The Slipping Place

by Joanna Baker

  Veronica rested her bottom on the back of a couch. ‘That little boy. Treen’s boy, Mayson. Did you know he’s Roland’s son?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Thank goodness. I’m so sorry. It was another thing I wasn’t allowed to mention.’ Lesley stepped closer, put her hands out as if to take Veronica’s, lowered them, left them curling near her thighs. ‘He plays us off against each other, doesn’t he? But it’s wonderful, really, isn’t it, in a way. His own boy. Your grandson. But it’s a problem, too. Such a mess. So if there is anything we can do …’ She locked her hands together again.

  ‘His mother is dead.’

  ‘Oh, yes. How awful. Where is he? The little boy?’

  ‘Still with Treen’s friends. I need to get him away.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘The man is violent. Mayson’s already been hurt several times.’ ‘Oh, I know. It’s just awful. But you’re not to panic. Roland wanted me to tell you that. He’s organising something.’

  ‘Where is he, Lesley?’

  Lesley looked pointedly at Judith and shook her head. ‘It’s all so horrible, isn’t it? Such a disturbed little boy. Roland brought him here. I told you that, didn’t I? Here, of all places.’

  Veronica could see what she meant. This was no place for a little boy. The carpet was flawless pink and the couch was chintz, printed with cabbage roses in sandy gold and watered grass green.

  ‘It was desperation, I think. Roland really had no idea about caring for a child. I changed his clothes and gave him a bit of a wash in the nether regions.’ She wrapped her arms across her stomach, clinking her silver bangles. ‘And let me just say that, so far, you haven’t missed anything. You haven’t missed any lovely hugs and kisses. It’s going to take some work to civilise the poor little devil. He was very naughty, really quite rough. I know it’s not his fault. I know he’s been ill-treated.’

  ‘I’ll sort him out. I’ll sort it all out.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I tell Roland that every time I see him.’ Lesley suddenly stepped around her. ‘Just a minute!’ Judith had opened a drinks cabinet. She reached into the mirrored interior, picked up a bottle and read the label. She took the top off and sniffed at it.

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’ Lesley sounded as if she was talking to a child, but uncertain. ‘I could make you a sandwich, Judith, if you like.’

  Judith snorted, picked up a glass and poured two inches of whisky.

  Lesley said, ‘No. I’m sorry.’

  Veronica said, ‘Just ignore her.’

  ‘That’s Gordon’s Ballantine’s.’

  Judith took a step closer and gave Lesley one of her penetrat-ing looks. She seemed to see something she expected in Lesley’s face and to be sad to find it there. For a moment Veronica thought she was going to comment on it. But what she said was, ‘Blend.’ She turned away, drinking.

  ‘Just a –’ Veronica moved to intervene but there was a catch in her lower stomach. The pain rose, locking up her organs as it went. She felt herself go pale, a cold sweat.

  Lesley said, ‘Are you all right?’

  Her stomach loosened almost immediately, but it felt strangely large. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Judith gave Lesley a knowing look. She was goading her. She drained her glass and filled it again.

  ‘Oh, all right.’ Lesley shrugged, stiff faced. ‘Why not? Perhaps we should all have some.’ She picked up a red jar from the sideboard and rubbed some cream into her hands. Immediately the room had a perfume, an old-fashioned scent, of pot pourri and geraniums.

  They had wasted enough time. ‘Lesley, I need to find Roland. I don’t want to hear about him, I need to actually speak to him. And now it’s urgent.’

  Lesley touched Veronica on an arm and lowered her voice. ‘Come over here.’

  They moved across the dense carpet to a window at the side of the room. In the driveway there was a breeze, so that the vines along the side threw flickering light and shadow. Pale sunlight glimmered on the chrome of the blue car. Beside the garage they could see part of the back garden, the bare branches of a magnolia, ending in buds, some beds of pansies, small, struggling against the cold.

