by Wendy Harmer
‘This isn’t funny, Meg. It really isn’t,’ said Claire with her top over her face.
‘Yes it is, Claire. It’s extremely amusing. I haven’t watched you make an idiot of yourself over a boy in years. Should be just like old times. See you out there.’ And Meg disappeared.
Claire nervously examined herself in the mirror again. She would be seeing Connor for the first time in daylight. And that would probably be the end of that. She’d had barely five hours sleep last night and wasn’t wearing it well. She grimaced and wouldn’t have been surprised if the skin under her eyes had made a crinkling noise like Christmas paper. She pulled the skin of her face back until she looked like a cheerleader with a too-tight ponytail.
Claire had finally realised she was middle-aged while watching 60 Minutes on television, when she saw she was the same age as the Federal Treasurer. She had also started calculating the age of the actors she saw in those old classic black and white movies on the Ted Turner Network. She had never considered what age Doris Day, Sophia Loren and Merle Oberon had been when they starred in those classic love stories. Sadly, she now saw they were at least a decade younger than her.
These days she could never say her age was forty-five without thinking, it’s five years until I’m fifty, fifteen years until I turn sixty, twenty-five years until I’m seventy . . . and maybe just thirty years until I’m dead. That’s all, thirty years. Thirty more Christmas days . . . less than the forty-five Christmas days she’d already had. And she hadn’t even started yet.
Claire slicked lip gloss on her mouth and took one last look in the mirror. She also saw the WRONG WAY GO BACK sign. She knew she was already hurtling towards it. She hitched up her bra straps, stuck out her chin and braced herself for the impact.
‘Hi there, Mum!’ Dermott bounded across the deck to plant a sloppy kiss on the side of Claire’s face. She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. She may have lost a stepdaughter, but she’d gained a golden retriever puppy.
‘Hello there, Dermott darling. Congratulations again!’ She smiled and pecked him back. Claire saw that Dermott loved Rose with his whole heart. She hoped that would be enough.
‘Rose, you look tired, and very happy.’ There was a lingering hug for her.
Rose was now a wife. Two months shy of her thirtieth birthday. When Claire had come into her life she had been twenty-three and was still aching for her dead mother. Claire had stepped into the role of big sister and they had come to love each other dearly. They had made a pact years ago to tell each other everything.
‘Ah, it’s the O’Hanrahans, to be sure, to be sure,’ said Charlie in his crap Irish accent. He stepped forward and caught Rose and Dermott up in an enthusiastic embrace.
Then it was Meg, Tony and Teresa’s turn to shower them with double Italian kisses.
There was a thundering noise as five children hurtled from the garden and threw themselves on top of the newlyweds.
‘MaxSophiaStephanieNicholas—get off, get off!’ Meg shouted the names of her four children as if they were one eight-legged, eight-armed beast.
‘Enough now,’ laughed Meg. ‘Look, here’s some ice-blocks and bags of chips. Off you go.’
The children fell on the tray like the flock of seagulls in Finding Nemo. ‘Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine,’ they chanted and then thundered back across the deck into the garden with their booty held aloft.
The smallest child was Madeline, but she was also the swiftest. Claire watched with pride as her daughter bounded away on skinny little legs, her blonde ponytail bobbing behind her.
Claire took the opportunity to make a quick reconnaissance of the entire deck and garden. There was no Connor. She registered a sickening thud of disappointment, instantly followed by a wave of relief. There would be time after all to calm her nerves and arrange herself seductively in a deckchair.
Stop, wrong way, go back, Claire thought. She was losing her nerve rapidly. She reached for a tray of champagne glasses and offered them around. ‘I think it’s time for another toast,’ she said brightly. ‘Here’s to the first day of the rest of your lives!’ She held her glass to the sun and watched the light refract through the lacework of bubbles.
