The Point of Us

By FL Rose

We all think we know where we're going. But sometimes, we realise that we don't know who we are.

 

Paul is losing his faith, both in God and in his own ability to make a difference to others. Signing up to visit notorious hitman Trevor Eddison in prison, his belief in the fundamental goodness of human nature takes a hit of its own. Meanwhile Paul's wife Terentia, a prize-winning novelist, can't get a publisher for her latest book. Is her creative career over, and who is she, if she's not a writer? Dave is accused of racism towards one of the passengers on his bus. Too stubborn to apologise, it looks like both his job and his relationship might be at risk. And finally, there's Emma, Dave's wife - a woman for whom life - as the saying goes - is a bowl of cherries. Emma couldn't ask for a better husband and more adorable kids, but perhaps Fate is taking a spiteful interest…

The Point of Us is about how we all deal with those times in life when it seems like there's nothing solid to hold on to - and how we push through. By turns funny, tragic and uplifting, it not only entertains but makes us question the assumptions on which we all base our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: FL Rose
• Release date: Feb 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201167707

Book preview

The Prison Visitor

You can still change your mind, she says, looking him up and down critically. He feels a shiver of irritation – or is it fear?

No, it’ll be fine. I’m good.

Then why do you keep running to the bathroom?

She’s read him correctly. He’s nervous. He’s been to the toilet three times in the last half hour, and he feels like going again. His mind says there’s nothing to worry about, but his body is offloading, getting ready for a last desperate dash to safety. Pull out, it says, it’s not too late. He tells it to shut up. After all, he signed up for this. He volunteered.

You said yourself there’s no risk of anything happening, says Terentia, straightening his collar. So what are you so worried about? They take precautions, don’t they?

"There is no risk. And I’m not worried!"

Physically, he’ll be fine. Since Trevor is a maximum security inmate, Paul won’t be meeting up with him in the general visitor area. He’s been told they’ll be in a separate room, on either side of a pane of security glass, communicating via a phone system, like in the movies. There’ll be guards, and video surveillance. They don’t take any chances in supermax.

In any case, Paul is not scared of Trevor Eddison, exactly. He’s scared of failing at Trevor Eddison. It reminds him, vaguely, of the first time he confronted a class of live children, as a student teacher. That visceral fear of humiliation, of having his head, metaphorically, dunked in the toilet bowl.

He’s never done anything like this before. The closest he’s ever got to a real life criminal was when Patti O’Donovan from the class of 93 started dating a Comanchero. A not-so-small voice inside him whispers, ‘What if you say the wrong thing, and he goes off the deep end?’ He imagines a roaring, outraged Trevor being hauled away from the glass, spitting unimaginable insults as he goes. Criminals are more sensitive than ordinary folks; they have more to take offence at. Crossing the park once on his way to the school, a trio of drug addicts had once yelled abuse at him and he’d wondered, is it something about me? No, Terentia had explained later, with an eye roll, they’re the ones with the issues. Still he couldn’t help feeling as if he’d merited it, somehow.

What if he looks wrong? Some people have a radar for such things. He doesn’t want to look like a Catholic school teacher.  He wants to look relatable (as absurd as that is, given the circumstances). On the other hand, he has read that they won’t even let you in if you don’t meet the prison dress code. No tee shirts with logos (he doesn’t own one anyway), no thongs. No underwire bras, though he doubts that will be a problem. What about the hearing aid? Will they think it’s contraband? Should he leave it in the car?

He'll have to establish rapport, somehow. He’s already made a list of things they might be able to talk about, initially. Football (not that Paul follows sport, but he’s made a point of reading the Daily Telegraph sports pages just in case). Cars? He knows nothing about cars, either. He wonders if Trevor Eddison reads. There’s no reason to think not; you can enjoy both literature and killing people. You’ll find something to talk about, Father Brennan had said, reassuringly (but had Paul detected a note of mild disdain, the innate superiority of the worldly-wise over the sheltered and blissfully ignorant?). Anyway, it’s more important to know how to listen. Plenty of blokes who can talk out there, not so many who can listen, eh?

Am I a good listener, he asks Terentia, the night before the visit.

Sometimes, she says cryptically, looking over her glasses. When you want to be. She hands out encouragement sparingly, like candy.

Paul picks the car keys up from the hall table, and kisses her cool narrow cheek. I don’t know how long the whole thing’ll take. It’s a long drive, and they make you wait, so I’m told. But I’m hoping to be back for dinner.

It’s fine. Take your time, I’ll manage. She pats him on the bottom, her mouth crooked. As he starts to close the door into the garage, she throws after him, Just don’t fall in love with him, ok? That’s all I ask.

