In the Company of Strangers

by Liz Byrski

  Ruby stares at him in disbelief, then looks away. She folds her arms across her chest and rapidly unfolds them. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘it was all so sudden. We have these feelings but we’ve had no chance to talk …’ Her voice fades away because everything about him this morning tells her that it’s hopeless. The relaxed, easygoing Jackson with his fluid movements and ready laughter has gone, replaced by someone else, someone rigid and cut off from feelings, someone hiding behind a wall. Ruby knows enough about people to realise that whatever she says now will be a sort of pleading, embarrassing and debasing. And while part of her wants to fight, her pride holds her back. A voice in her head tells her that this is worth fighting for but another tells her that holding herself together is more important. She feels she is falling apart from within but she’s determined not to let him see that. But then …

  ‘It’s never too late to change, Jackson,’ she says, and it clatters, like the cliché it is, into the space between them.

  ‘For you maybe, but it is for me.’

  ‘Perhaps you don’t want to change,’ she says, suddenly angry and ready now for a fight. ‘Perhaps you’re too selfish or too lazy.’

  But he won’t fight. Instead he just nods. ‘Perhaps both,’ he says.

  Ruby is shocked by her own impotence. She is used to winning, and it’s so long since she’s had this hopeless sense of something so precious slipping away from her. How many times has she pulled back from the brink of involvement for fear of facing the abyss of loss? But this is different, now she has no choice. She wants what she glimpsed with Jackson more than she can bear, and yet it’s too late, already gone. He has removed himself from the equation.

  ‘Some risks are worth taking,’ she says. ‘Stay a little longer, give us time to see what might happen …’ But she knows it’s lost, over before it started. Tomorrow he will be gone, leaving her nothing to salvage from it but the shame of grasping at love and having it moved out of reach.

  ‘Shall we go now, Alice?’ Declan calls, waving to her from outside the office.

  And she gives him a thumbs-up, fetches her bag and sunglasses from the cottage and pauses to draw a deep breath.

  ‘It’s like longing to leave home but being afraid to cross the street,’ the Outcare officer had told her just before she was released, ‘but the feeling will pass.’ It had been so much harder than she expected during those first few days of freedom, and now the fear overtakes her again. ‘But it is different this time,’ she tells herself, ‘Declan will be with me, and anyway I’m different,’ and she closes the cottage door and runs down to where Declan is waiting in the car.

  ‘Aren’t we going the wrong way?’ she asks as he takes a right turn out of the drive.

  ‘We’re going into town first,’ he says, ‘just a little practice run. You go into a shop, on your own while I wait outside, you buy a newspaper and come out and then we walk together to a coffee shop, sit down and order some coffee and chat in a relaxed manner. As though it’s something we do all the time.’

  Alice, her insides churning, turns to look at him. ‘We were going to visit Paula.’

  ‘We still are,’ he says, briefly taking his eyes off the road to look at her, ‘as soon as we’ve finished the coffee. If you have the courage to go looking for Paula – something which, I have to say, I am only able to do because you’re with me – then you certainly have the courage to have a cup of coffee with me. We’re old friends, remember, there hasn’t been much time for that recently.’

  ‘Sometimes you really surprise me, Declan,’ Alice says, smiling. ‘You sell yourself short. You claim incompetence but you’re actually a really good manager. You take good decisions and you’re thoughtful, but you’re not a pushover.’

  Declan gives a short laugh. ‘It must be the sisterhood effect,’ he says, ‘the combination of you and Ruby. It’s challenging but fortifying, like that breakfast cereal that builds iron men.’

  Alice bursts into laughter and then finds quite suddenly that the laughter turns to a couple of sobs.

  ‘Shit,’ Declan says, slowing down, about to pull off the road. ‘What have I said?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Alice says, laughing again now, ‘it’s just that I’m so scared of what we’re about to do – the newspaper, the café, not the Paula bit. But I suppose as I’m in the company of iron man there’s really nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Absolutely nothing at all,’ he says, pulling back onto the road. ‘In half an hour it will all be over and you’ll be wondering what you were worried about.’

