In the Company of Strangers

by Liz Byrski

  ‘I see,’ she says eventually. ‘And is that it? Do you want to tell me more? You don’t have to, it’s entirely up to you.’

  Alice is confused. Where is the shock, the dismay, the disapproval, the anger? ‘Well first I should apologise,’ she says cautiously. ‘You’re my employer, or half of my employer. I should have told you sooner. I could have told you any time since you got here but I didn’t, despite your kindness to me, despite your trust and the fact that you have treated me more like a friend than an employee.’

  ‘I’m sure you talked this through with Declan before I arrived,’ Ruby says, ‘so if I had a problem about it, it would be with him, as my business partner. But it’s not a problem. I’m going on what I see, and what I see is an intelligent, responsible woman who’s working hard to get her life together.’

  Alice hesitates. What is supposed to happen now? she wonders. What will change? Will this always stand between them to her disadvantage? ‘It’s hard to believe we’re having this conversation,’ she says eventually.

  Ruby picks up the teapot and pours them both some tea. ‘Here,’ she says, pushing a cup towards Alice. ‘Drink some.’

  Alice picks up the cup and inhales the sweet jasmine tones of the tea but doesn’t drink, just puts it down on the table so sharply that it spills onto the newspaper and soaks through to the writing pad beneath it. She both wants and doesn’t want to tell Ruby what happened. It would be the first time she’s told anyone outside the prison.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ Ruby says again, sipping her own tea. ‘But you might find it helps.’

  Alice nods. ‘I think so too,’ she says. She turns the teacup around in her hand, staring down into the green gold tea. ‘I’m an alcoholic,’ she says, ‘just like my father. He was a beautiful man when he was sober and a monster drunk. It was like living with two different people. He died of liver cancer when I was thirteen. My mother was a shy, quiet woman, always worried about what the neighbours might think. Her life was a battle for safety and respectability, and the need to protect both of us from the effects of his drinking.’ She pauses. ‘This is a very long, confused and self-indulgent story when I tell it to myself. I’ll try to keep it free of excuses and justifications, but I think that to understand it you do need a bit of background.’

  ‘Of course,’ Ruby says. ‘Take your time.’

  ‘You’ll have heard stories like this a million times in the years you’ve been working with women. I don’t suppose mine is so different. I got pregnant when I was seventeen. My mother was devastated. She thought it was her fault for not bringing me up properly. Anyway, I wanted to keep the baby and I moved in with Mike, the baby’s father. He was nearly ten years older than me and he’d been working in the north west – Wittenoom – but the mine had closed in ’66, the previous year, because the workers were found to be inhaling dangerous levels of asbestos fibres. It was a big issue here …’

  ‘I remember it,’ Ruby says. ‘I was still here in those days.’

  Alice nods. ‘Okay.’ She takes a first sip of tea and then gulps it. ‘Mike had moved back to Perth to look for work. His father was an alcoholic too. I suppose we thought we could look after each other and for a while we did. He was a very sweet natured man. Our son, Gary, was born early the next year, and we had a daughter, Jacinta. Several years later it slowly became clear that Mike was sick. He couldn’t work, he had no energy, there were problems with his lungs, and he was diagnosed with mesothelioma. I was working full time, to keep us all, and he started drinking, and I began drinking with him. I suppose we’d both thought that because of our backgrounds we could drink quite a bit but we would know when to stop. Only of course we didn’t.

  ‘Mike went down that track faster than I did. The prescription drugs he was on made it worse. He became very moody and was always angry. It was a big change from how he’d been when we first got together. He was angry with the company, with the government and he couldn’t seem to see or hear anything else. I was scared for him, but particularly for the kids, and it was that which drove me to AA. I had to stop drinking and I hoped that Mike would eventually come along. He was drinking every day. He wasn’t well but he would wear himself out going on protests, and meeting with other former asbestos workers and come home incandescent with rage and incapable of doing anything.

