Under the Influence

by Jacqueline Lunn

  ‘I left Scone when I was eleven, really, to go to school,’ Eve said after drawing a blank on a list of names. ‘Never to return.’

  ‘To play cello in London,’ Sam added. ‘That’s pretty impressive.’

  ‘There are other things in life,’ Eve said, putting the white salt and pepper together so their sides touched before picking up the laminated menu to look at desserts. She waved it backwards and forwards like a see-saw between them.

  ‘Like what?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Like life.’

  ‘We’ve just been to Meg’s funeral,’ Sam said. ‘Everything seems insignificant.’

  Eve continued to wave the menu backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards and then the prawnless fried rice arrived. They ate, asked the waitress about herself and the town and left a decent tip. Eve suggested a long walk.

  When Sam rattled the keys in the motel door an hour later, Eve couldn’t help but think how quaint it was that they were using a key, not an electronic card. Without explanation, she went to the car to get a bag of shoes from the boot. She tucked her hair behind her ears, straightened the bottom of her shirt and bent inside the shadow of the boot, knowing exactly what she was after. She was after fresh shoes, shoes that weren’t covered in dirt and sweat stains or had twigs and shit stuck to their soles. She hadn’t realised until she hit the fresh air on the walk to dinner how much better she felt for having a shower, washing the hangover out of her hair. She looked at Sam in his T-shirt and tired eyes rifling around his backpack, flinging disparate items of clothing on his bed. Eve put her clean, shiny, yellow patent ballet flats at the foot of her bed for tomorrow morning. She was beginning to pull herself together from the feet up.

  Sam repacked his backpack after he found an older T-shirt than the one he was wearing, right down the bottom, that would do as pyjamas and turned the clock radio on to fill the air.

  Eve pulled out her phone to check for messages and went through her purse, sighing at something. She wondered whether she should set the alarm to get going in the morning. An ad for the Real Deal Ugg Boots Warehouse came on, and Eve slipped off her old shoes and fell backwards onto the bed.

  ‘Eve, Eve, wake up, wake up. EVE!’

  Sam was shaking her. It was late or early morning. She was groggy, and her eyes took their time to adjust to Sam’s face in the dimness of the room, illuminated only by a yellow lamp turned on behind him and the glow of a laptop screen.

  ‘Uhh. What?’ Eve said, her mind not yet in the right gear to be alarmed that Sam was waking her up in the dark with such urgency.

  She sat up and looked at him. His eyes were red. He was wearing a T-shirt and white Y-fronts. His eyes were not just red, they were wet and red. ‘Sam, what’s happened?’

  Sam started to give out bits of information that were adding up to little more than bits of information. ‘I checked my emails before I went to bed. You were asleep. I couldn’t sleep. Didn’t want to wake you with TV. I checked my phone messages. I checked my emails.’

  ‘You’ve said that, Sam,’ Eve said in an exaggeratedly calm voice because inside she was starting to panic. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘No one knew. Not Meg’s great-aunt, not Georgia. No one. No one knew. I didn’t know.’

  Sam was not making sense, and there was not much room to pace in the room, so he had started to move his head side to side as though he was having a conversation with himself.

  ‘Sam,’ Eve said, sitting up and turning on the light next to her, taking note of the clock blinking 1.08 am, in preparation for something. ‘No one knew what?’

  ‘Meg has a baby. Her name is Kat, Katherine. She’s five months old.’

  The air left the room. Eve was sure a gust of wind had tried to suck the blinds out the window and failed, leaving a hollow flapping noise coming from the corner. A set of headlights swept the ceiling, illuminating patches of peeling paint and mould.

  Sam thrust his laptop on Eve’s chest. He pointed at the screen, directing Eve’s gaze to five emails in a row from Georgia. Eve sat up and moved the screen so she could read it. If Georgia said so, it must be true.

  After taking a moment to focus, she read the first email in the list, which was actually the last that Georgia had sent. It was all very businesslike and explained that the lawyers had called for the reading of Meg’s will this Friday in Tallow while the ‘relevant people’ were still near. Then there was a list of relevant people, which included her and Sam and Sarah and Penny and someone called Ben Heeley. The next email that Eve read, Georgia’s first, was hysterical. There were dashes and exclamation marks and words highlighted in bold. Georgia had written, ‘I feel betrayed!!!! This is wrong and sick. HOW COULD ANYONE KEEP A SECRET LIKE THIS?? It’s a baby!! Quite frankly, I’m in shock and I feel deceived.’

