by Anna Taylor
On the Friday following the call from the lawyer, Judy called Cherie earlier than usual. It wasn’t even close to lunchtime, and she expected Cherie not to answer, being out and about, most probably tending the land—but she felt a certain agitation, and Clive, whom she’d already tried, was in a meeting. It was adrenalin, or something. She couldn’t settle herself down.
Cherie did answer. She sounded breathless, having hurried inside to get out of the rain. She told some long anecdote about one of the cows. Judy didn’t have the energy for it.
‘And how’s everything there?’ Cherie said. ‘How’s Don?’
Judy walked to the window, leaned against it, rubbed at a little streak with the edge of her shirt. ‘You know what he’s like,’ she said. ‘Hard to read.’
‘It probably hasn’t even sunk in yet. I can hardly believe it’s over myself.’ Cherie was doing something—busy—her voice coming down the phone in jagged little puffs.
Even though Cherie and Michael lived four hours away, the rain was travelling. Insubstantial drops spattered the courtyard. Judy noticed that one of the fabric deckchairs wasn’t on a tilt. A pool would form on its seat.
‘I’ll write Paula another letter,’ Judy said. ‘I’ve already decided. She has to be told. The impact this has had on all of us. It’s god damn near ruined our lives.’ She felt her energy lift then, a soaring feeling, like she could take off.
And then the conversation dropped—or lifted—into its familiar territory. The details had an electric charge—of course they did—a charge that made Judy feel sluggish unless she was able to let it all out. These conversations with Cherie always left her feeling exhausted, but it was a peculiar kind of exhaustion, tinged with a faint euphoria.
‘I mean, she always had it in for him. Don’t you think? Even in the early days, when I look back now, she wanted to bring him down. She’s a genius of disguise, Paula. She had us all fooled.’
‘For years,’ Cherie said. ‘We were fooled by her for years.’
‘And to use her daughter like that. A pawn in her game. Don took her on as if she were his own—and that’s not easy with adolescents. And, now, for her to say that he did that to her—’ Judy exhaled audibly, started tidying piles of things on the table— ‘even if it supposedly happened when everything was falling apart. Don! Doing something like that to a girl. It’s laughable.’
The rain got heavier—a sudden downpour, little bits of hail in it bouncing around the courtyard. The cloud had enveloped everything.
‘What I don’t get,’ Cherie said. ‘Let’s say it was true—why she would have waited eight bloody years to say anything about it? Eight years. With a secret like that!’
‘It’s not true,’ said Judy. ‘That’s why it took so long. There was no secret. Only fabrication.’ She felt all filled up with the relief of it, this conversation.
Here is sanity, she thought to herself. This is what is sane.
*
The rain started falling and didn’t stop for weeks. It felt as if the heavens had opened and then forgotten how to close again. Doors and windows became swollen in their frames, wouldn’t open properly. The gutters by the road roared like little rivers.
Don started walking everywhere in the rain, even though his shoes filled up with it and squelched. He felt easier, out there in the rain. He was fifty-four years old, living in a house too big for just one person, now mortgaged to the hilt. Spending whole weekends with his sister and her husband as if they were his only friends. He told himself that it was because they lived just around the corner in their recently acquired house; that it was more to do with a sort of practicality than anything else. Maybe that was true.
Sometimes he thought he saw the girl, going by on the bus, an indistinct figure through the window. It had been ten years since Paula had left him, taking her too. She was in her early twenties now—he knew that exactly, from seeing the statements his lawyer had given him to read. Twenty-four.
He would think it was her, but it never was—only a flash of something—and his eyes scanned rooms, supermarket aisles, streets, in a sort of resigned panic, an alertness, really, that she might turn a corner and suddenly be right there in front of him. When he’d first got wind of the allegations, he’d searched cars, standing at the pedestrian crossing, watching out for the two of them—Paula and her. He imagined at the time that he might go right up to the passenger window, catch her eyes, shake his head, perhaps mouth No at her. No.
He had heard she had a nervous breakdown a couple of years before the allegations all came out. He had suffered—he realised now—something like that in the time Paula was leaving him. He knew what it was like when the world folded in on itself in that way. An oiliness—an oil slick—covering everything.
*
Judy wished she had never read the statements—what Don had supposedly done. The details had gone into her subconscious—with details as bad as that, how could they go anywhere else?—and she dreamt about things she had never dreamt about before. There were small blades that cut at skin that lay like a carpet all over the floor. Or Don running away from her down the street, carrying an enormous bag that she saw, when she got closer, had wisps of long dark hair flying out through a tiny hole, strands of it caught in the zip. Or visiting Don at night, and the rooms of his house all changed around, every closed door leading to a bathroom, and Don’s voice suddenly behind her, saying, Don’t go in there; her turning and seeing him looking back at her, so tired-seeming—the tiredness the most frightening thing of all.
Don’t go in there.
Or a scratching at the back door, the sound like something a possum might make. Irregular, but insistent. Opening it, and Don lying there, or sometimes the girl—looking young, and bony kneed, the age she would have been—always in a mess, always whispering something that sounded like he. Lifting her head towards Judy. A hole in her neck where the throat should be.
