Claustrophobia

by Tracy Ryan

  CLAUSTROPHOBIA

  A Novel

  CLAUSTROPHOBIA

  A Novel

  TRACY RYAN

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Copyright © Tracy Ryan 2014

  First Published 2014

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover image: Jake Olsen/Trevillion Images

  Cover and book design: Peter Lo

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  A cataloguing-in-publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia: http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  ISBN: 978-1-921924-73-6

  De jolies pensées interlopes …

  ‘Pénélope’-Georges Brassens

  For Tom

  1

  Pen stood in the kitchen with her back turned to her mother. She was intent on scraping the salt from slices of eggplant, pale hair tucked back behind her ears, her breath calm. Only the brisk strokes across each slice betrayed her feelings.

  ‘You’ll destabilise the whole thing,’ her mother muttered. ‘You can’t just knock out walls wherever you please.’

  Mrs Stone drained her teacup, and got up to help herself to a refill.

  ‘Gone cold,’ she said, peering into the glass-and-chrome pot. ‘New-fangled. Might be very chic, Pen, but it doesn’t keep the tea hot, does it?’

  ‘Now even the tea is my fault,’ Pen thought. But aloud she only said, ‘I’ll put the kettle on again.’

  She squinted at the boxlike living room, trying to picture how it would look when she and Derrick were finished with the renovations. They were going to make the room L-shaped, since there had never been a need, after all, for that fourth bedroom.

  Then it would be a better space for having friends over, which they knew they should do more often. They must make an effort to open up. At least, that was what they said to each other.

  ‘I hope you’re finally going to do something about those steps,’ Mrs Stone said, nodding at the gap between kitchen and living room, an old bugbear of hers.

  Pen smiled grimly. She liked her sunken kitchen. ‘Mum, you won’t know the place.’

  The change was still hard to imagine. There were so many books and papers around, old cartons of things that needed clearing out before they could really start work. That little room had become nothing but a storage dump, a dust trap netted with spider webs. And she wanted to get on to the cardboard boxes – so much was rubbish, if you really sifted through it.

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Stone sighed, ‘you’ll have your work cut out for you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. And the bulk of it will fall on you, since he’s at school all day.’

  Pen put the eggplant slices on a tray now and brushed them with oil, then slipped them into the oven beneath the chunks of potato and pumpkin, the onions which were catching and searing on their bursting tops. Derrick liked them almost blackened, caramelised.

  ‘You know that black edge on food is carcinogenic,’ Mrs Stone said; but Pen was off in her own space, thinking of knocking out walls. She was used to her mother’s soundtrack and had learned to tune out.

  ‘There’s a man at the sliding door,’ her mother said, and Pen wheeled around, startled. Nobody came here during the day. He looked strange. And with Derrick still at work. In a flash she tried to picture what to use in self-defence.

  But the man called, ‘Mrs Barber?’ and she nodded, feeling silly. Through the glass she saw his courier’s uniform. She opened the door.

  ‘I’ve got a parcel here,’ he said. ‘I knocked and knocked out front,’ he added, ‘but you obviously didn’t hear me. Are you all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!’

  Pen took the package, and the man jogged back to his van. The package was from Amazon, addressed to Derrick Barber.

  ‘What’s he been buying, then?’ her mother said.

  ‘Books, I would imagine,’ Pen said drily. She placed the package on the dining table and thought, ‘Odd that Derrick didn’t mention ordering any books. That’s not like him.’ They usually discussed everything they bought, and certainly books they wanted to read.

  She thought for a minute of opening it. But it might be a surprise of some kind, after all, and that would spoil it. And he would know, too, because you couldn’t easily close that flat packaging again.

  She could, of course, look it up later on their Amazon account, since they both used the same one. She could log in and see what it was. If she wanted to.

  ‘I must be going dotty,’ she thought, and laughed at herself for exaggerating things. First the fright from the man at the door, and now these silly doubts about a parcel …

  It was all this time alone. Practically a recluse at thirty-two. Of course she saw people in the mornings, when she was on the reception desk at Boys’ College, but it was all rather automatic, the same things day in and day out, a child with a nosebleed to send to the school nurse, a parent down for an appointment. Then it was over by midday, not even overlapping with her Jo, her job-sharer, by more than a few minutes.

  She did go out to the supermarket, and to the organic store, but that was about it. Her mother dropped by occasionally, if she could get a lift on someone’s way, but that hardly counted. They were not visits Pen wanted.

  Looking at her mother now as the kettle boiled, and fresh tea was made, Pen was almost guiltily glad she couldn’t have children. Then there would have been even more visits, both ways. O Grandmother, what big teeth you have …

  ‘I can drop you down at Gatelands, if you like,’ she said tentatively. ‘When you’ve finished your tea.’

  Mrs Stone tilted her head sideways. ‘I could help you make a start on all that rubbish in the spare room.’

  ‘No,’ Pen said. ‘I mean, no, you don’t have to do anything like that. I wouldn’t ask anyone else to! There’s years of old stuff in there. Derrick will help, when he gets home. Why don’t you let me give you a lift to the shops?’