  ‘She’s bolded words,’ Eve said, not knowing whether to read on from the top or the bottom.

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘I just think, in this instance, they are unnecessary.’

  ‘Jesus, Eve. What the fuck goes through your head?’

  Sam went to grab his laptop back. Eve was too quick for him and pulled it away, looking straight at him as she spoke.

  ‘Okay, sorry.’ She blocked Sam with her shoulder. ‘Let me finish. Please.’

  ‘Fuck.’ Sam turned in a circle, stepping on Eve’s pair of bright-yellow ballet flats at the end of her bed. ‘Fuck.’

  Georgia’s second-last email detailed the visit by police that morning. The nanny was in complete distress, it said, with three childish exclamation marks. When Meg didn’t come back on Sunday night as planned to pick them both up and take them back to Tallow the next day, the nanny knew something was wrong. It was not like Meg. She had been hesitant to leave Kat in the first place. It was meant to be three days away, the nanny said. Three days. So she could start unpacking, set up the house a bit. She couldn’t get Meg on her mobile; there was no connection in Tallow. But Meg had called the nanny from the one public phone box near the sports oval on Thursday and Friday night. The nanny figured she’d missed the call on Saturday night as her mobile had run out of batteries and was dead.

  ‘Hopeless mobile coverage hasn’t helped anything. That’s the thing,’ Georgia wrote, going off on a tangent. ‘They talk about a national broadband scheme. How about decent mobile coverage in rural Australia? Of course, we don’t need coverage out here, because we only need to talk to sheep or something.’

  Georgia then went into a rant about country people being treated as second-class citizens by Telstra and the government before returning to the nanny. Julie was her name. On Monday, Julie called the nearest police station, in Nyngan, and they took down Meg’s last name as Julie’s last name and said they would call if they heard anything. The nanny said she tried everything. She kept calling, and on Tuesday evening they finally took her seriously and said they would go to Tallow in the morning. At lunchtime on Wednesday, they arrived, asked some questions in the main street, discovered Georgia was the one to talk to and knocked on her door as she was sitting down to a toasted ham sandwich.

  ‘It’s been stuff-up after stuff-up. And the police acted like this kind of thing happens every day!!!! I made them lunch.’

  In different circumstances, Eve would have found the last sentence so off the point as to be amusing, but Sam was standing in front of her, waiting.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked, because he obviously wasn’t.

  ‘This is not happening.’

  Eve put the laptop on the bed and felt a strange, inappropriate rush. Georgia’s bolded ‘HOW COULD ANYONE KEEP A SECRET LIKE THIS??’ still flashed in her head. Despite all her ‘Meg this’ and ‘Meg that’ at the bar on Tuesday night, Georgia didn’t have a clue about Meg. Of course Meg could keep a secret. Even when she didn’t want to.

  There were three moles that made a perfect triangle on Sam’s upper thigh, and Eve kept her eyes focused on them as Sam went over details from the emails and phone messages as if
getting them in some kind of order in his head might explain why he didn’t know about Meg’s baby.

  ‘No one knew. Not Penny. Not that bloody great-aunt. Not us. The funeral happened so quickly. There wasn’t enough time. They should have waited.’

  ‘They didn’t know. They were trying to do the right thing.’

  ‘She should have told us,’ Sam said.

  Eve knew he wanted more, and she couldn’t give it to him. She had no right. It was Meg’s decision.

  ‘She’s been in the middle of nowhere. By herself. Maybe she’s forgotten what’s expected from her. Maybe she just wanted to shock Georgia, because Georgia is … Georgia.’

  Eve imagined the job interview Meg had with Georgia. She imagined Georgia talking across the table about her vision for Tallow, pushing a slice of buttered bun towards Meg with those fingernails and Meg deciding she liked the job but Georgia could wait a while to know more about her personal life.