The rest of your lives. In effect, it was, if you didn’t believe in the afterlife, eternity. Was it a blessing or a curse on a newlywed couple? There was no way you could comprehend what ‘the rest of your life’ meant. The older you got, the more you realised that your life was such a mean little allocation in the great span of time. It wasn’t fair that you had to share your life with anyone. And spend so much of it searching for The One to do it with. She looked at Charlie happily holding up his glass and in that moment saw him as a total stranger. ‘Who are you, grey-haired man in blue shirt?’ she wondered.
There was an enthusiastic clinking of glasses.
‘Oh jeez, the rest of their lives! Don’t say that, Claire, you’ll frighten the hell out of them,’ Meg teased, as usual reading Claire’s mind.
‘Now, Meg—’ Charlie put on his earnest voice—‘there’s something we always say at men’s group: “Nobody’s ready for marriage. Marriage makes you ready for marriage.”’ He looked meaningfully at Rose and Dermott.
Meg and Claire exchanged a look.
‘Yep, there he goes again, thinking all the time,’ nodded Tony.
‘You’re pissed already, Tony,’ said Meg. She had put down her glass and was noisily moving a pile of cutlery from one end of the table to the other.
‘I am not! What Charlie’s saying is true. You’ve just got to jump in and hope for the best. There’s no way out, you have to sink or swim. Right, Charlie?’
‘Well, not exactly . . .’ Charlie looked skyward and took on the air of a parish priest about to deliver the Sunday homily. Claire considered grabbing the barbecue fork and stabbing him through the neck. He went on in lofty tone: ‘Marriage is about hard work, not luck. It’s about listening to your partner and achieving good communication. It’s about hearing their needs and wants and trying to accommodate and validate them.’
Really? thought Claire. Well right now I want four masked men to arrive, throw me in the back of a truck, blindfold me, strip me naked and take me to a secret location where they make me suck their dicks under the table while they play cards. How about that, Mr Hard Work and Communication? Think you can validate that?
‘When I was young married girl in Naples,’ said Teresa, now producing a metre-high pepper grinder from her apron, ‘No talking. You don’t want to talk to men. They go off all day to work and talk about girls. You stay with the women, talk about children. This works. Men and women always different. No understand.’ Teresa banged the pepper grinder on the table and marched off to the kitchen.
All eyes turned to the pepper grinder and saw it for what it was—a giant phallus. Claire realised that Teresa’s dead husband Luciano had made an appearance at the gathering.
‘Well, that’s the most insightful thing she’s ever said,’ Meg announced.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ protested Tony.
‘What your mother says is true. You’ve got no idea what I go through with these kids every day and you don’t want to know.’ Meg had seen an opportunity to plonk her longstanding agenda on the table next to the monstrous plate of antipasto and was determined not to miss it.
‘Oh Christ, not this again!’ Tony flung the meat on the grill. Meg turned on her heel and also marched off to the kitchen.
The sound of sizzling sausages was all anyone heard for a good ten seconds.
‘So, Rose . . . Dermott.’ Charlie the radio announcer rushed to fill the embarrassing void. ‘You still haven’t told us. Where are you going on your honeymoon?’
Rose and Dermott clutched at each other as if their honeymoon tickets read ‘Titanic Cruise. One Way’.
After this rocky start the sunny afternoon wandered on in relative domestic peace and harmony.
No Connor.
Children were fed and watered. Relatives and frien
ds arrived to drop off gifts for Rose and Dermott. The table was emptied and replenished by Meg and Teresa. Tony and Charlie stoked then restoked the barbecue. Dermott’s mate chucked his rubber thong on the hotplate as a hilarious gag or by mistake—no one was quite sure.
No Connor.
The well-wishers had said their goodbyes and left. Car doors slammed. There was the obligatory hunt for an elderly aunt’s set of keys. The growing pile of empty wine bottles chimed at regular intervals like a grandfather clock. The world record for the number of cigarette butts jammed in one beer bottle top was broken. The embers of the barbecue gave a last heroic splutter and died away.
Still no Connor.
The girls were in one bedroom watching Sleeping Beauty. The boys were in the other playing Spiderman on the Xbox. Mother Teresa had cleaned what she could and if she had had a roll of yellow ‘Do Not Cross Crime Scene’ tape she would have strung it around the kitchen. It would have to be left until morning. She grumbled and stomped off to bed. Tony had carried out the bottles, scraped down the hotplate and polished his tongs.
