In the Company of Strangers

by Liz Byrski

  Declan makes himself a cup of tea, sits down again and steels himself for the task ahead. He opens the diary in which Catherine had thoughtfully put some reminders for various days. On today’s date the message in block capitals is sausage dogs followed by a phone number.

  ‘Sausage dogs?’ he exclaims in frustration, loud enough to make Paula, who is back now and is dragging the vacuum cleaner out of the office, jump almost out of her skin. ‘What the dickens are sausage dogs?’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Paula says, ‘you frightened the life out of me.’

  ‘How am I supposed to know what this means?’ Declan grumbles – it is so much easier to turn the sadness and the guilt into anger. ‘Sausage dogs!’

  ‘They’re the things you put along the bottom of the door to stop draughts,’ Paula says. And she reaches down behind the open door and picks up a long sausage-shaped thing made of purple corduroy. ‘Like this. They’re very popular with the winter tourists. Catherine would have been thinking about ordering some into the shop for when the weather changes.’

  Declan nods. ‘Draught excluders,’ he says quietly, ‘well I’d better get on to Belinda, whoever she—’ but he’s interrupted by the phone and when he picks it up there is no one there because it’s his mobile that’s ringing and he slams down the receiver and shuffles more paper to find it buried under a gardening supplies catalogue.

  ‘Declan? Declan, is that you?’

  It’s a woman’s voice. The signal is weak and he gets up and goes outside onto the deck. ‘Hello, who’s that? I can hardly hear you.’ And the line drops out.

  ‘Shit,’ he murmurs, ‘who was that? Oh my god it sounded like—’ and it rings again.

  ‘Popular, aren’t you?’ Paula says dryly, shaking her duster over the edge of the verandah.

  ‘Declan, it’s me, Alice.’

  ‘Alice?’ Declan is, quite suddenly, short of breath. ‘Alice?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice sounds odd, shaky, or perhaps it’s just the line. ‘You said to call when … well, if …’

  ‘Alice?’ he says. ‘Is it really you, are you getting out?’ Goose bumps prickle his skin.

  ‘I’m out,’ she says. ‘Last week, last Monday.’

  ‘But that’s wonderful …’

  ‘No, no it’s not, it’s awful. I thought it would get better, but it’s ten days now and it’s worse every day. That’s why I’m ringing. I’m sorry it’s just … I don’t have anyone else to talk to.’

  Declan’s spine tingles. Alice!

  ‘Alice,’ he says, and he can hear that she’s really distressed. ‘Alice, listen to me. Everything will be fine, trust me. Where are you now?’

  She mumbles something about temporary accommodation, about trying to find a job.

  ‘Listen, Alice,’ he cuts in suddenly, uncharacteristically decisive. ‘Listen to me. I’m in Margaret River now, my aunt’s place, remember? Can you get yourself here? There’s a bus you can get from Perth, it takes four or five hours. Do you have enough money for a ticket? Good. Get the first bus you can, it might not be till tomorrow, but ring and tell me what time it arrives. It stops right in the Margaret River High Street and I’ll be there to meet you.’

  ‘But I have to get a job, I won’t have anywhere to—’

  ‘You can stay here,’ he says, ‘I’ve got a job for you, you can have a nice little cottage all to yourself. Lovely place, lots of lavender …’

  ‘But I—’

  ‘Do it, Alice,’ Declan says, and he hears the pleading in his own voice. ‘Do it for you and for me. I need you here and you’ll love it. Go and find out about that bus and ring me back. Trust me, Alice, please just trust me.’

  uby gasps in shock as she steps outside the airport building and into the heat. She’d forgotten its intensity, the way it grabs you by the throat and leaches moisture from your skin in seconds. And she’d forgotten the sky too – that endless dazzling blue beloved of tourists and cursed by locals in the final days of a painfully long, hot summer. She hesitates, takes a deep breath that seems to burn her nostrils, drags her suitcase towards the taxi rank and waits, sweat creeping down her back, for the next available cab.

  It’s weird being back here. Nearly forty years since she quit Australia and fifteen years since Cat turned up unexpectedly on her doorstep in Islington.

