The Game You Played (15 page)

“Only twice in the past three months. I miss it. Dad doesn’t come out on it fishing anymore. I just talked to Mum. Says he’s depressed or something.”

“That’s no good. Hope he’s doing something about it and not just trying to battle through.”

“Once he’s wrung the maximum amount of sympathy out of Mum, maybe.”

“Depression’s no joke, Luke.”

“I know. But man, he’s always moaning about something.” I slumped back on her sofa, tilting my head back against the headrest. “Kitty, are you sure you want to go ahead with that purchase of yours?”

“Yeah, why not? I’m over investing in Sydney property.”

“That’s just it. It’s not the wisest investment. There’s much better ones out there. And it’s a huge amount of money to slap down. I wouldn’t touch it if I were you.”

“Well, you’re not me.” She smiled. “I get emotionally attached to things, and that means more to me than the potential profit.”

“Okay, I’ve said my piece. When I’m back in the office, I’ll get things moving on it. I haven’t been in for a couple of days.”

“Of course you haven’t. Don’t worry about it. You’ve got a head full of worry right now.”

“I should go.” I pulled myself to my feet, feeling a bit woozy from the alcohol. “I shouldn’t leave Phoebe alone too long.” Hesitating, I ran my hands through my hair. “Sounds wrong, I know, but I just don’t want to go back there.”

In response, she rose alongside me and hugged me again.

She felt good and warm and solid. Phoebe never felt like that. Holding Phoebe always felt like trying to negotiate something that could shatter at any moment.

A thought flashed through my head, the thought of being with someone like Kitty and what that must feel like. No stepping on eggshells and no constant worry about what her mental state was like today.

Inside that thought, my mind went blank, and I kissed her on her mouth.

Immediately, she pulled back. Like I’d stung her or something. “I know you’re hurting and not yourself, so I’m going to ignore that.”

“Fuck, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. You didn’t mean it.”

“That’s the problem. I can’t say for sure that I didn’t mean it.” Words were just spilling from me tonight, unchecked. What the hell was wrong with me? I wanted to blubber and be held like a little kid. I wanted to be with a woman who could give herself to me, unlike Phoebe.

She frowned, looking uncomfortable. “We’ll always be close. We’re friends. You’re going through a ton of stuff at the moment. This is not you. You’ll get past this, and we’ll keep on being friends.”

I swallowed hard. “Maybe I should have asked you to marry me that year we worked together at the agency. I shouldn’t have let you get engaged to that jerk.”

Her mouth twitched into a small smile. “You and I had a lot of fun that year. And yes, why
didn’t
you steal me away and stop me from accepting his ring? What was I thinking?”

“Christ, I wanted to belt him into next week for what he did to you.”

“Well, that’s all in the past. I made a bad decision. But I’m happy now.”

“You’re happy? I don’t remember what that feels like.”

“You will. You’ll find your way. You’re a positive person.” She looked certain as she nodded.

I said a quick good-bye, and she walked me to the door.

Plunging my hands into my hoodie pockets, I stepped back into the night air, feeling like a Biblical traitor. The gate closed behind me with a metallic click.

I didn’t want to go back to Phoebe. But I had no choice.

A thin mist skirted the ground, slinking around the fences and yards. I jogged back to my street, the cold plunging inside my bones. It was a damned miserable winter. The most miserable one I’d ever known.

I jolted when I spotted Phoebe sitting on the low fence next to our house. She was still in the towel, her hair wet and limp over her shoulders. I sprinted the last twenty metres or so up to her.

“Feeb, what the hell?”

Her expression was calm. “Where did you go?”

“For a walk. Get inside. Haven’t you brought enough attention on yourself lately?”

“Why should I stay inside, all safe and warm? Tommy isn’t safe and warm.”

“This ends, Phoebe. It ends now.” I grasped her shoulders. “You don’t have a monopoly on grieving for Tommy.”

“I can smell perfume. Why do you smell of perfume, Luke?”

“You’re imagining it.”

“Am I? No, I really don’t think I am.”

“Come inside. There’s no point hanging around out here.”

“You’ve been going for runs at night a lot lately, haven’t you?”

“Lots of people do.”

“You’re right. The people around here seem pretty nocturnal. Everyone wanders the streets at night. Bernice Wick goes out looking for her mother’s cat. The homeless people walk around looking for a place to sleep. That guy that’s been hanging around—who knows what he’s looking for? What are
you
looking for, Luke?”

