I take Tim back to school, still a bit pale but otherwise recovered. I keep my eye out for Adam in the playground, but I don’t see him anywhere. He’s probably hiding from me. I can’t even quite remember what I said as I hurtled out of the house and into a cab on Saturday night, but I definitely remember him looking hurt, and I haven’t had so much as a text message from him since, so I think I can safely assume I’ve buggered that up, whatever it even was.
Probably for the best, really. I need to focus on other things.
After dropping Tim off, I head to a cafe. I see lots of school mums and dads doing this. I’ve never quite managed to crack the scene though, because as much as Freya and Lola are excellent playmates for each other, they’re not exactly what you would call cafe-friendly.
I’ve given it a few tries, in several different local establishments, but never with any real degree of success. First we always have to have an argument about whether they will or won’t be sitting in highchairs. (Spoiler: they won’t; never have.) I order coffee for me and babyccinos for them, which they always manage to upend on themselves. The espresso cups the babyccinos come in are designed on Tardis principles, because although they are small enough to be clutched in chubby toddler hands, they seem to contain enough warm milk to irrigate the Murray–Darling. It’s certainly enough to course off the table and run directly over to whichever is the most expensive handbag another customer has placed by her feet. That’s one outcome.
Or the girls will spot another child who has a milkshake and then they set up a two-kid lobby group to be allowed to upgrade their babyccinos to chocolate shakes. That’s always successful because by the time I’ve ordered my long black I will do almost anything to remain sitting down until I’ve drunk it. Maybe if I drank lattes I would have more power in this equation, because you can knock back a latte in eight seconds, if required. But try that with a long black and you end up with a scalded oesophagus.
So in the past I’ve found myself sitting at a table, with two toddlers armed with chocolate milkshakes as big as themselves, who then ask for toast, which is a build-up to asking for Nutella on toast, and before I know it I’ve spent twenty-five dollars and the two of them are laughing maniacally, drunk on a heady cocktail of sugar and power.
No thank you. Milk Arrowroot biscuits and mandarins in the park is more my style.
But today, for the first time in ages, I enter the nicest-looking of the three cafes in the shopping strip. All three have had a hipster-makeover in the past five years, so they’ve been thoroughly subway-tiled and visible-filament-lightbulbed. The one I like the best has succulents growing in Spanish tomato tins as table decorations.
More than half of the tables are occupied by parents I recognise from the school. There are a couple of babies and toddlers, but they’re all sitting in high chairs and behaving like civilised humans, mostly clutching a parent’s phone that they have handed over in return for some peace and quiet.
See, that’s where my problem has been — I didn’t succumb to the lure of plugging the kids into a screen in a cafe. Not because I’m above that. Oh no, I’m not Screen-Free-Until-They’re-Three Helen. It’s just that I only have one phone. That’s the real reason to stay in a marriage: you need to keep the number of phones and children equal. Handing my phone to either Freya or Lola would not have made for a calm coffee hour.
Today I am alone. I’m not sure where to sit. I don’t want anyone to join me, so I don’t want to sit at a table for two, facing the door. If I sit facing away from the door I won’t be able to see anything interesting. There is a bar-height table along the front window, and I could sit there, but I’d have to sit on one of the high bar stools, which are slippery vinyl, not super comfortable, and always make be worry that my bottom is spilling over the edges. My bottom isn’t huge, but in a seated position it’s definitely wider than one of those stools.
A man who has been sitting at the very end of the window bar table stands up, closes his magazine and puts it back on a pile of other magazines the cafe has provided. He calls out a goodbye to the barista, who gives him a cool nod.
This is a win for me. I can now sit on a barstool, thus giving me a view of the street, but also lean against the wall, so if my bum on the stool looks like a denim beret atop a small bald man’s head, no one will be the wiser.
