‘OK,’ she said. ‘Maybe you want to knot the pairs together?’ He said he’d give it a go, he’d just go see about the chair situation. He strolled into the empty assembly hall as if he had every right to. He was always like that.
Bec took a deep breath, and to steady herself further, did a three-point check of the school yard. Essie was scrambling up the littlest climbing frame, Mathilda was arm-in-arm in the sausage queue with her current BFF and Lachlan was playing handball. Bec was restraining herself from rushing over to make sure Essie didn’t fall, when Stuart returned with a couple of black fold-out seats. He opened one up, and she sat down on it.
‘Sorry!’ she said, rocketing to her feet. ‘Did you mean that for me?’
‘Yeah.’ Gently. Of course he’d meant it for her. The man’s manners were impeccable.
They sat down, their heartbreakingly careful knees paralleling straight ahead.
‘So, how’s Amelia?’ Bec had practised the question, just in case, and she forced herself to ask it fairly promptly.
‘She’s well, thanks,’ he said. He handed her a pair of boots, their laces now neatly slip-knotted together. ‘She’s gone off to yoga.’ Bec remembered how, whenever they used to see people going into the local Flow Balance studio, he would wonder aloud how anyone could possibly flow in such tight pants.
‘That sounds . . . nice,’ she said, as neutrally as possible.
‘She’s trying a new place,’ he went on, unexpectedly. ‘She says she’s reached a point in her life where she point-blank refuses to pay for parking while she exercises.’ His voice was at least as neutral as Bec’s, but for all the world, he looked the way Lachlan did when Lachlan confessed to some mild misdemeanour.
‘Oh, right.’ Bec felt as if she was in a diplomacy grand final. Bland acceptance and mild, friendly interest were radiating from her every pore, even though she was thinking that yoga car parks were hardly a social justice issue, and so there was certainly no need to use the phrase ‘point-blank refuse’, and that Stuart would definitely agree with her on that.
But Stuart shrugged and smiled in a way that she couldn’t read, and she thought about how he’d probably woken up next to Amelia that very morning and how Amelia hadn’t had any children and that she no doubt had a non-stretch-marked tummy and would know about things like what was trending on Twitter. She wondered what sort of contraception Stuart and Amelia were using. If any. Suddenly, she stopped feeling proud of her diplomacy, and shook her head without meaning to. Luckily, he was concentrating on his knot.
‘How about you? he asked, politely. Being Stuart, he sounded only a little bit uncertain. ‘You seeing anyone?’
‘Nope,’ she said, lightly, looking at the boot in front of her. Then, with a quick glance at him, because, after all, he was still Stuart, she added, ‘God, no.’
‘Ah well.’ All casual. He handed her a second pair of boots, and asked her what they were doing anyway. For a second she thought he meant the soon-to-be-finalised divorce, the ‘amicable’ emails and Amelia-the-Architect, but then she looked at his face. He just meant with the boots, so she hurled herself into an enthusiastic spiel about second-hand sale and fundraising and that he wouldn’t believe how expensive brand-new boots were and how quickly children’s feet grew and the importance of team sport in underprivileged lives. (‘You sound as if your sole mission in life is to provide exercise equipment to the needy,’ Kate would have said. ‘Just calm down.’) But her evangelical fervour carried them through until Nat came back with the drinks and then they all started chatting about how instant coffee wasn’t that bad as long as you didn’t expect it to taste like real coffee, the value of guinea pigs as pets and the way they really couldn’t handle late nights anymore. Did that mean that he and Amelia-the-Architect weren’t having all night sex-a-thons? Or that they were?
When it was time for the medals the three of them parted. Bec got Nat’s number, and said goodbye to Stuart in a textbook amicable co-parent sort of way. When Essie and Lachlan materialised, she led them down to the very front. She told them it was so that they could all see Mathilda up close when she got her medal, but really it was so that there was no danger of Stuart’s undefeated shoulders being in her line of sight. She didn’t think she’d be able to bear it.
