‘Well. The offer’s there. From me. Whatever you two are comfortable with.’
I was as inoffensive and appropriate as an example out of a modern etiquette guide. In fact, I sounded like the sort of person I would definitely hate. (Or, as an etiquette guide might put it, the sort of person I may find rather challenging.)
*
Adam ended up spending nearly two hours defending the space between two potted bonsai trees against Essie’s goal kicks, and then we stayed for dinner. We had pizza (my treat, which Adam accepted for once; he was probably too exhausted to argue). After the kids were in bed, Bec seemed keen for us to stay, and we sat around drinking a lot of wine. Probably not a very smart move.
When Stuart went to their wine-cellar to bring out some more bottles of riesling I said, ‘He seems pretty down, doesn’t he, Bec?’ He had hardly opened his mouth all day.
She nodded.
‘Reminds me of last summer,’ I said.
‘Summer before,’ she corrected. ‘But yeah.’ She looked at Adam. ‘Stuart was involved in a case where a baby died,’ she said. That was when I realised Bec had had more to drink than usual, because neither of them usually talks about the specifics of his work. ‘An unborn baby, I mean. He’d operated on the mother.’ She drew a round belly in the air above her own tummy, which is something else she’d never usually do in front of me.
Without warning, Adam and I looked at each other for the tiniest could-you-possibly-be-thinking-what-I-think-we’re-thinking-about-babies? millisecond. Fortunately, because of course Way Too Soon, Bec talked on, so we both looked back towards her with very great interest. Her neck was flushed with alcohol and emotion. She spoke as if it was important that Adam got the right picture of her upstanding husband – ‘everyone knew it wasn’t his fault’ – and of what he’d been going through two summers ago, when he’d been so crushed by unwarranted guilt – ‘even the coroner said so, in the end’ – that we’d all left Hobart Food Festival early, even though Mum and BFG had the kids.
‘Leaving early suited me,’ I told Adam. ‘We kept running into people I knew from school, and it wasn’t very fun. I was a total bitch in high school.’
‘Surely not,’ said Adam, drily. To Bec he said, ‘She would have made my life miserable in high school.’
Bec nodded, in a Very Strongly Agree way.
‘Yep, I would’ve.’ I was only half joking. ‘So anyway, I kept wanting to apologise, but not knowing how, and at the same time I felt like telling them not to look so forgiving and self-righteous, because lots of people are bitches in high school.’
Adam laughed, Bec not so much. ‘Sorry for all the times I was mean to you, Bec,’ I said. I was still just mucking around.
To my surprise, Bec put down her glass, and said, in a hostile voice, ‘Oh it was excellent being constantly undermined, Kate.’ She used an offended fingertip to rub a tiny splodge of something off the table. Then she looked at Adam and said, ‘Nothing like a beautiful big sister to make you feel fab about yourself when you’re sixteen.’
She put ‘beautiful’ in air quotes. To imply two things: first of all, that everyone thought I was beautiful, which was pretty much true. (Actually, it was completely true, because I was. I never went through the gawky, too-tall, ugly-duckling thing that many models, usually untruthfully, complain about.) Bec’s air quotes also implied that my beauty was only skin-deep. Also true.
‘God. Bec,’ I said. I felt sort of breath-taken, and Adam got a wary, big-cat-standing-in-long-grass-near-some-zebras look about him.
‘I know. I was horrible, Becky. I was a total, total bitch at that really important and sensitive time. I’m so sorry.’
Bec kept her hands clasped in front of her, with her fingers all twisted like a ball of wool that was going to be impossible to unravel. She looked as if she was about to say something more, but Stuart came back with another two bottles and she turned her head to peer up at him. He was at least opening the wine with a convivial air, and she visibly relaxed. Her attention was always tethered to his pain at the moment. It was really nice, how they just loved each other so much.
As Stuart got on with the wine, Bec made eye contact with me. She shrugged and mouthed, ‘’S’alright,’ and shook her head rapidly, as if she was silly to be so upset. There was a little silence.
Adam said, ‘Kate tells me you’re starting a job, Bec?’
