Trust (27 page)

‘How very fortuitous,’ he said, with his easy charming smile, ‘that you decided to forgo the pleasures of the Bauer cocktail party and come to my little talk instead.’

‘Cocktails I can have any time,’ she said, swirling the ice cubes in her glass. ‘Your talk I’d diarised the moment I read the abstract. And then …’ She looked straight at him with keen dark eyes. ‘I noticed you at the reception on the first evening. And I thought, that’s the most …
interesting
man at this conference. Without a doubt.’

A pause, of several beats, as Gerry joined the dots. Susanna Delgado could have approached him at the end of his talk, but instead she must have followed him from the conference centre. When he came into the bar, she’d been waiting. He allowed his smile to deepen, become more sensual, letting her know by the subtlest movements that, although his eyes were still on her face, his awareness had expanded – at her invitation – to her body.

She would be wearing, assuredly, the classiest of lingerie. Her skin would be soft, lacking youthful resilience but expensively maintained; there would be a luxuriant heaviness to her breasts. Gerry despised those puerile men who slavered over girls young enough to be their daughters, even their granddaughters. A woman like Susanna Delgado, in middle-age, offered a depth of sexual savvy no high-tittied lass of twenty could possibly emulate. A woman of this age appreciated
him
, too: his good looks, hard cock, full head of hair. Gerry liked being appreciated.

From the bar to the hotel restaurant, and dinner. One minute they were quoting Joni Mitchell lyrics to each other, and the next discussing retro-fitting the heating systems of massive buildings.
We’re compadres
, he thought.
Her intellect is as big and bold as mine.

‘You’re a rare woman, Susanna Delgado,’ he told her. Their plates had been cleared away but they had been enjoying their conversation too much to make a move. Till now.

‘I am,’ she said, smiling, slyly confident.

The next sentence
, he thought,
will be —

‘Would you care to have a nightcap, Gerry Visser, in this rare woman’s room?’

He went back to his own room just long enough to brush his teeth and collect the emerald-green toy bag. On the coffee table sat his laptop, and the mobile phone still plugged in to the charger beside the bed; he made the decision, thrilling in itself, not to even glance at them. Tonight there were no emails, no phone calls, no messages, that couldn’t wait. Right now, he was on his way to a rare and different place.

About three in the morning they agreed that the final sessions of the conference could manage perfectly well without them. At last they slept, and when they awoke were in no hurry to do anything but talk more, have more terrific sex (enjoying Susanna’s toy collection, as well as his) and demolish an eclectic meal ordered from room service: coffee and mimosas, oysters and danishes.

It was past noon when Gerry finally left Susanna’s room, each wanting to get some work done. They would meet again toward evening – an evening, they both understood, which would again be enjoyed together.

When Gerry got out of the lift on his floor, he felt like he really had been off on a different world: his head seemed to be not quite attached to his body, while his body felt like it had experienced some other atmosphere than Earth’s. But he felt good; oh yes, he felt very, very good – right up until the moment he opened the door of his room and saw the dozen notes left there. He snatched a couple up:
Mr Visser to ring Mark S. Karnaley immediately
, and
Urgent!! Mr Visser to call this number …

He dived for his mobile phone –
37 missed calls –
flipped it open, swearing furiously, and jabbed in Marcus’s number.

Less than two hours later he was at JFK, in the first of many queues. As Gerry shuffled toward the security check, he thought of something else. He hadn’t yet spoken to his wife: no phones on in ICU, for which, under the circumstances, he was grateful. He called Marcus again.

‘This is what happened, why no one could reach me: I changed rooms, but the desk clerk forgot to enter it into the computer.’ From the other end of the line, silence. ‘Got that, Marco? I changed rooms, but the —’

‘I heard you,’ answered Marcus, not sounding pleased.

‘Just tell Susanna that, okay?’ said Gerry testily, and snapped the phone shut. His panic and guilt were only bearable if he could transmogrify them into bad temper. ‘Don’t give me a hard time,’ he muttered under his breath.

He’d been following this bloke in the blue uniform down vinyl-floored corridors for what seemed like hours, scurrying after him like a rat new to the maze, angry and anxious and exhausted and with his goddamn suitcase screeching like a hungry seagull as he towed it along behind him. A moment was all it had taken to catapult him into craziness, then twenty-four hours to go from one side of the world to the other, from below freezing to what felt, when he’d stepped out of the airport in Melbourne, like an oven in hell.

