Three Wishes (25 page)

“Are you sure you’re well enough to be back?”

Nobody at work had known about the pregnancy.

“It was just a very bad flu.”

Cat looked up from her computer and caught Barb’s eyes rest momentarily on her ringless left hand.

“Well. Take it easy. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

Barb had been Cat’s secretary for two years, and this was the first time she’d ever offered to make her coffee. She was way, way above that.

Cat took a shaky breath. If
Barb
started being nice to her, she would fall apart.

“No thanks,” she said shortly.

One night, Frank and Maxine turned up at the flat, their arms laden with a strange collection of offerings.

Multivitamins. Frozen casseroles in neatly labeled Tupperware containers. An indoor plant. An electric wok.

“Why are you bringing me a wok?” asked Cat.

“It’s mine,” said Frank. “Thought I’d try my hand at that oriental stuff. But I never used it.”

“I told him you had a gas stove,” Maxine said irritably, but Cat saw her pat him gently on the lower back as she bustled by, filling up Cat’s freezer.

“What, no bun?” asked Cat in mock surprise.

Maxine pulled out a white paper bag. “Yes, of course. Make yourself useful, Frank. Put the jug on.”

Cat watched them acting as if they’d been these types of parents all her life.

“So, how’s the
relationship going then?”

“Oh, your mother’s always been the woman for me!” said Frank.

“Bloody hell, Dad,” Cat said. “You barely spoke to each other for ten years.”

He winked at her. “I still adored her from afar.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake!” said Maxine.

“You two,” Cat reached for a piece of bun, “are very weird.”

“Weird, eh?” said Frank.

They both smiled at her, as if they couldn’t be more pleased to be weird.

There were moments when she thought she might survive. And there were other moments when she would catch herself thinking about her life as if it was a party she couldn’t wait to leave. If she lived to say eighty, then she was nearly halfway there. Death was the hot bath you promised yourself while you endured small talk and uncomfortable shoes. You could stop pretending to have a good time when you were dead.

One day at work, there was a mini-commotion outside Cat’s office door. She looked up to see a knot of cooing, rapturous women and sheepishly grinning men.

Somebody called out, “Come see, Cat! It’s Liam’s baby!”

Cat carefully plastered a delighted smile across her face and walked out to join them. She liked Liam, and this was his first baby, a little girl born back in November. Liam was worth a little fake delight.

“Oh, she’s beautiful, Liam,” she said automatically, but then she actually looked at the baby, clinging like a little koala against Liam’s chest, and she found herself saying, “Can I?” Without waiting for an answer she eased the baby out of his arms, responding to an overwhelming, physical desire.

“Someone’s feeling clucky!” cried the women.

The warmth of the baby’s body nestled against her own was an exquisite ache. The baby looked up at Cat pensively and suddenly smiled—a huge, gummy grin that sent the crowd wild.

“Oh! The little cutie!”

The noise frightened the baby, and she began to whimper.

Liam’s wife, a short, flowery, feminine woman, the sort who made Cat feel like a giant, said, “Oh, dear, I think she wants her mummy.”

She held up her arms with sweet authority, and Cat handed her back.

After they’d gone to visit another department, Cat sat back at her sterile computer screen and felt bereft.

Barb walked in with a pile of documents for her in-tray.

“Sweet baby,” she commented. “Such a pity she inherited Mummy’s ears,” and she made flapping moves on either side of her head.

Cat smiled. She was becoming rather fond of Barb.

“It’s nearly time for our ‘health and beauty weekend,’” Lyn said one day, pulling out the certificate Cat had given her and Gemma for Christmas.

There was something incongruous to Cat about that piece of paper. It was a cheerful relic of her former existence, like those miraculously unharmed possessions people retrieved from the
ashes of their fire-ravaged homes. Even her handwriting looked different: unguarded and confident. “You should organize a trip with the boys for that weekend,” she remembered telling Dan, while she wrote the date on their wall calendar, never thinking that by January, everything would be different.

“You and Gemma go,” said Cat. “I don’t think I will.”

“I think you will, young lady. We’re not going without you.”

It was easier not to argue, and when Lyn pulled into her driveway to pick her up, with Gemma sitting in the front seat wearing Maddie’s
Little Princess
tiara in her hair, she felt a tiny gleam of happiness.

“Remember when we went away together up the coast after our last HSC exam?” said Gemma, twisting around in her seat to look at her. “How we all stuck our heads out the windows and screamed, even you, and you were driving! You want to do that again?”

