The Last Anniversary (37 page)

M
argie is bathing Ron’s black eye with saline solution. He sits slumped at the kitchen table, while she stands next to him and looks dispassionately at the top of his head. That luxuriant dark hair is starting to thin so she can see his baby-white vulnerable scalp. When she first met Ron she thought he was so good-looking she was embarrassed to even meet his eyes. That was the problem. She’d thought he was too good for her and that she should be eternally grateful to him for choosing her. In fact,
he
was quite lucky to have her! When she’d shown Sophie the old photo of her in her red bikini she’d wolf-whistled and said she was like a supermodel, and then she’d said, ‘No, Margie, I’m
serious
,’ in that funny way of hers.

Ron winces heroically as she dabs at the cut on his eyebrow, and says, ‘Do you want to go on a picnic today?’

Margie stops dabbing while a bubble of laughter inflates in her chest. ‘Oh, that’s OK, I don’t think you’re in any condition for a picnic.’

All those times he’d sneered when she tentatively suggested they take a bottle of wine down to Sultana Rocks! All those times when the children were young, when at the last minute he’d say Daddy had to stay behind and do some work in his office because Daddy made the money that paid for the nice food they were taking on the picnic, as if Mummy and Scribbly Gum Island didn’t contribute a bloody cent.

‘I’m OK. If you feel like a picnic?’

‘I don’t feel like a picnic.’

‘Right. You know what I could do today?’

‘What?’

‘I could put that picture up for you. That one with the flowerpot.’

‘Actually, Debbie saw that and she thought it might be nice for Lily’s room, so I gave it to her. About a year ago.’

‘Oh, did you?’

There is silence. Margie gives his forehead a last dab and says, ‘Right. That should do you.’
I think it’s too late, love
.

‘So–ah–you had fun last night at that thing? With your friend? With…Ron?’

‘Loved it. Can’t remember the last time I had more fun.’

‘Great! It’s great to have an interest!’

‘Of course, it would have been nice to win first prize, not just runner-up.’

‘Oh yes! Trip to Venice. Wonderful. You always wanted to go to Italy, didn’t you?’

‘You’re thinking of Laura. She was the one who always went on about going to Europe.’

She notices he doesn’t ask what they would have done if they had won first prize, which was a trip for two. Actually, she and Rotund Ron hadn’t ever properly discussed it. Sometimes, their personal trainer, a blonde Amazonian called Suzie, would say, ‘So what happens if you win? Are you two going to run away together to Venice?’ and Ron would waggle his eyebrows suggestively and pretend to speak in an Italian accent and Margie and Suzie would make fun of him, because he sounded Indian, not Italian at all.

Last night Rotund Ron and Margie had been first runners-up in the National ‘
Bulges to Biceps
’ Beginner Body Building Competition for Couples, sponsored by a low-fat Italian pasta sauce company. Ron had heard about the competition and suggested to Margie that instead of going to their Weight Watchers meetings they hire themselves a personal trainer and enter the competition. ‘We’ll probably lose the same amount of weight,’ he’d said when he presented his proposal over their skim cappuccinos, ‘but we’ll have much more fun!’ He told her that he’d picked her out of all the ladies at Weight Watchers because she looked like someone with a good sense of humour, and Margie, who had never thought of herself as having any sense of humour at all, was ridiculously flattered. To enter the competition they had to take a ‘before’ photo of themselves in their swimming costumes, holding up newspapers to prove just how fat they were on that particular date. Margie came out of the changing room with her robe pulled bashfully around her, ready to display the appropriate shame of a fat person, but Rotund Ron wasn’t having any of that. He came strutting out like he was Mr Universe and soon had Margie quite weak with laughter and even striking Miss Universe poses herself, perhaps because she wanted to prove that she
did
have a sense of humour. It was as if she’d started to become an entirely different person, a flippant, confident, funny person–the sort of person Rotund Ron believed her to be, and damn it, maybe he was right.

