Oliver was hiding in his office. Still on study leave he didn’t want to be on campus at all but he needed something on the office computer that he hadn’t saved to his thumb drive. He had chosen a time when most of his colleagues would be at the monthly staff meeting and he was aiming for a flying visit. As the weeks of his leave slipped by he had found himself clinging to the remainder of this research time with a sort of desperation. Having time to write made him increasingly aware how the rigours of teaching, and all the associated administrativia, diverted him from the work he most enjoyed.
He downloaded the files, logged off, and almost jumped out of his skin when there was a knock on his door. The last thing he needed was students asking advice about enrolments, or enquiring whether he still had the assignment they had failed to collect two years ago.
‘Yep,’ he called out ungraciously, standing up and grabbing his briefcase so that it was clear he was just leaving.
‘I saw your car in the car park,’ Gayle said, popping her head around the door. ‘Have you got a minute?’
She was the last person Oliver had expected to see. The library was at the far end of the campus, and she was rarely in the vicinity of his office.
‘Oh, Gayle. Hi,’ he said. ‘Come in.’
She gestured towards the briefcase. ‘You’re just leaving?’
‘Well, I was, but . . . but . . . there’s no rush. Sit down.’ He shifted a pile of box files off the spare chair.
‘I wanted to catch up with you,’ Gayle said, ‘because when we had lunch it felt awkward. It wasn’t like it used to be, and there are things we need to sort out.’
Oliver’s face flushed to what he was sure must have been fiery red. He cleared his throat. ‘Yes, well . . .’
‘Look, I know you didn’t like being at the wedding. You probably didn’t like the house much, or anything at all there, really. It was silly of me to invite you. I should’ve left things as they were. But there must be something else. You see, since then I’ve hardly seen you and I’ve felt as though, because you didn’t like the wedding, you don’t like me anymore either . . .’
She looked straight at him as her voice trailed away and, to his horror, Oliver could see that there were tears in her eyes. Nothing had prepared him for this, not Sonya’s warnings, not years of advice from his mother, nor years of disastrous relationships with women.
‘Tell her,’ Sonya yelled in his head.
‘Women appreciate honesty, Oliver,’ his mother had droned, ‘they want to be accepted for who they are, not as the creation of someone else’s imagination.’ But Oliver’s chequered history of telling the truth at the wrong time was ringing bells too. Where was the guide book for the moment when someone whom he had admired and respected – cared for, even – came into his office waving an emotional hand grenade? He swallowed hard and looked down, fiddling with the handle of his briefcase.
‘Of course I like you, Gayle,’ he said without looking back up. ‘But I suppose I did feel a bit out of my depth at the wedding, and since then I’ve been busy working on the book and there was Berlin and . . .’ He found himself running out of steam.
Gayle grabbed some tissues from the box on his desk and dabbed at her eyes. ‘You must think I’m stupid,’ she said. ‘I thought I could at least rely on you to be honest with me after all you’ve said about that sort of thing.’
Trapped by his own words, Oliver’s awkwardness turned suddenly to resentment. ‘You weren’t honest with me,’ he said quickly, looking up at her now. ‘Things have happened in your life, important things, that you didn’t tell me about. I feel . . .’ He paused. How exactly did he feel? ‘I feel insulted that you didn’t share things with me; that I told you so much and you told me nothing. You let me believe that we agreed on issues which it now seems aren’t important to you. I don’t feel good about that.’
The silence seemed to throb in his ears.
‘I see,’ Gayle said finally. ‘I guess you mean Josh?’
Oliver turned away, looking out of the window, across the lawn to the lake. ‘Yes, your son. For heaven’s sake, Gayle, I didn’t even know he existed.’
‘So it’s just that, is it?’
‘That and your . . . it’s none of my business, anyway.’
‘Brian’s job?’
He nodded.
She patted her eyes again with the tissues and crumpled them into a ball in her hand. ‘You’re right, of course. We were friends, that was important to me and I should have told you but your friendship . . . well, it’s hard to explain . . .’
He shrugged. ‘You aren’t obliged to explain. It’s your family stuff, nothing to do with me.’
‘Oh, stop being so ridiculous, Oliver,’ Gayle snapped. She was angry now too. ‘First you complain, quite rightly, that I never told you, and then you say it’s nothing to do with you anyway. Make up your mind.’
