CHAPTER 14
“Tell them I don’t want to see anybody,” Cat told Dan. Gemma, Lyn, and Maxine all agreed that was understandable and a good idea but obviously it didn’t apply to them, and so they all arrived separately within fifteen minutes, running up the flat stairs, striding inside, breathless and flushed. When they saw Cat, they stopped and crumpled as if they thought just by coming they could fix things and seeing her made them realize there was nothing to be done and nothing to be said.
They squashed themselves shoulder to shoulder around Cat’s little round kitchen table to drink cups of tea and eat fat pieces of iced walnut bun with lots of butter—Kettle family comfort food. Cat ate hers ravenously. It was what they ate when Pop Kettle died and when Marcus died a few months later.
The difference was that everybody knew Pop and Marcus. Nobody knew Cat’s baby. Her baby didn’t have the dignity of a name, or even a gender.
It was just a nothing. Cat had loved a nothing. How foolish of her.
“We’ll try again,” said Dan solemnly and determinedly at the hospital, as if the baby was a goal they’d just missed kicking and if they really put their minds to it they’d get it next time. As if babies were interchangeable.
“I wanted this baby,” said Cat, and the nurse and Dan nodded their heads patiently and kindly, as if she were delirious.
“Darling! It was Mother Nature’s way of telling you that something wasn’t right with the poor little mite,” said Nana Kettle on the phone. “At least you weren’t far along.” Cat said through a clenched jaw, “I have to go now, Nana.”
Mother Nature can go f*ck herself, she thought. It was my baby, not hers.
Cat stuffed bun into her mouth and looked at Lyn standing up to pour everybody’s tea.
The heartbreakingly perfect curve of Maddie’s cheek.
The ugly little ball of bloody tissue that was Cat’s baby.
They took it away, with bland efficient medical faces, like it was something disgusting, like something from a science fiction movie that had been removed from Cat’s body and now had to be quickly removed from everybody’s sight, as a matter of good taste.
Nobody cooed in wonder over Cat’s baby. Cat’s hands trembled at the injustice. Only she knew how beautiful her baby would have been.
She had always suspected that deep within her, there was a secret seam of ugliness, of unseemliness, of something wrong that was the mirror of Lyn’s right. And now her poor little innocent baby had been contaminated by her wrongness.
“Where’s Maddie?” she asked.
“Michael,” Lyn answered quickly, leaning over to pour Cat’s tea. “You’re not going back to work tomorrow. You’ll have some time off?”
“Dunno.”
Gemma gulped at her tea, her eyes anxiously on Cat.
Cat said to her, “You’re doing that slurping thing.”
“Sorry.”
Sometimes Gemma got a particular expression on her face—a quivering pathetic puppy look—that aroused in Cat a powerful urge to kick or slap or verbally crush her. Then she felt racked with guilt. Then she felt angrier still.
I am not a nice person, she thought. I never have been. “You’re an evil, nasty little girl, Catriona Kettle,” Sister Elizabeth Mary informed her one day in the primary-school playground, the black band of her veil squeezed around puffy, red-veined cheeks. Cat felt an uplifting rush of wild courage, like she was about to run off the edge of the highest diving board at the swimming pool. “Well, you’re an evil fat nun!” Sister Elizabeth grabbed her by the upper arm and slapped the back of her legs. Slap, slap, slap. Veil flying. Hefty shoulder heaving. Kids stopped to stare in sick fascination. Lyn and Gemma came running from opposite sides of the playground. “Oh!” moaned Gemma in sympathetic synchrony with each slap, “Oh!” until Sister couldn’t stand it anymore and stomped off, after pointing a silent, quavering finger of warning at each of the three Kettle girls.
“You should certainly not go back to work tomorrow, Cat,” said Maxine. “Don’t be ridiculous. You need your rest. Dan can call work for you, can’t you, Dan?”
Dan had his mouth full of bun. “Yeah,” he said thickly, putting his hand over his mouth. “Course.”
He’d been so gentle and loving last night—as if she were very ill, or as if she’d experienced some painful injury. He played the role of understanding, supportive husband to perfection—so handsome, so caring! But he was playing it wrong. Cat wanted him angry and irrational. She wanted him scornful and aggressive with the doctor: Wait a minute, this is our child, how the hell did this happen? But no, he was all understanding masculine nods as the doctor talked, two logical, reasonable men discussing such a—sadly!—common occurrence.