  Lesley checked to make sure Judith was a distance away and spoke quietly, ‘I don’t want her to find him. She’s no good for him. Especially at the moment.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think she –’

  ‘He asked me to tell you not to panic. He’s found a place for that other girl to take the little boy. Belle is going to sneak away and hide there and then you can come and take the boy and care for him. Then there can be a paternity case or whatever is needed. But he couldn’t wait here. The police have been here, looking for him.’

  ‘Oh! Did they …?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in a minute.’

  Judith had come up behind them. She said, ‘The church in the park is mouldy. The oaken pulpit breaks into a cold sweat.’

  Veronica had had enough. ‘All right, Judith. Thank you so much. I think it’s time to go.’

  Judith turned her back. At the front end of the room, propped on a table, was a noticeboard with papers pinned all over it. She went to look at it, raised a hand to touch a picture.

  Lesley hurried after her, pushed at the raised wrist and again covered the movement with conversation. ‘Oh dear. This is embarrassing.’ She turned to Veronica. ‘This is my feeble attempt at brain-storming.’ She laughed uncomfortably. ‘I found a website that tells you how to write a story. Childish really. Gosh. And I think it’s making everything worse.’

  They all studied the board. Lesley had pinned Roland’s four drawings up there, overlapping each other, but there was a lot of other material as well: pages of typed script with notations in ink, words handwritten on scraps of paper, photographs and drawings, and a book cover printed from the internet, The Moonstone.

  Judith had her glass in her left hand. With her right she lifted a photograph of an old cottage to study the drawing of Justine. She leaned in, seemed to see something and stood back, slurping at the drink, scanning the loaded board.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Lesley. ‘What a waste of time. The trouble is there’s just too much material. Even one book is endlessly deep, isn’t it? You can just keep going into it – every character, every mind, every setting. You can never get to the end of anything.’ She gave a short hollow grunt. ‘I need to get a grip.’ Veronica looked at the notes on the board. ‘This is Roland’s writing.’

  ‘He left me some notes. I told him I had too much already.’ Lesley touched one of the typed pages. ‘Strangely, though, this project is starting to make sense. Sometimes I get a glimpse of something.’

  On the table in front of the board there was a notebook, a bulg-ing thing with extra pages pasted in it and corners of paper sticking out. Beside it was a white stone. Judith picked it up. It filled the palm of her hand.

  ‘Oh, please don’t …’ Lesley’s hand moved but she didn’t stop her.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Veronica.

  ‘What? I don’t know. It’s just a stone. I found it.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know. On a path somewhere.’

  Now Judith seemed to be trying to rattle Lesley. She waved the stone. ‘Weariness of soul lies before her, as it lies behind.’

  ‘Oh.’ Lesley’s mouth lost its shape.

  Judith put her glass on the table. Lesley moved to pick it up but Judith grabbed her forearm. Lesley shook free. ‘Stop it, would you?’

  But Judith had sensed a weakness now, and she seemed determined to work on it. She lowered her voice and moved closer to Lesley, watching the effect of her words. ‘My grief lies all within; and these external manners of lament –’

  ‘Just stop it.’

  ‘– are merely shadows.’

  Veronica said, ‘Ignore her. Judith, could you –’

  ‘The grief that does not speak –’

  Lesley said, ‘You don’t know. You don’t know me.’

  ‘– whispers the o’er-frau
ght heart –’

  ‘I don’t know who you think you are. I was trying to be kind. Pushing your way in here.’ Lesley waved at the sideboard. ‘Drinking my whisky.’

  ‘– and bids it break.’

  Lesley swiped at the empty glass, sending it across the room. It bounced on the soft carpet, clunked against the wall. ‘Just get out.’

  Judith looked grimly satisfied. She went back to the sideboard and picked up the red jar, then she went to the drinks cabinet, took the whisky and left the room.

  They stood at the front window and watched her drive away.

  ‘She’s a terrible creature,’ said Veronica. ‘I should never have brought her here.’

  ‘That insane way she talks … it’s as if her books have seeped into her reality. All those things she says, they’re quotations, aren’t they? They make you feel you should recognise them, as though there’s something you’re missing. Do you think she does that deliberately? To confuse people?’

