CHAPTER 26
At around 9 P.M. the night before Cat met Dan in the park, while Nana Kettle was eating a little snack of grilled cheese on toast, with a nice cup of tea and watching her favorite recorded episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, a brick came smashing through a glass pane on her back door and landed with a thud on the floor.
Nana heard a strange noise and naturally assumed it was Pop’s bloody dog. She enjoyed being cross with the dog and immediately put the video on pause.
“What have you done this time, you silly, no-good animal?” she called out querulously, as if for Pop’s benefit. Yelling at the dog made her feel like Les was still alive, working away on some project in the back room. She could almost hear him calling back, “I’ll see to it, love! You stay where you are.”
It used to drive her mad the way Les spoiled that damned dog.
She was on her feet, at the TV room door, muttering crossly to herself, when she heard footsteps.
“Who’s that?” she called out, annoyed rather than frightened, as she walked down the hallway. Frank and her granddaughters all had keys. But, really, it was polite to knock.
That’s when a strange person pounded toward her, somebody she didn’t know, in her own house, and a tremendous wave of fear shot vertically through her body, from the soles of her feet and into her mouth.
He came straight for her, without hesitating, as if he’d been expecting her, and punched her in the face.
She fell. Her shoulder banged painfully against the wall.
For a few seconds, her world turned misty red. Her eyes blurred with tears. She could feel blood coming out of her nose.
In the TV room, the video came back on. “What do you want to do? Have a go or take the dough?” Eddie McGuire asked the contestant.
She could hear the boy in her bedroom, pulling out drawers, touching her things.
I bet you think I’m one of those stupid old biddies who keeps all her money under the bed, she thought to herself. Well, too bad it’s all safe and sound in the Commonwealth Bank, matey!
Later, she found that he took her purse, her best jewelry, her jar of two-dollar coins for the slots, and a crisp $10 bill she had ready on the dining room table to include in Kara’s birthday card. He also took the brand-new camera that she’d won in a late night talk-back radio competition for knowing how much the colt was worth in The Man from Snowy River.
He spent twenty minutes walking through her house, picking and choosing what he liked, as if he were bloody shopping.
Then he walked straight out the front door, without looking at her.
The dog appeared from wherever he’d been skulking and for a full five minutes, did nothing but run around and around in distressed circles, before stopping to lick the side of her face, panting and whimpering.
She tried to get up, but her arm wouldn’t work.
She tried again and gave up. “Les,” said Nana into the carpet.
Around ten o’clock the next day, Bev told her husband, Ken, that it was a bit funny that Gwen Kettle hadn’t been out to water her garden yet. She always watered her garden on a Saturday, and she hadn’t mentioned that she was doing anything special this Saturday. Perhaps Gwen had a visitor? Although there were no strange cars out the front. What did Ken think?
Ken didn’t think anything. So finally, with a little “tsk” sound—it was impossible to have a conversation with a man—Bev went over to investigate, pushing tentatively on her neighbor’s open front door.
When she saw Gwen lying there in the hallway, she went back out onto the front porch and screamed Ken’s name so loud that he nearly put his back out jumping over the retaining wall and running over to see what was the matter.
“For heaven’s sakes, Bev, you took your time,” said Nana.
There was a messy blot of dried blood under her nose.
Bev bent down on arthritic knees to pluck uselessly at Nana’s sleeve and for the first time in her life was entirely incapable of speaking.
Cat caught a cab to the hospital. She sat in the backseat with her hands jammed hard between her knees and imagined a parallel existence where by lucky chance she’d popped by to visit Nana Kettle just at the same time that lowlife prick broke into her house.
Oi! F*ckface! she would have yelled.
When he turned around, she would have kicked him hard in the balls.
As his head bent forward she would have grabbed him by the ears and driven her knee into his face. And then, while he was moaning pathetically on the ground she would have kicked him again and again in the kidneys.
Pick on someone your own size!
Cat saw her family before she saw Nana. They were sitting very straight and still in a little semicircle of chairs around Nana’s bed.
“Oh, good, you’re here,” said Maxine.
Frank didn’t say anything, just held up a hand in acknowledgement. He looked like a man suffering from a fever. His neck was covered in splotches of red.
Gemma, in contrast, was deadly pale. Sal was in her arms, sucking frantically on a pacifier, dark eyes darting back and forth. “Look, Nana, it’s Cat!” said Gemma.
“Hey, Cat,” said Lyn, with a weird contortion of her lips that was presumably meant to be a smile. She was arranging flowers in a vase, her eyes red and watery.
