Work in Progress

by Paul Thomas

  Halfway up the stairs she thought, why am I doing this? Muz wasn’t going anywhere. The dark three-piece suit he’d borrowed from his churchgoing older brother would still be wrapped in dry-cleaner’s plastic and he’d be flopped out on the bed in his socks and boxers snoring like a pig. It occurred to her that the pig comparison had cropped up a few times lately but she was in no mood to beat herself up about it.

  Muz could wait. Whatever issues he’d — they’d — had with me over the years and however much I rubbed him the wrong way, I was family and fiftieth birthday parties were a big deal. And what was almost as infuriating was that if he’d rung her early on to say he wasn’t coming because he was buggered or pissed or simply couldn’t be stuffed, she would have been furious and embarrassed but at least she would have known where she stood: on her own for the night. But he didn’t even have the consideration to do that so she’d spent the whole night expecting him to turn up at any moment, which was a distraction she could have done without. It was a long time since she’d been able to go with the flow and please herself, as opposed to being an extension of her husband.

  Lying there listening to him snore held no appeal, nor did the guest bedroom, so she ran a scented bath in the downstairs bathroom, mixed a gin and tonic in a tall glass with lots of ice and fresh lime and soaked for half an hour thinking about the party. Even with Don Corleone’s ghost floating in her wake, it was more fun than she’d had for too long.

  After that, she was ready for bed — snorting, vexatious husband and all. But he wasn’t there.

  I ask, ‘When was the last time you tried his cellphone?’

  ‘On the way over,’ she says. ‘It’s been turned off all night, which isn’t like him at all.’

  ‘Have you spoken to anyone from his work?’

  ‘Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘It’s past the point of worrying about waking people up,’ says Stanley crisply, causing Felicity to gulp. ‘If they can’t shed any light on it, you’ll have to bring in the cops.’

  They go in search of a phone book. I apply more whiskey and my pickled mind to Murray’s vanishing act. Car accident? Unless he and the car were reduced to charred skeletons, you’d think the authorities would have contacted Felicity by now. Fallen down drunk and banged his head? It’s Saturday night; if it happened in the vicinity of a pub or bar, you’d think someone would have tripped over him. Mugged and left for dead in an alley? When real estate agents go out on the town, that usually means Ponsonby or Parnell or the Viaduct Basin, hardly mean streets prowled by a predatory underclass. Passed out in a K Road massage parlour under a human pyramid of underage Thai hookers? I wouldn’t discount the possibility that Murray has a secret life but whorehouses are not hotels. They operate on emergency ward rules: someone needs your bed. When his time was up, they’d slap him awake and send him on his way.

  Stanley returns, closing the door behind him. ‘I thought this could wait,’ he says, ‘but it can’t. I got a call yesterday from a big-time property investor. He said this thing Murray tried to get me into is a black hole that’s sucked money out of everyone who’s gone near it.’

  ‘Would that include Murray?’

  ‘When someone wants me to invest in something, the first questions I ask is, have you put your money where your mouth is? Murray said he was in for a couple of hundred grand.’

  Felicity reappears. This will probably turn out to be one of those high-anxiety non-events caused by crossed wires and Murphy’s Law but now she’s starting to entertain the possibility that it could be for real. After all, shit happens — mostly to other people, but it happens. It’s like Lotto in reverse: you don’t expect to win but someone has to.

  ‘This gets more bizarre by the minute,’ she says. ‘He was in the office this morning, I mean yesterday morning, went out to an open home around lunchtime and didn’t come back.’

  ‘Were they expecting him?’ asks Stanley.

  ‘It was pretty vague,’ she says. ‘Put it this way, they didn’t think anything of it, the fact he didn’t come back.’

  The party’s definitely over. Hef and the bunnies might have a pillow fight and a sex sandwich and drink tequila sunrises watching the sun come up but my sister needs looking after. On the way out Stanley drops a hand on my shoulder. If we find Murray sleeping it off in a broom cupboard, he murmurs, I should double back; my bunny will still be there. I tell him to release her into the wild; I’m saving myself.

