‘So, what action do you intend to take, Miss Helens? Max is in your care for seven hours a day. I’d like to be able to go to work and be confident that he is safe here.’ Aaach! Wrong. Never mention work. A mother’s work should be of no consequence, definitely not a reason for anything. Did the Virgin Mary work? Absolutely not.
‘Yes. Your work, Mrs Sands. I do understand.’ I doubt it. ‘Although,’ Miss Helens pressed on quickly, sensing that her adversary had stumbled, ‘I would suggest that Max stay away from school for a week. To get over things. And then we do sometimes call upon an excellent child psychologist, very very skilled with the little ones—’
‘Just a minute. Just a minute.’ I will not shout. I will not yell. I will get hold of this. I will. I will get this under control. Icy dignity, grave concern, regretful intervention. I will be calm and rational and as polite as I can be. I will. ‘I would have thought …’ Her voice was scratchy. Air, I need air. She gulped the close atmosphere, getting a whiff of chemically simulated lily-of-the-valley. Diorissimo. How could we have chosen a school where the headmistress dabs on a scent fit only for Sandra Dee? My God, the woman even had a handkerchief. Miss Helens was patting at the corners of her mouth with a dainty wad of white cotton embroidered with edelweiss.
‘I would have thought,’ Stephanie managed the second time, ‘that the proper thing to do would be to …’ No, no, never say punish. Punishment is not a concept recognised here, this is PC heaven, we are too wholesome to punish anybody. ‘Sanction the children who have been the aggressors, perhaps by suspending them. It would certainly help Max to get over things, to know he could come to school for a week and be in no danger of being beaten up.’
‘Max was not beaten up,’ snapped Miss Helens, demanding recognition for the exemplary patience with which she was handling this distressing conversation.
‘What would you call it then? Jon Carman stomped on him hard enough so you can see Nike written on his back in the bruises.’
‘Semantics …’ The queenly wave of the hand, dismissing a trivial annoyance. ‘You see all sorts of things in a school, you have no idea what children can do.’
‘And I can’t imagine why Max would need to see a psychologist. I don’t feel he’s the one with the problem.’
‘Now really, Mrs Sands. I was only trying to help. I can’t have my families falling out like this. Dr Carman – both of them – are great supporters of the school and I can’t possibly think of sending their boys home or suggesting to them that they need any kind of … treatment.’
‘You didn’t have any problem with suggesting that to me.’ Icy dignity. Obviously the clear forty-eight woman-hours put into running the cake stall counted for nothing against the thirty couple-seconds it took to write a cheque.
‘I don’t think we can make any more progress with this, Mrs Sands, Not this morning.’ Miss Helens heaved herself out of the wing chair, dragging off half the slip-cover. ‘You’re upset, it’s perfectly natural, mothers especially are always upset when something happens to their children. And I’m sure the Carman boys are upset about what’s happened. I know their father is certainly concerned. If you will leave this to my experience, I will speak to all the children today and remind them of all the things we believe in: good manners, consideration for others, good behaviour in general. We can move Max to another class, the top class. I was about to suggest that in any case because he’s so advanced. I’m sure that will take care of the problem. Now I must get back to running the school.’
We are so busy in Westwick. It’s so demanding, keeping the wheel of the ideal life turning, creating the ideal community. So we can’t carry passengers or slow down for the weak or waste our precious time on needy people and their problems. They make their own problems, the needy. The kindest thing to do is just leave them alone to find that out for themselves.
As Stephanie was leaving, the children streamed out of the side door into the playground. She dawdled to watch out for Max, who came almost last with Sweetheart ahead of him. Ben Carman at once swaggered over and started pulling at the splint on Max’s arm, but the junior teacher ordered him indoors. With his eyes sulkily averted, Jon was moping around the edge of the playground, kicking at nothing, raising puffs of dust. Ben appeared between the gingham curtains, making faces.
This is not the picture of Westwick life that Stephanie had imagined.
‘Maybe you need a mirror by the door.’ With muscular sweeps of her entire arm, as if scooping out Miss Helen’s entrails, Gemma stirred her pot of fusilli. ‘To reflect trouble away, you know.’