‘Ugh, let’s not talk about that tonight,’ she replied, flicking her eyes up at Stuart. I could see her casting around for something else to say, but she’d had a little bit too much wine to come up with anything fast enough.
‘I just thank God I was born with these legs and never had to work in a real job,’ I said. I did a theatrical shudder, and Bec smiled a grateful smile at me.
‘God, yeah,’ she said.
‘Yeah. Here’s to Kate’s legs,’ Adam put in, right on cue.
Stuart had finished pouring the wine, and we all picked up our glasses and said, ‘To Kate’s legs’ and the whole thing became kind of jovial. Bec smiled at me again. But Adam was sitting opposite me, and as he put down his glass, he shot me a look that was so loaded with private memories it made me nearly forget what I was even doing. He very much likes my legs.
Then Stuart chucked his arm across my shoulders, and said, ‘Sensational legs,’ and Bec laughed her secure-wife-being-pretend-horrified laugh, and Adam’s posture changed a tiny bit. I gave him a don’t-worry-about-it-this-is-just-family-stuff look, and we all slurped more wine.
*
On the way home in the Uber, I leaned rather drunkenly against Adam, and thought about how nice it was to be actually going home with a man.
A long time ago I had formed the habit of implying to Bec that I was dating multiple men and that I was having a lot of casual sex. It was pretty easy, because I actually had had quite a lot of semi-casual sex when I was modelling. This was in my early twenties, when I was living in London.
I used to tell Bec about most of those escapades. We’d email and talk on the phone. Back then, she was deeply in love with a Canadian boy called James. They were both medical students, and they met volunteering in Nepal, which would have to be the most nerdily romantic setting in the sweep of the universe. They painted a clinic, distributed antibiotics, had lots of (no doubt very safe) sex, and then went home. Though well aware that 23-year-old men adore passionate correspondence, neither Mum nor I were all that flabbergasted when, about eight months later, James met a Canadian girl. But Bec was devastated. For ages – nearly two years – she went all self-denyingly, primly single. Mum was getting a tiny bit worried, but then Bec met Stuart.
So the upshot was, whenever we chatted about sex, it was me who did most of the talking. It’s difficult to ask saucy questions about your sister’s boyfriend when he’s in Canada, especially considering sexting hadn’t been invented then, and we’d never heard of Skype.
A couple of times, Bec talked to me when she and Stuart were first dating. We probably spent way too much time giggling over terms like ‘surgical strike’ and ‘smooth operator’ and making lewd comments about his extensive knowledge of anatomy. But then they got engaged. You can’t giggle about someone’s fiancé. You just can’t.
Anyway. Around the time of surgical-strike-hilarity, Bec and I went to buy underwear in Hobart. That was obviously the first mistake. It was about five months after my amputation.
Bec called in from her cubicle that she’d finished with whatever slinky thing she was planning to prance around Stuart in. I was trying on a lemon-and-white Elle Macpherson bra. It was too small, and therefore looked as if it had been designed around someone’s milk-maid fantasy. There were no staff (obviously), so Bec said she’d grab me a different size.
I was just minding my own business, thinking about how nice my breasts were, when someone knocked once and opened my cubicle door. Is there anything more annoying than a single knock when someone’s on their way in? There are few things more annoying.
I jumped, beca
use I didn’t realise it was Bec. She never used to do that weird knock thing. When I jumped, my stump flapped up. Your stump flaps up faster and higher than your arm when you flinch. It’s to do with weight and muscle strength. (Before the Tudors, I went through a stage of obsessively studying arm anatomy, as though that would help.)
‘Oops! Sorry!’ Bec said. Apart from the ridiculous knocking, Bec had never before apologised if she caught me in my underwear. But that day she averted her eyes and turned her face away to Give Me My Privacy. She closed the door most of the way, and stuck in her arm with the bra dangling on its hanger.
But I’d already seen her expression.
‘Thanks!’ I said. I took the hanger from between her thumb and fingers and she went away. It took me ages to take the 10B off. There was no one to help. Trying on the 10C felt way too hard all of a sudden, so I sat down on the floor. I thought of Bec in her sexy new slip, with her sexy new boyfriend, and I felt a twist of something unfamiliar and horrible that I would later identify as jealousy. I didn’t buy anything that day.