“Nana.” Cat couldn’t finish her cheery hello. Now she could see why everyone looked frozen with shock, as if their faces had just that instant been unexpectedly and painfully slapped.
Seeing Nana was like seeing the attack happen in front of their very eyes.
There was a large bluish bruise smeared across her mouth and a bloody scab on her bottom lip. One arm was in a sling. Her hair was especially distressing. Normally, Nana took a lot of time with her hair, using hot rollers to create a neat cap of snowy white curls. Today it was limp and greasy, flat against her head.
She looked like a frail, ugly old woman. Someone else. Not Cat’s annoyingly spry grandmother.
“Did you hear?” Nana said to her, clutching her hand, as Cat kissed her on the fragile, wrinkled skin of her cheek. “He took the camera I won on the radio. I waited over an hour to get on!”
“We’re going to get you another camera, Gwen,” said Maxine. “An even better one.”
Nana didn’t seem to hear her. She clutched on tight to Cat’s hand. “It was only last week, I got one of those little green cards in my letterbox. And I said to Bev, now what could this be? It says there’s a parcel at the post office for me! I’d forgotten all about winning that competition you see. So Bev said—”
Suddenly, she stopped and looked up at Cat, and her pale blue eyes filled with tears.
“I got quite a fright last night, darling.”
Her voice quavered.
“Yes. I can imagine you did, Nana,” managed Cat.
Frank scraped back his chair and stood up.
“This is bloody—I can’t bloody—this is—Jesus!”
He slammed both his fists violently on the back of his chair.
Nana dropped Cat’s hand and became instantly peremptory. “Calm down, Frank! There’s no need to behave like that. It’s life! Bad things happen!”
They all looked silently at the bruise across her face.
“Hello, Mrs. Kettle!” A nurse broke through their silence, breezing efficiency. “Lots of lovely visitors I see! And look at all those flowers!”
“My back is killing me,” said Nana.
“Well, let’s see what we can do to make you more comfortable. Perhaps you could all come back in a few minutes?”
The nurse looked at them brightly and firmly.
“We’ll go and get some lunch downstairs,” pronounced Lyn. “We won’t be long, Nana.”
“Take your time,” said Nana. “Don’t know about lovely visitors. You’re all such misery heads.”
Gemma went to put Sal in his pram.
“Let your father carry the baby.” Maxine’s eyes were on Frank.
“You want him, Dad?”
“What? Oh yes, of course.” He took the baby into his arms. “Hello, little mate.”
Cat looked at Sal in a bright orange romper suit, a chubby fist clinging to Frank’s shirt. It had become like an old sporting injury: this familiar, reflexive twinge of pain whenever she saw Sal.
“What did Dan want?” asked Lyn as the three of them walked ahead to the elevator.
“He got the job in Paris. He and Angela are going.”
Both Lyn and Gemma turned to look at her with stricken faces.
“I didn’t know,” said Gemma immediately. “Charlie never said anything.”
“You’re not responsible for everything Angela does,” said Cat.
“I thought—” Lyn bit her lip. “Sorry.”
“Yeah. I thought it too,” said Cat as the elevator bell dinged and their parents caught up with them. The doors closed, and Frank suddenly handed Sal over to Gemma and buried his face in his hands. His shoulders shook. It took Cat a confused second to realize that for the first time in her life she was seeing her father cry. He lifted his face and wiped the back of his hand across his nose. His mouth twisted with violent hatred. “I want to kill that bloke.”
At the exact moment that Dan and Angela’s flight was due to leave Sydney, Cat was heaving a giant green garbage bag of junk out onto her grandmother’s front porch, her nose twitching and eyes streaming from the clouds of dust.
Would they hold hands? Make nervous jokes about their new lives together as Sydney rolled away beneath them?
Cat and Maxine were cleaning out Nana’s house: the house she had lived in for over fifty years. Nana was moving into a “lifestyle resort exclusively for over fifty-fives.”
“Of course, it’s a retirement village,” said Nana, showing them the glossy brochure with its pictures of white-haired couples ecstatically clinking champagne glasses on their “spacious balconies.” “I’m not stupid. Full of silly old biddies. But I’ll feel a lot safer and really what do I need this big old house for? I don’t know why none of you ever suggested it. Probably worried about me spending your inheritance, I bet!”
The family heroically refrained from mentioning that they’d been suggesting it for the last ten years. Now, it was Nana’s idea—and an extremely clever and sensible one.
She had said from her hospital bed that she was too frightened to spend another night in that house alone.
“Of course not, Mum!” said Frank. “You can live with Max and me!”
Cat saw her mother’s eyes flicker, but Nana interrupted him. “Don’t be stupid, Frank. Why would I want to live with you? I want to live in a lifestyle resort.”
