by Lette, Kathy
‘Only with you, apparently,’ a tipsy Emerald took aim once more.
Amber turned on her. ‘Shut up, Emerald, you’re pissed! And, anyway, you can’t talk. Exactly how many toy boys did you shag on the cruise? I lost count.’
I put my head in my hands. Catastrophes were piling up on each other like an acrobatic group.
Now it was Alessandro’s turn to utilise the word du jour. ‘What?’
‘Well, I’m not getting anything at home with Mr Limp-dick h . . . h . . . here,’ Emerald slurred. She had clearly drunk enough to achieve that level of volubility where no secret goes unshared. ‘What did you think was gonna happen, Sandro, if you put me on a sex diet? I have appetites, you know,’ she added, taking a ravenous bite of a steaming sausage.
The humiliating visual metaphor was not lost on Alessandro, but once more, ‘What?’ was the only word that sprang from his lips as he tried to fathom the Grand Guignol scene playing out before him.
‘Al can’t get it up?’ Harry asked, amazed, without thinking. ‘I thought he was the Italian stallion?’
Everybody was staring at Alessandro now. He dumped the plate of sausages down on the table, grabbed a beer from the esky, twisted the top off the bottle and took a husky slug. ‘Yeah, well, why bother?’ he shot back, in a snarky and facetious tone. ‘I’m second in importance in my house to the bloody dogs. I get the newspaper after the puppies. The only thing my wife truly loves are those goddamned animals, whereas I reckon animals are at their best on a barbecue. I especially hate dogs. Dogs have far too many teeth for a supposedly friendly creature. If I had to have a pet it would be a crocodile, so it could just eat all the fucking others.’
‘You hate animals?!’ Emerald flared. ‘How can you say that when you know it’s my passion?’
‘Maybe if you stopped absent-mindedly scratching me behind the ear and saying “Good boy”, I might feel a bit differently. As it is, you might as well start throwing me a tennis ball to chew on.’
‘You know I love you, Sandro. But you push me away constantly.’
I’d always presumed my tough oldest sister would only ever cry if, say, the local artisan cake shop got wiped out in a tsunami. But our time away together on the cruise had clearly changed her. Tears sprang to her eyes. She mopped at her face with a napkin.
‘Bullshit, Emerald. You only keep me around because your clinic’s losing money – all those rescue animal ops you do for free. You’d bloody well sink without my financial input.’
‘Why didn’t you come to me for money if you’re in trouble?’ Amber asked Emerald, consolingly.
I couldn’t suppress an indignant gasp. ‘Oh! Now you’re feeling sisterly? The only animal behaviour going on right now is from my own sister. I can’t believe it, Amber. I’m in shock. I don’t even know what to say to you.’
‘Ruby, I’m desperately sorry. We all make mistakes, okay?’ Amber’s pretty face flushed red again and the lines on either side of her mouth deepened in dismay. Attack being the best form of defence, she raised a combative eyebrow and then took aim with the only ammunition she had. ‘Just like you, with the ship’s doctor.’
‘The ship’s doctor?’ Harry asked me sombrely. ‘Fuck. Is he . . . the fresh sperm? Is he the father?’
Now it was time for Scott and Alessandro to ‘What?’ simultaneously.
‘We’re having another baby,’ Harry said, flatly. ‘I thought it was mine.’
‘I thought it was the menopause,’ I elaborated.
‘You can’t possibly keep it, Ruby. Everyone knows that, over fifty, there are two things a woman should never do – be seen in natural light and have a s . . s . . . sprog,’ Emerald stammered.
‘Jeezus Christ. It’s just one big sexual lazy Susan with you, isn’t it? Spinning from one sister to the next. Can’t you keep your dick in your fucking pants?’ Scott bellowed, grabbing Harry by the scruff of his Mambo shirt. In the ensuing scuffle, buttons popped and material tore, dissecting a reindeer and decapitating a snowman.
I could not believe what was happening. All our lives were being pulled apart like Christmas crackers.
‘I can’t fucking believe it. I thought we were mates!’ The noise Scott emitted as he punched Harry in the face sounded similar to the cry of a rhinoceros being fed into a food processor. Harry flailed one beefy arm in front of his face in defence, but Scott managed to land a punch on the bridge of his nose, drawing a dark comma of blood. While Harry reeled, Scott drove his clenched left fist hard into Harry’s abdomen.
