The Mistake

by Katie McMahon

  ‘So, do you support yourself with fire-eating work?’

  ‘Nah. I own a property near Byron Bay.’ Perhaps he’d inherited it. ‘Airbnb. That keeps me going. I do a bit of circus-skills stuff and labouring. A couple of gardens.’

  ‘I sound like the mother in Titanic,’ she said, remembering when poor-but-charming Leonardo DiCaprio went to dinner in first class. ‘Checking your credentials.’ Good grief, she was probably nearly the mother’s age by now too. ‘Have you even seen Titanic?’

  ‘’Course I have,’ he said. ‘That scene in the car.’ He gave a tiny groan. ‘Sexy, sexy Kate Winslet. Beautiful woman.’

  Bec went very still inside. His appreciative, knowing tone. The way he hadn’t said still beautiful. The way he hadn’t said was sexy. There was a pause.

  ‘To be honest,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t at all dusty after the other night. I barely drank.’

  He was quiet for a second too. Then he said, ‘’Course. Loads of work for you. Man. Putting everyone at ease, making sure things flowed right, directing the troops.’ There was a smile in his voice. ‘Me included. What else? Oh yeah, wrapping all the grumpy old men round your little finger. Helping that poor drunk lady.’

  ‘You saw that?’ Miranda had re-surfaced during the fire-eating.

  ‘Yeah. Nights like that don’t just happen, right? It was a slick operation. And it actually had heart. Beautiful outside and in, I thought.’

  ‘Wow. Thanks.’

  ‘It’s true.’ A little beat. ‘Yeah, so I was just calling. To thank you, really. I’ve had lots of calls, new business. Been good for me.’ Bec was aware of an indefensible stab of disappointment. ‘And also to say, maybe you and I could catch up one time?’

  She swallowed.

  ‘I know, like, six people in Hobart,’ he added.

  (Bec couldn’t imagine he wouldn’t be able to find dozens of people to be friends with – men like him were always part of a tribe of young people, all practising acrobatics in a way that barely concealed the sexual tension everyone was feeling. There was also usually a posse of their children, who all had mohawks and grown-up nicknames, and who were preternaturally good at either surfing or guitar.)

  ‘Um,’ she said.

  Don’t you dare! cried Stern Voice.

  ‘Probably not this week,’ Bec said.

  It was like being in a car accident. The type in which you were all right, but you couldn’t believe it had happened. You just sort of sat there, in your car, feeling shocked and brave and waiting for someone to help you.

  ‘It’s tricky, isn’t it?’ he said, eventually. ‘This thing. You and me.’

  She didn’t know how to respond. It took a lot of effort not to default to, ‘I know!’ or ‘Sorry!’

  ‘I’ll let you go then, Bec. Take care, won’t you, hey?’

  ‘I will. You too, Ryan.’

  They said goodbye. More fondly than was standard, but still. Very decorously. And as if they both thought it was for the last time.

  *

  ‘Oh my word, you have got to be joking!’ It was later that afternoon. Bec turned in her seat to meet Essie’s eyes. ‘Two certificates in one day!’

  ‘Mum! Watch the road!’ screeched Mathilda. Bec had just collected the girls from school. Essie was telling a long, excited story about the Premier’s Choir Challenge and her Star of the Week award, punctuating her sentences with kicks to the back of Bec’s seat. Bec inched the car forward towards the roundabout, and twiddled her fingers at Rachel (Amelia’s Mum) Linton who was stowing a backpack into the boot of her enormous four-wheel drive. Rachel gave Bec a sort of half-smile, half-grimace, as if they were Anzacs about to go over the top.

  ‘Well, that’s just wonderful,’ Bec said. ‘Darling, have you got magical shoes on? Is it them that I can feel tap dancing on my back?’

  Mathilda giggled. Essie giggled.

  In that moment, she knew she was crazy to have taken that call from Ryan. Stuart was really a wonderful husband, and they had a wonderful family. She had to put the fire-eater out of her mind, the way you sacked a piano teacher or a cleaner who wasn’t working out. Because she had never been of the view that fantasies were all right and crushes were to be expected and innocent flirting was simply a normal part of being married. Just her opinion, but surely you were better off putting your heart and mind into whatever you were actually doing.

