Three Wishes (19 page)

“I love those shoes! Are they Italian?” asked Gemma.

“Don’t even think about it,” said Lyn automatically, and then she looked stricken and said, “Or you can borrow them if you want.” Gemma said, “O.K. I will” and clomped around the flat in Lyn’s shoes and waited for her to say, “Walk properly! You’re doing your weird walk, you’re going to ruin them!” but Lyn just smiled in a strained, interested way and Gemma thought, My God, how long are they going to keep this up for?

It made Gemma feel queasy, how nice they were being to her. They were both speaking in strangely proper voices and every now and then she’d catch them staring at her, almost as if they were frightened.

Perhaps she was behaving oddly for someone with a dead
fiancé. She probably was, because she felt very odd. Extremely odd.

It was his
absence
that confused her. How could a tall, strong, definite man like Marcus just not be there anymore? She kept pushing the idea around in her head, trying to make sense of it. Marcus is dead. Marcus is dead. I will never see him again. Marcus is gone. Gone forever. A giant hand had reached down into her world and ripped out a large shred of her reality. It gave her vertigo.

Gemma’s only other experience with death had been Nana Leonard but she’d been such a frail, unassuming presence. There was no gaping hole left when she died, she just gently slipped away, leaving the world pretty much as it had been. But Marcus? Marcus was big, booming, and
definite.
That’s what she loved about him. You would never say to Marcus, “Are you sure?” because it would be a stupid question. Marcus had opinions and plans and a car and furniture. Marcus had a strong libido and strong political views. He could do one hundred push-ups without breaking a sweat.

Marcus must be very angry about not being there anymore.

“Yeah, mate, I don’t
think
so.” That’s what he said on the phone when he disagreed with somebody. He wouldn’t agree with dying. “Yeah, mate, I don’t
think
so,” he’d be saying at the Pearly Gates. “Let me speak to the manager. We’ll straighten this out.”

If Marcus wasn’t there, how could Gemma still be there?

She looked down at her own feet in Lyn’s Italian shoes and felt very, very weird.

“I feel weird,” she said.

“Well, you would,” said Cat.

“It’s perfectly normal,” said Lyn.

And they both looked petrified.

Gemma watched her sisters pinching their bottom lips in exactly the same way and realized she couldn’t possibly confess to them the dreadful, blasphemous thought that had come into her
head just before she went running across the road to see if Marcus was O.K. It would distress them. Even if they said, “Oh no, that doesn’t mean anything! Don’t worry about it! It was probably just the shock!” Gemma would know they were lying.

They would think of her differently forever. She had been hoping they could somehow make it right—but they couldn’t. Of course they couldn’t.

She put her hands up to her face, and now finally she was behaving properly. Both her sisters sprang to her side.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” asked Lyn, smoothing a lock of Gemma’s hair behind her ear, like she was a little child. “And bun? More bun?”

“No, thank you.”

Cat patted her arm nervously. “Would you like to get drunk?”

“Yes please. Or no. I know. High.”

“Sorry?”

“Marcus has got some dope. It’s in the cupboard above the stove.”

So that’s how they spent the night before Marcus’s funeral.

Lyn rolled a beautiful neat joint and they sat cross-legged on his clean creamy carpet and passed it around, without saying a word. Gemma felt a satisfying rush of nothingness filling and expanding her brain.

“No wedding now,” she observed finally, as she passed the joint to Lyn.

Lyn narrowed her eyes as she inhaled and the tip of the joint burned brightly. “That’s right. No wedding.”

Gemma said, “You won’t get to wear your bridesmaid dresses.”

“No,” agreed Lyn, coughing a bit as she passed the joint to Cat.

“You hated your dresses, didn’t you?”

They sat with very upright backs and exchanged solemn looks.

“Yes, we did hate them,” Cat said slowly. “We really did.”

And that’s when they all started to giggle, wildly, rapturously,
rocking back and forth with tears of hysteria running down their faces. Gemma watched Cat drop a piece of ash on Marcus’s pristine carpet and imagined his face twisting with rage. She got onto her hands and knees and still sobbing with laughter, she crawled over to the piece of ash and used the tip of her finger to rub it hard against the cream wool.

“You’re making it worse,” said Lyn.

“I know.” She rubbed her finger back and forth, harder and harder, smearing the black smudge across the carpet.

She never told anybody the thought that came into her head, the moment after Marcus collided with the concrete, while she was waiting for someone to tell her what to do, before she started running.

She didn’t think it so much, as hear it, with bell-like clarity, as if a sober person had walked into a drunken, noisy party, snapped off the music, and made an announcement in the sudden, stunned silence.

She recognized her own voice. Four clear, cool, precise words:

“I hope he’s dead.”

