Elsewhere in Success (11 page)

At five-forty pm the phone rings and an upbeat and friendly man named Nicholas has some fantastic news. He is able to offer her a wonderful vacation package in exchange for her mortal soul.

‘What did you say?'

But he continues with his spiel as if she hasn't spoken. She hears only every second or third word because the phone is tethered next to the radio, and Harry has the sound turned up so that he can listen to ‘Strike up the Band' above the barking, as he waters the garden and washes away the day's grime from Buddha. Louisa thanks Nicholas for his kind offer but says that she must decline. Nicholas points out that life can't be all work and no play. Louisa wonders how he knows so much about her and why he is using her first name. Nicholas sounds surprised when Louisa also uses his first name. After an exchange of banter he wishes her well, counts his gains, cuts his losses and exits the line before she is forced to hang up on him. A holiday would be nice, but she will not be pressured into it.

Louisa goes to the front door and looks out through the flywire. The man in the van with the mobile phone is back, parked under the tree in front of the house. This time he looks up and catches her staring at him. She lifts her hand in greeting. He gives her half a wave, half a smile, and drives off.

‘You're nobody,' she tells herself. ‘Just some guy.'

After the high comes the low. Louisa is sitting on the lounge room floor in the corner with the light out. She is hunched over a cushion that she holds against her midriff. She hasn't bothered to dress or brush her hair. Harry is out.

The past has been waiting for her to drop her guard. It bursts in from the wings, plants itself centre stage, and prepares to play its part. She is powerless to do anything but watch as the drama plays itself out, yet again.

Meredith is colouring in at the kiddies' table. This is the idea that remains, that she is protected in a small sectioned-off place in the corner of the room. Tommy seems to be wailing, but the sound is elusive. It might be coming from Louisa herself. It could be a series of different events. Meredith is in one time zone and Louisa and Tom are caught in another with Victor. Someone is grabbing onto Victor's arm. A hand catches Tom and sweeps him through the air. He falls onto the couch and stays crumpled there, but he is processing and learning. Victor doesn't seem to notice, or else it's how he wants it.

She struggles but can't remember Meri at all, as if she has been put aside and forgotten. Louisa can't remember where she has left her. She feels a familiar sense of rising panic. The
chair by the children's table is lying on the floor, the pencils scattered, one rolling towards the edge of the table. Meredith has disappeared.

Victor has been drinking all day and Louisa hears him saying once again that he will put them out of their misery. Uncharacteristically she retaliates, saying if he were a better person, that would put them out of their misery. If he would just fuck off and leave them all alone, that would put them out of their misery. Victor gives her a demonstration of what he is talking about, but stops short of killing her. He's giving her every chance to improve herself. He's teaching her.

Did you tell me to fuck off? He keeps saying it to the rhythm of his punches. It has become his mantra. Did you just tell me to fuck off? Did you say fuck off? Did you just tell me to fuck off? She's somewhere outside of this, watching as the scene plays out. This thing in a pile on the floor, this heap of old rags, is neither animal nor human. It deserves what it gets. He's doing it a kind of homage. He explains patiently as he continues his discipline: You're nothing, nothing without me, my darling little girl. Less than nothing. You told me to fuck off. He is speaking almost kindly, confusing her. This is for your own good. You're nothing without me. A woman is lying on the floor with dark fluid pooling around her. She is not right somehow. She is some sort of disease and he is the valiant doctor bringing her under control at his own cost.

The children are – where? Somewhere. Someone has taken them in hand temporarily and is looking after them. Later she tells herself the lie that they've survived to grow beyond Victor's influence. But she knows in the back of her mind that something has been left behind: a germ that proliferates in Tom's mind when he reaches puberty and destroys him. Victor gets off, apparently unscathed and unchanged. These things must be remembered. Louisa feels the gravity of her role as oral historian, telling Lucy, and Harry when he will listen, not having to talk about it to Carole because she doesn't need to be
told; she was there. Were the children with Carole that day?

In hospital Louisa emerges from oblivion into fluorescent light. She remembers feeling bitterly disappointed. Now she knows that her continued existence has been needed at the most basic level because she will hold the past in her body as proof of things that shouldn't be ignored. Perhaps this is the meaning of her suffering. At some stage the police appear to interview her at her bedside and she makes up a story to satisfy them. When she gets home, people who used to be quite friendly avoid her, even when she speaks directly to them. At school the children lose friends.