  She looked again at Essie and Mathilda (Lachlan was at soccer training). The two of them were talking about someone called Zora whose little sister had broken her arm. Essie was gazing at Mathilda as if she was trying to remember everything Mathilda did so she could tell someone all about it later. It was so very cute, and Bec made a mental note to mention it to Stuart. (‘They’re gorgeous at the moment, aren’t they?’ he’d say, his eyes crinkling up as he imagined them. Stuart’d been saying ‘gorgeous at the moment’ since the kids were born. With any luck, he’d still be saying it at their fiftieths. ‘Hey, Bec, just look at the way Lachy’s hairline’s receding. Gorgeous at the moment, isn’t he?’)

  She’d delete Ryan from her contacts. She’d block his number.

  But when they pulled into the garage, Essie was busting for the toilet and Bec had to rush to unlock the front door, and then there was the milk to bring inside and yet another lot of books had arrived from Amazon and Mathilda was suddenly starving to actual death and Nicole (Oscar’s mum) Zhao texted to say she wouldn’t be allowed to collect Lachlan from training unless Bec messaged Paul-the-Coach straight away.

  By the time she was making dinner (pouring an entire pan of cheese sauce over a small dish of broccoli; it was the only way she ever got anyone to eat green vegetables) she couldn’t believe she’d planned to block Ryan’s number. For one thing, he might need to talk to her about a fire-eating reference or something. And for another, she was allowed to make a friend. Heaven’s sake. She spent the vast majority of her life looking after her family; making cheese sauce on a Wednesday night was honestly the tip of the iceberg. She scorched her hand on the side of the saucepan and the pain barely even registered.

  ‘Dinner’s ready!’ she called. Being a weeknight, it was just the kids and her for dinner.

  ‘There’s no need to squawk, Mummy,’ said Mathilda, severely. She’d been sitting silently on the daybed near the kitchen. Bec hadn’t realised.

  By the time the children were asleep, her burnt hand had started to throb. She took two paracetamol and decided to pour herself a white wine. (She preferred red, but around the time she turned thirty-five it started giving her migraines, just in case the post-baby pelvic-floor situation wasn’t enough to be going on with.)

  With the sort of clarity that comes when you’re just a little bit drunk, she realised she’d better get rid of Ryan’s number. And that she should talk to Kate. Or to her mum. Or – why hadn’t she thought of it earlier? – to Stuart. They’d always promised to communicate. They’d always thought that most problems could be solved if couples only talked. Sitting in the quiet, darkened house, drinking her wine and folding the washing, the idea of opening up to her husband – ‘Something sort of silly’s happening, and I think I’d probably better just tell you’ – seemed completely feasible.

  ‘That cheeky little prick!’ Stuart would say, as if Ryan was a high school student who’d written lewd graffiti about a teacher. ‘In his dreams.’ There’d be a contemptuous sort of snort, as if Ryan was from a different species. Then Stuart would dismiss the subject completely and ask, ‘How’d Lachy go at training?’ or ‘Has Essie been back to the dentist yet?’ or, to be fair, ‘When’s your next walk with Allie?’ Stuart would be amused, she realised, more than threatened. He’d be totally secure in her love for him, and take it for granted he’d be informed immediately in the very unlikely event of anything remotely salacious happening in her life.

  Unexpectedly, that really wasn’t a very good feeling.

  *

  ‘Mummy! I think Goldy is dead!’ Mathilda’s voice from the kitchen was a wa
il.

  It was Thursday afternoon. Bec staggered through the front door, put down two school bags, one soccer bag and her handbag, and joined Mathilda by the fish tank. Goldy the goldfish was floating on top of the water.

  ‘Is she, Mummy? Is she?’ Essie had appeared. Her eyes were full of tears: she looked imploringly up at Bec. Lachlan came trooping in.

  ‘What can have happened?’ Mathilda was as dramatic as it’s possible to be when you’re eight.

  ‘I’m afraid Goldy’s died, darlings,’ Bec said, solemnly.

  All three children – even Lachlan, who was ten and hardly ever wanted to hold her hand anymore, and certainly never in public – started crying real, copious tears. She squatted down, balancing awkwardly on her ridiculous wedge heels – what sort of person got dressed in shoes like that just to buy a new hose and then pick kids up from school? – while all three children collapsed onto her lap.

