STEPPING INTO THE LIFEBOAT
Louise has been friends with Sigrid for about six months and in that time she has become attracted to the openly gay woman. After a trip to Sydney, Louise discovers that her late sister Cathy and Sigrid both had mutual friends in common even though they never met. That night they make out but are forced to stop when their boss calls to tell them her husband has just committed suicide. In the aftermath of the tragedy Louise faces the final hurdle before she can consummate her relationship with Sigrid. Can she make the crossing or will she stop short?
"Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats."
Voltaire.
Over the years there's been a lot of media coverage over heroin, cocaine, amphetamines and other drugs, but by far the drugs that kill the most people are tobacco and alcohol. The irony being that they're freely available if you're over eighteen and if you tried to ban them it'd be a massive shot in the arm to organised crime. The figures for alcohol related deaths are much higher when you take into account, accidents, murder, and suicide.
Jeff had a blood alcohol reading of about 0.17 meaning he was well over the legal limit. The till receipt the police found on the front seat showed he'd bought a six pack of beer, a bottle of Jack Daniels and a packet of cigarettes from the Ferntree Gully hotel at 16:30 but when he got home nearly forty minutes later a neighbour said he seemed to be in control of the car. He even avoided the garden gnome by the mailbox, which he'd been taken out several times in the past. Melanie was out at her parent's place in Templestowe and only came home later than planned because the kids wanted to watch the latest
Jurassic Park
movie again.
"I should have said no," she blew her nose, "I'd told him I'd be home for dinner but the kids were really wanting to watch the video. The stupid thing is they've seen it a couple of times before but it was the first time I'd seen them laugh in ages, so I weakened and just called Jeff at about five and left a message on the machine."
The neighbour who'd seen him come home told police he'd seen him park the car in the garage but he didn't go into the house. He did tinker with a generator on the garage floor and then went out to piss on Melanie's flower garden. He had a beer in his hand and according to the neighbour it was nearly empty because he had to tilt his head back to drain the stubby. Because Jeff had verbally abused the man in the past, his neighbour left him to his own devices when Jeff went back into the garage and closed the door.
Thus, he became the last person to see Jeff alive. Melanie got home about half past eight with a family dinner of chicken and chips from the local takeaway shop, thinking to at least get something into him. She opened the garage door, wondering why he'd left the engine running but didn't make the connection until she started coughing and saw him slumped over the wheel. By then the kids were out of the car but Melanie couldn't get into the car because he'd locked it.
Despite her state of mind, Melanie had the sense to wrap a damp rag around her mouth and nose before entering the poisoned garage and picking up a crowbar, smashed the window and hauled him outside. She shouted on the oldest kid to get the neighbour to call the ambulance and tried her best to revive him while keeping the kids at bay.
"I managed to drag him outside but he was blue all over and cool. The kids were crying and screaming but my neighbour managed to get them inside."
Elke arrived about then. She'd literally just come off a shift when Agnetha called her en route to Olinda. She jumped in her car and headed out as well. When she got there the police at first thought she'd been called out as well because she still had her uniform on until she explained the situation and they let her into the house to sit with Melanie for a bit. Elke put her arms around Melanie and just held her, and that was where it all began with Elke and Melanie.
It was a night that will live long in my memory. My most vivid recollection is Melanie's face partially illuminated by the porch light on the verandah and partly by the flashing blue lights of the police car. Her face was ashen and devoid of emotion, almost as if Jeff had killed her emotions along with himself. Melanie never smoked but Jeff did and she smoked three cigarettes in the hour it took for her parents to arrive from Templestowe and then threw up in the front yard while her mother rubbed her back.
Partly because the garage had been sealed off as a crime scene and partly because she just wanted to get the children away from the house, she arranged for the children to stay with her parents while she stayed with Elke. I went back down the mountain with Agnetha and Melanie while Sigrid took Melanie's two dogs back home. We hugged in the driveway as I stood by the back door of Agnetha's car and parted with a brief kiss.
"I'll see you at work," she rubbed my back, "if not sooner."
About halfway down the mountain as we drove past Kalorama Park, Melanie reached back for my hand and I held it all the way through Mount Evelyn and Montrose before she finally released it to answer a text message. When Agnetha got to my house, Melanie got out of the front seat and held onto me for dear life and I just let the hurt flow into me as best as I could.
"Thank you for coming up," she released me, "I won't be at work on Monday."
"Take as long as you need, you've done the same for me."
I remember sitting on the couch where Sigrid and I had made out a few hours earlier. The diaries were still on the coffee table and I could still smell her perfume on the cushions. I cried that night, for Melanie and Jeff, although I didn't know him all that well, but most of all I cried again for Cathy. That night instead of going to bed to sleep, I curled up on the couch where I could at least smell some of Sigrid's perfume.
I dreamed of Cathy and Sigrid that night, both women seemed to change places in my dreams, it was Cathy at my back with her hand on my breast but when I turned around it was Sigrid. I woke sometime before sunrise with the duvet half off and a sore neck. Eventually I went through to the bathroom and had a shower and changed into fresh clothes.
It was a strange day. One without phone calls from anyone and eventually I jumped in the car and headed over to Elke's place. She lived in Ringwood Street, not far from the police station where she was stationed. Melanie was there with her mother and the children. We went out to Ringwood Lake for a while and I felt Sigrid's absence keenly.
I learned from Melanie about Jeff's struggle with alcoholism. It's an equal opportunity disease and as a casual member of Alanon she had a good grasp of the disease concept, but it still shocked me to realise the happy go lucky man who turned up to the occasional Christmas night out was an alcoholic. I always thought they wore old raincoats and slept in the park. Melanie had hidden it for years, hoping it would get better but eventually she withdrew emotionally and physically until finally he cracked and called Alcoholics Anonymous.
"For a couple of months he was actually better. We started talking again, but then he started to ease off the meetings and began working longer hours because he was catching up for lost years. Before I knew it the meetings were gone and when he started staying overnight a couple of times a week at Adam's house, I knew he'd started drinking again but didn't want me to know."
When Melanie confronted him about it the previous week she'd actually used what she'd learned in Alanon.
"You can't control people, I knew that well enough and so I told him if he chose to drink then he could drink himself into the gutter but I wasn't going to lift a finger to help him. We're the worst ones for enabling, we mollycoddle them and clean up after them," she bit her lip.
"He hit me then and that was the end for me. I've put up with a lot from Jeff, he's embarrassed me in front of my parents and his parents, I've cleaned up after him, nursed him, bent over backwards to try and please him and the thanks I got was a fat lip."
I recalled she'd been off work for three days with a stomach bug.
"And that's the other price I've paid. I've lost time off work because of his monkeying around," she lit a cigarette, "he was facing bankruptcy before he got to A.A a few months ago, guess who helped stave off the creditors for the last three years?"
She tapped herself as she continued, "I paid off his fucking debts only to see him get back into debt again, in the end I had to take the cheque book off him because the cheques kept bouncing, but all I got from him was how I was a control freak."
She stared out at the lake.
"I've had it with men," she sighed.
There was more that came out that afternoon as we sat by the lake and eventually we went back to Elke's place and not long after that I left and went home. Periodically that day, I'd checked my phone to see if she'd sent a text but there was nothing and when I got back home I found a card under the door.
Thinking Of You.
Inside instead of the usual generic message there was a short poem.
When all about is fear and doubt
Let me be your rock.
