The Apology

by Ross Watkins

  After a while he heard a car pull up, and when he lowered the book he saw Detective Inspector Fielder and a uniformed officer stepping out of a police vehicle. They walked across the lawn.

  ‘Morning, Mr Pomeroy.’ The monotone of Fielder.

  An internal organ – it could have been Adrian’s stomach – tightened. He knew his time was up. Of course it was – it would only go down on a good day. The authorities had done their muckraking and dredged sufficient evidence to lay charges. And Fielder wanted to be the one to do it. The guy had wanted to screw him over good and proper from the outset.

  Adrian stood, but not in anger. The fight had gone out of him. Today was about surrender. In his imagination he was already holding out his wrists for cuffing.

  ‘Officers,’ he said. ‘So this is it, is it?’

  Fielder stopped at the bottom of the porch steps and looked up at Adrian. ‘I’m not sure I completely gather your meaning, Mr Pomeroy. But I’m probably not far off the mark.’

  Adrian put the book on the table. His hands shook. ‘The arrest,’ he said, though that dreaded word barely came out, such was the blockage in his throat.

  Fielder looked at his officer, then back at Adrian. ‘We need to talk. May we come in?’

  *

  With each passing moment his anticipation grew lighter, yet his confusion grew deeper. He directed them to the kitchen table, where they hauled out chairs and made themselves comfortable. Fielder spoke – the other didn’t seem to own a voice.

  ‘Now, we have some new information regarding the allegations. Yesterday, Mr Alex Bowman contacted the station via telephone to notify us that he’s decided to drop the charges. He also attended the station late yesterday afternoon with his father to make a formal statement in this regard, and recanted his original statement.’

  Adrian’s guts still churned but his head instantly lightened. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. However, regardless of Mr Bowman’s change of perspective, we can still proceed with charges if we believe there’s a case to answer. This happens more than you might think, especially if an alleged perpetrator has made admissions of guilt or if there are independent witnesses – then the matter can proceed even without the alleged victim’s cooperation.’

  ‘Right.’ Adrian felt both hopeful and decidedly grim. ‘Off the hook, but still in the abattoir.’

  ‘If you prefer to think of it in those terms, yes. It’s important for you to know that we’re continuing to look into the case with the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.’

  ‘And when will I know if you think there’s still a case to answer?’

  Adrian had never made an admission of guilt, nor had there been witnesses to any action he could be charged with. He knew this. He’d been careful enough. Foolish, to say the least, but a careful fool. The best witness would be the old clerk, but nothing had even happened that night. It was too circumstantial without Alex’s statement.

  Holy shit – Alex. Adrian wondered what had happened to prompt this change. For better or for worse?

  ‘It’s difficult to say,’ Fielder replied. ‘We’ll try to have an outcome as soon as possible, bearing in mind the delicacy of the circumstances.’

  ‘And you’ll keep my stuff until you have an outcome?’

  ‘Correct. We’ll continue to hold the seized property unless there’s no case to answer, after which you can come collect those items from the station.’

  Fielder had to remain circumspect – that was his job – but there was something in his demeanour that told Adrian he’d be okay, that they were just following procedure. Fielder’s eyes sent a conciliatory message, and Adrian couldn’t help but feel relief. Utter relief. Alex had granted him a reprieve. His life had been handed back to him – liberated from the train tracks of personal and professional destruction. Control had been placed back in his possession. Noo and Tam could come home. He’d get his job back. All would be sweet again. He almost felt a hankering to get back into the classroom, even to mark some papers.

  Yet as he showed the officers out the front door, with Fielder saying they’d be in touch, his initial emotion dwindled and in swooped another. Guilt – which he had successfully evaded for the most part until this point. Strange that it should arrive now, he thought, now that the ordeal might soon end. So why?

