by Liz Byrski
Donald, having welcomed everyone and thanked them for coming, has now launched into reminiscence. He’s talking about their first date all those years ago, when they’d met on the steps of the post office building. He’s describing it in detail even down to the blue floral dress with the white belt she was wearing. How come he remembers that when he never notices what she wears these days? He is onto the hat now, shiny straw, he says, with a wide brim and a big white flower on the side, but suddenly he stops. He blinks a few times and rubs his hand across his eyes. Then he shakes his head, as though trying to free it from something, as if he has walked into a cobweb, shakes his head again and continues. Phyllida smiles at him and moves closer and he reaches out to take her hand.
‘So here she is,’ he says proudly, his glass raised in his other hand. ‘My wife, my trouble and strife, the love of my life. Fifty years we’re celebrating tonight …’ and he stops again, and this time he screws up his eyes, tosses his head furiously from side to side like an angry carthorse and the glass drops from his hand like a stone, the champagne spreading in a golden pool on the cream carpet. For a few seconds he stands there, arm still extended, and then, letting go of Phyllida, he puts both hands to his head. ‘What?’ he cries out. ‘What’s happening …?’ And suddenly, like a great tree felled in the forest, he crashes to the floor and Phyllida hears the crunch of glass as the champagne flute is crushed beneath him.
There is blood on Emma’s dress; a great scimitar-shaped slash of it fiercely scarlet against the cream silk. She has tried to cover it by keeping her coat on her lap but at the same time she is compelled to look at it, unable to focus on anything except how she must appear sitting here wearing this hideously defaced dress. There is blood on her legs too, her knees are patterned with it from where she knelt on the bloodied carpet to help Donald’s colleague move him and stem the flow from the cuts. A jacket might have minimised the cuts but Donald, grumbling about the heat in the room, had taken his off sometime earlier. He is always too hot, largely because he’s considerably overweight and drinks vast quantities of alcohol in defiance of his own extensive medical knowledge and constant nagging from friends and family. His only exercise is a leisurely round of golf once a week, quite often riding in the golf buggy. He eats a lot of everything and sweats a lot. It’s a family joke that there is always a nurse on stand-by in the operating theatre with a cloth to stop the sweat from running down into his eyes. So when he keeled over at the party everyone thought stroke or heart attack. But they know now that it is a cerebral aneurysm. And, as they sit here in a small private waiting room at the hospital, an unusual privilege for anxious relatives, Donald’s colleagues, who have decided on an emergency craniotomy, are right now cutting into his head to surgically clip the artery.
Emma is trying not to think about any of this; the thought of her uncle’s large, sweaty and distinctly unhealthy body malfunctioning horrifies her. She has always loathed the ugly and messy aspects of the human body, her own and other people’s. It had made pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood unbearable and she had been thankful to hand Rosie over to Grant as soon as possible. She concentrates now on her dress, the blood, and the fact that the harsh white hospital lights make even the unmarked parts of the silk look dull and discoloured. Perhaps cream is not her colour, but she saw it and had to have it despite the enormous price tag. If she could just change her dress everything would be very much better. It horrifies her that she is here at the hospital looking such a mess. She’d wanted to stay behind, wanted to be the one to sort out the caterers, pay the musicians, organise the clean-up.
‘I’ll stay and sort things out here,’ she’d said, as the ambulance was about to leave and Grant was helping Margot into his car to follow it.
‘No, Emma,’ Phyllida had wailed from the ambulance, ‘come please. We need you.’
‘It’s okay, Phyl,’ Grant said. ‘Margot and I are coming with you.’
‘I need Emma too,’ Phyllida insisted. ‘Please, Em.’
‘It’s okay, Emma, you go,’ Wendy had said. ‘I’ll stay on here and clean up a bit. Rosie’s already crashed out upstairs. She’ll be fine.’
And so here she is, here they all are, sitting in vinyl, backward tilting armchairs which are too low for comfort and in which they feel as defenceless as upturned turtles each time they attempt to sit upright. They are, Emma thinks, the most disempowering chairs for people already disempowered by fear and confusion. And where is Lexie? How come Lexie escapes while she, Emma, is going to be stuck here all night, and still needs to be at work first thing tomorrow to do something about this crazy old woman chaining herself to railings and badmouthing the shopping centre? Is there no end to it?
