Ride the Tortoise by Liesl Jobson

Author:Liesl Jobson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jacana Media
Published: 2013-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Crest

I’m ten minutes early at the psychologist’s rooms where the mediation is being held. Kate’s father is there already, talking to his lawyer, whose mascara is punishing. I hold out my hand. Her fingers are sticks, her handshake pointed, hurting.

I’m wearing my black work skirt, ironed, the mauve silk jacket I bought at a second-hand shop for its good label. The heels do it, make me look competent, perhaps even pretty.

Her father returns to his car, retrieving a folder from the boot. The last jacaranda blossoms fall on the roof. I say to the lawyer, Did he tell you today was the day? She scrutinises me as if she’s hearing-impaired. It’s too late to stop the story. I say, Twenty-one years ago today, we got married.

She says, No, he didn’t tell me that.

I feel an idiot. But I’m not finished. I say, I was nineteen.

He returns and rings the doorbell. While we wait, a woman in the street answers her cell phone. She talks loudly, saying, That wasn’t the deal; I can’t possibly agree. She’s big, with cropped hair, wearing quilted salmon. From the way she opens her car door, I know she’s unafraid.

I carry my laptop in a briefcase. Moral support – that self I’m still proud of: photographer, writer. Digital codes more real than paper, than court orders.

Inside is dark and cool. A dragonfly hovers above a decorative koi pond at the entrance. This is going to be an expensive two hours. I’ll pay the child psychologist; he’ll pay the lawyer.

They open their folders, take notes when I talk, and say things like, Let me remind you… find a way forward… in the child’s best interest… appropriate developmental stage… manipulation.

The lawyer tells me I’m still playing the victim game, but I don’t listen too closely because my daughter has changed her mind, doesn’t want to go to boarding school after all.

I’m not sorry her father found out about her overdose from the school. I’m glad he was humiliated. I don’t say so, don’t need to. I am sorry I said terrible things about him to my daughter. I promise not to do it again, not because they’re extracting the words from me, but because I made her cry. Mostly I’m relieved that the fight’s gone out of this thing, because nobody can make a fourteen-year-old do what she doesn’t want to do. No judge in the land. That’s what the lawyer says.

I study a framed print of Beethoven’s ear on the wall. Was he still alive when they sloshed his head in blue paint, lying him sideways on the canvas? Was he already deaf? Already dead?

The notes of a symphony wander along the edge of his cheek, superimposed in silver. Strings of quavers crest the helix and anti-helix, twirl about his earlobe, and march out toward the frame.

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