*
‘Mum!’ said Mathilda, charging into the kitchen. It was the next day. ‘We’ve forgotten to make honey joys!’
‘We haven’t forgotten.’ She was emptying the dishwasher. ‘It’s only ten-thirty. There’s still nearly the whole of Sunday.’
‘Then why,’ said Mathilda, sounding like an OHS inspector who’d just discovered a non-compliant staircase, ‘is Daddy’s car coming down the driveway?’
*
The children swamped him at the front door while she humbly dried cutlery in the kitchen. She heard squealing (Essie’s) and Lachlan saying urgently, ‘But you’re still taking us to Fish Frenzy for dinner tonight though?’ Then everything went quiet. She should go and see what was happening.
‘Hi,’ he said. She looked up. He was already standing on the deck, and the sliding glass door had been left half open.
‘Hi! Where are the kids?’ She sounded as muddled as she felt, and found herself trying to smooth back her hair while holding a fistful of wet teaspoons. ‘Sorry, did I mess up the times?’
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Kids’re outside. I came to talk to you, actually. Can I come in?’
‘Of course.’ To be honest, it seemed incredible that he was even asking. Not because he paid the mortgage, but because this was their house.
He took a seat on one of the stools, and put his phone and keys on the bench. She chucked the spoons away wet in their drawer and moved a stool so she could sit down across from him.
‘Um,’ he said. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine. What’s going on?’ Because Stuart never said ‘um’. And he looked terrible. ‘What I mean is,’ she went on, a bit more calmly, ‘is everything all right? Are you all right? Oh! Have you come from work? Was it really busy?’ She stopped herself.
‘I’m fine.’ He touched his car key with his forefinger. ‘Amelia and I finished up last night.’
‘Oh.’ Her breath went out of her throat in an ugly-sounding half-laugh. ‘I hope you’re OK,’ she amended. She relaxed her shoulders and prepared to have a mature discussion about how this news might affect the children. Would they get the impression that all adult relationships were disposable? Although, all things considered, that was bound to be the least of their issues. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked.
He laughed. ‘Yep,’ was all he said.
She stood up and flicked the switch on the kettle. Out of her peripheral vision, she saw Essie run across the deck, shooting an enormous water pistol at Lachlan, who was hiding in tree ferns.
‘Did you just give them those?’ Bec asked. He nodded. They both smiled. Turning her gaze away from his was like throwing away a pile of the kids’ old baby clothes. She took two white cups out of the cupboard, and watched them as she placed them very carefully on the bench. She heard the chink of the china on the marble.
‘Bec.’ She looked up at him. ‘This.’
He didn’t have to say what he meant.
‘Bec,’ he repeated. Sometimes, when he said her name, he said it in a really lovely way. Almost like a chant, as if he really enjoyed the sound of it, as if he felt happy that he was the one who was allowed to say it like that.
She left the cups and sat down again. He swallowed.
‘When I was seventeen,’ he said, ‘I went into Mum’s study one night. Must have been during my year twelve exams or something. It was really late, but she was up working.’
Bec nodded, sombrely, although she was wondering where on earth he was going.
‘Mum was sort of frowning at her screen, and she looked up.’ He paused. He was deep in the memory. ‘She goes, “I’ll tell you this, Stuart. Any paralegal or trained monkey can report the data. The job is to make the call.”’
Despite everything, they exchanged a that-is-so-typical-of-her look. They even laughed a tiny bit.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Obviously at the time I just hoped she didn’t say things like that in front of her paralegals.’ Then his face changed. ‘But. Lately I’ve been thinking about that a lot. You know?’
Bec must have looked a bit confused, because he said, ‘I’ve been thinking that things can look a certain way on paper, but really sometimes how things look isn’t the whole story. And that’s what Mum was getting at. That sometimes it can be difficult to look beyond the obvious, but what you have to try to do – as a judge – or as a doctor, or a . . . a husband, or just as a person – is to see things as they really are, and then have the guts to make the right call.’