Amber’s face became a little, balled-up fist. She jumped on Scott’s back and thumped him. ‘Stop it, Scott. It’s not his fault! It’s all your fault. If only you’d ever encouraged or praised me! Harry didn’t take me for granted. He loved my food. Unlike you. He thanked me profusely after every bite!’ Amber seemed to have mistaken her husband for a piñata. She was banging and whacking and thwacking his back as though he were full of treats. Her gleeful animation seemed to be bordering on the thin edge of hysteria. ‘You always told me how gentle Harry was in bed – I wanted that. For a man who spends every waking moment so engrossed in human rights cases, my husband has a hard time being human. Whereas Harry actually talked to me – not monologued, but really talked. He would sit at the kitchen table and chat for hours.’
‘I think you did a bit more than chat, Amber.’ I was trying to make my teeth grind more slowly so as to muffle the sound of disintegrating enamel.
‘You have no idea how lonely it is being married to him. I sometimes think about getting myself taken hostage, just so Scott will take notice of me outside the bedroom. And what about my human rights?’ She pummelled her husband’s back again. ‘You can catch despots who launder millions of dollars but don’t know how to wash your own underwear. Really?’ Then Amber, who hated hugging, slid off her husband’s back and splayed her arms to me. ‘But what I did was wrong. Deeply, profoundly wrong. Please, please forgive me. I was not in my right mind.’
I winced away from her, feeling a queasy mixture of horror and also some grim satisfaction that at least my accusations about Harry’s infidelity had been proven, despite his gaslighting. But with my own sister? It was like being dropped straight into a Greek myth.
‘Do you think she’s on something?’ Emerald asked me.
‘Yes. My husband’s face, unfortunately,’ I replied, gutted.
‘The emotional libido, that’s what’s important to women,’ Amber addressed her husband’s vinegary expression. ‘Not just sex, sex, every bloody day, over and over and over. Wham, bam, no thank you, ma’am.’
‘Sex every day, over and over and over . . . Jesus, have you any idea how lucky you are?’ Emerald said wistfully, glaring with resentment at her well-built but impotent spouse.
‘Why didn’t you two just swap husbands? That would have solved everything!’ I tried to shout, but my voice was juddering and broken. ‘Have some husband replacement therapy.’
‘You always say that I hate to be touched,’ Amber said to me. ‘That’s not true. Emotional tenderness and connection, that’s what I’ve needed so desperately. But the whole Harry thing just made me feel more miserable and lost and self-loathing. I was still stressed, and barely eating. It wasn’t the answer. But it did force me to look harder for the deep affection I so craved. I tried to tell you both on the cruise but the time was never right. I’ve finally found what I was looking for. With . . . with . . .’ She began gesturing like a heroine from a Jacobean tragedy. ‘. . . with Leyla.’
I rubbed my ears. Surely I’d misheard? I was beginning to think that it would be safer to fly an American jet into Iranian airspace than attend a Ryan family gathering.
‘What?’ said Scott, in the same voice he’d use in court to shout ‘Objection!’
‘Who?’ asked Harry.
‘Leyla Khoury. We were at school with her. Almond-eyed, Lebanese, good at maths . . .’
It took a beat for this momentous revelation to sink in for the frazzled family.
�
��Khoury . . . You mean the doctor’s receptionist?’ Emerald asked. ‘The one you’re in a book club with?’
‘Yes.’
‘A book club for two, where you slip between each other’s covers?’ Emerald sought clarification. ‘No wonder you’ve been at “book club” every bloody night!’
‘You’re into women?’ a dazed and amazed Scott asked.
‘I don’t know! I’m into Leyla, that’s for sure. She’s so soft, so kind, so gentle . . . so slow. I’ve never known slow before. Slow sex in a fast world. Women don’t want a Tinder app, they want a Tender app. Well, I do anyway.’
Christmas, I thought, the gift that just keeps on giving. The whole family continued to stare at Amber, gobsmacked into rare silence.
And then there came a slow hand clap. The family focus shifted back to Ruth, who was lounging comfortably in her chair, feasting her eyes on the fallout.
