by Wendy Harmer
And of course it wouldn’t be as a teenager, when it felt like your brain had been disassembled and put back together in a new and unfamiliar configuration.
Would she like to return to her twenties? Claire had married Ben when she was twenty-one. Looking back now she could see the main reason she got married was to get away from her mother. She loved him well enough and he offered her financial security and a place of her own. Claire smiled to remember her very first kitchen. The chocolate-brown laminex breakfast bar was set with stoneware plates on raffia placemats and serviette rings with signs of the zodiac. A row of pottery canisters sat on the shelf beneath a macrame wall-hanging she had made in the shape of an owl.
In truth the two years she was married to Ben (an electrician who looked a bit like Rick Springfield), she would have been better off in domestic science class. She had spent most of her time with Ben playing house. While he stripped down a Kawasaki motorbike on the balcony of their one-bedroom flat, she was in the kitchen experimenting with incinerated oven mitts, shattered Pyrex dishes, charcoal ducks, raw whole snapper and shrivelled shishkebabs. Eventually she’d hit on a sure-fire dinner menu. Prawn cocktail, beef burgundy with Spanish Rice-a-Riso and fruit salad with a dash of Grand Marnier (not forgetting the after-dinner mints!). Then she got bored with playing hostess and started to think she wanted to be Deborah Harry.
The insistent beat of the London nightclubs played in her head and she left Ben. She spent the next two years living with Meg in a basement bed-sit in Notting Hill. She worked in the kitchenware department of Marks and Spencer by day and mixed nauseating rainbow-coloured cocktails in dance clubs by night. So, no, she didn’t want to go back to her twenties.
In her next decade, between twenty-five and thirty-five, when she wasn’t on the road with the band she lived in ten different shared households in inner Sydney. With Meg. With Louie. With her sister Louise. With a stand-up comedian who kept fifteen guinea pigs in his room. With a heroin addict. With two lesbian Kiwi tap dancers. With an anal-retentive Scrabble freak. With a sculptor who got them all evicted when a block of his sandstone fell through the floor into the old wine cellar. Those years had been the most exciting of her life. She never seemed to sit down to dinner with fewer than ten people. There was a party every weekend. The television wasn’t turned on for two years.
While Claire was often nostalgic for these times, the reality had been exhausting. Relationships had broken up and reformed around her like amoebae. She had felt like the lead character in a soap opera which threatened to go on forever. By the age of thirty-five, when Meg was married with two-year-old Max and pregnant with twins, Claire had had enough. She put a deposit on an apartment in Rose Bay and set about creating a home just for herself.
And it had been just for herself. Because she sat there on her cream linen-covered squashy sofa and rose-printed cushions, which perfectly matched the floral prints on the wall and the cream rugs, and waited for someone to walk though the door and take her away from it all.
‘Be careful,’ Meg had warned. ‘If you create this perfect life for yourself, a man will look at you and think you don’t need him. He’ll think, where do I fit in?’
She had been right. She always was. Claire began to find every reason to sleep somewhere else. To leave her life like her bed—unmade. She had rung Meg from her hotel room in New York on her thirty-sixth birthday.
‘Guess what I’ve been doing today, Meg? I had breakfast at Dean and DeLuca’s in SoHo and then I went to Barney’s and bought a pair of Robert Clergerie boots and then I walked up Fifth Avenue into Tiffany’s, pretended I was a millionaire and looked at diamond bracelets. Tonight the guy from Sony Music is taking me to a nightclub!’
‘Oh my God, Claire! Your life is amazing! I made macaroni and cheese for dinner and threw up. Hang on, don’t go! Max wants to sing you “Happy Birthday”.’
‘appy birfday oo yoo . . .’
Claire had hung up and bawled like a baby. ‘My life is shit!’ she said, throwing her new boots against the wall. ‘My life is totally fucked,’ she said as the complimentary chocolates followed. ‘I fucking hate myself,’ she said as she downed the bottles from the mini-bar in alphabetical order. So, would Claire like to go back to that time? No.
Then Charlie and Madeline had come into her life. Her fortieth birthday was at the house in Dover Heights. She had almost everything she had ever wished for. Madeline was toddling across the room into her daddy’s arms. The frangipanis were in bloom. The night was blessed with a full moon, a full house and an even fuller heart. But then she had felt that old familiar feeling. Her period. The night was bloodied. Another moon cycle gone without another baby. Claire wished upon her birthday candles for just one more blessing. Her wish was never granted. Claire didn’t want to go back even five years. So how would it be if time stopped—just as Madeline wanted it to—at this very instant?
Claire watched her daughter’s head bent with concentration as she attached Barbie’s bridal veil with tiny fingers. She was looking forward to seeing her grow up. To see the gummy gap where her baby teeth had been. To watch the girlish contours of her face settle into their adult likeness. She was hoping the blonde wouldn’t completely fade from her hair. That she would be tall, but not too tall. Madeline was musical. She had pitch, rhythm, could hold a melody in her head. Would she want to sing like Claire? Or blind the world with some other brilliance?
Then there was Madeline’s first kiss. Mother and daughter shopping for shoes, sharing secrets. And ultimately, Claire hoped, a wedding. She had no doubt that Madeline would walk through the front door with a doubtful procession of blow-ins and boyfriends. But one day (and please forgive this feminist backslider) Claire wanted to be standing in the front row in her vivid lavender lace suit watching her daughter walk down the aisle like Cinderella with all the bells ringing!
Life won’t stop, thought Claire. And then there was Connor. She didn’t want it to stop before she saw him. She knew if she didn’t see him she would regret it forever. Like that grey cashmere Calvin Klein coat she should have bought in New York. Seven years later and she still thought about it.
Time was just going to keep on slipping away. And, inevitably, Claire’s feet would be swept from under her.
Rrrriiippp!
‘Ouch! That really hurt, Shelley!’
‘Yep, we’re getting to the sensitive bit now. I’m going to keep taking it off evenly either side and you can say stop when you want.’
Shelley didn’t seem to mind pain. Inflicting or receiving it. Claire could see that her ears and nostrils were pincushions for dozens of piercings. The jewellery—roofing nails, whatever— had been taken out for her day job as a beauty therapist. Claire suspected her night job involved wrist restraints and whips.
In between the strips of hot wax, Shelley was going at Claire with the tweezers. Now that really hurt! And no amount of insipid Celtic whale music emanating from the wall speakers could make up for the fact that Claire had never felt so undignified.
She was lying down wearing a back-to-front G-string with her knees apart and heels together. The only difference between this and the pelvic examination last Monday was that at least Shelley, in her pristine white jacket and flat shoes, was better dressed for the job. Oh—and the fact that, if your gyno dripped hot melted wax on your clitoris, she’d probably be up on charges.
‘You know,’ said Shelley cheerily, ‘some women get the grey hair lasered off after they have a facelift so there’s no clue how old they are.’
‘You mean, apart from their school photos,’ commented Claire. ‘Honestly! As if a bloke is going to call the whole thing off because you’ve got a grey pube! By the time he’s got that “up close and personal” he probably wouldn’t care if you had a dick!’
‘Oh, I’ve waxed a few of those.’ Shelley was obviously an enthusiast. ‘It takes ages and the blokes have to help hold the skin tight, otherwise you practically take everything with you.’
Rrrrriiiiiipp
pp!
‘Owww!’ Claire was sure she’d be missing a few vital bits as well. ‘How long will it take to grow back?’
‘About four weeks. But it will probably be uneven, in sort of patches.’
So, thought Claire, something to look forward to there.
‘But I reckon, once you’ve had this done, you’ll be back over and over again.’
Rrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiipppppp!
‘Eeeeowwwch!’
Don’t friggin’ bet on it! That one hurt so much it jolted Claire into a sitting position.
‘Now,’ said Shelley, ‘I’m at the stage where I can leave a bit, so it’s just a cute little landing strip, or I can go the whole lot. What do you think?’
‘No, no, not the whole lot,’ said Claire. ‘Just leave that little bit and that will be fine, really. It’s called a landing strip?’
‘Yep. All you need now is the bloke standing at the end of the bed with the fluoro ping-pong bats saying “ease ’er in, ease ’er in” and you’ll be in business!’ Shelley laughed and left Claire to get dressed.
Very, very funny.
Claire looked at her new ‘do’ in the mirror. Hmm . . . there was ‘nude’, ‘naked’, ‘bare’, and then there was what she looked like—‘bald’. Plucked-chicken bald. Mange or hair-loss-affliction bald. Eeew!
But as Claire pulled on her silky knickers, she did have to admit that, actually—wriggle, wriggle—it felt quite nice.
As she closed Aphrodite’s door behind her, Claire smiled to herself. Charlie had asked her not to get a Brazilian and she hadn’t. And as for that little bit left? Well, someone could almost chew that off.
Driving home that afternoon Claire was thinking about Connor. She noted that although it was now a week since he’d had his hands on her, each time she replayed the memory in her mind it became more intense. She wondered whether her night with him would be an erotic memory that would stay with her for years. Or would it be like a favourite passage in a pornographic novel which, after you turned to it again and again, eventually lost its potency. Well, this one had to last because she had promised herself that it would never happen again. With Connor or anyone else.
She was supposed to tell him tonight about the most dangerous and illicit thing she’d ever done. That was tricky: Claire wasn’t sure she’d done either. Thinking back she could remember a session of mutual consent bondage (if you could count a silk Hermès scarf as a restraint); a sex act in a public place (semipublic— it was in a lift—oh, and the Nirvana concert); an aborted effort to have a threesome (one bloke fell asleep); and her one hopeless attempt at lesbianism. It was all pretty tame.
Michael Hutchence would have thought she was pathetic. Paula Yates had once said of him: ‘The first time we went to bed he did six things in the first hour which I was sure were illegal.’ Claire must have led a sheltered life. She couldn’t imagine what they’d done. After the obvious one—the ingestion of various prohibited substances—she could only come up with smuggling endangered wildlife, littering and letting off fireworks.
So . . . she was about to do the most dangerous and illicit thing she had ever done in her life—because she’d never had more at stake—and she would ring Connor and tell him that right now. And she would also tell him that she surrendered. She had thought she held the reins of this fantasy firmly in her two hands, but it had bolted. It was threatening to kick the doors down and rampage through her life. She couldn’t wait any longer. She would see him in forty-eight hours. But she wouldn’t tell him while she was driving.
Claire parked the car near an empty playing field under a jacaranda tree veiled with pale purple blossoms. It was a warm November afternoon. She pictured Connor sitting on his deck at Kirra under the same warm sun. Thinking the same hot thoughts. Her hands trembled as she dialled his number.
It rang.
Claire felt all her limbs go weak, as if they were disconnecting from her body.
It rang some more.
Of course there was no telling where he was, who he was with. She’d hang up, ring him back. There was still time to stop—
‘Hello, Connor speaking.’
Claire could hear voices, music in the background. This was not the time to tell him anything.
‘Hi, it’s Claire.’
‘Hey . . . how are you?’
His voice was not the relaxed, throaty purr she was used to. He was with someone. Probably a woman. Probably his fiancée back from Brazil.
‘Can you talk?’
‘Not really. I’m here having a few drinks at the marina in Southport with two friends of mine. You might know them— Rose Wallace and Dermott O’Hanrahan.’
Claire imagined a rock had hurtled into the windscreen and smashed it into a million tiny pieces.
‘Of course they’re Mr and Mrs O’Hanrahan now. They’re just off a boat, been cruising down from the Whitsundays on their honeymoon. Dermott called me, and here I am. So how about I ring you back tonight?’
There was a pause as Claire fought to find her voice. And then someone spoke. Logic told her it had to be her, but it came from some throat she had no command of: ‘No, no don’t ring me! I’ll . . . I’ll call you tomorrow. Tomorrow night.’
