Big Little Lies

  If Ziggy really had hurt Amabella, and if he did something like that again, he would never get invited to any parties. The teachers would call Jane in for a meeting. She would have to take him to see a child psychologist.

  She would have to say out loud all her secret terrors about Ziggy.

  Her hand shook as she poured the hot water into the mug.

  “If Ziggy isn’t invited, then Chloe isn’t going,” Madeline had said at coffee this morning.

  “Please don’t do that,” Jane had said. “You’re going to make things worse.”

  But Madeline just raised her eyebrows and shrugged. “I’ve already told Renata.”

  Jane had been horrified. Great. Now Renata would have even more reason to dislike her. Jane would have an enemy. The last time she had had anything close to an enemy, she was in primary school herself. It had never crossed her mind that sending your child to school would be like going back to school yourself.

  Perhaps she should have made him apologize that day, and apologized herself. “I’m so sorry,” she could have said to Renata. “I’m terribly sorry. He’s never done anything like this before. I will make sure it never happens again.”

  But it was no use. Ziggy said he didn’t do it. She couldn’t have reacted any other way.

  She took the cup of tea to the dining room table, sat back down at her computer and unwrapped a new piece of gum.

  Right. Well, she would volunteer for anything on offer at the school. Apparently parental involvement was good for your child’s education (although she’d always suspected that was propaganda put out by the schools). She would try to make friends with other mothers, apart from Madeline and Celeste, and if she ran into Renata she would be polite and friendly.

  “This will all blow over in a week,” her father had said at coffee this morning when they were discussing the party.

  “Or it will all blow up,” said Madeline’s husband, Ed. “Now that my wife is involved.”

  Jane’s mother had laughed as if she’d known Madeline and her propensities for years. (What had they been talking about for so long on the beach? Jane inwardly squirmed at the thought of her mother revealing every concern she had about Jane’s life: She can’t seem to get a boyfriend! She’s so skinny! She won’t get a good haircut!)

  Madeline had fiddled with a heavy silver bracelet around her wrist. “Kaboom!” she’d said suddenly, and swirled her hands in opposite directions to indicate an explosion, her eyes wide. Jane had laughed, even while she thought, Great. I’ve made friends with a crazy lady.

  The only reason Jane had had an enemy in primary school was because it was decreed to be so by a pretty, charismatic girl called Emily Berry, who always wore red ladybug hair clips in her hair. Was Madeline the forty-year-old version of Emily Berry? Champagne instead of lemonade. Bright red lipstick instead of strawberry-flavored lip gloss. The sort of girl who merrily stirred up trouble for you and you still loved her.

  Jane shook her head to clear it. This was ridiculous. She was a grown-up. She was not going to end up in the principal’s office like she had when she was ten. (Emily had sat up on the chair next to her, kicking her legs, chewing gum and grinning over at Jane whenever the principal looked the other way, as if it were all a great lark.)

  Right. Focus.

  She picked up the next document from Pete the Plumber’s shoe box and held it carefully with her fingertips. It was greasy to touch. This was an invoice from a wholesale plumbing supplier. Well done, Pete. This actually relates to your business.

  She rested her hands on the keyboard. Come on. Ready, set, go. In order for the data-inputting side of her job to be both profitable and bearable she had to work fast. The first time an accountant gave her a job, he’d told her it was about six to eight hours’ work. She’d done it in four, charged him for six. Since her first job she’d gotten even faster. It was like playing a computer game, seeing if she could get to a higher level each time.

  It wasn’t her dream job, but she did quite enjoy the satisfaction of transforming a messy pile of paperwork into neat rows of figures. She loved calling up her clients, who were now mostly small-business people like Pete, and telling them she’d found a new deduction. Best of all, she was proud of the fact that she’d supported herself and Ziggy for the last five years without having to ask her parents for money, even if it had meant that she sometimes worked well into the night while he slept.

  This was not the career she’d dreamed of as an ambitious seventeen-year-old, but now it was hard to remember ever feeling innocent and audacious enough to dream of a certain type of life, as if you got to choose how things turned out.

  A seagull squawked, and for a moment she was confused by the sound.

  Well, she’d chosen this. She’d chosen to live by the beach, as if she had as much right as anyone else. She could reward herself for two hours’ work with a walk on the beach. A walk on the beach in the middle of the day. She could go back to Blue Blues, buy a coffee to go and then take an arty photo of it sitting on a fence with the sea in the background and post it on Facebook with a comment: Work break! How lucky am I? People would write, Jealous!

  If she packaged the perfect Facebook life, maybe she would start to believe it herself.

