The Mistake

by Katie McMahon

  I sat back down at my desk and looked at my thesis. I couldn’t think about fleece transport anymore though. I just thought: in 500 years, my life won’t matter at all.

  That was a little bit comforting.

  *

  I was supposed to be having dinner with Adam that night. Obviously, I picked up my phone at least thirty times, and drafted many curt cancelling texts. My favourites were:

  It’s been nice getting to know you, but I don’t want to see you tonight, or ever again.

  Or:

  Never contact me, liar.

  I didn’t send them though, and not because I wanted to do things in a mature, face-to-face manner, or to hear his side of the story, or to confront him and pour a creamy blue cocktail over his head and thus obtain ‘closure’. It was just because I wanted to see him one more time. I wanted to be near him. And a not-very-tiny part of me was thinking that I’d like to have sex with him. ‘It would be on my own terms,’ I kept telling myself. Of course, that ‘my own terms’ business means absolutely nothing and is definitely the stupidest saying ever invented.

  We had a booking at some Thai restaurant that some friend of his had said was good, and that night, he managed not to cancel. In fact, any data-analysing crises must have been under control, because he arrived before me. He watched me, as I walked towards our table. I knew he’d be noticing that other people were looking at me, too, and I really wished I didn’t have an amputated arm, because then the looks would be different, and Adam would feel so jealous and so possessive and so proud that he’d immediately stop sleeping around and actually fall in love with me. This is me! I thought, in my most obstacle-overcoming, life-affirming manner. Then, in my most honest, non-pop-psychology manner: Alas.

  ‘Hey, babe,’ he said. He half stood up, as if to give me a hug.

  ‘Hello.’ I sat down. I was wearing a tight white top he hadn’t seen before.

  He sat down too.

  I resisted the urge to say, ‘No spreadsheets requiring your urgent attention?’ Or, better still, ‘What was wrong with Nonna, the other night at Bec’s?’

  ‘Are you OK?’ he said. He put his hand on his pretentiously casual water glass, but he didn’t raise it to his mouth. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘So, Adam.’ Conversationally. ‘What was wrong with Nonna, the other night at Bec’s?’ Turns out I just couldn’t resist the urge.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. He picked up his glass. ‘Some new worker needed to check something on the file. To do with a medication.’ He watched my face as he sipped his water.

  ‘And they check with you, do they?’

  He returned his glass to the table. He shrugged. Fake modest.

  ‘I would have thought her doctor would be the appropriate person, for a query regarding medication.’ You only had to watch television to know that.

  ‘What are you asking me, Kate?’

  ‘You know it wasn’t the nursing home who called you.’

  A waitress was suddenly standing next to me. You could just tell she had stickers all over her MacBook and that she pretended to enjoy kombucha. She asked, in what I considered an overly aloof manner, if we would like drinks to start. ‘No, thank you,’ I said. She actually took a step backwards. You beautiful mean girl, I thought. But I am so much more beautiful and so much more mean, and I am so very far from being afraid of you.

  ‘Perhaps in a minute,’ Adam told her. She looked at Adam as if he were a hero, for some reason.

  ‘Adam, what is actually going on with you?’ I said. Not at all gently. ‘Really? What are we even doing?’

  He did an infuriating little scan of the restaurant, as if the most important thing was that we didn’t make a scene.

  ‘Because you stroll around acting as if you know oh-so-much about me, and say I’m your girlfriend and, and do things – other things like that – and five seconds later you’ll be postponing lunch’ – he’d done that the day before – ‘or taking weird phone calls or making up more lies about your work or your nonna.’

  ‘I—’ His face moved in a funny, closed way that told me everything.

  ‘I never asked you for any of it.’ Tears came into my eyes, because that was almost the most heartbreaking thing. ‘Look, just be a man, be honest, buy me dinner, screw me and go home. You don’t need to pretend we’re an item or meet my family or act like you care about me or my . . . psychology.’ I stood up. ‘Just – you know – go and—’ I was crying, I was half yelling, ‘– go and shag whoever you want. Or whomever. Whatever.’ It really wasn’t my best moment.

