Life Before

by Carmel Reilly

  ‘Good,’ said Pam decisively. Saturday night settled in the way she liked best, with food, wine and good company.

  April 1993

  Northam

  It was hot for April. Warm enough for shorts and a t-shirt. Warm enough for a light summer frock. A day before the end of term and Pam was standing in a makeshift queue waiting to talk to Miss Keenan, Scott’s English teacher, wearing an expensive yellow summer frock and feeling a little self-conscious. It was her best dress, or the dress she liked best at the moment, and she’d worn it to have lunch with her father at the Saltram, the only local pub with a bit of class and a dining room with food worth eating. It was the place that he liked to take her when he had something serious to celebrate or discuss. (Truth be told, he was always looking for an excuse to go.) The only place around about where she might faintly be expected to dress up. She hadn’t had time afterwards to go home and change for parent–teacher interviews, where no one seemed to care much at all about what they wore. As a consequence, she now found herself surrounded by a hoard of women sporting flimsy skirts and shorts, tank tops, t-shirts and thongs, some even in trackpants. Overdressed felt like an understatement

  She knew a lot of people in this room, the library, with its shelving pushed back to make way for islands of chairs and tables. She might have known more of them better if she’d gone to high school here, but having been sent away to board, there were many who remained at the periphery of her knowledge: some ghosts from primary school, others not known at all. Newcomers even. Was it odd then that she’d sent her kids to the local school? She was sure many people here thought it was a strange decision. Her father had certainly found it hard to believe. ‘If you want to pay for the three of them to go to boarding school, be my guest,’ she’d said when he brought it up a few years before, sometime after it became clear she hadn’t enrolled them at her or her brother’s alma maters. Predictably that had shut him up. He wouldn’t want to be saddled with that expense, or the possible accusation of playing favourites when Peter was paying for his daughter Justine’s schooling at the ultra-exclusive Clearton all by himself. Instead it was she who had had to pay for her outburst by suffering the unspoken condescension he was so good at. The sense of ‘I told you so’ that still hovered between them for marrying Mick. For not having the money to do what she should be doing. For not upholding the family name. Lucky then that she’d changed hers, although everyone knew who she was anyway.

  But, even besides the cost, she couldn’t see the point of boarding school. The insignia embroidered on Scott’s uniform pocket read Industria et probitate. By diligence and integrity. Not too different from her old school motto. Scientia et industria, if she remembered correctly. Yet despite the science (substandard as it was for most girls’ schools in the 1960s, she was fairly sure) and the industry (homework only done by virtue of the stand-over tactics of the boarding house matron) she certainly hadn’t walked out with a deep knowledge of physics (or metaphysics, for that matter) or history or poetry. Only in geography could she claim some advantage. She could still recite capital cities (border changes notwithstanding), highest mountains and longest rivers at the drop of a hat. That and a few phrases in French. But, all in all, considering the money her parents had spent, what good had it done her—or them? She hadn’t moved far, hadn’t done much, had married a impecunious mick called Mick. She wasn’t even in touch with her old school cohort, although letters arrived every year suggesting she join the old girls’ network. Her brother, similarly packed off, had spent a year at university then simply returned to the farm. He could have cut out the middle man, Mick observed once, and just stayed at home. She speculated now that if her father had come with her today, he’d have seen only the hoi polloi.

  ‘All the good people send their kids away,’ he told her during one of their verbal tussles.

  ‘Depends what you mean by good,’ she’d responded. I’m good, aren’t I? she’d wanted to say, but thought better of it. Did she really want him to answer that?

  She was ruminating on this as she stood awkwardly, shuffling from one foot to another in strappy sandals that really were too high for queuing, watching Scott fidget beside her. She hated the process—all the waiting around and the evaluation—and thought if Scott was at boarding school at least she’d have the excuse of being too far away to come down for the ordeal. Simon had been dux of the school. He generally worked hard and got on with the teachers. Loren likewise made few waves. But, with Scott, she’d had six years of being told how much better he could do. How he needed to concentrate more, work harder, stop talking, wear his uniform with pride. Of course, that wasn’t every teacher, but at least one or two per semester complained. She’d learned to shut most of it out and only listen to the positive. What else could she possibly do? He was completely beyond retraining now. And perhaps, more to the point, so was she.

