Life Before

by Carmel Reilly

  Schiller took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. He appeared strangely vulnerable, a little tired. Definitely older, although he still had those beautiful pale eyes, dark lashes and brows. He looked over at her, shook his head slightly, smiled. ‘You did a lot of mad stuff, that’s for sure. Especially when I first knew you, but I didn’t really know you that well. You and your skateboard. Those random graffiti strikes you did with Perry. Caving in the sewers—that was crazy. I was kind of in awe of you, to tell you the truth. Everyone we hung out with was a bit mad, but you seemed fearless somehow.’

  ‘Fearless?’ Had she been fearless? She had a vision of being on a skateboard, feeling the juddering of the wheels under her feet (like being eleven again), the thrill of careering helterskelter down the pavement, the slight decline heading north on Brunswick Street. Was that fearlessness? Or numbness? Simply a need to feel something? She gave out a small cynical snort. ‘I don’t think it was all down to me and my superpowers. There were a lot of substances. I seem to remember many of those were supplied by you.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he bowed his head as if in contrition. ‘It was all a distraction of one sort or another. For all of us. I am the first to admit that now.’

  ‘When I look back I realise how young I was then. It took a while for me to grow up. Find my way.’

  ‘And heal, I guess.’

  ‘Heal?’

  ‘Well, you know. The disturbed sleep, the crying. That was still happening when you left. Maybe not so much, but …’

  ‘What?’ She shook her head slowly back and forth, her face creased with disbelief. ‘What do you mean, “disturbed sleep”? You never said anything.’

  ‘Actually, I did. Well, I tried to, but you never wanted to … I seem to remember you accusing me of being a liar at one point.’

  There was a part of her that felt like saying it now, getting up and knocking over a chair, shutting him down for good. The other part felt strangely suspended, as if she was watching someone putting the final pieces of a jigsaw into place. As if she was outside herself, seeing herself, aware of herself in a landscape of others.

  Schiller was leaning closer now, his voice soft. ‘Listen, by the time we were together you’d settled down a lot. You’d started your course, had somewhere to put your energy. But, when you were sleeping, something else kicked in. It wasn’t every night, but often enough. Everyone had their shit to deal with back then. We were young, all of us. Even me. But over the years, I thought about it more. I can see now what I couldn’t then. That you went through big stuff. I’m sorry that I couldn’t do more for you. You were alone and lost and I didn’t help. I feel bad about that.’

  She shook her head, felt the sting of tears behind her eyes, was grateful for the dark glasses. Was that what she’d been like? Thrillseeking? Attention-seeking? Despondent and isolated, frequently failing to connect? She thought of those times as the opposite, as formative, exciting, creative. Rosie had introduced her to books and film, with Schiller she’d gone to see every decent band who’d ever played in Melbourne. Perry graffitied half of the north side when he wasn’t organising shifts at Friends of the Earth or welding sculptures out of scrap metal and barbed wire. They’d all talked philosophy and politics, and loads of complete and utter bullshit. She was who she was now because of them, because of all that. But she hadn’t kept the friendships. She’d walked away from those people when they were no longer in her orbit. Let them go completely.

  ‘All I’m saying is it’s great you have the man and the kids. That they have given you something that, I don’t know, you didn’t have before. I can see it just looking at you.’ He might have been doing counselling, or a Gestalt course, all these new-found (or perhaps not so new) insights. She certainly hadn’t been expecting this.

  A tram passed and she followed it with her eyes, trying to take in what had just been said, feeling agonisingly exposed. What was he implying? That she was a fuck-up who’d been miraculously repaired? It was true that being with Jason, having the kids had changed everything, made her a part of something bigger. She had a family again. But was she really so different now to the person Schiller knew, or at least the version he was recounting to her?

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked, leaning forward towards her. ‘I’m sorry, bringing up old shit. I didn’t intend to make anything harder. I’m sure you have enough on your plate.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ she replied. ‘It seems to be what the universe wants from me right now. Time for some deep self-examination.’

