Wife on the Run Read online

  ‘No, Mr Nelson.’

  ‘Goodbye for now, then.’ The principal ushered them to the door and closed it behind them. Too abruptly, Paula thought. She hovered there for a moment, contemplating the pompous gold lettering on the door. Mr Geoffrey J. Nelson, Principal. She wanted to tear it right off.

  ‘Come on, Catie,’ she said, nodding at Mr Nelson’s secretary as they passed. Paula could feel the woman’s eyes following them down the corridor.

  They crossed the empty playground in silence, their shoes crunching on the gravel. It was spitting with rain, and the boughs of the majestic oak tree near the main entrance were creaking quietly in the wind. After weeks of welcome spring sunshine, winter coolness had inexplicably returned in the latter half of October.

  Caitlin dragged her feet across the playground, weighed down by her school bag, sports kit and art folder.

  ‘Here, let me help you.’ Paula reached for the school bag.

  ‘Are you angry with me, Mum?’

  ‘Should I be?’

  Caitlin’s lower lip trembled.

  ‘Why would someone just post a photo like that out of the blue?’ asked Paula. ‘It’s got your name on it, and Amy’s too. What am I supposed to think?’

  Caitlin began to cry softly.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry. Come here.’ Paula put her arms around her daughter. ‘Let’s go home and regroup. We’ll work it out.’

  They’d almost reached the school gate when they heard a piercing wolf-whistle. Turning automatically, they saw a group of senior boys milling around the gymnasium.

  ‘Hey, cocksucker!’

  Paula flinched. It was difficult to determine who had called out.

  ‘Caitlin cocksucker!’

  Caitlin looked mortified.

  ‘Let’s go.’ Paula shepherded her daughter through the gate.

  A teacher emerged from the gymnasium and corralled the boys inside.

  Caitlin wept all the way home, her slim body shaking. As Paula steered her yellow hatchback through the streets of Glen Waverley, she realised she’d never take the same route without recalling this exact moment. Two o’clock on Friday 19 October—when Facebook’s intrusion into their lives skyrocketed beyond daily disagreements about screen time.

  As they pulled into their driveway, Paula spotted a small figure hunched at the bottom of the stairs leading up to their double-storey weatherboard home. Lachie. She practically leaped out of the car. Caitlin remained slumped in the front seat.

  ‘Lachie, sweetheart, are you alright?’ Paula crouched down in front of him. ‘How did you get home?’

  ‘I walked.’

  ‘What, the whole way?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Someone showed me the Facebook photo at lunchtime. I was so grossed out I came home.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘I did,’ he said, in an injured tone. ‘You never answer your phone.’

  ‘I must have been with Mr Nelson.’

  Her son had a point, Paula thought. All too often she temporarily lost her telephone; under the car seat, behind a cushion, or deep in her handbag. And if she silenced it for a meeting—like she’d done with Mr Nelson—she almost always forgot to reactivate it afterwards. It drove her husband mad, but Paula wasn’t fazed by being unreachable—unlike Hamish, whose phone was virtually grafted onto his hand. On the odd occasion he misplaced it, Hamish would become tetchy, like an alcoholic deprived of drink.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lachie,’ Paula said, patting his knee. ‘It’s been a tough morning.’

  Caitlin emerged from the car, dragging her sports kit behind her.

  ‘I’m going to soccer practice this afternoon,’ she announced, lifting her chin defiantly.

  ‘Catie, no.’ Paula stood up from the step. ‘That’s not a good idea.’

  ‘Why not?’ Caitlin hurled the kit onto the lawn.

  ‘Because the whole school’s calling you a cocksucker,’ said Lachie.

  ‘Lachlan!’ Paula admonished.

  Caitlin stared at her brother.

  ‘Did you do it?’ he asked.

  ‘Do what?’ spat Caitlin. ‘I can’t believe you’d even ask, dipshit.’

  She stormed up the stairs to the front door.

  ‘Catie!’ Paula followed her and unlocked it.

  Pushing past her mother, Caitlin ran down the hallway and slammed the bedroom door.

  Paula turned back to her son, unsure what to do. ‘Would you . . . like some afternoon tea, Lachie?’ She felt mildly ridiculous for resorting to conventional maternal overtures.

