CHAPTER 4
“My wife is a triplet, you know,” Dan said chattily. He leaned back against the squeaky vinyl sofa and crossed his arms comfortably behind his head. Cat watched him suspiciously. He was finding marriage counseling far too enjoyable for her liking.
“Really!”
The counselor wriggled with delight. Her name was Annie and she was a bubbly ball of spiritually advanced energy and positive new age vibes. Cat couldn’t stand her. She could feel her sulky teenage self reemerging in the hard line of her jaw. It was like religion classes when soft, oozy Miss Ellis made them share their feelings with the class. Gemma adored her, obligingly spilling her soul, while Cat and Lyn listened, appalled, at the back of the classroom. Cat would have taken a double period of calculus with psychopathic Sister Elizabeth Mary over one squirmy religion class with pink-fluffy-cardigan Miss Ellis.
“And are you close to your siblings, Cat?” beamed Annie. Her green dress was covered in a diseaselike rash of sunny yellow polka dots. No doubt there was a pink fluffy cardigan in her wardrobe. She leaned forward, presenting them both with an uninterrupted view of endless freckled cleavage.
“Not really.” Cat concentrated hard on Annie’s forehead.
“Are you kidding?” Dan, who had been observing Annie’s breasts with awe, took his hands out from behind his head. “She adores her sisters! They’re unhealthily close if you ask me.”
“Except no one did ask you, Dan,” said Cat. Annie sat back in her chair and tapped her pen against her teeth with gentle empathy.
“The three of them are like this exclusive little club,” said Dan. “And they’re not taking any new members.”
“I want to talk more about Dan’s infidelity.” Cat shifted noisily on the green vinyl.
Dan looked irritated. “I don’t think it’s constructive to keep going over and over it.” He looked at Annie for approval.
“Cat has a need to work through her feelings about this, Dan,” replied Annie. “We probably should respect that, yes?”
Ha! Annie was on her side! Cat gave Dan a triumphant look, and his eyes glinted back at her.
“Annie, you’re right of course,” he said admiringly and gently patted Cat’s thigh.
Competition was an aphrodisiac for Cat and Dan. Their relationship was all about smart verbal jabs and wild wrestling for the TV remote and flicking each other with tea towels. Whether they were skiing or playing Scrabble or avoiding each other’s cold feet in bed, they were both equally, aggressively, in it to win.
They had fun together. Sometimes, just for the pleasure of it, they went through all their friends, trying to pick a couple who had more fun than they did. No one came close. They were the winners!
Not any more though. Now they were the losers. The couple going through a “rough patch.”
To her disgust and horror, Cat heard a sad, strangled little sob come out of her mouth. With practiced soothing murmurs, Annie nudged the discreetly placed box of tissues across the coffee table.
Cat grabbed a handful, while Dan cleared his throat and ran his hands up and down his jeans. “I went to see her, you know,” said Cat, looking at them both above her tissues, snuffling noisily. “She gave me directions back to the Pacific Highway.”
“Who?” asked Annie.
“Angela. The girl Dan slept with.”
“Goodness me,” said Annie.
“F*cking hell,” said Dan.
To: Lyn; Gemma; Catriona
From: Maxine
Subject: Proposal for Christmas Day
Girls:
It seems to me that it is quite ridiculous and inequitable that I am always responsible for cooking a hot Christmas lunch. I have done so for the last thirty years and it is becoming tiresome. This year I would like to propose a cold seafood picnic somewhere by the water. Everybody could contribute. Your thoughts, please?
To: Maxine
cc: Cat; Lyn
From: Gemma
Subject: Proposal for Christmas Day
MUM! You have made exactly the same proposal every Christmas for the last five years. Every year we ACCEPT your proposal with enthusiasm. Every year you IGNORE us and continue to cook a hot XMAS lunch. You are so funny! This year I would like to make a counterproposal. Let’s have Christmas lunch at Lyn’s!! She has an exquisite harborside home as we all know. That way we could all swim in her exquisite harborside pool and enjoy observing her shapely legs as she brings us drinks. We’d be lovely and cool and polite to one another. It would be fun! We could all contribute something. I will contribute my potential new boyfriend, Charlie. He is delicious.
