9
2011
Centennial Park, Sydney
Liss
On the morning of the babies’ first birthday party, stirred up by nostalgia and awe at how one thing led to another, Liss thought about how the decision to irritate your father by leaving a party with a confident man could lead you to packing sugar-free muffins and watermelon hunks into Tupperware containers to share with a group of people you hadn’t even known a year ago.
‘I didn’t really tell your father to get fucked,’ Lachy had said all those years ago, not long after they’d left the party. They had been lying on the sand in their underwear, the harbour licking at the shoreline, the lights of the surrounding mansions streaking the black water with yellow ribbons. They were wet, lightly panting.
‘I didn’t think so,’ Liss had said, rolling over to look at him.
She could tell he’d been nervous when she’d suggested a night swim, pulled off her dress and run into the water. She imagined he’d been thinking about the opening scene of Jaws as he hopped around the sand on one foot, trying to pull off his trousers as she stroked away.
Liss had called to him, as he stayed kick-kicking in the shallows, and she was out, beyond the boats bobbing in the front garden of their owners – the world’s most beautiful harbour. Liss liked it where the water was black and cool. Before her babies she was reckless like that, believing that if something came for her when she was doing what she loved, so be it. Her mother had passed down her impeccable freestyle stroke to Liss as if it were a family heirloom. Hours in their pool, up and down, up and down. ‘We’re water people,’ she’d said. ‘You don’t want to be a splash-about, Alyssia.’
But he hadn’t swum out to her, even though she could sense he wanted to. He’d stayed where his toes grazed the seaweedy floor and called for her to come back to him. A splash-about, then. She’d powered back into the shallows, laughing as she kissed him with a mouth full of salt.
‘So what did you say to Dad?’ she asked, rolling towards him, eyes narrowed, her body half-caked in crushed shells.
‘I told him I was going to marry his fucking beautiful daughter,’ Lachy said.
Liss had laughed. And kissed him again.
Bedraggled, crusty and dizzy with almost-sex, they’d carried their shoes back towards the glass box he rented in the city, blackening their soles on the quietly steaming streets.
Her peach dress had clung to her shoulders under her damp hair. She shivered as a breeze whipped along the pavement, cold at the dawn’s sharp edge. His suit jacket hung on his arm and for a moment she was sure he would drape it around her shoulders. But he didn’t.
‘So,’ she asked. ‘Who are you?’
He knew her brother from school, he said. Tom was a year ahead, but they’d played rugby together.
‘I didn’t really belong there,’ he told her. ‘Not like your brothers.’ He had neither the stellar grades nor a long history of old boys to ease his passage.
‘Tom’s a good guy. And meeting people like your family is why my mother wanted me and my brother at that school. It was my duty to make friends with him, and his friends. Still is.’
Liss had tried to remember his name coming out of the mouths of her brothers. Tried to remember his face from the blur of boys at formals and parties and presentations. She couldn’t. Not that she’d ever paid much attention.
‘School was a long time ago,’ she said.
He stopped outside a smoked glass door in an old sandstone wall. ‘Sometimes it feels like we’re all still there.’
‘It doesn’t have to be like that. You can opt out.’
Liss hadn’t understood the hard edge to Lachy’s laugh at the time. ‘You can?’
He swiped a card and ushered her through the door into his building. Behind the historic facade was a gleaming modernist block overlooking The Rocks, four rooms with glass walls. Everything sharp and shiny. Everything immaculate.
‘Do you really live here?’ She trailed her finger along the gleaming stainless steel kitchen bench. ‘Like, sleep here, eat here?’
‘Yes.’ He’d stood in the middle of that kitchen, his white shirt damp and unbuttoned, his shoes in his hand. He looked like an action figure, placed on a set. He looked proud and embarrassed at the same time. It made her want to kiss him again.
‘Can I have a shower? I’m freezing.’
The light-headedness of lychee martinis and no sleep was settling on her and she needed to cleanse.
He showed her the bathroom – more sharp lines, more dark gleam – with the confidence of a man who knew it would be spotless. He’d opened three invisible cupboards along the corridor until he found towels – deep, soft, dove grey – then turned on the water for her, and left.
What she remembered most about that morning was that when she’d come out of that bathroom, freshened and wrapped in a cloud of towels, Lachy had been asleep. Completely naked, curled onto his side on the inevitably black sheets – his mouth open, his damp hair stuck to his forehead, his breath raspy as it escaped his slightly too-full lips. He looked so vulnerable, like she could have slipped a knife into his belly.
She dropped the towels right there on the floor and curled up behind him, her body following his, one arm along his back, the other around his waist. And she fell asleep, too.
Now here they were, Liss introducing Lachy to the women who’d got her through this first year of Tia, of parenthood, of her new reality, her next life.
‘Be nice,’ she hissed to him as Juno raised her hand to wave them in.
‘I am nice,’ he replied, and Liss laughed.
‘You can be a bit intimidating,’ she said, knowing he liked to hear it.
Aiden. Jacob. Sebastian. The men’s names were thrown at Lachy in a flurry of pointing and grinning and hand-shaking. Liss knew he would be pleased that none of them were taller than him. She knew he would definitely comment, later, on Seb’s open-toed sandals. She knew he would, at some point today, ruffle Aiden’s sandy-blond, floppy hair.
Jacob was new. He was Sadie’s boyfriend, quiet, confident and some kind of ‘tech’ guy. Lachy had asked Liss, on the way to the park, if Jacob was rich. ‘It’s so crass to ask that,’ she’d told him, and he’d looked puzzled.
‘It’s just a fact,’ he said. ‘Like whether he has brown hair.’
‘It isn’t.’
‘It’s 2011. Everyone’s selling their shiny little tech start-ups for silly money and coming to us about it. I just need to know if he’s that guy.’
‘You don’t need to know that. It shouldn’t matter.’ But she knew it did. Of course it did.
Liss had hugged all the women, and they’d settled in a loose protective circle around the one-year-olds, watching them stagger and bounce and plop down on their bottoms, exclaiming all the time how quickly time had flown.
Six years ago she’d woken to Lachy kissing the back of her neck, her hair twisted in his fist. What she could remember so clearly, watching him now nod and attempt small talk with these new, unfamiliar men, was that she’d involuntarily gasped a porno kind of gasp as he’d pushed his fingers inside her and then they were lost. There are a few fucks you would always remember, and this was theirs.
It changed everything, as sex sometimes can.
‘My apartment,’ he’d said, later that day, ‘is completely wrong, now I’ve seen you in it.’
And she’d replayed the image of the action figure in the kitchen.
A boy playing house.
See me here, pulling off my tie and lying on my leather couch before my multi-storey entertainment system.
See me shaving with my edgy cut-throat razor in one of the bathroom’s fifteen mirrors.
See the maid moving around these rooms when I’m gone, restocking towels, wiping down the surfaces smeared with the traces of sticky white substances from the countless nights I came home, not alone, from the bar with the boys I have to beat at work every day.
See me winning. See me, on my black sheets, in my bed, with this woman, that woman.
Liss laughed. ‘It’s wrong because I’m in it?’
‘You don’t fit here. And so neither do I.’
Within a month Lachy had been trying on a new set. Renting a floor in an elegant art deco block at North Bondi. Learning to ocean swim. His sheets were warm white. His benchtops were marble. He was calling Liss every day, telling her he was tired of ‘all that’, which she took to mean not the fishbowl home in the skyline, but what came with it. A certain crowd. The constant need to prove yourself. It was time, he said.
‘To one year of fatherhood,’ he was saying now to the birthday party group, raising his Italian beer. ‘We all survived.’
Sadie’s tech guy looked away. ‘Sorry, mate,’ Lachy said, ‘do you have kids of your own?’
‘The world doesn’t need any more babies.’ Jacob clearly did not do small talk.
‘The future of mankind doesn’t depend on it?’ Lachy asked.
Jacob shook his head but didn’t respond. Dani’s Sebastian, in his almost comically French accent, did. ‘Funny none of us think we’re the problem,’ he said, ‘when we’re buying the little hats and changing the nappies and planning our legacies.’
‘Change a lot of nappies, do you?’ Lachy asked. He was play-acting Alpha Idiot again.
‘My fair share.’
‘I bet you do.’
Liss forced herself to stop listening and focus on Tia, who was sitting between her legs, playing with the unlit Number One candles they were about to push into the tops of the healthy muffins.
As the fathers stood a few lengths away, talking, the children’s chubby hands were reaching for everything, always, and the mothers were in constant motion, pushing them away, offering distractions, moving things out of reach.
She looked around the circle.
There was bubbly wine that definitely wasn’t champagne and there were cupcakes that allegedly had no sugar in them and there were little Vegemite sandwiches in the shape of stars.
How had they all come to know what one-year-olds would want to eat and what wouldn’t kill them? The Liss who had walked out of her brother’s party that night with Lachy could barely turn on the water in an unfamiliar shower.
The Liss who’d walked into that childhood centre with her baby and a panic attack could hardly leave the house.
And now here she was, puncturing a grape with her teeth and ripping it in half before she gave it to Tia.
She’d evolved.
All these women had been forced to become new, slightly altered versions of themselves.
Looking at the men, Liss felt a passing pang of pity.
Look at them, still grunting at each other.
‘Come over,’ she called to Lachy.
‘It’s time for cake.’
He looked relieved, and so did the other men, to be offered a reprieve from trying to connect. He crouched beside her, resting on his heels. ‘You know, babe,’ he said, as quietly as he could manage, ‘we have enough friends.’
‘These are Tia’s friends,’ she hissed back, gesturing at the kids rolling about on the grass.
‘One-year-olds don’t have friends.’
‘You’d be surprised. Tia loves Lyra but always pushes James in the face.’ She kept smiling.
‘James is probably a prick.’
‘He’s one.’
‘We’re born that way.’
Liss had to swallow a laugh. Dani was bending over to light the muffin candles, shielding the flame from the breeze. Sadie started up the birthday singing and, right on cue, all the children started to wail. Tia threw herself onto Liss with force, her chubby little arms whacking her brow as they looped around her neck.
‘Toddlers love a party, am I right?’ Lachy was just loud enough for Liss to hear under her singing.
No-one was singing louder than Jacob, who was standing next to Sadie with his arm around her waist as Trick, the little boy they’d all once doubted even existed, kicked him repeatedly in the shin, often falling over in the process.
‘I have something to tell you,’ Liss said to Lachy, as the singing and the crying subsided, and the children’s mouths filled with sugarless cake and strawberries.
‘That I’m handsome, and charming, and when you look around at these other guys, you’re so glad you chose me?’
‘You’re in a good mood, considering you didn’t want to come.’
‘I can handle a few new people, Liss.’
‘I keep thinking about when we met. Ever since I told Dani the story.’
Liss saw Lachy glance up at Dani. She was holding Lyra as Sebastian fed her little pieces of strawberry. Lyra was squishing the juicy red mess in her little fists, and Dani was twisting, giggling, to try to avoid her baby rubbing them all down her neat navy sundress with its halter-neck. She looked happy, Liss thought. Good.
‘You tell Dani everything?’ Lachy asked, his eyebrows raised.
Yes. ‘Not everything. No-one’s interested in the dirty bits.’
‘I am, tell me those again.’ Lachy was smiling.
‘I have something else to tell you.’
Juno and Emily were dancing with Bob. Ginger was badgering Sadie and Jacob for details of where they’d met as Aiden loaded James into his stroller, all fistfuls of cake and watermelon.
Incredible. How one thing led to another. And another. She leaned in close to Lachy’s ear and whispered, ‘I’m pregnant,’ a giggle barely contained in her voice.
He pulled back, eyes comically wide. ‘You’re pregnant?’
‘Shush.’ She pushed his shoulder with a flat hand, a tight little smile.
But it was too late. Lachy, who had never been able to resist an audience, whooped. ‘Everyone!’
‘No.’ But Liss was too giddy to rein her husband in.
Heads turned, shushes were whispered, toddlers were jiggled. Liss buried her face in her hands, then pulled Tia closer to her, stroking her hair. Tummy full of happy bubbles.
‘Liss’s pregnant!’ Lachy yelled.
Dani’s eyes were wide as Lyra splatted a red hand on the pristine blue linen. ‘What?’
There were whoops of delight or disbelief.
‘But, Liss! We were meant to do that together!’ Dani was half-joking, half not.
Seb’s head snapped towards his wife. ‘You were?’
‘You’re going to be a big sister, Tia,’ Liss told her bewildered daughter, whose face crumpled.
Lachy leaned past his daughter to kiss Liss on the lips, then jumped to his feet and raised his bottle.
‘I guess that means we won!’ he yelled. ‘First to number two!’