Big Little Lies

by Liane Moriarty

  liked it when women got angry with him. He liked getting a reaction. He thought it was cute.

  She saw his hand grab for the railing and slip.

  She saw him flip back, his legs high, like he was romping on the bed with the boys.

  And then he was gone without making a sound.

  An empty space where he’d been.

  It all happened too fast. Jane’s mind was dull with shock. As she groped for comprehension she became aware that there was a commotion going on inside the hall: yells, bangs, thuds.

  “Jesus Christ Almighty!” said Ed. He leaned over the balcony railing, both hands gripping the edge as he peered over, his gold Elvis cape stretched out behind him like foolish little wings.

  Bonnie had sunk down on to her haunches, her body curved into a ball, her hands clasped tightly over the back of her head as though she were waiting for a bomb to explode.

  “No, no, no, no.” Nathan took little agitated steps, dancing around his wife, bending to touch her back and then straightening up and pressing his hands to his temples.

  Ed spun around. “I’ll go see if he’s—”

  “Ed!” said Renata. She’d dropped the hand holding her mobile phone to her side. The balcony light reflected off her glasses.

  “Call an ambulance!” barked Ed.

  “Yes,” said Renata. “I am. I will. But um . . . I didn’t see what happened. I didn’t see him fall.”

  “What?” said Ed.

  Madeline was still on her knees next to Celeste. Jane saw Madeline look straight past Ed at her ex-husband. Nathan’s hair was all sweaty from the wig and stuck to his forehead. He looked at Madeline with distraught, pleading eyes. Madeline looked back at Celeste, who was staring catatonically at the place where Perry had been sitting.

  “I don’t think I saw either,” said Madeline.

  “Madeline,” said Ed. He pulled angrily at his costume, as if he longed to tear it off. The glitter was coming off onto his hands, turning his palms gold. “Do not—”

  “I was looking the other way,” said Madeline. Her voice was stronger. She got to her feet, holding her tiny clutch bag in front of her, her back straight and her chin high, as if she were about to walk into a ballroom. “I was looking inside. I didn’t see.”

  Jane cleared her throat.

  She thought of the way Saxon—Perry—had said, “It didn’t mean anything.” She looked at Bonnie, cowering near an upturned bar stool. She felt hot liquid anger suddenly cool and harden into something powerful and immovable.

  “So was I,” she said. “I didn’t see anything either.”

  “Stop this.” Ed glanced at her and back at Madeline. “All of you stop it.”

  Celeste reached for Madeline’s hand and pulled herself gracefully to her feet. She straightened her dress and pressed one hand to her face, where Perry had hit her. She looked for a moment at the curled-up form of Bonnie.

  “I didn’t see a thing,” she said, and her voice sounded almost conversational.

  “Celeste.” Ed’s face crumpled as though in terror. He pressed his hands hard against his temples, and then dropped them. His forehead sparkled gold.

  Celeste walked to the edge of the balcony and put her hands on the railing. She looked back at Renata and said, “Call the ambulance now.”

  Then she began to scream.

  It was easy after all those years of pretending. Celeste was a fine actress.

  But then she thought of her children and she didn’t need to pretend anymore.

  Stu: All hell had broken loose by this stage. Two blokes were fighting over some French chick, and next thing this four-foot weasel is laying into me because I’d said his wife couldn’t organize a root in a brothel and I’d offended her honor or something. I mean, jeez Louise, it’s just an expression.

  Thea: It’s true the argument over standardized testing got a little heated. I have four children, so I do lay claim to some expertise in the matter.

  Harper: Thea was shouting like a fishwife.

  Jonathan: I was with some Year 4 parents and we got into an argument over the legality and morality of that damned petition. There were some raised voices. Maybe some shoving. Look, I’m not proud of any of this.

  Jackie: Give me a vicious corporate takeover any day.

  Gabrielle: I was considering cannibalism by this time. Carol looked delicious.

  Carol: I was cleaning the kitchen when I heard the most terrible bloodcurdling scream.

  Samantha: Ed came running for the stairs and he was shouting something about Perry White falling off the balcony and would someone for the love of God call an ambulance. I looked over at the balcony and saw two Year 5 dads go crashing out through the open door.

  “There’s been an accident,” Renata was saying into her mobile phone. She had one finger plugged into her ear so she could hear the person on the other end over the sound of Celeste’s screams. “A man has fallen. From a balcony.”

