CHAPTER 23
The birthday dinners had started in their mid-twenties. They were Lyn’s idea. “No partners,” she had said. “Just the three of us. Seeing as we never give each other presents, it could be our present to ourselves.”
“How very sisterly,” said Cat. “How very triplety.”
“It’s a wonderful idea. I second it!” Gemma interrupted, as Lyn began to pinch her nose. “I know! We can each have our own birthday cake!”
And so the annual drunken Birthday Bash became an institution.
So you could say it was all Lyn’s fault really.
This year they went to a new seafood restaurant in Cockle Bay, with shiny wooden floorboards, disdainful white walls, and sleek chrome chairs. The kitchen was a square box in the center of the room with narrow, horizontal windows revealing bobbing chefs’ hats and occasional, rather alarming, fiery explosions.
“I hate it when you can see the kitchen staff,” said Lyn. “It makes me feel stressed.”
“You love feeling stressed,” said Cat.
“You don’t know me at all.”
“Oh no. You’re just a casual acquaintance.”
A waitress with a blue-and-white-striped apron and a distressing row of silver studs under her bottom lip appeared at their table, her arms stretched wide around a giant blackboard. “Tonight’s specials,” she said, plunking down the board and flexing her fingers. “We’re out of oysters and scallops, blue-eyed cod, and trout.”
“Why don’t you just rub out what you don’t have?” asked Cat. “Is it just to torture us?”
The waitress shrugged, and her eyes flickered. “Ha-ha.”
“Let’s share the seafood fondue,” interrupted Gemma.
“Could we get this opened soon, do you think?” asked Lyn pointedly, nodding her head at Michael’s contribution to the evening—a bottle of Bollinger.
“What’s the occasion, ladies?” sighed the waitress, sounding like a jaded hooker, as she lifted an expert elbow, popped the cork, and began to pour their glasses.
“It’s our birthday,” said Gemma. “We’re triplets!”
“Yeah? Oh, yeah?” The hand holding the bottle hovered precariously off course as she looked at them. Lyn reached over and navigated the glass under the liquid.
“How cool!” The waitress grinned. “Hey! You two are the same, right!”
“Five bucks and you can get your photo taken with us,” said Cat.
After their first sips of champagne, their moods became fizzy and frivolous. Lyn suddenly revealed a bizarre phobia about parking lots, at which Cat and Gemma howled with delight. “Thanks for your sensitivity,” she said.
“All parking lots?” asked Cat. “Do they have to be like, I don’t know, twenty-four-hour parking lots to be scary?”
“Actually, I’m sure I’ve got that phobia too,” said Gemma.
“You do not,” said Lyn. “I’m the interesting one.”
“O.K., if we’re doing secrets,” said Cat and revealed that a few months after breaking up with Dan she’d gotten drunk and slept with her boss.
Gemma was genuinely shocked. “But I met him at your office. He was a gray-haired man in a suit and tie! I can’t believe you slept with such a grown-up!”
“I sleep with a forty-year-old every night,” commented Lyn.
“Oh, don’t worry, Michael’s not a grown-up.”
“He’ll be relieved to hear that.”
“So what secrets have you got, Gemma?” asked Cat. “As if we wouldn’t already know them.”
Gemma, her mouth full of bread roll, considered sharing the secret she’d been lugging around for the last twelve years: My dead fiancé was…problematic.
“Look at her! Trying to look mysterious,” giggled Lyn.
She was never going to tell them. It was too complicated and at the same time too simple.
She said, “Once I stole ten dollars from Mum’s purse to buy cigarettes.”
“That was me, you idiot!” said Cat.
“How are we doing? We ready to move on to that second bottle yet?” The waitress had become their good mate, Olivia, who lived at Padstow and was taking a massage course and had a pregnant sister-in-law and had never met triplets, although her best friend in primary school was a twin.
Olivia had clearly decided they were lovable freaks of nature, adorable madcaps. As a result, the three of them were starting to behave like, in Nana Kettle’s words, “real characters!”
A waiter laden with seafood platters struggled by. “Triplets!” called Olivia proudly, pointing downward fingers at their heads. Obligingly, they all beamed and gave quirky waves.
The waiter smiled cautiously.
“Retard,” said Olivia. “By the way, don’t look now, but that man over there—I said don’t look!”
They all turned back to look at her guiltily. “He asked if you could keep the noise down. I’m like, Take a chill pill, wanker! So, I reckon, crank up the volume! He needs to get a life.”
They promised her they’d do their best to be even noisier.
She disappeared. “She’s sort of cool, that Olivia,” said Lyn. “I think I’m going to start being cooler now I’m thirty-four.”
