She thinks about it as she goes up to her room, brushes her teeth, slips into bed. By the time she’s ready to turn off her lamp, the sense of disquiet has changed, and she is more excited than anxious. For the first time in as long as she can remember, she goes to sleep feeling like she might have something to look forward to.
28
NEXT MORNING WHEN I GO TO THE KITCHEN I FIND ANNA SITTING at the table, pen in hand, notebook in front of her.
‘I’m making a list,’ she tells me, looking up shyly. ‘Of things we need to get for your party.’
I make coffee and sit beside her. She slides her notebook over and I read down the page.
‘We don’t need all this stuff, Anna. I was just planning on getting some sausages and beer,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t have to be a big deal.’
And though I’ve only meant to be helpful, to stop her doing too much, she looks shattered.
‘But if you want to . . .’ I point at her list. ‘If you really want to do all that stuff, that’s fine. I don’t mind. I just didn’t want you to do a whole lot of unnecessary work or anything.’
‘Why?’ She looks at me sideways. ‘Because I’m so busy?’ She takes her notebook back, clears her throat. ‘Could I ask you something, Tim? Would you do me a favour?’
‘Sure.’
‘Would you let me organise this?’
‘Well, if you want to . . .’
‘And would you let me pay for it?’
‘No way.’
‘Why not?’
I shake my head. ‘It wouldn’t be right. I just—’
‘Oh, stop it,’ she interrupts, and once again I see that spark in her, the fire that she normally keeps hidden. ‘Of course you can. I want to. I’m not twelve years old. I have money galore, more than I can spend. What am I supposed to do with it, stuck inside here all the time?’
‘But things won’t be like this forever,’ I say. ‘You’ll get better. And then you’ll need your money.’
‘But I have plenty. Too much for one person. One little party won’t even make a dent. Please, Tim.’ She shakes her head in an agitated way. ‘Please don’t try to be protective or moral or whatever it is you think you’re doing. And don’t be embarrassed. I want to do this. It’ll be fun. More fun than I’ve had in a very long time. And I know I said you couldn’t help me, but maybe you can. By letting me do this.’ She’s breathless now, her cheeks pink.
What can I say? I don’t particularly want a big-deal party. I’d be just as happy with a casual barbecue as I would with some kind of posh catered thing. But how can I refuse? Anna looks so determined, almost desperate.
‘All right, then,’ I say. ‘Why not?’
‘Good,’ she says. ‘Thank you. It should be fun.’
For all her use of the word fun, she doesn’t look as though she’s having any. Her brow is furrowed, her body tense. She looks anxious and stressed, more like she’s organising a funeral than a party.
29
SHE ASKS TIM TO WRITE A LIST OF ALL THE PEOPLE HE WANTS TO INVITE. She plans to design some kind of e-card, email the invitation to his friends.
He sits there for ages, scrolling through the contacts on his phone, thinking, chewing the end of the pen and writing down names and email addresses. He shakes his head, crosses a few names off the list, muttering vague reasons, before sliding the paper across to her.
‘That’s more than fifty people,’ she says when she’s counted them.
‘And what about you?’ he asks. ‘Who are you going to invite?’
‘Oh. It’s your party, not mine.’
‘So? Doesn’t matter. Invite your friends too.’ He gestures at the house. ‘No way it’s going to be too crowded.’
It would be easy to lie, to list a whole raft of legitimate-sounding reasons why that wouldn’t be a good idea, but she can feel the blush burning her cheeks before she has time to make up a story, compose herself.
‘Oh, I don’t . . .’ she says. ‘I’ll just invite Marcus and Fiona.’
‘That’s it? Just two people?’ he says quietly, and she can tell he’s feeling sorry for her, wondering how she can be so pathetic, why she doesn’t have anyone else in her life.
*
The first panic attack happened the week after Benjamin died. Marcus and Fiona were at work and Anna was alone in the house. She had been getting dressed, thinking about how she’d fill her day, missing Benjamin so much she struggled not to cry, when suddenly she was overcome by an entirely new sensation: a crushing feeling in her chest, a terrible sense of dread.