  ‘Okay.’ Lachlan jogged up the stairs. ‘I’m hungry.’

  Since he’d turned thirteen, Lachie’s appetite had become insatiable. On return from school, he’d often demolish half a loaf of bread or several bowls of breakfast cereal.

  Lachie dropped his school bag near the front door, then flopped down onto the lounge-room floor.

  In the kitchen, Paula set about preparing a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk.

  ‘Come and sit up.’

  ‘Can’t I have it in here?’ Lachie objected.

  He’d already turned on the games console; she could hear its irritating mechanical melody.

  ‘No, you may not.’ She was tired of this argument, more so this afternoon. ‘Just sit up now.’

  He sauntered into the kitchen, perched on a bar stool and began to devour the sandwich.

  ‘Do you’—she could feel herself blushing—‘want to talk about what’s happened?’ Hamish had only recently had a ‘man-to-man’ chat with Lachlan. She’d been too uncomfortable with the idea of discussing sex with her thirteen-year-old son to broach the subject herself.

  ‘Nah.’ He chewed and swallowed. ‘It’s a fake picture, right? Doesn’t even look like a real dick to me. More like a dildo.’

  ‘Lachlan!’ Paula had no idea the word ‘dildo’ was part of her son’s lexicon.

  He sniggered. ‘Don’t freak out, Mum.’

  Swallowing several hunks of sandwich and draining the milk, he pushed back the bar stool.

  ‘No computer games until your homework’s done,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t have any.’ He ambled towards the lounge room.

  ‘I find that hard to believe, Lachlan.’

  He turned to her, his hands pressed together in the prayer position. ‘C’mon, Mum. Just thirty minutes. I’ll do my homework after, promise.’

  Her resolve wavered. ‘Okay. Just make sure it’s thirty minutes and no more.’

  He grinned, rushing forward to hug her, before almost as quickly pulling away again. But these were the contradictions of a thirteen-year-old boy, she was discovering. One minute craving Mum, the next minute ignoring her.

  She watched him stroll into the lounge room, all knobbly knees and pale, ungainly limbs. He was not nearly as physically coordinated as his sister; not yet, anyway. But that might change, she often told Hamish, who was baffled by Lachie’s preference for cerebral activities like chess, computer games and Lego. The fact that Lachie still loved Lego worried Hamish, despite the fact that his creations were complex and elaborate. They’re kiddy blocks, Hamish would sniff, having once again failed to entice Lachie outdoors. He might be the next Jørn Utzon, she’d reply.

  Paula put the kettle on.

  I should check on Caitlin, she thought wearily, but I need a cup of tea first. And a chocolate biscuit or two. Lately it had been three or four, as evidenced by the extra rolls of flesh around her stomach.

  ‘Pauuula!’

  Her father had waited the mandatory ten minutes before pouncing.

  She walked down the stairs to the laundry and saw him, loitering hopefully at the glass sliding door. Beyond it, three steps led to a steep side path that wound its way up into their large, flat backyard. He was wearing his mandatory gardening uniform: green gumboots, grey tracksuit and a Richmond Tigers football scarf. Tiny flecks of soil had settled in his shaggy white eyebrows and moustache. His blue eyes twinkled and his skin was ru
ddy from the wind. Like Santa in civvies, Paula thought, smiling. She unbolted the door.

  ‘Hi, Dad.’ She couldn’t resist planting a kiss on his cheek.

  He grinned. ‘Time for a cuppa?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Your place or mine?’ he asked, as he always did, referring to the caravan parked in the backyard.

  ‘I’ve just put the kettle on. Come on up.’

  ‘Good-o.’ He slipped off his gumboots, then bounded up the stairs two at a time. He was spritely for seventy, more like a man ten years his junior.

  ‘You’ve got a spring in your step, Dad,’ she remarked, following him into the kitchen.

  ‘Picked a trifecta at Moonee Valley this morning.’

  He reached into his top pocket and removed a small leather-bound notebook—his ‘scribbler’, as he called it—and flashed some calculations at Paula. ‘If I’d put six dollars on it, I could’ve won twelve grand. Now that would’ve sorted out those school fees of yours, I reckon.’

