How to Be Second Best

by Jessica Dettmann

  This morning it’s no different. Round and round the same three or four blocks we go, willing people to come out of wherever they are hiding and get in their cars. ‘Come on, come on,’ I mutter. ‘Leave your houses, you mad shut-ins. Go for a drive. Surely you need milk. Don’t you have packages to collect from the post office depot? Where are you, people of this street?’ It has no effect.

  The class begins at ten-thirty, and by ten-thirty-five, I still haven’t found a car space.

  That’s it. That’s enough, I think. I have one life to live. I am not spending any more of it trying to telepathically convince suburbanites behind double brick to come outside and drive off in their cars. We will not be going to ballet today.

  ‘Girls,’ I announce. ‘Today, I cannot find anywhere to park this car, so we are not going to ballet. Miss Annabelinda will have to manage without Lola today. We’re going to have an adventure.’

  ‘Can we still have crunchy buns?’ asks Freya.

  ‘Yes you can.’

  ‘Where are we going for our adventure?’ asks Lola. It’s a valid question, and not one for which I have a ready answer.

  ‘It’s a surprise,’ I tell her.

  ‘But we’re still having crunchy buns,’ she says to Freya, ‘your mum says.’ I love the way kids talk about adults like we aren’t there. It’s very fair payback for all the talking over their heads we do.

  All this talk of crunchy buns gives me an idea and I turn onto the expressway. We’re going to go to the promised land, where the cinnamon buns are plentiful, the coffee is cheap, and the childcare and wi-fi are free. We’ll be spending the morning at Ikea.

  * * *

  A lot of people hate going to Ikea. They say there are too many people, they feel trapped, the food is bad, and they always spend more than they plan to and come home with things they don’t need. Such people just don’t know how to do it properly. It’s like drug-taking, or alcohol: you have to know what you’re doing, what your limits are, and most importantly, you have to be with the right people. And, like getting drunk or high, first thing Saturday morning isn’t the best time.

  Once you know the secrets, once you’ve embraced the Swedish way, there’s really no downside to Ikea. The key is to go early on a weekday, and to take a minimum of two children, and no significant others. Never take only one child. They won’t want to be parked in the playroom, and they’ll insist on tagging along through the furniture display area. You’ll find them attempting to scale bunk beds using the ladders that have Perspex nailed on them to stop exactly that behaviour.

  Turn up early, delight in the microscopically subversive act of feeding the children a two-dollar hot dog, embracing the mystery and wonder of what might be in the pasty-looking meat tubes, then deposit them in Småland. The older the kids get, the less likely they are to lick the balls in the ball pit, so the chances of coming home with hand, foot and mouth disease or gastro diminish with every visit, which always feels like a win.

  Then, and this is the good bit, I get to go sit in the cafeteria, alone, and drink coffee. I can eat meatballs or cinnamon buns. Hell, there’s nothing to stop me eating both. In that hour, I can be anyone or no one. Nobody’s mother, nobody’s ex-wife, nobody’s editor, nobody’s daughter and nobody’s sister.

  One coffee in, I usually start to unwind. One and a half coffees in, I feel edgy and a bit morose, like I’m a detective in a Swedish crime show. I like to sit with this feeling for as long as I can. All around me people are doing the same thing, so I like to exercise my imagination and surreptitiously watch them, trying to figure out what crime they are planning or concealing. Once I start freaking out that someone’s baby carrier is actually a bomb, I know it’s time to leave the cafeteria.

  Next I wander through the furniture display, to walk off the worst of the caffeine jitters, and imagine for myself a life where the people I live with would adhere to the organisational systems I implement. A life where I would not only buy the storage solutions from Ikea, but once I got them home I’d actually get around to explaining to everyone what is supposed to go in which square basket in which pigeonhole of the Kallax shelves. In a life like that, I wouldn’t end up marching around on Sunday evening, swearing under my breath about how I don’t know why I even fucking bother because clearly no one cares about their possessions in this house at all and how if this ever happens again I’ll just be putting all the neatly labelled toy boxes into the car and driving them to the charity bin.

  I find it very meditative, the Ikea stroll. Gentle Euro-pop plays through the sound system, and little arrows are projected onto the floor, telling me where to go next, removing all the options from my life except which microfibre bathmat I’m going to take home today to add to the already excessive number of microfibre bathmats I’ve brought home from previous trips to Ikea.

  Eventually I have to snap out of this reverie because the little buzzer they’ve given me at Småland pulses, like at an RSL when your chicken parmigiana is ready. That means it’s time to float back to earth, collect the small people, and go about my day. After an hour at Ikea like this, the feeling is not dissimilar to what it used to be like, before kids, to spend four or five hours at a day spa.

  * * *

  On the way home from Ikea, I try to nut out how I’m going to get Lola to keep this little excursion from her mother. I can’t tell her to keep it just our little secret. That phrase has been comprehensively ruined by child molesters. Which is a shame for many reasons — obviously the child molesting first and foremost, but also because having secrets from your parents is enormous fun when you’re a kid.

  I need Lola to just lie by omission. I need to give her something better than Ikea, something that Helen and Troy will approve of, that she can tell them about. Or I could just rely on the natural disinclination of small children to talk about their day.

  In the end I do nothing. If Lola tells her parents, so be it. If I can stand up to Suze Albion-Davies I can stand up to Helen.

  Chapter Nine

  The next morning Tim and I are headed back to the Lost Property room again. This time it’s his hat that’s disappeared. I’ve got the girls with me, again, because although it’s normally not a day I have Lola, Helen’s going to a meeting in the city with some people who call themselves branding specialists.

  There aren’t as many red-hot pokers involved with this business as the name suggests, more’s the pity.

  According to Helen, they’re going to talk about her social media presence and which brands they should be connecting her with. The company is called LikeLike. It sounds to me like a lot of BullshitBullshit.

  Helen was planning to take Lola with her, because apparently Lola, as Helen and Troy’s child, could become a social media influencer too, with a bit of judicious product placement. I think they are overestimating how cooperative a child they have on their hands, possibly because they so rarely actually have her on their hands. I’m not going to pretend I understand the first thing about social media and how this influencing business works, but I can’t imagine Lola getting on board with any of it, especially if it’s Helen suggesting it. Helen must have had a last-minute flash of insight into the true nature of her child, because she called me at eight-thirty to say that on second thoughts Lola might rather spend the day with Freya and me.

  So Helen has swanned off in an Uber, and Tim, Lola, Freya and I are returning to where we belong: the Lost Property room.

  I’m not altogether sure that the recent loss of the hat is legitimate. Tim has started saying he wants to wear the baseball-style school cap, which I am not keen on because it offers about as much in the way of sun protection as a flyswat.

  Tim thinks this sun-protection obsession of mine is just a ruse for making him look like a baby, because according to him, broad-brimmed hats are babyish. No amount of me pointing out adults wearing broad-brimmed hats has convinced him otherwise. ‘Look,’ I’ve said, ‘the postman’s wearing one! Look, the parking inspector has a broad-brimmed hat.
’

  ‘Babies,’ is always Tim’s reply. ‘They look like babies.’

  ‘Does that roofer look like a baby?’

  ‘Yes. He does. A big dumb baby in a dumb hat.’

  ‘. . . on a roof, without a rope, with his shirt off, doing a very dangerous job? Doesn’t look very babyish to me.’

  This argument never gets me very far and now I suspect he has taken matters into his own hands and ditched the broad-brimmed hat altogether, in the hopes that I’ll replace it with a cap to stop the whingeing.