  ‘In the end I couldn’t bear it any longer. I told him he must either go to AA or get out. He chose to get out. He was still around, he saw the kids from time to time, and that was usually okay. In the mid-eighties we got a divorce. He’d met a woman and they wanted to get married and move to Queensland. The kids had a few holidays up there with them. He’d cut back the drinking, and we were in touch from time to time when it was necessary.

  ‘Well, to cut a long story short, Gary took off for a job in New Zealand when he was twenty-five, and Jacinta married Alan, and then she got pregnant. They had a girl, Jodie, and then, a couple of years later, they had Ella. I was so thrilled – two beautiful granddaughters. I had a decent job managing a bookshop and was just about keeping my head above water financially, and then one day, right out of the blue, Mike turned up. His wife had left him some months earlier. I hadn’t seen him for years and I couldn’t believe the change in him. He was very sick – in fact he was dying and that’s why his wife had left. She was much younger than him and she just couldn’t cope.’

  Alice stops and finishes her tea. ‘You see I am making it very long after all,’ she says, looking at Ruby. ‘Sorry, but it all seems so important. It matters to me that you understand how it all happened. Of course this is just my version. I’m sure others would tell it differently …’

  ‘I’m sure I’d be doing the same thing,’ Ruby says.

  ‘I haven’t told it before, not like this. Just dribs and drabs to people when I was in prison. But it’s always in my head, of course, always back and forth, trying to explain it to myself, trying to reduce my own guilt, trying to make it different, but of course none of that works. In the end I always come back to what I did. Nothing changes that.’ She’s silent for a while.

  Ruby gets to her feet. ‘I’m going to get more water for the tea,’ she says.

  Alice nods. She sits alone on the balcony, listening to the strangely comforting sounds of Ruby in the kitchen.

  ‘I was thinking,’ she says, when Ruby comes back, ‘that all the time I was in prison, all the time I was telling this story to myself over and over again, I never imagined that when I eventually told the whole thing to someone else it would be in a place like this, that I would actually feel safe to tell it.’

  Ruby puts the teapot back on the table and sits down. ‘Well that’s good, isn’t it? Perhaps this place has something to do with it. I didn’t want to come here, Alice, for all sorts of reasons that I’ll explain to you some other time, but now I’m here I know it was the right thing to do. There’s something so peaceful and nurturing about the landscape, I’d forgotten that. I only remembered how much everything hurt. Once I got here I felt it again. Old man Benson knew what he was doing when he put his stake in this stretch of land. You know, people told him he was overreaching himself at the time. That’s how the place got its name, Benson’s Reach.’

  They sit in silence for a moment and there is a sudden change in the light as the door of cottage six opens and Lesley Craddock walks out onto her balcony. She leans on the rail, apparently straining to see down to the stretch of ground where Declan usually parks his car. Then she turns and goes back inside and closes the door. The two women look at each other and smile.

  ‘She’s out of luck again,’ Ruby says. ‘I fear he won’t be back before she has to leave. Did you tell him she wanted to speak to him?’

  ‘I did,’ Alice nods. ‘He didn’t seem too keen on the idea.’

  ‘Poor Lesley, but I think she’s probably her own worst enemy. Anyway, are you going to tell me the rest of your story or have you had enough for one night?’

  ‘No, no, I need to tell you now,’ Alice
says. ‘I need to get through to the end.’ She takes a deep breath and begins again. ‘Well, to cut it as short as I can, Mike moved in with me. He wasn’t drinking, he was too sick for that, and he was more like the man I’d married. I’d never wanted him back but once he was there I was glad of it. I nursed him for more than three years. He was very weak, and towards the end he was on oxygen most of the time, fading day by day. Jacinta and Alan helped when they could and the girls were beautiful with him. But eventually he died, at home, which was what we’d all wanted, especially him.

