Where Have You Been? (7 page)

‘You spend far too much time worrying about other people's problems, Ed,' his mother says now. ‘You'll wear yourself out. I know what I'm talking about, believe you me.'

Ed, on the other hand, doesn't know what she's talking about and isn't sure that he wants to. He tries diversion. Flattery. ‘God, this is good gravy, Mum. Susan uses packet stuff, but it's just not the same, is it?'

His mother's face lightens. ‘These modern girls just can't cut the mustard when it comes to cooking, can they?' Her smile is coy, almost a smirk. ‘Perhaps I should write out a recipe for her.'

Ed is vaguely ashamed of his disloyalty, but it has had the desired effect.

‘Two potatoes, Ed?' his mother asks brightly. ‘More gravy?'

Ed is not told the truth about Karen until two weeks before the wedding and he is so hurt by Susan's behaviour, the confected story – a lie! – her humiliating lack of trust in him, that he considers (only fleetingly, it's true) calling the whole thing off.

They have been flat hunting – unsuccessfully. All they can afford (if they are to remain in the beach-side suburbs of their childhood) with their combined student allowances and Ed's pitiful paycheque, are dark and dirty cockroach-infested studio apartments. Ed's father has offered to convert their double garage into a self-contained flat and though Ed is becoming gradually more inclined to accept the offer, Susan remains stubbornly, and to Ed's mind unreasonably, opposed.

‘But it looks like we mightn't have any other options, Susy,' he says. They are sitting in a seedy cafe on Manly's Corso, drinking cheap coffee and arguing.

‘There are plenty of options, Ed.'

‘Yeah, like what?'

‘We could get share accommodation near college. We don't have to live around here, y'know. We don't have to live near your family.'

Ed ignores the suggestion and goes straight to the heart of her remark.

‘I don't see why you always have to bring my family into it, Susy. Sometimes I think you just don't like my family. You don't, do you? Why not admit it?' Susan says nothing, stirs sugar into her coffee.

‘Anyway,' he adds sulkily, ‘It's not just my family. Your parents live here too. Surely you want to stay nearby?'

‘No, Ed.' Susan ignores his last comment, speaks softly, deliberately. ‘There's nothing for me to admit. It's not that I don't like your family. It's your mother – who doesn't like me.' She smiles, briefly. ‘Your mother thinks I'm not good
enough – not clever enough, respectable enough, or even pretty enough for her little darling.' Ed is suddenly ashamed. Tries to take her hand. ‘Oh, Suse,' he begins, but she shakes him off.

‘No, listen Ed. Your mother thinks I'm not good enough and that my family's worse. Don't think I don't get what's behind all those innocent little questions about Gillian and Dad, those sly comments about my mother. And the way she always brings up stories about missing teenagers: “I expect the stepfather's murdered her.” I don't know why she doesn't come straight out and accuse Dad of murdering Karen.'

‘Accuse your father of
what,
Suse?' Ed is completely bewildered by her digression. ‘What
are
you going on about? What have missing teenagers got to do with your dad? Why would she think your father murdered Karen? She died of meningitis. Didn't she?'

But Susan has her head down, is staring into her half-empty cup of coffee, is studiously avoiding his eyes.

Ed clamps his hand around her wrist, shakes it to get her attention. ‘Susan. What's going on?' He feels a strange knotting sensation in his bowels. ‘Did something happen to Karen, something you haven't told me about?' He is surprised that his voice sounds so normal. His throat is unaccountably tight and it's an effort to breathe normally. ‘Susan, is there something you haven't told me?'

Ed weeps a little when she tells him, feels his eyes fill and has to dab at them with his coffee-stained serviette. He is saddened not just by the enormity, the tragedy, of the particular events – the story itself seems half-familiar – the teenage girl missing on formal night, the searches, the uncertainty, the ultimate presumption of her death in some brutal manner. This is all pathetic and worthy of tears, but it is the manner of Susan's telling that really discomposes him. The way she sits up straight in her chair and looks him in the eyes as she speaks,
the detached, matter-of-fact manner in which she relates the story. The way Susan shrugs when the tale is told and says: ‘It was a long time ago, Ed. I was very young. I can truly barely remember her now. It's not important anyway,' she concludes. ‘Not any more. Not to us.'

Not important! His brave girl.

