In the end, I forced my parents to acknowledge him. They didn’t have a choice; we took them to lunch, we signed both our names on birthday cards, and I brought him along with me at Christmas. After a while, Mum and Dad came to realise how sweet he was. They came to recognise his good points. He was so lavish in his praise of me, and so frank in his confessions of a straitened childhood, that they couldn’t help but be disarmed. Nevertheless, they still thought him unsuitable. Not because of his Italian heritage. Not because he had never gone to university. Not even because he refused to ‘waste money’ on a bridge, to fill the gap in his mouth.
No—my parents simply thought that the difference in our respective backgrounds would be difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile. They didn’t believe that our mutual delight in each other’s company was a firm enough foundation on which to build a life together. Not that they said as much. They didn’t have to; I could read the vibes. Anyway, they felt guilty about their opinions, because Matt was so nice. Only a complete arsehole could have failed to recognise his charm, and my parents aren’t arseholes. They’re a bit constipated, but they’re not arseholes. No matter what I might have thought before the wedding.
In some ways, that wedding went very well. To begin with, Matt had just bagged himself a terrific job with the ABC: a sound engineer’s job. The pay wasn’t exactly stunning, but the benefits were good. What’s more, the wedding preparations went off without a hitch. God, it was a beautiful wedding. Mum and Dad didn’t stint, bless their hearts, so we were able to afford a seaside resort, with pool. The ceremony took place beside said pool, in front of a kind of classical portico thing that was wrapped around with garlands. I wore a Jean Fox Thai silk gown, and carried Madonna lilies. Danielle and Miriam, my bridesmaids, were dressed in fitted suits, very elegant, with saucy matching hats. There were seventy guests, most of them Matt’s family—who seemed a bit taken aback by the delicate portions of lobster and quail served up to them for dinner (though the extensive dessert buffet made up for the nouvelle cuisine mains). A string quartet played until the sun went down, at which point glowing Chinese lanterns were lit, and a friend of Matt’s took over the music selection.
I remember dancing with Matt, who looked almost indecently sexy in his tux. His brothers looked terrific too, all kitted out. There were toasts to the married couple’s future happiness, and my sister burst into tears as she hugged me, smearing her mascara all over my neck. Even the cake was a triumph, with its feathery sugar flowers and silk ribbon. Poor Mum snapped off a high heel in a pool grating, and Matt’s Nonna couldn’t make the trip, but on the whole it was a fairytale event.
There was just one bad moment, and that didn’t occur at the wedding. That happened the day before. I was frantically counting place cards, nagging florists, and directing pre-nuptial traffic when Mum decided to drop a hint. She murmured something about Matt’s level of ‘commitment’, and urged me to ‘think carefully’ because I was about to make a ‘big decision’.
‘You mustn’t worry about us, dear,’ she said. ‘We don’t mind how much money we pay—or lose—as long as we can be sure that you’re happy.’
You can imagine how well that went down with me. I was furious. Of course I didn’t tell Matt, but I stewed over it for months. Months and months. I castigated my parents privately, over and over again, for their unbearable North Shore conservatism, their stuffy prejudice, their boorishness.
But I’ve been lying here thinking: what if they were right after all?
Matt came home at ten tonight. I was propped up in bed with a book, but I hadn’t been reading; I’d been thinking. Thinking and thinking. I heard him come around the back (so as not to wake the children), fall over a pile of builder’s rubbish, swear horribly, and slam into the kitchen. He usually eats dinner at work, but sometimes he has a plate of ice-cream or a glass of port in front of the TV before coming to bed.
Tonight, though, he was too tired even for that. He looked exhausted. Dark circles under his eyes, grey hairs glinting in his stubble. He staggered into the bedroom and threw himself onto the bed.
‘Augh,’ he moaned, as the mattress bounced gently under his weight.
