Or the second worst moment, when she had to sit in front of her own parents, the Doctor and his loyal wife, married for forty years, and tell them the same. The look on her father’s face. His insistence this would blow over. Surely.
There was so much from that time that Abi never wrote about. Instead, she wrote about moving to the country, and buying chickens, and letting her new garden grow wild.
Gradually, as she felt more and more relieved about what had happened to her life, she realised that if she wanted a true reinvention, she needed a cause.
Now, The Green Diva had just been nominated for a fucking award, if you could believe it. And the sweetest part? Abi was up against the lovely Elle. Abi hadn’t had even a moment’s doubt that her passionate following would trounce Elle’s powdered poseurs, and her confidence had oozed onto the questionnaire she’d filled out for the organisers:
DESCRIBE YOUR BLOG IN ONE WORD:
REVOLUTIONARY.
WHY DID YOU START BLOGGING?
There wasn’t any truth on the internet. Only bullshit. Women have a good bullshit detector. I wanted to cut through the crap and actually be useful, not just ornamental.
WHO ARE YOUR READERS?
They are the Green Divas (GDs). They know most of what they’re being fed out there, by Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Data, is DANGEROUS RUBBISH. They are looking for the Truth and they find it with us. Don’t fuck with the Divas.
WHAT ARE YOUR MOST POPULAR POSTS?
Anything that tells my Divas what they can do to drop the crap and live a real life. A healthy life. A truthful life. My girls want to be in the kind of form where they can conquer the world.
WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO ASPIRING BLOGGERS?
BE REAL. GET REAL. Don’t worry about your abs. Seriously. Who gives a fuck about abs?
HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH THE TROLLS?
Sister, I AM a troll. The scariest of them all. Bring it.
IF YOU WIN BLOGGER OF THE YEAR, WHAT’S YOUR BIG IDEA TO DEVELOP WITH ATGT?
A ‘dating’ app for Green Divas. Wherever you are in the world, you can find a like-minded mum to offer advice about the best naturopath in the neighbourhood, the closest place to get raw milk, someone to hang out with who isn’t going to be pushing all their corporate BS on you. It’s the ANTI-SHEEP TINDER for mums who know their shit. It will organise and mobilise and change the fucking world.
• • •
In the art-house cinema, distraught parents of ‘vaccine-injured’ kids flickered across the screen. Mountains of cheeseburgers represented the decline of children’s natural immunity. A measles party looked like the most fun ever. Stylised hipster fonts and hand-drawn graphs climbed ever higher, showing the ‘terrifying levels’ of toxins being pumped into tiny babies, all over the world, every day.
When the credits rolled, the tiny crowd erupted in cheers. The woman next to Abi was crying.
Abi was the Doctor’s daughter. She knew every bit of this was bullshit. But she also knew that this was the stony path to the next level for her blog. Where controversy went, numbers followed.
She was going to win this thing.
CHAPTER SIX
GRACE
‘I have no idea where you get this calm Earth Mother thing from,’ Leisel was saying to Grace. ‘Every time I speak to you, I feel like I’ve taken a Valium.’
‘That’s what I’m here for.’ Grace was in the garden, phone tucked into her shoulder, fingers in the dirt. ‘You just need to get out of the city, breathe a little.’
‘I don’t know how to do that.’ Leisel laughed. ‘Tell me something relaxing.’
‘Abi and I are going to build a teepee over by the barn.’
‘That’s not relaxing—that’s just hysterical.’
‘The kids will love it. It will give the girls somewhere to go away from the noise of the little ones, and it’ll be a great family project.’ Grace pulled something yellow up by the roots and squinted at it. ‘I think I just killed something edible.’
‘Well, lucky you can still get to Coles.’
‘Haha.’
‘You’d better get back to building your sweat lodge.’
‘Teepee.’
‘Whatever. Quick, the teenagers need somewhere to smoke bongs.’
‘Stop being so cynical, Lee, no wonder you’re stressed out. So much negativity.’
