Out of Time

by Steve Hawke

  The aftermath was a lot simpler than it had been for Betty. No police enquiries this time round, thank god, and a far simpler probate process, all straight from George to him. The accountant confirmed Betty’s advice. There was going to be a small windfall for him once all the transactions around the Wanslea bond and the Arcadia Glen mortgage were finalised, and title to the shack.

  George’s funeral was smaller and sadder than his wife’s.

  Joe is thankful for today’s full stop, and feels that he has honoured them as best he could. He knocks his glass against the other two, calls, ‘Bottoms up.’ Drains his in a long, slow draught, then attacks his meal.

  SLIDING EYES

  A perception of some essential truth.

  Anne types it out in a large font. She presses print, watches the words emerge from the machine. She smiles grimly as she pins it to the board beside her desk. A reminder. It is one of five definitions of epiphany in the Macquarie. From the day Anne first looked it up the words have seemed seared in her mind. It was smart-arsery on Joe’s part, but the word rings absolutely true to the way she feels.

  Eric at least acted on his. I’ve just got an ache.

  A year and a month have gone by, and still she often thinks of the graven grouse, the imprint it has left. On nights like this, alone in the house, when the discontents of life are nibbling at her, she feels it as a comfort as much as a challenge. A reminder that patience and perseverance can prevail, if she holds to the essential truths.

  She’s not looking forward to the conference tomorrow. She’s put up her hand to go on the registration desk. It’s usually a gig for the newest member of the committee, or one of the handful of volunteers, but it appeals this year. No brainwork and minimal engagement required.

  Conference or classroom, it all seems to be leaving her flat these days. It is this loss of enthusiasm that worries her. She still cleaves to the notion of teaching as a noble profession, as her calling and vocation. She can still do the business. Her students will get through if they put in the effort. But she would be surprised if the spark ever returns.

  She has started to check out the options around long service leave, and even tentatively enquired about the ins and outs involved in taking early retirement. But not yet. The timing and the vibe have to be right to broach stuff like this. Joe has been so engrossed in his bloody civic centre project.

  A glimpse of the gleaming half-moon amidst scudding clouds in the gloaming lifts her spirits. At least she has talked Joe into taking a first bite at the Kimberley. They’ll have a week in Karratha with James and Claire, and then Geoffrey’s lined up a mates-rates deal on a hire car, and they’re heading up the Gibb River Road!

  Jimbala Wali! Bullfrog Hole! Just the names send a shiver through her.

  One more glass, she thinks, making her way down the stairs. Despite the early start looming tomorrow. A tsk of annoyance as the pantry door catches again.

  Should’ve just fixed it myself in the first place.

  Joe’s been promising to tighten the loose hinge screw since she first mentioned it weeks ago. That stuff usually gets dealt with straight away, but he seems distracted lately. She pours her glass of red, and wanders out to the shed.

  The screwdriver is where it’s supposed to be. Joe is finickity with his tools, unlike the mess that is his work station at the drafting table. Screwdriver in one hand, glass in the other, she turns a slow circle to survey the shed. It’s not that there are any rules, but this is most definitely his space; she is rarely in here on her own.

  The tatty old chairs she is forbidden to touch. The table between them with the crib board and deck of cards, as if he’s expecting Eric to turn up. The vice is covered and the workbench is clear. No handyman projects on the go at the moment. She sits herself on the stool in front of his drafting table. Pushes into a twirl, arms out wide. Takes a gulp then deposits glass and tool on the flat edge at the front of the table.

  He’s pinned a photo from the foundation stone ceremony up next to the old favourite of Claire and the famous fish. The premier and the mayor are front and centre with the obligatory shovel and cheesy smiles, and there he is, next to Johnson in the ranks behind, grinning like a schoolboy. But he looks relieved more than happy.

  It was a good day. But that night he’d been so uptight. She’d been expecting good cheer and good loving, but he’d disappeared in here with a whisky and a tight face.

  What’s going on Joe?