“Not especially.” Although she did remember how good it felt, with the air rushing wildly into her lungs.

“Do you want to wear Maddie’s tiara?”

“Not especially.”

“Do you want to play a game where I play the beginning of a song and you guess what it is for a prize?”

“O.K.”

So, as they wound their way around the twisting mountain roads toward Katoomba and the air outside became cooler, Gemma played songs from an ancient mixed tape collection. After the first opening bars, Lyn and Cat shouted out the names of the songs, and Gemma awarded snake lollies as prizes.

“I’m predicting a draw with this one,” she said, and before she’d even pressed play, Cat and Lyn yelled,
“Venus!”
Bananarama’s “Venus” was their “oh-my-God-I-
love
-this-song!” from the year they turned eighteen. They used to dance to it on top of their beds, feeling almost unbearably erotic, until their mother came in and spoiled it, just by the expression on her face.

As soon as they walked into the resort and breathed in the heavily scented air, Cat’s sinuses began to twitch, Lyn dropped her bag and said, “Oh dear,” Gemma said, “What is it?” and then all three of them began to sneeze. And sneeze, sneeze, and sneeze.

Wet-haired women in white fluffy robes making their way through reception stopped to stare at the interesting sight of three tall women, sneezing uncontrollably. Tears of mirth streamed down Gemma’s face, Lyn distributed tissues, and Cat walked up to reception and between sneezes said, “We need our money back.”

The weekend was now an adventure, a story to tell. They were ecstatic with themselves when they found a house, perched on the side of a mountain, with four-poster beds in each room, and a truly amazing bathroom! It had a huge spa bath right next to a giant window that revealed the valley tumbling dramatically away beneath them, so that when you sat in the bath, it was like
flying on a magic carpet.
“That’s what one of our visitors wrote in the guest book,” explained their hostess proudly.

Gemma insisted they share a spa bath immediately, before it got dark and the view disappeared.

“It’s like we’re all back together in the womb!” she said when they were sitting in the bath, their backs up against the sides, legs crisscrossing in the middle, wineglasses in hand. “It was just like this, except without the sauvignon blanc. Or the bubbles.”

“You do not remember being in the womb, Gemma,” said Lyn.

“I do!” said Gemma airily. “We used to float around all day, having fun.”

“Mum thinks we were fighting,” commented Cat. “She read somewhere about twins actually thumping each other in the womb.”

“Oh no,” said Gemma. “I don’t remember any fighting.”

Lyn widened her eyes fractionally at Cat and lifted her hair away from her neck. Gemma held her nose and slowly slid down until her head disappeared beneath the noisily bubbling water.

Cat closed her eyes and felt the childlike, familiar comfort of her sisters’ legs pressed casually against her own.

It might actually be rather nice to return to that shadowy time of preexistence, she thought, when there was nothing particularly pressing to do except the occasional somersault, no thoughts, just interesting sensations of light and sound, and no loneliness, because those other two versions of you, who had been there forever, were right there beside you, not going anywhere.

All her life
Cat had never had a problem falling asleep. Now she battled ferocious attacks of insomnia. Each night she lay in bed with her eyes firmly shut, her body carefully positioned for sleep, and felt like a fraud. Her body wasn’t deceived. The mechanics of falling asleep had become mysterious to her.

Eventually she would give up, turn on the lamp, and read, for hours, till three, four o’clock in the morning. She never closed the book. One second she’d be reading a sentence, the next the alarm was beeping insistently and she was groggily opening her eyes, the book still open in her hand, the light from the lamp insipid in the morning sunshine.

One night, in the middle of the night, she was sitting propped up in bed, turning the pages of her novel without taking in a word.

She was thinking about how she and Dan had shared over a decade of
events.

They were together, cooking steak at the pub barbecue, when they overheard somebody asking if it was true that Princess Diana had died.

They were part of the crazed crowd in the stadium on Bondi Beach, chanting “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oi, oi, oi!” when the women’s beach volleyball team won Olympic gold.

There was the Tuesday night when Dan was watching the late news and she was cleaning her teeth. She heard him swear and then call out, “You’d better come look at this.” She walked into the living room with her toothbrush still in her mouth and for the first time saw that plane make its unrelenting, cold-blooded flight across the skyline. They sat up until dawn, watching the twin towers crumble, over and over.

And then there were the personal events. The auction when they bought their unit.
“Sold!”
the auctioneer cried out, and they leaped to their feet, punching their fists in the air.

