The Life You Choose and That Chose You Read online

  I have to admit to feeling very pleased with myself around that time. The Imposter, my most recent play, had been a critical and commercial success. What's more, the ABC had just commissioned me to write a television drama series about the life and times of Henry Lawson. This was considered to be very cutting edge back then.

  Not long after the discovery of the girl's body, the cops called by my shed.

  ‘Gerald Blake? I'm wondering if we could talk to you about the body that was found up on the hill a few days ago.’ I remember clearly the detective sergeant's opening line, and the image of a pair of rumpled suits standing on my doorstep remains incredibly vivid. They looked like a couple of Hollywood screen stars from my childhood. Not the film-noir variety. No, no. Here was Van Johnson in The Last Time I Saw Paris and Donald O'Connor in Singin in the Rain.

  Deferential to rank, order and duty, one stood behind the other, waiting for me to invite them in, no doubt hoping I would spill my guts and tell them how I raped and murdered poor little Pauline. With the case solved and all wrapped up, they could go back to their homes, their wives and lives, and wait for the telephone to ring to inform them of the next corpse that had just been uncovered. The tone of the sergeant's voice told me they'd done their homework. They knew I was a man with a police record for a couple of youthful misdemeanours and who, of all bloody things, was now a writer with unruly hair and an unruly lifestyle.

  We heard a caw and turned to see a flash of wing as a bird grazed the cloudless, afternoon sky and came to perch on a branch of the angophora that stood to attention in my front yard.

  ‘Look at the kookaburra.’ It was the younger detective, the Donald O'Connor look-alike.

  ‘It's a kingfisher.’

  I just couldn't help myself. Sure, I was being a smart-arse, but I'd already had a few drinks that day and felt compelled to correct him. Besides, I'd never really liked the actor Donald O'Connor. He'd only ever played the fall guy or the goofy offsider.

  ‘So it is,’ said Van Johnson. ‘So it is.’

  ‘Do you like birds, Sergeant?’ I'd never expected to encounter a copper who knew his birds. Johnson smiled and nodded.

  God, I was on a winner here, I thought. He'd never suspect me now. I was a bird lover, a naturalist—just like him. So I invited them in.

  ‘I love wildlife, particularly birds. Always have. I use them a lot in my work. I'm a writer, you know, and birds are kind of like symbols for me…of the imagination…of memory and flights of fancy.’

  ‘You don't say?’ It was Donald O'Connor again, with an eyebrow cocked.

  ‘Have you ever seen one of my plays?’ I directed my question to Johnson.

  ‘Can't say that I have. Do you write anything else besides plays?’

  ‘Oh, I'm writing for television at the moment.’

  ‘TV, eh? Now you're talking.’ Johnson's smile was broad, genuine.

  I made some tea while telling Johnson about the Lawson project. He was well acquainted with his stories and told me how he loved poetry, particularly Australian bush ballads. We had strolled out the back and onto my decrepit wooden jetty, which appeared to collapse into the river at high tide, when Johnson began to reel off the first few verses of ‘The Man from Snowy River’.

  I stood still, enraptured with every galloping line of his wordperfect recitation.

  There was something grand, something quite magnificent, about that moment, about a homicide detective, steeped in blood and bloated corpses, immersing himself in myth and song. I still wonder about him sometimes, wonder if his memory and love of verse remain strong. He'd be quite an old man now, if he is still alive.

  No doubt part of my later impetus to confess to the murder was due to an unspoken empathy between us, a desire to please him and assist him in solving his case. But this is probably a facile explanation, for it allows me to shrink from my shame and to flirt once again with the truth and texture of my past.

  Anyway, the two of us eventually wandered back inside the house. By that stage of the afternoon, I needed another drink—it was thirsty weather, that December. It's around this point that my memory begins to fail me. I can recall knocking back a few more great slugs of bourbon, which was my drink of choice in those days, and also giving Johnson a copy of The Imposter, but I've absolutely no recollection of what O'Connor was doing all this time—probably poking around my cupboards, checking out my record collection and bookshelves, looking for clues, like sidekicks always seem to do.

