Life Before

by Carmel Reilly

  July 1993

  Northam

  The line of light around the edges of the curtains was all Des Robinson was aware of in the dim room when he opened his eyes. He wasn’t used to waking here in daylight, or at least this broad midday kind of daylight. It was all wrong, not just the light but the warmth in the room. At this time of the year it was ordinarily freezing when he got up. He rarely found himself in bed after seven am. On occasion after a late night he might sleep in an hour or two longer, but to sleep through the day like this was not only unusual but discombobulating. It took him some moments to get his bearings, to understand the heaviness that pervaded his brain.

  Waking like this reminded him of his childhood, of being an invalid, having to stay in bed for months with some illness or other. He thought it might have been polio. Or perhaps TB. He wasn’t sure anymore and would never find out now. His parents and his only brother were long dead, all family knowledge gone with them. Whatever it was, this illness, it had laid him low for a long time, he did remember that. He’d spent endless days staring at the ivy-papered walls in his bedroom and then later in his parents’ room, where his mother had installed him because it was closer to the living areas when it had become apparent he wouldn’t be recovering quickly. The paper in their room was prettier, floral, stripes of pink entwined with red roses, but it was older too, the seams gaped open in places and its edges yellowed where the sun hit. He hated wallpaper. When they’d moved here Mary couldn’t understand why he’d insisted on painting the whole house inside and not wallpapering. He didn’t insist on much, but no wallpaper was one thing he was clear about. Idiosyncratic, Mary had said he was. That’s a big word for a Greek girl, he’d teased, and she’d given him a filthy look and said it was a Greek word, but that was something that was clearly lost on the ignorant son of an illiterate coalminer.

  He got out of bed and pulled back the curtains. The vast windows looked down on the street but also allowed, not unlike the police station just up the road, a panoramic view of the town right across to the hills on the far side of the new estate across the river. It was a handsome and rather modern house, one that had seemed entirely improbable to him when he’d first seen it in the summer of 1970. The place had been designed by an architect, almost certainly the only house in Northam at that time to have been, and had been owned by the town’s doctor, a man who had come to live out his life in the mountain air but had decided after six years to move back to civilisation. Sometime in those six years he had built the house, which Des had thought must have been an attempt by the man to create something closer to his heart in this town, to make his own place there. In the end it only served to amplify his difference. After a protracted fight with council to have it built, difficulties finding builders to erect it and the sneers of many of the townsfolk, the doctor seemed to have thrown his arms up in despair and left. Des never met him. He’d departed before Des and Mary arrived and the town had continued to search for a doctor for the best part of a year before a new one appeared.

  Des and Mary had inspected the house on their second day in Northam. It wasn’t the sort of place he’d ever thought about, but devoid of furniture, all he could see were the generous angular rooms and the wonderful views. He fell in love. ‘Fantastic place for kids,’ he’d said, turning to Mary when they stood in the living room looking out to the hills. She’d laughed. ‘Are you counting yourself as one of the kids? Let’s have a proper look outside before you get carried away.’

  They’d inspected the garden, which Mary conceded would be ideal for growing vegetables. She could see a place for some fruit trees in the far corner. There was enough lawn to drive Des mad with mowing on his days off and a good-sized shed to contain whatever paraphernalia needed to be contained.

  ‘Nothing we’ll want for here,’ he’d said.

  ‘Furniture? Children?’ replied Mary. ‘There’re a lot of rooms to fill.’

  ‘Well, I know how to fix at least some of that,’ Des declared, grabbing Mary around the waist and swinging her in a clumsy tango-esque move.

