Other People’s Diaries (14 page)

This is the fourth time I've started this diary entry. The other three attempts are lying in screwed-up balls on the kitchen table and before I started this one I made myself a rule. I'm going to write what first comes to my mind without editing it. So my apologies if I split my infinitives or say something inappropriate.

Can it be, Alice, that your simple plan isn't so simple after all? Have you managed to weave a tangled web of organisation in which you had Claire stalking me in order to pounce and take me shopping?

I actually don't think so, but in any event don't really care. As well as a fabulous beaded necklace (in three colours actually), I am now the owner of four new items of clothing. After years of hating everything in my closet I've found myself going into the bedroom just to look at them. When I put them on I know how superheros feel in costume … The only problem with owning clothes that will ‘take me everywhere', however, is that I don't currently have ‘everywheres'. Actually, I don't even have ‘anywheres' – unless I count doctors' surgeries.

(Sorry about those last words, awfully self-pitying sounding I know. But rules are rules.)

Lillian

N
ext-door's dog heralded the postman's arrival without fail. Normally Lillian paid no attention, only vaguely registering the demented yapping.

But since she'd posted her third diary entry to Alice, she had found herself listening for the intermittent buzz of the postman's motorbike. On Wednesday his orange jacket and white helmet continued inexorably past, shoulders hunched against the rain. Yesterday he stopped in front of her house, but delivered only a bank statement and a phone bill.

This morning the dog started its desperate barking as she was sweeping the kitchen floor.

Her feeling of anticipation was ridiculous, she knew. It was a serious reflection on how little she had to fill her days. But she propped the broom next to the fridge and walked out to the back verandah.

David had enclosed the verandah in the seventies. She couldn't remember why exactly. Possibly because that's what everyone else in the street was doing. Or possibly because he was in a lull between research projects. David had been a scientist involved in medical research right up until he had died. Most of the time home handyman jobs had been totally ignored, but every now and then he'd focus on a certain job. For a while, whatever task it was would take on the importance of stem-cell research.

Lillian would have loved to strip out the glass windows and have somewhere cool to sit in the evenings. But somehow it seemed like too much trouble.

With a faint screech of brakes, the postman stopped abruptly in front of the low red brick wall, which had always been totally ineffectual at containing either children or dogs. Lillian watched him reach into his saddlebag and caught a flash of colour before he pushed something into the galvanised-iron slot in the bricks.

She walked down the splintering steps and onto the concrete path where wet weeds elbowed their way through the cracks. David's mother had always been quick to busily rectify the deficiencies in Lillian's homemaking. Weeding had been one of her mother-in-law's specialties. It had not been uncommon for her to pause on her way up the path, drop her beige vinyl handbag
and spend ten minutes ripping out offending plants. Lillian's small act of rebellion had been to silently cultivate the green upstarts and she'd grown to like their gutsy stamina and blowsy flowers. Even now, decades after her mother-in-law's death, she could only bring herself to uproot them when they threatened to take over the place.

The curtains across the road twitched and she waved at Mr Adams. As he had every day for the last thirty-five years, he ignored her. Which was just as well, Lillian decided. An answering wave at this point could only herald some cataclysmic change in the world.

Years ago Mr Adams had had something to watch. While not exactly edge-of-the-seat action and intrigue, there'd been a lot going on when the children were growing up. They and their friends had trailed in and out, dropping school bags and dragsters at the front gate. David had loved a chat and there was often a beer or two drunk on the front steps with a mate who happened to be passing.

There'd been a time when they'd had street parties. As far as Lillian could remember, no one had ever actually planned them. They had just sort of happened. Chairs would be pulled out onto the street, bottles of wine opened. Someone would produce a packet of chips, someone else a French-onion dip from the fridge. As it grew dark the women in the street would feed whichever children happened to be still there.

Now, though, the whole street seemed to have pulled back into self-contained bubbles. The last few years had brought another influx of young families, but they all seemed to keep to themselves. The street was deathly quiet even on weekends, everyone imprisoned in their own little space, watching television or manipulating joysticks.

So maybe her trip to the letterbox was the highlight of Mr Adams's day. Lillian smiled slightly, remembering the family competition to see who could make him wave back. The prize of two weeks free of washing-up was still unclaimed.

There was a red envelope in the box and she pulled it out, ignoring the others.

Lillian perched on the fence.
From Alice
was scrawled across the triangle on the back of the envelope.

She clumsily pushed her forefinger through the paper. As she did so, an image of her mother using her silver letter opener to cleanly slice open each letter came to mind. The familiar pang of loss throbbed in her chest. Her mother had been old and weary and happy to die. But Lillian still expected to see her seated at the kitchen table first thing in the morning, halfway through
The Courier Mail
crossword.

She thumbed open the sheet of paper inside.

Dear Lillian

I'm delighted that your shopping trip was successful. My intention was for you to buy something different which made you feel good. It sounds like you've achieved that and more. And by the way, that was just extraordinary good luck that you came across Claire. The organisation required to make that happen is way beyond me.

