Family Baggage

by Monica McInerney

  She paced the room all night. They were supposed to be going camping the next night and all she could think of were flash floods, spiders, snakes. Her clients writhing in agony. Des sick at the wheel of the bus, shouting that she’d have to take over. Two of the men doubled over in pain, brushing away spiders. A woman screaming that a snake had crawled into her sleeping bag, that Harriet had to come, quickly. And what if the camp fire wasn’t put out properly? A flicker of flame would spark on to a dry gum branch nearby, smouldering, sending out tendrils of low fire across the desert floor, towards their tents … Something bad was going to happen, and there was nothing she was going to be able to do about it.

  She didn’t come out to breakfast the next day. The group assumed she was in her room, or in the office making phone calls. They met Des at the minibus outside the hotel at nine o’clock, as arranged, but there was no sign of her. It was Des who came to her room.

  The door was locked. She was inside, in the corner, the quilts and pillows bundled all around her. She had pulled the curtains across and locked the door, now so frightened she couldn’t bear any light or the thought of someone being able to come in. His knocking sounded like bellows, shouts. ‘Harriet? Are you in there?’

  After a while he went away. She curled up tighter, trying to slow her heartbeat, feeling her nails pressing into her palms. She’d be all right, they’d be all right, she just had to be sure they didn’t camp near any rivers, and check for spiders and snakes and … The waves of terror took her again. She couldn’t help it. She screamed when the knock came at the door again. Des, and someone else with him. She saw the door handle turn. They were trying to get in.

  ‘Harriet? Harriet?’ It felt like they were screaming her name. She managed to crawl across the floor, still bundled in the quilt, and push a chair under the door handle to keep them out that way. She checked the bolt. Please, please, please let it be strong enough. She knew the window was already locked. She’d done that in the middle of the night. She’d locked the bathroom window too. She put another chair against the bathroom door, but it didn’t make her feel any safer.

  She heard a female voice and for one moment thought it was her mother, but it was one of the women in the group. More knocking. ‘Harriet, are you all right? Please, answer us.’

  She curled up tighter, as tightly as she could. If she spoke softly to herself, if she kept up a sort of murmuring, she discovered she couldn’t hear their voices. She tried counting, repeating numbers over and over again, in order first and then at random, trying to fix them in her mind, something solid and normal like numbers …

  It took the local policeman nearly half an hour to break down the door. By the time they got inside, she was so terrified she was screaming the numbers. They called the doctor. Austin flew up that night. She was taken to a clinic outside Melbourne. An anxiety state was diagnosed. A nervous breakdown. A severe grief reaction. She was given different names for what had felt like a boiling mass of fear and hurt and deep, endless sadness.

  She’d discharged herself from the hospital after three weeks of treatment, rest and medication, and returned to work. She’d thought she was okay. But then James asked her if she would be able to lead a three-day tour to the Riverland. The idea terrified her. Lara had taken it instead. She was offered another one two weeks later. Again, she’d turned it down. Then another. James stopped asking her. It went without saying that she wasn’t up to it. She was moved into the administration side of the business, while James and Lara spent nearly all their time out on the road with the tour groups. Yes, she was fine again, she told people. Yes, absolutely. No, she was perfectly happy being in the office. It was a nice change, not to have to do all that packing and unpacking. Oh, she’d go back on the road again, one day, just not quite yet, she said as brightly as she could. She’d been trying to convince herself as much as them.

  Harriet turned away from the hotel window and the darkness outside. It was quiet now, barely any noise from the motorway. It could be anywhere out there – England, Australia. She knew the same thoughts would have been in her mind wherever she was. She’d learnt that from all her years of travelling. You didn’t leave your memories, your worries, your problems behind when you got on the plane. They came with you, whether you wanted them to or not.

