Love and Punishment

by Unknown

  Francie read all this through a crystalline prism of hatred. Poppy had everything—awards, public accolades, fame, money and a cache of la Perla underwear—but apparently it wasn’t enough. She wanted Nick too. She had set out to steal him and then triumphantly set him as the prize jewel in her glittering diadem of privilege and success!

  Francie’s rage cast her fingers into solid, sharp claws of retribution. She ripped pages from their binding and then into pieces—smaller, and smaller again, until they were almost confetti. As she tore every membrane of paper and tissue from the spine of the album, Francie sang out loud. It wasn’t a recognisable tune, but rather a discordant, shrieking aggregation of sounds emitted at the crescendo of an operatic murder.

  And in Francie’s mind, when the final page was ripped away, when the gold and velvet binding was at last limp, empty and useless, Poppy died too. All life left her. She was a stone cold dead diva.

  Bbrring! Bbrring!

  Francie spun her head to locate the sound. Was it the foyer bell ringing intermission? Was it a door chime heralding the return of Poppy and Nick? She realised it was an alarm clock making a piteous call for an end to the performance, and with that Francie knew she was done. The red velvet curtain came down on the melodrama.

  If Francie was asked how she had left the house that night (through the door? The window?) or how she’d driven back to Richmond, she would not be able to say.

  But she could tell you about the scene the next day, because every detail remained bright, vivid and unforgettable, like the spray of blood on a wall at the scene of a slaying which had soaked into the plaster and did not fade, no matter how many times it was scrubbed.

  The morning after she had exacted her vengeance on Poppy, she was sleeping in the bedroom in Richmond and woke suddenly as the bedclothes were dragged off her. Nick was standing at the foot of the bed. The sheets were wrapped around his fists. His voice was low, cracking with menace.

  ‘Get out of bed, Francie. Get out of bed right now and tell me why I shouldn’t drag your arse down to the cops. This is an absolute fucking OUTRAGE!’

  Francie had curled into a ball and whimpered into the mattress. Nick walked around the bed, still dragging the sheets, and stood over her.

  ‘I know it was you. Don’t tell me it wasn’t. It’s got your fucked-up, sad, vicious handprints all over it.

  ‘I have spent the last two hours begging Poppy not to tell anyone about what you’ve done. Trying to protect you. And, believe me, there are plenty of people who’d like to know—the police, your friends, your family, the newspapers.

  ‘Hah! What am I talking about? You write for a fucking newspaper! Is that where this stupid front page drama came from? WHY? Why’d you do it?’

  What was Francie to say? I only did it because I love you? It was the same defence every screwed-up psychopath used when they shot presidents, stabbed their wives or gassed their children. But somewhere in there Francie recognised the truth of it. They were all saying the same thing: ‘Look what you made me do! See how much you’ve hurt me! This is how much I love you!’ And even as she thought this Francie also recognised the futility of it.

  Once you were no longer loved, the meaning was just leached out of you. There was no care, empathy or comprehension of what you felt. And, why should there be? You were an ex. A former something, but in the present tense, nothing. The responsibility for your pain was yours and yours alone. Every cheapo self-help book told you that. We all create our own reality. That was easy to say if your heart hadn’t been ripped out through your ribcage when you least expected it.

  That morning, however, Francie knew her actions had stepped outside the boundaries of all civilised behaviour. She knew there was nothing to be salvaged. So she would have her say. She sat up and snarled.

  ‘I’m sure your precious Poppy would love to tell the newspapers! What about the radio or the television, seeing she’s so famous? I’m sure the whole country would love to know. Why don’t you put out a fucking press release!’

  Nick had wanted to hit her. She could see that. His fists clenched and unclenched as he struggled for composure. For one moment she hoped he would hit her. The pain would absolve her of guilt and, simultaneously, proclaim her the winner. But he gained control and this time his voice was as cold and even as a lake which had frozen over.

  ‘You have no right to say that. None. I thought I owed you something, but from this moment on the debt is paid. We are finished. Even as friends. Forget you ever knew me.

  ‘And if you thought this was a way of breaking up me and Poppy? Of punishing both of us? You are even more fucked-up than I thought you were.’