  Mrs Stone opened her eyes wide and sighed again, as if to say she could take a hint.

  ‘Well, at least you’ve got the use of the car. That’s no small thing.’

  They’d had no car when Pen was young, after her father left. Whenever she thought of those times, she saw her mother weighed down with plastic shopping bags on each arm, like a loaded scale, wobbling back from the supermarket; doing the walk all over again if she forgot something.

  She would say, ‘Mum, why don’t you go for your licence?’

  ‘We can’t afford a car. What use would the licence be?’

  Before her father left, Pen had never noticed the cost of anything. Afterwards, it was like a refrain: can’t afford, can’t afford. A negative mantra.

  Afterwards meant grey suburban isolation, flat yards in cleared sandy areas where the only verticals were asbestos fences. Pen and her mother had lived in rental homes, and had to move every year or two, when the cost went up or the owner was selling.

  Sometimes she wondered if that was just the way her mother preferred it – never to put down roots entirely again. Pen had not been the grasping, hungry sort of teenager who had to have every latest gadget, every trendy outfit. Yet she couldn’t help feeling the pinch.

  Her mother felt it too, but seemed to wear it like a badge of honour.

  For Pen, it felt like walls closing in.

  ‘Your mother’s been here,’ Derrick said when he came home that evening, slow with fatigue, his short curls and trim beard damp with drizzle, just in the dash from the bus
-stop.

  ‘How do you know?’ Pen laughed.

  ‘I always know. I can smell it on you,’ he said, kissing her. ‘The smell of the eastern suburbs.’ He said it grimly, but he was smiling. Nonetheless, he said it a bit too often. ‘I’m just going to change. Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped.’ Pen was impatient to serve dinner, because it was his favourite. She’d left the mail package on the table, right in their way, hoping that would trigger an explanation from him. But when he saw it, he just raised his gingery eyebrows and picked it up, put it unopened into his briefcase.

  ‘What was that one?’ Pen said casually, setting out glasses and a jug of water.

  ‘Oh, something for school.’ Derrick was head of the languages department at the same Boys’ College where Pen worked. ‘They usually go to the PO box – I don’t know why it came here. Must have gone by courier.’

  Pen steeled herself not to be pushy. Deep breathing helped. Her birthday was too far off, but it could be for their anniversary; insisting would be ill-mannered, if he was trying to keep it a surprise. It made her agitated not to know everything Derrick did, but she didn’t want to upset him. Maybe it really was something for school.

  ‘Anything good on TV tonight?’ Derrick said, when he had finished eating.

  Pen nodded. ‘There’s a new Anna Karenina. And I bought us some chocolate,’ she said, knowing that he liked a treat when they curled up to watch television together. Derrick laughed.

  She’d watched something like it, a much earlier miniseries version, with her mother when she was small, but all she remembered was the ghastly scene of the woman throwing herself under a train at the end.

  Hardly suitable for a child, Pen thought now. But then again she had seen and read all sorts of things above her age when she was growing up, since there were only the two of them, herself and her mother, and no one to judge or object. It had been company, in a way, and her mother had liked the fact that Pen could understand things almost as an adult could. Or at least her mother had seemed to think so.

  Now watching this latest version with Derrick, Pen thought, ‘I can’t have understood this at all, or I would have remembered it.’

  When the program was over and the chocolate was gone, they sat on the sofa a minute or two, with the lights still off.

  ‘I don’t know how I’ll sleep after that,’ Derrick said.

  ‘The chocolate?’ Pen said. She’d realised with some dismay that she’d bought the coffee-filled one Derrick wasn’t so keen on. Its wrapper looked like the plain dark sort. But he’d eaten it without complaint. Her own head was buzzing.

  ‘No – well, yes – but I meant the movie. The series.’

  ‘You didn’t like it?’ Pen asked.

  ‘Oh, it was very well done. But the whole adultery thing – it’s so distressing. Especially because you sympathise with her, you know.’

  Pen nodded. ‘But she pays.’

  ‘I know. It’s not that, even. I just can’t stand the thought of deception. That kind of double life.’

  He leaned over and kissed Pen, the same kind of kiss he’d always given, as if his whole soul were in it. Like a transfusion, Pen thought.

  ‘I’m lucky I have you,’ Derrick said. ‘I would die if you ever left me.’

  ‘Despite the smell of the eastern suburbs,’ Pen thought. But he’d probably had a hard day at work, and it had made him emotional. Tired, and more inclined to say something extreme.

  Yet she knew he meant what he said. That was something she relied on in Derrick. He might tell a temporary white lie to hide a surprise gift, but he was honest. Whenever anything had gone wrong, however minor, in the whole ten years they’d been married, he’d always told her straightaway, and they’d fixed it together. And it was never anything other than minor.

  Pen suspected he was constitutionally incapable of deceiving her. That was why the mystery parcel was nothing to worry about. But she had decided, after all, not to think about that again.

  Derrick did go off to sleep quite easily in the end. They’d made love, the quick way that Pen preferred, which always relaxed him to the point where he couldn’t stay alert for more than a few minutes afterwards.