When he remembers this remark, driving, it makes him chuckle. An image of Terentia comes to mind, thin brows rising high over her long clever brown eyes, when he told her he was thinking of signing up as a prison visitor. When he told her he’d got Trevor Eddison, of all people, she’d put her book down with a thump, and stared at him.

"The Trevor Eddison?’

Well there isn’t another one. As far as I know.

She doesn’t acknowledge his attempt at wit. Really? You couldn’t find anyone more...harmless to visit? A nice con man, perhaps, or a society drug addict?

Nobody wants him. Paul feels like a kid pleading for a puppy. They asked me because he’s interested in theology. Go figure, but...

"Haven’t they got chaplains or something in prison? What do you know about theology?"

Not a lot. When the census asks, Paul ticks ‘Catholic’, but he hasn’t really read the Bible for a while, and has never taken much of an interest in theological disputes. He believes. That’s enough.

I thought not. Terentia presses her long thin lips together. So you’re going to discuss theology with a mass murderer, knowing zip about theology or murderers. You sure you’ve thought this through?

Paul shrugs. I could’ve said no. Everyone else did, apparently.

She grunts through her nose. I’m not surprised. You’ve got to be careful, you know. He’ll try to charm you.

He bridles. What do you mean, he’ll try to charm me? He’s a murderer! How charming can he be?

I read it in a book about psychopathic killers. You go in thinking he's going to be some simple-minded guy from the wrong side of the tracks who only needs to be shown a little love and kindness to see the error of his ways, and then he'll get round you with his cunning wiles. What about all these women that marry serial killers? In jail! They go in thinking they can help the poor bloke and next thing you know, they’re in love. Telling the Daily Telegraph he’s really a big softie and he’s sorry for everything he did, it was just his abused childhood...

Yes but that’s women, Paul says, somewhat stiffly. "I’m a man. In case you hadn’t noticed."

She snorts. Terentia has a funny way of laughing, she sort of lets it out, ha ha ha, and then pulls it back in again through her nose. "Oh so you think men don’t have a rescuer complex? Men are never happy unless they’re saving a damsel in distress. Or a bloke..."

A bloke?

Yeah, just to show him who’s top dog.

I don’t have a rescuer complex!

Just as well, he’d be pretty frustrated if he did. Over the twenty-five years they’ve been married, he’s gradually come to the realization that Terentia doesn’t really need him. Well, what’s wrong with that? she said, on the one occasion he brought it up, spurred by a sudden onset of vulnerability. "I’m not with you because I need you, I’m with you because I love you. Isn’t that better than needing you?’

He's not sure, but it’ll have to do. She hates what she calls ‘co-dependency’. If push came to shove – say if he died or got advanced dementia - she’d be just fine on her own. She’s always had a certain aloofness. In the beginning of their relationship he’d mistaken it for hard to get, and found it alluring; now he’s simply used to it. She’s probably right though, about men. Inside every man there’s a St George, asking plaintively, But where have all the dragons gone?

On the two hour drive to the prison, his hands grip the wheel with a certain stiffness. He can feel the arthritis just beginning to swell the joints of his thumb and his pinkie finger. His foot aches on the accelerator. The radio is playing Bach, Sonata No 1 in G Minor, on ABC Classic FM.  It should be calming but it’s not. The violins scrape at him. His stomach feels queasy. He wishes he hadn’t stopped for coffee and ordered two hash browns with it; their greasy heaviness is already clogging his intestines. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Stop talking to yourself, he says, aloud, as a cold quiver of adrenalin slides over the back of his hands. It doesn’t help.

He’s seen photos of Eddison. He looks like somebody’s gormless uncle; a bull-shouldered, red-faced man in his fifties, with a balding dome of a head and prominent ears. Of course, no one looks their best in a mugshot – Paul’s own passport photo makes him look half-witted, according to Terentia, and ten years older than he actually is. But he’s not gormless. He’s a man who’s murdered upwards of ten people, for hire, and most famously of all...

He thinks back over the pre-visit briefing with Father Brennan. Call me Tim.

"We try not to have too many expectations of our clients. It’s important to let the client tell you who he is. Of course we all go in with assumptions, in this case especially, we’re human aren’t we? But in the Fellowship we encourage our volunteers to set aside some of those assumptions and judgements that we all naturally have towards people like Trevor. I know it’s a hard ask, but you need to maintain a positive, open, encouraging attitude, that’s how we find we can do the most good. But of course it’s also really important to maintain boundaries. Actually we find that boundaries are probably the most difficult part of this mission, it’s so hard to both build a relationship with the client but also set firm limits to that relationship..."

