Nine Days (4 page)

Francis and me are lying on our tummies along the hall, just out of sight. There’s been tea and hysterics and a fainting spell and a glass of sherry for medicinal purposes and all kinds of
argy bargy. Connie’s lit the fire, but still Francis and me have pulled the blankets off the bed and we’re wrapped up like mummies, resting our heads on our hands, looking at each other.

Dad used to think it was funny to play like this when we were little. We’d face each other, move our arms, stick out our tongues, turn from side to side. Dad would say
ha!
and
do it again
and scratch his head and say
buggered if I know which one’s the mirror!
But now I know. Francis is the real one and I’m the comic-book version. The one who shouldn’t be allowed out by himself.

‘You’re dead,’ says Francis. ‘All over red rover.’

My tongue feels thick and my knee and hip still ache from when I came a cropper this arvo and my ear hurts from where Ma pulled me all the way to the bedroom. I feel like climbing out the window, jumping the fence and walking. I could leave and never come back, live like Huckleberry Finn, wild and without grownups.

‘Sssh,’ says Francis, even though I’m a mouse. We can hear them talking clear as anything. We’d have had Buckley’s figuring out what was going on if we’d stayed in the bedroom with the door closed like we were told.

‘Not one more night, not one more moment, will I stay under this roof. It’s perversion, that’s what it is. Disgusting. I should be calling the police.’ I don’t need to see Mrs Keith’s face. I know she’s sucking down her top teeth with her tongue until they are suspended halfway down her mouth then letting them go with a clack.

‘Oh my Lord,’ says Ma in a weedy voice.

‘And for how long? His
face.
I can’t even say it,’ Mrs Keith says. ‘I cannot even say it.’

‘You said it all right this afternoon,’ says Connie.

‘My blessed Saviour,’ says Ma.

‘It turned my stomach,’ Mrs Keith says. ‘I had a distinct gurgling.’

‘This is all over nothing,’ says Connie. ‘He’s a boy. He was playing some game.’

‘Wake up, girl,’ says Mrs Keith. ‘Menace all around us, abroad and right in this house. Wait until he’s fully grown. He’ll be a danger to decent women. He’ll be strangling them in their beds. Disgusting, he is.’

‘Cor,’ whispers Francis. ‘If you end up a strangler, we’ll get in the
Argus.’

‘Keep talking,’ I whisper back. ‘The odds of me strangling get shorter with every word.’

‘Strangler’s brother tells all,’ whispers Francis. ‘My years of living with a maniac.’

‘He is not disgusting. Ma. Tell her,’ Connie says, from the kitchen.

‘Story of survival against incredible odds. Courage and wit kept me alive, strangler’s brother says. Letters from pretty girls pour in to handsome youth who shared bedroom with strangler his whole entire life,’ whispers Francis. ‘Photograph of handsome youth, page six.’

‘Photograph of dead youth after his brother the strangler got to him, page seven,’ I say.

For an instant, unless it’s a trick of the light, Francis looks sorry. He leans towards me and pats me on the shoulder. ‘The
whole thing’s dee-ranged. Why would anyone want some old lady’s undies?’ he whispers. ‘You didn’t really do it, did you?’

‘Course not.’

‘Then tell them what happened. Just tell them.’

I turn my head on the side and bump it against the floor. I think about Mr Husting’s hand in mine. ‘I can’t. Gentlemen’s honour.’

He rolls his eyes. ‘You are an insult to cretins everywhere.’

I’m thinking what would be the worst that Ma could do to me if I’m caught out of my room and whether it’s worth clocking Francis for when I hear Ma say, ‘I don’t know what to think.’

That can’t be right. She’s my ma. She knows what to think.

‘See? Even your mother knows. He’s a menace,’ says Mrs Keith.

‘I’ve had about enough of this, you old cow,’ says Connie.

‘Holy Moses,’ says Francis. ‘She’ll have her mouth washed out for that.’

‘What did you just call me, missy?’ says Mrs Keith.

There’s a noise—maybe a chair scraping along the floor.

‘It’s a good thing you’re leaving,’ says Connie, ‘because you’re not welcome in this house.’

‘Please, please,’ says Ma.

‘Go on then,’ Connie says. ‘Good riddance.’

Me and Francis scarper to shut the bedroom door—well, as close to a scarper as I can manage while keeping my knee straight so it doesn’t start bleeding again and my hip aching like it’s been hit with a pile-driver and a whopper of a corkie on my calf courtesy of Mac and pulling the blankets behind us—and
we shut it as soft as anything. We lean against it from the inside: me with my ear flat, Francis with his eye stuck to the keyhole.

