The Slipping Place

by Joanna Baker

  She drifted into another thought. ‘Do you ever get the feeling that there’s somewhere else you’re supposed to be? That you’re not living your real life?’ She realised she had said something absurd, tried a weak laugh. Agony in her eyes. There was a rash on her hands, made red with the rubbing.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  But there were voices in the corridor. Gordon and Roland.

  Veronica went out. Only Gordon was there.

  ‘Gordon? Is it him?’ She went to the front door and looked out. There was no sign of Roland. Judith’s vehicle was parked outside, with Judith sitting immobile in the driver’s seat. So he hadn’t run here. Judith had driven him. Veronica turned around. ‘Where did he go?’

  Gordon looked confused. ‘He asked me where the photos were.’ Photos. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I’ve been scanning them. Out in the shed. He went around the side.’ Roland had been in the building when Belle had died. He would be as sickened as she was. And now he had come here to finish this. At Spring Beach he had been looking for something in the old photos. Veronica went back through the kitchen and out to the garden. Gordon’s shed was a low brick building. A granny flat, used as storage. The door was open.

  Inside, there was a table, a pile of boxes, a wine rack and Gordon’s old desk. Roland was there. More op-shop clothes – baggy black jeans held up with a cracked belt. A pale blue business shirt. Bare feet. On the desk in front of him, next to a scanner and a monitor, was a milk crate holding photo albums. He was pulling albums out of the crate and flipping through them. He didn’t acknowledge her entry.

  ‘Roland.’

  He ignored her.

  Veronica touched his wrist. He shook her hand off. He said, ‘Bad women, do you see? They were bad women.’ He slammed an album on the desk. ‘Is that supposed to make it OK?’

  He pushed the album away and grabbed another one.

  ‘Roland, stop this.’ She had been saying that to Paul. Just a moment ago. Was it? When? They were so alike. Paul. Roland. So different and so alike.

  Roland shrugged her off. ‘It isn’t your fault.’ He put the album down, chose another.

  She said, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Is Mayson all right?’

  ‘He’s fine. Matthew Reidy stitched him up. Miriam’s looking after him, and Georgie.’

  ‘I wanted you to go and get him, that’s all. Before it went bad. I wanted you to go and look after your grandson. But we’ve been tricked. Paul. Fucking Paul.’

  ‘Roland, honestly.’

  ‘You saw it too. Did you? Did you work it out yet? Maybe you can’t remember. He shoved an album at her. ‘Spring Beach. Help me find it.’

  There were other voices now, in the garden. She looked out the window. Paul was running across the grass, looking panicked. He had driven here in John’s Subaru, after drinking all night. Lesley and Gordon had come out of the house and they were following him. Behind them she could see John and Vicky getting out of an old red car that must be Vicky’s.

  Paul came straight in and grabbed the album Roland was holding.

  Roland shook him off and said, ‘Saint Helens.’

  Paul said, ‘Get out of here.’

  ‘It was St Helens when I first saw it. I remember now. Do you remember that weekend, Paul? Paul, you self-absorbed pathetic little shit.’

  Everyone was crowding into the little building: Lesley, Gordon, Vicky, John. Roland ignored them all. He found the album he was looking for. He threw it on the desk, looked up triumphantly, nas-tily. ‘St Helens, Paul. Are you with me now? Down by the harbour, on that grey sand, with the slimy rocks and all the mussels? We put our feet in the water and it was so cold it hurt. And then we sat on the jetty and had fish and chips. Lesley bought it. She had her shoes on. And she took a photo.’

  Gordon spoke sadly, ‘Come on, buddy.’

  Paul turned to John, his face twisted. ‘Go out. Please. Just go.’

  John didn’t move.

  Roland had been turning pages as he talked and he stopped at a photo. ‘Remember that, Paul? Fish and chips with your dad. Swinging our feet over the water.’

  He held the album open at the page he had chosen, leaned over it. Two little boys on a jetty, bluish-white feet, Gordon in shorts, reddish hair on his legs, white sandshoes.