  ‘The old witch. She took the Scotch, you know.’

  ‘How frightful.’ Lesley gave a pained smile. ‘But the way she looked at Roland’s drawings …’ Lesley frowned at the noticeboard. ‘It was almost as if she was looking for an important piece of information.’

  ‘It was almost as if she found one.’

  ‘Do you think?’ Lesley thought for a moment and then shrugged. ‘Maybe she was just looking for an excuse to get nasty.’

  Veronica remembered the lined, sallow face. Whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break. ‘Was she talking about your lost child?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past her.’

  ‘Could she possibly know?’

  ‘I suppose Roland might have told her.’ Lesley lifted a hand to her throat. ‘I can’t think why.’

  ‘Sad to be like that. Poking away at other people’s pain.’

  ‘Well, if that’s what she thought she was doing, she was on the wrong track,’ said Lesley. ‘There is no pain.’

  ‘No.’ Veronica put a hand on Lesley’s arm, let it drop. ‘Let’s forget her.’

  But Lesley was more affected by Judith than she admitted. ‘It wasn’t as if I wanted a child. Not at the age of seventeen. And it wasn’t as if they tore her from my arms. It wasn’t a huge life-defining event or anything.’

  ‘Her? You knew it was a girl?’

  ‘It’s scarcely an event at all. It isn’t even a memory, so there’s no pain. At the most maybe sometimes I feel there’s a … a space, I suppose. A vague feeling that there’s something I have lost, or forgotten. Just an absence … under everything, at the back of everything.’

  Veronica stood by Lesley at the window. In the shade of the street tree, the box hedge was almost black, with just a few leaves caught in the late morning sun. She looked at a red car, a square of lawn, a curved Art Deco building, brilliantly white. The colours were all primary and plain so that the street seemed to have receded somehow – become flat, like a stage set, crudely painted. It gave her a feeling she remembered from girlhood, the sense that something was ready, waiting, about to happen, and that when it did, she should watch closely.

  Lesley said, ‘Do you sometimes feel as if you’re not living your real life?’

  ‘Oh.’ It was almost as if Lesley had heard her thoughts. ‘I think we all do, yes. From time to time.’

  ‘Sorry. It’s this writing. It makes me crazy. I’ve even thought of starting with something dramatic and cryptic. Maybe: Sometimes I feel as if I am all sounds. But it’s a bit too bizarre, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. Not bizarre.’

  ‘I’m just trying to capture that … the way life escapes you.’

  ‘I do know what you mean.’ Veronica had brought on this mood, talking about Lesley’s lost child. She should have left it. She tried a sympathetic laugh, hurt her stomach, cut it short.

  Lesley looked pleased. ‘Do you? Well, that makes me feel better. I’ve always thought that by the time I was in my fifties my ideas, the way I saw my life … I thought that would have settled. I was expecting … I don’t know … cohesion. It’s almost hilarious, isn’t it, to just say it like that. But I thought that eventually there would be no more banality, no more wanting things. I thought everything would be softly illuminated, like one of those impressionist river scenes.’

  Yes, Veronica thought. Lesley and she had more in common than she liked to admit. She wanted to ask about Roland, but she couldn’t change the subject yet. Lesley had been distressed by Judith. And Veronica had brought her here. She should give her at least a few minutes, try to be a friend.

  She said, ‘When really we turn out to feel just the same as we always did, except tired.’

  Lesley wriggled her shoulders. ‘Oh, how ridiculous. All these mad thoughts. I can’t believe I let that old bag affect me like this.’

  ‘There has been a lot going on.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I’m starting to sound like Roland.’

  ‘It’s understandable. He won’t leave you alone.’

  ‘Well, that’s true.’

  Finally, they were talking about Roland. ‘He came again?

  Yesterday?’