The waitress comes over and I order a long black, while marvelling at how and why someone with such perfect, plump, unlined skin could possibly feel she needs to slather on as much makeup as this girl has. Nothing makes me feel older than wanting to tell girls in their teens that they should wear less makeup. ‘Heed me,’ I want to beseech her. ‘Believe me when I tell you your face is perfection and it’s only downhill from here. Your skin will never look better than it does now. Even with the odd zit.’
While I wait for my coffee, I take out a notebook. It’s time to make a list. Quickly I jot down: camping, Fun Run, work, Laura, Adam, Helen, Troy. It occurs to me I’ve ordered it from ‘task it will be easiest to deal with’ to ‘task I really, truly, deeply do not want to address. At all. Ever.’
I stare into my coffee instead. Suddenly there is a loud rapping on the window. My heads snaps up and there, inches from my face, outside the cafe, is the third-most difficult entry on my list: Adam. The butterflies erupt. Stop it, I think. He’s married and confused at best, but certainly not available. Let it go. He’s smiling. He doesn’t look like he hates me. How about that?
Maybe we can pretend that what happened on Saturday night, on my floor, didn’t happen. That’s possible, surely. It was just a very drunken fumble between friends. No big deal. Certainly not a big enough deal for him to tell his wife about. Probably not even a big enough deal to ever mention again. Right?
Wrong. He comes inside. The stool beside me is empty and he sits down. He looks very intense.
‘Hello,’ he says.
‘Hello to you,’ I reply.
‘We need to talk.’
‘About camping?’ I say hopefully.
‘Well, yes, that too. But more about, you know — Saturday.’
I’m going to play it down, see how that goes.
‘Saturday? Oh, that. That was nothing. Don’t even worry about it.’
‘Really?’ He looks a tiny bit forlorn. ‘Oh. Right. Okay. Well. Good, I guess.’
‘It shouldn’t have happened, I totally get that you were probably just a bit pissed, and missing Ilse and there was nothing more to it than that. I was smashed too. We’re mates. Just mates.’
‘Oh. Yes, mates.’
I peer at him. ‘Aren’t we? Or have I got this wrong? You are married?’
He straightens up. ‘Absolutely. I’m married, we’re mates. Shall we say no more about it?’
‘Say no more about what?’ I ask.
‘Ha!’
We are both being too jolly now.
‘So, camping,’ he says, and smacks the table firmly with both hands. ‘Let’s plan this.’
‘Just so you know,’ I say, wanting to be up-front. ‘If we go camping together, there is going to be talk. Even with separate tents. We’re likely to be the only single parents there and the fact that we know each other, that we are friends — well, that’s going to be some serious grist for the rumour mill.’
‘Is it?’ He looks perturbed.
‘It doesn’t bother me,’ I tell him. ‘I’ve been through that mill before. I’m already regarded as a bit worrying around here. I don’t have a lot of women friends around this area. I had a few sort of acquaintances back when we first moved in, but I don’t think people here quite know how to cope with me being a single mother and with my weird situation with my ex. It makes them uncomfortable.’
‘Surely not,’ Adam says. ‘Why would they care?’
‘I don’t know. But people seem to think you’re safer in a couple. Like I’m going to try to steal their husbands or something.’
We’re both quiet for a second.
‘Which obviously you’re not,’ he
says.
‘Obviously. But lots of the parents act strangely towards me anyway. They have ever since Troy and I split up. I don’t know if they will on the camping trip, but I thought I’d better give you the heads up, just in case.’
‘I think I’ll cope,’ he says. ‘In any case, I’m not doing this camping thing on my own, so they can just think what they want to think.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ I tell him.
* * *
I leave the cafe an hour later feeling surprisingly on top of things. I’ve dealt with the Adam issue. That is sorted. We are just friends. A small voice in me tries to speak up and ask what kind of friend doesn’t ask about your kid who was in the hospital last time they heard, but I tell it to pipe down. He’s just a new friend. He doesn’t have to be interested in my kids.
