Bad Behaviour

by Liz Byrski

  ‘But why?’

  Miss MacFarlane inhaled deeply and straightened her shoulders. ‘It seems the attack was racially motivated; a handful of drunken youths. His being hit by the car was an accident, of course, the driver was devastated.’

  ‘What about Agnes?’

  ‘Mrs Foreman had fairly superficial injuries. She was, as you probably know, working at the Royal Infirmary, which was where they were both treated. I believe she’s gone back to her family in Jamaica.’

  Tea was brought for Zoë, and she was offered shortbread and accommodation if she would like to stay overnight. Eventually someone checked the train timetable and she was driven back to the station. The train moved slowly out of the station as she closed her eyes, and fell into a deep and troubled sleep.

  Waking hours later, she sat numb and silent in the busy carriage until it was time to leave the train for the bus, and walk up the hill to Delphi Street. Ahead of her, she saw Marilyn standing on the step having a heated conversation with a man in black trousers and a short-sleeved white shirt and holding a Bible.

  ‘Zoë?’ Marilyn called, pushing past him to get to the gate. ‘Zoë, are you all right?’ She flapped her hand at the man. ‘Oh, piss off and bother someone else.’ She opened the gate, took Zoë’s arm and led her into the house.

  Trapped for weeks in the grip of a debilitating sadness that seemed unbearable, Zoë went through the motions of looking after Daniel, going to work and being a small part of life in the house. Moving, talking and smiling all involved an effort that frequently seemed impossible. She slept heavily and dragged herself through the start of each new day as though trudging uphill through mud. She clung to Daniel, and to the dual roles of motherhood and earning a living, with numb tenacity, knowing instinctively that the demands and disciplines of both were what would, in the end, hold her together.

  One Saturday morning at the end of November, she woke shivering with cold. The eiderdown had slipped off in the night and a cold, frosty light seeped between the curtains. Claire had gone to visit her parents in Manchester, and Zoë and Daniel had the bedroom to themselves. Zoë picked up the eiderdown, dragged it around her shoulders and went to the window. The park across the street was white with frost, a thick crust of ice covered the pond and the leaves on the trees were a vibrant russet in the early sunshine. As she stood there, rapt in the stillness and beauty of the morning, she realised that something had changed. She felt different; stronger, perhaps, and wiser. For the first time in months, she had a sense that she had a future over which she had at least some degree of control. Hope had returned.

  Daniel stirred in his cot and she turned to pick him up, tucking him inside the eiderdown and climbing back into bed. He smelt of sleep and talcum powder, and Zoë drew him closer, nuzzled his head, then held him away from her to look into his face. He was not even remotely like her. Every inch of him was Harry; her only contribution was his lighter skin tone.

  ‘So, it’s just you and me then, kiddo,’ she murmured. ‘I’m back now and I’ll try not to let you down again.’ She cuddled him closer until he began to fidget and whimper. ‘Come on, then,’ she said, getting up and pulling on her dressing gown. ‘We’ve got stuff to do.’

  Laying him on the changing mat, she washed and dried him and pinned a fresh nappy into place. He smiled at her, gurgling and kicking his sturdy legs as she tried to put him into a clean Babygro. ‘Miles to go,’ she said, grasping his feet, remembering the phrase from a poem. ‘You and me together, Daniel, miles to go.’ And she picked him up and carried him down to the kitchen to heat up his bottle.

  2000

  TWENTY

  Fremantle – New Year’s Day 2000

  It’s a pretty ordinary January morning; oil is still pumping, there haven’t been any nuclear meltdowns, computers have not triggered disasters and no aircraft have fallen from the sky. All that pre-millennium tension that cost some people millions and made fortunes for others has fizzled out overnight. It’s going to be another sweltering day and the clock tells Dan that the new century is seven hours and fifteen minutes old. He lies very still, listening for sounds of life. His sisters won’t wake for hours yet; he heard them come home about four this morning. They opened his bedroom door, crept in and whispered to him, but he feigned sleep and they backed out with muffled giggles. He wonders if he’s getting old – a few years ago he’d have been out on the town – now staying up just long enough to see the New Year in at home seems sufficient celebration. Kitchen sounds are minimal; someone is trying to do things quietly, so it must be his mother. Archie never does things quietly – carefully, thoroughly, but not quietly.

