Now You See Me (12 page)

*

Noel came up the steps to her flat after work, grinning and shaking her head as she remembered this morning’s expedition. Sharon had finally told her that Tony Voulas’ nickname round the cop shop was Shagga, and that he put the hard word on every presentable female he came into contact with.

‘You, too?’ Noel had asked her.

‘Nah. He doesn’t try it on with women who are already attached. But, go for it, Noel. You might be the one ...’

They’d said goodbye in a mood of hilarity, and female solidarity, too, Noel thought now. Nothing like it. Still, she thought she probably would go if Voulas asked her out. She wasn’t looking for a committed relationship, and she was forewarned. She fumbled in her bag for her key, and saw Paddy coming from the flight above.

‘Off to the workface?’

‘Yeah. Bastard, aint it?’ He grinned and shambled away down the stairs. ‘Catch you tomorrow,’ he called back.

She kicked off her shoes when she got inside and opened the fridge. There was some curried mince in a bowl and some cooked rice in the freezer — that’d do. She poured herself a glass of wine and wished she had some cigarettes. She lay back in the armchair and let her mind go blank. When the doorbell rang she was almost asleep.

The woman on the step was familiar but she couldn’t immediately place her. ‘Yes?’

‘You’re Noel, aren’t you? We met at the picnic. I’m Carly Brandt.’

‘Oh, yeah.’ Noel hid her surprise. The scarlet woman, Sharon had called her, and explained about Tom and ... Rose? Rosa. She couldn’t imagine what she was doing here.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but I was looking for Paddy. He’s not answering his bell, and then I remembered you were in this block, too. So I checked the nameplates downstairs.’

‘No, he’s gone to work. He sometimes does nights.’ Noel realised she was blocking the doorway in what might be thought an unwelcoming way. ‘Come in. Do you want to write him a note or something?’

‘Yes, I could do that, couldn’t I? Can you let me have some paper? And a pen ... I didn’t come very well prepared.’

She followed Noel into the living room. ‘Sit down,’ Noel said, shrugging herself out of her antisocial mood. Would you like a drink? As you can see I’ve started.’

‘Love one. What a great room.’ Carly stared around her in genuine appreciation.

‘I’ve only got riesling, so there’s no point in offering you a choice.’ Noel gave her a glass.

‘These flats are so ... well, awful, really, on the outside. They both laughed. ‘I never would have thought you had these views.’

‘The landlord’s an original,’ Noel said. ‘He thinks if he keeps the block looking really seedy and downmarket outside, the break-in merchants’ll stay away.’ She looked round her sparely but expensively furnished flat, with its huge window that gave a vista through the city skyscrapers to glimpses of the Domain gardens and the harbour.

‘And do they?’ Carly sipped at her drink.

Noel laughed. ‘Yeah. So I suppose he’s not so crazy. He charges a fortune in rent, though.’

‘How does Paddy afford it, I wonder?’

Noel gave her a sharp look. She didn’t appear to mean it bitchily. ‘He doubles as caretaker. I suppose he gets a discount.’

‘Is that what he does as his work? I’d lost touch with him until that picnic. I hadn’t been to one for years. You get older, and you realise your friends are slipping away ...’

‘You were all at university together, weren’t you?’ It was hard to believe that Carly was as old as Mick and Paddy and the others.

‘Well, I dropped out after first year, and did my nursing training. But we kept in touch in those days. And of course, I lived with Tom for a few years. Do you know Tom?’

‘No. I only really know Paddy, and Sharon.’

‘Oh yes, Sharon.’ Carly smiled. ‘Very different from Mick’s ex-wife, Fran. She’s a psychiatrist.’ Carly finished her drink and put the glass on a coffee table.

‘I’ll get you something to write with,’ Noel said. She found a pen and some paper. Carly scribbled, then folded the paper over.

‘Thanks. Wha
t
doe
s
Paddy do these days?’

‘Goes to the gym.’ Noel laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t know, a bit of this and a bit of that. He takes night watchman jobs, caretaker jobs, bartending jobs — they never seem to last very long. Were you good friends?’

Carly smiled. ‘We were all good friends, then.’ She stood up. ‘Paddy was considered brilliant, before he ...’ She hesitated. ‘Has he told you anything about that?’

‘His breakdown? Yeah, a bit.’

