Spinning Around (30 page)

This, as you may imagine, was a most unwelcome blast from the past. And before I told Matt about it (knowing that he would absolutely hit the roof, when he heard), I rang Stuart. Remember Stuart? The guy who recommended Jim? I rang him and asked if this Jim McRae bloke was really on the level.

‘What do you mean?' Stuart asked, perplexed. ‘What's he done?'

‘Have you had much to do with him, Stuart? Do you know what his background is? Why did he leave the police force, anyway?'

‘
Helen
. What's he
done
?'

‘He kind of … well, he won't leave me alone. That's all. It's creepy.'

Silence on the other end of the line.

‘I don't know if he's touting for more business or what. I don't know what to think.' A pause. ‘Stuart? Are you there?'

‘I'm here.' He sounded grumpy. ‘All right, I'll see what I can do.'

‘Thanks, Stuart.'

‘I mean,
I'm
not a private detective. I can't promise anything. But I'll ask around.'

So he did. And he found out that Jim McRae had left the police force after an incident involving a policewoman. ‘I couldn't get any details, really,' Stuart apologised. ‘You know what they're like. But I found out he was moved off the marital infidelity stuff by his former agency, after he had an affair with a client.'

‘Ah.'

‘Sorry, Helen. Nobody told
me
, as usual. I'm
right
out of the loop.'

‘In other words, he's a bit of a sleaze?'

‘Could be. Looks like it.' Stuart snorted. ‘Funny you haven't run into him yourself, working where you are.'

‘Yeah. Well thanks, Stuart.'

‘I'm sorry. It wasn't my fault. If anybody ever bothered to communicate with anyone, around here, I might know what the bloody score was.'

I told him it didn't matter. And it didn't, really, because all I had to do was send Jim McRae a strongly worded letter, on a piece of office stationery, warning him of the consequences that he might experience if he continued to harass me in such a manner. Harshly put, perhaps, but these things are best nipped in the bud. Especially when you know exactly where you stand. That had been my concern, you see—I'd been afraid that I was overreacting. It was
such
a relief to discover that I wasn't having paranoid delusions. About Matt, yes, but not about Jim. My instincts about Jim McRae had been spot-on.

Anyway, the letter worked. Jim McRae dropped out of sight, instead of lurking in the background like an evil smell. What's more, my kitchen's been done. Yes! It's all finished, and it's
beautiful
! Microwave shelf, Whirlpool dishwasher, stainless steel rangehood . . . the list goes on and on. I can sit there and bask in the gleam of it, the way other people bask in the sun. The back garden still looks like a dump (or should I say a Waste Management Facility?), but the extra bedroom's great—or will be, when it's painted—and who cares that it's yet another space to strew toys all over? That's what I tell myself: who cares? Who cares that Lisa's kids had chickenpox, last week, so mine will probably come down with it too? Who cares that Lisa and Simon have just paid off their mortgage, and are talking about buying an
investment property
on the north coast? Who cares that Paul and Kerry are also talking real estate, at the moment? (I guess Kerry's current abode isn't palatial enough for her; not enough bathrooms, perhaps?) Who cares that Ronnie's decided to spend a year overseas, travelling with Phil, after they get married? Who cares that Mandy the Wholefood Mother is five months pregnant? Yes, that's right—pregnant. She's heading for her fourth child now. How does she do it? How the hell does she cope? Do you know that woman uses cloth nappies, for God's sake? Is she
trying
to make me feel inadequate? Is that her bloody purpose in life?

But I won't let it get to me. I have to count my blessings, not cry for the moon. Until recently, I wouldn't lie in bed congratulating myself because I'd got a stain out of the good, damask tablecloth. No—I'd think about Matt's curious perception deficiency when it comes to things like dirty glasses or discarded shoes. I would think about the back garden, and the front gate (falling off ), and the stains on the couch, and the new stove (which has a faulty element), and the old hot water system, and the overdue bills, and the state of my hands (latest score: six bandaids), and Emily's diarrhoea, and the fact that I'm eight months overdue for a Pap smear, and I would wonder why everyone else's life seemed to be so much more organised, glamorous, or aesthetically pleasing.

Since the business with Josephine, however, I've discovered an entirely new perspective on things—a perspective which has only been strengthened by my twenty-year high school reunion.

