The Hypnotist's Love Story (15 page)

“I bet Ellen’s never heard that joke before,” said Simon.

“George!” said Maureen. “I’m sure there’s more to hypnotizing people than that!” She looked anxiously at Ellen. “That is—is there?”

“A little bit.” Ellen smiled. The French onion dip was made from sour cream mixed together with a packet of dried French onion soup. It took her right back to her school days.

“Sometimes I feel like I’ve been hypnotized after I’ve been watching too much television,” said Maureen. “I feel like I’m coming out of a daze.”

“Well, that actually is a form of hypnosis,” said Ellen.

“Is it really?” said Maureen, looking gratified.

“Ellen helps people give up smoking or lose weight,” announced Patrick. “Things like that. She helps high-powered business executives overcome their fear of public speaking.”

He was quoting verbatim from one of Ellen’s brochures. She hadn’t even known he’d read it.

She felt like their relationship had reached a new level today: a deeper, more complex, more profound level. Their lovemaking in the shower this morning had been so extraordinary she kept wanting to tell people about it. The man at the fruit and veg shop had said chattily, “What have you been up to today?” and she’d wanted to say, “Well, actually, I had a
particularly
enjoyable sexual experience in the shower this morning! Thanks for asking!” Afterward, they got back into bed and talked, and Patrick had apologized for snapping at her and said that Saskia made him feel so crazy at times that
he’d
even thought about counseling.

“So, you help people with public speaking. I have to do talks in front of clients for work,” said Simon, who was a website designer. “I always think I’m not nervous at all, but then this weird thing happens.”

He stood up to demonstrate. “It’s like an involuntary spasm in my left leg.”

He made one knee knock against the other one.

“Huh!” said Patrick. “The same thing happens to me. Except for me, it’s more like this.” He stood up and made his leg twitch.

“You boys look like Elvis impersonators,” chortled Maureen.

Jack had rolled over onto his back to watch. “I’m great at doing speeches,” he said. “That doesn’t happen to me. Does it happen to you, Grandpa?”

George shook his head. “Nope. You must get your nerves of steel from me.”

“Nerves of steel,” murmured Jack to himself. “I have nerves of
steel
.”

“What about you, Maureen?” said Ellen.

“Actually, I’m rather good at speeches,” said Maureen unexpectedly. “I’ve been doing the speech at our tennis club Christmas party for over forty years. It normally goes down quite well.”

“Mum tells a good joke,” said Patrick, sitting back down and picking up his drink.

“Most mothers are hopeless at telling jokes,” said Simon. “Not ours.”

Both men looked proudly at their mother. Maureen beamed.

“Sometimes they’re pretty dirty,” said George. “My wife tells a good dirty joke.”

“Oh, I do
not,
” giggled Maureen.

“I’ve got a joke! Knock knock!” cried Jack.

There was a knock on the door. Everyone laughed.

“I haven’t said the punch line yet,” said Jack, offended.

“Someone knocked when you said ‘knock knock,’” explained Maureen. “We were laughing at the coincidence. I wonder who that could be. I’m not expecting anyone. Are you boys expecting someone?”

“Probably some door-to-door salesman,” said Patrick. “Bet they’ll try to get you to change phone companies.”

“Well, I just don’t know,” said Maureen, without moving, as if they really needed to work this puzzle out first.

“Might be one of those Jehovah fellows.” George didn’t move either.

The person knocked again.

“I just can’t think of anyone who would visit at this time,” mused Maureen. “It’s such a funny time. Just before dinner.”

“Man! This is the craziest thing that has ever happened to us!” said Simon with such authentic astonishment that Ellen thought at first he was serious. “This is life on the edge! This is—”

“I’m going to answer the door.” Patrick put his hands on his knees.

“
I’ll
get it.” Jack leapt to his feet and ran out of the room.

There was the sound of the door opening and then the unintelligible sound of a woman’s voice.

“Probably some beautiful woman desperately trying to track me down,” said Simon behind his hand to Ellen. “Happens a lot.”

