The Prosperous Thief

by Andrea Goldsmith

  After the odd, hot-house wonder of the day, Laura was feeling good. The time with Raphe had reminded her what was important between people, what she and Nell had neglected recently. She was eager to be home, and hoped Nell had shut the door on her grant proposals, her PhD supervisions, her strategic planning, all the work that had increasingly colonised their private life. Then together they could come back to Brunswick Street, have a cocktail in one of the bars, followed by a leisurely meal and a browse in the bookshops, then home to bed for the first sex they’d had in months – which was, she decided, not only the best way of diffusing all that erotic confusion with Raphe, but making the best sense of it as well.

  A few minutes later, with her hopes reinforced with a heady anticipation, Laura arrived home. The house was in darkness and bloated with that stretched noiselessness of a place not disturbed for some time. Laura turned on lights, turned up heaters, turned on music, injected some life into the stillness. Then to the refrigerator to store the food left over from the picnic. The refrigerator was empty save for a few old jars of pickles, some mayonnaise and a bottle of undrinkable wine given to them by a stingy acquaintance. It was the sort of refrigerator that reeked of single person and no cooking, and just as eloquent as the supermarket basket with cans of cat food, packet soups, prepared freezer meals, and toffees to chew while watching TV alone. Bloody Nell, what was she thinking? Jobs come and go, grant applications and graduate students too, but their partnership was forever.

  And suddenly, and leaving her so giddy she had to sit down, she knew something was terribly wrong, knew it with absolute clarity. Perhaps it had required this special day with someone else to open her eyes, but something was wrong, and not a manageable I’m-busy-at-work wrong, but a fundamental wrong, and had been for a long time.

  Over the past couple of months Laura had made regular enquiries about the progress of Nell’s grant application, about the dynamics at work, about the new tutor. But only now did she realise she had kept her questions, her intellect too, on a short rein, because there were some things she never wanted to name, never wanted to canvas.This was how it had been between her and her father, and now she suspected she was loving Nell in the same way, a deep love, even all-consuming, but skirting the edges as if she were afraid of confronting the truth. Laura, it seemed, was an expert in loving profoundly and misguidedly.

  The answering machine registered just one message, and even while the tape was rewinding Laura was hoping it was not another excuse from Nell.But of course it was. Nell said she was determined to complete her grant application and would be home only when it was finished. The message had been phoned in at 4.46 p.m.,much the same time Laura was walking hand in hand in the bush with Raphe Carter. It seemed like an age ago. There was no apology from Nell, and Laura was suddenly very lonely as only one can be after a stimulating day. But worse, far worse, feeling very scared, and an old familiar fizzling in her stomach which she recognised immediately.

  She grabs her coat, leaves lights, heat and music turned on, and walks up to the corner shop. She buys her first packet of cigarettes in years, is appalled to discover they’re the same price as a dozen oysters. She smokes the first cigarette slowly as she walks home. It tastes like the gutter. She perseveres for a few more drags then throws it away.

  Back home she perches on the front doorstep and lights another. This time memory, or perhaps old entrenched habit is a winner, and she manages to smoke most of it.Too bad love is not so durable.

  Inside the house it is all chill and glare. The cigarettes have lodged in her right temple as a dull accusing ache. It was Nell who insisted she give them up, said she didn’t want Marlboro Maid in her bed.And she still wouldn’t. Laura shakes herself into action. She goes to the bathroom and washes her teeth, scrubs the smell from her fingers, applies scented hand cream. She sniffs at her jumper and decides to change it, chooses a hot pink polo neck Nell likes. She dabs on perfume, changes her watch for one Nell gave her and returns to the lounge. She wants Nell home, she wants to tell her how much she loves her, she wants to ask all those open-ended, risky questions she has avoided these past few months.

