False Advertising

by Dianne Blacklock

  ‘We don’t need all this stuff, babe,’ Luke had shot back. ‘How are we gunna cart it up north when we go?’

  Their plan had originally been to get jobs on one of the islands, or further north, up in the Daintree perhaps. They’d heard there was plenty of work in the resorts, with accommodation included. But they’d only made it as far as Brisbane before they ran out of cash. Perhaps it had been somewhat shortsighted not to pace themselves, but planning too far ahead was an anathema to Gemma, and obviously to Luke as well. Besides, they’d both picked up casual work easily enough when they’d arrived in Brisbane; Luke at the marina and Gemma in a cafe, at least till the morning sickness had made it impossible for her to work around food.

  She walked up the chipped terrazzo stairs to the second floor and dropped her backpack in front of their door, bending over wearily to find her keys in one of the pockets. The stairwell was a little cooler but Gemma knew the flat was going to be like an oven if it had been closed up all day. However, when she unlocked the door and stepped inside she was surprised to find it wasn’t closed up at all. The sliding doors to the balcony were open right back, the sheer nylon curtains dancing about on the breeze.

  ‘Luke?’ Gemma called tentatively. She walked across the living room to the bedroom. ‘Luke?’

  He wasn’t there. Gemma scanned the room: the bed was unmade, but the place looked neat. Too neat. Something wasn’t right. There were no shoes on the floor around the bed, not even a pair of thongs. She crossed to the wardrobe and slid back the door on Luke’s side. A few wire coathangers clanked against one another. His clothes were all gone. She pulled open a drawer: nothing; the next drawer: nothing. She knew she wouldn’t find anything but she kept going until all four drawers hung halfway out of their sockets, sagging listlessly, empty. Gemma crouched on the floor, breathing heavily; she felt herself beginning to tremble. What was going on? She got up and went into the bathroom, opening the mirrored door of the cabinet. No razor, no toothbrush. Gemma took a step backwards, her leg bumping against the edge of the toilet seat. She closed the lid and slowly lowered herself to sit, staring at the hideous pattern on the wall tiles. Where the hell was he? What the hell was going on?

  He’d gone north after all. Obviously. That had to be it. He was going to find work and send for her.

  Then why wouldn’t he tell her if that’s what he was doing?

  He wanted to surprise her?

  Now she was clutching at straws.

  She jumped up and strode determinedly back out into the living area, picked up the phone and called Luke’s mobile. It went straight to voicemail.

  ‘Luke,’ said Gemma, trying to keep her voice steady, ‘what’s going on, babe? I’m feeling a bit freaked out here. Call me, okay? Call me when you get this. Whatever it is, we’ll work it out, Luke. I love you, babe. Just call me.’

  Gemma hung up. She bit the edge of her thumb, thinking. She picked up the phone again and dialled the marina. Val in the booking office answered almost straightaway.

  ‘Donnelly’s Charters.’

  ‘Hi, Val, it’s Gemma, Luke’s Gemma. I was wondering if I could have a word with him?’

  ‘You’re not the only one,’ she replied. ‘Haven’t seen him all weekend. Ted’s ropable.’

  Gemma couldn’t say anything. She couldn’t speak. Her heart was doing this weird irregular beat.

  ‘You still there?’ said Val.

  Gemma cleared her throat. ‘Yeah, sure.’

  ‘When did you see him last?’

  ‘Um, well, I’ve been away for a few days.’

  ‘That’ll be the end of him, then,’ said Val.

  Gemma’s head began to spin. She felt sick. ‘Okay, thanks for that, I have to go, bye.’

  She slammed down the phone and ran back to the bathroom. Lifting the toilet seat, she dropped to her knees and threw up into the bowl.

  A week later

  Helen remembered every detail of the visit from the police, though she didn’t admit it when people asked. It was easier to say it was all a blur. No one ever pushed it. They accepted whatever she said, put it down to grief. Grief – Helen had learned through all the events of the past week – was the universal justification for all kinds of behaviour. People would let you get away with a lot on account of grief.