“Happens a lot in his dreams,” said Patrick.

They could hear Jack talking at length.

“I think he’s telling the mystery visitor the knock knock joke,” said Simon, grinning.

“Well, I suppose I really should—but I just can’t think who it would be!” Maureen left the room, patting down her hair.

They heard the sound of a woman laughing and suddenly Patrick banged his drink down so hard on the coffee table that beer sloshed over the side. “You’re kidding me.”

“Kidding you about what?” said his father.

Patrick stood up and pulled back the curtain of the window that looked out on the street. He shook his head with a nasty, bitter smile, dropped the curtain and went striding from the room without looking at Ellen.

Ellen felt her heartbeat pick up. Patrick had spent the drive over with one eye in the rear-vision mirror. “No sign of bunny-boiler,” he’d said happily as they pulled up in front of his parents’ house.

“What’s going on?” said Patrick’s father.

“I think you-know-who has stopped by,” said Simon. He gave Ellen a rueful, curious look.

“Bloody hell,” said George. “I’d better go see if they need my help refereeing.”

“I guess you know about her,” said Simon carefully, when they were alone in the room. “About his ex-girlfriend.”

“Yes,” said Ellen. She was pressing her hands to her thighs, to stop herself from leaping out of her chair to run to the door.
I just want to see what she looks like!

She strained to hear what was going on.

Simon shook his head. “Must be a bit weird—upsetting for you?”

“Oh, not really,” said Ellen. “I’ve never even seen her.” She tried not to make it sound like a complaint.

Patrick’s voice carried loud and clear into the room. Ellen had never heard him speak like that, his voice so rough-edged and unpleasant. He sounded like a big, beefy, red-faced man holding his palm up to the camera on one of those early evening current affairs shows. “Saskia. If you don’t leave now, I am calling the police. You’ve crossed the line. This is unacceptable.”

And then Jack’s voice, high with fear or excitement: “Daddy? Why are you calling the police?”

Simon winced. “I might just try to extricate Jack.”

He left the room. Ellen stayed pinned to her seat. There was no valid excuse for her to get involved.

She wondered if she should be frightened for their safety, if Saskia was about to pull out a gun or a big shiny kitchen knife. The book she was reading said that the vast majority of stalking victims weren’t even physically assaulted (just mentally terrorized), but it was still filled with horrific real-life case studies where some poor victims did end up dead.

Or perhaps her mother was right and she should be frightened for her
own
safety: Maybe she was Saskia’s target. Ellen’s mother would be so cross if Ellen ended up dead.

“OK, let’s everyone just calm down.” It was Patrick’s dad. Ellen still hadn’t properly heard Saskia’s voice.

She put her drink down on the Ayers Rock coaster on top of a crocheted doily and wandered restlessly about the room. There was a bookshelf crammed with framed photos.

She recognized one of Patrick with another woman and picked it up greedily. Could this be Saskia?

Then she saw that the photo was taken in a hospital and realized that the young blond-haired woman sitting up in bed holding a baby in a blue bunny rug must be Colleen. Patrick’s wife. His dead wife. Ellen wondered if the cancer cells that would take her life just a year later were already there in her body, gathering force for their malignant attack.

Patrick must have climbed up on the bed next to his wife. They were squashed close together, with their backs propped against the bars of the hospital bed. Colleen had one arm around the baby and the other hand lay entwined with Patrick’s on his lap. You could tell he was holding it tightly.

Colleen was smiling at the baby; Patrick was smiling at the person taking the photo. It was only eight years ago, but Patrick looked so much younger and different: His eyes seemed rounder, his cheeks chubbier, his
hair thicker and longer, his T-shirt a younger person’s T-shirt. Colleen’s hair was messy and Patrick was unshaven. It must have been taken only hours after Jack was born. They had that amazed look about them that Ellen had seen in other people’s first-baby shots.
Look what we did!
The birth of a first baby. One of those everyday events that only seem incredible to the people involved.

