Madness, Mayhem and Motherhood

by Nikki McWatters

  ‘I’ve broken it.’ I showed her, stricken.

  She laughed. ‘Oh, that! It breaks all the time. The mast is only loosely in there.’

  She put the little boat back on its perch and propped the mast gently into place.

  ‘Gretel,’ I said, more to myself than the gardener.

  ‘It’s a replica of the old family yacht. Named after Gretel’s grandmother. Kerry’s mother.’

  She also pronounced it grate-ul. I was sure I’d get used to it, but the media had always called her Gretel as far as I remembered.

  ‘Thanks,’ I called as the girl in the khaki shorts went back to her garden.

  I got to nine and I was completely done. Search and scan as I might, I could not find the tenth flaw.

  Davidson returned, clearly having a built-in valet radar. ‘How’d you go?’

  ‘Nine.’

  ‘Not bad. Not bad at all.’ His eyes lasered about the room.

  ‘Actually, ten,’ I announced confidently and pointed to the ornament. ‘That yacht looks like the mast is about to snap.’

  Davidson looked at me and raised his neat eyebrows. ‘You’re good.’ He walked to the sofa and reversed one scatter cushion. ‘The pattern,’ he explained.

  The cushions were virtually identical optical illusions of squiggles. Only a savant could have detected that one cushion was upside down.

  ‘I didn’t expect you to get that one.’

  I decided he was definitely a sun-bed devotee. His tan was too perfect.

  Davidson offered me a coffee and the job and we sat at the breakfast table and talked details.

  He had a snappy sense of humour and I warmed to him. He would have been a very high-maintenance boyfriend but he also seemed like a nurturing and gentle soul. I liked him very much. We would become good friends, I could tell. He had brotherly charm.

  ‘Can you start tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘Nine o’clock?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘We pay monthly but, as the pay month has just gone today, we’ll pay you a month in advance. How’s that?’

  ‘Spectacular!’

  That bit of news just blew my hangover out of the water, and I felt suddenly goddamned fantastic.

  I was in the money! For the first time in a year or so, I felt like I could relax and bob along in the current instead of having to flail, to splash and kick just to inch along through the floodwaters.

  Blood is thicker than water, they say … and that Christmas I was soaking in it. As I finally had an apartment that could fit my whole family, with room for the cousins all the way back to five times removed, I had invited my mother, father and siblings to share the special festive day with me in Sydney. And they took me up on it and all came down from Queensland!

  My family is completely nuts. No more nuts than most families, though, I suppose. If someone tells you their family is completely normal, they are lying or delusional. I had grown up in middle-class waspy Surfers Paradise with my Catholic schoolteacher parents and two sisters and a brother. I was the eldest, the guinea pig, the first foal out of the stables and frankly, as far as position in the family goes, I wouldn’t recommend it. As a mother of five now, I can honestly say that each child becomes easier because you relax a little more with each one. The first is kind of a trial, a test, and so you are hyper-vigilant and read all the books and take very few chances. Your first one will never be out of your sight and will be sixteen before you leave him with a babysitter and you will tell him to wear a helmet when he first drives a car by himself. This can feel quite restrictive and stressful for the child! By the time I had my fifth, I let the hospital janitor look after him at the age of one hour while I went to the cafeteria for a coffee and a wind down after the birth.

  I was a golden-haired child with so much promise and potential: the perfect specimen. I walked early, talked early and my mother even remembers my birth as having been quick and completely painless. This must have been a retrospective delusion because childbirth is never, ever naturally pain-free, unless you are a kangaroo or other marsupial. So unless my mother gave birth to me as a pellet-sized embryo and gestated me in a box, my birth was probably like everyone else’s. I am not Buddha and did not fall out of her side and begin to talk immediately. I have seen all the baby photos. I was a normal human.

  Everything went according to plan until I became a teenager and then I think my parents began investigating the possibility of a refund, exchange or late-adoption plan. Almost overnight I became the black sheep of the family: wild, boy crazy, smoking, drinking, running with a crowd of eighties cool kids with sexuality so fluid it kept leaking out all over the place. After I ran away with the punk rocker, got pregnant at twenty and then ended up as a single mother on welfare with two children by the age of twenty-five, well, all hope was lost that I would ever shrug off that tarnished black woollen coat.

  My family was hell-bent on presenting a wholesome glossy exterior to the world. Appearance and reputation were everything. I think this was what I was subconsciously rebelling against as a teenager: the charade. I’d given up on it all years earlier. But I felt it was time to mend the bridges, swallow my pride and invite my family into the life I had been/was trying to build. My unit was a bit shoddy and old and crappy. The kitchen was a makeshift alcove and my furniture was all shabby chic. But my boys were amazing and life was good and I wanted to show I wasn’t a complete write-off. We were OK. We were happy and strong.

  I spent weeks getting the place all scrubbed up as best I could. I planned the Christmas menu to the last peanut. I wanted everything to be perfect. I almost got a stuffed turkey but that was going too far. Cold meats and seafood were the ‘traditional’ Aussie Christmas fare and much easier to wrap my head around. The boys were excited about all the family coming. They didn’t see enough of them, and particularly looked forward to seeing my sisters and brother.