“I might leave you all for a bit, if that’s O.K. with you, Cat?” Dan stood up and took his mug over to the sink.
“Fine.” Cat looked down at her plate. “Whatever.”
“Where are you going?” asked Gemma.
“Just out, got a few things to do.” Dan kissed Cat on top of her head. “Are you O.K., babe?”
“I’m fine. I’m perfectly fine.”
Had there been a sharp edge to Gemma’s tone? There was something uncharacteristic about her asking Dan where he was going. Cat looked at Gemma, who was sitting cross-legged on her chair, twisting a long lock of hair around her finger. Did she know something? Had she got more sordid details from the locksmith about the one-night stand that Cat didn’t know about? Did Cat even care? It all seemed irrelevant and childish now. She didn’t even care if Gemma kept going out with the brother. What did it matter? When it came down to it, what did anything really matter?
“Gemma,” she said.
“Yes?” Gemma nearly dropped her slice of bun in her eagerness to be accommodating. She picked up the milk hopefully. “Milk?”
“Just forget what I said on Christmas Day. You know. About Charlie. I should never have said that. I was upset.”
There. Now she had redeemed herself for wanting to kick her.
“Oh. Well. That’s O.K. I mean, who knows? You know, my relationships never seem to last longer than a few months these days. So probably we will break up but it’s all going well at the moment, so if you—”
“Gemma?”
“Yes?”
“Shut up. You’re babbling.”
“Sorry.”
Gemma’s face closed down, and she picked up her teacup and slurped. “Sorry,” she said again.
Oh God. Cat breathed deeply. Now she was back to feeling evil again. She would have been a bad mother anyway. A sarcastic, harping, carping mother.
“Did Nana Kettle call you?” asked Lyn.
“Yes.” With enormous effort Cat managed to make her voice sound like a normal person’s. “She told me Mother Nature knew best.”
Maxine gave a derisive snort. “Rubbish. Did she tell you that God needed another rose in his garden, too?”
“No.”
“That’s what she said to me when I lost my baby.”
Lyn put down her teacup quickly. “I didn’t know you ever had a miscarriage, Mum!”
“Well, I did.”
“When?” Lyn obviously thought she should have been approached first for authorization.
“You girls were only three.” Maxine stood up and refilled the kettle at the sink, her back to them. Her daughters took the opportunity to exchange raised eyebrows and surprised mouths. “You all knew I was pregnant. You used to put your little faces up to my stomach and pat me and chatter away to the baby.”
She turned back around to face them, the kettle in her hand. “Actually, I remember you were the most interested, Cat. You used to sit there on the lounge whispering into my stomach for ages. It was the only time I could get a cuddle from you.”
“We could have had a little sister or brother,” said Gemma in wonder.
“It was an accident, of course,” said Maxine. “At first I was horrified. I even thought about an abortion, which would have had your father at confession every week for a year. But then I got used to the idea. I guess the hormones kicked in. And I thought, imagine, just one baby. I could do everything right, with one baby. Of course, it was stupid thinking. You three were toddlers. It wasn’t like I had any spare time.”
Lyn said, “I can’t believe we didn’t know this, Mum.”
“Yes, well, I lost the baby at thirteen weeks.” Maxine flicked the switch on the kettle. “There was no reason to upset you. I just stopped talking about the baby—and you all seemed to forget. You were only babies yourselves, of course. So.”
Cat looked at her mother, in her stylish Country Road slacks and blouse. Thin, brisk, and elegant. Short red hair, cut, colored, and styled at the hairdresser every three weeks. She would have been only twenty-four when she had her miscarriage, just a girl, a kid. It occurred to Cat to wonder if she would have liked Maxine if they’d been at school together. Maxine Leonard with her long swishing red hair, her long, long legs, and short, short miniskirts. “Your mum,” Nana Leonard used to say, “was a little bit wild,” and they all stared, thrilled, at the old photos. Really, Nana? Mum? Our mum?
She probably would have been friends with her. Cat’s friends were always the bad girls.
