No one knocks, but the handle is shoved violently down, and the door flung wide. Daphne the senior carer is angry, young Hannah behind her looks as though she is the one who has been caught out. ‘That’s it then,’ Daphne tells them, her neck red with how angry she is, her collar crooked as she tugs at it without knowing that is what she does. ‘That’s an end to you two sneaking round!’ she shouts at them. ‘Will Mrs McLintock hear about this!’
Stan is flustered, ashamed. He hates the bitch at the door who has tracked them, he now knows, for weeks. And the awfulness as he watches her, watches Marie Condon, his best friend, sagging against the wall as Hannah holds her, her mouth dragging to one side, her soft, uncontrollable whimper. She wants only to get to her room. She wants Daphne to stop scolding her. She wants no one to see her. Stan is the one who knows there is nothing more to lose.
Brendan liked Mrs McLintock. He admired the way she managed to be compassionate yet made it clear no one was free, that we are all confined one way or another. A duller person would have spelled it out—we need pedestrian crossings, traffic lights are for our own good, the easy analogies he had been bored with as a teenager and even more would resent now. They both knew what had to be assumed.
‘My sister’s inclined to be hysterical,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if that came through when you talked last night.’
‘Don’t be hard on her. Something that never occurred to her was there suddenly refusing to go away.’
There was a long pause, but not an uneasy one. Then Brendan said, ‘I’m surprised you’re not turfing Dad out.’
‘I’d have had to, if the other family insisted. If they hadn’t made their own arrangements.’ And then, ‘My hands would have been tied.’
‘Yours. Mine. I quite see that.’
The bright, glinty woman told him with a hint of weariness about it, ‘You try to find some point of balance with something like this but you never do. I try to understand the people who come here. I think I do. But I need to understand as well the people who want them to live here in a certain way. Every child wants a well-behaved parent. That’s what it comes down to. No one wants elderly brats.’ Her irony was a kind of charm, Brendan thought. He smiled back at her. Then she said, ‘We have no idea what they really think, of course. But everyone wants the old to be easily understood. To know their place. To be predictable. To make life easier for the rest of us.’
But theory, as she said, wasn’t her business, what she was here to do was to run a home for adults who until a few years ago, months, weeks even in some cases, would never have considered being where they were. Facts needed to be addressed by their right name. The fact in this case being that his father had groped an old woman, probably more than that, as Daphne had passed it on. Dad had taken advantage, wasn’t that the phrase they used for something like this? The woman facing him broke across the stark ugliness of that. She realised, for Brendan’s sake, that it needed to be said. ‘His friend knew what she was doing, remember. Let’s not condescend so much as to forget that.’
As they stood and she opened the door into the corridor with its patterned carpet, the framed Rita Angus prints, the distant feature wall of tiny vivid fish flickering above and between corals bright as lollies, Mrs McLintock mentioned again that the Condon family already had another Home in mind. In fact, they had taken their mother there already. Her earrings brushed as she turned. She assured him, it wasn’t random, you know. It was what they deeply felt, and that’s the pity of it. She didn’t want him doubting that.
He and Dad walked to the green-slatted seat where the sycamore seeds whirled their propellers in occasional lazy drifts. Stan said, to make it easier for the boy, to distract him, ‘Remember the tree we had like this up the coast, remember?’
‘I remember the seeds drove Mum mad this time of year.’
‘Twice the size of this one. It was thirty years old before we even bought the place. I remember,’ Stan said, ‘the wisteria on the pines. Over one branch then another. That great tumble of it every year. People slowed their cars to get a decent view of it.’ Last time he ran into the Graftons from next door, Stan said, they told him how the new owners had chopped the pines, the whole bloody lot, the wisteria, everything, would you believe that?
‘I’d believe anything if it’s bad enough,’ both of them smiling, each knowing they were skimming over things, wheeling away from what they would never really speak of, although why Brendan was visiting this time of day, why his father was so glad nothing more would come of it, was what they thought of, beyond their chatter. Each of them feared for what the other thought. The wind picked up slightly, light dappling faster, the blur of shadow one moment, splashes of light the next.
Stan began to say, ‘Mrs McLintock—’
‘I’ve talked with Mrs McLintock, that’s fine.’
Brendan saying something then about the twins, that they were keen to call in over the weekend, they both had things they wanted to show Slim, some medal Luke won at athletics, something or other, he couldn’t remember, Lexy had to tell him.
‘That’s nice,’ his father said. ‘I’m glad they want to do that.’
And his son now thinking, we sit this close together, no one matters more to either of us, and we don’t know the words really to talk. He saw Dad’s hand was shaking slightly as it rested on his knee. He thought, if there was somehow to say understanding even’s not the important thing about this, Dad, it doesn’t matter a damn, not to me it doesn’t.
