Promises
A series of interconnected short stories from my 2018 collection "Degrees of Separation"
Promises
(June 1983)
There was no way she could explain Prince Charming to Todd. He had been trying for the last two months to get her to change her mind. He had made promise after promise; promises she knew he could never keep. And in turn, Margie had made concessions and promises too, even knowing coming back to Brisbane every month would soon prove impractical, and that one day she would wake up over seven hundred kilometres away having forgotten what she had seen in him. While he swore undying loyalty on the assumption that doing so meant something to her, her promises were hollow. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, it was that she loved the potential of Sydney more.
Ever since her parents had taken her for that one long holiday - the road trip all the way to Melbourne - Margie had wanted to go back. She was now twenty-four and, even though over fifteen years had passed, had never returned. The young girl’s fantasy that said all rainbows ended in Sydney harbour was long since dead, but it had been replaced by others: Sydney was the city where the perfect job awaited, where dreams came true, where you could meet Prince Charming.
“Nothing and everything.” This had been her answer to Todd’s wanting to know what she could do in Sydney that she couldn’t do in Brisbane. “I know I could get a decent job here, I know that.” It was clear from his reaction to her somewhat cryptic answer that she needed to spell it out. “And I could move out from under Mum’s feet and get my own place somewhere…”
“Our own place,” he suggested hopefully, and not for the first time.
“Our own place,” she corrected herself, adding another empty and impossible promise to her list. “And I know that I could carve out a life that would be good enough to lead. Comfortable, you know? Friends, family; trips out…”
She allowed her answer to trail away, not wishing to add anything too material to it, not wanting Todd to see how much she had thought about it and about what she was giving up. Inevitably there would be elements on any list she made that would leap out at him, just like the popular options on a menu; but not everyone wanted to choose from the table d’hôte. ‘Comfort’, ‘family’ and ‘home’ were all things that ticked boxes on Todd’s invisible happiness chart. She wasn’t being disingenuous when she said those were important to her too, that she wanted them as much as he did. But the critical thing was that she didn’t want them now, she didn’t want them in Brisbane - and she suspected that she didn’t want them with him. Even though she couldn’t be definitive about why, she was virtually certain of the latter and moving to Sydney would either prove or disprove it. In her mind it was the only true test she felt she could apply.
She wanted to go à la carte.
“Your mother doesn’t want you to go,” he said for what seemed like the umpteenth time. It had become a specious argument.
“No-one wants me to go,” she had exaggerated, somewhat robustly, “but that doesn’t make any difference. I want to go.”
“And you’re the only one that counts?”
Margie had taken Todd to the edge of the same argument before, part of her wanting him to topple over. If they’d had a blazing row, if he were to demonstrate - in almost any way - that he was flawed, that they might be somehow incompatible, then she would have a trump card to play.
“Right now I am,” she said, not bothering to take the defiance from her voice.
As usual he said nothing. Margie wasn’t sure if it was because he was too passive or too scared. She was actually glad he always retreated at this point. Had he defied her, had he taken the challenge and flared up, there was always the possibility that she would find such a side to him irresistible. If she was scared of anything in relation to Todd, perhaps it was that.
Otherwise her position was bullet-proof. She had been arguing the toss for weeks now, starting with her mother, then on through her friends, and down to Todd. Everyone else - except Todd - had given in; most had moved on from grudging acceptance to being genuinely excited for her. Some were even jealous.
“You’ll have to tell us how it’s going.”
“I’d love to do something like that!”
“If you find anything that would be right for me…”
“I’m so sick of this town too.”
She wasn’t sick of Brisbane, though; that wasn’t why she was leaving. She had given up trying to persuade people that even though in many ways she actually liked Brisbane, she was actually running towards something; towards a promise, a chance, and that was a different thing entirely.
But no-one knew that she was running to.
It’s all too common for people to associate leaving with the desire to put distance between themselves and something ugly in their lives. Margie had tried - successfully, it seemed - to disabuse her friends of any such notion as early as she possibly could. She had consistently and vehemently stuck to the mantra of ‘running to’ rather than ‘running from’. How could they doubt her? And, other than Todd, from what could she possibly need to escape?
Failure to escape implies being caught, and the fact that she so very nearly had been forced her hand.
Like many things it started with a genuine mistake. For a few it might start earlier, just for a dare; to prove something, that you were ‘big’ or ‘brave’.
“Just stand here and keep a look-out.”
“Go over to the counter and buy some Pick’n’Mix, but take your time.”
“Pretend you’re struggling with your money and get the old guy to help you count it out.”
Margie had been fourteen and shopping for clothes with friends in TopShop one Saturday afternoon. It had been busy; the girls giddy. They were trying on t-shirts and denim shorts. She had already bought some things from Myers and was hauling a carrier bag around with her. TopShop was their last stop before they split up and headed home. She had tried on three things but refrained from buying any of them. When she was on the bus going home, she decided to check the colour of the skirt she’d bought in Myers, just to see how it looked in daylight. As she opened the carrier she saw one of the items she’d tried on in TopShop. It was just laying there, price tag uppermost.
