by Fiona Capp
Fraser and Ned stayed in touch, but didn’t see much of each other until Angela’s accident brought Ned back from his travels and forced an end to his protracted adolescence. He had never seen a reason to settle down or grow up. Then, one evening, his sister went head first down a flight of stairs and everything changed.
4.
Even now she can’t really be sure what happened.
Dinner had started well. Matthew had done the cooking and he was a good cook. He had gone to the local farmers market to get the freshest vegetables, fruit and meat, and had spent the afternoon happily pottering around the kitchen. On days like this, it was possible to imagine that there might still be hope for them.
He was working his way through his latest cookbook, The Best of France. The foie gras mousse had come off perfectly and the boeuf en croûte was pink, as it should be, and the pastry golden brown. He fancied himself a wine buff and had splurged on French varieties: a Sauternes with the entrée, a Châteauneuf-du-Pape for the main course, a Corsican Faustine Blanc with the petits fours.
Even as a teenager he’d liked to cook, although he kept it to himself. Back then, it wasn’t the kind of thing young men did in a country town. When Angela first started going out with him, he was one of the local sporting champions. Athletics, football, swimming and, above all, cricket. It all came to him so easily. Much as she admired his talent, though, what drew her to him was his diffidence. He wasn’t like most sportsmen. When he won a race or kicked a goal or bowled someone out, he never pumped his fists or threw out his hands to receive the applause of the crowd. If he responded at all, it was with a shy half smile that was quickly extinguished. And then there was his devotion – that was the only word for it. At seventeen, he made up his mind that Angela was the one and quietly set about winning her over.
The first time he came to her family’s place for dinner, they caught the bus home together after late cricket practice to find the house empty. Angela went straight to the garage where she knew her father would be working on a car he was restoring. He, of course, had no idea where his wife was. Wasn’t she in the kitchen getting dinner ready? They went into the garden and found her digging in the vegetable patch.
‘Picking something for dinner, Mum?’ Angela asked.
Her mother’s smile was apologetic. ‘Sorry, darling. All these weeds. I lost track of the time.’ Then she saw Matthew and suddenly remembered, and began saying sorry all over again.
Angela helped her to her feet. ‘It’s okay, Mum. Look, there’s a pumpkin left. I’ll make soup.’
Matthew, who had maintained a polite silence, said, ‘Mrs Coleridge, this garden is amazing.’ His eyes fell on the shiny bushels of silverbeet. ‘I do a mean spanakopita. Could I make it for you?’
How could you not love a boy like that? Or at least feel the kind of gratitude – the first of many moments of gratitude – that you could mistake for the dawning of love. He seemed so straightforward, uncomplicated. And wise, in a boyish way. How was she to know that bad luck would bring out another side to him, turn him into someone else?
After he finished school, Matthew got a job in the local bank, a stop-gap measure until his career as a cricketer took off. Angela was still at university when he asked her to marry him. She wasn’t sure – how did you really know? But everyone else was so convinced. And she did love making love to him. His young firm body, honed by years of training, was a beautiful thing to behold, to touch, to be held by. When they were in bed together, it was easy to believe that she was in love.
They had been married for less than two years when he was selected for the state cricket team. It was just a matter of time before he joined the national squad. And then, one ordinary Sunday, he was playing a social football match when he fell awkwardly and injured his knee. And that was the end of it. Two unsuccessful operations later, he had to retire from all competitive sport. Over time, the applause of the town that had accompanied him since childhood, the respect and praise he had taken for granted, began to fade away – and everything he believed himself to be faded with it. It took years for Angela to understand the full damage that was done – and how the damaged have a compulsive need to pass their damage on.
The golden boy she had married grew sullen. She desperately wanted to help him but had no idea what to do. She couldn’t fix his knee, couldn’t restore the future that had almost been his. Any attempt at consolation enraged him. If she talked about what she was doing, an essay she was writing or a lecture she’d had, he accused her of being superior, of looking down on him. The only time he didn’t seem angry with her was when they were making love. Yet even in bed, things were different. She noticed his sweat had turned acrid, as if his body was leaking the bitterness that would later consume him.
He started saying to her, You don’t love me, do you?
And he was right. She didn’t love him, had never loved him the way he loved her. He had known this when they married, but believed he could win her over. Like a hero from ancient myth, he would capture her heart with his feats on the sporting field, would prove himself irresistible. They were still children, barely out of their teens.
Not long after his injury, he had a falling out with his boss. When he got home, he announced that he’d resigned from the bank, that it was time for a change. Angela knew he’d been sacked, but they didn’t speak of it. She had just finished her degree and was keen to move to the city to pursue her studies in psychoanalysis. And Matthew was only too happy to go.
If they had stopped after the dessert wine, there might have been nothing to regret. It might have been one of the happier nights of their marriage. But Matthew got out the spirits and, buoyed by the success of the meal, reprised one of his favourite party tricks – inventing his own mind-scrambling cocktails with lurid names.
Angela could see where things were heading. It had happened too many times before. She knew she had to be careful. She put her hand on his shoulder. ‘We could have more fun in bed.’
