CHAPTER 1
You could argue that it started thirty-four years ago when twenty-year-old Frank Kettle, a tall, fair, hyperactive ex–altar boy, fell madly in lust with Maxine Leonard, a long-legged languid redhead just a few days short of her nineteenth birthday.
He was pumping with fresh testosterone. She knew better but did it anyway. In the backseat of Frank’s dad’s Holden. Twice. The first time involved a lot of head-bumping and grunting and breathless shifts of position, while Johnny O’Keefe bellowed at them from the car radio. The second time was slower and gentler and rather nice. Elvis soothingly suggested they love him tender. In each case, however, the terrible result was the same. One of Frank’s exuberant little sperm cells slammed head-on with one of Maxine’s rather less thrilled eggs, interrupting what should have been an uneventful journey to nonexistence.
Over the following days, while Maxine was chastely dating more suitable boys and Frank was pursuing a curvy brunette, two freshly fertilized eggs were busily bumping their way along Maxine’s fallopian tubes toward the haven of her horrified young uterus.
At the exact moment Maxine allowed the very suitable Charlie Edwards to hold back her long red hair while she puffed out her cheeks and blew out nineteen candles, one egg fizzed with so much friction it split right in two. The other single egg burrowed its way comfortably in between the two new identical eggs.
Guests at Maxine’s birthday party thought they’d never seen her look so beautiful—slender, glowing, almost incandescent! Who could have guessed she’d been impregnated with some Catholic boy’s triplets?
Frank and Maxine were married, of course. In their wedding photos, they both have the blank-eyed, sedated look of recent trauma victims.
Seven months later, their triplet daughters came kicking and howling into the world. Maxine, who had never even held a baby before, was presented with three; it was the most despair-filled moment of her young life.
Well, that would be Gemma’s preference for how it started. Cat would argue that if she was going to begin with their conception, then why not go back through their entire family tree? Why not go back to the apes? Why not start with the Big Bang? I guess I did really, Gemma would chortle, Mum and Dad’s big bang. Oh funn-y, Cat would say. Let’s look at it logically, Lyn would interrupt. Quite clearly, it started the night of the spaghetti.
And Lyn, quite naturally, would be right.
It was a Wednesday night six weeks before Christmas. A nothing sort of night. An unassuming midweek night that should have vanished from their memories by Friday. “What did we do Wednesday?” “I don’t know. Watch TV?”
That’s what they were doing. They were eating spaghetti and drinking red wine in front of the television. Cat was sitting cross-legged on the floor, with her back up against the sofa, her plate on her lap. Her husband, Dan, was sitting on the edge of the sofa, hunched over his dinner on the coffee table. It was the way they always ate dinner.
Dan had cooked the spaghetti, so it was hearty and bland. Cat was the more accomplished cook. Dan’s approach to cooking was somehow too functional. He stirred his ingredients like concrete mix, one arm wrapped around the bowl, the other stirring the gluggy mix so vigorously you could see his biceps working. “So what? Gets the job done.”
That Wednesday night Cat was feeling no specific emotion; not especially happy, not especially sad. It was strange afterward, remembering how she sat there, shoveling Dan’s pasta into her mouth, so foolishly trusting of her life. She wanted to yell back at herself through time, Concentrate!
They were watching a show called Med School. It was a soap about a group of very beautiful young medical students with shiny white teeth and complex love lives. Each episode featured a lot of blood and sex and anguish.
Cat and Dan shared a mild addiction to Med School. Whenever the plot took a new twist, they responded with loud enthusiasm, yelling at the television like children watching a pantomime: “Bastard!” “Dump him!” “It’s the wrong medication!”
This week Ellie (blond, cutesy, cropped T-shirt) was in a state. She didn’t know whether to tell her boyfriend, Pete (dark, brooding, abnormal abs), about her drunken infidelity with a guest-starring troublemaker.
“Tell him, Ellie!” said Cat to the television. “Pete will forgive you. He’ll understand!”
The ad break came on, and a manic man in a yellow jacket bounced around a department store pointing an incredulous finger at the Christmas specials.
