How to Be Second Best

by Jessica Dettmann

  I think that after Patrick, once I’d started going out with Troy, I was just really happy every time a week went by and he didn’t surprise-dump me. That’s not setting the bar very high for a relationship.

  As I now know from playing a huge amount of handball with Tim, things don’t bounce as high on the rebound. A rebound is nothing compared to a serve. So no more rebounds, unless I want my romantic future to be relationships of ever-decreasing quality.

  But a tiny voice in my head whispers, ‘Maybe not always. Maybe not this time.’

  Then through my headphones another, less tiny voice says ‘Phew, good job! Let’s take a little walk now.’

  I open my heart to both voices.

  * * *

  The end of the weekend drags around and on Sunday at six o’clock on the dot, Troy and Helen bring the kids back. I’ve tried not to stalk them on Instagram too much, but I’ve seen they’ve been at the beach. Helen posted a picture of Lola beside an incredible sandcastle that clearly no children had a hand in making, and a shot of a basket of sandy shells with the caption: ‘This is childhood. #childhoodunplugged #roamifyouwantto #seashells #enchantedchildhood #candidchildhood #capturedtreasures #carefreemoments #lettherebedelight’. Candid childhood, my arse. Neither of Lola’s siblings are anywhere to be seen on Helen’s Instagram feed. To look at it, you would never guess she had a less than perfect nuclear family situation. I mean, I don’t want her shoving my kids’ faces all over the internet, but I’m a bit offended at the way she just pretends to her many thousands of followers that they don’t exist.

  After the long drive back from Troy’s parents’ beach house, Tim and Freya are tired, grumpy and hungry.

  ‘That was so boring,’ says Tim. ‘That was the worst weekend I’ve ever had.’

  ‘Oh, really, sweetie?’ I say. ‘What happened? I thought you got to go to the beach.’

  ‘Well, we did, but Dad went to play golf so it was just us and Helen and she made us sit in a tent on the beach. Why does she bring a tent to the beach? The beach isn’t camping. She wouldn’t let me go in the water, even though I can swim. Mum, she treats me like a baby.’

  ‘Mummy, see all my shells!’ Freya interrupts, and upends a beach bag into the middle of the living room floor. The floor I’ve just swept and mopped. The beach bag is clearly from the Mary Poppins for Cotton On range, because out of it comes a seemingly impossible quantity of sand and shells.

  ‘Ah,’ I say, ‘that is a lot of shells. I’m very glad to see you brought back all the shells. Did you leave any shells on the beach for anyone else? Are there a whole lot of little nude hermit crabs scuttling about now? Does Lola have some shells too?’

  ‘Helen said she couldn’t take shells home to their house so she put her shells in with my shells. They can live next to her bed here. That one’s hers. And this one, and this one . . .’

  Freya carefully separates the shells into two piles, examining each one before deciding who it belongs to, acting for all the world like she can tell the difference between any of them.

  ‘That’s a bit sad for Lola,’ I remark. ‘Did Helen say why she couldn’t bring home her shells?’

  I’ll be interested to hear how Helen has spun this to the kids. Obviously she doesn’t want shells and sand all through her perfect house. Which is fine, because no one wants shells and sand all through the house. But it’s a bit rich to be Instagramming them left, right and centre and then banning them from her real life. She’s such a killjoy.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Freya.

  ‘She didn’t say why,’ says Tim. ‘Do you have to keep saying “shells”? It’s giving me a headache.’

  ‘Sorry, love,’ I say, then I whisper, ‘shells.’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘What? (Shells. Shells.)’

  ‘Stop saying that.’

  ‘Saying what? (Shells shells shells shells.)’

  ‘It’s not funny,’ he shouts, and rushes out of the room.

  I hear his bedroom door slam.

  Freya looks up. ‘Shells is a funny word, Mummy.’

  ‘Well I think so, Frey-frey, but I don’t think your brother agrees.’

  Tim’s like this more and more when he comes back from weekends with Troy. Usually I can jolly him out of it by being silly — hence all the shells carry-on — but when that doesn’t work he needs to be left alone.

