In the Company of Strangers Read online

  Stephanie is right; the time has come to test the water. Getting away – not just from Gordon but also from the proximity and the expectations of her adult children, her grandchildren, her mother and her circle of friends - might be a good idea. She needs to think about what she wants from this time of her life, and how she might negotiate that with Gordon. But when she looks at the picture of the women in the market she knows that another country is a step too far. If she is really going to try this then it will have to be a cautious sortie closer to home. Somewhere familiar from which she can easily escape if she doesn’t like it. Somewhere down south perhaps? Stephanie will probably think that a cop-out but it feels like it could be a start.

  ‘Les, Lesley?’ Gordon’s voice floats up the stairs and Lesley hears but doesn’t really register his footsteps.

  Somewhere she could go in the car and know she could get home easily if it turned out to be just too hard. There’s that place near Margaret River they went to a few years ago …

  ‘Lesley? Are you in the study? I wondered about lunch, it’s nearly one o’clock.’

  Lesley puts the laptop aside and gets up from the bed with a mixture of annoyance and excitement. That place where they grew lavender and the woman baked her own bread for the café, lovely rammed-earth cottages. If only she could remember what it was called.

  Gordon, halfway up the stairs, the remains of yesterday’s Turkish bread in one hand, realises too late that this is not a good idea and pauses briefly, leaning back against the bannister. But before he has a chance to retreat the door to Lesley’s room opens and she is out, passing him on the stairs at the speed of light, her face locked in that resentful mask that seems to have become her default expression.

  ‘I was just going to say,’ Gordon begins as he follows her down to the kitchen, wielding the Turkish bread, ‘that if you didn’t have plans for lunch I could knock up a sort of mezze for us out on the deck. Pop this under the grill, there’s some hommus left and some salami and some of those artichoke hearts, olives … you know …’

  Lesley straightens up, takes the bread from his hand and slaps it under the grill.

  ‘I didn’t mean you to do it … I was just checking …’ Gordon continues. ‘You could go and sit down and I’ll …’

  Lesley sighs. ‘It’s okay. You can take these out to the table,’ and she hands him tablemats, knives and forks.

  ‘Right,’ he says, opening the fridge door and gazing at the bottle rack inside the door. ‘What’s happened to the chenin blanc? It doesn’t seem to be here.’

  Lesley joins him at the fridge, leans over, takes out an unopened bottle and hands it to him.

  ‘But I could’ve sworn there was half a bottle left last night,’ Gordon says, dropping to his haunches and moving things on the bottom shelf to see if it’s tucked behind something else. ‘We didn’t drink it all, did we?’

  ‘I might’ve had a glass or two after you’d gone to bed. You’ll have to open the new one.’

  Gordon straightens up and looks at her as she turns back to the bench top and picks up a knife to slice a tomato. She’s wearing a sleeveless white t-shirt with jeans and from where he’s standing she looks much as she did twenty years ago; a little broader around the beam, perhaps, and if he looks hard he can see some grey in her hair and a graininess on the back of her upper arms, but she’s still in remarkably good shape. Briefly he is transported back to lunch times with the kids around: Simon groaning about having to lay the table, Karen rolling her eyes in contempt and skulking off with her Walkman, and Sandi charging around crashing into things until someone removed her to safety in the garden. Voices, arguments, awful music, mess, bartering over pocket money and whose turn it was to wash up, one of the kids always needing a lift to somewhere, or extra money for something. There were turf wars and culture wars, times when he and Lesley were the only two people in the house who were speaking to each other, times when they fell into bed at night and lay there, dissecting the day with, he supposes now, a sort of satisfaction at having survived it. Despite the chaos and conflicts they had both got what they had always wanted: three bright, confident children, a family that worked.