And still, no bloody Connor.
There was no rational reason for it, but Claire felt like weeping uncontrollably. Like prostrating herself on the back lawn and crying like a baby. It couldn’t have felt worse if it had been the end of a four-year relationship and he’d run off with another woman. Or said he wouldn’t leave his wife. Or that he couldn’t make a commitment because being happy stifled his creativity. Or all the other reasons in the past why Claire hadn’t been The One at This Particular Moment. Not that she wasn’t intelligent, beautiful and, who knows, one day in the future blah, blah, fucking blah! She couldn’t help but feel she had been dumped. And, this time, by a boy half her age.
She wandered into this familiar emotional territory and let herself feel the pain. It was all quite comforting in a strange way. The only trouble was, Claire hadn’t been dumped. She was, at This Particular Moment, very, very married. She looked over into the darkened garden to see Tony and Dermott standing in front of the four-wheel drive. The man with them, deep in conversation, was Charlie, her husband. She had been married to him for seven years and, as he told her every day, they would be together for eternity.
Claire leaned back in her deckchair and looked up at the stars. There it was. Eternity. People said the universe stretched on forever but from where she was sitting she could quite plainly see all of it. It went from the palm tree to the carport. Not very impressive, really. She could see the end of eternity right there near that lamppost. She figured her star had traversed more than halfway across the heavens and its brightness was already dimming. She watched as it slipped behind a bank of clouds and disappeared. Claire could feel the tears pooling just behind her mascara. There was only one solution. More alcohol.
‘He’s not coming.’ Meg caught Claire rooting about in the back of the fridge for another bottle of white.
‘I can see that, Meg.’ Claire was now in no mood for her straight talk.
‘Who’s not coming?’ Rose appeared, holding out her empty wineglass.
‘Um . . . oh . . .’ Meg was caught, a rabbit in the headlights of the Westinghouse. She casually took the bottle from Claire and found the corkscrew. ‘Just a friend of Dermott’s I met last night at the wedding. Connor . . . can’t remember his last name. Some friend from school apparently.’
‘Connor Carmody?We didn’t invite him to the wedding. What was he doing there?’ Rose’s voice had a surprisingly sharp edge.
Meg looked at Claire with a pained ‘explanation please’. Claire began talking, hoping her mind would catch up. ‘I think he was at the wedding next door. He just popped in to give you and Dermott his congratulations,’ she offered calmly. She could feel her cheeks burning.
‘You met him too, Claire?’ asked Rose.
‘Uh-huh.’ Claire’s voice came from inside the fridge, where she had ducked to avoid the interrogation and cool down her head. ‘Seems like a nice bloke.’
‘So he’s supposed to be coming here?’ Rose sounded tense.
Meg also caught Rose’s tone of voice and ran interference. ‘I invited him. Is there a problem, Rose?’
Rose poured herself a glass of wine and heaved herself up on the kitchen bench and Meg did likewise. Claire forced an air of nonchalance, although her mind had begun racing again at the mention of Connor’s name.
‘No, no problem. It’s just . . . well, I feel stupid complaining when we’ve only been married twenty-four hours . . .’ Rose looked at her companions for encouragement.
Meg hooted, ‘It’s never to early to start bitching about your husband.’
‘Yeah,’ added Claire. ‘Might as well get in training for the habit of a lifetime!’
Rose had come to the right place. The Whingers Club was now in session.
‘It’s just that Dermott has so many friends. Everywhere we go there’s another one! And you know what he’s like . . . come over, let’s go fishing, let’s go to the footy, let’s go to the pub. I hope he realises that from now on I’m his best friend. I hope he realises that marriage comes first . . . that’s all.’ Rose was biting her lip.
Claire sighed with relief that she was off the hook. Here at least was well-trodden ground. ‘You have to realise, Rose, that men gather mates like barnacles on a barge.’ Claire had invented this line and was quite pleased with it.
