‘Are you sure, Bobby? Just have a coffee, hey?’ I said, trying not to plead.
She shook her head and looked like she might vomit. Bobby had always been there for me when I needed her and I knew I had to be a good friend and have her back.
‘OK. Let’s go.’
Hot Chisel ran a hand over my thigh again as I squeezed out over his knees, my bum brushing against his chest. It was terribly erotic.
‘What’s your phone number?’ he asked.
‘Do you have a pen?’
He fumbled in his pockets. (I was tipsy enough to know that I’d like to fumble in his pockets.) ‘No. Just tell me and I’ll remember.’
I told him.
‘And you live in Bondi?’
I nodded and peeled myself reluctantly away.
The whole situation was feeling a lot like when my parents gave me a puppy and then took it away to the pound two weeks later for the trivial offence of having pulled all the clean washing off the line. I was in a bit of a surly sulk as I guided Bobby up to the taxi rank on Macleay Street.
Bobby and I shared a cab home and I wound the window down all the way so she got plenty of cool fresh air over her face. Throwing up in a cab was never a good idea and I knew this from first-hand experience.
‘Damn,’ I muttered. ‘They were really nice.’
I watched Bobby stumble through her little wrought-iron gate and up to the foyer of her apartment building, managing to get through her door after three or four tries with the key. Once I knew she was inside safely, I directed the cabbie to my place at the other end of Ramsgate Avenue.
The unit was empty. It felt hollow without my little boys. I kicked off the boots that looked great but felt like I was walking on torture devices. I peeled off my sweaty dark jacket and that’s when I saw the answering machine flashing, the little red alarm pulsing into the dark hallway. I pressed the play button and listened.
Hi, damn, I hope this is you. I’ve rung about five different combinations of numbers and pissed off a lot of sleepy people. Sounds like your voice. I’ll call again in a minute.
It was him.
The phone rang again and I felt my belly somersault and gave a little gasp.
‘Hi.’
‘Hey. I found you. I feel like a fool standing at a public phone like a safe-cracker punching wrong numbers.’
‘Where are you?’ I asked.
‘Bondi. On the esplanade. Where are you? Give me your address and I’ll be there in two minutes.’
I gave him the address, hung up and then went into overdrive, pushing dirty dishes into cupboards, shutting the children’s door, straightening books in the bookcase. My room looked all right and I touched up my make-up just in time to open the door.
Then the rollercoaster ride began. Rockstar raunch revved up to a roar.
We latched on and kissed, undressing as we stood in the corridor near the front door and then tumbled back into the unit in a frenzy. He was strong and led the dance. He was definitely the driver and I was the passenger and he went full throttle, pedal to the metal. My breathing became sharp and shallow as he took some sharp corners and mounted my kerb. Hell’s bells, I laughed to myself deliriously, I was actually thinking in automotive metaphors. It was surreal. But I couldn’t help it. The man had an impressive gearstick and was as cocksure as a Formula One racing driver. He was most attentive to my needs and so very present and fully engaged.
Panting, resting. I tried to catch my breath. I tried to remember the last time I’d had sex. It was like losing my virginity all over again … but good.
‘Did you come?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ I lied. I didn’t like lying. I didn’t like faking it. But the sex had taken me by surprise and I was not used to someone quite so … confident and my head was spinning and I had been trying so hard to impress and the harder I tried, the harder it was to concentrate on my own fall over the edge of pleasure. I got so close. So close.
‘I think not.’
I may have faked it more than once or twice in my life up to that point, but I had never, ever been called on it. We all do it. All girls do it. This is what I told myself. It was normal. It’s not like I had done it a lot. I had different reasons, depending on the lover and setting. Sometimes I just wanted them to get it over with so I could go to sleep. Sometimes, they were just crap in the sack and I wanted them to stop acting like a salivating rutting puppy dog who watches too much porn. Sometimes it was just not happening and I felt guilty that I was taking so long, and at other times I felt like there was something wrong if the earth wasn’t moving, so I faked it and sometimes, sometimes, I faked it because faking it can actually make it happen for real. But right then, I was busted.
He was so in tune with this duet of the flesh. I was impressed. Instead of being embarrassed, I was just paralysed by his powers of perception. Men are usually so intent on their own orgasms that they just assume you had a good time without really giving it much thought.
‘Well,’ I said and nuzzled into his body, while simultaneously stretching out to crack my ankles. ‘Maybe not.’
‘Let’s remedy that, shall we?’ he murmured, drifting south until he was just mumbling.
Like a conductor, he summoned all my nerve-endings into a swelling crescendo and brought down the house. I would have given him a standing ovation but my legs didn’t seem to work any more.
‘Now, that’s better.’ He nodded, satisfied.
I looked down at his mussed hair and gorgeous grin, barely able to muster a smile myself because my face was so sore from making stupid faces.
I felt like I’d been thrown through a windscreen and run over, completely flattened by ecstasy. By the time we finally fell apart in the first mauve of day, perspiration drizzling from our tired muscles, I was completely spent. There was not a drop of fuel left in my engine. And now, I promise, I will stop with the automotive analogies.
‘Well that was something else,’ I whispered into the early, hazy light, my words feeling cool against my own grazed and burning lips.
I had been around the block a few times in my wanton youth but that had been the most thrilling ride so far (oh shit, sorry: the car thing again). We lay there in silence, listening to the jabber of a kookaburra. All thoughts of the children were gone completely out of my head. School lunches. Tantrums. Sega Mega Drive. All gone. What a pleasant, pleasant distraction.
Hot Chisel left as the sun rose. I knew he had a home to go to. It was a one-night stand. We both knew that. It wasn’t something that had to be said. But I really wished he could have stayed.
I wondered, lying in the after-glow, streaks of dusty sunlight catching on my bare legs, whether I would ever fall in love again. It was foolish to be thinking that way after what was clearly a one-off track meet with a pro racer. But I hadn’t really missed having a man in my life until that point; and, even then, it wasn’t so much that I wanted one in my life, but in my bed. At least occasionally. My skin tingled. I let a hand feel the slack little pouch of belly fat, decorated with a patchwork of stretchmarks, the legacy of motherhood. And then I felt suddenly guilty and began missing my boys again and got up, draped a robe over my aching muscles and went to call them to tell them I missed them. If they asked me what I’d been up to, I decided that I would lie.
The sun was shining on Bondi Beach. For all the cockroaches, backpackers and crime, it was a pretty good place to live. The beach boomeranged around a sapphire sea, held together with seams of froth. The smell of the esplanade was always comforting: sizzling seafood and kebabs oozed an exotic perfume out from the crowded promenade and over the green hills that slid down to the sand. Old-timers played chess on the benches of the Pavilion as seagulls argued noisily and chicken-pecked each other for the potato chip dregs. A salty breeze sauntered up from the beach, filtering the intense heat from the midday sun. Even though it was almost winter,
no one would know it on Bondi Beach.
The boys and I were all dressed up and off to McDonald’s. Yep, we were putting on the Ritz! It was Ben’s sixth birthday and he had badgered me mercilessly for a party at the Golden Arches. I was still freaked out about the rumour that their ice cream was made of pig fat and that the burgers were made from cow’s anuses. I’d always been wary of Macca’s, a bit like I got claustrophobic in shopping centres. I think it was because my first job had been at McDonald’s Surfers Paradise and after two years of flipping burgers and shaking fries I’d been unceremoniously sacked for wearing a large paper bag on my head and leaning over the counter to kiss customers on New Year’s Eve at midnight. I think that had permanently damaged my work ethic.
‘I don’t care if it’s pig fat.’ Ben had shrugged when I’d tried that one on as a deterrent. ‘It still tastes good.’
