by Cate Kendall
In her mind, Mim sighed in frustration at her well-meaning husband as she glanced at the evil clock whisking her morning away.
‘James,’ she said, in what she hoped was a well-modulated, patient voice, ‘of course I would love to talk about yesterday afternoon’s “discussion” but I have to get three little people in the car and to school in six and a half minutes.’
‘Oh,’ said James in a quiet voice, ‘okay then, if you haven’t got the time …’ he drifted off, letting the accusation dangle unsaid.
‘James,’ she said, very impressed she wasn’t screaming as she noticed the minute hand click over, ‘honey, I’m very sorry too, a lot was said that was harsh and unfair, but really, right now isn’t a good time. Perhaps when you land in Hong Kong you could call me then and we can talk further?’
‘Sure, honey,’ James replied, slightly chastened. ‘Listen, is there anything special you want me to get you at Harvey Nicks?’ he asked, hoping to smooth Mim’s obviously frayed nerves, ‘or should I just get the secretary to pick you up whatever?’
‘Whatever,’ Mim replied. ‘Look, I have to go. Have a good flight. Bye, honey.’
The kids had taken advantage of her phone call and were watching television in the playroom. She flicked it off angrily. ‘You know there is to be no visual stimulation before school,’ she said. ‘Right, get your uniforms on properly now. Jack, get me the hot-glue gun from the art-and-craft cupboard. Chloe, put the guinea pig back in its cage, you are not sneaking it to kinder again. You know Mrs Casey has pet issues. Charley, get me the lunches from the fridge. Let’s get MOVING.’
‘Aw Mum, can’t we buy our lunch, this stuff sucks,’ Charley moaned.
‘No way,’ she answered, plugging in the hot-glue gun and assembling the autumn leaves on a piece of gold card, shuddering at the thought of the tuckshop menu and the effects the preservatives would have on her children’s post-lunch learning potential.
She darted into the front room to get her calligraphy pen to write the headings. As she entered the room, Mocha, their chocolate-brown labradoodle, vomited wheatgrass juice theatrically on the flokati rug.
‘Fudge!’ yelled Mim as she trod in the warm puddle. ‘Fudge, fudge, fudge.’ They’d instigated a no-swearing-in-front-of-the-children policy, but right now she was regretting it. She surveyed the damage to her Todd loafers, kicked them off and dropped them angrily in the bin. Now she’d have to rethink her whole outfit. ‘Shit!’
‘Mum, that’s five dollars in the swear box,’ Jack said gleefully. ‘We’ve got about fifty bucks already!’
It had been a stressful week.
‘Pay up,’ Jack grinned.
‘I don’t have any cash right now, Jack,’ she retorted angrily. Maybe they were taking their plan to teach the children fiscal responsibility a bit far. ‘Look, we’ll work it out later, now get the assignment and get in the bloody car, for God’s sake. I have to get changed.’
‘Muuuummmm.’
‘Forget it, you’re not getting another cent!’ she yelled. ‘Get your brother and sister, get your shoes on and GET IN THE CAR!’
Damn, she thought, only 8.20 a.m. and I’m shouting already.
She wasn’t the mother she wanted to be. Vexed and angry; rushing and tired. Always running late for something; always behind and never in control. What had gone wrong?
She’d had it all planned, she’d read all the books. She knew exactly what sort of parent she wanted to be. She and James had even attended pre-parenting classes and discussed at length their parenting policies before she’d become pregnant. They would never smack, avoid shouting and reason logically with their offspring. There would be no television or other forms of visual anaesthetic, no junk food and definitely no arguing, drinking or swearing in front of the children.
But all their best plans had been torn asunder once the children became a reality, and Mim felt she had been chasing her tail ever since.
In a new taupe, sleeveless, ribbed twin-set to coordinate with the Prada slides she’d been forced to change into since the canine vomit incident, she hopped into the driver’s seat of the black Mercedes 4WD and revved it out of the driveway. Then she stopped abruptly to jump out, run around to fling open the passenger door and strap Chloe into her child seat.
Off again, she sped to the pharmacy and then on to school and Chloe’s Reggio Emilia centre, while hastily coating her lashes in the rear-view mirror.
