by JH Fletcher
‘How did you meet them?’
‘Riding.’
Danger was in every word, every question; it was like groping in the dark along the edge of a precipice. She felt sweat trickling, waited to see if he would go on talking now he had started.
‘My brother and me, we got riding stables south of Melbourne. Kylie started to bring the kids.’
‘Did Kylie ride?’
‘Yeh.’ A pause, remembering. ‘She’s good.’
‘Did you ride with her?’
Another pause. ‘Yeh.’
A sigh from the bed made Ruth hold her breath, begging the sleeper not to wake. Another sigh, followed by silence; Ruth breathed more easily.
‘And you fell in love?’
Again the suspicious glare. ‘Something like that.’
Ruth laughed again to keep the tone of the conversation light but never stopped watching him, trying to gauge his mood. ‘I’ve been in love, too, you know.’
‘It was never easy. She’s rich, see.’
‘And married.’
He shrugged dismissively, a husband of less account than money.
‘I could never offer her anything like she’s got now.’
‘That wouldn’t matter,’ Ruth said, ‘if she loves you.’
His head turned at once, eyes like the muzzles of the gun. ‘If she loves me?’
‘When,’ Ruth amended, ‘when a woman — anyone — loves another person it doesn’t matter how much money they’ve got.’
His eyes still watched her.
‘She came away with you, didn’t she? Surely that shows she cares?’
‘I know where I seen you,’ he said. ‘On the box.’
Damn.
‘It could have been,’ she said.
‘You wrote that book. It won some big prize.’
‘Joshua’s Children. Yes.’
‘I knew I’d seen you somewhere. You’re famous, then.’
‘Not very famous,’ she assured him. ‘You were telling me about you and Kylie?’
‘She told me she and her husband didn’t get along. He’s a lot older than she is.’
He must have been at least ten years older himself, Ruth thought, but said nothing.
‘Whose idea was it that you should run away together?’
He hesitated. ‘I reckon both of us.’
‘What made her change her mind?’
‘I told her I was married.’
‘So when she came away with you she thought —’
‘I was single. Yeh.’
‘What made you tell her?’
‘She had the right to know. My marriage doesn’t mean a thing,’ he said. ‘It’s all over, same as hers. But I wanted everything to be right between us.’
‘Shouldn’t you have told her before she came away with you?’
‘I was afraid if she knew she wouldn’t come. But I never lied to her.’
‘You just didn’t tell her the truth.’
‘I love her.’ The heavy face was working. ‘Her husband … He’s a violent bastard. I thought maybe I could protect her.’
‘With a gun.’
‘I only brought it in case there was any shooting. That’s what someone told me, there was shooting up here.’ His despairing eyes stared at her, seeking comfort she had no power to give. ‘I’ve stuffed up, haven’t I?’
‘Sometimes you have to let people go to keep them,’ Ruth said. But saw he did not know what she meant.
‘What you reckon I should do?’
‘Get rid of that gun, for a start. Then you’ll have to talk to her. Tell her what you’ve told me. Tell her you love her. She may not listen, not at first, but it’s your only hope. Keep trying and if she believes you really love her, if she loves you, maybe in time it’ll work out.’
‘What if it doesn’t?’
‘Then you’ll have to let her go.’ She could see he would not accept it. ‘You must. You try and keep her against her will, there’ll be no future for either of you.’
‘There’s one way I can keep her.’ He raised the muzzle of the gun an inch, staring at her.
‘Where will that get you?’
‘At least we’ll be together.’
‘What about the kids? You planning to kill them, too?’ The voice from the bed made them both turn. The woman’s eyes stared at him.
‘How long you been awake?’ the man demanded.
‘Long enough. I heard what you were saying.’
‘You know I love you, then.’
Ruth held her breath but had little faith.
‘Maybe you do. In your own way. And I love you, too.’ A wan smile. ‘In my own way.’