“Were you upset?” she asked. (Could this be the most personal question she’d ever asked her mother?) “Were you upset about losing the baby?”
“Yes, of course. Very. And your father—well. It wasn’t a very good time in my life. I remember I used to cry when I was hanging out the washing.” Maxine smiled and looked embarrassed. “I don’t know why. Maybe it was the only chance I got to think.”
“Ah.” A sob of involuntary grief rose in Cat’s chest. She took a deep breath and tried to stop it. If she gave in to it, she might fall to her knees and start wailing and keening like a complete lunatic.
Maxine came up behind her and put a tentative hand against her shoulder.
“Darling, you’re perfectly entitled to grieve for your baby.”
Cat turned in her chair and for a fraction of a second pressed her face against her mother’s stomach.
She stood up. “Back in a sec.”
“Don’t, Lyn,” she heard Maxine say. “Let her be.”
She walked into the bathroom and turned on both taps at full blast and sat down on the edge of the bath and cried. For the baby she didn’t know and for the memory she didn’t have of a girl standing at the clothesline in a suburban backyard, a plastic clothes peg in her mouth and tears running down her face.
She’d bet she didn’t stop pegging those clothes for even a second.
The sun on her face woke her. They’d forgotten to close the blinds last night. “Good morning, sweetie.” Cat kept her eyes closed and reached down to touch her stomach.
Then she remembered and misery flattened her body, pressing her against her bed.
This was worse than Dan sleeping with Angela.
This was worse than finding out about Lyn.
This was worse than anything.
She was overreacting. She was being selfish. Women had miscarriages all the time. They didn’t make such a fuss. They just got on with it.
And far worse things happened to people. Far, far worse.
Little children died. Sweet-faced little children were raped and murdered.
You saw parents on television whose children had died. Cat could never stand to look at their white faces and pleading bloodshot eyes. They looked like they weren’t human anymore, like they had evolved into some other species. “Change the channel,” she always told Dan. “Change it.”
How dare she change the channel to escape from their horror and then lie here feeling desolate over an everyday, run-of-the-mill, happens to one-in-every-three-women miscarriage?
She turned over and squashed her face into her pillow, hard, until her nose hurt.
It was the second day of January.
She thought of all the hundreds of days ahead of her and felt exhausted. It was impossible to think of getting through a year. Day after day after day. Getting up to go to work. Shower, breakfast, blow-drying hair. Driving the car through rush hour. Accelerate. Brake. Accelerate. Walking through the labyrinth of cubicles at work. “Morning!” “Hi!” “Good morning!” “How are you today?” Meetings. Phone calls. Lunch. More meetings. Tap, tap, tap on the computer. E-mails. Coffee. Driving home. Gym. Dinner. TV. Bills. Housework. Nights out with friends. Ha, ha, ha, chat, chat, chat. What was the point in any of it?
And trying again. Sex at the right time of the month. Carefully counting the days until her period came. What if she took another year to get pregnant? And what if she miscarried again? There was a woman at work who had seven miscarriages before she gave up.
Seven.
Cat couldn’t do it. She knew she couldn’t do it.
She felt Dan’s thigh against hers, and the thought of having sex with him seemed bizarre. Slightly foolish even. All that grunting and groaning and ooooh and aaaaahing and we start up here, and now we move down there, and I do this and you do that and there goes you, and there goes me.
What a bore.
She rolled back over and looked at the ceiling. Her hands felt the little buttons on the mattress beneath the sheet.
She didn’t even like him that much.
Actually, she didn’t particularly like anybody.
The alarm began to beep, and Dan’s arm shot out automatically to hit the snooze button.
I’m just going to stay here, she thought. I’m just going to lie still like this, all day, every day. Maybe forever.
“So! How about I treat you to a real nice dinner in some classy restaurant? Just you and me. How would you like that? That’d be fun, eh? Put a smile on your dial?”
“No thanks, Dad. But thank you.”
“Lunch, then. That’d be better, eh? Smack-up lunch?”
“No. Maybe some other time.”
“Or with your mother? All three of us? That would be something different, eh? Ha!”
“Yes, that would be different. Ha. But no. I’m really tired, Dad. I might go now.”
