23

One week ago, everything had changed for Beth Ann. Some people’s lives would be altered by cataclysmic events - fatal car accidents, house fires, train wrecks, suicides. Hers altered with a phone call; with a simple question and a casual, seemingly innocent answer.

Tony had gone to Lightning Ridge for a meeting and she’d wanted to tell him that Simone had called and was coming home. She persistently rang his mobile but it kept going straight to voicemail. Beth Ann knew that sometimes in these country areas far from the city mobile reception wasn’t very good.

She could picture the small motel Tony was staying in - its teal doors, the sandy brick walls, yellowed laminated floors, the floral bedspreads and curtains. These country town motels seemed all cut from the same mould.

She’d rung the main switch and asked for Tony Harlowe’s room.

‘I’m sorry, Mr and Mrs Harlowe aren’t answering,’ the woman on the other end replied.

‘This is Mrs Harlowe,’ Beth Ann had said in a slow, determined voice.

The woman on the line had faltered. ‘Oh.’

Beth Ann could imagine her too. Short, with an abundant, fleshy body, a face hardened from work but soft eyes.

‘Yes. “Oh”, indeed.’

Beth Ann hung up. She sat there by the phone feeling as though her insides had been ripped out. She felt hollow.

‘Mrs Tony Harlowe’ was ringing in her ears. She spent the next few hours not only reeling from the betrayal but also wondering when it was that she stopped feeling like Beth Ann Gibson.

Even though she had felt Tony’s betrayal before, this time it was different. She knew it as she looked in the bathroom mirror, stared at her face. The same face she’d always had but now ripened with lines and, in this light, looking tired, drained. It wasn’t just the realisation that after thirty years together, twenty-nine years of marriage and twenty-six years of being parents, that Tony Harlowe was never going to change. This time it was something more.

This time, Tony was being more open about his infidelity, less discreet. And this time, while some of her emotions were so familiar – the humiliation, the knotted rage, feeling small and insignificant - she felt different too. Amidst her inner tumult was not resignation but the seeds of weariness.

All those years ago when she arrived in Canberra there was a mass of tents and tarpaulins, even umbrellas. People - black and white - had come from all over. While there was a group of Aboriginal people who had made up a kind of cabinet - making the decisions, deciding the strategies - she, like many others, was there to simply show that she too thought this fight was important.

There she had met Tony. But she had met his friend Arthur Randall first, timidly sitting on the edge of a throng of people. When she shyly joined them he turned to her and smiled. They got talking and didn’t stop for almost three hours. She felt flushed, knowing it was more than just the Canberra heat. He shared dinner with her from the communal pots and pans, the food that people from around Canberra had dropped off for them, and they stayed talking around one of the camp fires. She told him about Murray Simms. He told her about life on the mission.

She went to bed that night thinking about Arthur, his thoughtful dark eyes, his mellow voice. And the next morning he had introduced her to Tony Harlowe. Tony was in the thick of what was going on, in with the people who were the heart of the protest. Arthur had taken her to one of the meetings of the inner sanctum and, as she sat silently on the outside of the circle, she could feel Tony’s eyes upon her. He flashed her a smile and she felt herself blush. He was handsome, confident.

The more attention Tony paid her, the more Arthur seemed to recede into the background. And while she sought out Arthur for his company and conversation, he started to avoid her, found reasons not to sit with her, became elusive. All the time, Tony demanded more and more of her.

It was the fact that she still had feelings for Arthur that made her refuse Tony’s first offer of marriage. They were both so young. She had only known him for a few weeks; she hadn’t taken him seriously. Tony was so brash but Arthur, quieter, less dazzling, seemed more solid, more reliable.

Tony followed her to Sydney when she started her studies and asked her again. She refused the second time because she was not sure that she was ready to make such a commitment, ready to give up her only chance to see what she could make of her own life. But he was persistent. The third time he proposed he was so earnest. He made many promises but the thing that made her say ‘yes’, despite her fears and misgivings, was that over the months she had grown to love Tony. That Christmas, she left her studies and in the new year became Mrs Tony Harlowe.

And being Mrs Tony Harlowe had become a fulltime job. Much like the first time she met him, she sat quietly on the edge of his circle and let him take the stage. She believed in his work and always knew how important it was. It was a role that only he could perform and she, as a white person, was limited to the supporting role. She wanted to be out of the spotlight. She was proud of what he had achieved. And she felt, even though she had never pushed her way to centre stage, that she had assisted Tony to play an important role. It was, at its heart, an Aboriginal fight but it was something everyone, Beth Ann felt, had a part to play in fixing.

She happily became a full-time wife and then, three years later when Simone arrived, a mother. She had loved that, nurturing a child. She had never been able to conceive a second - though she had wanted to at first. She had planned to have a large family but while she had been trying - unsuccessfully - to conceive again she had begun to have doubts about Tony. Not as a father, but as a husband.

Over time, she lost regular contact with her family. Tony had always resisted visiting them, finding some excuse not to go. She would write to her sisters and call at Christmas but their lives had taken different directions. Her parents passed away - her father from colon cancer and her mother of a heart attack - dead at the table, two empty bottles of vodka beside her.

Tony was almost as estranged from his family as she eventually became from hers. He would make the odd reference to his childhood, tell the occasional story about it but Beth Ann never could get him to explain why he refused to go back to the place where he grew up. In all the time she had known him he had gone there only once, not long after their wedding. It was for his sister Emily’s funeral. Tony had been grief-stricken, crushed. He could barely speak about his sister’s death - had scarcely mentioned her in the years since - but the impact when he had first heard the news was visible. He had been firm about going to the funeral on his own. He had timed his arrival to coincide with the beginning of the service and left as soon as the wake started.

His mother, Frances, came to visit from time to time, not so often now she was older, but she still phoned regularly. Beth Ann had a good rapport with her, loved her spirit and her stories but, like her son, she never spoke of Emily, or why her son would never go home and why she never insisted that he did.

Beth Ann never minded that she had little support to raise Simone. In fact, she loved being alone with her daughter. But as Simone grew older, she seemed to become closer to her father and adored him in a way that Beth Ann could never compete with. Not that Beth Ann was too bothered; she understood the attractions of Tony Harlowe. She did, however, miss the closeness of the relationship she had with her daughter when Simone was very young.

When Simone was about five, Beth Ann volunteered to teach literacy in the prison as she found it hard to fill her day. Tony had thundered his disapproval at first but she had persevered and even enlisted a few others to exert some influence and gently put pressure on him. Years later, she had felt Simone’s departure from the house keenly. Simone’s study overseas had been hard to bear for Beth Ann who, even though she was so proud of her daughter’s achievements, missed her. Once, Simone had been enough to distract her from her unhappiness with Tony. Now she was gone, the emptiness became impossible to avoid.

Something hard had grown within her, setting even more solidly as she heard the answering machine two nights ago.

Hi love. Just ringing to let you know that I have a late work meeting. Should be there at about nine. I’ll have dinner out so don’t worry about me.

The lies. The easy slip of lies.