Under the Influence

by Jacqueline Lunn

  Charlie and Grace ran into the lounge room wet and dotted all over with blades of grass and some small twigs.

  ‘Grab a towel and dry yourselves outside,’ yelled Eleanor. Then she turned to Eve, who was looking at Charlie and Grace marching angrily back outside. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re a bit better than I expected.’

  On the walk home, this time it was Meg who didn’t know what to say. She wanted to know more about the cello, how long Eve had been playing it, what she was playing back at Eleanor’s, but nothing came out. Eve was talking about how gorgeous Charlie and Grace were and how nice it was to have some raisin toast that came out of a toaster that only toasted four slices and was still hot when you ate it.

  ‘Wasn’t it lovely to be in a home?’ Eve said, not yet wise enough to shield herself from letting a girl she hardly knew in on what made her happy.

  ‘Yes. I loved the raisin toast.’ It was the only thing Meg said until they reached the school gate, where they stopped. ‘What was that you were playing?’ Meg continued carefully. ‘At the start?’

  ‘Oh, at the start? Bach,’ Eve replied, putting her hand on the top of the gate.

  They opened the gate. Eleanor’s home – the music, the children, her turban – wasn’t a secret really. But for some reason they both knew it was their secret.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Decisions made at 2 am in a cheap hotel room fuelled by grief and guilt and six tequila shots apiece saw Sarah depart Tallow at 11 am Wednesday morning, two hours after scheduled, leaving a message for Eve not to forget dinner next week in Sydney at her place, and Eve giving Sam a lift back to Merriwa, west of Scone, where she was headed to see her parents.

  There was a timid knock on Eve’s door followed by a small, ‘Eve? Eve?’

  ‘I’m here,’ she managed.

  Then silence. Eve stared at the ceiling. She foraged on the side table like a crane and picked up her watch: it was 11.30 am. Eve and Sam had a five-hour drive in front of them.

  ‘Umm, Eve.’ A polite clearing of the throat through the door. ‘Thanks for this. Are we still on?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Eve gingerly pulled a sheet up over her naked torso and shivered – its touch on her skin was unbearable. Then she vomited into the wastepaper bin beside the bed.

  ‘I just need twenty minutes. Twenty minutes. Can you let yourself in? I think I need a bit of help, and I’m assuming you are fine with body fluids.’

  Sam walked into the room. Without fuss, he cleaned out the wastepaper bin in the bathroom and put it back beside the bed. Before him, Eve was lying across the double bed like a man who has just been shot in a New York cop show. Her head tilted awkwardly to the side, her toes sticking out the end of the sheet. Sam noticed they had that dark red, almost black, nail polish on that so many women seemed to wear.

  ‘Twenty minutes and we’re on,’ Eve said, her tone the complete opposite of her optimistic words.

  ‘I can call my brother and get him to come and get me. None of this would have happened if he looked after his bloody car. He’s such a bloody idiot.’

  ‘It’s a ten-hour round trip,’ Eve said flatly. ‘I’m heading in that direction anyway. Honestly, it’s not a big deal. I’ll get you home, Sam.’ Eve half-smiled and lifted her hand up from her chest to give him a limp thumbs-up signal. ‘Maybe you should drive. I just need to lie here for a while. Not too long.’

  Sam looked around the room. Eve had packed the night before, frenzy-like; the zip of her suitcase was only half-closed, and he could see the handle of a brush and one silver shoe and blue shirt sticking out the side. He sat in the chair by the side desk. He pretended not to look at the sickly creature being swallowed and protected by a twisted white sheet. For half an hour, they stayed like that. Sam opened the French doors to let some fresh air in and picked up the hotel guide, in its familiar black vinyl cover. He opened it up and thought about the night before, about how they had convinced the publican to sell them takeaway alcohol. How they had all sat on the floor of Sarah’s hotel room and he’d told them he was angry. Angry at the driver, angry at Meg, angry at anyone who believed in a god.

  Eve broke the silence. ‘I think I can move now. Grab my keys and my bag.’ She then corrected herself. ‘Please. And I’ll meet you downstairs.’

