Love and Punishment Read online

  She smiled to herself to see her female colleagues at the Press scurry past her corner desk with rubber bands in their hair, leather scraped off the heels of their shoes, buttons missing and paperclips holding sunnies together. It was a relief to be back where crimes against fashion didn’t rate a second glance. She’d almost copped an on-the-spot fine for wearing a floral scrunchie at Here and Now.

  Francie had an affection for P.S.—the weekly ten-page liftout on Melbourne’s arts and entertainment scene of which she was deputy editor. There were contributions from various arts reviewers and columnists to be edited and the odd feature story to write, and she enjoyed free access to every nightclub, music and arts venue in town. But she had a suspicion that she should have been feeling more. Where was her ambition? Her drive to succeed? It was something she could barely admit, even to herself, that without a relationship, there didn’t seem to be much point to it all.

  Five years ago everyone had been partying like it was 1999 . . . which it was. But where was the man to guide her around the dance floor? With the New Millennium on offer, supposedly revealing a fresh horizon of boundless opportunity, what she really wanted was a nice boyfriend. It was hardly the sort of aspiration which was likely to make it into print: ‘What I’m looking forward to in the New Millennium is someone to kiss me on the back of the neck and bring me a glass of water in the middle of the night.’ Francis McKenzie, 26, journalist.

  And then she had met Nick. It was on a chilly July night at the opening of the Melbourne Film Festival. Within six months she had waved goodbye to her mother and brother in the family home in the outer eastern suburb of Blackburn and set up house with him in a little worker’s cottage in the back streets of inner city Richmond.

  The years at work had then flown by in a distracted haze as Francie lived for the holidays and weekends she spent with Nick. They shopped for furniture, painted walls and hung pictures together. Francie learned to cook. She and Nick planted a garden. And when she stood and regarded her creation—from the cast-iron front fence threaded with white tea roses, to the wooden back fence and its trellis of jasmine—Francie had a sense of pride and achievement she had never quite found in her day job.

  Francie had been surprised when she was given the new Seriously Single column by the then P.S. editor. Giving Francie—who regarded herself as an almost ‘smug married’—the job of writing a column for sad singles had seemed like a joke. But she’d made a success of it, despite the fact that before her own break-up she had been dipping into a ragbag of well-worn platitudes to answer readers. Fragments of half-remembered stuff which had happened to her when she was a teenager, secondhand stories from friends and snippets out of self-help books.

  She couldn’t really take her readers seriously back then. You can’t find a man? Look harder. Your boyfriend had a one-night stand with another woman? Dump him. All the men you meet are wrong? Too picky. Your boyfriend’s left you? Buy a new hat. But now! Now she was an expert on being single and her replies to the lovelorn had that unmistakeable ring of authenticity. There was an air of desperation and a hard core of bitterness which made readers recognise her at once as a kindred spirit.

  So . . . to the matter at hand. Should ‘Jennyk’ go back to Steve for another ‘last’ bonk? Once she would simply have replied ‘no way’ and moved on to the next inquiry. But now, Francie thought differently. She knew that if she had one more chance to lie next to Nick, she would take it, no matter what the consequences.

  The thought of never smelling his chest again, of never hearing him murmur ‘I love you so much’ on his last breath before he slid into sleep. Never being able to wake early just to see his face in perfect peace on the pillow beside her. The way his top lip formed a glorious cupid’s bow that she wanted to kiss into wakefulness so that when he opened his caramel brown eyes, the first thing they would see was her. The thought of never being able to do any of this again tightened a band of grief across Francie’s chest.

  Francie wanted to reply to Jennyk: ‘Seduce him into bed any way you can. Drug him if you have to. Tie him up and sit on him. Throw away your birth control and get pregnant. Make him marry you. Live “happily ever after”.’

  Instead she typed:

  Dearest Jennyk,

  I know (hell, do I know) that when you feel lonely and sad you want to turn to the person who is the greatest source of joy in your life. But, tragically, Steve is not that person anymore. OK . . . one last bonk is understandable, but two is regrettable and three is unforgivable. (Are you two in love or just lazy?)

