Contrition

by Sheldon, Deborah;

  “A teacher rooting his student? Isn’t that illegal?”

  “Is it? Who knows? She was twenty-one or -two, something like that.”

  “Did she stay with him?”

  “Aw, how the fuck should I know? It was so many years ago…” He gazed into the distance, his bleary eyes misting over for a moment. Then he drew heartily on his smoke and grinned. “And what about you?” he continued, focusing on John’s hands. “No wedding ring, I see.”

  Automatically, John went to trot out the lie, now embellished thanks to Donna’s prodding—divorced when my two daughters were young, now I’m a grandfather and my grandson is named after me—but, on impulse, changed his mind. For some reason, he didn’t want to lie. Not this time. He didn’t seem to have the stomach for it. The thought of confiding in someone, at long last, tightened his throat with an aching lump and he had a sudden, irrational urge to confess everything. Absolutely everything…

  “Come on, Butt-rose. Out with it.”

  “Well, there’s this woman,” he said, and the truth felt awkward in his mouth, as lumpy as pebbles. “Donna. I’ve only just met her.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Pretty.” John smiled. “She’s got long brown hair, great body, sweet personality. And these friendly, kind eyes that sparkle, you know what I mean?”

  “Does she fancy you?”

  “I think so. She’s got this kid, a little girl—”

  Nate raised both hands. “Uh-oh! Baggage.”

  “No, it’s fine. Actually, the daughter, Cassie, is the whole reason why I came to the circus. I was trying to impress Donna by doing something for Cassie.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Yep.” John chuckled. “And Cassie’s favourite act? Yours.”

  “No shit?”

  “Honest to God. She couldn’t stop talking about it.”

  Nate roared with laughter and poured out two shots. “You see?” he said, wiping his tearing eyes. “It’s better to be a clown than a lawyer. Better to make other people happy than to make money for yourself, right? Ah, if only my family could hear this.”

  Nate’s family… John pushed away the glass, feeling almost sober.

  “Your brother,” he said. “I’ve got to find him. Damien, isn’t it?”

  “Good luck. There’s about a million Rossi’s in the phone book.”

  “Not that many with the initial ‘D’.”

  Nate stubbed out his cigarette. “Yeah, but Damo always planned to Anglicise his name by deed poll. He reckoned wogs don’t get the good job offers like skips.”

  “Anglicise it? To what?”

  “Ross or Russ. Maybe Russell.”

  Dead end…shit. John rubbed at his eyes. “Okay, what’s his job?”

  “Accountant. And there’s about a million of them, too.” Nate sat forward, gripped John at the elbow, and said, “Forget about Meredith. She’s ancient history. If you’ve got a chance at love, don’t fuck it up. What’s your girlfriend’s name again?”

  “Actually, she’s not my girlfriend.”

  “What’s her name?”

  John felt himself blush. “Donna.”

  “Donna…isn’t that a song?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “My folks liked Ritchie Valens.” Nate let go of John’s arm to take another drink, and his head wobbled on his neck. Slurring, pouting, he added, “I should’ve hung onto Rachel, probably even married her, finished my law degree, got into a practice. If I could do it over again, I would. There’s a lot a man can do with his life if he’s got the love of a good woman. My dad used to tell me that. I used to laugh at him, but I reckon he was right. Did your dad tell you the same?”

  John thought of his adoptive father, sour-faced, hostile, the kind of bloke who had spent his whole life, when not at work, hunkered into his recliner and glaring at the TV. A man of few words. From habit, John effortlessly swept the memory aside.

  “If you can’t find your brother, what about Flick?”

  “I told you,” Nate said. “No fucken idea about her full name or where she is.”

  “Can you remember the hospital she worked at?”

  Nate took another drink.

  John stared at the table top. The laminate was chipped, scratched, crusted with food stains, covered in scorch marks from countless cigarettes laid on their sides and forgotten. The heater kept humming and the air was stuffy, sapped of oxygen.

