Elsewhere in Success (17 page)

‘Do you think I'm in denial?' Louisa asks Harry.

‘Do you know what the definition of denial is?' he says, and she knows what he will say. ‘A river in Egypt.'

‘Yes, funny,' she says. ‘I knew you were going to say that. I must be a bit psychic.'

He goes back to reading the paper.

‘We could go out,' she says.

‘I've got stuff to do today. How about tomorrow?'

‘I'm already going out tomorrow,' she says. ‘I told Carole I'd catch up for morning tea.'

‘Oh yes,' he says. ‘That's right.'

‘I think I'll go and see my mother.' Louisa kisses him on the lips. It is Good Friday.

When she arrives she discovers that her mother is having a bad day. Louisa pulls out the chocolate that she bought as a gift for Easter Sunday. But her timing is wrong.

‘Aren't you coming Sunday?'

‘I thought you might like something to wake up to.'

‘I don't like chocolate.'

‘It doesn't matter. They're only small.' Louisa puts them on the kitchen bench.

‘Do you want a cup of tea?' her mother asks.

‘That would be nice. I'll make it.'

‘No, I'll make it.'

‘All right.'

They drink tea and eat a hot cross bun. There is nothing to talk about.

‘Would you like to go for a drive?' Louisa asks.

‘I'd like to get some flowers. I have nothing in my vases.'

‘I thought people didn't get flowers on Good Friday,' Louisa says defensively, ‘or I would have got you some.'

‘People go away at Easter, they have parties, I don't see why I shouldn't have flowers,' she says.

But she brightens up once they are in the car. Louisa puts on some music that she might like. Her mother tries to sing along, first going too high and then, when her voice doesn't hold, too low.

‘I could have been a singer once,' she says.

‘Why don't we go up to Kings Park?' Louisa suggests, and her mother brightens up further.

As they drive through the city her mother reminisces about buildings, some gone and some still preserved, where she has worked. Time compresses in her memory. It seems like yesterday when she was a young woman working in the city. Some of the old buildings are still there, but the Barracks Arch has nothing behind it. It is just a façade.

‘My cousin used to work there,' she says. ‘But it's gone now. Why did they just leave the archway? Silly, isn't it? Where does the time go?'

She has remarked to Louisa on these things before. Louisa, in turn, finds herself responding as she has before. They drive slowly through the park. It is a typical blue-sky day and the park is lively with the usual mixture of tourists and locals. Louisa tries to see everything as if for the first time, like a tourist, or a child, but she can't. Too many thoughts, ideas, interpretations intervene. They stop for a coffee at one of the
park's cafes. There are more lively people, colourful in their holiday clothes, children, a girl carrying a guitar, another with a digital movie camera, viewing life as it happens, on the small screen.

‘Harry says that how you see life just depends on where you happen to be looking.'

Her mother searches for something to say. ‘Harry's a nice man,' she says.

‘Yes.'

‘You were lucky to meet him. Lucky to meet each other.'

‘Yes, I think so too.'

They sit in silence for a moment. Louisa can't remember her mother ever saying anything much about Harry before, good or bad.

‘I'm so glad you got away from that other horrible man.'

‘Victor?'

Louisa finds herself disorientated for an instant. She wonders where this has come from, after all these years.

‘Of course Victor. There haven't been any others have there? I always felt that I should have stopped you marrying him.'

‘Did you? Oh no, Mum. Don't say that.'

‘I never did like him.'

‘I thought you did.'

‘No I didn't. A mother tries to be supportive of her daughter.'

‘What about Dad?'

‘He always thought he was a con man.'

‘You're kidding.'

‘No. You shouldn't have married him in the first place. You were a bit naive. It doesn't matter. You finally did the right thing, getting out. Still, two beautiful kids, well, yes, two beautiful kids.' Her mother is playing with the sugar packets, not looking at Louisa.

‘Why didn't you say?'

She meets Louisa's eyes.

‘You wouldn't have listened. You were always headstrong.'

‘I might have.'

‘Do you talk much to Meredith these days?'

‘I ring her about once a fortnight or so, just to keep in touch. She's busy. We don't really talk.'

‘No. She's your daughter. You should try. It's important.'

They drink their coffee.

‘That's a nice tree,' says her mother. ‘You could paint that.'

‘It's a Silver Princess.'

‘I know what it is.'

