‘Not exactly. You?’
‘I know her husband. We go kite-surfing together. There’s a whole group of us who go to Ramsgate Beach every Sunday. It’s tremendous fun. A great workout.’
‘I never knew Jason did that,’ Clementine said. ‘But then I don’t really know him that well.’ As she spoke the words, it dawned on her how true they were. She pictured Amanda and Jason as Tim knew them: a happy, perfect couple who took their Labrador for a walk along the beach in matching loafers. Doubt crept into her mind. Tim was still talking. Clementine had to fight the urge to reach into her bag to see if Jason had called.
‘He’s a real kite-surfing die-hard.’
She imagined Jason, absurdly handsome, sailing over the crest of waves strapped into a harness with a colourful kite carrying him into the air.
‘Of course, we probably won’t see as much of him now that his wife is pregnant.’
There was a clang as Clementine dropped her fork.
‘What?’
‘He’ll make a great father,’ Tim went on. That caving-in feeling returned to Clem’s chest. In the distance she could hear Tim saying what a good teacher Jason had been when he had first taken up the hobby. ‘It’s a lot harder than it looks. Jason’s a really top bloke.’
She nodded, and wiped her shaking hands on a napkin.
‘Excuse me,’ she stammered, standing.
She practically ran to the bathroom, where she stumbled into a stall. She could taste vomit in the back of her throat. Amanda. Pregnant. How long had Jason known? She fanned herself with her fingers. Perspiration was making her shirt stick to her skin. It was twelve degrees outside, but she was burning up. She ran the tap into her cupped hands and gulped water. She felt as though she had spent half the year lurching towards ladies’ rooms so nobody would see her have a meltdown over her relationship.
Somehow she got through the rest of the meal. Tim talked about photography while she stared at her Thai salad, which was starting to wilt. She knew how it felt. Outside on the street she fished her phone from her bag, hoping there would be an explanatory text message from Jason. She shook the phone, as though the message could be lodged somewhere in the back where she couldn’t see it. The streets were bare. She twisted her ring, aflame with fury and embarrassment and remorse. She was so angry she could hardly walk. But it was dark. And it was late. She put one foot in front of the other and began the slow walk home.
Clementine spent the next day kneading her eyes with her knuckles and tossing back handfuls of pills. Vitamin A for her immune system, D, B6 and some thiamine for mental acuity. The Highetts arrived at 3pm. A fresh crisis had arisen upon the discovery that they needed to buy a new car. Clem took a vitamin B pill.
When the day ended, she wandered into the city and aimlessly browsed racks of clothes in the quiet company of other late-night shoppers. She idly touched the mid-winter mark-downs and wondered what Jason was doing. Perhaps her was tucked on a couch behind Amanda, with one hand sitting protectively on her tight belly.
Clementine picked out items she would never wear, and pretended she was someone else. She chose a yellow bikini and a fiery orange caftan, a turquoise skirt with horrid copper coins dangling from the hem, and a belted dress printed with parrots.
‘You’re off on a holiday, then?’ said the changing-room attendant brightly as she handed her a plastic card.
‘Yes,’ Clem said absently. ‘The Maldives.’
‘The Maldives?’ She heard a squawk in her ear. Mirabella Burbage-Jones-McRae, freshly baked from her honeymoon, was standing behind her, holding a fistful of spangly dresses and shopping bags — including one from Baby Bunting.
‘Mirabella,’ Clem tried to sound enthusiastic. ‘How are you?’
‘Clementine,’ Mirabella leaned in to apply her glossy lips to each of Clem’s cheeks. ‘I’m fabulous, positively radiant. The honeymoon was divine. We went to the Maldives.’
Mirabella was wearing a sculpted leather jacket and a high-collared silk blouse that made her look like a frill-necked lizard. She had the sharp, flinty eyes of a reptile.
‘I heard a rumour that you’re having a tryst with a friend of mine.’
Clem felt as though she had been hit with a frying pan.
‘No, I …’ she stammered. ‘I don’t know where you got that from.’