“I’m not having this conversation anymore. If I have to pick you up and throw you into the house myself, I will. How did you get out here anyway?”

“Through the powder room window. What’s her name?”

“What?”

“Her name. The one you go to see, on your walks.”

“Stop it, okay?”

“There’s no point in us staying together anymore, is there?”

“Of course there is.”

“I’ll leave tomorrow.”

“Come inside. You’re not leaving.”

“What am I? A prisoner now? You have a licence to keep me locked up? I’ll go to Nan’s.”

Panic shot through me. Mere minutes ago, I’d been contemplating a life without her. But standing here in front of her, with her telling me she was going to leave me, I couldn’t let her go. Not even to her grandmother’s house. She belonged with me.

My jaw tightened. “I’m on my fucking knees, Phoebe. And you sit there, in a wet towel, like a fucking priestess, telling me you’re leaving me.”

For a second, she eyed me in surprise, but then her face resumed its mask. “You can’t stop me.” She wriggled down from the fence and walked inside.

I followed her in and upstairs. She let the towel drop like she’d shed a skin and had been reborn. Dressing in a long T-shirt, she slid into bed.

Stripping to my undershorts, I got into bed beside her. Fear whirled in my head. I didn’t want her to go anywhere. I shouldn’t have gone out for that walk. In the morning she’d be different. She depended on me. For everything. She couldn’t just
leave
.

In the moonlight, she was insanely beautiful in a way that she wasn’t in daylight. The dark light softened the angles of a face that had grown too thin. The waves that her dark hair made on the pillow were like brush strokes.

I kissed her, on the cheek and on the neck I’d come close to choking.

She didn’t protest.

But she rolled over, away from me, shutting me out.

Saturday night

I WOULDN’T SHOW HIM THE TSUNAMI inside.

I knew exactly how to contain it. I’d pack it into the box, along with everything else from today. Pack it down tight.

The bottom fell out of my world back in December. I was still falling.

If Luke hadn’t pulled me from the bath, would I be dead right now? I didn’t know. I’d vomited the contents of my stomach soon after getting into the bath. The residue of the pills that had been left inside me hadn’t been enough to put me to sleep.

I stared at the bedroom wall, wondering how long I’d known that Luke was cheating on me. When he’d come back from some of his
runs
over these past months, he’d been distant. I’d put it down to fatigue. But his mood at those times had made me shrug and shake my head.

Until tonight.

Tonight was different. Luke had gone out and left a wife that had just attempted to kill herself. It was then that I knew. He was going to see someone to make himself feel better. Because it was always about Luke and what he wanted.

I’d been in a haze, such a long haze, since Tommy went missing. I’d told myself that everything had been perfect between Luke and me before we lost Tommy. But that wasn’t true.

I recalled a time in July of last year, sitting on the sofa downstairs and drinking, long after Luke and Tommy were in bed. Out loud and drunkenly, I’d asked the gods if
my turn
with Luke was over yet. I’d had a longer turn with him than had Sass, Pria, or Kate. I’d had him for well over two years. Surely that was long enough.

But there’d been no one left to hand him over to. Sass, Kate, and Pria had all moved on with their lives. And Bernice was out of the question.

It was game over.

What went wrong with Luke and me?

Back when I lived in London, he’d appeared out of nowhere, just after Flynn had devastated me. And somehow, we’d just fallen together. It’d just happened. Things happened in a flash after that. I discovered I was pregnant. Luke announced the pregnancy to everyone, while I was still coming to terms with the fact that there was a life form growing inside of me. And then Luke got down on bended knee with a ring—just like in the movies—at a London restaurant.

It was a whirlwind romance with someone I’d known since I was eight. But while I knew the boy, I barely knew the man.

Less than three years later, it was over. As of now. The marriage gone. The baby gone. Like none of it ever happened. It had all been sucked into a vacuum and disposed of.

I’d become a sad remnant of that former life, losing my mind and writing letters about a child that (in all probability) no longer existed.

The rhymes in those letters were about me.
Of course I’d written them.
Anyone would know that, just by reading them.

No wonder Luke was cheating on me. No wonder Tommy had gone off so easily with a stranger. I couldn’t be the kind of wife and mother they’d needed.

