Maggie searched her mind for an answer to that, for some kind of assurance that it wouldn’t be that way again. ‘Your nan . . .’
Shaking his head, his eyes filled with worry as he turned to gesture to his mother. ‘Nan reckons Mum’s blood’s full of maggots. I heard her say it. She said she’d be better off locked up.’
And there it was, the fear of the boy laid bare. ‘She doesn’t want that,’ Maggie said. ‘It’s the drugs; she just sees what they’re doing, like you do.’
He shrugged. They were words he had heard before. Kayla started coughing and he took her a glass of water and made her take a sip, then helped her up and took her down the hall to the couch in the living room. When he came back, he appeared stronger in his mother’s absence. ‘You finished the painting?’
Maggie nodded. ‘I brought it today. Do you want to see it?’ She didn’t wait for an answer, but pulled the painting out again and laid it on the bench. Tyson stared at it a while but his eyes gave no hint as to his judgment.
‘She should put it up on the wall here in the kitchen,’ he said finally. ‘So everyone can see it. It might stop ’em nicking stuff, with her eyes on ’em like that.’
For a while he didn’t say anything, just stared and nodded. In the painting there were two images, both of Iris, one in the foreground against a wall made of shells and stones, and the other walking in the distance along a road. ‘It’s weird, how you got her,’ he said, looking up now at Maggie.
‘Well, I tried. There is a lot to get when it comes to your nan.’
His eyes softened. ‘Yep . . .’ He stopped there, though he clearly had something more to say.
‘What is it?’ Maggie asked.
‘You worked it out,’ he said. ‘Her secret.’ He waited for Maggie to ask what he meant, then pointed to the painting, to the image of the woman on the road. ‘She can be there—’ and then to the foreground, against the wall ‘—and she can be here.’
‘I’m sorry, Tyson, I still don’t understand.’
‘I thought you did.’ He didn’t look disappointed that he had to explain, but excited, like a small child with a story to tell, and for a moment she could see it, the child that he had been, and the child that he still was. ‘Someone’s sitting and talking with Nan in Dubbo, then next minute you see her walking across the street in Mount Druitt. You just got to ask where she’s been and soon enough you work out there’s no other way she could’ve done it.’
‘Done what?’
The boy hesitated. ‘It isn’t just me that’s worked it out. I heard other people around here say it.’ Maggie didn’t prod; she waited until he spoke again, more a whisper. ‘She can be in two places.’
In the corner of the next room his mother was slumped on the couch, the drool having made its way down the side of her face and caked now into a white trail, but in his mind the boy was a world away, a world in which anything was possible, a world in which selfless souls travelled across space with magical powers . . . Maggie turned away but the boy saw the tears in her eyes.
‘I’m not crazy or anything,’ he said.
‘No, it isn’t crazy, not at all.’
‘So you believe me.’
‘Yes, I do.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘I believe you.’
‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘I don’t tell many people that.’
‘Thank you, then,’ she said. ‘I am glad to know it.’
When Maggie went to leave, she again asked about Kayla, if there was anything she could do. The boy shook his head. ‘She’s hooked up with a new guy. He’s coming to get her.’
‘Are you going with them?’
‘Nah. He doesn’t want me around. Suits me alright.’
And as she turned to leave: ‘Hey, Maggie . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Nothing, don’t worry.’
‘What is it?’
‘Just something Aunty Peg said.’
‘What was that?’
The eyes shone bright when he smiled. ‘She said you might get me some shoes.’
It wasn’t until she was almost home that she had moved backwards in time from the boy to his mother; it wasn’t until then, sitting in the car outside her house with a pounding heart that the words returned to her.
You the judge’s wife . . .
So what you people trading now?
Chapter 28
On the morning news there was a story about the link between a ten-year-old girl’s abduction and her photos being tagged on Facebook. Laini wanted him to turn it off.
‘No photos of Finn on your blog, okay, babe?’ Ethan said.
