Where Have You Been?

by Wendy James

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘I think you’d better get down here now. They’re talking about surgery. I’ve rung Anna, but she hasn’t been able to get hold of Susan yet.’

  ‘Oh, shit.’ Ed has a meeting scheduled at four-fifteen and the client is travelling all the way from Penrith. It’s too late to put him off.

  ‘Ed?’

  ‘Sorry, Carly. I’ll be there. Fast as I can. Fifteen minutes, thirty maybe. Depends on the traffic.’ Almost an afterthought: ‘Is it a bad break? Is Stella okay?’

  He grabs his coat, his briefcase, tells Moira the news on his way out.

  ‘Go,’ she says, shooing him out the door. ‘Go. And don’t worry, this guy’s got a mobile, it’ll be fine. Hurry, she’ll be needing you.’

  He hurries out to his car, checks himself in the sun visor mirror. Pats at his hair, straightens his tie. He tells himself that it’s his anxiety about his daughter’s broken arm, that it’s the overwhelming fact of the thought of his daughter, his baby, broken, in pain, in danger, that and nothing else, that is making his heart pound, his breath come faster. She’ll be needing him.

  He reverses too fast out of the factory driveway, has to swerve to avoid an oncoming truck.

  The poor little thing – she’ll be needing him.

  Susan

  It is after seven before they manage to contact Susan, and by the time she arrives at the hospital Stella is already out of surgery, in recovery. Stella’s ulna had dislocated and her radius has fractured badly enough to warrant a plate. It’s hard to get any clear idea as to what actually happened – Carly has taken Mitchell to Ed’s parents for the night – and Ed is vague, isn’t quite sure.

  ‘Carly said she fell off the slippery dip, I think. But Mitch said it was the fireman’s pole.’ The surgeon has recommended an overnight stay.

  ‘I’ll stay with her,’ Susan tells Ed as they wait outside recovery for Stella to regain consciousness. ‘She’ll only need one of us.’

  ‘Perhaps it should be me,’ he says half-heartedly. ‘You stayed over when Mitch had gastro. I guess it’s my turn.’

  ‘Ed. Go home. Honestly. What good would you be? I’m a nurse remember.’

  ‘Well, I should at least wait until she’s out of recovery. What if...?’

  ‘Go now. She’ll be fine.’

  ‘Really?’ He sounds doubtful, but is obviously relieved, eager to be gone.

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Should I bring you anything? Change of clothes, a book, toothpaste, pyjamas? Food?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ve already eaten. And I can just sleep in what I’m wearing. Just go home and relax.’

  He hugs her briefly, hurries away.

  When Stella’s wheeled back to the childrens ward Susan hovers nervously over her daughter, listens to her drugged mutterings, watches closely as she drifts in and out of consciousness. Though she has downplayed her concerns to Ed, she is worried (how could she not be?), is particularly anxious about the effects of morphine on Stella’s infant system. She checks her daughter’s oxygen levels, her pulse, her pinprick pupils, every few minutes. She has never seen it happen, but knows that seriously adverse reactions are always a possibility with young children. Eventually the exasperated charge sister unplugs the monitor and takes it away.

  ‘You have to let her sleep, Mrs Middleton. She’s fine, everything’s perfectly normal. We’ll check on her every half-hour. That’s really all that’s required. Now, why don’t you try and get some rest.’

  ‘Mummy? Muummmeee? ’

  Susan’s by her bedside immediately. ‘I’m here, darling. You’re okay. Mummy’s here.’

  Stella clutches Susan’s wrist with her good hand. ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Here, sweetheart. I’m here.’ Susan brushes a stray hair back from her face. Stella’s skin is pale, clammy.

  ‘Mummy. I wish I didn’t.’

  ‘Didn’t what, darling? What did you do?’

  ‘Why can’t you change it, Mummy?’ Her voice is light, dreamy. ‘One minute everything’s normal and then it’s not and you can’t change it. Why can’t you go back to before? Before was better. If I could just go back to before I wouldn’t have to be here.’ She closes her eyes wearily, but tears squeeze beneath the lids, and slide down her cheeks.

