Three Wishes (13 page)

Gemma opened her mouth and waited for something to come out.

Cat looked at her crossly. “See! Now I’ve upset you.”

“I’m sorry.”

Abruptly Cat changed the subject.

“So did
you know about Dan and Lyn at the time?”

“No,” Gemma said definitely.

“Well, thank God they never had sex. That would have been too revolting.”

There was no time for Gemma to prepare her face. Cat looked at her. “But Dan said—”

Lyn came back to the table with two coffees. She removed the salt and pepper shakers from Maddie and firmly placed her in the stroller, distracting her with a spoonful of cappuccino froth.

“What?” she said, as she sat down and saw Cat’s face. “What now?”

Immediately, she looked with furious accusation at Gemma.

“What did you say?”

Gemma woke to the smell and sound of the sea. Through the open doorway of the bedroom she could see straight down a short, beige carpeted hallway to a small balcony with a table and two chairs. The screen door was wide open, and without lifting
her head from the pillow she could see a sliver of ocean sparkling in the morning sun.

She kept still, enjoying the sensation of Charlie’s back warm against hers. She wondered if he was pretending to be asleep.

Every move was so significant, every word loaded, the morning after you had sex for the first time.

She could see her underwear strewn down the beige hallway in pleasingly provocative satin crumples. “Look! Matching underwear!” she’d slurred proudly through a red-wine induced haze the night before. “Well done!” Charlie had said, although he didn’t waste much time looking at it.

There was movement next to her, a hand reaching for her hip

“Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

She wondered how his postsex personality was about to manifest itself. You never could tell. She hated it when they woke up wary, with that now-don’t-you-be-thinking-this-is-a-relationship look in their eyes. If she saw even the slightest hint of that sort of look, she’d dump him on the spot.

“That was very lovely,” she said, watching 8:31 snap over to 8:32 on his bedside digital clock. “Last night, I mean.”

Most men, Gemma knew, were convinced they were extraordinarily talented lovers and simultaneously terrified that maybe they weren’t. It was important to pay them lavish compliments about their abilities. It put them in a good mood.

Actually, now she thought about it, it
had
been very lovely. Quite surprisingly lovely.

“That second time,” she continued thoughtfully. “I had a rather startling orgasm.”

There was a dry chuckle from next to her, and suddenly she found herself flipped over and enveloped in a gigantic bear hug, her face pressed against Charlie’s wide chest. He had a body like a footballer, except for his legs, which were heartbreakingly skinny. She breathed in the faint leftover scent of his aftershave.

“A
startling
orgasm, did you? Why, did you feel it in your left ear?”

“No. It was just startlingly delicious.”

“And why the surprise? I’m a locksmith. I have trained hands. Trained to unlock delicious orgasms. You should have been lying there thinking, Yep, just as I thought.”

Thank God! Postsex Charlie was still presex Charlie.

“I like to keep my expectations low to avoid disappointment.”

He reached over for the blind by his side of the bed and pulled hard at the cord so that sunlight instantly flooded the room. Gemma put her hands over her eyes. “Bright light! Bright light!”

“Perfect weather,” he said, uncovering her eyes. “Now. Gemma Kettle. Sweet Gemma Kettle. Here’s my proposal for the day. First, I think I’d better give you another startling orgasm. Then I think I should make you breakfast while you’re in the shower. Then you’ll be so turned on by my cooking skills—especially in light of your own shameful efforts last week—you’ll probably want to seduce me back into the bedroom. Then I think we should go down to the beach and have a boogie board. I’ve got a spare one. Can you boogie board? Then back here for a siesta and more startling sex. Then maybe a movie?”

Gemma stared at him. “Goodness.”

“Not enough sex?”

“No. That seems like quite a substantial amount.”

Charlie’s face changed. “Or you might have plans, of course. You probably have plans. My little sister tells me I’m too domineering. So you know, that’s fine, off you go to your plans, I don’t mind.”