From the time Tommy vanished, I’d given a sanitised version of my life to the media. Sass had told me to. But more than that, my instincts had told me to. Show the world a different picture. Be the good woman from the commercials.

Sass and I had picked through my photos, feeding the media the pictures of Tommy and me that told the story of a happy mother and her happy child. Not just happy, but joyous. Days gilded with golden sunshine and Instagram filters. A Facebook mashup of images that showed the pearls but not the oyster shells.

That story had become mine.

Who was I, really?

I thought back to the beginning of my pregnancy with Tommy.

I’d done the usual things during pregnancy: obsessed over kick counts (the number of kicks to the guts the kid gave me every hour that told me it was still alive), raged over restaurants and stores that shunned breastfeeding mothers (I was about to join their holy ranks), cried over every sad story in the news (my body was pumped with hormones), and lived in sheer terror of this alien being that had taken over my body (and was soon to force its way out).

Luke had been too busy to tell any of this to. The baby wasn’t completely real to him yet because it wasn’t inside his body. To him, the baby was a shapeless mound of dough that wouldn’t spring to life until it emerged, fully cooked. Luke’s obsession was his business—and the house that his business might soon be able to buy for us.

The small, red, wrinkly Thomas Basko was born eight weeks early, a few weeks before Christmas. The birth itself was surprisingly silent. Neither Tommy nor I cried or screamed. Luke was the only one to shed tears.

Tommy wasn’t the usual picture you saw in birth announcements.
Please join us in welcoming our alien spawn to Earth
would have been an appropriate blurb for his first photo. Tommy was in intensive care for three weeks and a humidicrib for another two weeks. He belonged to the hospital and the nurses and the routines and the beeping machinery that he was attached to. Luke and I were on the periphery of all of this.

Then, all of a sudden, he was out. He was set free of the machines, and we were going to be trusted to take him home. Slight hearing issues in his left ear. Possible ongoing respiratory problems. But in general, healthy. Still, it felt wrong to leave the job of monitoring him to a pair of fallible humans.

At home, I exhausted myself just watching him breathe. I insisted on having a breathing monitor attached to him, in case I fell asleep.

Around this time, he turned into a little snapping turtle. In the hospital, I’d had to express milk into bottles. Now, I was expected to plug him directly into the source: my boobs. My nipples cracked and bled and pained. I dreaded each breastfeed. I couldn’t look at those soft-lens pastel-coloured, gloating breastfeeding photos in magazines anymore.

We engaged the services of a breastfeeding expert who
guilted
me into soldiering on for another month. When Tommy was two and a half months old, I snuck down to the grocery store and bought a can of formula. And fed it to him. I felt like a drug dealer, feeding crack to a helpless infant.

The formula healed my nipples, but it didn’t help Tommy sleep any better at night—or during the day. It wasn’t the golden elixir that would stop him from crying. Luke tried to help, but he’d manage to fall asleep even with a screaming baby in his arms. I didn’t know how that was possible. Crying babies were as loud as 115 decibels (louder than a jackhammer).

The books about babies talked about a mystical babymoon—like a honeymoon, except with a baby and without sex. A holiday in which you and the baby shut the world out and got to know each other.

Why did I feel so ragged? Why didn’t I know how to separate out Tommy’s cries and know what he wanted? Where was my mother’s intuition?

I was a phony. And Tommy knew it. And he cried all the harder because of it.

I had dreams. Dreams that exploded through my mind during the snatched hours of sleep in between Tommy waking and screaming. I dreamed of Tommy being in pieces all around the house. A leg here. An arm there. Like a broken doll. I’d try to collect the pieces and put him back together before Luke found out. But Luke always found out. In other dreams, I’d leave Tommy on a picnic rug in a park and I’d drive away, feeling desperate but free.

Around the four-month mark, things slowly started to get better. In some ways. In most ways, I was still lost.

Before my pregnancy with Tommy, my days had structure. I had casting calls and stage shows and parties and (languid) dinners in restaurants.

Now, after Tommy, my days were jelly. No firm ground anywhere. How had my life changed so dramatically? Luke was still doing the same things he’d been doing before Tommy. Tommy had barely altered his world.

At first, I managed my new life like an acting role. The housewife, out shopping for matching household appliances, together with her latest accessory—the baby—safely being paraded about in a sporty thousand-dollar baby pram.

