She wrapped her arm over his body and pulled him to her, feeling his cock grow suddenly hard against her stomach, the boundary between them slipping away, and she thought of that first night, when he had told her that his mother had just died. He’d come back from overseas for the funeral and was in a fog of grief and jet lag. She was there with her empathy and understanding and there was all that heightened intensity between them. She knew he needed to talk, so she let him. She didn’t say then that she’d lost her mother. And father. And brother. She didn’t want it to overshadow his own loss, compete with it in any way.
It was only later that she told him about the accident. The car accident that had wiped out her family. It was a brief sketch, an outline of how she came to be here. And that was enough. He, preoccupied with his own grief, had simply accepted her reluctance to talk much about her own—by then—long ago past, and as time went on he would only sometimes ask, bring family up. Mostly she managed to deflect deeper questions, offer up broad brushstrokes rather than details. She’d been surprised at how little people (loved ones and acquaintances alike) needed to know; how easy it was for them to disregard what had gone before. How most of life was simply lived on a day-to-day basis with only a glancing regard to history.
Lying in bed now, listening to his even breathing, she thought of the times, especially in the early years, when she had turned suddenly to see him looking at her, wondering she guessed if perhaps he should ask more, attempt to know more. And now, having seen Schiller, she realised that he must have noticed something in her, recognised tells that she wasn’t even aware of herself. Once he’d described her as self-contained and self-reliant. ‘You make that sound like a criticism,’ she’d countered, and he’d tilted his head in that way he did when he wanted to make a point without having to use words. ‘Mysterious,’ he’d said lightly, reaching out and brushing the backs of his fingers down her hair. ‘That’s what you are. My own international woman of mystery.’
July 1993
Northam
Pam was half awake when the knocking started. She’d roused around four needing to go to the loo and was finding it difficult to get back to sleep. Loren’s door was open when she got up, and while she didn’t panic, a little seed of concern lodged itself in her gut. Late nights weren’t unusual for the boys, but Loren tended to come home at a reasonable hour. Still, given they were all together, it was probably just a question of logistics. Easier to wait for Scott than to get a lift back. And they all knew how Scott loved a late night.
Loren hadn’t been going out with the boys as often as she used to. This was probably due to the fact that the boys themselves had been leading quieter lives these last couple of months, part of some small concessions being made to study. Pam suspected the slowdown had a fair bit to do with Troy’s parents. That parent–teacher interview in April had been a little bruising for them too, by all accounts. Troy’s social life had been somewhat curtailed since then. This had had a domino effect, which Pam conceded wasn’t entirely unwelcome. Perhaps she had something to thank the Druitts for after all.
But tonight had been a departure from all that. Tonight was the beginning of the mid-year break, and the spectre of early mornings and daily academic assessments had disappeared for the next two weeks. For the first time in months there had been a bunch of kids at the Greens’ for dinner. Pam had sat at the head of the table and had looked contentedly at the gathered throng, her family and their friends. Troy, Mike, Scott’s friend since kindergarten, Lori’s friend Katie, and Melissa, who may or may not have been Mike’s girlfriend at the moment. (There were questions Pam realised that you just didn’t ask.) The dining room had buzzed with life. Mick had decided on some quiet Rolling Stones (if you could call Goat’s Head Soup quiet) to accompany the meal and the conversation levels had raised a decibel or two. The buzz had made Pam feel energetic. There was something about young people. She wondered once if she hadn’t missed her calling, if perhaps she should have been a teacher. But then she’d have to chase them up for homework and tell them off for talking in class, smoking behind the bike shed. Being what she was, whatever that was exactly—the coolest mother, she’d like to think—gave her a much better feeling. She remembered her mother’s comment from years before: ‘You want to be liked too much.’ ‘What’s wrong with that?’ Pam had responded. She thought everyone wanted to be liked. (Apart from her mother perhaps, who wanted to be respected, even feared.) It was a part of human nature, wasn’t it?