  She felt a horrible urge to laugh. Then she remembered how they’d given Essie the goldfish tank – with the yet-to-be-named Goldy in it – for her fourth birthday and felt the urge to cry herself.

  ‘But she had a good, long life. Sixteen months is a very old age for a goldfish.’ Bec had no idea whether that was true. ‘We’ll bury Goldy in the garden,’ she told them. ‘You can pick some flowers to go on her grave.’ She was also not entirely sure of Goldy’s gender, and hearing her own solemn use of the word ‘grave’ almost made her want to laugh again.

  Just then, her phone rang in her handbag. Of course, she carefully ignored it in her best not-letting-technology-take-over-life way. She patted Essie’s back and Lachlan’s arm and shifted her weight slightly so that all four of them didn’t fall on top of the tank, in which Goldy’s surviving relatives (Daisy and Patchy) were still swimming. She waited for the sobbing to subside. She really must give the fish tank a clean. It was very hard to not ask Mathilda what on earth the bright red mark on her school dress was.

  That was when the landline rang. Three rings, then stopped, then rang again. It was their signal. Stuart thought Bec was a bit hopeless at answering his calls and replying to his texts, which was true, because she sometimes had her phone on silent. (She rarely bothered texting him. He couldn’t get at his phone when he was operating, and there was no point asking a theatre nurse to read, ‘Essie’s banged her head, and Lachlan needs new school bathers by tomorrow, and Mathilda’s on her bed crying about something someone said to her at lunchtime, and I’m exhausted, so can you please call me?’ to the operating theatre at large. Obviously. She tended to just get on with things.)

  ‘I’ll have to get this, darlings,’ she said. She disentangled herself. ‘Daddy must be needing to talk to me.’

  ‘Bec?’ Stuart’s voice was only a tiny bit different from normal.

  ‘No, it’s your mistress. You’ve called me by mistake.’ This was one of her standard wifely jokes. It was the harsh reality that Stuart was far more eligible than she was.

  Stuart didn’t laugh. There was a silence.

  ‘What?’ She lowered her voice and turned so that her back was to the children.

  ‘Something weird’s happened,’ he said. ‘There’s been a complaint.’

  ‘What?’ Her stomach twisted.

  ‘Not about work,’ he said, quickly. ‘Well, sort of not about work.’

  ‘Stuart. What?’ There was a breaking, flaking feeling in her chest, like honeycomb coming apart in her mouth.

  ‘Some girl. A girl from my party? One of the waitresses, I think. She reckons that I—’ He made a sound like a laugh. ‘She reckons I told her I’d do a lap band in exchange for a blow job.’

  ‘Oh no.’ Bec paused. ‘You didn’t, did you?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t.’ He sounded affronted. ‘But it’s a really bad look. She’s seventeen, apparently. She’s complained to the hospital, it looks like she’s going to go to MPRA, she’s posted on Facebook about it.’

  ‘What?’ Bec felt sweat come onto the hand that was gripping the telephone. ‘She can’t do that! It’s . . . surely it’s defamation or something?’ And even she knew that being reported to the Medical Practitioner Regulation Authority was pretty much every doctor’s worst nightmare.

  ‘What’s wrong, Mum?’ screeched Mathilda.

  Bec turned around to find all three children were staring at her. She was so upset that she made an impatient ‘run along’ gesture at them.

  ‘Maybe,’ Stuart said. ‘I’m seeing Rodney in the morning.’

  Rodney was their lawyer. He mainly advised them about insurance and tax and their wills. (She’d never really got used to the idea of having a family lawyer, but as far as Stuart was concerned, that was just what you did.)

  Stuart said a few more things that she couldn’t quite hold on to: it was as if his words were falling through her head like water through a colander. ‘I’ll be home about six.’

  ‘All right.’ She didn’t even register that that was very early for a weekday.

  She said her goodbyes and hung up, making an effort to compose her face before she turned and faced the children. They were standing in front of her, like skittles about to be toppled. Goldy floated on top of the water behind them.

  Essie’s warm little hands were around Bec’s thighs within seconds.

  ‘Don’t cry, Mummy,’ she said, earnestly. ‘Goldy will be happy in the sky now, and we can put her near the mulberry tree.’

