At lunch time, while everyone is out in search of coffee, food, fresh air or all three, Joyce rolls up her coat, sets it down on the floor behind the rows of chairs, and lies down resting her head on it. She has somewhere between forty-five and fifty minutes before people start to drift back in for the afternoon session and if she doesn’t grab a few minutes’ sleep, she knows she won’t last the afternoon. Relief floods through her as she closes her eyes and feels the tension ebbing away, her mind stops struggling to hang on, her thoughts begin to drift. One more week to go and that feels like liberation, but at the same time she doesn’t want it to be over, the intensity of it, the small but regular satisfactions of learning something new and putting it into practice. But what will she do when it’s over? All she knows is that she will be different, that these last few weeks have changed her.
‘I wish I’d done it years ago,’ she’d told Ewan that morning, ‘but at the same time I’m so happy to be doing it now, when I really need it, when it really matters.’ She’d wanted to say that she has the feeling of her life opening up to all sorts of possibilities, that getting old no longer feels as though it will be a slow and steady process of diminishment and loss. But nice as Ewan is she fears sounding pathetic. She has studied the job advertisements on the noticeboard; there are opportunities for people who want to teach everywhere from Japan to Germany, the Middle East to Mexico. It seems that if you can get up and go then you’ll always find work teaching English somewhere, including here in Perth.
‘Would you do that?’ Jacqui had asked her this morning. ‘Would you just take off somewhere and give it a go?’
‘I don’t know,’ Joyce had said. ‘My head’s too full of stuff to be able to work that out right now. But knowing that I can, that it’s a possibility – that’s what makes it exciting. I always thought I wanted to travel as I got older, not just for a holiday, but to stay somewhere for a few months at a time.’
There is a slight noise by the door and Joyce tenses again, imagining one of her fellow students returning, spotting her flat out on the floor, asking if she’s okay or needs help. ‘Just leave me alone,’ she murmurs into the silence, ‘please just leave me alone.’ But there is no one there.
She has made a determined effort to avoid distractions, and apart from a brief chat with Polly she has managed that. Mac had called her to let her know that Helen was back in Fremantle having fallen out with Damian. ‘So she’s back in the apartment, and apparently terrorising estate agents,’ he’d said. ‘Have you heard anything from her?’
‘Not a word since she sent me that text the day she left,’ Joyce had said.
‘Well Dennis reckons you should expect a visit,’ Mac said. ‘He doesn’t think she’ll last long bouncing around on her own, and he’s going to lie low here for a while.’
‘So how are you going?’ Joyce had asked.
‘Not too bad,’ he’d said, but she could hear the reservation in his voice. Mac was very fond of Dennis, but she was sure that by now, he would be itching to have the place to himself again. ‘He needed a break and he’s been helping me with the fences, and other things. We’ve done quite a bit of work.’
His tone was a bit strained and Joyce realised he was still smarting over her hanging up on him. Perhaps he was waiting for her to apologise; if so he was in for a long wait. He’d treated what she was doing as something trivial, probably because he was unused to her having some other focus in her life. Well, he’d just have to get used to it, he’d always had other things going on, things that took him away for weekends, or fishing trips, and when he was working his attention was almost always elsewhere. Now she has other things too. Mac, she thinks, has taken a lot for granted and she has let him. Things will have to change when he comes back, and in the meantime, if there is to be an apology it will not come from her.
Joyce shifts her position slightly; the floor is very hard, especially on her lower back. She thinks of Helen being turfed out of Damian and Ellie’s place and sent home, imagines her alone in the apartment calling agents, and harassing Dennis over the phone. Years ago she would have been worrying about Helen, calling her, offering help and consolation, but now, for the first time, she admits that it’s a long time since she really enjoyed Helen’s company. Helen had become obsessed with what she saw as the unfairness of her life and had constantly recycled angry, resentful monologues full of complaints, unanswerable questions, and calls for Joyce to support her. So despite Joyce’s shock and disappointment when Helen had announced that they were moving, it hadn’t taken her long to realise that it would, in some ways, free her from being Helen’s listening post. Since then Joyce has felt herself being sucked into the black hole of Helen’s anger or discontent. It had been the same when they had met up again at the Arts Centre. She’d hoped that by encouraging Helen back to their old spot on the verandah afterwards, they might recapture something of their past friendship, but it was the same old saga of complaints with none of the warmth and humour of the past. No more, she thinks now, and she knows that something in her has changed in the last few weeks. She feels different, so different that her response to Helen will be profoundly different too.