  It was the slow aftermath of her parents’ deaths that still shocked her. There had been the initial grief, the everyday wallop of feeling, when she would realise over and over that they were gone and that she wouldn’t ever be able to see them or speak to them again. That rawness had faded, changed in shape, but something else was emerging. The sharpening picture of how life would be now.

  It wasn’t only the physical details that were painful: her parents’ absence in the office, at family gatherings, in Merryn Bay, or the fact that James, Melissa and Molly now lived in the house where they had once lived. It hurt in her heart and mind, too. She had never realised how often every day she naturally thought of her mother and father, wanting to tell them something, remembering something one or the other had said, a flash of childhood memory, an idea, or the beautiful comfort of a memory of conversations with someone she loved and who she knew loved her. Thoughts like that which had once brought warm feelings now produced a sharp little stab of grief.

  It was as if all the safety nets she had never even known existed around her had been snatched away, leaving nothing to buffer her from what could be so frightening about life. Pain, grief, shock, sadness – she found it hard to believe she had made it to the age of thirty-one without truly knowing how any of those emotions felt. Her childhood seemed idyllic now, bathed in a glowing light of safety and familiarity. Even Lara’s arrival all those years ago had started fading into that golden state of memory, as if she had simply imagined that things were tricky at the start. It felt like she’d had two lives: the one before her parents’ deaths, when the world seemed full of promise and good things; and then afterwards, when it felt as if the ground beneath her feet was unsteady, prone to sudden chasms and gaping holes.

  As she started preparing for bed, washing her face and brushing her teeth, Harriet made herself focus on the present, on the tour. She talked herself through all the positives of the situation. She had tomorrow morning to do some final checking before the bus arrived to take them to St Ives. Out of consideration for the age of most of the group and the long journey, James had scheduled a late start. Once they got to St Ives she could sit down with Patrick Shawcross and talk through the itinerary, before his first official meeting with the tour group, an informal cocktail party at the hotel itself. All straightforward. All manageable. All of it under control.

  All except for Lara’s disappearance.

  ‘I’ll do what I can from here to track her down,’ Austin had repeated before he hung up. ‘I’ll ring James for you as well. He can get Melissa and Gloria on the job. Between all of us we’ll find out what’s going on with her. It’ll be something simple, you wait and see. So don’t worry about her. Your job is to worry about the tour.’

  She knew what he was trying to do, and she loved him for it, but what he was asking was impossible. Did he truly think she could block Lara out of her mind? Simply switch off the part of her brain that had worried about Lara for as long as she could remember? She had spent twenty-four years wondering if Lara was okay, if she was happy, and just as long being puzzled and confused by Lara’s behaviour in return. It had become second nature to her.

  Except this time it felt different. Since she had come out into the airport and there had been no sign of Lara, she had gone through a whole range of reactions. Worry. Concern. Confusion after she’d spoken to Nina, Lara’s flatmate. But if she was honest with herself now – in a way she never could be with Austin, or even Gloria – the more she was admitting to a strange kind of relief.

  Perhaps Lara was feeling the same way, wherever she was. Perhaps that’s why she had gone away, not only to England in the first place, but away this afternoon, abandoning the tour. She’d realised w
hat she had done to Harriet was so inexplicable that she couldn’t face her again either.

  The thoughts went round her head, as they had been doing for three months, ever since the night she had learned the truth from Lara. Harriet was still no closer to understanding it. She climbed between the white cotton sheets, turned off the bedside lamp and tried to sleep. Don’t worry about Lara, Austin had said. It was so much easier said than done.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  On the other side of the world, Gloria Hillman moved across the bedroom of her Merryn Bay cottage, carrying a tray and listening to the rattle of the cup in the saucer. It always woke her husband up much better than any alarm clock could. ‘Morning, darling.’