  You have to kick your Steve habit—and fast. Leave him out of your romantic (and sexual) fantasies. Think about anyone BUT Steve . . . George W Bush should do the trick.

  But, since I know it’s inevitable that you will go back one more time, TRY NOT TO DO IT AGAIN! One day I hope you will stop bashing yourself up.

  PS I can come over and hit you in the head with a rock if you want the same sensation.

  She hit ‘save’ on her computer screen.

  If only Francie had the chance for ‘another last time’. But the one night she had with Nick PP (Post Poppy) had been an embarrassing fiasco. She had managed to get him into bed at least, and have sex (sort of), but the aftermath had been bloody.

  The plan had been simple enough. It was four weeks since Nick had moved out. The Seagull had finished its run and Francie thought that once he saw Madame Arcadina (aka Madame Predator) away from the footlights he would come to his senses. She knew Nick was infatuated with her but, after all, actors had infatuations with their leading ladies all the time. They wore off. If you discounted Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward . . . Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith . . . Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson—aaargh! Think about Tom and Nicole instead!

  She had rung him on a Friday afternoon to ask him to come over to the house in Richmond that Sunday night to collect some cardboard boxes of clothes and CDs. He had agreed. Her hands were trembling as she hung up the phone and her mind raced with a thousand scenarios. The one she settled on—stupidly, idiotically (looking back)—was that he was coming home for good.

  The Saturday had been spent in a frenzy of preparation. Francie had already lost four kilos from her amazing new weight loss plan of substituting alcohol for food, so the size-ten jeans were dragged out from the bottom of the cupboard. The morning had been spent in the groovy boutiques of Chapel Street looking for a top to go with them. Nothing sparkly or obvious, but something which showed off her newly svelte midriff. She settled on a beaded singlet in a fetching shade of heliotrope. Which rhymed with ‘hope’. A moody blue-violet which she knew set off her fair hair and grey eyes.

  The afternoon was spent with her hairdresser. She didn’t want a radical new look, which, after you had been dumped, was always a neon sign of desperate transformation. As if you weren’t trying to cheer yourself up so much as get into a witness protection program. She just wanted her hair a touch blonder, brighter and more optimistic.

  On the Sunday afternoon she had taken a long bath. Exfoliated, moisturised, painted nails and shaved legs and underarms. Again, nothing obvious, just tried to compose a picture of herself at her lovable best: the Francie who Nick had come home to after a long day in rehearsal and been inspired to say, ‘Look at you, you beautiful thing! Come here now and kiss me.’

  As the shadows grew long over the little house, Francie had paced from room to room. She’d watched stylists art-direct perfect, beckoning, welcoming interiors. She knew it was all in the detail. The small touches which registered in the subconscious and made you long for home. Surely Nick would see them too. The way the old wooden floorboards in the kitchen shone a soft toffee brown under the single bulb and its tortoiseshell shade. The way the red velvet piping on the old Art Deco armchairs invited you to trace their contours with your fingers. The way the mantelpiece they’d painted a soft rose picked up the same shade in the pink and cream floor rug. She remembered them both standing back and holding hands as they admired their artistry. With a b
rilliant piece of lovesick logic she figured that while Nick might have left her, he surely wouldn’t want to leave this house!

  But there were still so many decisions to be made. Should she put on some music? Dave Matthews. Their favourite, ‘The Christmas Song’? It was the song they played over and over when they spent ‘Happy Holidays’ in New York in the snow. No. He’d know straight away it was a set-up. She realised she was humming ‘White Christmas’.

  A bottle of wine? Champagne? That would imply there was something to celebrate. Maybe he’d bring a bottle with him. If she saw it in his hand she’d know.

  Should she cook? Roast lamb, his favourite? But that would have the whiff of seduction about it even more than the music. Would cooking for him show she was a victim? Waiting for him to carve? Or just that happy domestic life went on without him? He’d see through that too. No-one cooks roast lamb just for themselves.

