Three Karmic Shorts
By Scott Norton
Copyright 2011 Scott Norton
Smashwords Edition
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Table of Contents
I put our house on the market because I couldn’t bear to stay. We had lived there eighteen years. We liked the area with its tree lined streets and parks. It was everything a young family could ask for. Then that morning came from nowhere. The police were at my door at the break of day explaining my oldest child, my boy, had taken his life in a nearby park.
I remember being confused. I told them he was in his room. He’d be up in an hour or two, growling about the wrong type of cereal, then he’d disappear again until either a lecture or meeting friends dragged him from the house.
The police stood looking at me with great sympathy and the closed door to my son’s room became more and more terrifying.
I’d known something was wrong for months, but he was a nineteen year old boy who didn’t like or know how to talk about his feelings. So we just waited, assuming when he was ready he’d come to us and let us help or support him in whatever way we could.
But he never came. His father and I talked over what we thought it might be, but we never once considered it was so bad he’d take his life. There’s something very wrong about a parent at a child’s funeral. It’s the wrong way around and without a lifetime of preparation an impossible grief to carry.
His best friend’s name was Bennett. It was an old family name his parents felt the need to inflict on him and he and my son had come together in primary school. They were expelled from high-school together when fireworks burnt down a bike shed. They’d fallen out at sixteen for almost a year over a girl, but came back together once they’d both been dumped. If anyone could tell us why our son took his life it was Bennett and his parents had rung to announce they were bringing him over with something very important to tell us.
It was an awkward meeting. It reminded me a lot of the incident leading to expulsion when all six of us sat outside the school office waiting a decision. Today there were only five of us. It was clear what Bennett had to say wasn’t easy and his father urged him on with a couple of pointed looks.
“He hit an old lady in his car. She came out from nowhere all in black. It wasn’t his fault, but he was drunk. We went back streets which is maybe why she stepped out like that. Not many cars come around those streets that late.”
Bennett’s parents looked at us waiting for a reaction. But how could we react in any rational way? Our son, our first born had done a stupid thing. He should have had the moral strength to step forward and take responsibility. The fact he’d found the guilt of his actions so debilitating he ended his own life was no comfort. So we got angry at Bennett; his closest friend who no doubt helped him make this terrible decision to hide what had happened. Bennett denied it. He swore he wanted to come forward and tell people what he knew and explained how they panicked when they heard the woman had died in hospital. We sat in silence as that implication sank in. Our son had killed someone and then, despite massive media coverage and a call for help from grieving relatives, covered it up.
I remembered the story from the news. She was an Italian woman, elderly, a mother, a grandmother, even a great grandmother. She was a journalistic dream with maximum sympathetic appeal. When she died there were tears from the family splashed over every bulletin. It suddenly made sense why the pride and joy of our son’s life, his car, had found itself relegated to the back of the house near his bedroom window. It wasn’t a fear of being stolen as he claimed, but a fear of being spotted as the vehicle wanted in a hit and run. Everything was starting to make sense.
“He kept having these dreams,” Bennett said. “They were making him crazy. He couldn’t sleep. He kept hearing the woman screaming.”
Our son’s guilt had overwhelmed him. We saw Bennett and his parents to the door.
“Can you tell us what you think you might do?” Bennett’s father asked.
We honestly didn’t know, but put on the spot we told them we didn’t want Bennett to be unduly punished because our son had made a terrible mistake. We briefly discussed the need for the woman and her family to have closure and find justice to a senseless act, but she was already dead and we had known Bennett’s parents for the best part of two decades. They were good people and we could see their relief when we agreed our son’s death ended the matter.
That night I went to my son’s bedroom for only the second time since he died. I looked out his window to the car he loved so much. I lay on his bed and cried. The tears were for his passing because I missed him so much. They were for his pain and his inability to see that owning his actions couldn’t have been worse than the punishment he finally delivered to himself. I cried so hard I cried myself to sleep. I dreamt of my boy. Was it fate playing out our hand, or the old woman from beyond making sure we paid for raising a boy who felt comfortable getting away with murder?
