Don't Leave Me Breathless

by A Kelly

  Half an hour later, Shadow started to wriggle.

  ‘Get the leash, Phil,’ said Joseph. He noticed Tim walk a few steps back.

  After putting on the lead, Joseph hugged the three-year old German shepherd from under the dog’s front legs and helped him to propel himself. He grabbed the leash as soon as Shadow broke free. Before the dog could run amok, he held on. ‘Sit, Shadow, sit!’

  And the dog obeyed. ‘Good boy!’ Joseph said and gave him more treats. He stroked the pup’s chest and watched his tail slowly wagging. He handed over the leash to Philip when he was confident Shadow was no longer aggressive. ‘Lock him inside unless someone is watching him. And tell your dad to just fill up the damn hole!’

  Tim threw Joseph a bottle of water he’d taken out of his bag.

  ‘Thanks, mate,’ Joseph said gulping the water as they walked out of the property quietly.

  ‘No troubles you said?’ teased Tim.

  Joseph smirked.

  15

  The last sail

  The last thing Bobby would’ve expected was for her return to the city, so that was exactly what she had done after being on the move every couple of days. She’d managed to get a new phone in the small Queensland city of Mt Isa after deciding to go without a mobile phone for a couple of days after it’d got fried. Now, back in the Rideau residence in Sydney, she waited for Tim to call her. She’d kept her old SIM card – the only number he knew.

  The air inside the house was still as suffocating as she’d remembered. But she had to get her things before moving to Penguin – Sam, Chevy, Jake’s sketches, and some of her clothes. Like the Alpaca turtleneck in her hands. Had she put it on when she’d been training and eating like a warrior, it wouldn’t have fit. Now, after weeks of eating fast food, throwing up and driving long distances, the top slipped on effortlessly. She was back to becoming Summer Rideau in Paris; Pierre’s sidekick on his last diplomatic mission before he’d quit. That afternoon they had taken a walk along Palais du Luxembourg.

  ‘I’m so exhausted, Summer,’ Pierre had said then. ‘I don’t know how long I can go on like this.’

  ‘I reckon they will accept the terms this time.’

  ‘I hope so or I’ll lose my mind.’

  ‘Your job is just a contract, Pierre, you can walk out of it.’

  ‘Lives depend on it, Summer.’

  Australians’ lives. True. ‘Even lives are contracts.’

  Out of the blue, a Great Dane had come running and jumped at her. The owner, a lady in her sixties perhaps, was horrified and shouted Je suis tellement désolée from 100 metres away before she got to them.

  But Summer welcomed the dog who, after unreservedly pawing at her, licked her face with equal enthusiasm. Despite wearing her delicate Alpaca top, she’d played with the Dane as if she was a little girl on a soccer field. Pierre had kissed her on the cheek too (and may have tasted the dog’s slobber). Her top was speckled with paw marks, but the drycleaners managed to get rid of them. Right there, in square pour chiens Rue Bonaparte, at the edge of Palais du Luxembourg, life with Pierre had been sweet.

  It could’ve continued to be sweet; had he not hidden her mum’s illness and killed himself.

  She took off the top and put on her T-shirt and stretch pants. Perhaps she would steal a few hours of sleep before Tim’s call. It was hot, but never again would she sleep naked – not even in pyjamas. Since Darwin she’d always dressed so she was ready to leave – wherever, whenever. She had two identical go-to bags – one near her bed, the other near the exit. If Bobby got her in her bedroom, she would run and grab the bag near the exit. If she caught Bobby before he got to her in the bedroom, then she’d flee with the one next to her bed.

  Just before midnight her mobile phone vibrated inside her pocket.

  Tim.

  ‘Found you a place in Penguin.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in Penguin.’

  ‘Shit! Why… I told you… shit… does Sylvia know?’

  ‘No, she doesn’t. Listen, I’ve sent you a ticket for the Spirit of Tasmania under the name Samantha Doyle to your Sydney home. I’ve sent her ID too. It’s the morning cruise––’

  ‘Who? You could’ve chosen a nicer name.’