All Ben’s friends had done it, had the Macca’s birthday, he told me. I had to take his word for it because he hadn’t been invited to a single birthday and we were well into the school year. It was a mother thing. They were such a cliquey mob. Tight. After the initial introduction to the women with good hair, no one had paid me much attention apart from the odd forced smile. They all huddled under the big tree in clumps of three or four. I hadn’t been invited into a clump at that stage, so I just hovered on the perimeter of social activity and waited for Ben every afternoon alone.
I really would have preferred a little low-key picnic in the park, but the lure of a Ronald McDonald ice-cream cake and Happy Meals and the chance to be the guest of honour in the ‘birthday section’ of the family restaurant was just too hard to fight. He was determined. It was the first party with friends that I’d ever thrown him so I guess he was entitled to pick where it was going to be.
‘Besides,’ he told me with a disapproving frown, ‘Dad took us there all the time in Darwin.’
Well, that was the clincher.
A teenage wannabe kindergarten teacher was going to play host and organise games, apparently. The kids got a kitchen tour thrown in and the whole party mess would be cleaned up by other youthful uniformed staff, so it was a win–win situation for me. And the price per head was single-mother friendly. Just. So it sounded like I would get to dodge a bullet and chill while someone else took care of everything.
Ten of Ben’s friends had been invited and Kate had offered to help me out. (Sam and her son couldn’t come because Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate birthdays because the only birthday mentioned in the Bible was the one where someone gave someone else a severed head on a plate and that left a nasty taste in Jehovah’s mouth about the whole thing, I suppose. I am so grateful to have been born without the capacity to believe such stuff.)
The restaurant (using that term loosely because it was really just a conveyor belt of crap) was clean and predictable. The staff were all in their matching blue-and-white-striped uniforms with nifty visors keeping their hair from falling out to contaminate the chemical-infused fake food with something organic. The tables were clean and the bins were emptied like clockwork. That had been my least favourite job at Macca’s as a kid. The place smelled sugary sweet, kind of like when you put your fingers under your arms to check the sweat factor and then smelled them. Ben was tap-dancing with excitement and Toby was sliding on the tiles on his belly like a deranged skateboard.
The parents arrived, throwing their children at me and then running away as fast as they could. Ben ripped colourful paper from his stash of presents. Three water pistols. A small box of Lego. A pirate sword. A Batman costume. A lunch box and drink bottle set. Two books. And I was pretty sure someone stooged us on a present.
Bubbly Jasmine was our host for the day and she started off very enthusiastically but wilted as the hyperactivity around her intensified. Tom and Drew were identical twins. There was the other Ben who was my Ben’s best friend. I thought it would be odd to be best friends with someone who shared my name. If Kathy from school had been called Nikki, I just don’t think it would have worked out. Leroi was too cool for school and then there were Chris and Tate, Kate’s sons. I’d had to invite Hugo, Kelly’s son, but only because Ben had been invited to his party the following week, so ‘manners’ and all that. The reciprocated party thing was a thing. The play-date she had promised me had never eventuated, though, so I suspected my Ben was only invited to Hugo’s party because the whole class was.
And then there were four other kids at the party who were randoms, and the parents didn’t hang around long enough to fill me in on who was who. They were just a blur of boys.
The mob of pint-sized kids started tearing between terrariums of plastic plants, rabidly screaming for sugary, packaged meal-boxes, fizzy drinks and ice cream. Toby began whining loudly that Ronald McDonald hadn’t put in an appearance and was grabbing at the shirt-hem of the poor hostess. She was completely out of her league.
‘I want Ronald!’ Toby screamed.
The twins were identical and laughing like maniacs. It was a dizzying optical illusion and I wondered how their parents coped or made sense of them. I got my boys’ names mixed up all the time, and they at least looked different. Ben was a dark blond while Toby was Nordic blond. Ben was as skinny as a praying mantis and Toby was a chubby-cheeked cuddle pot. Ben was kind of pointy and Toby was kind of round. If they had been identical twins I think it might have just been easier to call them the same name and then I’d never have to know or care which was which.
‘This is going to be fun.’ I smiled at Kate in a way that said What the fuck have I done?
Kate was a quiet woman with an air of such effortless, calm maternal buoyancy that I felt a bit safer for having her aboard. She made parenthood look easy and she had the figure of a teenager. She looked too good. Just too good! I wondered about women and money. Why did the wealthy girls look so much better than we of more challenging means? Sam and I often pondered this. We thought it might have been the lack of stress in their lives. Life on the cutting edge of abject poverty was brutally stressful. I had a permanent frown etched into my face. Was it facials? Massages? Cosmetic surgery? Better genes? Designer clothes? Or just attitude? I thought it might be a little bit of all of those things. Or maybe, having money just freed them up to be able to focus more on themselves. They probably ran for pleasure and ate beautifully healthy food. I ran with my shoelaces undone to make the bus, with schoolbags flapping behind me, and ate the crusts off the kids’ cold pizzas. No wonder I looked the way I did. I liked to call it Hobo Chic.
‘It’s only for two hours,’ Kate said, and I blinked, realising I was staring at her, and I looked up at the clock and immediately started mentally counting down the minutes. One hundred and nineteen.
After one hundred and two minutes my mind had become as glutinous and soggy as the tomato-and-pickle-stained pads of bread plastered to the floor, tables and walls. My heart rate had become dangerous and my breathing was coming in short, sharp bursts. I thought I might be about to have a panic attack at best, a heart attack at worst. The children had turned against us. They were those kids from Lord of the Flies and I was Piggy. Anything I screamed at them, they found hilarious. One boy had inadvertently frisbeed a plastic tray into another boy’s face, causing a split lip, a little blood and the need for an ice-pack. The hostess was out the back crying and threatening to quit her job. Even Kate had aged a few years. Ben was radiant, positively glowing.
‘This is the best party ever, Mum! Thanks!’
The plastic water pistols were finally broken, one of the birthday books had a torn front page and the only completely intact present was the lunch-box set, which would only have a life-span of a week once it hit the playground. Oh and the sword. The pirate sword was a late-arrival present. It was still hanging in there, probably waiting until there was an eyeball hanging from the plastic blade before it self-destructed.
‘I’m never having another kids’ party. I thought McDonald’s was the eas
y way out!’ I growled at Kate.
‘You’ll look back and laugh one day.’ She smiled, peeling a scab of yellow plastic cheese from her forehead.
‘Doesn’t anyone pick kids up early?’
‘Never. It never happens. Mostly they’re late. Squeezing every last free moment from the day.’
I looked from the clock to the children, who resembled wild animals, drugged with sugar and running amok, and back to the sliding-glass doors at the front of the building. Come on. Someone. Anyone. Come and collect these children. I can’t take another minute of this.
Rather than winding down, the little gremlins seemed to gain momentum as the clock ticked towards one o’clock. A fresh crew member brought out the cake and I swear to God it was like a Grand Final penalty shoot-out had just gone to the home team. They cheered and roared. It was just cake.
‘I was going to ask you,’ Kate screamed at me – it was like talking to someone at a nightclub – ‘there’s a big unit going above the surgery near school.’
‘What?’ I shouted back.
‘To rent!’ she yelled. ‘There’s a place for rent above the purple surgery. One of the school dads is the doctor there!’
‘How much?’
‘Two hundred a week! Four bedrooms, really big.’
I knew the purple surgery. There weren’t that many other purple surgeries to confuse it with. It was on Bronte Road and would only be a walk to school. That would be handy. But I was barely making ends meet as it was and that was another fifty a week. I tried to think about the cost in terms of time and whatnot, but I could not hear myself think.
‘I’ll think about it,’ I screamed, nodding.
I all but pushed the filthy little sweaty creatures at their parents when they finally arrived to collect them.
‘What do you say?’ parents asked their kids, with relaxed smiles because they’d probably been next door at the Bondi pub sinking schooners and enjoying a child-free lunch.
Madness, Mayhem and Motherhood Page 10
