Chapter 34

chapter thirty-four

‘Who can explain the difference between active and passive listening?’ Logan asked his Wednesday afternoon class.

Passivelistening: that word again. Was that the way he’d listened to Indira? Passively?

A motley mix of students sat at the semicircle of desks surrounding him: teenagers straight out of school, women looking to get back into an unrecognisable workforce after years spent raising children, older men who had worked all their lives in industries that no longer existed.

‘Active listening is the way I listen to my husband,’ said star student Rani. ‘Passive listening is the way he listens to me.’

A few women chuckled. The teenagers glanced up briefly from their phones and then instantly dropped their heads again as if there were magnets on their foreheads.

Rani was only a few years younger than Logan’s mother, and she was retraining to get back into the workforce after she and her husband had lost all their money to a charming, fraudulent financial adviser now doing prison time.

‘We thought this man was the bee’s knees,’ Rani had said in her ‘about me’ presentation at the beginning of the semester. ‘We mortgaged our home to invest with him. It was like we were under his spell.’

Rani’s sparkly demeanour reminded Logan of his mother and Logan wondered now if Joy might one day describe Savannah as someone they once thought of as ‘the bee’s knees’. His mother was spellbound by her, or at least by her cooking, but Joy was astute when it came to money. There was no way she’d mortgage the house for Savannah. Or would she? In return for a roast chicken lunch?

As Logan’s class brainstormed techniques for active listening (verbal affirmations like ‘Yes, I see’ and non-verbal affirmations like nodding your head) he thought about how Amy had said their mother was furiouswhen she heard of Logan’s doubts about Savannah’s story. Logan was kind of furious with Amy. Telling their mother was not the plan.

‘You were going to ask Savannah out for a drink,’ Logan reminded her.

‘I know,’ said Amy. ‘But she gives me the heebie-jeebies. She didn’t want to even let me in the door! It was like she was their carer.’ Logan had forgotten that you could never rely on Amy to stick to a plan.

‘To be fair, she does make excellent minestrone,’ Amy had said. ‘Simon and I had two bowls each.’

Simon, it transpired, was Amy’s flatmate, and for some unexplained reason he had been at their parents’ house too. Simon was going to help Amy do a ‘deep dive’ on Savannah.

‘A full-on background check,’ Amy told Logan. ‘Like the FBI would do.’

‘Right,’ said Logan.

‘Because he’s an accountant.’

‘How does that help?’ said Logan.

‘He’s very thorough,’ Amy said, and then she’d chuckled suggestively and Logan had hung up and called Brooke, who said not to waste any more time with Amy and that sheherself had begun preparing a ‘dossier’ on Savannah weeks ago and she’d come back to Logan with some proper information soon. She said the word ‘dossier’ with a lot of satisfaction.

Troy hadn’t returned anyone’s calls and for all anyone knew might have been out of the country, so he was no help. In the meantime, their mother had taken Savannah shopping last week and bought her a whole new wardrobe, which was upsetting for Amy and Brooke, not because they wanted to go shopping with their mother – they couldn’t think of anything worse – but what with Savannah’s incessant baking and her tiny feet,the girl was clearly intent upon transforming herself into their mother’s ‘dream daughter’.

‘Let’s role-play some active and passive listening,’ said Logan to his class. He didn’t ask for volunteers. He chose Brian, an Irish automotive worker who had lost his job of thirty years when Holden closed its doors, and Jun, a bright, bubbly hairdresser who wanted her boss’s job because her boss was ‘a real b-i-t-c-h’.

‘Tell Jun a story, Brian,’ said Logan. ‘About anything. And, Jun, I want you to be a passive listener.’

Brian launched into a story about a grossly unfair parking ticket, which Jun found impossible to listen to passively, because she’d been booked at the exact same intersection near the college (so had Logan). Brian’s Irish accent became more pronounced the more excited and upset he became and Logan was reminded of Savannah’s similarly Irish-accented boyfriend, sitting up in bed, reaching for his spectacles, the terror on his face.

He stopped dead and banged the whiteboard marker against his palm.

The source of truth. Or at least another version of the truth.

He’d go talk to the little Irish fucker.

*

Later that afternoon Logan stood at the apartment building where Savannah had lived with her boyfriend. He remembered the apartment number because his birthday was on the twenty-fourth so he’d always had a fondness for the number.

