The Aftermath

by Gail Schimmel

  I know from experience that I have to stay calm, and today I actually manage it, and eventually we find a hairstyle Mackenzie considers acceptable. She sprays almost a whole bottle of hairspray on it while I bite my tongue, and happiness is restored.

  I get Mackenzie to school on time, but Mrs Wood looks at me like a storm cloud and I remember I haven’t sent her the email. I touch her arm and say, ‘Such a comfort to me, knowing Mackenzie has a teacher who cares.’ Mrs Wood swells up with pride, and I promise to send her an email during the day.

  As I leave the class, I bump into Trish, another mum, and we take a few minutes for small talk and air kissing.

  ‘We must do drinks soon,’ says Trish as we part.

  ‘Totally,’ I agree. ‘Message me. Divine.’

  On the way to the car Janice runs after me, wanting to talk about a rumour she’s heard that the school is going to make sport compulsory from grade 1. I’m unclear if Janice thinks this is a good idea or a terrible one. I’m just worried it might disrupt my schedule and mean that Mackenzie can’t do horse-riding any more, which she loves. Which reminds me that she has horse-riding this afternoon.

  As soon as I can get away from Janice, I pull out my phone to check that I haven’t scheduled anything in conflict with the horse-riding, and find that I have a hair appointment. I need to change that to this morning, and then I can work on the Pinterest boards for the three wedding plans while I am at the hairdresser. I’m about to call the hairdresser when my phone rings, and it’s my old school friend Tatum, wanting to meet so that we can start planning our school reunion.

  ‘It’s sixteen years,’ I say. ‘Shouldn’t we wait till twenty to have a big one?’ But Tatum is determined, and I suspect a bit bored, so we schedule a coffee for next week and I ring off. Which reminds me that I’m meeting Chrissie for coffee now to talk about the event for her child’s class.

  I walk a bit faster to the car, dialling the hairdresser as I go. They fit me in for later that morning, which just gives me time for the coffee with Chrissie. If I’m quick, I can stop at Liandri’s on the way and drop off her lasagne. Hopefully the baby will be asleep and I can simply glance and run – if it’s awake I’ll have to stay for ages, reassuring her that it’s the most beautiful baby ever born. And I can’t even remember if it’s a boy or a girl.

  Then, after the hairdresser, I can drop off the lasagne at Mrs James’s and do some grocery shopping before I fetch Mackenzie. Mackenzie needs to go home, change clothes, and have lunch before horse-riding. I can work on setting up the meetings with the brides while she has her lesson, and then drop her at my parents – who are babysitting – on the way to a charity dinner at the hotel tonight.

  I sigh and lean my head on the headrest for a moment – but I don’t have time to stop. Chrissie will be waiting.

  As I pull off, Daniel phones. I think about not answering, and I wonder why he always seems to contact me at the worst time in my day. But my mum always says that a problem delayed is a problem doubled, and I kind of live by that.

  ‘Can we meet?’ says Daniel. ‘We need to talk.’

  I think through the schedule I’ve just created, instinctively trying to make time for him. And then I remember I don’t have to.

  ‘Friday,’ I say, two days from now. ‘I can meet you at exactly eight thirty after I drop Mackenzie, but only for half an hour.’

  Daniel is silent, and I switch the phone to Bluetooth so I can negotiate the traffic.

  ‘When did it become so hard for us to find time for each other?’ he eventually says.

  I suck the air through my teeth.

  ‘When you fucked my best friend,’ I say, keeping my tone conversational. ‘I would say it dates back to that.’ I turn the corner and pull into a parking space outside the coffee shop where I’m meeting Chrissie. ‘See you on Friday, Daniel.’

  I have to breathe deeply before I can think of getting out of the car. Because I’ve just admitted a truth I haven’t voiced until now. Julia isn’t an old friend and she isn’t a person I saw daily. But she never wanted anything from me except my company, and she made me laugh, and in a short time I’d come to think of her as my best friend.

  It goes without saying that I was wrong about that, but when I lost Daniel, I lost my friend too. Julia probably has lots of people like that in her life, but I don’t. And it makes me sad.