Her mobile rang and she grabbed to answer it, skilfully juggling it against the mascara wand and the steering wheel. ‘Mim Woolcott,’ she said breezily, gesturing threateningly at the children to be quiet in the back seat.
‘Latte, darl?’
‘Ellie, sweetie, I’d love to,’ Mim answered, plucking a stray glob from her eyelash. ‘Just have to deposit the demons from hell and I’ll be with you.’
LJ groaned as sunlight assaulted her sleep-swollen face.
‘Morning, cherub,’ her husband sang.
Bloody Philby, why was he always so bloody chirpy in the mornings?
‘How are we feeling this morning?’ he enquired, knowing full well that the equation of two bottles of champagne plus too few hours of sleep would equal an unpleasant result.
LJ inched slowly into an upright position, pushed her eye-mask into the brittle nest of red hair atop her head, and screwed up her eyes in disgust at the daylight streaming through the plantation shutters.
Philby placed a chai tea by her bedside and planted a kiss on her forehead before heading into the shower.
‘Bono’s had breakfast and is ready for school,’ he called over the sound of the water. ‘He was just getting up when I came in from my run.’
LJ had the body of a praying mantis – all stick and no figure. She stretched in an effort to get some blood flowing through her tiny frame, admiring the red-painted toenails that emerged from under the red and black oriental-design duvet. She’d copied the look from an Akira Isogawa piece and it fitted perfectly in her Asian-inspired bedroom.
Philby’s inconsequential prattle washed over her as she sipped her hot tea and felt its soothing effects. She leaned forward to examine the daily papers that Philby had dutifully left on the end of the bed, flicking through the pages keenly.
‘Oh FUCK!’ she spat, spilling tea on the duvet.
‘What’s wrong, sweetness?’ Philby was braced for the worst.
‘The social pages from last night’s Dan Dandrews exhibit!’
Philby tensed; from the tone of her voice he could tell it was more than just a bad review.
‘No shot of you, love?’ he ventured warily, wishing he’d checked the papers first and made an early break for work.
‘Well, of course I’m bloody in it. But it’s absolutely tiny and they don’t even have the journalistic integrity to use my name. It just says “the gallery owner’s niece”, like I was some two-bit accessory. But what’s worse …’
Philby could tell she was building up to a crescendo. LJ stalked into the bathroom, her flimsy red silk negligee barely skimming the flat expanse where her bottom should have been.
‘Look!’ she screeched, shrew-like, flattening the offending page onto the glass shower screen.
Philby sighed inwardly, turned from his therapeutic hydro-massage and, wiping the steam from the glass, he looked, as ordered.
His brain ticked over quickly. There was no time to waste. If he didn’t identify the problem and sympathise within the next three seconds the episode would escalate to a Code Red domestic alert and it would be days before the damage was rectified, and then only by serious sucking up and brown-nosing on his part. He was under pressure, sweating despite the shower. He scanned the full page of socialites parading in their finery … but, damn it, for all his experience with such imagined slights, with all his rigorous drilling from his wife, he just could not see the problem – and that was his undoing.
Sensing his hesitation, then spotting the brief look of confusion that slid across his damp features, LJ snapped.
This was now a full-blown situation and Philby swung into immediate damage control. A PR guru, he was well-versed in the fragile emotional state of creative types, and although he’d failed the first test of the day, he was damn sure he wasn’t going to stuff up another.
‘But cherub, Ellie is an attractive woman and it is wonderful PR for Nev’s gallery,’ he said, stepping from the shower and roughly towelling his blond-streaked hair. ‘He’s lucky that she even attended the event. Beautiful people – people like you, ma chérie – are what sells papers and, in turn, advertises his gallery.’
‘She’s not that good looking! She always gets better press than I do! She’s always in the social pages, and she often gets to go to better things than us!’ LJ stamped her foot on the white tiles and pursed her collagen lips, vaguely conjuring up an image of Mick Jagger in drag in Philby’s mind. He suppressed a smile, relieved now that the domestic alert seemed to be decreasing.
‘But darling, you invited her,’ he pointed out.
