Elsewhere in Success (5 page)

‘It's awful,' he says. He has an idea then, and he puts it out there before he can think it away. ‘I don't suppose you feel like going out again today? It's a while since we went out. It looks like it might be clearing up.'

‘Does it? Where?'

‘I don't know. We could have a meal and catch a movie. Or catch a movie and have a meal. It would be a shame to waste that dress.'

‘We could do something,' she says.

‘What do you want to do?'

‘I'd like to go somewhere with music.'

‘What sort?'

‘I don't mind. It doesn't matter.'

‘Okay, leave it to me,' he says. ‘Music sounds good.'

Harry searches the ‘What's On' section of the local paper and finds an obscure production, touted as ‘an improvisational musical':
Antigone Crashes on the Beach.

‘Looks like a student production. What do you think?' he asks her.

‘I'm game if you are. It's not actually
on
the beach is it?' she asks. ‘It's a bit cold.'

‘I don't think so.' He looks. ‘No, it's at Kidogo in Fremantle, you know that little building on the other side of the railway line. Hey, we're in luck. It's the last day! Oh, it's a matinee – starts at four. Hopefully they'll still have tickets. There's a mobile number here.'

Harry disappears into the next room, rings, and comes back to tell her it's all arranged.

‘He sounded surprised to get a call, like he was just waking up. It doesn't augur well. We might need to grab a stiff drink beforehand,' he says. ‘Just to take the edge off.'

She laughs. ‘It'll be good for you,' she tells him. ‘It's about time you got a bit of culture.'

The production is highly stylised with papier-mâché masks, figure-hugging lycra, projected images and an obscure storyline. They arrive just as the lights are going down, and are ushered in by a flustered young woman wearing black. There is a scattering of empty seats – not enough of an audience to beat a quick retreat if the production becomes unbearable, Harry whispers to her. The acoustics are good and the venue is small. A woman, who Louisa imagines to be the director, or producer, overhears him, glances across, and coughs. The music is experimental too, but over dinner Harry tells Louisa that he thinks this has been the show's saving grace. He says it reminds him of when he used to mess about with the guys trying to create a new musical genre. ‘We tried something we called “punk-rock jazz!”' He laughs. ‘The things you do!'

He tells her they'd rehearse in an old garage on a large semi-rural property. They'd lived there for about a year, when he and Yasamine had ideas of starting some sort of alternative lifestyle. The guys would come down and stay in an old cottage, and they had a great time working on their music every day.

‘You don't talk much about Yasamine, or Bella,' Louisa says.

He frowns.

‘Or your music. I'd like to hear more about it, Harry.
Sometimes I wish you'd get back into it again. Why don't you?'

‘It's gone, Louisa,' he says, to finish the conversation.

‘Yes, but why? You were good. You must have been good, and you must have loved what you did. It's only gone because you decided that it was, sometime back there. You must have loved it.'

‘Can we talk about something else?'

‘I don't get it,' she says. She never knows when to stop.

‘We should be getting back,' he says. ‘You've got work tomorrow.'

He stands, pays, and they drive home wordlessly, with country music playing in the background.

It's still early when they arrive home, not yet nine. Harry says he's pooped, and goes to bed. Louisa washes the cups and then decides to tidy up the study. She has barely started when she comes across the box of photos. She sits back, holding it on her lap.

‘This is not such a great idea, Louisa,' she tells herself. ‘You won't sleep tonight.'

She removes the lid, and settles back on the floor with her legs outstretched and her back against the wall. She is looking for a picture of Tom, but finds her daughter instead.

Meredith was eight when Louisa left Victor. There is a photograph of her about the age she was then, or just a bit younger, holding her cat, her face half buried in its fur. Louisa can't remember taking it, but it must have been her because Victor wouldn't have allowed her to put the animal up to her face like that.

Did she tell Meri to smile and is that why she is hiding behind Ginger? Later Victor backed over the cat with the BMW, not realising it was sleeping under the rear wheel. Louisa and Harry don't have a cat, but Louisa always checks under the wheels before she backs out, just in case.

Meredith was Daddy's girl. How horrible for her, Louisa
thinks now. How awful, the way she had to be all right for her father's sake. He said he was sorry, but that she should have kept the cat out of the way, and that if she were a good girl he'd buy her another one from the pet shop.

It seems to Louisa that there is deep sadness in her daughter's eyes. Was it a fleeting unhappiness, or was it the way she had always been? Louisa hadn't seen it at the time. The photograph has picked up something that her daughter hid well. It is no wonder that Meri seemed older than she was, and yet as Louisa looks at her now she knows that she was just a little girl, with a small child's interpretation of the world. That would have been the time to be there for her, when she was looking for some sort of direction, when she needed some sort of stability.

