Rachael's Gift (26 page)

His speech and touch brought a lump to my throat.

He took my hand and kissed my palm.

My gold wedding band glinted between his fingers. I wasn’t that nineteen-year-old anymore. I had Wolfe. And Rachael. And an ugly predicament back in Sydney. I took another sip of my martini. Let me just enjoy this, I thought.

He nuzzled his face against mine. ‘I want to kiss you very badly.’

A huge fireball ran from my sacrum to the crown of my head.

He laughed again, wiping the corners of his eyes. ‘I can’t believe I’m seeing you again after all these years. It’s like, how can I say it, like flowers and fleas in the same hand.’ He sat back. ‘I want you, but I can’t have you.’

Life is short, I thought. Life is short.

It was all over the morning news:
Parents protest against private school cover-up
. My coffee went cold as I watched the coverage on television. Over a hundred parents and their children had gathered from five a.m. on the road outside Rutherford, holding up banners and crudely written signs:
Protect our Kids! Parents for Safe Kids! Who is teaching your child? Demand the right to information!

TV crews crawled through the crowd like cockroaches. Protesters chanted into cameras: ‘We want safe kids!’

Avery Spencer’s head appeared, her hair blow-dried for the occasion. ‘We just want to know that our children are safe at school. That’s all. There have been serious sexual misconduct allegations at this school and they’re refusing to run a proper investigation. I don’t want my daughter being exposed to the threat of sexual abuse of any kind – would you?’ The reporter shook her head.

‘But haven’t they conducted an investigation and cleared the alleged perpetrator?’

‘This is my point – not enough has been done. I’m the last person to deny someone a proper investigation but that’s just it: it took us five minutes to find sexually explicit material on the accused’s Facebook page for anyone to see – including our children – and yet the teacher has been given his job back. All I – all
we
are demanding to know is why people with questionable morals and behaviour should be allowed to influence innocent children.’

The camera tilted away from Avery, the view bouncing along the ground until it righted and followed a throng of people up the street towards the school gates. People shouted, ‘Sheehan! Sheehan! What do you make of this? Will you comment?’ Through bobbing heads I could make out Sheehan’s mop cowering away from the cameras. She fended off bright flashes and microphones with her palm. A comical kerfuffle broke out and she stumbled, found her footing and ran into the school grounds.

The
Today
news segment switched back to the studio where the anchors were interviewing the Minister for Education live from Canberra.

‘Do you agree with the parents’ concerns?’

The minister looked uncomfortable. ‘The bottom line is we all want our children to be safe. That goes without saying. We have a duty of care to make sure our children are being protected, which we take very seriously, and that is constantly being reviewed, especially with the advent of social media. But we need to protect teachers, too – they have rights. It’s a sensitive issue.’

‘What about Rutherford? Have they done all they can?’

‘Independent schools have their own protocols. Of course, they still have to comply with government policy.’

I switched the channel.
Sunrise
was hosting a panel discussion with the president of the teachers’ union, some parents and the head of communications from the Independent Schools’ Association. My head ached. The story was all over the internet. I tried clicking on the Parents for Safe Kids website and then their Facebook page but both took so long to load I lost patience. The main newspaper websites featured the protest on their homepages; I emailed the articles to Camille.
The world’s gone nuts
, I wrote. There’d been no updates from Sheehan and White; things had been all too quiet since Lucy had gone in to give her statement and I didn’t know why.

Finally the Parents for Safe Kids website came up. On the right-hand side was a link to all the Twitter chat. I stared in horror.

That teacher is a fucking monster!

Get that pervert away from our kids!

Sick teacher should burn in hell!

Rutherford is an elitist breeder of spoilt brats – who cares what happens there? Let them cry on their mummy and daddy’s Burberry-covered shoulders.

Smash the school windows!

My daughter went there and loved it. She is now a top lawyer for an international legal firm and will sue you all.

The messages went on. Brutal slander. I wanted to see justice done but I did not want this. No one deserved this.

I looked at the flyer with Everett’s Facebook photos. Who was this guy? What did he do with himself? Did he have a girlfriend? A family? Mates? I knew nothing about him and wanted to see him for myself. I wanted him to look me in the eye and tell me the truth.