When I woke it was late. The clock by the bed lit the room with bright yellow lights that read three twenty one. The moon was full and the car was spot-lit through the window. The concrete it sat on glowed white and through the silence a terrible high pitched scream found me. I sat bolt upright and stared at that car. Slowly I rose and crossed the room where I wound the handle to the window no more than two turns before the cold night air hit me, but it was the scream growing louder that chilled me. It was coming from my son’s car.
I went outside following that scream. It wavered in pitch but it never went away, a constant wailing for justice. In the silence of the night it was deafening. The old woman’s voice so clear; but how? I never believed such things before, but I was hearing something now. The same voice had been enough to drive my son to take his life.
The scream came from the hood of the car. The old lady was crying out for vengeance from the very point where she’d been hit. Her voice came from the metal hood that gave way to the windshield. I ran through the house. By now my husband had woken and was asking what I was doing.
“She’s screaming. It’s real! The old woman! I can hear her screaming!”
What he must have thought. The woman’s voice from beyond the grave had sent another of his family crazy. I scrambled around my son’s room and found his keys. With my husband pleading for me to calm down I ran outside and back to the car.
“The scream,” I said. “Can’t you hear it?!”
We both stood in the silence for a moment in an otherwise still night as the scream of a dead woman cried out. My husband looked to me astonished. He heard it too. I opened the car door and popped the hood. He lifted it as I followed the scream. We looked but saw nothing. But that scream came even louder and wavered like it was feeling pain. My husband secured the hood and we both searched for an answer that didn’t shatter every skeptical belief we held of things supernatural. Without a breath of wind to the chilled night air the voice was strong and I let my ear guide me. And there it was.
Wedged tightly under a gap that sat below the windscreen of my son’s car the old woman’s hearing aide had somehow found a place to hide and still, months after that terrible moment, was squealing into the night with a pitch that if you didn’t know better could have been an old woman’s last cry for justice.
Lividia Dixon killed her husband; smothered him with a pillow. She then dabbed her eyes with a tissue and left to do the weekly shopping.
She bought vegetables, a large quantity of pasta and a few sauces. She tried to avoid the hot bread kitchen, as yeast wasn’t agreeing with her lately, and passing by the dairy foods she decided she’d try drinking yoghurt for the first time. At the check-out she bought a glossy magazine and screwed up her face at the antics of the stars as she waited in the queue to be served. She wheeled her shopping trolley to her car and loaded the week’s groceries into the back of her little hatchback and, with the voice of her favourite announcer for company, she set off for home.
Turning into her street her face registered fear for the first time that day. Police cars lined the road and an ambulance had parked itself half way out of her drive.
Before she could open her door a policeman came and helped her to the curb.
“Mrs Dixon?”
“Yes.”
Lividia knew what was coming. She’d prepared herself for exactly this moment. She believed the world to be an ordered place. If a wrong was committed today, punishment would find the culprit tomorrow. A religious woman with strong morals, she felt she knew what lay ahead. A faint smile escaped, in some ways she was pleased her conscience wouldn’t be taxed too long over what she’d done.
“There’s no easy way to tell you this, Mrs Dixon,” the young police officer said, before pausing to brace her as best he could for shocking news. “Your husband’s dead.”
Lividia waited for him to say more - but it didn’t come.
“Are you alright?” The young man said as sympathetically as possible.
Lividia said nothing. Her nerves were beginning to fray. She nodded her head - suspiciously eyeing the young man in uniform, waiting for what she felt was still to come. He read her look as shock and stood in silence with her a moment longer.
The body of her husband, still in the pyjamas she’d only recently washed and pressed, was pushed through the front door, covered and on a trolley, wheeled by two paramedics.