  He looked across at her, shook his head and laughed. ‘The universe, huh?’ Then she laughed too. A point of connection still, a fundamental understanding.

  Schiller pointed to the sign. ‘See I’ve still got your design here.’

  ‘Might be time for a change.’

  ‘Still works for me,’ he said softly. ‘Maybe when I need something new I’ll be in touch.’

  He pushed up his sleeves in the face of the warmth. Brushed his hair back from his face. She noticed his lean, sinewy arms and saw that the left one was now completely covered in ink, swirling interlocking designs of blue, green and red. She felt the pull of distraction, the very thing that design had always done for her, taken her into a different space. So different, tattoos now. So much more skill in them than twenty, thirty years ago. These days they were body art, considered acceptable, even in polite company. There wasn’t the stigma that they had when she was young.

  ‘Speaking of work, that’s beautiful,’ she said, gesturing towards his arm, the sleeve, fighting the desire to lean across and touch it.

  He looked down as if considering it for the first time. ‘If you’d been around I would have consulted you on this too.’

  ‘No. That would have been a bad idea. This person has done an amazing job. Not my thing, images on the body.’

  ‘You mean to do them or have them?’

  ‘Both. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate good ones.’

  The other arm had fewer tattoos; they were older, more discrete, accumulated one by one over the years. A rose, an angel, a spider, the ace of spades. There was one she remembered running her finger over, searching its form over and over again, higher up on his bicep.

  She looked up at him. ‘The bird,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You had a little bird tattoo, a swallow, on that arm.’

  ‘Yeah, a bird, but not a swallow. It’s an eagle.’

  ‘An eagle,’ she repeated dubiously. Could that be right?

  ‘Yep, an eagle with outstretched wings. Soaring high above it all.’ He tugged his shirt sleeve up higher and showed her.

  Lori felt a little jolt as soon as she saw it, wondered why on earth she would ever have thought the swallow belonged to Schiller. ‘Wow, my memory playing tricks. Again.’

  After a moment she ferreted out her coin purse from her bag. ‘Hey, I need to get going. I have to get back to meet the neurologist.’

  ‘Don’t worry about paying for the coffee,’ he said, reaching towards the hand that held the purse but too far away to touch it.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said simply, glad that he hadn’t wanted more, encouraged her to return, asked for something she couldn’t give him. She got up, grasping the coins for her coffee and walked past him then, across the street to where the man sat with his dog. He didn’t look up when she dumped them in his cup. With the hood pulled low over his face, he could well have been asleep.

  When she turned around, Schiller was at the front door of the café talking to the waiter but looking her way. Lori walked towards him and he smiled a small smile. She remembered that look. The last time she’d seen him, just before she got married, when she’d last come here to tell him the news and she’d seen what she’d thought then was indifference, cynicism, disguised behind that enigmatic smile, but she realised now was actually sadness. Loss. For a long time she hadn’t believed that she was worth much. She thought he thought the same thing. That she wasn’t worth the ef
fort of trying to keep, trying to love. And perhaps that was true too, just as it was true that he had cared for her. She knew now that emotions and their impulses were never singular. Thoughts never simply pure or impure, motivations never crystal clear. You could love someone and hate them in the same breath, wish them the best and the worst, help and sabotage in one sweeping motion. Reading it all was a skill, perhaps an art. One that she knew she still hadn’t managed to fully understand, let alone master.

  May 1993

  Northam

  It wasn’t until Pam put the washing on that she noticed. Spots of blood on the top of his shirt sleeve. She might have thought it was a cut or a scratch if it hadn’t been for the strange shape, suggesting something of a circular outline. She went into his room and pulled back the bedclothes. There was a smear of something dark against his pillow and a piece of gauze lying at the side of his bed.

