Blame Read online

  About the Author

  Nicole Trope is a former high school teacher with a Masters Degree in Children’s Literature. In 2005 she was one of the winners of the Varuna Awards for Manuscript Development. In 2009 her young adult novel titled I Ran Away First was shortlisted for the Text Publishing Prize. Blame is Nicole’s sixth novel. Her previous titles include the acclaimed The Boy Under The Table, Three Hours Late, The Secrets in Silence, and Hush, Little Bird.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First published in 2016

  Copyright © Nicole Trope 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone:(61 2) 8425 0100

  Email:[email protected]

  Web:www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 9781760293154

  eISBN 9781952534379

  Internal design by Lisa White

  Cover design: Alissa Dinallo

  Cover photograph: Elisabeth Ansley/Trevillion Images

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  For D. M. I. J.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  ‘Excuse me,’ says Anna to the policewoman standing behind the counter. She says it quietly, barely whispers it, preferring not to be heard at all. The policewoman doesn’t respond. She is in the middle of a conversation with someone else. A man wearing a long grey coat, despite the heat, is trying to explain what his lost dog looks like. He keeps saying the word ‘dog’ and sticking out his tongue and pretending to pant, in case the policewoman has forgotten it’s a dog he is talking about. Even though he’s standing a few feet away from Anna, she can smell the heavy unwashed odour coming from him. With his shaggy beard and long hair, he is starkly out of place in this suburban police station.

  Anna looks around her at the peeling fake leather chairs, grey laminate counter and cream-coloured walls, and tries to imagine someone actually designing the room. It’s not even ugly. It’s just nothing. If she closes her eyes, she immediately forgets what it looks like.

  The man at the counter waves his arms and his smell assaults Anna again.

  The policewoman doesn’t seem to notice the odour—or she’s very good at ignoring it. Anna furtively dips her head towards her chest and smells the perfume she sprayed on as she was getting dressed. The floral scent mingles with the man’s smell, making her feel slightly sick and reminding her that she only had coffee for breakfast this morning. And that she only had wine for dinner last night. She doesn’t usually drink wine, or any alcohol at all, but she was trying to see how much the rich, berry-coloured drink could alter the way she felt. ‘There must be a reason so many people do it,’ she had thought. She had not expected to have acid in her throat this morning and now doubts that she will ever be able to drink wine again.

  She was trying to see if, with enough alcohol, she could feel like her old self, or a different self—anyone but who she was right now. One glass of wine had slowed her heart rate a little and smoothed the rough edges of her thoughts, but before allowing herself to enjoy the sensation, she had poured another glass and then another. This morning, she had chewed on an antacid tablet and dismissed the idea of rediscovering even the smallest atom of her old self as ridiculous. Her old self hadn’t existed for so long, she couldn’t even be sure what feelings and thoughts she was trying to recapture.

  Looking in the mirror as she applied her make-up, she acknowledged that she was an entirely different person than she had been two weeks ago. Her face looked strange, filled with shadows and angles that she had never seen before. She had had to reapply her make-up because it looked wrong, as though she were a teenager making her first attempt at decoration. It didn’t look much better the second time but by then she was running late, and so had shrugged her shoulders at her reflection and given up on finding her old face.

  There is a mirror on the wall behind the policewoman and Anna glances at it, wondering if there are other police officers behind it, watching her. She straightens her shoulders a little. In its reflection, she looks, as Caro would say, like she belongs in some country house. ‘Oh my dear,’ her friend liked to say, affecting a British accent, ‘don’t you look fabulous.’

  Anna smiles down at her shoes as she thinks about Caro’s terrible accent that always came out sounding more New Zealand than British and never failed to make her laugh. Caro loved accents despite being hopeless at them. Only four weeks ago, she had insisted on pretending to be Italian when they tried out a new coffee shop. Caro’s ruse had fallen apart because the owner was actually Italian and had attempted to have a conversation with her. Anna had eventually excused herself to go to the bathroom because she could see her choked-back giggles were irritating the woman. Caro had simply pretended that she was speaking Italian until she finally gave up and went away.

  ‘She probably thinks you’re insane,’ Anna had said on returning to their table.

  ‘That’s Mrs Insane to you,’ Caro had said, stealing the last piece of mud cake.

  Anna had left for school pick-up feeling lighter than she had all day. She had breathed in the late-spring air and felt, if not content, at least better than she had. For what seemed longer than an hour, she had just been a woman having fun in a coffee shop.

  Anna looks at the mirror again and quickly stops smiling. She smooths down the front of her wraparound dress, which she bought last year. The fabric is soft and has a delicate rosebud print. She remembers how excited she was to find it on sale, marked down three times to a price that she could finally afford.

