by Wendy Harmer
‘It’s called a landing strip for a start and, forgive me, but I just thought it could be a bit of fun. That maybe you might like it. But now I see that you couldn’t possibly think I was doing it for you and I WASTED MY TIME!’
Claire was going for an Academy Award.
‘I’m going to ring the airline.’ She turned and trudged from the room.
‘CLAIRE! COME BACK TO BED!’ Charlie called. ‘FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!’
He punched the mattress, pelted a pillow at the door and fell back on the bed.
By the time Claire and Charlie were in bed together on Sunday evening, Charlie had begun to thaw. He had been angry all afternoon. Claire knew she was being an unreasonable bitch, but she wanted to punish Charlie. For what, she wasn’t quite sure. For everything. For no reason. Just because she could.
They were both sitting up, reading in silence, when he put down his book and said, ‘I’m finished with the men’s group.’
Claire put down her book as well and looked at him. She felt a surge of love as she looked into his sad blue eyes.
‘Really?’ Claire was hopeful, but sceptical. She’d heard Charlie say this before and almost expected him to add ‘and I’m taking a UFO workshop’.
‘Yeah. I am. I realised, watching that movie last night, that Diane Lane—what was her name in the film?’
‘Constance,’ said Claire quietly.
‘Yeah, that Constance had to make a choice between her loving considerate husband and her passionate young lover. And I thought—why does she have to make that choice? Why can’t a man be both?’
Well! This was too good to be true. Claire had been trying to communicate this to her husband for months. But how could you come out and tell your husband of seven years that you wanted him to stop being so considerate. That you now found sex with him predictable and safe, and you wanted him to climb down from his head and back into his dick. That loving his wife didn’t mean he couldn’t tear her clothes off and ravish her on the stairs. She now realised that it was exactly what Charlie had planned that afternoon when she had rebuffed him. An afternoon of wild passion. Was her hot little fantasy making her blind to what was right in front of her?
Charlie continued, ‘Do you know that on Thursday night I was sitting in a room with six other men listening to a woman trying to teach me how to be a man?’
‘A woman was leading your men’s group?’
‘Yeah. How sad is that? So I thought, I know how to be a man! I mean, you wouldn’t have a man telling a woman how to be a woman.’
‘I dunno,’ said Claire. ‘That Dr Phil—you know the one off the Oprah show?—he’s always telling women how to be women and he’s made a fortune.’
‘Anyway,’ said Charlie as he kissed Claire’s cheek and turned off his bedside lamp. ‘I just wanted you to know that. That’s all.’
Charlie turned to face the wall and settled in for sleep.
She sat looking at his back for a long time. She loved Charlie so dearly. Just when she was despairing of him, he always surprised her.
She made a promise to herself that she would go to Queensland and she would not see Connor. She would come back home and take up this conversation with her husband where they had left it.
And this time she really, really meant it.
Monday
Travelling North
‘So, I’ve got an hour and a half until I get on the plane. Here’s Maddie’s blankie. I know, I know—she’s six, she should be over it by now, but what are you going to do? I figure that, as long as she’s not carting it around at uni, I couldn’t give a rats,’ said Claire.
‘Any other instructions? Mashed pumpkin? Reheated breast milk?’ Meg took the pink ‘Barbie’ backpack and dumped it on her kitchen table.
Claire smiled. ‘Thanks for the sleepover tonight. Charlie says thanks too. He tried to get out of this dinner, believe me, but he was booked in months ago as guest speaker and—’
‘Hello? It’s me—Meg. You don’t have to make any excuses— Maddie’s part of the family. The kids love having her here. Have you got time for a cup of tea?’
Claire sank gratefully into a chair. She’d been up since 6 am packing, cleaning the house, getting Charlie out the door and Maddie off to school. She watched Meg rinse a cup. The grey sky reflecting off the green walls gave her the colour of a cadaver.
‘Honestly, you’ve got to get this kitchen painted. It’s so disgusting! It’s nauseating this time of morning.’