  But I can handle a lot of whingeing. I’ve tried explaining to him about skin cancer, and how, yes, sunscreen is helpful in protecting the skin but the more layers of protection the better, but it means nothing. If he’d ever had a really nasty sunburn I feel like he’d take my warnings a lot more seriously, but of course he hasn’t ever had a sunburn. From birth he’s been in a muslin-draped pram, or smothered in SPF 50 sunscreen for sensitive skin. I don’t think he actually has sensitive skin but it’s always felt more caring to buy that one. And he’s been wearing a babyish broad-brimmed hat. Which I intend he will continue to wear. As we amble up the footpath towards the school, I wonder how this has turned into such a big deal.

  Until recently, whenever I asked Tim to do something, he by and large just did it. There were times he did it slowly, or with some reminding, and perhaps with more daydreaming along the way than other kids, but generally, Tim’s always been such an amenable person.

  This newfound stance on hats is unlike my easygoing boy. Maybe it’s not about the hat at all. Is he trying to gain a tiny bit of control in a life where he basically has none? I mean, he’s six, he shouldn’t be in charge of his own life, but I feel like his mood has been getting worse and worse over the past few months.

  What I fear is that as he’s started to grow up, he’s begun picking up on Troy’s lack of interest in him and Freya. Troy never does anything with Tim. Even when he has them for visits, he’s on his phone all the time, dealing with work issues, and it’s Helen — and I’m loath to give her credit for anything — who talks to him and takes care of him. She treats him like a baby, sure, but at least she pays him a tiny bit of attention.

  It’s bang on 9.05 am when we roll up outside the Lost Property room. Deb is there, unlocking the door. Today she is a symphony of red and orange. She looks like she is going straight from work to play the part of a bushfire in an eisteddfod.

  ‘Good morning, Indiana Jones,’ she says to Tim with a wink. ‘Have you lost your Ark? I hope it had your name on it. Lots and lots of Arks in here today!’

  This is utterly lost on Tim, referring as it does to a movie made over thirty-five years ago, which is too scary for him to see. He gives me a baffled look.

  ‘In you go,’ I tell him. ‘I want you to find that hat.’ I’m using my most serious voice. The one that implies there will be Serious Consequences if the hat is not found. Of course I have no serious consequences, which he well knows, but he’s mostly a good boy so he pretends to be daunted. He turns to the first bucket of hats that time forgot, and starts checking nametags.

  I start in on the second bucket, while the girls take turns climbing a set of shelves that I quickly assess will probably not fall on them.

  The first hat I check belongs to someone called Matilda Makepeace. The second hat I pick up is Bon’s. Bon Cunningham, the tag says. I recognise Adam’s handwriting. That’s a bit weird, really. I don’t know if I’d recognise Troy’s handwriting. I haven’t seen Adam’s handwriting for many years, not since he returned his edited manuscript with manual mark-ups. But it’s unmistakeable. He has really nice handwriting. It looks sort of French.

  ‘Tim,’ I say, ‘this is Bon’s hat. Did you know he’d lost his hat too?’

  Tim doesn’t look at me. ‘Um, nup.’

  Tim lies to me very rarely and very badly. He’s lying to me now. You don’t have to be Hercule Poirot to figure out what’s happened here. The two of them have decided they’re too grown up — at five and six years old — to wear broad-brimmed hats and they’ve made an executive decision to jettison them. But because they’re five and six, they didn’t think to hide them where they wouldn’t be found, like in the bin. They probably just abandoned them in a part of the playground where they don’t often go and assumed that was the last they’d see of them. Sometimes the dumbest criminals are the cutest.

  If I deduce correctly, Tim’s hat will be the next one down in this bucket. I flip over another hat and there it is. Tim Lawson. And people say watching endless crime shows is a waste of time.

  ‘Did you guys chuck away your hats so Adam and I would buy you caps?’ I ask him.

  He cracks immediately. ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s pretty naughty.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Hats cost money, Tim. You don’t just throw them away because you want a new sort of hat.’

  ‘But I just really wanted a cap.’

  He looks so dejected, it’s all I can do not to grab five of the nearest caps and give them all to him — after we boil them for a few days, obviously. He’s so sad his terrible plan failed.