‘Hello?’ said an Irish-accented voice.

‘Hello?’ Logan panicked. He hadn’t thought it through! But the man said instantly, impatiently, ‘Come on up. Second floor.’

The security buzzer went and in his relief, Logan pushed the glass door so hard it crashed against the wall with a bang.

When he got to the apartment he saw that the door had been propped open with a battered old sneaker.

Logan tentatively pushed open the door.

‘Hello?’

Nothing. He could hear music playing from somewhere inside. Norah Jones. It was like the guy was doing everything possible to make himself look benign.

Savannah had mentioned his name but Logan was struggling to remember it. Something bland and one syllable.

He looked at the abstract painting leaning against the wall. It was god-awful. Indira would love it. He remembered when he and Troy first came here, Savannah had said the boyfriend was the artist. He studied the signature. Did it possibly say David? Was that the bloke’s name? Dave? Dave.

‘Dave?’ he called out.

A voice called over the music, ‘Yeah! Thank you! Just leave it anywhere.’

He walked into the dining room. It was like walking onto a building site, albeit one with Norah Jones crooning from a speaker. A giant paint-stained tarpaulin protected the carpet. The unpacked removalist’s boxes had been stacked in a corner and the coffee table had been tipped on its side and propped up against the wall. Dave – he assumed his name was Dave – stood in front of a giant easel. He was in the process of squeezing paint from a tube onto a piece of cardboard he was using as a palette. He wore a mechanic’s blue boilersuit. There was a blob of paint on his glasses, another on his earlobe. The canvas he was working on featured swirls of queasy yellow similar to the colour of Logan’s kitchen. The mood in the apartment was industrious and joyful. This was someone completely lost in something they loved to do, and Logan found himself feeling envious. He’d once lost himself in tennis, and then only sex and television. Now there was only television left.

Indira wanted to paint. Like this, maybe, Logan wasn’t sure. She’d told him this about a year ago, as if she were confessing to something deeply personal and private. ‘Go for it,’ Logan had told her. She said she needed somewhere to paint and that maybe they could think about moving to a bigger place where she could have a studio. ‘Just do it right here,’ Logan had said, and he’d pushed the coffee table up against the wall. Not passive listening, active listening. Very active listening! It was a heavy coffee table. The woman wants to paint, the man makes space for her to paint. But she’d said, sadly, ‘No, that won’t work.’ And then she stopped talking about it.

If she really wanted to paint, she’d have painted. Look at this guy. This apartment had half their living space.

‘Yeah, hi, thanks for that, did you . . . need something?’ said Dave. He replaced the lid on his tube of paint.

‘I’m Logan.’ His mind was still on Indira.

Logan was totally supportive of her desire to paint. He just didn’t want to sell the townhouse. Just in case it didn’t work out. No, absolutely not, that was not the reason. He was committed to the relationship. But sometimes you lost when you were meant to win. The townhouse was in his name. If it didn’t work out, nothing needed to change, the girl left, Logan stayed. And see, look what happened: the girl had left. Once again. His strategy was sound.

‘Yeah, thanks, Logan,’ said Dave, a bit impatiently. ‘So the pizza is . . .?’ He looked over Logan’s shoulder.

‘Oh,’ said Logan apologetically. ‘I’m not delivering pizza. I’m, um – hoping you might talk to me about your girlfriend. Your ex-girlfriend. Savannah. Just quickly.’ He remembered his strategy: ask for help, throw himself at his mercy. ‘I need your help.’

Dave took a step backward. ‘Fuck.’ He put down his tube of paint. ‘You’re one of the angry guys who came with her that day.’ Logan had a sick feeling that the poor guy was urgently scanning the room looking for a weapon with which to defend himself. He was even younger and smaller than Logan remembered.

Logan lifted his palms. ‘I come in peace.’ What in the world? He tried to stoop and round his shoulders to make himself smaller and less intimidating. ‘I just want to talk. Savannah is staying with my parents.’

‘Your parents?’ Dave had picked up a paintbrush, which he clenched in his fist as if he might stab Logan with the pointy end. ‘She’s staying with your parents? Not you? And she’s okay?’

‘She’s fine,’ said Logan. He thought of Savannah gliding about his mother’s kitchen with his mother’s haircut. ‘She’s good.’

‘How does she know your family?’ asked Dave.