  Paula laughed. One of her father’s interests was horse-racing, but he staunchly refused to place a bet. He claimed to have developed a foolproof formula for picking winners and studied the form daily, but described gambling as ‘one of the worst things ever to happen to humanity’. His own father, Paula’s grandfather, had gambled away the family’s savings not long after the Second World War, and they’d been forced to rely on charity and welfare to survive. As the youngest of five children, her father could still remember the day he’d received his first pair of new shoes: he’d been sixteen years old and about to start work as an apprentice butcher. Before that, he’d been forced to wear the ill-fitting hand-me-downs of siblings and generous neighbours, a fact he credited with causing his bulbous bunions. These days, he got around in the only shoes capable of accommodating his misshapen feet: a pair of thongs in summer, or gumboots in winter.

  ‘What’s wrong, sweetie?’ he asked, as soon as they sat down.

  Paula marvelled at how her father could intuit her mood. Prior to her mother’s death a year ago, their relationship had been affectionate but distant. In her youth, he’d always been too busy in the butchery; the blue and white signage above Jones Quality Meats was an enduring image of Paula’s childhood. She could still remember the smell of her father as he walked in the door of an evening, the pungent aroma of blood and bone, overlaid with hospital-grade bleach. Not altogether offensive—she never failed to run and throw her arms around him—but pervasive nonetheless. Even now, eight years after he’d sold the business, Paula sometimes fancied she could still smell the odour on certain items of his clothing, despite all the laundering her mother had done to expunge it.

  Her mother, Jeanette, had been the dominant partner in the relationship for as long as Paula could remember. The natural anchor of the family, she’d run the household, looked after the children, and done practically everything for her husband: choosing his clothes, issuing instructions, even speaking for him. Her mother had been vivacious, charismatic and the life of social gatherings, with an occasionally volcanic temper. By contrast, her father had been soft-spoken, measured and loath to offer an opinion. Paula had always attributed this to a natural passivity on his part, a certain laziness even. It had taken her mother’s death for her father to begin to reveal more of himself to Paula: his capacity for engaging conversation, his lively sense of humour, a genuine interest in the world beyond himself.

  A month after her mother died, her father had moved into the second-hand caravan parked in their backyard.

  ‘It’s just a temporary measure,’ she’d explained to Hamish, who’d been using the caravan as an after-hours office. ‘Until we’re sure Dad can cope by himself.’

  Hamish had assented grudgingly. While always respectful of his father-in-law, they seemed to lack the common ground so crucial to male bonding. Sid loved Aussie Rules and cricket; Hamish preferred cycling and boxing. Sid was proud of his four decades as a master butcher; Hamish, by contrast, had eschewed his tradesman roots and manoeuvred his way into senior management as quickly as possible. Sid loved nothing more than a ‘cuppa and a chin wag’, expansive discussions about current affairs, politics and life in general; Hamish had little time for idle chatter and less for debate, preferring instead a solitary whisky in front of the television before completing his evening’s work.

  Paula needn’t have worried about her father’s capacity to cope in the wake of his wife’s death, it turned out; Sid embraced his newfound independence with gusto. Not long after moving into the caravan, he joined the Waverley RSL and took trips with their day club to scenic locations such as the Dandenongs, Phillip Island and Ballarat. He maintained his long-standing membership of the Doncaster Rotary Club, which he’d first joined as the local butcher in 1972. And then, six months after her mother’s death, he embarked on the complete replanting of their backyard. Referring to a moon calendar he taped to the caravan door, he transformed it into a flourishing patchwork of flowers and vegetables. He rose early for his ‘daily constitutional’, always stopping to chat with passers-by as he power-walked around the neighbourhood. When finally given the chance to speak, it seemed, her father had plenty to say. It was as if her mother had gagged him for forty years, Paula sometimes reflected.

  And so Sid’s temporary living arrangement in the caravan had morphed into a permanent one, despite Hamish’s occasional hints that her father should return to the retirement village.

  Sid’s such a social animal, he’ll love it back there.

  The ratio of men to women is stacked in his favour.

  Why don’t you suggest it and see what he says?