Sure enough, in half a mo I hear Mrs Keith coming along the hall and slamming the door to her room next to ours. Everything is quiet then I hear another funny noise. I open the door and Francis is hissing at me to get down, that they’ll see me but I don’t bother. The noise is Ma, crying.

‘You had no business speaking to her like that,’ Ma says, between great gulps of air. ‘We won’t get another boarder in a hurry. Where will the money come from? Answer me that, Miss Smarty.’

Connie says nothing and that’s the worst noise of all. For a long while there’s quiet except a muffled stomping and slamming from Mrs Keith’s room. Francis is telling me to get back but I walk down the hall and there they are in the kitchen, Ma sitting with her dress lifted up to her face, Connie on her knees beside her, holding her arms, cooing soft like Ma is a baby. They don’t notice me at all.

‘There’s nothing for it,’ Ma says. ‘We can’t live on my wages. Francis will have to leave school.’

I feel someone at my shoulder and it’s Francis in my ear. ‘If I have to leave school,’ he says, ‘I’ll break every bone in your body.’

‘No,’ says Connie. ‘I’ll get a job. If we’ve no boarder there’s no need for me to stay home. I can do the housework after I knock off.’

Ma lifts her head out of her skirts and wipes her eyes. ‘And who’ll give a girl like you a job, exactly. I begged your father to find you a good government job. It’d be more useful than
drawing, I said. Something to fall back on. He wouldn’t have a bar of it. Who’ll give work to a
picture painter?’

‘I’ll go in to the
Argus,
see some of Dad’s friends,’ Connie says. ‘They said at the funeral. Gave us that lovely basket and said I should come and see them if there’s anything they can do.’

I can see Ma and Connie looking at each other. I can see the outline of their faces, the parts that are the same, like the shape of their lips and their brows, and the things that are different, like the wrinkles around Ma’s eyes.

‘Shows what you know.’ Ma sniffs. ‘People say things like that at funerals. It makes them feel alive, like they can still do things, not like the poor bugger in the box. Words are cheap. I wouldn’t give you tuppence for words.’

MY TWO O’CLOCK has daddy issues. She chooses the big red chair with the view of the park, not either of the simple black and chrome chairs opposite me. You don’t have to be Freud to figure that out. She’s cheating on her fiftyfive-year-old husband with a man in his mid-sixties. And she’s younger than I am. That, together with her eating disorder and history of kleptomania, gives us plenty of behavioural weaving to unpick. It’s as if I was running a monthly special: three issues for the price of one.

‘If I could remember my dreams,’ she says. ‘That would help, wouldn’t it?’ She’s twirling in my red chair like an undernourished child on a swing. Her legs kick back and forth, back and forth. It’s hypnotic.

Counsellors are not so interested in dreams. That’s for psychiatrists with prescription rights and psychoanalysts with unconscious rights. She’s been seeing me for over a year; surely she knows this.

‘I’m wondering why you say that, Violet,’ I say.

She doesn’t answer right away; instead she curls up with her legs under her, naked feet rubbing against my leather. I can see her toes. Her pedicure is perfect, glossy peach moons sparkling, but it’s the confidence with which she slipped her shoes off that’s telling. She either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the intimacy this assumes. Go on, Daddy’s Girl. Make yourself at home. Someone else has to sit there tomorrow, but don’t give it a moment’s thought.

Against the bookcase my couch poses like a piece of installation art. That couch cost an absolute fortune. I bought it when I moved into this office more than ten years ago, when I was planning to do a PhD. Counsellors don’t even use couches. I could have spent that money on a holiday. While I sit here on a Tuesday afternoon, listening to her, I could be recalling two weeks of sun-kissed splendour in the Maldives, where I would have drunk mojitos while a bronzed half-naked Maldivian called Omar massaged my feet. I was trying to do the right thing. Some clients would want to use a couch, I thought. Even if only ironically.

‘Dreams are important,’ Violet says, all innocent, like she hasn’t just put me in my place. ‘They’re like my brain thinking while I’m asleep.’

‘I can’t argue with that.’ I jot down her words, ready for the day I write my pseudonymous book about the things
people say in counselling, the one that will make me a fortune so I can move to the Maldives and shack up with Omar. If the airlines ever get back to normal, if anyone ever flies again, if I haven’t missed my chance forever. Outside it’s a beautiful spring. The pink magnolias on the street outside are blushing to life. We should be cursing our hayfever and praying for Essendon to fight off the northern invaders at the MCG on Saturday, not wondering if the world will ever recover.

I blink a few times. Come on, Stanzi. Focus on why she’s here, why she’s paying me good money. ‘Have you seen your father this week?’

