Other People’s Diaries (16 page)

‘Not really,' Kerry confessed. ‘I just noticed the piece in the weekend paper and then someone mentioned it at the stall yesterday. I thought Annie would like it, given her ballet obsession.'

He didn't think it was necessary to admit that until yesterday he'd always thought Degas was pronounced as it was spelt.

‘Are you feeling all right?' Sandra asked.

‘Me?' Kerry feigned surprise. ‘I'm great thanks, never better. Had a really early night and went for a run this morning.'

He managed to stop himself before his burbling became even more ridiculous.

‘How about you? Are things okay?'

As he asked the question, he looked at Sandra properly for the first time.

‘Yeah, things are fine,' she answered without much enthusiasm. ‘Business is good and Annie's been really easy this week …' She trailed off.

Kerry looked at her again and had a shock of memory. This wasn't just a woman who tried to make his life difficult. She was the person he'd spent most of his adult life with, the one who'd held him all night when the dog he'd had since he was fifteen died, who'd looked at him with wonder over the tightly bound bundle of their newborn daughter.

‘Kerry …' she started to say something, but stopped as Annie barged past her legs dragging a princess trolley bag behind her.

Annie grabbed Kerry's hand and pulled him toward the car. ‘Let's go, Daddy. I want to see the ballet pictures.'

Kerry twisted back to face Sandra, pulling back hard enough on Annie's arm to keep himself in one spot. But Sandra waved him away.

‘Have a good day, I'll see you tonight. Maybe they'll have a fried breakfast at the gallery cafe for that hangover of yours,' she added, closing the door before Kerry could answer.

To be frank, the fact that I am still part of this group is a grave indication of what a disaster area my life is. Two years ago I would have done the first task, made Claire happy and then found any excuse to stop. But now I find myself actually wanting to write this diary.

Claire invited us all to dinner, which was horrendous (sorry Claire). Bianca demanded to know how she could find her father, swore at me, then burst into tears and rushed from the room. I told her again all there is to know. I got pregnant at the end of school to my boyfriend Sven (yes, really), a Swedish exchange student. By the time I realised I was pregnant, he was back in Sweden. There was never anything serious between us and I didn't tell him I was having a baby. I haven't heard from him for the last seventeen years.

I've always thought that I would be enough for Bianca, but now I'm not so sure. Is it the not knowing her father that changed Bianca? Or is it just something else she is using to be angry at me?

I don't know.

Bianca and I were always a team. For a long time it was just us. I smugly watched friends' unhappy relationships with their teenage children, thinking how good things were for us. Bianca was a star student loved by her teachers, with heaps of lovely
friends. Then she discovered ninemsn, text messaging and the colour black. Now it feels like my friend has gone somewhere else and left in her place a surly teenager who heartily dislikes me.

‘B
ee?'

There was no reply and Rebecca looked at her daughter in the rear-vision mirror.

Bianca's headphones were clamped down tightly over her ears.

At the next lights Rebecca turned in her seat and gestured for Bianca to take the headphones off. Bianca complied, rolling her eyes. Rebecca ignored the attitude. A plan had been forming in her mind since she'd woken that morning.

She'd been annoyed by Alice's last email which had told her that her next assignment was to spend some time with Bianca. All Alice's children were no doubt perfect, she'd thought – probably still wearing pastel-coloured OshKosh and leather sandals. Alice knew nothing about Bianca or how to deal with her.

But even while Rebecca had been angry, she'd known Alice was right. It wasn't exactly rocket science, but having been rebuffed so many times, Rebecca had given up trying to get close to her daughter. A tense stand-off was about as good as it got at the moment.

‘Do you have anything big on at school this morning?'

‘Whadda you mean big?'

‘Well, anything you really can't miss. Like an exam?'

Bianca, looking suspicious, shook her head.

‘Any chance you could cut school with me?'

Bianca, looking even more suspicious, said nothing.

‘It was just that … I noticed an ad for a new vegetarian cafe in West End. I thought we could go there for breakfast.'

‘You hate vegetarian food.'

‘No I don't.'

‘You do. I heard you tell Jeremy it always tastes like wheatgerm.'

It wasn't a question but a quiet fact.

‘Well … Yes, you're right, I did say that.'

Bianca went to put her headphones back on.

‘I could have a coffee,' Rebecca added quickly. ‘They'd serve coffee with caffeine in it, right?'

Bianca shrugged. ‘Yeah.'

‘So are you up for it?'

Again Bianca shrugged, clamping the headphones back onto her head. Taking that as an assent, Rebecca indicated right at the next lights. She wasn't sure what she was going to tell them at work – she'd used car trouble last time the nanny was sick.

Half an hour later, Rebecca was wishing she had broken down on the side of the road.

Although she and Bianca were alone, she felt distinctly like a third wheel as Bianca hadn't stopped text messaging the whole time they were there.

So accomplished was she that she could do it with the mobile under the table with only an occasional glance.

Rebecca's attempts at conversation had been met with monosyllabic answers and finally they had lapsed into silence, punctuated only by the sound of the keys on Bianca's phone.

Bianca had declared herself not hungry and ordered a carrot juice.

The coffee was bad, just as Rebecca had known it would be. She felt like Pollyanna, throwing conversation topics at her daughter with a lilt in her voice and a false smile plastered on her face.

Finally she'd given up the pretence that everything was okay.

‘Why are you so angry with me?'

She was sure it was the wrong approach. But Rebecca didn't care. It was the only thing she really wanted to know.

Bianca's fingers didn't even pause on the buttons. ‘What? Other than the fact that your whole generation has totally screwed up everything?'

Rebecca didn't quite know how to respond to that. ‘What do you mean?'

Bianca looked at Rebecca with utter disdain for her lack of understanding. She was suddenly reminded of when, seventeen
years ago, her mother had raised the idea of an abortion. Rebecca remembered looking at her mother in an identical way. Strangely the memory gave her some comfort.

‘Do you really think it's a coincidence that it hardly ever rains?'

Rebecca looked at her, trying to figure out where this was going. ‘It's a drought, it happens every twenty years. Always has. Always will.'

‘Not this time.' Bianca sounded as though she was talking to Sam. ‘The world is dying and your generation has killed it. When you were my age the future looked fantastic – my future is nothing like that.'

‘Well it's not like it was just me,' Rebecca began, knowing what a terrible argument that was.

‘No – just everyone like you. You leave your kids with someone else while you work to buy a fancy house and wanky wine. If I don't want to be part of the hours you allocate to “quality time” with me, then I'm being difficult.'

Bianca was clearly bored with the subject and smiled down at her mobile.

God, she was probably telling her friends about the conversation she was having with her mother before they'd even finished it!

Enraged, Rebecca reached across the table and pulled the phone out of her daughter's hands.

‘Now hang on a minute, young lady.'

Bianca rolled her eyes again and for just a moment Rebecca longed to slap her.

‘You are hardly blameless. Where do you think your computer came from, and your mobile? You can't sit in judgement on my lifestyle when you're part of it.'

Bianca looked at her calmly with all the confidence of youth. ‘It doesn't matter what I do, your generation has destroyed everything. And I'm an accessory just like everything else.' She looked at her watch and added, ‘I really need to get back to school. Are you going to drive me or do you want me to get a bus?'

L
illian stepped inside her door.

All she could smell was dirty flower water. The roses in the vase were well past their best, but she hadn't been able to find the energy to throw them out.

She still couldn't.

Out of habit, she flicked on the kettle as she walked into the kitchen and then realised she didn't want a cup of tea. She didn't want anything.

Today there had been more tests. Now she knew she didn't have a tumour, Lyme's disease or about three syndromes whose names had slipped off the neurologist's tongue but hadn't lodged in her memory. That was another symptom, apparently – short-term memory loss.

It was a strange thing, excluding illnesses. She was pretty sure that she should be happy that there was no sign of a tumour. But Lyme's disease or the others on today's list? It was hard to know how to react when she didn't know anything about each of these conditions. They were just a line of black ink on the specialist's file, but a possible life sentence for her. One of the lesser diseases was surely a better result than multiple sclerosis, which seemed to be the last man standing.

Without knowing whether to cheer or be disappointed as the results of each test came in, Lillian had arrived at a strange kind
of ambivalence. No complicated migraine? Okay then, move on to Parkinson's, then to diabetes …

Restlessly she headed into the bedroom. She'd felt unsettled ever since she'd had coffee with Alice the week before. Even though she knew she'd done nothing wrong, she felt as though she'd let Alice down in some way, and that annoyed her. It wasn't her fault Alice was miserable, or that she'd got it wrong when she suggested the answer for Lillian was to go overseas.

She didn't want to. Why was that so hard for everyone to understand? And if she were totally honest, she was more than a bit scared. It was all right for these younger women who had been practically brought up travelling to tell her to ‘just do it'.

Changing out of her fancy ‘Claire trousers', she threw them onto the bed and put on a sagging pair of jeans and a cotton blouse. Perhaps an hour in the garden would help clear her head.

It was strange, she thought as she looked around. Her whole married life she'd yearned to have a feminine bedroom, but David had always objected. She'd imagined huge pink roses on the bedspread, maybe some light green as a contrast. Maybe even a white mosquito net above the bed.

And yet, in the three years since David had died, Lillian had changed not one thing. The quilted bedspread was beige and the walls featured prints she'd stopped looking at a decade ago.

A faint enthusiasm stirred and she remembered a scrapbook she'd started years ago. Back when the children were young and money had been tight. She'd torn out pictures of decorating ideas she'd liked, even collected fabric samples. No doubt it was all hopelessly out of date, but it would be interesting to look at. Like everything else that had no other home, it would be in the storeroom under the house.

Lillian walked down the stairs, her hand running along the polished banister. Beneath the house was a cement-floored room which had been the children's playroom. These days Lillian almost never came down here.

Pausing only briefly in the room, she walked through the other door and outside. Underneath the front of the house David had built a fibro-sheeted storeroom which had become a sort of
organic collection of memories. Photos shared boxes with junk and objects she couldn't even identify – all without any obvious logic or order.

Lillian wrestled with the bolt and finally jiggled it out of the position it had sat in for at least a year. She pulled the door toward her and looked in at decades' worth of boxes stacked on precarious shelving.

The floor of the small space was crowded with random items. Lillian picked up a skateboard and an old fan heater and piled them to one side. She smiled faintly. David had despaired of her inability to keep everything in the type of order he saw as perfectly normal. She'd never been able to make him understand that when you had two small children demanding your attention, there just wasn't time to place things in a careful pile. The children had grown, of course, but the habit had stuck and Lillian's standard practice had been to open the storeroom door, throw something in and slam the door shut before it could fall out at her feet.

An old beer carton was crammed onto one of the middle shelves. Lillian pulled it out slightly and saw it was full of yellowing
Women's Weekly
cookbooks. She shoved it back in. A box full of curtains from Daniel's teenage bedroom, one stacked with Mills and Boons she'd once read voraciously. There was no way she was going to find what she was looking for.

There was a pile of boxes off to her right. Lillian flicked back the cardboard flaps of the nearest one and saw that it was full of Kyla's stuff. God knows why she'd kept it, or anything else in this storeroom. Old high school reports. An end of senior year T-shirt signed by a hundred forgotten school mates. A tattered purple plastic ring folder with biology assignments.

Across the front of the folder, the corners curled up and blackened, was a rectangular sticker. Lillian remembered Kyla receiving it when she'd gone in her first ever street march. It had been to commemorate International Women's Day and declared boldly in green and purple letters:
Girls Can Do Anything
.

She stared at the words. That was it.

Kyla and Alice had been brought up on that slogan. It hadn't
always worked out for them, but at least they hadn't been afraid to try.

‘Girls can do anything.' That's what she'd told Kyla when she was growing up. Thinking back, Lillian was sure she'd believed it, but only in relation to others, not herself.

Kyla still believed it. Probably Alice did too.

What was the point in sitting here, money in the bank, waiting for some disease or, in the best-case scenario, old age to claim her? What exactly did she have to lose? She couldn't think of a single thing.

Lillian replaced the folder, closed the ancient cardboard box and headed upstairs to find a phone.

She had a travel agent to call.