The Mistake

by Wendy James

  ‘I don’t know.’ He answers before he thinks, and is shocked by this unexpected admission of doubt – quickly tries to qualify it. ‘Well, what I mean is … I do love Jodie, definitely, yes. I love her. But I’m so busy here – I haven’t had a moment to miss anybody really.’

  The girl’s scepticism is obvious. ‘You don’t actually sound all that definite, Angus. I’m busy too, but I know I’m missing home. That sounds like rubbish.’

  Angus shrugs, and reaches out for the wine bottle, fills his glass, then hers.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. I don’t know really. I don’t know what I think about anything, right now.’ He takes a sip. ‘To be honest, what I’d like to do is just stay here, forever.’

  ‘What, stay in England? Working your guts out? Doesn’t sound like much fun to me.’

  ‘It’s not that – I don’t mind the work.’ He fumbles to find what it is that he means – it’s something he’s working out now, as he speaks. ‘It’s just that here, I don’t have to be anyone … No one here expects anything of me. I’m just this kind of … organism, going through life, soaking things up. Nobody has any expectations of me. There’s nothing to prove.’

  She sounds puzzled. ‘But I’d have thought you’d have a lot to prove. All the stuff you’re learning, being in a new place, being Australian.’

  ‘Yeah. There’s that. But in a way, that’s not about me. I don’t have to be … nothing’s personal. I don’t have to be that person everyone wants me to be, the person I’ve been all my life. You know – you’re from a small town. I’m good old Angus Garrow, always reliable, always doing the right thing. If I go to work here and I’m an absolute arsehole, it almost doesn’t mean anything. I don’t mean anything.’

  ‘But that’s exactly what I hate about being here! I hate being invisible. No one knows me, no one cares what I do. It’s like here, I don’t exist. Like nothing I do touches anyone.’ Amelia sounds miserable all of a sudden, close to tears. Angus moves closer, pats her awkwardly on the knee.

  ‘Hey, it’s okay. I’ve met you now. You’re not invisible to me.’

  She wipes her eyes angrily. ‘Oh, it’s stupid, isn’t it? I thought it would be sooo bloody fantastic. You know, you have all those ideas and dreams about university, about making it in the big city – it’s something you’ve waited for all your life. You’re grown up and you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do and you can make all your own decisions, go where you want, when you want, with whoever you want. But there’s no one I want to see, no one to go anywhere with. I go to uni, I hand in my essays, I go to the library, I see all these people hanging out – they all seem to know one another, have places to go. But me, I feel like I’m pretending. I just want to go back home, and wake up in the morning to the sounds of my little sister and brother racing around the house, my mum yelling at me to get up and get ready for school. Everything I was desperate to get away from. God, I’m sorry.’ Suddenly she’s attempting a grin. ‘You’ve just been practically knocked over by a car, and here I am, moaning. Just ignore me – it’s the wine talking. Wine-ing.’

  Angus thinks for a moment. ‘Hey, listen. Why don’t we go out to one of those places you always wanted to go – and there are all the places I really wanted to go to, too, before I actually got here. What about a club – we could listen to some music. Is there a show you want to see?’

  ‘Oh, but I’m completely broke,’ she says doubtfully, ‘and you’ve had a bit of a shock, you’re not really in any state to go out.’

  ‘I’ve got tons of cash, so it’ll be my pleasure. I’ve barely spent anything since I’ve been here.’ He gives a regretful smile. ‘But you’re right – not tonight. I am too sore. And to be honest, I’m probably too pissed.’

  She touches his knee gently. ‘You should probably have a bath and go to bed. You’re going to be really sore tomorrow.’

  He can feel his erection return, captures her hand beneath his. ‘Actually,’ his voice catches in his throat, ‘a bath is exactly what I need. But I think,’ his voice creaky, almost apologetic, he moves her unresisting hand further up his thigh, ‘I think I might need some help with that. Maybe you could …’

  She moves closer, he can hear her breathing, fast and shallow, her other hand slips around his waist, under his shirt, her fingers warm this time across his chest. ‘I could,’ she says. ‘Whatever you need, just say.’

