To Know My Crime

by Fiona Capp

  Angela’s face breaks open in a radiant smile. She turns apologetically to Mai. ‘Would it be terribly rude . . .?’

  ‘No, of course not!’ Mai almost shouts to cover her dismay. With an exaggerated sweep of her arm, she ushers them off. ‘Go! Have fun! Go!’

  The lights have gone down by the time she stumbles back to her seat, bumping against knees and tripping over feet. The dancers enter from the wings and she tries to focus on their movements, but her head is still out in the foyer watching Morrow and Angela leave. If they get back together, it will be the end of Mai working for Angela. She has no desire to be around the politician again. She’s no longer sure she could vouch for herself; something would be sure to slip out.

  Mai wonders if the dancers are happy, if they feel fulfilled. In the two years since she finished her training, she has performed in one fringe show. She dreads Sunday dinners at her mother’s house because Huan can’t resist asking her how her dancing career is going, even though he knows. She once tried to explain the audition process. How you were a number, no one called you by name. When your turn came, you had to give everything – but they gave nothing back. To the choreographer, you were just a body, a tool to realise their vision. Your ideas, your feelings, didn’t count. The culling could go on for days. You could be called back again and again, your hopes rising to impossible heights, only to be told that you were good, but not good enough. You quickly learned that they’d made up their minds before the auditions began. They were looking for a certain type. It was all about luck, the genes you were dealt. No matter how talented you were, if you didn’t have the body they wanted, you didn’t have a chance. Each time she goes to a performance, the dancers on the stage look further away.

  The rest of the performance passes in a blur. After the first encore, she makes her getaway. Out in the street, with the trams clanking by, she calls Ned. She needs to see him. He is working at a pub not far from the centre of the city. By the time she gets there, he will be closing up and they will have the place to themselves.

  Ned is emptying out the slops tray and wiping down the bar when Mai steps into the familiar fug of stale beer and hot chips. The walls are covered in football and music memorabilia and odd pieces of kitsch: a mounted moose head and a three-dimensional picture of Jesus radiating sunbeams, a lurid red heart flashing in his chest.

  Mai locks the door behind her. They go outside to the beer garden and find a spot beneath the willow-pattern silhouette of a Japanese maple. She looks around at the empty tables. ‘Strange with no one else here.’

  ‘Bliss.’ For six hours, Ned has had hungry and thirsty and increasingly drunk people shouting orders at him, inches from his face. He would like to sit quietly and sip his beer and say nothing, but he can tell from the tense line of Mai’s mouth that there’s no chance of that.

  She seizes a beer coaster. Tears little pieces off it, placing them on top of each other, as if building a pyre. She’s just come from the dance show she is reviewing, she says.

  Ned knows what is coming. ‘How was it?’

  ‘Morrow was there.’

  He does his best to look surprised.

  ‘They left together at interval. Went back to his apartment.’

  This time, Ned’s shock is genuine. He hadn’t expected things to move so fast.

  Mai scans his face. She has let him down. ‘How could I stop her?’

  ‘You couldn’t. You’re not her mother.’

  ‘But I should’ve done something. Warned her somehow. She has a right to know.’

  He leans in. ‘And does she have the right to know about us? What we did? What good would it do?’

  Mai rips up the coaster in silence. She wishes she had a match.

  ‘Don’t torment yourself, Mai. How did she seem?’

  Ned can feel her reluctance to say it.

  ‘She was glowing.’

  ‘There’s your answer. I don’t like this any more than you do. But what choice do we have?’

  ‘Not much.’

  Less than that, Ned wants to say. He’s on his own now. Mai would despise him if she knew. And he wouldn’t blame her. He despises himself. There was almost a fight at the pub tonight, two guys goading each other. Shouting insults, jabbing each other in the chest. In the past, he would’ve stepped in immediately. But tonight, he held back and waited. Not out of fear but because he wanted it to go further. He dreams of it constantly, of walking up to Morrow and letting his fists do the talking. One to the face and then one to the gut. Make him buckle, make him gasp. Make him grovel and beg. Ned was never a fighter in the schoolyard. He didn’t need to be. He could smooth-talk his way out of anything. And now look at him. He’s mouthing whatever Morrow tells him, conning his sister and lying to his girlfriend. He doesn’t see how much lower he can go.

