Ali made her mouth smile. ‘Hi.’
‘A lovely man, your dad, a real gentleman among men,’ she went on. ‘He kept a photo of you on his desk. Such a terrible tragedy.’
Ali nodded, still watching her mum, and after a moment, Mavis melted away. Her mum looked pissed now, the hand that held her glass shaking as she brought it up to her lips again and again. The corners of her mouth were stained purple from the wine, giving her a ghoulish artificial smile.
‘I don’t know how I’m going to go on.’ Her words slurred as she spoke to the women on either side of her. ‘I’m nothing without him.’
‘Oh, that’s not true, Hazel,’ said some great aunt or another.
‘I’ve got nothing left,’ her mum whimpered.
Ali’s carefully cultivated composure bunched up tight, cracked, then exploded. She dropped the sandwich onto a table and crossed the room to where her mother sat on the couch. ‘What about me?’ she demanded. ‘Dad would never have left me to go through this on my own like you have.’
Her mum looked up at her with an unfocused gaze. ‘Well, your dad always did care more about you.’
Something snapped inside Ali. ‘I wish it’d been you!’ she hissed.
Her mum gave a rough laugh and downed the last of her wine. ‘So do I, love. So do I.’
She lurched to her feet and lost her grip on her glass. It tumbled from her hand and smashed on the floor. The room went quiet as all the guests turned to look at them. Ali knew she should be helping her mother, comforting her, cleaning up the mess, telling everyone it was time to go, but now, at last, the hurt, the grief, welled up inside her.
‘Jesus, Mum, you don’t have to be such a drama queen!’ she shouted, wet rivulets of mascara streaming down her face. She turned and ran from the room under the curious and sympathetic gazes of their guests, up the hallway to her bedroom, and slammed the door on the ruins of her family.
Ali
Ali was already resentful when she walked into the psychologist’s windowless room. She hated that she’d been forced to come back here again. She hated that she’d lied to Tom about it being her idea. And she hated that just when she’d thought she had a handle on things, everything had come crashing down around her ears at once, and she had no one to blame but herself.
‘I’m pleased to see you here again, Alison,’ Meena said as Ali took the seat opposite hers.
‘I hadn’t planned to come back, but…’ Ali hesitated.
‘What made you change your mind?’
Ali stared down at her knees. ‘I didn’t, exactly. I’ve been… making some mistakes at work.’
‘You don’t seem like the type who normally makes mistakes,’ Meena said.
‘I’m not.’
‘Why don’t you tell me what happened?’
Ali spoke, haltingly at first, beginning with the incident at the school, but as her confidence grew, she relaxed and moved on to the media response she’d forgotten to send. She knew she was going into unnecessary detail, but Meena didn’t interrupt or redirect her, just sat and listened with her unwavering, dark eyes. Once again she wrote nothing on the blank notepad in her lap. Her ballpoint pen remained resting on her lips, but this time Ali didn’t find the habit irritating. There was a certain comfort in being able to talk about these things with somebody who wasn’t involved, who wouldn’t judge her or tell anyone else. Who didn’t even make a record of what she was saying.
The psychologist cleared her throat when Ali had finished. ‘So are you here because you think your grief is interfering with your work performance?’
Ali shrugged. ‘I’m here because I have to be.’
Meena waited, and the silence stretched out between them. Ali felt her own resolve stretching with it.
‘Actually,’ she began. ‘There is something else. I need to know how I can… I’ve been getting flashbacks. I wondered if there’s a way I can make them stop.’
‘Flashbacks about…?’
‘The birth. It’s like… it’s hard to describe. But anything that reminds me of it sets one off.’
Meena twirled her pen around her slender fingers. ‘How does it feel when it happens?’
‘Like I can’t breathe. I sweat, and I feel dizzy, and trapped.’ Ali took a deep breath. ‘It’s like I’m back there again, in the hospital room, like no time has passed at all. It’s like going through it again and again and again. I want to turn off the memories. Can you help me do that?’
