Big Little Lies, Page 9

  marriage over the cliff it had been inexorably creeping toward for so many years.

  But the thought of being with any other man besides Perry filled her with a heavy, listless sensation. She’d be so bored. She was not interested in other men. Perry made her feel alive. If she left him, she’d be single and celibate and bored forever. It wasn’t fair. He ruined her.

  “You’re holding my hand too tight,” said Josh.

  “Yeah, Mummy,” said Max.

  She loosened her grip.

  “Sorry, boys,” she said.

  It hadn’t been a good morning. First, there was something cataclysmically wrong with one of Josh’s socks that could not be rectified with any amount of adjusting. Then Max couldn’t find a very specific little Lego man with a very specific yellow hat that he required right at that very minute.

  They’d both wailed and wailed for Daddy. They didn’t care that he was on the other side of the world. They wanted him. Celeste wanted Perry too. He would have fixed Josh’s sock. He would have found Max’s Lego man. She’d always known that she was going to struggle with the school-morning routine. She and the boys were late sleepers and generally out-of-sorts in the morning, whereas Perry woke up happy and energetic. If he’d been here this morning, they would have been early for their first day at school. There would have been laughter in the car, not silence, interspersed by pitiful shudders from the boys.

  She’d given them lollipops in the end. They were still sucking on them as she got them out of the car, and she’d seen one of the kindergarten mothers she recognized from the orientation day walk by and smile sweetly at the boys, while flicking Celeste a “bad mother” look.

  “There’s Chloe and Ziggy!” said Josh.

  “Let’s go kill them!” said Max.

  “Boys, don’t talk like that!” said Celeste. Good God. What would people think?

  “Just pretend-killing, Mummy,” said Josh kindly. “Chloe and Ziggy like it!”

  “Celeste! It is Celeste, isn’t it?” A woman appeared in front of her as the boys ran off. “I met you and your husband at the uniform shop a few weeks ago.” She touched her chest. “Renata. I’m Amabella’s mum.”

  “Of course! Hi, Renata,” said Celeste.

  “Perry couldn’t make it today?” Renata looked around hopefully.

  “He’s in Vienna,” said Celeste. “He travels a lot for work.”

  “I’m sure he does,” said Renata knowingly. “I thought I recognized him the other day and so I Googled him when I got back home, and that’s when it clicked! The Perry White! I’ve actually seen your husband speak a few times. I’m in the funds-management world myself!”

  Great. A Perry groupie. Celeste often wondered what the Perry groupies would think if they were to see him doing the things he did.

  “I’ve got some invitations for the boys to Amabella’s fifth-birthday party.” Renata handed her two pink envelopes. “Of course, you and Perry are most welcome to come along. Nice way for all the parents to start getting to know one another!”

  “Lovely.” Celeste took the envelopes and put them in her bag.

  “Good morning, ladies!” It was Madeline, wearing one of her beautiful signature dresses. She had two spots of color high on her cheeks and a dangerous glitter in her eyes. “Thank you for Chloe’s invitation to Amabella’s party.”

  “Oh dear, is Amabella handing them out?” Renata frowned and patted at her handbag. “Oh dear. She must have taken them from my handbag. I did mean to hand them discreetly to the parents.”

  “Yes, because it looks like you’re inviting the whole class except for one little boy.”

  “I assume you’re talking about Ziggy, the child who left bruises on my daughter’s neck,” said Renata. “He didn’t make it onto the invitation list. Surprise, surprise.”

  “Come on now, Renata,” said Madeline. “You can’t do this.”

  “So sue me.” Renata shot Celeste a glinting, mischievous look, as if they were in on a joke together.

  Celeste took a breath. She didn’t want to be involved. “I might just—”

  “I’m so sorry, Renata,” interrupted Madeline with a queenly look of apology. “But Chloe won’t be able to make it to the party.”

  “What a pity,” Renata said. She pulled hard on the diagonal strap of her handbag, as if she were adjusting body armor. “You know what? I think I might terminate this conversation before I say something I regret.” She nodded at Celeste. “Nice to see you again.”

  Madeline watched her go. She seemed invigorated.

  “This is war, Celeste,” she said happily. “War, I tell you!”

  “Oh, Madeline,” sighed Celeste.

  Harper: I know we all like to put Celeste on a pedestal but I don’t think she always made the best nutritional choices for her children. I saw the twins eating lollipops for breakfast on their first day of school!

  Samantha: Parents do tend to judge each other. I don’t know why. Maybe because none of us really know what we’re doing? And I guess that can sometimes lead to conflict. Just not normally on this sort of scale.

  Jackie: I, for one, don’t have the time to be judging other parents. Or the interest. My children are only one part of my life.