  I’m still not very good at reading which of his moods require leaving alone and which require jollying-out, so I always try the jolly tactic first. Poor Tim. There’s nothing worse than people trying to cheer you up when you are determined not to be cheered. I respect that, I do. Laura does it to me all the time. I hate it when Laura tells me one of her stories when I’ve got the shits.

  It’s a waste of a story, usually, and that makes me even crankier. If I’m not miserable and feeling sorry for myself, I’m much more likely to appreciate the tale of when she and her husband Andrew took Bledisloe to the dog park and Andrew loaded someone else’s black Labrador into the back of the car when they were leaving. It was getting dark, so when Laura subsequently loaded the correct black Lab in beside it, she didn’t see the dog Andrew had basically stolen, and so they arrived home with one more dog than they left with.

  They drove Bledisloe’s doppelgänger back to the park, where her distraught owner was wandering the oval shouting ‘Pippa! Pippa!’ They all had a good laugh and agreed the council needed to upgrade the lighting in the parking lot.

  I mean, it’s not a hugely funny story, but I would have had a little laugh at it if I hadn’t been in a foul mood. Laura wastes her stories because she’s always trying to cheer me up. She doesn’t have enough good stories to be profligate with them like that. None of us do.

  That’s why I just use silliness on Tim when he’s got the grumps. But tonight he needs peace and quiet. It will take more than some wordplay to mend the wound that I can see growing in his heart every time he tries and fails to spend time with Troy.

  Chapter Seven

  Troy and Helen’s house was identical to my house when they were built, back in the early years of last century. There are ten houses in a row just like them, all down our road. Opposite are ten more. They still all look more or less the same from the street, but once you’re through the front door, you start to see the differences.

  In my house, the leadlight front door leads along a dark hallway, with two rooms off each side. Three rooms are bedrooms, and the one with a fireplace is the living room. At the end of the hall is the kitchen, big enough to hold a table and chairs for six, and beyond that still is the bathroom. There’s a door off the side of the kitchen into the backyard, and a cracked concrete pathway leads first to the laundry, then on to the Hills Hoist in the middle of what could generously be called the lawn.

  Since it was built, very little has changed in this house. That is not the case for the rest of the street.

  These days, most of the houses’ front doors open to reveal bright, airy, open-plan living spaces with soaring ceilings and glass walls that give onto outdoor entertaining spaces, the sandstone pavers bleached like the cliffs of Dover. Entering these cathedrals of Scandinavian-inspired minimalism, especially on a sunny day, has the tendency to make me feel like I am in the middle of a bomb blast: everything is white and looks like a sharp surface that’s about to kill me.

  These houses all have staircases that lead up to more bedrooms, bathrooms, walk-in wardrobes, and upstairs decks overlooking back gardens. Helen and Troy’s house is a fine example. Half of their new first floor contains what real estate agents like to call ‘a parents’ retreat’. Because goodness knows, when they are finally at home with her, they need to squirrel themselves away from their one demanding child.

  If I sound judgmental about the state of their house compared to the state of mine, it’s only because I am. Troy gave me our house in the divorce settlement. He paid it off completely, which I know makes me incredibly fortunate, because I would never be able to keep up the repayments with
what I earn these days. And I wouldn’t be able to afford to live in Shorewood if I didn’t have this house. But with the proceeds of the sale of Helen’s home and further funds from the booming sales of bottled juice, they could afford to buy the bells-and-whistles version of our old place. Really, it couldn’t be a more obvious sign to the world that Troy upgraded his life, in every sense.

  When they moved in, there was nothing they needed to do to the place. Helen immediately abandoned her boho windchimes and crystals and embraced the fashion for white surfaces and pale wood. The appliances in their new kitchen were all top-of-the-line German machines, which emit ten to fifteen self-congratulatory beeps whenever they achieve anything. The backyard was a Tuscan-style dream, framed by neat rows of hedges in descending height order from back to front.

  Helen, needing to mark her territory, insisted they have the thousands of dollars worth of travertine paving in the garden torn up and replaced with lush turf, which arrived looking like huge brown and green jam roly-polys on the back of a low loader. So Helen could claim she was the one who had nurtured the garden into being, she insisted on rolling the turf into place all by herself.