Over the next eight weeks they’d met Suzie three times a week, sweating and puffing and chortling at each other. They shared their ecstasy as their bodies began to change. They tried to out-do each other when they did their sit-ups and push-ups and tricep dips and bicep curls. When it hurt too much they made very rude comments about Suzie under their breaths. They knew each other’s bodies as well as their own. ‘Feel that!’ Ron would say, pointing at his thigh. ‘Nothing but solid muscle, baby.’ After each training session they’d have a protein shake in the park, sitting on a bench, red-faced, dripping with sweat and laughing, always laughing.

Margie had not had an affair with Rotund Ron. They’d never so much as kissed, but in some ways it felt like the whole experience of transforming their bodies had been more intimate, more physical, more sexy, more
spiritual
than any old affair involving middle-of-the-day sex in horrible sleazy highway motels and…well, whatever else those affairs involved.

On the night of the competition held at the Hilton Hotel, the ‘before’ photos were displayed on a giant screen behind each transformed couple flexing their spray-on-tanned biceps and triceps and quadriceps in a carefully choreographed routine. Rotund Ron and Margie had to avoid eye-contact while doing their routine–to ‘Eye of the Tiger’
–
because otherwise they were liable to dissolve into laughter and Suzie said she was going to be furious with them if they ruined her hard work with an attack of the giggles. But on the night they’d both got caught up in the adrenaline-charged atmosphere and got all trembly and competitive before they went on stage. Afterwards they were euphoric with their achievement, even when a ferociously muscular pair of born-again Christians from Baulkham Hills won the first prize. Margie and Ron won a flat-screen TV, which they agreed to donate to a centre for kids with cancer, because Ron’s best friend’s son had died of cancer twenty years earlier.

It was when Rotund Ron, Suzie and Margie were all sharing a celebratory glass of champagne that Margie got the phone call from Ron and learned that he’d got into a violent argument with a taxi driver at Glass Bay who didn’t want him dripping river-water all over his cab and couldn’t care less that Ron was trying to get to the Hilton to drag his wife from a Jacuzzi. Unfortunately the taxi driver happened to have started an introductory course in Tae Kwan Do at the Glass Bay Evening College and after Ron threw his first clumsy punch the taxi driver executed a perfect kick to Ron’s temple. The police were called, and when Ron wouldn’t calm down they decided he was drunk and disorderly and threw him in the back of a paddy wagon which was jam-packed with excited, swaying young men from a drunk and disorderly bucks party. Margie, Rotund Ron and Suzie drove over to the police station to pick up Ron, and all the drunk bucks got to hear them explaining to Ron that no, they weren’t having an affair; they’d been entering a body-building competition and they’d won a flat-screen TV. The glassy-eyed groom, who didn’t seem to Margie to be in any state to get married the next day, became quite emotional, grabbing Ron’s arm and slurring, ‘She wouldn’t cheat on you, mate. She loves you. She made a solemn vow to you. She’s your
wife
, man! She was just doing a bit of innocent body-building and now you’ve got a flat-screen TV,’ while the rest of the bucks competed to get Suzie’s phone number by offering to arm-wrestle her.

It was all a bit embarrassing. The Glass Bay police thought it was hilarious.

She and Ron had taken the boat back over to the island in silence. Ron held an icepack to his eye, while Margie steered the boat and looked up at the stars and thought what a funny old world it was.

When they were nearly at the wharf, Ron had removed his icepack for a second and said, ‘Did
you
know our daughter was a lesbian?’ and Margie had grinned at him and said, ‘Yes, I did. I had a lovely lunch with her and Audrey last week,’ and Ron had said, ‘Oh,’ and pressed the icepack back to his eye.

Now Ron drums his fingers on the kitchen table and says nervously, ‘
We
could take a trip to Italy, if you like? You and me? A second honeymoon?’

Margie turns around from the sink and looks at him. It’s as if some sort of blurry substance has been peeled from her eyes and she can see him clearly for perhaps the first time in her life–an uncertain, greying, middle-aged man with a secret terror he’s not as smart or as classy as he’d like to be; a man who pretends he doesn’t care what other people think when he cares desperately; a man who despises himself so much that the only way he can alleviate his feelings of inferiority is by stomping down his wife’s personality with a daily stream of nasty jibes. A
little
man.

A man with a foolish wife who should simply have said, ‘Don’t speak to me like that.’ Maybe if she had she could have saved both of them.