“Cool people, like Olivia, like me, are born cool,” said Cat. “You can’t change your fundamental dorky personality.”
“That’s not true!” cried Lyn. “You can be whoever you want to be!”
“Don’t give me that self-help psychobabble bullshit.”
“No fighting, please,” said Gemma. “It’s bad for the baby.”
With the baby due in just three weeks, she was feeling superior and ladylike in her sobriety, carefully monitoring her first glass of champagne while Lyn and Cat were draining their third.
Cat and Lyn both looked at her stomach.
“Bad for Cat’s baby,” observed Lyn.
“Don’t start,” said Cat dangerously.
“I think I see our mains!” interrupted Gemma, even though she didn’t.
“There’s something I need to say about this,” said Lyn.
“I do see our mains!”
“Just say it, Lyn,” said Cat.
“Oh! I nearly forgot!” Gemma cried. “Guess what I brought tonight!”
She nearly lost her balance reaching down for her bag, which for some reason didn’t want to be picked up.
The woman at the table next to them said something that Gemma couldn’t hear.
“I beg your pardon?”
“She said the strap’s caught around your chair leg. Here. Stand up.”
The woman’s dining companion reached over and dislodged her bag. He was short and broad, like Charlie, except fair, with a sunburned nose and a grin that scrunched his eyes.
“Thank you,” said Gemma. “How does that always happen?”
“A mystery,” agreed the man.
Cat rolled her eyes as the man sat back down. “The mystery is why there’s always a good-hearted bloke around whenever Gemma does her damsel-in-distress thing.”
Gemma pulled three crumpled stained envelopes out of her bag. “Do you remember when Miss Ellis made us write letters to ourselves to read in twenty years’ time?”
Blank looks.
“Religion class. We were fourteen.”
“That’s right,” said Lyn. “She was talking about achieving your dreams. It was a pointless goal-setting exercise! You need to set short-term, medium-term—”
“What? You’ve got all our letters? You managed to keep them for twenty years without losing them?” Cat reached out to grab them. “Let me see!”
“Nope. Not until after we sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ That’s when we officially turn thirty-four.”
The distraction was successful. Lyn and Cat began an impassioned argument about whether Miss Ellis’s pink fluffy cardigans indicated latent lesbian tendencies, while Gemma sat quietly and wondered if the tiny person currently kicking her with such energetic determination was perhaps a boy.
Yesterday, she’d walked by a little boy and his father in the aisle of Woolies. They were buying globes.
“Dad? How does a light globe work?” the little boy asked, frowning with masculine concentration.
As Gemma walked by with her wagon, the father was squatting down, pulling a globe from its cardboard box.
Maybe the baby would be a little boy like that.
One of those sturdy, serious, interested little boys.
Freckles.
Long, curvy eyelashes.
Their three birthday cakes arrived with dozens of wildly crackling sparklers. The lights were dimmed, and Olivia led a choir of waiters and waitresses hollering three over-the-top renditions of “Happy Birthday.” Eventually, the whole restaurant seemed to be singing. The final round of applause was ridiculous, Olivia shouting “Hip, hip!” and the restaurant responding “Hooray!” thumping their feet on the floor, as if they were in a raunchy theater restaurant, not a Good Food Guide recommendation.
Gemma watched her sisters’ laughing faces illuminated by the fizzing sparklers, and remembered how excited their placid Nana Leonard used to become on their birthday.
“Make a wish, girls!” she’d say, fervently clasping her hands, as the three of them stood in a jostling row to blow out the candles on their shared cake. “Make a special wish!” It was as if she truly believed their birthday wishes could and would come true and as a result Gemma would construct elaborate wishes with multiple clauses: like school being canceled forever and living in a chocolate house and becoming a ballerina and Daddy finally coming back home.
The lights came back on and they blinked at one another. Olivia took their cakes away for cutting, promising to take some home for herself.
“Time to hear from our fourteen-year-old selves,” ordered Cat. Her eyes were glassy. “Hand ’em over.”
“We’ll each read out our own letters.” Lyn’s words were blurring around the edges.
So that’s what they did.
Cat went first.
Dear ME,
This is a letter from you in your past. You probably don’t even remember it but once you had to do these STUPID, SHITTY things called religion lessons with this IDIOT teacher who PISSES ME RIGHT OFF. Glad you’re finally FREE, I bet! I bet you’re just laughing your head off remembering how boring school was and how you felt like you were in PRISON. (By the way, Gemma is sitting in front of me sucking up to the teacher like you would not believe. Meanwhile Lyn has got her arm wrapped around her page as if I’ll try and steal her future for God’s sake.)
