Keep Her Sweet, page 4
‘Put the camera on,’ Rosie said. ‘I want to see your face.’
It took several wrong swipes before Joy managed.
‘Hold it up, stop walking, find a seat somewhere, take your time.’
Rosie was very bossy and ever-energetic. Why shouldn’t everything be perfect? – that was her motto – and Joy knew it was worth following her sister’s directions. She found a bench overlooking the water, settled in.
‘Hold the phone up. Up, higher. Ah, that’s it, that’s the little face I want to see. Hello!’
Rosie was sitting on her floodlit terrace with a cup of tea, a huge cake with burning candles on the table before her.
‘You made me a cake?’ No-one had made her a cake for – must be years. Had anyone bar her Mum and Rosie ever made her a cake?
‘It’s red velvet with real vanilla in the icing, and there’s a gooey strawberry surprise in the middle.’ She blew out the candles. ‘Happy birthday to you.’ She sang the whole thing.
‘It’s so beautiful, I love strawberry gooey surprises,’ Joy said.
‘How are you? All packed?’
‘Almost.’
‘And tomorrow you book the flight.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘Soon as the funds clear,’ Joy said.
They hadn’t seen each other since Jeanie’s divorce five years ago; the longest they’d gone without a fun-filled meet up. This particular reunion had been talked about since Bertie died – the lakeside accommodation decided on, activities planned. It was to be even more perfect than last time, and last time was at a five-star hotel in Yorkshire, the best fortnight of Joy’s life.
‘What toothpaste are you using?’ Rosie said.
‘Are they yellow?’
‘I’d say yellow-ing. That lipstick doesn’t help. Totally fixable. Just sending you the polish I use, it’s good. And stick with plain gloss, you’re too old and thin lipped for that red. So you’ll ring me tomorrow?’
‘Soon as I’ve booked.’
‘There’s a two-bed in my street, you should see it, Joy. It’d be perfect for you. How’s Jeanie doing?’ Rosie asked.
‘Really well. Home on Monday.’
‘That’s good,’ Rosie said, but she was worried, Joy could tell. It was best they didn’t talk about Jeanie.
*
Joy didn’t have a toxic family like the Moloney-Singhs but she did have a daughter ravaged by toxins. Ice, they called it – which seemed terribly unfair on frozen water. Joy loved water in any form, longed for the never-ending drizzle of Hampshire, for lakes and rivers and canals that were full, and for taps you could leave running for the duration of a two-minute tooth brush without someone yelling at you. Ever since she married Bertie and made Australia her home, she fell asleep to memories of white Christmases; of being snowed in for days with her mum and dad and little sister, playing board games in front of the open fire and walking the dogs along crunchy country paths. She even yearned for the smell of steaming clothing on radiators and for jeans that never dried on the line outside. Even Ballarat, arguably the most wintery place on the continent – how the locals complained – was not cold or wet enough for Joy. But it was ice that had nearly killed her only child and the word was sinister now.
Poor Jeanie.
How shocking that she now prefaced her child’s name this way. Before her addiction she had been chortling Jeanie, dancing Jeanie, beautiful Jeanie, loving Jeanie, clever Jeanie, hard-working Jeanie, married Jeanie, happily child-free Jeanie, strong-single Jeanie. Until two years ago, Joy had considered herself a tip-top parent with a fantastic and fulfilled child who would never be prefaced thus. She’d had no concerns about her girl at all. They had a constant and loving relationship. To the age of forty-one, Jeanie jogged and played tennis and had mates and went on holidays. She managed a thriving florist and was essential to the success of the annual begonia festival – everyone loved her, she was popular Jeanie. She even remained strong and positive after her husband left her for more fertile ground – this was three years prior to Bertie’s death and seemed to be more of a blow to Joy than it was to her daughter, who happily exclaimed thereafter that she had never wanted children really, and had in fact sabotaged interminable pregnancy efforts, unbeknownst to her hitherto adoring partner. Joy didn’t like to think about her ex son-in-law. She had thought he was a good man; that they were close; family. Turns out he was just another idiot, now the father of two mini idiots.
