Spinning Around (20 page)

Ah, well. What did it matter, when my marriage was on the skids?

‘Never mind,' I said, just as Jonah hurled himself at me, complaining that he had hairs in his mouth. ‘Don't spit on the carpet, Jonah, stop it.'

‘It's yukky, Mummy, yuk! Get it out!'

‘Say please.'

‘Please.'

And then the builders arrived.

I'm not much good at craft. Not like Mandy the Wholefood Mother. At our playgroup, she does basic origami and marbling and potato stamps while I'm fumbling around trying to stick one piece of playdough onto another. She keeps on resurrecting these strange, ancestral pursuits like dried-apple dolls and cotton-reel knitting, while my only contribution to the children's entertainment has been Rorschach ink-blot butterflies. Early this year, she even had a project going where every child in the group drew a house, and each house was stuck onto a big piece of paper (in a sort of streetscape) and then Mandy arranged to have the streetscape reproduced by a muralist friend of hers on the wall of the church hall where playgroup is held. I mean, will you please tell me how this woman finds the
time
? Let alone the energy. Needless to say, her own kids are absolute founts of creativity; Jesse even draws his own designs onto his T-shirts.

As for Lisa, while she couldn't draw an elephant to save her life, she has a creative mind when it comes to
conceptualising
. If Liam wants fake tablets to fill up an old pill-box, Lisa will suggest cutting up a drinking straw. If Brice wants a drum, Lisa will burst a blown-up balloon and fasten one of the broken pieces over the end of an empty coffee tin with a rubber band.

As for me, I'm the sort of person who dreads
Play School
. On the one hand, it's great to dump the kids in front of the TV for half an hour, while you hang out the washing. On the other hand, by exposing the kids to
Play School
, you also risk exposing them to a segment about creating a slippery dip from a toilet roll, a milk carton and piece of string. I can't count the number of times that Emily has come running up to me, after an episode of
Play School
, and asked me to make a mobile phone or a spaceship. It's something I can't do even when I've seen the program— especially since I don't happen to have a bottomless supply of egg cartons, pipe cleaners, cotton reels, plastic lids and cardboard boxes sitting around the house. I mean, I've already got a storage problem. Despite valiant efforts, I really can't keep every single paddle-pop stick that walks through the door.

I once asked Mandy the Wholefood Mother about this— knowing that she was a craft expert—but she wasn't very helpful. Apparently, she won't
allow
paddle-pop sticks through the door, because they're usually attached to paddle-pops. Similarly, her kids are denied access to plastic drinking straws (because they're not biodegradable), the plastic net bags that onions often come in (because she grows her own onions) and the tiny, plastic tables that you sometimes get holding up the lids of pizza boxes. ‘I believe in allowing children a lot of space for creativity,' she explained, in an earnest fashion, ‘but not at the expense of the environment.'

Isn't it always the way? You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. No sooner do I start stocking up on empty little mini-Nutella tubs and plastic ice-cream containers than it turns out I'm ecologically irresponsible. For God's sake, it's recycling, isn't it? In a manner of speaking.

Anyhow, what I'm trying to say is that I'm a bit of a washout when it comes to craft. And that's an especially big problem on days when we're all stuck inside. If I could whip up a dinosaur cave out of papier-mâché, or a finger puppet out of an old rubber glove, there wouldn't be nearly as much whining and moaning on days like today. We had to stay at home this afternoon, you see, because I was waiting for Jim McRae to show up. And that meant we hit the inevitable moment when every toy had been rejected, every healthful snack had been consumed, and every drop of enjoyment had been wrung from watching the bricklayers at work in the garden. To distract Jonah from his desire to actually get in and
help
the bricklayers, using his own toy trowel and unrivalled expertise, I had to break out my copy of
Fun Crafts
for Little Fingers
. This, in turn, meant raiding my personal supply of cotton-wool balls and typing paper, so that we could make (or attempt to make) a clutch of fluffy little chicks, as well as the three nests to put them in. I tell you, it wasn't a job for the faint-hearted. Jonah, being a perfectionist, gets enraged very easily—and Emily can be rather patronising when her chicks' mouths (or flowers' petals, or boats' sails) turn out better than mine.