  ‘She’s a real person! My marine friend in Hobart, it’s his sister––’

  ‘Far out, Tim! That “friend” you mentioned was real? What––’

  ‘Summer, listen! She’s about your age and she might just look like you if you’d dyed your hair blonde and put on a bit of make-up. Grab the rental car once you get to Devonport. Use Samantha’s ID, too, okay? Then head to Ulverstone and see Sandra at McLeod Real Estate. Once you get to Penguin, send the ID back to my friend,’ Tim said. ‘That should mean it looks like you haven’t left the mainland.’

  ‘Tim… thank you.’

  ‘Why Penguin? There’s nothing here!’

  ‘Believe it or not, it’s my happy place.’

  ‘Here’s the gist about where you’ll live. Your house is called the Beam House. Pretty weird, but it’s a good neighbourhood. You’ll be safe. There’s this guy living opposite you, smiles funny, but he’s harmless; then on one side you have an old lady, and on the other side there’s this dog whisperer. You have a driveway, also front and back yards, but your house is pretty close to the dog whisperer’s. I’m sure you won’t mind him. He saved a German shepherd when I was there,’ he explained.

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Summer, you want to fight Bobby? You need to have a fit mind. You came to Darwin looking like a warrior but your face told me I was looking at a train wreck. What do you want exactly?’

  ‘A final fight.’

  ‘Do you want to win?’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘What does a win look like to you?’

  Summer stayed silent.

  Tim said, ‘Look, I’m not gonna argue about what you think you’ve gotta do. You’re a big girl, as you said. Once you get to Penguin, stay there, lay low, think about what you want out of your so-called final fight. Anger, pride, revenge, they won’t lead you anywhere.’

  16

  Sergeant Scipio

  Torrential rain greeted Summer when she arrived in Devonport, Tasmania.

  ‘Thanks for waiting for me,’ Summer said to the lady at McLeod Real Estate. It was past their closing time.

  ‘That’s okay,’ the lady said cheerfully. Then she whispered as if there was someone else in the room: ‘Sandra paid me overtime.’

  ‘You’re not Sandra?’

  ‘She’s my boss. I’m Ayla,’ she said. She grabbed an A4 envelope and showed Summer the rental contract (under the name of Tim O’Brien and Samantha Doyle) and a set of keys. ‘Sandra’s busy getting a tan in the Bahamas. I hope the furniture is okay. If you need anything else just ring me.’

  With a smile, Summer drove to Penguin. The Esplanade stretched alongside her. She might just take a quick walk before she headed to her new home. She wanted to feel the ground, despite the rain.

  Summer grinned at the Big Penguin; it wasn’t as large as she’d recalled. And it wasn’t staring at her the way it had been imprinted on her memory – it was looking straight ahead, watching the town. She touched its wet belly, imagining how tall she would’ve stood as a five-year-old.

  ‘Much nicer on a sunny day, love,’ an old man said as he drove past.

  Water splashed her feet as she walked away from the Esplanade and arrived at a railway crossing. She didn’t remember this junction. Behind the drips off her raincoat hood, she spotted a green ball of feathers. She couldn’t tell whether it was moving because it was alive, or because of the wind. Then it spread its wings. The relentless rain pounded the bird as it kept hopping aimlessly.

  ‘Hey, buddy…’ She came down to the track and tried to scoop the bird up, but it wriggled away. The railway bell rang. She had time, she was sure. Trains always took ages to arrive at a crossing after the first ring. She made several attempts as the rain obs
cured her view. The ground trembled. She might’ve overestimated how much time she had, but if she and the bird had to go together, so be it. She couldn’t let him die like Jake the kookaburra.

  ‘I got you, buddy, I got you,’ she said when the bird was finally in her hands. Just in time she jumped onto a pedestrian island as a freight train whooshed past her.

  She breathed out the breath she’d been holding. ‘See! We made it,’ she whispered as she took off her raincoat hood and put the bird in it. Some sort of parrot, she thought. She wanted to call him Jake, but this bird looked old for some reason. No real indicator that it actually was, but she had already painted a picture that the bird had tasted life’s ups and down, and today it had flown so long, so far, that it had had enough.

