The Last Anniversary (35 page)

Callum’s hand is warm on the back of her neck and he’s pulling her to him, and some sober, tomorrow part of her mind is saying, Calm down, Sophie, it’s only a tacky, drunken kiss, it’s not a tidal wave, it’s not an earthquake, it’s not a
miracle
, but some other part of her mind is thinking what a beautiful and appropriate word
swoon
is and how she’s swooning like a regency-romance heroine who’s never been kissed in her life except that now, oh God, oh fuck, oh thank you, his tongue is in her mouth, and has every other kiss in her life been leading up to this ultimate, perfect kiss? Yes, she thinks it has.

Eating the samosa is like eating a piece of evil. Grace is committed to going ahead but she hadn’t realised just how difficult it would be to go up against the habits of a lifetime. She has to physically force the hand holding the samosa up to her mouth, as though the air around her has turned into wet concrete. For a few seconds her mouth stays jammed shut while her nostrils contract in horror–nuts, nuts, we smell nuts!–but finally she manages to unclamp her lips and shovel a corner into her mouth. She is standing away from the crowds on the main street, leaning with her back against a tree. The crowd is a heaving, solid mass, faces glowing under the lights of the giant heaters. Callum and Sophie must be in there somewhere. Dancing, probably. Making life look so simple. She waits and there it is. The first warning of every allergic attack of her life. A shuddery shiver straight down her back, icy fingertips caressing her spine. She swallows convulsively and waits. There is the unbearable sandpaper scratch in her throat. It’s moving faster than any other reaction she can remember. She’s being strangled from the inside. Her eyes fill with water. She claws at the bark of the tree. The pain is her punishment for not loving her baby. But now it’s impossible to hold on to that thought because she can’t breathe. What a complete fool! What an idiotic thing to do. Every thought in her head is wiped clean except for the need to breathe. For God’s sake,
she can’t breathe.

Rose is exhilarated. She wants to dance. Her backache has vanished. ‘It’s all over,’ she says to Enigma. ‘I told Connie years ago we should just tell everybody the truth. I feel so good! I feel all light and airy!’

Enigma is crying, of course, snuffling into her hanky. ‘Well, I certainly don’t feel light and airy! Oh! Why isn’t Margie here? Laura, make Rose stop talking! Do something! It’s all your dreadful friend’s fault!’

The Kook has put his urn on the floor and has folded his arms aggressively across his chest. ‘People are going to want to sue you. It’s fraud. You women have committed fraud.’

‘Well, you should know all about fraud,’ says Laura. ‘Because that’s what you were here to commit, weren’t you? You thought because you knew the truth you could get away with this pathetic stunt! Got some more gambling debts to pay off, have you?’

‘Oh, dear.’ Enigma is momentarily diverted from her crying. ‘I don’t think you should date a gambler, dear. They’re awful people, gamblers.’

‘For God’s sake, Mum, I’m not seeing him!’ says Laura. Rose notices for the first time that Laura is looking better than she has in years. She has a lovely gold tan and her forehead looks all smoothed out and she’s wearing a wonderful necklace with an oval red stone.

‘Laura,’ she says, ‘that necklace is really beautiful!’

‘Don’t we have a few more important things to talk about here than Auntie Laura’s necklace?’ asks Veronika.

And that’s when somebody yells into the tent with frantic authority, ‘Is there a doctor here? There’s a girl having some sort of allergic reaction.’

‘Grace? Is it Grace?’ Enigma lifts her tear-stained face. Veronika has already sprinted from the tent, like a runner hearing a starting gun.

‘What’s going on?’ Veronika’s new friend jiggles the baby up and down in her arms. ‘Who is it?’

‘Where did I put my bag?’ Laura kicks violently at the ground around her. ‘Somebody find my bag!’ The Kook picks up a black leather bag from the ground and she snatches it from him and runs off behind Veronika, and Rose’s legs shake so badly that Enigma and the Kook have to grab at her elbows to stop her from falling.

What’s going on?

Some woman is having some sort of fit.

I think it’s an allergic reaction.

At the moment the words penetrate Sophie’s molten consciousness, Callum shoves her away from him, and it’s like being wrenched awake from a beautiful dream by a shrieking alarm clock.

Grace’s limbs flail in raw, uncontrollable panic. She clutches at her throat and makes guttural sounds. There is a blur of strange, frightened faces around her. And then there is a face leaning close to her and a swinging red pendant on a chain and a voice saying, ‘Hold on, Grace,’ and every molecule of her body is drawn to that familiar cranky voice, because of course
she
won’t let her die, of course she won’t.

T
he phone has been ringing at intervals for hours, it seems, but Sophie just lies in bed with her pillow held so firmly over her face that she is practically suffocating herself. She takes it away and pulls a face at the ceiling. She stretches out her mouth into an elongated oval. She scrunches her face into wrinkles and bares her teeth. She makes strange ‘Yah, yah!’ sounds, pretending she is insane and wishing she was. She puts the pillow back over her face.