I could hear the builders snickering as she kindly offered to cut out my little paper diamonds ‘the right way'. ‘It's a bit hard,' she generously informed me. ‘But you can colour them in, okay?'

‘Okay. Thanks, Emily.'

I don't like playing to an audience. It's hard enough pulling off a convincing mummy act in front of the kids; it's doubly hard when you know that someone else is listening. Not that Mike and his mob spend all their time with their ears glued to cracks in the walls. Mostly they're hammering away with their radio turned on. But sometimes they need to use the toilet, or to borrow an old towel. Sometimes they take a break, and sit drinking bottles of water under the kitchen window. That's when they always manage to overhear me explaining to Emily why poos are brown, or what rainbows are for. (They've got to be for something; Emily's convinced of it.) Sometimes I don't realise that Mike's been eavesdropping until a frantic search for a lost plastic spade suddenly ends when he sticks his head through the kitchen door and waves the missing item under my nose, informing me that it was sitting in the clothes basket—which has been left by the Hills Hoist, in case I was wondering.

These days it's got to the point where I feel uncomfortable hanging my underclothes on the line. But what can I do? It's silly to use the dryer just for my underclothes. And really, there's nothing objectionable about Mike or his mates. They're cheerful and friendly, they work hard (when they finally get here) and they always remember to wipe their big, dirty Blundstones on the mat before they come in. Perhaps their taste in radio stations leaves a lot to be desired, but even there I can't fault them entirely, because they hardly ever listen to whatever program they select. They just seem to like a bit of background music as they haul bags of dry cement around in the broiling sun—and who can blame them?

Mike's a nice bloke. He's slow but he's careful, never taking short cuts or making guesses. I generally see him standing around in khaki shorts and a mortar-smeared T-shirt, peering intently at a truss or rivet over the top of his coffee cup, his tool-belt heavy with screwdrivers and tape measures and nails lined up like bullets in a bandolier. He doesn't say much. Nick, on the other hand, likes to talk. He's a hairy little guy who'd be quite happy discussing health insurance or his son's asthma or the fishmarkets with me all day long, if Mike would let him. Lars is very young; you can hear his laugh punctuating Nick's monologues, occasionally, and he'll sometimes sing along with the radio when he's by himself. Yusef hardly ever shows up. I don't know much about Yusef. Nick once told me that Yusef has a daughter with Crohn's disease. (Don't ask me how we got on to the subject.)

Anyway, there I was, surrounded by little cotton-wool balls studded with paper beaks, and there were Nick and Mike, mucking around with sandstock bricks and spirit levels right on the back step, and next thing you know, Jim McRae arrived. He timed it pretty well, actually, because I'd just put Jonah to sleep. Thank God bricklaying isn't a very noisy pursuit, or I never would have managed it; as it was, I had to give Jonah a bottle of warm milk. You'll probably shriek when you hear that. You'll probably say, ‘Don't you know how bad milk is for his teeth, before bedtime?' Well, the answer is: yes, I do know how bad milk is for his teeth before bedtime. And I also know that if Jonah ends up with dentures, it will be
all my fault
. But frankly, there comes a time when you just don't give a shit— and this was one of those times.

I mean, I had a cold. How could I pat him off to dreamland? Every cough would have woken him up again.

So Jonah was in bed asleep, looking like an angel with his arms flung out and his eyelashes making feathery half-moons on his flushed cheeks. (If you're ever cross with your kids, just look at them when they're sleeping; it puts you right every time.) As for Emily, she was still raring to go, flipping eagerly through
Fun Crafts for Little Fingers
, stopping every so often to raise big, pleading eyes and ask if we could do the steam train . . . the glove-puppets . . . maybe the Egyptian princess costume?

‘No, sweetie,' I replied, appalled at the complexity of some of the instructions. (‘
For moulding, you need to make paper pulp
.') ‘We don't want to do anything without Jonah, do we? He'd be really cross.' I was trying to persuade her that we should take a break from craft, and perhaps do a puzzle, when someone tapped at the kitchen door. Expecting it to be Mike, I said, ‘Come in!', my voice sounding snubbed and hoarse. Then I stared in confusion as a totally strange man entered the room.

‘Helen?'

