Claustrophobia Read online

  She was still hard at the pruning, covered in little flakes of pale blue from the sticky plumbago, when Derrick walked up the driveway.

  ‘Hello, love,’ he called. ‘I thought you were going to work inside today. Clear out the room.’

  Pen let the secateurs dangle, their weight suddenly alien. A momentary vision of lunging at him, screaming. It was ridiculous – these thoughts could come out of nowhere, for anyone. They didn’t mean anything. She shut the secateurs and placed them amid a thicket of spiky, lopped vines in the wheelbarrow.

  ‘Yes. I was. But the light was poor in there. Now we’ve got a window again.’

  Derrick smiled and shook his head. Pen thought: He is being tolerant, thinks I’m scatty. She knew how he made allowances for her, especially when it was her time of the month. Usually she was grateful for it. Now she saw it in another light. She turned her face abruptly.

  Pen peered into the study, her face ghosted on the grimy exterior of the glass. She had the curious sensation that there must be two of her from this moment on, just like that, one inside and living her life, the other outside, looking in.

  She must watch Derrick, see him with a measure of detachment, understand what it was she had missed, how deep the damage lay. Whether everything was discredited, utterly, or something could be retained. She would take nothing for granted anymore.

  ‘It’s getting chilly,’ Pen said. ‘Let’s go in and I’ll heat up the pizza.’

  She might have expected the evening to be an ordeal, but it was surprisingly easy, once you allowed for that split between the inside and the outside. Pen marvelled at how the mouth, the eyes, the body, could continue their standard operations. Once or twice, faced with a stance or gesture of excruciating familiarity, the question was nearly detonated: Pen almost blurted it out.

  It was as if he were skating around on her nerves.

  The knowledge she had unearthed today would have to go somewhere, and she must decide where, rather than letting it dictate … Every word seemed suddenly to drag with it a thousand alternative words; every movement in space alerted her to all the other movements she might take. But it was a revelation, not a trial – as if the teacher had suddenly said you could pick up the chalk and scribble anything you liked on the big blackboard. For all that her discovery had devastated her, it had also given her a strange power.

  Pen pulled the pizza tray from the oven and rummaged for the little cutting wheel. Right and left, up and down she sawed, noting the viscous stretching, the release of aromatic herbs and tomato.

  ‘I’m alive, anyway,’ she thought, ‘and after all this time, that woman is as good as dead to him. There’s no way he could still be in love with her.’ Her appetite, she realised, was enormous.

  They sat on the sofa together, Pen curled against Derrick with her feet up, trying to be normal – be normal! – and watched the evening news while they ate. You had to freeze the details out, to a certain degree, or you would go mental. Sometimes, if Derrick had a lot of stress at school, he wouldn’t watch the news at all, wouldn’t even let Pen buy the papers. It was a little frustrating, though she knew why he wanted it that way.

  But things were going well for him just now, and he seemed to take it all in his stride. Iraq, deaths, bombs, terrorists, the same old permutations and combinations.

  Then at the end of the news there was always a short, supposedly heart-warming human-interest story, before the weather.

  The newsreader was a girl Pen had gone to school with, only now her dark hair was bleached, her nose straightened, and she had a new surname by marriage. Scarcely recognisable. She’d been on the TV a while now, but her transformation still tickled Pen. Plus the fact that Pen could pick her. The success story of the eastern suburbs – anyone could rise if they worked hard, that was what their teachers had always insisted. But Pen had not been one of the woman’s friends.

  Best of all was to watch her adjust her expressions according to the nature of the news item. Consummately false. Sometimes there was a glitch, a slight lag in these changes, reminding you she was just a kind of actor after all.

  ‘You’re very quiet tonight,’ Derrick said at last, switching the TV off.

  ‘Am I?’ Pen smiled. ‘Probably just tired from the pruning.’

  She waited, as if he must somehow see through her excuse, but he didn’t.

  He just nodded. ‘Maybe we should get an early night,’ and he slipped his hand gently inside her shirt.

