The Hypnotist's Love Story (28 page)

I live in a three-bedroom duplex.

I’ve never been fond of duplexes, and yet, here I am.

When Patrick and I broke up, I needed somewhere new to live fast, and I asked a real estate agent I knew to find me the first available rental property in my price range. So he found me this bland, sterile little place, in a street crammed with identical duplexes and three twenty-story apartment blocks. The people who live here are hardworking midlevel professionals.
They are the worker bees of society, on their way to something better. This is an area where “convenience” is what counts. The railway station is an easy walk and it’s only a ten-minute trip into the city. There are dozens of perfectly adequate but not that great restaurants and twenty-four-hour dry cleaners and ATMs and cab ranks. People stride along checking their BlackBerrys and gulping down takeaway coffees. It’s not a place for lovers. There are no buskers or bookshops or galleries or cinemas. It’s good. It’s like an extension of the office.

Ever since I moved in, a man named Jeff has lived in the other half of my duplex. He is short and bald with a neat ginger-colored beard, and the most personal fact I know about him is that he doesn’t feel the cold. He wears short-sleeved shirts all year round. When he is inside, I rarely hear a sound from him through our shared walls: no music, no television. Once I did hear him crying out, as if in anguish, “But that’s
not
the way you do it!” Do what? But I was only mildly intrigued. I didn’t care enough to actually have a proper conversation or make eye contact with him.

If we see each other at the letterbox or walking in and out of our front doors, we both immediately speed up and walk away fast like we have suddenly remembered we are running very late, or we develop an intense interest in one of the letters we have just received, tearing it open as if it’s of the utmost importance. We call out things in a distracted busy tone like, “Hot, isn’t it?” and “Cold, isn’t it?” or if the weather is difficult to label, “How are you?” and we never wait for the other person to answer because we don’t care about the answer. Sometimes in my head I answer:
Still obsessively stalking my ex-boyfriend, grieving for my dead mother and suffering unexplained leg pain, thanks, how about you?

So, yes, Jeff is the perfect neighbor for a duplex. We have managed to live next door all these years, and collect each other’s mail when one of us is away, and negotiate shared issues about garbage collection and lawn mowing, while maintaining the most delightfully superficial of relationships.

And then today, when I’d just got home from collecting the car from the mechanic, Jeff suddenly marched up to me and stood far too close. I tried to take a discreet step backward. “Hi, Saskia,” he said. I think this was the first time he’d ever used my name.

“Hi, Jeff,” I said. Likewise.

“I wanted to let you know that I’m moving,” he said. “I’m having a sea change.”

“Sea change,” I repeated.

“Yes, I’m moving to a little town down the south coast. I’m going to run a café. I’m calling it Jeff’s Jetty Café.”

I was stunned. I’m not sure why. I think I just never expected him to be important enough to make any significant changes in his life, but of course, he doesn’t know that he’s only a minor character in my life. He’s the star of his own life and I’m the minor character. And fair enough too.

“It’s not on a jetty, but I’m going to give it a jetty sort of look. Ropes and anchors and … buckets, that sort of stuff.” A flash of uncertainty crossed his face. He has no idea what he’s doing.

“Sounds wonderful,” I said. It will be a spectacular failure.

“Yeah, decided it was time to get out of the police force,” he said.

“You’re a
policeman
?” I couldn’t believe it. I’d never seen him in uniform. I thought he was an auditor or an IT consultant or even a librarian. Shouldn’t policemen be forced to disclose their careers to their neighbors? What if I’d casually revealed a crime to him at the letterbox? Offered him an illegal substance?

And there is the matter of Patrick. He’s always threatening to call the police. So melodramatic. Why would the police be interested in what is essentially a private matter between two adults? But still. Technically, I do enter his house without his permission.

“I had no idea you were a policeman,” I said. I couldn’t keep the resentment out of my voice.

“Undercover,” said Jeff. “Pretty stressful. Messes with your head.
Impossible to form a relationship with anyone. I’m not getting any younger. I’m desperate to meet that ‘special lady.’ Want to be a dad one day!”

I did not want to hear that Jeff was desperate to meet that special lady. It was like he’d shared an intimate, slightly revolting sexual secret.

“A nice young family is moving in to my place,” he continued. “Two little kids. Boy and girl. You’ll find them a bit livelier than me.”

And that suddenly seemed to remind him of the sort of neighbors we’d been, and he took an abrupt step backward.

“So,” he said. “I’ve kept you long enough. Just thought I should let you know so you didn’t get a surprise when the movers arrive tomorrow. The young family will be moving in the day after.”

“Best of luck with everything,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said and smiled, and he had an unexpectedly nice, shy smile, and I was filled with a strange, sad regret. I could have been his friend. I could have invited him over for a drink or a coffee. Maybe then he wouldn’t have needed his silly sea change.

Before Patrick, I would have been the sort of person who would have done that. This is all Patrick’s fault.

