Hard Word (28 page)

‘But your letters?' I said.

‘Isn't pride a terrible thing?' Emily said. ‘They weren't written from Israel at all, only posted there.'

‘But how?'

‘I know a lot of men in Malaysia,' she said. ‘Some in the airlines …'

‘But what have you been doing?' I said. ‘How have you been able to live?'

‘Oh,' said Emily, ‘I fill in the time. I do a lot of this …' And she raised her glass, which was already nearly empty again. ‘And I know a lot of rich men. There are so many Chinese millionaires in KL,' she said. And they're very generous. And –' she laughed, ‘I don't know anything about their real lives. And that suits me fine.'

‘But Em –'

‘And I don't want to discuss it any more. Now I'm home. And I'm an aunt, to two lovely children. That Miriam,' she said, ‘and those eyes – where on earth did she get those eyes?'

‘My grandmother, I think,' I said. ‘There were always stories – though she was a redhead, I think. Or strawberry – you can't tell from old photos.'

‘That girl,' Emily said, ‘will
be
something. She will make something of herself. Won't you, darling? Come to Auntie Em –' And Emily stayed then, not with us – the house was too small even if she'd wanted to stay – but in an apartment by the water, and was more than an aunt. She had money to burn, it seemed, and she spent. ‘Small change is for age,' she said. She showered the children with presents, hired sitters and took Bill and me out to the theatre and the racecourse and places I hadn't been for seven years. And I was happy again. But Emily wasn't. She kept looking for the old life, but it had moved on, or settled, and the people in the bars were suddenly fifteen years younger than her, and though older men still flocked around her, she was quickly frozen out by the wives all of them now had, and who were women just as tough as she was. And tougher. And I could see she was starting to get restless again, and casting about.

We had a small car now and occasionally in the summer, we'd pack it and head for the South Coast for the weekend and hire a shack so the children could get out of the heat and dust of Sydney. And Emily who loved the sea – its roughness and freedom – always came with us. By this time Emily and I had grown very close again, and I was desperate for her to find something and be more settled at heart. And, deep down, I was terrified that if she didn't, she'd leave me again.

And then, out of the blue, there comes that day …

We are at the coast, we've all swum, and Emily and Bill have headed back to the shack to start the lunch while I've offered to stay on for another half-hour paddling in the shallows with the children. Miriam, as always, is unrestrainable, playing the tomboy, splashing water at Brian, kicking it in his face.

‘Don't –' he says.

‘C'mon,' she cries. ‘I'll race you to the pier and back.'

‘I don't want to,' he says.

‘Because I'll beat you.'

‘It's too hot.'

‘Well, cool off, then,' she says and kicks again. ‘If you're such a sook.' Brian takes the full wash of water in his face this time, and begins to cry.

‘That's enough,' I say. ‘If you can't behave, we'll have to go back.'

‘Well, Brian won't even play,' she says. And kicks at him a third time.

‘That's it, pack your things,' I say as I wipe the salt from Brian's cheeks. ‘And Miriam, you can carry your brother's towel and things as well.'

‘Why should I?' she says. ‘If they're his.'

Miriam – I know even at this early stage – will suffer in her life.

The shack is on a small rise – above the beach but hidden from it – and you approach it up a sandy, overgrown path from the back. Brian grumbles all the way up about the heat, his burning feet. Miriam sings to herself, seeming not to notice.

‘Go round the front,' I say when we reach the top of the rise. ‘Hose the sand off your feet before you go inside.'

