The Mistake

by Katie McMahon

  I was just about to tell them about a podcast I’d listened to on men’s sheds, but then Bec said, ‘People say surgeons don’t care. But Stuart certainly takes things to heart. Such a perfectionist.’

  ‘I guess even doctors are only human,’ I said.

  Bec looked like I’d smacked her, so I put my hand on her arm and added, ‘I know Stuart cares, Bec. Sorry. Of course, he does.’ He really does.

  Around then, Stuart himself arrived back from the hospital.

  ‘Madam Kate!’

  He was all bonhomie and, I could tell, genuinely happy to see me. He looked at Adam as if he was trying to decide what football code Adam followed. Bec flicked the kettle back on.

  The two men then got into an oddly lengthy discussion about sourdough bread. Bec and I had a good but similarly too-long chat about Essie’s lovely teacher who is letting her hair go grey as a statement. Then Bec and Stuart started talking about the Melbourne photography scene. They said names, all knowledgeable and show-offy. They talked about exhibitions and galleries and artists-in-residence.

  ‘And what sort of stuff do you do, Adam?’ Stuart said.

  ‘I tend to do urban streetscapes. A few people. Nothing too arty.’ Adam reached across me – leaning in so close I could smell him – and took a vanilla slice. ‘So, on the way here, we—’

  ‘Would we know your work?’ Stuart asked. ‘Sounds as if it might be that gritty Chris McLaren aesthetic?’

  Adam looked blank. ‘That’s not really what I do,’ he said.

  ‘You involved in that Laneways book? The Fred Delia anthology?’

  ‘That’s not really what I do,’ said Adam, again.

  ‘Weddings and stuff like that, is it, then, mate?’ said Stuart. He tilted his chin back a tiny bit, and his tone made me understand why some people hate private-school parents.

  ‘Well.’ Adam swallowed. He sipped his tea.

  ‘You must have some interesting wedding stories,’ Bec said, as if it was a cross examination. ‘Do tell us more, Adam.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Adam. ‘Nothing much comes to mind. How was—?’

  ‘So, how long have you been a photographer?’ she said.

  There was a silence.

  ‘I did a science degree first. And then sort of segued into it after that.’ For the first time since I met Adam – admittedly not that long ago – he looked less than completely self-assured.

  Stuart nodded. ‘I see,’ he said.

  ‘That so?’ said Bec, also nodding.

  I looked at Bec in this certain way I do (furious), and she immediately said, ‘Anyway, speaking of weddings! We’ve been invited to one in Brisbane.’

  ‘How nice,’ I said, very sweetly. But something in Adam’s posture had changed. Enough to make me feel a little bit sick about him.

  I said we’d better go, and that I’d just have a quick chat to the children. Bec decided to come with me.

  ‘So, um, how serious are you guys?’ she asked, as we walked down the corridor.

  Her face was so smooth and compassionate that I shrugged my most nonchalant shrug and said, ‘You know what I’m like.’

  Later, as she hugged me goodbye, she said, ‘Thanks for fitting us into your dirty weekend.’ She was trying for light and girly but didn’t quite manage it. With her forearm still on mine, she looked into my eyes – all serious and meaningful – and said, ‘As long as you’re happy. That’s all we care about.’

  I moved my arm away.

  ‘I didn’t mean—’ she said, innocently. Pretending she adored Adam. Pretending we’d all just had a perfectly marvellous chat.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll see you tomorrow at Mum and Dad’s.’ I sounded like Jane Seymour. (King Henry VIII’s third wife. Haughty and poised, yet forgiving of others’ foibles.)

  What is more annoying? I asked myself, as Adam reversed our hire car out of their twisty-turny driveway like he’d been doing it all his life. People who say ‘we’ when ‘I’ would suffice, people who talk about your ‘dirty’ weekend away, or people who say they ‘just want you to be happy’ when they’re not even your parents?

  But I didn’t laugh with Adam about any of that, the way I might have done only a few hours before.

  *

  The next day, Sunday, I felt a bit better about things. Perhaps I had strategically re-aligned my goals with the current environment, or nimbly adjusted my priorities in the face of changing conditions, or resiliently accepted the world’s harsh realities, or whatever.

  ‘Ready for the parents?’ I said, from around my toothbrush.