  ‘Samantha might’ve changed,’ he says. ‘I don’t mean the normal ageing process, I mean ruinously gone to seed.’

  ‘She might be a whole different person. She might be a mystic or a bomb-maker. She might be off men, like that little waitress you wasted your charm on.’

  Stanley screws up his face. ‘Oh, man.’

  ‘Anything’s possible.’

  ‘You’ll be able to handle it, though?’ It’s only now occurring to Stanley that, having bankrolled this sentimental mini-drama, he can’t stage-manage a happy ending. ‘If it doesn’t work out, for whatever reason.’

  ‘If it fucks me up, Stanley, rest assured I’ll sue the arse off you.’

  Felicity rings the police. Rock in a crisis that I am, I make a cup of tea.

  She hangs up feeling better. ‘The duty sergeant said nineteen times out of twenty these things turn out to be false alarms. He thinks Muz probably got sidetracked over a few drinks. When he realised he was going to be in the dog-box, he figured he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Apparently it happens all the time: people get themselves in the poo but instead of doing something about it, they freeze. When reality finally bites, they can’t face whoever they’ve let down so they go AWOL.’

  ‘Does that seem likely to you?’

  She shrugs. ‘More likely than anything we’ve come up with.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Murray paralysed by shame? I find that hard to believe.’

  Felicity sighs. ‘Not now, Max. When he turns up it’s open season but until then, lay off him, okay?’

  ‘I’m actually trying to be dispassionate. The Murray I know doesn’t fit into that scenario; it’d take a bit more than that to make him flip out, wouldn’t it?’

  She holds up her hands to indicate that she’d rather not have to listen to me being dispassionate. She just wants Murray to walk, stumble, crawl or be carried in the door so she can stop worrying about him and start tongue-lashing him.

  She goes upstairs to email the police a photo. I hear her calling and go out into the hall.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can you come up here?’ There’s a shake in her voice but I can’t tell if it’s panic or relief.

  I trudge up the stairs. She sits on the edge of the bed, hands trapped between knock knees. She doesn’t look panicked or relieved, she looks at a loss.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The sergeant told me to check his clothes. Some of them are gone.’

  I was sceptical when Stanley passed on Murray’s claim that he’d tipped a pile of his own money into the black hole. If I’d been in Stanley’s shoes, I’d have assumed Murray was bullshitting, just telling me what he thought I wanted to hear. I also thought that if he had squandered two hundred grand, Felicity would have had plenty to say about it. It didn’t occur to me that she mightn’t know.

  ‘Do you do internet banking?’ I ask.

  Felicity stares at me.

  ‘If you do, you should check that everything’s in order.’

  ‘Oh, I get it.’ The stare hardens, becomes a glare. ‘You think he’s emptied our bank accounts and run off to South America?’

  ‘It’s a way of tracking people’s movements,’ I say, avoiding the question. ‘He might’ve used his eftpos card or an ATM.’

  She’d like to shoot me down but hasn’t got the energy or the ammunition. ‘I suppose what you think of him isn’t really the issue.’

  I don’t hang around. If he’s gone, I don’t want to be looking over her shoulder when she finds out f
rom a computer.

  She comes into the kitchen a few minutes later with a bottle of wine, a hundred-dollar Waiheke Island red. I know Murray has a stash of fine wine reserved for special occasions and special people because he’s often said so in my hearing.

  ‘Happy birthday for the last time,’ she says. We click glasses and drink. She thinks the wine is overrated.

  ‘It’s probably not at its best at four in the morning.’

  ‘Tell me about it. We bought this place for two hundred and fifty thousand in 1983 and cleared the mortgage in five years. I remember it well: we had an Out of Debt party and I made myself sick on strawberry daiquiris. I haven’t had one since. According to the bank, though, we’re mortgaged to the tune of one million dollars. What are the chances of that being a computer error?’