She had no idea what was happening at first, no idea why she was so conscious of her heart all of a sudden, why her throat had become so tight, why she felt as if wet concrete had been poured into her lungs.
She wondered if she was dying, having a heart attack.
She texted Marcus for help.
Fiona was the one who came, rushing through the front door sooner than Anna would have thought possible, and Anna almost cried with relief at seeing her. Fiona did all the talking once they reached the hospital, explaining everything that had happened, the order of events. Anna listened silently as Fiona told the doctor about her parents’ death, all about Benjamin, the whole tragic story.
Panic, the doctor concluded. A mental condition, not a physical one. He told Anna it was a very normal, almost expected response to everything that had happened to her. Grief can do some strange things, he told her. There was nothing wrong with her. It was all in her mind.
Unfortunately, discovering it was ‘only’ panic didn’t help. The attacks started coming frequently, overwhelming her in the most unexpected and impossible of places – shopping for food, browsing for books at the library. A smothering avalanche of dread would send her rushing to the bathroom. When she could breathe again, she’d go outside and hail the nearest cab, curling up in the back seat like a lunatic. As soon as she got home she’d go straight to bed and hide under the covers, cry herself to sleep.
With the panic attacks came shame. What kind of person was afraid of the supermarket? What kind of person found it difficult to talk to people, to meet their eyes, in case they saw the truth? What kind of person needed to rush home and hide indoors just so that she could breathe?
The panic and shame grew worse and more intertwined, eventually becoming so bad that all she could do was keep herself hidden, bury herself inside the house and withdraw from everything and everyone.
Ever since her parents died she’d been making excuses to her friends, preferring to spend her time with Marcus and Fiona. The panic only made things worse. She told so many lies and made so many excuses, said no to so many invitations, that people stopped trying. And she found it surprisingly easy to avoid her friends. Most people made a superficial effort, but were ultimately quite happy to be pushed away, happy to be lied to, glad to be relieved of the burden of socialising with her now that she had changed so much.
30
WE SIT THERE FOR THE REST OF THE MORNING MAKING PLANS FOR the party. It’s the most relaxed we’ve ever been together, and apart from the brief uncomfortable moment when I ask if she wants to invite anyone, we pass the time companionably.
I bring my laptop downstairs and while I eat breakfast, Anna uses it to email out the invitations. When she’s done that, she looks things up on the internet. Food, grog, party supplies.
‘Balloons,’ she says. ‘What colour?’
I shrug, smile.
‘Silver,’ she says. ‘Silver will look great against the white ceiling.’
And a bit later: ‘What do you like to drink? What’s your favourite beer?’
‘I don’t mind, Anna. Seriously. Anything will do.’
‘I’ll order something nice. Something German. They usually do good beer, I think. And French champagne. And some nice food.’
Despite my initial reluctance, I start to warm up to the idea of this fancy, more organised kind of party. Good beer, nice food, everything taken care of. Why not? As the morning passes we
listen to the ping of emails coming in from friends responding to the invitation. Most of them say they’ll be there; one or two apologise and say they can’t make it. At each new acceptance Anna writes down the number on her list: 23, 24, 25 . . . 47, 48, 49.
When we get to fifty she smiles. ‘You’re very popular,’ she says. ‘Nearly all your friends are coming.’
‘And look,’ she says, as an email comes in from Marcus. ‘All my friends are coming, too.’
She starts laughing. I watch for a moment, surprised, but her laughter is contagious and soon the two of us are roaring. We laugh so much that tears come to our eyes and we double over, clutching at our stomachs. We try to stop, to breathe and take control, but each time we make eye contact we only start again.
‘Stop it,’ Anna says eventually, still sniggering. ‘You’re giving me a headache.’
‘Me too,’ I say, taking a deep breath. ‘Just stop. Breathe. Stop.’
‘Yes. It won’t do at all,’ Anna says, shaking her head in mock seriousness. ‘All this happiness. Quick. Let’s get back to being miserable.’
It’s such an unexpected thing for her to say that we look at each other and laugh again.
I barely even notice when an email comes in from Lilla saying she’ll be there.
