Marshmallows for Breakfast (13 page)

“Just wondering, as one does, what he did before you so conveniently moved into his backyard.”

“Gabs, I'm not living in his garden shed. And I don't know what he did,” I replied. “But I said I'd ask so I'm asking. I'll totally understand if it's not possible.”

My boss shrugged her shoulders. “Kennie, for as long as you've worked with me, you've put in the hours, so you can leave early if you wish, but… Ah, never mind.”

“What?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Never mind.”

“No, tell me.”

“Don't let him take you for a mug.”

“He's not. It was Summer's idea. She asked if I'd pick them up.”

“I'm sure she did, but he's a man on his own with two children, probably for the first time. He'll always take the easy way out. And, I'm sure your mother told you this, you don't want to get a reputation for being easy.”

Gabrielle's words had the vein of truth trickling through them. Kyle was struggling and, rather than pull himself together and find a way to meet this challenge, at the moment he was still wallowing in the loss of his wife. He was getting drunk; he was rowing with his wife then slinking into a depression that meant he ignored his children; he was having stand-up rows with his daughter. I wasn't surprised Jaxon rationed his speech, was quietly defiant; I wasn't shocked Summer had worked out that the quickest, most foolproof way to get her father's undivided attention was to throw a tantrum. They were twin behaviors, two sides to the same silent, desperate cry: NOTICE ME!

It'd be easy, possibly even wise for me to leave them alone. Let Kyle work it out and reorder his family life himself. Life
isn't easy. And, as I'd said to Kyle that day I found him drunk and virtually lifeless on his sofa, “Once you bond yourself to a child, you can't just walk away.”

I had bonded myself to them, I couldn't walk away. I couldn't let Kyle alone to work it out, his kids stumbling around in his wake, scrabbling around for as much attention and overt love as they could get from him. If I could do something then I had to.

I was about to explain this to Gabrielle when the door swung open and Janene, resplendent in her ankle-length, caramel- colored suede coat, carrying a Louis Vuitton bag and wearing Gucci sunglasses, entered. Despite her job title and low pay packet, most of her outfits cost more than six months’ rent for me.

“Hi,” she drawled and swept over to her desk.

Her arrival ended our conversation. Gabrielle glanced down at her watch, then up at Janene. “Thanks for dropping in, Janene, it's always nice to see you.” Gabrielle had explained to her at length that if she wanted to be trained as a consultant, she had to prove she was up to the job and to start putting in the hours. To her, this meant turning up at nine o'clock. To me, when I was being trained, it meant arriving at 7:30 a.m.

A wash of embarrassment pinked up Janene's face but she decided to brazen it out. “Anyone for coffee?” she asked and smiled brightly.

We both shook our heads.

“OK,” she said. She shed her coat like a snake leaving its old skin behind, then wandered off to the kitchen at the end of the corridor through the doorway beside my desk.

“That,” Gabrielle said, pointing a maroon, manicured finger in Janene's wake, “is what happens when people believe you're there to make their lives easier.”

I ducked my head. Gabrielle was right. But if she saw the
looks on Summer and Jaxon's faces the day they thought their father was dead, felt Summer's hug when she had her tantrum, saw the anxious way Jaxon looked at his father … Whether Kyle was taking advantage or not, I couldn't walk away.

STRAWBERRIES, BLUEBERRIES,
SLICES OF APPLE, SLICES OF
PEAR & A DOLLOP OF YOGURT

CHAPTER 11

S
upermarket shopping became a whole new experience in the weeks following my collecting Jaxon and Summer from school.

Now I had two personal shoppers (three if you counted Garvo, Jaxon's imaginary golden retriever with one brown leg, whom we weren't allowed to leave outside the shop with all the other dogs).

I was a novelty who paid them attention, so every spare second they could, they spent with me. I'd come home from work and they'd be sitting on the steps outside waiting for me. They'd often ring and ask if I would be able to pick them up from school because their dad was working. They rifled through my things and took whatever they liked. If I couldn't find something I could lay odds on one of them having it. It wasn't petty theft, not in their minds; it was simply an extension of our friendship. My antique silver and turquoise ring I'd bought in Sydney that I constantly wore, for example, Summer had seen lying on my dining table and had taken because it reminded her of me. She wore it on her thumb in her house and was very careful not to let it leave her sight. She never, for example, took it to school. Jaxon had taken possession of the mobile phone I'd used in Australia because Garvo (who spoke in barks only Jaxon could understand) had told him he could call Australia with it.

And if the children saw me leaving the flat after we'd had
breakfast on a Saturday, they'd run out, besiege me, ask me if I would take them with me. I invariably said yes, mainly because I hadn't worked out how to say no to them.

“Do your mumma and dad live in the same house?” Summer asked me one day while we were doing my weekly shopping.

“Yes, they do,” I replied as I dropped a tin of chickpeas into my trolley. “Which is a miracle to me and all my siblings. My brothers and sister, I mean.”

“Why?” Jaxon asked.

“Because they argue. Boy, do they argue.”

“Like Mumma and Dad,” Summer stated. It was a statement with the weight of the world on its shoulders.

“I suppose,” I said.

“Why didn't your mumma go away?” she asked.

Because they enjoy torturing each other too much,
was the flip answer I'd normally give.
Because they got together when marriage was for life and they'd had to work it out,
was the more considered reply. Whatever reason, after witnessing and living with all their rows and torturous silences it was reasonable to wonder the same thing that Summer was asking.

“I don't know,” I replied, the most honest answer I could give without them taking it the wrong way. An adult would be able to detect the nuances of my family's story and understand why one size doesn't fit all—a child would just take it and fit it over her experiences like she would slip a shop-bought, mass- produced dress on her mass- produced doll.

Summer and Jaxon both stared at me, my three-word answer clearly not good or illuminating enough.

“During all the arguments, we all knew that our parents loved us. Even if they didn't like each other all the time, they loved us all the time.” As an adult I could stand back and see that. Back then, I knew no such thing. All I knew—
all my brothers and sister knew—was that my parents
hated
each other. That they wanted to do as much as possible to make each other miserable and they didn't seem to notice how it affected us. All we knew was that we could never predict what day would be the start of another marathon argument. Years later, having been through many experiences, I knew that even if you were consumed by arguing with the person you once upon a time supposedly loved, you still had room in your heart for your children. You still loved your children, even if you forgot to show it. I wished my parents had told us that, had shown us that, but they hadn't, so I was trying to do that for Summer and Jaxon now.

Summer put her head to one side, regarded me with her languid inquisitiveness. “You mean Mumma and Dad love us even if they always tell each other off all the time?” she asked.

I'd wanted to sound profound, to have the message I was conveying to settle gently into their psyches like the soft falling of snow, to slowly melt into their minds so they knew without knowing that no matter what happened they'd always come first in their parents’ minds. Instead, Summer had cut the bull and stated outright what I had been trying to diffuse. I really should stop watching those trite shows where everything was neatly wrapped up in fifty minutes. The way they resolved everything by saying “you love each other” really didn't work in the real world, not even on a six-year-old. I nodded at Summer. “Pretty much.”

“When Mumma used to get sick Dad would tell her off,” Summer said.

I had been about to place a packet of kidney beans into the wire belly of my trolley, but the statement stopped me, and I turned my attention to them. “Your mum used to get sick?”

In unison Summer and Jaxon nodded. “All the time. If she didn't take her medicine she'd be even more sicker.” Summer explained. “It used to make Dad even more cross.”

“When Mumma was sick he'd shout and then go upstairs to his room for a time-out and do his work,” Jaxon said quietly, his eyes not focused on the present of a busy Saturday afternoon in a supermarket, but back in the past. Obviously it still played on his mind. His father shouting at his mother, his father's angry footsteps on the stairs.

“Sometimes, when Mumma was really, really sick he'd take us in his car for ages and ages,” Summer added.

“And Mumma would cry. She said we didn't love her because we left her. We didn't want to leave her.”

“Dad said we had to,” Summer concluded.

My eyes went from one to the other, a disturbed feeling growing inside me. When my parents rowed we'd hide in our rooms, waiting for their tempers to subside or for dinner, whichever came first. But, in all of it, my parents never did this. My dad wouldn't bundle us out of the house to punish my mum; my mum wouldn't sob and wail and claim we didn't love her. They'd create a hell we had to reside in, but I didn't remember them using us as weapons—they found far too many things wrong with each other to bother.

“Your mum's sick, you say?” I asked.

They nodded in unison.

“What's wrong with her?”

Their eyes darted to each other in unison, communicating in their secret way, the way identical twins were mythically supposed to, the way Summer and Jaxon did even though they were fraternal twins. They turned back to me, shrugged in unison and mumbled, “Don't know.”

“Don't know,” they said, but it felt more like,
“We're not allowed to tell.”
Cutting off further questioning, Summer wandered a few feet down the aisle, picked up a liter packet
of liquid stock. “Do you want this?” she called out, hefting it up with both hands. I'd bought it last week and she'd obviously remembered.

“Yes, please,” I called back. Rather than bringing it over, Summer stood and read the ingredients list. Her head bowed and slightly to one side, her forehead furrowed in concentration, her lips pursed.
That is me,
I realized with a start. In just a few weeks she'd gotten an impression of me food shopping down to an art. Jaxon, meanwhile, stood on tiptoes on the metal wheel bar of the trolley, my shopping list in one hand as he leaned into the trolley, rifling through the fruit and veg I'd put in there, looking at the list and then looking at the goods, like I usually did before we went to the checkout. They had cut me off by unintentionally pretending to be me.

Being so expertly cut off by them was isolating and bewildering. Whatever it was that caused them to do that must be a huge secret. Something so huge and scary it'd made them shut down and shut off.

Since I'd become a bigger part of their lives I'd learned a fair bit about Mrs. Gadsborough from the kids.

I'd learned that she called every other day to speak to her children and after each phone call the pair of them would be quiet and sullen, would often go to their rooms for a while to deal with their loss in their own way.

I'd found out that she couldn't speak to her husband without rowing with him.

I'd discovered she was beautifully photogenic. Long waves of caramel hair tumbled around her face, cascading down onto her shoulders; her eyes were the same deep, mesmerizing navy-green as her children's but an altogether different shape; her mouth was shaped like her children's, her small nose was not. The pictures of her with the twins were always vibrant, alive with her energy. Her head was always
raised, her eyes overbrimming with joy, her cheeks glowing, her arms wrapped around Jaxon and Summer, cradling them as though they were the most precious things in her life. With Kyle beside her in pictures she was more subdued but no less passionate. In the photos that were still on display in the children's rooms, she'd often be looking at him a mix of awe and tenderness smoothing out her features, molding the grin on her face and teasing out the sparkle in her eyes. Kyle would usually be looking at the camera, his head dipped sideways towards his adoring spouse, the bashful grin of a man in love on his face.

All the pictures of the pair of them had been taken down from the living room, from the hallway, from the kitchen. Faint outlines of where the large glass frames had been were still evident on the walls and he'd left the twenty-by- sixteens of her and the kids up for them, but the others, the reminders of their times together, he had rehoused in the cupboard under the stairs. Summer had taken them out and shown me once, almost as though trying to show me the life they used to have. While we'd been flicking through the pictures, Jaxon had stood near us, eyes wide with anxiety, moving from foot to foot and wringing his hands like an old woman sending her only child off to war, so terrified was he that his father would walk in and catch us.