In the toilet she splashed water over her face, checking in the mirror for drips without actually looking at herself. She was becoming expert at that. Looking but not seeing. A few minutes before she’d thought she would be sick, but the urge had passed and she was left only with a sense of exhaustion, fragility. She wasn’t sure how she’d go with fifty minutes of bending, stretching, balancing. But she knew she’d be glad of the company if nothing else. She certainly couldn’t imagine walking back out into the drizzle now and driving home.
Almost an hour later and the class had finished. Pam lay still, on the mat, eyes firmly closed. She felt exhausted. It had been a while since she had done anything physical. She attempted to send out a psychic message to her fellow classmates to disappear, but her abilities in that department were clearly deficient as she could hear them all loitering, clustered in little groups and quietly conversing. Did they usually do this after a class? The dynamic had changed since she had last come along; there were a lot more attendees in these last few weeks. Contrary to predictions, Aurora’s classes had become quite a hit.
‘Pam,’ she heard someone say above her. She looked up to see Bev. She hauled herself to sitting and Bev told her to have a good week and said she’d look forward to seeing her next Saturday. A procession of women followed, variously smiling, nodding and sharing a kind word or two. Pam sat there on her mat looking up at them as they passed, smiling and nodding back, feeling a little like the Dalai Lama, in exalted humble pose, giving audience. She only wished she had his wit and wisdom. What would he say, she wondered, about her situation? Was she paying for a transgression in another incarnation? Or was this simply the cut and thrust of the here and now, part of the vagaries of life, the randomness of existence?
Finally the room emptied and Aurora sat down next to her. ‘How are you?’ she asked.
Pam shook her head. ‘Do you think this is how it is now? That it’s always going to be about the Greens and the Druitts … avoiding each other? I was going to say hating each other, but I don’t hate them, not really.’
‘I wouldn’t blame you if you did.’
Pam shook her head slowly. ‘What I hate is being so hated by other human beings.’
‘Bit like being a politician, getting crap thrown at you every time you go out in public,’ said Cathy.
‘Except that politicians choose their lives. They might not like it, but they know being abused is part of the job. Me, I don’t know how the hell this happened. I’m not sure why they seem to hate me even more than they hate Scott. As if I’m the one who’s ultimately responsible.’
‘The sins of the mother,’ mused Aurora.
‘The worst thing is that a part of me thinks they’re right,’ said Pam.
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘That it was ultimately my fault. That I should have been better at being a parent.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Cathy. ‘You know you have three beautiful, good children. If you want to take that attitude then there’s been no sin committed. Quite the opposite. Triumphs of the mother, I would say.’
‘Just one of them made a terrible mistake.’ Pam hugged her knees to her chest, inhaled. ‘Does sin have to be intentional? I don’t know. Well, I suppose the law would say not.’
‘I’m not sure breaking the law and sinning are the same thing,’ said Aurora.
‘Most of the time they are,’ Pam returned.
No one spoke for a little while, then Pam continued, ‘Aurora, I want to say thank you for batting for me. I feel awful that I brought this all down on you.’
Aurora let out a small, unexpected laugh. ‘Honestly, I had to struggle to be polite. I wanted to tell Reggie to fuck off straight up. Excuse my language, but there’s been a bit of it around today. Look, it’s not that I don’t understand how she feels, but she made me choose. It wasn’t that I wanted her to go. Those two have been quite supportive of me and they’ve brought a few students to my classes. But they’re also hard work. Well, Reggie. Reggie’s hard work. She’s one of those people who only exist in two modes: either adores you or despises you. Frankly, it would have only been a matter of time until I slipped up, got moved from the good books to the bad. It happens when you get put on a pedestal. I never like that feeling.’
‘Guess we’ll see how many people turn up next week.’ Cathy sighed. ‘You might be cursing us then.’
‘Never,’ said Aurora, a defiant look on her face. ‘I don’t think Reggie will drum up too much support. But I hate all that agitation. Hate that I couldn’t have seen some way around it all. I only hope Reggie—all of them—can find some peace.’
