Chapter Thirty-Two
Dianne is not wearing one of her tennis shirts today: instead, she wears a white singlet that emphasises how small-boned she is, how delicate her wrists are, the fine line of a scar on her right shoulder.
‘I should have known what was happening from the very start,’ she says slowly. ‘It’s totally my fault. I put the children through it all.’
‘They don’t know it all, though, do they? Even now. You shielded them,’ Rose says.
Dianne half-nods. ‘I shielded them as much as I could but it wasn’t enough, Rose. That kills me. I hate myself for that and I still can’t see where they’re damaged but they must be, right?’
‘Children just need one good parent,’ Rose reminds her.
Dianne nods. For the first time on the retreat, she seems to lose her aura of control. It slips out almost physically.
Rose can see Dianne’s shoulders drop, her hands loosen.
‘I wrote it down because I didn’t think anyone could understand truly if they haven’t gone through this.’
‘Try me,’ says Rose evenly. ‘Say what is inside, tell me.’
Dianne fiddles with her watch.
She doesn’t wear jewellery, Rose realised from day one. No wedding ring, no bracelet, no golden spoils of a long marriage.
‘I don’t like talking about it,’ Dianne says.
‘Nobody does at first,’ Rose says, her voice soft.
Dianne does some more watch-fiddling. Then she gets up abruptly and Rose is sure she’s going to leave but, instead, Dianne goes to the drinks station and pours herself a glass of Adriana’s mint-and-lemon-flavoured sparkling water.
She sits down slowly, drinks her water and then slumps back into her chair.
‘I don’t want anybody to feel sorry for me,’ Dianne says. ‘I’m not a victim.’
‘The word “victim” gets overused,’ Rose comments gently. ‘People can be badly hurt by their life experiences or by another person’s behaviour. The idea of victimhood is that someone wallows in the pain caused by these things and, in that context, it’s both an unfair and unhelpful label.
‘To reframe it, we can be victims of circumstances and we are allowed to both feel that pain and express it without people assuming we like being victims.’
Dianne nods.
She exhales slowly.
Rose sees her make the decision to speak.
The island retreat has worked its magic.
‘I’m trying to figure it out,’ she says, still hesitant. ‘I’ve talked to myself about this for a long time but I’ve never said it out loud. To other people. In my head, yes. But my kids don’t know it.’
‘They were worried about your behaviour; that’s why you’re here,’ Rose said.
‘I never wanted them to grow up the way I did,’ Dianne says softly and, for the first time, Rose feels as if this gently spoken woman is the real Dianne Wilkins.
The hard and angry person is merely a protective wall.
‘How did you grow up?’ she asks.
Dianne takes a deep breath.
‘I thought we were normal,’ she begins. ‘We were my mum, my dad, my younger brother, Kev, and me. Both my grandmothers lived with us. It was a lot for my mother to take on. It made her bitter …’
Dianne’s eyes begin to lose focus on Rose.
She’s in the past.
Her mother had adored Geoff.
‘He’s nice, isn’t he?’ she’d said to Dianne approvingly when Geoff had gone to the loo.
For a millisecond, Dianne had felt that she’d done something right, which was not a feeling she was familiar with.
‘Yes,’ she’d breathed. ‘He is.’
‘Don’t screw it up the way you normally do,’ her mother had gone on, reaching out for her cigarettes.
She smoked Winfields, two packs a day when she was in good form, three packs on bad days.
She and Dianne looked a lot alike but Dianne was small and neat, a bundle of nervous energy, while her mother was taller, thin like a bicycle frame, her face caved in from bitterness and inhaling.
‘Tina.’ Geoff had walked into the room exuding masculinity and good humour. ‘I love the way you’ve decorated the place. There’s a sense of heritage here, you know?’
Dianne has often replayed this in her head because only the most fantastical of liars could say such a thing and be believed.
Her family home was a four-bed brick house with a tacked-on wooden verandah around half of the house where her mother liked to sit, smoke, read her magazines and watch what the neighbours were up to.
In place of an actual hobby, she had judgy watching of everyone else.
She’d learned it from Ida and Antoinette, the two women who’d ruled the house for so long. Now they were dead, Tina could judge all by herself.
Dianne had watched her mother preen in front of Geoff.
‘I do my best, Geoff, love,’ her mother had said, waving the skeletal hand with the cigarette in it, not noticing ash landing on the wooden verandah floor. The floor was used to it.
‘You’ve certainly done your best with your darling daughter, who, I can now say, has agreed to be my wife.’
