Big Little Lies (2 page)

Six Months Before the Trivia Night

F
orty. Madeline Martha Mackenzie was forty years old today.

“I am forty,” she said out loud as she drove. She drew the word out in slow motion, like a sound effect.
“Fooorty.”

She caught the eye of her daughter in the rearview mirror. Chloe grinned and imitated her mother. “I am five.
Fiiiive.
”

“Forty!” trilled Madeline like an opera singer. “Tra la la la!”

“Five!” trilled Chloe.

Madeline tried a rap version, beating out the rhythm on the steering wheel. “I’m forty, yeah, forty—”

“That’s enough now, Mummy,” said Chloe firmly.

“Sorry,” said Madeline.

She was taking Chloe to her kindergarten—“Let’s Get Kindy Ready!”—orientation. Not that Chloe required any orientation before starting school next January. She was already very firmly oriented at Pirriwee Public. At this morning’s drop-off Chloe had been busy taking charge of her brother, Fred, who was two years older but
often seemed younger. “Fred, you forgot to put your book bag in the basket! That’s it. In there. Good boy.”

Fred had obediently dropped his book bag in the appropriate basket before running off to put Jackson in a headlock. Madeline had pretended not to see the headlock. Jackson probably deserved it. Jackson’s mother, Renata, hadn’t seen it either, because she was deep in conversation with Harper, both of them frowning earnestly over the stress of educating their gifted children. Renata and Harper attended the same weekly support group for parents of gifted children. Madeline imagined them all sitting in a circle, wringing their hands while their eyes shone with secret pride.

While Chloe was busy bossing the other children around at orientation (her gift was bossiness, she was going to run a corporation one day), Madeline was going to have coffee and cake with her friend Celeste. Celeste’s twin boys were starting school next year too, so they’d be running amuck at orientation. (Their gift was shouting. Madeline had a headache after five minutes in their company.) Celeste always bought exquisite and very expensive birthday presents, so that would be nice. After that, Madeline was going to drop Chloe off with her mother-in-law, and then have lunch with some friends before they all rushed off for school pickup. The sun was shining. She was wearing her gorgeous new Dolce & Gabbana stilettos (bought online, thirty percent off). It was going to be a lovely, lovely day.

“Let the Festival of Madeline begin!” her husband, Ed, had said this morning when he brought her coffee in bed. Madeline was famous for her fondness of birthdays and celebrations of all kinds. Any excuse for champagne.

Still. Forty.

As she drove the familiar route to the school, she considered her magnificent new age. Forty. She could still feel “forty” the way it felt when she was fifteen. Such a colorless age. Marooned in the middle
of your life. Nothing would matter all that much when you were forty. You wouldn’t have real feelings when you were forty, because you’d be safely cushioned by your frumpy forty-ness.

Forty-year-old woman found dead.
Oh dear.

Twenty-year-old woman found dead.
Tragedy! Sadness! Find that murderer!

Madeline had recently been forced to do a minor shift in her head when she heard something on the news about a woman dying in her forties.
But, wait, that could be me! That would be sad! People would be sad if I was dead! Devastated, even. So there, age-obsessed world. I might be forty, but I am cherished.

On the other hand, it was probably perfectly natural to feel sadder over the death of a twenty-year-old than a forty-year-old. The forty-year-old had enjoyed twenty years more of life. That’s why, if there was a gunman on the loose, Madeline would feel obligated to throw her middle-aged self in front of the twenty-year-old. Take a bullet for youth. It was only fair.

Well, she would, if she could be sure it was a nice young person. Not one of those insufferable ones, like the child driving the little blue Mitsubishi in front of Madeline. She wasn’t even bothering to hide the fact that she was using her mobile phone while she drove, probably
texting
or updating her Facebook status.

See! This kid wouldn’t have even noticed the loose gunman! She would have been staring vacantly at her phone, while Madeline sacrificed her life for her! It was infuriating.

The little car appeared to be jammed with young people. At least three in the back, their heads bobbing about, hands gesticulating. Was that somebody’s foot waving about? It was a tragedy waiting to happen. They all needed to concentrate. Just last week, Madeline had been having a quick coffee after her ShockWave class and was reading a story in the paper about how all the young people were killing themselves by sending texts while they drove.
On my way. Nearly there!
These were their last foolish (and often misspelled) words. Madeline had cried over the picture of one teenager’s grief-stricken mother, absurdly holding up her daughter’s mobile phone to the camera as a warning to readers.

“Silly little idiots,” she said out loud as the car weaved dangerously into the next lane.

“Who is an idiot?” said her daughter from the backseat.

“The girl driving the car in front of me is an idiot because she’s driving her car and using her phone at the same time,” said Madeline.

