What Came Before

by Anna George

  ‘She looked great in the rushes.’

  Elle sat up. ‘The bath scene works, I think, but the tender scenes after that . . . I’m wondering if something happened with Jay.’

  Mira battled to keep her tone even. ‘Let me get this right: you missed it during the shoot, watching the rushes . . . but now you’re sure.’

  ‘I had a tiny hunch during the shoot but . . .’ Elle paused. ‘Mira, I’d love to be wrong. And I’m trying to make it work.’

  Engulfed by anger, Mira kept her face to the window. She knew she shouldn’t have accepted this lift. Especially not with the boys in tow. She couldn’t trust herself to speak. In the silence, her anger multiplied exponentially.

  ‘This isn’t about the film, is it?’ said Elle.

  Mira shrugged. No, it wasn’t. ‘I don’t understand what has happened to you.’

  ‘Nothing. I’m happy.’

  Mira’s laugh was unkind but she couldn’t restrain herself. ‘These last four months, it’s like you’ve taken up with a cult. The last time we spoke, properly spoke, you’d left him.’

  ‘Then he came back and we worked things through. Can’t you respect that?’

  Mira turned in her seat as if to launch a verbal rocket. ‘No.’ She spoke to the shock on Elle’s face. ‘I’m not going to collude with you on this. Every time I see you, you look more shattered.’

  ‘David loves me, and he’s better now. You don’t know him the way I do.’

  Mira shook her head, as though further discussion was pointless.

  ‘You know, we don’t need your blessing.’

  ‘Pull over, we’re here.’

  As Elle turned into a cramped car park in front of a private house, Mira sprang out.

  ‘Quick, boys, Mummy’s late.’

  The children burst out of the car like slingshots, and Mira couldn’t help herself. ‘I want the old Elle back, because if this is love, you’re better off without it.’

  Elle’s voice was raised as a line of semis rolled forward, exhaling. ‘You’re hardly a paragon of good judgement!’

  Fuming, Mira glanced to Jesse’s pale, wee face and grabbed his hand. She took a step, stopped. ‘Do you even remember Hal Hartley?’ she yelled. ‘Love is respect, admiration and trust!’

  Pricked by guilt at the memory, embarrassed too, Mira veers off the Princes Highway and into the gloom of a tea-treed rest area. As the car idles, Jesse grumbles in the back seat but she ignores him. After that, all communication with Elle ended, other than talk related to their film, and that became even testier once the investors saw the rough cut and gave their notes. Though Elle organised the occasional social event, which Mira attended grudgingly, Mira mostly left Elle to her husband. The cost of that course of action she still feels.

  ‘Why are we stopping?’ says Jesse, his voice croaky with sleep.

  ‘We’re having a rest.’

  This last break has been by far the longest – two months. And Elle managed it on her own. Yes, Mira thinks now, the old Elle did come back, sadder and disillusioned, but restored. That muscle, the one that was so weak for so long, must be strong by now.

  In the silence, gradually Mira’s emotions clear like clouds to reveal the question she’s been avoiding. If Elle refuses him, categorically, how will he take it? With a nod to Doris, she thinks: What is he capable of ?

  Reviewing Elle’s behaviour through the prism of possible physical harm, Mira doesn’t like what she sees. Didn’t he throw a bowl at her once? The longer she considers it, the more the trajectory from Elle’s unlikely elbow injury to her guilty backflips and waning looks worries Mira. Especially when it culminates, she can see now, in Elle’s behaviour at their film’s opening night, which was the last time that Mira saw Elle with David – the one night, even now, she’s not ready to recall.

  In that deserted rest area, Mira’s car is cold by the time she dials Troy, blurts her concerns. Troy asks her to repeat herself. Three renditions of the story later, he agrees, reluctantly, to meet her at their favourite pancake place in Geelong, feed the boys and take them to Jan Juc.

  ‘If it will make you feel better, I’ll call him,’ he says. ‘But Mira, I think she’s fine, wherever she is. He’s a tosser but he’s not a brute.’

  Forty minutes later, Mira is alone, finally, and driving wildly in a north-east direction. Her telephone rings, weirdly upbeat in the cabin.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I got through.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He hasn’t seen her since June.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘I could hear the lie in his voice.’

  ‘Fuck.’ Mira accelerates.

  Troy breathes, hesitating.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He told me how she’s ruined him. He wanted to know whether Elle understood the damage she’s done.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I will never understand that relationship.’

  ‘No,’ says Mira. ‘You won’t.’

  Troy clears his throat. ‘Mira, ring me as soon as you find her.’

  As the call ends, Mira’s resolve is palpable. In another forty minutes she’ll be back in Melbourne, and she will find Elle tonight if she has to stalk the coward herself, police in tow.

  19

  Desolate, Elle doesn’t want to observe any more. She was so foolish, so impressionable and weak. She considers her body soberly in all its sordid detail. Viewed from above, from the back, it looks so narrow and slight. Her hair, that morning cut into a twenties bob, is fanned across her face, and beneath her head it is soaked in clumps. At least she can’t see her eyes and any dead-fish stare. Even so, her body looks so frail and inconsequential. One hand is outstretched, above her head, in front of the washing machine. It is reaching as it does when she’s asleep. But she doesn’t look asleep, not with her legs twisted like pipe-cleaners and her fingers streaked with ribbons of black.

  As a final insult, on her right foot, on the big toe, the cockroach is nibbling.

  Perhaps, she thinks, I deserved this.

  Too late, she identified the interplay between what she did or didn’t do, and this tendency of his: to punish.

  Married, they had hit several cherished high notes: picnicking at the Heide gallery, lunching with his mother at Brighton Beach, taking Alex’s girls to the zoo. They even had two mildly torturous dinner parties with Troy and Mira. And David kept up the appointments with Marion, fortnightly. He’d begun to quote her like an oracle. ‘I wish I had a dollar,’ Marion had said, apparently, ‘for every time a client longed for his relationship to be the way it was in the beginning.’ And, ‘Disappointment is an inevitable part of any long-term union.’ And then, ‘A secure, loving relationship can have positive long-term effects on both parties.’ Elle listened, wondering what exactly they talked about. But she didn’t dare ask lest she disturb the process.

  During this time, David danced around the house, gave her pre-loved fiction and made chocolatey desserts. His anger abated; the jagged edges were shaved off his moods, and he continued to be civil to her friends. Perhaps because Mira and Troy were having troubles, with Troy pushing for their clans to move to his new Jan Juc house and Mira reluctant to hitch her wagon train to his so soon, David and Troy struck up an unlikely camaraderie. It transpired that David was familiar with Troy’s florid paintings of seventies surf culture. A meeting with some buyers was mooted. He was, for a month or two, being good – good, that is, for David.

  Marriage had seemed to agree with him: he was fit now, his body muscled; he ate well, slept at night.

  Most importantly, she had seen fresh glimpses of who he could be if he let himself be happy. She’d caught him in unguarded moments singing as he dressed, or exhilarated after a jog, or laughing on the telephone. Cheeky, playful, boyish. The David she loved, the man she married. But, despite her efforts – schlepping on the domestic front, sharing none of her anguish in the edit suite, ignoring his farting and his naked television viewing, even feigning interest in his leg
al matters – the good David didn’t last and the promised David didn’t come.

  Little by little, he began to snap at her again. ‘Isn’t it your class tonight?’ she’d ask, or ‘Can’t someone else go into the office?’ And he’d fire back: ‘I don’t care,’ and ‘No, they can’t!’ She found herself retracing their steps, questioning her memory. She began to ask less. To curb her chattiness to ward off his tetchiness. And then, for reasons she didn’t quite understand, their art-centric social life collapsed.

  One muggy evening, as he walked his fingers up the jutting staircase of her ribs, she felt apprehensive. Outside, rain was trying to fall. She told herself that if she acquiesced, perhaps it would go smoothly. It would be over in half an hour. It might dislodge her disappointing day, quiet her ever-rattling brain. Like going for a bike ride or eating fruit. And it might not hurt.

  It had been hard to predict, that prodding pain born in Red Hill. One moment, when she was on top, or her legs were over his shoulders, it was there; yet the next time, there was nothing. He could slam into her and find no resistance. It was random, unpredictable. But its very unpredictability taxed her. Whether it hurt or not, she was thinking about it. Anticipating it, trying to avoid it. David found it irritating. Sometimes, when she asked, he tried to steer to the left, to pivot or rotate. But, more often, he forgot or stopped.

  Oddly, though, while dulling her desire, it had the opposite effect on his. As soon as she laid her head on the pillow, she was overtaken. Overtaken by a determined army of tiptoeing fingers, ready to pilfer and thieve, as if her body was unguarded or without borders. While she wasn’t looking for passports and visas, a salute, given eye to eye, would have done the trick. Or at least one line raising the question. It would have given her the chance to choose, to acknowledge their separate states. Or at least remind him of the pain.

  David edged his body closer. She could feel his hands on the back of her neck, kneading the clammy flesh beneath her hair. His body curved around hers like a hot shadow. She could feel his penis nudging her thigh. It was at once enticing, menacing and infuriating. She wanted to grab it and snap it in half.

  Turning towards him, she opted, for once, to decline. But as her mouth opened he kissed her so deeply she felt invaded anew. Listening to him groan, she wondered how they had travelled so completely from his nocturnal indifference to this – his plunging tongue and penis – when she felt that prod. As usual, the pain was hot and angry. She sucked in a breath.

  ‘That was a definite stab.’

  David pulled away from her. ‘Again?’

  She nodded. To her surprise, twin tears escaped.

  David slumped onto his back.

  ‘I’ll see a doctor,’ she said, ‘once we finish the final cut.’

  He made an indignant humph. And she curled away from him, an island again on the sea of mattress. Outside, the rain had been blown away. The wind had deferred to silence. And her foreboding grew.

  It was early morning when she felt his touch again. She imagined she was floating on the sea, ebbing with the tide. Even in sleep, her shoulders were clenched and knotted. David worked away at her, rolling the folds of her in his hands. He sat on her backside and caressed her arms, her twiggy wrists and the bony tail of her spine. She murmured. Wordless. She was an undulating land without border control, its leader subterranean. He slid along her and sat on her thighs. He massaged her buttocks. He took his time. Like this she was separate from him yet surrendered.

  Parting her cheeks, he entered her.

  She awoke, completely, and propped on her elbows, her hands in fists. ‘Get out.’

  ‘Hey, it’s okay.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  David withdrew. ‘I thought you might like it. Did it hurt?’

  ‘I don’t. And it did.’

  David slid his hand along her leg, as if she was a flighty filly he’d ridden for the first time, and she stiffened. He gave her thigh a quick, hard slap. ‘Okay, okay.’

  Dazed, Elle lay flat on the mattress with her face in her pillow. Sleep had been torn from her, along with a kind of virginity.

  That morning, she visited her GP then made scores of calls until she found a gynaecologist with a cancellation. Mr Hanna was younger than her and an enthusiast, both of which compounded her anxieties. He bounced like a recent graduate in his airy, cool office, decorated with bronze statuettes of naked women – bending, stretching, standing tall – and explained the workings of her body. She listened, rendered silent by the statistics and the deductions he made – based on her age, lack of pregnancy (ever) and one symptom.

  ‘Ninety per cent likelihood,’ he said, ‘it’s the wayward weeping of a disappointed uterus.’

  Once, she would’ve laughed. But she’d come with fears of cancer – ovarian, uterine, even bowel – so this news brought relief, for a moment. Until she thought of her husband’s reaction to this news.

  It was the endometrium going outside the uterus, the wrong way, like a backwash of pool water. She studied Mr Hanna and his milky teeth as he went on. The backwash was like a normal menstruation, he said: it bled and wept. But then it healed like a sore. A lesion. It grew sticky, clear gunk. It attached itself to other organs. Caused sticky links. Like glue, she thought. Weeping and gluing. Weeping and gluing.

  That evening, she dozed fitfully until daybreak. Her dreams were the colour of hibiscus. Blood poured from her, soiling the bed, the sheets, flowing across her thighs, down to her ankles. Amid it, she heard a man’s voice, over and over, describing the uterus and menstruation: the weeping of a disappointed uterus. The wayward weeping. Then the blood swelled within her and she saw it floating in bubbles towards other organs – the ovaries, the bowel, the bladder. Even as she dreamed, she knew it was her body turning against itself. Rebelling in frustration. Binding her organs to one another. Filling spaces meant to be void. Shedding from a place meant, by now, to be occupied.

  When she awoke, she was cradling her abdomen. Though her foreboding was acute, she knew she had to tell him.

  On the city-bound train, she watched the houses pass like the slow images on an old film and tried not to think ahead to their impending conversation. Apprehension churned in her gut. But what, she wondered, was she so afraid of ? He could hardly throw a bowl at her at Freeman & Milne.

  Today, she was pretending that they were like proper couples – couples who popped into each other’s work or who spoke on the phone, without concern about whether it was a good time, whether he was in the right mood, whether there would be silence or sarcasm or aggro. As if they were as her parents had been once, a couple who followed each other’s concerns with genuine, impossible interest. She craved the highs and lows of daily intercourse seen through each other’s eyes: shared, relived, split. She wanted to share herself with him, unreservedly, unguardedly. Specifically, she wanted him to know, somehow, her film had slipped away, and, married to his changeable behaviour, she was unhappy.

  But outside his building, her ready words dissolved.

  Since leaving, she hadn’t been back to Freeman & Milne and she saw its tower as though for the first time. The whole fifty storeys were constructed of charcoal glass. Rain slid down the windows like oil. Inside, offices were alight and stacked like shelves. Figures were bent over desks, burrowing in filing cabinets, on the telephone. There was such busyness. Making her way to the elevators, she counted heads to steady herself. More people were in this foyer than she’d seen all year. Some sat on streamlined couches and sifted through briefcases while others carried coffee and paper bags from the cafe. There wasn’t one person doing absolutely nothing. Even the security guards were animated. Suited men and women passed and she averted her eyes. She was reluctant to be recognised by her old colleagues, as if she couldn’t trust her face. As if she had lost all memory of the language of this place.

  When the lift doors opened she faced a vast, five-star reception area. Charcoal marble and crimson flowers greeted her. Beyond the entrance were panels of glas
s and a long drop to the street. A young woman was on reception, speaking into a mouthpiece; with her black hair coiled and her skin creamy gold, she was another spectacular ornament that Elle didn’t recognise. She glimpsed her own reflection in the glass. Her hair was stiff, her jeans green with stains, her boots leaving a trail of mud on the marble. Ducking her head, she slid past the desk, heading for the southern tower.

  As she pushed through an internal door, she spied beneath her fingernails remnants of her garden’s basil. Briefly she was unsettled. How much she had forgotten herself. In the hall, a staff waitress passed, regarding her with something like pity.

  Approaching his office in the south-eastern corner, her nerves grew. His unpredictability was, she realised, worse even than his bark.

  She crept past glass boxes housing bent bodies. Stress emanated from the walls of densely packed shelves. One by one, she eyed the solicitors, associates, junior partners, but each ignored her. To her relief, not one of them was familiar. As she neared his corner, she felt eyes flicker in her wake, with the prospect of tearoom fodder. In his vast space, two walls of glass met. And there he sat, stooped over a thick document on his desk as an older, standing man stabbed a finger at the print. The man’s voice was a low rumble, but his face was crimson. Out of sight, Elle stopped.

  She loitered on the other side of the grey partition. She was facing now a cell of four women, who were typing and answering calls. Ignored, she felt even more conspicuous. Abruptly, the wall shuddered and the man exited. He passed her as if she were a pot plant. And she vacillated anew. Clearly, now was not the time.

  Then David appeared. Fully suited, clean-shaven and in matching socks. But ashen. Seeing her, he started. He took in her work boots, her jeans and wayward hair. She was, patently, in the wrong uniform, the wrong barracks.

  ‘Where’s the fire?’

  ‘Hi. I thought we could get some lunch, go to Treasury Gardens.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not today.’ He gestured to the lift well. But she didn’t move. She bit the inside of her lip. ‘Everything okay?’ she said.