Spinning Around (15 page)

‘It's all right.'

‘Things are really insane here.'

‘Things are really insane here, too.' I didn't know where to begin, so put off the moment at first. ‘Did you know that Ronnie's getting married? To Phil?'

‘You're kidding me.'

‘I'm not. They're engaged. I had lunch with her today, and she told me. Oh—she also told me that Briony's in Florence now, shacked up with some Argentinian artist. Spending weekends in Tuscan villas. Typical, eh?'

‘Typical,' said Miriam. Her tone was slightly distracted, as if she was casting her eye over a computer printout. ‘Amazing.'

‘Miriam?'

‘What?' Her voice sharpened, suddenly. ‘What's wrong?'

‘Have you ever heard of someone called Megan Molesdale?'

‘Who?'

‘Megan Molesdale.'

A pause. ‘No,' Miriam replied at last. ‘Who is she?'

‘I don't know. Matt's been calling her. From our home phone.'

Another pause. At last Miriam said: ‘You haven't asked him yet, have you?'

‘No,' I admitted.

‘Why not?'

I tried to explain, in the process sorting out and classifying my muddled emotions. I was scared. I felt guilty. I didn't want to scuttle the ship over a slight suspicion. I didn't want to give Matt an excuse to walk out . . .

‘You think he'd
do
that?' Miriam demanded.

‘I don't know.' Hesitantly. ‘What do you think?'

Miriam sighed. She seemed to be thinking. ‘Look, don't ask me,' she said at last. ‘You're the one who's married to him.'

I was horrified. ‘You mean you think he
might
?' I squeaked.

‘Helen, I don't know. I'm sorry.'

‘But you really think he's capable of that kind of deceit? We're talking about
Matt
here!'

‘Helen, I don't know the guy. I mean, think about it. How well do I know him?' She sighed again. ‘All I know is that it's amazing what can happen. It's amazing what people will do.' She gave a weird kind of snort. ‘Always expect the unexpected,' she added dryly. ‘That's my motto.'

I thought: that's your motto because you've spent your whole life dealing with con men. But I didn't say it aloud.

‘Well—I can't do anything about it right now,' I bleated, shaken to the core. ‘Not at work.'

‘No.'

‘How are you doing, anyway? How's
your
job going?'

‘Oh . . . pressured.' Again, that funny, dry note. ‘A bit full-on.'

‘Do you fancy a vent? Do you want to try and do a coffee, for once? On neutral ground. I could probably manage.'

This time the pause was so long, I began to wonder if she'd put me on hold—though I could still hear background noises. When she finally spoke, her voice was tight and clipped, as if she was upset about something.

‘Look, uh—let me get back to you. I don't know, things are a bit . . . I'm so sorry about this, Helen, I wish I could be more help, really.'

‘It's all right—'

‘Maybe I shouldn't have dumped this on you. Maybe I should have left well alone.'

‘No, no. You were trying to do the right thing.'

‘Was I? Maybe. I don't know any more. I'm out of my mind here.'

‘Really? Why?'

‘Oh, stuff. Work stuff. I'm sorry—I've got to go. I feel bad, but I've just got to.'

‘It's okay . . .'

‘I'll call you. I will. I promise.'

Click
.

I was left a bit shell-shocked, I have to admit. And I began to wonder: was Miriam having trouble with Giles, too? Could she have jumped to conclusions about Matt, for that very reason?

Rather than clearing my head, the whole conversation had left me more confused than ever.

This afternoon, on my way to pick up the kids from day care, I took a rather long detour through Randwick. I could do it because I had booked an overnight car; normally, I have to take a train to Marrickville, walk to the day care centre, then catch a bus home, all of which takes time. You might be wondering why, in that case, Matt gets to take the car to work. If you're anything like some of my more feminist co-workers, you might be up in arms already. But the fact is, Matt has his own private parking spot, and I don't. Nor am I in a position to rent a spot in the city for $250 a week (or whatever it is nowadays). So Matt gets the car, and I get public transport.

