Life Before

by Carmel Reilly

  Pam moved into Mick’s chair and gazed for a while at her daughter. When the kids were little she’d loved watching them sleep. It filled her with an exquisite contentedness of the sort that she had never experienced before. Parenting was like that. Incredible highs, and occasionally awful lows. Joy and anxiety. And now she discovered there was also abject misery. The worst misery she could imagine, apart from one of them dying. And, even then, she wasn’t sure if that would be worse, because this particular misery came from a death and was served with extra helpings of second-hand guilt, terror and grief. Everything mixed up, what she felt herself and what she was feeling for her children. Especially Scott now. Poor, poor Scott.

  Loren’s breath grew patchy and rapid, and Pam leaned over her, touched her brow, whispered her name. After a little while her eyes opened and she stared up. ‘Mum,’ she whispered.

  ‘You don’t have to talk.’

  Loren’s face collapsed. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  Pam took her hand and gripped it tight. All the things she could say suddenly seemed trite and false. She couldn’t say it’ll be all right. Maybe one day it would be, but not anytime soon. She couldn’t say it’s not your fault. That seemed to put the blame elsewhere. And, although there may be blame, she was reluctant to lay any.

  ‘Troy.’ Lori let out a small, strangled cry. ‘Oh Mum.’

  ‘I know. I’m here. I’m not leaving. We’ll go home soon.’

  Tears streamed down Lori’s face. ‘I loved him, Mum. I loved him so much. I can’t …’

  ‘I know you did.’ Did she? She hadn’t been sure before, but of course it was clear now.

  ‘I don’t know what to do. What am I going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know, sweetheart. We’ll just do what we have to do. Put one foot in front of the other.’

  Pam realised she was crying too. A tear dripped off the end of her nose and she wiped it with the back of her hand. She leaned back a little and her eyes followed the light to the window. The sky was beginning to clear, and she could see patches of blue above the rooftop of the building next door. The Earth was still spinning, morning morphing into midday, into afternoon. Her mind went back to the night before, Troy sitting opposite Loren at the table, balling up pieces of paper napkin and flicking them at her. She was pretending to be annoyed but laughing, basking in the attention. Troy was grinning, his teeth gleamed white against his fresh olive skin, his eyes fixed on her daughter. Then a distraction and he turned Pam’s way, grinning still, met her gaze. ‘Awesome food, Mrs Gee. As always.’ He raised his glass in a mock toast that could have been interpreted as cheeky but was so warm and spontaneous that she felt quite touched. Manners were important in his family he’d told her on several occasions. He was always being raked over the coals for some social transgression (he didn’t actually say that, she’d filled in the gaps). His parents may have failed to curb his personality in some ways, but they managed to instill politeness into him, and respect. That was one thing that Pam would give them: whether by accident or design, they’d brought up a beautiful young man. She couldn’t imagine their loss. It was bad enough for her. They must be going through hell.

  April 2016

  Melbourne

  The road ahead was a river of red tail-lights as far as the eye could see. They were late coming back from Niels’s and the kids had fallen asleep quickly, Cody out like a light almost as soon as they got into the car and Sophie succumbing soon after to the rhythm of tyres on asphalt and the heater turned up full bore against the chilly night air.

  ‘We should have left earlier,’ Jason said irritably. ‘Look at this bloody traffic.’

  Lori’s head was pressed back against the headrest, the lights in front mesmerising. She didn’t respond.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re going to go to sleep as well?’ Jason sounded about one quarter serious.

  ‘Have you ever known me to fall asleep in the car?’

  ‘Nah, guess not.’

  She sat forward suddenly and turned to him. ‘Do you want me to drive?’

  ‘What? I’m fine.’

  ‘Just thought it would save you being frustrated.’

  ‘Me!’ He laughed. ‘I’m never frustrated behind the wheel. ’Specially not in traffic jams.’

