Elsewhere in Success (20 page)

So there was the cold reason for Tom's death. There was the cause and there was the effect.

‘I'm just so very tired,' says Louisa. ‘I wish I could have a nice long sleep.'

‘Yes. I know.'

‘So.'

The counsellor and her client sit in silence. Ultimately Lucy speaks. ‘What use is guilt?' Silence. ‘What use is it? I'm asking.'

‘I don't know.'

‘Try. What use does it serve for you?'

‘It's my responsibility.'

‘To feel guilty?' Louisa nods. ‘Responsibility is important to you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Responsibility for?'

‘Tom's death. I deserve to be punished.' Louisa is crying now. Lucy passes her the box of tissues.

‘Is it your responsibility to be miserable?'

‘I guess.'

‘What if you're wrong about that? What if the real responsibility that you have is to be happy? For Tom's sake, if not for your own.'

Louisa wipes her eyes, but says nothing. Lucy continues.

‘You know Louisa, when I've listened to you I can't help thinking about your age. When you married Victor you were younger than Tom was when he died. Now days, you'd be considered a child. I mean, where does the responsibility for that lie?'

Louisa maintains her silence. Lucy tries again.

‘Of course we affect our children, we're important in their lives, but it's not everything. They have their own minds, their own motivations, and their own experiences outside the home. Once they have grown up, it's none of our business, not really. We can't own what they do. That belongs to them. We can care, of course, and try to help, but we can't keep them. We can own our memories of them, but if that's our entire world, then what about your life here and now?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Building strong relationships with the people that are here doesn't mean you can't still have a relationship with Tom, but if the relationship with Tom is so painful and persistent that it fills up your whole world, then where is the room for other people in your life? What about your responsibility to them? Just as importantly, to yourself?'

‘I do. I try.'

‘I know. All I'm saying is that I'm sure Tom knew that you loved him. He loved you too. If the shoe had been on the other foot and you'd taken your own life, would you want to see him continuing to suffer like you are? To put his life on hold? So would he want you to suffer the way you have? He just doesn't sound that vengeful to me.'

‘Vengeful?'

‘Yes.'

‘Maybe I'm the one who's vengeful. Is that what I am?'

‘That's interesting. Are you?'

‘No. I don't think so.'

‘Neither do I.'

‘I know it's not all my fault.'

‘Yes, that's right. It's not your fault Louisa. You didn't set out to hurt him.'

‘He was just a boy.'

‘Yes.'

‘It's not his fault either.'

‘No, it isn't his fault.' Lucy smiles and places her hand over Louisa's. ‘I want to say something more, something personal, Louisa. Is that all right?'

‘Of course.'

‘I like you. I really do. I'm not sitting here in judgement. How can I? I can teach you some techniques for managing your stress or shifting your habits of thinking if you want to work on that, but I don't have any profound or miraculous answers. I wish I did, but I don't. All I can really do is be a witness, and if you like, to let you know what I think or what I've learned through the years that might be helpful. It might not be helpful. I could be wrong. I make mistakes. There are no guarantees, are there?'

‘No.'

‘Awful things happen. People do horrible things. I don't know why. Power seduces, I suppose. They're looking for short-term gain, or revenge. Or they just don't care. Life goes haywire. Or maybe it doesn't. It's life, not some sort of utopian ideal. We can't make it what it isn't, whether we want to or not. Believe me I've been down that track myself. It led to a dead end. Now all I do is to try to live in peace, and once something is beyond my control, I try to think about it differently, and not to suffer over my own suffering.'

‘Your suffering?'

‘Yes, I lost someone dear to me. It's really hard.'

‘I'm sorry.'

Lucy nods.

Louisa says, ‘I am getting better. I don't dwell as much as I did.'

‘I know. I think you are too. I feel that you are starting to come back into the present. That being said, I want you to do something for me every morning when you wake up, until you come to see me next time. Will you do something for me?'