  When I walk into their house late on Monday afternoon to return Lola I’m struck again by the other-worldly tidiness. There is no clutter. There are a few little vignettes set up in homage to clutter, sure. A sort of ironic take on clutter sits in the form of half-a-dozen or so small hand-thrown pottery pieces arranged artfully on an otherwise empty gleaming expanse of engineered stone countertop.

  The room is still and quiet.

  In my house, there’s always movement and sound. A piece of paper will be sliding glacially off the top of a teetering stack. Almost inaudible creaks come from baskets of toys as the Duplo settles in them. The old corrugated iron lean-to that protects me from the rain when I go to the laundry pops and creaks as it stretches and contracts with the weather. The kitchen tap drips. The bathroom taps drip.

  If you watched my house through a time-lapse camera it would be like a jungle: growing, steaming, ever changing. Helen’s house feels like it’s under glass, brightly lit, in a museum.

  Helen is running slightly late today, so while the children haul open the glass bi-fold doors and start rolling on the lawn, I find myself with nothing to do.

  The kitchen sink is empty and dry, as though it was polished after the dishes went into the dishwasher this morning. It probably was. Helen’s tap doesn’t drip. Even if I dried my sink, four seconds later it would have drops of water in it again. My tap is old, and though I’ve taught myself some rudimentary plumbing skills through the wonders of YouTube, no matter how many times I change the washer, it drips with slow determination. Every three seconds. It’s a metronome keeping time, waiting for a musician who never comes to play a dirge marked larghissimo.

  I could make this tap drip. It wouldn’t be hard. It would be annoying though, to the people who live here.

  Before I can talk myself out of it I open the cupboard that conceals the laundry. Troy’s toolbox is on a shelf above the washing machine. Beneath it is a little printed label that reads TOOLS. These little labels are everywhere in this house. Helen is mad for her electric Dymo label maker. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if under her activewear her skin is covered in tiny little stickers saying ‘boob’, ‘rib’ and ‘hip’.

  I resist the temptation to peel the TOOLS sticker off the shelf and place it on their bed. Instead I borrow a spanner and a monkey wrench, and set to work, step-by-backwards-step reverse-engineering a leaking tap.

  By the time Helen returns half an hour later, the kitchen tap is building a heavy droplet of water that falls about every five seconds. The room is so quiet that I put on some music to disguise it, because the plink of the drip hitting the stainless steel seems to reverberate around like a cell door clanging shut.

  I say nothing about it, but as I farewell Lola and Helen, and head off to collect Tim from school, I feel the smallest shiver run through me. I still haven’t told them I’m not going to keep taking Lola to all her activities, but at least I’ve done something. A micro-aggression. I’ve fired a little warning shot. It’s a tiny spark of something that alarms me a bit, as I’m well aware that this feeling is the frisson of misbehaviour, and I rather like it. Sure, it’s not setting someone’s clothes on fire on the front lawn, and maybe they won’t even notice, but maybe it will make their day, or their week, just ever so slightly more irritating, and that can’t be a bad thing.

  * * *

  The next week drags unbearably. Every day before I take Tim to school I spend far more time than usual doing my hair and putting on makeup, in case I run into Adam. Every day, I don’t run into Adam. I don’t know why. Every day I vary my timing and my route ever so slightly, but we still don’t meet.

  My efforts seem to please the other parents at school though, and I get so many passing comments about how nice I’m looking that I begin to take offence. How horrible have I been looking until now?

  I’ve never really known how to respond to compliments. When I was young, my mother taught me that the gracious way to accept a compliment is to simply say ‘Thank you’ and give a pleasant smile. I think this was based on Lady Diana, and what she would do. This approach is utterly at odds with what my mum actually used to do when someone complimented her, which was launch into a flurry of denials, batting away the kind words like she was being attacked by a swarm of mosquitos.