Her immediate reaction was to blush profusely, and then quickly check her fellow passengers to see if anyone had noticed. The bus was less than half full and no-one was paying her any interest. She returned her gaze to the t-shirt, her hands now refusing to delve into the bag. It must have fallen in when she was preparing to leave the changing room. How had she missed it? It was too late to go back now, and the family were going out for the day on Sunday. Maybe she could pop in there on Monday after school, or the following weekend. If she were to go back on Monday, she’d need to concoct some kind of story for her parents to explain why she had to go into the city centre on a school night.
Back home, she relegated the contraband to the very bottom of her chest of drawers and then showed her mother the Myers’ skirt she had bought.
During the following week she lived in dread of coming home from school and finding the police there, ready to take her away. She was a criminal now and would have to face the full force of the law. She imagined defending herself in court, breaking down in tears, being ‘led away’.
“Not feeling well?” her mother had asked on Monday evening when she’d hardly touched her supper.
By Wednesday the fear had subsided a little, enough for her to excavate the t-shirt from the bottom drawer and take another look at it. Of the ones she had tried on, this had been her favourite - and the most expensive. She hadn’t been able to justify buying it as she’d already spent most of her money. As she looked at it, she began to construct the scenario awaiting her when she took it back.
“But that was last week!”
“You’ve had it so long we need you to buy it.”
“Audrey, call the police.”
As far as Margie could see, there didn’t seem to be any scenario that, from her perspective, could lead to a satisfactory outcome.
Come the end of Thursday she had decided to keep the t-shirt. It had been an accident, after all. “One of those things”. She was innocent really, wasn’t she? And as she snipped the labels from the garment to try it on in the privacy of her own bedroom, she consoled herself with “it’s not as if I’m going to do it again”. Two weeks later she was back in TopShop. She had loitered a little nervously outside, part of her believing that she would be apprehended as soon as she crossed the threshold. Her friends dragged her in and she waited outside the changing rooms as they tried things on again. Penny bought some jeans, Rosie a pair of dungarees.
The following day she dared to go out wearing the contraband t-shirt for the first time and was unable to avoid the little frisson of excitement doing so gave her. She knew it was highly unlikely that she would be stopped in the street or identified as a pilferer; and the t-shirt seemed to give her license to strut a little more than she was used to - even if such posturing were common for girls her age.
“Oh! So you went back and brought that, did you?” asked Penny, recognising the top. It was as close as Margie came to being found out.
After that the following few weeks were back to normal. School dragged on as only school can, while birthdays for friends came and went. Yet all the while something was growing inside Margie, a slight gnawing that she barely recognised, and when she did, found herself unable to give it a name.
That there was a second ‘accident’ was probably inevitable. This mishap occurred in a branch of Squiggle. She had gone in to buy a pencil case as a birthday present for Rosie and decided to get herself a few things while she was there. She had a soft spot for pens, particularly pens that were neither blue, black or red. Having made her selection she found herself slightly surprised at the bill quoted at the till. It seemed a little light, but she didn’t quibble. When she got home she compared the receipt with what she had in her bag only to discover that the person on the till had missed two of her pens and had failed to charge her for them.
This was not, she argued, the result of anything she had done. She had not tried to hide the pens. It was not her mistake this time, but theirs. She had benefited, yes, and she was in possession of goods that she had not paid for, but again she was the innocent party. What should she have done? What could she do now? This time she had no compunction in keeping the extra items; indeed, she went as far as to assume the purple and orange pens - two of her favourite colours - were the ones she had so fortuitously acquired.
Would it have been possible to put an exact moment on the time and place when Margie decided to experiment? Perhaps when it dawned on her how easy it had been for her to remove those pens, the t-shirt, from their respective stores without anyone being aware? And how much did her family’s social standing have to do with her decision, the fact that they were not as well-off as the Rayners or the Pauls? Somewhere in her mind she formed a vague and indecipherable equation that had misfortune, justice, ease, risk, gain and - perversely - inequality as arguments within it. However it might be articulated, Margie had arrived at a theory that seemed worthy of testing.
She started small scale, usually buying multiples of something and half-trying to conceal one when it came to paying. If all the items were counted, she’d feign girlish surprise, blush and pay for everything; there would be no issue. If not…
It proved painlessly easy. Over a period of sever months she acquired a small number of ‘bonus’ items. She was slightly surprised that she felt no guilt at her actions. The predominate emotional response was the rush she felt on leaving the store, and then the sense of victory perhaps a minute or two later when she was away and in the clear.
From there, the next step - deliberate concealment - was a logical and surprisingly easy one to take. Using the original TopShop experience as a model - buying something whilst deliberately taking something else with no intention of paying for it - worked particularly well with clothes. Take five things into the changing room; choose one to buy; return three to the assistant; secrete one in a bag. Over the next few months Margie’s wardrobe expanded much more quickly than her pocket money and the little she earned in the convenience store would allow. Her mother questioned her once or twice over a recent acquisition. “It was in a sale,” she would say, or “Rosie gave it to me.”
