Big Little Lies, Page 4

  A well-dressed, blond woman, who Jane thought probably qualified as one of Madeline’s Blond Bobs, bustled over with a yellow envelope in her hand. “Renata,” she said, ignoring Jane. “I’ve got that education report we were talking about at dinner—”

  “Just give me a moment, Harper,” said Renata with a touch of impatience. She turned back to Jane. “Jane, nice to meet you! I’m Amabella’s mum, and I have Jackson in Year 2. That’s Amabella, by the way, not Annabella. It’s French. We didn’t make it up.”

  Harper continued to hover at Renata’s shoulder, nodding along respectfully as Renata spoke, like those people who stand behind politicians at press conferences.

  “Well, I just wanted to introduce you to Amabella and Jackson’s nanny, who also happens to be French! Quelle coïncidence! This is Juliette.” Renata indicated a petite girl with short red hair and an oddly arresting face, dominated by a huge, luscious-lipped mouth. She looked like a very pretty alien.

  “Pleased to meet you.” The nanny held out a limp hand. She had a strong French accent and looked bored out of her mind.

  “You too,” said Jane.

  “I always think it’s nice for the nannies to get to know each other.” Renata looked brightly between the two of them. “A little support group, shall we say! What nationality are you?”

  “She’s not a nanny, Renata,” said Madeline from the bench, her voice brimming with laughter.

  “Well, au pair, then,” said Renata impatiently.

  “Renata, listen to me, she’s a mother,” said Madeline. “She’s just young. You know, like we used to be.”

  Renata glanced uneasily at Jane, as if she suspected a practical joke, but before Jane had a chance to say anything (she felt like she should apologize), someone said, “Here they come!” and all the parents surged forward as a pretty, blond, dimpled teacher who looked like she’d been cast for the role of kindergarten teacher ushered the children out from a classroom.

  Two little fair-headed boys charged out first like they’d been shot from a gun and headed straight for Celeste. “Oof,” grunted Celeste as two little fair heads rammed her stomach. “I quite liked the idea of twins until I met Celeste’s little demons,” Madeline had told Jane when they were having their champagne and orange juice, while Celeste smiled distractedly, apparently unoffended.

  Chloe sauntered out of the classroom with her arms linked with two other little princess-like girls. Jane anxiously scanned the children for Ziggy. Had Chloe dumped him? There he was. He was one of the last to come out, but he looked happy. Jane gave him an OK? thumbs-up signal, and Ziggy lifted both thumbs up and grinned.

  There was a sudden commotion. Everyone stopped to look.

  It was a little curly-haired girl. The last one to come out of the classroom. She was sobbing, her shoulders hunched, clutching her neck.

  “Aww,” breathed the mothers, because she looked so pitiful and brave and her hair was so pretty.

  Jane watched Renata hurry over, followed at a more relaxed pace by her odd-looking nanny. The mother, the nanny and the pretty, blond teacher all bent down to the little girl’s height to listen to her.

  “Mummy!” Ziggy ran to Jane, and she scooped him up.

  It seemed like ages since she’d seen him, as if they’d both been on journeys to exotic far-off lands. She buried her nose in his hair. “How was it? Was it fun?”

  Before he could answer, the teacher called out, “Could all the parents and children listen up for a moment? We’ve had such a lovely morning, but we just need to have a little chat about something. It’s a little bit serious.”

  The teacher’s dimples quivered in her cheeks, as if she were trying to put them away for a more appropriate time.

  Jane let Ziggy slide back down to his feet.

  “What’s going on?” said someone.

  “Something happened to Amabella, I think,” said another mother.

  “Oh, God,” said someone else quietly. “Watch Renata get on the warpath.”

  “Now, someone just hurt Annabella—I’m sorry, Amabella—and I want whomever it was to come over and apologize, because we don’t hurt our friends at school, do we?” said the teacher in her teacher voice. “And if we do, we always say sorry, because that’s what big kindergarten children do.”

  There was silence. The children either stared blankly at the teacher or swayed back and forth, looking at their feet. Some of them buried their faces against their mothers’ skirts.

  One of Celeste’s twin boys tugged on her shirt. “I’m hungry!”

  Madeline hobbled over from her seat under the tree and stood next to Jane. “What’s the holdup?” She looked around her. “I don’t even know where Chloe is.”

  “Who was it, Amabella?” said Renata to the little girl. “Who hurt you?”

  The little girl said something inaudible.

  “Was it an accident, maybe, Amabella?” said the teacher desperately.