On the way home – we were in a taxi, for some reason – I decided I was going to move to Melbourne. I thought Bec would say, ‘Don’t be stupid, stay here!’ or ‘But what will you do there?’ or even ‘Maybe I’ll come too. Time for me to get back into my medicine.’ But she turned to me with tears in her eyes and said, ‘That might be a good idea.’ I still don’t know why she said that.
Soon after that day I started, not exactly lying, more alluding. Like, if she said, ‘Things are going pretty well with Stuart,’ I’d say, ‘And you’re not bored yet?’ Or when she started saying, ‘Well, Stuart and I have been together forever,’ I’d sigh and say, ‘It must be kind of nice to be with the same person for a long time, though. What you’d miss out on in excitement, might be made up for in intimacy.’ Once she talked about a fight that they’d had and I said, ‘But isn’t make-up sex so great?’ A few times I told her (truthfully) that I’d been in bed all weekend, and let her think it was with a man.
Whenever she asked if I wanted to bring someone to Christmas, I would pretend to think about it and then say, no there’s no one special, or no it’s just a sex thing, or no he’d argue with Mum about politics. Once I almost paid someone, an escort, but it was too unbearable and I cancelled at the last minute. Another time – Dad’s sixtieth – I did actually pay an escort. He had goggly eyes and a tiny head, and he kept saying things were ‘unbiloiverbull, mate’. When Stuart took all of us to a fancy Melbourne restaurant for Bec’s thirty-fifth, I asked the brother of a girl from my book club.
‘I need a favour,’ I said to Tara, as if I was inconveniently between boyfriends just when an important function was coming up. The brother’s name was Troy; he had a serene look, like a patient in a brochure about leukemia research. I told Bec I’d known him for a while. Not exactly a lie. He was pretty good company after a beer, although he did say ‘upliftment’ twice. At the end of the night, he saw me to a taxi.
I said, ‘Thank you, that was really fun,’ and put my hand on his arm. I was wearing a tight lace dress that I’d bought especially. He laid his hand on my stump and said, ‘I’m really glad, Kate. I hope everything works out for you.’ Afterwards, I found out that Tara had cooked him osso bucco as a thank you.
I stopped going to book club a bit after that.
Maybe I could have tried harder. There are even special dating apps for disabled people. But I just couldn’t seem to do it. I didn’t want to be part of that, which maybe was my loss, but that’s how I felt.
In high school I had two boyfriends. At university I met Horrible Hayden, who for some reason I thought I was in love with, even though when I look back, all I remember is the way he used to act as if he was doing me a favour by letting me stay the night before he had a big game.
And then, after Hayden, things changed. It got different, once I started modelling and became, if not exactly famous, then at least well-known. And after I lost my arm, it got different again.
‘Hey, Kate?’ Adam touched my hand. ‘Are you asleep?’ It was dark and cosy in the back of the Uber, and a song I liked was playing quietly. ‘We’re nearly there.’
‘I’m awake.’ I sat up and looked at him, and I tried as hard as I could to focus. I thought about the photographer lie. I thought about the way he’d called me his girlfriend. I thought about how lovely he was with my family, and the late-night texts he sent occasionally, and the way he’d held me that morning.
‘Why do you like me?’ I said. I watched him, as if by straining my eyes enough I would be able to properly see the man next to me. ‘Do you like me?’
I heard him breathe out. ‘Don’t even get me started,’ he said. He cradled my face with both his hands. ‘Beautiful, beautiful mean girl.’
He kissed me, and the song whirled, and I let myself go, go deep, into the music and the kiss and the emotion. It felt wonderful. The relief. The surrender. The way my misgivings seemed like nothing, and I was pulled, down and in, down and in, down and in.
Chapter Ten
Bec
Bec woke up with an actual hangover. It took her a while to work out what the nausea was. In fact, as her aching head scooped her up out of sleep, she was thinking that surely she couldn’t be pregnant, because she had a Mirena in, and Mirenas were 99.9 per cent effective.
Ah, wait. It was just all that wine.