  My next sister, Annie of the Barbie doll murder (but remember that was only a dream … I think), was four years younger and had a sensible job in a bank, a sensible boyfriend and a sensible house on the Gold Coast. The other two, Rachel and David, were still teenagers.

  So imagine my surprise when my sister Annie arrived first on my doorstep, ready for the family shindig, with a buzzcut, dressed like a rainbow Buddhist nun. Freshly single. She’d swung in from some faraway hippy place and was now on a mission to find herself. I shrugged off the black sheep overlay with an enthusiastic flourish, metaphorically passing it on to her, and welcomed her with open arms, repressed glee and great gushes of relief. My parents, I thought, would die when they saw her. I was off the hook!

  Imagine further, if you will, my surprise to learn, upon my parents’ arrival, that they too were on missions to find themselves, separately. They were, after twenty-eight or -nine years of marriage, amicably separated. The good Catholic marriage was no more.

  It sounds terrible, but I was beginning to love this family get-together more and more because, for the first time in ever, they were behaving like real, live, flawed and exciting people. The Brady Bunch façade had dropped and we were all realising what a sham it had been. Hell, life was grand: we were ALL the black sheep.

  My teenage sister sat outside smoking, my teenage brother taught my boys magic tricks and read them gruesome stories about Jack the Ripper. Mum and Dad seemed to get on better than they had for decades and we all sat around laughing and telling them we wished they’d broken up years earlier!

  Mum sat at Christmas lunch wearing a velvet New Age coat, Dad regaled us most theatrically with wildly profane scenes from Pulp Fiction, uncensored, and Annie and I drank all the wine and, when that ran out, the salad dressing. It was the best family Christmas ever. And my present? A piano. It arrived by truck. My parents’ special surprise for me. It had belonged to my paternal grandmother and, as their things had been divided up so the house could be sold, like in some weird custody battle, as
a neutral party I ended up with the piano. I was also the only one who could play it, because as the first child I had been subjected to eight years of piano lessons (as well as seven of ballet and seven of speech and drama). Getting the piano up the narrow steps at the back of my unit had been almost as entertaining as Toby play-acting dead for the camera for so long I began to give him mouth to mouth at which point he jumped up laughing and got back on the trike, to ride it around the house for the thirty-thousandth time.

  I felt more at home and accepted by my family; our guards were down.

  It was nice.

  I didn’t have to pretend I was doing better than I was.

  I didn’t have to pretend at all.

  They’d all stopped, so I could too.

  I still watch the video of that Christmas in the Purple Palace with teary nostalgia. It was the most wonderfully weird and wacky holiday ever but it was a one-off, because they all mostly went back to conservative lives and began acting like it had never happened. Christmas in the Purple Palace had been a strange mirage, an oasis of madness, and it was marvellous. For a brief week, a wrinkle in time, the masks fell off and we had a hell of a ball being stupendously, abnormally normal. For the first time ever, I didn’t just love my family in an obligatory sort of stuffy way; I actually liked them. They were much funnier than I had ever given them credit for.

  For a long time, years and years, I thought I shared more genetic material with a block of marzipan than I did with my family. After that Christmas I realised they were all completely potty and the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree after all.

  The family left. I went back to work cleaning the mansion in Bellevue Hill, drying the bathtub daily, laughing with the butler and polishing silverware while Sam watched my kids after school. I could even afford to pay her a little as well, which felt nice after all I owed her.

  It was a brand new year.

  It always felt good, the first of January, particularly if the hangover was mild. It marked a turning point and every year I, for one, hoped the next year would be better and bring with it more sunshine and less stress.

  I am and always have been a pathological list-maker. So, needless to say, the very first thing I did upon waking on the first of January every single year was to throw away previous lists and write detailed and comprehensive new lists. Not just one list, but many lists. I had the yearly list of things I wanted to achieve and I redid the lifetime list.

  The lists for that New Year were as follows:

  THE RESOLUTION LIST FOR THE NEW YEAR

  Cut down on the drinking

  Exercise – swim, run, more workouts with Sam

  Eat less junk food

  Take the kids on a weekend away from the city

  Look into some study by correspondence

  Stop swearing in front of the children

  Write in journal every day

  Do not go to McDonald’s

  Have a pap smear in June

  Get my driver’s licence

  Teach boys to play the piano

  Write a book

  Start to save money

  LIFETIME LIST

  Win an Academy Award

  Die old, healthy and quickly

  Own my own New York apartment with a view of Central Park

  Go on an African safari that doesn’t involve shooting anything (other than with a camera)

  Dance around Stonehenge

  Climb an Egyptian pyramid

  Meet Madonna

  Sleep with Johnny Depp

  See my children grow into fine, good men

  Get rid of my disgusting belly (I’m talking surgery)

  ‘Can you pass me the chicken from the fridge?’ Davidson asked as he prepared a giant baking tray.

  ‘What time is she coming?’

  ‘Not entirely sure.’ He raised an eyebrow at me and grinned. ‘I see you’ve got all dressed up for the occasion, Nik! Pulled that out from the days when you dressed like a lady? Instead of your usual scummy mummy chic.’