  They’d managed the furniture, eventually. But all the tangoing in the world had not produced offspring. They made some investigations over the years, but Mary didn’t want to delve too far. ‘It’s God’s will,’ she asserted. ‘We have each other. That must be enough for Him.’ But Des felt guilty. Mary had come from Greece with her family when she was ten. It had been a wrench for all of them. Another trauma after the war and then the civil war. The hardship of establishing themselves in a new and not always welcoming land. They had expectations for her, one of which was to marry a good Greek boy, a boy who believed in God, their god. They weren’t expecting this skinny, freckled, gingery kid, brought up in Gippsland, who’d somehow become a copper. (For them the words ‘policeman’ and ‘respect’ did not go hand in hand.) He was neither Greek nor god-fearing. And, as it turned out, probably not fertile either.

  Des pulled on some old pants, a shirt and jumper and went into the kitchen. Mary had gone out. Being Saturday morning she’d had a small sleep-in and had only half surfaced as he climbed into bed at eight. When she turned over to check on him he pretended to be asleep. He hadn’t been ready to talk then. He was exhausted. He still was, but at least he’d managed a few hours’ rest, enough to keep him going. Just. Midday and already he was thinking about the stiff whisky he was going to have before dinner.

  In the kitchen he found a packet of cigarettes and made a pot of tea. The local newspaper was on the kitchen table, but nothing about the accident, which had happened too late in the night for it to be reported. He grabbed a jacket and took the paper, a mug of tea and his fags to the back terrace. Flicking away the last of the raindrops, he sat down at the little iron table under a now naked trellis in the patchy sun. He read about the council’s decision to grant, despite police objections, a liquor licence to a sports club in town (yet somewhere else to keep an eye on). A proposal to build a new Olympic-sized swimming pool in one of the old factory sites down by the river. The winners of the best scones, cakes and fruitcakes at Nilmkuk Primary’s fete. Youth awards across the local high schools. He skimmed the names, alighting only on Melissa Smythe, year twelve Northam High, for sport. Netball. He thought of the girl in the accident and wondered. That poor child wouldn’t be playing netball again anytime soon.

  Mary’s car pulled up at the back gate. He couldn’t see her for the tall privet hedge, but he knew the sound of her car, the dull thud of its doors closing. Soon she was on the path, shopping bags in hand. He stood up to come and help her, but she called out, ‘Don’t worry. There’s only this.’

  ‘Tea’s probably still warm,’ he said, following as she went inside.

  He poured her a cup while she put a few items away.

  ‘What a terrible night,’ she said.

  ‘You heard?’

  ‘Pat Mills down at the bread shop. She knows the Friars. Their boy.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  She shook her head as if it were all beyond belief. ‘Just the one boy?’

  ‘One fatality. One of the girls was pretty badly hurt. Don’t know how she’ll go.’

  ‘Kids.’ Her tone was neutral, but he knew she meant that they were just kids. Not grown yet. One dead. The others injured in ways obvious and not so obvious. That this was a tragedy of the most banal kind, one that had played out many times before, so much so that they had a shorthand between them now, an understanding. She never launched in with concern after he’d attended an accident like this. She’d learned that over the years. She knew he needed time to unwind, unfurl his emotions, or at least those he could deal with showing. He didn’t want any fuss.

  ‘You managed to get a bit of sleep?’

  ‘Enough.’

  She cut some bread, put out cheese and ham. They sat down at the table.

  ‘You saw the family?’

  He looked at the food. He wasn’t sure if he was ready to eat. ‘Do you know the Druitts?’

  ‘I’ve heard of them. Abo
ut them. They live over on the estate, don’t they?’

  ‘Yeah, moved here a few years ago. Two boys.’ He looked at his plate. ‘One now. They’ve been hit for a six.’

  ‘So awful.’

  ‘It was odd, though. He was waiting for me last night, their old man. Like he knew I was coming. It was coming. Standing there in the rain outside his house. There was this strange calm about him when I told him. It was very unusual.’

  ‘The shock.’

  ‘Everyone’s different. I can still be surprised by that.’

  ‘I’ve heard they’re slightly strange.’

  ‘What? The Druitts?’

  ‘Mmm. They’re a bit—’ she searched for a word ‘—aloof. Don’t mix.’