‘Peace. That’s an elusive concept,’ said Pam. ‘My family is a mess too.’
‘Time,’ said Aurora, putting her hand on Pam’s shoulder. ‘That’s all you can give it.’
‘But it feels like such a waste of time. All those good years we could have had, squandered in grief and anger and recrimination. Imprisonment. So much lost. So much we’ll never get back. Sometimes it feels too hard to bear.’
‘Bloody hell,’ said Cathy. ‘Pammy, life is tough at the moment, I won’t deny it, but you have friends. We’ll stand up with you, and for you. As you have seen. Things will get better. You just have to focus on the positive.’
‘And then everything will be okay?’
‘No. Of course not.’ Cathy looked slightly put out. ‘But you do have a lot on your side. Including us. Well, unless that’s a problem?’
Pam laughed then, a tender acknowledgement of Cathy’s earnestness, her desire for everything to be all right, to be able to magic away problems; her loyalty. ‘I am grateful to have you on my side,’ she said, and she was grateful, but in her heart she thought that company could only come so far with her on this journey. In the end she was going to have to walk the road alone, and no one else could ever know what that was like.
September 1993
Northam
The back door slammed, reverberating through the house. Pam was in the bedroom, making the bed. ‘Scott?’ she called. She could hear the clomp of footsteps up the hallway to his bedroom, the door being closed. She continued what she’d been doing, pulling up the quilt, plumping the pillows, folding clothes that had been left on the chair from the day before. When she finished she went down to the kitchen, passing Scott’s room, noting the silence. She asked him once what he did in his room during the day, the times he was closed in there, and he told her, with an odd little grin, that he was practising for prison. She wasn’t sure if that was an attempt at humour but she didn’t find it the least bit funny. It made her want to throw something at him, hit him and wipe that smile off his stupid, beautiful face.
It was a Thursday, one of her two weekdays off, Monday being the other. Thursday was her designated shopping day. She’d never liked Mondays for shopping. They were too busy, too many people in the supermarket aisles catching up from the weekend. Shoppers shopping, staff unpacking. Thursdays were easier days, quieter and more sedate. Plenty of time to browse and plenty of space in which to do it. These days, post-accident, that also meant less chance of being jumped unexpectedly by people she didn’t know very well wanting to ask her how she was going or even, as had happened on one occasion, Druitt sympathisers who might eyeball her, hiss a little warning, mention Scott’s name loudly as they passed her by.
On any other Thursday she’d be heading out by now to the supermarket in town, or the Fruit Barn on the highway, but this morning she was thrown off balance. Scott’s presence in the house, having been home for weeks, almost eight now, refusing to go to school, spending inordinate amounts of time in his room, was strange enough, but now there were his absences as well. He’d taken to leaving the house and not returning for a night or a day, not telling her where he was going or where he’d been. When she’d asked he’d simply ignored her or sidestepped her questions, and she hadn’t pressed him. After all, he wasn’t a child anymore, he was free to come and go. But it was more than the sum of these small parts. It
felt to her as if something essential had broken. A delicate thread that had once encircled her family had been severed, transforming them from a single unit into free-floating bodies, like astronauts walking in space cut loose from the mother ship. If she had to describe the change she’d say that in two short months her world had gone from ‘pretty good, thanks’ to ‘bloody nightmare’. Or in another version: ‘I know my family, I’ve got a good idea what’s going on’ had become ‘I have no idea about anything at all’.
Scott had spent a week in hospital after the accident. She and Mick had driven to Belandra to pick him up the following Sunday. It had been a rigmarole to take him out in the wheelchair, bundle him into the car, store the crutches on the back-seat floor. Scott reminded her of a newborn foal, unused to his new dimensions, his unsteady, clumsy limbs. It made him, the most sturdy, physically adept of her children, seem strangely, forebodingly vulnerable. She expected that he’d be happy about coming back, but instead he seemed more morose than he had been all week and sat silently in the car on the way home. He hadn’t asked, when they came up to get him, if Loren was coming. He knew now that she wouldn’t venture near the hospital. Pam had told him that she couldn’t face it, but that was only her surmising. In truth Loren hadn’t said anything at all except that she didn’t want to go. ‘No, no and no’ had been her continued responses to the repeated question about whether she was coming to the hospital with them each day.
