The Last Anniversary (39 page)

‘O
h dear. Oh damn. Where is she, I wonder? Oh. Ah. OK. Well. Here we go. HELLO! SOPHIE! IT’S ROSE! I WANTED TO TELL YOU THAT I REMEMBERED THE NAME OF THAT FELLOW CONNIE HAD PICKED OUT FOR YOU. IT’S CALLUM’S FRIEND AND…oh dear, I don’t think this silly machine is working, is it? HELLO? Oh sugar!’

S
ophie wakes up early and goes to the bathroom to look at the progress of her cold sore, which looks quite pretty now, just like a smudge of pale pink lipstick. It’s a pity all those horrible, humiliating feelings for Callum can’t just dry up and fade away too, until there’s nothing left but a nice, socially acceptable smudge of friendship.

As she’s cleaning her teeth she decides to give herself her own version of electric-shock aversion therapy. Every time she thinks of Callum she will pinch herself hard above the elbow. She will train her mind like a rat in a maze. Today should be a good day to start training because she has something new to preoccupy her mind: a new life. Yesterday, at yum cha, she and her mother unexpectedly came up with a new plan for Sophie’s career.

Gretel had started talking about that ‘fraudulent psychic’ they’d met at the Korean baths, and ‘who ever heard of a caramel aura’ and ‘why would
Sophie
, of all people, need a positive career-change when she was already doing so well in her career!’

That’s when Sophie admitted that well, actually, she’d been coasting for the last couple of years at work and that, while she still enjoyed it, she’d really gone as far as she could go there and it wasn’t really challenging her any more, and all of a sudden she was talking to her mother about how she’d always thought that when she had children–ha!–she would give up work and do something part-time, something completely different, like teaching a wine-tasting course, or perhaps using her HR skills for something different, like career counselling for teenagers or hardened (handsome, unshaven) young crims, and how she’d quite like to play violin again in a string quartet like she did when she was at uni. Her mother had said that she might have had some unrealistic ideas about just how much spare time she’d have with a baby, but seeing as Sophie owned a house outright and didn’t need to worry about her mortgage payments any more, why didn’t she just resign from work and take some time off and pursue some–if not all!–of these ideas.

‘Why not?’ cried Gretel, excitedly spilling her green tea.

‘Why not?’ said Sophie, thoughtfully spearing a chopstick through her steamed pork bun.

And just like that, the fraudulent psychic’s prophesy came true, and today Sophie is sitting down with her notepad to consider an entirely new lifestyle and wondering why she’d never thought of it before. She thinks about how interested Callum will be and immediately pinches her arm so hard it brings tears to her eyes. She puts on her Eva Cassidy CD and thinks about what Callum said about this album–and pinches her arm again. She would have thought she might have picked things up faster than the average rat.

She is standing at the sink, pouring herself a cup of tea, when she sees a strange man standing on the balcony, with his face pressed up against the window, peering in. She jerks back in fright, spilling boiling water over her hand and dropping the mug, which shatters on the floor.

Instantly the back door swings open and a tall, lanky, pale man is suddenly filling all the space in the kitchen, saying, ‘I’m so sorry for scaring you. I thought there was nobody home. I’m not an axe murderer, I’m Callum’s friend, although I suppose Callum could be friends with an axe murderer, who knows,’ and while he’s talking he has taken hold of Sophie’s wrist and is holding her hand under the cold running water. ‘Oh dear, I hope it’s not too bad. I’ve probably scarred you for life. And was that mug your favourite?’

‘I think it’s going to be OK.’ Sophie smiles up at him and he smiles back. He has a sad, accepting sort of smile, as if he knows life probably isn’t going to work out but he’s doing the best he can.

‘I’m Ed,’ he says. ‘And you’re Sophie. And I think I knew you a very long time ago. Do you remember me?’

And suddenly that mournful smile is so sweetly familiar.

‘Eddie Ripple,’ says Sophie, and to her own surprise she takes her wet, sore hand out from under the tap and stands on her toes so she can throw her arms around his neck.