  Des rubbed his chin, considered her description. ‘Could be. They, well, I should say he, might be described in other ways as well. Intense was one word I’ve heard used. Rigid was another. I can’t say I’m not concerned about him.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘He wanted to know a lot of details about the accident. Who was there. Who was driving interested him most. I saw a look cross his face that made me worry a little.’

  ‘He’s angry. That’s more than understandable.’

  ‘It’s usually the helplessness I see first. That initial shock, people break down, or they’re numb. Takes a while for anger to kick in. I think anger, cold anger, might always be with that man, a permanent part of his personality.’ Des took a bite of his sandwich, chewed slowly.

  ‘Who was driving?’ Mary asked after a minute.

  ‘Mick and Pam Green’s boy, Scott. Little Loren was there too, in the car. Although she’s not little now really. Sixteen.’

  ‘Oh lord. Did you see them?’

  ‘Mick and Pam? I met them at the hospital. The boy was in surgery. He’ll be all right.’

  Mary sighed and looked out the window to the back garden. ‘Sometimes I think we were blessed not to have children,’ she said.

  Des didn’t reply. He wanted to say that love and pain were inseparable companions, but he didn’t want to sound like a sanctimonious git, even to his wife who already knew him for one. But it would have seemed condescending too, and he didn’t want that either. To his mind, Mary was essentially the most sensible woman he knew, but her adherence to religion still puzzled him after all these years. Her idea that there was some divine plan made him shake his head in wonder. God was important to her, he was like the other man in their relationship, in the background, never mentioned. Or perhaps, as Des had considered more than once, it was the other way around and that he himself was the other man, living in a permanent state of sin with a woman already wedded to Christ. Whatever it was, Des never talked about God with Mary. He knew that he might say something he could never take back. He might shout at her and tell her that he couldn’t believe in a god who would allow the kind of suffering he had seen last night. What was the point of life for it to be thrown away almost as soon as it had begun? What was the bloody point?

  Des looked at his half-eaten sandwich. Food had definitely not been a good idea.

  ‘You should go back to bed,’ Mary offered.

  ‘No, the sun’s out. I might pull some weeds out of the garden.’ The truth was that he didn’t want to pull out weeds. He’d much rather go to bed, but the time just before sleep was always the worst, images would come to him, movies playing on the membrane of his closed eyelids. He’d prefer to have to go through that just once in a day, not twice. And with luck tonight he’d be so dog-tired he’d drop off quickly and not be afflicted. He never told Mary about this. He never told her anything much about the scenes he had to attend. The road accidents, the suicides, the tractor deaths, the drownings, the occasional homicide. He had it good compared to many of his city counterparts, he knew that. A country cop’s life was not usually as confrontational. He could go for months—once a whole year—without having to see something so terrible it would not leave him for days or weeks after. Over time he learned strategies for dealing with the flashes and the afterimages. He learned to switch his mind into another mode. But try as he would, he couldn’t do it immediately. It was like a process, where with each assault he would have to relive what happened any number of times before it could be—he didn’t want to say filed away—managed to some extent. Mary played a role in this. Her not knowing every little thing made it easier. He saw her as an unsullied part of his life, a neutral zone that he could come back to, find comfort in. Sometimes she’d look at him in an uncomprehending way and it did cross his mind that perhaps he wasn’t being fair to shut off this part of himself from her. But surely it would be cruel to inflict the details of his job, to have her imagine what he saw, to have her thinking about it all too.