But the alcohol had fired him up and he wanted to talk about his plans to open a restaurant. His enthusiasm was a welcome change from his moodiness, but if she stayed up talking with him, he would keep on drinking and the inevitable would happen.
He added shots of Drambuie, cognac and vodka to a glass of cola, and handed it to her.
‘Try this. It’ll lift your head off.’
Angela reluctantly took a sip. Her eyebrows shot up. She put the glass down. ‘My brain is scrambled already. Dinner was great, Matthew, your best so far. But I’ve got to get some sleep.’
She watched him mix another for himself. When he turned and raised his glass, his green eyes had the glittery haze of sea water churned with sand. ‘I’m naming this the Liquid Lobotomy. In your honour.’
Angela flinched. He called it playing devil’s advocate, and in the early days, it hadn’t bothered her – the digs he made about her work and the Viennese medicine man. She had seen too many slavish acolytes of Freud during her training to want to leap to the great man’s defence at every slight. She told herself it was another form of sport; he was just trying to get a rise out of her, keep her on her toes.
But it was suddenly obvious to her – the wonder was that she’d been able to deny it for as long as she had – that he really did despise her profession. In the end, though, it wasn’t his objections that bothered her so much as the venom with which they were delivered.
‘Why waste your time listening to these nut cases, Angel? You know what would fix them?’
She had heard it before.
‘Strap ’em down and hit them with a thousand volts. Or even better, get out the old ice pick. But no, you just sit there and let them rave on and on about their fucking childhoods and how their parents messed them up. And you think they’re going to talk themselves better! But as soon as I want to talk to you, it’s a different story. You don’t want to know. You’re sick of listening. You’re so fucking tired all you want to do is go to bed.’
Since he’d los
t his last job – he couldn’t seem to hold one down for more than six months – his days had been filled with brooding, and it would all come pouring out as soon as she stepped in the door. What had happened to him was her fault. She put her work before him. She took what he did around the house for granted. He had supported her through her studies and she had sucked him dry. When he was younger he’d never failed at anything. And look at him now! What comfort did she give him? She was even too tired for sex.
Angela told Matthew he needed help. From a professional.
‘I just want to talk to you.’
‘I can’t help you. I’m sorry but I can’t.’ She meant she couldn’t analyse him. That would be folly. But was this an excuse not to listen to him as his wife? She was terrified he would ask her, yet again, if she loved him. No matter how hard she tried to disguise it, the answer was obvious. She couldn’t give him what he wanted most.
She slipped into her soothing work voice. ‘Let’s talk in the morning. Please.’
‘Don’t patronise me!’
All she wanted was to vacate her body, to leave it sitting there for him to argue with while she escaped into the night. Into another life. Nothing she could say would make any difference. He couldn’t be reasoned with. All she could do was go to bed and hope he would sleep it off.
For the last time in her life, Angela walked out of the living room and up the stairs to their bedroom, followed by his snarls. She had just reached the top of the stairs when he came bounding up after her.
‘Walk away, you always do.’
She turned to him, suddenly resolute. ‘You’re right. I’m going.’
She marched into their bedroom, grabbed her handbag and groped around for her car keys, madly tossing everything else – a paperback, her diary, handfuls of pens, reading glasses and her mobile phone – onto the bed. Finally she found the keys and swung around to leave. Matthew stood in the doorway, blocking her path.
‘Get out of my way.’
His eyes seemed to have shrunk. For once, the loathing in them did not touch her. If anything, it made her more determined. She knew that in the morning he would be sorry and ashamed. He would promise it would never happen again; he would give her jewellery or flowers. He would be his old self again. Until the next time.
When she tried to squeeze past him, he grabbed her wrist and told her she was being stupid, that she was too drunk to drive. She had fallen for this too many times. He wanted to make her indignant and defensive because he was the one who’d had too much to drink. She yanked and twisted but he had her shackled. They were outside the bedroom, scuffling on the polished floorboards of the landing above the stairs.
After a frenzy of resistance which got her nowhere, she let herself go limp. The moment she felt him relax and loosen his grip, she threw all her weight into wrenching free. And suddenly she was. She was airborne, flying backwards with unexpected force toward the hard wooden staircase. The look on his face was almost beatific. His outstretched arms could have been reaching for her. Or sending her to her fate.
The ceiling reeled above her – she hadn’t seen it from this angle before: the patches of damp where the roof had leaked, the dusty cobwebs, the peeling paint. And then her skull smacked the top step. Her body crumpled against the wall as she plunged, head over heels, hands reaching for the railing and clutching thin air. She kept grabbing at whatever was in range – the wall, the steps, the balustrade – but the staircase was too steep, her momentum too great. She was a thudding avalanche, unstoppable. Then she hit the bottom. Just before she blacked out, she noted that her head was at an angle it had never been before.