  Roland wasn’t happy. He turned a page. There was an empty space. ‘You took it?’ He laughed meanly. ‘You took it?’ He took a breath. ‘Never mind. There’s another. Spring Beach.’ He pulled out another album, opened it, threw it aside, then found the one he wanted. ‘Spring Beach. The old dinghy? Remember that, Paul? The Slithy Tove?’

  Paul tried to seize the album from him. They fought for it. Paul fell back hard into the side of the desk and rolled, colliding with the wall. He was about to push off and attack Roland again, but Vicky put herself between them. ‘Leave it, Paul.’

  ‘You don’t know. You don’t know what this is.’

  ‘I think I do.’

  ‘You don’t. It’s much worse than you think. John will leave. John will hate me.’

  ‘John will understand. I’ll talk to him.’ She took Paul by the arm and turned him around. ‘Come outside.’

  ‘Vick.’

  ‘No. I’ll fix it. We’re going to leave.’ She put the other hand on John’s arm. John didn’t move.

  Roland was still turning pages. ‘The Slithy Tove. We pulled it out of the water. Gordon had to help us. We turned it upside down and sat on it and had Violet Crumble.’ He had found the photo he wanted. He reached over Vicky’s arm and shoved it in front of Paul. ‘Remember that, Paul? Remember the Violet Crumble?’

  Veronica leaned in to see. This photo was not much different from the one he had found in the Shanty Shack. Two boys, aged about eight, smiling. Bare feet hanging over the side of an upturned dinghy. But in this one Gordon’s feet were clean. They nearly reached the sand, but hung just above it. And his toes were clearly visible.

  Chapter 28

  ______

  ‘Apparently it skips a generation.’

  ‘So it’s a kind of genetic trick,’ said Veronica. ‘Your father has the webbed toes, but you don’t, but they can turn up again on your –’

  ‘Yes,’ said Paul quickly.

  It was over an hour since the scene in Lesley’s shed. After Roland found the photo of Gordon’s toes, Paul had left the little building without a word. Everyone else had left too and gone in different directions, Roland on foot out to the street, Vicky and John in Vicky’s car. Lesley and Gordon had retreated inside. Paul, distressed, dishevelled, probably still drunk although not showing it, had sat in the Subaru and watched them all disperse. Veronica had tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t listen. She mentioned driving and alcohol levels and he reacted with a mad cackle, as if such caution was ridiculous in the face of what was happening. But then he became suddenly calmer. He said there was something he had to do, and that he would meet her in an hour, at his empty apartment in lower Sandy Bay. Then he had driven away.

  She found him in the apartment when she arrived. The floors were finished and dried and the furniture had been replaced. There was a faint smell of polish. They stood at the windows for a moment, looking out at the river, and then Paul asked if she would come for a walk. They left the heaters on and the windows open and came down to the path by the water. All Paul’s panic and fury had drained away, leaving him morose, flat.

  ‘Your son, Paul.’

  He walked without answering, to the end of the path, on the small point below the apartment. They leaned on a railing, looking out over a bed of native grasses and some broken rocks to the river. Behind them was Blinking Billy, the tiny old lighthouse that had last been used heaven knows when. And up behind that, the apartment block, three storeys of glass, looking down on them.

  Paul said, ‘The poor little kid. There’s no escaping the ugly truth for him. He’s branded with it.’

  Paul had a son. She wondered how long he had known. He’d been w
ith Mayson in March, on the night of that terrible head injury. Later, he and Roland had taken the boy to Bellerive Beach. Paul would surely have seen the toes then. And yet he had allowed Treen to claim the boy was Roland’s.

  Lecturing him wasn’t going to help. She tried to lighten the tone. ‘Well, at least you know now that Gordon’s your father. Roland said you always had doubts because he’s so …’

  ‘Masculine?’

  ‘Gingery.’

  She got a pained laugh for that.

  ‘Well, Paulie, look, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, is it? To have a son? John loves you.’

  He made an unhappy sound, and looked at her as if she’d insulted him.

  ‘He does. And now you have a child.’

