Free A Needle in the Heart by Fiona Kidman Page A

was part of her life, that he accepted what she did.
    At breakfast, the first they had shared since filming began, she had run it past him. ‘D’you think we could get a sitter in?’ she asked, her coffee balanced between the fingers of both hands, elbows on thetable. She had big shadows under her eyes and a trace of make-up at her hairline.
    ‘We’ve had sitters in about three times a week for the past month. I’ve still got a life to lead, you know.’
    ‘Okay.’
    She had sat there in silence, blowing the top of her coffee.
    ‘You said …’ she began.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. Because he didn’t want her to remind him of what he had said, the last time the subject of a wrap party at the theatre had come up. ‘Is there any way I can get caught up in your brilliant orbit?’ he had asked her, and she’d said, ‘Well, come to the fucking party, if that’s what you want.’ He’d finished up staying home, and she hadn’t come back until morning. When things like this happened, he was aware of a queer electricity in the air, something that repelled him and yet attracted him to her, the way it always had. He thought she’d been with other people: it might be a man or a woman. She said on nights when they got drunk together that she wouldn’t mind either, not that she’d do it of course.
    ‘You’ll come then?’
    ‘The kids are used to Debbie.’
    ‘Don’t start on me again.’
    ‘No, I didn’t mean it like that,’ he said. ‘They really like her.’ Debbie was the girl who had been sitting for them for the past year. It wasn’t as if they were little children any more, twelve and ten, a boy and a girl.
    ‘You work as hard at doing good as I do at acting,’ she said then.
    ‘Yes,’ he said, because it was true, and he wanted to agree with her and have him back to himself. His life was full of causes. In those days, young lawyers like himself (he still thought of himself as young) jokingly called themselves storefront lawyers. They believed in helping the poor and giving the underdog a chance. A lot of his clients couldn’t afford to pay him properly. He organised food parcels for their families when they were in jail and saw to it that their children went to school, even if it meant calling round to their houses and banging on the doors until the mothers got out of bed (it wasusually the husbands who were in jail) and dressed the kids while he waited. His luxuriant hair was thinning a little but he still wore it round his collar. He wore suits that were rumpled and he didn’t care. In the lunch breaks from court he and his friends gathered in a café over a bookshop and exchanged case stories.
    ‘I have to work,’ Petra told her friends. ‘Philip might be a lawyer, but he doesn’t give a damn about money.’
    It wasn’t true about needing to work, but it was a fact that he took on cases which seemed unwinnable; that he had an affinity with people who were not particularly attractive but might be innocent. You don’t have to be good looking to be innocent, he said. He suspected that there was a raffish charm to this that she had still not fathomed; it kept them together when other things failed. As for the money, his father-in-law had paid for the house they lived in. They had looked at it just as a fun thing, and dreamed about how they could scratch a deposit together for it. Of course Petra had told her parents when they were up visiting for one of the wedding rehearsals, and that was their present: the title to the house. The house was full of newly delivered furniture and there was a car in the garage. There were things Philip didn’t want, wouldn’t have chosen.
    ‘I don’t want it,’ he said at the time. ‘I never asked for any of this.’
    ‘We’ll send it back them,’ said Petra, ‘and you can spend the rest of your life chasing lawsuits for the rich and famous and licking boots. I don’t care, it’s your life.’
    ‘I thought it was ours,’ he’d said.
    ‘I can’t