by Tim Buckley
“I told him I would pay for it. He said I should send the money to him and then, after a couple of days, I should come to the hospital where he would have the treatment. We could talk while he was recovering and he could get to work straightaway, as soon as the doctor said he was ready.” She paused, took a breath, then went on. “I know where you write the codes, for the internet bank, so I logged on and sent him the money. It was a lot of money, an awful lot of money, but he said the treatment was expensive and it would mean that he could get back to helping people again. Then I went to Sydney, to the hospital but…”
But he wasn’t there, and the hospital had never heard of him. He was in the wind, him and our money. And it was a lot of money.
“I’ve been searching for him,” she whispered, “I thought I would find him. Or that he would contact me. But…”
I didn’t have any words, or none that were worth saying. I could have told her she’d been stupid. I could have said she had no right to use our money without talking to me. I could have shouted and ranted and asked what the fuck she’d been thinking. A fucking psychic?! Would search the universe for Cara’s energy?! Her fucking energy, for Christ’s sake?! But what would have been the point? She didn’t need to be told any of that.
It wasn’t even about the money, not really. It was about something much more important than that, something that went to the heart of everything that we were. It was about being on the same side, two halves of the same whole. One of the reasons we didn’t need other people in our lives was that we were so strong together, as a self-contained unit set somewhere just outside the rest of the world. Emily had gone behind my back to talk to somebody about finding Cara. That was our job, together. It was our job to search for her and to do whatever it was going to take. She locked me out of that and that was what I couldn’t forgive. We were supposed to be a team but she’d gone rogue. Sure, she would say she did that because she knew I’d object, that I’d say it was a scam. But that wasn’t the point. She had no right to do it without me.
She told me later, a long time later when we were finally able to talk about it without the conversation spiralling into a riot of recriminations and tears, she told me that she had justified it to herself by comparing it to when I had lent the money to Cathal. I had given him our money without telling her, so how could she not be entitled to use that same money for the most important thing of all, to get Cara back? It wouldn’t have made any difference, of course. Even if I hadn’t given him the money, she would have found some other reason or justification. But it allowed her to do it and to feel that she had every right. I suppose, too, that she didn’t really see money as a constraint given our Lottery good fortune. I can’t argue with that, if I’m being honest, and it was her money just as much as it was mine. But there was no need for that conversation. It was done, and maybe we were too.
39
I moved out later that day with just a bag of bits and pieces to show for forty-odd years in the world. I booked into a hotel about an hour down the coast. I could probably have stayed with Nathan or with Bobby, or I could have booked into a hotel in town, but to be honest I just wanted to get away from all of it.
In the end, the conversation with Emily was chillingly frank. We had been struggling for months to stop our marriage falling apart, being ripped apart by forces that we just couldn’t control. One or other of us was storming out of the house every week, it seemed, and the constant breaking up and making up was exhausting. I had had enough, and I think Emily had too. We couldn’t keep pretending that it was all going to be OK. We had been surviving by thinking about how it would be when we found Cara, how everything would go back to normal and we could settle back into life. But even if we did find her, we had to know that we were broken. We had always been different people with different views of the world, but we’d made it work. The days and weeks and months had only served to expose in a brutal, stark white light what we had to accept was true. The Emperor was naked. It was all a hopeless charade.
We didn’t shout, there was no nastiness. I tried to keep it together while Emily cried and I avoided her eyes as I walked out the door. The babydoll sheep watched me go without a sound, their wide eyes following me to the jeep. They had seen us drive away before, but they knew better this time, they knew that this time was for keeps. I sent Nathan a text to say that I wouldn’t be out to the site for a few days, to call me if anything urgent came up. I told him I’d sort out the project account and that there would be funds in it the next day. A few minutes later my phone rang; it was Nathan. I dismissed the call and turned it off. Whatever it was, it could wait until tomorrow.
I got to the hotel and checked in to my room, and poured myself a beer on the balcony that looked out over the ocean. I sat there until the day started to fade and the bottles piled up on the table. The metronomic light of the Cape Leeuwin lighthouse flashed against the dark clouds behind the hill. The wind picked up and rattled the shutters on the windows. Out there, out on the tip of the continent, I felt really, truly alone for the first time in so many years. Alone and forgotten and irrelevant. If I didn’t have Emily and if I didn’t have Cara, then who really would care if I never came back? If I left a heap of clothes on the beach and walked out into the ocean? Brendan might go round the corner to the pub with Jess to raise a glass to my memory. Nathan and the builders would talk about me for a few nights in the Schoolhouse but then get back to whatever the next job was that had to be done. Bobby and Karl and Mitch would have forgotten about me by next Christmas, maybe stop to remember me when my name came up in town or when they saw a bottle of Emily’s wine in the bottle store. Cathal and Seán and Mairéad… what would they think? That they didn’t have to repay the loan? That there might be a bequest on its way, or one they could claim? And that was that. That was the legacy I’d leave behind to commemorate a life spent chasing shadows.
