Escape (34 page)

'Can I think about it for a while?' I said.

'All right,' said Dad, but as I got up from the sofa I saw a look of
such disappointment pass over his face that I nearly turned and threw
my arms around him and cried, of course, it would be lovely, yes!

I stood on one leg on the rug, biting my lip. Then we heard the
front door bang and Danny walked in.

'Hello, hello,' he said, 'is everything all right, okay?' He was smiling
but he peered quickly from one face to the other. He said things twice
when he was anxious.

'Yes, of course,' said Dad, springing up. But he looked startled –
guilty – and he glanced at me. Danny caught the look and examined
me, a detective searching a crime scene. I felt the blush deepen on my
face, creeping down to my chest until it was hard to breathe. Muttering
something, I fled into my room.

Quickly I began to pack a bag for Joanna's. Clean pyjamas, undies,
a pair of jeans for tomorrow, Sasha the mermaid. If I woke up in the
night, Sasha was an immediate comfort. I sat on the bed, stroking her
lovely fish tail. I'd think only about Sasha, not about Danny.

'Rachel!' my father called from the living room. 'Your friend
Joanna is here. Are you ready?'

'Coming!' I cried, and gently lay Sasha under the pyjamas in my
bag. Then I waved to her friends grouped on the pillow, picked up my
bag and dashed out of the room.

The skating was fantastic. Mrs Mulgrade had even arranged a
lesson for us. By the end of the half-hour I could go quite fast, as if
I was flying. There were little chocolate cakes with hundreds and
thousands on them and the smell of warm leather from the car seats in
Mrs Mulgrade's Jaguar on the way home.

At night, as I fell asleep in the truckle bed, I squeezed Sasha's
tummy to my chest. I tried not to think about anything troubling.

On Sunday afternoon, when I arrived home, my parents were in
the garden. Dad was potting up a new gardenia bush and Mum was
raking the path. They seemed deep in conversation but they put down
their tools as I called hello.

'How was the ice-skating?' Dad asked, taking off his gloves.

I told them about the rink and the cakes and the huge colour TV
at the Mulgrades. Then I said, 'Where's Danny?'

'Gone to get some milk and biscuits from the corner shop for
afternoon tea.'

I went to my room and threw down my bag. I sat on my bed and
closed my eyes, savouring the ice that had glittered under friendly
white lights, the pink cardigan like fairy floss that Joanna had let
me wear, the chocolate treasure we'd snuck into her bedroom for a
midnight feast. I remembered all these things, and a bubble rose in my
throat, sweet, joyous, tingly.

'Rachel?' My father's voice called from the garden.

I heard footsteps. Boots scraping on the mat outside. Floorboards
creaking under heavy feet. Dread pooled in my chest. I didn't want to
stop being on the ice. I didn't want to take off the cardigan. I didn't
want to feel like this, sinking, choking, furious, evil. I wanted to keep
being a whirling white fairy, white as ice. But I was falling down the
hole, into the witchy dead darkness. I sprang up to run out my door,
out of my street, out of my self. But I ran right into Dad.

'Everything all right?' he asked.

I stared at him. There was a stone in my throat.

'Because I was wondering, we were wondering,' Dad tapped his
thigh in a nervous rhythm, 'if you'd thought about what we discussed
yesterday. Your mother and I would like to tell Danny fairly soon—'

'No!' I shouted. 'No, no, no,
no
. I just want him to go away! I just
want our family back!' I ran fast into my room, as fast as I could away
from my words. I didn't look back because I couldn't bear to see the
smash of my father's face. I slammed the door. But as I lay panting on
the bed his face hovered above me like a moon, luminous and cratered
with sadness.

When Danny's brother Mark came to get him it seemed that
everyone wore that face. But I couldn't say what they wanted to hear.
I just couldn't say it. Why wasn't I enough? I wanted to shout at my
father. Why aren't I enough for you?

We had to sit through a cup of tea and hear about Mark's job
and flat. Dad had already visited the flat and he said it wasn't what
you'd call 'ideal'. The rooms were sparsely furnished, with stacks of
old newspapers on the floor, and in the bathroom there were heavy
mould stains around the sink and shower. More importantly, Dad
hadn't liked the look of some odd pills lying on the kitchen table.
The second time he visited, unannounced, he'd detected a definite
whiff of marijuana in the air. I remembered Dad saying once that
lots of hippies smoked this weed stuff and it wasn't the worst kind of
drug, oh no, and sometimes people pumped with alcohol committed
far more violent crimes. I wanted to remind him of this but I didn't
say anything.

Still, Dad said, trying to be hearty, you couldn't deny Mark was
family. And Dad wasn't going to send Danny back to strangers again.
No siree. He'd pop in on a regular basis and see how things were
going . . .

