Trust (28 page)

Susanna picked up one item after another and put it in its pile, taking a weary solace in the familiar motions of sorting and folding. Beneath the clothes, a few books, a folder of notes, a bottle of duty-free Scotch, hardly touched. Shoes. A soft, green, drawstring bag that Susanna recognised as one of the half-dozen she and Stella-Jean had bought in Bali last time: jewellery bags, silk-lined, with little pockets round the inside for rings and brooches.
But what use does Gerry have for it?
She picked the bag up, sat it on her lap and drew the silk-tagged strings apart. It opened smoothly, like the mouth of a large obliging frog.

The first object she withdrew was as long as her index finger, pink and bafflingly feminine, shaped to resemble a daffodil, with petals around the base and a softly knobbled head. Made of – latex? Puzzled, she dropped it back in the bag and felt around. Was this jewellery? She drew out a string of metal beads, which had no clasp and were only moderately flexible. How odd. Then a pair of clips joined by a cord, presumably a spectacles tether, but she’d never seen Gerry use anything so naff. A stretchy blue band – yes, latex, surely – with a smaller band holding a silver cylinder. It looked rather playful; could these be children’s toys? She fiddled with the tiny black base of the silver cylinder and it started buzzing in her hand. She gasped, tossing the thing away from her in fright.

Not children’s toys.
Adult
toys.

‘Oh my god!’ she cried aloud, the bag falling from her lap to the floor, the toys scattering. With shaking hands she picked up the stretchy blue band and twisted the base again to turn the buzzing off.
A cock ring
. She’d heard of them – was this one? Could it stretch that much? Little square packets of condoms lay scattered on the floor. She picked them up:
For her greater pleasure
, it said on one. Another:
Super sensitive. Rough rider
.

And the daffodil, the sweet little daffodil? Gingerly, Susanna picked it up again and peered at the underside of its stalk. Yes, small round batteries were stacked inside.
A vibrator
. A blush worked its swift way up from the base of her throat, racing over her jaw and up toward her hairline. Was she the last woman in the western world to actually see a vibrator? It was small; smaller than she would’ve imagined. This would never fill a vagina; where, then, did it go? And then:
Where has it been?

And now, Susanna got it.
Angie was telling me the truth.
The story Susanna had rejected so furiously was not malicious fiction. Angie really had seen Gerry in Sydney with another woman.

He’s having an affair
. The woman –
a redhead? Didn’t Angie say she was a redhead?
– she too must be an architect, and she too had been at this conference in New York.
That’s
why his phone had been turned off for so long, why he hadn’t been in his room at the hotel.
He was with his lover
.

Susanna sat there on her heels, blank, gutted, gripped by a nauseating sense of shame and humiliation.
I’ve been such a fool
.
Mum will be so disappointed.

No. No, no. An awful noise tore from her mouth. Her mother would never know. Her mother was dead.
Dead
. Susanna toppled to her side on the carpet, wrapping her arms around herself. ‘Mummy!’ Tears gushed from her eyes; she groaned, rolling to and fro. ‘Mummy, Mummy!’

But within just a few minutes, real though her agony was, another part of her, the onlooker, became aware of what she was doing.
Carrying on
, her mother would have said, disapprovingly. How many times had she heard Mum snap at Angie,
Don’t be such a drama queen
. Pressing her hands to her eyes, Susanna made herself literally swallow her tears; she could actually hear them sloshing and gurgling in her stomach.

When she opened her eyes, there right in front of her was the emerald-green bag. ‘I cannot deal with this,’ she said aloud. ‘Not right now.’ And a voice said,
You don’t have to
. She levered herself up to sitting. If she told no one, then it would be as though it hadn’t happened. She could shut it down. Shut herself down.

Quickly, she replaced the horrible little things in the bag, the bag in the case, and then the books, the Scotch, the stacks of clothes both clean and worn: shaking them out, refolding them roughly, just as they had been. The cashmere overcoat was the last thing to go back in. Everything restored and concealed. She jostled the zipped suitcase to the far side of Gerry’s wardrobe, where she would not see it from the bed.

