The Mistake

by Katie McMahon

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Phill

  Bec

  I never thought of myself as smug. That’s the really humiliating bit.

  I didn’t plaster a BRIARWOOD: INDEPENDENT AND OUTSTANDING sticker on our car’s back window. (‘Not everyone needs to know where you go to school, darlings.’)

  I wore my engagement ring – of course I was going to wear it – but my wedding band was as discreet and unassuming as a light switch.

  I was careful never to mention how easily I fell pregnant (yes, all three times) or that, after twelve years of marriage, Stuart and I still had sex at least once a week. I didn’t say things like, ‘The kids are doing long-haul so much better these days’ or, ‘My dermatologist is excellent, but I’m too much of a scaredy-cat for filler before forty’. (Those are actual quotes from the school gate, by the way. You can see where my baseline was.)

  I thought I was way too humble and sensitive and grounded for any of that sort of talk. And anyway, I felt the opposite of smug. I felt like someone who had to try really hard just to manage the minimum.

  But I was smug. Insufferably.

  Lots of people probably think I got exactly what was coming to me.

  And I agree with them.

  Kate

  Mum once said Bec was the easy one. Even when we were little, she was one of those people who never put a foot out of line. At least not deliberately.

  But when she makes a mistake, it’s a really, really big one.

  Chapter One

  Kate

  Eventually, I decided to try online dating.

  ‘So,’ I said, casual as anything, ‘I’m going on Tinder.’

  It goes to show how strong the urge to procreate is, because just about everything I’d heard about internet hook-ups was bad. Stories about ghosting and photos and genuinely frightening weirdos. It was almost enough to make you look back with fondness on the days of smoke-filled nightclubs where your bottom was pinched by simple, honest menfolk with beery breath and heads like red capsicums.

  ‘Oh right,’ Bec said. ‘Aren’t you on it already?’

  We were talking on the phone, and I could tell she was cooking dinner. She sounded a bit distracted: probably worried she’d accidentally put non-organic kale in the kids’ frittata.

  ‘Well, if you meet someone nice, you can bring him to Stu’s fortieth. As your plus-one.’

  Hearing Bec use the term ‘plus-one’ without irony was almost enough to make me cry. I loved my sister, but honestly, there were moments when I felt I didn’t know her anymore.

  In any case, I didn’t want a ‘plus-one’ for social events. I also didn’t want: walks along the beach, red wine in front of fires, or even sperm for my (no doubt rapidly dwindling) 39-year-old supply of eggs. I was just yearning, absolutely yearning, to have sex. (Intercourse, to be more specific.)

  Of course I know – believe me, I know – that intercourse is Just One Of The Many Ways Human Beings Can Enjoy Their Sexuality. But I felt I’d fully explored my personal sexual identity – if you catch my drift – and it was well past time to involve someone else. A man, in my case.

  Anyway, the yearning. For skin and touch and eye contact and that quiet, concentrated breathing. For the way some men know how to look at you and say – all level and effective – ‘God, I want you’ or ‘Been dying to get you alone’ or something like that. It hardly matters what they say. It’s all in the tone. And I wanted to wake up with urgent hands on me. I wanted to be undressed. I wanted to be dragged across a bed. But you just can’t say stuff like that to someone who uses the term ‘plus-one’ in general conversation.

  ‘Ha! Maybe,’ I said instead. ‘Listen, I’d better go.’

  I hung up, feeling a bit sad, as if I’d given someone a really thoughtful present that they hadn’t bothered to open. But it was hardly Bec’s fault she didn’t know what was going on with me.

  Far below my apartment windows, Melbourne gleamed. Lights were starting to come on: they snaked along the coast, all the way around Port Phillip Bay. So many headlights. So many houses and banks and football grounds and beaches and delis and trams and apartments and offices and building sites.

  I will go on as many dates as it takes, I thought, until I find one man to have sex with. The only criteria are that I must want to have sex with him, and he must want to have sex with me.

  I would give it three months, then reassess.

  I wasn’t optimistic.

  *

  ‘Kate!’ said Juliet. ‘There will be right-swiping a go-go! You’ll have so much fun!’

  Juliet – my main Melbourne confidante, given Bec lives in Hobart – is enthusiastic about most things, especially if they have to do with me. She is extremely kind.

  ‘I’m putting just my face in my photo,’ I said, looking at my cauliflower salad.

  Juliet chewed a cherry tomato. (We were having lunch at a café with second-hand chairs, butterscotch walls and a we’ll-accept-you-even-if-you-eat-gluten vibe.)

  ‘Whatever you’re comfortable with.’ She used a strident tone, as if someone had suggested I should do something I was uncomfortable with, and pushed her hair out of her face. She has curly red hair, like Nicole Kidman’s was before Hollywood.

  Just then her phone rang. Juliet is a travel agent. You would think that travel agents would have all perished of the internet, but a few of them hang on, battered and defiant. They are like survivors in a ye olde English village after the Black Death has galloped through. (The reason Juliet survived is the high-end retiree market. Her clients are elderly, but not sweet, easily-fobbed-off, grateful-for-any-old-rubbish-because-at-least-it’s-not-The-War elderly. More like: ‘I’m paying top dollar for this Northern Lights helicopter jaunt, so why is the Moët non-vintage?’ elderly.)

