Life Before

by Carmel Reilly

  ‘Mike?’ he said. He looked up at Lori, a plaintive expression on his face, as though the sight of her brother was something more painful than he could have imagined.

  ‘His name’s Scott, honey.’

  For a moment he continued to stare at her, a strange, serious look on his face, his mouth turned downward. The night before, even this morning, had taken its toll. He hadn’t been angry, he said he hadn’t felt betrayed, yet she could tell he was deeply shocked. Shocked at this hitherto hidden part of her life, shocked at bewilderment that would not soon recede, she knew that. It was the nature of shock, a pressure pad between experience and understanding, coming to terms. She would have to be patient and allow him to adjust. And with herself as well. Adjustment would be their key term for the foreseeable future.

  As Rebecca updated her, she glanced cautiously back at Jason. He had sat down in the chair next to Scott and was regarding him intently. He looked up again when Rebecca left the room but didn’t speak. She stepped closer to the bed, looking from her husband to her brother and back, wondering at Jason’s expression.

  ‘I know him,’ said Jason.

  ‘What? No, you can’t. How?’

  ‘He’s Mike. He was working with me.’

  ‘No. Scott said he worked for someone else. Someone called …’ She looked heavenward for inspiration. ‘Lincolns. Or something like that.’

  Jason nodded. ‘Lambeth Lincoln.’

  ‘Yes. That’s it.’

  ‘They’re a labour hire firm. We get a lot of our people through them.’

  ‘Oh.’ She stared at Scott. ‘You’re sure?’

  Jason made a small laughing sound, his mouth twisted up at one corner. ‘Yeah. Totally sure.’

  ‘I can’t believe it. God, as if this wasn’t all bizarre enough.’

  Jason raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Do you think he knew who you were?’ Lori asked.

  ‘He must have. Why else the false name?’

  ‘What name?’

  ‘Mike Green.’

  ‘That’s his middle name. He’s Scott Michael Green.’

  ‘You can ask me.’ Scott’s voice rose up between them.

  Lori started. She put a hand on his arm. ‘You’re awake.’

  Scott’s eyes slid from Lori to Jason. ‘I have a state. I am in a state of …’

  ‘Mate,’ said Jason, his voice suffused with emotion. ‘What the hell is going on? You’re not making sense.’

  ‘Jase, he has a head injury.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Scott. ‘I know what’s … on. Pretty much.’

  ‘Yeah, but we have to take things slowly,’ said Lori. ‘Not let you get overloaded.’

  ‘I was fucking worried about you,’ said Jason. He looked across to Lori but pointed to the bed. ‘Mike. Scott. This guy. He was the one I told you disappeared. My right-hand man.’

  Lori and Jason exchanged glances, thoughts transmitted wordlessly.

  ‘You need to talk to the police, Jase,’ said Lori. ‘You might be able to help them.’

  ‘Of course. Whatever I can do, I’ll do.’

  Scott smiled woozily at Jason. ‘It’s good to see you.’

  ‘You too, bro. Bro-in-law.’ He laughed abruptly. ‘Wow. This is unexpected.’

  Scott kept smiling, a lopsided grin that in any other circumstances would make him appear like a drunkard or an imbecile. Lori hadn’t quite got used to his tentative animation after days of watching him lying corpse-like on his back.

  ‘What happened? Do you remember anything?’ Jason asked. Lori had told him in the car that her brother had no recollection of the accident, but it seemed he’d forgotten that now, in the heat of the moment.

  Scott closed his eyes. Seconds ticked by and he didn’t respond.

  ‘This is what happens,’ she said. ‘He just kind of tunes out. Sleeps. I’m not sure. The nurses said he gets super tired.’

  Jason was nodding, but he seemed to have tuned out too. Lori saw that his face was pale and his eyes a little vacant. She thought that it was the way she had probably looked for the last few days too. He hadn’t noticed because he didn’t know what he should be looking for. She noticed because she knew exactly. ‘I think I need to go,’ he said.

