Can You Keep a Secret?

by Caroline Overington

  ‘Excellent news,’ he said, ‘we can fall in love together.’ He pushed the breakfast plates away and reached for the telephone. It was the old-fashioned kind, with a flat white receiver still connected to the base. He pressed nine for reception, and Liz said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Can you put me through to Robert Brancato’s room?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘My friend, Robert Brancato. I checked in with him last night. Can you put me through to him?’

  Liz said no. ‘We don’t do that. You can dial the number from your room.’

  ‘I don’t have the number,’ said Colby.

  ‘You don’t have the number,’ repeated Liz.

  ‘No. Can you get it for me?’

  ‘We’re very busy here,’ she said, ‘it’s right on check-out time. I’ve got two people at the counter now. You’ll have to wait.’

  Colby put the phone down. ‘Funny kind of service they have here. Like, I’m a pain in the butt for wanting the staff to do something for me.’ Ten minutes later, the phone rang, and it was Liz with the number.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Colby, but Liz was already gone.

  He called Robert and explained the situation: he was very sorry, but he was probably going to miss the flight to Sydney. No, no, everything was fine. He’d just decided to stay in Townsville a little longer.

  ‘So, you’ve landed yourself an Aussie sheila,’ said Robert, ‘and my guess is, it’s Daisy Duke.’

  Colby didn’t answer. He was old-fashioned that way. A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell.

  ‘And given that you’re not saying anything, she’s still there?’ Robert guessed.

  Colby still said nothing.

  ‘Well, good for you. But you don’t want to miss Sydney. You definitely don’t want to miss New Year’s Eve in Sydney. So, have your fun and wrap things up with Daisy and we’ll see you there tomorrow, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Colby.

  ‘And you’ll be coming alone, right? Meaning, what happens in Vegas is supposed to stay in Vegas. Do not turn up with excess baggage.’

  ‘Right.’ Colby put down the phone.

  ‘So, you’re leaving tomorrow now?’ Caitlin asked.

  ‘If that’s okay. I mean, you can stay with me another day, can’t you? Say you can.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I can,’ said Caitlin. ‘But, you know, it’s going to be hard to get a flight to Sydney tomorrow, with New Year’s Eve and everything.’

  ‘Well, that’s okay. Because I can’t see myself leaving you tomorrow either.’ Colby rolled towards her. ‘I actually can’t see myself leaving you this century.’

  It was a joke, or at least it was meant to be, but then Colby did in fact struggle to get a flight down to Sydney, and he missed the fireworks over Sydney Harbour, by which time he was so thoroughly smitten with Caitlin that he very nearly gave consideration to missing his flight home to New York.

  ‘It wasn’t just the sex,’ he told Robert when they finally caught up at Sydney airport for the long flight home. ‘She’s just so different from anyone I’ve met before.’ And that was true: Caitlin was all, and none, of those things that Colby thought he understood. She’d dropped out of school at fifteen, seemed not to care, and yet she was not stupid.

  ‘You must want to go back,’ he’d said.

  ‘But why? I hated school,’ she replied.

  They’d left the motel room to eat fish and chips off butcher’s paper on a bench on the Townsville Pier, in the company of anglers and giant pelicans.

  ‘You don’t have to love school, but you are supposed to finish.’

  ‘But they wanted me to do maths, and I hate maths. And then Mum got sick and she was going to be leaving Magnetic anyway.’

  ‘Your mom’s sick?’

  Caitlin nodded, shyly. ‘She’s got MS – multiple sclerosis.’

  ‘Jesus. That doesn’t sound good.’

  It wasn’t good. Ruby had been just thirty when she became aware of numb patches in her feet and, within a year, she was walking like a drunk. She caught a ferry into Townsville to see a GP who told her flatly that she’d have to leave her little pink timber cottage with its yellow-painted floor, which had been her home since Caitlin was born.

  ‘You’ll get less mobile as time goes by, and you’ll need to be somewhere where they have services. Plus it’s not fair on your daughter – she’ll end up your care-giver if you’re not careful.’ But Caitlin was already Ruby’s care-giver: she’d long done all the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning, and Ruby’s idea was for her to take over the business, too, which was picking heads off the marijuana plants behind the shed, drying them out in her old oven, and selling the buds to Dutch tourists as they got off the ferry from Townsville.

