The Way It Is Now

by Garry Disher

  A tired face turned, resigned to be flattened further by some kind of parental grievance. ‘Yes?’

  Charlie stuck out his hand. ‘Charlie Deravin. Rose Deravin was my mother.’

  Quigley shook automatically as emotions flickered behind the tiredness: surprise, unease, calculation. Releasing Charlie’s hand, he calmly opened the rear door, stowed his briefcase, shut the door—giving himself time, Charlie thought. The story, the facial expression he needed.

  He settled on a sombre face. Leaned back against his car, folded his arms, gave a little headshake. ‘I heard on the news. An awful story. Tragic. All those years of not knowing, and now this?’

  Charlie tried to imagine what his mother must have been thinking if she’d been involved with Quigley. What might she have seen in him? What would any woman see? He was nondescript, buttoned-down, almost prissy in his mannerisms. Good voice—the sonorous voice of a born instructor—but even so, an unlikely lover. The kind who was bound to get his heart broken. Had she needed someone safe and colourless for a change? Maybe Quigley was a kind man and she’d needed a listener. Charlie heard Jess’s words ringing in his head: ‘I just want someone who’ll listen. Even when you’re here you’re not here.’

  Still: an unlikely lover. And his reaction…Why wasn’t he more surprised? Puzzled? Annoyed? Twenty years had passed; he’d never met Charlie; there was no reason why Charlie or anyone else would track him down. Had he spent twenty years waiting for the hammer to fall? Did he always keep his cards close to his chest? He should have been utterly thrown. He wasn’t even spluttering.

  ‘Sorry to intrude,’ Charlie said, ‘but I wonder if I could have a word?’

  Quigley glanced right and left, then past Charlie’s shoulder and around at the admin building, as if mapping a dash through the long shadows forming up here, in the land of mighty trees and a late afternoon sun. Then he turned to Charlie and said, ‘I must confess I have no idea what you want with me, and things are always hectic at the start of the school year. I have a stack of reports to write when I get home.’

  Charlie ignored that. ‘You were friends with my mother.’

  Quigley winced and checked the exits again. He said, dragging the words out: ‘We worked at the same school…’

  Charlie said, ‘Close friends is what I heard.’

  ‘I don’t know where you’re getting your information from. I can’t help you, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Very close friends.’

  The hunted look returned. ‘A group of us…we’d have a drink after work sometimes, that’s all.’

  It was a word picture for Charlie. He visualised a single woman, lonely, looking for a kind ear. Quigley responds, she responds in turn. They contrive to stay on in the pub when the others leave. Knees touch. Fingers.

  ‘You’re a grandfather now.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Meaning twenty years ago you had a wife or a partner at least. Did my mother know about her? Were you separated at the time?’

  ‘Mr Deravin, I’ve been married for thirty years, happily married. But what that has to do with anything—’

  ‘It’s understandable,’ Charlie interrupted. ‘My mother had left my father by that stage. He had himself a new girlfriend, in fact, so she had every right to seek male company, and you—’

  ‘Do we have to do this here?’

  Charlie hadn’t been expecting that. He’d been pushing, expecting Quigley to push back, hoping that in the heat of it he’d make a mistake. ‘There’s a pub down the road.’

  Quigley gave him a look that said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, I don’t hang out in pubs,’ and gestured to the admin building, rattling his keys. ‘My office.’

  It made more sense to Charlie when he saw what Quigley had seen: a van marked Dandy Cleaners rolling in from the main road. It pulled up outside the main building and two women got out wearing headscarves and grey overalls. Slid open a door and reached in for buckets, mops, dusters. Useful witnesses in case I get agitated or violent, he thought.

  He followed Quigley into the foyer—Quigley calling a jolly, ‘Ladies!’ to the cleaners—and past the reception desk to a corridor hung with posters and naive paintings of trees, houses and stick figures. Odours hung in the air: cooped-up, hormonal kids and their industrial deodorants; disinfectant, copy paper, petrochemical carpets and resistance to learning.