  “Another shot?” Nate said.

  John stood. “I’d better go.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t help you, mate. But I’m telling you, forget about Meredith, all right? Donna is your future. Donna and that kid. What was her name again?”

  Pausing, his hand on the door, John looked back. Nate was staring at him intently, eyes red and watering, either from alcohol or memories, impossible to tell.

  Oh God, I don’t want to end up like you, John thought in a sudden and flaring terror. I want a life that means something. But I have to hurry, I’m nearly fifty. It’s almost too late to start over. It’s almost too late.

  “Bye,” he said, breathless. “I’ll see you.”

  “Really? You will? You’re gonna come back?”

  John glanced around the caravan, at the black mould crawling out of the sink, the yellow smoke stains on the plywood ceiling and walls, the pizza box with its desiccating chunks of yesterday’s pineapple. The bile roiling in his throat tasted a hell of a lot like panic. No, this place was a nightmare, the ghost of Christmas Future. He never wanted to see it again for as long as he lived.

  As if reading John’s mind, Nate scrabbled, trying to stand up. “You’ll come back though, won’t you, Butt-rose?” he said, staggering, grabbing the bench and table for support. “You’ll bring your girlfriend, what’s-her-name, and her kid for tea?”

  “Sure, mate. Whatever.”

  “Yeah, sweet, but when? How about tomorrow? I’ll order pizza.”

  “No worries.” John opened the door. Fresh air hit him like the bracing shock of cold water. Anything he said now didn’t matter. Nate was too pissed to ever recall it. “Keep on juggling. Take care of yourself, okay?”

  “Will do. Thanks for the grog.” Nate’s voice became high and querulous. “Don’t forget, Butt-rose. Tea-time here tomorrow, my shout. Okay?”

  John stepped down into the soft earth and closed the door behind him. As he wended his way through the trailers, with the cold and distant stars glowing overhead, he heard again the disembodied and elderly voice singing, floating somewhere on the wind, the words indistinguishable; the tune forlorn, hopeless and flat.

  11

  What if he encountered a booze bus?

  To make sure he didn’t, John took nearly an hour to drive home. Each minute was agony. Like a mouse scared of a cat that may (or may not) be lurking in wait, he crept and hid, crept and hid, crawling the car along byways and through the tangled snarl of residential side streets. What if he lost his license? God, the thought popped beads of sweat. How would he get to work? Unless you wanted to travel straight to the city’s CBD, Melbourne’s public transport system didn’t cut it. No doubt, he would have to take an insanely convoluted route, like a bus, then a train, a tram; lots of walking in between. His commute might be two hours each way. Fuck. And booze buses were everywhere. After drinking steadily throughout the whole day, he should never have driven to Nate’s in the first place. And then all those whiskies on top of all those beers? God, he was such an idiot.

  You’re an alky if you drink and drive…

  The idea occurred to him, gently, in a sidling and whispering way.

  Perhaps he was already an alky.

  No, he thought grimly, fingers tightening around the wheel. You’re an alky when you ditch meals for booze. And he always made sure to have three meals a day.

  Occasionally, t
hose meals consisted of a piece of toast, a couple of Tim Tams.

  He began to grind his teeth.

  Yes, of course, there was the term functioning alcoholic, but wasn’t that a contradiction? By definition, an alcoholic was somebody who could no longer function because of an over-arching dependence on booze. And John could function. He never skipped work because of a hangover. Never drank on a work day.

  So, fine, he wasn’t an alky.

  But that insistent and soft inner voice kept needling. When he wasn’t drinking, his hands shook. The shakes were a symptom of delirium tremens, were they not?

  No, wait a minute. Hold on.

