Three Wishes

It made Gemma feel queasy, how nice they were being to her. They were both speaking in strangely proper voices and every now and then she’d catch them staring at her, almost as if they were frightened.

Perhaps she was behaving oddly for someone with a dead fiancé. She probably was, because she felt very odd. Extremely odd.

It was his absence that confused her. How could a tall, strong, definite man like Marcus just not be there anymore? She kept pushing the idea around in her head, trying to make sense of it. Marcus is dead. Marcus is dead. I will never see him again. Marcus is gone. Gone forever. A giant hand had reached down into her world and ripped out a large shred of her reality. It gave her vertigo.

Gemma’s only other experience with death had been Nana Leonard but she’d been such a frail, unassuming presence. There was no gaping hole left when she died, she just gently slipped away, leaving the world pretty much as it had been. But Marcus? Marcus was big, booming, and definite. That’s what she loved about him. You would never say to Marcus, “Are you sure?” because it would be a stupid question. Marcus had opinions and plans and a car and furniture. Marcus had a strong libido and strong political views. He could do one hundred push-ups without breaking a sweat.

Marcus must be very angry about not being there anymore.

“Yeah, mate, I don’t think so.” That’s what he said on the phone when he disagreed with somebody. He wouldn’t agree with dying. “Yeah, mate, I don’t think so,” he’d be saying at the Pearly Gates. “Let me speak to the manager. We’ll straighten this out.”

If Marcus wasn’t there, how could Gemma still be there?

She looked down at her own feet in Lyn’s Italian shoes and felt very, very weird.

“I feel weird,” she said.

“Well, you would,” said Cat.

“It’s perfectly normal,” said Lyn.

And they both looked petrified.

Gemma watched her sisters pinching their bottom lips in exactly the same way and realized she couldn’t possibly confess to them the dreadful, blasphemous thought that had come into her head just before she went running across the road to see if Marcus was O.K. It would distress them. Even if they said, “Oh no, that doesn’t mean anything! Don’t worry about it! It was probably just the shock!” Gemma would know they were lying.

They would think of her differently forever. She had been hoping they could somehow make it right—but they couldn’t. Of course they couldn’t.

She put her hands up to her face, and now finally she was behaving properly. Both her sisters sprang to her side.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” asked Lyn, smoothing a lock of Gemma’s hair behind her ear, like she was a little child. “And bun? More bun?”

“No, thank you.”

Cat patted her arm nervously. “Would you like to get drunk?”

“Yes please. Or no. I know. High.”

“Sorry?”

“Marcus has got some dope. It’s in the cupboard above the stove.”

So that’s how they spent the night before Marcus’s funeral.

Lyn rolled a beautiful neat joint and they sat cross-legged on his clean creamy carpet and passed it around, without saying a word. Gemma felt a satisfying rush of nothingness filling and expanding her brain.

“No wedding now,” she observed finally, as she passed the joint to Lyn.

Lyn narrowed her eyes as she inhaled and the tip of the joint burned brightly. “That’s right. No wedding.”

Gemma said, “You won’t get to wear your bridesmaid dresses.”

“No,” agreed Lyn, coughing a bit as she passed the joint to Cat.

“You hated your dresses, didn’t you?”

They sat with very upright backs and exchanged solemn looks.

“Yes, we did hate them,” Cat said slowly. “We really did.”

And that’s when they all started to giggle, wildly, rapturously, rocking back and forth with tears of hysteria running down their faces. Gemma watched Cat drop a piece of ash on Marcus’s pristine carpet and imagined his face twisting with rage. She got onto her hands and knees and still sobbing with laughter, she crawled over to the piece of ash and used the tip of her finger to rub it hard against the cream wool.

“You’re making it worse,” said Lyn.

“I know.” She rubbed her finger back and forth, harder and harder, smearing the black smudge across the carpet.

She never told anybody the thought that came into her head, the moment after Marcus collided with the concrete, while she was waiting for someone to tell her what to do, before she started running.

She didn’t think it so much, as hear it, with bell-like clarity, as if a sober person had walked into a drunken, noisy party, snapped off the music, and made an announcement in the sudden, stunned silence.

She recognized her own voice. Four clear, cool, precise words:

“I hope he’s dead.”

CHAPTER 13

Between the ages of two and three, the Kettle triplets began to babble to each other in their own secret, unintelligible dialect, switching effortlessly to English whenever they needed to communicate with a grown-up.

Years later, Maxine discovered this was a relatively common phenomenon among multiples, known as “twin talk” or more impressively—idioglossia. (At the time, all she really cared about was that they weren’t attempting to drown, suffocate, or bludgeon one another.)

Gradually, they talked less and less in their secret language and eventually it was erased from their memories, vanished like the lost language of an ancient tribe.

Psychic connections between twins and triplets are another well-documented and exciting phenomenon. In this area, however, the Kettle girls have always lagged. The idea, after all, is to feel your sibling’s pain, not laugh uproariously at it. Elvis, before he went onstage, was able to feel the presence of his dead twin brother, Jesse. Yet nine-year-old Gemma, immersed in her new Enid Blyton book, couldn’t even sense the stealthy presence of her very much alive sisters stealing a bag of mixed lollies from right next to her hand.

When they were eleven, Cat became obsessed with the idea of telepathic communication. Many hours were spent on complex experiments. Unfortunately, they all failed, due to the appalling incompetence of her sisters, who could neither send nor receive a coherent message.

No, the Kettle girls share no psychic connections. (A lot of the time they don’t even understand each other in ordinary verbal, sitting-across-the-table conversation.)