The Last Anniversary Read online

  All new mothers are nervous, she tells herself.

  Not like this.

  Yes, of course they are.

  It's perfectly normal.

  I am perfectly normal. I am a new mother sitting down with a cup of tea.

  She tries again to draw Gublet's familiar features. He stares back at her with a new cold, bland expression.

  This hasn't happened to her before. It has always been such a pleasure to work on Gublet. She was never stuck for inspiration; all she needed was time.

  Grace has been working on her Gublet McDublet books for over four years now. He started as a doodle. Whenever she was talking on the phone, a wicked elf character would appear on her notebook. She became fond of him and eventually, just for fun, not really thinking too hard about it, she made up a funny story about Gublet's first day at school. It was Callum who secretly sent it off to a children's book publisher he'd picked out of the Yellow Pages and, astonishingly, they agreed to publish it as a hard-bound picture book for three-to five-year-olds. So far she hasn't made enough money to be able to give up her day job as a graphic designer for a company that specialises in beautiful annual reports. There isn't that much money in the children's picture-book market unless you are phenomenally successful, and besides which, so far each of the two Gublet books has taken her over two years to complete. 'Two years!' people always say with disbelief and a hint of derision. They seem to think she should be able to knock one off in a couple of weeks, when each illustration is actually an oil painting on canvas, a labour of love one generous reviewer described as 'exquisite works of art'.

  When her first book was launched, the local pre-school invited her to read her Gublet book to a group of cross-legged, squirming four-year-olds. She was nervous. Children made her feel huge and awkward and she was never sure exactly how to correctly pitch her conversation for their age group, worrying that she was speaking to them as if they were retarded or deaf. When friends suddenly (bizarrely!) put their heavy-breathing toddlers on the phone to talk to her, Grace would more often than not just sit there in tongue-tied silence. What in the world was she meant to say? 'So, what have you been up to lately?' 'Hear you just learned to walk, hey? How's that going, then?'

  She was convinced the pre-schoolers wouldn't like her. After all, people generally didn't. Friends were always cosily informing her how much they'd disliked her at their first meeting. 'You just seemed so cold and standoffish.' The children probably wouldn't hide their dislike like grown-ups. They'd probably boo and hiss. Maybe they'd all suddenly attack her like rabid little rats. Who knew what they'd do? They were another species.

  She was sure that she sounded ridiculous as she read her own words to the pre-schoolers, but then she got her first laugh. It was the part where Gublet jumped up and down on his mum's yucky pumpkin pie like a trampoline. The children whooped. One got up to demonstrate how he would jump in a similar situation. The teacher, sitting at the back of the room, gave her a thumbs-up, as if she knew Grace had been nervous, and the kids sat back down and looked up at her with open flower-like faces, eyes shining expectantly, ready for the next funny part. So this was what people saw in children.

  After she'd finished reading, when the teacher asked them if they had any questions, every hand shot in the air, straining high for her attention.

  'Is Gublet so naughty all the time because he wishes he didn't have pointy ears?'

  'Would Gublet like to come to my party? Do you think he would jump up and down on my cake? My mum would be pretty cross with him!'

  'Gublet is funny when he's naughty! I laughed so much! I laughed until forever!'

  'That time when Gublet's mum sent him to the moon for being naughty and he rang up Melly and then they ran away to Mars, well, guess what, that happened to me too! But guess what, it wasn't real! It was a dream!'

  Hearing a client say 'The CEO was quite impressed with your design concepts' could never compare with the intense pleasure Grace felt hearing a four-year-old say 'I laughed until forever!'

  So that was the day she decided that what she really wanted to do with her life was work full-time on her Gublet books. When she got pregnant and her mother had offered them her house on Scribbly Gum, she and Callum had gone out to dinner and worked out a whole life plan.

  She would take maternity leave from the graphic-design studio, but hopefully she'd never have to go back. When the 'baby' (it was so amazing to think that there really would be an actual real baby, separate from herself) was asleep, she'd work serenely on the third Gublet book and get it finished by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Callum would take on extra music students outside of school hours. The builders would do what they said they were going to do and their dream home in the mountains would be finished in plenty of time for them to move in when Laura returned from overseas. Within two years they would save up enough money so that Callum could start up his Music School for Adults. They would work out a sensible investment plan. They would take multi-vitamins and drink carrot, celery and apple juice every day. (They would need to buy a juicer.) They would be healthy, happy and successful. They would have one more child. Maybe even two more! Why not? So far it seemed pretty easy!