Bile rises suddenly in Emma’s throat, and she realises that although she’s had at least four glasses of wine, she’s been so busy she hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast. Clapping her hand over her mouth she makes a dash for the toilets which are, thankfully, empty. She dry retches over the basin, splashes cold water on her face and blots it with a paper towel. Her face, greyish white and drawn, looks back at her from the mirror, haggard in the harsh fluorescent light, and she rummages for her makeup purse, only to remember that she has left it in Phyllida’s bathroom. She can hardly bear to look at herself like this; the new eyeliner guaranteed to remain faultless for twenty-four hours has disappeared leaving only smudges under her eyes. And her lips! She’s always hated them, so thin, and they make her look old. Well that settles it, she’s definitely going to get her lips done. The plumping treatment and a permanent colour and lip liner. It’s supposed to be hideously painful but she doesn’t care. It’s better than looking like a gummy old witch. And squeezing her lips together to bring back the colour, she returns to the waiting room.
‘Em,’ Margot says quietly as she slips back into her chair, ‘Phyl’s calmer now, and the people here all know her. You must be exhausted what with the preparations and everything. Why don’t you go home now, get some sleep? I’ll stay on and I’ll ring if there’s any news.’
‘That’s right,’ Phyllida says, her voice thick from shock and crying. ‘You should go, you’ve been wonderful, the party, everything …’ The tears begin again.
‘I can drive you home if you like, Em, and then come back,’ Grant volunteers. ‘You look exhausted. This is Donald’s stamping ground and he’s in good hands. It’s not as though there’s anything we can do except wait.’
But Emma shakes her head. ‘I wouldn’t dream of leaving,’ she says. ‘It’d be different if Lexie were here of course, but goodness knows where she is.’ But of course if Lexie were here she would, by unspoken consensus, have been granted authority. In her quiet, irritating and super competent way she would be interpreting medical information, managing the practicalities, and calming everyone’s emotions. But Lexie is not here and this is Emma’s chance to make the decisions and organise everyone. Wendy has already usurped her preferred role of looking after everything back at the house and so she’s certainly not going to slink off into the night and leave Grant here – they already think he’s some sort of saint. And while she’s not blind to his many qualities, there is no way she’ll let this become another opportunity for the application of more polish to his halo.
FOUR
Suspended from a beam above Laurence’s bed an ancient ceiling fan clunks and rattles, stirring up the heat trapped in this windowless loft under the clay tiles, where a couple of skylights allow light but only faint whiffs of fresh air. Laurence lies very still, hoping that this will maximise the work of the fan. How is it possible to be this hot in Spain at this time of year when yesterday morning they were all complaining about not being able to get warm? He has never been so hot in his life. Well, actually he has, but he doesn’t believe that as he lies here in this makeshift dormitory in what was once army barracks and now masquerades as an oasis of overnight comfort for exhausted pilgrims.
Laurence doesn’t really regard himself as a pilgrim, but he likes the fact that others a
ssume he is on a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage has depth and meaning, a significance that attracts thoughtful questions, whereas saying you’re going on an eight hundred kilometre walk to take your mind off the fact that your life is falling apart is an immediate conversation killer. Now, buggered by the end of the third day of walking, he knows he was mad to agree to what’s beginning to feel like a very bad joke. For some reason which he can’t now recall it had actually sounded like fun. A group of friends enjoying Sunday lunch in a Melbourne garden, plenty of wine, a huge paella, talk of Spain, a bit of foot stamping and miming of the paso doble on the verandah, and somehow, by the end of the day, a decision to walk the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.
‘Aren’t you a bit old for that?’ Margot had asked when he’d told her a few weeks later. ‘It’s an awfully long way.’
‘About seven hundred and ninety kilometres,’ he’d said, ‘but we won’t be rushing. There are inns and old monasteries where you can stay along the route. Imagine it, Margot, rustic monastic cells, delicious food and wine, church bells ringing in the crisp dawn, on the road at daybreak. Marvellous.’
