This Picture of You

by Sarah Hopkins

  ‘It is hard, you know, being at home just the two of us, me and this little thing . . .’

  Fresh eyes, Mrs McCarthy said she wanted. The guy had made an offer, a reasonable one, the lawyer told her so. Tut, tut, silly fellow . . . she can’t make it that easy. His message to her: rest assured, it doesn’t have to end yet. For the moment, what his client needed was something fresh on which she could focus, something to fill up the blank screen and the empty house.

  ‘You say that after Timmy was born, you tried again three times?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And are there any eggs still left?’

  She nodded. ‘Two.’

  And there he handed it to her on a plate. ‘Has an agreement been reached about what to do with them?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘You tell me, Tina: what would you like to see happen with them?’

  Ethan looked over at Bob the Bristlenose, ignoring his food, suckermouth to the glass. ‘You need to think about that.’ He paused again before he spoke his final words: ‘I’m sure your lawyer told you as much.’

  Mrs McCarthy, Tina, declined the opportunity to consider it any further; she signed first an authority to have her file transferred from Marks and Bennet, and second a cheque for ten thousand dollars to the trust account of Argyle, Abbot and Williams.

  ‘I feel better about this,’ she said, rising from her seat. ‘I am a robust woman, Ethan, but this morning when I woke up and thought about signing those papers, all the strength went out of my legs. I had to sit on the floor of the bathroom. The only thing that got me up was knowing I was coming to see another lawyer, that by the end of the day I’d get another perspective.’ And with that she gestured for him to remain where he was, and she left his office.

  Mia buzzed. ‘I’ve got Laini on the line.’

  ‘Put her through.’

  ‘Hey, it’s me.’

  ‘Hey, me.’

  ‘Your mum called tonight off. Your dad isn’t sleeping.’

  ‘Why didn’t she call me?’

  ‘She did, you were in a meeting. She said not to worry, it was just a bad night. And he hasn’t stopped with the New York stories . . . This morning she caught him telling the cleaner about how he snorted speed at the table at some bar.’

  ‘Well, better the cleaner than Finn.’ Ethan had shooed Finn away last week when Marty started on about the artist who swung upside down and naked from a rope in the middle of a room.

  ‘Anyhow, it’s nice though, huh? We can stay home, I’ll cook. What do you feel like?’

  ‘I’m easy. What’s on the blog today?’

  ‘Thigh or breast.’

  ‘Perfect, either.’

  Laini’s blog had enjoyed a recent surge in readership. As far as Ethan could work out it was a virtual meeting place for the uberhomemaker or the frustrated housewife, depending on what sort of day you were having. She began each post with a question, sometimes bland—thigh or breast?—and sometimes not. During this last funk of hers, the question was whether the best way to pull herself out of it was to meditate or masturbate. Over the period of a week she had seven hundred and eighty responses from women expert in either or both—one claiming she could bring herself to climax while sitting in the lotus position, hands on knees, mind over matter. Sadly, that was about as graphic as it got. Browsing through them into the night, what surprised Ethan most—beyond the ability of respondents to discuss the subject without reference to their genitals—was that they could also discuss it without any sense of compunction. He had always been under the impression that for women masturbating was a guilty pleasure, that in their minds it was in essence an act of infidelity. The frank nature of the responses seemed to disprove that. Lying in bed in the early hours, Ethan pondered that for a while, the disturbing fact that he had got it so wrong, before letting it go—taking his cock in his cold hand and morphing the imagery into something tantalising, the unknown, the unknowable.

  It took him four weeks to raise the subject with Laini, the role of masturbation in dealing with everyday challenges. She laughed, said, ‘Sure, it helps sometimes—but . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘You know when I like it best?’

  Instantly a pool of saliva formed under his tongue. He shook his head.

  ‘When we are in bed and you are asleep.’

  He waited. This was the old Laini. ‘And?’

