The backyard was an ongoing project that Alice and her mother had been working on together. The pond had been dug only a week before the murder. Dug, filled and fitted out with a special pump and two beautiful goldfish. Lillian had wanted the pond to become home to all kinds of life: plants and water lilies, fish and frogs. The newly-planted semicircle of cherry trees was doing well, too. Her mother had visions of bricked paths, a miniature wooden bridge over the pond and a gazebo down the far corner. All in good time, darling! Planning the backyard used to comfort Lillian when she got lonely or dispirited. There was nothing she liked better than being out there in the sunshine, barefoot, in T-shirt and shorts, digging and planting.
Alice wonders if, by some miracle, the goldfish might have survived. The tenants were given instructions and a few packets of feed, but she knows it’s probably too much to expect.
‘Mullaney isn’t paying me to look glamorous,’ Alice says mildly.
‘What rubbish!’ Her grandmother waves one of her claws in the air as though directing servants. ‘Every office needs an attractive girl at the front desk.’
Alice doesn’t bother to tell her that Luke Mullaney made it very clear that he was not interested in some little show pony who took too long at lunch and spent half the time filing her nails and ringing up her girlfriends to chat. Alice had been thrilled when he rang to say that she had the job. She liked the cool marble floor, the leather lounges for the waiting clients, all those phones ringing and keyboards tapping. But most of all she liked the idea of herself behind a desk and in charge – instead of being behind a desk being told what to do by teachers and lecturers. God, university was a drag from the word go. Worse than school!
‘And the blouse is too frivolous,’ her grandmother adds.
‘You liked this blouse last week.’
‘You’re in a lawyer’s office, not an amusement parlour.’
A spurt of laughter builds up in Alice’s throat, but she is also on the point of crying. How long does she have to put up with this? How bloody long?
‘People don’t go to amusement parlours any more, Gran,’ she replies mildly. ‘At least, I’ve never been to one.’ As soon as she’s said it, she thinks it probably isn’t true. Not if those places on Elizabeth Street, down from the university, filled with the wild noisy slot games can be counted as amusement parlours. She used to go to them all the time with Eric Faltermaier, the one friend she’d made during her four-month stint as a uni student in Melbourne. She got to be just as good as Eric at some of those games and she was proud that he loved playing them with her.
‘People certainly do go to amusement parlours!’ the old lady declares. ‘There’s one down in the High Street arcade and I’m told it’s full most nights.’ The pink has hit the old woman’s cheeks and Alice wants to scream with laughter, as well as knock the old girl on the head with the nearby Venetian vase. That thing would do the job. It must weigh a ton. Oh shut up, you old bat! Why don’t doctors realise that this is what keeps old people alive? Forget about the operations and all those pills sitting on her side table, her gran never looks better than when she’s in the middle of a nitpicking argument or driving someone else up the wall.
Alice is nodding carefully but she has already taken herself off to another room of her brain, lying flat on her back on a polished wooden floor, staring out of a doorway at a huge starry sky. A soft balmy breeze is fluttering through her hair. Sea and grass, trees and sky have always given Alice enormous pleasure. She got that from her mother. Take the time to enjoy the simple things, Alice.
‘I have to go now or I’ll be late,’ she says abruptly.
‘Oh, Alice,’ Gran closes her eyes and shakes her head as though in great pain. ‘At least change the blouse!’
‘Okay, Gran.’ Alice moves over to kiss the paper-thin skin of her grandmother’s surprisingly unwrinkled cheek. ‘Maybe I’ll put on that white one you gave me last Christmas.’
‘That would be much better, dear.’ Her grandmother grabs her hand and squeezes it with her own liver-spotted one. Alice can feel all the bones under the withering flesh and thinks how easily they’d break.
‘Off you go then, dear.’
Alice goes to the door.
‘Did I tell you that your cousin is back?’ the old lady calls after her just as Alice is about to shut the door.
Alice stops, turns back, her hand caught in midair. ‘My cousin?’ That can’t be right. There is only one cousin.
‘Yes, the cousin,’ the old lady sighs.
‘But . . . I thought he was in Sydney.’
