Chapter fifteen

Tess woke up suddenly, irretrievably alert. She looked at the clock next to her bed and groaned. It was only eleven-thirty pm. She snapped on the bedside light and lay back on her pillow, staring up at the ceiling.

This was her old bedroom, but there wasn’t anything much left in it to remind her of her childhood. Tess had barely been out the door before her mother had transformed it into an elegant guest bedroom with a good queen-size bed, matching bedside tables and lamps. This was in complete contrast to Auntie Mary, who had reverently kept Felicity’s bedroom exactly as she’d left it. Felicity’s room was like a perfectly preserved archaeological site, with the TV Week posters still on the wall.

The only part of Tess’s bedroom that had remained untouched was the ceiling. She let her eyes follow the rippled edge of the white cornices. She used to lie in bed staring at the ceiling on a Sunday morning, worrying about what she’d said at last night’s party, or what she hadn’t said, or what she should have said. Parties had terrified her. Parties still terrified her. It was the lack of structure, the casualness, the not knowing where to sit. If it wasn’t for Felicity she would never have gone, but Felicity was always keen to go. She’d stand with Tess in a corner, quietly delivering cutting critiques on all the guests and making Tess laugh.

Felicity had been her saviour.

Wasn’t that true?

Tonight, when she and her mother had sat down for a glass of brandy and too much chocolate (‘This is how I coped when your father left,’ Lucy explained. ‘It’s medicinal.’), they’d been talking about Felicity’s phone call, and Tess said, ‘The other night, you guessed that it was Will and Felicity. How did you know?’

‘Felicity never let you have anything just for yourself,’ said her mother.

‘What?’ Tess felt bemused, disbelieving. ‘That’s not true.’

‘You wanted to learn the piano. Felicity learned the piano. You played netball. Felicity played netball. You got too good at netball, so Felicity was left behind; next thing, you’ve suddenly lost interest in netball. You get a career in advertising. What a surprise! Felicity gets a career in advertising.’

‘Oh, Mum,’ said Tess. ‘I don’t know. You make it sound so calculated. We just liked doing the same things. Anyway, Felicity is a graphic designer! I was an advertising manager. They’re quite different.’

But not to her mother, who pursed her lips as if she knew better, before draining the rest of her brandy. ‘Look, I’m not saying she did it deliberately. But she suffocated you! When you were born, I remember thanking God that you weren’t a twin, that you’d be able to live your life on your own terms, without all that comparing and competing. And then, somehow, you and Felicity end up just like Mary and me, like twins! Worse than twins! I wondered what sort of person you might have become if you hadn’t had her breathing down your neck all the time, what friends you might have made –’

‘Friends? I wouldn’t have made any other friends! I was too shy! I was so shy I was practically disabled. I’m still sort of socially weird.’ She had stopped short of telling her mother about her self-diagnosis.

‘Felicity kept you shy,’ her mother had said. ‘It suited her. You weren’t really that shy.’

Now Tess wriggled her neck against her pillow. It was too hard; she missed her own pillow at home in Melbourne. Was what her mother said true? Had she spent most of her life in a dysfunctional relationship with her cousin?

She thought of that awful, strange hot summer when her parents’ marriage ended. It was like remembering a long illness. She’d had no inkling. Sure, her parents aggravated each other. They were so different. But they were her mum and dad. Everyone she knew had a mum and a dad who lived in the same house. Her circle of friends and family was too small and suburban and Catholic. She knew the word ‘divorce’ but it was like the word ‘earthquake’. It wasn’t something that would ever happen to her. But five minutes after her parents made their strange, stilted little announcement, her father packed his clothes into the suitcase they took on holidays, and went to stay in a musty-smelling furnished flat full of spindly, old-lady furniture, and her mother wore the same old shapeless dress for eight days in a row and walked about the house laughing, crying and muttering, ‘Good riddance, mate.’ Tess was ten. It was Felicity who got Tess through that summer, who took her to the local pool and lay side by side with her on the concrete in the burning sun (and Felicity, with her beautiful white skin, hated sunbaking) for as long as Tess wanted, who spent her own money on a Greatest Hits record just to make Tess feel better, who brought her bowls of ice cream with chocolate topping each time she sat on the couch and cried.

It was Felicity Tess called when she lost her virginity, when she lost her first job, when she was dumped for the first time, when Will said ‘I love you’, when she and Will had their first proper fight, when he proposed, when her waters broke, when Liam took his first steps.

They’d shared everything throughout their lives. Toys. Bikes. Their first doll’s house. (It stayed at their grandmother’s house.) Their first car. Their first apartments. Their first overseas holiday. Tess’s husband.

She’d let Felicity share Will. Of course she had. She’d let Felicity be like a mother to Liam, and she’d let Felicity be like a wife to Will. She’d shared her whole life with her. Because Felicity was obviously too fat to find her own husband and her own life. Was that what Tess had been subconsciously thinking? Or because she thought Felicity was too fat to even need her own life?

And then Felicity got greedy. She wanted all of Will.

If it had been any other woman but Felicity, Tess would never had said, ‘Have your affair and give my husband back.’ It wouldn’t have been conceivable. But because it was Felicity it was . . . okay? Forgivable? Is that what she meant? She’d share a toothbrush with Felicity, so she’d also let her use her husband? But at the same time, it also made the betrayal worse. A million times worse.

She rolled onto her stomach and pressed her face into the pillow. Her feelings about Felicity were irrelevant. She needed to think about Liam. (‘What about me?’ her ten-year-old self had kept thinking when her parents split up. ‘Don’t I get a say in this?’ She’d thought she was the centre of their world, and then she’d discovered she had no vote. No control.)

There was no such thing as a good divorce for children. She’d read that somewhere, just a few weeks ago, before all this. Even when the split was perfectly amicable, even when both parents made a huge effort, the children suffered.

Worse than twins, her mother had said. Maybe she was right.

Tess threw back the covers and got out of bed. She needed to go somewhere; to get out of this house and away from her thoughts. Will. Felicity. Liam. Will. Felicity. Liam.

She would get in her mother’s car and drive. She looked down at her striped pyjama pants and T-shirt. Should she get dressed? She had nothing to wear anyway. She hadn’t brought enough clothes with her. It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t get out of the car. She put on a pair of flat shoes and crept out of the room and down the hallway, her eyes adjusting to the dark. The house was silent. She switched on a lamp in the dining room and left a note for her mother just in case she woke.

She grabbed her wallet, took her mother’s car keys from the hook beside the door and crept out into the soft, sweet night air, breathing in deeply.

She drove her mother’s Honda along the Pacific Highway with the windows open and the radio turned off. Sydney’s North Shore was quiet, deserted. A man carrying a briefcase, who must have caught the train home after working late, hurried along the footpath.

A woman probably wouldn’t walk home alone from the station at this time of night. Tess thought about how Will had once told her that he hated walking behind a woman late at night in case she heard his footsteps and thought he was an axe murderer. ‘I always want to call out, “It’s all right! I’m not an axe murderer!”’ he’d said. ‘I’d run for my life if someone called that out to me,’ Tess had told him. ‘See, we can’t win,’ he’d said.

Whenever something bad happened on the North Shore, the newspapers described it as ‘Sydney’s leafy North Shore’ so it would sound extra heinous.

Tess stopped at a traffic light, glanced down and saw the red warning light on the petrol gauge.

‘Dammit,’ she said.

There was a brightly lit all-night service station on the next corner. She’d stop there. She pulled in and got out. It was deserted, except for a man on a motorbike on the other side of the forecourt, readjusting his helmet after filling up.

She opened the petrol tank and lifted the nozzle from its slot.

‘Hello,’ said a man’s voice.

She jumped, and spun around. The man had wheeled his motorbike over, so he was on the other side of her car. He lifted his helmet. The petrol station’s bright lights were shining in her eyes, blurring her vision. She couldn’t distinguish his features, just a creepy white blob of a face.

Her eyes went to the empty counter inside the service station. Where was the damned attendant? Tess put her arm protectively across her braless chest. She thought of an episode of Oprah she’d seen with Felicity where a policeman advised women what to do if they were ever accosted. You had to be extremely aggressive and shout something like, ‘No! Go away! I don’t want trouble! Go! Go!’ For a while she and Felicity had taken great pleasure in yelling it at Will whenever he walked into a room.

Tess cleared her throat and clenched her fists as if she was doing one of her Body Combat classes. It would be so much easier to be aggressive if she was wearing a bra.

‘Tess,’ said the man. ‘It’s just me. Connor. Connor Whitby.’

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 574