Holier Than Thou (14 page)
Then Abigail and Lara’s voices too.
We need to get her home.
And Liam’s, I think.
Is she alright?
Fresh night air on my face.
I fucking hate that guy,
said Dan’s voice.
We were in a car. Liam was looking at me through the window, his face a furrow of concern. Ffion behind him with her arms crossed. I could hear a girl crying, wailing, begging for her father to come to her.
Dad!
she kept screaming
Dad! Where’s Dad?
She disturbed me.
Monday morning. I stood on the platform, alone, and surrounded by a crush of people. Tim had recently bought himself a motor scooter, and he no longer came with me to the train station for his commute. First traces of spring warmth were sniffable. The week yawned ahead like a nightmare.
I don’t want to go to work. Alas. I’d have to go to work for the next . . . quick calculation . . . forty-one years. My shoulders sagged, and I stepped onto the train.
The train passed over a green park glowing with early sunshine. I wished myself down in it with a coffee, a chocolate croissant and newspaper. A happy newspaper that is. The actual newspaper in my hands told of a father who had killed all three of his children during his custody week, to teach that bitch a lesson. These poor women. They hope that, in addition to saving everyone a futile and costly trip to the Family Court, going along with the ‘shared care’ thing will placate their exes. But nothing will placate them. They are implacable. Implacatable? I stared at the picture of the bonny toddler and his two big sisters, grinning in their rashies and brandishing bucket and spade. Poor little poppets.
A scruffy queue hovered outside the bank as I hurried across the Elizabethtown square. Pension day. An even sadder congregation gathered outside the hock shop.
A group of middle-aged Chinese women were having an outdoor dancing lesson outside the library, their arms raised as if dancing with a partner.
counted the teacher with solemn militancy.
One of Tessa’s clients was stretched out along a park bench in the sun, an empty cask wine box and its silver foil bag discarded on the concrete. Why did the Inebriates Act get phased out? I tried to avert my face, but alas, he saw me.
‘You! You son-of-a-beeeesh,’ he drawled. If you can drawl in a shouting voice.
Just the sight of him reminded me of the fruitless and ongoing feud between Mental Health and Drug and Alcohol Health services that would most likely not be solved in my lifetime. I scuttled on toward work, overtaking Niah from Drug Health, who was again locked in intense shenanigans on her mobile. I stopped to buy a breakfast manoush, calling Nick’s mobile as I did so, to see if he wanted one. Straight to voicemail. I bought one for him anyway.
When I arrived, there was some guy sitting in Nick’s cubicle, hunched over the computer. Maybe from ISD, fixing the flickering screen. I’d logged a call about it the week before. I stood, reading my messages and struggling to get my satchel strap over my head.
‘What are yer legs?’ said the IT guy.
I looked at him in surprise. It was Nick. Sans dreadlocks.
‘Oh my god . . . ’
‘You likey?’
‘I . . . ’
He looked hot with short hair. His facial features could stand on their own, no problem.
‘You look like you should be in a boy band.’
‘The bad guy or the angelic one?’
‘Depends,’ I lowered my voice. ‘Did you smoke before coming to work?’
I had supervision with Tessa that morning. Or a cheap therapy hour, depending on how you looked at it. It was once a week in my first year, but had dropped to once every two or three weeks. It made me feel mothered. Which was nice. Though possibly not that healthy.
‘Have you lost weight?’ was her first question, as we settled in our chairs in her office.
‘Dunno. Don’t have scales.’
‘Maybe you need a bit less caffeine and a bit more food?’
I yawned and did not reply.
‘Nick has cut his hair, I see.’ She changed the subject.
‘Yeah it looks . . . It’ll take some getting used to. But I like it. Don’t you?’
‘Why do you think he cut it?’
‘Er . . . well maybe he wanted a new look. Hey, how out of control was Johanna this morning?’
‘Why would he want a new look?’
‘Why are you so interested in Nick’s haircut?’
She sought eye contact with me and held it.
‘Why do you think he cut it, Holly?’
‘I swear to god, Tessa, I have no earthly idea.’
‘Do you think it could be for you?’
‘For me?’
