One Summer Between Friends

by Trish Morey

  ‘What?’ said Jules and Pru together.

  ‘There’s a hand on her booby.’

  Jules saw there was: a flour print of Pru’s hand neatly cupping one breast. She joined in the laughter.

  ‘I’m such a silly billy!’ Pru said. ‘I forgot to put my apron on.’

  ‘Put one of those on the other side,’ Jules said, ‘and you could almost be the Little Mermaid.’

  ‘Ariel!’ said Della gleefully, clapping her hands, because she’d watched Jules’s old videos a thousand times.

  Pru patted the flour from her top. ‘I always thought I was more of an Ursula.’

  8

  Floss blinked into the grey light of early morning. Thirty-seven years old. In three years, she’d be forty. In thirteen, she’d be fifty. In another thirty-seven she’d be seventy-four. Would she make it that far, or had she already used up more than half her life?

  Whoa! She had to get herself out of this funk.

  She knew what would help. She looked hopefully over at Andy, but he was still sleeping, a dark shadow in the gloom, his breathing slow and even. She’d been on tenterhooks all yesterday, wondering what kind of mood he’d be in when he got home after his days away on the supply ship run, but he’d breezed in, pecking her on the cheek before being buried alive under the deluge of their children’s welcome-home hugs. And if he gave a toss for the acrimony that had accompanied his departure, it hadn’t shown—he’d acted like their argument had never happened, like he’d dispensed with it as easily as flicking a bug from his arm. Half his luck. She’d spent the last three days replaying every sentence, trying to work out what she should have said to turn their problem around. After dinner Andy had read a couple of chapters of Harry Potter to the kids and gone to bed at nine o’clock. He’d been asleep and snoring by the time she’d finished her chores and slipped in beside him.

  But today was her birthday, and he had no excuse. If he didn’t display some kind of affection towards her beyond a peck on the cheek, she’d burst.

  Exactly the way her bladder would if she didn’t get out of bed this minute.

  She snapped on the kettle in the kitchen on her way back from the bathroom and stood at the sink, her arms crossed, gazing unseeingly at the wall of greenery swaying outside the window. It would be nice to linger in bed on her birthday, but there were kids to get ready for school, and three rooms to clean and change over before today’s plane came in.

  She squeezed her arms and looked around her simple country-style kitchen with the big table in the centre, every horizontal surface cluttered with lunch boxes and water bottles and whatever the kids had last got out of the fridge or pantry and left there and that she hadn’t had the energy to put away, and felt a wave of despair wash over her. Because this was half the problem. It wasn’t just the sex, or lack of it. It was this. The same thing. The same cycle of wake up, get the kids up, breakfast, school, cleaning rooms, washing, making dinner, homework, bed. The same view of swaying palms outside her kitchen window. And the next morning she got out of bed early to face it all over again.

  And if she couldn’t even look forward to having sex with her husband to relieve the monotony?

  She spooned coffee into two battered mugs as if on autopilot, one heaped spoon for him and one rounded for her, and two sugars for him, and there was no preventing the words of an old Marianne Faithfull ballad worming its way into her mind, a ballad written before she was born that she’d found in her mother’s music collection when she was young. A song she wished she’d never been curious enough to listen to, because the older she’d got, the song had become harder to forget. ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’.

  Today Floss was the same age as Lucy in the song. Thirty-seven years old, and with a husband who disappeared to work and whose kids went to school and who’d never get beyond the prison-like walls of her tiny home. The way her life was going, she’d never get to Paris, never ride in a sports car, never feel the warm wind in her hair either.

  Floss had seen pictures of Paris, of course. She’d talked to guests from all over who’d told her it was the most romantic city in the world. But what was it really like to experience it for yourself? Or, for that matter, what about London and New York? Rome and Istanbul? All of these places that were just names on a map to her. Foreign. Exotic.

  She looked down at the mugs, surprised to see she’d already put milk into them. Autopilot again. Her life in a word. Not having to think, just to do: the dishes, the cooking, the change overs. The sheer bloody drudgery of her existence. Day after day after bloody day.