  When Johnson did start asking me questions relating to the murdered girl, O'Connor reappeared and took notes while I kept drinking.

  ‘We'd better call it a day, don't you think, boss?’ It was getting late and I guessed that O'Connor wanted a drink too and preferred to seek it elsewhere.

  ‘In a minute, mate.’ Then turning back to me, Johnson said, ‘So you think you knew Pauline? Is that what you're telling me?’

  ‘I think I may have seen her once or twice.’

  ‘Really? And where exactly might that have been?’

  The precise details of the conversation that followed are murky at best—blame it on the bourbon—but the performance I gave was electric. I played to the gallery, and my audience was spellbound. O'Connor even stopped writing in his notebook.

  I told them how I'd met the under-age Pauline by chance, how we'd just started talking one day at the bus stop. I spoke of our clandestine trysts that followed that first encounter, and how difficult it had been for us to hide from discovery. I outlined the thrill and the hopelessness of it all, even describing our love-making sessions and my growing fear of the strife we'd have been in, had we been caught.

  ‘Imagine,’ I said. ‘Me, not quite the ageing Humbert Humbert, and Pauline, my very own Lolita.’

  When Johnson and then O'Connor understood the literary reference, I felt a sense of absolute mastery. This was no pitiful instance of self-dramatisation; this was me, the artist, in the act of doing what I do best.

  I've always thought of writing as a series of glorious imaginings, and I certainly agree with Wilde, who said that all art was a form of exaggeration. This confession was no different. I was impressed with my facility to confess, even though I now wince with shame and shudder at my foolish and blind arrogance.

  I do recall standing up and muttering something about my brain hurting and how I needed some fresh air. O'Connor and Johnson were whispering and I opened my mouth again to speak, but instead vomited over the clutter of the kitchen table. O'Connor hurled abuse back, which was fair enough, all things considered. Both detectives moved away from the stench and mess and observed me from the safety of the back door. I remained where I was, feeling wretched.

  I'm not sure how much time elapsed but the next thing I knew I was spread-eagled on the sofa in the living room. The place was full of bright fluorescent light. My brain still hurt. Outside, the early evening cicada chorus was in full song, and inside, from the kitchen, came an incessant tapping. O'Connor was pounding at my typewriter, but I was in too much pain to care about his lack of sensitivity.

  ‘So, you've come to.’ Johnson's voice was soft, paternal. I nodded. ‘What you need is some strong black coffee and then the hair of the dog. You'll be as right as rain in no time.’

  O'Connor handed me a steaming mug. I held it in both hands and sipped at it cautiously. Johnson continued to talk.

  ‘Now, Gerry, about this afternoon.’ I normally hated this diminutive, but not from the sergeant. ‘You were obviously a little, how shall I say, overwrought?’ And then he paused.

  Johnson was good at pauses. Pinter would have loved him.

  ‘Do you have any recollection of this afternoon's events?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ As I spoke, my mind's cinema was silent and on slow-motion replay.

  ‘Excellent. So you'll remember that you confessed to the murder of Pauline Sykes on the morning of December first?’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘Well, I put it to you, Gerry, that what you told us w
as nothing but a pack of lies. Pure fabrication.’ Another pause. ‘A work in progress, perhaps?’

  Shit, I thought, he's good. ‘Not exactly “a work in progress”, more an exercise or an experiment in the pursuit of truth. You know, in case I ever wanted to write about something like this.’

  ‘I'm sure it'd be riveting, Gerry, absolutely riveting.’

  ‘Jesus, I've had enough of this fucken bullshit, boss.’ O'Connor was pacing the room, and his face showed all the signs of impatience. Johnson chose to ignore him, and so did I.

  ‘In matters like these, we can use our discretionary powers, but I would really appreciate you signing a formal statement retracting the confession you made earlier.’

  I agreed. It was the least I could do.

