Three’s a Crowd (12 page)

And now Rachel was coming over to talk to Sophie. It felt like such an intrusion. Annie was so close to her girls, so good with them. They had a wonderful relationship, she'd never needed help from anyone else.

But Annie was gone. When was that going to sink in?

Tom met her at the door in bare feet, a T-shirt and board shorts. She was relieved to see that he looked a lot better than he had at the funeral; the time away had clearly done him good. He seemed refreshed, his skin was lightly tanned and his hair had grown out a little; Rachel could see a faint echo of his younger self.

‘Is this how lawyers are dressing these days?' she remarked.

He glanced down at himself. ‘I'm still in Crescent Head mode,' he said. ‘I couldn't wait to get out of that suit and tie today, it felt like a straitjacket.' He stood back to let her in. ‘Sophie's up in her room, alone. Hannah's at a friend's, she'll be home for dinner. So, you might as well go straight up, unless you want a drink or something first?'

‘No, I'm right.' Rachel frowned, looking ominously up the stairs. ‘Does she know I'm coming?'

Tom shook his head. ‘I didn't want it to seem like it was a set-up.'

‘I think she's going to pick up on that when I ask her why she doesn't want to go to the formal.'

Tom shrugged sheepishly, before giving her an encouraging pat on the back. ‘I'm sure you'll know how to handle it.'

Rachel looked at him sideways, passed him her bag and headed up the stairs. She knocked lightly when she reached Sophie's door. ‘Hi Sophie, it's Rachel.'

She glanced down the stairs to where Tom was standing, clutching her handbag to his chest as he stared back up at her with an anxious frown. She shooed him away as Sophie opened the door.

‘Hi Rachel,' she said, a slight edge to her voice. She was suspicious. ‘What are you doing here?'

‘Oh, your dad called, said you were back in town. I thought I'd drop in . . . say hi.'

Sophie just stood there, not saying anything. She'd always looked like her mother, but now it was a little uncanny. She had a level of composure quite beyond her years. Rachel had heard it said that when someone loses a parent, they shift up into that generation. Sophie was too young to become the woman of the house, but there was a world-weary look in her eyes that was disconcerting.

‘So am I interrupting something?' Rachel tried next. She was running out of openers.

Sophie finally released a groan. ‘I'm just catching up on Facebook. The internet connection is so-o-o slow at Grandma's.' She turned around and sauntered back over to her desk. ‘She still has dial-up, would you believe?' she threw over her shoulder at Rachel. ‘I didn't think that even existed any more. It's like, totally ancient.'

Rachel was relieved to see some semblance of a teenage girl surface again. She ventured a step or two into the room as Sophie plonked down on her chair and grabbed the mouse, clicking it in rapid succession to close or hide whatever was on the desktop. It wouldn't have mattered, Rachel couldn't make out anything from where she was standing anyway.

Sophie swivelled her chair around and swung her feet up to rest on the bed. ‘Take a seat, if you can find a spot,' she said.

The bed was covered in various stacks of folded clothes, neat little piles of string bikinis and underwear, and a couple of tops
and shorts laid out flat like she was working out what went with what. ‘Packing?' Rachel commented rather superfluously as she perched on the edge of the bed.

Sophie nodded. ‘We're leaving in the next day or two, I hope so anyway. Dad's got stuff to sort out at work.'

‘Yeah, he said you wanted to go straight back up the coast again. All that time without broadband, how will you survive?'

She shrugged. ‘It doesn't matter, I think I'm going to close down my Facebook page anyway.'

‘Oh?'

‘It just seems like such a waste of time. I had heaps of messages, some of them were kind of nice, but most of them were just requests to join some stupid group or do a quiz, like which
Twilight
character am I? I mean, who cares?'

Obviously not Sophie any more.

‘How did the school certificate go?' Rachel asked, in an attempt to move on to something she did care about.

‘It was okay,' said Sophie. ‘It was only three days. I didn't have to do any of the internal exams, they gave me “special consideration”,' she added wryly, using her fingers for quotation marks.

‘So,' Rachel hesitated, desperately searching for a segue, ‘what now that it's all over? Are you going to celebrate?' God, was that the best she could come up with?

Sophie looked her straight in the eye. ‘Dad told you I don't want to go to the formal, didn't he?'

‘Oh, he might have mentioned it . . .'

Sophie gave her a small, sly smile then. ‘You're so totally obvious, Rachel.'

She sighed, leaning back against the bedhead. ‘I know, I've never been good at subterfuge. I'd make a really hopeless spy. And I so wanted to be 99 out of
Get Smart
when I grew up.'

Sophie was frowning. ‘Is that the one Anne Hathaway played?'

‘Oh, in the movie, yeah.' Sophie was going to think she was a bit tragic. ‘I was talking about the TV show, I was just a kid . . . never mind.' Back to the subject. She looked directly at Sophie. ‘You know your dad's just worried about you.'

‘He shouldn't be,' she said. ‘He's making such a big deal about
this, like it's some major rite of passage that I'm going to totally miss if I don't go. But it's just a stupid party.'

‘Well, it's a little more than that,' Rachel suggested. ‘You don't think it might be fun?'

She sighed, shaking her head. ‘I don't know what it was like in your day, Rachel –'

Ouch, she was old enough for a teenager to refer to ‘her' day?

‘– but it's so over the top now. Everyone thinks they're on the red carpet or something. I don't want to spend all that money on a dress I'm never going to wear again, just so I can boast about where I bought it.'

Rachel thought that sounded eminently sensible. But what if she was just making excuses? Maybe it was because she had no one to go shopping with . . . Tom would be pretty useless.

‘You know, Soph, if you need someone to go shopping with you . . .' Rachel hesitated, what was she saying? ‘Well, to be honest, I'd be the worst person. But . . .' She thought about it. ‘Lexie! Lexie'd be great, and she would love to go with you.'

‘It doesn't stop with the dress, Rachel,' said Sophie. ‘There's the shoes, the bag, the jewellery . . . you have to get your hair done, makeup, nails, fake tan –'

‘Fake tan?' Rachel frowned. ‘That's crazy.'

‘Tell me about it.'

‘You're all fifteen, sixteen, right?' said Rachel. ‘Why the hell are you trussing yourselves up like turkeys at Christmas? The people who do all that stuff are desperately trying to recapture the way they looked when they were your age. You guys are gorgeous without all the trimmings.'

‘That's exactly what Mum would say,' said Sophie. ‘Would have said,' she corrected herself.

Rachel's stomach lurched. Was that good or bad? She wasn't actually arguing Tom's case. Not that he had a case. What was she doing here again?

‘Mum would never have approved,' Sophie added.

Rachel hesitated. ‘I don't know that that's entirely true, Soph,' she said carefully. ‘She wouldn't have wanted you to miss out on one of the highlights of your school years.'

‘Well, she did.'

‘Pardon?'

‘Mum didn't go to her formal,' said Sophie. ‘She thought it was a waste of time as well.'

Rachel knew there was a little more to it than that. Annie's family belonged to some fringe sect of an otherwise mainstream religion, and by all accounts she had a pretty austere upbringing. Rachel was quite sure she would never have been allowed to go to anything as potentially debauched as a school formal, whether she wanted to or not. So of course when she came home pregnant after a year of new-found freedom at university, her parents simply and quite thoroughly disowned her. Although they lived on the north-west outskirts of Sydney, Annie had never seen them again; they had never laid eyes on Sophie, or Hannah.

Rachel thought for a moment. ‘Look, whatever choices your mum made, I know she would always have encouraged you to make the decision that was right for you.'

‘That's exactly what I'm trying to do,' said Sophie. ‘It's just not important to me, Rachel. It seems . . .'

She was struggling to find the word, but Rachel knew what she was getting at. ‘Insignificant in the scheme of things?' she offered.

Sophie let out a sigh. ‘Yeah,' she said quietly. ‘Insignificant, and shallow, and frivolous.'

And adolescent, Rachel wanted to say. It was the one time in life when shallowness and frivolity were acceptable, even expected. And Sophie was going to miss it.

‘Look, I get it, Soph, I really do,' Rachel said kindly. ‘I know that's how it must seem to you right now. But think really hard, if you don't go, do you honestly think you might not regret it down the track?'

Sophie looked at her directly. ‘Nope.'

‘You seem so certain,' said Rachel. ‘All I'm saying is you might kick yourself once the photos are up on Facebook and MySpace, and there's nothing you can do about it then. It'll be too late to change your mind.'

While she was talking, Sophie got up off her chair and walked across to a corkboard on the wall. She removed something and turned around, coming over to stand in front of Rachel. She held
out a violet-coloured card, the invitation to the formal. ‘Here, you tell me if you think I'll regret not going.'

Rachel frowned, taking it from Sophie's hand. She scanned down the flowery script until her eyes landed squarely on the real reason Sophie did not want to go to the formal.

‘You are such a giant doofus, Tom!' Rachel declared when she came back down the stairs and he ushered her into the kitchen.

‘Why? What have I done?' he said, clearly baffled.

She thrust the invitation into his hands and folded her arms as he read it, his brow all furrowed in concentration. He looked up after a while and shook his head helplessly. ‘I don't understand.'

Rachel sighed loudly. ‘Look at the date.'

He looked, but still he didn't appear to twig.

‘Tom!' she exclaimed. ‘It's Annie's birthday.'

‘Oh fuck!' he cried, hitting his hand to his forehead.

Rachel stared at him in disbelief. ‘How did you not realise that? What is it with the male brain and dates? There's like a lobe missing or something.'

‘Still think I'm hopeless?' asked Tom.

After apologising profusely and berating himself repeatedly, he finally talked Rachel into staying for a beer. They had come out the front and were sitting side by side on the step, where they could glimpse the ocean at the end of the street and catch the evening sea breeze. But more importantly, where Sophie couldn't hear them.

‘Not entirely,' said Rachel. ‘You do have some redeeming qualities.' She clinked her beer bottle against his.

‘Poor kid, no wonder she didn't want to go,' said Tom.

Rachel nodded. ‘She has no way of predicting how she's going to feel on the day. Maybe it'd all turn out great, be the best thing for her . . .' She glanced at Tom. ‘But you know, to be honest, I can't help thinking it'd be really hard. She'd be all dressed up, you'd be taking photos, it would be so painfully obvious her mother wasn't there. There'll be a lot of times in the future when
she'll have to face that, and it'll be hard, but it's too soon right now, too raw, and she's way too young to have to deal with that around her friends . . . who, by the way, she doesn't even feel she can relate to any more, given what she's been through.'

Tom sighed. ‘I wish she'd felt she could have said that to me.'

‘It would have helped if you'd picked up on the date yourself.'

‘Go ahead, rub it in, I deserve it.'

‘Yes, you do,' Rachel agreed, sipping her beer. ‘So when will you head back up the coast?'

‘Probably at the weekend. I should at least put in the rest of the week at the office.' He took a swig of his beer. ‘I don't know how this'll go down at work.'

Rachel nudged against him. ‘They'll understand. You just lost your wife, for godsakes. What kind of place would it be if they gave you a hard time right now?'

‘A law firm.'

‘But they're not
inhuman
, surely?'

He looked at her sideways, then took another swig of his beer.

‘Well, Tom Macklin, what the hell are you doing working for them if they're that bad?' Rachel demanded to know.

‘I sold my soul, Rach, I admit it. And now I have a family and a mortgage, so there's no way out.' He shook his head. ‘I never imagined I'd be doing this corporate crap, it was the last thing I wanted to do with a law degree. Remember when we were going to change the world?'

‘I remember when
you
wanted to change the world,' said Rachel. ‘I was never that big on the idea.'

‘So all was right with the world as far as you were concerned?'

‘Not at all, I just wasn't cut out for it,' she said. ‘I needed to remember to change my sheets regularly before I started trying to change the world.'

Tom smiled. ‘You're a funny girl, Rachel Halliday-Holloway.'

‘Don't call me that. You know I don't use the double barrel any more.' She paused, considering him. ‘What happened, Tom?' she asked seriously. ‘When I left you were still this idealistic boy, raring to take on the establishment.'

‘You weren't around, Rach, so you missed it,' said Tom. ‘But you should have seen how these firms infiltrated the final-year
students, seducing us with their graduate programs and fat starting salaries. I thought I'd try it for a year or two. Couldn't hurt, get a bit of experience, some money in the bank.' He paused. ‘But life has a way of tying you down. Annie wanted another child straightaway.'