The children run in front of me, across the lawn and along the side of the house, racing to see who'll get to the hose first, and I sigh and follow after them, knowing what will happen when they do. I hurry past the old outhouse, past the hydrangeas flowering, blue and pink, along the sides of the cottage. As I pass, I glance through one of the windows and into the room, and there's Bill. He's standing in the kitchen with his back to the stove, looking out towards me, and my hand lifts automatically to wave to him. But the look on his face freezes my gesture. He's gazing directly at me, and his face is filled with the strangest expression. It's a look, I realize, I've never seen from him in all the time I've known him. We stand like this in amazement gazing at one another for a full three perhaps four seconds, until finally I understand that he isn't looking at me at all. He isn't looking at – or at least seeing – anything. And then I notice his hands, and the back of a head that he is holding between them. It is moving up and down rhythmically between his hips. And it is then that I realize he is naked. I can see the whole room now – and Emily, still in her bathing costume kneeling in front of him, and she has his pipe in her mouth, and I hear, right beside me, this scream of terror, ‘Never, Never' – and that's when Bill sees me for the first time, and just before I run I see Emily's head stop, while she kneels there. Not moving, not turning.

When I finally get back to the shack, everyone is dressed and packed and waiting, and we drive without speaking, Emily in the front seat with Bill, her case up on the seat between them, and me in the back with the two children who are sleeping. None of us speaks a word, until we are fifteen miles from the City, where the railway begins, when Emily just says, ‘Here,' and Bill pulls over and stops. And Emily speaks to me then without turning her head.

‘Vera,' she says, ‘you won't believe this, but what happened back there means nothing. It means only that I am unhappy, and I spoil everything.'

And, just for one second, such is the plaintiveness of her voice, I almost reach out to touch her. But she has the door open and is already out and running, and that's what I remember most vividly, her legs as she runs from the car, her calves still strong, still beautiful, but the heavy case banging cruelly against them as she runs all the way into the station house, and disappears.

That's when the years of real unhappiness begin. For me, and for Bill. For Emily too, I suppose, though there was only ever one card saying she'd gone back to Kuala Lumpur, and she hoped I could forgive her. I never wrote back. I thought I hated her, and the years ground on, and their emptiness gnawed at me. Bill too was depressed.

‘Can't you ever let go?' he said. ‘Why hang on to unhappiness?'

But if I suffered, so should he. And he did. And we fought over everything, then, but principally over Miriam. He wanted to use her as a shield against me, but I was determined that this was one thing Emily was right about. Miriam would
be
something, she would make something of herself – not waste her life as I had. But even then, little as she was, she began to go against me, to fight me at every turn. She deliberately made herself the very opposite of everything I wanted for her. And in the pain and unhappiness of all this, I realized there was in fact only one thing I wanted, or had ever wanted at all.

‘Bring her back?' Bill said. ‘Are you mad?'

But I wasn't. I think it was more that Bill himself was shocked, morally appalled by what I was suggesting.

‘You drove her away,' I said. ‘I want her back. I don't care what happens between the two of you, even here in my house, if you like. I just want Emily back.'

And as soon as I said it, I knew it was true. Emily could have Bill, I didn't care. I only wanted Emily.

And, to get her, I persecuted him, and made his life a living hell.

‘Call yourself a man?' I'd say.

‘But Vera, I didn't drive her away,' he protested.

‘You're not a man's bootlace,' I'd say. ‘If you were a man –'

And he became ill, and divided in himself. He couldn't sleep, he'd wake in the early hours and wander in the house, and pretend next morning he'd had a dream from the War, or he'd woken and had to
go.
But I knew he was often sitting in the lounge room in the darkness, and sometimes I'd hear him weeping. And not get up. He could suffer, until he brought her back.

And I think he would have. He was in fact preparing to go and look for her when the news came of her death. Someone rang from the Singapore airline office here in Sydney and gave me the broad details. But they knew nothing else, they'd just been asked by someone in Malaysia to pass it on. There was a paragraph Bill found in the
Straits Times,
again just something brief, vague, a car crash, at speed, alcohol, a Sydney woman, identified as a Mrs Emilia Dreyfus, and the driver a young Chinese man, son of a leading merchant in the city. Both killed instantly.

It was years before Emily started to write again. And I can't remember anything of those years in between. They passed, I suppose. It was only the things that Emily shared with me, only shared things I remember, nothing for myself. And she still writes, even now, and we have forgiven each other everything, and we tell each other everything, over and over again. Emily is my special friend. Emily is the only person I ever loved.