  I was hung-over and felt incredibly stupid, but I managed to ask Johnson how he knew I was lying. Calmly, he explained that he'd had a hunch from the start and that's why, mid-confession, he'd asked me about Pauline's port-wine birthmark. He also reminded me how I'd lovingly detailed the way the purple stain had completely covered the left-hand side of her body.

  ‘In fact, Gerry, there was not one significant mark on that poor girl.’

  So I'd been outwitted, but Johnson had been flirting with the truth too.

  At this point, he moved away from the sofa and walked towards my front door. I remember that I was sitting, holding my head in my hands. My self-respect and credibility were around my ankles.

  Without warning I was yanked from the sofa and slammed against the bookcase. For some reason I failed to cry out.

  ‘Take this, you fucken lying poofter.’ O’Connor’s fists thumped my stomach in quick succession. ‘You fucken waste of time and space.’

  I doubled over and what felt like an elbow crashed into the back of my head. When I was groaning on the floor, O'Connor gave me a well-aimed kick to the ribcage, by way of farewell. I never saw him again, but Johnson dropped by, some weeks later, to return The Imposter.

  ‘I enjoyed your play,’ he said. ‘But I have to be honest, I don't think it's as good as Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll!

  ‘Fair enough. Would you like to come in?’

  He refused my invitation, remaining on the doorstep this time.

  ‘I'm in a bit of a hurry, actually. We've just charged a bloke with Pauline Sykes's murder. You'll be able to read all about it in this afternoon's papers.’

  I wished him well and watched him leave my yard.

  I believe I was right never to have complained about the beating I received from O'Connor. As far as I'm concerned, I deserved it. I have also come to accept that only a few of us never tell an untruth; some of us flirt with the truth when the need arises, and others construct truths for a living.

  I had toyed with the art of murder but had constructed an unconvincing narrative, to which my audience had merely responded: one walked out and the other clearly wanted his money back.

  I am content with this.

  The lights went out over dinner. Annie dropped her fork onto her plate and swallowed her mouthful. We sat a moment in the silence of the interrupted dishwasher cycle until Annie could no longer contain a whimper. I could see that the lane at the back of the house was still lit.

  ‘It's okay,’ I reassured her. ‘Probably just a fuse.’

  My body knew the way down the hall. Annie refused to sit alone in the dark. She tugged at the back of my T-shirt, tailing me to the front door where I felt my way into the fuse box. I flicked the main back on, setting off a chorus of beeps as the machinery of the house came back to life.

  ‘It's back!’ As soon as she spoke, it was gone again. Three more times we tried.

  ‘We'll have to wait til Daddy gets home,’ I said. She whimpered again. Lenny wouldn't be home until the sun came with him.

  Back in the kitchen, I felt around in the drawers, pushing aside worn coasters and tea towels, gladwrap rolls and rubber bands. I couldn't remember if we even had a working torch. ‘Shit,’ I muttered. Annie waited on her stool, swinging her feet into the cupboards, stiffening as the minutes passed.

  ‘It's okay. Finish your dinner.’ I fumbled in a box above the fridge, and turned back to the bench. ‘And pass me the bread.’

  I stuck 24 birthday candles in what was left of the loaf. Annie brushed her teeth by half of them and we read the final chapter of a tale about a love-struck frog by the other half. I tucked her in, leaving her curtain open so the streetlight crossed her pillow, and told her to count the stars for sleep.

  The dishes awaited me. Annie's lunchbox needed cleaning for the next day. The washing basket groaned in the laundry. My work sat grounded on my desk out the back: an illustration for an article on tartan furnishing fabrics. I had been ruling lines all day, building the sett of a made-up tartan, fine strokes of colour, side by side. The work was absurd without light.

  A wind had picked up. From the back door the night was alive. A single cloud worked its way across the sky. Light was confined to three small pools under three street lamps, not enough to alleviate the black.

  Over the back fence, his light was not on either. I had not seen him for almost three weeks. It had taken me a couple of days to realise that his solitary shuffle no longer parted the back lane. As the days had accumulated I'd arranged them into realistic absences: a short trip away, an illness, a simple change of habit. I watched for him every day. Faded cushions and boxed appliances had appeared last week, beached on the pavement at the front of his flat, awaiting council pick up. They made me flinch.