  Susan says nothing, wipes her daughter’s face gently with a tissue.

  Stella’s breathing slows, deepens. ‘It’s not fair,’ she whispers, ‘not fair.’

  It isn’t fair, thinks Susan, Stella’s right: there should be some way to get back to before.

  Ed

  Ed can’t sleep. He is worried about Stella, is feeling slightly guilty about Susan having to stay overnight at the hospital. Guilty too, about leaving Mitchell with his mother, whose reluctance was evident even over the telephone.

  ‘You’ll have to pick him up early tomorrow, Edward. Before seven. I’ve got a busy day. I do have a life, you know.’

  His awareness of Carly in the bedroom across the hall only increases his anxiety. They have never really been alone in the house together. Not without the children, and not all night. He’s uncomfortable, tries moving from his side to his back. Turns over and pushes his face into the pillow. Looks at the clock. Three thirty-four. Moans. It’s no good, he can’t sleep.

  She comes into his bedroom quietly. He is not even aware of her presence until she slips in beside him. Doesn’t know she’s there until it’s too late.

  No moment is wasted. They do it fully clothed, with the necessary coverings dragged down, rucked up. There is no flesh on flesh. And none of the familiar sensations and sounds that accompanies his marital lovemaking. Or if there are, he’s completely unaware of them, utterly oblivious. And the anxiety, the what-ifs (Susan arrives back early, his mother calls in unexpectedly). Somehow, strangely, this anxiety only increases his pleasure, provides an unlikely turn-on.

  The sex is feverish and furious, not loving. Carly is a demon. There is no slow discovery of one another’s bodies, no gentling or fondling or tender caressing. It is urgent, desperate, and somehow, all through it, they remain quite separate. There are no words of love and no discussions afterwards. There is no future and no past. It is all physical sensation – wetness and heat, grinding and pounding. Sucking, biting, thrusting, pulling.

  They do not make love, they fuck. It’s fission, not fusion.

  Carly

  In the beginning the game plan was simple. Reappear. Satisfy the trustees. Make the claim. Disappear again. Exquisitely simple.

  She isn’t quite sure why she’s complicated the whole game so radically when all the rules were hers to make – but it seems she is playing for a stake in something much larger now.

  Still, one thing remains constant, there’s one rule she never breaks: when she plays, whatever she plays, she plays hard. She only ever plays to win.

  Susan

  For the first two days after Stella’s discharge from hospital Susan wonders whether she’s been transported to some parallel universe. It’s as if she’s in some impossibly slowed down scene from a bad horror flick, Susan thinks, or has been taken back to those days of early motherhood, but without the euphoria. Poor Stella: the paediatric painkillers give her barely any relief and, despite the bottle’s promise, don’t make her sleepy. She’s awake all night and all day, it seems, moaning and crying, her arm aching far beyond what the medical staff had led them to expect, her only comfort her mother’s continual presence. So Susan’s up all the night with her – has moved her into the marital bed, and Ed’s sharing with Mitchell.

  Ed, for some unfathomable reason, can’t meet her eyes, appears to be avoiding her. He seems to be disproportionately upset about Stella’s arm – wanders in and out of the room when he’s at home, but won’t stay more than a few minutes; it’s as if he can’t bear to see his daughter in such pain. Susan’s surprised by this, had not thought
he would be so fainthearted, thinks perhaps he’s feeling guilty – though of course there’s nothing he – nothing any of them could do. And anyway, she knows that really it’s no big deal, that Stella’s intact and will be pain free and ready to get back to school in a week or so – that in no time at all the hardest thing will be getting her to be careful – not to run, not to play too roughly. She’d reassure Ed if she wasn’t so damned tired, if she didn’t have so many other things to do...

  Carly

  She likes to save the best till last. She eats all her vegetables first, chews them fast, then savours the steak. Stories are like that, too, she thinks. The climax needs to be held back, held tight, delayed until the optimum moment. She’s good at sensing just when that moment comes. When she can do the most damage.