“Oh. Well, O.K. Maybe another time. You call me when you’re feeling a bit better. Bye, love.”
Cat let her arm flop and the phone thud onto the carpet beside the bed.
She yawned hugely and thought about lifting her head to look at the clock, but it seemed like too much effort for too little return. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t getting up. It was her third day in bed and already it felt like she’d lived this way forever. Huge chunks of time vanishing in deep, dark, druglike sleep that dragged her down like quicksand. When she woke up, she was exhausted, her eyes gritty, her mouth bitter.
She curled up on her side and rearranged the pillows.
Her father had sounded like a used-car salesman on the phone. He always put on that fake, fiercely happy voice when things were going wrong, as if he could sort of bulldoze you into being happy again.
Dad was better in the good times.
A memory appeared so clearly in Cat’s head that she could smell it. It was the smell of cold, crisp Saturday mornings and netball. The sickly sweet Impulse deodorant all three of them used to wear, the wedges of orange that Mum brought along in a Tupperware container. They were always running late and the car was filled with tension and Maxine drove so slowly and then they’d pull into the netball courts—and there was Dad.
They wouldn’t have seen him all week and there he was waiting for them, lifting a casual hand in greeting. He’d be talking away to the other parents and Cat would crunch across the gravel in her sneakers and squash her head under his arm and he’d hug her to him.
He loved watching them play netball. He loved the fact that the Kettle girls were famous in the Turramurra District Netball Club. A-grade players. And lethal, all three of them. “Even the dippy redhead turns into a hard-faced bitch as soon as the whistle blows,” people said admiringly. “It’s just their long legs. They’re just tall,” said the jealous short girls.
Cat was goal defense, Lyn was goal attack, and Gemma was center. The three of them had the court covered, with the wings and keepers all but irrelevant. It was the one time in their lives where the roles were divided up evenly, neatly, fairly—equally distinct but equally important.
“Good play, girls!” Frank would call out from the sidelines. Not embarrassingly enthusiastic like some parents. Just cool and smooth. A little thumbs-up signal. He wore chunky woolen sweaters and jeans and looked warm and comfortable, like a dad in an aftershave commercial.
And where was Maxine? On the other side of the court, sitting very straight on a fold-out chair, her elegant shoes in neat parallel lines. Her white face pinched and set. Cold weather made her ears ache, and she was not the sort of woman to wear a warm hat: not like Kerry’s mum, Mrs. Dalmeny, who wore a bright red tea cozy of a beanie and danced joyfully up and down the sidelines, calling out, “Oh, well done, Turramurra, well done!”
Cat hated her mother then. Hated her so much she could hardly bear to look at her. She hated the discreet little clap, clap, clap of Maxine’s gloved hands when either team scored a goal. She hated the way she spoke to the other parents, so stiffly and carefully. Her manners were so good they were like a putdown.
Most of all, Cat hated the way her mother talked to her father.
“Max, how are you?” Frank would say, his eyes hidden by designer sunglasses, his tone as warm and sexy as his chunky sweater. “Looking as gorgeous as ever, I see!”
“I’m perfectly well, thank you, Frank,” Maxine would respond with an unflattering flare of her nostrils. Frank’s teeth would flash with humor and he’d say, “Hmmm, I think it might be a bit warmer on that side of the court.”
“Why does she have to be a bitch to him?” Cat would say afterward to Lyn, and Lyn would say, “Well, why does he have to be so sleazy?” and then they’d have an enormous fight.
Twenty years later Cat lay in a sweaty tangle of sheets and thought, What if the three of them had been just plain mediocre netball players—or even bad, D-grade, fumbling-for-the-ball bad? Would Dad have still been there every week, smiling in his sunglasses?
Maybe not.
No, not maybe at all.
He wouldn’t have come.
Well, so what? Dad liked winning. So did Cat. She could understand that.
But Mum would still have been there. Shivering and sour-faced in her little fold-out chair, peeling off the lid on the Tupperware container full of carefully cut oranges.
That particular thought was somehow too irritating to deal with right now.
Once more Cat let herself submerge into deep, murky sleep.
“Cat. Babe. Maybe…Maybe you’d feel better if you got up and had a shower.”
