Three Wishes (24 page)

“More room for you!” Gemma began to spread out Cat’s coat hangers so that the empty half of the wardrobe disappeared. “Hey. I haven’t seen that skirt before. Hmmm. That’s very sexy.” She held it up against herself and swiveled her hips. Cat sat down on the bed in front of her and lifted up the hem of the skirt.

“Good. I can wear it clubbing when I’m out on the prowl again.”

“Yep. You’d pick up in no time.”

“Give those twenty-year-olds a run for their money.”

“For sure.”

They looked at each other, and Cat smiled wryly.

“Actually, I don’t have a great track record competing with the twenty-year-olds, do I?”

Gemma put the skirt back in the wardrobe and sat down next to her.

She put her arm around her. “You could get a hot young twenty-year-old yourself. They’ve got all that stamina.”

“Yeah,” Cat sighed. “The thought of some twenty-year-old pumping away at me makes me feel exhausted.”

Gemma laughed. “He wouldn’t last long. You’d get breaks in between pumping.”

“You know what I found this morning?” asked Cat.

“What?”

“A
gray pubic hair.”

“No!
I didn’t even know you went gray down there! Are you sure? Let’s see it.”

“Get lost!” Cat elbowed her. “I’m not letting you see my pubic hair, for God’s sake.”

“Well, your fridge is on the way. What’s so funny?” Lyn stood at the bedroom door, half frowning and smiling.

Gemma said, “Lyn’s probably got an identical one.”

“An identical what?”

But Cat had looked up and seen something on the top shelf of the cupboard.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

She stood up and pulled down some sort of soft toy, it looked like a little furry football.

Gemma and Lyn watched as she held it gently and her face dissolved like a child’s.

She spoke as if she were telling them some very bad news that she’d only just received. “I’m never going to have a baby now.”

“Of course you are,” said Lyn firmly.

“No question,” said Gemma.

But it took at least twenty minutes before they could get her to stop crying.

Later that night, after Lyn had gone home and Gemma and Cat were on to their third bottle of wine, Cat said, “What did you do with Marcus’s engagement ring?”

“I gave it to a lady sitting on George Street.”

“What?”

“She was singing ‘Blowing in the Wind.’ She had a beautiful voice. I took the ring off my finger and put it in her guitar case.”

“It was worth ten thousand dollars!”

“Yes. Well, she was singing really nicely. And I’ve always liked that song.”

“I’m going to pretend Dan is dead. Like Marcus.”

“Oh. Good idea.”

“But I’m not going to give my ring to some busker, for God’s sake. What’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t concentrate. That’s the problem with me.”

Gemma’s twenty-first birthday present from Marcus was a pair of ski gloves. Inside one of the gloves was a business-class ticket to Canada.

Her friends said, “Oh my God, Gemma, this guy is a
catch
!”

She’d been going out with him for eighteen months.

On their first day’s skiing, Gemma felt elated. The snowy peaks of Whistler were outlined against a cloudless blue sky. There had been a huge snow dump the day before, and people everywhere were in good moods, calling out things like, “Magic! Pure magic!” as they tramped in their boots through crunchy new snow toward the lifts.

She felt clean. She felt like they were a normal couple.

And then she forgot to concentrate.

It was because she hadn’t been skiing for a few years and she was overexcited, not thinking properly.

Skiing with Dad in the August school holiday was an annual event for the Kettle girls, an exuberant circle on Mum’s kitchen calendar, a brightly wrapped package of seven gleaming days. Sun reflecting off your sisters’ goggles. Exhilarated shouts. The rasp of skis sliding across ice on the early morning T-bars. Dad teaching you the fine art of pushing your way to the front of a lift queue without anybody noticing. Steaming hot chocolates with melting marshmallows and red, cold faces.

Skiing occupied a special place in Gemma’s heart.

That’s why she forgot she wasn’t a carefree little girl anymore.
She forgot to be careful, she forgot to think about the consequences, and on their first run, she just skied straight to the bottom, without even looking to see what Marcus was doing.

It was fantastic. She stopped near the gondola, the scrape of her skis sending a shower of snow in the air, and turned around to squint into the sun, breathless and smiling, to look for Marcus.

As soon as she picked him out from the weaving colorful figures on the mountain, she knew. She punched the ends of her ski poles deep into the snow and waited. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

He waited till he was right next to her. She smiled at him, pretending they were still normal people but she didn’t bother to say “Shhhh” when he started yelling.

She
should have waited for him. She was
fucking ungrateful. She
was selfish and stupid. The problem with her was she didn’t
think.