‘Yes, it was terrible. Shock therapy was very fashionable in those days. They almost turned him into a zombie. They certainly ruined him as an intellectual. Anyway, thanks a lot.’ Noel went with her to the door and watched her out of sight as she ran up the stairs.

Strang
e
woma
n
, Noel thought as she put the frying pan on the stove and heated oil for her curried rissoles. She remembered Tom’s wife, Rosa, clearly now, and wondered why he had gone back to her. Carly was so stunningly beautiful it was hard to imagine any man leaving her. She poured herself another glass of wine and put water on to boil for the rice. Useless to ask Sharon about it — she didn’t seem to know how to have a proper gossip. She yawned. She’d forget about the article tonight, she thought. Go to bed with a detective novel and have an early one. But all the time she was eating her dinner she was niggling at the possibility of getting hold of police records that might show an identical MO to the Belinda Carey murder.

‘What is it that you suspect? That he’s a homosexual?’ Fran’s voice was, as usual, disinterested, and she sat half turned away, her eyes fixed unseeing on the window.

Rosa squirmed on the couch. ‘No. It’s quite clear that he isn’t. But there was this period, when we were first back together ...’ She gulped back a surge of nausea. Whatever Fran said, she felt she was betraying intimacies in a way that appalled her.

‘Yes?’

‘He liked me to dress ... oh, I don’t know. Like Marlene Dietrich or some vamp in one of those awful movies. Suspender belts and seamed stockings. Push-up bras. And black lace negligees. He’d ... take the negligee off me when we were making love. He’d put it on himself. It got him over the initial ... problem.’

‘His impotency?’

‘Yes.’ She was silent for a while. ‘Then I got pregnant, with Jessie. I don’t know ... the maternal hormones cut in, I suppose. I started to hate it, the sort of sex we had. It started to make me physically ill — I dreaded it.’ She sat up and stared at Fran. I wanted to be the woman. I wanted him to be the man. Do you know what I mean?’

Fran nodded. ‘How did he respond to that?’

Rosa lay back again. ‘We were both surprised. At first he was disappointed, then worried that he wouldn’t be able to ... But there was something about me being pregnant that compensated. He loved the thought that our child was building inside me. He loved it that when we had sex he was putting part of himself near our child. Does that make any sense?’

‘I think “compensated” is the important word here, don’t you? He needed something, some intermediate thing, in this case either dressing up, or your pregnancy, to divert him from his sexual fears. It’s not uncommon. Do you know much about his childhood?’

‘No.’ Rosa thought for a while. ‘Hardly anything,’ she said in a surprised voice.

‘Wha
t
d
o
you know?’

‘His parents died when he was quite young. He was fostered out for a few years. He never wanted to talk about it.’ She sat up again. ‘D
o
yo
u
know anything?’

There was a slight shake of the head. ‘How did his parents die?’

‘Don’t know. He ... it was as if he didn’t have a past before he went to university. I could never get him to tell me much before then.’

‘All right. Let’s go back to how you felt during all this. What happened after Jessie was born? Lie down, please Rosa.’

Rosa settled herself again. ‘It was OK for a while. We were both so delighted with the baby. He liked ... he liked my breasts full of milk. He liked suckling. But then, after a few months, there were problems again. I still didn’t want to do the kinky stuff. He did.’

‘Do you know why you were so reluctant? Have you thought about it?’

‘Yes. It’s what I said. I wanted to be the woman.’

‘Why did his ... dressing up ... make yo
u
les
s
the woman?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I think you do, Rosa.’ Fran glanced at her watch. ‘Take away a question for next week, please. I want you to ask yourself very seriously how you perceive yourself. In every way. How do you look? How do you behave in the world? What sort of mother are you? What sort of daughter were you? What do you give of yourself to others? What do you hold back? What makes you a woman?’

Rosa smiled. ‘That’s more than one question. That’s heaps of questions.’

‘No,’ Fran said gravely. ‘It’s all the one question.’ She put her hands on the desk, the signal for the session to end, and Rosa got up from the couch.