‘The boy is back,’ her grandmother sniffs. ‘Has some kind of job.’
‘What job?’
Her grandmother is staring straight ahead now at the bright light coming in through the window, her cheeks still flushed. ‘That boy had talent!’ she hisses savagely. ‘I heard it’s said that he was bright. There was a time when I hoped he’d be a success.’ The old women shakes her head to dislodge painful memories. ‘But what else would you expect with a father like that?’
‘What job?’ Alice asks again. She has to know this. She figured that she’d never have to see her cousin again. Out of sight, out of mind, Jonty van der Weihl.
‘I told you, I don’t know!’ her grandmother snaps.
‘But why, Gran? Why would he come back here, of all places?’
‘Calm yourself, dear,’ the old lady snorts. ‘It’s nothing to get upset about. I certainly plan to avoid him and I’d advise you to also.’ Phyllis folds her reading glasses into their case and snaps the lid sharply. ‘No point overreacting.’
Overreacting? the small voice inside Alice is screaming. But he murdered my mother! She can’t bring herself to say the words out loud because she doesn’t even know if she believes them anymore. At one stage she did. When the police charged her cousin Jonty she had to believe it. She had to change focus from some unknown monster to . . . him, her cousin, Jonty. Then three months on they freed him! They let him out. Not enough evidence to go to trial. That didn’t mean he was innocent but it didn’t mean he was guilty, either.
‘You should go, dear. Or you’ll be late.’
‘Okay,’ Alice shuts the bedroom door quietly behind her and walks down to the front door.
Stuff the white blouse. Alice does up her coat and walks through the front gate and out onto the street. Luke Mullaney’s office is in the middle of High Street. She tries to think of the day to come, but Jonty van der Weihl has invaded her head. She remembers him coming around to her house with that friend of his, the tall dark-haired quiet boy, the quiet boy with the nice smile. The one she used to like until . . . she saw the way he looked at her mother and she didn’t like him at all after that.
Both of them used to sit at the kitchen table and talk to her mother for hours about all kinds of things that Alice wasn’t interested in. At first she was tickled that this cousin that she hardly knew was visiting her home with his handsome friend, but she soon realised that she wasn’t part of whatever they had going, so she tired of their visits. In fact, she came to dread finding them at the table looking at her mother with such admiration in their eyes. Those stupid boys with all their crap talk about Hamlet and Napoleon and boring foreign movies, their drinking and their smoking and all the rest of it. She remembers hating them both, her cousin and his friend.
At the end of the street she stands to cross at the lights. A man she vaguely knows, sitting behind the wheel of a stationary van, calls out to her, ‘How’s it going Alice?’
‘Good, thanks.’ Was he the guy who fixed Grandma’s hot water last year? He is drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, smiling a bit, trying to catch her eye as she passes. But Alice doesn’t stop, nor does she smile. She doesn’t like talking to strange men. People viewed her differently afterwards. In the supermarket it would be, ‘Hi Alice! How are you?’ Gush. Gush. But almost before she was out of earshot they’d be whispering, nudging each other, pointing her out. That’s her! That’s the girl whose
mother was murdered.
She’s used to it now. No one mentions it directly any more, but it’s in their eyes – curiosity, sympathy and even a strange kind of envy, because in a way she’s a local celebrity and a lot of people would like that. They don’t want their mothers murdered, but they want the notoriety and the attention that it brings; the pages in the newspapers, the name on radio and television and all the rest of it. Forget about fifteen minutes! Most people are so damned bored that they’d give anything for five minutes of fame.
That was a nice picture of your poor mother in the Chronicle, Alice. The local paper still runs the occasional article, usually with the same picture of Lillian alongside. It’s a way of selling papers. People love a murder mystery. Alice understands all this now, but she avoids the articles if she can.
She stuffs her hands into her pockets and quickens her pace, enjoying the walk into town. In spite of everything, she’s glad to be back. For the entire four months in the city she’d had a very strong feeling of being in the wrong place. She felt the pull back to Warrnambool, because the whole thing . . . wasn’t over. Her life seemed to be caught in aspic somehow; on hold. She couldn’t move.
