After the Darkness

by Brown, Honey

  That night, Bruce came to bed with the laptop. He put a pillow behind his back and balanced the computer on his knees. He’d been locked away in the office since I’d arrived home with the children. His dinner had gone cold on the bench and been put away in the fridge. A blustery wind rattled the window. I could hear the occasional whinny from the stables, the horses unsettled by the weather. The WithArt website was on the laptop screen. ‘Look at this,’ Bruce said, and turned the computer to me. He’d found a photograph of Guy Grant standing with a group of adolescents, all dressed in the same work shirts and pants, ready for a workshop or hands-on session of some sort. The clothes looked crisp and new, and matched those Reuben had been wearing. ‘Recognise the clothes?’ Bruce said.

  ‘Why did you ring my mother?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know why you did that.’

  ‘Look what I’m showing you.’

  ‘You didn’t trust me, did you?’

  ‘I thought it would help you,’ he replied, offhand.

  ‘Really? It seemed to me you wanted to make sure it was the mugging story I told her. I’m not angry with you; I think I’m frightened. We’re not acting right, Bruce. It’s unlike you to do that. You must have known by telling her it would take away any chance of me leaning on her.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t think that. Would you please look at this,’ he said. ‘This something pretty big I’ve found.’

  I switched my gaze to the computer, fought my feelings of betrayal.

  ‘Guy Grant isn’t the brains of WithArt,’ Bruce said. ‘He’s the money. Look at him … as if he needs a lathe or a drill press or a gantry. He looks like he wouldn’t even know how to use a screwdriver. He might have paid for the cliff house, but it’s not his vision.’ Bruce looked up from the screen and straight into my face. ‘So who do you build a house for? Whose passions do you support and indulge?’

  The detective-like nature of the question threw me off. No matter what we did or said it made us seem unstable. ‘Your partner,’ Bruce said, answering his own question. ‘The person you are with.’ He opened a page he’d saved to favourites. On screen was a newspaper article, dated two years earlier, with a photo of Guy Grant and the Melbourne lord mayor standing beside a freeway. In the background was a line of bright-orange sculptures, shaped to resemble huge potted trees. I knew those trees. I’d travelled past them many times. The article was about the lord mayor’s support of WithArt, an ongoing initiative to commission a piece of artwork annually.

  ‘Guy Grant is the face,’ Bruce said. ‘Reuben was the brains and the creativity. There’s nothing anywhere about Guy being married. No wife. No kids.’

  ‘Wouldn’t there be pictures of the two of them together if they were a couple?’

  ‘Not if they were in the closet.’

  He brought the photo of the adolescents in matching work clothes back up on screen. ‘Look at these clothes …’

  ‘Maybe there was a set of clothes at the house, and Reuben put them on.’

  ‘Is that really all you think? You can’t see how obvious it is that this man is involved?’

  ‘I don’t know what I see. I don’t think you do either,’ I said, close to tears.

  Bruce closed the computer and put it at the foot of the bed. ‘All right. You don’t like looking at it. I understand.’

  ‘Do you feel like it’s my fault, Bruce?’ I said. ‘Do you blame me? I was un-drugged, I was the rational one. I was the one making decisions. Do you think I made all the wrong ones? Are you angry at me?’

  ‘How could I be angry at you, Trudy? How could I blame you? You didn’t want to go in there in the first place. You sensed something wasn’t right. I ignored it. I keep thinking how many times you tried to tell me you weren’t feeling right about the place, how many chances we had to leave …’ The bitterness of his regret looked to have settled on his tongue: he grimaced.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I said.

  ‘I had a gut feeling too; I usually go with that.’

  ‘I would never dream of blaming you.’