Lividia went to them. The young policeman nodded and one of the paramedics lifted the covering slightly to reveal the man’s face. Lividia’s husband looked peaceful. She smiled on seeing his calm expression. It had been many months since she’d seen anything other than pain. The legs of the trolley clattered up the driveway and disappeared under the stretcher as it was loaded into the back of the waiting vehicle. A single tear began to dam in the corner of Lividia’s eye. The young policeman looked distressed. He handed her a fresh tissue, kept in a pocket for exactly this moment. It wasn’t the first time he’d broken such news.
“Do you want me to give a statement?” Lividia asked, ready to reveal all.
“A statement?” The young policeman said with a curious tone.
Suddenly there was commotion at the front door and Kenneth Parsons, Lividia’s neighbour of thirty-five years was roughly escorted out from the house and up the drive by two large policemen. His hands were cuffed behind his back and he was talking, almost without pause for breath. When he saw Lividia he suddenly directed his rantings toward her.
“I swear, I didn’t do this. I came over about the fence. That’s all. I never even touched him! You have to believe me!”
His protests continued as they pushed him past the front gate and away. Lividia was desperately trying to put the pieces of this confusing puzzle together. Mr Parsons was a childless widower, a man who largely kept to himself. Apart from the occasional rant about a tree growing onto his side of their shared fence, they’d only ever swapped pleasant neighbourly greetings as they came and went. How could such a man come to be arrested for something she had done?
“Is this Mrs Dixon?” A strong, deep voice called from the open front door.
“Yes Sir,” the young policeman fired back. The voice belonged to a Senior Sergeant and he came from the door quickly to take Lividia’s arm and lead her inside the house. The two sat down, the Sergeant leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees.
“I guess they told you what happened?”
“Only that my husband’s dead.” Lividia paused for just a moment before continuing. “Why was Mr Parsons taken away?”
“We think he killed your husband.”
Lividia began shaking her head.
“No, that’s ridiculous. My husband had terminal cancer. He was terribly sick and in a great deal of pain.”
“Your husband was smothered. The neighbour on the other side heard Mr Parsons yelling, according to her he was making threats.”
“About the fence. He’s been yelling at us about it for years. The Japanese Maple was planted too close and it’s pushing the whole thing over. We’ve already agreed to fix it, but under the circumstances, we hadn’t got around to it.”
“He was seen going into your house and a short time later rushing away in a very agitated state. Mr Parsons claims he was ringing us, but he never made any call. When we arrived he was back inside with your husband.”
Lividia sat stunned. The police were very considerate of her all afternoon and even had a counsellor come to the home to make sure she was alright. She wasn’t alright. What she’d done had taken a great deal of courage. She’d built up to it over a number of weeks, months and even years. Initially dismissing her husband’s request with little thought, but slowly, as she watched the man she’d loved for so many years suffer with increasing pain, she reconsidered and finally relented.
She meticulously planned every moment before and after the event. She was to go shopping to give herself an alibi that few would question if the time of death was pinpointed. Then she planned to hold off reporting the death until the next morning. She hoped the confusion over the time of death and her day’s regular routine would remove any doubts about her involvement. The efforts were all taken to try and avoid going to jail. Lividia was sixty-seven years old and felt she might not survive the experience, not to mention the effect it would have on her three children and five grand children. But Mr Parson’s involvement was a factor she could never have foreseen and it made her feel that all her precautions were for nothing. Her sense of fair play and her personal moral code was already gnawing at her. To do anything else but own up to her actions would surely tempt fate. If she stayed silent something dreadful would befall her or her family; she just knew it.
That night was a long and lonely one for Lividia. She climbed into her empty bed and nestled down under the covers, surrounded by a house that suddenly seemed cold and foreign. She closed her eyes and spoke, as she always did, to God. It was a very different conversation on this night. It confirmed in her heart what needed to be done. Tomorrow, first thing, she would unravel the knot she’d allowed to tie itself around her innocent neighbour.