She had taken him by surprise. He hadn’t seen her angry before – in fact, they had never disagreed about anything. With a horrible flash of insight, Oliver realised that that was one of the things that he had liked so much about her: she had never been angry, never argued, never challenged him. He opened his mouth to speak but didn’t know what to say.
‘I don’t know if you can even begin to understand this, Oliver,’ Gayle said. ‘My relationship with Brian is not good, it hasn’t been for years, long before Josh came out, and before the tobacco job. But for a whole lot of reasons I found a way of living with it. Part of that was through my friendship with you, by keeping it separate. I can see you’re now wondering if I was telling you the truth about the things I believe in. Well, I was. I didn’t lie to you, not once. My sin, if that’s what it is, is one of omission. I simply chose not to tell you certain things, because I wanted a space in which I could be the person I wanted to be rather than the woman I had become. And if you feel, as you seem to, that what I’ve said and what I’ve done are two very different things, then . . . I can only agree with you, and tell you that the roots of that go back a long way. You have a tendency to oversimplify things, Oliver, to think they are black or white. But relationships are fraught with grey areas. It’s not always possible to do what, in other circumstances, one would feel is the right thing.’
Oliver coughed and fidgeted in his chair. ‘I, er . . .’
Gayle got up. ‘No,’ she said, sounding more forceful than he had ever heard her. ‘It’s probably best not to say anything right now. I ambushed you. Anyway, you’re safe for a while. I’m going away for a couple of months. Sonya may have told you – the belly dancing thing?’
He looked up suddenly. ‘You’re going on that too?’
She nodded. ‘Surprising, isn’t it? Even I’m surprised. Maybe we can talk when I get back.’ She opened the door, and he heard the ring of her heels on the tiles and the clang of the outer door as she left the building.
It was something of a mystery to Frank that Marissa seemed to like him quite a lot. It went against all his previous experience, so that while he enjoyed it, he somehow didn’t quite trust it. Women usually reacted to him in predictable ways: total lack of interest, or the instant sexual attraction that got him into trouble. Just being liked by a woman, having a friendship, was something new. He supposed some of his female colleagues didn’t mind him too much. He got on with them okay, but it was all confined to work and the occasional drink at the pub. They fitted into the lack-of-interest category. He was always an outsider, a loner, partly from choice but also, he suspected, because a reputation for sudden outbursts of rage preceded him. Not that anyone he worked with now had experienced those rages because he’d had that under control for some time. Just the same, word got around. And so the Marissa thing was odd.
They’d been seeing each other regularly. He’d taken to calling in at her place when he was nearby – and sometimes when he wasn’t – and since the arrival of the grant letter she’d been involving him in planning her tour. He enjoyed sitting on her back verandah or in her kitchen talking, drinking the dreadful coffee she made for him. Just being with her lifted his spirits. Sometimes he felt she was a little wary of him and he wondered whether he’d done the wrong thing with her plants. She never mentioned it and he’d never seen her with a joint or smelled it in the house. Had she stopped smoking weed? Maybe the fact of him being a cop might just be freaking her from time to time.
Marissa was entirely different from any other woman he’d known: self-contained, content in the little blue house with the overgrown garden and its verandah full of tinkling chimes. As he drew up outside the gate he felt a strange sinking in his gut at the prospect that in a couple of days she would be gone.
‘Come in,’ Marissa said, unlocking the screen door, ‘you can meet the others.’ She led him through into the kitchen where two women were sitting at the table, surrounded by braid and beads, stitching sequinned motifs onto things that looked like big headbands.
If Frank had gone into a room full of women aged fifty-plus and been asked to pick the two least likely to go on a belly dancing tour with Marissa, he reckoned he would have picked these two. She had told him that one had a high-level job in the Education Department, and the other was married and a part-time librarian at the university. Even so he hadn’t been prepared for them to look so unlike belly dancers. One was slight and rather colourless, wearing a dull suit, the other was smarter but looked just like any other middle-aged bureaucrat, despite the spiky haircut dyed a bright and very fashionable red. For some reason he had expected them to look like versions of Marissa, with her long skirts and tops from the Indian stalls in the markets, or faded jeans and T-shirts. Everything about her seemed to fit with her dancing. Even the Harley marked her out as different, and totally unlike these two.