It's only later – lying alone that night in his lumpy childhood bed, unable to sleep – that Ed wonders why it is that Susan hasn't told him before this. He can understand, excuse even, the uncomplicated, frequently told lie, proffered at the outset – when they were little more than acquaintances, really, when the relationship was tentative, its future uncertain. But why hadn't she revised the story earlier? Let him know before this? Why had she kept up the lie? He finds it hard to believe Susan's claim that it doesn't matter. Her sister's disappearance, or as Susan insists, her death, was surely a defining moment of her childhood, hardly incidental. It had, after all, led to her parents' separation, her mother's decline, her madness. He wonders too whether such an omission, such evasion, such an unwillingness to share, should be considered treacherous, traitorous (or is he being melodramatic, oversensitive?), a betrayal of their commitment. Of their love.

And just before he floats off into dreams of floods and tidal waves, Ed wonders – and this is the first and indeed only moment of doubt that he will experience for many years – Ed wonders whether his mother might not be entirely wrong, wonders whether she might not have her reasons. Wonders what it is exactly he's getting himself into: marrying Susan.

Thinking about it later, Ed has to admit that his mother (why is it so frequently the way?) is right. He
is
worried. Nobody has actually asked Ed what he thinks, how he feels, not even
Susan. And why would they? It's not his problem. But if anybody were to ask him how he felt about the situation and Ed were to answer truthfully (which, being Ed, he most probably would. To the best of his ability, anyway), he would have to say that he is not happy, that he feels decidedly unsettled by the turn of events, even anxious, though he's not quite sure why.

So unsettled is he feeling that – and this is unusual, perhaps without precedent – Ed's work is suffering. Though he is getting through each day's appointments, though he is still selling enough to keep Derek and the boys working late most afternoons, though he is not being noticeably inefficient or slapdash, he knows that for the past month or so (since his mother-in-law's death, that shocking will) he has been functioning way below his optimum level, that he is lacking the spark, the taken-for-granted creative impulse that usually drives him. That he is on automatic pilot, so to speak.

These last few days he has left work early. Usually he likes to spend an hour or two in the office every afternoon. Finalising designs, conferring with Derek on the next day's check-measures, double-checking the production plans. But these last few days he has driven straight to Manly, parked the car under what remains of the Norfolk pines and spent an hour or so just watching the surf. He should, he knows, go home: spend the extra time with his children, with his family. But he's not up to that. He needs this time alone, meditating, contemplating. Wondering.

‘Listen to this, Suse.'

They are lying in their first shared bed, in their first shared home – a rented flat in Dee Why. It is past lunchtime and outside it is probably a glorious summer's day, but they
have only been married for three weeks, and are determinedly keeping the curtains drawn, the telephone unplugged.

‘What?' Susan is lying on her side, tracing dreamy patterns on Ed's back. Ed is reading. Ed is always reading.

‘Listen,' he says. He reads aloud.
‘Often trauma experienced in childhood is never resolved. Adults, in a well-intentioned effort to shield the child from what they see as unnecessary pain, frequently fail to properly discuss those issues that can have a serious and deleterious effect on the child. Issues such as death, divorce, family dissension. These may be repressed by the child – who has no way to make sense of them – only to resurface in adulthood as depression or unspecified anger or violence.'
He turns around to face her. Keeps reading.

‘But it is never too late to begin remedial treatment. Talking through such issues, even in adulthood, can help to alleviate symptoms of depression.'

Ed marks the page with his finger. ‘You see, Susy. We really ought to talk about it. If you don't, it could come back one day – resurface – take over your life.'

Susan prises the book out of his hand, drops it over the side of the bed.

‘Susy! I was reading that.'

She pushes him back against the pillows.

‘Ed,' she says. ‘I know all about that stuff. I've read all that psychobabble. Had to read it. I'm a nurse, remember.'

‘I know you know, but I really can't understand why you won't talk about it. It isn't right. It isn't healthy.'

She straddles him, pins his arms above his head.

‘Unhealthy, eh? Let's play doctors, then.'

‘Susy,' he says, ‘why won't you be serious? I really think you need to, to confront ... to confront this ... the ... past.' He's grinning now and his breath's coming fast and shallow.

‘Oh, I am serious Ed. You know I am. But first I think we need to confront
your
pain.' She lowers her haunches,
tightens her grip on his wrists. ‘You just tell her where it hurts, Ed, and Sister Sue'll fix it for you.'