She sits down in front of Ron and says, ‘I’m not really interested in going to Europe. What I’d really like is to drive around Australia. I’ve always wanted to drive across the Nullarbor.’

‘We could do that. Get a four-wheel drive…’

‘No, I mean on my own. I’d like to take a holiday on my own. For a couple of months.’

‘Oh.’ His face gets all pulpy with hurt. ‘Oh. OK.’

‘I think it might be good for us to spend some time apart, don’t you? I don’t mean an official separation or anything. Just a break. It seems like a good time now that we are talking about closing down the Alice and Jack business. And then we can think about what we’d like to do.’

‘Oh,’ he says again. ‘OK. Yep. That’s a good idea.’

Margie feels suddenly sick with this horrible new power.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘I’m going to call Callum and see how Grace is.’

She stays sitting and she is about to reach over and pat his shoulder but her new, strong body doesn’t move, and after a few seconds she stands up and goes to phone and leaves him sitting there studying his knuckles.

Maybe she’ll call him from some outback town and say, ‘Come and meet me.’

Or maybe she won’t. She really has no idea.

R
ose’s story is interrupted while they move into the living room, in the hope that Rose will be more comfortable on Sophie’s couch. They experiment with cushions behind her back until she says she thinks that’s about as good as they can manage.

Sophie feels a sick horror over Rose’s revelation. The scrambled eggs sit unsteadily in her stomach. Rose is too pure and fragile to even say the
word
‘rape’.

‘That’s so horrible,’ Sophie awkwardly touches Rose’s thin shoulder, ‘what happened to you.’

‘Oh darling, it’s OK, it was a very long time ago,’ answers Rose serenely. ‘There’s no need to be upset. You’re just like Veronika. We only just managed to save her from breaking one of Laura’s good mugs. She was
very
agitated. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t go straight to the police. But it’s a different era now. You modern girls are a lot better informed and a lot more assertive, which is a good thing. The problem was, I truly believed
I
was the criminal.’

Rose pats Sophie’s arm as if she is the one who should be comforted, and says, ‘Oh sugar! I brought a photo to show you. It’s in my bag still, in the kitchen.’

Sophie leaps to her feet and goes to the kitchen, conscious of how freely she can move around compared to Rose.

The photo is of Connie, Rose and their mother dressed up in hats and gloves for a day out in the city. They’re walking down a street, arms caught mid-swing, and both girls are looking at their mother and laughing. ‘They used to have “street photographers” in those days who would take your photo without you even knowing,’ says Rose. ‘Then they’d give you a card and you could go to this place on George Street and see if you’d like to buy it. Mum felt sorry for the photographer so we bought this one. It was a few weeks before she got sick.’

‘You were
so
beautiful.’ Sophie looks at Rose’s young, laughing face. ‘I bet you were like Grace and didn’t even realise how beautiful you were.’

‘Oh, I could be vain!’ says Rose. ‘Look at me with my long hair. The fashion was short bobs but I was so proud of my long blonde hair I refused to cut it!’

She caresses her mother’s face with an age-spotted bent finger. ‘That’s the coat Mum lost in the train. It was navy. Good wool.’ A tear runs down her withered cheek. ‘Oh Mum, you silly thing.’

Sophie feels her own eyes sting as she looks at fourteen-year-old Rose and thinks of the terrible things that were about to happen to her. She wants to go back in time and protect her and Connie. Take them along to an ATM and withdraw as much cash as they need. Buy their mum a new coat on her credit card and take her to the doctor on her Medicare card. March into David Jones and buy a whole damned roll of turquoise crêpe de Chine. Punch Mr Egg Head in the nose and then get him charged with sexual harassment before he even has a chance to lay a single sleazy finger on Rose.

‘Well,’ says Rose. ‘On with my story. Connie always said there’s nothing worse than a person who keeps meandering from the point.’

So, it was only a few days later that Mr Egg Head got transferred to another department, and a few weeks after that I started falling asleep at the counter in the afternoon.

I was fifteen years old, Catholic and pregnant. It was quite a scandal for those days, darling. Quite a scandal. And I had an awful suspicion that my father might actually kill me. I could imagine him quite calmly picking up his bible and thumping me to death with it.

