Between a Wolf and a Dog

by Georgia Blain

  And Ester had nodded solemnly, eyes wide, as she looked at the phone lying on the floor, all of her a-wonder with the human capacity to fall again and again and again, clutching fast to the sheer beauty of hope in the faith it would somehow stay buoyant.

  Today, the rain falls steadily, and she sits in her kitchen, her phone call to Victoria finished, wanting to hold in the incandescence of joy and excitement, to let it burn off the last vestige of the shame and sadness of Lawrence.

  It glows.

  BEING A CHRISTIAN underpins all of Edmund’s actions. It is the foundation for who he is and how he should be behave. It obviously takes precedence over any employment contract he may have with Lawrence, including any confidentiality obligations under that contract.

  Lawrence reads the email several times.

  Edmund does not wish to punish Lawrence — it is neither his role nor his intention. He believes Lawrence should be the one to confess to altering the polls. He has therefore decided to give him 48 hours to come clean to Paul. After this time has passed, Edmund himself intends to write to the editor — regardless of whether Lawrence has confessed or not — to assure him he had no knowledge of the numbers being altered. Needless to say, he no longer wishes to work for Lawrence, and he requests full payout of all moneys owing under their contract. In addition, he encloses the final poll figures.

  Lawrence reads the email again.

  Edmund is a sanctimonious fuckwit.

  But perhaps there is a chance of salvaging other business if Paul can be convinced to stay quiet. After all, they are terminating their agreement with him anyway, and there is no reason why Paul would want to damage his own reputation. No one else need know. He just has to be careful about how he words his confession. He does not want Paul to feel that Lawrence has been making a fool of him. It is delicate.

  He sits back in his chair and closes his eyes. Of course he can’t confess. It would be professional suicide. He could lie, though. Why not? He does it well. Just pretend that Edmund and he have had a dispute, and Edmund is trying to bury him in a scandal. But what if Edmund sends through evidence? He stands up now, his heart beating like a hard stone in his chest.

  He had never envisaged his life here. Middle-aged, divorced, unhappy with his work. It is a cliché of which he is ashamed. And now he is on the brink of being professionally ruined.

  What was it he had wanted? He finds it so hard to remember. He opens his eyes to see himself reflected in the rain-streaked window, and flinches. He has fucked up, again and again, and he puts his head in his hands, wishing he could dissolve who he is, go back to who he once was.

  He had loved music, but even he was wise enough to know he’d never had much talent. He’d loved drugs — still didn’t mind them if the truth be known. Ditto women. He shakes his head. If he is ruined, there really isn’t much to draw on in terms of setting up a new life.

  Ester used to encourage him to quit. She’d make suggestions — politics, journalism, policy research — all of which he’d dismiss. Eventually, she gave up. What would she tell him to do now, he wonders, and he can see her, horrified at first by the mess he has found himself in, and then not surprised, because this is what Lawrence does: he lies, he cheats, and he fucks up.

  As he glances down at his desk, the first thing he sees is Hilary’s number scrawled on a piece of paper next to his computer.

  He keys in each of the digits, and then hangs up before he presses call. Despite knowing it is unlikely she still wants to berate him (why now after such a long period of silence?), she makes him nervous. She always has.

  The first time Ester took him home for lunch, Hilary failed to join them. Maurie cooked, grilling fish with his usual enthusiasm, and making at least four salads — far more than the three of them could possibly eat. He had discovered kingfish, he told them — ‘is there any taste more perfect?’ — and had decided he was going to eat it every day.

  ‘Who knows, I might even trim down.’ He stood, inspecting his girth in the reflection of the window, before turning to Lawrence to tell him that it was only in the last year he’d found himself unable to wear the same pants he had worn since he was in his thirties. ‘Soft moleskin. They’ve never worn out — just become more pleasing with the years. Like your mother.’ He winked at Ester, who rolled her eyes before asking where Hilary was.

  ‘She knew we were coming.’