  ‘I’m really crap with parents,’ he said. He was in the bedroom, buttoning up his shirt. ‘But I’ll give it a crack. Your mum’s Marion, right?’

  ‘Correct. And Dad is Rob, but we all call him BFG. He’s really tall.’

  ‘Got names wrong once before.’

  ‘You dill. Don’t today.’

  ‘Won’t.’

  ‘Because my parents notice everything.’

  ‘No resemblance, then.’ Affectionately.

  We weren’t looking at each other, but we were having a really nice time.

  It turned out Mum had made lamb shoulder (Lebanese flavours, as predicted) and her Earl Grey tea cake. The cake was a nice surprise, as it’s my favourite dessert and I’d been anticipating cardamom rice pudding or some such.

  She was friendly – ‘How do you go with pine nuts, Adam?’ and then, ‘Be a love and pop the couscous on the table’ – but she didn’t ask him for his views on Extinction Rebellion, food additives or Scrabble. I could, therefore, tell that Bec had phoned a report in, and that it hadn’t been positive. Bec smiled at me and helped Mum with the pilaki and the water jugs. Innocent as a strawberry. Whatever, I thought.

  During lunch, Adam pointed out BFG’s recently completed chook enclosure, which admittedly is very well-engineered. ‘That pre-fab?’ Adam said. BFG was delighted, because he never uses pre-fab, and he therefore gave a very lengthy answer – at least ten seconds – involving the terms load-bearing and Z-something. Adam tilted his jaw in an attentive, man-to-man way and then said something about tensile strength. Stuart made a well-informed remark about the begonias.

  After lunch, while the kids were up various trees – Bec and Stuart embrace a limited-screen, free-play parenting style – Adam went outside with Mum and BFG to be shown the coriander patch and the tomato vines (as featured in the lamb) and to have a closer look at the chook enclosure.

  The rest of us cleaned up. Mum and BFG don’t own a dishwasher: their kitchen is little, with old cupboards – freshly painted blue – and an excellent gas cooker. I was happily putting Mum’s cups away, when Stuart said, ‘So, have you met his family?’ I was pretty sure Bec would already have told him I hadn’t. Of course, she’d wheedled that out of me days ago.

  ‘They’re out past Ballarat,’ I replied. Ballarat is an unpleasant three-hour drive from where we live.

  ‘So, what’s his place like?’

  ‘Pardon?’ I said. Imperiously.

  ‘Stu.’ Bec sounded like a warning beacon. She’s unbelievably two-faced sometimes.

  ‘All part of my standard vetting procedure.’ He was aiming to sound light.

  ‘No idea,’ I said. I put Mum’s favourite green teacup back on its hook. ‘Haven’t seen it.’

  Bec froze. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really?’ echoed Stuart. He stopped trying to be light, which was a vast relief as he’s not that good at it. He frowned, as if he was my father (the sort of vigilant-about-marriage-prospects father who would fight a duel over his daughter’s virtue) and I could practically hear him reminding himself of my ample net worth.

  Just then his phone rang, and he said a few brisk, surgeon-y things about normal saline and keep them fasted, and then told us he had to go off to work. (Pretty much all he ever says on the phone is normal saline and fasted. I could do it.)

  ‘Give my apologies to your mum and dad,’ he said to Bec. ‘Give the kids a kiss.’ He didn�
�t mention Adam. He didn’t go outside to shake his hand goodbye. At the kitchen door, he gave me a hug, which included a bear-up-old-girl pat on the back.

  ‘Hope work goes well,’ I said, wishing it would involve pus in someone’s bottom or something like that.

  Bec and I went back to the sink in silence. She dried items very thoroughly, and I put them away very neatly. Through the window, we heard Essie yelling, ‘Is Ms Tillack meaner than Mrs Syme?’ and Mathilda bawling back, ‘WHAT?’ several times. (Eventually they came up onto Mum’s tiny deck and it was established that no, Ms Tillack was kind yet firm, while Mrs Syme was the meanest teacher in the whole junior school, and had once been known to insist on a grade-six girl retrieving her untouched ham sandwich from a bin and taking it home to show her mother.)

  ‘“Kind yet firm”,’ Bec said. She hates confrontation. ‘Bloody Enid Blyton. The other day I heard them call someone thin-lipped and cruel. And Mathilda keeps asking for ginger bloody beer.’