When he finished, he shoved his poles in the snow and skied off, banging his shoulder painfully against hers, almost knocking her off balance. She watched him go and took a shaky breath. It would be all right. In a few minutes he would calm down.

“You O.K. there?”

It was a woman in a bright yellow ski suit, with a long plait of blond hair. She had an American accent.

Gemma smiled politely at her. “Yes, thank you.”

The woman pushed back her goggles, revealing the fanatical skier’s raccoon face: a distinct white silhouette around her eyes.

She said, “Sweetie. The only part that’s your fault is that you stay with him.”

Gemma flushed. Stupid, nosy woman. “Oh. Well, thank you very much,” she said as if she were talking to a madwoman and she skied off to catch up with Marcus.

That same night Marcus proposed to her in the hotel restaurant. He went down on one knee and produced a diamond ring and all the other diners clapped and cheered and called out “Whoo whoo!” just like in a schmaltzy movie. Gemma followed the script perfectly.

She put one shocked feminine hand to her throat, said, “Yes, of course, yes!” and threw her arms around him.

Sometimes, she thought about leaving him—but she thought about it in an abstract way, the same way that you dream about living an entirely different life. Imagine if I were a princess. Imagine if I were a famous tennis player. Imagine if I weren’t a triplet. Imagine if I were with someone other than Marcus.

Sometimes, just as she was falling asleep, he would whisper to her what he’d do to her if she ever tried to leave him. He whispered so softly it felt like she wasn’t really hearing it, she was thinking it. She lay so rigid that her muscles ached the next day.

The church was packed for the funeral. His parents and brother were distraught. Person after person got up to tell poignant, funny stories about Marcus. Their voices cracked with grief. They ducked their heads, hid their faces.

Cat and Lyn stood on either side of Gemma. They stood so close she could feel the entire lengths of their bodies next to hers.

After the funeral, she resigned from her teaching job and moved in with Maxine for a while. Her mother behaved the way she did whenever they hurt themselves when they were little—extremely crossly. “How did you sleep?” she snapped each morning. “Drink this please!” She didn’t hug her. She just handed her a carrot juice.

Gemma walked for hours and hours around the neighborhood streets. Her favorite time was twilight, when people began switching on lights, with their curtains still undrawn. You could see straight into the bright little cubes of their lives. It fascinated her. The minutiae of their existences. The potted plants on their windowsills. Their furniture. Their pictures. You could hear the sounds of their music, television sets, radios. You could smell their dinners cooking. People called out to one another. “What’s
this plastic bag in the fridge?” “What?” “This plastic bag!” “Oh, that.” Once she stood still for five minutes, listening to the soothing sound of someone’s shower running, imagining steam billowing, soap lathering.

She wanted to go into every house, curl up on their sofas, try out their bathtubs.

When she saw the notice asking for an experienced house-sitter it was the first time she’d felt definite about something in years.

She became a drifter through other people’s homes, other people’s jobs, and other people’s lives.

A year later she dated the second of the fourteen boyfriends.

He was a sweet-faced chartered accountant called Hamish. One day after they’d been going out for a few months, they went to the beach. “Wash the sand off your feet, will you?” asked Hamish mildly, before she got in the car.

On the way home, Gemma yawned and said, “You know, Hamish, I don’t really think this is going anywhere, do you?”

Hamish was shocked. He hadn’t seen it coming. He cried when they said good-bye, ducking his face against his shoulder to wipe away his tears on his sweetly uncool checked shirt.

Gemma felt terrible.

But somewhere deep inside of her she felt a tiny hard kernel of pleasure.

It seemed to
Cat that she’d been gathering momentum ever since the night of the spaghetti, slipping and sliding, grabbing frantically to save herself. The night of the mobile phone bill was when her fingers finally uncurled from the rockface and she went into freefall.

“You called her on Christmas Day.”

He didn’t look away, didn’t look at the bill she was waving at him. “Yeah, I did. Cat, babe—”

“Please get that
gentle
expression off your face.”

“O.K.”

“Why did you pretend to be happy about the baby?”

“I didn’t. I was.”

“Don’t patronize me. I don’t want my feelings spared! I want the truth.”

And like an idiot man he took her literally. He didn’t spare her feelings; he beat them to a bloodied pulp.

The thing was, he’d been having doubts,
little
doubts, sort of niggling feelings for a long time. A year at least.

A year at least?
Cat felt her whole world tilt.

He thought maybe it was normal after being married for so long. He just felt, you know, flat. Didn’t she feel that way sometimes?

“I don’t know,” said Cat, because she didn’t know anything anymore.

That night with Angela, even though he hated himself, he also
liked
himself. For the first time in ages. Angela made him feel good. Sometimes Cat treated him like such a moron.

