71.
Perry didn’t speak as they drove the short distance to the school. They were still going. Celeste couldn’t quite believe they were still going, but then again, of course they were going. They never canceled. Sometimes she had to change what she’d planned to wear, sometimes she had to have an excuse ready, but the show must go on.
Perry had already posted a Facebook photo of them in their costumes. It would make them look like good-humored, funny, fun people who didn’t take themselves too seriously and cared about their school and their local community. It perfectly complemented other more glamorous posts about overseas trips and expensive cultural events. A school trivia night was just the thing for their brand.
She looked straight ahead at the briskly working windshield wipers. The windshield was just like the never-ending cycles of her mind. Confusion. Clear. Confusion. Clear. Confusion. Clear.
She watched his hands on the steering wheel. Capable hands. Tender hands. Vicious hands. He was just a man in an Elvis costume driving her to a school event. He was a man who had just discovered that his wife was planning to leave him. A hurt man. A betrayed man. An angry man. But just a man.
Confusion. Clear. Confusion. Clear.
When Gwen had arrived to babysit the boys, Perry had turned on the charm as though something vital depended on it. She was cool with Perry at first but it turned out that Elvis was Gwen’s weak spot. She launched into a story about how she’d been one of the “golden girls” when Elvis’s gold Cadillac toured Australia, until Perry cut in smoothly, like a gentleman stealing a woman away at a dance.
The rain eased as they drove into the school’s street. The street was jammed with cars, but there was a space waiting for Perry near the school entrance, as if he’d prebooked it. He always got a parking spot. Lights turned green for him. The dollar obediently went up or down for him. Perhaps that’s why he got so angry when things didn’t go right.
He turned off the ignition.
Neither of them moved or spoke. Celeste saw one of the kindergarten mothers hurrying past the car in a long dress that forced her to take little steps. She was carrying a child’s polka-dotted umbrella. Gabrielle, thought Celeste. The one who talked endlessly about her weight.
Celeste turned to look at Perry.
“Max has been bullying Amabella. Renata’s little girl.”
Perry kept looking straight ahead. “How do you know?”
“Josh told me,” said Celeste. “Just before we left. Ziggy has been taking the blame for it.”
Ziggy. Your cousin’s child.
“He’s the one the parents are petitioning to have suspended.” She closed her eyes briefly as she thought of Perry slamming her head against the wall. “It should be a petition to have Max suspended. Not Ziggy.”
Perry turned to look at her. He looked like a stranger with his black wig. The blackness made his eyes appear brilliant blue.
“We’ll talk to the teachers,” he said.
“I’ll talk to his teacher,” said Celeste. “You won’t be here, remember?”
“Right,” said Perry. “Well, I’ll talk to Max tomorrow, before I go to the airport.”
“What will you say?” said Celeste.
“I don’t know.”
There was a huge heavy block of pain lodged beneath her chest. Was this a heart attack? Was this fury? Was this a broken heart? Was this the weight of her responsibility?
“Will you tell him that’s not the way to treat a woman?” she said, and it was like jumping off a cliff. Never a word. Not like that. She’d broken an unbreakable rule. Was it because he looked like Elvis Presley and none of this was real, or was it because he knew about the apartment now and everything was more real than ever before?
Perry’s face changed, cracked open. “The boys have never—”
“They have,” cried Celeste. She’d pretended so very hard for so very long and there was nobody here except the two of them. “The night before the party last year, Max got out of bed, he was standing right there at the doorway—”
“Yes OK,” said Perry.
“And there was that time in the kitchen, when you, when I—”
He put his hand out. “OK, OK.”
She stopped.
After a moment he said, “So you’ve leased an apartment?”
“Yes,” said Celeste.
“When are you leaving?”
“Next week,” she said. “I think next week.”
“With the boys?”
This is when you should feel fear, she thought. This is not the way Susi said it should be done. Scenarios. Plans. Escape routes. She was not treading carefully, but she’d tried to tread carefully for years and she knew it never made the slightest difference anyway.
“Of course with the boys.”
He took a sharp intake of breath as if he’d experienced a sudden pain. He put his face in his hands and leaned forward so that his forehead was pressed to the top of the steering wheel, and his whole body shook as if with convulsions.
Celeste stared, and for a moment she couldn’t work out what he was doing. Was he sick? Was he laughing? Her stomach tightened and she put her hand on the car door, but then he lifted his head and turned to her.
His face was streaked with tears. His Elvis wig was askew. He looked unhinged.
“I’ll get help,” he said. “I promise you I’ll get help.”
“You won’t,” she said quietly. The rain was softening. She could see other Audreys and Elvises hurrying along the street, huddled under umbrellas, and hear their shouts and laughter.
“I will.” His eyes brightened. “Last year I got a referral from Dr. Hunter to see a psychiatrist.” There was a note of triumph in his voice as he remembered this.
“You told Dr. Hunter about . . . us?” Their family GP was a kindly, courtly grandfather.
“I told him I thought I was suffering from anxiety,” said Perry.
He saw the expression on her face.
“Well, Dr. Hunter knows us!” he said defensively. “But I was going to see a psychiatrist. I was going to tell him. I just never got around to it, and then I just kept thinking I could fix it myself.”
She couldn’t think less of him for this. She knew the way your mind could go round and round in endless pointless circles.
“I think the referral is out of date now. But I’ll get another one. I just get so . . . When I get angry . . . I don’t know what happens to me. It’s like a madness. Like this unstoppable . . . and I never ever actually make the decision to . . . It just happens, and every time, I can’t believe it, and I think, I will never, ever, let that happen again, and then yesterday. Celeste, I feel sick about yesterday.”
The car windows were fogging up. Celeste ran her palm over her side window, making a porthole to see out. Perry was speaking as if he genuinely believed this was the first time he’d said this sort of thing, as if it were brand-new information.
“We can’t bring the boys up like this.”
She looked out at the rainy, dark street, which was filled with shouting, laughing, blue-hatted children each school morning.
She realized with a tiny shock that if it weren’t for Josh’s revelation tonight about Max’s behavior, she probably still wouldn’t have left. She would have convinced herself that she’d been overdramatic, that yesterday hadn’t been that bad, that any man would have been angry if they’d been humiliated the way she’d humiliated Perry in front of Madeline and Ed.
The boys had always been her reason to stay, but now for the first time they were her reason to leave. She’d allowed violence to become a normal part of their life. Over the last five years Celeste herself had developed a kind of imperviousness and acceptance of violence that allowed her to hit back and sometimes even hit first. She scratched, she kicked, she slapped. As if it were normal. She hated it, but she did it. If she stayed, that was the legacy she was giving her boys.
She turned away from the window and looked at Perry. “It’s over,” she said. “You must know it’s over.”
He flinched. She saw him prepare to fight, to strategize, to win. He never lost.
“I’ll cancel this next trip,” he said. “I’ll resign. I’ll do nothing for the next six months but work on us—not on us, on me. For the next—Jesus fucking Christ!”
He jumped back, his eyes on something, past Celeste’s shoulder. She turned and gasped. There was a face pressed gargoyle-like against the window.
Perry pressed a button and Celeste’s window slid down. It was Renata, smiling brightly as she leaned down into the car, a gauzy wrap about her shoulders clutched in one hand. Her husband stood next to her, sheltering her from the rain with a huge black umbrella.
“Sorry! Didn’t mean to startle you! Do you need to share our umbrella? You two look fabulous!”
72.
It was like watching movie stars arrive, thought Madeline. There was something about the way Perry and Celeste held themselves, as if they were walking onto a stage; their posture was too good, their faces were camera-ready. They were wearing similar outfits to many of the guests, but it was like Perry and Celeste weren’t in costume; it was as though the real Elvis and Audrey had arrived. Every woman wearing a black Breakfast at Tiffany’s dress touched a hand to her inferior pearl necklace. Every man in a white Elvis suit sucked in his stomach. The levels of pink fizzy drinks went down, down, down.
“Wow. Celeste looks so beautiful.”
Madeline turned to see Bonnie standing next to her.
Like Tom, Bonnie obviously didn’t do costumes. Her hair was in its normal single plait over one shoulder. No makeup. She looked like a homeless person on a special night out: long-sleeved top of some faded thin fabric falling off one shoulder (all her clothes fell off one shoulder in that irritating way; Madeline longed to grab her and straighten everything up), long shapeless skirt, old leather belt around her waist, lots of that weird skull-and-bones, crazy gypsy-lady jewelry, if you could call it jewelry.
If Abigail were here, she would look at her mother and her stepmother, and it would be Bonnie whose outfit she would admire, it would be Bonnie she chose to emulate. And that was fine, because no teenager wanted to look like her mother, Madeline knew that, but why couldn’t Abigail admire some random, drug-addicted celebrity? Why did it have to be bloody Bonnie?
“How are you, Bonnie?” she said.
She watched Tom and Jane melt away into the crowd. Someone was asking Tom for a soy latte to much hilarity (poor Tom), but Tom didn’t seem bothered; his eyes kept returning to Jane, as Jane’s did to him. Watching their obvious mutual attraction had made Madeline feel as if she were witnessing some beautiful, extraordinary, but everyday event, like the hatching of a newborn chick. But now she was making conversation with her ex-husband’s wife, and although the alcohol was numbing her nicely, she could feel the subterranean rumbling of her PMS.
“Who is looking after Skye?” she said to Bonnie. “I’m sorry!” She tapped her forehead. “We should have offered to have Skye over to our place! Abigail is looking after Chloe and Fred for us. She could have babysat all her siblings at once.”
Bonnie smiled warily. “Skye is with my mother.”
“Abigail could have given them all a tutorial on website design,” said Madeline at the same time.
Bonnie’s smile disappeared. “Madeline, listen, about that—”
“Oh, Skye is with your mother!” continued Madeline. “Lovely! Abigail has a ‘special connection’ with your mother, doesn’t she?”
She was being a bitch. She was a terrible, awful person. She needed to find someone who would let her say all sorts of horrible, bitchy things and not judge her for it or pass them on. Where was Celeste? Celeste was great for that. She watched Bonnie drain her glass. A Blond Bob came by carrying a tray of more pink drinks. Madeline took two more drinks, for herself and Bonnie.
“When are we starting the trivia competition?” she said to the Blond Bob. “We’re all getting too drunk to concentrate.”
The Blond Bob looked predictably harried. “I know! We’re way off schedule. We’re meant to have finished the canapés by now, but the caterer is stuck in a huge traffic jam on Pirriwee Road.” She blew a lock of blond hair out of her eyes. “And Brett Larson is the MC and he’s stuck in the same traffic jam.”
“Ed will be MC!” said Madeline blithely. “He’s a great MC.” She looked about for Ed and saw him approaching Renata’s husband, all handshakes and backslaps. Great choice, darling. Are you aware your wife ran into his wife’s car yesterday afternoon, resulting in a public screaming match? Ed probably thought he was talking to Gareth the golfer, not Geoff the bird-watcher, and was currently asking Geoff if he’d been on the course much lately.
“Thanks anyway, but Brett has all the trivia questions. He’s been working on them for months. He’s got this whole multimedia presentation planned,” said the Blond Bob. “Just bear with us!” She moved off with her tray of drinks.
“These cocktails are going straight to my head,” said Bonnie.
Madeline was only half listening. She was watching Renata nod coolly at Ed and turn quickly to talk to someone else. She remembered suddenly the hot gossip she’d heard yesterday about Renata’s husband being in love with the French nanny. That news had gone straight out of her head when she’d found out about Abigail’s website. Now she felt bad for yelling back when Renata yelled at her for running into her car.
Bonnie swayed a little. “I don’t drink much these days, so I guess I have a very low tolerance—”
“Excuse me, Bonnie,” said Madeline. “I need to go collect my husband. He seems to be in a very animated conversation with an adulterer. I don’t want him picking up any ideas.”
Bonnie swung her head to see who was talking to Ed.
“Don’t worry,” said Madeline. “Your husband isn’t the adulterer! Nathan is always monogamous right up until he deserts you with a newborn baby. Oh, but wait, he didn’t desert you with a newborn baby. That was just me!”
Bugger niceness. It was overrated. The Madeline of tomorrow was going to regret every word she said tonight, but the Madeline of right now was exhilarated by the removal of all those pesky inhibitions. How wonderful to let the words just come slip-sliding out of her mouth.
“Where is my delightful ex-husband anyway?” said Madeline. “I haven’t seen him yet tonight. I can’t tell you how great it is to know that I can go to the school trivia night and know that I’ll run into Nathan.”
Bonnie fiddled with the end of her plait and looked at Madeline with slightly unfocused eyes. “Nathan left you fifteen years ago,” she said. There was something in her voice that Madeline had never heard before. A roughness, as though something had been rubbed off. How interesting! Yes, please do show me another side of yourself, Bonnie!
“He did a terrible, terrible thing. He will never forgive himself for it,” said Bonnie. “But it might be time you thought about forgiving him, Madeline. The health benefits of forgiveness are really quite extraordinary.”
Madeline inwardly rolled her eyes. Maybe she outwardly did as well. She’d thought for a minute that she was about to see the real Bonnie, but she was just speaking her normal airy-fairy, no-substance rubbish.
Bonnie looked at her earnestly. “I’ve had personal experience—”
There were sudden squeals of delight from a group of people behind Bonnie. Someone cried, “I’m so happy for you!” A woman stepped back, causing Bonnie to lurch forward so that her cocktail spilled right down Madeline’s pink dress.
Gabrielle: It was an accident. Davina was hugging Rowena. She’d just made some sort of announcement. I think she’d reached her goal weight.
Jackie: Rowena had just announced she’d bought a Thermonix. Or a Vitamix. I wouldn’t know. I have an actual life. So of course Davina hugged her. Because she’d bought a new kitchen appliance. I’m not making this stuff up.
Melissa: No, no, we were talking about the latest nit outbreak, and Rowena asked Davina if she’d checked her own hair, and then someone’s husband pretended he could see something crawling through Davina’s hair. The poor girl went crazy and collided with Bonnie.
Harper: What? No! Bonnie threw her drink at Madeline. I saw it!