In the Company of Strangers

by Liz Byrski

  For the first two years he’d been thoroughly miserable and had learned that loneliness when surrounded by others is more painful than being alone. But by his fifteenth birthday he’d grown accustomed to the place and worked out where he fitted in the hierarchy. At eighteen, exams finished and on the verge of leaving, he’d realised he had developed affection for the school, the masters and some of the friends he had made there. But at eighteen he was far less prepared for the world outside the school than Todd is now as he approaches his sixteenth birthday. Neither of them has been equipped for family life but Todd seems to possess an inner fortitude that Declan envies. It’s why he’s brought Todd with him into town when he could easily have driven in alone for the mail and ingredients for tonight’s pizza. He’d wanted Todd there, not just for his company, which he always enjoys, but to insulate him against the possibility of an awkward chance encounter.

  ‘Come with me to get the mail and we’ll go to the bike shop too,’ he’d said, ‘have a look for a new helmet for you.’

  ‘But I can’t ride it yet,’ Todd had said, ‘it might be a few more weeks.’

  ‘By which time the festival will be on and I’ll be too busy,’ Declan had said. ‘And we can pick up anything else you need for the pizza.’

  Now, as they turn into the main street and he swings into a parking space, Declan looks across at Todd. ‘Look, mate,’ he says, ‘do me a favour, will you? Stick with me. Don’t wander off on your own, and if we meet anyone the story is we’re in a bit of a rush. No time to stand around talking.’

  ‘What – like Scooter and Will from the pub?’ Todd asks. ‘I thought they were your mates, helping with the music festival and stuff.’

  ‘No,’ Declan says, switching off the engine. ‘No, not them. Anyone else, you know, like – well, like a woman, for example.’

  Todd laughs. ‘Oh, you mean that Mrs Craddock. I heard she was coming back.’

  Declan turns to him sharply. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘No one told me, I just heard Paula talking to her on the phone. She was telling her the names of places to stay.’

  ‘What places?’

  ‘Dunno really … well, the guest house, and the pub, and that place out on the road to Busselton.’

  ‘Bugger,’ Declan says. ‘Trust Paula to get involved.’

  ‘She fancy you then?’ Todd asks.

  Declan feels his face flush. ‘Oh … um … I don’t know exactly …’

  ‘She was hanging around looking for you when you went to the hospital.’

  ‘Was she?’

  ‘Yeah, asking everybody where you were and if they could give her your number.’

  ‘Did she ask you?’

  ‘Yep, coupla times, said she needed to talk to you urgently.’

  ‘So what did you say?’

  ‘I said she should tell Ruby or Alice and they’d ring you and ask you to ring her.’

  Declan smiles. ‘Well done.’

  ‘So I’m like … protection today, am I?’

  ‘Spot on,’ Declan says getting out of the car.

  Todd slides awkwardly down from the high seat of the four-wheel-drive and does a few swift karate chops accompanied by appropriate whooshing noises. ‘Todd the Terminator, personal bodyguard to Declan Benson,’ he says, grinning. ‘No task too dangerous, no one gets past these hands.’

  Declan shakes his head, laughing, ‘You’re wasted here, Todd,’ he says, ‘you should be in the movies.’

  ‘I’m counting on it,’ Todd says, looking around as though guarding the president from potential assassins. ‘Meanwhile you can count on my services in keeping you safe from dangerous women.’

  ‘Just the one woman will be fine,’ Declan says, ‘you can let the others through. You got a girlfriend, Todd?’

  Todd shakes his head. ‘I did last year but it sort of fizzled out. I’ve got other things to think about right now.’

  ‘You and me both,’ Declan says, and as he locks the car and they head off to the post office he has the distinct feeling that there are eyes everywhere watching him. It’s all in his head, of course; Lesley can’t possibly have arrived yet. She would have called to say she was on her way – after all, she has called him every day, sometimes twice a day, since she got his number. Even so he can’t shake off the feeling that she might suddenly step out of the newsagent’s or screech to a halt alongside him in the car. He will eventually have to face her and he’s dreading it, but he’s also sure that it will be better if that meeting is planned, if it takes place in controlled circumstances, although he has no idea what those circumstances might be. It’s difficult for him to understand quite what’s happening but she’s obviously under the illusion that something emotionally profound has developed between them.

  Her husband, she’d told him, once he’d caved in and taken a call from her, has taken himself off to the Kimberley and isn’t coming back for a while. She was relieved but also offended that he had let her know by email instead of waiting to see her. Declan found this entirely understandable – she, after all, had taken off from home with little explanation, failed to answer her phone for days on end and then delayed her return with a text message. Sauce for the goose, he thought, but he kept that thought to himself. It is the rest of it that bothers him.

  ‘I have to see you and talk to you,’ she has said several times in her phone and text messages. ‘We need to talk about us, about you and me and what we’re going to do.’ And Declan, who fears misunderstanding on both their parts, has been trying to say as little as possible in the hope that she will eventually see that what happened between them as just what it was: a pleasant but fairly superficial encounter that is best forgotten. As far as he’s concerned there is no ‘us’. He liked her and it had helped to talk to someone detached from Benson’s, but taking it further had been a big mistake. At the same time he thinks he has done nothing worse than most men would have done in the circumstances, and others probably would have cut her off quite brutally by now.

