To Know My Crime

by Fiona Capp

  ‘It’s going to be all right, my darling. It’s not as bad as it seems. Everything will be as we planned.’

  She looks at him and tears pool in her eyes. Their plans mean nothing any more. She will never speak again. Or if she does it will be so laboured and mangled, she will sound monstrous, drunken, not all there. For an hour yesterday, she lay in her own faecal matter, unable to alert anyone, until the nurse finally realised and cleaned her up. Their love cannot survive this. She knows where she’s headed. That hell-hole she’s always feared. It is the one thing she was right about.

  She had prided herself on her clear-sightedness, on her willingness to look hard truths in the face. That was her job and she believed she was good at it. She believed she was fully awake to the ways of the human mind and heart. She might never walk again, but neither would she sleepwalk through her life. So why had she been so wilfully blind? Why had she pushed away what had puzzled her, that nagging feeling there were things she wasn’t being told?

  And now they are lying again. Telling her she will recover. Even now, after everything, they are still trying to shield her from the truth. Treating her like a child who cannot endure bad news, as if she doesn’t already know what bad news means. As if trust doesn’t matter. As if everything hasn’t been shattered. Everything that held them together. Everything she believed them to be. If the doctors opened her up, they would find a bomb site and a crater where her heart used to be.

  Ned comes each afternoon when Richard has gone. He parks the car in the underground parking lot and takes the walkway high above the busy road. He thought they’d left this place behind them. But here they are again, back in the hospital where it all began. The smokey ranges in the distance, the empty blue sky above.

  He was in the south of France, hiking in the Cévennes, when he got the call about Angela’s accident. Thirty hours later, at Angela’s bedside, he still had the dust of mountains on his boots. Whenever he looks back longingly on that footloose life, beholden to no one, he reminds himself of how it felt, every day spent alone or in the company of strangers, always moving on. It was only after he threw himself into getting Angela’s life back on track that he found some meaning in his own. The early months were the hardest, trying to reach her across those endless tracts of outer space. He will never forget the day when he saw her propped up in bed, looking out the window, and how he came up with something halfway witty that made her crack a smile. He was certain then that her exile was over, she was out of the darkness and back in the world.

  And now it’s dark again, even darker than before, and he’s frightened that this time she won’t even try to find her way back. And if she gives up all hope, he knows what she’ll want of him. And even though she occasionally smiles, it’s as if she’s baring her teeth. Ned has tried explaining why he did what he did with their money, how it was done with the best of intentions, but she won’t let him speak. Closes her eyes and shakes her head. None of it matters to her now. Every afternoon, as his shoes squeak down the hospital corridors on his way to her room, he braces himself for her demand that he fulfil the promise he made. She has been given an alphabet board she can use to communicate by spelling out words with nods and shakes of her head. So far, she has refused to use it. But any day now she might. And he knows that he will have to say no, that he won’t be able to honour his promise. And that this will be his final betrayal.

  Today he has brought his laptop with the time-lapse images of the cactus flowering. As he sets it up on the over-bed tray, he can see she’s doing her best to look grateful, but the effort is costing her dearly. Each day he visits her, he finds himself thinking of the flower in the early hours of dawn – the bit he didn’t film – as it closes and wilts.

  On the screen, the bud’s outer casing is twitching. At the sight of it, Angela is conscious of faint echoes of stirrings that belong to another life. And then, before she knows it, the flower is opening, hungrily drinking in the darkness, quivering stamens reaching for the moon. It’s all happening so fast, so much faster than it did that night, and now the bloom is wide open and hurtling towards its end. And that’s when it hits her with terrible certainty. That was her moment. Those weeks that followed. That’s all she gets.

  She can’t look any longer. What flares in front of them is not a flower in full bloom but a ghost. An after-image. A reminder of what is gone. There is only one thing she wants now. These atoms have never really been hers, have been a billion other things before they took her shape. She wants to set them free to take on new form, to go their own way. She imagines them swirling off into the universe, into infinity. For an instant, she feels euphoric. She is not trapped after all.

  30.

  The day she is released from hospital is her thirty-sixth birthday. At the park, the trees glow at the edges in the buttery afternoon light. Birds sing in the branches, a ripe smell rises from the earth. It was once her favourite hour, when the wheels of time slipped into a lower gear, when she succumbed to the mood of release and the sweet melancholy of another day gone, and declared a temporary truce between herself and the world.

  Mai is shaking out the tablecloth, letting it billow and settle over the tabletop before she lays out the food and the drink: the dips, the savoury tarts, the pastry treats; the bottles of prosecco and limoncello in tubs of ice. Nearby, Ned is hanging paper lanterns from the branches of trees. They are doing their best to make the occasion a happy one but their best is no longer enough. They have loved her too well. She can’t bear to think about what they risked, how they gambled their future, their everything. For her. She is the reason all this has happened. There must be something about her, something destructive. She can’t let them ruin their lives.