It wasn’t the divorce but her father’s unexpected departure that caused Jeanie to spiral. It seemed as if everything suddenly caught up with her, and she became very low. Although, according to Jeanie, it was a one-off incident rather than a spiral – one innocent trip to The Old Smithy to douse her sorrows with a moderate amount of gin and tonic, and one snap decision. That’s all it took with Ice, allegedly: one puff of a glass pipe. As Jeanie was suffering from grief and some kind of mid-life depression, she was enticed to take a puff. It was done without thinking. It got her when she was weak. It seemed to Joy that people were enticed to the drug for all sorts of reasons, but the reason they all kept using was exactly the same. The Old Smithy had always frightened Joy – she found it rough and dangerous, filled with drunk, uncouth locals calling women names. But now there was another group in the pub, not just the young men looking for dirty sex with scantily clad local girls, but motley crews of meth-heads, as they were known, staying up for days and terrorising the town. Even the unit in Sebastopol Joy bought had to be decontaminated before she could move in. Methamphetamine had seeped into the carpets and walls, and would have made her sick if she’d moved in straight away.
For the last two years Joy had watched her beautiful girl shrivel and rot. She stopped going to work and yoga, she lost her friends, lost her car, lost her house, her business, and her parents’ life savings. Joy had remortgaged her Victorian home three times to pay for Jeanie’s stints in rehab, before finally making the decision to downsize.
*
She headed straight for the confessional at St Pat’s. ‘Forgive me, father,’ she said, ‘it has been—’
‘Four days,’ Father Nigel said, his tone indicating that Joy came a little too often. ‘Honestly, Joy, you’re seventy and you’ve never done anything wrong in your life.’
‘Seventy-one,’ Joy said.
‘You’re a good Catholic and a good citizen,’ Father Nigel reminded her yet again, ‘and there is nothing to be forgiven for.’ He’d never met anyone with such moral strength, he continued: a staunch believer in family, a defender of the institution.
It’s true about family. She would never have considered leaving Bertie, she had never needed to, she had promised to love him till death. She believed that divorce was wrong. (Jeanie, the MacManuses, even the Rossis. Whoever next?) She also had an unflinching conviction that parents who abandoned their children were morally bankrupt. Siblings abandoning siblings: what a thought.
‘If you have anything to work on,’ Father Nigel said, ‘it’s being judgemental. Not everyone is as firm a believer in family, as strong a Catholic, as you.’
It consoled her a little to hear all this again. ‘But my tummy is all over the place today,’ she said, ‘and I just can’t help thinking it might all be a little overwhelming for me, that I won’t manage.’
Father Nigel reminded her that she was leaving the family home the following day, that her daughter would be moving in with her on Monday, and that the week ahead might well be one of the most stressful of her life. ‘Go easy on yourself,’ he said. ‘After the move, don’t rush around looking after Jeanie, do something nice for yourself. Can you do that for me, and five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys?’
Joy completed a decade – five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys was not enough for the lack of enthusiasm she had about Jeanie’s third exit from rehab. A little less nauseous, she donned her earphones and walked to Bunning’s to buy paint.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Mum
Penny should have insisted on driving. As per the rules she wished she hadn’t made, the driver always got to choose the music, which meant she had endured the bang-bang-bang-banging of Andeep’s eighties house mix all the way to Hall’s Gap. Three hours and three-hundred M&Ms later and her head was beating too. On the way home she’d take the wheel and choose ballads. They might soothe and trick her into feeling something other than pain and irritation. It was 9pm when they arrived at the rental, a pretty stone cottage one kilometre from the village shops that was not as easy to find as promised. She and Andeep carried the suitcases to the veranda and fumbled in the dark for the lock. Once the door was finally open and the lights on, she raced to the bedroom, fully expecting her husband to follow her and pounce on the bed. Mini-breaks had always been so much fun. Time to themselves, no offspring; a clean house that they could mess up and leave; a comfy bed with fresh sheets. But Andeep didn’t follow her. He stopped in the living room, went straight for the sofa and turned on the television, flicking through local channels and sighing.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ he was saying. ‘Even the ABC’s all crackly. Hang on, hang on, there’s Netflix – honey, they have Netflix. Hang on, fuck’s sake,’ he said. ‘Password. It needs a password. Penny, is there an instruction book somewhere? Penny?’
