The Cry (3 page)

Alistair transferred Noah to the nifty buggy-cum-car-seat which was waiting for them just outside the plane. The baby was wrapped snugly in his blue blanket, his tiny face barely visible.

‘Shh, no!’ Alistair scolded Joanna when she leant down to check on him. ‘Don’t wake him!’

Alistair was right. Even looking at him might cause this blissful calm to erupt.

Wheeling Noah ahead of them in the buggy, they manoeuvred through the queues at immigration, collected their baggage, and exited the air-conditioned terminal building.

Joanna wheezed in a mouthful of boiling air and panicked – it felt like someone had put the nozzle of a hair dryer in her mouth.

They walked as fast as they could to the car rentals parking area, not wanting to disturb Noah by removing his blanket.

‘Can you smell it?’ Alistair’s Australian accent was stronger already.

Joanna sucked thick air in through her nose. ‘Eucalyptus?’

‘Eucalyptus and . . .’ Alistair clicked the doors open to the hire car, put his hand up and held it out ‘. . . bushfire.’ A piece of ash from the fire that had been raging for three days floated down and landed on the palm of his hand. ‘God it’s good to be home.’

Alistair detached the buggy seat from its frame and strapped it into the car. He put the cases that were on the trolley Joanna had wheeled from the terminal in the boot, the smaller ones on top. A perfect fit. He’d probably asked the rental people to give the measurements of the boot to make sure the cases would fit before choosing this model. Joanna smiled at her organised manly man.

He sat in the driver’s seat beside Joanna and checked his phone. ‘Shit!’ he whispered.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked quietly.

‘That young labour girl with the tits has spoken to the
Daily Mail
. Says the dinners with Johnstone weren’t just dinners. He liked to wear a dog collar. Shit shit shit. What’s the time?’

Joanna looked at her watch, which she’d adjusted when they taxied in. ‘It’s 3 p.m. here.’

‘So that’s 6 a.m. in the UK. I’ll call the office when we get to the house.’

Air conditioning now almost too chilly, they headed along the Tullamarine Freeway.

‘Never thought I’d say this, but I am aching to be in Geelong,’ Alistair said, looking at the smoggy Melbourne skyline ahead. Geelong, a one-hour drive from Melbourne, was a poor cousin to the money-dripping metropolis of Victoria’s capital and Alistair had been scathing of it as a teenager and young man. He’d craved Melbourne or, better, London. But as he made his way to the Princes Highway which would take them west, he looked more and more excited. He told Joanna he was looking forward to eating burgers on the beachfront and mooching in the country-town-feel shopping centre and driving along the Great Ocean Road. But most of all, he was desperate to see his daughter, Chloe.

Joanna first met Chloe four years ago. It wasn’t a good meeting. Joanna was in bed making love to her daddy. Chloe was standing in the bedroom door, next to her mummy.

‘Who’s that?’ ten-year-old Chloe had asked, pointing to the naked woman on top of her father.

Joanna jumped off her lover, grabbed the sheet and attempted to wrap herself in it.

‘That,’ Alexandra said, ‘is a fucking slut.’

Alistair sat up, completely naked. ‘Alexandra, watch your language,’ he said.

‘Oh sorry, darling, of course,’ his wife said to her already deflated husband. ‘Swearing will traumatise our daughter.’

‘Chloe, go to the kitchen,’ Alistair ordered.

‘But what are you doing with that woman?’ Chloe asked.

‘Kitchen! Now!’

Chloe obeyed her father and left the bedroom.

‘Alexandra, will you please let us get dressed? We’ll talk about this calmly. Okay? And not in front of Chloe.’

They didn’t talk calmly. Alexandra threw a lamp at Joanna, who dressed and left. Alexandra then hit Alistair, refused to discuss an amicable divorce, waited till Alistair left the following day for a conference, packed, and fled, taking Chloe with her.

Alistair phoned Chloe regularly in the months that followed, and would have flown to Australia to visit, if not for several emergencies in Westminster.

But his attempts to make contact dwindled in direct proportion to his growing desire to make a new family with Joanna. (
Need to believe we are for ever? Have my baby.
)

This new family might have been enough for him had the following story by feared Tory blogger James Moyer not popped up on his Google Alert shortly after Noah was born.

Alistair and Joanna had come to Australia to fight for custody of Chloe. Alistair’s lawyer was very confident. The mother took the child from the UK without asking or even telling the father: kidnapping, yes, they could call it that. The mother did not reveal her whereabouts for over a month once she arrived there: that’d be called non-cooperation or evasion of responsibilities. The mother collected the child from her voluntary work at the Healesville animal sanctuary under the influence of alcohol, and was planning to drive the child home drunk: that was neglect . . . hell, that was criminal.

