All Together Now

by Monica McInerney

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m married.’

  ‘Come on. No one comes on these tours if they’re married.’

  ‘I’m separated, I mean.’

  ‘Then you’re not married, are you?’

  She still felt married.

  Back in London she heard music in shops, from car radios, that reminded her of him. She saw places she’d heard sung about. She imagined Harry seeing them with her. She bought a CD for him. She would send it to him. No, he had the key to her flat, he was keeping an eye on it. He’d insisted. She’d give it to him when they met after she’d got back. A thank you. A farewell present.

  ‘Let me be sad with you. It was my baby too.’

  ‘But you didn’t hurt it like I did.’

  ‘You didn’t hurt it. It wasn’t the right time for it. We’ll try again.’

  ‘We can’t. We can’t go backwards.’

  ‘Then we’ll go forwards. Don’t give up on me.’

  In Edinburgh there was a free afternoon of shopping time. On the second floor of a large shopping centre she found herself at the entrance to a Mothercare store. She had avoided any babywear shops since it happened. She would leave a shopping centre if she saw on the directory that there was one inside. This one surprised her.

  In a basket in front was a collection of pale yellow, pale blue, pale pink and creamy white knitwear. Little booties. Little hats. It came up from deep inside her, the hurt and the anguish and the sorrow and the guilt. There, in a strange city, she cried for the first time. The same woman who was embarrassed if she discovered she’d walked around town with a ladder in her stocking, now standing in public, in the middle of a shopping centre, crying hard. Sobbing. The younger girl inside the store looked shocked. An older woman didn’t.

  ‘Come in here with me, pet.’

  There was a small room at the back of the store. The woman didn’t need to ask. She seemed to know. She handed Shelley a cup of hot tea.

  ‘When did it happen, lovie?’

  ‘Three months ago.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘He wasn’t born yet. I was five months pregnant.’

  The woman nodded.

  ‘We thought we were over the danger time. We thought we had nothing to worry about.’

  ‘He was your first child?’

  Shelley nodded.

  ‘Is your husband all right?’

  A pause. ‘We separated.’

  ‘Not for good.’

  ‘It was my fault.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault. It was nobody’s fault, not yours, not his. Nobody’s. I know.’

  Shelley looked at her.

  ‘Five times,’ the woman said.

  ‘Five miscarriages?’ At the woman’s nod. ‘Did you ever …’

  ‘One daughter, just when I’d given up hope. And she’s had five children. I’m supergran. Keep talking to him, pet. Keep loving him. He needs you as much as you need him. The two of you made this baby together, so the two of you have to grieve together. Where is he?’

  ‘At home.’

  ‘Here in Edinburgh?’

  ‘Australia.’

  ‘Go home to him.’

  ‘I’m on a tour.’

  ‘Go home to him.’

  ‘Promise me you’ll email. I need to know you’re all right. Let me collect you at least.’

  She sent it from a crammed Internet café. She didn’t know if he was checking his emails regularly. She wasn’t due home for another five days. He’d be expecting her to go on to other parts of Scotland. He had the itinerary. He’d said he needed to have it, to know where she was. She could remember everything he had said to her and she could remember everything she had said to him.

  Her plane arrived at Melbourne Airport before dawn. The queue was long through passport control, through baggage reclaim, through the double doors out into the airport. Dozens of people were waiting. There was no sign of him. He wasn’t in the line of people pressed against the barrier. He wasn’t there with a cardboard sign with her name written on it. He wasn’t in the group of people near the door having cigarettes, or outside, double-parked in their old Holden station wagon, ready to whisk her away.

  He was under the meeting-point sign. He was standing on a rug. Her rug. Their rug.

  She was crying as she moved towards him. His arms were open. She moved into them and pressed her face against his chest.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Harry.’

  ‘Welcome home, Shelley.’ He didn’t say anything else. Not yet. He just held her tighter.

  The Role Model

  When I look back at those strange, sad months of last year, it’s as if we had joined a cult. Four sensible women in our late thirties, friends since school, but somehow, without noticing, we lost our reason and perspective, and so much else as well.

