Chapter 4
Chapter Four
I ’m clearly having one of the worst days of my life, but being outside in the soft winter evening makes me feel a tad better.
The stars are out. The sky is a black velvet. The storm has come and gone and everything is damp. The bushes are bristling with yellow wattle, which smells like honey. I can hear the marine roar from the traffic and bus brakes squealing, but if I concentrate, far off I can just hear the soft cackle of a kookaburra, which means it’s going to rain again.
As I step onto the Harbour Bridge, the dazzling waters below, black and gold, all the lights reflecting the smooth curves of the Opera House, I look at the moon, glowing and full, and decide that, whatever happened today, it was just a day – a horrible day – and tomorrow I’ll wake up feeling better.
I shove my earbuds in and flick through playlists curated by emotion: happy; going out; infinite Sadness… I choose Feather Light, and Taylor Swift streams into my ears.
By habit I check my inbox while I wait at the next traffic lights in Kirribilli. Tony has emailed to say, You left early, wanted to congratulate you on the new role.
I flip him the bird – literally and figuratively – but write back, Thanks, Tony, it’s a great opportunity.
One of our new writers, Tae Ng, has emailed, I’m so excited about your suggested edits, but I have complete writer’s block! Can you call and help?
Not tonight, pal.
Adam has emailed too. Hey babe, how did it go? Tell me all the details tomorrow, remember I’m out with the old work gang tonight, if you want to come along we’re at The Ivy. I’ll try not to get to yours too late.
The wind picks up and starts to lash at my face, making me shiver. I scroll through my inbox, stopping abruptly on one name.
Patricia Evans. My mother.
It’s an email, or rather what appears to be an eight-paragraph thesis from the middle of my parents’ campervan trip, with the subject: Flights. Flights? To where?
For the last few months, my mum has been sending these long emails that I don’t even bother reading because her anxiety turns my anxiety up and I always feel compelled to help. Eventually, I had the IT guys do something sneaky and move anything from my family straight into a Read Later file, but this one must have got through. Exhausted, I delete it.
I walk another few blocks, feeling the cold Sydney air, which makes my cheeks flush. At the next set of lights, my thumb hovers over the trash folder, curiosity creeping up on me. But then I put my phone back in my bag and try not to think about my mum’s email.
In fact, I try not to think about my family at all, especially about the time when it all started to go wrong.
That time in our family history is a bit like the Dark Ages, better not spoken about. Ever. Let’s just say, it wasn’t a good time for seven-year-old me, and worse for my mum, who hit the peak of her anxiety and became very close friends with Pinot Grigio and the psychic hotline.
I still remember those long, cold English winter nights, me hugging Mr Bunnikins in bed wondering when Daddy would be coming home, and Mum curled up at the end of the hallway, listening to the psychics tell her Dad would return and be very sorry for doing such a bad thing.
At the time I still didn’t know what very bad thing Dad had done. But then a few months later, there was Dad at the front door. Behind him was a young woman holding a small, pink wriggling baby who cried really loudly all the time, and I knew immediately that shrieking thing was the bad thing.
Dad babbled an apology, saying over and over he had made a very big mistake (so psychics can get it right), and then confessed to my mum that he’d lost his job, and he and Marla had nowhere else to go. So Dad, Marla, Mum, me and crying Lulu became a strange family co-habiting in our home for the next seven years, with Dad in the basement and Marla and Lulu in the spare room.
My mother, instead of icing out Lulu (which would have been normal behaviour), decided instead to show Marla exactly who was Mummy . My mother, previously of 3am psychic hotline addiction, suddenly became Mum-Extraordinaire (read: driven by anxiety). She was up at 5am every day. She wore rollers in her hair and then spent a good hour styling herself into a perfect imitation of a Stepford housewife. She wore actual lipstick – coral coloured – and she reapplied it every hour. She bought an apron. An actual 1950s frilly pink apron that she wore around the house at all times, as if we were always catching her just about to bake a plate of hot chocolate chip cookies.
