Inconsolable

by Ainslie Paton

  “No. I’m fine. It was the right thing to do. Nice guy, but … anyway, I want calories and TV drama, not current affairs.”

  “He’s back, Foley. He’s not a homeless man with problems anymore.”

  “La, la, la, la. I don’t want to know.” She stuffed a finger-load of chips in her mouth and crunched, said with a mouthful, “Oh God, tell me everything. But I can’t watch it.”

  “He looks, Jesus Christ, he’s a hunk. You’d know if you were watching. He looks ten years younger without all the hair. He launched a new charity, he’s the CEO and its funding comes from his own private wealth, matched by NCR.”

  Nat was quiet. Foley could hear the murmur of Nat’s TV set through the phone handset. She hung on to that sound, to the anticipation of more of Nat’s commentary like it was her last gasp of air.

  “Are you watching?”

  “I can’t.”

  If she saw Drum, Trick, Patrick, whoever he was now, she might come apart. On the night she gave up her ordinary normal guy she couldn’t think about her extraordinary one. He would always be missing, always out there somewhere, making his own rules, living on his edge. That’s the only way she could stand to think about him, because if he wasn’t that confused, intense, challenging man then she’d lost him twice. Once to lack of a secure future, and once to the new future he was building without her.

  “Apparently he’s had a trust fund that funnelled his earnings from his shareholding in NCR through a bunch of charities. Did you know that?”

  Foley shook her head and willed Nat to keep talking.

  “That was passive. He’s going to take control of this new one. Work with charitable groups to help disadvantaged people: low income, single parents, the disadvantaged and the homeless. He’s good interview talent. He doesn’t look mad, he’s making sense. Now they’re talking to his father. This is a big deal, Foley. He’s got a lot of money to play with.” Nat paused. “Are you crying?”

  She was sobbing uncontrollably.

  “It’s not about Mark, is it?”

  She couldn’t get an answer out. Drum had worked a miracle on himself and that made her impossibly joyful and horrifically sad at the same time. He was as lost to her in his new life as he ever had been when he lived in a cave.

  Nat let her sob, filling her ear with detail after detail of the interview segment and when it was over she kept talking about Nathan’s new job as a corporate affairs director, her own as the paper’s new editor. It was what Foley needed, that reminder everything changed, people moved on, nothing was static forever.

  On Monday morning she got another reminder. Her three month probation as Acting General Manager was up. She opened a single line email from Roger. I’m keeping you. Quit acting. Now the real performance begins.

  She forwarded it to Hugh as an FYI with a smiley face and was grinning about it when Adro walked in. He plonked himself in the visitor’s chair she’d occupied so often when Hugh owned this office. “I have good news.”

  “Hit me.”

  “There’s a genuine buyer for the Beeton house.”

  She sat up straighter. “You’re kidding me?”

  “A builder submitted redevelopment plans, and they’re all within heritage specification. If the trust accepts the offer the house gets restored. We win.”

  They grinned at each other. It was a good omen. Another loose end tied up, and to think she’d get to see the house restored to its former glory made it worth the slightly illegal things she’d done to stop it falling apart.

  “But wait, there’s more.” He held a finger aloft. “I have better news.”

  Foley laughed. Adro was enthusiastically enthusiastic about work now that he had Gabriella’s job. “I like this part of my job where you give me only good news.”

  “It’s insurance against the day when I have to come in here and give you nothing but the apocalypse.”

  She laughed. “Hit me.”

  “Walter Lam is moving to Queensland.”

  “No!”

  Adro stomped his feet and air punched with his fists. “Oh yes. It’s true. He’s moving to go live near his grandkids.”

  “Oh thank God.”

  “Without him the rest of the group will fall over. No more personal objectives couched as community good.” Adro stood. “Do you love me?”

  She’d have hugged him but she didn’t want to start any rumours. “I love you.”

  He tossed an envelope on her desk. “That came for you. Was passing reception when it arrived.”

  She tore the seal and a car key slid out. She looked up, but Adro had gone. The envelope had her name handwritten on the front but there had to be some mistake. She called reception to be told the courier was waiting if she had questions.

  She had questions. There was no reason for anyone to send her a car key. She was also busy, could the courier wait for fifteen minutes? Apparently he’d wait all day.

  She made it to reception thirty minutes later and there was no sign of the courier. She looked to the two women at the desk. One of them said, “He’s waiting outside.” This got more and more irritating.

  She went through the door, impatiently scanning for the leathers of a bike courier or the inevitable cap of a guy with a van. She almost got knocked over by the shock of meeting a pair of the palest eyes in a charcoal grey suit. She took an instant step back and he smiled and that staggered her too. He had no right to smile at her like that, sending her breakfast into instant rebellion.

  “How are you, Foley?”

  Her fist closed around the key. She could throw it at him, at this distance it might hurt. He was way too beautiful and she didn’t understand why he was here in a suit coat that fitted so well across his shoulders, draped so faultlessly over his chest. He made her throat tight, her chest hurt. Why was he here? Where had he been?

  “Why did you send me a car key?”

