by Anna Taylor
And the astounding thing, Lola thinks, is that when she said those words—the ones about wanting to be with him, right there in his bed, her head on his chest—just at the moment they were coming out her mouth she actually believed them to be true.
She looks dead into her own eyes.
‘Fool,’ she says out loud, and the reflection says it back to her. And she doesn’t just mean Jack Wright or Mike McDougall; she means herself too. Lola Jeffries. She feels suddenly sad for them, for all three of them.
She leans forward, bracing herself against the metal of the sink, up to her elbows in dishwater.
II.
Late one February afternoon, Jack called Lola at work—at the Riverside Tearooms—and said he was in town for the night and needed to see her. Urgently.
Lola said no.
This was seventeen years ago, at least. Long before Daisy. Long before Daisy’s weed of a father, Trent Monroe. Long before Mike McDougall and the monotonous drone of his voice.
___
She had looked down at her hands and listened to the sound of Jack’s breathing coming down the line. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘Lol, please.’ And then he had paused. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘please.’
She said no again. There was a long silence. Maybe she didn’t sound like she meant it, not really, because on the third please she said okay, and he didn’t seem surprised at all.
‘Give me your number at the motel,’ she said, looking out the window at people hurrying by on the pavement below. ‘So if I change my mind I can call.’
‘Nope,’ Jack said. ‘You won’t change your mind. It’ll be fine, Lola. Promise.’
She had walked home in the early evening sun, and lay on her unmade bed, looking up at the ceiling. All the windows were closed, shutting out the sound of the cars. Her clock ticked loudly beside her head. In the next room the phone rang three times, and then stopped. She should have a shower, she thought. Change her clothes. Put some foundation round her eyes, which she’d noticed recently had developed blue rings the colour of a dull, hazy sky. She was only twenty-three—too young, she thought, for signs of weariness like that.
Get ready, she said to herself out loud.
But she just lay there, looking up. Quite still.
Jack Wright had taken advantage of her innocence, if the truth be told. That’s not how she’d seen it at the time, but retrospect had put a fresh film on things. She’d met him when she was eighteen, he pushing thirty, and then left him two years later. She hadn’t seen him or heard from him since.
There had been an incident, of course. A long line of them, and then—what was the saying?—the straw that broke the camel’s back. Jack, picking her up from the bus stop one night after she had been away for a week visiting home. The dead look in his eyes. The way he told her, casually, just what he’d been doing while she was gone.
They were driving down the dusty road, the night sky glowing a strange yellow above the houses, and as they turned a corner Jack said, staring straight ahead the whole time, ‘I gotta tell you, Lola. I’ve gone bad.’
She had almost laughed out loud, imagining him as something in the fridge, something overdue for the bin. She kept her hand on his knee, resting lightly as it had been before, and looked out through the windscreen at the patch of road lurching into view, each illuminated square the same as the next, and said, ‘Really?’
She felt that if she lifted her hand, even her finger, off his leg, something irreversible would happen. A crumbling of sorts; a slow unravelling.
Jack kept his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel.
‘I’ve been drinking again,’ he said calmly. ‘And taking drugs. And sleeping with women.’
Lola moved her tongue round the inside of her teeth.
‘Have you, Jack?’ she said.
‘I have.’
They drove on, the lights from the dashboard lilting up towards their faces. Lola watched the clock flick from 8.11 to 8.12 to 8.13, and then she picked up her arm—that’s how it felt, as if she was picking it up like a kitten, or a small doll—and placed the other hand in her lap, one palm resting on top of the other.
‘Are you sorry?’ she said, achingly calm.
‘Well, yes,’ he said, ‘and no. No use crying over spilt milk, I figure.’
He took another corner, and then another, and pulled up behind their flat.
Lola got out and shut the door and walked quickly across the tarmac, feeling the air brushing against her face. She could hear the boot opening and shutting; Jack getting out her bags, the satchel of preserves her aunt had palmed off on her, along with mouldy lemons and shelled peas. He moved up the stairs behind her, weighted down, and set her bags on the floor in the kitchen.
He looked at her wearily.
‘I didn’t mean it as anything,’ he had said. ‘You know that. Let’s just put it behind us, hey?’
*
Lola ate a piece of toast and walked twenty minutes across town to meet Jack at the motel down by the river.
She had showered for longer than usual, scrubbed at her scalp to try to remove the smell of Sheryl’s steaks that always hung around on her hair. She had done it up into a sort of a casual pile on the top of her head—her hair—and sprayed at it profusely. That would help with the smell too, she thought. Somehow, since she last saw Jack (was someone playing some kind of crazy trick on her?) crow’s feet had begun snaking their way towards her temples, and there was an incipient sag around her waist.
People were wandering home, carrying shopping bags on their arms, wearing light sweatshirts and skirts and shorts. They talked quietly to one another. Some walked alone, heads down. It would not be dark for a while yet.
Jack was waiting at the motel entrance, leaning casually against the fence.