  Bruce returned the computer to his lap. He opened the photos we’d taken of our injuries when we’d come home from the Sunnyside police station. We’d put them in a password-protected file. They were unprofessional and clumsy images. I think he wanted us to look at them to remind us that what had happened couldn’t be blamed on either one of us. He angled the computer so I could see them too. Those strange hours were in his skin, deepening his lines and wrinkles. They were especially evident in his unsmiling mouth. Seeing the photos now, the unsettling feeling returned – every bruise, cut and laceration was steeped in violence. We looked at each image in silence. The pictures of me were nothing compared to Bruce’s. Mine had a try-hard element to them. The scrapes and knocks a G8 demonstrator might thrust in front of a news camera – look, I was treated roughly! The redness in my eyes was the only thing that came with a backstory of pain and fear. I was reminded, looking at them, of that moment when my phone was taken from my hands. Reuben had been standing there, looking down at me as I had groped the air and felt blindly around me. I wondered if he smiled while watching me, or whether he took his murdering more seriously than that.

  ‘Does it feel real to you?’ I said. ‘Sometimes it’s like my body knows but my mind isn’t sure it happened.’

  Bruce went through each photo again, quicker this time, looking at the shot in its entirety, trying to get an outsider’s perspective.

  ‘It’s the things I did that remind me the most. I should have stopped before killing him.’ He looked sideways at me in the dark. ‘I got it for a second, you know? I wanted him dead, I wanted him destroyed, and I wanted to feel it happen, and do it, and to …’ He breathed out. Even in the gloom I could see he’d turned pale. ‘It was like I’d been given permission to act like that, but not by God or anything good.’

  ‘By nature?’

  ‘Then why does it feel so wrong?’

  ‘Nature isn’t necessarily good.’

  I looked into my husband’s eyes and he let me. He put the computer aside and I moved closer. I didn’t hug him; it seemed like a demeaning thing to do. I sensed it was important I didn’t overprotect. I lay down and he lay beside me. A therapist would no doubt have something to say about our method, but we used sex as a way to broach the topic of the sexual assault.

  It was experimental. I was reminded of the first time we’d made love after Steven had been born – Bruce had seen me go through a physical ordeal then, he’d been shocked by the pain I had endured, the length of it, the trauma to my body and my mind (I’d screamed bloody murder), and even though I assured him I’d recovered in no time at all, four weeks and I’d felt fine, seemingly unchanged, a part of him had doubted I would ever bounce back. I touched Bruce with that same trepidation now, and beneath my touch was the hope that sex would remain good between us. I was as curious and careful as Bruce had been back then. I’d seen clues, I could guess what Reuben had done. I doubted Bruce would bounce back, and I was surprised when I felt his full erection.

  I suppose you could call my husband a sexual being. I’d always assumed everyone was a sexual being, in one way or another, but my girlfriend had informed me otherwise: her husband was asexual and could happily do without. Bruce couldn’t. He also used sex to show affection and to communicate. I never had to coax foreplay out of my husband. Those pages and pages in women’s magazines about how to bring romance into the bedroom were lost on me. In many ways, Bruce’s needs were more complex than mine. Without sex, he felt disconnected from me, but, also, and more importantly almost, disconnected in general. Whereas I knew I would function well enough without it. This time, though, it was a mutual feeling – I wanted to use sex as a way to understand and to communicate my feelings, my willingness to not shirk a difficult issue, to tell him I wasn’t shying away from what had happened to him. We didn’t kiss. We didn’t stroke or smile or rub or graze. Orgasms weren’t what we were after. We tried sex wi
th one another.

  It was too early, though, to be having sex, to be having this conversation.

  I started crying. It wasn’t the sort of crying a woman should do in bed. Tears slid freely down past my ears and wet my neck. Bruce touching me caused fear and hurt. The intensity of the terrible thing that had happened welled up inside me and couldn’t be contained. The hurt was big, bigger than me. Bruce’s body moving against me rubbed raw against my mind. Repetitive motion rasped like a steel file inside my head. I told him to go slower. My breathing was jagged. It filled my ears and put me crawling on hands and knees up the spiral staircase. My open mouth tasted the still air of the garage. I blinked and my eyes burned. I moved my arm and the sound of the sheet against my elbow was Reuben’s shirt brushing against me.

  ‘You get on top,’ Bruce suggested.

  I knew it wouldn’t work.

  ‘Stop,’ I said.