Mark had blue eyes like Danny, set far apart, but there was no
surprise in them. Mark's face seemed weary somehow, with the flat
look of a very old person who has seen everything. He stayed for a
second cup of tea and piece of my mother's fruitcake. He ate fast, and
a lot. I pinched the flesh over my knee. I made a crease and stretched
the skin till it stung.

Danny said nothing. But when Mark got up from the couch, taking
his brother's arm, Danny's eyes started to fill. His hands gripped the
sofa seat under his thighs. He held on, his jaw set, the veins in his arms
ropy with effort. 'Come on,' Mark said, grabbing an elbow and pulling.
But Danny was immoveable. He clung to his couch like a barnacle to a
rock. Tears spilled down his cheeks. Dad cleared his throat loudly and
came to crouch in front of Danny. His own eyes wet, Dad murmured
to him so that only he and Danny could hear. He patted Danny's arm.
I looked away from them both, at the bowl of apples on the kitchen
table, at the awful hydrangea picture. My stomach twisted.

I could change it all now, right now, I thought. Stop, I should say,
it's okay, let's have Danny
and
Mark if you like and let's make everyone
happy. I'm sorry sorry
sorry
. But the words stuck in my throat.

Mark was trying to prise Danny's fingers from the seat. Dad was
still talking. Danny's knuckles were white. Mum stood, her hand to her
face. For a second I caught her eye. She raised her eyebrows so slightly.
Will you change your mind, her eyes said. I went back to pinching my
knee.

'It's nearly six o'clock,' Danny suddenly screamed, 'can't we have
dinner now?'

'Oh for Chrissake!' exploded Mark and yanked his brother up
under the arms. I expected to hear a pop like a cork coming out of a
bottle but there was nothing, just Danny's eyes looking at mine. They
were swimming with tears, expanding, flooding with misery. 'Please,'
he whispered. I dug my nails into my palms. He knew, he knew I was
the one. The witch. 'Please, I'll be good.'

Mark put a hand on Danny's shoulder and he seemed to crumple
from inside like a collapsible umbrella. He let himself be dragged
along. The seconds between the couch and the door were as long as
hours. I counted them, wishing him away, wishing myself into the
ground or in the sky, flying with my witch's broom, my iron teeth set,
sweeping away every stain of my existence.

At the door Danny stood limp as Mark said goodbye. They turned
to go and Danny called, 'Please, promise you will eat at six!'

Dad watched them walk down the garden path. Then he went into
his bedroom and closed the door. When Mum called him for dinner,
he didn't answer. I sat with Mum eating a cheese omelette, a meal we
often had when Dad wasn't home. We sat in the cold kitchen, silent. It
was as if we were in mourning, eating the fruits of the funeral.

When I leave the therapist, I don't switch on the radio on the way
home. I let her voice swirl inside my head, inside the car. I listen again
to her responses, or just the quality of her silences. I hear my inside
self saying things out loud. I see the photo of her grandchildren on the
coffee table, the white box of tissues next to it. Although there's the
large window above her desk and clipped gardenia bushes outside, it's
as if we are in a desert cave, a safe house, rustling with jewelled secrets
and sounds from the war.

I try to hang on to her as long as I can. But it's never long enough.

When I ask her how I should live now, she smiles. I can't gauge
at all which might be the right path. She says there's no one right
answer. That's frightening, because I'm used to waving my antennae
around like a beetle, trying to sense danger, trying to please. But there
is something a little exciting, too, about what she says, like a door
suddenly left open, or a curtain pulled aside, letting the light shine
through. I'd love to jump into that light, search for its source, burst out
into the day, sunlit.

I remember how big the voice became after Danny was taken
away. It turned savage, barked at me, teeth bared in the silence. Dad
went back to work on the Monday after Danny left , and still put out the
garbage and read the newspaper. But his tears started again. A doctor
came to the house to talk to him. They went for a walk together in the
garden. Afterwards the doctor sat down in the living room with my
mother and me, in the chair under the hydrangea painting. 'Pete has
depression,' Dr Cross said. My father didn't talk much for the next few
months except to voice essentials like 'Is anyone in the bathroom?' or
'That was nice, dear,' after dinner. Even this seemed to demand great
effort and he flopped down on the chair afterwards in exhaustion. He
never answered the phone. No more boys came to the house for a
long time.

My mother smoked outside at night, under the stars that were
slowly dying. I leant against the screen door and watched her. I
thought about how long the light from the stars took to reach us. Even
if a star had exploded, snuff ed out like a candle, its light could still be
travelling towards us, like a walking dead person. Sometimes I joined
her outside, sat on the cool grass with my knees drawn up, sharing
the blanket of darkness. But even when I asked her questions on her
favourite subjects – the victory of the suffragettes, the hardships of the
Vietcong, the invention of electric light – she answered only briefly,
in phrases not sentences. Those nights were like the war I'd seen on
television, when the sound of gunfire was too loud for anything other
than hand signals or short sharp instructions. But the trouble in our
house was the silence, not the noise. The silence was alive, pulsing
with images and feelings and sighs, like a jungle full of night animals.
You could feel their breath on your cheeks, the back of your neck –
hot, shaming, hungry.