Eventually, the nurse keyed the two of them past some sort of security lock and was ushering Gerry swiftly through a room that looked like a cross between NASA’s control centre and a dormitory.
Rark, rark
, went his case, embarrassingly loud
.
He’d paid a fortune for the damn thing, what the hell was wrong with it? The nurse halted at one set of curtains and flicked them back abruptly.

Susanna gasped and lurched up from a chair beside the bed. ‘Gerry!’ Tottering toward him with her arms outstretched, she pressed her face to his chest and started crying, a thin drizzle that sounded as though she’d been holding it in so long it had lost all substance.

Looking over the top of her head to the figure in the bed, Gerry felt his blood go icy. If he hadn’t known it was his daughter he would never have recognised her.
She looks like she’s been bashed
. He wished there was someone he could hit, punish,
kill
, for doing this to his daughter. He let go of Susanna and hunkered down beside his little girl. Poor swollen face; tubes everywhere, stuck on her hands and chest, snaking into her mouth and nose. With the tenderest of touches, he traced the line of close-shaved scalp visible below the helmet of bandages.

‘You’re going to be all right,’ he whispered. ‘I swear, Stellabell, you are going to be all right.’ His face worked as he struggled not to cry.

‘Gerry? I didn’t know where you were,’ said Susanna in a broken mew. ‘I had no idea.’

Oh god, don’t say that!
‘It was just a stupid stuff-up,’ he said, keeping his eyes on Stella-Jean. ‘I turned my phone off for the lecture and forgot to turn it on again.’ That was true, more or less.

‘But we got them to look in your room,’ Susanna said with a pleading insistence, ‘and you weren’t there!’

‘Didn’t Marcus tell you about the room change?’ Gerry straightened, turning to look his wife squarely in the face, and got a shock almost as great as when he’d seen his daughter.
What’s happened to her?
Susanna looked sixty, not forty-five. Her face had gone all … baggy. Her whole body seemed to be drooping. And the way she was staring at him, with those desperate drowning eyes – it was awful.

‘About the — what?’ she faltered.

‘I changed rooms, but the desk clerk forgot to enter it into the computer.’
Why hasn’t Marcus passed that on?
‘I’m so sorry, Suze.’ He took her in his arms again, hugged her properly this time, stroking her hair. ‘It’s all right, I’m here now,’ he murmured. ‘The kids are going to be all right.’

‘All right?’ said Susanna, her voice muffled, confused. Not just confused: she sounded stupefied. ‘But what’s “all right”?’

‘They’re
alive
!’ he said, hearing his own voice full of strength and reassurance. ‘And I’m telling you, sweetheart, they are going to be all right.’

A wrenching sob tore from her.
But her mother’s dead
. Jesus, how could he have forgotten that? And he loved Jean! But the ferocity of his fears for his children had kept this other terrible news, somehow, from registering fully in his mind.

‘Oh, honey,’ he whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’

She felt like dough in his arms, heavy and spongy: he had a sudden ominous sense that her exhaustion was a black hole which would suck up all his energy and determination.
She can’t deal with this
, Gerry realised
. I’ve got to talk to the doctors.
He had to find out what was happening, here and at Seb’s hospital. He had to ask questions, demand answers, decide on courses of treatment.
Now!
It was time for him to take over.

‘How long since you had a sleep, a proper sleep?’ he asked. ‘How long since you’ve been home?’

‘Home?’ Susanna shook her head. ‘Not since it happened. I’ve been here the whole time, here or with Seb.’ She looked around vaguely. ‘Angie was here …’

‘Suze,
I’m
here now,’ said Gerry firmly. ‘You need to go home and get some sleep.’

She started crying again. ‘I haven’t … I haven’t seen Mum yet. They needed someone to identify her —’ Susanna’s lips made movements but she couldn’t say the word
body
‘— and I just
couldn’t
.’

‘Don’t worry. I can do that.’

‘No, Angie did; Angie did that. But I need to
see
her.’

Well, well; he wouldn’t have thought Angie had the backbone for something like that. ‘If you want, I’ll go with you, tomorrow,’ he said gently. ‘But right now, you need sleep.’

