Big Little Lies

  place. So first of all you’ve got your blue collars—tradies, we call them. We’ve got a lot of tradies in Pirriwee. Like my Stu. Salt of the earth. Or salt of the sea, because they all surf, of course. Most of the tradies grew up here and never left. Then you’ve got your alternative types. Your dippy hippies. And in the last ten years or so, all these wealthy execs and banker wankers have moved in and built massive McMansions up on the cliffs. But! There’s only one primary school for all our kids! So at school events you’ve got a plumber, a banker and a crystal healer standing around trying to make conversation. It’s hilarious. No wonder we had a riot.

  Celeste arrived home from the athletics carnival to find her house cleaners’ car parked out front. When she turned the key in the front door, the vacuum cleaner was roaring upstairs.

  She went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. The cleaners came once a week on a Friday morning. They charged two hundred dollars and did a beautiful, sparkling job.

  Celeste’s mother had gasped when she’d heard how much Celeste spent on cleaning. “Darling, I’ll come and help you once a week,” she’d said. “You can save the money for something else.”

  Her mother could not grasp the scale of Perry’s wealth. When she first visited the big house with the sweeping beach views, she’d walked around with the polite, strained expression of a tourist watching a confronting cultural demonstration. She’d finally agreed it was very “airy.” For her, two hundred dollars was a scandalous amount of money to spend on something that you could—should—do yourself. She would be horrified if she could see Celeste right now, sitting down, while other people cleaned her house. Celeste’s mother had never sat down. She’d come home from working night shift at the hospital, walk straight into the kitchen and make the family a cooked breakfast, while Celeste’s dad read the paper and Celeste and her brother fought.

  Good God, the fights Celeste had had with her brother. He’d hit her. She’d always hit him back.

  Maybe if she hadn’t grown up with a big brother, if she hadn’t grown up with that tough Aussie tomboy mentality: If a boy hits you, you hit him right back! Perhaps if she’d wept softly and prettily the first time that Perry had hit her, then maybe it wouldn’t keep happening.

  The vacuum cleaner stopped, and she heard a man’s voice, followed by a roar of raucous laughter. Her cleaners were a young married Korean couple. They normally worked in complete silence when Celeste was in the house, so they mustn’t have heard her come in. They only showed her their professional faces. She felt irrationally hurt, as if she wanted to be their friend. Let’s all laugh and chat while you clean my house!

  There were running footsteps above her head and a peal of girlish laughter.

  Stop having fun in my house. Clean.

  Celeste drank her tea. The mug stung her sore lip.

  She felt jealous of her cleaners.

  Here she sat, in her big house, sulking.

  She put down her tea, took her AmEx card out of her wallet and opened her laptop. She logged on to the World Vision website and clicked through photos of children available for sponsorship: products on a shelf for rich white women like her. She already sponsored three children, and she tried to get the boys interested. “Look! Here’s little Blessing from Zimbabwe. She has to walk miles for fresh water. You just have to walk to the tap.” “Why doesn’t she just get some money from the ATM?” said Josh. It was Perry who answered, who patiently explained, who talked to the children about gratitude and helping those less fortunate than themselves.

  Celeste sponsored another four children.

  Writing letters and birthday cards to them all would take hours.

  Ungrateful bitch.

  Deserve to be hit. Deserve it.

  She pinched the flesh on her upper thighs until it brought tears to her eyes. There would be new bruises tomorrow. Bruises she’d given herself. She liked to watch them change, deepening, darkening and then slowly fading. It was a hobby. An interest of hers. Nice to have an interest.

  She was losing her mind.

  She trawled through charity websites representing all the pain and suffering the world has to offer: cancer, rare genetic disorders, poverty, human rights abuse, natural disasters. She gave and gave and gave. Within twenty minutes she’d donated twenty thousand dollars of Perry’s money. It gave her no satisfaction, no pride or pleasure. It sickened her. She made charitable donations while a young girl got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the grubby corners of her shower stall.

  Clean your own house, then! Sack the cleaners. But that wouldn’t help them either, would it? Give more money to charity! Give until it hurts.

  She spent another five thousand dollars.

  Would that hurt their financial situation? She didn’t actually know. Perry took care of the money. It was his area of expertise, after all. He didn’t hide it from her. She knew that he would happily go through all their accounts and investment portfolios with her, if she so wished, but the thought of knowing the exact figures gave her vertigo.

