Life Before Read online

  ‘They’ll be able to tell you more at the hospital. While we don’t believe he’s in any immediate danger, he’s not in the best shape right at the minute.’

  She took a deep breath, felt a sense of foreboding creep in. Something niggled at her. ‘You said you found my name and address? Scott and I haven’t seen each other for a long time.’

  ‘He had his home address and a key on him. We went to his flat this morning where we found your info.’

  ‘Really?’ She regarded them silently for a moment. ‘This address?’

  The woman looked curious. ‘Yes. Is there a problem?’

  ‘No.’ Lori shook her head vaguely, half smiled. Not a problem, she wanted to say. Just a huge mistake. Maybe that was a problem? The officers went on, offering information about the accident, the scene, but she found it hard to concentrate on what they were saying, her mind drifting to her brother and how this could have happened. Or, more precisely, how she had never imagined that something like this could happen. But, of course, she had known the possibilities. She just hadn’t chosen to recognise them. She thought of the kids, covering their eyes and saying ‘you can’t see me’. What was that? Naivety, or simply wilful ignorance?

  ‘Are you all right?’ The male cop speaking now, the one whose name she hadn’t caught, a small frown on his face. ‘Do you want some water? I can make a cup of tea if you like. Or coffee.’

  ‘No, no. It’s just, like I said, I haven’t seen him for a long time. It’s weird, that’s all.’

  He nodded. She was sure he’d seen plenty of weird. This wouldn’t even count as weird from his perspective. Just another routine notification. Another disconnected family. Nothing whatsoever to see here.

  ‘The Major Collision Investigation Unit will be looking into this. They may want to speak to you,’ he went on. ‘There are a number of questions, such as where he worked.’

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t tell you anything. I have no idea about him or what he does.’

  ‘What did he do before, when you last saw him?’

  ‘He didn’t have a job back then. He was a kid. Eighteen. Still at school. He liked cars.’

  The cop raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I really know nothing. I didn’t even know he was in Melbourne.’ I didn’t know he was still alive, she might well have added. ‘Where does he live?’

  ‘In Prahran,’ said Constable Leonard.

  A couple of train stops. That close. ‘Is that where he was hit? Where the accident happened?’

  ‘No, in the city. Top end of Flinders Lane.’

  ‘Do you know … ?’

  ‘No witnesses that we know of as yet. Might be some CCTV footage. There’s a bit around the area. Waiting on that.’

  The two officers got up. The man gave her a card and contact information and Constable Leonard called a goodbye to the children, who managed a half-hearted glance in her direction from the mesmeric screen. Lori followed them to the front door, walking behind them up the hallway. In the confined space she suddenly became aware of them as intruders in her house, the bulk of them, their uniforms, the cluster of paraphernalia at their waists. She sensed them making assessments as they passed the bedrooms with unmade beds and her studio with its substantial desk facing the window—not disordered, but covered with piles of paper, jars of pens and brushes, a shiny computer monitor.

  From her bedroom she watched them walk away along the footpath, then waited for the few minutes it took before their car glided past again. The male officer was now driving, Constable Leonard in the passenger seat, her head turned towards the house. Lori swivelled back against the wall behind an open wardrobe door, uncertain if she’d been seen and wondering, even as she did it, why it would matter. She wasn’t even sure why she was there. Perhaps she simply needed to see them go, see them gone from her sphere. Only wishing that they could take the information they brought with them back too. Banish the knowledge to the place it had been for the past twenty-plus years. For a moment she stayed pressed against the wall then she turned and pushed the door closed, her head following her hand to rest on the cool laminated surface, and she let out a slow, jagged breath.

  It was close to ten when she finally bundled the children into the car and drove to school. The implicit promise of a day off (now clearly denied) had spoiled their mood, and both sat glumly in the back looking stupefied from the effects of too much morning TV. They drove along tree-lined local streets, through the car-congested shopping strip and on to the main road, where thankfully at least the peak-hour traffic had abated, before turning into the street that led down to school. At home they hadn’t mentioned the police again. It was as though, when the kids looked away from the screen, the two officers had simply disappeared in the same way that the actors had. But in the car, perched on her booster seat with nothing better to do than stare out the window, something came back to Sophie.