‘Frank’s been helping me with the planning,’ Marissa said. ‘Sonya brought some gin. Would you like one?’
‘Thanks, yes –’ he looked at Sonya – ‘that is, if you don’t mind.’
‘Be my guest,’ Sonya said. ‘It’ll save you having to drink Marissa’s herbal tea or that terrible dandelion coffee.’
‘So that’s what it is,’ he said, ‘dandelion. It certainly doesn’t seem to have much to do with caffeine. So, you’re off the day after tomorrow – all set?’
Sonya nodded. ‘We’ve been rehearsing really hard. My thighs may never recover.’
‘Your thighs and my knees,’ Gayle said. ‘We may yet end up being emergency airlifted by the Flying Doctor. I’m not really sure we’re ready for this public performance thing.’
‘Of course you are,’ Marissa said, putting a gin and tonic topped with a sprig of mint in front of Frank. ‘You’re both terrific. We’re going to inspire all the women we meet.’
‘Here’s to it, then,’ Frank said, raising his glass. ‘Wish I could see you doing your stuff.’ They clinked their glasses.
‘Did you let your parents know you’re coming, Sonya?’ Gayle asked.
Sony nodded, swallowing her drink. ‘I did, but I chickened out of telling them why. I thought I’d face it when I get there, although I must say the prospect of it makes me feel like throwing up.’
‘And what about you, Gayle?’ Marissa asked. ‘I know I’ve asked you this before, and I don’t want to go on about it, but what happened when you finally told your husband?’
‘I haven’t told him yet,’ Gayle replied, taking another sip of her drink. ‘I’ll tell him tomorrow. No point in prolonging the argument.’
‘But suppose he says no? We leave on Wednesday.’
‘He will say no.’
‘So what’ll you do? You’re not going to back out, are you?’
‘Of course not.’
‘You’ve left it awfully late,’ Sonya said. ‘D’you think that’s really fair?’
‘Probably not,’ Gayle said, ‘but that’s how it is. He’s away and he gets back on Tuesday evening. I’ll tell him then.’
‘The night before we leave?’
Gayle nodded. ‘Yes. Less time to argue about it,’ she said with a half-smile.
Frank watched her with interest; under the cool surface he sensed something more – fear, perhaps, a long-term fear that had suddenly crystallised into an iron will. He’d seen it before: women who, after years of abuse, suddenly called a halt.
‘This makes me nervous,’ Marissa said. ‘You can’t just mention it as you walk out the door.’
‘It does sound a bit dodgy, Gayle,’ Sonya said, turning to Frank. ‘What do you think?’
Frank caught Marissa’s eye. ‘It’s down to Gayle, if that’s the way she wants to do it. I know a woman who told me she bumped into a backpacker in a supermarket, and a day or two later she wrote a note and walked out while her husband was at work. As far as I know, she’s never looked back.’
Marissa glared at him and cleared her throat. ‘Well, yes, maybe,’ she said, ‘but that was a long time ago and it doesn’t sound like an ideal arrangement in this case.’ She leaned across the table. ‘Sonya, don’t forget you need to line that bra with something soft or it’ll scratch you to bits.’
Frank’s mobile rang and he got up from the table and wandered out to take the call on the back verandah.
‘He’s very nice,’ Sonya whispered, picking up some flannelette and scissors. ‘Is he your –’
‘No,’ Marissa hissed. ‘He’s not my anything. A friend, that’s all.’
‘He really likes you,’ Sonya said, ‘don’t you think so, Gayle?’
Gayle nodded. ‘Definitely.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Marissa said, pouring herself another drink.
‘Seriously, he does. You can tell. And he’s quite cute, really, for a man his age, and a policeman.’
‘Especially for a policeman,’ Gayle added. ‘I think he looks a bit like Normie Rowe.’
‘Oh please!’ Marissa said, rolling her eyes.
‘Yes, he does, only taller. And Normie Rowe is pretty fanciable,’ Sonya said.
‘Quite cute in a midlife sort of way,’ Gayle added.
‘Lord preserve us, ’ Marissa said. ‘You could fancy someone younger – Michael Bublé or Jude Law, perhaps?’
Gayle shook her head. ‘Too young. I prefer someone of substance, someone weathered a little by life.’