  She sniffed as she picked up the coffees, and headed back to her bedroom.

  There was a birthday card–sized envelope on her pillow. There wasn’t a present to go with it. They hadn’t done presents for each other in forever. Why buy something just for the sake of it? Andy had said they had everything they ever needed already. Back then, she’d agreed with him. But now?

  She put down their coffees and sat on the bed, picking up the envelope and flicking it over. Andy was still lying under the covers, watching warily.

  ‘I thought you were asleep,’ she said.

  ‘I was.’ One corner of his mouth kicked up, a concession to a smile as he raised himself to kiss her. It was a little stab to her heart that he missed her mouth. ‘Happy birthday, Floss.’

  She smiled anyway and pulled out the card. It had a bouquet of flowers on the front and ‘To my wife’ in fancy gold lettering. On the inside were more sprays of flowers scattered around the kind of sugary-sweet verse that made your teeth ache, but that was okay, because Andy had never been great at expressing his emotions. He’d written ‘To Floss’ above the verse, and ‘Love from Andy’ below it.

  She raised her eyebrows. Okay, so once upon a time he might have addressed it to his ‘favourite wife’ and added a kiss or two under his name, but at least he hadn’t signed it simply ‘from Andy’. That had to be worth something, surely?

  ‘Okay?’ he asked, looking at her with such sad eyes, almost like he was afraid of her, like he was afraid she was going to start another argument.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, adding a smile, because she meant it, but also because she mustn’t appear disappointed. He’d remembered it was her birthday, after all. And she didn’t really care that Andy hadn’t chosen to break their rule about not buying each other presents. She just wouldn’t have minded if he had.

  She stood the card on her bedside table and picked up her coffee.

  ‘Got a surprise for you tonight,’ Andy said, reaching for his coffee, his bare chest on full, glorious display. He was such a fine-looking specimen for his age, fit from his physical work, was it any wonder that the neglected place between her thighs went all tingly as her mind turned to sex?

  ‘Ooh,’ she said, leaning closer, propping herself on one arm. ‘Tell me more?’

  He looked supremely smug. ‘I’m not saying anything, other than to say that tonight, you don’t need to worry about making tea. It’s all taken care of, all right?’ And then he patted the back of her hand where it rested on the doona. Like she was the family pet.

  What about after tea? she wanted to ask. But she mustn’t start a row. She mustn’t look ungrateful or needy. Dinner out was good. It just wasn’t what she really wanted. It wasn’t enough.

  They piled out of the van and into the Halfway Café at six pm for her birthday tea. Eating at a café that mostly catered to the visiting tourist trade was a rare treat, not least because it was expensive. Andy set down the guidelines for choosing a meal: they weren’t about to pay for the local kingfish or steak at restaurant prices so their choices were limited to pizza or burgers, and the nut sundae selection of the dessert menu. All apart from Floss, because it was her birthday, and she could choose another dessert if she wanted.

  Annie immediately took umbrage. ‘I’m too old for a frickin’ nut sundae,’ she said, tossing the menu on the table and crossing her arms. Floss looked at their sixteen-year-old daughter and was sympathetic.
Tonight she looked more like twenty-one, although that probably owed more to the skilful cat’s eye curl at the ends of her eyeliner and the impressive bust under her wrap top. A bust ably assisted, Floss knew, by the push-up bra that Annie had requested for her own birthday.

  Floss’s DNA didn’t run to a steady hand with eyeliner and she didn’t own a push-up bra, but she had made an effort tonight, taking more time with her hair so her messy up-do looked more designer chic than struggle bun. She’d chosen her favourite blue and pink paisley peasant blouse and even broken out the mascara and lippy, feeling pretty good about herself until she’d made the mistake of asking Andy how she looked. ‘Yeah, all right,’ he’d said, barely sparing her a glance, before yelling at the kids to hurry up and get in the van.

  ‘You can share my cake,’ said Floss to Annie.

  ‘What about me?’ grumbled Brodie, gangly arms angled on the table like grasshopper limbs. ‘I’m not a kid anymore.’