Her mother accepted what she said at face value, and as her escapades in the shops had been so spectacularly uneventful, it seemed to Margie that no-one cared about anything very much - except themselves, probably. Given her mother had been having a difficult time of things recently - her sister, and Margie’s aunt, had died, and then she had struggled with various minor illnesses - Margie knew that as long as she was not in any trouble she would be fine. She hadn’t considered the consequences on her mother nor her relatively anonymous father. But if she had been caught, however…
It was her most audacious undertaking - just two days after her twenty-fourth birthday - that led her to announce to Todd her plan to leave Brisbane.
Nearly ten years of very occasional stealing, undertaken on little more than a whim or as a result of boredom, had become something of a drug to her; an illegal high that avoided the kind of risks she knew Penny had taken from time-to-time with pills from dubious sources - and which had once seen her hospitalised. Compared to that, she had argued what she was doing meant nothing. She was accomplished, a slick operator, and - she told herself - in no way addicted. The idea of moving to Sydney had been growing since she left school but she hadn’t yet found sufficient motivation to initiate the process.
She had always steered clear of David Jones as a target for her pilfering. She wasn’t entirely sure why. It was probably because she like shopping there too much; ripping a place off tended to mean she stayed clear of it for a while, just in case. It may also have been because she suspected their security was just that little bit tighter. Later, as she sat on the beach at Bondi or walked through the streets of North Sydney, she was still unable to articulate what had possessed her that particular Saturday afternoon.
Her trying-on-clothes-routine had developed to include a variation where you did not try and smuggle goods out in a bag, but actually wore them out of the shop. For that you needed to be wearing either a baggy jumper or a long loose skirt. She’d entered David Jones wearing both. Browsing for a while she chose three t-shirts, a skinny sleeveless jumper and two mini-skirts to try on. As she entered the changing rooms the assistant gave her six tokens, one for each item. Margie tried on all six, primarily to decide which of the t-shirts and skirts she preferred. She dressed, leaving the chosen mini on underneath her original skirt, the t-shirt and sleeveless jumper beneath her baggy top. Then she waited. She had chosen a booth where, if she left a small gap in the curtain, she could see the member of staff on changing room duty.
As soon as the assistant at the desk was different to the one who had served her, she walked out carrying the two discarded t-shirts and the remaining mini and just three of the tokens; the other three she had kicked under a chair in her booth.
“Just too small,” she said to the assistant with a smile as she handed the clothes and tokens over.
Walking casually towards the exit, she noticed the original assistant out of the corner of her eye, heading back towards the changing rooms. Margie increased her pace. If she turned right outside the store she would be in the heart of Queens Plaza and, by taking the Queen Street exit, there would be any number of shops in which she could lose herself. A noise from somewhere behind her forced her into a quick change of plan. The Adelaide Street exits were closer. She turned left and headed for those. Another shout behind her, but still she didn’t look round. With Kikki.K immediately to her left now, she headed inside as calmly as she could, trying her best to make her way through the store to its Adelaide Street exit as casually as possible. It took her just a few seconds. Still she hadn’t dared turn around. Emerging onto Adelaide Street, she found a bus stop just to her left. There was a bus there, doors open, the last person in the queue stepping on board. She ran for it and made it just as the doors were about to close. It was a 175, a bus she knew Penny used.
“Garden City,” she said to the driver, pulling out her purse.
As she made her way to a seat, the doors closed and the bus pulled away. She looked back for the first time. The assistant who had served her and a uniformed security guard were standing on the pavement looking her way.
“So what are you scared of?” Todd had asked again one day. She was only three days from leaving. He had tried every other tack for the last few weeks and instinctively wanted one final push. It was a desperate attempt to disprove Margie’s ‘running from’ versus ‘running to’ argument.
“‘Scared’? Why should I be scared of anything?”
“I don’t know. Is there something you’re worried might happen here, in the future? Is that why you’re going away? Because - ” he hesitated, “because if it’s to do with me, I can change.”
Margie knew that Todd had nowhere else to go now. He had never openly admitted that he might be the problem, had never offered to subjugate himself in this way. The fact that he was prepared to go this far was a victory of sorts. It was also the first time he had managed to get anywhere near the truth - the complete truth - as to why she was leaving. Running to and running from; that was the nub of it. All she had to do was keep her nerve.
She thought back to the episode in David Jones and how she had acted when she left the store. “Keep calm,” she told herself, “don’t look back.”
“It’s not you, Todd,” she said, putting her hand on his. He couldn’t help but look away. “I keep telling you that. I just need to get away, to try something new, to see what the world - Sydney - has to offer. I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t. You know that.”
She had one foot on the steps of the aircraft.
For links on where to buy Degrees of Separation, click here.