And now there will be a “nice young family” living next door. My bland little duplex will no longer be my safe haven from other people’s happiness. The thought of having to hear and see this smug family loving each other every day of my life is unbearable and unacceptable. I hate families with one boy and one girl, like a family in a car commercial. It’s so
tidy
. They’re always so pleased with themselves.

I can feel this explosive pressure building in my head. Something has to happen. I have to make something happen. Soon. I’m just not sure what.

When Ellen got home from lunch with her mother and godmothers, she sat on the front step with her bag on her lap. She didn’t want to take the keys out of her bag and open the door to an empty house. She wanted to ring the bell and wait for the sound of slow, shuffling footsteps. Her
grandfather always opened the door with a wary, almost belligerent expression on his face that would vanish when he saw it was her. “She’s here!” he’d call out jubilantly to her grandmother, and he’d open the door wide and Ellen would smell baking.

They’d been dead for over a year, but today for some reason it didn’t seem possible that they weren’t inside. They must have opened that door to her hundreds of times. It didn’t feel like she was just recalling memories. It seemed perfectly reasonable that they were still there, somewhere, on some other plane of existence, and if she just sat here quietly for long enough and really concentrated, she could slip through time or matter or something and rest her head on her grandfather’s shoulder just one more time and see him redden slightly the way he always did whenever she hugged him.

“What’s on your mind, Ellie?” Her grandmother was the only one who had ever called her Ellie. (“I did not, and never would have, named my child ‘Ellie,’” Anne would shudder.)

She longed to tell her grandparents about this new development in her life, that David Greenfield, that strange, enticing name on her birth certificate, was no longer the carefully selected sperm donor of her youth but the “loveliest man her mother had ever known.” It was like hearing that Santa Claus really did exist after all, when you no longer cared or believed in the possibility of magic, when it was just plain confusing.

“That mother of yours.” Her grandmother would shake her head and put the kettle on again. Ellen sighed and smiled. Yes, that’s what this was really all about. She wanted her mother reprimanded for creating this upheaval in her life. Her grandparents were always on her side.

And the reason she wanted her mother reprimanded was just fear. Fear of change. Fear of the unknown. The same fear that caused her grandfather to look wary when he opened the door.
Is that change knocking on my door?

She sighed, took her keys out of her bag and stood up. Her eye was caught by something on the wrought-iron mosaic table near the front door.
Her grandmother had made that table after she’d done a mosaics course. (It wasn’t actually very good. The green and orange rectangles were all out of alignment. Apparently the teacher had kept scolding her grandmother for talking too much during class.)

A book had been placed upright in the center of the table, carefully displayed like it was for sale in a bookshop. There was a pink camellia flower lying diagonally next to it.

An icy thumb caressed Ellen’s spine. It was the book she’d lent Saskia. She’d returned it, as promised. Ellen picked up the book and flicked through the pages. No note. Just the creepy, careful way it was displayed. And the flower. What did the flower mean?

“Is this the hypnotherapy place?” A voice interrupted her thoughts.

Ellen jumped and gave a startled, girly shriek.

“Oh! I’m
so
sorry to frighten you like that!” A man in his late forties or early fifties with a humble, apologetic look on his face stood at the bottom of the porch stairs looking up at her. He was carrying a notebook with a pen carefully clipped to the side, and wearing a business shirt that appeared two sizes too big for him, without a tie. He looked like a man running late for his new Bible study group.

Ellen pressed her hand to her chest to calm her thumping heart.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was just very deep in thought.” She smiled and held out her hand as she walked down the steps to meet him. “This is definitely the right place. You’re Alfred, right? Alfred Boyle. I’m Ellen.”

Alfred was a new client who had found her on the Internet and e-mailed a few weeks back to ask for written confirmation of her pricing. He’d said in his e-mail that he was a partner in an accounting firm and that he “required help improving his public speaking skills in a professional setting.”

As Ellen opened the front door for him and led him up the stairs, she glanced around hoping for a fleeting glimpse of her grandparents (what would they have to say about Saskia?), but the house was empty, and no
matter how hard she sniffed, hoping for the scents of her grandmother’s baking, all she could smell was the Thai chicken curry she’d made the night before.

She left the book and the camellia flower on the hall table to think about later.

E
llen, my dear. You are looking well.”

“Thank you, Flynn.”

Flynn Halliday bent to brush his cheek against hers.

It was a month since Ellen had returned from Noosa and she was attending the regular local chapter meeting of the Australian Association of Hypnotherapists. Flynn was president and Ellen was treasurer. They ran the meetings in a small room at a local community center, and Flynn and Ellen had arrived half an hour early to set up the room.

“How have you been?” asked Flynn, as they dragged tables and chairs into a horseshoe shape. “Any news?”

Ellen hesitated. She was feeling guilty. She always felt guilty around Flynn, because she felt like she’d let him down in many ways.

She’d known him since she was in her early twenties. He’d employed her for many years in his hypnotherapy business as an assistant, a trainee therapist and finally a hypnotherapist. He’d wanted her to go into partnership with him, and she knew he’d been very hurt when she decided to go out on her own.