  ‘At first I just had a sense of relief that the awfulness of watching him die was over and, frankly, that I was free from the burden of caring for him. I’d had to keep working part time as well and I was worn out. Anyway, after the funeral everyone came back to the house – you know, food, wine, reminiscences, tears, laughter, and then suddenly everyone had gone and I was alone with the mess of the wake, and still with the mess of his dying: the hospital bed, the oxygen cylinders, all that stuff. That night I walked around the house and all I could feel was despair. I was totally exhausted, as though everything had been sucked out of me. I felt incapable of getting out from under all the mess – not just the physical mess around me and the work of winding up his affairs, but the emotional mess inside. And all I could smell was the wine. I started to clear up the glasses, carry them out to the kitchen, pour away the dregs, load the dishwasher. But the smell was driving me insane. It was like a live presence demanding that I pay attention to it and eventually I did. I picked up a glass with a little wine left in it and sipped it. It was my first taste of alcohol in more than twenty years and it made me heave, but then I tried a bit more, and then a whole glass. I felt really nauseous and giddy, but that soon faded and I worked my way through the leftovers. The next morning I went to the bottle shop and bought more wine.

  ‘I was drinking again. I wasn’t thinking about it: no regrets, no self-flagellation and no worries about what it meant. No thought of going to AA, where I had been going once a month for years. I was anaesthetising myself, keeping my feelings at bay. I kept going to work and no one seemed to notice, or if they did they didn’t say so. I kept it up for four weeks and then Jacinta and Alan wanted to go away for a weekend. Jodie was going to stay with a school friend, and they asked me if I would have Ella, who was six by then. I thought Ella was just what I needed. And I do remember thinking, “I mustn’t drink this weekend because I’m responsible for a child.” But of course I did.

  ‘It was a terrible weekend, wet and windy, lashing storms. Ella was a bit snuffly when Jacinta dropped her off on Friday, and by late on Saturday she’d got a temperature and I had nothing to give her. So I wrapped her up well and put her in the car. I thought I would go to the pharmacy and come back via the drive-through bottle shop. I’d been drinking slowly all day and I was sure I was fine, but of course I wasn’t. We never made it to the bottle shop. I overshot an intersection on a red light and a car coming from my left hit the tail of my car and I swung and skidded across the intersection and rolled the car on the opposite island.’

  Ruby smothers a gasp.

  Alice looks down at the table, at the wet patch on the newspaper and writing pad, and the letter that will never be written.

  ‘And the other driver … ?’

  ‘A young man,’ Alice says, ‘in his thirties.’

  ‘I can’t begin to imagine how you must have felt, how you still feel …’

  ‘Ruby,’ Alice says, lifting her eyes to face her now. ‘Ruby, the man, he survived. A cut on his head, severe bruising and some damage to his shoulder that had to be rebuilt …’

  ‘Then who …’ Ruby begins, before realisation crosses her face. ‘Oh my God … no, surely not, not … ?’

  Alice nods. ‘Yes, it was Ella. I killed her, Ruby. I killed my granddaughter that night. It would have been terrible enough if it had been that young man and it so easily could have been. How crazy was I? How arrogant! But it wasn’t him, it was Ella, six years old, wearing red woollen tights and a check dress that I’d bought for her in Target and wrapped up in a blanket with a little red beanie pulled down over her ears. Is it any wonder that I was twice refused parole? Is it any wonder that no one in my family wants anything to do with me? I killed a child, Ruby, an innocent little girl with her whole life in front of her. And I killed a part of my daughter, my other granddaughter and my son-in-law at the same time. There is no forgiveness for this, not from anyone, most of all not from myself. In AA we say ‘one day at a time’, just get through one day at a time, and it works. To look further ahead is too hard; the future is too huge, too scary.’

  She stops suddenly, relieved that she has told it at last, but exhausted by the emotion of reliving it all. ‘And so that’s what I’ve been doing for the past five … nearly six years. Getting through one day at a time. But then I came here and I began to glimpse bits of the future: a home, a job, what it’s like to have friends, to be trusted again. And then I close my eyes and that vision disappears because I can really only have one day at a time and even that is more than I deserve.’

  esley, driving home on Sunday, has trouble keeping her eyes open. She’s been up since dawn, outside on the balcony searching for a sign that Declan might have returned during the night, but there was none, and she knew she had to leave this morning. For one thing there was a long-standing booking for her cottage as from today, but more importantly she had said she’d be at Simon and Lucy’s for lunch with the family and she could tell they were all getting edgy with her. She’d intended to go home on Friday but had waited as long as she could in the hope of seeing Declan.

