Dear God, we could have been on the front page of the Daily Telegraph.
No, I do not think I’m being the slightest bit dramatic.
Well yes, obviously, that’s what I’d like to know too. It was the very first thing I said to them when I got here:
“What in the world started it?”
You could argue
that it started thirty-four years ago when twenty-year-old Frank Kettle, a tall, fair, hyperactive ex–altar boy, fell madly in lust with Maxine Leonard, a long-legged languid redhead just a few days short of her nineteenth birthday.
He was pumping with fresh testosterone. She knew better but did it anyway. In the backseat of Frank’s dad’s Holden. Twice. The first time involved a lot of head-bumping and grunting and breathless shifts of position, while Johnny O’Keefe bellowed at them from the car radio. The second time was slower and gentler and rather nice. Elvis soothingly suggested they love him tender. In each case, however, the terrible result was the same. One of Frank’s exuberant little sperm cells slammed head-on with one of Maxine’s rather less thrilled eggs, interrupting what should have been an uneventful journey to nonexistence.
Over the following days, while Maxine was chastely dating more suitable boys and Frank was pursuing a curvy brunette, two freshly fertilized eggs were busily bumping their way along Maxine’s fallopian tubes toward the haven of her horrified young uterus.
At the exact moment Maxine allowed the very suitable Charlie Edwards to hold back her long red hair while she puffed out her
cheeks and blew out nineteen candles, one egg fizzed with so much friction it split right in two. The other single egg burrowed its way comfortably in between the two new identical eggs.
Guests at Maxine’s birthday party thought they’d never seen her look so beautiful—slender, glowing, almost incandescent! Who could have guessed she’d been impregnated with some Catholic boy’s triplets?
Frank and Maxine were married, of course. In their wedding photos, they both have the blank-eyed, sedated look of recent trauma victims.
Seven months later, their triplet daughters came kicking and howling into the world. Maxine, who had never even held a baby before, was presented with three; it was the most despair-filled moment of her young life.
Well, that would be Gemma’s preference for how it started. Cat would argue that if she was going to begin with their conception, then why not go back through their entire family tree? Why not go back to the apes? Why not start with the Big Bang? I guess I did really, Gemma would chortle, Mum and Dad’s big bang. Oh funn-y, Cat would say. Let’s look at it logically, Lyn would interrupt. Quite clearly, it started the night of the spaghetti.
And Lyn, quite naturally, would be right.
It was a Wednesday night six weeks before Christmas. A nothing sort of night. An unassuming midweek night that should have vanished from their memories by Friday.
“What did we do Wednesday?” “I don’t know. Watch TV?”
That’s what they were doing. They were eating spaghetti and drinking red wine in front of the television. Cat was sitting cross-legged on the floor, with her back up against the sofa, her plate on her lap. Her husband, Dan, was sitting on the edge of the sofa, hunched over his dinner on the coffee table. It was the way they always ate dinner.
Dan had cooked the spaghetti, so it was hearty and bland. Cat
was the more accomplished cook. Dan’s approach to cooking was somehow too functional. He stirred his ingredients like concrete mix, one arm wrapped around the bowl, the other stirring the gluggy mix so vigorously you could see his biceps working. “So what? Gets the job done.”
That Wednesday night Cat was feeling no specific emotion; not especially happy, not especially sad. It was strange afterward, remembering how she sat there, shoveling Dan’s pasta into her mouth, so foolishly trusting of her life. She wanted to yell back at herself through time,
Concentrate!
They were watching a show called
Med School.
It was a soap about a group of very beautiful young medical students with shiny white teeth and complex love lives. Each episode featured a lot of blood and sex and anguish.
Cat and Dan shared a mild addiction to
Med School.
Whenever the plot took a new twist, they responded with loud enthusiasm, yelling at the television like children watching a pantomime: “Bastard!” “Dump him!” “It’s the
wrong medication!”
This week Ellie (blond, cutesy, cropped T-shirt) was in a state. She didn’t know whether to tell her boyfriend, Pete (dark, brooding, abnormal abs), about her drunken infidelity with a guest-starring troublemaker.
“Tell him, Ellie!” said Cat to the television. “Pete will forgive you. He’ll understand!”
The ad break came on, and a manic man in a yellow jacket bounced around a department store pointing an incredulous finger at the Christmas specials.
“I booked that health and beauty thing today,” said Cat, using Dan’s knee as a lever to help her reach over him for the pepper. “The woman had one of those gooey, spiritual voices. I felt like I was getting a massage just making a booking.”
For Christmas, she was giving her sisters (and herself) a weekend away at a health retreat in the Blue Mountains. The three of them would share an “exquisite experience” of “indulgent pam
pering.” They would be wrapped in seaweed, dunked in mud, and slathered in vitamin-enriched creams. It would be extremely amusing.
She was pleased with herself for thinking of it. “What a clever idea!” everyone would say on Christmas Day. Lyn definitely needed the stress relief. Gemma didn’t need it but she’d be right into pretending that she did. Cat herself wasn’t especially stressed either, but perhaps she was, because she wasn’t pregnant and she’d been off the Pill now for nearly a year. “Don’t get stressed about it,” everybody said wisely, as if they were the first to pass on that hot little tip. Apparently, the moment your ovaries noticed you were worried about becoming pregnant, they refused to cooperate.
Oh well, if you’re going to get all huffy about it, we’ll just close down.
A health insurance ad came on. Dan winced. “I hate this ad.”
“It’s effective. You watch it more closely than any other ad on television.”
He closed his eyes and averted his head. “O.K. I’m not looking, I’m not looking. Oh God. I can still hear that woman’s grating voice.”
Cat picked up the remote and turned up the volume.
