Turned to three.
Alistair had to get wipes.
Turned to two-hundred-and-seventy-thousand-nine-hundred-and-forty-fucking-three.
She pulled at her hair as she sat on the loo, hoping her scalp would bleed like it had last time she did this. She pressed her finger against her tender skull and placed the tip of her finger on her tongue, no blood. She’d have to pull harder.
‘Noah,’ she said out loud. Her intention was to cry. Crying had made her feel better when she had her afternoon in bed with the calendar. She said the word again: ‘Noah.’
No tears. Just the memory of an act, an ever-present image, on replay in her mind. Rocking back and forth on the toilet, she tried to suppress this memory, but it was too powerful:
Alistair is asleep. Noah is screaming. I am sitting in my seat, holding Noah in my arms. I am opening the lid to a medicine bottle. I am filling a spoon with medicine. Some spills. I am filling it again, holding it steady. I am opening Noah’s mouth with my finger. I am leaning him back. I am pouring the liquid into his mouth. I am killing him.
The image rocked back and forth with her. She murdered the redemption she was supposed to have, the happy life she was supposed to guide and enjoy. She gave him the wrong medicine. He was allergic to it. She killed him.
She tried to drown out the image with happy ones. Noah always seemed quite calm while she bathed him. She remembered smiling and admiring his active feet. When he settled in for a feed, his little hand touched her breast. At Dubai airport, she ached with love for him as he slept in her arms. She thought of the pictures of Chloe in the album, growing up happily with her mummy and daddy. Noah would never grow up. And she’d ripped that life from Chloe.
She used to look at Noah and imagine him when he was older, saying ‘mummy’ and ‘I love you’. She used to imagine him riding a bike and squealing with joy and falling off and cutting his knee. In her daydreams, she’d put a plaster on it and kiss the top of his head. She used to imagine making jam on the veranda of her Aussie holiday house while he bounced on the trampoline.
None of these images stuck now. Just the killing one.
Her desire to go to his grave was becoming unbearable. She wanted to talk to him. She wanted to place something special there. What? He was too little to have a favourite thing. And the blanket was down there with him already. The only thing that came to mind was the Bananas in Pyjamas teddy she bought for him. But he didn’t care about that. She’d have to find something else to take to him. Oh, it would feel good to sit under the tree with him, say sorry, goodbye.
Alistair would never let her. She’d never get away with it.
She pulled her hair again and this time she tasted blood on her finger. It soothed her. She pulled her jeans up, opened the toilet door, and headed towards the sofa.
Joanna sat on her side of the sofa again.
The news came on – dangerous territory – and Alistair immediately switched it off. ‘Let’s go to bed.’
*
‘I have some things to tell you,’ he said as he undressed, not pausing long enough for her to ask what. ‘I didn’t see Phil today. I went to see Lex.’
Aha! She was right. Oh, thank God, she wasn’t totally crazy. But
Lex
? He’d never called her this. She knew he used it from old letters she sent him during their uni days, which Joanna found in the hall cupboard, and which he hadn’t thrown out: ‘Al, this is the longest summer ever!’ blah blah blah. ‘When do you arrive at Spencer Street? I’ll be the one wearing no knickers. Love Lex (The most interesting person in the room!) xxx’
‘Alexandra. I went to see Alexandra.’
‘Oh.’ Joanna’s face was suddenly unbearably hot. She couldn’t identify what was erupting inside: rage, perhaps. He went there without telling her. He was calling her Lex. He should have the decency not to use this name to Joanna’s face. She wanted to know every detail: where they sat, how long they were together, what she wore, if she looked good, if they were alone, whether they hugged, kissed, shook hands, had coffee, wine, talked about Noah, about her.
‘You’re cancelling the hearing?’
‘No. It’s got to be done properly.’
‘But you don’t want to take her back to the UK now? If we can ever go back.’
‘That’s the other thing I want to talk to you about. After the hearing, we have to go back.’
‘What?’
‘I have to get my job back. They’ve got Hanson doing it, fucking Hanson. The little prick’s been after my position for years. I have to get back. We have to get on with our lives. That’s what we would have done, I think. No one would think it strange. It’s stranger if we don’t.’