Despite his promises, Victor has failed to put her out of her misery. He manages that feat with another woman, just over a decade later. Louisa follows the story in the papers. A woman has been found dead in his home. An autopsy is done, and there is an inquiry into the death. Victor might be charged following a coronial inquiry. She worries that they will call her as a witness to establish a pattern of domestic violence, but she needn't worry. Everyone and everything seems to have colluded. There is an open finding. The inquiry is wrapped up and Victor moves interstate, to Sydney.

The papers make a small meal of it at the time, a brief sensation, a member of the establishment caught up in something like that. Then the story becomes more sympathetic. It turns out that the woman has something of a history. The story sells until more important things take precedence. There are wars, and people cheating on social security, or turning down perfectly good jobs. Something about breast implants.

Louisa has gone back into her shell. Harry tries to keep upbeat but it's hard with her like this.

‘Don't go getting paranoid on me again,' he jokes.

‘No,' she says. ‘No, I'm not.'

‘Really?' he says.

‘Oh Harry! It's just memories. I can't keep pushing them away
forever. It's probably not even healthy to forget everything. You don't mean to tell me you never think of the past? Really?'

‘Of course I do,' he says. He resists telling her about how he tries to keep himself more upbeat. A short silence. Louisa fills the space he leaves for her.

‘Anyway, I suppose it's time I did some work. The house doesn't clean itself.'

Harry puts the kettle on, and as he waits for it to boil, becomes aware that he is thinking about Bella. He wonders how often this happens without him even realising.

They both need to go out. Today. Right now. They need to touch base with some normal people. The neighbours are normal people.

He decides to reverse an earlier decision and take up an invitation for a get-together extended by Brian, to play darts and drink beer in his sizeable shed. They've been over once or twice before, not long after that first Christmas they were here. It was well fitted out then, but recently Harry was given the grand tour after ducking across the road to borrow a pump. These days Brian has an impressive array of trophies and pennants for his wins at darts tournaments, all displayed above a workbench that runs along the entire length of the shed.

The shed is equipped with every tool imaginable, plus a generously proportioned flat-screen TV mounted above the bench on the wall – Harry imagines it to be perpetually set on the sports channel. Brian has collected an impressive range of comfortable chairs, a sofa bed, a bar fridge, and a deluxe dartboard that forms the focal point of the set-up opposite the security-controlled roller door. And there's still room for foldout tables for the food.

Harry tries to keep his plan casual, low-key.

‘You should come over later,' he tells Louisa. ‘The women are bringing plates around six-thirty or seven.'

‘Just the women?'

‘I'm happy to throw something together,' he says. She ignores this.

‘What are they bringing?' It's the sort of thing that always seems to make her panic.

He reassures. ‘Nothing much. Just a plate of something. Chips and dips.'

‘Oh Harry,' she says, ‘It'll be more than chips and dips. I don't know. I've got something on.'

‘What?'

‘Something.'

‘Anyway, I won't stay long,' he says. ‘Just long enough to humiliate myself with my lack of darting and drinking prowess.'

‘I don't mind. Stay as long as you want.'

‘Yeah,' he says. ‘You don't have to decide now. See how you feel. I'm sure it'll be fine either way.'

‘I'm impressed,' she says, avoiding the point. ‘You're really fitting in around here lately aren't you? I still feel a bit strange.'

‘I always thought you felt a bit strange,' he says, catching her in his arms, and tickling her. She wriggles out.

‘Very funny.'

‘I thought so.'

She's still smiling, humouring him, being kind in spite of her low mood. Sometimes he wishes she wouldn't do that. Sometimes he wishes she'd be a bit more honest about what she feels about him, not verbose, just straight down the line. She could drop the act once in a while. She could say, ‘Harry, talk me into it.'

‘You
should
come,' he says. ‘It'll be nice. It would be nice to have you there.'

‘Really?' she says. ‘I might come over. I'll see.'

‘I'll come back in a while, then we can go back together if you feel like it.'

‘Okay.'

He decides he's on a mission, to get them both out. They've
both been dwelling on things that can't be changed. Building new experiences, that's the key. Yes, they need to get out more. They need to socialise.

