Like I Can Love

by Kim Lock

  Detective Dallas Morgan approaches, waiting politely until she is free.

  ‘I’m so sorry for your loss, Fairlie,’ he says. ‘How are you?’

  At the sound of him speaking, her mother stiffens. Fairlie senses her turn away from the couple to whom she’d been talking in a low voice. Unsure how to answer when her best friend has just been buried, Fairlie lifts her shoulders. ‘I don’t know. How should I be?’

  Her mother clears her throat and her hand closes over the inside of Fairlie’s elbow. ‘Let’s go, dear,’ she mutters, close by her ear.

  ‘Lovely to see you again, Mrs Winter,’ the detective says, offering her mother a smile.

  ‘You know my mum?’ Fairlie asks, surprised.

  Pattie returns the detective’s smile, briefly. ‘Likewise, Detective Morgan. Come on, Fro. Your father’s waiting.’

  Fairlie frowns and shakes her mother off. ‘It was nice to see you, Detective. Thank you for coming.’ Detective Dallas Morgan clasps her hands and tells her to take care of herself.

  ‘I’ll try,’ she answers, before turning to follow her family.

  *

  ‘I’m calling from Telstra regarding the fifty-two dollars and eighty-nine cents outstanding on your account.’

  Fairlie stops mid-stride. ‘Again?’

  ‘We need payment of the outstanding amount within the next twenty-four hours, otherwise this call is to notify you that your account will be disconnected.’

  ‘You know what?’ Fairlie squints up into the bright ball of the sun. She balances on the kerb and cars trundle past her elbow. ‘My best friend just died. I’m standing on the street after her funeral; I’m about to meet some friends for coffee. So we can grieve and remember our dead mate. And her life. Before she died.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear that, ma’am –’

  ‘I’m sorry too, I know you’re just doing your job. Do you like it, by the way? Thinking about a change of career myself.’ She digs her knuckles into her eyes, blotting out the sun. ‘That’s not true. I do actually love my job. I think it’s the only reason I’m still here, to be honest. Even though Jenna moved out and disappeared . . . the hospital kept me going. Routine. I just put my head down and worked. You know?’

  ‘Ma’am, would you like to pay by credit card?’

  Fairlie nudges an unidentifiable object in the gutter. It looks like a cockroach stuck in old chewing gum.

  ‘Her name was Jenna. She was my best friend. What am I supposed to do?’ The sun beats hot onto her scalp. ‘It’s my fault. I should have been there for her. She tried to tell me but I was mad and sad at her for leaving me for him. And his acres. I felt abandoned. Like I wasn’t enough for her anymore. Isn’t that just pathetic?’

  Silence from the Telstra employee; phones buzz and voices babble in the background. She can imagine him searching frantically through his instruction manual, looking for the heading: What to say if dead friend.

  ‘I can take your credit card details today. Or you can choose BPAY.’

  Up ahead Abbey and Damon emerge on the footpath. Abbey waves and Fairlie lifts a hand in return.

  Fairlie says, ‘I’ve gotta go. But look, it’s been enlightening.’ Disconnecting the call, she hurries to catch up with her friends.

  Dear Jenna,

  The first time I met Pattie Winter, I was actually trying to hide.

  I was kneeling in the neighbour’s garden, digging in the moist soil, damp agapanthus leaves draped across my head. Suddenly, the pile of rhizomes I’d unearthed had scattered across the lawn as a frenzied blur of white fur whizzed past. I heard a woman screech, ‘Cooper! You little shit!’

  Shooting to my feet, I watched a woman dive into a daisy bush across the yard – in my garden – then wriggle out, butt-first, clutching a wriggling Maltese Terrier.

  Anxious not to be caught, I scuttled across the drive.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the woman breathed, ‘I’m so embarrassed.’

  Dropping the dog, she kept a firm grip on the lead with one hand and extended the other. ‘I’m Patricia Winter. I live around the corner. Number 12.’

  When I introduced myself she blurted, ‘I know –’ and then clapped a hand over her mouth, her cheeks flaming.

  Her embarrassment struck me as amusing. Before her I stood with mud-soaked knees, dirt smeared across my face, caught trowel in hand as I scooped rare rhizomes from the next-door neighbour’s garden while they were away on holiday. I was supposed to be watering their garden, not looting it.