The cafe owner clears the table as soon as they have finished. He has been keeping an eye on them. It is the busy time of the day and tables are at a premium. It is a gentle hint to move along. He is friendly but firm, the perfect balance of tact and diplomacy. If only Louisa could achieve that.

‘That was lovely,' says her mother, pre-empting the termination of their outing.

‘Perfect weather,' says Louisa.

They drive slowly back and within five hundred metres of her mother's home Louisa stops at a roadside fruit and flower-seller.

‘I'll buy you some honey,' her mother says.

‘No, Mum. I don't want anything. I don't need anything.' Her mother wants to buy her things. What is so wrong with that? Louisa feels mean, edgy and ashamed. She tries to modify her refusal. ‘The flowers look lovely. What do you think?'

Her mother buys flowers and seedless grapes and lingers to chat with the flower-seller.

‘I'll just drop you off if that's okay,' Louisa tells her once they are back in the car.

‘That's fine, dear,' she says.

Louisa helps her into the secure building and notices that she is, after all, in her eighties and doing pretty well. They hug and her mother greets a friend and fellow resident. She is still standing there chatting as Louisa drives off.

Louisa turns up the music that she had turned down at
some stage during the drive there. The disc in her car starts up in the middle of a Wagnerian number. It comes in with such a dramatic flourish that Louisa is taken by surprise and starts to laugh, and keeps bubbling laughter until she is all laughed out and forced to wipe her streaming face with her sleeve.

Harry feels that Louisa is being melodramatic, but he doesn't want to call her on it in case she turns on him. She'll be okay. Anyone can tell that just by looking at her. She's as fit as a horse and everyone in her family, as far as he knows, has lived their full quota and then some. Especially the women. If anyone is likely to die before their time it will be him. He's spent his whole life fantasising about dying young. It's a bit late for that now, but he'll be buggered if he'll let Louisa beat him to the post. Given that he is statistically more likely to die first, the least she could do is to cut him some slack, instead of being there in his face all the time. For all she knows he might not have much time left at all. He really hasn't been feeling too well at all lately.

There it is, in the back of his mind, that niggling doubt. Maybe she really does have ‘the big C'. He does tend to worry. He's superstitious. He starts to build monuments out of little household items, shrines to keep Louisa from getting sick and dying. He builds a couple more to protect himself and the dog and his mother. And Bella.

It's what happens when you don't have religion, he decides. You end up creating your own. DIY religion. He knows what he's doing, but won't stop even so. It would be too much responsibility to bear if something went wrong.

He turns on the radio in the bedroom and in the back room and he turns on the television. The random mixture of all that sound around him makes him feel better. Louisa goes around after him, turning everything off. He goes around turning it on again.

‘Carole and Gordon are going to see Loudon Wainright the Third,' says Louisa. ‘They want to know if we want to go along. I'd like to go. I've always wanted to see him. I might not get another chance.' Louisa notices her voice rising in pitch. She pulls it back. ‘It would be nice to go,' she says.

Harry looks up the cost of the tickets on the internet. His idea of expensive is different from Louisa's. He is hedging. Again she argues that she might not have the chance to go again. She jokingly tells him that she might as well milk her imminent death for all she can. He fails to respond. Out of habit or just plain stubbornness, he is non-committal, but everywhere she goes she finds that he has been creating pyramids of lemons and the little packets of sugar that she bought to take on picnics.

She lets a day go by and then asks again.

‘I didn't say I didn't want to go,' he says, ‘it's just that I'll be on call all that week. I might have to rush off in the middle of the show.' Louisa takes this as his way of saying they're not going, but an hour later he has checked out whether there are tickets left and becomes positively encouraging. Louisa finds this disturbing. He thinks I'm going to die. Yet another wave of panic sweeps over her.

She leaves a message on Carole's phone to say that they'll come if they can get tickets. Then she wonders if she wants to go after all. What is the point? Harry can use the money they've saved for food. Or booze. She tries to be cheerful but her timing is off and her joke falls flat. Harry barely raises a smile.

Her usual strategy is to barricade herself with information. She has already conducted extensive research on the internet, but new things are coming up all the time. People who are depressed are less likely to survive cancer than people who aren't. So she tries to be happy. Alcohol increases risk; the more alcohol the more risk. She won't give up drinking – it calms her nerves. It is best to be selective in following advice. Being fat increases the risk, but just because a person is a bit overweight doesn't mean anything. There are a lot of people who are a lot fatter than she is and don't have it. Still, she would like to be thinner for Loudon Wainright III. She might diet until then.