  Paula always deflected such comments; she couldn’t countenance the idea of sending her father back to an empty one-bedroom unit at Greenleaves. Besides, she was enjoying getting to know him, at long last.

  Sid jiggled the teabags floating in their mugs. ‘Paula, I can tell something’s wrong.’

  ‘I’ve had a terrible day with Caitlin, Dad. It’s not something you’d understand.’

  ‘Try me.’

  She hesitated, then said, ‘Okay. A pornographic image has been uploaded to Facebook and it’s got Caitlin’s name on it.’

  He nibbled at the edge of a chocolate biscuit, seemingly processing this information.

  She helped herself to another Tim Tam, watching him.

  ‘And is it a picture of Caitlin?’

  ‘No, it’s a picture of . . . well, it’s obviously some sort of revolting joke.’

  Her father stirred milk into his tea and pushed Paula’s mug towards her. ‘Who’s the idiot responsible?’

  ‘The school’s investigating. They’ve got no idea, as far as I can tell.’

  He blew on his tea. ‘Well, I guess they’ll find out soon enough. And then there’ll be consequences.’

  ‘There already are consequences,’ she said, her voice quivering. ‘The whole school’s calling Caitlin names. The kids have shared the photo again and again.’

  ‘It’s gone virus then?’

  She almost smiled. ‘Viral, Dad. Yes.’

  ‘Hmmm. That’s the problem with the internet, isn’t it? It’s like the genie in a bottle. Once it’s popped out, you can’t stuff it back in.’ He reached across and squeezed Paula’s hand.

  She noticed the dirt under his fingernails; it was a hygiene habit that riled Hamish, whose own nails were clean half-moons. She was sometimes tempted to taunt Hamish: You used to be a tradie, but now you can’t stand dirty fingernails? Yet he still insisted on driving a dual-cab ute as some kind of testament to his blue-collar roots. Hamish was contrary, she’d concluded, often saying and doing things that were irreconcilable. In the early years of their relationship, she’d called him spontaneous, innovative, entrepreneurial. Now she just called it for what it was: inconsistency.

  ‘You’re a good mother, Paula,’ her father said. ‘You do a terrific job with the kids. You’ll know what’s best.’

  She sipped at her tea, unconvinced. How could she know
what was best, as the product of a different generation? The late-twentieth-century childhood she’d enjoyed, some thirty years earlier, had seemed much simpler. An environment uninterrupted by the demands of social media, with far fewer distractions competing with parental influence. The power of the peer group had always been substantial, but nowhere near as potent as in her children’s world of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Kik. Nowadays, it seemed to Paula, there were a thousand potential channels for young people to chat and post, pose and expose, name and shame—all of it enabled by the ubiquitous presence of the smartphone.

  In the early days of her children’s social-media usage, Paula had tried to find a balance, embracing the zeitgeist while setting parameters. ‘Friending’ Caitlin on Facebook, for example, then monitoring her posts. But Paula soon found that there were only so many hours in a day to scroll through the idle chitchat of teenagers online. And on some fundamental level, the technology felt intricate and inaccessible; a time-consuming tool of which Paula tired, inevitably, before reverting to more traditional methods of communication.

  You can’t beat face-to-face catch-ups or phone calls, she heard herself repeating to her children. All the while recognising that for their generation, social media was no longer a tool: it was the global lingua franca. The world was changing and, on some level, Paula was being locked out of her children’s lives.

  Luckily, Hamish was far less of a social media Luddite.

  She swirled the tea in her mug, then looked up at her father.

  ‘I’m not really sure what to do, Dad,’ she said. ‘But Hamish will know.’

  Later that evening, Hamish leaned over her shoulder in the lounge-room, peering at her laptop. He’d gone to the gym directly from work, then onto his usual Friday night beers with his best friend Doggo. The fetid smell of sweat still hung about him, overlaid with alcohol. Paula could remember a time, earlier in their marriage, when his body odour had smelled masculine to her. Enticing, even; part of the Iron Man persona that had attracted her in the first place. His supreme confidence in his body, his charisma and persuasiveness, it had all seemed so seductive. But more often than not these days, when he walked in all sweaty and looking for sex, she just wanted to hand him a towel and point to the shower.