Life Before

by Carmel Reilly

  Lori moved to the bed and sat down next to her brother, put her hand on his arm. Saw his eyelids flutter.

  ‘Scott?’

  Daniel found another chair in the corner and pulled it to the other side of the bed. He was facing Lori now and he smiled fleetingly at her as if in encouragement. She was glad of his company. Glad that this had happened when she was with him and that he had decided to come along (paranoid speculation notwithstanding). It had been hard to see her brother alone. She wasn’t sure of the depth of Daniel’s knowledge about her, her family, but now any knowledge seemed better than none. His understanding her greatest gift.

  Scott let out a low moan; not a cry of distress but something that she imagined approximated him re-emerging into the world. The kind of sound she’d heard her children emit as they woke in the morning, remembering their bodies again after a night of being physically untethered. She bent forward and watched as his eyes slowly opened and he stared up to the ceiling.

  ‘Scott,’ she said again.

  The nurse came over, standing in front of him for a moment to check something, then moving back.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ Lori asked. She stood up and leaned over her brother, but he continued to gaze vacantly upwards. She sat again and placed her hand on his arm, felt him flinch reflexively, make a small noise. ‘It’s Lori,’ she said. ‘I’m here.’ She glanced over at Daniel and shook her head.

  ‘Tell him something. Tell him about life, or your work. Anything.’

  She gave him a helpless look.

  ‘What about when you were kids? Did you get on?’

  ‘We were mates. We did a lot together, really.’

  ‘What kind of things?’

  She put her hands to her face, pressed her fingers into her cheeks. ‘He was always into something—up to something—and I’d follow him. Blindly. Do whatever he did. When we were younger, he used to take his bike to the dirt road behind our house and ride it up and down. Practise snap turns, wheelies. I had a little bike, a little pink thing, and I’d go out after him. He was really good, but I was always falling off, skinning my knees, elbows. Skateboards later, until he banned me because he just wanted to be with his mates and having your kid sister tagging along was seriously uncool.’

  Scott made a sound then that was more like a word than a grunt. She leaned towards him, surprised at her reflexes. ‘It’s okay. I’m here.’ His eyes seemed to slide towards her then and focus momentarily on her face. ‘I’m here,’ she repeated, and he blinked and looked away as if it had all been too much, closed his eyes again. She sat still for a while watching him, waiting to see what he would do.

  ‘That might be it for now,’ said Malcolm.

  ‘When will he wake again do you think?’ said Lori.

  ‘Could be an hour. Tonight. Tomorrow. There’s no real knowing. Take a break for a while.’

  ‘Want to get a coffee downstairs?’ asked Daniel.

  In the quarter-full hospital cafeteria they got coffee and water and sat at a white laminex table by the window with a view of the courtyard.

  ‘This must be the quietest café in Fitzroy,’ said Daniel.

  ‘There’s a lot of competition around here.’

  He raised an eyebrow, as if to say he didn’t think the competition would make much difference, and took a sip of coffee, made a face. ‘You said you hadn’t had contact with your brother for years. When was it exactly that you saw him last?’

  ‘Just before he went to gaol.’

  ‘Did you blame him? Is that why you didn’t see him again.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, surprised by his question and feeling the sudden heat of being seen as the perpetrator of an injustice. But he didn’t seem to notice her unease and took another sip of his coffee while he waited for her to answer. She glanced away through the windows, noted hospital staff sitting at the tables outside. Some talking, a couple reading papers, others looking at their phones. A few were smoking. ‘I wouldn’t have described it like that then. It was something very physical. I couldn’t bear to look at him. I was so angry. I guess I did blame him, but I didn’t consciously think that. It seems impossible to explain now, but at the time I couldn’t go near Scott. I think it was everything he represented. He and Troy were so close, it was hard to look at him and not see Troy. Expect to see Troy. It was terrible. I mean, it must have been awful for my parents. They had enough to handle as it was, and then me behaving like that.’

  ‘Did you get counselling?’