Ellen felt vaguely embarrassed. She’d spent the day thinking about sex in the shower with that young woman’s husband. How tacky. He’d had a
real
relationship with Colleen. He’d married her, had a child with her. It had been a grown-up relationship. You could tell how much Patrick had loved Colleen by the way his body was curved around hers.

Ellen felt a sense of kinship with poor, silly, crazy Saskia standing at the front door, still holding on, making a fool of herself. If the lovely Colleen (you could tell she was lovely, just from the photo) hadn’t died, Patrick would never have spared a glance for Saskia or Ellen.

Dying was such an elegant way to leave a relationship. No infidelity, no boredom, no long, complicated conversations late into the night. No “She’s still single, I hear.” No running into each other at parties and weddings. No “She’s stacked on the weight” or “She’s showing her age.” Dying was final and mysterious and gave you the last word forever.

“That’s my mum.”

Ellen started. Jack was standing next to her, looking at the photo in her hand. “That’s the day I was born. My mum is dead.”

“Yes.” Ellen carefully put the photo back in its place. She wondered if Jack felt the same way about his dead mother as she did about her nonexistent father: a sort of emotion without emotion. “I know.”

“My dad’s ex-girlfriend is at the front door,” said Jack. “Saskia. She lived with us for a while.”

“Do you remember her?” asked Ellen curiously.

Jack looked shifty. “Sort of. Like, I remember her picking me up from school, and she used to say, ‘Welcome back, Jack!’ She always had this
little plate ready with biscuits and fruit and stuff.” He gave her a quick, warning glance. “Dad doesn’t like to talk about her.”

“I know,” said Ellen.
Why was Saskia picking him up from school? Didn’t she have to work? Why wasn’t Patrick picking him up after school?

Out the front of the house, there was the sound of a woman’s raised voice, and then a car door slammed and tires squealed.

He said he would call the police if I didn’t leave.

I hadn’t even known he was going to be there. I was so pleased with how good I looked in my red dress and I still felt so cleansed from that naked swim at the beach, and I had this idea that going to visit Patrick’s mum and dad was just a normal, social, everyday thing to do. I was half thinking that maybe it was time to start looking up some old friends, and they seemed like a good place to start.

I didn’t think of it as part of my “habit.” My dirty, nasty little habit.

The proof is that I didn’t even notice Patrick’s car was parked out front! And I’m fixated on that car. I’ve got so used to following it, my vision telescopes in on it even when I’m stuck in traffic miles behind.

All I was thinking about as I walked up the front path was about the first time Patrick brought me here to meet the family. Jack running up the path ahead of us. I was nervous because it had been less than a year since Colleen had died and I thought they might think I was too quick to snap up the grieving widower.

I remember Simon was in his last year of school. He was still wearing his school uniform and for some reason he’d got hold of some elastic bands and done his hair in a whole lot of tiny little pigtails sticking up all over his head, like a hedgehog’s quills. Maureen kept apologizing for him.

That’s what I was thinking about as I walked up the driveway: how nice they’d all been to me. The front door looked exactly the same.

Stupid. For an intelligent woman, sometimes I’m so, so stupid. Did I
really think that just because their
front door
looked the same that the last few years had never happened, that I was just a regular old friend dropping by? My capacity for self-delusion is enormous.

Then I knocked on the door and I heard a burst of laughter, as if they were all laughing at me. It made me snap back to reality, and that’s when I turned my head and saw Patrick’s car. I couldn’t believe I’d missed it, and I thought, He’s brought Ellen over. He’s introducing them to Ellen.

I thought about running away, except that they would have seen me, and, anyway, part of me wanted to march into that house to say, “How can you meet this new woman as if I never existed? How can you do it all, the interested questions, the careful pouring of not very good wine, the special Harbour Bridge tray, I bet, with the Jatz biscuits, all exactly the same, except with a different woman? Doesn’t that seem bizarre? Wrong?”