Well, Connie guessed it eventually and I told her what had happened. I remember we were sitting down at Sultana Rocks and Connie had a stick and she was making holes in the sand, and as I told the story she jabbed harder and harder until the stick broke and she threw it hard across the water. Then she gave me a hug. A very quick, hard hug. We weren’t ever a very cuddly family, so it was special. It meant that
she
didn’t think I was a dirty thief who deserved her punishment. Then she picked up another stick and started jabbing more holes in the sand, but this time in orderly rows, and I knew she was trying to think out a solution. I remember closing my eyes and feeling so relieved because now it was Connie’s problem. I completely abdicated responsibility to her. So, I can’t really complain.

The normal practice in those days for unmarried Catholic girls was that you were sent off, all very hush-hush, to a home in the country, where you had your baby and it was quickly whisked away for adoption. Well, Connie wasn’t having any of that. She was determined that we would keep it. She was more interested in the baby than I was, to be honest. She was grieving for Mum too of course, and I think the baby gave her something to focus on. She was also determined to save my reputation, which seems funny these days, but she didn’t want word getting around Glass Bay that I was ‘used goods’. She thought I’d still meet a nice young man and settle down and get married. I remember she walked up and down the beach jabbing with her stick for ages until she finally marched back, looking very triumphant, and said, ‘Alice and Jack Munro are going to have a baby.’

I said, ‘Fine, Alice and Jack have a baby and then what? What happens to them?’

She said, ‘They vanish! Poof! We’re not even going to
try
to come up with an explanation. They’re going to vanish into thin air, just like the people aboard the
Mary Celeste
. It’s perfect. It’s absolutely perfect.’

She had a fondness for unsolved mysteries, you see, and the
Mary Celeste
was one of her favourites. She thought this would solve everything. We could keep the baby, save my reputation, and people would hear about Scribbly Gum Island. ‘Once people get a whiff of scandal they’ll want to come here for a sticky-beak,’ she said. ‘We’ll be ready and waiting with scones and tea. Light, fluffy scones! We’ll put Banksia Island right out of business.’

Well, I thought she was joking, or temporarily insane, but that very day she told Dad that Alice Munro was expecting. He said, ‘Well, as long as they keep paying their rent, that’s all we care about.’ Connie said, ‘I think they’re doing it tough, Dad. We’ll have to keep an eye on them.’ One day she said, ‘I promised that if anything ever happened to the Munros that we’d look after their baby,’ and Dad snapped, ‘What the bloody hell did you say that for?’ and Connie said, ‘I was being a Good Samaritan, Dad, just like in the bible,’ and that shut him up.

I didn’t see how we would hide my pregnancy from Dad, but Connie said he wouldn’t notice. She said he didn’t look at us. I didn’t see how it would be possible not to notice your daughter was nine months pregnant, but Connie was right. I just wore loose clothing and I never got very big anyway. Looking back, I think the poor man was close to being legally blind. That’s why he hardly left the house.

Or maybe he did notice and he just didn’t want to know. Maybe he saw through the whole thing. Who knows?

I had to give up work, of course, when I got to three months. The ladies at the department store had beady eyes. Luckily, Connie got a job doing office cleaning and she spent the next six months turning Grandpop’s house into Alice and Jack’s house. She put a couple of Mum’s old dresses in the cupboard. She managed to get a free crib from the Salvation Army. It was like a project for her. I think she enjoyed it. I remember the day she came up with the idea of the half-finished crossword, she was tickled pink. Well, I didn’t take much notice of it all, really. I was in a funny state at that time. The experience with Mr Egg Head had quite, well, shaken me up, I suppose. I spent hours fishing and trying not to think. I honestly didn’t think we’d get away with it. I thought we’d both end up in jail.