It’s Jacqui who wakes her, eventually, with a beaker of coffee and a sandwich from the café, and as Joyce blinks and rubs her eyes she sees that there are four other people curled up on the floor nearby.
‘You’re a trendsetter,’ Jacqui says, giving her a hand to get to her feet. ‘Did you actually sleep?’
‘Blissfully,’ Joyce says, yawning. ‘I may just make it through the afternoon now. I’m a trendsetter and you’re a saint.’ And she settles back at her desk with ten minutes left to eat, drink and get her head back into gear.
Later, at home, she warms up some soup, and sits on a stool at the bench top to eat it, listening to the sound of heavy rain on the roof. Then, pushing aside her bowl and spoon, she flops down into the old armchair in the corner of the dining area of the kitchen, and puts her feet up on the sagging ottoman, to study. Since the course began the kitchen has become both living and study space. She eats her meals at the bench, and her laptop, books and papers are spread the length of the kitchen table. It’s warm in here, cosy, and the light is good. The chair is old, shabby and comfortable, the pile of the fabric on the arms worn thin with years of use. One day she’ll replace it with a rocking chair but she has no time for that now. No time for anything except this extremely complex book chapter on the interference factor of native languages for students learning English. It’s as she is struggling with a particularly complicated section that the front doorbell rings and her heart sinks. Knowing that any sort of conversation will destroy her concentration she ignores it. Ben and Vanessa are away, Stella or Polly would call out, or walk around to the back door. She turns the page and reads on, and hears the bell again. Joyce looks up, waiting for whoever it is to go away. There is a third ring and then the sound of a key turning in the front door. Joyce gets to her feet and walks out to the passage to discover Helen closing the front door behind her. Helen! She had completely forgotten about her.
‘There you are,’ Helen says, turning around, looking slightly affronted. ‘I knew you were in but I kept ringing and you didn’t answer. It’s pouring out there.’
Joyce watches in amazement as Helen leans her umbrella in the corner and runs her hands through her hair. ‘I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to be disturbed,’ she says, her voice deliberately cold. ‘And I really resent your letting yourself in. I didn’t realise you still had a key. I’ll have it back please.’
Helen is unconcerned. ‘We’ve always gone in and out of each other’s houses,’ she says. ‘Done it for years.’
‘We haven’t done it since you moved,’ Joyce says. ‘Which is now several years ago, and I don’t even have a key to your home any longer so I’d like mine back.’
Helen shrugs. ‘Oh well, if you’re going to be like that . . .’ she begins, twisting the key free of the key ring. ‘But I’m hardly an intruder. You were obviously in and I thought you might not have heard or even perhaps be ill or something.’
Joyce takes the key and puts it in her pocket. ‘Did you want something, Helen?’
‘I came to tell you what’s been happening.’ She starts to unbutton her coat. ‘I had to come home earlier than I planned because Dennis made such a mess of the arrangements for selling the apartment and I . . .’
Joyce holds up a hand to stop her. ‘I know what’s happened, Helen. Dennis told Mac and he told me. Anyway, I’m sure you’ll be able to sort things out now you’re back. But I need you to go. I’m very tired and still have a lot of study to do for an exam. Even Mac and the kids are banned at the moment.’ She walks past Helen to the front door and opens it, taking great care to stay cool and distant. ‘I hope you manage to fix everything up and get a good price, it’s a lovely apartment.’ And she stands there, holding the door open, waiting.
‘I brought a bottle of wine,’ Helen says, as though she hasn’t heard a word of it. And she starts to walk away from Joyce towards the kitchen. ‘I thought we could get into this and order a pizza, or a curry.’
Joyce says nothing. She is struggling to stay and look calm standing there by the door, but inside she is boiling with resentment not just at what’s happening now but at all the things that have happened in the past few years, that have hurt or angered her and which, in her effort to manage the friendship and keep the peace, she has never mentioned.
They face each other in icy silence and it is Helen who breaks it.
‘Oh well, if that’s how you want it I’ll take my wine and go home,’ she says, and she walks briskly down the passage and back out through the open door. ‘So much for friendship, a lifetime of friendship,’ she says, grabbing her umbrella on the way, and Joyce watches as she runs down the path through the rain back to her car.