  She cradled the bundled creature on her lap as she drove around to find a vet. To her dismay the first vet practice she found was closed, and so was the next one. How could she train her mind to be fit when she kept finding sorrow everywhere?

  No time to feel sorry! From inside the car she looked around: a bar, a tapas restaurant, a bakery, a pharmacy… No other vets. But there was a shop with a cheerful springer spaniel wearing a police uniform on its signage. Sergeant Scipio. She drove closer and found the light was still on.

  She looked at the bird again and thought of another name.

  ‘See, you’ll be okay, Pierre.’

  From the window of his pet supply shop, Joseph Russo watched as the torrential rain battered the street. His assistant Chris was on his way out.

  ‘Don’t forget to turn over the sign!’ Joseph said to Chris.

  Joseph wished he could go home now, too. But the damn shelves in the storeroom needed fixing and he would have new stock coming in tomorrow morning. He stared unenthusiastically at the wonky shelves. He could almost convince himself to buy a new unit, but he took his tools and started hammering at the problematic metal bar to get it out of its groove. After an hour of fiddling, banging and screwing, he finally got the shelves to stand straight. He pushed them out to the shop floor and wiped them clean.

  It was past dinner time now. He wondered if tonight would be the night he’d come home to a lit-up Beam House and Tim asking him to come over for a beer. He hadn’t seen the retired marine, although a ‘LEASED’ sticker had been pasted over the faded ‘For Rent/Sale’ sign. This morning he’d noticed cleaners coming in, just as they had a few weeks ago, prior to Tim’s first visit.

  ‘Damn!’ Joseph said as he knocked his keys over into the gap between the till counter and the wall. That gap was something else he needed to fix! When he reached down, the front door burst open. The wooden door looked heavier than it was; people who weren’t familiar with it usually pushed it with force, sending it flying against the stopper with a bang. Now, with the wind swirling in all directions, the door soon slammed back shut.

  Couldn’t they read the sign that his shop was closed?

  ‘Excuse me,’ a woman said hesitantly.

  While the banging door had startled Joseph earlier, this time it was the visitor herself who made his heart pound. A tall, blonde woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties. Her lipstick was fading, a bit smudged, but her lips still looked striking. She had a rain jacket on but with no hood, leaving her hair and face soaked. A beauty queen from some exotic Scandinavian country, Joseph thought, lost in a sleepy Tasmanian town. He hadn’t seen anyone like her before.

  Once he’d dealt with his heart rate, he finally saw her eyes. A stranger’s eyes that drew him in.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Joseph slowly approached her.

  Behind the strands of wet hair her blue eyes emanated sorrow. He’d never seen a sadder face, but before he could think of anything to say, he realised she was cradling a feathery creature wrapped in her missing rain jacket hood.

  ‘I found this little fella near the railway,’ she said, gently opening the bundle in her hands.

  She had a perfect Australian accent. Was she from another part of Tasmania? Or the mainland? Joseph watched her delicate fingers petting the visibly distressed bird. Her concerns for the animal made him want to comfort her, hug her, and tell her everything would be okay.

  ‘The vets are closed,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know where else to go.’

  Probably a pet shop was the next best thing.

  ‘Let’s take it to the animal shelter,’ Joseph said, studying the bird. A green rosella. ‘Let me get my keys.’ He crouched – now he could see the keys were actually closer to the other side of the counter. He walked around and stretched his arm. But for once his chunky biceps became a liability.

  ‘I’ll get them.’ The woman knelt next to Joseph, flashing a tiny smile at him.

  She tried to hand the rosella over to him, but the bird refused to leave her embrace; although hurt, it kept hopping away from his scooping hands.

  ‘I’m Joseph,’ he said, watching her arm sliding into the gap effortlessly.

  For a moment she paused and blinked quickly.

  What was wrong with Joseph? He remembered Tim frowning when he’d heard his name, too.

  ‘I’m Sam––’

  She handed over the keys and took back the bird.

  ‘I’m Summer.’

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ Joseph said and pulled himself up. He was going to give her a hand but she stood up from her crouching position instantly, steadily, with the bird safely in her arms.

  Joseph rushed to the front door when he noticed it wasn’t his visitor who couldn’t read, it was his assistant who’d forgotten to turn the sign.

