by Lette, Kathy
‘Ruby! That’s amazing! Oh my god . . . But how do you know?’ Emerald interrogated.
‘No, no, you don’t understand. I never had cancer in the first place.’
Emerald’s face froze in disbelief. ‘What?!’
As Amber grappled with her feelings of relief, shock and confusion, her mind was slow to grasp the reality of what I’d just confessed. When she finally spoke, her voice was petulant with disdain. ‘Wait. You never had cancer? The cancer was a lie? But I carried your suitcase! I let you win at Scrabble. And Monopoly. And cards, come to think of it . . .’
‘It was a misdiagnosis. And you didn’t “let” me win, Amber. You two are always underestimating me,’ I lashed out.
Both of my sisters were doing a pretty good imitation of the tropical fish we’d been snorkelling with these past few weeks. I watched their mouths opening and closing, silently.
Finally Emerald’s lips set like granite. ‘When did you find out about the misdiagnosis?’ she asked, her voice cold and metallic, like an antipodean Dalek.
‘The day after my birthday party. I was going to tell you, but I so wanted you both to come on the cruise to patch up your differences and become friends again – which we have! And then, once we were on board, well, we were having such a lovely time and all getting on so well, and you were both so happy. I knew you’d be furious that I got you on board under false pretences . . . So, I just kept putting it off. Then we were having so much fun that I forgot all about it. And then, of course, I had bigger things to tell you. Like the fact that I’ve fallen in love and am running away!’
My sisters’ eyes were bare and round as full moons.
‘I really, really did want to tell you that I didn’t have cancer. But somehow it was so good to be dying that I kinda started to wish that I really was!’ I said, tap dancing in quicksand.
‘Don’t you worry about that, Ruby, because I am going to kill you,’ Emerald seethed.
‘I’m sorry, okay? Don’t be angry with me.’ My lips trembled. ‘I just didn’t want to ruin our holiday, which is why I decided that the best time to tell you was just as soon we got back to port. Which I’m doing now, right?’ I added, desperately.
‘Only because we forced you to confess! I cannot believe you lied to us! And lied, and lied, and lied . . .’ Amber said shrilly.
‘I’ve written you an explanatory email, begging your forgiveness. Here!’ I opened the email on my phone. ‘I’ve just sent it to you both.’
But it was too little, too late. Both sisters glowered at me, with hands on their hips.
‘This whole trip was a bloody lie, just like your stupid infatuation is,’ Emerald declared. ‘We don’t need a doctor to make a goddamned diagnosis, Ruby. It’s increasingly clear that your midlife crisis has started without you.’
‘I mean, the scheming, the manipulation, the emotional blackmail . . . Do you know who you remind me of? Our mother,’ Amber stated, coldly.
‘I’m sorry. Truly. I just didn’t want our holiday headline to be “Enjoy Your Trip to Paradise – or Possibly Hades”.’
‘I can’t believe you would put us through all this worry and anxiety and pain,’ Emerald smouldered, ‘and then joke about it!’
‘It didn’t look as though you were in that much pain as you shagged your way through every toy boy on board,’ I retaliated. ‘The ship’s fire officer was about to close down your cabin due to overcrowding. And as for you, Amber. Don’t judge me about my marriage. You’re supposed to be so blissfully wed, but in truth you’d rather have a plane jettison its chemical toilet on your head than get down and dirty with your husband.’
‘Marriage is not a happy experience for any wife,’ Amber prickled. ‘But we all just get on with it.’
‘Yes,’ Emerald echoed. ‘Just go to Bunnings, buy yourself some wood and some nails and then build a bridge and get over it.’
‘Well, I don’t want to “just get on with it” or “get over it”. I refuse to go to my grave in instalments. Remember when you said, Emmy, that the thing you missed most in life was great sex, mostly because you can remember having it? Well, I’m having it. Lots of it. And I’d do anything to keep having it. It’s my last hormonal hurrah, like you said. I’m glad I got the misdiagnosis. Otherwise the alarm would not have gone off on my mortality. Getting cancer was the best thing that never happened to me,’ I concluded, illogically.
My sisters just kept staring at me, gobsmacked. It was as if I were sending postcards from a parallel universe.
