‘Should have told them to bring the trailer down,’ said Mick, casting an eye towards the pile of junk, both boxed and unboxed, he’d amassed in the middle of the garage floor.
’A trip to the tip.’
‘Yeah. Haven’t made one of those for quite some time.’
‘Not since the last fridge,’ said Pam.
Simon dragged a box from the shelf and prised open the flaps. ‘God, what’s this?’ he said.
Pam stepped over to where he stood and looked inside. ‘Baby things,’ she said in a soft voice. She leaned in and pulled open a plastic bag that sat at the top, picking a small knitted jacket from inside. ‘Look at that!’
‘Mine?’ said Simon.
‘I think you all wore this.’
‘Mine really though? I was the first.’
Pam laughed. ‘I suppose so.’
She wanted to say then that Aurora was pregnant, but for some reason she couldn’t. There was an obvious connection (baby clothes, pregnancy), but one that was also a segue, a diversion into someone else’s life that didn’t sit with the moment. Instead she said, ‘You’re not proposing throwing those out, are you? Because they are non-negotiable.’
‘Wouldn’t have dared,’ said Mick, poker-faced.
Back inside, Pam put the salads on the table. The beef sat on a plate on the bench, beside it the chicken marinated in soy and honey and ginger. The sun was rapidly disappearing behind the hills and there was slight chill to the air already. Too cool now, she supposed, to eat outside. She checked the fridge for beer and went into the living room to retrieve the gin from the drinks cabinet. The Beatles had finished and she didn’t feel like side B. She flicked through the shelf of records below the turntable and found an Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong album. In a moment the strains of Ella’s sultry voice, the tinkle of piano rose up from the speakers and accompanied Pam as she stepped into the dining room. From the top drawer of the walnut sideboard she took out one of her mother’s beautiful lace-edged tablecloths, one of the many things she had claimed from her father after her mother’s death, and shook it out, watching it levitate then settle on the table. From another drawer she lifted out the good silver, setting five places and wondering as she did why she was bothering with her best tableware when it was only a barbecue. But somehow it felt right. The food might be simple, but the occasion not so much. It struck her briefly that this was the first time they’d had dinner in this room since the night of the accident, and her chest tightened around the thought. She gazed down the table and saw herself in residence, presiding over the events, enabling the unfolding of it all, drink in hand. Laughing. Always bloody laughing. A person could laugh too much, she thought, laugh so much that they didn’t see what was going on around them.
She took paused for a moment, bringing her mind back to the evening and surveyed the table with a different eye. She went to the sideboard and pulled open the drawer where she kept the placemats, pulling out three different boxes and inspecting them. Two were hers—one depicting native flowers that she’d had for years, and the other something vaguely abstract and colourful that she’d bought on sale at David Jones on a trip down to Melbourne two summers ago. The third had been her mother’s—an old set from the 1950s that depicted various British royal castles in subdued sepia tones. Just when she’d felt dubious about Mick’s choice of memorabilia she was confronted with her own, her mother’s ironic sense of connection to royalty. As if Marjorie would have ever passed muster. Less than a mere commoner, a colonial with an errant chain-dragging ancestor. (If you could trace your ancestry back to the 1800s, chances were high.) Still, Pam liked these placemats. They were hardy and delightfully old-fashioned. Just like her mother. She remembered loving them as a child, always opting for the view of Windsor Castle from across the Thames for herself when she set the table for dinner. She wondered if her father would recognise them when he sat down to eat. If they would make him feel nostalgic. Or if he wouldn’t notice them at all. He’d never been much of a noticer.
