Walking on Trampolines

by Frances Whiting

  When I finally stopped talking – nerves, I see now, nerves and that same old feeling of wanting to be enough for her – and the silence played out between us, she said quietly, ‘Tallulah.’

  She turned to face me, her eyes on mine.

  ‘I know what Josh and I did was wrong, inexcusable actually and I wish we had told you earlier that we were falling for each other, but it was just so hard, you know, because we so didn’t want to hurt you.’

  What I should have done at that moment was told her.

  Told her how I had never been quite the same since the day by the river, how I’d spent years after it suspended in time, how angry I had been, and how it sometimes simmered still just beneath the surface.

  I should have told her that seeing them together made me want to varf.

  I should have told her that they broke my heart.

  I wish I had.

  I wish I had, but instead I faltered, caught up again in the excitement that was Annabelle Andrews sitting next to me.

  I smiled at her.

  ‘Honestly, it’s fine, it was so long ago now, Annabelle. We were teenagers, everything seems so dramatic, doesn’t it, when you’re a teenager? I’m happy,’ I told her, ‘we don’t have to go back there.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ she said, ‘because I could try and explain what happened.’

  I did not want her to explain what happened, I did not want to hear how she and Josh didn’t mean to fall in love, how they tried not to see each other, how they kept apart until they could not stand it for one more minute.

  How I got in the way.

  ‘I’m sure,’ I told her. ‘Absopletely,’ – the lie falling like a lifetime of incorrect names from Duncan McAllister’s lips.

  *

  When Ben found us a couple of hours later we were passing a joint between us ‘like drunken teenagers’, as he said on the way home, Josh, Annabelle and Duncan all asleep in the back seat, Barney spread out over the top of them like an enormous throw rug.

  Ben wasn’t happy when he found us. He’d spent most of the evening at the bar with increasingly inebriated men who kept looking at the soles of their shoes to see if his company had made them, and cheering each time the Moreton’s logo was discovered on a pair.

  He’d also been keeping an eye on Duncan, getting louder in the centre of the room and rapidly moving out of his ‘Hail fellow, well met’ phase to dip his toes into more belligerent shoes. Usually when this happened it was my job to distract him, and Ben had been about to try to find me when Josh joined him at the bar and introduced himself.

  ‘If you’re looking for Tallulah and Annabelle,’ he told Ben drunkenly, ‘they’re outside.’ Josh had raised his glass. ‘To old times, good times.’

  Ben had hated him on sight. ‘For you maybe,’ he had muttered in response.

  When he found us sitting on the café steps, I half-stood and introduced him to Annabelle. ‘Ben, I was just coming inside – this is Annabelle Andrews.’

  ‘Hello, Annabelle.’

  ‘Hello, Ben.’

  The silence gathered under the awning above us.

  ‘Well, that went well, didn’t it?’ Annabelle said brightly, and the two of us – Annabelle and I – dissolved into giggles.

  With that, Ben walked off towards the gallery and said, ‘I’m leaving in five minutes, Lulu.’ Somewhere through my marijuana haze I understood it would be a good idea to go with him.

  ‘Jesus, Lulu,’ he said in the car. ‘I feel like a bloody chauffeur service.’

  ‘Ben, nobody could get a taxi, you offered to take people.’

  ‘No, Lulu, you offered for me to take people.’

  We drove on in the sort of brittle silence only late nights which have gone on too long can bring.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re so angry, it’s not far, and they’re all staying at the same hotel,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not what I’m angry about, Lulu, and you know it.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘You want me to spell it out to you?’

  ‘Yes, Ben,’ I answered wearily, ‘I do.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’m angry that you left me at a party for more than two hours while you went outside with the one person you have told me has really let you down and when I finally find you, you’re smoking marijuana with her like some loser drug addict, and the two of you sit there and laugh at me . . .’

  ‘We weren’t laughing at you, Ben.’

  ‘Well, that’s how it looked to me.’

  We drove on in more silence until I thought about Ben calling me a ‘drug addict’ after seeing me have one joint in the five years I had known him.

  I started to giggle.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’

  ‘You,’ I told him.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yeah, you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You called me a drug addict.’

  Ben smiled. ‘I know, you’ll be dealing crack cocaine next.’

  I reached over, put my hand on his knee. ‘I’m sorry, Ben, I shouldn’t have left you there.’

  ‘It’s just not like you, Lulu.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, looking down at my hands.

  He was right, it wasn’t like me, but then again I hadn’t been the girl he knew from the moment I’d felt Joshua Keaton’s hand on my back.

  *

  Frank Andrews’ exhibition at Bloom would, over the years, achieve a sort of mythical status, with every single painting and sketch sporting a discreet little red sticker by the end of the night, most of them fetching record prices.

  Anecdotes about the evening would be told at dinner parties for months afterwards, people would brag about being there, and someone would steal the green cherub knocker off Bloom’s front door.

  ‘There was far too much drink,’ Laura Metcalfe would sum up a decade later on the Sunday Arts program, ‘my fault, I over-catered, and everyone was overexcited, anyway . . . it was just one of those nights, I guess.’