So—I’ve got to tell you what I hope you’ve achieved.
Here it is:
You should drive a red MX5.
You should have traveled EVERYWHERE.
You should have a LOT of money.
You should have a tattoo.
You should have your own really cool apartment.
You should go to any concert that you want. GO RIGHT NOW IF YOU WANT! COS YOU CAN, RIGHT? So just go!
You should be very SUCCESSFUL—I’m not sure in what. You are probably a famous war correspondent. (I hope they haven’t got world peace yet. There are still wars, right?)
That’s about it. I don’t think you should be married yet. Wait till you’re 35. You don’t want to ruin your whole life like Mum did.
From, CATRIONA KETTLE, AGED 14.
Then Lyn:
Dear Me in Twenty Years’ Time,
GOALS YOU SHOULD HAVE ACHIEVED BY NOW ARE:
Enough marks to do Hotel Management at uni.
Travel to exciting places.
Your own successful catering business.
A husband with a voice like Mr. Gordon’s. (Husband should adore you and love you and be romantic and give you flowers.)
A big, beautiful house with views of Sydney Harbour.
Lots of beautiful clothes in a walk-in wardrobe.
One daughter named Madeline, one son named Harrison (after Harrison Ford. Mmmm, mmmm!).
Good luck and good-bye,
LYNETTE KETTLE.
And finally Gemma:
Ahoy there, Gemma!
It’s me, Gemma!
I’m fourteen.
You’re thirty-four!
Wow!
Anyway, here’s what you should have achieved by now:
A degree in something or other.
A career in something or other.
A HUNKY, SPUNKY husband whose name begins with either M, S, G, C, X, or P!
Four children. Two girls and two boys. Order should be Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl (but I can be flexible).
So—have you done it?? I hope so! If not, why not?
Lots of love from Gemma.
P.S. Hey! You’ve had sex. What was it like???!!! AAAGGGGH!
P.P.S. Who did it first? You, Cat, or Lyn??? AAAAGGGGH!
P.P.S. Give that hunky, spunky husband a big kiss and tell him it’s from your fourteen-year-old self!
“Wow,” said Lyn. “We were so, so…”
“Exactly the same,” said Cat.
“Different,” said Gemma.
It wasn’t so much the things that her fourteen-year-old self wanted. It was the fact that she so blissfully, so completely, believed she had a right to want anything.
Ahoy there, Gemma! I’m sorry, but I seem to have stuffed things up. I forgot. I’m not sure what I forgot. But I forgot it.
She thought of her mother, the day of Cat’s court case, watching Cat and Lyn obviously locked in some sort of vicious argument. “Those two need to let go!” she’d said. “What about me, Mum?” Gemma had asked frivolously. “What do I need to do?” “You’re the opposite. You need to hold on, of course. Hold on to something. Hold on to anything!”
“So, Lyn, all you need is that little boy called Harrison and you’ve achieved everything you ever dreamed,” said Cat.
“Yes, I know. I’m so boring.”
“You said it, not me.”
“Oh, stop it! The two of you. Just stop it.” Gemma could feel something indefinable inflating within her.
Cat and Lyn ignored her. They both took drowning gulps from their glasses.
“I note that your letter didn’t even mention children,” Lyn said to Cat.
“It wasn’t a contract.”
“It’s just interesting.”
“You know, Lyn, not everything is your business.”
“It is my business! Gemma’s baby is my niece or nephew. And I think children should be with their parents. That’s why—”
She stopped, took a breath and brushed at some crumbs on the tablecloth with the back of her hand.
“That’s why what?” asked Gemma.
“That’s why I called Charlie to tell him you’re pregnant.”
Gemma nearly knocked over her glass. “What did he say?”
“He wasn’t there,” admitted Lyn. “I didn’t leave a message. But I’m calling him again. I feel really strongly about this.”
Gemma watched as Cat began to tremble.
“You bitch. You absolute bitch.”
“Cat. It’s not about you.”
“It is about me. This is my baby!”
But it’s not, thought Gemma, with surprise. It’s my baby.
“Do you know how a lightbulb works?” she asked Cat.
“Oh, shut up, Gemma! This is serious!”
Charlie would know.
It seemed like the purest, most absolute truth of her entire life.
That Charlie would know how a lightbulb worked. And he’d pull a funny face. And he’d explain it so well that electricity would seem like something magical. And Gemma didn’t want to miss it. She wanted to be there, loving them both in the bright, white light of Woolworth’s.
“The thing is,” she began.
She knew what she was about to say was unbearably cruel, but she said it anyway:
“I’ve changed my mind.”