What Came Before

by Anna George

Perhaps only thirty centimetres from the floor, poised on one elbow and hip, she pauses. She hears a siren in the distance, growing faint. Beyond her house, lives go on. Cars crash. Traffic snarls. She can’t take it in: her absolute disconnection from everyone and everything. She is a small island of woman on her tiles. The thought drains the last of her resolve. Even if she did make it to her telephone, what could she say – with a whistle? Her call would be dismissed, a prank, a nuisance. Her thoughts threaten to run on, taking her further from herself. An image pops into her mind of a child’s face, soft and fleshy. Vaguely familiar. Jesse or Max? Those beautiful boys. The image steadies her. She breathes, whistles . . . waits . . . What she needs to do is not complicated: get to an external door, wave down a passer-by. The front, she decides, would be best, with the most chance of traffic, though it’s the furthest. Simple enough, when you can walk and speak, in daylight. Her galley kitchen, her long hallway; she has to survive them. It’s as if her humble home has become the front line.

  She inches closer to her washing machine and raises her right arm across her body. Carefully, she turns herself onto her hands and knees. She becomes conscious of the lack of pain and its absence is a gift. Staying on all fours, she’s conscious too that she’s almost up; coping. As she steadies, she becomes aware of something hanging. Heavy and loose. Reaching down, she touches warm, wet meat. Panic surges again in her chest. What has he done? Her arms tremble violently and their shaking threatens to spread. When she closes her eyes, she sees David’s face too close to hers, his expression raw and enraged. A matching burst of anger begins to clear her thoughts. Pushing the slippery stuff back inside her, she wraps the ugly green towel around her waist, like a corset. Using the washing machine, she pulls herself to her feet and, upright, tries to gather her circling thoughts. It’s almost beyond her. Anger, shock and disbelief whirl within her, carrying round and round the same questions: How could he do this? Why? Why!

  It is not until she feels the distant flutter in her stomach like the touch of wings that she remembers. And she lets out a long and soundless wail.

  25

  Within minutes, Mira will be outside Elle’s house again. She feels unbearably hot. Why didn’t she squeeze through that window? Speeding towards the intersection of Gamon and Somerville roads, she’d plagued by images of Elle injured and prone.

  Please, she thinks, bartering with the divine. If Elle is unharmed, I will never be judgemental again. I swear.

  When the lights rise to red, Mira hits the redial button. Please, please, pick up.

  Halfway down her hall, Elle is slipping under again when she hears the chiming. The sound is so loud; at first she can’t place it. Cold is seeping into her bones and she can hear her teeth chattering along with that horrible breathing. The wetness of that towel around her abdomen is bothering her too – that and the tiredness. So far she has blacked out three times. Each time she’s awoken disoriented, her fear escalating a notch, her fragility that much more obvious. Inescapable. Rose’s survival is the only thing driving her forward now. The infant’s face keeps popping into her head and she tries to hold it, to memorise it. But Rose slips from her, like a fragment from a dream. As the chiming persists, though she can’t place it, she wills herself to push on. She is stooped, as one foot and then the other scrape the surface of her floorboards. She is, she fears, barely progressing. A metre feels like an hour and her front door, her finish line, is six metres away.

  Then she sees it: her mobile phone, in a green fruit bowl on her hall table. A moment later, it falls silent. The effort it takes for her to reach the midpoint in her hallway leaves her faint. If only she could close her eyes, slip back to that floating peace. Only for a moment. Against the wall, she’s creating a smudge on the plaster, like a bleeding shadow; it takes all of her will not to look. Elle feels herself slipping. Down the wall she goes, heavily, like a bag of bricks. Into the blackness, she thinks: If only I never met him; if only I didn’t relent, again and again. As her ears ring, her final lament: If only I didn’t tell him.