  His smile got impossibly bigger. He had a scar on his cheekbone that hadn’t been there before. She wanted to put her finger to it, put her lips to it, hold onto him, block her ears to whatever excuses he made and throw her self-respect off a cliff.

  “What do you want from me?”

  His smile softened, but it simmered in his eyes. “Whatever you’ll give me.” His voice was an obscene caress; it flowed across her body and took her breath away.

  She threw the key at him. He caught it one-handed and the smile never left his face. It was infuriating. He couldn’t simply come here like this and trick her into seeing him.

  “Do you think you can come back wearing clothes that fit, with a decent haircut, and we’d pick up where we left off? Do you think I’ve been waiting around for you? I haven’t. You walked away. I have a life I like now. You had your shot.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you?” He wasn’t smiling now. He wore confusion on his face as well as he wore that open necked shirt. “I’d have stood in any hailstorm for you. Followed any rule. Risked every convention.”

  He reached a hand out to touch her. “Foley.”

  She stepped back. “I looked for you. I asked around. I wasted months pining for you. Did you even once think about me, worry about me?”

  He dropped his hand to his side. “I thought about you every day. I learned to recite three hundred and eighty-seven names backwards from Z to A because I was trying not to think about you and how I’d hurt you.”

  He pushed a hand through his short crop of hair. Her traitor hand wanted to march on through those shiny strands too. But there was sticky tape holding her heart together and she wasn’t brave enough to let him near it again.

  “I owed it to you to stay out of your life. I was too screwed up. I couldn’t take you anywhere I needed to go and I’m not apologising for that.”

  Foley wrapped that traitor hand around her waist. “Then I guess we have nothing to say to each other.”

  He held out the key. “I bought you a car.”

  She looked at his hand then back to his face. Was this some kin
d of sick joke? “What piece of stupid logic would make you think I need you to buy me a car?”

  “You have a new job but you’re still driving the old one.”

  “I haven’t had ti—What business of yours is that?” Her hands came up, an aggressive gesture. “You’d have to have freaking well stalked me to know that.”

  He didn’t even have the grace to duck eye contact. “I drove by your flat. That car’s not safe.”

  “That’s not your concern.”

  He took a half step closer to her. “Yeah, it is.” He looked amazing, Nat was right, he looked younger, sexier, damn him. “It always was. That’s why I had to leave you.” He needed to stop looking at her like he wanted to eat her with chocolate sauce. “I couldn’t keep you safe. I couldn’t be what you needed.”

  “You took my confidence away. You ripped my heart out. It was a wet lump of shredded lettuce. If that’s your version of safe, I’ll take dangerous.”

  “You already did that. You took my confusion, my anger and my rule making and you smashed it all up. You’re the bravest, finest person I know.”

  “Well, maybe you don’t know me anymore. Maybe my life is a thousand times better than it was when you were in it. I don’t need anything from you.”

  “Foley.” His tone was so low, so hazardous to her continued mental stability. “If all you want to do is have me lay at your feet so you can walk over me, you only have to tell me where you want me to stretch out, and how long you want me to lay there.”

  He couldn’t say things like that. She’d virtually begged him to stay. This lying at her feet caper was a piece of crap. “You’re unbelievable.”

  “I believe in you. I believe in us.”

  “There’s no us.” Oh, he was just delusional. And she was a madwoman. She’d just yelled at him in the street outside the council chambers on her first legitimate day as general manager. “Why would I take you on again, to have you walk away when it got too difficult?”

  That blow landed. It showed on his face. He lowered his chin. “It’ll never be that hard again. I’ll never make those same mistakes.” He looked up and straight into her eyes. “You can call me Drum or Trick or Patrick. They’re all me and I won’t ever try to battle things beyond me alone again. But I understand how you feel. I sucked,” he smiled gently, “and still you cared for me with everything you had.”

  “I loved you.” She said that with bitterness; a slavish devotion to the past tense of it, the over and done, lost and gone of it.

  “I love you still.” He said it as though it was the science of futurism, the secret of life everlasting, the untold wealth of conquered frontiers. He had no right to make promises he couldn’t keep.

  “No you don’t, you can’t. You want to overwhelm me, buy me, dangle me off your arm, like one of your model girlfriends.” She put a hand to her throat, her anger was throttling her. “Fuck you, buying me a car. I can buy my own car. If you loved me you’d get that. You’d have done anything to come back to me sooner, no matter what state your head was in. We could’ve worked it out together.”

  “Ah Foley. I couldn’t risk that. You’d have drowned in my despair. The only way I could come home to you is if I knew I wouldn’t hurt you again. If I knew I was strong enough for you.”

  “Newsflash. You’re hurting me now. It’s life. No one can avoid it.” She took a step away from him, he lifted his foot to follow and she put her hand up to stop him.

  “All this macho stuff about being strong.” She took another step. Her weight was on the pressure mat that operated the automatic doors. “I was strong enough for both of us.” The doors shushed open. “But here’s a new headline,” she took another step and now she was inside the building and the doors were closing and he couldn’t make her risk loving him again.

  “I’m not anymore.”

  36: Consolation

  The sliding doors closed on Foley and she turned her back on Drum and fled into the council chambers. He slapped his palm over his mouth. That was the most spectacular collision with stupid he’d ever undertaken, and that included trying to talk his own board out of making money.

