Between a Wolf and a Dog

by Georgia Blain

  Ester has a client who has recently fallen in love. She’d talked about it during her last session, the glow of it suffusing each word and gesture. It’s rare that she hears about love in her consulting room. Most of her clients talk of anger, failure, boredom, depression, conflict: the flipside to love. That session had been like opening each of the windows to her room, heaving them up, sashes groaning, and letting in the freshness of an early spring day.

  Lawrence, too, had been teetering between a career in music or a full-time job as a researcher. Music was what he wanted, but as April once pointed out, he had the looks but not the talent. He was a ‘serviceable guitarist’, she said, but he was never going to make a living from it.

  And so they had met, both on the brink of letting go of youth. He became a pollster, and, despite the occasional sardonic joke he made about himself, she knew he liked having a media profile. As for her career, he went from quips about her ‘Happiness Book’ to downright dismissiveness. She pedalled false hopes to a spoilt middle class. She handed out security blankets to children who should just grow up.

  And yet, when everything had blown apart, he had begged her to go to therapy with him, and she had refused.

  Ester likes to keep half an hour between appointments. It gives her time to empty her head of one client before she begins work with the next. She sits in her room, reading through the previous week’s notes for the Harcourts, while outside the rain stops and starts, the sky still resolutely grey. It might rain forever, she thinks, staring out at the bleakness of the day.

  Across the road, she can see Jenny and Damon have pulled up, ten minutes early. They are sitting side by side in their car, neither of them talking.

  She watches them for a moment and then looks down, aware that they can possibly see her. Closing their notes, she puts them back in the file, and then she checks her phone is on silent.

  It is, the screen showing a message from Steven. He’s booked a place to eat. Is 7.30 okay? Glancing up, she catches sight of her reflection in the window, her fear and excitement illuminated by the desk lamp.

  It’s been three years since she and Lawrence separated. After a year she had tried to date again, trawling through the various websites, and wishing she were one of those women who could approach the task with a business-like practicality (which is probably how she would advise her clients to tackle dating, she thinks, ashamed at the thought). If you want to meet someone, you have to put your mind to it. It’s much harder when you’re older, when everyone has partners and when you don’t go out and meet new people. Those were the words she’d once uttered to friends who’d found themselves alone, never realising how difficult it was to enter the world of online dating.

  She’d gone through the men in her age group, alarmed at how old they all looked, because she still thought of herself as young. She dismissed all the ones who referred to wanting to find a ‘lady’, along with the many who nominated The Shawshank Redemption as their favourite film. It only left a few. There was one she liked, a man whose profile made her smile. He was looking for a woman who agreed that ‘there was never any excuse for vertical blinds — ever’. He was probably gay, she thought, and she sent him a ‘Kiss’, deeply embarrassed by the whole terminology. He never responded.

  A week later, she did go on a date. His name was Angus. She had contacted him, and he had emailed her back arranging to meet for a coffee. As soon as she arrived, she knew it was never going to work, dismissing him for surface reasons while battling with herself about how wrong it was to do this. He was seated near the door, legs stretched out in front of him, socks with sandals in full view. (Later, she would laugh about this, turn it into a story, but then it was only part of the sad loneliness of the experience.)

  They talked for about half an hour, telling each other what they did. (He was a telecommunications salesperson who was writing a novel in his spare time. He liked going to the movies, eating out, bushwalking, swimming.) (She was a therapist who painted as a hobby, and also liked movies, eating out, bushwalking, and swimming — but she was different, she thought, clinging on to this. Yet surely if she was so much more than this summation, so might he be?)

  At the end of the coffee, he asked her what they should do.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Shall we take this further?’

  She looked down at table, breathing in before she met his eyes again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she told him. ‘I just don’t think it’s going to work.’

  ‘Why not?’ he asked.

  And she didn’t know how to respond. ‘I just don’t feel a connection,’ she eventually said, hating the banality of the words as she uttered them.

  He nodded, standing up as he did so.

  She stood also, only wanting to leave. ‘Thank you for meeting me,’ she offered, and as they said farewell at the door, he took her hand in his.

  ‘Could we have a hug?’ he asked.

  She stood there, frozen, mute, as he hugged her for what seemed an interminably long time but was probably only seconds, before he broke away and said goodbye, leaving her alone on the footpath.

  AFTER HE’S DROPPED Otto at home, Lawrence goes to his usual café. It’s around the corner from the single-room office he rents at the back of a warehouse. The café owner is guitar obsessed, usually sitting at the table with Lawrence to show him his latest online find.

  ‘Dave in America sent me this,’ and he hands over his phone so that Lawrence can scroll through the pictures. ‘He wants two grand, but I’m trying to talk him down a couple of hundred.’

  Lawrence shakes his head, smiling as he does so. ‘And this would be the sixth this year?’

  ‘Seventh,’ Joel admits. ‘And each a thing of beauty.’

  As far as he knows, Joel barely plays, his repertoire limited to average renditions of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and the chorus of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Lawrence used to see him at the bars and pubs all those years ago, when they were both younger and leaner.