  Or she could even post, Mad as hell!! Ziggy the only one in the class not invited to a birthday party!! Grrrrr. And everyone would write comforting things, like, WTF? and Awwww. Poor little Ziggy!

  She could shrink her fears down into innocuous little status updates that drifted away on the news feeds of her friends.

  Then she and Ziggy would be normal people. Maybe she’d even go on a date. Keep Mum happy.

  She picked up her mobile phone and read the text her friend Anna had sent yesterday.

  Remember Greg? My cousin u met when we were like 15?! He’s moved to Syd. Wants your number to ask u for a drink! OK? No pressure! (He’s pretty hot now. Got my genes!! Ha ha.) x

  Right.

  She remembered Greg. He’d been shy. Short. Reddish hair. He’d made a lame joke that no one got, and then when everyone said, “What? What?” he’d said, “Don’t worry about it!” That had stuck in her head because she’d felt sorry for him.

  Why not?

  She could handle a drink with Greg.

  It was time. Ziggy was in school. She lived by the beach.

  She sent back the text: OK x.

  She took a sip of her tea and put her hands on the keyboard.

  It was her body that reacted. She wasn’t even thinking about the text. She was thinking about Pete the Plumber’s receipt for wastes and plugs.

  A violent swoop of nausea made her fold in two, her forehead resting against the table. She pressed her palm across her mouth. Blood rushed from her head. She could smell that scent. She could swear it was real, that it was actually here in the apartment.

  Sometimes, if Ziggy’s mood changed too fast, without warning, from happy to angry, she could smell it on him.

  She half straightened, gagging, and picked up her phone. She texted Anna with shaky fingers: Don’t give it to him! Changed my mind!

  The text came back almost instantly.

  Too late.

  Thea: I heard Jane had a quote-unquote fling with one of the fathers. I’ve no idea which one. Except I know it wasn’t my husband!

  Bonnie: She did not.

  Carol: You know there was a man in their Erotic Book Club? Not my husband, thank goodness. He only reads Golf Australia.

  Jonathan: Yes, I was the man in the so-called Erotic Book Club, except that was just a joke. It was a book club. A perfectly ordinary book club.

  Melissa: Didn’t Jane have an affair with the stay-at-home dad?

  Gabrielle: It wasn’t Jane who had the affair! I always thought she was born-again. Flat shoes, no jewelry, no makeup. But good body! Not an ounce of fat. She was the skinniest mother in the school. God, I’m hungry. Have you tried the 5:2 diet? This is my fast day. I am dying of starvation.

  21.

 
Celeste arrived early for school pickup. She ached for her twins’ compact little bodies, and for that all too brief moment when their hands curled, suffocatingly, possessively, around her neck and she kissed their hot, hard, fragrant little heads before they squirmed away. But she knew she would probably be yelling at them within fifteen minutes. They’d be tired and crazy. She couldn’t get them to sleep until nine p.m. last night. Much too late. Bad mother. “Just go to sleep!” she’d ended up shrieking. She always had trouble getting them to bed at a reasonable hour, except when Perry was at home. They listened to Perry.

  He was a good dad. A good husband too. Most of the time.

  “You need a bedtime routine,” her brother had said on the phone from Auckland today, and Celeste had said, “Oh, what a revolutionary idea! I would never have thought of it!”

  If parents had children who were good sleepers, they assumed this was due to their good parenting, not good luck. They followed the rules, and the rules had been proven to work. Celeste must therefore not be following the rules. And you could never prove it to them! They would die smug in their beds.

  “Hi, Celeste.”

  Celeste startled. “Jane!” She pressed a hand to her chest. As usual, she’d been dreaming and hadn’t heard footsteps. It bugged her the way she kept jumping like a lunatic when people appeared.

  “Sorry,” said Jane. “I didn’t mean to creep up on you.”

  “How was your day?” asked Celeste. “Did you get lots of work done?”

  She knew that Jane supported herself doing bookkeeping work. Celeste imagined her sitting at a tidy desk in her small bare apartment (she hadn’t been there, but she knew the block of plain redbrick apartments on Beaumont Street down by the beach, and she assumed inside would be unadorned, like Jane. No fuss. No knickknacks). The simplicity of her life seemed so compelling. Just Jane and Ziggy. One sweet (putting aside the strange choking incident, of course), quiet, dark-haired child. No fights. Life would be calm and uncomplicated.

  “I got a bit done,” said Jane. Her mouth made tiny little mouse-like movements as she chewed gum. “I had coffee this morning with my parents and Madeline and Ed. Then the day sort of disappeared.”