I didn’t say anything, except ‘Hello’. I was watching him, you see, trying to work out if he’d changed. He didn’t give the impression of someone nursing a salacious secret. He didn’t seem particularly guilty and careworn, either—at least, not more than usual. I should explain that Matt has a bit of a CD addiction. He can’t go a week without buying one, though I’ve pointed out several times that our budget won’t stretch to it any more. So now he sometimes buys them surreptitiously, and hides them around the house like empty bottles of gin. I can always tell he’s done it, even before I find them; he has a sheepish look that I can pick a mile off. Half the time, all I have to do is lift an eyebrow at him and he’ll confess.
So how, I thought, could he be having an affair? How could he possibly keep such a big secret to himself?
‘What a fuckin’ awful day,’ he said, rubbing his eyes. ‘God.’
‘Busy?’
‘Flat out. We had inserts coming in at the last possible moment. What about you?’
‘Messy.’
‘Did the builders show up?’
‘No.’
‘For God’s sake.’
‘You haven’t seen that little blue horse of Emily’s, have you?’ I was going through the motions, my heart pounding, as I summoned up the courage to ask the real question. The important question. ‘I spent at least half an hour, this morning, looking for the damn thing . . . I don’t know. She must have lost it.’
Matt took his hands away from his eyes, and blinked at the ceiling.
‘What blue horse?’ he asked.
‘The one with the pink tail. About this big. Sort of squishy.’
‘Doesn’t ring a bell.’
‘No. Well.’ It didn’t surprise me. ‘God knows what she’s done with it.’
‘It’s probably been given a Mafia burial. It’s probably part of that cement slab out back.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Or that dog next door ate it.’ Matt groaned again, rolled over, and sat up. He began to take off his shirt.
Staring at his broad, white back, I said, ‘So how was lunch?’
‘Huh?’
‘With Ray? How was it?’
I could feel the pulse in my throat as I waited for a response. When it finally came, I couldn’t believe my ears.
‘Okay,’ Matt said. ‘It was good.’
‘So what’s the latest?’ I’m amazed that I could even talk coherently. It was as if a heavy stone had landed on my gut. ‘Any new girlfriends I should know about?’
Normally, Matt can’t spend half an hour in Ray’s company without picking up at least two really good stories. When they worked together, he was always coming home with tales about what Ray had said in a planning meeting, or what Ray had done with a ‘grab of John Howard actuality’. (Don’t ask me what the lingo means—I’ve never been able to sort it out.) Even after Ray’s move to post-production, his infrequent lunchtime meetings with Matt always resulted in something worth passing on. Especially since Ray was always getting involved with the most monstrous women.
Not this time, however.
‘No new girlfriends,’ said Matt.
‘No funny stories?’
‘Not really.’ His shoes hit the floor. Thud, thud. ‘He sent me a funny e-mail though. This afternoon. I’ve got it in my bag. Hang on while I get it, okay? It’s off the Internet.’
Was he trying to escape? I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I’m lying here, and he’s asleep beside me, now, and I don’t know what to do. I just don’t know what to do.
Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow morning, and realise that this has all been nothing but a nightmare.
Please God.
CHAPTER TWO
Saturday
You won’t believe this, but I didn’t say a word to Matthew about the Girl With Purple Hair
today.
Not that I had much of a chance, mind you. He works a full day shift on Saturdays—nine to five, more or less— so he was gone pretty early this morning. I was still shuffling around in my most revolting dressing-gown, mashing banana, while he was gathering up his keys and his wallet, smelling of aftershave. Give him his due, though, he did change Jonah’s nappy. And wipe the seat of the highchair. He even examined Emily’s mozzie bite, with grave attention, before pronouncing it ‘very nasty’ though not life-threatening.
‘But it’s itchy!’ Emily wailed.
‘I know. Poor Em.’
‘I wanna bandaid!’
‘What’s the magic word?’
‘Please!’
‘Do you want a Wiggles bandaid or a Winnie-the-Pooh bandaid?’
‘Ummm . . .’
‘What about Winnie the Pooh?’
‘No, Wiggles!’
‘This one?’
‘No, Dorothy!’
‘This one?’
‘No, the other Dorothy!’
‘I don’t think there is another Dorothy, Em.’
‘You’re thinking about the dinosaur bandaids, sweetie.’
