Anyway, Jonah fell asleep, and I deposited Emily in front of a Barney video with chocolate milk and a muesli bar. We call this time of day the ‘quiet time’; it’s when Emily has to amuse herself, without running around, while Mummy has a stab at doing some work for an hour. Today I didn’t do any work. Today I sat down and trawled through the phone bills for any numbers that might not correspond to the numbers in the family address book.
I found six.
One of them was the number of a discount CD store. One belonged to the chemist up the street; I remembered phoning it after five o’clock several weeks before, when I desperately needed rehydrating iceblocks (Jonah had gastro), and wanted to find out if it was open late. One was answered by a machine with a male voice: ‘Hello, you have reached Paul, Marcus and Joe, we can’t come to the phone right now, so please leave your name and number and we’ll get back to you. In the meantime, party hard!’ One was the number for the local railway station— a timetable query, no doubt.
That left two more. But I didn’t have time to call them, because Emily started getting restless, and I had to break out the sultanas, the self-raising flour and the margarine, and make some scones with her. She likes cooking, does Emily. I suppose I should be encouraging her to play football as well, but I can’t be bothered, somehow. I can’t seem to dredge up the energy.
At one point I left my daughter happily slopping dough around, and in a fit of despondency called the nearest estate agent—the one who sold us this house. I asked the secretary who answered the phone if she could send me some information on flats to rent in the area, though I was careful not to tell her that I wanted to get an idea of what it might cost to split up with Matthew. Because we wouldn’t want to move, not if we could possibly help it. Not with kids so happily settled at the local day care centre. Not with everything so handy. Oh God, I thought, as a sense of panic began to rise in me again, oh God, what if it really happens? What if this is for real ?
Then Jonah woke up, and it was time to go to Lisa’s place.
Lisa lives two streets away from us. She’s another playgroup mother, only a very different one from Mandy. In fact she’s not very nice about Mandy. ‘Oh, don’t for Chrissake let her get you down,’ Lisa once boomed, adjusting her generous bosom through the folds of her capacious sweatshirt. (‘These days my tits are down there in my purse, hunting for the car keys,’ she’ll say philosophically.) ‘The thing about girls like her is, it’s all front. Did she tell you what she used to do for a living? Before she married that dickhead with the overbite? Wait for it. She was a plastic surgeon’s receptionist.’
‘No!’
‘I swear to God. She had her nose done.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘It is. She told me.’
‘Really?’
‘I’d been telling her that I was thinking of getting perkier tits.’ A braying laugh. ‘Like I could afford a new bra, these days. Anyway, she gave me this big lecture about it all—she wouldn’t know a joke if it came labelled, in a package—and told me about her nose. Apparently she has chronic sinus problems. She takes ten garlic pills a day.’
‘God, poor thing. When did she tell you?’
‘Oh, ages ago. I asked her if she ended up suing the plastic surgeon, and she looked at me like I was mad.’ Another laugh. ‘So you see, her life isn’t perfect, no matter how hard she tries to persuade you it is.’ Lisa then went on to expound one of her favourite theories: the fact that a good portion of new mothers who won’t admit to any feelings of rage, despair, frustration or fatigue—who turn a beatific face to the world and assure it that everything’s fine, wonderful, no problems, a breeze—end up drowning their babies in the bathtub. ‘A mother’s got to vent,’ she often declares, before launching into a vicious attack on her father-in-law, her next-door neighbour, the local council or the Taxation Office. She also believes that a mother has to ‘let go’; that is, abandon certain standards that are only attainable when you don’t have children.
Her own house is a perfect demonstration of this theory. She has ‘let go’ with a vengeance, and only cleans up once a week. Because she has two rambunctious boys and one dog, this means that the floors are always littered with toys and clothes, the barren garden-beds with toys and gardening equipment, the raised surfaces with broken toys, broken crockery, and confiscated tools (or poisons), and the back steps with old shoes and chewed-up tennis balls. The only things that she won’t leave around are dirty plates, cups, bowls or utensils, because her cockroach problem is even worse than my ant problem.