Since the attack, Nana Kettle seemed to have developed two conflicting new personality traits.
She had moments where she seemed to Cat heartbreakingly frail and frightened, like a child waking up still in the grips of a nightmare. Describing the attack, her voice would quiver with surprised tears. It was as if her feelings had been hurt. “He didn’t look at me,” she kept saying. “Did I mention that? He never once looked at me.” But at other times, she seemed sharper than ever before. She had a new way of lifting her chin, a determined new edge to her voice.
It helped perhaps that she had become something of a minor celebrity.
A story appeared in the Daily Telegraph with the headline OLYMPIC VOLUNTEER ATTACKED! Lyn had given them a photo she’d taken of Nana marching in the Volunteers’ Tickertape Parade. Nana grinned cheekily up from the page—a charming, innocent old lady who could recite all the words to The Man from Snowy River, whose husband was a World War II soldier!
Sydney threw up its arms in horror. Nana was inundated with letters of support, flowers, teddy bears, cards, checks, and close to a hundred brand-new cameras. People wrote letters to the paper and rang up talk-back radio stations. It was un-Australian, it was appalling, it was plain wrong.
The attacker was arrested after his girlfriend recognized the Identikit picture Nana had helped create. “When I saw that sweet little old lady in the paper, I just thought, Nah, that’s it,” said the girlfriend self-importantly to the television crews.
“Sweet little old lady, my foot,” said Maxine now, as she joined Cat out on the veranda, dragging another green bag of rubbish behind her. “She’s driving me up the wall.”
“Me too.” Cat wiped the back of her hand across her nose and looked down at her T-shirt and jeans. They were covered in dust.
Her mother, naturally, looked neat as a pin.
“The last time she threw something out,” sighed Maxine, “must have been 1950.”
Nana Kettle was bossily insisting that before any object could be assigned as “rubbish,” “Smith family,” or “new place,” she first be approached for authorization. She then wanted to chat at length about the history of each item and after finally making a decision, would more often than not change her mind, demanding that Cat and Maxine rummage through the rubbish bag and re-present the item for another lengthy discussion.
Neither Cat nor her mother had the right personalities for this sort of work.
“We need Gemma,” said Cat. “She could sit and talk to Nana while we just throw the lot out.”
“She’s doing something with Charlie’s family,” said Maxine and then compressing her lips at her mistake, quickly changed the subject, producing some creased and faded sheets of paper. “Look what I found!”
Cat smiled as she recognized her own childish handwriting. “Another blast from my past.”
It was the Kettle Scoop, a weekly family newspaper that Cat had produced when she was around ten. There had been four issues before she got bored.
“I’m really pleased,” said Maxine. “This is the missing issue! I was convinced Gwen had it!”
“You would come in and present it to me with this stern little frown on your face,” said Maxine. “And I had to sit there and read it without laughing. It nearly killed me. Then you’d leave the room and I’d laugh myself silly. You were such a funny, passionate kid.”
“I thought I was producing a serious publication!”
Cat read the front page:
INTERVIEW WITH POP KETTLE!
Mr. Les Kettle (sometimes known as Pop Kettle) is a tall, very elderly man aged approximately sixty years old. His hair is gray and his favorite foods are baked dinners and Tooheys beer. His favorite hobbies are reading the paper, betting on the doggies, and doing his wife’s nails. His least favorite things are mowing the lawn and broccoli. This reporter has sometimes seen him sneaking broccoli to his dog under the table. Pop Kettle has three granddaughters (they are triplets) and when they’re all together he calls them all by the same name, which is “Susi.” He doesn’t know why he does this. Our undercover reporter asked which Susi was his favorite. His answer was “CAT.” “But don’t tell your sisters,” commented Mr. Kettle quietly and under his breath. Mr. Kettle did not know that he was speaking to an undercover reporter at the time but this is what he said. This is an example of FREEDOM OF THE PRESS.
Next to the article was glued a blurry photo of Pop Kettle that Cat remembered taking herself. At the bottom of the page was a star: Look out for next week’s issue of the Kettle Scoop when we reveal who are Gemma’s real parents! As everyone knows, Gemma Kettle is adopted.
Maxine wiped tears of laughter from her eyes.
“Give it to me,” she demanded. “I’m not letting it out of my sight again.”
Cat handed it over. She liked hearing herself described as a “funny, passionate kid.”
“So,” Maxine folded the page neatly in two and tapped it against her hand, “just what are you going to do with your life?”
“Sorry?”
Typical. The very moment she became the slightest bit likable, she had to repair the damage by reverting to bitch mode.