  Maurie pointed up at the studio, and then bellowed her name out loudly.

  There was no answer.

  ‘She’s tetchy,’ he eventually explained, his voice loud enough for Hilary — perhaps even the whole neighbourhood — to hear. ‘She seems to think I failed to tell her about today. Which of course I didn’t.’

  ‘I’ll go up.’ Ester beckoned Lawrence to follow her, which he did with some trepidation.

  Hilary was at her desk, headphones on, unable to hear them until Ester lifted them from her head and asked her if she was going to join them.

  ‘This is Lawrence,’ she’d said, slightly shy as she introduced him.

  Hilary had turned to look at him. Her blue eyes were sharp, her pale hair escaping a tangled knot at the back; she wore no make-up, and little jewellery, just a startlingly large silver ring, heavy in his hand as she reached out to greet him.

  ‘I’m too busy,’ she told them both. ‘He knew I was planning on working all weekend, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to eat without me.’

  ‘Just for half an hour?’ Ester asked.

  But Hilary had already put her headphones on and turned back to the screen.

  Ester sighed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she told Lawrence loudly, ‘my parents seem to be locked in some childish fight.’

  The headphones came off again, and Hilary turned to face Ester. ‘I have a film to finish by Wednesday. I’m sorry I can’t eat with you — but if he stays around,’ she nodded briefly in Lawrence’s direction, ‘which remains to be seen, there’ll be plenty of other opportunities for lunch.’

  On the way home, Ester apologised for Hilary’s rudeness. ‘It was nothing to do with you. It’s part of a long, ongoing war she’s been having with Maurie about the lack of respect he gives to her work. Which isn’t entirely true. Although if he’d had an exhibition to finish, he wouldn’t have been there — and no one would have questioned it.’

  Lawrence had grown used to Hilary over the years, although he was never entirely sure of how she felt about him.

  Shortly after he and Ester had returned home from Paris with the girls, she’d taken him aside and told him he needed to ‘change your act — pronto’.

  She was worried about Ester not getting enough time to work.

  ‘You earn enough to pay for extra childcare,’ she told him.

  Ester was quite happy working part-time, he replied. There was no need for her to go back full-time.

  Hilary narrowed her eyes. ‘Is that you saying this, or her?’

  He lost his temper then, asking Hilary a similar question. If Ester was unhappy with the arrangement, she hadn’t expressed it to him. And if it was simply Hilary who was unhappy with how they were living, then it was none of her business, and he had no interest in listening to her complaints.

  She hadn’t flinched. ‘Fair enough,’ she agreed.

  He’d shaken his head. ‘You’re incredible,’ he’d muttered.

  She smiled then. ‘She’s my daughter. And I don’t want to see her, years down the track, with regrets.’

  ‘We all have regrets,’ he countered.

  She looked at him, surprised by his response. ‘I don’t,’ she’d said, and she had seemed completely genuine.

  She doesn’t, Ester had agreed when he’d relayed the conversation to her later that night. ‘She loves Maurie, her work, us — she doesn’t hanker after anything or wish she’d lived a different life. She’s genuinely happy with where she’s at.’

 
‘She’s possibly one of the only people in the western world who could lay claim to that,’ he’d replied. And he’d raised his glass. ‘To Hilary.’

  He dials her number again, knowing he should have called back straight away. What if something is wrong with Ester? It has been so long since they have spoken. If she was sick, she might even not tell him, he thinks — although surely she would for the sake of the girls? He is suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to see her, to have her centre him, right him, and then he shakes his head. Ester wouldn’t want to know about putting him back on track. Not anymore.

  Outside, the sky is low, darkening as another downpour builds. He glances across and sees Leon closing up, pulling the blind down on the front door of the café. He struggles for business most days of the week — the neighbourhood is now home to four or five fashionable new cafés — and today is hopeless. Lawrence wonders how he survives.