  The strange thing was, she suddenly wanted him now more than usual, as if the knowledge of Derrick’s fakery, deception, treachery – whatever you wanted to call it, and however long ago it was – had only added to his allure. He had become partly someone else.

  Pen had never, in the whole time they’d been married, found herself seriously attracted to another man. Neither did she ever expect another man to be attracted to her. As far as she knew, no one had.

  She had simply thought of sex as ‘what I do with Derrick’, rather than a reality in its own right. But now that he was someone else – the same and yet different, the outer form painted with his features like an effigy – a driving hunger kicked in.

  As they got into bed and he went to turn the lamp off, Pen said, ‘No, leave it on,’ against her usual inclination. She wanted, now, to see everything. She wanted slash-and-burn and scorched earth.

  When they woke in the morning, it was like being dredged up from a deep mire. They did not know where they had been, only that they had both been there together, and could not speak of it. They had forgotten, because of the break in their routine, to set the alarm, and it was late now.

  ‘Just take the car,’ Pen said, rolling over. ‘I’m going to ring in sick.’ She groped about for the mobile on the bedside table.

  Derrick leaned down to kiss her, as if sniffing for clues. ‘That’s not like you,’ he said, too close to her ear, so that she pulled away, hugely sensitised.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I need a day off.’

  Derrick shrugged. ‘Are you sure? If you step in the shower right after me – I’ll leave it running – we can still make it.’

  ‘No, really,’ Pen said. ‘I think I might actually have the beginnings of a cold.’

  ‘Oh great,’ Derrick said, pulling back quickly. Whatever the throes of the night before, whatever strange zone they might have encountered, his pragmatism would always hold sway afterwards – his terror of sickness, of missing a day’s work. She laughed.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, and pulled her head under the covers. ‘You’d better get moving, anyway.’

  Pen did feel a bit feverish, so it wasn’t untrue – only the cause was not physical. When she heard the front door click behind him, and the Volvo reverse down the sloping drive at last, then surge up the next slope to the highway, she pushed the blankets back.

  She lay rigid for a minute, as if to master all the kinks and bumps, to stretch away the night, and then slackened. She thought about sex and Derrick, Derrick at seventeen doing that with a grown woman who must have felt extraordinarily flattered, or vain. Or insecure, unable to control men her own age. What would it take? Duty of care and all that.

  But the boundaries were so much more blurred at uni. It wasn’t like the college, where the boys were clearly boys, and you couldn’t feel anything but motherly towards them. Though there were even people who … She found that idea so disgusting that she pushed it from her mind.

  Kathleen Nancarrow was like that, she reasoned, making use of someone more vulnerable. Probably born into privilege, and seeing everything as her entitlement … Just because the students were older, and it was legal, didn’t mean it was morally right or harmless. Maybe Kathleen had gone on doing it for years, ruined lots of students for her own satisfaction. All at once, the anger Pen hadn’t felt toward Derrick, despite what he had concealed, surged up in her towards this woman.

  Pen leapt out of bed and stared at herself in the dress
ing-table mirror. Red marks, legacy of the night, were visible on her neck; just as well she hadn’t gone off to school today. She peered closer, as if her appearance could explain something, then slowly reached for Derrick’s robe, and wrapped it around her, girding her loins. She would track this woman down. She walked into the study and switched on the Mac. Then she went to put the kettle on, waiting for it to boot up so she could go online.

  3

  She was little, so small as to be still square and compact in her body, eight years old maybe. The smell of her new synthetic tracksuit, flocked on the inside, was overpowering, the kind of thing that usually made her nauseous. But it was mixed with excitement – being out at night in the shiny gym, among a group of children she’d never seen before, and all boys except for her – and it charged her up. Adrenaline, an older boy in the group said it was called.

  ‘Fight or flight,’ he’d told her. ‘You can feel it in your legs because your body is getting them ready to run if your defence doesn’t work.’