Walking home I think about the weird warning I just gave Adam. It’s true, what I said about people around here not being very friendly to me since Troy and I split up. I mean, they’re not out and out rude, but there are definitely a few couples who were neighbourhood mates who stopped contacting me once I was single. The sort of people you meet in the park, on a Saturday morning, and get chatting to while you push your kids on the swings and drink your takeaway coffee. There were a few people like that, who we progressed to having a dinner with, at either our house or theirs. We only moved in here when Tim was born, so there were only a couple of years in which we built these kinds of relationships, but it’s long enough to see the general direction a friendship is going, and it was definitely strange the way those people dropped off the radar once Troy left me.
I suppose I can’t really blame them. They probably didn’t know what to say. And then when Troy and Helen moved into my street, that was just the icing on the freak show cake. I guess that’s why I’ve worked so hard to be cool about it. I think I thought that if I acted like it was no big deal that my ex-husband and his mistress-turned-wife decided to live three doors up from me, then other people would be admiring and chilled about it too.
But now I suspect that’s made us look more like a freak show. And it’s probably why I’m clinging so much to the idea of having Adam in my life. He’s a nice bloke. Normal. A friend.
As I turn the corner into my street, a car passes me. A big, white Range Rover. It’s Helen’s. I deliberately slow down so that she’ll have parked and gone inside before I have to walk past her house, but she pulls into a space in front of her house and lingers in the driver’s seat.
Has she seen me? Can I walk past and pretend I don’t know she’s in the car?
I don’t know what to say. What if Troy’s told her about our kiss? That’s the sort of dick move he would pull. It’s what he’s been doing to me ever since he told me about Helen and Lola: trying to involve me in his emotional quagmire. His attitude seems to be ‘Why bother having an emotional crisis if you can’t bring someone else down with you?’
I speed up, ready to charge past her car, and just as I reach her rear bumper she leaps out. She walks around the front of the car and stands in the middle of the footpath, blocking my way.
I come to an abrupt stop.
‘Oh!’ I say, feigning surprise. ‘Helen. Hi.’
She looks me straight in the eye. ‘I’m only going to say this to you once. Stay the fuck away from my family.’
It feels like the air has been sucked from my lungs.
She continues, in a clear but quiet voice. ‘I know you kissed Troy. He told me. You were drunk and disgusting, but that is the reason — not an excuse. You are pathetic, Emma. He’s not interested in you. He never really was. You think it was me who destroyed your marriage, Emma, but it wasn’t. It was you.’
I’m rooted to the spot, and she’s not finished.
‘We tried to be nice to you. That was what Troy wanted, because he wanted to think that you were capable of rising above the break-up. And we genuinely thought you loved Lola. It’s clear we were wrong. You couldn’t even respect us enough to take her to her classes.’
I still haven’t moved. I can’t believe we are having this conversation in the street. To a passer-by it would look like we’re coordinating a soccer pickup carpool. Instead I’m enduring a blow-by-blow character assassination.
There’s a tapping sound from the car and I turn. Right beside me, in the back seat, strapped into her car seat, is Lola, wearing her pale pink ballet cardigan, wrap skirt and tights. She’s smiling at me and tapping her little fingernails against the window to get my attention.
I move to open the car door but Helen pushes straight past me to get there first. She unbuckles Lola and picks her up.
‘Hi Memma,’ Lola says, and my heart almost breaks.
‘Emma,’ Helen corrects her. ‘Emma, not Memma.’
Lola looks confused.
‘How was ballet, sweetie?’ I ask.
‘A bit boring. I wanted to go to the ball room again. But Mummy said no.’
Helen looks at me with nothing but loathing.
‘Time to go in for some lunch, my darling,’ she says, and opens the front gate. As she walks up the path Lola watches me over her mother’s shoulder.
‘Bye-bye, Memma.’
‘Bye-bye, Lola.’
I stand for a moment, my chest feeling like it’s about to explode. Then I hear my voice, calling, ‘Helen.’
She stops, about to close the door behind her. She puts Lola down, sends her into the hall, opens the door fully and looks at me.
‘Helen,’ I say. ‘You were fucking my husband. Before I was pregnant and then all through my pregnancy. You will never be in a position to criticise me.’