  She turns on the TV – Saturday night and it’s all sport or drivel – puts on some music but even Bach fails her, tries to do some work but her brain is itching to do something else. Reading will provide a better diversion. On the way to the bedroom for her book she walks past Nell’s study and notices some posters have been left on the display board. Nell is most particular about her posters, and without giving it much thought, Laura unclips them and files them away. Then to the bedroom for her novel, an early Iris Murdoch which should see her through the next couple of hours. Her bookmark has fallen out and one of the pages is turned down. Laura reads books as if they are priceless manuscripts, never a drop of coffee or a Vegemite smear on her pages, never a dog-eared corner or cracked spine. Nell used to say that if she were to have her time over again she would like to return as Laura’s collected Shakespeare: plenty of attention, plenty of admiration and first-class care. Which makes the state of Laura’s book noteworthy. If Nell was reading it she would have treated it with far more deference.

  A moment later Laura grabs her keys, dashes out to the car and she’s on her way to the university. She knows what’s wrong, she knows with heart-stopping certainty what’s wrong – not the particular someone Nell is seeing, although she has her suspicions. The university is deserted. Nell always parks in the same area. But not tonight. The building where Nell works is spotted with the occasional light, but the cinema studies floor is in total darkness. Ten o’clock and Nell is not there. Back home at ten fifteen and Laura is checking the dishwasher – yes, she’s positive there’s an unaccounted mug in there, and surely those are sugar grains in the bottom. Neither she nor Nell takes sugar. And the shortbreads, ultra-expensive, pay-by-the-piece delicacies and only one left in the jar. Last night there were five. It’s simply not possible Nell could eat four pieces in a single day. And then back to the bedroom and Laura sifting through the bits and pieces on Nell’s bedside table, and only when she’s inspecting the sheets and then bending down to smell them does she pull back. She sinks to the carpet, swamped not by grief nor anger, but terror, gut-strangling terror. Time passes but with no proper thoughts to measure it, might be hours or minutes. Eventually Laura goes downstairs, pours herself a large whisky, lights another of the cigarettes and does not go outside to smoke it. She turns on the TV with the mute control activated, replaces Bach with Jeff Buckley, and amid the sorrowful insistence of someone else’s knowledge, waits for Nell to come home.

  The Purloined Narrative

  On another Saturday night twelve weeks later, Laura is at Melissa’s house for an evening of food, wine and comfort.With Daniel attending a religious gathering in Sydney led by a Brooklyn rabbi considered to be the last word in Messianic predictions, it is just the two of them.

  They have taken possession of the Lewin living room. Melissa, dressed in designer beige, provides elegant contrast with the charcoal leather armchair, while Laura, in close-fitting black, is draped over a startling rug whose coloured patches and squiggles recall the later Matisse. Both are in easy reach of a long, low table messy with the remnants of assorted delicacies: scraps of smoked salmon dotted with the occasional caper, the pickled onions of what were originally pickled herrings and onions, a seriously mauled selection of cheese, a roasted vegetable salad reduced to its zucchini – neither of the women like zucchini – and the slimy remains of a spinach and bocconcini salad. Little restraint in the way of eating has occurred, and with Melissa now filling glasses from a newly opened bottle of wine, not too much in the way of drink either.

  ‘An Anglican Steven Spielberg from Australia! Spare me.’ An extremely gaunt Laura reaches for the smoked salmon.‘I think I’m rediscovering my appetite. Do you mind if I finish this off?’ And with a nod from Melissa, cleans the plate. ‘It’s difficult to know if Nell’s worst crime is (a) leaving me; (b) for a girl fourteen years my juni
or, or (c) the fact she absconded with my mother as well.’

  ‘Your mother’s story,’ Melissa says.

  But given the circumstances Nell deserves no allowances. Nell Bartholomew, Laura’s partner of twelve years had, nine weeks previously, removed herself from their relationship. This she had done with promises of a hypothetical permanent friendship to replace their very real permanent partnership.

  ‘You’re irreplaceable,’ she said to Laura over and over again.

  ‘And I’ll always love you.’

  She also, as it turned out, loved young Cyndee, and if that were not betrayal enough, she loved Etti Lewin’s life story too. Such a good film it would make, Nell had said when first she heard it all those years ago, and had not changed her mind since.Wisely, she did not emphasise her filmmaking aspirations in the early weeks of the break-up, instead she stressed the inviolate nature of her connection with Laura – daily reminders as it happened, over the phone, over coffee, over meals, during walks down to the Merri Creek, and all the while she was forging a new connection with the twenty-nine-year-old Cyndee.

