That’s why we have plastic sick bags and old towels strategically placed around the back seat of the car. She’s old enough now to anticipate trouble, though not necessarily to aim as well as we’d like her to. Poor darling, you could hardly expect it. So I had to change her skirt and her socks, and dispose of the sick bag, and wash her face, and give her a drink, and as a result we were late getting to Tamarama, what with the beach traffic and everything.
Not that it mattered much, because lunch wasn’t served until half past two. This meant that I had to make a pest of myself cutting up apple and slicing cheese and buttering biscuits for Emily, or she would have thrown up again. (Too many corn chips on an empty stomach does it to her every time.) I hate that. I hate looking like a neurotic mum, asking if there’s anything besides Coke or mineral water or lemon squash or tomato juice or soya milk or green cordial—some Ribena, perhaps? It’s not even as if Emily has a respectable allergy, for God’s sake. Just a stomach like a live volcano.
And Kerry, I could tell, hated having me clutter up her kitchen benchtops with jars of Vegemite and strawberry fruit straps and Jonah’s special little tubs of (butterless) popcorn and chopped-up dried apple (he’s terribly picky about his food) while she was trying to mix salad dressing. She mixes her own salad dressing. She even has her own yoghurt maker. But don’t get me started on Kerry.
It’s a shame, because I always want to go to the Irwins’. They live in the most fantastic house, exactly eight minutes’ walk from the beach. They have a cat, a dog, and a pool. They also have two children, one five and one seven—so in addition to everything else, they have an unlimited supply of scooters, Barbie dolls, wooden puzzles, Lego bricks, Madeline DVDs, computer games, and everything else you need for a leisurely, stress-free lunch on the patio. Plus the two kids are great— especially Zoe. She looks after Jonah as if she were born to it. Reads to him and everything.
The upshot of all this is that we can never get over there fast enough. Whenever I think of that glassy box cantilevered over that tumbling slope, I think of airy blue vistas and strawberry daiquiris and sandy bathrooms and children’s laughter and rockpools and barbecued octopus. And then I arrive, and it all starts to go sour in my head.
I’ve known Paul since university. He is, and always has been, the funniest guy in the world—so sharp, and at the same time so good-natured. A sweetheart, in other words. Maybe a little nervy and high-strung, but nothing you’d need medication for. We didn’t go out together (he didn’t turn me on, if truth be told), but we were always good friends, even though he was brilliant and I wasn’t. Well—brilliant in his chosen field, that is. He’s a big-time corporate lawyer now, making stacks of money, but you’d never guess it. Though his sandy hair is thinning on top, and he wears polo shirts and yachting shoes and a big, chunky Rolex, he doesn’t behave like your average bigshot. He’s one of those people who’s always delighted to see you, who thinks that your jokes are funnier than his own, who has a big, toothy grin and a joyous laugh, who tells a terrific story (but rarely at someone else’s expense), and who specialises in taking the piss out of himself. You know the sort of thing. The way Paul talks, you’d think that he bluffed his way into his job, and now spends his time screwing up PowerPoint presentations and doing pratfalls at board meetings. But he doesn’t, of course. He’s just modest. Modest and eager to entertain.
You might be thinking: what’s your problem then, Helen? If Paul’s so terrific, if his house is so terrific, if his kids are so terrific, then why the long face? Why are you off on one of your rants again, you miserable, long-faced party pooper?
The answer is: Kerry. Kerry and my own flawed nature. Kerry and I don’t hit it off, because she’s one of those eastern suburbs girls who always struck me as being incredibly blinkered and dense. She’s tall and blonde and willowy, with a long face and porcelain skin; she hardly ever speaks, and her face is inscrutable; she has a high, pretty voice, an impeccable wardrobe and expensive tastes. And that, as far as I can see, is all there is to her. It seems extraordinary, when Paul is so funny and smart and (let’s face it) rich, but I honestly can’t see what else she has to offer. Because if she’s not stupid, she’s doing a bloody good imitation. What I mean is—she’s a trained florist, right? With some kind of florist’s certificate? So I ask her things like: ‘Are native flowers selling better than they were ten years ago?’ or ‘Do you have to ask a bride if she’s allergic to anything, before you make up her bouquet?’, and she looks at me as if I’m mad. Honestly. That’s the precise expression on her face: a sort of blank-eyed alarm. As if I’d told her that I was planning to donate my womb to the Smith Family.
