The Golden Child Page 9

  ‘Maybe she’s a bit awkward or something, but from what I’ve seen Sophie’s really sweet.’ Lucy’s voice is uncharacteristically loud, indignant.

  ‘She’s fat and she’s weird. And she’s not the sort of person I want to hang with. It’s not that hard to understand.’

  ‘I get it, Charlie. I really do. You only like the pretty, rich girls.’

  ‘What would you know, anyway? You haven’t got a clue what goes on in our year.’

  ‘Yeah, right. I suppose I live under a rock.’

  ‘You’re such a douche—’

  Lucy gives her sister a warning look, then gazes beyond her to the doorway and produces a beatific smile. ‘What do you think, Dad? Don’t you think Sophie’s a really nice girl?’ Their father is leaning against the doorjamb, his arms folded, face stern.

  ‘I do. And she’s certainly not a retard. Or fat. Or weird.’ His voice is cool. ‘Lucy’s right, Charlotte, you shouldn’t be making friendships based on whether people are popular. Being popular is the least important thing. I didn’t realise you were so – superficial.’

  ‘But I didn’t mean—’

  He interrupts. ‘I heard what you said, Charlotte. And I’m disappointed.’

  ANDI

  ANDI IS SURPRISED AT JUST HOW EAGER SHE IS TO PURSUE this new friendship. Her initial overture was for Sophie’s benefit – she hoped to encourage a friendship between the two girls – but she enjoyed herself more than she expected that first afternoon, was buoyed by the chat, the casual confidences, the unexpected bursts of laughter. It was a while, she realised, since she’d had this sort of girly fun.

  There was a time, long ago, back when she was a career woman, a clever young solicitor accruing billable hours at an astonishing rate, heading for the bar exam, before she met Steve, and long, long before she had Sophie, that Andi had made time for friends, time for fun.

  When she met Steve she was at what she knows now to be her career pinnacle. At the time she thought she’d be going a lot further; she had no intention of following any sort of old-fashioned, if still dominant, female trajectory. She wasn’t looking for an out – a bloke, babies, a mortgage, all that. No. Andi was going to do it differently to her mother, who’d retired from primary-school teaching when she’d married her builder husband and insisted she’d never regretted it – though Andi could only see boredom and restlessness in her mother’s volunteer work and endless committees. She was going to do it differently to her two much older sisters too, both of whom never even finished school, let alone went to university, but married young, and quickly filled their nests with an appalling number of chicks (or so it had seemed to the young and disdainful Andi). Andi, as she’d understood ever since Mrs Rice in year two told her she was the cleverest – if not the prettiest – of the Marshall girls, was meant for Better Things.

  And so for a goodly number of years she was consumed with chasing those better things. She hadn’t stopped to think about what they really were, or what she actually wanted; it was more a case of what she didn’t want – a life like her parents’ or siblings’. She’d studied hard, and then worked hard. She’d moved as far away from her lower middle-class background as she could without actually leaving the city she’d grown up in or actively disowning her family.

  And then came Steve.

  They met, strangely enough, at a nightclub in the Cross. It wasn’t the usual scenario; neither of them was there in the hope of picking up. In fact Andi was there reluctantly, out of duty – it was a work outing – and she’d planned to leave as early as was polite. But gradually she gave herself up to the evening – from the raucous exuberance of the strip show to the loud surreality of the nightclub, it was all a laugh, and for once she drank enough to unwind and embraced the experience of losing herself. She was sitting out a dance at the end of the night, nursing a drink and dreamily watching the writhing bodies on the dance floor, when a contingent of local police entered the club for a routine Friday-night visit. They looked frightening, Gestapo-like in their blue overalls, high-laced boots and heavy belts, their faces blank. Andi was surprised by her fellow patrons’ nonchalance – most barely gave the cops a second glance – and the police themselves, despite their initially intimidating presence, were remarkably relaxed. She handed over her licence without demur to a solemn young constable. He looked at her photo carefully and then back at her, his expression deadpan.

