. . .
After a week of this, Fred had settled in so well that neither of us could imagine life without him. Feeling a little guilty, but not much, I cooked a meal, checked with my neighbours to make sure they’d be in for the evening, told Peter I’d be gone for a couple of hours and he was to go next door if he needed anything, and went to see Rae Evans.
Rae slowly twirled her wine glass by its stem and said, ‘The police took my electric toaster.’
‘It’s funny isn’t it?’ She set the glass down with a small sharp sound. Her face was weary and uncertain. ‘I don’t even have a home computer. If you’re ever raided in the middle of the night Sandra, the police will know what to take. They might leave your clothes in the cupboard.’
‘It must have been horrible.’
‘No,’ Rae said quietly. ‘It was unbelievable.’
‘I guess they were searching for old bank records.’
‘I always keep my bank statements in the toaster,’ Rae replied. ‘I find it does them to a turn.’
There was so much I wanted to tell her. I wanted to say, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care about the stupid money, where it went, or who took it, or why. We can just start here, start again.
When I arrived, I’d followed her out to the kitchen with the bottle of wine I’d brought, and watched Rae open it and pour two glasses. The kitchen was inhumanly clean. I guessed Rae didn’t cook in it enough to make a mess from one weekly cleaning lady’s visit to the next.
Now we sat opposite each other across a low glass table. I knew I should be pleased that she’d agreed to see me. But in those few minutes while she’d fetched glasses and poured the wine, my hopefulness had vanished. Worry overlaid it like a cushion.
I brought Rae up to date. I broke the news about Jim Wilcox’s abusive email—at least, I assumed it was news to Rae. I told her I believed that Compic had got hold of Access Computing’s list of subscribers, and my list of interviewers and outworkers, and were using them to bully Access Computing members into buying software packages from them.
‘Do you know how the money got into your account?’ I asked.
‘I told you,’ Rae said, ‘I have no idea.’
Her skin looked dry as parchment, as if no amount of face cream would ever be enough to moisten it. Her once-shiny silver hair was dull and dry. I realised that since the first time I’d seen Rae—well, maybe not at the interview—but since that first morning I stood in her office doorway clutching a potted cyclamen, she’d had these brittle edges. She’d had them well before the story broke about the missing money.
‘Why would Access Computing be involved in a plan to get rid of you?’ I asked. ‘You’re their golden goose.’
‘Not a very big egg.’ Rae attempted a weak smile.
‘But an egg nevertheless,’ I went on. ‘You gave them a grant. Why would Access Computing frame you for theft, or collude in a plan to frame you?’
‘Are you saying you think that’s what they did?’
‘I don’t know. But it seems as though a million dollars did go to Access Computing and someone transferred money from Access Computing to your bank account.’
‘Do you have a family, Sandra?’ Rae asked suddenly. ‘I mean uncles, aunts?’
‘My mother lost contact with her family.’ I stared at Rae, wondering where this question had come from.
Rae’s eyes turned dark grey. All the depth and moisture that had gone from her face seemed to soak down into them.
‘Did your mother ever mention me?’ she asked. ‘Did she talk about me at all?’
‘Not that I remember.’
Rae said, ‘Lilian and I used to meet at conferences. Those were heady days.’
‘I know that.’
‘I guess I hoped that somewhere along the line my name might have come up, she might have talked to you about me.’
‘How was it you—why didn’t you—my mother was ill for years before she died.’
Rae nodded. ‘She said she didn’t want to see me again. I didn’t accept that. I mean, I tried—pestered her I suppose—and then I gave up because I couldn’t see that there was anything else for me to do.’
OK, I thought. But Mum’s been dead for eight years. Surely you would have heard.
I hesitated, and in that moment of hesitation I saw that Rae was stuck—not in the way my mother had been stuck, from a lack of formal education and the need to fill my mouth and hers, but stuck because of a gap, a lack in her personality.
The conviction came to me more strongly than ever that if Rae was at fault, it was a fault of omission, of oversight, rather than a deliberate plan to deceive.