‘Of course not,’ she snapped. ‘I’m not stupid.’
He didn’t need to say anything else and fuck knows why he did: ‘I mean the dog’s fine, just not Finn.’
She finished her mouthful. ‘How do you know there’s photos of the dog on there?’
He shrugged. ‘I saw them when I looked that time.’
But she was straight onto it. ‘No, you didn’t. I only put them up a month ago.’
He put his hands up. Caught. ‘So shoot me, I took another look. Can’t I be interested? I mean since the publisher’s come on board . . .’
She smiled. ‘Sure, but why not tell me?’
‘I’m telling you now. It looks great. The book will smash it.’
The conversation was over, but still she looked at him across the table, a bemused expression in her eyes, and then the thought: Would she recognise me? In his head he could see it, her mind ticking, and the dots beginning to join . . . He reads it. He reads the comments. How far a jump was it to the possibility he had made a comment? Of course, he always deleted his browsing history (he made double sure of it again after she went upstairs), but still he hadn’t been able to get those damn dots out of his head all day.
Now it was late lunch in the hotel room, and he was still doing his best as he thrashed it out with Sally in the shower and on the bathroom floor, and that was all good (better than good), until it happened—the afterglow cut short by an event to which he would react—an action and a reaction with the potential to bring the whole hoopla crumbling down into an ashy heap.
Lately he had heard the idiom repeated too many times. It must have been on an office calendar, or one of those Google quotes of the day—Max was the last one to give it voice, yesterday afternoon as he sipped his sencha tea: It isn’t what happens to you—so it went—it is how you react. ‘You heard it from me,’ Max said, and Ethan smiled back, while mentally in a single, swift motion he reached across the tearoom table and snapped Max’s birdlike neck.
With her ecstatic scream echoing against the cold tiles, Sally sank her nails into Ethan’s arse, the shot of pain sending his climax skywards, and for a moment that was all it was, a blissful blend of pain and pleasure . . . just a moment, before it was blasted away as she ran her hand over the broken skin and said it—after a single action, a single word: ‘Oops.’
All afternoon, Ethan had been forming an explanation in his mind as to what lay behind his reaction. His reaction: a chemical combustion, or, more aptly, a brother to the neuronal activation that had preceded it by only minutes; he could see in his mind one of those diagrams with the feeder bubbles joined by transmitters and in the centre, the big box, the big bang—the exothermic, the ejaculatory response.
‘Oops,’ she said, and he reached back to feel for himself, five little crescent welts.
The feeder bubbles, with the benefit of hindsight, all on the back of his blunder with the blog.
The marks, the position of the marks, there was no way to explain it to Laini—fingernails at the centre of his right buttock—and there was little chance of concealment. (Behind this, the discarded possibilities: a tryst with the neighbour’s cat, a pyjamas comeback . . . discarded because he had never been near the fucking cat, and they were naked people; they slept naked, they went to the fridge naked . . . )
In the seconds that followed her short and painfully inadequate expressi
on of regret, Ethan felt the odds stack against him. Odds-on chance, the game was up . . . It was the end.
And then: the end of what? Out of that bubble, two feeders.
First, the end of Sally . . . There she was, Sally, stone-faced in her frilled blouse, packing up her desk.
And last, the end of marriage. Laini and her hot, phlegmy tears.
‘Oops.’
The reaction.
He closed his eyes and began to count again, and again the feathered darkness was forming, the screeching menace in his brain, because something was being taken from him . . . What Ethan did then, worst of all: he clenched his fist. There he was, teeth gritted, clenching his fist to contain the instinct, the instinct to inflict pain. In all his life, in all the fury, it had never entered his mind, not a woman . . .
And at that very moment, the very woman reached up and put her hand on the side of his face.
He didn’t move, but permitted the instinct to flow into his words: ‘Don’t touch me.’ And a second later, making sure she was looking back at him, dead straight in the eye. ‘Don’t fucking touch me. Not ever . . . again.’