‘Look, you’re just at a tricky time in your marriage,’ Amber placated. ‘If your marriage was a week, you’re kind of up to Wednesday afternoon – too far from the last fun weekend and too far from the next. But you’ll get there.’
‘Well, I still intend to carpe the hell out of the diem no matter what day it is. And, anyway,’ I said, peeved, ‘shouldn’t you two be just a little bit pleased that I’m not actually dying?’
‘Of course we’re pleased,’ Emerald said, through clenched teeth.
‘Then be happy for me. You’ve totally underestimated Brody, too. He wouldn’t abandon me because of a cancer diagnosis. It would only make him love me more. Ask him yourselves, as soon as he gets here.’
Emerald and Amber exchanged a glance. I stabbed at Brody’s name on my mobile. The call went straight to voicemail. I tried again. And again.
‘The thing is, Ruby,’ Emerald finally said. ‘We told Brody that you wanted him to leave you alone. And that he had to allow you to be with your husband and family in your final months. We told him that you wanted us to tell him that it was all over, not to contact you and to leave you in peace.’
‘And that, as a doctor, he should respect your final wishes. As a doctor who has broken the law and could be struck off,’ Amber added, with earnest insinuation.
It was then that the real tidal wave of panic rolled in and pulled me under. ‘You blackmailed him? Why? Why have you sabotaged my one chance at love and happiness? Mum was right – you’re both jealous, selfish, horrible siblings.’
I observed then that it’s a good idea to love one’s enemies, just in case your friends and family turn out to be two-faced, rotten rats. I’d just turned to run to the gangway and fight my way back on board when I saw my husband striding across the dock towards me, flanked by my brothers-in-law.
If I’d been on a plane, an oxygen mask would have dropped from the overhead panel at this moment. Mayday! Mayday! All I could do was adopt the brace position.
25
Harry propelled himself towards me with such force that I steadied myself for a punch. But he hugged me instead. I thought about smiling in greeting, but decided it was just a waste of facial muscles.
‘I still love you,’ my husband said rapidly. ‘So much.’ He raked his blonde hair, the colour of ripe wheat, out of his anxious face. ‘I know I should’ve been in touch, but I was so pissed off, to be honest. I couldn’t process it all – the way you put me down in front of all our mates. I thought we were happy and then, kapow!’
I raised a combative brow. ‘Our happiness warranty expired when I found out you’d been cheating on me.’
‘But I didn’t! That’s bullshit. Those stupid texts were just harmless bloody in-jokes with an old client I was trying to keep sweet, which you totally misinterpreted. I swear on . . . on Don Bradman’s grave. Whatever happened to innocent till proven friggin’ guilty?’ His face crumpled.
I saw Emerald and Amber greeting their own husbands. Scott was wearing the standard uniform of the intellectual male – rumpled linen shirt with a trail of food stains, like a menu, down the front, faded chinos covered in ink stains, and a pair of white Crocs, which looked as though he had two huge paracetamols strapped to his feet. As he hugged her, I thought it took all of Amber’s considerable strength of character not to show that she found the whole look extremely irritating.
Emerald, on the other hand, launched herself at Alessandro with a feline moan of pleasure. With his dark, curly hai
r, forearms like glazed cudgels and bodyguard build, if he didn’t have that ruthless look so common to hardened Mafiosos, the man could have been a male model. ‘Hi, babe,’ he said, his voice as composed and calm as a hotel receptionist, then vaulted out of Emerald’s grasp on the pretext of picking up her suitcase.
Harry steered me out of earshot of the others and said, ‘I was a complete dickhead not to get in touch, I know. But one thing’s for sure, Ruby – I missed you.’ He clutched me to his chest in a bear hug. ‘All the little things that annoyed the bejesus out of me – your inability to kill a spider or get a lid off a jar . . . The way you can’t read the paper without bloody well demolishing it, or fold maps back up along the creases – Well, I find all those little habits so endearing now. I really do. It sounds nuts, but I wanna be with you every moment of every day – especially when you can’t get a lid off a jar. I really, really missed you – I missed you all the time, like when I couldn’t find the salad spinner – where is that bloody thing kept, by the way? – or when I was trying to fold the washing without creasing it – how do you do that? – and in the mornings, when I couldn’t find clean overalls and was late for work. I mean,’ he blundered on, ‘you’re the only the person who can look in the bathroom cabinet and find the toenail clippers, which aren’t there.’