  Pam was also tired. She would have loved to just go home, but she was the parent who always went to these meetings. Mick never came along. He didn’t like anything to do with school. It was almost a phobia, which she understood knowing his relationship with educational institutions and the limits of his patience. So here she was in her role as family representative, standing in the queue having rushed here to make the four o’clock timeslot only to find that Miss Keenan was running way behind. She glanced at her watch and looked around the room. Lori was near the door in a huddle with her friend Katie and another girl Pam couldn’t quite place. Was it Julie Roth? She had an appointment in fifteen minutes with Loren’s maths teacher and she didn’t want to miss that either. She’d never expected to be stuck here like this but, if push came to shove, talking to Scott’s teachers was more pressing; VCE year was as important as it got, and Scott making it this far seemed like some monumental achievement. It was going to be the last time they would ever have to bend her ear and what they had to say about these last few months was significant.

  ‘There’s Troy,’ said Scott, straightening up. She saw him tilt his head in the direction of the door on the far side of the library where Troy had paused to scan the room, looking, Pam knew, for Scott. In seconds his face lit up and, as though some invisible electric current connected them, she felt Scott’s body charge a little beside her and return the greeting with a grin. Behind Troy, his parents, Ray and Maxine, were still orienting themselves to the unfamiliar layout of the room, searching for teachers among the throng. She looked away quickly, picking up her bag and poking at its contents so she wouldn’t have to greet them from afar, make them look like movie stars when they turned in her direction and she was forced into a smile or, even worse, a wave.

  She’d first seen them in this very room at a parent–teacher meeting three years before. The boys were in year nine then. The Druitts had only just moved to Northam, and Troy and Scott had struck up an immediate friendship. She had met Troy a couple of times before she met his parents, and her surprise when she first clapped eyes on them was palpable. She’d liked Troy from the first. He was a sparky kid, she’d thought, wiry and lively with black curls that fell across his face, like one of those adolescents from a Renaissance painting. ‘He looks like Marc Bolan,’ she said to Loren, who had stared at her blankly.

  ‘Who’s Marc Bolan?’

  ‘A bit of a sex symbol in the seventies,’ Pam had replied.

  Loren, then aged thirteen, had made a face of disgust (which probably encompassed the gamut from the ridiculous idea that her mother could ever have been young, a vague notion of the prehistoric 1970s, and the fact that her mother could even dare to have this thought about a teenage boy) and countered, ‘Oh gross, Mum.’

  Looking at Ray and Maxine, it was hard to see where Troy had come from. Where Troy was dark and angelic, they were fair and raw. Not unattractive, not uninteresting, but, especially in Ray’s case, so different in looks as to pose the question of adoption in Pam’s mind. Ray was the sort of person your eyes would light on in a crowd. He was big, not fat, but tall and imposing, muscled, like a s
trongman in a circus, with a large head that sported the double whammy of luxuriant blond mullet and a thick russet moustache. Commanding was a word that might have been used, except there was another layer to the man. A sense of something rigid and unyielding and entirely self-possessed. An air that suggested sergeant major, but with more than a touch of sergeant-at-arms.

  Beside him, Maxine was what Pam’s mother, always a sharp observer (with the emphasis on sharp), would have called a bottle blond. Mid-height and mid-build—a good figure, Pam grudgingly conceded—and blessed with an even-featured, although somewhat coarse, face that was neither good-looking nor plain. The only feature that seemed to link her to Troy was her dark-lashed blue eyes. Mostly she was made interesting by her choice of make-up and clothes, which served to give her colour and expression that probably didn’t exist in the rough (and arguably could never exist in nature). In another incarnation she would have been brassy, but she didn’t quite have the confidence. She was too much in Ray’s shadow to run her own show, yet as Pam came to believe perhaps that was because Maxine was not so different from Ray; in truth, she too had a kind of steeliness at her core, hidden by this outer layer of adornment, an almost exaggerated politeness and, most of the time, a devotional deferral to her husband.

