Elsewhere in Success (19 page)

‘That's true.'

‘I feel proud of how strong you are.'

‘Really?' Louisa is barely able to respond. Her eyes fill.

‘Yes. Anyway there's something really important now. I have news. Listen, I was going to ring you soon. I have been thinking of ringing you for a while, but I didn't want to until...' Meri hesitates, searching for words. ‘Until I was sure everything would be all right. I'm pregnant, Mum. We're thinking of coming back to live in WA. What do you think?'

Louisa's mind is racing. Her daughter's voice has taken on a tone of vulnerability that Louisa hasn't heard before. Louisa realises that she hasn't responded.

‘Oh darling, that's wonderful. A baby? That's wonderful.
Yes,
come home. Of course I'll be there for you.'

‘Really?' says Meredith. ‘You are happy for me, aren't you, for me and Todd?'

‘Of course I'm happy for you. I'm happy for me. It's just wonderful.'

‘Thanks, Mum.'

‘When?'

‘I'm ten weeks,' she says. ‘I was going to wait until the end of the first trimester to be sure, you know, but you rang. I wanted to tell you as soon as I found out.'

‘When will you come over?'

‘Todd says next year.'

‘So long?' says Louisa disappointed. ‘I'll come over there. Soon, as soon as I can.'

‘We could talk some more.'

‘Yes we should, we'll talk soon.'

‘Okay. Talk to you soon.'

When she hangs up Louisa still can't quite decide what to do with the rest of the day. She feels strange, happy, scared. She could paint a portrait. She could do a mother with her baby, a Madonna, mixed media.

‘This was really strange,' Louisa tells Lucy. ‘I was dreaming about Tom. I kept trying to see his face but I couldn't. I woke up and I had to go straight to his picture to study it. I needed to memorise his expression. His expressions. It started to come back then. His tone of voice. The way he used to sing. He used to try to sing, but really he couldn't hold a tune. We joked he just had the one note, but it was a good one. He'd ham it up, you know. I can't remember the song. I kept trying. It'll come to me. In the middle of the night, probably.' She laughs.

‘Do you want to talk about the dream?'

‘Yes, I wrote it down. Wait a minute.' Louisa rummages and finds it in her bag. She reads it through before continuing. ‘I could just read what I've written.'

‘Okay.'

‘It was about three o'clock. My writing is a bit hard to read at the best of times.'

‘That's all right.'

‘Okay then. I'll just read what I've written.
I know this is Tom but I can't see him because he won't turn around. He is bent over a table and there is someone else there – someone I
don't know – but I don't get a good feeling about this. There are long blinds with vertical strips of material, blocking the light, and the room has an odd sort of smell, I can't place it, but familiar. Tom is doing something but he has his back to me so I can't see. I don't have a good feeling. There is a bag on the floor, like an overnight bag, open, and dog-eared school books, coloured pencils, and some coins spilling out onto the floor, and a syringe rolled up in a fifty dollar note. Nobody is taking any notice and the money seems pointless because the room they are in is dingy, and smells, and there is not a nice feeling.'
Louisa looks up. ‘There is an anxious feeling but that could have been me.'

‘Okay.'

Louisa hesitates before reading on.

‘Then I wrote:
What does this mean? The floor gives way and they are all falling. I look for Tom but he is falling with his back to me. It might not be him. I keep trying to see the man's face, hoping it isn't him.'

Louisa stops and looks up. ‘That's it, Lucy. I woke up at that point. It was three o'clock, and I went to the study to get his picture. But it wasn't enough, so I tried to think about what he was doing at the time the picture was taken, and how he looked from the different angles. I tried to remember what he said on the day of that photo. I tried to remember who took it. I couldn't remember. I stayed there until it got light and Harry came out to give the dog its breakfast. He looked in on me and then he went back to bed. That would have been about six, six-thirty.'

‘Are you waking often? Early in the morning?'

‘Sometimes. Occasionally I sleep through. What do you think it means?'

‘I don't know Louisa. Do you know – did Tom deal drugs?'

‘No, of course not.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Of course I'm sure. There was nothing like that. I think I might have been afraid that he had a drug debt. He had used heroin, I told you that before. I think it was only the one time, as far as I know. So you don't know what it means.'

‘What does it mean to you?'

‘I knew you'd say that. I mean I thought...'

‘You thought?'

‘I was going to say I thought that was your job. How should I know what it means? If I knew I wouldn't ask you.'