  That poor bastard, Nate, was an alky. And that dero slumped on the bench outside the bakery, he was for goddamned sure an alky with his matted hair and clothes stinking of piss. Those two blokes were alkies, but not John. This stupid line of thinking was borne from anxiety—the fear of driving into a police trap, of being breathalysed, of losing his license—and nothing else. Everyone knew the .05 limit was only a bee’s dick away from stone-cold sober. An old maid’s gulp of sherry would register .05. The booze buses were nothing more than a devious way of squeezing more revenue from the already over-taxed Australian driver.

  Perspiration drenched his shirt by the time John steered the car into the driveway. He turned off the engine and leaned his forehead against the wheel. When he got out of the car, his legs trembled. This felt like a small triumph. He told that accusatory voice inside his head: There, you see? I’m shaking and drunk so there goes the delirium tremens theory.

  Across the road at the clinker-brick shithole, light glowed around the edges of what he knew to be the lounge room windows. He checked his watch: 9.08 p.m. Perhaps Donna and Cassie were watching TV. Or maybe just Donna; it was a school day tomorrow, after all. Had Donna managed to swap her Monday shift? He checked his phone. No messages. The let-down felt palpable. Fatigue swept over him.

  Perhaps it was for the best. He was in no mood to make love to her anyway.

  Nate’s words came back: Donna is your future. Donna and that kid.

  And then: Did Meredith kill the animals first? Or eat them alive?

  Wiping at his eyes, John found tears on his lashes.

  The myopic windows of the miner’s cottage stared him down. He locked the car and trudged to the front door.

  Please God, he thought, don’t let Meredith be doing anything weird. Don’t let her be standing like a mannequin in the middle of the kitchen or raking through her collection in the hobby room. Please let her be closed up inside her bedroom, quiet, maybe asleep. I can’t stand it, he thought as he fitted the key into the lock. Momentarily, he rested his forehead against the front door. An errant sob clogged his throat. Please, he thought. Please.

  He twisted the key.

  The door creaked open.

  His gaze darted about in the darkness. He groped for the hallway light and switched it on. Shadows disappeared. The flat and yellow radiance seemed expectant, hushed, like a held breath. He didn’t much like it.

  “Merry?”

  Shutting the door, he cocked his head to listen.

  No sounds.

  Oh, for fuck’s sake. What did Meredith do inside the house all day, for years and years on end? Stare at the goddamned walls? Donna is your future. Donna and that kid. But a man can’t turn his back on his responsibilities. A man must try to atone for his sins, no matter how futile his attempts might be. And John had ruined so many lives. He should never forget that. Deliberately, he unclenched his hands, sighed, and put the keys on the hook.

  Her voice sounded faint, confused. “John?”

  He went into the lounge and turned on the overhead lights. Meredith, sitting stiff-backed on the couch, blinked at the sudden brightness.

  “What are you doing here in the dark?” he said.

  “Waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “For you to come home.”

  He approached. Her hair stuck out in crazy tufts, as if she had been running her hands through it, over and over and over.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  “Yes. Where have you been?”

  He hesitated. “I went to see Nate Rossi.”

  “Again? Why?”

  “I don’t know. To catch up on old times.”

  “Did you talk about me?”

  He shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “Yeah,” he finally said. “You came up in conversation.”

  “What did Nate tell you?”

  “Nothing I didn’t already know…high school stuff.”

  Her head turned, slowly and precisely, so that her gaze fell upon him. She smiled. Her lips stretched wide and bloodless. “Did he tell you about Peaches?”

  John stared at her. She was very still. Unnaturally still. The notion that her ribcage wasn’t moving, that she wasn’t breathing, made his heart race. A half-minute passed when he couldn’t speak. Her eyes during this long stretch of time stayed open, unblinking, reminding him of Lyle’s dead eyes. He became aware of a faint smell of something ripe and mouldy, but he couldn’t distinguish right now between reality and his fevered imagination, his nervous exhaustion.

  “Tell me about Peaches,” he whispered.