  As I turned to go back inside I could hear a plane approach. They often came at this hour, in sets, like waves cresting over the roof of our house. It was never the noise that unsettled me, but the fact of them passing over. The back door began to vibrate. I stepped out and waited for it to appear, the moment announced in an all-concealing din which I followed down the back steps. The sound bounced off the walls of all our houses, until it disappeared over the lane and westwards, and I continued out the gate, along the side of our fence and up the path to his flat.

  The door to the block was held open with a brick. Moths clung to the coughing fluoro on the landing. I could hear the family upstairs, a microwave door slamming and opening and slamming shut again, the mother shepherding her children. I placed my hand on his door and I leant on the handle. It gave way.

  A pause confirmed the silence. From the doorway chairs emerged from the darkness, arranged in the middle of the room; three chairs, a low table between them, a console and a television screen. The walls were empty. I moved towards the table, where my eyes adjusted to the shapes of pens, papers, a television remote control. And then the light went on.

  ‘Shit!’ I said in unison with a man.

  ‘Who are you?’ he added. He stood in the doorway, in jeans and a track top, unaccompanied and unfamiliar. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘The cleaning lady.’ I looked away as I said it. ‘Louisa. I'm sorry. I hadn't—’

  ‘You scared me half to death.’

  He moved into the room and towards the kitchen, which I saw for the first time in the light.

  ‘I hadn't heard from him for a while,’ I persisted. ‘I just thought—’

  ‘Died two weeks ago.’ He took a box off the bench.

  ‘I'm sorry. I didn't know.’

  He looked me up and down.

  ‘I've been away,’ I answered.

  ‘I'll need your key,’ he said, taking the box out to the landing and returning for a pile of papers stacked beside the door. ‘He never mentioned you. Mind you, he probably never mentioned me either.’

  ‘We didn't talk much.’

  ‘Listen—I'm Nick, by the way—the agent's coming Thursday. Could you do the place before then?’

  It took me a moment to realise what he meant. ‘Oh, sure. Tomorrow's fine.’

  ‘Any bits and pieces, just put them aside,’ he said, turning to leave. ‘I'll pick ‘em up Thursday.’

  ‘Nick?’ I said, stopping him. ‘The key.
I never had one. He always let me in. It was open tonight.’

  ‘Bloody lock.’ He tossed me his keys with an underhand throw. ‘You gotta do it from the outside. Meet me at ten on Thursday.’

  He left without looking back.

  I turned out the light and stood a moment in the open doorway, long enough to hear Nick start his car and drive away, his headlights briefly casting their light in an arc across the space, each wall and surface aglimmer for a moment.

  As I closed our back gate, a pair of spotted doves sat cooing. They had tucked into the clover for the night and they looked at me without moving, pious and querying. I shooed them with a mock kick and slipped back inside.

  I poured a whiskey, found a chocolate biscuit and took them to the back step. A breeze cut through the poplar tree next door, but there were no shadows.

  I pictured him, his grey hair bobbing behind the grevillea as he smoked, or walking up the back lane, his downward glance just high enough to stop his glasses falling from the bridge of his nose, a single paperback in a plastic bag by his side. Most afternoons Annie and I passed him at the local Portuguese bakery. Had they noticed he hadn't been in? He always sat outside, sipping a milky coffee from a glass, its froth coating his moustache. I'd looked over his shoulder whenever I was close enough, hoping to see what he was reading: philosophy or a classic. I had attempted contact when we passed face to face, wondering if he recognised me too. But he never searched for my eyes.

  Inside, I felt for my phone and sent Lenny a message: Power out. Can you check? Fridge urgent. x.

  Annie lay on her back in bed, her swaddled teddy beside her, her chest rising and subsiding with each breath. I drew the curtain and lifted the blanket to her chin.

  Lenny was beside me when I woke.