“Like when you need to call Daddy when we’re running late?” said Chloe.

“I only did that one time!” protested Madeline. “And I was very careful and very quick! And I’m
forty
years old!”

“Today,” said Chloe knowledgeably. “You’re forty years old today.”

“Yes! Also, I made a quick call, I didn’t send a text! You have to take your eyes off the road to text. Texting while driving is illegal and naughty, and you must promise to never ever do it when you’re a teenager.”

Her voice quivered at the thought of Chloe being a teenager and driving a car.

“But you’re allowed to make a quick phone call?” checked Chloe.

“No! That’s illegal too,” said Madeline.

“So that means you broke the law,” said Chloe with satisfaction. “Like a
robber
.”

Chloe was currently in love with the idea of robbers. She was definitely going to date bad boys one day. Bad boys on motorcycles.

“Stick with the nice boys, Chloe!” said Madeline after a moment. “Like Daddy. Bad boys don’t bring you coffee in bed, I’ll tell you that for free.”

“What are you babbling on about, woman?” sighed Chloe. She’d picked this phrase up from her father and imitated his weary tone
perfectly. They’d made the mistake of laughing the first time she did it, so she’d kept it up, and said it just often enough, and with perfect timing, so that they couldn’t help but keep laughing.

This time Madeline managed not to laugh. Chloe currently trod a very fine line between adorable and obnoxious. Madeline probably trod the same line herself.

Madeline pulled up behind the little blue Mitsubishi at a red light. The young driver was
still
looking at her mobile phone. Madeline banged on her car horn. She saw the driver glance in her rearview mirror, while all her passengers craned around to look.

“Put down your phone!” she yelled. She mimicked texting by jabbing her finger in her palm. “It’s illegal! It’s dangerous!”

The girl stuck her finger up in the classic up-yours gesture.

“Right!” Madeline pulled on her emergency brake and put on her hazard lights.

“What are you doing?” said Chloe.

Madeline undid her seat belt and threw open the car door.

“But we’ve got to go to orientation!” said Chloe in a panic. “We’ll be late! Oh,
calamity
!”

“Oh, calamity” was a line from a children’s book that they used to read to Fred when he was little. The whole family said it now. Even Madeline’s parents had picked it up, and some of Madeline’s friends. It was a very contagious phrase.

“It’s all right,” said Madeline. “This will only take a second. I’m saving young lives.”

She stalked up to the girl’s car on her new stilettos and banged on the window.

The window slid down, and the driver metamorphosed from a shadowy silhouette into a real young girl with white skin, sparkly nose ring and badly applied, clumpy mascara. She looked up at Madeline with a mixture of aggression and fear. “What is your
problem
?” Her mobile phone was still held casually in her left hand.

“Put down that phone! You could kill yourself and your friends!” Madeline used the exact same tone she used on Chloe when she was being extremely naughty. She reached in the car, grabbed the phone and tossed it to the openmouthed girl in the passenger seat. “OK? Just stop it!”

She could hear their gales of laughter as she walked back to her SUV. She didn’t care. She felt pleasantly stimulated. A car pulled up behind hers. Madeline smiled, lifted her hand apologetically and hurried back to be in her car before the lights changed.

Her ankle turned. One second it was doing what an ankle was meant to do, and the next it was flipping out at a sickeningly wrong angle. She fell heavily on one side. Oh, calamity.

That was almost certainly the moment the story began.

With the ungainly flip of an ankle.

J
ane pulled up at a red light behind a big shiny SUV with its hazard lights blinking and watched a dark-haired woman hurry along the side of the road back to it. She wore a floaty, blue summer dress and high strappy heels, and she waved apologetically, charmingly at Jane. The morning sun caught one of the woman’s earrings, and it shone as if she’d been touched by something celestial.

A glittery girl. Older than Jane but definitely still glittery. All her life Jane had watched girls like that with scientific interest. Maybe a little awe. Maybe a little envy. They weren’t necessarily the prettiest, but they decorated themselves so affectionately, like Christmas trees, with dangling earrings, jangling bangles and delicate, pointless scarves. They touched your arm a lot when they spoke. Jane’s best friend at school had been a glittery girl. Jane had a weakness for them.

Then the woman fell, as if something had been pulled out from underneath her.

“Ouch,” said Jane, and she looked away fast to save the woman’s dignity.

“Did you hurt yourself, Mummy?” asked Ziggy from the backseat. He was always very worried about her hurting herself.

“No,” said Jane. “That lady over there hurt herself. She tripped.”

She waited for the woman to get up and get back in her car, but she was still on the ground. She’d tipped back her head to the sky, and her face had that compressed look of someone in great pain. The traffic light turned green, and a little blue Mitsubishi that had been in front of the SUV zoomed off with a squeal of tires.

