‘One day. And I can’t wait to meet him.’ Jean’s eyes grew wide and her hand flew to her mouth.
‘What?’
‘What if we already know him? Oh my god, what if he’s right under our noses and it’s just not the right time for you two yet?’
The girls had giggled away, naming names and pointing to the occasional pedestrian through the café window. Who knew – maybe it would be the guy from the Cellar who now couldn’t stop looking at Viv?
Eventually the guy came over to the girls’ table with his friend, said they were from out of town for work, would they take them to a more happening place?
Viv looked at her friends. ‘There’s Casablabla?’
Neddy raised her hands. ‘I’ve got a baby at home. I’m out. You girls go but no texts about hangovers tomorrow, please, because I’ll be dealing with poo and will have no sympathy. No sympathy.’
‘Jean?’
Jean thought for a few seconds and Viv knew she had her.
‘OK, OK, I’ll go,’ said Jean because Jean was a dancer and Casablabla was the only place around with dancing aside from the gay bar and the club with all the uni students. It’s why Viv had mentioned it, Casablabla being Jean’s weakness.
On their way out the door, Viv put her arm around Jean’s shoulder. ‘See? Whatever will I do without you?’
‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll get by. You always do.’
Viv looked at her friend and it was then that she briefly froze time and etched a picture of Jean into her mind: buoyant and rambunctious sparks coming out the ever-so-slight gap between her front teeth; each freckle on her childish face dotted with an aged fidelity; her smile a bigger spotlight than all three bottles of wine blended into one.
The club had a Spanish/hip-hop/reggae groove and the ladies knew how to work it. The men danced too and kept the drinks coming. Viv and Jean were well and truly tanked by the time the DJ called it quits.
‘I’m screwed tomorrow. Professor Ironed Pants is going to smell the booze on my breath. I’m going to stink.’
‘Oh, never mind. He’ll be wildly jealous that it wasn’t him out drinking with you.’
‘Who’s ever been jealous of a hangover?’
‘Just tell him your news and he’ll think you’re brilliant, no matter how hungover you are.’
‘Oh, yeah! I’m going to America!’ Jean hugged Viv instantly and the two rocked back and forth in each other’s arms.
The four of them ran out to the taxi rank in a steady drizzle of rain. Reece, the fairer of the two men, opened the door for Jean and gave the taxi driver a twenty-dollar note to get her home safely. Unlucky to be paired with the happily married mother-of-one, he’d still been a gentleman. The darker man, coincidentally named Keith, asked Viv if she wanted to share a ride. With a sultry slur Viv told him, ‘You know, I think I was destined to meet a Keith tonight so we should probably share a taxi, yes.’
‘Is that right?’
‘I do believe.’
Reece slipped away unnoticed as Keith said to the happily unmarried mother-of-none, ‘I’ve always wanted to be someone’s destiny.’
‘Are you glad you’re mine for the night?’
‘The night, eh?’
‘The night’ sounded perfect because this Keith would not be the man who would one day change Viv’s life and make her want to commit. This Keith was like a little boy and Viv was only interested in being his toy.
When he kissed her in the back seat of the taxi on the way to her place, Viv forgot about the frozen picture of Jean in her head, but it would resurface the next day, after she had dealt with the wake-up sex; after the coffee and the crumpets with butter and honey; after the exchange of phone numbers and email addresses; after she had kissed Keith goodbye, letting her terry-towelling dressing gown fall from her shoulders and reveal her breasts; after he’d pressed his body to her own and she’d smelled his skin all over again; after the phone call had interrupted what would’ve been their third round of romp-festivities in less than eight hours; after telling Keith he didn’t need to come to the hospital, then accepting his offer to share a taxi. It would resurface after the hospital and the quick in-and-out to and from her office, and after she’d gone back to the hospital, then left it again, had taken a bus in the rain, closed the door to her flat and stripped on the way to the bathroom. It would resurface during the much-needed shower. When the hot water washed the hot tears from her cheeks and down the drain. When the news of Jean Harley’s accident no longer felt like a dream.