I've just re-read your diary entry. Yes, rules are rules … And I'm about to break all of mine here.

I told you that I wouldn't ask you to do anything major, that they'd all be small changes. But then your having a serious illness has got to be against some kind of rules too, hasn't it?? I came up with, and discarded, about ten ideas for your next task. But they all seemed a bit of a waste of time, to be honest. So here it is …

You have money from your mother and you need an adventure. Go overseas. Kyla in Paris, Daniel in New York. Pretty good options … You choose. But I think you should go.

Alice

Lillian stared at the paper. Her feeling of anticipation had vanished, replaced by disappointment and a strong sense of irritation.

‘Join the queue,' she muttered.

Kyla had been lobbying for years to have her mother visit her in Paris.

‘C'mon Mum – live a little,' she'd say.

Lillian had lost track of the number of times she'd tried to make Kyla understand that it just wasn't that simple.

Alice's generation seemed incapable of appreciating how different their life was from Lillian's. For Alice, or for Kyla or Daniel, travelling to the other side of the world by themselves was purely a mechanical exercise. The only issues for them were whether they had sufficient money and time.

But Lillian had lived her whole life in Brisbane. She'd been a good mother, a reasonable wife and had read enough to have an understanding of how much went on outside the boundaries of her small life. But she could count on one hand the number of times she'd been on an aeroplane, and the only time she'd left the country was for a brief trip to New Zealand.

When David was alive, they'd always done things together. Except for the occasional shopping lunch in the city with a female friend, all their social occasions involved each other. Confidences with friends were things shared while making salads for the BBQ, not over a glass of wine in a bar. It was just the way things were.

Sometimes she wondered guiltily how much of her grief at David's death had been genuine sorrow and how much had been terror for herself left alone.

Time had passed. She'd learned to write out a cheque, mow the lawn and take out the rubbish on Tuesday nights. The loneliness hadn't disappeared though.

And despite Kyla's urgings, she hadn't gone out to do things by herself.

Asking friends to go to the movies or dinner with her always seemed like a favour, dragging them away from their family. And then her mother had needed her first hip replacement operation and had moved in with her afterwards. She wasn't well enough to be left alone so Lillian had settled into a gentle and very uneventful life.

There were days when the only person she spoke to was Ross. And she didn't understand half of their conversations. This morning's football update had been that Liverpool's coach was having some fight with the club's American owners. Ross had shaken his head. ‘Don't they understand football clubs need money?' he'd asked her. ‘You know that, I know that, why the hell don't they?'

If she couldn't manage to socialise in Brisbane, how on earth would she manage on the other side of the world?

The last thing she wanted was to be a pathetic old woman who sat inside all day in a foreign city, waiting for her child to come home and take her out. But the thought of even getting to somewhere like Paris or New York by herself terrified her, let alone finding her way around once she got there. She didn't speak a word of French and what she knew of New York made it sound dangerous and violent.

Really, what would it achieve anyway? She'd spend the small nest egg her mother had left and come home to exactly the same place as when she'd left.

The breeze waved through the branches of the jacaranda tree on the footpath and Lillian watched the purple blossoms rain down onto the concrete. Suddenly she had a vision of herself looking at the same trees in bloom next year, and the year after. With nothing else having changed, except perhaps her health. The days between then and now stretched endlessly, punctuated only by rare visits from the children or occasional drearily predictable social occasions. It all seemed unbearable.

Lillian had read only one of the latest genre of books about middle-aged women finding themselves. She'd picked up the book in
Words
, surprised to find it was about a woman of her generation, a group who seemed only to exist in popular culture as cranky mothers-in-law or eccentric but wise old women.

But halfway through she'd put it down, more bored than offended. Yes, she had a life yet to lead and, yes, she had all kinds of options. But walking away from everything she'd spent her life working for and believing to ‘find herself ' seemed rather stupid and distinctly self-absorbed. She'd wondered where women who did this would find themselves in five years without the family they'd discarded on the way.

Perhaps, though, it didn't have to be that way. For a moment she pictured herself in a Parisian cafe. For there'd be no competition between Paris and New York. America appealed not at all, but France … well, that was different.

Intensely intelligent students on the Left Bank, an open barge
drifting down the Seine, smoke-filled cafes patronised by brooding dark-haired men called Pierre … It had always seemed like a magical place to Lillian, even before Kyla brought back stories of dimly lit restaurants off cobbled streets and brilliant green parks filled with metal chairs for sun worshippers.

The thought of doing something totally and utterly different was intoxicating. Lillian gave it free rein, pretending for a moment that it was possible. Then, though, she pictured an eternity crammed on an aeroplane next to a complete stranger, the huge cost, days spent alone in a big city, strange trains and buses …

Lillian slowly crumpled the paper in her hand, then walked back down the path, feeling years older than when she'd left the house.

I had no idea that Greg was married when we first started seeing each other. In fact, I wasn't even sure he was male.

Sounds kind of weird, I know, but we met in a virtual world. A whole alternative world where you can do anything or be anything you want.

You just logon, pick yourself a name, conjure up how you want to look and off you go.