Cat heard the sound of the blind being opened and sensed evening light filling the bedroom. She didn’t open her eyes. “I’m too tired.”
“Yeah. But I just think maybe you wouldn’t feel so tired if you got up. We could have some dinner.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Right.”
A tiny “I give up” twist on the word “right.”
Cat opened her eyes and rolled over to look at Dan. He had turned around toward the wardrobe and was taking off his work clothes.
She looked at the perfect muscled V-shape of his back as he shrugged himself into a T-shirt, pulling it down in that casual, don’t-care boy-way.
Once upon a time—was it that long ago?—watching Dan put on a T-shirt used to make her feel meltingly aroused.
Now, she felt…nothing.
“Do you remember when we first started going out and I thought I was pregnant that time?”
Dan turned around from the wardrobe. “Yeah.”
“I would have had an abortion.”
“Well. We were pretty young.”
“I wouldn’t have thought twice about it.”
Dan sat down on the bed next to her. “O.K., and so?”
“And so I’m a hypocrite.”
“We were like, I don’t know, eighteen. We had our careers to think about.”
“We were twenty-four. We wanted to go backpacking around Europe.”
“Well. Whatever. We were too young. Anyway, it’s irrelevant. You weren’t pregnant. So what does it matter?”
He reached out to touch her leg, and she moved away on the bed. “It just matters.”
“Right.”
“It didn’t suit me to have a baby then so I would have got rid of it. I was even a bit proud of how O.K. I was about it—as if having an abortion was making some sort of feminist statement. My body, my choice, and all that crap. Deep down I probably thought having an abortion made me cool. And now…so, I’m a hypocrite.”
“Christ, Cat, this is the most ridiculous conversation. It never happened.”
“Anyway, I probably aborted this baby.”
Dan exhaled. “What are you talking about?”
“The night of your work Christmas party. I drank a whole bottle of champagne in the Botanical Gardens. I would have been pregnant then. God knows what damage I did.”
“Oh, Cat. I’m sure—”
“Before that I was being so careful whenever I thought there was a chance I could be pregnant. But I was a bit distracted by your little one-night stand with the slut.”
He stood up abruptly from the bed. “O.K. I get it. It’s my fault. Your miscarriage is my fault.”
Cat pulled herself up into a sitting position. It was good to be fighting. It made her feel awake. “My miscarriage? Isn’t it ourmis- carriage? Wasn’t it our baby?”
“You’re twisting my words.”
“I just think it’s really interesting that you said your miscarriage.”
“Christ. I can’t talk to you when you’re like this. I hate it when you do this.”
“When I do this? What’s this?”
“When you fight for the sake of it. You get off on it. I can’t stand it.”
Cat was silent. There was something unfamiliar about Dan’s voice.
His anger was cold, when it was meant to be hot. Their fights weren’t biting and contemptuous. They were violent and passionate.
They looked at each other in silence. Cat found herself touching her hair and thinking about how she must look after three days in bed.
What was she doing thinking about how she looked? This was her husband. She wasn’t meant to think about how she looked when she was fighting with him. She was meant to be too busy yelling.
“I know this is really hard for you,” said Dan in his new cold, calm voice. “I know. I’m upset too. I really wanted a baby. I really wanted this baby.”
“Why are you talking like that?” asked Cat, really wanting to know.
His face changed, as if she’d attacked him.
“Oh, forget it. I can’t talk to you. I’m going to make dinner.”
He headed for the door and then suddenly turned back, and she felt almost relieved as his face contorted with anger.
“Oh. And one thing. She’s not a slut. Stop calling her that.” He closed the door hard behind him.
Cat found herself breathing hard.
She’s not a slut.
You used present tense, Dan.
Present tense.
And why are you defending her?
The thought of Dan feeling protective toward that girl gave her such a violent, unexpected thrust of pain that she almost whimpered in surprise.
“Where are you going?” Gemma had asked him the other day, as if she had a right to know. Gemma never talked liked that. Sharply. Looking straight at Dan, with a touch of accusation. Most of the time Gemma didn’t even notice people leave the room. Dan always said Gemma had the attention span of a goldfish.
And then there was Christmas Day. “Danny!” Angela had said and there was pleasure and surprise in her voice. Was that the right reaction for someone you slept with once and never heard from again? Someone who went slinking shamefaced off in the night, without even bothering to say, “I’ll call”?