“Well? Not many people get a chance like you’ve got. I hope you’re not going to mope around forever, throwing cutlery at people whenever you don’t get your own way.”
Cat stared at her. She couldn’t believe it. And here she was helping move out Nana’s stuff while Lyn and Gemma spent the day with their happy little families. Cat had been feeling like the old maid daughter, the saintly one, Beth in Little Women—except she wasn’t dying, unfortunately.
“What do you mean?” Heavy, resentful bitterness filled her voice. “Not many people get the chance to enjoy a miscarriage and a divorce? How unfortunate for them.”
“Not many people get the chance to choose a new life,” said Maxine. “You’re young, smart, talented, you’ve got no ties, you can do whatever you want.”
“I’m not young! And I want ties! I might never get the chance to have children!”
“You might not,” agreed Maxine. “Would that really be the end of the world?”
“Yes!” It came out like a self-pitying sob of fear.
Maxine sighed. “Look. When I was your age I had three teenage daughters who were all convinced I was trying to ruin their lives. I had a dead-end job and an ex-husband with a bizarre habit of introducing me to all to his new girlfriends. I felt trapped, depressed—and now I think about it, a little bit insane. I would have given anything to be you with all those choices.”
“But I don’t have any choices. Not any that I want.”
I want to be sitting on a plane next to Dan. I want my baby. I want Sal. I want to be somebody else.
“But you do, you infuriating child.”
Nana’s voice trilled imperiously down the hallway. “Maxine! Cat! Where are you both?”
“Look at your grandmother,” said Maxine.
“What about her?”
“Oh, well, now you’re just being obtuse.”
Nana called again, “Maxine!”
“Just a minute, Gwen!”
At that moment a plane flew overhead, and Cat put her hands on the balcony fence and watched it turn into a speck on the horizon.
Maxine opened the screen door to go back inside.
“France was Dan’s dream,” she said, her hand on the door. “Why don’t you come up with some of your own?”
“That’s not true,” said Cat furiously, but her mother was gone, the screen door slamming behind her.
It was pride that was holding her back. There was something pathetic about the rejected wife bravely pulling herself together, joining a tennis club, doing a photography course, cutting her hair, venturing timidly back out onto the single scene. It was like accepting the punishment handed over by the malevolent forces of fate. She wasn’t going to be a good little girl stoically picking up the pieces.
While her personal life was being pulverized, her professional life had been ticking along nicely. The “Seduce Yourself” Valentine’s Day campaign had been an unqualified success, with sales rocketing. There were even complaints! She’d always wanted to do a campaign that generated complaints. (“It was certainly not our intention to offend anyone,” said Marketing Director Catriona Kettle.) Breakfast show DJs made risqué jokes about Hollingdale Chocolates. “What are you going to do next, Cat?” asked Rob Spencer. “Give away a vibrator with every box of chocolates?” “Now you’re talking,” said Cat.
Rather than being embarrassed about their night together, Graham Hollingdale seemed to find it all rather delicious. He gave her twinkly little nudge, nudge, wink, wink looks in meetings. Sometimes she twinkled back. He was too dorky to be lewd. Polyamory was just a really interesting new hobby he’d taken up.
One day, he called her into his office and told her that he was giving her a promotion. Her lengthy new title would be “General Manager—Marketing and Sales, Asia-Pacific Region.” Rob Spencer and his team would report to her. (Rob Spencer would rather be savaged by a rabid dog.) She’d receive a twenty percent increase in her salary.
Graham grinned, and Cat thought, Did I just sleep my way to the top?
“Twenty percent?” she said.
“Yes,” said Graham fondly. “The Board is over the moon about the last quarter results. Your new strategy is so powerful!”
How far could she push this? Could she get more? Could she double it?
“Triple it,” she heard herself say.
“You want a sixty percent increase?”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
Bloody hell!
She sighed and thought of her mother telling her to come up with some dreams of her own.
“The thing is,” she said to Graham. “I don’t really want to sell chocolates anymore.”
He looked at her with doleful sympathy. “No. No, neither do I. What do you want to do instead?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I.”
They laughed guiltily, like two teenagers sitting outside the careers adviser’s office.
“Wednesdays still no good for you?”
“No, Graham.”
It was a Sunday afternoon, and Cat was legally behind the wheel for the first time in seven months. Driving again after so long was an enjoyable sensation. It reminded her of that flying-free feeling of her first solo drive as a teenager. Not nearly as good but then, all her adult emotions felt like shadows, self-conscious imitations of those intensely real feelings from her childhood.