  It began with the arrival in our town of the new doctor and his wife. He was comfortingly like the old doctor: in his early fifties, short dark hair, kind face. The sort of man you wouldn’t look twice at in the street, which was a relief when you had to undress in front of him in the surgery. His wife, however, was something else. Tall, fine-featured, slender as a model, beautifully groomed, and at least twenty years younger than him, which made her just a few years younger than the four of us.

  Our town was a small one, with the usual amenities: one main street of shops, two pubs, three schools, a small hospital and a good medical centre that served the communities for one hundred kilometres around. There was little to distinguish it from dozens of other Australian country towns apart from its proximity to a large lake, which meant for several months of the year it became a holiday haven. We were used to our country lives being invaded by the city-ites, as we called them, but they never raised any envy among us. It was like watching migratory birds fly in, make a lot of noise and leave. When my three friends and I met for our usual Saturday-morning coffee at one of the lakeside cafés, we liked to guess at the amount of money these holidaying women had spent on their clothes or shoes or swimsuits, but they didn’t bother us. We knew they’d be gone soon and we could go back to our own lives.

  Caitlyn, the doctor’s wife, was different. She was here to stay. Caitlyn, with her designer wardrobe, sleek hair, close-fitting clothes and the something else that we couldn’t quite put our fingers on. Aloofness, my friend Jenny called it. Stuck-up-ness, Susan called it. Snobbery, Alice said. I was undecided at first. Maybe she was just shy, I suggested.

  ‘Shy? She’s got more confidence in her little finger than I have in my whole body. And as you can all see, I have a lot of body.’ Susan was an ample size 18, curvaceous and brown-skinned. ‘I’ve asked her over for coffee three times, and she’s cancelled each time, said she wasn’t feeling well. The last time she cancelled I saw her an hour later, picking up her husband in their car – a new model Mercedes, of course – and she looked fine. She saw me, I know she did, and she looked away. Guilt written all over her face.’

  ‘You’re just jealous of her.’ We’d been friends long enough to speak the truth like that. But Susan still took offence.

  ‘Jealous of what?’

  ‘Her figure. Her looks. Her relationship with her husband.’

  Susan poked out her tongue. She used to do that to me at school too. It meant my words had hit home, even if she wouldn’t admit it.

  The truth was we were all a bit jealous of Caitlyn’s relationship with her husband. We’d all seen them talking over dinner in the town’s one high-class restaurant, her leaning her head on his shoulder, him stroking the hair from her face, holding her hand, as though she was some precious object. When we went out with our husbands, we went as a group. They talked to each other about sport and business while the four of us talked about every other single thing. As for public displays of affection, forget it. The idea of going out with our husbands, in pairs, was out of the question too. People in the town would think the ‘Gang of Four’, as we were known, had had a falling-out.

  ‘They must be newlyweds,’ Jenn
y suggested.

  ‘They’re not,’ Susan said. ‘They’ve been married for ten years. Her husband told the receptionist at the medical centre who told her sister who told me. They had their anniversary just last week.’

  ‘Where did he find her? The local primary school?’

  ‘She’s older than she looks. Thirty-four, I was told.’ Susan was very good at finding out people’s personal details. She worked part-time in the council office and had access to a large database. She swore she never looked up information on any of us, but I wondered sometimes.

  Alice sniffed. ‘She’d better get a move on with the kids, then.’

  The fact Caitlyn didn’t have children created another barrier, in a way. The four of us had seven kids between us, ranging in age from ten to fifteen. We’d had to put a ban on talking about them at our coffee mornings, otherwise the time would have gone before we’d even started on our husbands.

  By unspoken agreement, we switched the subject from Caitlyn to a different, favourite subject.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about dieting again,’ Alice said.

  Jenny put down the last few centimetres of her croissant. ‘Me too.’

  ‘Me too.’ I didn’t have any of my croissant left to put down.

