The Last Anniversary

She wonders if Grace and Callum will expect her to fill a similar role. They’d probably love to know about her attraction to Callum; it might invigorate a stale relationship. Although it seems unlikely that women who look like Grace are ever in stale relationships.

Rain splatters on the windshield. Sophie puts on the wind-screen wipers and leans forward slightly to concentrate more on the road ahead. It’s easy to forget to think about driving on these long, straight roads.

Yes, Grace had been odd when she issued this lunch invitation. Perhaps she is very shy. Or just not a very nice person. Or devastated by Aunt Connie’s death. Or perhaps she was behaving oddly because Sophie is going to be forced to undergo some bizarre Scribbly Gum Island initiation ceremony, with chanting and incense and walking across hot coals. Or maybe the whole family is going to confront her about Aunt Connie’s will. It will be like an intervention, or a mock courtroom, with Veronika presiding as judge. Sophie will be found guilty, of course. ‘We find the defendant GUILTY as charged!’ They will blindfold her and frogmarch her to the highest point of the island where they’ll toss her over to certain death on the vicious rocks below. After all, the family is probably perfectly capable of murder. They’re all a bit strange. Look at their mysterious history. Look what happened to Alice and Jack–the last non-family members to live on the island! But then, against all odds, Sophie will survive! She’ll need extensive plastic surgery, of course, and months later she’ll come back even more beautiful than Grace (but essentially still Sophie) to confront them all with their crime. ‘Gad, who is that intriguing woman?’ Callum will say, peering through his eye-glass, inexplicably dressed and talking like a regency gentleman.

Sophie chuckles out loud in the car at her own fantasies. She has a special, slightly dirty-sounding chuckle she only uses in private. As her mum always says, one of the advantages of being an only child is that you have no trouble amusing yourself.

As she pulls off the freeway at the Glass Bay exit, Sophie feels her heart lift, like it did when she was a child and her parents were taking her for a day out on Scribbly Gum. At this point her father would always make the same joke. ‘Only another hour to go, Soph!’ when really they were only minutes away. Daddy was being a trickster!

The opening bars of a new band’s song comes on the radio and Sophie quickly flicks up the volume. A good omen. She’s been listening out for the song for ages. She’s in the early stages of falling in love with it, where she knows the chorus but not the verses and she makes up pretend words so she doesn’t have to stop singing. She sings lustily, enjoying how stupid she must look to other people, with her mouth opening and shutting and her face twisting in rock-star anguish.

By the time she pulls in at the ferry wharf she is in a fine and feisty mood.

25

Gublet McDublet was running away from home. He’d had enough of Mummy and Daddy and his best friend, Melly the Music Box Dancer.

LEAVE ME ALONE, he wanted to shout, but you weren’t allowed to shout. It wasn’t nice. So he was going to live on the moon all by himself. It would be dark and cool and silent. He would be weightless and free, taking giant floating footsteps inside his big spacesuit.

Or maybe he would just kill himself. Commit hari-kari like a Japanese samurai. Or put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger. He hadn’t really decided yet.

Grace is brushing Jake’s hair for Sophie’s visit. It’s raining hard now and Callum has gone down to the wharf to meet her with a big golf umbrella.

It’s the first time Grace has used the soft little blue hairbrush with the teddy bear on the handle. It came in the huge cellophane-wrapped basket she got from the girls at work. ‘Ohhhh,’ everybody said when she held up each new item.

The baby seems to like having his hair brushed. He looks up at her with ruminative, wise-old-man eyes. He has an ugly pimply rash across both his cheeks, which is apparently very normal, according to Aunt Margie and Enigma, but Grace wishes he didn’t have it at the moment. ‘A face only a mother could love,’ Ron said the last time he saw him, glancing briefly in the pram, and Grace was filled with a rage so murderous she had to avert her head.

She brushes the baby’s hair flat with a part down the side and his whole face is transformed into that of a 1950s geek. All he needs is the bow tie. She fluffs it back up again so he looks like a baby. His head is so soft.

She imagines smashing his tender head with the side of the hairbrush, again and again and again. He would cry but he wouldn’t try to wriggle away because he doesn’t know how. He’d just lie there inert, while his head was transformed into a mess of blood and bone.

Grace trembles. Her heart races.

She stands up with the baby held lightly in her arms and walks rapidly to the pram. She breathes shallow short breaths as she places him flat on his back.

The baby is crying as she walks carefully out of the room and stands in the hallway. She silently pummels her body with clenched fists, punching the tops of her arms and thighs, slapping herself across the cheeks. The pain is exquisite.

After about a minute she stops. Her body aches, her cheeks sting. She breathes in deeply through her nostrils and then turns her head and practises smiling in the empty hallway–a warm, welcoming smile to no one.

The baby wails. Outside, the rain picks up.

‘It’s all right,’ she says softly, to him and to herself. ‘Everything is going to be all right. I’m going to find a way to fix it.’ Sophie’s coffee and walnut liqueur cake recipe had called for one cup of finely chopped walnuts. The sides of the cake are decorated with half-walnuts carefully pressed into the icing in a pretty pattern.

It is an especially nutty cake, which is unfortunate because Grace has a life-threatening allergy to nuts. If she eats even the tiniest mouthful of Sophie’s cake she’ll experience anaphylactic shock. Her throat and mouth will swell up, her heart will race and she’ll collapse. Within seconds she’ll be dead. She has something called an ‘EpiPen’, which must be jabbed into her leg, straight through her clothes, giving her a dose of adrenaline. ‘Wham! Just like that scene in Pulp Fiction,’ explains Callum, cheerfully demonstrating with his fist.

‘It’s a beautiful cake,’ says Grace. They are all standing in the kitchen observing Sophie’s deadly offering and listening to the rain, which is now pounding down relentlessly. Grace is holding the baby up over one shoulder. The baby has a single drop of milk hovering on his bottom lip, and flushed cheeks. His arms flail. Sophie is entranced by the delicate curve of his floppy dark head.