It was the second week of the holidays by then. Mike and Josh became frequent visitors to their house along with a few other kids Pam didn’t know quite as well, including a girl called Deanna, who claimed she was there to help Scott with his maths homework and stayed in his room until late in the evening after the others had left. Loren, on the other hand, went out, avoiding these comings and goings as much as possible, instead spending time with Katie and Leah, or so she told Pam. At home she crept about like a lizard, rarely speaking to anyone, least of all Scott, her bedroom door implacably closed against them all.
‘They just need some time to settle in,’ Mick had said when Pam expressed her dismay at the lack of social cohesion in their house, the wall of doors closed in the hallway.
‘They used to be best buddies,’ replied Pam.
Mick sounded exasperated. ‘Give it time. You of all people should know how hard it’s been.’
‘What do you mean me of all people?’
‘You’ve taken it pretty hard yourself.’
‘Well, we all have, haven’t we?’
Mick inclined his head and made a grunting sound that could be read as agreement.
‘You think I’m over the top about this, don’t you?’
‘I just think there’s only so much we can do. Sometimes you’ve just got to let things take their course.’
Mick thought that about the dumped animal corpses and phone calls too. Everything in his estimation would pass and all would be fine. Maybe he was right, that she had taken it harder than him, but she’d also been at the front line, dealing with the Druitts, the messages, the children when he was off at work. She wasn’t sure he really understood the scope of it all, the raw pain she’d endured. But perhaps she was exaggerating her part and underestimating his?
At the end of the holidays Scott had refused to go back to school, and this unexpected eventuality had shocked Pam. He hadn’t indicated he wouldn’t return, just didn’t get up on the Monday morning. When she went in to wake him, assuming he’d overslept his alarm, he spoke to her from under the bedcovers and told her simply that he wasn’t going back. She’d agreed, not concerned then, thinking she could talk him around in a few days, but in the end there was no budging him. At some point she’d wondered if it was the cast and offered to pick up homework from his teachers to save him from having to front up to school.
‘No, I’m done,’ was all he said.
‘But—’
He held his palm up. ‘I’m not going to talk about it again. I’m not going back. Ever. Okay?’
Accordingly she didn’t bring it up again, well, not with him at least, but every time a friend came over she’d quietly take them aside and ask them to intercede. Only Deanna told her straight up that it was a waste of time.
‘But you were helping him with maths,’ said Pam, who felt like an idiot as soon as the words were out of her mouth.
Deanna smiled, not unkindly, carried on the fiction. ‘That was before he’d talked to the lawyer.’
‘The lawyer? You mean Hugh?’
‘Don’t know. Whoever it was, he said Scott could get years in prison. Like twenty or something. The cops were going to go for the harshest penalty.’
‘No,’ said Pam, wondering when that conversation had happened, how she’d been kept out of the loop. ‘No, he’d never get that much.’
Deanna shrugged. ‘He doesn’t think school’s worth it now. You need to let him make that decision. Hassling him only makes him feel worse.’
Pam had to restrain herself from telling this overconfident young interloper to bugger off. What the hell would she know? But she realised this was all new territory. The rules had changed. Maybe Scott had to use an intermediary now to express himself. She just hoped it wasn’t the other way around, that the intermediary wasn’t putting words into Scott’s mouth. ‘Does he think I’m hassling him?’ she said at last.
Deanna shrugged again. ‘He feels pressured. By everyone.’
Pam had gone to talk to Hugh after that. ‘It’s a possibility,’ he’d said. ‘He was a P-plater with a high level of blood alcohol. That alone will ensure he doesn’t get minimum. But I’ve recommended that he plead guilty when the time comes. Show remorse. He clearly is remorseful. There could be other factors. We’ll have to look at the witness statements.’