Penny straightened the sheets she’d messed with her premature pounce and was now unpacking their two large suitcases into drawers and cupboards, and planning the rest of the evening in her head. They could go out for dinner in the village. No, there’d be nothing open now. Anyway, she wasn’t hungry after stuffing her face with M&Ms on the way. She had a headache and stomach ache, and might make plain pasta with tomato later, or just have toast and vege. They could paint – she’d brought canvases and oils. No, that’d be better outside after the hike tomorrow, as was her plan for day one. They could ring the girls. No, that would put her in a worse mood. She was determined to feel close to Andeep again. Since the girls left their Preston home they’d become more and more distant. They didn’t have fun together anymore. Empty-nest syndrome turned out to be a real thing. The move to Ballarat had done the opposite of helping. Andeep seemed to be out of the house most of the time since the move – joining this group, that group, running a course at the Eureka, making friends, having meetings. Add Asha and her ankle tag into the mix, and they hardly even talked to each other these days. Penny would sort it though. She would get her marriage back on track. She popped her head out the bedroom door. ‘You want to have sex?’ she said.
‘Um, yeah, sure.’ Andeep didn’t look up. He was reading the information booklet he’d obviously managed to find himself and pressing buttons on the remote.
‘Great,’ she said. ‘I’ll go to the shop and get wine.’
*
The store was closed, but the pub wasn’t, and it was 11pm by the time Penny realised that it was 11pm. She and another drunk mother had been competing over who had it harder. The other mum was on her own with three boys (men, they were eighteen, twenty-three and twenty-six). The boys had not been invited on this mini-break but had come anyway. Within an hour all three were rat-arsed and throwing things at animals. Penny saw this and raised it: one home-wrecking, god-bothering, daughter on an electronic tag, one unemployed winder-upperer who was allowed to leave the house but never did, and one narcissistic husband who she didn’t like much anymore and had to shag tonight. They were calling it a draw when Penny noticed the time. She ran home with a red-stained mouth and the plugged half-bottle she had left (out of the two she had bought). She fumbled with the lock for a while then screamed when Andeep suddenly opened it. ‘You scared me,’ she said.
‘Sorry,’ he said, making his way back to the couch to watch some dumb zombie show, not at all bothered, it seemed, that she had taken two hours to get the wine required for her to have sex with him. (She must not say this out loud.) She sat beside him and put her legs on his knees. ‘I took two hours to get this wine,’ she said, pleased to have left out the aggro part that was getting louder in her head. ‘You didn’t get worried?’
‘I rang the pub and they said you were there,’ he said, eyes on the zombies.
‘Oh.’ Penny tried to watch the television for a few minutes. She tried really hard, but it was so fucking stupid that she just couldn’t do it any longer and went off to bed. If only she’d had time to whip up a sexy black dress on the Singer, like she planned. Mind you, why should she? He hadn’t changed his T-shirt in three days.
*
Every plan Penny made for the following two days turned to crap. Andeep twisted his ankle two hours into the five-hour Pinnacles loop and crawled back down the path, whining like a baby, blaming her in thickening Glaswegian the whole time (except when other hikers were within earshot. When others could hear he mustered allegedly witty one-liners that strangers laughed at).
‘Why did you pick such a long and difficult walk?’ he said when no-one could hear, and why didn’t she pack his walking boots?
By the time they reached the house she was ready to divorce him, but she didn’t say anything. She was determined for this mini-break to work. ‘It might take a while to rekindle passion,’ a life coach with no front teeth had said to her before the move to Ballarat. ‘You must be patient.’ But his life drawing of her on the patio in the afternoon was just plain mean. Her boobs were not saggy or irregular, and her nipples were not inverted, and her stomach was flat for a woman of her age and definitely didn’t have stretch marks on it, not from where he was sitting, anyway, with his nasty, spiteful paintbrush. He seemed determined to wind her up, like he wanted to send her to the kitchen to finish off last night’s wine before afternoon tea, and to the shops to buy more before they dressed to go out for dinner. At the restaurant he complained the whole time about his ankle, which wasn’t swollen or bruised at all. The agonising crawl down the path had been for show, she was sure of it. And he feigned a hobble back from dinner too, both of them silent, hands disengaged. Back in the rental, he went straight for the zombies, and she went straight for the bed. She wasn’t going to give up, though. Tomorrow would be better.
It wasn’t. Her life drawing of him was also mean. Perhaps she should have eaten a good breakfast. And perhaps she shouldn’t have suggested a perfunctory quickie after showering. ‘No expectations, we don’t have to enjoy it, we should just get our love muscles working again.’ He didn’t like this. He wanted connection.
‘I’m not a prostitute,’ he said.
Perhaps she shouldn’t have said what man says no to a quick, no-frills fuck, and thrown her pants at him.
‘You’ve made me really fat,’ he said when she showed him her oil painting, which was no oil painting.
‘Are you really fat or are you just really close?’ she said, slamming the canvas on the outdoor table and heading off for a solo hike without a lazy, moaning man to hold her back.
When she returned, Andeep had finished the zombie series and moved on to an unhappy all-male Antarctica one. ‘We’ve got work to do,’ she said. ‘Can you give the telly a rest for an hour?’ Their account, as usual, was in overdraft, and they had to sell sell sell to survive another month. It was Andeep’s job to write material for their first YouTube video, which they would do as soon as they got back the following day. In the video, she would bake Aunty Jane’s famous brownie and wrap it in thick, hand-painted paper (they could charge seven bucks a pop at the open house, what with the original artwork on the wrapping and the careful rustic writing on the little cardboard tags and the twirly string and all). She left him on the deck to write his comedy routine, and she set up her brownie-wrapping materials on the dining-table inside. ‘Don’t show me what you’ve written,’ she instructed. ‘It’ll be so much better if I’m surprised.’ She set the clock for two hours so neither could slack off and tried not to look out the window at her husband, whose pen did not appear to be making contact with his new, essential and expensive moleskin pad, and whose eyes closed after twenty minutes. Penny didn’t want to have sex with him, she didn’t want to divorce him either. She wanted to kill him.
Thankfully, when the alarm rang, Andeep came inside and suggested they choose photographs for next week’s therapy session. All four of them had been instructed to do this by the posh therapist with very thin lips. Penny was so pleased that he had initiated something. Andeep scrolled through the Nucular Family group chat. Penny had photographed and posted dozens of old pictures a few years back. She must have been feeling sentimental at the time because both girls had left home. She must have been sad, actually. But it was even sadder that she had stopped posting happy photos. She had stopped chatting to her clan altogether, she realised.
They both got mushy looking at the photos of their many wedding celebrations (registry office in Melbourne, family dinner in Lygon Street, drinks with mates at The Prince of Wales in St Kilda and a full-on party a month later at the Clutha in Glasgow). They found it difficult to choose three each, there were too many wonderful memories – when Penny carried baby Asha round the wreck that was to become their beloved suburban home, for example; when Camille and Asha both got bunny rabbits for Christmas; when they had that huge toga party for their fifteenth wedding anniversary. They laughed thinking about the wild sex they had after that party. Jess and Martin from round the corner got really pissed and suggested they swap partners. Penny and Andeep declined but talked about it in bed that night, a lot. They did used to have passion. They used to have sex all over that house, often outside too. Ah, the shot of the girls playing totem tennis in the blossoming garden; and of Camille’s first day at school, Asha holding her little sister’s hand to escort her into the building, promising to look out for her, ever the protector. And how could they leave out that first wonderful summer in Portsea, and the second and the third? They had at least ten exceptional summers in those golden years. They had been happy, quite often in fact, before the girls left home, both at the age of eighteen, excited to find themselves, never expecting they’d need to return.
