Madness, Mayhem and Motherhood

by Nikki McWatters

  ‘You didn’t sleep well,’ I said to him.

  He looked tired. ‘Nah,’ he answered, shaking his head. ‘Sorry if I disturbed you. Work stuff.’

  I didn’t really know too much about what he did. He was a security guard and mostly worked nights. He said he hated work and never wanted to talk about it so I left it alone. Maybe he was some kind of Clark Kent with a superhero double life, I thought indulgently.

  ‘I want to get out of the city,’ he said, drinking the last of his coffee.

  I didn’t finish mine. It was too strong. I picked at the flaky corner of my croissant.

  ‘Like where? You mean for a holiday or for good?’

  ‘Blue Mountains,’ he said. ‘Like move out of the city.’

  ‘It’s nice up there.’ I nodded. ‘But wouldn’t you miss the beach? I thought surfing was some kind of religion to you guys.’

  He shrugged. ‘Yeah. I’m just feeling like a complete change.’

  I smiled. On some level I knew how he felt. The city was like a treadmill and I was struggling to keep up with it. Everything was expensive and the pace at which you needed to run to survive was gruelling. I was always tired.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’m finding it hard to keep up the grind, you know.’

  ‘It’s like everyone in the city is hungry and stressed and competitive.’

  ‘And it’s expensive,’ I added, thinking about all the bills that had suddenly arrived in the mail.

  I thought about his idea. I’d been so busy with the day-to-day stresses of existing that I’d never really considered moving out of the city. The very idea struck me like an invisible gong had gone off in my ear. I was reeling with it. The kids would love it.

  But it would cost a fortune to move.

  ‘I was thinking of getting away for a weekend,’ he said. ‘To check it out up there. What do you say?’

  A weekend away? Oh my, that was taking things to a whole new level.

  ‘How’s about next weekend?’ he asked.

  I thought about it. I was assuming he meant just me. Not the kids. He hadn’t even met them yet, although he constantly badgered me about wanting to.

  ‘I’ll have to check to see if I can offload the kids,’ I said.

  It wasn’t so easy now Kate had moved but they had mates and often had sleepovers.

  ‘Nah.’ He laughed. ‘Bring them. I love kids. It’s time I met them anyway.’

  I wasn’t really sure he was ready for my kids. They were little wild animals. Well, not really. They were quite tame but they were very loud and very, very energetic.

  ‘Maybe.’ I smiled. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  In the end the kids stayed at Sam’s again. They liked staying there because they enjoyed playing with Dasche. I’d promised the boys I’d check out the mountains and when I had some spare money I’d take them away for a weekend to show them the Three Sisters and various other tourist attractions up there. I was still not really in a position to be able to save so I was thinking of pencilling that in for maybe the following winter and then we might even get to see some snow if we were really lucky.

  The mountains in spring were a visual delight and I was cosied up to Clay as we sat in a park and enjoyed a picnic lunch of cooked chicken and bread rolls, a nice bottle of white and some fruit.

  ‘I love it up here,’ he said. ‘My folks used to bring me during the school holidays and I’d go hiking for hours. There’s a really cool energy up here. Kind of magical.’

  I could feel it too. ‘The air smells so clean and fresh and kind of minty,’ I said and played with Clay’s dark hair, curling it around my finger and then releasing it, as he rested his head in my lap.

  ‘Here.’ I laughed. ‘You look like a Greek god, so open your mouth.’

  And I popped in a green grape and then playfully hung the whole bunch above his face while he snapped at them like a turtle.

  ‘You can be Atlas. You’ve got the build for it.’

  ‘And I’ve got the weight of the world on my shoulders too.’ He gave a dry sort of laugh that was more like a cough. Heavy. But then the frown was replaced by his gloriously handsome smile. ‘I love hanging out with you, Nik,’ he said, looking up at me, squinting against the glare of the sun.

  I looked down at him and his perfect little heart-shaped lips were twitching like on my little mousey friends back home. Twitching. I would have leaned down and kissed him but the twitching was freaking me out a little. Maybe if I kissed him he’d stop, I thought.

