To Know My Crime

by Fiona Capp

  He drops the phone onto the floor by the bunk and closes his eyes again. He’s so tired of thinking and plotting. The shed is stuffy and he soon dozes off. The swell surging up the beach enters his dreams as muffled explosions in the distance, the city being bombed in wave after relentless wave until nothing but smoking rubble remains.

  When he wakes, he has no idea whether it’s morning or evening. Or even what he is doing here. Then he remembers his breakfast with Morrow and his dream and he marvels at what the mind will do, the lengths it will go to obliterate the mess of the past.

  14.

  Angela is sitting on the veranda of the meditation hall, watching the rain. It has been falling on and off for seven days. A Buddhist saying has it that thoughts are like the weather; they come and go like passing fronts, and behind the clouds the sky is always clear. She tells herself to remember this: somewhere beyond the storm in her head there exists a part of her that is untroubled and calm.

  The first time she came here, it rained for a week, just like now. Then the skies cleared, and in the mornings the tops of the hills on the far side of the valley floated like islands in a sea of mist. She thinks of how, after the final meditation session, she stepped out of the hall and was greeted by an enormous full moon hanging just above the hills. She had come through the bad weather and out the other side. She had shown herself that she could do it, that she could sit with her fears, her pains, her obsessions. And not run away.

  The gong chimes to mark the end of the break. She watches the other students coming back up the hill from their cabins, their eyes trained on the muddy ground. She must not think about the days ahead of her. There is only now and now and now.

  She wheels herself into the hall. After a period of fidgeting and adjustment, everyone settles onto their cushions and the new session begins. The teacher is talking about the first Noble Truth, dukka, that all is suffering. There was a time, Angela reflects, when suffering was just a word. Something found only in tragedies, operas or epics. Or instances of mass misfortune. Something that happened to others. In the early days of her practice, she worried that she had not suffered enough to understand what her patients were going through. She is now liberated from this particular anxiety. She can’t say where her suffering falls in the hierarchy of what is humanly possible, but she has experienced enough to no longer be afraid of the dark places her patients take her to, or overwhelmed by what they find there.

  As to what difference she makes in their lives, this is a question she can never really answer. Whether the ‘surgery’ she conducts is successful, or whether she is fuelling her patients’ obsessions, encouraging them to wallow in their wounds. If she was a physician or surgeon, there would be no doubt. She would have the satisfaction of suturing a lesion, excising a tumour, administering medicine to lower blood pressure or banish infection. The health of the body would be her proof. Analysis can be transformative, she is certain of that, at least, as radical as a work of art; a piece of theatre performed by analyst and patient witnessed by no one, whose truth is deep rooted yet never fully grasped. But it demands the kind of patience and money and time that most people can’t afford. Not to mention a degree of faith. Like art, its significance is open to question, and like an artist, she can never be sure of the value of what she does or if she is trying to work magic that no one believes in any more.

  A few nights ago, she dreamed she could walk. She was in the bay, floating on her back, when she simply stood up and waded to shore. She wasn’t surprised; it seemed perfectly natural. She had meditated long and hard and now her body was answering the call. On reaching the sand, she broke into a loping run that took her to the end of the beach and along the pathway up to the park at the top of the hill overlooking the bay. Before she knew it, she was bounding across the baize of freshly mown grass towards the mansions of Millionaires Walk on the rocky bluff up ahead. In between lay a beach with an obstacle course of wooden jetties, but nothing was going to stop her, not now that she had found her legs. She would keep on running until the movement was imprinted deep in her flesh so that her muscles would never again forget how it was done. Without even thinking about it, she leapt over the first jetty and then the next and the next, like an astronaut on the moon. She was floating over the last jetty when she made a fatal mistake. She looked down. In that moment the spell was broken and she woke sprawled on her back, as if she’d just crashed back to earth. That was the day the tears started falling and wouldn’t stop.