Between the ages
of two and three, the Kettle triplets began to babble to each other in their own secret, unintelligible dialect, switching effortlessly to English whenever they needed to communicate with a grown-up.

Years later, Maxine discovered this was a relatively common phenomenon among multiples, known as “twin talk” or more impressively—idioglossia. (At the time, all she really cared about was that they weren’t attempting to drown, suffocate, or bludgeon one another.)

Gradually, they talked less and less in their secret language and eventually it was erased from their memories, vanished like the lost language of an ancient tribe.

Psychic connections between twins and triplets are another well-documented and exciting phenomenon. In this area, however, the Kettle girls have always lagged. The idea, after all, is to
feel
your sibling’s pain, not laugh uproariously at it. Elvis, before he went onstage, was able to feel the presence of his dead twin brother, Jesse. Yet nine-year-old Gemma, immersed in her new Enid Blyton book, couldn’t even sense the stealthy presence of her very much alive sisters stealing a bag of mixed lollies from right next to her hand.

When they were eleven, Cat became obsessed with the idea of telepathic communication. Many hours were spent on complex experiments. Unfortunately, they all failed, due to the appalling incompetence of her sisters, who could neither send nor receive a coherent message.

No, the Kettle girls share no psychic connections. (A lot of the time they don’t even understand each other in ordinary verbal, sitting-across-the-table conversation.)

And so:

At nineteen, Lyn’s chin slams into her steering wheel in a car accident caused by a very drunk driver on the Spit Bridge. Gemma feels nothing, not the tiniest twinge, as she dances seductively in a dark, smoky club on Oxford Street, a frangipani in her ear, a cigarette between her fingers. And Cat doesn’t even pause for breath in screaming at her computer, which keeps crashing while she tries to finish an overdue uni assignment.

At twenty-two, Marcus whispers vicious threats into Gemma’s ear, and Cat senses nothing as she breathlessly wrestles with Dan while just outside the door his flat mate laughs heartily at
Hey, Hey It’s Saturday.
And Lyn is far away in another time zone and another season and doesn’t look up from suspiciously reading the label on a can of deodorant in a London chemist.

And at thirty-three, Cat rocks back and forth, back and forth, as her abdomen knots and locks and she silently screams, Stop it, stop it, stop it. Lyn feels nothing but pleasure as she watches Maddie’s awestruck face illuminated by the colors of fireworks thundering across the sky. And Gemma feels nothing but Charlie’s tongue and taste as she kisses him in the hallway of some friend of a friend’s New Year’s Eve party.

No, neither of them feels a thing until the first day of the New Year when Dan calls to say, “Cat’s lost the baby.”

“Tell them I
don’t want to see anybody,” Cat told Dan. Gemma, Lyn, and Maxine all agreed that was understandable and a good idea but obviously it didn’t apply to
them,
and so they all arrived separately within fifteen minutes, running up the flat stairs, striding inside, breathless and flushed. When they saw Cat, they stopped and crumpled as if they thought just by coming they could fix things and seeing her made them realize there was nothing to be done and nothing to be said.

They squashed themselves shoulder to shoulder around Cat’s little round kitchen table to drink cups of tea and eat fat pieces of iced walnut bun with lots of butter—Kettle family comfort food. Cat ate hers ravenously. It was what they ate when Pop Kettle died and when Marcus died a few months later.

The difference was that everybody knew Pop and Marcus. Nobody knew Cat’s baby. Her baby didn’t have the dignity of a name, or even a gender.

It was just a nothing. Cat had loved a nothing. How foolish of her.

“We’ll try again,” said Dan solemnly and determinedly at the hospital, as if the baby was a goal they’d just missed kicking and if they really put their minds to it they’d get it next time. As if babies were interchangeable.

“I wanted
this
baby,” said Cat, and the nurse and Dan nodded their heads patiently and kindly, as if she were delirious.

“Darling! It was Mother Nature’s way of telling you that something wasn’t right with the poor little mite,” said Nana Kettle on the phone. “At least you weren’t far along.” Cat said through a clenched jaw, “I have to go now, Nana.”

Mother Nature can go fuck herself, she thought. It was my baby, not hers.

Cat stuffed bun into her mouth and looked at Lyn standing up to pour everybody’s tea.

The heartbreakingly perfect curve of Maddie’s cheek.

The ugly little ball of bloody tissue that was Cat’s baby.

They took it away, with bland efficient medical faces, like it was something disgusting, like something from a science fiction movie that had been removed from Cat’s body and now had to be quickly removed from everybody’s sight, as a matter of good taste.

Nobody cooed in wonder over Cat’s baby. Cat’s hands trembled at the injustice. Only she knew how beautiful her baby would have been.

She had always suspected that deep within her, there was a secret seam of ugliness, of unseemliness, of something
wrong that
was the mirror of Lyn’s right. And now her poor little innocent baby had been contaminated by her wrongness.