  Gordon sighs and looks at the unopened bottle of wine, his fingers smudging the perfect film of condensation. It doesn’t seem that long ago, really, and yet it’s a world away: same kitchen, better equipped; same view from the window but minus the minefield of toys, bikes and skateboards; same deck with much more expensive furniture; and only two of the five people remain. Trouble is, he thinks, you’d hardly know they were the same people; conversations evaporate almost before they’ve begun, tension hangs in the silence between sighs that shriek of frustration, boredom, resentment. It’s as though their shared endeavour, the unspoken understandings, the intimate knowledge that bonded them, began to wither once Sandi, the youngest, left home. The house grew tidier and quieter, they ate out more and talked less, and they bought more wine but he drank less. Lesley, he had thought, was lonely. She wouldn’t admit it, wouldn’t say outright that she missed the kids, but that’s what it must be. And so he’d taken the plunge, retirement.

  It wasn’t what he’d wanted. He’d been considering negotiating some sort of change that would have allowed him to spend a final few years back in the field again. The price of promotion was that it had taken him away from the part of the job that he loved. He was never really comfortable with life behind a desk, with meetings and boardrooms; it was the science that fascinated him and he missed it. Even so he’d have been glad to have a few more years and the company had worked hard to persuade him to stay. But he felt he owed it to Lesley. ‘She’s put up with the job long enough,’ he’d said. He’d known it would take a while for them to get used to it, to adjust to each other, but a year later things were getting worse rather than better.

  ‘Do you remember,’ Lesley asks, tossing the sliced tomato onto a bed of cos lettuce and rocket, ‘the name of that place we stayed at once in Margaret River, the place with that big woman who grew lavender?’

  Gordon leans against the fridge screwing up his eyes, trying to remember.

  ‘I know the place you mean,’ he says. ‘The name … it was something Reach, wasn’t it? Began with a B, Baron’s Reach? No … it’ll come …’

  He loads a tray with the wine bottle, glasses and cutlery, carries it out to the table, and sets two places. ‘Barrett’s Reach?’

  Lesley, carrying the salad, shakes her head. Gordon sighs, pulls out a chair and drops down into it. It is as though the connections that have held them close over the years have burned out and he has no idea why, or how to reconnect them. He has offered weekends away, overseas holidays, suggested joining her at tennis, or on morning walks. He even suggested that he could join her choir.

  ‘Why don’t you find your own thing to do instead of trying to muscle in on mine?’ she’d said. ‘Get a life, Gordon. For heaven’s sake, get a life.’

  But he has a life; he has golf, a lifelong fascination with science that he now has time to pursue in various ways, he has fishing trips with former colleagues and the tree house he and Simon are building for the twins. He has a life. It’s just not a life that he shares with Lesley, and it seems to Gordon that every attempt to forge some connection to bring them closer together is rebuffed.

  ‘I’ve tried, lord knows I’ve tried,’ Gordon whispers into the silence as Lesley returns to the kitchen for the bread. But he knows that he is dangerously close now to giving up on trying, that he is reaching a point at which he will stop caring about it because it’s all too hard, and then what? What does Lesley want? Does she even know the answer to that herself?

  ‘Benson’s Reach,’ he says, the name sneaking unexpectedly out from its hiding place. ‘Benson’s Reach, that’s it, and she was Catherine Benson, wasn’t she? The lavender woman?’

  Lesley nods, ‘Yes, yes I think that’s right.’

  Gordon pours the wine and makes a valiant effort. ‘Nice place that. We should try it again. How a
bout next week, after the twins’ birthday party, a few … ?’

  Lesley looks up and she has a weird expression on her face. ‘No,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘I want to go there but on my own. A week, maybe two.’

  ‘On your own? But you’ve never …’

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘but there’s a first time for everything, isn’t there, and this is my first time.’

  lice has waited for this day for years – five years in fact. She has imagined it by day and dreamt of it by night, anticipated it in so many ways, confident of the overwhelming sense of relief and liberation she will feel as she walks out of the gate. Believing in it, visualising it, has kept her going, sustained her when she has feared tipping over the edge into despair. At least that’s how it was for the first four years and nine months; it’s only recently, in these final three months, that it all began to change.