  Susan pulled a face. ‘That’s all I think about. Diets and food. Food and diets. Food always wins.’

  ‘It’s the thought that counts,’ I said. ‘Anyway, you’re beautiful just the way you are.’

  I know a lot of women say that to their friends and mean it, but in our case, it was a lie. The truth was that each of us was overweight, by at least ten kilos. We had been for years, since we started having children, not finding time to exercise, excusing ourselves our morning biscuits and afternoon snacks, eating the kids’ leftovers … The weight had just crept on, but because it had happened to all four of us, it kept us on an even keel, so to speak. Several years earlier, Jenny had got a bad stomach bug and lost nearly five kilos in two weeks. It upset the equilibrium. She’d been as anxious to put the weight back on as we were anxious for her to do it.

  ‘I got this flyer in the post last week.’ Alice held up a piece of yellow paper. She worked in the pharmacy and was a fount of knowledge on all matters medical and cultural. The pharmacy window was the display area of choice in our town, for everything from lost-dog notices to Cars 4 Sale to advertisements like this one.

  The writing was black and bold:

  Overweight? Over it?

  CHANGE IT.

  The flyer went on to explain this wasn’t the usual calorie-counting deprivation regime. The instructor would go to the core of her clients’ weight problems, using a new approach. Our town had been chosen for a pilot program. If anyone signed up for ten weeks, they’d get the last two weeks for free. That appealed to all of us. We’d been to enough weight-loss sessions over the years as it was, eventually tiring of handing over the price of a nice lunch to be told how much we weighed. We could do that at home for free.

  We were all on time the next week for the first meeting. It took place in the small room at the back of the medical centre. To our relief, there was only the four of us. Possibly because Alice hadn’t put the flyer back up in the pharmacy window.

  The instructor came in a few minutes after us. She was a petite, sharp-eyed, well-groomed woman in her sixties. She nodded a welcome.

  We settled into our chairs, waiting for the pep talk, the jokes, the charts, the discussion about portion size, the shock news that there were as many calories in one glass of wine as there were in fifteen cream buns.

  But there was no welcoming smile. No motivational ‘I used to be overweight and now I am thin’ photos. Instead, the woman briskly introduced herself as Margot – she didn’t give a surname – and then left the room, returning wheeling a full-length mirror. Still unsmiling, she asked each of us to go and look at ourselves for a minute, in turn, and then sit down again.

  We did, fighting back nervous giggles, not daring to look at each other, unsettled by the silence in the room.

  ‘Have you all had a good look at yourselves?’ she said after we’d sat down again. She still wasn’t smiling.

  We nodded.

  She was silent for a few minutes, staring at each of us in turn. All our smiles had gone by now too.

  When she spoke again, her voice was low, firm and cold. ‘Aren’t you ashamed? Embarrassed? Disgusted?’

  Susan gasped.

  Margot continued. ‘You should be. How could you have let yourselves go so badly?’ She looked directly at me. ‘Have you seen your back view? You’re twice the size you should be. As for you —’ she looked at Jenny, ‘where is your self-respect, coming out in public wearing clothes as baggy and shapeless as that?’ Another laser glare, this time at Susan. ‘You must have been pretty once – what happened?’ Alice wasn’t excluded from the insults either. ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’ Alice shook her head. Another long pause. ‘Well, you look it.’

  This time there were four gasps, one from each of us. Susan rallied first. ‘How dare you? We’ve come here to lose weight, not be insulted.’

  ‘You deserve to be insulted,’ Margot said in that same steely tone. ‘And I’ll tell you something else. You will lose weight with me. Because I’ll say it like it is, every week, until you’ve lost all this lard and turned back into attractive women. Because you’re not attractive at the moment, are you? You don’t look it and you don’t feel it, no matter how much you might pretend otherwise.’

  More gasps, but somehow, just then, there was a subtle change of mood in the room. She was right.