  Dan sits up, cautiously puts his foot to the floor and considers transferring some weight to it. He considers this very carefully because he is not in the mood for pain. He knows he’s always been a wuss about pain. It was one of the things Archie had said to him when he was seventeen and Dan had told him he wanted to join the army.

  ‘You sure about that, mate? What if you come up against a bullet or a grenade; could be a tad painful.’ Archie had been joking, of course, but as he’d reminded Dan last night after several beers, he was also prescient. Something like that is more than a tad painful.

  Dan grasps the bedhead, grits his teeth and heaves himself up. Pain rips like lightning up his leg to his hip and down again, swirls and circles, and then finally settles to a bearable blur. He exhales in relief, lets go of the bedhead and reaches for his crutches. The kitchen seems a long way off but he knows that the pain will decrease as his leg warms up to movement. Still in his boxers and T-shirt, he hobbles down the passage to the kitchen, the rubber ends of the crutches squeaking on the tiles.

  His mother is standing by the window, waiting for the kettle to boil and watching the galahs lurching around like drunks under the lillipilli. She is wearing a grey-and-white cotton kimono that he brought back for her from a holiday in Japan years ago.

  ‘Happy new century,’ Dan says, and she jumps and turns towards him. ‘The kettle still works, I’m glad to see.’

  ‘Happy New Year, again,’ Zoë says. ‘Everything works, according to the seven o’clock news. So much for the millennium bug. Tea? Shouldn’t you sit down?’

  ‘Yes to both, thanks.’ He lowers himself into a chair and rests his crutches against the table.

  ‘Is it worse in the mornings?’

  He nods. ‘Until it loosens up. It’s a bugger, actually, but without it I wouldn’t be back here for New Year, so everything has a silver lining.’

  She nods and pours the tea, and he notices a couple of things that he missed in the excitement of yesterday’s homecoming. Her hair is greyer, and he likes it; it’s softer. And he can see that without makeup, although she looks good for fifty-two or fifty-three, or whatever she is, there are a few more lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. But there’s something he did notice last night and sees more clearly now; it’s as though a little light has been switched off inside her. He wonders if something happened while he was away.

  ‘So,’ Zoë says, putting the tea in front of him and gesturing towards his bad leg. Dan knows what’s coming next. ‘Maybe this’d be a good time to get out?’

  He sips his tea, trying not to sigh. ‘It’s my job, Mum. I’m a professional soldier and sometimes soldiers get wounded.’

  ‘Don’t patronise me, Dan,’ Zoë says, putting on her sharp face – the one she used when he wagged school or lied about homework. ‘I love you, I worry about you. And I’ve never . . .’

  ‘. . . understood why I wanted to join the army in the first place,’ he finishes the sentence for her. ‘I know, but I did want to and I still want to be there.’

  ‘Presumably, you don’t want a lump of shrapnel in your leg!’ She softens her tone. ‘And, as if the army itself wasn’t bad enough, you get into the SAS. I mean, really, Dan, it’s madness.’

  Dan grins. ‘I know, Mum, it’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it. Even a wuss like me.’

  ‘I j
ust wish you could have picked a nice, safe job near home.’

  Her hand is worrying at the stubborn seal of a packet of biscuits. Dan leans across the table and stills it with his own. ‘Well, when I’m not somewhere else, I am close to home. Swanbourne’s only fifteen minutes from Fremantle, after all.’

  ‘But when you’re not at the barracks, we never know where you are, or what’s happening,’ she says. ‘Sometimes we don’t even have a chance to say goodbye.’

  There are tears in her eyes, and Dan can see that the emotion she held back when he arrived home on crutches yesterday has taken its toll.

  ‘I know you’re incredibly tough and you’re all amazing and do the hardest things, but . . . but . . .’

  ‘But it’s hard for you too,’ Dan says. ‘I know; honestly, I do, it’s the same for all the families.’

  ‘But you, Dan – you and I, in the beginning, when there was just the two of us . . . I felt so responsible. I woke up every day feeling it was up to me to keep you alive and safe.’

  ‘And now I’m nearly thirty-one . . .’

