CHAPTER 19
I am doing nothing wrong, thought Lyn. She sat at her desk listening to the distant, singsong sound of her computer dialing up its Internet connection.
She wasn’t hurting Michael. The only person who could conceivably think that was, well, Michael. She knew he’d be hurt. If the situation were reversed, she’d be hurt.
But it was nothing. The whole thing was nothing.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t told him straightaway about the “blast from the past” e-mail from her ex-boyfriend Hank. She’d even printed off a copy and coyly presented it to him. Michael had been obligingly macho in his response.
“Hmmm. ‘Fond memories of our time in Spain.’ This guy better watch himself!”
Hank’s erotic appearances in her dreams weren’t the problem. After all, more often than not, Michael also featured, looking on with benign approval. (In one he cheerfully mopped the kitchen floor and said “shift your feet” while Hank did interesting things to her up against the fridge.)
Everyone knew that sexual fantasies were perfectly acceptable. Healthy. Even necessary!
Michael probably had them about Sandra Sully on Channel 10. Lyn often caught him smiling fondly back at the television while he watched the late news.
So the fantasies weren’t a problem. (In fact, their sex life had picked up recently. What did it matter if the credit went to Hank and Sandra?)
And the problem wasn’t that she and Hank were now e-mailing quite regularly. Hank was happily married. He wrote in rather dull detail about his wife and his two little boys. There was even talk of him coming to Sydney for business.
The betrayal was simply this:
She had just written an e-mail to Hank about her “little problem.”
Her secret little problem with parking lots.
It had happened twice more since the first time with Maddie. Once she was in an underground parking lot in the city, running late for a meeting. The next time she was doing the grocery shopping. Both times had been equally horrific. Both times she had been convinced, no, this time, I’m really going to die.
Now, hilariously, she was avoiding parking lots—pretending that it suited her to walk an extra two blocks with a stroller and a laptop. She even found herself looking the other way when she drove past one. Oh, what’s that interesting billboard over there? she would think, swiftly turning her head, as if she could put one over on her sensible, sane self.
Nana Leonard, Maxine’s fragile, wispy mother, had been a nervous woman, or as Frank so delicately put it, “off her bloody rocker.” She became breathless and dizzy in shopping centers, and the older she got, the less and less she ventured out of her home. Nobody ever used the word “agoraphobia,” but it was there in the room with them, a silent, hulking presence, whenever they had a conversation about Nana. “She said she wouldn’t come to afternoon tea after all,” Maxine would say tersely. “Tummy bug.”
By Lyn’s calculations, when Nana died, she hadn’t left her house in two years.
Mental illnesses were hereditary. What if Lyn had been the one marked at birth to end up “off her rocker”? The one the wicked fairy godmother had cursed, This one shall be the nut case!
She had to nip it in the bud!
And so, there were numerous, logical, justifiable reasons why she had chosen to share her little problem with an ex-boyfriend—someone she barely knew—out of all the people in her life.
For starters, Hank was American. Americans were more open about this sort of thing. They liked chatting about deeply embarrassing emotions. They loved weird phobias! There was no such thing as an Aussie Oprah.
Then there was Hank’s profession: He published self-help and self-development books. He spoke a language that most of the people in Lyn’s life found cringe-worthy. He could provide articles and facts and stats and lists of instructions.
Finally, there was the fact that Hank didn’t really know her. He didn’t know, for example, that Lyn was meant to be the sensible one, the calm one.
“There’s this special tranquillity about you,” Michael had said once, and she’d treasured that remark, especially when he followed it up with, “which is most definitely missing in your mad sisters!”
Hank didn’t know that Lyn had no right to feel anxious when everyone knew her life was so wonderful, while Cat’s was falling to pieces and Gemma couldn’t seem to make one.
It made perfect sense to tell someone on the other side of the world, someone who wouldn’t tease or guffaw or say with disappointment, “But that’s not like you, Lyn!”
“You haven’t published a book on parkinglotaphobia by any chance, have you?” she had written to Hank, trying to sound wry and self-deprecating, not panicky and weird.
She put her elbows on her desk, rested her head in the palms of her hands, and watched the little blue stripe zip across her computer screen.
“Lyn! Have you seen my mobile?” called out Michael.
She picked up the phone on her desk and dialed Michael’s mobile number.
“Don’t worry, honey!” There was a banging of feet. “I think I hear it ringing!”
“I have to say, these tubby creatures set my teeth on edge,” commented Maxine, as she helped Lyn decorate a giant, Teletubby-shaped birthday cake the night before Maddie’s second birthday.