He smiled at her, lines deepening on either side of his brown eyes with their ridiculous eyelashes. “I’ve got plans myself actually. Now I think about it.”

It seemed like everything he was feeling was right there in his eyes—a hint of nerves, a touch of laughter.

No secrets. She hated secrets.

“Sisters,” she said, pulling him to her. “Who cares what
they
think.”

They followed Charlie’s proposal to the letter.

“Nope. Won’t do,” Charlie announced as they sat down opposite each other in a café. “You’re too far away.”

He moved his chair from the opposite side of the table, so he was close enough to entwine his legs around Gemma’s.

He could make her melt like warm caramel.

Three weeks since she met him. Six dates. Two nights at his place. Two nights at hers. A lot of kissing. A lot of fine-quality sex. A lot of stupid jokes.

She knew it was always good at the start of a relationship, but was it always
this good?

Yes, probably.

“No sticky date pudding,” she said sadly, looking at the menu. “It’s gone out of fashion.”

“We should make our own,” Charlie said. “Let’s make a sticky date pudding together tomorrow night. Not that you’ll be any help. But you can stand around and look pretty and pass me things.”

“First I have to see my sister. I have to fix things.”

“I’m sure it’s not your fault.”

“Well. It is a little bit.”

“Do you fight a lot? Do triplets fight more than normal?”

“The Kettle triplets do. But I don’t think we’re normal. Mum used to take us to a club for triplets when we were little and some of them adored one another. We were so disgusted, we threw rocks at them.”

“Little savages.” Charlie stroked her wrist with his thumb.

“We got expelled from the Triplet Club for a whole month. Do you fight with your sisters? When I was little I used to have fantasies about having a big brother.”

“My sisters would have paid you to take me. I used to beat them up. I specialized in vicious Chinese burns.”

“No!”

“Yep. Then I went through my juvenile-delinquent stage and ignored them.”

Gemma was rather aroused at the thought of Charlie as a juvenile delinquent. She imagined him in a black leather jacket, striding in slow motion down a dimly lit street.

“Then once I got bored with delinquency, I suddenly became friends with them. It was nice. Like getting bonus friends overnight. Now we give each other relationship advice.”

“Really. What do they tell you?”

“Oh stupid things, of course. I don’t listen to them. But I give them very wise advice.”

“Like what?”

“Well, the other day one sister happily announced she’s seeing a married man, for Christ’s sake. So my advice was to stop it.”

“Oh, very wise. It might be a bit more complicated than that.”

“It’s not.” Charlie was looking around for the waitress. “Why are these women all avoiding eye contact with me do you think?”

“My sister fell in love with a married man. It was their destiny to be together. His ex-wife was a witch.”

“Mmm,” began Charlie disapprovingly, when a waitress finally appeared, fumbling in her apron for a pen.

“Before we order you have to tell us what happened to your sticky date pudding. My girlfriend is still recovering from the shock.”

The sweet, teenage pleasure of hearing herself described as Charlie’s girlfriend made her forget all about defending Lyn’s destiny.

It was 3
A.M
. that same night and Gemma burst gasping into consciousness, as if she’d been drowning in a deep, dark pool of sleep.

She’d forgotten something. Something very important.

What could it be?

Then it hit her and she screamed, “Charlie!”

He woke with a gasp and leapt straight out of bed, bouncing on his toes like a boxer, jabbing wildly at the air around him. “What? Where? Stay back!”

Gemma rolled out of bed, her legs trembly with fear. “We forgot! Charlie, how could we!”

She ran to the chest of drawers and began scrabbling wildly through her clothes, throwing them on to the floor. “We forgot we had a baby! We left it in the drawer!”

It would be too late. The baby would be dead. Babies needed
food,
or milk, or something! She imagined a tiny, shriveled-up corpse with accusing eyes. How terrible. How could they have forgotten? They were murderers.

Charlie was behind her, enfolding her in his arms. “We don’t have a baby, you fruitcake,” he said. “Come back to bed. It’s just a dream.”