  After they have eaten, Mai brings out a cake and they sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and it’s the saddest, most dismal sound Angela has ever heard. Even the doves and the blackbirds, even the screeching cockatoos, fall silent, as if appalled. She leaves her wine undrunk and nods at the ground to indicate that she wants to lie down on the grass so that she can look up at the trees, the old elms that used to comfort her in a way that nothing else could. Mai protests that the ground is too damp, but Angela doesn’t care. She won’t feel anything anyway, except when she turns her cheek to the grass, just to remind herself the earth is still there.

  She thinks of what lies beneath her: the vast, hidden lattice of roots that once, when the tree was a sapling, ventured into unknown territory, like the territory she has spent so many hours exploring with her patients, trying to comprehend how this fertile darkness feeds the world above.

  These old trees are near the end of their life span; they can’t have long left. Their branches no longer reach wide and high, and every strong wind prunes them a little bit more, snaps off their extremities. Not long ago, she came here after a storm to find one of these huge centurions ripped from the ground at the roots. You could see that it had rotted inside. Perhaps all of them are rotted inside; how can you know? Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before the rot gets them all.

  She once regarded them as the greatest of philosophers. They stood above things, wise and aloof. They seemed to know how to endure with dignity, how to hold up the sky. But she is done with sentimentality. The truth is they know nothing at all. They are blind, deaf, dumb. Rooted to the spot, they mindlessly draw water from below and suck light from above, vessels for the life force that possesses them until it is time to move on. They can offer her no comfort now. All around her, broken twigs litter the ground.

  Fingers of cloud inflamed by the sunset are reaching across the sky when Ned helps Angela back into her chair and Mai pushes her across the grass. They file off down the street, over the cracks in the footpath tufted with weeds, like a royal procession: the queen, her lady-in-waiting and her joker, her fool. Marching along as if they know where they’re going, as if there aren’t larger forces at play forever jerking on their strings, tugging them this way and that.

  When they turn into Angela’s street, the
y see him up ahead, leaning against his sleek black Jag. He watches them approach, his eyes fixed on Angela. The arrangements have already been made; nothing needs to be said.

  Mai bends to Angela to kiss her goodbye. ‘See you Monday. Have a good time.’

  Angela lets her cheek linger against Mai’s silky skin. This young woman has been her hands and her legs, has devoted herself to Angela’s most intimate needs. Has been more than a friend. There is no way she can thank her – even if she could speak. She summons up all her energy and puts her whole being into it, into a blazing smile of farewell.

  Mai steps back and Ned looms over her. Angela looks up at him, blinking fast. Her lips scrape the stubble near his mouth. Without him she would not have had the past three miraculous years. It’s as simple as that. She breathes in the little brother smell of him, almost sobs and then steels herself. In a moment she’ll be in the car, with its tinted windows, and the ordeal will be over.

  She sends Richard a sharp glance that says, I can’t bear this. Take me away. As the car moves off, she drinks in one last look at the street with its plane trees, the old man’s cottage, the house of the hillbillies, the brightly coloured place where the artists live. And then they are out in traffic, heading for the coast, and her world is receding behind them in a blur of tears.

  Richard has been watching her all the while, knowing her anguish but unable to speak of it because he has to believe her mind can be changed in the span of time it takes for the freeway to pass through the endless suburbs and the dwindling farmland and vineyards and deliver them to the house on Millionaires Walk.

  Only when the tears have stopped does he begin to speak. If she has the slightest doubt, if the smallest part of her is still unsure, he will turn the car around and they will drive back to town.

  As he talks, he is painfully conscious that all his methods of persuasion, honed by the years of telling people what he believes they want to hear, are utterly useless. Angela is not people. She is the most singular of all women; the woman he loves. A woman who knows her own mind. Who won’t be bargained with. Won’t be tempted. Every carefully worded argument and ardent plea, the finest performance of his life, is met with a shake of her head.

  When she was in the hospital, he would try to reach her with questions to which she could answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’, a nod or a shake. It was the only form of communication left to him. She was perfectly capable of spelling out words, but she chose not to because there was nothing left she wanted to say. She was simply waiting for him to ask the right question. Some days, her eyes positively shouted at him. Angela had told him, when they first fell in love, what she had asked of Ned after her accident. The promise that, if things got too much, he would give her the thing that she wanted. ‘But I would never have asked him. I couldn’t. It wouldn’t be fair.’ Just knowing it was possible made all the difference. ‘There is nothing more terrifying, more crushing,’ he remembers her saying, ‘than being utterly helpless. Every newborn knows that.’

  In the lead-up to her discharge, he could see her despair deepening in the frantic way her eyes bored into him. It would be the greatest act of love he could show her. How could he deny her when he knew it was what she wanted more than anything else? When it would mean redeeming himself in her eyes?

  Angela can’t look at him, but neither is she really seeing what is passing outside the car window. The world is perpetually behind glass now. It is a place she can no longer be part of, a place she has been cut off from ever since she collapsed on her lounge-room floor. She remembers the blowfly in her hospital room that kept head-butting the window, this incomprehensible, invisible barrier between itself and the world outside. And how its assaults on the glass became ever more deranged until it dropped dead from exhaustion. Or maybe despair – who could know?

  If she could do it on her own, she would. It is a terrible thing to ask of him but after everything that has happened, doesn’t he owe her this?

