Life Before

by Carmel Reilly

  Simon had brought his bag in from the car and dumped it in his bedroom (old bedroom, former bedroom, she corrected herself). Now, having perambulated the property, he had materialised in the kitchen.

  ‘We should have some lunch, I suppose. You hungry?’ she said.

  ‘Always.’

  She opened the fridge door and looked inside. ‘Do you know where Mick is? Did I hear you talking to him before?’

  ‘He was in the garage. Looking in boxes. Didn’t really talk. Just said hi. You know Dad, he was pretty engrossed in whatever it was he was doing.’

  ‘What?’ said Pam, turning her head to look at Simon. ‘What boxes?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask. He didn’t say.’

  ‘Can you get the bread out and some chutney from the cupboard up there? Cheese and tomato be okay?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’ll do something a bit more interesting for dinner, promise. Dad’s going to put on the barbecue and I thought I’d make a potato salad and coleslaw and beans and I don’t know.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ said Simon.

  ‘You don’t care, do you? As long as it’s food.’

  ‘Ah well, I’m thinking about becoming a vegetarian.’

  Pam delivered butter, cheese and tomatoes to the bread board on the table. ‘Just hold off till tomorrow then, all right? We have a carnivore’s delight in the fridge right now.’ Simon face contorted and Pam looked at him in exaggerated surprise. ‘Gosh, you’re not serious, are you?’

  He opened his mouth to speak when he glanced beyond her to the door, smiled. ‘Hiya,’ he said.

  Loren appeared, chalky faced and puffy-eyed from sleep. ‘Not serious about what?’ she asked, reaching up to the cupboard for a glass and filling it with water.

  ‘Simon says he’s going to become a vegetarian,’ said Pam.

  ‘Oh … okay.’ She turned and rested her lower back against the sink, put the glass of water to her forehead. ‘It’s warm already.’

  ‘Yeah. Let’s hope it lasts. Want some lunch? Or going for breakfast first?’

  Loren leaned forward and eyed what had been put on the table. ‘Don’t know just yet.’

  ‘Oh well.’ Pam threw her hands up in the air, then looked to Simon. ‘At least that is vegetarian. Shouldn’t be any quibbles from anyone. Just grab some plates and cutlery.’

  Pam headed out the door to the garage, just a few metres off to the left of the back of the house, at the end of what was once a side path but had now been covered over for a carport. The garage was an old structure from the twenties or thirties, built at the same time or a little later than the house. Weatherboard, white with a red tin roof, but unlined and raw on the inside. It was one of the things that had attracted Pam to the property when they’d first inspected it more than twenty years ago. It reminded her of the garage at her parents’ place, where she’d spent much time as a child in the company of her father’s Pontiac, then Dodge. Sitting behind the wheel pretending to drive. (She’d left home by the time he started buying Fords.) This garage, however, was too small and too inconvenient a space to house a car, unless you owned a Model T or a Mini Minor, and was much more useful as a storage shed. Mick had, for a while, been keen on the idea of it being a toolshed, but he wasn’t really very handy and the tools that eventually made their way inside were mostly of the gardening variety, a domain that largely belonged to her, apart from the lawnmower. Otherwise there was just boxes of stuff that went back twenty years and were rarely if ever looked at. Sometimes Pam thought she should just take it all to the tip, but that was something they needed to do together. Sort and sift. Discern and discard. She couldn’t make a unilateral decision. Mick would go off his nut.

  ‘Mick,’ she said, peering into the dim interior. The double doors faced south and Mick had only opened one half, but she could hear him inside, the sound of grit scraping on the concrete floor and intermittent guttural grunts. She stepped in and saw that he was pulling a hefty box across the floor. ‘Why didn’t you turn the light on?’

  ‘It’s daytime.’ A reply that at face value sounded logical.

  ‘Need a hand?’ she asked.

  ‘Nah.’ He stopped and slowly stood up.

  ‘What’s that?

  ‘Dad’s tools.’

  ‘Oh.’ She stood with her hands on her hips and waited for him to expand.