‘It’s not because of that idiotic blog,’ Alistair said to Joanna before they left. ‘I don’t care about work. Since Noah, since our family, what matters is clearer than ever. That woman was always a drinker, and now I know she’s happy to endanger the life of my little girl. Chloe should be safe. She should be with her dad. She should be with an inspirational, kind, caring, responsible woman – with you, Joanna – and with her baby brother, she should be with her
family
.’

Joanna couldn’t even cope with her own child. The thought of looking after someone else’s terrified her. But she loved making Alistair happy, and everything he said was fair and right.

As they drove along the freeway towards Geelong, Joanna turned to Alistair and said, ‘Will she always hate me?’

‘She doesn’t hate you now,’ he said, touching her thigh. ‘She doesn’t know you. Everything’s going to be perfect. Everything’s going to be just great.’

Alistair approached every situation, no matter how difficult, in the same way: Get the facts. Decide on a plan of attack. Get the job done.

According to Alistair, these were the facts of the affair:

He and his wife were strangers. When it ended they hadn’t even had sex for a month.

Alexandra was, in fact, a mentally ill paranoid bitch with an addiction to alcohol.

He and Joanna were soul mates. She couldn’t dispute this, could she? He had never felt this way before. She was his best friend. She was the love of his life.

Therefore there was nothing wrong with what they had done. They
had
to do it. They were
meant
to be together.

His initial plan of attack was simple: Explain the situation to Alexandra. Ask for a divorce. Remain friends in order to share the custody of an emotionally unscathed Chloe. Live happily ever after.

This plan hadn’t worked well.

But Alistair maintained that he and Joanna had done the right thing, the only thing they
could
do, considering the strength of their love for one another. And it would all work out eventually if they were patient.

Alistair was a patient man.

And he’d been right in the end. Okay, so it had taken time, and it wasn’t as simple as he’d hoped, but things are never simple.

It would work now. Everything would work now.

All they had to do was get the job done.

Get Chloe.

‘State your name.’

‘Chloe.’

‘And your last name, Chloe?’

‘Robertson.’

The girl, fourteen years old, appeared on a large television screen, set to the left of the judge and in front of the lawyer addressing her. She leaned her skinny upper body forward, as if she wanted to be inside the camera, and repeated in an innocent, childlike voice: ‘Chloe Robertson.’

The ten-year-old girl Joanna had seen at the bedroom door four years earlier was now a tall adolescent. A line of light shone down the right side of the middle parting of her dark brown hair. She wore a T-shirt with ‘Paolo Nutini’ written on it. A Scottish singer. This was a dig, Joanna thought. She was sending the message that she loved Scotland, and that Joanna had made her leave. Joanna wondered if Chloe could see her. Was there a screen in her room which showed the courtroom?

‘I’m just going to ask you a few questions, Chloe. Is that okay?’ The lawyer, Amy Maddock, had two children of her own. Her voice sounded like one she had used many times to trick them – ‘The needle won’t hurt at all, I promise!’

‘Yes.’

‘Please stop me if I go too fast and ask me if you don’t understand anything.’

‘Okay.’

‘Do you know this woman?’ Ms Maddock’s bony finger may as well have been a skewer in Joanna’s chest. So the girl
could
see her. No matter how bad she felt since it happened, new things seemed to push her down further on a regular basis. The artist drew carefully with her pencil: eyes to sketchpad, eyes to Joanna. The scratching of pencil against paper overtook all other noises in the large courtroom.

‘Yes,’ Chloe said.

‘How do you know her?’

‘She had an affair with my dad.’

A teenager says it like it is, hey.

‘When did you meet her?’

‘I walked in on them in Edinburgh.’

‘You “walked in on them”. Who’s “them”? What were they doing?’

‘Objection. It’s not in the best interests of a child to ask that.’ Joanna’s lawyer, Matthew Marks, came over as arrogant and posh. She wished she’d picked a lawyer with a child-friendly voice. This one sounded like the Child Snatcher in
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

‘Overruled. You can answer if you want to, Chloe, but I think we understand what you mean.’

Joanna looked down at her lap and attempted to calm her breathing.
Don’t answer, don’t answer. No need to answer.

‘I’d like to answer please.’

The words jolted Joanna’s head upright again. Chloe didn’t sound childlike this time, but accusatory, almost sinister. She directed her eyes away from Joanna’s and turned to the judge, a woman of around sixty. According to Joanna’s lawyer, the judge’s sons were both married with kids, and both doctors.

Judge, opposing lawyer: good mothers, both of them.

‘They were doing it in my mum and dad’s bed. I found out later she’d been after him for nine months.’

The courtroom artist was going for it now. A new reaction. A new page. Pencilling, rubbing, blowing, brushing the paper with her hand, pencilling again, eyes at Joanna, eyes at sketchpad. What was she seeing? The earth mother artist narrowed her eyes as she examined Joanna’s face, answering her question:
A murdering slut, that’s what.

