Now You See Me (26 page)

She wanders home through the sunny narrow streets, hardly noticing the tiny front gardens with their primly pruned roses in full flagrant bloom, the cloudy purple jacarandas in other gardens proclaiming trendy newcomers. Usually the Leichhardt streetscape gives her pleasure and amusement; she likes the clash of culture and taste, the way the old-time Italian residents stubbornly resist the move to native Australian plants, the fashionable, neutral paint jobs, the rough pavers and natural-looking landscaping. She has favourite houses: one where the entire front yard is tiled in shiny orange terracotta and stiff standardised citrus trees stand awkwardly about in red and blue-painted tubs; another which has perfectly turned and raked dark soil filled with hundreds of long-stemmed, multi-coloured plastic flowers in straight rows, like a film set for a children’s fantasy.

But today she ignores it all. She is asking herself again the question Fran had once put to her: ‘What sort of woman are you?’ The answers she gave Fran then had not satisfied her, or Fran. But she had felt at first that she was getting closer to some basic truths. ‘I’m a woman who needs a home and a family,’ she’d said, defensively. ‘I’m not a beautiful woman, but I think I might be attractive — I look friendly, I think. I used to think I was a woman who wanted a career and a purpose in life, but after all this with Tom I understand my real priorities better. A relationship — someone to love who is the most important person in your life, and to whom you are the most important person. I’m an affectionate mother, but I am not a woman who makes her life out of her children.’

‘You rattle that off as if you’d rehearsed it,’ Fran had said. ‘It’s very superficial. Come on, Rosa, you can do better than that
.
Wh
y
do you need a home and family
?
Wha
t
does beauty mean to you as a woman? Why can’t you have a real relationship as well as a career?’

‘I don’t know. You asked me how I saw myself, and I’ve thought about it. That’s what I’ve come up with. Now you’re asking m
e
wh
y
I see myself that way.’ She sounded resentful, she knew, like a child complaining that the exam questions were unfair.

Fran had pushed her to go to the heart of her problems with Tom, and she’d wilted, answering weakly.

‘I seem to be a woman who can only love one man in her life,’ she’d said.

‘You sound like a bad country and western song. You’ve kicked Tom out because you couldn’t live with him as he is. Is that love?’

‘Yes. I do love him. I just wish he was ...’

‘What? Different? You love him, but not for what he is? Then what do you love him for? What does this love consist of?’

‘I don’t know.’ She’d almost shouted it. ‘You can’t quantify something like love.’

‘Perhaps you are saying you love him because he is a man, is that it? And you are a woman who needs a man to complete you as a person?’

‘All right,’ she had replied sullenly. ‘I accept that love is partly need. It always is. So what?’

‘Rosa, you have come to me. You have broken down in this room and you have told me that you are so unhappy you have been contemplating suicide. Yet you sit there now and tell me that your love is normal, that your needs are normal, and that somehow they will be met. If only the object of your love and need would be someone completely different from the person he has become. Do you think this is reasonable?’

Rosa was silent for a long time, thinking, trying to force her feelings into a coherent form that she could express. Eventually Fran had broken the silence.

‘Our time is nearly up. You have done a lot of good work here, Rosa, but you have still a lot to do. I have another question for you to take home today. What il Tom came to you and said he could only be happy if he lived as a woman? If he dressed and behaved and referred to himself as a woman? Would you still love him? Or would you decide that he was not the one who could answer your own needs?’

She’d wept as she left Fran’s office, had cried on and off all the way home and into the night.

Now she thinks about what Fran has said today about Carly, that she encourages Tom in his fetishism. She asks herself if she would be prepared to go that far, and for what? She cannot untangle her theoretical tolerance from her personal needs; she wonders if anyone can. She is crying again as she opens her own gate and walks up the path to the door of the empty house.