  Then he stopped, took off his rain jacket and detached its hood. ‘Umbrellas are useless in this weather. You should wear this. You have more hair than me. May I?’

  Summer nodded. Joseph scrambled to secure his jacket hood on her. It was almost like preparing Cornelia for school back in the days. He took a step back when he was done. Summer was already wet; now she looked silly with an oversized green hood sitting like a tablecloth folded around her head, and a red jacket. His fault. And his remark about her having more hair than he did – that was next-level stupid!

  He put on his own rain jacket and quickly locked up. He said, ‘My car is at the next street up. I’ll meet you here.’

  ‘No, I’ll go with you! We’ve gotta leave now!’

  On his mark they both ran to his Toyota Prado.

  As they settled in the car, Joseph looked for something to wipe the rain off his face. Why didn’t he keep a box of tissues?

  Summer unbuttoned her jacket and, with some difficulty, untwined and pulled out her long scarf. ‘Here.’

  ‘No, no, that’s too nice,’ he said looking at the grey knit scarf.

  ‘Just use it! Come on, let’s go,’ she said.

  The scarf smelled like a rose garden. Since the disastrous lovemaking with Emily, which had sent her to hospital a few times, women’s perfumes usually made him run the other way, and Emily’s screams and cries would then follow him all the way home. He took a deep breath and wiped his face slowly. How he wished he’d had forever to do it. This fragrance didn’t smell like perfume, it was like she naturally smelled like that; her skin, her neck, her chest ––

  He snapped himself out of his runaway thought and started the car.

  ‘It was very kind of you to pick up that bird, what with the rain,’ he said.

  ‘I couldn’t just leave it there, it’d drown,’ she said as she wriggled her head out of Joseph’s oversized hood. ‘What sort of bird is it?’

  ‘A green rosella, also known as Tasmanian rosella,’ Joseph said.

  ‘A rosella? It’s so big!’

  Joseph smiled. She seemed to know a thing or two about birds.

  ‘It’s the biggest species of rosella.’

  ‘I see. I only know crimson and eastern rosellas. There was a pair of eastern rosellas who regularly came to our backyard when my brother and I were growing up.’ She looked ahead.

  A long pause.

  Joseph slowed down. He took glances at her while watching t
he road. The woman was crying and made no attempt to hide it. Perhaps she thought her wet hair would conceal her tears. It wasn’t the rain, he knew, her eyes were glistening and she was blinking ferociously.

  With no traffic around, he let his car roll so he could get a red light at the upcoming intersection.

  Summer uncovered the bird and stroked its head. ‘This guy is so beautiful. At first I thought it was a mound of something, like moss, but it was moving, then it spread its wings and I saw the bright green chest.’

  Summer gave Joseph a pleading gaze.

  ‘He’ll be all right. The vet at the shelter is very good. You said you found it near the railway. Where was it?’

  ‘At the junction, I think just before the Crescent crossing.’

  A blind spot. He didn’t want to think about what would’ve happened had the freight train gone past, which it usually did around this time.

  Summer quickly asked, ‘Was that your shop?’

  ‘Yes. Been running it for 20 years.’

  ‘I like the name. Sergeant Scipio. Is it your dog on the logo?’

  Joseph smiled at her thought. His girl, Piper. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘His name is Scipio?’

  ‘No. Scipio was my name.’

  ‘Was?’

  Joseph pondered. He should’ve just told her it was his dog’s name. ‘An old alias.’

  She smiled to herself and said softly, ‘Scipio…?’ She turned to him slightly. Her full lips stayed parted, revealing a gap in between her front teeth.

  Joseph took a deep breath. Maybe it hadn’t been a mistake to tell her his old stage name after all. That was the first smile he’d seen from her.

  ‘Sounds like a famous person.’

  ‘He was a Roman general who defeated Hannibal.’

  ‘I know of Hannibal, but not Scipio.’

  He had been used to this trail of conversations, but not since he’d abandoned his theatre career. Theatre execs, his fans and media had used to ask about his choice of stage name. Now, having this conversation with a young woman he wanted to impress, he tried to choose his words carefully.