To Know My Crime Read online

  DEDICATION

  To know my deed, ’twere best not know myself.

  William Shakespeare, Macbeth

  Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak

  Whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.

  William Shakespeare, Macbeth

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Part I Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Chapter 13.

  Chapter 14.

  Chapter 15.

  Chapter 16.

  Chapter 17.

  Chapter 18.

  Chapter 19.

  Chapter 20.

  Chapter 21.

  Chapter 22.

  Chapter 23.

  Part II Chapter 24.

  Chapter 25.

  Chapter 26.

  Chapter 27.

  Chapter 28.

  Chapter 29.

  Chapter 30.

  Chapter 31.

  Acknowledgements

  Advertisement

  About the Author

  Also by Fiona Capp

  Copyright

  Part I

  1.

  All night the sea moves restlessly under the jetty. The wind might drop, the swell might fade but the slave-driving moon keeps flogging the tides back and forth. Whenever Ned wakes, the symphony is still playing, sloshing around the pylons, thwacking the underside of the boatshed, exhaling on the beach as the incoming tide is whipped up by the northerly wind. He drops his fingers to the floorboards to check they’re still dry. Since the shipping channel at the heads was deepened, the high tide has swallowed beaches and left teeth marks at the base of cliffs, where ledges hang poised in the air as if walking the plank.

  Ned tosses and turns with the sea until daylight leaks through pin-holes in the iron roof and gaps in the weatherboard walls. When he yanks open the old wooden door, the newborn day washes in. At the edge of the jetty, he fumbles with his boxer shorts and shoots a glance up at the cliff. No one there, of course. Too early for sightseers on Millionaires Walk or for the few who live on the cliff top to be up and about. Too early for anyone but the fishermen and the birds that tell them where the fish are schooling. He relieves himself while staring out over the bay.

  The wind has dropped, the water so glassy he can see the ripples on the sandy sea floor and a solitary toadfish skulking through gold veins of light. Behind the eastern hills, the radiance deepens. When the red disc finally appears, it is as if someone has thrown a match on oil, setting the sea on fire in sheets of copper and bronze. A flotilla of low-lying clouds blazes like plundered ships. Ned can’t help grinning. It’s one hell of a way to wake up. Better than coffee, which is lucky because it’s been a week, cold turkey, and the headaches each morning are thumping. A month ago, he wouldn’t have thought he could do it. But he’s beginning to discover that there’s no end to what you can give up when you have no choice.

  The water on the camp stove puckers. He pours it over wilting peppermint leaves he picked from somebody’s garden a few days back, gulps a scalding, weak-as-piss mouthful and tosses the rest away. Halfway up the wooden walkway that zig-zags the cliff face, he catches his breath and takes in the view. To the north, on the far side of the bay, the city is an apparition of sugary white pillars. From this distance, it hardly seems to exist, except as a fading memory of a former life. The foreground, though, is crisp and picture perfect. To the east, the enfolding arm of the bay is covered in ti-tree and the winking windows of houses catching the sunrise, the blue hills rising behind. Closer to shore, yachts and motorboats bob like overfed gulls above sunken continents of reef and seaweedy rock. Jetties divide the beachfront into haphazard lots, each with its own fenced-off bathing area and boathouse.

  Ned stops again at the top where a sign on a gate warns passers-by: Private Property. Enter at Own Risk. When he stands here first thing in the morning with his head blissfully empty, he can almost share the fantasy of the rich and the blessed that, at this moment, it is the best of all possible worlds. His eyes fall on a nearby boatshed that mimics a miniature castle with crenellated battlements and a courtyard. The boathouse on the jetty next door has a large deck and Hawaiian-style bar with glass globe lanterns from fishing boats, a built-in barbecue and fixed stools under a bright yellow sunshade stretched taut in the shape of a sail. They look like expensive cubbies, places where adults play pretend. On paper, the sheds are strictly for boats; they are not meant to be occupied. The council makes an inspection once a year to ensure the sheds comply with the bylaws. An inspection, that is, of the exteriors. As to what happens inside, they prefer not to know. Which is lucky for Ned. His shed might lack the extravagance of these more lavish creations but he is happy, for now, to have four walls, a roof and a bed. Not to mention the restless sea shifting under the floor and the sunrise on his doorstep and a sense of bounty that only someone else’s money can buy.

  He could start to enjoy this furtive life – if things were different. If he hadn’t fucked up so badly. If it had been only his money he’d lost. People say money talks, as if it’s a kind of Esperanto, a universal language. But for the owners of these mansions and boatsheds money speaks a language all of its own, a tongue that everyone would like to command but only a very few can. A tongue that speaks of the best of everything and has no word for ‘enough’. For everyone else there’s the common tongue, the language of survival. People dress it up with borrowed phrases from the cliff-top language and forget the cavernous gulf between the two. You only notice when all the trappings have been stripped away. Like after Angela’s fall, when he heard the language of survival being spoken in its bluntest form. Money as life support. And in managing to lose almost everything she had, Ned might as well have pulled the plug.