She’s not a slut. Don’t call her that.
Cat lifted and dropped the sheet over her legs.
So.
So.
So.
So, she wasn’t having a baby.
So, it seemed there was a very real possibility that her husband was having an affair with a gorgeous brunette with very large breasts.
So the gorgeous brunette had a brother who just happened to be dating Cat’s sister.
And Cat’s divorced parents were having sex, instead of politely despising each other, like nice, normal divorced parents.
And sick leave didn’t last forever.
And as far as she knew Rob Spencer was still alive and breathing clichés and spite.
And there was no point in any of it. No point at all.
Cat got out of bed and walked with wobbly legs to the dressing table mirror.
Ugly. So ugly.
She bared her teeth in a mockery of a smile and spoke out loud.
“Well, Happy New Year, Cat. Happy f*cking New Year.”
“Why don’t you just say sorry to Daddy?” For days after Frank moved out, six-year-old Cat followed her mother relentlessly around the house, questioning and nagging, her fists clenched with frustration. It was like pushing and pushing against a gigantic rock that wouldn’t budge—and you really, really needed it to budge so you could open the door to where everything was good again.
She didn’t care what Mum and Dad said when they had their little talk in the living room. All that stuff about how they still loved them and it wasn’t anybody’s fault and these things happened and everything would be just the same except that Mum and Dad would live in separate houses. Cat knew there was no question about what had really happened. It was her mother’s fault.
Dad was the one always laughing and making really funny jokes and coming up with really fun ideas. Mum was the one always cross and cranky, ruining everything. “No, Frank, they haven’t got sunscreen on yet!” “No, Frank, they can’t have ice cream five minutes before dinner!” “No, Frank, we can’t take them to a movie on a school night!”
“Oh school, schmool! Relax, Max, babe. Why can’t you just relax for a minute?”
“Yeah, relax, Mum! Relax!” chanted her daughters.
That’s why Daddy had moved out. He couldn’t stand it any longer. It was no fun living in this house. If Cat was a grown-up, she might have moved out herself.
All Mum had to do was say sorry for being such a misery-head.
Cat followed her mother as she lugged a basketful of laundry into the living room and upended it on the sofa.
“You always tell us,” Cat said shrewdly, “to say sorry when we’re fighting.” Her mother began sorting the clean clothes into neat piles across the top of the sofa, one for Lyn, Cat, Gemma, Mum—and none for Dad.
“Your father and I are not fighting.” Mum lifted up a T-shirt of Gemma’s and frowned. “How in the world does she get these marks on her clothes? What does she do?”
“Dunno,” said Cat, bored by this topic. “I just think you should say sorry. Even if you’re not really.”
“We’re not fighting, Cat.”
Cat groaned with frustration and slapped both her hands to her head. “Muuuum! You’re driving me crazy!”
“I know just how you feel,” answered her mother and when Cat tried to change tactics and be nice by saying, “Mum, I think you should just relax a bit,” it was like she’d pushed a button. A button right in the middle of her mother’s forehead that turned her into wild, crazy, lunatic Mum.
“Catriona Kettle!” Her mother threw down a clump of clothing forcefully and her face went a familiar bright red, causing Cat to immediately begin strategic escape maneuvers. “If you don’t leave the room this instant, I’m going to get my wooden spoon and smack you so hard that, that…you won’t know what’s hit you!”
Cat didn’t bother to point out what an amazingly stupid thing this was to say because she was already running. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” she muttered under her breath. “Hate, hate, hate!”
A few days later their father took them to see his new flat in the city.
It was on the twenty-third floor of a very tall building. Through his windows you could see the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House and little ferries chugging frothy white trails across the flat blue water.
“So what do you think, girls?” Dad asked, spreading his arms wide and turning around and around in circles.
“It’s very, very pretty, Daddy,” said Gemma, running happily through each room and stopping to caress different things. “I like it a lot!”
“I’d like a house with a window like this.” Lyn pressed her nose thoughtfully against the glass. “That’s what I’m going to have when I grow up. How much does this cost, Dad? Quite a lot?”