Over the next couple of weeks Harry and Louisa are unable to get tickets to go the concert. It is frustrating but somehow fitting.

‘We're not meant to go. The universe is telling us not to go,' she tells him. He tells her not to be so silly. The universe is indifferent. He's not convincing. He doesn't seem all that keen. He seems to have gone off Carole and Gordon lately. Carole has been acting a bit weird around him too, ever since the day of the babysitting. Louisa wonders if he and Gordon have had a falling out, but she doesn't pry. She doesn't want to know.

The ticket agency refuses to sell the tickets online because of an intervening holiday. The usual outlet that they go to no longer operates. There is one at a university near another destination of Harry's, but as the students are on a study break, this too is closed.

Louisa leaves messages for Carole and Carole leaves messages for Louisa but they seem unable to connect directly. Nothing falls into place. In the end, Harry and Louisa decide
to simply turn up at the venue and take pot luck on tickets being sold at the door.

They meet Carole and Gordon for a meal at the markets and then go round to the Fly by Night Musicians Club to check on the tickets. There are no door sales, so they all kiss, shake hands and go their separate ways.

Harry and Louisa go to a second-hand bookshop and she buys a book featuring photographs of philosophers. Later they wander back past the music venue and sit outside on the low brick wall at the back of the stage. They can hear Loudon clearly singing about sleeping with another man's wife and how to stop time. Now he is telling a story, but Louisa can't get the gist of it. He sounds nice though. Somehow sitting outside alone in the dark is more intimate than sitting inside amidst the crowd. She feels very close to Loudon and he doesn't even know she is there.

She puts her head on Harry's shoulder and feels like telling him that she loves him, but is afraid she will cry if she speaks at all, so she says nothing.

They walk to the car and drive home in silence.

Lucy tells Louisa that she might be suffering from generalised anxiety. She can't slow her mind down at night. She spends the early hours on the internet, seeking answers. She is becoming obsessed with ideas about time, finds a second-hand book in Fremantle called
A World Without Time
and buys it immediately. The dustcover describes a friendship between a mathematician called Gödel and Albert Einstein. Gödel and Einstein used to bounce ideas off one another.

As she lies in bed next to Harry with her eyes wide open, her mind is everywhere. She fantasises about bringing Tom back from the dead. She's going to change the course of history. Nothing is fixed. Everything can be changed. It's all about bouncing a whole lot of balls off the wall without dropping any. It takes work and practice. She remembers how she
used to bounce a tennis ball off the brick wall at school in some sort of game that started easy, but became increasingly complicated with each stage that passed. It was used to establish a pecking order of competence among her peers; she always came to rest somewhere around the middle. Ideas of past and future bounce around in her head – two, three, four balls. She is throwing them against a brick wall at the back of the school but she keeps dropping them.

It's two am when she finally accepts that she can't sleep. She goes to the computer, seeking her answers there. Not long after World War Two, Gödel decided that time did not exist. The idea is seductive. What does it mean? What is its significance – that things just happen randomly? That nothing has any meaning? People are bits of matter bumping about and shooting off in different directions. Does nothing have any value at all? Her mind is spinning. Stop it, she says. Stop it, stop it, stop it.

She is going nowhere. She switches off the computer and turns to her photos. There is a black and white picture of her and Zoe as children in their Sunday School clothes: patent leather shoes, nylon dresses and straw hats. The light is strong and they are squinting into the camera. It mostly seemed a happy childhood. She remembers it that way.

She recalls herself as a small child standing on the train platform. She is waving goodbye to her mother, who is travelling to Perth for a break. She is holding her father's hand and Zoe is tossing pebbles onto the track. It feels as if the platform is moving off. Is their mother leaving them, or is it the other way round?

Louisa puts the computer away and climbs into bed beside Harry, her mind racing. She feels futile and demoralised as if she has achieved little and learned nothing. All that information and no answers at all. She gives up, turns her back into Harry's warmth, and waits for sleep.

In the morning the van is back and Tom sits behind the driver's wheel eating his lunch and listening to his iPod, bobbing his head up and down. Louisa's heart aches for him, just for the chance to say hello. She idly wonders if there has been a mistake. It wasn't Tom who died after all. She was distraught. She was mistaken. What was she thinking?

Then something happens. He opens the door, gets out, stretches his body to its full height, gets back into the van, and starts the engine. She sees that he is the wrong height, the wrong shape, the wrong everything. A wave of embarrassment washes over her and subsides. She is hollowed out.