The sound of Maria Callas’s grief-stricken voice spiralled through Lucien’s studio, ‘Amami Alfredo’ from
La Traviata
. It was the beginning of act two, the scene where Violetta tells Alfredo that she loves him, meanwhile knowing that she has promised to leave him.

Lucien handed me a glass of red wine. Our fingers brushed.
I want you but I can’t have you
, he had said.
You can
, I wanted to say.
You can
. But I held myself back. I couldn’t. Just because we had once been in love didn’t mean it would be the same again.

‘You used to play this back then,’ I said. ‘It was the first time I’d ever heard it. You used to play it on some old tape recorder. But even then, the music . . .’ I inhaled deeply.

‘So I did.’ His thumb rubbed the ridges of my spine and I tingled all over. ‘Here, this is what I wanted to show you.’

He led me to two easels in the centre of his studio. One was covered with a sheet and the other was unveiled, a painting of a giant waterlily. A single kitchen chair had been placed in front of the easels, as if ready for a model.

‘Do you like it?’ He folded me into his arms from behind.

‘Hmm,’ I murmured, sinking into him. I can’t do this . . . I thought. Can’t do this. Shouldn’t do this.

‘These flowers, they bloom for only three days. They start white and turn pink overnight. I stayed there, in the greenhouse, watching them as they changed, painting them.

‘You know –’ he pushed a strand of my hair away ‘– in Brazilian legend, a princess once believed the moon could make her a star of the sky. She wanted to be the moon’s companion. One night she saw the image of the moon in a lake, a huge blank face, and thought it had come for her. So she jumped in, and sacrificed herself. She became, instead, the Star of the Waters and in return the moon made the giant white flower turn pink. It’s a nice story,
non
? They smell, too. It’s like . . .
les ananas
.’

‘Pineapple.’ I gazed at the image of the flower, a hot pink spreading over the whiteness.

‘After two days,’ he said, ‘the flower dies. Until next year, another one.’

An image in his mind, a pink and white fantasy, as fleeting as the waterlily’s bloom. The music stopped and left a prickling silence.

I rested my head on his shoulder and inhaled the skin on his neck, feeling the strong contours of his forearms, and closed my eyes. Had to stop. Somehow. I felt his lips on my neck. His fingers down my arm. I heard myself moan. This was wrong.

‘
Mon ange
. . .’ he whispered.

He swung me around, kissing my forehead and then my cheeks. I resisted. ‘Lucien . . .’

But he gripped the back of my head roughly, so that I could not get away, and kissed me hard on the mouth. The world disappeared. What did it matter? I kissed him back.

‘Wait – stop!’ I broke away from him. ‘I can’t do this.’ My lips felt bruised.

We panted at each other, a pair of jungle animals.

‘But it’s so good.’

So good and so wrong, I thought.

From the top of the hill, the lights of the city skyscrapers glittered in the distance; bumper-to-bumper red lights flashed on the road ahead of me: twilight rush hour. I turned off the main road to Woolloomooloo, a low-lying former docklands that once wore its violence like a badge and had now been tarted up for the rich and famous, but still bore its scars of homeless, druggies, drunks and hookers. I pulled up outside a terrace house I knew to be a place where businessmen ate raw fish off bare tits: Everett’s place was next door.

I parked front to kerb. I’d expected to see a media scrum but realised it would be illegal for them to reveal Everett’s name and address. Mr Brown licked his paws on the seat next to me. I wanted to see where he lived, maybe catch a glimpse of him, maybe go knock on the door, maybe have a quick word . . . I wasn’t sure yet what I would do; I just wanted to see things for myself. Shadowy figures began to emerge in the half-light. I watched Everett’s front door. It was brown with a brass knocker in the shape of a monkey’s face.

Up the street I heard a loud moan. A man stumbled along, shirtless and out of it, and as he came closer I saw his scrawny ribcage was covered in dried blood. He had the desperate look of a junkie, the skin pulling tight on his skull, his eyes sunken.

There was a knock on my window. I started. Christ. A woman with the thighs of a racehorse peered down at me. I wound the window down a smidgen.

‘Hey, honey,’ came a deep voice. ‘You waitin’ for someone?’ She opened her jacket, revealing a fishnet top with nothing except a tattoo of a butterfly underneath.