Outside she became aware of raised voices, something amiss. She didn’t have the music up high, but it was loud enough to distract from outside sounds, render them less distinct. It wasn’t like Mick and Simon to argue. She upstretched her head, like a little prairie animal, alert, sensing. Baffled at first then quickly alarmed. She had little time to work out what was happening, what the shouts (if indeed they were shouts) might represent, when she heard a blast, like an explosion so close that she could feel the vibration of it through the house. An awful screaming followed and another great boom, as though she’d suddenly found herself in a war zone. She knew that sound, the sound of a shotgun. She’d heard it often enough growing up on the farm, rabbiting with her father and Peter, even learning how to use one herself, getting used to the kickback of the gun butt against her shoulder. While it might have been familiar, it was completely out of place. A shotgun was not a weapon that they kept in this house.
She rose to her feet, her body suffused with adrenaline, blood pounding through her head, drowning out music or extraneous noises. She felt oddly light, incapable of rational thought, only simple reaction. She had no idea whether to go forward or backward, or sideways, and instead ran aimlessly (like the chickens she had seen dispatched by her grandfather in her childhood, headless, blood spurting skyward with every heartbeat) past the end of the table and into the kitchen at the exact same time the back door swung violently open. In front of her, Ray Druitt appeared like a terrible apparition, a gun half raised in her direction. She stopped abruptly, facing him, feeling like she knew in that split second all there was to know, that the last four months had come to this. That life had been distilled into this tiny aperture.
‘Where is he?’ Ray said in a voice so measured she couldn’t see the connection between it and the tortured expression on his face.
Pam tried to speak, but her throat was dry, her vocal chords reluctant.
‘Where?’ he repeated, louder this time.
‘He’s not here,’ she rasped. ‘He doesn’t live here now.’
‘Tell me where he is.’ Ray stared at her with dull eyes, not able to register an answer that he didn’t expect.
She shook her head frantically. ‘What have you done? Where’s Mick? Simon? What did you do?’
Behind them in the hall, the telephone began to ring, its urgent trills mingled with the silky-voiced Ella, a tinkling piano and soft jazz trumpet.
‘What did I do? Fuck you. What did you do? You took away everything. Everything.’ Ray’s voice was a barely contained sob in one breath, a statement of steely rationalism in the next. ‘Now I’m evening things up, taking it all away from you. That’s only fair, isn’t it?’
Ray lifted the shotgun higher, moved his arm unsteadily to take aim. Pam could not register what she was seeing. Instead visions of Loren filled her head, morphing snapshots of a tiny tot, taking her first steps across the kitchen floor—the place where Ray was standing now—a ten-year-old, proud as punch, holding a netball trophy high above her head with two hands, like a wild child gladiator. And then, inexplicably, a moment, or perhaps an amalgam of them, of the two of them in town in the days when it was still okay for Loren to be seen with her mother, and the pure joy on her face as she pointed something out as they passed a shop window and then turned to Pam, eyes shining, cheeks wide with excitement. ‘Look at that, Mum! Look!’
Every fibre of Pam’s being fought the urge to call out her daughter’s name, warn her. But not alert him. She took a step backwards and bumped into the wall behind her. There was no more room for her to move. She knew she had run out of space. And time.
April 2016
Melbourne
There were things he never talked about. Artefacts from the past, to borrow a phrase from Daniel Levandi, that he held close and didn’t share. Jason’s first girlfriend was called Marissa. He went out with her for ten years, from the age of sixteen to twenty-six. It had been an intense relationship from all accounts, at least i
n the beginning, but not one that Lori knew a lot about. It had been over for more than three years when they met, and he’d had a few dalliances in its wake. Apart from a brief rundown in the first weeks, he only ever mentioned her again in the context of his own general history, as though she hadn’t been that important at all.
Lori tried not to think about Marissa in the early days of their relationship. Was she the jealous type, she asked herself? She’d never thought of herself that way. Perhaps the opposite, avoiding relationships rather than holding onto them, not worried about control, or at least control over others. But, of course, Jason was different. Everything about him, for her, was different. Almost from the first moment she met him she couldn’t imagine life without him. Yet he’d had a life like this with someone else—a girl he’d known since schooldays, had gone through university with, the early years of working life. Until something happened. What exactly, he’d never properly explained. Sometimes it had driven her crazy, this lack of information. But, most of the time, she wasn’t sure if she’d wanted to know.