31
SHE SAVES THE BEST BIT FOR WHEN TIM HAS GONE TO WORK. A NEW DRESS.
She searches for an hour before she finds the right one and orders it. The website guarantees it will be delivered within three days – plenty of time before the party.
Once she’s ordered her dress she flicks idly through Tim’s bookmarks. They are mainly links to surfing websites – graphic pictures of tiny-looking men on horrifyingly big waves. There are links to a few cooking sites, one to a site on the tsunami. Almost without thinking, she clicks on the last link, which takes her to Tim’s Facebook page. Before she has a chance to even look at anything, a message appears at the bottom of the screen.
Back again, Timmy?
It’s from a girl called Lilla. Of course Anna doesn’t respond. Tim would find out and think she was snooping. Which she is. But, unable to control her curiosity, she clicks through to Lilla’s Facebook page and browses through her photos. Lilla is pretty, dark. There are a lot of pictures of her with a well-built blond guy and Anna is surprised by how relieved she is at this visual confirmation that Lilla has a boyfriend. There are hundreds of photos. Photos of Lilla looking wild and outrageous at parties, photos of her wearing skimpy little dresses that show off her tanned, athletic body. Photos of her dancing, riding bikes, hiking in the bush, swimming at the beach, drinking beer in pubs, drinking cocktails in posh bars. There are photos of her in fancy dresses, in tight jeans, in rumpled pyjamas. She looks equally confident and sexy in everything. She looks bold, brash, happy, as if she’s having the time of her life.
Anna feels a powerful and irrational jealousy – of Lilla’s life, her obvious carefree happiness, her 798 Facebook friends – but most of all, of her apparent friendship with Tim.
There’s one particular photo that she stares at for a long time. Lilla’s standing on the footpath, the facade of a building behind her. She’s punching the air with her clenched fist,a huge, victorious smile on her face. There’s something about the picture that makes Anna curious, something familiar, something that tugs at her memory.
Still here snooping, Tim? Another message appears from Lilla and Anna closes the page, shuts the computer lid and rushes away, feeling ashamed of herself.
And a strange, mildly unpleasant feeling of inadequacy stays with her for hours. It’s ridiculous, idiotic. She doesn’t even know the girl.
*
That afternoon she goes to the junk room to find the lights that her mother used to put up for parties. It’s early yet – the party’s not for a few days – but she wants to set them up so she can show Tim just how spectacular the ballroom will look.
She takes the lights to the ballroom and dusts them off, then spends the rest of the afternoon stringing them up around the walls of the ballroom. She needs a ladder from the back yard and, though she feels anxious walking out there, going into the dark, cobwebby interior of the shed, she manages to avoid a panic attack and makes it back inside, ladder in hand. She works all afternoon and evening. It’s a hot, uncomfortable job, climbing up and down the ladder, holding her arms over her head while she hooks the lights up. There are enough lights to make three complete circles of the room. When she’s done she closes the door and turns the lights on to get the full effect. She turns the chandeliers on as well, switching them to low, and the combination of chandeliers and fairy lights creates the perfect ambience. Dreamlike, soft, beautiful.
It’s past eight and she’s hungry. She goes to the kitchen to make herself some dinner. She hasn’t had an appetite like this for a long time. She usually sees food as a necessity rather than a pleasure, as fuel that she has to put in her body in order to survive, but tonight she’s ravenous.
She toasts three slices of bread and butters them generously. She cuts a mango into pieces and puts it a bowl with a dash of cream on top. She gets one of the beers that Tim keeps in the fridge and takes it all to the ballroom. She eats sitting on the floor, lights glowing around her, enjoying the atmosphere. For the first time in months she feels a sense of accomplishment; if not exactly happy, she is at least temporarily content. She has a pleasant ache in her arms, and every mouthful of food, every sip of beer, tastes delicious and well-deserved.
Normally she goes to the attic in the evening, but tonight she doesn’t want to dwell in the past. Instead, she watches television in the living room. She has another beer while watching a late-night movie, and then another, and another. By the time she hears Tim’s key in the door she’s feeling tipsy, light-headed.
