The Last Anniversary

‘That’s annoying. I wanted to tell her something. Something to do with the Munro Baby Mystery.’

‘What is it?’

‘No, no, I’ll tell Mum.’

‘Oh, well, the Alice and Jack business is nothing to do with me.’ He tries to take a light tone but knows that he is sounding jocular and middle-aged. ‘Strictly women in charge. It’s a wonder they let men on the island.’

Veronika ignores this. ‘Mum’s always out these days,’ she says. ‘Where is she?’

He searches his mind and comes up blank. ‘I don’t know. Weight Watchers?’

‘Mmmm. I don’t think so. Not at this time. I’d be worried if I were you, Dad. Maybe she’s having an affair now she’s getting so trim, taut and terrific.’

Ron has no idea what she’s talking about.

Veronika says, ‘I hope you’ve been complimenting her on how good she looks.’

Ron sighs. ‘What, has she changed her hair colour or something and I didn’t notice?’

‘Dad!’ Veronika explodes and sounds more like her normal self. ‘Are you telling me you haven’t noticed that Mum has dropped three dress sizes? You’re unbelievable! Do you even look at her? All that sniping about her weight and then you don’t even notice! God! You’re probably too busy getting off on that pathetic  p**n ographic calendar of yours to even look at your own wife! I wouldn’t blame her if she was having an affair!’

‘Is that just a pause for breath or have you finished?’

‘Yes, I’ve finished. God! Just tell her I called when she gets home. And take a second to look at her! I’ll see you at the Anniversary.’

‘Yes, all right.’

Ron puts down the phone. He picks up the calendar and puts it back on the hook. He is used to Veronika’s outbursts but this one has left him with a vague sense of disquiet.

He crosses his arms behind his head and stretches back in his chair. So Margie has been losing weight. About bloody time. She could have told him! She tells him everything else, babbles on about all sorts of irrelevant crap. Wasn’t it a bit strange that she hadn’t mentioned she’d lost weight? Was it some sort of trick? It is true that she has been out a lot lately. Actually, he’s barely seen her over the last few weeks. She must have told him where she was going tonight but he hadn’t really registered it. He knows Veronika was only joking about her mother having an affair, but thinking about it gives him a strangely familiar sort of jolt, deep in his gut. It’s not necessarily an unpleasant sensation. It’s a nervy, adrenaline-filled feeling like he used to get before a rugby game. He looks at June Girl’s br**sts and identifies the feeling exactly.

It was the summer of 1967. The Prime Minister, Harold Holt, had just vanished while surfing on a Victorian beach. His body was never found and everybody was talking conspiracy theories, but Ron couldn’t have cared less about whether it was the Mafia or Martians who took off with Harold, any more than he cared what had happened to Alice and Jack Munro. He was fixated on one goal: Margie McNabb, the prettier, in his opinion, of the somewhat renowned Scribbly Gum Island sisters, daughters of the Alice and Jack baby. There were at least three other guys vying for Margie, and Ron was determined to be the last one standing. He wasn’t necessarily the best looking or even the smartest of the three of them, but he knew exactly how to play it, when to come on strong with the charm, when to pull back and be a bit cool, when to be funny, when to be sensitive. He didn’t consider it a done deal until the day he triumphantly slid that diamond ring on her finger. Then he knew he could relax and concentrate on other things–like work and sailing.

Margie, he remembered, used to wear a red crochet bikini, which used to send him bananas. Her br**sts in that red bikini outclassed all the girls on his Aubade calendar.

It was in the Eighties that she started to really pile on the weight. It seemed to happen so fast. One day he woke up with a fat wife. Not a chubby wife. A fat wife. He didn’t like it and that made him the bad guy. Apparently it’s the worst thing in the world to comment on your wife’s weight, even while she balloons before your f**king eyes. You can’t say, ‘Are you sure you need that second piece of cake?’ You can’t even say, ‘Maybe we both should eat a bit healthier.’ No, you’re meant to just pretend to be equally attracted to her now she weighs as much as a small truck as when she wore a red crochet bikini. The only solution is to try and avoid looking directly at her as much as possible. That’s why he hasn’t noticed she’s lost weight. It’s not his fault.

Does he still love her? It’s not something he’s bothered to think about much. She aggravates him, certainly. Sometimes he can feel his nerves begin to chafe the moment she opens her mouth.

But he still thinks nothing tastes as good as Margie’s cheese and mushroom omelette. He still automatically rubs the soles of her feet when she puts them on his lap while they’re watching television, although maybe it’s been a while since she’s done that. He still remembers how he felt watching her cry her heart out at her dad’s funeral. Margie was always such a Daddy’s Girl, and it made him want to punch something because there was nothing he could bloody well do to fix it for her.

They haven’t had sex for months, but he’s never been unfaithful to her, except in his mind, and who could blame him for that?

He does give her a pretty hard time, sometimes. But she just takes it–no matter how far he goes with it–she just keeps on smiling and blinking until he wants to scream, Are you still in there, Margie?

The thing is, even though he knows that Veronika was only joking, if some guy, for whatever reason–maybe if he had some sort of fetish for fat women–tried to come on to Margie, then she could easily fall for some pathetic line. She’s so gullible! A hopeless judge of character. The way she repeats what tradesmen tell her with such wide-eyed respect!

To his own surprise, Ron finds himself suddenly banging an agitated fist on his desk so hard that his jar of paperclips rattles.

It’s past ten on a Tuesday night. Where the hell is she?

Rose is sitting at Enigma’s kitchen table separating eggs. She does it automatically, in quick, efficient movements. One sharp crack of the egg against the side of the bowl, yolk in one half of the shell, white in the other.

Rose is working in an assembly line with Enigma and Margie, baking marble cakes for the Anniversary. They’ll be sold in special ‘Alice and Jack Anniversary’ souvenir boxes and sold at a premium: $30 a cake. Last year they sold over a hundred on the night. Rose remembers Connie had rubbed her hands with joy after counting up the cash, as if she were still nineteen years old and destitute, not ninety years old with a share portfolio worth so much that Rose had to sit down the last time the accountant went through the figures with them. Those years of worrying about money and not having enough to eat had changed Connie forever, thought Rose. Food and money were her two obsessions until the day she died. And Jimmy, of course. And the island. She was an obsessive sort of woman, really.