Rae was sitting hunched over, shoulders rounded. In a bulky tracksuit top, crinkled at armpits and neck, she looked lumpy, overweight.
I said, ‘You gave me a job as a way of getting to my mother.’
‘At the interview—when I saw you—I liked you straight away—I knew you could do it—I had no trouble convincing the rest of the panel.’
‘You were counting on the fact that I’d tell Mum about my new job, tell her about you. Mum would be up here some time visiting me. There’d be a way for you to meet.’
‘If that was true I’d’ve paid no more attention to you to once I found out she was dead.’ Rae’s voice was cold and disdainful. In just that way she dismissed people she had no interest in, people she looked down on, Felix Wenborn for instance.
Suddenly, I’d had enough. I stood up and said, ‘My mother was nothing like you. I don’t want to discuss her.’
I headed for the door. Rae didn’t try to stop me leaving. She said goodnight and thanked me for coming to see her, as though I’d paid a social visit, nothing more.
As I drove home to Peter, Rae’s dark face by the lake, the face I hadn’t been able to see clearly, kept coming back to me. My mother and Rae Evans. I waited for it, the sick, empty feeling. It didn’t come. There was dullness, apathy, where I expected raw chafing and a plunge into the dark. I would put aside what Rae had told me, at least for the time being. I wouldn’t think about it. If I did, it would become another layer of blame, of me blaming myself for not understanding, for being blind and deaf to who my mother really was.
I have this picture of myself outside a house with my hand raised, about to knock, and the door, the house, everything disappears.
What becomes wicked is only an extension of the ordinary along a certain plane. No-one has to pass through a needle’s eye to get there. The ordinary can extend into a fast, unfitting shape, or else contract into a needle’s eye.
Love in the (sub)Tropics
One Sunday, shortly before Peter left for Philadelphia, we took Fred for a walk up Mount Majura.
I’d often seen the mountain from the oval, or from a parallel height on O’Connor Ridge, but never, in all my years in Canberra, climbed it for itself. And that Sunday morning, it seemed that the mountain had been waiting to spread us out along its palomino flanks. Or it may have been the light, sun with the first assured warmth in it, which in Canberra has the quality of new-blown glass that you never find, or I have never found, in any coastal place. Outdoors for the first time without coats, susceptible to such breaking light, high-stepping, would we have let anything stop us?
Ivan was some way ahead. Fred barked once, running backwards, forwards and sideways, never in a straight line.
He smelt something and took off underneath a fence. I had to give Peter a leg up over it, so he could chase his dog and bring him back to the path.
I caught up with Ivan and we began to talk about a computer show that was coming up in Brisbane. Ivan and Guy Harmer had been preparing a virtual reality display for it for ages, in their spare time—not that Guy had much of that, but he seemed as excited about it as Ivan was.
‘Why don’t I come too?’ I suggested. ‘I’ve never been to Brisbane. A long weekend in the tropics. We could kill two birds with one stone.’
Ivan frowned. Then he grinned and said, ‘Well, I suppose so,
Sand. If you like killing birds with stones.’
. . .
The day before Ivan and I left for Brisbane, two things happened. I said goodbye to Peter, and I ran into Allison Edgeware in Garema Place.
At the last minute, when Peter was packing his rucksack, he said he couldn’t go to America because Fred would miss him too much.
‘I’ll be looking after Fred for you,’ I said.
‘But you won’t know what to feed him!’
‘Fred and I will get along fine.’
‘But you’re going to Brisbane!’
I sighed and pressed my thumbnail into the tip of my left index finger. ‘Only for three days. And the lady at the kennel’s very nice. You said so yourself.’
For a few seconds, Peter swayed on the edge of a stubborn and complete refusal. He threw himself down on his bed, and I decided to leave him there. Whose idea had it been for him to visit his father, anyway? But I knew Peter wouldn’t have written that letter to Derek after we found Fred.
A while later, I heard the back door flap and Peter’s love murmurings and assurances to Fred that he would survive the weeks without him.