‘You came,’ he said to her, perhaps trying to hide the victorious curl of his lip, but not succeeding in doing so. He was wearing pale jeans, worn jandals, one of which he’d discarded on the grass. He was tanned, more so than Lola had ever seen him. She had put a dress on, garishly coloured, its fabric almost transparent. She suddenly wished she hadn’t.
‘Did you think I wouldn’t?’ she said. ‘Did you really think I wouldn’t?’
He started towards her with more purpose than she could ever turn from, reaching out his arms.
‘I hoped that you would,’ he said.
She had felt flooded with an almost appalling relief. It could have knocked her backwards, that flood. Yes—a happiness so close to despair.
Jack’s room smelt musty, even though all of the windows were open, letting in the river air. They drank sherry out of plastic cups, and Lola watched—remembered—the way Jack’s hands moved when he smiled at her, his fingertips always framing his face, pale moons under the nails.
He leaned over, touched his thumb to her mouth.
‘There you are,’ he said.
And before Lola could stop him—before she could even pretend to object—he was on the floor, starting at her toes, working his way upwards. He licked at her fingertips, and at the skin behind her knees.
He said, ‘All I’ve thought about for three years is getting you into bed.’
She shook her head, laughed; but she did believe him. She believed him—almost—completely.
‘And how do we get these off?’ he said to her, or rather to her underwear.
Afterwards Jack said to her, quite out of the blue, ‘Well, I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused you.’
They were sitting on the bed, their backs pressed hard against the wall, getting their breathing back to normal.
‘You’ve always been too good for me, Lol,’ he said. ‘Everyone always said so. I know that.’ He didn’t look at her as he said this. The words were directed straight out in front of him, and their bodies weren’t touching at all, just sitting side by side, like the bodies of strangers on a bus.
‘What I wanted to tell you,’ Jack said, and he reached out his hand to her as he said it, though his e
yes stayed fixed, looking hard at the cupboards on the opposite wall, ‘is that I got a girl knocked up, and I’ll have to marry her, I guess.’
Lola was looking at her thighs as he said this—the stickiness of them high up, the insides of them covered in a transparent slick. Her veins were pressed right up against the skin so that the colour of them—her thighs—was too pink, nearly purple.
Jack yawned.
‘I’d probably rather marry you,’ he said.
He squeezed her hand, and then let go.
Out of the window, the river looked lazy, a muddy brown, hardly moving at all. Was it the smell of the river that Lola could taste in her mouth, or was it Jack? She leaned across to her half-filled plastic cup and spat into it. The spit wormed around in there for a moment, all white and frothy, and then rose to the top. Lola licked at her lips. The taste was still there. It was Jack, for sure.
‘I’d probably rather marry you,’ Jack said again, monotonously, as if she hadn’t heard the first time.
Lola began to laugh, an awful breathless laugh, like a wheeze.
‘Should I take that as a compliment?’ she said, though the words sounded more like the far-off screech of a bird. ‘Jack? Should I be glad?’
‘I guess I just thought you should know,’ Jack Wright said to her, though his voice now sounded defeated. Lola saw out of the corner of her eye that he was searching for his jeans and, once he found them, through the pockets. Looking for his fags.
The best way out—or so it seemed at the time—was across the river.
Later, Lola wondered why she had thought this when, really, walking out through the gates of the motel and down the road would have been the simplest way home. Maybe she was half drunk, from the sherry.
It was beginning to get dark, and the sky, down low by the hills, was a dirty red. Lola had her dress back on, but somehow had forgotten her sandals. She was damned if she was going to go back for them.
It was simple—she would swim. Jack couldn’t swim to save himself, or so he said.
Lola could see the milky light shining out through the open window of his room. It was not dark enough to seem strong, yet. It looked weak, washed out. Jack, she imagined, would be in there drinking himself into a stupor. Though perhaps part of her thought—part of her hoped—he might just come out across the perfectly groomed lawn and stand there on the bank, helpless, watching her swim away. That would have been nice.
The water was not as warm as she expected, and it was filled with silt. Lola didn’t care. Not about the muddiness, the possibility of eels, or her dress which was billowing around her like a sail. She’d swum in the river before, though never all the way across. If she concentrated, she would make it to the other side in no time. It wasn’t hard.
Jack had taken her head in his hands, palms against the base of her neck, holding her like someone might hold a new baby. That’s what he’d done as he was lying her down. He’d held her head like that, looking at her as if she was something astonishing; something unexpected that he’d found on the bottom of a lake. Lola couldn’t get away from it, that moment. The heat of his hands seeping right into her skull. She shook her head—no—every time it came back to her.
The sky grew dark quickly. It happened faster than she expected. She was already halfway across, although she was slowing herself down by turning round to look for Jack every once in a while. She thought she saw him against the motel lights, coming across the lawn, his shadow stretching out in front of him, but when she looked harder she saw it was only a woman in a short skirt and oversized teeshirt. Jack’s light was still on, anyway, and when she turned to look again the curtains were drawn. He was still in there, for sure.