Her own unsmiling face was watching from the easel.
Honest
, he had said.
That’s you.
She couldn’t bear to look at it, her honest, stupid face. Unclipping the thick sheaf of drawings, she mashed each one into a ball, tossing them one after another into the wicker laundry basket which she carried down the hallway to the rubbish bin in the kitchen.

The bin? No. They must be burnt.

She stepped out into the backyard and cried out at the shock of the terrible heat. It was insane, as well as illegal, to even think of lighting a match on a day like this.
Maybe I am insane
. She went back in to the kitchen and collected the gigantic pasta pot and a box of matches. Down at the far end of the backyard, in the negligible shade of the lemon tree, she squatted down and dropped the first scrunched drawing into the pot. The flame of the lit match flared terrifyingly high in the ravenous air, and in a flash the drawing was devoured. One after another, Susanna burnt them all to ashes, glimpsing now and again the shape of her arm, or her mouth, just for a moment before it blackened and disappeared.

Then it was done. She left the pot there, sitting charred and smoky under the tree, stumbled inside, fell into her bed, and slept.

The room was blissfully cool after the scorcher outside. Even with the curtains drawn, more than enough afternoon light filtered in for Gerry to see his wife’s huddled form.
Sleeping.
He looked around for his suitcase, shoulders sagging with relief when he located it, unopened, on the far side of the room.
Thank fuck for that!
It had given him a nasty jolt when, hours after Susanna left the hospital, he’d remembered what was in it.

He noticed an untouched cup of tea on her bedside table. Showed how exhausted she’d been, poor girl. He left the room quietly, and made a fresh cup with a teabag. ‘Suze,’ he said, sitting on the edge of the bed beside her. Lightly, he touched her hunched shoulder. ‘Suze, cuppa tea here.’

She burst from sleep in a panic, jolting upright. ‘
Whaa?
’

‘It’s all right,’ he soothed. She was staring at him as though she didn’t recognise him. ‘It’s all right, honey, it’s me.’

In Susanna’s dream, or nightmare, she had been in a helicopter that was racketing out of control toward power lines. She was terrified. If it hit those lines, they would all be killed: her children, her parents, everyone she loved. Gerry was in the pilot’s seat. She’d been trying to scream,
Gerry, you don’t know how to fly
, but no sound would come out of her mouth.

No, Gerry was here, sitting looking at her, holding out a mug. She took it, stunned, lifting it automatically to her mouth to sip. Too hot. She put the mug down and rubbed her eyes, then peered at her husband, at his moving mouth, trying to make her ears and brain connect.

‘… Glasgow Coma Scale … eighty-seven per cent … only a few days …’ she heard. None of it was making sense. Gerry smiled at her encouragingly. ‘Two to four weeks, max!’

‘What?’ she asked him. ‘Two to four weeks what?’

‘Till Stella-Jean wakes up! That’s the statistical likelihood. And Seb’s going to be home in a few days. He’s comfortable, they’re keeping the painkillers up to him. They’ll know soon whether the axillary —’

‘What are you doing here?’ Susanna said, and started getting out of bed.

‘Whoa, whoa, stay there,’ he said, motioning her back, but she ignored him. ‘You don’t have to get up. Let’s get some —’

‘You left Stella-Jean on her
own
?’

‘She’s not on her own! She’s in the ICU, she’s
surrounded
by people. Not just people, specialists! Highly trained —’

‘I’m going in there.’ Susanna was pulling clothes from her cupboard, fumbling and stumbling but getting dressed. ‘I’ve got to be with her.’

‘Susanna, don’t be ridiculous! Were you listening to —’

His wife left the room.

‘She’s
unconscious
!’ Gerry shouted after her from the doorway. ‘Susanna!’

No reply.

Susanna sat hunched in the vinyl chair by her daughter’s bed, elbows held in tightly to her sides, rocking minutely to and fro in distress. She wasn’t thinking of her husband, her mother, even her own children, but of another family. In a newspaper, years ago, she had read about a family of four – mother and father, daughter and son, just like her own – on holiday in the Blue Mountains, who had visited a lookout. The mother, taking photographs, had turned to see one of the children perilously close to the edge. She had rushed, grabbed, intending to rescue, but her momentum had carried both herself and her daughter over the cliff. The father and the other child had seen them plummet to their deaths.