  I laughed, but tightly.

  By the time we’d finished the cutlery, the others were all on the deck, looking down towards the river and up towards the mountain. BFG appeared to be pointing out the road up to the summit. Just about every house in Hobart has a really good view and a biggish garden, but Adam of course wasn’t used to that and was staring around in an impressed, only-ten-minutes-from-the-CBD! way.

  Bec folded up the tea towel and hung it neatly over the middle of the oven rail, the way she and Mum and I always do with tea towels. Then we stood together, looking out of the kitchen window at the little group on the balcony. Adam was now squatting on his haunches to talk to Essie.

  ‘He’s really cute, though, isn’t he?’ she said, eventually.

  ‘Yep.’ I said it icily, with a very pronounced ‘p’ sound.

  She looked down at her fingers, which were twisted together the way they always are when she’s under pressure. ‘Kate, Stuart just wants to make sure you—’

  ‘Not everyone even wants a cookie-cutter perfect relationship, Bec, you know.’ The sentence started off sounding cosmopolitan and scornful but finished up a bit broken. It’s a stupid saying anyway, because everyone likes cookies, and how else would you even make them?

  ‘Of course!’ she said. ‘Well, like I said, he’s really cute, and as long as you’re happy.’

  ‘I am.’ Then I gathered my now unbraided hair so it fell over my shoulder and gave her a modest-yet-suggestive little smile. I nudged her with my hip and lowered my voice in an experienced-urban-older-sister way. ‘It is just ridiculous, the chemistry.’

  Which had the dual advantage of being true and of wiping the appraising, superior shrewdness right off her face.

  *

  ‘Babe, I can’t make it to dinner tonight,’ Adam said, the very next Tuesday. ‘Sorry.’

  It was almost five. I told myself that he wasn’t to know there was beef stew simmering on my little-used stove, or how hard I’d worked to finely chop two large onions, or that, while I’d been re-drafting my essay on late-sixteenth-century concepts of household roles, a whole separate part of my mind had been polishing up my delight in the idea that, like a genuine bachelor girl, I’d be finishing up at my desk by around five and having a quick shower before sitting down to a casual dinner with the guy I was seeing.

  ‘No worries,’ I said. Against all the boring advice about men that has ever been given, I added, ‘How come?’

  ‘Work stuff,’ he said.

  ‘What work stuff?’ Lightly.

  ‘Should I come by later? Say eleven?’

  There was a silence. I considered my options.

  ‘All right,’ I said. My tone was as breezy as a small-car commercial. ‘I’ll save you some stew.’

  I planned to leave the stew on the counter and be smooth and scented and asleep (or at least fake-asleep) when he buzzed. Unfortunately, he appeared an hour early, at just after ten, and I was sitting on the couch, un-showered and crying. My eyes always go red when I cry.

  ‘Hey. Kate. Babe. What’s wrong?’ He put down his backpack and gave me a hug.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ I said, into his shoulder. When I could smell that he’d just had a shower, I totally dropped my bundle. My snot went all over his black thermal.

  ‘I told you.’ His voice was tender. ‘Work stuff.’ I stood back and looked at him the way Bec looks at the kids when there are Tim Tams missing from the treats shelf.

  ‘How dumb do you think I am?’ I said. In my head I was Catherine of Aragon (first wife): intelligent, dignified, moral-high-ground occupier extraordinaire. But out loud my voice was the unhinged shriek of the vacuous and contemptible (in my humble opinion) Catherine Howard (fifth wife) on her way to the Tower. I saw my stump waggling in my peripheral vision. It’s very difficult not to talk with your hands when you’re upset, even if you don’t still have a hand. My jigging stump made me cry more.

  ‘Kate. I promise. I was working.’ He gave me a gentle kiss on the forehead, and put his arms around me again. After a bit he kissed the top of my head. ‘Now. Go and blow your nose,’ he said. I didn’t feel like moving, but I turned around and went towards the bathroom.

  I had a shower, and thought about how, that evening, I’d discovered that even if you went through every single entry on the first six pages, Google had nary a mention of a Melbourne photographer called Adam Cincotta.

