The Memory Trap
Page 10
These words were greeted with astonished silence. Finally Elizabeth, the Uniting Church minister, spoke. ‘I see what you mean.’ She looked around the table. ‘I think we all see what you mean, and it’s useful to be reminded of who we are and what we represent. But we don’t think for one moment that a lack of diversity in our interfaith, multicultural group,’ – she loaded ‘interfaith’ and ‘multicultural’ with emphasis – ‘is any reason to weaken our resolve. If anything it strengthens it. If we can draw on our similarities in the light of seemingly great diversity, others can too.’
Nina was about to respond but Elizabeth was not finished.
‘We’ve often joked that the orthodox branches of our various religions would have much more in common with one another than they would with each of us, moderate practitioners of their own faith.’
‘And what would happen if you were to include orthodox believers in your group?’ Nina asked.
The rabbi answered. ‘We’d introduce competing views, views that couldn’t be assimilated with our own. We’re all well aware of this.’
‘But if you can’t convince your co-religionists, how do you propose to convince atheists and half-strength believers and just plain ordinary pragmatists more concerned with their everyday comforts than anything disturbing or inconsistent in their beliefs? What monument could possibly have such power?
‘The world is small these days,’ Nina continued. ‘You can connect with anyone anywhere. You can read breaking news in dozens of countries while riding the tram. If people want to look and learn beyond their own sphere it’s very easy. But I’d suggest most people would prefer to catch up on episodes of Big Brother and MasterChef when they go online, and that’s after they’ve chatted on Facebook and checked out their friends’ postings on YouTube. The wider world’s at our fingertips yet many people choose to look away.’
Several voices sounded in unison: this was the very reason they wanted a monument, something to concentrate attention on beliefs and values and attitudes that were easily overlooked in the rush and tumble of modern life.
‘And your monument is to remind us of freedom, social inclusion and a common humanity?’ Nina said. Your monument: it sounded as if she were deriding it.
‘Yes, but also to inform those who’ve never considered such values before,’ Cate said.
‘With a pedagogical function as well?’ Nina continued.
There was much nodding around the table.
‘And there’s more,’ Nadirah Harvey said. ‘Here in Australia, people of different ethnicities and religions live in harmony.’
Nina was tempted to interject: if there’s so much harmony then why the need for a monument, but kept her silence.
‘There’s no sectarian violence here,’ Nadirah continued. ‘No centuries-old religious arguments, and we want it to remain that way. So our monument will have a pre-emptive function. It’ll send a message to would-be terrorists not to bother with us, that Australia offers freedom to all its citizens.’
‘Our monument will be like the Statue of Liberty,’ Elizabeth said.
‘Exactly,’ the rabbi was smiling, ‘but with aesthetic merit.’
Nina reminded them that when the Statue of Liberty was dedicated back in 1886 it carried very different cultural capital. ‘It was actually a gift in friendship from the French to the Americans to commemorate the centennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. No one thinks of that now.’
In the silence that followed Nina thought she had at last made an impression. Then Charlie Goldstein reminded her again this was not a group willing to change its mind. ‘It’s what the Statue of Liberty has come to represent,’ he said, ‘that encourages us a monument can embody complex abstractions like freedom and hope.’
‘You don’t think that the monument you’re planning might be over-burdened with symbolic freight?’
Charlie smiled. ‘No. We’ll choose our designer carefully. We’ll choose our site carefully. Our instructions will be absolutely clear to those whose job it is to transform our dreams into a reality. And when the monument’s unveiled, we’ll ensure ample information is available so that our ideas and ideals are brought into easy reach of everyone.’
There was a scatter of applause around the table, and an array of relieved faces. Nina had detected a let’s-bring-this-meeting-to-a-close tone as Charlie spoke and she decided there was little more to be done today. She thanked them all and apologised if she’d caused any offence.
‘It did feel rather like an interrogation,’ Nadirah Harvey said.
Nina knew this woman had lost family members to interrogation and torture under Saddam; hers was a comment aimed at putting Nina in her place. But she didn’t react, she knew the reasons for her questions.
She suggested they discuss the form the monument might take at their next meeting. ‘And before then I’ll circulate a paper on trends in memorialising and monuments to help frame the discussion.’
The words were out before she could stop them: the professional wrapping things up. There was to have been only one meeting and now she was setting herself up for another. In the past she would not have made such a mistake.
There was a stiffness as Nina left the room. It didn’t surprise her: often when working with groups she was the first person to question a seemingly worthy project. But even before the door was closed she heard them, not the words, but small explosions, and then one clear voice. She recognised it as belonging to the young rabbi.
‘Do we have the right person?’
It was hot, too hot to remain outdoors, but neither did Nina want to return to the flat. She was unsettled, irritated, and the tiny box of her temporary home would plunge her deeper into the mire. The fact was she was better informed than the good people seated in the boardroom of C.G. and C.K. Holdings, and was burdened by this in much the same way as if she were privy to hurtful information that would be damaging to a close friend. She wondered, not for the first time, whether any of her friends had known about Daniel’s infidelity before she herself found out. And if so would she have wanted to be told? She needed to know, but would she have wanted to know? The TIF people were, she believed, in a similarly vulnerable situation. They were corralled by their goodness, and their vision so narrow that even if they wanted, they could not see all the troubles ahead. And there was something else, something harshly personal; it was the couple at the centre of the group, Cate and Charlie, partners in every aspect of their lives. Why them? Why not her and Daniel?
