The Last Anniversary (29 page)

Margie dreams she is trying to kiss Rotund Ron in a gondola in Venice, while an extraordinarily good looking Italian gondolier in a red and white striped top makes the gondola rock back and forth so much that they can’t get their lips to meet. (The gondolier is doing this because he wants to kiss Margie himself!) They all three find this hilariously funny. Rotund Ron is doing his jolly fat-man laugh, even though, of course, he’s not a fat man any more, and Margie is giggling uncontrollably like a schoolgirl. She looks down and realises she’s wearing her red crochet bikini, and this is so funny she can barely breathe. Tears of mirth stream down her face. She points out her swimming costume to the two men and they gasp and laugh with her.

‘You just got a text message!’

Margie opens her eyes. ‘What did you say?’

Ron leans up on one elbow and looks down at her with a suspicious, sleep-creased face. ‘Your mobile phone just beeped. Someone sent you a text message. Do you want me to show you how to read it? Are you laughing? Why are you laughing?’

‘I was having a funny dream.’

‘Do you want me to check it for you?’

‘It’s OK. I know how to check my text messages.’ Margie wants to get back to her dream in Venice. ‘I’ll check it later.’

‘Well, who would be sending you a text? I didn’t even know you knew how to text.’

He sounds hurt and uncertain. He thinks she’s having an affair. Apparently Rotund Ron’s wife is suspicious too. Both Margie and Rotund Ron agree that they quite like these wrong-footed versions of their spouses. It’s a hoot! Margie compresses her lips to stop herself from giggling. She actually feels a touch tiddly, as if she’s been drinking champagne. It must be nerves about tonight, or that dream, that funny dream!

‘It’s probably one of the kids,’ she says. ‘They send me text messages all the time.’ This is an outright lie. The only person who sends her text messages is Rotund Ron, and this one will be something about the arrangements for tonight. It would never occur to Veronika or Thomas to text their mother. They would assume, like their father, that she wouldn’t know how to read one. This is the first fully fledged, blatant lie Margie has ever told in her life, and instead of feeling guilty she feels a rush of exhilaration.

‘Really?’ Ron lies back down, scratching the top of his head. ‘What do they text you about?’

‘Oh, just whatever,’ says Margie carelessly. She gets a bit reckless. ‘Sometimes Veronika sends me jokes.’

‘
Veronika
sends you jokes?’

Margie’s lips twitch. ‘Yes. Sometimes they’re quite funny too.’

There is silence while Ron digests this. Margie rolls over onto her side away from him and secretly runs her hands over her stomach under her nightie. She has ‘abs’ now. People know she’s lost weight but nobody knows about her ‘abdominals’. She flexes her legs and caresses her ‘quadriceps’. Her body belongs to her again now, like it did when she was a little girl, before she developed curves and hips and that inconvenient bust. She used to wear her bra to bed every night, done up on the tightest clasp, because Laura told her that if she didn’t she’d end up with breasts so big they’d be dragging on the ground. She didn’t like her breasts. They were arranged by someone else to please boys like Ron Gordon and then to feed her children; they weren’t anything to do with skinny, busy Margie McNabb who could turn cartwheels and climb trees with her dad.

And then, when she got fat, her body seemed to have even less to do with her; she was lost in a mountain of chicken-skin flesh. She shudders just thinking about it.

For some reason she hasn’t been out yet and bought a whole new wardrobe to reveal just how much her body has changed. She prefers to keep wearing her old clothes, hanging off her and gaping around the waist. She doesn’t want to share all the details of her weight loss around just yet, to hear Veronika take credit for it, to hear everyone discuss it and argue about it and make jokes about it.

The ordinary phone rings and Ron bounces upright as if to defend himself from a punch. Oooh, lovers calling from every direction, thinks Margie gleefully. ‘Ron Gordon!’ he growls, and Margie swallows a guffaw.

‘Oh, good morning, Enigma.’ Ron relaxes against the head-board. He gives an old-Ron-style smirk. ‘Happy Anniversary.’

Margie hears her mother’s plaintive voice spilling from the phone. ‘Well, my word, Ron, you know perfectly well it’s a very unhappy anniversary! Let me talk to Margie!’

Ron goes to hand over the phone but Margie silently, wickedly shakes her head.