  ‘That’s where I drew the line,’ said Caitlin. ‘I told Mum, I’m not going to be a drug dealer. She’s got this view about marijuana – it’s harmless, that they only make it illegal because they’ve never figured out a way to tax it. Which is fine, whatever, but it’s not what I wanted to do with my life. So I told her, I’m leaving. It was the only way I could think to get her to leave the island.’

  ‘And did she leave?’ asked Colby.

  ‘Not yet. She’s stubborn. I dropped out of school and went to Brisbane and she basically stayed here and sulked. But it’s like the GP said: she’s got worse. She can’t even walk down to the pier anymore, not without a cane. And that’s where she’s got to go, to sell to the tourists. So now she really will have to move. I’ve promised to help her in the New Year.’

  ‘What about your dad?’ asked Colby. ‘Can’t he help?’

  Caitlin picked up a chip, and threw it towards some pelicans, setting off loud squabbling.

  ‘I don’t see him,’ she said, which wasn’t true. Caitlin’s father had dropped into the Merchant not a fortnight earlier, having heard that Caitlin was working skimpy.

  ‘Nice one,’ he’d said, tipping his baseball cap towards her breasts. ‘So, you’re all shy when I come around the house, but here they are, out for everyone.’

  Caitlin had sworn at him, gone into the cool room, and refused to come back out until security had shown him the door.

  ‘You know who he is, though?’ asked Colby.

  ‘Yeah. I know who he is. But I don’t really talk about him. Tell me about your parents.’ Caitlin was still young enough for that to be one of the first questions.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  Colby was now lying flat on his back, staring up at the blue sky and the crying gulls. Caitlin’s head was resting on his shoulder. She was drawing circles with her fingers, and occasionally dropping small kisses on his chest.

  ‘Well, are they still alive?’

  ‘Jesus. How old do you think I am? My mother’s alive, yes.’

  ‘But not your dad?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Long story.’ It wasn’t, not really. Colby had been seventeen when his father, Alan Colbert, who worked for Boeing, ploughed into a field while trying to land a small plane near Sag Harbour. There had been a young boy in the field, and the crash had claimed his life, too.

  ‘His family sued my father’s estate,’ said Colby, ‘and things went downhill pretty quickly after that. My mother had to sell the house. Not that she minded. We’d been out in Connecticut and she’d always hated that. She moved into the City – that’s New York City – into something rent controlled. That was, what, thirteen years ago? When the neighbourhood – Upper West Side – wasn’t quite so glamorous. But now it’s where everyone wants to live, and she’s got this palace, and because it’s still rent controlled she pays nothing for it.’

  ‘What is that? Rent control?’

  ‘When the landlord can’t put up your rent,’ said Colby.

  ‘That’s like my mum. She’s in Department of Housing. Pays $22 a week.’

  ‘Right,’ said Colby, ‘it’s not quite like that, but fair enough. And Pearl – that’s my
mother – has got no real income, except for Dad’s Boeing pension, which isn’t indexed and gets smaller every year. But the rent’s nothing. So I pay that. And I pay the salary of the bloke she’s got living with her, who’s some kind of butler.’

  ‘Your mum’s got a butler?’

  ‘He’s not a real butler. He’s, like, I don’t know, maybe he was a doorman or a butler in the building years ago and Pearl’s sort of inherited him. The place she’s in is massive. And I like the fact that he’s there. Pearl’s not … well, she’s not sociable. She basically hasn’t been good since Dad died. She drinks quite a bit. She’s only, what, in her fifties? But you’d think she was older. She smokes too much. She gets no exercise.’

  ‘But what happened to you when your father died? Where did you go?’

  ‘To business school. To Yale first, and then Columbia. This was back when everyone was going to business school and wanted to go to Wall Street.’

  ‘And that’s where you live now? Wall Street?’

  Colby looked down to see if Caitlin, who was still curled up to him, making circles on his chest, was joking.