‘If those roaches get any bigger,’ she remarked on one occasion, ‘we’re going to have to start charging rent.’
Her house is an old one, like mine; it’s a little bigger and a little darker. She earns a bit of cash doing phone polls, these days, though she used to be a psychiatric nurse, and has lots of terrific stories about her time ‘on the wards’. According to her, there are countless lunatics around Sydney leading apparently normal lives—like her next-door neighbour, for instance. She says that her next-door neighbour is a borderline schizophrenic. She says that her husband’s boss is a sociopath, and that the woman across the road, who keeps complaining about the positioning of Lisa’s garbage bin, has an obsessive-compulsive disorder. According to Lisa, it’s easier to understand the world if you realise that most of the people in it are nuts.
‘I’d say that you were a bit bipolar,’ she diagnosed, upon our second meeting, ‘but that’s okay, because so am I. My advice is: keep drinking coffee and stay off the Merchant Ivory films.’
She’s good company, is Lisa. It’s no coincidence that she knows most of her neighbours, and is friendly with a lot of them (the ones, she says, who only exhibit slight neuroses or personality disorders; they can be interesting and fun). She’s a sociable sort of person, unlike me. I don’t know any of my neighbours, except to wave to. I don’t even know their names. It’s my North Shore upbringing, I suppose. People who are raised on large, leafy blocks flanked by the residences of reticent bank managers, and who are driven everywhere as children, and forbidden to play on roads, or wander far from home, don’t develop the kind of skills that you need to casually drop in on a friend down the street. Lisa is different. She grew up in a noisy, beach-suburb house with a banging screen door and cousins over the back fence and neighbours sitting around on plastic porch furniture lighting cigarettes and telling their kids to take the dog with them, and be back by five.
As a result, Lisa will talk to anyone, freely and fearlessly. And if they turn out to be tiresome nutters, then she detaches herself with cheerful nonchalance, not really caring what they think of her in consequence. I admire her so much.
She’s a nice person, too. Whenever her husband has to work on a Saturday, she invites me around as a gesture of solidarity, and we sit drinking coffee while the kids play together. Her boys, as I’ve said, are a bit of a handful, but Emily can take it because she’s such a resilient, good-natured kid, just like her father. If she falls down and hurts herself, she just gets up again. Jonah’s different. I can’t imagine how he’s going to survive school, because he’s terribly sensitive, with a tenacious memory. Whenever we go to Lisa’s house, Emily always dashes out to play trike races with Brice and Liam while Jonah sits inside, arranging Matchbox cars into complicated patterns.
I feel so sorry for the poor darling. My heart dissolves whenever I see him frowning fiercely over a tricky Lego attachment. But what can I do? Maybe I should give him a computer for his next birthday, and be done with it.
When Lisa answered the front door today, kicking aside her dog as she did so, piercing screams from the back of the house made Jonah clutch at my neck, almost choking me. Lisa rolled her eyes (‘They’re being electric eels, or something’) and invited us all in. Emily disappeared immediately; I hardly saw her again for an hour. Jonah stayed with me while I sampled Lisa’s freshly unwrapped chocolate muffins (she cooks curries, not cakes), pressing his brown, silky head against my
jaw. He wouldn’t go to Lisa. He wouldn’t loosen his grip on my neck. I had to carry him out to the garden when I went to look at the new lattice that Simon, Lisa’s husband, had put up. It was framed, and firmly rooted in the ground against a side fence. Lisa intends to train a passionfruit vine up over it.
‘It’ll be another barrier between me and that psycho next door,’ she said, in a loud voice. ‘And it should be all right, because it gets the sun in the mornings. What do you think? It’s nice, isn’t it?’
‘Very,’ I agreed.
‘I think I might get Simon to do the whole fence. We’ll paint it all white and it’ll show that we haven’t given up entirely.’ She pointed to the bald patch in the middle of her backyard, where Liam, Brice and Emily were kicking up dust. ‘Simon has a fit every time he looks at that lawn,’ she explained, ‘but I tell him: “What are you moaning about? Your head’s in a worse state, and I still like it.”’