No matter how many times she replays the scene in her head, she can never be sure of those final seconds at the top of the stairs. Was it her own force that sent her tumbling? Or did he release her deliberately, knowing what would happen? Did he actually throw her down the stairs? In the weeks and months afterwards, she relived the fall over and over in her dreams. Sometimes it was her own doing; sometimes it was his. Sometimes, they were entangled as they fell.
5.
For breakfast, Ned makes himself an omelette with fried vegetables on the camp stove and takes a deckchair into the sun. The world is starting to stir out on the bay. A container ship slides along the horizon as if drawn by a fine thread. The first ferry of the morning is pulling out from the pier, its engines emitting a faint deep-sea rumble as it manoeuvres between the bollards. And at the whiff of food, a flock of squawking seagulls has descended out of nowhere. Just off to his right, one bird in particular is creeping forward when it thinks Ned isn’t looking, as if they are playing a game of Mr Wolf. He pretends not to notice, intrigued to see how adventurous the bird will get. Then his phone rings and the sudden jangle makes the whole flock levitate as one.
Ned looks at the screen. It is Angie. His face twists. He lets it ring out. He will call her tonight when he has worked out what to tell her. She must sense something’s not right. He caught the bus and train back to town last week so as not to miss their weekly dinner, but hated himself so much afterwards for all the pretending that he couldn’t face doing it again. A few days later, he texted her that he wasn’t well enough for the weekend drive they’d planned. At least there was some truth in his claim to be sick. The thought of telling her what has happened really does make him feel ill.
The squabbling gulls have decamped to a little lozenge of rippling sea floor exposed by the low tide, as if shipwrecked on a desert island. It doesn’t matter whether the stock market is the siren song or the rocks you founder on, Ned finds himself thinking, it amounts to the same thing.
After the crash, he turned his back on what was happening for as long as he could, until, one afternoon, he stopped to buy some local honey from a stall by the bike path. The seller was wrapping the jar in newspaper when Ned caught sight of the front page headline and knew he had to act.
He got on his bike and headed straight for Fraser’s office, taking comfort in how normal everything looked: the rows of solid Victorian terraces, the people walking their dogs, the wattlebirds harassing mynahs in the eucalypts, the bunches of kids dawdling home from school. No one was craning their neck waiting for the sky to fall. The chatter he’d been trying to block out, the hyperbolic metaphors of train crashes and blood baths, of tsunamis and earthquakes, of firestorms and shockwaves reverberating across the globe seemed, in the face of the very ordinary day, absurdly overblown.
He was approaching the Carlton Gardens when the breeze began to stiffen into a driving wind. A heavy drop of rain hit his nose. Within moments, the air was liquid. Water sluiced the road. He wasn’t so much pedalling as treading water. Rain found its way under his hood and snaked down his neck but if you stopped on a hill in conditions like this, you were done for. You’d never get started again. By the time he reached town, he was soaked. He locked up his bike out the front of the skyscraper where Fraser worked, not far from the stock exchange. The normally busy street was eerily deserted, as if cleared by water cannon. Out the front of the building, a car alarm screeched like a demented goose. Ned dripped his way through the sepulchral foyer and into a lift. As it rose towards the twenty-eighth floor, he thought of the headline he’d glimpsed earlier. ‘. . . WIPED OFF THE AUSTRALIAN MARKET’. He hadn’t seen the figure and didn’t need to. Should he have been on to this earlier, should he have told Fraser to sell up? But when, exactly? How did you know? Wasn’t it Fraser’s job to advise him?
Fraser shared an office with half a dozen other youngish brokers, a rowdy crew you could normally hear whooping and generally making a racket as you approached down the corridor. When Ned opened the door, six haggard faces turned to him, most looking like they hadn’t seen sleep for days. Their cheeks were bruised with stubble. Ties hung in baggy nooses around their necks. The air was rank with sweat and half-eaten food. Ned searched for his friend. The others knew he was Fraser’s client and one by one they turned back to their computer screens as if he wasn’t there.
N
ed went over to Fraser’s desk. It was bare except for a vase of dead flowers. Some of the drawers were open. All of them were empty. He looked from broker to broker.
‘Anyone know where Fraser is?’ His voice was a pathetic squeak.
No one replied. Just the furious tapping of keyboards. He waited.
Eventually, a shaven-headed twenty-something on the far side of the office met his eye.
‘He went out for lunch. Yesterday.’ The broker smiled gormlessly.
Low-level hysteria hummed in the air. Furtive glances passed between the brokers. Ned saw the corners of their mouths twitching as if they were trying not to crack up.
‘So?’
‘He’s gone.’
‘Gone where?’
‘To the Bahamas. The Côte d’Azur. Wherever you go when you don’t want to be found.’ The broker took a drag on his cigarette. Someone snickered.
Ned’s mind went blank. This was worse than watching the Saints get pummelled. He knew the answer but he had to ask. ‘Why?’
The man exhaled. ‘What planet have you been on? Dodgy futures. They were toxic. He had to sell up and get out. Fast.’
It took Ned a few seconds to decode the message. ‘We didn’t have futures.’
The broker waved his hand and ash fell through the air like acid rain. It was obvious he was beyond caring. ‘We all had futures.’