocking business, that. But that’s what you get, letting all these foreigners into the country.’ Heather closed her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘They haven’t caught him yet, then?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘Funny, you know. I wasn’t sure when you got in the cab, but when you said Parliament House I thought, yes, that’s her, that’s the one that got shot. Thing is, you look younger in the photographs, so I wasn’t sure . . . know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Heather. ‘I know exactly what you mean.’

  Jill arrived early and sat in a corner of the café in Macquarie Street, trying to look as though she were reading the paper but wondering why she’d organised this lunch. She couldn’t remember a time when she had actually had a conversation alone with Heather about anything personal. They had rarely been alone at all except in the context of family functions: preparing food together in the kitchen, washing up, or walking side by side in a straggling group. They had never before met alone, never talked intimately about themselves and certainly never discussed Adam.

  As Jill stirred her coffee and glanced out of the window wishing she were anywhere else, she caught sight of Heather walking towards the café, and her self-esteem took a dive. She looked, as always, smart and professional in a dark green suit and cream shirt, and Jill felt slightly in awe of her. She wished she had worn the red wool Carla Zampatti suit with the black buttons that she’d bought for less than a third of its original price in the recycling shop. She’d opted instead for the black leather bomber jacket, black skirt and leather boots (all also from the recycling shop – did she have anything apart from underwear that wasn’t from there?), and she felt scruffy and suburban. Heather opened the door, looked around and smiled when she spotted Jill. No turning back now.

  ‘This was a lovely idea,’ Heather said, kissing her and pulling out a chair. ‘What are you doing in this part of town?’

  ‘Oh, just a meeting,’ Jill said, ‘so I thought it’d be nice to catch up.’

  ‘We should do it more often. We never seem to get a chance to talk.’

  ‘No. Silly really, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very silly. After all, we’re family.’ Heather opened the menu. ‘Have you ordered?’

  A waiter materialised and Jill shook her head. ‘I was waiting for you.’

  ‘Well, I’m starving. I’ll have the club sandwich with chips. No, scrub the chips, just the sandwich and a salad. And a mineral water, please.’

  Jill ordered a caesar salad and handed her menu back to the waiter. ‘Well,’ she said in the silence that followed, ‘how are things? You’re looking a whole lot better than when I last saw you.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Heather said with a shrug. ‘Up and down. One little bullet and everything changes. I saw it, you know, the bullet, before the police took it away. It had my blood on it and I remember thinking, that’s that over and done with. I had no idea, just no idea and now . . .’ Her voice trailed away.

  ‘And now everything’s a mess,’ Jill said. ‘Now it’s changed everything and everyone.’

  ‘You too? You and Adam?’

  ‘All of us,’ Jill replied. ‘All of us, and Adam especially.’

  They talked at length about the shooting, and the police investigation that seemed to have run out of steam.

  ‘It won’t let go of me,’ Heather said. ‘I’m waiting, waiting all the time for it to be over, for everything to be back like it was before that night.’

  ‘I wonder,’ Jill said, ‘whether things ever get back to how they were. Something like this changes people. I think you can’t go back, you just go on in a different way.’

  ‘That’s what Ellis says. But anyway, let’s talk about something else. I’m too obsessed with what happened and why. I’m sorry, Jill. What’s that line from Beaches? “That’s enough about me, let’s talk about you – what do you think about me?”’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Jill said, feeling perfectly at ease at last.

  ‘Tell me what you meant about Adam.’

  Jill hesitated, wary of the track that led to her resentment of Adam’s relationship with his sister. ‘He’s more withdrawn than ever,’ she said slowly. ‘But that’s been going on a long time. He’s spending more and more time shut in his room playing his cello.’ She felt a sudden burst of anger. ‘I’m so sick of those fucking Bach suites, Heather, I want to scream at him.’

  ‘I know what you mean. He was doing that when he and I shared a flat. It’s an avoidance technique, when he thinks there’s an argument brewing.’

  ‘I realise that,’ Jill said, ‘but he does it more and more, even when there’s not a whiff of conflict to avoid. He just seems to want to cut himself off.’

  ‘It’s probably just a part of the way he is.’

  ‘So he did it with you too?’

  ‘Oh yes, and with Yvette. It used to drive her insane. I think that’s part of the reason she left him. Well, probably part of the reason she had the affair and then left – eventually she couldn’t cope with his withdrawal.’

  ‘I thought it must be my fault, but he doesn’t seem able or even willing to discuss it.’

  Heather nodded. ‘It’s just him, and I think the orchestra gets him down.’

  ‘That’s what Barbara said. That he never expected the orchestra to be like an ordinary job.’

  Heather nodded again. ‘Yes, that sounds about right.’

  ‘But he never mentions it.’

  ‘No,’ Heather said, ‘he wouldn’t. You see, he had very romantic ideas about spending his life immersed in music, and when he chucked the geology degree so that he could get into it full time, Mum and Granddad were furious. They kept telling him that if Dad were alive he’d be terribly disappointed in
him, that he would have wanted Adam to have “a proper job”. Granddad thought music was for dilettantes, and anything that wasn’t played in chapel was a fast road to sin. Even after he died it took a long time for Mum to feel really okay about Adam’s desire to be a musician, because of that. Barb was the only one who encouraged him, so I suppose he felt he was just going to keep his head down, press on and prove that music could be a proper job. But there is so much more than the love of music or the instrument that’s involved in being in an orchestra.’ She paused, pouring the last of her mineral water into a glass. ‘And I suppose that once he got to be first cello, there were more of the sort of responsibilities he dislikes: the everyday running of things, organising people . . . that’s not his scene.’

  Jill shook her head. ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘And you think the disappearing act is getting worse?’

  ‘It got worse quite quickly after you were shot. And now, since . . .’ she hesitated.

  ‘Since Ellis turned up?’

  ‘Yes. Since then he’s been more uncommunicative than ever, and he’s angry, I think.’ She leaned forward with a sudden insight. ‘In fact, it’s almost as though he’s in pain. Not physical pain, something more profound.’ She took a deep breath and summoned all her courage. ‘It’s horrible, especially this thing about you and Ellis, it’s as though there’s something between you and Adam around this, something that excludes me. It makes me really uncomfortable.’

  Heather flushed. ‘Yes,’ she said, looking away. ‘Yes, I can see that it would, Jill. I’m sorry, it must be horrible, and you need to know that it isn’t anything about you. It’s about the past, about how Adam felt about it. He was wonderful to me, but he took it all very personally, and now, Ellis coming back like this, he’s taking that very personally too.’

  ‘But why?’ Jill asked. ‘It’s so long ago.’

  ‘Yes, and I’ve got over it, so why can’t he?’

  ‘Exactly.’