And there were cookies, all types, on the bench for Lulu and me each afternoon – oatmeal, and ginger snap and choc chip. There were superb school lunches, with an array of sandwiches she cut into shapes: frogs and ants and cows. We had fresh fruit salad every morning. Gone were the days of having a plain old ham sandwich on hard bread in a brown paper bag; now I had fresh panini rolls with sliced tomato, pastrami and mayo, fresh orange juice, a tub of chocolate yoghurt, and a bag of potato crisps.
Mum, still in her pink apron, frenetically did the laundry and most of the house cleaning before Marla even struggled to get up. Mum suddenly became whiz of everything; there was nothing too big or too small. She bought Lulu all kinds of presents that Marla couldn’t, and took her anywhere she wanted to go. Marla decided the only way to deal with this was to shower Lulu in the only thing she could afford: affection. So if Lulu wasn’t receiving presents from my mother, she was being covered in hugs and kisses from Marla, and I hated that she was still small enough to sit on Dad’s knee each night while he read the paper or his Michael Frayn.
Marla soon got bored with Dad (shocker), and Dad and Mum patched up the crisis, got back together, bought a campervan, and are now travelling around Europe as if it was their second honeymoon.
It’s a time my mum still refers to as ‘The Mid-Life Crisis’, which is confusing because my mum also refers to Marla as ‘The Mid-Life Crisis’, even now. To Marla’s face. And I almost feel bad for Marla, who is now well into her fifties, on her fourth husband, orange from self-tan and enjoying a lot of Botox, and still being referred to as a crisis. If someone referred to me as a crisis (like, to my face) it would send me into the corner weeping and requiring a thousand years of therapy. However, cheers to Marla and her healthy self-worth, because it seems to have done nothing to dint her self-esteem.
We’re not one of those families that truthfully share feelings or work through stuff. We’re British, very stiff upper lip and let’s just talk about the weather, and give people directions for the A1, even if they didn’t ask. We gladly sweep everything else under the rug and just drink a lot instead.
Since I left fifteen years ago, I’ve flown back to the UK for an obligatory Christmas visit every three years, but it’s always a strained affair.
I’d stand on the driveway, arming myself with affirmations and hope. This time will be different, I am a fully formed adult, for goodness’ sake . I will let nothing irk me. Nothing will get me down!!
Like clockwork, my mum would be already tipsy, and that means one thing: memories. Bang on ten minutes after arriving, ashen-faced and glum, she would pull me aside in the kitchen and whisper, ‘He still hasn’t said he loves me. Not really. After … you know.’ Bollocks. So we’d be already talking about the thing we weren’t meant to be talking about.
Then she’d say, ‘Does my right eye look bigger than the left? More bulge? Graves’ disease is a big issue. Too many thyroid hormones.’
‘Mum, you don’t have Graves’ disease,’ I’d say, even though I’ve got no idea what that is.
Then Dad would come into the kitchen. ‘Hello, love, you look good. Down under treating you well?’ I’d nod, and he’d pull me aside later and say, ‘Your mum seems a bit cranky, doesn’t she?’ And there it is, that awful feeling of being put in the middle of it all.
I’ve seen enough pseudo psychology YouTube clips to know not to get involved. And I know I shouldn’t try to fix it because it isn’t my fault, but if I didn’t this would go on all day. So I’d do my best to appease the situation, going between them, telling Mum, ‘Dad just said you look lovely.’
‘Did he?’ She’d look confused but would start glowing a bit. And then to Dad, ‘Mum said it was the oven she was cranky with; she thinks you’re a real help today.’ And Dad’s chest would puff up as he ran off to help set the table.
I would refill my glass of Sauv Blanc, and tell myself, only four more hours , then I’d be back in my hotel room, in a bathrobe, eating an overpriced Kit-Kat from the mini bar. Thank God . But those four hours stretched like four years because it wasn’t just my parents making me go slowly insane – it was also Lulu.
Lulu, my half-sister, curled up on the couch like she is always about to be photographed for a British Vogue cover and appears bored by any topic that isn’t about her. No matter what I wear I always feel dumpy in comparison.
