Those Other Women

by Nicola Moriarty

  And she was right, because Chelsea had continued on. ‘It’s just that everybody else is juggling things too and we do all need to take our turn, you know? You couldn’t make it to the school disco, could you?’

  So Frankie had let herself get guilted into it. And the whole time the voice in her head was screaming, How many more pieces of myself can I give away?

  ‘Frankie,’ Chelsea exclaimed now as though they were old friends. ‘So, great to see you. Your two little munchkins have been absolute angels for me this afternoon. Come in. Can I get you a drink?’

  Frankie’s first thought as she followed her through the door into her immaculate home was that Chelsea and Lucy could be best friends. Actually, no – Lucy had genuine kindness in her heart, she would never have pushed her into volunteering for the carnival as Chelsea had. This woman was all fake. Fake platinum blonde, dead-straight hair (had to be hair extensions as well). Fake tan. Fake nails. But the designer clothes were genuine. Frankie would love to be able to afford an outfit like the one Chelsea was wearing.

  ‘Um, no, I’m fine, thanks though. I’ll just gather up their stuff and we’ll get out of your hair.’

  ‘Honestly, it’s no trouble, you’re not in my hair at all. I was going to sneak in a cheeky glass of wine before I start cooking dinner. Sure you don’t want to join me?’

  Frankie hated people who called a drink ‘cheeky’. What was so cheeky about it? Are you underage? Are you skolling vodka at 9 am? No. You’re an adult having a glass of wine in the late afternoon/early evening. Act like it.

  ‘No, really, I’m good,’ she said and started calling for the kids.

  ‘Now,’ said Chelsea, as Coby and Hayley appeared and started packing up their school bags, hats and jackets, ‘Hayley mentioned you hadn’t had time to work on the Australian animals project with her, so we just made a little bit of a start on it together. Show Mum,’ she instructed and Hayley proudly lifted the cardboard up to show Frankie.

  She swallowed. She’d had no idea Hayley was supposed to be doing some sort of animal project. ‘Oh wow,’ she said, forcing the enthusiasm into her voice. ‘That looks fantastic, Hayley.’ She paused and added to Chelsea, ‘You shouldn’t have. We would have got to it eventually.’

  ‘Yes, well, it is due tomorrow, and I just thought the two of you will end up staying up till midnight if you try to do the whole thing tonight, and you know how kids get if they don’t have enough sleep. Turn into little terrors for the teachers.’

  The criticism of her parenting was clear. And right now, Frankie didn’t care that she’d saved her a stack of time on the school project tonight. All she wanted to do was rip up that poster and start fresh with her daughter. But obviously she’d never do that to Hayley.

  She forced out a thank you and got the hell out of there as fast she could.

  It was times like these when Frankie especially felt the loss of her parents. They would have made fantastic grandparents, Frankie’s mum and dad. They would have loved to step in and help out with Coby and Hayley, and Frankie wouldn’t have taken advantage of them too much either. Well, at least she liked to think she wouldn’t have. But she and Lucy had lost their mum to a stroke when they were in their late teens. And then their dad passed away when they were both in their twenties. Some relatives had offered the romanticised notion that their father had died from a broken heart. If they thought this would somehow be a comfort, they were wrong. It was diabetes that had killed their dad – plain and simple. And Frankie found the idea that he’d succumbed to his grief and chosen to leave his two daughters offensive.

  These days, Frankie and Lucy didn’t talk about their parents often.

  * * *

  Dom wasn’t coming home until late that night. The kids were in bed, the animals project had been finished off and Frankie had filled her stomach by grazing off the kids’ plates, along with a few ‘cheeky’ glasses of wine. She wanted to unload on Dom, tell him all about Chelsea and how she’d shown her up and judged her, but as far as Frankie knew, he hadn’t even left the office yet.

  She wandered restlessly around the lounge room, sipping her wine, on the one hand enjoying the peace and quiet, and on the other hand half wishing the kids hadn’t fallen asleep so obediently on time tonight, just so she could have someone to chat to.

