The Trojan Dog (3 page)

The smells of cooling toast and untouched tea, and my mother with that photo of Mary Gaudron at the kitchen table.

Two absolutes; being and non-being. I hadn't ever been able to get past that, though I'd pretended for a long time that my mother was still with me when she wasn't.

I yelled at the trees along the fence, the winter night that held its secrets close between white breasts. Grief was a hot ball inside my chest, a volcano in Antarctica.

. . .

My first batch of completed questionnaires arrived and I began the work of compiling and assessing them. The outworkers' responses were of great interest to me, and while my news for the most part wasn't good, in that they seemed to be getting royally ripped off, there was a pleasure in the routine of work that I hadn't anticipated.

One lunchtime Ivan Semyonov and I took a roundabout route to the park for a change. We'd fallen into the habit of having lunch at Glebe Park once a week or so. The sun was out, but there was a knife-bite in the wind.

‘We need a cross-section of their rates of pay,' I told Ivan, lengthening my stride to keep up with his, something I now did automatically. ‘Whether or not they
are
substantially lower.'

Ivan was looking at the shops, the discount clothing shops and Clint's Crazy Bargains, who'd moved all their goods out on to the walkway, as though they needed sun. He muttered, ‘Are they?'

‘There's a huge range, but so far, yes.'

‘What does that prove?' Ivan asked, sidestepping a woman with a pram. ‘If they charge more, they won't get the work. They know that, and you know it too.'

I rose to Ivan's bait; I couldn't help it. ‘If
other
workers had accepted that,' I said, ‘
they'd
still be on starvation wages.'

Ivan waved and called ‘G'day' to a plump man in a blue jumper who was taking plastic covers off his tables in preparation for the lunchtime crowd. Ivan always met people he knew on our walk to the park. We skirted the merry-go-round, still and silent in its metal cage.

‘Sandushka,' Ivan smiled at me condescendingly. ‘You would have got on well with my mother. You would have understood one another very well.'

I stared at him, still annoyed, then asked, ‘What did your mother believe in?'

‘Us,' Ivan said. ‘Her children.'

‘And your father?'

‘Not in the movie.'

‘Your father was dead?'

‘No, just AWOL. In his head at least. In another country.'

We passed a man dressed from head to toe in orange plastic, cleaning a fountain with a fast funnel of water from a high-pressure hose.

The double row of casuarinas in front of the Boulevard cinema looked half-dead as usual, but I knew that soon the male trees would be covered in long, dull orange flowers, modest strings of flame dry as a hennaed wig.

The park, when we reached it, was a kind of gasp, a breath of different air. As we headed for our usual bench, I realised that my stomach was clenched tight.

It had always seemed the coldest part of Glebe Park to me, the green metal seats Ivan favoured near the barbecues and playground. In my previous life I'd eked out long windy afternoons there, with Peter threatening to fall from the cage at the top of the climbing net. I was always torn between wanting him to come down and knowing that he'd whinge if I made him—the selfish part of me wanting him to be occupied, even if riskily, wanting to be left alone to read my book.

If I described those afternoons to Ivan, would he have any idea what I was talking about?

Because it was so cold, we had the whole space of green and brown to ourselves, empty flower beds curving round us like fat sleeping fingers.

‘I want to show that women aren't computer-illiterate or shy,' I said. ‘No more than men. They've just been learning as they go along.'

I watched Ivan unwrap his felafel roll. As usual, the chilli sauce had run and everything was pink. ‘Do
you
find any difference,' I asked him, ‘dealing with men and women?'

Ivan glared at me suspiciously. ‘Is that an on-the-record question? You're putting me in your survey?'

‘You've had more experience than most,' I said demurely.

Ivan said, ‘Well, shit, there's your two, Black and Decker. Couple of computer jocks if ever I saw one. Or should I say jockettes.'

I laughed and said, ‘Dianne's got a huge chip on her shoulder, and Bambi's—well, you know.'

‘So what's the big deal?' Ivan growled. ‘Voice activation's just around the corner. No more boring keystrokes. We'll all just get RSI of the throat. Anyway,' he went on nastily, ‘you won't get it finished. When DIR gets the chop, this report you're so proud of'll be just another draft for the shredder.'

‘But I want to do it anyway. It matters to me and you shouldn't be rude about it.' I sighed and said, ‘Whatever happens in the future, it's kind of like paying a debt to my upbringing. Mum took me to hear Hawke arguing for equal pay when he worked for the ACTU back in '69.'