Of course, there was the problem of who would deliver the baby, when it came. We could hardly go to a hospital because what would we do about the birth certificate? Connie was thinking about confiding in a friend who was a midwife, but she really didn’t trust anybody with the secret. Well, in the end we didn’t have a choice. I started getting contractions three weeks early. It was one of those stormy, dramatic days. Connie took me around in the boat to Grandpop’s house. The water was all choppy and I was out of my mind with fear. We got up to the house and I had Enigma on the kitchen floor in about half an hour. Connie delivered her. She cut the cord with our grandmother’s old kitchen scissors. Her hands were all slippery and she was shaking so much she cut herself. So that’s her blood on the kitchen floor, and probably some of mine too. I remember Connie kneeling there with tears streaming down her face, blood dripping from her hand, holding Enigma. She loved Enigma instantly. It took me much longer. Actually, to be honest, Sophie darling, I could hardly bear the sight of her for quite a few months. I was worried she had an egg-shaped head. Don’t ever tell her that, will you? I still think it has a slightly eggy shape to it, at times. Connie was crying with joy, while I cried for my mother.

Well, we cleaned the baby and wrapped her up and took her home to Dad and we told him the story about going around to have a cup of tea with Alice and Jack and finding the baby. It was a test to see if he swallowed it–but he did, hook, line and sinker. At first he said we’d just have to take the baby to the hospital in Glass Bay and have it put in care, but Connie kept saying, ‘We made a promise, Dad,’ and then the funniest thing happened. Connie gave him the baby to hold and his face melted, went soft and smooth. He said, ‘Well, as long as she doesn’t wake me up at night,’ and handed her back.

The next morning Connie said to me, ‘This is your last chance to change your mind’, as if any of it was my idea! And she went off to the police station and told them we’d found an abandoned baby. Then the newspapers sent around Jimmy to do a story, and funnily enough I think Connie and I both really started to believe in it. Alice and Jack seemed more real to me than Mr Egg Head whispering vile things in my ear. Connie was right. The very day after the story appeared a boatload of sticky-beaks turned up at the island and we were ready with a tray of freshly baked scones: tuppence and ha’penny with a cup of tea.

Connie didn’t tell Jimmy the truth until after he came back from the war, and he was
furious.
The Munro Baby Mystery had been the story that started his career and he was horrified that it was a hoax. He took a long time to forgive Connie. That was when Connie came up with the idea of not telling Enigma until she was forty. I think it threw her when she realised she’d hurt Jimmy’s feelings. People don’t like to feel they’ve been conned, do they? Especially men. Men take themselves so seriously. Connie had this idea that by the time Enigma got to the age of forty she’d be mature enough to handle it. Actually, I think Enigma was mostly worried about whether she’d stay famous.

As the years went by I started to think that maybe we could come clean about the whole thing. I wanted Enigma to know that I was her mother, but she was really more Connie’s daughter than mine, especially in those first few months after she was born when I went a touch barmy. I barely touched her. Connie brought her up really. I was just like a big sister. I remember I felt hurt when Enigma asked Connie if she could call her ‘Mum’. But what could I do? Connie
was
her mum. If it wasn’t for her, I probably wouldn’t have been able to keep her. And when Connie and Jimmy couldn’t have their own children and she so badly wanted them, I could hardly say I wanted Enigma just for me.

Besides which, by then the Munro Baby Mystery had become a successful business. When Dad died in 1940 we had made more money than we’d ever dreamed of. Whenever Connie thought interest in the Munro Mystery was starting to wane, she’d come up with something new to get people talking again. After the war, she wrote all those letters from Alice to Jack and pretended to find them in the cake tin under the bed. Confidentially, Sophie, those letters were really all about Connie’s feelings about her marriage to Jimmy; they were going through a bit of a bad patch. So Jimmy sat down and wrote that beautiful love letter from Jack to Alice. Connie cried when she read it. You’ve read it, haven’t you? He could be romantic when he wanted to be, that Jimmy! Then of course, in the 1970s, when our numbers were very low, Connie read
The Female Eunuch
and decided that Alice was being ‘emotionally castrated’ and she sat down and wrote Alice’s diary in two days and got Margie to ‘discover’ it under the floorboards. I remember Jimmy saying, ‘Nobody is going to fall for this rubbish! How many more historical documents can be hidden in one small house?’ Well, that diary caused a sensation because it implied that Alice probably bumped off Jack, and the feminists just
loved
that. After that we all agreed there couldn’t really be any more discoveries.

There were so many times when I felt such a strong desire to tell everyone the truth, but Connie was like a stubborn old–is that the phone again, Sophie? No, answer it. I’m finished. That’s the end of my story.