C'est la vie
, I guess.

Because I had a car, I found myself with time to spare this afternoon. Not a lot of time—just enough to swing past Megan Molesdale's address before I raced off to pick up the kids in Marrickville. I didn't know when I'd have another opportunity to do this. I also didn't know what I was hoping to accomplish, except to satisfy my overwhelming curiosity. Maybe I was hoping to spot the Girl With Purple Hair. At any rate, and entirely against my better judgement, I fought the traffic all the way to Randwick, where I located Megan Molesdale's house squashed in amongst a line of terraces near Alison Road.

It was a shabby little house. You don't often see shabby houses in the eastern suburbs any more, but this looked like rental accommodation; it probably hadn't been painted since the seventies, because there was a lot of mission brown all over its doors and windows and iron lace. Nevertheless, it didn't look totally uncared-for. Proper curtains had been hung. An elaborate wrought-iron bellpull had been installed over a hand-painted tile that featured the house number and a lot of baroque curlicues. A set of pottery wind chimes was suspended from beneath the boards of the first-floor verandah. There were more ceramic things in the tiny front yard: two glazed female figures on the gateposts, a kind of birdbath thing inlaid with bits of broken china, several large flowerpots covered in vivid designs. Studying them from across the road, I wondered if the occupant was a potter or a sculptor.

Or an art student, perhaps? An art student with purple hair?

I considered getting out of the car, walking up to the mission-brown front door, and tugging at the wrought-iron bellpull. What would happen then? Would she answer the door herself? I hadn't the faintest idea what I would say to her if she did. As a matter of fact, I had a sneaking suspicion that I might vomit all over her garishly painted toenails, because I felt cold and sick at the very thought of such a confrontation.

Nevertheless, I did get out of the car. I did cross the road, and push open an iron gate so rusty that it shrieked like a slaughtered pig. It gave me a terrible fright; my hands were shaking when I tugged at the bellpull, which clanked in a wheezy sort of way. My heart was in my mouth. My mind was a blank.

I waited and waited.

The wind chimes clinked. In the distance, car horns yelped angrily. I gave the bellpull one more tug, and rattled the security door, which was made of black iron bars like something out of a maximum-security prison. Then I moved over to the living room window, and peered in.

Grubby white lace impeded my view. There seemed to be a table of some kind with a stack of paper on it. A little glazed bowl half full of congealed candle-wax sat on the windowsill.

I returned to my car slowly, more relieved than disappointed. I also felt that I could have done with a stiff drink. Unfortunately, however, I had to negotiate the peak-hour traffic, and decided to forgo even a quick stop at the local pub, which looked fairly civilised. (Lots of canvas umbrellas, not many yellow tiles.) This was probably a wise choice, because as I was sitting at one of the interminable traffic lights on Cleveland Street, something suddenly clicked in my head.

Megan.

After that, I was desperate to get home. I practically broke into a sweat just thinking about the photo albums stuffed into our linen cupboard. But I had to inch my way up Cleveland Street, down City Road, along King Street, until I finally popped out of the crush on Enmore Road and roared off to the day care centre, arriving only seven minutes late. Then there was the slow process of collecting bags, finding hats and toys, signing out, adjusting the seatbelts in the car, which of course didn't contain anything remotely resembling a booster seat, and explaining to the kids that they should keep their heads down. The rest of the trip was a nail-biter; I was afraid that I might get arrested for not strapping Jonah into an appropriate restraint. (But it was only a ten-minute ride, for God's sake— what was I supposed to do?) On arriving home, I had to rush about getting dinner ready, settling quarrels, washing hands and running baths. Jonah had to be fed. Emily's latest graze had to be treated and dressed. They both had to be helped into their pyjamas, after which there was story time, the toilet (for Emily), a bottle of milk (for Jonah), tooth-brushing, nursery-rhyme singing, several calls back into the bedroom . . .