  ‘Catherine?’ Ruby had said, shock fixing her rigidly in the half-open doorway. ‘You’re here? You didn’t …’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ Cat had said, bluntly. ‘I didn’t get in touch and I didn’t say I was coming because you might have told me not to. But I needed to see you, Rube, needed to talk to you face to face. Are you going to stand there all afternoon or are you going to let me in?’

  After shock Ruby’s next sensation had been resentment that she had been ambushed. Catherine taking control again, she’d thought, getting what she wants irrespective of anyone else, presenting me with a fait accompli so I’ve no choice but to open the door and invite her in. ‘Stay cool,’ she’d told herself aloud while Catherine was in the bathroom and she was making tea in the kitchen. ‘Don’t blow this because of your pride. Years ago, for a very long time, she was your only friend in the world.’

  ‘It’s your turn next,’ Catherine had said as they parted at Heathrow three weeks later. ‘We’ve dealt with the past so now you can come to Perth.’

  Ruby had hesitated, shaking her head. ‘It’s not only what happened between us,’ she’d said, ‘it’s the rest of it – being sent away from England, the convent, everything that happened there. I don’t know if I can …’

  ‘You can, you will, I know you will,’ Catherine had said. ‘I just know it.’ Once home again she had continued her urgings and Ruby had hesitated, prevaricated and now it was too late.

  ‘Where to, love?’ asks the taxi driver, heaving her suitcase into the boot.

  He sounds, she thinks, like a Londoner, but she doesn’t ask. The British are no novelty here. She and Catherine had been part of a massive human cargo designed to boost the Australian population with good British stock but there were plenty who came of their own volition as ten-pound-poms, seeking the opportunities of a new life in the sun. People wait years now and have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get in. How times change, she thinks, and how relentlessly that early experience still defines her feelings about the place decades later.

  ‘The Sheraton, please,’ Ruby says, and settles back to fasten her seatbelt. Open mind, she tells herself, keep an open mind. Ignore the muddled surge of unsettling emotions that reared as the aircraft began its descent. She didn’t have to do this, she could simply have found a local agent to act for her, provide a business assessment, and offer advice. Or she could have sent one of the staff. In fact, she acknowledges now, she could easily have sent Jess, who would probably have jumped at the chance.

  They follow the other traffic out of the car park onto a wide and rather boring stretch of road lined with dusty native plants, long-term parking lots and the characteristically bland, crouching buildings that sprout up around airports. Ah well, she’s here now and stuck with it. Stuck with Benson’s Reach and her co-beneficiary, who, from the couple of telephone conversations she’s had with him, seems to be struggling to get to grips with their shared legacy. He’d sounded pleasant, but nervous – as though he knows as little about the place as she does. I’m too old for this, she thinks, it’s time for a quieter life, not racing off to Australia to sort out a failing business.

  Later, when the worst of the heat is gone, she opens the glass doors of her hotel room and sits on the balcony, watching the sun setting in a spectacular haze of crimson and coral, until her eyelids feel heavy. But the minute she slides between the immaculately laundered sheets she is awake again, her stomach writhing with anxiety, memories clamouring for attention.

  ‘You can still turn around and go home,’ she tells herself. ‘Pick up the phone, call the airline, get the next possible flight back to London and despatch someone else to do the job.’ But as
she reaches for the phone a flicker of reluctance stops her and she pauses, equivocating. This is different. Benson’s Reach no longer belongs to Catherine and along with some excruciatingly painful memories it also holds some happy ones which are entirely her own. The gut wrenching echoes of childhood in the convent, the cruelty and the shame – well, she may never be able to lay those ghosts, never rid herself of that outrage, but Benson’s Reach is different. She is here for Catherine and for herself, for their years of precious but severely disrupted friendship. ‘Respect that,’ she tells herself, ‘make something good from it. Run away from this and you’ll regret it later.’ And punching her pillows into submission Ruby turns over, pulls the sheet up herself once again and closes her eyes and her mind in the pursuit of sleep.

