Love and Punishment Read online

  She was back at the old house in the quiet leafy suburb of Blackburn with her mother and brother, but Francie had never felt more alone in her life. She closed the curtains, lay back on her bed and stared at the ghostly orb of the tattered rice paper light shade she had hung when she was a teenager.

  There was not much left in the room from that time—her Pet Shop Boys and Bros posters had long gone. Her mother had claimed the room for her sewing and Francie’s single bed was now jammed in one corner behind a dressmaker’s mannequin and a clothes rack. Francie thought she just might stay in this hidey-hole forever. She didn’t see how she could possibly show her face again. She had been revealed to the world as an unhinged housebreaker and there didn’t seem to be any way back to the company of rational grown-up human beings after that.

  Every time she closed her eyes she saw Poppy’s downturned wobbly lip and Nick’s hot, pink cheeks. It had been an award-winning performance. She had to congratulate Poppy on that.

  Francie could see that this was a story which would run and run. She could imagine her competitors over at the Sunday Star jumping on it with glee. She could see tomorrow’s front page with Poppy holding up a shredded pair of knickers, her face a perfect portrait of outrage. What had Francie said in her own Seriously Single column about revenge? That’s right: I don’t actually believe in revenge. All the best ones have been done . . . leave it to a higher power to exact karmic retribution. As ye sow so shall ye reap . . .

  Sanctimonious crap! So she was a hypocrite and a liar along with everything else. After this she’d be lucky to get a job on a free TV guide. Everything was finished—her career, social life, her relationship—and she was back here in this house boarded up with painful memories. She might have known that the notion of living happily ever after with Nick was a mirage, that one day her past would come back to claim her. She felt that for the past five years she had been swimming on top of a lake and then, with the shore almost in sight, she had been pulled back under the surface. She didn’t have the strength to fight anymore. She would just lie here on her old bed and let her lungs fill with tears until she drowned.

  She buried her face in the pillow. She was instantly back there. Behind the wheel of her car, trying to resist the urge to drive towards 35 Everton Street, Parkville. The last time she’d driven there—three months ago now, a cool night in August—she’d parked outside the house with its immaculately trimmed lavender bushes (to match Poppy’s perfectly tended pubic hair?) and seen Nick’s car in the driveway. His old Renault nudged up against Poppy’s sleek little silver Honda. Jesus! Was there no end to this? Even their cars were kissing!

  She had known they would be away in Sydney that weekend for the season launch of the Sydney Theatre Company. It was easy to track Poppy Sommerville-Smith’s movements if you really wanted to. If you were, say, a kidnapper, a robber or a pervert. She was interstate for an arts festival one week or a play opening the next. She was routinely photographed here and there with an adoring Nick on her arm. He had been exchanged for the ageing theatre directors she was usually clutching at. Poppy’s future engagements were apparently breathlessly anticipated by an adoring public.

  The banality of their parking arrangements had blindsided Francie. Of course he would leave his car here so they could travel to the airport together. Then came the torturous questions. How often was his car here? Did he stay with her a night, a week, a month at a time? Were his clothes hanging in the wardrobe? Was his shaving kit in the vanity unit? His books, computer, CDs . . . what? Had he moved in with Poppy permanently and Johnno knew, everyone knew but her . . . Again?

  So they were out of town, the house was silent and the backdoor key was easy to find. It was inside a fake rock in a fake pot full of fake geraniums. Figured. Poppy Sommerville-Smith was a fake too.

  A small click and Francie was inside the house. If she had been discovered that night she wouldn’t have had an explanation for being inside the house with a torch. It was premeditated break and enter. She might have been able to plead mental instability. Imagining what Poppy and Nick’s life together was like had driven her mad for months. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat for trying to picture how it was.

  As Francie stood there in the hallway in the dark she had a feeling she was drawing a thread through the fabric of her life from a long time ago. When she was a small girl she had lain awake night after night wondering what her father’s new life was like. Her mother had never let her see Dad’s new house with that woman. After a year, or however long it was, he had given up asking for Francie and Joel to come and visit. As a young girl she had endlessly pictured him in a kitchen, a bathroom, a hall, a garden. Did he have a new favourite chair in front of the television? Did he sleep on the side of the bed near the window like he did at home?