  ‘Kate. I told you I’m not seeing anyone else, and that’s true.’ Credit to him, he was looking up at me and speaking in a clear voice, even though other people were definitely looking. A young woman in a nice floral vintage dress had turned right around in her seat to stare.

  ‘Fine.’ I took a deep breath in, and I drew myself up to my full height, and I pulled the slurry of agony that was gushing out all over the restaurant back inside my body. I breathed out. ‘Well, Adam.’ I managed a little shrug. ‘If you think I’m dumb enough that you will ever get your hands on any of my money, then you are delusional. So you can give up now.’ The floral-dress girl was still staring. Let her, I thought. I don’t care.

  He was silent for a moment.

  ‘That’s really what you think, is it?’

  I made an angry, flapping gesture with my one and only palm. ‘Of course, that’s what I think.’

  No heroic, don’t-be-ridiculous-Kate response was forthcoming, apparently.

  ‘It’s been nice getting to know you, but I never want to see you again,’ I said. ‘Never contact me, liar.’ Then I added, slightly irrationally, and very loudly, ‘My family love me, Adam.’

  Vintage-dress girl looked concerned, but in a thrilled way. ‘You’re welcome to him,’ I told her. Hopefully she looked mortified. I didn’t see.

  Because it was like a scene in a movie, and the only possible ending was for the heroine to walk out, so I did.

  *

  In a movie the next scene would be the heroine looking out of her window, and it would be raining, but I couldn’t bear to go home alone. I walked around the busier, lighter streets and ended up in a McDonald’s. Quite a diverse bunch of people. A very handsome businessman type, expensive suit, was buying two large take-away fries. Odd. A group of uncool teenage girls – their bad skin plastered with pale make-up, their eyebrows a sad riff on current catwalk styles – sat in a booth. Their voices were unattractively loud.

  When I walked past, one of them went to get up and nearly bumped into me. ‘Courtney!’ yelled her friend, as if Courtney was about to fall over a precipice. Then they all proceeded to shriek with pretend-stifled, scandalised laughter, as if accidentally almost bumping into a grown-up was the funniest, most embarrassing thing that had ever happened in the whole history of the universe.

  I ate an apple pie. It was the first time I’d been in a McDonald’s since they started admitting to the kilojoule count. Apple pies have a lot of kilojoules. Maybe, I thought, I should just let myself go. Have an apple pie every day. Nothing stopping me. I felt an urge to go and sit down with the teenage girls and give them make-up tips. One of them had beautiful lips. One of them had auburn hair that would be gorgeous if she stopped ironing it and stopped having cheap yellow foils. I wanted to take them all shopping and buy them MAC primer and Chanel loose powder and Covergirl mascara. I would take the one with the worst acne to a dermatologist. I would demand proper treatment, whatever the cost.

  I will never have a teenage daughter, I thought.

  Whatever women choose is fine and you don’t have to be married and life can be very rewarding without kids and blah-de-fucking-non-judgemental-blah. I will celebrate my fortieth birthday with Heaps of Fantastic Friends and my beautiful sister, her lovely husband, my wonderful parents, my adorable nieces and fabulous nephew to whom, yes, I Am Very Close. They will be a consolation. Because I wanted a husband. I wanted a few normal (yes! normal!) kids of m
y own. I wanted to stand up at my party and say, ‘We are so happy you could all be here.’

  That’s what I wanted. But this was my lot. I licked the inside of the apple-pie wrapper before I threw it in the bin.

  *

  When I got home, Adam was sitting next to my front door.

  ‘Kate.’ He stood up as I approached.

  ‘How did you get in?’ I said, crossly.

  ‘That red-haired lady from downstairs.’

  ‘Elizabeth.’ I said it as if his failure to remember her name made him pretty much an axe-murderer.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  I shrugged, like it was an idiotic question, and opened the door. On my own terms, I said to myself, uselessly.

  When we went inside, we started kissing straight away. Very, very enthusiastically. I grabbed one of his hands and shoved it inside my top and up under my bra. He took my skirt in his fist, rumpled it up around my waist, clinked his belt open, rustled a condom. I was against the wall, and I said some embarrassing-in-hindsight thing along the lines of harder and he groaned and then he finished really quickly.

  ‘I’ll make us some tea,’ he said, and then he did up his jeans and off he went. I leaned against the wall and thought: That was really, really amazing, but also, I feel sick at myself.

