Trip of a Lifetime

by Liz Byrski

  They would have to spice up Heather’s image to bring it more in line with his own. Obviously she’d need to lose some weight. Had she ever ridden a motorbike? Probably not, but she’d look good in photographs poised behind him on the pillion. At some stage, and it needed to be quite soon, they could talk it through with Luke and see if he had some suggestions for packaging her.

  ‘When are you coming back?’ Heather had asked him the day after the funeral.

  ‘I was thinking of flying down on Friday, seeing Luke and then driving back to your place in the evening,’ he said.

  ‘It seems ages,’ she said. ‘So much has happened. I’ve really missed you.’

  ‘It is too long, again,’ Ellis said. ‘But it’s all over now. We can get on with our plans, and I’ve got a wonderful surprise for you – two surprises, in fact. I’ll see you Friday evening. Put some champagne in the fridge.’

  ‘You two seem to be getting on really well,’ Jill said as she and Diane walked out into the dusky garden while Adam and Stefan cleared the table and made coffee. ‘This is the first time Stefan’s ever brought anyone over for dinner.’

  ‘And he’s the first man I’ve been out with since Gerry,’ Diane said. ‘And I mean, since I met Gerry, not just since he left.’

  Jill stopped and turned to face her. ‘Really? But Gerry wasn’t your first boyfriend, was he?’

  Diane flushed and lowered her voice. ‘Well, not my first boyfriend, but the first man I slept with. The only one I’ve slept with.’

  ‘No! Not really?’

  Diane smiled. ‘You married late, Jill! I married young and my mother put the fear of god in me about sex and at the same time failed to give me any information. You know what it was like back then. People talk as though everyone was doing it all the time, but I was really ignorant and terrified of ending up pregnant.’

  Jill laughed suddenly. ‘Me too. I knew nothing and was frightened of everything. My mother gave me a booklet that explained it all with drawings of rabbits. It took me a long time to translate it to human beings. I’d never seen a penis and wasn’t sure what you did with them but one night I was out with a boy, sitting kissing on a seat in the park, and quite suddenly he undid his fly and put his penis in my hand and made me hold it. I was terrified. I honestly thought I might get pregnant just from holding it.’

  ‘It was scary, all that stuff,’ Diane said. ‘A similar thing happened to me, only it was in the dark foyer of a rather dingy block of flats. I remember thinking, so that’s what it’s like, what am I supposed to do now?’ They laughed, and Diane felt a sudden sense of relief at being able to talk like this. ‘I never saw that boy again, and the next penis I saw was Gerry’s. But what I remember from that night in the flats was a sort of confusion, that all the stories and speculation came down to this strange thing that was lying in my hand twitching like a dying puppy.’

  Their laughter floated out on the still evening air in the darkening garden. ‘So, I guess this must all seem pretty scary,’ Jill said, ‘starting again after so long?’

  Diane nodded. ‘I really like Stefan, and I don’t want to stuff this up, but I feel incompetent. I’ve forgotten how to read the signs, if I ever knew how to read them. And he’s such an unusual person. I don’t just mean his cultural background, but as an individual – he’s unlike any other man I’ve met before.’

  Jill smiled. ‘I probably shouldn’t break a confidence, but it might help you to know that Stefan called in here this morning and was agonising about his own lack of confidence. It’s strange for him too, Diane. Take it slowly and trust him. He’s a good man.’

  Diane hadn’t intended to confide in Jill but the evening had been so entirely different from any she had ever spent with Gerry and their friends that it seemed perfectly natural. Stefan lacked the hard edge that had so attracted her to Gerry, and his friendship with Adam was different from the way Gerry had related to his friends.

  ‘Barbara says that Stefan is a true grown-up, and that Adam’s reached that stage too with a lot of help from you.’

  ‘That does sound like Barb,’ Jill said, breaking off a twig of lavender and squeezing it between her fingers. ‘Adam’s had a hard time recently, we both have. His friendship with Stefan helped, and they’re pretty comfortable with who they are. They don’t need to push and shove each other to see who’s in the ascendant.’ She indicated a wooden bench and they walked to it, moving aside the remnants of a game Daisy and her friend had been playing with plastic cups and a couple of dolls who had seen better days. ‘Speaking of people in the ascendant,’ Jill went on, sitting down, ‘Ellis is far too much in the ascendant for my liking.’

