In the Company of Strangers

by Liz Byrski

  Ruby thinks she has never seen anyone so obviously fishing around in desperation for something to say. She clears her throat. ‘Actually, Paula,’ she says, ‘we’re rethinking the management of the gift shop and the production of the lavender products right now and we haven’t come to a decision yet. But it’s good that you’ve told us you’re interested. Just leave it with us and we’ll come back to you when we’ve decided what we want to do.’

  Paula looks affronted. ‘No one told me you were going to change things,’ she says.

  ‘No one else knows yet,’ Ruby says. ‘And until we decide how we want to run things it’s not appropriate to discuss it, but we need to work out a plan for the gift shop and with Fleur moving on, it’s a good time to rethink things.’

  ‘Well I’d’ve thought I’d been here long enough to be told about things that are likely to happen,’ Paula says. ‘Catherine used to tell me everything.’

  ‘Did she really?’ Ruby says, holding Paula’s eyes in a fierce, unblinking gaze.

  Paula looks away and fidgets in her chair. ‘I did a lot of confidential work for her,’ she says.

  Ruby does not relax. ‘What did that involve exactly?’ she asks.

  Paula hesitates, flushing, not making eye contact with either of them now. ‘It’s difficult,’ she says, eventually. ‘Some of it was, well … personal.’

  ‘And you can’t give us an example?’

  ‘It was between Catherine and me,’ she says, clearly aware that she’s trapped herself. ‘I don’t like to talk about it.’

  ‘Well if it was personal that’s not really our business,’ Ruby says. ‘But as far as operations at Benson’s Reach are concerned, we have been looking at everyone’s pay and conditions. We plan to make some adjustments, draw up proper job descriptions and provide you all with new contracts before too long. I’m sure you’ll be glad to see some improvements there.’

  Paula is apparently unsure what to make of this, which was of course Ruby’s intention; it will, she hopes, deliver a warning shot.

  Paula shrugs. ‘I suppose so, but I’ve been here a long time and I think I have certain rights because of that.’

  Declan opens his mouth and shuts it again on a signal from Ruby. Any sort of response to Paula’s last remark could take them into choppy waters. They sit in silence until Paula, with a huge artificial sigh, picks up her coffee and doughnut and stands up.

  ‘Well, I’d better be getting on, I suppose,’ she says, and she is about to walk away when she stops and turns back. ‘By the way, Declan, Mrs Craddock rang earlier when I was doing the office floor. She wanted to speak to you. She said it was important so I looked up your mobile number in Catherine’s old teledex and gave it to her. She was chasing you all last week.’ And she gives them both a disapproving nod and weaves her way between the tables and out of the café.

  Declan sinks his head into his hands and Ruby lets out a hiss of irritation. ‘Since when has Paula been answering the office phone?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I don’t think she’s done it before, but recently she seems to think her duties extend beyond the cleaning, the laundry and provisioning the cottages.’

  ‘Well we’ll have to stop her doing it in future. I’ll talk to her about it, if you like, but you need to speak to her about giving out your number. She really is a pain in the bum.’

  ‘And Fleur’s job?’

  Ruby pulls a face. ‘There’s no way we could give Paula that job. I’m sure she could manage the production but there’s all the rest of it, the bookkeeping, the ordering – I’m not sure about that, but I do know she couldn’t do all the PR and the demonstrations that Fleur does with the visitors. Perhaps we can find a way to reshape her job so it makes her feel a bit more important, and I’m working on the contracts so that all the staff will get the full award rate. Hopefully that will satisfy her.’

  ‘Staff,’ Declan says, ‘I hate this part of it. It would be so easy if we didn’t have staff.’

  ‘And easier still if we didn’t have guests or customers,’ Ruby says with a grin. ‘Let’s drown our troubles in another cup of coffee. I’ll go and order.’ And she gets up and heads for the counter just as Declan’s mobile phone begins to ring.