  She should open a bag of potato chips. That would be a casual gesture. Leave them in the bag or put them in a bowl? STOP DOING THIS!

  I can’t live . . . if living is without you! Aaargh! An ACTUAL Bridget Jones moment! Save me!

  Candles? Too obvious. Maybe she would burn the candles an hour earlier and leave the scent of ylang-ylang hanging in the air. How long would ylang-ylang hang in the air anyway? And then she couldn’t get ylang-ylang out of her head. Ylang-ylang, ylang-ylang, ylang-ylang! If she hadn’t been so distracted, so dumb, so pathetically, hopelessly needy, she would have recognised the sound of a warning bell.

  In the end she elected to go with k.d. lang, the potato chips (in the bag) and a glass of white wine. She burned one vanilla-scented candle, turned on the lamps in the lounge room and curled up in an armchair with a magazine. This is how she would be discovered. Peaceful and content. Cool, contained. Single, singular. It would look entirely casual to the untrained eye. Although a forensic expert inspecting this crime scene at a later date would have noted the fridge stocked with beer, the scrubbed bathroom and clean sheets, and deduce that someone was definitely expecting something more than a casual visit.

  By the time Nick arrived two hours late at 9 pm, the candle had burned down leaving an acrid smell in the air. She’d turned off the stereo, thrown her magazine at the wall and was well on the way to being drunk. This was unsurprising since she had eaten only three pieces of sushi and two potato chips all weekend and had consumed almost a bottle of chardonnay since six. Her careful art direction was coming unglued.

  When, finally, Nick pushed open the front door and walked into the lounge room, Francie barely managed to restrain herself from running into his arms. Her grief at the loss of him was perfectly understandable. It was as if one half of her own body had been hacked off with an axe. And now here he was, as familiar to her as her own arms and legs. She would have liked to attach him like some flesh-coloured prosthesis so she could start walking again.

  He looked as handsome as he ever did. Tall and lanky with his shiny black hair longer than she remembered, and falling down over his eyes. He looked good in anything he wore. Tonight it was jeans over boots, a scruffy red T-shirt and an old denim jacket.

  His shuffling, awkward movements and lack of eye contact kept her at a distance. They both could sense there was an empty space between them which one of them had to have the courage to broach.

  You could have guessed the place where their strangulated small talk turned into one of the most passionate moments Francie and Nick would ever experience in their lives. It was in the bedroom. She was going through the wardrobe to find Nick’s favourite brown suede jacket. He was sitting behind her on the bed. Their bed, for five years. She knew he was looking at the Degas print on the wall they had brought back from their visit to Paris.

  He finally said, in a strange, sad whisper, ‘Francie. What’s happened to us?’

  She turned and replied, ‘I don’t know. I’m scared. I miss you so much.’

  And then he reached out to her and pulled her down on the bed. They clung to each other so tightly it was as if they were on the edge of a precipice. In front of them was a drop of a thousand feet into blackness.

  Nick cried as he kissed her. He traced his tongue over her flat stomach and expressed amazement at her new sharp hipbones. He cried as he buried his face in her breasts, her hair, between her legs. Francie cried too. She only remembered it later, because while she was with him it felt as if her rational mind had gone and she was just a dead thing which was being coaxed back to life by the smell and touch of the divine. Then he was inside her and she wrapped her legs around him. Francie felt she was about to have a full-on Mills & Boon ‘oneness with the infinite’ moment when reality whacked her hard across the side of the head.

  ‘Have you got any condoms?’ Nick had stopped moving and was looking down at her in the half-light coming from the open doorway.

  And then Francie blew it. It was as if she had seen the edge of the cliff and suddenly decided to hurl herself off.

  ‘Don’t stop, Nick. Let’s keep going. Let’s have a baby.’

  In the deathly silence after Nick had pulled himself out of her and rolled over onto his back, Francie sensed she was falling, falling, falling. His next words signalled that she had hit rock bottom.

  ‘No. I don’t want a baby with you, Francie. Is this some kind of trap? Because if it is . . .’ Nick sat up, ‘it’s fucking tragic.’

