Spinning Around

C
ATHERINE JINKS
was born in Brisbane, Queensland, in 1963. She grew up in Papua New Guinea and later spent four years studying medieval history at the University of Sydney. She now lives in Leura, New South Wales, with her husband, Peter, and their daughter.

Catherine is the author of many children's and young adult books, as well as several novels for adults including
The Gentleman's Garden
(2002).

CATHERINE
JINKS

The author would like to thank Trish Graham,
Andrew Hellen and Phillip Jinks for their help.

First published in 2004

Copyright © Catherine Jinks 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The
Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

Email: [email protected]

Web:
www.allenandunwin.com

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Jinks, Catherine, 1963–.

Spinning around.

ISBN 1 74114 155 9.

1. Marriage—Fiction. I. Title.

A823.3

Set in 11.5/14 pt Adobe Garamond by Midland Typesetters
Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Meredith Osborne

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER ONE

Friday

How did I ever get into this mess?

Look at me. Just look at me. I'm a walking disaster area. Check out the hands, for a start—you get hands like this, when you have babies. They're in water all day long, what with the nappies and the spills and the bottles that have to be disinfected, so they crack up like dried-out creekbeds. Happens practically overnight. With the result that I'm a 38-year-old law graduate with the hands of a fifty-year-old hop-picker. A fifty-year-old
blind
hop-picker. Count the bandaids. This one's so old, I can't remember why I put it on. I know why I haven't changed it—no time—but I can't remember why it's there. Number two is there because I'm ecologically responsible. I was washing the lid off a tin of stewed pears, in preparation for recycling, and gave myself the kind of gash you'd only reasonably expect to pick up after scaling a barbed-wire fence. (No more civic duty for yours truly. They can wash their own bloody tins.) Number three was Emily's fault: she dropped a glass. I picked up the pieces, put them in the kitchen tidy, forgot about them, and when I was trying to compress the rubbish by giving it a shove, so that I could insert just one more eggshell into it—
yeow
! Of course, it's my fault that our garbage bins are always overflowing. I never seem to have time to empty them.

Number four is a particularly bad crack; it got infected. Number five is a fingernail repair. Half my fingernail was ripped off because I always let them grow too long (no time to cut them), and they get nicks in them, and then the nicks get snagged on woollen jumpers, and the nails get torn way down into the fleshy bits, and there's nothing much you can do about that except wrap a bandaid around the damage and wait for the nail to sort itself out. Either it grows or it sheds. Whatever it does, however, you know that the bandaid is going to be there for a good, long time. Weeks, usually. I've forgotten what my hands look like without bandaids on them. Just as I've forgotten what my clothes look like without stains on them.

This top, for instance. This top dates from my breastfeeding period. You can tell because it buttons down the front, and because it's covered in faint, yellowish marks that are either baby puke or breast milk. (They're the same thing, really.) If I'd tackled those stains early enough, I might have got rid of them with a paste made of powdered laundry detergent, but of course I wasn't up to it, in those days. I was so sleep-deprived that soaking clothes in a bucket of NapiSan was about as far as I could extend myself. Anyway, what would have been the point? Because this stain here is much more recent (chocolate biscuit fingerprints) and this one is too. Don't ask me what it is. A mystery stain. What's watery and greenish and ends up on your shoulder? I don't think I want to know.

Stains on the top. Stains on the shoes. Stains on the skirt, which has an elasticised waistband. Yes—an elasticised waistband. That's how low I've sunk. Or rather, that's how big I've got. I used to be size ten, before I had Emily. I used to wear natural fibres, and iron all my clothes, and shun things like track-pants and elasticised waistbands. I also used to wash my hair more than once a week. How the mighty have fallen!