  Ned polishes off his beer. ‘Coming?’

  Just as Mai is getting up, something silvery catches her eye in the far corner of the garden. She stops. ‘Is that a camera?’

  Ned doesn’t even look at it. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Never noticed it before.’

  ‘Because they weren’t there.’

  Ned started his shift one day to find a camera either side of the entrance, clocking the passing traffic on the footpath and anyone who came into the pub. Inside there was another above the door marked PRIVATE that led to the kitchen and the stairs. This one was a large black ball with glittery little bulbs like the pixilated eyes of an insect that never sleeps.

  ‘They’re everywhere.’ He leads the way up the wooden stairs, sticky from a century of grime, and points to a spot over the door that leads to the old publican’s residence, which is now his. Another eyeball. It was two days after Ned and Morrow’s encounter at the Anchorage that they appeared. He had just discovered that Morrow knew everything, that he had him over a barrel. And suddenly these cameras were installed, without warning. Crazy to imagine that Morrow is behind it, and yet Ned wouldn’t put it past him. The boss is always boasting about his influential friends. If Morrow could bring in the security expert who followed the money trail back to Ned, who knows what else he might do? The cameras are just another form of private eye.

  Mai searches the walls of Ned’s bedroom. Her eyes linger for a moment on a disconnected fire alarm dangling from a wire. She is about to ask him if there’s been a break-in or a brawl. Or money going missing from the till. There has to be a reason for the cameras. Then she remembers something that’s been bugging her, a passing remark Angela made before the show.

  ‘Angela told me about the cactus flower. She said it was a shame I couldn’t come.’

  Ned is lying on his bed, one hand over his eyes. He takes his hand away. ‘You were having dinner at your mum’s.’

  ‘But I told you it was cancelled. Mum was sick.’

  ‘Well fuck it! I forgot. What the fuck does it matter?’ Suddenly he’s on his feet, hissing like a cornered animal as he bounds across the room, his head about to explode. The next thing he knows, his fist has gone through the panel in the door and he can see the hallway beyond. Then he’s reeling backwards, cradling his knuckles to his belly, a strangled sound coming from deep in his throat.

  When Mai moves towards him, he pushes her aside and lurches out to the bathroom. After the first burning rush of cold water, the swollen pulp of his hand goes numb. Blood and splinters of wood swirl down the plughole. Mai appears in the mirror, her face so white it’s a miracle she’s still on her feet. He can’t bear to meet her eyes. If only he could crawl into a small dark hole and never come out.

  27.

  She wakes to the swampy scent of their bodies and the contented warbling of a magpie somewhere out in the street. Richard is already up. She can hear him in the kitchen, can smell coffee and toast. She smiles at the sight of their clothes wildly abandoned on the chair in the corner. When she thinks about the sequence of events, how it all unfolded – Ned at the open house, the cactus flower blooming, Richard at the ballet on a whim – she can see why people sta
rt to believe some things are fated, that they’re meant to be. The idea is nonsense, of course, but she can understand the temptation. Her patients do it all the time. It’s so hard to resist.

  Last night when Richard kissed the nape of her neck, when his tongue fluttered behind her earlobes and into the hollows of her clavicle, when he lacquered her all over with his lust, she swore she could feel parts of her that had long ago gone to sleep. The joy of it went so deep. And she remembers how his long frame shuddered as she swept her hands down his body, how he rose to her open mouth.

  Afterwards, they talked until dawn. There was nothing they could not say to each other. Everything felt so easy, so right. Nights will no longer be a lonely ordeal, flat on her back and unable to move, counting down the interminable hours before the morning shift arrives. She thinks of all the nights stretching ahead of them and the pleasures of this other kind of dancing in the dark. Richard appears in the doorway with the breakfast tray. He is wearing a claret silk dressing gown she hasn’t seen him in before.