Dianne had beamed, taken Geoff’s hand and watched him take her mother’s free one.
She should have run.
But she didn’t.
She couldn’t forgive herself for not knowing better. Because how could anybody have been that stupid?
Losing the baby made everything worse. Geoff blamed her for it and she, already broken, began to blame herself too.
When she finally gave birth to Lauren, she suffered from what she knows now was post-natal depression. But it was a long time ago and no cavalry came to help her.
The garden and verandah of Geoff and Dianne’s house is thronged with the couple’s friends and family.
There is Geoff’s sister, Sal, from Perth, who’s flown over with her three kids, now tearing around the garden playing loud games of tag with the other small children brought to the Wilkins’ house.
Sal is nose to nose with Dianne’s mother, Tina, who is wearing her Sunday best in honour of the church service.
This means a white hat with a violet feather, her pale-purple skirt suit and high-heeled shoes that are now plugged into the hopeless lawn at the back of the house.
The outfit is accessorised with two packets of ciggies, and a swipe of Revlon’s Foxy Brown lipstick that Tina reapplies after every smoke.
Dianne can relax because both her mother and husband are happy.
Geoff has given up his position in front of the barbie to his best friend, Ralph, and is now leaning against the pale-green verandah that Dianne had slowly painted while she was pregnant.
He has a beer in one hand and beneath him is a plastic container filled with ice and bottles of beer.
Dianne is pleased that everyone is there to help them celebrate but she is so tired.
The first six weeks of a baby are supposed to be the hardest but Lauren is four months now, and she still sleeps only in two-hour segments, leaving Dianne exhausted and on the verge of insanity.
She still dreams of the other baby, the one who died.
The one with the perfect little face who never breathed a breath.
‘You’re coddling that baby,’ her mother says. ‘Babies need to know who’s in charge.’
Dianne isn’t sure how babies find out they are not in charge. The only option would be to leave Lauren to cry herself sick.
‘Here she is, the best baby in the world!’ Geoff holds out his arms to Dianne to take Lauren, clad in her fluffy white christening robe.
Dianne smiles weakly as she hands the baby over. Lauren is the best baby in the world but she hates being passed from person to person. Her little face is red and Dianne knows she is ready to roar. But she can do nothing.
Geoff wants the world to look at his new child, proof that he is fertile, very male, after the tragedy of the first one, the one he never speaks about.
Tina comes over, ciggie still in the corner of her mouth.
‘Come to your nana,’ Tina says.
Geoff hands her over, Lauren stiffens, arches her back and begins to scream.
Her child’s scream is like a dog whistle for Dianne, one only she is programmed to react to. It hits her ears, goes straight into her central nervous system, and her adrenaline spikes.
‘Little pet needs her daddy,’ says Geoff, all charm and smiles for the audience.
In his arms, Lauren screams even more.
Someone laughs. ‘Give her a beer, Geoff, then she’ll be happy!’
‘Shut up, Mac,’ hisses a woman. ‘She’s a baby.’
Dianne moves closer to her husband, mask fully on.
‘I think she’s hungry, darling,’ she says loudly. ‘You know what they’re like when they’re hungry.’
Geoff’s eyes are like flint as he hands the baby over.
‘He made me suffer for that,’ she says flatly to Rose. ‘The baby had shown him up in public. I had shown him up. I got no grocery money for a week afterwards. I had to use cloth nappies and, I can tell you, those things are a bitch to clean. He complained about the smell, too.’
‘But he’d made you use them,’ said Rose.
‘Yeah,’ agrees Dianne, ‘but I’d upset him and I had to pay.’
‘Tell me how you met.’
‘I met Geoff when I was a kid. Eighteen. I had no idea what I wanted in life, no idea that people were supposed to treat me with kindness or respect. My mother loved Geoff. Do you know why?’ Dianne asks.
‘Because he treated you with no respect in front of her and she liked it,’ says Rose gently.
‘Got it in one,’ Dianne says bitterly. ‘My mother loved him, couldn’t wait for the wedding, the kids. Geoff was a golden boy.’
‘From your diary it sounds as if your mother had some narcissistic tendencies, so she might have felt envious of you, jealous even …?’
Dianne nods again.
‘You’re on the money, Rose. I learned how to walk on eggshells as a kid in case anything I did upset my mother. She wasn’t interested in anybody’s problems – just her own. She hated her own mother, hated my father’s mother too.
‘If you’re scared of upsetting your parents when you’re a kid, then that’s what you consider is normal.’
Dianne looks at Rose square in the face.