Emotional Fishing
Charley sat as far back as he could, feeling out of place, though that was nothing new. His bald head shone under the fluoro lights and the back of his neck itched – an eczema problem that flared up when he was nervous. He kept smoothing his long beard to a point – another nervous tic. One might think he was made of tougher stuff because if this was an eye-for-an-eye world, here was a man who’d seen things that should’ve blinded him, a man who’d done the sorts of things people don’t talk about at the dinner table but read about in newspapers over breakfast, a man who’d spent a quarter of his life behind bars. But he’d repented; Charley had done his time.
Leaning forward, elbows on knees, he eavesdropped on a man who was probably in his forties, a good ten years younger than Charley. The man called people, told people it was Stan, then said things like, ‘It’s not good,’ and ‘still no change’. Charley knew he should say something, but what? I was there. I’m to blame.
Charley got up and moved like a great bear just out of hibernation and asked the man at the reception desk if he could have a pen and paper.
‘Excuse me?’
Charley was a mumbler. ‘A pen and paper, thanks.’ It was almost distressing.
When he got what he’d come for, he let his shoulders rest. He turned to walk back and got a good look at Stan from the front. Shortish. Fit. His hair a bit windswept. Charley noticed hair, admired hair, wished he had some.
He pressed himself uncomfortably into the chair and stared at the blank sheet of paper long and hard before he closed his eyes and took three deep breaths through his nose. This is how he always composed: first, in his mind.
Dear Lisa – You probably just sat down with a cuppa on your veranda. I remember you wrote that once so I always picture you reading there. He opened his eyes as if to snap himself out of some daydream. What was he doing? This isn’t how he wanted to begin. If he started like this, he wouldn’t be able to slide into the horrible truth. Better he start with the meat of the beast.
Dear Lisa – I might’ve killed a woman. What a crazy way to start a letter. Most people probably start with the weather or something. Well, it’s been pissing down. A real summer storm. What the bloody hell was he talking about the weather for? He mentally erased the words to start again, keeping only the salutation.
Dear Lisa – I want to tell you about the cars at the accident. I didn’t think they’d ever stop coming at us. They just kept coming and they were moving so slow. The headlights in the rain were like torches searching me out because I did something wrong.
Charley opened his eyes, checked to see if anyone was staring at him. It wasn’t his norm, composing in public. He liked to do it over an ashtray full of ciggies and some coffee or whisky, or both.
He wrote down what he’d composed about the accident, slowly. He thought carefully about how to spell certain words: accident, lights, searching. When he finished he knew some of the usual suspects looked wrong, but couldn’t work out what to do with them: would, something, because. He left them misspelled. At the end he wrote that he knew the cyclist’s name: Jean Harley. And after spending fifteen minutes writing those five sentences, he needed a break.
Looking around the room, he decided there was nothing good about the place. There were magazines he could read if he wanted to take the time, but they’d be a waste because they were compl
ete crap. Dr Phil was on the telly and had Charley thinking, Bugger that man and his guest with anorexia. Who cares if it’s not normally a bloke’s thing? He reckons he’s too embarrassed to leave his house but he can come on bloody TV! Charley never watched TV, didn’t own a set, but still he knew that Dr Phil would fix his guest’s problem by offering the best help money could buy and the skinny guy would cry and the rich audience would cry and everyone would fucking cry and the next show would come on. TV was bullshit and so was Dr Phil.
Charley stared at the sheet of paper once again – long and hard like he always did – then closed his eyes and took three deep breaths through his nose.
The coppers gave me a good questioning after but they let me go because they said they couldn’t keep me. There will be an investigation and I can’t say I blame them, guy like me. Of course I’m nervous. I don’t ever want to go back to prison. You know what it was like. Well, not really.