‘Do you think he might be trying to be, to look and act, more like someone you would want to be with?’
My heart started beating all over the shop.
‘Be with!’ I squeaked.
‘Calm down . . . ’
‘I have a boyfriend!’
‘I know you do sweetheart—’
‘I have no idea what you are referring to.’
‘Referring to,’ she mimicked. ‘Your face has gone a pretty shade of pink.’
I crossed my arms.
‘You have the aircon way down in here, what, it’s my fault that you like to work in a frickin’ sauna!?
‘Do you think he’s attractive, Holly?’
I glared. ‘Do I think? Do I think he is attractive?’
‘Do you?’
‘What?’
‘Do you?’
‘I don’t think he’s attractive, Tessa; I mean, he’s clearly, demonstrably, empirically an attractive guy, and, of course, having the power of sight as I do, the image of his attractiveness is projected onto my retina, and hence I am aware of same. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
People can see it
, I freaked.
It’s impossible to hide this sort of thing. But there is no ‘it’! I mean, nothing is happening . ..
‘So, how long,’ asked Tessa innocently, ‘has he been, er, on your retina?’
‘I have a boyfriend, Tessa. I’m a good person.’
‘You are a good person. And you’ve built yourself around that principle. So if you should ever find yourself in contravention of trafonyour own . . . legislation . . . it might be a bit difficult for you.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. Might be having a bit of trouble sleeping and eating for example.’
‘Might one?’
‘Might be a bit preoccupied. With a few things.’
‘Hmm.’
‘You’re only, what, just gone twenty-four?’
‘Jah.’
‘So, it would be a pity for you to . . . already be locked in to some idea of the person you think you should be.’
She’s onto me. She’s bloody onto me. They’re probably all onto me.
‘Have you lost weight, Hollier-than-thou?’
Nick posed the question as we descended the stairwell to the car park. Johanna had sent us out to Jindarra Street to see a young guy who was mad on ice and putting holes in his mother’s walls.
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
‘It just, your . . . well, not that I was looking at your . . . Okay I was looking at your arse when you were walking ahead of me, and there’s less of it.’
‘Really?’
‘Not that there was too much there before or anything, I mean, everything was perfectly proportioned . . . ’ He had both his hands raised in a gesture that had hop-skip-jumped over ‘the line’.
‘Throw away the shovel, Nicholarse,’ I said sharply, ‘before you dig yourself any deeper.’
‘Sorry.’
We slammed the car doors shut and yanked at our seatbelts.
‘So how was supervision this morning?’ he asked politely.
‘Fine!’
When we arrived at the address, there was music blaring out of the fibro cottage. At the front fence we also heard shouting, and the sound of crockery smashing. To top it off, there was a large Rottweiler in the front yard. I hesitated, constricting with fear.
‘Sometimes, I can’t believe this is my job,’ I muttered.
‘Hey . . . ’ Nick touched my arm. ‘You know, I’ve never met a dog I couldn’t charm. And growing up in Appin there was nothing to do but smoke and practise karate. So I can hurt people good.’
Looking at him, his kind eyes contradicted his words.
‘I would never let anything happen to you, Holly. Is what I’m getting at.’
I couldn’t think of a response.
‘Now. Reckon we’ve got us a live one in this here house.’
He opened the gate, patted the Rottweiler and climbed the steps to the where the live one’s mother was waiting to usher us inside.
Nick’s gentlemanliness had always presented itself to me as a parody, an act, with perhaps a bit of homage to a bygone era thrown in. He rushed to open doors for me; he always walked between me and the curb; he held his umbrella almost completely over me in the rain, letting himself get wet. He protected me in a crowd; he insisted I have the seat on the train if there was only one.
It struck me for the first time that perhaps the gentlemanliness was genuine.
Kristo went home sick at about 3 p.m. He had been rostered for the B-shift and on-call overnight, so Johanna hunted the halls for someone to replace him. I agreed to do it, compulsive volunteerer that I was. Plus I didn’t want to go home, brood on the balcony and watch the abandoned blonde woman sobbing into her cup of tea.