  ‘It’s quite common,’ Julie, the Outcare women’s officer, had told her. ‘It’s called exit anxiety. People are longing for release, wanting to get out into the world again, and then when the date gets closer it starts to seem quite frightening.’

  What’s confusing for Alice is that she didn’t feel like this the first time she’d thought she would get out on parole. She’d been in a different prison then, Bandyup, where they’d sent her after sentencing. Five years with two years’ parole, so everyone had said she’d be out in three, but when she made the first application to the Prisoners Review Board a new, hardline approach had been adopted and she was knocked back.

  ‘New president of the board, new regime,’ her solicitor had told her. ‘Doesn’t make sense to me, nor a lot of other people. The judge recommends parole after three years provided you have a good record, and because you aren’t considered a risk to the community. And now the board ignores it and keeps you inside at the taxpayers’ expense. People are pretty angry about it.’

  The same thing had happened the following year, although by that time Alice had been moved here, to the pre-release facility, because her solicitor wasn’t alone in thinking she’d get out at the second review. Fortunately they hadn’t sent her back to Bandyup when the second application failed, just kept her here and she’d starting watching the calendar obsessively, crossing off days, at least knowing now exactly when she would be out. It was with ninety-one days remaining that she’d felt the first flicker of anxiety and by the time it was down to sixty days she was a nervous wreck.

  This place wasn’t that bad; it was certainly much better than Bandyup. She shared a unit with two other women. They cooked some of their own food, ate in the canteen sometimes and looked after the unit themselves. There was a shop, and work, and you could train for something. It was all supposed to prepare them for a return to the world and the workforce, although of course it was completely artificial and entirely unlike the life she, or anyone else she knew, had lived in the outside world.

  ‘Cooking,’ Alice had said when they’d asked her about retraining – it made her laugh because ‘retraining’ assumed that, because of her age, she had previously been trained for something. ‘Cooking would be good – I mean, I can cook, but if I learnt properly then maybe I could get a job when I get out, or do you think I’ll be too old?’

  The officer smiled, shook her head, wrote ‘Hospitality and Catering’ on the form and Alice signed it. She’d heard that the chef who was running the course had been trained in one of Perth’s Gold Plate restaurants. If she was going to train for something then this was the least frightening prospect. Not an ambitious choice, perhaps, but a practical one. People always needed cooks, didn’t they? Well, now she’s about to find out.

  So this morning, for the first time in five years, Alice dresses in the clothes she wore that last day in court: a plain black cotton jersey dress with three-quarter sleeves and a flared skirt, and black sandals, the teal jacket because the air conditioning in the courtroom had been really cold, and the pearls – her mother’s pearls. Simple things she’d felt good in, things that made her feel confident. It feels good to wear them now although she’s so jittery nothing is going to boost her confidence this morning. She rolls the pearls between her fingers. They’re not an impressive string but they’re small and evenly matched with a lovely mellow tone. Thank goodness her mother never knew; how appalled she would have been to see her daughter go to jail, how devastated by the events that led to it.

  Alice fastens the pearls around her neck, straightens her skirt and studies her reflection in the mirror, wishing that she had a photograph of herself on that last day for comparison. But no, that’s not what she wants. What she wants is a photograph of herself before it all happened, before that awful night, a photograph of her old self, that’s what she wants to see now. The old Alice, or rather the younger, pre-disaster, pre-prison Alice. The Alice who had learned to make it from day to day without cracking up, without having a drink; the loving mother and grandmother, the good friend and neighbour. The woman who had nursed her ex-husband through a long illness towards death, the one to whom others turned in a crisis. She stares at her reflection in the mirror and sighs. It would be good to see what she looked like then, before it all happened. Where are her photographs? What’s happened to the rest of her clothes and her books? The contents of the house had been sold and the money put into her bank account. At the time release had seemed distant and she had felt so helpless and defeated that she hadn’t asked the right questions. Someone must have them, presumably her daughter, but as none of her family has visited or even written there has been no one to ask.

  ‘You look really nice,’ Tracey says, sticking her head around the door. ‘Like … like you’re used to it already. Like you’re used to being a normal person again.’

