Big Little Lies (5 page)

People never like missing out on a party.

J
ane was not drunk when she arrived back at the school to pick up Ziggy. She had had three mouthfuls of that champagne at the most.

But she was feeling euphoric. There had been something about the pop of the champagne cork, the naughtiness of it, the unexpectedness of the whole morning, those beautiful long fragile glasses catching the sunlight, the surfy-looking barista bringing over three exquisite little cupcakes with candles, the smell of the ocean, the feeling that she was maybe making new friends with these women who were somehow so different from any of her other friends: older, wealthier, more sophisticated.

“You’ll make new friends when Ziggy starts school!” her mother had kept telling her, excitedly and irritatingly, and Jane had to make a big effort not to roll her eyes and behave like a sulky, nervous teenager starting at a new high school. Jane’s mother had three best friends whom she had met twenty-five years ago when Jane’s older
brother, Dane, started kindergarten. They all went out for coffee on that first morning and had been inseparable ever since.

“I don’t need new friends,” Jane had told her mother.

“Yes you do. You need to be friends with other mothers,” her mother said. “You support one another! You understand what you’re going through.” But Jane had tried that with Mothers Group and failed. She just couldn’t relate to those bright, chatty women and their bubbly conversations about husbands who weren’t “stepping up” and renovations that weren’t finished before the baby was born and that hilarious time they were so busy and tired
they left the house without putting on any makeup!
(Jane, who was wearing no makeup at the time, and never wore makeup, had kept her face blank and benign, while she inwardly shouted:
What the
fuck
?
)

And yet, strangely, she related to Madeline and Celeste, even though they really had nothing in common except for the fact that their children were starting kindergarten, and even though Jane was pretty sure that Madeline would never leave the house without makeup either, but she felt already that she and Celeste (who also didn’t wear makeup; luckily, her beauty was shocking enough without improvement) could tease Madeline about this, and she’d laugh and tease them back, as if they were already established friends.

So Jane wasn’t ready for what happened.

She wasn’t on alert. She was too busy getting to know Pirriwee Public (everything so cute and compact; it made life seem so manageable), enjoying the sunshine and the still novel smell of the sea. Jane felt filled with pleasure at the thought of Ziggy’s school days. For the first time since he was born, the responsibility of being in charge of Ziggy’s childhood weighed lightly on her. Her new apartment was walking distance from the school. They would walk to school each day, past the beach and up the tree-lined hill.

At her own suburban primary school she’d had views of a
six-lane highway and the scent of barbecued chicken from the shop next door. There had been no cleverly designed, shady little play areas with charming, colorful tile mosaics of grinning dolphins and whales. There were certainly no murals of underwater sea scenes or stone sculptures of tortoises in the middle of sandpits.

“This school is so cute,” she said to Madeline as she and Celeste helped Madeline hop along to a seat. “It’s
magical
.”

“I know. Last year’s school trivia night raised money to redo the school yard,” said Madeline. “The Blond Bobs know how to fund-raise. The theme was ‘dead celebrities.’ It was great fun. Hey, are you any good at trivia, Jane?”

“I’m excellent at trivia,” said Jane. “Trivia and jigsaws are my two areas of expertise.”

“Jigsaws?” said Madeline. “I’d rather stick pins in my eyes.”

She sat down on a blue painted wooden bench built around the tree trunk of a Moreton Bay Fig and put her ankle up. A crowd of other parents soon formed around them, and Madeline held court, introducing Jane and Celeste to the mothers with older children she already knew and telling everyone the story of how she twisted her ankle saving young lives.

“Typical Madeline,” a woman called Carol said to Jane. She was a soft-looking woman wearing a puffy-sleeved floral sundress and a big straw sun hat. She looked like she was off to a white clapboard church in
Little House on the Prairie
. (Carol? Wasn’t she the one Madeline said liked to clean? Clean Carol.)

“Madeline just loves a fight,” said Carol. “She’ll take on anyone. Our sons play soccer together, and last year she got in an argument with this giant dad. All the husbands were hiding, and Madeline was standing this close to him, poking her finger into his chest like this, not giving an inch. It’s a wonder she didn’t get herself killed.”

“Oh, him! The
under-seven age coordinator
.” Madeline spat the
words “under-seven age coordinator” as if they were “serial killer.” “I shall loathe that man until the day I die!”

Meanwhile Celeste stood off slightly to the side, chatting in that ruffled, hesitant way of hers, which Jane was already beginning to recognize as characteristic of Celeste.

“What did you say your son’s name was again?” Carol asked Jane.

“Ziggy,” said Jane.

“Ziggy,” repeated Carol uncertainly. “Is that an ethnic sort of a name?”