Meena hesitated. ‘You’ve been through a traumatic event. It may help to work through that and then try to control your response to it. What about other traumas in your life? How did you cope when your father died?’
‘I studied.’
Meena raised an eyebrow. ‘So you used school to keep yourself on track then, and now you’re using work.’
A smile twitched at the corner of Ali’s mouth. ‘I guess you could say I have control issues.’
Meena’s face relaxed into a smile. ‘We all do, in one way or another. Is your career something you’ve always focused on, or was it a response to your mother’s situation?’
Ali bit her lower lip as she thought about it. ‘It was more my dad, really. I wanted to be a journalist since I was eight years old, but he was the one who encouraged me to pursue it.’
‘How did he do that?’
‘He wasn’t overbearing or anything, but he expected me to study hard. He didn’t want me to end up as a housewife like my mother.’
A crease appeared between Meena’s eyebrows. ‘He said that?’
‘Well…’ Ali stopped. She couldn’t remember now. ‘Maybe not in so many words. He wanted me to take my future seriously, whereas Hazel was more about encouraging me to enjoy my youth.’
‘Hazel is your mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you always called her by her name?’
‘I started calling her that around the time I graduated from high school.’
‘Any reason why?’
‘Because she stopped being my mum the second Dad died. It was like losing both of them at once, except that she was still alive.’
‘What did she do?’
Ali hesitated. It’d been so long since she’d talked to anyone about Hazel, but maybe this was easier than talking about the real reason she was here. ‘At first, she just cried. Constantly. Then, on the day of the funeral, she started drinking… and she never really stopped. The booze replaced the tears and she’s been going ever since.’
‘She drank to cope with your father’s death?’
Ali nodded. ‘We lost the house when Dad’s life insurance money ran out, and by the time I started year twelve we’d moved into a Housing Trust flat in Brompton. It was still a dodgy neighbourhood back then—car bodies in front yards, cigarette butts on the footpaths. We were living off welfare because she was too busy drinking to get a job, and she had no skills even if she wanted to.’
Meena leant forward slightly. ‘So it was the drinking that destroyed your relationship?’
Ali crossed her arms over her chest. It hadn’t happened all at once. Before her father’s death, Hazel had loved Ali wholeheartedly, in the way that mothers did, and Ali had thought her mother was strong, in the way that children did. It had taken a while for that bond to fade from Ali’s heart. But something had broken between them on the day of the funeral, and by the time she’d graduated from high school there’d been nothing left to salvage. ‘She didn’t even try. She just gave up. I had to be the responsible one. I had to do the shopping, pay the bills, cook the meals. She was my mother, but I had to look after her.’
Meena studied her for a moment. ‘What about your husband? How has he coped with the loss?’
Ali’s heart contracted. This was the topic she’d been avoiding. ‘He’s devastated. He wants to talk about her all the time… and I can’t.’
‘Why do you think that is?’
‘Because every time I think about it I get these flashbacks. I feel like everything’s
expanding inside me and I’m going to explode. And I want it to stop.’
‘Has that caused friction between you and your husband?’
Ali’s fingernails were digging into her palms. She’d never, ever shared any troubles with their relationship before, and it felt like a betrayal. ‘Yes,’ she found herself saying. ‘We’ve said some terrible things to each other.’
Meena’s face softened into a sympathetic smile. ‘You’re both human… we all make mistakes and say things we don’t mean. What was your relationship like before this?’
‘Perfect.’ Ali’s voice caught on the word. ‘Tom was—is— everything I’ve ever wanted. We’ve never really had problems until now.’
‘Sometimes tragedies can drive a wedge between people. The important thing is that you keep communicating.’
Ali was silent. She knew she was the one who’d been pulling away from Tom, but she didn’t know how to find her way back to him without acknowledging what’d happened, and she couldn’t do that while the pain was still so great.