They were both so stupid. Didn’t they see? Everything in Dad’s new house gave Cat a bad feeling in her stomach. Everything he had—his own fridge, his own TV, his own sofa—proved that he didn’t want their TV or fridge or sofa. And that meant he wasn’t coming back and this was what it would be like forever and ever.
“I think it’s a really dumb place to live.” Cat sat down on the very edge of her father’s new sofa and crossed her arms tight. “It’s all small and squashy and stupid.”
“Small and squashy and stupid!?” Frank opened his eyes very wide and let his mouth drop in shock. “Now would a house be small and squashy if you had a room to swing a cat? But where could I find a cat to test it out? Hmmmm. Let me think.”
Cat kept her arms folded tight and compressed her lips, but when Dad was being funny it was like the very tip of a feather dancing ticklishly across your cheeks.
She was already laughing when her father grabbed her under the arms. “Wait a minute! Here’s a cat. A really big grumpy one!” and swung her wildly around the room.
There was no point being mad with Dad. It was all Mum’s fault. She would just stay mad with her, until Daddy came back home.
“You’re up.” Dan was at the door, car keys in his hand.
“Yes.”
“That’s good.”
“Yes.”
Cat stood in her dressing gown with her hair wet from the shower and her limbs heavy and doughy. She imagined her arms falling straight to the floor like stretched-out plasticine.
Someone should mold her into a nice, neat smooth ball and start again.
He said, “I was just going to Coles. I thought maybe a nice steak for dinner.”
Dan always thought maybe a nice steak for dinner.
“Oh. Good.”
“You want a steak too?”
“Sure.” The thought of steak made her want to gag.
“O.K. I won’t be long.” He opened the door.
“Dan?”
“Yeah?”
Do you still love me? Why were you talking in that cold, hard voice? Do you still love me? Do you still love me? Do you still love me?
“We need more tea.”
“O.K.” He closed the door.
She would ask him when he came back. She would match his cold tone. “Is something going on with that girl?” and there would be no undignified catch in her voice.
She sat down at the kitchen table and placed her hands flat in front of her and bent her head till she was close enough to examine the tiny pores and wrinkles on the joints of her fingers. Her hands looked elderly in close-up.
Thirty-three.
At the age of thirty-three, she thought she’d be a proper grown-up doing whatever she pleased, with a snazzy car that she could drive wherever she wanted and everything—all the confusing parts of life—worked out and checked off. In fact, all she had was the not especially snazzy car. She had more worked out when she was twelve. If only bossy, know-it-all twelve-year-old Cat Kettle were still around to tell her what to do.
There was a messy pile of bills sitting on the kitchen table from today’s mail. Bills bored Dan. He threw them down in disgust when he saw one, leaving them half sticking out of their envelopes for Cat to worry about.
She pulled the sheaf of papers toward her.
The bills would keep on coming, no matter what else was happening in your life and that was good because it gave you a purpose. You worked so you could pay them. You rested on the weekends and generated more bills. Then you went back to work to pay for them. That was the reason for getting up tomorrow. That was the meaning of life.
Electricity. Credit cards. Mobile phone.
Dan’s mobile phone bill.
She picked it up almost eagerly, a sick sense of satisfaction, a refreshing injection of adrenaline. Twelve-year-old Cat Kettle always wanted to be a spy.
The paper quivered in her hand. She didn’t want to find something bad, but she almost did. For the sheer satisfaction of solving a tricky problem. For the pleasure of the “gotcha!”
Many of the phone numbers she recognized. Home. Work. Her own mobile.
Of course, there were a lot she didn’t recognize. And why should she? This was stupid. Silly. She was smiling mockingly at herself as she scanned the page and then, there it was:
25 Dec. 11:53 P.M. 0443 461 555 25.42
A twenty-five minute call to someone late on Christmas Day. Cat had gone straight to bed as soon as they got home from Lyn’s place. On the way home in the car they were O.K. They’d talked, calmly, without fighting, about the day’s events. Angela turning up in Lyn’s kitchen. Frank and Maxine getting back together. They’d even managed to laugh—Dan a touch warily, Cat a touch hysterically—about how horrible it had all been. Nana with the lepers. Michael clicking his fingers to his awful Christmas music CD. Kara finally collapsing face-first on the tabletop.