  They had sat in the front room, the police officers and Helen. She had quickly snatched up David’s coffee cup and offered them a seat. Constable Alison Hammond and Constable Michael Murray. They had looked genuinely upset. Later Helen thought how hard it must have been for them, making that trip in the car, pulling up outside, walking to the door, facing her. It was hard on doctors too. She’d stood beside enough of them as they told family members of a negative prognosis, of an adverse outcome after surgery, of the death of a loved one. To be the bearer of bad tidings must be a heavy load indeed.

  And it would have been extra difficult considering what had happened to David. Helen was amazed they’d kept a straight face. Not that it was funny. Of course it wasn’t. A person getting hit by a bus was a tragedy. But it was also a cliché, with unfortunately comic overtones. So much so, Helen wondered for a second if they were joking. Not that they just came out with it like that: ‘Your husband’s been hit by a bus.’ What they said, or what Constable Alison Hammond said, after she’d removed her hat, after she had verified that Helen was who they expected her to be, that she was in fact the wife of a ‘David Alan Chapman’, of this address, what Constable Hammond said was, ‘Mrs Chapman, I’m sorry to have to tell you there’s been an accident.’

  Now there was a cliché.

  Helen allowed Noah to slide from her hip down onto his feet. ‘Sweetheart, I think it’s time for Playschool!’ she said, leaning down to his level. His little face lit up and he clapped his hands together. Helen cupped his face and kissed his forehead, holding him for a beat longer than normal before releasing him. She watched him scupper off down the hall, before turning back to the ominous visitors on her doorstep.

  ‘Please, come in,’ she invited Constable Hammond and Constable Murray. Once they were seated in the front room, Constable Hammond did the talking.

  ‘Your husband, Mr David Alan Chapman, was standing waiting to cross at lights on George Street at Broadway at 7.28 this morning. He stepped from the kerb directly into the path of the 422 bus on route to Railway Square. The driver was unable to stop. I’m afraid your husband was killed instantly.’

  Helen often wondered how they knew that. Killed instantly. Was there an instrument that measured it? What was an instant anyway? Did he turn to see the bus coming towards him in that instant? Did he flinch; did his life flash before his eyes? What did he feel when it hit? Was there an instant before the instant he was killed, when he felt the impact of several tonnes of metal and glass colliding with his body?

  She had of course remained calm as they told her. She didn’t get hysterical; Helen never got hysterical. She was a nurse, for crying out loud. She was trained to handle emergency, sickness, death, without fuss, to take them in her stride.

  But she had felt something well up inside her. She couldn’t name the feeling. Perhaps she’d never had it before. It wasn’t grief yet. It wasn’t even particularly sad. Helen knew it was going to hit her, probably soon, but not in front of the two officers. She was protected right now by the silicone coating of shock. She had to focus, get the information she needed, and then she’d have some calls to make. Or at least one call. And that was going to be the hardest.

  ‘What happens now?’ Helen asked finally.

  ‘Pardon?’ said Constable Hammond. She looked bereft, white; Helen noticed her eyes had teared up. God, this was probably her first time, poor thing. Helen wondered if she ought not go over and sit by her, pat her hand in that consoling way she did for the relatives of very ill patients.

  ‘I’m not sure of the procedure,’ Helen explained. ‘I guess there’s something I have to do, that I’m supposed to do . . .’ And then it occurred to her. ‘Wouldn’t someone n
eed to identify the body?’

  ‘That’s correct, Mrs Chapman.’ It was Constable Murray speaking this time. ‘Under the . . . circumstances,’ he said carefully, ‘it might be better if it was someone else, another family member. Is there someone we can contact for you?’

  That was thoughtful. They probably didn’t know she was a nurse, that she’d seen hundreds of dead bodies. Sometimes they didn’t look scary at all; they simply looked as though they were sleeping. Many who died in the hospital were at the end of long illnesses, so they were emaciated, pale and bloodless, but strangely at peace. The only ones that did upset her were those who were gruesomely twisted and deformed in accidents so they didn’t even look human any more . . .

