Under the Influence

by Jacqueline Lunn

  Eve shouted to Sarah without taking her eyes off Meg. ‘There she is, Sarah. She’s not missing any more.’

  Sarah and Eve put their drinks down on the wobbly table and lost her for a moment as she snaked her way towards them through the crowd. When she emerged, they hugged and thrust each other outwards as far as possible to examine bodies and faces more closely. They noticed changes in appearance and commented on the positive ones. Then they all sat down on their stools, and Sarah and Eve leant towards Meg to catch every word.

  Meg began an amusing story about an old man outside her hotel lobby with a parrot. She was staying in a hotel overlooking Sydney harbour for a three-day conference on childhood and adolescent obesity and waiting for a taxi when she saw the old man searching in the garden beds, the gutters, with the parrot clinging to his shoulder clicking its beak and shaking its feathers. It was bobbing up and down and looked like it was having a fit, she said. The man had lost his pen and small notebook, both of which were usually kept safe in his shirt pocket, and Meg had helped him search for his bounty outside the hotel. It was why she was late.

  ‘I don’t know how he lost them, or when he did. I don’t think he knew either, but he really wanted to find them. We searched for ages. I started to think he was making the whole thing up, and then the parrot found them,’ Meg said. ‘It jumped off his shoulder onto someone’s luggage and started squawking like it was, I don’t know, laying an egg.’

  Sarah and Eve laughed, both imagining Meg, all dressed up, hunting alongside this old man with the parrot on his shoulder.

  ‘I would have given up after five minutes,’ Sarah said. Eve shook her head, her lips curled in a half-smile.

  ‘What can you do?’ Meg said, pulling her wallet out of her handbag in preparation for braving the bar. ‘And I was rewarded, Sarah. He made the parrot give me a kiss on the cheek as a thank you.’ Meg put her wallet down on the table and turned her cheek to both of them, pressing her finger into its fleshiest part to indicate the site of the parrot kiss. Her warm, soft, tanned cheek. Two moles in a straight line high on her cheekbone. Meg and a parrot kiss.

  And now Eve sat on the end of her hotel bed, her fingers picking up a corner of the bedspread where cheap satin acted as a border, rubbing the cool softness backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, as she wondered how to fill in a few hours before she met Sarah and they both made their way to a church they’d never seen, in a town they hadn’t known existed, for Meg’s funeral.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘It’s hot. The kind of hot where sweat runs down the back of your knees and you find yourself absent-mindedly flapping your arms like a chicken to get some air under there,’ Eve said into the phone while lifting her arms above her head and waving a takeaway flyer from a Chinese shop under one armpit and then the other. ‘It’s all very dignified.’

  It amazed her. She was a world away from London, waiting to go to Meg’s funeral, stuck in Tallow like a single eye in the top-right-hand corner of a melting Picasso painting featuring square cows, bulbous dirt roads and oven-dried pubs, and the first question Richard asked was about the weather. ‘Guess where I am?’

  ‘I’m hoping in Tallow?’

  ‘I’m behind the bar downstairs on the landline. There’s no mobile service here, Richard.’ Eve then turned her back to the bar, even though it was empty, and whispered dramatically into the oversized phone attached to the wall. ‘We are cut off from the world here. Forgotten people.’

  ‘You can’t use your phone?’ Richard asked.

  ‘No. Can’t pull up a map, can’t check emails, can’t use my phone for anything but the calculator function, basically. You forget how much you take it for granted.’

  A young girl carrying a tray of washed and steaming beer glasses nudged past Eve, forcing her to flatten herself against the rows of bottles on the wall.

  ‘No one seems to mind, though.’

  Richard was silent on the other end, seemingly reeling from the idea that there were people out there in the world not comparing iPhone apps. ‘How was the flight?’ he asked after digesting.