  ‘So when’s your first date?’ said Juliet, when she’d finished explaining to the man on the phone why he didn’t want a balcony the size of a postage stamp.

  ‘You sure? About just my face in the photo?’

  ‘You don’t owe anyone anything.’ She gave me a sweet smile, then started eating fast. She would have an appointment to talk about Copenhagen, Iceland or Budapest at two.

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  ‘Just don’t show your bazookas,’ she added, with her mouth full. ‘Tinder would actually burst into flames.’

  That’s Juliet. Exceptionally kind.

  *

  Two weeks later, both Bec and Juliet had texted to ask me if I had met any ‘cuties’ (Bec) or ‘contenders’ (Juliet).

  No luck yet, I texted back, to both of them. I sent the emoji with the crossed eyes, as if the w
hole thing was a hilarious adventure.

  I didn’t know how to tell them there’s a certain look men get. It’s the look that probably crosses your face when you think you’ve spotted an amazingly good deal and then realise you missed a zero on the price tag, or when you grasp that the $14 is per oyster, not per six oysters. And that’s the look from the polite men – the ones with nice mums and dads, the ones who weren’t the coolest boys in school.

  The others – the ones used to getting their own way – look annoyed, as if they’ve been duped by a shoddy naturopath into buying herbs that do nothing. Date Number Seven fake-yawned as I said, ‘Hello.’ So I’d know it was a fake yawn, he raised four straight fingers to his wide-open mouth and gave his lips several slow taps. Date Twelve – cuffs flipped back revealing tanned wrists – looked at his watch as I sat down and said, ‘I need to be elsewhere.’ He gave his head a little shake, the way you might when your team loses because the referee made a stupid decision.

  On the way home that night I remembered the time David Hillman – the film producer – invited me out for Italian and I said no. I told him it was because I was off to New York in the morning, but really it was because he pulls his shirt collars out over the necklines of his jumpers. (That’s a really bad look; I stand by my judgement there. Even he couldn’t pull it off. And he still wears them like that, too; I saw him interviewed recently. Handsome as ever. He’s aging well.)

  I listened to a podcast the other day, about aging. Some women thought it was easier to age if you hadn’t been good-looking to start with. You would have based your self-esteem and your sense of identity on your intelligence or your sense of humour or your kind heart or whatever. But other women thought that it was easier to age if you’d been hot in your youth. They said that hotties, having been hot for their allotted two decades (late-teens to late-thirties, or thereabouts) inevitably realised the limitations of hotness. They saw through it. Understood hotness never buys happiness.

  I wondered if I would, eventually, have come to believe that.

  *

  Adam Cincotta was the seventeenth date. No one can say I don’t persevere.

  We met at a newish restaurant with good black-and-white drawings on the walls and sensible – by which I mean dim – lighting. It was crowded, but not too noisy. Well-designed acoustics. I was wearing a pale-green mohair sweater, black skinny jeans and my favourite black ankle boots. Also the earrings Bec and Stuart gave me for Christmas. They were dangly and sparkly and, having been chosen by Bec, much more tasteful than they sound.

  I was first to arrive, partly because I wanted to get it over with. I waited, facing the door, watching plates of gnocchi go past and thinking I’d definitely stay and have dinner even if he left straight away. When he arrived I was reading the menu.

  ‘Kate?’ he said.

  He was standing behind the chair opposite me, one capable-looking hand resting across each of its polished wooden knobs. His black polar fleece was the sort of thing I’d wear for a bushwalk, if I were to suddenly become the bushwalking type. He was skinny, but not in a bad way, and at least as tall as me.

  ‘Adam?’ I said.

  He sat down and asked me what looked good. I immediately noticed he hadn’t done The Look and that he had very definitely grey eyes. He had a sort of alert, quick-reflex way about him that could have made him look like a meerkat but didn’t, because his gaze was grave and his shoulders were relaxed. Meerkats are cute, with their babysitting among the tribe and their big roundy eyes, but you just wouldn’t want that frantic, bouncy sort of vibe when it comes to sex.

  We talked about my family (a mere seventy-minute flight away in Hobart) and budget airlines (generally not too shabby) and Melbourne’s inner-city traffic (we both tried to walk everywhere). Then we somehow got onto his hobby: rock-climbing. He had done something called free-climb Arapiles, and seemed to think I would know what that meant.

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘Scrambling illegally up an ancient ruin?’

  ‘No, Arapiles the mountain,’ he said. ‘In the Grampians?’

  He didn’t immediately reach for his phone to show me a photo, which was nice. Instead, he tilted one of his forearms to indicate a steep cliff-face.

  ‘You climbed it without a rope?’

  ‘No. With a rope.’

  ‘But you said, “free climb”.’

  ‘Yeah. You have ropes. Gear. It means you don’t—’

  ‘Not that impressive, really, then,’ I said. I was smiling though.

  ‘Bugger.’ He had a smile that came and went fast. ‘That’s all I’ve got.’

