To Know My Crime

by Fiona Capp

  During the first retreat something happened that Angela will never forget. It is the reason she has come back, the reason she still hopes against hope. After six days of the students honing their technique, of tuning into their bodies as they had never done before, the teacher made an announcement. It was time to experience the universe at its most elemental, atomic level. To feel in the depths of their being the state of flux that defined all life. Angela was sceptical when the teacher talked like this. She could buy the argument about sitting with pain because it made psychological sense. But this talk of becoming mindful of your atomic structure, of actually feeling it, was surely going too far.

  Imagine, the teacher said, your body in cross-section. They were to mentally dissect themselves, slice through their limbs and torso from front to back, and feel it deep in their flesh. They would find it easier to move their minds through soft tissue and organs than bone, but if they persisted, the resistance would lessen. They were to begin with their chests and focus their minds on their breastbones. It was the strangest instruction that Angela had ever received and part of her couldn’t help wondering if it was entirely safe to do this, even in your imagination.

  Reluctantly, she turned her attention to the bone just above her loudly beating heart, and moved mentally inward. To her surprise, she started to feel a pushing sensation, as if something was moving through her, followed by a sense of something pushing out through her back. Stunned, she tried it again, mentally slicing through her chest at a point slightly lower down. Each time, it felt a little easier and she grew a little more game. It was macabrely liberating, like conducting her own autopsy, utterly in her body and yet utterly detached. By the time she reached her toes, she was covered in sweat.

  She worked her way back up to her head and then down again, absorbed by her task. They had been at it for about an hour when it happened. The teacher had told them it would, but Angela hadn’t believed it. Not to her. She didn’t think she was susceptible enough. It started as a fizzing sensation, a kind of effervescence. But instead of falling through her in a light shower, as before, it came like a tropical downpour. Wave after furious wave, faster and faster until she was nothing but pure vibrating matter: a mass of quivering molecules in the shape of a human. All thought suspended, she sat observing the cascade of sensations, the dissolution of her physical being. To think that everything was like this, particles in motion. That nothing was solid or immutable. If you attuned your mind to it, all matter was a humming beehive, thrillingly, blissfully alive.

  Angela didn’t want it to stop, yet was afraid of what might happen if it didn’t. Would she ever feel normal again? Was it possible to stay like this, forever in the thrall of your agitated atoms? Forever aware of this buzzing, this sense that at any moment you might fly apart? In a sudden panic, she reached out and touched the tip of her nose, as the teacher had advised them to do if they wanted the free-flow to stop – and regretted her caution instantly. The torrent dried up as if it had never been. All those vibrating atoms coalesced, her body dense, inert, once more. She had foolishly cut short something exceptional, something she feared she might never experience again.

  Angela had thought she understood the way the mind worked, had always accepted Freud’s dictum that the damage of childhood, of the past, could not be undone. Her job was to help her patients abandon their fantasies of perfection and to reconcile them to common human unhappiness. Equanimity, detachment, was the best you could hope for. The ability to step back from your pain. She saw now how limited this was, how the plasticity of the brain, the mind’s capacity for renewal, for healing both itself and the body was beyond Freud’s wildest dreams.

  She sighs as she thinks back on it now. It is one thing to imagine slicing through your own spinal cord. It is another to imagine that you can mentally reverse real damage. Restore feeling where it has been lost. And yet what happened that unforgettable day gave her a glimpse of a power she didn’t know she possessed; a power that has fostered within her the most dangerous hopes.

  13.

  Ned gets up early, collects his few personal possessions from the other shed and goes to the toilet block on the foreshore for a shower and shave. When he joins Morrow for breakfast, he doesn’t want to look like a man who’s been living in a boathouse for close to a month.