‘Oh really, Louisa! It's your mind, not mine. You need to do the work yourself. Go on, think. If you think it means something, what do you think that might be?'

‘I've just remembered – I should have written this down but it was just in the background – there was smoke in the room. Not cigarette smoke, but black or grey smoke. What was that?'

‘I don't know. I haven't studied dream interpretation. I've told you that. There's no one way of seeing something. And to be honest I'm not even sure that this is something we should be spending your time on. Some people do specialise in that, if you want to explore in more detail. I don't know how helpful it is, or if it makes things worse, continually mulling over everything. Yes, it can be helpful to process the events that brought you to this place, but there is a point where thinking about it becomes the problem itself.'

‘Are you giving me the sack?'

‘Of course not. I'm saying it's all right if you want to use other options. If coming to see me is helpful to you, all I can do, in this case, is facilitate. All I know to do is to ask what you get from the dream. What does the black smoke mean to you? What are your feelings about it?'

‘Black smoke isn't good, is it?'

‘Not usually, I suppose.'

‘Not that any of this matters. It feels like I don't have much time left to see what I need to.'

Lucy stares at her. ‘Can you explain what you mean by that?' she asks. ‘Have you been thinking about suicide?'

‘Oh no!' says Louisa, shocked by Lucy's bluntness, especially at this time, as if she's made no progress at all. ‘I wouldn't do that. Not now. Not that. I'll be around for a while yet. It's just that I'm forgetting things. I'm afraid – I feel like everything is falling out of focus.'

‘Like what?'

‘After I talk to you, all of this, what I've talked about, goes through my mind. It starts to feel like a story, rather than something that really happened. Like it's something I can close up sometimes, and put on the bookshelf. Or take it out and read it, if I want. Sometimes it even feels like I'm making stuff up. Like it used to be real, but it has stopped being real somehow. Does that make sense? I mean, this dream could be part of the story. I could put it away.'

‘Is that a bad thing, do you think, or is it okay?'

Louisa takes a moment to think about that. She is trying to be honest with herself.

‘Yes, okay. I feel like it is. I feel sad about it, but it's okay.'

‘Sure?'

‘Yes. Although I'd like to be getting more sleep. I must still be trying to work something out. That's time, isn't it?' Louisa prepares to leave. ‘Oh Lucy! Guess what?'

‘What?'

‘I should have told you about this straight away. This is what I really want to talk about. I'm going to be a nanna.'

‘Whoa! Congratulations.'

Louisa smiles. ‘I know! Yes. Thanks.'

‘When did you find out?'

‘A few days ago. I rang Meredith to talk about my test results, and we had a great talk. She's coming back here to live, she thinks. We'll be a family again.'

‘And your test results?'

‘Clear.'

‘Clear?'

‘Yes.' Louisa can't stop herself from grinning.

Lucy sits for a moment gazing at her with a big smile on her face. ‘Can I give you a hug?'

‘Go on then,' she says.

As Louisa cooks, she wills her mind to dwell on positive things. At first she focuses on her health, and then on Meredith and the baby, but she is afraid that she has more to lose now, so she pretends to herself that she doesn't care. She determines not to tempt fate. She refuses to be afraid for her daughter, the baby, and the future. She refuses to think too much about such uncertainty. Her eyes are stinging because she is chopping an onion. She finishes quickly, and scrapes it into the pan. A spatter of hot oil gets her on the arm and she pulls back quickly, drops the chopping board on the bench and runs her arm under the tap. Concentrate! Life takes effort, concentration, and a certain amount of risk.

It suddenly occurs to her that this could be why her mind goes to the past all the time, to the fait accompli: to Tom, who can be harmed no longer. Except that she is starting to suspect that it's not Tom that she is holding so close to her heart, but her own creation. She turns off the tap and mops her arm with the tea towel. Get real, Louisa, she tells herself. Who was he? What did he actually do? She searches for an answer. What about that incident with his father?

Tom went to see Victor when he was sixteen. He'd started passing the occasional comment about his father in recent years. Victor hadn't been there so it was inevitable that Tom would create an idealised picture of the man. The better Victor began to seem to him, the worse he viewed her.

At home there'd be arguments, adolescent tantrums. She'd had to deal with the day-to-day problems. She'd done everything, endured sleepless nights, borne the brunt of his
teenage moodiness, borne the guilt. It wasn't fair that it should be her guilt alone.

