by Lette, Kathy
When Amber presented her famous pavlova, a huge and impressive pagoda of strawberries and passionfruit, the meringue whipped into curlicues and covered in creamy foam, Mum adopted the sort of pained expression that made me think she was trying to suck her face out of the back of her skull.
‘Pavlova? Again? It’s become quite your signature dish, hasn’t it? I was rather hoping for something more special for one of the lord’s holiest days.’
Amber wilted like a perm in a sauna and put her magnificent pav back into the esky.
Scott was Ruth’s next victim. ‘Oh, look who’s just arrived. That feisty champion of the common man! So, how’s the pro-bono work going? Of course, you couldn’t indulge your do-gooding side if your wife didn’t work so hard. A wealthy wife is quite a labour-saving device. It’s obvious you hit it off because you have so much in common: Amber owned a waterfront home, and you wanted one.’ Our mother laughed, to make out she was only joking, which she clearly wasn’t. ‘I now pronounce you Man and Mansion. That’s what Father Gallagher ought to have said at the altar. Prawns, anyone?’
Ruth was obviously ‘coming the raw prawn’, as our Dad, a lover of colourful Aussie vernacular, was wont to say. Even decades on, our sadness at losing our darling dad in a car crash was a constant hum, like tinnitus. It was just always there. The loss was felt even more intensely on Christmas Day, because he’d been the cheerful buffer between mother and daughters.
The food started curling in the heat as soon as it hit the table – ham, turkey, salads – and tempers were running nearly as high as the temperature. As Ruth handed around platters of oysters and seafood, her fuchsia-painted lips slapped together in a wet percussion of rebukes to all and sundry. Emerald and Alessandro were her next victims.
‘A caftan, Emerald? What a sensible idea for someone as big-boned as you.’
‘I’ve actually lost six kilos, Mum, thanks to Ruby taking us on that cru—’
‘Although, isn’t it interesting that, in a gulag, there’s never anybody “big boned” or suffering from “water retention”, is there? Isn’t that “food for thought”? I imagine you’re on a starvation diet for that kind of nourishment, Emerald, being married to a mechanic. Intellectual sustenance is the one thing you really should be hungry for. When did you leave school again, Alex?’
Alessandro, who hated being called Alex, bristled, but replied politely, ‘Sixteen. Once I’d wised up to how many graduates were bumming around on the dole and saw the moolah I could make in trade, I reckoned getting an apprenticeship was a no-brainer—’
Ruth cut him off. ‘Yes, no wonder it’s lucrative. A mechanic is just someone who picks your pocket from underneath your car. Still, at least you know that Emerald married you for love. How else would she stand all these years of talking about differential shafts and lubricant.’ Ruth’s fake smile was so intense it could irradiate soft fruit.
‘Lube,’ Alessandro corrected his mother-in-law, through clenched lips. ‘Lube greases the steering system and suspension to keep moving parts that touch from wearing each other down. Maybe I should have brought some today.’
‘So . . . shall we get the barbecue fired up?’ Harry suggested with urgency.
The three brothers-in-law fell on each other with relief. They grinned and slapped each other’s shoulders, then, taking a bucket of prawns and a plate of oysters, retreated to the barbecue at the bottom of the garden for their annual corroboree.
Emerald popped the champagne with alacrity and filled her sisters’ glasses to the brim. Today’s Christmas spirit was clearly going to come from a bottle.
‘Oh, look, the tide’s gone out already,’ she said, refilling her glass with a fizzing whoosh.
The kids fell on the prawns like squawking seagulls then leapt into the pool. Ruth Ryan quite liked her grandchildren – they were still malleable. Talk turned to the kids’ plans for the future, the safest conversational option. It was only during her third champagne top-up that Emerald realised I wasn’t drinking.
‘Why aren’t you drinking?’ she asked, amazed. ‘After the hottest, driest year in history, we’re saving water by drinking alcohol.’
‘I just . . . I just don’t feel like it,’ I prevaricated.
‘Are you sick?’ my mother asked. ‘Actually, you don’t look at all well. Even worse than usual,’ she added, true to her style.
‘Thank you, Mother. I can always count on you to brighten my mood.’
Ruth rummaged in her handbag for a lipstick. ‘And you can brighten mine by putting on a bit of lippy.’
‘Actually, Mum’s right. You do look a bit peaky, Ruby. Are you okay? A friend of mine, Leyla, works as a receptionist at the medical centre, and she told me at book club that she’d seen you there twice this week,’ Amber probed.
‘Oh, god. You haven’t gone and actually got cancer, have you?’ a tipsy Emerald joked.
‘Well, now, that really would be funny,’ my mother said, a smile acid-etched onto her face. All she needed was a black chariot drawn by howling, multi-headed hellhounds to complete her ‘Dark Mistress of Torment’ image.
A fierce desire to shock my merciless mother down to her very hair follicles came over me in a rush. ‘I’m just feeling a little bit nauseous, you know, because of the baby.’
All three heads jerked in my direction like a small school of hooked herring.
‘What baby?’ Emerald, who’d been up since dawn trying to arm-wrestle a naked turkey into the gynaecological position in order to stuff chestnuts up its orifice, had developed the demeanour, aching legs and mood swings of a member of a long-haul cabin crew. There was no point messing with her.
‘The baby I’m carrying. I wasn’t going to say anything till the three month mark, or until after the termination,’ I added, to shock my staunchly Catholic mother even more, ‘but—’
‘What?’ Amber said, similarly flabbergasted. ‘How can that be? At your age?’
‘No, it can happen,’ Emerald espoused. ‘The famous change-of-life baby.’ Fuelled by champagne, my oldest sister ploughed on without thinking. ‘Especially, biologically speaking, if the vagina hasn’t had time to become hostile. Vaginas love new sperm. With a new lover the vag hasn’t had time to build up immunity. It’s a very, very warm and welcoming place indeed.’
‘New lover? What the hell does that mean?’
We three sisters were sitting facing the swimming pool – our backs to the path that ran down the garden to the barbecue below. Only Ruth, with the pool behind her, had noticed Harry’s reappearance, but had chosen to say nothing. She just sat there, gimlet-eyed, in full Madame Defarge mode, with her imaginary guillotine and invisible knitting. We swivelled in unison to face him.
Emerald’s words hung, irretrievable, in the air. For a moment, all that could be heard was the splash and splosh of the cousins frolicking down the deep end, and the cackle of the kookaburras, who were clearly in on the joke.
‘What do you mean, “new sperm”?’ Harry asked again, aiming his barbecue tongs at Emerald like a weapon.
As elephants in rooms go, this one was more like a woolly mammoth. Emerald and Amber’s eyes jumped to mine. I just kept smiling until my face cramped and my teeth felt like they would fall out. Remorse racked my whole body. I figured now would be a good time to fake a terminal illness – say, necrotising fasciitis – or possibly to emigrate to New Zealand.
‘Tell me!’ Harry demanded. ‘What the bloody hell’s going on?’
I wanted to throw myself in front of my husband like a fire blanket to protect him from what was about to be revealed. I tried to speak but seemed to have a live eel halfway down my throat – that’s what it felt like, anyway. ‘I . . . I . . .’ I was suddenly sweating more than a Russian athlete about to take a drug test. ‘I met a man,’ I began, finally grabbing the elephant by the trunk. ‘On the ship. I was going to tell you—’
‘Oh, and, what, you decided not to tell me until now so that I could have a heart attack at leisure in front of your entire
fucking family?’
‘Somehow I don’t think this is quite what’s meant by Secret S . . . S . . . Santa,’ Emerald slurred, in a drunken attempt to alleviate the tension.
I glanced towards my mother, expecting sanctimonious fury. But she was wearing the smug expression of a preacher, or a saleswoman; someone who knows they’re about to command the room. In fact, it turned out that my mother had been waiting for this moment for a quite a while. The baby bit was news to her. But it didn’t compare to the information she’d been nursing like a precious piece of porcelain, a treasure, to be revealed when the time was right. She’d obviously fondled the evidence regularly, weighing up its worth, evaluating its price and its power.
‘Harrison,’ she said, in a measured voice, her eyes glittering with spite. ‘I never thanked you for your old iPhone, which you kindly passed on to me. It’s been an invaluable source of information.’
‘What? Oh . . . good,’ Harry said, distractedly, his eyes welded to my stricken face.
‘Yes. Especially about you. I know you told me you’d erased all your . . . “data”, I believe is the right word? The grandkids might say I suffer from a technology deficit disorder, but when my daughters abandoned me to go on their luxury cruise I was forced to teach myself to use the contraption. One day I was pressing things randomly and a message popped up on the screen from something called “WhatsApp”. I followed what you might call a text chain . . . A chain that led me to a very startling conclusion.’
Harry’s eyes now darted towards Ruth. A layer of sweat glistened on his tanned face, wet moons rapidly appeared in the armpits of his shirt, and his thick, sun-bleached blonde hair suddenly seemed to stick in lank strands to his forehead.
‘You see – the thing about men, girls, is that they’re lazy. They’ll just make do with whatever’s lying around the home . . . even when it comes to gratifying their carnal appetites.’ Ruth’s bejewelled hands twitched like spiders on the tabletop, and a malicious smile shrieked across her face.
It had seemed for one astounding moment that my mother was coming to my defence. But I should have known better. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, bilious with what I hoped was only morning sickness.
‘Why don’t you ask your cherished sisters? The ones you so kindly took on a cruise, completely forsaking your poor, lonely mother, who loves a cruise but has no one to go with. Six months, I’d say, the affair lasted. Judging by the messages. Being both self-employed, I’m amazed either of you found the time.’
Amber’s laugh vibrated on a high, metallic note. Harry looked at my sister, sheepishly. And that’s when I knew. My heart scrambled and foundered as the truth hit me, hard as a punch. The pain came, rapid and intense, like opening the blinds on a summer’s day when you have a hangover. The knowledge that my sister had slept with my husband settled on my heart, compressing my chest in a vice grip that would never let go.
A shark can smell one tiny droplet of blood in one hundred litres of water. It then traces its prey by following the electricity that is discharged by a terrified animal. My mother gave a gloating grin, her bleached teeth bared. It was the grin of a Great White going in for the kill.
The rest of us were frozen, speechless, as our offspring splashed on in the pool, oblivious. The shimmering bay sparkled at the edge of my vison. I fought the urge to run down the garden and throw myself into it.
What my mother had revealed was so surreal that I lost the power of speech. I sat, welded to my wrought-iron chair. My mind rejected what I’d so clearly heard. My entire body felt hollowed out by the bright white light of a nuclear blast. I was a shell of my former self. My tongue felt suddenly swollen and unyielding. When some words finally came out, they sounded foreign in my mouth. ‘You had . . . an affair? With Amber?’ I ventriloquised.
Amber’s normally alabaster cheeks blazed red, becoming two expressionist splatters of colour.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Emerald gasped. ‘Miss Goody-Two-Shoes. It seems, Amber, that you have entirely failed to grasp the concept of loyal sisterhood – the very first rule of which is not sleeping with your bloody brother-in-law.’
I turned on Amber, eyes ablaze. ‘But you said you hated being touched?’
‘Just not by your husband, obviously,’ our mother qualified, helpfully. ‘You laid the table today, didn’t you, Amber? Forks on the left, and knives in your sister’s back?’
All the comments Amber had made on the ship, encouraging me to forgive Harry, came back to me in a rush: ‘Therapists believe an affair can rescue a marriage’; ‘It’s not about assigning blame, but finding the roots of the infidelity’; ‘All marriages can suffer from a little fidelity fatigue’; ‘We should be more European, and forgive adultery . . .’
No wonder Harry hadn’t contacted me the whole time I was away. He was no doubt desperately worried that Amber would confess. He was just waiting to see the lay of the land. Literally. And why hadn’t she confessed, instead of letting me continue to suffer?
I looked at my middle sister, dumbfounded, battling a desire to knock her to the ground; to pull her hair and pinch her, hard, and Chinese-burn her arms, the way we did when we were girls. I could feel myself reverting. It was primal. It was instinctive. It was survival. It was biblical – siblings smiting each other.
‘Oh my god, Amber! The grief you gave me for lying, when all the time it was you who was telling the biggest lie of all! Why? Why did you do this to me?’
Amber seemed to have become a finalist in a fixed smile event.
‘Tell me, Amber – with brain trepanning, is there pain afterwards?’ Emerald quizzed, sarcastically. She’d got herself drunk to avoid Ruth’s verbal bullets, but was now behaving just like her, shooting from the lip. ‘What were you thinking? Or rather, not thinking . . . Well, say something, for god’s sake!’
‘I . . . I . . . I’m so sorry,’ Amber finally stage-whispered.
‘That’s it? That’s all?’ Emerald threw up her hands in disgust. ‘You’ll have to come up with something better than that, sis.’
‘It’s just, well – Scott tried to put together this flat-pack furniture cupboard and built himself in – I had to call Harry to rescue him. I made Harry a crepe suzette to say thank you. And he was so grateful. And then, you know, Harry started to pop round with that tool belt of his and just fixed everything Scott was too busy saving the world to mend. Pretty soon nothing in my house smoked when I plugged it in, leaked oil, or made a funny clunking noise anymore. And then I’d feed him to say thank you and . . . he liked my cooking so much and, for once in my life, I felt so appreciated . . .’
I reacted to these words as though they were gunfire and dropped my glass in surprise, which smashed into smithereens on the flagstones. Once more, the reassurances Amber had uttered on board the cruise boomeranged back at me: ‘Infidelity is about so much more than sex’; ‘People have affairs because they don’t feel appreciated’; ‘They want to feel wanted, needed, desired’; ‘They are looking for an emotional connection . . .’
‘Jesus, Harry! You made me feel so guilty that I’d accused you of being unfaithful. You even swore on Donald Bradman’s grave!’
‘Yeah, well, if you knew me at all, you’d know I don’t even like bloody cricket,’ Harry said, petulantly.
A darker thought clouded my mind. All over the Insular Peninsular, photos of Harry’s ruggedly handsome smiling face were tacked to noticeboards or beamed out from under fridge magnets, offering his ‘Hire a Hubby’ services. How many other lonely, unappreciated women had taken up his offer? And in how many ways? ‘Jesus, Harry. Exactly how many ladies love the tradies?’
‘What? None! Gimme a break.’
‘Why should I believe you?’ I seethed.
‘Look, I can’t explain it either! I know it’s an inexcusable act of first-grade scumbaggery. But Amber so reminded me of you, but a more confident, successful, domesticated version, I guess. And she kept feeding me. Oh, the food. The tarts, the trifles, the banana cakes, the lamington
s – how can a lammie taste that good?’
‘What?’ I repeated, duly horrified. ‘You betrayed me for some banana cake and a lamington?’
‘My dick just went into overdrive and the rest of me was forced to follow. I don’t know what got into me. A midlife crisis, maybe.’
‘Oh, puh-lease! How can you have a midlife crisis when you’ve never left puberty?’ I fumed.
‘And Amber was so chuffed by everything I did. She heaped praise on me all the time. Unlike you. You never even mention all the DIY I do for you. She really appreciated me.’
His words echoed in my head like an explosion. ‘Appreciation? What about how unappreciated I feel? Doesn’t that count? Appreciation for what you do? You’re not a surgeon wielding a scalpel, Harry. Hammering a shelf over a woman’s sink to hold unpaid bills is not exactly rocket science.’
‘Hey!’ The voice was Scott’s. He was striding up the garden path, waving his barbecue fork. ‘The steaks are nearly done,’ he said. ‘We’re waiting on that platter, Harry. What’s the ho, ho, hold up?’
Amber’s eyes were fixed straight ahead. Her face was blank and her lips moved as if she were reading from an invisible book.
‘What?’ Scott asked. ‘What are you saying? Speak up. I can’t hear you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.
‘Mate.’ Harry’s flat, ironical voice had developed a tremor.
‘What?’ Scott asked again. ‘What have I missed?’
Nobody spoke for a full minute. Nerves jangled more than the reindeer bells on the plastic Santas sleighing across Ruth’s roof.
‘Apparently your wife has been having an affair with her brother-in-law,’ Ruth said. ‘Forget the turkey, Harry. Your goose is well and truly cooked,’ she concluded with sour glee.
From Scott’s limitless legal lexicon only one feeble word sprang to his erudite mind. ‘What?’
Alessandro appeared behind him then, sausages piled high on a plate, just in time to hear a stunned Scott say to Amber, ‘But I always have to initiate every encounter. You’re just not that into it. Sex, I mean.’