  The water was slate grey and choppy, slapping in an irritated way at the rock of the foreshore, the wind whirring in the needle grasses.

  She spoke coolly. ‘Personally, I’d have to say it’s a surprise.’

  ‘It was a mad. Roland and I went out to Chigwell. That’s where Treen was living back then. I don’t know why we even went. She was having a … It was just one of those parties.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t need to know.’

  ‘There was a lot of stuff there. I don’t even know what it was. And we were so young.’

  ‘Three years ago.’

  He grunted, thought for a moment. ‘It wasn’t an act of … It wasn’t nice in any way. For her or me.’

  Veronica was always surprised by Paul’s need to talk. He told her much more than her own children did. Maybe that was normal. There was a seat near them. She ached to sit on it, but she didn’t want to move away from him.

  ‘Treen was being … She pretended to be excited, you know, whooping and jumping around, but sometimes she seemed just angry. And Roland was being stupid. There were a few girls around him and Treen pretended to be really upset about that. I mean, maybe she was, but she could turn it on, you know? She was completely manipulative.’

  Worse than manipulative. But it wasn’t fair for Paul to blame Treen for his own actions. ‘Even so.’

  ‘Yeah. All right. Anyway, Roland …’ he stopped himself, chose a phrase, ‘… slept with her. And then he left. Which was bad.’

  It was beyond her what anyone saw in the view down here. Across the water there were low headlands, stripped of trees years ago and left as brown grass. Opossum Bay was a huddle of small houses that looked as if they’d slipped down the hill to lie on top of each other, crammed up against the water. And off to the south there was just the grey river, widening out to ocean. Hobart, the lonely edge of the world.

  ‘And then she started coming on to me. She knows I’m gay. She pretended she was playing, she pretended to think it was funny, but really she was being nasty. She was angry with everything, but with Roland especially, and she was taking it out on me. She was really horrible. So I thought, all right, I’ll show you.

  ‘And it was more than that. I was trying to … aah … imagine … Roland. I spent a lot of time in my life doing that, trying to imagine what it must be like to be him. You always said I copied him. Well, I did. And I thought, he’s just done this. It was a kind of …’

  A kind of what? Experiment? Tribute? She didn’t want to call it anything.

  The wind was whipping around, slapping at her, flipping bits of hair, goading her to leave, to run from this. But she would stay and listen. And help. That’s what she did.

  ‘So then …’ He drew the word out exhaustedly, as if only just realising how long this story was going to be. ‘I didn’t see her after that. It’s a long way from Sandy Bay to Chigwell, isn’t it?’

  ‘At some point they moved to Mornington.’

  ‘Also a world away.’

  ‘Then South Hobart.’

  He shrugged. ‘She’s lived all over the place. I heard she had a baby, but that’s about it. That night in Mornington, when the little boy got hurt, I went and helped … but I didn’t see his feet. It never occurred to me that he could be mine. And then, later, Roland turned up at Mum’s …’ He shook his head. ‘Treen had finally got him to come to Hobart. He told Mum he had to help an old friend and he asked us not to tell you.’

  They heard a noise in the apartments behind them. Someone had slammed a sliding door on one of the balconies. But it was a neighbour. The windows of Paul’s place reflected grey sky.

  ‘He came and went at Mum’s, and I went with him a couple of times to see Treen and the kid. And that was all pretty dire. And then finally he told me the child was his son. He sounded so sure. So I never thought he could be mine.’

  ‘Until you saw his feet.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He said that slowly, sadly. Then again, thoughtfully. ‘Yeah. One day we took Mayson out to Bellerive and he ran straight into the water with his shoes on. Roland went to get chips, because that’s how you keep Mayson quiet, and I took his shoes off and saw the toes. I went into this kind of trance. I just felt sick. I got his shoes back on without the socks. And Roland had no idea it was remotely possible that I could be the father. And he never changed Mayson’s clothes or anything. Mayson had these special pants, and we only had him for a few hours each time.’

