Chapter 42

chapter forty-two

Now

‘Stop this, stop this, stop this!’

Stop what? Caro Azinovic was one hundred per cent positive those were the words a man – it had sounded like Stan Delaney – shouted over and over on a coolish night last spring. Caro had been dragging her yellow ‘glass and plastics’ bin to the kerb, and she’d heard the shouting over the rattle and scrape of her bin and stopped in her tracks, a little shocked.

She didn’t know what had suddenly made her think of that night now, all these months later, as she carried a vase of dead tulips from her dining room into her kitchen.

Should she tell the police about that night? When the police interviewed her she’d told them that her neighbours were a nice ordinary happily married couple. This was absolutely true and absolutely not true. There was no such thing as a nice ordinary happily married couple. But obviously the fresh-faced police detectives were far too young to get their heads around that.

It was unusual to hear any noise at all from the Delaneys’ house. Of course, years ago, when all those giant children still lived at home, the Delaneys’ had been the noisiest house on the street. Once, Caro had phoned Joy because she’d heard a kind of maniacal screaming as if people were being murdered, but it turned out they were just playing a board game that got out of hand. They were very competitive people. When the Delaney children came over to swim in their pool, Caro’s own children ended up coming inside and watching television. ‘They’re scary,’ her daughter had said to her.

Caro studied the once bright yellow heads of her tulips, slumped over the side of the vase, as if overcome with despair.

When she’d looked over at the Delaneys’ house that night she had been reassured to see the familiar figures of Logan and Brooke under the porchlight at their parents’ front door. She’d hurried back inside before they caught sight of her and felt embarrassed about their parents arguing loudly enough for the whole street to hear.

She’d assumed it was just an argument. Caro knew retirement could be stressful. No routine. Just the two of you stuck in your home, stuck in your aging bodies. An argument over a damp towel left on the bed could last for days and then it often turned out that the argument was not about the damp towel at all but about something hurtful that was said thirty years ago and your feelings about your in-laws.

The newspaper articles were full of innuendo. ‘There was no history of domestic violence.’ Up until now. That was the implication.

Had Joy been in need of a friend and Caro hadn’t been there for her the way Joy had always been there for Caro?

Caro’s son, Jacob, who had come over to mow the lawn, was chatting right now to a young female journalist from the local paper, who was parked outside the Delaneys’ house.

‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ he’d promised Caro.

Caro bet that if Joy had been young and beautiful the street would have been crawling with reporters.

Joy had been so young and beautiful when Caro moved in across the road from the Delaneys all those years ago. She could remember when she first laid eyes on her neighbours. She was unpacking boxes in her front room when she heard a commotion and pulled back her curtain to see a family milling about, right there on the street. (The Delaneys always treated the cul-de-sac as if it were their own personal property.) A gigantic man, who of course turned out to be Stan, was talking to a young woman wearing very short shorts, her long hair in a ponytail. A fat baby bounced and laughed on her hip, while three older children played tip like it was the Olympics. Caro actually thought Joy was their teenage babysitter until Stan kissed her. Caro could still remember the way he pulled on her ponytail so her head tipped back as he kissed her. It had seemed stunningly erotic to Caro, a man kissing his wife like that right there in the middle of the street, but maybe she’d misread the signs of an abusive relationship. Caro had secretly rather enjoyed Fifty Shades of Grey, but her daughter had explained that the book was about an abusive relationship and Caro had felt foolish because her daughter, who had struggled to learn to read, now had a degree in English literature so she was right and Caro was wrong and she should not have enjoyed that book, how embarrassing.

The past could look very different depending on where you stood to look at it. The fat baby bouncing on Joy’s hip turned out to be Brooke, who was now treating Caro’s sciatica.

‘Stop that!’ snapped Caro as the cat clawed at her pants leg. Otis stalked off, deeply offended. No doubt he would reappear in a while with a random piece of clothing in his mouth. Apparently cats stole laundry for attention. Caro remembered how she and Joy had laughed when Caro returned the lacy underwire bra Otis had stolen from her clothes line.

‘That’s a very sexy bra, Joy,’ Caro had said, and Joy retorted, ‘Well, you know, I’m a very sexy woman, Caro.’

How could Caro live here without Joy across the road? How could she finish their memoir-writing course? How could she cope with the annual neighbourhood street party?

‘They’ve found a body,’ said Jacob from behind her.

The vase of tulips slipped straight from Caro’s hands and shattered on the kitchen floor.