It wasn't until half past eight that they were finally asleep, and I had a chance to tackle the photo albums.

The photo albums are pretty much my domain. Until Jonah was born, the family's photographic record was totally under control; I'd labelled every shot and slipped it into a protective pocket. (All our latest photos are sitting about in Kodak envelopes, of course, but I can't do
everything
.) My own life is chronicled in nine thick albums, dating from my fourth year at high school. Matt's is less exhaustively covered. In fact he's lost most of the photos that ever came his way before he met me, with the exception of those collected and preserved by one of his former girlfriends, Nadia. Nadia was a neurotic girl who took countless brooding, black-and-white photographs which she arranged with great style and sensibility in albums that she constructed herself out of handmade paper and old-fashioned corner mounts. She also used old concert and airline tickets, pressed flowers, postcards, feathers, colour polaroids and scribbled phone messages to construct these ‘memory books', one of which she gave to Matt as a birthday present. I'm always gobsmacked when I look at it. For one thing, the girl must have had as much spare time as those Victorian women who used to embroider elaborate designs on their doilies, slippers and underwear. For another, you get the impression, as you leaf through the rough, maroon and charcoal-coloured pages, that Matt spent two years of his life contemplating the Oneness of Being in isolated mountain weekenders, or Pyrenean farmhouses, or disintegrating country sheds. Whenever I tease him about this, he replies, in plaintive tones, that he never even went as far as Bathurst, during those two years, and it isn't his fault that Nadia had him picked as a closet folk poet, or something. ‘Half of those shots she took while I was asleep,' he wails.

But this was the album I wanted. This was the album that I emptied the linen closet for, discovering it at last under a pile of my grandmother's crocheted table napkins. I hauled it out, opened it up, and flicked hurriedly through the out-of-focus (‘atmospheric') landscape shots, the fragment of dried cabbagepalm leaf, the Manly ferry tickets, the portraits of Matt—all dark shadows and glinting eyes—the photographs of river pebbles, of an empty café chair, of a rake leaning against a weatherboard wall, until I came to a typical, rather dingy colour snap taken in somebody's living room. Nadia had tried to tart it up with highlights drawn onto hairlines and T-shirts and sofa cushions with some kind of glitter-glue pen. She had even drawn a couple of sparkling purple ‘auras' around herself and Matt, and had framed the shot with strips of Christmas tinsel. But for all her effort, the photograph was still a muddy happysnap, with acres of white wall and people's eyes reflecting an eerie red light.

Beside it was written, in purple glitter-glue: ‘
Gary's housewarming—
Matt and Nadia, Gary Comino, Eva Wobilt, Megan
Molesdale, Dillon Draper, Mark Verney
'.

The date, I worked out, must have been all of seventeen years ago.

Seventeen years ago, Megan Molesdale was a skinny girl with dark, spiky hair cut short, big lips covered in plum-coloured lipstick, lots of teeth, and a taste for exotic earrings. Even then, she looked to be in her early twenties.

There's no way on earth that she could now pass for anything under forty.

I went and poured myself a gin and tonic. It was obvious that I'd been barking up the wrong tree. Megan Molesdale was an old friend of Matt's—one of the crew he mixed with when he was fresh out of Newcastle. Mark Verney was in Matt's first band. Nadia had introduced them both to a host of artistic girls who liked Balinese puppets and French cinema and African music and Lebanese food. Megan, I was sure, had been one of those girls. If she was a potter now, she could have been an artistic girl back then. In fact, I was quite sure that I remembered Matt mentioning a potter among them. A girl who wanted to build a kiln in her backyard, and who applied to the Australia Council for a grant to study pottery-making in Java, or somewhere like that.

She wasn't, I felt sure, the Girl With Purple Hair. Though it seemed odd that Matt hadn't mentioned her. Why not tell me that his old mate Megan had suddenly surfaced, after all these years? Unless Megan was
living
with the purple-haired girl? Unless that's how Matt had met her?