Jane put her signal on to drive around the car. They were on their way to Ziggy’s orientation day at the new school, and she had no idea where she was going. She and Ziggy were both nervous and pretending not to be. She wanted to get there in plenty of time.

“Is the lady OK?” said Ziggy.

Jane felt that strange lurch she sometimes experienced when she got distracted by her life, and then something (it was often Ziggy) made her remember just in time the appropriate way for a nice, ordinary, well-mannered grown-up to behave.

If it weren’t for Ziggy she would have driven off. She would have been so focused on her goal of getting him to his kindergarten orientation that she would have
left a woman sitting on the road, writhing in pain
.

“I’ll just check on her,” said Jane, as if that were her intention all along. She flicked on her own hazard lights and opened the car door, aware as she did of a selfish sense of resistance.
You are an inconvenience, glittery lady!

“Are you all right?” she called.

“I’m fine!” The woman tried to sit up straighter and whimpered, her hand on her ankle. “Ow. Shit. I’ve rolled my ankle, that’s all. I’m such an
idiot
. I got out of the car to go tell the girl in front
of me to stop texting. Serves me right for behaving like a school prefect.”

Jane crouched down next to her. The woman had shoulder-length, well-cut dark hair and the faintest sprinkle of freckles across her nose. There was something aesthetically pleasing about those freckles, like a childhood memory of summer, and they were very nicely complemented by the fine lines around her eyes and the absurd swinging earrings.

Jane’s resistance vanished entirely.

She liked this woman. She wanted to help her.

(Although, what did that say? If the woman had been a toothless, warty-nosed crone she would have continued to feel resentful? The injustice of it. The cruelty of it. She was going to be nicer to this woman because she liked her freckles.)

The woman’s dress had an intricately embroidered cutout pattern of flowers all along the neckline. Jane could see tanned freckly skin through the petals.

“We need to get some ice on it straightaway,” said Jane. She knew about ankle injuries from her netball days and she could see this woman’s ankle was already beginning to swell. “And keep it elevated.” She chewed her lip and looked about hopefully for someone else. She had no idea how to handle the logistics of making this actually happen.

“It’s my birthday,” said the woman sadly. “My fortieth.”

“Happy birthday,” said Jane. It was sort of cute that a woman of
forty
would even bother to mention that it was her birthday.

She looked at the woman’s strappy shoes. Her toenails were painted a lustrous turquoise. The stiletto heels were as thin as toothpicks and perilously high.

“No wonder you did your ankle,” said Jane. “No one could walk in those shoes!”

“I know, but aren’t they gorgeous?” The woman turned her foot
at an angle to admire them. “Ouch!
Fuck
, that hurts. Sorry. Excuse my language.”

“Mummy!” A little girl with dark curly hair, wearing a sparkling tiara, stuck her head out the window of the car. “What are you doing? Get up! We’ll be late!”

Glittery mother. Glittery daughter.

“Thanks for the sympathy, darling!” said the woman. She smiled ruefully at Jane. “We’re on our way to her kindergarten orientation. She’s very excited.”

“At Pirriwee Public?” said Jane. She was astonished. “But that’s where I’m going. My son, Ziggy, is starting school next year. We’re moving here in December.” It didn’t seem possible that she and this woman could have anything in common, or that their lives could intersect in any way.

“Ziggy! Like Ziggy Stardust? What a great name!” said the woman. “I’m Madeline, by the way. Madeline Martha Mackenzie. I always mention the Martha for some reason. Don’t ask me why.” She held out her hand.

“Jane,” said Jane. “Jane no-middle-name Chapman.”

Gabrielle:
The school ended up split in two. It was, like, I don’t know, a civil war. You were either on Team Madeline or Team Renata.

Bonnie:
No, no, that’s awful. That never happened. There were no
sides
. We’re a very close-knit community. There was too much alcohol. Also, it was a full moon. Everyone goes a little crazy when it’s a full moon. I’m serious. It’s an actual verifiable phenomenon.

Samantha:
Was it a full moon? It was pouring rain, I know that. My hair was all boofy.

Mrs. Lipmann:
That’s ridiculous and highly defamatory. I have no further comment.

Carol:
I know I keep harping on about the Erotic Book Club, but I’m sure something happened at one of their little quote-unquote meetings.

Harper:
Listen, I
cried
when we learned Emily was gifted. I thought,
Here we go again!
I’d been through it all before with Sophia, so I knew what I was in for! Renata was in the same boat.
Two
gifted children. Nobody understands the stress. Renata was worried about how Amabella would settle in at school, whether she’d get enough stimulation and so on. So when that child with the ridiculous name, that Ziggy, did what he did, and it was only the orientation morning! Well, she was understandably very distressed. That’s what started it all.