I, of course, was a willowy dark-haired temptress. Think Wonder Woman in edgy clothes.

The very first person I chatted with turned out to be Greg. Except he didn't call himself that. His character was a huge musclebound guy called Knowledge Seeker.

So we started talking.

It was 5 am in Los Angeles which was where most of the players come from. So it probably wasn't that much of a coincidence that he turned out to be Australian as well.

We both seemed to have the same routine and kept finding ourselves online together around about midnight. So we became friends. We started visiting the online nightclubs together and listening to bands, each sitting comfortably in our own living rooms.

It was six months before we discovered we both lived in Brisbane (he never asked and I figured to do so must be uncool).

It was another two before we talked about meeting up in real life and another three before we actually did.

The funny thing was …

M
egan deleted the words she'd just typed. Why on earth would she put that out there for the group to see?

She was supposed to report on the effect of Alice's last task.

Okay Alice, she thought. Here you go.

My task was to do something for myself, something which wasn't for anyone else. So instead of breaking up with Greg, which was what I'd figured pretty well everyone and his dog was telling me to do, I met up with him again. One thing led to another as they do and – well, I actually think I'll keep seeing him.

Megan hesitated for a moment then pressed Enter so that the words were added to Alice's website. She made a mental note to do that work on the website. It was so bad at the moment, she was embarrassed to be associated with it.

Walking into her bedroom, Megan grabbed her running clothes from their customary place on the floor. Despite her defiant words in the diary entry, she'd had an uneasy feeling since she'd met up with Greg. Perhaps a long run would shift it.

She'd told Greg about the Red Folder Project and he'd laughed with her at the predicament her family had put her in, all because they believed her moral compass was faulty.

He had shifted position, leaning more comfortably against the headboard of her bed. Megan had tried not to stare at his bare chest. Presumably, Greg's wife didn't get a thrill in her stomach just looking at him. It wasn't that he had a perfect body – far from it. He was nearing forty-five with a lifetime of good living behind him. But she'd never got accustomed to having a man in her bed and there was something compelling about him.

‘That's exactly why you're so hot,' he had said, running a finger along her shoulder and over one breast. ‘I love a woman with suspect morals.'

Megan had smiled her most vampish smile. ‘Tell me more,' she'd whispered, pulling his mouth toward hers.

Now, Megan pulled on her sneakers. Although she never would have admitted it to anyone, Greg's barb about her morals was bugging her.

On their first real-world date Greg had seemed anxious, constantly glancing at his mobile as if he expected an important call. She'd ignored it, trying to convince herself it was just nerves, and by his third gin and tonic he'd begun to relax.

Megan had been in the middle of telling Greg why she hated teaching when he'd interrupted her mid-sentence. ‘I'm married,' he had blurted out.

There had been a long echoing silence and then, with the bravado of too much alcohol, Megan had thrown back the last of her drink.

‘I'm not,' she had replied, heading off to the bar for another round.

When she returned, she'd merely picked up the conversation from where he'd interrupted. The last thing she wanted to hear was how his wife didn't understand him. They'd moved bars again, done tequila shots and finally ended up back at Megan's place. By the time Megan had woken late the next morning, convinced this was the hangover that was going to kill her, Greg had gone. Not only had he not left a note, there was no evidence at all that he had ever been there.

Feeling let down and miserable, Megan had stepped into the bathroom, turned the shower on hard and let the hot water pour over her head. Willing herself not to throw up, she'd stayed there until the hot water had run out. To hell with the drought.

Stepping out, she'd glanced in the mirror. Words had appeared there as if by magic.

Last night was amazing. G

She later found out Greg had written the words using an old candle he'd found in the lounge. The white wax had remained invisible until the mirror had fogged up with steam.

Over the following days, in between disconcerting flashes of the two of them naked in her enormous bath, she'd given the whole thing a lot of thought.

It wasn't her problem, she'd reasoned, if Greg and his wife didn't much like each other any more. If anyone should be feeling guilty about what was going on, it was Greg, not her.

If Greg wasn't doing the nasty with her, he'd be with someone else. It wasn't like she owed Greg's wife anything. She'd never held much with female solidarity anyway. Every woman for herself and all that.

By the time Greg called again, she'd made up her mind and had never once asked him why he'd come looking for her or what went on in his other life. He had once mentioned in passing that his wife, Deborah, was a freelance journalist, and even that small piece of information had been more than Megan wanted to know.

With Greg's words about her morals echoing in her ears, she closed the front door behind her and slipped the key into the letterbox. She took off slowly, easing into her pace.

It was a long way to the river from Megan's house, but it was the route she took most days. An old folks' home sat at the point where Megan joined the path along the river bank. The nurses would wheel some of the patients out onto the grass in the late afternoons and Megan had got into the habit of waving as she went past. Usually no one responded, but there was one old man who would occasionally wave back. Once he even called something out to Megan, but his words had been lost on the wind. For weeks afterwards Megan had wondered what he had said.

Megan increased her pace. She sucked in air to drive her legs faster, and the pressure in her chest pushed all thoughts from her mind.