I drove down to the Emergency Department at about 5:30 p.m. There was a sultry Portishead song on the radio, which, left unchecked, could lead to swelling. A huge flock of black cockatoos passed overhead as I locked the car and walked up the path to the hospital, crying their strange sighing cries in the late afternoon sunshine. I craned my head to watch them. It was quite a surprise to me when two shouting police officers grabbed me and manhandled me backwards.
In my fug I had walked right past a police cordon, erected because of a suicidal woman on the roof of the hospital. I looked up and saw her figure, lonely on the edge of the Emergency Block. She locked eyes with me. It’s a funny thing, eye contact. She was at least thirty metres away but my wide eyes met with her feverish ones. Oddly, she was dressed in a smart black suit with what had probably started out as a crisp white shirt. She couldn’t have been older than thirty. She looked dishevelled, but not long-term dishevelled like, say, my client Stan.
‘
I’ll be challenged,’
she shouted into the glowing sunset,
‘when the sun goes down!’
I generally kidded myself that so much separates me from these people. That’s how I managed to come to work every day. But one of these fine days it could be me.Those strong core muscles of mine, the shiny steel . . . it could all come crashing down. Especially if I found myself . . .
in contravention of my own legislation.
It was Abigail’s birthday, and she had decreed a picnic at Bronte to celebrate. All week, Tim and I had stockpiled gold coins to feed into the parking meters. I fell asleep in the car while Tim drove us there.
Over the previous week I had developed the disturbine Tg habit of waking at 2 or 3 a.m., wired, and unable to sleep again until about 6, shortly before the alarm sounded. It was hideous. I would get up and sit on the couch in the dark. TV at that time was just infomercial crap. Except for the Wednesday night when, like a gift from the gods, I turned theTV on at 2 a.m. and caught some kind of Regina Spektor megamix, followed by a weird but touchingly vulnerable conversation between Quentin Tarantino and Fiona Apple. Apparently they were mates. There was something touching about a man and a woman who loved each other tenderly but not in a sexual way. I loved Dan so much my heart swelled with it, but my loins didn’t burn for him. I just want the best for him, and want him in my life. Forever. I hate change. Hate it when the mainstays change.
‘Wakey, babe.’ Tim touched my cheek and I started violently awake, panicked and disorientated.
‘Mmmmmh?’
‘We’re here.’
‘Uuh.’
The sun was out and it was warm enough to swim, but the sea was angry, as it often is at Bronte. When I was little my dad used to take me there, leaving Mum at home alone, or with baby Paddy. If it was too rough at Bronte we’d drive around the headland to the usually calm channel of Clovelly. He’d pump up the air mattress with many grins and I would clutch his hand as we approached the water’s edge.
‘All aboard,’ he’d say, loading me on and positioning himself so he could power us along with a back stroke, ‘for the voyage of the SS Air Mattress!’
‘I’m scared!’ I’d squeal, clinging onto his neck for dear life. But not for long. I’d relax and let go of him, sitting up straight between his shins. People would wave at me as we ‘sailed’ up the length of the bay, and back again to the sand, passing over the patterned rocks, sand, seaweed and fish below the clear water.
‘My daddy,’ I remember confiding to my little friend Alexander at preschool, ‘is the strongest man in the world.’
He hit back with the claim that
his
daddy was in fact the strongest man in the world, and the biggest, and the oldest. I punched him in the stomach and he ratted on me.
Abigail had invited the high-pants brigade along. I chatted to one of them, who was just about to finish his training, escape to the private sector and start charging a mint. I told him I was a social worker and worked in mental health. As people often do, he took this as a cue to launch into the story of how his radiographer girlfriend left him last year for some guy she met as a patient while she was performing an ultrasound, and how he begged her to come back, but she moved all her stuff out of their flat while he was at work, and never paid him a cent of the rent she owed him, and he wanted to kill himself and could barely function at work and had to take antidepressants.
On automatic pilot, I cocked my head slightly to one side and made empathetic, active-listening noises. Which encouraged him. It encourages them all.
Abigail wandered over to me after people had finishple Ited eating. Tim was kicking a football around with Dan and some of the high-pants.