  ‘Lily of the Valley,’ I said, sheepishly offering the bag of ­rhizomes. ‘The scent is divine.’

  ‘And highly poisonous,’ Pattie added, holding the dog up to her face and scowling at him. ‘Doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.’

  I knew we’d be friends then, Jenna, because she’d plucked the trowel from my hand and begun a fresh trench.

  Only a couple of days later, I found myself at Pattie’s door, in need of her telephone as I had locked myself out of the house. Pattie prepared tea and fed me lamingtons and told me about the time she had once locked herself out of her car in the Target car park and walked all the way home only to find the keys in her handbag.

  We saw each other almost every day after that. The rest, you know. We’re inseparable. I would do anything for her.

  Well, you know that, too.

  One evening I found Pattie inside my front door, her body bowed in a frightening deflated curve, her hands over her face. I could hear her sobbing and she was apologising over and over. She said, ‘I hoped I’d pull myself together before I saw you.’

  After a moment she said, ‘My monthly came again today. This time I wasn’t even pregnant. Is that better than a miscarriage?’

  I must have told her I was sorry, or some other thin and useless condolence. But my thoughts had stolen to the humble swell of my abdomen – I still hadn’t told anyone besides Stephen. A secret hidden by the ruffles of my blouse. And here was my dear friend telling me that what I hid she was being cruelly denied, over and over and over.

  Pattie smiled tearfully. ‘I wish I could say that after so many years it would be easier, that each month would be less of a bitter disappointment.’

  I said something empty and limp, if only to fill the air between us with words so she could know how much I cared, how sorry I was for her hurt. But the space between my hipbones seemed hot and weighted, and it was all I could think about. I felt like a fraud.

  She told me, ‘I feel like a failure as a woman. Why can’t I fall pregnant?’

  ‘Sometimes, there’s things we just don’t know,’ I said, feeling the clench of the truth of it.

  Things we don’t know. I asked myself, What do you know, Evelyn?

  I cannot understand why I chose that moment to tell Pattie that I was pregnant. But when I did, my dear friend responded with a fervent, unconditional delight that only intensified the low ebb of my guilt.

  It was on that weekday evening that our friendship was cemented; we clicked with a marrow-deep understanding of each other over the raw grief of loss and the exquisite joy of hope – and of how things out of one’s control can turn with the slip of time.

  Until next time,

  Love, Mum

  6

  THEN

  Leaning silently on the bathroom door frame, Jenna watched Fairlie settle the elderly woman over the toilet before she knocked.

  Steadying the old woman by cupping her bony elbows, Fairlie glanced up at Jenna and smiled. ‘Uh oh, Mrs Pearce,’ she said, ‘Jenna’s here.’ Then she added seriously, ‘Hide your jewellery.’

  ‘Crack whore,’ Mrs Pearce muttered in a voice like sandpaper. ‘You killed my father.’ It was a common allegation from the 81-year-old. She’d accused two other nurses of the same crime, as well as a teenage boy at the front desk, and the vending machine in the hallway.
/>   ‘I’m so sorry,’ Jenna said good-naturedly. ‘It won’t happen again.’ She felt her cheeks glow, and her breath came quickly.

  ‘What’s with you?’ Fairlie asked, ignoring a loud fart trumpeting into the toilet bowl beside her. Squatting, Fairlie shifted her weight to her other knee, groaning as the joint cracked, and carefully clutched Mrs Pearce’s robe out of the way. ‘Never seen you so keen to start night shift.’

  Jenna grinned. ‘I have some news.’

  ‘Oh?’ Fairlie tore off a few sheets of toilet paper to clean her patient.

  Jenna took a deep breath. ‘Ark asked me to marry him.’

  ‘What the –’

  ‘I’m not done, you stupid girl,’ Mrs Pearce barked.

  Fairlie dropped the paper, unused, into the bowl behind her patient’s bottom. Straightening, she turned to Jenna. ‘I’m sorry – what?’

  ‘We’re engaged.’ Stretching out her left arm, Jenna held her palm downwards and watched Fairlie’s gaze fall on the modest diamond on a white gold band. It glinted upon her ring finger in the sterile bright lights.

  Fairlie blurted, ‘But – you’ve known him for a month.’

  ‘Four months,’ Jenna corrected, softly.

