by Nicole Trope
‘What a fucken wanker,’ said Rhonda.
‘Have you called the police?’ Rebecca asked.
Liz nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She was getting impatient with the questions. The answers were obvious and she felt a slight twinge of regret that she had called the women from the group. They looked incongruous standing in her mother’s pale living room. Her mother was standing off to the side holding her face in a silent smile. She had not been pleased when Liz told her Rhonda and Rebecca were coming.
‘What on earth for, Liz?’ Ellen had asked. ‘This will all be over soon. Alex won’t like coming back to a house full of people. You know that.’
‘I do, Mum,’ said Liz, ‘but I need them here. I can’t explain it. I guess it’s because they understand what someone like Alex can be like. I’d rather they were here when he got back anyway. I don’t need him starting any crap with me today.’
‘I understand, Liz. You keep sidelining me but I do understand. I’ve watched you and Alex these past few months and I know what he’s like.’
‘God, Mum, it’s not a judgement call, okay? I’m not saying they’re better to have around than you are. I just want a bit of extra . . . I don’t know: support, I guess.’
‘Well, your father’s coming now as well. He wasn’t happy about leaving his precious football game but I didn’t give him much choice.’
Liz hadn’t had anything to say to that so she had made her way to the living room to look out of the window in the hope of seeing Alex’s car turn the corner.
Liz watched now as Rhonda, Rebecca and her mother made awkward conversation. She knew she could help things along— Rebecca liked gardening and so did her mother, and Rhonda was addicted to the same television shows as Ellen—but Liz couldn’t muster the energy for anything other than worry.
‘Well,’ said Rebecca, ‘I guess we’ll just have to wait. I’m sure it’s all going to be fine. He’s not the first man to do something like this. Not the first man at all. It’s ego and pride, you know. He just wants to let you know he’s in control. He’ll bring him back soon enough.’
Rebecca had never had children with her first husband. Liz bit her lip, trying not to be irritated by Rebecca’s positive attitude.
Rebecca had breezed in to that first meeting on the dot of ten in a dress lush with flowers. Her hair was pulled back with a band and her clear skin and glowing eyes lit up the room. Just about every woman in the group hated her on sight. She had only just taken over running the group and she chirped away about setting boundaries and being strong and powerful. She was into positive affirmations and treating yourself with respect. It was a couple of months before Rebecca’s story came out and afterwards Liz was sorry for laughing at her. Sorry for judging her as uptight and full of shit.
One week they had a self defence lesson.
The man who came in to play the offender was padded up from head to toe.
‘I wonder where I can get one of those,’ Liz said mostly to herself.
‘Just look at you speaking and making a joke,’ said Rhonda.
‘Now ladies, please. We need to pay attention so we can learn the sensitive areas on the body.’
‘I know all about those,’ said Cherry.
‘This will help you all. This will allow you to feel a little more in control,’ said Rebecca.
‘Yeah and then I can beat the crap outa him,’ snorted Glenda.
‘That’s not what this is about, Glenda,’ said Rebecca sternly.
‘This is to buy you time so you can get hold of the police or remove yourself from the situation.’
‘That’ll really fucking help,’ said Esther, whose husband was a retired police officer.
‘Most police officers will be very helpful, Esther. You have to trust the authorities to do their job.’
It was Rhonda who had snapped. ‘You know what pisses us all off, Bec?’ Rhonda had said, ignoring Rebecca’s obvious distaste at being called ‘Bec’.
‘What would that be, Rhonda?’
‘It’s the way you sit there with your big fucken diamond ring and the picture of your three delightful kids and tell us how to figure our way out of these fucked-up relationships, when clearly your pretty skin has never, ever been marked by someone’s fist.’
Rebecca had looked at Rhonda for a long minute, and then at all the other woman assembled in the circle. Then she had taken a picture out of her bag and passed it around.
It was a picture of Rebecca in a hospital. There were tubes in her arms and her leg was in a splint. Her nose looked like it had been broken and on one side of her head a whole chunk of hair was missing. Both eyes were plums, shining on her face.
No one had said anything after that and they had moved onto words that had power.
Later at coffee time Liz had come back from the bathroom to find Rebecca and Rhonda huddled in a corner. Rhonda who looked like she never shed a tear was crying and Rebecca was saying, ‘It’s okay Rhonda. Now you know it’s possible to move on. This does not have to define the rest of your life. It doesn’t have to be who you are five years from now.’
Rhonda took charge and made tea and coffee for everyone.
‘I can feel it’s not right,’ said Liz, taking a mug of coffee from Rhonda.
Rhonda nodded. Rebecca was big on you trusting your feelings.
‘If you can see him working his way up to something,’ Rebecca always said, ‘get out. Trust your feelings and make an excuse to get away from him if you’re still with him or get him to leave if you’re living apart. Trust your instincts. That’s what you can count on.’
Liz’s instincts told her she had fanned the flames of Alex’s resentment. She hadn’t just touched it or added a few sticks; she had poured a whole can of petrol on it.
The doorbell rang; it was Liz’s father.
‘It’s turned into a fucking tea party,’ thought Liz.