  “It wasn’t an accident, for heaven’s sake,” snapped Renata. Her face was aflame with righteous rage. “Someone tried to choke her. I can see marks on her neck. I think she’s going to have bruises.”

  “Good Lord,” said Madeline.

  Jane watched the teacher squat down at the little girl’s level, her arm around her shoulders, her mouth close to her ear.

  “Did you see what happened?” Jane asked Ziggy. He shook his head vigorously.

  The teacher stood back up and fiddled with her earring as she faced the parents. “Apparently one of the boys . . . um, well. My problem is that the children obviously don’t know one another’s names yet, so Amabella can’t tell me exactly which little boy—”

  “We’re not going to let this go!” interrupted Renata.

  “Absolutely not!” agreed her hovering blond friend. Harper, thought Jane, trying to get all the names straight. Hovering Harper.

  The teacher took a deep breath. “No. We won’t let it go. I wonder if I could ask all the children . . . well, actually, maybe just the boys, to come over here for just a moment.”

  The parents pushed their sons forward with gentle shoves between the shoulder blades.

  “Over you go,” said Jane to Ziggy.

  He grabbed hold of her hand and looked up at her pleadingly. “I’m ready to go home now.”

  “It’s OK,” said Jane. “It’s just for a moment.”

  He wandered over and stood beside a boy who looked like a giant next to Ziggy. He was about a head taller than her son, with black curly hair and big strong shoulders. He looked like a little gangster.

  The boys formed a straggling line in front of the teacher. There were about fifteen, of all shapes and sizes. Celeste’s fair-haired twins stood at the end; one of them was running a Matchbox car over his brother’s head, while the other one swatted it away like a fly.

  “It’s like a police lineup,” said Madeline.

  Someone snickered. “Stop it, Madeline.”

  “They should all face forward, then turn to the side to show their profiles,” continued Madeline. To Celeste she said, “If it’s one of your boys, Celeste, she won’t be able to tell the difference. We’ll have to do DNA testing. Wait—do identical twins have the same DNA?”

  “You can laugh, Madeline; your child isn’t a suspect,” said another mother.

  “They’ve got the same DNA but different fingerprints,” said Celeste.

  “Right, then, we’ll have to dust for fingerprints,” said Madeline.

  “Shhhh,” said Jane, trying not to laugh. She felt so desperately sorry for the mother of the child who was about to be publicly humiliated.

  The little girl called Amabella held on to her mother’s hand. The redheaded nanny folded her arms and took a step back.

  Amabella surveyed the line of boys.

  “It was him,” she said immediately. She pointed at the little gangster kid. “He tried to choke me.”

  I knew it, thought Jane.

  But then for some reason the teacher was putting her hand on
Ziggy’s shoulder, and the little girl was nodding, and Ziggy was shaking his head. “It wasn’t me!”

  “Yes, it was,” said the little girl.

  Detective-Sergeant Adrian Quinlan: A post-mortem is currently being undertaken to ascertain cause of death, but at this stage I can confirm the victim suffered right-rib fractures, a shattered pelvis, fractured base of skull, right foot and lower vertebrae.

  7.

  Oh, calamity, thought Madeline.

  Wonderful. She’d just made friends with the mother of a little thug. He’d seemed so cute and sweet in the car. Thank God he hadn’t tried to choke Chloe. That would have been awkward. Also, Chloe would have knocked him out with a right hook.

  “Ziggy would never . . .” said Jane.

  Her face had gone completely white. She looked horrified. Madeline saw the other parents take tiny steps back, forming a circle of space around Jane.

  “It’s all right.” Madeline put a comforting hand on Jane’s arm. “They’re children! They’re not civilized yet!”

  “Excuse me.” Jane stepped past two other mothers and into the middle of the little crowd, like she was stepping onto a stage. She put her hand on Ziggy’s shoulder. Madeline’s heart broke for them both. Jane seemed young enough to be her own daughter. In fact Jane reminded her a little of Abigail: that same prickliness and shy, dry humor.

  “Oh dear,” fretted Celeste next to Madeline. “This is awful.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” said Ziggy in a clear voice.

  “Ziggy, we just need you to say sorry to Amabella, that’s all,” said Miss Barnes. Bec Barnes had taught Fred when he was in kindergarten. It had been her first year out of teachers college. She was good, but still very young and a bit too anxious to please the parents, which was absolutely fine when the parent was Madeline, but not when Renata Klein was the parent, and out for revenge. Although to be fair, any parent would want an apology if another child tried to choke theirs. (It probably hadn’t helped that Madeline had made Renata look silly for thinking Jane was the nanny. Renata didn’t like to look silly. Her children were geniuses, after all. She had a reputation to uphold. Board meetings to attend.)

