by Liz Byrski
TWENTY-ONE
Diane was wrapping a present to post to Charlene. She’d left it as late as possible in the hope that her daughter would manage to hold back from opening it until Christmas Day. It was a handbag that Charlene had been ogling when they went shopping together and Diane had filled it with some of Charlene’s favourite Kylie underwear, and added a David Jones gift voucher. She wished she could watch her open it but she was also thankful that her daughter had decided to stay on at the Gold Coast with her new friends for Christmas.
The task of packing up the house was more or less complete and the place felt bleak, but the last thing she needed was to start unpacking to find fairy lights and decorations. She would be moving out in the first week of the New Year and the holiday period seemed like a tiresome interruption to the process of leaving. She would go into the New Year homeless and probably jobless, but working with some of Heather’s constituents had made her aware of how fortunate she was to have enough money to make choices about the future. She was on the brink of a new life, which was both scary and exciting, and she was impatient to get on with it.
This would be her third Christmas without Gerry, her first without Charlene, and she was about to get a taste of being on the fringes of someone else’s celebrations rather than at the heart of her own.
‘Why don’t you come to Heather’s Christmas Day? I know she’s invited you,’ Shaun had suggested as she drove him home from Morpeth. He was still looking horribly shaken by the ordeal of discovering he’d been the target of the shooting and he’d jumped at her invitation to go home with her and stay overnight. He had laughed when she told him her fears about Gerry, fears that now seemed simply foolish. ‘But it was because you were so worried about Charlene,’ he said. ‘Are you going to call and let her know about Danny?’
Charlene was devastated to learn the truth about the shooting and had asked to speak to Shaun. While they talked, Diane made up the spare bed, contemplating the irony that Shaun now looked like a highly desirable son-in-law but was never likely to be her son-in-law.
‘You have to tell Heather soon,’ she said later that night when he told her that he was planning to resign. ‘You can’t leave it much longer.’
‘After Christmas,’ he’d said, ‘and before New Year. I’m dreading it. You realise she might ask you to stay on?’
‘Really?’ Diane said, surprised. ‘But what about Patsy?’
‘Heather will still need to replace me.’
‘But I couldn’t do your job. I don’t know enough about it, about the party, politics, any of it.’
‘You know much more than I did when I started, and you’re heaps better at it than Patsy, who’s been there three years. Maturity is a big plus in this job.’
Diane laughed. ‘Well, thank goodness ageing has something going for it.’
‘Would you take the job?’
‘I don’t know, I’m enjoying it but . . .’ she hesitated. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Anyway she probably won’t ask.’
Diane tied Charlene’s parcel with gold ribbon, put some bubblewrap around it and packed it into an Australia Post box. Then she started on the gifts she’d bought for Barbara, Heather and Shaun. How strange that this time last year she wouldn’t have dreamed of giving Heather or Shaun a present, and she didn’t even know Barbara. She laid sheets of gift wrapping on the table and tossed the fragments of paper from Charlene’s parcel into the bin. Was this how her mother had felt when Diane and her sister left home? Free to become someone different? Free to please herself? It seemed unlikely; her mother had been a disappointed woman, disappointed by her marriage and her daughters, and disappointed by widowhood and old age. As she cut the sheet of gift wrap in half, Diane realised that she couldn’t remember a time when her mother seemed truly delighted or excited about anything. She had lived life regretting the past and talking about what might have been. Even when she boarded the plane to fly to Arizona to live with Diane’s older sister, she had looked bored and disappointed. ‘So it all comes down to who you are and what you make of it,’ Diane said aloud. ‘And I intend to make the most of it.’
She stacked the wrapped gifts on the table and went to the kitchen to make a sandwich. A magnet fell off the fridge door as she opened it and the slip of paper it was holding fluttered to the ground. It was the paper Stefan had given her with his phone number. She had promised to call and make a time to see his garden, but somehow she’d never got around to it. Diane looked at the paper, turned it over in her hand and put the magnet back on the fridge. ‘But what sort of person wants to live in a memorial garden?’ she said aloud. ‘Only someone who’s still trapped in the past, and I don’t need that.’ And she screwed up the paper, chucked it in the bin, made a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich and a cup of tea and settled down to watch the news.