  ‘Do we have to have nut sundae?’ piped up eleven-year-old Cameron, who was making noises to younger brother Ben about the chocolate brownie listed on the menu.

  ‘You’ll have what I say you can have,’ said Andy, laying down the law. ‘There’s nothing wrong with nut sundae.’

  ‘I hate nut sundae,’ said Mikey, buying into the mood and looking thoroughly dissatisfied at an upside-down menu he had no hope of reading even the right way up.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ snapped Annie. ‘You love it when we have it at home.’

  ‘Have I had it before?’

  Annie rolled her eyes.

  ‘Of course you have, you drongo,’ said Brodie. ‘Mum makes it all the time in summer.’

  ‘Brodie called me names!’ cried Mikey.

  ‘Maybe we could just sort the pizzas out first,’ Floss suggested, ‘and worry about dessert afterwards if anyone’s still hungry.’

  ‘I’ll still be hungry,’ said Brodie.

  ‘And me!’ said Cameron.

  ‘I don’t want nut sundae!’ yelled Mikey.

  ‘Shh,’ said Floss, feeling a vague drumbeat behind her eyes. Dinner out with the kids. What a brilliant present.

  ‘All right?’ said Andy.

  She looked at him. He’d dressed up tonight too, as much as Andy did—a rare open-neck shirt under his crew jumper—and with his six weeks’ overdue hair flicking over his ears and an unshaven jaw, he was definitely the best thing on the menu tonight. That is, if he was on the menu.

  ‘How about we order dinner and get this lot home,’ she said. Because the sooner they got home, the sooner they could get the kids to bed and think about going to bed themselves. Surely tonight, for her birthday, he might forget about his book for once?

  Andy’s eyes did a sweep at the already bored bunch of kids around the table. ‘Yeah, let’s do it. Okay, kids, how many for ham and pineapple?’

  An hour later, full up on pizza and ice-cream, the family dived through a rain shower and climbed back into the van. Annie buckled Mikey into his booster seat while Floss and Andy jumped into the front, brushing off the rain.

  ‘Not such a great idea, then,’ Andy said under his breath. He took her hand and squeezed it. The acknowledgement and the feel of his hand around hers were so unexpected that Floss couldn’t help but smile.

  ‘It was okay.’

  He snorted. ‘It was a disaster. I’ll make it up to you somehow.’ And before she could respond, he looked over his shoulder, and said, ‘Everybody in?’

  ‘Mikey says he doesn’t feel well,’ Annie said, sliding the van door closed and clicking her seat belt.

  ‘Hang on, Mikey,’ said Andy, ‘we’ll be home before you know it.’

  They were halfway home, Floss busy working out ways to tell Andy exactly how he could make up for tonight’s disaster, when she heard the sudden gush, felt the splatter, and heard Annie’s scream followed closely by, ‘Oh, Mikey, gross! Stop the car!’

  To Andy’s credit, as soon as they got home he hosed out the van (it wasn’t like it was new, but they’d been so right to get rubber mats rather than carpet) while Floss bathed Mikey and collected up the vomit-splashed clothes, now reeking of second-hand ham and pineapple pizza and chocolate sauce. It wasn’t half as nice second time around.

  She was still settling Mikey when she heard Andy come inside and hit the shower, no doubt needing it after sorting out the van. He was just getting in bed by the time she got to the bedroom to grab her dressing gown and head for the shower herself.

  ‘Quite the night,’ she said, feeling battered by the events of the evening. Though if Andy was still determined to make up for the disaster of the evening, she wasn’t going to be unwilling. She’d already waited too long.

  He sighed and picked up his book from his bedside table. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’

  She clutched her dressing gown against her belly. ‘It’s still my birthday—at least for another hour—if you still want to work out a way of making up for it.’

  For a moment he looked like he wanted to argue, and then he seemed to relent, and said, ‘Sure. I’m sorry your birthday got fucked up. Go have a shower. I’ll be waiting.’

  It was the fastest shower she’d ever had, her clothes kicked into a corner of the bathroom rather than being rinsed out. Except when she got back to the bedroom, Andy was already snoring.