  ‘No, God no!’ she’d scoff if you mentioned her jumper looks nice. ‘I look horrendous. This thing? It’s so old you can see through it. It’s dreadful and I should throw it out. In fact I will, I’ll throw it out right now. You’ve helped me make up my mind. Oh no, I can’t because if I take it off you’ll see my massive arms. The children will all run in fear! Ha! Here comes your terrible old mum with her horrible smelly old jumper and great big arms and her wrinkles. Have you seen these wrinkles? I suppose the pattern on the jumper distracts the eye from the wrinkles, doesn’t it?’

  Either that or she’d do a complicated magic trick by which she’d turn the nice comment around and fling it back at you in the form of a suggestion that perhaps you were blind, or thick, or demented. The compliment-to-criticism transformation was as swift as it was brutal.

  ‘I like your lipstick,’ I might have said.

  ‘Emma! What on earth’s wrong with you? How can you say you like this lipstick? It’s a freebie and it’s completely the wrong colour for me. It’s just awful. Makes me look like I’ve been dug up. I worry about you sometimes, I really do. Have you had your colour vision checked recently? Because I’ve read that it can deteriorate with age. It happens.’

  I worked very hard not to absorb this attitude to compliments, but when so many people say nice things over the course of a few days, when you’ve made slightly more effort than usual to put on a bit of mascara and maybe some eyeliner before venturing outside, I can see why it’s tempting.

  Of course it’s lovely that people are thinking I look nice, but I think I’d prefer that it wasn’t such a shock to them that they need to remark on it.

  By the time Thursday rolls around, I’m starting to remember why I normally don’t bother with makeup, because Thursday is the day I take all three kids to swimming lessons after school, and as if that isn’t difficult enough without having to deal with mascara dripping down my cheeks and eyebrow pencil smearing across my forehead. I realise this as I’m wrangling three kids and a giant swimming bag through the turnstiles at the local pool.

  If I could choose one activity to absolutely never ever do with small children, it would be swimming lessons. Unfortunately, if there’s one activity I feel it’s really important to do with small children, it’s swimming lessons.

  I’m paranoid about children drowning — perhaps more so than other people, although maybe other people just manage the fear better. When Tim was born I took him to baby swimming classes as soon as he was six months old — the earliest they would take him. He hated it. Some people just aren
’t water babies, it seems, or perhaps some babies don’t find it relaxing to be joggled about in deep cold water by a clearly nervous mother who keeps saying, ‘It’s for your own good, it’s not as bad as drowning.’

  He’s better about swimming now; in fact as soon as he was old enough to have a lesson without me in the water with him, infusing the whole pool with my panic like a giant pot of stress tea, his swimming came on in leaps and bounds.

  By that stage I’d had Freya, so when Tim had his lesson I’d take her in at the other end to get her used to the water. She loved it from the get-go, and so did Lola, who we started bringing with us when the girls were about eight months old, because Helen always seemed to have a Pilates class scheduled, whichever day or time of the week we had swimming.

  Back then, my kids didn’t go for overnight visits to Troy’s place — it was too much for Helen to deal with, what with having such a little baby — so his offer to feed all three kids dinner at his house once a week, post-swimming, seemed like a good deal. One evening a week to myself — well, two hours really — seemed like the height of luxury to me at that point. It seemed like a fair exchange to take Lola to the pool for the afternoon.

  I look back on those days with mixed emotions. There’s pride, obviously, because it’s an amazing achievement to take one slippery, squirmy baby into deep water, let alone two, and bring them both out alive. There’s also astonishment that I agreed to this absurd and hugely unequal arrangement.

  But mostly there’s horror. The lasting, deeply scarring trauma caused by the dressing rooms at the pool. It wasn’t so bad when the girls were babies. Then it was a matter of getting them out of the pool ten minutes before the end of Tim’s lesson, wrapping each in a towel and plonking them in the double stroller.

  One at a time, I’d take a baby out, peel off her swimsuit, remove her sodden swim nappy, dry her off, put on a fresh nappy and some clothes and replace her in the pram. And repeat. It took me a few months to realise I should dry and dress myself first, because dressing babies involves a certain amount of holding them against your body while you hold their pants and kind of shake the child in. But the point being that it’s no use lowering a baby into dry clothes if you then hold them to your sodden bosom and get them soaked with chlorinated water again. Those were the days.