The red on the horizon had all but disappeared. It had been replaced by a deep blue, an indigo blue. Was that the word for it? It was almost impossible to tell where the hills ended and the sky began. Lola began to tread water, just to rest for a while. She would have to conserve energy to keep her strength up, even though she was a good swimmer. She had heard once about a man who went far out into the sea, so far that he couldn’t possibly make it all the way back, on purpose. She would not want anyone ever to think she had done that.
The sound of voices moved across the water towards her. Perhaps they were coming from the playground in the motel’s grounds. They did sound like children’s voices, high and song-like. She would not allow herself to turn around and look for them, though—to look for those voices. From now on she would not allow herself to look back at the motel at all.
Things with Jack Wright were over, Lola decided. She was done with him. She would swim to the other side, and then she would run home, barefoot but fine despite that. Despite all of it. She would run to dry herself out—and Jack Wright and the sediment of him all over her skin, inside and out, would fly right off her, right out of her.
‘I’m done with you,’ she said to the dark sway of grass on the bank, her legs beating beneath her, head turned away from the motel and its grounds, away from Jack and his curtained window.
‘Do you hear that?’ she called, though who she was saying it to she really didn’t know.
The memory—that small contraction in her chest—of Jack on the bed, looking down at her, tried to slide back into her head, but she shook it out. Jack was a nuisance in her life—that’s what he was—and she would brush him away, like soot.
Yes, Lola thought, and her body felt suddenly light, buoyant in the river. She was done with him, and everything would be just fine. She was sure of it. Jack Wright—he was nothing but history.
Relief
In July the lawyer phoned to say the charges had been dropped. The girl hadn’t changed her story, he said, but had decided she wanted to put it all behind her, get on with her life.
Judy took the call. After she had hung up she sat down heavily on the settee and cried a little, though in a gulping self-conscious way, as if the relief was something she had to paste over herself, like a glaze. She tried Don’s phone—as the lawyer had said he had done—but it was indeed out of range, and so she left a message asking him to call.
Later, when she talked about that moment, she described herself falling back onto the sofa as if hit by an invisible force. It was the relief that did it, she said. It had knocked her off her feet. A palpable presence in the room.
Don worked in accountancy, though he hadn’t always done so. For years he’d taught maths at the local high school, but everyone felt it was best if he gave up his position, given the circumstances. No one wanted to kick a man when he was down, Don’s boss had said, so a friend of a friend had arranged for an interview at a small accountancy firm in the suburbs. There were only six other employees, and they were all men. Males would be more sympathetic about such things, the principal had said—including himself in the generalisation—but they really couldn’t keep him on there, especially with the risk of it getting out amongst the students.
Don had gone willingly, afraid of that himself. He had already felt that young women were looking at him differently. Or was it just his imagination. Surely they couldn’t have heard the rumours at that point.
Somehow Don had always known inside himself that it would never go to court. He’d willed that; wouldn’t allow himself to imagine anything else. That’s why he felt nothing much when Judy called, and then called again, and then finally got a hold of him once he was back at the office. He looked up from his desk as she spoke, his eyes searching outside the window.
Nothing unusual was happening out there.
*
On Sundays Don sometimes went to church with Judy and her husband Clive, even though he—Don—wasn’t a believer. Judy and Clive had been his everything since the accusations, and he almost felt that he was doing his penance, accompanying them as he did. They were liberal Presbyterians—that’s how they described themselves—but Don found the atmosphere of the church oppressive. Liberal Presbyterian seemed a contradiction in terms to him.
It was odd how a person could b
ecome something they never would have wanted to be. Judy had been wild during their childhood and adolescence, sometimes vaguely frightening. That’s what came from being the only girl of three boys, he thought. She’d been gay for a while, in her late teens; and had then grown her hair so long she could sit on it, had dressed in faded kaftans. She had settled into middle age now, though—her hair in a blonde tidy bob, a collection of Venetian glass in a cabinet in the lounge. She was reliable-seeming. And she had been more than reliable for Don. She had taken on his battle as if it were her own. A war between darkness and light—those were the words she used to describe it. She used language like that when she was fueled up on red wine.
It was Judy and Clive who got the lawyer involved early on. Judy and Clive who helped cover the costs. It was important to try to keep it all quiet. Don knew that as well as they did. Once something like that got around, you’d spend the rest of your life trying to get the stain out.
*
Judy talked to her sister-in-law, Cherie, regularly on the phone. Judy worked four days a week, Monday to Thursday, in the archives section of the National Library. Friday was the day she set aside for herself, for catching up on things. Cherie and Michael had a large block of land—nobody could say they didn’t work hard—but in the middle of the day Cherie normally took some time out. She had been married to Michael for twenty-two years—she really was just part of the family. If the truth be told, Judy needed her support. She often found herself feeling bewildered and anxious—standing in the queue at the train station, searching for something in the supermarket, finding herself in a room she’d gone into for something and not knowing what that something was. The stress, everybody agreed, had been unbearable. That girl would be responsible for putting them all in early graves, Cherie said. What a thing to have on your conscience! She had laughed when she said it, but any humour they tried to bring to the situation always felt forced and hollow. Unsurprising, of course—with all things considered.