  ‘OK. Sure,’ Bec said. ‘How about you guys go and dig a little hole? I’ll bring Goldy out in just a second.’

  Of course they wouldn’t go without her. Of course she had to hold it together long enough to go with the three of them to make a hollow under the canopy of the mulberry tree and preside over the funeral.

  When they got back inside, she said, ‘How about, for a treat, you go and watch a movie?’

  ‘But it’s a school night,’ said Mathilda. ‘What’s for dinner? Mummy! We haven’t even had afternoon tea!’

  ‘For a treat.’ Dear God, she just had to get away from her poor, lovely children for five single minutes. ‘To celebrate Goldy’s life.’ She was improvising. ‘And let’s have take-away chicken for dinner: I’ll nip down and get it now. Lachlan can be in charge.’

  Only when she was back from the corner deli and had checked they were all safe in front of Harry Potter (the third one, not too scary) did she pick up her phone to see what Facebook said. She had a lot more messages and notifications than usual. Her whole body seemed to squeeze in on itself.

  Bec have you seen this? Very concerning, one of the school mums had messaged. She’d shared a post with Bec. It had a photo of Stuart, the one that was on his website, where he was wearing a College of Surgeons tie and looking professional and serious and just the tiniest bit self-satisfied. (‘Only a third-generation surgeon could pull off that expression,’ she’d told him, more than a year ago, when she first saw the picture. ‘I don’t look like too much of a tosser, do I?’ he’d replied, a bit sheepishly.)

  The post seemed to be from one of the party’s waitresses. Bec couldn’t tell which one: her profile photo was of someone in a platinum wig and big sunglasses. Her name was given as Stef Hanni. The post said:

  I did a waitressing job approximately three weeks ago at the house of this surgeon. DO NOT go to this man. He said he would do a FREE lap band on me WHICH I DON’T EVEN WANT if I performed ORAL SEX on him.

  There were 246 reactions. There were seventy-seven shares. There were 154 comments.

  Just not acceptable in this day and age!!!

  Typical culture of entitlement in that profession i’m sorry to say.

  There was no sound in the room now; it was as if Bec was alone on the planet. She scrolled.

  Appalling behaviour. Thanks for posting, will change my appointment.

  Known him since he did my husband’s bowel operation, cannot believe it, I am so sorry this happened to you.

  She scrolled on. Surely there’d be at least some posts in Stuart’s defence. His practice manage
r and the receptionists (none of whom, she now recalled, had been invited to the party) would stick up for him. Or at least his nurses. Someone would say, ‘This is ridiculous. Stuart respects women. Stuart would never have said that.’ One of his patients might put in a good word. Just last week he had brought home a jar of home-made jam, with a gift-tag attached that said, ‘Words can never express my gratitude. You are a truly wonderful doctor. Tasmania is so lucky to have you!’ And in his study, on the mantelpiece, was a heavy, expensive card with a Tasmanian watercolour on the front, and inside, a message that said, ‘I know you couldn’t save our beautiful Jessica, but thank you, Mr Henderson, for explaining everything about her condition so clearly. It was a source of considerable comfort to me and my wife on that most dreadful of days.’

  But that night, only merciless black-and-grey type stared out at her.

  You poor girl, no one deserves to be treated like that. Good on you for speaking out, it takes guts.

  Will ask my GP to refer me to someone who RESPECTS women.

  Hashtag sexualharassment. Hashtag baddoctors. Hashtag collegeofsurgeons. Hashtag MeToo.

  Believe the woman, her mum had always said. You have to listen, and you have to believe.

  Yes, Bec had always thought. Yes. Of course you do.

  One comment said, I found him fine, certainly no complaints about my scar or experience. Another said, He removed half of my colon for bowel cancer, very traumatic, but no problems with him myself, but I am older. Another said, I think these complaints/allegations should go through the proper channels.

  That was as much support as he was going to get, it seemed.

  Does not deserve the title of doctor. How is this not illegal?

  Makes me feel sick to think this predator operated on my teenage daughter.

  Bec went into the toilet and vomited. It was the second time in her life bad news had made her do that.

  *

  Before Stuart got home, she realised that she’d better pull herself together, brush her teeth and at the very least make a salad. She was standing at the bench, cutting cherry tomatoes into leaky halves, when he came into the kitchen.