During the term Troy had turned eighteen and got his driver’s licence. His father had bought him a Falcon ute, about ten years old but still in good nick. Despite the timing, it hadn’t truly been a birthday present. Ray was big on responsibility. Something like a car shouldn’t just be given away—it needed to be earned, valued. Troy would pay it off by helping out part-time in the workshop, which in all honesty wasn’t really that arduous for him because what didn’t he love about labouring over cars? So now there were two drivers and two vehicles, and when they had left the Greens’ that night they had driven in convoy: Troy and Mike in the ute; Scott, Loren and Melissa in the car. Pam had stood at the front door and watched the red tail-lights disappear down the road and around into Grant Street and had thought warmly, as she knocked back her fourth wine of the night, how lucky these kids were to have each other. They were a nice bunch, good-hearted. People often complained about the youth of today, but if this lot were anything to go by the world would be fine. Funny, kind, caring. Just normal kids who liked to let their hair down from time to time. What was wrong with that?
When the pounding roused her the clock was glowing five am. Pam hadn’t realised she’d fallen back to sleep and would have thought she’d been awake for the last hour except for the fact that she’d been speaking to her mother, who had been admonishing her for something. No surprises there except that her mother had been dead for five years now. Beside her Mick murmured something she couldn’t quite catch and swung out of bed, flicking on the light at the same time. She looked at his face and saw a reflection of her own. Puffy with sleep and full of foreboding.
They opened the front door to a young, unfamiliar-looking constable, pale and nervous under the porch light. For a moment her spirits inexplicably lifted. She realised that he, this policeman, was not Des Robinson, which made her feel that the situation might not be dire. She knew Des. Had known him a long time, since he’d arrived in town over twenty years ago. She felt he would have come to them if it had been something truly catastrophic. Beside her Mick stood straight and tall, braced for the worst. She never thought anyone could look dignified wearing striped pyjamas, skivvy and socks, but somehow Mick managed to. He stared at the boy who’d come to tell them the news and took a small step forward, his hand shaking as he gripped the edge of the door.
The constable seemed nervous too, but he could see what needed to be done. Probably drilled by Des, Pam thought. ‘To put your minds at rest, they’re okay. They were in an accident but they’re okay.’
‘Jesus fucking Christ.’ Mick bent forward as though he was going to throw up.
‘But you’re not just here to tell us they’re okay,’ said Pam.
‘No,’ said the constable. ‘They’re both at Belandra hospital.’
The forty-minute drive to Belandra seemed more like two hours. It felt to Pam that Mick was driving like a ninety-year-old and she had to restrain herself from telling him to put his foot down. But the roads at this time of the year, this time of the morning, were dangerous, treacherous with black ice and the slime that formed on sheltered stretches of bitumen. All made worse by the rain they’d had, which by now had mercifully eased to the occasional splatter on the windscreen. The constable had been able to tell them very little. He hadn’t attended the accident and had scant information. As a consequence, they didn’t know whose car the kids were in or who they were with. He’d assured them that someone else from the station, ‘probably Sergeant Robinson’, would join them at the hospital shortly to fill them
in. But, in the meantime, at least they knew that Scott and Lori were not seriously injured, were actually okay. That was all that mattered to Pam. They were alive. They were safe.
At the hospital a registrar told them Scott had a shattered ankle, which required urgent repair and the insertion of a plate, and he had just been taken in to surgery. A stroke of luck, he said, that the visiting orthopaedic surgeon was up from Melbourne and had a scheduled operation that morning. They had to get him out of bed slightly earlier than usual, which seemed to amuse the registrar, who had the look of a man who had spent far too little time in bed on this night, or in general. Loren was physically unharmed, he’d continued, but they wanted to keep her in for a few more hours, possibly the day, for observation. She was clearly in shock. But she had been sedated and was resting.
The registrar was a tall man, and Pam, who was not terribly tall at all, stared up at him. The emergency ward was so quiet she could almost hear the molecules of air moving around them. She watched him, it seemed, in slow motion turn towards a curtained cubicle and an odd sensation ran through her. The part of her that had just felt a rush of relief was beginning to shrink. Something didn’t feel right.