Of course, that was when she was still carrying her baby like a magical talisman.
“Next year,” she’d said to Dan as she sighed with the comfort of cool sheets and a pillow. “We could have a Kettle-free Christmas. We could go away somewhere. Just us and the baby.”
“That sounds like a perfect Christmas,” he’d said. “I’ll come to bed soon. I’m going to walk off some of Lyn’s cooking.”
He’d kissed her on the forehead like a child, and Cat fell immediately into a dreamless sleep.
And then he’d spoken to someone for nearly half an hour, till past midnight.
It could be anybody of course. It could be a friend. It could be Sean, for example. It was probably Sean.
Although his conversations with Sean were always short and to the point. They weren’t chatters, Sean and Dan. Yeah, mate. No, mate. See you at three then.
Maybe they had long, meaningful, sharing-their-feelings conversations when Cat wasn’t around.
She looked back through the bill for other calls to the same number.
It appeared eight times in December. Most of them long conversations. Many of them very late at night.
On the first of December, there was an hour-long call at eleven o’clock in the morning.
That was the day after Cat found out she was pregnant. It was when she would have been at Lyn’s place, looking after Maddie.
She’s pregnant. I can’t leave her now.
No. It would be Sean. It would be a work friend. It could even be Dan’s sister, Melanie. Melanie. Of course it was Mel. Of course.
Cat stood up, walked to the phone, and dialed the number, and found she was breathing in exactly the same way as when she forced herself to sprint up that killer hill by the park. Frantic little gulps for air.
The phone rang once, twice, three times. Cat wondered if she was having a heart attack.
It switched to voicemail.
A bubbly girl’s voice spoke clearly and sweetly into Cat’s ear, in the tone of a special friend who is so sorry she’s missed you: “Hi! This is Angela. Leave me a message!”
She hung up, hard.
Gotcha.
Scrape and twist of the key in the lock. He walks into the kitchen with plastic bags of shopping hanging from his wrists.
She waits till he dumps them on the bench. Then she stands in front of him and puts her hands flat against his chest and automatically he links his hands behind the small of her back, because this is the way they stand. This is what they do. Her hands here and his hands there.
She looks at him. Full in the face. Right in the eyes.
He looks at her.
And there it is. She wonders how she missed it and for how long.
He’s already gone. He’s already looking back at her, politely, coolly, a little sadly, from some other place far off in the future.
He’s gone.
Just like her baby.
Heads or Tails, Susi?
Do I have a problem with gambling? No! I’ve got a problem with winning! Ha! That’s a joke I heard once. I don’t know if I told it right, though. It’s not really that funny.
So, you want to know about the first time I gambled. Yeah, I remember. It was Anzac Day and I was sixteen. I was down at the Newport Arms. You know, it’s the one day of the year you’re allowed to play two up until midnight. It’s legislated! Only in Oz, eh?
It’s a good atmosphere in the pubs on Anzac Day. A lot of old codgers. And you’ve got this big, excited circle of people standing around a guy in the middle, who tosses the coins. He’s normally a bit of a performer. He uses a special little wooden stick and the coins go spinning up into the sky and everybody looks up and watches them come down. The way it works is everybody bets with one another. You just hold up your money in the air and call out ten on heads, or whatever.
It was the first 2-Up game I’d ever seen, so I was watching for a while, seeing how it worked. I was mostly watching these girls, ’cos they were pretty easy on the eye. They were there with their grandpa, I think, they called him Pop. He was wearing one of them old-fashioned hats. He called them all “Susi” for some reason. They were all four putting away the beer. Jeez, were they into the game! They bet on every toss and they’d be yelling out, just like the men, “Head ’em up!” or “Tail ’em up!”
When one of them won, their grandfather would do a little old-fashioned dance with them. Like a waltz. Just a couple of little steps whirling them around. And then they’d be back, holding up their cash, yelling and laughing, giving each other high fives.
So finally I got up the guts to have a go. Bet five bucks on tails and won. I was hooked. Mate, I loved it. I can still see those coins flipping and turning in the moonlight and those three girls jumping up and down and hugging their grandpa.
Oh, yeah, I was hooked. Big time.