  ‘And it doesn’t go away. Not ever.’

  He grasps her hand again. ‘I know, Mum. But it’s my life, and I’m responsible for me now.’

  She nods and pulls a tissue from the box at the end of the table. ‘Sorry. I’m being pathetic. It’s weird – I can’t bear you being hurt but I’m almost glad you were wounded because it brought you home.’ She attempts a laughs and blows her nose.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ he says, ‘I’m here, so let’s make the most of it.’

  Zoë nods and sips her tea. ‘The girls are thrilled to have you back. It was after four when they got home. Did you hear all that giggling?’

  He nods. ‘They’re the ones you should worry about; barking mad, they are.’

  ‘You know Rosie wants to do that youth volunteer corps thing up in Vietnam when she graduates?’

  ‘Not my idea,’ Dan says, raising his hands palms outwards. ‘I didn’t know anything about it until she told me last night.’

  ‘I know. It was Rob’s idea, they want to go together. He’s a lovely boy but I wish he’d keep his ideas to himself.’

  ‘And Gabs tells me her New Year’s resolution is to go travelling.’

  ‘She can get that idea right out of her head for a while yet,’ Zoë says briskly, picking up her mug. ‘She’ll do the TEE and at least one year of university, if I have to nail her feet to the floor. Have you made any resolutions?’

  Dan leans back in his chair. ‘To be nicer to my mother,’ he says with a grin.

  Zoë laughs. ‘About time.’

  ‘So, what’s your resolution, Mum?’

  ‘Not sure – I’m still working on it,’ she blushes slightly. ‘But it’s about trying to change.’

  ‘Change?’

  ‘Yes . . . I think I’m stuck. You know, fifty-two this year, children grown up, same old job, same old habits: walking in the mornings, book club once a month, Thursday late-night shopping, all that. Maybe I should try something else, take a risk.’

  ‘What sort of risk?’ Dan asks, the reasons why he would prefer her not to change piling up like stacks of disused tyres in his mind.

  ‘That’s the problem, I haven’t worked it out yet. Not your sort of risks, of course, just doing something different. Archie says it’s like the pipeline to bring water to Perth from the Kimberley; just a pipe dream.’

  ‘Not that dreams aren’t worth having,’ Archie says. They hear him before they see him, because he has a deep voice and his bare feet are slapping noisily against the tiles.

  ‘Hi, Arch. Happy two thousand,’ Dan says.

  Archie, wrapped in a white towelling robe, his hair still damp from the shower, grips Dan’s shoulder with a large hand as he passes his chair. ‘You too, mate. Let’s make it a good one.’ And he goes over to Zoë, who is pouring him a cup of tea, and puts his arms around her. ‘Morning, lovely one.’

  Dan likes seeing them together; there is something wonderfully reassuring about having them always there to come home to. He’s seen enough men who lack what he has, who think that having nothing to lose makes them better soldiers. But, too often, it makes them reckless. This change thing niggles him though, consistency is one of the things he loves best about his mother. He likes her reliability, likes that he can predict her reactions, even when they irritate him. There is something unspoken between them that comes, he thinks, from what happened when he was born. He’d been twelve when Rosie was born, and when he’d walked into the maternity ward with Archie to find Zoë holding a grizzling interloper wrapped in its fluffy white shawl, a bolt of jealousy had whipped through him. What about me? he’d wanted to shout. But Zoë had reached out and patted the bed beside her, and as he scrambled onto the high hospital bed, he’d known that he was safe, that what bound them together was unchanged. He could afford to be generous to this squalling, blue-eyed baby.

  Archie takes a mug of tea from Zoë and joins Dan at the table. ‘Risk,’ he says, winking at him. ‘You’d think she’d have had enough of that being married to me, wouldn’t you?’

  Dan laughs. ‘You are the least risky person in the world, Arch. If Mum’s planning a new career as a parachutist or a caver, that’s why.’

  ‘Stop talking about me as though I’m not here,’ Zoë says, pulling her chair closer to Archie’s and leaning against him. ‘I’ll work out what my risk is without your interference, thank you.’

  Archie rolls his eyes. ‘So, Dan, this woman you’ve been keeping up your sleeve. Tell us more about her.’