Louisa rings Meredith on a regular basis, but the conversations go nowhere. These days Louisa hears more about the details of her daughter's life from her sister, than from Meri herself. Zoe tells Louisa that on the surface everything is fine, but she worries about the girl and says it might be a good idea to give her a ring.

‘I do ring her,' says Louisa, ‘but she never tells me anything.'

It's true. Whenever Louisa rings, Meredith is polite and guarded. No, there's no special news. Todd is well. They are both working long hours to get more of the house paid off. Yes, they're coping just fine. Louisa and Harry should come to Sydney some time, but it's difficult arranging a time, with work and everything. There's someone at the door, she has to go. Thanks for ringing. Yes she'll keep in touch. She'll ring home next time. Home? The line clicks shut.

It's a frustrating and pointless exercise that only seems to make things worse. After Louisa hangs up she feels empty.

Harry seems fast asleep, but he half wakes when she crawls in beside him, and rubs his warm feet against her cold legs,
reaches his arm around her body, and nuzzles into her neck.

‘Night,' she whispers, but he is in deep sleep again.

The following week Louisa tells Lucy about Harry's unwillingness to talk about his music, and about the photographs, and Meredith, and Victor. Lucy advises her to keep trying to reach Harry, not to let herself get shut out.

‘Because, what is the point otherwise?' Lucy says.

‘I try,' Louisa says, ‘I know I need to try harder. I do want to find more opportunities for us to talk, so that he feels comfortable to tell me things, so I can tell him things, so that we get closer, but I bend over backwards, and agree with him quite often about stupid things that don't even matter, even when I don't, but then he turns around and takes the opposite point of view which turns out to be what I thought in the first place, only then I can't say it, can I? So he's deliberately contrary. It doesn't matter how nice I am.'

‘Well, no,' says Lucy. ‘You need to try something else. You need to get a bit more angsty.'

Angsty? What's that? Grumpy? Angry? What has that ever achieved, Louisa wonders, but it's too hard to explain. ‘Yes, I suppose,' she says. ‘I guess so.'

Just the same, Lucy's comment precipitates something.

Louisa finds the first occasion she can after her session to tell Harry more about Victor and how what he did to her made him feel powerful, which she thinks he must have needed, because underneath it all he was weak. Why else would he pick on a person half his size, not to mention his own children who he should have been protecting from harm? She tells Harry, with a little too much feeling, that it makes her sick, what he did to them all.

Harry apparently takes her brief attempt to communicate as an oblique criticism of all of his sex, and gets moody for a while.

‘Oh, for Pete's sake,' he says.

He goes for a walk around the backyard, does some light pruning. He comes back inside, puts the secateurs down, and takes up where they left off.

‘I'm not Victor!' he says.

‘I know.'

‘For one thing, I actually care about you Louisa,' he says. ‘Believe it or not.'

This surprises her, the fact that he would say it in so many words.

‘Do you?' she says.

‘Of course I do. I'm here, aren't I?' And he gives her an awkward squeeze. ‘It doesn't have to be said.' His voice breaks over the last word, suddenly uncertain. Her eyes fill.

‘Sometimes it does need to be said,' she says.

A short silence, then:

‘We could have sex more often I suppose,' he suggests, hopefully.

‘Could we?'

‘Yes.'

‘No time like the present,' she retorts.

Harry misses two beats, fixes her in the eye, strips off his gardening gloves, begins to hum the national anthem, and dances her towards the bedroom.

‘What about the pruning?' she says.

‘Bugger the pruning!'

As they make love, Louisa slows him down, luxuriating in the generous heat of his body and the ever-surprising tenderness of his touch. There is something subtle and new for her here, as if her body, even at this late stage, is still learning.

Afterwards, when they are lying lazily on the bed, with his arms loosely holding her, and the late sun filtering in, she tells him, ‘You know, Harry, I do love you.'

His arms tighten fractionally, before he lets her go. He rolls over, sits up on the side of the bed, and stares out of the
window. A cloud must have slipped across the sun. The light in the room softens.

‘I know,' he says, ‘me too.'

He stands with his back to her, naked, vulnerable, desirable. Her body aches for him, but he is gone, already moving on to the next thing. The end of the day is upon them, and tomorrow things will be as usual.

He begins to dress. ‘It's getting late,' he says. ‘I'd better take the dog for a walk. Want to come?'

Buddha cost seven dollars and ninety-five cents from a retail outlet that Louisa and Harry have difficulty categorising. The store sits near a south-of-the-river market and sells a range of goods including a substantial quantity of fruit and vegetables, lollies, cheap ornaments, antiques, bric-a-brac, multidenominational religious items of devotion, fairies, artificial flowers and pot plants.

