It transpired that Cheryl was under the impression that the Commodore so lovingly presented as a nuptial gift was hers to drive. But Dennis, equally bewildered, was stunned beyond belief that a woman would actually dare to drive such a machine. He faced her down in the driveway yelling, in his teddy-bear boxers, until she finally turned the ignition off. She got out of the car and he went up and wrenched the key from her hand.
Still yelling, though she was right beside him, he threw at her all the work he had performed on it. The many nights in the garage under the fluorescent lights. The layers of Turtle Wax. The fake-fur upholstery, which he had ordered specially and had made up locally, at huge expense, and not some shit factory job from China. And many other factors.
As a man, he would only consider driving it on rare occasions. As a couple, they would only take it out to, say, a Commodore Car Club function or maybe the annual CommRally, in Camden. While Dennis continued to yell the neighbours dispersed, the situation being too confrontational even for them. He had called her names – stupid sheila, fucking idiot, and worse – until, enraged and exasperated, he was depleted of all words and he stamped, barefooted, back into the house. She followed him to the bedroom as he flung on track pants and runners and as he walked back out the front door towards the Commodore parked in the driveway. At the letterbox Cheryl uttered the unforgivable words.
‘Then what’s it for, Dennis? If it’s not to drive?’
Now speechless, Dennis shook his head, slipped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door, but not too hard. He started up the ignition, which growled rather than purred. What was it for? The question, or at least the answer, was so monumentally obvious he had never had to confront it before, not even to himself. What was it for? He slipped it into gear and stuck his head out the window.
‘A stupid woman wouldn’t appreciate. Couldn’t appreciate. Obviously. I thought you were different, but.’ Then he drove into the garage and slid the roller door shut behind himself and the car.
It was an existential question I pondered myself after Cheryl had finished telling me all the details of this incident and retired behind her computer screen where her face became unreadable. She had a way of peering through her transition lenses as if just by effort of her considerable personality she could force them to darken even though we were inside and the light remained unchanged. What was the Commodore for? Any Commodore, for that matter, at least any like the ones he fixed up, with their pink or blue fluorescent lights radiating out from underneath, with their stereo systems fixed so that even if you were underneath tinkering with the exhaust system you needn’t miss out on the effect, with their duco so brilliant you could shave in the reflection, and with all the little things like their sheepskin-padded armrests or the customised his ‘n’ hers fold-down travel trays and coffee cup holders.
This existential issue apparently also preoccupied Dennis for days afterwards, as, according the Cheryl, he did little else but mutter and shake his head. He left the new marital bed and shifted into the double garage, which was just as comfortable, if not more, than the house, since he spent so much time there that, years before, he had fitted it out with all the conveniences. It was warm, dry and equipped with facilities like a toilet, telephone and fridge. It even had carpet, which the Commodores never soiled, for their tyres were always washed and wiped dry after their occasional outings. Naturally they never dripped oil.
Soon afterwards Cheryl stopped driving her Mazda to work and was dropped off by Dennis, then picked up again in the afternoon. He drove one of the lesser Commodores, or ones he had not finished making over, and would park in the factory driveway with the ignition running. If Cheryl did not appear within several seconds, he would sound the horn. These came in a variety of tunes, all of them tuneless. The one I remember most was that of La Cucaracha, played fast and flat. The factory workers, also leaving then, would jump in the air, startled by the sudden blast of synthetic trumpet right in their ears. Cheryl would glance out the window, then at me, before grabbing her handbag and stomping down the stairs.
This seemed to go on for weeks. Cheryl remained as hardworking though much less talkative. To me at least. From being efficient and personable when dealing with our creditors she became voluble, at times even strident. I was not fully aware of this myself, not until one day when Mario appeared with a tray of crème brÛlée tarts, still smelling deliciously of singed sugar, to hear her berating the owner of a coffee shop in Surry Hills who owed three months’ worth of orders.
‘Do you think I give a stuff about your rising rent?’ she was saying and Mario raised his eyebrows, left the tarts on my desk and quickly retreated. He abhorred commerce. It was what people like me were for, so that he could cook and avoid people who owed or even paid him money. When Cheryl slammed the phone down it seemed her mouth was set straighter. Dennis tooted from below. She pulled her mouth into shape and left.
One day I had the old CD player ready at the window and as soon as he opened the driver’s window I pressed the start button. I was not subtle. Frank Zappa and all his instrumental syncopation blasted into the factory yard before I let him have the chorus at full volume, the part about being harder than your husband, harder than your husband . . .
The next afternoon, Dennis arrived early. This time he got out of the car and stood on the nature strip. He was wearing track pants and trainers, not cheap – Nike or Adidas – and a tight polo shirt, also with its signature tick emblem. He lit a cigarette and tucked the packet into his track pants pocket, then smoked steadily, staring up at the factory office window through his sunglasses. I noticed he was stocky. Almost, but not quite, fat. It was as if his skin was only just holding the rest of his body in, that if he breathed differently, harder or faster, it would all start to subside. I thought of that body in its mesh singlet and teddy-bear boxers. The anger. He threw his cigarette butt into the dwarf grevillea. When Cheryl joined him he took her by the wrist and pushed her inside the car, all the while staring up at me through the window.