  There was a moment of silence. Jenna asked herself what she had expected: happy tears? Hugging? Maybe some shrieking and dancing and hand-flapping?

  ‘Fro?’

  ‘Huh?’

  Jenna kept her hand outstretched and lightly touched Fairlie’s forearm.

  ‘I know it’s sudden – but I couldn’t be happier. I feel great.’

  Fairlie was studying the toilet paper dispenser.

  ‘You excited?’ Jenna tilted her face to catch Fairlie’s eye.

  ‘Of course,’ Fairlie said. ‘Of course.’ After a brief shake of her head, she grabbed Jenna in a hug. ‘Wow. I knew you two were happy, but I had no idea this might happen yet.’ Stepping back, she took Jenna’s hand and studied the ring, rolling her hand to watch the diamond catch and toss the light.

  Jenna shrugged. ‘We love each other. We want to be together.’

  ‘Okay, wow,’ Fairlie repeated. ‘If you’re sure, then I’m sure.’ She smiled.

  Jenna felt a ripple of irritation, so subtle it might have been imagined. ‘I’m glad I have your approval,’ she said, dryly.

  Jenna watched Fairlie draw her hand back and the space between them seemed to expand.

  ‘She’s done, by the way,’ Jenna said, gesturing at Mrs Pearce, whose torso tilted towards the chrome railing on the wall, silver curls dipping dangerously forwards.

  Fairlie either missed it, or refused to acknowledge Jenna’s ironic dig. Instead she balled a large wad of toilet paper. ‘This is great news, Jen.’ She nudged the commode forwards to clean her patient. ‘I’m happy for you. And hey, you never know.’ Fairlie straightened. ‘Maybe I’ll shack up with some dude soon, too.’

  ‘You’d have to keep them longer than one night,’ Jenna pointed out.

  ‘It’s not for lack of trying.’

  Stepping behind the commode, Fairlie rolled Mrs Pearce towards the door. But as the wheels rolled silently across the bathroom tiles, there was a sudden and explosive wet ripping sound. Fairlie cursed and danced backwards, crashing into Jenna as Mrs Pearce let forth a diarrhoeal stream – straight through the open hole in the seat of the commode, and all over the floor.

  ii

  It looked to Jenna as though the scent of the freesias was making Fairlie sick. Their heady fragrance filled Jenna’s nose like syrup and she watched Fairlie with a sense of sad amusement. The determined set of her smile, invisible fish-hooks drawing the corners of her mouth outwards. Fairlie was mincing her knees, trying surreptitiously to wriggle the clinging silk a little further down her thighs – it was riding up, bunching under the billow of her arse.

  Jenna turned to Fairlie and saw the tender decades flash between them. How it could come to be that she, Jenna Walker, the ten-year-old who used to hide in the wardrobe with Fairlie trying on her mother’s lacy bras and stuffing them with socks, who had once declared that when she was a grown-up she would move to the African plains and run wild with the elephant matriarchs, was now standing in front of a crowd of people she barely knew, in a glimmering white gown, a spray of freesias clutched in her fist, smiling benevolently as though this was something for which she had eternally longed?

  Ark was shaking hands, kissing cheeks, clapping arms, moving through the crowd broad-shouldered. As Jenna watched him he laughed and bent down to pick up a small child with a blue bow in her hair. He tossed the girl gently into the air and she squealed with delight. Ark hugged the child and set her down.

  Fairlie threaded an arm through Jenna’s, brought her in close as the crowd surged in, all air-kisses and a rain of coloured rice.

  ‘Can you believe it?’ Jenna said.

  ‘I’m calling the Pope,’ Fairlie announced. ‘But not before I fling this dress to the op shop. I hope you don’t mind, but I’m sweating up a storm here.’ She pfffd unsuccessfully at a limp curl hanging down her face, before using her bouquet to swat it up onto her crown. ‘Do you know anyone here?’

  Jenna kept a hold of Fairlie with one arm while she was swamped with perfumed embraces and smacked with sticky-lipsticked kisses.

  ‘Well,’ she began, ‘Ark’s mother, Marguile, and his sister, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Jenna smiled. ‘I’ll introduce you. They’re lovely. His mother is so sweet and genteel, she’s like a lady from ­eighteenth-century England or something. And his sister, Ness, is just adorable. She already calls me sis . . .’ Jenna busied herself with her bouquet for a beat. ‘Abbey and Damon are over there somewhere.’ She stopped talking as a wide, bearded man abruptly appeared and swooped in to hug her, then finished with an assertive squeeze of her bum. Jenna gritted her teeth.