“I booked that health and beauty thing today,” said Cat, using Dan’s knee as a lever to help her reach over him for the pepper. “The woman had one of those gooey, spiritual voices. I felt like I was getting a massage just making a booking.”
For Christmas, she was giving her sisters (and herself) a weekend away at a health retreat in the Blue Mountains. The three of them would share an “exquisite experience” of “indulgent pampering.” They would be wrapped in seaweed, dunked in mud, and slathered in vitamin-enriched creams. It would be extremely amusing.
She was pleased with herself for thinking of it. “What a clever idea!” everyone would say on Christmas Day. Lyn definitely needed the stress relief. Gemma didn’t need it but she’d be right into pretending that she did. Cat herself wasn’t especially stressed either, but perhaps she was, because she wasn’t pregnant and she’d been off the Pill now for nearly a year. “Don’t get stressed about it,” everybody said wisely, as if they were the first to pass on that hot little tip. Apparently, the moment your ovaries noticed you were worried about becoming pregnant, they refused to cooperate. Oh well, if you’re going to get all huffy about it, we’ll just close down.
A health insurance ad came on. Dan winced. “I hate this ad.”
“It’s effective. You watch it more closely than any other ad on television.”
He closed his eyes and averted his head. “O.K. I’m not looking, I’m not looking. Oh God. I can still hear that woman’s grating voice.”
Cat picked up the remote and turned up the volume.
“Aaaagh!” He opened his eyes and grabbed the remote from her.
He was behaving perfectly normally. She remembered that afterward and it made it worse, somehow. Every moment he behaved normally was part of the betrayal.
“Shh. It’s back on.”
Ellie’s betrayed boyfriend, Pete, appeared on the screen, flexing his freakish abs. Ellie gave the TV audience guilty looks.
“Tell him,” Cat told her. “I’d want to know. I couldn’t stand not to know the truth. Better to tell him, Ellie.”
“You think so?” said Dan.
“Yeah. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
There were no bells jangling a warning in Cat’s head. Not a single chime.
She had put down her wineglass on the coffee table and was feeling a pimple that had just that very moment appeared on her chin, undoubtedly a malevolent herald of her forthcoming period. Each month it appeared like an official stamp on her chin. There will be no baby for this woman this month. Nope. Sorry, try again! Cat had begun to cackle bitterly, throwing back her head witchlike, as soon as the first treacherous spots of blood appeared. It was such a joke, such a crushing anticlimax, after all those years of anxiously ensuring she didn’t have a baby, after all those months of “Are we ready to make this momentous change in our lives? I think we are, don’t you? Ooh, maybe we should have one more month of freedom!”
Don’t think about it, she told herself. Don’t think about it.
“Cat,” said Dan.
“What?”
“I have to tell you something.”
She snorted at his ponderous tone, pleased to be distracted from her pimple. She thought he was sending up the show. “Oh my God!” she said and hummed the Med School sound track that helpfully warned viewers when something dramatic and awful was about to happen. “What? Have you done an Ellie? Have you been unfaithful to me?”
“Well. Yes.”
He looked like he was going to be sick and he wasn’t that great an actor.
Cat put down her fork. “This is a joke, right? You’re saying you’ve slept with someone else?”
“Yes.” Now his mouth was doing something strange. He looked like a guilty little boy caught doing something disgusting.
She picked up the remote and turned off the television. Her heart was thumping with fear but also a strangely urgent desire, a desire to know. It was the sick feeling of excited resistance at the very top of the roller coaster—I don’t want to go hurtling over that precipice but I do, I do!
“When?” She still didn’t really believe it. She was half laughing. “Years ago, do you mean? When we first started going out? You don’t mean recently?”
“About a month ago.”
“What?”
“It didn’t mean anything.” He looked down at his plate and picked up a mushroom with his fingers. Halfway to his mouth, he dropped it and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
“Would you just start from the beginning, please? When?”
“One night.”
“What night? Where was I?” She fumbled through her mind for events over the last few weeks. “What night?”