  After a bit, I followed him into the kitchen, and stood near the bench. He put tea in front of me, swivelling the cup – almost undetectably – to make it easy for me to pick up. Acting all grave, as if he was about to announce the family business had to close because of an economic downturn.

  ‘Kate, babe. I need to tell you something.’

  ‘I’ve heard that line already, Adam.’ I didn’t touch my tea. ‘I just want you to go.’

  The thing is, even though he was pretending to be so humble and serious, I could tell from the light way he was cradling my teacup, and the poised way he was leaning against my bench, that he assumed that after he’d told me some more lies, we’d be going to bed. He thought he’d be kissing my hair and telling me I smelt gorgeous and cuddling me to sleep. He thought I was going to allow him to keep occupying the space he’d been chiselling out for himself – so easily, actually – in what had been a perfectly fine life.

  ‘Kate, what I—’

  ‘Just don’t, Adam. You’ve fucked me, well done, you’ve salvaged your evening, it wasn’t that great for me—’ I just said that to insult him, obviously ‘– but whatever, you can go now, and if you want to have sex again some time, fine, I’ll maybe be free, I’m not exactly, you know, the hottest girl in the world anymore, so just text me.’

  He looked so gutted that I felt guilty for the three seconds it took me to remember how manipulative men like him work. Even then, I considered saying, ‘But actually don’t worry about all that. Let’s just snuggle up on the couch and drink our tea, and the good news is that this morning, before Stuart rang and ruined my life, I bought us chocolate biscuits.’

  ‘I asked you to leave,’ I said.

  ‘Kate—’

  ‘I am telling you to please get out.’ It occurred to me to consider my safety. I took my phone out of my pocket, and stepped backwards, away from him, so I was closer to the door.

  ‘If we could just—’

  ‘Adam! I said I want you to go.’ I held up my phone, thumb poised.

  He stepped back and put both his hands up, fingers spread, palms angled towards the floor. ‘OK. It’s all right, Kate. I’m going.’

  When he got to the door, he said, ‘I’ll text you. I mean, not for . . . just, in the morning. Or call you. Bye.’

  ‘Liar.’

  I stayed sitting at the bench. My apartment was silent except for the fridge, and when it stopped whirring, I felt, bizarrely, very alone. As if the fridge was my friend. I looked over at Philomena, and she helped the tears to stop.

  After a while, I did something I hadn’t done for a very long time, which was to take some of my favourite pictures out of their box in my wardrobe. There’s a perfume ad that used to be on a billboard near Covent Garden. I’m wearing a short, light-blue slip. There’s my only Vogue cover: my face, close up, and a mauve caption reading NEW MILLENNIUM PRETTY, as if my beauty was more real and wonderful than the sort that had been around in the mediocre Old Millennium. There were quite a few other photos. To do with skin cream and clothes, mainly. I looked at them all for maybe an hour. Then I went and put on my favourite white silk chemise and pouted around in front of the bathroom mirror for a bit. Then my favourite black chemise. More pouting. After a bit more pretend-modelling, I went to bed.

  I had a big cry, and I tried to masturbate, but it seemed that it wasn’t my night on that front either. So I just lay there and thought about everything.

  I wondered if he’d have bothered even trying it, if I still looked like that girl in the photos. I thought probably not. I didn’t really know what he wanted, or why, but I knew that men like him prey on the vulnerable, and I supposed that was how he saw me.

  It was very hard to accept somehow. Another loss.

  And I wondered if I would have been with him, if I still had my arm. I lay and thought about that for a long time. I didn’t know, but at least I could see that it wasn’t as simple as that, because if I still had my arm, I wouldn’t be the person I am now. I’m not saying having an amputation is character-building (as I am not a cretin) and I’d always told myself that I would refuse to let it define me. Everyone seemed to believe that the it-doesn’t-define-me view was the correct one.

  But losing my arm had shaped me, the same way that being born ‘beautiful’ shaped me, the same way that becoming a businesswoman or a mother would have shaped me, the same way that being born smart shaped Bec into the person she was, the person who always had the answer.

  In the end, so much of it all was just what was in our genes.