  Dan flushes. ‘We met a couple of months before I went away, and I wasn’t sure how it was going to work out.’ He feels his face go hot. ‘I didn’t want to say too much,’ he laughs, turning it into a joke to hide his vulnerability. ‘You two are always trying to marry me off.’

  ‘It seems to be the only way of getting rid of you,’ Archie says. ‘Finding a good woman to get you off our hands.’

  Dan looks down at his tea. ‘Well, I may have found her,’ he says quietly.

  Archie whistles through his teeth. ‘May have?’

  ‘Almost certainly have.’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ Zoë says, and he can see that she’s genuinely happy for him but also anxious. He’s had plenty of girlfriends but most have been passing fancies.

  ‘So, we get to meet her this afternoon?’

  Dan nods. ‘You do, and you have to promise not to be weird and not to interrogate her. Just be normal. Both of you.’

  ‘We are normal,’ Archie says, putting his arm around Zoë’s shoulders. ‘We’re very normal people, aren’t we, Zo?’

  ‘Mum?’ Dan says, looking at her.

  ‘I promise not to interrogate her, Dan,’ Zoë says. ‘At least, not on her first visit.’

  Some hours later, Zoë stands at the worktop whipping egg whites for pavlovas. It’s a job she hates and she’d bought ready-made cases in Coles but, strangely, this morning she decided to make her own. Is she trying to impress Dan’s girlfriend? It’s hard not to want to make a good impression because he does seem serious this time. She’s trying not to feel hurt that Dan’s known her for almost six months and hasn’t said a word about her until now.

  Seated nearby at the table, Eileen is slicing strawberries and kiwi fruit. She does it slowly and methodically, watching the sharp blade and her own hands very closely, because, as she told Zoë earlier, ‘I don’t see so well these days, and when you’re my age a cut can take a long time to heal, like when I caught my arm on that nail on the back gate.’

  These days, everything Eileen does is slow, laborious and somehow attached to a convoluted story from which she emerges as a victim.

  ‘This girl of Daniel’s is coming over, then?’ Eileen says now, looking up and pushing her glasses back on to the bridge of her nose, leaving a fragment of strawberry on the corner of one lens. ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘I’ve told you, Mum, I don’t know,’ Zoë says, trying to hide her im
patience. ‘I’ve not met her yet.’

  ‘He must have told you something about her.’

  ‘No, he’s being very secretive, although apparently he told Rosie that she’s a bit older than him.’

  ‘Older? Well, that’s a bit odd. Men are usually older.’

  ‘Not necessarily. Not these days.’

  ‘These days,’ Eileen sniffs, ‘these days, anything goes, if you ask me.’

  Zoë hates discussing Daniel with her mother. Not that Eileen ever says anything overtly critical, but she doesn’t need to; it’s all in her tone and the silences punctuated with sniffs of disapproval. The day Zoë and Dan arrived in Perth in seventy-four, just in time for him to start school, Jane had brought Eileen to meet them at the airport. After the first awkward embraces, while Jane went to fetch the car, Zoë, Eileen and Dan collected the bags.

  ‘Why do you keep looking at me like that?’ Eileen had demanded of Dan, who had been watching her carefully since they arrived and was still staring thoughtfully up at her. He’d looked away then, and started to jump on and off the kerb. ‘I’m deciding if I like you,’ he said.

  ‘Well, really!’ Eileen said, colouring in annoyance.

  ‘He’s heard a lot about you, Mum,’ Zoë said. ‘Now he’s getting to know what you look like.’ But she had known even then that this was going to be more difficult than she’d imagined. A few years earlier, her mother had told her not to come home with a black baby, but Zoë had assumed that, over time, Eileen would have softened and that she had been forgiven. But immediately she saw her mother’s face at the airport and felt her body stiff as a post when she went to hug her, she knew that nothing was forgiven. Daniel was different, as different as it was possible to be in Eileen’s eyes. She clearly resented her daughter for forcing this difference on her, making it part of her life.

  ‘Let it go, Zo,’ Archie had said seven years later, when Rosie was born and greeted with lavish affection and gifts from her grandmother. ‘Let it go, she’s never going to treat Dan like a grandson and you can only make things worse. If Dan can handle it when he’s only twelve, you have to handle it too.’