‘Ha. Says the partner of the woman who’s telling us we’re all toxic.’
‘So not getting into that with you. Congratulations, by the way.’
‘On what?’
‘Getting nominated for that award. You, and Abi and Elle. You couldn’t make that stuff up, could you?’
Grace could hear Leisel’s sigh as loudly as if her sister was squatting in the dirt beside her. ‘You’re telling me,’ she said. ‘I think we all know who’s going to win that one. I’m practising my gracious loser face. I hope Abi is, too.’
‘As if.’ Grace laughed, stood up and took the phone in her hand, stretched out her back, took off her sunhat for a moment. ‘Abi is gearing up. You guys had better bring it. Anyway…’
Whenever Grace and Leisel talked about Abi, there was always a moment when Grace felt like she was being disloyal. It was probably the same the other way around. Best to move on. ‘How are my gorgeous nieces and nephew? I miss them.’
‘They are breaking me, but they’re fantastic. Harriet’s trying to get the phone off me right now. She’s obsessed with Candy Crush. Harri!’
‘Leisel, I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. You know how bad screen time is for infants. All the studies show…’
‘I’m shitting you, Gracey! Harri can’t play Candy Crush, she’s not even one. She’s still on Words with Friends. You’d better get back to your abacus there.’
‘Very funny. Very funny. Okay. Tell Mum I’ll call her soon. We’ll be up there for the awards. I can’t wait to see you. Love you.’
‘Love you, sis. Give the kids a squeeze for me?’
‘Even the bong-smoking teenagers?’
‘Especially them, they’ll appreciate it.’
Grace hung up, dropped the phone in her apron pocket and got back to the garden. It was usually the place she felt most calm, with her hands in the earth. But as she eased out some more (non-edible) weeds, she worried about Leisel. Her sister hid behind humour, but she sounded on edge—like she was only just managing to keep things together.
• • •
Leisel and Grace were the only children of an absent father and a mother who wouldn’t leave her suburb. They were each other’s family. Family who lived a thousand kilometres apart.
The last time Grace had seen her mum, she’d invited her down to stay at the farm for a holiday. ‘It’s beautiful, Mum, you have no idea. You won’t know yourself.’
‘Why would I do that, darling?’ Anne had asked. ‘I don’t think you and Abi need any more mouths to feed, do you?’
A dig, obviously, but also an excuse. Her mum was comfortable doing what she’d been doing for decades—working part-time at a local builders’ office, playing lawn bowls with her friends at the Gordon Club, and moaning about how many ‘Chinese’ were moving into her street. Grace and Abi’s world was way too confronting for her.
Anne had never quite forgiven Grace for two things: being gay and moving to Melbourne. Despite her mother’s instinctive conservatism, Grace wasn’t really convinced that she felt more strongly about one than the other.
Anne was welded to the chip on her shoulder. After being left by the man who was supposed to provide for her, she’d always felt ashamed. Ashamed that she lived in a unit block amid leafy streets and detached brick homes. Ashamed that she wasn’t as educated as the doctors’ wives she met at bowls. She’d always kept things nice—hair done, clothes clean and pressed—but she felt marked with the bruise of rejection.
And she was sad. An enduring memory for both girls—from an early age—was coming home from school or netball to a darkened flat, the only light the glowin
g end of Anne’s cigarette as she sat there listening to Air Supply. No one ever said anything about it.
Grace had worked out she was gay when she realised that the other girls at school weren’t looking at the popstars and actresses in the same way that she did. White-bread Gordon in the ’90s wasn’t ready for gay schoolgirls, but there they were, coming ready or not, as Grace and her girlfriends used to say. Teen romance was conducted in strict secrecy, and although Anne must have known—especially after she walked in on Grace and Josephine from two doors down—no one ever said anything about that either.
After Leisel sprinted off to a Newtown share house, Grace and Anne were alone. The silence suffocated Grace, who, even then, was drawn to colour and movement and the chaos of little children. She had to leave, but Anne never really forgave her for this. ‘Family meant something, once,’ she would say, darkly, after a rare port.
