ADRIAN

Adrian regained consciousness inside the wreck. It was a vague sense of consciousness – he knew there were people outside the vehicle and his face was wet and his door was opened by a paramedic. The paramedic asked questions and Adrian believed he made answers with his mouth, though he couldn’t be sure. There was pain in the centre of his face and pain across his chest. He wondered if he’d had a heart attack.

There was pressure around his neck, and now he was on a stretcher. He couldn’t move his head. Soon there was movement and he felt that the car was getting further away. Then he was inside the ambulance. He felt a cannula go in under his skin, and it didn’t take long before the sound was turned down. Adrian closed his eyes and went with the rhythm. There may have been a siren. He assumed there were lights. Next there came a gentle tapping. Maybe it was a check of his vital signs, or an oxygen mask, or something else entirely. But one thought repeated: one tap means teeth, two taps means someone’s coming.

*

Adrian woke in a hospital bed. His vision was partially obstructed by a white object on his nose, and when he put his fingers to the whiteness he realised it was a dressing. He could tell that his left eye was swollen and there was a band of tape running across the dressing and onto his cheeks. There must have been a laceration, he realised, because if he closed one eye and used the other to look down at the bridge of his nose he could see a patch of blood.

His nose. The nose his grandfather on his mother’s side gave him, and he’d gone and broken it. He’d never liked its shape but now it would spite him even more. And he’d have to put up with the dressing in the centre of his face, branding him as a victim. How ridiculous. It made him think of Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, spending most of the movie with a bandage over his nose after Roman Polanski slit his left nostril with a flick-knife. Adrian had always thought that having the hero going about his business with such a thing on his face was pure genius; yet Jack had been a nosy feller, and Adrian wondered if his own punishment was something similar – as if his involvement with Akker had invited a dark variety of cosmic justice. Despite the accident, he hadn’t forgotten what Mr H told him.

He could move his head now, and as he tried to sit up there was still an ache in his chest, though the morphine nullified any acute pain. God bless analgesics. The bed curtain was closed but through the window he could see the rooftops of hospital buildings and cloud the colour of Sydney grey. It was getting dark, and for a moment he thought it a respite to be here in this bed with a view of the falling evening. Especially considering the alternative.

He could hear someone crying on the other side of the curtain and thought it might be Nguyet, so he said, ‘Are you there, Noo?’ but there was no response. He pressed the buzzer for the nurse.

The nurse came in and pulled the curtain back. ‘Hi, Adrian,’ she said. ‘You’re in Westmead Hospital. How are you feeling?’

Through a gap in the curtain opposite he saw a pale guy, perhaps in his late twenties, sobbing. It was a quiet sob – the midst of grief. His sheets were pulled up and so Adrian couldn’t be sure, but he thought the guy might have lost both legs. The sheet flattened to the bed at his knees.

‘Fine,’ Adrian said. ‘Fine enough, I suppose.’

‘Can you tell me why you’re here today?’

He looked at the nurse. He explained that he remembered certain aspects of the accident, like the sensation before blacking out, and she nodded. She didn’t seem big on small talk. She told him what he already assumed about his nose, and then said that the chest pain was from the pull of the seat belt upon impact. Most people break their ribs, she remarked, so to suffer only deep tissue bruising was fortunate.

Good fortune was not the term Adrian would use to describe his situation. Good fortune was finding out that the four-thirty meeting hadn’t gone ahead, or that Akker’s parents hadn’t believed his story, or that Mr H had dealt with the issue in another way, a less official way. Better still, good fortune was Akker telling Adrian’s side of their truth …

The nurse showed him the meal order sheet and he thanked her. Then, instead of asking about his wife – which he knew he should have done – Adrian said, ‘Have the police come for me?’

*

When Nguyet and Tam arrived the food service lady was there with her trolley full of trays. Even though Adrian was a late admission and hadn’t ordered his meal in time, she gave him a tray that was an extra. ‘A man checked out,’ she said.