‘Was anyone else admitted?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Are they okay, the rest of them?’
The registrar stopped just short of the curtain and turned, pausing for the briefest moment as if having to recall the details. ‘Yes. There were two others. One with a few cuts and bruises. He’ll be fine.’ He saw their quizzical looks. ‘Josh Friar his name is.’
Mick and Pam glanced at each other. There had clearly been some personnel swapping during the course of the evening.
‘The other was a young woman with more serious injuries who we sent to Goulburn Valley. Melissa, I believe? I don’t have the paperwork on hand to tell you her last name.’
‘Melissa.’ Pam put her hand to her mouth. ‘Was she badly hurt?’ She thought of the tall, willowy girl who’d sat at her table earlier that evening. She hadn’t met her before, but was struck by her poise, her polite, quiet, amused manner too. A hearty eater, which was always pleasing to see. Pam liked it when they devoured her food.
‘We sent her down for specialist care. It’s not good, but we think she’ll come through.’
‘Thank god.’ Pam pressed her lips together. ‘And that was all? No one else?’
Suddenly the doctor looked uncertain. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. ‘I do understand there was a fatality at the scene.’
Pam gripped Mick’s arm, felt a flood of anguish take hold of her. Someone had died. One of the kids they knew was dead, perhaps someone who had been at her dinner table that night. A friend of Scott’s, or Loren’s. Next to her Mick seemed as incapable of speech as she was.
When she found her voice she was barely audible. ‘Who?’
The registrar shook his head. ‘All I can tell you is that it was a young man. I’m afraid I don’t know the name.’
To know and not to know. And yet already she had formed an idea of who it might be. Later when she thought back she couldn’t believe that she had never not known, that it had only been this moment that a swirling universe had burst forth from a pinhead of information and changed everything.
‘Mum.’ Loren’s voice, muted and husky, filtered from beyond the curtain. Pam pushed past the doctor and with hands shaking yanked the curtain back. Even after a morning of shocks she was taken aback by what she saw. Loren, looking like Loren, but not looking like Loren. A facsimile of her daughter. A broken doll propped up in bed, her back against the headboard with her knees bent in front of her making a tent out of the hospital cotton blanket, her face so pale that its only apparent features were two dark mascara-stained eyes. For the umpteenth time this morning Pam felt the temporal world shift and split into two. In the few seconds it took her to reach her child, the space inside her brain seemed to expand infinitesimally. Thoughts raced through her head. Impressions lodged in her mind. She could see the meaning of her actions and their futility too. Her one impulse was to hold Lori, comfort her, make everything right. But there was no making this right. Her daughter had witnessed—no, more than that—had been part of something terrible. Something that could never be changed. Never erased.
‘I’m here,’ was all she could say, all she was capable of. ‘I’m here.’
For a few seconds Lori didn’t move, stayed stiff and unyielding inside her mother’s arms. ‘Troy,’ she murmured. Then her body seemed to crumble. She began sobbing, not hysterically but rhythmically, keening. A low call. ‘Mum, mum, mumma.’ Mick was with them by then, too, his arms around them both. In better times, when the children were small, they would have joked and said, ‘Group hug.’ But there was nothing comforting about this. It felt instead as though they were building some kind of fortress with their bodies. A pathetic attempt to prop up a crumbling edifice, to keep the world at bay. But in reality, there was no making good, making better. Only the dubious consolation of solidarity.
They sat with Loren for a very long time until her whimpering gave way to ragged breathing and finally to sleep. Mick got up to find the doctor, who came to check her and pronounced this all to be a good thing. The pills, he explained, might send her out for a few hours. But she needed the rest. Rest, thought Pam. Respite perhaps. That was about all her dear child would get. She imagined the intensity of waking up. Remembering. That’s how it would be now, for a long time to come.