  ‘Mainly to bring the car. He wasn’t game to drive it anymore because he said the police were looking for it. And, of course, Paul and John have another car. They don’t need the Honda. So Roland thought the best thing would be to leave it here. And as it happens the police had been here earlier in the day, asking about the car. Somehow they’re working out all the connections. Treen’s friends would have told them about Roland, and they’ve seen text messages or something. They’ve worked out that Paul is a friend of Roland’s and that he has a blue Jazz. It wouldn’t be that hard. It will be all joining up for them like a neat puzzle.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I played dumb. As I said, it was before Roland had brought the Honda here. So I told them I didn’t know where Roland was and as far as I knew the car was kept at Paul’s.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Well, we can only keep them running around in circles for so long. I don’t know how convincing I was. No doubt they’ll come back. They’ll surely want to talk to you, too.’

  ‘So Roland needed somewhere else to stay.’

  ‘He really is determined to dodge them. I said he should just be interviewed but he wouldn’t listen. But he couldn’t stay here, obviously, because they’ll be back. So I lent him my car. I said he should go and stay with Georgie, but he wouldn’t do that either. But that’s a shame because she’d love to help. She’s beside herself.’

  ‘So where did he go?’

  ‘He’s at the Shanty Shack.’

  Chapter 21

  ______

  So she was driving again. It seemed to Veronica that she had spent most of the last few days in cars – dashing backwards and forwards between the gallery and the bookshop, making ever-widening sweeps across Hobart. And now she was on the road to Spring Beach. Lesley had driven her home to pick up her car and she had stopped for some food, but by one o’clock she had cleared the cause-ways of Midway Point and was turning left at Sorell.

  It was only after she reached Buckland and saw the old church among its ragged pines that her mind slowed enough for her to recognise how wrong things had become. This winding road, past thin fields and scrappy hawthorn hedge, was a drive for weekends and summer holidays, something Veronica had travelled, over and over, in cars full of squealing, bickering children. Before that, it had been a road to her own childhood holidays – long weeks camping along the rocks at Coles Bay, in the days when that was still allowed. Everything on this stretch was deeply familiar – the way the hills seemed to press forwards as you approached them, and then, as you got close, opened, drawing you through, offering up their silly names: Break Me Neck, Bust Me Gall, Black Charlies Opening. It had been family tradition to chant them as the signs went past. Today the memory of that came to her with a kind of mockery. It was somehow unthinkable now, that there could have been times like that, i
n the same world, in the same family, as those photographs of Mayson.

  By the time she got to the Prosser River a light mist was sinking through the treetops. She turned right at Orford, and went south along an avenue of white wattles. Spring Beach always struck her as a melancholy sort of place. A small collection of shacks that looked empty, rows of blank windows. She drove past them and up the hill to Lesley’s.

  The Shanty Shack’s gateposts were overgrown with grass. Roland had dragged the gate open and wedged it back into a wall of unpruned pelargoniums. The shack spoke of Lesley and Gordon’s humbler days. It was white weatherboard, with thick wooden window frames that needed paint. There were odd planks tacked on for no obvious reason and its base was made of scraps of sandstone collected from a quarry. The garden was humble, too – echiums, cordylines, gazanias, all in beds with cement edges, a concrete disc over the septic tank. Veronica was pretty sure Lesley never came to Spring Beach.

  It had been years since Veronica had been here. The place was familiar and at the same time changed. This wasn’t something she could put her finger on – it wasn’t that things looked smaller – but it was as fundamental as that. There was a faint but all-encompassing wash of difference, as if someone had filtered the light.

  In the carport she could see Lesley’s white Audi, on the back shelf a T-shirt and trousers screwed into familiar balls.

  He had heard her coming. There was a movement at the window, and then she saw him, the shape of him, a big raggy head, straight shoulders. Childe Roland. But not a child now. A father. The thought was absurd and hilarious, and she found her throat had locked. However she had imagined grandmotherhood, it had not been with Roland, and it had not been like this. Now that anticipated joy, that whole world of grandchildren, of new children, had become linked with another kind of world, with other pictures – Treen, blackened and frozen – and with stories and photographs, bruises and burns. And suddenly, instead of rushing to him, she was facedown on the steering wheel, making a tiny groan of pain and nausea, and then she was throwing herself back, gasping for air.