The scuba dive when they saw their first Weedy Sea Dragon, a fragile, mythical creature. Dan drew three big exclamation marks on his slate.

The trip to Europe. The wedding. The honeymoon. The trek in Nepal.

A million minuscule events. The pizza that never came. The Pictionary game where they slaughtered Lyn and Michael. The first time they used their breadmaker and the bread was so hard they kicked it around the kitchen like a football. The weird, druggy guy from next door who inexplicably said, “Bitchin’ Barney!” whenever he met Dan at the garbage bins. How could she not be with someone who shared such a major chunk of her life?

Just six months ago they’d had a weekend away in a B&B in the Southern Highlands. It rained and they made up a stupid game called Strip Scrabble. She laughed so much her stomach hurt. Was he experiencing his “niggling doubts”
that weekend?

Each time Cat looked the other way did his smile vanish and his face go blank, like a movie character letting the audience know what he was really thinking?

She slammed the book shut and looked over at his empty side of the bed. Was he sleeping peacefully next to Angela right now? Had they made love? Had they worked out positions for sleeping together? Did he complain about her hair tickling his nose? All that long, lovely black hair.

Oh God, this pain was unbearable, excruciating. Nobody could expect her to bear this.

She got out of bed and went around the flat swiching on lights. She stood under the shower and held her face up to the water. She turned on the television and flicked dully back and forth between channels. She stood in front of her open fridge, staring blankly at its contents. A basket of ironing killed off forty-five minutes.

By five
A.M
., she was dressed and ready for work.

She sat on the sofa with dry, burning eyes, her hands folded in her lap and her back straight, as if she were waiting for a job interview.

Dan was supposedly staying on Sean’s floor until he got a new lease on a flat. He wouldn’t be there every night, of course. Sometimes he’d stay with his girlfriend.

Girlfriend. A girlfriend sounded so much younger, sexier, and prettier than a wife.

Cat hadn’t seen him now, or talked to him, for thirteen days. Thirteen days, where she hadn’t known what he wore to work, what he ate for dinner, who pissed him off, what made him laugh on TV.

And that lack of knowledge about his life would just keep accumulating and expanding, pushing them further apart, a cold empty space between them.

Decisively, she stood up and went looking for the keys to the courtesy truck. She needed to know where Dan had spent the night. If he’d stayed at Sean’s place, she would be able to make it through the day. If he’d stayed with Angela, well, at least she’d know.

It felt good to be outside, moving. The truck made her feel tough and capable. The streets were deserted, the streetlights still glowing.

At Sean’s place in Leichhardt, she drove up and down the narrow street, peering hopefully at each parked car. Finally, she gave up with a sickly sort of calm. So he was with her. Right now, he was with her, in a bedroom Cat had never seen.

It was light by the time she turned into Angela’s street in Lane Cove.

She remembered driving there that first time, filled with righteous hurt. Looking back, it seemed like she’d been luxuriating in her pain, safe in the knowledge that their marriage was a given, that Dan’s love was a given.

Dan’s car was parked outside Angela’s block of units, parked with the assured confidence of a regular visitor. It looked like it belonged there.

Then she saw the car in front of Dan’s. A blue VW. She remembered Charlie on Christmas Day. “Her Vee-dub conked out this morning.”

She looked in the car window and Dan’s long-sleeved blue top was lying on the passenger seat. It seemed she had an endless capacity to be hurt. The casual familiarity implied by that shirt was somehow more shocking than anything.

“Ange? Have you seen my shirt?”

“Your blue one? I think you left it in the car.”

And was Cat in Dan’s consciousness at all when he had these conversations with Angela? Of course not. Cat no longer existed, except as a problem to be solved, a memory to put behind him.

She was an ex-wife. Ex-wives were vindictive women with bitterly lined faces. Fine then, she’d act like one.

There was a Swiss Army pocketknife in Sam’s smash repair truck. It slid back and forth in the center console each time she turned a corner. She got the knife from the car and unsnapped it. The morning sun caught the blade.

It was a beautiful Friday morning. The cicadas were already humming a promise of a hot summer’s day and a weekend especially created for brand new-couples.

Tomorrow was Saturday, and she’d be waking up alone.

She squatted down besides Angela’s car and plunged the tip of the knife into the black rubber of the tire.

Something unlocked in her mind. She tipped right over into blind fury.

She hated Dan. She hated Angela. She hated herself.

She hated the tires for resisting her. It was so typical: nothing ever went right for her! “Fuck you!” In a frenzy she ripped and slashed with all her strength, not moving on to the next tire until she was sure it was satisfactorily butchered.