‘She’s in the shower, Enigma. Can she call you back?’

‘Thank you,’ says Margie after he’s hung up. ‘She only wants to go on and on about tonight.’

‘That’s all right.’

It’s an oddly courteous exchange. Goodness me, thinks Margie. It’s all very strange in the Gordon household today. They lie next to each other in silence, as polite as strangers on a train. I’ve slept beside this man for over thirty years. I should be more relaxed with him than anybody else in the world, so why is it that I feel so much more like myself when I’m with Rotund Ron, who I’ve only known for such a short time? Relaxed enough to laugh so hard I do those embarrassing laugh-snorts. Relaxed enough to tell him whatever comes into my mind, without censoring it, without checking first if it’s going to make him sneer or sigh. Like the ladybird beetles. I’ve never told anybody about the ladybird beetles before.

Yesterday she’d told Rotund Ron that whenever a ladybird beetle landed on her hand she liked to think it was a message from her dad, telling her he loved her, and that it was amazing how often, whenever she was feeling especially low, that sure enough an exquisite red and gold beetle would appear from nowhere, tiny wings fluttering. It hasn’t even
occurred
to her to ever tell Ron this, even though he was really very fond of Dad and the two of them used to have long, serious chats together about their cars and mileage or something.

‘So–are you–disappointed about missing the Anniversary tonight?’ asks Ron.

Lordie me! The man is actually asking how she
feels
about something.

She answers noncommittally, briskly, just like he does when asked about anything too personal. ‘Not really.’

Ha! Give him a taste of his own medicine.

‘Oh,’ he answers. ‘I thought you enjoyed the Anniversary, that’s all.’

Her heart softens slightly. After a few seconds, she says, ‘When I was little, every Anniversary morning I used to wake up frightened that Mum and Dad were going to disappear like Alice and Jack.’

She would lie in her bed, her heart thumping. She’d want to run and check if they were still there in their bed, but she was frozen with fear. She couldn’t even move a muscle, as if that would set everything in motion. Sometimes it seemed whole lifetimes of paralysed horror passed before her dad would appear at her bedroom door in his striped blue pyjamas, his hair all sticking up, asking if she’d like a cup of tea in bed. The relief of not being abandoned was so enormous she nearly wet her pants each time.

And then, when her own children were little she became morbidly convinced
they
would vanish if she took her eyes off them for a second. She was obsessed with newspaper stories about missing children. Often she wrote letters to their mothers, telling them their child was beautiful and she was praying for them and enclosing a large cheque just in case it could help in any way. One woman in Queensland still writes back to Margie every Christmas, thirty years after her curly haired six-year-old daughter vanished while waiting for the school bus. Margie can see the faces of those missing children from the Sixties, the Seventies, the Eighties, as clearly as if they were her own children. She can remember their names, their mothers’ names and what they were wearing when they disappeared. It’s the unsolved ones who haunt her the most. It’s better when the bodies are found. Aunt Connie always said, ‘Unsolved mysteries are the best!’ and Margie would want to scream at her, ‘Not for the mothers, they’re not!’

She has never told anybody about her ‘thing’ with the missing children. It’s between her and their mothers.

Ron clears his throat. He sounds as awkward as a teenage boy on a first date. ‘So, were you angry then–when they told you the truth about Alice and Jack?’

Yet another question about feelings! Has he been reading her copy of
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus
?

‘I think I already knew, without knowing I knew,’ answers Margie. ‘I think my subconscious had worked it out. So it wasn’t a surprise, really, it was like a confirmation. I didn’t feel angry so much as hurt that they felt they had to wait till I was forty to tell me.’

‘Yeah. Sure. Right. I can imagine it might have been, ah…hurtful.’

Watching Ron try to talk about anything vaguely emotional rather than factual is like watching an uncoordinated man earnestly trying out a few moves on the dance floor. It’s both touching and excruciating. There is silence. Margie takes the opportunity to quietly practise her pelvic-floor exercises. She can squeeze her pelvic floor for an impressive eight seconds now, which is not bad for a fifty-five-year-old woman with two children. An interesting thing is that these exercises often make her feel a bit sexy, or ‘horny’, as they say.

Ron says, ‘So, this thing you’ve got on tonight, this Weight Watchers thing, partners aren’t invited, right?’

He has already asked this three times. She says, ‘No, I’m sorry, you can’t come tonight.’ This new feeling of power is quite delicious. She rolls over to face him and says, hardly able to believe her wantonness, ‘But we could arrange for you to come right now if you like.’ He stares at her blankly. Oh dear, thinks Margie, did I get the terminology wrong? Doesn’t ‘come’ mean orgasm? I guess I’m as bad at dirty talk as he is at ‘feelings’ talk! She puts a hand down his pyjama pants and takes a good, firm hold of his penis. His eyes widen in understanding. In all their years of marriage Margie has never,
ever
done such a thing without husbandly guidance. It was always Ron’s role to request sex and hers to either acquiesce, or plead tiredness or ‘that’ time of the month. She’s behaving like a real hussy this morning!

He says, rather hoarsely, ‘This is unusual.’

A shadow of concern flits across his face and Margie knows he is wondering if she has developed these new habits in another man’s bed, but then he obviously decides to think about it later as his eyes roll back in his head comically, like a cartoon character parodying sexual pleasure. Margie pulls her flannelette nightgown over her head, closes her eyes and imagines she is stroking the handsome gondolier’s swarthy Italian penis.

And the best thing is, according to her calorie-counter book, an ‘active’ sexual session can burn as many as four hundred and twenty-five calories.

Grace is flossing her teeth while she stands at the end of the bed, fully dressed, watching Callum sleep. It’s a strange feeling to stay awake the whole night while the rest of the world sleeps. It makes her feel tough and edgy. Sleeping seems like a dopey, passive way to spend perfectly good time. She remembers reading somewhere that the average person spends twenty-two years of their life asleep. Year after year after year. How pathetic! Callum’s unshaven face is soft and facile. He’s been lying there in virtually the same position for hours on end. Meanwhile, Grace has done two loads of laundry and cooked and frozen three more lasagnes. There is not another centimetre of room in the freezer. That will have to do.

The baby has slept through again. He’s slept through now for three nights. Sophie won’t have any trouble with him.

What will Laura think about this? Grace imagines her mother flinching with disgust. She’ll be secretly embarrassed that Grace has done something so publicly emotional. (
Don’t be a drama queen, Grace.
) The whole thing will seem messy to her. Grace looks at her fingertips, which are red and raw from cleaning products. Every surface in the house is shimmering and sterile in the early morning light. Of course, by the time Laura gets back Callum will have had free rein of the house for a while, so standards will have plummeted. Sorry, Mum. Did my best. I never did clean anything quite well enough for you anyway. Although I remember I once did quite a good job on the tiles in the spare bathroom. You said, ‘You only missed that bit in the corner by the vanity.’ How I glowed with pride! What a tender childhood memory. And what about Dad? Dentist Dad. Will he come to my funeral? Will he feel bad that he never even gave his own daughter so much as a check-up, let alone a filling? Will he send a card with a twenty-dollar note in it?
Dear Grace, So sorry to hear you killed yourself, have fun! With love from Dad.

She grinds the floss against her gums. Her eyes are huge, dry, stinging orbs, like an alien’s.

It was seventy-three years ago today that her great-grandmother Alice Munro decided to step free of her life. Veronika’s theory about Aunt Connie killing the Munros is manifestly wrong. It was Alice. She knew she couldn’t be a good mother to her baby so she took herself out of the picture. The only difference is that she decided to take her husband with her, whereas Grace is leaving Callum with a nice ready-made family.

Although he’s sure to be upset at first. He may even grieve. She thinks of Aunt Connie’s funeral. There was a moment when she happened to glance over and see Aunt Rose staring at the coffin with such naked anguish that Grace had to look away. Her pain seemed intensely private. It is unbearable to think of Callum suffering like that, to imagine the familiar features of his face distorted and ugly with grief.

But oh God, she has no choice. It will be such a relief to just stop, for good. And in the end he’ll be so much happier with Sophie. It will only take a year or two. It’s best for him and for Jake. No pain, no gain.

Callum’s eyelids twitch as he suddenly senses her presence. ‘Bloody hell!’ He is instantly wide awake and sitting up, rubbing at his eyes. ‘What’s the matter? What are you doing there?’