  I straighten my clothes and get out of the car. Chrissie is sitting at a table inside and she brightens when she sees me, and gives a little wave.

  I plaster a smile to my face, and get on with it.

  Helen

  I wake up excited. I can’t remember the last time I woke up excited. Probably on the morning of The Accident, picturing a perfect family outing ahead of us, not knowing that my life as I knew it was about to end. But for once, not even that thought takes away my excitement. This evening Julia is coming to tell me something. And it’s either going to be that she’s getting married or that she’s pregnant, I know it. And I have always promised myself that as soon as Julia has a baby, I can die – it’s the deal I made with myself all those years ago.

  Because I, of all people, know that loving a child is bigger than anything. If she has a baby, she’ll have someone of her own, someone who needs her. I’ll have done my job. I’ll be free.

  Today is different. Today, I’m excited. But I still have hours to go before Julia comes. And it’s my half day and that usually means one thing.

  But first, work.

  I had to stop nursing after The Accident. When it happened, Julia was two, and I had just gone back to work. I had a few shifts a week in the emergency department and emergency theatre, because that was my favourite area of nursing, and I had a postgraduate diploma in emergency medicine as well as my nursing degree. I loved the adrenaline rush and the feeling of being really important, making a difference, making choices that could save a person. For some reason, I could cope with the fact that I also made choices that could kill a person. I knew that, in the big picture, my work was important.

  Mike used to admire me for it. He used to say I had more balls than any man he knew. He used to say that the sight of me would give anyone the will to live.

  I tried to go back after The Accident. We needed money, despite the insurance, and I knew my only hope of salvation was to keep busy. On my first shift back, everyone was gentle with me, and patient. When I spent ten minutes dithering about whether a victim of food poisoning should be put on a drip or sent for a stomach pump, another nurse quietly took over, pretending that she needed me to look over her notes. And when I froze when a child had a fit in the waiting room, my colleagues seamlessly managed the crisis. We all thought I would adjust. Nobody was worried, not even me.

  And then there was a bus accident, and our hospital was the closest. There were twenty-two people on that bus – mostly mothers and children. Seven died at the scene, fifteen were brought in. It was the sort of situation where I used to be at my best – ‘Queen of the Crisis’, they even used to call me. But when I saw the first child being wheeled through, I froze. I was back reliving the night of The Accident, and all I could think of was that if I made one wrong decision, somebody’s life would be as bad as mine.

  I backed away from the trolleys being wheeled past me until I was against a wall. When the trolleys had passed, I heard someone calling me: ‘Sister Helen!’

  I opened my mouth to answer, but nothing came out. Keeping my back to the wall, and my hands on it for support, I crab-walked my way to the staff-room, where we kept our bags. I sat down on a hard chair for a moment, hands on my knees, trying to will myself back into the woman I had been, for Julia’s sake.

  But that woman was gone, and so was her career.

  I packed up my stuff and walked out. Yet another chapter closed.

  But I needed to work – both emotionally and financially – and I eventually found a job as a receptionist in a busy doctors’ practice. There are six doctors and when I’m on duty, I’m the only recepti
onist. My duties involve answering the phones, making appointments, phoning various suppliers and reps, and doing mild medical tasks like taking blood pressure and testing urine. When I started, I was a bit worried the medical bit would throw me – but it’s benign enough that I can handle it. Nobody is going to die if I get the urine test wrong. But it is lots of different things to juggle, so it keeps me very busy. That’s what I needed then, and now. To be so busy I can’t think. And when I’m busy, I can try to act normal. Nobody at work thinks of me as a friend, but I also don’t think they realise that I’m dead inside, because I’m always moving, always doing something.

  When Julia was little, I only worked mornings. It took two people to do the same job in the afternoon, and the doctors were always amazed by that. ‘Are you sure you don’t need some help, Helen?’ they’d ask, and I would shake my head.

  ‘It’s easy,’ I would answer, and compared to the life-or-death stuff I was dealing with, it was.

  With Julia all grown up, I work all day – but I do have Wednesday afternoons off, and it still takes two people to relieve me.