  Not that Pen minded: she liked to watch his dim outline lying in the dark, rising and falling steadily, and know that he had gone ahead of her calm and satisfied into the night. As if she were a mother watching over a child.

  Mostly Derrick’s rest was still and deep, though there had been a very few times she’d seen him twitch or even convulse in nightmare, interior trauma he usually couldn’t remember the next day. Once, he had even lifted his arm and belted her from his side of the bed, woken only by her yell.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he’d said, sitting up suddenly. ‘I dreamt you were choking me. You had your hands around my neck and you were trying to kill me. I can’t believe I hit you. And I can’t believe I would dream that. Darling, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she’d said. ‘Lucky you only got my shoulder.’

  Derrick had been mortified, but Pen had to laugh.

  ‘You can’t be held accountable for what your unconscious cooks up,’ she’d said, and they had made love then, too, slowly and closely, moulded against each other, as if to repair the imaginary damage, to reinstate the true order of things and wipe the memory of the ridiculous nightmare.

  Now he reached over to her from the depths of sleep so that they faced the same way, and wrapped one arm around her, tucking it over her belly as if that were simply where he belonged, and Pen let go, finally, of her wakefulness, and sank down to join him in her separate dreams.

  In the morning they drove off to work together, as they always did. He would get the bus home later, because she finished in the early afternoon.

  The school was about twenty minutes away down the hill, or more if there was a traffic problem, which increasingly there was, as housing estates grew up everywhere and brick-and-orange-tile replaced trees. The Hills were ‘booming’, people said. The pocket of bush Pen and Derrick so treasured seemed to be diminishing daily.

  In the beginning Pen had thought Hills people must care about trees, since those who lived in the cheaper wasteland where she’d grown up were indifferent.

  But Derrick, born into the middle class and therefore the last word, had said, ‘No, it’s a marker of affluence. The right kind of backdrop for the right kind of people. They’ll still traipse dieback through the bush in their expensive hiking boots. Trust me, people are green when it suits them.’

  They’d rented the house up there when they were first married, and then bought it as soon as they could, forward-planning, thinking they’d need a big place when children came along. But children never did.

  Their house was a typical Hills place from the old days, before big money had moved up there. Wood and iron, up on stilts, not quite what people now called a ‘pole home’ but a real bush retreat, freezing in winter if not for the wood-burning stove, and dark relief in the searing West Australian summers. Pen’s mother had disapproved.

  ‘A tinderbox!’ she always said. ‘In the middle of all those trees! It’s just foolhardy.’

  Yet ten risky Februaries had come and gone without so much as a lick of flame approaching, even one year when the national park, just down the road, had been threatened. You could call it luck. But Pen preferred not to dwell on the fear of fire. Everything came at some kind of cost.

  And the whole thing with her mother mattered less because she had Derrick. Because they had each other, and supported each other. He was the ally she’d always wanted but never imagined was really out there.

  ‘Mrs Barber,’ a boy’s voice said, as soon as Pen had taken her seat at the front counter. She looked up – it was Cliff, one of the day pupils, fourteen or so. He was likeable, but very shy. This was enough to put Pen on his side. She was aware, too, that his parents were going through a divorce, the father had moved out, and she knew only too well how tough t
hat could be.

  Cliff was avoiding her eyes. ‘I’ve got a terrible headache,’ he said.

  Pen checked her watch. ‘Nurse isn’t in yet, Cliff. But you could come back in about half an hour.’

  Cliff bit his lower lip. ‘I’ve got phys. ed.,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think I can do it.’

  Pen swallowed. ‘I understand,’ she said; headache as euphemism. She knew the phys. ed. teacher wouldn’t like it, but why should kids be forced? ‘Well, I can let you in to the sick room, and you can wait there till Mrs Davies arrives.’

  The boy followed her behind the counter into a corridor, at the end of which was a clean, white room with a single bed and a cotton blanket. It was like a private hospital room. Boys’ College looked ancient, imposing, on the outside, but it was all fake gothic, colonial pretension. Inside was expensive and up-to-date.

  ‘Just lie down here and don’t worry about a thing,’ Pen said, and Cliff gave her a look of shaky gratitude. ‘Cliff,’ she added softly, ‘nobody’s giving you trouble, are they?’

  He sat very still. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s not bullying, or anything like that?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Okay.’ Pen slanted the venetians to dim the room. ‘If Mrs Davies isn’t here soon, I’ll see if I can get you some Panadol.’

  ‘Thanks, Mrs Barber,’ Cliff said, closing his eyes, as if to squeeze back tears. ‘You’re the best.’

  Pen laughed gently.

  ‘No, I mean it,’ Cliff said. ‘You don’t make fun and call me a delicate little daisy and stuff like that.’

  ‘Who said that?’ Pen asked.

  ‘Miss Walsh, in Science. Because they were dissecting frogs, and I didn’t want to. I think it’s cruel. Now the boys call me Daisy and sing that song, you know.’

  Pen paused, careful. ‘Well, I can’t comment on your teachers, Cliff, because you know you have to respect them,’ and here she smiled, ‘but I must say I’m with you on that one. Only don’t quote me, okay?’