  “It was him?” Madeline took Jane’s arm and pulled her close. “It was Perry who—”

  Jane stared at the perfect pink cupid’s bow of Madeline’s lipstick. Two perfect peaks. “Do you think he’s—”

  She never got to finish her sentence because that’s when the two grappling white-satin Elvises, their arms wrapped tightly around each other’s backs as if in a passionate embrace, slammed violently into Jane and Madeline, sending them flying in opposite directions.

  As Jane fell, she put one hand to save herself and felt something snap with sickening wrongness near her shoulder as she landed hard on her side.

  The tiles of the balcony were wet against Jane’s cheek. Celeste’s screams mingled with the far-off sounds of ambulances and the soft sound of Bonnie sobbing. Jane could taste blood in her mouth. She closed her eyes.

  Oh, calamity.

  Bonnie: The fighting spilled out onto the balcony, and that’s when poor Madeline and Jane got so badly injured. I didn’t see Perry White fall. I . . . Would you excuse me for just a moment, Sarah? Wait, it is Sarah, isn’t it? Not Susan. My mind went blank. Sorry, Sarah. Sarah. A lovely name. It means “princess,” I think. Listen, Sarah, I need to pick up my daughter now.

  78.

  Detective-Sergeant Adrian Quinlan: We’re looking at any available CCTV footage, photos taken on the night and mobile phone footage. Obviously we’ll be studying the forensic evidence when it becomes available. We’re currently in the process of interviewing every one of the one hundred and thirty-two parents who attended the event. Rest assured, we will find out the truth about exactly what took place last night, and I’ll charge the bloody lot of them if I have to.

  The Morning After the Trivia Night

  I don’t think I can do it,” said Ed quietly. He was sitting on a chair next to Madeline’s hospital bed. She had a private room, but Ed kept looking nervously over his shoulder. He looked like he was seasick.

  “I’m not asking you to do anything,” said Madeline. “If you want to tell, tell.”

  “Tell. For God’s sake.” Ed rolled his eyes. “This isn’t snitching to the teacher! This is breaking the law. This is lying under . . . Are you OK? Are you in pain?”

  Madeline closed her eyes and winced. Her ankle was broken. It happened when the two Year 5 dads crashed into her and Jane. At first she thought she wouldn’t fall, but then, it seemed like it happened in slow motion, one of her legs slid behind the other one on the wet balcony as though she were doing a fancy dance move. It was her good ankle too, not the one that kept rolling. She had to lie there on the wet balcony last night in excruciating pain for what seemed like hours while Celeste screamed that awful, endless scream, and Bonnie sobbed, and Nathan swore and Jane lay on her side with blood on her face and Renata yelled at the fighting Year 5 dads to “grow up, for God’s sake!”

  Madeline was scheduled for surgery this afternoon. She would be in a cast for four to six weeks, and after that there would be physiotherapy. It would be a long time before she’d be in stilettos again.


  She wasn’t the only one who had ended up in the hospital. As Madeline understood it, the final tally this morning of injuries from the trivia night were one broken ankle (Madeline’s contribution), one broken collarbone (poor Jane), a broken nose (Renata’s husband, Geoff—less than he deserved), three cracked ribs (Harper’s husband, Graeme, who had also been sleeping with the French nanny), three black eyes, two nasty cuts requiring stitches and ninety-four splitting headaches.

  And one death.

  Madeline’s head swirled with a violent merry-go-round of images from the previous night. Jane, with her bright red lipstick, standing in front of Perry and saying, “You said your name was Saxon Banks.” At first Madeline had thought Jane had the two men mixed up, that Perry must resemble his cousin, until Perry said, “It didn’t mean anything.” The look on Celeste’s face after Perry hit her. No surprise at all. Just embarrassment.

  What sort of an obtuse, self-absorbed friend had Madeline been to have missed something like that? Just because Celeste didn’t walk around nursing black eyes and split lips didn’t mean there hadn’t been clues, if she’d just bothered to notice them. Had Celeste ever tried to confide in her? Madeline had probably been rattling on about eye cream or something equally superficial and hadn’t given her the opportunity. She’d probably interrupted her! Ed was always calling her out on that. “Let me finish,” he’d say, holding up a hand. Just three little words. Perry hits me. And Madeline had never given her friend the three seconds it took to say them. Meanwhile Celeste had listened while Madeline had talked endlessly about everything from how much she hated the under-seven soccer coordinator to her feelings about Abigail’s relationship with her father.

  “She brought around a vegetarian lasagna for us today,” said Ed.

  “Who?” said Madeline. Regret was making her nauseous.

  “Bonnie! For God’s sake, Bonnie. The woman we’re apparently protecting. She was just bizarrely normal, as if nothing happened. She’s completely nuts. She’s already been talking this morning to a ‘very nice journalist called Sarah.’ God knows what she’s been saying.”