Joanna’s nose was itchy and she’d been told she couldn’t scratch it, not now. She couldn’t scratch it and she couldn’t fidget and she couldn’t –
For God’s sake, never!
– smile. She hadn’t felt like smiling much
since
, but the daily coaching sessions Alistair had given her – about fidgeting and smiling and many other things – had firmly rooted that last idea in her head.
Don’t smile, don’t smile
,
remember Foxy Knoxy, remember Lindy
. She chanted it to herself, forgetting the original problem, which was a nose itch.
Why on earth would she smile? Don’t, just don’t.

In the end, the urge to scratch subsided. She turned to the screen and focused: look sane, look responsible.

Chloe’s eyes were right on hers. ‘My mum’s a good mum,’ Chloe said. ‘She and Dad were happy before her.’

Joanna turned to check on the baby. He was sound asleep, his face snuggled sideways into the blanket.

‘He’s going to be a lady-killer,’ she said to Alistair, smiling. How she loved Noah when he slept.

‘He’s going to be prime minister,’ Alistair said.

‘Of Scotland!’

‘Wash your mouth out!’ Alistair scolded.

Alistair was a staunch Labour supporter. With a politics degree and MBA from Melbourne University, and a fierce determination to succeed, he had climbed from being a lowly council PR officer to political advisor to the Labour Party candidate of Victoria. He did such a good job that the British Labour Party poached him. As Alistair’s father was Scottish, he was granted citizenship in the UK. He worked in London for two years until he was seconded to Scotland, where the Party was in need of a PR miracle. He was powerful and well respected, and – as reported in James Moyer’s blog – was indeed being primed for a safe seat in the next election.

Joanna was socialist and pro independence. She voted for the Scottish National Party. From day one, they had enjoyed jibing at each other’s political views.

They’d met on polling day. Joanna’s school had been overtaken for voting. Alistair was supporting the local Labour candidate at the entrance and offered her an election leaflet as she walked in.

‘No thanks, I’m not conservative.’

‘Neither are we!’ he said, watching her go inside. She had running gear on. She had good legs and an excellent bum. She knew he would notice.

‘I can prove it to you,’ Alistair said as she came out again.

‘Prove what?’

‘That we’re nothing like the Tories.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Over dinner.’

He didn’t tell her he was married until four weeks later.

The road to Geelong was famously dull. The only landmarks were the crosses at the side of the road, where people had died trying to get the journey over as quickly as possible.

A thick cloud of black smoke was visible ahead.

‘Shit,’ Alistair said. ‘I thought it was up north, around Kilmore.’

He turned the radio on. The first channel was classical music. He pressed another button. A flat female voice was saying: ‘If you live in Anglesea and Lorne and you are seeing flames, do not attempt to leave your house. It is too late . . . If you live in Torquay and you are seeing flames, do not attempt to leave your house. It is too late. If you live in . . .’

‘Bloody hell,’ Alistair said.

‘What does it mean, too late? That you’ll just die?’

‘Probably means you’ll have a better chance of protecting yourself staying put.’

‘Will we get to Point Lonsdale okay?’

‘Hang on . . .’ Alistair listened to the rest of the broadcast. ‘Sounds like it’s further on, along the Great Ocean Road. I’m going to stop and ring Mum.’

Different couples make important decisions in different ways. Joanna had only been in one serious relationship before Alistair. His name was Mike. He was six months older than her. They were both English teachers who shared a love of Russian literature. They lived together for four years. And they made decisions by talking things through, calmly. They communicated well, Joanna and Mike. They averted crises. It was sad when they realised they’d met too young, and when Mike decided to go to Japan for a year. But they talked it through, and parted ways with a warm hug. Mike emailed her with his news from time to time. She replied with hers, from time to time.

With Joanna and Alistair, big decisions seemed to be made at the point of crisis, by Alistair.

‘I’m glad she caught us,’ he said over the telephone after his wife had slammed her fists into his naked chest. ‘Now we can be together.’

‘Chloe’s gone,’ he said the following day. ‘I’ll find a way to see her. It doesn’t change things. We are meant to be together.’

Then, most recently: ‘We’re going to get her and bring her back with us. Our family will be complete.’

While packing for the trip, Joanna made a plan. As soon as they settled into their self-catering cottage at Point Lonsdale, she would suggest to Alistair that they set half-an-hour aside each day to talk things over. She didn’t necessarily mean big things. In fact, it was the little things she worried about because you don’t notice them growing. She liked her new plan and smiled as she zipped the last of the suitcases. Yes, she and Alistair would agree to this plan on the balcony of their cottage, clinking champagne glasses to seal the deal as they gazed at the bay. After that, all decisions would be made jointly and calmly. And there would be no more crises.

Unfortunately, in four minutes, this plan would go out the window.

Because in four minutes, she would face the biggest crisis of her life.