‘That’s not the point,’ LJ whined childishly. ‘Of course I invited her. It’s very important to invite her. I obviously couldn’t have not invited her, now could I?’
Philby was having difficulty following both the syntactical trickery of the sentence and the intricate social politics at play.
‘But how come she has to be more important than me! I’m Nev’s niece, and I look good too,’ she whined, drawing out the final word over several annoying seconds. She angrily tore up the paper and let the scraps fall carelessly about her on the carpet for someone else to pick up later. Philby made a quick retreat to his wardrobe to dress.
LJ flung open the double doors of her walk-in robe and selected her day’s outfit.
Black.
It was her ‘thing’ to wear black and accent it with the colour she was ‘feeling’ on the morning.
Today’s accent was to be black – all Ellie’s bloody fault.
LJ decided on a black skin-tight singlet mini dress, black knee-high boots and a black wrap. She piled what to her mind were her luxuriant curls (but actually looked more like frayed strands of old rope) into a loose bun, then flew downstairs, the wrap flapping like a crow’s wings behind her.
‘Bono, get in the car, we’re late.’
‘Sure, Mum.’ Bono jumped off the couch, grabbed his bag and nipped down the corridor to the garage. He sensed his mother’s mood and knew there was no point in arguing or dilly-dallying, it just made her shittier.
LJ grabbed a banana from the fruit bowl to keep her hypoglycemia at bay, wrote a terse note to the cleaner to work harder on getting the white-tiled family-room floor to sparkle, and followed her child to the car.
‘Five more minutes; just five more minutes; just four and a half; not long to go, keep going, girl, you can do it.’
Tiffany’s chunky, Lycra-clad legs pumped as she chanted to the end of her daily sixty-minute workout. She talked herself down to sixty seconds, then twenty, then ten, then stepped off the treadmill, holding the supports until she steadied herself.
Many women glow after exercise; but not Tiffany. She sweated; her face turned bright red; she puffed alarmingly and had been known to groan mid knee-bend. All of which was why she’d insisted on a home gym, so she could wage a battle against her thighs in private.
If Tiffany could change a single thing about herself it would be her thighs, she had decided many years ago. Looking in the mirror every morning she scowled at the saddlebags she carried on her legs, like a pack mule loaded for a long journey.
It wasn’t that she didn’t work hard. She’d just drawn a short straw in the genetic lottery of life. During her twenties she’d enjoyed the figure that usually accompanied petite women, but since child-bearing her hips and bottom had ballooned until her Peter Pan shape had gone pear-shaped.
Still panting for breath, she walked down the corridor into her huge kitchen. The pristine grey granite benchtops gleamed, the bright red-tiled splashback a striking contrast. She peeped through the glass door of her most recent appliance acquisition, the full-sized wine fridge, to ensure the supplies were up – champers for cocktail hour this afternoon, she decided.
Jana, the smiling French au pair, had surfaced unusually early today, and was busying herself with cereal and bowls, combining Kellogg’s with Wedgwood and Weet-Bix with Mikasa. The children not only had different tastes in breakfast, but also in china patterns.
Jana crammed some oranges down the throat of the juicer as it whirred into life, and sliced some melon.
‘Kids, breakfast,’ Tiffany called up the stairs. While she waited for the morning parade to begin, she swapped her trainers for high-heeled Miu Miu thongs. At a diminutive five foot tall, Tiffany felt awkward in flats, even while padding around the house. In fact, years of high-heel usage had shortened her hamstrings to the point where it was almost impossible for her to walk barefoot.
‘Morning, gorgeous,’ she greeted Sophie as she swung her daughter from the third-bottom step, ‘who’s nearly six then?’
‘ME!!!’ said Sophie in glee as she ran off to the breakfast table.
‘Hiya, handsome,’ she said to the ruffle-headed Edward. ‘Good sleep?’
‘Yeah,’ came the tired reply, and he walked down the hallway ahead of his mother towards the breakfast table.
What is it with eight-year-olds? Tiffany thought in wonder as she followed her pyjama-clad son. I’m sure they’re made of plasticine, he’s grown five centimetres this week, I swear.
As the children crunched noisily, Tiffany nibbled at a piece of melon.
