Big Little Lies (16 page)

T
here are harder things than this,
thought Madeline as she folded a pair of white skinny jeans and added them to the half-packed open suitcase on Abigail’s bed.

Madeline had no right to the feelings she was experiencing. Their magnitude embarrassed her. They were wildly disproportionate to the situation at hand.

So, Abigail wanted to live with her father and she wasn’t being all that nice about it. But she was fourteen. Fourteen-year-olds were not known for their empathy.

Madeline kept thinking she was fine about it. She was over it. No big deal. She was busy. Other things to do. And then it would hit her again, like a blow to the abdomen. She’d find herself taking short shallow breaths as if she were in labor. (Twenty-seven hours with Abigail. Nathan and the midwife joked about football while Madeline died. Well, she didn’t die, but she remembered thinking that this sort of pain could only end in death, and the last words she’d hear would be about Manly’s chances of winning the premiership.)

She lifted one of Abigail’s tops from the laundry basket. It was a pale peachy color, and it didn’t suit Abigail’s coloring, but she loved it. It was hand-wash only. Bonnie could do that now. Or maybe the new upgraded version of Nathan did laundry now. Nathan Version 2.0. Stays with his wife. Volunteers at homeless shelters. Hand-washes.

He was coming over later today with his brother’s truck to pick up Abigail’s bed.

Last night Abigail had asked Madeline if she could please take her bed to Nathan’s house. It was a beautiful four-poster canopy bed that Madeline and Ed had given Abigail for her fourteenth birthday. It had been worth every exorbitant cent to see the ecstasy on Abigail’s face when she first saw it. She’d actually danced with joy. It was like remembering another person.

“Your bed stays here,” Ed said.

“It’s her bed,” Madeline said. “I don’t mind if she takes it.” She said it to hurt Abigail, to hurt her back, to show that she didn’t care that Abigail was moving out, that she would now come to visit on weekends, but her real life, her real home would be somewhere else. But Abigail wasn’t hurt at all. She was just pleased she was getting the bed.

“Hey,” said Ed from the bedroom door.

“Hey,” said Madeline.

“Abigail should be packing her own clothes,” said Ed. “Surely she’s old enough.”

Maybe she was, but Madeline did all the laundry in the house. She knew where things were in the wash, dry, fold, put-away assembly line, so it made sense for Madeline to do it. Ever since Ed had first met Abigail, he’d always expected just a little too much of her. How many times had she heard those exact words? “Surely she’s old enough.” He didn’t know children of Abigail’s age, and it seemed to Madeline that he always shot just a little too high. It was different with Fred and Chloe, because he’d been there from the beginning.
He knew and understood them in a way he never really knew and understood Abigail. Of course, he was fond of her, and he was a good, attentive stepdad, a tricky role he’d taken on immediately without complaint (two months after they began dating, Ed went with Abigail to a Father’s Day morning tea at school; Abigail had adored him back then), and maybe they would have had a great relationship except that Nathan the prodigal father had returned at the worst time, when Abigail was eleven. Too old to be managed. Too young to understand or control her feelings. She changed overnight. It was as though she thought showing Ed even just basic courtesy was a betrayal of her father. Ed had an old-fashioned authoritarian streak that didn’t respond well to disrespect, and it certainly compared unfavorably to Nathan’s let’s-have-a-laugh persona.

“Do you think it’s my fault?” said Ed.

Madeline looked up. “What?”

“That Abigail is moving in with her dad?” He looked distressed, uncertain. “Was I too hard on her?”

“Of course not,” she said, although she did think it was partly his fault, but what was the point in saying that? “I think Bonnie is the real attraction,” she said.

“Do you ever wonder if Bonnie has had electric-shock treatment?” mused Ed.

“There is a kind of
blankness
about her,” agreed Madeline.

Ed came in and ran his hand over one of the posts of Abigail’s bed. “I had a hell of a job putting this together,” he said. “Do you think Nathan will be able to manage it?”

Madeline snorted.

“Maybe I should offer to help,” said Ed. He was serious. He couldn’t bear to think of a DIY job being done badly.

“Don’t you dare,” said Madeline. “Shouldn’t you be gone? Don’t you have an interview?”