‘So,’ I recapped, incredulous. ‘You love me because of my toenail-clipper-locating abilities, washing-folding prowess, clean-overall-finding powers and salad-spinner storage?’
‘No! Yes . . . Look, what I’m trying to say is, it’s the little things in a marriage that add up to make the big picture. And that picture is . . .’ Harry squirmed with discomfort. The word was on his tongue, but he just couldn’t spit it out. ‘Love,’ he finally regurgitated.
Harry’s comment was so treacly-sweet it wouldn’t have been out of place on a British boarding-school pudding. When I was too astounded to respond, Harry ploughed on nervously.
‘What happened to those two kids who used to surf and sail together, and swim in the nuddy down at Bundeena Beach, and make love in the moonlight, and laugh till our lips fell off?’
‘They got busy cheering on toddlers for pooing in the potty,’ I explained, flatly.
‘You’re right, Rubes. And when we weren’t applauding bowel movements we were doing the bloody school run and attending parent–teacher nights and taking it in turns to drive across town at one in the morning to pick up kids from festivals, and arguing about pocket money, and parties, and which one of us was the most exhausted.’
‘Dear god, I was so bored helping with math homework I could see my plants engaging in photosynthesis,’ I concurred with a sigh.
‘Exactly, hon. We lost each other in there, somewhere. But all the reasons we fell in love, Ruby, way back when we were kids – well, they’re still there. And in the time we have left, I wanna rekindle it all . . .’
My face registered a look of mild surprise and then deepening horror as it hit me that, of course, Harry didn’t know about the misdiagnosis. Nor could I guess how he’d react to the news that I’d hijacked my sisters to come on a cruise on false pretences. I experienced a colonic flutter as my sphincter battened down its hatches. Why, oh, why hadn’t I come clean way back in the beginning? Of the many, many misdemeanours of my life, this was by far the stupidest thing I’d ever done. I took a deep breath and tried to steady my nerves. There was no need to panic, I told myself – a handy little phrase which often means ‘Take those cyanide pills now.’
But before I could blurt out the whole surreal tale, Emerald, who’d been eavesdropping, suddenly barrelled back into the conversation. ‘Do you have my sunscreen?’ she asked, winking at me. ‘Has Ruby told you the great news? It was a misdiagnosis. She got the doctor’s apologetic email this morning,’ she gushed. ‘It’s miraculous. She has told you, hasn’t she?’
Harry’s double take was so cartoon-comical it could quite possibly have caused whiplash. ‘Is it true?’ he asked, warily.
I nodded. Hey, I’d been lying for weeks, why start being honest now? Nauseated at the level of my deceit, I just tried to maintain an enthusiastic facial expression. I smiled until my face cramped. The gauzy, leaden atmosphere around Harry suddenly lifted. His eyes started to burn and his chin to tremble.
‘Seriously? Is this for real?’ he asked, falteringly.
I felt like the demented heroine in a Tennessee Williams play who’d forgotten her lines and had no prompt. All I could do was nod away like a bobbleheaded toy dog in the back window of a car.
Harry’s face, which had been ravaged with despair, lit up. He let out a baritone boom of a laugh.
‘Bloody hell! I was about to organise a marathon with the footy boys and the surf lifesavers: “Run for Ruby”. And I deadset hate running! But I was sure as hell going to run one for you.’ He laughed again and hugged me to his chest once more, wiping tears from his eyes. ‘Come on. Let’s get home and tell the kids the amazing news. Zoe’s still up at Byron, but we can Skype. And Jake’s asleep on the couch, chucking a sickie.’
‘Um, the kids already know that it was a false alarm and that I’m okay.’
‘What? You told them before me?’
I glanced at Emerald, pop-eyed, signalling SOS.
‘Ruby wanted to tell you the good news in person,’ Emerald ad-libbed.
