4.
Jane had brought along a book to read in the car while Ziggy was doing his kindergarten orientation, but instead she accompanied Madeline Martha Mackenzie (it sounded like the name of a feisty little girl in a children’s book) to a beachside café called Blue Blues.
The café was a funny little misshapen building, almost like a cave, right on the boardwalk next to Pirriwee Beach. Madeline hobbled along in bare feet, leaning heavily and unselfconsciously on Jane’s shoulder as if they were old friends. It felt intimate. She could smell Madeline’s perfume, something citrusy and delicious. Jane hadn’t been touched much by other grown-ups in the last five years.
As soon as they opened the door of the café, a youngish man came out from behind the counter, his arms outstretched. He was dressed all in black, with curly blond surfer hair and a stud in the side of his nose. “Madeline! What’s happened to you?”
“I am gravely injured, Tom,” said Madeline. “And it’s my birthday.”
“Oh, calamity,” said Tom. He winked at Jane.
While Tom settled Madeline in a corner booth, bringing her ice wrapped in a tea towel and propping her leg up on a chair with a cushion, Jane took in the café. It was “completely charming,” as her mother would have said. The bright blue uneven walls were lined with rickety shelves filled with secondhand books. The timber floorboards shone gold in the morning light, and Jane breathed in a heady mix of coffee, baking, the sea and old books. The front of the café was all open glass, and the seating was arranged so that wherever you sat you faced the beach, as if you were there to watch the sea perform a show. As Jane looked around her, she felt that dissatisfied feeling she often experienced when she was somewhere new and lovely. She couldn’t quite articulate it except with the words If only I were here. This little beachside café was so exquisite, she longed to really be there—except, of course, she was there, so it didn’t make sense.
“Jane? What can I get you?” said Madeline. “I’m buying you coffee and treats to thank you for everything!” She turned to the fussing barista. “Tom! This is Jane! She’s my knight in shining armor. My knight-ess.”
Jane had driven Madeline and her daughter to the school, after first nervously parking Madeline’s massive car in a side street. She’d taken a spare booster seat from the back of Madeline’s car for Chloe and put it in the back of her own little Honda, next to Ziggy.
It had been a project. A tiny crisis overcome.
It was a sad indictment of Jane’s mundane life that she’d found the whole incident just a little bit thrilling.
Ziggy too had been wide-eyed and self-conscious at the novelty of having another child in the backseat with him, especially one as effervescent and charismatic as Chloe. The little girl had chatted nonstop the whole way, explaining everything Ziggy needed to know about the school, and who the teachers would be, and how they had to wash their hands before they went into the classroom, with just one paper towel, and where they sat to have their lunch, and how you weren’t allowed peanut butter, because some people had allergies and could die, and she already had her lunch box, and it had Dora the Explorer on it, and what did Ziggy’s lunch box have on it?
“Buzz Lightyear,” Ziggy had answered promptly, politely, and completely untruthfully, as Jane hadn’t bought his lunch box yet, and they hadn’t even discussed the need for a lunch box. He was in day care three days a week at the moment, and meals were provided. Packing a lunch box was going to be new for Jane.
When they got to the school, Madeline had stayed in the car while Jane took the children in. Actually, Chloe had taken them in, marching along in front of them, tiara gleaming in the sunlight. At one point Ziggy and Jane had exchanged looks as if to say, Who are these marvelous people?
Jane had been mildly nervous about Ziggy’s orientation morning and conscious of the fact that she would need to hide her nerves from Ziggy, because he was prone to anxiety. It had felt like she was starting a new job: her job as a primary school mother. There would be rules and paperwork and procedures to learn.
However, walking into school with Chloe was like arriving with a golden ticket. Two other mothers immediately accosted them, “Chloe! Where’s your mum?” Then they introduced themselves to Jane, and Jane had a story to tell about Madeline’s ankle, and next thing, the kindergarten teacher, Miss Barnes, wanted to hear, and Jane found herself the center of attention, which was quite pleasant, to be honest.