  Then the teacher gazed sternly at them, and they fell silent. Pen writhed under scrutiny: she was the only child in the class without a proper white belted outfit. But the teacher moved on without a comment.

  ‘Eeurrgh, you going to judo?’ the other girls at school had said, wrinkling their noses, no matter how many times Pen told them, ‘It’s not judo, it’s jujitsu kan.’

  ‘Same diff,’ they said, and she couldn’t disprove it, because she wasn’t really sure about the distinction herself. Her mother and father had decided it would be good for her, and the hall was only a few hundred metres down the road from their house. More than that, Pen did not know.

  Now the teacher was telling them things they didn’t believe, the marvels they could work if they stayed with the course, that he would teach them to bring down opponents much bigger than themselves. Some of the boys whooped and cheered, until the teacher added, ‘But it may only ever be used in self-defence.’

  Pen wondered briefly how you could control that, since it relied on a code, a promise, like the honour box when you lit candles at church – no one could tell if you hadn’t really paid for them. Some of the boys whispered that a curse would come upon you if you used your jujitsu to attack someone.

  They lay on the ground to learn how to trip up a standing opponent.

  ‘Tim-ber!’ some of the boys yelled, and the teacher was not pleased.

  Then they had to learn how to ‘throw’ someone who lunged at them. For this they formed pairs again, but it was closer contact this time and none of the boys wanted to join with Pen, since she was a girl.

  ‘You come here to me,’ the teacher said, and Pen flushed. The boys began to snigger. The teacher put his hands to Pen’s throat the way he had demonstrated, and she did as he instructed, stepping forward, her hip thrust behind his, her whole body becoming a lever. Her arms as good as thick cable, her feet firm but electric.

  In one swoop, little Pen flipped the teacher to the floor.

  Now it was there again, undeniable, that adrenaline, only this time there was no question of running.

  Pen placed her mug of Earl Grey carefully on a shelf, at the safe, no-spill distance from the computer she and Derrick had formally agreed upon, one of their many little rules.

  Googling people always made her feel like a girl again, lying on her belly beside Sally Fearn from next door, leafing through the big dog-eared phone book together to see where their teachers lived, or the Grade Sevens they had crushes on. Not that they would ever follow these people home, or even ring them up. It was just the feeling of power you got from secret knowledge, seeing without being seen. The reassurance that even gods had an ordinary location you could pin them down to. It added a new dimension to the boredom of school.

  But now Pen was an adult, and this wasn’t boredom. This was something else. If Kathleen Nancarrow was still out there, with such a distinctive name and an academic career, Google would be sure to turn her up. Pen was teetering, she knew, on the threshold of a wholly different existence. She thought of Bluebeard’s chamber, and the blood-stained key. Then she chuckled at her own melodrama. Derrick was no Bluebeard, and he need never know. She could just sneak a peek, and then clear the cache. No harm done.

  ‘Bingo.’

  She clicked on the first link. Talking to yourself is the first sign of madness, Sally Fearn used to say. Hair growing on the palm of your hand … and then she would scribble with biro on Pen’s sweaty palm.

  It was a university webpage, and to her amazement, it was here in Perth. The adrenaline grew louder.

  Kathleen Nancarrow was actually here, had perhaps been here for years. Did Derrick know she had left Sydney? Had she followed him over, despite returning his letter?

  Kathleen Nancarrow was an Associate Professor, whatever that meant exactly, and her office was in the Arts building. There was a whole cluster of links to her research interests, the classes she taught. No photo.

  If there had been a photo, perhaps it would have all stopped there.

  Like doubting Thomas in the Bible, Pen needed to see in order to believe. She ran a Google image search but nothing looked likely. Then she dived back into the university site. Clicking around, she saw that some of Kathleen’s colleagues had supplied their photos, and some had not. Modesty, maybe, or vanity. Or just not getting organised. She riffled through the links on Kathleen’s page, reading them over and over, but it was all unsatisfying. That was the internet – like biting into fairy floss. Ethereal stuff, all ungrounded.