‘Yes. What do you want?'

‘You have a lot of different types of birds around where you live don't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Every morning, as soon as you wake up, go into your garden for five minutes, on the clock, and listen to the birds. Count how many different calls you can hear.'

‘You want me to count the birds?'

‘That's right. Report back. I'd be interested to know.'

When Harry visits Adam in Fremantle, they walk to the hospital gardens, where Adam sneaks a cigarette. Adam tells him he's no stranger to this place and asks if Harry knows what it's like to feel so bad you want to die.

‘I went through a bad patch when my first marriage broke up,' Harry says. ‘I felt like topping myself, but I couldn't be bothered.'

Adam laughs. ‘You're kidding, are you?'

‘Yeah. But I had fantasies of ... never mind. Water under the bridge so to speak.'

‘So how did you get through it?'

‘I generally find exercise is the best thing,' says Harry. ‘I feel okay most of the time now. That proves it works, eh? I do a bit of jogging and I've taken up weights lately.'

‘Yeah, I should look after my health more,' says Adam staring at the cigarette in his hand. He throws it on the ground and grinds it out. He's dressed in jeans, a black T-shirt with a peace sign, and expensive-looking sneakers. ‘They don't like us wearing pyjamas all day so they make us get dressed,' he says. ‘I don't usually wear them anyway.'

They spend nearly the whole time talking music, and Harry
promises to bring his sax next time for a jam. He'll have to drag it out first and have a blow so he doesn't make a fool of himself, he says.

At some point they get to talking about whether Harry has any kids. He tells Adam about Bella and how he hasn't seen her since she was around four.

‘I've thought about her a few times lately,' he says.

‘Why don't you get in touch?'

‘I wouldn't know how,' says Harry. ‘She could be anywhere.'

‘She'll probably be on Facebook or something.'

It hasn't occurred to Harry. The possibilities start to grow in his imagination.

‘I don't know how to get on,' he says.

‘I can show you.' They are back on the ward by this time. Adam gets out his laptop and signs him up on the spot. And there she is. A version of Yasamine, and himself he supposes, but better looking. Beautiful, in fact. His daughter.

‘Look, you can send her a message,' says Adam. ‘You just put it in there.'

‘I'll think it through.'

‘Fair enough.'

The time skids past and Harry feels great when he finally leaves with a promise to come back next day. He will keep this promise, is looking forward to it, and sees the possibility of a friendship developing. He pushes Bella out of his mind for the moment, focusing instead on Adam.

He'll get his sax out again to see if he can still play. He could even make an effort to catch up with some of his old friends. He has Ziggy's card from when he and Louisa bumped into him that night. Ziggy was just the same, a bit older. They were the best times, those summers. Great memories.

One hot evening late one January everyone was sitting on the front veranda of the old weatherboard house in East Vic Park. Yasamine told him she was pregnant and they invited friends over to celebrate, Harry's music buddies, their partners,
and Yasamine's bridesmaid, a sullen woman who didn't really get into the spirit of things. A couple of the guys brought along their instruments for a jam. Yasamine was in a good mood, singing ‘Fever' along with the old Peggy Lee standard. The guys indulged her request and complimented her on her voice, which indeed had a nice texture to it. She became self-conscious when everyone grew quiet, and she drifted off pitch. Harry found it endearing.

The music had gone well into the night. Harry remembers the improvised feel of their lives as they were back then. There was no worry if someone wanted to crash on the floor for the night, rather than drive home under the influence. Next day they usually went down to the cafe strip for an early lunch and sat there nursing a coffee or two well into the afternoon.

They were good, lazy times, and he remembers the neighbours, all fairly young and tolerant, coming across with bottles of wine to join in the small party. Nobody got very drunk, just relaxed, and they passed around a couple of joints. That was as far as anything went. They kept to their own partners. It wasn't the rock-and-roll lifestyle people imagine. They just liked the music. They liked messing around, experimenting, inventing.