  Quigley’s office was small but overlooked a playing field, white goalposts and fence pickets, trees beyond. Files sat on the desk and the tops of the filing cabinets. Two large monitors faced the swivel chair, and the walls were crammed: a trophy cabinet, timetables; a tourist poster of Neuschwanstein Castle.

  Not the worst place for a chat, but Quigley would regain a sense of assurance here, surrounded by the symbols of his authority. And he’d had a couple of minutes to collect himself on the walk from the carpark. Charlie watched him settle behind his desk, then grabbed one of the visitors’ chairs for himself.

  Quigley regarded him across the desk: This is my ground. ‘Now, how may I help you?’

  ‘You and my mother were lovers.’ Everything in Quigley’s responses so far made Charlie certain of it.

  ‘We most assuredly were not. We were work colleagues.’

  And he leaned back and actually steepled his fingers: The ball’s in your court.

  Charlie nodded absently. Weak; pompous. Perhaps his mother had seen that, finally—or even from the start. Had quickly tired of him. He’d bored her. Too stuffy; too needy.

  But before he could formulate his next move, Quigley sat forward and fixed him with a headmaster’s gaze. ‘And for your information, and to head off any nasty little accusation you might have in mind, I was teaching the day your mother disappeared. All day. Sorry to be blunt, but there it is.’

  He would have wanted to micro-manage her, Charlie thought. He’d have brought the habits of classroom teaching to sex, to ordinary relating. He’d have laid down the law, satisfied that she couldn’t possibly demur because no one else ever had.

  ‘You hit her.’

  Quigley blanched. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘If I can find that out, so can the police. You hit her.’

  ‘I would never hit a woman.’

  ‘My mother wasn’t someone to kick up a fuss or rock the boat. She was a pacifist. Sweet, protective, always looking out for others. But she’d left my father and was having a taste of freedom. She wanted to be happy. But she was still vulnerable. Given time, she’d never have got involved with you. With any married man, for that matter.’ He glanced around the room, his voice goading. ‘Did you lie to her? Tell her you were separating; your wife didn’t understand you?’

  Quigley flapped. Charlie ignored him, his gaze taking in the depressing walls again…

  Something about the timetable. Coloured inks on a whiteboard, it took up a quarter of the side wall above a row of four two-drawer filing cabinets. Teachers’ names: Gittins, Driscoll, DiMaggio…Charlie got to his feet to check. A little x in place of the dot above the i.

  He returned to his chair. ‘In any event, she came to her senses, and you didn’t like it.’

  Quigley seemed ready to prolong his protest, but then he slumped. Said, in a low, desolate voice: ‘You’ve got it all wrong. I treated her with respect. I would never…’

  Charlie saw the motions of Quigley’s throat as he swallowed, trying to claw back his dignity. ‘We parted amicably. I had feelings for her, she for me, but it couldn’t continue, we both saw that.’ He paused, a calculation behind the eyes. ‘She was terrified of your father; did you know that?’

  ‘It was physical: you were lovers.’

  ‘None of your damn business.’ Almost a shriek. But again Quigley put a brake on his feelings. Avoiding Charlie, seeking answers in the turrets and spires on the poster, he said loftily, ‘I was a happily married man—I still am—but your mother and I had a special friendship. It broke my heart, her disappearing like that.’

  ‘Did you tell the p
olice about this so-called friendship?’

  ‘You’re a grubby little man, aren’t you? Tell the police what, that we were friends? She had heaps of friends. That woman…Karen Wagoner—why don’t you talk to her? I was at work all day, like I said.’

  ‘Did the police talk to you?’

  ‘They talked to everyone.’

  ‘Have they talked to you again?’

  ‘No. Why should they? As I said, your mother was afraid of your father. Join the dots.’

  Charlie stood; Quigley flinched.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, I’m not going to hurt you.’

  ‘I’d like you to leave now.’

  ‘I’m going. And by the way, stop sending my father those anonymous letters. They’re as pathetic as you are.’

  29

  CHARLIE SPENT THE weekend regrouping. Time now to work on the possibility that it was not his mother but the boy who had been the intended target.

  After his swim and paper run on Saturday morning, he googled ‘Saul’ and ‘Berwick’. The family hadn’t moved. Tania Saul, now divorced, would see him on Monday.