  ‘And … I … I,’ he stammered, and his face was going red and I was suddenly terrified that he was choking on a grape and I rolled him over roughly and squeezed hard, hard, squeezing and grunting, ‘Spit it out. Spit it out!’

  And then he was wriggling out from my Heimlich Manoeuvre, laughing so hard. ‘What are you doing, you crazy woman?’

  ‘I thought you were choking.’

  He threw his head back and laughed up to the sky and then crawled over and put his hands on my cheeks and kissed me hard, pulling away with a little pop.

  ‘I was trying to spit it out, when you started wrestling me,’ he said, looking into my eyes very seriously. ‘I was trying to tell you that I love you.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said sheepishly and then it hit me. He just told me that he loved me. He said the actual words.

  I felt my face reddening and my cheeks were tingling and I was half grinning and half crying. ‘I think I love you too,’ I said and, wow, I had not seen that coming out of my mouth but there it was in the cold clear light of day.

  We lay back on the picnic rug and held each other, eyes closed, and I could feel the pulse of his blood beneath his warm skin. He smelled like vanilla beans.

  I was in love. I really was. This man was so sweet and soft and yet hard and sexy and yet I didn’t really know much about him at all. It had been a couple of months but I didn’t know anything about his life away from me. I supposed that, having exchanged the L word, we’d get into the business of discovering everything about one another. I wanted him to meet the boys. I wanted them to like him. I wanted him to like them. I’d never felt this way about another man since Billy. I realised all my infatuations and crushes up until that time had been exactly that. This felt completely different. Clay made me feel like a teenager. I thought about him when I woke up every morning and he was the last thing on my mind when I went to sleep. He’d got under my skin. The other guys, every other boy who’d crossed my path, they were just surface rashes. This one was in deep, into my organs, into my bones, into my marrow.

  Back at the pretty basic motel we made love, and it was one of those times that you felt like you’d had an out-of-body experience because you were both so present, so in tune with one another, and it wasn’t about an orgasm: it was about connection. With a dusty ceiling fan above and the scratch of a pine tree against the window, Clay and I fused and melted into one body and it was the first time in my life that I had ever felt that. It was like a soul orgasm or ten and I wondered if perhaps I’d been wrong to dismiss the whole soul-mate thing as a fairy-tale. Maybe fate really did throw two halves of a whole together sometimes, coincidentally, serendipitously, out of the blue, for example in a mouse-infested medical surgery when a receptionist and patient cross paths. Just like that. He walked in for a script for strep throat and left with my heart. It was the schmaltziest sounding romance ever.

  ‘I’ve never felt like this,’ I said, nestled under his arm, wallowing, floating in the sinkhole of post-coital love.

  He leaned up on one elbow and looked down at me, gently moving a strand of my sweaty hair across my forehead. ‘I have to tell you something,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to like it. But it will get sorted out. I’m engaged to someone.’

  And my heart just cleaved in two.

  ‘It’s over.’ He kept on fucking talking and I was drowning, reaching
out, unable to breathe. ‘I don’t love her. I love you. I’m telling her this week that the wedding is off.’

  His words were bouncing around my skull. The wedding is off. The wedding? His wedding?

  I had been lying in his arms imagining being his bride when there was another woman out there actually being fitted for a fucking wedding dress for her wedding to Clay!

  I couldn’t breathe.

  ‘I’m sorry, Nik,’ he moaned. ‘It’s just. It’s family. Her family and mine are tight and it’s going to come as a huge shock to them all and to her.’

  ‘It’s a huge shock to me,’ I whispered and my voice came out as a hoarse and ragged whisper.

  I really was having trouble breathing and swallowing. My mouth was dry.

  ‘I love you,’ he implored but I was finding it hard to return the words to him. ‘She can keep the ring … ’

  ‘Stop talking,’ I said. ‘Stop saying “she”.’

  I was trying not to cry but doing a bad job of it.

  I cried.