  ‘Buy it,’ Caro had said as she watched Anna twirl in front of the boutique’s large gold-framed mirror.

  ‘But it’s still expensive. When will I ever wear it?’

  ‘We’ll have a night out together,’ said Caro. ‘We’ll go drinking without the husbands and pick up gorgeous young men.’

  The dress had hung in her closet ever since, waiting to be worn. Anna had only pulled it out this morning when she had run out of other options. She had held it to her cheek for a moment, remembering. ‘I found somewhere to wear it,’ she would like to tell Caro.

  Because it’s a wraparound dress, she can wear it even tho
ugh she has lost weight in the last two weeks. ‘Eat something,’ says Keith every time someone else brings over a meal. There are at least five different kinds of lasagne squashed in the freezer, all in dishes she knows their owners will require back.

  ‘Why can’t they just use something disposable?’ she said to Keith as she watched him note exactly who the latest one was from.

  ‘I suppose they think these look better. I’m heating this one up now; please eat some of it with me.’

  ‘What’s the point?’ she had replied, making him shake his head. She left him in the kitchen and curled up on the couch in the living room, switching on the news but muting the sound.

  She hadn’t asked that question to be difficult. She really would like to know if there is any point in her continuing to exist, continuing to feed and dress herself, or even get out of bed in the mornings. She doesn’t think she has ever looked this thin and this old. At a certain point, she seems to have crossed a boundary between waif-like and haggard. ‘So what,’ she thinks, staring at the reflection of her collarbones in the police station mirror. ‘So what.’

  ‘You need to eat, Anna, because there’s going to be a day when you’re ready to move on, to move forward,’ said Keith, who had joined her in the living room. He’d handed her a plate of lasagne and given her a fork. ‘You want to be physically strong enough to get on with your life. We both need to be strong enough to get on with living.’

  ‘What if I don’t want to get on with living?’ she had asked and put the plate on the coffee table, next to the sandwich he had made her for lunch.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he had replied, and then she had watched him shove three large forkfuls of the lasagne into his mouth, barely even chewing one mouthful before opening his mouth for the next one.

  ‘You’ll choke,’ she said and he had shrugged.

  ‘You can do something with your life, Anna; really do something,’ he said, as though she were now free to embark on some great adventure. ‘You could go back to school and study for your master’s degree in art, or you could study teaching . . . anything!’

  Anna had been unable to suppress a bubble of laughter. Sometimes the things Keith said were so stupid that she thought about hitting him.

  ‘We could try for another child,’ he said quietly after she had finished laughing at him.

  Then she had hit him. It had happened so quickly that she had barely felt herself move as she leapt to her feet, whirled around and slapped him across the face. The stinging sensation on her palm made her aware of how numb she had been feeling and she had looked at her hand, almost enjoying the tingling.

  She had never done anything like that before and had a vision of herself powered by rage.

  ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ he had yelled. He had dropped his plate of lasagne on the floor and the congealed mess of yellow and brown made Anna feel sick.

  ‘Arsehole,’ she had replied and then had gone to the kitchen and found an unopened bottle of red wine. ‘Well what have we here?’ she’d heard Caro say so clearly that she had turned around—expecting her to be there.

  Now she swallows twice, reliving the cheap acidic taste that she had managed to ignore in order to finish half the bottle and collapse into bed, only to be woken four hours later by a raging thirst. ‘You’re such a lightweight,’ Caro used to say whenever she managed to convince Anna to join her in a drink.

  Anna takes a step back, so she is further away from the man who has lost his dog, pats her hair and straightens the dress’s belt. She knows, without another check in the mirror, that to the outside world she looks well put together, regardless of how she looks to herself. She could be on her way to lunch at a beachside café or she could be planning a day of shopping. She could be anywhere but instead she is right here, waiting for the policewoman to notice her.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Keith had said when he came into the bedroom before he left for work and found her sitting on the floor, surrounded by dresses and pants that, not knowing what to wear for this interview, she had rejected, but she told him not to. She is sure that they will not allow anyone else to be present in the interview, and she is also sure that she does not want Keith sitting next to her today, or, possibly, ever again. Anna had known that he wouldn’t mention her slapping him. It has never been his way. Keith had always been able to compartmentalise their arguments and dismiss them as single moments in time. He’d just pretend it had never happened. Perhaps he’d been afraid to push her for an explanation in case it pushed her too far or opened a discussion he didn’t want to have. Either way he said nothing and she did the same.

  ‘You should have hit me back,’ she wanted to say but knew that Keith would have been profoundly shocked by that.

  ‘He is . . . dis . . . dis . . .,’ says the man, trying to indicate, Anna thinks, that the dog has spots of colour. ‘Is . . . is,’ he continues and then looks around, and not finding what he’s looking for, growls at the policewoman.