  I stood under the hot water and tried to decide what to do. What sort of urban wilderness artiste doesn’t have a bafflingly solemn website that takes minutes to load? I could ask him, in a teasing voice, as if I was joking. And – I could say, a bit more seriously, as if I was concerned about industrial exploitation in the creative sector – what sort of photographer has to be at work at nine o’clock on a Tuesday evening without warning?

  When I got back to the lounge room, he was just finishing his stew. I hovered for a moment. He turned around and smiled at me, and I decided not to ask any of my questions.

  You see, I had been lonely for such a very, very long time.

  Chapter Six

  Bec

  It was after ten by the time Bec arrived home from dropping off the kids. She was vacuuming the lounge room when her phone rang.

  ‘Mrs Henderson.’ His voice sounded intimate and jokey, as if they’d agreed on that as a private nickname. The vacuum cleaner finished its brief decrescendo; there was silence.

  ‘Hi, Ryan,’ she said. She stayed standing up, even though she was right next to her own couch.

  ‘Thanks again for the other night,’ he said. It was more than three weeks since Stuart’s party. ‘How’d you all go the next morning?’

  ‘Yeah. Bit dusty.’ What was she saying? Why was she using that knowing, sardonic tone? She used to talk like that when she was at university. ‘I think Stuart had a very sore head.’ That was the right response. And it would remind them both who the party had been for.

  ‘Fun night,’ he said. She was still trying to work out exactly how he meant that, and also, how to agree in a not-overly-eager way, when he said, ‘Life settled down now, then?’

  ‘Oh well, you know, there’s always something, isn’t there?’ she said. ‘Things are as cray-cray as usual.’ Dear God, she was sounding more like Allie every day.

  ‘Ah yeah. My mum always reckons it’s women who carry the burden of the universe.’

  ‘Sounds like the sort of thing my mum’d say.’ Her mum would have put it more like, Women perform the majority of domestic labour and have hardly any superannuation. But really, similar sentiment.

  ‘Would she?’ He sounded intrigued, almost as if he thought that implied some sort of connection between them.

  ‘I can just imagine your mum,’ Bec said, on an impulse. She actually could, too. ‘I bet she knits beanies – in a cool way – and makes those beeswax sandwich wraps. I bet she used to let you climb really high on play equipment but hardly watch any TV and I bet . . . I bet she doesn’t believe in vaccination.’ She used a shock-horror voice when she s
aid the vaccination line, so he’d know that she was not judging his mum’s choices on that issue. Even though she was judging her head off, and obviously her children had had every vaccine going.

  ‘Pretty right,’ he said. ‘She weaves. And does cool pottery.’ He laughed. ‘Just don’t tell your husband about the vaccination thing.’

  ‘Hate to break it to you, but I’m a doctor too, Ryan. So you’re in big trouble now.’ She didn’t know what was worse: that she sounded as jolly as all-get-out, or that she sounded so pathetically show-offy.

  (Once, when she was in year ten, Bec had been on the kitchen phone to the boy she had a crush on. When she hung up, Kate – then in year twelve – said, ‘Were you trying to be un-sexy, Bec?’)

  ‘Are you? Really?’ said Ryan. He sounded intrigued again, and as if he didn’t think she was being too jolly or too show-offy at all.

  ‘No. Not really. I mean, I was. But I don’t – I’m not even registered anymore.’

  ‘Because of the kids?’

  ‘Partly, I suppose. I don’t quite carry the burden of the entire universe, but definitely the burden of an average-sized household.’ Less jolly now, thank goodness. ‘And the kids are young still, and I sort of believe they need me. Not that it’s not great. I mean, I know I’m very fortunate. To have that choice.’

  Even as she was saying all that, she knew that later she would regret being so forthcoming and unguarded and sincere. All the stuff about their mums, too. But it somehow felt as if she had to be – had to be light and open and confiding – to make the conversation take the right shape, so he wouldn’t feel disappointed in her. So he wouldn’t think, Why did I bother ringing that uptight Sandy Bay lady? and instead would think, That woman is down to earth and enchanting. And then he might ring her again, or at least keep using that impressed, intrigued tone.

  ‘Sounds to me like your family are really fortunate too,’ he said.

  ‘Oh well. Surgeons have to work very hard.’ She kept saying that lately, as if a surgeon was all Stuart was. ‘How long have you been in Hobart?’

  ‘Two or three months. WA originally. Then I was up northern New South Wales. Just time for a change.’