‘You hate walking,’ she’d said in that irritating, down to earth way she always used to deliver unpleasant truths. ‘You always have, and you loathe getting up early.’
‘This is different,’ Laurence had said. ‘It’s a once in a lifetime experience; a pilgrimage. And I’m already in training for it.’
‘What about Bernard?’ Margot asked.
‘Well, he’s not coming, if that’s what you mean. He’s been invited to Vietnam – a Visiting Professor.’
Margot had raised her eyebrows and said nothing, which had simply served to harden Laurence’s resolve. It was a pain in the arse having someone who could always see through him, who could dismantle him in a single sentence. He is still very fond of Margot, and in view of everything that has happened they have retained a remarkable friendship, but sometimes she’s a bit too all seeing, all knowing, for Laurence’s comfort.
His present exhaustion is due not only to the rigorous trek of the first few days, but to the fact that several weeks earlier he’d reneged on the training which everyone had agreed was essential. He’d started off all right, swimming a couple of times a week and doing some work at the gym, but then he’d slacked off, observing his friends’ committed efforts with a certain amount of indulgent amusement. It was only walking, after all, you did a bit each day, had a rest and then went on again the next day. How hard could that be? One day at a time, rest longer if needed. And the others – seven of them altogether – were hardly spring chickens; the youngest was fifty-five, Laurence himself and a couple of others the oldest at seventy-four. He’d actually envisaged himself walking with a gnarled wooden pilgrim stick and leather sandals until Griff, the self-appointed leader of the pack, had made the rule that no one could go unless they were properly equipped. That meant super lightweight everything, including high tensile collapsible sticks, and sturdy walking boots with thick socks.
Lying flat out now on their beds further up in this vast dormitory, Sheila, Griff’s wife, and Fred, his brother, are also crashed out in the heat, Fred snoring loudly, Sheila twitching restlessly in her sleep, her muscles doubtless reliving the last agonising hill on the route to Villava. Laurence closes his eyes, feeling himself drifting into sleep. No one had mentioned that the wonderfully rustic and atmospheric accommodation along the route could be very short on comfort, nor had they mentioned steep hills that would make the blood drum in his ears. Most of all they hadn’t mentioned that walking, something one did every day, could be a killer activity designed to shred your feet, burn muscles you never knew you had, and torture what remained, at this age, of one’s hip and knee joints. Laurence would like to blame others for the fact that he’s in danger of becoming a millstone around the neck of the group, but he knows that it’s his own failure to prepare, or even to think seriously about what he was taking on.
‘Fucking arrogant, that’s your problem,’ Griff had said to him at the end of the first day. ‘Train, I told you. Train, train, train, but no, you just gave me that superior fucking smile as though you were secretly running ten kilometres a day and swimming twenty laps. I don’t think you’re going to make it to the end, Laurence, I really don’t. In fact I’d lay a hundred bucks on your not making it halfway.’
So of course Laurence took the bet and now he has to make it; not just to Santiago but also that additional leg to Finisterre. And it is his pride, not the money, which makes finishing essential. He’d reneged on the exercise thing because he was so distracted that he hadn’t been able to stick to anything. What he had told Margot about Bernard’s ‘visiting’ status in Ho Chi Minh City was simply a cover for the fact that Bernard was leaving him for good. Neither of them had actually said it but the slow deterioration of their life together over the last couple of years, and Bernard’s urge to cram more onto his CV before retirement, made it inevitable. The sixteen year age gap between them had not seemed to matter until now. Laurence is not actually sure whether he committed to this trip as a means of coming to terms with this or distracting his attention away from it, but the more he hears stories of what happens to people who walk the Camino, the less likely it seems that it will provide distraction from grief or assuage a fear of the future. Closing his eyes he thinks miserably of the sort of horrors he may have to face on the road ahead. When they had stopped to eat their lunch alongside a group of other, more experienced pilgrims who had walked the route several times, there had been talk of bleeding sores on the feet, sunstroke, muscle spasms, dehydration, slipped discs and heart attacks, and that was before the emotional torment even began to hit.