  When I get to work, Dr Marigold is already there, which is unusual – I’m normally the first in and the last to leave.

  ‘Morning, Helen,’ says Dr Marigold, a young man fresh out of training who expects me to call him Ewan. I’m not usually a formal woman but old habits die hard, and I struggle with this business of calling doctors by their first names. So I just call them all ‘Doc’.

  ‘Morning, Doc,’ I say. ‘You’re in early.’

  Dr Marigold looks at me. ‘I am,’ he says. ‘I’m worried about a patient I saw yesterday. I feel like I missed something. I want to go over the file, maybe chat to one of the others, or phone a specialist.’

  I like this about Ewan Marigold. Sometimes when young doctors start in private practice, they’re arrogant. They think they know everything and they don’t ask anyone for help. And then something bad happens, and they learn humility. I don’t know if Ewan Marigold is just a humble person, or if he’s learnt the hard way during his internship or community service. Either way, he’s careful, and that’s why I feel confident recommending him to patients.

  Since The Accident, I haven’t had the energy to actively like many people, but I do like young Ewan Marigold. I like Ewan Marigold, who is the colour of a sun-baked stone and just as warm. I’m really excited about my day, and I find myself humming as I start my work.

  Dr Marigold looks at me for a moment and then he smiles. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard you humming before, Helen.’ I smile. ‘It’s not something I normally do,’ I admit.

  ‘You’re obviously having a good day,’ he says. ‘I hope it stays that way.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I wonder what he would think if I told him I’m just very excited that I might be able to commit suicide soon. I picture him scurrying around, checking his textbooks, trying to find out how to change my mind. He wouldn’t realise how pointless that would be. Nothing will change my mind.

  ‘You have a good day too,’ I tell him.

  Daniel

  I’m at work but I’m just staring into space. I can’t do anything or think about anything because it’s all got so messed up. Julia is complicated. Claire is complicated. Even my baby girl Mackenzie is complicated, with arrangements every second weekend and every third holiday and every Wednesday night, and phone calls only at particular times, and a whole lot of other rules that Claire’s father’s lawyer sent me before my slippers were even parked under Julia’s bed. I can’t keep track of all the rules, and Claire never tells me in advance what to expect. She’s always making some demand and then referring to the goddamn letter like I’m supposed to have learnt it off by heart or something. And now Julia’s pregnant, and she wants to keep the baby, and nothing will ever be the same. I’m trapped.

  I put my head down on my desk.

  ‘How did I get here?’ I ask myself, but I’m not really asking myself.

  I’m asking Claire. But Claire is gone.

  Julia

  I’m nervous about seeing my mum. And I’m pretty sure Daniel is angry with me – about the baby, about telling Mackenzie’s teacher about us, about his stupid dry-cleaning, about his life. Daniel seems angry a lot of the time, and when I met him, he was always happy.

  After that first dinner, it was like Claire and Daniel adopted me. They invited me over for casual braais on the weekend, where Daniel would stand by the fire cooking the meat, and Claire and I would drink white wine and laugh; and for dinners when they needed a ‘spare girl’, or even just for a drink. And I could always make it, because of course my great blossoming romance – the one I’d needed the dress for – came to nothing.

  It wasn’t Steve’s fault. It was basically the perfect first date. He took me for drinks at a bar in Newtown with a view across the whole city, and then we moved on to a restaurant in Dunkeld where you usually have to wait three weeks to get a table, but Steve knew the owner. He was attentive and polite and interested in what I had to say. He didn’t order for me, or insist I paid, or ogle the waitress, or tip badly. He smelt good and looked nice. He was interested in a number of different topics, and he didn’t pretend to know about things he didn’t know about. Believe me – I’ve got a long list of things a man can do wrong on a first date. Steve didn’t break any of the rules.

  But I was bored.

  Suddenly his model-like good looks that I’d been obsessed with the week before seemed a bit dull. He seemed a bit too tall and too muscly, and his eyes were too blue. I found myself thinking that such blue eyes could only result from inbreeding. And though he laughed and joked, his jokes were ordinary. He didn’t have a sense of the ridiculous. He wasn’t at all silly.