Adrian wondered what she meant; in a hospital, he mused, there was checking out and then there was checking out. He wanted to point out the ambiguity, but thought better. He wasn’t in the classroom. The correct word was discharge but that wasn’t really much better.

Nguyet was visibly relieved to find Adrian awake and okay. She smiled at the service lady and closed the curtain once the trolley was wheeled away; although she’d been in Australia for seven years, she still found any public display of affection uncomfortable. She kissed Adrian’s forehead and gently touched the swelling around his eye. She made cooing sounds.

Tam was sheepish, like he didn’t know what emotion he was meant to feel. He was that kind of boy. Adrian remembered well the day the cat died, when Tam was only four. While Adrian dug a space in the herb garden, Tam had watched with an interested smile. ‘This isn’t the time for smiling, mate,’ Adrian had said. Tam also smiled when his mother wrapped the cat in a blanket and placed it in the hole, and when Adrian smoothed the dirt over it and put some rocks on top. Tam looked at their faces, trying to understand the ceremony of grief. It was his first experience of death, and because he had never developed a meaningful attachment to the cat his only option was to act out sorrow, mirroring that of his parents. It was then that he had stopped smiling. When he did, Adrian regretted saying anything and wanted the boy to be himself. He had imposed his own emotions on his son.

Nguyet pulled a chair to the side of the bed, sat down and took Adrian’s hand, kissing it. She asked how it all happened and he told her about the truck. She kept shaking her head.

‘It’s not that bad,’ he said. ‘I’m sure I’ve come out better than the car.’

She laughed a laugh of heartache.

Tam had climbed to sit on the edge of the bed. He stared at his father’s face like he wanted to touch it. He then looked at the food tray, opened the lid on the meal and screwed up his mouth at the potato and beef. There was also a bread roll and a packet of butter. He picked up the roll. ‘Can I have this?’

Adrian nodded. ‘Sure.’ He had no hunger, and anyway his face hurt.

Tam tore the roll open.

Nguyet put her head down on Adrian’s arm, and he realised she’d never seen him so vulnerable. He touched her chin and bottom lip with his thumb, hoping that her affection would continue in the days to come. He was on the edge of a far greater vulnerability than a hospital bed. ‘I guess you called Mum?’ he asked.

She hadn’t. Nguyet got along with Glenda, but Mal was another story. She’d held off calling.

‘I’ll do it when I get home,’ he said. ‘The less fuss, the better.’

Tam finished the roll and was now jamming a finger into the butter packet and licking it.

‘You can eat the custard too,’ Adrian said, and passed him the tub and spoon.

This is a good moment, Adrian realised, and he tried to hold on to the feeling because anxiety was building in him again. He had an intuition that the police were going to arrive soon, and a conversation would ensue involving enquiries about a matter of which his wife knew nothing – and which he didn’t want to talk about right now. It would be an uneven encounter, too. The police knew what Akker had said but Adrian didn’t, and it was from this position of advantage that they would direct their questions.

He could phone Noel for advice but his brother would tell Glenda, and he didn’t want her finding out that way. He didn’t know how or when he’d tell her, but he wanted to retain that control. Plus, Noel was Noel. Since Adrian’s wedding eight years earlier, the brothers only spoke once a year, if that. The last time was a random phone call about six months ago, with the stilted tone and awkward gaps of two strangers. No. Noel had gone to Perth for a reason, and the last thing he wanted was to be dragged back to the east coast by something like this.

Adrian had the thought that he was still inside a wreck.

*

When the police arrived, Tam was asleep on the end of the bed and the television was on with the volume low. A doctor came in with the officers and they introduced themselves.

But this wasn’t yet the moment Adrian feared. The police asked questions about the accident, and he told them about the truck and blacking out. The doctor asked if Adrian had been experiencing a heightened level of personal stress; Adrian said that, no doubt, he had some unresolved issues at work. According to the police there was a case against the truck driver for negligent driving occasioning grievous bodily harm, but Adrian didn’t want to pursue it. He suspected there’d be enough police attention soon enough.

