All Together Now

by Monica McInerney

  Lola checked her watch. One minute to eight. Then thirty seconds. There was a good crowd around, boys and girls. Kane had obviously arranged to have an audience.

  Eight o’clock came. In the middle, Kane’s smile was getting wider and wider.

  By five past it wasn’t quite so wide. There was some shifting of feet. Some awkward glancing at watches.

  A voice came from the huddle behind him. ‘Looks like you’ve been stood up, mate!’

  Kane spun around. ‘Who said that?’ No one owned up.

  By ten past, most of the group had started filtering into the hall, laughing loudly, wanting to share the news with the rest of the group already inside. There were still about fifteen people waiting outside when the noise of a car caught their attention.

  A bright-orange Torana drew up right to the foot of the steps. A 1970s song blared from the car as the doors were flung open. ‘Born to be Alive’ by Patrick Hernandez.

  In one swift choreographed movement, four young women stepped out, slamming the doors firmly behind them. Their hair was teased. Their fishnet and leopard-skin stockings were torn. Their clothes were a ragbag of chiffon, animal print and nylon. It was as if a feral version of the Spice Girls had arrived. With just the smallest of stumbles, they lined up in a row, put their arms around each other and walked, heads held high, straight past Kane, past his friends and into the hall. Emily’s head was held highest of all.

  ‘Hey!’ It was Kane. They ignored him.

  ‘Stood up not just once, but four times, mate,’ Lola said softly.

  The orange car pulled away from the steps, turned in a slow semi-circle and then pulled in beside the car Lola and her two friends were sitting in.

  Luke wound down his window. ‘Hi, Mum. Hi, Lola. Hi, Mrs Hendon.’

  ‘Luke, what excellent driving. Well done,’ Lola called across. ‘You’ll be a rally-car driver yet.’

  He grinned. ‘So how do you think that went?’

  ‘Like clockwork. The girls looked marvellous.’

  ‘That’s one word for it,’ Luke said.

  Lola had had a wonderful evening at the motel with the four girls, getting them ready. As it turned out she hadn’t needed to bring anything from the charity shop. There’d been plenty enough in her own wardrobe. They had tried on different outfits with great enthusiasm. Patricia had been called in to help with the make-up and had done an appropriately terrible job. Margaret had helped with their hair.

  If Lola had had any lingering doubts about telling Emily and the other three the truth about Kane’s invitation, they’d been short-lived. As soon as the four girls had arrived at the motel, she knew she’d made the right decision. She’d seen instantly that Kane had picked on four of the most vulnerable girls in the school. Karlie with her stutter, but with such beautiful eyes. Lisa, overweight certainly, but what a bright mind. The fourth girl – the one who had been the hardest for Emily to track down – was Shana. Poor little Shana, with her buck teeth and her sweet nature. And of course there had been Emily, shy, blushing Emily.

  Lola had called over to speak to Emily three days earlier, just as she was finishing her waitressing shift. She’d wrestled with her decision for days before she’d finally made up her mind. Yes, there were times when young people had to learn from their own mistakes. But she’d decided this wasn’t one of those times.

  She went straight to the point. ‘Emily, you might think I’m interfering, but I’ve become privy to some information that might concern you. I don’t want you to be hurt, but you might want to check it out, and if it’s true, perhaps you would tell me. There might be a way we can fix things.’ Then Lola had told her all she’d heard in the charity shop.

  Emily did check. It was true. Kane had invited the four of them, in exactly the same way. Sidling up to them at lunchtime. Stressing the importance of punctuality. Swearing them to secrecy. And each had accepted.

  By the time Emily reported back, Lola had hatched her plan. Luke was drafted in to drive the girls. It was a way of introducing them to him, and him to them, and, as he said himself, he had the perfect car for a bad taste party.

  ‘Such a shame you couldn’t have gone in there with them,’ she said to him now.

  ‘Oh, they’re not staying. They’ll be out in a minute. That’s why I’m waiting here.’