  ‘It’s horrible, isn’t it?’ Diane said. ‘Heather’s a different person when he’s around, like she’s doing some weird dance to please him. It’s embarrassing. I think he intimidates her. I keep hoping she’ll catch sight of herself and be as shocked as we are.’

  ‘With the exception of Adam, we’ve all fallen into the trap of letting her think we like him just because we want her to be happy,’ Jill said.

  ‘I’m certainly guilty of that,’ Diane said. ‘And although Heather’s become a friend, she’s also my employer, and frankly I don’t feel right telling her that I think the love of her life is a pain in the bum.’

  ‘Maybe we could get together, you, me and Barb. Talk to her. What do you think?’

  ‘Ooh! I don’t know,’ Diane said cautiously. ‘I don’t think I’m close enough to Heather to know how she’d take that. I mean, wouldn’t she just feel she needed to defend him?’

  ‘Who’s defending whom?’ Adam asked as he and Stefan emerged from the shadows.

  ‘Heather defending Ellis if Diane, Barb and I tried to knock some sense into her,’ Jill said.

  Adam shook his head. ‘Bad idea. Very bad idea. My sister is extremely stubborn and I’ve already made the situation worse, although it’s hard for me to get over the satisfaction I got from punching him. All we can do now is stand back and wait for her to recognise what she’s doing.’

  Stefan nodded, sitting down beside Diane and taking her hand as though it were the most natural thing in the world. ‘Adam’s right,’ he said. ‘Ellis is too full of himself, flying too close to the sun. I don’t think you have to wait very long before his wings catch fire.’

  Barbara sat on the end of her bed staring at the small pile of George’s belongings that she’d gathered from around the house. There was an old cotton hat that he’d left hanging on the back of a chair on the deck; several battered tobacco tins full of various sizes of screws; one of his collection of corkscrews – an old-fashioned one with a little brush on the end for cleaning fragments of cork from the bottle top; some notes and lesson plans he’d brought in to show her; and an ancient, hand-knitted, bottle-green sweater that he kept there because he always complained her house was too cold in winter. She picked up the sweater and held it against her face. It smelt of George, of autumn leaves and grass, and the Old Spice she always smelled on his face and neck when he hugged her.

  ‘You are so conventional,’ she’d teased him once. ‘You smell like forty years ago.’

  ‘And who were you hugging forty years ago?’

  ‘None of your business,’ she’d said. ‘A woman must have her secrets.’

  The sweater was old and much washed, the wool soft against her skin. Barbara pressed it closer to her face and rocked gently back and forth.

  ‘Do you have any idea how much I miss you, George?’ she said. ‘How hard it is to be without you?’ She wished she could be angry. People often were when a loved one died, angry about being abandoned. Would anger be easier, she wondered, easier than this grinding sadness and emptiness that manifested at times as panic and at others as desolation?

  She had told them she wasn’t going to crack up, and she wouldn’t, but there were things about George’s death, what it had shown her and what it meant for the future, that were unexpected and very hard to contemplate. She had been given no say in
the funeral arrangements, and although George’s son and daughter-in-law had accepted her offer to have the wake in her home, she knew that their acceptance was about a responsibility they didn’t want rather than an acknowledgement of her place in his life and his death. She remembered a colleague who, in her late thirties, had an affair with a married man. The hardest thing, she’d said, was that if he’d died no one would let her know, she couldn’t even go to his funeral and no one would legitimate her grief. In George’s death, as in his life, his family had treated Barbara as one of his friends, but they had never managed to get a grip on what they had meant to each other. Unlike her own family, they didn’t seem to understand that friendship could be as profoundly rooted in love and commitment as any marriage might be.

  ‘You mean they’d take it more seriously if we shared a bed?’ she’d laughed one day when he had railed about his son’s failure to comprehend.