Lulu is a petite, slim thing. Nothing sags. Nothing is puffy. She is eternally youthful with cherub lips, as if a thousand bees have stung them. Anyone who gets collagen lip-plumping injections is insanely jealous when they meet her. The thing about Lulu is that she has a way about her that makes her look sweet, even when she’s pointing out your flaws, which is a favourite pastime. With her stunning, delicate features, she looks like one of those china dolls from horror movies: all innocent and sweet, until the haunting begins.
The last time I saw her, I hadn’t even made it inside the hallway before she started staring at my forehead until I thought perhaps I’d suddenly grown a third eye.
‘Gemma. Frown lines are a killer. Isn’t it time for Botox? You know what they say when women age prematurely . Just be careful; go to someone who knows exactly where the needle should go.’
Typically I don’t care where the fucking needle goes, as long as it isn’t anywhere near me. I’m staunchly anti-Botox, mostly because I can’t afford it, secondly because the idea of needles with paralytic ingredients going near my eyes makes me want to faint.
Over one Christmas lunch, while Lulu nibbled on a green leaf salad instead of turkey and cranberry like the rest of us, she wanted to talk about the latest Dior jacket, but how can someone spend thirty minutes discussing that? I ate three servings of Mum’s trifle cake that lunch, as a reward for being there listening to Lulu prattle on about Vera Wang and the House of Gucci and small kitten heels, and who gives a shit?
So no, I don’t want to read Mum’s latest email asking if I’m sure Dad loves her or extolling Lulu and the latest wonderful thing she’s done. I’ve put an ocean between us, isn’t that enough?
Thankfully a phone call interrupts my thoughts. Hannah .
‘Hey, how did it go?’ Just hearing her voice makes me feel better.
‘It was a disaster. Certifiable.’
‘Which part?’ I can hear her pouring a large glass of wine in the background.
‘All of it.’ I proceed to tell her everything: the promotion I didn’t get, Weasel, Tony doubling my workload with no pay rise…
‘Feck em all. The lot of them. You’ll get a job somewhere else where they know you’re amazing. Maybe you’ll even get your own book published and in three years be sitting on Oprah’s couch saying, “Well, Peacock Publishing couldn’t see my talent.” Pish. Total pish.’
See? Perfect friend. If anyone knows me, it’s Hannah. We met in kindergarten aged five, after Han’s family moved to London from Glasgow. Our teacher found us eating chewing gum we’d taken from another teacher’s bag and we got put in time out. We tried to bust our way out of lockdown by attempting to balance on each other’s shoulders to get out the window. We failed miserably, but from that day on we were inseparable.
We were so close we planned the move to Australia together, talking about it all through high school and university, planning it carefully, excited about our new life – better weather, cool jobs, and a chance to get away from our dysfunctional families. Hannah’s mum still hasn’t come to terms with the fact that her daughter is a lesbian, which makes me sad, but as Hannah says, feck her.
‘How about a round of margaritas at Frankies? Jess will come too. And we can get a big plate of lime fish tacos too. You’ll forget all about today.’
I waver a little. ‘You know I love a salty rim.’
Hannah hoots. ‘A salty rim! Sounds saucy, you dirty little minx.’
I laugh. ‘I love the idea, Han. But right now, I’m terrible company. I think I just need to go to bed and pretend this day didn’t happen.’
‘Well, you know where we are if you change your mind. Call me anytime. Love you.’
‘Love you too.’
It’s eight p.m. by the time I walk up the cold pavement of 669 Military Road. Finally home .
I’m about to unlock my front door when I realise shoved under it is a cream-coloured, gold-embossed envelope, which now looks old and a bit frayed. I pick it up, noticing three large red stamps across the front manifesting the letter’s displeasure at having been re-routed, once to my old Sydney address in St Leonards, and then forwarded to this address but the wrong unit, to Mrs Gleeson, who must have shoved it under my door.
At the top right corner of the envelope, a large sticker proclaims, ‘UK Air Mail.’ Oh, God.
I can already hear Ruby saying, ‘This is it. Bad thing number two.’