‘Did that work for you?’ Rod Fuller extended his legs and rested his crossed feet on the edge of Gemma’s kitchen table. His feet were a little small for his build and very high at the arches. They always put Stephanie in mind of the statues of the Indian god Shiva, the dancing deity, balanced on one delicately cantilevered foot and high-kicking with the other.
‘Well … at least once I had the mirror up we didn’t get any more trouble.’
‘On top of the barrow-load we had already,’ Topaz explained, without taking her eyes off her screen. ‘The plants are still dying.’
‘Well, at least they’re not letting your father out of jail.’
‘Yet.’
‘If I put a mirror up in the boat, will my tendon get better?’
‘OK. I hear you, unbelievers. Rod, are you making salad there or what?’
‘I’m making salad.’ He winced histrionically in getting up, limped across to the worktop and grabbed the lettuce. ‘I’ve got it cracked, anyway. I’ve trained the classes to work to my voice, so I can just stand up front and yell at them instead of jumping around the full sixty minutes. I miss you, you know.’ This was to Stephanie, who had not taken the Bunbuster for months. ‘You’re one of those who always follows good. Now I’ve only got Catwoman left and a couple of new spods who’re willing but they’re s-o-o slow.’ He threw garlic into the salad bowl and leaned around Gemma’s backside to reach for the oil.
‘Time,’ sighed Stephanie, wondering where in the world she had found all those golden narcissistic hours.
‘You’ll come back to me,’ he promised, his hands ripping the lettuces faster than their eyes could follow. ‘They all come back to me in the end. And you never ogled, you know. That doctor, she does that.’
Gemma held out a spoonful of pasta for tasting. ‘Al dente?’
‘AI! We were kids together in Palermo. I hear he’s a made man now.’
‘Mamma mia, listen to him. Listen to my boy, e speaka mafiosa like-a goodfella.’ Gemma hauled the pan of pasta to the sink and tipped it into the drainer.
The humour of the oppressed. When all you can do is laugh, you laugh. If there’s nothing to laugh about, you laugh. Especially then, you laugh. The Irish, the Jews, the blacks, the single parents. Stephanie laughed. At least she was only one of the foregoing.
‘Kids,’ bellowed Gemma into rhe garden where Molly, Max and Sweetheart were supposed to be watering the vegetables but were actually watering each other, ‘time to eat.’
‘You’ve got a million tomatoes,’ Sweetheart announced, dragging in a brimming basket with Max’s help. ‘Look at this one, it’s as big as a melon.’
‘As big as a football,’ suggested Max.
‘As big as a pumpkin,’ countered Sweetheart.
‘As big as a big tomato,’ said Flora flatly, dealing out forks around the table.
‘Isn’t this just like The Witches of Eastwick?’ Rod took the tomato basket from his daughter and lifted it on to the dresser. ‘The three of us keeping company here with all this fruitfulness.’
‘You know what always gets me about that movie? Michelle Pfeiffer was supposed to have four children and you never even saw them, you never even heard their names.’ Stephanie started putting out glasses but held a particularly smeary specimen against the light and wondered if Gemma would be insulted if she washed them.
‘And the Cher character was meant to be fat. And nob
ody ever pointed out that the whole reason the witches were always getting together for spaghetti dinners was they were single mothers and nobody ever asked, them out and pasta was all they could afford.’ Gemma took hold of the tomato basket, carried it to the fridge, and poured the fruit of her soil into the salad drawer.
‘I wonder why things don’t grow so well at Gaia.’ There was relief in thinking about another woman’s problems. Stephanie surveyed the luxuriant vegetation in Gemma’s garden, where red rose petals littered the shaggy grass and late nasturtiums snaked over what might once have been intended as a border. It was nothing like the diseased wasteland to which her business was sinking. In the steamy warmth of autumn every fungus known to mycology was breeding in the beds at Gaia, giving the coup de grâce to plants which seemed to have lost their grip on growth from the day they arrived.