  That look the other weekend, as he snatched up the paper and fled to the shed. He wasn’t to know she’d caught it all in reflection. Pure chance. The angle of the half-open window as she stood at the sink. She felt like an eavesdropper, however inadvertent it might’ve been. But he looked just like Claire aged eight, scurrying off hoping she hadn’t been caught out. What had he done?

  And what was that sliding eye about this morning?

  WISH YOU WERE HERE

  What to do with George and Betty’s dinners? He hadn’t pre-planned that part. It doesn’t seem right to just bin them. It’s always been a rule of the shack that food scraps are not to be left lying around or discarded in the bush; it attracts the feral cats and foxes. Betty’s brick compost bin, always securely lidded, is a thing of the past, but he digs a hole where it used to be, and buries the food deep; an offering of sorts. Then takes their beers, one in each hand, and pours them as a single stream, mingled like their ashes, over the back-filled hole.

  He does the dishes, then opens a fresh bottle. He’s got some serious thinking to do, he tells himself. But as ever he shies away from it.

  It’s another delaying tactic, he knows, but he does owe Eric an email.

  Hey mate,

  I’m up at the shack this weekend. On my own, which feels weird.

  The deed is done, burial at sea. Bless ’em.

  And I’m stuck here with my thoughts. I’d rather be playing crib. That’s what nights up here are supposed to be for, after all.

  I’ve just attached a photo. Recognise me in a suit and tie?

  Yep, building work’s started on the civic centre. I can’t believe how smoothly it’s gone, touch wood. And I think it’s going to be all I hoped for. My role’s going to scale right back now we’re into construction, JKH’ll manage that.

  I think I’ve told you about Tony Chen, the intern who services the project team. Sharp as a tack. Definitely on track for a permanent contract at the end of the year. Well, it’s almost embarrassing. It’s like having an acolyte.

  He’s just so into the buttressed arch thing. You know what he’s asked to do? He talked me into showing him the Sydney drawings. Wants to rerun the engineering. Not exactly a piece of piss still, but not nearly as challenging as it was back in the day with the computers he’s got access to.

  He’s mostly into ‘the beauty of it’. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can see your raised eyebrow from here you prick, but I can handle the flattery. And like I said, he’s smart as a tack. He reckons it’s inevitable that they’re going to build a new stadium here in Perth someday. Subi’s already out of date compared to what they’ve got everywhere else. And he reckons the way China’s starting to go there’s got to be an iron ore boom on the horizon, which means a premier with more money than he knows what to do with. He talks a good game. Says it makes sense for JKH to do the research in advance.

  I think I’ll let him.

  He can’t help drumming his fingers on the table edge at the thrill the thought gives him.

  Not so sure about the second one I’ve attached. It’s the scarecrow the kids made for the community garden at the school. Recognise the shirt? Hope it makes you laugh. Apologies if it doesn’t.

  He pauses, wondering if the Carol shirt nerve might still be too raw. Anne wouldn’t approve.

  I sure wouldn’t pass up a chance like that if he was here in the flesh.

  He saves the email to the drafts folder, whispering into the sea breeze, ‘Wish you were here, mate.’

  Another glass?

  ‘No.’
He says it out loud. Instead he heads for the beach. As he crests the dune the breeze becomes a blast that he opens his arms wide to embrace. He needs to be scarified.

  SANDBLASTED

  But if I tell Anne now it’s going to hang over the whole Kimberley trip like a dark fucken cloud. And she’ll insist on telling Claire, and … Aarrghh!

  The trouble is, that the excuse has become so patterned, so clichéd by now, that he does not even pretend to believe it. But it is also deeply, inexorably true. Finches’n’barra will be ruined.

  He stomps down the dune to the beach. There is enough moonlight between the scudding clouds for him to evade the banks of seaweed. The wind is truly fierce, blowing the dry sand in gritty, stinging swirls. It is just what he needs. He narrows his eyes to the merest of slits, and faces into it, rubbing the tiny, abrasive grains into his skin, his hair, his scalp, keening through pursed lips.