He doesn't spend much time out in the factory these days. Years ago, when he was at high school and needed the cash, his father had given him a part-time job: three afternoons a week and on Saturday mornings he'd worked in the factory as a general dogsbody. His elder brother Derek had already left school and was part way through his apprenticeship. At first Ed had just been given tasks like sweeping and tidying the benches, or had been sent out to bring back the men's smoko orders – bacon and egg rolls, custard tarts, bottles of Coke, cigarettes. It hadn't taken too long before he'd been given more responsible tasks: the foreman, a patient middle-aged man, had taught him to use the edgebander, then to nail up a cupboard, and finally, despite his mother's protestations, he'd been allowed to cut up board on the beam saw. He was methodical and conscientious, and managed the work easily. But he knew that he didn't want this – the endless menial tasks, cutting, gluing, screwing, the sawdust, the polyurethane fumes, the vulgar lunchtime conversations ... Ed had other plans for his life. Big plans. And they didn't involve being a trained ape in his father's factory.

It had been Susan who'd persuaded Ed that it was an opportunity not to be lost. He'd been working for a sportswear company in the city, running their PR and marketing. It had been an interesting enough job, with opportunities to move up and away – the company had offices in the UK and Malaysia – but somehow he'd become bored. ‘There's nothing substantial, nothing
real
for me to do,' he said, ‘It's too big – I'm just a cog in a wheel.'

She'd made the suggestion, initially, as a kind of a joke; ‘Why not work for your dad, Ed? Derek seems to enjoy it.' And initially Ed had taken it as a joke – just imagine him, Ed – swapping his Country Road Workwear for KingGees and steel-capped boots, sitting out with the blokes in the dusty factory. It was after a conversation with his father – who'd bemoaned the way the kitchen industry and the market itself had changed, that he'd begun to think into it seriously, to see the opportunities and possibilities on offer.

‘You can't even hire people these days, Ed, to do the measures. They want new cars, want twenty per cent commission, want to be called designers. Want bloody letters after their name. They're all wankers – think they're bloody architects. And then the bloody architects are even worse. Jesus. Ten years ago you'd just turn up with a tape measure and a scrap a paper. Now all the women want to gasbag about colours, and finishes; want to know which way the shadows of their fucken door handles will fall at particular times of the day, or whether they can get a consistently coloured timber that looks like plastic but isn't, how much the new kitchen will increase their market value, whether the new kitchen will help little Henry get his place at Kings ... I don't know if I can handle it much longer, son.'

Ed had thought about it for a few weeks. He'd spoken to Susan, discussed his ideas with Derek, then rung his father. ‘You want to do what? You want to work here? In the factory? You?'

Ed had explained that, no, he really had no desire to work in the factory, but he was convinced he had a guaranteed way to help his father get out of the sales side of the business, and to increase productivity and profitability at the same time. It would be a win-win situation.

It had taken his father a few weeks to get used to the idea, and several years to stop laughing at Ed and his flaky
theories, until eventually, inevitably, the company's profits did begin to increase. Ed knows he can't take full credit for this: the Sydney housing boom had certainly contributed to their success, along with the more recent renovation madness that had swept the suburbs. Ed's innovations have been significant, of course: he has made sure they've kept pace with the boom, that they've made best use of new technology; they have invested in up-to-the-minute computer design programs, the latest spray equipment, edgers, saws, cutting-edge hinges and drawer runners. Their presentation and marketing procedures have been significantly enhanced and streamlined, their terminology has been updated: customers have metamorphosed into clients; salesmen and women have become designers (as much for the benefit of the clients' egos as the designers'); cupboards are discrete storage units; benchtops are work surfaces. But Ed is convinced that the major factor in their transformation from back-street budget cupboard factory to boutique bespoke kitchen design and manufactuary, has been his insistence (in the face of considerable scorn) on the development of a ‘kitchen philosophy' – a coherent statement of their corporate mission. Ed's revolutionary ‘idea of the kitchen' – the recognition that the kitchen is not just an assortment of little white boxes, but the symbolic centre – the heart – of all family activity and harmony – now informs every facet of Middleton and Sons dealings – from manufacturing the most humble refuse and recycling containment station, to advertorial in glossy architectural digests.