Grace moved to Melbourne to train as a teacher in 1998, the same year that Abi graduated from uni and headed to London. Grace liked to imagine them both in airport taxis at the same time—she leaving the Tullamarine domestic terminal to start her new life, Abi and Adrian arriving at departures to fly off to their own. Imagine if those cars had passed each other, and they’d made eye contact.
But that wasn’t meant to be.
Grace did her training, but she hated classrooms and their rules. She wanted to travel, and applied for temporary roles all over Australia, then taught English in Europe and South America. Wherever she was, she sought out the most colourful people—the ones who rejected the suburban attitudes that had shamed a thirty-something single mother in Gordon. Grace spent her mid-twenties temping in Aboriginal communities and joining permaculture groups and training as a doula, happily falling in and out of relationships with intense women. Then she met Edie at a Territory school and soon found herself back in Melbourne, living with a headmistress and trying on a suburban life for size.
Grace was a romantic. She knew this about herself. She believed that a higher power had sent her to knock at Abi’s door in the summer of 2011 when Arden needed extra help with reading and maths—the summer when Abi was questioning everything.
Grace had loved Arden before she loved Abi. If you asked Grace, the dreamy, creative eight-year-old was trapped at a school that didn’t fit her. And Abi did eventually ask Grace for her opinion on this, over tea in the kitchen (something that had become a post-tutoring session ritual between them).
‘You need to get her into a new school, or get her out of school entirely,’ Grace said to Abi, stirring a teaspoon of honey into her tea. ‘She just needs the space to learn the way she needs to learn.’
Abi didn’t listen. But she did hear. Grace was aware that Abi heard everything she said, and that she was watching her mouth closely when she said it. It wasn’t the first time that Grace had been the object of an older, married woman’s interest. Her partner Edie told her it happened because she was nonthreatening, feminine—beautiful even—and open. She seemed like a safe canvas onto which these suburban wives could project the fantasies they pretended they weren’t having.
But Grace could sense that more was going on in that Balwyn kitchen than a crush. As they talked and talked over cooling teas, Otto entertained by the girls in the next room, she got the sense that Abi was playing a role in which she was miscast. She even looked like she was wearing the wrong costume, constrained by the stylish wardrobe demanded of the school-gate mums.
Later—much later, when Grace and Edie had wrung each other out with goodbyes, and Adrian and Abi were done—Grace witnessed Abi’s metamorphosis into a different woman in her bed. As each of Abi’s sweat-drenched curls sprang back, as her huge, generous smile filled her bare, freckled face, as she cried out in a guttural voice, Grace thought she was watching a woman become her true self. It was intoxicating. It was binding.
And they had four children between them.
• • •
Otto and Sol were running towards her through the veggie patch, wanting to show her something. ‘Abi’s back from town, Mum, and she bought us Creme Eggs!’
Jesus, Abi. Online she was the Green Diva, all organic and gluten-free, but she spoiled these kids with too much crap—if you asked Grace, who would no more eat a Creme Egg than shoot heroin.
‘Don’t eat those, boys. They’re full of chemicals. I don’t think they’re even real food.’ Grace put her hand out for her sons to hand over the sugar.
‘But Muuuuum, that’s why they’re so good,’ Sol said, laughing, but he did as he’d been told. Grace had trained her boys well: that was why they’d brought her the contraband in the first place. ‘Can we have them at Easter?’
‘I doubt it.’ Grace put the chocolate in her apron pocket and looked over the boys’ heads to see if Abi was visible behind them, up at the house.
There she was, waving out of a window and calling, ‘Hey, you! I’m hooooome!’
Grace put a soily hand up to her eyes and squinted into the sun to see her better.
‘Oh my god!’ Abi shouted. ‘I just saw a movie that you would LOVE!’
‘I would? Well then, you’re going to need to tell the world about it, babe.’
‘I’m coming down!’
Grace smiled to herself.