‘I wanna dinosaur bandaid!’
Somehow it didn’t seem like the right moment to raise the subject of the Girl With Purple Hair.
It wasn’t the right moment this evening, either. Oh lord— why not admit it? I’m scared. I’m scared to ask him. Sure, a simple question might have cleared up the whole problem. But what if it hadn’t? What if he had said, ‘Yes, I’ve found my soul mate?’ What if he had walked out of the house for good, like the husband of a girl I know at work? This poor girl, her name’s Jenny, and she found out that her husband had been seeing someone else for three years. So she confronted him with the evidence (a telephone bill for a mobile that she’d never even known about) and he calmly packed his bags and left. Just like that. And she had an eleven-month-old baby, at the time.
You think to yourself: how could that happen? It couldn’t happen to me. Jenny must have married a prick. She must be a bit slow, not to have worked it out. Not to have spotted the signs.
But it can happen. It does happen. And I don’t want it to happen, that’s the thing. If it’s true—and it probably isn’t—but if it’s true that Matt’s seeing someone else, and I ask him about it, what if I’m opening a huge can of worms? What if he wants a divorce? What if he asks for a divorce? I don’t know what I’d do. I think I’d have a nervous breakdown. I’m practically having a nervous breakdown just thinking about it—about what it would do to Emily, for a start. She wouldn’t understand. Jonah wouldn’t understand. Surely Matt would never do something like that to the kids? He might do it to me, but not to them. He must know it would break their hearts. How could he bear it, knowing that Emily was falling asleep every night with tears on her cheeks? I couldn’t.
And then there’s the house. How could we possibly keep the house? Suppose he decided on divorce, and wanted to rent his own place—how could we keep up with the mortgage payments? We couldn’t. We’d have to sell this place, and I’d have to move out to . . . I don’t know. Punchbowl? Penrith? What’s more, I’d have to quit work, because we can only afford childcare two days a week as it is; Matt always looks after the kids on a Tuesday. Unless I was to ask my mother for help, of course. But I’d rather die than ask my mother. I’d never hear the end of it. ‘I told you so’ would be hanging in the air for ever after, and I wouldn’t be able to ignore it because I’d be in her debt, God forbid. I’d be a pitiful welfare mother living miles from all my friends, squabbling with Matt about child support payments, agonising over his new girlfriend, over his new wife, over his new family—my God, what if he goes off and has more children?
But that’s silly. I’ve got to calm down. Because this whole business about the purple-haired girl—it might be perfectly innocent. And if it is, would Matt ever forgive me for suspecting him? Would it screw up our marriage? I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want it to happen because I love him, and I don’t want to lose him.
It’s true, I’m not angry. I’m frantic—even though he’s been annoying me so much lately. I know it’s unreasonable, but I can’t seem to help it. I’ve been grinding my teeth over all sorts of things: his CD addiction, for instance. He’s always been one for impulse buying, and not just CDs—he’ll often come home with toys for the kids, boxes of Darrell Lea chocolates (he loves Darrell Lea), new videotapes or strange liqueurs. He’s been pining after a DVD player, recently; I’m so frightened that he’ll go out and buy one. God knows, I’m not mean. I didn’t mind when we had separate bank accounts and no mortgage. I didn’t mind when I had lots of my own money. But those days are gone, and he doesn’t seem to realise it. He still seems to think that he can throw his money around the way he used to, even though we’re on a tight budget. I don’t think he understands about budgets. He probably thinks they’re what people used to have before credit cards were invented.
And then there’s his drum kit. It’s so big that it fills up vast tracts of our sunroom (because he won’t put it in the garage, even though he hardly ever practises, these days). It’s impossible to clean, and it’s blocking the linen cupboard, and when he does play it—about once a month—it’s so noisy that I live in perpetual fear of the neighbours complaining. There are cobwebs on it, for heaven’s sake. And yet when Jonah scribbled on the snare drum with a biro, Matt threw a monstrous tantrum, even though he tells me that I ‘overreact’ when Emily gets into my make-up or jewellery.