“No, no.” She opened a new drawer. “We have to find our baby.”

But even as she was saying the words she was starting to doubt herself. Maybe there was no baby?

She turned to face Charlie. “We don’t have a baby?”

“No, we don’t have a baby. It’s a dream. Jesus. You frightened the hell out of me.”

“Sorry.” Now she felt a bit stupid. “Did I tell you that I sometimes have nightmares?”

“No, you didn’t.” He put his arm around her shoulders and guided her back toward the bed. “Just as a matter of interest, how often do you have them?”

“This is going
to sound bad,” said Dan, with the courageous expression of a bloody-lipped boxer stumbling back to his feet for another round. “But I sort of—forgot.”

“You forgot you slept with my sister.”

“I forgot.”

“You
forgot.”

“Yes.”

“How is that possible?” Cat felt insulted on Lyn’s behalf. “She lost her virginity to you!”

“I hadn’t even thought about it for years,” confessed Dan, “until Annie asked. All I remembered was going out with her a few times. But if Lyn says we did, then we did. I wouldn’t argue with Lyn. She probably records every shag on a spreadsheet.”

Cat refused to smile.

“I was young, I got around. It feels like another world.”

“You still get around.”

He flinched and took it like a man.

Cat believed him. He could remember rugby league grand final scores from fifteen years ago and quote whole slabs of
Simpsons dialogue, but his memory of personal events was notoriously
shocking. It hadn’t mattered before. If this revelation had come
before Angela (
long black hair tumbling, black bra strap sliding, stop it, stop it, stop it
) maybe she would have laughed. Yes, she probably would have laughed. She would have exaggerated her shock, milked it, but not really cared, because she took Dan’s faithfulness for granted. Everything else in her life could and probably would go wrong, but she thought she and Dan were a given.

Naive. Pathetic.

“I would never have gone out with you if I’d known. Do you know that? Lyn’s leftovers. You would have had no chance.”

“Just as well I didn’t tell you then.”

“Is it?”

She could have had a different life.

Once, when she was waiting for a leg wax, Cat read a magazine article about a study of identical twins separated at birth. When they were reunited years later, they discovered amazing similarities in their lives. In spite of very different upbringings, they had ended up with the same jobs, hobbies, habits, pets, cars, and clothes, even the same names for their children! This proved, according to the author, that personality, just like the color of your hair, was decided at conception. Your destiny was indelibly carved in your genes.

Bullshit, thought Cat, flipping the page irritably and wondering how much longer the bloody beautician would keep her waiting. Look at Lyn and me! Look at those what sits name twins from school. But the author was ready for her. The reason that identical twins brought up together were different, he retorted, was because they
deliberately set out to be different from each other.

“Hmmmph,” muttered Cat. It seemed to her that there was a fundamental contradiction in his argument. If environment didn’t matter for the separated twins, why did it matter so much for the poor twins forced to live side by side with their doppelgangers?

But while the beautician ripped hair from her calves and tried
to sell her moisturizer, Cat buried her nose in a lavender-smelling towel and wondered whether it was she or Lyn who was leading the “right” life, the one they were predestined to lead. Nana’s next-door neighbor once said to her, Are you the one that’s done so well for herself? Bev! cried Nana. This is
Cat! She scuba dives!

Or were they both leading hybrid versions of the right life? Perhaps Lyn should have married Dan? And what about Gemma? How did a shared fraternal twin muddle the formula?

“There you go, my dear! All defuzzed!” The beautician patted Cat’s legs with uncalled-for intimacy. “I bet you feel like a new woman!”

And Cat had said ungraciously, “I bet I don’t.”

It was still light on a Monday evening and Cat had just pulled into her driveway after work, when she saw Gemma’s battered green Mini come screeching around the corner.

The Kettle girls were all speed freaks, but Gemma combined her need for speed with a spectacular lack of ability. She regularly drove into things—other cars, walls, the occasional telegraph pole.