  On nights like this it’s the stillness that Gordon loves. You can be with other people but still feel completely and blissfully alone. Lying flat on his back gazing up at the vast inky blackness of the sky scattered with more stars than you can ever see in town, he tries to remember when he last did this – twenty years ago, at least. When he was younger it had been part of the job – checking out various sites, with a surveyor, sometimes a couple of others. He remembers one time – he’d have been in his thirties – the company had taken on a new surveyor, a woman, a really attractive woman in her mid-forties. There had been plenty of blokey joshing and jockeying about her before the first field trip but when it came to it he and the other three men had just felt awkward and stupid. In the truck on the first day they’d been unable to think of anything else except that she was a woman, and to manage their own awkwardness they’d focused the entire conversation on her – how weird it must be for her out there in the bush with three randy blokes. How did she cope with sleeping in the open? Was she okay with snakes and spiders? – on and on and on until she … Vivienne, her name was … Vivienne finally called their bluff.

  ‘Look, guys,’ she’d said in a tone that combined total self-confidence with mild boredom, ‘I think we should get one thing clear. This isn’t awkward for me. I’ve done trips like this dozens of times with blokes who make you guys look like school kids. But it’s obviously awkward for you, so why don’t you just pull over, hop out into the trees and have a nice little jerkoff about it together, and then we can get back on the road and behave like adults.’

  There’d been a long painful silence after that until one of the others had mumbled something under his breath.

  ‘What?’ Vivienne had barked, ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Sorry, I said sorry,’ the guy said, clearly this time. ‘Sorry, I … we behaved like dickheads. Sorry.’

  Gordon and the others had mumbled their apologies, and the tension had subsided. An hour or so later they were talking about the place they were heading for, laughing and later even singing.

  Now as he lies here – his bedroll outside his tent so he can feel the night air on his face, hear the sounds of the bush – Gordon remembers the third night of that trip, in a place not unlike this one. They had cooked sausages over the fire, heated up baked beans and sat around with beers and as the evening wore on the conversation slowed and they drifted off to their tents. It was a still, cold night and he had slipped into his sleeping bag and lay there wide awake, wondering about Vivienne, wondering whether he had misread the looks she’d given him in the light of the fading fire. Not that it mattered anyway, he was far too cautious to risk anything. And suddenly a shadow fell across the opening of his tent and she was there, crawling in, swift and silent as a bush creature, unzipping his sleeping bag, sliding her long, cool legs alongside his. ‘What the … ?’ he had started to say, but she had put her hand over his mouth, shaking her head, her hair, no longer tied neatly back, brushing his face in the darkness as she slid one leg across his and shifted her weight onto him and tugged to free his penis from the pants from which it was eager to escape.

  ‘Shh,’ was all she said, taking her hand from his mouth and holding a finger to his lips as she raised her hips and slipped him inside her.

  It was probably every man’s fantasy, Gordon thinks now, the sexy older woman, experienced, confident, silent and so unexpected. Sometime later she’d left as swiftly as she had arrived and he was alone again, wondering what next, what about tomorrow night, why me? They hadn’t exchanged a word and that had disturbed him, but in the light of day he knew it was right. Words were what they exchanged as colleagues, but this was different. Silence quarantined day from night, it was a boundary that neither of them crossed. The next night he’d lai
n awake waiting but she didn’t come, nor any of the following four nights. But then, on the last night, she came back just as before, and the following day they sat beside each other as colleagues on the flight back to Perth, talking about the possibilities of the site for future exploration.

  He had been married to Lesley for seven years then, Karen was a particularly fractious three-year-old and Lesley was five months pregnant with Simon. On his first night at home he broke out in a cold sweat, wondering what Lesley would do if she ever found out, terrified by what he stood to lose. But there were other nights over the years when he had longed, not for Vivienne, but for what she represented: freedom, the unfettered life, the silence that brought a kind of anonymity, the intense uncomplicated intimacy of strangers.