  ‘It’s absurd to think you can slice the friendship component from the partnership,’ Melissa now says.‘Like preserving the orange peel with the old girl while eating the juicy flesh with the new.’

  ‘I thought I was happy.’ This Laura’s mantra of the past three months since finding out about Cyndee.

  There were three hellish weeks between Nell’s confession and her packing her bags. Three insultingly shortweeks for Nell to throw away twelve years of a well-rounded, multifaceted relationship. Nell left, and Laura lost her confidence, her sense of security, her mother’s life story and an eighth of her body weight, this last despite Nell’s concern to leave the cupboards full.‘For you, Laura,’ she kept saying, indicating the full pantry, the full linen press, the shelves of crockery and cutlery. But Vegemite, pasta, tablecloths and soup plates are poor substitutes for what Laura really wanted, which was the old Nell. ‘For you,’ the new Nell said, indicating the full cupboards, but really for Nell, because she anticipated moving around over the next few months while she raised money for her film.

  As for the topic of her film, according to Nell, Etti’s story was too good to waste. When Laura objected, Nell’s answer was swift: ‘What were you going to do with it, Laura? You couldn’t even bring yourself to read the transcript.’

  Her mother’s life was being used as Nell’s ticket out of academe, her mother’s suffering reduced to a career move.

  ‘How can you steal my mother’s memories?’ she said to Nell. ‘How can you steal my heritage?’

  ‘How can you be so melodramatic?’

  Nell then proceeded to argue her case by quoting Laura’s own words: that the lessons from the Holocaust needed to be shared; that we have to find new ways of entering the old material.‘You’ve been harping on about these things for years,’ Nell said.‘And even if you hadn’t, your mother’s story is simply begging to be filmed. It has the lot: pathos, hardship, death, sex, all capped off with a happy ending. And so many benefits in a non-Jew doing the story,’ she added. ‘For a start, no one can accuse me of pushing my own bandwagon.’

  Laura was too upset for restraint. ‘You mean you’re more interested in ambition than atrocity.’

  ‘That’s so like you Laura. Give me one good reason why I, or any non-Jew for that matter, can’t put her stamp on the Holocaust.’ She proceeded to provide what she believed to be a water-tight justification for her film. So far, the Holocaust had stayed in the hands of the Jews, she said. Yet not only was anti-Semitism as rife as it had ever been, given the number of atrocities that had ripped through the world these past sixty years, clearly the lessons of the Holocaust hadn’t been taught particularly well.‘It mightn’t be such a bad idea to take the Holocaust away from the Jews. Or at least loosen their monopoly.’

  Laura was too horrified to speak. Such sentiments belonged to the extremist groups she spent her days fighting, not to the woman she had loved these past dozen years. Nell, however, interpreting her silence more positively, reached across the kitchen bench and squeezed her hand,

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll do justice to your mother’s story.’

  Nell strips Laura’s heart, she steals the family history, and with the young thing on her arm and Hollywood in her sights, she turns a firm back on the past.

  ‘Let’s drink to the film never getting off the ground,’ Laura says to Melissa filling their glasses.

  ‘And if it does, may it be a real turkey, a case of Cleopatra meets Holiday in Auschwitz,’ says Melissa.

  ‘And may the young thing wear her out – Nell’s old enough to be her mother.’

  ‘And may Nell, infamous cradle-snatcher and committed urban dweller, find herself prematurely located in a lesbian nursing home at the back of Bourke,’ Melissa says.

  ‘And may the nursing home be infested with spiders and ants,’ adds Laura, who after twelve years has an intimate acquaintance with Nell’s phobias.

  And so they laugh their way through the last of the food and the second bottle of wine. But the laughter has to stop some time, and an hour later, with misery lurking like a cyclone off the coast of Darwin, Laura prepares to leave. And yes, she knows she’s welcome to stay at Melissa’s, but equally she knows she’ll never adjust to an empty house unless she spends more time there.

  Laura drives with the studied care of the nearly drunk, avoiding the roads she knows to be favoured by the police. She feels trebly bereft: she’s lost Nell, she’s lost the future they would have shared, and in some weird sense she has again lost Etti. Her life is shuffling backwards: the empty house, the memories, the longing, and before she sinks too low, she quickly slips a tape into the cassette deck, and just as quickly ejects it: the music reminds her of Nell, all the music she has in the car reminds her of Nell.

