Simply Heaven (45 page)

But I’m in a good mood tonight. It’s the first night of a week’s R and R, and I’m just ripe to get my bubble popped. We had a good dinner at Trader Nick’s, elbows on the table, shooting the breeze and sinking stubbies with Tina and her bloke-of-the-week, Dylan, and Tines’s sister, Lola, and her girlfriend Rusty, a muscular, forthright type who drives one of Dad’s cabs and never takes shit from anyone. Then we had a couple of sharpies on the deck of our unit, Andrew throwing jokes about, an arm lightly draped over my shoulder just like the old days, and a race in the moonlight down through the forest to Old Settlement beach, where the moon glittered so invitingly off the ocean that Tines and I were overtaken by an urge to chuck our Daks over our shoulders and go skinny-dipping, like we used to when we were fifteen, sixteen. And it was great: just like the old days. A laugh.

And then, the moment we were alone, he reverted to the silent punisher he’s been for months now. That’s Andrew all over: solicitous boyfriend in public, taciturn judge in private. It came as a surprise to most people when we broke up. ‘But you guys got on so well,’ they said. ‘He was always all over you. I don’t understand …’

I lie and listen to him breathe. Decide that I’m not going to let this night be ruined like so many recently. So I reach across the border that’s been drawn down the centre of the bed, and touch his hip, run my fingers forward and down towards his doodle. Men are always harping on about women making the first move, after all.

He slaps the hand away. ‘Get off,’ he says.

I sit up in bed, shocked at the baldness of the rejection. ‘What’s eating you?’

‘Just don’t touch me. I don’t want you pawing me tonight.’

‘What’s your problem this time?’

‘Nothing.’ The back stays firmly turned to me.

‘What, nothing?’

‘Well, if you really want to know, it’s you,’ he says. ‘You give me the irrits.’

‘Oh yeah? And what am I meant to have done this time?’

He sits up sharply, looks at me with an expression of loathing like I’ve never seen on his face before. ‘Well, just look at ya,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘It just hit me, that’s all. When you and Tina were galumphing about with no clothes on. You’re seriously fucking fat. You’re chunderous.’

‘Jesus.’ Taken aback is hardly the word.

‘Just look at ya,’ he repeats. Jabs a finger out and rams it into my belly. ‘You’ve let yourself go. It’s like you don’t care at all. Do you really expect me to fancy
that
?’

I’m stunned into silence.

‘I’m ashamed to be seen with you,’ he says.

‘You disgust me,’ he says.

‘Just keep your hands to yourself,’ he says. ‘It makes me crook just thinking about it.’

Wednesday. 6 p.m. Home. I’m in a narky state anyway, because I’ve just got my period and I feel like my guts are about to fall out, and, believe me, the last thing you want to be doing when your hormones are all over the place is bending over someone else’s bunions and listening to them grizzle. It’s been a full day, driving about in forty degrees of heat, with a full complement of whingers, because, let’s face it, whatever I think about the power of reflexology, the majority of the people I treat are the sort with more money than sense and too much time on their hands, and I don’t really rank higher in the social order than a manicurist or a hairdresser. Even digging my trigger pointer in twice as hard as I need to doesn’t seem to have had the satisfaction quotient it usually does. I’ve heard nothing but self-pity all day, and though I know that this is largely what people pay me for it’s hard to take when your back hurts and your stomach is cramping and your tolerance levels are at practically zero. I need a shower, a long cold drink and a backrub.

What I get is a lounge full of torn-up rolling-paper packets, a floor full of takeout, a sink full of last night’s washing-up and the dolie I call my fiancé fast asleep in front of the aerial pingpong, volume turned up so loud the neighbours will be over. He’s been there all arvo, by the looks of it. His feet are up on my silk cushions and his mouth is open in a sluggard’s snore, and he’s got one hand down the front of his baggy shorts, cupping his balls. Andy, who I used to love to distraction. Andy, who when I met him was a lion – lean, strong, agile, eager – turned into a neutered tomcat, raggedy blond body hair scattered over a little pot belly. Did I do this to him, that he can have changed so much in four years? Maybe. I can be an über-bitch when I get going. Maybe that’s what I do. Maybe I’m a ball-breaker. Maybe that’s what I am.

I certainly act like one now. And no, the menstrual excuse is no justification. I go into the kitchen, fill a glass full of water, come back into the lounge and throw it in his face, with all the energy I can muster.