  Two women would physically fight over Frank’s ‘Twelve Apostles’ painting, Annie Andrews would leave very publicly with Fergus, Maxine Mathers would turn up at Duncan’s hotel room and demand to be ‘McAllistered’, and Harry and I would lie to Rose, and tell her everyone had enjoyed the teacake.

  I would wake up the next day with Frank’s gift to me beside the bed, a small frame holding the merest hint of two little girls behind its glass.

  Ben had already gone for his run, and for once I was thankful.

  Usually his insistence on running every morning, even on Sundays, annoyed me, and made me resentful as he slid out of our bed, creeping around the room getting dressed even on those mornings when I reached for him.

  But on that particular morning I was glad to be alone, feeling strange and unsettled, closing my eyes to the frame beside me, and remembering Josh’s hand on my skin.

  The week after the exhibition, on the way to work – after bragging about Maxine Mathers’s late-night visit to his hotel room: ‘Now, there is a woman whose reputation exceeded her . . .’ – Duncan announced he would not be renewing his contract when it came up in a month’s time.

  ‘Can’t do it anymore, Lulu,’ he said, ‘got to get ready for my final turn on the floor with Jimmy Dancer. I wanted to wait until you’d had your little high school reunion to tell you, but the tumour’s hanging on tighter than Kimmy to the pre-nup, and there’s a few more of the buggers now, apparently.’

  We pulled into the station and made our way inside, Barney snaking in and out of our legs as we went. It was cold, Duncan was rubbing his hands together and blowing on them, pacing back and forth in our little room beside the studio, and all I could think was how I should get him a scarf. I should get him a scarf, so his neck would not get cold, surely that couldn’t be good for him?


  ‘I’m getting you a scarf,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m getting you a scarf, it’s too cold in here for you.’

  ‘Lot colder where I’m going, Lulu.’

  ‘Duncan, don’t say that.’

  ‘It’s true, Lulu,’ he said, flicking the shutters of our office closed. ‘There,’ he said, ‘now when everyone arrives they’ll all think we’re in here shagging ourselves senseless, could do wonders for your reputation.’

  ‘Or yours,’ I smiled.

  ‘Mine doesn’t need any help, Lulu – now where was I? Oh, yes, it’s time for my action plan to kick in.’ He began to outline it, telling me how he had been meeting with his lawyer for weeks, working on a plan to distribute his not inconsiderable fortune equitably between his ex-wives and children. ‘The will’s sewn up tighter than a gnat’s arse over a rain barrel,’ he concluded cheerfully. ‘I don’t want any fighting after I’m gone. They’ve all been more than adequately compensated for the ignominy of being married to me – particularly Karen. God, I was a bastard to her . . .’

  ‘I don’t think you were that bad,’ I said.

  ‘I called her Katie at our wedding ceremony, Lulu, and don’t start being nice to me now just because I’m dying,’ he said. ‘It’s very patronising.’ He took a sip of his coffee, holding it in both hands. ‘Now we need to talk about what we’re going to tell everyone – so far, only you, I and the specialists know that I’m to shuffle off this mortal coil sooner rather than later, and that’s exactly how I mean to keep it. No-one must know, Lulu – not Kiki, not Kerry-Anne, not Katie—’

  ‘Karen,’ I said automatically.

  ‘What? Right, not Karen, not Kimmy, not the children and certainly not the Mephistophelean bastards I work for.’

  I sat on his desk swinging my legs, wondering how he thought we were going to pull this off.

  ‘Here’s what we’re going to do,’ he said, pacing the room and rubbing his hands.

  Gloves, I thought. Gloves.

  ‘In a couple of weeks’ time, we’ll make an announcement that I’m retiring, that after forty years I’m giving the tonsils a rest and looking forward to spending more time with my family – they all say that, whether they’re retiring or have been given the flick. We do no interviews, no specials, do not, for Christ’s sake, let anybody come at me with that red book – I’ll do my last shift, then we leave. Got it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Then, I retire quietly to Willow Island to while away the hours. I’ve sorted it all out with Dr Stephenson, I’ll visit the specialists when I have to, and he’ll provide me with whatever painkillers I may need.

  ‘You take some leave without pay from the station, but stay on the same wage, on my own payroll as my personal assistant – by the way, I’m going to need you to get me some pot.’

  ‘Get you some pot?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘Pot, Lulu, you know, weed, grass, dope, herb, skunk – apparently it’s marvellous for pain management – oh, stop looking at me like I’ve asked you to smuggle cocaine in your undies! Really, Lulu, it’s not that hard, you just wander around the corridor for a bit and ask if anyone’s got some, this is a radio station, you know. But I don’t want any rubbish – no leaf, just some nice, sticky heads, got that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘go outside in the hallway at my place of work and ask people who pass by if they have any skunk for me.’

  ‘Good girl,’ he beamed, ‘now about the children. They are not to visit when things start to get ugly. I do not want those children to see me unless I’m up and about, with a fishing rod in my hand, do you understand?’

  I understood.

  Duncan McAllister had relied on me to handle just about every aspect of his life for the last few years – now he wanted me to do the same for his death.