She has a headache, of course. She knew she would have a headache, but actually it’s not even that bad, just a blurry ache behind her eyes. It’s a strange sort of hangover. Her mouth doesn’t feel horrible. It feels quite nice and nutmeg-ish.

It would be better if she had an all-consuming run-of-the-mill hangover that would make her forget the shameful, shrivelling feeling of Callum pushing her away. The revulsion on his face. As if he’d swallowed a fly! As if she was a desperate old tart trying to stick her tongue down his throat.

And then! It was like a nightmare. Seeing Grace’s beautiful face contorting spastically, spit at the corners of her mouth, her eyes rolling into the back of her head like a frightened horse. ‘Shit, I think she’s actually
dying
,’ somebody said in an awe-filled voice. Callum was on his hands and knees next to her, his fingers digging into the dirt, and Grace’s mother took a plastic tube from her handbag with yellow and black writing, pulled off the lid, and, without pausing for even a second, took a firm hold of Grace’s leg, lifted her arm high in the air and plunged it down, stabbing her, hard, murderously really, and the crowd gasped collectively but quietly, as if they were in church. Grace’s body arched in the middle and then slammed against the ground, and Sophie caught sight of Veronika, also on her hands and knees, bursting into tears, and Sophie had never seen Veronika cry before, and there was Thomas shouting into a mobile phone the words ‘anaphylactic shock’, his face all red, and Sophie had never heard Thomas raise his voice before, and it was all so awful, so truly awful.

Twenty minutes later a police-rescue boat came roaring up the river, but by then everyone knew that it looked like the woman who had the allergic reaction was going to be fine. She was breathing normally, thanks to her quick-thinking mother, and ‘Really, you’d think people with dangerous allergies would be a bit more careful about what they ate!’ The Anniversary Night was suddenly over and people were trooping down towards the wharf to line up for the ferry, with sleeping, face-painted children draped over their shoulders.

Callum and Laura went off in the boat with Grace to the hospital. Veronika recovered her normal frenetic equilibrium and was going on and on about how she didn’t understand how Grace would have eaten a samosa, when Mum had written her a note, and why in the world would you put walnuts in a samosa, they needed to have a good talk to the caterers, and had Sophie heard that the Alice and Jack story was a complete hoax, they never even existed. Aunt Rose had got pregnant with Grandma Enigma when she was sixteen and Connie had come up with this elaborate lie, it was such a
betrayal
really, and who was going to look after Jake tonight, she hadn’t brought Audrey along to provide free babysitting, and apparently Auntie Laura had seen Dad going off somewhere on his jet-ski, fully dressed and looking quite demented, and you’d think Mum would be home from her Weight Watchers party by now, and if Auntie Laura hadn’t been carrying around the EpiPen in her bag, Grace would be dead by now, no doubt about it, dead.

‘Is she always like this?’ Audrey had asked Sophie. ‘Should I slap her across the face?’

Sophie had wondered vaguely if
she
should offer to mind Jake for the night, but it didn’t seem appropriate. What if Callum came home and was horrified to find her touching his child and shoved her away again? Besides which, she was drunk, and she thought childminding was probably like driving, something you shouldn’t do when you’re over the limit. Luckily it soon became irrelevant because there was a family squabble over who should take Jake for the night. Aunt Rose said she’d do it, and Grandma Enigma said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you’ve got the Alzheimer’s, you can’t take care of a baby.’ Thomas said he and Debbie were all set up for Lily and they would take Jake home with them, although Debbie wasn’t such a good advertisement for motherhood herself, as she was sitting on the ground next to Lily’s stroller with her head in her hands, shaking her head sadly over her empty glass of mulled wine, while Lily reached over from her stroller and stroked her mother’s hair. Veronika said no, Jake had obviously taken a liking to Audrey, and she and Audrey would take him back to Callum and Grace’s house and stay the night there, and in the end nobody had the energy to argue with her, and it
did
seem that Jake looked very comfortable with Audrey and she seemed very competent and calm. So everybody went home to bed.

Sophie had walked back to Aunt Connie’s house in a daze. She’d managed to take off only one shoe before hopping into bed in her fairy dress, and obviously she’d had intentions of cleaning her teeth, because when she woke up she was still holding her toothbrush, with a carefully applied line of toothpaste. She has no memory of doing that at all.

The phone rings again. It’s probably her mother, feeling guilty about last night. This time it only rings a few times before it stops abruptly, as if the caller has slammed down the phone. Sophie continues pressing the pillow down into her face and tries to think of something extremely boring and non-emotional. Tax returns. She sets herself a mental test to see if she can remember her Tax File Number. It is a stupid test. She can’t remember one digit of her Tax File Number. All she can remember is how it felt to dance with Callum, and how her lips had tingled with anticipation as he lowered his head…and actually her bottom lip is still tingling quite painfully now.

