The Couple Upstairs, page 13
Now here she was, too many of these silly drinks in, sitting on the floor. She knew she needed to have a different conversation with Flynn now.
Mel stood up, pushing off Kat’s restraining hand, and headed to the kitchen.
It smelled like Thailand. Mel hoped she was entirely steady on her feet as she leaned on the kitchen doorframe and watched Flynn cook for his audience of two young women in short shorts and neon hoodies.
She knew this spot was where Lori had stood. She knew the door to the left, slightly open, led into the bedroom where Lori had slept, just above her own. Flynn was telling the watching women that he had perfected Tom Yum Kung while he’d been working as a cook and handyman at a health retreat south of Bangkok, and he’d dated a masseuse from the nearby town who’d taught him how to make her mother’s favourite comfort food.
‘I couldn’t leave before I’d memorised the recipe. This exact way of doing it has been passed down for generations.’
The women nodded and cooed and took pictures of soup with their phones.
Mel considered the likelihood that a small Thai spa would employ an Australian cook over a local one and stifled a laugh. She wondered if she had been as easy to impress when she was young and travelling, so keen to seem worldly, curious and interesting. The evidence would suggest definitely yes.
The Flynn she’d met in the hallway a few hours before – sobbing, vulnerable – had faded. In his place was the Flynn Lori had lived with: charming, confident – no, arrogant. ‘We need prawns!’ he was exclaiming, loudly, waving his beer hand. ‘You can catch them down at Gordons at this time. Nothing like a night walk along the cliffs.’
The women looked uncertain about whether this was a joke from the man with the missing girlfriend. Was he really talking about walking along clifftops at night?
He squeezed past the girls to the freezer, and yanked at the ice-choked bottom drawer to pull out a bag of frozen prawns. ‘No need!’
Mel knew Lori had bought those prawns. She pictured the young woman in Woolies, choosing the ginger and the lemongrass, the stock and chillies and the bag of icy blue, caught-in-Thailand prawns, almost a week before. Now, she was gone, but the shellfish she’d carried home were being tossed into a smelly soup by this man.
Yes, Izzy, she continued the imaginary conversation that she was always having with her sister inside her head. I am getting indignant and rageful about home-brand frozen prawns.
‘Can I talk to you?’
It was her voice, as loud and forceful as she could manage. Heads turned, and she registered confusion on the faces of Flynn’s friends. Who had invited the mum?
I used to be you, she wanted to say. One day, you will be me.
She had said exactly that to Lori, once. Infuriatingly, Lori had laughed.
Flynn nodded at the women. A dismissal.
They padded past her, smiling politely, heading for the living room, back to the people who were like them.
Now it was just Mel and Flynn in the kitchen, and the soft hiss and pop of a bubbling pot, and the slightly open door to the room where Lori had slept, and the bed right there, mussy, messy.
Flynn sipped his beer and turned his back on the stove, leaning against the counter.
He looked at her expectantly, shrugged his square shoulders in his faded grey T-shirt.
‘Want to say something, Mel from downstairs?’ he asked, in a playful tone that didn’t match his expression.
‘Who are they? Those girls?’
‘Not girls,’ he replied. ‘Women.’ His smirk was insufferable. Dom’s had been too, at times.
‘Barely.’ As soon as she said it, Mel hated the way it sounded. Jealous. Mean. ‘Who are they?’
‘Friends,’ he said.
‘Are they even supposed to be here?’ Mel put down the seltzer. She knew she’d had a little too much; her insides were warm and swimmy. ‘Isn’t it breaking all the virus rules?’
‘The rules are bullshit,’ said Flynn, sipping his beer. ‘Designed to keep us in line. I don’t buy into that narrative.’
‘What narrative do you buy into?’ asked Mel, feeling a little bolder. ‘Because there’s a pretty strong one going around that you should be acting a little more bothered about the fact your girlfriend has disappeared. That having parties every night isn’t a great look when you’re the key . . . witness.’