  He turns away from the priceless view and heads across the grass to the cliff-top path, pushing open gate after gate erected by the property owners to make the gawking public feel they have no right to be here. But since the local tourist bureau began to promote it as ‘Millionaires Walk’, everyone knows that this stretch of cliff top – between the mansions and the private jetties down below – is Crown land and open to all. Some owners have let their front lawns and garden beds of lavender and rosemary sprawl across the invisible boundary to generate a feeling of trespass in those who venture past. Others have forsaken the view and retreated behind high stone walls.

  Soon the path narrows, becomes a tunnel through the ti-tree and umbrella-topped moonahs twisted over by the wind. Here, the houses are set far back from the path and obscured by shrubbery and trees. With their established gardens and acres of lawn that have remained unchanged for over a century, these secluded properties seem to suck the oxygen from the air and leave the viewer gasping for breath.

  Ned can’t afford to let himself dwell. Tying his guts in a knot won’t help Angela one bit. He has never been one to worry about anything much, never been driven by anything more urgent than what to do on a Saturday night. Worrying has always struck him as a pointless activity. But not worrying is no longer an option. Not with the limited time that’s left to recover what has been lost.

  2.

  When her first patient for the day knocks and enters, Angela is at her desk with a scarlet pashmina thrown over her shoulders, one hand gesturing at the couch, the other inert on her lap. She smiles broadly, savouring the satisfaction of facial muscles stretching and contracting, and the feeling it gives her of sending a part of herself out into the world, of setting something free.
/>   The patient offers a pained, tight-lipped smile in return, goes straight to the couch and removes his shoes. When he lies down she can see the balding crown of his head and the hole in the big toe of his right sock. She watches him wriggle around, adjusting his legs and bottom until he is comfortable; movements he gives no thought to. Movements no one gives any thought to until they can no longer make them. He cannot see her at all. The couch is positioned to free him to talk without inhibition. The usual pressures of conversation do not apply. He can scowl, he can lapse into silence, he can close his eyes. He can let his mind wander. He can fall asleep, if he likes. Sometimes patients do.

  Once he is on the couch, a transformation takes place. Angela becomes her old self. The woman who follows her patients through the thicket of their days, who lopes after them over the open fields of their past and into the darkened rooms of childhood. The woman who swims alongside them as they flail in the choppy ocean of dreams, who shadows them through the tangled forest of their fears. All the time looking for the crumbs they unwittingly drop that will lead them out: the hints, the signs, the slips. The things they cannot say or cannot see.

  After a hesitant start, her patient has returned to the subject he cannot let go of: his first wife, who walked out on him over twenty years ago. Although he remarried and was happy, the death of his second wife has left him floundering, as if he has been abandoned all over again. But it is not his second wife he is grieving for, the woman who was devoted to him. Her death has summonsed the impotent rage that engulfed him after his first wife left. Angela listens to his familiar story, hoping for a slight variation, some new piece of information, some flicker of insight that might be the key. At the moment, he is as locked in the holding pattern of his past as she is locked in her body. He can’t admit that his possessiveness provoked his first wife to leave. He was equally controlling of his second – in this case a willing accomplice – but in death she, too, has escaped him. And it all plays out in their sessions, in the way he tries to control Angela while demanding her unconditional attention, even – as Freud would have it – her unconditional love.

  The moment she remarks on this, his fists clutch empty air and his knuckles whiten. She can feel the rage coming off him. If she didn’t need the money, she would refer him to one of her colleagues. The analysis is stuck and not only because he can’t own his fury. He reminds her too much of Matthew. Calling it counter-transference doesn’t help. Some days, all it takes is the sight of him and she is back in that hospital bed, Matthew’s ruddy face hovering over her. The world gone fuzzy from the drugs, except for the sunlight knifing her eyes. Too weak to fight him again, she had rolled away, or thought she had. In her head she was facing the wall. When she opened her eyes again, the ceiling swam into view. Why had they strapped her down? Did they think she had lost her mind? In the distance, her feet made two small peaks under the sheet. She concentrated on moving her toes. The slightest quiver would have been enough, but there was only the infinite stillness of fallen snow. Her mind reeled off into darkness. It might have been for minutes or hours. Days, weeks, even. She had no idea.

  Next time she woke, her body was tilted up slightly, her knees almost within reach. If she could just stretch out her arms. But how did you make muscles work? You didn’t need to know, it just seemed to happen. You wanted to move and you did. Perhaps she was thinking too hard. She was so very tired. Way beyond tired. A dark halo pulsed around everything. Around her bed, around the chair by the window, around the room itself. She fixed her eyes on her kneecaps, dredged up every last bit of energy she had. Out of nowhere came an answering call. A missile of pain so annihilating the world went black.

  When she came to, the pain had passed and the trace of something else remained in the throbbing vacancy where the pain had been. She waited for it to announce itself. Very slowly it came to her. Where there is pain there is hope. All those days sitting in the mountains watching her pain unfurl like a flower. Of welcoming it, absorbing its lessons, remaining detached. The thing to remember, the teacher used to say, was that nothing was permanent. All things pass. The phrase swept over her like an eternal truth. Or a mother’s reassurances that there was nothing to be afraid of, that everything would be all right. Where there was pain there was feeling. Where there was feeling there was hope.