  It’s an odd affair, not an affair of passion for either of them, or so it seems to Angus, but one of mutual need – two lonely transiting souls needing companionship for a few months: a warm body to share a bed, a warm heart to share the occasional bottle of wine, film, trip to the theatre, dance, visit to an art gallery. The inevitability of the relationship’s end – it is limited from the start by Angus’s necessary return home – doesn’t make the whole thing any more urgent or desperate, rather the opposite; they both seem to take a certain pleasure in the temporary nature of the affair.

  In the end, it’s all over well before Angus’s departure – and just weeks before Jodie’s surprise appearance – when Amelia returns home to Dorset after her second-term holiday, taking a job as a residential tutor at a local boarding school, deferring her studies until the following year.

  Angus misses Amelia far more than he imagined possible. He hasn’t heard from her at all – was informed by a bemused Martin of her decision – and spends several weeks working hard, staying back ever later at the office, giving himself as little spare time as possible, anxious to avoid the nagging sense of loss he feels whenever he’s at home alone. He resists for weeks the temptation to call and speak to her on the phone, but finds himself hoping, every day, for some word of or from her – a postcard, a phone message. But there is nothing. It isn’t until he overhears Martin, on the phone to some friend, mention that he’s met up with Amelia’s brother, who’s told him that Amelia is on the mend, that he has even the faintest inkling that the affair might have meant more to Amelia than to him, and that she’d sensibly taken herself away to avoid getting in any deeper.

  He is stricken – and wonders at his own stupidity: of course, this terrible hollowness that he’s been feeling, that he thought was merely boredom, or overwork, is the result of missing her, missing Amelia. He determines to see her again – plans a trip into Dorset, has gone so far as to book a room (always hopeful – a double) in a pub near her school, has prepared in his mind a sort of speech, a conversation. And he has half made up his mind that he should, as Amelia – rather surprisingly, considering her reticence about matters personal – had suggested once or twice, rethink his hasty engagement. He has even attempted a ‘Dear John’ letter, has begun many times, but can never finish, never overcome his sense of cowardice, along with a nagging uncertainty about the real state of his feelings, the possibility that he might be mistaken, that he shouldn’t be making such a decision from so far away. Anyway, it was all for nothing – Jodie arrives without warning, just a few days before his planned departure for Dorset. There is no trip, no resumption of his casual affair with Amelia – no test of whether it was in fact something stronger, something more momentous than a temporary affair.

  And there is no ‘goodbye’ letter written to Jodie, then or ever. She stays with him during his last few weeks in London, and the almost immediate revival of Angus’s old feelings for her reassure him that his initial choice has been the right one. He knows that he loves her, without any reservations, knows that she is the girl for him. And despite a few unsubtle hints from Martin, who, Angus thinks, rather fancies Jodie himself, Jodie has not the slightest idea of what has been going on.

  They return to Australia as planned, move in together, finish their studies. They keep their engagement secret, and disregarding his mother’s disapproval and parrying her continued attempts to keep them apart, they marry immediately after Angus finishes his degree. When he secures a position in Arding, the young couple move back, set up home, slipping easily into the town’s familiar rhythms.

  E
ven before the children come along, Angus feels himself grow solid, established, sees the pattern of his life stretching out inexorably before him. But he’s not, he’s never, discontent, is well aware of his good fortune – he loves his career, his kids, his wife, in this he never wavers. He rarely thinks about Amelia, but occasionally he dreams of those first moments between them – the English girl’s unconditional kindness, her gentle touch – and wakes feeling inexplicably bereft, almost homesick. It’s a yearning that can’t be explained, can’t be resisted, one that he has always been able to satisfy, up until Wanda, with a fling, an inconsequential sexual adventure. It’s some sort of resistance to a life settled so early; or a reclamation, perhaps, of another love, another life, never lived.

  SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

  ‘Stepford perfection hides dark interior’

  by Caro McNally

  I had coffee with a couple of friends the other day, and inevitably the conversation got around to the topic du jour, the bizarre tale of Mrs Jodie Garrow and her long-missing child.

  Like most of the nation we’d all seen the interviews and statements, gawked over the photos of the blondely pretty, impossibly preserved forty-three-year-old, watched her carefully choreographed television interview and seen snaps of that happy, happy, happy nuclear family.

  We’re all around her age. One of my friends worked out that she’d actually attended the same small city college at the same time as Jodie. They didn’t know one another, of course: Sophia was in Communications, Jodie in the then brand-new Faculty of Nursing, but maybe they sat together at the bistro, or bumped into one another in the library queue. Who knows? We none of us knew her – and we none of us even knew anyone like her. We’ve all exclaimed in disbelief at her professed naiveté: how could a bright girl of our generation – and I like to think we Gen-Xers were no less savvy than teenagers now – how on earth could such a girl have got knocked up and not known about it until it was too late? And how could she go through the whole birth drama alone, without reading up a little, finding out something about the legal ramifications of adoption and so forth? It’s unimaginable, and – we all agreed – frankly unbelievable.

  There’s something highly ‘sus’ – in the parlance of our long-ago youth – about the whole thing. It was easier – much easier – to believe that she’d done away with the child (and we could all imagine that grisly act; it’s not all that hard to dispose of a not-quite-three-kilo, 22-inch newborn, after all, not hard to drive to a secluded spot – a dam, a river, a deserted industrial bin – to dump said child) than to believe anyone could have been so naive. We’re talking about the late eighties here, not the nineteen fifties.

  Not since the Chamberlain case has the story of a missing child so gripped the Australian imagination. In case you’re wondering, yes – I was too young to have really understood all the ins and the outs of the Chamberlain debacle, though I do remember (or is it just the footage from the film, masquerading as a memory?) some rather heated discussions, and the polarisation of opinion between those who wanted to shoot the dingo, and those who would have taken pleasure in shooting poor Lindy.

  Not since the Chamberlain case has the nation been so galvanised, so shaken from its usual apathy and indifference. Forget about conversations around the water cooler – I’ve been accosted by little old ladies at the newsagents, those customarily gentle blue-rinse types on their way to bowls, or to meals-on-wheels or whatever, who practically froth at the mouth when confronted with front page pics of the woman in question.

  ‘Just look at her,’ one little old lady spat, completely without encouragement. ‘So cool, so calm. Not a hair out of place. Ought to be strung up, women like that. There’s women out there’d give their right arm to have a baby. Oh, that poor little mite. You hate to think what she did with it.’

  There’s the photographs the murders have supplied for use in the media, no doubt to make Jodie Garrow look as mild, as respectable, as appealing, as just-one-of-us as possible. Oh, but how they’ve missed their mark. The one taken out the front of her – dare I use the term? – McMansion, the rendered, two-storey job that seems oddly out of place in the dignified university town of Arding. (I lived in Arding myself as a student, and chez Garrow is a far cry from the charmingly dilapidated – and utterly freezing in winter – weatherboard cottage of my student days.) Garrow is pictured standing calmly on the doorstep (the front of her 4WD just nosing its way into the viewfinder, though the sleek black Audi coupe is perfectly clear) with her arms around her teenage daughter – who provides the only jarring note with her scowl – and her young son, who’s standing beside her looking positively boy-scoutish in his private-school uniform with his short back and sides, his boater. The lawyer husband (from a wealthy grazing family), handsome, tall, obviously supportive, is standing protectively behind them all.

  And then there’s Jodie herself – her hair neatly bobbed, glistening, the expensive jeans, the padded vest that’s de riguer for all good middle-class mums, the single row of pearls around her neck. She’s slim, she’s pretty, she’s blonde; her teeth are perfectly white and even. She’s the kind of woman that I – and a lot of women I know – love to hate. No doubt she’s a good enough woman – a paragon of a mother (now that it suits her!), a good citizen, working at the school canteen every week, running the netball team, volunteering at the hospital once a month. But what difference does it make in the end? What difference does any of that make to the child that went missing?