It seemed that on a Tuesday night, three weeks before, at drinks after squash he met a girl. She came on to him, and he was flattered because she was, well, quite good-looking. He was a bit drunk, and so he went back to her place and one thing led to another. It didn’t mean anything, obviously. He didn’t know why he had made such a stupid, stupid mistake. Maybe all the stress lately with work, and, you know, the baby thing. Obviously it would never happen again and he was very, very, very sorry and he loved her so much and God, it was such a relief to have this out in the open!
It was almost like something interesting and unusual had happened to him and he’d forgotten to tell Cat about it until now. She asked him questions and he answered them. “Where did she live? How did you get home?”
He finished his story and Cat stared stupidly at him, waiting for it to hurt. All her muscles were tensed tight in anticipation of pain. It was like giving blood and waiting for the smiling doctor to find her vein.
“What was her name?” she said.
His eyes slid away. “Angela.”
Finally. An exquisite twist of her heart because this girl actually had a name and Dan knew her name.
She gazed at her dinner congealing on her plate, and she could see every snakelike strand of spaghetti in nauseating definition. The lens of a telescope had been clicked, and her previously blurry world was now in sharp-edged focus.
She stared with new eyes at their living room. Casually angled cushions on the sofa, bright wacky rug on polished floorboards. The bookshelf, lined with photos, each one carefully selected and framed as evidence of their happy, active lives. Look! We’re so loving and cosmopolitan, so fit and humorous! Here we are smiling and hugging in our ski gear! Here we are having a laugh before we go scuba diving! We party with our friends! We pull ironic faces at the camera!
She looked back at Dan. He was quite a good-looking man, her husband. It used to worry her in a pleasurable, not-really-worried way.
He’s been unfaithful to me, she thought, trying it out. It was bizarre. Surreal. Part of her wanted to switch the television back on and pretend it had never happened. I have to iron my skirt for tomorrow, she thought. I should do my Christmas list.
“It was nothing,” he said. “It was just a stupid one-night stand.”
“Don’t call it that!”
“O.K.”
“This is all so tacky.”
He looked at her beseechingly. A speck of tomato sauce quivered beneath his nose.
“You’ve got food on your face,” she said savagely. His guilt was inflating her, making her powerful with righteousness. He was the criminal and she was the cop. The bad cop. The one that grabbed the criminal’s shirtfront and slammed him up against the wall.
She said, “Why are you telling me this now? Is it just to make you feel better?”
“I don’t know. I kept changing my mind. And then you said you’d want to know the truth.”
“I was talking to Ellie! I was watching television! I was eating dinner!”
“So you didn’t mean it?’
“For God’s sake. It’s too late now.”
They sat in silence for a few seconds, and suddenly she wanted to weep like a five-year-old in the playground because Dan was meant to be her friend, her special friend.
“But, why?” Her voice cracked. “Why did you do it? I don’t understand why you would do that.”
“It didn’t mean anything. It really didn’t mean anything.” Had his friends told him to say that? “Tell her it didn’t mean anything, mate. That’s all they want to hear.”
If she were on Med School, one single tear would have been trickling so slowly, so heartbreakingly down her cheek. Instead, she was making strange, wheezy sounds as if she’d been running.
“Please don’t be upset. Cat. Babe.”
“Don’t be upset!”
Dan placed his palm tentatively against her arm. She pushed it violently away. “Don’t you touch me!”
They looked at each other in horror. Dan’s face was pasty-white. Cat was trembling with the sudden chasm-opening revelation that he must have touched this woman she’d never seen. Properly touched her. He must have kissed her. All the tiny, trivial details of sex.
“Did you take her bra off?”
“Cat!”
“I mean obviously her bra came off. I just want to know if she took it off, or you? Did you reach your hand up her back, while you were kissing and undo it? Have any difficulty? Was it a tricky one? Those tricky ones are bad, aren’t they? Been a while since you’ve had to worry about that. How’d you do? Breathe a sigh of relief once you got it undone?”
“Please stop it.”
“I will not stop it.”
“I took her bra off, O.K.! But it was nothing. I was drunk. It was nothing like with us. It didn’t—”
“It didn’t mean anything. Yes, I know. What meaningless position did you choose?”