  ‘We can stay for longer. Till you feel better,’ Sam said, standing up and walking towards Eve. He placed his hand on her forehead without knowing why. It wasn’t going to help one bit. As he removed his hand, he brushed the dark hair falling across her right eye, then stood at the end of the bed.

  ‘I’m not staying in this shithole any longer. Let’s go.’

  Somehow, ten minutes later, Eve made it to the car. She had no shoes on, and her hair had a small bird’s nest growing out of it at the back. She fell into the passenger seat, wound down the window and stuck her head out like a dog.

  The car drove past Tallow’s bottom pub, The Centennial, past the general store, the post office and the showground, which had a single maroon car parked in the middle of the car park.

  ‘This town makes me puke,’ Eve yelled, her head sideways in the hot wind, as they drove out of town, past no one, towards the long road to Scone.

  Eve’s bravado lasted two hours, fifteen minutes and three vomit stops.

  ‘Eve, let’s just stop at the next town,’ Sam said, holding her hair away from her face as she bent over and vomited on the side of the highway. ‘It’s 2.30 and you are still vomiting. We still have three more hours till we get to Scone. You have alcohol poisoning.’

  ‘I am just really, really hungover.’

  ‘Well,’ Sam said, ‘that would be the medical definition of alcohol poisoning.’

  Eve sat by the highway staring at the wheels of the car, at Sam’s feet, at the tiny pebbles that bunched around the black rubber of the tyres. She wiped her mouth and looked out across the bitumen highway at the sunbaked landscape spread out in front of her. ‘The sky is further away here,’ she said, squinting at Sam. ‘In London, I swear one day I’m going to go for a walk outside, be minding my own business and it’s going to fall on my head. It’s so close.’

  ‘Like Henny Penny,’ Sam said.

  ‘Like Henny Penny, but I’ll actually be right.’

  Eve stood up and leant against the bonnet of the car. Sam opened the passenger door for her. ‘Okay,’ she said, hopping back in. ‘You are in charge.’

  At the next town, Gilgandra, Sam and Eve checked into a roadside motel. Conveniently for Eve, they could park right in front of their room. She scrambled around in her handbag as though it contained the contents of Harrods and finally thrust Sam her credit card. ‘Please use this.’

  The payment argument began.

  ‘I’m not arguing,’ Eve finished. ‘It’s my fault we are here. If it wasn’t for you, I would still be back there.’ Eve flicked her head back over her shoulder. ‘I’ll pay for this and you pay for dinner.’

  ‘Dinner and breakfast,’ Sam replied.

  ‘Done.’

  They shared a room. Twin beds surrounded by rough brick walls. A round table and two chairs in the corner. Sam flung the key on the laminate side table and Eve curled up on her single bed and fell straight to sleep.

  Sam’s legs were restless and the room was small and hot, but he figured it would be irresponsible to leave Eve on her own like this. He opened the window at the rear for some fresh air then scrunched two pillows behind his head and made himself as comfortable as possible on his bed. Every now and then, he would put his book down on his lap and survey the room for nothing: the old TV, the bathroom door, the squat bar fridge, Eve with her mouth open, occasionally trying, without success, to brush the hair off her face.

  At 4.30 pm, just as the room was moving from stuffy to unbearable, Eve woke. Sam kept reading, but he could hear Eve trying hard to swallow a few times next to him.

  ‘You look like this kind of thing happens all the time.’ She was on her side, her face wedged into the pillow.

  Sam put
his book on his lap. ‘You feeling better?’

  ‘Hang on, let me sit up and see.’

  Eve moved cautiously into the sitting position. She had a big red crease running down one cheek and her face was red, layered on top with an unnatural glisten.

  ‘A bit better … a bit better, I think. It’s hot.’

  ‘It is,’ he said.

  ‘What’s the book?’ Eve nodded towards Sam’s lap.

  Sam talked about the plot and the subplots, the conspiracy and the rough-diamond cop with the heart of gold.

  ‘Listen,’ Eve interrupted in the middle of a plot twist. ‘I am really sorry about today, about the … you know … vomiting … and … about my general juvenile disgustingness. Strange times. Sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘It’s not. I need a glass of water.’