***
I woke up the next morning to the sound of housekeeping rapping on my door and barging into my room before my mouth and brain could coordinate to send them away. My head throbbed and my mouth tasted like a possum had holed up there for the winter. I checked my phone to see what time it was and saw a message from Nathan.
“Need cash for suppliers today. URGENT.”
Shit. I’d meant to make the transfer before I hit the beer the night before but I’d forgotten and he’d obviously checked first thing to find the cupboards bare. I got up and showered and brought my laptop down to the restaurant so that I could at least get a coffee while I made the transfers. When Brendan had recruited Brian to tackle the fiasco that was my finances, he had taught me a few simple tricks to keep control over my cash. He taught me how to budget and to make sure I didn’t spend more than I had. He taught me how to make provisions for costs that were coming down the track that I’d have to meet so that I didn’t find myself saddled with a big bill and no way to pay it. He taught me how to check that I had received any money that was owed to me from any bits of business that I managed to sell. The problem was that, after we won the Lottery, there seemed no real need to be so meticulous about it. There was never a problem with bills because there was always enough money to pay them. There was no real need to budget because we could afford whatever we wanted. And I’d stopped selling any business so there was no income to control. The complacency that bred meant that I’d stopped checking our accounts as regularly as I used to until, in the end, I hardly checked them at all. If there was a problem, the bank would call me and if we needed money for the lighthouse, Nathan would tell me how much and what for. I hadn’t looked at any of it for months, so wrapped up were we in everything else that was going on and that morning, when I did have a look, the brutal truth of our financial situation was laid bare before me.
We’d put our money into a portfolio of accounts and financial products recommended by an investment manager at the bank. Neither Emily nor I were very adventurous and it wasn’t like we needed to earn a lot fro
m our money, so we opted for a conservative set of products and pretty much left the money to look after itself. We had one account to take care of our living expenses. That was the one that had our ATM cards, that paid our utility bills and taxes, that paid our credit card bills – in short, we lived out of that account. I also took money out of that account to fund the lighthouse. We’d set things up so that the account was automatically topped up as necessary by moving money out of our various investments and savings accounts, and that was the problem. We had spent a lot of money. Every month, we had been haemorrhaging cash and every month the drawdown from our investments was getting bigger and bigger.
At first, I thought it must have been a mistake or maybe even a fraud, that there was no way we could have been spending that much money. As I drilled down into it, though, it was clear that there was no mistake. It wasn’t as though we’d been especially flamboyant. We hadn’t bought expensive cars or a boat or been on extravagant holidays. It was just that we were getting through it like it was never going to end. We liked the nice things that we had never been able to afford before and we didn’t deny ourselves anything. On top of that, we had probably wasted a lot of money on the vineyard by virtue of not really knowing what we were doing and I know we had double-spent on a lot of stuff by simply making bad decisions. And on top of that again, there was the lighthouse and the endless transfers to the project account. Once Cara was born, of course, it all just ramped up even more until it really was getting out of control.
I decided it was time to get all “Brian” about the whole process. I asked the waitress for a pen and a piece of paper and I drew lines to make columns for all the ways we were blowing our fortune. After a while I just stopped. I didn’t need to go any further to see that we were managing to live beyond even our lottery-funded means and, if we didn’t cut it out, we were going to run out of money soon. I sat back in the chair and asked the waitress for another coffee, while I could still afford it. I rubbed my eyes and tried to get my addled head around the problem. Around all of the problems, because there were a lot.
The first was the lighthouse. I knew that it had been bleeding money and I suppose I knew, deep down, that it was probably costing more than I could afford. The question was whether or not we should cut our losses and cut it off now, or get some value out of what we had spent by finishing the job. I needed to talk to Nathan about it so in the end I transferred just what we needed for that week and pushed the decision off to when I had less of a headache.
The second was how to break the news to Emily. I didn’t know if we were over or if we would, as we had so many times before, find a way to get through this. Deep down, though, I knew that this time it was different. This time it wasn’t going to be easily fixed or patched up, this time we wouldn’t be able to brush it under the sofa and act as though nothing had changed. This was going to be difficult. Or maybe it was the end, what then? What would we do with the house, the investments, the money, the vineyard…? It was far too soon to be thinking about it but at some point we might have to divide it all up and come to an arrangement that was fair and that gave us both a fresh start. The problem was that there was far less money than we thought and so I had to tell Emily, to let her know the position we were in. But if I was to go back to her now and tell her that she had to rein in her spending, that we were heading for broke, would she believe me? Would she trust me that I wasn’t simply conning her out of what was hers? After all, she had even less idea what was going on with our finances. The only time she had ever accessed our accounts was to pay that fucking charlatan in Sydney. After everything that had happened the past few days, the wounds were still open and raw. How do you talk about money at a time like that?