  ‘Terrible. The plane was delayed going out of Singapore and it stuffed the whole day up. I missed my flight to Dubbo and had to wait around Sydney airport for hours, trying not to fall asleep. It was a complete balls-up. I didn’t get here until dinnertime last night. I felt like I was doing some kind of endurance race for a reality TV show. When the plane finally left Singapore, I was fuming because they sat me next to a huge woman who took up all my air space, but she was so self-conscious I started to be overly friendly so she didn’t feel so fat. I gave her all my magazines and sat in this odd sideways position. For the whole flight. But I’m here. Finally. Did I mention I filled out a missing-baggage report for my cello? As I was signing it, I realised I hadn’t brought it. The two Australian guys behind the counter thought I was mad. I am going mad.’

  ‘God, Eve, it’s so far away. Annie called yesterday and asked us over for dinner, and I said you would be away for two weeks. She had no idea you weren’t here. Didn’t you tell her you were going?’

  ‘I didn’t have time, Richard. I got the call and left straight away. You know that.’ Eve tried to walk around to the other side of the bar with the phone and nearly pulled the cord out of the wall. ‘Shit.’ She was jolted back to standing on her rubber bar mat, facing the bottles. Some had little bubbles in them, floating around in the shiny liquid. ‘I should have told Annie. It’s just a quick phone call.’

  Eve twisted the curling cord around her index finger and leant her forehead against a wooden shelf. She thought she would get some comfort out of the call. She was waiting for Richard to ask how she was and instead felt that she was getting into trouble.

  The mirrored glass splashback behind the bottles was allowing her to see what was happening behind her, in the bar. Once she focused past the top of the spirit bottles, she could see a young couple by the ATM. The woman had a pink sponge in her hand and was distractedly wiping the top of the machine again and again as he told her something obviously amusing. He was wearing a singlet, shorts and workboots, his knees were like the knots of a Moreton Bay fig tree and his body was sinewy and tight, already being eaten from the inside out by daily hard physical labour. She had gone the other way and her body searched for tightness. Her breasts met her waist, and her waist met her hips, and her hips met the viscose of her pale blue dress. Every now and then, they would bang shoulders together or hit the other playfully on the arm or look down at their feet as they spoke. They gave each other a long kiss on the lips. He slipped his arm around her back, and she kept her arm on top of the ATM. The man then headed for the door, and the woman kept her eyes on him until he disappeared through it.

  ‘I miss you already,’ Richard said, swinging the conversation around with a drop in his voice.

  ‘I miss you.’ Eve turned the bottles so that the labels all lined up perfectly. ‘I wish we were away and Mum couldn’t have tracked me down and I knew nothing about this funeral until it was too late.’ Eve knew she was being petulant and sounded like a six-year-old. Then she felt the familiar pang of failure for not being able to arrange her emotions in the way it was expected of her. ‘I’m carrying on.’

  ‘It’s so sad and needless, Eve. But she was your friend. You’d always regret not going. You don’t know how much you talked about her. “Meg wouldn’t have cared”, “Meg would have said something”. You need to be there. There’s a reason for funerals.’

  ‘Did I say those things? It was so long ago. Another life. God. I know I have to go. Funerals are disasters. I don’t know why I asked my parents not to come. I don’t know.’

  ‘Most funerals are disasters, Eve. You just have to be there. Just be there. That’s all you have to do: show up. Have you seen Sarah yet?’

  Eve stared at everything glistening and sparkling: the glass, the liquid, the stainless steel against all the heavy brown of the bar. She was relieved Richard was moving the conversation on. She like
d that he knew when to move on.

  ‘I’m meeting her in the bar in a second. She just left a message with reception to say she’ll be here in fifteen.’

  ‘Fefteeeeen. You already sound like you are going back to bad habits, Eve. You’ve gone all nasal, Oostraliaaan. Like a cast member on Home and Away.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. I haven’t even been here a whole day, Richard. My accent is the same. I’ll be back before I turn feral, don’t worry.’ Eve spotted the owner in the kitchen, his head peeping out the square glass window cut into the swinging doors. She had told him he could put $50 extra on the bill for an international phone call. He kept walking past and checking if she was still on the phone while trying to look like he wasn’t checking if she was still on the phone. ‘I think I’d better go now.’