She behaves, in other words, as if I’m eccentric, as if my kids are underprivileged, and as if we were all living in a fibro housing commission place out in Mount Druitt, or somewhere else equally lacking in cachet. Dulwich Hill just isn’t part of her vocabulary. To her, it’s ‘out west’. What’s more, if we ever finish our renovations and invite her over, it won’t change her opinion. She’ll cast her vacant gaze over the leadlight windows, the tessellated tiles and the ornate ceilings, and she’ll fail to be impressed, because the house is on a quarter-acre block half an hour from the nearest headland, French provincial antique dealer or merchant banker.
That’s one reason why I end up feeling very prickly and competitive, when I visit the Irwins. I become grudging and petty-minded; I think to myself, That pool’s not so big, but it fills up the whole backyard, or, Imagine how dismal it must be in here on a grey, blustery afternoon, with all this slate floor and minimalist furniture. Kerry’s taste is very formal, and much more modern than mine. She likes unusual colour combinations and spiky flower arrangements and vast tracts of polished blond wood. I’m different. I like old things. That’s why we bought the house in Dulwich Hill, which is a double-brick Federation place with a slate roof and wooden floors, a lemon tree in the backyard and a detached laundry. I was pregnant with Jonah, at the time, and we had to find something fast because we couldn’t stay in our rented flat in Darlinghurst, with its cramped proportions and mouldy bathroom—I was going mad, in that place. So we bought our new house as soon as we’d saved up enough money for a sizeable deposit, not realising what we’d got ourselves into.
Old houses are full of secrets. Not good old secrets, like caches of love letters under the floorboards, or marble mantelpieces concealed behind a sheet of plasterboard—I’m talking about bad old secrets. Our house only had two bedrooms, but we thought that we’d add another when Jonah was eighteen months old and I went back to work. We wanted another bedroom, a larger kitchen, and a laundry with a roof that didn’t leak. Little did we know that, on pulling up some of our old linoleum, we would find not only layers of delightful antique newspapers, but termite damage and sewage leaks as well. Pipes had to be dug up, boards had to be replaced, and by the time all that was done our builder was running late; our job was beginning to impinge on another one. So then our builder started to juggle them both, and you can guess what happened. Nothing. Nothing at all, for long stretches of time.
I was such an innocent when I bought our house. I had no idea what it means to own your own real estate. Sure, I knew about mortgages, but I didn’t understand about pest inspections, gutter cleaning, electric hot water systems, council rates, plumbing problems, sewage leaks or termite damage. I never imagined that it would all be so expensive. God, it’s expensive—especially if neither you nor your husband can change a tap washer, or replace a hinge. And it was all made doubly expensive by the fact that I went a bit mad, when Jonah was a baby. What I mean is, I became obsessed with interior design magazines.
You know the type of thing I’m talking about. Those thick, glossy doorstops full of ads for upholstery fabrics and tapware and six-burner cook tops. There’s usually a ‘special’ feature on beautiful bathrooms (or kitchens), an article on a designer’s ‘inner-city’ cottage—utterly transformed into a four-storey mansion with guest room and Tuscan courtyard—and another one o
n a converted coach-house in the southern highlands of New South Wales. Well, I don’t need to tell you. You’ve probably seen about a million of them—or two million, if you’re anything like me. I was fixated on our house when Jonah was a baby. I thought about almost nothing else, because it was our first house, because I was stuck in it all day every day, looking at the wood-grain laminex in the kitchen, and because thinking about limestone benchtops or concealed rangehoods took my mind off the awfulness of Jonah. God, he was awful. I know I shouldn’t be saying it (most people are really shocked, when a mother comes out and says that her child’s being a pain) but some babies are sent to try you. Lisa reckons that when she was pregnant with Liam, and as sick as a dog, the only things that saved her sanity were grisly thriller videos like Seven and The Silence of the Lambs, from which she could derive the satisfying knowledge that, while things were bad for her, they could be infinitely worse.