  She arrives home chilled and suddenly sober. She finds an old bar radiator and huddles over it with Wystan. Distraught woman with cat, it is not a pretty study, and Laura decides to accept Melissa’s offer of a bed for the night. A moment later, she changes her mind: she has to learn to manage. She keeps up what she hopes is a sane and humorous commentary to Wystan while rummaging in the cupboards for some valerian tea. Nell used to drink it on the rare occasions she couldn’t sleep. Laura, a chronic nonsleeper, tried it just once before deciding that such foul stuff made insomnia a preferred choice.

  She can’t find the tea, hates the search, hates seeing their possessions, hates the memories attached to them. When Nell first moved out, Laura selected a mug, a glass, some cutlery and crockery from her pre-Nell period, and confined herself to an old rocker of Etti’s to avoid using the lounge suite she and Nell had bought together. Their bed was full-strength arsenic. She told Nell to take it, but again, on the pretext of thinking of her, Nell said she’d leave it with Laura.

  ‘But I don’t want it,’ Laura had yelled.

  The house is full of memories and none are welcome. Either they are infused with the devastation of the past three months or the now-tainted pleasures of the previous twelve years. Laura longed for the day when she would stop missing her, or rather stop yearning for her. Longed for the day when she would wake up and recognise a lightness, a freedom, like the morning after a migraine, or the sloughing off of jetlag.

  It was not so much that everything she did reminded her of Nell, rather she slotted Nell into all her moments. She would linger in front of a travel agent’s window decked out in posters of London and feel the pleasure Nell would feel. In their first year together they spent a month in London and Nell loved it so much that Laura kept showing her more of the city, just for the joy of seeing Nell’s joy. Or she would pick a book at random and start to read, and the words would inflame her longing. Or another time and another book and a rash of new insights into their life together replete with new arguments to bring Nell home. If only I knew then what I know now, Laura would think as she read and read, for Nell and to Nell, while she sat alone in the
house they had once shared.

  In a peculiar sort of way, Nell had a stronger presence now she was gone. Laura would sit on the couch, their couch, eat food Nell had enjoyed, watch TV programmes Nell preferred, wear clothes Nell liked. Nell was gone but was ever-present in all Laura’s moments. I love you, Laura would find herself saying aloud in the shower. I love you, as she put out the rubbish. I love you, as she pulled the weeds from the garden. I love you, as she tried to work. She maintained a constant conversation with Nell. No matter where she was or who she was with, Nell was there too. Laura was holding on to her as hard as she could, hanging on to Nell who had gone.

  And waiting, always waiting. For the knock at the door, for the familiar figure sitting in their favourite café, for the woman walking towards her on the Merri Creek path, or the film aficionado at the late night showing of Kubrick’s 2001.And waiting for Nell’s car to appear in the street outside, with a chastened Nell in the driver’s seat hoping to be seen. And daily, hourly, waiting for an email, and when the server crashed, wild with frustration, knowing, knowing it would be at that very time Nell would be trying to contact her. And in the sudden silence of cyberspace, composing email after email, queuing them up for when the system was up and running again. And when finally it was, the thumping disappointment of junk mail, work memos and trite messages from friends. And her own relay of white hot emails would be transferred to the ‘never sent’ category to cool down with all the others never sent.

  And waiting for the phone, willing it to ring, refusing invitations so as not to miss Nell’s call. And in the early mornings when Nell did most of her telephoning, watching the clock, watching the minutes drag by, carrying the phone when she went to the toilet or took a shower or watered the pot plants or picked out a tune on the piano which was already sounding hollow and unused. Waiting and waiting for that phone call, for that familiar voice, tentative now but loving, telling Laura of her change of mind. She’d made a mistake, Nell would say, and wanted to come home; she’d acted in a moment of madness, had never stopped loving Laura. And of course she wouldn’t be making her film. And only then, exhausted with all her waiting, exhausted with all her yearning, only then would Laura pause to gather in her worn-out suffering and consider if she wanted Nell to return.