Joanna couldn’t believe Alistair was thinking about work . . . There’s no way she could even think about a lesson plan. How could either of them concentrate on anything, after what they’d done? No, she did not want to go home. She wanted to stay here, near the tree. ‘So what did Alexandra say?’ she asked.
‘Nothing really. I didn’t give details. I just wanted to warm her up.’
None of the questions Joanna wanted answered had been answered. Instead he’d added more facts and plans into the mix that filled her with – yes, definitely – rage. This was just another shitstorm to Alistair, just one shitstorm in a lifetime that was filled with them. Her suspicions about him were not crazy, not paranoid. Perhaps he had gone there to plant something on her, just in case. Perhaps he had left something in her house.
‘We have to try and feel normal,’ he said, taking off his boxer shorts, lying on the bed, and touching himself. ‘Maybe sex would help.’
It was the first time he’d brought up the subject since. ‘It might relieve some stress.’
Joanna grasped at anything that might drown out the memory. She hated Alistair right now, and probably wouldn’t have agreed if she hadn’t. She needed to do something with the anger.
She took her pants off, and noticed the triangle line was now attached to the pubic hair she hadn’t cared less about shaving since. The line ended at his foreskin. She watched it shorten and disappear as she sat on him.
He wasn’t erect.
And she wasn’t wet.
But she wriggled for a while, making it hard, and then he disappeared into her. He shut his eyes and she wondered if he was imagining Lex. All he’d ever said about her sexually was that she had more curves than Joanna and that sex was never as good. ‘No details!’ he’d say. ‘It only upsets you.’ She could tell from the expression on his face that he was fantasising. Bethany perhaps.
‘Ah, honey,’ he said, the fantasy and the wriggling obviously working. ‘Ah baby . . . Oh this is helping!’
‘We made Noah doing this,’ Joanna whispered.
‘Shh. Ah, yes, yes, that’s it . . .’
‘I’m opening a bottle.’ Her voice was louder this time.
‘Don’t talk.’ He was almost ready, which meant it was time for him to withdraw and wank onto her stomach, or face, or wherever he fancied, as long as it wasn’t inside her, as long as he wasn’t looking at her. He started doing this almost as soon as the affair changed into a proper relationship, very few variations since.
He wouldn’t tell her what to do any more, she’d had enough of that. ‘Get back inside me!’
‘Shh, shh.’ He was going at himself, eyes only on her bottom half which could have been anyone’s from that angle.
‘I’m leaning Noah’s head back.’ Joanna grabbed Alistair’s face and pulled it towards hers.
He put his hand over her mouth and closed his eyes. She tore it off angrily.
His features gathered for the climax.
‘Open your eyes.’ A louder voice this time. But he didn’t obey, wouldn’t, too close.
Almost a yell this time: ‘I’m killing our son, Alistair. I’m killing Noah.’
*
After pushing Joanna away, Alistair turned to his side and fell asleep. Fell a-fucking sleep. She lay on her back and listened to the hiss of her angry breaths. It was part of the same thing: the affair, the incident. All part of the same screwed-up relationship. Right now, she couldn’t recall one happy moment with him. She couldn’t recall ever feeling confident with him. She couldn’t recall making one good decision with him.
Before him, she was an unfathomably happy Act I character, unaware that she was doomed to die by the end of Act II.
She stared at the ceiling and said, ‘I want to be me again.’ It didn’t wake him. She got out of bed, slipped as quietly as she could into her jeans, T-shirt and trainers, took her phone with her into the toilet, locked the door, and dialled her counsellor in Glasgow. ‘Anne, it’s Joanna Lindsay.’
‘Joanna, my God I’ve been thinking about you. Are you okay? What time is it over there?’
‘Can I talk to you? I can send you money over tomorrow.’
‘Go ahead. Forget the money. I’ll just go into the other room.’ It only took her a few seconds. ‘Okay, I’m alone. Talk.’
‘I need to get off the triangle.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You know, the triangle. I’m trapped.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Right now I don’t know which one I am. I could be all three.’
‘Is there someone you love nearby, Joanna? Does someone know where you are?’