Laura

The day after the barbecue everyone sleeps in, except me. I've got school again tomorrow and homework I haven't done for the whole of the break, and I am going to do it and everything, but not right now because there are some things I need to do in my room first. Mum and Philip are usually up by now, and if it's sunny, they have a long Sunday coffee on the patio in the yard while Philip reads the newspapers and Mum does the crossword and Mr Sanderson comes out and starts up his motor mower over the fence just beside them, but he hasn't this morning because they haven't come out to give him the signal, and it's like a house in which someone has died in the night.

But I'm not surprised Mum and Philip aren't up yet because I couldn't sleep very well after all the excitement of the barbecue and Grandma Vera and that, and at one o'clock I went down to the kitchen to get a glass of Milo and Mum was already there with the fridge open but not to get Milo but more ice cubes, and she was still in her distracted state, and thinking of something else, and hardly saw me except when I said, ‘Are you having a party?' and she said, ‘Sort of,' and I said, ‘Is it private?' and she said, ‘Definitely,' and drifted back to her room without even asking what I was doing up at that time, and was I worried or upset about something because a girl my age should be sound asleep and not wandering about the house at all hours, looking in the fridge for drinks, and I could even be going to poison myself because I'm a disturbed adolescent or have a complex or a depressive illness or something fatal like that, much and all as she cares, sprinting back to bed with Philip with loads of ice cubes, and I hope she does something with them other than just put them in his drink, and I get my Milo and go back to bed and the Milo's still there when I wake at six, so I must have been more tired than I thought.

And Katie – I've just looked in her room and she's still snoring her head off with Yogi up on her pillow, she must have kidnapped him when Grandma Vera was in the shower, and Yogi's not even supposed to be there because Mum says it could give her an allergy with cat hairs floating in the air and getting up her nose while she snores because she's nasally anyway and will have to get her tonsils out later – but that's all her business and Mum's, so I shut the door and she won't wake up till Mum comes and slobbers all over her and says, How did that cat get there? and Katie'll say, I don't know, he must have come up by himself after I went to sleep, and Mum will believe her, she's so unbelievably soppy on Sunday mornings. But not soppy enough today to remember to get Grandma Vera up and take her to church, and when I think of that, I feel much better. But I won't tell her because I know what she'll do, she'll ring all the churches in the yellow pages and ask the minister if he'll do the service again because Grandma Vera slept in and missed it, and she'd make it worth his while.

It's about eleven o'clock, and I've
had
to start my homework, just out of boredom, before I hear Mum on the stairs, and she comes to my door and her hair's still all tousled and weird and she says, ‘You girls are very quiet?' and I prove it by not saying anything and pretending I'm upset, but I can't think of anything to be upset about, so I say:

‘I'm doing my homework.'

And that's when she comes into my room and says, ‘You what?'

‘Doing my homework,' I say. But she's not listening. She's gazing around my room like she's expecting a tsunami any second and says:

‘What on earth happened?'

‘What do you mean?' I say.

‘It's so … tidy,' she says. And then she jumps completely to conclusions like she's always doing and says, ‘Oh, of course, Philip's coming to dinner,' as though that had anything at all to do with it, and anyway it's still seven hours and twelve minutes before he's supposed to arrive and, if I wanted to tidy my room just for him, I could have spent the whole afternoon doing it, but I don't need to, it's tidy as it is. So I ask instead:

‘Have you got a hangover?'