She took a tram back to the centre of the city, it was far too hot to walk, and then on a whim she caught another tram to the university.
It had always excited her that nothing, barring disease or trauma, is ever forgotten but is locked away, often behind steel-plated doors, not because the memories are injurious – although that can be the case – but for the simple reason that life has bolted off in another direction. Then something happens at a very particular time and the doors are suddenly opened. If someone had mentioned Felix Hovnanian a few years ago, Nina expected that after a brief nod at the past she would have let him slip away. But now, today, she turned her back on a less-than-satisfactory meeting and headed towards the University of Melbourne, perhaps to front up at his door twenty years on, or perhaps not: she was yet to decide.
She took out her phone and searched the university website. Felix was an honorary fellow at one of the new institutes that had replaced so many of the traditional university departments. She walked across campus to the location, found that it was more virtual than actual, but there was, quaintly, a pigeon-hole for each institute associate. She found Felix’s name – her heart was thumping – scribbled a note with her phone number and email address and put it in his slot. She left quickly before she could change her mind and caught a tram back to the flat.
She switched on the cooling, stripped down to her underwear and flopped onto the couch. She was tired, and it was not just the meeting with the TIF group, hers was a tiredness that
stretched all the way back to Daniel’s departure. It takes a great deal of energy not to think about someone, and it’s impossible to do the job properly. She could monitor her thoughts with the diligence of a fundamentalist but just by being who she was, the woman who for thirteen years had shared her life with Daniel, condemned her to failure. If she’d been asked before his dumping how long she thought it would take to recover from a spouse’s defection, she would have naively answered six months maximum, that such betrayal simply would not warrant any more energy or time. But some things, it seemed, were beyond control.
And maybe it was these thoughts that steered her into her email archive, for one minute she was making herself a cool drink and the next she was scrolling through the emails in an ancient file titled ‘Daniel’, untouched since his return from that fateful trip to Cape Town. So many loving messages, hundreds of them saved over the years, his emails to her, hers to him. Nina dipped in at random; she could actually hear his voice in the words he wrote. There were emails sent by him from Argentina, Canada, Ireland, America, and by her from Russia, Vienna, Paris, Australia. There were emails written at his desk in Primrose Hill and others from her desk in Bloomsbury. Billets doux, they called them and she’d kept them all. She loitered in their correspondence, let herself roll with the current of his words, down down down the list until she was reading the emails from their last months together.
When someone owns up to deceiving you for four months, they may as well own up for six months or eight; she’d been inclined to believe his timeline, primarily because she simply could not believe he had been lying all through their anniversary weekend, that loving weekend when the storm raged and the two of them had never been closer. But as she scrolled down the email list, she began to doubt. This was a man who could hide behind words.
I love you. Don’t forget that. I’ll toast my beautiful
girl tonight from the plane. You toast me too.
You are a great blessing. Please look after yourself
while I’m away.
And DON’T run yourself into the ground … for anyone …
much love and missing you already
Your dxx
Daniel was off to Japan, a meeting in Osaka with a few days’ holiday tacked on the end. She would have joined him but she was in a delicate stage of negotiations with a difficult group, so difficult that if she had not been so interested in the proposed project – a monument to the Jewish presence in London’s East End – she would have withdrawn from consideration. So Daniel went to Japan and she stayed home. But the date of the email would have put him, according to his confessed timeline, in that first exciting flush of the affair with Sally. Loving emails sent to his wife and, she now assumed, wild passionate emails to the new lover. Unless, that is, the lover travelled to Japan with him.
If words come easily to you, as they did to Daniel, how simple to use them to conceal your deceits. Did he pause for a moment and think what he was writing to her, his wife, during those four months, or longer, he was cheating on her? Or did he simply sit at his computer and let the familiar words and loving expressions roll off his fingers. And for each email he sent to his wife, how many arrived in the girlfriend’s inbox? Nina read every email written to her during their last months together. All those loving and familiar words, and all of them lies. As for the happiness she experienced during that time – it was corrupted, it had been a sham.
She had thought Daniel to be a man of good faith, for thirteen years she believed he had a horror of self-deception. So what was happening here? Either she’d been wrong for thirteen years and all his loving words were no more meaningful than a football commentary. Or he had really loved her, in which case might he have made a mistake in leaving her? She wondered if he was happy in his new life – a momentary lapse before calling a halt. You can’t afford to think like this, she told herself. Allow him even the possibility of a mistake and you let in hope. He’s not coming back to you, he’s not coming back. If he’s made a mistake, it’s no business of yours.
Chapter 6. The Frailty of Monsters
Nina would have floated a raft of excuses to avoid a whole day in the company of her sister and brother-in-law, but Zoe’s blunt honesty silenced her.