Grace and Callum are making the bed together. He says, ‘Ed is going to stop by at Sophie’s place and see if she wants him to quote on painting it. He thinks he knows her.’ Grace lifts the mattress and tucks in her side of the sheet. Sophie sent around a big bunch of flowers after the Anniversary Night, but Grace hasn’t seen her yet and it’s odd that she hasn’t been around. It’s also odd that Callum hasn’t mentioned her before now. It seems to Grace that something must have happened between Sophie and Callum that night, and it makes her feel guilty because whatever it was, Grace made it happen. They were the unwitting puppets in Grace’s plan to give away her husband to another woman and step out of her life. Then again, they’re not made of
wood
¸ they do have their own brains, they didn’t have to fall in with Grace’s plans quite so willingly!

Callum says, ‘Do you remember how your Aunt Connie thought Ed and Sophie would make a good match?’

‘Did she?’ says Grace. ‘I don’t remember. Oh dear. Ed Ripple. Aunt Rose always said she thought Connie’s matchmaking skills left a lot to be desired.’

‘I’m sure Sophie will meet somebody herself,’ says Callum.

Grace looks up and meets his eyes on the other side of the bed, and he looks away and pretends to be interested in tucking in the corner of the sheet perfectly. So, she’s right. Something
did
happen that night. She wonders what it was. Just a kiss? Surely they didn’t sleep together? Where would they have gone? Aunt Connie’s house? She imagines Callum kissing Sophie (she’d have to stand up on tippy-toes, which would be so adorable!), his hand caressing the back of her creamy white neck. When he kisses, he does this thing with his thumb on the back of your neck, a slow, delicate, circular motion, which used to drive Grace into a frenzy of weak-kneed desire when they first started going out. And Sophie, what would she be doing? Saying something funny and cute? Blushing? She probably has kissing techniques of her own. She probably does something really unusual and stylish with her tongue. Grace has no kissing techniques. She just lets Callum kiss her and enjoys herself.

Then it hits her. Callum and Sophie probably danced together. Of course they danced together; how could Callum resist dancing with a real live woman instead of a cardboard cut-out?

She becomes aware of a digging pain, as if someone is poking her in the side. It’s jealousy. She wanted Sophie to marry Callum and now she’s jealous at the thought of them dancing together. She lets the feeling take hold of her. It’s so much better than that horrendous dull nothingness; it’s a proper, human emotion. Real spiteful human blood is pumping through her veins.

She says, ‘Well, would you look at this nice freshly made bed.’

Callum squishes a pillow into a pillow slip. He looks blankly at the bed and says with endearing uncertainty, ‘Yeah?’

‘Don’t you think we should mess it up a bit?’

He drops the pillow and has her flat on the bed so fast she’s laughing while he’s kissing her, his hand on the back of
her
neck, his tongue in
her
mouth, and she must have been out of her mind to have thought of giving him away to another woman.

‘Eddie Ripple,’ says Sophie. ‘I haven’t seen you for thirty years. Can you believe we’re old enough to say, “I haven’t seen you for thirty years”? Did you ever think we’d get this old and still be us?’

She is sitting with ice wrapped up in a tea towel held against her hand while Eddie kneels with a dustpan sweeping up the broken cup. He looks up at her with exactly the same green eyes of the little boy who used to sit with her under the tuckshop stairs. The Blusher and The Twitcher. The Outcasts. The Spastics. The Retards.

He says, ‘I think I thought anything that happened to me after I turned thirty would be sort of irrelevant.’

His voice is deep with the slower rhythm of a laconic Australian farmer being interviewed on TV about the drought. Sophie can feel her own voice, her own heart beat, perceptibly slowing down to match his pace. He sounds like a country boy, and of course, she remembers, that’s what he’d become. His family had moved up to Queensland to live on a farm. Sophie, who only had very vague ideas about what the ‘country’ meant, had always imagined him going to a one-teacher school in a horse and buggy, with girls wearing bonnets, like in
Little House on the Prairie.

‘I missed you when you left,’ says Sophie, remembering that all of a sudden as well. That first day at school without Eddie by her side had been like the first time she’d travelled to another country on her own. She’d felt simultaneously invisible and overly visible at the same time. She used to go to bed feeling sick about school the next day. She says, ‘But guess what? Then I got popular and I didn’t miss you at all.’

‘How did you manage that?’

‘My eleventh birthday party was a social coup. We got an in-ground swimming pool, you see, and my dad made this amazing slide into the pool. I became A-list after Dad built that slide. All the girls decided my blushing was cute and the boys pretended not to notice.’