At the airport Peter was small, round-shouldered, amazingly together. I told him to give Dad my love and to take care, and he reminded me that Fred had to have milk in the mornings for his bones. I watched the back of my son’s head bob up and down level with the air hostess’s armpit and disappear into the belly of the bird that would take him half a world away.
. . .
On my way back from the airport, I stopped off at the bank. It didn’t seem real that tomorrow I’d be setting out myself, a bona fide traveller with a suitcase. How much cash do you need for a dirty long weekend in Brisbane? I was hurrying out through the bank’s automatic doors when I spotted Allison in Bunda Street.
She was looking straight ahead and walking purposefully, but I had only to keep going straight myself and our paths would cross, and I somehow couldn’t believe that this was accidental.
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Oh. Hello.’ Allison stopped a couple of metres from me and smiled. I thought she was pretending to be surprised to see me.
‘When was the last time Ivan Semyonov did some work for you?’ I asked her.
‘Ivan who?’ Allison puckered her eyebrows, but I felt sure she knew who I meant. ‘I don’t think—’ Allison shook her head, then smiled again and said, ‘You know, Sandra, I’ve only been with Compic for a year or so.’
‘What has Compic been selling Access Computing?’
‘Access Computing? Isn’t that that women’s company that was in the news?’ Allison answered with yet another smile, more of a smirk this time. ‘I think they might have bought one of our graphics packages. It’s very popular. It’s doing even better than we hoped.’
Allison glanced at her watch and murmured, ‘Look, I’m really sorry, it was lovely to see you, but I’ve got to run.’
I returned the compliment and said goodbye. On reflection, I decided I was wrong to suppose that Allison had deliberately bumped into me.
Allison. Isobel. Angela. Allison was in Canberra. Angela was rumoured to be holed up in a Scottish nunnery. If my plan worked, I might soon be meeting Isobel.
All good detectives, in the novels I nightly took to bed with me, possessed an ability that I most clearly lacked. When I let my mind wander, hoping it would yield up significant facts and the logical connections between them, all it came up with were images of women whose mascara never ran. I filled my late-night hours picturing Angelas and Allisons, crooked ladies who never broke a nail, whose hair would never be presented to the world as grey.
I felt them all around me, smooth women, with a smoothness like that of buffed furniture, polished heads inclined gracefully over matching keyboards.
What must it be like to make love with such women? What would they reveal, withhold, what aces under the pale skin of an inner arm?
Are hackers, I asked myself, for the most part browsers, intellectual explorers? Or voyeurs, snoopers, invaders of privacy? Agents of espionage, or industrial spies? Or trespassers? Was hacking theft of service? Was it fraud? Perhaps, I decided, hacking was best described as impersonation.
. . .
I’d never flown from a cold part of the country to a warm one, never on that magic carpet, leaving Canberra airport at 7 a.m., when the temperature was minus two degrees. Nor had I ever really felt the urge to.
It had been one of the shadows before Derek left—that I obstinately refused to appreciate the pleasures of travel. To Derek, it was as if I was refusing to live, preferring a job in a stuffy, uninteresting office in a soulless city.
So the delight of climbing down those aluminium steps at Brisbane airport—the air a kiss—it was incredibly corny in a way, and commonplace to Ivan, who had circumnavigated the globe more times than he cared to remember, and for whom Canberra to Brisbane was as close to going home as he seemed likely to get.
Even Peter, by bunny-hopping to the States, had already travelled further than I had, and perhaps ever would.
A kiss. The surprise of curling down out of the sky and opening my eyes and the pores of my skin to—Brisbane on a Friday morning.
‘Smell it!’ I said. ‘Ivan!’
I led him through the arrival gate. ‘Love in the tropics,’ I said, teasing myself with it.
Our hotel room smelt of air freshener. I spent ten minutes trying to get the window open, then gave up. The green-and-white curtains were made of muslin, or some other thin stuff; but that was all they needed to be, because there was no freezing 2 a.m. air waiting to walk through them. I’m not normally a person who complains about the weather, but all through that first day I kept thinking, how can we go back to it? What will we be going back to?