  ‘Are you in trouble, Mummy?’ she asked.

  ‘What? No, darling. Not at all.’

  ‘So why did the police come?’

  ‘They wanted to ask me about someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Someone they believed I knew.’

  ‘Your brother?’ Sophie had obviously heard more than she thought.

  ‘Oh sweetheart, I don’t think the police … I think they made a mistake.’ In the rear-vision mirror, she could see Sophie mulling this statement over, her face mobilised by thought, trying to make sense of her mother’s response.

  She summoned her conspirator’s voice. ‘Hey, what about a visit to Game On after school? Daddy has to work late. Again! We don’t have to come back early.’

  Cody sparked up, perhaps sensing her overenthusiasm, the very oddness of the suggestion. ‘Can we get burgers?’

  ‘And chips too?’ added Sophie, in on the act.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Let’s go the whole hog.’

  ‘Cool!’ shrieked Cody, who proceeded to babble, filling the space with amiable non sequiturs, unable to believe his good luck at the prospect of games and normally forbidden foods on a weeknight.

  At school she parked and walked with the kids to the office to get late passes before delivering them to their classrooms. When she returned to the car, she sat for a few minutes staring at the empty playground, glad finally of a moment alone. A cigarette. That would do the trick. If only she still smoked. What was it that cigarettes did? Sedate and stimulate, depending on how you smoked them. Slow drags as opposed to frantic puffing. If she had a cigarette right then, she thought she’d go for both. Something like Dutch courage; that’s what she needed now. She checked the car clock. An hour to get across town. An hour to get back before the bell sounded again at three-thirty. Enough time.

  Going to a hospital—any hospital—was a challenge. There was nothing Lori liked about hospitals. The look of them. The smell of them. She hadn’t been to one since she’d had the kids, and even then she’d gone reluctantly. She’d wanted a home birth for Sophie, but Jason had been resistant. He worried for her, wanted to protect her. ‘It’s an unnecessary risk,’ he’d said, shaking his head in frustration. (She’d wondered if he might add, ‘For a family as unlucky as yours.’) Then, joking, cajolling, ‘Come on, just for the sake of a few days in a sterile green room? It’s no big deal, is it?’ He couldn’t comprehend her aversion, although when he pressed her on it she could see some glimmer of understanding on his face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he’d added, not an apology in the end, but a sign of his implacability. He saw them, hospitals, as places of safety, but she saw them as places of suffering. Her feelings so ingrained that even the joy of two healthy newborns hadn’t erased her sense of foreboding on stepping through the front door of St James.

  If the lobby had seemed depressing, with its eighties ice-blue leather couches and its kiosk display of flaccid metallic balloons, the seventh floor, where ICU was housed, felt like something from a sci-fi film. After negotiating a security door she’d followed a short corridor into an open space where a
panoptical nurses’ station looked onto a dozen glass-fronted rooms. The place appeared freshly-minted, unworn. Walls, beds, cupboards, machines: everything white except the floors, which she noted were a pale striated grey.

  A woman at the nurses’ station took her across the space to a partially curtained room on the opposite side of the ward to where she had entered. The woman instructed Lori to put on a paper gown and wash her hands with antiseptic lotion from a dispenser on the adjacent wall. She rapped gently on the glass door and a nurse appeared, slid it open and beckoned Lori inside.

  The nurse, a no-nonsense woman with cropped dark hair, introduced herself as Rebecca. She said this was her second shift with Scott. She’d been there when he came in.

  ‘Has anyone talked to you about your brother’s condition yet?’ she asked.

  Lori shook her head. ‘No.’

  Rebecca turned slightly to regard Scott, and Lori turned too, her eyes skimming the contours of the room, taking in the monitors, the tubes and leads, the elevated bed—but somehow avoiding looking directly at the body under the draped sheet—before coming to rest back on the nurse.