  His assent has moved her more deeply than she thought it possible to feel. She will neither have to linger interminably nor die alone. She could ask for nothing more.

  She turns her head to the passenger-side window and her exhalation forms a cloud on the glass. Not my breath, the breath. This is what she has learned. Not to claim but observe it. The rhythm, the depth of it, whether it rolls out smoothly like ocean swell, or is broken, like a wave over a shallow reef. They are out of the suburbs now and the countryside is opening up before them in the dying light, the hills with their serried ranks of vines and the curve of the blue bay beyond.

  Finally she turns to him. She wants to offer him one last chance. She gives him an inquiring look and hopes he understands. You don’t have to do this.

  His fingers relax their grip on the wheel, as if with relief. She can see him wavering. She holds her breath as an unbearable silence stretches between them.

  It is almost dark when they arrive at the Anchorage. Richard wheels her to her favourite spot on the lawn, looking out over Millionaires Walk and the deep purple bruise of the bay. Across the water, the shattered glitter of the city bounces off the clouds. The hills to the east are exhaling stars into the obsidian sky, like shiny bubbles rising from the depths.

  Richard goes into the house and with trembling hands pours the liquid into a glass and returns to her side. Their kiss is chaste. He meets her gaze and she nods. He stares back at her, unable to move. She nods again, more sharply, commanding him to go on. Still he hesitates. What made him think he could do this? It is too enormous a thing.

  Angela can’t wait any longer. An animal moan wells up out of her, a moan more articulate than words, a moan that beseeches him, Do not abandon me now.

  The sound of it shocks him into action. He can’t fail her again. All that matters is this moment, seeing it through to the end.

  He holds the glass to her lips. The cold liquid enters her body. She relaxes and closes her eyes. Every last ounce of her attention goes to her breath. This is something she knows she can do. Let go of all thoughts. Nothing exists but the breath. Her terror is a passing cloud, behind which the sky is clear and full of stars. This is what it was all about, those endless hours of sitting. To prepare her for the moment when the breath would no longer come.

  Richard crouches at her side, his arms wrapped tightly around her. He can feel her breath growing ever more shallow until her chest ceases to rise.

  Out on the bay, lights flicker like fireflies. Here and there and then gone.

  31.

  The police are still there when Ned and Mai arrive close to midnight. When he looks back, Ned will remember almost nothing of the drive down, how the speed limit ceased to exist as his screaming brain fixed on those final moments before Angela disappeared into Richard’s car. Why didn’t he realise? He, of all people, should have known. Anyone could see she had drifted out of reach, that she didn’t want to come back. And he had heard her stifle that gasp when he bent to kiss her goodbye. But he let it pass, just as he did Angela’s hints about trouble between her and Matthew all those years ago. It had always been his way, to act as if everything was fine in the hope that it would make it so. He has never learned.

  Now, as they stand on the garden path outside the Anchorage, the police ask Ned about Angela’s relationship with Morrow, his sister’s state of mind and what he knew, if anything, of her wish to die.

  When the police are finished with him, Ned and Mai go inside to the bedroom. On the high, canopied bed lies Angela’s body, dressed in the slacks and the soft white blouse she was wearing when they last saw her. But the room couldn’t be more empty, a cold absence at its heart. He can’t look for long. He would never have presumed to stare at her when she was alive and doesn’t see what gives him the right to do it now.

  Mai is weeping behind him. He turns abruptly and strides out of the house and across the lawn to Millionaires Walk where he almost collides with Morrow who is looking out over the bay. The two men recoil from each other.

  It is Ned w
ho speaks first. ‘What have you done?’

  Morrow gazes about him like a man who has just stepped out of a dream or a fog or a smoking wreck and is stunned to find people going about their normal lives. His haggard eyes widen as the magnitude of what has happened, of what he has done, begins to sink in.

  ‘I hardly know myself.’

  Ned kicks open the gate that says Private Property. Enter at Own Risk, and hurtles down the wooden walkway, not caring where his feet land. On the beach below, he rips off his shoes and staggers out into the shallows, flailing the water until the explosions drip from his face like another man’s tears. He thrashes about until his arms are spent and he is completely soaked and then lurches drunkenly back to the sand. Following the shoreline up to the headland, he gropes over the rocks, feet slipping into unseen pools, as he makes his way around to the beach beyond.

  The white arc of it glimmers in the moonlight, much of it swallowed by the Easter king tide. Ned’s eyes go straight to the spot where he saw the whale’s rotting carcass and then further up to where it was hurriedly interred. Instead of a gentle mound, something large and skeletal is rearing up out of the sand. The tide has finally done its work and exposed what had been put out of mind. All the flesh is gone now. Nothing but pure, white bones. The leviathan has been washed clean.

  Ned drops to his knees and drags out handfuls of beach from the vast rib cage. When there is enough space inside, he crawls in and lies on his back, his body surrendering to the soft, fine sand. He will stay here until morning so that no one can cover it again. So that the truth can finally come out. He stares up through the bars of bone and the last thing he remembers before sleep claims him is the kite of the Southern Cross diving towards the sea.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS