by Cate Kendall
‘It’s none of her damn business, Mim,’ Ellie said tersely. ‘There’s no way I am going to bare my soul to that mercenary little social climber. Let her go for it. Good on her. I could not care less. And, Mim, you must promise me you will keep out and not even hint about this to her.’
‘Absolutely, Ellie,’ Mim agreed. ‘I’ll control myself, I promise.’
‘You’re a good friend, Mim, thank you. Now let’s cross our fingers and hope Bryce doesn’t lose it completely when he finds out what she’s done.’
June 2000
Liz was on a mission, and she was running out of time and – quite frankly – out of patience trying to navigate her black Volvo through the grungy back streets of St Kilda.
The bayside suburbs were a bit of a mystery to Liz, who felt that one could find all one needed in High Street, Armadale, thank you very much. But apparently a new vibe had come into the area and it was becoming quite acceptable, with its fashionable boutiques and opulent stores. That was the problem with this new millennium: now that it was the year 2000 everything old was new again – it was so hard to keep up!
Besides, Liz just had to have a cashmere piece to wear to today’s party – Ellie’s little Rupert was turning two years old – who could believe it that all their babies were suddenly toddlers. All the best people had been turning up at casual luncheons and coffee mornings wrapped in darling little cashmere throws, twin-sets and boleros from a new little boutique called 8 Inkerman. Now Liz could stand it no longer: she wanted cashmere today, if it killed her.
Stopped in her quest by traffic lights, she drummed her fingers on the leather steering wheel and peered out through her tinted windows with interest. What a mélange of colour and activity, she thought. It’s almost artistic, in an earthy, urban way – like one of those paintings one sees of turn-of-the-century peasant life.
A very young mother in a kaleidoscopic outfit of hessian, complete with turban, rocked a stroller while waiting at a bus-stop. Two young men leaned against a wall, with bare feet and torn jeans, sharing a bottle in a paper bag. Their eyes were blank, their bodies limp and lethargic with defeat. A blonde Rastafarian busked on the corner. The suited businessmen animatedly chattering on mobile phones were juxtaposed with the Aboriginal group in the park. The prostitutes plied their trade on street corners with blank faces and minimal clothing.
Soaking up the atmosphere of the streets, Liz suddenly felt an overwhelming sadness at the huge contrast of this area, where the poverty-stricken, the drug-addicted, the affluent and the fashionable walked side by side, yet miles apart.
The Volvo came to a stop at the Fitzroy Street lights, perpendicular to a laneway. With an almost perverse voyeurism Liz scanned the alley to see what this seedy side of the suburb would reveal. What at first glance she had dismissed as a pile of discarded rags against a mini-skip, Liz quickly realised was actually a person curled in the foetal position, a shabby coat pulled over the top for warmth. As if sensing the scrutiny of another, the street-kid slowly lifted her head and locked eyes with Liz for a fleeting second.
Poor love, Liz thought to herself. God, there were so many to help that some days she felt overwhelmed with a sense of powerlessness. She looked again as the child put her head back down on her knees, her matted black hair now all that was visible.
Something shifted inside Liz. Something flew, just out of sight, across her mind. There was something about those eyes, that face seemed familiar somehow.
The lights changed and Liz, struggling to reach a slippery thought at the edge of her mind, eased the car back into gear and steadied her foot over the accelerator, taking a last look into the alley. She was set to pull away as a sickening rush of realisation flooded her consciousness.
It was her. The eyes, the hair, the set of her face all told her that this was the daughter she’d thought she’d lost. Liz pulled on the hand-brake with little consideration for the traffic behind her, leapt from the car and ran awkwardly in her Chanel pumps towards the girl. ‘Mikaylah,’ she shouted as she ran towards the child. ‘It’s me! It’s Liz!’
Mikaylah stared at Liz through a drug-induced haze. Her eyes were flat, her features slack, her cheekbones pronounced against the hollow face. Hardened to street life, her instant response was to flee. Few nights passed when somebody didn’t chase her for sex, drugs, money or food.
She staggered to her feet while Liz was still ten metres away. Liz’s shouting was indistinguishable over the car horns honking angrily at the black Volvo and Mikaylah stumbled down the alleyway to escape certain attack.
The alley danced in her heroin-haze, the cobblestones unstable under her feet. Fear drove her on, brought out her animal instincts for survival and forced her wasted body away from the enemy.
From far away across the ocean of her addled mind she heard the cry: ‘Mikaylah: is that you?’
Mikaylah had reached her goal. Nestled between two wheelie bins a simple grey door was ajar. The door was at the base of a two storey wall punctuated with steel-barred windows. She staggered toward the entrance shouting, ‘Mikaylah’s dead!’ before disappearing into the darkness.
Liz heard a door slam, and by the time she reached the space between the bins where Mikaylah had fled, the door she had gone through was shut and deadlocked.
Liz hammered on the door and yelled until her voice was hoarse.
‘Mikaylah, I am so sorry! Please talk to me!’ She looked at the simple hand-painted sign on the door. St Kilda Angels. A Mission for Life.
The honking back on Grey Street was escalating, and she looked up to see two policemen standing beside her empty car. She hurriedly made her way back to the vehicle, and after stammering an apology to the boys in blue, jumped behind the wheel to the chorus of angry shouts and horn-blowing from the throng of trapped cars late for their busy and important lives.
Barely unable to see through the tears that streamed from her carefully made-up eyes, Liz concentrated on getting out of the traffic and then parked in the first quiet street she could find. Turning off the engine, she collapsed back into her seat and let her emotions engulf her.
Wracked with sobs, she thought back to the moment that had haunted her for the past two years.
A day hadn’t passed where she hadn’t begged for time to turn back. To have that thirty seconds again. Regret was a heavy burden, and one she had carried alone ever since she had turned her daughter away from her door as though she was nothing more than a stray dog.
Liz hated herself for what she had done. She thought back to the dinner party that evening two years ago and wondered for the hundredth time how she’d made it through. It had been the first time she and the Mothers’ Group had ever dined together and they still laughed about how vague and distant Liz had been.
Liz could barely remember a minute of that night after Mikaylah showed up on her doorstep merely hours earlier. Her stomach was churning and her thoughts a scattered mess. The memories she’d worked so hard to deny – to bury – had resurfaced with a vengeance, and had lost none of their painful edge despite being hidden away for fifteen years.
Liz had been in emotional agony as she struggled to smile and play the perfect hostess to her new friends that awful night, while inside shards of memory kept rising to slice open old wounds. She just couldn’t reconcile the scruffy teenager at her door with the little pink bundle she’d tearfully handed over to a nurse.
‘It’s for the best,’ the nurse had said. ‘Just think of the scandal, dear.’
So Liz had handed over her baby, with her sweet rosebud mouth, big dark eyes and cheeks that felt like peach fuzz against Liz’s face. Afterwards she was empty, and the hole inside never really filled up. It was simply patched over as Liz swung herself determinedly back into a life that had little meaning to her any more.
Falling pregnant with Roman, her first child, had done little to heal her pain. Subconsciously she felt she had no right to be a mother to this boy, not after giving away her tiny newborn daughter. She hired two n
annies so there would be round-the-clock care for her dark-haired infant, but she rarely held him or interacted with him, instead filling her calendar with inane social events that kept her even busier than before her pregnancy.
No one noticed much. After all, she had money and privilege – why should she change nappies and run baths? She was parenting in a perfectly acceptable form for a woman of her rank and position.
Everything had changed the afternoon Mikaylah stepped briefly back into her life. Not only was the wound inside her torn savagely open, another part of her came alive, and more than anything Liz wanted to be a mother to her remaining child. The next day she fired her nannies and started parenting. She quickly found that it helped to ease the pain inside her, but it also provided a bittersweet glimpse into everything she had missed the first time, with her daughter; the daughter she had first given away and now had sent away.
During the bleak year that followed, Roman and her burgeoning friendship with the Mothers’ Group girls were the only bright moments in a dark period of depression that descended on Liz. Her guilt was so raw, her soul so grazed with regret, that for the longest time just getting out of bed each day required a sheer force of will that seemed too great to endure. If it weren’t for Roman’s happy gurgles summoning her, she would have made the Sheridan sheets and silk bedspread her permanent home.
After Roman’s first birthday the fog began to lift from Liz. She could see her son changing and growing; could see what a good job she was doing and took strength from that. His unfailing passion for her; his delight at her presence and tears if she even left the room without him stunned her to the core and helped nurse her back to emotional health.
As Roman tottered into his second year, watching him grow and blossom into an adoring toddler made Liz’s heart lift even more. A hard kernel of pain still sat squarely in her heart, but she could breathe and live and enjoy life again.
But now this. She had almost come face-to-face with her daughter for the second time, and she had blown it again.
Would she ever get the chance to make it up to Mikaylah?
Liz let out a few jagged gasps as her crying storm abated, then she dried her eyes, reapplied her make-up and considered her position.
At least she knew that Mikaylah was in Melbourne, in St Kilda in fact. She even knew where she had gone for help – she was sure if she turned up there now the teen would be long gone, but at least she had a place to start looking for her.
She started the engine and headed for home, her mind suddenly filled with a plan.
There would be no cashmere today.
Present Day
‘Darling, you know Mummy doesn’t do games,’ Monique sighed, waving Sienna and her Bratz dolls away. ‘Go on and ask Chloe, I’m sure she’ll play fashion models with you. It’s Mummy’s turn to talk to her friends.’
Sienna skipped away as Monique turned back to the Mothers’ Group with a sigh.
‘It’s just never enough, is it?’ she asked. ‘We bring them to these gorgeous play centres with … with … well, with all this stuff …’ she indicated in the general direction of the play area (which she had never actually set foot in), ‘and still they want more. What else do we have to do?’
The Mothers’ Group girls murmured sympathetically as they sipped their chai lattes, macchiatos and green tea. They were ensconced in a quiet corner of Monkey Business, the designer indoor-play centre where they met now and again.
Apart from serving great coffee and an interesting range of herbal tea, the best thing about this Malvern play-centre was that the parents’ and children’s areas were conveniently separated by a thick wall of noise-proof glass. ‘We really should do this at home,’ Tiffany had remarked in the past more than once.
And with Monique’s nanny, Prudie, and Ellie’s Ursula on the noisy side of the glass to deal with any tiffs, tantrums or tears, the Mothers’ Group only had to wave and smile at their offspring occasionally.
‘Anyway, sorry about the interruption, girls,’ Monique sighed again. ‘Now, where were we? Oh yes, that’s right, after-school-care – well, of course they should serve an evening meal. Most definitely! They need to talk to Peter Rowland’s Catering, I’m sure he could sort something. It doesn’t need to be three courses, two would suffice.’
‘Well absolutely,’ Ellie drawled in agreement. ‘The last thing I want to do when I pick them up at 5.30 p.m. is have two tired, hungry children hassling me for attention and food. Of course, Ursula normally does pick-up … but you get my point.’
‘It would certainly help me out,’ Monique said. ‘In fact if they could board during the week that would be a real weight off …’ she stopped, suddenly embarrassed by her admission. ‘Oh, not that I would ever actually do it, of course, it’s just that with the long hours in the shop and all … anyway, I think the after-school program is so rich and valuable, don’t you think? Mitchell came home with the most delightful little craft thingy, which we would never have managed to make at home …’ She petered off, running out of justifications.
‘It’s all right, Monique,’ Ellie leaned forward to pat her friend’s hand. ‘We know that you’ll soon be working full-time so you’ll really need after-school care, you don’t have to justify it.’
‘It’s not that at all,’ Monique came back quickly, ‘I just think it’s an excellent chance for the children’s further development!’
‘Of course it is, Monique,’ the other mothers assured their friend.
‘So is Tiff still in Portsea?’ enquired Ellie. ‘I haven’t seen her in simply ages.’
‘Mmmmm,’ replied Mim, ‘apparently having a detox month or something.’ Tiffany had sworn Mim to secrecy and, as much as Mim hated lying to her friends, she was determined to keep Tiff’s plan quiet.
‘Nice for some,’ said Ellie as her mobile trilled ‘Dancing Queen’, bringing a welcome interruption to the topic of child-care. Ellie listened for a moment then sang into the phone, ‘No worries, lovey, see you then.’
She flipped the Motorola shut and, fluffing up her hair where the phone had slightly flattened it, announced sarcastically, ‘You’ll never guess.’
‘Liz’s running late?’ Mim asked.
Ellie nodded with pursed lips as she dropped the phone back into her Gucci handbag. ‘She’s hopeless!’
‘You can’t talk!’ Mim said playfully as Ellie grinned.
‘She’s up to something,’ said Monique, ‘I’m sure of it. She’s always off to secret meetings and she’s so hard to get on to during the week.’
‘I know, it’s weird,’ agreed Monique. ‘Even I don’t know what’s going on.’
‘Now that is weird, I’ve never known you not to have your finger on the pulse!’ Mim laughed, but for once wasn’t envious of Monique’s traditional command of gossip.
The girls discussed the interesting topic of Liz and what on earth could keep someone so rich and well-staffed so busy. Surely they’d know if it was a lover, they speculated. And really, Liz was not the type at all for a tawdry love affair.
‘Maybe she gambles,’ Mim was suggesting as Chloe came up and tugged at her mother’s pristine white sleeve. ‘Hmmm?’ Mim said distractedly, caught up in the deliciously naughty conversation. ‘Oh yes, darling?’ she asked, glancing briefly at her sleeve to ensure Chloe had not left grubby fingerprints.
‘Come and see the shop Paris and me made,’ Chloe said, beaming at her mum. ‘It’s a supermarket!’
‘Oh,’ Mim said, torn between the intriguing chat and being a good mummy.
‘Come on,’ Chloe tugged at her insistently and Mim gave in.
‘All right sweetie,’ she smiled, then bent towards the other mums. ‘Say nothing without me, girls,’ she warned.
Mim inspected the makeshift supermarket in the home corner and dutifully admired the ‘specials’ and the ‘checkout’, amused to note that her daughter was the shopkeeper and Paris was the ‘lady’.
‘Lovely, girls, well done,’ she said extricating
herself as quickly as possible to head back to the table before the others started talking about her.
Ellie had left the table to take a call on her mobile and was standing at the far side of the patisserie counter. Monique wandered over to order a third macchiato (her biorhythms were a tad flat today), but as she got within earshot she could tell from Ellie’s tense body language and urgent tone that this was no ordinary chat.
Monique was startled to hear Ellie’s normally breezy voice edged with hysteria. ‘Look, I can’t calm down,’ Ellie was saying shrilly. ‘The place has been sold. It’s all still there, I just know it is. What am I going to do? Who can help me out of this? What if everyone finds out? … I really need to see you.’
Monique was torn between wanting to comfort her obviously upset friend and feeling embarrassed about eaves-dropping. She decided to move discreetly away as she heard Ellie finish the call.
‘I can be there tonight, Sarah. Absolutely, I have nothing on tomorrow, Ursula can take the kids to school … Okay, I will leave here at seven and should be with you by nine … Mmmm, okay, thanks so much … see you then … love you.’
By the time Ellie slammed her phone shut and gathered herself together, Monique was back at the table fussing in her handbag at the table to cover her guilt. Monique tried to read her immaculate complexion for clues. Ellie caught her stare and smiled back.
‘Love that turtleneck, darling. Is it cashmere?’
‘Naturally,’ Monique scoffed. ‘You know I wouldn’t wear anything else.’
‘We love a natural fibre,’ Ellie said breezily and sat back on the café chair, crossing her ankles.
‘So what’s on tonight, darlings?’ Monique asked.
‘Homework, dinner, bath, bed, ho hum,’ offered Mim.
‘What about you, Ellie, what’s on at your place?’ Monique leaned forward enquiringly.
‘Oh, you know how it is, Bryce has a work do on, and I am quite looking forward to a lovely soak in the bath and an early night,’ Ellie said smiling over at a toddler in head-to-toe Baby Gap, oblivious to Monique’s blank stare.