I went to the reunion because Matt was safely at my side. Without Matt, I wouldn't have gone. He's a bit of a trophy, after all, and I was still glorying in the fact that I had managed to keep him. I had photographs of the kids, of course (it was an evening event, with no kids allowed), but snapshots of my offspring aren't something that I like to wave boastfully around. Don't ask me why. Other people do, and I always cringe when they start blathering on about accelerated learning programs and swimming certificates and computer literacy as if they're boasting about Porsches and beach cottages and harbour views. There's something about the whole process that makes me uneasy.

Anyway, I went. I wore my Lisa Ho cream silk chiffon (which was beginning to stretch a little at the seams, but who cares?), my Italian slingbacks, my mother-of-pearl evening shawl and my gold earrings. I looked okay. Matt wore black pants, a dark grey shirt and his wedding ring, and looked devastatingly gorgeous. We hired a professional babysitter—I won't even tell you how much she cost—and drove to a hotel at Milson's Point, where we had a lot of trouble finding a place to park.

The reunion committee had hired a convention room from seven-thirty until one; there were drinks, canapés, and a modest dance floor. Everyone was given a name tag. The venue was fitted out in your typical corporate-hotel fashion, so blandly and correctly that I can hardly remember a thing about it. (Shades of veal and cinnamon? Curtains hiding the walls?) Hotel staff in black and white circulated with trays of spring rolls, marinated prawns, miniature quiches, satay sticks. Music played continually, but no-one paid it the slightest attention at first.

We were all too busy talking.

School reunions are curious things. You suddenly feel young, but at the same time incredibly old. You converse with people so easily, falling back into ancient habits, yet at the same time you're aware that you have almost nothing in common with them any more. I recognised and remembered almost every schoolmate there, because I went to a girls' school; no-one had gone bald or grown a beard. Nevertheless, many of them had changed enormously, in attitude as well as appearance. It was difficult to reconcile the bitch-queens of old with the dazed and worn-looking part-time physiotherapists who came up to me with tremulous smiles on their faces, saying: ‘Do you remember on the train, when we used to flirt with the guys from Grammar?' Many of the former cliques and divisions seemed to have evaporated into thin air. Uneasy truces had somehow blossomed into noisy expressions of delight: screams, laughs, embraces. A teenaged stunner had metamorphosed into a pudgy, middle-aged mother of six. A notorious flirt, now twice divorced, had turned up unaccompanied, white and jittery and angular, chain-smoking on the terrace outside.

Yet the ghosts of the past still exerted some control over the present. The awkward outcast remained, to some degree, an awkward outcast, despite her hugely successful career in the public service. The noisy, joyous, opinionated leader was still the centre of attention, as dishevelled and sharp-witted as she ever was. The bony artist was now a bony graphic designer. The childhood sweethearts had now been married for nineteen (nineteen!) years. My old friend Caroline was wearing the same sort of stuff she wore on that memorable hen's night when I first met Matt.

I had braced myself for the success stories, and there were several. There was a woman who, in partnership with her husband, had made a colossal amount of money from computers, and now owned a villa in the south of France as well as a waterfront penthouse in Sydney. There was a TV anchorwoman whose name had been linked (in publications such as
Who
Weekly
) with a well-known Australian actor. There was a neurosurgeon. An opera singer. A hot-shot corporate lawyer who'd been mentioned on the news.

I'd been fairly close to the lawyer and the opera singer at school. The lawyer, whose name is Tracy, was then a tall, pale, sarcastic girl with a rather sickly constitution. She's still tall and pale, but her health's a lot better, and her attitude is one of quizzical resignation. The opera singer, Sally, has the same fluting voice and bouncy hair that she once did, but she's put on weight (she has a
fabulous
cleavage) and seems a lot wilder than she was. I found myself talking to them both, and to my old mate Deborah—who was a teacher before she decided to follow in her mother's footsteps and raise three strapping children for a wealthy man on the North Shore—and I was astonished, absolutely astonished, at what they had to say.

First of all, they informed me that I hadn't changed a bit. Not one little bit. When I replied that I had gone up four dress sizes since last we met, there were groans all round. ‘Only four, you lucky bitch?' Sally chirruped. ‘I should be so lucky!'

‘It's the kids that do it to you,' said Deborah. ‘Five kilos for each kid—that's my experience.'

‘But I don't have kids!' Sally objected. ‘At least, not little ones. I've got a full-grown child helping to pay the rent, but I don't think he'd really work as a father.'