She takes away the pillow and gingerly puts a finger to her lips. For God’s sake, that’s why her lips were tingling all night–because
she was getting a cold sore.

She hasn’t had a cold sore since she was sixteen. She gets out of bed and hobbles to the bathroom, still wearing one shoe, and looks at herself in the mirror. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the ugliest women of them all? There is an extraordinary strawberry-shaped blotch right in the centre of her lip. She’s been branded for kissing another woman’s husband. Her hair is a comical bird’s nest. There are half-moons of mascara under her eyes. She is a hung-over, herpes-ridden old witch. She is so ugly, it’s funny.

And what’s really funny is this: she does love him. It’s not a silly crush. She’s actually fallen in love with him. And she is never going to be with him. She doesn’t even want Grace to leave him. She just wants to be living in the parallel world where he never met Grace at all and instead he met Sophie at the Pseudo Echo concert back in the Eighties and they dated and got married and had three kids and now she pretty much takes him for granted and sits on his lap like he’s an old armchair and they’re trying to find ways to spice up their sex life and on Saturdays they ferry their kids around to soccer and netball and on Sundays they work in the garden. She wants that life so bad.

You stuffed up big time, buttercup.

The doorbell rings. Sophie doesn’t even bother to smooth down her hair. She is irretrievably unattractive. She kicks off her shoe and walks down the stairs in her crumpled-up pink fairy dress, fingering her cold sore with enjoyable disgust, muttering to herself like a mad old crone. She flings open the door.

‘Good morning, darling.’ It’s Rose, and she’s cut off all her hair. It’s a white elfin cap and it makes her neck look longer and her eyes larger. She’s wrapped in a stunning, richly beaded pashmina. ‘You look a bit tired.’

Sophie says, ‘Well, you look beautiful.’

‘I’ve dressed up to celebrate the end of the Munro Baby Mystery.’ Rose lifts a corner of the pashmina. ‘This is a gift from Laura. It’s from Nepal, or somewhere like that.’

As Rose turns her head to examine the fabric, Sophie feels a shock of recognition. She says, ‘I can’t believe I’ve never noticed before how much you look like Grace.’

Rose smiles sadly. ‘Well, she is my great-granddaughter, even though she doesn’t know it yet. Imagine that! If she’d died last night from her allergic reaction she would never have known I was her great-grandma. I think that’s terrible, I really do. I could wring Connie’s neck! What have you done to your lip, Sophie?’

Sophie holds the door open and lets Rose walk in front of her. She answers, ‘It’s a cold sore.’

‘Oh,’ says Rose. ‘I think you’re meant to put lemon juice on it. Who told me that? I know. It was Rick. The gardener. I think he gets them sometimes.’

Sophie makes a silent gruesome face at herself in Connie’s hallway mirror as she passes it.

‘Have you heard how Grace is this morning?’ she asks.

‘Yes, apparently she’s fine. Just shaken up. What a scare she gave us. We could have lost her. Thank goodness for Laura. Do you know what Thomas has done today? He’s gone out and bought one of those EpiPens for each of us. So we can
all
carry one, and they cost an absolute fortune! One for you as well! But you know Tom. He’s a terrible worrier. He’ll be worrying over this for years after we’ve all forgotten it! Oh, and did I mention Ron ended up in jail last night?’

‘
No
!’

‘Yes, it’s all a bit confusing. Margie had to go and get him and apparently she wasn’t at a Weight Watchers party at all. Enigma wasn’t making much sense because she’s very cross with me and thinks I’ve got Alzheimer’s. She won’t stop crying. What a night it was! What with the Kook, and Laura coming home, and Grace, and, well, goodness me! Anyway, why don’t you go and have a shower while I make us a cup of tea. Would you like me to scramble you a few eggs?’

‘Oh, no, no, sit down, please!’ Sophie flaps her hands ineffectually, but Rose is too much at home in Connie’s kitchen. She’s already taking out a glass bowl and tut-tutting as she discovers the eggs in the fridge. ‘You must keep your eggs at room temperature. I thought I’d mentioned that before? Quickly, go and have your shower. You’ll feel better. Then we’ll put some lemon on that cold sore and you can eat your eggs while I tell you the whole story about Alice and Jack. We’re going to put out something called a ‘Media Release’, you see, and I want everyone in the family to hear it all first before we go public.’

So, Sophie stands under the shower and lets the water spray hard on her face and thinks about how Rose meant her too when she said, ‘Everyone in the family.’ As she towels herself dry, the smell of scrambled eggs and coffee is drifting up the stairs and she wonders if there is something profoundly superficial about a person who can take so much pleasure in the thought of eating breakfast, even when her heart is split right in two.