The school itself was beautiful, perched at the end of the headland, so that the blue of the distant ocean seemed to be constantly sparkling in Jane’s peripheral vision. The classrooms were in long, low sandstone buildings and the leafy-treed playground seemed to be full of enchanting secret spots to encourage the imagination: cubbyholes in between trees, sheltered pathways, even a tiny, child-sized maze.
When she’d left, Ziggy had been walking into a classroom hand in hand with Chloe, his little face flushed and happy, and Jane had walked outside to her car, feeling flushed and happy herself, and there was Madeline in the passenger seat, waving and smiling delightedly, as if Jane were her great friend, and Jane had felt a lessening of something, a loosening.
Now she sat next to Madeline in Blue Blues and waited for her coffee to arrive, watching the water and feeling the sunshine on her face.
Maybe moving here was going to be the beginning of something, or the end, which would be even better.
“My friend Celeste will be here soon,” said Madeline. “You might have seen her at the school, dropping off her boys. Two little blond ruffians. She’s tall, blond, beautiful and flustered.”
“I don’t think so,” said Jane. “What’s she got to be flustered about if she’s tall, blond and beautiful?”
“Exactly,” said Madeline, as if that answered the question. “She’s got this equally gorgeous, rich husband too. They still hold hands. And he’s nice. He buys me presents. Honestly, I have no idea why I stay friends with her.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, she’s hopeless. Always late! Anyway, I’ll interrogate you while we wait.” She leaned forward and gave her full attention to Jane. “Are you new to the peninsula? I don’t know your face at all. With kids the same age you’d think we would have run into each other at GymbaROO or story hour or whatever.”
“We’re moving here in December,” said Jane. “We live in Newtown at the moment, but I decided it might be nice to live near the beach for a while. It was just on a whim, I guess.”
The phrase “on a whim” came to her out of nowhere, and both pleased and embarrassed her.
She tried to make it a whimsical story, as if she were indeed a whimsical girl. She told Madeline that one day a few months back she’d taken Ziggy for a trip to the beach, seen the rental sign outside a block of apartments and thought, Why not live near the beach?
It wasn’t a lie, after all. Not exactly.
A day at the beach, she’d kept telling herself, over and over, as she drove down that long swooping road, as if someone were listening in on her thoughts, questioning her motives.
Pirriwee Beach was one of the top ten most beautiful beaches in the world! She’d seen that somewhere. Her son deserved to see one of the top ten most beautiful beaches in the world. Her beautiful, extraordinary son. She kept looking at him in the rearview mirror, her heart aching.
She didn’t tell Madeline that, as they’d walked hand in hand back to the car, sandy and sticky, the word “help” screamed silently in her head, as if she were begging for something: a solution, a cure, a reprieve. A reprieve from what? A cure for what? A solution for what? Her breathing had become shallow. She’d felt beads of sweat at her hairline.
Then she’d seen the sign. Their lease at their Newtown apartment was up. The two-bedroom unit was in an ugly, soulless, redbrick block of apartments, but it was only a five-minute walk to the beach. “What if we moved right here?” she’d said to Ziggy, and his eyes had lit up, and all at once it had seemed like the apartment was exactly the solution to whatever was wrong with her. A sea change, people called it. Why shouldn’t she and Ziggy have a sea change?
She didn’t tell Madeline that she’d been taking six-month leases in different rental apartments across Sydney ever since Ziggy was a baby, trying to find a life that worked. She didn’t tell her that, maybe the whole time, she’d been circling closer and closer to Pirriwee Beach.
And she didn’t tell Madeline that, when she’d walked out of the real estate office after signing the lease, she’d noticed for the first time the sort of people who lived on the peninsula—golden-skinned and beach-haired, the sort of people who surfed before breakfast, who took pride in their bodies—and she’d thought of her own pasty white legs beneath her jeans, and then she’d thought of how her parents would feel so nervous driving along that winding peninsula road, her dad’s knuckles white on the steering wheel, except they’d still do it, without complaint, and all at once Jane had been convinced that she’d just made a truly reprehensible mistake. But it was too late.
“So here I am,” she finished lamely.