  “I opened the electricity bill today and I just wanted to cry,” Madeline had said the other day, and Celeste had wanted to offer to pay it for her, but of course, Madeline didn’t want her charity. She and Ed were perfectly comfortable. It was just that there were so many different levels of “comfortable,” and at Celeste’s level no electricity bill could make her cry. Anyway, you couldn’t just hand money over to your friends. You could pick up lunch or coffee whenever you could, but even then you had to be careful not to offend, to not do it so often that it looked like you were showing off, as if the money were part of her, when in fact the money was Perry’s, it had nothing to do with her, it was just random luck, like the way she looked. It wasn’t a decision she’d made.

  Once, when she’d been at uni, she’d been in a great mood, and she’d bounced into her tutorial and sat next to a girl called Linda.

  “Morning!” she’d said.

  An expression of comical dismay crossed Linda’s face.

  “Oh, Celeste,” she’d moaned. “I just can’t handle you today. Not when I’m feeling like shit and you waltz in here looking like . . . you know, like that.” She waved her hand at Celeste’s face, as if at something disgusting.

  The girls around them had exploded with joyous laughter, as if something hilarious and subversive had finally been said out loud. They laughed and laughed, and Celeste had smiled stiffly, idiotically, because how could you possibly respond to that? It felt like a slap, but she had to respond like it was a compliment. You had to be grateful. Don’t ever look too happy, she told herself. It’s aggravating.

  Grateful, grateful, grateful.

  The vacuum cleaner started again upstairs.

  Perry had never, in all their years together, made a comment on how she chose to spend their (his) money, except to remind her occasionally, mildly, humorously, that she could spend more if she liked. “You know we can afford to get you a new one,” he’d said once when he came upon her in the laundry, scrubbing furiously at a stain on the collar of a silk shirt.

  “I like this one,” she’d said.

  (The stain was blood.)

  Once she stopped working, her relationship to money had changed. She used it the same way she’d use someone else’s bathroom: carefully and politely. She knew that in the eyes of the law and society (supposedly) she was contributing to their lives by running the house and bringing up the boys, but she still never spent Perry’s money in the same way she’d once spent her own.

  She’d certainly never spent twenty-five thousand dollars in one afternoon. Would he comment? Would he be angry? Was that why she’d done it? Sometimes, on the days when she could feel his rage simmering, when she knew it was only a matter of time, when she could smell it in the air, she’d deliberately provoke him. She’d make it happen, so it was done.

  Even when she was giving to charity, was it really just another step in the sick dance of their marriage?

  It wasn’t like it was
unprecedented. They went to charity balls and Perry would bid twenty, thirty, forty thousand dollars with the unsmiling nod of a head. But that wasn’t about giving, so much as winning. “I’ll never be outbid,” he told her once.

  He was generous with his money. If he ever discovered that a family member or friend was in need, he discreetly wrote a check or did a direct transfer, waving away thanks, changing the subject, seemingly embarrassed by the ease with which he could solve someone else’s financial crisis.

  The doorbell rang, and she went to answer it.

  “Mrs. White?” A stocky, bearded man handed her a giant bouquet of flowers.

  “Thank you,” said Celeste.

  “Someone is a lucky lady!” said the man, as if he’d never seen a woman receive such an impressive arrangement.

  “I sure am!”

  The sweet heavy scent tickled her nose. Once, she’d loved to receive flowers. Now it was like being handed a series of tasks: Find the vase. Cut the stems. Arrange them like so.

  Ungrateful bitch.

  She read the tiny card.

  I love you. I’m sorry. Perry.

  Written in the florist’s handwriting. It was always so strange to see Perry’s words transcribed by someone else. Did the florist wonder what Perry had done? What husbandly transgression he had committed last night? Coming home late?

  She carried the flowers toward the kitchen. The bouquet was shaking, she noticed, shivering as if it were cold. She tightened her grip on the stems. She could throw them against the wall, but it would be so unsatisfying. They would flop ineffectually to the ground. There would be drifts of sodden petals across the carpet. She’d have to scrabble around on the floor for them before the cleaners came downstairs.

  For God’s sake, Celeste. You know what you have to do.

  She rememebered the year she turned twenty-five: the year she appeared in court for the first time, the year she bought her first car and invested in the stock market for the first time, the year she played competitive squash every Saturday. She had great triceps and a loud laugh.

  That was the year she met Perry.

  Motherhood and marriage had made her a soft, spongy version of the girl she used to be.

  She laid the flowers down carefully on the dining room table and went back to her laptop.

  She typed the words “marriage counselor” into Google.

  Then she stopped. Backspace, backspace, backspace. No. Been there, done that. This wasn’t about housework and hurt feelings. She needed to talk to someone who knew that people behaved like this; someone who would ask the right questions.