  Detective-Sergeant Adrian Quinlan: In addition to the murder investigation, we expect to be charging multiple parents with assault. We’re deeply disappointed and quite shocked to see a group of parents behaving this way.

  19.

  Oh, Madeline,” sighed Ed.

  He parked the car, pulled the keys from the ignition and turned to look at her. “You can’t make Chloe miss her friend’s party just because Ziggy isn’t invited. That’s crazy.”

  They’d driven straight from the school down to the beach to have a quick coffee at Blue Blues with Jane and her parents. It had been Jane’s mother who had suggested it, and it had seemed so important to her that Madeline, who had an overly ambitious list of things to achieve on the kids’ first day at school, felt she couldn’t say no.

  “No it’s not,” said Madeline, although she was already feeling the first twinges of regret. When Chloe heard she was missing Amabella’s A party there would be hell to pay. Amabella’s last birthday party had been insane: jumping castle, a magician and a disco.

  “I’m in a very bad mood today,” she told Ed.

  “Really?” said Ed. “I would never have noticed.”

  “I miss the children,” said Madeline. The backseat of the car felt so empty and silent. Her eyes filled with tears.

  Ed guffawed. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “My baby has started school,” wept Madeline. Chloe had marched straight into the classroom, walking right alongside Miss Barnes, as if she were a fellow teacher, chatting the whole way, probably making a few suggestions for changes to the curriculum.

  “Yep,” said Ed. “And not a moment too soon. I think those were the words you used yesterday on the phone to your mother.”

  “And I had to stand there in the school yard, making polite conversation with my ex-bloody-husband!” Madeline’s mood flipped from teary back to angry.

  “Yeah, I don’t know if I’d use the word polite,” said Ed.

  “It’s hard enough being a single mother,” said Madeline.

  “Um. What?” said Ed.

  “Jane! I’m talking about Jane, of course. I remember Abigail’s first day of school. I felt like a freak. It felt like everyone was so disgustingly married. All the parents were in perfect little pairs. I never felt so alone.” Madeline thought of her ex-husband today, looking comfortably about the school yard. Nathan had no clue as to what it had been like for Madeline for all those years she’d brought Abigail up on her own. He wouldn’t deny it. Oh no. If she were to scream at him, “It was hard! It was so hard!” he’d wince and look so sad and so sorry, but no matter how hard he tried, he would never really get it.

  She was filled with impotent rage. There was nowhere to aim it except straight at Renata. “So just imagine how
Jane feels when her child is the only one not invited to a party. Imagine it.”

  “I know,” said Ed. “Although I guess after what happened, you can sort of see it from Renata’s point of view—”

  “No you can’t!” cried Madeline.

  “Jesus. Sorry. No. Of course I can’t.” Ed looked in the rearview mirror. “Oh, look, here’s your poor little friend pulled up behind us. Let’s go eat cake with her. That will fix things.”

  He undid his seat belt.

  “If you’re not asking every child in the class, you don’t hand out the invitations on the playground,” said Madeline. “Every mother knows that. It’s a law of the land.”

  “I could talk about this subject all day long,” said Ed. “I really could. There is nothing else I want to talk about today other than Amabella’s fifth-birthday party.”

  “Shut up,” said Madeline.

  “I thought we didn’t say ‘shut up’ in our house.”

  “Fuck off, then,” said Madeline.

  Ed grinned. He put a hand to the side of her face. “You’ll feel better tomorrow. You always feel better tomorrow.”

  “I know, I know.” Madeline took a deep breath and opened the car door to see Jane’s mother fling herself out of Jane’s car and hurry along the sidewalk toward her, slinging her handbag over her shoulder and smiling frantically. “Hi! Hi there! Madeline, will you just walk along the beach with me for a bit while the others order our coffee?”

  “Mum.” Jane walked behind with her father. “You’ve seen the beach. You don’t even like the beach!”

  You didn’t have to be gifted and talented to see that Jane’s mother wanted to talk alone with Madeline.

  “Of course I will . . . Di.” The name came to her like a gift.

  “I’ll come too then,” sighed Jane.

  “No, no, you go into the café and help your dad get settled and order something nice for me,” said Di.

  “Yes, because I’m such a doddering old senior citizen.” Jane’s father put on a quavering old man’s voice and clutched Jane’s arm. “Help me, darling daughter.”

  “Off you go,” said Di firmly.

  Madeline watched Jane struggle with whether or not to insist, before giving a tiny shrug and giving up.

  “Don’t take too long,” she said to her mother. “Or your coffee will get cold.”

  “Get me a double-shot espresso and the chocolate mud cake with cream,” said Madeline to Ed.