They continued to live separated under the same roof, she told me. He was very comfortable there in the double garage. To make room for himself he would rotate the cars, keeping just one at a time inside while the others were lined up in the driveway like a string of racehorses waiting to be exercised. He shut himself in there and turned up the volume of his sound system and refused to come out, though she continued to cook meals for him which he would sometimes take, slamming the internal garage door behind him. They spoke only when necessary. I did not ask what music he listened to, alone in his garage. When she told me that he often had the engine running as he tinkered and polished, she stared at me, her lenses inscrutable.
‘He likes to listen to the sound of the engine running,’ she said.
I was not surprised when Dennis ceased to bring and fetch Cheryl to and from work. Nor even to learn that she had found him early one morning, slumped over the open boot, the engine that he had tuned so perfectly still growling harmoniously after running all night.
But I will say I was surprised when the police arrived one morning a day or two later. It was just after she started work and she had arrived, as she always did, right on nine. Their boots crunched over a mess of meringues that had been dropped the day before and not been properly cleaned up. As they led her away, she turned to me and said, ‘He was very pink, you know, when I found him. He didn’t look dead at all’, as if that made a difference.
Airlock
The first appointment is not until 9.30 but I like to give myself plenty of time, so it is just gone 8.30 when I turn into the driveway. I drive all the way to the end and around the corner to park behind the house. Beside the shed and the bins there is nothing else on the concrete slab, just a washing line. Which is never used. I have a steering lock, which I always attach before getting out and locking the car itself. Out here, kids are prone to come through the back lane and up the side. It is a short cut to the station.
The washing line wheels uncerta
inly in the breeze, a few centimetres above my head but I duck anyway to get past it. The handle is stuck, otherwise I would wind it further up. I unlock the security door then the wooden door, which leads directly into the back waiting room. I shut and lock the security door behind me. If the weather is pleasant I leave the wooden door open, and I can see the clients before they see me. The security door presents them with a blank face. They peer at it, trying to see the figure behind it, but I know I barely form a shadow to their squinting eyes.
It must take the department ages to find these places. So many conditions. Close to public transport, and a medical facility just in case. A police LAC within five minutes’ reach. Central enough to both parties. No garden, to minimise upkeep. Quiet neighbours, or preferably none. A driveway all the way down the side of the house. Not so large as to be wasting space. But not small either. A lockable side gate. And two separate entries, front and back, security doors on each. Of course the department can take care of the latter requirements, and in some cases they install window shutters and CCTV systems too. But the other conditions are not so easy to satisfy.
The place is brick but still traps the heat, or the cold if it’s winter. It feels hot inside already, and since I cannot open the doors and windows to let in the breeze, the first thing I do is go to the middle room and turn the air conditioner on. The rest of the house does not matter. The second thing I do is switch the kettle on in the kitchen, which is off the waiting room. I might not have a cup of tea straight away, but I like the sound of the water humming into life. I stow my bag in the lockable cupboard beside the unused stove, and place my folders in the tray that is the only thing on the bench aside from the kettle. There is a special bay for my laptop, which I attach to a lock and then plug in.
Everything else that is needed, and this is not much, is in the cupboards. There is still fresh milk in the fridge and all the cups are clean and dried and put away. I did this yesterday before I left. After I check through the appointments list and then leaf through the Lewis folder, I walk through the middle room to the front of the house. I check the front door is locked, and the security door. I stand at the door to face the front room. The lights have to be on, as the blinds are down and the curtains drawn. Some of these places have those security shutters, like blank eyelids, forever shut against the street. But not this house. I am meant to keep the blinds down but sometimes the airless, sunless spaces close in on me. I raise the blind an inch to allow a band of sunlight to cut into the room, but still pull the curtains shut. No one should notice. I am glad there are no security cameras either. I am lucky that my clients are classed minimal risk. Not that I do anything compromising, however the thought of someone watching me drinking my tea, or standing at the back door looking at the bare yard as I wait, would be unnerving.
The front room has oatmeal-coloured carpet and walls, a light brown, two-seated sofa, a small coffee table and some magazines. Women’s Weekly. New Idea. National Geographic. Most of them outdated, some by more than a year. I will bring in some recent ones, I sometimes think, and then I remember that no one will care, no one ever reads them. The fathers sit there, arms crossed, staring at nothing. The mothers, the few who come, tap at their phones. There are some posters. Anti-smoking. Breastfeeding. Say No To Domestic Violence. It could be the waiting room of a doctor, except one who sees few patients.