  They were outgrowing their home. The kids didn’t have their own space. There was only one small single living area for the four of them to share, and their bedrooms were barely big enough for a bed, a bookshelf and a wardrobe. The kids both needed their own desks so they could keep their homework more under control, instead of spreading it out across the dining room table or the kitchen bench, and constantly losing important sheets of work. And a second living space would be great for them to chill out away from their parents once in a while, instead of having to retreat into their bedrooms if they wanted to escape them. And okay, if she was entirely honest, Frankie would much prefer to watch an episode of Grand Designs or listen to music in the afternoon while getting dinner ready, instead of having to put up with episodes of Mister Maker or Ben 10 – depending on which child won the battle for the remote.

  Coby would also love a dog. And a yard big enough to play with the dog. Hayley didn’t like dogs, so if they got one, it would be good for her . . . But all they had out the back was a four by four metre courtyard with a patch of grass so small you could maintain it with a pair of nail scissors.

  They had a five-year plan: a schedule to get them out of that townhouse and into their dream home, with a big yard and maybe a swimming pool. They’d plotted out how much they needed to save to make it happen and estimated how much they’d be able to sell this townhouse for at the end of the five years, based on average growth for the area. It was definitely viable and they were currently coming up on two and a half years. Halfway there. Frankie often caught herself daydreaming about what their next house might look like, wondering if they’d be a different family in a different house. More organised. More relaxed. More loving to one another. Could a house do that to you? It was probably wishful thinking, but then again, personal space could surely do wonders for relationships, couldn’t it? Both between husband and wife and parents and children.

  When Dom finally arrived home at close to eleven, all hopes of Frankie unloading on him were quickly dashed. The first thing he said when he came through the door was, ‘Did you use the CBA card the other day when I asked you not to?’

  Frankie stared at him, irritated by his tone, and by the fact that he hadn’t even bothered to greet her before launching into an accusation. He’d always been blunt. He came from a massive Melbourne-based Italian family and he’d grown up learning to be loud and outspoken, and to get straight to the point in order to be heard.

  She had to stop and think what he was on about for a minute, but then she remembered the message he’d sent. It had come through right when she was finding out about the scandal between MOP and NOP and it had completely slipped her mind. When she’d shopped for groceries later that night she hadn’t even thought about it when she swiped her card at the check-out.

  ‘Oh yeah, I guess I did. Sorry. Was it really a problem?’

  He grunted and dumped his bag down before crossing the room straight to the kitchen. ‘If it wasn’t a problem I wouldn’t have asked in the first place,’ he said. He opened the fridge and stood scanning the contents. ‘What are we having for dinner?’

  ‘Catch and kill your own night,’ Frankie replied. ‘I ate with the kids. What’s the issue with the CBA card anyway?’

  ‘Problem with the bank,’ he said, running one hand through his dark curls and messing them up. ‘A transfer that failed. Forget about it, I’ll sort it out. So you’ve eaten?’

  ‘Yep. Well, sort of.’

  ‘Any ideas on what I can have?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’re a big boy. You’ll figure it out.’

  She took her glass of wine and headed upstairs to the bedroom where she climbed onto the bed and sat against th
e pillows. She didn’t feel like staying downstairs with Dom when he was being so irritable. Especially not when she’d been hoping to complain to him and get his sympathy. And if she was completely honest, she was also hoping for that sympathy to turn to sex. They seemed to be going through a bit of a dry spell lately.

  Sometimes she wondered if Dom still found her attractive. She thought she had a plain, average, normal face. She wasn’t stunningly beautiful, but she wasn’t ugly. Her chin didn’t jut. Her nose wasn’t pointed or hooked or turned up or long, but it wasn’t a cute little button either. Her eyes weren’t too close together or too wide apart. Her face wasn’t heart-shaped, her hairline didn’t dip into a widow’s peak. Her ears didn’t stick out. She guessed that’s what she meant by normal. No special, defining features.