*

Fran lets herself into her new home with that frisson of surprised pleasure that the pretty terrace house still evokes in her. She has moved from an apartment in Coogee, pleasant enough in its own way, with the sea visible from most windows, but for several years now she has yearned after a patch of earth, a garden, separation from her neighbours.

She puts away her eclectic shopping — some fat black olives, shampoo, household cleaning items and a bag of lopsided golden mandarines, packages of staple foods. She has resolved to be more domestic in this proper little house, to cook and to keep supplies of rice and flour and pasta; to fill the freezer with potential meals. She realises that the year in Coogee was a transition period, a time of adapting to the fact that she now lives alone and likes it. Buying this small place, with its tiny spare bedroom, is a commitment to her wish to stay contentedly single. The flat always felt somehow temporary.

She makes herself a sandwich for lunch and eats it on the narrow back porch, planning her garden. She has bought a book about how to make the most of small yards, but its photographs of fountains, cunning lattice partitions and concentric swirls of paving make her laugh. She thinks she will have some climbing roses, some jasmine, and a white camellia. There is already an old lemon tree in one corner.

Thinking of gardens makes her think of Rosa. She knows she has not been entirely honest with her, especially about Carly. In fact, for several years she had liked Carly, found her thoughtful and admirable. And that first fling between Mick and Carly had not caused him much harm, it had been uncommitted on both sides. What Fran hugs to herself is the memory of the second time, the weeks that broke her marriage apart. Then the months of recrimination and self-recrimination. It was during this time that Mick accused her, Fran, of being cold, unable to give anything of herself. He compared her with Carly, with Carly’s unquestioning warmth and passion. He attacked her work and her methods, holding up Carly’s example of selfless absorption in her patients. At that time Mick was hopelessly in love with Carly, obsessed by her. And Carly was on the rebound from Tom, fighting loss and the humiliation of knowing he’d gone back to Rosa.

Perhaps, Fran thinks now with the dispassion of hind sight, Carly had been sincere in her promises to Mick, too confused and unhappy herself to know how much she hurt him. But it was Fran who’d picked up the pieces, who’d persuaded him into therapy, who’d sat with him night after night, comforting, listening, his anguish flaying open her own injuries again and again.

‘There’s no-one else like her,’ he’d said, repeatedly. ‘I’ll never find anyone else who understands the way she does. Who allows me to be so much myself. Who allows me so much of her. And she’s so beautiful.’

Fran soothing, not beautiful, withholding, salt in her wounds.

I’v
e
hate
d
he
r
sinc
e
the
n
, she thinks
.
Sh
e
i
s
th
e
onl
y
perso
n
I’ve eve
r
trul
y
hate
d.
It’
s
nothin
g
t
o
d
o
wit
h
he
r
sel
f-
contro
l,
o
r
tha
t
I
thin
k
she’
s
manipulativ
e.
It’
s
t
o
d
o
wit
h
he
r
bein
g
beautifu
l
an
d
sexuall
y
liberate
d
an
d
tha
t
sh
e
wrenche
d
Mic
k
fro
m
m
e
irrevocabl
y
.

She smiles, sipping her orange juice. She has never fully admitted this to herself before and she’s pleased by it, as if she were her own patient and had made an important breakthrough. She sighs happily as she walks back through the charming rooms. The house is a working symbol, she thinks: renovation, no more cobwebs, fresh paintwork and light in the corners. The move has done this for her already. In keeping with her new resolutions she decides she will spend the afternoon at the pool, do some laps.

Changing into her bathers later she thinks she finds a small hard lump under her left breast, so small it is difficult to be sure. The pleasure drains out of her day as she plans how she can alter Monday’s schedule to fit in a doctor’s appointment.

‘I wish I knew why we were doing this,’ Sharon grumbles, shrugging a black silk shirt over her head. ‘I didn’t like her the one time I met her, and I didn’t even speak to him.’

‘Tom’s me mate, that’s why,’ Mick says, rooting through a drawer and throwing most of its contents on the floor. ‘He invited us, and I said yes. Didn’t your mother ever tell you that if you were asked out you should put on your hat and go?’

