Trust (34 page)

There was a momentary blank, and then he had a lightning-quick image of Monica, the redhead with the luscious arse. ‘Sydney?’ he said. ‘Right. The developer’s PR person interviewed me at the hotel. I can show you the story she wrote for their corporate newsletter. Nothing happened. I’ve never laid eyes on her again. Susanna, I do not have a girlfriend.’

His wife’s face suddenly crumpled. Gerry saw that he was off the hook and the adrenalin flooding through him kicked into triumph.
I’ve won!
Watching her struggling for control, Gerry prepared himself to accept her tearful apology, and rested a solicitous hand on her bowed shoulder.

She wrenched herself away. ‘Don’t lie to me,’ she snarled. ‘She was with you in New York. I found your cute little bag of toys.’

Gerry’s skin, all over his body, tightened, but he was a good liar. His face never gave him away. ‘Toys? Susanna, I don’t know what’s going on here. This is getting very weird.’

She glared, and he looked back at her with concerned innocence, while assessing his options as fast as the shock, and the alcohol in his system, would allow. The game was suddenly knife-edge – but he could bluff this out. He knew the toy bag was safely locked in his filing cabinet under the desk in his office. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘A green silk bag? From Bali?’ Susanna sounded dangerously calm again. ‘Full of – sex toys.’ The way she said it sounded prissy, a bit lame, and she pressed her mouth down hard in dissatisfaction.

Okay, fuck. So, she’d found the toy bag.
Fuck.
Could she have unpacked the suitcase that day, after all? Adrenalin pumped faster through his system.
But she doesn’t have it now
. Therefore, no evidence, and if she’d only seen it that once, in the traumatised condition she’d have been in —

‘Honey, I don’t know what you thought you saw,’ he said, shaking his head, puzzled, worried. ‘I’m no more familiar with sex toys than you are. Yes, I do have a green bag. You mean the one with a bunch of little pockets round the inside?’ he asked. She nodded. ‘Yeah. I use it to keep my tech gadgets in – USB hub, connection cables. Stuff like that.’

Susanna made a rolling motion with her hand, for more information.
What else? What could feasibly be mistaken for a sex toy?
‘iPod extras …’ he offered. He could feel his mind running out of track. ‘I dunno. Spare batteries … I’ll bring it home from the office and show you, if you like.’

‘That’s all?’ She sounded disappointed. She walked back over to the kitchen bench, looked at the glass she’d filled earlier, picked it up, glugged down the water, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘That’s the best you can do? You really do think I’m a moron, don’t you?’

She raised the arm holding the now empty Duralex glass behind her head, like a softball pitcher. Instinctively, Gerry ducked, but she wasn’t aiming for him. The heavy glass hurtled through the air and struck the big window at the far end of the kitchen, the one that looked out onto the backyard. The window shattered with a sound like a rifle shot.

‘
Holy shit!
’ yelled Gerry, spinning around to see. Another huge jolt of adrenalin made his heart feel like it had suddenly doubled in size. Cool night air rushed into the room. ‘Jesus fucking Christ! Susanna, have you gone
mad
?’

‘That’s how fragile our marriage is,’ she said. She was holding her own forearms in a kind of monkey grip; she was shaking.

‘You’re
nuts
,’ he said loudly, going over to the window. Though very little glass had come into the room, the brick paving outside was covered in shards. ‘You have lost your mind!’

‘Why would your iPod need condoms, Gerry?’

No evidence, she has no evidence
. ‘I am not going to indulge this madness. You need help, Susanna.’

‘No,
we
need help, Gerry. If this marriage isn’t already shattered into a million fucking pieces, that is. We need to see a counsellor, and you need to start telling the truth.’

‘I can
show
you that bag,’ he shouted in a fury, convinced now by his own righteous shock. ‘And I’m telling you, there are
no
condoms and no sex toys in it. You are
sick
, blaming men for every bad thing that’s ever happened in the world. Blaming
me
.’

She looked at him in a way he’d never seen her look before. With disgust. ‘I’m sleeping in Stella-Jean’s room,’ she said, and left the room.

THIRTY

‘It could be post-traumatic stress,’ Rory suggested. ‘Don’t you think? From the car crash?’