  From the kitchen window Alice can see up the slope to the balcony of the cottage where for the last two days she has sat watching the daily life of the place: Declan heading back and forth to the office, guests arriving and departing, a boy in a black baseball cap sweeping or pruning or riding off home on his bike, staff and tradespeople coming and going, and Paula, the only other person she’s met so far, heading up the hill to clean the vacated cottages, or smoking surreptitiously behind the old cow shed. Benson’s Reach is supposedly smoke free and Alice wonders if Paula had risked smoking while Catherine was still around.

  It’s the first time she’s been here in the main house, but from the vantage point of her balcony she has studied the outlines of this rambling, single-storey, stone building, with its wide verandahs, which has so suddenly become Declan’s property and, for the time being at least, his home. She has imagined what it would be like inside, the arrangement of bedrooms, the place at which the office, added much later, is linked to it by a paved pathway. She has studied the other building too, a large, rammed-earth structure built in the eighties as a café and gift shop. The extent of the place has amazed her, not just the buildings but the sweeping, lavender clad slopes, the serried rows of raspberry canes, and the rest of the holiday cottages, similar in size and style to the one that Declan had taken her to when she arrived three days ago.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ she’d said then. ‘But I don’t need a whole cottage to myself.’ She was emotionally exhausted by almost two weeks of painful freedom followed by the long bus ride, and was still likely to burst into tears at any moment. Declan’s kindness had seemed overwhelming.

  ‘They’re just holiday places, but you need some privacy,’ Declan had said. ‘And Ruby will need to stay in the house; it’s partly hers, after all. We’re low on holiday bookings now anyway, Catherine dropped the ball in the last few months. I should have been here to help her but …’

  ‘But you’ll get more bookings,’ Alice had said. ‘You’ll stay here, won’t you? Get it going again?’

  ‘It really depends on Ruby,’ he’d said, and he’d explained then about the will, about his aunt and Benson’s Reach, and the prospect of her old friend’s imminent arrival. ‘Right now I don’t really know what I want from it all. But whatever we decide we’ll need to get things back on track first. Anyway, you need some time to sort yourself out, get over the trials of freedom.’

  The interior of the house is bigger, lighter and more airy than Alice expected. The rooms all open off a wide central passage, and at the heart of it is this kitchen with its quarry tiled floor, the huge old range, a long line of windows and a scrubbed pine table loaded with unfinished paperwork, old newspapers, a bowl of fruit, a jug of dried flowers, and various items of crockery. Alice finishes rinsing the cups she and Declan have used for their coffee and dries her hands on a tea towel that looks as though it needs a good wash.

  ‘I need to know what my job is,’ she’d told him earlier this morning. ‘I can’t sit around in the cottage contemplating my navel; it’s no good for me. So tell me what you want me to do. You must have had a role in mind for me when you invited me here.’ But as they talked it soon became clear that Declan’s invitation had encompassed everything in general and nothing specific.

  ‘I’m a lousy organiser, I needed help,’ he said sheepishly, ‘someone to talk to and to … share the load, I suppose. Maybe we could talk about it now?’

  It reminded her how diffident he could be, how indecisive.

  ‘All my motivation and decision making abilities disappeared years ago,’ he’d told her once. ‘It floated off in a cloud of all that dope I smoked in my youth.’

  ‘Then let’s make a list of things that absolutely have to be done and done soon,’ Alice had said this morning, and they had soon filled a page of Declan’s notebook. They were both floundering, she thought, but hopefully they would be able to keep each other afloat. Now, a couple of hours later, Declan has driven off to an appointment at the local council.

  ‘Have a good look around the house, the office, everywhere, while I’m gone,’ he’d said. ‘Here are the keys for the café and shop. We can talk again when I get back, and if you could make up a room for Ruby that would be good.’ He’d handed her another key hanging from a string of small purple beads. ‘This is the key to Catherine’s room. Apparently she made them lock it when they took her to hospital.’ He glanced away, obviously embarrassed. ‘I haven’t been able to bring myself to go in there yet. And I certainly didn’t want Paula nosing around in there. Have a look, would you, see what you think?’