Susanna could remember the awful hollow feeling she’d had reading the brief article. How quickly she had turned the page. But the story she’d pushed out of her consciousness now wouldn’t stop replaying in her mind. She could see them, the family on their holiday, picnicking, making jokes; pausing along a bush track to admire some bird or flower, then the scene at the lookout unfolding in all its horror: the mother’s dash, the tipping point, the two screaming, clutching at each other as they fell. The father rushing forward, helplessly watching his wife and child in freefall. Had he seen them hit the ground, far below?

Susanna saw it from every angle, from every viewpoint. She couldn’t look away.
That woman was just like me
, she thought.
I was trying to be a good mother, and instead I destroyed them
.

Her own tragedy melded with all the tragedies that befall families everywhere, every day. Guilt, pity, and the dreadful awareness that people’s lives, their sufferings, their deaths – all are soon, or finally, forgotten.
Mum will be forgotten. Me, too.
Her solitary horror so overwhelmed her that she couldn’t even cry.

The nurses, who had been quietly coming and going all the while in their regular monitoring of Stella-Jean, now gently asked Susanna to go to the nearby visitors’ room while – and they gestured to Stella-Jean’s tubes, her catheters, the various bags that nourished and drained her. Silently, Susanna went. Other patients’ families, sitting in clusters in the visitors’ room, nodded a welcome, but resumed their own sombre conversations when they saw that Susanna wasn’t up to talking. She heard someone say
the hills
, and
bushfires
, and realised that she had no idea what had been going on in the outside world for the past few days.
I have to get a grip, somehow; I have to take hold of something.

Allowed back into the ICU, she went first to the nurses’ station. One of the small clutch of staff huddled by a computer screen gave her an inquiring smile. ‘I was wondering if you might have some spare sheets of paper?’ Susanna asked. ‘Blank paper?’

Sitting beside the bed where her daughter lay, Susanna took a black pen from her bag and began to draw the story that had unfolded in the Blue Mountains years before.
I don’t know your name
, she told that mother,
but I remember what happened to you
, and one image followed another, from happy innocence to grim death, exactly as they played out before her inner eye.

She drew and drew, and when she had drawn it all Susanna put the sheets in her bag, stretched, rolled her tight shoulders, flexed her fingers. She felt sad, and calm, and resolved, as though something she’d been putting off for a long time had finally been done.

In that strangely peaceful state, she rested; perhaps she fell asleep. Something roused her: a touch? A voice? She sat up, looking around. No one else was there except Stella-Jean. Her darling face: was it a little less swollen? Susanna bent over and gave her daughter’s cheek a feather-soft kiss. She looked at her watch and saw to her surprise that it was after nine o’clock at night.

The sounds on the other side of the curtain, she became aware, had shifted, become more urgent. Looking into the ward, she saw that some change had occurred in the focused calm of the intensive care unit. Additional nurses and other staff had appeared and were busy moving equipment and beds purposefully around, making room for more. She beckoned to a passing nurse and asked her what was happening.

‘We’ve got word that the bushfires are even worse than anyone expected,’ the young woman told her in a low voice. ‘All the major hospitals are preparing. We’re expecting a large number of casualties.’

TWENTY-SIX

Finn’s mum said, ‘Be careful not to mess anything up, honey,’ in a low voice. She’d just finished tidying up the living room after the Faith Rise Band rehearsal, but Gabriel was back in his room with the door closed, so it was okay for Finn to linger in the living room with her. His mum had been home with him all week, since the accident, and he hadn’t had to go to school. He wouldn’t be going till after tomorrow, after Jeejee’s funeral; that was when everyone would say goodbye to Jeejee, and her body was going in the ground.

They could hear Gabriel playing his guitar, trying to get this new song right. Little changes each time to the music, or to the words he was singing.

‘Calling them home

Calling them ho-oh-ome

He sent the angels, through the fire,

He’s calling them home.’

‘You know what that means?’ Angie asked. ‘The angels calling them home?’