Oh Marina Girl Episode 35

She always dropped her bombshells that way, as if she was making small talk and her revelations were no more provocative than everyday observations about the weather. It was as though she set out to pre-empt and undermine the anticipated shocked response from the recipients of her surprises so that her deadpan delivery led them to question the appropriateness of such a reaction.

That’s how she would have told Will. I can hear her voice.

“One night, when he was blind drunk, your dad forced himself upon me against my will,” she would have said, “and, though I struggled against him and pleaded with him to stop, he was stronger than me and when he punched me I realised that further resistance was futile.”

It’s imperative that you believe me when I insist that, though this might well have been Lisa’s truth, it was, nevertheless, a travesty of the truth. It was false in every respect.

The fact of the matter was that, on the night in question – a Friday – I arrived home later than usual after a particularly stressful week (a by-election campaign had just started and the postbag had begun to bulge with mountainous volumes of the usual petty and parochial party political propaganda for me to wade through in the forlorn hope of uncovering a letter written by an author expressing an independent, coherent opinion) laden with a couple of bottles of my favoured Jacob’s Creek Cabernet Sauvignon purchased from a wine shop en route.

Whilst it is true that, on the night in question, Lisa chose not to join me in the consumption of these delectable bottles of South Eastern Australian vintage 1998, it is equally true that I only opened one of the two bottles and, having sampled several glasses throughout a hearty two-course meal, I sipped at the remainder of the bottle throughout the rest of the evening as I sat in my worn armchair reading a book that Lisa had lent me, so that, though relaxed, I was not intoxicated.

I mention the book Lisa had lent me because I believe it had a significant part to play in the subsequent events of the evening in question. I remember it well. It left a lasting impression on me.

It was called The Image and, since it traversed the blurred boundary between the erotic and the pornographic, I’d fancied that Lisa had lent it to me with the precise intention of arousing me with a view to precipitating some sexual congress later that evening.

This was at a time when we were still sexually active. Little did I know then that this was to be our last sexual encounter.

In retrospect it could be argued with some validity that I’d misread Lisa’s intentions in lending me the book – she herself was adamant that this was indeed the case – but then, can everything not be reinterpreted in a different light under the beneficial glare of hindsight?

Nevertheless, I still did not force her against her will.

Although perhaps slower than usual to respond to my advances, my fumbling touches had met with no resistance.

As for Lisa’s claim that I punched her, this was no more than a deliberately misleading gross exaggeration of a playful slap; a slap, moreover, which she herself was in the habit of urging me to deliver but which my reticence meant that I was only ever able to provide half-heartedly.

In fact, now that I think about it, not only had Lisa urged me to slap her on the night in question, she’d insisted that I verbally abuse her too.

It seemed to excite her.

“Call me a w **** ,” she’d whispered, squeezing me. I concurred.

“Call me a b **** ,” she’d demanded, manipulating me.

Distracted from my thoughts by the taxi driver swerving to avoid a pensionable pedestrian who had wandered inadvertently into his path, I felt I understood the motive behind Will’s hatred for me all these years.

I could comprehend his insatiable lust for revenge. I could hear Lisa prompting it with her poisonous truth.

“Later, when your dad discovered that I was pregnant with you, he flew into a rage and demanded that I have an abortion,” I can hear her tell him.

“When I refused, he hit me so hard that I had to hide the bruise on my cheek under a thick layer of foundation for a week.”

Yes, that’s what she’d done. That explained everything. She’d force-fed Will her own twisted truth and poisoned him against me.

The taxi screeched to a halt and I sprinted up the steep hill to the flagpole at the top of Queen’s Park.

Finally I felt I was beginning to comprehend a connection between Original Harm and why Will had reacted to it in such an extreme and irrational manner.

All these years he’d thought that I’d sought to have him aborted and now here I was, dedicating a book sympathetic towards abortion to him.

How he must despise me!

How anxious I was to enlighten him about his mother’s lies and to convey to him some sense of the ecstasy of relief that surged through me now I knew he was alive.

How anxious I was to explain to him how much he meant to me and that, now that I had him back and had been granted a second chance, this time around I’d never let him go.

I had to put him right on what had really happened between Lisa and me. I had to tell him the truth and then maybe we could start to explore ways to resolve the predicament within which we’d ensnared each other.

It was Will, I now realised, who had transformed The Amino from fiction into fact.

It was Will who was the kidnapper. I knew I had to reach him before Pardos. Reflecting on my last conversation with her, it seemed clear to me now that she already suspected him.

It was Will who had transformed The Amino from fiction into fact... It was Will who was the kidnapper

More tomorrow.