Then she realised that Meg was actually vomiting in the sink.
‘Ow, jeez—sorry, honey! I forgot. Doesn’t it get any better the fourth time around?’
‘No. You feel just as sick, but the shock’s worn off. You’re just depressed that you’re sick, not surprised.’ Meg was now chomping into a gingernut biscuit. ‘They reckon ginger biscuits are supposed to stop morning sickness. The only way that could work is if you’d used them as a contraceptive device. They’re bloody useless, but I’m addicted.’
Claire laughed to think of Meg getting about with a gingernut biscuit in her undies. ‘So, do you still think it could be twins again? I hate to say it, but your tummy looks huge. When are you going in for the ultrasound?’
‘Tomorrow morning. When are you coming back from Surfers?’ Meg asked innocently.
‘Oh well, it just depends on how long Mum and Dad need me there,’ Claire answered innocently.
‘Liar.’
‘Wha—’
‘You’re a bloody liar!’
‘Meg, Dad called me, I didn’t call him! I haven’t spoken to . . . you know . . . whatsisname . . . Connor . . . for ages. I told him not to call me. That’s it—it’s over.’ Claire was acting her little heart out.
‘Oh yeah?’ Meg was having none of it. ‘I’d ask you to show me your pubes, but that’s a bit personal, so open your overnight bag and let me see. If there’s a long dress with buttons down the front of it . . .’
Claire could have kicked herself for telling Meg every detail.
‘Come on, I dare you—open that bag!’
Claire sat exactly where she was and put her head in her hands. Meg took this as her licence and pulled everything out of the suede holdall onto the kitchen floor. The contents would have suited a hooker on holiday. A good deal of it was flimsy underwear, scarlet, black, pink with ribbons, and then there it was—a long, slinky, silver satin wrap dress. OK, it wasn’t buttons, but one pull of the ribbon at the waist and all would be revealed.
‘See, no buttons.’ Claire smiled weakly.
Meg just shook her head. ‘Oh, give me a fucking break! So you’re taking your mum and dad out to where? The Playboy Mansion?’
Meg shook the garment under Claire’s nose. ‘Let’s just call this Exhibit B, shall we, Claire, since I’d bet my arse you’re sitting on Exhibit A.’
Claire could see herself on trial.
‘Would you like to explain to the court, Mrs Wallace, why this dress was in your luggage?
‘I have no idea how it got in my bag. Someone must have put it there.’
‘I put it to you, Mrs Wallace, that you packed this bag yourself. It was a pre-meditated packing. Isn’t it true that you were taking this dress to Queensland at the express request of the co-respondent, Mr Connor Carmody?’
‘I . . . I’m . . .’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Wallace, speak up—I’m sure the court would like to hear your answer. Unconvincing though it may be.’
‘I . . .’
‘And would you like to stand and lift your dress, drop your knickers and show the court Exhibit A—your bald pudendum?’
‘Objection, Your Honour! The evidence before us falls far short of what is required for a guilty verdict.
‘And, as has been laid out clearly before the court a number of times in this trial, there is a mitigating circumstance. Mrs Wallace is perimenopausal and not of sound mind or—’
‘Objection overruled. I see no point in continuing this farce. The court grants the
decree nisi and full custody to the applicant husband. Mr Wallace may walk from this place a free and decent and honest single man, with a marvellous speaking voice. That is all.’
Claire couldn’t find anything to say. Meg deposited her cup of tea on the table.
‘I hope you enjoy your little farewell ovaries party. But don’t come crawling to me if it goes wrong, that’s all.’ Meg was in a shit mood, as you would be if you’d just hurled in the kitchen sink.
‘I don’t know why I’m taking the dress, Meg. I really don’t. I’ll probably just go up there, referee Mum and Dad, and come home.’
‘Leave it here with me then, as an act of faith.’
‘No!’ Claire’s voice was sharp. ‘I just want to take it. Call it hanging on to the last little bit of fantasy, if you want. I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘So I see Madeline isn’t the only one in the family who needs her security blankie.’
Ow! That hurt. Claire and Meg stood and glared at each other. This was a battle of hormones. Pregnant and peri-menopausal. Claire bit first.
‘This is none of your business, Meg! How I decide to conduct my marriage—my private life—is up to me.’
Meg was at her poisonous best and tore into Claire. ‘It is my business, since you are leaving your child here with me while you go off on this . . . What is it exactly, Claire? Some weirdo Hollywood fantasy? Some last pathetic effort to prove you can still wiggle your arse and cause a testosterone tsunami in Tokyo? At your age it’s just fucking sad. That’s all. Leave it to Sharon Stone. GIVE UP! GET OVER YOURSELF!’
She turned her back on Claire and looked out the window so she wouldn’t have to see the shock on her best friend’s face.
Claire fought back. Equally venomous. ‘You don’t have to take Maddie! I can pick her up from school right now and take her with me to see her grandmother and grandfather.
‘Maybe there’s a part of you, Meg, that wishes you were still out there like me. Maybe you are terrified that it’s all over for you.
‘And maybe you’re shit scared that, if I go up there and do everything that you fantasise about every day while you’re here in this green shitbox packing school lunches, it will remind you of everything you can’t have because you are trapped here until you fucking die. THIS IS YOUR LIFE. YOU ASKED FOR IT. GET USED TO IT!’
There was a thunderstorm of tears. Like when a cold front and a warm front smack into each other on a hot summer’s afternoon and produce hailstones the size of golf balls.
Claire and Meg threw their arms around each other.
‘Oh, don’t leave me, Claire! Don’t fall in love with him and leave me. I couldn’t bear it. I’d die without you!’
‘Meg, don’t have any more babies after this! I know you’ve got the biggest heart in the world, but leave some room for me. Will I ever have you to myself again?’
They cried and kissed, hugged and cried and kissed some more. Until Claire had to run for a taxi and almost missed her flight.
Claire stood on the tarmac at Coolangatta airport blinking in the mid-morning sun. No matter how carefully you dressed in Sydney anticipating the warmth, it was always hotter here than you thought. She felt like taking her clothes off already.
She could be at Kirra Beach in five minutes. But she was determined. That’s not where she was going. She climbed into a taxi and directed the driver to downtown Surfers Paradise.
She took her mobile phone out of her handbag and looked at it. It would be the easiest thing in the world to call him now. In fact, she could call just to say that she wouldn’t be seeing him. But she knew she couldn’t do that. Once she heard that voice it would all be over. Instead she called her father.
‘Hi, Dad. I’m here. Just leaving the airport now.’
‘Good, good. Your mother’s not back until lunchtime, so we’ll have some time to talk.’ Her father sounded nervous. Claire guessed this was because he was going to have to address Big Emotional Stuff and he wasn’t good at it.
‘Did you tell Mum I was coming?’
‘I told her you were coming up for lunch because you had some business to do in the late afternoon. I told her I wasn’t sure what it was about. Perhaps you could go out shopping or something, so she doesn’t suspect anything.’
Claire couldn’t believe that her own father was conspiring to get her out of the house. She was afraid of what would happen if she left the safety of her mother and father’s four walls.
‘OK then. See you soon.’
Claire ended the call. At this point she could turn off her phone and there would be no way he could get through to her. But what if Charlie rang, or Meg wanted to call her about Maddie? She left it on and tucked it back in her bag.
Claire looked out the window of the taxi and watched the suburbs slide by. If she could just stop thinking, she would be fine. She would be back in Sydney by this time tomorrow and her life would be exactly as she had left it.
The Gold Coast. Claire loved this part of the world, although most people she knew turned their noses up at it. Cheap and tacky was the usual pronouncement. But Claire’s mother and father had taken family holidays here since the mid-sixties. Almost forty years ago. She sighed in disbelief.
She loved the glimpses of what it had been like back then. When every small-time entrepreneur from down south had stampeded here to create their own versions of California or Miami—to open a motel and make a fortune selling the sand, surf and sun to the swinging generation. You could still see the rundown ‘Sun Deck’ and ‘Paradise’ motels, with murals of the Mexican desert or Hawaiian palms painted on the walls. Their green concrete beer gardens were cracked and long deserted, their empty swimming pools painted such an intense shade of blue that you had to squint to look at them.
She remembered they had once rented a house on the beachfront at Burleigh Heads, probably about . . . there! They used to sprint over the crab-hole pitted dunes and dive into the ocean. She saw the very spot slide by the window. It was now occupied by a block of designer apartments.
Their school holidays had always stretched to infinity. It was Christmas all year round. There was always more mini-golf to be played, a visit to the Porpoise Pool to feed the seals, or a ride on a ferris wheel with the wind off the beach whipping through your salty hair.
Dad loved the Currumbin bird sanctuary because the rainbow lorikeets’ feet got stuck in Mum’s hairspray and shat in her perm.
Claire remembered the bloke—so sunburned that the creases in his skin were charcoal—who rented you a Surf-O-Plane on the beach so you could catch a breaker while waving to Mum at the water’s edge in her floral one-piece cossie.
And the other bloke—Dad said he had ‘the best job in the world’—who sprayed coconut oil on the girls in their bikinis .
Coconut oil! Claire now realised why that smell so often jolted her brain back to memories of adolescent lust. On her family’s last visit to their holiday house, when Claire was sixteen, she had crept across the wooden verandah to meet Shane, a golden-haired surfie boy who drove an emerald green panel van. He parked next to Elephant Rock as the sun went down and she climbed in the back with him amongst the empty KB tins, the Castrol oil bottle bongs, the blocks of coconut board wax. There was a full moon and a big swell that night. Claire felt as if she’d paddled out to where it was six foot and perfect . . .
Claire was only five minutes away from her parents’ highrise apartment when she cracked. She reached for the phone and rang the number.
‘Hello, The Green Wave. Connor speaking.’
‘Hi. Guess where I am?’
‘I don’t know. I thought I’d lost you.’
‘In Surfers. Can I see you tonight?’
‘Yes.’
‘I know this isn’t what we planned . . .’
‘And that’s why it’s better like this. I forgot to tell you that that’s what makes a night great. No amount of planning can make any difference. It’s the unfolding. How a night unfolds to make it like no other. M
eet me outside the Kirra pub at six o’clock.’
‘OK . . . and Connor?’
‘Yeah?’
‘If you go for a surf today, don’t shower.’
Claire snapped the phone shut and felt every tiny cell in her body burst into flame.
‘So run through this again for me, Dad.’ Claire was pacing the beige carpet in front of the windows of her parents’ fifth floor beachfront apartment.
Her father sat in a lounge chair watching Claire silhouetted against the brilliant sea and sky. There was a vertical roll call of blues behind her. Azure, cerulean, cobalt, cyan, gentian, indigo, sapphire, saxe, turquoise and ultramarine.
Claire was not looking out the window. She was trying to focus intensely on the matter at hand for two reasons: firstly, because she really did want to help her father and, secondly, because apparently she had a death wish and might be tempted to jump.
‘Well,’ said Ron, who was perched at the front of his chair with his hands clasped between his knees, ‘as I’ve already outlined, there have been three different flower arrangements arrive here in the past week. She says she’s brought them home from charity lunches, but that seems a bit circumstantial.’
In his mind Ron was back chairing a Balmain Lawn Bowls Club committee meeting where he had always felt most comfortable. Claire was equally determined to keep proceedings focused, but informal.
‘How come she’s going to all these lunches without you in the first place?’
‘You know me, Claire. I don’t feel comfortable at social outings. I never have. I just seem to cramp your mother’s style. It’s better we do things apart.’
‘Well, maybe it’s not better, Dad. Not if she’s lonely and started having an affair—which, by the way I do not think is true. What else?’
‘She’s been out a couple of times that I know of at least, to visit Clive Sinclair down at the surf-lifesaving club when she expressly told me she was going shopping.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because I followed her.’