  Then he was pulling on his jeans and finding his boots. Francie could say nothing. She turned her face into the pillow and opened her mouth to howl in agony but not one sound came out. She could hear him hauling on his jacket. She knew Nick was angry.

  ‘I knew I shouldn’t have come here. I tell you something, if I am ever going to have a child, it won’t be because I’ve been seduced into it. It will be something I do consciously with someone I’m in love with.’

  As soon as he said those words Francie knew she would never forget them until the moment she died. Although that moment might come in the next few seconds.

  She knew Nick was standing above her now, looking down at her bare back. She must have looked so pathetic lying there that he was moved to pity. He sat down on the side of the bed next to her, sighed and spoke deliberately.

  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it like that. I do love you. Obviously. That’s why I see you and end up in bed with you. But I don’t want to be in a relationship with you anymore. I don’t want to be with anyone. I thought I’d explained all that.’

  Francie could feel her shame and humiliation solidify into blind rage.

  ‘You—have—not—explained—anything—to—me,’ she said into the pillow.

  Then she rolled over, pulled the sheet to her chin and sat up. She struggled to control her voice as angry tears stung her eyes.

  ‘You told me you wanted to end this. You told me you were leaving. You said you wanted to be by yourself. And that’s it, Nick. That has been the only explanation I have ever had from you.’

  Nick stood up and walked to the bedroom door. He turned to her.

  ‘I have tried to explain to you, but you won’t listen . . .’

  Francie dragged the sheet from the bed, wrapped it around her bare body and followed him. She was whining, pleading. She couldn’t help herself.

  ‘I am listening! Why don’t you love me anymore? Is it because of her? When did you stop loving me? Do you love her now? How did it happen? Why didn’t you give me a chance? Why was I the last to know? YOU HAVEN’T TOLD ME ANYTHING!’

  Nick was now standing by the front door. His hands were thrust deep into his jacket pockets and he was inspecting his scuffed black boots. Francie screamed at him, knowing that half the street would be able to hear her. She couldn’t give a shit.

  ‘AND WHAT? WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO NOW? HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO UNDERSTAND ALL THIS WHEN YOU WON’T TALK TO ME? TALK TO ME!’

  Nick opened the front door and the cool air of the evening rushed inside. Francie leaned against the wall in the hallway and pressed her hot, wet face into the pla
ster.

  ‘I can tell you one thing for sure. I want you to know that if we had had a baby, I never would have left you.’

  And with that Nick had walked out the door.

  Now, Francie sat at her desk in the office asking herself, for the millionth time, what he’d meant by that. Did he mean that they should have had a baby? No, he couldn’t have meant that because she’d brought it up with him before and he always said he wasn’t ready. She guessed what he’d meant was, that if he had been a father he would never have abandoned his child. That meant he would have stayed in a loveless relationship with her for the sake of the children. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was supposed to demonstrate to Francie that he was a good, moral man. Only it didn’t.

  Barely a week after that humiliating night, Francie was sitting by the window on a tram in St Kilda Road when she saw them walking hand in hand outside the Arts Centre. She watched as they paused to kiss. She had stumbled off at the next stop and been sick in the grass just next to Melbourne’s famous floral clock.

  Francie looked at the clock on her desk now and at her calendar. The time was 3 pm, the date was 19 November 2004. It was exactly six months since Nick had walked out. She read the thought for the day: ‘The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen, nor touched . . . but are felt in the heart,’ Helen Keller (1880–1968). Well, that was true. She hadn’t seen Nick for six weeks and hadn’t touched him for longer, but, in her heart, he was at his beautiful best. Stop this! Stop thinking about him like this!

  The worst part of it was that Francie was a writer. She was supposed to be good with words, but whenever she thought about her life now, the best script she could come up with was a soap opera with a soundtrack by Enya. If Francie could have composed her own ‘Thought for the Day’ it would have consisted of just one word—Why? It would be a great merchandising opportunity—a desk calendar for the brokenhearted. Only trouble was, the first six months would seem like yesterday. And the next six months would stretch into infinity.