  Well one thing’s for sure, Gordon tells himself now, gazing up at the grandeur of the night sky – it’s not going to happen tonight, out here with Fred from the Land Council and Ray the tracker. Bruce, with his damp, cold nose, is the only one who has aspirations to share his sleeping bag tonight, but what if … ? Well, of course he wouldn’t fight off any present day Vivienne who wanted to unzip him. He is shocked suddenly to realise that as she was about ten years older than him at the time, she must now be in her mid-seventies. He wonders if she ever thinks about him, if she even remembers him. He’d like to think she does, that he was special, but he thinks it more likely that he was just one of many.

  y the end of her first weekend of trading Alice is feeling cautiously confident that she has the right mix of staff and the right menu for the café. The figures have been surprisingly good all week and over the weekend the place was packed and they were rushed off their feet. By the time they closed at five o’clock on Sunday everyone was exhausted and when Declan turned up with champagne they had locked the doors and sat down with their feet up on chairs, chewing over everything that had happened. As the staff finally trailed off home Ruby, Declan and Todd were ready for their evening meal but Alice wanted nothing more than a cup of tea in the stillness of her cottage. Having made it up the hill she flopped down onto her bed thankful that tomorrow the café would be closed and she need do nothing at all. Flat on her back, arms outstretched and still wearing her shoes, she fell into a deep and comforting sleep in which she dreamed she had grown huge, white, angel-like wings and was flying in large leisurely circles looking down on Benson’s Reach, the town and surrounding countryside, observing people scurrying about below. It was a rather better dream than usual.

  It was morning when she woke, amazed to find that she had slept for almost ten hours, barely stirring and still wearing her shoes. She wandered into the shower, groggy with sleep, and stood under the stream of hot water waiting for it to bring her fully awake, thinking only of the indecent amount of water she was using. Now, as she takes her mug of coffee out onto the balcony, she feels almost restored to normal. She is too late for the kangaroos this morning but not too late to enjoy watching the other early signs of life: Ruby returning from her walk, Declan and Todd eating toast on the back verandah, and two lots of guests loading their bags into their cars with the reluctance of people about to head home after a holiday. A white van and a small flatbed pick-up make their way slowly up the drive – Phil and Ray, the contract workers whom Declan has taken on to deal with maintenance, lay a couple of new paths, and prepare for the music festival. They are followed, minutes later, by Paula, who parks her car alongside Declan’s and heads for the staff room.

  Alice is curious about Paula: the obsession with everything pink, her assumptions about her role here at Benson’s, her efficiency and her unerring ability to alienate people. It’s a strange combination of traits. The night that Ruby had come to the cottage it had been to ask Alice to work with her on the job descriptions and contracts for the staff. When they sat down to it a few days later Paula’s was the first.

  ‘I want to formalise the arrangements with her as for everyone else,’ Ruby had said. ‘Despite the fact that she can be so frustrating to deal with she’s a valuable member of the staff and she’s currently being paid below the award rate. We need to fix that and create a clear job description which, by definition, should also make it clear what’s off limits. I’m sure that like everyone else here, Paula’s been affected by Catherine’s death, but I wonder if she hasn’t also used it to redefine her job. You see, I think that Paula sees herself as the keeper of the flame, Catherine’s flame, as though it’s up to her to keep that burning. She just has this intrusive way of going about it.’

  It hadn’t been easy. They had spent an inordinate amount of time trying to shape a job description that would enable Paula to feel that her work was valued, and define specific areas in which she had some authority, at the same time creating boundaries that would give them a benchmark for managing her in future. Alice had never worked through a process like that before and felt she learned a lot from it, but her level of tolerance for Paula seems to be lower than Ruby’s; perhaps, she thinks, because she herself feels she lacks the authority to deal with her. She suspects that while undoubtedly being affected by Catherine’s death, Paula has probably always been just the way she is now. In a lifetime of work in shops, and then years in prison, Alice had come face-to-face with people she had never expected to encounter, but she had never come across anyone quite like Paula. The outstanding work performance combined with the unerring ability to get under everyone’s skin seems to Alice to be unique. And she’s cautious too, because she’s now convinced that Paula was behind the Google search, and she fears what she might do with that information.

  But, since talking to Ruby and with the success of her first week’s trading, Alice also feels she is grasping at a new sense of herself as a stronger person weathered by years of grief and incarceration.

  ‘You’ve paid your debt,’ Ruby had said, ‘and of course you’ll go on paying it for the rest of your life, but it doesn’t mean that you’ve lost your rights as a citizen, nor the right to want things for yourself.’