  That first time Pam had met them, Ray had stepped up to her and shaken her hand. His grasp firm and his stare, a fraction short of challenging, seemed to sum her up in an instant, although what that summation might be was hard to guess. She had a feeling that Ray wasn’t the sort to be in thrall to anyone, that most of his assessments might not turn out particularly favourably for the subjects of his scrutiny. But there was something else about him. A whiff of sensuality that made her wonder, just a little, if he might have tried something on if the circumstances had been a little different. It made her wonder too if that was why Maxine always stood so close.

  She soon learned that Ray liked to talk. He was a mechanic and had moved from Karatta, a town about fifty kilometres north, to become head mechanic at Gary Alderson’s Holden dealership in town. Pam had almost said Gary was a friend of theirs, but somehow she didn’t think that would be appropriate. With Ray, it felt like pulling rank, which was not who she was, and something she sensed he’d be sensitive to. Defensive about. Ray had filled her in on their philosophy on life, told her one of the reasons they had moved here was that the local secondary school had a good reputation. (At least someone held it in high regard.) They wanted the best for their kids, opportunities he and Maxine hadn’t had or hadn’t grasped when they were young. Their children were not going to miss out.

  And there was Maxine, right next to him, nodding mostly, quietly scrutinising. Occasionally Maxine added something of her own. A small, seemingly humble line that was in reality a quiet boast about each of the boys under the guise of how lucky they were to be here. They’d been told by the teachers within a few weeks of their arrival that Troy had the capacity to do whatever he wanted, and Kyle, only in year seven and young for his class, hadn’t quite found his direction yet, but at least he was fitting in, having already been chosen for the junior football team. Pam didn’t recall that they’d asked her about her kids, or herself. Either they already knew enough, didn’t care, or didn’t want to know. She told them a few facts anyway, just to get her point across, but not enough to make them feel she wanted to be their friend.

  They mixed in different circles, the Greens and the Druitts. (Well, to be honest, Pam didn’t know if the Druitts had a circle, but if they did it wasn’t hers, not even a Venn diagram. She didn’t count yoga classes with Reggie.) While the boys grew to be inseparable, they, the parents, rarely saw each other. When they did, Pam was often struck by how differently Troy behaved in his parents’ company. She thought of him when he was at her house, half slumped across the table, conspiring with Scott, teasing Loren, and couldn’t imagine him being like that at home. Couldn’t imagine him less than bolt upright, sitting to attention, waiting for his father to signal the commencement of the meal. She never heard a word of complaint from Troy about his family life, nothing that signalled any dissatisfaction, but she often wondered about their relationship. She’d heard from Scott that the Druitt house was the neatest place he’d ever seen. The kids’ rooms were really tidy, he’d said incredulously after his first visit.

  ‘Why can’t our place be like that?’ she’d muttered and he’d looked at her and rolled his eyes, as if his own logic could not stretch to such an eventuality, could only see tidiness as a negative and not a positive.

  She’d reasoned at the time that Maxine had probably tidied the boys’ rooms because she knew that a new friend was coming over. But sometime, much later, when she’d mentioned it to Scott again, he’d looked at her wide-eyed and said nothing had changed. ‘That place is like a museum. We can’t go inside if we look a bit scruffy. No boots, no dirty clothes.’ He shook his head in mock disbelief. What he didn’t tell her for a long time was that the kids helped to keep the place tidy themselves. There was a regimentation, a system that everyone followed. Their rooms had to be spotless and both boys had chores to do as well. Scott wasn’t about to set himself up for similar hardship by announcing such facts to his mother. Not then at least.