  ‘Georgia was meant to find out on Monday, with Meg and her baby and her nanny in town. Meg can choose something and that’s it. She won’t turn around once she has committed.’

  Sam said nothing.

  ‘We haven’t seen her in a long time, Sam. This is about distance and time and life. Not us. She was always going to tell us, you know that. We weren’t here. Don’t be angry with her.’

  ‘She must have been in her first trimester when we had a drink in Sydney before I left for Papua New Guinea. She was drinking lime and sodas. Lime and sodas. She didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Don’t be angry with her,’ Eve repeated. ‘Please. She didn’t know all this was going to happen.’

  Then Eve let go and ran to the bathroom to throw up. The carpet was dirty, and Eve could feel crumbs and grit on the bottom of her feet. A sticker from an apple stuck to her heel. She hadn’t eaten an apple in weeks. She sat on the bathroom floor and picked it off and stuck it on the side of the cistern. Six minutes ago, she didn’t know that Kat was in the world.

  Sam didn’t ask, or pop his head around the doorway to check on her. He sat on his bed, hitting keys on his laptop. He reread text messages on his phone with the other hand. ‘Tallow was going to be permanent. She spent years moving from town to town. She was going to settle. Finally stay in one place. Walk up the main street on Monday with Kat on her hip. There was a reason she was going to settle, had rented a house of her own. It all makes sense, if you think about it. I should have known something was going on.’

  Eve appeared at the bathroom doorway. Her fingers flicked off the fluorescent light. It went dark for a second and then the light from the bedside and laptop screen slowly reclaimed their territory.

  ‘You know they used to joke about Meg?’ Sam said, his face mottled with blue light.

  ‘Who’s they?’ Eve stayed by the doorway.

  ‘Other doctors. They used to call her the Yesmad doctor.’

  Eve was confused.

  ‘As in nomad. They would emphasise the “mad” part. Always moving, taking the jobs reserved for Indian doctors, they would say. Ms Yesmad.’

  ‘Did she know?’

  ‘Yes. Doctors can’t wait to let it be known they’ve cracked a joke. Especially if they are ordinarily humourless. I think for a second it might have knocked the wind out of her, and then she just started to go to fewer and fewer social events. Conferences, yes. Birthday parties, reunions, no.’

  Eve knew Meg was on her own a lot, but not fitting in? Being ridiculed? She imagined those doctors thinking they were so smart and that Meg was Ms Yesmad.

  They sat on the twin beds, one on each. The red numerals on the clock read 1.23 am.

  ‘Nothing we can do now. We’ll go tomorrow,’ Sam said. ‘First thing.’

  They turned out the lights, rearranged their pillows and slid beneath their sheets.

  ‘It will be interesting meeting that Ben Heeley,’ Eve said, remembering the name on the list. She was hardly going to forget the name of Kat’s father. She started to worry for Kat.

  ‘It will,’ Sam said, his voice deep and slow.

  Ten minutes later, Eve lifted the sheet away from her legs quietly and walked over to Sam’s bed and sat near his knees. She put her hand on his shoulder, and he turned to her face in the dark.

  ‘Please, can we go now?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  They pulled on jeans, shoved everything into bags and were packed and ready in minutes. When they walked out of their room into the sweetness of early-morning dark, Eve bowed her head behind Sam’s shoulders and mouthed, ‘Meg and Kat.’

  Sam reached behind and grabbed Eve’s hand and held it in his until he had to open the car door.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The hedging was perfect. Perfect, luscious green, tight viburnum hedges ran the length of the back garden and up the eastern side fence to meet glass sliding doors and a rumpus room. Trimmed like a sailor’s head, they gave privacy to the fifteen-metre pool, the rectangle of freshly mowed grass beside it and the oriental-themed cabana. Servants to 35 Baker Street, Pymble, Sydney, the tight viburnums barely moved or made a fuss when a wind swept through. Two of them, though, looked unkempt and slightly drunk, a few of their low branches hanging at odd angles after the trestle tables for Sarah’s thirteenth-birthday party clipped them as they were being carried to the backyard.