How hard can it be, thinks Paul - he’s inside and I’m outside, you can’t get a firmer limit than that.

Tim has gone through the rules. No judgement ("Of course you’ll be making judgements, that’s human, but try not to share them with the client.) No sharing of personal details, beyond the most general Yeah mate I’ve been there supportive cliches. No passing of messages between the client and the outside world. No – it goes without saying – passing objects or substances between the client and the outside world, in either direction. No making of promises, Because it’ll be tempting, they’ll ask you, they’ll play on your sympathies. And Trevor, he’s got his heart set on getting out after the next parole hearing, but that’s out of your control, obviously. And don’t let him think the relationship’s going to continue in any form after – if – he gets out. It’s a helping, supportive relationship while the client is incarcerated, but it doesn’t continue beyond that. We’ve found that leads to all kinds of difficulties."

And the client – Trevor - he’s been briefed too? He knows what to expect?

Father Brennan had laughed, a hearty, blokey, shrewd laugh that saw right through to the heart of Paul’s trepidation. He knows what this is all about, yeah. But these guys’ll always try to play you. It’s not their fault, I’m not blaming them, you don’t survive on the street, let alone prison, unless you work out how to use people to your advantage, know what I mean?

Into the face of Paul’s uneasiness he had added, Takes one to know one. I used to be one of them, after all. Prisoners, I mean. Five years for fraud, back when I was in my twenties.

Brennan looks like a sports reporter, with his crinkled eyes and bluff haircut, not like an ex-crim.

Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. If you can manage a mixed class of thirty pubescent teenagers, you can manage Trevor. Alright? Let him tell you his story. He’ll surprise you, they all do.

At the time Paul had felt reassured, but now, with the heat haze rising off the highway, he remembers that he doesn’t really like surprises.

The prison rises up out of the sucked-dry plains like something out of the convict era. It’s an ugly building, all red brick and barbed wire. For a moment Paul pauses to wonder if criminals would reform more readily in a beautiful building. Beauty is a rare quality in buildings of any kind, these days, thought to be unnecessary. But especially, he supposes, in prisons.

He negotiates the parking lot, not without difficulty – he always gets confused when he’s stressed - and makes his way to the visitor’s entrance. He can feel the stern gaze of the prison’s surveillance cameras upon him as he scuttles inside. Is there anyone who doesn’t feel hunted when they enter a prison? It’s bad enough at airports, having to take off your shoes and empty your pockets and walk through that disconnected door frame, that portal to an alternate universe, one’s every sense on alert for the accusing squawk of the sensors, ‘One moment, SIR!’ Paul, Terentia has pointed out, has an abiding fear of the authorities, whether or not he’s done anything to be ashamed of. Something to do with the canings at St Bart’s, no doubt.

In reception, he’s eyeballed from behind a bullet proof glass screen by a stocky woman with a short golden buzzcut and a fake tan. She has a grim, tired look about the mouth, stage-heavy makeup, and eyes blue as forget-me-nots. Paul is distracted by the unexpected loveliness of her eyes, until she growls at him,

Name?

Paul Teague.

She types morosely. Address?

He provides it.

ID?

Paul pulls out his driver’s licence. Standing there while she examines it, he realises he urgently needs to go to the toilet. Again. Coffee and hash browns, what was he thinking! He looks at the woman helplessly – she’s obviously in no hurry – and wonders if it would look suspicious to ask for the rest room. He doesn’t want look like someone who’s stuck a balloon of heroin up their rectum. He clenches, trying to look relaxed.

At last the typing ceases, and the woman looks up, those improbably beautiful eyes set like sapphires in the pouchy, world-wizened face.

You’ll need to leave your keys, mobile, wallet and all other personal items in a locker before you go through for your visit. This is a token for the locker. She hands him the token. Don’t lose it.

No, no l won’t, but I was just wondering if you could tell me...

She cuts him off. Take a seat, and an officer will take you through presently.

Dismissed, he peers around the room and, thank God, there’s a sign for restrooms, male and female. He hurries in. On the stall door is a list of prohibited items, with a big red cross through them.

Mobiles

Wallets or purses

Knives and scissors

Weapons of any kind

Drugs

Cigarettes or lighters

Just then Paul remembers that there’s half a packet of aspirin in his pocket. He’s tempted to put it in the toilet but there might be cameras for all he knows, even here in the bathroom. They will think he’s trying to dispose of illicit pills. Back in reception, he approaches the blue-eyed virago and waves them cautiously in front of the window.

"Are these...?

She shakes her head, rolls her eyes, and jerks her thumb towards a bin.