Mirabella arched her eyebrow. Clementine put a hand to her throat. Her oesophagus felt as though it was being crushed.
‘My maid of honour told me,’ Mirabella said coolly. ‘For heaven’s sake, Clementine, I don’t see what all the fuss is about: Damon Dresner is a catch. Especially for you.’
Clementine breathed out. She was too relieved to be insulted. The blood returned to her extremities as her heart began to beat again.
‘Oh, no, I mean — we did. That is, we were, um, seeing each other,’ she looked away.
‘If I were you, I’d lock him down.’ Mirabella pointed a painted talon at Clementine. ‘How old are you now? Thirty-six?’
Clem straightened her back. ‘I just turned thirty-five.’
‘Still,’ said Mirabella. ‘I remember turning thirty-four and thinking “thank heavens I have my Humpty”. Did I tell you I’m re-doing the house for the summer?’ She pulled a large blue box from one of her shopping bags. ‘The theme will be St Tropez chic. House and Garden magazine are doing a summer series of Sydney homes, and I want ours to be featured. I was speaking to the editor at a cocktail party the other night and she said—’
To change the subject Clem nodded at her other bags.
‘Baby Bunting: you’re not …?’
Mirabella lifted the bag. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Oh, God no.’ She opened the bag and produced a small knitted jumpsuit in dove grey. It had wooden buttons and little white feet.
‘Isn’t it darling?’ she cooed, as if the suit held a real baby. ‘Touch it, it’s cashmere.’
Clem slowly reached her hand toward it.
‘This is for a friend of mine. You know her: Amanda Ceravic,’ Mirabella said. Clementine whipped her hand away as though the suit was woven arsenic.
‘She’s the one who told me about you and Damon. She’s married to Damon’s best friend, Jason. You do know Jason, don’t you, Clementine?’
Mirabella fixed Clementine with that particular stare of hers, like she was a boa constrictor and Clementine was the small mouse she was about to eat.
‘I think we met briefly at the wedding,’ Clem said faintly.
Mirabella flicked a shiny curl behind her shoulder and took a step towards Clementine. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this, but Jason has a reputation. I was so thrilled when Mandy told me she was pregnant. He loves her, but women lose all their senses when they’re around him.’
Clementine looked into Mirabella’s eyes, trying to understand why she was telling her this.
‘Of course,’ Mirabella said. ‘Amanda is one of the most beautiful women in Sydney. I’m sure she has nothing to worry about. Although’ — Mirabella took another step forward, her face lit with mischief — ‘I did hear at my wedding—’ Clem caught her breath again — ‘that Jason was seen sneaking into the garden with someone …’
Clem scanned Mirabella’s face.
‘I’m sure it was nothing,’ she spoke quickly. ‘Just idle gossip.’
‘Maybe.’ Mirabella didn’t sound convinced.
‘Why would he do that, right there in front of her?’
‘He’d have to be mad,’ Mirabella agreed. ‘Amanda’s a celebrity. She’s just signed on to do a summer TV special called Yummy Mummies. If he ever cheated on her, it would be quite the scandal.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Clementine choked.
‘Well, I must run,’ Mirabella said, as she leaned forward and, once again, stamped Clementine with her sticky cherry lips. She sauntered towards the elevator, leaving Clem feeling like she had just been narrowly missed by a falling piano.
Mirabella was right. If the seal of secrecy around the affair was somehow breached, it woul
dn’t just be Clem’s friends and clients who would hear about it, it would be everybody in Sydney. Clementine grasped her ring, breathless at how close she had come to catastrophe. Bold font headlines appeared before her eyes. Marriage counsellor steals Sydney socialite’s husband. Preggo journo loses hubby to slutty shrink.
She would never work again.
Outside, the air was mean. Clementine passed a toy store with a kite display in the window. Their colourful tails were pinned up as if floating on a breeze. She put her hand on the glass, thinking that right now what she needed was some wholesomeness in her life; green grass and fresh air and afternoons without booze and men and text messages about ending marriages. But the shop was closed.