  Just before eight o’clock, he climbs the stairs to Millionaires Walk and pushes open the heavy wrought-iron gate that leads to Morrow’s garden. The politician calls out from the veranda for Ned to let himself in. French doors lead into a sun-filled living room full of slightly tatty Victorian furniture and oil paintings, many of which appear to be family portraits. He certainly doesn’t remember them from Fraser’s time. Ned can’t help feeling like the boy in the fairy tale who breaks into the giant’s castle and tricks him into handing over the golden goose. Admittedly the place is rather shabby. All peeling paint and cracked plaster. But Ned’s never had a problem with shabby; there is a certain romance to it, a kind of faded splendour. The past kept fresh through decay.

  He takes the staircase up to the second floor and when he steps out onto the veranda, the world suddenly opens up. He’d forgotten how perfectly positioned it is, how astounding the views from this height. The veranda skirts the entire house, and as they move around it, they take in the unfolding panorama of the peninsula, from the opalescent bay and busy main street of the town to the distant surf of Bass Strait and the narrow mouth of the heads. The gawkers on Millionaires Walk think they are getting a glimpse of how the other half lives, but the cliff-top view is truncated by headlands and high walls. If you really want to know what it means to be above the fray, you have to be up here. You have to forge your own Trojan horse and get yourself invited inside.

  Not that Ned engineered it to unfold this way. It wasn’t as if he set out to infiltrate this enclave of privilege. Somehow it just happened, both times. Fraser trusted him because Ned wasn’t captive to what the ‘right people’ thought of him. All he can hope is that Morrow will do the same.

  They complete one lap of the veranda, but Morrow keeps walking until they can see the town again. He stops and inspects Ned from head to foot. ‘In daylight you look almost respectable.’

  Before Ned can reply, Morrow has turned back to the view. ‘See the Cosmo,’ he says, pointing to the hotel with the limestone tower on the hill. ‘My great-great-grandfather’s company built it. And the baths that used to be on the beachfront. And the tram that used to run from the pier to the back beach. And the rotunda there. And the paths along the back beach foreshore. It was all his doing. He started out building theatres. And when he came down here, he saw new possibilities.’

  This puzzles Ned because he knows a thing or two about the town’s history. ‘But there’s never been a theatre here.’

  Morrow smiles indulgently, impressed that he knows this much. ‘Look around you, we’re standing in the stalls. The bay and the ocean, they’re the show. The main event. An everlasting drama. Nature never lets you down.’

  Ned surveys the bay flecked with white and blue yachts and a container ship silently cleaving the water, then he pans across the narrow end of the peninsula and the headland on the far side of the bay and further around to the distant spume of the surf and the depthless blue ocean beyond, and he can see what Morrow means.

  ‘And look,’ the politician adds, ‘if you place your palm just so, you hold the whole town in your hand. Which is why he built the house in exactly this spot.’

  Ned smiles at the clever optical illusion, but also at Morrow’s pride. The gesture – the town cupped in his palm – says everything. The question remains, however, why is he showing Ned this? Why would he bother? And what does he suspect, if anything? What bothers Ned is that Morrow knows how to string his opponents along, how to lure them into his web and when to strike. It’s his job.

  Ned follows him inside, looking around warily, although what for he can’t say. The trip-wires or trapdoors he needs to watch out for are those hidden in conv
ersation, not in the house. Edgy though he is, he can’t help wondering when the food will appear. He has been dreaming of toast with jam and a hot pot of coffee. To his dismay, Morrow suggests a tour of the house and leads him down hallways and into rooms Ned didn’t know existed. The few times he came up to the house with Fraser, they went straight to Fraser’s bedroom to watch TV or listen to music turned up so loud the speakers throbbed. As they move from room to room, Morrow points to cracks in the plaster, peeling paint, water damage in the ceiling, rotting window frames, sagging floorboards. His eyes narrow, as if he can’t bear to look. His voice deepens to a growl.

  ‘When my parents sold the house it was in perfect condition. I was thirteen. We used to have an open house once a summer. My father wanted the public to be proud of their heritage.’

