Set Me Free (11 page)

Geoff wouldn’t
find her tonight.

Brewing hot
chocolate in his kitsch 1960s kitchen, while Emily settled herself on his
couch, Ben studied his apartment through her eyes for the first time. Did she
feel safe?  Would she be comfortable here?  

His furniture: the
couch; dining table; bookshelves and sideboard, were all old and solid, built
to last. No flat-packs for him. Even the books lining the shelves were old, a
collection of dusty second-hand paperbacks, each with its own tale as to how it
ended up wedged between the others. Inside the sideboard was a collection of
old classic movies on VHS. Was his apartment a reflection of him?  Was he old
and stuffy?  Or solid and enduring?  He knew how he would prefer Emily to see
him.

As she sank into
his leather Queen Anne sofa, he poured a nip of spiced rum into her hot
chocolate. Her phone rang, and he listened to her reassure Charlotte she'd be
alright for the night. She hung up as he passed her drink.

‘This is good,’
she observed after she sipped it, clearly savouring the smoothness of the
liquor. ‘Much better than tea. Perhaps it’s time to review that Evans family
tradition.’

Ben smiled and
hesitated, unsure where to sit. ‘It’ll help you sleep,’ he said.

‘I hope so. I do
feel insanely tired. I guess that would be from all of the crying.’ She yawned
and stretched.

He’d always
tolerated Geoff, but never really liked him. Right now, he hated him. He hated
him for being married to the most amazing woman he’d ever known, and for
treating her like she was second rate. It astounded him that the man could be
so foolish.

But deep inside
him, a tiny seed of hope had been planted and he was praying to whichever God
was listening, that this was well and truly the end for Emily and Geoff.  

Diane
Wallace swept through the airport terminal in a gust of intellectual, bohemian
eccentricity.
Really Mum
, thought Emily.
You're such a stereotype
.
But as she was pulled into her mother’s arms, her fragile shell of cynical
bravado fractured, and she found herself blubbering on her shoulder.

‘There, there,
darling,’ said Diane, nervously. Diane had raised her children to be made of
sterner stuff. Not this emotional nonsense that clouded your rational thought.

Emily could feel
her mother’s discomfort, but right now, she needed a normal mum, and holding
her sadness in was too much hard work. She hated feeling like this in the
airport. Airports were sacred places of joy, tinged with the excitement of
pending adventures or the joy of long-awaited reunions.

Diane pulled back
gently and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. ‘Which way is the car,
sweetie?’

Blindly, Emily
guided her there, desperately trying to pull herself together so she could drive.
She didn’t succeed. Settling in behind the Monster’s steering wheel she
unleashed the longest and hardest wail she’d had since Monday.

Diane patted her
arm ineffectually.

‘I..I c..c..can’t
b..believe he d..d..did it,’ Emily managed eventually, gasping for air.

‘I know, darling,’
said Diane. ‘He’s a silly little prick.’

‘I don’t know what
hurts most, that he did it at all, or that he did it with her.’

‘Oh darling, don’t
make this about her. If you make it about her she wins whatever little game she
has been playing with you. She’s been following you around like some bizarre
kind of groupie since you moved up here. If you ask me, she probably went after
him. But it’s not about her darling. She’s irrelevant. He is the dickhead who
betrayed you, not her.’

‘You never liked
him.’

‘No, I didn’t. He’s
a sanctimonious twat.’

‘Why did you let
me marry him?’

Diane put her hand
under Emily’s chin. ‘I raised you to make your own decisions, darling. To think
independently and take care of yourself. There's no way I would tell you whom
you should or shouldn’t love. Or whom you shouldn’t marry.'

Emily looked at
her mother. As difficult as she was, there was no question that everything
Diane did for her children, she did because she believed it was best for them. Her
parenting was driven by intellectual idealism, which left said children
confused and sometimes feeling neglected. Yet as they grew older, they came to
understand her beliefs and values, and subsequently her behaviour. Frustration
was never far from the surface, but their love ran deep.

‘What am I going
to do, Mum?' The question was never far from her mind.

‘You’re going to
take it one day at a time, darling.’

‘I don’t have
anywhere to live. I don’t have any money. I don’t have a proper job.’

‘Geoffrey has all
of those things, darling. Most scorned women would be looking for their share.’

‘I don’t want it,
Mum. I don’t want anything to do with him or my married life. It hurts too much.
I don’t ever want to speak to him again.’

