Sarah shook her head. ‘I have no idea.’
Sarah placed another photo on the coffee table, covering the image of the three in the park. In this one she and Ginny were standing side by side in their school uniforms in front of a huge old fig tree. They must have been about seventeen. Sarah clearly dominated the photo. She was laughing with one arm around Ginny’s shoulders and one leg kicking the air. She radiated energy and vitality. Ginny, by contrast, was perfectly still, with a pensive, closed expression. They were physically alike, both slender and small-boned with even features, but the expressions on their faces and the way they held their bodies was completely different.
Both women looked at the photo and, in the same instant, recognised that that was who they were. Sarah – confident, happy, in charge. Ginny – quiet, in the background, runner-up. It was a sobering moment as they sat staring at the picture. The hint of warmth Ginny had felt for their shared childhood memories chilled inside her. She felt the bitterness return, squeezing the breath out of her.
Sarah instinctively felt for her friend. Ginny lacked confidence. She always had. Sarah knew that. And Sarah thought it was her role to help Ginny build her confidence and her self-esteem. Sarah’s concern pushed her own troubles away. What would help her friend? she wondered. Falling in love would be a good start. Maybe Hal? These were the thoughts that went through Sarah’s head as they sat, side by side, looking at the photo.
Ginny’s reaction was different. She imagined watching all the photos burn.
*
Tom came home early. Sarah hadn’t been expecting him, which was obvious. The floor of the lounge room was covered in photos. Sarah sat in the middle of them, sobbing. She was unkempt, in her dirty tracksuit, her hair wild and unbrushed.
Tom picked his way carefully to her. She looked at him but didn’t seem to see him.
‘Why don’t we ever realise about people until it’s too late?’ she said. She didn’t seem to expect an answer from him.
‘I love you, Tom. Do you know that?’ Her tone was urgent and her voice sounded unnatural.
Tom, wearing his best work suit, loosened his tie and sat on the floor facing her.
‘Yes, Sarah, I know that,’ he said quietly. Tom noticed the photos she was holding. He gently prised them out of her hands. She didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t seem aware. ‘I love you too,’ he said.
The photos were a jumble of snaps – one taken of them at a friend’s wedding a few years ago, a picture of Sarah and her mother posing at Stonehenge, Ginny and Sarah with Gus, an old photo of her father in an army uniform. They held no clue to this new mood swing. When he left Sarah that morning she had seemed relaxed, a bit subdued perhaps, but he had thought that was to be expected. Now she seemed on the verge of hysteria.
‘You have to know that I love you,’ she said. ‘And I love Ginny. And I love Thel. And I love Anne and Kate.’
‘Oh darling, and they all love you too. What is this? What’s going through your head?’
Sarah didn’t appear to hear him. ‘I have to tell them how important they are to me. People go away. They leave you or you leave them. It’s like McKenzie. I was wrong. I didn’t see it. And now it’s too late.’
She was off on another tangent. Tom didn’t understand where McKenzie came into it. She was babbling. The thoughts tumbled out of her mouth, one after the other.
‘Life is all about change. It never stops. As soon as you think you have it figured, whoosh, it changes. Don’t get comfortable. That’s the message. Because as soon as you do, that’s when you’ll get hit. Midships.’
Tom listened for a thread, something that he could follow.
‘No-one is what they seem. How can you ever really know a person? How well do I know you? How do I really know what you are thinking? If you thought half the thoughts about me that I have about you, I’d be insulted.’
Tom felt himself floundering. ‘Sarah, you are scaring me,’ he said. ‘What is going on?’
It was as if he hadn’t spoken. Sarah ignored him, stood up and went into the bedroom. She reappeared with her runners in her hand.
‘I’m going for a run,’ she announced.
Tom said nothing. He couldn’t think of anything to say. He stayed sitting on the floor, looking at the pile of photos, wondering why his life with Sarah seemed to be spinning further and further out of control.