  ‘And I watch you and I start. I try not to move too much or make a sound. It’s always best when there’s a risk.’

  Ethan thought that through before making the obvious request: ‘Could you wake me up next time?’

  She smiled, reached her hand under the table. ‘That’d kill the fun.’

  In any event, as far as the blog went, the readership surge brought an end to Laini’s funk. One of the more progressive mothers at Ethan’s school—for by now it was doing the rounds of the Lower North Shore—worked for a publisher and had an idea that Laini could turn it into a kind of self-help book. But even now he sensed something was still up.

  ‘So everything okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, you?’

  ‘Sure, I’m good. I’m fine.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Yeah, me too.’

  After he hung up the phone, Ethan typed up a file note on a request for particulars regarding Stewart McCarthy’s position on the fate of the remaining fertilised eggs, a request that would drag it out just long enough—long enough for Tina to know she didn’t make it too easy for him, and long enough to send the account into a fourth page and ensure a fat final fee. For that to happen something needed to emerge, a change in circumstance. When he got the files he would go through them and find a backup or two.

  Ethan finished the note, and started scribbling numbers on a timeline as he processed in his mind how the matter would play out. By Christmas, he estimated, it would be settled. Until then Tina McCarthy needed to feel she wasn’t in this alone, because today, right now, that was how she was feeling: all alone in her big house with her child—her ‘little thing’; alone on the cold tiles of her bathroom floor. She had lost a piece of herself and she was looking for a way to get it back. It wouldn’t be long before she would start to pour her soul across his desk; there were the beginnings of it already. Next time he would stop her. I understand that this is important to you . . . but it is not important to me. And she would stand up and brush herself off. The husband would come back with a better offer to finally be rid of it.

  And Tina McCarthy would know then, finally, for better or for worse, that it was all over.

  Chapter 11

  ‘It is private,’ Maggie said, or, ‘No one is interested.’

  How could he make her understand? He told the story because this was the story. That was his response to Maggie. She didn’t like that he was telling the cleaner, but when Maria came into his study to clear out the bin, that was where he was up to. What was next was Hannah Lee.

  And in answer to Maggie: ‘Nothing about Hannah Lee was ever very private.’

  As the subway jolts into motion, Maggie holds on and tells Dave she is going home to finish art school and she wants to be a painter.

  ‘You’re a painter?’ Linda says and turns to Dave. ‘Then she should come with us to see Hannah Lee . . .’

  When Maggie asks who that is, Dave smiles, says wait and see.

  An hour later they are sitting in a performance space. In front of them is a raised stage, enclosed by three walls; the audience, on milk crates and stools, forms a fourth. The floor and walls of the room are white, and in the middle hangs a rope and at the end of the rope a harness. They sit there a while, Dave and Linda, Martin and Maggie, more than a while.

  ‘Is this it?’ Martin gibes. ‘We watch the rope?’

  Linda orders him to zip it (this is a serious crowd), and with that the room goes dark.

  In silence a shadow crosses the stage to the harness. When the lights come back, there she is: a naked woman hanging upsi
de down at the centre of the white enclosure, her dark curls mopping the floor as she starts to swing. In her hand is a paintbrush, and when she swings from side to side her head arches upwards, as she stretches her arm out to swipe the wall with her brush. And back she swings to the other side to swipe again. The only thing to emerge amid a bunch of random lines is the letter I, and when it does, members of the audience begin to clap, at which she slows to a stop, picks another brush from a tin on the floor and starts up again, this time with her eyes closed, arching her body towards the one wall like an acrobat, returning to it again and again so the lines form an orange maze. And so it continues on the remaining wall, blue then purple then orange again.