  ‘May your butler come in?’

  He puts the tray on the bed and helps Angela to sit up, then slides into bed next to her. Announces that he’s taking the day off.

  Angela takes a bite of her toast. ‘What about all your appointments, those important people desperate to see you?’

  ‘They can wait.’ He smiles. ‘I am at an appointment right now. With the most important person I know.’ He pours her coffee and becomes more serious. ‘I meant it, what I said in my letters. I want to get out.’ The problem with politics was that you couldn’t be who you really were. You were always on the defensive, guarding against attacks, forced to act against your better judgement, always afraid you’d slip up. It was impossible to be your best self. And this, he explains, is what he wants to give her, the best he can be.

  As he speaks, she can hear him putting a distance between Richard the politician and Richard the man. It was Richard the politician who lived in the world of compromise, who did the deals that had to be done. Things at which Richard the man now looks askance. He can’t go back and change the past but he can leave the politician behind him. So much that once mattered to him no longer does. Not now that they are together again. He is not the man she first met that day at the Anchorage, nor even the man she knew when their relationship began. He wants them to make a fresh start.

  Richard searches her sculpted face. A face so beautiful to him it makes him ache. Will she understand? Since their separation, he has thought long and hard about what he wanted to say to her, and hopes it hasn’t come out like a speech. In politics, you have to make hard decisions and move on. He’s never been one for self-doubt or reproach. It is a weakness he couldn’t afford. Until Angela ended the relationship and took everything meaningful with her, left him as hollow as his empty house. He knew then he would do anything for her, anything to get her back. Anything to restore himself in her eyes.

  His solemnity makes Angela smile. She had found it hard to believe he would quit politics. She assumed he was saying what he thought she wanted to hear. She sees now that she wasn’t being fair to him.

  ‘It worries me you’ll regret it.’

  He gives a mirthless laugh. ‘Of all the things to regret, leaving politics will not be one of them. There are plenty of company boards I can sit on. I could go back to the law. And think of the travel we could do.’

  Can she be this lucky? He had been prepared to sell his house for her, now he is vowing to give up his career. She knew it would take a rare kind of man to love her. And he has proved himself to be that man. She has not pressed him about what happened with Stone. But he has addressed it, in his way. There’s no point dragging it up, raking it over on this beautiful sunny morning after such a night. She would only break the spell.

  It is the future that matters, not the past. And no matter what Freud might say, they don’t have to be ruled by it. Everyone is capable of change. This time, she and Richard have come together with their eyes wide open. They know about each other’s ghosts and will not be haunted by them. There is so much to look forward to, so much to be happy about.

  They have agreed on the importance of spending more time at Angela’s flat, of Richard discovering her side of town. She wants him to know her neighbourhood: the streets, the people, the little park she loves so much. It will feel like travel, she teases him. Like visiting a foreign country or exploring the dark side of the moon. He has to admit there’s some truth in it. These are suburbs he knows nothing about, except for when they hit the evening news – a gangland shooting or a shocking rape; things that never happen in his electorate, or if they do, it’s behind closed doors. Now everything about this part of the city intrigues him because it matters to Angela, draws him deeper into how she sees the world.

  The morning she takes him to her little park, tucked away in the back streets, council workers have just finished installing new playground equipment and wooden benches either side of the gravel path with its colonnade of elms. In keeping with the secret garden feel of the park, the quirky equipment has a fairy tale look, with odd angles, all of it made from rough-hewn wood. What she hadn’t anticipated was the adult-sized swing – a cedar bench with a back rest strung on chains from an A-frame, with a gentle backward tilt. Finally, she thinks, the recognition that adults need to play too.

