The Cafe by the Bridge

by Lily Malone

  ‘I have to be! I haven’t even tried the eggs yet. If you wanted eggs, why didn’t you order them?’

  ‘I only want to try them.’ She waved her fork at his eggs again.

  ‘Oh go on, then,’ he said, pushing his plate nearer to her, turning so the eggs were the closest to her.

  It was worth losing a few bites of breakfast to watch her lips move as she ate.

  * * *

  ‘You don’t rent where you live, do you, Doc? You own that place?’

  ‘I do. Me and the bank, but I own more of it than the bank now. I have a rental investment property too. An apartment in Como. The bank owns a bit more of that one but I’ve never had a problem getting good tenants in there. Rent covers the mortgage.’

  Abe’s palm felt warm and steady in hers. The sun was warm and steady on her arms. They weren’t far from her house, walking back slow and lazy after that big breakfast and the coffee. There were clouds out on the Indian Ocean, black in the belly, white on top. The forecast said rain in Perth for the start of the week, but right now that rain felt a long way away.

  ‘I’ve been thinking maybe I’ll have to rent something in town. If Ella and Sam move in to be with Jake, that big house’ll start feeling a bit small. Plus there’s not really anywhere to invite you to stay when you visit that’s private, you know?’

  She glanced sideways at him. ‘You want me to keep coming down to Chalk Hill?’

  ‘I do. Course I do.’

  ‘You’d rent, not buy?’

  ‘For now, I think so. My credit rating wouldn’t be too flash.’ He glanced away, over the water, before he came back to her and added quietly, ‘Plus, I’m not sure how long it will be before Chalk Hill gets too small for me.’

  ‘You like it in the city more.’ It wasn’t a question.

  ‘I don’t know about more, exactly. I like the noise of the city—you know there’s always someone out there. Down home it feels so quiet. I’m still getting used to how quiet it is at the farm.’

  ‘You mean boring.’

  ‘No, I mean quiet.’ He glanced sideways at her. ‘You arriving in town, on the other hand, livened things up a bit.’

  ‘Good.’ She gave his hand a happy little extra swing. ‘You needed livening.’

  Abe tugged Bruno off the path as a biker cycled past. ‘Did you ever live with a guy before, Taylor?’

  She glanced at him. ‘No.’

  ‘But you’ve had boyfriends? Like, long-term boyfriends?’

  They’d never really talked that much about her history. Most of their deeper conversations had been to do with Abe. ‘I have.’

  ‘But you didn’t live together?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She sighed. Skeletons in closets. She really only had one, but it was a dinosaur. T-Rex-sized bones.

  Abe squeezed her palm. ‘Why not, Doc?’

  ‘He was married,’ she said, letting out a breath into the river breeze.

  ‘Did you know he was married?’

  Please don’t hate me. ‘Yes.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Mid-twenties.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Older than me. Maybe ten years older.’

  ‘But you split up?’

  ‘We did. I was just something on the side and he never would have left his wife, but I thought he would for a long time. Bit deluded, really.’ She stared at a pair of seagulls, coiled for takeoff on a low rock wall.

  ‘Who broke it off?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  She glanced at him. ‘What are you sorry for?’

  ‘Well, it sounds like he hurt you.’

  She’d cried a lot of tears for Hugh. ‘The whole thing was a mess. No one comes out a winner.’

  ‘You’re kicking goals, though, Doc. Owning your own place for a start. You got a high-powered career.’ A squeeze on her palm. ‘You’re doing good.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She stopped walking. Her drag on Abe’s hand made him stop too and he turned to her with a question in his eyes.

  She stood on tiptoe and kissed him, not rushing it. Then she stepped back. ‘Thanks for understanding.’

  He shrugged. ‘Nobody’s perfect.’

  ‘It’s called being human.’

  ‘Yeah. I’m learning that finally, I think.’

  * * *

  Dr Larissa Palmer had waiting rooms pretty much like any medical specialist Abe had ever seen, not that there’d been many: a few broken bones and a visit to an ear, nose and throat specialist as a kid. Indoor plants were dotted here and there. Magazines—the posh kind—crowded a table. None of the reading material held his interest.