  Helen caught her breath. Her heart was palpitating. Not yet, keep control. She cleared her throat. ‘If you could leave it with me. How much time do I have?’

  After the police had left, Helen picked up the phone and speed-dialled Jim and Noreen without pausing to think about it. It just had to be done. David’s parents were both retired and they barely ever left home before ten in the morning, there being no longer any need to be the early bird catching the elusive worm. Jim Chapman had enjoyed a successful and highly satisfying working life, he liked to remind everyone, frequently. He’d started out as a bank teller but before long was made branch manager, and then area manager, and eventually some complex and very specific title to do with superannuation which Helen could never recall. He’d achieved all of this with no fancy qualifications, he liked to tell everyone, frequently. Not that he didn’t realise things had changed, and that a university degree was now a compulsory entry visa into the ranks of white-collar professionalism.

  Eldest son Steven was halfway through a commerce degree when David finished school and announced he wanted to do Arts. ‘What, painting?’ Jim had frowned. ‘You haven’t got an artistic bone in your body, boy.’ David had explained that he wanted to study humanities; sociology and archaeology in particular. His father had laughed. ‘Commerce is good enough for your brother, it’ll do you.’ But of course it didn’t, and after failing his first year, David took off overseas on money he’d made working part-time jobs when he should have been studying the Dow Jones. His parents couldn’t do anything to stop him, and from the omniscient perspective of middle age, they counted on him getting it ‘out of his system’. What exactly he was supposed to be getting out of his system was not clear, and David befuddled them further by landing himself in South America and working as a volunteer with a non-government aid agency.

  Helen often wished she had met him then, when all things still seemed possible, when his enthusiasm apparently knew no bounds. Not that he didn’t have fervour when they met, but it was on the wane. He’d come home from his stint overseas and was living with his parents while he continued to work for various overseas aid agencies, for little or no money. His father ranted and raved that he was throwing his life away, that he would never have a career. David said he wasn’t interested in a career; he was interested in making a difference. What about making a living? Jim countered. How did he expect to support a family and buy a home by ‘making a difference’? David said he would worry about supporting a family when he had one, and he didn’t care in the least about buying a house. That was incomprehensible to Jim. How could he not care about buying a house? Where was he getting these crazy, communist, leftie ideas from?

  Clearly, it was an untenable situation. In the end the only way David could get out from under their roof and support himself was to take a job as a base-grade clerk in the public service – ironically, exactly what his father had wanted. David remained involved in his various causes, and he planned eventually to go back to university and get the qualifications he needed to find paid work in his chosen field. But other things got in the way. And one of them was Helen.

  ‘Hello?’ David’s mother always sounded wary when she answered the phone, albeit with good reason today. But Helen knew she couldn’t tell Noreen first. She had to give Jim control, let him ‘handle’ his wife, as he was wont to do.

  ‘Hi, Noreen, it’s Helen,’ she said levelly. Noreen was a nice enough woman, but they’d never been close. She followed her husband’s lead in everything, and as he didn’t much care for Helen, neither did she. She was just a little more polite about it.

  ‘Helen.’ She said it like a greeting. ‘Everything all right? How’s Noah?’

  Helen nearly replied ‘everything’s fine’ on automatic pilot. ‘Noah’s fine, he’s good,’ she said. ‘I was wondering if I could speak to Jim, if he’s around?’

  ‘Of course, dear.’ Noreen would never question why Helen wanted to talk to Jim and not her. She would assume it was something important, perhaps a financial matter, that didn’t concern her. ‘Just a minute, I’ll get him for you.’

  A moment later Jim came on the line. ‘Hello Helen?’ He said it as though it was an accusation. ‘What’s up? Noreen said you wanted to talk to me?’

  Helen took a deep breath. She suddenly realised what she had to say, and she hadn’t even absorbed it herself yet. David was gone. Gone. He wasn’t coming back. He was dead.