  But he’d taken one look at her in her tailored work suit with the tiny stud in her nose and rational thought took a holiday. All the things he’d meant to say: how he’d missed her, how he craved her, how he’d find forever too short a time to make up for what he’d put her through, never elbowed past the fantasy of holding her in his arms again.

  He looked at the key and winced. She was bang on. He’d hurt her, he’d denied her, he’d made decisions for her, and then tried to seek forgiveness and win her back by surprising her and shoving his privilege at her. He was nothing but extremes in her life from cave to car and he should’ve understood that.

  Fuck. It was hard to think of a worse way to have handled that.

  He wanted to follow her through the glass doors and track her to wherever she’d gone. He’d go to his knees and beg for another chance, but if he got anywhere near her right now, she’d take his head off. And that wasn’t the manner he’d figured on meeting his end.

  He needed Plan B. He’d have to find a less lame-arse, insulting way to prove he knew how to complete her puzzle. He pocketed the key and brushed his hand over his side, a phantom itch on the mark he might yet come to regret, like she did. It would forever illustrate what he was missing. If she never saw it, he’d only have himself to blame because he’d taught her hesitancy, doubt and abandonment.

  And Plan B had better be inspired because after seeing Foley again and that red flare of passion that lit her up from inside, flushing her cheeks and making her eyes shine, there was no way he was going to settle for friendship. They’d gone too deep, too far with each other to go back to tense yearning, the absence of touch, and the distance of separate lives.

  He drove to the new house. He’d spent a week camped out in it with a mattress on the floor and a couple of folding chairs. The bare bones kitchen was stocked though. He had a full fridge and food in the old walk-in pantry, but he was essentially still living in a tent, or a very sophisticated cave with boarded-up windows that rattled in the wind and a hot water system that creaked and whistled like an ancient steam train. It would take a lot to make the house a home, and repairs and internal renovations weren’t the problem.

  None of his properties were ever home-like. They were investments he’d turned over, filled with designer furniture picked from catalogues sight unseen, or professionally sweated over by the girlfriend of the moment. They’d been showpieces, beautiful in their symmetry and occasional softening whimsy, but he’d treated them like hotel rooms, never caring one way or another what they looked like or how they made him feel.

  So what the hell made him think he could set up a home, that Foley would want him to have this house she’d sweated over?

  Fuck. What made him think he could win her back?

  He’d been a paranoid hermit squatter and now he was a recovering delusional fool.

  He changed out of his suit into a pair of shorts that fit and a shirt that had all its buttons. He wandered around and did a few odd jobs, and the more he tinkered, the more he knew he was sunk. Foley was an all or nothing proposition, and he had nothing. There was no Plan B. It wasn’t about real estate, furniture or finishes, colours and patterns. He would always be homeless no matter where he lived, how he lived, if he was without her.

  He’d come all this way from inconsolable towards reclaiming a useful life and the one thing he most wanted to use it for—loving Foley—was beyond him. That was an unalterably depressing thought.

  He took it out of the house. He’d walk it off. It was just on sunset and balmy. He’d get his fill of the salt air and the blue on blue that was his religion and maybe inspiration would strike. Because he wasn’t giving up and this was only the beginning. If it took the rest of his new life to convince Foley to walk on the beach with him, he’d consider that a triumph in the face of all he could lose.

  It was a conscious
decision to walk towards the cave, but he felt no compunction to visit it. The thought of standing on that rock edge made him feel faintly nauseas. He’d thoroughly replaced that danger and discomfort with solid, everyday objectives to make him feel worthy of being alive.

  Shadows had lengthened before he reached Marks Park, and when he crossed it to walk to the railing above the cave, he had reason to wish he’d convinced the NCR board to make pills to prevent heart attack.

  Foley stood at the railing, at the place they’d met, at the place he’d left her. His feet faltered. He clutched at his chest like cardiac arrest was an acute possibility. She couldn’t possibly want to see him a second time today, but why was she there?

  He said her name so she wouldn’t startle as he came up beside her. She half turned so he caught a glimpse of her face and gravity became an arbitrary force. She looked broken, was so huddled into herself, he found it hard to stay upright. He took hold of the railing because otherwise he would take hold of her and never let her go.

  She looked out towards the beach and he watched her, frantically wanting the space between them to dissolve.

  She tightened her grip on the railing. “I haven’t come here for six months. You were gone, there was no point.”

  “But you came tonight.”

  “I thought it might help.”

  “Does it?”

  She took a deep breath. He thought she might turn to him, but she got further away without moving. “Not yet.”

  “But you have hope?”

  “Maybe that’s what I should call it, hope. But it’s a flimsy thing. Nothing much to it.” She looked to the sky as a lone black cockatoo flew overhead. A bird less ordinary in a sky full of gulls. “Why did you come?”

  He shifted his weight so it was all on the leg closest to her. He’d settle for an accidental touch, a graze of their bodies in the growing dark, because if he initiated a deliberate one, he feared she’d recoil.

  “I came looking for you.” He’d been looking for the acceptance and love Foley gave him his whole adult life.