‘Oh, yeah, by the way, thanks for dropping me in the shit, Ruth. And on Christmas Day. Thanks a lot,’ Harry addressed his mother-in-law, bitterly. ‘Why don’t you just finish things off by sodomising me with your fucking Hoover?’
‘Yes, Mum. How long were you holding on to that grenade, waiting to lob it into my life?’ I demanded to know. ‘You wanted to maximise the casualties, obviously. Why else would you wait until Christmas Day?’
‘Well, now you all know what it feels like to be cheated on. Not so nice when it happens to you, is it?’ Our mother’s tissue paper Christmas hat had tipped across her forehead like a witch’s fringe. ‘We’ve had every sort of failure in our family. Alcoholics, adulterers, homosexuals, gamblers. But, in truth, you’re all the most bitter disappointments.’ She rose up like a cobra ready to strike, hissing through clenched teeth. ‘When I finally die – of shame, no doubt, after today – I’m bequeathing a little legacy to each of the grandchildren, but the rest I’m leaving to the church, the only part of my life that has never let me down,’ she said, with all the melodrama of a Dickensian denouement.
I took a deep, shaky breath and marshalled all of my energy for a final desperate surge, like a drowning surfer paddling for the wave that will rescue them from the rip and get them safely to shore. ‘I’ve never wanted to admit it to myself, Mum,’ I said, with surprising tranquillity, ‘but you really do hate us, don’t you? Why?’
Our mother’s cheeks sucked in to make valleys in her face, and her eyes glinted like metal. ‘Your father was the most feckless, irresponsible, selfish man on god’s earth. And you girls worshipped him. Even when I’d discover another of his sordid little affairs, you’d always take his side. You even covered up for him! I just hope he’s writhing in his gruesome grave,’ she said venomously.
The Ryan girls looked at our mother with pained astonishment.
‘Wow, Mum,’ I finally said. ‘You’d be discharged from a Saudi hit squad for being too brutal, do you know that?’
Ruth’s false nails, which were sharp enough to disembowel an echidna, raked a scratch down my arm. As an imaginative child, I’d taken more beatings from mum’s feather duster than my sisters for telling tall tales. ‘I’ve told you a million times, do not exaggerate!’ Ruth would yell while whacking away at my legs. The pain of the scratch was the catalyst I needed.
‘I don’t know why Dad married you, but I’d be very surprised if it didn’t involve some kind of satanic ritual at some point.’
Ruth fluttered her bejewelled fingers in the air, shooing away the conversation as if it were a mosquito. ‘What better way to hurt him, than to hurt all of you!’ Her voice was firm and punitive – the kind of voice that God would have used to part the Red Sea. ‘At least your father confirmed my Catholic faith. Yes. He taught me that there really is an afterlife; I finally had a life after he died.’
A shocked silence descended once more onto the Christmas gathering. Punch-drunk, reeling, raddled, stupefied and combat-fatigued, we all just stared at our matriarch. Some ants crawled across Ruth’s hand. I hoped they were the South American flesh-eating type. Finally, I spoke up on behalf of my sisters. ‘Well, Mum, you’ve definitely brought religion into our lives, because now all of us really do know what it’s like to be in hell.’
Then, extracting Amber’s famous pavlova from the esky by my feet, the youngest, most polite, most pliable, most intimidated Ryan daughter smashed it into our mother’s face.
The younger members of the Ryan clan had clambered up out of the pool some time ago and had been watching the melodrama unfolding beneath the gazebo. They were so startled not one of them had checked their iPhone or taken a selfie or Instagrammed anything for at least, oh, twenty minutes.
Bella: ‘If only we’d brought them up better.’
Jake: ‘It’s pathetic, really. I mean, this is our gene pool?’
Zoe: ‘Is it too late to put ourselves up for adoption?’
Alice: ‘Oh, shit. The worst thing is . . .’
Justin: ‘There’s something worse than this drunken display?’
Alice: ‘. . . now there’ll be no Secret Santa.’
30
The Insular Peninsular has everything in common with the Wild West, except for, well, dress sense, lingo, gun laws – oh, and access to abortion. But Christmas Day had left the Ryan family feeling like they’d been in a shootout in the O.K. Corral.
It was, without doubt, the worst Christmas any of us had ever experienced. Lunch had been abandoned, uneaten. Presents were left unopened, beneath the tree, Santa’s secrets never to be revealed. There was only the prospect of a month of ham sandwiches to indicate that Christmas had even happened at all.