She slumped home. She was sifting through her bag looking for her keys when a car horn ripped through the air. Clem jumped and dropped her satchel. The source of the noise, a blue car, was parked two houses down. It was a familiar Saab. The car door opened. A large flock of roses emerged, followed by Jason’s arm. She turned back to her building’s security door and tried to get the key into the lock.
‘Clementine!’ he shouted.
‘Go away,’ she flapped her arm at him.
‘Clem!’ he shouted again.
Clem looked around the street, then dashed over to his car and hissed at him: ‘Jason, what are you doing here?’
‘I heard it was your birthday last week.’ His voice sounded strange.
‘Go home.’
‘I’ve been waiting since seven,’ he said.
‘You can’t just turn up here like this.’
‘Can I come up?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘I’m not leaving until you talk to me.’
Mirabella’s words were echoing in Clementine’s head. Scared a photographer would pop out of the bushes, she hurried into the Saab’s passenger seat.
‘Jason, what are you doing here?’
‘I wanted to see you.’ He reached towards her, folding his arms over her shoulders. ‘I wanted to see you the other day. But things with Amanda are dragging on longer than I expected.’
‘Jason, no!’ She jerked out of his reach. ‘You can’t come here any more.’ Clem’s heart was racing. Every minute in the car was suffocating. It was like being buried alive.
He grabbed her arm.
‘But we were going to be together.’
She wrenched out of his grip.
‘Jason. Control yourself. It’s over. It’s been over for a long time. Go home to your wife.’ She slammed the door behind her and ran back to her apartment.
Clementine opened her eyes and squinted. Dawn. The sadness she had felt the night before had taken on the hard edge that was pinning her to her mattress.
Fight it, she told herself. Fight it.
There was a message from Annabel on her phone: Looking forward to another round of husband-hunting together soon! She smiled. For all her bravado and flash, Annabel was a source of bottomless hope and warmth. Clementine threw off her doona and put one leg on the floor.
The hardest part of the day was now behind her.
Clementine’s first appointment wasn’t until ten, so she took a detour to the train station and hopped on a city-loop line. The carriage was crowded with little girls going to a ballet recital. Each had their hair scraped up into identical buns on tops of their heads. They wore loose white tights that bunched around their knees and made them look like they had ostrich legs. The air smelled of hairspray. As Clem stood to get off, she felt a tug on her jacket.
‘Excuse me, missus,’ a little girl in a blue leotard held up a glove.
‘Thank you,’ Clem said, taking it. The little ballerina raised her arm above her head in the graceful arc of a ‘you’re welcome’ gesture. Clem swallowed the lump in her throat.
She headed to the toy store she had passed the night before and bought two kites, then called Will and offered to take the boys for the weekend.
‘I know it’s short notice, but they could sleep over,’ she said, picturing herself serving macaroni cheese from a steaming pot. Afterwards they could camp around her fondue set in the lounge room and dunk marshmallows into melted chocolate.
‘That would be great,’ said Will. ‘The boys love spending time with Aunty Clementine.’
On Sunday, after three sleepless nights, Clem took her nephews to the park. The boys flew kites and ran around throwing handfuls of wood chips at each other until Clementine growled that they would get it in their eyes, and directed them to play on the play equipment. They ran to the slide and started hurling themselves down it, waving as they went. She thought of Jason and Amanda watching their child squeal with delight as he or she sailed through the air on a swing. Jason’s arm would be around Amanda’s shoulder, as they sat watching from a nearby bench, and she would press his knee when she wanted to tell him something.
‘How old are they?’ asked a woman next to Clementine on the park bench. She was reading the Financial Review with one eye and had her other eye on a little girl on the roundabout.
‘Two and four,’ Clem said.
‘They have your hair.’
They did have the Crosley hair, inherited from Will, but darker. His was the almost-transparent gold colour of toffee. Theirs was burnt butterscotch, with freckles to match.
‘Jemma is the image of her father,’ the woman said. ‘We got divorced when she was only one. It makes it hard to maintain a rage when the person you hate most in the world looks so much like the person you love most in the world.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Jem, time to go,’ she called.
