The Low Road (18 page)

N
ot yet comfortable with his new prison swagger, Lee enters the visitors' room clutching a plastic bottle of water. He sees Claire before she is even aware of him. She is sitting with her knees pressed together, knocking the toe of one black shoe against the other. She looks fearful. When people talk about Claire they say she is a good woman and gently nod. Lee knows what they really mean is that she's had her work cut out for her looking after her little brother since their parents died. She even dresses like a social worker, just the fashionable side of dowdy.

The visitors' room has walls of thick glass on three sides and a linoleum floor. It has the rotten-fruit smell of a classroom. There is a vending machine for chocolate bars and chips. A couple of screws stand around the walls keeping an eye on things. Contact is limited to fervent hand-holding across the low tabletops. Almost everyone looks defeated and somehow embarrassed, except the children who are too young to have learned about such things. People talk about the football, about family, and about the future and the past. They know not to discuss their current lives because it's too difficult and foreign for loved ones to comprehend. The prisoners don't want to hear about the outside world. The women don't want to know what goes on in here.

Claire stands when Lee is several yards away and holds her arms out. He allows himself to be hugged and then inspected as Claire steps back with her head cocked. You alright?

Lee shrugs. Yeah. As well as can be expected, I suppose.

Sorry I haven't been down here to see you yet. Been flat out with the kids. Graeme's not keen on me coming down here—

Fucking Graeme.

Claire turns away with a lengthy sigh. Come on, she says. It's only been a couple of weeks—

Three weeks.

Claire looks around at the other people in the visitors' room. Lee knows that this is precisely what she feared for him and imagines that her disappointment is at least tempered with vindication. When he was fourteen, Claire sat him down with a local guy called Leonard—there being nobody else—who tried to impress upon him the risks of the kind of life he was beginning to lead, the stealing cars and shoplifting and whatever else he was up to. Leonard was Claire's expert witness: he'd done a few years inside and was tough in a minor way. Leonard's conversion to the straight and narrow failed to impress Lee, however. Unfortunately for Claire, there is no story quite so compelling to a teenager of a certain bent as the one that starts:
When I was doing time for . . .

Claire tries again. So. You're alright? You need anything?

Another shrug. He hasn't a clue what to say. He is afraid he might actually cry. It is safer to rein in all emotion rather than risk any sort of leak.

It's only another eleven months. Can you hang on for that long?

Yeah, Lee says after taking a slug of water.
Only
eleven months. And regrets his rudeness.

Well, you just need to hang on. Stay out of trouble.

Yeah. Stay out of mischief.

He can feel her examining him now, possibly searching for signs of damage or violence. She sighs and looks around again. A little boy visiting his dad launches into a high-pitched wail, perhaps an imitation of a siren. The mother raises the back of a hand and the kid squirms away and sprawls on the floor in a knot of limbs. He's probably only ten years old but already has the angular prison haircut, like he's being groomed for a life inside.

God, Claire says in the kind of low voice she might have used years ago when commenting on a casserole a neighbour had left on the front porch in the weeks after the accident. What a dump.

You got that right.

And Lee looks at this woman, this remote being, and wonders if there is anything left for them to talk about. He feels the unwieldy burden of language, an implement he is unqualified to use. She has worked hard to fashion herself into something, smoothing away all edges, a woman of spit and polish. Twenty-eight years old, married to a respectable man, with two children. Probably owns an exercise bike. He can in fact imagine her pumping away in the sunroom, the room where their dad used to read the Saturday paper. Lee is amazed and appalled by her. He remembers her struggling with the can opener on the kitchen bench years ago, determined to break into that can of beans or soup or whatever, finally giving up and flinging the entire thing—opener and can locked together—through the kitchen window into the backyard. The crash of glass and outside sounds filtering into the house. How embarrassed she was, not just at what she had done, but at the fact that she had been observed. And Lee at the kitchen door picking sullenly at the paint on the jamb, always in a doorway in the months after the accident as if unwilling to commit to entering any room.

He thinks of something. Do you remember going to the beach?

Claire looks surprised, but nods.

With Mum and Dad. Mum was wearing sunglasses. You had a yellow bucket. Bright metal.
Really
hot.

Red.

What?

Red bucket.

Oh. Really?

I'm sure.

They sit in silence for a few moments more. Finally, Claire shakes her head. My God. You're in jail. In . . .
jail
.

Lee slouches over the table and lights a cigarette. He has always hated the way Claire leaves a meaningful space where a normal person would swear, like she wants to swear—really wants to—but is too civilised to go through with it.

He pouts to remove a shred of tobacco from his lower lip. You think I don't know that?

Claire rests her head in her hands, then recomposes herself. They talk haltingly of other, desultory things for several minutes, before she places a hand down carefully on the laminated table, as if playing a card. Anyway. What I wanted to tell you was . . . that if you want to . . . I think it might be a good idea to come and live with me again for a while when you get out, until we can get you some work and get you settled. What do you think?

With you? At our old place?

Yes. Of course.

What about Graeme?

Well. With me
and
Graeme, of course. He's OK with it.

Yeah, right.

He doesn't hate you, despite what you think. He just doesn't know you. Might be a chance for you two to get to know each other. Listen to me. Just for a few months. There's heaps of room. You can stay in the back room, where Mum used to have her sewing stuff. It's been repainted. The kids would love having their uncle there.

Lee doesn't say anything. He looks down, chips at the crappy table with a fingernail. He understands that expression—what is it?—about having your heart in your mouth. His own mouth is full to bursting. His lip trembles. Home seems an impossible idea.