  Jane looked at Amabella. “Sweetheart, are you sure it was this boy who hurt you?”

  “Could you say sorry to Amabella, please? You really hurt her quite badly,” said Renata to Ziggy. She was speaking nicely, but firmly. “Then we can all go home.”

  “But it wasn’t me,” said Ziggy. He spoke very clearly and precisely and looked Renata straight in the eye.

  Madeline took her sunglasses off and chewed on the stem. Maybe it wasn’t him? Could Amabella have gotten it wrong? But she was gifted! She was actually quite a lovely little girl too. She’d been on playdates with Chloe and was very easygoing and let Chloe boss her about, taking the supporting role in whatever game they were playing.

  “Don’t lie,” Renata snapped at Ziggy. She’d dropped her well-bred, “I’m still nice to other people’s kids even when they hurt mine” demeanor. “All you need to do is say sorry.”

  Madeline saw Jane’s body react instantly, instinctively, like the sudden rear of a snake or pounce of an animal. Her back straightened. Her chin lifted. “Ziggy doesn’t lie.”

  “Well, I can assure you Amabella is telling the truth.”

  The little audience became very still. Even the other children were quiet, except for Celeste’s twins, who were chasing each other around the playground, yelling something about ninjas.

  “OK, so we seem to have reached a stalemate here.” Miss Barnes clearly didn’t know what in the world to do. She was twenty-four years old, for heaven’s sake.

  Chloe reappeared at Madeline’s side, breathing hard from her exertions on the monkey bars. “I need a swim,” she announced.

  “Shhh,” said Madeline.

  Chloe sighed. “May I have a swim, please, Mummy?”

  “Just shhhh.”

  Madeline’s ankle ached. This was not turning out to be a very good fortieth birthday, thank you very much. So much for the Festival of Madeline. She really needed to sit back down. Instead she limped into the middle of the action.

  “Renata,” she said. “You know how children can be—”

  Renata swung her head to glare at Madeline. “The child needs to take responsibility for his actions. He needs to see there are consequences. He can’t go around choking other children and pretend he didn’t do it! Anyway, what’s this got to do with you, Madeline? Mind your own beeswax.”

  Madeline bristled. She was only trying to help! And “mind your own beeswax” was such a profoundly geeky thing to say. Ever since the conflict over the theater excursion for the gifted and talented children last year, she and Renata had been tetchy with each other, even though they were ostensibly still friends.

  Madeline actually liked Renata, but right from the beginning there had been something competitive about their relationship. “See, I’m just the sort of person who would be bored out of my mind if I had to be a full-time mother,” Renata would say confidentially to Madeline, and that wasn’t meant to be offensive because Madeline wasn’t actually a full-time mother, she worked part-time, but still, there was always the implication that Renata was the smart one, the one who needed more mental stimulation, because she had a career while Madeline had a job.

  It didn’t help that Renata’s older son Jackson was famous at school for winning chess tournaments, while Madeline’s son Fred was famous for being the only student in the history of Pirriwee Public brave enough to climb the giant Moreton Bay Fig tree and then leap the impossible distance onto the roof of the music room to retrieve thirty-four tennis balls. (The Fire Brigade had to be called to rescue him. Fred’s street cred at school was sky-high.)

  “It doesn’t matter, Mummy.” Amabella looked up at her mother with eyes still teary. Madeline could see the red finger marks around the poor child’s neck.

  “It does matter,” said Renata. She turned to Jane. “Please make your child apologize.”

  “Renata,” said Madeline.

  “Stay out of it, Madeline.”

  “Yes, I don’t think we should get involved Madeline,” said Harper, who was predictably nearby and spent her life agreeing with Renata.

  “I’m sorry, but I just can’t make him apologize for something he says he didn’t do,” said Jane.

  “Your child is lying,” said Renata. Her eyes flashed behind her glasses.

  “I don’t think he is,” said Jane. She lifted her chin.

  “I just want to go home now, please, Mummy,” said Amabella. She began to sob in earnest. Renata’s weird-looking new French nanny, who had been silent the whole time, picked her up, and Amabella wrapped her legs around her waist and buried her face in her neck. A vein pulsed in Renata’s forehead. Her hands clenched and unclenched.

  “This is completely . . . unacceptable,” Renata said to poor distraught Miss Barnes, who was probably wondering why they hadn’t covered situations like this at teachers college.

  Renata leaned down so that her face was only inches away from Ziggy. “If you ever touch my little girl like that again, you will be in big trouble.”

  “Hey!” said Jane.