“Yeah, I do.” Ed bent to kiss her.

“Someone interesting?”

“It’s Pirriwee Peninsula’s oldest book club,” said Ed. “They’ve been meeting once a month for forty years.”

“I should start a book club,” said Madeline.

Harper:
I will say this for Madeline: She invited all the parents to join her book club, including Renata and me. I already belong to a book club, so I declined, which is probably just as well. Renata and I always enjoyed quality literature, not those lightweight, derivative best sellers. Pure fluff! Each to their own, of course.

Samantha:
The whole Erotic Book Club started as a joke. It was actually my fault. I was doing canteen duty with Madeline and I said something to her about a raunchy scene in the book she’d chosen. It wasn’t even that raunchy, to be honest, I was just having a laugh, but then Madeline says, “Oh, did I forget to mention it was an erotic book club?” So we all started calling it the Erotic Book Club, and the more people like Harper and Carol clutched their pearls, the worse Madeline got.

Bonnie:
I teach a yoga class on Thursday nights, otherwise I would have loved to have joined Madeline’s book club.

One Month Before the Trivia Night

I
have to take in my family tree tomorrow,” said Ziggy.

“No, that’s next week,” said Jane.

She was sitting on the bathroom floor, leaning against the wall while Ziggy had a bath. Steam and the scent of strawberry bubble bath filled the air. He loved to wallow in deep, very hot bubble baths. “Hotter, mummy, hotter!” he was always demanding while his skin turned so red, Jane was worried she was scalding him. “More bubbles!” Then he played long, complicated games through the bubbles, incorporating erupting volcanoes, Jedi knights, ninjas and scolding mothers.

“We need special cardboard for the family tree,” said Ziggy.

“Yes, we’ll get some on the weekend,” said Jane. She grinned at him. He’d molded the bubbles on his head into a Mohawk. “You look funny.”

“No, I look supercool,” said Ziggy. He went back to his game. “Kapow! Kapow! Ow! Stop that right now! Watch out, Yoda! Where’s your lightsaber? Say please, Yoda! Here it is!”

Water splashed and bubbles flew.

Jane returned to the book Madeline had chosen for their first book club meeting. “I picked something with lots of sex, drugs and murder,” Madeline had said, “so we have a lively discussion. Ideally there should be an argument.”

The book was set in the 1920s. It was good. Jane had somehow gotten out of the habit of reading for pleasure. Reading a novel was like returning to a once-beloved holiday destination.

Right now she was in the middle of a sex scene. She flipped the page.

“I’ll punch you in the face, Darth Vader!” cried Ziggy.

“Don’t say ‘punch you in the face,’” said Jane without looking up. “That’s not nice.” She kept reading. A cloud of strawberry-scented bubbles floated onto the page of her book. She pushed it away with her finger. She was feeling something: a tiny pinpoint of feeling. She shifted slightly on the bathroom tiles. No. Surely not. From a book? From two nicely written paragraphs? But yes. She was. She was ever so slightly aroused.

It was a revelation that after all this time she could still feel something so basic, so biological, so pleasant.

For a moment she saw the staring eye in the ceiling and her throat tightened, but then her nostrils twitched with a sudden flare of anger.
I refuse,
she said to the memory.
I refuse you today, because guess what,
I have other memories of sex. I have lots of
memories of an ordinary boyfriend and an ordinary bed, where
the sheets weren’t that crisp and there were no staring
eyes in the ceiling and there wasn’t that muffled, draped
silence, there was music and ordinariness and natural light and
he thought I was pretty, you bastard, he thought I
was pretty, and I
was
pretty, and how dare you,
how dare you, how dare you?

“Mummy?” said Ziggy.

“Yes?” she said. She felt a crazed, angry kind of happiness, as if someone were daring her not to be.

“I need that spoon that’s shaped sort of like this.” He drew a semicircle in the air. He wanted the egg slicer.

“Oh, Ziggy, that’s enough kitchen stuff in the bath,” she said, but she was already putting her book down and standing up to go and get it for him.

“Thank you, Mummy,” said Ziggy angelically, and she looked down at his big green eyes with the tiny droplets of water beaded on his eyelashes and she said, “I love you so much, Ziggy.”