  Adrian remained on the porch as the police vehicle drove away. He picked up his book from the table. He stared at the cover, then looked through it, reaching out to memory, to Alex. There – that was his guilt. The fact that Alex had been reduced to both victim and unwitting villain. It was all bullshit. Alex was neither. And Adrian was both. Alex wasn’t really to blame; although he had played a part, Adrian was in the position of authority but hadn’t shut the whole thing down. And he hadn’t shut it down because, quite simply, he liked it. He liked Alex more than he knew he should.

  As he closed up the house and got into his mother’s car, Fielder’s last words resounded: ‘I suggest you continue to steer clear of the Bowman family. Do not approach them or their home, or the school during school hours. I understand you might feel tempted to do so, and to say something to them – I’ve seen it before – but don’t. You’ll only cause distress for all involved, and potentially incriminate yourself.’

  Adrian had nodded, said he understood completely.

  ‘There are many temptations in this world, Mr Pomeroy,’ Fielder added.

  Adrian couldn’t help thinking that for some reason Fielder hadn’t finished his sentence. Perhaps, he now realised, Fielder wanted Adrian to finish it himself.

  *

  Tam pushed past him into the house, going straight for his bedroom. At least the boy was happy to be home.

  ‘You’ve still got school, don’t forget,’ Adrian said.

  ‘But I’m already late,’ Tam called.

  ‘So? Doesn’t mean you can’t learn something today.’

  Noo trailed behind. She’d refused Adrian’s help bringing in the suitcases, asking that he just hurry up and unlock the door for Tam. He obeyed. He held the flyscreen open as she went inside and looked about – what she thought she’d find he had no idea – and went to their bedroom to unpack. She then took Tam to school and didn’t come back for a while. He assumed she was getting groceries.

  Earlier, when he’d arrived at his parents’ place to tell them the good news, to hopefully drive his little family back home, together, his mother hugged him and said, ‘See, I told you sense would prevail.’ Noo hugged him also, kissed his cheek and said she’d get their things. But it was offhand affection – neither sympathy nor capitulation. It was more like an allowance. Tam was watching television and eating biscuits. Adrian walked over, roughed up his hair and told him the holiday at Grandma’s was over. No one said a word about the night before, and Noel and the others were already back at their hotel. Adrian wondered when he’d hear from them.

  The rest of the day followed that trend – Noo had possibly the coldest shoulder of any woman alive, and she inflicted it with perfect restraint.

  Walking on eggshells was the cliché, and even though he despised clichés, it fitted. A calcified fragility had set in, one they both recognised and dared not stomp on. He tried to get her to sit down and talk but it didn’t work – she got busy doing busy things. When he made her a cup of tea she let it go tepid. When he began to speak she left the room. Later, he heard her vomiting. He tapped on the toilet door but she went quiet, coming out long after he’d walked away.

  Until that moment he hadn’t realised the true impact the allegations had wreaked on her. On her trust in him. On the fortitude of her love, maybe. And through her actions on this day she was making him realise his selfishness – and selfish he had been, he recognised, for too long. How he could restitch the seams of their relationship he had no idea. Perhaps Noo would show him the way. Perhaps their relationship would now operate on her t
erms.

  NGUYET

  Nguyet was well aware that white men often thought of Vietnamese women as subservient, but she knew herself to be otherwise. Instead, Nguyet believed in her own tenacity and endurance, and her ability to exercise charm.

  Her mẹ had taught her about charm and grace from a young age. Charm, her mother had instructed, was the use of complicity and force. Her mother said this many times over the years, perhaps to herself more than to her daughter, and young Nguyet had often wondered if it were some form of mantra to be used in moments of doubt. Doubt in her marriage, her custom – in her being an effective woman, maybe. But Nguyet no longer had to wonder about that because, from her own experience, within her own marriage and her own struggle to hold on to her custom while living in a foreign land, she knew it to be true. There was, after all, so much to doubt that complicity regularly outweighed force, and the negotiation of marriage became a negotiation about how much she could tolerate – and tolerate in silence. I am being complicit, and force will one day come, she sometimes told herself. That balance is the basis of happiness.