Harry grabs a sixpack out of the fridge, and turns back to Louisa.

‘Come,' he says. ‘It'll do you good.'

‘I might come,' she says, and though her voice lacks commitment, she adds, ‘I don't suppose it matters what I bring really.'

‘Course it doesn't,' he says. ‘They're good people. They don't judge.'

‘I'll see how I feel.'

‘No, don't do that,' he says. ‘Just come on over. Or like I said, I'll come back in a while, and then you can come.'

‘Okay,' she says. ‘I'll see.'

Harry leaves the house. Bella is lingering in his thoughts. He drops the six-pack at Brian's, makes some excuse to duck back to the house, and takes a walk around the oval to deal with it before he has too many drinks under his belt and starts getting maudlin.

Something happened to him after Bella was born. He has been permanently altered by the fact of her existence. It's no less real than some sort of physical change in him.

A stone hits you on the head and you keep the scar; you fall off your bike and you skin your knee. Your body shows all the dents as evidence of the life you've lived. Bella is imprinted on him, as he must have been for his own father, or might have been but for the old man's alcoholic disease. How is it that the two things go together? He has a flash – himself as a boy.

His mother always dressed him neatly and made sure he combed his hair. She kept the house immaculate. She stuck it out with his father until Harry and his sister left home, and then some.

Harry is thinking about degrees of separation, how pain
spreads exponentially, accelerating as it affects more and more people, spreading outwards until everything is taken over. Before you know it the whole world is miserable and kidding itself that it's how it has to be. He couldn't be responsible for the world, but he could be responsible for what he did. That's why he drove his wife and daughter out. Yasamine thought it was her idea, but really it was his. Everything came clear that day.

One day he saw himself as if he was standing on the outside. It was like a rehearsal, a story that hadn't been written yet, something like that. He saw himself
push
Yasamine. He saw blood. He saw marks his hands left on her arms, felt his rising anger and his horror at his inability to hold back. He was sickened by how easy it had been, by how quickly it had happened, before he had time to think. He saw where the situation could lead, in spite of his best intentions, in spite of his determination not to go down that path, and from the bedroom he thought he heard the baby crying, his daughter learning that he was not to be trusted.

Harry has been circling the oval with his head down. He looks up to see a woman and a small girl walking towards him. The woman is carrying a plastic shopping bag and the girl is pushing a small pink pram. He stops and watches them. The woman glances at him suspiciously as they approach, and puts herself between her child and Harry as they pass. He smiles and nods, but she doesn't catch his eye.

‘This is ridiculous,' Harry says to himself. He puts it away and cuts back to Brian's to sink a few beers.

By the time that Harry gets back to the shed, the party is in full swing. No one seems to notice his late arrival. There are no worries about formality here – the neighbours who make up the gathering drift in and out, as do their kids who span the various stages of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. People in this neighbourhood have started their families early, but they seem to have got the formula right.
Their offspring look to be pretty well-adjusted. They're not in any hurry to leave home. There is plenty of rough banter accompanied by laughter, a common language of what it is that constitutes acceptable humour. It's hard-hitting, but never nasty. Life's not easy, but with loud enough laughter you can get through just about anything.

One or two of the women have already turned up with food and are passing comment on the dart competition. Brian is winning, predictably, but no one seems to mind.

Louisa has fallen asleep in front of the television. She is drifting away from a small island in the middle of an ocean. It is one of those cartoon islands with a single palm tree and a castaway. Tom stands on the shore looking out to sea, getting smaller, but he is never quite lost from view. If she looks away the after-image remains and if she directs her attention there she can see him smiling and waving. She closes her eyes now and she can see him, but it comes to her with a grip of pain. She opens her eyes.

Time has done nothing to diminish the pain in her body, but even pain serves its purpose. It binds her like a steel cage, keeping her together. She closes her eyes again, prepared this time. Tom is a castaway and her boat seems to have stopped at a set distance with his small figure on the shore, and she is bobbing about at sea, stuck, with no way of getting back or going on.

After she wakes it takes her a while to get her bearings. There is a documentary on the television about parasites infecting crickets. It is disturbing and fascinating at the same time. It has just finished when Harry breezes in, full of good cheer and encouragement to come on over.