Until then she’d avoided thinking about sentencing. After all, Scott hadn’t even been charged yet.
Hugh tilted his head as if to say expect the unexpected. ‘Once he is charged it could all happen quite quickly,’ he told her. ‘He could be put into remand. Although chances are he’ll be bailed until the sentencing. If he pleads guilty.’
‘What if he doesn’t?’
‘Well, Scott has indicated he doesn’t want to do that—plead not guilty. And there would have to be extenuating circumstances really to override the other factors. And I haven’t seen anything in the witness statements that give me hope. But, if he did, same deal. I can’t see him getting anything non-custodial.’
‘So he’ll go to prison. Sooner or later. One way or another.’ She barely phrased it as a question.
‘Undoubtedly,’ had been his response.
Questions about the future were on Pam’s mind this morning as she wrote out her shopping list at the table. Today or tomorrow or in another couple of months there would be a knock on the door and a cop would be standing there telling Scott that he was being charged with whatever offences they had decided to charge him with. There were a few to choose from apparently. Culpable driving causing death would most certainly be one of them. Driving under the influence of alcohol would be another. She woke often at night, even sometimes on the nights that she dosed up on sleeping pills (perhaps not heavily enough), thinking about this eventuality, and beyond. His future. Their future. Her mind circled obsessively around and around the idea of how her son would fare in gaol, of where his life might go after that. It was exhausting, all that speculation. Fear of the unknown Mick called it, as if she was going to feel better after Scott had been paraded in front of the judge and sentenced to ten years in an institution on the other side of the state. Feel better knowing he was at the mercy of burly gang members, psychopathic murderers, sadistic prison guards.
‘Hey, Mum.’
Pam swivelled to see Scott in the doorway behind her. ‘Oh, I thought you’d gone to bed.’
‘Nup. I’m up.’ He traipsed past her and she noticed that now his cast was gone his jeans seemed to be inordinately baggy, almost falling off him.
‘Have you had breakfast?’
&
nbsp; He sat down, put his elbows on the tabletop and rested his head on one hand. He appeared as weary as she felt. ‘I’m okay,’ he muttered. ‘I ate something before.’
‘Before? Where were you?’ She made it sound as casual as she could, not sure if she’d get a reply.
‘At Deanna’s. Her mum made me some toast.’
‘Oh, okay. Well, that’s good.’
He looked up and gave her a half smile. ‘Good I wasn’t sleeping under a bridge.’
‘Don’t know of any decent bridges around here.’ Without thinking she stretched her hand across the table and he glanced up at her for a second before covering it with his own. The warmth of it made her want to cry.
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ he said.
‘What? What for?’
‘All of this.’ He looked up at the ceiling for a moment. ‘Jeez, what aren’t I sorry for?’
‘Sweetheart.’ She turned her hand upward and squeezed his, said the line, or a variation of the line, she’d been trotting out now for weeks. The line of last resort, she’d come to think of it as. The line that plugged the yawning gap of having nothing better, more useful, to say. ‘You know we love you.’
‘Yeah.’
The room was quiet except for the ticking of the wall clock behind them. Somewhere, not far away, a dog barked. It was surprising how tranquil it could be up here on the Hill at times. Although she wasn’t sure this felt like tranquillity. It was more desolate than that.
‘So, things getting serious with Deanna?’
‘Hah! Maybe. I don’t know. I can’t tell anything about anything anymore.’
‘Her parents are all right …’
‘With me? It’s just her mum. She’s fine.’
Pam had resisted asking a lot about Deanna as part of the not hassling deal and knew little about her, mostly just what she’d observed herself. Under normal circumstances she would have had a roll of questions about who her mother was, what she did, where she lived. These days she mostly waited to be told. ‘Do you want her to stay here? I mean, she can anytime, you know.’
Life Before Page 21