I turn away. Then I stop. I look back and she’s still at the door.
‘And we both know I’m not the one you’re really angry with.’
* * *
Inside my house I push the door closed behind me and realise I’m shaking. My hands are trembling and my knees are so wobbly I feel like I could collapse. I don’t know what just happened. Obviously some of it’s pretty clear — Troy told Helen I kissed him — but what was all that stuff about me destroying my marriage? That doesn’t make any sense.
The kiss was a mistake, although I still don’t know who initiated it, so I can’t say with any authority whose mistake it was. I guess it doesn’t really matter. What matters is it won’t happen again.
And if Troy and Helen want to destroy the happy co-parenting relationship we’ve built together, there isn’t much I can do about that. Let’s see how they like it when there’s no flexibility in the care arrangements, when I’m not at their beck and call when they want to have a week in Bali.
I feel like I’m on fire. I want to sort this life out. I want my independence from them. For that I’m going to need a hell of a lot more money. A bit of freelance work here and there — fitting it in around the kids — that’s got to stop. I don’t want to need the money I get from Troy every month. Work needs to become a serious business.
And it’s got to start now. The first thing I need to do is figure out when this ridiculously late book of Wanda’s is going to show up — if it is even still coming — and then fill in the gaps around it with other work. Preferably not cricket-related.
In the kitchen I pour myself a huge glass of water, which I drink with shaking hands. Then I sit at the table, open my laptop and check for emails from Carmen. I want to call Philip, who for some reason seems to be the only person who understands Wanda’s schedule and cares enough to keep me in the loop, but he’ll have left Wanda’s by now. Anyway, it’s Carmen’s job to keep me informed, not Philip’s. She can sort this out.
Surprise, surprise . . . there’s no email from her. Well that’s not good enough. If they want me to edit this book, I’m going to have to insist on having a manuscript. I know how this works: they’ll keep putting me off and putting me off, and then all of a sudden the manuscript will arrive and they’ll want me to turn the whole edit around in about three days. And it’ll be when I have the kids, or when we’re camping o
r the weekend of the Fun Run. I need to be more proactive about this.
It’s time to do the thing I hate most. I pick up my phone and place a call to Carmen’s office phone number.
She answers immediately.
‘Hi Carmen, it’s Emma Baker,’ I say.
‘Emma Baker!’ she cries. ‘That is just the weirdest thing. I was just about to call you.’
Highly unlikely, I think, but I let her continue.
‘I’ve finally managed to get Wanda on the phone and we’ve had a very good talk.’
‘You’ve spoken to Wanda herself, or Wanda via Philip?’ I ask.
‘Philip who?’
‘Philip her friend, the one who’s been staying and helping her.’
‘Why would I talk to him?’
‘Never mind,’ I say, wanting to keep her on track. ‘Is the manuscript ready?’
‘Nowhere near,’ she replies. ‘Miles and miles from ready. So not ready. Apparently she has writer’s block. She says she’s written eighty per cent of it but she is now stuck. How anyone can have writer’s block when they’ve been give a six-figure advance is beyond me. I think I’d find that much money to be very unblocking. But that’s what she’s claiming, and frankly I now need to do whatever it takes to unblock her.’
‘How will you do that?’
‘She wants me to come up to her house in fucking Woop Woop and sit with her while she writes, but that’s not going to happen because the bigwigs from the UK office are out for two weeks and if I’m not at my desk here it’s not going to be a good look. What I can do is be there for her in a virtual sense. I’ll Skype her every day, and if she wants me to sit there with her for twelve hours at a time, talking it through while she types, then that’s what I’ll do. Surely that will work.’
‘I hope so,’ I say. ‘When shall I expect the manuscript then?’
‘Let’s see . . .’ I can hear her clicking away with her mouse, no doubt confronting the full horror of the state of her calendar. ‘It’s Tuesday now . . . and if she really puts her head down I would say that if you put aside next week and the week after, we should be good.’
How to Be Second Best Page 21