‘Yeah. Every now and then you have to go around and scrape ’em off,’ Meg added.
The women all laughed.
Claire offered another of her theories. ‘You know, I’ve always thought that men and women approach marriage quite differently. It’s the same way they buy a house.’
Meg and Rose were all ears.
Claire continued, ‘Well, men see an average little house covered with climbing roses, smoke coming out of the chimney and an apple tree out the back, and they fall in love with it on the spot. They think it’s perfect, just perfect. And later on, when they discover that the floorboards are sagging or there aren’t enough bedrooms, they can’t believe what they’ve actually bought and they get rid of it and buy an ultra-modern duplex with a spa and pool.
‘Women see the same little house with the roses and apple tree and think it’s perfect. All it needs is a new roof, restumping, a couple of extra bedrooms, a new kitchen and a paint job. It’s absolutely perfect. They lovingly renovate it over the years and keep it forever.’
‘So you mean . . .?’ said Rose, who was clearly lost with this one.
‘What I’m saying is that women fall in love with a man’s potential. Don’t be worried if you feel there’re a few problems with Dermott. That’s half the fun. Fixing him up. I reckon all women see their husbands as a renovator’s opportunity.’
Meg was warming to the theme and added, ‘You know something, Rose, from what I’ve seen being married to an Italian, here’s how it goes. From the time boys are born their fathers tell them: “Son, your mother’s a saint, an absolute saint. All you have to do is find someone like her and you will be the luckiest man alive.” At the same time, the mothers are telling their daughters: “You’ll find a man, he won’t be perfect, but just make do. Do the best you can with what you get.” ’
‘So, does that work?’ Rose was clearly not doing a lot better with Meg’s theory.
‘Of course it does!’ Meg cried. ‘Women are here to organise men. Our whole life’s work is convincing them we are already perfect and one day, if they work at it hard enough, they can be perfect too!’ And here Meg laughed so much she slid off the kitchen bench into a heap on the floor.
Claire looked at Meg rolling on the slate tiles with her legs and arms in the air and was reminded of a Christmas beetle which had landed upside down and couldn’t get up again. She doubled up laughing herself.
‘Need a hand there?’ came a voice from the doorway. The three women turned to see a tall, broad figure silhouetted in the light from the deck. Connor.
They all jumped to as if they’d been caught smoking
behind the sheltersheds by the headmaster. Meg climbed up from the floor and rearranged her skirt, Rose slid from the bench and smoothed her hair and Claire stood and set her wineglass on the table, sloshing the contents everywhere. She noticed her hand was shaking and hoped no one else had.
Meg found her voice first. ‘Well, hello there. Connor, isn’t it? We weren’t expecting anyone quite this late.’
Connor stepped into the light of the kitchen. He looked so . . . Claire thought the word was probably ‘vivid’. His green eyes were set off by a sarong of almost exactly the same shade and his bare tanned arms, contrasted gorgeously against his white singlet. His skin was the colour of a newly baked biscuit. This was all topped with a mop of wild brown curls which had been bleached by the sun to translucent platinum at the ends.
Claire reminded herself to keep breathing.
‘Yeah, I’m really sorry I’m so late. I got caught up today. You should have seen the waves at Northie! I couldn’t get out of the water.’ Connor flashed a huge dazzling smile and the picture of perfection was complete.
‘I just dropped in, really. I’m going away tomorrow for a couple of weeks . . .’
A couple of weeks! Claire’s heart stopped.
‘. . . and I promised to call in and congratulate the happy couple. I missed talking to you last night, Rose—I was on duty at the wedding next door—but I did see you. You made a very beautiful bride. Congratulations.’
Connor leaned forward to kiss Rose and there was a momentary fumble as she offered her hand at the same time. He took her hand and pulled her towards him and got his kiss anyway.
‘Um . . . thanks, Connor,’ said Rose shyly. ‘You know my stepmother, Claire?’
‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ he said, turning to Claire. She looked at him with alarm. A small script adjustment was needed here!
‘I think we did meet,’ stammered Claire. ‘It was outside on the deck, you probably don’t remember.’