My mother retreated from the war. There was a look of fear on her
face whenever she talked to Dad. I remember that. I told the therapist
and she said, 'What do you think Deborah was afraid of?' I hadn't ever
thought about it – she had always seemed so powerful. 'I don't know,' I
said, and the clouds drift ed into my mind, blurring the landscape. I felt
dumb, numb, and I had to sit in silence on the black leather couch for
the rest of the hour. The sliding feeling made me want to lie down. I
looked at the therapist's books, so many interesting titles, the pictures
on her walls. 'It's okay,' she said at the end of the session. I looked at
her closely. She seemed to understand that I wasn't holding back on
purpose. During the week, away from her, I thought about her voice
saying, 'It's okay, we're on the way' and I felt her smile behind it. 'We're
on a journey together,' she said. Sometimes, just the thought of her is
like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. That light behind the
door. She doesn't tell me how I should feel, who I should be. 'There's
just what is,' she says, 'and what was.'

It's hard to fall asleep with Clara away. My eyes snap open at
the faintest sound. Those herbal pills do nothing. Passionfruit and
Valerian flowers, maybe they work on people with no regrets. Danny
keeps coming back into my mind, when I haven't thought about him
for years. Sometimes he's winged, on fire, like a shooting star, or an
angel. His eyes are always closed. I hope he isn't a message from a
dying light source. I wanted to find him back then, afterwards, when
everything was over. I wanted to undo my words, but at ten years old
I didn't know where to start looking, and I was afraid to even say his
name out loud: the word was powerful, like black magic.

Lately, staring into the darkness, I see how Danny's departure
became a defining event that gave shape to all others. There was Before
Danny and After Danny. When I grew into a teenager, he became less
of a real person than a symbol of my character. 'Describe yourself,' my
English teacher in high school told us. 'Describe yourself so well that
a stranger could pick you out in a crowd.' I saw my gritted face hard as
stone, my hands lying in my lap, heavy, passive, cruel. There was my
long witchy nose, my red hair. Women with red hair used to be burned
at the stake as witches. But everyone knew now that hair was just dead
protein. Only the root was alive. I saw Danny's face when I saw my
own, his flooding eyes. I caused his pain, I thought. Like a spell. That's
the sort of person I am.

It could have been different, I realised when I turned sixteen. If
I'd been a nicer person, everyone would have had a good life. But it
had been too much for a child, hadn't it? How does a child make that
decision?

When I was teaching grade three about democracy and our
parliamentary system, Bill Cooper asked why children weren't allowed
to vote.

'It's a very big responsibility,' I said. 'If you're not ready, and you
don't have all the facts, decisions like that can be crushing.' I went on
to discuss the agony of choice for human beings, how if you decide
on one option you kill the other. My voice gave out as I talked and
Bill went to fetch a glass of water. The rest of the class sat quietly
pondering, I suppose, the terrible power of democracy.

When I had my own child, there were big decisions to make every
five minutes. Decisions with consequences, deep and dangerous as
holes in the ground. I read scores of parenting books, hoping I might
learn how to make the right ones. One book said a traumatic event in a
child's life can arrest their development. I read that part over and over.
When I had finished I thought, I'll make sure nothing like that ever
happens to my daughter.

I knew all about my own arrest and sentence.

In dreams, Danny became confused in my mind with the boy
my father shot. I always woke with the feeling that it was me who had
pulled the trigger.

Instead of lying on the couch at night, I've tried to change my routine
and go to the computer instead.
Your best is good enough
, says the
Confucius quote above my desk.
I like myself
, says the mirror in the
bathroom. Jonny Love's Sydney show starts in just three weeks.
How can time keep rolling along in the present, unsnagged by the
undertow of the past? I sit at the computer with a glass of wine and
try to concentrate. Mary has sent more interview cuttings and photos
of Jonny, so I read through them, underlining the relevant quotes with
a pink highlighter. But how do I decide what is relevant? How would
Jonny see the highlights of his life? Why am I writing this? What
would
I
know?