  Declan can see that he has made things worse by avoiding her, but how is he supposed to respond when she tells him that it is the first time she has been unfaithful to her husband in more than thirty-five years? Is she attempting to assuage her guilt by confusing sex with something more like – oh shit – like love?

  ‘I’m coming back to Margaret River as soon as I can,’ she’d said. ‘We need to spend some time together and work out what to do.’

  ‘I’ve got a lot on at the moment,’ Declan had said. ‘The music festival’s coming up, other stuff – I don’t have a lot of time.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Lesley said, ‘you won’t be busy all the time – after all, you have to eat and to … to sleep, of course.’

  Declan had opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out, which, he thinks now, was probably a good thing.

  ‘But I can’t come yet. Just the day after I got back my daughter-in-law collapsed with a ruptured appendix. She’s going to be okay, but I need to stay on here and help with the twins for a while. Maybe book one of the cottages for me from … now let me see, I think the …’

  ‘We’re fully booked for some time now,’ Declan had cut in. ‘Easter, you see, and then the jazz and blues festival.’

  She’d gone very quiet then. ‘Well I suppose I’ll just have to find somewhere else to stay …’ she’d said, her voice trailing away as though expecting him to take responsibility for this, or at the very least to suggest something.

  Lesley, he thinks now, as he and Todd empty the post box and take the mail back to the car, is in a very fragile state, almost a loose cannon, and his own stupidity has added to that. If, as he suspects, she thinks that they are at the start of a relationship he is going to have to set her straight about it and the prospect brings him out in a cold sweat.

  ‘Freeze!’ Todd hisses as they are about to cross the road. ‘Check out, target approaching from the right.’

  Declan’s heart pounds in his chest and he drops the mail as T
odd doubles up with laughter.

  ‘Gotcha! You’re too jumpy, gotta stay cool, man.’

  ‘Wanker!’ Declan says, hitting him over the head with a large envelope. ‘Some bodyguard you are. You nearly gave me a heart attack.’ He sinks down onto a nearby seat laughing, and as Todd hops around doing karate chops he wonders what he has missed. Is this what it’s like to have a son, growing up and becoming a mate? Someone who accepts you for who you are, who will laugh with you and at you, forgive you and be there for you even when you’ve totally pissed them off or let them down? And for a brief moment he is overcome with longing, and with a sort of melancholy for what might have been if things had been different, if he had been different – if he’d been brave enough, sober enough, mature enough to risk love.

  ‘Come on, Todd,’ Declan says, getting to his feet. ‘Let’s get this stuff back to the car and then we can go to the supermarket. What sort of pizza are you making?’

  ‘It’s my own recipe,’ Todd says, ‘thin crust with chorizo, mushrooms, green capsicum and buffalo mozzarella.’

  ‘Onions?’

  ‘No onions.’

  ‘And no pineapple, I hope. Can’t stand pineapple on pizza.’

  ‘Yuk, no way. No pineapple.’

  ‘Plenty of chorizo then?’

  ‘Heaps.’

  ‘Good,’ Declan says. ‘That sounds like a pizza for real men.’

  ‘Sure is,’ Todd says. ‘But you can have some anyway,’ and despite his dodgy ankle he manages to duck out of reach as Declan wields the envelope again.

  uby has reached the end of the line. No more distractions, no more excuses, time to face up to the past – at least the part of it contained in Catherine’s room. Outside in the grounds teams of people are doing things with temporary fencing, and bales of straw are being stacked under tarpaulins in case the threatened rain reduces the car park to mud. She has been thinking of London – she’s been away longer than she anticipated. Jessica is more than able to run things in her absence but Ruby feels it unfair to expect her to manage everything for much longer.

  ‘How do you know I’m not enjoying it?’ Jessica had joked on the phone. ‘With you out of the way I can do things my way. I’m drunk with power. But really, Ruby, just stay as long as you want, it’s fine, really it is.’

  The prospect of her London life holds little appeal for Ruby right now. Years ago Benson’s Reach had helped to heal the wounds of childhood, but then her life here had soured suddenly and dramatically and she had left vowing never to return. But she is back, nothing terrible has happened and once again the place has worked its magic on her. Even so the past waits and she is still avoiding it. Cleaning up Catherine’s room was one thing, but what remains is the task of sorting the contents of the boxes in which Catherine had stored her personal possessions. This seems like the final rite, after which the room can be returned to its original purpose as the heart of the house. Ruby unlocks the door and crosses immediately to the window to fling it open. Despite her many attempts to air it the same musty smell remains. Turning away from the window she surveys Catherine’s boxes and, determined to put an end to her procrastination, picks one at random. It’s quite heavy but she lugs it onto the table, puts on her glasses and opens it.