*

Driving home, Rosa recited the list of questions Fran had suggested. She would write them all down when she got back. She would try to answer them honestly, she knew, but she also knew there was a dark area under them that she might not approach. She had never tried to talk to Tom about her own fears — she expected him to intuit them. She shook her head now, at her simplistic expectations. No, she thought, I have tried to protect him, as women always try to protect weak men. She grinned. Fran would jump on that
‘
wea
k
men
’
. It’s too hard, she thought. I don’t know what it’s about. But somewhere, she did. It was about not feeling feminine, about doubting herself as a woman. Some hangover from the teenage years when she had realised she was plain and not sylph-like, a girl out of step with the accepted model of femininity. Yet feminism had changed that, or so her generation had said. It was lip-service, she thought, now. Girls like me took to feminism as a validation, but we didn’t examine ourselves very deeply. It meant we didn’t have to.

She manoeuvred the car into her driveway and turned off the ignition. The kids wouldn’t be home from school yet. She should shop, but she thought she would ring for takeaway Chinese. She was living like a squatter here now that Tom had moved out. The children liked this anarchistic break in their routines, but she felt the daily world was slipping out of her control. She applied herself to work on the three days she spent in chambers, but she hadn’t been studying for her law exams. Next year, perhaps, she thought. What does it matter? She wondered what Tom was doing, what he was thinking. One answer she could give Fran: she didn’t see herself as a woman alone.

*

Tom almost ran from the lecture hall to his car. There were three hours before he was to meet Diana, but he felt that if he was in his motel room, showering, getting dressed, sipping a whisky, it would be almost as if it had begun. He had bought a black flimsy G-string that he would put on under his jeans. And Diana had said she had a surprise for him. He felt the beginnings of an erection as he thought about it.

The phone rang just as he was drying himself. He stared at it, terrified that it was Diana cancelling their appointment. He wrapped the towel round his waist and lifted the receiver.

‘Tom?’ It was Rosa. He sat at the round laminated table and lit a cigarette, thinking that she would be furious if she knew he was smoking again.

‘Yes. How are you?’ He stared out at the rooftops of Glebe and Ultimo and the arcing curve of the bridge in the distance.

‘OK. How are you?’ There was a silence. ‘Tom, do you want to have dinner with me and the kids tonight? Just takeaway, but ...’

‘I can’t,’ he said abruptly. ‘Sorry, love. I’ve got a meeting.’ He felt dread beginning at even the suggestion that his date with Diana was in jeopardy.

‘Oh. One of your meetings.’ Her voice was cold and forlorn at the same time. ‘Oh, well, see you tomorrow when you pick up the monsters.’

‘Rosa ...’ She seemed like a stranger to him already, someone he’d once known in a different life, but he was aware of the need not to alienate her.

‘Yes?’

‘See you tomorrow. Are you managing? Do you need money?’

‘No, Tom. That’s not what I need.’ She rang off. He sat with the phone in his hand for a while, then placed it gently on its rest. He took the G-string out of its glossy brown plastic bag and put it on, watching himself in the mirror, pulling its strap hard between his buttocks, watching it swell with his tumescent cock. An hour to go.

*

At midnight he lay beside Diana, his hand limply on her breast. ‘Time to leave, Tommyo,’ she said, lifting her legs over the side of the bed.

‘But I don’t have to go home,’ he said. ‘We ... I thought we’d spend the night.’

‘Did you now?’ Her lipstick was smeared and her black mascara had spread into deep blotches beneath her eyes. Her hair was lank from the massage oil they’d used, falling in heavy bangs across her face. She unstrapped the dildo from around her waist, watching him as she let it slip to the floor. ‘I’ve got things to do tomorrow,’ she said. ‘And so do you.’

‘It’s Saturday,’ he said. ‘You’re surely not working?’

‘That’s none of your business,’ she said, frowning. ‘Come on, get up. I want to clear away. You don’t need to shower, do you? Since you’re not going home to wifey.’

‘Don’t, Diana.’ He heaved himself over the side of the bed. ‘She’s unhappy enough as it is.’

‘And you don’t want to compound your disloyalty by being bitchy about her?’ She gave him a sardonic look. ‘You’re a poor fish, Tom, really. I don’t know why I bother.’

‘You love me,’ he said confidently.

‘Of course. Now get dressed and go, will you?’

Again she checked the rooms after he’d left. She showered and changed her clothes. Tonight he’d brought her freesias, early multi-coloured ones, glasshouse-forced, not her favourites, but they had already sent their perfume into the air of the flat. She was surprised into a moment of nostalgia at their smell and wondered whether to take them home with her. No, fuck it, she thought. Don’t confuse the issue. She lifted them from the vase and threw them into the bin. The room glowed blue and cream, pristine again, before she turned off the light.