  And he was right, except that it took longer, more than twice as long in fact. Not longer to stop worrying, which happened quite quickly, just longer to luxuriate in the difference, to sit there on the café terrace watching people go by. To wander back down the hill to the bookshop and browse the shelves, even longer to go into the eco shop and buy a gorgeous purple wool jacket that Declan assured her she would need as the days grew cooler.

  ‘There’s no stopping you now, is there?’ he says as they leave the shop. ‘You’re already into retail therapy. May I escort you back to your car, madam?’

  ‘It feels good,’ she says, taking his proffered arm. ‘Really good. Thank you.’

  ‘It’s an extraordinary pleasure,’ he says, drawing her hand further into the curve of his arm and keeping hold of it. ‘We will do it often from now on, along with other daring things, like going out for a meal, or to the cinema, or for a walk on the beach. For now, though, we’ll just go and see if I can work the iron man charm on Paula.’

  It takes them a while to find Paula’s place, losing themselves along unmade roads and then backtracking, but at last they discover the unmarked road and reach a cluster of small weatherboard cottages dating back several decades.

  ‘It has to be that one,’ Declan says, pointing to a bright pink gate which leads up a short path of broken pavers to the white cottage with a badly painted pink door and pink window frames. ‘It has Paula written all over it. Number three – there, you see, I was right.’ He pulls up outside the gate and switches off the engine. ‘Come on then, iron woman,’ he says, ‘let’s do it.’

  ‘She’s not there,’ Alice says as they reach the gate, and for some reason the place makes her feel uneasy. ‘It’s all shut up.’

  ‘Of course it’s shut up, it’s a chilly day.’

  Alice shakes her head. ‘There’s something wrong, I know there is.’

  Declan runs up the three steps to the front door and knocks a couple of times. The black iron door knocker shaped like a dragon is loud in the stillness. He steps back, waiting for a response.

  ‘She’s not there, I know she’s not,’ Alice says.

  ‘Give her time,’ Declan says, ‘she might be out the back, or in the bathroom.’ He knocks again. ‘Okay, she’s not there,’ he says, and he walks back down onto the path, jumps over a flowerbed and peers through the window of the small garage. ‘No car either. I’ll look round the back,’ and he strides off down the drive and opens the gate at the end.

  Alice knows it’s a waste of time. Paula isn’t there, she feels that so strongly that it hardly seems worth checking out the back of the house, but she follows Declan through into the yard and waits while he knocks at the back door. Nothing.

  ‘I suppose that’s it then,’ Declan says as they stroll back to the front of the house. ‘Not much else we can do. I guess she’ll turn up when it suits her.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ Alice says.

  Next door but one an elderly woman is making her way from her front door to her garage.

  ‘Looking for Paula?’ she calls.

  ‘We are, yes,’ Alice says, walking towards her. ‘Have you seen her in the last couple of days?’

  ‘Oh yes, she was there yesterday, about five o’clock. I saw her in the garden. Spoke to her.’

  ‘Did she seem okay?’

  ‘Oh well, you know Paula,’ the woman says, ‘up and down, up and down. She was having one of her grumpy days when you c
an barely get a word out of her. But she was there all right. Then she went out in the car in the evening. I was coming back from bridge about ten o’clock and I passed her on the lane. Goodness knows where she was going at that time of night. She’ll be back later, I expect, shall I give her a message for you?’

  ‘Could you could tell her that Declan and Alice were looking for her?’

  ‘Dylan and Alice …’

  ‘Declan,’ Alice says. ‘Or perhaps just ask her to call Benson’s Reach.’

  ‘Ah, that’s where she works,’ the woman says. ‘She told me she’s the executive housekeeper now. Anyway, I’ll tell her you were here.’

  Alice thanks her and walks back to Declan. ‘Did you hear that?’

  He nods. ‘So shall we go?’

  ‘Might as well,’ Alice agrees, ‘no point waiting here, we could be waiting all day.’ But as she hauls herself up into the four-wheel-drive she can’t get rid of the feeling that something’s wrong, very wrong. ‘I don’t like this,’ she says as Declan starts the engine. ‘She might be inside, sick or something.’