  Pen closed the page and emptied out all evidence of her meanderings, thinking: if only it were so easy to wipe out the actual past. Or at least a part of it. In any case, she knew, the university wasn’t that far away. There was nothing to stop her having a look around in person.

  Lying was easy – because she had not done it before, she had no preconceptions. All it meant was a new consciousness, a kind of heightened sensation, like Derrick said people got from smoking pot – it didn’t really change anything.

  There were millions of ordinary times Pen had gone ahead and done something other than what she had told Derrick. People said one thing and then did another all the time, without giving it a second thought. That was called spontaneity. You said you were going to Coles for vegies but you dropped by the growers’ market instead. Same diff.

  The only thing that made it lying was the intention. So it must be the intention, Pen thought, that made an act right or wrong. Because the form of the act might be exactly the same.

  She might say, ‘I’m going to nip into Perth this afternoon to pick up a new jacket’, and if she also happened to drive on further to visit the campus, just another curve around the bay, and have a wander around the Arts building, who could judge, from the outside, whether it was willed or whimsical?

  So easy it was, in fact, that she could hardly believe this possibility had been sitting there all the time, like paid leave you didn’t know you had accrued, like a talent that had never been called on.

  It struck her now as amazing that she had got up each day of her life and tried to stick to the day’s outline, as if there were some great supervisor in the sky watching for variation, for deviation, for a poor fit between player and part. It seemed now that she must have been the only person making that mistake.

  Certainly Derrick hadn’t. He had known the possibility of lying and made generous use of it. A lie told even a long time ago remained a lie. So she certainly wasn’t injuring him. She even felt a little grateful to him for the knowledge of it.

  The Arts building was quiet except for an occasional unearthly screech from peacocks in the courtyard, the campus curiosity. Maybe a symbol of something; Pen didn’t know why they were kept there. She walked around a few times, glancing from side to side, but even where the odd door was open nobody looked out or questioned her. It was like a maze, a mausoleum, or the still corridors of a mental hospital. You felt the floors above were bearing down on you, and because each level looked the same, i
t was like those places that trap you in dreams.

  It was a picture by Escher, and she was in it.

  She could stroll once or twice past the faculty desk, check out the ID pictures on the staff noticeboard.

  There was no photo of Kathleen Nancarrow on the noticeboard.

  She might even inspect the door of Room 413, A/Prof K Nancarrow.

  That door held nothing but a pouch for student essays and a timetable that showed Student contact times Mon & Wed 10 till noon.

  It was now late in the day. There was a small glass panel against the roof, too high for anyone to see in or out of, but enough to indicate that the light was switched off inside.

  Pen tried the handle: it was locked. She could come back some other time …

  In just such a room, long ago, when Derrick was a student, on the other side of the country, there were trysts, no doubt, declarations and remonstrations, maybe even tears. An anonymous box of an office, like a confessional. Sordid but solid, impenetrable.

  Suddenly it was as if there were simply too much weight on this side of the continent, even with the room apparently empty. As if a set of scales were tipping, and must be put to rights.

  Pen checked both ways along the corridor, reached into the door pouch, and retrieved an armful of papers. Marked essays, ready for collection.

  There was nothing to stop her walking down the stairs with them, out past the faculty desk – which in any case was closed now, its convent-like grille pulled across and bolted – past the drinking fountain with her eyes straight ahead, as if she were any tutor or mature-age student carrying her work home, past the cold stone wall with its giant chiselled motto Know Thyself, and safely out to the Volvo parked right below.

  She would have preferred to burn the papers where she could really see them go, in the old open fireplace with its jutting mantel of Toodyay stone, but they never used that now that they had the Bushman stove, and Derrick would have noticed for sure. Instead, she fed the essays through the smoky glass stove door page by balled page, fearing that otherwise they might fly up and out and catch other things alight, even in winter, or lie around outside in half-legible fragments. So she screwed them up painstakingly and poked them in.