Peter Corris - The Other Side of Sorrow

‘Her natural mother is dying and wants to see her.’

Her thin, blue-veined hands flew up to her face, almost hiding it. This was too much hard-edged information for her to process. She dropped the hands and looked up at me. ‘The poor woman.’

‘Yes. Do you know where Megan might be, Mrs French? People seem to think she might have a place to go to.’

‘People?’

‘People who care for her. People who want to help her. She’s keeping bad company, Mrs French.’

I could hear some sort of movement inside the house. Rex? I whipped out a card and extended it. She didn’t move and I had to grab one of her hands and wrap it around the card. She clutched it like a child with a toy. I asked her again where Megan might go but she’d heard the sounds herself by now and didn’t reply.

The man who entered the room was big and bulky. He was fair, a redhead who’d turned grey I guessed. His pale skin was blotched with freckles and whitish skin cancers. He towered over his wife and almost shouldered her aside to confront me.

‘You are?’

I told him.

‘Your business?’

I told him.

He sensed that his wife was moving so as to be able to look at me and he pushed her towards the door. ‘I’ll handle this, Dora.’

She shot me a quick, hopeless look and left the room.

‘Megan’s mother was a whore,’ Rex French said. ‘Like mother, like child.’

It took every atom of self-control I had in me not to hit him. ‘That’s not a very Christian attitude,’ I said.

‘The word is be-fouled by your use of it.’

He was sixty or thereabouts, flabby and slack-bodied in overalls and work boots. A decent punch would destroy him but I’d met enough fanatics to know how useless it is to argue with or assault them.

‘You’re pathetic,’ I said. ‘She deserved something better than you.’

‘Leave!’

I had to clench my fists to control the impulse to plant one in that soft belly. ‘I’m going. By the way, your brother Frank doesn’t say hello.’

French snorted. Another sinner.’

‘No, a human being. Not a sack of self-righteous shit like you.’

‘How dare you,’ he shouted.

Pastor John and two other men entered the room. They looked at me as if I’d shat on the carpet.

‘I’m afraid you’ve upset Brother Rex,’ Pastor John said. ‘I must ask you to leave before you create more disharmony.’

They represented no physical threat but I was repelled by their self-righteous disapproval. I drove away feeling sorry for Megan who’d spent something like sixteen years with Rex French, sorry for his wife, sorry for Cyn and sorry for myself. Sorry.

‘Cultists!’ Cyn almost screamed at me. ‘What do you mean cultists?’

‘Apparently they were Catholics…’

‘That’s nearly as bad.’

Religion, dislike of it, was one of the few attitudes Cyn and I had had in common and nothing had changed.

We were sitting in the living room of Cyn’s flat. Contrary to what she’d told me, there were no signs of medication and illness. The flat was elegant, as I would’ve expected. Elegant, but not obsessively so. Cyn had always had good taste and had only let it slip once – when she’d married me. I couldn’t identify the pictures on the walls or tell who’d designed the furniture, but I knew someone had. I can’t tell a leather couch from a vinyl one on sight either, but I was sure what I was sitting on was the real hide. I’d thought it was better to talk face to face with Cyn about what I learned so I’d driven straight to Crows Nest from the mountains. Now I wasn’t so sure. She was working herself up into a fury as she used to do when we were together and I’d transgressed.

She paced the room with energy she’d summoned up from somewhere. ‘Cultists. What sort of a life must she have led? They’re insane, they have group sex. They…’

‘Cyn, shut up! We’ll talk about this rationally or I’ll leave and phone that son of yours and get him to come over and take care of you.’

‘You don’t know his number.’

‘You think not?’

‘God, you’re a bastard.’

‘When I have to be. Why doesn’t your daughter come around? And you never talk about her.’

Cyn sat down in one of the leather chairs and all the energy left her in a rush. ‘We’ve fallen out, Anne and I. It’s nothing serious.’

I had my doubts about that and I wondered whether the falling out had contributed to the search for the lost child. I was out of my depth. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘The place of birth checks out. The date’s one day out, though. I suppose this Megan French could be your daughter.’

‘ Our daughter.’

I’d told Cyn about Meg French’s early academic record and about her jump across the creek. I hadn’t mentioned Talbot hitting her. ‘She’s athletic and bright…”

‘And running around with some low-life. That’s you coming out in her.’

‘Cyn.’

She covered her face with her hands. Her hair flopped forward and suddenly, thin and frail in a silk dress that was loose on her, she looked old. She lifted her face and pushed back the hair. ‘I’m sorry, Cliff. I’m sorry. It’s late in the day. Would you like a drink?’

‘I would. If you’ll have one.’

‘I hardly slept at all last night. On all these pills sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. It feels bloody late in the day to me. I generally have a brandy at seven o’clock when I watch the news. I think I’ll have one now. You?’

‘Why not?’

She went to the kitchen for ice and soda water and poured the brandy from a decanter on a shelf. The tray also held bottles of gin and Scotch – I would’ve preferred either of them, but what the hell.

‘Cheers,’ she said. We touched glasses. ‘D’you remember when we used to like brandy, lime and soda? I wonder if people still drink that these days?’

‘Haven’t heard of it lately,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t a bad drink though.’ I sipped. ‘This is pretty smooth.’

But from the way she set it down on the arm of the chair I could tell that she wasn’t really interested in the alcohol. ‘So what’s your next move? It doesn’t sound as if you pushed very hard up there. They must know where she’d go.’

I was enjoying the drink. Brandy at 6.30, I thought. Have to watch out for that. ‘I don’t think so. The woman does possibly, but the husband’s got her hog-tied. You have to watch your step these days. Can’t throw your weight around like before. She’ll turn up again at this environmental thing.’

She gestured impatiently, almost upsetting her glass. ‘So we just wait? That doesn’t sound like the old Cliff. Goes with the suit, does it?’

I sipped the smooth brandy and didn’t say anything.

‘French,’ Cyn mused. ‘Quite a nice name for such nasty people. You said that her… uncle I suppose we have to call him, spoke well of her?’

‘Everything speaks well of her, Cyn, except her association with this Talbot. But for that, I wouldn’t be too worried.’

‘Wouldn’t you? But that’s you all over, isn’t it? Not worrying about other people. Well, he went to NIDA. What does that say about him?’

I let her waspishness pass. ‘I don’t know anything about NIDA except they train actors there. Didn’t Mel Gibson go there?’

‘Dropped out I think, like this one. That’s another thing I don’t like – this dropping out. Jesus, Cliff, how’re you going to find her? You can’t just wait for her to turn up.’

‘I’ll keep looking. That’s all I can do. I’ll talk to people at these schools they’ve gone to. Try to squeeze something out.’

Cyn took a long swallow of her drink. ‘Yes, of course. You have to find her. You have to talk to your daughter.’