  ‘Hello, my sweet.’ Kevin sat up in the queen-sized bed. He’d greeted Gloria that way each morning for the past thirty-five years. She placed the cup in the same spot on the bedside table she used every day, then perched on the end of the bed watching, but not helping, as Kevin reached and felt for the saucer. He was sixty-three years old, a bit older than her, but still fit-looking. Tanned, too, from all the outdoor work he’d done as a roofer over the years. He even had a full head of hair still, even if it was more grey than brown these days. He took a long sip. ‘Thanks, love. Did you sleep well?’

  ‘Like a dream.’

  ‘Any big news?’

  ‘Nothing earth-shattering.’ Gloria always delivered the seven o’clock news headlines with the morning cup of tea. ‘Industrial action on the ports. Election campaign due to begin next week. And two goats from Melbourne Zoo seen making a run for it down Flemington Road.’

  ‘Good for them. And the weather?’

  ‘Blue. Sunny. Twenty-eight degrees, if you can believe a word any of them say.’

  Gloria stood and pulled back the curtains. Their house was set back from the road, but if she leaned in a certain way she could get a glimpse of the sea through the pine trees, and a good view of the sky. It was cloudless so far. April was her favourite time of year. All the summer crowds had left and they had the small town back to themselves. Merryn Bay’s normal population of five thousand swelled to nearly twelve thousand for a few months, the holiday shacks and caravan park down the end of the beach crammed to bursting point. People were drawn to the simple beauty of the town, with its curving bay, secluded beach, little wooden jetty and the view across the water to bare hills and other small towns, invisible in the day, twinkling lights at night.

  Strolling around at lunchtime in the summer, down the only shopping street in the town, she’d often overhear conversations between holidaymakers from Melbourne, remarking on how well set up the town was, with its banks, hairdressers, clothes shops, supermarket, ‘Look, even a travel agent,’ one would usually say. ‘Let’s sell up and move down here. It’s a big enough town, and we’d be beside the sea all the time.’

  She was always surprised at how protective she felt, as if it all belonged to her – the changing colours of the water, the long beach path lined with imported pines, the big sky, blue and hazy in the summer, dramatic in winter. She didn’t want it teeming with crowds all year round. She liked it the way it was.

  ‘Any clouds, love?’

  She turned back to her husband. ‘Not that I can see. Blue skies ahead. Do you want the radio on? Your book, or anything, while I get ready?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m fine. You look after yourself.’ As she left the room, she watched as Kevin reached confidently to the back of the bedside table and switched on the radio. A Beatles song filled the room, too loud. Without hesitation, Kevin found the right knob and turned the volume down.

  He smiled. ‘Sorry. Bit early for a disco.’

  ‘Just a bit,’ she said. That was one of the advantages of it having been a slow decline in his sight. There had been time for him to prepare, to make almost a mental imprint of not only appliances like the radio and the CD player, but also the arrangement of the house. He’d been able to learn his way around before his sight went completely. The girl from the Institute for the Blind in Melbourne had been wonderful. They would never have thought of doing the things she’d suggested.

  ‘The mind is amazing, it can remember more than you think possible,’ she’d said. ‘If you practise things before your sight goes, Kevin, it won’t be as frightening when it happens.’ She’d given some examples. The teacup and radio on the bedside table. The position of his knife and fork and glass of wine at meal time. ‘You never know. You might find this opens up far more experiences than you thought possible, once you get over the shock.’

  She’d been so honest about it. It was going to happen so they may as well be practical about it. Other people gave them false hope or avoided the subject altogether. She had helped Kevin, and Gloria and their three sons, come to terms with it in many ways.

  Honesty was always the best policy, in Gloria’s opinion. She remembered arguing with Penny Turner about it. Penny had been shocked at the way Gloria spoke so openly about it when Kevin was first diagnosed. The words had sounded so ominous: macular degeneration blindness. The lay term – the slow erosion of the retina – had sounded even worse.

  Penny had been just as shocked to overhear a conversation between Gloria and one of their more tactless customers. The woman had asked after Gloria’s health before leaning forward and lowering her voice, ‘And how is that poor husband of yours?’