‘Where's your mother now?'

‘She's dead. She died while I was pregnant with Peter.'

Ivan looked at me. I felt as though he was looking at me properly for the first time. He said, ‘I'm sorry.'

. . .

Over the weeks I had noticed how Ivan helped us when we got a glitch in our machines; me in particular, because I didn't yet understand how the LAN operated, or how to connect with other networks. He found files that had been given up as lost. He helped me sort out the database that was supposed to be Di Trapani's job.

Ivan was thankful that he didn't have to wear a suit. He said it was the main reason he never went for promotion. No-one bothered to call IT if Ivan was there. IT was short for Information Technology, but I soon found out that the letters also referred to a man called Felix, who was director of the section. When something went wrong and you called IT, the call had to be written up and paid for. Whereas Ivan was just there. There was no record of your having stuffed up, and it didn't cost the section money. It was like having a home handyman as opposed to calling in the plumber.

Ivan told me that DIR had started the year well behind the mega-departments of Health and Social Security, but that we were catching up fast. And we weren't spending millions of dollars on state-of-the-art equipment, either. We were like SBS. I didn't quite see the comparison, but that didn't matter to Ivan.

I wondered why he hadn't set up his own computer business, and it occurred to me that, under his ideas and his puzzling, often contra­dictory personality, he lacked confidence. It wasn't just a question of not having enough money.

Another lunchtime in the park I asked him, ‘Are you married?'

‘Was.'

‘Strictly past tense?'

Ivan held up three fingers in a cub-scout salute and clicked his winkle-pickers. ‘And you?' he asked.

‘I'm a wife on pause,' I told him.

Cheating

Practically before I'd pulled up in our driveway, Peter was out of his seat belt and bolting across the front lawn to the letterbox. He'd seen the blue aerogram poking out. He was too excited even to try to read Derek's careful, rather squashy handwriting. ‘What's it say, Mum? What's Dad say?'

Usually it was hard to get Peter to write anything except ‘love, Peter' at the bottom of my letters, but this last time he'd laboriously added a paragraph asking his father to send some pictures of cream cheese being made.

In my last letter I'd told Derek I'd met a techie called Ivan.

I scanned down the lines of the aerogram. Derek's sarcasm sliced across the Pacific Ocean. ‘Looks like you've collected another lame duck.'

I looked up at Peter. ‘It's just something for me, I think.'

Peter turned away so that I wouldn't see his disappointment. I quickly checked the rest of the letter for something I could read aloud. My eyes blurred with anger at Derek—no photos, not even a mention of cream cheese.

‘Maybe Dad's written to you separately,' I said, hitching up my ­groceries and bag and handing Peter the front-door key. ‘Your letter could be on its way right now.'

As soon as he was inside, Peter turned the television on and flopped full length in front of it. I bent down next to him and put my arm around him. He wriggled to shake me off. I knew he was trying not to cry.

I turned away to get our tea, chopping carrots so hard with my vegetable knife that a whole lot flew off the bench and jumped across the kitchen floor.

. . .

One of my earliest memories of Derek has him standing with his back to the King George statue outside the old Parliament House. I'm walking towards Derek, and he's smiling. We don't know each other well; we've met maybe twice, maybe three times, through friends of friends. Derek calls my name and waves, leaning loosely back against the statue.

I can't remember what we said, and it isn't important. It's somehow like a scene from a silent movie. The crowd around us fading away, Derek's face in close-up.

Self-contained people have always attracted me; even when, as has sometimes been the case, I've found that their self-containment was a sham. It's their ability not to give themselves away immediately, as I have a habit of doing, that I find attractive. Reserved people make me consider my words and actions more carefully, at the same time building up a tension that is nearly always sexual. Good-looking reserved people can pretty well rely on getting me to eat out of their hands.

Derek was—is—a snob. He considered that there were bits of me missing, the way other kinds of snobs consider people without much formal education to be missing manners or taste. Derek has definite ideas about how it is proper for an intelligent person to behave. One of these, I soon learnt, was never to forget a face. But why, propping up King George on a windy Canberra holiday afternoon, did he pick
my
face out of the crowd?

It became apparent, after we'd exchanged a dozen of those words that didn't matter, that we were going to spend the rest of the day and possibly the night together.