*

Carly was woken by the doorbell. She sat up and looked at the clock — eight a.m. on a Saturday for Christ’s sake. By the time she had pulled on a tracksuit and made her way downstairs there was no-one there, but a large basket of flowers stood on the step. Freesias and stocks and Iceland poppies, with baby’s breath and fern in among them. A florist’s bunch. She picked up the basket and read the card. From Alastair, with love, apologising. For what? She shrugged and took the arrangement inside. She put the kettle on and removed the flowers from the basket. She found a couple of vases and shoved them in anyhow, finding that they fell naturally and gracefully. She shook her head; sometimes she spent hours trying to make a posy work just right, coming back to it again and again through the day, adding blossoms, taking them away, changing the containers.

She put the vases on shelves in the living room, wondering if the various strong perfumes would become cloying, then unable to resist plunging her face into a clump of mauve stocks. The smell was almost overwhelming, and it stayed in the back of her throat while she sipped her coffee, like an added flavour. The empty basket stood on the kitchen table, the pale cane tawdry and badly woven. She set it outside the back door with the rubbish bins. Alastair was feeling guilty because he hadn’t been home the other night, she worked out. Playing games. He didn’t realise she hadn’t gone round there. She’d had other things on her mind. She’d rung once to tell him she wasn’t coming and, getting no answer, had forgotten about him. That’s just about run its course, she thought. He’s getting too possessive, too inquisitive. She yawned and checked the time. A shower, some toast, then she’d be due at the clinic.

When she left the house half an hour later the clashing scents of the flowers wafting from the doorway stirred in her a sharp, almost sexual pang. She wondered what Tom was doing.

*

Rosa was becoming increasingly anxious about where Tom was. The children had been dressed and ready now for half an hour. She’d tried ringing the motel but there was no answer. Jack crouched over the computer pretending to play monster games and Jessie stood at the window biting her lip. It was their first weekend as what Jessie called cheerfully ‘children from a broken home’ and the reality was finally affecting them.

‘Here he comes,’ Jessie said suddenly, her voice full of relief. Jack simulated lack of interest, punching keys with renewed energy, screwing up his eyes in concentration on the screen.

‘OK,’ Rosa said, not sure how to behave now. Should she invite him to have a coffee? Or would it be better if they all just left at once? She opened the door before Tom had to face the dilemma of ringing the bell or simply turning the handle, and they stood awkwardly, not quite seeing each other.

‘Kids ready?’ he said. He looked tired and drawn, and embarrassed to be standing like a stranger on his own doorstep. Rosa felt like weeping, like throwing herself at him in such a way that he would be forced to embrace her.

‘You’re late,’ she said. ‘Surely you realise how important it is for the kids to get here when you say you will.’ She turned around and left it up to him whether to follow her inside.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, coming no further than the hall. ‘I slept through the alarm.’

‘Late meeting again, was it?’ She had no control over the anger in her voice. His miserable helpless expression made her want to slap him. But the children stood, still in the living room, waiting for the signal that might show them how to deal with this situation, their faces reflecting Tom’s unhappiness. She took a deep breath and dredged up a smile and a cheerful voice from somewhere in her maternal repertoire.

‘Got your coats?’ They nodded and sidled towards Tom.

She turned back to him, watching his tentative patting of Jessie’s hair, his hand half held out to Jack. ‘Where are you going? I mean, how are you going to spend the day?’ She felt bitingly sorry for him.

‘Oh, to Mick’s, first,’ he said vaguely. ‘He’s taking us up to the Hawkesbury, to his sister’s place. She’s got kids this age,’ he said. ‘Look, we might stay the night, is that all right? Mick said something about going out in the boat, and a barbeque.’

‘Sure,’ she said, struggling to keep her voice light. ‘They’d better take some overnight things, then.’

She ran upstairs and packed a bag with pyjamas and fresh underpants, adding jumpers automatically in case it got cold on the river. When she came back down Jack was asking excitedly what sort of boat and what the boy’s name was. Jessie gave her a slight frown from under her fringe, but she, too, seemed pleased to be going somewhere different. Tom had relaxed, he was his old indulgently teasing self with them. Rosa kissed the children goodbye and watched from the door as they all walked up the street, Jessie swinging from Tom’s arm, Jack turning circles in front of them, chattering.