‘I don’t think I missed you,’ says Ed, considering, and of course that was the thing about Eddie Ripple, he was always devastatingly honest. ‘Everything in Queensland was so different. We went to school barefoot. We caught yabbies in the creek at lunchtime. It just felt like I stepped into another world and you didn’t even exist any more–like my old bedroom, my old street, the whole state of New South Wales had just vanished. And then, thirty years later, I’m having dinner right here in this house, with Callum’s family, and they started talking on and on about this girl called Sophie who blushed, and I thought, How many blushing Sophies can there be in Sydney? And it all came back, all those conversations under the tuckshop stairs–I seem to recall discussing existential dilemmas with you, Sophie Honeywell, as well as making up bloodthirsty stories about how we’d get revenge on Bruno, and all the kids who were mean to us. Anyway, I kept remembering things while they were all talking about you, and then your ex-boyfriend, Thomas, pulled out a photo and there you were, all grown up and beautiful.’

‘Thank you.’ Sophie grabs hold of a blush and swiftly slays it. ‘Do you still twitch, Eddie Ripple? Seeing as you’ve opened the door on our disorders!’

He smiles. ‘Not as often, but if I’m nervous or stressed it comes back. I don’t worry so much about it these days.’

Sophie says, ‘How do you know Callum?’

‘I met him when I moved back to Sydney. I play saxophone in his band.’

‘So you were there on the Anniversary Night? Actually, I think I saw you and thought you looked familiar!’

‘Yep, but I never got a chance to say hello, and then when there was all the disaster with Grace’s allergic reaction I thought I’d leave it for another day. Callum told me you want to repaint this house, so I thought I’d come over and ask if you want me to quote on doing it.’

‘So is that what you do, paint houses and play the saxophone?’

‘I do a bit of this and a bit of that. I paint houses because I write poetry, and I’ve discovered the only way for me to write a poem is to paint a house. I manage a poem a room. The painting pays a lot better than the poetry. The problem is I paint slower than the average house-painter, so my clients have to be patient, but my quality is outstanding, if I do say so myself.’

‘Are you a published poet?’

‘Well, yeah. But it hasn’t exactly flown to the top of the bestseller lists. I actually think my mother might be responsible for all of my sales. She gives them away to waitresses in coffee shops. What about you? What did you end up becoming?’

‘Oh, well, I accidentally became a Human Resources Director for a company that makes lawnmowers,’ says Sophie.

‘Hey, did you know that our old nemesis Bruno is married with twins and working as a chartered accountant for one of the Big Six firms? I had a two-week fling with him.’

‘Really? Remember Gary Lochivich?’

‘I always thought he’d become a hairdresser.’

Eddie gives her a puckish grin. ‘You were right,’ he says. ‘He did become a hairdresser and
I
had a fling with
him
.’

It seems Sophie’s Fairy Godmother has made just a slight error of judgement. It doesn’t matter how perfectly the glass slipper slides on to her tiny foot…Prince Charming isn’t looking for a princess.

Enigma and Rose, Margie and Laura are having a meeting at Rose’s house to decide what to do about the Alice and Jack business, now that Rose has ‘gone public’. Ever since they issued their media release the phone has been ringing endlessly. Margie has organised for the Alice and Jack business to give a
very
big donation to some charity group (an overly generous one, Enigma thinks, but she is keeping her mouth shut) as a ‘public apology’. Margie also has some idea about offering the Alice and Jack house as a free place to stay for families with sick children, or mothers suffering from postnatal depression, which everybody is excited about, and although it’s awful to think of the house being changed after all this time, Enigma quite likes the idea of having nice, grateful people staying there. It gives her a pleasant, kind-hearted feeling.

Apparently some silly legal organisation called the Australian Consumer and Competition something or other wants to talk to them about ‘misleading and deceptive conduct’, which is very bad, according to Ron, and just goes to show that Rose has got them into hot water! Fortunately, Ron seems to be dealing with lawyers and talking to a lot of serious-looking chaps in dark suits, and they are working out something called a ‘loophole’, which sounds like a good idea. Anyway, it’s nice for Ron to have something to do and to feel important, so they all act interested and encouraging when he talks about it.

Of course, nobody wants to interview Enigma any more, oh no, she’s no longer the Mystery Munro Baby. She’s a nobody. She’ll never be on
This is your Life
now. She’ll never have another
Women’s Weekly
spread and nobody will ever want her autographed photo. She’s just an ordinary old widow who isn’t even very good at tennis. She may as well be dead.