  One morning, when she had the strength to speak to the doctor, she asked him. The young man’s cowlick made his hair rear up in perpetual surprise. This was clearly a conversation he didn’t want to have. One hand gripped the stethoscope hanging around his neck. He did not mean to be brutal, he said. But her pain did not signal the return of sensation or movement. It was best that she knew the truth. He talked about the vertebrae which encased the spine, and how you could break the bones without damaging the column, but that in her case the spine had been severed. He thought he was making himself perfectly clear until Angela interrupted him.

  ‘I won’t be able to walk?’

  The surgeon frowned. She had disappointed him.

  As he explained, the hairs on the back of her neck rose in a wave that travelled up over her scalp. Her face muscles contracted in horror. The rest of her body might as well have been a corpse. For thousands of years, philosophers and theologians had spun meaning out of human suffering. And all it took was a tactless young surgeon in a spinal unit, for whom pain was nothing more than an electrical impulse, to unravel it, strip it away. All those millennia might never have been. There was no hope.

  ‘No movement and no sensation,’ she repeated. ‘Except for pain?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Matthew, who had kept a vigil at her bedside, couldn’t contain himself. ‘Surely there’s something–’

  The surgeon pulled a face. ‘There are radical operations and cowboys who do them. But the chances of success are minuscule. We don’t do that kind of thing here.’

  Angela squeezed her eyes tight but couldn’t stop the tears bulging out from under the lids. They hung suspended on her lashes before rolling down her cheeks. When her husband dabbed at them with his handkerchief, she thrashed her head against the pillow. He took her face between his powerful palms to stop her dislodging the clamp attached to her head. Her guttural howls brought the nurses running. She screamed for them to take him away.

  The silent alarm on her digital clock starts to flash. Angela doesn’t like thinking about that time. Light only began to penetrate, pin-prick by agonising pin-prick, as her arms came back to life. Not completely, but enough that she might feed herself, hold a book, propel herself on wheels.

  She puts her right hand on the arm of her chair and pushes down, raising her left buttock slightly and then does the same with her left hand, relieving the weight on the other side. It is a routine she resisted at first, or conveniently forgot to perform. But the pressure sores made life so miserable that she quickly learned to submit. Now she can do it without her patients noticing. Another good reason to have them facing away. They have no idea of the extent of her injury and she wants to keep it that way. What matters to them is her mind and what she can do for theirs.

  When her patients arrive for their sessions, they see a smartly dressed woman in her mid-thirties sitting behind a solid wooden desk. When they leave, they let themselves out. There is almost nothing about their regular encounters to alert them to the truth of her life: that she cannot wash or dress, put herself to bed or get herself up; that she depends on carers to evacuate her bowels. That almost everything she does with her arms comes from the shoulders – eating, drinking, pushing her chair, typing at the computer, brushing a hair back from her face. It is a point of pride that she has kept her hands supple and, dare she say it, normal-looking; that she can still talk with them as she has always done. During the early months in rehabilitation, she had been advised to let her fingers contract into claws. If they were rigid, it would make them more useful, the physio said.

  For the first time in her life, Angela had to confront the fact of her beauty, how much she
needed it. Before the fall, she only had to smile at a man in the street for him to hungrily return her gaze or look over his shoulder as if he couldn’t quite believe the smile was for him. Now, she is met by a sorrowful twitch of the lips that grazes her face and upper body but descends no lower, as if the rest of her has ceased to exist; a smile that says, If only . . . and then fades away.

  She glances at the clock. Her patient’s time is up. She watches him leave without a word, taking his dark cloud with him, and breathes a sigh of relief. The moment he is gone, Mai appears in the doorway from the kitchen with a tray. When Angela interviewed her for the job, she doubted this elfin young woman could do the heavy lifting required: helping Angela into the car, or to and from the commode in the shower; applying the necessary pressure to Angela’s diaphragm when she needs to clear her throat, to cough or sneeze. But Mai has proven, as she promised, that correct technique is all. Brute force doesn’t come into it. She is a dancer in her other life and understands these things.

  She has promised to take Angela dancing. Every week she goes to a church hall and dances in the dark with strangers who want to let loose without being watched. Sometimes, Mai says, the walls run with sweat. She has seen people in wheelchairs there. Angela hasn’t made up her mind yet. Could she bear it? The sight of those silhouetted bodies moving so freely, lost in the music? And what would she do? Wave her arms and nod her head? Mai says she would be surprised by what music can unleash – in any body, even one such as hers. And Angela had loved to dance. Not in a professional way, like Mai, but just letting loose, her body flowing like an underwater plant in a powerful current. There was a certain kind of joy that could only find expression in dance. She wonders if it is still in there somewhere, locked away.

  Mai puts the tray down on the desk with the same deliberation and ease that she does most things, as if every gesture were a tai chi movement. It can be very calming, except when Angela is in a hurry. This morning, though, Mai’s composure looks forced.