  Seconds or maybe minutes later, the phone starts again and pulls her back. Leaning into the wall, Elle raises herself and then pushes off: one foot and then the next. Reaching the narrow table, she glimpses her friend’s name lingering in the screen and draws strength from it. But, as she picks up, the name disappears. Confused, she retrieves the missed call. With her heart pounding in her throat, she hears the ringing signal and then that deep, rich voice, and she hisses. Whistles. But her tongue, her voice box, will not give. Words jam in her throat. Snared. Too big for the tiny space that he’s left.

  ‘Is that you?’

  Hearing Mira’s concern she wants to weep, to crumble like a child into the arms of her mother.

  ‘Elle, are you all right? Say something, please, you’re scaring me, where are you?’

  She bangs the telephone on the hall table. A text, I’ll text. But as she cuts the call, the telephone beeps, the screen fades and it’s as flat and useless as a tile. This time, she closes her eyes and slides onto her haunches. She hears her father’s voice: ‘Ellie,’ he’s saying, ‘don’t stop.’

  But she is sorely tempted. She waits, slumped against the wall, for the decision to be made. She waits, breathing noisily, shivering, almost impatient with it. But it doesn’t come. She’s as grounded, as earthed, as her house on its timber stumps. In the hiatus, as the minutes pass, she finds herself listening. For that delicious flutter, otherworldly yet within. She was only just learning to identify it – not a rumble, not wind, not pain. Rather, a delicate, internal tickle. Consciously pregnant for only two weeks, she hasn’t had the time to get accustomed to that thickness around the waist, the need to slide doors open wider, the need to rest. But she’d known, right away, to savour that flutter. To celebrate and cherish it.

  Her gaze shifts to her locked-up study where, inside, a white cot stands, pristine and already made up with sheets the colour of the sky, topped with a pale pink teddy. When it had arrived, two days earlier, she’d hummed ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ as she’d tucked in edges, smoothed crumples, in unrivalled delight. She had not known love like it.

  She listens, but beyond the chattering of her teeth and the rasping of her breath, nothing comes.

  Dave is bent double on the bitumen when he sees movement in the house. He stares, slack-jawed, through the darkened windows. Without streetlights, without a moon, the night isn’t helping. But he’s convinced a shadow’s moving. He barrels across the nature strip to her gate. There he halts, as if it were electrified. Is that really her, or a trick? Is the night, this crazy night, playing with him?

  Maybe, but there it goes again, growing closer, in the hall. Any second now the locks will click. His body jerks. It’s fucking unbelievable. But then again, it isn’t . . . If anyone could survive that – survive him – it’d be her. He grabs the gate’s pickets. His palms are wet. The window is black again, the shadows still. He waits.

  Slowly, he buckles. He stays on his knees: folded out of sight. He can see the months ahead now. Wherever he is, she’ll come for him in the dark, as she is tonight. Dead or alive, she’ll look at him with those big, cold eyes. That her feelings for him are gone astounds him. He pictures her as she was in her kitchen: content, self-sufficient and aglow. Unscathed without him. No desire left in her. Definitely no love. His power over her, which he’d never fully understood, gone. And now, the possibility she’s alive somehow makes all that worse. The baby too . . .

  He tugs his telephone from his pocket. His thumb presses firmly, three times. His sore, obedient thumb: how he hates it.

  Shoving open the flywire screen, Elle is accosted by the close sky and its chemical odour. And then she sees him. He is crouched on the footpath like a huge, stalking cat. Oh fuck. She clings to the edge of the flywire, steadies it, and pulls it closed. Thankfully he doesn’t hear, isn’t looking. Though it has taken an aeon to get to the threshold, the possibility of his return hasn’t occurred to her. She shrinks into the shad
owy reach of her hall and waits, her heart thudding in her throat. Her mind can’t latch on to a lucid thought. Closing her eyes, she sees that cherubic face again. This time the wisps of honeyed hair, gummy smile and enormous blue eyes become the narrow, heart-shaped face of a six-year-old; and she tries to draw strength from it, from her. Inching to the screen door, she nudges it open again.