  It had taken her a long time to feel comfortable in a car. In the weeks after the accident she had insisted on walking everywhere until circumstances dictated otherwise. When she did finally take the plunge she was continually wary, on edge. Later, in Melbourne, there was no need to use cars. She lived in the inner city. Trams, bikes, skateboards, feet got her around. She didn’t learn to drive until she met Jason, who was horrified that she didn’t already know how. (A country girl who couldn’t drive? Surely an oxymoron.) He taught her on the back roads of Mornington and the long sweeping Peninsula highways, the very place where they were now. Weekends spent learning to surf and learning to drive. She found she liked being in the driver’s seat. There was a feeling of being in control that you didn’t have as a passenger. It astounded her that she’d never really imagined that before she got behind the wheel. The freedom. The exhilaration. She saw a reason that people liked cars, other than a way to get from one place to another.

  It was nine o’clock by the time they got back and hauled the kids from the car to their room. Sophie was half awake and Lori managed to run a toothbrush around her mouth and a flannel across her face. Jason carried Cody straight to bed.

  ‘At least they’ll have a good night’s sleep,’ he said, returning to the kitchen where she was putting away produce they’d bought at a farmers’ market earlier in the day. A cabbage, some onions, carrots with long feathery tops, a solid chunk of deep-yellow cheese.

  ‘Yeah, they’ll probably wake me up at the crack of bloody dawn. Payback.’

  ‘Speaking of which—dawn, I mean, not payback—I’m going to head off pretty soon too.’ Jason started his working day before the rest of them woke up. He wasn’t a natural early riser, but he’d learned to accommodate new diurnal rhythms. Lori envied the fact he was an easy sleeper. It was something she had never been good at. There had been long periods that she had used sleeping pills to soothe her into a pattern. Before kids she had a job at an advertising agency, and had to get to work on time, be alert enough to create decent artwork. Children had reintroduced erratic sleep, but they were also infinitely tiring. Now her sleep seemed to be controlled by them. When they woke, so did she. Whether she liked it or not.

  Jason showered and Lori went into her studio to check the calendar on her computer. She’d had a nagging feeling she’d already scheduled something for tomorrow, the time when she’d agreed to meet that policeman. Sure enough there was a coffee date with Anselma at ten. Anselma was sparky and irreverent, larger than life. They’d made friends through their kids. Anselma’s son, Mischa, and Sophie had gravitated to each other at kindergarten and the mothers arranged a play date, soon discovering a shared passion for art (she was a photographer, ‘Prophetically named for Ansel Adams,’ she’d declared on the first day they’d met) and a fellow outsider’s disrespect for authority and decorum. Lori took her phone out of her pocket and plugged in a quick text. Sorry, something has come up for tomorrow. Have to reschedule. Call soon. Cancellations between them were not unusual. Work could be unexpectedly demanding and Anselma, self-employed herself, frequently had the same problem. Lori regretted it though. They had a lot of laughs together. She didn’t see any laughs coming up tomorrow.

  Lori looked back at the screen, scrolled through her calendar and emails, and quietly lamented that she’d gone away for the weekend. She should have put up a bit more of a fight, made some excuse. She could have even sent Jason and the kids away by themselves. But she didn’t do that. She’d never done that. It would have been strange (very unlike her), and she was trying as hard as she could to make sure nothing was strange at the moment.

  Jason appeared at the door dressed in a t-shirt and towel. ‘Guess I’ll see you tomorrow night
.’ He smiled wanly and, not for the first time, he reminded her of her father standing there in the half light, his hair wet and ruffled from the shower, his t-shirt snug across his belly. Growing into middle age, just as her dad had been when she’d last seen him. Bittersweet love and loss in one package.

  She walked over and nuzzled into his neck. ‘What time will you be back?’

  ‘Hard to say. I’ll text you tomorrow, let you know what’s happening. Should be better this week.’

  ‘Pity they don’t pay you for the extra twenty hours you’ve been clocking up the last few weeks.’

  ‘Ha, no hope of that. Do or die. If I don’t fuck this up too badly I’ll get another job out of them. Maybe a better contract.’

  ‘And if you do?’

  ‘What? Fuck it up? Well, I’ll probably never work in this town again.’ He smiled crookedly.