Hanging out with Gemma, there had been plenty of opportunity to witness the process. Trays of patio lovelies would arrive from the growers in full lush leaf and brilliant bud. Within a week the leaves would begin to yellow and the buds shrivel and die; within a month the entire consignment would be reduced to withered stems. They were watered, they were sheltered, they were cossetted with foliar feeds and dosed with fungicide, and still they died, even the muscular modern hybrids, which normally grew so vigorously they looked like a vegetable world domination conspiracy. Topaz had started arguing that if her mother couldn’t sell the place she should retain the greenhouse for floristry and decor plants and turn the outdoor space into a commuter car park with shuttle buses into the city.
‘Please – what are a few sick plants compared to what Max has been through?’ Gemma retorted in a voice intended to be too low for the rest of the gathering to hear, energetically slopping the fusilli into a dish so that twenty of them escaped over the side straight away. ‘Or you, since the kidnap. Or Rodolfo here, recently bereaved and looking at the end of his career. OK, so his Achilles isn’t actually busted, but his legs are his fortune right now. You know what I mean.’ She turned back to the stove for a second pot and dolloped rich red sauce into the dish.
‘You’re so untidy,’ Topaz complained, wiping down the table with neat sweeps of a sponge. There was an oilcloth cover over the surface, white, printed with fluffy-topped red carrots which looked ridiculously suggestive.
‘You’re so anal,’ Molly retorted, dripping in through the garden doors.
‘Don’t use words you don’t understand,’ said Topaz. ‘And go and get out of that wet T-shirt and put on something dry before you come to dinner.’
‘When I have a minute I’ll come down to Gaia with my soil test kit,’ Stephanie promised, passing down the loaded plates while Gemma served out her dish. ‘It has to be a chemical imbalance. You’ve no problem in the greenhouse. It’s not like nothing grows, is it? You can keep mint, eucalyptus …’
‘Camellias.’ Gemma nodded. ‘Lady of the camellias, that’s me. The only class plant I can get along with. The rest are just jumped-up weeds.’
There was a concentrated outbreak of stabbing, sucking, scraping, slurping and swallowing at the children’s end of the table. The heaped plates were cleared of pasta, refilled with lettuce and cleared again before Gemma had finished grating the parmesan.
‘Why do four children eat fifty times faster than one?’ asked Rod, frowning at them. Molly burped.
‘Daddy, can we go outside again?’ replied his daughter, rolling her eyes around in exactly the cute way her mother used to do.
When the adults were alone they put Stephanie’s problems at the top of the agenda.
‘So the Carman woman denies everything?’ Gemma put the steaming coffee pot before them.
‘Totally. Boys will be boys, that’s her line.’
‘Unbelievable.’ Rod poured himself a fresh glass of wine, scrupulously topping up the other two glasses first. With a meal, it was OK. At Gemma’s, it was OK, because she had this exquisitely tactful way of managing the amount of booze available so he never drank too much and never even knew what was happening, although it happened all the same. He had allowed himself one bender after his wife’s death, sent Sweetheart to sleep over with Molly and destroyed a couple of bottles of vodka; since then he’d been on wine-with-dinner only, but it was hard.
‘How could she do this to Max?’
‘Your child’s just another weakness to them,’ Gemma assured her. ‘It’s like they know there’s a limit to what you’ll do because of Max, so they push it even further. Rachel knows you won’t scratch her eyes out and pull her hair because you’re a good mommy, you don’t do that naughty stuff.’
‘Money, that’s what this is about,’ Stephanie declared, wondering if she was going to become as bitter as Gemma before long. ‘The cheque was on her desk. Josh Carman just bought her off. Stewart would never have let them get away with it. He’s got this way of just standing there being decent and people don’t pull strokes on him. God, I wish he was here.’
‘Believe me, Stephanie, if Stewart was here you wouldn’t be having this hassle. They’re picking on you because you’re a woman without a man, and Max is a child without a father. So they think they can get away with it, all of them, even Miss Helens.’ Gemma sat heavily back in her chair; it creaked with her weight. ‘It’s primitive. You’ve got no male to fight for you, so you’re automatically a victim. That’s what this is about.’
‘But that’s just animal,’ Rod protested, thinking that Ms Arty T-shirt, with her soft, soft eyes and her long, long legs, did indeed at times have the air of a nubile doe antelope at the water-hole.
