Claustrophobia

by Tracy Ryan

  Cliff nodded and lay back.

  Pen shut the door and said to herself: he’s a thinker, that boy, like Derrick, and sensitive. He’ll be worth twenty of his classmates when he grows up, only now it’s tough for him.

  ‘It’s always tougher for boys,’ Derrick had insisted, though Pen remembered how cruel girls could be too. Especially if you had no money.

  Where’d you get that dress from, your grandma?

  Someone run you over with a lawnmower?

  Look, she’s wearing ankle-freezers!

  Pen’s jeans had always been too short in the leg, because she grew faster than new ones could be bought.

  The well-off girls, to whom Pen was a pathetic specimen, had taunted her and yelled abuse. The rougher ones, who thought her a snob, threatened ‘catfights’.

  Up yourself, arntcha! Think you’re better than us.

  You had to steer between the two.

  Long after Pen had left home, she was still paranoid, turning in front of mirrors and checking to make sure her trouser cuffs fell to the correct length. Even with Derrick to shield her, she crossed the road to avoid rough-looking women.

  Now she looked around for Derrick in the staffroom at tea-break, but he wasn’t there. He must have got held up. Instead she was cornered by Jean Sargent, school counsellor.

  ‘Christmas in July,’ she reminded Pen. ‘We need to have numbers to book for the meal. Are you coming?’

  Pen concentrated on filling her teacup from the urn. Urnie, it was called. Then she turned to face Jean.

  ‘I’ll have to check with Derrick,’ she said. ‘He might have plans.’

  Jean laughed. ‘And he said he’d have to check with you. You both have the same alibi. So I’m going to have to get you two in the room together if I want a final answer. What do you reckon?’

  ‘Oh, put us down,’ Pen sighed, figuring they could always pull out later, by phone if they had to. ‘I’ll let you know if it doesn’t work for us.’

  On rare occasions she and Derrick did the right thing by putting in an appearance at these events. They got along with their colleagues well enough, but they weren’t really party people, or quiz-goers, or even drinkers. They might sometimes have a glass of champagne at New Year or some other special occasion. But Derrick had been a bit too inclined to drink when Pen had first met him, and she wasn’t sorry he went easy now. Nonetheless, Pen was careful never to go on about it, because nobody liked prim and proper wowsers, and neither did she. And many of the teachers were regulars at Happy Hour in the local, every Friday. But it did hamper social interaction, if you wanted to be discreet and avoid the booze.

  On her way out at midday, she passed Derrick in the corridor.

  ‘I’m going to get stuck straight in this time,’ she said, meaning sorting through the old boxes at home, and getting rid of stuff. ‘That’s the only way to do it, no interruptions, no distractions.’

  ‘The Putzteufel,’ Derrick grinned. It was a German word – the cleaning devil. As if something possessed you and took over your will at such times. Derrick leaned over and kissed her, despite the other staff members squeezing past. ‘You make me feel guilty.’

  ‘Don’t be. You’re here teaching all day, it’s only logical that I do the clean-out.’

  ‘I’ll make it up to you,’ Derrick said, and gave her an affectionate squeeze.

  Pen dropped by the post office box to collect their mail on the way home, and picked up a sandwich for herself from the Eyrie, and a fresh vegetarian pizza from the deli for dinner. Her mother always tutted over bought food – ‘You spend much more that way!’ – but to Pen it was a functional thing, not a luxury. It meant she wouldn’t have to waste time cooking and could get started on the cleaning up.

  ‘Putzteufel,’ she laughed to herself, ‘I wish!’

  She had taught herself a bit of German from books and CDs, and then some French, and then some Italian. It was a way of getting closer to Derrick, though she knew she would never have his university-level fluency. There were too many gaps, missing patches. Back at her high school they didn’t do languages, and anyway, she hadn’t finished Year Twelve properly. But she just liked to feel she could connect with Derrick in that way.