  ‘Thought Scott might like them. He’s been doing some carpentry up at Jim’s. Could come in handy.’ He got up and hauled open the other half of the door so there was more light, then pulled back the top of the box where the flaps had been folded in on themselves.

  ‘That looks like something from before the war,’ said Pam, eyebrows arched.

  ‘Definitely pre-electric,’ said Mick holding up a hand drill. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’

  Mick’s dad had died not long after Mick and Pam had married. Pam barely knew him. He’d always seemed nice enough, a quiet, unassuming soul. But she’d really only met him a handful of times before he’d suffered a catastrophic heart attack while she was pregnant with Simon. When Mick’s mother moved up to Coffs Harbour a few years ago to live with his sister, she’d cleared out the house and Mick had taken his father’s tools. Pam had wondered at the time why of all the keepsakes he could have chosen it had been those. His father had never really used them to her knowledge, he hadn’t been a builder but a labourer, an odd-jobber most of his life. Mick told her that his dad had harboured hopes of being apprenticed. But the war broke out and he went off to New Guinea where he endured three and a half years of pursuing the Japanese over its densely forested slopes and suffered a bout of dengue fever, neither of which he ever properly recovered from. When he returned, his dream of becoming a chippie never eventuated and the tools he’d bought prewar were relegated to the shed (or various sheds, given the family’s tendency to move). They became a symbol of his life’s disappointments. The perfect keepsake given that his life seemed to be made up of disappointments.

  ‘I don’t know if Scott will use them,’ Pam said dubiously, trying to imagine him putting in the time and effort to master these mechanical devices, considering if he would see the same beauty in them as his father did.

  ‘Well, I’m not going to force them on him. He can play around with them if he wants to.’

  ‘He probably won’t have that much time now.’

  ‘He can bring them back anytime.’

  What was it that fathers wanted to give their sons? What had Mick’s father given him? Nothing that Pam could tell. Years of childhood poverty and a sense of rootlessness. What did Mick want to give Scott? A sense of belonging, a lineage, a chance to rewrite the past in some small way? The week before Scott had been charged and bailed. A committal hearing had been scheduled for March. They, he, had four months, maybe more, depending on the vagaries of proceedings: the plea, the police, the judge. Four months until Scott’s future would be cemented. After that he would have a criminal record, he would be in prison, and after that he would have been in prison. An ex-con.

  Pam put her hand on Mick’s forearm. ‘It’s nice,’ she said. ‘It’s a nice thought.’ She knew it was hard for him, even if he didn’t say much. Hard for him, just as it was for her, to see a way forward, work out what he should do, needed to do.

  Mick pushed the box out into the sunlight and they looked again at what was inside. Braces, chisels, drills and drill bits, a plane, a file, a hammer, a tack hammer. ‘You know, it makes me sad looking at these.’

  Pam was surprised at this pronouncement. Sad wasn’t a word Mick used; he wasn’t given to nostalgia, overt emotion, talking feelings. ‘Why did you take them from your mum then? Why keep them?’ she asked.

  He stared down at the box as though the contents would provide an answer. ‘He wanted me to have a better life than he did. These tools. They remind me of him, his life. Highs and lows. He never had a great deal. And there was a lot that he never got to do. Things that circumstances didn’t allow. We—us, our generation—grew up
in better times, we had more chances at life. Which as you well know I have wasted for the most part. He’d have been disappointed in me if he’d lived long enough. That I hadn’t grabbed the opportunities he didn’t get. Just let things happen to me.’

  Pam who had been shaking her head as Mick was speaking, let out a long sigh. ‘I think that was your mother. She was the disappointed one. I reckon your Dad would have liked you to be happy.’

  Mick looked up at her, stretched his mouth flat. ‘You know, you might be onto something. Mum only got excited when I married you because she thought I’d married into money.’

  Pam snorted. She and Mick’s mother had never really hit it off. She’d speculated over the years that Mick’s mother had probably never really hit it off with anyone. She felt sorry for his sister, saddled with her in her dotage, although Mick always maintained they had a good enough relationship. She wasn’t sure what he really knew about that. His sister never looked particularly happy to her. Perhaps though that was just projection on her part. ‘So what do you mean you just let things happen?’ she said finally.