With much love, Gemma
To: Gemma
cc: Maxine; Cat
From: Lyn
Very funny G. But a good idea. I will have a seafood lunch for Christmas at my place. Better for Maddie anyway. Everybody can bring something. We’ll give you Christmas off this year, Mum. I shall e-mail more details. O.K. with you, Cat?
To: Maxine; Gemma; Lyn
From: Cat
Re: Christmas
Fine with me.
To: Gemma; Lyn; Cat
From: Maxine
If you would all feel more comfortable at Lyn’s place then I won’t raise any objections. I do apologize that past Christmases have obviously been so unpleasant for you all. I shall bring a turkey and roast potatoes, Lyn. Otherwise there are sure to be complaints. Gemma, Lyn has a lot on her plate! She certainly won’t be serving you drinks on Christmas Day. Everybody will have to roll up their sleeves and pitch in! As for bringing a new boyfriend, who we’ve never met, please don’t be ridiculous.
To: Maxine
From: Gemma
Subject: Christmas Day
You’re a classic, Mum.
Love, Gemma
“You look very nice,” said Dan.
They were crossing the Harbour Bridge in the back of a cab, an hour late for Dan’s Christmas party in the city. “Thanks.” Cat smoothed down her skirt and scraped at her lipstick with her fingernail.
It was her fault they were late. Over the last few days her body had become a leaden weight that needed to be dragged around from place to place. It was a tremendous effort to do anything at all.
Dan had sat silently on the end of their bed while she paused to rest and sigh after doing up each button on her shirt, his feet tapping a violent rhythm on the carpet. He liked parties.
Cat watched the lights of the city reflecting red and blue on the harbor’s murky depths. She liked parties, too. In fact, December was normally her favorite time of year. She loved the way Sydney become all giggly and light-headed. She loved the way nothing mattered quite so much and work deadlines lost their power. Of course we can’t even think about that until after Christmas, people said happily. But this December didn’t feel special at all. There was no special December smell in the air. It could just as easily have been March, or July, or any boring old month.
The car careened across two lanes as they took off from the tollgates and Cat fell against Dan’s shoulder. They both laughed polite-stranger laughs and Dan looked at his watch. “We’re making O.K. time, we won’t be that late.”
“That’s good.”
They sat in silence while the cab headed toward the Rocks. Cat spoke to the window. “Do of any of your friends know, you know, about…”
“No.”
He took her hand and put it in his lap.
“Of course not. Nobody knows.”
Cat looked out at George Street. Traffic had slowed to a jolting stop-and-start crawl. Horns tooted. Men and women in business suits spilled out of the pubs and their laughing faces seemed hard and strident. People in the distance kept seeing Cat and Dan’s cab, throwing one arm in the air and then dropping it with aggressive disgust when they saw it was taken. Sydney wasn’t giggly and light-headed at Christmastime; Sydney was just drunk and sordid.
“I wish you’d got the Paris job,” she said.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t.”
Ever since Dan had started working for the Australian branch of a French company, they had dreamed of a transfer to Paris. The Christmas before, he had made it onto the short list for a management position and the dream got so close they could touch it. They even enrolled themselves in a Beginner’s French course at the local evening college. In France, they would be themselves, but better. They’d wear French clothes and have French sex, while still, of course, maintaining their fundamental Aussie superiority. They’d be more worldly, more stylish, and in years to come, they’d say, “Oh yes, we both speak fluent French! Naturellement! We had a year in Paris, you see.”
But he’d missed out, and it had taken weeks to recover from the sour disappointment. And now here they were trapped in their stale, same-old Sydney lives. The only difference was a girl with shiny black hair and fresh young skin.
Cat turned away from the window to look at Dan. “Did you kiss her good-bye?”