I wish
, thought Seb. He rolled his head from side to side,
no
, on the pillow. ‘That was a month ago.’

‘So what? Seb, a month is nothing, to get over something like that. And it’s
ongoing
: your shoulder, your tennis, your sis—’

‘
I know
,’ he interrupted loudly, and then repeated in a much quieter voice, ‘I know.’

‘Oh, mate, I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘No,
I’m
sorry, Rors. I didn’t mean to yell at you.’

She moved closer and manoeuvered one arm under his neck, pulling his head across to rest on her shoulder. The way she offered
him
comfort; he didn’t deserve such a sweet girlfriend. ‘Sorry,’ he murmured again, turning his face to touch his lips to her inner shoulder, and she stroked his hair.

‘Anyway,’ she continued after a while, ‘I
do
think it’s got something to do with stress. The nerve damage, too, that’s got to be affecting you.’

‘The nerve damage affects my ability to get my arm up, Rors, not my dick. Don’t laugh!’ he said, when Rory sniggered. ‘Anyway, they can fix the nerve damage, if I have another operation. Or it might improve on its own.’

‘Another operation, that’s another stress factor,’ she pointed out.

He moved his sore shoulder restlessly, and sat up, looking around at the stuff in her older brother Tony’s bedroom. It was the first time he’d stayed the night at Rory’s house since they were little kids; her parents were in Townsville for the weekend, settling Tony into university there. Seb and Rory and their friends had spent the evening watching TV, eating pizzas, playing video games, arguing about bands – and it was all cool, till the others left. Then Seb got nervous, anticipating what would happen in her brother Tony’s queen-size bed, where she’d suggested they could spend the night. Rory would lead, and he would follow – but only to that certain point, and then his dick would go no further. He wished he hadn’t been right.

‘I feel like some ice-cream,’ he said. ‘You got any ice-cream?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

There’s something wrong with me
, Seb thought as they sat at the Fengs’ kitchen table digging into huge bowls of ice-cream.
I’m not really traumatised by the car crash, the way I should be.
He’d hardly even cried. And there was another reason he knew it wasn’t post-traumatic stress that was stopping him getting it on with Rory.

A week ago, he’d watched his own fingers texting Andrew, like they had a mind of their own.
Wanna catch up?
They’d gone out, they’d had a great time with other friends of Andrew’s at a club in the city with a fantastic DJ. Sitting in Andrew’s car at the end of the night, the two of them, just talking – and Seb had leaned across and kissed him. He’d been wanting to do it all night; he’d even got Andrew to park right up the other end of the street from home.
That kiss
, like no other kiss he’d ever had or imagined. And then he freaked and said, ‘I have to go!’, and jumped out of the car and ran off. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it. And every time he did, he got hard in a nanosecond. And if he was by himself when he imagined what might’ve —

‘Seb?’

What?
he asked Rory with his eyebrows, since his mouth was full of ice-cream.

‘Have you ever, um, considered your sexuality?’

His guts flopped over like a fish. He took his sweet time softening and swallowing that ice-cream. ‘How do you mean, “considered my sexuality”?’ he asked finally, trying to make it sound like it was something that had never even remotely occurred to him.

‘Just that,’ she said. ‘No biggie.’ But he knew her just as well as she knew him, and both of them knew it
was
a biggie.

‘I’ve considered
sex
,’ he said. ‘Is that the same thing?’ It was just something to say; he hoped she wouldn’t ask what it meant, because he didn’t even know.

‘I don’t think so.’ Rory shook her head. She wasn’t accusing him of anything, she was
worried
about him, he could see it in her face, hear it in her voice.

He chased the last bits of runny ice-cream round the bowl, and put his spoon down. ‘I don’t want to consider my sexuality, Rors. I just wanna be able to have a good time. With you.’ And suddenly, horribly, he felt like he might be about to start crying. ‘You’re a really great person, Aurora Feng, you know that?’ And then, bloody hell, he
did
start crying.

She jumped up and came around to hug him.
Stop crying
, Seb ordered himself, screwing his face up hard.
Stop.
He picked up a paper serviette and blew his nose on it. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered.