She had passed her driving test the first time, at 9 A.M. on the morning of her seventeenth birthday—the earliest possible moment she was allowed to try for it. Her sisters didn’t bother. Lyn wasn’t in a hurry, and Gemma couldn’t stop driving into things.
Frank had been waiting for her in the registry office, his head down reading the newspaper. When he glanced up and saw the expression on her face, he grinned, folded the paper in half, and tucked it under his arm. “That’s my girl.”
He let her take his brand-new Commodore for a drive. “Please don’t kill yourself. I’ll never hear the end of it from your mother.”
She drove all the way to Palm Beach. No alert-eyed grown-up in the passenger seat, the car felt so empty! Accelerating around each new swoop of the road made her delirious with freedom. She could do anything! If she could parallel park—she could take on the whole world!
Her future back then, thought Cat now, was like a long buffet table of exotic dishes awaiting her selection. This career or that career. This boy or that boy. Marriage and children? Maybe later—for dessert, perhaps.
She didn’t realize they’d start clearing the plates away so soon.
Somebody pulled into the lane in front of her without signaling, and Cat slammed on her brake and her horn simultaneously. That was it. The novelty of driving had taken approximately four minutes to wear off.
She was going over to Lyn’s place for coffee.
The famously gorgeous Hank, Lyn’s American ex-boyfriend, was in Sydney, and Lyn, for some unfathomable reason, wanted Cat to meet him.
“You’re not trying to set me up with him, are you?” asked Cat. There was a suspicious breathlessness in Lyn’s voice.
“No!” said Lyn. “And anyway—well, you’ll see. Just come. Bring a cake.”
Cat pulled over across the road from the bakery and hopped out of the car. The traffic was beginning to slow and a truck pulled up beside her. The passenger, his arm resting along the windowsill and his feet up on the dashboard, glanced down at her and gave a relaxed wolf whistle.
Cat looked up and met the guy’s eyes. He grinned. She grinned back. The traffic moved and she ran across the road, the sun warm on the back of her neck.
As she waited in the bakery for her turn, Cat the sneering sideline observer popped into her head. You do know why you’re feeling a little bit happy, don’t you? It’s because that guy whistled at you! Instead of feeling objectified like a good feminist should, you’re actually feeling flattered, aren’t you? You’re feeling pretty! You’re even feeling grateful! You must be getting old if you feel good when some guy in a truck whistles at you. You make me sick!
“What can I do for this beautiful young lady?”
The little man behind the counter gave her a big flirtatious wink.
“Mmmm. I don’t know. What are you offering to do for me?” said Cat, and the little man roared with appreciative laughter, slapping his hand on the counter.
“Hoo-eee! If I was twenty years younger!”
Bloody hell. Now you’re getting off flirting with old men.
Shut up, you boring cow! Get off my back!
As she drove toward Lyn’s place, the cake in its white paper bag on the seat next to her, together with a free chocolate éclair—“Don’t you be telling my wife!”—she remembered how Nana Kettle always flirted outrageously with the butcher and the man in the fruit shop. When you went shopping with Nana it was like shopping in a village. “Here comes trouble!” people would call out as she approached.
Cat reached over for the chocolate éclair and took a gigantic bite. Chocolate, pastry, and cream exploded sweetly in her mouth.
Nana would have to make all new friends in her new local shopping center. She would too. She’d probably know all their names after the first week.
Cat was there when Nana had walked through the empty rooms of her house for the last time. Her bruises had faded to dirty yellow. Her hair was bouncy and curly again. “Looks much bigger now, doesn’t it, darling?”
Then she took a big breath, turned on her heel, and walked out the front door.
“That’s that,” she said firmly.
Cat drove with one hand on the wheel and licked cream from her fingers.
She pulled into Lyn’s street and took another gigantic mouthful of éclair.
The sun really was quite warm. The éclair really was quite delicious.
She parked the car and peeled off her sweater as she got out of the car and walked up the driveway to knock on Lyn’s door; she listened for the sound of Maddie’s footsteps pattering excitedly down the hallway, about to catapult herself into Cat’s arms.
Maybe it wasn’t that hard to be happy.
Maybe tomorrow morning, she would walk into Graham Hollingdale’s office and hand him a letter of resignation, launch herself free, and see what happened.
Maybe she’d sell the unit.
F*ck it, maybe she’d even get her hair cut.
Steady on, girl, said sideline Cat.
Maybe it wasn’t giving in. Maybe it was fighting back.
Approximately two hours later Cat came back out to her car. She put on her seat belt, and turned the keys in the ignition.
There were goose bumps of possibility on her arms. Her fingers danced a celebratory jig on the steering wheel.