Three Wishes (15 page)

“It’s going to be hot,” she said out loud, stretching and kicking off the sheet. Dan lay on his stomach, his face squashed into his pillow, his arms looped around it.

“Lucky we’re going to the mansion,” he said, his voice muffled. He half lifted his head from the pillow and opened one eye to look at her.

“Happy Christmas, Catriona.”

“Happy Christmas, Daniel.”

It was their thing, calling each other by their full names, whenever they wanted to be funny or portentous or especially loving. It started after their wedding, remembering their wedding vows. “I, Daniel, take you, Catriona, to be my wife…” except on their honeymoon it was more likely to be, “I, Daniel, take you, Catriona, to fuck your brains out.”

No one’s brains had been fucked out lately, of course. She’d let him back into the bedroom after three nights on the sofa bed,
and ever since the news about the baby she’d stopped flinching violently every time his arm accidentally brushed against hers, but there was still an invisible, uncrossable line down the middle of their bed. Well, not quite down the middle. Cat’s half—the wronged-party half—was a touch more generous.

They did what they always did on Christmas morning and stayed in bed to exchange their Christmas presents.

He gave her a delicate gold bracelet and the new
Marie Claire
recipe book and a “make your own herb garden” kit. She gave him aftershave and a new squash racket. They were just a little too effusive about each other’s gifts.

“I’ll let you open this one,” said Dan, once the bed was covered with wrapping paper. He pulled an extra package from his bedside drawer.

Cat read the gift tag out loud: “To my new little baby girl or boy. Happy Christmas. I love you and I love your mum. From your dad.”

Normally Dan’s cards read,
To: Catwoman. From: Batman.

The present was a miniature furry football.

“Boy or girl, they need to learn how to kick a ball properly,” explained Dan. He bent his head down and spoke to Cat’s stomach. “Did you hear that? No sexism in this family.”

Cat looked at the top of his head, and her mind did one of those strange little shifts, a mental double-take.
He’s going to be someone’s dad. There’s my dad, their child would say one day and
the other kids wouldn’t bother looking up from their game because fathers were all pretty much the same really and this
dad
would be walking toward them—and the dad would be
Dan.

For some reason, this thought was very, very sexy.

As Dan sat back up she pushed him by the shoulders and rolled herself on top of him, to sit astride his stomach. The Christmas paper crackled beneath them, and Dan looked up at her with narrowed green eyes, an unshaven jaw. “She’s crossed the line.”

“Yeah, I’m crossing the line.” Cat pulled off her T-shirt and bent toward him. “And you’d better not cross it again, mate.”

“Never,” he mumbled, his tongue already in her mouth, his hands running up and down her spine.

She had thought sex would be ruined forever—but they were too good at it for it to be bad. The hurt of the last few weeks seemed only to make it more intense; it gave her a feeling of exquisite fragility, as if at any moment she would cry. She came fast and hard and that thing happened, the phenomenon that had only happened twice before and both those times she’d been smoking pot. It was like a stained-glass window shattered in her head and every fragment was a different memory or thought or feeling. There was the plate of spaghetti smashing against the wall and there was Gemma with shiny eyes saying, “Two very, very pretty blue lines,” and there was Dan walking toward a child looking up to say, “That’s my dad,” and there was the Christmas tree of Cat’s childhood, glittering with gold and silver tinsel in the morning light, surrounded by presents that had magically materialized overnight.

It took them a few seconds to catch their breath.

“Wow.”

“Yeah, wow.”

“So, this should make Christmas less stressful,” Dan said as they drove toward Lyn’s place. “Getting your parents over and done with in one go, instead of driving all over Sydney to see them.”

Dan had a low-maintenance family. His parents had considerately moved up to Queensland a couple of years ago, and he had an enviably casual relationship with his only sister, Mel. Christmas was all about the Kettles, which was fortunate because they didn’t leave much energy for anyone else.

“It will be more stressful,” said Cat. “I think it’s a bizarre idea having the parents together for Christmas. Mum will be even more uptight than usual, and Dad will be showing off. It will be painful to watch.”

“And you can’t drink yourself into oblivion anymore.”

“I assume you’re going to give up alcohol in sympathy with me.”

“Enjoy your little fantasies, don’t you?”

“You’re still on probation. Don’t get all cocky just because you got lucky this morning.”

“Ooh, I got lucky all right.”

As they waited for the traffic lights to change Cat looked out the window and watched a family who had just pulled up outside someone’s house. A group of kids were running helter-skelter into the house, and a man was standing with his arms outstretched while a woman loaded him up with presents from the car. He pretended to stagger under their weight, and the woman flicked him on the arm.

The lights changed and Dan accelerated.

“You know, I might forgive you, one day,” she said. “I might.”

“The air conditioning isn’t working,” said Michael as he ushered them into the house. “My wife is not happy. Merry Christmas.”

He had a screwdriver in his hand, which he handed to Dan. “It’s time to initiate you into one of the great joys of fatherhood, mate.”

Dan stared at the screwdriver.

“You get a picture on a box, a thousand little screws, and instructions entirely lacking in logic. Oh, it’s fun. Today, we’re working on a three-story cubby house. Santa Claus must have been out of her mind. Come on. You’re not escaping.”

“A drink?” asked Dan a touch desperately, as Michael led him off by the elbow.

Cat mouthed the word “probation” at him.

She found Lyn in the kitchen, wearing a sleeveless sundress that made her shoulders look too thin. The gleaming granite bench tops were covered with orderly rows of chopped ingredients. She was standing at the kitchen sink washing lettuce leaves.

“You’re the most organized cook on the planet,” said Cat. “What is that
noise?”
She bent down to see Maddie sitting under the table, frowning heavily, while she banged away discordantly on a tiny xylophone.

“My Cat!” cried Maddie and banged even harder to celebrate. “Look! Maddie noisy! Shhhh!”

“Ooh, can I see?” asked Cat hopefully, but Maddie was way too smart for that.

“No!”

“It’s no use.” Lyn wiped the back of a wet hand against her forehead. “It’s her favorite present. You know who it’s from—
Georgina. The bitch. She must have combed the shops looking for
the loudest toy she could find. I’ve had the worst morning. First the air conditioning. We can’t get anybody out to fix it and they’re forecasting thirty-four degrees. Nana will be complaining all day. Michael has spent two hours on that stupid cubby house. Mum’s setting the table on the veranda, and she’s so tightly wound up you can see the static crackling. You’d better keep away from her. Kara is upstairs, refusing to come out of her room. Gemma just called, all dreamy and idiotic, asking how to make a potato salad. Dad and Nana are late. Oh no, you
disgusting, vile creature
!”

Lyn did a strange little flapping dance on the spot and pointed at a cockroach in the middle of the kitchen floor. It seemed to have caught Lyn’s panic and kept changing its mind about which way it should go.

“The spray! It’s right there next to you. Stop laughing and kill it!”

Cat grabbed the spray. “Die, you little motherfucker,” she said and blasted it.

“Yucky,” observed Maddie, who had come out from under the kitchen table and now stood with her hands on her hips like a disgusted little housewife.

“That’s exactly what
I say when I kill cockroaches,” said Lyn, as
she scooped up the cockroach with a paper towel.

“Yucky?”

“Die, you little motherfucker. In exactly that tone of voice. I’m pretending to be Arnie Schwarzenegger.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

They grinned, pleased with themselves.

“We’ll have to ask Gemma if she does it too,” said Lyn.

“She probably doesn’t know you’re meant to kill them. What shall I do to help now I’ve got rid of your vermin?”

“Can you extricate Kara from her hovel? She listens to you. Thinks you’re cool.”

“O.K.”

“You’re glowing by the way,” said Lyn as she returned to her lettuce leaves and Maddie returned to her xylophone. “Pregnancy must suit you.”

Cat smiled widely. “Cool and glowing. Glowing coolly.”

“Yeah, yeah. Go away. Maddie, I’m
begging you to be quiet!”

Cat knocked once on Kara’s door and walked into her dark bedroom, which smelled of perfume and illicit cigarette smoke. The floor was layered in discarded clothing.

It was Cat’s own teenage bedroom. The one she got for four months of the year before she had to move out and let a sister take a turn at a room of her own. Kara was lying facedown on her bed, and Cat could hear the tinny beat of music from her headphones. She sat down on the end of the bed and grabbed her ankle.

Kara’s shoulder blades twitched angrily and she turned over, revealing blotchy mascara tearstains.

“Oh,” she said, pulling her headphones around her neck. “It’s you.”

“Yep,” said Cat. “Happy Christmas. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“So why the suicidal look? Did you get really bad presents?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“No. Probably not. Try me anyway so you can prove yourself right.”

Kara sighed dramatically.

“O.K., so this morning right, Mum gives me these shorts for Christmas and she goes, Try them on, try them on! I didn’t want to try them on in front of everybody but she wouldn’t shut up, so I did and I had to do this embarrassing, like
fashion parade,
with my gran saying Ohhhh, isn’t she sweet? and then do you know what Mum said, really loudly, in front of everybody?”

Kara’s voice quivered and Cat thought, You bitch, Georgina.

“What?”

“She said
they didn’t really suit me!”

Kara’s face crumbled. “Can you believe she said that?”

“Mmmm. Well, I guess—”

“She means I’ve got fat, ugly, disgusting legs!”

“No, I don’t think she did mean that actually.”

“You don’t understand. You’ve got great legs!” Kara pinched viciously at the flesh on her own thighs. “And don’t you
dare
say there’s nothing wrong with my legs because if you do, you’re just a liar. I know there is, because at the swimming carnival, Matt Hayes pointed at me and said he’d seen better legs on a table, and all his stupid friends laughed through their noses, like they agreed!”

It was no wonder that teenagers ended up going on shooting rampages, thought Cat. She herself could cheerfully fire off a few rounds at Matt and his pathetic, pimply little mates.

“And don’t talk to me about how the media tries to make women feel bad about their bodies and it’s a feminist issue and blah, blah, blah. I know all that stuff! It doesn’t make any difference.”

Cat shut her mouth quickly. Kara lay back down on her bed and they sat in silence for a few seconds.

Cat tried frantically to think of something cool to say.

“I really hate my breasts,” she offered finally, lamely.

“What?” Kara snorted.

“The Kettle girls missed out on breasts. You should hear the
jokes boys have made about us over the years. They thought they were so witty. So hilarious.”

“To Lyn, even? Did Lyn get upset?”

“Of course. Once a boy told Lyn she had two mozzie bites instead of tits and she cried for a whole week.”

“Really? Did she?” Kara sat up, invigorated. “I can’t imagine her, young, and getting all upset.”

“And you obviously don’t have any worries in that department.”

“Shut up.” Kara pulled at her T-shirt. “Boys don’t care about breasts.”

Cat stood up. “No. Of course not. Boys never think twice about breasts. Come on, you idiot, I’m sweltering in here. Are your legs capable of getting us downstairs?”

“Oh, all right. I’m starved to death, anyway. So what did that boy say again? Two mosquito bites, huh?”

“Don’t ever mention it to her, will you?”

Now Kara looked positively delighted. “I won’t. It might be a traumatic memory.”

“Probably.”