“Aaaagh!” He opened his eyes and grabbed the remote from her.
He was behaving perfectly normally. She remembered that afterward and it made it worse, somehow. Every moment he behaved normally was part of the betrayal.
“Shh. It’s back on.”
Ellie’s betrayed boyfriend, Pete, appeared on the screen, flexing his freakish abs. Ellie gave the TV audience guilty looks.
“Tell him,” Cat told her. “I’d want to know. I couldn’t stand not to know the truth. Better to tell him, Ellie.”
“You think so?” said Dan.
“Yeah. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
There were no bells jangling a warning in Cat’s head. Not a single chime.
She had put down her wineglass on the coffee table and was feeling a pimple that had just that very moment appeared on her chin, undoubtedly a malevolent herald of her forthcoming period. Each month it appeared like an official stamp on her chin. There will be no baby for this woman this month. Nope. Sorry, try again! Cat had begun to cackle bitterly, throwing back her head witchlike, as soon as the first treacherous spots of blood appeared. It was such a joke, such a crushing anticlimax, after all those years of anxiously ensuring she
didn’t
have a baby, after all those months of “Are we ready to make this momentous change in our lives? I think we are, don’t you? Ooh, maybe we should have
one
more month of freedom!”
Don’t think about it, she told herself. Don’t think about it.
“Cat,” said Dan.
“What?”
“I have to tell you something.”
She snorted at his ponderous tone, pleased to be distracted from her pimple. She thought he was sending up the show. “Oh my God!” she said and hummed the
Med School
sound track that helpfully warned viewers when something dramatic and awful was about to happen. “What? Have you done an Ellie? Have you been unfaithful to me?”
“Well. Yes.”
He looked like he was going to be sick and he wasn’t that great an actor.
Cat put down her fork. “This is a joke, right? You’re saying you’ve slept with someone else?”
“Yes.” Now his mouth was doing something strange. He looked like a guilty little boy caught doing something disgusting.
She picked up the remote and turned off the television. Her heart was thumping with fear but also a strangely urgent desire, a desire to
know.
It was the sick feeling of excited resistance at the very top of the roller coaster—I don’t want to go hurtling over that precipice but I do, I do!
“When?” She still didn’t really believe it. She was half laugh
ing. “Years ago, do you mean? When we first started going out? You don’t mean recently?”
“About a month ago.”
“What?”
“It didn’t mean anything.” He looked down at his plate and picked up a mushroom with his fingers. Halfway to his mouth, he dropped it and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
“Would you just start from the beginning, please? When?”
“One night.”
“What night? Where was I?” She fumbled through her mind for events over the last few weeks.
“What night?”
It seemed that on a Tuesday night, three weeks before, at drinks after squash he met a girl. She came on to
him,
and he was flattered because she was, well, quite good-looking. He was a bit drunk, and so he went back to her place and one thing led to another. It didn’t mean anything, obviously. He didn’t know why he had made such a stupid, stupid mistake. Maybe all the stress lately with work, and, you know, the baby thing. Obviously it would never happen again and he was very, very,
very sorry and he loved her so
much and God, it was such a relief to have this out in the open!
It was almost like something interesting and unusual had happened to him and he’d forgotten to tell Cat about it until now. She asked him questions and he answered them. “Where did she live? How did you get home?”
He finished his story and Cat stared stupidly at him, waiting for it to hurt. All her muscles were tensed tight in anticipation of pain. It was like giving blood and waiting for the smiling doctor to find her vein.
“What was her name?” she said.
His eyes slid away. “Angela.”
Finally. An exquisite twist of her heart because this girl actually had a
name
and Dan
knew her name.
She gazed at her dinner congealing on her plate, and she could see every snakelike strand of spaghetti in nauseating defini
tion. The lens of a telescope had been clicked, and her previously blurry world was now in sharp-edged focus.
She stared with new eyes at their living room. Casually angled cushions on the sofa, bright wacky rug on polished floorboards. The bookshelf, lined with photos, each one carefully selected and framed as evidence of their happy, active lives. Look! We’re so loving and cosmopolitan, so fit and humorous! Here we are smiling and hugging in our ski gear! Here we are having a laugh before we go scuba diving! We party with our friends! We pull ironic faces at the camera!
She looked back at Dan. He was quite a good-looking man, her husband. It used to worry her in a pleasurable, not-really-worried way.
He’s been unfaithful to me, she thought, trying it out. It was bizarre. Surreal. Part of her wanted to switch the television back on and pretend it had never happened. I have to iron my skirt for tomorrow, she thought. I should do my Christmas list.
“It was nothing,” he said. “It was just a stupid one-night stand.”
“Don’t call it that!”
“O.K.”
“This is all so
tacky.”
He looked at her beseechingly. A speck of tomato sauce quivered beneath his nose.
“You’ve got food on your face,” she said savagely. His guilt was inflating her, making her powerful with righteousness. He was the criminal and she was the cop. The bad cop. The one that grabbed the criminal’s shirtfront and slammed him up against the wall.
She said, “Why are you telling me this now? Is it just to make you feel better?”
“I don’t know. I kept changing my mind. And then you said you’d want to know the truth.”
“I was talking to
Ellie
! I was watching television! I was eating dinner!”
“So you didn’t mean it?’
“For God’s sake. It’s too late now.”
They sat in silence for a few seconds, and suddenly she wanted to weep like a five-year-old in the playground because Dan was meant to be her
friend, her special friend.
“But, why?” Her voice cracked. “Why did you do it? I don’t understand why you would do that.”
“It didn’t mean anything. It really didn’t mean anything.” Had his friends told him to say that? “Tell her it didn’t mean anything, mate. That’s all they want to hear.”