  Bad Nikki, upon hearing the news that Clay was engaged, returned with her claws sharpened. The trip back from the Blue Mountains was fraught with silence. Every time Clay opened his mouth to spew out more excuses, I would hold up a hand to tell him I didn’t want to hear it. I turned the radio on and listened to bad music and worse commercials and watched as the mountain vista made way for the outer sprawl of Sydney.

  He dropped me off on the street outside the Purple Palace and, as he took my overnight bag from the boot and gave it to me, I looked into his dark eyes and sighed.

  ‘I don’t know how I feel about this, Clay,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Is it like some sort of arranged marriage thing?’ That, maybe, I could understand.

  ‘No,’ he said shaking his head slowly. ‘But it’s complicated. I’m going to tell her it’s off. I love you, Nik.’

  ‘Today? Like right now? You’re going to tell her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Look,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘Let’s just cool off and you do what you’ve got to do. I just need some time to think. It’s a trust issue. All this time and you never told me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was scared. I feel really bad. It’s been weighing on me so hard—’

  ‘What? Poor you,’ I snapped. ‘What do you want? A cookie? Seriously. Don’t pull the “It’s been hard on me” line. What’s the hard bit? The lying? To me? To her?’

  ‘Argghh,’ he groaned and looked up at the grey sky. ‘I know you’re angry—’

  ‘I’m hurt.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again and put his hands on my shoulders. ‘Give me a week. You cool down. I’ll get disengaged and wade through the fall-out of that with my family. Jesus … this is getting real.’

  ‘If it’s just getting real now,’ I frowned, ‘what was it before? Make-believe? Because that’s what’s upsetting me the most. That what we have has never really been real. Just bullshit.’

  ‘Nik, Nik, Nik,’ he soothed. ‘Not bullshit, but life is complicated. It just is. I didn’t see you coming and I wasn’t sure where we were headed and now I’m sure—’

  ‘Well, I’m not.’

  Silence. Heavy like lead. The sky overhead darkened.

  ‘I will fix it and we’ll be good. OK?’ he asked.

  I didn’t answer and he put a finger under my chin and lifted my head gently and kissed me on the forehead.

  ‘OK?’

  I nodded. ‘OK.’

  He got back into the car and I looked in through the open passenger window. ‘Are you still sleeping with her?’

  There was a moment of frozen hesitation on his brow before he stammered, ‘N-no.’ It was a moment that said everything except ‘no’.

  I felt sick in the belly as I waited for Sam to drop the boys back. I walked around my empty apartment, looked out the windows down at the congested traffic and touched a finger to the glass, following the tracks of the raindrops that had begun to splat on the window. I was a seething mess of anger and confusion and pain. My heart hurt. My guts spasmed and churned. I thought I might actually throw up all over my stupid purple floorboards. My temples pulsed and my mouth was dry. Was that it? Was it over?

  And then Bad Nikki began screaming at me.

  BAD NIKKI: Of course it’s over.

  I shut my eyes, willing her to leave me alone.

  GOOD NIKKI: Not now. Please, not now.

  I begged her to stop, to let it go, to let me deal with it myself.

  BAD NIKKI: She’s prettier than you and doesn’t have two brats to deal with. She’s probably tall and dark and exotic; not like you, a little troll with no prospects.

  I tried to shake her out of my head but she was clinging on like a toxic barnacle.

  BAD NIKKI: You need to pay him back.

  GOOD NIKKI: That’s not a good idea.

  But like a brainwashed automaton I went to my phone that lived on the bar fridge and I opened my address book and I dialled the number of an old lover who had been a reliable source of fun when I’d been lonely over the previous few years. I knew it was wrong but I had Bad Nikki pressed up behind my weakened hippocampus, prodding her fingernail into the revenge part of my grey matter.

  BAD NIKKI: Ring him. There is nothing so satisfying as a revenge fuck.

  I dialled.

  She was wrong. Bad Nikki was almost always, no always always wrong. First up, I broke my rule about no men in the bed while the boys were at home. I waited until they were asleep before giving him the green light. Jay arrived just after midnight with a bottle of Moët champagne and a very sexy grin. It got me every time. My guilty nerves and apprehensions were sedated by the bubbles and he looked so damn good and smelled so damn good and, most importantly, he wasn’t Clay, and to me he represented that other woman, the fiancée. If Clay could sleep with someone behind my back, then I could do the same.