  Pam looked at the amassed evidence like a detective. There was only one conclusion, and a shocking one at that. A tattoo. He’d got a tattoo. Why the hell would he have done that? After her brief moment of satisfaction a few months before (the revelation that he was indeed thinking about his future, and seemed intent on continuing in the right direction, well, any direction), this came as a slap. A neat reminder that he was indeed still impulsive, perhaps still easily influenced. When had he done it? she wondered. Last weekend? She thought back to the account that he’d given himself, but it seemed to be exactly the same sort of thing he’d say on any weekend. Mick said the kids recounting what they did when they were out reminded him of making his confession when he was a child. ‘I was disobedient and told lies’ was his staple for a good ten years. The other question was why? There were silly things you could do, but nothing so irrevocable, so indelible, as a tattoo. She was rarely angry with Scott, but today she felt that surge of emotion fill her, make her want to scream at him. She hated the thought that her children were going to ruin their lives in some way. With Simon she had always believed that everything was shipshape, but with Scott she really should have known by now that nothing was ever going to quite go to plan. For every step forward there would always be several back.

  Outside the day was bright and sunny with a sharp little breeze. She pegged out the clothes on the washing line. Scott and Loren’s items not too different from each other. T-shirts, flannel shirts, jeans. Only the underwear and gender-defined school uniforms betrayed the fact that they belonged to different people. To make matters more confusing there were shirts of Scott’s that Loren had taken over. Pam would routinely receive admonitions from her daughter about putting articles of clothing into the wrong pile. Surely she should know by now that Scott was no longer the owner of the yellow t-shirt, or the brown and blue check shirt. The underpants seemed safe enough, though. For now.

  In Scott’s room, she removed the bedding and hauled it to the washing machine before remaking the bed. She’d check his arm tonight and make sure it was healing properly. Who knows what he had been doing to look after it. They’d have a good talk, preferably before Mick came home and started World War III. She’d get to the bottom of what was going on. A momentary youthful indiscretion she hoped, and not the beginning of an extensive collection of ugly ink. Mum, Dad, on each arm. Love, Hate, across the knuckles.

  Loren’s room was not quite as untidy as her brother’s. Pam pulled the sheets and quilt to an approximation of a made bed, picked up a tangle of clothes from the floor and hung them on the open rail that stood in for a wardrobe. Mick told her she shouldn’t bother with their rooms, but she couldn’t help herself. She hated walking past to see the clutter and the mess, it disturbed her. Why she couldn’t quite say, but it seemed to tip some equilibrium inside her into low-level agitation.

  ‘They are grown up enough now to do things for themselves,’ he said.

  ‘Grown up,’ she scoffed. ‘That is hardly even technically true.’ She felt confident that Mick hadn’t been tidy at their age. Or if he had been it was because he had nothing to be untidy with. He certainly wasn’t when they got married and that hadn’t changed, for all that he might think he was now. Four kids, that’s what she had. Well, three live-in dependants. The other one was away at university.

  After hanging out the sheets she checked her watch and swore in a way that her mother would definitely not have approved of. She had to be at work by ten and it was five to already. She ran a comb through her hair, smeared gloss across her lips (no time for foundation and blusher today, they’d just have to deal with that) and changed her shoes. She was grateful that she could wear pants to work now. When she’d first started in the late sixties, skirts were mandatory for women. She’d never thought that was fair. Skirts, pantyhose, an uplifting bra (not that uplifting bras were mandated, it was just the state of them back then before they went all natural and formless in the seventies). The whole catastrophe. Worse than her school uniform, which was pretty awful. That starchy shirt and tie, the gloves, stockings and suspender belt, the boater hat. Cripes. It incorporated the worst of men’s suits, and added restrictive undergarments to boot. What kind of special hell was that? In hindsight, though, perhaps that uniform had inoculated her against putting up with discomfort. If she could live in jersey knit, she would. She was gradually moving towards it, season by season. Imagine what she was going to be like at eighty? An ageing member of the Starship Enterprise. Not so bad perhaps if those suits were antigravity.