  They had that in common now, and books in general. Literary novels, biographies, poetry. Appalled at what she didn’t know, and that fact that she mostly read genre novels, Derrick had guided Pen over the years, till she was at least as well-read as he was.

  At first his guidance had hurt her pride a little. Then she found it useful. These days she could hold her head up with any of his colleagues, even if she was only office staff.

  Once home, she ate her sandwich sitting cross-legged on the floor in the storage room, leafing through old documents.

  It was a trap if you read through everything, because it took up time. On the other hand, if you didn’t, you might throw away something important. Most of this stuff hadn’t been touched for years. Newspaper clippings that had once seemed significant. Stacks of floppy disks from long-gone computers. Even a small pile of old mobiles they really should have recycled by now.

  So much of it was garbage, or things Derrick had brought home for her from school that she would never get around to using. Audio books of German literature, for instance, that he was sent as free samples years ago. But Pen had only listened to one or two, and really couldn’t justify keeping so many.

  Maybe the CDs could be donated somewhere … They were stacked, forty or fifty of them, in shoeboxes above a desk so cluttered that neither Pen nor Derrick ever sat at it. Pen reached up to pull the last box down, and a thick envelope fell and wadded against her foot.

  Dusty and old, it was addressed in Derrick’s handwriting – to Kathleen Nancarrow in Sydney.

  Pen turned the envelope over and over – yes, Derrick was the sender on the back. She felt immediately sick in a way she hadn’t for a long time.

  Kathleen Nancarrow. A name she had not heard often, and not for over a decade, but could hardly forget. The envelope was sealed, might never have been opened, though it was so tattered she couldn’t be sure. Across the front was scrawled in red: Return to Sender.

  So Derrick had written to Kathleen, rebuffed by the look of it, and had kept the letter. But when? Pen strained to read the date on the franking, but it was very faded.

  This time she had no qualms about opening Derrick’s mail.

  2

  Twenty-one, she was back then, and working part-time in a deli near Thomas Street. Close enough to go for walks in King’s Park every so often – and to take the bus to typing classes at a small business college in West Perth, part of a long-term plan to better things for herself.

  She had a chopped-up wispy hairstyle back then (the hairdresser’s idea; she couldn’t be bothered arguing). And a face fresh enough to disguise the fact that she’d already had and lost one lover.

  He was a jovial, deep-voiced man seven years her senior, who turned out to be married, and shot through when Pen discovered it after a few weeks.

  Only it wasn’t Pen who discovered it. It was her mother.

  ‘I knew there was something not quite honest about that fellow,’ she’d said, grim with satisfaction. She’d rung around to check on his background, and then confronted Pen.

  Her mother’s snooping bothered her more than the man’s deception. Pen was disappointed but not destroyed. She chalked it up to experience, grateful anyone would have wanted her, and somehow glad it was over.

  The lying had shocked her, but not the leaving. She didn’t need anything messy: she was trying to get established. She was not even on the lookout for love.

  So when the pale, curly-haired man first appeared in the shop, the last thing Pen expected was for anything to spark up between them.

  What stood out was that this young man didn’t speak to her at all. He came in quickly for cigarettes every few days, always at the same time, avoiding eye contact. Generally, the other customers were breezy, cheery – workers at the ne
arby hospital mostly, nurses and care assistants, in their standard whites and pastels, their sensible flat shoes.

  But this man was different – about her own age, her own height, though thickset, and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, his face often unshaven, handsome in that ethereal Celtic kind of way. If he hadn’t looked so dejected.

  One day he came in and bought chewing gum instead.

  ‘You’ve given up,’ Pen said, trying to be friendly.

  He was startled. ‘What do you mean, given up?’

  ‘Smoking,’ she said. ‘I mean, cigarettes. You’re buying gum instead.’

  He nodded and smiled, and she saw it was a lovely smile, a slightly incredulous one, as if he were surprised he had anything to smile at.

  ‘Good on you,’ she said.