‘Yes it is,’ Gemma confirmed, picking up the coffee and beginning to pour. ‘Nice, clean, leafy Westwick, exclusive Maple Grove – bullshit. It’s a jungle out there. I bet you’ve had half your friend’s husbands slavering round your door already. Go on – deny it if you can.’
Stephanie coloured and shook her head. ‘How did you know?’
‘Because the same thing happens to every single woman in a suburb. The husbands wheel around like vultures, the wives treat you like a pariah dog, like it was your fault their sex lives are so lousy the guys are permanently in rut. Excuse me, every single person. This is an equal opportunity phenomenon. Rod gets hit on just the same.’ And she got up and went to open another bottle of wine, reckoning the occasion demanded it.
‘Go on, tell about Allie Parsons.’
‘There’s nothing to tell,’ he asserted, a shadow of disgust clouding his fine, broad forehead. ‘I’ve been training her, if you can call it that, almost five months now and she never lets up. If they made steel shorts I’d wear’em. She’s even offered to fix me a job on her show.’
‘Meanwhile, I’m getting harassment off the husband.’ The cork, popped indignantly and Gemma brought the bottle to the table. ‘He gives me this fantastic contract supplying decor plants for his office and then it’s a dozen oysters for lunch, the sticky paw on my leg and the big smooch in the taxi.’
‘He’s so pathetic, Ted.’ Stephanie didn’t realise she was smiling. In her grey mood, she had accepted a degree of responsibility for the pass in the garden; it was a relief to discover she had not been the only woman to arouse lust in Ted Parsons ‘ despised loins.
‘You too, huh?’ Gemma refilled her glass. ‘Yeah, he is pathetic. I can feel sorry for him if I let myself get that soft. Married to the witch-queen. Aren’t those kids tragic? She should be prosecuted for child abuse, she really should. And spouse abuse. And they’re always in the gossip magazines. “Allie Parsons of Family First with her lovely husband and her lovely family in their lovely home in Westwick …” Not that I read gossip magazines, of course.’
‘Of course you don’t.’
‘Did we say you did? You just see them at the hairdresser, that’s all.’
‘Topaz brings them home for me from Magno. This is what my daughter thinks of me.’
It was after midnight when Stephanie unsteadily extracted her sleeping son from the back of the Cherokee in New Farm Rise, st
ruggled upstairs carrying him and slid him into bed without waking him. The bruise on his back was now showing its full colours. Soon he was going to be too heavy for her to manage. Stewart was stronger, of course, but Stewart was gone.
She went downstairs and drank some water, feeling helpless. Stephanie never took her good life for granted. She was always conscious of what she had left behind: shame, anxiety, being poor, and guilty pretence, the companions of her own childhood. Stewart had been her passport to safety. Now the passport had been revoked, she was being stripped of her privileges and pushed down again to raise her own child in the appropriate condition of misery. They weren’t good enough to live good lives, not good enough for Westwick. She could leave, or she could stay. Staying meant she’d have to tough it out, work her ass off without getting paid for it, fight everybody when they picked on Max and the only joy would be a bitch session round at Gemma’s place. No choice, really.
She walked around the house, enjoying the quiet and the order, feeling the emptiness. There was a fat moon shining and no blinds were drawn. Moonlight silvered the lawn and cast deep shadows behind their furniture. It’s just a house, she told herself. Just a shell. Someone else can live here. I want someone to take care of us. I need someone to take care of us, I can’t do it by myself. I’ll call my mother in the morning.
15. A Garden to Every House
‘Chester?’
‘Ted.’ Like a toad gulping a fly, the BSD swallowed down the name, as if he were expecting the call, which paranoided Ted somewhat, because he had been counting surprise among his weapons. In the background the roar of the 31 could be heard above the crackle of the line; Chester was on his way to the airport.
‘Chester, I need a meeting. ASAP. About the Sun Wharf sale.’
‘I thought that was going through.’
‘I think it would pay us to take a different approach.’
‘How so?’
‘It’s complex. That’s why I need a meeting.’
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