  Sometimes she saw her father walking down a golden staircase in a tuxedo—he lived in a palace with white marble floors and stained-glass windows. Other times he was standing near a fireplace in a cottage which was all dark wood, like the home of the Seven Dwarves. She even saw him in a plastic Barbie condo. He was lying on a white sun lounge by a pink swimming pool holding a drink with an umbrella in it. So, you can understand why she had to see what the inside of Poppy’s house looked like. She was grown up now. She could go wherever she liked.

  Francie was surprised when she first saw Poppy’s kitchen. She had predicted it would be a designer’s dream of slick, expensive stainless-steel appliances with an aubergine feature wall. She had not expected to find it all so unpretentious and cosy—and yellow. Well, as cosy yellow as she could tell from the light of a small torch. It was altogether more . . . sensual . . . than Francie had imagined. Arty and bohemian. Perhaps if she had been able to switch on the light, the illusion of being in the back room of a café in Casablanca would have been shattered, but Francie didn’t want to alert the neighbours that there was an intruder in the house.

  She could see the two of them in this kitchen. They would sit around the restored butcher’s bench on wooden stools, Poppy leaning towards Nick with an outstretched hand, waiting for him to kiss her fingers. He would walk around the bench and pull her amber curls to one side and kiss her bare neck. Maybe they would drink red wine as they waited for Turkish bread to come out of the old gas oven to accompany a platter of dips they’d bought from the Victoria Market. A cosy night in. Hot bread, hot . . . sex.

  Francie discovered the lounge room next. She had carried an image with her of taupe linen sofas and a commanding oil painting of Poppy on the wall above. Again, as the small circle of light swooped over the room, she was surprised to find deep burgundy walls hung with tapestries. The long low couches were dark brown wool and strewn with cushions made from Moroccan carpets. Again she saw them lying here together. Poppy was reading Proust aloud, in French, as Nick parted her silk robe and kissed his way up her bare thighs.

  She groped along a dark hall through to the bedroom. She knew its configuration from the night in July when she had looked in through the window. Back then she had just stood on a plastic bucket and peered in. She was much more powerful now. A trespasser? Or just exercising her privilege as the third party in this sordid tale?

  She crossed in front of the bed and entered an ensuite bathroom. She closed the door behind her and switched on the light. She was momentarily blinded by the brightness bouncing off the arctic white tiles. When Francie focused on herself in the mirror she saw someone she didn’t recognise. She’d pulled a striped woollen beanie down over her head to her eyebrows. Her grey eyes were wide and bright, her skin was paler than she had ever seen it and her freckles were faded after the dull skies of winter. Her lips were set into a thin line spelling an emotion you couldn’t quite read. She looked like the sort of person you would avoid sitting next to on the tram for fear of somehow being involved in a random act of violence.

  Her heart was pounding faster than usual, her own breath a breeze in her ears. But her hands were steady and she was oddly calm. The house was empty. They we
re not coming here tonight. There was no need to hurry.

  Francie was inside the inner sanctum where Poppy Sommerville-Smith groomed herself to face the world. It would take her a long time, she thought bitterly. At forty-three years old it had to be taking longer and longer.

  Francie guessed that the vanity unit would be full of anti-wrinkle creams and vials of expensive youth serums. She opened the mirrored door and there they were—a row of expensive La Mer products. How much did that stuff cost? Three, four hundred dollars a jar? What else was in here which would give her a clue as to what she was dealing with?

  Francie grimaced to find packets of Ural and a tube of Canesten cream. Thrush, cystitis? Disgusting. You could get them when your sex life took an unexpectedly vigorous turn. Francie wondered whether they fucked in the shower . . . or on the floor on the thick white mat in front of the bath. Or maybe Poppy liked to do it in the dark where Nick wouldn’t see the latticework of wrinkles on her neck and be reminded of how old she was.