  Bruce bowed his head and pressed his face into my shoulder. His body tensed and I felt his breath, warm with grief, against my skin. That day was so real then. I’d been right – our bodies did know, the memory lived inside our bones; using our bodies had released it into our bloodstream. Those hours surged into our brains. We could taste, smell, feel Reuben’s house. Reuben was in bed with us, he was vivid. His thoughts in our heads and his will to hurt us were tangible. He was in the light sheen of sweat covering our bodies. We would have to get up and wash him off.

  Bruce and I tried kissing as a last-ditch measure. It was a nightmare. The moment our lips touched it was as though our pain combined and the grief grew beyond all comprehension. We pulled away, shamed by the concentrated nature of the connection, by what we’d seen and felt in one another. My husband had been hurt by that man, but, more than that, he’d been disgraced. Honour mattered to Bruce, and it was that above all else that had been held down and taken from him. I felt it in his lips – it was in the cautious touch of his tongue against mine, the fear of passing over what he wanted left unspoken.

  He sensed my insight and the shame between us increased. I crawled to the end of the bed and used the doona to stifle my sobbing.

  Bruce sat hunched on the side of the bed with his elbows on his knees.

  ‘We’re in such trouble, Trudy,’ he said, and it was unlike him to be such a defeatist. ‘We’re absolutely fucked.’

  14

  For days after that we were subdued and softly spoken with one another. Blinking in the glare, I think, of the spotlight our attempt at sex had shone on us. I felt hollow and Bruce’s gaze was empty. Going through the motions of work and parenting wasn’t difficult; it was like we drifted from one chore to the next. We woke each morning in the same positions we’d laid down in, the quilt unruffled over our bodies, yet having hardly slept – closing our eyes and powering down into the sort of sleep computers switch to when left alone, never truly switching off, and never properly recharging. We ate, enough to keep Summer distracted by what next to feed us. We talked, enough to blend in and deflect any close inspection. There were times I was fooled by my own ability to seem okay, and I’d have an odd moment of not knowing exactly where I was in terms of my headspace. Then I’d remember the attack, I’d recall the hesitation in my husband’s lips when we kissed, and my head would drain of thought. The children sometimes shouted near me, or bumped their solid and vibrant bodies up against me, and I would be jarred back to real life for a moment, shocked by how loud and how colourful reality was.

  As though recognising we couldn’t stay like that, we met up one morning in the driveway. There was no breeze and the sun was shining. It was cold, though. The trees seemed reluctant to shed their leaves.

  ‘This is another thing in our life we have to get through,’ Bruce said. ‘It’s our war story. We have to think of it like that. It’s hard to see it now, but it’s going to make us stronger.’

  ‘It’s probably normal,’ I said in support. ‘All these things we’re experiencing. If we did see someone, they would probably say it’s normal with trauma. There’s no way around it. To eventually cope we have to go through all this.’

  Bruce nodded.

  ‘But we will cope,’ I said.

  The children were waiting in the car, ready to be taken to school. Steven hung his head out the window. ‘Mum, any chance of us leaving this year?’

  Bruce and I left in our separate cars.

  When I arrived at Cove Street Bruce took me by the hand. He was my shield, keeping the tradesmen from chatting too long with me, smiling for me, bringing me in close to his side and getting short-tempered with the painters when they arrived with their spray units. He demanded they pack them up and do what I’d asked – paint the replaced interior walls by hand, the old-fashioned way, with rollers and brushes, a quality job, no fine misty spray drifting over everything and barely coating the plasterboard. He sat on an upturned crate with me in the downstairs bedroom of townhouse number four. We looked down at the wide strip of dark-coloured cement, freshly poured, semi-dry, covering the newly laid pipe underground.

  ‘Will we try these townhouses on the market?’ he said. ‘Even though things are still a bit depressed it might be worth a try. I want to get rid of them, don’t you?’

  He was talking business as an additional way to ground us.

  ‘This is too far from Delaney to manage easily,’ I agreed. ‘The beauty of all our rentals is that they’re no more than ten minutes from the office. We should put these on the market for a break-even price. Forget about this being our big payoff project. I can’t be bothered making a killing.’