In a daze, she left Mick with Lori and went to get a cup of coffee. She hadn’t eaten, but food wasn’t what she wanted. By now there were a few more staff around, the cafeteria was open. Almost as if she’d conjured him, Des Robinson appeared near the cafeteria door. Like everyone she’d encountered this morning, he looked exhausted. His eyes were bloodshot and his cheeks bore the trace of yesterday’s stubble. Even his uniform seemed somewhat rumpled, adding to the effect of a man down on his luck. Perhaps he thought the same of her: that she looked down on her luck as well. God knows she hadn’t looked in the mirror all morning. He gave her what she thought of as the long look. The one where his head was tilted downwards, as though he wanted to angle his eyes to the level of the person he was speaking to. It was interrogation meets sympathy, and it could have come off badly, but with Des it always seemed avuncular, had the effect of making you think he cared. And she was fairly certain he did. That was his saving grace as a small-town cop. That he had a true concern for the people he lived among.
‘How are you?’ he asked quietly.
She could feel her eyes filling with tears. Her jaw began to quiver. Des quickly placed his hand under her elbow and guided her into the cafeteria, to the nearest table by the door. He told her to sit while he fetched them a drink. When he returned he spooned a couple of teaspoons of sugar into the coffee before passing it to her.
‘We didn’t know until we got here,’ she said. ‘I thought everything was going to be all right. How stupid is that?’
‘I apologise. It took me longer than I thought to … How’s your lad doing?’
‘He’s in surgery. His leg. Ankle. I’m not quite sure. They’re putting in a plate.’
‘Yeah, I saw it. Smashed up. Might take him a while to get the full use back.’
‘God, really? You were there?’
Des nodded and took a sip of his drink. Mr Laconic. That’s what Mick had called him after years of running into him, rubbing shoulders at community functions and working bees. ‘Getting conversation out of him was like getting blood out of a stone,’ Mick once said. Well, who could blame him? Town cops had to stay neutral, out of the fray. The less they said the better, she supposed.
‘What happened?’
‘There’ll be an investigation. Hard to say exactly. But I think you could put alcohol and speed into the equation. Inattention.’
She didn’t want to ask who was driving, she felt too raw to know more, but somehow the words escaped her lips anyway, and she knew from his split second of hesitation that the driver was Scott. ‘Oh
my god,’ she said, staring at the half-empty cup in front of her. ‘Did you go to the Druitts’ place? You know, they were at our house last night for dinner. Not the Druitts. Oh god, not them. I mean the kids. A few of them. I was thinking how great they were, how lucky to have each other. Everything they had ahead of them.’ She looked up at him. She was babbling. ‘Oh god,’ she said again, frustrated at her lack of vocabulary, incredulous that she wasn’t crying.
‘Is Mick here?’
‘With Loren.’
‘We’ll take him a coffee.’
Mick was sitting in a chair, hunched over the bed, his head resting on his forearm. He might have been asleep too but he looked up quickly when they came in, alert enough but saggy-faced.
Des cast a glance at Loren. ‘It was hard for her this morning. Seeing her boyfriend like that. Terrible for these kids.’
‘Boyfriend?’ Mick squinted.
‘The Druitt boy.’
‘Troy wasn’t her boyfriend,’ said Pam, slightly defensively, as if it mattered. ‘He was a friend. To all of us. We’ve all known him for years. We …’ She turned to Mick, delivered the news like she was ripping off a bandaid. ‘Des just told me that Scott was driving.’
She watched Mick’s face. The import of it all settling in. ‘No,’ he said firmly, looking up at her as if she’d told him the damnedest lie. ‘No.’
Pam put her fingers to her lips and glanced at Loren.
Mick closed his eyes for a few seconds, then stood up. ‘I’m going to get some air. Des, you want to join me?’ He gripped Pam’s forearm as he turned to leave. ‘We won’t go far.’ His eyes were moist and raw-looking and she nodded, giving him the tacit approval to leave that he hadn’t actually asked her for. He needed to talk to Des now, perhaps he would be braver than her, find out more.
Life Before Page 11