And the third problem was how to make this right, how to make the money we had left go far enough to give each of us a life. The only way to do that was to sell the lighthouse and the vineyard. The vineyard I was pretty sure we could sell. We had done a lot of work on the house and it was in good repair, and the land was in prime winemaking country. There might be a bit of ganging up by the local producers who had an axe to grind, but it was worth a lot of money and it would sell. The lighthouse was a different proposition. Even if I could afford to get it to a state where I could realistically put it on the market, it was a small market and there was no guarantee I would be able to sell it. If I didn’t finish it I would be liable for the costs of tearing it down and I just didn’t have that kind of money to spend on nothing. I had no choice but to get it finished so that at least the council might take it off me for nothing but without penalising me for failing to deliver what I had promised to the planning committee.
It felt callous to be thinking like that, only a day after I’d left home, melodramatic even. I thought back to those evenings sitting in Dublin just after we’d won the Lottery, talking about dreams for the future and all of the things we could do. Nothing seemed out of our reach, nothing seemed impossible. And it had all come to this.
40
“I’ve put on some toast,” she says, “butter and jam OK?”
I nod and go over to the French windows that lead out onto the stoop and into the garden. We took out almost the whole back wall and replaced it with a huge concertina window that folds away to open up the entire back of the house, bringing the outside in. Beyond the little garden, the field slopes gently down to the old paddock, all red earth and dust. Her precious vines have been hard-pruned and stand gnarled and stunted, like an army of ancient creatures ranked to defend the fields. Vinosaurs, perhaps… Between the rows, the drills are weedless and clean. The little babydoll sheep are gone, of course, and I’m surprised to find that I miss the little buggers. In the outbuildings that remain after we knocked down what was barely standing, her little machines and tools are neatly stacked. All of the fencing has been fixed and gleams with coat upon coat of fresh white paint. Not a thing is out of place. Away in the distance, the mountains are cloaked in a blue haze that shimmers and floats on the air like wisps of smoke. Apart from the hot chirruping of insects, there is hardly a sound.
“Vinosaurs…” I mumble under my breath and smile.
“Did you say something?” Emily has brought over a plate of toasted soda bread dripping with butter from the kitchen and she offers me some.
I take a piece and shake my head. She wouldn’t get it. Crunching toast echoes in the silence and she outwaits me, as usual.
“What’s the plan, so?” I say at last.
She shrugs and some of the deliberately casual confidence that she has dug up from somewhere deep seems to ebb from her face. We look at one another for a moment, it’s the first time in a long time that I’ve held her stare. There’s the briefest pause in the flow of time and it’s the first time in a long time that I’ve really seen the flecks of grey in the blue of her eyes or the freckles on her cheekbone. Is that what happens when you get the feeling that you’ve been here before, that sense of déjà vu? Somewhere two people have paused time for a split second and you’ve come to in the place you left a long moment ago?
I take a mouthful from my coffee to break the spell.
“I suppose we should probably start in the garage,” I say. “There’s a ton of old crap in there.”
“Oh God, no,” she grimaces, “the garage is a disaster, I swear it. How about we start in the spare room? Maybe ease ourselves into it a bit, eh?”
It’s my turn to shrug. I don’t really care how we do this, I just want it to be done.
“Do we have any old boxes or bags to put the rubbish in?” I ask.
She throws a hand up to her forehead and closes her eyes.
“Oh crap, I should have thought of that, shouldn’t I?” she says. “I’m such an idiot. Sorry, Wilde.”
She looks at me like a child who’s just knocked over a mug of tea – she knows she’s done bad but she’s kind of hoping I’ll find her too pretty to be angry. I’m not angry. Not because she’s pretty
, but because we’ve been through too much bullshit and I’m too weary to get mad about rubbish bags. And she is pretty.
“Hang on,” she raises a finger in the air, puts down her coffee and runs back into the kitchen. There’s some banging and scuffling and finally she comes back with a wad of plastic shopping bags. “Would these do, d’you think?”
It takes me a second before I realise she’s not joking and I shake my head.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say, and I’m still not mad but I have to keep the bubbling beginning of that familiar frustration out of my voice. If she gets even a waft of that then this is all going to hell in a handcart. “Let’s just get started. We can put what’s for throwing out in a pile and I’ll get something to put it all in later.”
“OK. There probably won’t be that much to throw away anyway, I’d say?”
You know those people who, every time you meet them, have a new plan, a new epiphany for a future of guaranteed happiness or wealth or health or all three? Well, we were those people. It’s not that we were ever looking for a way out of an unhappy life or that we were ungrateful for what we’d been given, it’s just that we were just always looking for the secret formula. In those days before Cara, we were so invigorated by the world of opportunity that had just opened up in front of us. We had discovered an unknown world of such excitement that we couldn’t believe that another even greater utopia wasn’t just another half-mile up the road and round the corner. What we had known for so long was beige and anodyne and dull but we’d accepted it on the basis that we knew no better. Now we’d been allowed to peer into something else and we didn’t want to pass up a single drop of the joy that that “something else” might offer.