  ‘You want to get coffee or something to eat?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, and she felt something shift between them.

  ‘It’s too much, all this, isn’t it?’

  He was looking out the window. ‘I just don’t know what to make of any of this. I mean there’s you, and there’s him. It’s fucking bizarre. You sure there’s nothing else to know? No extra children or anything I haven’t been told about?’ There was a sharpness in Jason’s voice. It made her stomach clench, left her speechless.

  ‘Nothing, just the details, like I said.’ She held her arms outward, as though giving a blessing. ‘What the hell, Jason? Don’t treat me like I orchestrated this. It’s as much a shock to me as to you.’

  He got up, pushing his chair back carelessly, looking at the floor rather than at her. ‘I’m going to go out for a walk.’

  ‘Go home if you want to,’ she said to his back. ‘I can make my own way.’ She spoke gently so her words didn’t sound angry, punitive.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, stopping and turning. His face was soft again and he looked as though he was going to cry, and her instinct was to go to him, but she remained in her chair. ‘I’m not going home,’ he added. ‘I just need a little time.’

  After he closed the door she sat leaning forward, her arms resting at the edge of the bed, for what felt like an eternity.

  ‘What were you up to, Scotty?’ she said. ‘Playing at being someone else? Or just …’

  When he didn’t reply she got up and walked to the window, looked out without seeing and turned around, surveying the room. ‘I’ll be back soon too,’ she announced with no idea if he’d heard her or not.

  In the café downstairs she texted Jason to tell him where she was in case he returned and didn’t find her. She rang Daniel Levandi and, when he didn’t answer, she left him a message to call her. After fifteen minutes and a horrible milky, weak coffee, she returned upstairs to find Jason sitting with Scott. He turned his head towards her and smiled as she came in.

  ‘Has he said anything else?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing that makes a lot of sense.’

  She sat down in the opposite chair. ‘The doctors said it could take weeks or months for him to stabilise. He could have deficits. They don’t know how it will be.’

  ‘Head injuries are a bastard. I had a friend at school who was in a car accident. It took him a long time to come good.’

  She nodded, gave him a long look. ‘How are you?’

  Jason smiled wanly at her across the bed. ‘I’m all right. I’m sorry if I sounded shitty. God, my part in all of this is minor. I don’t have any right to be angry when you two have gone through so much.’

  ‘He has. He has gone through so much crap.’ She looked at him, lying still again, peaceful. ‘And I treated him so badly. For so long. There in my own bundle of pain, all I could do was blame him for everything.’

  Scott’s eyes opened and he looked to Jason. ‘Did you get them?’ he asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Fricker and Walt … Cash.’

  ‘Did they do this?’ Jason’s voice was urgent.

  ‘What’s he talking about?’ interjected Lori.

  ‘The guys I told you about at work,’ Jason replied, then addressing Scott he said, ‘I need you to tell me what you saw and heard. What happened to you.’

  ‘Photos,’ he said. ‘On phone. And other …’

  ‘Where’s his phone?’ Jason’s voice was sharp.

  ‘I don’t know. The police?’

  She got up and walked outside Scott’s room looking for one of the nurses, saw Rebecca exiting another room and beckoned to her. Rebecca confirmed the police would have taken all Scott’s effects, although she couldn’t say exactly wha
t they might have been. Lori made her way back to Scott’s room and mimed ‘phone call’ through the glass to Jason before heading back out, through the open area by the nurses’ station, down the short corridor to the exit door and out into the waiting room beyond. As if on cue, when she took her phone out of her pocket it rang. Daniel Levandi’s number, which she recognised now, flashed up in front of her.

  ‘I think I know who knocked Scott down,’ she said.

  ‘You do? Who?’ He sounded neither surprised nor sceptical, as if he’d been expecting some kind of case breakthrough from her all along.

  ‘Scott had been working on my husband’s worksite. They were having problems with pilfering. Some kind of a racket.’