  She looked up at him, scrutinised his face. Was he being serious? It was often hard to tell with Jason. In most ways he played life so straight—the very thing she’d always liked about him, his reliability, his rock-solidness. And yet there was just a little more to him than you imagined. A little something that undercut those expectations of convention. Subversive humour, a dry sense of irony.

  ‘Hey. It’ll be fine. Honestly. I just need to go to bed and get some sleep. A weekend away has tuckered me out. All that fresh air.’

  ‘All those fresh kids, you mean.’

  He smiled. ‘It’s the best time, the time with them. Oh, and you too, of course, my darling wife.’

  She kissed him on the cheek and thought that ten years ago they could never have imagined being so domestic, so kid-centric, so tired, having so little sex (anything less than nightly would have been unimaginable). Her mind flickered to Schiller. Still in the thick of it, it seemed. Was that what she would have had instead? Sliding doors. Take one path and you’ll never know where the other one would have led you. Perhaps just accept that none of them was ever going to take you where you might have once imagined you’d go. Most of life was down to sheer luck. Good or bad. Often indifferent.

  She went to the back of the house and made a herbal tea. It was quiet there with the door closed. She could play a little music if she fancied. But she never really did fancy. It was the silence she craved above all else, silence and seclusion. She never explicitly articulated that need to Jason. Her usual shtick was that this time of the evening was when she could get things done. But the truth was that she rarely did anything with the time. Why did she need it then? She had no idea. All it gave her was a little while to sit undisturbed. Not to think, but to let her mind drift, float across a mutable landscape of knowledge and speculation.

  The living room was almost in darkness. A small lamp gave out minimal light and allowed her to see the vague shapes of the garden overlaid with the reflection of the room. A double exposure. It was a simple, elegant space (when the floors weren’t strewn with toys). One solid wall filled with shelves of books and objects, two walls of black-framed glass that looked out into the backyard. She and Jason had designed the back of the house themselves and even contributed at times to its building. They had made a space that felt like theirs out of something that had once very definitely not been, although it was most certainly a place of significance. The house had been Jason’s family home and was where his mum, Jo, had continued to live after she split from Niels. The bedroom where Sophie and Cody slept now had been his. The one across the hall his brother Josh’s. Their bedroom his parents’ room. Her studio the living room. The back of the house, a basic lean-to, had housed a kitchen–dining room and laundry, renovated in the seventies with brown floor tiles, dark wood laminate and orange Formica benchtops.

  ‘Do you miss your old home?’ Lori had asked Jason, renovation completed.

  ‘It’s still in here,’ he said, putting a finger to his temple, giving her a downturned smile. ‘Just like all the other memories I have of places that still exist, or don’t exist anymore. This house is different now. It’s a new start. I’m pretty happy about that.’

  Lori had first visited the house only days after the funeral. It was as though Jo had just stepped out for a moment. The cupboards and fridge were full of food. There were cigarettes on the bench and half-filled ashtrays in the dining and living rooms. Every free space around the house chock-a-block with knick-knacks that ranged from the almost stylish to the downright kitsch. When Lori first saw Niels’s house a month or so later she was shocked at the difference between them. His minimalism, she conjectured, must have been a response to Jo’s excess. Jason laughed at that notion. ‘No, he kept her in check while they were together. When he left, the ornaments started to move in. When me and Josh went, there was a mass invasion. Trinkets and fags right out of control.’

  Lori had seen photos of Jo at different stages of her life. Pretty young bride in the seventies. Mother to small boys in the eighties. An older woman at a barbecue twenty or so years later. As time went on there was a growing seriousness about her, a maturity as she emerged out of the shadow of Niels. But a sadness too, Lori thought. Something unfulfilled. But perhaps she was just reading in too much from what Jason had told her. Between them they might have come up with an interpretation that wasn’t really true. That she would never know.

  Jason resembled Jo. The dark hair and eyes, round face, tendency to carry a little weight. Lori felt inexplicably close to her for that likeness to her son and she often thought about her in the house as she went about the day to day. What would Jo think of her? Their decisions? Jason found her once crying hysterically over one of the decorations she’d accidentally broken, one of the few they’d kept. (‘I’m not sure what significance this one has,’ Jason had said, ‘but it does remind me that she did sometimes have good taste. Maybe it was a gift?’) He’d been puzzled by her meltdown, but of course it really wasn’t about Jo then but about Pam. Pam and Jo had been conflated into one absent super-mother. The perfect guardian angel Lori had never had, who’d love her no matter what, be ready with sage advice, dote on her children.