  Callum wrote it all down on a notepad. Grace added amusing sketches to illustrate each point. They ate duck with crab-meat sauce. They were pleased with themselves.

  Grace draws her pencil back and forth across the page in deep zig-zags, remembering that night. Their plans had been so very, very pat, hadn't they?

  She remembers how she'd poked at her stomach to make the baby kick back and how she and Callum had laughed, high on the possibilities of their future. What was so different about her imagined life from the reality of it? It's all going according to plan. Here she is, with her baby sleeping, sitting at her mother's dining-room table, ready to do Gublet-and everything seems bland and pointless, just plain old yawning dull.

  Gublet. A trite, not especially original picture book in an overcrowded market which doesn't sell that well or make that much money.

  Her marriage. She remembers all that fuss she'd made when she first met Callum. So prissy and girly. Oh, oh, I just love him so much! Did she really feel any of that? He is just a man, for God's sake. A slovenly man who doesn't do enough around the house, who is getting a bit fat around the tummy, who has really horrible breath in the morning, who is infuriatingly convinced he is always right.

  She says out loud, 'Oh, stop being such a bitch, Grace.'

  She remembers the day the call came through from the publisher about Gublet. 'There's someone on the phone for you,' Callum had said, failing to repress an enormous grin. Grace, mystified, had taken the phone, and Callum had carefully watched her face until he saw her start to smile, at which point he'd performed a wild, silent victory dance around the kitchen.

  How can she not love Callum?

  Well, she does love him. Of course she loves him.

  The baby is crying. She looks at her watch. It has happened again. Two hours vanished.

  This is not normal.

  15

  From inside the warm restaurant, Sophie looks down at the crowds of people walking back and forth along the quay, heads bent against a chilly wind. A non-descript couple rugged up in black coats, hurrying and holding hands, slowly meta-morph into the familiar figures of her parents, like a special effect in a movie. Sophie smiles involuntarily and tries to keep watching them with the eyes of a stranger. A perfectly ordinary middle-aged, quite stylish, definitely married couple with a relaxed, happy air about them, as if they are on holidays. They are both on the short side, giving them a cute, compact look. The woman stops and demonstrates something: a hammering movement with hands. The man shrugs, grabs her hand and pulls her along towards the restaurant. Sophie laughs to herself and feels the anticipation of relief. She is going to read them Aunt Connie's letter and let them decide what she should do. Whatever they say, it will be said with unconditional, soothing approval of Sophie.

  She watches them come in
the door, pink-faced and peeling off their coats. Her father, in a smart grey suit with a red tie, has a roundish face, old-fashioned gold glasses and a lovely smile, which he gives his wife as he helps with her coat. Her mother, who is wearing a soft blue dress, is checking herself in the glass-mirrored wall and trying to smooth down her irrepressibly curly hair. The wind has given her a slightly crazed look. They chat away to the maitre d' as if he is an old, dear friend and there is a loud burst of laughter. Sophie's parents create flurries of laughter wherever they go.

  Finally, they look Sophie's way and she raises a hand. Her parents beam in unison, as if it has been months since she'd seen them last, not a mere two weeks.

  Sophie's friend Claire, on meeting the Honeywell family for the first time, said, 'Now I get it why you're so popular. You've always been adored. You expect to be adored and so you are.'

  'I do not expect to be adored. Anyway, all parents love their children,' retorted Sophie, feeling embarrassed because she knew it was true.

  'Not like yours love you,' said Claire. 'It's borderline dysfunctional.'

  'Hello, darling,' says her mother. 'That's a gorgeous new top. Can you believe my hair? I look like I've been electrocuted.' She bulges her eyes and vibrates her head to demonstrate her point.

  'Hello, Soph,' says her father. He pulls out a chair for his wife and kisses Sophie on the cheek. 'Your mother accepts full responsibility for our lateness. No drink yet? Two points off? This lighting is a bit too moody I think. I can hardly see you.'

  Every third Thursday, Sophie's father takes his wife and daughter out for dinner at a carefully chosen restaurant. The Honeywell family specialises in fine dining. They'd applied their own elaborate rating system to restaurants in Paris, London, New York and, of course, Sydney. It is one of their shared family hobbies, along with opera, Scrabble and reality TV.

  Her mother, Gretel, enjoys telling people about how they used to take Sophie out to restaurants when she was just a toddler. They would prop her up on two cushions so she could reach the table and she'd be 'good as gold!', solemnly pretending to read the menu which was 'twice the size of her!'. The waiters made her pretend cocktails exactly the same pink colour as her mummy's. Sophie also smoked pretend lolly-cigarettes, just like Mummy and Daddy's, blowing pretend smoke out the side of her mouth ('little actress'), but Gretel generally leaves out that part of the story because it makes people stop saying 'Ohhhh' and say uneasily 'Oh?' Plus, Gretel doesn't actually like to think about the number of cigarettes they smoked in their daughter's presence. Sophie only has to give the tiniest cough before Gretel is clutching her husband's arm. 'Listen to that! Passive smoking! What were we thinking? We probably destroyed her poor little lungs!'

  Sophie's Dad's name is Hans. Hans and Gretel. When they were teenagers they had mutual friends who found the idea of them becoming a couple so uproarious that they engineered a meeting. Hans and Gretel were determined not to like each other but accidentally fell hopelessly in love the moment they were simultaneously pointed out by chortling friends on opposite sides of the Prince Albert Park ice-skating rink. If it had been a movie, it would have switched to slow motion and a romantic soundtrack as Hans and Gretel glided over the ice into each other's arms. In reality, neither of them had been skating before, so they bravely made their way across the rink with spaghetti legs and flailing arms, met in the middle, went to shake hands and crashed to their bottoms on the ice. 'I hit my tailbone,' said Gretel. 'I was in excruciating pain but I was so blissfully happy it was like I was drunk. I knew, you see, and I knew he knew too. I quickly peeked a look at my watch so I'd always remember the exact moment that I met my husband. Twenty past two, eleventh of June, 1962.'

  It doesn't matter how many times Gretel tells Sophie this story, they both still sniff at the end. Not that it takes much to make mother or daughter sniff. They are, after all, addicted to anything romantic: romantic comedies, regency romances, romantic TV ads.

  The Hans and Gretel romance ended with them living happily ever after-well, pretty much, anyway. The only mildly unhappy thing in their lives is that they couldn't have any more children after Sophie. Both Hans and Gretel came from small families and they had planned to have 'a few dozen kids', but as her mother says cheerfully, it just wasn't meant to be, and besides which they hit the jackpot first time.

  It seems to Sophie that her parents are the sort of parents who should have had a whole brood of shouting, messy, sticky-fingered children. Her mum should have been one of those distracted mums serenely presiding over a crammed table, dishing out gigantic, nutritious casseroles, ruffling one kid's hair, slapping another one's knuckles. Her dad should have been one of those dads flipping sausages on the BBQ in between tossing kids in the air like juggling balls and saying funny things to visitors like, 'Who are you? You one of mine?' while his own children squirmed, 'Aww, Dad!' Sophie herself would have been the perfect older sister: kind and loving, firm but fair. She would have let her younger sisters use her make-up under supervision and dispensed judicious dating advice. She would have driven her dear little brothers to their soccer games and helped them with their homework. She probably would not have had a blushing problem if she had been an older sister.

  But instead there is just Hans, Gretel and Sophie. They are like three guests at a party where no one else has turned up, doing their best to create the impression of a much larger, rowdier group, and doing so well that it turns out to be the party everyone is sorry they missed. People always comment on how extraordinarily close a family they are, how much fun they have, how they seem like three best friends. When Sophie was a child, her friends were thunderstruck when she invited their parents to join in with games, just like her own parents did. She thought all parents were just extra-large-sized kids. (How she blushed when this terrible faux pas was pointed out to her. 'Mum isn't even allowed inside the cubby house, Sophie. She can't play with us. That's sort of...weird.')

  This Thursday night the Honeywells are trying out a new restaurant at the quay, with ceiling-to-floor windows revealing the white sails of the Opera House like a gigantic, gold-lit sculpture. The three of them sit in grave silence, studying heavy, hard-bound menus, with sighs of indecision and lots of flipping back and forth of pages. They put their menus down, frown, pick them up again and continue flipping. Finally, hands clasped over closed menus, they each present their selections as if they are explaining complex mathematical solutions.

  'Confit of Tasmanian ocean trout with roe,' says Gretel. 'Followed by marinated scampi with pawpaw, cucumber and tonburi.'

  Sophie and Hans shake their heads in admiration.

  'Salad of sea scallops,' says Sophie. 'Followed by-if you're thinking the salmon, Dad, you'd be wrong-lobster ravioli with tomato and basil vinaigrette!'

  'Oh, no!' Her father puts a hand to his forehead. 'I had the ravioli!'

  'Back to the drawing board, darling,' says Gretel.

  There is a rule that nobody ever has the same dish. It is an unfair rule because Hans always chivalrously insists that Gretel and Sophie say their choices before him.

  He heaves a dramatic sigh, pushes his glasses back up his nose and picks up his menu, squeezing his bottom lip with two fingers. In the meantime Sophie's mother has tipped slightly back on her chair with a dazed expression on her face. It means that a conversation at the next table has caught her attention. She, like Sophie, is an avid eavesdropper.

  Sophie looks to see who she is listening in to. It is clearly a family group. Grandparents, daughter and son-in-law, or son and daughter-in-law (Gretel will confirm in a few minutes), together with a silent, unseen baby in a pram. Sophie can sense by the way they are all sitting slightly self-consciously, with their heads cocked towards the pram, that the baby is a new addition to the family.

  It is bad enough that Sophie's parents have only one child, but now they are in their early sixties, when they can quite reasonably expect to be grandparents, their only daughter isn't even in a relationship. Sophie's mother has a group
of friends who she has been playing tennis with for over twenty years and Gretel is the only one in that group who isn't a grandma. Sophie can't bear to think about her mother politely listening to all those women showing off about their grandchildren. The worst part of it is that her parents never put pressure on her. There are never any loaded questions like, 'Met anyone interesting lately?' Sophie would feel less guilty if Gretel was like her friend Claire's pitiful mother, who nags and cajoles and begs, accusing Claire of deliberately not having children just to spite her.

  'The mozzarella and chilli salad followed by the slowly poached veal shank, if anyone is still interested.' Hans closes his menu. 'Your turn to choose the wine, Soph.'

  Gretel leans forward and lowers her voice to a hoarse secret-agent whisper. 'First night out with colicky new baby,' she informs Sophie. 'Mother-in-law about to make daughter-in-law cry.'

  'Fascinating.' Hans doesn't approve of his wife and daughter's eavesdropping habits. 'Do you think we could concentrate on our own family now?'

  'I am terribly sorry,' says Gretel in a Royal Family accent.

  'How frightfully rude of me.'

  'I happen to think it is,' says Hans sternly, although Sophie knows he is trying not to laugh. Nobody chuckles louder than Hans at his wife's repertoire of accents and funny voices.

  Sophie watches her parents acting as if they have just reached that nice stage in a relationship where you pretend to be annoyed with each other in public. There is a mean feeling in her chest like heartburn. It takes her a few seconds to identify that it is actually envy. She puts down her glass of water with a thud. Well, this is getting beyond a joke. Yesterday she'd been pounding away on the treadmill at the gym watching a documentary on one of the television screens. It was about a woman with no arms and no legs who had to get around on a skateboard. A touching story of courage in the face of terrible odds. But even while she was blinking back tears of sympathy, Sophie had, just for a second, actually felt a tiny bit envious of the woman. Why? Because of her nice, good-looking (fully limbed) husband! As punishment she had given herself an extra twenty minutes on the treadmill to show her appreciation of her two rather short, but perfectly functional, legs. (Still, she couldn't quite get the thought out of her mind: if an arm-less, leg-less woman on a skateboard could find a man, surely Sophie was doing something very, very wrong? How did this woman meet him? Pull on his trouser leg as she rolled by him in a nightclub?)