  ‘Oh, give me a break,’ she said, as she slipped in beside him, punching her pillow because it would have been bad form to punch her husband while he was asleep, no matter how much she felt like doing it.

  Andy snorted, oblivious, and rolled over, putting his back to her.

  Floss squeezed her eyes shut and rolled over likewise, ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ playing on an endless loop in her mind, words she’d like to erase from her memory, because—god knows—that story hadn’t ended well.

  She hugged her pillow tight. ‘Happy birthday, Floss,’ she muttered as she waited fruitlessly for sleep to claim her. ‘Happy freaking birthday.’

  9

  Jules hated turbulence. Stupid really, when the only practical way off the island was by plane, but she would never get used to the way the small plane was tossed around on the wind currents, dropping into holes in the air and landing with a thump before juddering along towards the next invisible booby trap.

  She sat with her seat belt firmly fastened, willing herself to relax, telling herself that staring at the propeller outside her window wouldn’t be enough to prevent an engine falling off, all the while trying to believe that a plane in turbulence was no different to a car on a bumpy road. But how could that be anywhere close to the same when there was no shoulder to pull off onto if you broke down, just thirty thousand feet of empty, unhelpful air under your wings instead?

  No, she hated turbulence.

  She hated the turbulence in her head even more.

  Don’t get ahead of yourself, the doctor had told her, but how did one do that exactly? How did you maintain a zen-like calm and think, Well, if it happens—and the tests come back positive—then it happens and I’ll just have to deal with it then? How did you restrain yourself from using what little internet allowance you had to consult Doctor Google and search for terms like ‘needle biopsy’? ‘Lumpectomy’? ‘Mastectomy’? ‘Radiotherapy’? ‘Chemotherapy’?

  Cancer.

  How did you stop the bubble of fear that was wedged right at the back of your throat from rising further until it damn near choked you with panic?

  How could you not be more aware of your own mortality?

  And even though the sites were full of happy-clappy stories of smiling people wearing scarves over bald heads who had won the battle against breast cancer—even though there was article after article saying the odds of overcoming this thing if discovered early enough were tipped massively in your favour, there were other stories too, of women who weren’t so lucky—or who had considered themselves lucky and counted themselves among the survivors, until they’d discovered secondaries a year or two on and it had all turned to c
ustard. It was those other stories that nibbled and gnawed at Jules’s threadbare confidence, like the rats that chewed off the green shoots from the island’s forest floor.

  Jules leaned her head back against the rest and closed her eyes.

  If she’d never got pregnant and had Della, then the fishing trip would never have happened. She would never have lost her father, and her mother wouldn’t have lost her husband. Her father was always the stronger of her two parents. He would have supported Pru, whatever happened to Jules. Bottom line, they would have coped.

  But Pru alone with Della?

  Jules swallowed. God—and the doctor had told her not to get ahead of herself? How could she not get ahead of herself? How could she not join the dots? All she had at the moment were dots. Possibilities. And if those dots joined up and ended up somewhere she didn’t want to go …

  She pinched her nose and took a deep breath as the plane lurched and bounced. The intercom crackled into life and the pilot apologised again for the conditions and said they were trying to find smooth air but meanwhile, to remain seated with seat belts fastened.

  Smooth air. Jules could do with some of that. Already she knew more about breast cancer than she ever wanted to. And the crazy thing was, if she got lucky, she might be able to forget it all in a week. It might be nothing. A cyst. Benign. Because she’d searched those words as well, joined those dots and followed them until they took her home in a couple of days, to hug her daughter and kiss her mum and say with a smile of relief, ‘False alarm.’

  Which dots should she believe? The ones she dearly wanted to, or the ones that scared the shit out of her?

  The plane pitched and bounced and a woman on the other side of the aisle gasped. ‘Oh, god,’ she whimpered, more a cry of resignation than a prayer for help. ‘When will it stop?’ Her partner at the window seat said nothing, clearly trying to put on a not entirely convincing brave face given his complexion was a pasty grey.