  She could feel her cheeks burn as she typed in the two shameful words.

  “Domestic.” “Violence.”

  28.

  There are harder things than this, thought Madeline as she folded a pair of white skinny jeans and added them to the half-packed open suitcase on Abigail’s bed.

  Madeline had no right to the feelings she was experiencing. Their magnitude embarrassed her. They were wildly disproportionate to the situation at hand.

  So, Abigail wanted to live with her father and she wasn’t being all that nice about it. But she was fourteen. Fourteen-year-olds were not known for their empathy.

  Madeline kept thinking she was fine about it. She was over it. No big deal. She was busy. Other things to do. And then it would hit her again, like a blow to the abdomen. She’d find herself taking short shallow breaths as if she were in labor. (Twenty-seven hours with Abigail. Nathan and the midwife joked about football while Madeline died. Well, she didn’t die, but she remembered thinking that this sort of pain could only end in death, and the last words she’d hear would be about Manly’s chances of winning the premiership.)

  She lifted one of Abigail’s tops from the laundry basket. It was a pale peachy color, and it didn’t suit Abigail’s coloring, but she loved it. It was hand-wash only. Bonnie could do that now. Or maybe the new upgraded version of Nathan did laundry now. Nathan Version 2.0. Stays with his wife. Volunteers at homeless shelters. Hand-washes.

  He was coming over later today with his brother’s truck to pick up Abigail’s bed.

  Last night Abigail had asked Madeline if she could please take her bed to Nathan’s house. It was a beautiful four-poster canopy bed that Madeline and Ed had given Abigail for her fourteenth birthday. It had been worth every exorbitant cent to see the ecstasy on Abigail’s face when she first saw it. She’d actually danced with joy. It was like remembering another person.

  “Your bed stays here,” Ed said.

  “It’s her bed,” Madeline said. “I don’t mind if she takes it.” She said it to hurt Abigail, to hurt her back, to show that she didn’t care that Abigail was moving out, that she would now come to visit on weekends, but her real life, her real home would be somewhere else. But Abigail wasn’t hurt at all. She was just pleased she was getting the bed.

  “Hey,” said Ed from the bedroom door.

  “Hey,” said Madeline.

  “Abigail should be packing her own clothes,” said Ed. “Surely she’s old enough.”

  Maybe she was, but Madeline did all the laundry in the house. She knew where things were in the wash, dry, fold, put-away assembly line, so it made sense for Madeline to do it. Ever since Ed had first met Abigail, he’d always expected just a little too much of her. How many times had she heard those exact words? “Surely she’s old enough.” He didn’t know children of Abigail’s age, and it seemed to Madeline that he always shot just a little too high. It was different with Fred and Chloe, because he’d been there from the beginning. He knew and understood them in a way he never really knew and understood Abigail. Of course, he was fond of her, and he was a good, attentive stepdad, a tricky role he’d taken on immediately without complaint (two months after they began dating, Ed went with Abigail to a Father’s Day morning tea at school; Abigail had adored him back then), and maybe they would have had a great relationship except that Nathan the prodigal father had returned at the worst time, when Abigail was eleven. Too old to be managed. Too young to understand or control her feelings. She changed overnight. It was as though she thought showing Ed even just basic courtesy was a betrayal of her father. Ed had an old-fashioned authoritarian streak that didn’t respond well to disrespect, and it certainly compared unfavorably to Nathan’s let’s-have-a-laugh persona.

  “Do you think it’s my fault?” said Ed.

  Madeline looked up. “What?”

  “That Abigail is moving in with her dad?” He looked distressed, uncertain. “Was I too hard on her?”

  “Of course not,” she said, although she did think it was partly his fault, but what was the point in saying that? “I think Bonnie is the real attraction,” she said.

  “Do you ever wonder if Bonnie has had electric-shock treatment?” mused Ed.

  “There is a kind of blankness about her,” agreed Madeline.

  Ed came in and ran his hand over one of the posts of Abigail’s bed. “I had a hell of a job putting this together,” he said. “Do you think Nathan will be able to manage it?”

  Madeline snorted.

  “Maybe I should offer to help,” said Ed. He was serious. He couldn’t bear to think of a DIY job being done badly.

  “Don’t you dare,” said Madeline. “Shouldn’t you be gone? Don’t you have an interview?”

  “Yeah, I do.” Ed bent to kiss her.

  “Someone interesting?”

  “It’s Pirriwee Peninsula’s oldest book club,” said Ed. “They’ve been meeting once a month for forty years.”

  “I should start a book club,” said Madeline.