  There was a second of silence. ‘Ah. That’s, um, a strange coincidence he ended up there.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. Jason knew him as Mike. He used his middle name. I imagine to obscure any possible connection to me. It might have been a coincidence, or he might have been … Well, I guess we’ll have to wait and see what he says when he’s better.’

  ‘Who could blame him for changing his name though, eh? You changed yours, didn’t you? Everyone wants a break from the past, don’t they?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said after brief consideration. ‘I didn’t think that … But, I guess I did.’

  ‘So you think it was these blokes from his workplace?’

  ‘Do you have his phone?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Apparently he took photos.’

  ‘Hm, hold on. I don’t think we do, but I’ll double-check that.’ She heard him rustling through papers again, had a vision, not for the first time, of his desk piled high with files and folders. Somehow she couldn’t imagine that he was tidy. ‘No, there’s no phone in the inventory. Just clothes, wallet, keys, bike helmet, backpack with a thermos. That’s it.’

  ‘Shit. He said he’d taken photos of the guys doing something incriminating, I guess. They must have realised and taken his phone.’

  ‘Could be what this has all been about. Or the phone might have skittered into a drain when he got knocked down. Could have been left in a work locker.’

  ‘How will we ever know?’

  ‘I’m thinking your husband knows exactly who they are, these blokes. We might be able to put something together. The footage we have from CCTV. The vehicle. There’s a chance. We also have Scott’s computer. He might have been sensible and downloaded the photos. I’ll try to get a hurry up on that. And finding his number. Might find the phone too if we get a fix on it. I feel pretty confident that if this is the case, we’ll be able to get these guys, one way or another. Could be good news for your husband too.’

  ‘God, I hope so.’

  The waiting room was empty. She walked over to the door and buzzed to get back in but no one responded. It took a few minutes for an older woman she’d never seen before with a harried look on her face to front the small booth by the door. ‘Our staff are all busy right now,’ she said, as if being summonsed by the buzzer had been a deep imposition. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a little.’

  ‘I was just in there a few minutes ago,’ Lori said a little testily. ‘I only came out to use the phone. My husband is inside with my brother. He’s a patient.’

  The woman’s face softened. ‘I’m very sorry but I still can’t let you back in until we have enough staff free. There’s a ratio. One of the patients is being prepared for emergency surgery.’

  Lori returned to the waiting area and sat down. This place, the ICU and its waiting area, was nothing like the hospital at Belandra. It was nothing like the ICU at the Royal Melbourne either, where her father was taken by air ambulance after the accident and where he lay for two days, without ever regaining consciousness. This ICU was new and spacious, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows rimmed and crisscrossed with thick white steel tubing. Did it make any difference to the whole experience of attending the critically ill, she wondered, if the furniture was modern, the walls and floor new and unblemished, if there was a view? When she’d been in those places had she been looking? Had she cared? Not at the time. But when she thought back she saw that her memories were made up of those images. Drab, dark hallways. Grey linoleum. Overstuffed noticeboards. Ugly plastic chairs. Low ceilings clad with perforated tiles. When she thought of her time here later she might remember the curved orange and aqua couches and the views across the rooftops of the neighbouring buildings, the stretch of sky above. A better outcome. She could only hope.

  The quiet of the waiting room was broken by sudden traffic. Simultaneously, an elderly woman and her daughter emerged to her left with a ding from the lift, while from the right the door from the ICU swung open. As the two women stepped towards reception, Jason dodged around them to her. For a moment she thought only that he’d come to get her and didn’t register his expression, the urgency of his step. When she looked up she saw his face was pinched and she knew in that instant that there was something wrong.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she asked. ‘Why did the ward shut down?’

  ‘Mike had a fit. A convulsion? I don’t know what it was. Fucking frightening. Good that nurse was in there. She took over. Some more of them rushed in. Pushed me out of the room, closed the curtains. I waited for you—’

  ‘I couldn’t get back in. They wouldn’t let me.’

  ‘Then the nurse came out and said he had to be taken down to theatre and I should leave.’