And walking down the hill to find somewhere to eat, through a park smelling of frangipani—every step I took down the sloping grass I had to think about—I couldn’t just do it—and every breath in and out. I held my breath, not wanting to let go of the sweetness. Not to be conscious of every second was like losing them, and I was so anxious and so happy at the same time that I almost cried.
While Ivan went to set up his display—Guy Harmer was arriving on a mid-afternoon flight—I took a bus along Brisbane’s winding, hilly streets to an address I’d memorised.
I was still trying to decide whether to be myself, or a woman working from home wanting information. As the bus wound up the hill, I closed my eyes and let the swaying fill my head. I was sitting at the back, near a clutch of schoolgirls in kelp-coloured uniforms. A couple were swinging in their seats, exaggerating the laboured movements of the bus and giggling with the bored expressions of people who’d made the journey many times before.
Relaxing, I felt again as I had when I stepped off the plane, as though this northern space, this movement, was a gift.
The girls got out, and the bus kept clanking and winding upwards until I was the last person on it. Was Access Computing’s office in a suburban shopping centre, then? Would we come to it in a minute, round a bend?
At the last stop, the driver closed the sliding doors after me with a hiss and a thud, and I turned to see him check his watch and pull a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket.
The stop was a yellow post in the ground, no shelter or anything; there was no-one in the street. Most of the houses were set back, with high fences or hedges.
The footpath still sloped upwards under my feet. Ahead of me were some shabby old cement-rendered flats with outside wooden staircases. The paint had cracked and swollen away from the wood, and should have been replaced ten years ago. I’d thought the tops of hills were usually reserved for the rich.
When I stopped outside number six, I was even more surprised. It seemed that the building might well have been one of the first in the area. It had double red-brick chimneys and a peculiar domed tower at one end. I imagined it hanging above the city until at last the suburbs rose to meet it, feeling their way with paved roads and cur
ved gutters, and at last a sun-coloured stick for a bus stop.
I looked over the mailboxes until I spotted 13. Half the boxes had mail in them. I took a step closer, flicked the envelope in 13 so that I could see the name on the front, and, as pleased with myself as if I’d solved one of life’s larger mysteries, made my way into the building.
I rang a doorbell. The door was opened by a woman with black hair, dressed for a winter’s day in Canberra.
She peered at me and said, ‘It’s the office you want, dearie? It’s on the next floor, right above our heads.’
I opened my mouth to ask, isn’t this flat number thirteen? But the woman was quicker. ‘Are you from the police?’
‘Just visiting.’
‘They’ve had a lot of visitors.’ A smile of amusement and complicity creased the woman’s lips. ‘Would you like something to drink, dear? You look hot. Been walking up the hill?’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That would be very nice.’
I was startled by my eagerness to pry. I hadn’t given it much thought till then. Finding Access Computing’s office had been an adventure, part of the adventure of being away from home. I hadn’t been able to plan what I would do when I got there.
The woman’s name was Mrs Styvcek. We introduced ourselves while she led me down a narrow hallway. Her flat was full of indoor plants with a look of piracy about them. She motioned me to sit in a bower between polished leaves larger than dinner plates, pinched from the Daintree maybe, or some other far northern rainforest. Her skin was deeply lined around the eyes and mouth, her hair dyed a flat, dark shade and pulled back in a bun, giving prominence to her clever eyes. I knew she’d already taken in as much of me as she could from first impressions, from my wedding ring to southern style of dress.
Mrs Styvcek brought me lemon cordial with ice cubes, peering at me round her outsize plants.
I thanked her, then asked, ‘How many people use the office upstairs? Do you see much of them?’
‘We’ve had the police here, dear. The Federal Police.’ Mrs Styvcek’s high cheekbones shone with recognition of a kindred snooper. ‘The police asked me lots of questions.’ She leant forward confidentially. ‘They asked me how often there was someone in the office, whether there was someone there all the time. I had to say I didn’t know.’
The Trojan Dog Page 17