“Gemma said she had nightmares after she watched Maddie’s latest video.” Lyn formed a licorice stick into a smile and pressed it down on the bright yellow icing. “She was being attacked by feral Teletubbies.”
“That child says the strangest things.” Maxine frowned distractedly at the garishly colored photo in the recipe book.
“That child is thirty-three.”
“Humph.”
Lyn opened a packet of M&M’s and observed her mother. She was leaning forward and a lock of red hair had escaped from behind her ear.
“I think I know what they’ve been up to,” Michael had whispered when Frank and Maxine came breezing into the house that evening, both of them looking giggly and pink.
“Are you growing your hair, Mum?” asked Lyn suddenly, suspiciously.
Maxine pushed her hair back behind her ear. “Just a little.”
“For Dad?”
“Don’t be silly.”
Oh, sure. Dad wanted his long-haired sixties babe back.
She changed the subject. “You know Cat’s not coming tomorrow? She hasn’t seen Maddie now for weeks, months even. I understand, but—”
“But you don’t.”
“No, I don’t at all! Her own niece’s birthday party. I told her that Maddie has been asking for her!”
That was the part she found inconceivable. It broke her heart to see Maddie’s head pop up hopefully when the doorbell rang. “My Cat?”
“A miscarriage and a marriage breakup in the space of a few weeks is a lot to handle. She adores Maddie. You know that.”
“I know.” Lyn scratched irritably at her neck and wondered if she was coming down with the flu. Her whole body felt like it had been rubbed with sandpaper.
“Cat seems to think she’s lost her chance of having children,” said Maxine. “I think it genuinely hurts her to see Maddie.”
“She’s being overdramatic,” said Lyn. “She’s young enough to meet someone new and still have children. What’s she going to do? Avoid Maddie for the rest of her life?”
Maxine raised her eyebrows. “Lyn. She deserves a little slack right now.”
Lyn dotted M&M’s around the Teletubby’s head and thought, Well, I’ve been giving Cat slack her whole life. Just because you’ve suddenly turned into Doris Day.
She wondered whether her mother would disapprove if she knew she was trying to get pregnant again. Michael had convinced her that three months after Cat’s miscarriage was a long enough waiting period.
She’d agreed but with conflicting emotions. Besides feeling guilty about Cat, she sometimes wondered if she really did want another baby. How could her already overcrammed life cope?
Then she remembered the wonder of a wrinkly, wise little face, miniature fingernails, that exquisite clean-baby smell. And then she remembered cracked nipples, bleary-eyed 3-A.M. feeds, and the earsplitting scream of a baby who has been fed, changed, and burped and should therefore have no reason to cry.
Oh, it was all so simple for Michael!
Maxine said, “Apparently Gemma and Cat are thinking of moving in together.”
Lyn looked up sharply. “How incredibly stupid. They’ll kill each other.”
“That’s what I said. But Cat wants to buy Dan out of the flat and Gemma could help her pay the mortgage. At least it would be more permanent than this house-sitting nonsense.”
“She likes house-sitting,” said Lyn, even though she’d said exactly the same thing herself before. “Gemma doesn’t have any money. I don’t see why she has to help pay off Cat’s mortgage.”
“Maybe if she has to pay rent she’ll be forced into taking on a proper full-time job. A career, for heaven’s sake,” said Maxine.
Lyn found herself passionately in favor of Gemma’s bohemian lifestyle. “Gemma doesn’t want a career!”
“Gemma doesn’t need a career.” Frank strolled into the kitchen and scraped a finger around the icing bowl. He and Michael had been giving Maddie a bath, and his short-sleeved shirt was drenched. “She’s making a mozza from this online trading stuff.”
“Really?” Lyn didn’t believe it. Gemma was always trying to impress Frank with outlandish stories.
“She does it all by intuition. Says it’s like roulette.”
“Ridiculous!” said Lyn and Maxine simultaneously.
“Did you two get into the bath with her?” asked Lyn as Michael appeared looking even wetter than Frank. Even his hair was wet.
“She kept throwing things at us,” he explained. “It was worth it because it put her in a good mood. I only had to listen to her read me Good Night, Little Beartwice.”
Maddie had recently decided to take on responsibility for reading bedtime stories. She flipped the pages, babbling in perfect imitation of the excited up-and-down rhythms of her parents’ reading voices, sneaking little glances at them to make sure they were enjoying the story.
“Are you talking about Gemma’s shares?” asked Michael. “Because from what she’s said to me, I think her intuition is based on some pretty astute reading of the financial pages.”
Lyn and her parents stared at him in disbelief. That seemed even less likely.
“Gemma only pretends to be a ditz,” Michael told them. He looked at the cake and with his arms held close to his side and his hands splayed began to totter around saying in a squeaky voice, “Oooh, yummy!”