Charley looked up as Stan hugged a woman struggling with a baby in one arm and a little girl hanging off her skirt. The woman was OK at first, but then she sat down and put her head in her hands and started crying. Stan started to cry too. The woman said it wasn’t fair because Jean was supposed to be going back home, as if a homecoming was reason enough to not get run over by a van. Charley watched them, though he pretended not to watch because their grief was private, even in this public space. NOTHING SEEMS REAL, he wrote, then transcribed his dealings with the cops. He felt so on-display, hunched over his paper and holding his pen the incorrect way, that he began to sweat. He not only scratched the back of his neck but his armpits too. It all felt like a nightmare, and Charley knew about those. Now he’d have to dream about the bicycle going down in front of his bumper and him not being able to stop. The heavy bounce of his van lumping itself over Jean’s body. The brokenness of her bike. Of her body. The paramedics doing their job. The coppers taking notes and eyeing him. All those fucking cars. One more nightmare among so many others.
Closing his eyes, trying to keep everything together going round in his mind, he calmed himself and started composing again. The other person with me was a woman named Sam. She was hysterical. She kept talking about late nights and early mornings with her baby and saying, ‘I can’t handle this I can’t handle this’ so many times she couldn’t hardly breathe. What happened was she opened her car door and knocked poor Jean into the traffic. Lisa, I was the traffic.
He liked the emphasis on her name because Lisa was his saviour and confessor. How ironic that right before the accident he was less than a kilometre away from the big red mailbox where he would’ve posted the last letter he’d written to her. How ironic that he’d almost gotten into a second accident on the way to the hospital this morning because the letter was still on the seat next to him and, when he’d noticed, he became so distracted he had to brake hard when the car in front of him stopped for a red light. Then he tore it up because everything in it was now a lie. After the accident, nothing in the letter mattered.
Charley needed a smoke. He tried not to make eye contact on his way out of the ICU waiting room, but the little girl was running around and almost ran into him. She stopped and stared up, up, all the way up to the top of Charley’s body and into his eyes, where shame was pouring out.
When the smoke hit, it hit the back of his throat and filled his lungs like angry relief, and he went in for more. The sign said no smoking within fifty metres of the building, so Charley walked as far as he could from the door, squinting in the white light of cloud cover and the sheen of solid rain. By the time he’d reached his destination, he’d finished his smoke, so he lit another. His doctor had told him he needed to quit and lose twenty kilos, for a start. His health wouldn’t be on his side when he needed it most if he continued in this way. He’d have maybe ten years at the most. Charley thought living to the age of sixty-six sounded more than fair. Hell, he was amazed he’d made it this far. If the manual labour he did at work wasn’t enough to help him lose the twenty kilos, Charley didn’t know what would do the trick. And as for the smoking, fuck it.
He threw the butt down, twisting the sole of his shoe over the smouldering remains. An old woman holding a little boy’s hand passed him and gave him a disapproving look; he’d done worse things in his life than litter, and some habits are hard to break. He followed them all the way to the waiting area, and when they got there, Stan picked up the boy. No doubt he was his son. Jean Harley’s son. They hugged for a very long time.
Charley went directly to his chair and read what he’d written so far. It seemed he’d been writing for hours and there wasn’t much on the page. Always the way. A person needed patience with tasks like this, yet he wrote to Lisa religiously. Vigorously. Gratefully. It was like emotional fishing: he’d release, then wait. Release his tormented thoughts, then wait for a reply.
Stan kept coming and going. Each time he came back into the waiting room, he looked sick. Charley thought Jean must look awful. Old Doc at the prison would’ve told him to find a way to make peace. Charley reckoned ‘making peace’ meant telling Stan, who sat only metres away, sorry. But every time he thought about it, his body froze. Surely they didn’t need his apology now. Surely now all they needed was each other. Charley marvelled at them glumly, wondering if this had happened to him, if he were in such bad shape, who would be waiting for him to recover? Seriously, who would the hospital ring? How would Lisa find out if he couldn’t write her a letter to tell her he’d been mowed down? No, he didn’t want to apologise. All he wanted was to hear the next update, then get the hell out of there. Go home and crash and dream about it all over again.