  On and on she went, in the same cold voice. She wouldn’t be soft-soaping us, excusing us, making allowances. It was obvious we’d been doing that to ourselves for too long already. The same words kept coming up in her speech – weren’t we ashamed, disgusted, appalled? Didn’t we hate our ugly bodies, wobbly thighs, bulging stomachs? A childhood saying came back to me: Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me. The saying was wrong. Words could hurt and Margot was choosing the most hurtful of them with perfect aim and precision.

  She asked questions but didn’t wait for our answers. She talked about our poor husbands, having to get in bed with these revolting bodies. Had we all been thin on our wedding days? Yes, we had, but she didn’t wait for that answer either. On she went about our husbands, how they had every right to leave us; we weren’t the women they’d married; we’d become lazy and uncaring; showing them as much disrespect as we showed our own bodies.

  Mid-diatribe, something outside the window caught her attention. Not something but someone, in the car park of the medical centre. It was Caitlyn, getting into her husband’s Mercedes.

  ‘Look at her,’ Margot said.

  We looked.

  ‘What has she got that you four haven’t? I’ll tell you. Self-respect. Self-love. That’s a woman who takes care of herself, who respects herself. You can see it in her figure, in her clothes, in her make-up. But you four?’

  Jenny started to cry. I was too shocked. I wanted to leave; I wanted to throw insults back at Margot, but there was something frightening and compelling about her approach.

  She was telling the truth.

  She glanced at Jenny, then calmly reached for her bag. ‘That’s all for today.’

  Our shock must have shown. Susan, always the bravest, spoke up. ‘How can that be all? We should sue you for false advertising. Where are the tips and the diet sheets?’

  Margot fixed her with a stare. I was uncomfortably reminded of a snake staring down its prey. ‘You don’t need diet sheets. You’re grown women. You already know why you’re fat.’

  That word. Fat. Not overweight, not curvy.

  ‘You eat too much. You don’t exercise. So change it. I’ll see you next week.’

  The door closed behind her, not with a bang or a slam, but with a firm sharp click. We were silent for a moment and then the room exploded into noise. Anger, astonishment, and even – eventually –
some laughter.

  ‘She’s a witch,’ Jenny said, shuddering. ‘She’s flown up from the underworld.’

  ‘More of a bitch than a witch,’ Susan said. ‘I’ve never heard anything like it in my life. She can’t get away with that, can she?’

  ‘We’re the ones who paid to meet her,’ I said. ‘She didn’t force us.’

  ‘Well, she’ll be talking to an empty room next week, I’ll tell you that.’ Susan’s expression changed as she looked at the rest of us, from outrage to surprise. ‘You’re not going to come back, are you?’

  Another brief silence.

  ‘It’s a different approach,’ I said. ‘Maybe there’s something in it.’

  ‘A different approach? Insulting and offensive and belittling …’

  ‘I wish she could belittle me,’ Jenny said gloomily, rubbing her belly.

  We laughed and a little more tension lifted. A knock at the door got us moving. Someone else needed the room. We all had to go and do shopping, pick up the kids, go back to work.

  ‘Let’s keep all of this to ourselves,’ Alice said in an oddly urgent voice as we walked out together. ‘We’ll give her a second chance, but no one needs to know how awful she is, do they?’

  That was the first mistake we made. We agreed to keep quiet.

  The second week was worse, if possible. More insults. No weighing – ‘You’ve all got scales at home, haven’t you? Use them. You don’t need me to tell you you’re carrying too much fat.’ For an hour she hit us with a barrage of insults and each one of them stayed with us.

  It wasn’t Caityln’s fault that she happened to be walking down the main street as the four of us came out of the second meeting. Or her fault that, yet again, she was beautifully dressed, her clothes skimming her model figure, her posture perfect, her whole image so feminine and graceful. We felt like four elephants coming across a deer in a forest clearing. But – and I know I wasn’t the only one to think it – seeing her again was like a sign. She was the finished product. We were the raw, unshapely materials. Margot was right. We were disgusting. We were fat. We felt like our bodies were revolting. But we didn’t have to be like that. We could change.