  ‘They’re not staying?’ She hadn’t known about this. That was the whole idea, for them to have fun in the party together, in front of everyone and especially in front of Kane and his cronies.

  ‘No. They decided on the way here they only wanted to stay for one song. We all thought it would be much more fun to go out for pizza together instead. That’s all right, Mum, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course,’ Patricia said.

  Lola decided she was even more pleased with the new plan. She pretended not to be. ‘You’re going to be seen in public with the four of them? In those clothes? What will people think?’

  ‘That you had something to do with it, probably,’ Margaret said drily.

  ‘We were actually wondering if the three of you would like to join us,’ Luke said.

  Lola sounded shocked. ‘What? With those four dressed like that? And you, in that car?’ She turned to the other two women. ‘What do you two think?’

  Margaret, sporting one of Lola’s chiffon ponchos and silver eyeshadow, nodded enthusiastically. Patricia, resplendent in a purple crimplene kaftan with dangling moon-shaped earrings, did too. After a glass of champagne at the motel, they’d been more than happy to dress up as well.

  ‘What about you, Lola?’ Luke asked.

  She paused as if giving it some thought, quickly adjusting the draped scarf on her tiger-print pantsuit and slipping her feet back into her gold rope sandals. She wouldn’t miss it for the world. It was just a shame she hadn’t had time to get dressed up tonight too. Never mind. With luck no one would notice her ordinary outfit among the others. She gave the fake orchid pinned in her hair a final tweak and then beamed across at him.

  ‘I’d be honoured,’ she said.

  The Long Way Home

  Shelley made the age limit for the ten-city Rave tour of Europe by two months and three weeks. The woman in the travel agency pointed out that fact as she ran her eyes down the application form.

  ‘You’re thirty-four? Nearly thirty-five? Our clients do tend to be the younger end of the age group. You’re sure you’re happy to go ahead? We’ve other tours with more of a focus on culture, less on —’

  ‘No, I’m very happy with this one, thanks.’ Shelley had her hand on the brochure on the desk between them as if she was staking a claim.

  The woman lowered her voice. ‘They’re usually all single, not really into the history side of things. More out for a good time.’

  Shelley dug out a bright smile from somewhere. ‘I am too, I promise.’ A pause. Then her confidence faltered. ‘Don’t I look like I am?’

  The other woman seemed relieved when her phone rang.

  At home, on the new sofa in the centre of the living room which still felt nothing like home even after three months, Shelley leafed through her ticket folder and read the brochure. All the people in the Rave photos looked like models. Happy models. Happy and high-on-life models. She’d have to do her best to look like them. She had obviously not dressed casually enough that morning. She pulled her hair out of its current plait. Made a mental note to buy some T-shirts. Decided to wash her jeans a few unnecessary times to fade them. She automatically went to the towel cupboard to get the washing powder when she realised that was where she’d kept it in her old house. In their old house. In her new house, she kept it under the sink.

  She’d seen the Rave ad on TV the previous week, rung the toll-free number for the brochure and picked out the tour that lasted two weeks and took in ten European cities, finishing with a visit to Edinburgh and the highlands of Scotland. She read the description, fighting her way through the exclamation marks that surrounded the brief eligibility questionnaire. Yes, she was between eigh
teen and thirty-five. Yes, she was single. As of three months previously. Yes, she was out for a good time. ‘Are you looking for carefree days of fun, adventure and romance? We supply three out of three!’ the Rave copywriter promised.

  Travel was the key, Shelley had heard. Lose yourself and find yourself at the same time. She had a different motto in mind. Run, run, run as fast as you can. She couldn’t get away from her own life fast enough.

