17
TULLY
‘I stole them.’
A few months back, Tully had been watching an old episode of Dr. Phil about infidelity. The guest, a woman in her forties who’d been having an affair for eight years, was discussing the moment she decided to tell her husband. She talked about how she expected it to be a crescendo moment – something that would come out after much deliberation and planning, or perhaps in the heat of a fight. As it turned out, she just walked into her living room one day while her husband was watching the footy, sat down beside him, and confessed. She didn’t know why that was the moment when she felt she couldn’t contain it anymore. And Tully didn’t know why this was the moment she told Sonny her secret. It might have been the hangover. It might have been that she was feeling so warmly towards Sonny. It might have been because, after all these years, she’d finally reached her limit of lies.
‘What do you mean you stole them?’
It seemed fairly self-explanatory to Tully. She wasn’t sure how she could make it any clearer. ‘I stole them. Shoplifted. Took them without paying.’
Sonny’s face contorted as if he was going to laugh, but it stopped somewhere around a grimace. Then he looked back at the scarf in his hand, which still had the security tag attached. ‘But . . .’
‘It’s true,’ she said.
A few metres away, in the kitchen, the boys were semi-quiet because they’d been granted more screen time and an extra Kit Kat. In her peripheral vision, Tully could see Miles eating his Kit Kat directly off the kitchen table – a new eating technique that Sonny put under the ‘kids are weird’ umbrella, but Tully knew it was more.
‘But . . .’ He held up a battery-operated torch he’d found in the pile. ‘A torch? We have half-a-dozen of these. Much better quality, too.’
‘I know,’ Tully said. ‘I wasn’t going to keep it.’
Sonny looked like he was trying very hard to understand, and failing. ‘You weren’t going to keep it, but you stole it . . .’
‘It’s like a release,’ she explained. ‘Imagine my anxiety is like air in a balloon. It builds up and up until I feel like I might burst. But when I steal something, it’s like pricking the balloon with a pin. The anxiety rushes out of me and I feel kind of . . . breathless and elated. Does that make sense?’
Sonny’s face said it didn’t.
‘Afterwards I feel so ashamed,’ she continued. ‘I hide all the stuff in the garage or a drawer or under the bed. Periodically I get rid of everything – take it to a charity shop or the tip – but within a few days I take more stuff. I tell myself every day, You won’t do this again, Tully. But by the end of the day, I’m shoving a chocolate bar or a packet of Tim Tams into my pocket at the supermarket. I can’t control it, Sonny.’
Sonny closed his eyes and massaged his temples with the thumb and middle finger of each hand.
‘I know it’s hard to understand.’
‘It . . . is hard to understand,’ he said slowly. ‘How long has this been going on?’
‘Since I was eleven.’
‘Since you were eleven? How did I not know this?’
‘I guess . . . it’s not the kind of thing that you confess to the new guy you’re dating: Hey, I’ve been shoplifting since I was eleven and I still do it. By the time we got married it just felt too shameful. Besides, I always thought I would stop.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
Sonny started to pace. In the living room, Miles was using his chin to nudge the Kit Kat closer to the edge of the coffee table.
‘You went to a counsellor a few years back, right?’ Sonny said. ‘Did you talk to her about it?’
Tully had indeed gone to a counsellor a few years back, a serious young woman with thick black hair and a perpetually confused look on her face. The sessions had been pleasant, but not especially helpful, as Tully had found herself unable to admit the problem. Anxiety, she said, when she was asked what she was doing there. And strange compulsions. It wasn’t as if she could just come out and say, ‘I steal things. Meaningless things that I don’t even want and that I can afford to pay for.’
‘What kind of strange compulsions?’ the serious woman had asked, looking confused.
It was little wonder she looked confused. It was, after all, a high-end practice in a very nice area. The serious woman likely spent her days talking to women who thought they had problems because their husbands couldn’t send them first class to Europe for the second time this year. Or trying to put their marriages back together after their husbands strayed. The serious woman’s clients wouldn’t steal! Tully couldn’t bear to admit to the woman that she did.