  ‘Oh, there’s Tom, Eliza and Mrs Yates from work,’ Fairlie pointed out, having missed the butt grope, ‘and Mum and Dad.’ Fairlie waved to her parents at the back of the crowd, but then dropped her arm, turning to Jenna with an expression of guilt.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Jenna mumbled. ‘I didn’t think she’d come.’

  ‘You didn’t invite her.’

  ‘Lack of permission never stopped her.’

  Fairlie drew back, surprised. ‘Did you want her here?’ Her expression turned soft. ‘Jen, you could have invited her.’

  ‘Mrs Ark Rudolph!’

  The title panged in Jenna’s belly, the erasure of even her first name. Ark’s mother breezed over wafting scarves of Chanel, puckering up to kiss the air in front of Jenna’s cheeks. Another handful of coloured rice was tossed in her direction and some of it filtered down her cleavage.

  ‘Mrs Rudolph –’ Jenna began.

  ‘Oh stop,’ the older woman tsked, ‘Marguile, please.’

  ‘Right. This is my dear friend Fairlie Winter.’

  Ark’s mother clasped Fairlie’s wrists and smiled, pearls glimmering on her milky skin. ‘Pleasure.’

  ‘Right back atcha,’ Fairlie said.

  ‘The photographer wants us over by the roses,’ Ark’s mother said, turning back to Jenna. ‘And the caterer said the first round of hors d’oeuvres are ready.’ Clasping Jenna by the elbow, she issued a gentle tug away from Fairlie, towards the crowd.

  An anxious flicker stiffened Jenna against Marguile’s grasp, like an animal baulking at a gate. ‘I’ll see you later,’ she said hurriedly to Fairlie, ‘this doesn’t change anything.’

  Fairlie squeezed her hand. ‘Hey. Don’t worry about me. Just focus on losing your virginity tonight.’

  Ark appeared, wrapped his arm around Jenna’s waist and placed a kiss on her temple. ‘I see Mum has got everything running smoothly,’ he said with a laugh. He made a joke that after the honeymoon, when his mother would stay with them for a
few days, she might never want to return home.

  ‘You know me, darling,’ his mother chuckled, her cheeks suddenly flushed. ‘You might be a big strong boy but your sister still needs me.’ She winked at Fairlie, who nodded, as though she had any idea what they were talking about.

  ‘I’m just sorry Ark’s father didn’t live to see this moment.’ Finally releasing Jenna’s elbow, Marguile’s eyes misted over.

  Ark squeezed his mother’s shoulder. ‘I know, Mum,’ he said. ‘Me, too.’

  Jenna turned away. From Fairlie, from Ark’s mother, and she took the hand of her new husband and began to walk down the centre of the gratuitous aisle that some faceless person had spent all morning arranging ivory plastic chairs to create. Two enormous manna gums flung piebald shade onto the lawn. From somewhere above a kookaburra hollered, determined to outdo the lone violinist who whined away from over beside a row of prickly grevilleas.

  And Jenna walked away, into her instant family, into her new life.

  iii

  Jenna sighed, flinging herself down on the bed.

  ‘Long shift,’ Ark said, leaning down to kiss her nose. He straightened and started to unbutton his shirt. ‘You work too hard.’

  ‘It was.’ Jenna sat up with a yawn. ‘But,’ she stretched out her arms; the muscles pulled deliciously, ‘it’s Saturday night and for the first time in three weeks, Fro and I are both free. So, what shall we all do?’

  Ark walked into the ensuite and turned on the shower. He reached into the spray to test the temperature, then peeled off his shirt and dropped it into the laundry hamper.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘it’s the first Saturday night you’ve had off in a month. We should do something special.’ He began to undo his jeans.

  ‘Hmm, special in Penola.’ Jenna tapped her chin. ‘So, the pub? Or, we could go out on a limb, and go to the other pub.’

  Ark slowly lowered his zipper. ‘And that’s special how?’

  ‘We’ll wear bow ties.’ Jenna sauntered over to him and placed her palms over his bare chest. ‘And top hats.’ She stood on tiptoes and kissed his lips, tasting the sugary tang of fresh grape juice.