  Jason had divined all this to some extent. ‘You must miss your mum,’ he’d asked her a couple of times when something had come up about his. She’d shake her head as if it didn’t matter, tell him it was so long ago now that she couldn’t really remember her mother very well at all anymore. ‘You don’t have any photos of her. Or you as a kid, either,’ he’d stated incredulously once, when they’d been looking through, trying to sort, Jo’s relatively vast collection, which featured many of Niels and of the boys at various stages of their childhoods. Jason grungy in the early nineties had made her laugh. A doe-eyed teen with shaggy dark hair. (He still had his Nirvana and Hole albums, a few Stone Temple Pilots, as if to say that it was more than a phase.) She told him that her parents hadn’t been much into photography, and then what photos there were had been misplaced when their house was cleared out. She’d said she was grateful at the time, that she didn’t want to ever look back, and that, for her, photos were only a reminder of what you didn’t have anymore. She’d felt him observing her for a moment, weighing up her words. ‘I guess we’re all different,’ he’d said at last.

  Lori wasn’t sure what had hurt more: his pity or her inability to be honest. There were photos, had been photos. Some in albums, most in a box. And she had taken one. Kept it close, secreted in various places over the years, hidden away like a precious relic, shown to no one. It was the only memento she’d allowed herself to take when she left her grandfather’s house the morning after his funeral. A shot of her and her mother together at Scott’s eighteenth birthday party on the back lawn that last summer—autumn really by then. Her mother beaming out at the camera, as was her way; Lori smiling too, a teenager’s grin- and-bear-it smile. Her mother’s arm was around her shoulder, bracing her, anchoring her to the spot. If Lori closed her eyes she could still feel the force of that hold, smell Pam’s soapy scent, the mineral whiff of wine on her breath.

  Lori used the photo like a knife in the
same way that those who cut themselves might use a blade. The image held a visceral force that was completely overwhelming. In her first years away from home she employed it continually, often in the company of alcohol and pot. A tool in the constant roundabout of self-loathing and depression; the thing that could flick her out of numbness. The risk-taking adrenaline rushes of graffiti and skateboarding might have made her feel alive, but this plunged her deep into another sensation: the rawness of grief. It was, for a long time, the ultimate emotional trigger. When Jason arrived on the scene, the photo, time-worn now, had already lost a good deal of its potency, just as the drugs and alcohol, already then receding, had virtually disappeared too. But it was still there, at the back of one of her old notebooks, ready if she needed it. Not just to inflict pain but to remind her that she once did have that life. That it had been real.

  In her pocket her phone buzzed. She pulled it out. A text from Anselma. No worries. Talk whenever. Look forward to it. XX It was late, she saw from the time on the phone, and she had to be up early. She picked up her cup and rinsed it in the sink, wiped down the bench, surveyed the kitchen, satisfied that the place was tidy enough. She thought of their old kitchen at home. Her mother’s kitchen, really, it was so much her domain. Sixties cupboards painted a soft teal, a stainless steel sink and bench. Her mother had taken such good care of it, never complained about it being ancient, there being no dishwasher, not enough bench space or storage. Lori loved that kitchen. In her mind’s eye that was the heart of her childhood, there at the kitchen table, with the back door open and a breeze blowing in through the flywire. A view out across the timber decking to the lawn, and beyond that the fruit trees tucked into the corner and then the bigger gums on the back road outlined against a clouded blue sky. If her dad was home he might have Led Zeppelin booming out in the background, one of the rock anthems he loved, the soundtrack to her childhood. This kitchen, her own kitchen, had everything she needed. She’d designed it, made it hers. But it wasn’t the same. If they had to move tomorrow, she wouldn’t pine for its polished boards and marble benchtops, its glass splashback and stainless steel appliances. If she could trade it in for the old model, if that could bring them all back to life, she’d do it in a heartbeat.