Joyce closes the door and leans back against it. She has a pain like indigestion in her chest, and is close to tears. The relief of the closed door is enormous, but it is matched by the sense of loss. It is, she knows, the end of a connection that was once very special, but which has been a long time dying. The lives of their two families had hung together largely on her friendship with Helen, a friendship now so soured that it taints the memories of the good times. She stands there, still leaning on the door, listening to the sound of Helen starting her car and accelerating away up the street, and as the sound fades she locks the door, puts on the chain, and walks back to her chair in the kitchen. She remembers a time some years ago, not long after Helen and Dennis had moved, when she and Helen had gone to an event at the Perth Festival, and then walked across the grounds of the university where it was held, in the midday heat.
‘I know you’re angry about a lot of things, Helen,’ she’d said. ‘Perhaps these are things you should have dealt with a long time ago but they all sound to me very much like the usual things that happen in a marriage, situations change, people change, some of it’s you, some of it Dennis, some unavoidable circumstances. But within all that you had the chance to be happy, to make what you could of it or do something different. You were never entirely powerless, and I think you have often chosen resentment over looking for ways to change things. I mean, it seems to me that there have been times when you have chosen to be unhappy rather than looking for solutions.’
Helen had stopped walking and looked at her in amazement. ‘I can’t think what you mean,’ she’d said. ‘But it seems unfair, after all I’ve done . . .’ and off she’d gone into one of those terrible monologues and Joyce had felt the black hole of negativity opening up in front of her again. Helen had changed so much from the days when for both of them a coffee, a glass of wine, the chance to let off steam and end up doubled up with laughter had been how they had solved their problems.
Perhaps, Joyce thinks, life is simply like that, people change. I’ve changed. Helen has changed. We’ve simply outgrown our friendship. Whatever the causes, something that was once very precious has juddered to a halt and restarting it is out of the question.
*
Despite the fact that he would like the house to himself again, Mac has enjoyed Dennis’s company, as well as the feeling that he’s been able to do something for his friend. They’ve spent more time together these last couple of weeks than ever before and it’s surprised him to discover how much at ease they’ve become. Now as he stands on a ladder painting the ceiling in the laundry Mac pauses for a moment, thinking that without Dennis around to talk to he might have found it harder to cope with the change in Joyce. Not that he’d mentioned that to Dennis, of course, but listening to him talk, learning more about how things between him and Helen have been over the years, has helped Mac to get this in proportion. Has Joyce actually changed? The more he’s thought about this the more he feels that there’s something about her tone, her manner, that’s different. She’s abrupt, distracted, and it seems to Mac that it’s always him calling her, rather than the other way around. He’s still smarting over the way she’d told him not to come home, and hung up on him. At his lowest he feels she’s abandoned him in favour of this new interest, and while deep down he realises that might be a bit pathetic it continues to niggle at him. But he’s determined not to say anything, not to make waves, although who knows how far out a wave might be building? Dennis and I are alike, he thinks; we prefer to avoid trouble, particularly trouble at home. However did he cope all those years?
A couple of times Mac has considered calling Carol, suggesting that the three of them meet for a meal, or that Dennis goes with him on his morning walk at the beach, but something has held him back. How would he explain this to Dennis, when he has no idea how to explain it to Joyce? And because he can’t answer that he decides to leave things as they are. He takes Charlie to the beach in the mornings, and Dennis, who is not by choice an early riser, takes him out along the bush path in the afternoons.
‘Two old codgers doing their own thing,’ Dennis had said the other day. And it had jarred with Mac, because he’s not yet ready to be an old codger. In fact, as he sets out in the morning, to swim or walk or both, knowing Carol will most likely be there, Mac feels younger than he’s felt in a while. There is something about being with Carol that reminds him of who he used to be; not at the time when they had met, but later, much later, the time in his fifties when he was at the top of his profession: confident, competent, respected; in control of the entire research facility, making decisions that would have serious and far-reaching consequences. The time of his life when he’d felt he’d finally grown into the man he was supposed to be. How strange that somehow that had evaporated without his even noticing it. And he lays the paint roller in the tray and stands there at the top of the ladder, wondering how to hold on to that; how to be old and at the same time hold on to that same sense of himself.