‘So you guys might be taking a trip soon, huh?’ she said, linking her arm through mine.
‘Um . . . I haven’t got any annual leave booked at the moment. But maybe in the New Year, after the school holidays.’
‘No, I mean your long trip . . .Your move . . .To the UK.’
‘What?’
‘I was talking to Tim about how he is so over his job and wants to try working in the UK.’
‘You were?’
I couldn’t even remember the last time me and Tim had had a proper conversation about his work. I just tended to assume that it was fine, as long as there was no screaming from the seclusion room, no capsicum spray, no tasers and no overdoses, which I was pretty confident there wasn’t.
‘Um . . . yeah, well nothing’s been decided,’ I free-styled. I was going to have to corner that mofo on the way home.
‘It’s just something I’ve been thinking about,’ Tim said. ‘I’m outgrowing DPNR and I want to travel . . . ’
‘
You
want to travel? You, like, you on your own?’
‘No, no, I’d want you with me, of course I would.’
‘Why did I have to hear about it from Abigail?’
‘I . . . she and I were talking about our jobs, and feeling blah about it, and she said she was hoping to get work overseas next year, and I said I had thought about it too . . . ’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘It just came up.’
‘Right.’
‘I was going to talk to you about it.’
‘You were, were you?’
‘Yes! You could find work easily over there; we could work for a year and travel for a year.’
The thought of leaving Befftown for the UK, and making my way every morning to a workplace that didn’t include a ‘welcome to work’ post-it note on my desk followed by Nick’s smiling face popping up over the partition, was chilling.The week before he had put a funny little origami shape on my desk with holes punched all through it and another post-it note saying, ‘I done some craft!’ I loved how he used ‘done’ and ‘brung’. Or my very favourite . . . I’d send him off to buy me a manoush and he’d reappear waving it in the air shouting, ‘I done brung!’
‘Well . . . We he’8217; I said slowly. ‘If you really want to go . . . we should talk about it.’
But we were silent all the way home.
I woke at 2 a.m. and tossed for an hour, seething with frustration.
I’m so tired
.
Why can’t I sleep?
I finally got up and sat on the couch, hoping that the next train back to dreamland would be more noticeable in its approach if I was upright. I brooded on the couch looking around the flat in its quiet darkness. That flippin’ landline, that I had insisted on getting, cost us fifty dollars a month, and I had to admit that the only times I ever used it were a) to call my mother’s landline and b) to call my own mobile when it was lost somewhere in the flat. We should get rid of it. Except I couldn’t be bothered calling the phone people and fighting with them about it.
At 5 a.m., I made a cup of tea, wrapped the rug around me and sat out on the balcony in the pre-dawn chill. The sky in the east turned grey, blue and then orange. Usually watching the sun rise gave me a sense of renewed hope, or at the very least a gladness that our earth was continuing to turn on its axis.
That morning I watched it grimly, knowing that it heralded another day of paradox to be gotten through. And my reward for getting through it? Another one after that. And that. Et ceter-fucking-ra.
What had Tessa been going on about, me being only twenty-four and shouldn’t be locked into some idea of the person I should be, or whatever she said, I couldn’t even remember, but I did know that if we all went around leaving our partners every time we felt a passing fancy for some inappropriate drug addict, even if they did appear to be yin to our yang . . . that would be . . . you know . . . bad. I was not that person. I refused to be that person. The dark-haired woman from the love nest, who had left her lover a broken woman,
she
was that person. I put my mug down on the concrete and my head on my knees.
At work the next day we had a tough morning. One of Kristy’s clients had jumped in front of a train overnight. Johanna glared at her as she does at anyone whose client dies. We got called out to one of the local high schools to see a young girl who had drunk close to a bottle of Jim Beam at recess and was lying on the girls’ toilets’ floor in her own piss and vomit, begging someone to kill her after an attempt to hang herself with her school tunic belt had failed. Nick phoned for an ambulance, while the principal apologised for not having already done so.
I sat next to her and extracted the story in drunken dribs and drabs. She had grown up with her mum in New Zealand, and her mum’s boyfriend got two for the price of one for many years.When the girl finally told a teacher at her school what was going on, social services swooped, and the boyfriend was charged. The mum disowned the daughter, and social services had to place her with relatives in Sydney, Australia. She was thirteen. Nice one, Mum. Nice mothering. Choice. Keep it up.