  ‘My bag’s still in there,’ said Lori.

  Jason sat down beside her and took her hand and held it tenderly.

  ‘I never thought it would be him they were taking to surgery,’ she said. ‘He was doing so well.’

  ‘He was talking to me when it happened.’

  ‘What was he saying?’

  ‘I asked him if he was working with me to get to you. He said it was a coincidence initially—he’d been jobbing on building sites for a long time—but when he started with our company he recognised my name. He’d had a private detective track you down a few years back, knew we got married.’

  ‘Huh, makes sense.’

  ‘When I didn’t cotton on to who he was, he realised that you hadn’t told me about him. He said he’d been calling himself Mike since he got out of prison. No big cover-up, just wanted to go under the radar, I guess.’

  ‘You got a lot out of him,’ said Lori.

  ‘He wasn’t saying heaps, really. Mostly I pieced it together.’ He squeezed her fingers gently. ‘We’ve known each other a while now, me and Mike. You know, we really got along. He’s a good guy.’

  They sat, mostly silent, holding hands and staring out at the view. What was it about rooftops that was so restful, she wondered. The sight of buildings against the sky. When the unit reopened they got up, following the woman and her daughter along the short corridor to the central open area. Lori walked on to Scott’s room and found her bag in the corner near the door where she had left it. The room was empty, and there was no sign of Rebecca anywhere on the ward. The one nurse they did see at the central desk had no firm details about Scott and could only tell them that she believed the operation was most probably to clear a blood clot and that there was nothing to do but wait. It would be hours until he was back out again.

  Jason called Daniel from the hospital foyer, told him all he knew, gave him Scott’s phone number. Lori heard him explain his work situation to Daniel, saw him nodding his head as he listened to what Daniel had to say. When he’d finished, he’d looked at Lori and let out a long breath. ‘I feel really bad. Mike was helping me out. If it was those guys, well, I reckon I put him in harm’s way.’

  ‘He would have wanted to do the right thing. It wasn’t your fault,’ she responded. ‘You didn’t start this.’

  They drove home in silence, Jason at the wheel this time, too tired to talk about what they knew about Scott (or Mike), to swap memories and knowledge, to try to create some kind of objective vision. That was a conversation that would require time and energy; that w
ould come out in dribs and drabs over weeks and months. When they got back, he volunteered to pick up the kids while Lori lay down on the bed and rested for an hour or so. But she couldn’t sleep. Only stare up at the ceiling, repeating the same mantra over and over: please god, please god, please god.

  At dinnertime, as she was reheating last night’s tomato sauce and boiling water for pasta, Malcolm called and said that Scott was returning to ICU. He had survived the operation but they wouldn’t know the outcome for hours, days or possibly even weeks. The effects could play out in many ways. Time without sufficient oxygen could have been detrimental. Haematomas could recur.

  ‘What does it mean for us?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s like returning to square one,’ he said. ‘He might be fine. Or he might not be. Or any degree in between. I can’t say anything else right now. Sorry.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m grateful you’re being honest. That’s all I want. I can work with that.’

  She thought about something her mother told her once, not long after Troy was killed. It was about life being a matter of chance and luck. She wasn’t sure why Pam had said that. It seemed insensitive, callous, at the time. Her mother knew how she felt about Troy. She was little more than a child who wanted to see sense in everything, some point in the pain she was going through. She didn’t want to have to picture the object of her affection as a soldier in some army-of-life board game, being swept away by the indifferent hand of fate as though he and his life had no real meaning. It wasn’t until much, much later, after everything else that happened in those few months and the time that ensued, that she saw the truth in Pam’s statement. Every act having an effect, like the movement of the wings of a butterfly in the Amazon. Nothing truly controllable. Action, reaction, chance, luck. The only thing that could be governed to any degree were your own reactions. Others reactions could go any which way. She took a lesson from that, made a choice. If you could stop remembering, you could stop feeling. If you could stop feeling you could live.