He let go of her hand. “Oh, Cat, please no more, not tonight.”
“Because you called a cab, didn’t you? What did you do while you waited for it? Did she stay in bed or did she get up and wait with you?”
“I don’t understand why you can’t leave it alone,” said Dan. He was looking at her as if he didn’t know her, as if he didn’t even particularly like her. “You’re actually getting pretty f*cking boring, Cat.”
“What?”
The rage was a glorious relief after the apathy. It went straight to her head, like tequila.
“I can’t believe you said that.”
She had a vision of his head snapping back as her fist slammed into his chin.
In a sudden rush of movement she leaned forward, so that her seat belt pulled tight against her and tapped the taxi driver on the shoulder.
“Can you believe he said that?”
“I was not listening, sorry.” The driver cocked his head politely toward her.
“Oh, Jesus, Cat.” Dan bunched his body up into the corner of the cab, as if he were trying to disappear.
“We’ve been married for four years,” she told the taxi driver, becoming more exhilarated with fury with every word. “Everything’s going well; we’re even trying to have a baby. And then, what does he do? He goes out and has sex with some strange woman he picks up in a bar. He tells me this while we’re eating spaghetti. So, fine. That’s fine. I’m trying to deal with it. He’s sorry. He’s very f*cking sorry. But you know what he just said to me?”
The cabdriver had pulled up at a red light. The streetlights illuminated his face as he twisted around from the steering wheel to contemplate Cat. He had a black beard and smiling white teeth.
“No, I do not know,” he said. “You tell me.”
Dan groaned quietly.
“He said I was boring because I keep asking questions about it.”
“Ah, I see,” said the driver. He glanced over at Dan and back at Cat. “This is very painful for you.”
“Yes,” said Cat gratefully.
“The lights have changed, mate,” said Dan.
The driver turned back around and accelerated. “If my wife unfaithful to me, I kill her,” he said enthusiastically.
“Really?” said Cat.
“With my bare hands, I hold them to her neck and I squeeze.”
“I see.”
“But for men, it is different,” he said. “Our biology, it is different!”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Cat put her hand on the door handle. “Stop the car. I can’t stand either of you.”
“Pardon me?”
She screamed at him, “Stop the car!” and opened the car door to reveal the ground rushing by beneath them. Dan reached over and clenched her upper arm painfully hard. He told the driver, “You’d better pull over!”
The driver swung the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes to an enraged chorus of horns.
“You’re hurting my arm.”
Dan loosened his grip. “Do what you want. I give up.”
Cat climbed out of the car, while Dan looked straight ahead, his arms folded, and the cabdriver watched with wary eyes in the rearview mirror. Gently, precisely, she closed the door behind her.
She wondered if she was going mad.
It felt like a decision she could make. One small step over an invisible line and she could choose lunacy. She could lie down right now in the middle of Sydney and scream and kick and throw her head from side to side like Maddie having a tantrum. Eventually someone would call an ambulance and stick a needle into her and she could sink into a mindless sleep.
The cab pulled away from the curb in a mature, sober fashion so Cat could see just how childishly she’d behaved.
It was like every fight she’d ever had with her sisters. A wave of rage would sweep her up and carry her high and righteous until she did something embarrassingly excessive. Then it would dump her, splat, leaving her stupid and small.
Maxine’s voice sharp in her head: If you don’t learn how to control that temper of yours, Catriona, you’ll pay the price. Not me! You!
No doubt Dan and the cabdriver were chuckling and shaking their heads over the amusing, probably premenstrual hysteria of women. Dan would make up some excuse about her nonappearance at the party, get drunk, and not even spare her a thought until he was unsteadily aiming his key at the front door.
Or of course, he could find some other woman to sleep with. It would be understandable. Not only did his wife not understand him, she was f*cking boring too.
An excited babble of Christmas-drinks noise was coming from a bar directly behind her.