“Where’s Maddie?” she asked.

“Michael,” Lyn answered quickly, leaning over to pour Cat’s tea. “You’re not going back to work tomorrow. You’ll have some time off?”

“Dunno.”

Gemma gulped at her tea, her eyes anxiously on Cat.

Cat said to her, “You’re doing that slurping thing.”

“Sorry.”

Sometimes Gemma got a particular expression on her face—a quivering pathetic puppy look—that aroused in Cat a powerful
urge to kick or slap or verbally crush her. Then she felt racked with guilt. Then she felt angrier still.

I am not a nice person, she thought. I never have been. “You’re an
evil, nasty
little girl, Catriona Kettle,” Sister Elizabeth Mary informed her one day in the primary-school playground, the black band of her veil squeezed around puffy, red-veined cheeks. Cat felt an uplifting rush of wild courage, like she was about to run off the edge of the highest diving board at the swimming pool. “Well, you’re an evil
fat
nun!” Sister Elizabeth grabbed her by the upper arm and slapped the back of her legs. Slap, slap, slap. Veil flying. Hefty shoulder heaving. Kids stopped to stare in sick fascination. Lyn and Gemma came running from opposite sides of the playground. “Oh!” moaned Gemma in sympathetic synchrony with each slap, “Oh!” until Sister couldn’t stand it anymore and stomped off, after pointing a silent, quavering finger of warning at each of the three Kettle girls.

“You should certainly
not
go back to work tomorrow, Cat,” said Maxine. “Don’t be ridiculous. You need your rest. Dan can call work for you, can’t you, Dan?”

Dan had his mouth full of bun. “Yeah,” he said thickly, putting his hand over his mouth. “Course.”

He’d been so gentle and loving last night—as if she were very ill, or as if she’d experienced some painful injury. He played the role of understanding, supportive husband to perfection—so handsome, so caring! But he was playing it wrong. Cat wanted him angry and irrational. She wanted him scornful and aggressive with the doctor: Wait a minute, this is our child, how the hell did this happen? But no, he was all understanding masculine nods as the doctor talked, two logical, reasonable men discussing such a—sadly!—common occurrence.

“I might leave you all for a bit, if that’s O.K. with you, Cat?” Dan stood up and took his mug over to the sink.

“Fine.” Cat looked down at her plate. “Whatever.”

“Where are you going?” asked Gemma.

“Just out, got a few things to do.” Dan kissed Cat on top of her head. “Are you O.K., babe?”

“I’m fine. I’m perfectly fine.”

Had there been a sharp edge to Gemma’s tone? There was something uncharacteristic about her asking Dan where he was going. Cat looked at Gemma, who was sitting cross-legged on her chair, twisting a long lock of hair around her finger. Did she know something? Had she got more sordid details from the locksmith about the one-night stand that Cat didn’t know about? Did Cat even care? It all seemed irrelevant and childish now. She didn’t even care if Gemma kept going out with the brother. What did it matter? When it came down to it, what did anything really matter?

“Gemma,” she said.

“Yes?” Gemma nearly dropped her slice of bun in her eagerness to be accommodating. She picked up the milk hopefully. “Milk?”

“Just forget what I said on Christmas Day. You know. About Charlie. I should never have said that. I was upset.”

There. Now she had redeemed herself for wanting to kick her.

“Oh. Well. That’s O.K. I mean, who knows? You know, my relationships never seem to last longer than a few months these days. So probably we will break up but it’s all going well at the moment, so if you—”

“Gemma?”

“Yes?”

“Shut up. You’re babbling.”

“Sorry.”

Gemma’s face closed down, and she picked up her teacup and slurped. “Sorry,” she said again.

Oh God. Cat breathed deeply. Now she was back to feeling evil again. She would have been a bad mother anyway. A sarcastic, harping, carping mother.

“Did Nana Kettle call you?” asked Lyn.

“Yes.” With enormous effort Cat managed to make her voice
sound like a normal person’s. “She told me Mother Nature knew best.”

Maxine gave a derisive snort. “Rubbish. Did she tell you that God needed another rose in his garden, too?”

“No.”

“That’s what she said to me when I lost my baby.”

Lyn put down her teacup quickly. “I didn’t know you ever had a miscarriage, Mum!”

“Well, I did.”

“When?” Lyn obviously thought she should have been approached first for authorization.

“You girls were only three.” Maxine stood up and refilled the kettle at the sink, her back to them. Her daughters took the opportunity to exchange raised eyebrows and surprised mouths. “You all knew I was pregnant. You used to put your little faces up to my stomach and pat me and chatter away to the baby.”

She turned back around to face them, the kettle in her hand. “Actually, I remember you were the most interested, Cat. You used to sit there on the lounge whispering into my stomach for ages. It was the only time I could get a cuddle from you.”

