by Lette, Kathy
I was looking forward to Christmas with the same enthusiasm as a turkey might, but with five days to go and my fairy lights still not strung up, the tree lying at half mast, I suddenly went into a frantic Yuletide frenzy of holly-bedecking and eggnog-whisking, contracting chronic hand cramp from the penning of two hundred Christmas cards. It gives new meaning to ‘cardiac arrest’, I messaged my sisters. Emerald joked back that Christmas had been cancelled. Apparently you told Santa you’d been good and he died laughing.
The very thought of gift-wrapping made me want to garrotte myself with a string of tinsel. ‘Comedy rapper’ does not refer to Ali G but to a description of my present wrapping technique, I messaged them once more. Amber sent an emoji of a terror-stricken face, but had no time for actual words.
Still, I was more adept than Harry. When wrapping my present, he laid out the wrapping paper on the table, then accidentally cut straight through an antique tablecloth given to us by his mother. Which made me wonder via our sisters Messenger group how Christmas had ever really caught on. I mean, three wise men? Yeah, right. But they were both too busy to banter – or possibly still pissed off with me. I wasn’t sure.
Two days before Christmas, I couldn’t put off the present purchasing any longer and dragged myself to the shopping centre, the large glass towers of which rose up above the surrounding suburban houses like tombstones. It took so long to find a parking spot I thought I’d probably missed Christmas altogether. I then panted through department stores in a desperate hunt for last-minute gifts for my picky brothers-in-law, followed by a frantic dash through the supermarket for the necessary ingredients for my potato bake. Carrying my own body weight in chips, dips, drinks, napkins, nuts, potatoes, mince pies and marzipan – enough stuff, in fact, to establish a comfortable wilderness homestead – I then tried to find my way back to the car. Where the hell was it again? I’d been so distracted and irritated, I hadn’t paid enough attention to where I’d parked. After two futile attempts in two different parking areas, I realised I’d have to hire a car to find my car.
The taxi rank was at the other end of the huge shopping complex. On and on I trudged along endless fluorescent corridors, passing elves in budgie smugglers and carol singers in bikinis, and endless glossy promotional photographs of festively festooned couples smiling at each other as they happily hung curtains and drilled nails in DIY cupboards, cruelly mocking the fraught misery of the average suburban scene of attempted IKEA assemblage, which had embittered couples turning their power tools on each other, shouting, ‘Die, evil scum!’ within minutes.
I was slogging past the food hall towards the escalators when a wave of nausea almost knocked me off my feet. I lurched left and steadied myself on the shoulder of an exhausted Santa who was chowing down on a spring roll during his lunch break. He was wearing the full red suit, requisite fluffy white beard, eyebrows that resembled toothbrush bristles and the suitably wrung-out expression of a man who’d been sitting all day letting kids pee on his lap while they whispered the brand names of skate and surf boards into his ear.
I felt myself swoon and then collapsed onto his lap, where I promptly vomited into my handbag – the handbag that contained the car keys I’d have to fetch out when I finally found my car. But I felt too sick to care. Bent double, barfing, two things dawned on me. First, that I was going to be a headline in my own newspaper: ‘Fifty-Year-Old Woman Arrested for Refusing to Get Off Santa’s Lap’. And, second, that I really was sick. There was no doubt in my mind that it was cancer. I felt it in my gut. It would be poetic justice, wouldn’t it? The medical karma I so richly deserved. And, of course, the worst part was, nobody would bloody well believe me.
28
‘Ruby Ryan?’
My head emerged from the hood of my cotton top like a meerkat peeking out of its burrow. I trudged from reception into the doctor’s office like a condemned woman to the electric chair. The decor, I noticed, was flesh coloured. I sat down on a hard chair facing the doctor’s desk, which squatted on a faded rug. The name on the desk plate read Zahra Hanbury, but our family doctor was on sabbatical. The locum greeted me with brisk professionalism.
‘And what brings you here today?’ she asked with perfunctory politeness.