To know or not to know. It was a delicate balance of preservation. Whenever she thought about his past, she thought about hers. To question and probe would only be to invite the same response from him. A minefield of reciprocity. It was the price she had paid, she told herself, in a vain attempt to prop herself up, create an equilibrium, excuse herself from never having told him the entire truth. But in the end she was fairly certain he’d never lied to her—by deliberation or by omission—and therein lay the real difference between them.
Jason had promised to come home early. It was a rarity on a weeknight, but she’d called him in the afternoon as she’d left the hospital and told him that she needed to talk to him about something. When she heard the note of concern in his voice, she assured him it was nothing dire like disease or divorce. ‘Just something to think about for the future,’ she’d said lightly. Enough to mildly warn him, but not enough to set off panic.
The kids were still up when he came in. They’d had their dinner already, and after some initial excitement at seeing their father went off to read their books in the living room. Cody was only just starting to decipher words and usually it was Lori who would sit patiently with him and help him along, but tonight he looked up and insisted that Jason took over that job. Jason had only just uncapped a beer and he gave her a small eye roll before heading to the couch, bottle in hand. She turned back to the stove, her stomach tight now with hunger and nerves.
After the reading he returned to the kitchen, grabbing another beer on the way. Drinking during the week was as unusual as him being home early.
‘Everything okay?’ she asked.
‘I’m supposed to be asking you that question, aren’t I?’
She turned off the stovetop and wiped her hands on a hand towel. ‘Let’s get the kids off to bed, shall we? Talk later.’ Her voice sounded odd and stilted in her ears, but he didn’t seem to notice.
Children settled, she served dinner, wondering why she’d decided on having this conversation over food. She took a beer out of the fridge for herself and gulped down half the bottle before she’d even sat down.
‘How was work?’ she said, not quite willing to begin what she had to say.
Jason put his elbow on the table and rested his head in his fingers. ‘Well, if we’re on the subject of me, I’m thinking of quitting.’
‘What?’ Her stomach seemed to do a little flip. ‘Why? I mean … I know you’ve had some hassles but …’
‘Because I don’t know if I can keep going. The harassment. Threats.’
‘Threats? God, Jason. You didn’t tell me there were threats.’
‘Yeah, well. There was no reason to have to drag you through it.’ Suddenly his preoccupied demeanour had a different kind of context.
‘Until now?’
‘Yeah, ’cause now I think it’s bad enough for me to leave.’
‘How bad?’ she asked tentatively.
‘You want the unvarnished truth?’ He made a small sharp sound. ‘I’ve just been offered a truckload of money to look the other way on some pretty dubious shit. If I do that, I’m fucked. They’ll own me, and I might still have to answer for an over-budget project. But if I don’t knuckle under there’s a good chance that their theft will look like my mismanagement. I either resign before I’m sacked, or I do what they want and they’ll make me their bitch and this will happen over and over. For bloody ever.’
‘What? Who is “they”?’
‘A bunch of pretty powerful guys, I believe. I don’t know who they all are. Some of them work on the site. They have connections to gangs, corrupt unions. Apparently.’ He put his hands up in the air. ‘It’s a long story, and I don’t think I know half of it.’
She looked across the table at him for a few seconds trying to take in what he was saying, interest in food lost. ‘I can’t believe those are the only choices—leave or knuckle under. What if you go to the company management? Tell them what’s happened? Or the police?’
‘Part of my job is to get on top of these bastards. And, besides, I just don’t have any real proof.’
‘But this is so bad. Crooked. Totally illegal. You can’t be expected to stand up to them by yourself. It doesn’t seem right. There must be a way to expose them?’
‘There was a guy at work who had my back, and he was going to help me, but he’s pissed off. I’m pretty sure they got to him. Bought him off, or threatened him. Without him I have no proof. It all just looks like incompetence on my part.’