“Hello, there, I’m
Renata
!” A woman with a crisp gray symmetrical haircut and intense brown eyes behind stylish black-framed spectacles appeared in front of Jane, hand outstretched. It was like being accosted by a politician. She said her name with strange emphasis, as if Jane had been expecting her.

“Hello! I’m Jane. How are you?” Jane tried to match her enthusiasm. She wondered if this was the school principal.

A well-dressed, blond woman, who Jane thought probably qualified as one of Madeline’s Blond Bobs, bustled over with a yellow envelope in her hand. “Renata,” she said, ignoring Jane. “I’ve got that education report we were talking about at dinner—”

“Just give me a moment, Harper,” said Renata with a touch of impatience. She turned back to Jane. “Jane, nice to meet you! I’m Amabella’s mum, and I have Jackson in Year 2. That’s
Ama
bella, by the way, not
Anna
bella. It’s French. We didn’t make it up.”

Harper continued to hover at Renata’s shoulder, nodding along respectfully as Renata spoke, like those people who stand behind politicians at press conferences.

“Well, I just wanted to introduce you to Amabella and Jackson’s nanny, who also happens to be French!
Quelle coïncidence!
This is Juliette.” Renata indicated a petite girl with short red hair and an oddly arresting face, dominated by a huge, luscious-lipped mouth. She looked like a very pretty alien.

“Pleased to meet you.” The nanny held out a limp hand. She had a strong French accent and looked bored out of her mind.

“You too,” said Jane.

“I always think it’s nice for the nannies to get to know each other.” Renata looked brightly between the two of them. “A little support group, shall we say! What nationality are you?”

“She’s not a nanny, Renata,” said Madeline from the bench, her voice brimming with laughter.

“Well, au pair, then,” said Renata impatiently.

“Renata, listen to me, she’s a
mother
,” said Madeline. “She’s just young. You know, like we used to be.”

Renata glanced uneasily at Jane, as if she suspected a practical joke, but before Jane had a chance to say anything (she felt like she should apologize), someone said, “Here they come!” and all the parents surged forward as a pretty, blond, dimpled teacher who looked like she’d been cast for the role of kindergarten teacher ushered the children out from a classroom.

Two little fair-headed boys charged out first like they’d been shot from a gun and headed straight for Celeste. “Oof,” grunted Celeste as two little fair heads rammed her stomach. “I quite liked the idea of twins until I met Celeste’s little demons,” Madeline had told Jane when they were having their champagne and orange juice, while Celeste smiled distractedly, apparently unoffended.

Chloe sauntered out of the classroom with her arms linked with two other little princess-like girls. Jane anxiously scanned the children for Ziggy. Had Chloe dumped him? There he was. He was one of the last to come out, but he looked happy. Jane gave him an
OK?
thumbs-up signal, and Ziggy lifted both thumbs up and grinned.

There was a sudden commotion. Everyone stopped to look.

It was a little curly-haired girl. The last one to come out of the classroom. She was sobbing, her shoulders hunched, clutching her neck.

“Aww,” breathed the mothers, because she looked so pitiful and brave and her hair was so pretty.

Jane watched Renata hurry over, followed at a more relaxed pace by her odd-looking nanny. The mother, the nanny and the pretty, blond teacher all bent down to the little girl’s height to listen to her.

“Mummy!” Ziggy ran to Jane, and she scooped him up.

It seemed like ages since she’d seen him, as if they’d both been on journeys to exotic far-off lands. She buried her nose in his hair. “How was it? Was it fun?”

Before he could answer, the teacher called out, “Could all the parents and children listen up for a moment? We’ve had such a lovely morning, but we just need to have a little chat about something. It’s a little bit serious.”

The teacher’s dimples quivered in her cheeks, as if she were trying to put them away for a more appropriate time.

Jane let Ziggy slide back down to his feet.

“What’s going on?” said someone.

“Something happened to Amabella, I think,” said another mother.

“Oh, God,” said someone else quietly. “Watch Renata get on the warpath.”

“Now, someone just hurt Annabella—I’m sorry,
Ama
bella—and I want whomever it was to come over and apologize, because we don’t hurt our friends at school, do we?” said the teacher in her teacher voice. “And if we do, we always say sorry, because that’s what big kindergarten children do.”

There was silence. The children either stared blankly at the teacher or swayed back and forth, looking at their feet. Some of them buried their faces against their mothers’ skirts.

One of Celeste’s twin boys tugged on her shirt. “I’m hungry!”

Madeline hobbled over from her seat under the tree and stood
next to Jane. “What’s the holdup?” She looked around her. “I don’t even know where Chloe is.”

“Who was it, Amabella?” said Renata to the little girl. “Who hurt you?”

The little girl said something inaudible.

“Was it an accident, maybe, Amabella?” said the teacher desperately.

“It wasn’t an accident, for heaven’s sake,” snapped Renata. Her face was aflame with righteous rage. “Someone tried to choke her. I can see marks on her neck. I think she’s going to have bruises.”

“Good Lord,” said Madeline.

Jane watched the teacher squat down at the little girl’s level, her arm around her shoulders, her mouth close to her ear.

“Did you see what happened?” Jane asked Ziggy. He shook his head vigorously.

The teacher stood back up and fiddled with her earring as she faced the parents. “Apparently one of the boys . . . um, well. My problem is that the children obviously don’t know one another’s names yet, so Amabella can’t tell me exactly which little boy—”

“We’re not going to let this go!” interrupted Renata.

“Absolutely not!” agreed her hovering blond friend.
Harper,
thought Jane, trying to get all the names straight.
Hovering Harper.

The teacher took a deep breath. “No. We won’t let it go. I wonder if I could ask all the children . . . well, actually, maybe just the boys, to come over here for just a moment.”

The parents pushed their sons forward with gentle shoves between the shoulder blades.

“Over you go,” said Jane to Ziggy.

He grabbed hold of her hand and looked up at her pleadingly. “I’m ready to go home now.”

“It’s OK,” said Jane. “It’s just for a moment.”

He wandered over and stood beside a boy who looked like a giant next to Ziggy. He was about a head taller than her son, with black curly hair and big strong shoulders. He looked like a little gangster.

The boys formed a straggling line in front of the teacher. There were about fifteen, of all shapes and sizes. Celeste’s fair-haired twins stood at the end; one of them was running a Matchbox car over his brother’s head, while the other one swatted it away like a fly.

“It’s like a police lineup,” said Madeline.

Someone snickered. “Stop it, Madeline.”

“They should all face forward, then turn to the side to show their profiles,” continued Madeline. To Celeste she said, “If it’s one of your boys, Celeste, she won’t be able to tell the difference. We’ll have to do DNA testing. Wait—do identical twins have the same DNA?”

“You can laugh, Madeline; your child isn’t a suspect,” said another mother.

“They’ve got the same DNA but different fingerprints,” said Celeste.

“Right, then, we’ll have to dust for fingerprints,” said Madeline.

“Shhhh,” said Jane, trying not to laugh. She felt so desperately sorry for the mother of the child who was about to be publicly humiliated.

The little girl called Amabella held on to her mother’s hand. The redheaded nanny folded her arms and took a step back.

Amabella surveyed the line of boys.

“It was him,” she said immediately. She pointed at the little gangster kid. “He tried to choke me.”

I knew it, thought Jane.

But then for some reason the teacher was putting her hand on Ziggy’s shoulder, and the little girl was nodding, and Ziggy was shaking his head. “It wasn’t me!”

“Yes, it was,” said the little girl.

Detective-Sergeant Adrian Quinlan:
A post-mortem is currently being undertaken to ascertain cause of death, but at this stage I can confirm the victim suffered right-rib fractures, a shattered pelvis, fractured base of skull, right foot and lower vertebrae.

O
h, calamity,
thought Madeline.

Wonderful. She’d just made friends with the mother of a little thug. He’d seemed so cute and sweet in the car. Thank God he hadn’t tried to choke Chloe. That would have been awkward. Also, Chloe would have knocked him out with a right hook.

“Ziggy would
never
 . . .” said Jane.

Her face had gone completely white. She looked horrified. Madeline saw the other parents take tiny steps back, forming a circle of space around Jane.

“It’s all right.” Madeline put a comforting hand on Jane’s arm. “They’re children! They’re not civilized yet!”

“Excuse me.” Jane stepped past two other mothers and into the middle of the little crowd, like she was stepping onto a stage. She put her hand on Ziggy’s shoulder. Madeline’s heart broke for them both. Jane seemed young enough to be her own daughter. In fact Jane reminded her a little of Abigail: that same prickliness and shy, dry humor.

“Oh dear,” fretted Celeste next to Madeline. “This is awful.”

“I didn’t do anything,” said Ziggy in a clear voice.

“Ziggy, we just need you to say sorry to Amabella, that’s all,” said Miss Barnes. Bec Barnes had taught Fred when he was in kindergarten. It had been her first year out of teachers college. She was good, but still very young and a bit too anxious to please the parents, which was absolutely fine when the parent was Madeline, but not when Renata Klein was the parent, and out for revenge. Although to be fair, any parent would want an apology if another child tried to choke theirs. (It probably hadn’t helped that Madeline had made Renata look silly for thinking Jane was the nanny. Renata didn’t like to look silly. Her children were geniuses, after all. She had a reputation to uphold. Board meetings to attend.)

Jane looked at Amabella. “Sweetheart, are you sure it was
this
boy who hurt you?”

“Could you say sorry to Amabella, please? You really hurt her quite badly,” said Renata to Ziggy. She was speaking nicely, but firmly. “Then we can all go home.”

“But it wasn’t me,” said Ziggy. He spoke very clearly and precisely and looked Renata straight in the eye.

Madeline took her sunglasses off and chewed on the stem. Maybe it
wasn’t
him? Could Amabella have gotten it wrong? But she was gifted! She was actually quite a lovely little girl too. She’d been on playdates with Chloe and was very easygoing and let Chloe boss her about, taking the supporting role in whatever game they were playing.

“Don’t lie,” Renata snapped at Ziggy. She’d dropped her well-bred, “I’m still nice to other people’s kids even when they hurt mine” demeanor. “All you need to do is say sorry.”

Madeline saw Jane’s body react instantly, instinctively, like the sudden rear of a snake or pounce of an animal. Her back straightened. Her chin lifted. “Ziggy doesn’t lie.”

“Well, I can assure you
Amabella
is telling the truth.”

The little audience became very still. Even the other children were quiet, except for Celeste’s twins, who were chasing each other around the playground, yelling something about ninjas.

“OK, so we seem to have reached a stalemate here.” Miss Barnes clearly didn’t know what in the world to do. She was twenty-four years old, for heaven’s sake.

Chloe reappeared at Madeline’s side, breathing hard from her exertions on the monkey bars. “I need a swim,” she announced.

“Shhh,” said Madeline.

Chloe sighed. “
May
I have a swim,
please
, Mummy?”

“Just shhhh.”

Madeline’s ankle ached. This was not turning out to be a very good fortieth birthday, thank you very much. So much for the Festival of Madeline. She really needed to sit back down. Instead she limped into the middle of the action.

“Renata,” she said. “You know how children can be—”

Renata swung her head to glare at Madeline. “The child needs to take responsibility for his actions. He needs to see there are
consequences
. He can’t go around choking other children and pretend he didn’t do it! Anyway, what’s this got to do with you, Madeline? Mind your own beeswax.”

Madeline bristled. She was only trying to help! And “mind your own beeswax” was such a profoundly geeky thing to say. Ever since the conflict over the theater excursion for the gifted and talented children last year, she and Renata had been tetchy with each other, even though they were ostensibly still friends.

Madeline actually liked Renata, but right from the beginning there had been something competitive about their relationship. “See, I’m just the sort of person who would be bored out of my
mind
if I had to be a full-time mother,” Renata would say confidentially to Madeline, and that wasn’t meant to be offensive because Madeline
wasn’t
actually a full-time mother, she worked part-time, but still, there was always the implication that Renata was the smart one, the one who needed more mental stimulation, because she had a
career
while Madeline had a
job
.

It didn’t help that Renata’s older son Jackson was famous at school for winning chess tournaments, while Madeline’s son Fred was famous for being the only student in the history of Pirriwee Public brave enough to climb the giant Moreton Bay Fig tree and then leap the impossible distance onto the roof of the music room to retrieve thirty-four tennis balls. (The Fire Brigade had to be called to rescue him. Fred’s street cred at school was sky-high.)

“It doesn’t matter, Mummy.” Amabella looked up at her mother with eyes still teary. Madeline could see the red finger marks around the poor child’s neck.

“It does matter,” said Renata. She turned to Jane. “Please make your child apologize.”

“Renata,” said Madeline.

“Stay
out
of it, Madeline.”

“Yes, I don’t think we should get involved Madeline,” said Harper, who was predictably nearby and spent her life agreeing with Renata.

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t make him apologize for something he says he didn’t do,” said Jane.

“Your child is lying,” said Renata. Her eyes flashed behind her glasses.

“I don’t think he is,” said Jane. She lifted her chin.

“I just want to go home now,
please
, Mummy,” said Amabella. She began to sob in earnest. Renata’s weird-looking new French nanny, who had been silent the whole time, picked her up, and Amabella wrapped her legs around her waist and buried her face in her neck. A vein pulsed in Renata’s forehead. Her hands clenched and unclenched.

“This is completely . . . unacceptable,” Renata said to poor distraught Miss Barnes, who was probably wondering why they hadn’t covered situations like this at teachers college.

Renata leaned down so that her face was only inches away from Ziggy. “If you ever touch my little girl like that again, you will be in big trouble.”

“Hey!”
said Jane.

Renata ignored her. She straightened and spoke to the nanny. “Let’s go, Juliette.”

They marched off through the playground, while all the parents pretended to be busy tending to their children.

Ziggy watched them go. He looked up at his mother, scratched the side of his nose and said, “I don’t think I want to come to school anymore.”

Samantha:
All the parents have to go down to the police station and make a statement. I haven’t had my turn yet. I feel quite sick about it. They’ll probably think I’m guilty. Seriously, I feel guilty when a police car pulls up next to me at the traffic lights.