by Unknown
Olga had occupied about six chairs around the room, smoothing her expansive rose-printed skirt each time she sat down. She was always nervy, but seemed especially stressed out tonight. Francie thought that there was something else on her mind.
Amanda put down her orange juice and clasped her hands underneath her belly in that way pregnant women have of using their new hard tummies as a comforter and shield. Francie could see Amanda was mustering her courage for a deep-and-meaningful.
‘Look, I think there’s something here that you’re not really facing, Francie. And I don’t think you’re going to like it, but I’m going to say it anyway.’
Francie sat back in the overstuffed chair and gripped an armrest with one hand. She took a gulp of wine and listened. She knew Amanda could not do any more damage. She’d already beaten herself to a bloody pulp.
Amanda tucked her sleek, dark, bobbed hair behind her ears, which she always did when she was nervous.
‘You know, and I know, that if she hadn’t come along you and Nick would have broken up anyway. I think we all saw it coming and so did you, if you’re honest. You remember that weekend we all went away to Aireys Inlet? You were complaining then how distant Nick was. You were wondering then whether he was really the man you wanted to spend the rest of your life with. And that was a couple of weeks before he’d even met her.’
The name Poppy was mercifully never mentioned in this company. Francie’s silent forbearance encouraged Amanda to keep going.
‘I remember that weekend because I was ovulating and Lachlan and I had started trying for this baby. There was a lot of talk about babies and every time the subject was raised Nick would get up and go for a walk on the beach. You were wondering way back then whether you two were going to last. You were putting a lot of pressure on him to make a commitment—which was fair enough after five years—but you had come to a sort of crossroads. Don’t you think?’
Francie was now looking around the room, avoiding Amanda’s eyes.
‘Francie, we have been trying to tell you this for months, but you haven’t listened. You’ve been too angry and upset, but you’re going to have to accept the reality. You and Nick were over even before she came on the scene.’
Olga felt it was an opportune time for her contribution: ‘You’d started looking at other men too. There was that photographer from work.’
Another dose of reality Francie had to take.
Amanda continued: ‘You would have left anyway . . . that’s if he hadn’t got in first. I know the way he left was bloody hopeless and that he owed you something better than that, but we all love Nick and you’ve got to stop punishing him.’
‘He started it. He punished me first,’ said Francie, and as soon as the words were out of her mouth she heard how childish they sounded.
‘Oh come on, Francie!’ Amanda was exasperated. “Where’s this going to lead to? It just—’
‘I know, I know. That was stupid.’ Francie finally looked at her friends.
‘Everything I’ve done has been stupid. I wish I could take it all back. You’re right. The truth is I should have left Nick years ago. I know. I promise I’m trying to work it out. I’m really sorry. I’m sorry that I’ve bored you all shitless for the past six months. I really have tried not to. I’m sorry.’
There was silence as Amanda considered her plea, but Olga had one last charge: ‘All that stuff in the paper about married men and husband-stealers—where did that come from?’ Her tone was surprisingly sharp.
‘I don’t know. I just saw her on television and I wanted to punish her too. And then there was this opportunity at work and I got pressured. I know it’s no excuse, but I—’
‘Well it didn’t just punish her, it hurt a lot of other people,’ said Olga emphatically.
Francie and Amanda turned to Olga, who was compulsively rearranging her skirt again. She looked up and blurted, ‘I’m in love with a married man.’
Francie and Amanda glanced at each other—yes, they were both stunned—then looked back at Olga, who had leapt from her chair and started circling the room, her white wine sloshing from her glass onto the floor rug.
‘And it’s not how you think it is, Francie! I didn’t steal him. I mean, can any man really be stolen? You make it sound like a man is some sort of inanimate object, like a VCR. Like I’m some sort of cat-burglar who cased his house and then stole him from his wife and kids in the night. That’s not how it was at all!’
‘Well, how was it?’ asked Amanda.
‘How long has this been going on?’ asked Francie.
‘A year.’
‘A year?!’ they chorused.
‘And there’s something else. I just found out yesterday that I’m pregnant. Four months, Amanda—just a week ahead of you.’
Olga plopped down on her chair again, her skirt billowing out like a pink toadstool.
There could not have been a greater difference between the two pregnancy announcements. Where Amanda and Lachlan’s news had been greeted with cheers and champagne, Olga’s was met with open-mouthed amazement. She looked at her two friends and burst into tears.
‘I couldn’t have another abortion—I’ve already had two,’ she wailed. ‘I’m thirty-five! And anyway, I love him and I want to have a baby with him. And I am. So that’s that.’
The details of Olga’s affair were haltingly recounted. She had met her married man, whose name was Dominic, at a weekend jewellery trade fair. She was manning her booth, selling her handmade beaded necklaces, and he was next door flogging his silver rings and pendants. They had extravagantly admired each other’s handiwork and then, as these things happen, each other. It was a meeting of artistic minds—although she was also taken with his dreadlocks and silver toe ring and he with her cat’s eye glasses and elegant long neck.
