The Chance of a Lifetime

by kendra Smith

  ‘What?’

  ‘A treehouse, silly!’ she said, raising her eyebrows. ‘And a Prada handbag…’

  ‘Yes, I did notice the glasses…’

  ‘Yeah, well, then there’s the top-of-the-range four-wheel drive… but… oh gosh, sorry, sorry, I’m just a bit on edge. I think seeing you, makes me realise…’

  ‘Realise?’

  ‘What I miss: you… London,’ she sighed, spooned the sauce over the pasta and started grating some cheese over it. ‘The friendships, you know? Been hard fitting in here… I’ve got my ideal house, haven’t I, but…’ She turned around, scratched her neck and looked down.

  ‘But what, Luce?’

  ‘Adam’s hardly ever around to enjoy it. I’m on my own a lot and I just get so caught up in what everyone else is doing… His commute is dreadful. Takes him two hours door to door – the fruit markets open so early. We didn’t really factor that in when we fell in love with the house…’ Her eyes brimmed with tears. ‘He’s away a lot seeing farms all over the UK, then he stays up in London – says it’s very hard getting the last train back. When he does, he comes in at 11 p.m., totally shattered. Has no energy for me or Rosie…’ Her voice trailed off. ‘And now we’ve got number two on the way…’

  ‘He’s probably worried about the baby,’ Katie said, patting her friend’s protruding belly. ‘Men don’t talk about stuff like we do, don’t open up to people at the check-out desk in a supermarket, or in an escalator, like we can.’ She noticed the edges of Lucy’s mouth turn up slightly. ‘They keep it locked up. Try and talk to him?’ Katie stared at her friend, the one who had the dream – or did she?

  She went to the dresser and found plastic plates, and two Peter Rabbit bowls for Rory and Rosie, and started spooning the kids’ supper onto it.

  ‘They only talk to their mates about cricket or the stock market. He’s probably worried about work – remember what happened to us? Tom got so stressed out by money and work, he thought we should leave for Australia to make it all better…’ She smiled, glossed over the fact that it was their only chance to pay off thousands of pounds of debt.

  ‘And is it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Well, I suppose… I don’t know if it’s “better”, what with everything going on with me and Tom… but you know, I’m really enjoying some of it—’ She suddenly stopped what she was saying and realised what she’d said.

  ‘Good for you,’ said Lucy, placing green plastic forks and spoons onto the table. ‘And how’s your ocean swimming?’

  ‘Actually I’m training to dive too.’

  Lucy spun around and stared. ‘You’re joking! You’re terrified of deep water!’

  ‘Well I used to be… but I’m really loving it,’ Katie said laughing. ‘It all started because I wanted to show Tom that there’s more life in this old girl yet…’ Her voice went quiet. ‘But now, after all this Ann baby business… I’m not so sure. In fact, I’m doing it for myself mostly. Tom doesn’t know by the way. I was going to surprise him, just not sure when… now with all of—’ Her voice trailed off, and Lucy looked at her, walked towards her and put her arms round her.

  ‘Well done, you. You’ll get through this.’

  Suddenly the children bounded in, James leading the pack, with Rosie tottering behind. Lucy scooped her up and into the high chair. ‘Supper, everyone!’

  ‘Mummy, does Rosie’s daddy live here?’ Andy said, taking a slug of orange squash.

  ‘Yes, darling, he does.’ Katie smiled.

  ‘So why doesn’t our daddy live with us?’ Andy stared at her. Katie turned away, started to chop up Rory’s food.

  ‘He stole my dinosaur!’ Andy squealed as Rory placed a purple plastic dinosaur into his mouth and started chewing it.

  ‘When will Daddy come home? Mummy?’ James was insistent.

  Katie looked up from spooning mashed macaroni cheese into Rory’s mouth. ‘Um, well, soon. He’s got a long work project.’

  Lucy looked over at Katie and smiled sympathetically. ‘James, lots of daddies work away from home from time to time. Even Rosie’s daddy. He’s away too sometimes.’ She went over and stroked his hair. Katie’s heart nearly burst. Am I doing this? Taking their father away from them? She turned away.

  ‘Katie?’