  Gloria hadn’t skipped a beat. ‘Like a pig in muck. He has me running around after him from dawn to dusk. Says he should have gone blind years ago.’

  ‘He’s very courageous,’ the woman said, unabashed. ‘And so are you. It can’t be much fun caring for an invalid in your home like that.’

  ‘Oh, we have lots of fun,’ Gloria had said cheerfully. ‘We play hide and seek most nights. It’s great. I always win.’

  One evening, over their usual end of the working day cup of tea in the back room of Turner Travel, Penny had brought up the subject. ‘Gloria, I think you’re wrong to talk about this so bluntly. Kevin might get better and you’re talking as though his sight has already gone. If you don’t have hope, what’s left?’

  ‘Confusion,’ Gloria had said. ‘Disappointment when the inevitable happens. He is going to go blind, Penny. Kevin knows that, I know that, we talk about it, so his mind is already adjusting to the idea even before it happens.’

  Penny had never liked facing up to the nasty side of life. If she didn’t like something, she’d either pretend it wasn’t happening or gloss over it. She called it being sensitive. Gloria called it being blinkered. It was the one thing they had always argued about, in all their years of friendship. Gloria and Kevin had often spoken about it too. ‘Think about it, Kev. It must have had an impact on the kids. Penny did it with Lara’s arrival, never wanting to acknowledge that there might be some repercussions on the others, especially Harriet. She chose not to see that Austin spent all his spare time teasing James. Is it any wonder James found a fierce woman like Melissa to protect himself with?’ Penny had done it in another way, too. Trying to protect Lara from something. The one thing in thirty-five years of marriage that Gloria had never been able to speak to Kevin about.

  In the early lean months with the travel agency, though, when anyone else might have given up or decided they had made a mistake, Gloria had been forced to admit it was Penny’s attitude that had kept them all so cheerful. ‘Our time will come. I know it will. We just have to stick at it.’ She had been right. The terrible shame was that Penny wasn’t there to see the agency these days, when it was doing better than they could ever have imagined.

  ‘You know, I think I’m missing Penny and Neil more as time passes, not less,’ Gloria said to Kevin now, as she came back into the bedroom to pick up her work jacket – her uniform, as she had to learn to call it – and do a final check of her hair and make-up in the wardrobe mirror. Not that she bothered too much with that side of getting ready. A quick brush of her now greying curls, perhaps a dab of lipstick, and she was done. Her sixty-year-old skin had seen too much sun
shine over the years to be saved by any make-up now. Besides, she knew practically everyone who came into the travel agency and they’d get a shock if she started dolling herself up. ‘I’ve been thinking about them so much lately for some reason. It would be great to have one more of those nights of good conversation with them, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Good conversation? Good arguments, you mean.’

  ‘No, not arguments. Spirited discussions. Remember that’s what Penny always called them?’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Quarter to eight. I’ll be late.’

  ‘Run, Gloria, run. You’d better be careful or Melissa will sack you.’

  ‘An old piece of the furniture like me? She wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘No, of course she wouldn’t. That place would crumble if you left.’

  ‘Once upon a time, perhaps. Not under this new regime.’

  ‘Melissa’s still on the warpath?’

  ‘She was born on the warpath. But it’s Melissa they have to thank for things turning around, as I keep telling Austin. If she hadn’t come on the scene they would be bankrupt by now, whether Penny and Neil were still alive or not.’

  ‘To which Austin replied, if my memory serves me right, it would have been better to be bankrupt than bullied to hell and back by the Evil One.’

  Gloria laughed. ‘He really is far too wishy-washy about her, isn’t he?’ She finished her tea, and leaned and kissed Kevin goodbye. ‘I’ll see you at lunchtime, love.’

  ‘Good, because I won’t see you.’

  It made her laugh every day. Even better, it made him laugh. Picking up her bag and sunglasses from the bench beside the sink, she pulled the door shut behind her and walked down the path to the front gate.