  In the bathroom, Eve couldn’t see the glass on the ledge above the sink and drank straight from the tap. She splashed her face with water and came back into the room and sat on the bed. ‘Look, I know I’m not doing this right,’ she said. ‘And I just want you to know, I wish I was doing it right.’

  Eve rubbed at her forehead with both hands so her face disappeared and all Sam could see were fingers and the bones of her knuckles. She let her hands slip down to her neck. The glistening had been washed away, and there was her pale bare face in front of Sam being held up by her hands.

  ‘I don’t know …’ Eve shook her head. ‘It’s like when my brother ran outside in his bathers for the sprinkler when he was about ten. He ran straight through the sliding glass door. Mum was screaming, so was Dad. They had this tea towel on his forehead, and it was soaked with blood. I started laughing. My brother was screaming, and I stood behind the curtain laughing. Then they started screaming at me. And I still couldn’t stop laughing.’

  Sam could see the little girl with bare feet behind the curtain, laughing. The curtain being ripped back, Dad yelling. Mum screaming and panicked. A bloody tea towel. ‘I don’t know what “doing it right” is,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  A car pulled into a spot out the front. Doors slammed. There was the sound of a heavy bag hitting the ground and then thongs slapping bitumen.

  ‘I’ve wondered about you,’ Sam said. ‘Meg talked about you.’

  ‘I obviously exceed expectations.’ Eve plumped the pillows from her bed and put them behind her back. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Just stories when we lived together. Stories about school, about boys, about how she used to still come with you to cello lessons even when the school said you were fine to go on your own. About both of you lying on the floor of the dorm to do up the zippers of your skintight jeans, about dyeing your hair in the dorm room and it turning into the colour of pepperoni pizza. Lots of little stories.’

  ‘God, did she tell you how smart she was? I remember her getting bored in chemistry – I think a lot of things ended up boring Meg – and while we were all earnestly measuring strange liquids and powders in beakers and test tubes, she made herself some powder eyeshadow. It was this residue, and she mixed it with, I don’t know, something else and made it blue and then she put it on her eyes. The rest of us didn’t notice until the teacher started freaking out and yelling at her for being irresponsible and plain stupid and how did she know it wasn’t going to burn her eyes. Meg looked like a nightclub singer and just looked at Mrs Evans and said calmly, “I thought women were meant to suffer for beauty.” She was so …’

  Two silhouettes outside their window stopped to have a cigarette. They could hear parts of the conversation from behind the glass and the sheer curtain that was being annihilated by the afternoon sun: the silhouettes were discussing how much cigarettes cost. One of them leant against the window, his big palm flat against the glass.

  ‘It’s like we’re in our own secret world of ugly brick in here,’ Eve said. ‘No one knows we exist.’

  ‘They haven’t got a clue,’ Sam said. He started blinking rapidly. ‘I need to open another window or something. It’s stuffy in here.’

  Eve went to the window and pressed her palm on the sheer curtain right on top of the big, flat palm from outside. The silhouette outside didn’t move. She turned to Sam. ‘I spend a lot of my life waiting: waiting to go on stage, waiting at the airport, for Richard to come home, and I’ve thought about it a lot. Girls, at that age, at school, the intensity, the jealousy, the insecurity; it’s like your first love affair. Some girls go from group to group, and some girls stick, Sam. We stuck. We were connected. It doesn’t sound earth-shattering, does it? That we just worked best together. We were really good together. It’s only been in the last few years, when we say goodbye on the phone, that we would say it. We would end the conversation with “Love you” and then the other would say “Love you”, and then we would hang up. It was never a big deal, just a “Love you”. Maybe it’s not love when it’s so easy, so simple?’

  Eve didn’t let Sam answer; she turned to the two silhouettes outside and kept talking. ‘I used to think we were so special.’ She slid open the window and the silhouettes jumped in unison.

  Sam opened his mouth to say something, just as a tinny rendition of Beethoven’s adagio from Sonata in C pierced the room.

  ‘Sorry,’ Eve said, turning her back and fumbling for her mobile phone. ‘Obviously we have coverage here.’

  ‘Richard, hi. Yes, yes. Oh, god, I’m sorry. I should have called, but I am alive – on my way back to Mum and Dad’s now.’