  She laughed; a dry, brittle sound. Looking away towards the blank TV screen, she said, “You ought to know, Mr Green Thumb. Peaches are a fruit with fuzzy skin.”

  “Hey, don’t play games.”

  “I will play,” she said, “whatever kind of games I fucking well like.”

  Monday, and it had rained overnight but only lightly. The early morning sun had burned off the moisture. John ran the mower back and forth across the front yard. Long ago, maybe forty years back when the house had first been built, someone had planted a lawn of tall fescue. Little of it remained. Now thistle, dandelion and bindi eye choked what was left. Soon, perhaps tomorrow, John would go to Bunnings and buy some weed killer, seed, fertiliser, a sprinkler head for the hose. He would peg, in a zigzag pattern, a maze of twine and rags to help scare off hungry birds. With time and attention, this old miner’s cottage would boast the best lawn in the street. He could imagine the grass, lush and thick, and felt proud already.

  As he passed by the lounge room window, movement caught his eye. He stopped. Through the net curtain, he saw Meredith’s face but just barely, a ghostly image. The hairs rose on his arms. She faded away. Logically, John knew she had merely stepped back from the window but his gooseflesh persisted. God, stop it, he had to get a grip. Talking with Nate had been a mistake.

  Nate’s bullshit about witches and zombies…and who’s to say he was telling the truth about what that psych nurse, Flick, had said to him? The poor fucker’s brain must be Swiss cheese from decades of heavy drinking. Maybe Flick had been making up stories, or at least embellishing them. And wouldn’t he, John, know Meredith better than anybody? They’d lived together for eight years, after all. She wasn’t a witch and she wasn’t a zombie…

  Was she?

  Of course not; the idea was ludicrous.

  But sometimes, the way she behaved, the way she looked…

  Supernatural creatures did not exist in the real world. Merry was unwell, that’s all; unwell both mentally and physically. He hated to admit it, but she had deteriorated since moving here. The old, nagging fear came back.

  What would he do if she ever needed urgent medical attention?

  If she fell, say, and broke a hip. He would have to take her to hospital. He couldn’t just leave her…could he? No. But what would people think? She had been missing and “off the grid” for decades. The authorities would jump to terrible conclusions, assume she was his prisoner, that he abused her. No one would believe the truth; he had found her, rescued her. And even if they did believe him, they would badger him with insistent questions, wondering why on earth he had protected and she
ltered and put up with such a nutcase for all these years. But he wouldn’t be able to explain it to their satisfaction without confessing to Lyle’s accident—

  (…murder…)

  —and he would never confess to that. Never, never, never.

  John pushed the mower faster, panting and sweating.

  For all he knew, Meredith’s recent erratic behaviour flagged a mild stroke or a growing brain tumour. So how could he get her to a hospital?

  God, if only she were mute. He could pretend he’d just found her on the street, a concerned citizen helping a random homeless woman—but she would talk.

  If he took her to hospital, the police would track him down and lean on him. They would keep demanding to know his motive. Why he kept Meredith in secret, why he hid a crazy woman who happened to be the sister of Lyle Berg-Olsen, his best mate who had disappeared under mysterious circumstances thirty-odd years ago. How could John make them understand his obligation without divulging the truth? It seemed unlikely anyone in authority would see him as a Good Samaritan.

  And as always when thinking these thoughts, John circled back to the same awful, heinous conclusion: if she ever got sick, really sick, he would have no choice but to dump her somewhere in the bush, somewhere isolated—

  A sudden movement at the window startled a gasp out of him. Meredith again, scrabbling with the net curtains, glaring.

  Shit.

  Once in a while, it was as if she could read his mind.

  Gritting his teeth, he shoved at the mower. He ought to be ashamed. A grown man acting like a scared little girl. Then he thought of Cassie’s frightened eyes. And I saw a witch…really pale, like she was dead… She bared her teeth and waggled her tongue like she wanted to eat me… No, he thought uneasily, he might have every reason in the world to be afraid.