Another flimsy propeller brushed against his shoulder. Then Dad surprised him. He put his hand across his own. He said, ‘It’s all right, you know, Brendan.’ And surprising himself too, the old man said, ‘Bugger Susan too. I should have said that to her years ago.’
‘Earlier,’ Brendan laughed. ‘Before that even.’ So things were OK, he at least knew that. He knew Stan wasn’t going to be broken by all this. Although it did not occur to him until he was driving back, passing the still-empty beach where the churned waves pounded in, where the people had stood that day when Dad wanted him not to see the woman in the yellow dress, what else his father might be going through, now his friend was taken away.
Daphne stood at the dayroom window, the clatter of morning tea going on behind her. He was still out there, she noticed, sitting by himself now that his son had left.
Would she be keeping an eye on that one.
PIECES
Mandy has a flicker of what may be going on in Weston’s mind. Although how could she be sure? Hadn’t already she been wrong about jewellery, that first visit? At each subsequent meeting the lawyer was wearing one piece or another. Today it is a broad close-fitting copper bangle she goes to turn then realises the metal clasps her wrist too tightly for it to move. She had said, as Mandy handed the few handwritten pages across to her, ‘I didn’t mean you to go to that trouble.’
Mandy likes it that they don’t say things to each other except when something needs to be said. She tells her, ‘I wish I had something to hide. Then you could feel you earned your keep prising it out of me.’
Weston ignores the little attempt at levity. ‘Are you saying that what you did saved you from something worse?’
‘From taking “something worse” too seriously,’ Mandy corrects her.
Weston raises her eyebrows. She is not into theatrics, which Mandy likes in her, so does not do this for effect. The older woman wonders if this is her lawyer stopping a touch short of a smile. ‘It would take more skill than mine, Mandy, to convince a jury of that.’ She then returns to a sheet of paper inside her opened folder. She asks, ‘You checked those Listeners I left with you?’
Mandy moves several copies of the magazine across the table. Her own hand, now ringless, and Weston’s plumper, younger fingers, touch by chance. ‘I told you I never watched much. Apart from the news. A few documentaries.’
‘But you have marked those?’
‘What I remember.’
‘These past few months?’
‘Yo
u’ll see there aren’t so many.’
Mandy fills the plastic cup in front of her from the jug of water that is always placed there before the interviews began. She says, in a voice not quite her own, ‘A line of behaviour which is not admirable but is not therefore inexplicable.’
‘Which means?’ Weston is again attempting to move the bracelet which she forgets is fixed. ‘You don’t need to invent a defence. A scenario. That’s all I’m saying.’ But of course it will be invented. As it is already, as she knows.
Weston’s hair has been dyed, the tracings of grey at her parting quite gone since Tuesday afternoon. Mandy watches her look at the list she had written on the cover of the top magazine. ‘What you wanted. They’re written there.’ And then, when her solicitor looks up, ‘Enlighten me,’ Mandy smiles. They both know there is something of a game in all this, although she would not offend Weston’s professionalism by winking across at her as they say their lines.
‘It’s not you I have in mind, not this part of it. It’s those I shall read it out to.’ Yes, she would read the programmes in court a little later, making the most of them. The documentary on honour killings in Pakistan, the witnesses speaking from behind veils not in this case to meet the customs of their place but to cover the features where acid had disfigured them. Another was on zoos in China. Parents buying live chickens for their children to throw to carnivores. Buses driven into lion enclosures so those on board, as birthday treats, as party fun, might watch up close as living mules were tumbled from the backs of trucks.
‘You can leave it there,’ Mandy instructs. ‘I can see the drift.’
‘More than drift. The key to your defence.’
There is a pause between them. Then Mandy says, ‘There was one I couldn’t find in there. It must have been on some channel I happened to come across on Sky.’
Weston’s pen is ready to note it down.
‘Africa this time,’ Mandy says. ‘There was civil war. There was an interview with a woman who saw her husband shot, after he was made to watch the soldiers have sex with her. Her relatives are also forced to have sex with her and then they too are shot. Her daughters are raped in front of her then disappear. The woman said she still believed in God. You should add that to the list. Exhibit A.’
There is a longer silence until Mandy asks, without irony, ‘So my defence, as you see it, Weston? I didn’t know what I was doing?’
‘There’s a point,’ her solicitor reminds her, ‘when your opinion isn’t the compelling one. Which is why we have expert witnesses.’ And again, the big clock ticking above the door.
‘For goodness sake take it off,’ Mandy suddenly tells her, watching her fiddling at her wrist. ‘It’s not good for you, metal that close against your skin.’
