Sometimes he imagined himself back at twenty-eight, on a windy walk on some godforsaken frosty common in West London. He could feel the excitement in his stomach when he’d looked at Abi. She had wild curly hair and was wearing one of those silky nightie dresses that all the girls wore back then, with Doc Marten boots and a hefty granny cardigan. He saw the way she looked at him—like he was interesting, like he was going to make her life interesting.
He could conjure up that feeling of infinite possibility.
And then he’d fucked some Swedish girl. I was a cliché then, too, he thought.
He could have kept moving, following young and beautiful women around the backpacker trails of Europe and South America. Instead, he went back to London and asked Abi to forgive him. If he was a woman, he would call that his ‘sliding doors’ moment.
He now knew enough about himself to know that even if he’d gone in the other direction, he probably would have ended up in the same place: working in finance in Melbourne. It was what he’d been schooled for. It was what he’d been bred to do. And ultimately, he knew, he was the one who had allowed himself and Abi to be pulled back to the script.
Of course, it would be different for his boys: the money and the education, yes, but also the drive and ambition to take those advantages anywhere they chose. There would be no script for them.
• • •
Adrian had been exercising in secret. Tonight, he was running in the dark. Elle had ordered him to lose weight, but no one could see him do it. Ridiculous but necessary.
His face had never appeared on Elle’s blog. All you ever saw of him was a hand, a forearm, perhaps the back of his head. He had wanted it that way: he had clients, and teenage daughters, and serious people to sit down with and talk to about serious things.
‘You’re so old-fashioned,’ Elle had said. But she was comfortable with his decision. A little too comfortable, Adrian suspected. Her followers probably thought he was much younger and more handsome than he was—but that was good for the brand, of course.
Still, she was paranoid about him being seen looking healthy in public. ‘You never know who’s out there,’ she would say when he insisted he wouldn’t get recognised. ‘Look at Leisel Adams.’ As though this was meant to make him feel better about running in the dark: the fact that crazed stalkers could be loitering outside.
Elle’s preferred option for his weight loss was strict dieting. He was on severe food rations at home. The boys were eating more than he was. And at work he couldn’t be seen to be wolfing down Big Macs. So he was constantly hungry—it was giving him a headache. Fittingly, for a man pretending to be seriously ill, he felt pretty awful.
Now he ran into a convenience store, pulled his bank card out of his sock and bought a pie in a plastic wrapper. He ran to the park on the corner of his street, sank onto a bench and devoured it. ‘Don’t tell my wife’ were the words running through his head as he did.
It was funny—when he thought of his wife, he still thought of Abi. Even though she was a lesbian now, and he had two sons with his 27-year-old wife.
A lesbian now. How had he not seen that coming? But he knew the answer—he hadn’t been looking at Abi for years. Not really. He turned up, he made noises, he took the girls to netball, he took Abi out to dinner with their friends. They played the happy couple at crowded tables of other happy couples. The blokes talked to the blokes. The women talked to the women. That was how it was. Not how it started, but how it became.
Adrian looked around the park, fringed by so many houses just like his own: white and glass, all newness, all shine. He wondered, How many of the families living in these houses are just like mine? How many of these houses were built from the money of some rich old guy to impress a young wife? How many homes across Melbourne did each middle-class family take up these days? Two each? Three each?
• • •
Ever since he’d met Elle, ever since she’d decided he was going to be hers—he was under no illusions about that—he had been moving slowly towards this lie.
He had fucked other women before Elle. But they had been one-night things: some woman at a conference in Perth, another in Kuala Lumpur. He had never been interested in an ‘Affair’. When his mates would tell him—usually out of necessity in a moment of crisis, that’s how men friends were—about the woman whose rent they’d been paying for years, or about the marketing exec they’d been stringing along for months, or about (shudder) the nanny, the dance teacher, the babysitter, Adrian always judged them: they were gutless or stupid. For years he’d been saying, ‘Mate, if you’re over it, just leave.’
