‘Look, I wanted to apologise.’
Dana was perplexed. ‘What for?’
‘For bailing on you, just near the end. I felt like I left the team to finish the job. Sorry ’bout that.’
There was something beyond her apology, but Dana couldn’t work out what it was. ‘No need, Luce. I know you’re, uh, pretty prompt. No need to be sorry about it.’
Another clatter and the ping of a microwave. Dana strained to imagine the setting: maybe a one-bed apartment with clean, straight lines, or perhaps a cottage with sloping ceilings and wide floorboards. She had no source material to work with.
‘It’s just’ – Lucy paused – ‘that I could see you were getting pretty anxious. Not about Whittler – you were always going to get your man there. I mean generally. What it took from you today. I mean. Ah, crap. I mean specifically today.’
‘Don’t get you, Luce.’ Dana had grabbed the arm of the chair with her free hand, her knuckles white.
‘It’s probably nothing, but… I’m one of those sad sacks that keeps a diary. Well, a journal, really. I flick back to what I was doing the same day last year, and so on. Trying to spot some progress in my life. Anyway, I’d noticed that the last two years you’ve been very adamant about having this day off. This exact day. So I thought maybe you found it tough working on this day. And then when we spoke – in the bathroom? I could tell you didn’t want to talk about it much, but…’
A silence caused by Dana fighting back a tear.
‘Ah, sorry,’ Lucy continued above the clack of spoon on saucepan. ‘None of my business, I know. I dunno. Thought that’s what it was.’
‘No, no, you’re right.’ Dana had her hand raised in placation, irrespective of Lucy’s ability to see it. ‘Yes, it’s a weird kind of commemoration.’
There was no more extraneous noise from Lucy’s end. Whatever she’d been doing, she’d stopped.
‘You don’t have to—’
‘No, let me, Luce. I have to. Want to.’
‘Okay.’
This time Dana did sink back in the chair, felt it settle about her shoulders. She focused on the strips of light spearing through a louvre blind on to the carpet.
‘Most of today, one way or another, I’ve been talking with Nathan about family. It kept coming up. I mean, each time I thought I was talking about something else we ended up mentioning our mother or father, or his brother. Always, back to family.’
‘Yeah, sometimes it feels like the world is going to fixate on a topic, no matter what you do.’
‘Exactly. And it was a quandary. Because, as I kept telling Nathan, everything I said in those interviews goes to defence counsel. They can discuss it in open court, they can quiz me on it. It was deeply personal. Deeply. I don’t want that sort of stuff in the public domain. And it might undermine the case – if I’m that sympathetic, did I really believe he’d done it? Did I con him into confessing by being his pal? Don’t I think it’s manslaughter, a mistake in the dark? I ended up saying that at the end, as it turns out. But all day, I kept trying to steer him away from my family.’
Dana switched off the table lamp. The only light was the muted orange shards spearing in through the louvres.
‘But?’
‘But I needed to have a rapport with him. It would be what undid him, convince him to tell. And it did. But there was this quid pro quo all day: I had to give, to get. He knew it; I knew it. So I spent half the time talking about things that I normally keep stuffed away in a safe place.’
A safe place so buried that skilled professionals could get nowhere near it; but which held its own weight, its own gravity, within her.
‘And today, of all days,’ asked Lucy, ‘it was especially raw? That’s a heap of bad luck at once.’
‘Tell me about it. Bloody kid of Mikey’s – if not for him, I might have been secondary and not lead.’
Lucy laughed. ‘Yeah, little bugger had eaten two tubs of ice cream in the night. Not appendicitis after all, just gluttony.’
‘Is that what it was? Crap. And God, I didn’t even ask Mikey about it. Bill nagged me and I still wiped it. Bad Dana.’
Lucy was silent. Then:
‘So today’s date is special because…?’
Her gentle way of pulling Dana back on track. Dana liked being led this way, by this person. Her grip on the arm of the chair relaxed without her realising.
‘Like I said before, it’s an anniversary. Two, in fact. They’re twenty years apart but totally connected. I struggle to deal with… ah, not explaining myself very well. Sorry, Luce. I need to— Jesus. I’ve explained this to I don’t know how many shrinks and counsellors: I should be word perfect by now.’
There was a moment before Lucy replied.
‘No need to be word perfect. Take the pressure off. Just say how it started.’
‘You’re right. Okay.’ Deep breath. ‘So, we lived near Carlton when I was a little kid. My mother worked at the church – St Vincent’s, a short way down the road from here. Dad was a road engineer for the council. My mother’ – another deep breath – ‘didn’t like that I was an only child. She had this vision of… I don’t know, of a brood. Of a clutch of little kids trailing after her like ducklings, raised on her religion and absorbing her version of wisdom. I spoiled it – came out being strangled by the umbilical. The damage… well, she couldn’t have any more, and that was my fault.’
‘She sounds charming,’ said Lucy drily.
‘You haven’t heard the half of it. I’ll spare you years of detail. So we lived out of Carlton, on the Gazette road. Near the abattoir – you could smell the stench in a westerly. I don’t think Dad liked it, but my mother seemed to think it reminded us all of mortality. Which was apparently a good thing.’
Dana could hear the edge in her voice and tried to rein it in.
‘My dad had heart problems all his life. From before I was born, in fact.’ She gave a watery smile to the darkness as she recalled his face. ‘Anyway, as far back as I could remember, he had to have his heart pills nearby. He used to tap his pocket without even thinking, to double-check. It was a reflex. Like me with those nebulisers, I suppose.’
She wondered if Lucy had even noticed that. The silence suggested she had.
‘So, one day my mother had gone to the church for organ practice – a new hymn the preacher wanted to introduce.’ Dana could still feel the way her shoulder blades eased when she heard her mother’s car backing out on to the road. The clunk-scrape as it cleared the gutter; the slight squeal as it pulled away. She could recall that day now; rippling shadows as she ran around the tree, blowing soap bubbles that nestled on her arm.
‘She and Dad had been arguing about making me a treehouse. I was only eight. We had an old poinciana at the bottom of the garden: must have been twenty years old, even then. Wizened, crooked; a pair of sagging branches that looked like helping hands, cupping you into the foliage – it looked like the trees in children’s books, the ones that kick-started an adventure. It was deep summer – that explosion of crimson that poincianas do: delicate shade, fallen blossom on the grass like a field of poppies. Dad wanted to build a small treehouse for me, but Mother said it was an indulgence – I’d grow out of it soon enough and I wasn’t to be encouraged. Those were her exact words.’