  ‘Illusion,’ Alice says, and she picks up the clothes she has discarded. ‘I feel as though these were my safety net and now someone cut the ropes.’

  ‘Get off it!’ Tracey says. ‘You’ll be fine once you get out there. And we’ll have to put up with someone new. Christ knows who we’ll get but she won’t be like you, that’s for sure. I’m so gonna miss you. I wouldn’t have stayed out of trouble if it weren’t for you,’ and she makes an awkward dash across the room and hugs her.

  ‘You’ll be out soon too,’ Alice says when Tracey steps back.

  Tracey nods, tears running down her face now. ‘Yeah, and we’ll go out and get rat arsed,’ but the words choke her.

  ‘No, we’ll go out, get some new clothes and have a nice cup of tea,’ Alice says. ‘Rat arsed is what got you in here.’

  ‘I know, only kidding,’ Tracey says, swallowing hard and stuffing a handful of tissues into her pocket. ‘New start, eh? First you, then me. You’d better go or I’ll blub again. Thanks, Alice, thanks …’ and she disappears out through the door and Alice hears the squeak of her work shoes on the vinyl tiles.

  Just her handbag now: small, black leather, five dollars in an op shop in Midland a lifetime ago. She strokes the leather, still thinking it was a bargain. The smell of Minties wafts out as she opens it and she retrieves three from the side pocket and dumps them in the bin. There’s a handbag size packet of Kleenex, the grey wallet with her bankcard, library ticket, blood donor card, an old bus pass, thirty-five dollars in notes, and a few coins. The keys to the house are useless now so she dumps those in the bin along with the Minties. Her watch needs a battery, her mobile phone is dead but she has the little black notebook with addresses, phone numbers, PIN numbers and other vital stuff. Alice puts her make-up purse and her glasses into the bag, closes it and takes a last look around the room, which now seems so safe, so secure. Then she turns away, out into the passage, where Julie is waiting for her.

  ‘I still think you should take the bus straight to the accommodation,’ Julie says as they walk out of the building.

  ‘I’m going right into town,’ Alice says, ‘shock treatment. It’ll blast the fear out of me.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Julie says. ‘But it’s up to you. You’re free now, yo
u can go where you want when you want.’

  Alice nods, turns to Julie and gives her a wobbly smile. ‘So much freedom, not sure I know how to use it anymore.’

  Julie puts a hand on her arm. ‘You’ll soon get used to it. A couple of weeks and this will all start to feel like a bad dream. Take care of yourself, Alice. Have a good life.’

  And Alice, unable to speak, grips her hand for a second, turns away and without looking back she walks out through the open gate.

  By the time she gets off the bus on St George’s Terrace it’s almost midday, and she stands at the bus stop, marooned in the heart of the business district, wondering why she didn’t listen to Julie’s advice. She’s always found the business district intimidating; the tall buildings block out the sun, plate glass automatic doors, stainless steel railings, marble foyers all make this feel like an alien country, and the strong hot wind is heavy with exhaust fumes. The street is busy with slow-moving mid-morning traffic, bike couriers dart perilously between cars and buses, and pedestrians weave between the cars to cross the street. Around her, on the pavement, young people dressed for success go about their business, Bluetooth headsets clamped to their ears, their progress impeded occasionally by tourists with cameras. Men in suits walking three or four abreast, confident of their own importance, stride on expecting the waters to divide for them, and women with carrier bags from the department stores head towards the bus station.

  After years of predictability, structure and confinement all the activity overwhelms her but she’s here now and so she just has to try to behave like a normal person. ‘Come on,’ she tells herself, ‘try to look as though you do this every day. Get some money. Have a coffee in a real café.’ And she turns left into William Street and then right into the Hay Street mall.

  Alice’s hand is shaking as she inserts her card into the slot at the ATM. She feels like a criminal, as though she’s not entitled to be there. ‘It’s my card, my account, my money,’ she whispers, keying in her PIN. ‘My money.’