  Her taxi was delayed the morning the tour group left. She heard the driver make his excuses about heavy traffic and oil spills but she was too nervous to console him the way she normally would. She needed him to concentrate on his driving and get her there before she changed her mind. She was the last to arrive at the meeting point in the departure area. She knew immediately it was a mistake. She should have got there first. She could have welcomed the others, been someone they came to and wanted to talk to, instead of having to edge in and join the group, feeling left out on the sidelines. She hated being late. She was always the first to arrive anywhere. Harry said it was from being the daughter of a schoolteacher.

  They’d been late for the first appointment at the maternity hospital. She’d been fidgeting in her seat, willing the tram to go faster. He’d taken her hand and squeezed it.

  ‘Shell, relax. We’re about a minute late, that’s all.’

  ‘What if they give our appointment to someone else?’

  ‘Then I’ll tie myself to the receptionist’s computer until they give us another one. Go on a hunger strike. Hire a brass band and march up and down outside until they see you.’

  They’d had to wait another hour in the reception area for an appointment that lasted less than five minutes. It only took that long to confirm a pregnancy these days. Outside they’d sat on a stone step, in the sunshine, not speaking, just gripping each other’s hands and smiling at each other and at everyone who walked past.

  On the plane, a hitch with the seating arrangements meant she was in a different section from the rest of the tour group. She didn’t mind. She took every distraction on offer. She watched five movies, one after the other. She ate everything put in front of her. She drank red wine. She left in the earphones when the movies finished, hoping they could block the thoughts.

  ‘Shelley, at least send me emails. Let me know where you’ll be.’

  She could barely look at him. It hurt too much. ‘Harry, there’s no point. Please, can’t you accept —’

  ‘An email. Just now and again.’

  ‘It has to be over. We have to make a clean start. Away from each other.’ How else could they recover from something like this? It wasn’t a normal fight.

  *

  London was the first stop. The sky was grey, the weather cool, even though it was spring. They visited Big Ben, took a cruise down the Thames, stood outside Buckingham Palace discussing whether the Queen really was inside.

  The guide called her. ‘Shelley? Come on, the bus is waiting.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She’d been looking at a couple further down the footpath, peering through the gates into the palace like everyone else. The woman was her age. The man was about Harry’s age. About their height too. There was a pram between them. The father’s hand kept absently reaching into the pram and stroking his son or daughter’s head.

  Two nights in Paris. A joke party with everyone wearing berets and an impromptu quiz. The tour guide was good at impromptu activities. Name three famous French people. Shelley couldn’t. She could name three French restaurants in Melbourne. She could remember three meals she’d had with Harry in those restaurants, one for their first date, the second when they got engaged. The third for no reason at all.

  She could remember telling him in detail about something funny that had happened at work and him interrupting her. ‘I love you very much, you know.’

  ‘You’re dropping it into the conversation? Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that. Sorry, go on.’

  *

  In Amsterdam she followed the group down the canal paths, through the red-light district, into the clog factory and the cheese shops. The guide was talking but Shelley was remembering different conversations and attempted explanations.

  ‘I don’t understand. I get home from work and you tell me it’s over. You’re moving out. Without even talking about it with me?’

  She didn’t understand herself. ‘I need the space, Harry.’

  ‘It’s not about that, is it?’

  It was about the pain she felt every time she looked at him. She was trying to get as far as she could from that, not from him.

  Venice. City of love. City of food. The forty members of the tour group took up three long tables in the cheery restaurant. The waiters were friendly. There was no European snobbishness. ‘We’re worth too much to them,’ the guide had whispered to Shelley as they walked in.

  ‘And here for poor tired Shelley who has had a long week and needs to spend the weekend with her feet up being spoiled is a glass of shockingly expensive Italian wine and the speciality of the house, crostata di pastore, colloquially known as shepherd’s pie —’

  She needed to remember the bad times, not the good times.

  ‘You’re running away, that’s what you’re doing.’

  He was right. She was running away as fast as she could. But she wasn’t getting anywhere. Everything that made her feel bad had come with her.

  Rome. She wanted to be pinched. She stood hopefully in Piazza Navona. She watched confident, curvy Italian women walk past, watched the promenade – the passagiata, the guide told them. The women glanced over their shoulders, knowing they were being watched.