  ‘Counselling wasn’t something people did in Northam twenty years ago. I guess they could have sent me somewhere—Shepparton or Wangaratta or down here. There were places, but it wasn’t seen as a priority. I think they thought time would heal the wounds.’ She let out a small snort.

  ‘I think now you might be diagnosed with PTSD. Certainly because of what happened later, if not then.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’ Lori closed her eyes briefly and thought about what Schiller had said. ‘I used to cry in my sleep, apparently. Having the kids, I had a lot of anxiety before and after their births, I don’t know if that was normal. I missed my mother so much then. But, in a way, having them changed everything for me. Someone else to live for, have a future for. I guess I got to transform some of that negative energy into something positive, but I might not have been able to do that by myself.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know. I might just be talking a pile of crap. Do you have kids?’

  ‘No,’ he said, then added, ‘not sure I ever will.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Daniel looked surprised. Not even his mother had asked him that question. He cocked an eyebrow as if to say ‘what a cheek’ but answered anyway. ‘My job. It can take me to some dark places. Doesn’t always make me feel so positive about bringing kids into the world.’

  ‘I understand that. I think if it hadn’t been for Jason—my husband—I wouldn’t have either.’ She put her hands on the table in front of her and examined them for a moment. Her hands were a lot like her mother’s, neither broad nor delicate, but with long tapering fingers that gave them a certain elegance. ‘You know, it was hard for me to like myself for a long time. Even when I met Jason, I still didn’t really. One day he said to me that he thought I had great hands—I don’t mean he never complimented me, but this was kind of different, he made me see them differently. I’ve always been an artist, a designer. These hands are the tools of my trade, they enable me to make beautiful things and to earn a living. They remind me of what I can hold onto, touch. And they remind me of my mum. I can see her hands when I look at mine.’

  ‘Does that help you make sense of it?’

  ‘It helps me to see the connections. The wonder of being a child. Being a parent. This thing that links us. I’m glad of my children for that bond. It’s worth the risk to have that intensity.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I get that.’ Behind them, two people left the café. The door glided shut. He glanced around and then back at her. ‘Do you want to talk about it? The accident?’

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘Why do you want to know? You’d have the reports.’

  ‘You said you’d never talked to anyone about it. I thought perhaps now you’d like to.’

  ‘Get some practice in, you reckon?’

  ‘You worry about telling your husband?’

  She sat quietly for a little while, staring out the windows, not wanting to think about Jason. ‘I gave some statements to the police. The last one for sentencing. That’s the last time I ever talked about the crash.’

  ‘What about your parents?’

  ‘They left me alone with it. I can’t explain how angry I was. It wasn’t just aimed at Scott. I mean I was angry with the world. With myself. Talking about what happened was the last thing I wanted to do, so they didn’t either. And they were concerned about Scott. About him going to gaol. And about other stuff that was happening to them at the time. But I was a sixteen-year-old who had no idea.’ She looked across the ta
ble at him and had an urge to reach over and brush his hair back, to kiss him. A kind of transference, she knew that, knew she had to let it wash over her, not take hold. She looked down at her hands again and hoped he hadn’t noticed. She’d never been good at recognising what kind of signals she gave out.

  ‘When the car crashed, it flipped, I don’t know how many times. One minute Troy was sitting next to me. Saying things. Laughing. And then all of a sudden, there’s stuff everywhere, everything is falling and he’s gone. Disappeared. The car comes to rest on its wheels and I’m still there in the back, piled next to Josh. The door on Troy’s side is wide open and all I can hear is Melissa crying in the front seat and I think Scott moaning and there is some hissing sound. Everything’s dark, but there was this strange, spooky really, pale light from the headlights. Somehow they’re still on.’ She turned her head towards the window again and paused.

  ‘I don’t know why I wasn’t hurt. Why Josh wasn’t hurt. I don’t know how that could have happened, but it did. I found Troy where he’d been thrown against a tree. Not far away. Just slumped down.’ Her fingers felt for the glass of water in front of her and she put it to her lips, took a small sip. ‘I could hear him. I could hear him … gurgling. Rasping. It was loud and weird and I think I knew what it meant, even then, but you know. I’ll never forget that sound.’ She put her hand to her mouth, looked across at Daniel silently for a few seconds. ‘You must have seen a fair few accidents yourself. Your job.’