‘It’d be much more enjoyable for me if you joined us,’ she said. ‘Easier, too.’
A day trip was planned down to the coast to the Jameson family beach cottage. Zoe had lent the place to friends the previous week; the wife was undergoing treatment for breast cancer and the couple had needed a break. With her normally efficient and reliable friends clearly squeezed by the stresses of cancer, they’d left a few of their belongings behind. Zoe offered to collect them and at the same time check that all appliances had been turned off, the rubbish bin emptied, the house secured.
Please come with us, Zoe said, and of course Nina agreed – for Zoe primarily, but also to see the old beach house. It was here the family had holidayed throughout her childhood, and where her parents planned to retire when they were, in their own words, ‘too old to move’. Until such time, Zoe and Elliot used the house more than anyone else; Elliot, in particular, loved the place and would often go there by himself to work.
How much easier it had been to manage the tensions between Zoe and Elliot when Daniel was around, she found herself thinking, which was, she realised, dangerously close to wishing Daniel was here with her now. She was quick to remind herself that if Daniel hadn’t deserted her she’d not be in Australia at all. Instead the two of them would be on an adventure in the Amazon Basin, or watching the northern lights in Greenland, or tracing the footsteps of Bruce Chatwin in Patagonia – they had promised themselves all these trips when their future stretched forever.
How mindlessly does happiness trade in forevers, she thought.
She grabbed a shopping bag, shoved in jumper and shoes, bathers and a hat, hesitated over a book and in the end included it: if the tensions between Zoe and Elliot escaped so would she, to a shady spot on the rocks with her book as she had done so many times as a girl. She locked the apartment and walked down the four flights of stairs rather than rely on the old slogger of a lift. The building had been recently renovated, but for some reason the lift had been left languishing in the 1980s. Her brother-in-law was not a man to be kept waiting and she wanted to be standing on the pavement when he pulled up.
Elliot drove one of those monster four-wheel drive vehicles with tinted windows and a don’t-mess-with-me bull bar. Nina, who had never owned a car much less one so dangerous, was appalled when she first saw it.
‘He loves it,’ Zoe said. ‘It makes him happy.’
Elliot was a biographer and academic, Zoe taught music at an inner-city school, both were committed urbanites whose children were fast approaching the age of independent mobility; they had no need for such a vehicle. But if it made Elliot less prickly and disagreeable, and if life thereby became a little easier for her long-suffering sister, then let him have his monster.
It was while she was waiting for Elliot that Nina noticed a man standing at the edge of the footpath, just a few metres away. In one hand he held a cigarette, with the other he steadied himself against an electricity pole. He wasn’t wearing shoes and there were holes in the heels of his socks; the exposed skin was not soiled as she would have expected but a vulnerable piglet pink. His white shirt was creased and there was a large brownish stain between his shoulders. But the sleeves were folded back in that fashionable way of businessmen relaxing after work, and his trousers, while in need of a press were, to her eye, stylish and well cut; his hair was neatly cropped, suggesting a recent visit to the hairdresser.
The man finished his cigarette and threw it in the gutter. Then he turned around and she saw his face. The orbits of his eyes were so swollen that the eyes themselves were reduced to sad black slits. His cheeks were bloated and the skin mottled with wine-dark blotches; his mouth hung loosely open. The man was thirty, perhaps a little older, impossible to know in a face so ravaged.
The man mumbled something and brushed him away.
Elliot persisted. He offered to call a taxi, he offered to ring the man’s family, to telephone a friend, he offered to find him water, shoes, a clean shirt. The man now pushed past him: he was fine, he said, and staggered towards the apartment building. He had almost reached the entrance when he stumbled, an arm jerked towards the door frame and missed, and down he slumped, first to his knees then on all fours. Elliot was again by his side. ‘You can’t stay here, mate,’ he said. ‘I’ll help get you home.’
‘This is home,’ the man said.
He tilted back on to his knees then, using the wall for balance, managed to drag himself upright. He fumbled with his wallet and with the slow deliberateness of the drunk withdrew a key card; he nearly lost his footing again as he tried to insert it in the slot. Finally the card connected, the door opened and he was inside.
An hour later and hurtling along the road out of Geelong, Elliot was still trumpeting on about the man. He could pick an alcoholic at one hundred paces in poor light (a short-sighted teetotaller could have picked this one, but with Elliot venting his expertise on alcohol dependence, Nina decided to remain silent); Elliot could predict the man’s future, obviously still in work judging by his clothes, but not for much longer given the state he was in. Without help this man would end up in the gutter. Elliot knew the man’s drinking patterns – steady daily drinking with binges on weekends; he knew the man’s drink preferences – Scotch, he could smell it on his breath; his personal supports – the family had thrown him out otherwise he wouldn’t be staying in a serviced apartment. And while it occurred to Nina that the man might be visiting from interstate or overseas, he might be staying at the flats while his house was being renovated, staying there with his wife and children, the man might be renting a well-appointed serviced apartment close to the city centre for a host of different reasons, but again she kept her silence because alcohol and its dependence were Elliot’s specialty. Elliot could speak with the greatest authority because he, Elliot Eugene Wood, had been there.