She rushes to the door and pulls it open.
‘Shit,’ he says, taking a startled step back. He looks almost frightened, but then he smiles and steps inside. ‘Anna. You scared me.’
‘Sorry, sorry, it’s only me,’ she says, and she takes his arm, leads him towards the ballroom. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. I just wanted to show you something.’
She closes the ballroom door behind them so that everything is momentarily black. She turns on all the lights.
‘Wow,’ he says, and he turns, taking it in. His wide eyes and delighted grin make it all worth it. ‘This is awesome, Anna. Awesome.’
‘And I’ve ordered balloons and streamers,’ she says. ‘They’ll be here on Saturday. It’ll look even better when I’ve finished.’
Then he does something surprising, wonderful. He puts his hands on her shoulders, leans down and plants a kiss on her lips. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he says. ‘Thank you.’
She’s glad the lighting is dim so he can’t see the look on her face, the heat she can feel spreading over her skin.
‘Hey,’ she says, turning away. ‘Do you want a beer? I’ve been drinking yours, I hope that’s okay . . . But there’s still some left. We could have one in here?’
‘Okay,’ he says, laughing, and she rushes from the room, filled with a strange sense of urgency, as if Tim might disappear, as if the delicate thread of happiness she can feel expanding within her might just snap if she doesn’t hurry back.
PART 2
32
ON THE NIGHT OF THE PARTY, SHE TAKES HER TIME GETTING DRESSED.
She hasn’t thought about clothes for a long time. When Benjamin died she lost all interest. The way she looked, clothes, make-up – all the things that she’d once found so absorbing and believed so important – became immediately irrelevant.
But something about Tim, and the way she’s starting to feel when she’s with him, has made her care about the way she looks. It’s a nice change to worry about something so trivial, to devote her attention to a problem so easily solved.
It’s both refreshing and liberating being with someone who didn’t know her before, someone who doesn’t remember the old Anna London. Tim never looks at her, mouth
agape, and wonders what the hell happened to the happy-go-lucky girl he used to know. Eventually she will, of course, have to tell him everything. It’s not a secret she can keep forever. But even then, he will only know it as a story, a sad piece of her history, and he will never look at her in the same part-pitying, part-morbidly curious way her old friends do now.
She showers, taking her time, shaving her legs and washing her hair while she’s in there. Afterwards, she moisturises, sprays perfume – two things that used to be automatic but now feel slightly self-indulgent, after going so long without. She puts her new underwear on. It is red and delicate; the bra designed to lift and create cleavage, the matching underpants brief.
She pulls the dress over her head and smooths it over her hips. It’s black and figure-hugging, with a pattern of large old-fashioned burgundy roses all over, and a v-shaped neckline. Her shoes are red too, with wedge heels and thin, elaborate straps that twist around her ankles.
The dress looks amazing on – a perfect fit.
She blow-dries her hair and leaves it loose so that it sits thick on her shoulders, framing her face. She opens the vanity cabinet and scrabbles through her basket of make-up, looking for a lipstick. When she finds the one she wants, in exactly the right shade of red, she pushes her lips out and steps close to the mirror, applying the colour carefully.
She looks utterly changed.
She takes a deep breath and smiles at herself in the mirror. She’s used to feeling anxious, but this is a completely different kind of nerves. It feels like an eternity, a thousand empty years, since she’s had this happy tingle of anticipation in her belly.
33
I DRESS UP FOR THE PARTY – AT LEAST, I ENGAGE IN MY VERSION OF dressing up, which involves putting on a pair of cargo pants instead of my usual shorts, and a relatively new and intact T-shirt. I wash my hair and try to comb it into something resembling a style, but I look ridiculous and end up shaking it out into its normal mess. I consider asking Anna to help me do something with it, maybe even trim it a bit, but I get the feeling she’d be even more hopeless than me. There’s nothing about her to indicate that she’s got any talent for fashion, or that she even cares. She pretty much wears a T-shirt and a shapeless skirt or pair of jeans every day. I’ve never known a girl who puts less effort into her appearance.