Of course, as time ticked on, he knew it wasn’t that simple. Do you blow up your life, your children’s lives, your financial future, for a fuck? No. But still, all the more reason to keep it as simple as possible.
But then Adrian looked down at himself in the shower one day, and he couldn’t breathe. Perhaps it was a panic attack. Perhaps it was a moment of clarity. But that day, with the water pummelling him, he really couldn’t breathe. He grabbed at his stomach and looked at the folds, then the brown spots on the back of his hands. He thought about going to his office that day. And he cried. In the shower, he sank to his knees and he cried and he cried and he cried.
Abi knocked on the ensuite door and asked him, ‘Are you okay?’ She sounded worried, but he heard an edge of disgust: why was this grown man sobbing in the shower? Then she would have thought of his father—it was only six months after his heart attack. She would have decided that this was grief. ‘Adrian, are you okay?’
‘Yes, fine,’ he managed, although he could hardly speak. He sat there for a few more minutes, breathing deeply, letting the water pour on him.
So this is a midlife crisis, he thought. I get why they call it a crisis.
In the shower that day, Adrian decided to dig up the man on the common in London. The one with all the possibility.
He would get strong. He would push through all the bullshit at work and get to a position where he could go it alone, run his own race. He had let go of the dream of ‘Making a difference’, but he’d never replaced it with another. He’d just allowed his career to happen to him: moving up, taking on more clients, but not pushing through. That was going to change.
For Adrian, everything changed that day. But as far as he could see, Abi didn’t notice.
‘Adrian’s always at the gym these days,’ she would complain to their friends at those interminable dinners. But she said it in the same way that she’d complained in the past about him always being at work or always being at conferences. His absence was expected—a reversal of that would have confused everyone.
When he looked at his daughters now, he realised he had no idea who they were. Not because of the eyeliner and the rags and the boots, but because he never had. Arden and Alex had always been Abi’s domain.
• • •
Adrian screwed up the pie wrapper in his hand, making it disappear. Then he stood and leant over the back of the bench, stuck his fingers down his throat and threw the pie back up. His mouth tasted like cheap meat for the second time. Disgusting. He took a big glug of water from his running bottle and spat it out over the bench.
This wasn’t quite what he’d had in mind when he’d had that vision of reinvention. He had imagined something more honest, more real.
But he’d also seen what had come of going with the flow. He admired Elle’s refusal to be limited by anyone else’s vision: she was whoever she said she was. Sometimes, that was terrifying. Sometimes, she seemed so focused that he didn’t think she could see him at all. But then, when her attention was on him, he was invincible.
At his bucks night, four years before, a drunk Dean had asked him, ‘How can you be sure she’s really into it, Ade? How do you know it’s not just the nice house and the cars?’
Adrian knew this was what every one of his friends had thought when they’d found out about the divorce, about the engagement, about the wedding: What a sucker.
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But what they didn’t get was how it didn’t matter. What mattered was how Elle made him feel full of possibility again. With her, he felt like he could do anything, be anything—and that she was going to will him into it.
So no, this was not what he’d imagined, exactly, eating and purging a Four’N Twenty on a bench in the dark.
But he knew that soon—when Elle’s blog was the biggest in the country and she walked away with the award, and when the investment money met his and they began to rebuild—everything would be different.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LEISEL
The After Breakfast! studio was freezing.
‘It stops your make-up running,’ the wardrobe assistant noted cheerfully, dusting Leisel’s nose for the fourteenth time.
The set of the morning show was tiny—a couple of lurid couches in the corner of a cavernous aircraft hangar. A miniature world within a world. Right next to it, just a few steps away, was the much more complex set-up of Breakfast! where the celebrity cast were finishing up, delivering their goodbyes to camera, signalling for the soundmen to unhook them so they could get off to Pilates or squash or whatever it was that famous people did when their workday finished at 9 a.m.