His face lit up. ‘Then we’ll be able to work something out —’
She shook her head. ‘It’s no good, Gary. I’m not going to tie myself up with another violent bloke. Once was more than enough.’
For a long time they stared at each other.
‘That’s it, then.’ Gary’s voice was expressionless.
The atmosphere in the room had changed once again. What Ruth was watching had become a tableau of despair, rejection, death. Death for all of them, perhaps. I have done no good by interfering, she thought. I may even have made things worse.
‘If you’d only talk to each other,’ she said.
Neither of them looked at her. ‘You get out,’ Gary said.
Ruth shook her head, afraid what might happen as soon as she was out of the cabin. ‘I’ll stay.’
‘Stupid bitch,’ the girl screamed. ‘He’s going to kill the lot of us. Get out while you got the chance.’
She takes me for a fool, Ruth thought. Perhaps she’s right. But would not move, fool or not.
The light around the edges of the curtain had changed from grey to gold. Ruth felt crushed by the pressure of time. Each passing minute had become an enemy. There was still a chance, however faint, but it would not be long before someone came to tidy the room and then there would be no chance at all.
The little girl stretched, whimpering, and turned over. Her eyes were still screwed shut but she would soon be awake. No doubt her brother would follow her quickly enough. More pressure there.
There was nothing more she could do yet as long as she had breath she was determined to keep trying. Reason had failed; perhaps, if she spoke to him toughly, that might work.
Her bones ached, her head ached, she felt her age and more than her age. Never mind. She got up. Before he could move she had marched to the window and thrown back the curtains. Daylight flooded in.
Gary was on his feet, gun pointing. ‘What the hell you think you’re playing at?’ Fury in his voice; fear, too. ‘Keep those curtains closed.’
‘No.’ She turned to face him. ‘We’ve had enough of this nonsense. I took you for a man but I’m beginning to wonder.’ His mouth opened but she gave him no chance to interrupt. ‘You say you love her. Then for heaven’s sake talk to her. Try and sort out your troubles.’ She turned to the girl. ‘And you’re no better. You heard what he said. You chose to come away with him. At least listen to what he’s got to say. All this,’ with a wave of her hand she dismissed the room, the threatening gun, the whole situation, ‘is nonsense.’ She walked towards him, stood so close she almost touched him and looked him full in the eyes. ‘Talk,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what you can do until you try.’
He gulped, said nothing. Recklessly, she let the impetus of her attack sweep her along. She placed both hands on the gun. ‘You won’t be needing this.’
For a moment he resisted, starting to pull back, but she clung to the gun, eyes still fixed on his, and suddenly the full weight of the weapon was in her hands. She could barely believe she had done it. She stepped back.
A sudden knock at the outside door. The cleaner had come to tidy the cabin. Ruth saw panic flood Gary’s face and her heart lurched. She raised her voice. ‘We’re a bit late today. Can you come back later?’
‘Okay.’
Frozen into statues, they held the
ir breath. There was the clank of a bucket, a faint whistle retreating. Slowly they relaxed. Ruth backed away to the side of the room.
She stared at them both. ‘Talk,’ she urged them fiercely. ‘It’s the only way.’
Gary looked uncertainly at Kylie. ‘You reckon we should —?’
‘No!’
With shocking speed Kylie made her move. She flung herself forward, shoved past Gary. Before he could grab her she had opened the door. In a flash of bare legs she was across the living room. She threw open the outside door upon a sudden glare of sunlight. ‘Help!’ she screamed. ‘Help! He’s trying to kill me!’
A look like ashes on Gary’s face. He stared after the fleeing figure, hearing her diminishing cries, watching his future dissolve into ruin. He turned towards Ruth, eyes sharpening on the gun, and she backed away from him, the weapon tight to her breast. He hesitated, then with an expression of utter hopelessness sank to his knees in the middle of the room.
A blizzard of mewling cries as the children woke.
A day of unimaginable turmoil and tension was over.