‘She doesn’t.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘She turned up on their doorstep late one night, bleeding. She said that you hit her.’

‘Hit her?’ Dave’s mouth dropped. His face became stupid with shock. ‘She really said that? That I hit her?’

‘That’s why my brother and I came here to help her pick up her stuff. But then the other day I saw something on TV. It was a girl telling the same story as Savannah told me. About you. Almost word for word. It made me think she might have made it up, and well, that’s fine if she made it up.’

It wasn’t fine if she made it up, but he wanted to be clear that he was an easygoing, accepting kind of guy. All he wanted was information.

‘She’s living with my parents, and my mother loves her, and I guess we’re just trying to understand. We just . . .’ He felt suddenly overcome by the peculiarity of this whole situation. He’d walked into a stranger’s apartment, just like Savannah had walked into his parents’ life. People weren’t meant to behave like this. ‘We just need to know if we should be worried. We just don’t . . . we don’t quite get her.’

The kid’s shoulders dropped. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right then.’ He took off his glasses and cleaned off the paint from the lenses with an old rag from his pocket. ‘Well, firstly I did not hit her. I’ve never hit anyone.’ He looked up at Logan. ‘Man or woman.’

‘Okay,’ said Logan. ‘I believe you.’

‘Is that why you two looked like you wanted to kill me that day?’ Dave put his glasses back on and peered at Logan. ‘Because you believed I’d –’

‘We didn’t want to kill you,’ said Logan uncomfortably.

‘Your brother did. It was a nightmare. Like a home invasion.’

‘You were apologising to her. You kept saying sorry to Savannah,’ remembered Logan. He kind of wanted to find mitigating circumstances. ‘You were apologising for something you’d done, something pretty bad.’

‘Not for hittingher!’ said Dave. ‘I was apologising for forgetting her birthday. I was meant to meet her at a restaurant for her birthday, and I never showed. She was all dressed up, in this fancy restaurant, waiting, waiting, and my phone battery was dead.’

‘Wow,’ said Logan.

‘I know,’ said Dave. He shook his head remorsefully. ‘I still can’t believe I did that.’

‘So. This story she told me . . .’

‘She probably did repeat it from something she saw on TV. She does that. Like, monologues from movies. Stories that people told her. Or that I told her. She’s like a parrot. It’s her party trick.’

‘Okay,’ said Logan. Some party trick: pretending you were a victim of domestic violence.

‘Supposedly she has this thing called superior memory syndrome, or something like that. She says she can remember every day of her whole life. I never knew if that was true, or if even that was something she’d seen on TV.’ He looked uneasy. ‘She could be kind of . . . loose with the truth.’

‘She’s a liar,’ said Logan. ‘That’s what you’re saying.’

The apartment buzzer rang, and they both jumped.

‘That’s my pizza,’ said Dave. ‘I thought you were my pizza.’

‘Yeah, I got that,’ said Logan.

‘You mind if I let him come up?’ asked Dave carefully, as if he were being held hostage.

Logan took a step back, held his palms up again, idiotically. ‘I won’t take up much more of your time.’

Dave buzzed in the pizza guy, and then they both looked at each other, awkwardly, waiting.

‘What sort of pizza?’ asked Logan.

‘My favourite from my local,’ said Dave. ‘It’s called the Saucy Stripper. Chicken strips and sweet chilli sauce. You hungry? I won’t eat it all.’

‘Starving,’ said Logan honestly. ‘But that’s okay, I won’t –’

‘Family-sized Saucy Stripper for Dave?’ called out a deep voice at the door, and Logan and Dave grinned in mutual involuntary appreciation, which somehow lifted the mood, and that was how Logan found himself sitting on the floor of Savannah’s ex-boyfriend’s apartment, drinking beer and eating excellent pizza, and strangely enjoying himself.

‘My girlfriend wants to paint this sort of . . . stuff . . . art.’ Logan gestured at the easel. ‘My ex-girlfriend.’ He looked about the room. ‘I said she could just paint in our living area, like you’re doing. She said she needed a studio.’

He wanted Dave to say:high maintenance.

‘Yeah, well, I’m only doing it here because Savannah moved out,’ said Dave. ‘Otherwise I’d need my own space. That’s the silver lining of her leaving. I’ve suddenly got my own studio. Your girlfriend couldn’t paint with you breathing down her neck.’