“What on earth is he doing?” asked Maxine.
“He’s being a Teletubby,” said Lyn. Frank, who had never seen the Teletubbies but didn’t like to miss an opportunity to be stupid, began to totter around in a similar fashion, while Maxine giggled.
Watching them, Lyn scratched viciously at something invisible on her arm and wondered if her parents had only pretended to hate each other for all those years.
“I must be such a bitch,” Lyn said later that night, after her parents had left and she and Michael were packing the dishwasher. “I can’t bear the fact that my parents are happy, and I’m sick of feeling sorry for Cat.”
“You’re a very sweet bitch,” said Michael. He stuck his thumbs and fingers out like a rap singer and waved his arms around, “Yo mah bitch.”
Lyn smiled and had a sudden memory of Cat and Dan dancing together at Michael’s fortieth. They were laughing their heads off while they parodied rap moves, but they were actually pretty good, their bodies loose and rhythmic.
“Actually, I do feel sorry for Cat,” she said, removing the dishwasher powder from Michael’s hands before he overfilled it. “Sometimes, it makes me want to cry.”
“O.K., I think I’m having trouble following this conversation.”
The day of Cat’s court case was when Lyn’s sympathy had first begun to fray around the edges.
Frank, Maxine, Nana Kettle, Lyn, and Gemma all came to give their support. The atmosphere, Lyn felt, was inappropriately festive.
Cat could have killed herself that night. She could have killed someone else. Drunk drivers killed people, for heaven’s sake!
Frank was especially cheery, bouncing around, hugging Cat to him, and telling her he’d arrange the breakout when she got sent to jail.
“Managed to get away from work, did you, Dad?” asked Lyn. “That’s nice.”
Very nice. He’d missed Lyn’s university graduation and Maddie’s christening because he couldn’t take time off work but Cat’s drink-driving charge—oh well, that was a special event.
“Quite a crowd here,” said Cat’s solicitor as she shook hands with each of them outside the courthouse.
“It’s a nice day out for us all!” beamed Nana Kettle.
“They’re giving her a penalty, Gwen,” said Maxine. “Not an award.”
“Maxine, I’m not senile!” snapped Nana. She gestured at her multicolored Sydney Olympic Games Volunteers shirt. “That’s why I’m wearing this. So that the judge will see that Cat comes from a real community-minded family!”
She gave the solicitor a cunning look. “Smart thinking, eh?”
The solicitor blinked. “Yes, indeed.”
As if to prove her point, a man passing by saw the familiar uniform and called out, “Good one, love!” and gave her a thumbs-up signal. Nana smiled graciously and waved one hand at him like the queen.
In fact, Nana had done about five minutes volunteering before she tripped and twisted her ankle. She spent the next two weeks enjoying the events on TV. Her ankle was fine by the time of the Volunteers’ Tickertape Parade. She marched through showers of colored paper with her head high, giving her regal wave to the cheering crowds.
“Cat’s a good girl really,” Nana told the solicitor. “Although she does like a little drink now and then.”
Gemma looked at Lyn and began to laugh with her usual abandon.
“Her sisters are terribly upset,” confided Nana.
Gemma made a strangled sound.
Cat didn’t say anything. She was wearing sunglasses and looked pale and bad-tempered and not at all repentant.
The Kettle family squeezed into a row of seats at the front of the room. Lyn wondered if she should warn them not to applaud. Frank and Maxine held hands like teenagers at the movies. Nana complained loudly about the uncomfortable seats. Gemma, who was sitting next to Lyn, twisted back and forth, checking out the audience.
“What are you doing?” asked Lyn.
“Just seeing if there are any cute criminals.”
“What happened to Charlie?”
“Long gone.”
“Because of Cat?”
“Of course because of Cat.”
“That’s a bit sad.”
Gemma swung back around. “Well, you’re the one who said I should break up with him. The day Dan moved his things out.”
“If it wasn’t going anywhere!”
“Well, I guess it wasn’t going anywhere.” She was dismissive. Lyn took out her Palm Pilot and began scrolling through her day’s diary entries. Gemma looked at it and scrunched up her nose.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Lyn sighed. “It’s not pretentious. It’s practical.”
“Whatever.”
They had to sit through six dull cases before it was Cat’s turn, and by then the Kettle family was starting to fidget and whisper.
The magistrate herself seemed bored and businesslike. She frowned deeply as she flipped through the evidence of Cat’s driving records. “Fifteen speeding offenses in the last five years,” she remarked.
Maxine coughed meaningfully. Gemma elbowed Lyn, and they both dropped their heads, sharing Cat’s guilt.