  Ed gave her a thumbs-up and led Jane and her father into Blue Blues, while Madeline reached down and slipped off her shoes. Jane’s mother did the same.

  “Did your husband take the day off work for Chloe’s first day at school?” asked Di as they walked across the sand toward the water. “Oh, goodness, the glare!” She was wearing sunglasses, but she shielded her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “He’s a journalist for the local paper,” said Madeline. “He’s got very flexible hours, and he works from home a lot.”

  “That must be nice. Or is it? Does he get under your feet?” Di picked her way unsteadily across the sand. “Sometimes I send Bill off to buy me something at the supermarket I don’t really need, just to give myself a little breather.”

  “It works pretty well for us,” said Madeline. “I work three days a week for the Pirriwee Peninsula Theatre Company, so Ed can pick the kids up when I’m working. We’re not making a fortune but, you know, we both love our jobs, so we’re happy.”

  My God, why was she talking about money? It was like she was defending their choice of lifestyles. (And to be honest, they didn’t love their jobs that much.) Was it because she sometimes felt like her whole life was in competition with high-flying career women like Renata? Or was it just because money was on her mind because of that shocking electricity bill she’d opened this morning? The truth was that although they weren’t wealthy, they were certainly not struggling, and thanks to Madeline’s savvy online shopping skills, even her wardrobe didn’t need to suffer.

  “Ah, yes, money. They say it doesn’t buy happiness, but I don’t know about that.” Di pushed her hair out of her eyes and looked around the beach. “It is a very pretty beach. We’re not really beach people, and obviously no one wants to see this in a bikini!” She made a face of pure loathing and gestured at her perfectly ordinary body, which Madeline judged to be about the same size as her own.

  “I don’t see why not,” said Madeline. She had no patience for this sort of talk. It drove her to distraction the way women wanted to bond over self-hatred.

  “But it will be nice for Jane and Ziggy, living near the beach, I think, I guess, and ah, you know, I just wanted to really thank you, Madeline, for taking Jane under your wing the way you have.” She took her sunglasses off and looked directly at Madeline. Her eyes were pale blue, and she was wearing a frosted pink eye shadow, which wasn’t quite working for her, although Madeline approved of the effort.

  “Well, of course,” said Madeline. “It’s hard when you move to a new area and you don’t know anyone.”

  “Yes, and Jane has moved so often in the last few years. Ever since she had Ziggy, she can’t seem to stay put, or find a nice circle of friends, and she’d kill me for saying this, it’s just, I’m not sure what’s really going on with her.”

  She stopped, looked back over her shoulder at the café and compressed her lips.

  “It’s hard when they stop telling you things, isn’t it?” said Madeline after a moment. “I have a teenage daughter. From a previous relationship.” She always felt compelled to clarify this when she spoke about Abigail, and then felt obscurely guilty for doing so. It was like she was separating Abigail out somehow, putting her into a different category. “I don’t know why I was so shocked when Abigail stopped telling me things. That’s what all teenagers do, right? But she was such an open little girl. Of course, Jane isn’t a teenager.”

  It was like she’d given Di permission to speak freely. She turned to Madeline enthusiastically. “I know! She’s twenty-four, a grown-up! But they never seem like grown-ups. Her dad tells me I’m worrying over nothing. It’s true that Jane is doing a beautiful job bringing up Ziggy, and she supports herself, won’t take a cent from us! I slip money into her pockets like a pickpocket. Or the opposite of a pickpocket. But she’s changed. Something has changed. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like this deep unhappiness that she tries to hide. I don’t know if it’s depression or drugs or an eating disorder or what. She got so painfully thin! She used to be quite voluptuous.”

  “Well,” said Madeline, thinking, If it’s an eating disorder, you probably gave it to her.

  “Why am I telling you this?” said Di. “You won’t want to be her friend anymore! You’ll think she’s a drug addict! She’s not a drug addict! She only has three out of the ten top signs of drug addiction. Or four at the most. You can’t believe what you read on the Internet, anyway.”

  Madeline laughed, and Di laughed too.

  “Sometimes I feel like waving my hand in front of her eyes and saying, ‘Jane, Jane, are you still in there?’”

  “I’m pretty sure she’s—”

  “She hasn’t had a boyfriend since before Ziggy was born. She broke up with this boy. Zach. We all loved Zach, gorgeous boy, and Jane was very upset over the breakup, very upset, but gosh, that was what, six years ago now? She couldn’t still be grieving over Zach, could she? He wasn’t that good-looking!”

  “I don’t know,” said Madeline. She wondered wistfully if her coffee was sitting on the table up at Blue Blues getting cold.