  Lil, the waitress, brings his short black over, and sits with them as well, oblivious to Joel telling her that she’s meant to be working, not chatting up the customers.

  ‘Oh please,’ she laughs. She takes the phone from Lawrence, and has a look. ‘I don’t know how you could buy a guitar without playing it first. You have no idea what the action is like.’ She sips the coffee she’s made for herself.

  She’s a singer — slow country and western that verges too close to the somnambulistic to ever really thrill him. Fortunately, she’s never asked him what he thinks of her songs, and if she did, he’d lie.

  ‘Got the girls this week?’ Joel asks him.

  Lawrence nods.

  Outside, the trees bend and bow, shivering under the weight of another downpour. The sky is dark, the clouds thick and low. A woman comes in with two small kids, all three of them dripping wet, the children demanding a babycino and a biscuit, and Lil takes their order, smiling sweetly as she tells the kids she didn’t quite hear that last word they said, ‘was it a please?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s your job to teach my children manners,’ the woman tells her, and her eyes are hard, her tone cold.

  ‘Nor do I,’ Lil responds, the sweetness of her smile never diminishing.

  Lawrence barely glances in Joel’s direction, but he catches the shaking of his head and the muttering under his breath as he tamps the coffee, uncertain whether he should be making the order or not. Lil has a way with the rude customers, and they often leave before anything to eat or drink gets to the table.

  ‘I’m paid to serve. Not to be treated like shit,’ she mutters as she takes the flat white from him, fending off any possible disapproval he might dare to express.

  Lawrence slept with Lil a couple of times in that terrible first year of separation. There was even a night when he convinced himself he was falling in love with her. He’d gone so wrong; marriag
e, serious jobs, children — none of it was what he’d wanted. Lil was almost twenty years younger than him, but they had a connection. He split the second ecstasy tablet between them, and told her he felt lighter and freer than he had in years.

  ‘I’ve come back to myself,’ he declared. ‘This is who I am.’ He’d been aware of how ridiculous he sounded as soon as he uttered the words, but he banished the thought, or tried to, until Lil looked at him and smiled, the ecstasy making her a little more tender than she would otherwise have been.

  ‘This is who you’d like to be at the moment. But don’t tell me that all the rest wasn’t real.’ She shook her head, and then pointed at her chest. ‘Wisdom from the young,’ she grinned. ‘Frequently dismissed.’ And then, still smiling broadly, she’d told him she didn’t want to hurt him. ‘Don’t you go falling in love with me.’

  Wasn’t that what he was meant to say to her?

  It had been a bad year. One in which he’d disappeared into the terrifying limitless expanse of freedom, a vast terrain that he’d been incapable of controlling, and so he’d roamed untethered, never still, never wanting to rest on the ramifications of what he’d done.

  April had told him to pull himself together. ‘It’s bad,’ she’d said. ‘I know it. But there’s no need to keep making it worse.’

  She, too, had been kind to him, although he had been wary about taking her kindness, unsure of what to do each time she came round to see him when he’d had the girls, until Ester had put an end to it, telling him it was wrong. It was too confusing for Lara and Catherine — her not talking to April, him playing house with her.

  ‘I’m not playing house with her.’

  ‘Whatever it is you’re doing, I don’t want to know about it. I just want her out of our lives.’

  And now, here he is, alone.

  When there is a pause in the rain, he walks around the corner to his office, the tin door locked, the corrugations streaked iron-grey and rust-red. All the other studios are occupied by artists, most of them young and dreadlocked, who produce fairly average work from found objects and recycled rubbish. The whole building is run by Joachim, who sleeps in his studio and never washes, but he is always cheerful, and often leaves a loaf of bread, scavenged from the bakery around the corner, for Lawrence.

  Lawrence took on the space in the terrible year — it was part of reclaiming his youth — and despite knowing it’s not really a place to see clients, he’s stayed.

  The rain is thunderous on the tin walls and tin roof; from inside, it’s like a stampede of wild animals overhead, yet when he looks out of the single window, rubbing a hole in the fogged-up glass, he sees that the downpour isn’t as heavy as it seems.

  He doesn’t mind the noise. There’s something elemental about its insistence, and he turns on the heater and switches on his computer, calling up a Bonnie Prince Billy playlist before he begins to read through the poll results. The gothic edge to the sweetness of these songs reminds him of April’s music. She released her first album when she was only twenty-two. Sometimes he still listens to it, to the throaty crack in her voice, the soar that never quite touches the peak it yearns for, the delicate pick of her guitar, the brush of the snare drums, and the sadness of the piano; they all make him ache. She used to perform in pubs, always managing to still a crowded bar; she would sit out the front, long-limbed, bathed in gold, her gap-toothed smile giving her a cheeky likeability, and that voice, the crack in it always unsettling, the notes never quite where they should be, and yet there was something so relaxed about her performance that each song lifted you with it.

  She’d asked him to go on tour with her shortly after he’d started seeing Ester. A guitarist had dropped out, and she’d needed a replacement quick.

  ‘Why you?’ Ester had asked. It was still early enough in their relationship that she wouldn’t have been disparaging his lack of talent, but he’d wondered the same thing himself.