  “The day goes so fast,” agreed Celeste, although hers had dragged.

  “Are you going back to work now that the kids are at school?” asked Jane. “What did you do before the twins?”

  “I was a lawyer,” said Celeste. I was someone else.

  “Huh. I was meant to be a lawyer,” said Jane. There was something wry and sad in her voice that Celeste couldn’t quite interpret.

  They turned down the grassy laneway that led past a little white weatherboard house that almost seemed to be part of the school.

  “I wasn’t really enjoying it,” said Celeste. Was this true? She had hated the stress. She ran late every day. But didn’t she once love some aspects of it? The careful untangling of a legal issue. Like math, but with words.

  “I couldn’t go back to practicing law,” said Celeste. “Not with the boys. Sometimes I think I might do teaching. Teach legal studies. But I’m not sure that really appeals either.” She had lost her nerve for work, like she’d lost her nerve for skiing.

  Jane was silent. She was probably thinking that Celeste was a spoiled trophy wife.

  “I’m lucky,” said Celeste. “I don’t have to work. Perry is . . . well, he’s a hedge fund manager.”

  Now she sounded show-offy, when she’d meant to sound grateful. Conversations with women about work could be so fraught. If Madeline had been there, she would have said, “Perry earns a shitload, so Celeste can live a life of leisure.” And then she would have done a typical Madeline about-face and said something about how bringing up twin boys wasn’t exactly a life of leisure and that Celeste probably worked harder than Perry.

  Perry liked Madeline. “Feisty,” he called her.

  “I have to start doing some sort of exercise routine while Ziggy is at school,” said Jane. “I’m so unfit. I get breathless going up a tiny slope. It’s terrible. Everyone around here is so fit and healthy.”

  “I’m not,” said Celeste. “I do no exercise at all. Madeline is always after me to go to the gym with her. She’s crazy for those classes, but I hate gyms.”

  “Me too,” said Jane with a grimace. “Big sweaty men.”

  “We should go walking together when the kids are at school,” said Celeste. “Around the headland.”

  Jane gave her a quick, shy, surprised grin. “I’d love that.”

  Harper: You know how Jane and Celeste were supposedly great friends? Well, obviously it wasn’t all roses, because I did overhear something at the trivia night, quite by accident. It must have been only minutes before it happened. I was going out on the balcony to get some fresh air—well, to have a cigarette, if you must know, because I had a number of things on my mind—anyway, Jane and Celeste were out there, and Celeste was saying, “I’m sorry. I’m just so, so sorry.”

  It was about an hour before school pickup when Samira, Madeline’s boss at the Pirriwee Theatre, called to discuss marketing for the new production of King Lear. Just before she hung up (finally! Madeline didn’t get paid for the time she spent on these phone calls, and if her boss offered to pay, she’d have said no, but still, it would have been nice to have had the opportunity to graciously refuse), Samira mentioned that she had a “whole stack” of complimentary front-row Disney On Ice tickets if Madeline wanted them.

  “When for?” asked Madeline, looking at her wall calendar.

  “Um, let’s see. Saturday, February twenty-eighth, two p.m.”

  The box on the calendar was empty, but there was something familiar about the date. Madeline reached for her handbag and pulled out the pink envelope that Chloe had given her that morning.

  Amabella’s A party was at two p.m., Saturday, February 28.

  Madeline smiled. “I’d love them.”

  Thea: The invitations for Amabella’s party went out first. And then next thing, that very same afternoon, Madeline is handing out free tickets for Disney On Ice, like she’s Lady Muck.

  Samantha: Those tickets cost a fortune, and Lily was so desperate to go. I didn’t realize it was the same day as Amabella’s party, but then again, Lily didn’t know Amabella from a bar of soap, so I felt bad, but not that bad.

  Jonathan: I always said the best part of being a stay-at-home dad was leaving behind all the office politics. Then first day of school I get caught up in some war between these two women!

  Bonnie: We went to Amabella’s party. I think Madeline forgot to offer us one of the Disney tickets. I’m sure it was just an oversight.

  Detective-Sergeant Adrian Quinlan: We’re talking to parents about everything that went on at that school. I can assure you it wouldn’t be the first time that a dispute over a seemingly inconsequential matter led to violence.

  22.

  Three Months Before the Trivia Night

  Celeste and Perry sat on the couch, drinking red wine, eating Lindt chocolate balls and watching their third episode in a row of The Walking Dead. The boys were sound asleep. The house was quiet, except for the crunch of footsteps coming from the television. The main character was creeping through the forest, his knife drawn. A zombie appeared from behind a tree, her face black and rotting, her teeth snapping, making that guttural sound that zombies apparently make. Celeste and Perry both jumped and screamed. Perry spilled some of his red wine.