‘Unexplained weight loss, constant fatigue, loss of appetite, nausea, headaches . . . It’s cancer, clearly,’ I stated.
The doctor, who was around half my age, showed about as much interest in this self-diagnosis as she would if I’d read her the specifications from the back of a manual for a fridge freezer.
‘Been consulting that well-known quack Doctor Google, have we?’ the locum diagnosed. ‘Let’s just take some actual medical tests, shall we?’
I extended my arm for a blood-pressure check then looked away from the needle at the cheap walnut panelling on the walls and the commercial grade rust-coloured carpet on the floor. Tests were pointless. I knew I was doomed. At least I’d get to pen my own obituary for my paper. ‘Fate struck while the irony was hot,’ I would write. Through the window, grey clouds sloshed across the sky like jumbled washing. A sense of foreboding as heavy as a winter coat pressed down on me. As I left the medical centre, the cloudy laundry overhead had thickened. It was only when I got to my car that I realised it was smoke – bushfire smoke billowing up the coast. It seemed ominous and apocalyptic.
On Christmas Eve I dragged myself from the office back to the surgery for the results of the tests. I couldn’t think of a less appealing rendezvous. A barbecue with Hannibal Lecter held more allure. Sitting opposite the doctor, I could feel my blood coagulating with fear. I actually flung my hand over my eyes like a damsel in distress about to be tied to a railway track. ‘Give it to me, straight,’ I said. ‘Is it pancreatic?’
‘Congratulations,’ the doctor said.
‘What? It’s not pancreatic cancer?’
‘On your pregnancy.’
I fell back against the plastic bucket seat in a fugue of shock, my eyes bare and round as light bulbs.
‘There must be some mistake. I mean, I’m fifty!’ I looked at the locum the way a monkey must look at a medical researcher – knowing such experiments need to be conducted for the sake of knowledge but still pleading for release.
‘A lot of women your age presume they’re peri-menopausal, so they forgo contraception,’ she explained. ‘When they get the symptoms of pregnancy, they put it down to the change of life.’
My life was about to change, all right, but not in the way I’d foreseen. I started squeaking like a lost kitten. My smile became unhinged. To make matters worse, the estimated date of conception that the doctor gave was vague enough that it could either be Harry’s or Brody’s.
Driving home on autopilot, my whole body felt numb. The realisation that life hasn’t quite turned out the way we thought it would hits us all at some point. It’s prompted by many things – a lover leaving, kids flying the nest, neighbours’ designer pool cabanas, and . . . falling accidentally fucking pregnant aged fucking fifty and not knowing who the fucking father is. I slammed the steering wheel with both hands. WTF? What the fuckity, fuckity, fuck? To keep it or not to keep it? That was the (insert pregnant pause) question.
I had no idea how to break the news to Harry. Maybe I could lessen the blow by telling him something much worse first, like, I dunno, ‘My mother’s moving in.’ But that would only give him a heart attack and mean a drive back to the medical centre. I decided not to tell him until I’d figured out what I was going to do. But when Harry opened a bottle of wine after he got home from work, the smell made me retch. Plus, I had a sudden craving for mashed potato. I gnawed away at bowls of the stuff like a barnyard animal – all under Harry’s watchful and wondering gaze. Next would be spaghetti sandwiches, Tim Tams and mustard, and ice cream on toast. We’d had two children – Harry would surely recognise the signs. It was pointless trying to keep it from him. And so, I reluctantly asked him to join me at the kitchen table so I could reveal the results of my test.
‘I’
ve got something to tell you.’
‘I hope it’s that you’ve won twenty grand on a scratchie,’ he joked, nervously.
I wriggled in my chair and contemplated using my serviette as a balaclava. All I wanted to do was go and lie down in a cordoned-off chalk outline to see if it would fit.
But after I brusquely broke the news of my impending abortion, Harry took a beat, then emitted a joyful shout loud enough to be heard in an Antarctic base camp.
‘That’s friggin’ awesome!’ he exclaimed. I realised that, in his mind, pregnancy explained away my strange behaviour and mood swings. The relief he felt that my withdrawal was biological and not psychological was seismic in its immensity.