  But Martin isn’t really watching what is happening on the wall; he is working through the parts of her body as it arches and cartwheels from upside down to sideways—the bobbing breasts, the stretched navel, the muscles as they tense and release, the glorious glimpse of pink as her legs splay—until the artist swings no more and the rope is lowered to the floor where she spreads her limbs and reaches over to write something in one corner before rolling over to the next. The lights go out and the shadow crosses the floor again and disappears from the stage. A rogue in the audience whistles. Martin wonders whether or not to stand up. But when the light comes on she is there again, her face smudged with ink, this time clothed in a black bodysuit and tights.

  When she starts to swing, Dave leans over and whispers: ‘I think we’ve seen the best of it.’

  To which Linda snipes: ‘Go back to Princeton, you fucking jock.’ But it is she who stands up, and they all follow her lead.

  ‘Come on, baby,’ Dave says. ‘I would’ve stayed to the end.’

  Without looking behind her: ‘I doubt it. She goes like this for six hours.’

  Next is the street and the bar, but the nighttime begins to blur as images float out of sequence—the upside-down artist, an outstretched Maggie on a mattress in a garden . . . Someone, something is tapping at Martin’s chest. Tap. Tap-tap, double time. It takes hold of him, like a clamp, from the inside. Then and now; he is walking through a door, and in his memory there is an older man, an older man lost in his memory.

  Martin sat upright, held his hand in the place where the pain had been, or the place he thought it had been. He moved it up to his throat and down to his stomach, in search of evidence that it had been there at all. Beside him, Maggie slept, one arm reaching up and over her head, her breaths long and deep and even.

  The rhythm of it, his Maggie, as the curtains lifted away from the open window and fell back again.

  Every night since his return from the hospital that was how he woke, to pain or panic, but then to this, the room still but for the curtain, quiet but for Maggie’s breath, and in his mind, clarity. There were no judgments to write. There had been an accident and he had run over a dog. The stroke was his second. And it made him forget, like old Stan who lived next door to the house where Martin grew up. He remembered Stan wandering the streets and his wife Sal weeping at their kitchen table with Martin’s mother holding her hand. Stan woke in the middle of the night too, not to this, but wet with terror; he thought he was back in Birkenau and that outside the bedroom door lay the corpses of his sisters. After that Sal put Stan in a home but the terror mustn’t have stopped because one night he swallowed a bottle of pills and went to sleep forever. When his mother told him what happened, Martin could see that taking the pills was a sensible thing to do, if that was the place you went to in the middle of the night, a room with dead sisters waiting at the door.

  Where else did Stan go? Martin now wondered. What was chosen for him? Which branches were cut from his mind, and which were left?

  John had called and come to visit.

  He had been the Chief Judge just a little over two years and today was the first time Martin had seen him look uncomfortable in the job. A year ahead of Martin at school, John Giles had been his head prefect and had studied law at the same university. On the day Martin was appointed to the Supreme Court, John brought him a bottle of single malt whisky and sat down across his desk to compare watches and help him make a dent in it, the beginning of a ritual that Martin would grow to cherish. Coming from a bustling barristers’ chambers, he found life as a judge to be a secluded one. Among themselves, judges did not on any habitual basis sit down to offload and share war stories, let alone stories of a more personal nature. Gone were the days Martin would come home pink-faced after a long lunch or a session in a pub. During his years on the bench he could count on one hand the number of genuine friendships he had seen formed between judges, and he himself did nothing to bump up the number. John Giles was the closest he ever came. Two scotches straight up on a Thursday night—never Friday, John’s golf day—and while the talk might begin with the law, it often ended with John (in his wonderful deadpan way) reciting best-of snippets of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, something to sever the daily grind and leave them at the end of the day with smiles on their faces.

  John sat at the table on the front porch and looked out at the view. ‘It is a beautiful spot you have here, my friend.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ Martin said. ‘God’s country.’

  ‘Remember how the southerlies used to scare people away from buying oceanfronts? Lord, look at these places going up around you now. You’d be sitting on a goldmine here.’