Buddha had originally been priced at fifteen dollars, but because he had a small chip on the big toe of his left foot, he was marked down. It was the bargain that drew Harry's eye, and a love of imperfection that drew Louisa's. Louisa held him and said no to the plastic bag, as Harry counted out eight dollars and told the shop assistant to keep the change because he was so pleased with the price. They drove straight home while Harry hummed along to Peggy Lee and ‘Fever' playing from the CD stacker.

There was no debate regarding Buddha's place in the grand scheme of things. For once they were agreed. It was as if the spot beneath the pink rose tree had been waiting for him all along. A welcoming of petals had been prepared by the breeze.

Buddha's chip glinted white against the dark green paint that covered the rest of his expansive body. At first when they
looked out onto the garden from the dining room window they could see it clearly, but after only a week it had begun to disappear. Dirt was covering it, and a petal from the rose had bandaged it. The petal shrivelled and stuck, and eventually dried out and was blown off and absorbed into the general background. By this time, the white had virtually disappeared, leaving an interesting black scar that could be discerned only at close quarters. Although the wound healed with the passage of time, Buddha retained a triangular mark on the tip of his toe, a point of focus for the observant to meditate upon.

They each noted the event as a minor miracle, and independently wondered about its significance.

Louisa stands in the mist watching the drops of water form and trickle over Buddha's bald head. He smiles. The winter grass has almost obscured him from view, but it doesn't seem to matter.

‘Let nature take its course,' she murmurs, on his behalf. ‘You don't seem to mind, do you Buddha? Of course, you're not actually alive. That might have something to do with it.'

At that the rain gets heavier, encouraging her to go inside.

There was a man, Floyd, who worked on the station for her father when she was very young. He used to play tricks on her and Zoe. Part of his job was to kill sheep for the homestead meat. It's not a pleasant job, her father said when she came crying to him that first time, but it has to be done. Floyd actually seemed to like it though. He liked other things too – making her feel safe and then ridiculing her for trusting him. Zoe seemed tougher, more able to handle things like that. She stood up to him a bit more.

It takes a long time before a person looks back at the child and the adult and realises that, logically, the child can't be held responsible. It takes even longer to feel it is true. Responsible for what, she's not sure.

‘Come on,' says Floyd. ‘Come with me.'

Zoe is there too. She must be about six years old. Louisa is four.

‘Where to?' says Zoe, tripping after him.

He's walking away. He has the dog with him – a bitzer, part kelpie, part several other things. A bit of dingo. He expects them to follow. They do, of course. They might have an inkling about Floyd's tendency for mischief by now, but they are curious. The yard, which is attached to a smaller pen, is a short distance from the homestead. Mostly it stands empty, but today it holds about a dozen animals including some ewes with their lambs, already weaned, but with some still trying for milk.

‘Pick one,' he says.

‘What for?' says Zoe.

‘Which one do you like best?'

‘That one is cute,' says Louisa, pointing to one of the bigger lambs.

‘That one it is,' says Floyd.

Louisa hasn't thought of Floyd for years. She wants to approach the subject obliquely, talk about it generally, and not get into the particulars. She doesn't like to think about Floyd, but he has emerged in her consciousness for a reason. He might hold a clue. Louisa thinks of Buddha then. He could be the bridge she needs. She tells Lucy that she's interested in Buddhism because it doesn't shy away from the subject of death, and how she thinks she might be looking for some sort of spiritual or philosophical answer. ‘What do you think?'

‘About what?'

‘The meaning of death.'

Lucy says, ‘The meaning of death? I think that we can dwell on it, or just acknowledge it as a fact that helps us to appreciate our experience of living. I suppose it's not just about an individual's life or death is it? I mean we're all a part
of something bigger than ourselves, don't you think, even if you think of it as just being part of the community? If you have the opportunity to contribute something positive to that, that's good. I see you doing that, Louisa – making your contribution rather than just curling up in a ball. Not that I could blame you if you did. But remember, the aim is to keep moving forward. Isn't it?'

‘I guess.'

‘I'd like you to try focusing on the future for a change. Some goals for the future. Do you want to continue with the hypnotherapy to consolidate your commitment to moving forward?'

‘Not this week if that's okay.'

‘It's your time, of course. It's up to you.'

‘Not sure that it's the best approach for me.'

‘At all?'

‘I'm not sure.'

‘All right. That's fine with me now.'

‘I need the big picture.'

‘What do you mean by the big picture?'

‘The meaning of life.'

‘It's what you make it.'

‘No.'

‘There is no need for a big picture in psychology.'

Louisa's heart sinks. ‘I thought there was.'

‘It's a distraction, Louisa. I mean, what's the real issue here? You need to be prepared not to run away from the small picture. Why do you continue to hurt yourself? That's worth thinking about.'