Laurence feels himself sinking into a gloomy doze. There is a minimal softening in his aching joints and the fire in his feet is starting to ease when a piercing ringtone jolts him back into consciousness. Fred leaps up swearing, and Sheila sits bolt upright, dishevelled and bewildered, and then flops back down again, while further up the dormitory others grunt and toss around on their bunks, irritated by the interruption of their siesta.
‘It’s mine,’ Laurence mumbles, reaching out for his phone. ‘Sorry, forgot to turn it off.’ It’s a lie of course; he’d deliberately left it on, because it made him feel better, less cut off. Even though he’d doubted there would be a signal there was still something reassuring about having it there ready for global roaming to link him to civilisation at the first opportunity.
‘It’s me, Dad,’ Lexie says, her voice breaking up in the weak signal. ‘How’s it going? Are you enjoying it?’
Laurence flops back onto the bed, his heart rate settling to normal again. ‘Fantastic,’ he lies, keeping his voice really low, his face turned to the wall. ‘Absolutely marvellous – the scenery, the company, magic. Bloody tiring though. I’ve got a few blisters already.’
‘Good. Well not good about the blisters, the rest of it, I mean. I thought maybe you’d heard from Mum so I’m calling to let you know I’m fine.’
‘I haven’t heard from anyone since I left home.’
‘Ah, well that’s all right then. It’s just that … I thought I’d tell you myself.’
‘Tell me what?’ Laurence asks, rubbing his eyes.
‘Well I … I’ve sort of taken a bit of time out. I left on Sunday afternoon, just before the fiftieth anniversary bash.’
‘I see,’ says Laurence, not at all sure that he does. ‘So where are you?’ he asks, only slightly unsettled by Lexie’s news but spotting an opportunity for dignified withdrawal from the pilgrimage. ‘Are you okay? Would you like me to come home or meet you somewhere?’
‘Definitely not,’ Lexie says, her voice surging through more strongly now. ‘I need to be alone, maybe for quite a long time.’
Laurence runs a sweaty hand through his damp hair. ‘What about work?’
‘Redundant. The practice is being wound up. I suppose I knew it was coming but it’s a blow, after all this time – half my life down the drain.’
‘Oh well, Ross … you know Ross. I’ve emailed him and told him not to contact me. I need a break – I’m really not in the mood to talk to him right now.’
Laurence’s antennae twitch anxiously at the possible onset of parental responsibilities. ‘So what are you planning …?’
‘No idea. Not a clue. Time out; that’s it for now, time to sort myself out.’
Laurence hesitates, wondering fleetingly if he will confide the reasons for his own time out, and then deciding against it. ‘You okay for money? I can organise it from here.’
‘I’m fine for money, thanks,’ Lexie says. ‘Just wanted you to know I’m okay in case you got another version. Anyway, gotta go now. You take care, Dad, have fun. Hasta la vista and all that stuff.’
‘Yeah,’ Laurence says, ‘you too Lex – adios. Take care. Ring me again, let me know how …’ but the line is dead. Lexie has gone, back into her time-out capsule, leaving him with no reason to quit, and an unfamiliar sense of fatherly concern about her well-being. Lexie is the most consistently conscientious and reliable person in the world. Laurence is not one to dwell much on guilt but he’s never underestimated the difficulties he created for Margot and the girls by leaving. Lexie, eleven at the time, had responded by standing alongside Margot with fierce, almost protective determination. The stories about how Lexie coped when Margot returned from hospital after a hysterectomy, how she established a herb garden, cleaned all the windows and took the cat to be put down when no one else could face the task, are the stuff of family legend. She is the head prefect who keeps track of everything and everyone, cranks up the support systems when necessary and winds down the arguments. She is not a person who takes time out; she is the one who facilitates it for everyone else. Just like her mother, which is, of course, why Laurence had married Margot all those years ago; he believed she would keep him on track, keep him safe. But of course what he hadn’t realised then was that not even Margot could keep him safe from himself. And now, here he is again, hiding the truth from everyone, pretending that this is some great adventure, when it’s really about the fact that his own life is on the rocks – again.