  I loved Davidson. I would have said yes to marrying him if he hadn’t been so physically perfect. Of course, he never asked because the thought would never have occurred to him. Everything about him was wonderful except that he made me feel like a complete slob. Seriously, if Davidson had a hair out of place, the world would have noticed. It would have stood out like Dolly Parton’s boobs. If he had one day had a hair out of place and he’d seen himself in the mirror, I suspect he would have had a nervous breakdown.

  ‘Oh, this old thing?’ I spun around.

  I didn’t wear dresses as a rule, but I had pulled out a beige dress with sequin trim and thrown a tailored burgundy vest over it. I did look quite smashing, if I didn’t say so myself. I particularly liked my new (second-hand) burgundy boots.

  ‘Very nice.’

  It was easy for him – he was in the penguin uniform – but I was a girl, and it wasn’t every day you got to meet a supermodel.

  Jennifer Flavin was coming to lunch. She was currently dating James Packer and on that particular day she was coming to visit the latest addition to the Packer family – Gretel’s new baby daughter. It was going to be a cosy, informal girly get-together.

  The compound was still buzzing with the excitement of the birth. She really was a lovely little baby, as far as babies go. If you liked that sort of thing. I didn’t. Only my own. I found most other babies quite revolting. But the little heiress baby was very adorable and everyone doted on her. The nanny was heaps of fun and whenever she had a night off I brought my boys to the compound and babysat in her place. The baby was, of course, Australia’s most eligible baby. If we had lived in the Middle Ages, she would have already been betrothed to some prince somewhere, or a duke or emperor. As it was, she was just a tiny little baby, who leaked and burped and farted like all other babies, and she had no idea that she had won the lottery in life, being born into this sort of affluence, as opposed to my poor boys who had a single mother who worked making other people’s beds and vacuuming up their toenail clippings to bring in enough to pay the bills.

  That said, the Packers were pretty damn awesome to work for. The Christmas hamper was incredible and it took me until March to get through it all. There was more good-quality food in that than I’d ever seen. And Gretel had been generous with the Christmas bonus, which also helped make the family Purple Palace Christmas the best Christmas ever. Not only that: for billionaires, my bosses were really nice. I didn’t really know all that many billionaires. Well, none, really, other than them, so I had no benchmark. But they talked to me like I was just another person – no demeaning or class-thing nonsense. I liked them. I’d always imagined billionaires would be like a royal family, with people bowing and scraping all over them, but they were just regular people, just a regular family that just happened to own everything in the world. And on that particular day, I was going to meet some real-live Hollywood person and it was all very, very exciting.

  I knew of Jennifer Flavin from the tabloids. She used to date Sylvester Stallone of Rocky fame (eventually reuniting and marrying him). She was drop-dead gorgeous in a natural way. I’d been scouring the glossy mags for weeks leading up to this casual little lunch. I wondered if she’d look as good in person or whether it was all just airbrushing in those magazines.

  ‘I’ve already cooked them. They just need reheating.’

  Davidson was the butler, but that was a position that covered a lot and if the chef wasn’t on hand to cook, then it fell to Davidson. He was a man of many talents.

  I made myself useful by tidying out the pantry. I did love rummaging about in other people’s pantries. Every few weeks I did a clean up, checking the use-by dates of goods. If anything was on, or very close to, its expiry date, I asked Davidson whether he could use it or not. I usually found that the stuff was good for wee
ks after. So anything he planned to chuck in the bin, I took home to eat. I was like the pilot fish on the shark or the seagull pecking the barnacles off the whale. I was a billionaires’ scavenger. That morning my haul included a packet of biscuits and some sauces and dried fruit. I wasn’t too proud to eat the scraps of the rich.

  I still could not imagine paying an electricity account in anything but small instalments over a period of months. I didn’t answer my phone sometimes for fear of the Rottweiler debt collectors. I could budget well and I knew how to juggle by paying Peter and robbing Paul, but the money that came in still didn’t always come close to covering the outgoings and so I needed to be a very creative accountant. I’d become a savvy shopper who knew that Franklins marked down all the bread and bakery products at exactly six o’clock every day, which meant I could get a huge bag of croissants, pastries, bread rolls and fruity scrolls for a dollar. I started my usual grocery shop in the deli section where the marked-down goods were and then planned my meals around the discounted stuff. I separated the ply on toilet rolls on bad weeks and watered down the milk. Not much, just enough to have it still tasting like milk. But life was much better. I didn’t lie awake stressing so much. It had been a good few months. And the boys were happy.

  On Ben’s birthday he wanted a particular alien toy.

  ‘It has to be the queen,’ he told me. ‘Only the queen.’

  It was the first time in a while I had been in a position to be able to buy him a brand new toy from a department store. Only problem was that the ones in the Eastern Suburbs didn’t stock it or had sold out and so, on my one day off, I caught a train all over Sydney to find it. At the eleventh hour, I found it in Chatswood, and the look on my boy’s face when he tore the paper off the gift was worth it. It was a little bit of plastic with a ridiculous price tag but it sure beat throwing him another McDonald’s party!