  ‘Like a leopard,’ she says. Anna has no idea how the policewoman has understood what the man was trying to say.

  ‘Dat,’ he says, pointing a finger at her.‘Like dat.’ His accent sounds European but Anna doesn’t know from which part. Keith, as he tells her all the time, always knows. He makes a habit of talking to strangers with accents, just so he can enjoy their incredulous expressions when he picks, say, the state they’re from if he’s talking to an American, or the county they’re from if he’s speaking to an Englishman.

  ‘Pity it’s not the sort of thing you can make money from,’ she always thinks as she smiles and congratulates him on his accuracy. ‘Keith is easily impressed with himself,’ she told Caro once when they were exchanging confidences about their husbands. ‘Most of them are,’ Caro had said.

  Anna smiles again as she remembers how Caro’s laughter had set her off and the two of them had giggled like much younger women. There was a freedom in uncontrollable laughter, a feeling of being right in the moment, and Anna had not experienced such moments with anyone but Caro since she was a child.

  The policewoman sighs and writes, in a small notebook, the dog’s description. ‘Okay; we have everything we need. We’ll call you if we find him.’

  The man nods and smiles and his shoulders slump forward a little, as though he is relieved that the police are on the case. He shuffles out of the station and the policewoman turns her attention to Anna. Her hair is tightly slicked back into a short ponytail. She is wearing a vest covered in pockets and has a gun holstered at her side.

  ‘Do you really find lost dogs?’ Anna asks.

  ‘No, not really,’ she replies, giving Anna a small smile, ‘but he comes in every week to report it. I used to try and explain that it’s not something the police do but he doesn’t seem to understand, or want to understand, so it’s easier just to take down the details and tell him we’ll do our best.’

  ‘Doesn’t he wonder why you never find him?’

  ‘We don’t think the dog actually exists, but it makes him happier to report it missing.’

  ‘But surely you need to help him understand that?’ Anna asks, finding herself aggrieved on behalf of the old man.

  The policewoman seems to realise that she has unwittingly found herself in a conversation and stops smiling. ‘Can I help you?’ she says.

  ‘Oh yes. I’m . . . um . . . I’m here to meet with Detective Anderson,’ Anna replies and feels herself flush at the words. This is not a situation she has ever imagined she would find herself in.

  The policewoman consults a computer on the counter.

  ‘You are?’ she asks.

  ‘Anna McAllen.’

  ‘Yes, Anna McAllen,’ says the policewoman, agreeing with Anna that she is, indeed, who she says she is.

  ‘No one else would want to be me,’ thinks Anna.

  ‘Come this way, please.’ The policewoman’s tone is low and her voice formal. The change is alarmingly sudden, making Anna wonder what she’s heard. She glances at the m
irror again, wondering how many people are judging her.

  She is no longer a nice woman seeking help. She is here to be interviewed, to help police with their enquiries. No one has said these words to her but she is thinking them. Whenever she’s heard the phrase on the news, she’s known instantly that while it sounds like a friendly exchange of information, it is anything but.

  I’m here because they suspect me of something. I’m here because I am a suspect. I know that, she knows that. Everyone knows that.

  ‘It’s just routine,’ Detective Anderson had told her when he called yesterday. ‘It’s just so we can get all the facts down.’

  ‘But you already have the facts,’ she said. ‘You were there.’

  ‘I wasn’t there when it happened, I was only at the hospital. Trust me, it’s no big deal. We just have to do it in a formal situation so we can get your statement on camera. It can wait if you’re not . . . ready.’

  ‘Why does it need to be on camera?’

  ‘Anna, I don’t want you to get upset about this. It’s more to do with how the case against the driver is going to proceed. We just need a clear statement from you. But, as I said, it can wait if you’re not ready.’

  ‘No,’ she had said. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll come in and do it.’

  It was, for a moment, a relief to think that she could leave the house, that she should leave the house. Bereaved people were supposed to stay home, out of sight and away from people who were trying to get on with their lives. Last night, she had looked at the walls of the hallway leading to their bedroom and wondered if they were moving closer together. She’s found herself standing in the garden at all hours, sucking in deep breaths of air to carry back inside with her.

  Anna follows the policewoman through a door into the back of the station, which is really just a collection of small rooms. The air-conditioning seems to be failing in the face of the heat and she feels her lip bead with sweat. She reaches up to touch her cheek and finds it wet. Again, she has been crying without having realised. Anna had always assumed that crying involves the whole body, starting with heaving shoulders and guttural sounds, but now she knows better. She can be standing in the kitchen, thinking about whether she would like a cup of tea, and absent-mindedly touch her face and find it wet. She is always embarrassed when this happens and is glad Keith hasn’t caught her.