‘I see.’ But her voice sounded tentative, because she very much didn’t want to get her hopes up, and maybe he was talking about schools or Amelia or houses or something.
‘You know. Bec. Bec? All those times?’ He looked away for a moment, then back at her. ‘We’d be here’ – he rotated a hand to indicate their kitchen – ‘and you’d be stirring a cake or something, and telling Essie to pick up her shoes and checking a text and pouring us a wine and saying people who were too tired to move their shoes were too tired to stay up for ice cream. And you’d be telling me about Lachlan’s reading or a homelessness report off the radio or how my dad had hurt his knee again or – I don’t know – did I think Mathilda was getting enough iron. And I’d be, just, leaning against the cooker, half-thinking about someone’s pancreatitis or the laparotomy I had on the next morning. You know?’
There was a silence.
‘Yes,’ she said, because she did know. And astoundingly, there was a trace of anger in her voice. ‘Yes. That’s how it was.’ Tears would start in a minute. ‘That’s exactly how it was, Stuart.’
They looked at each other. It was just him. The hostility had gone. The amicability had gone, too. And somehow, their hands had made their way towards each other across the bench, and two of his fingertips were touching the side of her wrist.
‘I’ve cut back, lots, already, and I was thinking that if you wanted I could—’
But she was already nodding, nodding, nodding, in a way they knew meant yes, please, come home, come here, come back to us and she didn’t want to move her hands, so there were tears on her face.
‘I’m sure we can work it out,’ he said, in a thick voice. ‘We can – whatever you think will work.’ He cleared his throat and went on more steadily. ‘Because, I want to be with you, Bec. And I think we should get back together.’
Their fingers had interlaced themselves without her having to make any effort. She moved her wrists forward, and so did he, so that their palms touched.
There was a long precious quiet.
Stuart said, ‘Bec?’ He kept his hands where they were. ‘After we . . . after you told me. I had sex with a lot of different women.’
Bec nodded. What could she say? It was to be expected.
‘Sometimes it was really amazing.’ He definitely wasn’t gloating. ‘It was mainly about loneliness and feeling, um . . . unwanted. And I can imagine that maybe that’s how you were feeling too. Last year. In our relationship. I wasn’t around enough. Or, when I was here, I wasn’t properly present.’
‘Have you been seeing a counsellor?’ she said.
‘Can you tell?’ Semi-ironic.
‘Your feelings! Not being “present”.’ She actually laughed. ‘And I . . . oh look, Stu. Whoever you slept with. Whatever. As long as you don’t, anymore, if we . . . are going to be together, again.’
He shook his head, in a way that meant course not, not if we were together.
‘OK. Well. Thanks for telling me. I guess.’
He laughed, when she said ‘I guess’. But it helped, oddly, him telling her.
She found herself thinking: the kids will be here any minute, it’s a miracle they’ve left us alone this long, those water pistols were genius, but let’s not push our luck, we can’t be sitting in here crying and talking about sex when someone comes in for a Band-Aid.
So she said, ‘Stuart?’ It came out very clear. ‘I’d love for us to be together again.’
He made a little noise. So inarticulate, so unlike himself. He nodded. He squeezed her hands, very hard.
Kate
The car park was a concrete mess, but above us the still evening sky was fading from palest blue to palest pink. ‘I’m a bit numb,’ I said, as we approached my car. ‘Maybe you could drive home?’
‘’Course I can,’ he said.
Once we were strapped in, Adam rattled the car key in his loose fist, and kept his eyes on the windscreen. An older woman in a crafty, emerging-local-designer-type outfit clipped efficiently past. When she’d gone, he turned to me.
‘You OK?’ he said.
‘Scans.’ I made a wild sort of gesture with my hand.
‘I really think it’s going to be all right. I really do.’
‘I’m forty,’ I snapped, and I nearly started crying. ‘Sorry,’ I added. He touched my leg.
It was like if you went to an Irish pub and everyone started singing folk songs while a kindly old man played the fiddle and a handsome farmhand whirled you about in a rollicking jig. You’d think: Can this actually happen in real life? Is it actually happening? To me?