  He put his arm around me and pulled me close. ‘I love you so much. You’re right, we’ll find a way to get on top of it. It’s not going to beat us.’

  On the way back to the car my phone alerted me to a text. I stopped on the footpath. Why aren’t you at Four Seasons? I read.

  I didn’t recognise the number. The Four Seasons reference was all I had to go on. I texted back, Is that you Finn?

  Finn? came the quick reply. Who the fuck is Finn?

  The message could only be from one of my girlfriends. No one else communicated with me this way. A second text came zooming in: Get your butt here and start explaining Finnnn!

  My phone rang. I took the call. A cackle of female laughter greeted me down the line.

  ‘Trudy, Trudy, Trudy,’ my girlfriends sang into the phone. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m missing something?’

  ‘Lunch. Derr. Four Seasons Inn. You made the booking, love.’

  ‘Sorry, I’d forgotten. I’ll be there in about an hour.’

  ‘An hour?’

  I could hear them laughing at something one of the other girls had said.

  ‘Start without me.’

  ‘Hurry up!’

  I hung up. A text came through from the sedate member of our crew. Come and control them.

  I arrived at the Four Seasons to the contrite faces of my friends looking at me from their table in the main restaurant. The hotel had not long been refurbished. Someone had taken the step of doing away with the plush fabrics and carpeted floors, but they’d stopped short of a full minimalist makeover. The chandelier remained. The chairs were upholstered. There were candelabras and lamps and tea trolleys. The wall to the left of the bar had been taken out and four plain pillars put in its place. Beyond the pillars was the kitchen, where the staff could be seen working. The kitchen smells and noises escaped and mingled with the dining room chatter.

  I’d booked a table a month ago, just before Bruce and I had left for our holiday. The restaurant had become popular since the renovation. The tables I wound my way through were filled with women chatting. There were couples seated by the windows. One long table by the bar was filled with men in shirts and ties.

  ‘Blame her,’ Jem, the sedate one, said as I approached. She pointed at Nadine.

  Nadine’s plunging maxi-dress could serve as an apt metaphor for the woman inside it – cleavage bared, long loose skirt sweeping the floor, material
bunched up and untidy. Nadine was an accountant, three times divorced, with a child to each ex-husband. Bruce disapproved of Nadine. Jem, a low-key working mother, was more his style. Jem was on school councils, and snuck in each day to straighten her children’s bedrooms, in a way they might not notice. I’d like to be able to say that next to Nadine’s black sheep Jem was a dark horse, but she wasn’t even that. My other two friends were Bonita, a maths lecturer and academic, and Megan, a secondary school teacher whose marriage had disintegrated the previous year. She was still fragile due to that. Bonita was the eldest at forty-six, then me at forty-five, Jem at forty-four, and Megan and Nadine were tied on forty-one, the babies. I was closest to Nadine and Jem. I’d known them the longest.

  Nadine explained to me in a stage whisper, ‘I didn’t know this Finn worked here? I was saying his name —’

  ‘You were shouting his name,’ Jem said.

  ‘The waitress went into the kitchen and told him we were talking about him.’ Nadine’s eyes grew round. ‘He came out. It went a little pear-shaped from there …’

  ‘He thought there was some issue with the food,’ Megan explained.

  On the table were two empty bottles of wine. A pile of dirty plates was stacked at one end for easy collection; Jem would have tidied them for the staff.

  ‘Sit down,’ Nadine said to me. ‘No, don’t, stand up. Have you lost weight?’ She turned in her seat and said to Megan, ‘Look at her.’

  ‘Keep on with what happened,’ Jem whispered harshly.

  ‘Why do you look so gorgeous?’

  I sat down. The kitchen was to my right. Over the tops of the diners’ heads I could see the staff busy at their different workstations. They wore black uniforms, with black baseball caps pushed down firmly over their hair. It was hard to tell them apart.

  Nadine pulled her chair in close to mine. ‘I had to explain what happened and that we didn’t hate his meals. He looked like he was about to cry.’