And then, oh goodness, the dread. Because if Saturday night was finished then now it was already Sunday, and so there were only two more sleeps until Tuesday, when she had to go to work. She knew she was carrying on like a spoilt princess, but she honestly felt as if she was going to jail. It had been such a long time – more than a decade – since she’d had to be accountable, to strangers, for things she did. And she just knew she wouldn’t have a natural ability to slot in behind a reception desk. She’d been considered a good intern, because she knew a lot and she cared about her patients, but she’d never been one of those terse, practical women, full of quick decisions and with a knack for applying protocols and enforcing policies. She knew that she’d forget names and have to ask stupid questions, and then she’d try to make up for it by being extra nice, and then she’d get so busy being nice that she’d forget to do basic things such as turning on the answering machine or putting an important piece of correspondence in the correct pigeon hole. And if someone said to her, casually, ‘You might just want to check on the . . .’ she wouldn’t realise that that was actually an instruction at first, and then she’d have to go back later and ask in humiliating detail exactly how to do it.
She rolled over, and thought of Ryan. Glad we finally got around to that. It was now more than a week since she’d seen him. Very, very pretty though. Maybe she should call him. Come back soon.
‘Hi,’ Stuart said. He was already standing up, looking out of the window and rubbing the back of his neck. He was wearing a grey T-shirt and the blue pyjama bottoms they’d given him for Christmas.
‘Morning,’ she mumbled.
Stuart came and sat on the bed. ‘Hey, Bec. Do you know what’s going on with Kate and this Adamdick guy?’
She said Kate hadn’t really told her much, but it seemed as if they were getting along very well. It was habitual, to use that inflection when they discussed Kate’s romantic life, and she hoped she didn’t really sound like a repressed teenager. ‘Why?’ she said.
Stuart looked more alert than he had in weeks. ‘I overheard him on the phone last night,’ he said. ‘I’m concerned.’
Oh, what now? she thought, unforgivably.
Stuart told her what he’d heard, and Bec sighed. Once upon a time she would have snapped into horrified action, all bustling Google searches and serious phone calls. To her mother (Should we intervene?) To Allie (What would you do?) To Kate herself (I think you need to know). But that morning, she just wanted a cup of coffee. She wanted to be doing the laundry and tutting about the grass stains on Essie’s tunic and wondering in a comfortable sort of way about whether
she’d make Anzacs or bliss balls for the school lunches that week. Not thinking about school fees or work or horrible comments on Facebook or whether it was possible that her husband was a sexual harasser who fancied teenagers. And definitely not involving herself in Kate’s colourful love life. For one thing, Bec had more than enough on her own plate. For another, she and Kate would more than likely just end up in another fight where Kate would make her feel as if she, Bec, was too staid and too stilted to grasp even the basics of properly sexy sex. And for a third, if a third reason was even needed, Kate was quite experienced enough to look after herself.
‘Look, Stu, maybe you could talk to her,’ she said.
‘Seriously?’ He leaned his head back on his neck in a way that reminded her of a turkey.
‘Well, you’re the one who heard it.’
‘Me?’ He was still doing the turkey look.
‘She respects you, darling. And maybe it’s the kind of thing that’s better coming from a man.’ That seemed a reasonable thing to say. ‘Sometimes stuff like that can be weird between sisters.’
‘Nah,’ he said. He gave his head a little shake and looked towards the windows, ‘It’d . . .’ then back at her. ‘Can’t you, Bec?’
‘Stuart.’ She felt like screaming. For heaven’s sake, she hadn’t even been awake for five minutes. ‘I just cannot take this on right now.’ She was dimly aware that she sounded like a hysterical person off a teledrama. A hysterical Californian person. And she’d shared an adulterous kiss with a handsome man who made chai. Dear Lord.
‘Just think about it,’ said Stuart. He looked at her face. ‘And yes. All right. I will as well.’
*
The rest of Sunday was not too bad a day. She left her phone on its charger in the cupboard, Stuart pottered around in the garden, and she made toasted sandwiches for lunch. Kate and Adam popped around to say goodbye, and once they’d gone, the five of them watched Despicable Me. After they’d had Bec’s pumpkin soup for dinner and the kids were in bed, she sat down in the lounge room across from Stuart.
The Mistake Page 13