  As soon as the swing is free, Angela and Richard claim it. They rock forward and back, the arc gradually deepening, lifting them up towards the outstretched branches of the elms. Angela closes her eyes to better experience the pitch and swell of their motion. They might be in a boat on the ocean or soaring through the sky. She is reminded of her favourite ride as a child, the few times her parents took her and Ned to Luna Park. The ghost train didn’t scare her and all the scenic railway offered was a nice view of the bay. But the rotor was a different story. The cylindrical room would begin to spin, slowly at first and then faster and faster until the anticipation of what was coming was almost too much to bear. And then suddenly the floor dropped away and somehow you stayed pinned to the wall, too young to understand the gravitational forces at work. To her mind it was magic. A terror and exhilaration beyond words.

  How long, she wonders, is it since she felt as free or alive as she does at this moment? The last time she can remember was at the retreat when her body dissolved into vibrating atoms, into a cloud of swirling particles in motion. The liberating knowledge that nothing was as solid or as final as it seemed. This time, she will not cut it short, not be afraid. She will drink in every second and come back for more. She feels Richard’s hand tighten on her shoulder, holding her secure while she flies. She could die right now and be happy. Could die over and over again.

  As they stroll down her street, Angela points to the houses and tells Richard about the people who live there. A tumbledown workers cottage was occupied, until recently, by a ninety-year-old man who was always shouting and cursing someone inside. It took her ages to realise he was talking to his dog. Every day Angela would see them on their halting circuit of the block. A week after the dog died, the man did, too.

  Then there’s the double-fronted wooden place painted the colours of a Chinese joss house where two artists live, and next door to them the home of the bearded woman who goes about her life with serene indifference to the stares. A few doors up there’s the Buddhist nun and her teenage daughter who never says a word. Angela’s favourite household are the hillbillies, as she calls them. The mother was a lollypop lady until her daughter – her spitting image – took over the job. The father wears a piratical black eye-patch and rides a tricycle.

  When they reach Angela’s flat, she grins. ‘Well, you know the strange woman who lives here. Gets around in a chair. Tries to shrink people’s heads.’

  They laugh, and as they head up the path through the garden, they see the two lank-haired sisters from the flat above coming out the front door. The sisters nod reluctantly at Angela and Richard. Angela never knows what to expect from them. Sometimes they
are friendly, almost gushing; other times, they walk right past her as if she isn’t there.

  That evening during dinner, Angela and Richard hear an angry voice shouting into the intercom at the main door outside. It is the younger brother of the women upstairs and they won’t let him in. There’s been a falling-out between the sisters and the brother, Angela explains to Richard, over their mother’s will. After a heated exchange, the sisters refuse to respond to his buzzing. Eventually he falls silent. They assume he has given up until someone from the flats arrives home and the brother slips in the front door. He stomps up the stairs and starts bashing on his sisters’ door, telling them to let him in. When they ignore him, he calls them evil bitches and crooks and much more. He seems to have run out of insults when he gets a second wind and launches into a hysterical screech. You ugly, ugly, ugly . . .

  Angela and Richard fall silent.

  There is a pause as the brother searches for the word he is after, the word that will nail their betrayal. Then he finds it, his voice thick with disgust. Sisters!

  In the flat below, Angela and Richard erupt into laughter. Angela almost expects people to fling open their doors and break into applause. It is so funny and sad.

  ‘What a soap opera,’ Richard says. ‘Better than reality TV. Not that I watch it.’

  ‘Bet this kind of thing doesn’t happen in your apartment block. You poor, poor man. You’re missing out.’

  He smiles. ‘I think maybe I am.’

  They finish the last of the gourmet take-away and settle down for a post-mortem of the afternoon’s events over wine. Richard had a meeting with the premier to tell him of his plans to retire. The premier, of course, tried to talk him out of it.

  ‘I told him he was wasting his breath.’

  ‘I saw the premier’s friend,’ Angela says. ‘The one who told him I did wonders for her. Her husband recently left her and she’s in a mess.

  When the door buzzer goes again – this time in Angela’s flat – she assumes it’s the brother back for a second try. Then a crackly voice comes through the intercom, a voice that she knows too well.