I am slow to form judgements about people, and even slower to express them. I like or dislike people—sometimes both at once—and so far as liking is based on judgement, I suppose I judge them. But it's an emotional response, not an opinion. When I'm asked my opinion of someone, I usually evade the question. I have to dig for opinions; they don't present themselves, and digging makes me uncomfortable. I was attracted to Derek partly because he was so certain of his judgements that he absolved me, at least temporarily, from making any. With Derek on permanent alert for the shortcomings of others, I was free for a more charitable response. This is what I believe now; I wouldn't have put it that way while I was getting to know him.

Derek considered me incomplete, but at the time he married me he trusted in his vision of the finished product. And now, from as far away as America, he was watching to see that I behaved correctly.

. . .

Next morning, the frost was thicker on the ground than I'd ever seen it, covering the grass with a thoroughness, a deep-freeze coldness, that took my breath away. When Peter and I stepped out on to its crunchy surface, it felt as thick as the snow I waited for each Canberra winter, but had seen only once.

We turned into Wattle Street and noticed that the lights were still on; something must have gone wrong with the time switch. They were huge and mustard-coloured, hinting that the day was a fraud. High-school kids cracked open white grass with a soccer ball.

Peter complained about having to stay in the playground while I went to speak to his teacher, but there seemed no alternative. No-one was allowed inside before nine, he told me crossly.

The interview was the teacher's idea, not mine, and as I approached Peter's classroom, my heels clattering on green lino tiles, I felt a twinge of nerves I hadn't allowed myself to feel before.

The classroom was empty. I stood beside the teacher's desk and looked out the window. In the couple of minutes it had taken me to find the right room, the sun had come out. The windows glittered with it, their ledges lined with plants, paint tins and art and craft work in various stages of completion. The sun on the frosty grass just outside the window was something I wanted to suck up into my spirit, and hold and keep. The sun was melting the frost every second—and it was right that it should do this, and delightful—yet it was as though something precious was dying.

I was thrown back to my own primary school, set on one side of the wide throat that was Port Phillip Bay. We had daily fogs, not frosts, winter fogs that lasted till midday, squatting glumly on the asphalt and gravel. When I was Peter's age I don't think it had occurred to me that other schools had grassy playing areas. In my school playground, swirls of fog sat on the hard ground like a congregation of bad-tempered ghosts.

There was a bowl of daphne on the teacher's desk. The bowl was round and dark blue, the sweet-smelling winter flowers in a bed of dark green leaves. There were some small-petalled white flowers as well, with long spiny leaves, and, almost hidden between them, a sharp-scented yellow flower. This wasn't a posy thrown together at the last minute, a grab-bag of blooms plucked on the way to work. Perhaps they were a gift from the parents of a grateful child.

I heard a step in the corridor and turned round.

‘Mrs Mahoney,' Peter's teacher said. ‘Won't you take a seat?'

She held my hand briefly rather than shook it. She was well-groomed, well-fed, giving off the afterglow of croissants and hot coffee like an expensive scent. She made me conscious of the fact that I'd had no breakfast, and my clothes could have used close contact with an iron.

‘Mrs Mahoney,' she repeated, and came straight to the point. ‘I'm sorry to have to tell you this. Peter is cheating.'

‘Cheating?' I repeated. ‘How do you mean cheating?'

The teacher sat down, careful not to crease her skirt, and handed two sheets of paper to me across the desk.

‘Same mistakes as the boy sitting next to him,' she rapped out. ‘Spelling mistakes the same.'

‘How do you know it's Peter who's copying and not the other boy?' I asked, skidding around in my mind for a halfway suitable approach, at the same time hating this woman, instantly and completely.

‘I hoped moving your son might stop it,' she said, ‘but it doesn't matter who Peter's sitting next to. Moving his desk right away from the other children is a bigger step, one they'll all notice, I'm afraid.'

‘Have you talked to Peter about this?'

‘He just denies it. I understand his father is away?'

‘That's right,' I said. ‘He's gone to America for a year.'

‘And Peter misses him?'

‘Look—I had no idea about any of this.'

‘There'll be teasing if I put Peter at a desk by himself.'

I stared at the teacher in disbelief. ‘Can you wait?' I spluttered. ‘At least until I've spoken to him?'

. . .

Simply by looking at me, Peter would be able to tell that something was wrong. I walked up to him and put my arm around his shoulders and squeezed his hand, expecting him to pull away, knowing any public show of affection from me was an embarrassment. I whispered to him that I'd pick him up as early as I could.

‘What was it, Mum?' Peter searched my face. ‘What did she want?'

‘We'll talk about it tonight, OK?' I knew it wasn't and Peter knew it too, but he nodded, mouth wary and down-turned. I gave his hand a last squeeze and hurried to the car.