The little girl leapt from the swing and ran to her mother. She waited obediently while the woman packed Tupperware into a backpack and folded away her newspaper. Then they took each other’s hand and walked to the park gate.
As Clem watched them go, she thought perhaps she could have it all if she stopped expecting it to look how it was on television.
Oscar was barrelling down the slide, shouting ‘Look at me! Look at me!’
She wondered if she was capable of doing it alone. She could investigate IVF or adoption. Countless articles she had read over the years talked of all the unloved baby girls in China. But it was just another of the million fleeting thoughts that flew through her brain at five frames a second every moment of the day, like celluloid through an old-fashioned film projector. Some of these thoughts were grand: Maybe I can have it all. Some of them not: I must try to find that fridge warranty. But almost all centred on things that needed to be done. And that was without a child. No, she told herself. Banish the thought. She could not and did not want to do it alone.
‘Oscar, Finn — come on. Time to go. It’s getting cold.’
She cupped her hands and blew into the cave they made. Her breath condensed and curled like kettle steam. She rubbed her palms together.
Then her peace was shattered.
Her ring was gone.
Chapter 14 Annabel
‘It’s strange being back,’ Harry shouted from the living room. ‘Everything is so … concrete.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Annabel yelled, as the pasta water frothed up and made the saucepan lid dance.
She had settled on a simple meal of chilli prawns and linguine, followed by Eton Mess, a sexy kind of dessert of strawberries, raspberries and cream smooshed together. She hoped the message it sent was: ‘I’m capable and low-maintenance and I just tossed this together’.
‘When I got home everything was caked in rust-coloured dust,’ he went on. ‘Even things that looked clean to the naked eye. I threw them all in a tub and they bled red dirt.’
Annabel took two glasses of wine into the lounge room. Harry was sitting on the couch with his feet set firmly apart on the ground. His skin was dark from hours spent in the sun.
‘It sounds beautiful there,’ she said, handing him a glass. She pictured the two of them together in a rural town at dusk when the sky is starting to turn orange. She, carrying sandals and wearing a long white skirt; he, with a muscular arm
draped over her shoulder.
‘Annabel?’
‘Sorry, what?’
‘You went all quiet.’
‘Sorry.’ She took a sip of wine, embarrassed to have been caught day-dreaming. ‘I was just listening to the prawns — they should be sizzling … Excuse me.’ Annabel jumped up and hurried into the kitchen.
The pan was hissing. She shook it and gave the ingredients a rough stir with an egg whisk, trying to remember the husband-hunting rules. She reached for the neck of the wine bottle, but put it down. Getting drunk would not help. She lifted the lid off the saucepan and checked her reflection. The steam was making her curls frizz.
‘How’s the wine?’ she called, thinking to herself, you can do better than that.
‘It’s lovely,’ he shouted back.
She heard her own voice giving Clementine and Daniela advice: ‘If in doubt, ask an open question.’
‘Tell me more about the Top End.’ She returned to the lounge room and tucked her feet up under herself, then changed her mind and crossed her legs, so as to put them on display. Harry looked at them.
‘I have some photos,’ he said, digging out his phone. He showed Annabel the faces of the kids he taught and the teachers he worked with, the bare classrooms and the giant grey roos that hung about the school as if they were on yard duty.
He stopped and sniffed the air. ‘Is that gas?’
‘Damn!’ Annabel leapt off the couch.
The pasta water had boiled over and extinguished the flame. Pale noodles had floated to the surface like stick-figure corpses. She prodded them with a fork. They were stiff. Spaghetti rigor mortis. Scared to strike a match to light the stove because of the gas that had leaked into the air, she turned on the exhaust fan and returned to the couch.
Her plan of demonstrating her excellent wifely qualities was failing. She wondered whether there was any way she could have an Italian restaurant deliver some food without Harry realising it. She imagined herself paying a delivery boy as he passed her prawns in the kitchen from a window-cleaner’s rig.
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