• • •
Grace’s friends had often asked her: Why Abi? Why Abi when she and Edie had gone through so much together to have their gorgeous boys? Sperm donors and counselling and IUI and family meetings and legals and then the beauty of the babies inside her and becoming what she had always felt born to be—a mother, part of a family. So, why Abi?
When people asked, she always said the same thing: ‘If you’ve ever been in love, you already know.’ Yes, it was an infuriating, patronising answer. But it was her only answer.
To Grace, the big things in life were best guided by instinct. By gut. But having her babies with Edie hadn’t been about that. She and Edie were so different—Grace had talked herself into that relationship, she could see that now. Edie was deeply ambitious for a respectable middle-class life that would have seen them living in Abbotsford forever and working in education and being ‘accepted’ by the straight neighbours and having Friday night dinners with them in the family-friendly beer garden. But Grace had never wanted to be like everyone else.
And then came a moment in that Balwyn house when Grace caught a glimpse of who Abi could be, who she really was.
After a tutoring session with Grace in the living room, Arden told her mum that she wanted to show her something. She sat on an armchair, lowered her little blonde pigtailed head and read a whole book to Abi. Even Otto, who usually staggered around banging things, was quiet, perhaps sensing the weight of the moment. Abi—who had been quiet herself recently, thin-skinned around the eyes with the look of someone who wasn’t sleeping well—sat next to Arden and listened, hands crossed in her lap.
When her daughter had finished, Abi leapt from the tasteful, neutral lounge and began to whoop. She scooped Arden up, all eight skinny years of her, and danced her around the living room. Her energy was so infectious that soon Alex and Otto were dancing too. And Grace was laughing and laughing from the sidelines, until Abi passed her on a turn, grabbed her by the waist and pulled her in tight, kissing her cheek hard: ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you!’ And they all danced.
And that Abi, the Abi with her head shaking and her feet stomping, whooping and laughing and wearing her joy on the outside, she felt like someone Grace knew. And they felt like family.
That evening, she went home and told Edie that she thought she was leaving.
Not for Abi. Not yet. Abi was married. But that glimpse of the family she wanted had changed everything for Grace.
• • •
Abi was down in the veggie patch with her. For a beat or two they just stood there, smiling at each other.
‘I had a good day in the city, as it turns out,’ Abi said. ‘Fucking nightmare place not so fucking nightmarish today.’
Grace k
issed her, twirling a piece of curly hair around her dirty finger. ‘That’s good. Got to love a day that doesn’t turn out how you’d expect.’
‘And Gracey. I tell you. Spiked. I’m going to push it. It’s going to help. It’s going to be big. We’re going to be biiiiiiiiiiiigg…’ And Abi was kind of stomp-dancing around the veggie patch, and the boys were back around her waist, and Grace was laughing.
It was just like that moment from the living room in Balwyn. Grace had been right—she’d glimpsed a scene from the future.
‘You are going to be big, baby,’ she said with a laugh. ‘As big as you deserve.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
LEISEL
The problem with blogging was that some days, nothing happened.
Some days, there was so much to say, you were itching to get to your keyboard where the words poured like hot tea. But other days, well, they were just… the same as the last one.
Especially, Leisel thought, when you’re working every hour god sends, and dealing with children’s myriad needs in the other, less god-sent hours.
Meanwhile, Abi and Elle seemed to have all the time in the world to sit around arranging pomegranates in white china bowls or recording interviews with Mothers Who Matter. Their blogs were their jobs.
Leisel knew, through the small details her sister had let slip, that money wasn’t a big concern for Abi and Grace. Abi’s divorce settlement, the sale of the Balwyn house and the inheritance Abi had received from her old-money grandparents meant that their modest lifestyle was pretty much taken care of.
How nice for them, Leisel had to stop herself from thinking.
She never used to be envious of others’ lives. Their decisions to marry ‘up’, their high-flying corporate jobs with the annual bonus that dictated whether or not they could holiday somewhere cold this summer? Not her scene. She was a gen Xer, and they were not a materialistic people.
BUT. But, but.
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