The Best Man

by Dianne Blacklock

  ‘Did you find my phone?’

  ‘I didn’t look.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I was brought up not to look in ladies’ purses,’ said Aiden. ‘There’s scary stuff in there.’

  ‘What, like tampons? They don’t bite, you know. Give it here.’

  He handed her the bag, and Madeleine rooted through it until she found her phone. ‘As I suspected, it’s flat.’

  ‘Do you have a charger here?’

  She nodded. ‘It should be plugged in under the bedside table.’

  Aiden got down on his hands and knees and found the lead, passing it to Madeleine. She plugged in the phone. ‘I should call Henry.’

  But Aiden stopped her. ‘I’ve spoken to him twice already. And now he’s on his way, so –’

  ‘Oh God, he’s already left? We have to get going.’

  ‘Settle down. He has a much longer trip, remember? We have time, and you have to eat something.’

  ‘I really don’t think I can, Aiden,’ she said again.

  He sat down on the bed, facing her. ‘You can’t take the ibuprofen unless you have something in your stomach.’

  She sighed. ‘Why does it have to be eggs?’

  Aiden picked up the fork and scooped up some scrambled egg. ‘Because eggs have an enzyme called cysteine that mops up the toxic chemicals produced when alcohol breaks down in the liver,’ he said, holding the fork in front of her. ‘Open.’

  Madeleine did so and Aiden popped it into her mouth. She moved the egg around on her tongue a little. She supposed it was all right. She swallowed gingerly.

  ‘Those toxins are what’s causing that poisoned feeling,’ Aiden went on. ‘And eggs are loaded with cysteine.’ Madeleine accepted another mouthful. ‘The dry toast is whole wheat,’ he continued his infomercial, ‘and carbohydrates help restore your blood sugar, which is why doctors recommend dry toast or crackers for morning sickness. They fill the stomach without aggravating the nausea.’

  ‘And what’s in the drink?’ Madeleine asked, taking a bite of toast.

  ‘It’s an electrolyte replacement, a real one, from the pharmacy. Not one of those useless sports drinks.’

  She blinked. ‘Did you go out this morning and buy all this?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said dismissively. ‘Just eat a couple more mouthfuls and then I’ll give you the drugs. And later, when we get to your sister’s, you should have a beer.’

  Madeleine grimaced.

  ‘There is something to the hair-of-the-dog theory,’ said Aiden. ‘But you should only have one, and drink it slowly.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘Years of hard-won experience,’ he said with a rueful smile.

  To her surprise and relief, Madeleine was gradually starting to feel a little better. ‘How are we going for time?’ she asked.

  ‘We’re okay, keep eating.’ He leant across her outstretched legs, planting his hand on the mattress beside her. ‘Maddie, I can’t help feeling responsible for this.’

  She looked at him. ‘Nonsense. I’m a big girl, Aiden. You weren’t to know it was going to hit me so hard.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I feel responsible because I told you all that stuff about Henry, and his father . . .’

  It all came rushing back to her now. Madeleine dropped the toast on the tray, her appetite gone again. Fragments of the night before started to filter through into her consciousness. There were tears, a lot of tears . . .

  ‘I’m sorry, Aiden. I was a weepy drunk, wasn’t I?’

  He smiled indulgently at her. ‘You were okay,’ he said, giving her leg a pat. ‘You had a lot to process last night, you just had to get it out of your system.’

  Why did he have to use that particular turn of phrase? She had to know . . . ‘Where did I throw up?’ she asked in a weak voice, praying it wasn’t in the cab, or worse, his lap.

  ‘Straight into the toilet bowl,’ he assured her. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  She sighed. ‘I hope I at least did you the courtesy of taking myself to bed after that, and leaving you in peace.’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ he said. ‘I had to fight you off for a bit, but eventually I convinced you that no means no.’

  Madeleine gave a nervous laugh. ‘When you say you had to fight me off . . .’

  ‘You were trying to get me to sleep with you, that’s all.’

  Madeleine was horrified. ‘That’s all? I came onto you? Oh God! How embarrassing. What must you think of me?’ She gasped. ‘What’s Henry going to think?’