It’s been two days, he said in his head, and it’s all I can think about. It hurts. One thing I’m learning, Lisa, is that pain doesn’t disappear. You think I’ve done my time and I’ve forgiven myself but pain lives on. I have nightmares and in the morning I wake up and all I want to do is start my day like a normal person but it hurts. The accident and everything else.
Lisa was normal. Did she start her days in pain? It’s something Charley wondered often, how many people around him began their mornings in pain. The years before prison were hard and he’d never been proud of what he’d done, but at least he wasn’t ashamed. He was sane when he killed that puny shit. Even though it happened really fast, he knew he was in control. He knew his hands were smashing the man’s life to pieces. He saw the life leave the fucker, saw his face let it go. They were Charley’s hands that did it and Charley felt each punch. He had complete control over what he’d done and he was not, nor would he ever be, ashamed.
Not everyone deserves to live.
Charley opened his eyes quickly, knowing he wouldn’t transcribe any of that. He was getting ahead of himself. Or behind, thinking of the past. His eyes moved to the little boy. He had freckles. He played with a Lego aeroplane. His father took his hand and they both walked up to the reception desk, then disappeared around the corner where Charley knew Jean Harley was. At least the little boy had a dad to help him through. At least the man had the little boy.
Charley closed his eyes again to focus, thinking it was about time to finish the letter and get the hell out of this miserable place. I’m at the hospital. I wanted to see if she was OK because the guilt was driving me crazy. I’m really worried because she’s in a coma. I think she might die. I remember at the accident there was a bus that passed by and a person on it looked right at me and it seemed like ages but it must’ve only been a second but I swear he was shaming me.
Transcribing, he only got three sentences in before he lumbered out of his chair. He had good penmanship but he wrote big. He had to ask a woman at the reception desk if he could have more paper. Please.
‘I’m sorry?’ Granted it wasn’t the same person he’d asked for the paper in the first place, but this was always the case. Mumbler or no mumbler, of course they could hear him. It’s just that people don’t give you their immediate full attention unless you make an
immediate full impression. One would think Charley made quite the impression, but as big as he was, he was also very small, and often people didn’t see him. Twenty years ago the case had been otherwise because he’d had a different look in his eyes. Now he hid his eyes as much as he could, afraid someone might look into them.
‘Did you say paper?’
‘Please.’
When she returned with three sheets of blank paper, Charley managed a ‘ta’ and walked back, trying to avoid the eyes of the mother and her children and the old woman, but not being able to look away. The mother looked tired, the old woman looked tired, and when Stan returned with the little boy, he, most of all, looked tired.
Charley squeezed himself into the chair again, pinching his hips and legs between the armrest and seat. Again he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. This time he took more than three breaths because there was a lot to clear out before he could write. And when he finished, all he wanted was another smoke.
Giving Back
On day one Marion noticed the windowsill and its ledge hadn’t been wiped down for ages, maybe not even once in the seven years Stan and Jean had lived in the house, and there was mildew around the sink taps and building up on the silver of the drain. She’d been brushing her teeth, fighting the temptation to swivel around for fear of finding the bathtub. She knew she’d have to help bathe Orion at some point over the next few days and surely there’d be dirty water rings. Who knew how long she’d be staying at her son’s house? Well, maybe I’ll clean it – somebody has to, she thought, because Jean had never been a good housekeeper. Marion would be the first to say that Jean was a good mother and a good wife to her son, but didn’t both of those somehow entail keeping a clean house? Hadn’t it for Marion? It was the one thing her ex-husband, Donald, had demanded of her on the few occasions he was around, and it was the one thing she’d taken with her when she and Stan had left him: this obsession for cleanliness.
Jean Harley Was Here Page 3
