Holier Than Thou (15 page)

24

I stared at Tim’s and my wardrobe. At our lack of one. At our clothes hanging side by side on the hastily assembled IKEA rack. My clothes and his clothes. It still shocked me, when I borrowed something to wear of Mum’s, to see her clothes hanging in the wardrobe without my father’s next to them.

I was sitting on our bed doing the staring. The bed that smelled of both our bodies. In the home we had made together. I was late for work. Dressed and everything, just couldn’t bring myself to leave. Tim had left over half an hour before. I’d said I was hung over. Which was true.

I could just pack a bag, pack some things, leave a note, leave Tim and go to Mum’s tonight. I could do that.

Looking at the clothes, though, I knew I wouldn’t. Tim was a gift from the gods, and I didn’t want to anger the gods. Did I?

Johanna glared at me as I slunk in late to handover. I no longer cared. I took my seat, sweaty from the unseasonable heat, and didn’t look at Nick. It was the first time he had ever been in there before me. While Tessa talked her way down the whiteboard of clients, I wrote on a piece of letterhead paper I had strapped to a clipboard.

Ms Johanna Dukes, Service Manager Elizabethtown Integrated Mental Health Service

Dear Johanna,

I hereby tender my resignation from my position as social worker at Elizabethtown Mental Health Service, effective four weeks from today.

Yours sincerely,
Holly Yarkov

‘Johanna.’ I knocked gently on her door.

She sat with her back to the door and always jumped in fright whenever anyone knocked, which, her being the manager, is frequently.

‘Oh!’

‘Sorry.’

‘That’s alright.’

‘Can I talk to you for a moment?’

‘Yes, but it’s fine, Holly, I know you are not habitually late and you must have had a reason.’

‘It’s not that.’

‘Oh?’

I gave her the paper and stood looking at the ground while she read it.

‘Oh, Holly,’ she said, and her eyes got wet.

Nick appeared in the doorway and knocked. Johanna jumped.

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ he said. ‘Holly, just wondering, are we leaving to visit Gerard as planned?’

He jangled the medication box.

‘Yep.Yes. I’m coming now.’

Out to Jindarra Street, to our ’hood, to the view that heaves into s he;

I’ll tell Nick after we finish at Gerard’s, I resolve.

Johanna ended up giving both of us a couple of hours off, after we had returned to the centre, hollow-eyed, and finished the preliminary paperwork and reports for Gerard’s suicide. His file was bundled off to Clinical Governance before you could say ‘high lethality’.

Tessa hugged me in her office.

‘I’m resigning,’ I said.

‘Sweet pea. These things happen; it’s a tragedy but it’s not your fault and you’ll move past it in no time.’

‘No—’

‘He was a very sick man.’

‘It’s not about Gerard. I gave Johanna my letter before I even knew about him.’

‘You did?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

I didn’t answer.

‘Is it because of Nick?’

I wanted to visit my mum. My actual mum. I hadn’t visited her in ages. So I ran out of the health centre and up to the train station without saying goodbye to Nick and hoping he wouldn’t follow me. I sprinted through the barriers and down the stairs, praying to make the train I could see down on the platform. The whistle blew before I made it to the bottom stair, but like Indiana Jones I didn’t falter in my speed or belief, and I slipped through the hissing doors with a millimetre to spare.

I stared out at the water tower at the top of Guthrie Hill, the one we always drove past when visiting Gerard. It shimmered in the heat. The train pulled into Petersham Station, and as I climbed the stairs I half-expected Liam to fall into step beside me. But he didn’t. I just missed him keeping step beside me. I missed my friend. There was no script to follow for a friend who had gone MIA. If you get dumped by a lover there is a script. You grieve intensely, you cry, you don’t eat for a few weeks, you take a deep breath and you move on. But the hole left by an absent friend never really closes over. You never stop missing them or wondering what the fuck happened.

I wanted answers; I wanted . . . I pulled out my phone and dialled the old numbers, hovering at the top of the stairs near the turnstile.

The answering machine kicked in. ‘You have reached Ingrid Keller. I’m unable to take your call at the moment but if you leave a—’

‘Hello?’

A real voice.

A male voice.

Liam’s voice.

‘Uh, Liam?’

‘Yes.’

‘Liam! It’s Holly.’

Pause.

‘Hi there.’

There was a superficiality in his tone that broke my heart. No, chilled it actually. Dulled it.

‘What are you doing home?’

‘I’m . . .We’re . . . in town this week. I have a work thing, and my mum wanted me to install her new computer, so . . . that’s what I’m doing.’

‘Right. Um, it’s been a while, hey? I miss you—’

‘Yeah, it’s been a while. Busy with work and stuff.’

‘I left you some messages . . . ’

‘Oh, I got a new mobile.’

‘And some emails . . . ’ I petered out.

I wanted to go to him and blurt out the whole mess I was in with Tim and Nick and work and everything. I didn’t like being a grown-up. I wanted to go back to uni and sit around with Liam all day and all night, drinking beer and watching Star Trek, walking the streets at night thick as thieves and singing the same songs.

‘Hey, I’m actually at Petersham Station. Um, I could drop around, you know, for a cup of tea or whatever . . . play me some Tori . . . ’

‘Yeah, I really can’t today.’

‘I’m five minutes away!’

‘Yeah, it’s just . . . I have to do some things. Uh, but I’ll give you a ring some time. We’ll catch up.’

‘Oh. Okay.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

I should have listened to Lara and Abigail. He really was gone.