The magistrate’s face remained bland as the solicitor presented affidavits to prove Cat had been overwrought due to her miscarriage and the breakdown of her marriage.
“My client regrets her actions. They were the result of severe and unusual stress.”
“We all suffer stress,” the magistrate commented irritably, but she sentenced Cat to only a six-month license suspension and a thousand-dollar fine.
“The best you could have hoped for,” the solicitor said afterward.
“Six months will fly by!” agreed Frank. “Lyn and Gemma can give you lifts!”
Lyn gritted her teeth. “Or you can just pretend you’ve still got a license and keep driving.”
Everybody turned on her.
“What a silly thing to say, Lyn!”
“That wouldn’t be a good idea,” The solicitor spoke without irony. “The risk is too high.”
Lyn groaned and suppressed a childish desire to tattle, Ask her about the truck she’s been driving!
“I was joking,” she said.
Cat pulled her to one side as they all walked toward their cars.
“I’ve given back the truck to the smash repairers. So don’t get all f*cking sanctimonious.”
Lyn felt her pulse accelerate in response to Cat’s contemptuous tone. It was like turning the dial on her gas stove. This is my biological fight or flight response, she reminded herself. Breathe! Cat was the only person who could make her feel this angry. It was like every fight they’d ever had over the past thirty years was all part of the one endless argument. At any moment, without notice, it could be started again, hurtling them straight into the middle of irrational, out-of-control, name-calling fury.
“Do you know how hard it was for me to get here today?” she said furiously.
“You came because you wanted to gloat, and now you’re disappointed because you think nobody took it seriously enough.”
The colossal injustice of the first accusation, combined with the element of truth in her second, made Lyn want to pick up her briefcase and slam it into Cat’s face.
“That night, I was going to take the blame for you! I was going to try and get you out of it!”
Cat wasn’t listening. “I’m not an idiot. Do you think I don’t know I could have killed somebody? I know it! I think about it!”
“Well, good,” said Lyn nastily. “Because it’s true.” Suddenly Lyn felt her fury slide away, leaving her weak with remorse. “O.K. then. Well. Want to go for a run this weekend? Do the Coogee to Bondi?”
“Oh sure! I’d love to!” Cat hammed it up, and they grinned at the absurdity of themselves. “Could I trouble you for a lift?”
Lyn rolled her eyes. “Of course.”
It was always like that. They never said sorry. They just threw down their still-loaded weapons, ready for next time.
The weather chose to be kind for Maddie’s birthday. The air was crisp, the sun warm, and it was a pleasure to look at the sky. A birthday picnic at Clontarf Beach would be just right.
Maddie, thankfully, had woken up as sweet and sunny as the weather, but Lyn’s cold had gotten considerably worse. She dosed herself up on aspirin and felt wooly-headed, muffled from the world.
They were just about to leave the house when the phone rang.
“It’s for you, Lyn,” called Michael.
She called back, “Take a message! We have to get going!”
A couple of minutes later he came down into the kitchen and picked up the giant picnic basket to take out to the car.
“Who was it?” asked Lyn. She was squatting down, retying the laces on Maddie’s shoes. Maddie’s hands rested gently on her head.
“It was Hank.”
She looked at the bright red laces on Maddie’s shoes and felt as caught out as if she’d been unfaithful to him.
“Did he leave a message?”
“Yes. He said he got your e-mail about your panic attacks and to hang in there, because you’re not alone, and he’s got lots of really helpful information he’s putting together for you.”
Lyn finished tying up Maddie’s shoelaces and stood up, swinging her onto her hip. “O.K. Look. It’s nothing.”
“It’s something.” He was agitated, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, swinging the picnic basket. “You’re telling some bloody ex-boyfriend your problems. Some strange guy I’ve never met telling me about my wife’s problems!”
Lyn put a hand on his forearm and deliberately allowed a fragile note to creep into her voice. “I’ve got a cold. I’m really feeling terrible. Can we please talk about it after the party?”
He immediately, as she knew he would, lifted Maddie out of her arms and said without malice, “Of course.”
Oh, Georgina, no wonder you cried when I stole him.
With her head heavy against the passenger car seat and the Teletubby birthday cake safely on her lap, Lyn let her eyelids sink and wondered if she’d make it through the day.
Maddie kicked and chattered in her car seat between Kara and one of her more likable best friends, Gina. The girls were taking turns playing Around and Around the Garden, like a teddy bear tracing a circle on Maddie’s palm, causing her to chortle with rising anticipation until they tickled her tummy and she completely dissolved.
Every time she laughed, everyone in the car laughed.