‘Do you want kids?' asked Tracy, standing in a poignantly familiar attitude, her long legs crossed awkwardly at the knee.

‘I don't know. Probably.' Sally's expression was rather blank. ‘But I'd want a place to put them in first. A decent home. Not to mention a reliable other half.'

‘Adam and I are on IVF,' Tracy revealed, and there was a sympathetic murmur.

‘For how long?' I inquired.

‘A year. I get so sick, from those hormone injections.'

‘Really?'

‘Oh yeah. It's terrible.' She went on to reveal that she'd had two miscarriages. Deborah had also suffered a miscarriage. Their lives began to take shape in my head: Tracy was all set up in a Coogee house, with a sympathetic husband and a nursery fitted out with Laura Ashley drapes and Lamaze soft toys, calmly and patiently waiting as she pursued her high-profile international cases. Sally, who was being poorly paid for her romantic roles, yearned for a decent little flat of her own, and perhaps a decent man to put in it, though she seemed to be making do with a series of very sexy, if somewhat rackety, theatrical types. Deborah had survived a nasty bout of postnatal depression after her third child (now three) was born, and couldn't praise her husband enough because he didn't let the pressures of his business overwhelm him to the detriment of his family.

‘But I can't believe you're working,' she said to me, shaking her head. ‘I can't believe you manage it. I'm in awe.'

‘So am I,' Sally agreed.

‘I've only got two kids, Deb,' I pointed out. ‘You've got three.'

‘If I had
one
, it'd still be too much for me,' Sally declared. ‘I babysit my nephews, and I'm a
wreck
. A wreck! I have to go to bed for a whole day, afterwards.'

‘Do you find it difficult, Helen?' Tracy asked, then smiled. ‘Silly question, I suppose.'

‘Actually, work is the least of my problems,' I admitted. ‘Work's a piece of piss. Moving everything else around to accommodate it—that's the problem.'

‘I don't know how
we're
going to do it,' Tracy said thoughtfully. ‘I'll have to keep working, because of the mortgage, but I'm not sure how.'

‘Where do you live, Trace?' Sally wanted to know.

‘Coogee.'

‘Oh, Coogee.' A sigh. ‘God, I'd love a house in Coogee.' Sally glanced at Deborah. ‘Or Pymble. Or Dulwich Hill. Or
anywhere
. You lucky things.'

‘Be fair, Sal.' By this time I'd learnt her boyfriend's name. He was an extremely attractive stage actor who had recently bagged a small part in a big-budget movie. ‘You've got Ian Braidwood on tap,' I said. ‘You can't have every-fucking-thing, you cow.'

‘Says you,' Deborah interrupted, and turned to Tracy. ‘Have you seen her husband? What's his name—Matthew? He is such a spunk.'

‘Really?' Tracy cast about. ‘Where?'

‘Over there.'

‘Oh yes. I see. Mmmm . . . nice.'

She wasn't envious, however. Appreciative, but not envious. That's what I noticed about all of them. They felt that they had achieved something. I could tell that just from the tone of their voices when they talked about the important things in their lives. What's more, they felt that
I
had achieved something. They said as much. It didn't matter to Deb that I used disposable nappies instead of cloth ones; she still called me ‘super-mum'. It didn't matter to Sally that my house was dim and narrow, with a broken front gate; she still viewed it as an unattainable prize. As for Tracy, she sighed gently over my photographs of Emily and Jonah. ‘They're gorgeous,' she said. ‘You must be so proud of them.'

‘I am,' I replied. And it's true. I know that I bitch and moan (a mother's got to vent, as Lisa would say), but I'm proud of my kids, and the fact that I raised them. They're an achievement. So is my job, and my house, and the state of my marriage. I've been lucky, of course, but I've also worked hard. I've cooked and cleaned and sewn and budgeted and planned and laundered and bluffed and negotiated my way to this vantage point. It might have been a messy road, but it's actually led somewhere. When I stop and reflect on my life as a whole, it occurs to me that I've pretty much got where I wanted to go. I guess I've just lost sight of the forest for the trees, on occasion. (Mind you, some of those trees have been pretty damned big.) All things considered, I'm not such a hopeless, disorganised slob after all. Okay, so I let the kids watch too much TV. Okay, so I can't get rid of certain stains on the couch. Well none of us is perfect, right? Except perhaps Mandy the Wholefood Mother. And even she resorted to plastic surgery, at one stage.