“You’re going to love it here,” Madeline enthused. She adjusted the ice on her ankle and winced. “Ow. Do you surf? What about your husband? Or your partner, I should say. Or boyfriend? Girlfriend? I am open to all possibilities.”
“No husband,” Jane said. “No partner. It’s just me. I’m a single mum.”
“Are you?” said Madeline, as if Jane had just announced something rather daring and wonderful.
“I am.” Jane smiled foolishly.
“Well, you know, people always like to forget this, but I was a single mother,” said Madeline. She lifted her chin, as if she were addressing a crowd of people who disagreed with her. “My ex-husband walked out on me when my older daughter, Abigail, was a baby. She’s fourteen. I was quite young too, like you. Only twenty-six. Although I thought I was over the hill. It was hard. Being a single mother is hard.”
“Well, I have my mum and—”
“Oh, sure, sure. I’m not saying I didn’t have support. I had my parents to help me too. But my God, there were some nights, when Abigail was sick, or when I got sick, or worse, when we both got sick, and . . . Anyway.” Madeline stopped and shrugged. “My ex is remarried now to someone else. They have a little girl about the same age as Chloe, and Nathan has become father of the year. Men often do when they get a second chance. Abigail thinks her dad is wonderful. I’m the only one left holding a grudge. They say it’s good to let your grudges go, but I don’t know, I’m quite fond of my grudge. I tend it like a little pet.”
“I’m not really into forgiveness either,” said Jane.
Madeline grinned and pointed her teaspoon at her. “Good for you. Never forgive. Never forget. That’s my motto.”
Jane couldn’t tell how much she was joking.
“So what about Ziggy’s dad?” continued Madeline. “Is he in the picture at all?”
Jane didn’t flinch. She’d had five years to get good at it. She felt herself becoming very still.
“No. We weren’t actually together.” She delivered her line perfectly. “I didn’t even know his name. It was a . . .” Stop. Pause. Look away as if unable to make eye contact. “Sort of a . . . one-off.”
“You mean a one-night stand?” said Madeline immediately, sympathetically, and Jane almost laughed out loud with the surprise of it. Most people, especially of Madeline’s age, reacted with a delicate, slightly distasteful expression that said, I get it and I’m cool with it, but I now place you in a different category of person. Jane was never offended by their distaste. She found it distasteful too. She just wanted that particular topic of conversation closed off for good, and most of the time that’s exactly what happened. Ziggy was Ziggy. There was no dad. Move right along.
“Why don’t you just say you split up with the father?” her mother had asked in the early days.
“Lies get complicated, Mum,” said Jane. Her mother had no experience with lies. “This way we just close the conversation down.”
“I remember one-night stands,” said Madeline wistfully. “The things I did in the nineties. Lordy me. I hope Chloe never finds out. Oh, calamity. Was yours fun?”
It took Jane a second to comprehend the question. She was asking if her one-night stand was fun.
For a moment Jane was back in that glass bubble of an elevator as it slid silently up the center of the hotel. His hand around the neck of the champagne bottle. The other hand on her lower back, pulling her forward. They were both laughing so hard. Deep creases around his eyes. She was weak with laughter and desire. Expensive smells.
Jane cleared her throat.
“I guess it was fun,” she said.
“Sorry,” said Madeline. “I was being frivolous. It was because I was thinking of my own frivolous youth. Or maybe because you’re so young and I’m so old, and I’m trying to be cool. How old are you? Do you mind my asking?”
“Twenty-four,” said Jane.
“Twenty-four,” breathed Madeline. “I’m forty today. I told you that already, didn’t I? You probably think you’ll never be forty, right?”
“Well, I hope I’ll be forty,” said Jane. She’d noticed before how middle-aged women were obsessed with the topic of age, always laughing about it, moaning about it, going on and on about it, as if the process of aging were a tricky puzzle they were trying to solve. Why were they so mystified by it? Jane’s mother’s friends seemed to literally have no other topic of conversation, or they didn’t when they spoke to Jane. “Oh, you’re so young and beautiful, Jane.” (When she clearly wasn’t; it was like they thought one followed the other: If you were young, you were automatically beautiful!) “Oh, you’re so young, Jane, you’ll be able to fix my phone/computer/camera.” (When in fact a lot of her mother’s friends were more technologically savvy than Jane.) “Oh, you’re so young, Jane, you have so much energy.” (When she was so tired, so very, very tired.)