  It’s full of papers, most of them recent, in no sort of order and most of them of no particular significance: some receipts, guarantees and instruction books for small household items – an iron, a hair dryer, the kitchen toaster, other bits and pieces. There are letters or printouts of emails from acquaintances. Ruby retrieves those from people who have not yet been advised of Catherine’s death, her guilt growing with each new discovery. She really should have done this weeks ago. She makes a small pile of the essentials and tosses the rest into a larger box – Todd will be spending some time with the shredder if the rest of the boxes are like this. But of course they’re not, most of them will be nothing like this, and that’s what she’s dreading.

  The next box is packed with trinkets, souvenirs, some small gifts. There are china ornaments concealed in bubble wrap, a collection of framed photographs of the lavender fields and other shots of Benson’s Reach, some with Catherine standing awkwardly alongside smiling strangers, mementoes probably from satisfied visitors who have scrawled messages on them: ‘A wonderful holiday, so lovely to have met you.’ ‘We’ll be back again and that’s a promise.’ ‘We love Benson’s Reach, thanks for everything.’ ‘Another splendid visit, thanks Catherine.’ All followed with illegible signatures and some adorned with kisses.

  There are other gifts too, obviously from people who didn’t know Catherine well: a box of lace trimmed handkerchiefs embroidered with the initial C. A couple of printed silk scarves, one decorated with riding crops and stirrups, another with exotic plants accompanied by their Latin names. There are several strands of ugly and unmatched beads that look homemade, some purple leg warmers, a pair of Christmas reindeer horns on a black velvet headband, and some green earrings in the shape of Christmas trees. There is a hip flask, an imitation leather writing case and more, all packed carefully away with their original gift wrapping folded loosely around them. Ruby dumps the wrappings, removes the photographs from their frames keeping them in a pile, returns the frames and everything else to the box and scrawls ‘Op Shop’ across the lid in black felt pen. There – two boxes done already, not so bad after all. Maybe Catherine didn’t keep much from the past, their past, maybe she, like Ruby herself, disposed of it all years ago.

  She leans back, putting her feet up on the op shop box, reliving her own ritual burning of the past, now such a long time ago; the early seventies when she and Owen had just moved into the Islington house that he’d inherited, along with a healthy share portfolio, from an aunt. It was a glorious June day, a day for fresh starts. From the window of what would become their bedroom when he’d finished the decorating, Owen, wearing an old green viyella shirt spattered with paint, looked down to where she was standing in the garden, feeding the remains of her Australian life into a bonfire.

  ‘Hey, Rube, what are you burning?’

  ‘The past,’ she’d said, looking up at him, shading her eyes against the sun with one hand and poking a stick at the embers with the other. ‘My past. Start of a new life, clean slate, all that.’

  ‘You’ll regret it,’ he’d said, waving his paintbrush. ‘One day you’ll wish you’d kept it. I can put all that stuff up in the roof. We’re not exactly short of space.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ll never regret it, there’s nothing here I want to remember.’

  He was down the stairs in seconds, running up behind her, wrapping his arms around her. ‘Stop, please, darling. It’s history, your history. It’ll be part of our family’s history. What about our children and grandchildren? They’ll want to know about you.’

  But she had kept on burning. ‘Not this part,’ she’d said, ‘no one would want to know this. The things worth keeping are happening now. I’ll keep our stories, tell them the stories that began here in London.’

  Ruby sighs now, remembering how he had turned away in frustration and walked back to the decorating. The house and Owen himself had seemed unusually quiet that evening, as though something really quite important had been consumed by the flames.

  ‘You weren’t there,’ she’d said. ‘You can’t know what it was like. If you did you wouldn’t want me to preserve it.’

  Owen had shaken his head. ‘But that’s the point,’ he’d said. ‘I can’t know and neither will our children. Even if you can’t face looking into it now you should still preserve it, write it down. Stories are important. Sometime in the future you’ll find out more about what happened to that shipload of children, and why you were sent to such an awful situation, in fact why you were sent away at all. You’ll wish you’d never lit that bonfire. I just can’t help feeling that what happened to you is part of something much bigger. I wish you’d hung on to that stuff. And I wish you’d try to find out more—’

  ‘No,’
she’d cut in then, ‘I just want to be free of it. All I want from the past is to find my mother. I still don’t believe she died that night. It’s just a gut feeling, that’s all. Everything else is … well, it’s ashes now, in every sense, and that’s how I want it to stay.’

  And she hadn’t regretted it, at least not then, not even when she had been searching for her mother, nor even when in the fourth month of pregnancy she lost the baby and was told she would never be able to carry a baby to term. She threw herself into a demanding and rewarding life in the present, into the work and activism that would sustain her then and has continued to demand her attention and her energy ever since. It was only in the early nineties when the stories of children who had been shipped out of the country to different outposts of the Empire began to trickle through in the press that she allowed herself some regret. Owen had been right: stories are important, far more important than she had realised the day she had set fire to her own and willed herself to forget. But painful memories, she knows now, always remain, however many bonfires you light.

  ‘Owen,’ Ruby murmurs softly. ‘I still miss you. I really do.’ She had promised to bring him here one day, but when she’d made that promise she hadn’t really meant it.

  ‘We can go together and you can make your peace with the place,’ he’d said, and so she’d promised, crossing her fingers behind her back, hoping she would never have to keep the promise, and she hadn’t, but for all the wrong reasons.