  ‘I wish I could have come with you. You know what? If you can change your flight home to just two days earlier, you won’t miss Mick and Alyssa’s weekend away,’ Richard said. ‘Think about it. It could be exactly what you need.’

  Sarah Hall née Partridge mouthed a ‘sorry’ as she came through the heavy double doors of the pub. A hot wind followed her inside, swirling up her skirt and ruffling the few errant strands of her long auburn hair. It used to be red, but Sarah began hating red hair a long time ago, and as soon as her mother let her dye her hair she toned it down to something no one would look twice at. Titian was the colour she chose. Thick, with a recalcitrant wave, it had been tamed and carefully tied back in a ponytail, stretched far away from her tiny features. Tiny nose, tiny eyes, tiny chin, tiny lips, tiny forehead. Tiny freckles that, no matter how hard she tried to hide them, always danced across her face. Her features were such that they became less distinct the more people tried to study them, slipping back into her pale skin and almost disappearing.

  She had tried her best to make it on time to meet Eve today, but everything had taken longer than expected. She had woken crying. Andrew hugged her and told her it would be okay. She turned into him and curled up in the foetal position, her hands crossed under her chin, her feet entwined with his, the top of her head against his chest. She would get up soon. He always knew what to do when she was like this. Just hold her and say nothing. Down the polished-wood floor, she could hear Ben calling out to her from his cot. She could distinguish the sound of his fat hand banging on the primary-coloured plastic fish toy slung across the side of his cot and then his fat foot banging against the plastic turtle that hung at the end of the cot. His cry changed; he had pulled himself up and was now reaping the benefits of a deep breath and a vertical set of lungs. She hoped he didn’t wake Sebastian.

  She had dressed, done her hair – which required time and patience – and fed the boys, then taken a plane for an hour to Dubbo, hired a car and driven for two and a half hours because she didn’t want to make a ‘big event’ out of the funeral. If she went to Tallow by herself, she could be back in her own bed by tomorrow, Wednesday night, and not leave Andrew in the lurch for the rest of his working week. In Sarah’s book, big events were for weddings, birthdays, christenings and hen’s parties, not funerals. They were for the good stuff. Minimising the bad stuff was a gift she was born with, like remembering people’s names and being an expert on how not to touch anything when using a public toilet.

  Sarah made her way straight to Eve. They hugged and kissed each other on the cheek until the wonky square table in between them started to dig into the tops of their thighs.

  ‘I mucked up my timing this morning,’ Sarah sighed, glancing around the room and feeling inadequate for talking about tedious timelines. ‘Shit. Who would have thought we’d end up here?’ Her head darted from the door to the bar and back to Eve. ‘This is bloody awful. I can’t believe it. She was so young. I hope she had no clue. No clue.’ The fact that the short, sharp, shock death phrases had all been said before, on TV, in movies, to the woman on the plane sitting next to her reading Oprah Magazine, added to the feeling of make-believe in the air-conditioned room.

  ‘It’s awful, Sarah,’ Eve said. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  Sarah waited for another short, sharp sentence. These things were best delivered in at least threes.

  When Eve spoke again, which was some time after she took a sip of her mineral water and turned the ring on her right hand around and around, it was not the short, sharp, shock sentence Sarah expected. ‘How are the boys?’ Eve asked.

  ‘The boys? Good. Good. Growing. Loud. Like two lion cubs stuck in someone’s living room. Sebastian’s in his last year at childcare. Gives me some time just with Ben, and I can get some things done around the house.’

  Eve kept at Sarah about her home and her boys and nodded when Sarah talked about how busy it all was. Sarah began most anecdotes and catch-up stories with ‘we’. At first, the ‘we’ had been her and Andrew. Now, the ‘we’ was her and the boys and Andrew. She had become a package, and Eve was expected to know that.

  Sarah asked questions about Eve’s job as a concert cellist in London and how handsome Richard was going. ‘Two years now, Evie. That’s serious.’

  ‘It is. It’s nice,’ Eve said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Eve said before the conversation went on to mirror, in a faded way, the one they had every few months – Sydney to London, London to Sydney – on the phone.