On the way home and over the next few days Louisa grows increasingly irritated with Lucy. Angsty, in fact. Lucy seems to think everything is so much more simple than it is. It's not what she meant, this logical linear type of thinking that Lucy seems to specialise in, as if life is a problem to be solved with a right and wrong answer. Besides, it's a bit facile to imply she
should just let go and move forward, as if history isn't a part of her life, as if it isn't her present and her future. As if Tom didn't even exist. She owes him that at the very least, an element of prolonged suffering. He'd expect it of her.

If she were to be perfectly honest, all that last session did was to make her feel worse. She'd wanted to talk about meaning, not her personal failings. What she needs most is a grand scheme of things, some sort of higher order so that there is a point to everything, despite all the suffering.

The mere thought of it makes her feel agitated. It's hard to watch the television news. She has to walk out of the room to find something else. She has to get her mind onto another track. Harry tells her not to be so sensitive. That's life, he says. The mortality rate is one hundred percent. Which, he says, begs the question: what does it matter anyway?

There are times when Harry says things that make her wary of him, even suspicious. She says nothing, forces her mind onto something else.

She thinks of the grasshopper with the broken leg. She would have been about seven or eight. She'd picked it up and brought it to Zoe to see what could be done. Zoe said give it to me, dropped it on the ground and stepped on it. Then she ran off to get on with her play. Louisa stood there looking at what remained of the grasshopper, not sure what she should feel about what had just happened. It was still twitching slightly. She stepped on it again, finishing it.

She should have known. Zoe was like that. Not unkind exactly, but tough and realistic. Once they had to pluck a chicken after it had been decapitated. Floyd chopped its head off and the poor thing ran around headless with Zoe laughing until she wet herself. They'd plucked the chicken with its body still warm. Louisa has a fleeting experience now of the smell – wet feathers, and steam from the water coming to the boil in the old copper. It slips by and gives way to Floyd.

‘Sit on the fence here. This is going to be funny,' he says.
‘It'll make you laugh. You'll see.'

He whistles to the dog and it goes into work mode, crouching down, sorting and dividing the small flock. The dog seems to intuit his intention. It doesn't take Floyd long to catch Louisa's sheep, her lamb.

He drags it from yard to pen, and her emerging realisation hardens into certainty. He takes the knife from his belt. She wants to run, but can't move. She is drawn to watch, impassive, as the frightened animal struggles and cries out for its mother. It struggles, stumbling around in Floyd's grip, until it gives in, throat exposed, eyes rolled back. The blood gushes. All the while, the lamb's mother is frantic, running up and down the fence line, trying to break into the killing pen. The rest of the flock bunches together. Floyd turns to look at the girls. Louisa sees that Zoe's face is blank. Her own is hot.

‘You're horrible!' she shouts. ‘You're mean and horrible!' Her tears won't stop running. Floyd begins to laugh.

‘See,' he says. ‘I told you it would be funny didn't I?'

Louisa left school at fifteen, started her training to become a nurse's aide, and not long afterwards was shown her first dead person. The clinical instructor pulled the curtain back after preparing her charges for gravitas that Louisa failed to feel. The body in death was a transitory token at best – a temporary link to the life that had gone. She would see many more corpses before she left the hospital to marry Victor. She would lay them out, think about them, forget for a while. They came back to haunt her after Tom died. Death in all its various forms.

Sometimes she sat with people as they died, when there was no one else. She felt their souls depart. Presence. Absence. She found one man too late, after rigor mortis had set in. He was set in the foetal position with his arms folded up and crossed over his chest. She thought of ancient ritualistic burials. He looked as if he were preparing himself for birth into the next
world. That one returned to her sometimes, just before sleep. He'd been brought in off the street and nobody knew who he was. John Doe. It was difficult to tell how old he was – old to her mind then. He moved in and out of delirium.

That night he'd grabbed at her hand and read her palm as she prepared to straighten his bed. He told of her forthcoming marriage, the children she'd have, her unhappiness, and about Harry. Not by name; something about a musician. The details have become vague. Subsequent events have merged with memory. Perhaps there was something else about a mysterious man in a white van.

She is making it up. She wonders again about the man parked in front of her house. She wants to believe that there is more to life than she can see, and a stranger who can predict her future would suggest that. The man in the van might be significant.

The old man held her hand, talking in full flight, but suddenly looked startled, stopped and let her go.

‘That's enough,' he said. ‘Could you get me a bottle, nurse? I need a bottle now!'

Afterwards Louisa wondered if he had seen Tom's fate in her hand. Had he wanted to spare her, or had he suddenly wondered whether he was really seeing the future at all?

It's possible he just needed to urinate and couldn't hold on any longer.