  ‘As you might be able to see, Scott has some bruising, a few cuts. There are no internal bodily injuries. Nothing broken. Apparently he was wearing a helmet, but still …’ Rebecca inclined her head a little, implying that she couldn’t say whether this had worked in his favour or not. ‘His brain has suffered a traumatic assault, and there has been a bleed, which is being monitored. On the positive side his responses are generally good. I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more. You’ll need to talk to the doctors for a fuller picture. The neurologist, especially, will be helpful. We’ll arrange a meeting for you as soon as possible.’

  ‘So, you don’t know how he’ll be? If he’ll recover? Or how quickly?’

  Rebecca’s face was sympathetic. ‘Brain injuries are difficult to predict, and to understand. As time goes on we’ll know better. I would say we’re cautiously optimistic, but I don’t want to lead you on. It’s very early days.’

  Looking at the nurse, Lori felt a sudden sense of panic, a terrible uncertainty. ‘I’m not sure what I can do.’

  Rebecca smiled gently, taking the query at face value. ‘The difficult thing is that there really isn’t a lot you can do. Sit for a while. Talk to him.’ She pointed to the far corner, past a boxlike machine that was most probably a respirator. ‘You can bring that chair closer if you like.’

  Lori nodded. Of course, she could, should, do the obvious. She was here, had made the choice to come, and that was enough for now. She didn’t need to overthink anything, worry about a big picture. She walked around the bed, pulled the chair forward under the window, where narrow strips of natural light entered between half-closed slats, and sat down.

  Beside her, Scott lay disconcertingly still. She could have believed he was dead except for the rise and fall of his chest, almost imperceptible under the hospital gown and sheet. These last few minutes she’d avoided looking at him because she had anticipated that the sight of him would be overwhelming, but her first reaction was that he didn’t look quite real. It was something about him being so inert, his face slightly slack. He could have been a modern art installation; some kind of conceptual curiosity.

  ‘Can he hear me?’ she asked.

  Rebecca, who had returned to the monitor, glanced over at her. ‘We believe so. Although it’s doubtful he’ll remember anything later. These early days always seem to be lost to patients. We do feel though that they respond to voice, to touch. You can’t underestimate human contact in the healing process.’ Rebecca made a final tap on the keyboard, smiled across at her. ‘Listen, I’m going to leave you for a while. There’s a buzzer there if you need anything.’ She pointed to a red button just to the side of the bed.

  With Rebecca gone, there was a sudden quiet in the room, and for a while all Lori was aware of were the small sounds that interrupted it. An indecipherable hum like a fridge running, occasional voices, the syncopated squeak of a trolley wheel from the ward outside. She’d had no real idea of what to expect before she got here. What would she see? How would she feel? What struck her most now, apart from the unreality of it all, was how little Scott had changed, or perhaps her idea of how he might possibly have changed was so close to the way he actually appeared. Familiar, yet unfamiliar. There was the essence of the boy, but the image of a man—a man she did not know—that lay like a semi-transparent veil over him. His hair, still golden blond, dulled only by a hint of grey, cut short close to his skull, revealed a face that had changed little apart from the lines around his eyes and mouth. He had always been good-looking. She’d forgotten that. How the girls loved him, loved that impossible surfer-boy appeal (especially exotic given they lived nowhere near the sea) and his strong, spare physique. He was still lean, she could see, almost to the point of gaunt, but she could tell from the shape of his shoulders and arms under his gown that he had a force to him too, that he worked hard somewhere, did something physical.

  A hint of bruising on his cheek and a thin gash along the side of his scalp above his ear were the only visible signs of what had happened. What his real injuries were, remained to be seen. Such a mysterious organ, the brain. Like an iceberg, so much invisible, unknowable. She thought of who he’d been all those years ago. Loose, carefree. Funny. She’d forgotten that too. What had he become, she mused. Who had he been all this time when she hadn’t been looking? She knew she should talk to him. But what could she say? Once there had been blame to apportion, rage to hurl. Now she no longer had a sense of that. Who knew what the facts of them being here together like this meant. What was she to make of the situation? Scott lying unconscious here in this bed, unknown to her in almost every way. She a wife, a mother, but in her mind no longer a sister. Not a sister for a very long time now.