  Although her mother was Sri Lankan and she’d been born with silky brown skin – so maybe that was her special, defining feature? Maybe that’s what made her beautiful to Dom?

  Did other men look at her? It was something she wondered about all the time. She wondered about it more often than she probably should. She wasn’t a very good feminist, was she? She pretended to be one. There were videos on social media of women walking through a city to demonstrate how hard it was for a female to put up with the attention: the catcalling, the comments, the propositions. Sometimes they called the men out on it, or they threw out clever, smart-arse responses.

  Frankie knew how she was supposed to react to these videos – she was meant to be appalled by the behaviour of the men. She should have been fist-bumping the air when the women shut them down.

  But secretly, she’d find herself wondering why men didn’t pay her that kind of attention anymore. She was jealous of those women.

  Was it because she was too old for that now? Was she even attractive anymore? Did anyone glance at her and check for a wedding ring? Did anyone look her up and down? Or was she simply invisible?

  She decided to try Lucy for some sympathy instead. She put her wineglass down on the bedside table and typed out a text on her phone.

  So this mum who looked after the kids this afternoon did Hayley’s school project with her.

  The reply came back immediately.

  Score!

  No! Not score. Annoying. She was showing me up.

  Umm, sorry? How was she showing you up?

  By proving she’s a better mum than me. That she’s more on top of things.

  Rubbish! Count it as a win, NO ONE likes doing homework with their kids.

  Frankie had to admit, she could see how it sounded from Lucy’s point of view – like Frankie was being a spoilt brat. But she couldn’t seem to convey the way Chelsea had spoken, the way she’d seemed so smug about it . . . that comment about keeping kids up too late and making life harder on the teachers.

  Frankie decided to drop it and move on to something else. For a second she considered asking her one of the questions they always avoided. How much do you still think about Mum and Dad? How much do you miss them? What do you think they would have thought of our kids?

  But instead she wrote:

  Dom is in a terrible mood tonight.

  Rough day at work?

  I don’t know. Didn’t ask.

  Communication, babe! Key to a good relationship!

  Okay, maybe she wasn’t in the mood for Lucy tonight either. Frankie shut down the conversation with a quick, Thanks, good idea, heading to bed now, and turned to Facebook instead. She hadn’t checked back to see what was going on with the whole MOP/NOP drama and she wondered if anything more had happened. She scrolled through the various posts about the back-and-forth between members of each group. This was exactly the distraction she needed.

  * * *

  Tuesday of the following week, Frankie had to work late again and once more she was stuck for what to do with the kids. She wished Dom’s parents lived up here in Sydney instead of down in Melbourne. One thing she knew – she wasn’t asking Chelsea for any more favours.

  She sat at her desk and tried to figure out what to do. Why does this have to be all on me? Why couldn’t Dom step in and help out for a change? It wasn’t like he didn’t have enough sick leave saved up. She gave him a call.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked when he answered.

  ‘I need you to pick up the kids this afternoon,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘Why would I be able to do that? I’m at work!’

  Frankie couldn’t believe how incredulous he sounded at the mere suggestion he leave early in order to take care of his own offspring.

  ‘I know that,’ she said, ‘but I’m sure you can leave early just this once. For crying out loud, it’s not as though you’ve ever done it before.’

  There was silence for a moment then he took her by complete surprise. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘It’s no problem. I’ll get them.’

  ‘You will?’

  ‘Yep. Don’t worry. See you later tonight.’

  Frankie hung up the phone in a slight daze. It was such a complete one-eighty. Maybe he’d heard the desperation in her voice. Having his support in this way felt like such a lovely change. Was that all it took? The simple act of actually asking for his help? If that was the case, she ought to ask more often. Maybe the only reason he never offered was because he had no idea how hard it was for her.

  Oh bugger, she thought then, he’s not going to have a clue where to meet them or what time or anything.

  She texted some instructions to him and got back to work.