  The one thing she didn’t see was any evidence of birth control devices. At the age of forty-three Poppy probably didn’t have to worry about all that. Had Nick given up on ever having a child? He was twenty-nine. One day, and it might take five years or it might take ten, but one day he would realise he was giving up the chance to be a father. If you went to the doctor and asked for a vasectomy when you were childless and twenty-nine, they wouldn’t do it. But that’s what Nick had chosen for himself, in effect. And then she wondered again what Nick’s mother had said when he first walked through the door with a 43-year-old woman.

  Poppy had stolen much more than her man. She had stolen her future. Her husband and the father of her children! She slammed the door of the vanity unit shut and looked into the mirror again.

  ‘Fucking bitch! I hate you!’ she spat at her reflection. She took up the torch and snapped off the bathroom light.

  Francie stepped into the bedroom onto soft carpet. She could see it was grey from the moonlight slanting in through an old sash window.

  She looked in the wardrobe next. The circle of torchlight played over a vast rack of clothes, mostly black. The labels were expensive—Dolce & Gabbana, Jean Paul Gaultier, Versace. Nothing Francie could afford. She tugged the bottom of her floral polyester top down over her midriff.

  And then she saw them sitting next to a jumble of Poppy’s shoes—Nick’s boots. The good black Italian ones she’d found and bought for him from an outlet store in New York. She remembered she’d also found him a herringbone tweed Armani jacket on sale and triumphantly carted it back to their hotel room. The jacket wasn’t here. Of course not. He’d need it with him in Sydney if he were to be carted around as Poppy’s latest chic handbag.

  She slid the mirrored door closed and turned her torch to a chest of drawers. The first drawer held Poppy’s negligees—a swirl of pink and cream silk, a dessert of strawberries and cream. The second contained her underwear. Again, predictably, la Perla. A label Francie could only dream about. This stuff was mostly black with the occasional garish slash of scarlet—silk, netting, ribbons, bows. The sort of frilly shit which must have looked laughable on a middle-aged woman. The knickers were Francie’s size. The bras were a ‘C’ instead of a ‘B’, but close enough.

  And then Francie did something she would never be able to explain. Lying on her bed here tonight in Blackburn, months later, thinking back on it all, she was still paralysed with shock trying to understand why. Why had she done it?

  She had stripped off her clothes, kicked off her sandals, until she was standing naked in the gloomy bedroom. She rested the torch on the chest of drawers. The round button of light illuminated a photograph on the wall of Poppy in a crimson evening gown, curtseying on a stage, accepting a bouquet of red roses.

  She slipped on a pair of Poppy’s silky black knickers and a lacy, ribboned bra. She pulled back the bedcover to reveal white sheets and pillows and slid into the side of the bed she guessed would be Nick’s. She was right. It was his side of the bed. She could smell him.

  She lay there, closed her eyes and fell headfirst into a black abyss of misery. She thought she might never get up again as memories wrapped around her limbs like long trailing weeds, holding her down. Her voice swirled in her head, soundless. Why did you go? I thought you loved me. I tried to be good. I tried to be perfect. Come back. Come back.

  So this is where it all happened? Where Nick took someone else in his arms, folded himself into her. Where all thoughts of Francie were gone. Gone to dust! Where memories of her were picked up by the four winds of love, togetherness, always and forever and scattered on a vast expanse of forgetfulness. It was an endless ocean where Francie disappeared and ceased to exist until she was swept back, some time later, large as life, on a vengeful tide.

  Her pale limbs were illuminated by the full moon. Her body was picked out in the light, white and hard, a mannequin in a shop window. Stiff and dead like the bride doll in the corner of her grandmother’s room. The warm blood in her veins slowed. Every pulse point in her body—her wrists, her neck, inside her elbows—chilled and fractured. Her eyes narrowed so she felt she was peering through a crack in a glacier.

  The feeling was not unfamiliar to her. It was an emotion from a long time ago which had made her wrench the head off Joel’s Batman action figure, bury it in the backyard and not tell him where it was. No matter how hard he cried. The same feeling which made her kick the back of Justine Smith’s chair in Year 9, again and again, until Justine wept with frustration. The same feeling which had compelled her to crawl into her mother’s bed in the middle of the night so that the man in the lounge room, drinking wine, laughing and dancing with her mother, would never, ever take her father’s place.

  Francie slipped out of the bed and groped in her handbag. She found her dressmaking scissors and held them up to the moonlight shining through the window. She’d carried the scissors for weeks. In those first days after Nick left she’d thought many times about cutting Poppy’s heart out and had armed herself with the weapon in case she had the chance. This was her chance now. They felt cool and heavy in her hand. The blades sharp, precise, bright silver mirrors.

  She upended Poppy’s underwear and negligee drawers and felt the silky trifle slide cool and slippery over her bare feet. Then, sitting down on the floor in a slice of moonlight, she quietly and methodically cut the crotch out of every pair of la Perla undies in the pile. When she had finished with them she tore into the bras and negligees, stockings, corsets, suspenders.

  With every cut a string to a memory was severed. This slash was for the night Francie had first had sex with Nick. When she had first traced the naked landscape of his body with her fingertips and knew it was a place she never wanted to leave.

  This rip was for the afternoon on the beach when they were up to their necks in champagne surf at Aireys Inlet and he had carried her in his arms from the water and fallen beside her in the hot sand. He shouted to the white gulls skirting overhead that he loved her. Told her he would stay with her. Heal the hurt. Never leave.

  Lies, lies, lies! All lies!

  She went on like this, scything through satin, twisting wires, shredding straps and ribbons until everything in the drawers was ragged and unrecognisable.

  Her hands ached from the effort of holding the scissors so tightly. Her fingers cramped with the pain of cutting through seams of folded satin. Severing one half of a pair of flimsy knickers from the other. Hacking a ribbon rose from a nightdress as soft as butter. Slitting a slip, from lacy hem to embroidered neckline. Renting the fabric, dismembering the sleeves of a feather-trimmed negligee as if she was slaughtering a small bird.

  She uncurled her fingers and held the scissors in her palm like a dagger. This stab into the soft cup of a bra was for Poppy’s right eye. Francie saw her on a stage, staggering along a cardboard parapet, a tragic Tosca screeching with pain and indignation.

  This wound was for Poppy’s left eye. Francie saw her blind and bleeding, in her death throes
. Tragic, martyred, appealing to the heavens for mercy.

  The final slash tore into Poppy’s neck, from one side of her lovely white throat to the other, leaving her bleeding and mortally wounded centre stage. Then Francie tore down the theatre. She hoisted a chair and smashed it into the mirrored wardrobe doors. Shards of glass cleaved the room. Impaled themselves in the carpet, the bed. Each sharp splinter reflecting the moon as if she had broken the sky.

  Her hand stung and she lifted it to see blood already making its way in a shiny black trail down her arm. She held her scissors high again—this time as if brandishing a mythical sword forged in righteous crusade—and then plunged into pillows and eiderdown. Feathery entrails haemorrhaged on the carpet.

  Fuck him here, will you? Sleep with him here? Dream here?

  She turned to the chest of drawers next and, with a sweep of her bloodied forearm, cleared the top of books, framed photographs, candles and keepsakes. Poppy’s precious things arced and crashed into dark corners.

  When the satisfying racket of destruction ceased, Francie saw one artefact remained. A heavy album, bound in red velvet, gold embossed. She took it down and sat on the floor, now white with feathered flakes. She found her torch and, in its eyeball of light, turned the pages. It was Poppy’s scrapbook, lovingly and carefully cataloguing her stellar career.

  Here, a review: Once more Poppy Sommerville-Smith reminds us all why she is the doyenne of the Australian stage with a stunning performance as . . . On the next page, a caption to a photograph: Ms Sommerville-Smith graciously accepts her third Critics’ Circle Award at a glittering night at the Sydney Opera House. There were floral greeting cards from her fellow cast members: ADORE working with you, precious Poppy! Here’s to our opening night! Chookas! And a collection of perfectly preserved theatrical programs: She graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 1983 and has since been at the forefront of . . .