  And he’s right. All the big boys at the school, and all the cool ones, they all wear caps. It’s the little ones who get about looking like a bunch of mushrooms in their stiff-brimmed hats with a chin-strap. It’s the chinstrap that really adds insult to injury, I think. How grown-up can you feel when your hat is held on with a toggle?

  ‘You have to get to class — the bell’s about to go. We’ll talk about this after school.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mummy,’ he says, and he looks so little. I scoop him up off the ground and cradle him in my arms like he’s a baby. He doesn’t resist.

  ‘It’s all right, Timbo. We’ll figure something out with the hat. I love you.’

  ‘I love you.’

  I put him down, glance into his hat, giving it a quick once over for obvious signs of head lice, and finding none I cram it down over his hair. He grabs his bag and scoots out of the room, up the corridor towards his classroom, as the bell rings.

  * * *

  With the girls at kindergarten, I head home. I drop Bon’s hat on the floor by the front door so I don’t forget to take it to school this afternoon, and sit down to work on the edit of an autobiography of a recently retired cricketer, which Carmen has flicked to me by way of apology for the lateness of Wanda’s book. As apologies go, it’s quite punishing. I keep having to google terms that sound like they can’t possibly be correct. Each time they turn out to be totally legitimate expressions from the cricketing world. I struggle to keep my biffers and my blockers straight. Someone chops on, someone else farms the strike and someone else delivers fruit salad bowling.

  In between paragraphs, I stare at my phone, willing it to ring. Surely someone, somewhere needs me, urgently, to do something that is not this. Anything but this.

  Astonishingly, this works and the phone rings. It’s Wanda’s mate Philip.

  ‘Philip,’ I say, thrilled to hear from anyone, ‘you couldn’t have called at a better time.’

  ‘Hello, Emma. I’m glad to hear it. I’m not interrupting anything?’

  ‘You are interrupting me trying to edit a book about cricket and I can’t thank you enough. Do you know anything about cricket? You’re an Englishman, you’re probably an expert.’

  ‘It’s never been my thing, I’m afraid. We did have to play it at school, but I was always twelfth man.

  ‘Aha. I know what that means. If you’d called me an hour ago I would have had to just laugh politely, but I now know it means you were a sort of back-up guy who plays when required but mostly gets the tea. Oh!’ Something occurs to me. ‘The twelfth man is the cricket version of an emotional support animal, isn’t it?’

  He laughs. ‘Yes, I think that’s more or less it. You’re quite taken with that emotional support animal concept, aren’t you?’

  ‘I really am. It’s such a great idea. I read recently that an airline in America now has a l
ong list of animals you can’t take on board a flight as emotional support. Apparently you can’t take a hawk, but a falcon is fine. And they’ve banned hedgehogs. Sorry, Philip,’ I say, remembering suddenly that this isn’t just a friend calling for a chat. ‘You didn’t ring to talk about cricket or hedgehogs. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I wish I were calling to say Wanda’s finished and I can deliver you from the torments of your cricket book, but she’s not quite done. She has written another chapter though; that’s what I wanted to tell you.’

  ‘That’s good news. Progress is good. How many more does she think she has to write before it’s finished?’

  ‘That I don’t know. She’s being a bit cagey. I’m leaving here tomorrow, but I’ve given her a huge pep talk, and she knows what she has to do to get to the end.’

  ‘Have you threatened her with Carmen if she doesn’t hurry up?’ I say. ‘I think she’s getting pretty antsy.’

  ‘I haven’t but I will. That’s a good idea.’

  ‘Thanks for keeping me in the loop, Philip.’ I should get back to work but I want to keep talking to him. ‘Where are you heading on your travels?’ I ask.

  ‘Back to London, to begin with. Then I’m not sure. Could be one of a few places.’

  Wanderlust sweeps over me like morning sickness. Travel. I wonder if I’ll ever get to go overseas again. Or even somewhere else in Australia. It doesn’t seem likely. Imagine just jetting off to London, and not knowing where you’ll go next.