  ‘You don’t live on Wall Street,’ he said. ‘You work on Wall Street. Actually, that’s not strictly true, either. I don’t work on Wall Street. I work for a company called Carnegie. It’s an investment bank, owned by a guy called Aaron Blatt – a very rich guy called Aaron Blatt.’

  ‘And you’re not on Wall Street?’

  ‘Right. Well, I am. It’s just what you say when you’re in finance. I’m in finance. I work on Wall Street … but my office, it’s actually in the World Trade Center.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Caitlin. ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘You really don’t know?’ Colby asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Okay. The World Trade Center, it’s a building – two buildings actually – in downtown Manhattan. I work in what they call the North Tower, on the sixty-eighth floor.’

  ‘With Robert?’

  ‘Right,’ said Colby, and then he laughed.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Nothing’s funny. Just, I guess, how you think people know things and they don’t. But, I mean, why should you know? You’re Australian. The main thing is, you should come and check it out for yourself. Not my work. New York. Manhattan. You’d love it.’

  Caitlin paused in her circling of Colby’s chest.

  ‘What would I do in New York?’ she asked. ‘From what you’ve said, all you ever do is work.’

  ‘Not true,’ he protested, although that was mostly true.

  ‘And anyway, you’ve probably got plenty of girls to keep you company.’

  ‘Not true,’ Colby said again, although that was absolutely true.

  Chapter 7

  The conversation had started as most of them did, with Colby saying, ‘Hey, babe, it’s me. Tell me what you’re wearing.’

  Caitlin answered the way she always did: ‘I’ve got my daggy undies on. Why do you want to know?’

  They were no longer in each other’s company but at opposite ends of the earth, and on opposite ends of the phone, with Caitlin still in Townsville and Colby back in New York. He hadn’t missed the flight back to Manhattan (dodging the fireworks with Robert was one thing; missing a day’s work was quite another). Colby hadn’t been bothered about missing the fireworks. He hadn’t expected to miss Caitlin upon returning to Manhattan either, but he’d found himself thinking about her quite a bit. He’d imagine her in her denim cut-offs, with her feet dangling over the edge of the pier, sunning herself in Queensland, while he was trudging through snow to the office, or sticking chopsticks into a takeaway carton, and, nine times out of ten, he’d call her up just to say hi.

  The first time one of his calls had come through, Caitlin had been startled – she missed Colby, too, but she was pretty sure that his idea of a holiday romance was exactly that. Before long, though, she started looking forward to his calls, and felt wretched when the phone didn’t ring. She wasn’t sure where their relationship was going – was it even a relationship? – and she could sense Colby trying to keep his tone jokey, and yet there was no denying it: as the months went by, he kept calling.

  ‘I was hoping you’d be in bed.’ Colby was sprawled on his sofa once again eating takeaway, having worked a full eighteen-hour shift.

  Caitlin propped herself up on her pillow. ‘And the reason you’re calling me at this hour is?’ she asked.

  ‘Why do you think? Because I miss you, obviously. Now, tell me honestly, what are you wearing?’

  ‘You know that big T-shirt, the one we saw at the market that day – the one with the comedy body on it, that’s supposed to make you look like you’ve got big boobs in a pink bikini? – I bought one of those. I’m wearing that.’

  ‘You are not. You’re naked.’

  ‘Fair enough. I’m naked.’ Caitlin was in fact naked.

  ‘Well, you better stay that way. Because I’m coming to see you.’

  ‘Sure you are.’ Caitlin was curled up under a sheet, the aluminium blinds on the window behind her bed drawn against the daylight.

  ‘No. I really am,’ said Colby. ‘I’m not kidding. One of our clients here is an Olympic sponsor. He’s offered me a ticket to your opening ceremony. Why? Do you think I should say no?’

  Caitlin sat bolt upright. ‘Really? Can you come?’

  ‘Of course I can come.’ Colby was enjoying Caitlin’s reaction.

  ‘And can I come down and stay with you?’