  Harper: I will say this for Madeline: She invited all the parents to join her book club, including Renata and me. I already belong to a book club, so I declined, which is probably just as well. Renata and I always enjoyed quality literature, not those lightweight, derivative best sellers. Pure fluff! Each to their own, of course.

  Samantha: The whole Erotic Book Club started as a joke. It was actually
my fault. I was doing canteen duty with Madeline and I said something to her about a raunchy scene in the book she’d chosen. It wasn’t even that raunchy, to be honest, I was just having a laugh, but then Madeline says, “Oh, did I forget to mention it was an erotic book club?” So we all started calling it the Erotic Book Club, and the more people like Harper and Carol clutched their pearls, the worse Madeline got.

  Bonnie: I teach a yoga class on Thursday nights, otherwise I would have loved to have joined Madeline’s book club.

  29.

  One Month Before the Trivia Night

  I have to take in my family tree tomorrow,” said Ziggy.

  “No, that’s next week,” said Jane.

  She was sitting on the bathroom floor, leaning against the wall while Ziggy had a bath. Steam and the scent of strawberry bubble bath filled the air. He loved to wallow in deep, very hot bubble baths. “Hotter, mummy, hotter!” he was always demanding while his skin turned so red, Jane was worried she was scalding him. “More bubbles!” Then he played long, complicated games through the bubbles, incorporating erupting volcanoes, Jedi knights, ninjas and scolding mothers.

  “We need special cardboard for the family tree,” said Ziggy.

  “Yes, we’ll get some on the weekend,” said Jane. She grinned at him. He’d molded the bubbles on his head into a Mohawk. “You look funny.”

  “No, I look supercool,” said Ziggy. He went back to his game. “Kapow! Kapow! Ow! Stop that right now! Watch out, Yoda! Where’s your lightsaber? Say please, Yoda! Here it is!”

  Water splashed and bubbles flew.

  Jane returned to the book Madeline had chosen for their first book club meeting. “I picked something with lots of sex, drugs and murder,” Madeline had said, “so we have a lively discussion. Ideally there should be an argument.”

  The book was set in the 1920s. It was good. Jane had somehow gotten out of the habit of reading for pleasure. Reading a novel was like returning to a once-beloved holiday destination.

  Right now she was in the middle of a sex scene. She flipped the page.

  “I’ll punch you in the face, Darth Vader!” cried Ziggy.

  “Don’t say ‘punch you in the face,’” said Jane without looking up. “That’s not nice.” She kept reading. A cloud of strawberry-scented bubbles floated onto the page of her book. She pushed it away with her finger. She was feeling something: a tiny pinpoint of feeling. She shifted slightly on the bathroom tiles. No. Surely not. From a book? From two nicely written paragraphs? But yes. She was. She was ever so slightly aroused.

  It was a revelation that after all this time she could still feel something so basic, so biological, so pleasant.

  For a moment she saw the staring eye in the ceiling and her throat tightened, but then her nostrils twitched with a sudden flare of anger. I refuse, she said to the memory. I refuse you today, because guess what, I have other memories of sex. I have lots of memories of an ordinary boyfriend and an ordinary bed, where the sheets weren’t that crisp and there were no staring eyes in the ceiling and there wasn’t that muffled, draped silence, there was music and ordinariness and natural light and he thought I was pretty, you bastard, he thought I was pretty, and I was pretty, and how dare you, how dare you, how dare you?

  “Mummy?” said Ziggy.

  “Yes?” she said. She felt a crazed, angry kind of happiness, as if someone were daring her not to be.

  “I need that spoon that’s shaped sort of like this.” He drew a semicircle in the air. He wanted the egg slicer.

  “Oh, Ziggy, that’s enough kitchen stuff in the bath,” she said, but she was already putting her book down and standing up to go and get it for him.

  “Thank you, Mummy,” said Ziggy angelically, and she looked down at his big green eyes with the tiny droplets of water beaded on his eyelashes and she said, “I love you so much, Ziggy.”

  “I need that spoon pretty fast,” said Ziggy.

  “OK,” she said.

  She turned to leave the bathroom, and Ziggy said, “Do you think Miss Barnes will be mad at me for not bringing in my family tree project?”

  “Darling, it’s next week,” said Jane. She went into the kitchen and read out loud from the notice stuck to the fridge by a magnet. “‘All the children will have a chance to talk about their family trees when they bring in their projects on Friday, March twenty-four’—oh, calamity.”

  He was right. The family tree was due tomorrow. She’d had it in her head that it was due the same Friday as her dad’s birthday dinner, but then Dad’s dinner