  ‘Well, that’s me, isn’t it? Never been known for my driving ambition.’

  ‘Ambition? There are other things in life besides getting ahead. We do well enough. And now you have an accountant for a son. That’s something, isn’t it?’

  He gave her a sharp look and the unspoken words filled the air between them. They had more than one child. ‘I don’t know. I’ve always cursed my old man, but I’m not any better.’

  Pam put her hands on his shoulders. ‘We’re both in this child-rearing enterprise together you realise, don’t you?’

  He put a hand up to one of hers and gripped it tight. ‘I worry about him. About the future.’

  Pam turned her hand over and squeezed his back. ‘Listen, lunch is on the table. Maybe it’s time to come in and eat. You can sort this lot later. Were you going to give them to him tonight?’ ‘Yeah. I thought tonight’d be a good time. Don’t know why. It’s not as if we’re not going to see him again. Guess it was on my mind.’ He glanced into the garage. ‘The shed needs a good clear-out.’

  Pam laughed. ‘Go for it. Just don’t touch anything of mine.’

  After lunch, Mick went back to the shed and Pam cleaned up and went to yoga. It had been weeks now since the confrontation with Reggie, but each time she braced herself for a further appearance. It wasn’t just at yoga that she became apprehensive, although that was the worst, which was ridiculous really when she was surrounded by such support there and it was fairly unlikely that Reggie would ever venture back. She was wary wherever she went into Northam, despite having only caught sight of Maxine once in all this time—in the chemist a month or so ago, and she had quickly backed out before she’d been seen. Her fear, her caution, had made everyday life more circumscribed than before. It wasn’t as though she was under house arrest, but she’d found herself hyperconscious of herself in public places and had developed a kind of disassociation that meant she was continually looking at herself from the outside as she moved about, running a constant imaginary surveillance. Between home and work there was shopping to be done, petrol to be put in the car, bills to be paid, visits to be made to doctor and dentist, accountant and mechanic. Now none of those were made automatically or taken for granted. Every entry or exit from car or building came with the fear of running into Ray or Maxine or Reggie, or perhaps even Kyle (she wasn’t really sure about him, about where he stood) or some other crony, who may or may not exist.

  After yoga Pam stayed for a few minutes talking to Aurora and Cathy. She was planning to leave swiftly so she could get home to make the salads. It was already past four. But Aurora, with an excited little hip-height beckoning hand wave at the end of the class, had signalled she wanted to talk.

  ‘What are you two up to now?’ she asked.

  ‘Not a lot,’ said Cathy. ‘Got some ideas?’

  Aurora laughed and looked at Pam. ‘And you?’

  ‘I’ve got to get home. The kids are all around for a barbecue. Dad’s coming too.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Cathy. ‘You’ll all be together.’

  ‘I’m a little nervous to tell the truth. But, you know.’ She looked to Aurora. ‘But did you want to do something? Maybe we could next weekend. Nothing planned. We could have dinner at my place—all of us.’

  ‘I wasn’t angling for a dinner invitation. Although that would be very nice. I just wanted a moment of your time now to tell you both something.’

  Cathy’s face went rigid. ‘You’re leaving!’

  Aurora put her hand up. ‘No, nothing like that.’

  ‘What then?’ said Pam.

  ‘It’s nothing bad. Relax.’

  Cathy and Pam, getting the feeling they were being teased, stood looking at her while a small smile twitched at Aurora’s lips.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.

  There was half a second of silence before Cathy lunged forward, arms outstretched. ‘Oh my god! Oh my god!’

  Pam smiled at Aurora who was looking at her over Cathy’s shoulder, pleased for Aurora, happy that Cathy had taken it well too. ‘That’s wonderful, sweetheart. Amazing. I have to say though that I’m a bit astounded. I didn’t know a baby was on the agenda.’

  ‘I didn’t either,’ said Aurora. ‘I didn’t think I could have kids. We’d tried for ages and then figured it was never going to happen.’

  ‘It’s the mountain air,’ said Cathy, releasing Aurora from her grip.