  Nick dumped the bedsheets on the floor and turned to go.

  Francie heard her voice come out as a screech. It was a thin, desperate noise she didn’t even know she was capable of. As if she was a wild animal which had ventured onto the icy surface of the lake and fallen through. She was trapped there, freezing to death.

  ‘Friends? You’re a cheat, a sneak, a filthy fucking liar! Why would I want you as a friend?’

  She grabbed a pillow and hurled it at Nick’s retreating back. Then she gathered up the sheets and what remained of her dignity and wrapped them around herself. She sat on the bed and rocked, nursing her body for most of that dull August day.

  And as she sat here tonight, three months later, on her narrow single bed watching the first raindrops landing hard and flat against the window of her childhood room, she wished her every atom could be scattered to the four winds.

  Love, togetherness, always and forever.

  Tonight there was no tempest fanning the wings of an avenging angel. No king tide sweeping her to victory. Francie saw she had been washed up on the shores of a place she knew all too well. The arid landscape of her past.

  There was a tap at the door.

  ‘Frank?’

  Her brother Joel’s head appeared.

  ‘Hey, are you coming out for dinner? Mum’s made chicken Maryland.’

  Francie sat up and wiped her eyes. ‘I dunno. I’m not really hungry.’

  ‘Come on. She’s sacrificed an entire tin of fresh pineapple!’

  Francie managed a twisted smile. Mum’s cooking was always a joke between her and her little brother. The past twenty years of the multicultural revolution in cookery seemed to have passed her mother by. It was as if her cookbooks were themselves set in aspic.

  She still cooked the same stodge they’d eaten as kids. Fish pie (tinned pink salmon and mashed potato); Toad in the Hole (lumps of sausage mince in Yorkshire pudding batter); Ki Si Min (mincemeat again, with cabbage, soy sauce and instant chicken noodles) and chicken Maryland (fried chicken in white sauce sweetened with chunks of tinned pineapple). Stir-fries, steamed vegetables and the world of spices were all exotic mysteries to Carol McKenzie, although she was a dab hand with puddings, slices, cakes and biscuits. It was a wonder Francie and Joel had escaped early onset diabetes. Although now Francie saw Joel had a pasty, puffy look about him which wasn’t healthy.

  ‘You can’t stay here in this room forever, you know,’ he said as he switched on the bedside lamp. ‘This is Mum’s paper pattern shrine to Simplicity, McCalls and Butterick. She’s not gonna give it up for you! Sounds like a law firm, doesn’t it? Simplicity, Butterick and McCalls. Attorneys at Dressmaking.’

  Francie squinted against the light. Joel sat on the bed next to her. He was a big rumpled lump in his old sweatshirt and ripped jeans. His brown hair—the same dark shade as his father’s—was a shaggy haystack. He peered at Francie from under his fringe and she saw her own soulful grey eyes looking back at her.

  ‘You know she’s still selling Barbie doll clothes? She knitted a Fair Isle ski jumper for a Barbie doll this morning. Can you believe it? And a pair of tights. I mean, what sort of a sick unit does that? Don’t they mass manufacture Barbie doll clothes in China these days out of plastic and velcro shit? What sort of a fucked individual sits there, day after day, and actually knits Bar
bie doll clothes and even sews on buttons the size of pinheads? I tell you, she’s mental. Anyway, if you don’t come and eat the chicken Maryland she’ll crochet you a doggie bag so you can take it home with you.’

  Joel put his arm around his big sister’s shoulders and whispered in her ear: ‘Come on, Frank, come and have dinner with me! Rescue me for just one night.’

  It was an invitation Francie was bound to accept. She would have liked to rescue Joel forever. It wasn’t right, an almost thirty-year-old man stuck here in this house in Blackburn with his sixty-year-old mother. There was something creepy about it. Johnno had hit the mark. Joel was a clinger too. He was collateral damage from Mum and Dad’s break-up way back in 1982.

  Francie knew that Joel had never been the same since Dad left. He was six then. She remembered him standing on the front lawn one wintry afternoon in his yellow and brown Hawthorn football jumper waiting for Dad to come by and take him to the match. He stood there until after dark, until the temperature was almost zero, and Dad hadn’t come.