“Got any ID, love?” asked a bouncer who seemed to be having trouble balancing the top half of his body. Any minute he would topple forward from the weight of his muscles.
“Yeah, I need ID like you need more steroids,” she told him and walked past him into the bar.
Men. What was the point of them?
Expertly, her elbows vicious, she ducked and wove her way through the crowd to the counter and ordered a bottle of champagne.
“How many glasses?” asked the girl. Her roundly innocent eyes made Cat feel like a wizened old crone.
“One,” she snapped. “Just one.”
With the ice bucket and champagne cradled brazenly under one arm, she walked out of the bar and onto the street. The top-heavy bouncer didn’t try to stop her. He was distracted by some more appreciative thirty-plus patrons who were gigglingly presenting their ID.
She walked down George Street toward the Quay.
“Merry Christmas!” A group of drunken office workers in witty Santa Claus hats danced around her.
She kept walking.
Why did everyone have to be so inanely happy?
She continued on past the Opera House and finally into the Botanical Gardens. Hitching her $200 Collette Dinnigan skirt up to her thighs, she settled down cross-legged on the ground, her back up against a tree. She poured herself a glass of champagne and let it slosh all over her hand and onto her skirt. “Cheers.”
She toasted the harbor and drank thirstily. Boats strung with colorful lights slipped across the water, throbbing with music and the shouts and cries of overexcited party people.
If she drank this whole bottle she’d have a hangover for tomorrow morning’s counseling session. Now that would really add to the whole experience.
Tomorrow they were discussing their childhoods. Their “homework”—Annie’s plump fingers formed exaggerated inverted commas in the air—was to think of a memory from their childhood when they had observed their parents dealing with conflict. “We’re going to look at the role models in your life!” cried Annie.
Cat was looking forward to submitting the famous story of Kettle Cracker Night 1976. There was no material in Dan’s boringly happy childhood that could possibly match it. She would win the battle for most psychological damaging childhood hands down.
Cat, Gemma, and Lyn, six years old, wearing identical blue hooded parkas and brown corduroy pants. Everyone in the street had come to a Cracker Night party in their backyard. There was a towering, noisy bonfire and its crimson glow made everyone’s faces shadowed and mysterious. The kids were waving sparklers that fizzed and crackled white-hot silver stars. Their father, a cigarette held rakishly in the corner of his mouth, kept making all the men laugh, big booming bursts of raucous laughter. Their mother, in a short green dress with big gold buttons down the middle, was handing around a big platter of prunes wrapped in bacon with little toothpicks. Her hair was still long then, a smooth auburn sheet that stopped in a neat straight line just past her bottom.
At last, after endless hours of lobbying the slow-moving parents, it was time for the real fireworks. Beer bottle in hand, their father strolled theatrically to the center of the yard, pulled at his trouser knees, squatted down, and did something mysterious and clever with his cigarette lighter.
“Wait till you see this one, girls!” he said to his daughters. Seconds later—bang! The air exploded in color.
“Oooh!” exclaimed everyone at each new firework. “Aaaaah!”
It felt like their dad was creating the fireworks himself. It was wonderful. Cat was pretty sure that it was the best night of her entire life. So it was typical that Mum had to try and ruin it.
“Let one of the other men have a turn now, Frank,” she kept saying, and Cat hated her mother’s hard, whiny tone and the way it was getting sharper and sharper. She was probably just jealous of Dad for having the fun job, while she was stuck handing around cups of tea.
“For God’s sake, hurry, Frank!”
He stood grinning in the center of the yard, challenging her with his chin, taking a slow, deliberate sip of his beer. “Relax, Max babe.”
And then it happened.
Frank lit a Roman candle and was still on his knees, unsteadily peering down at it. “Frank!” their mother warned. This time Gemma caught her mother’s fear. “Hurry, Daddy!” she called, and Lyn and Cat gave each other looks that said, She’s such a baby!
Frank stood up, took a step back, and the Roman Candle exploded. The beer bottle fell to the ground as he held out his hands, palms down, as if he could stop the firework from exploding.