  The receptionist told him Dr Palmer wouldn’t be long and gave him a clipboard of what she said was standard paperwork to read and complete for first consultation patients. Patient medical and contact information. Consent forms. Patient privacy and confidentiality forms.

  He signed the consent form without reading it, but he did read the clinic’s confidentiality policy because, you know, he didn’t want every man and his dog to know he’d seen a shrink, let alone what he’d told the shrink.

  He took his signed forms back to the front desk. The receptionist thanked him and continued keying stuff into a computer. A radio played in the background, more adverts than music.

  A corridor ran off between the reception counter and the waiting room, and every now and then murmurs would drift to him along the corridor. Female voices rising, falling.

  On pretty much the stroke of 2.20 pm a door opened in the corridor. He heard mutual goodbyes and a ‘See you in two weeks’.

  A woman appeared at the reception counter and chatted to the receptionist as she paid for the session, glancing around the room as she did so, smiling at Abe before she left.

  She didn’t look nuts.

  His pulse had been reasonably normal during the day, but it kicked at him now as the clock neared 2.30 pm and no other patients came in. Patient. That’s what he was, a patient at therapy. He was about to have a therapist do a therapy session.

  On him.

  Brix would die laughing.

  Footsteps. A stir of anticipation through the room. A woman turned the corner and smiled at him. She wasn’t wearing a white coat. ‘Abel? I’m Larissa Palmer. Good to meet you.’

  She held out her hand and he stood, then they shook. Hers was a soft hand. Cool fingers. Firm shake.

  On first appearance he guessed her age as similar to Taylor’s. Thirties, not twenties. She was about Taylor’s height, with frizzy brown hair and purple-framed glasses. She reminded him a bit of an upcycled barn owl.

  ‘Come in,’ she said, picking up the file the receptionist offered. He guessed it now held all the paperwork signing his life away.

  She led him down the corridor and into her room. ‘Please take a seat.’

  ‘Where’s the couch?’

  She laughed. ‘Everyone asks me that. I’ll have to get one. I tell myself that every time I see someone new and they ask me about the couch.’

  In a corner, a water feature spilled ripples from a dome-topped fountain into a pebble-filled base before pumping the water to the top again.

  The room had a view. Boats cruised lazily on the Swan River, but the river was a long way in the distance, a blue ribbon with boats the size of kids’ toys. Kings Park made an olive-hued hump on the city skyline to the north-west.

  Unlike the front office reception area, which could have been any medical rooms anywhere, this room had its own personality, much like Larissa Palmer. It wasn’t bright white light, for one. She had lots of lamps dotted about the place, none of which matched and all of them had the look of being bought at garage sales around different parts of Perth. Bright-coloured cushions topped the chairs, with more than a few spares piled on the tiled floor. Abe shifted a cushion with a huge gold star embroidered on it so he could sit down.

  The chair pretty much did the job of a couc
h. Two people could have sat side by side without much trouble. It had wide soft arms and when he sat, he sank, and he wondered if that was part of her plan: create a chair so comfy the patient couldn’t get out when the questions got tough.

  There were three similar chairs placed in triangular formation and a couple of fabric conventional guest chairs pushed nearer the doctor’s desk. Her desk was much like the rest of the room, piled with stuff.

  Abe’s anxiety faded. This couldn’t be as bad as the dentist. No one here wanted to look in his mouth with a mirror and scrape a metal hook along his teeth.

  ‘So you found me okay?’ she asked, settling in the chair opposite his, with a low-slung chest taking the space between them. A tissue box sat on a pile of books on the chest. A green glass bottle filled with water sat off to one side, clean water glasses around it, none of which matched.

  ‘Taylor dropped me off.’

  ‘Oh good. That makes it easy.’ She opened his file and scanned the papers. ‘Did you have any questions for me about any of these forms? Anything you want clarified before we start?’

  ‘Nah. I think I’m good.’