So the bracelet lies there beside the magazines, a three-quarters shiny crescent on the table between them. Mandy’s finger touches for a moment the thin-beaten copper that is warm from Weston’s forearm.
‘Leave that,’ a voice sharply orders her. The female warder who watches through the opaque glass has opened the door.
Her counsel—‘the defender of my insanity’, Mandy would come to call her—is a slightly overweight, soberly dressed woman in her early thirties. A good swot, her client guesses, but not the clout, not the connections, to be one of the bright young things with a big-name legal firm. You can read as much from the card she left on the table when first they met. Her own name, and that of another woman, an office of only two. Ambitious then, presumably good at her job. She is also direct. She holds out her hand on that first visit and says simply, ‘Weston.’ Mandy is for the moment unsure if that is a first or second name, but as the solicitor addresses her at once as Mandy, she calls her Weston in return. After talking for twenty minutes, a matter mostly of questions and replies, the young woman admonishes her. ‘You are not helping your cause.’
‘I don’t have one,’ Mandy corrects her. ‘Nothing so grand as a cause.’ What is the point, she thinks, in playing games?
‘These are serious issues,’ Weston says, then clarifies what she has in mind. ‘In terms of sentencing.’
‘I was hoping,’ Mandy says, ‘you were speaking in terms of something decided on carefully. I would agree with you about that.’
Weston has placed a tape-recorder not much larger than a matchbox on the table between them as they speak. She taps it rather than switching it on and off. Soon she reprimands again. ‘We are not getting far.’
‘I don’t think of this as a journey,’ Mandy says. She smiles. She does not intend to be difficult. She realises her words may come across as both silly and glib. She then tells the young woman facing her in the dull green-painted room with its metal door and ugly table, and the square of clouded glass through which they can be observed, ‘I know you mean to help.’
Weston would like a little more co-operation. She would appreciate her client recognising the gravity of the situation. She says, without raising her voice but with a discrete emphasis on certain words so there is an almost admonitory rhythm to what she says, ‘You have, so far as most would see it, Mandy, acted savagely against your husband, destroyed property, inflicted damage on your son’s professional and emotional life. What I therefore have to do is to explain this behaviour in a way that does not excuse it but attempts to relieve you of responsibility. And that is how I can help you. You do understand that?’
Which is when Mandy tells her, ‘I was never more lucid.’
Again the younger woman taps the recorder. She is like a nun, that is what she reminds me of, Mandy considers. Her patiently folding her hands. Her face not altering expression. Only God presumably knowing what is in her heart. Mandy accepts she must help if she can. So she says, ‘It may seem at first blush,’ then surprised that she put it so oddly, rephrases, ‘It may seem to the casual observer, which of course we all are most of the time, that I deeply dislike my husband and Gareth. Which up to a certain point was true, at least for a very short time. But the “crime”, as everyone calls it. It is also because I considered suicide in a remote kind of academic way, and decided, quite rightly, anything like that would do them no good at all. They would never really wake up to what it was about. My defence is clarity and righteousness. Like what you call my “crime”.’
Weston closes her folder, with a name embossed on the leather cover that Mandy is unable to read, upside down as it is from her side of the table. Then, ‘What century are we in?’ her solicitor puts to her bluntly.
Mandy tells her, ‘As if doing something right at last is confined by temporal boundaries.’ For the second time within minutes, Mandy knows she is being difficult, and now pretentious as well.
Then Weston surprises her by smiling slightly. ‘We’ll get somewhere,’ she says, ‘sooner or later.’
She stands up. She cannot be much more than five feet. She stands and holds her hand across the table, as she had done when she first came into the room. The guard or whatever she is has her back against the door to prevent it swinging closed. There was no sign, no ring, no paler strip of skin, on Weston’s fingers that hinted at a private life. Nor earrings in her ears. Perhaps lawyers, like surgeons, removed jewellery as a first preliminary to carrying out professional tasks?
Turning from the door, Weston says, ‘I won’t insist, Mandy, that you put anything on paper. But think about what you’d say, just to me, in confidence, I mean, about thinking of suicide “academically”.’ She said it as though the way her client had used the word rather amused her.
Mandy is not quite sure of her tone. How can ‘in confidence’ come into it with the law?
‘Will you do that for me?’ Weston says, before she steps through the door, and the woman in uniform closes it.
Someone official attempted to talk things through with Tom. First a woman, then a man and a younger assistant, none of them wearing the white jackets he expected them to get about in if it was professional business they were on about. ‘The psycho mob,’ as he later told Gareth, ‘pai
d to enlighten us as to why your mother’s completely off her head. As if talking to us was supposed to tell them what they should have known from day one.’
The Families Page 14