“I need that spoon pretty fast,” said Ziggy.

“OK,” she said.

She turned to leave the bathroom, and Ziggy said, “Do you think Miss Barnes will be mad at me for not bringing in my family tree project?”

“Darling, it’s next week,” said Jane. She went into the kitchen and read out loud from the notice stuck to the fridge by a magnet. “‘All the children will have a chance to talk about their family trees when they bring in their projects on Friday, March twenty-four’—oh, calamity.”

He was right. The family tree was due tomorrow. She’d had it in her head that it was due the same Friday as her dad’s birthday dinner, but then Dad’s dinner had been moved until a week later because her brother was going away with a new girlfriend. It was all bloody Dane’s fault.

No. It was her fault. She only had one child. She had a diary. It shouldn’t be that hard. They’d have to do it now. Right now. She couldn’t send him to school without his project. He’d be calling attention to himself, and he hated it when that happened. If it were Madeline’s Chloe, she couldn’t care less. She’d giggle and shrug and look cute. Chloe liked being the center of attention, but all poor Ziggy wanted was to blend in to the crowd, just like Jane, but for some reason the opposite kept happening.

“Let the water out of the bath, Ziggy!” she called. “We have to do that project now!”

“I need the special spoon!” called back Ziggy.

“There’s no time!” shrieked Jane. “Let the water out now!”

Cardboard. They needed a large sheet of cardboard. Where would they get that from at this time of night? It was past seven. All the shops would be closed.

Madeline. She’d have some spare cardboard. They could drive around to her place and Ziggy could stay in the car in his pajamas while Jane rushed in and got it.

She texted Madeline:
Crisis! Forgot family tree project!!!!!!!!!! (Idiot!) Do you have spare sheet of cardboard! If so, can I drive around and pick it up?

She pulled the instruction sheet off the fridge.

The family tree project was designed to give the child “a sense of their personal heritage and the heritage of others, while reflecting on the people who are important in their lives now and in the past.” The child had to draw a tree and put a photo of themselves in the middle, then include photos and names of family members, ideally dating back to at least two generations, including siblings, aunties, uncles, grandparents and “if possible great-grandparents or even great-great-grandparents!”

There was a big underlined note down at the bottom.

NOTE TO PARENTS: OBVIOUSLY YOUR CHILD WILL NEED YOUR HELP, BUT PLEASE MAKE SURE THEY HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO THIS PROJECT! I WANT TO SEE
THEIR
WORK, NOT
YOURS
!
Miss (Rebecca) Barnes

It shouldn’t take that long. She already had all the photos ready. She’d been feeling so smug about not leaving that until the last minute. Her mother had gotten prints done of photos from the family
albums. There was even one of Ziggy’s great-great-grandfather on Jane’s dad’s side, taken in 1915 just a few short months before he died on the battlefield in France. All Jane had to do was get Ziggy to draw the tree and write out at least some of the names.

Except it was already past his bedtime. She’d let him stay far too long in the bath. He was ready for story and bed. He’d be moaning and yawning and sliding off his chair, and she’d have to beg and bribe and cajole, and the whole process would be excruciating.

This was silly. She should just put him to bed. It was ridiculous to make a five-year-old stay up late to do a school project.

Maybe she could just give him the day off tomorrow? A sickie? But he loved Fridays. FAB Fridays. That’s what Miss Barnes called them. Also, Jane really needed him to go to school tomorrow so she could work. She had three deadlines to meet.

Do it in the morning before school? Ha. Yeah, right. She could barely get him to put his shoes on in the morning. Both of them were useless in the mornings.

Deep breaths. Deep breaths.

Who knew that kindergarten could be so stressful? Oh, this was funny! This was so funny. She just couldn’t seem to make herself laugh.

Her mobile phone was silent. She picked it up and looked at it. Nothing. Madeline normally answered texts immediately. She’d probably had enough of Jane lurching from crisis to crisis.

“Mummy! I need my spoon!” cried Ziggy.

Her phone rang. She snatched it up.

“Madeline?”

“No, love, it’s Pete.” It was Pete the Plumber. Jane’s heart sank. “Listen, love—”

“I know! I’m so sorry! I haven’t done the pay yet. I’ll do it tonight.”