  ‘You’d expect the population of Northam would be larger if that was the case,’ said Pam, taking her turn for a hug.

  ‘I don’t know what it is but it’s a miracle.’

  ‘I’m really, really happy for you,’ said Pam. ‘But does this mean you’re going to give up teaching?’

  ‘No way,’ said Aurora. ‘I plan to keep going for a as long as I can and come back as quickly as I can after.’

  ‘And you will,’ said Cathy. ‘Super woman. Super bendy woman.’

  ‘Noel is very supportive of my career. He’s going to take time off, do the weekend shift.’

  Pam smiled, nodded. That what’s he says now, she thought, picturing Noel, lover of downtime and the great outdoors, with his hiking gear, his cross-country skis. She thought of Mick when she was pregnant with Simon. ‘I don’t have to come to the birth, do I?’ he’d said to her. While she’d been horrified, her mother had told her it was a good thing. ‘Men don’t want to see that.’ Pam didn’t know what that meant until she’d gone through it, and when she had she thought she hadn’t wanted to see it either, but there she was. She insisted Mick come to Scott and Lauren’s births, even suspected he had a few puffs on the gas when no one was looking. But then he got to see the moment of birth (the thing that she missed out on, really, her head being at the wrong end of her body), the moment when a new life came into the world, when you got to see what you’d produced. That was something. It really was.

  When she got home Pam felt a strange subdued sense of joy. Perhaps it was Aurora’s news, but it was almost as though some miniscule weight had lifted. It reminded her of some of the ideas Aurora had talked about in her yoga sessions. What was it called again. Anicca? Impermanence. Nothing stays forever, good swept away by bad, bad swept away by good. Life swept away by death, death by life. She went into the living room, surveyed Mick’s record collection and put on the Beatles, Sergeant Pepper’s. Good music to make salads to. While she’d been out, Simon had joined his father in the shed and was doing his bidding, sorting the wanted and the unwanted into piles. Pam hoped they wouldn’t be distracted mid-task and leave her with an untidy assortment of boxes. At least now, even if they were useless and took up space, they were neatly stacked. Almost out of sight, almost out of mind.

  Loren had retreated to her room again and Pam had knocked gingerly on her door and asked if she’d be joining them for dinner, to which Loren had replied with a terse ‘yes’. Pam wanted to ask her to come out and help, but she feared the next rep
ly would be a terse ‘no’. How had it come to this, she wondered, this trepidation. What was it about? They should all have gone to counselling. All they had done since the accident was to look perpetually forward. She’d seen the pain inflicted on Loren by the interviews with the police and she didn’t want to make her daughter suffer any more. Silence had seemed to be the easiest option, a way to avoid more agony.

  The sky, hazy now in the late afternoon, was beginning to lose its colour when the phone rang. Pam put down her knife, wiped her hands and walked into the hall, approaching the phone as she always did now, with a sensation of queasiness in her stomach. He (she still hadn’t given the caller a name, even though she knew what his name was) didn’t usually call on a Saturday, but there was no reason to think he wouldn’t. When she answered the phone she was relieved momentarily to hear Scott’s voice on the end of the line, then dismayed because he wouldn’t have made the call unless there was a problem.

  ‘Something’s wrong with Grandad’s car,’ Scott blurted. He sounded like he’d been running. ‘It might take a while to get it fixed.’

  ‘Can’t you borrow Peter’s? Or Janet’s?’

  ‘Yeah, I went over, but they seem to have gone out. Anyway, I reckon I can get on top this. But it might take an extra hour or so.’

  ‘Oh, okay. We’ll wait for you. It’s still early. Ish.’

  ‘You sure? You can start and we can just eat something when we get there.’

  ‘No! Look, if it doesn’t seem likely, Simon can go out and pick you up in half an hour or so.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll let you know in a while.’

  Pam went out to the shed and looked in at Simon and Mick.

  ‘Do you want me to light the barbie?’ asked Mick.

  ‘No hurry yet. Dad and Scott are going to be late. There’s something wrong with the car.’ She ran through the phone call she’d just had because she knew Mick would say all the same things she’d just said and she’d have to repeat the whole thing for his benefit.