  Nguyet thought of these things as she waited for her name to be called. She looked around at the other people, and could hear the two receptionists talking behind the counter. All women. Women waiting for men.

  She looked down at her lap and thumbed open her purse. Inside was a wedding photo. Sự mỉa mai. There were many ironies to observe in life, but perhaps the greatest was that Nguyet had used her mother’s mantras against her in order to justify marrying Adrian. Adrian Pomeroy – the white man, the tourist.

  ‘Such an inauspicious union,’ her mother had said at the an hoi, the day Adrian arrived, the day before the wedding ceremony, placing not only her own belief but her daughter’s future in the Chinese zodiac. ‘He is monkey, you are tiger.’

  Nguyet knew this wasn’t the worst union, but it was said to be characterised by continual disagreement. She put her mother’s criticism down to her caution about Adrian being a white man. He did look odd, Nguyet admitted, sweating in his black dinner suit, unable to handle Vietnam’s heat, not understanding much of what was going on around him, asking her to translate, to decode the cultural significance of objects and gestures, her having to take the lead. To her mother, none of this was right. And yet she let her daughter have her way. That day, her mother chose complicity.

  Adrian came from the airport in a taxi, and her family greeted him with much smiling and nodding and shaking of hands, then brought him inside to the table, which was laid out with dishes of catfish and prawn and vegetables and rice. Her family wasn’t at all wealthy – the apartment was small, with two bedrooms for the six of them, the kitchenette and dinner table and bath all in one room, their clothes hung to dry over the bathtub – but they weren’t impoverished, as many of Nguyet’s friends were.

  Hai was especially poor. She had been there when Nguyet first started talking to Adrian online – giggling, asking if Adrian had a brother or friend who would want a Vietnamese girl. Hai had shared in Nguyet’s growing affection for Adrian and his chatroom messages. She had witnessed what could only be called Nguyet’s quick addiction to the contact, and encouraged her to do the first online video call. She had helped Nguyet choose an outfit to wear, how best to do her hair. But when Nguyet started going to the internet cafe every day to video chat, Hai stopped coming along, and eventually they ceased talking. Nguyet knew it was jealousy, but felt she had no reason to apologise. She felt much the same when it came to family.

  As they sat around the table and talked and ate, her family called Adrian du khách, the tourist. Nguyet had laughed along with them, although ashamed that Adrian was here in her cluttered home, partaking of the food as well as the indignities of the room. She watched him closely, and wondered if he was normally so red-faced, or if it was the humidity, or maybe the heat in the food. Perhaps it was nerves. A rash rose around his collar, up the side of his neck. She wanted to reach out and touch the skin there, but knew not to – they had not yet touched at all. Somehow they had failed to do so when he arrived, such was the commotion around making sure he met her family in the proper way, they who would become his family the next day, if all went well. Then he was bustled inside by her bô and sat at the table. Her younger brother and sisters wanted to sit with Adrian, but her mẹ made sure Nguyet was seated beside him.

  Their first touch was at the elbow, a rub of the skin which made her strangely conscious of her arm – how she held it, how she could wield it to steal yet another touch, soon getting what she wanted. That seemed to grant him permission to be bolder than her, and he casually dropped his hand beneath the table to place it on her thigh – only for seconds, but long enough to make her hold her breath, as though the gesture tied strings to the ends of his fingers that were directly joined to her heart.

  When she regained her breath, she looked up and met her mother’s cautious eyes as the old woman spooned more food onto Adrian’s plate and implored, ‘Ăn ăn người gầy.’

  Her little brother said, ‘Thin man, thin man,’ in his best English and pulled at Adrian’s other elbow.