Leisel’s arm throbbed but it was no contest for her nerves, which were actually clanging in her ears. What the fuck was she doing? Why had she let Claire talk her into this? And where the hell was Claire?
She hadn’t seen her friend since Claire had deposited her, beaming, into the make-up chair at some ungodly hour. How long did it take to make a forty-something mother-of-three look acceptable for a national television audience? Forty-five minutes, evidently, with the full attention of two professionals who’d applied layer after layer of ever-so-slightly different shades of nude foundation to her face with as many teeny-tiny brushes. When they’d finished, one of the make-up artists had sighed a small sigh and said, ‘You look great. So natural.’ Yup, natural.
Claire and Leisel were both once keen young journos on a weekly ‘human interest’ magazine, Let’s Talk. Together, they’d tracked down mothers who had slept with their sons-in-law, Australia’s heaviest housewife and the woman who’d married her cat. Theirs was a friendship forged through long hours, after-work drinks and interminable road-trips out to places like the TINY TOWN THAT WON LOTTO—HOW THEY BLEW IT ALL.
These days, Claire was the executive producer on After Breakfast! A big job, one way above shepherding guests in and out of make-up chairs and holding their nervous hands, but it was only because of Claire that Leisel had agreed to go on the show.
• • •
After the attack, Mark had confiscated Leisel’s phone. He took it off her in the hospital, as she tried to type out a status update with her still-good hand, mind addled with painkillers, tears still flowing. ‘For fuck’s sake, Leisel. Stop.’
‘I need to let them know I’m okay…’ she said.
‘Who? Who do you need to let know you’re okay? Your mum? She’s on her way. Your sister? I just spoke to her, she’s flying up. Our kids? They’re with Wendy. They’re fine. No one else needs to know. Not right now.’
‘But they’ll know…’
‘Who gives a fuck, Leisel? This is your real life, you know. Your real life.’ She had rarely seen Mark so emotional. She handed over her phone.
But they did know, Leisel’s followers. They knew because the attacker posted on The Working Mum’s Facebook page that night.
I hope I killed you. Or at least made you realise what it is to be in pain. The world will be a better place without you in it. You don’t deserve that family. You don’t deserve anything.
It sent Leisel’s friends and followers into a frenzy of calling and mailing and checking. Poor Mark had to deal with it all.
• • •
Claire reappeared, trailed by two young women with clipboards. Everyone was edgy, checking their Apple watches—they looked at Leisel, looked at her arm, looked worried.
‘You ready, darl?’ Claire smiled at her, arm outstretched. She looked exactly the same as she had back in those mag days, if a little smoother.
‘Sure.’ Leisel offered a weak smile. ‘Sure I am.’
The two young women helped Leisel out of her chair and over to the set, where the shiny-haired hosts sat side-by-side, engrossed in their phones, waiting for the signal to smile and go Live again. Leisel shrugged the girls’ hands off, politely. She could walk. She was fine. ‘You owe me,’ she hissed to Claire.
Claire hugged her, gingerly. ‘Are you fucking kidding? This is going to be great for you. Great for both of us. You are going to be amazing.’
• • •
When Leisel had got her phone back, after four whole days, it would have been impossible to look at every message, every mention, every notification, every text.
Her boss, Zac, had sent her maybe fifteen texts, all along the lines of: We’re all thinking of you, darling Leisel. And when you’re ready, WL, AWD and JFH are standing by to tell your side of the story. xxx
I bet they are, thought Leisel. Woman’s Life, Australian Women’s Daily and Just for Her. All magazines in the stable. All magazines for which she was managing editor. Yeah, she knew Zac’s sympathies were deeply genuine.
The police had caught The Contented Mum within hours. Not exactly a master criminal, she had posted about the attack from her own home computer, and when they knocked on her door, she answered it in her dressing-gown. The knife was back in the kitchen drawer. She was arrested. Her real name, it turned out, was Kristen Worther.