‘Hi Dad,’ the children sang out in unison as Cliff sauntered in, shirtless, fresh from the shower.
‘Hi guys,’ he returned from the side of his mouth, on a desperate mission for coffee. Tiffany had tried tempting him with the espresso machine but he was old-school and preferred the drip variety. She shuddered at the thought.
‘Good morning, sweetheart, I didn’t hear you come in last night,’ Tiffany said.
Cliff’s naked, hairy guts spilled messily over his pants, his belly-button a tangled black eye of wiry fuzz. Tiffany worked hard to keep her eyes on his face.
Cliff grunted as he deposited his weight into a kitchen chair in their sunny breakfast nook. ‘Yeah, it was a late one, I tried to be quiet.’ Before she could question him further he distracted her: ‘So, how was your night?’
‘Oh, it was fine. The artwork’s meant to be good, at least that’s what the reviews say … most of Langholme Grammar turned up, so there were plenty of people to talk to. It’s a shame you couldn’t make it, you would have enjoyed it … Bryce Ashcombe was there.’
‘Great bloke, Bryce, really good man.’ Again to avoid further interrogation, Cliff placed his shaggy paws on the table and pulled himself up. ‘Well, best get dressed, I’ve an operation first thing.’
Forever attempting to show an interest in her husband and his dreary work, Tiffany asked, ‘What type of procedure?’
Cliff, never missing an opportunity to talk about his chain of orthodontic practices, turned on his way out of the room and explained, ‘Strange really, her teeth are perfect – the woman wants them all scraped back and a complete set of porcelain veneers put on! Very dramatic and an expensive operation for a very minimal end result – could have advised her against it but it’s what she wants – says it’s because of that Hollywood starlet, whatsherface, who had it done.’ He turned to leave and threw over his shoulder, ‘Oh well, ten grand for a morning’s work is nothing to be sneezed at.’
Finally dismissed, Tiffany turned to her children and, after instructing Jana to establish the status and location of homework, readers, library bags, sports uniforms and show-and-tell, she sent them off to get their school uniforms on.
She finished her melon, flicking through the latest Vogue, interested to see that snakeskin w
as in (her favourite), then went upstairs to face her daily struggle with her wardrobe and mirror.
Ellie floated into the Italian marble kitchen in a floor-length white silk feather-trimmed robe and blurted a raspberry on the necks of the kids sitting at the kitchen bench tucking into their porridge and Vegemite toast.
‘Hi Mum,’ giggled Paris.
‘Muuuuum,’ said Rupert, flicking her away like an annoying mosquito.
Ellie responded by giving him another raspberry and this time he scrunched his neck and laughed.
‘Ursula, darling, how are you?’ Ellie flopped onto the overstuffed white couch and plumped the down cushions behind her head, kicking off her feathered slippers.
‘Very well, Mrs Ashcombe, and you?’ the au pair asked, handing Ellie her regular morning latte.
‘Tired. I’m afraid I had a late one last night.’
‘Oh, I know, look, I’ve put the paper out for you on the coffee table.’
Ellie glanced over at the social pages. ‘Nice pic of LJ. Look, doesn’t Liz look sweet next to the artist; she was so interested in his work with underprivileged children. I don’t think she once talked to him about his exhibition.’
She sank back into the sofa and studied her children. ‘You could probably use a hair-wash tonight, Paris darling.’
Paris pulled an unimpressed face.
‘Yes, Mrs Ashcombe, I was thinking the same thing. We’ll be sure to do that, won’t we, Paris sweetie?’ Ursula said.
‘Oh you’re divine, Ursula, thanks lovey,’ Ellie drawled, draining her latte and leaving the cup on the table, the paper scattered and her slippers on the floor as she padded back to the master bedroom. She pushed open the heavy floral curtains that draped luxuriously onto the thick carpet. The sun bathed her naked husband, half-asleep and half-covered in the king-size bed, and filled the white and raspberry room.
Ellie had been just twenty-three when she fell heavily for the international media mogul, and to this day she couldn’t quite decide what had finally won over her heart. She knew Bryce was the most exciting and yet gentle man she had ever met, and when they were together their twelve-year age gap just melted away.