  Saturday afternoon he surfed, Point Leo promising onshore waves to 1.5 metres. He loaded his board and was there by 3 p.m., stopping to pay for a parking permit before driving around to the surf lifesaving club, where he pulled onto a grassy verge beside the usual panel vans and SUVs. He wriggled into his wetsuit and the familiar snap of the material against his skin worked with the sounds of the wind and the gulls, the tang and odour of the sea, to bring back the past even as the present was fully alive in him. With his board bumping his right hip, he trudged past the clubrooms and down the dune track to the beach. A few solitary dogwalkers; hunting seabirds tipping onto one wing above the waves; the tiny, patient dots of surfers out on the water; waves that merely rolled uneventfully to the shore but sometimes teased, sometimes reared and broke, if you were patient enough.

  He joined them out the back, bobbing lazily, waiting. Then an anomalous wave began to rise. He paddled hard for it, launched into a steep take-off, dropped fast down its face and came through in a low crouch, riding a short barrel section and finally gliding upright until he flopped onto his belly and paddled to the shore. That was all he needed. There’d be no repeating that, not today.

  Saturday evening Anna called him. He should have been the one to call—his turn, if anyone was keeping tabs—but some indefinable reluctance had crept into him since he’d seen her lying there in hospital. The grazed and broken skin. The police hovering. The shit he’d brought down on her—things like that.

  It was there in his tone now as he returned her greeting. Maybe she sensed it. She started chatting, a little faster than was natural to her. She’d been released from hospital that morning; she was recuperating at her parents’ house in Ivanhoe and already impatient with the idea of spending days sitting in the sunroom at the back, all cane furniture and flowery cushions; a physio had called by to discuss her rehab; the bushfire news just got worse and worse…

  ‘I’m babbling, Charlie. How are you coping?’

  ‘All right.’ A barely adequate response, and she was silent. ‘Keeping busy,’ he added, not quite understanding why he was being such a prick.

  She said, treading carefully, ‘Let me know if I can help in any way.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Mum and Dad were saying, will there be a funeral?’

  ‘Some time,’ Charlie said, ‘when they release the body.’ Once they’d finished poking, prodding, scraping and analysing his mother’s remains under magnification. Once the coroner cleared a backlog of paperwork too, probably. And what kind of funeral? A celebration of a life or an interment of dead bones?

  There was a silence and Charlie felt Anna reach for him as she said, ‘Or maybe a memorial service? Something less gloomy?’

  Presently Charlie said, ‘That’s actually a good idea.’

  ‘I can help—you can bounce ideas off me, I mean.’

  ‘Better leave the planning to Liam. Liam and Ryan. If I got involved, we’d just fight.’

  A brief silence.

  ‘Charlie,’ she said, ‘when you get your head on straight, come and see me.’

  And so he felt like a bastard all day Sunday. Not helped when, halfway home from a run to Bunnings, his mobile rang. Bluetooth was hit and miss so, steering with one hand, an eye on the rear-view mirror and CCTV cameras, he snatched the phone up from the passenger seat.

  ‘Deb Fiske here, Charlie.’

  Charlie ducked as if a sniper had spotted him. ‘Oh, hi.’

  ‘Forgive me, but I saw on the news about your mother. Look, it’s not strictly kosher, my calling you like this. But I want to let you know, if you need a session I can always squeeze you in.’

  Something like gratitude stirred in Charlie. ‘Thank you. Stage two of ironing out my soul and character.’

  ‘I wouldn’t necessarily have put it that way.’

  ‘I’m fine, Doc,’ Charlie said. ‘Yet to fall in a heap.’

  Which was probably a lie.

  30

  ON MONDAY MORNING Charlie surfed then drove to Berwick and parked outside a 1970s brick-veneer house on a busy street. Tania Saul shook his hand warmly and ushered him into an interior of low ceilings and compact rooms as if he were not a stranger but a friend come to give her answers.

  ‘Make yourself comfortable,’ she said, gesturing at a tired sofa.