“We’ve always been so competitive. Sean’s mentioned it. How we were always making little digs at each other.”

As if their marriage was something that happened a long time ago.

“Go on,” said Cat. “It’s all so fascinating.”

She felt as if she’d committed a social gaffe of gigantic proportions. Had their relationship appeared bitchy and cruel to the world instead of sexy and fun? Had Dan been lying beside her each night, separated by an entirely different reality?

“Just go on,” she repeated. He seemed too brightly defined under the kitchen lights.

That week after he told her about Angela was pretty rough. Cat wasn’t talking to him, or else she was screaming at him, and he didn’t get much sleep on the sofa bed. He was exhausted.

So, one day, without really thinking about it, he accidentally rang Angela.

Cat laughed—a contemptuous bark. “Are you telling me that this all happened because you were
tired?
Because I was giving you a hard time about your little fling, you decided to turn it into a bigger fling?”

“You’re twisting my words again.”

“I am not twisting your fucking words. I am trying to understand you!”

“It’s complicated.”

“So, while we were trotting off each week to fat Annie, you were having an affair?”

“It wasn’t like an affair! Every time it happened I said, O.K. this is it, never again. It was like when we were giving up smoking. I just kept falling off the wagon.”

Cat snorted and stored that one up for Lyn and Gemma. It
was like giving up smoking. It was on the tip of her tongue to say, You
are
a moron.

He said, “And then you got pregnant.”

“Yep. Then I got pregnant.” She remembered the joy like a crisp, clean scent.

“So then, it was easy. I broke it up. When we saw her at Lyn’s place, I hadn’t spoken to her in, well, days. I only rang her that night because I knew she’d be upset.”

“And now I’m not pregnant anymore.”

He looked at the floor.

“How very convenient for you.” Fat, salty tears blocked her sinuses. “You must have been pleased.”

“No.” He moved as if to hug her, and she backed away.

“You’re only here because you don’t want to look like a bastard by leaving too soon after the miscarriage!”

“That’s not true.”

“Well, what do you want? Do you want me or her?”

He said, “I don’t know what I want.”

He was a child in the six-foot-body of a thirty-seven-year-old man.

“You
wimp! You fucking coward!”

“Cat.”

“If you don’t love me anymore, then have the guts to say it.”

“I do love you. I just think, maybe, I’m not
in
love you with anymore.”

“And you think maybe you’re in love with her.”

“Yes.”

It felt as if he’d just thrown a bucket of icy cold water at her. She blinked and tried to catch her breath.

“Leave.”

“What?”

“I’m making it easy for you.” She tugged her engagement ring and wedding ring over her knuckle and threw them across the room. “We’re not married anymore. Go to your girlfriend’s place.”

“I don’t—”

Suddenly she was filled with manic hatred for him. She couldn’t bear the sight of him, his worried face, his reaching hands, and his slack, stupid mouth.

“Go! Just go! Go now!”

She screamed harder than she knew it was possible to scream and shoved him violently in the chest. “Get out!”

She was frightened and fascinated by the unrecognizable sound of her own voice. Cool, cynical Cat appeared on the sidelines of her consciousness to observe the whole performance with interest. Wow, I must really be upset. I must be mad with grief. Look at me!

“Cat. Calm down. Stop it. People are going to start calling the police.”

He grabbed for her wrists, and she writhed away from him, bucking her body like a true mental patient.

“Go! Please, please just go!”

“Fine,” he said, releasing her hands and lifting his own in surrender. “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m going.”

But she could see little pinpoints of relief in his eyes. He left, slamming the door behind him.

Cat slid to the kitchen floor and wrapped her arms around her knees. She rocked back and forth, her eyes dry.

What are you doing Cat? Why are you rocking like that? Nobody’s watching. Who are you trying to impress with the terrible depths of your pain?

“Oh shut up!” she said out loud to the empty kitchen.

She stood up, dressed, and drove herself to the pub. Her mind was a burning white-hot rectangle of nothing.

She sat at the bar and drank tequilas, one after the other, and didn’t allow her mind to think one single thought.

It wasn’t surprising that she got drunk.

She hadn’t eaten all day.

She hadn’t had a drink since the day with Gemma when she found out she was pregnant.

And five tequilas will do that to you.

At some point the world became blurry and confused, like a strangely edited MTV clip.

She was talking with the bartender about cricket scores.

She was tearing up her beer coaster into tiny little pieces.

She was telling a girl in the toilets about her miscarriage.

“OmiGod,” the girl said to her mirrored reflection while she pursed her lips to apply her lipstick. “That is just so awesomely sad. A little fucking baby.”