Simon, in fact, is a paunchy, balding, sun-whipped bloke who looks years older than his age, which is around forty-four, I think. He used to be a surfer, but you could never tell it now. Sometimes, when I’m sighing over the fact that he can put up lattice, spray weeds and fix chairs, I remind myself that he’s also one of the most physically unattractive men of my acquaintance, all belly and boiled skin, whereas Matt is tall and dark and handsome, and will open his mouth in mixed company.
I reminded myself of this fact again today, before it suddenly struck me, like a bucket of cold water in the face, that I might no longer be justified in laying claim to Matt’s rakish good looks and lazy charm.
‘What’s up?’ said Lisa. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You haven’t got a cramp, or something?’
‘No. I’m fine.’
‘That’s one thing you can say about kids. At least they put an end to period pains. Did you find that? After you had Emily?’
‘Yes.’
‘I used to get killer cramps, I’d be doubled over, right from when I was a kid. And back then I was so embarrassed about it. I told someone I had appendicitis once, would you believe? Now I’d just say that my uterus is going into spasm, you got a problem with that?’
As she rattled on, I wondered if I should tell her. I wondered how she would respond: by dismissing my fears as laughable, or by stridently condemning Matt as a ‘typical bloody male, someone ought to bring out a line of chastity jocks’? In the end, I couldn’t bring myself to utter the words, though for all I knew she might have had her own problems with Simon (despite his unappealing gut). What’s more, she possessed all the qualifications of an excellent confidante and counsellor: the psychiatric training, the quick wit, the sympathetic manner, the trustworthy moral code.
But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was too shaming— too revealing.
Besides, I thought, with a spark of hope, who’s to say that I’m not mistaken? I mean, I haven’t even checked those last two phone numbers yet.
I finally did it this evening, after Matt arrived home. He was late again—an hour late—and blamed it on farewell drinks for somebody-or-other. Even so, he was back in time to put Jonah to bed, and then Emily. If he hadn’t been, we would have Had Words. The kids are always keen to have Daddy put them to bed on the weekends, because Mummy does it the rest of the week (except Tuesdays). They also prefer Daddy’s putting-to-bed technique because he plays the ‘bouncing game’—something he inherited from his own father—and doesn’t have such a fetish about teeth cleaning. Not that I mind. Let’s face it, I’d rather have Matt put me to bed. His voice is so rough and warm, it’s like a woolly blanket.
While Matt was reading books and singing songs, I had a shower. I emerged from the steamy bathroom to find my husband chopping vegetables for dinner, and instead of melting with gratitude became instantly suspicious. Only guilt would have driven him into the kitchen without prompting, I decided.
Was it guilt for being late, or guilt for being late because the Girl With Purple Hair had detained him?
‘It’s chilli, right?’ he asked.
‘That’s right.’
‘Feelin’ better?’
‘A bit.’ I mean, it wasn’t as if I’d had a long, scented bubble bath, or anything. ‘What’s this? A menu?’
‘It was in the letterbox. New Thai place. No mail today?’
‘It’s Saturday, Matt.’
‘Oops! That’s right. I forgot. Bugger it—I thought my tax refund might have arrived. I should have got it by now.’
Matt’s an optimist; he always looks forward to getting mail. I don’t. The mail always seems to be bills, these days.
I looked at him standing there, stooped over the cutting board with his back to me. He was wearing a thin, grey cotton jumper, very old and loose, that swayed slightly with every rhythmic shift of his muscles. The back of his neck was showing as he bent it, a pale line between the grey wool and the black hair. I couldn’t believe that he was there, looking so normal. I could have reached out my hand and touched him—and why did that seem so strange? Was it because, in my mind, he had already fled? Or was it because I expected him to be different in some way from the man I had married?