  He dabbed at the splash of wine on his T-shirt. “That scared the life out of me.”

  The man on the screen drove his knife through the zombie’s skull.

  “Gotcha!” said Celeste.

  “Pause it while I get us a refill,” said Perry.

  Celeste picked up the remote and paused the DVD. “This is even better than last season.”

  “I know,” said Perry. “Although I think it gives me bad dreams.”

  He brought over the bottle of wine from the sideboard.

  “Are we going to some kid
’s birthday party tomorrow?” he asked as he refilled her glass. “I ran into Mark Whittaker at Catalinas today and he seemed to think we were going. He said the mother mentioned we were invited. Renata somebody. Actually, did I meet a Renata that day when I went to the school with you?”

  “You did,” said Celeste. “We were invited to Amabella’s party. But we’re not going.”

  She wasn’t concentrating. That was the problem. She didn’t have time to prepare. She was enjoying the wine, chocolate and zombies. Perry had only gotten back less than a week ago. He was always so loving and chipper after a trip, especially if he’d left the country. It somehow cleansed him. His face always seemed smoother, his eyes brighter. The layers of frustration would take weeks to build up again. The children had been in feral little moods tonight. “Mummy gets a rest tonight,” Perry told the boys earlier, and he’d done the whole bath, teeth, story routine on his own, while she sat on the couch, reading her book and drinking a Perry Surprise. It was a cocktail he’d invented years ago. It tasted of chocolate and cream and strawberries and cinnamon, and every woman he ever prepared it for went crazy over it. “I’ll give you my children in return for that recipe,” Madeline had once told Perry.

  Perry filled his own glass. “Why aren’t we going?”

  “I’m taking the boys to Disney On Ice. Madeline got free tickets, and a group of us are going.” Celeste broke off another piece of chocolate. She’d texted her apologies to Renata and hadn’t heard back. As the nanny did most of the school pickups and drop-offs, Celeste hadn’t run into her since the first day of school. She knew she was aligning herself with Madeline and Jane by saying no, but, well, she was aligned with Madeline and Jane. And this was a fifth-birthday party. This was not a matter of life or death.

  “So I’m not welcome at this Disney thing?” said Perry. He sipped his wine. She felt it then. In her stomach. A tiny squeeze. But his tone was casual. Humorous. If she trod carefully, she might still save the night.

  She put down the chocolate. “Sorry,” she said. “I thought you’d appreciate a bit of alone time. You can go to the gym.”

  Perry stood above her with the wine bottle still in his hand. He smiled. “I’ve been away for three weeks. I’m away again next Friday. Why would I need alone time?”

  He didn’t sound or look angry, but she could feel something in the atmosphere, like an electrical charge before a storm. The hairs on her arms stood up.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think.”

  “You sick of me already?” He looked hurt. He was hurt. She’d been thoughtless. She should have known better. Perry was always looking for evidence that she didn’t really love him. It was like he expected it, and then he was angry when he believed himself proven right.

  She went to stand up from the couch, but that would turn it into a confrontation. Sometimes, if she behaved normally, she could gently nudge them back on track. Instead, she looked up at him. “The boys don’t even know this little girl. And I hardly ever take them to see live shows. It just seemed like this was the better option.”

  “Well, why don’t you take them to live shows?” said Perry. “We don’t need free tickets! Why didn’t you tell Madeline to give the tickets to someone who would really appreciate them?”

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t about money, really.”

  She hadn’t thought of that. She was depriving some other mother of a free ticket. She should have thought of the fact that Perry would be back and he’d want to spend time with the boys, but he was away so often, she was used to making social arrangements that suited her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said calmly. She was sorry, but it was fruitless, because he would never believe her. “I probably should have chosen the party.” She stood up. “I’m going to take my contacts out. My eyes are itchy.”

  She went to walk past him. He grabbed her upper arm. His fingers dug into the flesh.

  “Hey,” she said. “That hurts.”

  It was part of the game that her initial reaction was always one of outrage and surprise, as if this had never happened before, as if he maybe didn’t know what he was doing.

  He gripped harder.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Perry. Just don’t.”

  The pain ignited her anger. The anger was always there: a reservoir of flammable fuel. She heard her voice turn high and hysterical. A shrieking shrewish woman.

  “Perry, this is not a big deal! Don’t turn everything into a big deal.”

  Because now it was no longer about the party. Now it was about every other