  *

  ‘Is Duncan holding out for more money, Lulu, is that what this is all really about? Well, tell him we’ll give it to him.’

  ‘Tallulah, I don’t think you or Duncan realise how vital it is for us to retain his services . . . we’ve just repainted his name in the car park, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Fuck him, Lulu, all right, fuck him, if he wants to play this game, then fine, tell him we’ve got Alan fucking Jones champing at the bit to take over.’

  On and on the questions went, asked by those further and further up the ladder until I was summoned by the man who sat on the very top rung, every now and again poking out a polished shoe to knock someone clawing their way up off it.

  ‘Is there nothing you can do?’ Jack Abraham, owner of OzRadio, was asking me, having flown from London, it was rumoured, specifically to change Duncan’s mind – which he hadn’t because Duncan was hiding from him on Willow, saying, ‘You deal with it, Lulu.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Abraham.’

  ‘Call me Jack.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jack, but no, I don’t think I can do anything at all.’

  ‘Is there nothing anyone can do, Lulu?’ His canny eyes met mine.

  ‘No, I don’t believe so.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, getting up, ‘better let the man go then.’

  *

  On Duncan’s last morning, the media camped outside the security gates waiting for his car to creep through the pre-dawn fog, and although the papers and airwaves had been full of his departure for days, we were both still surprised to see so many of them there, like guests we never expected to turn up at a party.

  ‘Eat them, Barney,’ Duncan said, before pulling up beside the pack, rolling down his window, his arm resting on the door, squinting at the lights.

  ‘Slow news day, is it?’ he said, ‘Or has someone died? Bernie Hanson, you old fraud, I thought your dick was the only thing that got up this early in the morning . . .’

  He pulled them all out, all the old tricks, the insults, the one-liners, and as the security gate lifted like a game show hostess’s arm, the pack stepped back to let Duncan MacAllister through for the last time. Then they put down their cameras and recorders, and applauded.

  ‘Geez,’ said Duncan, taking in their standing ovation, ‘if I didn’t hate half the bastards I’d be quite moved by that.’

  Duncan’s last shift broke all the ratings records, but even when it was over, it wasn’t over.

  While he quietly moved to Willow Island, I had to stay behind at the station to ‘tidy things up’, answer the listeners’ letters that still arrived weekly, long after he and Barney had left the building, which had been a strange procession of man, dog and well-wishers who opened their doors to shake hands and paws along the way.

  I’d also stayed to take the phone calls, the lies falling from my lips like casually dropped stitches: ‘No, Duncan’s fine, he’s just ready to take a well-deserved break after forty years in the business.’ ‘No, I’m sorry, he’s not doing any interviews at all at the moment, too busy fishing.’ ‘Thank you so much for making Mr McAllister that beautiful commemorative quilt, he thanks the ladies of the McLean Valley with all his heart.’

  Duncan would call every day or two from the island to bark instructions at me, ordering books and newspapers, any special food he wanted brought over, names of people he wanted called, and outlining elaborate plans to keep the truth hidden for as long as possible.

  This involved furtive trips to and from the ferry, into town and the hospital, where he had somehow contrived a separate entry from the general public for us. We would drive into the basement car park and catch a service elevator to a third-floor storage room, which we would stroll out of – Duncan motioning ‘One, two, three, go!’ at me with his hands – and down to a passenger lift to take us up to Dr Stephenson’s rooms.

  I don’t know how many people we fooled, or for how long. We certainly did not fool Kimmy.

  She and Duncan were no lo
nger together, a quiet divorce and an even quieter settlement having ended their union legally, but they kept in touch and she had turned up at Willow Island one day, roaring up the driveway in the red BMW the divorce had bought her.

  Duncan told me afterwards how he’d opened the door and she’d said, ‘What’s all this bullshit about you retiring here, Duncan?’, and he, unable to deflect her steady gaze, had answered with the truth.

  ‘Hard luck, Mac,’ she’d said.

  He also told me he’d apologised to her for ‘stuffing things up’ between them, and she’d said it was all right, that they’d had some fun together, and asked if he was still up for some more.

  ‘I told her I wasn’t dead yet,’ he beamed, completely delighted with himself.

  It wasn’t just Kimmy who had seen through Duncan’s elaborate – and increasingly exhausting – ruses. Other people were beginning to suspect he was not well too.

  The papers started hinting at his demise, people asked me outright what was wrong with him, and a few months after Frank’s exhibition, a letter fell through the slot in our doorway, landing so softly on the carpet I did not hear it drop, or the footsteps which had brought it.

  Dear Tallulah, bright green ink looped large across the page. It went on:

  I’m very sorry about your friend Duncan’s illness. I liked him very much when I met him at Bloom – I think. Anyway, he told me something that night I would like to talk to you about. This is where we are, come anytime. We’re here for a couple more months.

  Love Annasmell Andrews

  She had underlined ‘anytime’, and I longed – instantly – to go to her, laughing at the childhood nickname she had signed off with in her emerald-green pen.

  Its colour, and her mention of his name, also reminded me I had not yet got Duncan his pot – but at least now I knew where I would get it from, and it gave me an excuse to go to them.