  Their? Ned lets it pass. He calculates when the house would have been sold. Morrow says he waited forty years to get it back – that makes it the 1970s. Ned wasn’t around here until the nineties. When Fraser inherited the place after his father dropped dead on a squash court, he came to regard it as a burden. It had never meant that much to him. He used to say that his grandfather had bought it to impress the chaps at the club, not to mention his many lovers, and that his father held on to it for somewhere sheltered to park his yacht.

  Ned has lost count of the number of rooms. Eventually, Morrow leads him back to the veranda and gestures towards one of the rattan chairs with a ragged cushion, indicating he should take a seat. It strikes Ned that Morrow hasn’t mentioned why his parents sold the house to the Wainwrights; evidently even old wounds can be raw.

  The doorbell rings downstairs. ‘Breakfast!’ Morrow announces. ‘Won’t be a moment.’

  Ned watches Morrow’s soft suede loafers taking him down the hallway to the staircase with the unhurried pace of someone who rushes for no one. There is muffled talk and the smell of freshly baked bread and pastries wafts up the stairwell.

  As Ned hungrily feeds his face, the politician finally gets to the point. Morrow’s gardener recently retired, and he needs someone to take his place. Not simply to look after the garden but to act as caretaker during the restoration of the house, to make sure the tradesmen complete their allotted tasks – on time.

  ‘No small ask, I know,’ says Morrow, rubbing flakes of pastry from his hands. ‘I want someone here who knows how the house and garden used to look. I have photographs, but not many. You said earlier you’d quit your job. It occurred to me that you might be available.’

  Ned doesn’t need to feign surprise. He twitches his lips in what he hopes looks like a smile. In the course of their conversation, Morrow has adroitly extracted a mix of facts and fictions about Ned’s background – the university courses he started and never completed, the series of casual jobs, his travels, where he grew up. That Ned’s ‘marriage’ had been on the rocks for some time because he had been having an affair with a girl called Mai.

  And now this offer.

  Is it an elaborate trap or has Morrow really satisfied himself that Ned can be trusted? Why give a job to a trespasser, a totally unknown quantity? But then again, Ned does possess certain knowledge, certain connections. And he knows from his foray into Fraser’s world that you can’t underestimate the old-schooltie thing, how it works regardless of the individuals involved. Ned is a known quantity within this network. And maybe Wainwright’s disapproval of him only confirms Morrow’s impression that Ned is trustworthy. A kind of everyman who chanced a walk-on part in the house’s history at a time when Morrow was excluded from it. The politician can’t get back the days he missed here but that, it seems, is not going to stop him trying.

  Ned looks Morrow in the eye. He always thought he was a useless liar – Angela was never fooled. He is shocked by the ease of this deception, and how irrational people really are. Morrow is known as a shrewd operator, a canny judge of character. But if Ned can fool him how shrewd can he really be?

  ‘You’ll want some references.’

  ‘I make my own judgements.’

  Ned gives a nod, as if he is grateful. Then adds wryly, ‘Just don’t ask me to vote for you.’

  Morrow almost cackles. ‘I assume that means you’ll take the job.’ He tells Ned he can stay in the bungalow, although it will probably need cleaning out. It has a toilet and shower.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ Ned breaks in, ‘I’d rather the boatshed.’ This time, he’s not trying to ingratiate himself.

  Morrow nods, impressed. ‘The old days. I understand completely.’ He stands up, the conversation over, and casts a glance over the back garden. ‘You can start with the lawn. The mower’s in the shed. There’s an old Range Rover in the garage you can use, if you need to take rubbish to the tip.’ They agree on a weekly rate. He shakes Ned’s hand and says, ‘Good man.’

  Unable to resist tempting fate, Ned says, ‘Ever heard of the law of adverse possession?’

  ‘Can’t say I have.’

  ‘If I squat there for twelve years, the boatshed is lawfully mine.’

  A smile feathers Morrow’s lips. ‘But I’m employing you, so you’re not squatting.’

  Ned pretends to be crestfallen. He shakes his head. ‘That could be a complication.’

  ‘You’ll have to come up with a better plan.’

  ‘Do you have a daughter?’