  After that, Joel never put the jumper on again. Instead he read The Hobbit, then The Lord of the Rings and retreated into Middle Earth. It was almost as if Gandalf the Grey had become his long lost father. And now here he was—Joel, the hobbit who never left the Shire, the pineapple ring bearer. Francie kissed his forehead and tried to reach her arms around him, and when it all became a bit embarrassing for them both they heaved themselves off the bed. Joel clomped down the almost soundproof, carpeted hallway, leading the way to dinner.

  ‘Hello there!’ her mother sang cheerily. ‘You’re up and about. Good to see. I’ve made your favourite! Chicken Maryland.’

  Francie couldn’t be bothered to tell her that since the age of fourteen she’d been scraping the sickly white pineapple-flavoured sauce off the chicken and hiding it under a pile of peas.

  Francie sat at the dinner table and watched her mother take her place, still wearing her blue floral apron. Carol always wore an apron around the house, as though the letters M-O-T-H-E-R were emblazoned on the front so there could be no confusion as to who she was. As long as she was wearing her apron, she had a purpose in life.

  Her mother had a plump face, strangely unmarked by time for someone who was sixty years of age. But then she didn’t smoke, didn’t drink and hardly left the house other than to walk to the end of the street where she had been the receptionist at the doctor’s surgery for the past twenty years. She was almost unused. She had an emotional snap-lid like a Tupperware container.

  Doug walked out on Carol when she was thirty-nine. For a few years after that she still saw herself as a sexual human being, and there had been attempts at romance. She had been to dinner with a couple of men. Even cooked here at home for them and danced in the lounge room, but none of it had come to much. Francie had played her own small part in that. And then at some stage in her early forties, Francie couldn’t be sure exactly when, Carol had packed away her notion of herself as a woman and become just a person. It was as if she’d seen enough of romantic life and decided it really wasn’t for her.

  She kept herself and her house neat and tidy. Tonight she was the same as she had been for the past fifteen years. Smooth, mousey brown bobbed hair, small pearl earrings, navy trousers, white pintucked blouse and the inevitable apron. If she was going on a social outing she would wear a navy skirt, the white blouse would be silk instead of cotton, and a pair of black court shoes would be matched with a black handbag. She would take her delicate diamond watch from the jewellery case and a modest pair of diamond stud earrings and hum a little tune as she put them on. A spray of Estée Lauder’s White Linen, a light application of plum lipstick and she was set to go.

  Everything was in order, from the little patch of gay annuals in the garden outside the front door, to the ornaments in the polished crystal cabinet in the lounge room and the swept and weeded path between the back door and the clothesline.

  But there was something so desperate and fragile about it all. There was sometimes a far-off look in Carol’s eyes, a catch in her voice that made Francie think that just one accidental knock would send the whole elaborate construction smashing down. Francie thought that her mother was an emotional addict who was on a lifelong twelve-step program. If she took even one draught from the cup of despair she would be off on a bender of fury. Maybe that’s what Joel understood too, and why he couldn’t bring himself to leave her.

  Joel slumped in his chair at the round table. Francie always suspected that the table was round so no-one was reminded there was no father up one end of it. The table covering was floral plastic with an elasticised hem which tucked neatly underneath. No point in using a good linen tablecloth when it was just the family!

  Each place setting had its own salt and pepper shaker. It was a family tradition to use a different set of shakers for every person at every meal. It was a way of giving Carol’s vast collection an airing. Francie had a pair of handpainted china toadstools in front of her plate, Joel a pair of silver robins perched in a little silver branch and Carol a fish and seahorse in a clump of ceramic seaweed. Carol placed the dinner plates, decorated with Irish shamrocks, in front of both of her children and then took her own place with a grateful smile.

  ‘Well, isn’t this a nice surprise?’

  Francie looked at her plate and was not surprised at all. It looked like the same inedible mass it always was. Dinner tonight would be an endurance test. She needed alcohol.

  ‘Thanks, Mum. It looks delicious. Um, could I have a bread roll, please?’

  ‘Well, we haven’t got rolls, we’re not a restaurant, after all, but I might have some wholemeal slices . . .’