Tom rang Hal. He desperately needed to talk to his father. He felt emotionally drained by the hysteria that seemed to have become a new fixture in his life. He wanted the cool, calm solidity of a chat with Hal over a few beers, preferably in the public bar of an old hotel, with the races playing on Sky Channel above the bar. Just the thought of it made Tom feel better.
Hal seemed pleased to hear from him.
Hal knew the minute he saw him that Tom was unhappy. He looked like a man under pressure. But Hal wouldn’t ask outright. It wasn’t his style. Nor was it the nature of their relationship, or it hadn’t been, thought Hal. He felt ridiculously pleased that Tom had called.
They talked about bikes, the rugby, Tom’s stories on steroid abuse. Hal noticed that Tom didn’t once refer to Sarah during the conversation. It was quite a contrast to the last time they had shared a few beers in a pub. Hal remembered the murderous looks that had passed between them at the picnic on the weekend. He figured he knew where the problem lay.
They were on their third beer when he asked, innocently enough, ‘And how’s Sarah?’
The look on Tom’s face was instant confirmation. He looked beaten. ‘I don’t know.’ H e struggled with the words while Hal waited patiently. ‘I think we may be making a mistake.’ Tom’s voice broke as he spoke, just a little warble on the word mistake, but Hal caught it.
‘Why do you think that?’
Tom, who made his living from expressing himself, stumbled to articulate his fears. He felt he was wading through thick treacle. He didn’t understand what was going on at home, Sarah’s erratic behaviour and his own ineffectuality in the face of it. He was ceasing to like the woman he woke up next to each morning and was feeling angry with the man who stared back at him from the mirror each day.
He was starting to think that together, those two people were not a good combination. But admitting that aloud seemed in itself to be a betrayal. Once those words were out there, he worried what would happen. He felt he may be unleashing something that couldn’t be brought back.
‘It doesn’t feel right,’ said Tom. ‘Something’s not right. Sarah’s bitterly unhappy. It’s obvious in the way she speaks to me and behaves. I worried at first that I was losing her. But now,’ his voice dropped to a whisper, ‘I don’t think I care. And that’s worse, much, much worse.’ There, he had said it. It was out. Tom felt he had opened a door that couldn’t be closed. He stared forlornly at the bar.
Hal ached for his son. He wanted so badly to be able to help him, to find the right words, to be the wise father that Tom seemed to need. Hal wasn’t comfortable talking about intimate relationships. He thought how it was hard enough living through them, without trying to explain them. He thought of his own history and shuddered. It had taken him many years, and much heartbreak, to finally arrive at the point where he understood himself.
‘Relationships are tough,’ he said. ‘They force you to face yourself.’
Tom nodded bitterly. He knew that to be true.
‘When everything is going well it’s easy. But it’s when things aren’t going well that the relationship is tested. If it’s strong and the foundations are good then it will survive. But if not then it won’t. You and Sarah have been together a long time and you seem good together. I would be careful about throwing that away. But also, you are very young. You will both change a lot in the next ten years and perhaps what you want now won’t be what you want in the future.’
Tom listened to his father. His words were comforting. The noises and smells of the public bar were comforting. The tight knot in his stomach was starting to unravel. He felt the fi
rst whisper of peace he had felt in weeks.
‘Is that what happened with you and Thel?’ he asked. ‘Were you too young? Did you both change?’
Hal sipped his beer slowly and thoughtfully. He had known the day would come when Tom would ask. He had almost prepared what he would say. He wasn’t surprised that Thel hadn’t told Tom. She had been so badly hurt. He remembered the pain in her voice when he had left. It would be hard for a mother to share that with her son.
But now Tom was asking and Hal wasn’t sure it was the right time for his son to hear. He didn’t want to bail out on him. He figured he had done enough of that already. But having just found him, he didn’t think he could stand the thought of losing him again. And would it help Tom to know the truth now, when his own relationship was in trouble? Hal considered it all before speaking.
‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘I’d like to tell you what happened, but I don’t think this is the time. I hope you will understand that. Your mother is the only woman I ever loved. She is the most remarkable lady. I will always love her. But we couldn’t live together. When we got married we wanted to build a life together, start a family. Those first few years after you were born we were so happy. But we were such different people. The foundations, I guess, had never been good. Only it took me that long to figure that out. It wasn’t your mother’s fault. It was mine. Completely mine.’
Tom felt the same overwhelming feeling of confusion, of being lost, that he had felt as a child when his mother explained to him, tears spilling out of her eyes, that his father had to go away and from now on, she said, it would be just Thel and Tom, and they would have to look after each other.
Tom hadn’t understood. It made no sense to him. He had looked at his sad, weeping mother and felt scared. He waited for his dad to come home and explain it to him, and it had taken a few days for him to realise that Hal wasn’t coming home. To Tom it was like the sun went behind a cloud and stayed there, for many years. He had felt overwhelmed by a world he couldn’t understand and standing at the bar next to Hal, he felt that confusion again.
The message from his father, he realised, was that love just may not be enough. He spoke of Thel with such tenderness and Tom remembered the wistfulness in his mother’s eyes when she spoke of Hal, before the wall had gone up. They didn’t hate each other. That was obvious. So why couldn’t they make it work?
It all swirled about in his head. Maybe marriage was an impossible ideal. Maybe it wasn’t for him. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for it. There were lots of things he wanted to do with his life and maybe marriage would prevent him from doing them.
He couldn’t expect Hal to make his decisions for him. Or anyone else. Even Sarah. Especially not Sarah. Tom felt the frustration returning as his thoughts started to rotate around his head, circling back on each other. He changed the subject.
‘We were thinking of going along to the Mardi Gras on Saturday night. Would you like to come? We thought of asking Ginny.’
Hal looked embarrassed and Tom felt clumsy. He hadn’t meant to put it quite like that.
‘Can’t, mate,’ said Hal. ‘I’ve got something on that night.’
‘You’re not homophobic, are you?’ asked Tom, trying to lighten the mood.
Hal matched him. ‘No, mate. Dykes on bikes are some of my best customers,’ he said with a laugh.
CHAPTER 15
I’ve stopped taking them. I’m storing up the fog. In the toilet. I hide them in my cheek, then drop them in the toilet and flush. I’ve got three already, stored somewhere along those gurgly pipes. I reckon they stop at the S-bend near the wall. That’s where they are. My little stash of drugs. Every day I’m going to add to my little stash. No more fog for me, no sirree.
*
Sarah was asleep when Tom came home and he was relieved. Tom gently pulled back the sheets on his side of the bed, not wanting to wake her, not wanting to talk to her. He wanted to sleep, long and deep, and not wake up until the world was back on track and his life started to make sense again.
Sarah stirred slightly as Tom eased his body under the sheets. She turned away from him and backed her bottom toward him. Instinctively he accommodated her, moulding himself around her. Tom lay looking into the dark at the back of Sarah’s head. He was aware of her naked bottom, the feel of her soft skin, but his senses were overpowered by her smell. She smelled, he thought, like stale wet nappies. He was consumed by revulsion.
*
Tom was alone in the bed when he woke, lying precariously close to the edge. He struggled against waking up, trying to linger in the semi-conscious state as long as possible, ignoring the announcer on the clock radio, the feel of the pillow under his head and the sun streaming through the windows onto his face. He didn’t want to rejoin the world. It was nicer here, warm and soft. There was a faint, insistent, nagging thought that was trying to rise. Tom didn’t want to acknowledge it.
He became aware he was alone before he opened his eyes. Sarah didn’t appear to be anywhere in the apartment. She must have gone for her morning run. Tom decided to have breakfast at his favourite café on the way to work. He was showered, shaved, dressed and out of the apartment in less than fifteen minutes.
*
Ginny fed Kitty some milk and checked on the cockroach still lying at the base of the fish tank. The water was turning milky and the bubble-eyed fish skirted around the dead insect, ignoring it. Ginny took her position at her bedroom chair. She saw Tom walk across the living room floor and pick up his briefcase, then she heard the front door click behind him. Minutes later she watched Sarah walk across the living room, into the bedroom and strip off. She was red-faced, panting and her body was covered in sweat.