I’m not proud of this. I’m not proud of this part of my history. If I remember it, I blush with shame. How can someone have so little self-control? I knew it was ending, I desperately didn’t want it to end, and this was how I went about keeping him.

If I could take it back, I would. All of it. Every little bit. I don’t mean I want him back but, my God, when you know how much you are to blame, when you have so much to be guilty about, you find yourself making every bargain under the sun with God to get him to take the shame away. This was the way I behaved to someone I loved. What sort of person does that make me?

Andy rolls awake, coughing, looks up at me blearily. ‘What’d you—’

‘Get up!’ I shout. ‘Get up, you lazy bastard! What the fuck have you been doing all day?’

Andy scratches his wrist, says: ‘Oh, sorry, babe, I sort of fell asleep.’

I pick up a cushion, swipe him with it.

‘Ow!’ he cries, puts his hand up in front of his face. Somehow this action enrages me all the more. I don’t know. It was a mad time. Mad and bad, and my heart was coming apart at the seams. Suddenly, I’m whacking at him with the cushion, full-throttle, and he’s curled into himself on the couch, saying nothing.

I can hear my own voice, and it doesn’t sound like me. It’s like an ogre has taken over my body. ‘You fucker. You total pointless waste-of-space fucker. You can’t even do the fucking washing-up. Sitting around on your lazy arse all day and I come back and the house is worse than when I left.’

‘Melody!’ his voice is muffled by his defensive arms. ‘What are you doing? Stop it! Stop fucking hitting me!’

Suddenly I realise that I’ve dropped the pillow and am using my bare hands. I’ve been slapping him about the head, even got a couple of punches in on his body. The rage goes out of me as quickly as it came. My arms drop to my sides. ‘Jesus,’ I say.

Andy cautiously unrolls himself. His hair is all messed up and his face is red – whether as a result of my attack or from breathlessness I can’t yet tell.

‘Oh, Jesus, babe.’ I hear the ritual cant of the wife-beater spill from my lips. I’m aware of what I’m doing, but I don’t know what else to say. It all sounds so simple when you see it on the problem pages: he’ll promise he’s sorry. He’ll say he didn’t mean it. He’ll say he doesn’t know what happened. He’ll say it’ll never happen again, but don’t believe it. What they don’t say is this: if it’s you, if you’re the violent one, you probably
do
mean it. I’m all twisted up inside: confused by my rage and sickened by my behaviour. I can see myself in my mind’s eye, and what I see is a monster. I am disgusting, vile, a modern leper. ‘Oh Jesus,’ I say again, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. Oh God, are you all right?’

Andy’s nose is running. He dabs at it, obviously thinking it’s bleeding, looks down at his fingers and back up at me. And the look in his eyes is so wounded, so wounded and disgusted, that I reel. I see in Andy’s eyes the way I feel about myself.

I drop to my knees in front of him. Put a hand out to touch his face, attempt to offer him the comfort we used to give each other in the early days, before we started tearing each other apart. ‘Let me—’

He grabs me by the wrist, pulls the hand away.

I start to cry. Crying and shouting: that’s all we do these days. ‘Please don’t. Oh, Andy, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’

Head bowed in penitence, I look up through my eyelashes. Andy is shaking his head. His mouth turns down at the corners.

‘You’re sick,’ he says.

He’s right. How can he be wrong? Look at what I’ve just done.

I sob. ‘I’m sorry. Andy, I’m so sorry. I swear, it’ll never happen again. I’m so sorry. Let me make it up …’

Sharply, with contempt, he pushes me by the shoulder so I drop back on to the floor. And there’s something about the gesture that is more humiliating, more enraging, than anything I’ve experienced before. It reminds me of Reggie Harper and her buddies back at school. It reminds me of the way he’s talked to me lately, the way he looks at me lately, his lip curled with a potent combination of dislike and contempt, and waits two beats before he lets go with some remark that crushes the wind out of me. And I see red: a red mist descends in front of my eyes and I lose what remaining restraint I had.

He’s turned and started walking to the door by the time I’m on my feet. I belt across the room, teeth bared, and throw myself on his back, like a kid going for a piggyback, calling him a bastard, a cunt, a fucking shithead. And Andy staggers under the sudden weight, claws at the arm I’ve got wrapped round his throat as I batter at his head with the free hand.