You may wonder what stops me from washing my hair. Well, nothing really—except the fact that every time I step into the shower, despite all my attempts to bribe and distract, the kids start screaming in the kitchen. And I can't shower when they're asleep, because of the noise made by the plumbing. It's extraordinary, like the engine room of the Titanic; I don't know what it is about the pipes in this place. It's as if they're haunted. I've heard them grumbling and wheezing away at two o'clock in the morning. They're yet another aspect of this house that needs a complete overhaul.

But don't get me started on the house. If you want to talk about mess, here it is—mess central. Just cast your eyes over my domicile, will you? Note the layer of dust from the renovations, and the matching pile of builder's rubble outside the window. Note the sticky patches on the kitchen floor, the fingermarks at knee level, the biscuit crumbs, the cockroach traps, the soggy fragment of chewed Cruskit on top of the video player, the doll's house furniture and plush animals and frayed silk scarves and capless marking pens and bits of ribbon and Tonka trucks and broken Fisher-Price activity centres scattered all over every available surface. Note the big, nasty stain on the couch (blackcurrant juice), and the scribble on the wall. That was Jonah. I used to nag Emily about leaving the caps off her coloured markers, but I'm wiser now. After all, Jonah can't do much harm with a dried-out marker, can he?

Last, but not least, take a squiz at the refrigerator. I ought to get a biological hazard sign. The inside certainly wouldn't pass a health inspection; you can't pull the crisper drawer out because some kind of sticky brown paste has welded it to the white plastic surface beneath it. As for the outside, it's almost as bad as the inside, though in a different way. All those unsightly, reddish bills stuck up there, glowering at me. The letter from my cousin in England that's six months old and that I still haven't answered. The laughable builder's quotes. The reminder about the day care fete which utterly slipped my mind. The takeaway menus that are never used, these days, because we don't have the money to splurge on Thai food. The backcare health leaflet. (Don't ask.) The Tresillian Parents' Help Line number. The invitation to my twenty-year high school reunion.

I remember the ten-year reunion. At least, I remember
me
at the ten-year reunion. I had twenty thousand dollars in the bank, a great figure, a trendy haircut, an impressive and secure job, fantastic clothes and a phenomenally sexy boyfriend.

Now I'm overweight, in debt, dowdy and unshaven. My hair looks awful. I've got minced hands, a part-time job that I can't enjoy because I feel too guilty about it, and a husband who seems to be cheating on me.

So I repeat: how did I ever get into this mess?

It was Miriam who broke the news, needless to say. Miriam Coutts. She's Senior Manager of the Investigations unit at the Pacific Commercial Bank, and she's always had a nose for suspicious behaviour. That's why she does what she does. She started off as a branch teller, but was so successful at stopping frauds over the counter that the bank moved her to its Investigations unit, and had her chasing down credit card scams at the age of twenty-three. That was when I first met her. Since then she's taken over the unit, but she hasn't really changed much. She was always old at heart. Even when we were sharing a shabby terrace house in Paddington, and living on practically nothing, she had a managerial look about her. Very neat. Very organised. A routine for everything, and a file for everything else. That makes her sound deadly, I know, but she isn't. She has a very dry, very sharp sense of humour, and some interesting eccentricities: an addiction to Space Food Sticks, a taste for watching stock-car races, a collection of antique medicine bottles. She's also one of those people who don't age very much, for some reason—perhaps because she has olive skin and a ‘thin' gene. Even her hair is the same as it always was, shiny and dark and cut in a pageboy style. Only the labels on her clothes are different.

She turned up this evening in a Carla Zampatti suit. She also wore shoes that matched her handbag, which was a kind of sage green. I remember when I used to wear sage-green shoes with my sage-green handbag. Or taupe shoes with my taupe handbag. Back in the Good Old Days, when Matthew admired me for my stylish wardrobe as well as my pert little bottom. (I seem to have lost both.) The last time I used my suede brush was to scrub dog shit off the soles of Emily's white sandals. I bet Miriam still employs her own suede brush to brush suede, and keeps it in a drawer along with the conditioning oil she still uses on her handbags.