The morning rituals passed quickly as Lividia readied herself for her trip to the police station. Inside her hatchback she welcomed back her favourite announcer, chatting about all things important and championing the moral rights of the world. She pulled up to a park close by the station, paid enough into the meter to avoid a ticket and walked calmly up the steps of the old blue stone building.
Initially she was ignored, but the same young policeman who’d been so kind to her the day before saw her through a two way mirror that separated the waiting area from the work stations and came quickly to greet her.
“Sergeant said he couldn’t reach you,” the young man said as he led her through to the inner area of the station.
“Sorry?” Lividia replied, confused again.
“He said you weren’t answering your phone.” With that he led the way to an office door and knocked. It was the Senior Sergeant’s office. His face came to life as she entered. It was his public face, one the other officers rarely saw without a member of the public present.
“We’ve been trying to call,” he said. “Mr Parsons died last night.”
“No!” Lividia cried with genuine shock.
“I’m afraid so. He began to have some breathing difficulties while we were questioning him so we sent him to the hospital. He had a heart attack during the night and died in his sleep. He didn’t suffer. In fact he’s the luckiest man I know, considering what he was facing.”
Lividia stood stunned. She drove herself home and sat looking out her bedroom window onto the bowed fence that was losing its struggle with the slow growing force of the Japanese Maple.
A week passed and every hour of every day she made a decision which would take another hour to reverse. The driving force against owning up was the fear of an uninviting future. The forces against staying silent were her morals, screaming at her for being denied. She was challenging the doctrines of her education, her religion and the universe as she knew it. Every day she waited for the wrath of her actions to find her. Every day passed silently without retribution.
On the radio, her favourite announcer told the world what to think and why to think it. She was sure if anyone could help her, he could. She rang the number and was put on hold. Five minutes later she was abruptly asked a few questions, before the line clicked back to the very radio program she was waiting to be a part of. Ten minutes passed and the talkback callers ahead of her solved the world’s problems with the help of their guru. But Lividia was never put through.
“Sorry to Pat, Lividia, Duncan and Sue, we’ve simply run out of time,” was all the acknowledgment she got for her time spent waiting on the line. Commercials played for the next five minutes until the news bumped even them from the airwaves and Lividia was again left alone without an answer.
Another week passed and visits from children and grandchildren toughened her against owning up to what she’d done. Collecting the mail one afternoon, she felt fate’s finger tap her on the shoulder. It came by way of a letter from a lawyer’s office; Mr Parson’s Lawyer. It asked her to contact the office to arrange an appointment. Lividia felt it only right it was to happen this way. Her conscience could deal with her husband’s death, but Mr Parsons’ life ended after he stumbled into a web that Lividia had spun and intended or not, she knew there would and should be a price to pay in order to bring equilibrium back to the world.
The Lawyer’s office was impressive. Lividia approached a woman at a mahogany desk and gave her name and showed the letter. She was pointed to another room where she waited amongst antique furniture. Finally an elderly man entered and gave her a warm greeting. With chatty small talk he escorted her to his office where they sat at low chairs away from the nearby desk.
“Would you like tea or coffee?” he asked. Lividia declined. She’d waited long enough to get matters settled. The elderly lawyer took a pair of bifocals from his jacket pocket and slid them to their final resting place with an outstretched finger.
“I’m acting for Mr Parsons in this matter. I’m not sure if you knew he had no relatives?”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“To cut a long story short, he’s left his entire estate to you. This letter outlines his wishes, but in total there’s a little over two point two million dollars that he’s bequeathed.”
Lividia couldn’t bring herself to say a word. She was stunned. Where was the karma her whole life had promised her?
“There is one proviso however.”
Lividia smiled - certain her time was up, certain that somehow her neighbour of many years was about to deal her the fate she deserved from beyond the grave.
“Before any of the money is paid, he’d like you to repair the back fence adjoining your properties.”
I thought I could take it with me. I thought it was mine to keep. It lay there so abundant, so easy to pick up and hold, to run across and feel between my toes. It was the symbol of my youth. Of family holidays locked away in memory. Of my father wearing shorts and an old cotton hat that turned him into a different person from the suit wearer he became for the other forty nine weeks of the year.