‘No. My mother was a very sensible woman. She did what she felt like doing. What on earth are you looking for?’

‘The other maroon sock. Find me the other sock, Sharon darling, there’s a dear. Please find little Micky’s sock.’

‘I’l
l
giv
e
you one in a minute, on the jaw. Find your own fucking sock.’ But she lets him see her smile. ‘Who wears maroon socks these days, anyway? You’re a dinosaur.’ She sorts through the mess he’s made and comes up with the missing item. Here, if you must wear it. But seriously, Mick, you have to keep an eye on me, all right? Talk to me a bit, don’t get caught up in drunken reminiscence or anything and leave me trying to make conversation with her.’

‘I don’t know why you’ve taken such a dislike to her,’ Mick says. ‘Carly’s all right, for a cold stuck-up bitch.’ He can think about her in these terms, now, flippantly. He has practically forgotten the passion she once inspired in him, the year of grief and recovery. He’s congratulated himself often, since then, on the person he has become, the flexible shell he has grown around that old vulnerability.

‘I like Rosa better,’ she says. ‘And I’ve hardly exchanged two words with her, either. I wouldn’t mind if we were going to dinner with her, though.’

‘Well,’ he considers it. ‘I like Rosa better, too. But I’ve never been to bed with her.’

She stares at him. ‘Am I to understand from that that yo
u
hav
e
been to bed with Carly?’

‘Put your skirt on,’ he says, stroking her stockinged leg. ‘Or we won’t get there at all.’

‘Skirt? Honestly, Mick, sometimes you sound like my grandfather. I’m going to wear pants, if you don’t mind. And don’t change the subject, counsellor.’

‘Look,’ he says. ‘There was nothing to it. We were undergraduates. It was before I met Fran.
’
Th
e
firs
t
tim
e
, he thinks.

‘How long did it last?’

‘A few months. She dropped me for someone else. Someone more interesting on campus. Then a couple of years later she seemed to fixate on Tom. He and Rosa were obviously having problems — married too young, all that sort of thing.’

‘What sort of thing? Explain it to me
,
I’
m
too young to understand your cryptic references.’ She pulls on tight scarlet pants, and puts her feet into black high heels, dodging Mick’s reaching hands.

‘Oh, I dunno. Tom was ambitious — academically, I mean. He’d come from nothing, had to make his way. Rosa was a bit of a cut above. She was just at university for something to do before she got married. Dabbled in various Arts subjects, was in the Drama Club, lefty politics. For Tom it was his one chance, like it was for me — know what I mean?’

‘Yeah.’ She moves closer to him and pulls his head against her breast. ‘Me too, in a way, but things were different. Your generation seemed to make their whole lives on campus.’

‘I suppose so. Anyway, Rosa resented him studying all the time. She wanted to play house, have dinner parties, be bright young marrieds. When he finished his honours degree and got a tutorship, she thought it was all over. But then he had to do his MA and his PhD, write a couple of books, a few million articles, all that university treadmill shit.’

‘How did Carly come into it? Didn’t she drop out after first year?’

‘Yeah, but she still hung around with us. She didn’t find the other nurses she was training with all that exciting.’

‘So — what happened? Did she seduce him at a party or something?’

‘I guess so. She was always around — I don’t know, I was studying my bum off, too, I didn’t really notice what happened. One minute Tom and Rosa were the go, the next minute he was living with Carly. We all just accepted it — it was like that, then.’

‘And why did he go back to Rosa?’

‘Don’t know that, either. But I bet Carly was a cow to live with.’ Mick had never actually lived with her, though he’d wanted to, desperately. He shakes his head slightly in bemusement, remembering how besotted he’d been. ‘I used to see a lot of Tom, then, but Carly was often on night duty or some strange shift. We didn’t talk about that stuff.’

‘No, I bet,’ she says scornfully. ‘Typical blokes. Wha
t
di
d
you talk about? The football?’