‘But I’m not going to keep it, Harry,’ I added, gravely. ‘Of course I’m not. It’s more likely that my mother would release a death metal album than it is that I would keep this baby.’
He gazed at me blankly for a moment. ‘Why not? The kids are about to bugger off. The nest will be empty. What could be better? This is just what we need to bring us closer together!’
‘We’re too old to be parents again.’
‘But a baby will keep us young. A baby. Can you imagine? Wow!’
I made a noise like a tyre going flat. Realising that I wasn’t showing the right level of enthusiasm, I curled my mouth into what I hoped was a smile but was more like a rictus. My toes curled up as though I were wearing a pair of Turkish slippers.
‘Be serious, Harry. What sane people our age would want to spend one more second of their lives making rocket ships out of loo rolls?’
‘I have a say in this too, Ruby. And, hey. At least, as an older mum, you’re programmed to the baby’s schedule – up all night drinking.’ He winked.
And if I didn’t drink before having a baby at fifty, I definitely would after, I thought grimly.
‘And I’ll take such good care of you, love. I’m gonna treat you like a princess. Because I do love you so, so much, Rubes.’ His voice sounded so sickly sweet I was worried he might slip into a hyperglycaemic coma.
‘Are you, ya know, craving anything else? You always get the munchies when you’re up the duff. What do you feel like? Malaysian? Vietnamese? Waffles? New carpet and a car upgrade? They’re the pregnancy cravings you got last time. Whatever it is, I’ll race out and pick it up. Well, what do ya know!’ he laughed. ‘There’s lead in the old pencil yet.’
Of course, what I didn’t tell him is that I wasn’t at all sure which pencil had written my fate.
My forced smile now felt as though some multi-legged tropical insect was climbing across my chin. As soon as Harry had scooted off to get me some salted caramel chocolate and some Tabasco, I lay on the hammock by our turquoise pool, feeling the evening cool. It was that time of day when the sun normally looks like a knob of butter in a red hot skillet, sizzling and caramelising into a golden brown, but today due to the bushfire haze the sky was end-of-the-world-eerie and sinister.
What was I going to do? Harry wasn’t a bad person. He had a big heart. He was a good dad. He was kind to animals and kids. He volunteered for Nippers and school barbecues and firefighting. And then there was all our history . . . Perhaps I could make a go of it with my husband? And this could be our new beginning? Maybe Brody was nothing more than a foolish fling. But if so, why did I so crave the miraculous comfort of his smile?
Many of my middle-aged friends were desperately groping for a ripcord to parachute out of their marriages. But jumping off into the unknown has its hazards, too. There was no guarantee of a safe landing. When lust evaporates you could just be lost. Maybe it was better to just stay strapped into my marital safety belt, ride out the buffeting winds and hope for bluer skies? But it was only fair to tell him about my affair – after which he might not want me anymore, anyway. I felt driven to reveal the truth – but feared I was being driven by Ted Kennedy at Chappaquiddick. Anyway, I couldn’t tell him now, on Christmas Eve, with Zoe due home any moment and Jake putting his electrician skills to work by happily stringing up extravagant lights around my haphazardly decorated tree.
I know what you’re thinking – Don’t tell another lie, Ruby Ryan! You just want to fling yourself forward and shake me until my fillings fall out, don’t you? And I’m with you! I really am. While I wouldn’t call myself an intellectual – I mean, I’m clearly not the kind of girl who sits around splitting atoms in her spare time – I had never before realised the true depths of my stupidity. If it’s any consolation, at this point, nobody could have liked me less than I did. There’s a cream to cure people like me, you know; haemorrhoid cream, because I’m such a pain in the arse.
Above me, seagulls squawked like teething babies. The sound repulsed me. Any slight angst I had was soothed by simply burying my face in a beach towel for half an hour and screaming and screaming and screaming.
29
On Christmas Day, it’s a good idea to tell each family member what to bring to lunch – that way two people don’t show up with the same sexist or racist opinions and get thrown in the pool. This was the Ryan motto.