“And listen, how do you support yourself?” said Madeline worriedly, sitting up straight, as if this were a problem she needed to solve right this minute. “Do you work?”
Jane nodded at her. “I work for myself as a freelance bookkeeper. I’ve got a good client base now, lots of small businesses. I’m fast. So I turn the work over fast. It pays the rent.”
“Clever girl,” said Madeline approvingly. “I supported myself too when Abigail was little. For the most part anyway. Every now and then Nathan would rouse himself to send a check. It was hard, but it was also sort of satisfying, in a fuck-you kind of way. You know what I mean.”
“Sure,” said Jane. Jane’s life as a single mother wasn’t making a fuck-you point to anyone. Or at least not in the way that Madeline meant.
“You’ll definitely be one of the younger kindergarten mums,” mused Madeline. She took a sip of her coffee and grinned wickedly. “You’re even younger than my ex-husband’s delightful new wife. Promise me you won’t make friends with her, will you? I got you first.”
“I’m sure I won’t even meet her,” said Jane, confused.
“Oh, you will,” grimaced Madeline. “Her daughter is starting kindergarten at the same time as Chloe. Can you imagine?”
Jane couldn’t imagine.
“The kindy mums will all have coffee, and there will be my ex-husband’s wife sitting across the table, sipping her herbal tea. Don’t worry, there won’t be any punch-ups. Unfortunately it’s all very boring and amicable and terribly grown-up. Bonnie even kisses me hello. She’s into yoga and chakras and all that shit. You know how you’re meant to hate your wicked stepmother? My daughter adores her. Bonnie is so ‘calm,’ you see. The opposite of me. She speaks in one of those soft . . . low . . . melodious voices that make you want to punch a wall.”
Jane laughed at Madeline’s imitation of a low, melodious voice.
“You probably will make friends with Bonnie,” said Madeline. “She’s impossible to hate. I’m very good at hating people, and even I find it difficult. I really have to put my heart and soul into it.”
She shifted the ice again on her ankle.
“When Bonnie hears I’ve hurt my ankle, she’ll bring me a meal. She just loves any excuse to bring me a home-cooked meal. Probably because Nathan told her I’m a terrible cook, so she wants to make a point. Although the worst thing about Bonnie is that she’s probably not actually making a point. She’s just freakishly nice. I’d love to throw her meals straight in the bin, but they’re too damned delicious. My husband and children would kill me.”
Madeline’s expression changed. She beamed and waved. “Oh! She’s here at last! Celeste! Over here! Come and see what I’ve done!”
Jane looked up and her heart sank.
It shouldn’t matter. She knew it shouldn’t matter. But the fact was that some people were so unacceptably, hurtfully beautiful, it made you feel ashamed. Your inferiority was right there on display for the world to see. This was what a woman was meant to look like. Exactly this. She was right, and Jane was wrong.
You’re a very fat, ugly little girl, a voice said insistently in her ear with hot, fetid breath.
She shuddered and tried to smile at the horribly beautiful woman walking toward them.
Thea: I assume you’ve heard by now that Bonnie is married to Madeline’s ex-husband, Nathan? So that was complicated. You might want to explore that. I’m not telling you how to do your job, of course.
Bonnie: That had absolutely nothing to do with anything. Our relationship was completely amicable. Just this morning I left a vegetarian lasagna on their doorstep for her poor husband.
Gabrielle: I was new to the school. I didn’t know a soul. “Oh, we’re such a caring school,” the principal told me. Blah, blah, blah. Let me tell you, the first thing I thought when I walked into that playground on that kindergarten orientation day was cliquey. Cliquey, cliquey, cliquey. I’m not surprised someone ended up dead. Oh, all right. I guess that’s overstating it. I was a little surprised.