There was an old green and white canvas beach umbrella that came with us everywhere. An umbrella made to last and one that faded as I grew. An umbrella that held a ghostly second life warned of by well meaning parents who jumped and sprinted on occasion when gusts of wind ripped the stake from the yellow ground and blew that green and white away; like a pin wheel spinning on the back fence at Halloween. But the metal tip of the umbrella’s stake could kill – we had heard the urban myth many times; a common beachside fate, pierced by umbrella, though it seems, attested over time, a rarely reported injury.
There were days when that yellow ground grilled young feet to dance and hop upon it to the cooling water’s edge. Then days where wind would whip it like a stinging swarm of flying ants to prick and nip at bared skin and heat-waves where the masses cooled and shielded from the rays above by water’s breeze that whistled by.
Even on cloudy days where happy summers were long away and hidden by a wash of sandstone gray, it was still the place I’d dream and take myself away to in my happiest times. I’d recall the memories of my family watching as we played games that lent themselves to soft landings on a field of a trillion particles together holding firm.
I was sure I could take it with me. The damp of the shrinking sea that let me wrap my hands around a block of golden ground that lifted and stayed together, my own to keep.
It would be mine forever. And in it I would also own the happiness it had brought; the moments where our family saved videoed memories for the rest of time.
I took the sand with me as if I had the right to own a part of what had laid the foundation to my fondest days. When down, or in doubt I could come to what was now mine, the source of all the moments I now cherished in memories. I’d wrap my hands in my owned grains and find a place I had always known but never connected with outside of those three annual weeks away with my family as a young boy. I was sure I had found the key to making the pleasure of those days last all year long.
But in my home, away from the holiday’s bright glare, away from the tidal sticky salt that bound the grains and renewed them daily with a bonded paste - I had a pile of sand. The wind swirls by and takes grains with it as it passes. The cat flicks its tail and scatters part of my childhood playground across the table, away from its display. The flies and bugs and elements of life unseen take single grains and dismantle the thing I thought of as my own.
If I want to keep this slice of paradise for myself I need to cultivate and care for it.
I can no longer swing into the beach car park with laden car and cooler bright the way my father did. Times are different. He traveled without plans and would snap open the boot on the family’s Cortina to take out the faded canvas umbrella that offered both shade and the chance of death in high winds. He never looked for space before carting everything down those large steps through the dunes. He didn’t need to. There was space for everyone back then.
If I want what he had my only choice in these modern selfish times is to own it. That’s what I work for; to give my children what I had - but for them it’s not to be shared, they will own it exclusively. My cherished utopian land no longer waits for me to come and share time with it. Today it’s all about getting your name on the lease that gives a single person total and private access. I have to claim my slice of life by taking it in my arms and bringing it home to own.
But away from where it usually sits it needs care and attention to keep it golden.
I am busy paying bills over the computer and with a cable box that tapes entire series on demand. A techno savvy son has shown me how to download a million bytes of entertainment from Beethoven and Beowulf to things no boy needs to see, but every boy must see. There are papers to read and novels waiting by a bed that sees me far too late and gives me up far too early.
Tending my golden dream becomes less important than I thought it would be on a list of ever growing priorities. Luckily there’s a modern processed answer. The brush flicks the miscreant sand and the scoop whisks it away and pours those grains neatly into a large jar bought from the two dollar shop for just $5.95.
Weeks go by and days and nights follow like the ticking of a clock. My sandy dream and boyhood memories sit quietly unnoticed, locked away, preserved from life, as I come and go.
They sit for a year at first, then more. They compete with the modeled clay ashtray that could be better recast in a sheltered workshop, but has stood for at least a decade above the door to proudly hail an offspring with opposable thumbs.