  Renata ignored her. She straightened and spoke to the nanny. “Let’s go, Juliette.”

  They marched off through the playground, while all the parents pretended to be busy tending to their children.

  Ziggy watched them go. He looked up at his mother, scratched the side of his nose and said, “I don’t think I want to come to school anymore.”

  Samantha: All the parents have to go down to the police station and make a statement. I haven’t had my turn yet. I feel quite sick about it. They’ll probably think I’m guilty. Seriously, I feel guilty when a police car pulls up next to me at the traffic lights.

  8.

  Five Months Before the Trivia Night

  The reindeers ate the carrots!”

  Madeline opened her eyes in the early morning light to see a half-e
aten carrot shoved in front of her eyes by Chloe. Ed, who was snoring gently next to her, had taken a lot of time and care last night, gnawing on the carrots to make the most authentic-looking reindeer bites. Chloe was sitting comfortably astride Madeline’s stomach in her pajamas, hair like a mop, big grin, wide-awake shiny eyes.

  Madeline rubbed her own eyes and looked at the clock. Six a.m. Probably the best they could hope for.

  “Do you think Santa Claus left Fred a potato?” said Chloe hopefully. “Because he’s been pretty naughty this year!”

  Madeline had told her children that if they were naughty, Santa Claus might leave them a wrapped-up potato, and they would always wonder what the wonderful gift was that the potato replaced. It was Chloe’s dearest wish for Christmas that her brother would receive a potato. It would probably please her more than the dollhouse under the tree. Madeline had seriously considered wrapping up potatoes for both of them. It would be such an incentive for good behavior throughout the next year. “Remember the potato,” she could say. But Ed wouldn’t let her. He was too damned nice.

  “Is your brother up yet?” she said to Chloe.

  “I’ll wake him!” shouted Chloe, and before Madeline could stop her she was gone, pounding down the hallway.

  Ed stirred. “It’s not morning time, is it? It couldn’t be morning time.”

  “Deck the halls with something and holly!” sang Madeline. “Tra la la la la, la la la la!”

  “I’ll pay you a thousand dollars if you stop that sound right now,” said Ed. He put his pillow over his face. For a very nice man, he was surprisingly cruel about her singing.

  “You don’t have a thousand dollars,” said Madeline, and she launched into “Silent Night.”

  Her mobile phone beeped with a text message, and Madeline picked it up from the bedside table while still singing.

  It was Abigail. It was Abigail’s year to spend Christmas Eve and morning with her father, Bonnie and her half sister. Skye, who was born three months after Chloe, was a fair-haired, fey little girl who followed Abigail around like an adoring puppy. She also looked a lot like Abigail had when she was a child, which made Madeline feel uneasy, and sometimes teary, as though something precious had been stolen from her. It was clear that Abigail preferred Skye to Chloe and Fred, who refused to idolize her, and Madeline often found herself thinking, But, Abigail, Chloe and Fred are your real brother and sister, you should love them more! which was not technically true. Madeline could not quite believe that all three had equal footing as Abigail’s half siblings.

  She read the text: Merry Christmas, Mum. Dad, Bonnie, Skye and me all here at the shelter from 5:30 a.m.! I’ve already peeled forty potatoes! It’s a beautiful experience being able to contribute like this. Feel so blessed. Love, Abigail.

  “She’s never peeled a freaking potato in her life,” muttered Madeline as she texted back: That’s wonderful, darling. Merry XMAS to you too, see you soon, xxx!

  She put the phone down on the bedside table with a bang, suddenly exhausted, and tried her best to restrain the little eruption of fury behind her eyes.

  Feel so blessed . . . A beautiful experience.

  This from a fourteen-year-old who whined if she was asked to set the table. Her daughter was starting to sound just like Bonnie.

  “Bleh,” she said out loud.

  Bonnie had arranged for the whole family to volunteer at a homeless shelter on Christmas morning. “I just hate all that crass commercialism of Christmas, don’t you?” she’d told Madeline last week, when they’d run into each other in the shops. Madeline had been doing Christmas shopping, and her wrists were looped with dozens of plastic shopping bags. Fred and Chloe were both eating lollipops, their lips a garish red. Meanwhile Bonnie was carrying a tiny bonsai tree in a pot, and Skye was walking along next to her eating a pear. (“A fucking pear,” Madeline had told Celeste later. For some reason she couldn’t get over the pear.)

  How in the world had Bonnie managed to get Madeline’s ex-husband out of bed at that time of morning to go to work in a homeless shelter? Nathan wouldn’t get up before eight a.m. in the ten years they’d been together. Bonnie must give him