  At work she sauntered past the main desk in an effort to look as though she wasn’t racing. No one seemed to notice the time. The two receptionists greeted her as they always did. ‘Morning, Pam. Lovely day.’ When she reached her office she discovered that Roger was in a meeting somewhere deep in the bowels of the council chambers, so she was accountable to no one for being ten minutes late. Cathy simply raised her eyebrows as she looked up from her screen and made a grunting noise that indicated she was in the middle of something and they would speak in a moment. Leeanne, the junior, was, she assumed, on her tea break.

  The office had recently been fully computerised. She and Cathy had done a course on the new Windows operating system and another on a special program that generated rates notices tailor-made for the shire. This was supposed to make their lives so much easier but they had both agreed was really going to load them with much more work. Not that she really minded, as long as she had a job. Work meant time out of the house, time with people she mostly liked, and money. The trifecta really. But, still, she was sceptical of technology. It wasn’t like anything came at the press of a button without some trade-off. There was always so much to learn and so much to go wrong. Simon said that mobile phones (devices Pam had only seen on TV) would take over the world. They would get smaller and smaller and cheaper and cheaper, and everyone would have one that they’d carry all the time and be able to communicate in new ways. She sighed. Not for her. Imagine being able to be contacted twenty-four hours a day, being at everyone’s beck and call. (Weren’t mothers at the coalface already?) Just the thought of it all was exhausting.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Cathy, looking up from her computer. ‘I just had to finish this batch of payments before Roger got back. He wanted everything put through. Now that you’re here you can hold the fort and I can go and get a cuppa.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Pam.

  ‘Everything all right?’ asked Cathy.

  Pam threw her hands up. ‘Scott! He got a tattoo.’

  ‘What? When was this?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just found the evidence this morning. I ended up doing some extra washing, which is why I was late.’

  Cathy swotted the air in a ‘who cares’ gesture. ‘But you haven’t spoken to him yet? Have you seen it? What is it?’

  ‘Not a giant skull and crossbones at least. Something small on his arm.’

  ‘Up the top? That’s not too bad, is it? No one will see it.’

  Pam sighed. ‘But it’s what it represents, isn’t it?’

  ‘What does it represent?’

  ‘Oh, I
don’t know. It just … it just doesn’t seem right. Tattoos say something, don’t they? He’s only eighteen.’ Pam’s voice wavered.

  Cathy stood up and walked around to her desk. ‘Don’t worry.’ She put a hand on Pam’s shoulder. ‘It’s no big deal, really.’

  ‘You reckon? I don’t know. It feels like it is. I can’t imagine why he’d do it. He just seemed to be going along so well and now he’s done this stupid bloody thing.’

  ‘Oh Pammy. It’s really not so bad. I mean, he hasn’t hurt anyone. Or himself. A few inches of skin notwithstanding.’

  ‘No,’ she conceded. ‘You’re right. It’s just … oh, I don’t know. It’s off kilter.’ And it wasn’t just Scott’s action she meant. It was how she felt about it too, how it had affected her as if by contagion. Like a giant hand had just come along and knocked everything ever so slightly out of place. Hard as she tried, she couldn’t shake that feeling all day. There was plenty to do at work, plenty to keep her busy, but her mind kept shifting, settling in some strange space around Scott, as though the tattoo was a harbinger, a sign that something more would come out of all of this.

  Back home from work just after four, she took the washing off the line and folded it while she sat on the couch in the living room with a cup of tea watching Wheel of Fortune. It was Loren who came in first, appearing at the door of the living room as she walked past to the kitchen.

  ‘There’s tea made if you want one,’ said Pam, patting the left side of the couch which was washing free. ‘You can come back and take your clothes away.’

  Loren returned in a moment with a mug in one hand and two biscuits in the other.

  ‘Crumbs,’ said Pam.

  Loren eyed the screen. ‘Why are you watching this?’

  ‘I’ll turn it off. I want to talk to you anyway.’ Pam jabbed the mute button on the remote control.

  ‘Why? What have I done?’