  When the teacher announces that today they will experience their bodies at their most fundamental, as particles in endless motion, a moan escapes Angela’s lips. She knew this was coming, but had somehow managed to forget. Last time, the road stretched out in front of her, in front of them all: the road to the ultimate reality beyond mind and matter. Now a landslide blocks her path. Of all the things that are closed to her, this is the hardest to accept: that beckoning glimpse of nirvana.

  Angela knew the risk she was running and she has no one to blame but herself. There are periods when she is convinced she has finally accepted her lot, accepted the million things she will never do and never feel – all those things she took for granted – but they never last. The longing for her healthy body always returns. Being here has only thrust these never-again things back in her face. Each session, as she strains to find sensations below her shoulders, as she futilely scans her body, visualising every part, willing herself to do the impossible – to feel her toes, her knees, her breasts – she is reminded over and over of what has been lost.

  And so she sits, like an agitated child, bashing her head against this wall of rock until she has to accept it. This is what she needed to learn. What is lost is lost. A simple lesson, you would think but so hard to accept. What on earth had she been expecting? She had dressed up wishful thinking as science. Had come here for all the wrong reasons, looking for miracles, as if to a shrine where the sick are healed, the lame made to walk.

  The teacher is instructing them to concentrate on mentally slicing through their bodies, on pushing their minds where they have never dared go. Angela’s attention immediately flees elsewhere, to a park she often visits not far from her flat. Tucked away in a quiet back street, it is like a secret garden. When the weather is warm enough, she asks whichever carer is with her to help her lie down on the grass so that she can look up through the branches of elm trees over one hundred years old. She was there only last week, the diamond-shaped yellow leaves falling lazily around her with every fresh gust of wind. She remembers watching one particular leaf spiralling down with intermittent upward leaps, like the ever-diminishing spikes on a graph charting an inexorable course towards zero.

  There are times, when she is lying there, that she truly wishes she was a tree, a big old elm or a great Moreton Bay fig. She might be rooted to the spot but her roots could travel deep beneath the earth and her branches could reach for the sun. She could move in mysterious ways.

  They are eating lunch when the hospital calls. It is the main meal of the day and always deeply satisfying after the hard slog of a morning’s session. The retreat manager crouches down beside the table where Angela and Mai are sitting and whispers to Angela that a doctor from a hospital in the city is on the phone, asking to speak to her. It is urgent. The manager leads the way down to the office where Angela can take the call.

  The doctor has little time for pleasantries or apologies. He gets straight to the point. Two days ago, Matthew was found unconscious in a park not far from Angela’s flat. He has pneumonia and other complications and may not survive. When asked about relatives, he mentioned only Angela. The doctor says he understands they are no longer married, but given Matthew’s condition, she might want to consider coming to see him. He doesn’t say ‘before it’s too late’ but his meaning is clear.

  Angela thanks him and says, of course, she will come. She puts down the phone, staring blankly at the desktop in front of her. Much as she wants to be free of him, she has never wanted this. Haven’t
they both suffered enough?

  ‘Bad news?’ the manager asks.

  Angela starts. She’d forgotten the young woman was there. ‘I have to leave.’

  She wheels herself back to the dining room, thinking of Matthew lying unconscious in the park. Ever since the divorce, she has told herself he is not her problem. But is this true? Some would say he will never forgive himself until she forgives him. And that in forgiving him, she would free herself. But she has never had much time for conventional wisdom. You can’t force yourself to forgive someone. It has to happen of its own accord and might be the work of a lifetime, if it happens at all. Freud would say that it can’t be done, that the unconscious is too rife with ambivalence. You can’t simply wipe the slate clean.

  Everyone in the dining room looks up as she enters and then quickly away. Angela gestures to Mai to come outside. On the path overlooking the valley that has finally emerged from the mist, she tells her what has happened.

  ‘We’ll have to leave. Right now.’ Angela searches her carer’s grave face and is glad to find a flicker of relief.

  Mai offers a reassuring smile. ‘Of course. I’ll go and pack our things. You stay here and finish your lunch.’

  She bounds effortlessly up the slope like a prisoner released.

  15.