After she finished Angela’s tires, she moved on to Dan’s, becoming efficient and deadly in her movements. And now it was for her baby. Her baby had been betrayed too. Her baby didn’t have a chance to live and that was somebody’s fault and she was going to
kill
them!

“Hey!”

The sound made her jump.

She looked up and saw Dan and Angela walking out of the glass doors of the block of units.

Dan’s face changed as he got closer and recognized her.

“Cat?”

The knife was clenched hard in her hand as she stood up. Her chest was heaving, her face hot and sweaty.

It was a moment of profound humiliation.

On their faces she could see fear, pity, and a touch of revulsion.

And the worst of it was, this was an
event
happening to
them.
They were experiencing it together; they would talk about it later. It was the first in their collection of shared stories. “The time Dan’s ex-wife slashed our tires.”

Cat didn’t say a word. She turned away from them, climbed into her truck, and drove off, without looking back.

Her hands on the steering wheel were filthy black.

What is happening to me?

She drove home to clean up. She had a nine o’clock meeting.

Gemma turned up at lunchtime.

She sat in Cat’s office with that mystified expression she always got when she visited, as if she’d landed in a foreign country, instead of a normal, everyday workplace. It was an expression Cat found simultaneously charming and irritating.

She said, “I don’t have time to go out for lunch.”

“Oh, that’s O.K., I’m not hungry.” Gemma looked up from reading a memo in Cat’s in-tray. “Goodness. It’s all so serious here.”

“Yeah. Deadly serious. We sell chocolates.”

Gemma put down the memo. “Did you happen to slash a few tires before you came to work today?”

Cat was startled. She had just come back from a meeting where she had given a highly professional presentation. That knife-wielding maniac of this morning was somebody else entirely.

“How did you know? Oh. Stupid. The brother.”

“So you did! Was it satisfying?”

“Not really.” Cat scraped away a rim of black from her fingernail. “Did you come in just to ask me that?”

“They’re thinking of taking out a restraining order against you.”

Cat looked up and felt her neck becoming hot.

“A restraining order?”

“I know! It’s exciting, as if they’re scared of you! But still, I thought I should warn you with your court case next week. The prosecutor might mention it. Of course, your lawyer will object, and the judge will say, Sustained, the jury will disregard that! And the jury will all look thoughtful and your lawyer will say, This is a
travesty,
Your Honor! My client—”

“Oh shut
up
! It’s not that sort of court case.”

“I know. I was being funny.”

“Not.”

“No. Sorry. Really, I just wanted to tell you that, ah, I don’t think you should go near them again.”

“Thanks. Is that all? I’ve got work to do.”

“That’s all.” Gemma stood up. “By the way, I’ve broken up with him.”

“With Charlie,” said Cat dully. She was thinking about how she must have looked that morning, holding a knife. “You didn’t need to.”

“It wasn’t because of you.”

“Oh.”

“I nearly forgot!” Gemma picked up her bag and began fumbling through it. “I got you a present.”

She pulled out a foam hammer with a ribbon tied around the handle.

“It’s for stress relief.” She banged it on the edge of Cat’s desk and it made a sound like glass shattering. “I thought you could hit things with it when you got mad at Dan.”

Cat made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a sob. “I should have had it this morning.”

“You can even hit people with it. See!” Gemma hit herself on the arm with the hammer. “Doesn’t hurt! Do you want to hit me and pretend I’m Dan?”

“That’s O.K.”

“Or Angela?”

“Cat, could I have a word?” Graham Hollingdale poked his head in the office, just as Gemma furiously smashed the hammer against her own forehead, crying, “Take that, Angela!”

He looked alarmed. “Oh, excuse me! I’ll come back.”

Gemma rubbed her forehead. “Actually, it does hurt a bit.”

Saturday morning welcomed Cat with a thumping headache, dry mouth, and furry tongue.

Why did she keep doing this to herself?

She lay still, fingertips to her temples, her eyes closed as she tried to remember the night before.

“Hello there.”

Her eyes flew open.

Sweet Jesus, don’t let this be true.

Snuggled up next to her, with the pillow making wings on either side of his pealike balding head, was her CEO Graham Hollingdale.

She just managed to stop herself from screaming.

“How are you feeling?” She watched in horror as he wriggled himself up and the sheet slipped to reveal a not unattractive naked chest. Graham Hollingdale, naked, in her bedroom. She’d never seen him without a tie before! He was way,
way
out of context.