  She remembered him walking in and finding her standing side-on in front of the full-length mirror in their bedroom. ‘Is it showing yet, do you think?’

  Harry coming up behind her, with a pillow, putting it in front of her, the two of them laughing. ‘Now it is.’ He grabbed another pillow. ‘It might be twins.’ A third pillow. ‘Triplets, even.’

  The guide organised football and basketball matches in Madrid. Shelley didn’t play. She sat on a wooden bench back from the park.

  *

  ‘You need to relax. Promise me you won’t do anything while I’m away.’

  ‘Sit still for three days? Harry, I’ll go mad. And I want to get the room painted while I can still move.’

  ‘It’ll wait. I’ll do it when I get back.’

  ‘It’ll take me less than a day.’

  ‘But should you be doing all that sort of climbing around?’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  She’d been up and down the ladder, moving the chest of drawers, wriggling the cupboard side to side across the floor, wincing at the screeches it made on the floorboards, out to the car, carrying in heavy pots of paint, singing to the radio. She’d felt a twinge, so attuned to every movement in her body. Then another. Then something worse.

  It was all over by the time Harry got home, even though he’d left the conference centre the second he heard her voice on the phone.

  Hands held in front of a doctor the next day, but this time no smiles.

  She’d asked the question. ‘Doctor, did I make it happen?’

  He was an old doctor. He hadn’t looked at her, making notes as he spoke, pulling open a drawer beside him, taking out a fresh prescription pad. ‘I can’t say. It mightn’t have helped.’

  Outside, at home, the next day, the day after, the week after, they discussed it, over and over. ‘He said it mightn’t have helped. He didn’t say you killed your own child.’

  ‘But I did. It’s what you think, isn’t it? You think I killed him.’

  ‘Shell, I don’t.’

  ‘That’s what you think every time you look at me.’ It was what she felt every time she looked at herself in the mirror.

  ‘Shell, I —’

  She couldn’t listen to the rest. She could see it in his eyes. He didn’t want it to be that way, but she knew that’s what he thought.

  In Munich she came
across a carpet shop that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Morocco. The rest of the group were in a beer hall. She’d run out of things to say to them, and they had run out of things to say to her. She wanted to tell them that a year ago she would have been different, a year ago she would have loved this. Two years ago she and Harry might have been on a trip like this together. But she couldn’t find the words. She hadn’t been able to find the right words for anything for three months.

  There was a deep-red carpet in the front window. It had a purple and green border of flowers and leaves. The longer she looked at it, the more she found hidden in the pattern. It wasn’t as beautiful as their rug at home. It was the only thing she had taken with her. The carpet that had been in the hallway of their house. She’d found it in a second-hand shop a week before their wedding. It had come with a spiel from the shop owner, a second-generation Afghani. The patterns signified the future, happiness, growth. She and Harry had made love on it that night. At first on the rug itself but then it had tickled and started to burn and then she’d got the giggles. So he had put a quilt on it. She wasn’t fanciful enough to think that’s when their baby had been conceived. The timing was wrong. It had been a practice run.

  The rug didn’t look as good in her new flat. It looked out of place. It didn’t quite fit. The edges pushed up against the sides of the hallway.

  In Prague the bus driver tried to make a pass at her. He’d had too much wine at dinner.

  ‘Isn’t this against the company rules?’ she said.

  ‘To hell with the rules. There’s something special about you.’

  She’d heard him say the same thing to one of the other girls the previous night. For a moment she gave in. This was what she needed. A new experience, the feel of a different body, to cancel out and cover over memories of Harry’s body. The bus driver was a good kisser. That made it easy at the start and easy for a little while. It would have been simple to sink into it, to let feeling take over from thinking even for just an hour. To cover the traces. To try and forget about everything. But when his hands strayed beneath her shirt, against her skin, it was like she was burnt. She pushed him away.