‘That Mike guy?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where did he go?’
Jason shook his head despairingly. ‘I thought about tracking him down, but I don’t know just yet. It’d be hard. Fuck.’
‘This is … it’s just awful.’
‘If I go I’ll lose my completion money. So no paying off the renovations for a while.’
‘I don’t care about the bloody money. I only care that you’re safe.’
He shrugged and took a long swig of beer, emptying the bottle, the bowl of pasta in front of him cold now. ‘It could be worse. I don’t know if I’m cut out for this shit. Managing these sorts of sites. Maybe it’s for the best. I can just quit, go back and finish that degree. Do something else.’
She got up and put her arms around him. Then she sat on the chair next to his and he turned towards her, his face blurred with what looked to her like despair. He had always had such an open face, so much that could be read on it. He might be right, she thought, about not being cut out for that kind of a job. The stress of managing projects, then the stress of dealing with crooks. He wasn’t a hard man. Not hard at all.
She said, ‘You do what you have to do. Whatever that is.’
He nodded, picked up a fork and nudged his pasta.
‘Cold,’ she said, grabbing the bowl and taking it to the microwave.
He retrieved it a minute later and ate quickly, and in silence. She didn’t bother to reheat her own, and after nibbling a few rubbery strands put it aside. When they finished, he looked up to the ceiling for a little while before getting up and clearing the plates away, stacking the dishwasher. She put the kettle on, spooned tea into the pot. He talked about Cody’s reading and she started to think that perhaps he’d forgotten why he’d agreed to come home early and she felt a certain relief. His own news was momentous enough. No wonder Niels had asked her if she was worried. She felt like a fool now, not having read between the lines (even on the lines). This had been going on long before Scott had reappeared—she’d somehow failed to notice Jason’s preoccupation for weeks or possibly months.
She poured the tea and they took their mugs and sat on the couch, and Jason smiled and said, ‘I was going to watch the footy show, but you had something to talk to me about, didn’t you?’
‘Oh, we don’t have to do that,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to make today worse. You should just chill for a while.’
He looked a little surprised, perh
aps remembering her earlier reassurances on the phone. ‘It’s not that bad, is it?’
‘No. I don’t know. It’s …’
‘Spill. I’m a big boy. I can deal with whatever.’ He looked to her and smiled. ‘One thing I know is that you’re not pregnant because you had beer with dinner.’
She sighed. ‘Okay. You remember on the weekend you said Sophie told you about the police coming? And I said they’d got it wrong.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘They didn’t?’
‘Well, it is true that my brother died. My brother Simon. But the police didn’t come about him. I had two brothers. The other one is called Scott and he is alive.’
He looked at her blankly. Seconds passed. ‘Did you know? I …’
‘That he was still alive? Yes, I knew. But when I met you I hadn’t seen him for ten or twelve years. To me, he was dead. As good as.’
She could see Jason trying to process this information. ‘Why wouldn’t you see him?’
‘Oh, why?’ Seconds passed. ‘I suppose because I thought he was responsible for my parents’ and my brother’s deaths. I was angry with him.’
‘He was driving the car?’
She bit her lower lip, felt a small sharp pain. ‘He was driving the car. But not that car.’
‘I’m not following.’
‘I’m not sure I can tell you everything right now.’
‘Okay.’ He blinked, as though he had something in his eye, then put his hand on her forearm. ‘Can we talk about him? Can you tell me something?’
She nodded slowly. ‘Yeah.’
‘Why did the police come to see you?’
‘He’d been in an accident. He’s in hospital.’
‘You’ve seen him?’
She nodded again.
‘Is he all right?’
‘I think he will be. He was unconscious, but he’s coming round. I don’t really know.’
‘Jesus Christ. Why didn’t you tell me?’ He sounded bewildered. ‘I don’t get it. I mean, why not tell me? More than that, lie to me the other night.’
Life Before Page 26