‘Unfortunately,
you will have to, but only when you're ready. In the meantime,’ Diane added,
looking Emily up and down, ‘the least you can claim is some of your own
clothes.’

Smiling weakly,
Emily looked down at Ben’s faded black T-shirt. ‘Will you come with me when I
collect them?’

‘I’d love to,’
said Diane mischievously, as Emily started the car.

Bean Drinkin’ was
doing its usual Saturday morning trade when they arrived after dropping off
Diane’s luggage and collecting Charlotte. A queue of waiting diners was growing
outside, but when he saw them appear, Ben summoned them and showed them to a
reserved table by the espresso machine.    

Ben gave Diane a
welcoming kiss on the cheek and asked her how her flight was. She swooned. Ben
was the only man in their lives of whom she approved. And his approval rating
had soared over the last week for providing Emily with a sanctuary within which
to hide from both the world and her soon-to-be ex-husband. Tonight she was
moving back to Charlotte’s. With Diane in town, Geoff was unlikely to go near
them.

‘The usual, ladies?’
Ben asked, setting up behind the espresso machine. ‘I believe that’s a long
black for you, Diane.’

‘It is indeed,
Ben. I’m impressed,’ said Diane.

‘Stop schmoozing
my mum, Ben,’ said Charlotte.

He grinned at her above
the sound of grinding beans and bumped them to the top of the long list of
coffees on order. Emily watched him, listening to Charlotte and her mother
catch up. It really was quite masterful; the way he worked the machine. She
lost track of the conversation at the table. Ben had been a dream friend over
the last few days. Not only had he given her a place to stay, he’d been feeding
her, keeping her company, letting her weep all over him and feebly, though with
good intentions, trying to distract her from her misery.

He placed a coffee
in front of her and patted her on the head. She gave him a grateful smile. He’d
taken to treating her like a puppy, and for some reason it was comforting.

Emily tuned back
in to the conversation between her mother and sister.

‘Don’t get me
wrong,’ Diane was saying, ‘I loved your father passionately. But we were never
weighed down by the burden of other people’s expectations of what love should
be. We were free spirits, free to come together and drift apart as we chose. Young
women these days have regressed. My generation worked bloody hard to give you
the freedoms you have today, and all I see you doing is looking for a knight in
shining armour to ride up on his steed and announce he is going to keep you, so
you don’t have to make your own way in the world.’

Was that a dig? 
Diane was going in to lecturer mode. Emily started to bristle.

‘Of course you’re
speaking generally, aren’t you, Mum?’ Charlotte’s voice was strained with
irritation.  

‘Yes, yes, of
course darling. But honestly, why can’t you girls just have some good old
fashioned no-strings attached sex?  We did it all the time in my day…' Emily
caught Charlotte and Ben exchange a look as the roar of the grinding coffee
beans drowned out the rest of Diane’s diatribe. Back behind the espresso
machine, Ben was suppressing a smirk. Charlotte was rolling her eyes, her face
slightly flushed with embarrassment.

Emily was not sure
why that bothered her. She and Ben weren’t really on eye-rolling terms. With
all the head patting and tear catching, why did she feel this faint twinge of
jealousy?  It wasn’t fair of her. Ben was Charlotte’s best friend. Emily had no
right to be resentful of their relationship.

Perhaps it was
because she didn’t have a friend like Ben with whom she could roll her eyes
about her embarrassing mother. Geoff had been her best friend since she was
sixteen. Over time, all her other friends had drifted away. Some had moved
away, other friendships had been severed by broken relationships, where friends
became part of the separation settlement. In so many ways, Geoff had been her
anchor, and since moving to Queensland, she'd found herself letting him make
the decisions about whom they spent their time with. Emily knew plenty of
people, but apart from Charlotte, she didn’t have any of her own friends. The
thought made her incredibly sad. Not in the tragic way she'd been for the last
few days, but in a bone deep kind of way. She glanced up at Ben and found him
watching her, his smirk replaced by a slight frown. Their eyes met for a
millisecond, before he went back to working the machine.

‘Thank goodness
you have the good sense to leave him,’ Diane said, her voice carrying slightly
across the café. ‘There’s no forgiving in these circumstances. He made a vow to
you, and he’s broken it.’

Emily’s
sadness gave way to peevishness. Diane’s
righteousness was getting on her nerves.

‘Perhaps I should
forgive him?’ she suggested. ‘You forgave Dad plenty of times and for plenty of
things.’

‘Yes, of course I
did. But no matter what happened between your father and I, we never broke a
promise to each other. He never lied to me or broke his word.’

