Big Little Lies (15 page)

C
eleste could feel the pressure of Renata’s grip at the other end of the finishing tape, and she tried to match it with her own, except that she kept forgetting to concentrate on where she was and what she was doing.

“How’s Perry?” called out Renata. “In the country at the moment?”

Whenever Renata made an appearance at school or school events, she made an amusing point of not talking to Jane or Madeline (Madeline loved it, poor Jane not so much), but she always talked to Celeste, in a defensive, prickly way, as though Celeste were an old friend who had wronged her but she was choosing to be mature and rise above it.

“He’s great,” called back Celeste.

Last night it had been over Legos. The boys had left their Legos everywhere. She should have made them pick them up. Perry was right. It was just easier to do it herself after they were asleep, rather than do battle with them. The whining. The drama. She just didn’t
have the resilience last night to go through it. Lazy parenting. She was a bad mother.

“You’re turning them into spoiled brats,” Perry had said.

“They’re only five,” Celeste had said. She was sitting on the couch folding laundry. “They get tired after school.”

“I don’t want to live in a pigsty,” said Perry. He kicked at the Legos on the floor.

“So pick them up yourself,” said Celeste tiredly.

There. Right there. She brought it on herself. Every time.

Perry just looked at her. Then he got down on his hands and knees and carefully picked up every piece of Lego from the carpet and put it in the big green box. She’d kept folding, watching him. Was he really going to just pick it all up?

He stood and carried the box over to where she sat. “It’s pretty simple. Either get the kids to pick it up, or pick it up yourself, or pay for a fucking housekeeper.”

In one swift move he up-ended the entire box of Legos over her head in a noisy, violent torrent.

The shock and humiliation made her gasp.

She stood up, grabbed a handful of Legos from her lap and threw them straight at his face.

See there? Again. Celeste at fault. She behaved like a child. It was almost laughable. Slapstick. Two grown-ups throwing things at each other.

He slapped her across the face with the back of his hand.

He never punched her. He would never do anything so uncouth. She staggered back, and her knee banged against the edge of the glass coffee table. She regained her balance and flew at him with her hands like claws. He shoved her away from him with disgust.

Well, why not? Her behavior was disgusting.

He went to bed then, and she cleaned up all the Legos and threw their uneaten dinner in the bin.

Her lip was bruised and tender this morning, like she was about to get a cold sore. It wasn’t enough for anyone to comment upon. Her knee had banged against the side of the coffee table, and it was stiff and painful. Not too bad. Not much at all, really.

This morning Perry had been cheerful, whistling while he boiled eggs for the boys.

“What happened to your neck, Daddy?” said Josh.

There was a long, thin, red scratch down the side of his neck where Celeste must have scratched him.

“My neck?” Perry had put his hand over the scratch and glanced over at Celeste with laughter in his eyes. It was the sort of humorous, secret look that parents share when their children say something innocent and cute about Santa Claus or sex. As if what happened last night were a normal part of married life.

“It’s nothing, mate,” he’d said to Josh. “I wasn’t looking where I was going and I walked into a tree.”

Celeste couldn’t get the expression on Perry’s face out of her mind. He thought it was funny. He genuinely thought it was funny, and of no particular consequence.

Celeste pressed a finger to her tender lip.

Was
it normal?

Perry would say, “No, we’re not normal. We’re not Mr. and Mrs. Average, mediocre people in mediocre relationships. We’re different. We’re special. We love each other more. Everything is more intense for us. We have better sex.”

The starter gun cracked the air, startling her.

“Here they come!” said Renata.

Fourteen women ran straight at them as if they were chasing thieves, arms pumping, chests thrust forward, chins jutting, some of them laughing but most looking deadly serious. The children shouted and hollered. Celeste tried to look for the boys, but she couldn’t see them.

“I can’t run in the mothers race after all,” she’d told them this morning. “I fell down the stairs after you went to bed last night.”

“Awwww,” said Max, but it was an automatic whine. He didn’t seem to really care.

“You should be more careful,” Josh had said quietly, without looking at her.

“I should,” Celeste had agreed. She really should.

Bonnie and Madeline led the pack. They pulled in front. It was neck and neck.
Go Madeline,
thought Celeste.
Go, go, go—YES!
Their chests hit the finishing tape. Definitely Madeline.

•   •   •

B
onnie by a nose!” shouted Renata.

“No, no, I’m sure Madeline was first,” said Bonnie to Renata. Bonnie didn’t seem to have exerted herself at all. The color on her cheeks was just a little higher than usual.

“No, no, it was you, Bonnie,” said Madeline breathlessly, although she knew she’d won because she kept Bonnie in her peripheral vision. She bent over, hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. There was a stinging sensation on her cheekbone where her necklace had whipped across it.

“I’m pretty sure it was Madeline,” said Celeste.

“Definitely Bonnie,” interrupted Renata, and Madeline nearly laughed out loud.
So your vendetta has come to this now, Renata? Not letting me win the mothers race?

“I’m sure it was Madeline,” said Bonnie.

“I’m sure it was Bonnie,” countered Madeline.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, let’s call it a tie,” said a Year 6 mother, a Blond Bob in charge of handing out the ribbons.

Madeline straightened. “Absolutely not. Bonnie is the winner.” She plucked the blue winner’s ribbon from the Year 6 mother’s hand and pressed it into Bonnie’s palm, folding her fingers over it, as if she
were entrusting one of the children with a two-dollar coin. “You beat me, Bonnie.” She met Bonnie’s pale blue eyes and saw understanding register. “You beat me fair and square.”

Samantha:
Madeline won. We were all killing ourselves laughing when Renata insisted it was Bonnie. But do I think that led to a
murder
? No, I do not.

Harper:
I came in third, if anyone is interested.

Melissa:
Technically,
Juliette
came third. You know, Renata’s nanny? But Harper was all, “A twenty-one-year-old nanny doesn’t count!” And then, of course, these days, we all like to pretend Juliette never existed.

Samantha:
Listen, you need to get your head around the demographics of this 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.

C
eleste 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.”