  She looked down on him, saw his breath and the pulse at his neck. A wave welled inside her, a surge of emotion that took her by surprise. She felt her lip quiver and pressed her teeth together as though she could set her face like a dam and stop the tears. Before she’d had time to even consider what she was doing, she reached out and laid her hand on his arm, felt his warmth under her fingers. When was it she’d touched him last? She struggled to remember. Perhaps because for so long she had simply sought to forget.

  March 1993

  Northam

  The one thing that Pam Green had realised living in Northam, which subtracting her four years at boarding school in Melbourne amounted to almost thirty-eight now, was that, in essence, it wasn’t too different from anywhere else. There was a myth abroad about country towns, that they were somehow better, more wholesome places than the greater metropolises to which they always seemed to play second fiddle. But Pam believed in another reality: they were a microcosm. Not that she would have used that word to describe them, but she would certainly say they were a cross-section of what you could expect in any larger place. There were people with money, and people who did it hard, go-getters and underachievers, those with kind hearts and others with dark souls. She thought of all the different types you mixed with, at school, through work and business. Crossing paths with almost all of them, at some point at least, was unavoidable. But it had its divides too. Like anywhere, especially as you grew older, people tended to gravitate to others like them. If you lived on the Hill (Northam’s equivalent of establishment—the lawyers, the doctors, the accountants, heaven bloody forbid!) you didn’t socialise with the inhabitants of the Flat, those who lived on the land down below. (Like feudal serfs, she’d heard someone say once, although given half of them were unemployed she wasn’t sure it was an apt analogy.) She thought sometimes this was changing, social mobility being what it was, but essentially she felt there was a divide. Something that set certain sectors of the town apart from each other, separated them into tribes. Forced them to take sides when sides had to be taken.

  It wasn’t that Pam saw any of this as a particular problem. It was simply the way things were. Her reflect
ions on the town were not judgemental, merely evaluative. She would probably never have even bothered to ponder too deeply on life in Northam had it not been for the comments she got from outsiders, those people who told her how they envied her idyllic life. A few of them had even moved here from the larger centres to take advantage of the peace and quiet and what they perceived to be a community more cohesive and nurturing than the one they came from. She could see right off the bat that half of them were going to end up leaving again. It was one thing to live on the edge of the mountains, to enjoy the vistas and inhale the clean, fresh air, but another to have to endure small-town gossip and backbiting, conservative politics and the enmity and suspicion of a community that didn’t believe you could be a part of it until you’d been here at least a generation.

  Pam didn’t have to trouble herself with that. Her own family, the Temples, had lived in and around Northam since the 1850s. Her great-great-grandfather had come for the gold and like so many had found none, or at least not enough to make him wealthy. When he gave up on the idea of instant affluence he managed to acquire a little land in the area, where he ran cattle and sheep and gradually expanded his operations. By the time her father was born, three generations had made a living from the undulating terrain, prospered even, considered themselves local establishment. Her brother, Peter, now ran the farm, a size-able acreage these days, and she had relatives across the district. Her cousin, Hugh, was one of the handful of solicitors in town. Another, Andrew, owned Northam Farm Supplies and, like her, they both lived on the Hill.

  She sometimes wondered what it might be like to live somewhere else, in a place where she was more anonymous. When she first met Mick she had played with the idea of moving to Melbourne, even Sydney, and starting afresh. But leaving her parents, or not having help when she had children, that scared her off. She’d never thought a lot about working, so that wasn’t a factor. As for Mick, he didn’t want to move. He hadn’t grown up in Northam, but was from another town, a little bigger but not dissimilar, across the border, and it felt comfortable to him, he wanted to stay. Unlike many, he’d found a niche, and marrying into a local family had boosted his status sufficiently for him to feel at home. It was 1971 and the old order was starting to crumble. The fact that he was an outsider, the fact that he was a Catholic, these perturbations were not as serious as they would have been even ten years earlier. Still, they weren’t ideal as far as her family, her father in particular, was concerned. She wasn’t sure he’d got over it, even now.