Leisel posted to her followers on Day Five:
Working Mums, thank you so much for giving so much of a shit that I am safe. I know you have a lot of other things to worry about. I am. I am fine. My family is safe. The person who attacked me is in custody. Let’s get on with things, hey? #survivor
There was an eruption. The blog had never had so much traffic. Her Facebook followers tripled. Twitter was melting down.
We thought we’d lost you, WM. Thank the Goddess you’re safe. #survivor
Trolls will never beat us. #survivor
That crazy bitch should rot in jail. #survivor
The story, whether Leisel was telling it or not, spread everywhere. The Daily Trail was running almost hourly updates. Everyone who knew her was being called for comment. Every time she picked up her phone, more think-pieces about trolls had sprung up like mushrooms.
‘Sure,’ she told Zac on Day Seven. ‘I’ll tell the story, let’s get this over with.’ And then she called Claire.
• • •
Leisel took her seat on the couch next to the After Breakfast! hosts. The show had once been hosted by Shannon Smart and, in all honesty, Leisel had struggled to keep up with who’d been in and out of the seats since then, despite them appearing on her magazines almost weekly. But here they were—the very shiny Diane and Darryl—and they gave her three beats to sit down before turning to the autocue:
‘The world of mummy blogging isn’t all dinnertime tips and feeding schedules. It can get pretty fiery out there on the internet—right, Diane?’
‘Absolutely, Darryl, and no one knows that better than our next guest, Leisel Adams. The whole nation has been rooting for Leisel, who blogs as The Working Mum, since she was brutally attacked by a crazed critic just ten days ago. She survived the horrific knife attack and today is here to talk about it publicly for the very first time. Hello, Leisel…’
‘Hi, Diane.’ Leisel remembered Claire’s advice: Pretend it’s just you and them. Look them in the eyes. Just tell it like it is.
‘First, I’m sure I speak for the whole country when I say, “We’re so glad you’re okay.” Are you okay?’
‘Yes, Diane, I am. I’m fine.’
‘We are so happy to hear that, aren’t we, Darryl? Can I ask you to take us through what happened that day? Are you okay to do that?’
Leisel blinked, swallowed. Breathe. ‘Well, Diane, I had just got my kids off to bed and I was getting ready to
go to sleep myself—’
‘You have three kids, right?’
‘Yes. Yes, I have a six-year-old, a three-year-old and my baby, who’s almost one—’
‘So your hands are full!’ Tinkling laugh.
‘Very.’ Harriet’s face popped into Leisel’s head. Big, blinking eyes. Smile.
‘Leisel? Are you okay? So, you’ve put the kids to bed…’
‘Yes. Sorry, I…’ Blink, breathe. Leisel shook her head ever so slightly. Harri disappeared. ‘The kids were asleep, and my husband, he was asleep, and I went to lie down too, and my phone beeped. And there was a message. You know, a Facebook message. I’m not sure why I looked at it, really. I get a lot of Facebook messages. I can’t always read them all, and I—’
Mark had moved a little in bed, kind of juddered, when she’d grabbed her phone.
‘It said, “I’m at the front door.” And it was from… well, I can’t tell you who it was from, but a name I recognised as someone who has sent me some not very nice messages.’
‘Do you get a lot of those, Leisel?’ asked Darryl, leaning in.
Leisel shifted on the couch, adjusting the sling on her arm. ‘Darryl, all bloggers, especially women bloggers, we get a lot of people disagreeing with us. Some of them get pretty upset. You have to get used to it, and I guess I had.’
‘But this person, they had bothered you before?’
‘The name was familiar from other messages. But I had no reason to think—well, I don’t know…’
The cupcakes. Really, Leisel? You had no reason to think that the person who sent you death-threat cupcakes might have a screw loose?
‘So,’ said Diane, a little too brightly, ‘you get this message that they’re at your front door. And so, you just go and answer it? You weren’t worried?’
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