At last Ruth was able to shut her cabin door on an inexorable pageant of people, vehicles, uniforms, barking voices, voices asking questions, men with narrow and suspicious eyes that pinned her neat as a butterfly to the page of their investigations.
They could not believe that she had gone willingly into the cabin.
After hearing a shot? In the middle of the night? The investigating officer smiled tolerantly. He scented mystery, collusion, scandal but for the moment had decided to humour this celebrity who imagined he could so easily be fooled.
‘You knew these people?’
‘No.’
‘Perhaps you had spoken to them? In passing?’
‘No.’
‘You are a celebrity?’ As though something for which she might be charged. ‘Let’s start again, shall we?’
‘No.’ She had never felt more frail in her life but rage restored the bones to her legs. She stood. ‘I have told you everything, everything. I am going to lie down.’
To breathe air untainted by questions.
It was the truth she had told them. She had not known that Kylie’s husband was a rich and famous man who owned a television network, whose face Australia knew as well as its own.
Because of the husband’s power, no doubt, a television crew was with them by midday: cameras, lights, make-up personnel, the panoply of the media blitz.
‘A few questions, Ms Ballard.’ Her maiden name; the name under which she still wrote. A sly smile nudged her. ‘Great publicity for your new book.’
It was dreadful, dreadful, but Ruth was a professional; for over forty years publicity had been an unavoidable part of her job. For years she had not needed it but it was a mind slant hard to break. Nowadays she steered clear of it, as far as possible, but there were times when she still went along.
A different tone to these questions, building her up for the viewers. Her courage. How single-handed she had saved the lives of an innocent woman, her two children.
‘I talked to him, that was all.’
The interviewer would have none of it. ‘You went in there, alone. After you had heard the shot. You rescued them. Single-handed.’
Gary the villain. Kylie the victim. Ruth the heroine.
Over-simplifications destroying truth’s hard edge.
‘It wasn’t like that.’
They knew better. Truth was what they decided it would be; the viewers’ daily injection of media truth.
The interviewer — another famous face, spokesperson for the Aussie Republic now it had become fashionable — laughed off-camera. ‘This time tomorrow, Ms Ballard, you could be elected President, if you wanted it.’
She did not want it, knew there were more important things in life than the Republic, ultimately wanted only to be rid of the nightmare.
Abruptly, in a diminishing confusion of people and vehicles, they were gone. Solitude, if not tranquillity, returned.
The manager of the resort escorted Ruth back to her cabin.
‘The publicity will have damaged you,’ she apologised, as though she had caused it.
He disagreed emphatically. His voice rubbed its hands. ‘It will make us a household word.’
Perhaps he was right.
She closed the door, poured herself a stiff drink, then a hot bath. Garlanded in scented steam, she relaxed for the first time that day, reliving the tragedy that had hit the news, hauling her along with it.
Elected President, indeed.
‘Queen of the fools, more like,’ she told herself. ‘You get more of a fool every day.’
Rosy with heat, she was drying herself when the phone rang. She wanted to ignore it, for a few minutes did so, but its insistent clamour eventually wore down a resistance frayed by the day’s events.
‘Hullo?’
The switchboard operator said, ‘Your daughter, Mrs Hudson.’
Oh dear. Ruth wondered whether she would be strong enough to deal with Roberta tonight, knew she had no choice. ‘Put her on.’
‘Mother?’
‘Hullo, dear.’
‘What on earth have you been up to?’
Roberta’s voice, like her manner, battered. Ruth held the receiver away from her ear. ‘Nothing.’
‘I’ve just seen you on the news. You’re the hero of the hour.’
Ruth had never fathomed the political correctness of actresses being actors, heroines being heroes, but never mind. ‘It’s all nonsense.’
‘They’re saying you should have some award.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘I’ve had the television people on the phone to me, of course.’ The hectoring tone became complacent. ‘I told them I had nothing to say.’