‘It’s OK if you still can’t talk about it,’ Meena said, as if reading her mind. ‘But I would advise you to find ways to stay connected to Tom.’
Or I’m going to lose him too, Ali thought.
Before
The combination of the spicy scent of Tom’s cologne and the anthemic soar of the music intoxicated Ali, and she hadn’t even had a drink yet. They’d only been out on their first date two nights ago and they’d barely touched one another, so the closeness of his body in the crowd was setting off all sorts of delicious sensations within her.
Normally she’d never agree to a second date so soon after a first, but after they’d discovered they both had tickets to see the Foo Fighters, she’d relented when he suggested they go together. Besides, this guy was different. She’d known it the second their eyes had met in the pub that night, and Ali didn’t usually believe in that rubbish. She was enjoying the anticipation of keeping him at arm’s length, holding off on physical contact for as long as possible, but now she could feel the outline of his body behind hers, and the electricity crackled between them, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to resist for much longer. She’d never felt such an instant attraction to someone before.
By degrees, she allowed herself to lean back into him, allowed his arms to encircle her waist and their bodies to sway together to the music. By the time the band left the stage and the applause thundered all around them, she was lost. She turned to him and then his lips were on hers and his stubble grazed her cheeks and his hands were in her hair and hers were clutching his back and their kiss drowned out the screams of the crowd around them begging for an encore.
Ali
Ali was in a foul mood when she left the office on Friday evening. The party had been polling badly and Alex was pushing her to get some good news stories out there, to try to turn the sentiment around and give the government a clear run to the March election in the new year.
The thing was, it wasn’t that easy. While the media were still theoretically unaware that Dixon was being investigated by the ICAC, journos had been salivating at the prospect of Dixon losing his head ever since the allegations of corruption had first come out. They weren’t going to drop the story just because Ali pushed fluff pieces on them. And to top it all off, she’d had another flashback and had barely made it to the toilet in time to throw up.
She headed to the bus stop on Grenfell Street and joined the end of the line of people waiting for the bus.
She used to shy away from it, but now her eyes automatically sought out the rounded bellies of pregnant women. It was bittersweet, somehow, to punish herself by looking at what she couldn’t have. Sometimes, she imagined stepping out onto Grenfell Street in the middle of peak hour and allowing one of the buses to mow her down. It would be easier in a lot of ways. Sure, Tom would grieve, but eventually he’d move on, find someone better. Someone who could give him the children he wanted.
But she never did it.
Her bus pulled up at the kerb with a screech and hiss of the air brakes. In that odd, politely Adelaide way, the line shuffled sideways up the footpath and the passengers for the bus peeled off in order and boarded, their metro cards out and ready. She didn’t check her emails or the news sites on the way home. She didn’t even take her phone out of her bag. She just stared straight ahead, digging her nails into her legs to quiet her mind.
* * *
The house was full of the rich smell of something meaty when Ali arrived home, and she groaned inwardly. Tom’s mother was probably here again, with a casserole big enough to sink a ship. But when she paused in the hallway, listening for her mother-in-law’s authoritative voice, all she heard was the sound of the Foo Fighters playing on the stereo.
Her heart quivered a little at the memory of her second date with Tom. They’d been intoxicated by one another back then. To be apart from him had felt like she couldn’t get enough air; every reunion was to feel drunk on the heady essence of him. It was hard to believe now, when it was so difficult just to be in the same room as him.
She took a breath and stepped into the living room. Tom stood behind the bench, tossing a green salad. Candles burned on the dining table, even though the sun still streamed through the window behind it.
Tom looked up at her and smiled. Once that smile had made her heart flip over and dance a jig. Now it filled her with a hollow ache.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘Cooking a romantic dinner for my wife. Beef bourguignon, your favourite.’
Her stomach swirled. This—the dinner, the candles, the music—was all for her. Tom washed his hands in the sink and came out from behind the bench. His arms wound around her waist. ‘I’m so proud of you for going back to the psychologist. I know how hard it must have been for you.’
