A continuation of ‘Vanishing Point’

CHAPTER 1
It had been a long drive back to Booker, through the familiar stop-go around the M25 until we lost most of the traffic on the M40. Mary had looked at me as I sat next to her, the sundress riding up over my thighs, and tutted.

“Put my coat over those legs. It’ll take a while for the heater to warm us up. And… I need to think, but I need to concentrate. Can’t do both”

She had slipped a disc into the CD player, and Suzanne Vega’s ‘Solitude Standing’ had begun. Sometime later, when it ended, she had waved at the glovebox, and I had swapped it for Kate Bush and ‘Sensual World’. That had finished before our journey ended, so I had simply pressed ‘play’ once again.

Home, or what had once been home, Mary looking round nervously as I followed her into the house with my panniers, and finally I was warm.

“Tea, E… llie?”

“Please”

She paused in the doorway, her back still turned.

“I have so much confusion, Ellie. I don’t want to spoil the day, so could you please, if you have any photos, just let me see where you were?

Displacement, delay, whatever. I could handle that. I dug through my luggage until I found the bundle of CDs loaded by a little camera shop Carly had recommended. I felt more than a little out of place, being so used to hotel rooms or my tent. I set up the aTV, and she was already setting down a couple of mugs.

“Got cheese on toast cooking. Thought you might be hungry”

You have no idea, love.

Ten minutes later, and she was back. I passed her a campsite guide I had bought more for the road maps than the site list, and talked her through my route in between bites.

“How hot was it?”

“Didn’t quite make fifty Celsius, but close. Got a bit fond of swimming pools, I can tell you. Now, this is King’s Park in Perth, gorgeous place, full of birds…”

I talked her through the slides, as she made appropriate noises while studiously avoiding the fabled pachyderm, as we moved on to Gracetown and my impromptu meal with Phil, Val and Jacky, where one of the kids had snapped the group of us in the dining shelter”

“Who are they? And what the hell is that in the rafters?”

“That, love, is Gracie, an elderly possum The people---that’s Phil, and his wife Val. One of their kids took the photo. They come down to that beach for their Christmas holidays. Other woman’s Jacky, from Toronto. We kept bumping into each other along the road. Good company”

“And she was travelling on her own?”

“And she’s just getting sorted after a nasty divorce, and besides, she’s straight”

I could feel the cogs turning as she tried to adjust, but my life was only going one way now.

“Her sister is a copper. Took the husband down, and it turns out, well, Jacky said he was, as she put it, trying to get into the pants of their cleaner. She got a message from home just before I left, and the ‘trying’ seems to have been a bit forceful, if you take my meaning”

The photos turned out to be an eye-opener for both of us, for while I had listened to others commenting on my weight loss, it had been almost invisible to me, seeing it as I did from the inside. When I compared that snap with Phil to one I had snapped with a timer at Lake Cowan Lookout near Norseman, the change was shocking. The whole sequence ended with a couple of group photos of Jacky, Carly and me as we slobbered our way through far too much Italian food and not enough wine.

“That’s Jacky again, in Perth when I got back, and the other girl’s Carly, from my hotel. I mean, it’s her family’s hotel, but she stored my bike box for me”

I flicked a glance to my right, to see Mary in tears, and it was so, so easy to slide across the sofa and wrap her in my arms.

“What, love?”

She opened and shut her mouth a couple of times, as her breath caught, until sje was finally able to speak.

“That photo. It’s… That’s just… just three women, together”

“That’s the whole point, love. It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, then show you. It’s not clothes, it’s not some weird sex thing, it’s just being who I am”

She gulped a couple of times, then tried a joke.

“I’d have picked a neater handbag, though”

“I didn’t pick this one; Carly had it in lost property at the hotel, been there a year or more, She literally chucked it at me when we were on our way out for that meal. All I had was a little rucksack”

She broke down properly just then, so I rocked her like a mother would a hurting child as her cheesy toast cooled and congealed. It took twenty minutes, but eventually she was out of tears.

“I didn’t think you’d be coming back…”

“It’s like I said, love. There were a couple of times I felt like leaving the bike in a bush and just walking out into the wild. See how far I could get… No. Didn’t happen. Jacky and Carly there, they talked a lot of sense. It was Jacky’s suggestion I send you a card, and really the two of them together who said I should be open heart, open mind, open to options”

“What are you going to do?”

“That rather depends on you, love”

“I… I…”

She stopped, taking some long, slow breaths, then spoke again.

“What are we going to do?”

I should have been the one stuck for words just then, but for once in my life they were there.

“Get to know each other better, love. Going to be hard work, but I’m starting to believe it won’t be as hard as I feared”

Her eyes widened slightly.

“Oh god, what about work?”

“Honestly? I hadn’t…”

“You really didn’t expect to come back, did you?”

My turn to crack, just a little, but I was beginning to realise how much I had been relying on the strength offered by Carly and Jacky. If I admitted my real intentions to Mary, I would finally be admitting them to myself. A pile of clothes on a beach, back turned on dry land, head out and away to where death would be inevitable and implacable. I had worked through a number of scenarios, wondering how far I could walk from the road before the excuse ‘Going for a piss’ would cease to be credible to any random driver spotting me.

My own tears still shocked me, though, as I simply shook my head.

“Bloody expensive way to kill yourself, if you ask me”

This time it was me that was being comforted, until she felt I was stable once again.

“So, that question: what about work?”

“I suppose I better ring them”

“Not today. Not in the state we’re both in. And, well, don’t think thus genie can go back in the bottle. Am I right?”

I shook my head yet again, for we both knew that answer, without doubt or confusion.

Her smile was so weary.

“I don’t really feel like eating any more tonight. Can we just go to bed? Watch a film together? No idea which one, though. And what… what do you wear to bed now?”

“T shirt and shorts, same as ever”

I could almost read her mind: thank god it’s not a nighty.

The film was some Sandra Bullock rom-com, and we went to sleep lying back to back. When I awoke at about four in the morning, she was spooning me, still fast asleep, but her right hand cupping my breast.

I slipped out from under arm and duvet to send that text to the girls:

Door was unlocked. Turned the handle.

Things were still a little tense over breakfast, but I knew she was right about work. Once we were into office hours, I picked up the house phone and dialled the familiar number.

“Maynard and Richardson, good morning. How may I help you?”

“Hi, Lynn. It’s Ellie Ellison. Is Mr Maynard in?”