‘He took me to lunch yesterday.’ Her individually articulated toes twitch like she’s playing a tiny invisible piano, a sight I find creepy but mesmerising. Lunch with her father is like a date: she worries about her clothes, fusses over her hair, what to order, what he’ll think of her. So much palaver just to eat.

‘What were your thoughts about that?’

‘He’s too thin. Cheryl’s not looking after him. My previous stepmother, Michelle—she was a better cook. Italian. All that pasta. At the time I thought she was making him fat.’

She
thinks
he’s
too thin? What is he, a Chupa Chup? Still, she’s the one who brought up food. Encouraging this discussion is not a bad idea. ‘What kind of pasta did she make?’

She stares at me like I’ve asked her the calorific value of snot. ‘Do I look like Nigella Lawson? I don’t know. Pasta. Different little shapes. With sauce on it.’

Right. ‘And what did you and your father talk about over lunch?’

‘This and that.’ She swings her legs down and sits upright.
For a moment she looks very small, a tiny girl nestled in giant furniture. ‘We talked about father stuff, mainly. What’s your father like?’

‘Mine?’ She has taken me by surprise, something that rarely happens. I wouldn’t have thought she was the type to be interested in anyone else’s life. It’s sweet, kind of. She may be realising there are other people in the world besides herself. Maybe that’s why I answer.

‘Funny. My dad’s funny.’ This is the short version, the
keeping communication channels open in both directions
answer. The long version would be this: my dad is a photographer, a great one. Art and commercial. He loves taking photos. And he’s really smart. Mind you, he needs to be. He’s one man alone in a femocracy. My mother, my sister and me: we throw our weight around.

‘Funny huh,’ she says, in a dull voice that tells me she couldn’t care less if my father was the headline act at the Comedy Festival. Then she stands, bare toes wriggling into my thick-pile rug, and stretches her arms over her head like she’s just woken up. ‘Anyway. I spent Saturday morning shopping in Chapel Street. I’ve been picking up things again.’

This may not be the setback it seems. Sometimes problems can become worse for a while. Taking steps towards giving up a behaviour we define as part of ourselves can sometimes make us cling to it all the tighter. It’s futile to fight your difficulties head-on. The only way to beat your unconscious is to sneak up on it. I’m reminded that even the very thought of dieting invariably leads to weight gain. Why? Say you make the decision mid-week, a Wednesday. When will the
hypothetical diet begin? Monday morning. But that’s four long days. Since we’re starting on Monday, we might as well live it up today. One little bit of cake, a tiny slice of cheese, make the most of it. Regardless of what happens on Monday morning, the conscious decision never wins.

And besides, the way the world is lately. The tensions—it’s enough to make cracks appear in anyone. The trick is discovering her personal pattern, her specific trigger.

‘I’m wondering if there’s something about that particular shop. Or something in it.’

‘I doubt it. Nice things, of course. They’re all idiots. They never catch me.’ She smiles angelically and bats her eyelashes. ‘They’re looking for disaffected yoofs from the western suburbs. Losers. Not people like me.’ She walks to the long window and looks out over the park. ‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘when I see a tower in the distance, I half expect to see a plane fly into it.’

From my office here in Hawthorn I can see the city, its skyscrapers huddled together like a slightly freaked-out forest. I know what she means. When I shut my eyes, I can see it also: over and over, from a variety of angles. Last week I saw a client who was planning a business trip to Sydney and mentioned it at dinner with her family. Her six-year-old became hysterical, crying and screaming and throwing things, clinging to her legs. When she calmed him down, she realised he thought every replay, every angle, was a separate plane spearing into a separate skyscraper. He thought all these hundreds of planes were crashing into buildings everywhere and his mother’s Qantas flight from Tullamarine to Mascot would do the same.

‘It’s been a stressful couple of weeks for everyone, that’s for sure,’ I say. I speak slowly, make open hand gestures so she feels safe to jump in, to tell me how she feels. ‘The way we see the world has changed for good. It’s frightening. Lots of my clients are reporting an increase in their anxiety levels. Trouble sleeping, things like that.’

She rolls her eyes. ‘They’re wimps then, aren’t they.’ She abandons her shoes and walks the length of the room, pointing her toes like she’s in
Swan Lake
and running her fingertips along my bookcase. She leaves flattened footprints in a silvery trail against the nap of the rug. ‘I mean, it was stressful for the people who were actually
there.
We’re on the other side of the world. Anyone who lives
here
and feels anxious is just a hysteric.’

‘It’s interesting that your shoplifting is increasing at the very time people are talking about a new war. A war in the Middle East. What are your thoughts about that?’