Like that, except about a million times more.
‘Show me that again,’ said Adam. He put one of his hands on my belly, and I held out the shiny slip of paper that curled at the edges. On it was an ultrasound image.
‘Good size for thirty-four weeks,’ the obstetrician had just said, and I’d relaxed my sweaty grip on Adam’s hand a little bit. ‘All looks excellent. Nearly there.’
The woman in the arty clothes was way over the other side of the car park now. I stared down again at the black and grey splodges on the shiny little slip of paper. A photo.
Our baby. Our daughter. Our beautiful little girl.
Acknowledgements
A huge amount of credit is due to Tegan Morrison for her expert editing and her brilliant ideas. Enormous thanks also to the rest of the Echo team, both in Australia and the UK. Particular thanks to Katie Lumsden for her insights and Jon Appleton for copyediting.
Thanks to Ros Calita for meticulous attention to names and for helping with early drafts of the final scene.
Thanks to Claire Bryan for telling me about medieval textiles, Helen Cushing for gardening advice, Claire Donoghue for mountain-climbing lingo, Mardi George for helping me understand Kate’s occupational therapy, and Steve Karpeles for patiently explaining aspects of criminal law. To Sophie Ricketts, awe-inspiring surgeon and generous friend, thank you for your expert explanation of sarcoma management, and for telling me about how surgeons look after their hands. Thanks to the staff at the State Library of Tasmania for retrieving many, many old editions of Vogue. Thanks to others, too, including the unknown resident of Melbourne with the INCWINC number plate. Any mistakes are mine, of course. I took artistic license when necessary.
The Medical Practitioner Regulation Authority that investigates Stuart is a fictional entity. The real-life Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) is the body charged with regulating doctors in Australia. Their website, and the report on the 2017 Senate enquiry into AHPRA’s methods of dealing with complaints against doctors, were useful in writing about what happened to Stuart. The books Sarcoma, edited by Robert M. Henshaw, and One Step Beyond, by Warren Macdonald, were very useful in my research, as was a medical journal article called Unexpected Resection of Soft Tissue Sarcoma (2000), by K. Siebenrock et al.
To the beautiful school community I am lucky to belong to: thank you so much for all the great times, and I’m very glad this is a work of fiction. Thanks to Katie Daniels, Fiona McIntosh, Ian McMahon and Frank Meumann for rock-solid career guidance. To Gillian Tsaousidis-nee-Ahluwalia – I don’t think I could write about sisters if not for you. (Thanks also for the voice
mail about the pronunciation of ‘obviously’.)
To all my family: I started listing the ways you helped with this book, but it was going on for far too long, and then I started crying (in the happy way). Thank you. Special thanks to my mum, Trish, and my dad, Ian.
To Cuthbert and the B-factor, you help make my world. Thanks for everything.
And very deepest gratitude to my beloved husband, Phill.
If you or someone you know is suffering from mental illness, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14, Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636 or the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800. You can also contact headspace.org.au (for young people and those who care for them) or ring the Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467.
About the Author
Katie McMahon wrote The Mistake while attending a masterclass run by the internationally bestselling author Fiona McIntosh. Previous writers discovered at the masterclasses include Tania Blanchard, author of the runaway bestseller The Girl from Munich. Katie lives with her family in Hobart, Tasmania, where she works as a GP and teaches communication skills to medical students. She is a lapsed Masters of Creative Writing student, and her hobbies include reading and drinking tea. Katie has previously published articles in The Age and The Quarry. The Mistake is her first novel.
First published in 2021
This ebook edition published in 2021 by
ECHO PUBLISHING
An imprint of Bonnier Books UK
80–81 Wimpole St, London W1G 9RE
Owned by Bonnier Books
Sveavägen 56, Stockholm, Sweden
Copyright © Katie McMahon, 2021
Cover design by Christabella Designs
Cover image (foreground): CoffeeAndMilk/E+/Getty Images
Cover image (background): Polnon Prapanon/Shutterstock.com
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