  ‘Steady on,’ Aiden said. ‘It wasn’t like that, you weren’t coming onto me. You wanted me to sleep in the bed with you – like, beside you – because you felt bad that I had to sleep on the couch. And as for what Henry might think, he’s not going to hear anything from me, so don’t worry about it.’

  ‘You think I should lie to him?’

  ‘No, I think you should tell him nothing, because there’s nothing to tell. I slept on the couch, that’s the truth . . . Nothing to tell, Maddie.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said in a small voice.

  ‘Nothing to be sorry about either, you were actually very sweet,’ he said, giving her another reassuring pat on the leg. ‘Now, you need to take a shower, and be quick about it.’ He lifted the tray off her lap and stood up.

  ‘What about my drugs?’ she pleaded.

  ‘All right, all right, you don’t have to beg.’

  Once she was showered, dressed and medicated, Madeleine felt like a new person, although still not quite back to her old self. The food had helped, and the drugs were working – her head wasn’t throbbing any more – but she still felt debilitatingly fragile. She didn’t know if debilitatingly was a word, but that was how she felt. The thought of negotiating the Saturday morning traffic on Parramatta Road was more than a little daunting.

  And then it dawned on her.

  ‘Aiden, how did we get here last night?’ she asked as she joined him out in the living room.

  ‘By taxi, I told you. Why?’

  ‘That means my car’s still at work!’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘Shit! Shitshitshit!’

  ‘Calm down,’ said Aiden. ‘We’ll just get a taxi to your building and pick it up.’

  But she was shaking her head. ‘We don’t have enough time.’

  ‘Well, what do you want to do?’

  ‘I could call Henry,’ she suggested, ‘get him to pick us up on the way.’

  ‘Nah, that’s not going to work. He rang again while you were in the shower, he’s already there.’

  ‘What?’ Madeleine said, alarmed. ‘He’s at my sister’s?’

  ‘I assume that’s where he meant.’

  ‘Oh no. Did he sound cross?’

  ‘He didn’t sound too happy when I said we hadn’t left yet.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘It’s not the end of the world, Maddie.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t get on all that well with my family.’

  ‘Well, it’s about time he did, he’s about to marry into it.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s how Henry sees it,’ she muttered. Madeleine knew he only tolerated her family at best. He was all right with her mum, it was Genevieve who really pressed his buttons. And who could blame him. Genevieve had elevated pressing people’s buttons to an art form, while Mark was just plain rude a lot of the time, constantly taking phone calls and ignoring his children, who all seemed to behave worse around their father, no doubt in a vain attempt to get his attention. At least he wouldn’t be there today.

  ‘Then we’ll just get a taxi from here,’ Aiden said. ‘You said it’s not far.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right.’ She picked up her handbag and checked that she had her keys. ‘It’s just that the more urgently I need a taxi, the longer it always takes me to find one.’

  ‘And tell me,’ said Aiden,
holding the door open for her, ‘how long have you been experiencing these paranoid delusions?’

  Madeleine pulled a face at him as she walked past him out the door. Her pessimism wasn’t entirely unwarranted; it did end up taking more than ten minutes before a taxi finally pulled up for them. When they joined Parramatta Road, Madeleine’s anxiety levels rose as she saw the traffic snarl ahead of them. It would be like this until they passed the used-car-yard stretch, and there was no guarantee the traffic would move any faster beyond that either.

  Genevieve and Mark had moved to Strathfield after Declan was born. They wanted their sons to attend a good private boys school from prep, and there was one such establishment just up the road. Jonathan Pepper would be spinning in his grave: he was a firm advocate of public schooling, having taught in the system his whole career. But that wasn’t a subject Madeleine was ever going to broach with her sister. ‘Mark’s never home,’ Genevieve had said at the time. ‘Boys need a firm hand, discipline, structure. They’re only going to get that at a private school.’

  Madeleine knew that Genevieve was just trying to do the best with the disappointing hand she believed life had dealt her. Things hadn’t turned out quite the way she’d planned. Instead of re-creating her family with a loving husband and two daughters of her own, she had a largely absent husband, and three sons. One after the other. She’d tried again for a girl after Declan, and Madeleine had been quietly horrified when Genevieve had mused out loud about terminating the pregnancy when the ultrasound confirmed another boy. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she’d snapped at Madeleine. ‘I’m not going to actually do it, but you can’t blame me for thinking about it.’

  Madeleine had a soft spot for Declan out of the three boys; as the second child of the same gender herself, she’d experienced the vaguest of niggles from time to time that maybe her parents had hoped for a boy. They had never made her feel anything but loved and wanted, but she sometimes wondered if there had been even a split second of disappointment when she was born. Poor Declan didn’t have to imagine it; Genevieve’s favourite war cry when the boys were running amok was ‘I wanted girls, you know!’

  ‘So prepare me,’ said Aiden. ‘Who am I meeting today exactly?’

  Madeleine roused herself. ‘Right, well, first there’s my mum, Margaret. She’s very sweet, but a little . . .’

  ‘What?’

  Madeleine was about to say ‘ditzy’, but that felt mean. There was no need to telegraph her mother’s shortcomings. And besides, her ditziness was endearing as much as anything, despite what Genevieve had to say about it.

  ‘She’s very sweet.’ Madeleine left it at that. ‘And my sister’s Genevieve, who’s married to Mark, but he won’t be there.’

  ‘Oh, why not?’

  ‘He has to travel for work quite a lot. All the time, in fact. She’s pretty much bringing up those boys on her own.’

  ‘Those boys?’

  ‘My three nephews,’ said Madeleine. ‘Gabriel is eight, Declan’s five, and Archie is about twenty months.’

  ‘She’s got her hands full,’ said Aiden. ‘What does she do?’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Genevieve – what does she do for a job?’

  Madeleine looked at him. ‘Well, like you said, she’s got her hands full already.’

  ‘So she’s a stay-at-home mom? I didn’t know there were any left.’

  ‘They’re not extinct yet.’

  Genevieve was caught in a trap of her own making. With three kids, and Mark away so much, it would be a nightmare for her to work outside the home. But once upon a time, she’d been crazy ambitious. She had qualified as a high school teacher, although everyone joked that she would be running the entire Department of Education before long. But then after their dad died she was in such a hurry to start a family that she didn’t wait to be appointed to a permanent position before she fell pregnant with Gabriel. Madeleine assumed she had probably dropped off the eligibility list altogether by now. At home with a baby, and planning another one, Genevieve had pushed Mark to seize every opportunity and apply for promotions, even though they both knew this would mean he would be around less, especially when he became manager of Asia Pacific operations. His predecessor had actually based himself in Singapore, but Genevieve wouldn’t even consider relocating, so it was hardly surprising that Mark was never home; he was barely ever in the country. Madeleine sometimes wondered if that’s the way Genevieve wanted it. Though she carped and complained about being a virtual sole parent, when Mark was home she carped and complained even louder. They weren’t an easy couple to be around, and Madeleine couldn’t really blame Henry for his reluctance to spend time with them.

  She just wished he had known her family while her dad was still alive. They were all so different then. He brought out the best in them; he brought out the best in everyone who had anything to do with him. Genevieve had become so brittle over the years, but she hadn’t always been that way. Maybe she’d been a little bossy – that came with being the eldest child – but she was also caring and fiercely protective of her little sister. Madeleine didn’t know how to define their relationship now; sometimes Genevieve seemed disdainful of her, at other times she seemed envious. A lot of the time it was both at once, which was confusing, frankly.

  The rumba started playing loudly from her handbag, and Aiden shot her an amused look. She fumbled inside her bag for her phone, quickly pressing answer to stop the interminable ringtone before she’d even checked who it was, though she expected it would be Henry.

  ‘Where are you?’ Genevieve demanded as soon as Madeleine put the phone to her ear.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ she said, wincing at the volume of her sister’s voice. ‘The traffic’s been crazy.’

  Genevieve responded with a dubious-sounding grunt. ‘Well, your fiancé managed to make it on time, and he had to come three, no, four times further.’

  ‘Is Henry all right?’ Madeleine asked.

  ‘What do you mean? Of course he’s all right. He’s not a child.’

  She would have liked to speak to him, but trying to gauge his mood over the phone with Genevieve around was unlikely to achieve anything but make Madeleine more uneasy. She couldn’t imagine how they were filling in the time, what they were talking about. She hoped Henry wasn’t going to be too annoyed with her by the time they got there.

  ‘Okay, tell him we’ll see him soon.’ Madeleine hung up and looked at Aiden. ‘We’re in trouble.’

  ‘I won’t be in trouble,’ said Aiden. ‘I’m the guest.’

  That was true. Aiden’s presence was likely to change the dynamic considerably today, and that could only be a good thing.

  Strathfield

  They eventually pulled up at the house about half an hour late. As Aiden stepped out of the taxi he gave a low whistle. ‘Nice place,’ he said.

  To say the least. A grand Federation pile, meticulously restored, set in an exquisite garden in one of the best streets in Strathfield, it was indeed a very ‘nice’ place. If she couldn’t have daughters and a doting husband, then Genevieve went for the next best thing – conspicuous wealth and the envy of others.

  Pressing the doorbell summoned what sounded like a charge for the door; it wasn’t so much the patter of tiny feet as the thunder of heavy footsteps on the polished floorboards of the hall, the two older boys squabbling, the baby crying, and finally Genevieve’s voice booming over the top of it all, ‘Stop right there!’

  There was a pause while muffled voices carried out tense negotiations on the other side of the door. At last it opened and Genevieve stood looking harassed, flanked by Gabe and Declan. She had one hand firmly on Gabe’s shoulder – perhaps more correctly the scruff of his neck – as she held the door back with the other. Declan had tucked himself under her arm, his face half-buried. ‘Everything has to be a competition!’ she said, pink-faced. ‘Even who gets to open the door.’

  ‘Sounds pretty normal to me,’ said Aiden.

  It was cool a
nd dark inside the hall, so Genevieve wouldn’t have been able to make out their faces clearly when she first opened the door and her eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the bright spring sunshine outside. Now she turned her head towards the deep voice, and blinked rapidly. Madeleine observed the transformation. Genevieve quickly released Gabe, coyly smoothing her hair back from her face, the colour deepening in her cheeks.

  ‘You must be Aiden,’ she said, sounding like a teenage girl. For the record, Genevieve had never sounded like a teenage girl, even when she was one.

  ‘But you can’t be Genevieve,’ Aiden was saying, taking a step towards her. ‘I was told she’s the older sister.’

  Oh brother. Genevieve would never swallow a line like that.

  But it looked like she was, along with the hook and the sinker. In fact, she was giggling. Her sister was giggling!

  ‘Oh, stop,’ she said. ‘There’s only a couple of years between us, it barely counts at our age.’

  Madeleine was about to say, ‘Speak for yourself,’ but Genevieve hadn’t seemed to register that she was even there.

  ‘It’s so nice to meet you, Aiden,’ she purred, extending her hand. ‘Welcome to my home.’

  Aiden took her hand. ‘Aren’t we family now?’ he chided, drawing her into a hug. It didn’t quite qualify as one of his signature hugs; Madeleine supposed he had to be careful not to squash Declan, who was still clinging to his mother like a barnacle to a boat.

  ‘Hi, Gen,’ Madeleine said finally, to announce herself. ‘Hello, Gabe.’

  ‘Gabriel, kiss your aunty,’ said Genevieve, her voice undulating weirdly. Madeleine suspected it had started out as an order, but remembering Aiden was right there she’d quickly modified her tone to something sweeter.

  Gabe kind of slouched towards her; Madeleine did the hugging and the kissing, he was just the receptor.

  ‘And Deccy, how are you, mate?’ she said. He ducked around behind his mother and Gabe, probably to avoid Aiden, and then clung on to Madeleine as if to dear life. She ruffled his hair.

  ‘Now say hello to Uncle Aiden,’ Genevieve said in a voice now resembling a fairy godmother in an old Disney animation.