He and Yasamine talked about how when the baby was born, if they felt like it they'd just take off on the road somewhere, head off to America, New Orleans, not be tied down by conventional expectations. It would be good for the kid, teach him to be flexible, adventurous. Then Bella was born. He loved her – of course, who wouldn't? If he is honest with himself there was also resentment.

It beats him how so much can change after you have a baby, and why you feel you have to follow the usual paths. Yasamine forgot all about New Orleans and just going where the mood took them. Then it turned out that Yasamine didn't really like jazz. Or even Madonna. Truth be known, she was a closet country music fan.

Harry writes his letter as a practice run, with no real intention of sending it. His finger twitches, he presses return, and the message disappears into cyberspace.

Somehow now with the baby coming, and everything that has been stirred up by the other night's adventure on the bridge, Louisa feels a sense of urgency in getting herself straight.

‘It's not easy,' she says.

‘The more you avoid it, the more power you give it,' says Lucy.

‘Tom used to say darkness has its own beauty.'

‘What are you thinking about?'

‘I'm thinking of the painting that Tom did, the day he brought the flowers home.'

‘Can you describe it to me?'

‘It was a picture of a car crash. There were flowers strewn across a car that had been twisted around a lamp post, and a young man's um blood-streaked hand hung from the broken passenger window. On the ground was a package tied up in brown paper and string, and another hand, a woman's hand, was reaching into the frame towards it. He used watercolour – it was all done in a delicate watercolour. He called it
Still Life.'

‘Still life?'

‘Yes.'

‘Whose hand do you think it was, the one reaching in?'

‘I don't know. I've thought lately it was mine.'

‘And the package?'

‘Not what it must have meant to him when he painted it, obviously. This package of pain that I've been carrying around.'

‘Why don't you ever play your saxophone anymore?' she asks Harry one day.

‘I'm thinking of selling it,' he lies.

‘That would be a terrible shame. I wish you would start playing again. I think you're just being stubborn.'

‘Takes one to know one.'

Still, the exchange surprises Harry because of what he has been thinking and feeling lately. Whether he is still capable of playing. She definitely has some sort of sixth sense. She might even know about Carole, or suspect. Is she telling him it's okay, forgiveness is possible, that history doesn't have to weigh a person down as much as it does? She's letting him know that everybody makes mistakes, that nobody's perfect.

Something still holds him back from getting everything out in the open; about Carole, about why he doesn't play anymore, if only he knew himself, and about the changes that are happening to his heart. It's possible that some things just can't be said in so many words.

Louisa goes into his study, climbs up, pulls the case down from the top shelf, and places it on the kitchen bench. ‘Anyway, suit yourself. I'm going out for a while as soon as I get changed,' she says.

‘Where?'

‘My new painting class. Remember? Lucy suggested it.'

‘I get it,' says Harry, ‘you think playing would be therapeutic for me.'

‘It's not all about you, you know, Harry,' she says. ‘But yes, I reckon it would.'

‘Just checking,' he says. ‘Sometimes I can be a grumpy old bastard.'

But she has already gone.

It is difficult to tell where the music is coming from. Snatches of sound move across cold dark air. Louisa winds her window down and turns the engine off. The sound is drifting out, originating from somewhere in the house, possibly the back room. Harry is playing, softly at first, but as her ear adjusts, Louisa can hear the notes greet one another, tentatively, and then as the closest of old friends. He is improvising, floating long, sad notes into the night. A melody is emerging; each note follows the one before like a story, vulnerable, erratically spaced and breaking like a voice, releasing years of feeling. The sound is not perfect. He might be losing his breath or perhaps the notes have congregated in irregular pockets throughout the house so that the music escapes in uneven rushes into the darkness. He is feeling his way, but the music is all the more moving for that.

Louisa sits in the car for a long time, on the brink of a discovery. What is it? Something that music can get at, but words cannot.