‘Yes,’ Sonya agreed. ‘Like Gabriel Byrne. But Normie has that lovely crinkly smile. He looks like a genuinely nice person, like your Frank. Definitely right for the discerning older woman.’
Marissa shook her head. ‘It must be the gin. You two have totally lost it. I’m starting to feel very uneasy about this tour. I’m not sure I’m in good company.’
‘Well, you can always call the police if you get into trouble,’ Frank said, walking back in. ‘Gotta go, I’m afraid.’ He looked at Marissa. ‘The guys down at the port have just picked up someone who we think is involved in the same set-up as your ex-neighbour.’ He pocketed his phone and took his jacket from the back of the chair. ‘Do you ladies need a chauffeur for the airport?’
Brian stood alone in the kitchen staring at the list of instructions Gayle had left on the fridge door. He couldn’t believe this was actually happening. The whole situation was ridiculous. She had to be completely off her head. It had started the previous evening when she’d announced she was going off belly dancing. He’d thought it was stupid when she’d first started going to the classes but he’d never expected anything like this. His wife dancing in a public place, shaking her arse, bumping and grinding in front of . . . well, in front of anyone who cared to watch?
‘It’s not like that . . .’ she’d begun, but he stopped her.
‘Don’t argue with me, Gayle,’ he said, feeling his anger burning hotter than ever. ‘I’ve seen those women. You must be stupid if you think I’m agreeing to this. It’s not negotiable.’
‘You know nothing about it,’ she insisted. ‘It’s a women’s heath and ageing program funded by the Health Department, and we’re only dancing at special events for women. If you’d just listen for a moment –’
‘No way,’ he’d said. ‘Absolutely no way. Are you crazy or something? I don’t care if the Pope’s funding it. There is no way I’m going to have my wife prancing around half dressed all over the state. And anyway, what about me? What am I supposed to do while you’re not here? Just forget it, you hear? Forget it. I don’t know where you got the stupid idea anyway. Belly fucking dancing.’
The foul mood that had begun in the Sydney office was oppressing him, and his anger was ready to burst out of his body. Here he was back home after five days, tired and pissed off with Mal and the half-witted US director who had flown over after the regulation board decision. His head ached and he was worried stiff about what was in store over the next few weeks. This was the last thing he needed.
He’d poured his third drink and was on his way to the fridge to get some ice when she started to speak to him again, and that was when he lost it. He grabbed her by the wrist and twisted her arm, dragging her towards him so their noses were almost touching.
‘I’ll say this one last time,’ he hissed into her face. ‘No belly dancing tour and you can stop going to the classes too, or . . .’
She looked at him then, cold and steady. ‘Or what?’
He let go of her arm and opened the fridge. He knew he’d overstepped the mark. She’d have backed down anyway, she always did. So he got his ice, stalked out to his study, slung his jacket over a chair, undid the tight waistband of his trousers and, flopping down on the couch, flicked through the TV channels until he found a Clint Eastwood movie on Foxtel.
It was morning when he woke thinking he’d heard a car in the driveway. The bottle of scotch was empty and the time panel on the DVD player was flashing 7:10. He was horribly hungover; his eyes were scratchy, his neck hurt from the awkward half-sitting position he’d slept in and his clothes felt tight and dirty. Hauling himself off the couch he padded out to the kitchen to see if Gayle had put the coffee on. She hadn’t. Irritably Brian scratched his head, yawned several times and began to fill the kettle.
‘Ah, you are awake,’ Gayle said, coming into the kitchen. ‘I’ve left some notes for you on the fridge. Just stuff about putting out the garbage and paying the lawnmower man. There’s plenty of food in the freezer, and it’s all labelled. I don’t suppose you’ll be here much anyhow. Don’t forget to check the pool-cleaner, and there’s a guy coming this afternoon at four-thirty to fix the problem with the automatic gate. You’ll need to be here for that. My itinerary’s on the fridge.’ And she walked out of the kitchen, just like that.
‘Hang on,’ he’d said, struggling to wake up and get a grip on what was happening. ‘What’s going on? Where the hell d’you think you’re going?’
‘I told you last night where I’m going,’ Gayle said, picking up the suitcase that was standing by the front door. ‘I don’t think we need to go through all that again.’ And with that she simply walked out the door and got into the back of a car that was waiting outside with the engine running. He was left standing in the hall, his fly undone, clutching an empty coffee plunger.