  There was a little silence until I started talking about a holiday I’d been on near the Grampians. I made it sound as if I’d been camping with friends, although it had actually been a health retreat where I’d eaten a great deal of chef-prepared fermented stuff and resisted pressure to discuss my ‘bowel actions’ with the On-site Qualified Ayurvedic Therapist. Since she was about twenty, I did not believe she could be that well-qualified.

  When the waiter told us there was only one panna cotta left, Adam asked me if I wanted it. I said, God no, I was having the chocolate thing, and he said, well, thank Christ, and did you notice how chivalrous that was? I laughed and so did the waiter.

  While I was eating my chocolate tortino, I found myself thinking about my underwear. I was wearing a matching maroon ensemble from Victoria’s Secret. The bra only partially concealed my nipples; the knickers were called the Very Sexy Strappy Cheeky Panty, which made me think of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Curled up in my drawer, the entire Very Sexy Strappy set had looked like a top-quality version of the shoebox of hair ribbons that Bec and I shared during primary school. On me, it looked pretty much the way it does on the VS models.

  Pretty much.

  Adam said he could walk me back to my apartment. I said that would be beyond chivalrous, we were now heading into gallant territory. He smiled his quick smile again. We ambled along a wide, busy-ish street. Necklaces of headlights shimmered past, and a tram with an ad featuring a beautiful, curvy twenty-something whose hips presumably represented the brand’s Very Genuine Commitment to diversity. It was raining, but we were on a wide footpath, under the awnings of lovely old shops. They mostly sold expensive kitchenware, expensive shoes or expensive haircuts. I was thinking, if he turns out to be a nutter, at least we will have been captured on CCTV and in tasteful environs.

  As we waited to cross a road, a shiny black four-wheel drive with a numberplate saying GELUZ? went past.

  ‘Do you have a personalised number plate?’ I asked. He looked at me and shook his head. ‘Would you ever get one?’ I went on.

  ‘Maybe. If I first had a lobotomy.’ Then he squinted his eyes and said, ‘You?’

  ‘Mine says “For Kate Not You”, with K 8 for Kate,’ I said. I drew a squiggle in the air to show the ‘8’. ‘And the number four, and the letter U,’ I clarified. He looked at me for a moment.

  ‘Kay Eight, I know U R joking,’ he replied, and did his quick smile again.

  The lights changed. He put his hand on my back, just for a second, as I stepped off the kerb. It felt nice. After a minute I stopped to look in a window (boring knitted things, but I needed to collect myself for a bit) and when we started walking again, he took my hand. His hand felt Very Subtly Lively. I felt very something. Not nervous. Not excited. A bit scared. A bit hopeful. Turned on. I felt very turned on.

  It was that delicious time when you sort of want to talk but there’s nothing to say, when it feels as if your bodies are swooshing your minds along. A familiar feeling, lovely and painful at the same time, an echo of a long time ago. From early on at dinner I’d been able to tell the sort of lover he’d be. Agile and strong; quiet, purposeful, competent.

  ‘Here we are,’ I said. I dropped his hand to fiddle with the coded gate into my apartment complex.

  It was when we turned down the path that I saw us in the double glass doors that lead to the lobby
. My hair, which as usual was down, had got a bit wet and gone very frizzy. It felt suddenly, unbearably itchy against my face, and I became aware that a few strands were stuck to my lip. The doors glinted at us with malevolent accuracy.

  We didn’t hold hands again. As soon as we reached the bright fluorescent glow of the vestibule, I turned to him.

  ‘Thanks for a fun evening,’ I said. I was aiming for dignified.

  ‘Thank you, Kate.’ He put one of his hands on my waist. ‘Shall we go in?’

  He obviously hadn’t noticed that my forehead was all tight, the way it goes when I need to cry. I felt the pressure he was putting through the base of his palm, onto my jeans, through to the uppermost strap of my ludicrous knickers.

  I shook my head. Not flirtily. Not maybe-next-time promisingly. Just the way Mum used to when I asked her for a treat before dinner. Firm, routine, with the chance of some mild irritation just around the corner.

  ‘Possibly an unchivalrous suggestion,’ he said, not letting go of my waist.

  ‘No problem at all. Thank you for walking me home.’ He let go. ‘In such a gentlemanly manner,’ I managed to add.

  Then, as I turned away, I somehow pulled out my best smile. The dazzling one. The iconic, stunning, light-up-the-room, insert-any-other-superlative-here one, just as if I were still a true professional. And I did it over my shoulder, in a manoeuvre that was a perfect imitation of a normal – of a sexy – woman flirting. As if there was nothing marring my anticipation of all the fun we were planning to have When We Were Both Ready.

  When I got into the lift, I pressed the button and leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes. But I’d missed the moment and now the tears wouldn’t come.

  *

  In the morning I made myself do all the usual things. No phone in the bedroom. Yoga in the yoga room. Ancient-grain porridge with stewed apricots for breakfast in the sun. The whole time bracing for disappointment. Telling myself he probably wouldn’t have texted, and if he hadn’t it could just be because I’d acted weird, and in any case that it didn’t really matter either way, and also that, if he hadn’t, it was his loss.