  She returned from her kitchen a minute later with a glass of iced tea in each hand, to find Charlie not sitting but peering at framed photographs on a glossy upright piano. As he stepped away self-consciously, she came up and proffered one of the glasses. They stood there looking at the phases of Billy Saul’s short life: in Tania’s arms; giving a gummy smile from the depths of a stroller; revving a yellow truck in a sandpit; beaming in a floppy hat outside a primary school; onstage at a ballet concert.

  It wasn’t a shrine—elsewhere in the room were photographs of a daughter, and photographs of both children—but the little collection had a grave dignity to offset sad memories and financial struggle.

  ‘It must be strange for you…It’s strange for me,’ Billy’s mother said.

  Suddenly she gave Charlie a quick, unexpected one-arm hug, as if to say, ‘We’re in this together.’ A welcome antidote to some of the victim reactions he’d witnessed over the years: sibling competing with sibling in the suffering stakes, friend with friend, parent with parent.

  ‘Come. Let’s sit.’

  Charlie settled at one end of the sofa and glanced around the room. Partly open venetian blinds cut the sunlight, striping a child’s playpen in the corner.

  Tania caught his curiosity. ‘I’m a grandmother now.’

  He glanced at a photo of Billy with his sister and a scruffy dog. The girl looked a couple of years older. He did a quick sum—she was probably about thirty now.

  The passing of the years. Charlie felt awkward, didn’t know where to begin, and kept eyeing the room. A sewing machine on a card table in another corner, with a sewing basket and fabrics on the floor beside it.

  Again Tania Saul deciphered his gaze. ‘I do mending for people. Dressmaking, replacing zips, taking up hems, you name it.’

  ‘Wish you lived near me,’ Charlie said.

  She smiled, inclined her head, prepared to indulge him, but she knew this wasn’t a social visit. For his own good as much as hers, it was time for him to spit it out. He gulped down half of his iced tea and settled the glass on a coaster. ‘Now that I’m here, I don’t quite know what to say.’

  ‘Take your time.’

  ‘I’ve had this sense of two, two…’

  ‘Two depleted households,’ she said simply, ‘apparently unconnected for twenty years, and now this.’

  He was relieved. ‘You’ve felt it, too?’

  ‘Since the news came in.’

  He glanced at photographs on the wall behind her. She’d been slim when the children were young, lit up inside as if her days were too short,
and she’d favoured jeans and T-shirts. She was pushing sixty now, with cropped grey hair, and looked slower and more comfortable in herself, as if grief had burned away the excess energy.

  ‘I’m glad you made contact.’ She paused. ‘I didn’t want to intrude.’

  Seeing his gaze go to the piano again, she said, ‘If you’re wondering about Billy’s father, he hasn’t been on the scene for a long time.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. We had some good years together.’

  ‘He left after what happened to Billy?’

  ‘I know people do split up when that kind of thing happens…’ She shook her head. ‘No, he left when Billy was a toddler. He wasn’t comfortable here. Didn’t want to be a father again. It happens. He went back to Thailand.’

  Then she looked at him and in it was a wisp of challenge. ‘In case you were wondering about the children’s colouring.’

  Not to mention their dark eyes and their beauty and grace, thought Charlie.

  Still looking at him, Tania Saul said, ‘The kids really copped it, both of them.’

  Charlie grimaced in sympathy. But his next ungracious thought was: if the father didn’t do it, maybe there was a boyfriend?

  ‘Have you told your husband?’

  ‘Ex. We’re divorced. Yes, I phoned him a few days ago. I think he was genuinely shocked and sad but after a couple of minutes I got the feeling he thought I wanted something from him, so I just said goodbye. Anyway, he has a new family now. I doubt he’ll come to the funeral—whenever that will be.’

  ‘We’re having the same issue,’ Charlie said, and silence gathered around them until he looked up and said, ‘I’ve had to completely rethink everything.’

  ‘Me, too.’

  ‘All these years I more or less forgot about Billy—no offence.’

  ‘None taken.’

  ‘All I thought about was my mother being abducted and I got it into my head this guy who was renting a room from her knew something about it.’

  ‘Do you still think that?’

  A shape passed by the window, a flicker in the gaps of the venetian blind. Tracking it, Charlie said, ‘Someone just walked down the side of your house.’