‘Jesus, love, some warning next time.’

‘Sorry, darlin’. You need some lookin’ after?’

‘Maybe another time.’

‘What are you, some kinda perv?’

I wound the window up. Mr Brown whined.

One by one apartment windows lit up; the office workers had gone home and the night workers were taking their stations. Racehorse warned others against me. Night fell with urban sound effects to match. I switched on the radio.

It was a busy street, this one, living up to its reputation, and I watched all sorts of business transactions take place. The lack of streetlamps and the out-of-the-way nooks were an advantage around here; cars were used for other reasons than driving. I stared at Everett’s front door. Had I missed him? The lights were still off. Eight p.m. Perhaps he’d gone away?

My phone rang. It was Harvey.

‘Just wanted to follow up with you, mate, re Lucy Spencer. I’m afraid it’s a no-go. Turns out she never actually saw anything.’

‘That’s not what she told me.’

‘I know you were hoping for otherwise. But Lucy admitted that it was Rachael who told her about the kiss. She’s not a real witness. We’re back to square one. We can’t pursue it any further.’

Damn it. I threw the phone on to the passenger seat. So there was no proof against Everett and everything pointed to the story being false. I felt a mix of anger and frustration and a deep sense of sadness that I’d been right about Rachael all along. I started the engine and slammed the Ford into reverse.

I stared at myself in the mirror, feeling wired. There were black smudges beneath my eyes. I splashed water on my face; it had taken all my willpower to stop Lucien. I dabbed my face with a towel and returned to the studio; Lucien was no longer there.

A plate of cheese and our two half-eaten baguettes were where we had left them. One of the cheeses smelt like wet laundry. It was late. Outside the window the sky was not black but a deep violet. I wondered what Wolfe was doing – it was daytime on the other side of the world and I suddenly missed him.

Lucien’s painter’s clothes hung on a peg. There were empty wine and whisky bottles and half-full packets of cigarettes. I looked at the painting of the giant waterlily and then my gaze shifted to the painting beside it, covered by a cloth. Rachael’s work. I played with the end of the sheet. She’d been so mysterious about it. ‘It’s a surprise – you’ll see,’ she’d said when I asked what she’d been working on.

I lifted the edge of the cloth and saw the wooden legs of the kitchen chair. I pulled the cloth back a little further, revealing a bare foot. The brushwork was thick and vivid. The sitter’s toenails were painted red and curled around the bottom rung of the chair; her ankle was flexed and the calf muscle disappeared underneath the rest of the cloth. I froze for a moment and then let it fall back down.

‘What are you doing?’ Lucien stood in the doorway.

‘Nothing.’ I was shaking and didn’t know where to look.

‘Come to bed.’ He moved towards me and traced his finger along the top of my collarbone. He leant against me and I saw our bodies press together in the reflection in the window, our skin yellow in the glass.

Marguerite’s boxes lay upturned on the garage floor. I remembered seeing an address book when we’d packed them up. It must be here somewhere. I pushed one of them upright, opening the flaps, breaking a spider’s web in the process, and dumped photo albums and piles of crap back inside. A couple of stray photos fell out. Pictures of Camille in Paris from years ago. Camille grinning in front of the Eiffel Tower; a group of people in front of a painting on a wall in a garden: an older lady and gentleman, a woman about Marguerite’s age who looked exactly like her, and two men – one wearing painting overalls. A picture of her French family, I assumed. The second photo was just the guy in overalls – tall and dark, he brooded into the camera. Camille must have been the one taking the photos. I tucked them into my back pocket, folded over the cardboard flaps and pushed the box into the corner, but something was caught on the bottom edge – a scrap of material. I crouched down, peeling it away, and a cold shiver ran down my back. Between my fingers was the edge of a piece of canvas, almost wholly charred, except for the remnants of flesh-coloured oil paint.

In the early hours of the morning, I walked along the street, looking for a cab. Sleet settled on my coat. When I thought of what had just happened, I broke into a sweat. I replayed it over in my head. Lucien wanted me. After all this time, he wanted me. I crossed the road and stood on the bridge, gripping the rails, staring at the water that rushed below. I felt like a river was rushing through me. I turned my face up to the sky, the coldness on my skin.