‘Yes?' I blinked. He was very well dressed, for a builder.

‘You told me to come around the back,' he offered, and suddenly I recognised his voice. ‘So I wouldn't wake the baby.'

‘Oh!' I leapt to my feet. ‘Yes, of course. Sorry. I wasn't thinking. I was just—I was miles away. Sorry.'

‘That's okay.'

‘Um—right. Yes.' I tried to think. Where would we talk? The builders were outside. Emily was inside. ‘Emily, I'm going to put a video on. What about
The Little Mermaid
?'

‘No! I want to do a puzzle!'

‘You can do a puzzle
and
watch
The Little Mermaid
.'

‘Will you help me?'

‘Not just now.'

‘Please?' The Magic Word. I was impressed.

‘Mummy's got to do something for a while, Emily,' I explained, ‘so why don't I put on
The Little Mermaid
, and you can have some chocolate ice-cream? How about that?'

‘Yay!'

‘But you'll have to be careful, because I don't want you spilling it all over the rug.'

Another bribe. I'm hopeless. But at least it did the trick; in fact Emily was so excited about my unprecedented offer of icecream in the middle of the afternoon that she didn't really notice Jim McRae. If she spared him even a passing thought, she must have assumed that he was another builder—because we've had a lot of unfamiliar men passing in and out, over the last few months, and they've all been builders (or architects or plumbers or that kind of thing). She sat herself down in front of the TV without much fuss, and I was able to leave her there for half an hour.

But then I was faced with the problem of where I would take Jim. We couldn't talk in the living room. We couldn't talk in the kitchen or the enclosed verandah, because Mike and Nick were bound to overhear. Jonah was sleeping in the kids' room, so we couldn't talk in there; we couldn't even talk out the front, near his window, or we'd probably wake him up.

‘It's either the bathroom or our bedroom,' I whispered, wiping my nose. (We were standing in the hall, and Jonah was too close for comfort.) ‘I'm sorry. It's just these bloody builders—I didn't think they'd be coming today. They
never
show up, normally.'

‘It's okay,' murmured Jim. His appearance was a bit of a disappointment. He had such a nice voice that I'd been expecting someone big and impressive, with possibly a bloodhound's face, all wise and craggy under a thatch of salt-and-pepper hair, or perhaps something a bit more along the lines of Sherlock Holmes, sharp and finely drawn. But Jim was nothing like that. He was quite young, for a start. (Maybe even—horror of horrors—younger than me?) He was also quite short, and his face was instantly forgettable: fair-skinned, clean-shaven, with full cheeks and small features. His eyes were brown. His hair was brown. He looked like—I don't know, a chemist or something. An accountant. Mister Bland. He certainly didn't look like an ex-copper.

When I offered him coffee he shook his head.

‘No, thanks,' he replied.

‘Tea? Something cold?'

‘I'm fine, thanks.'

‘Okay, well . . .' I had to take him into the bedroom. It was a nightmare, but what choice did I have? And of course the bedroom looked like a
tip
, what with the pile of dirty laundry in the corner, and the scattering of used tissues on the floor, and the junk draped over every bedpost and doorhandle: scarves, handbags, broken blind cords, one of Emily's shell necklaces . . . Thank God I'd made the bed, is all I can say. But then we had to sit on the
edge
of the bed (as if I wasn't feeling embarrassed enough) while Jim McRae's bland, brown gaze flitted from wedding photo to anti-histamine tablets, from mangy slipper to discarded credit card receipt, from the stain above the door to the tear in the doona.

My heart was in my throat; it was like visiting a psychiatrist or a gynaecologist. He just waited, the way a gynaecologist does when you try to explain why your period's bugging you. Personally, if
I
were a private detective, I'd make more of an effort. I'd try to put people at their ease, instead of watching them like a customs and immigration officer at Sydney airport.

I had to take a deep breath before I spoke, as if I was diving off a cliff into the sea.

‘Well, like I said, I've got this problem with my husband. I think he might be involved with someone, but I don't know. So I want to find out.'

He nodded gravely. He didn't ask if I had discussed the matter with my husband. Maybe he didn't want to know all the sordid details. Maybe he'd been the recipient of too many tortuous, hysterical confidences regarding other people's marital difficulties.