Fragile? Doesn’t he mean ‘strong’? Everyone else tells me I’m strong! I don’t know how you do it! You’re amazing! I could never be as strong as you!
It’s an exhausting reputation to uphold. I’ve given up trying to explain that it’s not the way it seems. I’m not strong at all. I just have no choice. The idea of collapsing in a heap, drinking myself into a stupor and retreating from the world seems like a fantasy, but I just don’t have that luxury. Every day, I have to get up and be two parents, even when every part of me wants to stay under the covers and hide from the experience that swept away my entire future.
‘I mean that with respect,’ Hugh explains gently. ‘The fragility. Anyone would be . . .’
Grief almost beat me, once or twice. I wanted to die just to make the pain stop. Landed in his office on one occasion, at wits’ end, shut the door behind me and lost it. ‘I can’t do this any more!’ I cried, between gasping sobs. ‘I’ve tried. It’s too hard. I miss him too much. I just want to be with him, Hugh. Wherever that is. Even if it’s nowhere.’
The mother guilt that flooded in after I’d admitted that was on a scale of its own. And Hugh had listened and let me talk and cry and fetched the bin for me to fill up with a million tissues. Then he’d popped his head out of the office and asked Sophie to bring more tissues and clear his calendar for the rest of the day. He and Cam had been thick as thieves. Hugh would have done anything for him.
‘Are you safe?’ he’d asked when I finally ran out of words. ‘Are you thinking of hurting yourself?’
He was the only person ever to ask me that directly. Even the doctor had glossed over it when she’d increased the dose of my antidepressants. Telling Hugh had been sensible. Close as he had been to Cam, he kept enough professional distance from me to cope with the information. Mum or Grace would have fallen to pieces over it and somehow made it worse – and they had enough to worry about just dragging Charlie and me through daily life. Hugh organised a psych through work. Gave me easy projects I could do in my sleep, or difficult ones I could get lost in. Whatever I needed. And he didn’t once complain if I just sat at my desk, accomplishing nothing.
I am fragile. Just too exhausted to allow it. Sick of being sad all the time and stuck in an endless rut where the game plan is simply ‘holding on’. Surviving. With no glittering prize if I make it through. Just raising Charlie, then seeing out the course of my natural life, minus Cam.
The Darth Vader ringtone shatters me back into the present and Mum launches unconventionally straight into a conversation. ‘Katherine! Right. Grace and I have been in cahoots,’ she begins in a businesslike manner. ‘I told her about my conversation with Hugh about your being stranded there with no fixed address and no plans right in the middle of a natural disaster—’
‘It’s not quite that bad,’ I say, my face basking in brilliant sunshine through the car window.
‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me about that disastrous attempt you had at matchmaking?’
What?
‘I don’t know what you were thinking. Hugh and Grace? Entirely unsuited – you’re as bad as Emma Woodhouse.’
Does she have an actual point?
‘Anyway, is Hugh there? Put the phone on speaker.’
‘That depends, Mum. Are you about to change the topic?’
‘Yes, yes. I have news!’
‘Brace yourself,’ I whisper to Hugh as I hit the speaker button.
‘Look. Both of you. We’ll have no argument about this,’ Mum starts. ‘Grace and I have organised everything and it’s all settled and paid for.’
Okay, now I’m nervous. Hugh catches my eye, wary.
‘You’ll be staying for three nights in a two-bedroom beach house in New Brighton.’
My stomach flips and I look at Hugh, dismayed. What have they done?
‘Grace said you’ll want to go to the Byron Bay Writers Festival and I said I couldn’t think why. Of course, you were always scribbling away as a teenager but I thought you were over that now you’re an important executive at the university.’
Hugh somehow maintains a straight face.
‘There are two separate bedrooms, Kate . . . And this is your first proper child-free break. All I’m saying is you’re a young, single woman and it’s time you started acting like one.’
‘Mum! Please!’ I can’t even look at Hugh.
‘Nonsense! If you’re at the beach and you happen to hit it off with some aimless young Byron Bay vagabond . . . It doesn’t have to be a Hemsworth brother.’
‘MUM!’
Even the cabbie’s shoulders are shaking now in the front seat. How is this my life?
‘Grace is going to move into your place on the weekend with Charlie. She’s got some ludicrous scheme to overhaul your front garden, not that the poor girl would recognise a weed if she tripped over one in all that Gucci.’
I get a mental picture of Grace flailing around in my rock garden in this season’s chambray denim Valentino coveralls and patent Prada boots, Fendi bag swinging from her shoulder, developing an urgent data science quandary requiring the assistance of a mathematical genius.
‘I told her there’s no point tidying the yard. You’ll only let it go to rack and ruin again because you’re addicted to that machine. What do you do on there all the time, Kate? I’m sure it’s not work. Is it an internet beau? Just make sure he’s not one of those puffer fish. I saw a story about that on A Current Affair and they prey on desperate, lonely women.’
‘Mary,’ Hugh interrupts, taking the phone out of my hand altogether. ‘It’s thoughtful of you and Grace to organise this for us.’
‘Oh, Hugh, it’s our pleasure,’ Mum says, her tone transformed.
‘Now, we won’t have either of you paying for it,’ Hugh explains firmly. ‘I’ll sort that out with Kate when we get back. No arguments. But a break is probably what we both need, for different reasons.’
Hugh has reasons? Have I become so absorbed in my own problems that I’ve neglected to check in on his? I know he errs on the side of undersharing his personal life and seems to have it all together, nearly all the time, but I feel like a very bad friend if I’ve missed something important. Perhaps a weekend away could fix a few things.
‘Mum, what if Charlie isn’t on board with this plan?’ I ask. I couldn’t possibly relax if I knew he was pining for me.
‘Oh, he’ll be ecstatic about a weekend with Grace. I must tell you, he made up a distressing story about you having had some sort of police incident over a bomb, Katherine. Said he would have brought the bomb to school for show and tell but it exploded in Sydney. Do you think he needs more counselling?’
No, but I think I do.
‘Where the child inherited this propensity for dramatics I’ll never know,’ she adds, wrapping up the call as the cab pulls up along the main street in Bangalow. ‘Maybe he’ll be the writer in the family.’