But that night you could tell something was different. Liza hadn’t come out, and Kathleen was tight-lipped and said she was staying in the house. So I went in, and sat down where I found her in the kitchen. I didn’t say anything about the fact that she was checking out some photograph because when I came in she shoved it into her jacket pocket, like she didn’t want anyone to see, and her eyes were all red, like she’d been crying. For once in my life I managed to keep my big gob shut because I had a feeling like something was different and, if I was careful, it might work to my advantage.
Then, after she’d sat there for a few minutes, and I’d tried not to shift about on my chair (I’ve hated sitting still since I was a nipper), she looked up at me, her big eyes so sad they made even me want to weep, and said, ‘Greg, will you help me get drunk? I mean, really drunk?’
‘Well, now,’ I said. I slapped my knees. ‘No man more qualified in the whole of Silver Bay.’ Without a word to Kathleen, we walked down the track, got into my truck and drove to Del’s, where she sat and knocked back Jim Beam like it was going out of fashion.
We left after the bar shut, and by this stage she was so far gone she could barely stand. She was not a silly drunk, like Suzanne, who would sing and get fresh, which, I’d tell her, just wasn’t pretty in a woman, or even an angry drunk. She acted like whatever was getting to her was eating at her from the inside.
‘Not drunk enough,’ she mumbled, as I shoved her into the truck. ‘Need some more drink.’
‘The bars are shut now,’ I said. ‘I don’t think there’s one open this side of Newcastle.’ I’d had a few myself, but there’s something about watching someone who’s really out to sink them that puts you off getting too drunk.
‘Kathleen’s,’ she said. ‘We’ll go back and drink at Kathleen’s.’
I didn’t imagine the old Shark Lady would be too happy at the thought of us raiding her bar in the small hours but, hell, it wasn’t my decision.
It was still hot enough that your clothes stuck to you and we sat outside with our beer. In the moonlight I could see the sweat glistening on her skin. Everything felt odd that night, like the atmosphere was charged, like anything could happen. It was the kind of night where you get a sudden storm at sea. I listened to the waves breaking on the beach, and the crickets, and tried not to think about the girl next to me, swigging hard at her beer. I remember that at some point we had taken our shoes off, and it was someone’s idea to go paddling. I remember her laughing so hysterically that I couldn’t be sure if she was actually crying. And then, as she lost her balance under the jetty, she kind of fell against me and I still remember the taste of her lips as she reached for mine – Jim Beam and desperation, I told myself. Not a pretty mix.
Not that that stopped me.
The second time was about six months later. Suzanne and I had split up for a while, and she was staying with her sister in Newcastle. Liza had got even more drunk and I’d had to hold back her hair while she was sick before she was together enough to come back in the truck. Didn’t stop her finishing a bottle of Mr Gaines’s finest shiraz at mine. She was a strange one, though – stone-cold sober every night of the week, but now and then it was as if she’d decided to knock herself out cold. That night I woke up in the small hours to find her weeping in bed beside me. She had her back to me, her shoulders were shaking and her hands over her face.
‘Did I hurt you?’ I was half groggy with sleep. You don’t like to find a girl weeping after you’ve given her one, you know what I mean? ‘Liza? What’s the matter, love?’
Then, as I touched her shoulder, I realised she was asleep. It freaked me out a little, so I called to her, then shook her.
‘What?’ she said. And then, as she looked round the room, ‘Oh, God, where am I?’
‘You were crying,’ I said, ‘in your sleep. I thought . . . I thought it was me.’
She was already out of bed, reaching for her jeans. Honest, if I hadn’t been so drunk myself it would have been insulting. ‘Hey, hey, hold your horses. You don’t have to go anywhere. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.’ I saw the white flash of her brassière as she hooked it over her arms.
‘It’s nothing to do with you. Greg, I’m sorry, I’ve got to go.’
She was like a man. She was like me when I used to go out on the lash, before I met Suzanne, and wake up with someone I’d have gnawed my arm off to get away from.
Ten minutes after she’d left I realised she didn’t have her car. But by the time I got downstairs she was long gone. I reckoned she must have run half-way down the coast road to get home. She would do that, like she had no fear. (‘Why should she?’ said Kathleen, cryptically, when I asked. ‘The worst has already happened.’)
The next day, when I sat down beside her on the bench, she behaved like nothing had gone on.
Four more times she had done this to me. Not once had we been together when she was sober. If I was less of a looker I reckon I’d have been a bit worried.
I guess I should have got pissed off, but you couldn’t with Liza. There was something about her. She was not like anyone else I knew.
When she finally told me about the bub, she was sober. And she told me not to say a word. She wouldn’t answer questions. Didn’t even tell me how the little one died. She just told me because I’d got mad and asked her point-blank why the hell she had to get so drunk to go to bed with me.
‘I don’t get drunk to go to bed with you,’ she said. ‘I get drunk to forget. Going to bed with you is a by-product of that.’ As straight as you like, as if none of it would hurt my feelings. ‘And don’t go asking Hannah about it.’ She looked like she regretted telling me already, which was a bit much. ‘I don’t want you stirring things up. She doesn’t need reminding.’
‘Jeez, you’ve got a poor opinion of me,’ I said.
‘No, I’m just careful.’ She closed her hands into two tight fists. ‘These days I’m just careful.’
Del was happy to host the meeting – he knew he’d get a few extra all-day brekkies out of it – but he’d told me straight beforehand that he didn’t oppose the development. Sited where he was, within a few feet of it, he said, wiping his hands on his apron, he stood to make a killing. Like the kind of clientele they were talking about would stop by an old greasebucket like MacIver’s for lunch. I knew I wasn’t going to sway the old bugger, but I guessed correctly that guilt might make him good for a bacon roll and, as the time approached, I sat outside and ate it, washed down with a good strong coffee.