  ‘Excellent. So first sessions are always a bit of a one-sided thing, Abel. I’ll ask a lot of questions. You can ask me anything on your mind. Don’t worry about asking me something inappropriate—if I don’t want to answer or I can’t answer, I’ll say so. We get to know each other and hopefully you can tell me a bit about why you’ve come to see me today, and what you’d like to get out of our time together.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a counsellor before.’

  ‘Most people haven’t.’

  ‘I thought every man and his dog are in therapy.’

  ‘Dalmatians are the worst. Incredibly anxious about changing their spots …’ she smiled.

  He laughed at her joke. Figured that was politic. Paused. What to say next?

  ‘So why don’t we start at the beginning, Abel? Why did you come to see me today?’ She looked at him with those barn-owl eyes.

  ‘A couple of things happened this last year. The main one I guess was: I fell for a woman who shafted me. I loaned her a fair bit of money and I lost my businesses because of her when I had to sell to pay back some debts. Now I’ve cleared my debts but I have a moral obligation to my family. They helped me out, you know? I don’t like feeling like I owe people.’

  Dr Palmer nodded sympathetically but didn’t say anything.

  ‘Then last week we found out my mum isn’t well. My folks are caravanning around Australia, and they had started to head back home when Mum had a turn a week ago. She’s been in Tamworth Hospital all week. Anyway, I think because Mum knows she’s sick, she offloaded a family secret on me. I found out my father isn’t the man I thought he was. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean it literally. I found out late last week that my birth father is a completely different man. My mum had an affair and I’m the product of it.’

  ‘And how did that make you feel, when you found out about your father?’ Dr Palmer asked.

  ‘That’s the weird thing. More than anything else I think that’s why I came to see you. It didn’t make me feel bad at all, except maybe for my mother and what she’s been hiding all these years. It actually made me feel better about a lot of things. Is that weird? I came to see you to make sure that’s not weird.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s weird.’ She laughed—a sound bright as her collection of cushions and throws—and clicked her pen so she could start writing notes. ‘I’m sorry to hear about your mum not being well, that’s always hard. Do you know what the problem is?’

  ‘She has some kind of lesion or swelling on her brain. They need an MRI scan to find out more. I guess we can talk about that when they get home. Dad doesn’t want me to talk to Mum about the other thing.’

  ‘About your biological father?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do you know why your dad doesn’t want you to talk about it?’

  ‘I think because he’s worried Mum’s not up to it.’

  ‘You said you felt better about things when you found out the truth about your father? Can you tell me about that?’

  ‘It made things make sense for me. My brothers loved the farm and I never did. I always felt like I was a disappointment to my dad, and I could never do anything right. I didn’t ever feel that same connection to the land, or to our family, not like my brothers did.’

  She thought for a moment, poised with her pen off the page. ‘Did your dad ever say you were a disappointment to him?’

  ‘Not in as many words … but I knew he didn’t feel the same for me as he did for Jake and Brix. He was different with them.’

  ‘You say you knew it, but how did you know? What made you think that?’

  ‘He was more alive with them somehow. Louder, more physical, more involved, more interested. He was happy to do things with them, whereas with me I always felt like he’d rather be somewhere else. He’d do the things with me, like kick the footy, or muck-around wrestle, but I don’t think he enjoyed it as much as he did if Jake and Brix were there.’

  Dr Palmer made some notes.

  ‘So we’ve touched on your dad, talked a little bit about your mum, tell me about this woman who scammed you. What was the scam?’

  ‘It wasn’t one of those internet scams. You know, the Nigerian ones with lousy English and they never spell your name right?’ He shifted in his seat and Dr Palmer’s barn-owl eyes caught the movement. ‘I thought this woman loved me. I thought I’d found my soul mate.’

  ‘What made you think that?’