‘Stop it!’ he chokes. ‘Mel,
stop
it! Get off! Get offa me!’

‘I’ll fucking – I’ll – I fucking
hate
you! I
hate
you! I’ll fucking do for yer, you
bastard
!’

I slip down on to the ground, stand in front of him fists clenched, barely able to see him through the slits that are my eyes. And I don’t know what I’m doing, really I don’t, just that I hate him, and I want to hurt him, make him feel the way I’m feeling right now, hurt and humiliated and hot and stung like snakebite.

And I belt him. Pull my hand back to arm’s length and clout him with all my strength, full in the face. Feel his nose give under my knuckles, feel the rush of power as his head snaps back on his neck and his shoulders roll.

And then I’m flying sidewise, air whistling past my ears, and my face comes into contact, hard, with the door-jamb and I don’t know anything more.

Even if I hadn’t seen the limo coming down the drive, I would have heard their arrival if I’d been locked up in the dungeons. Well, if not their arrival, the outbreak of bellowing that follows close on its heels. She’s shouting the odds, and it sounds like everyone who’s in the house is shouting them back. I can hear her as I pound down the stairs to the Great Hall, her honk bouncing off the walls like cannonballs.

‘I want to see my
daughter
!’ she bellows. ‘Let me see my bloody
daughter
!’

I burst through the fireplace door, find Mum, Mary, Beatrice and Mrs Roberts facing each other off by the door, the Bourtonites lined up, arms folded, while Mum rages impotently at them. ‘Just let me see my
daughter
!’ she shouts again.

Mary’s voice, raised and imperious: ‘No-one’s trying to
stop
you seeing your daughter! I told you! If you just wait here, someone will go and
get
her!’

‘Get her out of my house!’ cries Beatrice. ‘Mary! I will not tolerate—’

‘Ahh, shyaddap!’ Mum snarls. I don’t understand what’s got her in such a wax. Other than the fact that she must have come expecting a confrontation, like she does, so she’s creating one. ‘Shut yer stupid
face
!’

‘Mum!’ I shout. ‘What are you
doing
?’ I can’t believe this. All that work, all the time I’ve spent putting up with things, holding my counsel, and she’s smashing all of it,
all
of it, with one display of her explosive, vituperative, childish temper. What sort of chance did I stand, growing up with someone who reacts to everything,
everything
, with this red-faced, stamping, swearing, fist-shaking rage? ‘
Stop
it!’ I shout. ‘What are you
doing
?’

‘You!’ she blasts at me. ‘Come on!’

‘What?’

Mary, Beatrice and Mrs Roberts simply stand there, drink in this example of family communication with gloating pleasure.
You see? You see? What did we say? Didn’t we say it all along?

‘I’ve got a ticket here,’ says Mum, ‘and I expect you to use it.’

‘
What?
’

Her voice, astonishingly, rises another notch. ‘
Don’t
answer me back, missy! … Come on! We’re all waiting in the limo and we’re not waiting for ever!’

‘
What are you talking about?
’

She blinks, slows, speaks to me as though I’m a stupid child. ‘We’re going back,’ she says, ‘and you’re coming with us. You’re not staying here.’

‘You,’ I say, ‘have taken leave of your senses.’

‘Don’t you
dare
talk to me like that.’

‘Like
what
, Ma?’

‘There’s no way,’ she says, ‘you’re picking this lot over your own family.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Melody,’ she says, and the threat in her voice is palpable.

I don’t look in any direction at all, because I know whichever way I look, it’ll undermine every intention I have. She’s gone mad. Stark, staring mad. She can’t seriously think I …

I fold my arms across my chest, look down at my feet for support and say: ‘I’m sorry, Mum, but I’m not coming.’

Mary and Beatrice are far too well-bred to react to this, but I feel the
frisson
none the less.

‘Bollocks,’ says my mother. ‘Come on. Get your stuff.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

She looks stunned, like the idea had never entered her head. No-one gainsays Colleen Katsouris. It will literally never have occurred to her that I might say no. I never have before, after all. I’ve run away rather than face it.

She takes a minute to drink in this sea-change. ‘Well, what are you
going
to do, then?’ she asks eventually, still belligerent.

I don’t know if the obtuseness is deliberate or not, but I don’t want to play this out in front of the two people who hate me most in the world.