“We could have had a little sister or brother,” said Gemma in wonder.

“It was an accident, of course,” said Maxine. “At first I was horrified. I even thought about an abortion, which would have had your father at confession every week for a year. But then I got used to the idea. I guess the hormones kicked in. And I thought, imagine, just
one
baby. I could do everything right, with one baby. Of course, it was stupid thinking. You three were toddlers. It wasn’t like I had any spare time.”

Lyn said, “I can’t believe we didn’t know this, Mum.”

“Yes, well, I lost the baby at thirteen weeks.” Maxine flicked the switch on the kettle. “There was no reason to upset you. I just stopped talking about the baby—and you all seemed to forget. You were only babies yourselves, of course. So.”

Cat looked at her mother, in her stylish Country Road slacks and blouse. Thin, brisk, and elegant. Short red hair, cut, colored, and styled at the hairdresser every three weeks. She would have been only twenty-four when she had her miscarriage, just a girl, a kid. It occurred to Cat to wonder if she would have liked Maxine if they’d been at school together. Maxine Leonard with her long swishing red hair, her long, long legs, and short, short miniskirts. “Your mum,” Nana Leonard used to say, “was a little bit
wild,”
and they all stared, thrilled, at the old photos. Really, Nana? Mum? Our mum?

She probably would have been friends with her. Cat’s friends were always the bad girls.

“Were you upset?” she asked. (Could this be the most personal question she’d ever asked her mother?) “Were you upset about losing the baby?”

“Yes, of course. Very. And your father—well. It wasn’t a very good time in my life. I remember I used to cry when I was hanging out the washing.” Maxine smiled and looked embarrassed. “I don’t know why. Maybe it was the only chance I got to think.”

“Ah.” A sob of involuntary grief rose in Cat’s chest. She took a deep breath and tried to stop it. If she gave in to it, she might fall to her knees and start wailing and keening like a complete lunatic.

Maxine came up behind her and put a tentative hand against her shoulder.

“Darling, you’re perfectly entitled to grieve for your baby.”

Cat turned in her chair and for a fraction of a second pressed her face against her mother’s stomach.

She stood up. “Back in a sec.”

“Don’t, Lyn,” she heard Maxine say. “Let her be.”

She walked into the bathroom and turned on both taps at full blast and sat down on the edge of the bath and cried. For the baby she didn’t know and for the memory she didn’t have of a girl standing at the clothesline in a suburban backyard, a plastic clothes peg in her mouth and tears running down her face.

She’d bet she didn’t stop pegging those clothes for even a second.

The sun on her face woke her. They’d forgotten to close the blinds last night. “Good morning, sweetie.” Cat kept her eyes closed and reached down to touch her stomach.

Then she remembered and misery flattened her body, pressing her against her bed.

This was worse than Dan sleeping with Angela.

This was worse than finding out about Lyn.

This was worse than anything.

She was overreacting. She was being selfish. Women had miscarriages all the time. They didn’t make such a fuss. They just got on with it.

And far worse things happened to people. Far, far worse.

Little children died. Sweet-faced little children were raped and murdered.

You saw parents on television whose children had died. Cat could never stand to look at their white faces and pleading bloodshot eyes. They looked like they weren’t human anymore, like they had evolved into some other species. “Change the channel,” she always told Dan. “Change it.”

How dare she
change the channel to escape from their horror
and then lie here feeling desolate over an everyday, run-of-the-mill, happens to one-in-every-three-women miscarriage?

She turned over and squashed her face into her pillow, hard, until her nose hurt.

It was the second day of January.

She thought of all the hundreds of days ahead of her and felt exhausted. It was impossible to think of getting through a year. Day after day after day. Getting up to go to work. Shower, breakfast, blow-drying hair. Driving the car through rush hour. Accelerate. Brake. Accelerate. Walking through the labyrinth of cubicles at work. “Morning!” “Hi!” “Good morning!” “How are you today?”
Meetings. Phone calls. Lunch. More meetings. Tap, tap, tap on the computer. E-mails. Coffee. Driving home. Gym. Dinner. TV. Bills. Housework. Nights out with friends. Ha, ha, ha, chat, chat, chat. What was the point in any of it?

And
trying again.
Sex at the right time of the month. Carefully counting the days until her period came. What if she took another year to get pregnant? And what if she miscarried again? There was a woman at work who had
seven
miscarriages before she gave up.

Seven.

Cat couldn’t do it. She knew she couldn’t do it.

She felt Dan’s thigh against hers, and the thought of having sex with him seemed bizarre. Slightly foolish even. All that grunting and groaning and ooooh and aaaaahing and we start up here, and now we move down there, and I do this and you do that and there goes you, and there goes me.