‘So what do you think?’ Adam asked, knowing his indecision would be inexplicable to many, but that he would get an intelligent response from Stefan.
‘You are asking me?’ Stefan said. ‘If I have a beautiful wife who loves me and tells me to give up my job, I do it like the shot. Why even do you have to ask?’
Adam sighed. ‘It seems like such a big step, and as though . . . well, as though I’m opting out of my responsibilities.’
‘Huh? You say you leave the orchestra but keep working, take more students, do sometimes emergency fill-in. You take on looking after the house. These are all responsibilities.’ He threw his hands in the air. ‘I am killing to be so lucky.’
‘I would kill,’ Adam corrected him automatically. ‘But it doesn’t feel like . . . like a proper job.’
‘Adam, my dear friend, remember the day we are flying to Canberra to play Dvorák to politicians? And you tell me about your father, and how he will think the orchestra is not a proper job? And now you think about proper jobs too? What is it, this proper job? What is so special?’
They were sitting on the steps at the back of the concert hall killing time before going inside to change into their dress suits to play The Messiah. Adam tossed his phone nervously from one hand to the other and dropped it on the ground. When Jill had suggested that his leaving the orchestra might be the key to a better life for them both, and the children, his immediate reaction was that it was impossible – not because he didn’t want to, but because it would be irresponsible to give up a secure job at his age.
‘Let’s work out the finances,’ she’d said, ‘see how it looks.’ And when they did, it was obvious that as long as he kept his students and acquired a few more, which would not be difficult as he already had a substantial waiting list, they could manage.
‘You see,’ Jill said, ‘it is perfectly possible. ‘We don’t have to look after Kirsty anymore, we both have good super, and we own our home. All we have to do is live a little more carefully.’
‘More clothes from the recycling shop?’ Adam had said in an attempt to lighten up. ‘Don’t you want to escape from that?’
‘I’ve almost grown to enjoy the satisfaction of finding treasures there,’ Jill said. ‘We’d be fine, Adam. We have lots more than most people, we’re really lucky. I love my job and I can keep working for another ten years at least, if that’s what we need. I think it’s just your need for security that’s holding you back. But if there’s something we should all have learned from Heather getting shot, it’s that there is no certainty. There’s only the present and we need to make the most of it.’
Adam could imagine himself saying the same thing to someone else in this situation, it all made sense, but his nights were disturbed by muddled, scary dreams in which he could recognise almost nothing except the sense that his life was collapsing around him. By day, when not at work, he fought off the urge to hide in the music room with his baroque cello and the Bach suites. But then Jill fired her final bullet.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I promise to shut up about it if you tell me this. Do you look forward to going to work or do you dread it? Do you like being with the orchestra or is it devouring your life one discont
ented day at a time?’
Adam felt as though the breath had been punched out of him. He feared he might start crying as he had done the night he was with Barbara.
‘I hate it,’ he said finally, getting control of his voice. ‘I hate what it does to me, how it strips away my joy in music and makes it into a burden.’ He heard the chink of his own chains loosening. ‘When we’re rehearsing and playing, I loathe it. At the end of a performance I can’t believe that the audience applauds. It’s only later if I hear a recording that I know we’ve done something beautiful. Sometimes I think I must be completely mad.’
‘Yes, you are,’ Jill said, putting her arms around him and looking up, smiling into his face, ‘completely mad to have gone on with it for so long without saying anything. But you don’t have to do it anymore. You can escape, you can have your music the way you love it, and you can own your share of how we live. It’s easy.’
But Adam still felt it was a pathetic way to end the career for which he’d fought both his mother and grandfather.