The officers took his statement and informed him that he would be on a temporary conditional driving licence because he’d blacked out at the wheel. The doctor would refer Adrian to a psychiatrist; if the source of the stress was an ongoing issue, he was told, medication was available that might help reduce his anxiety.

And that was all. Adrian thanked them for their time.

Nguyet left soon after, with Tam asleep in her arms. She kissed him again and said she’d be back in the morning; she’d got her shift at the grocery store covered. She said she’d wait it out with him while the nurses did their observations to make sure he was fit to go home.

When he judged they were far enough away, Adrian finally let go. He cried hard but without sound. He cried on and off for over an hour, and when the crying was exhausted he called in the nurse to replace the dressing on his nose, which was soaked through. She said nothing as she crafted a fresh bandage out of wadding and tape. He appreciated the empathy he felt in her fingers, in their gentle application of pressure, and in her expression, even though she gave little away. He closed his eyes, and soon she was gone.

When he opened them again it was morning, and the amputee was sitting in a wheelchair, staring out Adrian’s window.

*

Adrian was eleven when he saw Mal shut the door of the granny flat, which adjoined the rear of the detached garage. The flat was just one large room, with no kitchen but with a toilet in a small side room. The walls – both inside and out – were fibrocement, and there were a couple of holes where you could see through to the timber trusses. The lino was stained and had a faint animal smell, like dog piss; Adrian was convinced that a dog had had a litter in there.

When Adrian was eleven Noel was seventeen, and that year he’d claimed the room out the back as his own. He dragged in some old lounges from a council clean-up and had his mates over. Someone brought around an old television and hooked up a video player so they could watch American frat house movies. They put up posters of AC/DC and Cold Chisel, and on Friday nights they drank beer from cans as they sang ‘Flame Trees’ over and over.

‘What goes on out there stays out there,’ Glenda said firmly.

Mal said no smoking; although he himself went through a carton of ciggies a week, Noel was still a child and still under his roof, and the parents of kids who smoked were useless. Mal was a walking contradiction on some topics, and could be strikingly old-fashioned. One of Noel’s mates was already eighteen and had a tattoo of Bon Scott on his forearm. When Noel came home with a tattoo magazine, Mal said that if the magazine was brought into the house he’d chuck Noel’s stuff onto the kerbside and change the locks. Noel took the magazine to the flat out the back.

There was no lock on the door, and it was always left open anyway, unless there was heavy rain and someone thought to shut it, but Adrian hardly ever went in there. The only word he could think of to describe it was seedy, but there was more to it than just low light, pizza boxes and sticky lino. If that room showed what he had to look forward to when he grew into a young man himself, then he wanted to stay a boy forever. Yet even this idea of his youth was eventually obliterated. He was there when Noel and his mates thought it would be funny to show their dicks to each other and manipulate them like puppets, and he happened to be looking the day Mal went into the room.

Glenda was doing the groceries and Noel was somewhere else. Adrian was playing in his bedroom and through the window saw movement outside: his dad went into the granny flat and shut the door. Adrian kept playing with his superhero figurines, but he also kept watching the door, and kept wondering. Maybe twenty minutes later, Mal opened the door and went back into the garage to work on his car. It was then that Adrian decided to have a look around in there someday as well.

He walked home from school a bit quicker than usual one day that week and went in with his school bag and shut the door. He turned on the light and started looking behind the lounges and shifting cushions. There was a drawer under the TV with some videos, but that was all. There was the stereo, some tapes, a football on the floor. He picked it up and sat on the lounge. He then looked at the posters, which he knew covered the holes in the fibrocement boards. He leant over to one of the posters and pulled a bottom corner from the wall. He peered inside the hole and could see paper wedged there, so he reached in and felt for it. He thought it would be the tattoo magazine – perhaps his dad had been looking to get rid of it. But it wasn’t what he expected.

And yet it was.

All that skin … The pictures of the women were confronting enough, but it was the men with their hairless bodies and hard cocks which stirred a dream he must have had almost half his lifetime ago. A dream he could only remember with vague tactility and as a murmur of sounds. He tried to remember more but couldn’t. He only felt the onset of heat, as if all the blood in his body had rushed to his head. He’d uncovered something other than a porn mag, but he didn’t know what.