  Ned shuffles through the old photographs, some sepia, some black and white, some colour, comparing them to the garden as it is now. It surprises him how uncluttered, almost classical, it once looked, as if the aim was to mimic the landscape that the European settlers discovered – lush, open pasture and rolling hills dotted with occasional trees. A landscape like a tended garden that has since become a thicket of ti-tree and foreign species. A landscape tended by people whose trace on this peninsula has been all but erased.

  When Ned came here with Fraser, the garden was much as it is now – overgrown. The front hedge gone shapeless and wild, weeds in the garden beds, gnarled ti-tree branches collapsing onto the lawn with tentacles of ivy clambering over them. The Wainwrights had enough wealth to be perfectly comfortable with this unkempt appearance, this shabby decay. Only the petit bourgeois cared about keeping things spick and span. You could hardly call Morrow bourgeois, but it’s not appearances, shabby or otherwise, he’s concerned with. It’s the way things used to be.

  As he studies the photographs, Ned is distracted by the people in them – Morrow as a boy with staring eyes and a languid smile, his two sisters with their flawless skin and perfect teeth, and his mother and father, all of them radiant with the confidence that comes from generation upon generation of inhabiting a place like this, a world of natural beauty and material ease. Ned tries to imagine how Morrow feels when he looks at the photographs: how his younger self must look to him, lounging back in his chair, so supreme in his certainty that everything will stay just as it is.

  He puts the photographs away and is setting the sprinklers when he hears a car coming down the driveway. Morrow is back. Again. If parliament isn’t sitting, he can’t seem to stay away.

  Ned straightens up and gives him a wave.

  The politician smiles, gazing around. ‘You’ve got your work cut out for you.’

  They talk for a while about Ned’s ideas for the garden, based on photographs and Morrow’s memories. When the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth blare from the politician’s coat pocket, he walks away to take the call. Ned notices the change in his voice, how it softens, becomes attentive and fatherly. An edge of disappointment creeps in and he says, ‘Oh, I see. Yes, of course, darling. Another time.’

  Morrow stares at the freshly cut grass at his feet for a moment, then wanders back to Ned. ‘That was my daughter, Lucy.’ He sighs. ‘Tomorrow, she’s off to New Delhi for work. Next week, it’s probably Dubai. She has no desire to come here and I can’t really blame her. She never knew it the way I did.’

  Once the house was sold to the Wainwrights, Morrow says, he stayed away from the peninsula, couldn’t bear to come back here. After he was married, he wouldn’t even visit his wife’s parents at their house near the surf beach. Instead, he, Veronica and Lucy went overseas or to the snow or up north. And all the time, he promised them that, one day, he would get the house back. Bored them stupid with it. But none of it meant anything to Lucy.

  Ned stops raking the ivy cuttings. ‘Why, if you don’t mind me asking, did your parents sell in the first place?’

  Morrow looks at him squarely. ‘Gambling. My father loved this house desperately and yet he threw it away. I’ll never forget the day he told me the house was to be sold. He tried to pretend it was a temporary setback. Like in a game of Monopoly. Sometimes you had to mortgage Mayfair or Park Lane when times got tough but you knew you would get them back, it was just a matter of time.’

  This isn’t what Ned was expecting. Before he can ask any more questions, the politician says, ‘Now, tell me something, Ned. Do you ever go back to your old beach house? The one your family used to rent?’

  Ned can feel his face pulling in all directions. It seems ludicrous to be talking about the old fibro shack and this house in the same breath. He removes bits of ivy from the teeth of the rake and wonders how long it is since Morrow has seen his daughter. ‘Not me, but my sister did. With her husband.’

  ‘Not any more?’ Morrow is genuinely interested. The intricacies of people’s connections with this area seem to hold an endless fascination for him, perhaps because they offer some kind of mirror for his own. Ned would rather keep their exchanges perfunctory, confined to superficial niceties, but Morrow is keen to chat and Ned can’t afford to be standoffish.