  Chapter Twelve

  Bec

  Essie didn’t eat on the morning of the first day at Ashton Heights Primary, even though Bec made waffles and (in desperation) offered maple syrup.

  ‘Go on, Essie. Breakfast will make you run fast,’ said Mathilda, with a quick glance at Bec. When Essie shook her head ‘no’, Mathilda doggedly ate on, even though her own little face was like a cracked dinner plate. She took her breakfast things to the dishwasher without being asked, and when it was time to go, shouldered her backpack in a quiet, responsible way that made Bec want to sit down on the floor and howl.

  ‘Shouldn’t we go and say bye to Dad?’ Lachlan asked, at the front door.

  ‘Let’s not,’ said Bec. ‘Dad’s not feeling very well. He needs to have a good sleep-in.’ Stuart, she knew, had taken three temazepams at two o’clock that morning. And to be honest, it was easier without him.

  No one spoke on the way to school. It was the middle of May. The autumn leaves along their street were brown and wet and unattractive. When they dropped Lachlan off, Essie said, ‘Mummy, since Briarwood’s near here, maybe you could just let me out and I could have a play with Mrs Wilkinson just for today? Because it’s Monday and—’

  ‘I’m afraid not, Essie darling,’ said Bec. ‘But you’ll get to see your Briarwood friends at Isabel’s party on the weekend, so that’ll be good, won’t it?’

  The new school was pleasant enough. Red-brick single-storey buildings, aluminium windows, a covered walkway near the oval, a basketball ring over a large square of concrete, a cluster of demountables.

  ‘Please don’t go yet, please, Mummy,’ Essie whispered, into Bec’s thighs, as the two of them stood uncertainly just inside the new classroom door, next to a display titled OUR TRIP TO THE MUSEUM. A girl in a navy-blue polo shirt with toothpaste on the front stared at them with apparent hostility as she passed. In the far corner, two boys were hitting each other with some large, soft puppets.

  Bec knelt in front of Essie and said, ‘I do need to go now, darling, but I’ll be back at half-past three to pick you up.’ Essie bowed her head to hide her silent tears in Bec’s shoulder, and the teacher finally
came over.

  ‘Right. Essie Henderson, isn’t it? I’m Ms Goldbold. Got your bag on its shelf? Good. Time to say bye-bye to Mummy and sit on the mat, please.’

  She didn’t make eye contact with Bec, who could only stand for an agonised moment looking after the tiny, golden-and-navy little girl who was being led briskly away.

  *

  On Tuesday, eleven sleeps had passed since their bushwalk and she hadn’t heard from Ryan. She hadn’t contacted him, either. Maybe he was right. Maybe she actually couldn’t. Maybe they needed to let it go, let the feelings pass, let things be.

  Mathilda seemed to take all right to Ashton Heights. Her teacher was smiling and efficient, and, at pick-up on the second day, told Bec that she’d sat Mathilda with some of the quieter kids. ‘Gives her a chance to find her feet,’ she said. She touched Bec’s arm. ‘Don’t worry. It’s harder on you than them.’ The teacher gave Bec a quick smile before turning away.

  But for Essie, things seemed to get worse instead of better. ‘When can we visit Mrs Wilkinson?’ she kept asking, as if it would be possible to just drop into her old school for morning tea under the oak trees. ‘How many sleeps till Isabel’s party?’

  There were tears every morning at drop-off. Ms Goldbold was the sort of woman who you could just tell had a messy car and teenage children with no boundaries. She always had a half-full cup of cold instant coffee on her desk and had called Essie ‘Mia’ at least once.

  ‘Can’t you home-school her or something?’ Kate said on the phone on Thursday. She sounded anguished, more so than Bec would have thought. ‘The poor little kid.’

  ‘You’ve changed your tune,’ said Bec, trying for light-hearted. ‘I thought you were all for diversity and equality and down-with-private-school-elitism.’

  ‘Yes, well this is Essie,’ Kate said, and Bec could hear her impatient shrug down the phone. ‘And let me say that I can’t believe Briarwood wouldn’t let them finish the term. Sorry. Don’t cry, Becky. Should I come down at the weekend? We’ll take them for ice cream. It fixes everything with Essie.’ Kate sounded close to tears herself.