And then she was out in the parking lot and she was going somewhere, somewhere important, to fix things.

He doesn’t love me anymore.

The crunch of metal. Her head snapping back.

“I think she’s drunk. I think we should call the police.”

Lights flashing red and turquoise.

Lyn suddenly, confusingly, right there in the middle of it all, in the same way that new people popped into your dreams, without actually arriving.

Sitting in the back of the policeman’s car, watching the back of his neck. It was a boy’s neck, slightly flushed, his hair cut in a very straight, scissored line. Another young boy pressed her black, inky fingertips one by one against official white stationery. He held her hand so respectfully, even though she was an evil, drink-driving, baby-killing criminal, that Cat started to cry.

And then arriving at Lyn’s place and Michael meeting them at the door and being nice to her, his arm around her waist, helping her up the stairs to the spare bedroom.

“I love you, Michael,” she told him.

“I love you too, Cat,” he pushed her gently onto the bed.

“But I’m not at all physically attracted to you.” She shook her head sadly.

“Well, that’s quite O.K.”

Kara materialized, carefully placing a glass of water and aspirin next to her bed.

She didn’t know if she imagined the bit where Lyn kissed her
forehead just before sleep finally, thankfully, closed her mind down.

The next afternoon, she didn’t love anyone.

Lyn and Michael dropped her back home. They were like solicitous parents, twisting their heads to offer advice to Cat sitting slumped in the backseat. Cat felt hungover and immensely irritable. She also uncharitably suspected that Lyn and Michael were enjoying the drama.

“With your first offense, I’m sure you only lose your license for a year at the most. That won’t be that bad,” said Lyn.

Why was she using words like “first offense”? Did she think this was an episode of
Law and Order
?

“Don’t forget you girls have appalling driving records,” said Michael cheerily.

Oh, he was a
dork.

The flat was empty, and Dan hadn’t called.

She took a taxi to the smash repairs where her car had been towed and winced in empathy when she saw her beloved car parked sadly against a grotty paling fence, a violently scooped-out dent in one side. She felt exactly the same way.

“You need a courtesy car, love?” asked the manager, his head down as he filled in forms.

“Yeah,” she said. What did it matter if she got caught for driving without a license? Dan didn’t love her anymore. All the rules that mattered had already been broken.

There was a framed photo of a baby on his desk.

“Your baby?” asked Cat.

“Sure is!” The man stood up and grabbed a set of keys from a hook.

“I’ve got a little boy about the same age,” said Cat.

“Oh yeah?”

“He’s just started walking,” she said, as they walked out of the office. “My little boy.”

“Yeah?”

He took her to an aggressive-looking ute with a gigantic sign on the back:
SAM’S SMASH REPAIRS
,
YOU SMASH ’EM
,
WE FIX ’EM
.

“Hope you don’t mind the free advertising,” he said.

“No. Good slogan.” Because mothers were nice like that, generous with their praise.

His face became animated. “You like it? I thought of it. Says it straight.”

“It sure does.”

She gave him a smiling little waggle of her fingers as she drove slowly out of the driveway, the mother of a little boy, the sort of woman who feels a little nervous driving a big wide truck. But when she pulled out onto the highway, and put her foot hard on the accelerator, she felt the evil tentacles of her true self spreading and multiplying.

The sort of woman with an impending court case.

The sort of woman with a dry hung-over mouth going home to no one.

The sort of woman who automatically looks for the next side street when she sees a police car in the distance.

She and Dan decided to separate.

Separate.

She practiced conversations in her head:

“How’s Dan?”

“Oh, we’ve separated.”

“My husband and I are separated.”

Sep-a-rat-ed.

Four sad little syllables.

She went back to work seven days after her miscarriage, two days after Dan moved his things out of the flat.

It was the first time in her life that she had lived on her own. No sisters. No roommates. No boyfriend. No husband. Just her.

Cat the silent observer appeared to have moved in permanently. She felt herself watching everything she did, as if every move were significant.

Here I am waking up. This is the new quilt cover with big yellow sunflowers that Gemma gave me. Dan hasn’t even seen it. And I’m tracing each petal with my fingertip.

Here I am eating Vegemite on multigrain toast, a single, professional woman, living on her own, preparing for another long day at the office.

“Good
morning!” Her secretary, Barb, popped her head around
the cubicle door. “How
are you? Oh God, you look terrible.”

This last sentence sounded to Cat like the most genuine thing Barb had ever said to her. She had long ago accepted that in spite of her excessively bubbly demeanor, Barb actually held Cat in the greatest contempt. It didn’t matter because she was an excellent secretary.