‘What did you call me for?’ asked Jack, looking around the room.
‘I told you why, Jack,’ said Ellen. ‘They don’t send police out if they think you’re just being a hysterical woman. The police are coming and Liz wanted you to be here. When Alex does bring him home maybe you and he could have a little chat.’
Her father nodded and sat down to wait.
Liz said nothing. She was just grateful that her mother seemed certain that Luke was coming home. Liz wished she could be so sure herself.
One hour and twenty-five minutes late
The house was a single storey on one of those ‘quiet’ streets everyone always wanted to buy in. It had the clean look of constant upkeep but it didn’t scream money.
The pitched roof was painted slate grey. In front of the house was a garden where the winter flowers were beginning to show themselves. There were patches that Robert would bet contained all the beauty that would arrive in spring. The lawn was trimmed and the flowerbeds even. The garden was loved in the obvious way that you sometimes saw in houses where older people lived. People who had the time and the patience to wait for the reward of a garden.
This was not the garden of a recently single woman. Robert would bet that this was the house Liz Harrow had grown up in.
It was one of those suburbs where the old folks on a pension lived next door to the young folks who knocked everything down and threw up a McMansion that covered every square inch of ground. Once it may even have had more of those pensioners struggling to get through the month but the whole of Sydney was gentrifying itself, one suburb at a time.
Robert and Dave got out of the car and looked around. They’d been on the street for about two minutes but not one car had driven past them. Robert had hoped their visit might coincide with the arrival of the father and then they could give him a bit of a shock and maybe stop him from being such a prick in the future. ‘No such luck,’ he said softly.
‘What?’ said Dave.
Robert shook his head. ‘I wanted the guy to turn up now and then we could . . .’
‘Yeah, I know,’ said Dave. ‘It would have
been my pleasure to scare the shit out of him.’
Robert grunted in reply. Dave had a thing about men who hit their wives. He never explained it but Robert knew there was a long story behind his distaste for violent men. He wanted to remind Dave that they had no real idea of the truth. It could be that the man had never lifted his hand to his wife.
Robert looked at the gleaming house across the street. The man in the garden had stopped mowing his lawn to stare at them. The police were obviously not regular visitors in this neighbourhood. Robert waved and the man lifted his hand a little but he didn’t start the mower again. Robert debated going over the road to say something but then let that idea go. Right now they were only here to keep a member of the public happy. Right now nothing illegal was going on and there was no reason to talk to the neighbours.
He and Natalie had always wanted to build the big house with a swimming pool but had decided that they didn’t want to build it with each other before the plans even got through council.
Robert had loved the house he used to live in before Natalie scraped together enough to buy him out of his half. He had mowed the lawn on Sunday and painted the fence in the holidays and now some stud named Eric was living there with Natalie and his children. He had been so pissed when Eric moved in even though he could see that the man wasn’t half bad. He was one of those timid little accountant types whose clothes were always clean. So not exactly a stud but he must have had something because Natalie was talking about marriage now.
Mark loved him because he was a model-train enthusiast. Natalie had let him turn the small study that had belonged to Robert into a whole town filled with trains and miniature people.
Robert made fun of the guy over a few beers but really he was grateful that he was good to the kids and he seemed to make Natalie happy. It wasn’t that he was pleased about his ex-wife moving on, just that he couldn’t quite kill every feeling he had for her. He wanted her to be happy.
‘Looks like a nice place,’ said Dave, bringing Robert back to the present, back to where he was right now. Meaning it was not a suburb where husbands and wives typically involved the police in their divorce issues. If there had actually been domestic violence in the marriage, he would bet it was kept quiet.
‘Yeah,’ agreed Robert.
There were a few cars parked outside the house and Robert wondered if they were for other houses or if the woman had called everyone she knew.
If she had called everyone that meant she was circling the wagons. It wasn’t a good sign. If she was doing that this wasn’t an ordinary case of some wanker who wanted to keep the kid until the ex was crazy. If the wagons were being circled then this was something entirely different.
There could be a lot more going on here than the woman had told Lisa.
Robert felt his gut twist a little. Maybe there was a history of violence. Maybe there was a real danger here.
They didn’t even get to ring the bell before the door opened. Robert stepped into the living room to find it filled with people.
‘Shit,’ he thought. ‘They’re really worried.’
Robert took in the cream carpet and lush cream sofas and confirmed his notion that this house did not belong to the mother of the missing child. There was a marble fireplace in which a low fire was burning. Next to the fireplace was an antique wooden trolley set up with bottles of different types of whisky and glasses. Someone liked a drink.
Behind the sofa, almost hidden from view, was a toy box filled with trucks and cars and what looked like a plastic tool set. Robert wondered how long the woman had lived with her mother and whether or not they got along. It didn’t matter really, but in a worst-case scenario everything eventually became relevant.
‘I’m Senior Constable Robert Williams and this is Senior Constable David Mathieson—we’re looking for Elizabeth Harrow,’ he said.
The room was quiet with everyone taking in the idea that the police were actually here. The air was thick with tension and worry.