She stood naked in front of the mirror, sucking in her stomach and flexing her biceps. She walked around the apartment, still naked, putting on a CD, fixing herself a coffee then sitting down on the couch to read the newspapers.
Ginny had given up any idea of going to work. It had become too much of an interruption. She could feel the tension from Toft Monks, spilling out of the speaker with a hiss. She had her notebook on her lap, ready for whatever may happen. Ginny had little patience with people. But if she was studying an animal that interested her she could sit still for hours.
*
Hal opened his shop, wheeling half a dozen bikes onto the sidewalk. He was distracted from the shop, concentrating on the call he planned to make to Thel. He had come very close to contacting her a few times over the years but something had always stopped him. Guilt, fear, cowardice. He had placed money in her account whenever he could. Sometimes it had been a little and at other times it had been a substantial amount. But he had never contacted her. In many ways he felt he had lost that right.
Whenever he felt the overpowering urge to ring he would examine his reasons and every time he felt they fell short. He wanted to hear about Tom, know how his son was doing, check that Thel was okay. The motivation, when he looked at it, was always to make himself feel better. But what would the call do to them? He didn’t believe he had the right to cause Thel any further pain. And he believed his son was better off without him. He was not a fit role model. Hal spent years running away from himself, hating himself. When he left Thel and Tom he was a haunted and unhappy man.
Hal had been largely brought up an orphan. His mother struggled on her pension and when it got too hard, she would put him in an orphanage. He never knew when she would come back for him. Sometimes it was weeks, mostly months and once he had not seen her for three years.
Hal had met Thel at the local surf club dance when they were both just sixteen and the attraction had been instant. Thel was like a little dark-haired pixie with her black hair so long she could sit on it and jet black eyes that darted around. She was dainty and feminine and Hal could put his huge hands around her tiny waist. They had married as soon as he left school. They never had any money and they had never cared. There were more important things in life to worry about, like creating the happy family unit
that Hal so craved and saving the world from environmental bullies.
Tom’s birth had seemed like a miracle to them. Hal loved his son passionately, so much so that it scared him. Watching his son grow, Hal thought he finally had everything he wanted, everything he needed to be a man – a respectable job, a loving wife and a healthy son. But he was wrong. There was a hole inside him that they didn’t fill, an ache that wouldn’t go away. He didn’t understand it. It scared him. So he had left.
He remembered his last conversation with Thel. She hadn’t cried. Her face was so blank he wondered if she had understood what he was saying. He remembered every second of that last morning together, sitting in the little kitchen, surrounded by Tom’s artwork. That was twenty-two years ago.
Hal knew now the time had come. He wasn’t sure what he would say. Mornings in his bike shop were quiet. The bike owners who had jobs were at work and the hard-core bikers hadn’t got out of bed yet. He left his assistant to cope with any salespeople or merchandisers that might drop by unannounced and closed the glass door to his office.
*
Thel was eating breakfast, sitting deep in her favourite leather couch on the verandah, watching the morning surfers paddle their boards out to the first break. She knew Hal would phone. She knew it from the moment Tom had told her he had seen him. And she thought she was ready. She was curious, more than a little scared and quite a bit excited. The telephone sat by her feet. She had been carrying it around with her for days, just in case. She had gone over their life together, meeting at the surf club dance, chaining themselves to trees in some protest or other, riding up the east coast on Hal’s new bike, living in that caravan for months before they moved into their first proper little house with its funny crooked doors. And then the miracle of baby Tom. For days she wallowed in the memories, savouring them.
Finally, when she thought she was up to it, she went through the more painful memories. They were like a pile of photos she had kept face down in her heart for a long time, knowing they were there but avoiding them. She carefully pulled back a corner to see what the image might be, then, when that seemed okay, she gently, nervously turned it over.
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