  Nothing was ever going to be the same again. As soon as she said it out loud to Jim everything was going to change. It was almost as if it wasn’t real yet. This last half-hour had been like standing in the centre of the hurricane, the calm before the storm, and every other cliché used to describe that inevitable, apprehensive, loaded pause that occurred just before everything started to fall down around you. A lump was rising again in Helen’s throat. No, not yet.

  ‘Helen, are you there?’ Jim said impatiently.

  She swallowed. ‘Yes, Jim. Sorry.’ She took a breath. ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news.’ She sunk into a chair, her legs suddenly not doing such a good job of holding her up. ‘Perhaps you’d better sit down.’

  ‘What is it?’ he said guardedly.

  ‘It’s David . . .’ God, this was so hard.

  ‘What about David?’ he demanded. He was beginning to lose it. Deep down, on some inexplicable, molecular level, he knew his son was gone.

  ‘He’s been in an accident,’ she said weakly.

  ‘What hospital is he in, where did they take him? Not that blasted St Michael’s –’

  ‘Jim,’ Helen interrupted, ‘he died instantly.’

  There was silence.

  ‘The police have just left,’ Helen went on after a while. ‘He was . . . he was run over . . .’ She didn’t want to say it. ‘In the city, on his way to work. Um, it was a bus.’

  ‘Oh God,’ he breathed, barely audible.

  Helen allowed him time to collect himself. Jim would not want to show any weakness, to appear vulnerable. He was the head of the family, after all.

  After a while she heard him clear his throat. ‘I would imagine in a situation like this they’ll need someone to identify the body.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Helen. ‘That’s what the police said.’

  ‘Okay.’ He sounded resolved. ‘I’ll take care of it. I’ll call Steven, and ah, look, I’ll probably drop Noreen around with you when I go. She shouldn’t be left alone.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Helen. He hadn’t asked her how she was. She hadn’t really expected that he would.

  ‘You’d better give me the name of the policeman you spoke to.’

  It was because of Jim that Helen and David had met in the first place. Helen had been Jim’s nurse, or one of them, when he had had his first heart attack, and she suspected that attributed to the fact that he had never seemed comfortable around her. She supposed that it was not entirely unreasonable – she’d had to perform various intimate, though routine, procedures on him when he was at his most vulnerable, a condition Jim was not exactly accustomed to.

  Helen had been in the habit of taking her lunch or dinner in a public café, usually with her head stuck in a gossip magazine she’d borrowed from one of the waiting areas. While most hospital staff preferred to hide from the public and use the staff cafet
eria, Helen usually preferred to hide from the rest of the staff, be anonymous, and absorb herself in the lives and loves of Hollywood celebrities. It was a guilty obsession. She would never actually buy one of these magazines herself; they were trash, completely fabricated and a load of rubbish. But Helen couldn’t get enough of them. Perhaps reading about the trivial, so-called struggles of the rich and famous made her own situation seem not so bad. Perhaps they simply transported her to other worlds, other lives, lifting her out of her own. Helen didn’t know, and she was not inclined to analyse it too closely in case even this small, harmless pleasure became tainted for her.

  Then, on a particular day in the month of August, David Chapman had walked into the café and collected a cup of coffee and a salad sandwich on his tray, and was making his way to an adjacent table when he recognised her.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, not exactly displaying a great deal of originality.

  Helen didn’t respond: she was too caught up reading about Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s $1.4 million Lavish Fairytale Wedding, recalling a theory she’d heard somewhere that the level of fuss a celebrity couple went to over their declarations of love for each other was inversely proportionate to the length of time they would stay together. On the evidence before her she had given them three years, four years tops. But even if Helen had not been absorbed in her magazine, she probably wouldn’t have responded to David’s greeting anyway. Helen would never have assumed anyone was talking to her; the ‘hello’ would have been filtered out as background noise, assumed to be directed towards someone else.

  But David had persisted. He’d cleared his throat and repeated, rather loudly, ‘Hello there,’ and then stooped to read her name tag, adding, ‘Helen, I thought it was Helen.’