  Eventually he makes his way to the wet sand above the waterline, and the sandblasting stops. He turns north, the wind now on his left cheek, and stalks up the beach. The heavy sand is cold on his bare feet, but he ploughs on, his whirl of thoughts and emotions finally starting to settle.

  With this morning’s appointment, his deception of Anne has escalated from passive sins of omission—choosing to not tell her about things that have happened—to active concealment. He’d told her he was putting in a couple of hours at the office before heading to Dongara.

  Now the inevitable moment of revelation and confession will be a greater betrayal.

  But she’ll still forgive me, that’s the thing. Eventually, angrily yet gracefully, she’ll come to terms and come back to me, and I’ll feel like the biggest dickhead in the world. Which I already do. Which I probably am.

  DOCTOR GOOGLE

  He retreats back up to the drier sand and sits, slit eyes into the wind, the half moon now halfway down the western sky, and tries to catalogue his sins, no longer sure he has a grasp upon them all.

  He hasn’t gone far enough up the beach. His arse is getting wet, and quickly cold, but he figures he deserves it.

  The car. The seminal event. The first big lie. Seared clearly in his mind.

  Mrs Scap’s builder. He convinced himself for a while it was nothing. But he can’t get the details back. There’s a blank there, he can’t deny it.

  It was all ok for a while after that.

  Then. He nearly didn’t make it to the foundation stone gig. He put it down to pressure and unfamiliar surroundings at first. But there is still a blank that morning that he cannot recall or reconstruct.

  And that was followed by the Saturday morning freak-out at home. Looking forward to sitting down with the sudoku, he picked up the paper and turned to the puzzles page. The squares were already filled in! For one wild moment he was going to have a go at Anne for spoiling his ritual. Until he realised how ridiculous the thought of Anne doing a sudoku was. Besides, the numbers were in his handwriting. His guts turned to water as he tried to remember doing it sometime between getting up and now, and he found nothing. Thank Christ he’d escaped back to the shed before Annie saw how shook up he was.

  Doctor Google turned the weekend into a nightmare. He’d managed to grab an appointment with their GP for the Thursday. He found himself swearing her to secrecy if she saw Anne anytime soon. But he got the referral. It has been a long and tense two weeks, waiting for this morning’s appointment with the specialist.

  THE BENCHMARK

  Dr Vanessa Sykes. Neuropsychologist with four certificates from three continents on the wall, and she hardly looks older than Claire. There is a frown on her face as she finishes scanning the paperwork and reading the GP’s letter. ‘Just so I’m clear, Mr Warton’—she checks the forms—‘Anne Woods is …?’

  ‘My de facto.’ Hastily he adds, ‘Long term. We have grandchildren.’ He shifts uncomfortably, anticipating her question.

  ‘And you are concealing these issues from her?’ Her look is stern.

  ‘Just for now, until I can get a better handle on what’s going on.’ He sounds as defensive, as whiny as he feels. ‘That’s what I’m here for, see.’

  She gives little away in terms of responses or questions as she gets him to recount the series of incidents that have brought him here.

  The tests she insists on him completing are almost demeaning in their simplicity. ‘I do cryptic crosswords you know,’ he says at one point. ‘And the tough sudokus.’ She merely smiles and leads him through and marks up her charts. When she brings out a pegboard on which he has to match pegs to the correctly shaped hole, he almost explodes. ‘My daughter was doing these before she went to kindy!’

  ‘Could you please complete the exercise, Mr Warton, starting,’ she clicks a stopwatch, ‘now.’

  ‘This is pure cognition skill isn’t it?’ he asks as he places pegs.

  ‘Mainly. And it tests concentration, which you should try.’

  ‘Boom, boom, boom. Checkmate,’ as he places the last peg. She clicks the stopwatch and makes a note on her chart. ‘I can see why the ones who get dragged in here against their will get shirty. Can’t you come up with something that serves the same purpose but doesn’t make you feel like you’re at kindergarten?’