‘Yep. Good as gold. OK, Mick, I’ll give them your best. Catch you soon, mate. Bye.’
Claire dropped the phone. In an instant she was out of the car, ripping off her jacket, gulping for air. In the next instant she was leaning over a wooden railing and throwing up her lunch.
‘You stupid, stupid, stupid bitch,’ she said aloud as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She spat the bitter taste into the gravel. ‘What the fuck did you ever think you were doing?’
‘Why did you bring this movie home, Charlie? Do you think I’m having an affair?’
It was late evening; the doors were open to the ocean breeze and Claire was curled up on the couch watching Unfaithful. She felt she could say exactly what she liked. There was nothing to hide anymore.
‘No. I brought home Jurassic Park and we weren’t going on holiday with a tyrannosaurus, were we?’
Charlie was sitting in an armchair in the amber light of an antique table lamp, nursing a glass of red wine. He turned to look at his wife. ‘Why? Are you thinking of having an affair?’
‘No.’ Which was perfectly true . . . now.
Claire looked back at him and asked him the same. ‘Are you?’
‘No. I just haven’t seen this movie, that’s all.’
Claire watched as the screen turned into a mirror. Claire was Constance, the beautiful wife. Charlie was Edward, the handsome, caring husband. Madeline took the part of their young son. And Connor was recast in this instance as Paul, the young, achingly handsome French lover.
Constance and Edward were a privileged couple. They’d been together eleven years. Their marriage was a warm and loving one. And yet Constance had chosen to embark on a reckless, passionate affair with a 28-year-old ‘kid’. Claire felt she understood the compulsion perfectly. Constance could have taken a taxi home, not gone up to the apartment, and not set the disastrous affair in motion. Claire could have stopped it too.
She replayed the scene in her head:
‘How’d you like a nice little pick-me-up? Come with me, honey, and let’s get this party started.’
‘Oh, thanks anyway, but I’ve got to be getting back. It’s my daughter’s wedding.’
The trouble was, once Constance/Claire had a smell of him, a taste of him, it was too late. For Constance it was his fingers brushing the back of her neck. For Claire it was her hand on his forearm and the smell of coconut, and suddenly every cell in her body was alive with the memory of all-consuming lust.
That’s if you could think of an educated middle-aged woman as merely a life support system for a primitive, seething colony of hormones. And Claire thought the description had fitted her perfectly. Until this afternoon, when her higher powers of reasoning had been re-engaged with the shocking realisation that she could be easily found
out.
So here she was, watching Olivier Martinez and Diane Lane ravish each other on the floor, in the hallway, in the toilets(!), and doing everything she had thought about for the past week. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She only knew she was suffering from a particularly nasty case of fantasy interruptus.
In the film Constance and her two friends were in a café discussing having an affair:
‘They’d never find out. It would be something I did for myself to broaden my horizons, like a pottery class.’
‘Having an affair is nothing like that. It always ends disastrously.’
‘Well, that’s true,’ said Charlie.
‘Yeah, Charlie, I know,’ said Claire wearily. ‘It’s the oldest story in the book. Eve tastes the forbidden apple, or the pomme interdite in this case, and everyone gets kicked out of the garden.’
Charlie protested, ‘The same director made Fatal Attraction and in that it’s the husband who has the one-night stand and brings destruction on the family.’
Claire wasn’t buying it. ‘Yeah, but Glenn Close ends up being the deranged bitch bunny-boiler everyone hates. You know, in the French version of Unfaithful, the husband gets arrested in the end.’
‘What for?’
‘Because he kills the French guy.’
‘He what? Oh fuck—thanks, Claire! You’ve given the ending away now! I told everyone not to tell me. Thanks a lot. Shit!’
Charlie grabbed the remote and pushed the pause button. Claire was immediately on her feet standing between Charlie and the television.
‘I don’t know why you even brought this stupid movie home! WHY ARE WE WATCHING IT?’
Charlie looked up at her and took a considered breath. He was trying to keep his voice calm and even. ‘We were talking about it in men’s group the other night and I wanted to see it.’