  Her mother headed for the pantry and, as soon as she was out of earshot, Francie turned to Joel.

  ‘I need a drink, JoJo! What have you got stashed?’

  Joel reached down under his chair and retrieved a can of rum and Coke. She might have known that his innocent tumbler of soft drink contained something a lot harder. After all, he’d been smoking dope since he was thirteen.

  They were both furnished with orange tumblers decorated with daisies and filled with Dutch courage when their mother returned.

  ‘So . . .’ Her mother beamed with satisfaction as she dumped the plastic bag of bread on the table. ‘Here we all are. I might just say, it’s lovely to see you, Francie. Although she does look quite thin, doesn’t she, Joel? Still, at the end of the day it’s lovely to have you home . . . it’s where the heart is, after all.’

  What was her mother—fucking cliché woman? Francie trawled her mind for one original thing her mother had ever said. She drew a blank. Joel took up his tumbler and drained half of it. Carol was obviously not expecting a reply to anything she ever said to him.

  ‘You do look peaky, Francie, so I’m expecting a clean plate from you tonight. I’ve made your favourite, lemon meringue pie.’

  Carol watched with pride as Joel ploughed through the glutinous pile on his plate. Francie thought she could see the beginnings of tears in her mother’s eyes.

  ‘They were the best days of my life when you were both little and we were . . .’

  Together with Dad. A perfect family.

  ‘Come on, Francie, you’ve hardly started yours,’ she admonished.

  Francie took a bite but couldn’t manage to swallow. She washed it down with rum and Coke. It was all so depressing. Francie and Joel were children again and Carol was a sad suburban single mum. How different it all could have been. Francie imagined a parallel universe where she and Joel sat drinking a glass of wine and picking over a plate of French cheeses with their parents, who were just back from a trip to Europe. They would be talking about the Picassos in the Pompidou Centre or the Velasquez portraits in the Prado Museum in Madrid.

  ‘Your Auntie Kath’s had her eyebrows tattooed,’ said Carol. ‘You know she had alopecia and all her hair fell out? Well, she wears a wig now, but her eyebrows have always been a worry, so she came down to Melbourne from Benalla on the bus
and she had them done by a cosmetic tattoo artist. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Wonders will never cease.

  ‘She rang me last night wanting your new phone number, Francie. Was Nick on television last night?’

  ‘Drop it, Mum,’ Joel said tersely through a mouthful of peas. ‘Where’s the pie?’

  Later in the evening, when Joel had retreated to his room and his computer, Francie sat with her mother in the lounge room. They were at either end of the couch. Its knobbly teal synthetic covering scratched the back of Francie’s knees and she pulled at her denim skirt. Carol was proud of the fact that the lounge-room setting was not arranged around the television—that was gauche and suburban—so instead they looked at a featureless drop of beige synthetic curtains and a knick-knack shelf crowded with gleaming, handpainted china plates and figurines.

  Carol was knitting the tiniest item Francie had ever seen—a white woollen handbag for a Barbie doll, the size of a ten-cent piece. Francie was flipping through a Woman’s Day magazine from last October. When she realised she had read the same item on Paris Hilton three times, she finally laid the magazine on her lap.

  ‘Mum . . . how long did it take you to get over Dad leaving?’

  ‘Oh!’ Carol looked up from her handiwork, startled. ‘Do you really want to talk about all that, dear? It’s so long ago now. Water under the bridge.’

  ‘Yeah, I think I do. I haven’t told you but I’m seeing a counsellor and it’s bringing up a whole lot of stuff I have to—’

  ‘A counsellor? Like a psychiatrist? Are you alright?’

  Carol finally put her knitting down and looked closely at her daughter. Francie could see furrows of concern where her mother’s forehead was usually a blank, bland space. She suddenly looked all of her sixty years.

  ‘No, I’m not really. It’s not really going all that well since Nick left . . .’ And then her promise to herself not to cry in front of her mother dissolved in a salty deluge.

  Carol was across the couch in an instant and took her daughter in her arms. Francie buried her face in the flowery blue apron and gave way to heaving sobs. Carol smoothed her blonde hair.