I walk down the hall again to double-check the back waiting room. Everything is in place here, I know. But still. Three lounge chairs, matching though in different shades, with the look of Ikea about them, though they are more probably Fantastic Furniture, because the department has an arrangement there. A small side table with another stack of magazines. Nothing else. They always look around for an ashtray, even the ones who have been coming for a long time, and I always shake my head and point them out the back door. I have brought in several pot plants but only one of them survives – a small prayer plant, which I water carefully and move around so it gets neither too much nor too little sunlight. I check it now before returning to the second room. The middle room. Sealed from each end of the house like an airlock in a submarine. First I check each door shuts and locks properly. When I first worked here the number of different keys was ridiculous. I asked for a locksmith to rationalise them. Now the one key opens and locks all the doors, the front and back doors, and the mesh security doors and the two connecting doors to the middle room. I have separate keys for the gate and the cupboards.
In the middle room I also check the window is shut and bolted, the blind down. It is getting cool in here by now. I switch the air conditioner to low, unlock the cupboards and begin setting out the books and paper, the crayons and board games, the jigsaw puzzles and packs of playing cards, Happy Families, Uno, the fishing game, and tubs of Play-Doh. There are no electronic games. These are regarded as counterproductive. This room is quite cheery. It is painted banana yellow, and the carpet is blue. There are two beanbags, adult and child-sized, two easy chairs and two smaller chairs at the low table where I set up the colouring-in books. Someone has attached an alphabet frieze at head height all the way around the room, and if you think to turn the lights off, dinosaur stickers glow in the dark on one of the walls. But no one, as far as I am aware, turns off the lights.
Winston arrives several minutes before 9.30 but this time it is not with his mother. An older woman propels him into the back room after rattling at the mesh door.
‘Nikki couldn’t make it today,’ she says, coughing. She falls into the lounge chair and bangs her chest, then gropes in her bag for a handful of tissues. When she stops coughing she adds, ‘Job interview. She had to leave before seven to get there.’ She starts coughing again.
Winston glances at me before going over to her side and saying, ‘You okay, Nan?’
I lock the mesh door again behind them, leaving the other open. It is not right. They are meant to phone or email at least twenty-four hours beforehand if arrangements are to be changed. Winston knows this, though perhaps the grandmother does not. But something in his glance tells me not to make a fuss. He is very knowing, for a nine-year-old. And still quite small. Besides, I have to go to the front room. The father generally arrives first. He is probably at the front door now and indeed I only just have time to show the grandmother where to sign the register before I hear the discreet buzz. I leave them there and close and lock the back room door to the hallway.
Winston’s father is always on time, to the minute. He does not drive. I imagine him taking the train then walking from the station, which takes seven minutes, and timing the entire trip so that he arrives early. Perhaps he sits in the park around the corner, the tiny one that is sandwiched between two houses, just an empty block no one wanted to build on. It is called Francis Spears Playground and I cannot imagine that Francis Spears must have been held in any great regard by the local council. There is one bench seat opposite the one swing. The grass is scuffed thin. I imagine Winston’s father sitting there checking his watch until he walks up the road to ring the front doorbell.
Or perhaps he takes the bus, which would deposit him at the local shops, two blocks back on the main road. This would require more planning, since the buses here are notoriously unreliable, and a much longer walk. But whatever he does, every fortnight he is here, ringing the doorbell exactly when the clock reaches 9.30.
As soon as I open the door he walks inside and goes straight into the front room. He is not hostile. He never acknowledges my existence. And why should he? Despite this I always say, ‘Good morning, Mr Lewis. Please wait here and I will call you shortly.’ Sometimes when I speak he sniffs, or moves his mouth or crosses his arms or something to signify he knows the drill, but he never looks me in the eye.
As for Winston, he has lost the haunted look he had when he first started coming. I will not say he was frightened. But certainly he was apprehensive, and the very first time refused to come in until I promised to stay outside the door where he could hear me. I had to close the door, I explained th
at to him. ‘But I will be right there,’ I said, pointing to it. ‘I will bring my chair up to the door and if you need me I will come straight in.’
And I did. Not all children would be reassured like that, I thought as I sat there trying hard to block out the sounds of their conversations, if it could be termed that, but also to keep alert for any hint the boy might be distressed. It seemed to me then to be a terrible breach, to listen in, despite the crimes of the father. It still does. I feel that for all they have done, for me to hear even the routine conversations, about what happened at school, or what they will do come the holidays, or what their best friend’s new toy is, let alone the whispered endearments, or the half-uttered apologies – all the more eloquent for their strangled delivery – to be a violation of their intimacy so profound that I should be the one under duress, not they. It still does seem like that to me.
Now, however, there is no need for that sort of vigilance. Winston will have his forty minutes with the convicted rapist and manslaughterer who is his father, and I will sit out in the back room with his grandmother.
Her name, she tells me, is Gloria. The cough has subsided. She is looking around the room and I can read every thought all over her face. She wants to make some comment about the basic facilities, but isn’t sure if that would constitute a personal insult to me or not. I would not care. I have worked here for three years but feel no affinity with the place. The look on her face also says, what kind of person has to come to a place like this? It’s only a fleeting look but I’ve seen it on every face in this room. The kind of person like your daughter, I would say if I could, and your ex-son-in-law. People who can’t stop hating each other for a single hour for the sake of their own children. I offer tea.
Letter to George Clooney Page 17