  “Next thing she’s pregnant, and supposedly Zach isn’t the father, although we did always wonder about that, but she was absolutely adamant that Zach was not the father. She said it over and over again. A one-night stand, she said. No way of contacting the father. Well, you know, she was halfway through her arts-law degree, it wasn’t ideal, but everything happens for a reason, don’t you think?”

  “Absolutely,” said Madeline, who did not believe th
at at all.

  “She’d been told by a doctor that she was likely to have a lot of trouble falling pregnant naturally, so it just seemed like it was meant to be. And then my darling dad died while Jane was pregnant and that’s why it seemed like his soul might have come back in—”

  “Mu-um! Madeline!”

  Jane’s mother startled, and they both turned away from the sea to see Jane standing on the boardwalk outside Blue Blues, waving frantically. “Your coffee is ready!”

  “Coming!” called Madeline.

  “I’m sorry,” said Di as they walked back up from the beach. “I talk too much. Can you please forget everything I said? It’s just that when I saw poor little Ziggy didn’t get asked to that child’s birthday party, I felt like crying. I’m so emotional these days, and then we had to get up so early today, I’m feeling quite light-headed. I didn’t used to be, I used to be quite hard-hearted. It’s my age, I’m fifty-eight. My friends are the same, we went out for lunch the other day, we’ve been friends since our children started kindergarten! We were all talking about how we feel like fifteen-year-olds, weeping at the drop of a hat.”

  Madeline stopped walking. “Di,” she said.

  Di turned to her nervously, as if she were about to be told off. “Yes?”

  “I’ll keep an eye on Jane,” she said. “I promise.”

  Gabrielle: See, part of the problem was that Madeline sort of adopted Jane. She was like a crazy, protective big sister. If you ever said anything even mildly critical of her Jane, you’d have Madeline snarling at you like a rabid dog.

  20.

  It was eleven a.m. on the first day of Ziggy’s school life.

  Had he already had his morning tea by now? Was he eating his apple and his cheese and crackers? His tiny box of raisins? Jane’s heart twisted at the thought of him carefully opening his new lunch box. Where would he sit? Who would he talk to? She hoped Chloe and the twins were playing with him, but they could just as easily be ignoring him. It wasn’t like one of the twins would stroll up to Ziggy, hand outstretched, and say, “Why, hello! Ziggy, isn’t it? We met a few weeks back at a playdate. How have you been?”

  She stood up from the dining room table where she was working and stretched her arms high above her head. He’d be fine. Every child went to school. They survived. They learned the rules of life.

  She went into the tiny kitchen of her new apartment to switch the kettle on for a cup of tea she didn’t especially feel like. It was just an excuse to take a break from the accounts of Perfect Pete’s Plumbing. Pete might be a perfect plumber, but he wasn’t that great at keeping his paperwork in order. Every quarter she received a shoe box filled with an odd assortment of scrunched, smudged, strange-smelling paperwork: invoices, credit card bills and receipts, most of which were not claimable. She could just imagine Pete emptying out his pockets, scooping up all the receipts from the console of his car in one meaty hand, stomping around his house, grabbing every piece of paper he could find before stuffing the lot into the shoe box with a gusty sigh of relief. Job done.

  She went back to the dining room table and picked up the next receipt. Perfect Pete’s wife had just spent $335 at the beautician, where she had enjoyed the “classic facial,” “deluxe pedicure” and a bikini-line wax. So that was nice for Perfect Pete’s wife. Next was an unsigned permission note for a school excursion to Taronga Zoo last year. On the back of the permission note, a child had written in purple crayon: “I HATE TOM!!!!!”

  Jane studied the permission note.

  I will/will not be able to attend the excursion as a parent helper.

  Perfect Pete’s wife had already circled “will not.” Too busy getting her bikini line done.

  She crumpled the receipt and permission slip in her hand and walked back into the kitchen.

  She could be a parent helper if Ziggy ever went on an excursion. After all, that was why she’d originally decided to become a bookkeeper so she could be “flexible” for Ziggy, and “balance motherhood and career,” even though she always felt foolish and fraudulent when she said things like that, as if she weren’t really a mother, as if her whole life were a fake.

  It would be fun to go on a school excursion again. She could still remember the excitement. The treats on the bus. Jane could secretly observe Ziggy interact with the other children. Make sure he was normal.

  Of course he was normal.

  She thought again, as she had been all morning, of the pale pink envelopes. So many of them! It didn’t matter that he wasn’t invited to the party. He was too little to feel hurt, and none of the children knew one another yet anyway. It was silly to even think about it.

  But the truth was, she felt deeply hurt on his behalf, and somehow responsible, as if she’d messed up. She’d been so ready to forget all about the incident on orientation day, and now it was back at the forefront of her mind again.

  The kettle boiled.