  ‘God no, they’d probably be horrified and embarrassed. They’re far more conventional than our generation. No, I think the only thing that would do it would be if we got married.’

  ‘And still lived in separate houses?’

  He’d shrugged then. ‘Who knows? I certainly don’t.’

  ‘But it doesn’t really matter, you know,’ she’d said. ‘We know what it means and so in the end it doesn’t really matter.’

  But now that George was gone, it seemed to matter quite a lot. It made Barbara feel that she had less right to grieve, that her loss was, in their eyes, less than it would have been if she and George had put a more conventional seal on their relationship. Perhaps it was petty to feel like this – after all, she was the one charged with collecting his ashes and sorting out the contents of his house – but again these were rights awarded for reasons of convenience.

  Barbara took a final long draw on the scent of George’s sweater and then leaned over the bed and tucked it under the quilt alongside her pillow. There was something else too, something that generated an unfamiliar sense of fear. For most of her life she had thought of herself as self-contained and alone, but she had not been alone since she and George had met. For several years now they had grown old together and ageing had not bothered her, she had enjoyed its rewards and satisfactions. But now she was fearful of her ability to cope with the challenges of everyday life: the mysteries of her computer, the servicing of her car, driving to unfamiliar places, learning to use new appliances – things she had always handled competently while George was alive seemed monumentally confusing, possibly even hazardous, now that he was gone.

  Only a few weeks earlier she had been planning to travel to a strange country where she didn’t speak a word of the language, to do a job she had never done before. It had seemed like a wonderful adventure. But when George took his last breath, the breath of her confidence had also been extinguished, and now she questioned her ability to cope with the comparatively trivial demands of an ordinary life. ‘You must still go, for me, for both of us,’ George had said as she knelt at his side. But the task was beyond her now and she knew she must let him down, that she could not see China for herself, let alone for both of them.

  Barbara took the small bundle of possessions off the bed and placed them tenderly on the dresser, standing briefly with her hand resting on top of them before turning away. As she walked out of the room and down the stairs to the kitchen, she wondered, for the first time since she had made her move from the city, just how many years of independent living lay ahead, and she felt the icy chill of being alone. Ageing no longer seemed like a challenge to be met with enthusiasm, but like a long dark road full of potholes and boulders, a road she must negotiate without even a torch to light her way. A road that led nowhere.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Heather sprinkled cinnamon across the top of the custard tart and put it in the oven. By the time they were ready to eat it, after the pasta and salad, it would be cooked and still warm, the pastry sweet and short, the custard softly set and creamy, just as Ellis liked it. He had called to say that he would be there by seven and she had been determined to have everything ready so that she could relax, give time to him, and think about the future. The chaos of Christmas, her resignation, the drama of George’s accident and death, her own grief and concern for Barbara, had all left her in turmoil. This weekend with Ellis would restore her. At last they would have peaceful time together.

  ‘It’s really quiet today,’ Shaun had said earlier. ‘Why don’t you make the most of it and go home?’

  Heather knew that he was trying to get everything in the office, including her, running smoothly before he left in a few weeks’ time. He would do well with Rosa Hartman, but she dreaded his actual leaving. Patsy had resigned, they had found a new part-timer and Diane had agreed to stay on full time until the election. She would rent Shaun’s house when he moved to Sydney. ‘I’m very grateful,’ Heather had told her. ‘I thought you might be rushing off to Sydney too, to be near Stefan.’

  ‘It’s tempting,’ Diane admitted, ‘but I think we both need to take things slowly. The pace seems ideal at present – we have all the time in the world.’

  Heather felt slightly in awe of Diane these days. Less than a year ago, brittleness and anger had made her irritating and exhausting, but now she had an enviable serenity, taking each day as it came, focusing on the present without worrying at the past or struggling to shape the future.

  ‘You make it sound easy,’ Heather said, ‘embarking on this new relationship. But for me it seems like a constant battle to balance time and commitments and try to keep Ellis happy.’