  But it’s a mistake to think that the climax is ever the end. After steak comes dessert. And anyway, she’s always been a multiple orgasm kind of girl.

  Susan

  ‘You want the real truth? I’ll give it to you. I know you don’t believe, that you’ve never believed that I left for no particular reason. I guess it’s hard to imagine. So I’ll give you the truth. But I warn you – you won’t like it. You’ll wish I never told you.’

  ‘No, I won’t wish that, whatever it is, whatever it was. You don’t understand, Carly. I really need to know...’

  ‘Okay.’ Carly takes a deep breath, ‘It was your father,’ she says, looking straight at Susan, her gaze level, cool. ‘I left because of your father.’

  She doesn’t have to say more – to give details. Just mentioning her father is sufficient. It’s not as if Susan has never considered this possibility – but when Carly actually says the words, makes the accusation, she feels as if she has been hit hard in the stomach.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she whispers. ‘Not Dad.’

  ‘And Mum,’ Carly continues. ‘Mum was worse than useless. When I finally plucked up the courage and told her what was going on – despite the fact he said he’d kill me if I opened my mouth – she said I was lying. Said that I was just a jealous little bitch. Sometimes I think that she knew all along. That the frigid cow thought it was a good way to keep him away from her.’ Carly’s voice hasn’t wavered through all this, her face is expressionless.

  ‘So there you go, Susy. Now you know. Happy?’

  Susan doesn’t really want to probe any further, can hardly bear to speak, but there is something she needs to know – something she has to know. She blows her nose, sits up straight, takes a deep breath:

  ‘How old were you, Carly, when he – when it – started?’

  She frowns, thinks. ‘Oh, I was seventeen I guess, almost eighteen. But it didn’t go on for too long y’know. I got out of there quick smart. I wasn’t stupid.’

  Seventeen. It’s not exactly a reprieve, Susan thinks, but it’s something. Some aspect of her father salvaged. At least (and she is amazed by her vague feeling of relief, by the desperate and endlessly elastic nature of love, the way it recovers, like one of those clowns that can’t be knocked down), at least Carly was more or less an adult, and her father, however wrong, however depraved, was not – legally, at any rate – that worst of all modern monsters – a pedophile. Small mercies.

  She tells Ed later that night, when they’re in bed. She waits until he has finished reading, has put out his bedside lamp, waits until they’re lying in the dark. She can’t bear to face him, to see his face.

  ‘Ed,’ she whispers, though she knows Carly, in the room across the hall, can’t hear even if she speaks normally.

  ‘Mmmm.’ She can tell that he’s already almost asleep. He goes to sleep so quickly sometimes, like a little child with nothing on his conscience.

  ‘Ed, she told me. Carly told me why she left.’

  ‘Uh huh. You’ve already said. She just got bored. Left. Weird.’

  ‘No. She told me the real reason. Today. There was a reason.’

  ‘Oh?’ She has his attention now, he’s rolled over towards her, she can hear his suddenly rapid breathing, senses his anxiety. She wonders whether it’s been at the back of his mind all this time, too.

  ‘It’s awful, Ed. It’s really awful.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he gropes for her hand, clutches it tight. ‘Tell me, Suse.’

  She takes a deep breath. ‘It was Dad.’

  ‘Your father? What? He hit her or something? I find that pretty hard to believe. I mean, I know he was a grumpy old shit, but ... he never even smacked you, did he?’

  ‘Oh, Ed.’ She almost laughs. ‘It’s much worse than that. Dad ... he ... he raped her.’

  ‘No.’ It’s barely a negative, but a sigh of disbelief, of disillusion, echoing her own. ‘No.’

  Susan needs badly to tell someone else, someone who knew her father. Ed’s reaction has been too much like her own, she can’t bear his appalled solicitude, his comforting smiles, she can’t discuss it with him at all, she needs another perspective, a more detached perspective, so she calls Anna. It’s suddenly occurred to her that her father’s predatory behaviour may have extended beyond Carly – that there may have been other victims. Anna had been a frequent visitor when they were teenagers – and though Susan herself has no memory of inappropriate conversations, oglings, gropings – as far as she was aware her father had ignored Anna’s presence – as he had ignored all of her girlfriends – she needs to know what Anna remembers.