I turned quickly, and went into our bedroom. It’s the darkest room in the house, but at least it’s a good size. There isn’t much in it: just the bed (which pretty much emptied our bank account), a clothes rack, a shoe rack, and a beat-up, old-fashioned wardrobe that’s much too small (hence the clothes rack). On my side of the bed there’s also a stool, with a piece of white linen draped over it. That’s where I put my books and my tissues and the telephone.
I closed the door, picked up the receiver, and dialled the first of the two remaining numbers on my list.
A woman answered on the third ring.
‘Hello?’ she said. She had a high, breathless voice.
I cleared my throat.
‘Hello,’ I replied hoarsely. ‘Who’s this?’
‘Megan.’
‘Megan Stewart?’
‘No. Megan Molesdale.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry. Wrong number.’
I put the receiver down, and sat there on the bed. Megan Molesdale? Who the hell was Megan Molesdale? I’d never heard the name before in my life.
‘What’s up?’ said Matt, from behind me. I nearly jumped out of my skin.
‘Oh!’ I gasped. ‘Oh . . .’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. You scared me.’
‘Who were you talking to?’
‘No-one. Wrong number.’ As Matt’s eyes widened, I quickly backtracked. ‘I mean—Lisa gave me the wrong number. I called the wrong number.’
‘Oh.’ He raised an eyebrow as he slowly scratched the back of his neck. ‘Well . . . okay. Do you know where the tomato paste is?’
Selective blindness. Does he really not see the jar sitting at the front of the shelf, or is it just a pretence, because he can’t be bothered even looking? Perhaps it’s that brain-wiring problem again.
‘I’ll show you. It should be there.’ On my way to the kitchen, I was slightly unsteady on my feet. But I made it, and did my usual trick with the magic materialising jar of tomato paste.
Megan Molesdale?
Another sleepless night lies ahead.
CHAPTER THREE
Sunday
Other people look forward to Sunday mornings. Once upon a time, I was the same. On Sunday mornings I would wake up around ten, make percolated (not instant) coffee, take a long, hot shower, then wander down to a café on Oxford street for brunch—eggs, French toast and banana pancakes—which I would eat while leafing through the Saturday papers.
This morning, I got up at 5.45 a.m. Why? Because Jonah’s an early riser, and can’t be allowed to roam about unsupervised, even in a house where every power point has a protective plug in it and every cutlery drawer is fitted with a child-proof latch. He’s such a determined little thing when it comes to latches— and such a Houdini, when it comes to squeezing through holes?
??that you can’t help admiring him for it, even while you’re peeling his fingers off the handle of a breadknife. ‘I want to make a carrot,’ he pointed out to me this morning, in injured and perfectly articulated tones, when I refused to allow him access to the vegetable peeler. I told him that he could do it later, when he was Emily’s age. (By then, I thought, he probably would be making carrots—out of thin air. Using a patented matter generator of some kind.) After which he explained that he wanted to make a carrot into a kangaroo, and I wondered, with alarm, if he was suddenly going to start sculpting things out of root vegetables.
Sometimes, I swear, he intimidates me.
In case you’re wondering, I’m always the one who gets up early, in this house. It’s not exactly that my husband and I came to an agreement; it’s just that I’m a light sleeper, and Matt isn’t. Matt can sleep through the noise that Jonah makes, pounding flat-footed over our wooden floors, whereas I can’t. Everything wakes me, these days. Coughs. Cats. Hot-water pipes. It’s something to do with being a mother. Something to do with the shake-up that your body clock suffers during those first few months of four-hour feeds.
So I got up with Jonah, and warmed his milk, and changed his nappy, and checked the phone bills again before Matt had a chance to crawl out from under the doona. Six calls to Megan Molesdale. A quick glance at the Coustos & Sons Pharmacy calendar (‘Serving the Community since 1974’) confirmed my suspicions. The calls to Megan Molesdale, all six of them, had been made on three consecutive Tuesdays, between the hours of nine and five-thirty. When I was at work, in other words, and Matt was at home, looking after the kids.