He pulled himself up off the floor and got dressed. As he opened the door to leave, Sally stepped in front of it. ‘Ethan, stop . . . Stop this. It’s me here. I know you, and I know what’s happening here.’
She waited, but he didn’t move or respond. As she spoke the next words, her mouth hardened. ‘You are having some kind of breakdown.’
Finally, a minute’s silence. She stepped back, and Ethan walked out the door.
Strike four: a partner fucking a junior solicitor.
The end of it all.
Chapter 29
Martin was sipping tea at the kitchen table when Maggie entered.
As was now his way, he took continuous sips until the cup was finished. Once something was put down, it was too often forgotten. Better to keep it in his hands, like his camera. Same principle.
He smiled up at her and didn’t notice that she didn’t smile back. ‘Ah, that was good,’ he said when he was finished. ‘I could almost have another. How about I make us both one?’
She watched him as he pulled the milk from the fridge and the sugar and tea bags from the cupboard and returned everything to its rightful place. The wires, it seemed, were connected. There was no reason to wait.
‘Thanks,’ she said, taking the tea—just how she liked it, the lemon sliced thin. ‘I went to Iris’s today.’
He nodded. ‘Up on the hill.’
‘Yes. Up on the hill.’
‘The old woman there up on the hill.’
He had taken to repeating words or phrases when he liked the sound of them. With Finny, it was the bear hunt: ‘Swishy, swashy, swishy, swashy . . .’ She waited to see that he was finished.
‘Yes,’ she continued, ‘but she wasn’t there today. Someone else was though. A woman named Kayla.’
What Maggie expected in response was a glimmer of recognition and then a failure of memory (or at least a claim to it), but she got more than that, much more. With Martin’s reply there began one of the most difficult conversations of her life.
‘Tell me what you know,’ he said, matter-of-fact. ‘I’ll work out what is relevant.’ And when he saw that Maggie hesitated, he continued as though he were turning now to a professional matter: ‘There is no need for you to filter it. Please, take a seat.’
Maggie looked back at him. Though his mind had jumbled the context, there was not a skerrick of confusion on his face, and though her instinct was to correct him, to remind him what the pieces were and how they fitted in, she had the sense that in front of her now was a window, and behind that window there was the truth. All she had to do was reach inside and take it.
She sat down.
‘Very well,’ she said, now sorting through the facts in her mind to find the shortest route. ‘Rodney is Iris’s son. Rodney is in prison. His partner is Kayla, and their son is Tyson.’
At this Martin shook his head. ‘No, no, I don’t know about the son, not yet. Don’t jump around. Get to the charges. What are the charges?’
Cautious of treading in a minefield, Maggie slowed. ‘They were . . . they are robbery charges.’ Martin nodded, waved his hand in a circle to direct her to continue, which she did. ‘There are a number of them, but one is very serious. A boy was stabbed.’
‘But Rodney is granted bail.’
‘Yes, he is the only one to get bail.’
‘And that’s why they want to keep the lawyer. They have faith in him.’
With his use of the present tense and now the third person, again her instinct was to correct him, but it seemed already they had a pact, that this was the way it would be told: this way, or not at all. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said. ‘So he stays in it. He remains in the matter.’
‘A messy business,’ Martin said.
‘Yes, the stabbing—though it wasn’t Rodney with the knife.’
Martin shook his head dismissively. ‘Please! Not the stabbing. If you want my help with this, you must stop jumping around it . . . Not the stabbing. The payment of fees, get to that.’
Not knowing what it was she was meant to get to or how she was meant to get there, Maggie felt certain of only one thing: that Martin, finally, had something to tell. She searched her mind, her memory of everything Iris had said, about the plea bargain and the sentence, but nothing about fees. And then the words returned to her again, not the words of Iris, but of Kayla. What are you people trading now?