  ‘But the car’s not there, Alice,’ Declan says, ‘she’s out somewhere. And anyway, we can’t just break in.’

  ‘No, no we can’t,’ she says. ‘But do you think we should report her missing?’

  ‘But she’s not missing. The neighbour saw her yesterday evening. Look, Paula freaked out, she yelled and screamed and started throwing things and now she feels stupid and embarrassed. That’s hard for anyone but especially for Paula, who can’t tolerate being in the wrong. I think she just needs a bit more time. She’ll turn up before the end of the week, I bet you, and it’ll all be someone else’s fault.’

  ‘But where would she be going at ten o’clock?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe she has a lover and went to his place for the night. She could have gone anywhere and that’s really not our business.’

  Alice nods. ‘Okay,’ she says, ‘you’re probably right. Let’s go home.’ But as Declan lets out the clutch and they make their way slowly towards the main road, she still has the feeling that something about this is far from right.

  It’s the police who find Paula. While Alice and Declan were knocking on her door her body was being winched up from the rocks at the foot of Wilyabrup Cliffs in a black body bag.

  ‘She was spotted by a light plane flying low along the coast,’ the police officer explains to Ruby late that afternoon when he arrives at Benson’s Reach in an effort to find contact details for her next of kin.

  ‘It would be my nan and granddad, I suppose,’ Todd says, and gives him what he can remember of the address. ‘But she didn’t ever see them, not for years.’

  ‘Will the cops go there or will they phone?’ he asks Ruby once the officer has left.

  ‘They’ll go there and tell your grandparents personally,’ Ruby says. ‘They don’t give people news like that over the phone.’

  ‘I don’t fancy their luck,’ Todd says. ‘They’ll probably be drunk, they usually are.’

  ‘Are you okay, Todd?’ Ruby asks. ‘I mean, Paula was part of your family.’

  He shrugs. ‘Not so’s you’d notice.’

  ‘And what about your mum?’

  ‘Like I told the police, she’s in Kuta but I don’t know where.’

  Ruby looks at him anxiously, searching for signs of distress. ‘There must be ways of finding her if you need to talk to her.’

  ‘The police said they’d find her.’

  ‘But if you want to speak to her, if you’re upset, I mean, we could try to speed it up.’

  Todd pauses. ‘Paula didn’t give a rat’s arse about me,’ he says, blushing. ‘Sorry, Ruby … but she didn’t. In all my life she never said one nice thing to me, and she said horrible things about me and Mum and she tried to get me in trouble with Catherine and with Declan. I’m sorry if she jumped off that cliff because she was unhappy, but I’m not sorry that she won’t be around anymore. Shall I go and tell Declan?’

  Ruby watches as he goes off down the path heading for the field where Declan is chatting to the men who have finally turned up to dismantle the stage. Todd is, she thinks, far more affected by the news than he’s prepared to admit. His face betrayed profound anger and hurt, less perhaps about Paula but an older, deeper hurt. Perhaps, even in their mutual hostility, there was something solid for him about her presence. His mother and grandparents have abandoned him; perhaps even as she persecuted him Paula was one fixed point of connection to his family.

  As Todd reaches the group on the hill Ruby watches as Declan turns to listen to him, then draws him away from the group to sit, side by side, on some upturned packing cases. Todd, talking fast, gesticulating, stops abruptly and buries his face in his hands. Declan slips an arm around his shoulders and Todd leans in to him. He has picked the right person, Ruby thinks. Declan, robbed of his mother by death and his father by grief and depression, will instinctively respond to the complications of Todd’s feelings. ‘You did a grand thing with those two, Cat,’ she murmurs. ‘I hope you know that.’

  She glances up to Jackson’s cottage, sees him there on the balcony, talking with one of his musicians. Resisting the temptation to turn away she holds her ground, keeps looking at him until he stops speaking and meets her eyes across the distance, and then finally turns slowly back to his conversation, leaving her feeling rejected once again.