  In retrospect, despite their lack of questions for her, Pam had felt severely vetted at that first meeting. It was more as though Ray and Maxine were reading her character as she stood in front of them, evaluating her reactions to them. Her approval or disapproval sucked up and sieved through their own filtering system, then spat out again as a judgement for or against her. She was part of a bigger picture, some way of working out if Scott was a good enough person for their son to be spending time with. This would have made her laugh if it hadn’t been more than a touch insulting. She could feel the spirit of her mother taking up residence inside her. ‘Nothing worse than being patronised by a social inferior,’ she incanted. Subsequent meetings seemed to acknowledge a status quo. Perhaps there was some kind of trade-off. Her family might not meet the exacting standards of the Druitts, but they did live on the Hill. Her father had been shire mayor through the 1970s and was still president of the golf club. They were viewed as good people in the district. They still had some clout.

  ‘Mum.’ Scott nudged her and she looked up from her bag.

  Maxine Druitt stood next to her, smiling. Pam wondered for a moment if Maxine had had her teeth straightened. They seemed so regular and white. Had they always been like that? ‘Reggie says you’ve been doing yoga together. Small world,’ said Maxine.

  Pam smiled, hoping not to seem as stiff as she felt. ‘Small town.’

  ‘She said I should do yoga.’ Maxine let out a nervous laugh as if the idea was clearly preposterous.

  Pam’s first reaction was God no, but she realised Maxine was being quite abstract, her real question was about yoga, not about her presence in the class. ‘Well, it’s probably not for everyone.’ Feeling that the short summation didn’t seem like enough, she went on. ‘I didn’t actually think I’d like it as much as I did. The teacher is good.’ (Why had she said that? She really didn’t want to encourage her.)

  ‘Reg told me about her. Aurora. That’s her name, isn’t it? I don’t think I could do that. Reg is a bit more adventurous than me. You know. She’s the sort of person who gets divorced.’ Maxine laughed nervously again, then cast a glance over her shoulder.

  Pam followed her gaze and saw Ray talking to a man she didn’t know, but whom she assumed was one of the teachers. Beside her she was aware of Maxine stiffening. Ray had what she thought of as his bonhomie face on—mouth smiling, but eyes cold. His feet were planted firmly apart, upper part of his body leaning into the other man’s space.

  ‘Do you know him?’ asked Maxine.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ryan Gall. Teaches woodwork. Kyle nearly took his finger off last week. Ray was beside himself. I mean, Ray knows about how to be safe in a workshop. He came down to school the next day. Had a word with Mrs Clarke. You can’t have this happ
en. You’ve got to let people know when they step out of line, don’t you?’ Maxine turned back to look at Pam. ‘You waiting for Miss Keenan?’

  ‘Yes. She seems to be popular,’ said Pam, still half digesting what had been said.

  ‘Mmm.’ Maxine nodded and cast an eye around her, most probably wondering how long she would have to wait. She looked back at Pam as though seeing her for the first time. ‘You’re all dressed up.’

  Pam felt a flush of embarrassment. Why she had no idea, but she found herself stuttering a response. ‘I had lunch with my father. He—we—it was a business lunch, I suppose you could say.’ Pam found it hard to explain to some people (people like Maxine) why she would get dressed up to have lunch with her father, the kind of code they had between them that dictated lunch at a certain place wearing certain clothes. Perhaps more to the point it gave her licence to get dressed up once in a while. Odd, really, because if anyone else in the room had made an effort of sorts it was Maxine, whose tight-fitting skirt and shocking-pink top marked her out from most of the others.

  But Maxine didn’t seem to care why she was dressed up. Pam suspected that she was just filling in space. She looked over at Scott. ‘And did you go too?’

  Scott looked momentarily puzzled. ‘I was at school, Mrs Druitt.’

  ‘Oh yes. Of course you were.’ Maxine glanced over her shoulder again.

  ‘Mum,’ said Scott. He pointed towards Miss Keenan’s table. ‘It’s us.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Pam, edging away from Maxine.

  ‘No, it’s all good. Means we won’t have long to wait either.’

  Out of the corner of her eye Pam could see Ray approaching. Miss Keenan’s summons had been perfectly timed.

  Mick was sitting in an armchair in the living room with a beer, the newspaper in his hand and Pink Floyd on the stereo. He got up and turned the volume down when Pam came in. ‘How’d it go?’