  ‘Oh it’s just seeing you, Luce,’ Katie said standing next to Lucy by the French doors. She wiped a tear away with the back of her hand. ‘And… and I really do miss everyone, miss Tom, if you must know – can you believe it?’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes, of course you do; he’s your husband. He’s hurt you. Really, really hurt you, but you need to decide if you can work it out, don’t you?’ she said squeezing her shoulder. Lucy then opened the fridge and poured her a glass of wine. Katie stared at the glass as she took it from her, watched as the beautiful crystal sparkled in the low sun coming through the French doors.

  She took a big gulp. ‘I know, and coming back to the UK, I feel kind of weird. I do wonder what I’ve become,’ she said shaking her head. ‘Australia or no Australia… I just feel like most of the time – when I’m not in the sea – I kind of melt into the background, know what I mean?’ Katie smiled thinly at her and started to fold a tea towel, realising that Lucy wouldn’t understand the sea bit. She felt a unique feeling bubble up inside, a pride in how much she had found happiness in the ocean.

  Lucy smiled at Katie and took a gulp of mineral water. ‘Yeah, I feel like I might as well be in another country – it’s taken ages to get to know people, and there is so much I don’t know – heard one of the mums at Rosie’s playgroup call me “London Lucy” in a funny voice when I was in the kitchen getting a coffee. That hurt. I went home that day and cried – hormones!’ She looked across at the view, out over the fields, and then turned to Katie and shrugged her shoulders. ‘My perfect life, huh?’

  ‘And we are the perfect wives…?’

  They both burst out laughing. ‘Life isn’t perfect, no matter where you are, Lucy.’ Katie smiled.

  Lucy nodded, adding: ‘And you know what’s been really hard?’ Lucy frowned at her. ‘You mustn’t say you are scared of mice – everyone laughs at you in the local pub!’

  Katie grinned, imagined Lucy trying so very, very hard to fit in.

  ‘Listen, try and get away for a weekend will you, just you and Adam – and talk,’ she said, kissing Lucy goodbye later that day.

  As they all waved from the car, Katie looked behind her, felt a cocktail of emotions: sadness, gratitude and relief to have offloaded her pain; comfort at seeing Lucy, then a weird feeling. Pity? No, couldn’t be. She glanced again at Lucy from her rear-view mirror as she beeped her horn. She stared at the woman with the Alice band, the pink cheeks and her castle behind her, watched as she put on a smile. She’s living in a totally alien world herself, Katie thought ruefully as the car crunched slowly over the gravel.

  As she negotiated her way back along the narrow roads, Katie tried to make sense of her jumbled ideas. She attempted to order the mounting pile of thoughts on her mind: What do I want? Do I want my days to be full of rain, my kids to go to smelly soft play centres smelling of chips when I can let them run around in the fresh air of the beaches; do I want Tom back? Is that what I really want in life? Where is home? Is Tom my home?

  Pulling into a service station she looked behind her: all the boys were asleep. She let her head fall back on the headrest and let out a deep sigh. What are my boys becoming? Anglo-Aussie? Fair Dinkum English? Does it matter? Home is really where your family is, where your husband is, where you want to be with them, surely? But what if you’re not happy? Is Lucy ‘at home’, deep in the countryside?

  She thought about her friend again, realised that Lucy couldn’t swim in the sea on a Tuesday morning, watch kookaburras from her deck in the garden, show her children the dolphins swimming on an early morning walk. She couldn’t trample through the gum trees in the Blue Mountains breathing in the eucalyptus vapours. And what
about happiness?

  As she pulled away from the service station, she knew that the next village was Gressington. The village that had the house for sale, the house with five bedrooms, two acres of land and a sunk-in trampoline in the garden. The one with the Aga, the double garage and the odd-looking bathroom in a terrible mustard colour. She remembered all the details the agent had sent her via email to Sydney, the fact that it was going cheap, bit run-down, needed work. Remembered how her heart had lurched, realising that it was the next-door village to Lucy’s; that they could be neighbours. She saw the For Sale sign coming up on her left… wiped a tear away and then did something that surprised even her.

  44

  Hi hello, how are you? It was all so familiar. Familiar faces, familiar smells. Katie looked around: pint glasses, hanging baskets overflowing with lobelia, geraniums; chips in a basket, the yeasty smell of beer, Walkers crisps. Pound signs on the blackboard telling you today’s special was chicken korma £8.99 (what was that in dollars?); black cabs roared past; hazy sunshine filtered through dusty windowpanes from outside.

  They had been there for an hour already, a friends’ catch-up in a popular North London pub, one of their old haunts. Katie was exhausted. No sooner did one set of friends arrive: shriek, greet them like they’d moved to Afghanistan (What’s it like over there?), start a conversation; then another group came in and they had to repeat the ritual all over again. She was weary with the effort of it all.

  She and Tom had decided to keep the charade of We Are Still Together going for the afternoon at least, for the UK. But do I like it? thought Katie, looking at Tom, admiring his broad shoulders as he stood at the bar. She shook her head as another old friend appeared and gave her a bear hug.

  ‘How are you, darling? How are the boys? When are you coming back?’

  She stared at Henry, her old colleague from her publishing days. There was no concrete answer. I don’t know, she thought, as she smiled, embraced him, felt like she was an alien who had landed on another planet. She was being handed a picture. She gasped. ‘That’s not Immy, is it?’

  Caroline smiled back. ‘Yes it is!’ Caroline and Harry had been together for four years. When Katie left, they had just bought the bottom flat of a terraced house in Tooting Bec. Katie stared at the pictures of children who were babies when they had left. The podgy faces she remembered had thinned out. They were growing up; their smiles beamed from iPods, iPads, small passport photos in wallets, new babies squished into babygros, born since they’d left. She handed round a picture of her boys.

  ‘Wow, look at James!’ shrieked Caroline. ‘He looks Australian!’

  Does he? Why?

  ‘Whose idea was this?’ Katie whispered to Tom, closing her eyes and leaning her forehead on his arm when they were up at the bar getting another round of drinks.

  ‘Yours,’ he said resting his hand on her head tenderly. She looked up, saw the longing in his eyes, the way he touched her arm, squeezed it with his hand and then hesitated, moved away, picked up the two pints at the bar, smiled at their group of friends in the corner and walked towards them.

  As she stood at the bar staring at Tom and her old friends, she found herself wondering what would happen if she just stood on a bar stool and yelled, ‘Tom had an affair. With my best friend! She might be having his twins!’ What would happen then? What would a pub full of English people who don’t discuss emotions do with that outburst? How would they silence the flow of lava from her lips? Would they all mutter there, there, and tell her to sit down and stop making such a fuss?

  *

  When they left Katie’s head was throbbing. They took a cab to Kings Cross and she watched the streets pass her by from the cab window; she stared at the traffic, the grimy pavements, the litter-strewn roads, the graffiti. The place was so crowded she could hardly breathe. She studied the sky above them. It was low somehow, like a giant was standing above them, pressing the now late afternoon clouds down with his enormous brown, muddy boots. It’s so achingly familiar to me, yet it seems like a lifetime ago, I lived this busy, dirty life, she thought.

  We met everyone to ‘catch up’. But have we? Not really, she decided. Because it was the little things that mattered, things like forgetting which of her god-daughters liked blue and which liked purple. She had no idea, she realised, no idea either that Zoe tiled her bathroom last August in mosaic tiles and that Harry’s dad had angina, not asthma. They’d kept up with the big picture, the huge charcoal line drawing, but nothing was coloured in. The shading was all gone; some bits were even blank. Homework, husbands, a new job, laundry, a curious rash on the inside of your thigh – that was the stuff of life – and she didn’t have a clue. She sighed, as she leant her head on the cab window, just as Tom tentatively took her hand and squeezed it. She squeezed it back, exhausted with the whirlpool of emotions.

  *

  Debra walked into the bathroom as Katie was bathing Rory and Andy.

  ‘How are you, sis? What’s going to happen with you and Tom?’

  ‘Don’t know really, things aren’t great.’ She shrugged.

  ‘I can tell.’

  Katie leant her head on the bath and let Debra take over bath duties. She watched as Debs washed Andy’s face, scrubbed his back elaborately as he tried to catch the bubbles. She hadn’t wanted to tell Debs everything, ruin her glossy image of married life.

  Katie thought about her day, about the pub, the friends, what she had missed living in Australia. About how some of her closest friends hadn’t even met Rory – and about how she hadn’t even seen Simon, her new brother-in-law. He’d had to go away for a week’s training – was sorry to have missed them, was sorry to have missed Tom.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’

  Katie drew a deep breath. ‘I don’t know, I feel I’ve missed out.’

  ‘On?’

  ‘On everything here, Debs – you know, we don’t sweat the small stuff, and that’s what really matters. If someone you love dies you can do an amazing job of keeping it together at a funeral, at the big event. “Hello, thanks for coming, lovely service, yes we’re all pulling through, sherry’s over there.”’ She gestured with her hands dramatically.

  ‘But the real test is coming home, walking into the room where they were last, finding the seedlings they planted, a scarf left over a chair – a powder compact on the bedside table. Those are the things that bring you to your knees, that have you lying in the foetal position, sobbing into the swirls on the carpet – you know? Like with Dad? The small stuff, Debs, know what I mean?’

  Her sister looked at her. ‘Do you miss the UK?’

  ‘I miss my husband, but I don’t know if I can trust him again.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, tipping water over Rory’s back as he gurgled in the bath.

  ‘One minute I hate him, want him out my life, but then, as I wander around the house, he is everywhere. His cufflinks on the dresser, a pair of shoes in the bottom of the cupboard as you rush out the door, the tacky Christmas tree lights that keep falling out of the sodding airing cupboard as you close the door…’ She tried to laugh. Debra knelt on the floor beside her and put her arm around her.

  ‘There are just constant reminders of the man you love, the man who has betrayed you, the man who has slept with your best friend. How do you get over that? At least death is final; at least you bury someone, end of. Sleeping with someone else? It lingers on, like smoke and cheap perfume in your hair.’

  ‘Only if you let it,’ she replied gently. ‘Give it a chance, Katie. Simon told me his first wife betrayed him and he left her; there was no second chance there. I mean he hated her, yes, but, after a while, he said time did heal. Maybe you’re being given a bit of a second chance with Tom? He wants to be with you, right? But do you want to be with him?’

  Katie leant her head on the side of the bath and sighed. She was truly washed out.

  45

  Katie wandered up the little pathway to Gramps’s house, Rory on her hip, the other two ch
arging ahead, trying to be first to ring the bell, gravel spraying onto the rose borders.

  ‘My turn!’

  ‘Noitsmine!’ yelled James, hurling Andy out of the way and pressing the bell, defiantly.

  It felt like yesterday she’d been there. I would recognise Gramps’s house, the smells, the feeling of it, if I was blindfolded, she thought, ringing the bell. The features were etched into her consciousness like the slight irregularity of Rory’s upper lip. The same pretty two-bed cottage with a gravel path to the wooden front door, painted white; golden stone bird feeder just outside the lounge window where James used to sit and watch the blue tits feeding.

  Tom greeted them at the door. They both stood and stared at each other, then he leant in and kissed her cheek chastely. ‘Hi, Katie, how was Debs? Did you see Lucy?’

  She found herself nodding, saying yes they were both fine. It wasn’t the time to tell him about the English country cottage she had coveted in Sydney, about the glossy brochure in her suitcase, which she’d studied when he’d fallen asleep in the Bangkok hotel. Wasn’t the time to tell him what she’d done.

  As she walked inside to the familiar mothball smell, she noticed subtle changes. She noticed how frayed the tartan carpet had become in the hall and when she went to the fridge to put away the groceries, a rancid smell filtered up her nose. Three tubs of yogurt, months past their use-by date; cheese with mould on it; ham edged with a curious green line. She grabbed the lot and chucked it in the bin. Tom came up behind her. ‘We’re all in the garden; shall I make coffee?’

  ‘No it’s OK – I’ll do it.’ She turned to him and looked up. He was so tall, somehow seemed taller today, his shoulders broader. She reached out and touched the sleeve of his checked shirt with her hand. ‘How’s Gramps?’

  She saw his eye sadden, but he tried to smile. ‘He’s all right. Walking with a stick at the moment; doctors say that it won’t be long till he’s not using it. But… I don’t know.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘He’s lonely, Katie.’ He looked at her and forced a smile.