‘Witness, is it?’ Flynn turned back to the soup, poked at the flabby prawns with his wooden spoon. ‘I thought you just told me Lori loved me so much. That we all needed to be together. Now I’m a witness?’
‘It’s not what I think. It’s what everyone else thinks. They’re watching you, and you probably need to take it seriously.’ Her tone, imitating his earlier plea, sounded a little more taunting than she’d intended.
Flynn didn’t say anything for a moment. Stirred at the soup, shook his head slightly. Then, he changed.
‘Why don’t you fuck off back downstairs?’
He spun around towards her and Mel felt like she was back in her body, decades before. Being growled at by a different man, in a different place.
‘For a moment, I thought you were cool,’ Flynn said. ‘But you’ve gone back to being the busybody from downstairs. The old woman with not enough going on in her life.’
Mel snapped back into herself, embarrassed that she was embarrassed by Flynn’s words. Old enough to know just how empty and ignorant they were. But still. Old. Busybody.
Who do you think you are? Up here, with these people?
She wanted to say something. Something to make her feel strong, especially later when she knew she’d be going over and over this encounter.
‘Lori spoke to me, you know,’ she said. Her voice was higher, smaller. ‘I know a lot more about you than you think.’
‘Is that because –’ Flynn took one small step towards Mel. It was a tiny distance but it had the effect of him filling her vision. She could feel him again, smell him. ‘– you’ve been obsessed with me since I moved in?’
Mel wanted to throw up. It was an immediate, throat-burning feeling. She swallowed, hard. ‘Are you threatening me?’
Flynn laughed. ‘How am I threatening you? By saying something true, not all that bullshit you’re spinning on Facebook about me?’
‘I am not saying anything that isn’t true. In fact, I wish I was saying a lot more. Lori has gone. You’re not telling anyone the truth about what happened. And you don’t care.’
‘Don’t tell me what I care about.’
Flynn’s fury was rippling under his skin. He was clenching and unclenching the hand that wasn’t tightly gripping his bottle of beer.
The noise drifting down the corridor from the living room was growing louder. Chatter, music, clinking cans, bursts of laughter.
He took another tiny step towards her.
‘Why are you up here, anyway? Is this really all about Lori?’
Mel’s chest grew tight. She needed to leave. Why had she thought this might help?
‘I need to leave. You’re not a safe person to be around.’
Flynn laughed again. ‘Sure, I’m the bogey man. Lori was an angel. And that makes me the devil. You keep telling yourself whatever you need to believe to get through. I’m sure you’ve been lying to yourself for years. And to your poor fucking husband.’
His stare was forensic. Like it was stripping something from her.
‘Or that old boyfriend of yours. Dom?’
Mel shoved past him, towards the front door. She could see Kat, standing at the door of the living room, staring. She looked so powerful. So serene and composed in the centre of this roiling storm.
‘Flynn,’ Kat called, her eyes on Mel. ‘Is that food ready, mate?’
‘Almost!’ he shouted back. ‘Our neighbour’s just leaving.’
‘Oh, shame.’
Kat kept looking right at Mel.
Mel grabbed the door handle and pulled. Flynn stepped in and leaned to her ear, his voice hot and close.
‘You don’t know anything. You’re so sure Lori told you all about me. Well, she told me all about you. Don’t you think people are watching you, too?’
27
January: Mel
Downstairs, Mel fell through her door and straight into the bathroom to be sick.
Kneeling on the black and white tiles she and Simon had picked out so many years before, delighting in their very adultness – Look at us, we’re choosing tiles and taps and plugs. Look at us, making our little home better. Look at us, renovating.
Now, a few years down the line, among the half-empty bottles of kids’ shampoo, topless toothpaste tubes and almost empty hand-soap, Mel was getting the grooves of these carefully selected tiles embedded in her knees as she knelt over the toilet, her head so close to the ceramic bowl, retching.
It was the seltzer on an empty stomach. It was fear. It was disgust.
What a terrible excuse for a grown-up I am.