  The news travels through Benson’s Reach like a flash fire. Everyone has something to say, something conditional. ‘She was a pain in the neck but she had a good heart.’ ‘She really got on my nerves but she meant well.’ ‘She was so annoying and bossy but she’d have done anything for you.’

  ‘It’s my fault,’ Alice says that evening as they gather around the kitchen table. ‘I should have followed my instinct and gone up there yesterday.’

  ‘It’s not your fault, Alice,’ Declan says. ‘You would have gone but I made you wait until today. If it’s anyone’s fault it’s mine.’

  ‘But I should have talked to her weeks ago,’ Alice says. ‘I knew something wasn’t right. I should’ve tried to connect with her.’

  ‘I feel terrible,’ Fleur says. ‘I was a real bitch to her. She pissed me off so much, always nosing into things, no respect for any sort of niceties. But now I think she just wanted attention. That’s all she wanted, really – attention.’

  ‘I should have talked to her more right from the start,’ Declan says, ‘should have tried to involve her. But she just kept getting my back up.’

  ‘I do feel a bit responsible,’ Lesley says. ‘I did use her when I was … when I was upset, and then she thought I had her job.’

  Ruby, battling her own conscience, watches and listens. ‘I didn’t see it coming,’ she says, ‘but now I know that all the signs were there. What did I do, switch off my brain or something?’

  ‘And I should have let her sing for me,’ Jackson says, ‘but you know none of this would have stopped it happening – if not now, then some other time.’

  They sit on in silence, each one, Ruby thinks, crushed by the vision that Paula’s death has given them of themselves as less caring, less insightful, more selfish than they had believed themselves to be.

  ‘You may be right that none of us could have stopped this happening, Jackson,’ she says crisply, ‘but I guess we all know we could have done a whole lot better.’

  Todd pushes his chair back from the table and gets up. ‘Paula could have done better,’ he says. ‘Catherine said it to her all the time. I heard her – “Paula, you have to take responsibility for your own behaviour. You have to stay on the medication.” So now she’s done it, taken responsibility. Her choice.’ And he walks out of the kitchen, down the passage and they hear his bedroom door close behind him.

  Declan shakes his head. ‘Sometimes that boy just blows me away,’ he says. ‘Sixteen going on forty,’ and he gets up to follow him.

  esley is stricken with guilt. Relentlessly she tracks back over her involvement with Paula,
the way she pumped her for information about Declan, the pressure she put on her to get his mobile number. She recalls how frequently she invited her into the cottage, drank tea with her and listened to Paula’s tales of life at Benson’s Reach and, once she was back home in Perth, Paula’s efforts to help her find somewhere to stay. Most of all she thinks of Paula’s persistent calls on the night before the festival – the calls she had deliberately ignored. Lesley is chilled by the memory of her own irritation at the growing number of messages and texts and how easy it had been to dismiss them simply because Paula was someone she no longer needed. It revives memories of the uncomfortable occasions when her mother has accused her of selfishness, of an inability – or was it an unwillingness? – to put herself in someone else’s shoes.

  ‘You’ve been too fortunate, Lesley. It’s all about you. You don’t have a social conscience. I don’t understand it, we didn’t bring you up that way.’

  Lesley has rolled her eyes, ignored Dolly or made light of it, but now she can’t get the words out of her head. What was it like for Paula driving that night to Wilyabrup? Just what was she feeling as she left the car and walked to the cliff edge? Had she really believed that she was to be put in charge of the shop? Could a life really hang on something so fragile? There must, she knows, be a much bigger picture, and she is clear that it was not her fault, but she is painfully aware of the role she may have played in the final days of Paula’s life. Once again she is faced with an image of herself as irresponsible, as a person so fixed on her own track that she can mow others down as she follows it. It leaves her feeling shallow, selfish and ill at ease with herself.

  Back in her rented house she opens her laptop and reads Gordon’s message again. The weekend after next, he says, he will be here, in Margaret River. She wonders what it has cost him to do that, to detach from what he is working on and come here to talk to her. Has it all gone too far? Is he coming to tell her that he wants a divorce?