  Outside the office Alice sees Declan waving off the couple who have just vacated cottage two, and Todd, whose plaster was removed a week ago, taking the paperwork from the driver of a delivery truck. ‘I’m part of this,’ she tells herself, ‘a really useful part. I’ve been given a chance so maybe what I need to do now is to give myself a chance.’

  Later, towards midday, she fetches her pad of notepaper, returns to the balcony table and reads the first lines of the letter she had started to Jacinta the night that Ruby came to see her. The ink is smudged, the paper stained and crumpled from the spilled tea, and the words she has written infuriate her. Angrily she rips this and then the other damaged pages from the pad and tears them into shreds. Then she picks up her pen, writes the address of Benson’s Reach at the top of the page and begins again.

  Dear Jacinta

  I was recently released and am now living and working at the above address. I doubt you will want to have any contact and I respect that, however I would like to have my personal possessions which I assume you still have: my books and clothes, my jewellery, and particularly my mother’s things, which were packed in the leather suitcase with her initials on it.

  Please let me know what sort of arrangements you would like me to make to collect these. I can arrange for them to be collected if you could let me know when and where would be convenient for you. I am not going to turn up on your doorstep but will ask a friend to pick them up for me.

  As always I send my love to you, Jodie and Alan. My thoughts are with you always.

  Mum

  She puts down her pen, takes a deep breath and reads through it again, surprised by the cool assertiveness of it compared to the grief-stricken pleas for forgiveness that she has sent in the past. She has asked for nothing that is not hers, she hasn’t begged or pleaded or thrown herself on her daughter’s mercy. It is painful to be writing like this but it’s also powerful: she is taking back something for herself. But she knows she must send it now, in case she caves in later. Inside the cot
tage she addresses an envelope, finds a stamp, and goes out to the top of the balcony steps. It’s just after midday, and most days around this time Declan, Ruby or one of the staff drives into town to collect the mail. Alice runs down the steps and walks briskly to the back door of the house and into the kitchen where Todd is studying a recipe book and writing a list of ingredients.

  ‘Has anyone been for the mail yet?’ Alice asks.

  Todd looks up, shaking his head. ‘I’m going with Declan in a minute. We’re getting the mail and stuff for me to cook pizza tonight.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ she says, ‘am I invited?’

  ‘You’re guest of honour,’ he says, getting up and stuffing the list into his pocket. ‘You taught me how to do it.’

  ‘Are you going to make the dough yourself or buy some bases?’

  Todd looks shocked. ‘Make it, of course,’ he says. ‘That bought stuff tastes like old thongs.’

  ‘Good on you,’ she says, and holds the letter out to him. ‘Can you be sure and post this for me when you’re in town? Don’t forget it, please. It’s really important that it goes today.’

  He takes the envelope and gives her a mock salute. ‘Done,’ he says. ‘Pizza, seven o’clock. Don’t forget.’ And he limps out of the kitchen and along the verandah to where Declan is waiting for him in the car.

  Declan watches as Todd hops down the steps and begins his lopsided walk towards him. What a difference, he thinks, remembering the anxious boy who had appeared at the office door wanting to talk to him a few weeks earlier. Todd now seems confident and at home in the house with him, Ruby and Alice. Declan struggles to remember what he was like at that age; surly, he thinks, awkward, resentful, and lacking Todd’s willingness to attempt whatever is put in front of him. He remembers the anger and, more than anything, the vulnerability of being alone with no one of his own to turn to. Shortly after his mother’s death, Robert, his father, had withdrawn into a deep depression from which he had never really emerged. It had been his Uncle Harry who had stepped in then, and organised Declan’s move to boarding school in Perth. At thirteen, still mourning his mother and confused by his father’s retreat into the depths of his own darkness, Declan had resented it bitterly. He had always been a loner, happy in his own room listening to his cassettes, reading books. He would take off on long bike rides, sometimes meeting up with other boys but more often alone. The prospect of living at school with organised sports, team games, dormitories, crowded showers, and having to do almost everything with other boys appalled him.