At the end of the bookcase, she rests her hand against the shelf while she does a plié. Her feet look alive, alert, like they’re on her side. Then she shifts her weight and balances perfectly on just one. My feet are not on my side. My feet hate me. They ache to an extent I find impossible to describe, in every little bone and every cell of skin. They’re uppity, my feet. They believe carrying me around all day is beneath them. Thanks to their bad attitudes, I have a cupboard full of shoes I can’t wear and I even limp in these nanna-ish Mary Janes.

‘That’s just stupid,’ Violet says. ‘The Americans won’t invade. It’s the twenty-first century. Humans are no longer fodder for the military—industrial complex. We’re evolved.
We are,’ she pliés again, ‘enlightened.’

‘If there was a new war, would that concern you?’ She was a teenager during the Gulf War. Me, I remember it clearly enough: sitting up all night, unable to believe this terrifying technicolour history unfolding on the screen.

She rolls her eyes. ‘If they do invade, it’ll take them six weeks max to fix up the whole Middle East. They’re not the leaders of the free world for nothing. They’re rolling in money and they’re not stupid. I’m sure Bush has a plaque on his desk that says:
First rule of being commander-in-chief: do not fight a ground war in Asia.
If they go, they’ll send the airforce to sort things out and be back in the officers’ club for drinks at five. Everyone knows that.’ She sounds so unlike her usual self I realise she’s answered my question about what she and her father discussed at lunch. So now I say nothing. Silence encourages clients to fill the gap.

And she does. ‘If there’s anything we should worry about, it’s SARS and people sending anthrax through the mail. That’s what’ll get us.’

‘Is that a cause of concern for you? Opening things that come in the mail?’

‘Of course.’ She rubs her hands up and down her arms, like she’s cold. She’s not cold. If she was, she’d tell me to turn the heat up, pronto. ‘You’d be an idiot not to be afraid of stuff like that. We’re so fragile. We’re like balloons filled with blood. The slightest injury, the smallest bug. Sometimes I feel we should walk around with our own invisible force field. Anything could do us in. There’s malice everywhere. Don’t you watch the news?’

The anonymous death, the one among thousands, the symbolic, representative, impersonal killings: she fears this not at all. She fears the deliberate, the targeted. Someone would need to aim for her. This is not a logical understanding of the risks, although I can see her point. If someone’s trying to kill you, at least it should be about
you.

She stops her circumnavigation in front of my desk. ‘What’s this?’

I know what she’s asking right away. My desk is usually bare like every surface in my office, bare like every tabletop in my room. I like things sparse, lean, minimalist. Clutter makes my eyes ache. Charlotte and the kids, the mess drives me crazy.

Sometimes I put my foot down. When we moved in, Mum gave us a set of white lace doilies as a housewarming present. Doilies. They were wrapped in a striped linen tea towel with a wooden spoon holding the ribbon in place. So I can see where Charlotte gets it from. Our parents’ place—God, it’s a shrine to bric-a-brac shops the world over. It’s where paintings of dogs playing poker go to die, every surface covered in shepherdess figurines and crystal koalas and miniature cars. And photos, of course. Newer ones of the kids and older ones of the three of us. Never Dad, because he’s always taking the picture. It looks like my sister and I were brought up by a single mother with a time-delay camera. And there’s no satisfaction in appealing to Dad. Despite his world-famous aesthetic sense and natural good taste, he won’t say a word to Mum. He lets her do whatever she wants, he always has.

But today my desk is not bare. Today there is an old coin
on it, a shilling. I should have put it in the drawer with my handbag when I first came in. I don’t know why I didn’t. My theory of practice allows for some self-disclosure. An unguarded response can sometimes make clients feel safe, especially since it’s Violet’s relationship with her father that seems to be at the core of her troubles.

‘It’s my father’s. One of his most prized possessions. Mum smuggled it out of his study. I’m getting it framed, as a get-well present from me and my sister.’

‘Funny prized possession.’

‘He says it reminds him of silver linings.’

‘Money? That’s a silver lining all right. I couldn’t agree more.’

She couldn’t be more wrong. It’s just that he’s attached to this coin. It’d be the first thing he’d grab if the house was burning down. He’d leave the art, Mum’s jewellery, even his first editions.

‘I’m wondering what your prized possessions are,’ I say.

She doesn’t answer. For the rest of the session, I try to bring her back to her father, her husband, her boyfriend, her habit of dropping things into pockets and open handbags. Instead she talks about a new nail bar that’s opened in her neighbourhood, about trying to set her brother up with one of her friends, about someone she knew who left the window open while on holiday on the Peninsula and a duck flew in and shat on her friend’s luggage, the bloody duck didn’t care it was Louis Vuitton, so that night at dinner they all ordered the duck as revenge.