  * * *

  On the bus on her way home, Frankie couldn’t help herself. She sent Dom a message to make sure it had all gone fine and that he hadn’t forgotten to get the kids. A response buzzed back. It was a selfie of Dom, Coby and Hayley, beaming up at the camera. She smiled as she stared at the image. Coby and Hayley were both fair-skinned like Frankie’s dad, each with a light dusting of freckles across their noses. And Hayley had inherited Dom’s dark curly hair. Neither of them looked like Frankie though. Apart from maybe Coby’s eyes. Sometimes when she was out with the kids she caught people looking at them, and suspected they were trying to work out whether or not she was their biological mother. In the picture, Dom looked hot with his collar turned up and a sexy glint in his eye. Coby was poking his tongue out – he never liked to smile for photos, but Hayley was grinning toothily out of the phone at her.

  The phone dinged again and she thought it was another message from Dom.

  It wasn’t.

  It was from Paul’s wife.

  CHAPTER 26

  Frankie hopped off the bus at the next stop and called Dom. She kept her voice light and breezy. ‘Hey, babe, I know you’ve already done me this massive favour of leaving work early to get the kids and I was about to head home but . . . a few of the girls at work want me to have a quick drink with them tonight. Do you mind? You good with the kids?’

  Before he could answer, Frankie gabbled on, ‘I wouldn’t ask, but you know how hard it’s been getting the women here onside, so I don’t want to turn them down now that they’ve finally asked.’

  ‘Of course.’ His deep voice with its thick Italian accent came back warm and reassuring. ‘I’m fine with the kids.’

  Frankie closed her eyes, saw the picture of the three of them all grinning up at her and felt a hard pang of guilt at lying to him.

  ‘Hey, Frankie,’ Dom added, ‘just do me a favour and remember to use the St George card this time, would you, and uh . . . try not to put too much on it. The issue with the CBA card means that now the St George account is almost maxed out.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘I won’t forget this time.’

  Once she’d hung up, she ordered an Uber and within five minutes, she was heading back in the same direction the bus had brought her. Waste of money – it was a shame Linda couldn’t have texted a little earlier, before Frankie had got so far away from North Sydney. Linda wanted to meet at a coffee shop on MacArthur Avenue. She wouldn’t say in the message what it was about. But Frankie could gu
ess, and there were butterflies dancing up a storm in her stomach as the Uber driver took an agonisingly slow route through the traffic to the city.

  At the cafe she spotted Linda in a far corner, her dark hair pushed back by a pair of sunglasses, her fingers absent-mindedly tapping on the tabletop as she waited. She’d picked an isolated table, away from the rest of the patrons who were clustered nearer the front, enjoying the last of the sunshine. Frankie made her way through the cafe and took a seat opposite her.

  The expression on Linda’s face confirmed her fears.

  ‘It’s got worse, hasn’t it?’ Frankie reached across the table to touch Linda’s hand.

  Linda opened her mouth to speak but a waitress appeared next to them. ‘You need a menu, or is it just drinks?’ she asked, a friendly smile across her face.

  ‘I’ll take a flat white with one, please,’ said Linda.

  ‘Skim cap,’ Frankie said, eager for her to leave them be.

  ‘Anything to nibble on?’

  ‘Nope,’ Linda and Frankie said in unison.

  Then Linda added quickly, ‘Thank you, though.’ She was always polite like that.

  The waitress left and Frankie looked at Linda, willing her to talk.

  ‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘It’s this.’ She pushed her phone across the table and Frankie read the text message on her screen, in confusion at first.

  Linda, I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you this – but I’m an employee at Cormack and I think you need to know that your husband isn’t being faithful to you. Again, I’m really sorry.

  Frankie was flabbergasted. ‘Paul is cheating on you?’

  Linda gave her a pitying smile. ‘Frankie,’ she said, ‘no, darling, Paul’s not cheating . . . this text is about you. Someone thinks the two of you are having an affair.’

  ‘But . . .’ Frankie stopped for a second, trying to get her brain around it. It fell into place. ‘Oh my God, you’re right!’