  Colby hadn’t expected that. He put his takeaway box to the side. ‘I’ve only got one ticket,’ he said, which was true, but he also didn’t think having Caitlin holed up in whatever five-star hotel room they were likely to give him in Sydney was a good idea. There would be other traders in Sydney – not Robert this time, but others from Carnegie – and they’d want to party, and he’d probably want to party, too. Caitlin would have to wait until after the games.

  ‘But I can’t wait,’ she wailed. She did, however, and Colby was happy to see that she had not changed when she met him at the airport. She was in the same torn shorts, and she took him straight to her little flat so he could throw her down on the squeaky brass bed, with fairy lights wrapped up and down the bedposts.

  ‘I missed you,’ she said afterwards.

  Colby was lying on his back, exhausted. ‘Not as much as I missed you,’ he said, and from that moment they were back into old habits: awake all night, asleep all morning, waking around noon so Caitlin could make smoothies and cut fruit for lunch, in her cheap and cheerful laminated kitchen. Then they’d head out, usually to the beach, or for ice-cream, or to throw more chips at the pelicans on the pier.

  ‘I’d forgotten how much fun you are,’ Colby said. He liked the way she teased him about what she called his dorky clothes; how she’d taken a jar of Vegemite from the pantry and said, ‘See this, it’s made from the scrapings inside old beer kegs.’ She took the lid off the jar and waved it under his nose.

  ‘It is not,’ he said, feigning disbelief, though he’d had the bet-you-can’t-believe-we-eat-it Vegemite story from at least four Australians on his last visit.

  ‘It is!’ Caitlin said.

  ‘And you eat it?’

  ‘It’s good for you … you spread it on toast.’

  ‘I’ll have you on toast,’ he said.

  He liked how they didn’t have to be doing much to be having fun. And in quiet moments, after sex, how they could just stay twisted up in her sheets and talk. Caitlin filled him in about her mum: Ruby had moved off Magnetic Island into what they called ‘assisted living’ in Townsville.

  ‘She can’t open a jar anymore, not without a special tool,’ she said.

  Colby lay back, listening and stroking Caitlin’s hair. ‘What kind of place is assisted living?’

  ‘It’s basically a home for people who haven’t quite carked it. There’s a nurse on call, meals delivered, smells like Dettol.’

  ‘Dettol?’

  ‘Dettol. A
ntiseptic. Grandmas use it to clean the bathroom. It’s an old person’s smell.’

  ‘And what’s the prognosis?’ asked Colby.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘What do they say about the illness?’

  ‘Only that it gets worse. I don’t really understand it.’

  Colby understood it. He’d taken the time to look it up on Ask Jeeves before he’d flown out. He had read that MS is like scabs forming down the spinal cord. Messages can’t get from the brain through to the limbs. It’s degenerative, and although it can take some time to kill a person, it’s usually also fatal. He wondered how far down that path Ruby already was.

  ‘So, she doesn’t really walk anymore?’ he asked.

  ‘No. She’s got a wheelchair. She hates it, of course, but she bought a little dog. He sits on her lap. The people who run the place, they take them to Bingo. So, it’s not terrible, but it’s not really her scene.’

  ‘What is her scene?’

  ‘Oh, you know, that hippy kind of life on Magnetic – jugglers and fire twirlers and being all organic. And you can’t really compare what she’s got now with that life. All the people where she is now are old.’

  ‘I’d like to see Magnetic Island.’ Colby had got out of bed to stand – stark naked – by the barbecue on Caitlin’s tiny verandah, to sear T-bone steaks the size of baseball mitts.

  ‘Well, there’s a ferry.’

  ‘So then, should we go?’

  ‘It’s your holiday. I suppose it’s up to you,’ said Caitlin.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ said Colby. ‘Tomorrow. I want to see where you grew up.’ So the next day they paid the fare and made the journey, with Caitlin in a little singlet, and Colby in tailored shorts, newer and brighter and sharper across the creases than those he’d worn the year before.

  They were not four steps along the timber pier when the ferry captain called out, ‘Hey, scamp, coming to visit Jack, are you?’

  Caitlin stiffened. ‘No.’

  ‘Who’s Jack?’ asked Colby.

  Caitlin started walking faster. Colby had to stride to keep up with her.