  Themes clashed at Sarah’s home. There was a French provincial feel to the oversized furniture in the formal dining and living room, which was adorned with tasteful muted colours, a touch of designer bric-a-brac in corners and on side tables, and a barely used antique oak dining table at the centre. The kitchen was redolent of the Romans: too much marble was never enough; ornate taps splashed streams of flowing water over tiles embossed with grapes. The bathrooms were from Bali: all white stones and bamboo. The rumpus room – the domain of the two children, a zone Amanda and Paul Partridge entered only after the cleaners had finished, to make sure behind the TV was vacuumed – was a mishmash of beanbags, TV, video player and two couches from three redecorations ago. It was all very Amanda: big on drama, thin when it came to connection.

  Trestle tables covered with neat navy-and white-striped tablecloths had been dotted around the pool, and a speaker system hung on the side wall. Amanda was busying herself with last-minute preparations before the young, inevitably teased-hair guests arrived in half an hour. She stacked a pile of magazines on the coffee table in the child-free formal areas at the front of the house, removed the catering from the fridge so the sandwiches and cakes could warm to room temperature, and made sure there was enough toilet paper in the downstairs bathroom for eighteen girls aged twelve and thirteen.

  Grey clouds had started to roll over the late-afternoon sky. Amanda said a silent prayer about the weather holding off; she didn’t want all those girls trekking through the house with grass and mud on their feet. That’s why you bother paying to have a pool and a decent backyard, so kids don’t need to come into the house.

  Sarah deserved a big party for her thirteenth, Amanda thought. She was officially a teenager, it was the beginning of her second year at high school, and she had settled in so well to school last year, coming home and talking endlessly about what she and Eve and Meg had been doing and who the strict teachers were and who let them take their shoes off in class. Her grades were solid – a marked improvement from primary school – and her contentment had made it easy for Amanda to decide that Sarah would continue as a boarder at Hetherington until work calmed down. She wouldn’t be in this job forever – next stop would be publisher, and she would have more regular hours in that seat. She wouldn’t have to prove herself week after week when circulation results came in. It was relentless editing a weekly magazine. She knew she was lucky that Sarah was Sarah.

  ‘Darling,’ Amanda called, head tilted skywards up the stairwell. ‘Darling, you need to be ready soon.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’

  Amanda had bought Sarah a new dress for the occasion. She’d had to. Sarah, with budding breasts and in
flating hips, was outgrowing everything, and it was beginning to look as though she was deliberately wearing clothes two sizes too small for her as some kind of fashion statement.

  ‘I told you, didn’t I, that Jan is coming over with Rebecca?’ Amanda said, their conversation continuing through the void in a stairwell that the architect had promised would create drama.

  ‘Yeah.’ It was a long yeah, a yeah that asked why in the middle. Sarah was getting ready for the party upstairs with Eve and Meg. They rolled their eyes at Sarah, who was shouting out her bedroom door. ‘I don’t hang around Rebecca at school, though. She’s a day girl, with day-girl friends. I don’t know why she should want to come to my party.’

  ‘Because you’re lovely. I thought you were friends with Rebecca.’ Amanda had heard Sarah mention Rebecca once or twice before and never in a bad way. She was certain of this because, whenever Sarah mentioned Rebecca – Rebecca who lived in the same suburb and attended Hetherington as a day girl not a boarder – she felt a pang of guilt. But Sarah was happier at boarding school than being in the house watching reruns of Happy Days with a nanny and her little brother, Amanda reminded herself.

  Janice Thornton was an old friend and always supported Amanda in her decision to send Sarah to boarding school. Janice didn’t work, and Amanda thought that wasn’t ideal either; it just bred a daughter who adored you when she was a little girl and grew to pity you when she became a bigger one. Janice said all the right things, but she didn’t get it. How could she when she had time to lunch with friends on a Thursday and take Rebecca to extra French classes at 7.30 am every Tuesday? From what Amanda could gather, Rebecca was as smart as a whip at school. She and Janice both had made their decisions and both had lovely teenage girls – as far as teenage girls could be lovely. Janice was a sweet woman and, since Paul was interstate on business and not due back until the morning, Amanda needed the company of another adult to survive the next few hours. She and Janice could open a bottle of wine and dig into some nice cheese while the girls talked, listened to music, played Marco Polo in the pool and mentally filed who the fattest girl in a bikini was.