  ‘Not great, I wouldn’t think. He didn’t tell you about his get-rich-quick scheme, did he?’

  She shakes her head. I repeat what Stanley said.

  There are no dramatics. She’s either going into shock or she’s tougher than I thought. ‘That doesn’t particularly surprise me. He’s always had this dream of getting into property development and making a killing. I wouldn’t let him so he did it behind my back. Meet the new me: a forty-six-year-old solo mother with two children at university, a job I was hoping to give up soon and a colossal mortgage. What do I do now? Start by selling this place, I suppose. So much for the dream home.’

  ‘You’ve got other assets, haven’t you? I seem to remember him banging on about some flats.’

  ‘There’s a couple of apartments and some shares.’ She pours herself another glass; I’m not even halfway through mine. ‘What’s the bet he’s sold them?’

  ‘The money aside, how do you feel?’

  ‘Fuck, Max, that’s right up there with “Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you like the play?” How can I forget about the money, for Christ’s sake? That’s food on the table and a roof over our heads and you’re treating it as some kind of optional extra, like a third movie channel. How do I feel? Betrayed, I suppose. We made promises to each other, we created something. He’s just washed his hands of all that and put us out on the street. To tell the truth, what I really feel is very fucking scared.’

  She puts her head in the crook of her arm and weeps. I try to comfort her with hugs and caring words as our father did whenever the capricious world found a new way to make her cry but I don’t have the gift: I can’t transmit love via my voice and fingertips, I can’t make her feel safe. All I can do is help her upstairs, suggest she take a couple of pills and leave her to her visions of lonely struggle.

  Murray isn’t sleeping it off on a mate’s couch or in the back seat of his car. He isn’t on the operating table or waiting to get patched up by an exhausted junior doctor. He’s not face down in some side-street with empty pockets and a caved-in skull. He’s not in the morgue. He’s eight miles high in business class, drinking Jack Daniel’s and Coke, not sure whether to laugh or cry.

  In the morning there’s a note on the kitchen table. Felicity has gone to see our mother. What a doleful get-together that will be: two generations of Napier women keening for their men. I’m guiltily grateful to Felicity for not asking me to attend a family crisis meeting.

  I walk over to Stanley’s place in the hope of a swim and of finding someone who feels worse than I do. He’s poolside, still in the Hefner outfit except for the pipe, which has gone the way of Alan’s tennis racquet. From across the pool the huge orange-tinted sunglasses make him look like a mutant, an insect from the neck up, a Kafkaesque metamorphosis in progress. Up close and without the sunglasses he looks worse. The lank, unwashed hair, lifeless eyes and air of joyless depravity bring to mind those grey nonentities with weak chins and soft hands who haunt suburban parks and sit in third-hand hatchbacks with the window down listening to playground noise.

  A stainless steel cocktail shaker and an empty glass are at his elbow.

  I ask how he’s feeling.

  ‘A damn sight better for having put away three of these babies. There’s another batch in the fridge, if you’d be so kind. Get yourself a glass while you’re at it.’

  About once a year I feel like a Bellini. Today isn’t the day but it seems churlish to prefer something else. As Stanley pours, I give him a Murray update. He seems more interested in his fourth cocktail.

  Eventually he says, ‘If I’d asked you yesterday, would you have said he was a good husband and father?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Did he treat Felicity like shit in public?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was he domineering? Did she have to walk on eggshells and avoid contradicting him at all costs?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was he affectionate towards his kids?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was he proud of them?’

  ‘Shit, yeah. You’d swear they were the greatest prodigies since Mozart.’

  ‘Did they do much family stuff together?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he have any expensive bad habits? Coke, horses and whores are the usual suspects.’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of.’

  ‘Okay. Anyone’s theoretically capable of walking out on his wife and kids. Your average Joe, from the moment he wakes up his wife’s nagging him about money and standing up to his boss and demanding a level of recognition and reward he might deserve but is never going to get. He thinks about the day ahead and it’s more of the same — tedium, frustration, shit-fights with people he despises. When he says hi to his kids, they don’t even look up from their cornflakes. To the outside world he’s a good family man with a steady job but you can see why he might want to be somewhere else.’

  ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’

  Stanley sits up, jabbing his finger at me. ‘Exactly. I couldn’t have put it better myself. The point is, though, fuck all of them ever do anything about it. They might fantasise about it in the shower, then they have breakfast, try to get a few grunts out of the kids, kiss the wife, pat the dog, go to work, do their job. And they’ll do it all over again tomorrow and the day after that and so on and so forth until they retire or drop dead. Guys like that need a catalyst.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘It begins with P and ends with Y.’

  ‘Penury?’

  Stanley slumps back on the recliner. ‘Not penury, you fucking dunce, pussy. The French have got a phrase for it.’ He clicks his fingers impatiently.

  ‘Cherchez la femme?’

  ‘That’s the bugger: cherchez la femme. Take it from me, there’s a woman involved.’

  ‘Hold on,’ I say. ‘You’re the one who found out that he’s blown a fortune. If that’s not a fucking catalyst, what is?

  ‘Do the math, pal. He blew a couple of hundred grand. That’s a setback, a kick in the teeth even, but a two hundred K mortgage is hardly the end of the world. But he made it an even mill. What’s that money for? I’ll tell you what it’s for: it’s to underwrite his new life. I reckon he got into this property venture with the idea of making a quick bundle so he could split without leaving Felicity and the kids in the shit. But it went tits-up and he had his girlfriend whispering in his ear — “It’s now or never, baby, let’s take the money and run.”’

  ‘Jesus,’ I say. ‘That would be adding insult to injury.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something else,’ says Stanley, warming to his work. ‘When you cherchez la femme, start in his office. I bet you anything you like they worked together. Simple physical proximity — it’s fucked more marriages than stretch marks and mothers-in-law put together.’

  nineteen

  Stanley’s right, of course. There is another woman — the client relations manager at a printing outfit used by Murray’s agency. While she and Murray didn’t work under the same roof, they interfaced on a regular basis.

  All is revealed in a letter posted at the airport shortly before Murray went airside, passing the point of no ret
urn. He regrets the upheaval and upset but insists his weasel run — which he characterises as a ‘clean break’ — is for the best. He undertakes to help with the children’s running costs and hopes they’ll treat his new abode (in Noosa or on the Gold Coast, depending on value for money and professional opportunities) as a home away from home.

  Their son Josh is reluctant to take sides and enthused at the prospect of an alternative residence in subtropical Queensland. Daughter Bella is vowing never to speak to Murray again. While appreciating her daughter’s stance, Felicity frets that Murray will use it as an excuse to backslide on his studiously unspecific promise of financial support.

  On the wider money front, Murray is unapologetic. As he sees it, he has simply divided the spoils, unilaterally but fairly, thereby avoiding the expensive viciousness of a protracted, lawyer-driven negotiation. The house is worth two million so Felicity has effectively bought him out. If she can’t handle the mortgage, she can trade down to something more manageable, a sensible option seeing the children aren’t too far off quitting the nest. He has pocketed the proceeds from the sale of one apartment, leaving her the other, and sold their shares to cover his losses on the property venture which is only fair since, naturally, he would have split the profits if it had proved a winner. So they’re all square and, far from being hard up, Felicity has a net worth of more than a million. This ignores her looming budget crisis: she has a part-time job and limited prospects, having put family ahead of career for most of her married life.

  As for Felicity, she insists that the emotional storm blew itself out in forty-eight hours. Now as she steels herself to break the news that they’ll have to sell the house and settle for less in a less desirable part of town, she’s consumed with anxiety over the children’s reaction to the imminent decline in their standard of living. Mother offered to put them up indefinitely and at no cost but Felicity turned her down on the spot. Josh and Bella supposedly adore their grandmother but would regard moving in with her as an unbearable humiliation.