During my time of trial, I relied on homemaker magazines. My brief moments of respite—when I was sitting on the toilet, say, or waiting at the Early Childhood Clinic, pushing Jonah back and forth in his pram—were always spent poring over paint catalogues or photographs of window treatments. Raptly, I would marvel at the names of the colours. (Whoever thought of ‘minced onion’ as a name? Or ‘reef cocktail’? Or ‘medici sunset’?) Enviously, I would study shots of somebody’s renovated 1830s farmhouse, wondering how there could be so many people in the world with money for Georgian book-cupboards and silk tapestries. It was the only time in my life when I’ve ever been able to talk to Kerry about anything; we could discuss German dishwashers and hardwood inlays and be more or less on the same wavelength, because I had vaulting ambitions, at that stage, owing to my constant reading of Interiors and Country Style.
Since then, I’ve calmed down a bit—just as Jonah has. I’ve abandoned my visions of parquet floors and Miele appliances, and settled for something more basic. With the result that I’m back to square one with Kerry, reduced to comments about the weather, or the state of the traffic. It’s terrible. I suppose I could solve the problem to some degree by complimenting her generously on her clothes, dinnerware, paintings, view, jewellery or entertainment system, but I just can’t do it. I’m too mean-spirited. Not like Matt, who has a better nature than I do. He’s always quite happy to admire Paul’s Plasma-screen TV and concealed speakers with unselfconscious delight, because he doesn’t have an envious or judgemental bone in his body. I bet he never once even thought to compare our Persian rug with the Irwins’ Persian rug, at lunch today, whereas I was constantly making comparisons. For example: This house might be bigger than ours, but it’s too stitched up—you can’t relax in it. This dining suite may be expensive but it’s going to go out of style pretty quickly—ours will never go out of style, because it’s antique. Our bath is nicer than this one. My eyes are bigger than Kerry’s. My husband is better looking than any other man in this room.
There were two other men and three other women, besides Kerry and Paul. They were all pretty nice. One of the blokes seemed to think a bit too much of himself (he was some kind of chief executive officer) and the other one hardly uttered a word, but the women were friendly. The CEO’s wife had this whole routine worked out, based on the fact that she and her husband had recently—owing to his phenomenal success— found themselves mixing with people whose tastes and incomes were beyond anything she’d ever had to deal with before. So she’d rattle her bracelets and giggle about how she’d been faking an intimate familiarity with restaurants she’d never heard of; how she’d been complaining about the Sydney Morning Herald to one of the Fairfaxes, without realising it; how she had made a big, big mistake when she’d started denigrating miniature dogs at a party in Rose Bay. I mean, she was only saying all this because she wanted to make a point about her social horizons, but it was very nicely done. And she knew enough to giggle at everyone else’s stories, too.
The other women were genuinely pleasant. Bettina was thin and dark, with huge, luminous, pale green eyes and one of those lovely soft voices that you normally associate with yoga teachers or massage therapists. Even if she had said something rude, it wouldn’t have come off that way—and of course she didn’t. Every word she uttered was reassuring, sympathetic or grateful. Looking at her, you just knew that she used a lot of essential oils and had a cat called Thalia.
Candice was a lot sharper, but in an amusing way. She made wry observations about being attacked by a modern sculpture, and doing battle with a child-proof latch. She talked about the thief she’d surprised climbing through her bathroom window; he’d said ‘Sorry, love’ before making his getaway, as if he was turning down an invitation to a cup of tea. (‘I almost said “Sorry” myself, when I burst in on him,’ she admitted. ‘Force of habit, I suppose.’) She had big brown eyes behind owlish glasses, and was dressed so drably that I couldn’t help feeling relieved. In fact I was astonished that Kerry had even let her through the door, until I discovered that, despite the scuffed sandals and Indian cotton skirt, Candice was the daughter of a literary agent and a wealthy politician (I forget their names) and was running her own successful furniture restoration business when she wasn’t looking after her teenaged boys.