  He remembered realising when he was about twelve that his own father had served in World War II. He would never have known if it hadn’t been for a school project provoking the inquiry. His dad didn’t go to the RSL or attend dawn services. When Des asked him about it he’d said it was better to put the past behind you, to always look forward, to focus on the better part of human nature and not the worst. Des was fairly certain army life had been more traumatic for his father than police life was for him (he’d never been shot at, never spent days dug into a tiny piece of ground not knowing if he’d make it out alive, never seen his friends die beside him), but he took his father’s view as a template for himself. When he attended his first death—and he remembered it still, a dilapidated paint-flaking house in Malvern, an old woman dead a good few weeks—it was 1964. The bloke he’d gone in with was a senior constable a few years older who’d been around the block a few times. He didn’t laugh when Des threw up in the kitchen, unable to get out of the house quickly enough to puke outside. But he did tell him that he’d get used to it, would start to see it as it was. The end of life. Nothing more or less. After their shift he took him back to his place for a beer (in the days of six o’clock closing) and they drank themselves stupid, while his wife cleaned up in the kitchen and took herself off to bed. Des fell asleep on the senior constable’s couch and woke up in the morning to the faces of two small children staring intently at him and shouting to their mother that there was a strange man in the living room. She came in and unsmilingly offered him bacon and eggs.

  ‘What will happen?’ Mary’s voice came to him as though from a distance. He wondered for a moment if he’d blacked out but Mary’s face didn’t betray any concern, or at least not for him.

  ‘You mean to Scott Green? I’m pretty sure he’ll be charged with culpable driving. Depends on whether he pleads guilty or not as to whether there’s a court case. Mostly they get a prison sentence. A few years.’

  ‘For a life. A few years for a life?’

  ‘A year. Two. Could be up to twenty. But these boys were best friends. Scott Green will carry the burden of guilt forever, however long he spends in prison. If anything I think he might welcome it. A real punishment. Something concrete.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘I know it. I’ve seen it before. I’ll see it again. These moments of madness that lead to a lifetime of … regret, to put it mildly. Boys like Scott Green want to be punished. Remember Glenn Gannon?’

  ‘Lord, Des. He killed himself, didn’t he?’

  Des got up and took his plate to the bench, looked out at the garden. It was only at times like these that he thought about retiring. When the prospect of a simple life doing simple activities seemed overwhelmingly attractive. He’d wondered sometimes if he’d stay in this town after he left the force, and he and Mary had discussed the idea but had decided they’d probably stay put. More than twenty-five years he’d been here, seen all sorts of comings and goings. He wasn’t sure he could claim to have a lot of close friends, but Mary was well in with the community. In their own ways they both belonged here now. And they had each other. He couldn’t imagine living somewhere else, but he also couldn’t quite imagine what it would be like to live here and not be the local copper. Who would he b
e when he retired? What would he do?

  In another ten years he may not even care. A lot of water could pass under the bridge between now and then. If there was anything he knew it was that he was no seer. The constant in life was the unpredictability of human nature. It was what made him love and hate his job in the same breath.

  July 1993

  Northam

  Pam woke in a sweat. She’d dreamed that she was being strangled. It wasn’t clear who her assailant was, but she had a sense that it might have been a demon or a spirit rather than a person. She could feel the weight of the thing upon her, exerting all its force into extinguishing hers, pulling a tight band around her throat. When she opened her eyes she felt a sudden surge of buoyancy, a rising up, as though she could levitate off the bed. Her heart thumped fit to bursting.

  It was still dark and it took her a few seconds to get her bearings, remember she was at home in her own bed. She lay panting, feeling the relief. Then a seeping heaviness. She tilted sideways to check the time. Six-thirty. She was surprised that she’d slept at all, let alone so long. It seemed absurd that she’d been able to, but she’d been so exhausted the night before that as soon as she’d eaten she’d hauled herself off to the bedroom—where the bed was still a mess from the morning—and fallen promptly into a torpid slumber. It was extraordinary the way the body demanded a level of normality, asked that day-to-day life be kept ticking over even under duress. That you continued to take part in those acts that kept you alive, nourished your body and soul (eating, sleeping, conversing), when death lay so close. She’d felt the same way when her mother died. How in the days that followed her death and burial Pam watched the world pass by in a blur, people going about their business just as they always did. Her included. Functioning in the most mundane of ways: washing, cooking, getting the kids off to school. Yet inside she’d been rendered in stone, ossified with grief.