Adrian put the magazine back and smoothed the poster corner down again. He picked up his bag, switched off the light and opened the door, and as he walked away he told himself that remembering the dream was the only important thing now. Regardless of how it made him feel, he needed to know what it meant.

At the time he didn’t mention these things to anyone because he couldn’t articulate his thoughts; that did not come until later, when he was fourteen or so and Noel had shifted to the Goulburn Police Academy. By then the granny flat had become a storage space for boxes of Adrian’s old toys, Mal’s engine parts and the stuff Glenda didn’t really need but couldn’t face throwing away. Noel’s musty lounges and everything else, including the magazine, had gone – as had Adrian’s grip on the dream he only might have had.

*

When Nguyet pulled into the driveway, she failed to notice the man in the car parked over the road. Adrian noticed.

Alex Bowman’s father – Adrian couldn’t recall his name right then – sat in a charcoal-grey Camry with the window down. For a moment Adrian wondered if he was there to beat the shit out of him, but the man didn’t budge when they got out of the car and walked to the front door. While Nguyet was finding the house key, Adrian couldn’t help looking across the yard and the road. Bowman looked back. As Nguyet pushed the key into the lock, Bowman mouthed some words Adrian couldn’t decipher, and then put his head out the window and spat onto the bitumen. A car passed. Adrian went inside.

He spent the next hour in the lounge room watching afternoon TV, trying to ignore the roil of his gut. His senses were amplified but at the same time he lacked mental clarity, as though emotion had exhausted his capacity to think. The television was meant to be a distraction, but he was distracted even from it, glancing through the blind every so often to check if the Camry was still there. It was, but he couldn’t see Bowman because he had the window up now, and it was tinted enough to obscure what was within.

Adrian was sure he was there to intimidate, but the longer the Camry stayed, the more Adrian wondered. At the very least, it confirmed that the meeting at the school had taken place, and the allegations had been aired. He assumed that a statement had by now been made to the police. Interviews would then begin. Mr H would receive a visit because he was the first one Alex told. Next would be Alex’s parents. His mother would cry for the second or third time and his father would swear and shout. Eventually, Alex’s mates at school would be questioned for evidence or corroboration, especially those in Adrian’s English class. They’d be asked what Mr Pomeroy was like as a teacher, what his reputation was among the students. They’d be asked if they witnessed preferential treatment for any particular student, or suspicious behaviour. Of course the students wouldn’t tell the police what really went on in the classroom – the stupid shit they did to themselves and each other, a bunch of testosterone-fuelled lads intent on fucking whatever they could get their hands on, or at least thinking and talking about fucking as much as they could.

Adrian got up off the lounge. Nguyet was folding clothes in their bedroom. He stood behind her and put his arms around her, and she relaxed against his chest. He kissed her hair. She put the clothes she was holding on the bed and turned and hugged him and sighed, and he knew what the sigh was for. Over the past two days they’d shown each other more affection than they had for several weeks, if not months. In fact, the marriage had been troubled for over four years but they had somehow found a way to function. It now seemed ironic that the year he first taught Alex was the year their trouble began. The two were not directly connected, of course, but there were perhaps some furtive links. Having entered Adrian’s life at that very time, Alex might now bring an end to his marriage.

Now, Adrian thought; now is the time to tell her. Even though he knew it would destroy this rare moment.

Then came a knock at the door.

Adrian said he’d get it – he was ready for Bowman – but before he opened the door he saw blue through the opaque glass.

Two officers had come for him, an older woman and a younger man. The female was a senior constable, and the male reminded him of Noel as a first-year officer – young, yet to be appalled by what humanity is fully capable of. Especially against its own. Adrian looked down at the man’s left lapel – the plain navy blue of a probationary constable. In the distance over his shoulder, Bowman was leaning against his car bonnet, arms folded, here for the show.

It was then that Adrian understood – and then that he resigned himself to the thought of Noel.