‘Oh, love.’ Harry melted. I relaxed for a moment into the familiar comfort of his big, solid arms, my face mashed up against his scruffy shirt. He smelt like home, like pool chlorine and a hint of Christmas. I felt it all, then, our long history, in vivid, colourful flashbacks – the pregnancies, the births, the cute things our kids did and said, like the time Zoe came home from her grandmother’s to report that for tea she’d had ‘elephants and chips’, which apparently decoded as ‘an elegant sufficiency’. And the time Jake, aged nine, had written us a note to say that he’d discovered his superior intellect and was clearly a ‘genus’.
I thought of the weight of our shared mortgage, which we’d only just paid off together after years of scrimping. Maybe it was just a Wednesday in the week of our marriage. Maybe Thursday and Friday would be so much better . . . not to forget the hedonistic weekend. Perhaps the passion I shared with Brody truly was just a mirage, the cruise ship nothing more than a floating Brigadoon.
Harry had sworn on Bradman’s grave that those texts were just meaningless, stupid banter with an old customer, which made me the adulterer now, come to think of it . . . Although there was nothing adult about it. No, it had been wild, rash and reckless. Maybe my menopause had started and Brody was my hot flush? A hot flush made flesh?
Harry checked his watch. ‘Come on. We’d better get our skates on!’ He called to the others. ‘We’re smack-bang in the morning rush hour, of course, which is a bit of a bummer. Traffic jams are so bloody bad in Sydney these days you can have an oil and grease change and a full friggin’ service without losing your place in the lane,’ he chuckled, relief rolling off him in waves.
Harry was always ready to laugh at the world. It was one of the things about him I’d fallen for – that sanguine, devil-may-care, she’ll-be-right-mate Aussie insouciance, so at odds with the stressful atmosphere I’d known in the Ryan family home.
Alessandro and Scott hugged me, expressing joy at the excellent medical news and generously putting my birthday outburst down to shock and grief and alcohol. Amber and Emerald waved goodbye as they followed their husbands to Alessandro’s SUV. Harry tilted my bag onto its back wheels, put his arm around my shoulders and guided me out of the terminal and towards his Hire a Hubby van, which was parked precariously, half up on the kerb.
‘You look like a sunbeam in that dress.’ He smiled.
I felt the chill of the sea breeze cut through the flimsy silk and shuddered.
While Harry put my suitcase in the back of the van, I surreptitiously checked my phone one more time. Nothing. I stabbed at Brody’s number and again it went straight to voicemail. I strapped on my seatbelt. Crosscurrents of feeling
were pulling me to and fro. This is what it must feel like to be drowning, I realised. As Harry manoeuvred the van onto the road, I discreetly pressed redial five or six more times. Still nothing.
As the van nosed its way into the traffic, Harry chatted on amicably about the kids, the traffic, the weather, the cars – he’d lent mine to Jake, hence the van.
‘So, I’ve stacked the fridge with mangoes, prawns, camembert and lamingtons – the four essential food groups. I’m just so glad you’re home, hon! Jake held a “gathering” just after you went away, because I am the best dad ever, as well as being a pushover. I’m afraid the carpet’s suffered, along with some of the more delicate pot plants, which some of the boys puked their pizza into. Then I had to drop off Zoe to her farewell party before she left for Byron Bay, which turned out to be a bit of a rave and set off a brief and kinda challenging flashback! I had to hurry home to a nice cup of tea and Antiques Roadshow,’ he joked.
As Harry turned the car south, the city unscrolled on my right. After the calm of the high seas, the honking horns and dashing pedestrians jarred on my nerves. Sydney at peak hour seemed to be braying at me like a drunken man laughing too loudly in a restaurant.
‘We had a mini cyclone while you were away, too, which the Bureau of Meteorology didn’t bloody well notice until next morning, when they woke to discover that the Opera House had washed away to friggin’ Parramatta.’
His voice sounded distant, as if it were coming from the bottom of the ocean. I tried to tune in to his chatter but an unpleasant buzzing had started in my ears.
‘“Chance of showers”, the weather bloke had said. “Chance”, note. So I painted the fence with Jake, and then we went for a surf till – WHOOSH! Down it came! Buckets of the stuff. Six inches of rain in about five minutes, then press repeat all night long.’
I watched the brutish flow of cars racing towards the city on the opposite side of the highway.
All I could think about was Brody’s velvet-brown eyes, his crooked smile, his touch, his warm mouth on me.