  ‘You went and dug out the photo of Gordon at St Helens. You had it at the gallery. What were you going to do with it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to hide it from Roland or maybe I was going to tell him the truth. But by that stage, he’d gone to live in the bookshop. When I saw him he was talking about Dane and saying he had to get Treen and the boy away from him. I was just glad he was handling it. And then Treen was dead, so …’

  He seemed to feel the cold now, put his hands in his pockets, shrugged into the collar of his jacket. ‘Roland never saw the feet until after Treen died. Just the other day. He met Belle in the Chemist Warehouse to give her the key to the old building and he saw them then. But by then he was running. To Spring Beach. It took a while before he remembered Dad’s toes and then worked out what it meant. He asked me to come and see him at the old building. And then Belle died.’

  The path ended just behind them, in a circle around a bed of westringia. Paul took a few steps around and Veronica followed. They stopped with their backs to the wind, facing a grassy slope. There were two old concrete bunkers that had once housed search-lights for nineteenth-century gun emplacements. Veronica had laughed about this as a child. The fear of Russian warships in the Derwent. So long ago, so absurd.

  Paul started to defend his friend. ‘I don’t know how she convinced him Mayson was his. Roland always uses a condom. He always does and he would have that time. I don’t think he can remember much about that night. Anyway, Treen said he didn’t wear one and he had to believe her.’

  ‘He chose to believe her.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s it. He felt guilty, because he’d had sex with her and didn’t like her, so he thought he had to take her word for it. He was making amends or something. I don’t really understand, but it kind of fits with him, doesn’t it?’

  ‘But you knew the truth.’

  ‘Well, really, look, it would’ve been a lot better if he had been Roland’s. Roland is … good. He’d be a good father and he’s got the big family and he’s got you. You would have helped him.’

  ‘Lesley will help you.’

  She saw this saddened him more than anything.

  ‘She will, Paul. She wants a grandchild, badly. She lost her first child. She’s very confused about that –’

  ‘Ha! Vicky isn’t exactly the daughter she’d dreamed about.’

  ‘Give your mum time. She thought she’d lost her child. And maybe that could all be fixed now. Maybe Mayson will help. You could form a family. I’m sure your mum wants to.’

  He went over to one of the bunkers and rubbed a hand across a concrete wall. Old defences, hollow and eroding.

  ‘I’ll help you too.’

  ‘I don’t want him.’ He shook his hands in front of him, as if trying to fight something off. ‘I don’t want him to exist
. I didn’t want Treen to exist and I couldn’t stand Belle.’

  ‘Be careful, Paul.’ This is what she suspected, but now, at the point when he was about to tell her, she found she wasn’t ready.

  ‘I told John about it. Just then. I found them at Vicky’s and told him it was all true. I’d had sex with Treen and I’ve got a son. I didn’t have any choice, did I?’ He looked at her, pleading, as always, for reassurance.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Nothing. He went pale. I left him with Vick. If it was me I’d have gone out drinking. John and Vicky are probably cooking.’

  ‘Cooking?’

  ‘It’s what they do. It’s some kind of thing for them. They say it comforts them, whatever that means. I tell them it’s an orphan thing. They’re not orphans but they were both … they’re like orphans.’ He laughed. She recognised he was trying to be mean. ‘And now they’ve found each other and they’re developing this cooking and decorating thing. Housey housey.’ He waved towards the apartment. ‘They go to Habitat and drool over the coloured French casseroles.’

  ‘Well, that sounds like a good sign. For –’

  ‘It’s a fantasy.’

  ‘Paul, it’ll be all right.’

  He laughed again, sourly. ‘Are you going to tell me John’ll come round?’

  ‘Well, it might not even come to that, might it?’

  ‘What does that mean? If he leaves?’

  ‘I mean there might be a lot more that he needs to forgive you for.’ He looked at her blankly.

  ‘Can we walk a bit?’ She led him away from the point, back towards Long Beach. At least here they were slightly shel-tered, facing the little bay, the diving raft, the sports fields and playground.

  ‘Paul, that’s all extremely important, having a son, and I will help you with it. But there’s something else we have to sort out.’ She left another space, but this time he didn’t fill it. ‘We have to talk about what happened to Treen.’