Claire goes on. Think about it. It's a good idea. You might run out of chances one day.

It is a while before he is able to speak. I don't know.

What else are you going to do? You've got to get your life together, Lee.

He shrugs. A pathetic gesture. A shrug.

You need to make some new friends, maybe learn a trade or something. Mr. Ellroy is always looking for someone. Go back to school. Remember the lake? Fishing in the lake? She looks around at the smoking, mumbling crowd. This isn't for you. This is one of her favourite themes. Any second now she'll go on about the way she managed to pull herself up and how she didn't raise Lee in that damn house and keep him out of the clutches of the social workers for him to end up
here
.

Lee counters with a favourite theme of his own. What makes you so sure it's not for me?

Is that what you really think? That you belong here or something?

Maybe.

What does that mean? She lowers her voice. What does that
mean
, Lee?

Some of the other prisoners look up and smirk. A birdlike woman with a scrawny neck offers Claire a wry nod, a sort of
You think if we could tell these blokes anything, they'd be in here right now?

He shakes his head. Nothing.

Please, Lee. Think about it. Please.

OK, OK. I'll think about it. I've got a few months to think. Jesus, you sound like someone's mother. And knows immediately this is the wrong thing to say. If he were a better person he might apologise right now.

Claire rolls her eyes and looks away, blinking. They sit in silence for a while and Lee smokes another cigarette, angling the burning end to a point against the tinfoil ashtray. Almost everyone in the room is puffing away on a cigarette and there is a grey slab of smoke at shoulder height. Nearby a woman with heavily made-up eyes is sobbing and saying
Why now?
over and over. She dabs at her face with a tissue and inspects it to see how much of herself is coming loose.

Claire scowls and waves cigarette smoke from her face. I thought I saw them the other day.

Lee senses a trapdoor has clanked open somewhere inside his chest. He licks his lips and toys with his cigarette. He doesn't want to, actively resists asking, but gives in. Where?

Actually, I see them quite often. It comes and goes. Sometimes not for a long time and other times I think I see them regularly. It's weird. Sometimes I think—this will sound crazy—but I think I
conjure
them from a crowd.

Lee raises his head to look at Claire and is met by her gaze, which seems calibrated somewhere between accusation and pity. He is mesmerised. He has seen them himself—on streets, in his dreams, always in the distance or on their way somewhere—but has always been afraid to tell anyone about it. He has been awoken by their murmuring night-time voices, by the feel of a hand on his brow and by the smell of his mother's occasional gold-tipped cigarettes.
They're good for my heart so
please
don't look at me like that, sweetie.

I was on a tram, Claire goes on, and it was in the city. Crowded. Peak hour, you know, people everywhere, and it was raining hard, a real summer rain. Everyone was covering themselves with newspapers and umbrellas and coats and whatever. Trying to stay a little bit dry . . . People everywhere. And I was on the tram and the tram window is all foggy from people's breathing, you know how it gets like that? So it looks almost underwatery. So I wipe the window with my sleeve to look out and I see a man and a woman, about the right age, maybe early fifties. And the man is covering himself and the woman with his coat, a black coat, very . . . gallant, I suppose, and they're sort of crouched over, like you do when it's raining. Scurrying along. Just going around the corner of the Town Hall, where the benches are. And I swear to God . . . for a second I thought it was really them. Almost stood up to pull the cord. Crazy. And then they dropped something. The woman dropped something and they had to stop and turn around to pick it up. And I'm watching them real close, my eyes right on the glass and I could see that they were laughing. Really laughing. Like it was the funniest thing. You know how Mum and Dad used to do that? Just crack up like there was always some private joke going on. Especially Mum, that—what would you call it?—wisecracking.
A wisecracking dame
, Dad used to call her. Remember that? She was laughing like a drain. That must have been it. I thought it was them because of the laughter, the way they were laughing as they got soaked.

Lee draws the last from his cigarette and grinds the butt into the ashtray. In the weeks after the accident, Claire would talk incessantly of their parents, attempting to describe them back to life, as if speech might have had the power of resurrection. Tom and Jean, she called them now. She spent hours on the telephone with friends, going over their lives. She spoke with strangers on trains, at the cemetery, accosted old women in public toilets. At night she rang radio talk shows for the bereaved and broken-hearted, her voice out riding the airwaves, leaking into the homes of strangers. She even took up prayer for a while, as if conversing with mortals failed to satisfy her. A monstrous unravelling of language that frightened the ten-year-old Lee. He worried she would run out of words and, in fact, she seemed to have less and less left over for him. Increasingly they would sit in silence at the kitchen table after dinner, listening to the house creaking and sighing like a liner about to slip its moorings. At other times, Claire would make Lee tell her everything he remembered about the accident.
Everything
, which was very little, just the scream and crunch, just the scream and crunch. The scream and crunch and the smear of sudden darkness. The ticking of a cooling car engine.

So it wasn't them? Lee asks in a small voice, afraid of the question, afraid of the answer.

Claire looks at him, as if only now aware of his presence. Her glance is thick with pity. She loops a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. It wasn't your fault, you know, she says in an unconvincing voice.

There is an announcement over the loudspeaker that signals the end of visiting time and there is a commotion of people standing and talking. Chairs scrape on the floor. She smiles and reaches across the table to touch Lee's face but withdraws before making contact, perhaps remembering where they are and thinking it is forbidden.

Part Three

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