  Alice turns the string of beads in her hand and then hangs it back around her neck. She is both curious and cautious and the caution dictates that the impersonal space of the office is the best place to start. Stepping out of the back door she pauses, inhaling the scent of the lavender that lines the path. Closing her eyes she senses, fleetingly, something that has evaded her for so long. Is it calm, perhaps, or hope? Yes, hope. She is free, and despite the awfulness of those first ten days back in the world, she is now somewhere safe and friendly, somewhere with possibilities. She has some control over her future now, but it’s still going to be a struggle. A woman only a couple of years off sixty with no one left of her own, no home, no possessions, an ex-con with a terrible scar across her past constantly threatening to overwhelm her – does she actually have a future?

  When Declan had met her at the bus stop in Margaret River she had been a mess. The freedom she had craved so long hadn’t been anything like she’d imagined and as each day passed she had sunk further into despair at her inability to cope without the boundaries to which she’d become accustomed. Stick it out for at least a week, she told herself several times a day. She didn’t want to think about what she would do if things didn’t improve in that time. And when the week was up the outlook was grim. She’d applied for jobs, turned up for interviews and was knocked back from all of them. They were jobs that she could have got standing on her head back before all this happened.

  ‘When you call for the interview, don’t tell them where you’ve been for the last few years,’ the counsellor had told her. ‘You don’t have to lie, just don’t say anything about it. If you get an interview you’ll make a really good impression, and that’s when you put your cards on the table.’

  But Alice, uncomfortable with what seemed like deception, had disclosed the information on the telephone and those first conversations had promptly been terminated. Finally she tried it the other way and landed four interviews in four days. They were jobs in cafés and restaurants that she thought she should easily be able to get. She wasn’t aiming high, just hoping for something she knew she could do and that would get her back in the workforce again. One was in a sandwich bar, another waitressing in a city café. The third was on the checkout in a large supermarket. Alice agonised for hours over what to wear – not that she had much to choose from – what to say, and how to appear confident. And then she struggled with the shame that paralysed her when she disclosed where she had spent the last five years. The first three employers cooled immediately at this point. The final interview was for a short order cook in a hotel near the airport. It was a perfect location, walking distance from the place
she was staying. The interview went well, and when she told the manager that she had just been released from jail he was warmly supportive. For a moment she thought she’d got the job, but then he shook his head and said he was sorry, he had no problem with her record but he’d tried in the past to employ post-release applicants and the general manager wouldn’t agree.

  And so she began again, with similar results, until she had hit rock bottom and was drained of energy and unable to muster the confidence to carry on. It was then, desperate for the sound of a familiar and friendly voice, that she had called Declan and the next day she was on the bus to Margaret River. They didn’t even know each other very well – at least, not in the way you’d normally know an old friend. They’d met at a particularly difficult time in his life and she’d been able to support him through that. Then, when Alice was the one in trouble he’d been there for her. The first time he had come to see her in prison had been her first connection with her pre-prison life.

  ‘It’s a two-way thing,’ he’d said, flushing when she told him what it meant to her that he’d visited. ‘You were an absolute rock for me when I needed it, so if there’s anything I can do now, you only have to say. I’ll come again in a few weeks’ time.’ And he had. In fact he’d come every six weeks or so, until he took a job in Albany, five hours’ drive away, so the visits stopped, but he wrote from time to time. They were strange, sometimes melancholy, sometimes light-hearted letters in which he told her more about himself and what he was doing, but spoke mainly of his observations on what was happening in the world. From climate change to celebrity excess, from social networking to the treatment of asylum seekers, Declan had a view – thoughtful, considered and always concisely expressed, and usually remarkably similar to her own. His despatches on the state of the world had grown increasingly important to Alice; they were her only personal contact with life outside the prison and she treasured them. But Declan is still something of a mystery to her as, she supposes, she is to him. What she’s sure of is that she trusts him; he has learned from his mistakes, and can acknowledge his weaknesses even if he is slow to acknowledge that he has any strengths.