  ‘Her marriage . . .’ he falters. He never knows how to talk about what happened to Angela. Does he say, ‘Her husband threw her down a flight of stairs’? Does he say, ‘She fell down the stairs during an argument with her husband’? He could simply say that the marriage didn’t last, like so many others. But it feels callous to gloss over it, as if it was something to be ashamed of. A great violence was done to her. Fucking Matthew fucked up her life.

  He finds himself talking about Angela, about her paralysis, about how hard it has been to watch. And the more he talks, the more he wants to talk. He finds himself speaking of his regret that he ignored the early warning signs, that he didn’t really want to know. The more he talks, the angrier he becomes until he can’t tell who he’s more angry with, Matthew or himself for taking refuge in the convenient excuse that it was none of his business. And when he speaks of his slackness, he’s also thinking of the ticking bomb that is her empty bank account. He keeps his head down, raking the ivy as if scouring the ground for something honest to say.

  ‘At least she can work now. Just as well.’

  Morrow is listening as if he really cares. Politicians must get good at it, appearing to be concerned about what people are telling them. Or perhaps at deluding themselves that they can step in like some fairy godfather and set everything right.

  As if in the thrall of his own benevolence, Morrow says suddenly, ‘Bring her here for a visit, Ned. She could stay if she wants to. There’s no shortage of space.’

  Ned looks up at the house with all its empty rooms. It’s a puzzling offer from a man like Morrow. Perhaps he’s salving his guilt. Or is it another twist in an elaborate trap? Or a version of his grandfather’s open house, a gesture of noblesse oblige? Ned has no idea. Each new conversation with Morrow seems to draw him into territory so murky he hardly knows what to think any more.

  The problem is that Angela would love to come and stay here and he can’t pretend that she wouldn’t. He knows how much she misses the peninsula, misses the sea. Every morning when she and Matthew were down here during the summer, they would swim between the jetties at the front beach and then have their morning coffee at the Baths. She told Ned once that life never felt better than it did after a swim in the bay, the memory of the water still lapping about her and all those endorphins, all that caffeine, washing through her veins. But how to extend Morrow’s invitation without admitting
why he was in the boatshed in the first place?

  ‘Very good of you. I’ll mention it to her.’ Sweat pearls on his forehead and above his lip. ‘Getting muggy, eh?’

  ‘Make it sooner rather than later. This weekend. Before the renovations start.’

  Ned’s skin tightens like shrink wrap. The following Monday is the deadline for the payment. Maybe Morrow simply wants a distraction from what is hanging over him. His own time bomb, ticking away. All this coming and going he’s been doing, like a man trying to run away from himself. Or maybe he’s chosen to ignore the demand, or he’s passed it on to the police after all.

  Ned explains that Angela is away on a retreat, that he can’t speak to her for another three days.

  ‘A Buddhist psychoanalyst?’ Morrow raises his eyebrows.

  ‘Not exactly. I mean, she’s not really a Buddhist. Lots of people do these retreats. I don’t know much about it. She can explain it better than I can.’

  Morrow smiles thoughtfully. ‘I look forward to that.’

  That afternoon, when Ned hitches the trailer to the old Range Rover and takes a load of cuttings to the tip, Morrow goes down to the boatshed. He steps cautiously into the raw wood interior, faintly irritated to find himself feeling like a trespasser. To his surprise, everything is neat and orderly. The floor swept, the bed made, not a wrinkle in the tightly tucked blanket. With two fingers, he lifts the pillow, then squats to look under the bunk. On the floor at the end of the bed, he finds an unzipped duffel bag containing cheap-looking underwear, socks and some folded T-shirts. He moves gingerly, fearful of disturbing things. Deeper into the shed, he finds a plastic bag of basic groceries – baked beans, pasta, tinned tomatoes, a loaf of bread. The rickety wooden cabinet below the basin contains crockery, cutlery and a rusty old tea tin, empty. In the fridge, there is nothing but a half-litre carton of milk and a few eggs. Ned, he can only conclude, is a man of modest, nondescript tastes.