I write
I want to go to sleep for the rest of my life
. My eyes
ache. I look down at my trackpants spotted with red wine. I've
worn these pants and T-shirt for the last three days. Nobody's
noticed. What's the point of getting dressed if no one else sees
you? I rather like not having to shower. Washing your hair and
cleaning your teeth and getting dressed take up so much time, are
such boring activities and, like housework, you only have to do
them all again the next day. You don't have to do any of that when
you're dead – something to look forward to. I don't clean down
the kitchen bench now in the morning before I start work or do
the washing-up. I think, fuck it. Sometimes I say it out loud. The
cockroaches in the cupboards are ecstatic. Even when I imagine
them doing the tango in the sink, climaxing over the crusted egg
on the frypan, I don't waver. Sometimes, when I come home from
lecturing at a school, I rip the top off a bottle of red and drink it
before I get a glass. If only the voice would piss off, I might even
feel free. Whatever that is. I wonder if Jonny Love feels free. I look
over what I wrote last night:

'About ten years ago I reached the point where I realised that as a
single act, I'd gone about as far as a man can go. I guess I accepted
my limits. For a magician that is no small thing!'

Jonny's insight triggered a fundamental change of direction
in his work. His show, The Magician's Assistant, which opened
in Chicago in 1997, was the first to feature this personal and
professional revolution. The whole performance became more
like a play, rather than a series of self-contained magic acts. Some
people liked it, some didn't. 'Well, if an artist doesn't continually
reinvent himself, then he's dead in the water,' says Jonny.

The new show opened with an argument between Jonny and
his assistant, who demands that he train her to be an escape artist.
It is apparent this is an old argument that the assistant usually loses,
but as the show proceeds, she becomes increasingly rebellious and
comically defiant. After deliberately bungling a vanishing trick (she
refuses to disappear!) she storms off – taking Jonny's top hat with
her. But when she puts it on, something about her miraculously
changes. She turns back to Jonny with a brilliant smile and they
begin a new act, where her performance is impeccable, inspired –
she has become a true professional! She takes over now, escaping
from the Bohemian Torture Crib, the Electric Chair Illusion, the
Water Torture Cell – she is like lightning, as elusive as Houdini,
and soon she is doing things even Jonny can't explain.

'Obviously, any show is enhanced by the presence of a lovely
female and the more you use her assets, the better off you are,'
Jonny told the media. 'Simply lopping off her head or cutting her in
half is hardly my idea of that! The Lady Assistant, developed to her
full potential, not only illuminates the act but contributes charm
and saleability. Seventy-five per cent of my act now is built around
my assistant, who thus becomes no more an assistant but an active
partner.'

Jonny married his protégé, Carole Evans, when they
arrived back in Chicago after touring in Europe. They took their
honeymoon in the Caribbean, where Jonny gave an interview to
The New York Times
.

'I've found the love of my life,' he said. 'I feel so lucky to have
someone to share all my life with – work and home! Not many
people find either one . . .'

Carole turned out to be such a brilliant protégé that only two
years later she went on to have her own show. Life imitated art! She
and Jonny separated in 1998 when stupid Carole left him, an act so
moronic that it is hard to believe, unless of course she is an absolute
nut case and suffers from delusions of grandeur, and it will now be
necessary to explore the history of mental instability in the life of
Carole the fuckwit, the dickhead, the cretinous abuser of good luck
who has no understanding of her own good fortune.

I fan out the photos of Jonny on my desk. He is compelling, even when
two-dimensional and in black and white. Imagine a magician such as
he – famous, admired among his peers, faultless at his work, a creative
artist – making way for a woman, whom he grooms to become a
star
!
Look at his lean, muscled thighs in those black leather pants, the
shouting masculinity of that chunky jewellery. As he said, it is no small
thing for a magician to see his limits, when busting the limits is what
they do! No small thing for any of us.

I look at the picture of Carole. She was a magician with him, an
equal on stage, he was teaching her everything he knew. He took
his time, coaching her patiently, letting her have the glory. She held
the audience in the palm of her hand, had love and commitment
and admiration. Carole didn't have to sit alone swearing to herself,
checking in mirrors to see if she still existed, drowned by waves of
inexplicable rage at the sound of the telephone, the mower next door,
photos of moronic women. What an idiot she is, how I
hate
her! I
grab the pencil on my desk and stab her in the eye. The point goes in
deep and I do it again and again hard with my whole fist and the lead
breaks off . I put Jonny's picture together with Carole's and I look back
and forth, trying to see what is in their eyes, the connection or the
attraction, but it's difficult to see anything now because Carole's eye
is all bunged up and smeared with lead, serve her right.
Look at Jonny,
Carole
– Christ he's gorgeous, he's actually a
LIVING
relative of Harry
Houdini and he's actually admitting he needs you, wants you to be a
part of his act, he's willing to work with you, polish you, make you a
star, isn't that what you always wanted? You should be so
grateful
!

I get up and go back to the computer.
Procrastination is failed
escape
, says another note above my desk. I can't remember where I
read that. Or maybe I made it up.

There's a photo of Jonny and Carole sitting under a palm during
their honeymoon. They are facing each other, in profile, and his hand
rests on her cheek. His eyes are wide, as if he is drinking her in. His
slight smile is almost awed, reverent.