‘But it is not a career ending,’ Stefan said now, getting up and pointing at his watch to indicate that it was time that they went inside to change. ‘It is just different. You are still a musician, a brilliant cellist. You know Dennis? He needs a cellist for the quartet, Belinda’s husband is posted to Perth. Dennis will jump to have you in the quartet. Then you play the chamber music you love, you negotiate about interpretation, and you get paid too.’
Later, when he was alone in the dressing room, Adam stood in front of the mirror, straightened his white tie and smoothed down his shirt front. He loved playing Handel, but he didn’t particularly like the way this visiting conductor wanted them to play The Messiah. He had spent so many years of his life playing beautiful music under pressure and resenting it. It wasn’t anything terrible, just the sort of frustration and powerlessness that at least half the population would experience at work. But, despite his fears, he knew he didn’t want it anymore.
‘So many people!’ Ellis had said when Heather told him who she had invited for Christmas Day. ‘I thought we’d be having a quiet Christmas together, exchanging our presents and eating chocolate and drinking champagne in bed. Lounge around, go for a walk or swim, then a lovely meal.’
‘We can do all of that,’ Heather said. ‘Everyone’s organised to bring food. All I have to do is cook the turkey. Jill’s done the cake and mince pies; Barbara, the pudding; Diane is making brandy butter and homemade ice cream; Nick and Kirsty –’
‘Okay, okay, I give in,’ Ellis said, leaning over in the bed to kiss her. ‘You are a terrific organiser and an absolute wonder woman. I just want you to organise me a bit more, give me your full attention.’
‘Easy,’ she said, wrapping her leg around his. ‘I am entirely at your service.’
‘Yes,’ he said, kissing her again, reaching down to stroke her leg, ‘for about two minutes and then you’ll be up and gone.’
‘Right. But I’ll be back early. We’re closing the office at midday, and meanwhile you can go to the bottle shop and find some excellent wine, and pick up the beer and soft drinks.’
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘you remind me of Margaret Thatcher.’
‘No!’ Heather cried, throwing back the sheet and leaping out of bed. ‘Don’t say that. Wash your mouth out. I am not like Margaret Thatcher.’
Ellis laughed and leaned on his elbow, watching her pull on the soft cotton kimono that she had, apparently, bought years ago on a trip to Japan. He had bought her something much nicer for Christmas: a short, scarlet negligée trimmed with frills of black lace. That old cotton thing absolutely had to go. He’d bought more too – expensive lingerie, lacy French knickers in black and red, matching bras, a suspender belt and black stockings. And he had done it all from the comfort of his laptop through a website that specialised in extra large lingerie – ‘beautiful gifts for big and beautiful women’ their advertisements said, ‘slinky, sensuous, sexy’. He’d had enough of Cottontails. Glamour was coming to an underwear drawer near him soon, and he could hardly wait.
Ellis lay back in the bed planning his day. He hadn’t heard from Luke in ages but knew he was waiting to see some chapters of the book. But Ellis wanted Heather to read them first and that clearly wasn’t going to happen until after Christmas Day. He would finish chapter five and then get her to look at it – Boxing Day, perhaps – she’d have plenty of time then. He would be generous and reasonable about her commitments – it was, after all, only for the short term. He got up and went into the shower, singing his own discordant and muddled Cole Porter compilation. Then, pulling on his jeans and a t-shirt, he ran downstairs towards the promise of toast and coffee.
‘I’m off now,’ Heather said when they had had their breakfast and she’d stacked the plates and cups in the dishwasher. ‘I’ll see you later.’
She kissed him and he held on to her hand. ‘I’ll go and get the booze and then come over to the office, take you somewhere nice for lunch.’
She dropped a second kiss, this time on the top of his head as she stood up. ‘Thanks, darling, that’s lovely of you,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to take Shaun and Diane out to lunch. Just as a thank-you for all they’ve done.’
Ellis forgot that he was being generous and reasonable. ‘Second place again, Ellis,’ he said. ‘Second place again.’
Heather flushed. ‘That’s not fair,’ she said. ‘You know how important you are to me, but you seem determined to make me feel guilty about meeting my responsibilities to other people.’