That made me a bit glum, I can tell you. Three teenaged boys and a successful business! Fortunately, she wasn’t a whole-food mother—‘I usually go for the easiest option,’ she confessed to me—but even so it was intimidating. Particularly when the youngest son turned out to be a total delight. Declan, his name was. Fresh-faced, alert, a talented guitarist, thirteen years old and polite, my God, I couldn’t believe it. Smiled. Answered questions. Responded with genuine interest (instead of total incomprehension) when Matt confessed to having been a drummer in a band. Poor Declan, he was really making an effort; it wasn’t his fault that he was a bit hazy on dates, and made the mistake of asking if Matt had worked with—uh— AC/DC? Or the guy who wrote ‘Eagle Rock’?
Naturally, we all laughed at that, and Declan looked bewildered.
‘Bit before my time, those blokes,’ Matt said gently.
‘Oh.’
‘Bit outta my league, and all.’
‘They’re experts in the art of making you feel ancient,’ said Candice, once her son had finally managed to extricate himself from adult company. ‘They do it all the time.’
‘Oh, isn’t it awful, though?’ the CEO’s wife yelped. ‘Suddenly I’m middle-aged! I don’t know how it happened! I find myself saying the exact same things my mother used to say to me!’
‘Well, it’s inevitable,’ Paul said comfortably. ‘You can’t help it. You just have to resign yourself—one day, you’ll be playing golf every weekend. It’s happening already. I’ve got myself a set of clubs and everything. Soon I’ll be subscribing to the Readers Digest, and watching Gardening Australia.’
‘Hey,’ I protested with a laugh. ‘Don’t knock Gardening Australia. It’s a great show. I always watch it.’
‘Mulch,’ Matt added. ‘It’s always about mulch. What is mulch, anyway, some kind of fertiliser?’
‘Mulch, my friend, is the answer to all of your problems,’ Paul rejoined, reaching for the wine. ‘People never stop talking about mulch these days, have you noticed? Every single barbecue I’ve attended in the last six months, I’ve ended up discussing mulch.’
‘That’s a dig at me,’ Candice interposed. ‘Just because I showed him my mulcher, last time he visited. Paul, I’m proud of my mulcher.’
‘This woman puts mulch on her kids. I just know it. Their beds are full of pine bark, you mark my words.’
‘And what if they are? Has it done them any harm? I don’t think so.’
‘Christ, are we talking about mulch again?’ lamented the CEO, in mock despair, and Matt laughed.
‘It’s true,’ he said, ‘we’re middle-aged. My dad always talks about mulch—mulch and his grapevines. I must be turning into my dad.’
But he wasn’t, of course. For one thing, he wouldn’t know the difference between a g
rapevine and a tiger lily. For another, he didn’t look the least bit middle-aged—not like the rest of the men at that lunch. They were all going bald, and spreading out. They were all wearing polo shirts and mobile phones. Despite the odd glint of grey, and a bit of slack skin here and there, Matt seemed as vital as he had ever been. Perhaps it was something to do with his hair, which sprang from his head in thick, vigorous waves. Perhaps it was the fact that his jeans had a hole in them.
I sat contemplating him while Candice said something about tut-tutting over the skimpy kids’ fashions, these days. Then Matt said something about Rolling Stone. Then reference was made to the phenomenon of middle-aged men divorcing their wives for young, blonde trophies, at which point I decided that I’d rather not discuss that particular subject, in the circumstances, and went to find Jonah.
I wanted him to take a nap. He had been surprisingly good, since we arrived—thanks to Zoe. She’d dressed him up as a pirate, and he liked that. She’d pulled out her old Duplo, and he’d liked that too. He was at his most gorgeous, all sweet smiles and round, brown eyes and earnest, puckered brow, explaining at length, in his deep, serious voice, that dogs and beavers could be friends. Zoe thought he was lovely. You could see it in her face. She takes after her dad, because it’s possible to see what she’s thinking from her expression. Gemma, on the other hand, is prim and secretive, like her mum.
But that’s all right, because Emily gets along with just about everybody. Nasty comments simply bounce off her, leaving her sunny good humour intact. Whatever anyone else wants to do is fine with her; it makes me tremble a bit, when I see how like Matthew she is. She’s exactly the same sort of person—the sort of person who’d go pig-shooting in Queensland because her mates suggested it. She’s going to be a nightmare teenager. Not sullen or moody, but suggestible. It’ll be all tongue-studs and Ecstasy, I know it will. Unless I come down hard, the way my parents would have. But should I? After all, Matt was the same, and look how he turned out.
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