  At the end of the date, when he leant forward to kiss me, I turned my cheek so the kiss landed awkwardly on the edge of my mouth. He looked at me for a moment, and smiled a bit sadly.

  ‘Like that?’ he said.

  I thought of pretending I didn’t know what he meant. But in the end I just met his (freakishly blue) eyes with my own and said, ‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

  Steve nodded. ‘You win some, you lose some,’ he said. ‘I wish you happiness.’

  I couldn’t even fault how he handled rejection.

  The next day, Saturday, I was so depressed I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t believe the date I’d wanted so badly had gone so wrong. I wanted to tell someone – and I told myself I wanted to talk to Claire.

  Maybe I even believed it as I dialled her number that day.

  That was the beginning of the time I was Julia, Family Friend. Claire invited me over to lunch with a few other friends of theirs. We drank a lot and laughed and laughed. I tried to picture Steve sitting with me, at Claire and Daniel’s table – but I couldn’t. All I could picture was Daniel. Every time I closed my eyes, all I could see was Daniel.

  I told myself it was just a post-Steve reaction. I told myself it wasn’t so much Daniel I wanted, but a Daniel sort of man. It wasn’t Daniel I liked – it was just that I’d realised there was more to a man than good looks. Daniel was about sex appeal and laughter. That, I decided, was what a person should look for in a man. After all, it’s what Claire had chosen, and everybody can see Claire has impeccable taste. Maybe I thought that if I chose what Claire had chosen, I would have what Claire had. At the beginning, maybe it was more about wanting to be Claire than about wanting Daniel.

  But the more I got to know Daniel, the more I liked him. And he seemed to like me. He was always so happy to see me, and sometimes when Claire phoned to invite me over, she’d say, ‘Daniel said I should invite you,’ and my palms would heat up and I’d walk with a spring in my step all day.

  I’m not walking with a spring in my step now, as I face the visit with my mother.

  I almost drag myself through the day, feeling slightly nauseous and tired – but tense and touchy at the same time. I snapped at Gerald when he asked me to show him again how to attach a file to an email, an
d I snapped at the receptionist for putting calls through to me when I was working. Even though, as she pointed out, I hadn’t asked her not to.

  Just before I get there, I give myself a final talking to. I always have to do this before I see my mother. Alice calls it consciously managing my expectations. She says that because there’s a part of me that remembers what my mother was like before The Accident, I am constantly subconsciously hoping to see her again. And that’s why I always expect more than she can give. I don’t really believe that The Accident could have changed my mum that much – I can’t imagine she was ever warm – but Alice’s theory does make sense. And I have to admit that the thing about consciously managing my expectations does seem to work.

  ‘She will not be happy for me,’ I say to myself, standing at the gate. ‘She will not hug me when she sees me, and she will not express joy that I’ve found Daniel. She might be mean about him being married and she will probably just not react at all. I will be okay. I will survive.’

  That last part is what Alice says I must say, but whenever I say ‘I will survive’, I want to burst into song. Alice says this isn’t a bad thing, because it makes me greet my mother with a cheerful attitude.

  I ring the bell and my mother answers so quickly she must have been standing on the other side of the gate. I hope I whispered my affirmations as quietly as I meant to. I hope I didn’t yell ‘I will survive’ out loud just before I pushed the bell. But I might have, so I start giggling.

  I don’t know if it’s because I’m laughing, but my mother smiles as she steps aside to let me in. And then she touches my arm as I walk past, and it is as soft as a butterfly but it burns into my bare skin and I feel it etched on my arm as I walk in the front door and down the passage. My mother is not a toucher. I don’t know what to do with this touch.

  ‘Tea or something stronger?’ she says as we turn towards the kitchen. We always end up standing around in the kitchen. It’s not like it’s one of those kitchens – like Claire’s – where there’s a table and chairs in the middle, maybe with a vase of flowers, and people sit around chatting and laughing. My mum’s kitchen is just a bog-standard kitchen, and most of our exchanges happen with us standing propped against the melamine cupboards.