  She doesn’t tell her what Carly has told her, not straight out. Instead she asks if Anna had ever noticed anything funny, anything sexual, with her father when they were growing up.

  Susan is half-expecting an embarrassed admission, or some shameful revelation, so is surprised by Anna’s laughter. ‘Your father? You’re kidding aren’t you? There’s no way. Your father never so much as looked at me.’

  ‘That’s what I always thought, but are you sure there wasn’t anything? He didn’t walk in on you in the bathroom ... he didn’t touch you...?’

  ‘I’m absolutely certain. Don’t you remember me at that age, Suse? I tried it on with every bloke. With any bloke. I even flirted with your dad, the poor old bugger. Wanted to see what effect I had, how far I could take it. God, I was dreadful.’

  She sounds slightly wistful and Susan understands why, remembering the teenage Anna. Short skirts, long hair, bosoms bursting out of low-cut tops, pretty as well as sexy. She’d had every boy they knew panting over her. Susan had never noticed her flirting with her father, but it was entirely probable, completely in character.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Truly. There’s no way. I really don’t think he’d have noticed if I’d walked into a room naked.’

  ‘Oh.’ Susan’s not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. It seems there’s no way to confirm Carly’s story. And no reason. She has her sister back, at last – and she’s glad. She wants her here, after all.

  ‘Don’t tell me that’s what she’s telling you. Carly’s not saying that your father abused her or something, is she?’ Anna’s voice is loud, indignant.

  Susan says nothing.

  ‘Oh, Suse. Come on. That’s bullshit. That bitch. She’s lying. She has to be lying.’

  Susan hopes she is. But why would she lie? There’s no reason for it, there’s nothing to be gained by such a monstrous accusation, is there?

  Ed

  Carly laughs when Ed confides that, other than her, Susan is the only woman he’s ever slept with. Oh, he’d come close a few times with an earlier girlfriend, he tells her, but had never quite made it.

  ‘Christ, Ed. You two are like a couple of bloody christians. I don’t believe it!’

  ‘It’s true.’ Ed doesn’t mind her laughter – he knows his sexual inexperience must seem a little bizarre – that it is bizarre. It worried him once, especially in those long ago days when he was constantly regaled with Derek’s outrageous – and, frankly, unlikely
– tales of sexual conquest. These days he’s resigned to it, has come to regard it as one fairly insignificant aspect of his personal history. ‘And anyway, it wasn’t planned – it just worked out that way. We got together fairly young.’

  ‘Fairly young! You were nineteen. You could vote, drink, drive, go to war. You were hardly babies. You have to admit, Eddy, that you two have got the best excuse I’ve ever heard for having affairs. Nineteen! By the time I was nineteen...’ Carly lets the sentence trail, grins.

  ‘Probably can’t even remember your first time,’ Ed realises his mistake even as he speaks, is stricken, horrified by his tactlessness.

  She says nothing for a moment. ‘Oh, I remember that occasion, Ed.’ She stubs out her cigarette carefully, speaks quietly: ‘I remember it only too well.’

  Susan

  The two women are waiting in the express check-out queue at Coles. It is early afternoon, and the queue is a long one, though the supermarket is not crowded. They have only a half-dozen items to pay for, and Carly is impatient, paces, flips through magazines, sighs, rolls her eyes to the ceiling every now and then. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she mutters, ‘Why is this girl so fucken slow?’

  Susan murmurs something soothing, suggests her sister waits outside.

  ‘Oh no,’ Carly says, ‘I guess I should get used to this sort of thing.’

  Finally they are at the head of the queue and Susan greets the cashier politely, offers a commiserating smile. The cashier – a young woman, plump and pale – says nothing, scans the items and bags them automatically, without looking up.

  ‘Hey,’ Carly says. ‘Hey, we said hello.’

  The girl remains silent, reaches for the next item and runs it over the scanner. She keeps her head down, presses her lips together firmly.