‘Did you really?’ Roberta with nothing to say would be a phenomenon, indeed, but Roberta had always been a stranger to irony. Ruth imagined her now, sitting in her ministerial office in the Parliament Building in Adelaide, disciplining the furniture, terrorising the telephone. Minister for Commercial Development. Madam Minister. Or perhaps Mr Minister, Ruth no longer knew. I really am getting old, she thought.
‘What are you planning to do?’ Roberta asked.
No doubt the flowers on her desk, if she had flowers, were standing to attention. Ruth laughed.
Roberta asked, ‘I beg your pardon?’ crossly; laughter had no place.
‘I was wondering. Do you have flowers? In your office?’
‘Flowers?’ By her tone Roberta thought her mother was unhinged.
‘I just wondered.’ And laughed again, her own private joke.
‘I was asking what you were planning to do next.’
Ruth had thought about it in the bath. The holiday was spoilt. There would be curious faces, eyes watching her. Damn television, she thought savagely. ‘I think I’ll come home.’
‘When?’
If she were going, she might as well go straightaway. ‘Tomorrow, I suppose. If I can get a flight.’
‘Do you want me to arrange it for you?’
Unlike irony, arranging things was Roberta’s forte but Ruth had always preferred to do things for herself. ‘I’m sure I can sort it out.’
‘If you’re certain…’ In some ways Roberta thought her mother woolly-headed as, no doubt, in some ways she was.
‘You’ll let me know your flight number? Promise, now.’
‘Of course, dear.’ She put down the phone, poured herself another drink, a hefty slug. It burned deliciously, going down.
Roberta would meet the plane. Ruth had never doubted it and should have been glad but, sadly, was not.
It was a sorry thing, a daughter whom she loved but who exhausted her with her energy, her implacable will. Roberta had inherited both from her, of course.
Ruth looked about her. At the bed just so, the chest of drawers with a mirror on it, the cupboards built flush with the wall, the neutral decor of beige on beige. The room was a walled space, devoid of passi
on or personality, yet surely had known both. It appalled her that she could have lived here almost a week and left not even the faintest imprint of her passing on the air.
A claustrophobic tremor touched her throat. She had to get out. She had to escape, to fill her lungs with the warm air of the tropical night, hear the shush, shush of the waves, know the blazing infinity of the stars.
Before Roberta’s phone call she had been exhausted. Now, hating the room that threatened her, she was on her feet without thought of fatigue, crossing to the door, flinging it open. The cabin light threw a golden oblong across the grass and she followed it on frantic, seventy-three year old legs, lips craving the taste of peace.
The darkness was blood hot. She stood by the sea wall, yearning mouth open to trap the faint stirrings of the breeze, to draw its healing into her body. Upon it came a melody of scents: salt and coral, the faintest miasma of decay, fecund with birth, with rebirth. Her heart steadied. Her breathing eased. Her upturned eyes sensed star and galaxy tracing their paths across an infinite night.
Behind her, amid the darkness, something grew close. Ruth held her breath.
The great tree filled her with stillness. Without turning her head she sensed its presence, the rustle of leaves, the branches against the stars. She acknowledged it humbly, its protective arms outstretched between her and evil. Oh, the peace of those soothing leaves, those sturdy arms.
‘The tree will protect me,’ she proclaimed aloud to the milk-warm night, ‘as it always has. It will let no harm come to me.’ Throughout her life it had done so. It had stood between her and storm, had been her guardian and her friend. Now she sensed its coolness. The trials of the day, Roberta’s misguided but well-intentioned aggressiveness, even the threatening pressures of the impersonal room no longer mattered. Secure beneath the tree’s sheltering branches, Ruth knelt to acknowledge the generosity of its protection, knowing that at the end of things she would find her way home at last.
TWO
Roberta’s office did indeed have flowers, a dried arrangement, bronze tints arranged like an heraldic emblem upon a side table. Live flowers needed water, attention. Live flowers died. The dried arrangement was much more practical.
‘That the lot, then?’
‘That’s everything, Minister.’