  ‘At the time it was because she paid me so much attention, I think. After we met, those first few days, she’d text me maybe five or six times in a day, just asking what I was doing, did I miss her, that she missed me. She’d send me photos of what she was up to. Riding her bike along the river. Shopping. Whatever it was. I’d never had so much attention from a girlfriend. It was like all my life I’d been missing out on this love thing that everyone talked about … and now this was it. This was the real thing. That bolt in the chest thing. Maybe that was the problem. It was so unreal, it never felt real. That’s what Amanda used to say. That it felt like a dream, her and me. I always tried to make her feel secure, that it was real, that I was in it too and I felt the same way. That’s when the money side of things came into it. I bought her presents because I thought it would prove that I loved her. Then the presents got bigger. Too big.’

  He shrugged and fell silent.

  ‘And what about now when you think about Amanda, Abel? How do you feel?’

  ‘Stupid. I feel so bloody stupid. I guess I deserved what happened to me, given how naïve I was. She taught me a lesson.’

  ‘That’s how you feel about yourself, Abel, and we’ll talk about that another time. But that’s not how you feel about Amanda. Choose one word to describe your feelings for her. Is it love? Hate? Hurt? Resentment? Bitterness?’

  How did he feel about Amanda now? She’d faded in his mind, that’s for sure, and the emotions weren’t so raw. A lot of that was to do with time and distance. He hadn’t laid eyes on Amanda since before Christmas. Taylor came into it too. Before Taylor came into his life, he’d chased a woman out of his café over the price of two coffees and he’d been melting down over a song on the radio because it reminded him of Amanda. But not because he loved Amanda. More what had happened and how stupid he’d been. Amanda felt like a distant summer day. Hot on your skin—gave you a sunburn—but gone, and the burn healed.

  ‘Indifferent,’ he said. ‘Bitter just a bit, maybe.’

  Dr Palmer scratched a note and looked up to meet his eyes again. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I guess betrayed. It wasn’t so much about the money but the loss of trust. That’s what hurt the most.’

  ‘What about the money you lost? How do you feel about that?’

  He shrugged. ‘The money was for things that I was happy to help with. Like towards house insurances, or rates, or towards her daughter’
s school fees, or Keeley’s braces—whether it actually went to those things or not, I’ll never know. Amanda could have spent it on shoes. The way I was thinking at the time, I figured her house would be my house, you know? I thought Amanda would be my wife one day—that’s how much she sucked me in. So because I was prepared to take Keeley on as my own child, the money for Keeley didn’t worry me. I thought it was the right thing to do.’

  Dr Palmer looked up when she finished writing. ‘The loss of your business? What about that, Abel? How does that make you feel?’

  This time he grinned, opening out his hands. ‘This will sound really strange, but I won the bulk of my start-up money for the tapas bars in 2012 when Green Moon, Fiorente and Jakkalberry ran first, second and third in the Melbourne Cup. I picked the trifecta. Paid $51,117.’

  She smiled. ‘Easy come, easy go?’

  ‘A bit like that. Not that I want to do it again, I’m not about to bet everything on black. But I know I’ll recover the businesses one day. I’m young and I’ll start again. Maybe not tapas bars, but something else.’

  ‘Are you gambling now, Abel?’

  ‘No. I can’t afford to lose now. I haven’t had a bet in two years except for twenty bucks on Melbourne Cup day.’

  Dr Palmer put her pen down, tapping it gently on her notepad so that the tap tap broke through the ripple drip of the fountain.

  ‘Here is what I think, Abel,’ she said, with the tone of someone about to cut to the chase. ‘I think you’re in pretty good shape, to be honest. I don’t think it’s weird to have positive feelings about this news of your father, and we can talk more about that. Right now, I think we need to make sure that whatever it is that Amanda saw in you—something she knew how to manipulate—we need to explore that and resolve that so it doesn’t happen again. We’ll find out what it was that made you vulnerable and work on that and that’s what I meant when I said you described feelings about yourself just now when I asked you about Amanda and you said you deserved what happened. Okay? No one deserves to be hurt or betrayed. The blame here isn’t with you.’

  ‘You’re the one with the certificates here, Dr Palmer. Taylor trusts you, so I think I’m in good hands. I’m all yours.’