  And then, after four rings, just when he is about lose his nerve, Hilary finally answers. Her voice is less certain than usual, the faintness heightening his anxiety so that he speaks without waiting for her to say any more than his name — ‘Is Ester all right?’ — his words cutting through any awkwardness.

  ‘She’s fine,’ Hilary assures him. ‘Unless there’s something she’s been keeping from me?’

  And now it’s Lawrence’s turn to reassure, telling Hilary that if there were, he wouldn’t know. She, Hilary, is far more likely to have heard. ‘You called me,’ he says. ‘Asking me to ring you. I’m sorry I took so long. It’s been one of those days. Terrible.’

  She doesn’t feign interest in what’s been happening for him. Even if they had been on friendly terms she may not have asked him, assuming he would tell her if it mattered.

  ‘I need you to help me,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to discuss this on the phone. I need to see you.’

  The next downpour has begun. Everything heaving with the weight of it, slanting sheets of rain, and across the road, a man tries to shelter under the awning over Leon’s front door, but it is hopeless. The rain drenches him, his jeans darkening, his coat sodden. The drumming against the tin is so loud, Lawrence isn’t sure if he has heard her correctly. He doesn’t know how to respond.

  ‘This is important,’ she tells him.

  Of course it is. She has never been one for just calling him to have a chat, and he laughs nervously as he tells her he gathered as much.

  She cuts over him. ‘I’m dying,’ she says.

  And he is appalled as he wonders why she needs to tell him — what does this have to do with him? He stands now, trying to move somewhere where he can hear more clearly, but also because he cannot sit still, he is feeling ill, and he doesn’t know why.

  He begins to utter a response, words of ‘how awful’, or something similarly pathetic, when once again she stops him from continuing.

  ‘If you could come to my house and we could talk?’

  He is shaking his head, mouthing the word ‘no’ and pressing the phone to his ear, when she utters the word that surprises him most of all.

  ‘Please,’ she says, and in that instant, the rain stops, as suddenly as it began, the clarity of her plea sharp and sudden, the only word he has truly heard.

  ‘Of course,’ he tells her, his panic dissipating as quickly as the downpour. And in the silence that follows, he looks out at the sky, still again, and asks her if she is at the same address.

  She is.

  ‘Do you want me to come now?’

  She does.

  And he is not to tell Ester or April. Not yet.

  He stands alone at his window, his face reflected back at him, older than he ever expects — lines across his skin, greying hair, mouth drawn — and he watches himself as he tells her he will be there soon.

  APRIL HAS PLAYED the record six times now, but they want to hear it again: ‘I Can’t Stand The Rain’, louder each time, all three of them singing with the chorus, Catherine abandoning herself to the performance, wailing with the sadness of the refrain.

  ‘Again,’ Lara demands.

  But this time, April shakes her head.

  ‘I think we need something a little happier,’ she tells them, searching through her old vinyl, the record covers a smear of colour across the floor. It’s on an old hits album, later than ‘Ripper’, she thinks, and then there it is — an eighties disco collection she used to love.

  ‘Now this is a good one,’ she tells the girls.

  The needle crackles, sliding round and round the edge. She lifts it and places it right in the groove this time, the music building and building until those first words take it to its crescendo —

  Hi, Hi — We’re your weather girls and have we got nooooos for you!

  They love it — and of course they want it again and again, each of them familiar with all the words by the third hearing, Lara throwing her head back and singing to the sky, Catherine taking her pretend microphone and working the room.

  When it ends for the fifth time, Lara wants to know what it means.

  ‘Who’d want it to rain men?’ she asks.

  April shrugs. ‘Sex-starved women?’

  ‘That’s gross,’ Lara tells her. ‘Really gross.’ She looks out the window, a huge arched pane of glass looking over grey rooftops, the heavy sky low over the charcoal sliver of harbour, a strip of metal shimmering dully. ‘Imagine if they were coming out of the clouds,’ Lara says. ‘They’d squash everything.’

