‘Away?’ Joy never went away. Where would she go? ‘When did she go away?’
It was on Valentine’s Day, according to Stan. Eight days ago.
‘She never mentioned she was going away,’ said Barb.
‘It was a last-minute decision,’ Stan had said tersely, as if Joy were in the habit of making last-minute decisions.
Very odd.
Barb put down the framed photo with a regretful sigh, plugged in the vacuum cleaner and tried to remember if they were due to vacuum under the bed. How long had it been? Joy liked to make sure they pushed the bed to one side and gave it a good clean at least once a month.
She got down on her hands and knees and peered under the bed. Not much dust. She’d leave it until Joy was back. She was about to stand up again when something caught her eye. A sparkle.
She dropped flat on her stomach and reached out with her fingertips. She had a good reach. Joy used to tell her that when she played in the afternoon ladies’ tennis comp.
She pulled the object towards her. It was Joy’s mobile phone. She recognised it immediately because of the glittery phone case, like one of those Glomesh evening bags they all used to love in the seventies.
She got back up and sat on Joy and Stan’s bed, panting a little from the effort. The phone was dead.
So Joy had gone away without her phone? There was a sick feeling in her stomach.
She walked out into the kitchen where Stan was sitting at the table with his son Troy. They weren’t talking. They looked like two strangers forced to share a table in a food court, although there were no cups of tea or food on the table.
Troy was holding Joy’s precious headphones, which gave Barb a strange, chilly feeling. It felt too intimate, like he was holding something that was part of his mother: a wig or dentures.
‘Hi, Barb,’ said Troy brightly. ‘Haven’t seen you for ages. Love the new haircut. How is –’
‘I just found your mother’s phone.’ She held it up. Troy’s smile vanished as fast as if she’d slapped him. His eyes flew to his father.
Stan said nothing. Not a word. He didn’t even look surprised. He just stood and dully held out his hand for the phone.
‘I have to say, I found Stan’s reaction quite peculiar,’ Barb would later tell people. Then she’d pause and let her cheeks collapse with the dreadful gravity of her inside knowledge. ‘Even, you might say, suspicious.’
chapter seven
‘Troy just called to say Barb found Mum’s phone under the bed.’
The physiotherapist’s voice carried out to where her patient sat reading a health and fitness magazine. It was the patient’s third rehab visit after surgery for a ruptured anterior ligament following a clumsy fall while jogging. The patient hadn’t rung the bell on the reception desk when she arrived fifteen minutes early, just in case Brooke – that was the physio’s name, she was very nice, very caring and calm – was seeing another patient.
She wanted to be helpful because she knew Brooke had only just started out and didn’t have a receptionist yet.
At their first consultation, the two of them had bonded over their shared experience of debilitating migraines.
Brooke Delaney said she’d decided to become a physiotherapist after seeing one as a child. ‘He said he might be able to help my migraines if they were caused by upper neck tension,’ she said. ‘My neck wasn’t the culprit, but it still felt like he was one of the few people in the medical profession who took me seriously. You know how people think you’re exaggerating your pain? Especially when you’re a little girl.’
Oh, the patient knew all about that.
She turned a page of her magazine and tried not to listen to what was clearly a private conversation.
‘So that explains why Mum isn’t answering our calls.’ Brooke’s voice was looser and louder and also somehow younger than the soothing well-modulated tone she used when addressing her patients. ‘We just feel like this might be more serious than we first thought.’
Goodness me. The patient closed her magazine. She wished now that she had rung the bell.
‘I know. Off-grid means off-grid, but it just doesn’t seem like her to leave her phone behind.’
Pause.
‘Sure, but you know how you said you and Mum argued the last time you talked?’
Pause.
‘Yes. Yes, I know, Dad, but I just wondered . . . I just wondered, was it a very bad argument?’
There was a seismic tremor of emotion on the word ‘bad’.
The patient stood. She tossed the magazine back into the basket. This was not a call that should be overheard.
Everyone had secrets. The patient had not, in fact, been jogging when she ruptured her ligament. She’d never jogged in her life. She’d fallen out of a taxi after two glasses of champagne and three espresso martinis at a fiftieth birthday lunch. She suspected that Brooke Delaney knew she hadn’t been jogging, and she appreciated the fact that she didn’t push the point.
The patient quietly got up and left the office. She would come back in fifteen minutes. She didn’t need to know her lovely physiotherapist’s possibly terrible family secrets.
chapter eight
Last September
Brooke Delaney drove to work on Monday morning with breakfast radio on low, her window shield shades tilted down. Occasionally she moaned softly, for effect. For whose effect, she didn’t know. Her own, presumably. She wore polarised sunglasses but the morning sunlight pouring through her tinted car windows still felt hurtful, in an unspecified way, like a mild insult from a stranger.
She stopped at a pedestrian crossing to let a little schoolgirl cross. The girl waved her thanks like a grown-up and walked hurriedly, gratefully. Flat feet. She broke Brooke’s heart. You are fine, Brooke told herself as her eyes filled with tears and she put her foot on the accelerator. You feel strange and teary and fragile and surreal but you are fine.
She touched her forehead. The ache is just the memory of the pain, not the pain itself.
The migraine had attacked with a brutal blow to her right eye early Saturday morning. She was braced for it. She’d known the fucker was coming, so she’d cancelled her plans in anticipation. She’d spent the weekend alone in her bedroom, the blinds down, a cold cloth on her forehead. No-one but her and her migraine.
It was her first migraine since Grant had moved out six weeks ago. No-one to bring her icepacks or glasses of chilled water, no-one to check in or care or lay a firm hand on her forehead. But she’d got through it on her own. A migraine wasn’t childbirth. Although she’d read a survey that showed women who had experienced both rated their migraine pain as the higher of the two, which was oddly cheering to hear.