  They explored the surface of each other’s lives, but it was uncomfortable to be catching up on news, to talk about the future, what might be, what they wanted to do, when they were in a pub in the middle of nowhere on a Tuesday morning because of Meg.

  The heat was beginning to mark the windows, and the conversation became potholed with long silences filled in by twirling straws and staring at nothing. The air-conditioning system struggled, and wet clouds began to form on the glass. On the door leading to the beer garden, there was a definite cloud pig taking shape.

  ‘Do you know anyone else coming today?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘No, no, I don’t. I don’t know who is going to be there. I know she has two cousins, but beyond that I have no idea.’

  ‘I’m glad Bill isn’t here to see this.’

  Eve bumped her knee on the table hard, shaking their glasses from below, and lemon, lime and too much bitters spilt all over the table.

  ‘Shit, sorry,’ Eve said. ‘I’ll get a cloth.’

  She wiped down the table spotlessly, taking great care to get every drop of liquid, to make sure there was no sign of her crime remaining.

  Meg was an only child, and this was the foundation of Sarah and Eve’s theory of why she held on to her friendships so ferociously. Both of Meg’s parents were dead, and she had one well-meaning great-aunt and two very efficient, distant cousins. Meg used to say matter-of-factly that her family tree was a bonsai.

  ‘This is awful, fucking awful,’ Sarah said, shaking her head. There was nothing new to offer. No answers. ‘What was she doing getting in the car with someone like that? She’s not an idiot, even when she’s drunk. I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Sarah, we don’t know what happened, what state she was in.’

  They both felt they could bet on it, though.

  Meg had hopped into a car on Friday night, New Year’s Day, with the wrong man. Eve and Sarah knew she had a gift for choosing the wrong man, and they knew Meg minimised the harm by never staying too long. When she could manage it, the relationship lasted for an hour and a half. Forty-five minutes in the bar and forty-five minutes back at his place. She just wanted to lie with someone. She would have sex, wait until she could hear heavy, long breaths next to her and then retrieve her clothes from the floor and tiptoe out the door and back into her world of just Meg. Eve and Sarah had given her the talk about her strange and fleeting attractions but she had dismissed them all. Her defence was always that she used protection when she had sex, she was the one who left when she wanted, she was the one who decided. It wasn’t a full-time occupation; it fitted in the cracks of her life. Meg would joke, too, that her relationships were like a
bonsai. One year, during university, Eve and Sarah gave Meg three bonsai trees as part of her birthday present. Meg lined them up above the fireplace in her rented terrace. No one else at the party got the joke.

  Meg did not have her forty-five minutes with this man. On Friday night, she’d hopped into the car with Ryan McCabe, and two hours later Max Rayder had discovered parts of a car on his drive home from The Crown. Max had been deep in his own thoughts on the way back to his farm and had nearly missed the metal sculpture by the side of the road. Meg and Ryan were dead. The ghost gum hadn’t made it either.

  Sarah began to blink too quickly. She wondered why on earth she would have thought bonsai trees were an amusing birthday present. She saw them lined up, their twisted, tiny, green branches pruned into submission, on the fireplace. She tried to remember the look on Meg’s face when she opened her present. Liquid emotion began to betray Sarah. She wiped her nose with her finger as delicately as possible and took a quick swipe at the corner of her left eye.

  ‘You know what Meg was like,’ Eve said. ‘No one could have stopped her if she wanted to do it. No one.’ Eve trailed off, pushing a few bangles up her arm until they were so tight they stuck. ‘Should we have done something for after the service?’

  ‘I know about as much as you, Eve. I got the call on Saturday, funeral is Tuesday. Got the place and time, and now I am here. It’s all been so fast, so bloody fast. I can’t believe we’re here.’

  A haze danced on the street outside, and what passed for traffic began crawling up the bitumen road. Maybe four cars drove past. Soundless people in small groups began shuffling to the pub door, foraging for their car keys in their bags, or tugging at their once-a-year ties. Eve and Sarah stood up and followed the small crowd.