Olga told her friends how she and Dominic had spent a scintillating afternoon drinking in the local country pub and then been treated to a tarot reading together by Mistress Merriweather—one of the weekend mystics who also had a booth at the fair. His cards had turned up The Lovers, The Sun and The World, which meant relationship, enlightenment and fulfilment; and she had selected The Hanged Man, The Fool and The Empress, which told her to let go, it was the beginning of abundance. If they had instead revealed the six cards of The High Priestess, The Devil, Justice, The Tower, The Moon and Strength—which would have meant non-action, hopelessness, cause and effect, downfall, illusion and willpower, it was doubtful their conclusion would have been any different.
They were handmade for each other. They were joined body and soul that night at a motel down the road. It wasn’t until a few months later that Olga discovered Dominic had already turned his capable hands towards fashioning himself a family—a wife and three-year-old twin daughters. But by then it was too late. Olga and Dominic’s relationship had been forged in the hot furnace of passion and deception and, according to Olga, couldn’t be undone. They would go wherever it led them. Only it didn’t seem to be headed towards a divorce court—from what Francie and Amanda could divine—any time soon.
‘He’s going to ask his wife for a separation,’ said Olga.
‘Ask her? They’re still living together then? Jeez, Olga, what about his kids? How old are they again?’ Amanda demanded.
‘At pre-school probably . . . I don’t know. I didn’t ask to fall in love with a married man. I didn’t know he was married. I met him and fell in love the same way you and Lachlan did. The same way Francie and Nick did. You don’t pick who you fall in love with! The heart wants what it wants!’
‘But you could have stopped it when you found out he was married,’ added Francie.
‘Oh yeah? The same way you could have stopped before you slashed Poppy’s things with a pair of scissors? Don’t give me your sanctimonious bullshit about self-control, Francie.’
Olga had a dangerous and determined look in her eye which her friends had rarely seen. Her remark hit the bullseye. Francie breathed deeply and took it. She tried a
more sympathetic tack.
‘Why didn’t you tell me? Maybe I could have helped.’
‘Hah! Like you’ve had a teaspoon of emotional energy for anyone but yourself for the past six months. If you had, you would have seen that Nick has been going through hell too. Poppy says it’s been a nightmare watching him so tormented by you falling apart the way you have.’
Amanda groaned and put a cushion over her face. She didn’t want to watch the next bit.
‘Oh?’ said Francie sardonically. ‘Poppy is your new best friend, is she? It occurs to me, Olga, that you are on her side because you and she have a lot in common.’
Olga threw her wineglass at the wall. It smashed and sprayed the room with glass. Amanda ducked behind her cushion and uttered a muffled ‘Oh shit.’
‘DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA OF THE AGONY YOU’VE CAUSED?’ Olga was shouting now. ‘Agony Aunt—that’s the perfect name for you. Nick stopped loving you. Is that a fucking crime? Why shouldn’t they put on a show together? What’s it got to do with you? Do you think they would bother to mention you and your sordid little deeds? Just how big is your ego?
‘You advising people about their love-lives is the biggest joke ever. You don’t know anything about love. You’ve never had it and you wouldn’t know it if . . . what was your charming phrase? If it bit you on the arse. Get fucked, Francie! Goodnight.’
Olga snatched her little beaded bag from the coffee table and ran from the room. Her high-heeled lace-up boots crunched on broken glass.
When she heard the front door slam Amanda took the cushion from her face. She eyed Francie carefully.
‘Don’t worry,’ Francie said wearily. ‘I had it coming. All of it.’
Amanda tried to make it better. ‘If she is pregnant . . . I mean, she is if she says she is, it’s just such a shock! Anyway, being pregnant, she’ll be teary and tired. I know what that feels like. She’ll come around.’
‘Yeah, she will. But a baby . . . bloody hell!’ said Francie. ‘I think we’ll have to be there for her. I don’t like the sound of this Dominic thing.’
‘God, Francie!’ Now it was Amanda’s turn to be up on her feet and walking on broken glass. ‘Why does it all have to be so complicated? Sometimes I get this foreboding about me and Lachlan. It feels like it’s been so easy. I can’t help feeling that somewhere down the track we’re going to pay the price. The fact that it’s been so, I dunno, normal feels almost abnormal.’
‘Don’t start thinking like that, Amanda. It’s supposed to be easy. We’re just living in a moment when people have too much time to think about all this shit. Once, you got married when you were a teenager, got pregnant and the responsibility of raising kids and just surviving made you grow up too. You didn’t have a choice.
‘But now . . . It’s like when you go into the supermarket and you look at a hundred different brands of shampoo. It’s the same stuff, just different packaging, but having the choice can send you mad. If we went into the supermarket and there was just one bottle with “shampoo” on the label you wouldn’t always be wondering whether there was something better you could have bought. It’s the same with love. Doesn’t matter what brand it is. If you find it, buy it. Be happy. And if it runs out, I dunno, buy a new bottle.’
Francie had no idea where this bizarre analogy had come from. What if the shampoo hurt your eyes? What if someone nicked your bottle? What if there was no more on the shelf? But she just sat with it and thought it was as good as any other banal self-help pronouncement she had come up with in her life.
She decided she would go home, sit in the bath and wash her hair.