‘That’s me,’ said a woman, standing up. Robert had guessed it was her already. She had been sitting in a recliner with her hands on her knees, looking into a place only she could see. There were two women sitting by her feet like handmaidens. Elizabeth Harrow was tall, taller than Robert but not taller than Dave, whose skinny noodle body towered over everyone. She was pretty, too, and he could see that once, maybe a few kilos less and a shitty husband ago, she would have been close to beautiful.
He looked over at Dave and could instantly see his partner’s eyes glaze over a little. Dave liked women who were close to his size. It was a pity this wasn’t a bar so they could all have a drink.
‘Call me Liz, please,’ she said.
‘I’m Ellen Searle, Liz’s mother—Luke’s grandmother,’ said another woman coming in from the kitchen. She listed her titles as if to make sure they knew where to place her in this family drama.
She was much smaller than her daughter and had some extra lines around her mouth and a worn look that her nice clothes and good make-up couldn’t quite hide. Robert decided she was the one who liked a drink or two. When she shook hands with him he caught the sharp sweet smell of whisky floating around her like perfume.
One of the women on the floor looked familiar. She nodded at him and it took him a moment to place her before realising that she ran a domestic violence group.
So there was the answer. It explained a whole lot that she was here.
She had once come to give everyone at the station a talk on domestic violence. The staff sergeant thought they all needed a personal perspective on things. She had come on a Monday when one or two of the boys were nursing hangovers from a wedding the night before. No one had exactly made her welcome but she didn’t seem bothered by their bland faces and heaved sighs. Even the women didn’t seem interested in hearing about something they dealt with every day.
She looked like some Stepford wife but the first thing she had done at the talk was pin up a whole lot of pictures of her bruised body. ‘These are just a few of the photos I have from five years of abuse,’ she had said. The words were a simple fact and she threw them out without any obvious self-pity. In some of the pictures she was half naked but she didn’t seem to care. There were broken bones and scratches and even some knife wounds. Bruises ranged from black to yellow and no part of her was left untouched. When she’d pinned up the last picture she turned around and smiled at them. Some of the young boys sat up straight after that. Robert admired her courage—she certainly made her point.
There was only one man in the room and he stood up now and held out his hand to Robert. He was obviously the grandfather. He was even bigger than his daughter. He looked Dave in the eye. Robert wondered if he knew there was a history of violence in his daughter’s marriage and, if he did know, why he hadn’t stopped it. His handshake was rough and strong. This was a man who worked with his hands. He could surely have done something—not that Robert would condone it, but if some man was mistreating his daughter he would have a hard time just being a cop.
The man took up too much space in the cream-coloured living room. It was possible he didn’t live here at all.
‘I’m Jack—Liz’s dad. I was just waiting for you. I think I’ll go and take a drive around the place. I’ve asked some of my boys to visit a few shopping centres. We’ll see if we can find them.’
‘Sorry,’ said Robert. ‘Your boys?’
The man looked down at him and took a deep breath. Robert could see he wasn’t a talker but the way the women were looking at him he didn’t seem to be a hitter either, despite his size. Big men with anger issues could be really dangerous, but then so could small men with ego issues. He wondered how big the man who wouldn’t bring his kid home was. Robert would guess small, even though that probably wouldn’t fit with this family; he would guess small.
‘Sorry. I move pianos. I’ve got a few trucks and a few workers. They live all over so I’ve asked them to take a look around the centres where they live. I’m goin
g to go up to the nearest centre to us and have a look too,’ said Jack
‘Can I caution you, Mr Searle, not to engage with Mr Harrow if he seems upset or if it may put the child at risk?’
‘I’m not stupid,’ said Jack Searle.
‘Of course not,’ said Dave, ‘but perhaps you could leave this to the police.’ Robert could hear a change in Dave’s voice. Clearly he had also felt the anxiety here in this room.
‘Luke is my grandson,’ said Jack.
‘I know, sir, but we don’t want the situation to get out of hand,’ said Robert.
Ellen handed Robert a picture of the father and son. She had been standing quietly holding the picture in her hands. Robert glanced down. Just as he thought: the man was small.
‘I’ll take that,’ said Dave.
‘He likes to ride in the truck,’ said Jack and Robert turned to find him still standing at the door.
‘I bet he does,’ said Robert, remembering Mark as a three-year-old, fascinated by anything with an engine.
‘I’ve got a proper seat for him and everything,’ said Jack, staring at Robert as if defying him to question his grandparenting abilities.
‘My little boy used to love that sort of thing too,’ said Robert.
‘So you know,’ said Jack.
‘I do,’ nodded Robert.
Jack tipped his head just a little and Robert could see that he had been deemed fit enough to help.
‘But perhaps it would be better if you remained at the house, sir.’
‘Would you?’ said Jack.
‘No,’ Robert acknowledged. ‘But I am with the police.’
‘I bet you’re a father before you’re a cop,’ said Jack, glancing at his daughter, who had returned to her chair.
Robert had nothing to reply to that and Jack turned and went out of the door. Robert knew he couldn’t have stopped him without using physical force. It was easier to just let the man go, and anyway, Alex Harrow could be anywhere. It was unlikely the grandfather would find him.
10