  And after that most ordinary of beginnings, they talked every time he came in to the deli, until one day he said, ‘Look, I won’t be around here much longer but I’d like to keep in touch,’ and asked if she would go out for coffee with him, and that was how she and Derrick had started.

  She thought he must be moving house, but he was going home. He’d been a patient in the hospital, D-Ward: the psychiatric ward. Not the worst one, Pen knew that; it was for mild cases, people who weren’t dangerous. That was why they were allowed out to the shops and so on. Most mornings you could see them being taken out for a walk, off the hospital premises and around the block.

  But Derrick was not a long-termer: he was only there for a few weeks. And he was up-front and honest about it, so that she was going into things with her eyes open. At least he wasn’t married …

  Later, so many times, he would say, ‘If I hadn’t had that breakdown, I would never have met you,’ and that was true, because his family lived way on the other side of Perth. So it seemed good fortune out of bad, felix culpa, Derrick said.

  As for his emotional collapse, Pen didn’t ever press him for details, even when she burned to know. But he did tell her the name of a woman: an older woman, his lecturer at uni over east, who had dropped him after a long affair right throughout his student years. Fearing exposure, perhaps – the threat to her career.

  ‘It wrecked me,’ he said. ‘You know, I was only seventeen when that started.’

  ‘She exploited you,’ Pen said firmly, and that was that.

  Neither of them had ever discussed Kathleen Nancarrow again.

  Two urges were at war in Pen over it, right from the start, but the pragmatic urge won out. She’d always been practical, always had to be, fending for herself. And this natural attitude was bolstered, over the years of their marriage, by old platitudes of her mother’s like Least said, soonest mended, and Out of sight, out of mind. Her mother was a firm believer in self-control.

  Whatever she might feel inside, Pen was quite capable of harnessing it to her greater purpose. So she had coaxed Derrick through his add-on year of a teaching diploma, and seen him into his first appointment. She had worked and scraped to build him the kind of buffer against the world that he’d need if he was to thrive. Pen had never met anybody so intelligent, but brilliance alone wouldn’t do it.

  Derrick was from what people called a ‘good family’, but most of their money was tied up in properties, and they weren’t about to give him a leg-up. His illness had embarrassed them, almost as if it were a reflection on their genes, or their parenting. They’d distanced themselves after that, so he and Pen saw very little of them.

  ‘Got yourself the discount version,’ Pen’s mother sniped. ‘The markdown. Social climber meets social backslider.’

  ‘I love him,’ was all Pen could say, hoping that would shame her mother into silence. Underneath, she suspected, her mother was jealous.

  But there was no doubt Derrick required pushing. Gentle pushing by someone who could see what he was capable of.

  Pen watched, then, and monitored, and kept her eye on vacancies till the time came for him to move out of the public education system into an altogether better situation. One that appreciated and rewarded his exceptional talents.

  So much easier to do this for Derrick because he was a man. None of the inch-by-inch scraping of her own attempts to rise. Men were expected to. Their ambitions were not vanity, not arrogance. For them, lack of ambition was a fault …

  Pen had seen instantly, that day they first went for coffee together, that they were each other’s best chance, and she had made sure they took it. There was no going back.

  Now Pen unsealed the fat envelope carefully. The first page was dated just over a decade ago, written from Perth. She was aware of her heart pounding, the pulse at her ear and temple. There was a kind of tinnitus but it seemed outside her.

  She eased backwards into a beanbag and held the letter upright, as if it could somehow become transparent, a window.

  Kathleen, my only Kathleen, you know who you are, and you know who I am even if you will not acknowledge me – you are wrecking me with this silence. How can I believe it all means nothing to you? What can I do to prove that you must not cast me off, that you can’t do it?

  I will recognise no obstacle, you should know that. You are both the brightness and the bane of my life: you have consumed me and spat out the wretched pieces – can’t you feel how wretched I am? You said you had never felt this way about anyone else. You are afraid to face those feelings, and you are making excuses – as if I would ever expose you, ever put you at risk.