This must have been in her mind when she finally relented and accepted that the meeting would go ahead. At first she'd tried to talk Tom out of it, but when he succeeded in tracking down the number she consoled herself with the thought that perhaps Victor had changed, or, if not, at least Tom would finally know the kind of man his father really was. He'd have to find out for himself some time.

Victor was sober, apparently, when Tom finally went.

‘I don't believe it!' she said, unable to resist the cheap shot.

‘Don't do that,' said Tom. ‘You haven't seen him, like, forever. People do change you know, and anyway, you're hardly objective.'

‘You don't know the half of it,' she said, wishing as she said it that she could stop herself, but she couldn't. She figured that if he was old enough to contact his father, he was old enough to know the truth. ‘You have no idea what he put me through. He just about killed me once. I thought he was going to kill me. He was capable of ... capable of anything.'

‘I was there,' said Tom.

‘You were six years old,' Louisa reminded him, but he said he saw more than she gave him credit for.

‘I remember things,' he said. ‘He wasn't the only one to blame for what happened.'

But when Louisa asked him what he remembered, he fell into silence. She could see the hurt working in his face. She felt sick, sorry she hadn't shut up. She saw him closing off. She struggled to rescue the situation.

‘You're right, my love,' she conceded with some difficulty. ‘There are always two sides to everything. More probably. People do bad things, but he is a person after all. That war did terrible things to the young soldiers – not just him. But don't
forget, we were trying to survive too. He brought the war home with him.'

‘So? What do you expect? They laid their lives on the line.'

‘What, so we could lay ours on the line for him?'

‘Maybe.'

‘Then what's the point of it all?'

Tom shook his head, clenched his fist, and was about to walk out. It wasn't going the way she wanted.

‘Look,' she said, ‘it's true they weren't given the help they needed when they got back. So many of them were shell-shocked. Post-traumatic stress. More than that, they were met with protests. People just wanted the war to end. They wanted to bring the boys home. But when the soldiers returned they saw it as a slap in the face, as if people didn't appreciate what they'd been through. We probably didn't.'

Tom had turned back.

‘That's an understatement.'

‘Besides, he's your father, so there must be something good in him – the good bit that came to you.'

Tom wasn't really listening anymore.

‘If you thought he was so bad, why didn't you stop me from going?'

Louisa said something lame and Tom gave her a look of disgust, almost hatred. He was young, she tells herself, halfway between a boy and a man. All adolescents have to move away from their mothers at some stage. It was natural. She was feeling something else, something that she couldn't control. She could feel him slipping away. She remembers the sudden feeling of dread that flooded her body.

‘I love you, you know,' she said, but a part of her was still angry with him.

Tom looked embarrassed, and his next remark was bitter.

‘You were right about one thing,' he said. ‘He's a real arsehole.'

‘I don't want to be right if it hurts you.'

‘Then you're an idiot. Dad was right about that.'

He said it, but Louisa could see that, although he was angry, he was sorry that he had. She wanted to say that it was okay, that she understood, but she couldn't bring herself to voice the words.

Later that night Tom told her what had happened. His account was brief and detached, but at least he was talking to her and she saw that it was his way of trying to apologise. After a promising start, things turned. Tom had said something that Victor didn't like. He didn't elaborate on what that was, but it changed things. Victor poured himself a drink, and another, and then he told Tom that he'd turned out exactly the way he'd imagined. He said he was a bloody disgrace. Victor always did have a way with words. Tom put down the drink that his father had given him and said he'd better go, but Victor blocked his way and said that if he'd had his way, Tom wouldn't have been born, and that he was a namby-pamby pathetic excuse for a human being, just like his mother.

Louisa knows that Victor would have enjoyed saying that, hurting him deliberately, and getting back at her through her son, but Tom took it to heart. Victor was just getting started. He said he was glad that he'd washed his hands of him and that slut mother of his. He said that the only one of them with half a brain seemed to be his sister. Apparently Meredith had been in touch with him the year before, but she'd never mentioned it to Louisa. Then Victor said something unforgiveable. He said that Tom probably wasn't his son anyway and that he'd always suspected Louisa of playing around. Tom reported this one last, carefully watching her for a reaction that would tell him that his father was telling the truth.

‘It's not true. Sometimes I wish it was. I wish it was true.'

‘How can you say that?' said Tom. ‘How can you say that?' He looked totally deflated. Then he walked out on her.

That was it. You can't unsay something. How could she wish half of him gone? Of course Tom was like Victor in many ways, but she refused to see it. She saw only the differences and turned away from the rest. She had committed the offence of not accepting Tom for who he was.