  In the photos her expression isn’t precisely joyous – I mean she’s not grinning, no one could be that silly; but she’s not exactly grim, either, is she? You can’t see any discomfort, any sense of having transgressed in any way, can you? She looks calm, collected, beautiful, cold. Untouched and untouchable. And that’s why we’re so suspicious. We get the sense that she remains unmoved by her own situation, that she’ll be buffered, protected, by all that material privilege. In a way, she’s representative of all that’s wrong with modern Western culture, isn’t she? She’s got everything she needs and wants – I suppose so many of us do – but there’s no questioning of her right to all these privileges. We all know what her life is like: her house is dirty, she calls a cleaner. The car engine’s playing up; she can buy a new one. Her teeth aren’t as good as they used to be. Well, cap ’em. Sebastian or Olivia aren’t happy at one school, send ’em to another. A baby you don’t want? Easy, just get rid of it.

  And whatever happened to that baby all those years ago – whether or not she sold it to ‘Simon and Rosemary’ on the advice of poor old Matron O’Malley; or did the unmentionable, unthinkable – whatever it was that happened to that child, you can almost be certain that it’s never given her a restless night’s sleep, never added a single wrinkle to that smooth (botoxed?) brow.

  You also have to wonder about the Garrows’ very savvy manipulation of the media – what sort of people would have the nous to go to the media themselves (surely it’s like inviting a vampire over the threshold)? And to offer a generous reward for information just days before the police initiate their search? These people are too clever by half, methinks. Then there’s the language of Garrow’s public statement: it’s as brief and as uninformative as possible, every word measured. There’s no way to read anything significant between those lines, because there’s simply nothing there. Even in her single television interview she remains chillingly composed: there is no sense of stress or strain, no hesitation, no erring from the script in any way. Jodie Garrow’s husband is a lawyer, and no doubt she’s been prepped by the best, but still – you’d think there’d be a slight bursting out of emotion, even a quaver.

  And then there’s her excuse – that she’d been young and silly – that she’d made a mistake, a series of mistakes. Well, it’s lame. Actually it’s more than lame – it’s a criminal misuse of language. We’ve all been young and silly, and we’ve all made mistakes.

  But this wasn’t just a ‘mistake’, Jodie. This was a baby.

 
; 23

  Of all the things that have been said about her, this last should mean nothing. She should be immune by now; she has been deserted by her friends, denounced by her own mother, accused of having the face of a killer – and yet nothing has rocked her as much as this. Something in the woman’s writing, her tone, has hit something raw in Jodie, something vital. Once – in some former life – that woman, that writer, Jodie can’t even bear to think of her name now, had actually been someone whose writing Jodie had admired, whose opinions she’d respected. She’d once assumed they were on the same side – apparently not.

  Part of her – and it’s a big part of her – still wants to admire this woman. She imagines writing a letter, explaining herself, providing a little potted bio – stories from her not so straightforward life – trying to win this woman over, to have her see Jodie as she sees herself. Look, she’d like to tell her, these were my parents, my brothers, this is the house – not home – I grew up in, this was my life as a child. It’s not what you assume; things were hard, I wasn’t loved, I wasn’t told that I was special, as you no doubt were, as so many others were. I was never told that the world was my oyster, that I could have what I wanted, if only I worked hard enough, used my brains.

  She’d like to show this woman just how limited, how stunted, her expectations had been; that everything she had she’d had to fight hard for, sharpened tooth and bloodied claw, that nothing, not one thing – not her neat blonde hair, not the handsome husband, not the two-car garage in the nice suburban street – had come easily, none of this had come, as it were, naturally. She’d like an apology from the woman, like her to offer an alternative story, more sympathetic, a narrative that included not only her mistake, but some understanding of all that had led to that moment – because even now, or perhaps even more now as she ages, as she sees what a singularly difficult road she’d had to travel, now she has more sympathy for that girl – so determined to succeed, so hopelessly unworldly, so desperately alone.