And she smiles this dopey smile, that's supposed to be mysterious or something but just looks as though she's had a bad prawn at the barbecue and has only now found out, and says, ‘No, I didn't really have that much to drink, my mind's crystal clear,' but if it's as clear as her hairdo, I think, then there's no way she'll get through the crossword this morning unless they've reversed all the clues. So I ask if Grandma Vera is all right because I know Mum will have been down at her flat, checking, before she came up here, and she says Grandma is still sleeping soundly and she just got her up briefly to go to the toilet, and we don't look at each other or talk about that. And she says then she's come up because she wants us all to have brunch together, and I say I'm not really hungry and Katie's not even awake, and she says it's not really for the food but Philip wants us to have a family meeting because there's something to discuss. And I remember the last time we did this was to decide if we thought Grandma Vera should come and live with us in the first place and if she did, where would she live – in whose room? – or should Philip build a flat on the back especially for her, and it was Katie's and my decision as much as theirs because this was our home too, and we had to be consulted and had equal say with the adults, and if we said no, then it wouldn't happen, though in fact when we said yes, Philip took out of his briefcase all the plans for the flat which had been drawn up by an architect friend of his, and the builders were starting on Monday. What a fake Philip can be.

‘A meeting?' I say. ‘About what?'

‘We'll talk about that when we get downstairs,' she says. ‘But Dr Lazenby is worried about Grandma Vera, and so am I and so is Philip, and it's a matter of what we do about her.'

And I say, ‘About or for?'

And she says, ‘It would always be for, Laura. You know that. But I don't want to talk about it now,' she says, as though I don't know she's finally realized Grandma Vera has to go into a home, and she can't cope and perhaps it's bad for us girls and dangerous for little Cambodian refugees and everything, which everybody else has known about for about two centuries, except
she
hasn't because she's got such a bad conscience cos she doesn't love Grandma Vera, and she's been up half the night drinking whisky and probably having sex with Philip, not because she wants to – because she must have better taste than that – but because she's worried and anxious about Grandma Vera and how she'll manage in a nursing home, and will they torture her and make her drink her own urine instead of porridge for breakfast like it's a madhouse from the nineteenth century or run by the Liberal Party or something, and whether Katie and I will grow up scarred for the rest of our lives because we've abandoned our grandmother in the frost when she's at her weakest instead of putting her in a wheelbarrow and pushing her round the yard in the sun like all those refugees in Yugoslavia that are on the news every night.

‘Okay,' I say. ‘I'll just finish this paragraph.'

‘There's no hurry, dear,' she says. ‘Katie's not even up yet.'

And, listening to her, I'm not even sure how keen she is to get to this meeting herself either, or whether she'd rather put it off to another day. Or year.

Anyway, the next thing is, she's gone, and I hear her voice from Katie's room. burbling and smooching and things, and then I hear:

‘What's that cat doing in the bed?'

And I yell out, in Katie's whiny voice:

‘I don't know. He must have just got in here by himself after I went to sleep.'

And I can hear them listening, and not saying anything, through the wall.

When I get downstairs, Philip's already dressed and sitting at the head of the table in the dining room and looking smug and that, and there's croissants and coffee and some of the leftovers from the barbecue in dishes in the centre of the table, but he's not reading the newspapers but just sitting there and preparing his mind like he thinks he's President Bush or someone and is just waiting for his Cabinet to assemble so he can tell them to go and bomb Denmark or somewhere before he has his lunch. And I look at the floor round his chair, but I can't see the briefcase with the secret plans of what he's going to do to the house next after he's consulted us and told us we all have an equal say in the decision he's made seventeen years ago. So, when he says, ‘Good morning, Laura, you're looking very smart and pretty today,' I smile and say ‘Good morning' back and feel a fake, but I don't want him in a bad mood when the real Philip comes. And then Mum and Katie come in and Mum's still looking like a possum that's been caught in a garage roller door or something, and it's unusual for her but she's still nearly as dreamy as she was last night, and I see from the way Philip looks at her he actually likes her that way, and I try to see her from his perspective, all mussed up, and her dressing gown half off her and not wearing anything underneath, and I understand and I think Yeeech, my own mother.

‘Right,' Philip says. ‘We're all together now.'

‘No, we're not,' says Katie. ‘Grandma Vera's not here.' ‘Grandma Vera's sleeping in,' Mum says. ‘She won't be joining us for lunch.'

‘She won't wake up,' Katie complains then. ‘I shook her hand, and I even gave her Yogi. But that didn't work either.'