  As if sensing movement, David’s head swings her way and he stands. On the footpath, he is only two metres from her porch, an arm’s span from her low picket fence. Confronted by the size of him, she scolds herself for moving. She waits, knowing that he could stride over her knee-high gate . . . Knowing that if he struck, she would go down like a felled tree. She waits, shivering, that towel around her waist wet and cold. But he doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, simply stares at her. The embers in his red-brown eyes are alight again. In them, she detects shame and something new: bewilderment? At the sight of her, or his predicament, she isn’t sure. He looks so broken and so lost to himself; it’s ridiculous. She feels him trying to extract something from her – an emotion, perhaps. But she is dry. In him, she doesn’t recognise herself at all. The only thing that matters now is inside her. What she’s learned and what she’s carrying. She holds his gaze to let him glimpse it. No matter what she has done or said, she doesn’t deserve what he did to her tonight.

  His head drops, chin to chest.

  An edge is shaved off her dread. She wills herself to keep upright. It is so good to be outside, despite that cloud. She props herself against a vine-covered pillar. Warily, she observes him. Though the relief she feels is real, she cannot trust it. Not until he’s gone. Then, unbidden, her future plays in her head: her gradual recovery, a court case, a jail term. She realises that, regardless of where she is, there will always be the unavoidable prospect of him. If what she hopes is true, her baby is alive and, inevitably, he will know. And, one day, he will be sitting at a desk in a low-security jail: a father. Writing confused letters, briefing advocates, exploring his rights. And what are his rights? Would they survive this? The glorious relief she felt when that flutter returned to spur her on is eclipsed now by a new pragmatic fear.

  She peers at his pathetic bowed head, as from the depths of her memory news stories erupt. A father on an access visit driving his three young sons into a dam . . . Another estranged father tossing his precious four-year-old daughter off the West Gate Bridge . . . The frailties of the legal system rattle at her. Terrify her. Yet again, she’s reminded of the never-ending consequences of her recklessness.

  Her heart thuds and she fears she may black out again. On the footpath, David is fussing with his trousers. His trousers purchased one horrid shopping day in the city and soiled now with her blood. Chilled and faint, she watches him, this man to whom she’s bound herself. His face has altered, drawn inward, and he seems to be frisking himself. Patting his body down, as if to check he is all there. She notices then his terry-towelling dressing gown. What is he doing? He is to her left, on the road now, but far too close.

  She watches him pace, while in the background a car grows closer. She is shaking too much, her teeth chattering; but help exists – somewhere. A moment later, headlights swing around the corner at Hamilton Street. A police car. The sight of it is so wonderful she wants to weep again. She looks to David, and tries to grasp what he is doing and what he has done. He seems curiously unsurprised, turning his back to the car. Something glints beneath his robe. A blade.

  26

  Poised on the kerb, Dave is searching the faces of the young women in their car. Searching but not seeing. Finally, he thinks, you’re all here. Even Mira, hopping out of her old Saab, midway between him and the cops: blameless, loyal Mira.

  He takes a step onto the road and the cops get out of their car. They share a look as an ambulance pulls up. The driver looks at him then, hard. Her broad face changes, maybe in recognition. She’s pretty, with a blonde ponytail: familiar. She hasn’t seen his knife. The other one, a stocky redhead, eyes Elle, and her face changes too. Her gaze is steady on the bloody green towel.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she yells to Elle. ‘You’re going to be okay.’

  The redhead calls to the ambos. No one moves.

  Dave fingers the tape in his pocket. It’s a shame he can’t listen to it, relive their first date at Middle Park: her wild urchin hair and all-seeing pale eyes. Her breathless arrival at his house and the glorious colours of her face. That first night at Alex’s gallery, her poise and spunk. Her shining eyes, urging him to draw a frigging picture.