I acted like the young wife loyal to her husband and his career. I acted contented to be the one with the mixed smell of baby poo and lavender soap emanating from her skin. Those other women walking their babies in prams were surely doing the same as me—pretending to be deep in mystical babymoon bliss.

I told myself that once Luke and I got Tommy past the
wake-all-night-long
stage, we could travel. Babies could travel, couldn’t they? They surely weighed less than a backpack. So we could just pack our stuff and pack the baby and go.

But Luke no longer wanted to travel. Nothing interested him except the push to gain footholds into the higher end of the Sydney property market. The higher end meant more expensive real estate and bigger commissions.

By the time Tommy was five months old, we were having Saturday lunch with his parents and Sunday walks in the park and visits with Nan on weekday afternoons. We had dinners with Rob and Ellie and clients of Luke’s.

That had become our life.

Visits.

Family lunches.

Client dinners.

Walks in the park.

The best times for me with Tommy were his baths. Untethered from baby clothes and wraps and accessories. Human. Soft, warm, accessible. I’d imagine escaping with him to an island in the South Pacific. Just him and me. We’d swim in the wide blue water. We’d rock to sleep in a hammock overlooking the ocean. When he was old enough, I’d feed him mashed bananas and avocadoes straight from the trees. We’d have no need of the dozens of toys and accessories that parents bought their babies.

I mentioned the jelly days and the South Pacific fantasy to my baby health clinic nurse and was promptly handed a questionnaire. The
are-you-depressed?
quiz. I scored high on the quiz, but there were no prizes. I didn’t win a South Pacific holiday.

The first plan of attack by the nurse to manage my depression was a mothers’ group—an organised group of mothers (and less often, fathers) who got together to share and support each other. The babies were all at a similar stage of development—four to six months old.

I started driving weekly to the group in my local area.

Swiftly, I learned there were ranks within the group.

First came the rank of wealthy mothers who swapped names of party organisers and house cleaners. They discussed the merits of private schools that their fat-faced babies would one day attend. Some had already put their little Evas and Edwards on the waiting lists for schools.

Next came the rank of achievers. Their focus was firmly on the achievements of their progeny. Baby signing, musical and mathematical ability were at the forefront of the charge. Baby milestones were old hat.

Next came the naturals—the baby-wearing attachment-parenting earth mothers who spoke a language I didn’t understand. They could pronounce all the names of substances and chemicals in baby lotions and foods. They grew their own vegetables and pureed them and froze them in tiny individual glass containers (with BPA-free plastic lids). They sewed their own clever baby slings and spent a lot of time talking about the materials and designs. They were nice to a fault, but I found no connection.

I hung with the strays, the unranked, the ones who turned up with hasty hairstyles, bereft of homemade things. We’d cling together in the hall. Our prams would be turned inward in a circle, the babies propped up and facing each other—alternately glaring and giggling at each other like small maniacs.

I liked the strays. They said inappropriate things, and they overshared, and they carried mother guilt. I didn’t feel conscious about my fifteen kilos of extra weight I was carrying or my stomach rolls when I was with them. They didn’t care, and they weren’t judging me.

Marta would tell us about her parents’-in-law shady business dealings and the nitty gritty of her prolapse surgery. She described her attempts at anal sex with her husband and the difficulties involved—she was tall and extremely large. Her husband was much shorter than herself:
Russell
has to prop himself up with pillows under his knees! It takes a bit of adjusting to get the angle right.
She and Russell were also swingers. She’d casually popped that snippet of information into the conversation like a discarded cherry seed.

“Oh goodness,” Gina the ex-librarian had exclaimed. “How do you manage it? It’s not for me. Mick and I invited another man into our bedroom eighteen months ago. Before I was pregnant with Cora. It was something we both wanted to do, but it turned out to be a complete disaster!”

I’d listened with the fervour of an acolyte.

A swinger at a mothers’ group! And anal sex! And an extra man in the bedroom!
These people were real and exposed. Nothing was hidden or shameful. None of them subscribed to any program.

They were nothing like me. I loved them all because they weren’t. Through them was an escape from my
visits-and-lunches
life. The conversation had brought back an image of a man I used to know. Flynn O’Callaghan. A gorgeous, eclectic Irish actor who’d broken my heart with his
open relationship
suggestion. But was I wrong and he right? Did he know something that I didn’t?