Then one rainy Sunday afternoon the first shift taxi driver takes a child to court, the sort for sport not pleading clemency, although this later will likely also have its day. Another child is with a friend and no more clues than that. I am left sitting home alone where I see that dream of sand and sun sitting locked away and neglected for so long. When I pop the lid there’s a smell that hails the stale and lost time gone. Whatever memories and dreams it held have withered under glass without fresh air to revive and renew each grain.
I poured that sand to a dish and place it on my desk. Determined to bring it back in colour and touch to the envy of the sand it once neighboured; sand that gave me a childhood that still rests in memory as the happiest days of my life.
For that moment, that minute, that hour, that day, even that week – I was happier, driven, determined and revived.
Then a client died. A big client and his assets needed to be dealt with. The office found itself at the centre of a legal battle that started with the falling of leaves and didn’t end until the next generation lay crisp and brown from the summer’s heat. And in all that time the sand had become no more than it was when locked away from fragrant breeze. Neglected and sitting alone, it was no longer poignant or part of anything. It became of itself quite new. No longer beach, but back to single grains of sand.
At first it scrapped against my bare foot on tiles as I braved the dark night and squinted at bright bathroom lights to deliver sweet relief. Then it became the crunch and shiver travelling my spine as it ground under something placed on table or bench. It shouted its irritating grittiness that screamed for wet cloth to wipe it clean. And finally it was in clothes and finding its granular way into crevices that tickled well away from searching finger’s overdue relief.
And when I next remembered the part of beach I had claimed as my own it was gone. The Bonsai style dish I had lent to display my childhood gold, the grains of my youthful memories and dreams of happier, younger days - held nuts.
Granted they were pistachios, a high ranking nut, but the shells were to be peeled and discarded. There are no memories or dreams to be kept in empty pistachio shells.
I circled a day on the calendar to drive the whole of my world to the beach and sit and enjoy the moments again that played in my memory and gave me such dreams as a boy.
The day came, but my ex wife didn’t. Nor my son who needed to study for a college exam, although it was the first I had heard of this. My youngest, my girl, my shining bright princess is staying at her boyfriend’s house for the weekend – he’s a drummer in a band. The dog is dead.
So I went on my own, in my BMW. The leather seats feel cool on my bare thighs as my shorts ride high and threaten to chafe. Luckily a BMW is a car designed not to chafe.
I park away from the beach, due to workers at work building buildings that need to be built for workers to work. I pay for a ticket at a ticket machine and leave my car with a towel draped over the leather steering wheel. I drape a smaller towel over my shoulders and let it bounce as I walked the steps to the shore.
And there is my beach. The one I see whenever I need a moment for me. I cast my mind back to here, the place where I first dreamt where my life may go and who I would be. Staring out to sea from the golden horse-shoe cove, surrounded by high flaking sandstone walls roofed in tea-tree it shocks me to see what I saw as boy. Everything is the same as it had been all those years ago when I first ran across that golden sand. And there is still so much of it to enjoy. I think of the handfuls of sand I took with me to own. The handfuls I took to capture the joy it had always given me.
I looked to the golden dimpled floor now playing host to coolers and Umbrellas, to tents and towels. To families playing games or sharing picnics. I see the fresh built moats and castles and look to the couples strolling as they hunt for shells, the Frisbies flying and the ball games being played. Then I think of that long, long drive to get here.
And it comes to me at once. You can’t take this day or this place with you. You have to spend the time to come and be with it and each moment of that effort brings a memory new to keep forever. And then I froze and realised, my children had so few.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Scott Norton began writing for theatre and studied at Australia’s Victorian College of the Arts. His play ‘Clipped Wings’ won the Australian Writer’s Guild Theatre Award and was later published by Playworks. Since 1994 Scott has worked as a writer for television and films. He set up television dramas in Indonesia and Poland before returning to Melbourne Australia in 2006. He’s a keen sportsman and has recently added water polo to his list of sports played.
Discover other titles by Scott Norton at Smashwords.com: Inner City, Outrageous Rhymes.
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