I walked, stinging, alone to Mum’s.

It was the darndest thing. I turned up the driveway of my ancestral home, and stopped short. Had I walked up the wrong driveway? It . . . it was painted a lovely shade of grey, with a dark burgundy trim. The tiles were swept clean, a new gate had been fitted, the letterbox was freshly painted and empty. I peered at the number on the door: 38. It was the right house. And the same old door, just nicely painted, with the brass door knocker actually brassy and polished. My mother’s silver Ford Focus was parked, gleaminarkht houseg, in the garage. I knocked on the door and waited. She didn’t come. I knocked again. Some kind of music was playing inside, she must be home. Maybe she was out the back. I pulled my key ring out of my bag and put my old house key in the door.

‘Mum?’ I called, sticking my head inside. ‘Mum?’

I put my bag down on the floor and was taking off my sunglasses when I recognised the music. All in a flash. A horrible, sick-making flash. It was that beautiful old jazz piano CD, the one I had come home to find Mum and Dad listening to, in those final months. My mother’s pulsing-with-anticipatory-grief hand clutching my father’s prematurely wizened one.

And without warning, everything that I had successfully pushed down, down into my sternum the night I stepped out onto that stage, came rushing out in a wail crossed with an asthma attack.

‘MUM,’ I wheezed. ‘
MUM!
’ Louder. And that was how she found me, frozen to the spot inside the doorway, as she came tearing in from the back yard in her gardening hat and gloves.

‘What is it! What!?’

I made strangled sobbing noises, punctuated by laboured inward breaths, and tried to point at the stereo.

‘Is it Paddy?’ She held my shoulders. ‘What?’

I shook my head.

‘Music,’ I sputtered. ‘Turn off the music.’

She went into the living room and a moment later the house was blessedly silent, except for me.

‘Holly. Holly,’ she kept saying. ‘You’re hyperventilating. Try to slow down your breathing. You’ll be alright.’ Stuff like that.

She steered me into the kitchen and pushed me onto a chair.

‘That’s right. Nice and slow. Nice and slow.’ She rubbed my back.

Eventually I calmed down and just started to cry normally. Then stopped even that, and the kitchen was silent except for the buzzing of the fridge.

‘Doesn’t that music make you sad?’ I asked.

‘No. It makes me happy.’

‘Doesn’t it make you remember him?’

‘Well, yes . . . happy memories.’

What?

I stared at her. It was all coming together. How debilitating and raw her grief had been for the years after his death, how she had ‘given in’ to it, as I had not with what I had thought was stoicism. And here she was nine years later, having her house painted, sweeping the tiles, gardening, listening to their music with
happy memories
. Whereas ‘Every year that passes,’ I said slowly, ‘I get angrier and angrier about it; I accept it less and less. I find the memories of that time
more
vivid. Not less.’

She nodded.

‘I do not accept it Mum! Orright?’

My mother sighed.

‘You can’t outrun it, Hol,’ she said quietly.

‘I just thought I could . . . I thought I had to be strong, and I could decide that I would just not, you know, let it . . . ’

‘You were scared of strong emotions.’

I suspect she comprehends me completely, my mum, for all the lack of bonding.

‘I was
scared
of my mother not showering for days on end! I was scared that my mother would not survive, that I wouldn’t have a mother anymore either. I was scared of not having a place in the family without . . . without Dad.’

‘What do you
mean
, not have a place in the family?’ It was Mum’s turn to crank up the shrill.

‘I mean . . . Dad was always in my corner and you were in Paddy’s—’

‘I am in your corner! I have always been in your corner, Holly, even if it hasn’t felt like it, even if we got off to a rocky start . . . ’ She was tearing up.
Shit
.

We sat there, together at the kitchen table, wiping tears and blowing noses, which was how Paddy found us.

‘What’s going on here?’ he asked warily.

‘Nothing, nothing . . . ’ said Mum, ‘just talking about some things.’

He came and hugged her around the shoulders as he always does, then me, which he rarely does.

‘Where’s Lucy?’ I asked, trying to sound conversational. Lucy was the latest girlfriend.

‘Lucy is a psycho,’ said Paddy succinctly. ‘I dropped her.’

‘Oh.’

He went over to the couch and turned on his laptop. I desperately wanted to tell Mum about the Nick stuff, and how my nightmares were all seeming to wake simultaneously, but the moment had passed. Plus, I knew she really loved Tim. As did I.

What were my nightmares?

That I would lose my battle against that raging tide of grief. That I would no longer be, for the most part, coolly functional.
Such a strength to hestr. My mother no longer needed me to be strong for her, so where did that leave me?

That we would never find a way to rebalance the family without Dad, the gaping hole, the yawning absence . . . We would continue our polite pretence of being a family, forever.

That I would no longer be a good person, loyal,
holier-than-them
– just a garden variety muck-raker, down in the mud with everyone else, a disappointment to my – it must be said,
dead
– father.

That my carefully ticked-off boxes would become un-ticked – gorgeous, reliable Tim, our flat, our jobs, our future.

That me, Dan, Abs and Lara would not make it through to the next round together. Like me and Liam hadn’t.

That only the unpredictable grace of God separates me from the girl on top of the roof.
I’ll be challenged when the sun goes down!

I had been calm, strong and compassionate for all the fractured souls and grieving families that were my daily bread at Elizabethtown. I could feel my compassion seeping out, my cynicism and hopelessness hardening, baking themselves onto the pan.

When I leave my mother’s house, I will return to Tim’s and my place for good.

I think.