Lying in the darkness that night, Harry and I were as far apart from one another as it was possible to be in a double bed. I’d expected him to go sleep on the couch, and he’d expected me to abandon the marital bed. It was your classic stand-off, except, well, lying down. We hadn’t spoken to one another since lunchtime. I actually had no plans to speak to him for the rest of my life. My last words to him were, ‘You’re a total arsehole, only not as useful. Why don’t you make like Santa and only visit us once a year?’
I tossed and turned as images I’d buried kept flashing into my head – my husband’s concupiscent glance down Amber’s cleavage at a family gathering; his eagerness to help Amber out any day and, more worryingly, any night, at a moment’s notice; the number of plumbing emergencies Amber phoned up about, which, curiously, always seemed to coincide with Scott’s trips interstate; my naive appreciation of Harry’s concern for my sibling, imagining it only proved what a great guy I’d married. Why had I turned a blind eye to all those red flags? Helen Keller could have seen it coming.
By two am, the only thought on my mind was whether I should cap off an otherwise unproductive day by flogging my handyman husband to death with his tool belt.
‘Hmm,’ I addressed my pillow. ‘A husband who had an affair with my sister, a psychotic mother, an unwanted pregnancy at fifty, a broken heart and a dead-end job . . . Who says you can’t have it all?’
After a fitful pre-dawn doze, I awoke consumed with rage at my mother’s vicious timing. Her selfish performance had given me a strong desire to anchor her with weights into a pool of piranhas. Couldn’t she at least have waited till Boxing Day to box our ears with such brutal news? I determined then and there to book in for an abortion. I mean, how could I bring another human into this dysfunctional family? Especially if the poor kid was carrying any of Ruth Ryan’s sour and acidic gene stock.
A feeling of defeat had settled over the house, acrid and thick, like the sulphurous bushfire smoke that clung to everything it touched. Mother Nature was in meltdown and so was I. Watching the sun rise over the sea, the bitter taste of remorse flooded my mouth. My whole life I’d allowed myself to be intimidated by my overbearing mother. I realised that I wasn’t suffering from multiple personality disorder – I didn’t even have one personality. But no more.
Fifteen minutes later, after rolling over a couple of kerbs and taking out a letterbox en route, I wheeled to a
tyre-screeching halt outside my old family home and catapulted across the nature strip to my mother’s door. I rat-a-tatted my knuckles on the glass panel in the same way my irritable and impatient mother announced her arrival anywhere. No answer. I stabbed my finger on the doorbell, repeatedly. My mother was clearly resting after the exertions of machine-gunning her entire family with psychological shrapnel – a day that forevermore would be known as ‘The Christmas Day Massacre’. Determined to finally speak my mind, I scrabbled around in the rockery for the hidden spare key, speared it into the lock and let myself in.
‘Mum?!’ Met by silence, I wondered briefly if she’d gone back to the bottle – memories flooding back of Ruth’s many drunken stupors, when she would sometimes be found lying in a pool of piss on the bathroom floor when we girls got home from school.
My march into the kitchen became less confident as girlhood terrors returned. Was my mother lying in wait with the feather duster for a quick, painful thwack around the legs?
The big glass doors opening out onto the terrace were still wide open. I walked outside, trying to keep my nerve. My mother was lying, asleep, in the banana chair. Her paper Christmas hat sat at a rakish angle. Yesterday’s lunch lay uneaten and swarming with flies on the table.
‘Mum?’
The eyes of dingoes are yellowish grey, and alert yet neutral. That’s what Ruth Ryan looked like now, staring straight ahead, unperturbed. A shiver of ghostly shock ran through me. I shook my mother gently by the shoulder. Her body crumpled, as if my gaze had shrivelled her.
A jolt of pain and panic spread instantaneously through me from top to toe. I felt as though I were on a sinking ship and hadn’t paid attention during the muster drill, so had no idea how to find my lifeboat station. When I noticed the traces of pavlova still on my mother’s face and hair, a pathetic, wretched sob wrenched its way out of my throat.
I killed her! was all I could think. Quickly followed by I’m an orphan. But how could I be an orphan? It sounded so Jane Eyre. An orphan is a poor heroine in a dusty old novel who ends up in a workhouse.