  Morrow really cackles this time. ‘I’m going to enjoy having you around, Ned.’

  Ned turns away, lifting his arm high as if to quell the silent applause even as he curses himself as a jester and a fool. He always has to do it, can’t help himself. Has to push his luck, turn everything into a game.

  Back in the boatshed, he lies down on his bunk, his head rattling like a window in the wind. He has always thought of himself as fundamentally honest, thoroughly trustworthy. Perhaps most people do. Perhaps this is the lie everyone lives with. The necessary self-delusion. You don’t become aware of it until a moment of folly or bad luck forces your instinctive dishonesty out into the open and you see – because your stories have become, by necessity, grander and more consciously false – that you have been fooling yourself and everyone else all along. Or is this a convenient rationalisation for what he has done? An out-clause. Nature made me do it. I lie, therefore I survive.

  He closes his eyes. Beneath the furious static in his head, he is conscious of something stirring, an urge both dangerous and typically perverse. An idea so potentially destructive it could well become irresistible: what would happen if he went to Morrow and told him the truth?

  It is too big a thought to contend with. As a boy, whenever he was confronted with a situation he couldn’t handle, his usual reaction was to fall asleep. Great yawns would come bursting out of him and he would have to fight to keep his eyes open as he is doing now. It doesn’t seem to matter that it’s mid-morning and that he slept well last night.

  He has just started to drift off when his phone rings. He scrambles to find it and sees Mai’s name on the screen. His impulse is to ignore her; if he tells her what’s going on, she will think that he’s in danger of incriminating himself. And she may well be right. But if she’s calling from the retreat, it may be urgent.

  ‘Everything okay?’

  There is a deep sigh. ‘This is hard, Ned.’

  ‘What happened to not talking?’

  ‘The Noble Silence?’ she says with mock solemnity. ‘Well, I’ve broken it.’

  ‘I guess you have. How’s Ange?’

  Mai hesitates. ‘During meditation this morning she couldn’t stop crying. No sound, just tears streaming down her face. She wouldn’t tell me why. She said this kind of thing happens, old hurts surface. That it’s cathartic, nothing to worry about. But you know what it’s like when she gets stuffed up. She can’t breathe properly. She can’t clear her throat.’

  ‘Do you think she should stop?’

  ‘She won’t. She reckons she’ll be okay.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘If Angela can do it, I can. Only four more days.’
She gives a desperate laugh. ‘What’s happening there? Any word from Morrow?’

  ‘Do me a favour, Mai. Just concentrate on what you’re doing. Ange needs your full attention.’

  ‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’

  ‘It can wait.’

  ‘Tell me, Ned. Otherwise I’ll imagine all sorts of things.’

  ‘There’s no response to the letter, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Morrow’s come back, hasn’t he?’

  He should’ve known she’d get it out of him one way or another. He tells her what happened last night and this morning. ‘He’s given me a week’s wages up front.’

  ‘You’re going to work for him?’

  ‘Why not? He trusts me and I need the money.’

  ‘Come on, Ned. He’s got to suspect something.’

  ‘Why would he offer me a job?’

  ‘To keep an eye on you. Suss you out. And even if he does trust you, he’s taking advantage of you. An overseer for his renovations would cost him more than a gardener. And what about the other business? Are you just going to forget about it?’

  Ned doesn’t reply. She is like a terrier. She won’t let up. Of course he would like to forget about it. But he can’t, can he? Even if he put all of his wage towards Angela’s mortgage, it wouldn’t cover the repayments, not to mention the cost of the operation she needs.

  ‘For God’s sake, Mai, I’m waiting to see what he does. He’s got until the end of next week. But this isn’t your problem. It’s mine.’

  ‘It’s ours, Ned. You know that.’

  ‘I don’t know what the fuck I know any more! Will you give me a break?’

  There is a tense silence before Mai says, ‘Sorry. When I’m anxious, I badger.’

  ‘Yeah, and I snap. I’m sorry too. The main thing is to keep our nerve. Try not to freak ourselves out.’