“Please, Cat.”
“Did she have an orgasm?”
“Please don’t.”
“Oh, darling. Don’t worry. I’m sure she did. Those little techniques of yours are so reliable. I’m sure she was very appreciative.”
“Cat, I’m begging you to stop.” There was a tremor in his voice.
She wiped sweat from her forehead. It was too hot.
She felt ugly. In fact she was ugly. She put her hand to her chin and felt the pimple. Makeup! She needed makeup. She needed makeup, wardrobe, a hair stylist, and an air-conditioned set. Then she’d feel clean, beautiful waves of grief like the stars of Med School.
She got to her feet and picked up both their plates.
The back of her throat itched unbearably. Hay fever. Right now, of all times. She put the plates back down on the coffee table and sneezed four times. Each time she closed her eyes to sneeze, an image of a sliding bra strap exploded in her mind.
Dan went into the kitchen and came back with the box of tissues.
“Don’t look at me,” she said.
“What?” He held out the tissues.
“Just don’t look at me.”
That was when she picked up one of the plates of spaghetti and threw it straight against the wall.
To: Lyn; Cat
From: Gemma
Subject: Cat
LYN! WARNING, WARNING! DANGER, DANGER! I just spoke to Cat and she is in a VERY, VERY bad mood. I would not recommend ringing her about minding Maddie for another twenty-four hours at least.
Love, Gemma
To: Gemma
From: Cat
Subject: ME
Warning, warning, if you’re going to send e-mails about my bad mood at least make sure I don’t get them. That could really put me in a bad mood.
To: Gemma
From: Lyn
Subject: Cat
G. Need to be careful about hitting “reply all” instead of “reply to author” on old e-mails. Set up address book!! No doubt Cat v. impressed. Kara minding Maddie so no problem. L.
To: Lyn; Cat
From: Gemma
Subject: Kara
Dear Lyn,
I don’t know how to set up an address book but thank you for the thought. I don’t mean to alarm you but have you heard of SHAKING BABY SYNDROME? I think leaving Maddie with Kara could be very dangerous. Once I saw her shaking a box of cornflakes FURIOUSLY. She is a teenager and teenagers have problems with their hormones that cause them to be just a little insane. Can’t you ask Cat, once she has finished her bad mood? Or else I could cancel my date with the luscious locksmith. I am prepared to do that to save Maddie’s life. Let me know. Love, Gemma
Cat wondered if her face looked different. It felt different, as if it were bruised and swollen. Both her eyes as if like they’d been punched. In fact, her whole body seemed strangely fragile. She’d been holding herself stiffly all day, as if she were sunburned.
It was surprising really, how much this hurt and how consistently it hurt. All day at work she kept thinking that she ought to get a painkiller and then remembering that she wasn’t actually in physical pain.
She hadn’t slept much the night before.
“I’ll sleep on the sofa bed,” Dan had announced, looking heroic and pale.
“No, you won’t,” said Cat, refusing to give him the satisfaction.
But when they got into bed and she lay there looking at the ceiling and listened to Dan’s breathing starting to slow—he was actually going to sleep—she had snapped back on the light and said, “Get out.”
He went, clutching his pillow sleepily to his stomach. Cat lay in bed and imagined her husband having sex with another woman. She was right there, under the covers with them, watching his hands, her hands, his mouth, her mouth.
She couldn’t stop. She didn’t want to stop. It was necessary to imagine every excruciating second-by-second detail.
In the middle of the night she woke Dan up to ask him what color underwear the girl was wearing.
“I don’t remember,” he said blearily.
“You do! You do!” She kept insisting until finally he said he thought it might have been black, at which point she burst into tears.
Now Cat looked at the people in the 4:30 P.M. Operations Meeting and wondered if this thing, this vile thing, had ever happened to them.
Sales Director Rob Spencer was in his favorite position by the whiteboard, enthusiastically scribbling flamboyant arrows and boxes. “Folks! I think this makes my point very clear!”
Rob Spencer. Well, that was a joke. For the last five years or so Rob Spencer had been having an affair with gorgeous Johanna from accounts. It was the company’s favorite secret. Telling new staff the Rob/Johanna legend was part of the induction procedure at Hollingdale Chocolates. The only people who didn’t know, presumably, were Rob’s wife and Johanna’s husband. Everyone stared with enjoyable pity at the two unfortunate spouses when they made their appearance each year at the annual Christmas party.
It occurred to Cat that she now had something in common with Rob Spencer’s pathetic wife. She was the faceless wife in Angela’s amusing story of a one-night stand with a married man. Well I feel sorry for the wife…the wife isn’t Angela’s responsibility…who cares about the wife, just give us the gory details, Ange!
She swallowed hard and looked down at Rob’s analysis for a quick way to humiliate him.
Colorful graphs. Nifty little spreadsheet. All done by his minions, of course.
Aha.
“Rob,” she said.
Ten heads turned in relieved unison to face her.
“Catriona!” Rob spun from the whiteboard, teeth flashing against solarium-yellow tan. “Always value your feedback!”
“I just wondered where those figures came from?” she said.
“I do believe the marvelous Margie did the number crunching for me.” Rob tapped his figures seductively, as if Margie had given him a rather marvelous blow job at the same time.
“Yes, but what figures did you give Margie to crunch?” asked Cat.
“Ah, let’s see,” Rob began shuffling vaguely through his paperwork.
She savored the moment before moving in for the kill.
“Looking at the marketing budget here, it seems you’ve given her last financial year’s figures. So your analysis, while fascinating, is also, hmmm, how can I put it best…irrelevant?”
Too bitchy. Male egos were so tender, just like their balls. She would pay for that one.
“Crash and burn, Rob, mate!” Hank from production thumped his fist on the table.
Rob held up both hands in boyish surrender. “Team! It seems the Cat has caught me out again with her razor-sharp eye for errors!”
He looked at his watch. “It’s nearly five on a Friday afternoon! People, what are we still doing here? Who wants to join me in drowning my humiliation at Albert’s? Catriona? Can I shout my nemesis a drink?”
His eyes were opaque little marbles.
Cat smiled tightly. “I’ll hold you to it another time.”
She bundled up her files and left the room, feeling quite ill with inappropriate-for-the-workplace hatred for Rob Spencer.
To: Cat
From: Gemma
Subject: Drink
Would you like to have a drink?
We can talk about the bad mood you’re not in.
Love, Gemma
P.S. Essential that you back me up on Kara issue!
P.P.S. Do you owe me any money by any chance? I don’t seem to have any.
Cat sat in a dimly lit corner of the pub with three beers in front of her and waited for her sisters.
She wasn’t going to tell them. She and Dan needed time to work it out for themselves. It wasn’t necessary to share every single detail of her marriage. It was weird and triplet-dependent. “You tell those two everything!” Dan always said, and he didn’t know the half of it.
If she told them, Gemma would hug her and rush off to buy supplies of ice cream and champagne. Lyn would be on her mobile ringing friends for referrals for good marriage counselors. They would inundate her with advice. They would argue passionately with each other over what she should and shouldn’t do.
They would care too much and that would make it real.
She took a gulp of her beer and bared her teeth at a man who was making hopeful gestures at the two stools she had saved.
“Just checking!” he said, hands up, looking hurt.
She definitely wasn’t telling her sisters. Look what happened when she went off the Pill. Her cycle became public property; every month, they’d call to cheerily ask if her period had arrived yet.
They had both stopped calling now but only after she’d said to Gemma that yes, it had come, and yes, she probably was infertile, and now was she satisfied? Gemma had cried, of course. Then Cat had felt sick with guilt as well as period pain.
“Are these seats?”
“Yes, they are seats, but no, they are not free.”
“What’s her problem?”
“Ignore her. Bitch.”
Two girls in matching Barbie-doll business suits tottered off disapprovingly on their high heels, while Cat examined her knuckles and imagined jumping up and punching their lipsticked mouths.
She wondered what that girl looked like.
Angela.
She was probably short and curvy like those girls who had now stopped to giggle and gurgle up at a group of, no doubt married, men.
Cat hated curvaceous little women. Feminine, doll-like women who tilted up their sweet faces to Cat like she was some sort of towering, lumbering giant.
Her sisters understood. Tall women understood.
But she didn’t want the humiliation of their understanding. In fact, for some reason the thought of their intensely sympathetic faces made her furious. It was their fault.
She searched her mind for a rational reason for blaming them.
Of course: it was their fault she’d ever met Dan in the first place.
Melbourne Cup Day over ten years ago. Twenty-one and delightfully drunk on champagne, back when you were still allowed to call cheap sparkling wine “champagne.” Betting spectacular amounts of money on every race. Laughing like drains, as their grandmother said. Making a complete spectacle of themselves, as their mother said.
They accosted every boy who walked by their table.
Gemma: “We’re triplets! Can you tell? Can you believe it? They’re identical but I’m not. I’m a single egg! They’re just half of the one egg. Half-eggs. Would you like to buy us a drink? We quite like champagne.”
Lyn: “Got any good tips? Personally, I like Lone Ranger in Race Five. We’re drinking the $9.99 bottle of champagne if you were thinking of buying us a drink. We’ve already got glasses, so that’s O.K.”
Cat: “You seem to have an unusually large head. It’s blocking the television and I’m about to win a lot of money. Could you go away? Unless you’d like to buy us a drink.”
The boy with the large head sat down in the booth next to Cat. He was very tall, and they all had to squash together to give him enough room.
He had evil green eyes and stubble.
He was gorgeous.
“So,” he said. “You’re all ex–womb mates.”
Gemma thought this was hilarious and dissolved into tears of laughter. Cat sat back, sipping her drink, waiting for the gorgeous boy to fall in love with Gemma. Men generally fell in love with Gemma when she laughed. They couldn’t hide their sheepish grins of pride. It became their life mission to make her laugh again.
But this boy seemed more interested in Cat. He put his hand on her knee. She removed it and put it back on the table.
“Did you just put your hand on Cat’s knee!?” shouted Lyn, whose voice tended to rise several decibels when she was drunk. “Gemma! That boy just put his hand on Cat’s knee!”
“Do you like her?” said Gemma. “Do you want to kiss her? She’s a good kisser. She says she is anyway. After you’ve kissed her could you buy us some more champagne please?”
“I don’t want to kiss him!” said Cat. “His head is abnormally large. And he looks like a truck driver.”
She wanted to kiss him quite a lot.
“If I pick a winner in this race, will you kiss me?” said the boy.
They looked at him with interest. They were all gamblers. It was a rogue gene they’d inherited from their grandfather.
Lyn leaned forward. “WHAT IF IT LOSES?”
“Bottle of champagne,” said the boy.
“Deal!” Gemma knocked over Cat’s champagne as she reached across to shake his hand.
“What are you two, my pimps?” asked Cat.
He picked a horse called Dancing Girl.
“NO CHANCE!” cried Lyn. “She’s fifty to one for God’s sake. Why didn’t you pick a favorite?”
Gemma and Lyn were screaming on their feet for the whole race.
Cat stayed sitting next to the boy. She kept her eyes fixed on the television. Dancing Girl ran in the middle of the pack until the last few seconds when she broke free and began surging forward. The race caller’s voice rose in rapid surprise. Gemma and Lyn wailed.
Cat felt the boy’s hand at the back of her head. As Dancing Girl was thundering toward the finish line, the boy was pulling her to him and Cat’s eyelids were closing as if she were sinking into a deep, delicious sleep. He smelled of Dunhill cigarettes and Palmolive soap and tasted of Colgate toothpaste and Tooheys beer, and she had never wanted anything so bad as she wanted that boy.
The boy turned out to be Dan and Dan turned out to be her husband and her husband turned out to be a cheat.
Cat drained her beer and started on one of the other two.
Gemma and Lyn had adored Dan from the moment Dancing Girl had come in second and they turned around to claim their champagne, to find him claiming the kiss he hadn’t won. He managed to extricate his wallet from his back jeans pocket and hand it to Lyn while keeping his tongue firmly entwined with Cat’s. So cool! So sexy! So dexterous!
How could she admit the adorable Dan wasn’t so adorable after all?
She wasn’t going to tell them.
She slammed the beer down on the table, reached for the third, and looked up to see her sisters walking through the pub toward her.
Gemma was dressed, as always, like an oddly beautiful bag lady. She was wearing a faded flowery dress and peculiar holey cardigan that didn’t match the dress and was too big for her. Her glinty red-gold hair was all over the place, a tangled mess that fell past her shoulders. Split ends. Cat watched a guy at the door turn to look at her. A lot of men didn’t notice Gemma, but the ones who did, really did. They were the sort of men who wanted to brush her hair out of her eyes, roll up her cardigan sleeves, and tell her to zip up her bag before her purse got stolen.
Lyn had come from teaching aerobics at the gym. Her straight, blond hair was in a smoothly coiled knot at the back of her head. Her cheeks were pink and healthy. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt that looked suspiciously like it might have been ironed. A fair, lanky, sporty-looking girl. Her nose was too pointy, in Cat’s opinion, but she was attractive enough. (Although, maybe not?) When Cat saw Lyn she saw herself in three dimensions. Three very vigorous, Lyn-like dimensions.
Cat felt that sense of pleasure and pride that she always felt when she saw her sisters in public. “Look at them!” she wanted to say to people. “My sisters. Aren’t they great? Aren’t they annoying?”
They saw Cat and sat down on the waiting stools without saying hello.
It was one of their rituals, never saying hello or acknowledging one another. People found it strange, which they found enjoyable.
“So I’ve been going to this new deli for my lunch,” said Gemma. “Whatever I order, whatever, it seems to shock the woman behind the counter. I say, I’ll have the fruit salad, and her eyes widen and she says, The fruit salad! It’s the funniest thing.”
“I thought you hated fruit salad,” said Lyn.
“I do. That’s just an example,” said Gemma.
“Well, but why not give an example of something that you actually ordered?”
Cat looked at her sisters and felt her limbs becoming weak with relief.
She ran her finger around the rim of her empty beer glass and said, “I’ve got something to tell you.”
The Cabbage-Leaf Trick
Do you know, I can never see a cabbage without thinking of breast milk.
I wonder if they still do that? The cabbage-leaf trick. I can tell you when I first saw it. It would be over thirty years ago now. My first week as a nurse’s aide. Everyone at the hospital was in a tizz because a young girl had given birth to triplets. Everyone wanted to see them. They even had reporters from the papers!
I happened to be making beds in the maternity ward when the three babies were wheeled in for their feeds. Sister Mulvaney, the cruelest woman you could ever hope to meet, was directing the whole event. My eyes popped as the nurses undid the mother’s bra and peeled off soggy green leaves! Your breasts sometimes become very hard and swollen when you start nursing, you see, and for some reason chilled cabbage leaves soothe them.
Gosh, but that poor young mother was in pain. You could tell. Her face was all set and white. Her three little babies were sound asleep but in those days they were sticklers for routine. You fed them every four hours on the dot. The first little baby did not want to be woken. They tried everything. Undressing her. Moving her around. Eventually, Sister Mulvaney sprinkled some water on her little face. That certainly woke her up. But the moment she started crying, the other two were off. All three screaming!
They got two of the babies and showed the mother how to tuck them back under her arms, one on each breast. But she couldn’t get the babies to latch on. Sister Mulvaney was barking out instructions and the mother was doing her best to follow them. By this stage, the babies had worked themselves up into a fine rage. What a racket! The whole ward was watching.
Eventually, they gave up and got a breast pump to try and get her milk started. They were dreadful, clunky old contraptions in those days. You could tell that poor mother was upset, with her babies hollering, Sister Mulvaney tut-tutting, and everyone pretending not to stare. All of a sudden she just burst into tears. My supervising nurse said, very know-it-all, “Ah the three-day blues, all new mothers cry on the third day.” And I remember thinking, But my goodness, who wouldn’t cry?