  ‘I know you,’ April had explained, ‘it’s just so much easier.’

  She’d encouraged Ester to join them.

  He had too, not wanting to be separated from her for a month.

  But in the end she hadn’t come — and it had been his last gig as a musician, one in which he’d known he wasn’t up to scratch, frequently playing so poorly that he’d been tempted to just quit halfway through if it hadn’t been for the fact that he’d left his day job and needed the pay cheque.

  While the rain continues, loud and clattering, harsh and hard, Lawrence trawls through his emails, deleting as he goes; junk, an invitation to dinner, a suggestion of a drink from a woman he’d met a week ago, a client wanting a survey on chocolate-buying habits, another wanting one on leisure activities, and then, last, the email from Edmund with the latest poll results.

  When he’d glanced at it in the park, he’d opened the attachment without reading the message at the beginning.

  Now, as he scans it, he feels acid rise in his gut.

  Edmund wants to talk to him. There seem to have been disparities between the data he has been sending through to Lawrence and the resulting reports in the media.

  He hovers, wanting to ignore the request, but then he sees the end of the message. Edmund doesn’t want to send through the latest report unless they speak.

  Lawrence doesn’t know Edmund well. He’s only met him a few times, always finding him serious, dogged, dull in his laboured determination — all excellent qualities in someone who produces data. He is also a Christian. He has told Lawrence about the church he belongs to in the north-western suburbs — a new one started by a zealot with a passion for linking faith with material success. At twenty-nine, Edmund already owns three investment properties.

  Foolishly, Lawrence had assumed the adjustments he had made to the data were so small, Edmund wouldn’t notice. Perhaps if he’d only done it once, this would have been the case — a simple mistake he could explain away, perhaps even putting it on the shoulders of the client. The second time might also have slipped through the net. But the last time … He’d been drunk. He’d gone too far.

  He answers the email with bluster. They have a contract that specifies a delivery date and time. He has results to get through to the client, with a pressing deadline, and no time for talk. This is work that he has paid for, and Edmund’s job is simply to deliver the information, and not to question how it’s used. If he wants to continue to have Lawrence as a client, he needs to do just that.

  He hovers the cursor over ‘send’, and then lets his hand fall back into his lap.

  He knows that charm is his best offensive. It always has been. And so he leaves the email open on his screen and calls Edmund. It only takes two rings before he answers.

  His voice smooth and calm, Lawrence quickly deals with the pleasantries — how is he? It’s raining cats and dogs down here, he tells him, a deluge of biblical proportions, and he regrets the reference as soon as he utters it.

  And then to business. He’s just opened Edmund’s email and he doesn’t understand.

  Edmund clears his throat. ‘I do read the results,’ he tells Lawrence.

  There is a brief silence between them.

  ‘The first time, I just looked at the media reports in passing, and it didn’t seem quite right. The second time, I was sure a mistake had been made. The third time, I actually went back and checked.’

  Edmund’s voice is soft, sibilant. Lawrence has always disliked it, particularly now.

  He hovers between loud denial and puny excuses, choosing neither. ‘I need to deliver the latest numbers this morning,’ he tells Edmund. ‘We have a contract. And there is nothing in that agreement that gives you any right to question what I choose to do with those results.’

  Edmund takes a moment. But this is what he always does. If Lawrence cracks a slightly distasteful joke, Edmund will even take a few seconds before he clears his throat in dismissal, the silence emph
asising his disapproval. He’s a sanctimonious prig, Lawrence thinks, and he feels ill as the full weight of Edmund’s response to his actions sinks in a little deeper.

  What he has been doing is tantamount to interfering with the political process, with democracy itself, Edmund tells him, the low hiss on each ‘s’ scraping like nails on a blackboard. Edmund may have a contract with him, but as an independent, free human being who sets great store by choosing the moral path, he no longer wants to work with Lawrence.

  The rain beats down.

  Lawrence looks out the window. ‘What we do is an interference with the political process,’ he eventually says. ‘The questions we ask, when we ask them, how we interpret them — they all shape the debate. You know that. I know that.’

  Edmund interrupts him. ‘This is different.’

  But is it any worse? Lawrence wants to ask him if in all honesty he really thinks it is, but he’s already said too much. He can hear another call on his mobile, the beep of the phone harsh in his ear. He is happy to terminate the contract, he tells Edmund, but he does need those last results.

  ‘Which will be published without alteration?’

  ‘Of course,’ Lawrence promises.

  ‘And I will receive full payout for the year’s work?’

  Lawrence has no choice.

  Edmund is silent again. ‘I will need to think.’

  It isn’t over. Of course it isn’t over.

  Lawrence leans back in his chair and puts his hands over his eyes. What was he thinking? He breathes in deeply, and stares up at the ceiling.

  AS A CHILD, April had hated the bath. She couldn’t stay in one place, and she would slip and slide and squirm, splashing great waves of soapy water over the edge before leaping out, running through the house naked and dripping half the bathwater along the way, Maurie and Hilary oblivious to the fact that she was still filthy and that the entire exercise had been a waste of time.