Twenty
‘Why is all this happening to me?’ Francie looked at Faith Treloar without a tear in her eye. It was time for Francie’s Wednesday night confessional. The box of tissues sat on Faith’s shelf behind her desk and that’s where they would stay. Francie’s crying had stopped and she doubted whether she would cry again as long as she lived.
‘And what is happening to you, Francie?’ Faith asked. She was leaning back in her red velvet thinking chair with her hands folded across her embroidered bosom in their usual manner. Her fingers wove a jewelled prayer mat.
Francie mirrored her and leaned back in the blue chair and regarded the ceiling. Where do I start? With my professional ruin? My friendships blasted to rubble? My family a relic I can’t identify anymore? My own feelings a foreign land I don’t know how to navigate?
Francie still resented being psychoanalysed by Faith Treloar, which was stupid. After all, she was the one who drove here. She was the one paying for it.
‘I know you are going to say that this has all been sent to me for a reason and, honestly, if you tell me that the Chinese words for “crisis” and “opportunity” are the same, I think I’ll throw up.’
Faith smiled. ‘Why did you think of that particular proverb?’
Francie shifted in her seat with irritation. Why did she have to do all the work? She could add ‘poverty’ to her list of problems if she had to pay Faith when she could have come up with these glib questions herself.
‘Because,’ she sighed, ‘I know that the standard self-help crap is that you can’t form a new pattern of thinking until the old one is broken. That the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step . . . blah, blah, blah.’
Faith smiled. ‘So you’ve been giving this a bit of thought then? In what way would you say your old pattern of thinking has outlived its usefulness?’
‘You’re the therapist. You tell me.’
‘OK, time to earn my fee.’ Faith sat up and leaned over the desk.
She took her lavender-rimmed glasses from the top of her head and perched them halfway down her nose. It occurred to Francie that she’d never seen Faith actually look through her glasses. She had to be about sixty, the same age as Francie’s mother. But her dangly hippie earrings and elaborate kurta said she was still young at heart. The dozens of positive affirmations stuck on the walls of her consultation room were signposts on a journey of personal growth. If Francie told her mother she was doing some ‘personal growth work’, Carol would have assumed she was talking about a pot of parsley for the kitchen.
‘I would say,’ Faith said in her professional calming tone, ‘that, as we identified last week, you have certain ideas which have been patterned in childhood. I think your life is driven by fear. The fear that you are not good enough. That you don’t measure up. That any person you love is bound to leave you, to run away. Now, while most of us have these fears from time to time, you are crippled by them.
‘You chose Nick because he was emotionally unavailable and then came to believe that the feeling of insecurity you had with him was love.’
‘But I did love him,’ Francie ventured.
‘Yes, but the question is, Francie, did you feel safe in his love? Did you feel he’d love you no matter what? Or did you feel that unless you were perfect he’d leave?’
Faith and Francie already knew the answers to those questions.
‘And then he did leave. Your worst nightmare came true. Everything that has played out in your life since has come from a place of fear and anger. And if you don’t deal with it, it will become worse.
‘Looking at you as you are now, I’d say you’ve got no hope of forming a decent, grown-up, loving relationship unless you go back and resolve some of the grief you felt when your father left home. We’ve started the process here, but we’ve got to keep going until you “get” it, until your behaviour actually changes. Who could you talk to about that, Francie? Where could you gain some insight into your past?’
Francie thought for a moment. ‘Well . . . I suppose I could go and talk to Nick . . .’
She still didn’t get it.
When the time for her session was up, Faith walked Francie to the front door of the old terrace house. Francie sneaked a look back down the hall into a small room where a young woman, about the same age as her, sat huddled in a chair waiting for her appointment. Francie saw she was just
another unit on an assembly line of grief.
Faith held out a small box wrapped in silver paper and tied with ribbon. ‘Open it.’
Under the hall light Francie could see it was a pack of cards. They were bright blue, edged with gold and had ‘The Journey’ written on them in white.
‘I do try to operate in the realm of human logic. But who knows what’s real and what’s not? A little divine guidance never goes astray. When you have some time to contemplate, take a card and just sit with it for a while and think on the message. See what comes up.’
Later that evening Francie was sitting and toying with the ribbon of apple peel in her martini as Joel polished off the last of his veal cutlets. He sopped up the meaty juices with a chunk of bread and stuffed it in his mouth. Francie reflected that she seemed to have been doing this a lot lately—watching people eat as she drank. The waistband of her size-ten jeans was loose.
They were sitting in Becco’s, just around the corner from Joel’s favourite bookshop in Bourke Street. A few tables were occupied. It was a quiet Wednesday night and it had been a happy coincidence to find that Joel was in the city, just out from a movie, and able to meet Francie, just out of therapy, for a meal.
She wasn’t sure that Joel would be able to give her much insight into her childhood but, of course, Dad had left him too. How much did Joel remember? How much did he care? It was odd, Francie realised, that she had never asked him directly. The circumstances of their family had been endured and coped with, but never really talked about. She knew that her mother’s twenty-year ban on discussion of the topic had been total and effective. Even now, Francie felt that she was betraying her mother by seeking out Joel to talk about it.