  ‘The uniforms or CFA are generally the first responders. I saw more as a rookie cop than I do now. My team are often there after the worst of it. The aftermath. Looking at the wreck, tyre marks, working out how the accident happened, interviewing people.’ He shook his head quickly as if he knew it wasn’t the same. ‘There’s a lot of follow-up. That said, I’ve seen some pretty terrible things.’

  They were both quiet for a while.

  ‘No one I know has ever had the same experience, been in an accident like that. None of them had to deal with it. At least you know.’ She looked away from him and down at her cup. ‘I remember I put my arms around Troy and I said all the sort of shit that you say when you want everything to be okay. I couldn’t see his face clearly. But I could hear that sound he was making, and then it stopped. Josh told me later that he called for me to help him with the others, but I didn’t hear. Sometime later people came, someone pulled me off the ground.

  ‘Memory is a funny thing. I don’t know if it was because I was out of it that night. Even before the accident. I don’t recall much about what went down—the party or the drive. Then later the hospital. My parents coming in. I think the doctor gave me some sedative. Maybe that stuffed me up too? When I look back, I feel like a spotlight fell on those few terrible moments and the rest was just swept away. And, even now, I don’t know if those things I remember are real. I found out later that Josh pretty much kept Melissa alive and maybe Scott too in that time till the ambos came. I guess I found it hard to forgive myself for that. I was AWOL.’

  ‘It would have been extremely difficult to witness what you did. You were with someone in their dying moments. I think you were very hard on yourself to imagine that you could leap up and start tending to others.’ He paused delicately. ‘Were you together? Boyfriend, girlfriend?’

  Lori bit her lip. ‘There was something just starting. I’d known him for years. He was my brother’s friend, but he was mine too. I thought I was in love with him. I don’t know how true that was. I was a child. But I did believe that for a long time, and that he loved me too. What was and what might have been. You know, when you lose someone like that you don’t just lose them but all the possibilities. I felt as though I’d lost my future. Your first love. The intensity, the purity. I thought for a long time after that I was cursed. You know, that Scott and I both were. For us to live through all that, to have survived everything. It was too much. We could never be happy. We didn’t deserve to be happy.’

  ‘I can see why you thought that. You had an enormous amount to endure in the end. It must have taken grit to survive.’

  She shrugged dismissively. ‘But people do survive, don’t they? People can lose everything. In war they lose their homes and families, their communities. They watch unspeakable acts. They are forced into bravery or abasement. They lose their dignity. But they go on. It’s been part of the human cycle for millennia. It’s the history of the human race.’

  ‘Is this how you see that period? As war?’

  She gave him a crooked smile. ‘Well, it turned out to be that way, didn’t it? I mean, I didn’t think that at the time. I didn’t say, “I’m in a war zone.” But in many ways I was.’

  The cafeteria was completely empty by then. Outside, too, the tables had cleared. It was just the two of them against the light of the glass, black figures in a sea of white. Around them the sounds of pots being scraped and cleaned, an indecipherable comment from someone in the kitchen. A peal of laughter. Lori checked her watch. She’d have to get back to pick up the kids soon. One last chance to see her brother. Daniel was already rising from the table having taken the cue. She shut her eyes for a second and thought of Jason. Imagined him across from her. Imagined that she had just told him what she’d told Daniel Levandi. And the rest as well. How would he be? Would he lean towards her, concerned, surprised, alarmed? Would he be angry that she’d never told him, feel betrayed? She thought she knew him, but when she thought about marrying her past with the present all she could see was a huge black hole. She had no idea how he would react.