‘That sounds
something like honour, Mum. How very bourgeois of you.’

Diane glared at
her daughter. ‘And so is respect for your parents. Please, Emily. You're
sounding like a child.’

‘Stop it, you
two,’ Charlotte intervened.

Irritated, Emily
clamped her lips shut and gazed out towards Boundary Street. Within seconds,
Geoff himself came into focus as he casually leaned on a shopfront window
across the street. Momentarily lost in time and space, she stared at him,
failing to register he was actually there in person. The man across the street
was her husband, yet he was a stranger. He should be here at the table with her
family, yet he shouldn’t be anywhere near her. Her world spun; the sights and
sounds around her becoming unfocused.

Judging by his
relaxed posture, Geoff had been watching her for some time. Diane’s back was to
the street and Emily wondered if he realised she was there. His view might be
obscured by the other diners crowding the café.

Before she could
look away, Geoff caught her eye and pushed himself upright. He was looking to
cross the street and approach her. Emily’s stomach churned. She’d successfully
avoided him completely since catching him with Cassette. Was he really going to
confront her in public? 

‘What is it, Em?' Charlotte
had been keeping an eye on her. Behind the counter, Ben stopped what he was
doing.

‘Geoff,’ Emily
squeaked, looking towards the street.

He made it to the
front door before Diane stood up and slowly spun around like an avenging
Goddess. Ben appeared at her side. Together, and silently, they created a human
wall that blocked Emily’s view of her soon-to-be ex-husband. She gathered he'd
fled when Diane turned to Ben and said, ‘I don’t mean to emasculate you,
darling, but I don’t think it was you who frightened him off.’

‘No, it certainly
wasn’t,’ Ben chuckled. ‘Can I get you ladies another coffee?’

‘We’re women,
darling,’ Diane corrected him. And I’ll certainly have one for the road.’

‘Coming right up,
darling
.’

‘Touché,’ Diane
beamed. Sitting back down, she stage-whispered to Charlotte, ‘I don’t know why
you bother with this ‘best friends’ thing. The man is divine. Why don’t you
just shag the daylights out of him already?'

Charlotte moaned,
horrified. Emily looked at Ben.

‘Who
is she, Craig?’

‘Pardon, Nana?

‘The woman you
can’t take your eyes off. Who is she?’

Craig shifted his
gaze from the bustling market crowd cluttering the Northside Wharves, to his nana
across the table. He ran his hand through his hair.

‘She runs an art
gallery in one of the retail spaces at the Boundary Street site.’

Nana Gwen reached
up and smoothed his wayward hair. ‘That’s complicated,’ she said and took
another sip of her tea, watching him over the brim of her cup. The café they
were in was enclosed with tinted glass, cocooning them from the summer heat and
the bustling crowds, but giving the impression they were part of the action
outside. Craig much preferred the impression.

He turned his
attention back to Charlotte. Indeed it was complicated.

He’d been watching
her for a good few minutes, which was a rather pleasant way to pass the time. She
was wearing a vintage dress this morning, a 1970s mini with bold orange and
black swabs of colour. The cork wedges on her feet gave her a little more
height and accentuated the length of her lovely legs. Disappointingly, her
luscious hips were secreted away beneath the A-frame mini.

He regretted the
mess he'd made of things. He certainly did not regret sleeping with her,
although the image of her hovering naked above him still haunted him at the
most inopportune times. He couldn’t help wondering what might have been if he'd
kept a clear head, and his clothes on that night. Had he been more tactical he
might have gotten everything he wanted, the Boundary Street development, and
Charlotte Evans, a warm, naked and regular, smoky-eyed feature in his bed.

Craig shook his
head to clear the imagery.

What was done, was
done, and, as his dad used to say, ‘You can’t stop progress’. The development
application was rolling on regardless. Margie assured him last week the plans
had been submitted to Council.

As much as the
collateral damage in this one pained him, the designs were good, and the
project should be a success. He would come out on top and Keith would have to
back off and give him free reign.

When he spoke at
the community meeting about blending the old and the new so the cultural
heritage was preserved, he’d meant it. He genuinely believed in protecting
urban heritage, and this was the opportunity of a lifetime. The right building
in the heart of a gentrifying neighbourhood would improve the value of the
whole area while preserving what made it unique. The building he wanted to
demolish was so old and decrepit, it was about to collapse. Seemingly the
locals, including the tenants working hazardously within, were in denial over
that.