She mentioned them to the minister but no one else. It was natural, he said, in times of great stress to have dreams that inhabited the realm of darkness. He seemed unconcerned by them, almost not to hear her. They were only dreams. That girl, and her lies, had got inside Judy’s head, that’s all. They tainted the day only slightly. Just a little smudge in its corner.
Early on—when it had all first come out—Judy had gone to visit Paula, knocked on the door, tried to talk some sense into her. Paula had stayed calm. Judy hadn’t. It was this calm assuredness that Paula used to get people onside, to confuse them. She blamed herself, she said to Judy. Things had been bad between her and Don. He knew she was trying to leave. He was unwell. Very unwell. But she had had to keep travelling with her job. What else could she do? She had left her daughter behind with him a few nights every fortnight. That’s when it had happened. It never occurred to her that he would do that. Not for an instant.
The signs had been there all along, she had said—that something was terribly wrong—but it had taken her years to piece things together. Her daughter had been on sedatives for years to help her sleep. Was unable to go anywhere by herself at night. Fainted, once, in a room full of people when someone mentioned Don’s name.
Judy had felt her breathing get tight, high in her chest, a feeling she imagined asthma to be like. She had raised her voice—the wrong thing to do. It hadn’t made their cause look any better. But Don was her brother. She loved him. There had been too much loss. Too much loss in his life already.
*
A year or so after Paula left him, a woman Don was seeing had taken him to a bar in a new city—a city he’d never been to before. The bar was underground, below the level of the street, and the heat in there was alarming. The music was too loud. There were too many people. Low-hanging lights were knocked at by heads and erratically waving arms. It was like coming upon an ancient war ritual—all those violently throbbing bodies, leaping up and down, doing something that was presumably supposed to resemble dancing.
‘I feel like I’ve been here before,’ Don had said�
��or rather yelled—to his date.
‘What?’
‘I feel like I’ve been here before.’
She looked at him and shook her head, seemingly unsure if he was joking or not, perhaps unable to decipher his words. The city was totally new to him. He had told her that over and over again. She was introducing him to it, his tour guide. He could tell from her weary expression that often he didn’t make sense to her.
Don had watched Suzie, or whatever her name was, become absorbed into the mass, sucked under like someone being dragged underwater. A few minutes later she returned—for him. He stumbled into the crowd behind her.
The dancing bodies had thrashed all around him. Animals: a man beside him twisting violently, like a snake. Don’s head was making a sound like a jet, the screech of its wheels braking against tarmac. Could anybody else hear it? Was the sound coming out of his mouth? He fought his way out of there. Up the stairs. Outside.
That was the first time he had experienced it outside of the house. It had been happening, occasionally, for months before that, but only when he got up at night. There was something about the darkness of the hallway, the sound of his footsteps shuffling down it, the dull light from the streetlamp outside the toilet window that made his skin look grey. The closed door, when all the lights were out, and then the sound of it, the shushing sound, opening across the carpet.
Two years ago he had been the first person to arrive at the scene of a car crash. A girl had gone through the windscreen, her hands up to her face. The bones of her knuckles were showing through like a set of large rounded teeth emerging out of wound-red gums. Her face was not too bad, but her internal injuries were critical—though Don didn’t know that at the time. When he arrived she had managed to get herself up off the road, and was moving in circles—a sort of a half run, almost a skip—that looked appallingly helpless, inappropriately comic. He managed to get her to lie back down on his coat on the road, tore his shirt up to try to bandage her hands. She was young, perhaps in her late teens, and once she was down she became subdued, distant. She didn’t respond to his questions, but made a sound in the base of her throat, not really a crying sound, but something worse than a whimper. Her fingers were still able to move, and she tapped them against her chest, repetitively, a heartbeat on the wrong side. Was she trying to remind it—her heart—what it needed to do? She seemed to be desperately trying to calm herself. He talked to her about his day, where he’d been, what he’d done, trying to remain calm too. Bangles, greased with blood, jangled on her arm.
Later, after the ambulance had arrived—after they had lost her—Don drove home without his coat and shirt, and even then still speckled with her blood. That echo had sounded as he was stepping into the shower. The smell of her, when he had got up close—not the smell of blood, but something else, every time she moved. It was sweat, but more than that. A smell like one of those bugs—was it called a stink beetle?—radiating panic. It was unmistakable. The recognition entered his body, sharp that time, then lurched away.
*
Judy and Clive organised a dinner to celebrate Don’s freedom. Cherie and Michael drove down from up north, and the five of them drank wine and ate homemade pizzas. Judy made one of her specialty cheesecakes, adorned with chocolate truffles from the deli down the road. Don made jokes about not wanting to be the centre of attention, and he seemed weary to her, somehow distant. He was like that—hard to read, hard to understand. He’d always been complicated.
‘To innocence!’ Clive said, raising his glass to him.
‘To innocence!’ he responded, his voice in a chorus with the rest of the room.