  ‘It is easy,’ Diane said. ‘Once I got over worrying about whether Stefan would still love me if he knew what I was really like, it became easy. The morning I woke up next to him for the first time I realised that it could be easy with him, because his ego doesn’t get in the way.’ She’d turned away slightly, stopping abruptly and blushing, as though she wished she hadn’t said it. Heather got the feeling that she should have asked Diane exactly what she meant, but she hadn’t liked to.

  Despite her preparations and her impatience to see Ellis, Heather still felt nervous and empty, still questioned her ability to retain her sense of herself within the charmed circle. Sometimes she even felt she was teetering on the edge of a disaster she couldn’t define. She poured herself a glass of wine and sat on the deck drawing lines with her finger through the condensation on the glass, thinking of things she needed to sort out with him. Head to Heart was number one. It wouldn’t be easy, but it had to be done. And she needed him to understand that giving up her job didn’t mean that she wanted to take on the job of looking after him. They were two intelligent adults who would care for each other. She wasn’t about to become a doormat. But not tonight, she didn’t have the energy for any of this tonight.

  She heard a car purr to a halt outside and she finished her wine, got up and walked through the house to the front door. Ellis, who was unloading some things from the car, looked up and saw her framed in the doorway.

  ‘Heather, darling,’ he said, straightening up. ‘How wonderful,’ and he put down the files and boxes he was holding, walked over and drew her into his arms. She leaned against him, seeking the magic ingredient that everyone else seemed to have found.

  Together they carried Ellis’s things into the house and piled them onto the settee. ‘I’ll sort them out later,’ he said, taking the glass she handed him. ‘To you, my darling, to us,’ and they sat together talking, until Ellis said he was famished and Heather lit the tall lemon-scented candles on the table and went to the kitchen to put the finishing touches to the pasta.

  ‘I’ve missed you so much,’ Ellis said, following her and slipping his arms around her waist, turning her to face him. ‘In fact, I’m sure you can feel how much I’ve missed you, how glad I am to see you,’ he said, sliding his hands down onto her bottom, pressing her closer. ‘Maybe we should eat later,’ he said, reaching up with one hand to unbutton her blouse.

  Heather felt a sudden, quite s
hocking revulsion, and stopped his hand. She kissed him lightly and turned back to the stove. ‘Let’s wait,’ she said, ‘anticipation is part of the pleasure,’ and she stirred the pasta, hoping he would not sense the tension in her body, the lack of conviction in her voice. ‘Why don’t you open another bottle of wine and we’ll eat straight away.’

  Slowly, methodically, she tilted the saucepan and tipped the pasta into a serving dish, scraping the last fragments away with a wooden spoon and sprinkling it with chopped parsley. She was watching herself, her every movement, as if from a distance and in slow motion, wondering what on earth she was doing. She was empty, drained of feeling, almost as she had been the morning after the shooting: an empty shell, doing things, saying things, but feeling nothing. As she carried the pasta out to the table she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror and paused, surprised at how calm she looked compared with the way she was trembling inside.

  As they ate their pasta, Ellis described the rockery in the garden at Byron Bay that a local man had completed the previous day. ‘I think you’ll agree it looks excellent,’ he said, breaking off a piece of warm Turkish bread and popping it into his mouth. ‘It’ll be better when the plants grow up a bit, but it’s made a wonderful feature of that area of the garden.’ He had overcome his initial disappointment at Heather’s lack of interest in sex before dinner. He’d timed that erection perfectly, taking a tablet when he was twenty minutes away from Newcastle. He was familiar now with the time the medication took to work and how long the effect could be sustained. It was always a bit of a gamble, of course – sometimes it waned before he had the chance to take advantage of it, and he had to take another rather quickly to avoid an embarrassing loss of function. Managing the medication was difficult, as difficult as keeping the secret, but it was a cross he had to bear.

  ‘Custard tart!’ he exclaimed in delight as Heather put the dish on the table. ‘My favourite, and it looks so perfect too.’ He took a small piece on his spoon and tasted it, closing his eyes in pleasure. ‘And it tastes even better. This is truly to die for, Heather. And I have a surprise for you – a couple of surprises, actually. Why don’t we take our dessert outside, and I’ll make some coffee and show you everything.’