7
2010
Bronte, Sydney
Liss
‘It’s like falling in love,’ Liss had told Lachy as he was trying to break into her breastfeeding bra. ‘Dani gets me.’
‘I get you,’ he’d said, burrowing into her aching, oozing cleavage.
‘Babe, no. Not the boobs, not now.’
He didn’t get her at all. Not lately.
It had been one month since the mothers’ group revolution and everything had changed.
With a combination of Dani’s hustle and Liss’s own spending power, she was on the books of an expensive therapist.
Tia’s feeding had settled into a more predictable rhythm.
And she had people to talk to.
‘You’re having sex?’ Dani had gasped, when Liss told her about Lachy’s pawing. ‘Already?’
‘I don’t remember a lot of advice my mother gave me,’ Liss had said, rubbing Tia’s head as she fed. ‘But she told me to always be in the mood to fuck your husband.’
‘No offence to your dead mother, but that’s the worst advice I’ve ever heard.’
Baby Tia let out a surprised squawk as Liss’s boob shook with the unfamiliar feeling of spontaneous laughter.
‘My mother had a lot of shit advice. Wonderful mum, terrible taste in men.’
Dani was in Liss’s too-big, sunny kitchen, sitting at the thick wooden island bench on a squishy leather high stool, balancing Lyra on her knee and unenthusiastically picking at the bland bran muffins she’d brought along.
Liss didn’t usually invite people to her house. But this last month Dani had been in and out regularly, with muffins, lattes and well-timed welfare checks.
The house could be intimidating. Six bedrooms. Sandstone. Set in gardens behind Bronte Beach. You could see and hear the ocean from the deck’s swimming pool. Liss knew there were so few old houses this size left in Sydney’s eastern suburbs that living in one marked you as Other. Which was why, she also knew, fancy old money hangs around with fancy old money.
When Dani had pulled up the first time, and lifted Lyra out of the car in her little capsule, Liss had stood at the gate to her driveway, watching Dani take it all in.
Dani had turned and looked directly at Liss, who was wearing an oversized, stained lacy Victorian nightgown and battered sheepskin slippers. Liss knew she hadn’t brushed her hair yet, and couldn’t remember whether she had brushed her teeth.
Dani smiled with half her mouth, a kind smirk. ‘So, you’re rich. Doesn’t seem to be doing you many favours.’
Then she’d seemed to examine Liss more closely. ‘You know, you could have opened your fancy electric gate, and not walked out here looking like that. Your poor neighbours.’
‘Like what?’ Liss had asked, and Dani laughed.
Dani was not intimidated or awed by the house. Just confused.
‘Why haven’t you just got a night nurse, and some sleep?’ Dani asked a little while later in the kitchen.
Liss was padding about in her slippers, trying to make tea. ‘We hired one when I first brought Tia home.’ She turned on the tap, turned it off, shook the kettle, and turned the tap on and off again. ‘I was too embarrassed for her to see what a disaster of a mother I was.’
Dani had stepped in, taken the kettle, filled it, switched it on.
Four weeks later, kettles were less of a challenge and Dani was stuck on Liss’s dead mum’s sex advice.
‘My mum can’t even say the word fuck. And Seb isn’t even a little bit interested in having sex with me until this,’ Dani gestured broadly to her body, ‘pulls itself together.’
‘Everything looks pretty together to me.’
‘He’s worried about . . .’ Dani’s hand travelled lower.
‘Your vagina? Well, he might be waiting a while for that to pull itself together. Tell him not to be so fussy.’
The immediate intimacy Liss felt with Dani and – to a lesser degree – the other members of the renegade mothers’ group was remarkable. She was trying to remember any other time in her life when she’d felt so comfortable with strangers so quickly.
University? Certainly that had been Liss’s first attempt to shake off the social circle she’d been allotted and rewrite her assigned script. All her clever friends went off to do law at ANU and medicine at Melbourne Uni while she opted for a degree in Fine Arts at UNSW, a school her father and grandfather considered beneath her (they meant beneath them). It provided Liss with an escape and she’d made fast friends in clouds of pot smoke in the share houses of Sydney’s inner west. But all those people had fallen away in the years since, the years she’d spent slowly heading back to where she’d started.
Her travelling friends? After uni, Liss had delayed the inevitable by embracing the cliché of a couple of years overseas. Getting as far away from her father as possible was the driving force. Of course, he kept turning up wherever she was. Liss was sunbathing, topless and high, on a beach in Skiathos and he’d stepped off a ferry with his oldest friend’s ex-wife. Liss was pulling pints at a pub in Chelsea and he’d walked in with her middle brother for a summer afternoon Pimms.
‘Come home, darling,’ he would say. ‘A beautiful life is waiting for you.’ So she went to India, where she knew he wouldn’t follow.
But the friends she’d made in those years? The boyfriends and the girlfriends and the drinking partners and the ravers? Facebook, now, mostly. And all of their lives looked like hers these days, which meant she couldn’t talk to them, not really, about what a shock all this was.
These mothers’ group women didn’t know her. They expected nothing of her. And they didn’t know Lachy.
Four weeks of fast, firm friendship, of multiple daily texts and endless cups of tea, yet Dani hadn’t met Lachy and Liss hadn’t met Seb.
They were existing in a women’s world.
When she’d pushed Lachy away from her last night, Liss knew he’d be trying another angle within the hour. He loved her. Adored her. Always, always wanted to fuck her.
It’s not that he was aggressive about it, it’s just he was always so dejected if it didn’t happen. Such a moper. And Liss didn’t like to see him sad. Since the day she met him, his smile was her motivation. It wasn’t always easy to get, because he was hard on himself, driven, disciplined, and that came with its pressures and stresses. So a moment of joy, of unselfconscious release, was rare. And for Lachy, like lots of men, Liss imagined, that moment came in bed.
Before she could introduce Lachy to Dani she would need to explain him a bit. He could be the kind of man you could take the wrong way. And although she’d only known Dani for a month there were two things Liss knew about her. She did not like dickheads. And Liss wanted her approval.
She had heard about Dani’s husband, Seb. He was French. He and Dani had met in New York. Dani said that he was pretty much the opposite of any man she’d imagined herself being with – impulsive and creative and spontaneous, whereas she had never met a spreadsheet she didn’t want to optimise. Dani handled things, quickly and capably. Liss got the feeling that their relationship was complicated, trying to settle into Sydney and parenthood at the same time. But Dani was not an oversharer. Liss absolutely was.
‘Before you meet Lachy,’ she started.
‘I’m meeting Lachy?’
‘Of course you are, we’re friends now. And I’ll be meeting Seb. And we’ll all go away together one day for one of those couple weekends new friends like to do to see if they’re compatible.’
‘We will?’
‘It’s inevitable, Dani, don’t fight it. Anyway. Before you meet him, I need to prepare you.’
Dani was making faces at beautiful little Lyra, who was having her ‘stimulation’ half hour, or whatever the latest stop on Dani’s increasingly complicated schedule was. ‘Does he have a thumb for a nose?’
‘That’s a strange place to go to.’
‘Something my mother would say. Go on.’
‘He can be a lot.’
‘How?’
‘He’s handsome,’ Liss started.
Dani laughed. ‘Come on, I can handle handsome. Do you think I’m going to try to hit on him? I promise, I do not have the energy or the will for that.’
‘And he’s confident. He talks a lot at first . . .’
‘I feel like you’re speaking in code.’
‘I just want you to know that if he comes off like a bit of a prick, he’s not. He would never do anything to hurt anyone.’
Dani held Lyra up to her face and kissed her nose. ‘This is beginning to sound scary. Is he scary?’
‘No!’
‘Anyway, I don’t have to meet him. We can stay in our bubble.’
‘I don’t want to,’ Liss said. ‘I told you, I’m in love.’
Dani smiled in a way that made Liss feel warm. ‘You know how you said Lachy’s a lot? You’re quite the generous serving yourself.’
‘You saved me.’
‘I did not.’
‘And so whether you like it or not, we’re bonded now.’
Dani was clearly not comfortable with all this naked emotion because she stood up and jiggled the baby, changed tack. ‘Tell me how you and Lachy met. I like those stories.’
Liss lay Tia on the kitchen island – the one Lachy wanted to get redone in Italian marble – and windmilled her little legs as she told Dani the story of how she’d only just returned from a few years travelling overseas when she was summoned to her eldest brother’s birthday party.
It was the kind of party her sister-in-law insisted on calling a barbecue. Her brother’s harbourside new-build was full of caterers, and waiters bringing around mouthfuls of things on Chinese soup spoons, and a man in a bow tie mixing cocktails in the corner. Not a barbecue, in Liss’s opinion.
‘Piper loves money.’
Dani raised her eyebrows. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’
‘I don’t,’ Liss said, and caught Dani swallowing a splutter.
‘You’re thinking it must be easy to pretend you don’t care about money when you’ve got it, but it’s more complicated than that. There are rich people who love money, who dedicate their life to keeping it close and getting more of it, and making sure everyone knows they have plenty of it.’
‘Your father?’
Liss nodded. ‘And there are almost-rich people who are always chasing an invisible number, some mythical amount that will make them safe. Like Lachy. His family was . . . he’s driven by wanting to be a different kind of rich. I know that was part of his attraction to me.’
‘Brutal.’
‘No.’ Liss scooped Tia towards her and began unfixing her bra. ‘It’s just true.’
Dani still looked amused. ‘Well, I’m not rich, but I’m chasing that invisible number, too.’
‘Most people are.’
‘And you?’
‘I don’t care about it at all.’
Tia feeding was the most satisfying feeling Liss had ever experienced. Now that it was working, it was better than any drug. Maybe it was acting as a truth serum, because she could see that the longer she talked about this, the more irritated Dani looked. And she didn’t want to irritate Dani.
‘Come on. All this? The view, the house, the right pram? You’d give it all up?’
Liss decided she’d gone far enough. ‘I don’t care about money, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate what it’s done for me. Or that I am an idiot.’
Dani laughed. ‘So, Lachy? And the fancy barbecue?’
Piper’s party had been fairy lights in trees and a string quartet playing Metallica. Liss’s overwhelming memory of walking into that evening was of feeling displaced. After the time she’d spent travelling in India, everything back home seemed wasteful, frivolous, gross. Her dad, her brother, Piper and the ugly new house, all of it repulsed her. She didn’t fit here. She didn’t fit in stinking, throbbing, exhilarating India either. There she’d felt slight, faded, sketched, like an impression of a person rather than the full, bold-colour version. Thing was, she felt like that here, too.
She was by the cocktail cart, avoiding her father. She was about to take the first glug of her third lychee martini when a man stepped up to her.
‘Who are you hiding from?’
Liss knew she didn’t look like the other girls at the party that night. She was wearing a long, loose dress from a market in Goa, the colour of overripe peaches. Leather sandals wound around her big toe and snaked up her ankle. She was slight from the inevitable Indian flu and her hair was untrimmed and frizzy. The other women, in their little cocktail dresses and tasteful diamond-stud earrings, blended in. Liss stuck out. Was that why Lachy had noticed her?
He must have realised that she was only there out of obligation.
‘I’m hiding from my dad,’ she’d said, with a freeing lurch of honesty.
The man was kind of beautiful. Tall and wide-shouldered with a direct gaze. But she had seen enough, in the few years she’d been out in the world, of handsome men who knew their power.
‘Would you like me to tell your father to fuck off?’
‘I wouldn’t. He’s paying for the drinks.’
Was that the moment? Maybe. But what Liss could still conjure, as she sat at her kitchen island, was how she’d felt when he leaned in towards her, his mouth so close to her ear his lips brushed her hair as he said, ‘I’ll still do it. Is it him?’ He turned his head, pointed. His hands, she noticed, were big and wide, but clean and soft.
Liss’s father wasn’t hard to pick from the crowd. Everything about him said ‘holding court’. This wasn’t technically his party, or his house, but his entire demeanour said that none of this would be happening without him. The way he threw his head back and laughed one notch louder than anyone else. The way he put a hand out, casually dangling an emptying glass, knowing that it would be plucked away and swapped for a frothy replacement within seconds. Even in his mid-sixties, Michael Gresky had a glow about him.
‘Yes,’ Liss said, her lychee martini stopped at her lips, her eyes now looking up at this man. ‘That’s him.’
Lachy turned abruptly and walked away. Down the three stone steps to the pool deck, along the edge of the glowing turquoise oval lit from below. Right up to where Liss’s father was talking to three of Piper’s most attractive friends, all women less than half his age.
Liss watched Lachy stop, wait for the couple of seconds it took for her father to register his arrival. This tall man smiled a glorious smile and then leaned to her father’s ear and spoke. Liss actually gasped as she watched her father’s face change. His expression shifting from polite curiosity to disbelief to anger. His lips moved, most likely in exclamation, but the younger man was already on his way back to Liss. Her father’s eyes settled on his back. And then moved to Liss.
The stranger was smiling, walking ever so slightly faster than he had on his way there.
When he reached her, Liss knew, she was going to put her sickly drink down, and he was going to grab her arm, careful but firm, and she was going to be swept along with him.
‘We’d better go,’ he said, still smiling. ‘I just told your dad to fuck off, as discussed.’
‘As discussed!’ Liss allowed herself to be steered towards the house, towards the front entrance and the leafy, ink-dark street, almost giggling with fizzy excitement as she pictured the look on her father’s face.
They stopped on the street. It was late summer, the insects were a cheering chorus, the air was sweet and warm.
‘I’m Lachlan,’ he said. ‘Lachy.’
‘I’m Liss,’ she said. ‘Alyssia.’
‘What do you want to do now?’ Lachy asked. This big man, in a suit. She had never before gone anywhere with a man in a suit. She could feel the last traces of India, of the version of herself caught in the threads of this peachy market dress, floating off and up into the evening like fireflies.
‘I’d like to go for a walk,’ she said, ‘by the water.’
The harbour beside them lapped at still, quiet beaches that ran along the front gardens of huge homes, lit up like shopping malls against the navy sky.
The big man surprised her by putting out one of his hefty paws, as if to shake on it. ‘Can I hold your hand?’
‘It’s cheesy, but I knew my next adventure was him,’ Liss told Dani, raising Tia to her shoulder and patting her tiny back.
‘No shit,’ said Dani, her finger hooked in Lyra’s mouth, her body rocking back and forward. ‘That’s a great story.’ She bent to strap Lyra into the capsule. ‘Okay, I’ll meet the guy. Who wouldn’t?’