19.
Oh, Madeline,” sighed Ed.
He parked the car, pulled the keys from the ignition and turned to look at her. “You can’t make Chloe miss her friend’s party just because Ziggy isn’t invited. That’s crazy.”
They’d driven straight from the school down to the beach to have a quick coffee at Blue Blues with Jane and her parents. It had been Jane’s mother who had suggested it, and it had seemed so important to her that Madeline, who had an overly ambitious list of things to achieve on the kids’ first day at school, felt she couldn’t say no.
“No it’s not,” said Madeline, although she was already feeling the first twinges of regret. When Chloe heard she was missing Amabella’s A party there would be hell to pay. Amabella’s last birthday party had been insane: jumping castle, a magician and a disco.
“I’m in a very bad mood today,” she told Ed.
“Really?” said Ed. “I would never have noticed.”
“I miss the children,” said Madeline. The backseat of the car felt so empty and silent. Her eyes filled with tears.
Ed guffawed. “You’re kidding, right?”
“My baby has started school,” wept Madeline. Chloe had marched straight into the classroom, walking right alongside Miss Barnes, as if she were a fellow teacher, chatting the whole way, probably making a few suggestions for changes to the curriculum.
“Yep,” said Ed. “And not a moment too soon. I think those were the words you used yesterday on the phone to your mother.”
“And I had to stand there in the school yard, making polite conversation with my ex-bloody-husband!” Madeline’s mood flipped from teary back to angry.
“Yeah, I don’t know if I’d use the word polite,” said Ed.
“It’s hard enough being a single mother,” said Madeline.
“Um. What?” said Ed.
“Jane! I’m talking about Jane, of course. I remember Abigail’s first day of school. I felt like a freak. It felt like everyone was so disgustingly married. All the parents were in perfect little pairs. I never felt so alone.” Madeline thought of her ex-husband today, looking comfortably about the school yard. Nathan had no clue as to what it had been like for Madeline for all those years she’d brought Abigail up on her own. He wouldn’t deny it. Oh no. If she were to scream at him, “It was hard! It was so hard!” he’d wince and look so sad and so sorry, but no matter how hard he tried, he would never really get it.
She was filled with impotent rage. There was nowhere to aim it except straight at Renata. “So just imagine how Jane feels when her child is the only one not invited to a party. Imagine it.”
“I know,” said Ed. “Although I guess after what happened, you can sort of see it from Renata’s point of view—”
“No you can’t!” cried Madeline.
“Jesus. Sorry. No. Of course I can’t.” Ed looked in the rearview mirror. “Oh, look, here’s your poor little friend pulled up behind us. Let’s go eat cake with her. That will fix things.”
He undid his seat belt.
“If you’re not asking every child in the class, you don’t hand out the invitations on the playground,” said Madeline. “Every mother knows that. It’s a law of the land.”
“I could talk about this subject all day long,” said Ed. “I really could. There is nothing else I want to talk about today other than Amabella’s fifth-birthday party.”
“Shut up,” said Madeline.
“I thought we didn’t say ‘shut up’ in our house.”
“Fuck off, then,” said Madeline.
Ed grinned. He put a hand to the side of her face. “You’ll feel better tomorrow. You always feel better tomorrow.”
“I know, I know.” Madeline took a deep breath and opened the car door to see Jane’s mother fling herself out of Jane’s car and hurry along the sidewalk toward her, slinging her handbag over her shoulder and smiling frantically. “Hi! Hi there! Madeline, will you just walk along the beach with me for a bit while the others order our coffee?”
“Mum.” Jane walked behind with her father. “You’ve seen the beach. You don’t even like the beach!”
You didn’t have to be gifted and talented to see that Jane’s mother wanted to talk alone with Madeline.
“Of course I will . . . Di.” The name came to her like a gift.
“I’ll come too then,” sighed Jane.
“No, no, you go into the café and help your dad get settled and order something nice for me,” said Di.
“Yes, because I’m such a doddering old senior citizen.” Jane’s father put on a quavering old man’s voice and clutched Jane’s arm. “Help me, darling daughter.”
“Off you go,” said Di firmly.
Madeline watched Jane struggle with whether or not to insist, before giving a tiny shrug and giving up.
“Don’t take too long,” she said to her mother. “Or your coffee will get cold.”
“Get me a double-shot espresso and the chocolate mud cake with cream,” said Madeline to Ed.
Ed gave her a thumbs-up and led Jane and her father into Blue Blues, while Madeline reached down and slipped off her shoes. Jane’s mother did the same.
“Did your husband take the day off work for Chloe’s first day at school?” asked Di as they walked across the sand toward the water. “Oh, goodness, the glare!” She was wearing sunglasses, but she shielded her eyes with the back of her hand.
“He’s a journalist for the local paper,” said Madeline. “He’s got very flexible hours, and he works from home a lot.”
“That must be nice. Or is it? Does he get under your feet?” Di picked her way unsteadily across the sand. “Sometimes I send Bill off to buy me something at the supermarket I don’t really need, just to give myself a little breather.”
“It works pretty well for us,” said Madeline. “I work three days a week for the Pirriwee Peninsula Theatre Company, so Ed can pick the kids up when I’m working. We’re not making a fortune but, you know, we both love our jobs, so we’re happy.”