  April can only agree. ‘But some of them might survive. And they might be fun.’ She sniffs the air. ‘I believe a cake may be cooked.’ There’s a warm sweetness, the scent of molten chocolate, and it’s good.

  ‘Perfect,’ she says — and it is.

  Her capacity to cook is something that always surprises people. She used to make the meals with Maurie, neither of them afraid to experiment, both of them with a nose for balance — ‘when it comes to food,’ April would add ruefully, ‘but nothing else.’

  Lara hovers, ready to stick her finger right in the centre, but April slaps her away, tickling her under the arm as she does so. ‘Let it cool,’ she says. ‘Just a bit.’

  It’s 3 o’clock. She needs to call Lawrence again, but her phone is nowhere to be found.

  ‘Here it is,’ Catherine tells her, pointing to the landline long since disconnected.

  ‘Doesn’t work,’ April replies.

  ‘Then why do you keep it?’

  She shrugs.

  ‘Okay,’ she tells them. ‘Our mission is simple. Locate the communication device. If you find it, you win an extra piece for yourself and your sister.’

  ‘What happens if you find it?’ Catherine asks.

  ‘I’ll have to cut an extra piece for Ester.’

  Lara rolls her eyes. ‘What would be the point? It’s not like you could give it to her.’

  This is true. ‘Maybe one day,’ April tells her. ‘I could put it in the freezer until then.’ She looks around the room, hands on her hips, practiced in quickly scanning the chaos as a means of finding what she’s lost. Sometimes it works immediately.

  ‘Ah ha.’ She had left it in a sensible spot. Hall table, next to her keys.

  Lawrence answers on the third ring. He is in the car, he tells her, static making it difficult to hear as she asks him whether he got her message. ‘I have the girls,’ she tries to explain. ‘It’s complicated, but they are totally fine. I can bring them to you when you get home.’

  He is heading in her direction, he replies. He can pick them up — if she doesn’t mind keeping them for a little longer.

  Of course she doesn’t. ‘It’s lovely to see them again,’ she says, but the call has disconnected, or at least this is what she’d like to presume, and not that he’s hung up on her.

  ‘There’s no need for you to avoid me,’ she’d once said to him, and she’d meant it, once her horror over h
is confession had subsided, and the cold chill of shame passed. ‘We may as well try and be friends.’

  The sadness of knowing they might have loved each other was always present, and even now there were times when she would wake from a dream of him, surprised by the intensity of her longing. But she was always quick to push it aside, to give it no air, trying for a more pragmatic assessment of their relationship. If there had been no obstacle — and when they first met, there had been none — would they have chosen each other? And would they have lasted? Of course not, she would tell herself. They would have enjoyed a period of drug-and-alcohol-fuelled days together, only to eventually sicken of the excess towards which they both tended to drift.

  She’d had brief affairs with men like him. She knew what happened. They were often drawn to her, sure that she would let them be who they wanted to be, that she wouldn’t try and constrain them. But after an intense period of wild unadulterated fun, there was no net holding them together, no substance to anchor any connection between them, and it was over.

  April stands in the doorway to her kitchen, where the girls are leaning together, both tall and slender, long limbs in school tracksuits smeared with flour and cocoa from the baking, tangled hair escaping pigtails. They concentrate as they serve up the cake, carefully cutting even slices — one for each of them, two for April, and an extra plate also with two slices.

  April used to have them to stay when they were little. Ester would drop them off, each with a carefully packed bag containing neatly folded pyjamas, clean underpants, and toiletries. Her instructions were lengthy — bed times, number of stories, toilet routines, tooth brushing, hair brushing, sugar rationing. After the first time, April simply pretended to listen.

  ‘And I’m trying to get them to sleep on their own,’ Ester told her as she’d left. ‘So if they get into bed with you, it’d be great if you could take them back to their own room.’

  April had nodded earnestly, failing to tell Ester that she didn’t actually have another bed for them to go to. The one in the spare room was covered with old guitars and clothes she’d been intending to donate to someone whenever she could figure out who might want them.