  After the meal, the women cleaned and the men sat outside at a table overlooking the street and introduced Adrian to rice wine, passing around a communal shot glass. That evening her uncle gave Adrian a decorative arrangement of betel nuts in a red dish, which he was to present to her parents, requesting permission to marry. Her mẹ and bô received the dish with gratitude, and then invited Adrian to sit with them on the floor and chew the nuts with lime paste, her mẹ’s hands showing willingness while her eyes still refused.

  This reticence continued the next day, even as Nguyet stood in her áo dài of red silk, the red khan dóng like a halo; even as her brothers and sisters lined up outside the house and held out red lacquered boxes of cakes, wine, betel nuts and roasted pig, offerings draped in red silk, in lieu of Adrian’s family. And reticence still as Nguyet and Adrian knelt at the family altar, her mother and father lighting candles, before the couple turned to her parents’ feet and accepted two envelopes of money.

  All these things, she could see, overwhelmed Adrian, who said nothing, and she thought him small right then, sweltering in the suit he’d hired from a shop in Australia. Australia – a place she’d heard about from friends, even though none had ever been there. She knew Adrian lived in Sydney, so she had read as much about the city as she could find online, although she knew this would mean little once she left Vietnam and landed on foreign soil. As she looked at Adrian, pink-fleshed like a pig, Nguyet understood that he was gaining a family but she was losing her country. She was happy here, there was no denying, but there was also no denying the opportunity Australia offered. From that day on, their relationship would be one of give and take, of gain and loss, of force and complicity. Tiger and monkey.

  After the ceremony a neighbour brought her fat baby boy to the apartment and placed him on Nguyet’s bed to improve her chances of having a son, her mother insisting that to be happy she must have many children, especially boys. Years later, Nguyet sent the neighbour a card and photo of Tam, thanking her for this luck.

  And now here she was, waiting. This time, she had found a way to use force.

  *

  Her decision to pursue a second child regardless of Adrian’s wishes came earlier in the year. They’d been arguing over whether or not to have another baby for over four years. She’d begun the conversation with a soft strategy, saying that because Tam had grown less dependent, perhaps they could start thinking about a second child. But Adrian parried, arguing that Tam’s independence gave them more opportunities to do things as a family, and that a new baby would be a step backwards in this regard. She said that Tam had begun asking for a brother or sister to play with, but Adrian replied that they could play with him and teach him good things through play, or that he could go to daycare and Nguyet could find a better job and contribute more to the finances. This had stung her.
>
  Nguyet wasn’t one to argue. She never raised her voice and preferred to communicate emotion through gesture, yet Adrian had aggravated her. Her final appeal was that she had grown up in a large family: family meant everything in her culture. Each time she phoned her family her mother asked what was wrong, why she wasn’t having more babies, so Nguyet called them less and less, out of shame.

  When Nguyet told Adrian that she would only consider a trip back to Vietnam if she had another child in her arms, he had held out his hands in protest and said that he loved his small family very much, but that didn’t mean he shared her desire to keep growing it.

  At that, she turned her shoulder so she did not have to look at him.

  ‘Tam is enough,’ he had said. ‘Tam is everything.’

  And so he was. But Nguyet knew that everything could also be found in another – that love would not be halved, but doubled.

  This went on for several years, becoming the topic of no conversation and yet somehow every conversation. It was present even in the most trivial things, the things that husbands and wives must say to each other on a daily basis so the household can function. All their conversations were inflected with Nguyet’s discontent – her embarrassment at the rejection, at the selfishness of her husband, at her fantastical excuses when she spoke to her mother on the phone and the inevitable question was asked. She turned her shoulder to him more and more, and eventually they made love less and less. It was his only way to reduce the chances of pregnancy, she felt, and in her more cynical moments she wondered whether he suspected her of popping her contraceptive pills into the drain instead of her mouth. When she thought about this too much her gut cramped and she would vomit. She knew his fear each time this happened, worrying that it was a symptom of the other thing, the unspoken thing, the unreasonable and unconvincing thing. But no. It was only her anxiety over wanting that thing.