Cat dropped her briefcase, pushed her sunglasses up onto her head, and leaned back against her car with folded arms to enjoy watching Gemma reverse park across the street.

After four bizarre attempts that each ended with the car crunching straight into the curb, Cat finally pushed her glasses back down onto her nose and walked across the road.

As she got closer to the car, the nasal whine of a scratchy cassette tape assaulted her ears. One of the multitudes of ex-boyfriends had been a country music fan and left Gemma with an unfortunate passion for Tammy Wynette. It was like, Cat thought, he’d given her herpes.

Gemma smiled radiantly when she saw Cat. She was singing, thumping her hands on the steering wheel in time to the music.
“Stand by your man!”

“Get out and let me do it,” yelled Cat above the music.

Gemma switched off the tape. “How are you?”

“Fine.” Cat pulled on the door handle. “Come on.”

Gemma hopped out of the car holding a bottle of wine in a brown paper bag.

This was clearly a peacemaking mission.

“Shall I direct you?”

“No.” Cat got behind the wheel and pulled on the handbrake. “There’s room enough to park a truck here, let alone this matchbox.”

She parked the car in two moves. (You drive like a guy, Dan always said. It’s very sexy.)

Cat slammed the car door shut and handed Gemma her keys. “You give women drivers a bad name.”

“Yes, I know. I’m very ashamed. How are you?”

“You already asked me that. Was there a message in that song for me?”

“What do you mean?” Gemma looked alarmed.

“Stand by your man.”

“Oh. Goodness. No. I mean, stand by him if you want—it’s really up to you.”

“Gemma!”
Cat had glanced down to see her own black summer sandals on Gemma’s feet. “I was looking for them just the other day!”

“Oh! Sorry. Are you sure they’re not mine? I seem to have a memory of cleverly bargaining for them at the Balmain Street markets.”

“I bargained for them at the Balmain markets. Help yourself to
my memories, why don’t you, as well as my shoes. I let you wear them to Michael’s fortieth, remember?”

“Oh dear, this isn’t going too well,” said Gemma. “I’m meant to be fixing things. I’ve got a whole speech ready.”

Cat took the bottle of wine from her. “You’d better get me drunk first.”

They went inside, and Cat went to the bedroom to change out of her work clothes while Gemma opened the wine.

“There’s some good Brie in the fridge,” Cat called out. “And some olives.”

She came out buttoning up her shorts to find Gemma staring reverently at the fridge door.

“What are you doing?”

“You’ve got Charlie’s number here.” She peeled off a colorful advertising magnet in the shape of a key and held it out to Cat. “I forgot it was thanks to you that I met him. Remember, that day when I got locked out watering the garden and I called you? How did you get this magnet? It was the hand of fate!”

“More likely a letterbox drop. Or the hand of Dan. How is your luscious locksmith anyway?”

“He’s wonderful.”

“You say that every time.”

“This one’s different.”

“You say that every time too.”

Gemma pulled the cork from the bottle. “Do I? I guess I do.”

Cat wondered if her fifty dollars was safe. As soon as Charlie had arrived on the scene, she and Lyn had followed their normal routine of putting money on how long he’d last. Cat had him off the scene by March. Lyn had him lasting till June. A closet romantic, that girl.

“In a funny way, he reminds me of Pop Kettle,” said Gemma. “There’s something sweetly old-fashioned about him.”

“God. That doesn’t sound very sexy.”

“Everything seems very simple and uncomplicated when I’m with him.”

“Ah. A bit thick, eh?”

“Shut up.” Cat watched as Gemma automatically poured exactly the same level of wine in each glass. She did it herself. It was the legacy of a childhood spent sharing cakes and chocolate bars and lemonade with two eagle-eyed sisters.

“You’ll meet Charlie,” said Gemma. “He’s going to stop by at Lyn’s and say a quick hello on Christmas Day.”

“I’m not coming on Christmas Day,” said Cat, wondering if she meant it.

“Of course you are,” said Gemma. “You haven’t heard my persuasive speech yet. Where’s Dan tonight?”