I jangled my key in the ignition, twisting it fiercely when it happened to stick, and ground into reverse.

. . .

‘You don't need to copy from other kids,' I said to Peter that evening. ‘You'll never learn that way.'

Peter's eyes were fixed on Captain Planet. I walked over to the ­television set and knocked him off.

Peter leapt up to turn the TV back on, shouting, ‘That old bag! What would she know!'

I was ready for this and I blocked him, arms stretched out as if to catch a bird in flight. ‘Stop it! Sit down!' My voice already prissy, high-pitched and ridiculous.

A little while later, when we were calm enough to open our mouths without shrieking, I said, ‘Do you want me to speak to the principal then, if you're sure Mrs Correa's made a mistake?'

‘No.'

‘Well then, how about we do some practice at home?'

No answer.

‘We'll start in the morning.'

No answer.

Though it was late, I gathered an armful of kindling and lit the fire. Watching the orange eyes of flame grow stronger, I gradually felt better. I poured myself a generous glass of wine, a treat that was usually postponed until I'd navigated the twin shoals of dinner and homework.

There was a louder-than-usual sound of tyres skidding on the icy road outside, and Peter's eyes flicked from the TV to the doorway. It was the way he'd waited for Derek since he was a baby, since before he could ask, ‘When's Dad coming home?'

When I came back with our meal already served on two plates, a bottle of tomato sauce under one arm, Peter lifted his chin towards me with the same silent, watchful reproach that had made his baby's face look older.

He walked to the table in a careful, adult way. I picked up my knife and fork and began eating, only realising then how hungry I was, and how stupid I'd been to mention the cheating business before we'd had dinner. I had one of those sudden, unpleasant shifts of perception that occur to parents—when you notice a difference in your child that's been coming over a long time, and you're faced with it, and at the same time you're groping back to touch the child they were a minute before, while a somehow unaccountable, unpredictable person is watching you, waiting for you to catch up with them, contemptuous because you haven't.

I reached for my wine glass and realised I'd left it sitting on the kitchen bench and said ‘Damn' softly to myself. It was such a simple thing, but just then I couldn't get up off my chair and fetch it.

Peter said, still with that odd expression, part disdain, part stoic dignity, ‘I'm going to get the juice.' He came back with my wine as well.

While we ate, we talked about everything but cheating. I finished my wine, and Peter picked up the dirty plates without being asked, and carried them out to the kitchen.

I washed our few dishes and he dried them. We never ordinarily bothered to dry things, but picking up a tea-towel and helping me in the kitchen was part of the change in my son that evening. I realised that we'd passed the point where I'd insist that he tell me the truth, but that in the morning he might be prepared to let me help him.

. . .

I missed Derek that night. I rang his work number. I still had to calculate the time difference whenever I phoned Philadelphia. Derek was in a meeting at some government office, I was told. No-one could tell me when he was expected back.

I got ready for bed, knowing I'd have trouble sleeping.

Derek had been as surprised as I was when I got the job at DIR. ‘Maybe it's like rats and a sinking ship,' I'd said to him shortly before he left. ‘If everyone knows the ship's sinking, who cares if the odd stray rat climbs aboard?'

I'd laughed and gone red.

Derek had looked dour and displeased, as he often did when I tried to joke about something that mattered to me. Of course I'd wondered why they'd picked me for the job. With unemployment nudging eleven per cent—sinking ship or no sinking ship—they must have had plenty of applicants.

But then I thought about it—I'd published quite a bit on outwork. Home-based work. All its names were ugly. A few years ago I'd done some research for the clothing union that had been quoted and used all over the place. I was pretty proud of that. More recently I'd written a paper for DEET on the move to outwork in white-collar industries. When I put together a list of publications, it didn't looked so bad.

Some time after my conversation with Derek, when I thought he'd forgotten about it, he said, ‘We're assuming the election result's a foregone conclusion, but it mightn't be.' He didn't sound very pleased about the prospect that I might have a job past the end of the year.

He was sorting through his papers, deciding what to take. I left him to it and escaped into the kitchen, whispering crossly to myself that maybe, just maybe, I'd been the best person for the job.

Now I lay in bed and thought about my shaky and confusing start at DIR, and about Peter, going back over the interview with his teacher.

I recalled an evening when Peter was six, an age when print should be beginning to make sense. But Peter had stared blankly at a page, then thrown the book at the wall so that the spine broke and loose, broken pages fluttered down.