‘You were a Queen’s Counsel.’ She forgot the rules, the tense, the pretence. ‘You didn’t do Legal Aid matters—you were barely doing any more crime. Legal Aid wouldn’t pay your fees.’
He allowed it. He nodded. Maggie was now asking the questions.
‘You did the bail application pro bono.’
He nodded again.
‘But the rest of it . . .’
‘There was to be a trial . . . It was a messy business.’ There he stopped and looked at the empty cup on the table. ‘Did we have our tea?’
‘Go on, Martin.’
‘I told you, Maggie: ask someone else.’
Maggie paused, as one with a last chance to turn back. ‘No, Martin,’ she said. ‘There is no one else. You remember this, and you can tell me.’
He shook his head. His eyes widened, the flash of a cornered animal. If she pushed, it would scuttle away . . . ‘Let me keep going,’ she said. ‘I will tell you what I know, what I know about Kayla. I know that she is an addict. And I know that she lives in Redfern, but that she used to live up on the hill in La Perouse. When you acted for Rodney, that is where she lived.’
‘Is that all?’
‘There is one more thing, something she said.’
He waited.
‘She asked me if I was the judge’s wife, and when I said yes she began to laugh. And then she asked me what we were trading; she said: “What are you people trading now?”’
Martin listened carefully, nodding his head long after she had finished speaking. ‘I see. Is that all?’
‘Yes. Do you know what she meant?’
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘That is not the place to start.’ He tapped his forehead and looked down at the floor. ‘Where to start . . .’
It was a moment before she realised he wasn’t thinking out loud, but asking her a question—that he was playing witness, and would not proceed unless prompted.
‘Start when you met Kayla.’
‘Yes, that is best.’ He seemed almost grateful. ‘I saw her at court with the rest of them, just briefly. I didn’t recognise her when I saw her again.’ He stopped, waited for the next question to come.
‘Where was that?’ she asked.
‘In a bar, in Surry Hills.’
‘And you didn’t recognise her.’
‘No, not at first. The face was familiar, but no.’
‘But you talked to her?’
‘She approached me, and I remembered then seeing her at court.
’
‘What did she want?’
He looked up. ‘I don’t know what was in her mind. You can’t ask me that.’
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘What did she say?’
‘At the bar?’
‘Yes, at the bar.’
‘She said she was Rodney’s girlfriend. I didn’t want to talk to her, but she sat down with her friend. They wore tiny skirts. I soon left.’ And he repeated. ‘I didn’t want to talk to her.’
Again he had reached a point where unless prodded he would go no further—as though there were still a chance that could be the end of the story.
‘One wanted to help, you know . . .’ he said, the digression made in earnest. ‘The fellow wasn’t a bad sort.’
‘You mean Rodney?’
‘Yes, Rodney.’
‘You told me that before. You said he was just mixing with the wrong people.’
‘Yes, I said that. And that is true, that is—and of course the drugs had a hold of him . . . But there was another thing: he was scared of something, like he was being chased. It was as though he’d had a glimpse of what was to come, if you believe that sort of thing. One wanted to help. One hoped one could.’
‘And you did, you got him bail.’
‘Yes, and after he got bail he was alright for a little while, but he stopped reporting to the police and they picked him up pinching batteries or something like that. The matter had been passed on to someone else by then, one of the public defenders. But the family thought I was some sort of magician . . . The irony was that as a lawyer I’d never felt more powerless.’
‘But you took it up again, and you got him a good deal.’
‘Well, yes. Good in that he ended up with two years instead of four, but either way the die was cast, wasn’t it? I knew he’d be in and out then, just as he knew . . . And we were right, weren’t we? You tell me he’s in prison now.’
She pulled him back. ‘What about Kayla?’
He went to speak, but stopped, looked her in the eye. ‘It is ordinary, Maggie, very ordinary. The truth is more ordinary than you ever thought it could be.’ A last look: in it there was something pleading, but in the way she returned it there was nothing permissive. All that was left was for him to go on.
This Picture of You Page 23