  “It was an accident,” said Madeline.

  She remembered Bonnie’s face disfigured with rage as she screamed at Perry. That strange guttural voice. We see! We fucking see!

  “I know it was an accident,” said Ed. “So why don’t we just say the truth? Tell the police exactly what happened? I don’t get it. You don’t even like her.”

  “That’s not relevant,” said Madeline.

  “It was Renata who started it,” said Ed. “And then everyone else jumped on board. ‘I didn’t see. I didn’t see.’ We didn’t even know if the man was dead or alive and we were already planning the cover-up! I mean, Jesus, does Renata even know Bonnie?”

  Madeline thought she understood why Renata ha’d said what she’d said. It was because Perry had cheated on Celeste, like Geoff cheated on Renata. Madeline had seen the expression on Renata’s face when Perry said, “It didn’t mean anything.” At that moment Renata had wanted to shove Perry off the balcony herself. Bonnie just got there first.

  If Renata hadn’t said, “I didn’t see him fall,” then perhaps Madeline’s mind wouldn’t have moved fast enough to even consider the consequences for Bonnie, but as soon as Renata said what she did, Madeline had thought of Bonnie’s daughter. That fluttery thing Skye did with her eyelashes, the way she always hid behind her mother’s skirt. If ever there was a child who needed her mother, it was Skye.

  And maybe it was more than that.

  Maybe it was actually an unspoken instant agreement between the four women on the balcony: No woman should pay for the accidental death of that particular man. Maybe it was an involuntary, atavistic response to thousands of years of violence against women. Maybe it was for every rape, every brutal backhanded slap, every other Perry that had come before this one.

  “Bonnie has a little girl,” said Madeline.

  “Perry had two little boys—so what?” said Ed. He looked off to a space above Madeline’s bed. His face was haggard in the harsh single light. She could see the old man he’d one day be. “I just don’t know if I can live with this, Madeline.”

  He was the first one to get to Perry. He was the one who saw the broken, twisted body of a man who had just moments before been talking and laughing with him about golf handicaps. It was too much to ask of him. She knew this.

  “Perry was not a good person,” said Madeline. “He’s the one who did those things to Jane. Did you get that? He’s Ziggy’s father.”

  “That’s not relevant,” said Ed.

  “It’s up to you,” said Madeline. Ed was right. Of course he was right, he was always right, but sometimes doing the wrong thing was also right.

  “Do you think she meant to kill him?” she asked.

  “I don’t,” said Ed. “But so what? I’m not judge and jury. It’s not my job to—”

  “Do you think she’ll do it again? Do you think she’s a danger to society?”

  “No, but again, so what?” He gave her a look of genuine anguish. “I just don’t think I can knowingly lie in a police investigation.”

  “Haven’t you already?” She knew he’d spoken to the police briefly last night before he came to the hospital, as she’d been taken off in one of the three ambulances that had pulled up in the kiss-and-drop zone out in front of the school.

  “Not officially,” said Ed. “Some officer wrote down a few notes and I said . . . God, I don’t really know what I said, I was drunk. I didn’t mention Bonnie, I know that, but at one o’clock this afternoon I’ve agreed to go down to the police station and give an official witness statement. They’ll tape it, Madeline. They’ll have two officers sitting in a room, looking at me while I knowingly lie. I’ll have to sign an affidavit. That makes me an accessory—”

  “Hey there.” It was Nathan, charging into the room holding a big bunch of flowers and smiling a big wide celebrity smile, as if he were a motivational speaker walking onto a stage.

  Ed jumped. “Jesus Christ, Nathan, you scared the life out of me.”

  “Sorry, mate,” said Nathan. “How are you, Maddie?”

  “I’m fine,” said Madeline. There was something unsettling about having your husband and your ex-husband standing next to each other, looking down at you while you lay in bed. It was weird. She wished they would both leave.

  “There you go! Poor girl!” Nathan dumped the flowers on her lap. “I hear you’re going to be on crutches for quite a while.”

  “Yes, well—”

  “Abigail has already said she’s moving back home to help you.”

  “Oh,” said Madeline. “Oh.” She fingered the pink petals of the flowers. “Well, I’ll talk to her about it. I’ll be perfectly fine. She doesn’t need to look after me.”

  “No, but I think she wants to move back home,” said Nathan. “She’s looking for an excuse.”

  Madeline and Ed looked at each other. Ed shrugged.

  “I always thought the novelty would wear off,” said Nathan. “She missed her mum. We’re not her real life.”

  “Right.”

  “So. I should get going,” said Ed.

  “Could you stay for a moment, mate?” said Nathan. The big positive-thinking smile had gone, and now he looked like the man in the wrong at a car accident. “I wouldn’t mind talking to the two of you for a bit—about, um, about what happened last night.”

  Ed grimaced, but he pulled over a nearby chair and placed it next to his, gesturing for Nathan to sit.

  “Oh, thanks, thanks, mate.” Nathan looked pathetically grateful as he sat down.

  There was a long pause.

  Ed cleared his throat.

  “Bonnie’s father was violent,” said Nathan without preamble. “Very violent. I don’t think I even know half the stuff he did. Not to Bonnie. To her mum. But Bonnie and her little sister saw it all. They had a very tough childhood.”

  “I’m not sure I should—” began Ed.

 
; “I never met her dad,” continued Nathan. “He died of a heart attack before I met Bonnie. Anyway, Bonnie is . . . well, one psychiatrist diagnosed post-traumatic stress. She’s fine most of the time, but she has very bad nightmares and just, um, some difficulties sometimes.”

  He looked blankly past Madeline to the wall behind her head. His eyes were blank as he considered all the secrets of what Madeline now realized was his complicated marriage.

  “You don’t have to tell us any of this,” said Madeline.

  “She’s a good person, Maddie,” said Nathan desperately. He wasn’t looking at Ed. His eyes were fixed on Madeline. He was calling on their history. He was calling on past memories and past love. Even though he’d walked out on her, he was asking her to forget all that and remember the days when they were obsessed with each other, when they woke up smiling goofily at each other. It was crazy, but she knew that’s what he was asking. He was asking twenty-year-old Madeline for a favor.

  “She’s a wonderful mother,” said Nathan. “The best mother. And I can promise you, she never ever meant for Perry to fall. I think it was just that when she saw him hit Celeste like that . . .”

  “Something snapped,” said Madeline. She saw Perry’s hand swinging back in its graceful, practiced arc. She heard Bonnie’s guttural voice. It occurred to her that there were so many levels of evil in the world. Small evils like her own malicious words. Like not inviting a child to a party. Bigger evils like walking out on your wife and newborn baby or sleeping with your child’s nanny. And then there was the sort of evil of which Madeline had no experience: cruelty in hotel rooms and violence in suburban homes and little girls being sold like merchandise, shattering innocent hearts.

  “I know you don’t owe me anything,” said Nathan, “because obviously what I did to you when Abigail was a baby was completely unforgivable and—”

  “Nathan,” interrupted Madeline. It was crazy and it made no sense because she did not forgive him, and she chose to never forgive him, and he would drive her to distraction for the rest of her life, and one day he’d walk Abigail down the aisle and Madeline would be grinding her teeth the whole way, but he was still family, he still belonged on her piece of cardboard showing her family tree.

  How could she possibly explain to Ed that she didn’t particularly like Bonnie, or understand her, but that it turned out she was prepared to lie for her in the same way that she would automatically lie for Ed, her children, her mother? It turned out, as strange and improbable as it seemed, that Bonnie was family too.

  “We’re not going to say anything to the police,” said Madeline. “We didn’t see what happened. We didn’t see a thing.”

  Ed stood with a sudden backward scrape of his chair and left the room without looking back.

  Detective-Sergeant Adrian Quinlan: Someone is not telling the truth about what happened on that balcony.

  79.

  The policeman looked like a nice young soccer dad, but there was something cool and knowing about his tired green eyes. He was sitting next to Jane’s hospital bed with a pen poised over his yellow notepad.

  “Let me get this straight: You were standing on the balcony but you were looking back inside?”

  “Yes,” said Jane. “Because of all the noise. People were throwing things.”

  “And then you heard Celeste White scream?”

  “I think so,” said Jane. “It’s all so confusing. Everything is muddled. Those champagne cocktails.”

  “Yes,” sighed the policeman. “Those champagne cocktails. I’ve heard a lot about them.”

  “Everyone was very drunk,” said Jane.

  “Where were you standing in relation to Perry White?”

  “Um, I think sort of off to one side.” The last nurse had said that someone would be taking her for an X-ray soon. Her parents were on their way with Ziggy. She looked at the door of her room and wished for someone, anyone, to come and save her from this conversation.

  “And what was your relationship with Perry? Were you friends?”

  Jane thought of the moment when he took off his wig and became Saxon Banks. She never got to tell him that he had a son called Ziggy who liked pumpkin. She never got an apology. Was that what she’d come to Pirriwee for? Because she wanted his remorse? She actually thought she’d get his remorse?

  She closed her eyes. “We only met for the first time last night. I’d only just been introduced to him.”