  Martin didn’t disagree, and after only a brief pause John went on to thank him for having the medical report sent through. ‘We have to move pretty quickly on this sort of thing—you know what the media’s like, and obviously it’s a minefield for appeals. So I’ve directed those last ones with judgments outstanding be reheard.’

  ‘I’ve drafted the Malouf judgment,’ Martin interjected. Malouf was the carjacker appealing on the basis of the identification evidence. ‘It’s ready to go.’

  John shook his head. ‘It’s a safer bet, Martin, you understand . . . You don’t want appellants subpoenaing your medical records. An extended leave pending recovery. It’ll give you and Maggie the chance to take that trip. Then we’ll get you back the minute you are ready.’

  Martin gestured that he needn’t say any more. Poor John, it was an awkward thing, putting a friend out to pasture.

  The two men finished their cake and tea and talked about flight routes to Morocco and the balance of power in the hung parliament but made no mention of the greatest comic duo of all time. In the corridors and the chambers of Phillip Street there would be whispers but no knives; already Martin had begun to receive sympathy cards, some quite touching. With a cup of tea and a spoonful of well-phrased words, Justice Martin Field would fade and go away . . . So this was it: an extended leave, pending recovery.

  ‘On second thoughts, John, let’s give it a date. In three months we’ll see what these doctors say, and if it is more of the same, I will announce early retirement and we can have one of those flash dinners to send me off.’

  At which John leant across and took a firm hold of his shoulder. ‘You are a fine judge, Martin. We do this however you want to do it.’

  Better that way, yes—when one can, to control the flow of things . . .

  The pills, for instance. It would be sensible, just in case, to arrange a stock for a rainy day. He would need to write a list of these things when he remembered them, and tell Maggie so they were not forgotten. Like spring planting, and the boy crying over his dog . . . He climbed out of bed and found a pen and a pad and made the first entry. It was Maggie’s suggestion but he could see the sense in it: buy dog.

  All that was left for Martin was this new set of facts to consider. At least that was what Maggie wanted him to do. A man and a car, a boy and a dog: she wanted him to piece it together. If only he could, if only he could do what she wanted. It was a matter of controlling the flow, yes, but the trouble was the undercurrent; the trouble was that what occupies the mind is determined not by what we or others want . . .

  When the doctor told him he could go home from hospital, Maggie had l
eant down and kissed him on the forehead, the kiss long and tender, like a mother’s kiss, and she had told him that he was going to be fine.

  ‘Does nothing scare you?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Of course it does. This does.’

  And later, when he woke from sleep, ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘It isn’t your fault.’

  She seemed so certain. But how could she be when she didn’t know what it was he was sorry for? There were things to say, but she wouldn’t listen; she didn’t want him to talk about where it started.

  It was different with Ethan. They sat on the back veranda after dinner and drank beer and when Martin talked about New York his son’s eyes didn’t glaze over. Ethan asked questions and he listened to the answers like they mattered to him, then he went to the fridge and got more beer. When Maggie came, he turned it into a whisper and leant in: ‘She doesn’t like it.’

  But Ethan told her to let him talk; it was family history. ‘And Christ knows I’ve never heard any of this before.’

  He had told him about Maggie arriving at the loft, and the pigeon lady and the garden. So he was up to the nighttime. He was up to Hannah Lee.

  But Ethan shook his head. ‘You already told me that. Remember? I said you’d have to walk up some very dark stairs to see something like that these days.’

  ‘Yes, so you did.’

  ‘Tell me about Linda,’ Ethan said.

  ‘It was Linda who decided we had to take her to see Hannah Lee. She was Dave’s girlfriend. I lived with them in the loft.’

  ‘I know that. But after Mum left . . .’

  Martin flinched, then his voice was firm. ‘Please, I haven’t finished the day yet.’ And after a pause, when he felt assured the parameters had been accepted: ‘She was quite famous in her day, Hannah Lee. Linda liked taking visitors to see her—until a cousin from Texas insisted one night they stay for the full duration . . .