‘We discussed philosophical and judicial questions of supreme importance to mankind,’ he says. ‘The football may have been among them.’ He ducks her flicking finger. ‘I didn’t see Tom at all for a while. I was trying to keep it together with Fran, as well as greasing my way up the legal ladder. Then I heard he’d gone back to Rosa. After that I only saw them occasionally — at the picnics, when Paddy got them going, sometimes for dinner.’ He’d avoided Tom, almost hating him for the power he still seemed to hold over Carly. Carly had made Mick her confidant, and over long evenings of offering her comfort he’d fallen hopelessly, inextricably in love with her.

‘OK,’ she says, smoothing down his hair. ‘I’m ready. I feel adequately briefed. Let’s go.’

At the car he puts his arms around her and kisses her. He tells himself he has not deliberately lied to Sharon; the time of his obsession seems irrelevant, unreal, nothing to do with him as he is now. If he told her about it it would be giving a fantasy more flesh than it deserves. And he is ashamed of that Mick who grovelled and humiliated himself, who was no
t
himsel
f
.

‘You’re not really pissed off about me and Carly, are you?’ he says.

‘No,’ she says. ‘But I’ll be watching you all night. Just remember that. Keep your hands on the table.’

‘Yes, officer,’ he says. ‘I do love a bossy woman.’

*

Carly is wearing a calf-length, loose white shift. She is barefoot. She immediately thwarts Sharon’s plans by inviting her into the kitchen while she finishes cooking the meal. She pours them both champagne and lifts her glass in a toast. ‘To you and Mick, and to me and Tom,’ she says. ‘New beginnings.’

‘I’ve been with Mick a while now,’ Sharon says. ‘Nearly a year.’ Carly doesn’t seem so self-contained and intimidating tonight. Her eyes are shiny and she is behaving with abandoned friendliness.

‘Well, that’s still quite new,’ she says. ‘It’s a second chance for me and Tom. We won’t fuck it up this time.’

She chops herbs and stirs pots, all the while asking Sharon about herself and her work. Despite her wariness, Sharon is charmed into talking freely. She relaxes further with the second glass of champagne. This is not nearly as bad as she’d feared. And Carly is not what she’d expected, or as Mick had described her. She’s interested, asking searching questions, waiting for the answers and thinking about them. Sharon finds herself opening up, telling Carly things she has not told anyone, even Mick. Her plans, her ideals, how disillusioned she is with her work.

‘It’s the same with me,’ Carly says. ‘I had to get off the floor in the end — that’s why I went into administration. I was burnt out. I thought if I had to put one more bandage on one more damaged child, I’d scream. I was starting to give injections like some guard in a concentration camp, as if they weren’t real people, those kids. I was becoming an automaton, beyond seeing the pain and confusion.’ She gives an embarrassed shrug. ‘Sorry. I don’t often get to talk with someone who understands.’

‘I know,’ Sharon says. ‘Me either. Not even Mick. If you’re not down there, dealing with it every day, you just can’t comprehend it properly. Women come in, they’ve been persuaded finally to lodge a complaint, and I look at them and think: Well why the fuck don’t you fight back? Why don’t you take a knife and cut the bastard’s balls off?’ She up-ends the rest of the bottle into her glass.

‘When I started, you know, I was so optimistic. I used to think every time a woman made a complaint and actually followed through, rape or assault, or whatever, I used to think: Well, that’s another blow struck. Now I think: So what? We’ll get a restraining order and in three months’ time she’ll relent and he’ll be back there bashing the shit out of her. I can feel myself becoming some sort of fatalist. I’m starting to think they get what they deserve.’

‘No,’ Carly says seriously. ‘Don’t let yourself think that. That’s just frustration talking. You should find another department to work in.’

Sharon laughs. ‘The chance’d be a fine thing. Women cops get shunted into support and welfare. Rape and child abuse, that’s what women cops are good for. You have to have contacts to get into anything more general, and I haven’t got them.’

