Three Wishes

Someone should mold her into a nice, neat smooth ball and start again.

He said, “I was just going to Coles. I thought maybe a nice steak for dinner.”

Dan always thought maybe a nice steak for dinner.

“Oh. Good.”

“You want a steak too?”

“Sure.” The thought of steak made her want to gag.

“O.K. I won’t be long.” He opened the door.

“Dan?”

“Yeah?”

Do you still love me? Why were you talking in that cold, hard voice? Do you still love me? Do you still love me? Do you still love me?

“We need more tea.”

“O.K.” He closed the door.

She would ask him when he came back. She would match his cold tone. “Is something going on with that girl?” and there would be no undignified catch in her voice.

She sat down at the kitchen table and placed her hands flat in front of her and bent her head till she was close enough to examine the tiny pores and wrinkles on the joints of her fingers. Her hands looked elderly in close-up.

Thirty-three.

At the age of thirty-three, she thought she’d be a proper grown-up doing whatever she pleased, with a snazzy car that she could drive wherever she wanted and everything—all the confusing parts of life—worked out and checked off. In fact, all she had was the not especially snazzy car. She had more worked out when she was twelve. If only bossy, know-it-all twelve-year-old Cat Kettle were still around to tell her what to do.

There was a messy pile of bills sitting on the kitchen table from today’s mail. Bills bored Dan. He threw them down in disgust when he saw one, leaving them half sticking out of their envelopes for Cat to worry about.

She pulled the sheaf of papers toward her.

The bills would keep on coming, no matter what else was happening in your life and that was good because it gave you a purpose. You worked so you could pay them. You rested on the weekends and generated more bills. Then you went back to work to pay for them. That was the reason for getting up tomorrow. That was the meaning of life.

Electricity. Credit cards. Mobile phone.

Dan’s mobile phone bill.

She picked it up almost eagerly, a sick sense of satisfaction, a refreshing injection of adrenaline. Twelve-year-old Cat Kettle always wanted to be a spy.

The paper quivered in her hand. She didn’t want to find something bad, but she almost did. For the sheer satisfaction of solving a tricky problem. For the pleasure of the “gotcha!”

Many of the phone numbers she recognized. Home. Work. Her own mobile.

Of course, there were a lot she didn’t recognize. And why should she? This was stupid. Silly. She was smiling mockingly at herself as she scanned the page and then, there it was:

25 Dec. 11:53 P.M. 0443 461 555 25.42

A twenty-five minute call to someone late on Christmas Day. Cat had gone straight to bed as soon as they got home from Lyn’s place. On the way home in the car they were O.K. They’d talked, calmly, without fighting, about the day’s events. Angela turning up in Lyn’s kitchen. Frank and Maxine getting back together. They’d even managed to laugh—Dan a touch warily, Cat a touch hysterically—about how horrible it had all been. Nana with the lepers. Michael clicking his fingers to his awful Christmas music CD. Kara finally collapsing face-first on the tabletop.

Of course, that was when she was still carrying her baby like a magical talisman.

“Next year,” she’d said to Dan as she sighed with the comfort of cool sheets and a pillow. “We could have a Kettle-free Christmas. We could go away somewhere. Just us and the baby.”

“That sounds like a perfect Christmas,” he’d said. “I’ll come to bed soon. I’m going to walk off some of Lyn’s cooking.”

He’d kissed her on the forehead like a child, and Cat fell immediately into a dreamless sleep.

And then he’d spoken to someone for nearly half an hour, till past midnight.

It could be anybody of course. It could be a friend. It could be Sean, for example. It was probably Sean.

Although his conversations with Sean were always short and to the point. They weren’t chatters, Sean and Dan. Yeah, mate. No, mate. See you at three then.

Maybe they had long, meaningful, sharing-their-feelings conversations when Cat wasn’t around.

She looked back through the bill for other calls to the same number.

It appeared eight times in December. Most of them long conversations. Many of them very late at night.

On the first of December, there was an hour-long call at eleven o’clock in the morning.

That was the day after Cat found out she was pregnant. It was when she would have been at Lyn’s place, looking after Maddie.

She’s pregnant. I can’t leave her now.

No. It would be Sean. It would be a work friend. It could even be Dan’s sister, Melanie. Melanie. Of course it was Mel. Of course.

Cat stood up, walked to the phone, and dialed the number, and found she was breathing in exactly the same way as when she forced herself to sprint up that killer hill by the park. Frantic little gulps for air.

The phone rang once, twice, three times. Cat wondered if she was having a heart attack.

It switched to voicemail.

A bubbly girl’s voice spoke clearly and sweetly into Cat’s ear, in the tone of a special friend who is so sorry she’s missed you: “Hi! This is Angela. Leave me a message!”

She hung up, hard.

Gotcha.

Scrape and twist of the key in the lock. He walks into the kitchen with plastic bags of shopping hanging from his wrists.

She waits till he dumps them on the bench. Then she stands in front of him and puts her hands flat against his chest and automatically he links his hands behind the small of her back, because this is the way they stand. This is what they do. Her hands here and his hands there.

She looks at him. Full in the face. Right in the eyes.

He looks at her.

And there it is. She wonders how she missed it and for how long.

He’s already gone. He’s already looking back at her, politely, coolly, a little sadly, from some other place far off in the future.

He’s gone.

Just like her baby.

Heads or Tails, Susi?

Do I have a problem with gambling? No! I’ve got a problem with winning! Ha! That’s a joke I heard once. I don’t know if I told it right, though. It’s not really that funny.

So, you want to know about the first time I gambled. Yeah, I remember. It was Anzac Day and I was sixteen. I was down at the Newport Arms. You know, it’s the one day of the year you’re allowed to play two up until midnight. It’s legislated! Only in Oz, eh?