  ‘Are you sure this is your ID? Not somebody else’s? A cousin? Or your older sister’s, say?’ he asked eventually in a voice that was low and monotonal.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, for one, you don’t look old enough to be thirty-two, and for another, it’s not a real good photo, is it? Doesn’t do you justice.’ She baulked momentarily, before she noticed his liquid eyes looking at her hopefully. It wasn’t the most straightforward of pick-ups, but pick-up line it definitely was.

  Andi thought later that it could so easily have backfired – she could have taken offence, kicked up a stink, complained to his superiors. At the very least she might have told him to go fuck himself. She was a lawyer, for Christ’s sake; she had a typical lawyerly disdain for the cops – but something about him appealed and she responded in a way that was atypical of her thirty-two-year-old wisecracking professional self, smiling back at him, answering politely: ‘I’m afraid it is me. I take the worst photographs in the world. But thank you. I think.’ He must have understood the risk he was taking, because he looked instantly relieved, smiling broadly. The smile lightened his heavy face considerably, and she noticed that beneath the uniform he was a good-looking man: shortish, dark-skinned, powerfully built.

  He made as if to hand back her licence, but paused and looked at it again. ‘You know, I’m not sure that I am satisfied. I think I should probably follow up on this. Check that this is actually your correct address.’

  She laughed then, amazed by his brazen behaviour. She held out her hand for the licence.

  ‘You can visit whenever you like, and you’ll definitely find me there, but why don’t I make it easier for you. How about I give you my phone number? That way you can make sure I’m in when you call.’

  He raised his eyebrows, took a small notebook out of his pocket.

  ‘Oh, you don’t need to write it down. She flicked through her wallet, handed him her business card, with her name and work number: Andrea Marshall, Solicitor at Law, Winston Chalmers and Associates.

  He read the card, a grin splitting his face. ‘You work for that prick?’

  ‘I do.’

  He snorted, shook his head, handed back her licence, pocketed the card.

  ‘Well, I’ve always wanted to consort with the enemy. What do you say I give you a call in the morning? It’s the end of my shift tonight. We could . . . go for a walk. Buy an ice-cream. Trade secrets. Commit a little espionage. I’m in Bondi, just up the road.’

  ‘You do that. I’ll be looking forward to it,’ she said.

  The risk was greater than Andi had known. She soon found out that Steve’s behaviour was wildly out of character. He admitted to her, lying in bed later that week, that he wasn’t that sort of bloke at all, was generally hopeless with women, had never before behaved so boldly, either in or out of uniform. But somehow he had been unable to resist, he confessed, awed and slightly confused about the rapid sequence of events. It had happened almost without him thinking about it. ‘As if I was bewitched. It was as if you’d put some sort of evil lawyer spell on me. The words just came out.’

  She laughed. ‘And then coming over to my place the next day – I guess you couldn’t help it? That was powerful lawyer magic too?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh no. That was entirely conscious. I wanted to check if you were real and not some kind of hallucination – I always have these insane dreams when I’m on night shift, and at first I assumed the whole thing was just one of those. And then when I found your card in my wallet, I thought I’d better come and check you out.’

  Steve was as unli
ke her as it was possible to be, and a long way from being the sort of man she usually hooked up with or had ever imagined marrying. Whenever she’d thought about it – though she’d always had a take-it-or-leave-it attitude to marriage – she had seen herself with another lawyer: a city boy, fast-talking, energetic, ambitious. But Senior Constable Stephen Pennington was from a background that was entirely foreign to her. He’d been brought up in a series of country towns, his father a Uniting Church minister, his mother long dead. He was serious, earnest, alarmingly literal, sometimes dour. He had studied theology after high school, intending to follow in his father’s footsteps, but lost his faith mid-degree and joined the cops instead. He had found his calling in the police service, transferring his zeal to the upkeep of law and order. Oddly, for a cop, in Andi’s experience anyway, Stephen’s idea of good and evil was never murky. He was clear about what was right and what was wrong, about how justice should be meted out, in a way that the utterly secular Andi never could be. And though she could never hope to understand it, his ideals, his unwavering faith in order and righteousness, somehow appealed to her.

  Despite all their surface differences, the attraction between them was startlingly simple. And irreducible. They recognised each other. She had known him immediately – and he her.

  At Steve’s insistence they married (there was no way his father would tolerate him living in sin) six months after that first meeting. And just on a year later, Sophie was born.

  Marrying Steve probably kept Andi closer to her own family than she would have been otherwise. Most of the men she’d been out with up until that time came from very different worlds to her own: most of them were middle class, some of them from private schools. They were generally lawyers, too. The relationships were all clearly finite and she made little effort to introduce any of them to her parents and siblings. But Steve insisted on meeting all her family pretty much immediately, and despite his odd background and his off-centre personality, was quickly made welcome. Indeed, he seemed more comfortable in her family than she was herself, enjoying the boozy card nights, the endless barbecues, even watching the cricket with her brothers-in-law. When they moved to Scone her mother was most upset, not because she’d miss Andi – although she would – but because Steve wouldn’t be around every couple of weekends to mow the lawn and have a cuppa. Steve was the perfect son-in-law.

  And their marriage was remarkably happy. During the long years of trying to conceive a second child – the miscarriages, the rounds of IVF – Steve never gave up. He never said he’d had enough, or suggested, as so many had, that Andi was too old. And he never complained about the emotional stress: Andi’s constantly crappy moods, her tears, her complaints about the physical discomfort, the intermittent despair, the inevitable depression. He set his shoulder to the wheel, as he always did, and kept on. ‘It’ll happen, Andi,’ he said when things were at their worst, when she began to feel that the desire to have a second baby had become something else, bordering on obsessive, unhealthy and all-consuming – when she was ready to give up. Somehow he always managed to reassure her. ‘As long as the doctors think we’re in with a chance, I think we should keep trying. We’ve come this far . . .’

  Home-based freelancing seemed like the perfect solution when they first arrived in Newcastle. Andi had built up plenty of connections, and it was practical on so many levels – so much easier to fit in with Sophie’s schedule, the IVF, Steve’s shifts, pregnancy – and it wasn’t until the last weeks before the baby’s arrival, that calm before the storm, that Andi realised how few people she knew. She had made a few half-hearted attempts to befriend some of the school mothers when they’d first arrived, there were a couple of coffee dates, other mothers sounding her out, and she doing the same, of course, but these went nowhere, which was probably her fault as much as theirs, she realised.

  Andi had become fussy and impatient, and difficult to please when it came to other people – or more particularly, other women. She couldn’t bear women who talked about themselves too much, or too little, or who were only interested in their children. She couldn’t stand women who rattled off their husband’s accomplishments and boasted about their incomes. Women who were too intense and who got too intimate too quickly made her uncomfortable – and then those who never opened up, even after successive conversations, were just plain exasperating. Or maybe it was none of those things. Andi sometimes thinks that she’d like to be a kid again. In her memory, childhood friendships were simpler, based on instinct, surely – you smell good! – rather than intellectual and social compatibility. But then, her daughter’s friendships have never been quite that easy – were fraught even as a small child. Perhaps it is just the modern world – everyone expecting more, and somehow ending up with less.

  It isn’t that Andi despairs of ever making real friends in Newcastle, but it is something she’s put on the back burner. She’s watched Steve and Sophie settle into their respective routines, but her own routines have been temporary, uncertain, and she’s been so preoccupied she’s forgotten just how much she enjoys, how much she needs, really, other women’s company. But now, with Beth so fortuitously arrived, it’s time to make an effort.

  Over that first afternoon any initial awkwardness between the two women quickly dissolves. The question of whether it is to be tea or wine isn’t even broached – Beth has brought a bottle of a good local white with her, and as Gus has already had his afternoon feed, and won’t need another until early morning, Andi can indulge with minimal guilt. She can relax altogether – she’s got dinner ready early, Gus is contentedly swatting at his floor mobile and the three girls are upstairs in Sophie’s room doing God knows what, something iPad-related, she guesses, leaving the two women to chat. At first the conversational balls hit the net a little too frequently, or bounce outside the lines, but it isn’t long before a deceptively light discussion about the school and its particular dynamics mutates into an intense confessional rally, and in no time at all they seem to have covered everything important: children, parents, marriage, work, motherhood.

  Andi admits to Beth – and Beth is the first person she’s said this to, she’s barely managed to admit it to herself, really – how much she’s dreading having to start working again.

  ‘I know it sounds stupid. I work from home, anyway, so it’s not like it’s all that difficult. I can pick my own hours. But I’ll still have to put Gus in care – and I don’t think I can bear it. It really is ridiculous. I mean, I was so desperate to get back to work with Sophie. I had her in care from six weeks . . . It must be my . . . er . . . advanced maternal age.’

  Beth is curious – she’s had the opposite experience, been out of the workforce since she left Australia and is wondering what to do now she’s back home.

  ‘It’s not that I’m not happy being back, I really am. But here it’s so clear that I’m not doing anything. In the US it was okay. I was foreign, I didn’t have a green card, so I couldn’t work. Maybe it’s the whole thing of having too many choices.’

  ‘And somehow they don’t necessarily make you happy, either.’

  ‘I know. I feel like I was almost happier when I had no choice. Maybe I could have another baby. Maybe that’d solve the problem.’ She looks enviously at Gus.

  ‘It really does seem like bliss, staying home with Gus. Just giving in to the whole mummy thing. With Sophie, I hated it. She was hard work, wouldn’t feed or sleep. I couldn’t wait to get back to my real life. It was as if everything I liked about myself had disappeared; as if I’d turned into this big soggy blancmange.’ She laughs. ‘And you know what, I actually look like a big blancmange this time, but for some reason it’s okay. Steve thinks I’ve gone a bit mad.’

  ‘But it’s a good madness, right? Oh God, I am kind of jealous. I loved it when they were babies. Especially nursing.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I did.’ Beth looks wistful for a moment. ‘I really liked that whole animal thing of motherhood. I’d have had more, only Dan wasn�
��t up for it. And now, of course, I’m too old.’

  ‘I don’t know about the animal thing, but I’m definitely enjoying it more this time round. Although I am feeling my age. The broken sleep seems way harder to cope with. But you know the old cliché – I wouldn’t swap them. Whatever trouble they are, it’s all worth it.’

  On this, as in so many things, they agree: whatever trouble children bring – morning sickness, ruined bodies, hard labours, leaking breasts, late nights, career dilemmas – it is all, always, whatever the cost, worth it.

  When Beth lets slip that she has a blog, Andi has to fight against a somewhat irrational prejudice, although she’s never read Beth’s blog, never heard of her. Mummy-blogging had seemed a brilliant thing initially – at last, a forum where ordinary women could voice their conflicting experiences, could vent about the combination of boredom, ecstasy and terror that was mothering. But it changed over the years. The blogs proliferated insanely, some went ‘professional’, and it now seems to Andi that the whole thing has transformed into yet another competitive arena. All the posturing, all the arguing about the right way to parent – it just isn’t Andi’s scene. To her it all seems very old-fashioned, very retro, like those manuals, periodically republished as humorous oddities, on how to be a good wife.

  ‘Wow!’ Andi tries to sound impressed. ‘Do you have a lot of readers?’

  Beth shrugs. ‘Not really. I’m pretty small fry – maybe a few hundred a week. Regulars. If one of the big websites shares one of my posts, which happens every now and then, I get more traffic – maybe in the thousands – but it only ever lasts for a day or so. Not many of them stick around. It’s not enough of an audience for advertising, and that’s the only way to make money. It’s really just a hobby, a way of keeping my hand in, in some small way. I always hoped that I’d go back to journalism when the kids got older. But the internet’s kind of made that impossible anyway. There are no jobs. It’s ironic, isn’t it – I’ve been enthusiastically making myself redundant.’