One night in the city she’d flicked onto a TV program about mothers in Argentina whose children went ‘missing’ during the years of the military junta. Once a week the women would gather and walk silently around and around the central plaza in Buenos Aires, carrying placards depicting the faces of their loved ones. They wanted answers. Who took their children and why? At the end of the program Alice had switched off the television and wept for the first time since her mother’s funeral. Then she’d rung her friend Eric Faltermaier and told him about the program and, for the first time, all about her mother and what had happened. He let her rave and although she couldn’t see him she knew he was listening carefully.
‘You have to go back there,’ he said matter-of-factly, after she’d got it all out, ‘and conduct your own vigil.’
Yes of course. A vigil. It was good to have a name for it.
Alice feels that she has more in common with those women in South America than with anyone else she knows. There are vital things she needs to know before she can tackle . . . the rest of her life, for starters. She looks around at other people and notices that they are solid in a way that she is not. They think and talk and laugh in distinct ways. Compared to them she feels like a cardboard cut-out, a flim-flam girl, a piece of gauze in the shape of a human, blowing in the wind, changing colour all the time depending on the strength of the light. Her personality is cobbled together from all kinds of bits and pieces stolen from those around her. She tries on the pieces like articles of clothing. When she gets tired of one she tries another, sometimes almost in the same moment.
Only two blocks away from her destination, her mobile phone rings. Alice reaches into her shoulder bag and pulls it out without slowing down. She recognises the number and smiles.
‘Leyla?’
‘Sylvie, you idiot!’
‘Sor-ry!’
Apart from Sylvie’s odd-coloured eyes, Leyla and Sylvie Cassidy are identical down to their funny deep voices and the gap between their front teeth. Most people can’t tell them apart, but Alice can.
‘Whatcha doin’?’
‘Walking to work.’
‘Work?’ Sylvia sounds indignant.
‘The law office, remember. So what are you both doing?’
‘Freaking.’
Alice grins. Sylvie’s stern, impatient way of talking amuses her. The twins never call just to chat. There is always a purpose.
‘Jonty’s back.’
‘I know.’
‘He’s working at Thistles.’
‘Oh.’ Alice tries to imagine it. ‘Doing what?’
‘Cooking.’
‘Isn’t that place meant to be . . . classy?’
‘Yep,’ Sylvie sniffs. ‘So what is that fucking goon doing there?’
‘Hmmm.’
‘Want me to find out . . . stuff?’
‘Yeah,’ Alice isn’t sure quite what Sylvie means, ‘like what?’
‘Any shit we can.’
‘Okay.’
‘Grannie carked it yet?’
‘Nope,’ Alice laughs.
‘Bummer.’
‘You said it. When do I see you both?’
‘Soon. Bye. Have fun with the law.’
‘Bye.’
She’d hardly known the twins before her mother was killed. They were just two skinny kids sitting down the back of her Year Ten classes. Oddballs. Always together. They didn’t seem to need other friends. Alice had been moving through school at the edges of a crowd of good-natured, popular, noisy girls when the murder happened. Afterwards, she found she couldn’t cope with the ordinary girls any more – their curiosity and sympathy, their prayers and kind gestures only made her feel worse. The twins stepped in and filled the gap. Not straightaway of course. She didn’t go back to school for weeks, and it was another month, at least, before she could face walking out into the playground at lunchtime. Mostly she sat in the library and doodled with a set of fancy pens that Mrs Hooper, the librarian, supplied. Then one day the twins came into the library, and Sylvie asked in her dry matter-of-fact manner if she’d like to walk down the street with them. From then on they were friends.
It’s easy for Alice to tell them apart now. They move differently. Sylvie is the bubbly one, talkative and quick to smile. Her face shows it all, with twinkling eyes and a mouth that constantly teeters on the edge of a laugh. By contrast, Leyla is calm, a watcher rather than a participator. Her smiles are grave and often hesitant, as though she’s not quite sure she should be doing such a frivolous thing. Actual laughing is done privately behind her hand or with her back turned. Leyla would rather stay silent (and often does) than give an ill-considered opinion.