He had walked over in the rain, and his woollen jersey and worn leather shoes were giving off an odour like wet dog. When Judy sat down next to him it was almost overpowering. When had he last washed properly? His taupe-coloured pants were fringed with grey around the edges of the pockets, and the bottoms were soggy, quite black with dirt. His teeth, she noticed, seemed more stained than usual, the colour of old people’s toenails when they grew too long. They’d been yellow for years, his teeth, but they were definitely getting worse.
‘The truth will always out!’ said Michael, red-faced and growing drunker by the minute, raising his glass again.
‘To the truth,’ they all said, smiling at each other. It was time for more cheesecake, and possibly a little more whipped cream. Everything was turning out all right. The trauma of it all would leave them soon.
Judy had first heard about the allegations from Paula, who called her one day, steady-voiced but a little breathy, her voice growing low at times, quite deep. Someone in the family needed to be told, she had said, and Judy was the obvious choice, living close by, and being closer to Don than anyone. Her daughter had decided to lay a formal complaint with the police. Don would certainly need some support.
Don, whom she’d gone to see afterwards, seemed resigned, his movements unusually measured. He laughed every now and then, and shook his head, like a man who had misplaced something and was bewildered and slightly ashamed at having done so. She, on the other hand, felt enraged, a terrible tension vibrating in her knees. Don was a good man—she told him—a fine schoolteacher; a fair person; kind. He was a good person. Good and kind. An innocent man. He looked mostly at his hands as she spoke, but she knew he was listening.
It was only at the end of their conversation that she questioned him. She did ask him if he had ever done anything wrong. She gave him the opportunity to say it was true, even though she believed completely that it wasn’t.
‘I never laid a finger on her,’ he said, and it was only then that his movements seemed to become agitated, his fingers rolling a piece of tissue into a little ball, then moving it from palm to palm as if it was hot. A little bubble of spit had gathered in the corner of his mouth as he’d said it. It had grown bigger, moved across his lip as he spoke, dribbled a little down his chin. Had she been too hard on him? She felt sick about it to her stomach. Of course he hadn’t done it. Of course not. When she got home she called him to apologise.
The first of her bad dreams came not long after that. Judy and Don were sitting in a bedroom, sitting beside a bed that had a girl in it, although Judy couldn’t see her face. The two of them were talking about ordinary things—their parents and siblings, Judy’s job, the books they’d recently read. The girl was not alive, and they both knew that. It didn’t seem strange, at the time, that her body was moving a little under the covers. Her dark hair was slicked back, gluey-looking and wet. Don seemed so undisturbed by her presence—quite happy—that Judy felt calm, undisturbed also. She looked at her watch, and realised she was late. I have to go! she said. He got up to let her out. As he was closing the front door, she caught his smile, wide mouthed, and gummy. It was like a baby’s, his mouth, though the gums were dark, not fresh and pink like a baby’s would be. And no teeth in it. No teeth at all.
*
It had rained almost solidly for over a month. Don didn’t mind it like everyone else seemed to. He liked the way it soaked through his coat, jersey, shirt, right to the skin; the little squelch that it formed between the insoles of his shoes and feet. It found its way into everything.
Sometimes, when he was walking home, he felt an urge to turn off two blocks earlier, to turn into Judy’s street, walk through the gate and up the path and in through the front door without knocking. The impulse would start at his feet and ripple up through his body, like applause. The rain seemed to make the desire stronger, but it had actually started long before the downpours. It would come upon him, but if he ignored it and kept walking it would fade away soon enough.
When he was a boy he had taken his mother’s engagement ring from the box on her dresser, and had gone down to Pryor’s field to show it to a girl who was pretty but had a lisp when she spoke. He put it in his pocket, and hopped some of the way, and when he arrived there, at their meeting place, it was gone. He searched, quite desperately, while the lispy-lipped girl watched, her arms folded acr
oss her flat chest. It wasn’t anywhere. And the grasses were so tall and dry, scratchy like tussock. He returned home, defeated in every way, a faint high-pitched note sounding in his ears.
There had been a burglary, his mother said. A crime. He heard her, that evening, talking on the phone to the police. For weeks he still searched for it, every afternoon after school—down on his hands and knees, trying to propel his way through the grass smoothly, as if it were water. And every afternoon he would return empty handed, unable to avoid her presence—brusquely folding washing at the kitchen table, preparing dinner, the radio crackling in the background. Once he moved towards her—the possibility of saying those words pulsing in his throat—but when she turned towards him her expression seemed to prevent him from saying them. It was me. Who took it. Me, who lost it. Her face was so vacant, and that vacancy—that lack of suspicion—exonerated him. The relief was weighty, like a pendulum swinging inside him. If she didn’t suspect him, somehow it seemed that it wasn’t even true.
Don never turned down Judy’s street on the days when he hadn’t been invited. He kept walking, the rain staining his coat a darker blue, forming patches that eventually joined up, swamping him. Sometimes he rescued worms from the gutters down his street. He watched out for them, hooked them out of the water, laid them on the grass, crouched down to watch the way they jerked and flailed about: rescued but exposed. It was me, who took it. The relief of saying those words to her would have consumed him, he was sure of that. He would have been absorbed into the afternoon light, eaten up by it. His body, in the sunshine, dissipating like a cloud of dust.