Slowly, she nodded. ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

He saw, with relief, that she was giving way. ‘You need a cab, babe? I think there’re cabs outside. Or they can call one.’

‘No.’ She lifted her head, looking around as though reassessing her location. Her gaze lingered on Stella-Jean’s face and then she forced her eyes back to him. ‘My car’s here,’ she said. ‘I can drive.’

He kissed her doughy cheek, her lined grey forehead. ‘Drive carefully,’ he said, and with this innocent, well-meant phrase the reality of the crash was horribly present again. They came together in a fumbled hug, parted clumsily.

Pausing by the gap in the curtains Susanna said, ‘I’ll take your suitcase with me, shall I?’

‘Sure,’ said Gerry. He’d already plucked the clipboard from its hook at the foot of the bed and was scanning it, trying to make some preliminary sense of the charts and notations. ‘Thanks.’

She gave a tiny wave, shy and mechanical in her exhaustion, and walked away, trundling the suitcase –
rark, rark, rark
– behind her through the strange and focused hush of Intensive Care.

TWENTY-FIVE

A parching wind buffeted the car as Susanna drove home. Each time she had to stop at a traffic light she listened to more messages on her mobile phone. So many voices full of concern and sympathy, so many helpless offers to help. How had all these people learned of the crash in the — how long since it happened?
Thursday night, to … is it Saturday morning?
Her slow brain took ages to figure it out.
Thirty-six hours.
The messages made her want to cry again. She stopped listening to them.

So tired. Her body was almost not under her control, as though she was drunk, and when she parked safely in the driveway of her home it was with a drunk’s sense of undeserved good luck at having made it. The day was already so hot; the air seemed to crackle, as though all the oxygen had been sucked out, leaving it starving and savage.

She heaved Gerry’s suitcase out of the car and dragged it up the three broad stairs to the front porch, just as Tigger leapt in front of her, miaowing frantically, pushing himself hard against Susanna’s legs. ‘Oh, Tigger, I’m sorry. Were you scared you’d been abandoned, poor thing?’ The ginger cat charged through the front door as soon as she got it open, than ran back out and looked searchingly toward the car. Tears filled her burning eyes. ‘He’ll be home soon, Tigger. He will, I promise.’

The house was cool; the kids, she realised, must’ve left the air conditioner on, and the knowledge that she would’ve yelled at them for that almost crushed her. After shaking out some dry food for the hungry cat, she trundled the suitcase through to the bedroom.
Shower.
Suddenly she was desperate to be clean.
I never want to wear these clothes again
, Susanna thought as she stripped off and scuffed them aside with her foot. She slumped against the wall of the shower, tempted to sit and let the water just pour down on her – but if she did that, she might not be able to get up again.

The bed, not neatly made, looked so horribly normal.
Can I sleep there again? Ever?
Putting on her old cotton nightie, she spotted the easel standing modestly in a corner, and paused, regarding the topmost self-portrait with hollow eyes.
That’s me; I drew that, only a few days ago.
It seemed impossible. Ludicrous.

She couldn’t lie down, not yet. Susanna wandered the house. Along the hall, she noticed for the first time in years the remnants of drawings the kids had done when they were naughty toddlers.
We can’t repaint
, she realised. If they repainted, these drawings would be covered over, and her heart would turn to dust.

In the games room, Stella-Jean’s garment rack was filled with clothes she’d made. Susanna ran her fingers softly along them, and stroked the dress tossed half-finished on top of her new sewing machine. In Seb’s room, she collected a crumbed plate and a couple of glasses from beside his computer, as she’d done so many times before. She swore to herself that she’d never growl at him about that again.

The kitchen was so quiet that the crackling of the electric jug when she put it on sounded like a roaring fire. She held the white teapot in both hands and gazed at the blue phoenix on its side.
Mum gave me this teapot.

Now, with a cup of tea, she would be able to climb into bed and go to sleep. But first, she’d just unpack Gerry’s suitcase, standing in the middle of the bedroom. Susanna eased it onto its back, knelt down and unzipped it. His black wool and cashmere coat was on top, then jumpers, shirts, trousers, barely folded. She imagined him hurling things in there in a panic once Marcus had reached him with the news. How dreadful to have been so far away; she wished she hadn’t complained about not knowing where he was.