She pulled herself up from the floor, looked in the mirror, the one with the pleasing art deco edges, the one she’d told Simon was worth the extra money he hadn’t wanted to spend. ‘This is our home,’ she’d said. ‘Don’t you want it to be nice?’
Who was it nice for, now?
Cold water splashed on her tired, lined face. Eyeliner applied in some sort of deluded hopeful state earlier – to look nice for the young people upstairs – now draggy-smudged down her cheeks.
Look at the state of you.
Words thrown at her, so many years before, when everything began to turn with Dom.
It was Bangkok. The weather was so heavy there. Like a hot, wet blanket you were always trying to shrug off. They had a fight about it. About air-conditioning.
By then, Mel had learned to be watchful for the signs that Dom’s mood was shifting. The short flashes of anger she’d seen in London, the swelling irritation spilling into cruel words on the Mekong, were still outnumbered by the days she was certain that her person – the man she saw skip with joy on her sister’s rainy street the night they met – was perhaps the only one she had ever met who truly saw her, loved her, knew her.
But at the hostel in Chiang Mai, the one between the old town and the new, rooms without air-conditioning were ten dollars a night. Rooms with a fan were a little more. Rooms with full air-con were fifteen dollars.
Mel wanted to spend the extra money. They’d been sleeping on boats and on trains. They’d been sweating into their clothes for days and days. She’d felt like the grime of the road was in every pore and crease of her body, and in every piece of clothing in her bag. The romance of the road, of bumping along beside her beautiful Australian man, falling asleep with her head on his shoulder on buses, at stations, was still tangible. But she also wanted to shower. In private. She wanted to wash all her clothes. She wanted to slip in between cool, clean sheets with damp hair. She wanted a cup of English tea.
The clouds began to roll in as she suggested this to Dom.
‘This isn’t a holiday,’ he’d said at the reception desk of the hostel as they were checking in. ‘This isn’t a two-week package trip to Ibiza. This is life on the road.’
It was after the deep green bubble of the boat trip, where he’d told her he couldn’t live without her. It was after him holding her face in his hands and diligently, softly, kissing every part of her face. ‘Because I want to have kissed every inch of you.’ It was after he’d licked her until she came, over and over, in a narrow bunk on a rattling train carriage as an unfamiliar world flashed past the windows and she had barely believed this could be her life and that he was in it, telling her she deserved to be honoured like the goddess she was. She had giggled at that, even while it felt so wonderful, so perfect, and pulled him up to her face and kissed him, tasting herself on him, not caring. Loving him and herself, and feeling like any doubt she had was only her insecurity talking, because this man loved her, loved her, loved her.
And here he was, the rain tipping down outside the reception shack of an unimpressive hostel. Morphing, as she watched, from the man who needed to kiss every inch of her face into the man who found her an embarrassment. It was shocking.
‘What do you think people think about you?’ he’d asked her, too close and too loud. ‘When you’re whining about wanting air-conditioning, and clean sheets, and tea bags?’ His hand around her arm was gripping much harder than it should have been. ‘You’re embarrassing me.’
‘It’s just a fan, Dom,’ she remembered saying, but tears were coming, because she was confused, and exhausted, and a little bit afraid. Strangers’ faces turned to them, curious, uncomfortable. ‘It’s only two pounds. I can pay for it.’
‘You can’t pay for it,’ he said. ‘Your money’s my money, here. We’ve been on the road for three weeks. How long do you think we can last if you’re going to be a fucking princess at every stop?’
She didn’t want to cry in front of strangers. Or in front of this man, who she’d believed, only hours or minutes before, thought she was wonderful. It was the first time she truly felt that poisonous soup of uncomfortable emotions she would become so familiar with over the next few months. Don’t talk to me like that. Please don’t stop talking to me. Leave me alone. Please don’t leave me.