Thanks.  He scuttles to the bin and drops them in, then sits down on a plastic chair. It’s almost an hour later when an officer – male, portly, grizzled – puts his head through the reinforced glass door that presumably leads to the cells.

Teague?

Paul’s heart lurches. He can almost feel the blood leaving his face, a cold sweat. If he could flee, with dignity, he would. But the guard is waiting, bored, heavyset. He follows him through the glass door; normality fades behind him.

The Novelist

Terentia has spent the last hour on You Tube. Not for entertainment, obviously, but in a doomed attempt to understand what people see in the damned thing.

No, she snaps reflexively, when Paul puts his head in and asks if she wants a cup of tea, but before he’s left the room, she changes her mind. As this is a regular occurrence, he smirks before whisking himself out the door. If a plump man in his fifties can be said to whisk.

As he sets the cup and saucer down beside her (she won’t use mugs, they’re too modern), she closes her laptop,

What are you doing?

She grimaces. Sometimes I think the only reasonable attitude to today’s world is despair, don’t you?

Oh, you know, he says lightly. Catch me after a Thursday afternoon detention with the Harris girl and I might agree with you. Why, what’s up?

She looks at the laptop with disgust.

Oh, I thought I’d see what the young people are so obsessed with - Francie showed me this dreadful rubbish she’s been following. Some idiot who throws himself onto a pile of cactuses in his underpants. The idea, I gather, is to attract ‘clicks’.

Oh yes, says Paul, as if he’s completely familiar with the genre. You can make a lot of money on YouTube, I hear, if you manage to go ‘viral’.

So I understand. Cat videos are sweet in their way (if you’re brain dead). But this – it’s the ‘look at me’ generation. Happiness measured in attention, and no wonder, considering the modern attention span. "She thinks it’s funny. But what kind of person laughs at this sort of thing? In what twisted world is this regarded as humour?"

Francie’s world, apparently.

Oh well, she thinks crossly, perhaps it is a kind of humour, of the kind that some medieval fool might have provided to a king who needed light relief from his daily round of beheadings. It doesn’t matter what the younger generation do with their time, really – let them wallow – but Francie, surely, has better taste. What has happened, she wonders, to that little girl who used to listen to carefully curated quality children’s literature, who was not even allowed to watch Disney’s Snow White and Pocahontas for fear of consumerist corruption? She’s been corrupted – that’s what’s happened - right under their noses.

Anyway they tell me Youtube’s gone out of fashion now, Paul adds, as if to comfort her. It’s all Tik Tok now. They’re all videoing themselves performing in these little one act plays. It’s really quite creative when you think about it.

I’ll believe that when I see it, she says, hearing the sourness in her own voice.

She thinks with annoyance of the way Francie looked at her this morning as she came into the room with her washed clothes in a basket. It was the way you might look at an intruding servant, someone who isn’t where they are supposed to be, and who, anyway, doesn’t matter very much.

Here you go then, says Paul, getting out his phone, just as if she meant it. He’s unbelievably literal-minded, at times. After some earnest tapping, he shows her a video featuring a boy with bleached hair and a skinny girl of about fourteen. The boy is pretending that he’s just discovered that his girlfriend has cheated on him, and is demonstrating this by contorting his face into various histrionic expressions. The girl is clearly suppressing giggles. The whole thing – over in less than two minutes - is appallingly over-acted, a sort of mini-Othello for cretins.

"And people watch this?"

So I’m told.

He should know, as a teacher of today’s twisted adolescents.

She should probably be thankful that Francie seems to be mainly interested in banana-skin comedy. A friend of Terentia’s told her once, in a hushed and prurient voice, that there are women on the internet who for money and sexual pleasure crush small animals – mice and guinea pigs and so forth – underfoot on camera, and the like cruelties. If that’s true – and she can’t quite believe it - then the horrors of the Colosseum, of Nazi Germany, haven’t faded, but have just gone digital. It’s depressing, if you allow yourself to think about it.

Then again, ‘people’, in their distant anonymity, are an imaginary, hypothetical mass, whereas Francie, ensconced in the fortress of her bedroom, is precious and irritating as a pea under forty mattresses. The trouble that went into conceiving that girl, and now look at her...

When Terentia became pregnant with Francie, at the age of forty-four, her sister Cecilia had said, But aren’t you a bit old? Cecilia had, and still has, the unpleasant habit of always saying exactly what she thinks. At the time, Terentia had stormed out of the house in a rage, and now she only sees Cecilia, stiff-legged, at Christmas; she has not forgiven her for the remark. In that moment of relief and joy, she’d only wanted Cecilia to be happy for her. She and Paul had almost given up hope.  She’d been telling herself for years, if it doesn’t happen, I’ll be fine, I’ve got my career, after all, I don’t need to breed to complete myself. But when the pregnancy test came up positive at last, she knew with clarity that all of those assertions had been lies. And then Cecilia, with that sense of entitlement that comes with being the eldest of three, had tipped her little bucket of icy water over Terentia’s big announcement.