Our family always celebrated Christmas lunch beside Ruth’s backyard swimming pool. The sisters divvied up the courses and the boys manned the bar and the barbecue while the six cousins played Marco Polo in the deep end, forgetting to be ‘cool’ and harking back to the fun they’d enjoyed as little kids.
My mother still lived in our family home – a palatial manor on the furthermost point of the Insular Peninsular, on a big, broad block that looked out across the mouth of the river to the swaying eucalypts of the national park. The area is an architectural minestrone, with residents playing out their fantasies in bricks and mortar. A Swiss chalet with a gabled roof and ornate carvings rubs up against a Japanese-themed minka with sliding doors, opposite a Mexican ranch house. Ruth’s plantation-style French colonial mansion is the most imposing on the street, and nicknamed by we Ryan girls ‘The Swank-ienda’.
Ruth’s current neighbours were rich footballers, property developers and daytime TV hostesses, who all unapologetically put the ‘nouveau’ into ‘nouveaux riches’. Christmas one-upmanship was high on the agenda, epitomised by the residents’ annual competition to determine who had the most sensational decorations. Despite global warming angst, the bushfire season starting earlier and lasting longer, and summer temperatures so intense that local chooks had taken to laying hard-boiled eggs, no electrical wattage was spared in the flashing, disco-dancing reindeers, gyrating polar bears, strobing ‘Ho Ho Ho’s, and frenzied elves and Santas sleighing back and forth across suburban roofs in a phantasmagoria of fluorescent choreography. On and on they flickered across the sky, even in full, blazing sunlight.
Stunned pedestrians staggered from throbbing cul-de-sac to cul-de-sac. My mother’s street attracted the most sightseers. My favourite of her neighbours, an old surfie dude in a fibro shack, who’d refused to sell out to the developers, had just one homemade neon sign on his front porch. It was a simple, luminous arrow pointing back towards his neighbours’ houses, above one flashing word – ‘WANKERS’.
Even on Christmas Day, gawping crowds meant that the roads leading out to the point were blocked with suburban SUVs. We trundled along behind these standard parental-issue behemoths at a geriatric pace. Zoe and Jake reverted to ironic, kiddie-type whining, with exaggerated ‘Are we there yet?’s. Although they were joking, it made me have serious second thoughts about my secret baby on board. When we finally arrived at the family home, my mother swung the front door open wide and made a sweeping gesture, like a French courtier, to indicate that we should enter. The look she gave me was so searching and shrewd that when she said, flatly, ‘You’re late,’ for a sickening instant, I thought she was talking about my period.
My mother’s harsh face suddenly appeared to have the fragility of ancient, drying paper. Ruth hesitated and for one fleeting moment I actually imagined she was going to say something nice. ‘Potato bake?’ she said, peering down at the huge baking dish I was clutching. ‘So g
lad you took me at my word and didn’t go to too much trouble.’
I sighed. Here we go, I thought, resignedly. My mother was good at being mean the way a shark is good at being predatory. Today, even the big windows in her sunny, deep waterfront home seemed cold and unfriendly. Despite the brightness outside, it felt cold in here, as though sunlight never entered.
With forced geniality, my mother offered a cheek to her grandchildren to be kissed, then turned to Harry. ‘Harrison.’ Her eyelashes whisked up and down his frame. ‘I didn’t get the memo that it was fancy dress.’
Harry glanced down at his shirt front to look at the colourful stingray chasing a board-shorted Santa across his broad chest. ‘It’s my new Mambo shirt. I thought it was kinda festive?’ he said, the wind taken out of his sartorial sails.
In silence my family trailed our matriarch through the house and out onto the big, rolling, billiard-table-green lawn, which stretched all the way down to the bright-blue bay. Harry caught my eye and rolled his orbs behind his mother-in-law’s back, but once we’d joined the clan under the patio awning it became obvious that Ruth’s antagonism wasn’t aimed solely at us. It seemed the whole family had entered a hard-hat area.