‘It’s hard to see what responsibilities you have to someone who’s responsible for getting you shot, and to a woman who’s really only been working for you for a few weeks. Anyway, if that’s what you want, I won’t interfere with it. When will you be back?’
‘Probably two thirty or three,’ Heather said, picking up her handbag. ‘And I’m going to ignore what you just said because I don’t believe you can really mean it. I’ll see you later,’ she called and closed the front door behind her.
Shaun thought that this might be one time in his life when he really did need to get some counselling. Learning that the bullet had been meant for him had left him with a strange mix of emotions, many of which he couldn’t identify. There was guilt, of course; he could at least work that one out. Guilt about Heather and all that she’d gone through because of him; guilt exacerbated by the knowledge that he was about to resign. There was guilt too about not having come clean with Alex Roussos, with whom he had recently become quite friendly. There was worry about Charlene and whether it really was possible to keep her clear of it all, and about Diane, whose anxiety was contagious. But there was other stuff, vague, dark, shadowy stuff about knowing that it really was supposed to be him, that floated in and around the other emotions like fog, confusing, muddled and chilling.
‘It’ll take time,’ Ed had said when they met for a beer. ‘Bound to. Your mother’s in a bad enough state about it and she’s several stages removed from it. It’s bound to stir up a whole lot of stuff for you.’
‘I know I should just be relieved, thankful that I got off so lightly,’ Shaun said, finishing his first drink. ‘But I can’t even feel that. Knowing the bloke is dead and not likely to come after me again is something Heather never had. I think I’m being a bit of a wanker.’
Ed shook his head. ‘No, mate. This is big stuff, like I said, bound to take time. And changing your job, that’s big too. You’ll feel better when you’ve got that off your chest.’
‘You do think I’m doing the right thing then?’
‘And what if I don’t?’
‘I suppose I’d still do it.’
‘There you are then, what I think isn’t important. It’s your life, your decision. But, just for the record, I think it’s the right one. You need to branch out and it sounds like this Rosa woman has her head screwed on.’ He emptied his glass and signalled to the bartender for refills. ‘Get this stuff off your chest with Heather and it’ll all get a
lot clearer.’
Shaun nodded and pushed his empty glass across the bar. ‘Straight after Christmas,’ he said. ‘Don’t want her worrying about it over the holiday. Straight after Christmas.’ And his stomach churned at the thought of it.
‘Bloody Ellis isn’t coming to lunch with us, is he?’ Diane asked. ‘Every time he comes in here he gets up my nose. If I see him again I may have to punch him right between the eyes.’
‘Bad as that?’ Shaun asked. ‘How are you going to cope with Christmas Day? I’ll have to put you into a straitjacket when I pick you up.’
‘Wouldn’t be a bad idea,’ Diane said with a laugh. ‘But I think there’ll be enough people at Heather’s that day to dilute the Ellis effect. What is it with her? Can’t she see it, or is she so desperate to have a man in her life that she’s prepared to ignore it?’
‘Which particular aspect of him are we talking about?’ Shaun asked. ‘I mean, I know we agreed that he’s arrogant and pretentious, but lots of women fall for men like that. Maybe he’s not that way with her.’
‘He is,’ Diane said, glancing out through Shaun’s open office door to make sure that Heather was still out of earshot. ‘He is arrogant and pretentious with her; you’re just too involved in your own stuff to notice. So here’s the full rundown. She keeps saying he’s some sort of saint because he raced through the night to be at her side and he’s here to look after her. But she’s looking after him, and she’s flat out trying to do that and get ready for Christmas and finish up here before we close.’
‘You don’t know that,’ Shaun said.
‘I do. I know it from heaps of things she’s let slip. And this morning she’s on about how wonderful he is because he’s going to pick up the wine. Oh, please!’
Shaun laughed. ‘We all have our blind spots when we’re in love.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Diane said. ‘I suffered from extended periods of blindness while I was with Gerry. But I’ll tell you this. Gerry did some lousy stuff drunk, and sometimes sober, but he did at least have some respect for women.’