How could she have forgotten? She always did the pay slips for Pete by lunchtime on a Thursday, so he could pay his “boys” on Friday.

“No worries,” said Pete. “See ya, love.”

He hung up. Not one for small talk.

“Mummy!”

“Ziggy!” Jane marched into the bathroom. “It’s time to let the water out! We’ve got to do your family tree project!”

Ziggy lay stretched out on his back, his hands nonchalantly crossed behind his head like a sunbather on a beach of bubbles. “You said we didn’t have to take it in tomorrow.”

“We do! I was right, you were wrong! I mean, you were right, I was wrong! We have to do it right now! Quick! Let’s get into your pajamas!”

She reached into the warm bathwater and wrenched out the plug, knowing as she did that she was making a mistake.

“No!” shouted Ziggy, enraged. He liked pulling the plug out himself. “I’ll do it!’

“I gave you enough chances,” said Jane in her sternest, firmest voice. “It’s time to get out. Don’t make a fuss.”

The water roared. Ziggy roared. “
Mean
Mummy! I do it! You let me do it! No, no.”

He threw himself forward to grab for the plug so he could put it back in and pull it back out again. Jane held the plug up high out of his grasp. “We don’t have time for that!”

Ziggy stood up in the bathwater, his skinny, slippery little body covered in bubbles and his face contorted in demented rage. He grabbed for the plug, slipped, and Jane had to grab his arm hard to stop him from falling and probably knocking himself out.

“You HURT me!” screamed Ziggy.

Ziggy’s near fall had made Jane’s heart lurch, and now she was furious with him.

“QUIT YELLING!” she yelled.

She grabbed a towel from the rail and wrapped it around him, lifting him straight out of the bath, kicking and screaming. She
carried him into his bedroom and laid him with elaborate care on the bed because she was terrified she might throw him against the wall.

He screamed and thrashed back on the bed. Spittle frothed over his lips. “I HATE YOU!” he screamed.

The neighbors must be close to calling the police.

“Stop it,” she said in a reasonable, grown-up voice. “You are behaving like a baby.”

“I want a different Mummy!” shouted Ziggy. His foot rammed her stomach, nearly winding her.

Her self-control slipped from her grasp. “STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!” She screamed like a madwoman. It felt good, as if she deserved this.

Ziggy stopped instantly. He scuttled back against the headboard, looking up at her in terror. He curled up in a little naked ball, his face squashed into his pillow, sobbing piteously.

“Ziggy,” she said. She put her hand on his knobbly spine and he jerked away from her. She felt sick with guilt. ”I’m sorry for yelling like that,” she said. She draped the bath towel back over his naked body.
I’m sorry for wanting to throw you against the wall.

He flipped over and launched himself at her, clinging to her like a koala, his arms around her neck, his legs around her waist, his wet, snotty face buried in her neck.

“It’s OK,” she said. “Everything is OK.” She retrieved the towel from the bed and wrapped it back around him. “Quick. Let’s get you into your pj’s before you get cold.”

“There’s someone buzzing,” said Ziggy.

“What?” said Jane.

Ziggy lifted his head from her shoulder, his face alert and inquisitive. “Hear it?”

Someone was buzzing the security door for their apartment.

Jane carried him out into the living room.

“Who is it?” said Ziggy. He was thrilled. There were still tears
on his cheeks but his eyes were bright and clear. He’d moved on as if that whole terrible incident had never taken place.

“I don’t know,” said Jane. Was it someone complaining about the noise? The police? The child protection authorities coming to take him away?

She picked up the security phone. “Hello?”

“It’s me! Let me in! It’s chilly.”

“Madeline?” She buzzed her in, put Ziggy down and went to open the front door of the apartment.

“Is Chloe here too?” Ziggy bounced about excitedly, the towel slipping off his shoulders.

“Chloe is probably in bed, like you should be.” Jane looked down the stairwell.

“Good evening!” Madeline beamed radiantly up at her as she click-clacked up the stairs in a watermelon-colored cardigan, jeans and high-heeled, pointy-toed boots.

“Hello?” said Jane.

“Brought you some cardboard.” Madeline held up a neatly rolled cylinder of yellow cardboard like a baton.

Jane burst into tears.