As for the housework issue, don’t even ask. The fact that he’s never been much good didn’t matter before—not when we were living in that rented flat in Darlinghurst. I remember we used to do the housework every Saturday morning, with the stereo turned up high, singing along at the tops of our voices. We’d take it in turns to vacuum, wash the kitchen floor and clean the bathroom, and it didn’t matter that Matthew was hopeless, because the flat was such a tip to begin with. The bathroom was so mouldy that the grouting was past redemption; nothing that either of us did made the slightest difference (and God knows, I nearly poisoned myself spraying mould killer about), so in the end we gave up. Same with the toilet, which had an unsightly brown stain on the porcelain just where the water gushed down from the cistern. When the shower curtain became slimy and black, we threw it away and bought a new one. When the plastic soap dish became too encrusted, we applied the same principle. It didn’t matter that the mirror was always streaky after Matthew cleaned it, because it was already a spotty mess, with brownish patches showing where the silver had peeled off, or rotted away.
As for the carpet, it was so disgusting to begin with that vacuuming made almost no impression at all. Neither did steam-cleaning. We had it steam-cleaned when we first moved in, and the only result was an analysis of all the stains that seemed to be indelible. We were informed by the steam-cleaning man that the greyish spot near the wall had been a leaky sewage pipe, that the round, brownish one near the sofa was vomit, and that the orange one beside it was very possibly tandoori chicken. ‘It’s the smell that gives it away,’ he said cheerfully, before hastening to assure us that he’d seen worse—much worse. In one flat he’d cleaned, the previous tenant had kept several large dogs, and the carpet had been disfigured, not only by an ankle-deep mist of fleas, but by countless shit stains.
When we bought this house, however, we were lucky. The carpet was brand new, and the bathroom was only two years old. It’s a lovely bathroom, with brass taps, a wooden toilet seat and a claw-footed bath. The shower recess has glass screens, not a curtain; there’s a porcelain soap dish cemented to the wall. Naturally, I’ve worked hard to ensure that this room has remained lovely, polishing the brass and keeping an eye on that hard-to-reach spot under the bath, where the dust collects. But has Matthew felt the same sense of responsibility? Has he hell. He never remembers the spot under the bath unless I remind him. He seems to think that scrubbing the ring off the bath and giving the S-bend a quick poke
with the toilet brush constitutes a ‘good clean’. I don’t know how many times I’ve pointed out that we paid big money for this bathroom—that it’s an investment which shouldn’t be allowed to deteriorate. I might as well be talking to myself, for all the notice he takes of me.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s a case of middle-class hang-ups versus working-class informality, and become prostrate with guilt. After all, hadn’t that always been part of Matthew’s attraction, for me? His had been a childhood of noisy, communal sessions in front of the TV; friendly, beat-up, smoke-kippered loungeroom furniture; football boots on the kitchen table; five strapping boys being served by ancient, stoop-shouldered Nonna as the dog snored underfoot. Weren’t Matt’s housekeeping deficiencies the natural result of his exotic background? Should I really be giving my pinched, Anglo, middle-class world view so much priority in our relationship?
At one stage I decided that I’d stop flogging a dead horse, since it was perfectly obvious that Matthew wasn’t going to stop vacuuming around things (instead of moving furniture), or start wiping down windowsills without being endlessly nagged about it. I thought to myself: why fight the forces of history? Why not go with the flow, stop struggling, and surrender yourself to your traditional role? But that didn’t work either. For one thing, I would have been forced to give up my job, and for another, Matthew couldn’t manage the traditional male role any better than he’d been managing the New Age one. He broke our lawnmower, the other day. He also cracked a wall putting some pictures up. And though he’s not a bad hand with the fuse box (thank God), his understanding of tap washers, car engines and barbecue gas bottles is as rudimentary as mine. In other words, while I’ve been playing my part, he hasn’t been playing his. And even this wouldn’t matter so much if it wasn’t costing us money. It costs money to fix a lawnmower. It costs money to have a couch recovered, because he let the kids play on it with markers. Couldn’t he see what was going to happen? Why doesn’t he think ahead sometimes?