‘I wish I’d never said anything!’ wept the girl.‘At least I’d still be with my mum . . . Those bloody social workers . . . You’re not a social worker are you?’
She threw up again.
It was getting on for 3 p.m. on wi before Nick and I were able to escape to our crates with coffee and a newspaper. At 1 p.m. I had been desperate to pee, but was too busy fighting with the triage nurse in ED to take a toilet break. I still hadn’t had one, but the urge had gone away. Weird. It was warm, bordering on hot.
‘I have a headache,’ I said dully.‘Do you have any Panadol or anything?’
‘I have the new one, Panadol Rapid,’ he replied. ‘It’s supposed to absorb faster or something.’
‘Oh, yeah, I’ve seen it on TV. A much better choice to overdose on.’
Nick chuckled.
‘Yeah . . .
New Panadol Rapid, easier to overdose on, double your chance of liver damage and death . .. ’
‘
See your doctor if pain persists ...
’
‘
Although it will be too late by that point ...
’
We were in paroxysms of laughter. Which subsided guiltily.
‘I can’t believe we are laughing. It’s not funny, Nicholarse.’
‘Yes it is.’
‘No! No. How did this become my job, my life? I can’t remember what I was supposed to be doing . . . but surely this wasn’t it.’
‘Relax,’ he said, smoothing out the Opinion section of the paper. ‘Oh, look here, apparently the young lawyers are depressed. You’re not the only one having issues with your life choices.’
‘Who wrote that?’ I asked, peering over.
‘Er . . . Rebecca Hulme.’
‘I know her!’
‘You do?’
‘Well, I met her once. At a dinner thing.’
‘Well . . . she says that it’s not just the young lawyers . . . her friend Brendan (not his real name) was . . . an advertising executive in New York . . . six figures . . . loft apartment in SoHo . . . very high functioning . . . friends . . . parties. .It all looked perfect from the outside. But on the inside he was very depressed.’
‘Poor Brendan-not-his-real-name.’
‘It was like,’ Nick continued, ‘this black dog was following him around . . . ’
‘Mean old cur.’
‘ . . . and whenever he’d look up from one of his PowerPoint presentations . . . ’
‘That black dog would be sitting on the projector, sapping his pleasure in thinking up new ways to getew p
‘Tragique.’
‘What became of him, Brendan Not-his-real-name?’
‘He . . . blah blah . . . saw someone in New York, got better, came back to work in Sydney . . . married with two kids . . . An ambassador for the national depression initiative . . . Ooh and he’s writing a book about his struggle.’
‘God love him.’
Nick closed the paper and looked at me.
‘Nicholarse,’ I said seriously, ‘I’m worried I’m losing my compassion.’
‘You will never lose it, Hollier-than-thou. You couldn’t. This is a tough gig. You’re allowed to be a bit cynical some days.’
‘Every day.’
‘Whatever.’
‘Have a drink with me after work. It’s the only thing that will get me through the afternoon.’
‘I’ll have as many drinks with you as you like,’ he said. ‘And that is my personal guarantee.’
I texted Tim.
Rough day at the office of pain Timbo. Debriefing with work peeps and beverages. Home later. Love you. Kiss emoticon.
OK hun xxx
he texted back.
Nick was texting too.
‘Let’s get off at Sydenham today, and walk,’ I said abruptly, as the train pulled in to that station.
‘Um, okay,’ Nick replied indulgently, following me out of the carriage and up the stairs. ‘Why did we get off at Sydenham?’
‘I just feel like a walk,’ I said, stepping out onto the street. ‘And . . . it’s like an eyrie up here.’
‘A what?’
‘An eyrie.’
‘Buh?’
‘Where an eagle lives.’
He squinted at me. ‘Guh?’
‘The
view,
Nicholarse. I like the view.’
‘View?’ he laughed, following my line of sight. ‘That’s not a view; it’s an industrial, soon-to-be-post-industrial wasteland!’