But maybe Cecilia was right. There have been times – over the last year or so - when she looks at Francie –her eyes fixed on that little white screen, her thumbs moving like a medium’s at a seance – and thinks, it’s as if I’ve given birth to some kind of alien life form. It’s at these times that she realizes that you can love someone, and yet feel no sense of connection to them whatsoever. Love is a strange thing; a bond acknowledged but not always felt.

And now Paul seems to be having some sort of mid-life crisis. Just recently, he’s decided to go off do-gooding. She doesn’t say it out loud – she doesn’t want to discourage him, exactly - but he’s wasting his time. Is such a world as ours salvageable? Terentia doubts it, and even if it is, should it be salvaged? Perhaps the twentieth century, and the twenty-first, are like some sort of dying relation you only wish had access to charitable euthanasia.

Anyway, if you’re going to do a Saint Theresa, why pick Trevor Eddison? If you had to find the most undeserving recipient of compassion in the entire country, Trevor would surely be it.  No doubt he’ll see Paul as the soft touch he is and pour out some tale about his dreadful childhood, sincere intentions to reform, only need a bit of a hand up, someone to listen, etc etc, and Paul, being the essentially kind, timid man that he is, will fall for it like a patsy. Paul, of course, insists that even people like Eddison deserve a second chance. Personally, Terentia doesn’t believe it. People don’t change; they cannot, any more than a tomato seedling can blossom into an aubergine. Although, when you think of it, where would fiction be if they didn’t? (And perhaps that’s why it’s fiction.)

Poor, sweet Paul, with all his good-hearted Christian ideals. How will he manage when he discovers, as he eventually will, that Eddison is just using him to get out of the hole he’s dug for himself? Paul has no experience of men like that – the worst person he ever met so far probably wore a pleated skirt and a school blouse. Terentia, mind you, has no direct experience either, but writing a certain kind of fiction accustoms one to a dim – no, realistic - view of humanity. Paul, on the other hand, is like a white knight without armour. He’s fodder, for the likes of Trevor, and if whatisname from the Fellowship can’t see it... But he's a grown man, and determined to go out of his comfort zone, so it’s not Terentia’s business to stop him.

In any case, she has other things to think about. At eleven, she has a meeting with her agent. It’s about the new book, the one she’s been working on for the last eighteen months, sent in to Carl just last week.

It’s been a long time, five years more or less, since the last book, A Scent of Cypress, was released, and that – Carl has been careful not to point out – didn’t sell as well as it could have. But then, there was the recession, and anyway she likes to think that as she’s matured as a writer she’s become more...deliberative. Reflective. So naturally, it takes her longer to complete a project.

Carefully, she chooses a pair of plain black pants, a white shirt, and the same expensively cut jacket she’s been wearing to business meetings for the last decade. She really should update her look, but frankly, it’s worked for her so far, and she’s getting too old to be vain. Or, at least, she should be.

On impulse, she adds a scarf: it’s a silk piece she brought from India, when she and Paul were there last year. It reminds her of a landscape on fire, a wild and passionate piece probably more suited to a romance novelist. She recalls buying it at that market in Madurai, paying three times what the vendor would have taken, because she’d fallen in lust with it. You should have bargained him down, Paul had muttered afterwards, in a reversal of their usual roles as caretaker and innocent abroad.

It’s not quite her usual style. It says, look at me, I’m not afraid to catch your eye. There’s a touch of the Isadora Duncan about it. Bold, relevant. She could do with some relevance. But then, look what happened to poor Isadora, strangled by her own neckwear on the French Riviera. It may be an omen. Never mind, such allusions will never so much as cross Carl’s mind.

Terentia! You look very French today! he says gratifyingly, as his assistant Sarah waves her into his office. What a lovely scarf... such an elegant touch! 

Carl is a chubby, dimpled, infantile looking man who perpetually twinkles. With the happiness, presumably, of welcoming Terentia into his domain. They’ve known each other for twenty years, during which he’s barely aged a second. All that fat, she thinks enviously, or maybe the man gets himself seen to.

Thank you, Carl.

He gestures towards a navy leather armchair, and sits himself across from Terentia, filling his seat like a bean bag with not enough beans in it.

How’s Paul?

He’s gone to jail. She can’t resist.

Carl pauses, rosebud mouth open over buck teeth like a surprised guinea pig. Oh dear...really?

"As