‘But aren’t you involved with these child murders? Paddy Galen told me you were working with that journalist, Noel Baker.’

‘Only on the sidelines,’ Sharon says. ‘I’d probably be suspended if they found out I was talking to Noel.’

Carly opens another bottle of champagne and pours for them both. ‘Why?’ she asks. ‘I mean, don’t the police encourage contacts with the press?’ She takes a pan off the stove and puts another in its place. The smell of garlic and pungent spices fills the room.

‘Yes, to some extent. But Noel’s got this mad idea, and she’s drawn me into it.’ She broods over her glass and sips slowly. Carly looks at her encouragingly and she finds herself explaining Noel’s theory.

Carly frowns when she’s finished. ‘Well, I don’t know. In my experience it usually is the so-called carers who commit these crimes. I don’t know why she wants to complicate the issue.’

‘Me too,’ Sharon says, aware that she’s getting drunk. ‘But there’s a certain, strang
e
je ne sais quo
i
about it, all the same. That’s if you’re into patterns, the way Noel is.’

Carly laughs and starts getting bowls from the shelves. ‘This is just about ready. Would you mind carrying some of it in?’

  *

Tess creeps into the house, her shoes in her hand. She closes the door carefully, with the slightest click. She reaches to turn off the outside light.

‘No need to be so quiet,’ Judith’s voice comes from the dining room. ‘I’m awake.’

Tess puts her shoes down in the hall and goes to the doorway. ‘Couldn’t sleep?’ she asks. ‘Or are you waiting up for me?’

‘Both.’ Judith is sitting in semi-darkness, the light from outside washing part-way into the room, a wine bottle and glass on the table beside her. ‘Tess, we need to talk, I think.’

‘Can’t it wait? I’m shagged.’

‘No, I don’t think so. Where have you been?’

Tess comes in and sits down at the table opposite her. Light from the window falls across her face in streaks, making almost phosphorescent stripes in her silvery hair. ‘I thought we’d agreed you wouldn’t ask that particular question any more. I thought we had an arrangement in place, here.’

‘Arrangements fall down,’ Judith says, her voice tired. ‘Human discourse is riddled with changed arrangements.’

Tess reaches for the glass and she pours herself some wine. ‘OK. You’re changing the rules, is that it?’

‘Where have you been?’

‘Well, let’s see. First I went to dinner with a couple of my students. Then I went to a bar, then to a nightclub. By myself.’

‘Did you leave by yourself?’

‘Do you really want me to answer that?’

‘You have answered it. I found your stash this afternoon. You told me you weren’t using it any more.’

‘It’s only speed. You shouldn’t snoop, Jude, we’ve been through all this. What’s going on?’

‘How long have you been seeing Carly Brandt behind my back?’

Tess snorts, so that wine sprays on the table. She dabbles her fingers in it. ‘Behind your back? You make it sound like a major conspiracy. Who told you?’

Judith shrugs. ‘That’s not relevant.’ She leans forward into the light. ‘Why would you keep it from me? That’s what’s relevant.’

‘Relevant. You can’t help sounding like a lawyer, darling. I’ve always kept in touch with Carly, if you must know. She’s one of my best friends. I know you don’t like her, so I couldn’t see the point of talking to you about it.’

‘Do you sleep with her?’

Tess looks at her across the table. ‘Why are you doing this? Why now?’

‘Do you?’

Tess sits back so that she is no longer visible. Her voice is clear and clipped when she finally speaks. ‘Over the years I have been to bed with Carly occasionally, yes. Not all that often. It’s not really her bag. Does that make you feel better?’

‘No,’ Judith says quietly. ‘It makes me feel like shit. I had coffee with Rosa the other day. Did you know Tom is back with her? Carly, I mean.’

‘Oh, yes. She told me. She’s over the moon about it, though I could never see the attraction, myself. Nerdy, needy bloke. Still, whatever turns you on, I suppose.’