‘You wanna talk about it?’ Rory asked tenderly.

Seb gave a shuddering exhalation. How he wished he could say
yes.

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I just want to go to sleep now. I feel buggered.’

They did sleep, for a while, but after a few hours Seb was awake again. He lay there in the darkness of the unfamiliar room beside Rory, his good and lovely friend, thinking his unhappy thoughts. Ben Folds Five’s
Brick
, the saddest song in the world, was on a loop in his brain, repeating and repeating the lines about finding someone and feeling more alone than ever before.

When he was a kid it had all been so simple: hit the ball, have a laugh with your mates, do okay in school, give your sister a biff when Mum wasn’t looking, watch sport on TV with Dad. And then all those fantasies of being a famous doubles star, with Clarence. Now he could see real life, adult life, stretching out before him, and it was a freaking maze of traps and danger. Lying to everyone, terrified of the truth, tortured by the constant risk of being found out. And he
would
be found out, and then he’d be an outcast. Alone, for the rest of his life.

Did he doze? Maybe. When he opened his eyes again the quality of light there in Tony Feng’s bedroom had changed, and he could hear the first notes of birdsong outside. He looked at Rory: still sleeping, curled up around a pillow. Just watching her, Seb felt guilty. He couldn’t keep lying there. Stealthy as a thief, he slid out of bed and gathered up his clothes. He dressed in the living room, wrote Rory a note saying he’d remembered he had an early morning training session
(liar)
and quietly left the house.

It was six or seven kilometres to his place. At the end of the Fengs’ block, Seb did a few stretches and then began to run, a steady jog, then a short sprint, and back to jogging. His bad arm lagged and tried to droop, and he tried not to let it. There was a cool tang in the air, and some of the trees he passed were starting to change colour. Magpies warbled. Everything was so beautiful and so familiar, and yet everything had changed so much and it would never be the same again. He didn’t think he could bear it.

Gerry, having slept badly alone, heard Susanna get up at dawn. He listened to the muted, familiar sounds of her making tea in the kitchen; she would bring a cup in to him soon, as she always did, whether he drank it or not. No doubt she’d clean up all that broken glass first, though; she wouldn’t want the evidence of her craziness staring her in the face.

He was still lying in bed, anticipating her entry, her ashen apology, when he heard the front door close, and then the sound of her car backing down the drive.
What?
He jumped up, and reached the window just in time to see her driving away down the street.

What the hell?
Maybe there was no milk in the fridge for the tea, and she’d gone to get some? He went swiftly to the kitchen, which felt and sounded weirdly different with the smashed window letting in the air. Nothing from the night before, including the broken glass, had been touched, and there was plenty of milk in the fridge.

Gerry showered, dressed, made his very much-needed cup of espresso. Drank it, glaring at the space where the window used to be, thinking about how hard it would be to get a glazier to come on a long weekend. Still Susanna wasn’t back. Was it possible she was already sitting at Stella-Jean’s bedside, drawing more of those hideous scenes? She had her mobile on most of the time in there these days – it wasn’t like the ICU, where the no-mobiles rule had been strictly enforced – but he was buggered if he was going to call her.

By the time he’d finished his coffee, he couldn’t stand it any longer, and quickly swept up what little glass there was inside before going outside to deal with the worst of it.
Bloody hell, how can there be this much glass from that one window?
He set to work, furious at being landed with this mess. Not like it was of
his
making.

‘What happened?’ said Seb’s amazed voice, behind him. Gerry was so startled he almost dropped the jagged shard he’d just picked up.

‘What does it look like?’ he growled, not turning round.

‘Broken window. But how’d it get broken?’

‘How?’ Gerry dropped the shard into the cardboard box beside him and stood up. For a moment he was disoriented: Seb’s T-shirt was dark with patches of sweat and he was breathing pretty hard; how come he’d been out running already? No, that’s right, he’d been staying at his girlfriend’s last night.
Well, welcome home, son!
With a certain satisfaction Gerry said sternly, ‘Your mother threw a glass through it. One of those Duralex ones.’ He pointed at the evidence: the heavy tumbler still lying, unbroken, in the parched herb garden.