As they pulled up at a set of lights on the Spit Road, there was a loud bip of a horn.
Michael looked out his window and said, “Look who made it after all.”
Lyn leaned forward and saw Cat in the passenger seat of Gemma’s car. They were both waving extravagantly. Cat wound down her window and held out a bunch of brightly colored balloons.
Watching their lips move excitedly and silently reminded Lyn of some moment in her life when she had understood something, for the first time. Something sad and inevitable. Her blocked sinuses and muffled head wouldn’t let her pin down the memory.
The lights changed and Gemma’s car sped off down toward the blue-green glitter of the harbor, the balloons still bobbing merrily out of Cat’s window.
Maddie went wild when they arrived at Clontarf and saw Gemma and Cat already unpacking picnic things and tying balloons to a tree.
“Mummy! Look! Cat! Gem!”
“This O.K.?” called out Cat.
Lyn waved an approving hand, and Maddie went running drunkenly across the grass to be scooped up by Cat and spun around.
Kara and Gina didn’t offer to carry anything from the car. They also went straight to Cat, both of them pulling out sheets of paper from their knapsacks. Lyn craned her neck to watch as the three of them bent their heads over the papers, the two girls laughing and pointing. She wished Kara could be as relaxed and natural with her.
“What do you think those three are talking about?” she asked Michael, as she slammed shut the boot.
“Homework?”
“In your dreams.”
The birthday picnic was well under way when Lyn got a call on her mobile from her play-group friend, Kate. They weren’t coming because her little boy, Jack, had just come down with chicken pox.
“Maddie probably has it too,” said Kate. “Nicole’s kid was the culprit; she would have been contagious at Julie’s lunch. Anyway, good to get it crossed off! Some parents have ‘pox parties’ to pass it around.”
“I had Maddie immunized.”
“Oh, I see. Well, I looked into it obviously but—”
A child roared in the background, so Lyn was spared the sweetly veiled criticism she knew she was about to receive. She felt far too woozy for it.
“You know, you missed out on chicken pox, Lyn.” Maxine looked up from her foldout chair, where she was delicately balancing a paper plate on her knees. “Gemma and Cat caught it when they went on that Christmas holiday with their father.”
“Oh, don’t remind their father,” said Frank. “What a nightmare.”
Now she remembered that memory. It was the day Cat and Gemma drove off in Frank’s car for the water-slide holiday. They were both up on their knees in the backseat, their faces pressed against the back window, shouting things to her that she couldn’t hear.
Different things will happen to us, six-year-old Lyn had realized and felt a little sad and shocked but also almost immediately accepting. It was logical. It made sense. There was nothing you could do about it.
“We probably infected about a thousand kids on that water slide,” said Cat.
“Oh shit,” said Lyn. She was thinking about Julie’s lunch and how Nicole’s runny-nosed little girl had wrapped her arms around Lyn’s knees.
Everyone looked at her.
“I think I’ve got chicken pox.”
Gemma patted her shoulder in a motherly fashion. “Nooo, you’ve just got a little cold!”
Lyn pushed back her cardigan sleeve to look at her wrist where she’d been scratching. There was a tiny little red sore. “I think this is the start of the spots.”
Michael dropped his bread roll onto his plate.
“But what if you’re pregnant? Is it dangerous?”
“Pregnant?” said Cat. She was sitting cross-legged on the picnic rug, a bottle of beer in her hand. “Are you trying to have another baby?”
Lyn watched Cat and Gemma exchange loaded looks and closed her eyes. How many more people would she upset today? Suddenly she felt unbearably ill. She opened her eyes again.
“Where’s Maddie?”
Nobody took any notice of her question.
“So do you think you are pregnant?” asked Cat.
“Where is Maddie?”
She got to her knees on the rug and looked around wildly, fear clenching her heart.
“She’s right there with Kara and her friend.” Maxine looked closely at Lyn. “Darling, I don’t think you are well. Feel her forehead, Gemma.”
Lyn saw that Maddie was in fact only a few feet away, sitting on Kara’s lap.
She collapsed back down on the blanket and looked mutely at her family.
Gemma put her hand against her forehead and announced, “She’s burning up!”
“Right,” Michael stood up. “We’re getting you home.”
“You’re not to worry about Maddie,” ordered Maxine.
Gemma said, “We’ll sing her “‘Happy Birthday.’”
And before she knew it, Michael and Frank were on either side of her, practically carrying her off to the car.
“I’m not paralyzed,” she protested.
But her legs did feel strangely wobbly and her head was spinning and it was rather nice to be carried off, away from all those plates of food that needed handing around, candles that needed lighting, and Cat’s hard, closed-up face.