“Out picking up another slut in a bar.”

“That’s nice for him.”

“He’s playing squash. I think. The worst thing about this is he’s turned me into one of those suspicious wives. Noticing what time he gets home. I hate it. I’m not like that. I’ve never been like that. All of sudden I’m a cliché.”

“You’ll be O.K.” Gemma ate an olive and spat out the seed into the palm of her hand. “Dan adores you. He does, I know he does! The thing with Lyn was just nothing, and the thing with that girl was just a stupid mistake. You and Dan have always been the best couple. Everybody says that.”

Cat held the stem of her wineglass firmly. Jesus. She’d done more crying over the last few weeks than she’d ever done in her whole life.

“I never thought this could happen to me,” she said with difficulty. “It’s so sordid. So tacky. You know what I mean? I thought I was too good for it.”

“Oh, Cat!” Cat felt her body become stiff and awkward as Gemma put her arm around her shoulder and she breathed in her familiar soft, soapy Gemma smell.

Lyn had a clean, citrus fragrance. Was there a “Cat” fragrance? Probably not. She probably smelled like a cardboard box.

Cat shrugged Gemma’s arm away. “It’s O.K. I’m fine. Come on, let’s drink our wine on the balcony. Enjoy my
marvelous view.”

“I like your view,” said Gemma loyally.

Cat and Dan lived in a renovated 1920s apartment, with high, ornate ceilings and polished floorboards. Their view was a sliver of bay, a sweeping arc of the Anzac Bridge, and a lot of gum trees.
On summer mornings they ate breakfast with an audience of brilliantly colored rosellas quivering busily on their railing.

They had bought before the last boom and had built up enough equity to buy an investment property a year ago. According to the standards of property-obsessed Sydney for a hip, professional young couple, they were doing O.K. In fact, they were right on track.

Gemma and Cat sat down and rocked back on their canvas chairs, balancing themselves by entwining their big toes around the railings of the balcony fence.

Cat said, in honor of their mother, “Sit like that if you want to break your neck, young lady!” Gemma responded in perfect Maxine-pitch, “You’ll be laughing on the other side of your face when you’re in a wheelchair, miss!”

“I wonder if we’ll say things like that to our own kids,” said Gemma after a minute. “I heard Lyn ask Maddie if she wanted a smack the other day. Maddie shook her head in this patronizing way, as if to say, Really, what a stupid question!”

Cat could visualize the exact expression on Maddie’s little face. It was amazing to her, how a toddler could already be such a little
person.
Sometimes just looking at Maddie twisted Cat’s heart. She was the one thing Lyn had that Cat couldn’t even pretend not to want. Lyn had got pregnant the very moment, the fucking
month,
she scheduled it. Why hadn’t Cat’s identical womb responded to orders? The injustice of it. Month after month, you’re not a mother, you’re not a mother, and once again, you’re not a mother.

Her period must be due any day now, just to add a final touch to the general gloom and doom.

Gemma rocked her chair back onto all four legs and gulped a mouthful of wine. She put the glass down at her feet. “Right,” she said with a deep breath. “I’m ready to do my speech.”

Cat swirled her own glass reflectively. When
was
her next period due?

Gemma stood up and opened her arms wide, like a politician
behind a podium. “Cat. This has been a difficult, terrible time for you—”

“My period is three weeks late.”

“What?” Gemma plunked herself back down and picked up her wine again. “Are you sure?”

Cat could feel a strange shivery tremble in her lower stomach.

“It was due the day Dan told me about his one-night stand. I remember. I had a pimple. Right here on my chin. I thought it meant my period was coming. That’s what it normally means. But it didn’t come. And I didn’t think about it like I normally do.”

Gemma was jiggling up and down in her chair, wine sloshing all over her hand.

“You’re pregnant! You’re having a
baby!”

“I might not be. I might just be late.” It seemed so improbable, as if just by remembering her period was late, she could instantly make herself pregnant.