My God, why was she talking about money? It was like she was defending their choice of lifestyles. (And to be honest, they didn’t love their jobs that much.) Was it because she sometimes felt like her whole life was in competition with high-flying career women like Renata? Or was it just because money was on her mind because of that shocking electricity bill she’d opened this morning? The truth was that although they weren’t wealthy, they were certainly not struggling, and thanks to Madeline’s savvy online shopping skills, even her wardrobe didn’t need to suffer.
“Ah, yes, money. They say it doesn’t buy happiness, but I don’t know about that.” Di pushed her hair out of her eyes and looked around the beach. “It is a very pretty beach. We’re not really beach people, and obviously no one wants to see this in a bikini!” She made a face of pure loathing and gestured at her perfectly ordinary body, which Madeline judged to be about the same size as her own.
“I don’t see why not,” said Madeline. She had no patience for this sort of talk. It drove her to distraction the way women wanted to bond over self-hatred.
“But it will be nice for Jane and Ziggy, living near the beach, I think, I guess, and ah, you know, I just wanted to really thank you, Madeline, for taking Jane under your wing the way you have.” She took her sunglasses off and looked directly at Madeline. Her eyes were pale blue, and she was wearing a frosted pink eye shadow, which wasn’t quite working for her, although Madeline approved of the effort.
“Well, of course,” said Madeline. “It’s hard when you move to a new area and you don’t know anyone.”
“Yes, and Jane has moved so often in the last few years. Ever since she had Ziggy, she can’t seem to stay put, or find a nice circle of friends, and she’d kill me for saying this, it’s just, I’m not sure what’s really going on with her.”
She stopped, looked back over her shoulder at the café and compressed her lips.
“It’s hard when they stop telling you things, isn’t it?” said Madeline after a moment. “I have a teenage daughter. From a previous relationship.” She always felt compelled to clarify this when she spoke about Abigail, and then felt obscurely guilty for doing so. It was like she was separating Abigail out somehow, putting her into a different category. “I don’t know why I was so shocked when Abigail stopped telling me things. That’s what all teenagers do, right? But she was such an open little girl. Of course, Jane isn’t a teenager.”
It was like she’d given Di permission to speak freely. She turned to Madeline enthusiastically. “I know! She’s twenty-four, a grown-up! But they never seem like grown-ups. Her dad tells me I’m worrying over nothing. It’s true that Jane is doing a beautiful job bringing up Ziggy, and she supports herself, won’t take a cent from us! I slip money into her pockets like a pickpocket. Or the opposite of a pickpocket. But she’s changed. Something has changed. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like this deep unhappiness that she tries to hide. I don’t know if it’s depression or drugs or an eating disorder or what. She got so painfully thin! She used to be quite voluptuous.”
“Well,” said Madeline, thinking, If it’s an eating disorder, you probably gave it to her.
“Why am I telling you this?” said Di. “You won’t want to be her friend anymore! You’ll think she’s a drug addict! She’s not a drug addict! She only has three out of the ten top signs of drug addiction. Or four at the most. You can’t believe what you read on the Internet, anyway.”
Madeline laughed, and Di laughed too.
“Sometimes I feel like waving my hand in front of her eyes and saying, ‘Jane, Jane, are you still in there?’”
“I’m pretty sure she’s—”
“She hasn’t had a boyfriend since before Ziggy was born. She broke up with this boy. Zach. We all loved Zach, gorgeous boy, and Jane was very upset over the breakup, very upset, but gosh, that was what, six years ago now? She couldn’t still be grieving over Zach, could she? He wasn’t that good-looking!”
“I don’t know,” said Madeline. She wondered wistfully if her coffee was sitting on the table up at Blue Blues getting cold.
“Next thing she’s pregnant, and supposedly Zach isn’t the father, although we did always wonder about that, but she was absolutely adamant that Zach was not the father. She said it over and over again. A one-night stand, she said. No way of contacting the father. Well, you know, she was halfway through her arts-law degree, it wasn’t ideal, but everything happens for a reason, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely,” said Madeline, who did not believe that at all.
“She’d been told by a doctor that she was likely to have a lot of trouble falling pregnant naturally, so it just seemed like it was meant to be. And then my darling dad died while Jane was pregnant and that’s why it seemed like his soul might have come back in—”
“Mu-um! Madeline!”
Jane’s mother startled, and they both turned away from the sea to see Jane standing on the boardwalk outside Blue Blues, waving frantically. “Your coffee is ready!”
“Coming!” called Madeline.
“I’m sorry,” said Di as they walked back up from the beach. “I talk too much. Can you please forget everything I said? It’s just that when I saw poor little Ziggy didn’t get asked to that child’s birthday party, I felt like crying. I’m so emotional these days, and then we had to get up so early today, I’m feeling quite light-headed. I didn’t used to be, I used to be quite hard-hearted. It’s my age, I’m fifty-eight. My friends are the same, we went out for lunch the other day, we’ve been friends since our children started kindergarten! We were all talking about how we feel like fifteen-year-olds, weeping at the drop of a hat.”
Madeline stopped walking. “Di,” she said.
Di turned to her nervously, as if she were about to be told off. “Yes?”
“I’ll keep an eye on Jane,” she said. “I promise.”
Gabrielle: See, part of the problem was that Madeline sort of adopted Jane. She was like a crazy, protective big sister. If you ever said anything even mildly critical of her Jane, you’d have Madeline snarling at you like a rabid dog.