  August 1993

  Northam

  The telephone rang in the hallway four times before the answering machine clicked in and carried the message stealthily away from earshot. Pam knew now how many rings there were because she had reset the machine, reduced the number down from six to the minimum four (why four, for god’s sake, why not zero?). It had become something of a ritual for her now, counting the rings, listening to see if a message would be left, waiting for the final beep of the machine. Whether she replayed the messages straightaway depended on how she felt at the time, if she was strong, was up to the assault. Mostly she wasn’t.

  The calls had started days after the accident. Some, she was sure, were kids. Lots of deep breathing and laughter, the odd ghostly ‘ooooo’ thrown in for effect. Once a wavering voice saying, ‘I’m Troy and I am here to take my revenge.’ Amateur and silly, sure, but deeply upsetting too, if only for their button-pushing callousness. Then there were the more menacing calls that featured either panting breaths or silence. More latterly, someone had taken to whispering the word ‘killer’ over and over. Pam found it hard to listen to these—even when she only gave them a couple of seconds, the knowledge of them coming in was enough—and she certainly didn’t want Scott or Loren to hear them. Or even Mick half the time. (A problem shared, she believed, was not a problem halved but in their case one mutually stewed on.) Hence, she’d became the guardian of the answering machine, the chief bile absorber, checking each message, deleting those that were offensive or abusive and, when she was up to it, answering the merely routine.

  Most of these calls came through at night. She, or Mick, had taken to pulling the phone cord from its socket after nine pm. Let the phone ring on in the ether, not allowing the hate to connect to its target. When the barrage had started, she’d gone to Des Robinson straightaway and he’d traced them. The majority were made from the town’s three telephone boxes—by whom, who knew—with the others coming, she’d later found out, from the home of a year ten Northam High student. She’d speculated that it might have been a friend of Kyle Druitt. Des didn’t provide details about that but assured her that whoever it was wouldn’t call again. The laughing and ghostly voices dropped out of the mix, but the silences, heavy breathing and the whispered accusations continued unabated, no doubt from the round of phone boxes. Of course, while nothing could be proved, she was sure that these calls originated from the Druitts. Possibly executed by a number of people—extended fam
ily, friends—but that was a mere technicality. It was most certainly Ray’s doing. To what end Pam couldn’t be sure: revenge, rough justice, a way to make them feel as dreadful as they felt themselves? She attempted to put herself in their shoes but, try as she might, she couldn’t imagine making trips to the local phone box and picking up the handset and breathing hard. She’d like to think she wouldn’t do that if she’d been faced with the same situation, no matter how much grief and bitterness she might have harboured. If nothing else it was ridiculous. Like something from a B-grade movie, mobs with pitchforks and burning torches. Yet somehow she wouldn’t be surprised to see one at her doorstep sometime soon, feel the sharp tips of the prongs on her skin, the heat against her face. Fantasy translated into reality.

  Pam and Mick had heard from their friend Gary Alderson, who also happened to be Ray’s boss, that Ray hadn’t come back to work. He hadn’t resigned. He simply hadn’t been in. Gary told them that he’d gone to the funeral and given the Druitts his heartfelt condolences and that Ray had looked right through him. ‘I didn’t take it as a snub,’ Gary said. ‘He’s an odd guy at the best of times, and he seemed to be like that with everyone. Like a zombie.’

  Gary’s wife, Karen, had said that Maxine seemed little better. ‘I’ve never seen a funeral like it,’ she’d told Pam the following weekend. ‘Honestly, doll, it was good you didn’t go. The eulogy was awful. Done by the minister. No one from the family could speak. Half of the church was wailing and the other half catatonic.’

  Gary and Karen had come over for lunch. In fact they had brought most of lunch (salad, salami, pickles, a big crusty loaf from the bakery, a couple of coffee scrolls) and invited themselves in. Pam had known them since she was a kid. Their families had all been friendly when they were growing up. Alderson’s car dealership (emblematic of the times, it was Ford in the old days, Toyota now) had been started by Gary’s father in the 1940s. Karen’s dad had been the town’s accountant. Gary liked a drink, or two. Or three. He brought a bottle of Scotch with him to lunch, which Pam found to be an odd gesture. Karen made an apologetic face at Pam as if to say ‘what a hick I married’.