‘I wouldn’t have done that,’ said Logan.

‘She would have felt embarrassed to paint in front of you.’ Dave peeled off a piece of chicken from his pizza and spoke with his mouth full. ‘Especially if she’s only just getting started. That’s the thing about art. It’s so visible.’

‘Oh,’ said Logan. ‘She never said. I could have gone out. Left her to it.’

‘Sure,’ said Dave. ‘But she probably got it in her head that a studio was the answer to overcoming her fear. She wants to paint but she’s afraid to paint.’

‘Why would she be afraid to paint?’

‘In case she’s no good,’ said Dave. ‘In case she can’t get what’s in her head and her heart onto the canvas. Maybe she’s afraid of being afraid. That she’ll be so paralysed by fear she won’t do a thing, she’ll just stand there with her paintbrush, feeling like a fraud.’

Logan put down his slice of pizza, suddenly bereft. He’d thought it was just a passing whim, and the truth was Indira became weirdly reticent each time she brought it up, as if she didn’t really care all that much. She’d raise it and then she’d instantly back down. She never pushed that hard. Was it possible the reticence was because of fear?

He should have understood that she could have passionate, complicated feelings about art, just like he had passionate, complicated feelings about tennis. Art wasn’t a hobbyfor Indira, like tennis could never be a hobby for him. When she walked through art galleries she felt what Logan felt when he watched the grand slams: pain and pleasure, like unrequited love.

He was a fool. They could have afforded a bigger place. Why did he insist they stay? Because he never felt like changing anything: his job, his address, his bank, his gym. Jesus. It would have been so simple to move to a two-bedroom place with a second room she could have used as a studio. She could have closed the door, faced her fear. She was probably good. Probably better than this guy. She was probably great.

‘Did she break your heart, then?’ asked Dave.

‘No,’ said Logan. ‘It just ran its course.’ He changed the subject back to the point of his visit. ‘How long had you been with Savannah?’

‘It was only early days,’ said Dave. ‘About three months.’

‘You moved in together pretty fast,’ commented Logan.

‘Probably too fast,’ agreed Dave. ‘I told her on one of our very first dates that I’d been thinking of moving to Sydney, and she said she’d been planning to do the same, but it was so much more expensive than Adelaide –’

‘Wait – she told us you both moved down from the Gold Coast together.’

‘Adelaide,’ said Dave.

‘Why would she say the Gold Coast?’

Did coming from the Gold Coast sound more tragic and dramatic than coming from Adelaide? Maybe it did.

Dave shrugged. ‘She did that. It’s a habit of hers. She lies about things for no reason, things that don’t matter, that are easy to catch her out on, like, I don’t know, what she’d had for lunch. I’d say, “But, Savannah, I know that’s not true,” and she’d say, “What does it matter? It’s so trivial, who cares what I had for lunch?” And I’d think, yeah, it is trivial, I don’t care, but it made me feel kind of befuddled.’

‘I bet,’ said Logan.

Dave helped himself to another slice of pizza and said, ‘You know, I did some research. Savannah actually fits the definition of a pathological liar, which is someone who lies when there is no benefit to lying. That’s exactly what she’d do. Lie for the sake of it.’

Logan tried to channel his mother and show compassion. ‘I guess it might have something to do with her growing up in foster care?’ He warmed to the subject. ‘She maybe got used to saying whatever she thought people wanted to hear and –’

‘Yeah, no, mate,’ said Dave. ‘She didn’t grow up in foster care.’

Logan slumped back. ‘She didn’t?’ His compassion vanished.

‘No,’ said Dave. ‘Her father died when she was a baby. I don’t think they ever had much money, but she definitely was never in foster care. She’d lived in the same house from when she was seven. She used to do ballet. She says her mother still has all her trophies displayed, like a shrine to her ballet career. I know that part is true. I’ve seen photos of her performing.’

Logan felt queasy. All these unnecessary lies. Had she stolen the details of her childhood in foster care from some poor contestant describing their ‘journey’ on a talent show? None of it was necessary to arouse Logan’s mother’s sympathy. She could have just admitted she was an ordinary girl from Adelaide who had been stood up by her boyfriend on her birthday and Logan’s mother still would have let her stay the night, although perhaps Logan’s father would not have let her stay the second night.