  ‘Well frankly, Mr Warton, it’s not designed for the likes of you, but it is one of the tools of my trade, if you like.’

  ‘Sure, but who could do this without feeling humiliated.’

  ‘The intention is certainly not to humiliate. But a person’s capacity to understand intention and context is relevant to my assessment.’

  This brings a smile of acknowledgement. ‘Fair point. Would you mind calling me Joe. I hate Mister.’

  ‘Why are you here, Joe?’

  ‘I’ve told you. All this weird stuff that’s happening.’

  ‘When was the first of them, do you think? With the calculations?’

  ‘The cos tan balls-up. I can put a date on it. Seventh of November the year before last.’

  ‘That’s very precise.’

  ‘It was a big day. I buried a friend. And like I said, there’s been a few more inexplicable misfires like that, and the blanks, the bits of day that have just disappeared from my brain. Five of them.’

  ‘That you know of.’

  ‘What?’ Sharply.

  ‘It’s possible—likely even—that there’ve been others that haven’t registered with the same effect as the ones you’ve told me about.’

  ‘Why thank you. That’s very reassuring.’

  ‘I am not here to reassure you, Joe. I’m here to assess you, and assist you. But that’s a two-way street. What are you hoping to get out of this session?’

  ‘I want a benchmark. Something I can measure things against.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not that simple. The field of neuropsychology is a lot less precise than you seem to imagine. The best summary I can give you is that based on what you’ve described, and the tests we’ve done today, you are certainly experiencing a level of memory impairment, but it is not necessarily outside the parameters for your age.’

  ‘For my age? I’m not even sixty yet!’

  ‘Some slippage is not unusual from the mid fifties.’

  ‘How much is “some” in my case? What did the tests show?’

  ‘In themselves, the tests showed very little. You did fine. But proper evaluation requires follow up and comparative testing.’

  ‘But it’s started.’

  ‘It?’

  ‘The downhill slide. Into the pit of dementia.’

  You idiot, he thinks, hearing the whine in his voice again, and seeing her straighten in her chair. She speaks tersely.

  ‘Mr Warton. I am making no diagnosis of any kind whatsoever! I am confirming, based on your accounts, that you appear to be experiencing some degree of occasional memory impairment. There can be any number of causes for this. Dementia is only one of them.’

  ‘What about the misfires? The cos tan thing?’

  ‘Again, not an uncommon phenomeno
n, with any number of possible causes. It can even be as simple as tiredness or stress. Besides which, there’ve been very few from what you have said.

  ‘I don’t particularly like the term, but so-called senior moments are a reality for most people as they age. Yes they should be monitored, but not obsessively. To be frank with you, on an incident by incident basis, though I appreciate it is not always appropriate, they are best laughed off where possible. That’s what most people do.’

  ‘I’m not most people.’

  She leans forward, looking over her glasses, makes sure he is paying attention. ‘Avoidance almost always makes things worse. The tension of trying to hide these things from those nearest and dearest to us can in fact exacerbate the situation.

  ‘As I said, I am making no diagnosis. What I will say is that considering your family history, and the patterns you are exhibiting, we should certainly monitor your condition.’

  Joe has closed his eyes.

  ‘Are you listening?’

  He nods.

  ‘What I recommend is that you make another appointment for six months’ time. We can run the tests again, and we’ll be able to do a comparison and make a much more informed evaluation.’

  ‘Maybe. I’ll let you know.’

  She is having trouble hiding her exasperation. ‘What on earth is the point of your “benchmark” without a follow-up?’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘I shall mail my written assessment out to you.’

  ‘Please make sure that’s to the work address, not the home one.’

  ‘I see.’ Icily.

  ‘Thank you doctor.’

  As he gets to his feet she takes off her glasses, and fixes him with a look. ‘Mr Warton.’

  He faces her.

  ‘Dementia is a complex phenomenon. Self-diagnosis can be very dangerous … You do understand what I’m saying?’