  Eve stood up and gave Sam the ‘I’m going outside’ signal. Sam nodded. He could hear the slap of thongs from the silhouettes as they moved somewhere else to finish their cigarettes.

  ‘Just thought I would break up the drive. We’re staying in Gilgandra. Sarah’s sad. We’re both sad. It’s …’

  Eve’s voice trailed off as she shut the motel door and started walking towards a low stone wall at the end of the car park.

  Sam was tired of reading his book but didn’t want to walk outside and follow Eve when she was on the phone to her boyfriend. She had spoken about him the night before, just before she couldn’t speak about anything. Sam stood up and stretched near the window, letting the smallest of breezes stroke his face, watching Eve in the car park on the phone to Richard.

  They had been together for two years. He was divine and they were in love.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Before Richard, weddings were Eve’s bit on the side. They provided the extra pounds in her purse to buy those new wedge-heeled black suede boots she had been coveting or shrink the overdue balance on her credit card. One time, with the extra money from a wedding between Lord No Lips and his young bride, whose name everyone during the speeches kept prefacing with ‘surgeon’s daughter’, she spoilt herself with a whole day at London’s most exclusive health and holistic spa. She sipped piously, trying not to use her sense of smell on the loose-leaf chai tea in handmade taupe-coloured ceramic mugs, and saw Gwyneth Paltrow walking past with greasy hair in a white bathrobe.

  It was easy money. A handful of times each year, she would form a string quartet with a few talented friends and play Pachelbel’s Canon, too many times, and Vivaldi and Handel at the kind of weddings that made it into the social pages of Tatler or Vogue magazine. The bride and groom could boast that some of the musicians sitting in the corner of grand reception rooms or castle dungeons or on rooftops or under white marquees the size of a small town were from the orchestra at the Royal London Opera. Eve had carried her cello, Percy, through six-hundred-year-old hedge mazes, up and down winding, dangerous servants’ stairs and across spongy green lawns that ate her ankles. Percy had travelled with her to exclusive London clubs where she was only told two hours before the event where to go and needed to give the doorman a password for entry.

  They would pump out Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 or Schubert’s Ave Maria or Shostakovich’s ‘Romance’ from The Gadfly. Clusters would walk by in their Christian Louboutin heels and Zegna loafers talking about th
e dress, the flowers, whether Matt was gay or if they kept on feeding Annabelle Kerr Pimm’s would she go down on them in the toilets later. Occasionally, they would notice the quartet and say, waving their hands in their direction as they walked past as if Eve and her crew were a Freud painting on the wall, ‘Aren’t they divine?’ That would be it, and they would go back to their French champagne, crab sandwiches and oysters, and their impeccable manners when being watched.

  Eve loved being anonymous with Percy in front of her on guard, watching the bride and groom, their families and friends like a spider on the wall. These were the people the happy couple chose to come to the most important day of their lives. The guests were walking, talking, eating representations of the characters of the newly-weds. There could be a few odd ones out, but usually just after entrée Eve had a pretty good idea about the internal lives of the bride and groom.

  One mother of the bride, immaculate in an ice-blue creation, pearl-drop earrings and a French roll, wept and sobbed, clearly not with joy, through the seven speeches, her shoulders shaking in spasms. Everyone pretended she wasn’t there. At the end of the speeches, the mother of the bride, eyes bloodshot, dress still immaculate, stood up for the toast with the wedding party and raised her glass with a shaky hand and smiled with red lipstick smeared across her teeth as though she was the happiest woman on earth.

  At another wedding, on a Surrey estate, Eve walked into a service room by accident and found the groom’s father giving a blowjob to one of the waiters. He didn’t jump up and run away. He continued to kneel and suck and just looked at her out of the corner of his eye – his knees saved from further discomfort on the cold tiled floor by his £5000 dinner jacket.

  At a wedding where they gave every guest a red satin heart-shaped pillow with the newly-weds’ initials embroidered on it, the speeches were so passive-aggressive that Eve googled the family when she got home, making their web of lives, lawsuits, rumoured affairs, bankruptcies and corruption allegations a research project for weeks.