  ‘Can’t you give me his mobile number?’ she’d asked Paula on Friday. ‘You must know it.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Paula had said. ‘I told him when he first came I’d need to have it for emergencies, and he simply said, “What sort of emergencies do you have in mind?” and I couldn’t think of anything so that was that.’

  ‘Well you must be able to get it, find it in the office or something?’

  Paula had shaken her head. ‘No way, not with that nosy Alice hanging around all the time and Madam Ruby, the Grand Inquisitor, asking questions about what I’m doing. The other day I’d just slipped round the back for a cigarette and suddenly she’s there, right in my face. “Benson’s Reach is smoke free, Paula,” she says. “That applies to the staff as well as the guests.”’

  Lesley had hesitated. She had already noticed Paula’s furtive lighting up when she thought no one was looking. But now, more than ever, she needs an ally here. ‘So did you smoke when Mrs Benson was here?’ she’d asked.

  ‘’Course not,’ Paula had said, ‘but the Grand Inquisitor isn’t Catherine, is she? And it’s not really her place – she’ll be gone soon. Strutting about as though she owns it – who does she think she is?’

  ‘Well she does own it, or most of it, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Not for long. She’ll be out of here with the money as soon as she can and back to London. She’s that type, you can tell.’

  Clearly the chances of getting the number were nil and all that Lesley could do was wait. And wait she did, to no avail. But Declan will certainly be back there next week – before they open the café. She’ll call the main number, many times if she has to, until she gets to speak to him. Now she just has to get home and face the first dreaded conversation with Gordon. Maybe she’ll go straight to Simon and Lucy’s place. It’ll be easier to see him the first time with the rest of the family around. She has to try to keep it in her head that although she’s done something very wrong Gordon doesn’t know that, and what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him. The main thing is to behave exactly as normal. And, she reminds herself, it’s partly his fault anyway – after all, if he hadn’t tried to take over her life she’d never have gone away.

  The road is wide and straight, lined on either side with dense bush, and there is not much traffic about. Lesley yawns and rubs her eyes. She’s been going for an hour and a half, ju
st under halfway there, and ahead a sign points to petrol and a café in 500 metres. Coffee is just what she needs and she slows down and pulls off the road into the car park. The café is decidedly seedy and smells of meat pies and sweat. Lesley buys a coffee and a rather sad looking chocolate muffin, takes them outside and heads towards a seat in the sun. The muffin is considerably better than the coffee but as she eats it she realises that the horrible emptiness in her gut has nothing to do with food or the lack of it; it’s a deeper sense of emptiness about herself and the fact that these weeks away from home haven’t provided any answers, just simply added to her confusion. There were moments at Benson’s Reach when she’d tried to concentrate on how Gordon could organise his life so that he didn’t intrude on hers, or on what she really wanted as a plan for the future. But the future now, she believes, includes Declan and that thought occupies her mind most of the time. Fleetingly it occurs to her that some people might think her recent behaviour obsessive. Maybe she should have talked to someone, a therapist, perhaps, but it’s too late for that, all she can do is get through today, and tomorrow she’ll call Declan, get things sorted out with him. After that who knows? Just try to concentrate on today, she tells herself. Best to get back on the road as soon as possible.

  The coffee is hot but lacking in everything except bitterness and she gets up to walk to the car thinking she’ll finish it as she drives. The bleak open space of the car park is drenched with blinding morning sunlight and she blinks against it. She is fumbling in her pocket for the car keys when she stumbles and suddenly the ground rears up and hits her in the face, and she is flat on the tarmac, splattered with scalding coffee and with the distinct feeling that her face has been smashed to pieces.