Both twins are fair-haired and olive-skinned and, in spite of neither of them ever making even the slightest effort, they are pretty, with neat features and slim athletic bodies. Apart from school uniform, Alice has never seen either of them in a skirt or dress.
Their mother died in a car accident when they were two, and they live with their meatworker father in a small neat house out of town. Their idea of a good time is to go out on bird-watching hikes with their father on the weekends. Alice sometimes tags along with them, not really interested in birds but comfortable anyway. They have penfriends in all kinds of countries in Africa and Europe that Alice had never even heard of, and they make jam from the fruit trees in their backyard and sell it (quite shamelessly) in the middle of the street on Saturdays for pocket money, not caring if kids in their class see them. Alice knows the twins are a bit weird but she feels easy with them, which is more than she can say about most other people.
Alice pushes open the heavy door, walks into a large, expensively-furnished lobby and looks around, liking the decor all over again. The marble floor is so impersonal and the original abstract painting hanging over the plush leather lounge in the waiting room is so nicely about nothing much in particular. Yes, I could live with that.
But when a well-dressed lady in her sixties looks up from the front desk and gives a professional smile, Alice wants to turn and walk straight back out the door. The expensive gold-rimmed glasses halfway down her nose, the two strings of pearls and the pale-green fine-wool sweater, the hair up in a stiff blonde chignon all give off an air of placid superiority. The woman looks exactly like a younger version of her grandmother! Alice makes herself cross the shiny floor to where the woman is waiting, her face upturned in quizzical fashion.
‘I’m here to see Mr Mullaney,’ Alice says.
‘And you are . . .?’
‘Alice.’ She tends not to give her surname unless someone asks for it, because she hates that jolt of recognition on people’s faces when they realise exactly who she is. Oh, you’re the one whose mother . . . But this woman’s face relaxes into a smile.
‘Alice!’ she repeats. ‘Of course.’
‘I’m here . . . because I got the job.’ Alice begins to fumble around in her bag looking for the letter offering the job, feeling heavy and awkward and unsure now if she should even be there. She’s never had a job before. Not even babysitting or mowing lawns or selling ice-cream. Maybe she won’t be able to cope, just as her grandmother predicted.
‘Oh, don’t bother about that,’ the woman laughs. ‘I know who you are. Luke is always late.’ She points to one of the leather chairs. ‘Have a seat over there, Alice. He won’t be long.’ She gives a small wave of apology and points to her screen. ‘Just got to finish this before ten.’
‘Okay.’ Alice is filled with relief as she sits down. The woman is okay. Maybe . . . the whole thing will be okay.
‘I’m Martha, by the way.’ The lady peers over the counter and smiles again. ‘Been with Luke a million years!’
Alice smiles and nods.
‘And I knew your mother,’ the woman declares matter-of-factly, not bothering to change her tone or expression. ‘Enormously fond of her, too.’
Alice nods again and picks up a magazine and the woman goes back to her work. People are always telling her that. I knew your mother. It’s the way they say it that makes all the difference. This woman’s way is . . . fine. Alice can handle this. What she really hates is when they expect her to respond. When there is a question mark imbedded at the end of their sentences. What do they expect her to say? Oh did you? Shame she got murdered, isn’t it? Gee, yeah . . . Hope it doesn’t happen to us!
‘I’ll make you coffee just as soon as I’ve done this,’ Martha adds.
‘Thanks.’
Luke rings in to say that he’s been held up further and ten minutes pass. Martha finishes the urgent document and Alice is given coffee and shown the ropes. She will have her own desk in a separate room just off the main lobby, and the phone calls will go through her. Martha explains how to answer the phone. Good morning. You’ve rung Mallaney Law Practice. This is Alice speaking. How may I help you? Always be polite even if they are rude and stupid, the older woman tells her with a wry smile, and expect roughly half of them to be just that. Martha explains how to put a call on hold, how to switch it through to Luke or herself or the other lawyer working down the back of the building. She learns how to keep notes of the calls. To take down the matter in shorthand and to never forget to get a number to ring back. There will be more for her to learn, but Martha suggests she get the hang of the phones first up.
Somebody's Crying Page 6