‘So that night when you forgot her birthday, is that when she left?’ Another thought struck Logan. ‘How did she hurt herself, then? She was bleeding when she got to my parents’.’

‘So I worked late. I’m the new guy, trying to impress.’ He lifted his bottle to his mouth, took a long swig. He was loosening up now that he’d nearly finished his beer, becoming voluble. ‘We’d both got new jobs straight away when we moved in, so we were busy. I was working full-time as a graphic designer, and Savannah was working odd hours at two jobs. We were both exhausted.’

Savannah had two jobs? What happened to those two jobs? The last Logan had heard was that Savannah had said ‘there wasn’t much out there right now’.

‘I had in my head that the birthday dinner was another week away. So I got home and my phone was flat and I couldn’t find the damned charger. We’d only just moved in. We still had boxes to unpack. I was getting hungry because she does all the cooking.’ Dave dolefully considered his slice of pizza. ‘She’s a great cook.’

‘I know,’ said Logan, although it felt wrong to admit he’d enjoyed Savannah’s cooking, while he was here investigating her.

‘And then finally she came home. I thought, Yes, dinner! But then I saw she was all dressed up and I said, “Oh, feck, it’s not today, is it?” Like, it was obviously the first time we’d celebrated her birthday together, so it was a real balls-up.’

He clearly still felt bad about it.

‘It’s strange because she didn’t seem that angry at first. She was upset, but not crazy angry. She said it didn’t matter, we’d go there again another time. She made pasta! We were watching TV, having a glass of wine, it was all good, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, it was like she lost her mind. She stood up from the couch and said, “I can’t take this anymore.” She was walking back and forth holding her wine and it was like she was having some kind of episode,and we still had boxes and shit everywhere. Next thing she trips over my guitar case. She’d asked me to move it out of the way, and I never did.’ He looked at Logan. ‘I’m officially the lowlife in this story.’

Logan sucked his teeth sympathetically, which was a good example of a non-verbal affirmation while active listening.

‘The wineglass smashed when she fell, and she cut herself.’ He put a hand over his own eye as he remembered. ‘I thought she’d lost an eye for a moment. All that blood. I was trying to help her, and she wouldn’t let me look at it, she was turning in circles, muttering to herself. Next thing she just . . . left. Bare feet. It was a cold night. No money, no phone. Gone.’

‘Where did you think she’d gone?’

‘I had no idea. I said, “Where are you going?” And she said, “I’m going back there.”’

‘Going back where?’ said Logan.

‘That’s what I said, “Going back where?” I assumed she meant going back to Adelaide. I said, “You can’t get a flight at this time of night!”’

Logan studied him, looking for the holes in the story that his sisters would find. ‘You must have been worried.’

‘I didn’t know whether I should call the police or what. I didn’t sleep. But then the next day I went to work – it’s a new job, I had to work – and she’d left this weird, whispered message on my voicemail, like she was calling from a library. She said she was staying with old friends, and I thought, What friends? I didn’t think we knew anyone here. She said that she “wished me well”. I took that to mean we were done.’

Logan winced. ‘She wished you well.’

‘I know,’ said Dave. ‘That was the way she talked sometimes. Like an old lady. Or like she was playing a part. I feel like I never even knew her. And you know, since then I’ve talked to people about it, and I just think, man, that’s one of those short relationships where you look back and think, What was that all about? Because she was fun and sweet but she was weird. I think maybe I dodged a bullet.’

‘Maybe you did,’ said Logan. Was that dodged bullet now headed straight for his parents?

‘I don’t think she’s dangerous,’ reflected Dave. ‘She’s just a really strange person. That night, her behaviour was weird; so out of the blue. I remember thinking, Is this actually nothing to do with me missing her birthday? Was it something on TV that upset her? But it couldn’t have been. We weren’t even really watching it. It was just some random news story about tennis.’

‘Tennis?’ said Logan sharply. He’d been about to have a mouthful of beer, and the bottle banged against his teeth. ‘What about tennis?’

‘Savannah has less than zero interest in sport, so it couldn’t have been that.’

‘But you said there was something on TV about tennis. What about tennis?’

Dave shook his head adamantly, trying to make it clear that Logan had the wrong end of the stick.

‘It was nothing,’ he said. ‘Just something about that player making a comeback. What’s his name?’ He frowned, snapped his fingers. ‘Harry Haddad.’