  It was quiet and intense. But it felt cheap. Usually a casual romp with Jay was fun. We both knew there were no strings. We were the definition of ‘fuck-buddies’. We’d known each other for years, pre-Bill-break-up even, although nothing but flirtation had happened until long after the end of that relationship. Jay was funny. A rock musician of course. Pretty full of himself. But always good for a fun time. But that night it felt tacky as we squelched together like sweaty clumps of wet clay, muted grunting and trembling sighs into each other’s mussed hair.

  BAD NIKKI: There! Doesn’t that feel good?

  GOOD NIKKI: No. Fuck off.

  I didn’t realise I’d said it out loud.

  ‘What?’ Jay laughed and rolled away.

  ‘Sorry,’ I muttered. ‘I’m just … sorry … nothing.’

  He left long before the sun came up and I lay in my damp sheets, smelling him. Jay had no idea he’d just been a tool of revenge. I’d used him as some kind of payback sex toy and it did not feel good.

  BAD NIKKI: I bet you feel like a dirty whore now.

  GOOD NIKKI: Yes, I do. So, thanks very much.

  BAD NIKKI: My pleasure.

  I made the school lunches like a zombie. Dried apricots for Ben but not for Toby because he thought they looked like little boys’ ears. No bananas, so they got little containers of grapes. Sandwiches. Little packets of crisps. All juice poppers. I made sure Monday’s homework was in Ben’s bag. The mirror in the bathroom showed that I also looked like a zombie.

  ‘I hate you,’ I said to my hideous reflection. ‘You disgust me.’

  And then I lurched to the toilet and threw up, coughing up the last remnants of my stomach before flushing them away.

  ‘You OK?’ Toby asked, appearing at the bathroom door.

  I nodded but said nothing and proceeded to brush my teeth, scrubbing away the taste of vomit and Jay’s kisses.

  After walking the kids to school,
I went home and crawled back into bed but I couldn’t sleep. I went downstairs to shoot the breeze with Krissy in the surgery for a bit and she cheered me up. I thought about calling Girl George and suggesting a boozy lunch so I could offload my guilt and have her tell me that what I’d done was understandable. I wanted absolution. I wanted to forgive myself. But I also wanted to forgive Clay.

  That night I had to bake a bloody cake for a school fête. I could do stir-fries and roasts and stews but I was not a baker and my oven was a bit dodgy. I think the mice had eaten the wiring at the back of it. Sometimes I missed the mice. The doctors had called in the pest people and fumigated the place one day while we were all out. I imagine they all took off en masse to the park at the end of the street. That was what I liked to imagine. The alternative was too gruesome. The kids watched cartoons while I worked my way through the cheap packet mix. It didn’t come with an icing sachet so I blended some cocoa and icing sugar and butter by hand because I didn’t have a hand-mixer.

  The cake looked surprisingly good. It had risen well. I let it cool before icing it and imagined a wedding cake. My own wedding cake when I’d married Bill had been a pyramid of profiteroles. A croquembouche. I wondered if Clay would really break off his engagement or just dump me and have his own wedding cake with what’s-her-name and I imagined a tiny statue of Clay and some princess on the top of my little chocolate cake and I felt sick and sad.

  ‘You can lick the icing bowl, kids,’ I called and they came running.

  I gave both boys a spoon and the bowl, but one mouthful in, they pulled faces of disgust.

  ‘That’s gross,’ Ben said, prickling up his nose.

  ‘Show me,’ I said and traced a finger over the inner surface of the bowl and then sucked on it.

  It was truly awful. I frowned. I looked back to the bench and saw the mistake. I’d used the orange box of Gravox instead of the orange box of cocoa. A quick look in the cupboard showed we had no cocoa left, and I’d used the last of the butter and icing sugar.

  ‘Shit!’ I growled at myself. ‘I’ve made a gravy cake!’

  Both boys started laughing. I felt annoyed but they were finding it so hilarious that it was catching and I started laughing too.