  He’s stopped on the bitumen now, a bushfire roar in his head. He’s been the worst kind of idiot: privileged and wasteful. Fucking up everything he cares about. And, tonight, he’s trashed the only thing that was left to him: his future. He can’t bear to think of his daughter living without her dad; worse, living with the knowledge of what he’s done. And with the shame. His eyes shut. His grief crescendos, bitter and intense. Thick with it, he raises his arm.

  Elle sees, high above his head, her long kitchen knife. Forgetting her useless throat, she screams. Only a gust of air and searing pain eventuate. Time is suspended, inching, eternal. The police officers shout, their hands find their guns and raise them. Words of caution and appeasement fall like blanks at David’s feet. The blonde woman’s face glazes with panic.

  To Elle, the seconds seem to creep.

  David locks his eyes on hers, and takes a step closer. To her dismay, she glimpses his regret. It confuses her that remnants of the man she’d loved endure. That he has chosen now, this late hour, to reveal them to her. But his regret is no match for hers. Please, she thinks, let us go.

  David turns and charges – at Mira. He is yelling a command that Elle can’t make out. Mira screams, her mouth a large black hole, as she scrambles to her car. The redhead hollers. David is almost within striking distance, shouting wildly with the knife high. The driver shoots.

  A volley of five shots strikes him, at short range, in the chest. The exit wounds in his back explode fireworks of red across the white sky of his towelling gown. Bloody jags of flesh and fabric merge and flap. He sinks to his knees, slow and heavy, like a beast of burden: plainly, instantly, lifeless. Elle reads the two young women’s faces: matching contortions of duty and grief, fear and comprehension. And then she understands the extent of it.

  Tears swamp her eyes. Oh, David. She stares at him, willing him to stay down. Get up. Stay down. The last of her anger leaches away. Mira emerges from behind her car door. She’s whiter than china, her head shaking. Elle sees but doesn’t feel Mira’s confusion. What she feels is reprieved. And shocked. And crushingly sad – for him, for her, for them.

  Around her, a wind picks up: clean and cool. The movement releases the people on the road; more cars arrive, flashing blue. A policewoman tends Mira while a spectacled paramedic strides across dancing leaves to Elle, saying, ‘Here’s hoping that blows it out to sea.’

  Other voices fill the night now; neighbours, the curious. Doris. Elle is faint with relief. If she’s not careful, she could slip beneath the voices and float again. Perhaps find David hovering above the telegraph pole. She plunges her fingers through the vine and towards the pillar, like ten slender anchors, and wills herself to stay earthed. The paramedic bends to her, calls her Elle, slides a needle in her arm. When her eyes close, for the briefest moment, she smells David’s melon scent, hears his giggle. She blinks, half expecting to see him afloat, or standing over her. The good David. But there is no trace of him in the night or the shape on the bitumen. Farewell, you, she thinks. The paramedic is squeezing her hand, talking gently, confirming what they already know. Within, underscoring his words, is that flutter. Tiny fingers tapping out their otherworldly morse code: I am still here.

  Yes, she thinks, smiling, we are still here. And then, on a stretcher, she’s passing Mira, passing David, facing the sky, taking in its sweep.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  What Came Before has gone through several incarnations. Thank you t
o everyone who read the manuscript and gave feedback – from those in the legal profession and film industry to fellow writers, editors and friends. Specifically thanks to Alison Girvan, Sam Everingham, Zoe Odell, Sarah Barton, Bruno Moro, Clare Kennedy, Sally Hepworth, Cristina Pozzan and Nicola O’Shea. I’d also like to thank my family; my agent Tara Wynne at Curtis Brown Australia; and the editorial team, Cate Blake and Ben Ball at Penguin.

  Finally, my biggest thank you to Jason for his unwavering support and faith.

  It took me over a decade to write What Came Before. During that time, I read countless news stories of women killed by their partners or exes. I’d like to acknowledge those women, as well as the women and children I’ve alluded to in this book, whose lives were so devastatingly cut short.

  VIKING

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