Cat, Gemma, and Lyn watched their father’s ring finger get blown cleanly off his hand. It went hurtling through the air illuminated in sharp detail by a flash of brilliant purples and greens.
He collapsed backward into a silly sitting position, like a clown, clutching his hand. There was a strange sweet fragrance in the air, the smell of their father’s sizzling flesh.
“You stupid, stupid man!” Their mother’s voice was a furious wail. She stalked across the yard toward him, her high heels sinking into the grass.
“Girls. Inside, now!” And they all had to go inside to the TV room and sit with Pop and Nana Kettle. Sammy Barker got to find their father’s finger where it had fallen into the rosebush underneath their parents’ bedroom window.
Cat never forgave her mother for that. She should have been the one to find her dad’s finger, not snotty-nosed Sammy, who gained instant celebrity status at St. Margaret’s Primary.
It was only a few months later that their dad packed his things and moved into a flat in the city. They couldn’t save his finger. He kept it floating in a jar of formaldehyde. It was brought out from his bathroom cupboard with much ceremony for especially privileged guests.
Now that should keep Annie satisfied. And how pleasingly symbolic! It was their father’s ring finger that got blown off! A symbol of their parents’ explosive marriage.
Of course it was one of Dan’s favorite family stories too. “Awesome!” he said when he heard it for the first time. At dinner parties, he told the story as if he’d been there too.
If Dan had been one of the neighborhood kids, Sammy Barker would have had no chance at finding that finger.
Lifting the champagne bottle from the ice bucket, she held it by the neck and refilled her glass. She hiccuped as she settled herself back against the tree.
Maybe she should just forgive him. Maybe she did forgive him.
After all, didn’t she herself have fantasies about Dan’s uni friend, Sean? Every time they went out with Sean and his irrelevant wife, Cat would feel her cheeks start to go pink after her third glass of wine, as shocking images popped unbidden into her mind.
It was alcohol. Alcohol was a terrible, terrible thing, she thought and held up the champagne bottle to look at it accusingly.
Perhaps she could just choose to stop being angry, as recommended by Lyn’s self-help gurus.
She felt a sense of wonderful well-being at the thought. It was like recovering from the flu, when you suddenly realized that your body was functioning normally again.
Her mobile phone beeped. It was a text message from Dan:
Where R U? Did not go to party. Waiting at home 4 U. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. XXX
Carefully, Cat got to her feet, pulled her skirt back down to her knees, and, leaving the empty bottle and ice bucket on the ground, began to walk toward the ferry.
“Well! Here we are again!” Annie had gone for a nautical theme today. She wore a blue-and-white-striped shirt and a little red scarf tied jauntily around her neck. Her eyes were clear and dewy. Cat and Dan regarded her with bleary awe. They’d been up all night, drinking and crying.
“Now, you’re a triplet, Cat!”
“Yes!” said Cat, failing to match her enthusiasm.
“Now, a lot of triplets have unusually strong relationships with their siblings. Yes?” said Annie.
Oh, Christ. Annie had obviously been foraging through her old textbooks since their last meeting.
“Now, what I’d like to look at today is Dan’s relationship with your sisters!”
“What about our homework?” asked Cat.
Annie looked confused. She obviously didn’t remember the homework.
“Well, yes, but first let’s look at this. I think it’s important. Dan?”
Dan smiled.
“I get on well with her sisters,” he said. “Always have done.”
Annie nodded encouragingly.
“Actually,” said Dan. “I even dated one of them before Cat.”
An invisible fist punched the air from Cat’s lungs.
“What are you talking about?”
Dan looked at her. “You knew that!”
“No, I didn’t.”
“But of course you did!” said Dan nervously.
Cat’s heart was hammering. “Which one?” Gemma. It would be Gemma. Dan was looking at her beseechingly, Annie was quivering with professional pride at this breakthrough.
“Which one?” insisted Cat.
“Lyn,” he said. “It was Lyn.”