‘Grandma Vera's still upset from yesterday,' Philip says. ‘Dr Lazenby's given her something to help her sleep, and we're hoping she'll get over things completely –'

‘She'll wet the bed,' Katie warns.

‘I've already got her up,' Mum says, ‘a little while ago. She won't wet the bed, I think.' Mum looks at Philip then. ‘I might need to go out later and get a few things,' she says to Philip. Over our heads.

‘Like a pot?' I say.

‘Well, yes,' she says.

‘Well, why didn't you just say it?' I say.

‘Pot,
Katie giggles. ‘For Grandma.'

Mum ignores this, and looks at me. ‘And some incontinence pads and adult napkins,' she says.

‘Napkins?' says Katie. ‘But we've got lots of napkins, and anyway Grandma Vera usually eats with a bib.'

‘Not table napkins, dear,' Mum says. ‘These are more like – well, like babies' napkins,' and she gives Philip this small, soppy smile which she thinks I don't see but I do, and I wonder what
that's
about. ‘They're to stop Grandma Vera wetting the bed. She may not, of course. She's been fine till now.'

‘Ahem,' says Philip who looks smaller already and is losing control of the meeting. ‘I wonder if …' he says, when he's not wondering anything at all but just politely saying
Shut up.
So I say to Mum:

‘Did Grandma Vera say anything? When you got her up?'

‘No,' says Mum. ‘Oh, yes, she did say one thing.'

‘That's a good idea,' Katie and I chant.

‘No,' says Mum. ‘She didn't say that.'

‘What, then?'

‘She said, ‘‘Thank you, Em.'' '

‘M?'
I say. ‘Who's M?'

‘I don't know,' Mum says, and you can see she's puzzled. ‘Mother's mentioned an Em before, and I've been racking my memory about it. And you know, it's true, she did once have a friend called Emily. For some reason I'd blanked her out completely. She was like an aunt, always at the house – this is when I was very young – and then she just went away and never returned. She went to Malaysia or somewhere, and died there.'

‘What of?' Katie says.

‘Ahem,' says Philip, and he's tapping the table now and getting upset because he's called this big important meeting and nobody's paying the slightest attention when he's supposed to be bombing Europe and we're all talking about Grandma's friends in Malaysia.

‘When was that?' I say to Mum, just to stir Philip. I don't really care when it was, or if she died in Antarctica.

‘Oh, it was a long time ago,' Mum says. ‘Must be over thirty years. I don't think it was
that
Emily she was thinking of. It's just names, I think.'

‘COULD WE START THE MEETING?' Philip yells, and we all jump in shock, and he must see how startled we all look – even Mum's eyes are wide and her crest's up and she looks like one of those gang-gang birds that's landed bottom down on a spiky branch. ‘Yes, all right, darling,' Mum says. ‘There's no need to yell.' And Philip himself's so shocked that he begins to whisper and we have to ask him to speak up. People are so weird sometimes.

Anyway, when he's got his proper voice back, he tells us that Mum and he thought they wanted to explore some ideas with us about the best care for Grandma Vera, and nothing's decided yet, and we all have a say in this, not least of all Grandma Vera, whom we're to talk to later, and everybody has equal rights in this and nobody's going to force anything on us against our own will – like a flat at the back of the house, though Philip doesn't
say
this, I just think it – and blahdeblahdeblah, till Katie yawns and says, ‘Is that meringue?'

And it's Philip's turn to land on a branch with his eyes like a startled parrot. ‘What?' he says.

‘In the blue dish,' Katie says. ‘Is that meringue?'

And, just from looking at him, I know Philip wants to say
Fuckkk, why do I bother?
but he doesn't, he just swallows and says, ‘We'll come to the meringue in a minute, we just need to finish this piece of family business first,' and I ask him how can we finish it when we haven't started it yet because he's talking so much, and
he
starts to look then like he's swallowed a meringue whole and can't get a word out past it for a moment, and that's when Mum says: