Suddenly no one is watching the TV. The forensic team continues searching the barn anyway.
‘I’m not being taken advantage of. Laura, tell him.’
Laura takes a huge mouthful of curry.
‘Really, Laura? You don’t agree with him, do you?’
She chews for a long time and then swallows. ‘Ah . . . yes. It seemed rude to say it — it was rude to say it, Dad — but yeah. They’re taking you for a ride, Em.’
Shit. It’s that obvious to everyone.
‘How long have you thought that?’ I demand.
‘Always,’ says Laura simply. ‘Don’t act like you haven’t thought it too. You must see that what you’re doing isn’t normal.’
I don’t know what to say. Of course I know this set-up is demented. Now. I’m just a bit mortified to admit how recently it’s occurred to me. I can almost hear Mum’s voice in my ear telling me to calm down, to listen to what they’re saying. But I’m sick of feeling wrong. It’s the worst. So I do exactly what I know I shouldn’t and go on the attack.
‘Mum would have stood up for me. She would have understood that I have to do this for my kids.’ How dare she be dead when I need her on my side? ‘It’s all for their benefit. Kids of divorced parents have better outcomes when their parents get along — that’s a fact established by research, I’m pretty sure. And if helping Troy and Helen out with the childcare is the way for the family to get along then that’s exactly what I’m going to do.’
‘See,’ Dad says. ‘They are having an absolute lend.’
‘I’m not being taken advantage of. I’m setting an example to my children of how to be the bigger person. I’m showing them that just because one of their parents behaved badly, it doesn’t mean I have to too. I’m showing them that tit-for-tat is unnecessary. You know, when they go low, we go high. I’m making the best of a less than ideal situation by turning the other cheek.’
Laura and Dad snort in unison.
‘There’s turning the other cheek,’ Laura says, ‘and then there’s, I don’t know, slicing off your own cheek and braising it in red wine in your slow cooker because Helen forgot to get anything for their dinner. You’re such a martyr. I know you know, but you’re too proud to admit it. You’re a cross between an ostrich and a martyr.’
‘I’m an ostrich martyr? Laura, what does that even mean?’
‘It means you won’t admit what everyone else can see. That Helen and Troy treat you like crap, and every time you respond by doing even more for them. What’s that about? Are you trying to make them feel bad by being aggressively helpful? I don’t know if that’s going to work. Is it because of the money? Troy still has to give you money even if you only look after the two kids you had with him. I know he gives you a bit more than he has to, but that isn’t enough to be a salary for looking after Lola.’
‘Girls, girls,’ says Dad. ‘This isn’t how we talk to each other. Ostrich and martyr are judging words. And I can’t hear the TV so if you’re going to continue this, how about popping out to the garden?’
‘You started it,’ I tell him. ‘But you’re right. We don’t need to continue this,’ I say. ‘I’m going home. It’s pretty clear you both think I’m a useless doormat, even though all I’m trying to do is make my kids’ life as calm and stress-free as I can. I don’t expect any of you to understand because none of you has the slightest idea what it’s been like for me. I’m well aware that mine is the first broken marriage in sixty-five generations of our family, so maybe you should just let me get on with it.’ I stand up and grab my bag from the floor beside the sofa.
Laura is rolling her eyes at me. ‘All right then, Miss “Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen”, see you later.’
I pointedly step over her outstretched legs to kiss Dad goodbye. I don’t say goodnight to Laura.
I get as far as the front door before I turn around, walk straight back into the living room and give Laura a hug and a kiss on the cheek. ‘Love you, bye.’
‘Love you.’ She knew I’d be back. She knows that since Mum died I never leave anyone I love without telling them that, no matter how grumpy I might be. You just never know when it might be the last time.
* * *
I’m still cross when I wake up the next morning. I’m so cross that I wake up at six and can’t get back to sleep. This makes me even crosser, because the children are at Troy’s so I am supposed to be able to sleep in.
I roll over and try to force myself back to sleep, but outside I can hear the neighbourhood gearing up for a busy Saturday. My bedroom is at the front of the house, so there’s not much between me and the family across the road loading their two Range Rovers, ready to head off for a full day of ferrying their two kids to about as many sports fixtures as the Commonwealth Games.
Along with the rest of Shorewood, in fact this whole city, they seem determined to create as much traffic on weekends as during weekday peak hour. It’s worse on the weekend, in fact, because none of the sporting fields seem to be on public transport routes, so everyone drives. Plus all the matches start at different times, which just serves to drag out the traffic chaos until late afternoon. Once you throw in the house-hunters and the people trying to get their shopping done, you have a fully fledged gridlock situation.
‘Hockey stick, Georgie!’ I hear Julia from across the road yell. ‘Hockey stick! Hockey. Stick.’
‘God, Julia,’ bellows her husband, Ian. ‘There’s no need to shout. Just go inside and remind her.’
‘I have reminded her. I do nothing but remind her. This car is leaving this driveway in one minute — and that starts now — and if Georgie is not in this car with her hockey stick and her shin pads and her mouthguard I will simply leave without her.’
‘What’s the point of that? What are you going to do when you get to hockey without Georgie?’
‘I don’t know, Ian. Shame her? Tell all her little friends in the team how Georgie has let them down on the field because she is disorganised and lazy? Hmmm? Maybe that’s what I’ll do.’
I hate Julia and Ian. Quite a lot, but still nowhere near as much as they seem to hate each other. Especially on Saturday mornings.
They’re not finished yet.
‘Damon,’ Ian shouts. ‘Damon! Get in the car, Damon. Jesus Christ, Julia, what is that boy doing in there?’
‘How would I know? Do I look like I can see through walls, Ian? I have just as much idea what Damon is doing in there as you do. Damon! Darling, come on.’
There’s the clatter of a hockey stick being turfed with some force into the luggage compartment of a four-wheel drive, and the slam of a car door.
‘Georgie! That is a four hundred and fifty dollar piece of premium sporting equipment. If you break it, you are spending your own money on a new one,’ Ian says, at top volume. ‘I am sick to death of everyone in this family treating their belongings with such a lack of respect.’
‘Everyone?’ says Julia in a voice that portends danger, if you are Ian.
Uh, oh, Ian. Now you’re in for it.
‘Everyone treats their belongings with a lack of respect, do they, Ian?’
Back down, Ian. You are not going to come out of this well.
‘I meant the kids, Jules, obviously.’
‘That’s not what you said. You said everyone. You meant me. You’re talking about the dent in the car again.’
‘No I’m not. You said that happened while you were parked at the shops and I accept that. We said we’d say no more about it.’
‘But you just can’t let it go, can you? I don’t think you really believe me, Ian. I think you think I’m lying, and that I just crashed the car willy-nilly because I’m a bad driver.’
This is an interesting tack for Julia to take, going on the offensive, and I’m intrigued how it’s going to play out. Because I happen to know she pranged the car right out the front of their house, two afternoons ago, doing a very sloppy three-point turn. She reversed it into a crepe myrtle tree. If Ian spent any t
ime at all watching crime dramas he’d figure that out for himself. There’s metallic navy paint right there on the tree.
But when Julia goes on the offensive, Ian retreats. I’ve seen it time and time again in the years I’ve lived opposite them. Usually, though, when she goes on the attack it’s because she hasn’t done anything wrong, and she’s all self-righteous. This use of attack as defence is new and clever.
His voice is wheedling now, like a dog that has been reprimanded, if that dog were also very conscious of not being late for football. ‘Jules, love, of course I believe you. You’re an awesome driver. You know I think that. Who does your dad let move the Jag when they’re away? It’s not me, is it? It’s you, Jules. Now let’s all head off. Here’s Damon! Good boy, Damo, you got everything? Mouthguard? Yep? You have a great game, Georgie, and don’t let the hockey umpire get distracted by your beautiful, beautiful mother.’
I hear two car doors slam and within seconds he’s gone, with a squeal of tyres, off up the street.
Julia closes her door, reverses swiftly down the driveway and steams off after him, only very slightly clipping the wing mirror on the Subaru parked next to their drive.
There’s no way I’m going back to sleep now. I get up and boil the kettle.
* * *
I get a lot of work done on the weekends when the kids are with Helen and Troy. It’s the best distraction I can come up with. If I don’t have a book to edit — another person’s imaginary world to absorb myself in — the days without them are too long and quiet, and then the loneliness gets me.
Once you’ve been abandoned by your husband — and I’m going to say this like I’m an expert even though it’s only happened to me once — loneliness becomes a big part of life.
Well, it has for me anyway. Oh, I know I should cultivate hobbies and find more friends, but I’m done with that. That was what I did before I was married. I was planning to do it again once the kids were grown and Troy took up some absurdly expensive and time-consuming pastime like jet-skiing, as I assumed he would do. I just thought he would still be married to me when he reached that stage. And I thought all our friends’ husbands would be doing it too so I’d have people to hang out with again. I never meant to be thirty-six and having to decide whether to join a bushwalking group or start taking life-drawing classes.
This was the part of my life where all I was going to do was focus on my family and do some work on the side. Now my family disappears for two days out of every fourteen. That leaves me with work.
When there’s work to do, I can just put my head down and get on with it, knowing that every hour I do now is an extra hour I can hang out with them when they’re back during the week.
This weekend though, I’m left hanging. The last time she emailed, just after the launch, Carmen assured me Wanda’s book would be with me by today.
But the manuscript still hasn’t appeared, and this morning when I wake to see yet another email from Carmen in my inbox, I assume it’s to tell me of another delay.
I’m correct.
‘That bloody woman,’ begins her email, in direct contravention of what she taught me about only slagging off your author by phone, and never in writing, ‘still isn’t ready to deliver. I’m this close to going up to her stupid hippie enclave and hanging her upside down by her ankles until the damn book falls out of her.’
There’s another email with the same subject line, only this one is from Wanda’s friend Philip. I open it and read:
Dear Emma,
It was delightful to meet you at the book launch. I hope your small tiger has recovered from her heatstroke. It is an occupational hazard for all tigers.
Wanda has asked me to email you, because she does not like to be the bearer of bad news and thought that I would do a better job. She says I should be flattered by this but I do not find her argument watertight.
Anyway, the news, as you can probably guess, is that the manuscript is not finished. Wanda is very sorry, and I am too, only slightly less than she is perhaps because I would not otherwise have had the opportunity to email you and I did very much enjoy our chat the other evening.
We both hope this does not cause you too much inconvenience. Rest assured, work is progressing, just at a slower rate than anticipated.
Please accept Wanda’s humble apologies, via your obedient servant,
Philip Albert
I’m very annoyed, but the email mitigates my fury slightly. Philip’s quite funny. He writes like he speaks, as if he were raised by Mr Darcy and Joanna Lumley.
It seems there will be no work this weekend. If I’d had this information on Friday I could have contacted the other publishers I have work lined up with to see if anything they have booked me for has by any miracle come in early, but the emails were sent late Friday night.
That leaves two days of nothing ahead of me.
My heart fills with dread. The weekend stretches out before me in a horrible daunting span of carefree, unstructured time. It’s exactly what I used to fantasise about back when Tim was a baby. How can it seem so terrifying to me now?
Troy was just starting his business back then, so for weeks on end I’d barely see him and it would just be the baby and me, together, alone.
Weekends were the hardest, because at least during the week everyone else’s husbands were at work too. Monday to Friday, I could hang out with all the women from mothers’ group, and all my old university friends and colleagues who experienced the simultaneous explosion of our biological clocks and got sprogged up around the same time.
That first year, when most of us were on maternity leave, it was never hard to find people to go to the park with, meet in a cafe, or just hang out at each other’s houses. In those halcyon days before our babies could talk or express their own opinions, I got to have such great conversations with my old friends.
And it was so easy to make new friends. A simple ‘How old’s your baby?’ to a woman waiting at the traffic lights could lead to a coffee and a chat with no awkwardness at all. Babies were such a visible signal of someone who had at least one thing in common with you. It was like the swinging sixties, but instead of sex we’d have banana bread.
It didn’t always lead to friendship. I had my fair share of bad mum dates, where I’d get five minutes into a conversation before realising that the only thing we had in common was that we’d both recently played host to a human parasite, and apart from that I was having a latte with a Big Bang Theory-watching racist whose child slept through the night from two days old.
But when the weekends came, back in those days, all the other dads would be around to play with their families, and with Troy still at work I’d be left wandering the suburb with a baby in a pram, wondering if maybe my dad or my sister were free to hang out with me. Back then, the idea of two whole days to myself, with no small children to look after, seemed like an unattainable dream that I’d have to wait for retirement to experience.
Sometimes the only way I could fall asleep was to imagine that I was alone in the house — or better still, that I was in a hotel — and there was no one who would require my love, attention or boobs in the small hours. I’d doze off, only to be shocked awake an hour later by Tim’s little squawks.
So now, really, I should be beside myself with joy at the uninterrupted time I get as a single mother, on the occasions when Troy and Helen actually do what the custody agreement says and take Tim and Freya every second weekend from Friday afternoon at four until Sunday dinner time. But I’m not.
There’s no one around to hang out with now. I could see friends with their husbands and kids, and I know I should because since everyone went back to work after maternity leave those friendships have withered from lack of attention. I still feel like I know what all my old mates are up to, because I can see it on Facebook and Instagram, but I don’t see them in real life much any more.
These are people I once would have called my closest friends, and who in fact I still consider myself close to, but th
en I realise I haven’t met their youngest children, who are one or two years old. That’s disgraceful.
And I do have these free weekends, when I could, theoretically, visit said friends. But here’s the thing: it feels wrong spending time with other people’s kids when my own aren’t with me. I’ve done it a few times, but I always end up talking about them too much. I feel like some weirdo who has an imaginary friend. My mate’s child will do something — a handstand, interrupt a conversation, a poo on a potty — and suddenly I find I’m telling everyone how my kid does that too.
What I forget, in those instances, is that no one cares about anyone else’s kids. At all. They only tolerate them, sometimes, because they provide company for their own children, who they adore. It’s human nature, and it means it’s just very strange when you hang out without your kids, with other people’s kids.
* * *
This weekend, like most of my childfree weekends, I decide to fill my time with household chores. Not so much cleaning or tidying-type chores, more the sort where I take myself to the big shopping centre and walk around putting things in my shopping basket before taking them out again. I can swing between over-consumption and minimalism in the time it takes to do a lap of the shops.
Today I need to replace Tim’s handball. We were practising in the backyard earlier this week and it fell down an uncovered drainpipe. The drain bends just beneath the opening, so even with a torch we couldn’t see the ball once it was lodged in there. We tried poking it with an unwound coathanger, but that, as you would expect, just pushed it further down. God knows what’s going to happen next time we get a lot of rain.
I wander around a cheap department store, magnetically drawn to the toy section, past the brightly coloured Fisher-Price farmyards and plastic chainsaws. Toys that were popular when I was little are back, revamped for a new generation of parents trying to buy back some of their own childhood for their offspring. But while the names are similar, it’s as if the toys have had a horrible distorting filter applied: the My Little Ponies aren’t ponies any more. Now they’re teenage girls with pony heads and drag-queen makeup. They confuse me. Do they live in a paddock at the end of a rainbow or are they equine cyberbullies in tartan mini-skirts?
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