‘I paid you thirty-five pounds a session. I sat on your sofa and listened and all I wanted was an answer and that’s all I’m asking for now. I’ll pay you double, seventy quid, more, I’ll give you my house! How do I get off? Tell me. Please! How do I get off it? I’m banging around from corner to corner and I can actually see the lines when I’m with him now and I have to get off it I have to get off it.’
Anne’s voice slowed, lowered, flattened: a soft, counselling monotone. ‘Joanna, I am listening to you. Where did you say you are again? Is there anyone with you?’
‘Oh God! You don’t know! No one knows!’ Joanna hung up, got what she needed from the cabinet in the bathroom, a torch from the laundry and car keys from the hall table. No one outside. They’d probably all moved on to a fresh search, for an even cuter kid.
*
She knew where the house was, having looked it up on Google maps about a hundred times on her phone in the toilet, deleting her browsing history afterwards. She drove the silver Ford Alistair hired out of Geelong and along the long, straight, dark, Bellarine Highway. It took her thirty minutes to reach the house. She hadn’t noticed anything about the house or the area the last time, but now it seemed as eerie and as flat as the highway she’d just travelled there on. A light fog hung over the flat grassy swamp, which a still strip of moonlight cut in half. There were no hills and no high trees around the lake, just flat land that melted into a distant horizon. A railway line ran along the edge of the lake opposite the houses. The steam train, she supposed: the one Alistair and Alexandra had been married on. If the houses on this street were occupied, the occupants were asleep. No lights, anywhere. Dead silence.
She drove past the large two-storey house slowly to check there were no cars in the driveway, then turned back and parked at the front of the property.
All the lights were off. Curtains drawn. She crept down the side of the building and pointed her torch in the kitchen window. A few of the kitchen units were open – empty, as far as she could see. The cooker still had plastic on it and was unplugged. The new Smeg fridge rested on a trolley in the corner. Satisfied that no one was home, she walked from the paving stones at the back door into the garden, torch pointing up in search of the tree.
Shit!
Joanna’s shin bashed against something. She pointed her torch down – a short fence. She followed the line of light around the fence. It surrounded a rectangular pool. The edge of the pool was only six feet or so from the high garden fence. She stood up, walked to the high fence, and swept her hand along it all the way round the perimeter of the back garden.
The pool was surrounded by recently laid paving stones. A rectangle of wood chippings was at the back, a rockery at the left, a fountain in the centre-back, and a large square compost bin in the right corner. The block was a meticulously landscaped quarter of an acre at most. She couldn’t see any freshly dug earth. And there were no trees.
Panting with confusion and fury, she stood on the bottom rung of the wooden fence and shone her torch over it, doing the same from all sides. It looked as though the garden had been subdivided. There was a large block at the back, with a small driveway at the side of Phil’s. The block was levelled and flattened, and had a For Sale sign. The grass had grown after the levelling, which meant the land had been cleared a long time ago, well before the incident. She raced back around the side of the house, jumped in the car, and drove all the way to Geelong with no belt on, her foot flat on the accelerator.
*
Alistair looked surprised to wake with a woman straddling him and a key digging into his neck.
‘Where did you put him?’
‘What? Joanna, shit. Ow! Get off me.’
‘Tell me where you put him or I’ll yell the truth so your mum can hear.’
‘Get the key off. It hurts.’
‘Elizabeth! I killed . . .’
‘Shhh. Okay, okay.’
The key was pressed into his flesh so hard it looked like he had a small cave in his neck. She didn’t care. ‘Where did you bury my baby?’
‘You went there?’
‘You never answer a question, always another question. I am asking you a simple thing. Where did you put Noah? You said the garden was two acres, that there was a Lilly Pilly tree. You said it was beautiful. Where is he? Is he in the compost bin?’
‘No!’
‘The rock garden?’
‘No. Ouch, God, I don’t remember.’
‘You don’t remember where you buried our son? Is he even in that garden?’
‘Yes, yes, he is. Please, you’re cutting my skin now.’
‘In the woodchip part? Where? The left? The right? The middle?’
‘Yes, under the woodchip but I don’t know where exactly. I was in shock. I was in a hurry.’
‘You really don’t remember? I thought you remembered things, Alistair. I thought out of the two of us you were the one who remembered things. Next to the fountain?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re just saying that because your neck’s bleeding.’