  It went on and on like that, for pages, out of control, as if it were some kind of brainstorming exercise, or an elaborate note he’d written to himself. Pen had never seen anything like it – certainly Derrick had never spoken or written to her that way. It didn’t even sound particularly like him – it sounded like play-acting, poetic posturing.

  Brightness and bane … If it were not in his own handwriting, nothing would have convinced her that Derrick had composed it. Let alone actually sent it. It embarrassed her.

  Then she saw her own name, spread out in full on the fourth page.

  I told you I had met a girl my own age, Penelope, now you know her name. You must either answer me or I will go ahead and marry her – yes, despite you, because you show no compassion, no guilt – and then you will pay, you will come to regret what you have given up, what we could have had – it will be too late, do you understand?

  If I don’t hear from you by the end of the month, I will go ahead. Yes, this is an ultimatum.

  Pen dropped the letter to the floor as if it were on fire, or toxic, contaminated. She stood up and stared down at it. All those years sitting there on some shelf – and he had kept it! – waiting to pounce at her with that long name only her mother used, to ridicule everything she had counted upon.

  Eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves. Her mother as a set of accusatory phrases, a voice in her ear. Derrick as a letter, a poison pen, cancelling in one stroke the entire story Pen had written, in her head, of their life together.

  Had Pen been nothing to him then but a way of forcing the issue? I will go ahead and marry her … and then you will pay.

  She walked across to the study window, sliding back the rickety glass pane to get some cold air on her face, her fingers dampened by powdery black mould that had settled in the groove where the frame met the sill. Pen shuddered. The brilliant pink of the bougainvillea outside hurt her eyes. It was almost blocking the view now, and she’d have to cut it back.

  Pen laughed suddenly at the absurdity – as if everything could go on in its mundane way. Garden jobs and renovations, dinner, washing-up – all part of a practised routine that held her together, in the same way that necessity had held both Pen and her mother together, after her father had left.

  If she confronted Derrick – and he would be home soon, so she must decide either way – where would it lead? What could he possibly have to say?

  ‘I’m sorry, our entire life together has been based on a lie …’?

  A showdown. An ultimatum – that was what he had written. Pen could hardly impose one he
rself, a whole decade later. But the enormity of it. The vital piece of information she hadn’t even known was missing. The staff at school had a phrase – ‘La-La Land’, they said, for anyone who wasn’t with it. Pen had been living in La-La Land.

  She put on a thick jacket, went outside to the shed, and found the secateurs. That wasn’t hard – Derrick always put things back where they belonged. Good, reliable Derrick. Surely not the weak-minded author of that pleading letter? He kept the shed almost orderly enough to live in, a kind of shadow of the main house.

  Pen headed for the bougainvillea. She waded through clumps of grass and plumbago to hack at the papery pink-and-green monster all afternoon, cutting it back till the window was clear and the immodest plant finally reduced to reasonable proportions. It was always easier to process things if your hands were busy.

  But there really weren’t that many options to process. Whatever Derrick might say to cover it up – if she showed him the letter, if she screamed at him, if she hammered him with her fists, if she lost it, as the boys at school would say – the truth would still be the truth.

  He had loved someone else and not her at all.

  She tried to push the thought away. Ten years: that must count for something? He couldn’t have been faking, tolerating her all that time. Why on earth would he?

  But her mother’s voice harped in her inner ear. You’ll have your work cut out … The bulk of it will fall on you. You run around after that man so much he takes you for granted. Pen had put such comments down to jealousy. But what if her mother was merely pointing out what everyone else could see?

  Pen rubbed her eyes till they stung.

  Whatever she and Derrick had now was not, had never been, what it seemed to be.

  She could force that out in the open, and it might destroy things once and for all. But that was a joke, surely. She could never leave Derrick: she had grown into him, and he into her, two inextricable elements. Which she had thought indestructible.

  No, she would wait, observe, turn it over like a curious stone and examine what squirming creatures clung to the underside, until she decided where to put it.