Now, eyes closed in front of the art deco mirror, Mel could see herself, as if she were a stranger, standing next to a wooden counter with propped-up signs for banana pancakes and temple tours, a small queue of other grimy travellers straight off the night train behind them. She saw young Mel, looking down at her feet, in those stupid Velcro sandals that were back in fashion again now, seeing her own ugly toes. Her throat had been burning and a man leaning against the wall near the door had been smoking one of those cigarettes that smelled like cloves. His face had been twisted in a smirk. She remembered feeling the straps of her pack cutting into her shoulders and the smell of herself, and that her tears had tasted salty but dusty as they dripped onto her lips. She had felt like she was a woman of power, until that moment when she realised how foolish that was.
‘Look at the state of you,’ Dom had snapped, and yanked her towards him with that forceful grip. ‘You’re pathetic.’
Then he’d let go of her arm, but she could still feel his fingers there as he turned back to the counter and paid with the cash he kept strapped under his shirt, along with her passport and her money. Safer that way. Then he’d turned, wearing his huge, battered backpack and walked out of the reception.
Mel remembered pushing the tears away with the flat of her hand. The face of the young woman behind the counter, who smiled at her, but nodded towards the door, keen to move on to the others who needed a bed, needed a fan, needed to hand over their hidden notes.
The room, when she found it, had air-conditioning. But no Dom. Only his pack, discarded on the floor, ripped open, his dirty shirt crumpled next to it, a different one, presumably, pulled out. More tears in the shower. More tears in the damp, smelly washroom as she’d shoved her clothes and his into the giant, rusty washing machines. The sheets, when she’d crawled between them, alone, were scratchy on her skin, the whirr of the fan was loud and no sleep came. At midnight, she’d pulled on a T-shirt and shorts and gone to look for him in the guesthouse restaurant, but it was closed up. He wasn’t among the travellers sitting drinking Singha in the courtyard. She went to the gates of the guesthouse and looked up and down the street. So many cafes, so many bars, he could be in any of them. What if he didn’t come back? Was that possible? Might he leave her here? Would he do that?
She’d gone back to the room, back to the sheets and the whirr of the air-conditioner and the drone of the mosquitos. She’d felt punished.
Some time as the night crawled towards morning and she lay there, wet with tears, she heard him shove the door open and bump into the room. Her relief was so enormous, so complete, that she’d launched herself from the bed and onto him, into his arms, and he’d pulled her up and around him, and she’d kissed him and kissed him and he’d pushed her up against the wall, and the sex that they had that night, sex that she didn’t think she had the strength to have, was, even now, one of the most memorable fucks of her life. Why was that?
Stop it, Mel.
Where are these memories coming from? Mel stared at herself in the mirror. The version of young Mel in her head looked a lot like Lori. Was she getting herself confused with the young woman who lived upstairs? Was that how all this had begun? Why it had gone so very far?
She rubbed away the dark eyeliner with a cotton pad, drank some water, thirstily, straight from the tap, and undid her dress, letting it drop to the floor in a tangled pile. There was no-one else here, she didn’t have to keep the bathroom nice.
The unit’s silence was familiar to her now; weekends without the kids were no longer a novelty. Mel grabbed her robe from the back of the door and threw it on, walking out through the empty hallway, the door to the kids’ room wide open, the darkness signalling its emptiness.
No question, she’d seen Lori stepping where she had stepped, decades before. And it had poked at her, and poked at her, as she’d lain there, listening, night after night. As Lori had drunk her English tea in the kitchen with fingers that trembled slightly as they closed around the mug, eyes that darted with any sudden small noise.
‘Were you always like this?’ Mel remembered saying to her, one of those afternoons when Lori came downstairs to be with the kids, but stayed a little longer than she needed.
‘Like what?’
‘Jumpy? Nervy?’
‘Am I?’ Lori had pushed the comment away, lightly, but her eyes stayed on her tea. ‘It’s a bit of a nervy time, isn’t it?’
But Mel knew.
Now she went to the lounge room, lay down on the couch, her head still swimming. Blurry around the edges. She picked up her phone, scrolling, scrolling.
So many good wishes for Lori. Wherever you are.
There was a story on a news site. Fears grow for backpacker missing in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