He bent his head to kiss her, but the bitter taste of vomit still lingered in her mouth, and she didn’t want him to know. She pulled out of his embrace abruptly and tried to smile when his face fell. ‘I’ll just get changed, be back in a minute.’
She went to the ensuite and cleaned her teeth before returning to the kitchen. It’d been several days since she’d had a drink— she knew there was a bottle of white wine already in the fridge. That’d take the edge off, make it easier to talk to Tom, eat the meal he’d lovingly made for her. One glass wouldn’t hurt. It was Friday night, after all.
‘I thought you were getting changed?’ Tom said as she opened the fridge.
Ali looked down at the white shirt and navy skirt she still wore, as if they could answer for her, and gave a nervous laugh. ‘I must have got distracted. What happened to the wine that was in here?’
Tom didn’t answer straight away, and she turned to face him. His eyes shifted away from hers. ‘Actually, I thought we could both do with a break from the booze.’
Ali stared at him for a moment, then went over to the dining table and sat down at one of the set places. She focused hard on the warm flicker of the candle’s flame while she processed what he had told her.
‘I got some soda water, though,’ Tom said tentatively. ‘Would you like a glass?’
Ali bunched her skirt in her fists beneath the table as Tom poured the soda water into a wine glass and brought it over to her. She watched the little beads of effervescence as they streamed upwards to settle at the top for a few seconds before dissolving into the air. Tom returned to the kitchen bench and spooned a generous serve of the casserole that she knew she wouldn’t be able to eat onto a plate.
He lowered the volume on the stereo, toning down the frenetic drumming of ‘Monkey Wrench’, then brought their plates over to the table and sat down opposite her. The dark stew oozed greasily across her plate. Ali’s stomach turned and she drained the soda water in several long gulps, grimacing as the bubbles prickled in her nose. She stabbed a lettuce leaf with her fork and folded it into her mouth.
‘Try the beef.’ Tom’s eyes shone, eager for her opinion. ‘I think it’s one of
my better efforts.’
Ali chose a small piece of beef and tasted it. The meat was tender, the sauce rich with red wine and garlic. Six months ago, she would’ve devoured it, but now she had trouble even swallowing it. Tom was watching her for a reaction. She forced a smile.
‘It’s nice,’ she said. ‘But what it really needs is a good red to go with it. Shall I get a bottle?’
‘There’s none left.’
She frowned. ‘What do you mean, there’s none left? There’s a whole rack full of bottles.’
Tom fidgeted with his fork, moving it from hand to hand. ‘I took it all around to Mum’s this afternoon. I kept one bottle for the stew, but I used it all.’
His words rained over Ali. For a moment, all she could focus on was Tom’s habit of referring to his parents’ house as his mother’s. It had always annoyed her, but she’d never been able to work out whether it was the discounting of his father or his closeness to his mother that got to her. Gradually, the meaning of what he’d said dawned on her. ‘Why?’
Tom hesitated. It was obvious he didn’t want to have to speak the words, but Ali waited. She wanted to hear him say them.
‘Honey, I think you need to stop drinking for a while.’ He began to speak faster, stumbling over the words in his effort to get them out. ‘You hardly eat, you work long hours, and as soon as you come home you open a bottle.’
A mixture of anger and shame surged through Ali. How could she face her mother-in-law again after this? ‘I haven’t had a drink all week! I don’t need you to hide alcohol from me, Tom. If I want to drink, I’m old enough to do it whenever I like.’
Tom’s face was pained. ‘I’m just trying to help. I thought if you didn’t have it at home to tempt you, it might make it easier to give up. I was hoping…’ He faltered. ‘I was hoping we could try for another baby.’
She recoiled in horror and her hand knocked the empty wine glass onto its side with a hollow clang. There had been two pregnancies before Elizabeth. Ali had rarely thought about them since Elizabeth’s death, but now the memories of the miscarriages paraded through her head: the blood, the pain, an imagined future truncated.
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