Three Wishes

It’s a good atmosphere in the pubs on Anzac Day. A lot of old codgers. And you’ve got this big, excited circle of people standing around a guy in the middle, who tosses the coins. He’s normally a bit of a performer. He uses a special little wooden stick and the coins go spinning up into the sky and everybody looks up and watches them come down. The way it works is everybody bets with one another. You just hold up your money in the air and call out ten on heads, or whatever.

It was the first 2-Up game I’d ever seen, so I was watching for a while, seeing how it worked. I was mostly watching these girls, ’cos they were pretty easy on the eye. They were there with their grandpa, I think, they called him Pop. He was wearing one of them old-fashioned hats. He called them all “Susi” for some reason. They were all four putting away the beer. Jeez, were they into the game! They bet on every toss and they’d be yelling out, just like the men, “Head ’em up!” or “Tail ’em up!”

When one of them won, their grandfather would do a little old-fashioned dance with them. Like a waltz. Just a couple of little steps whirling them around. And then they’d be back, holding up their cash, yelling and laughing, giving each other high fives.

So finally I got up the guts to have a go. Bet five bucks on tails and won. I was hooked. Mate, I loved it. I can still see those coins flipping and turning in the moonlight and those three girls jumping up and down and hugging their grandpa.

Oh, yeah, I was hooked. Big time.

CHAPTER 15

The first time it happened, she was driving out of the Chatswood Shopping Center parking lot.

Maddie was in the back, silently strapped into her car seat, her thumb in her mouth, one finger locked around her nose. Lyn could see her accusing eyes in the rearview mirror. They weren’t talking to each other after a particularly horrible experience in the bookstore.

Maddie had spotted a copy of her favorite bedtime book in the children’s section and grabbed it triumphantly off the shelf.

“Mine!”

“No, Maddie, it’s not yours. Yours is at home. Put it back.”

Maddie looked up at Lyn as if she were nuts. She shook the book vigorously at her, eyes blazing righteously. “No! Mine!”

Lyn felt quietly browsing customers around her lifting their eyes and tilting their heads in an interested way.

“Shhhh!” She put a finger to her lips. “Put it back.”

But Maddie wasn’t having any of it. She stomped her feet like a demented tap dancer and hugged the book tight to her stomach, hollering, “No, shh! Mummy, mine, mine, mine!”

A woman walked into the same aisle as Lyn and smiled sympathetically.

“Ah. The terrible twos, is it? I’ve got that to look forward to!” She was pushing a stroller with a cherubic blond baby, who observed Maddie with surprised round eyes.

“Actually,” said Lyn. “She’s not even two yet. She’s starting early.”

“Ah. Advanced for her age,” the woman said nicely.

“You could say that,” began Lyn. “No, Maddie!”

She leaped forward too late. The angelic baby had reached out a hand as if to grab Good Night, Little Bear and Maddie had responded with swift, efficient retribution, using the book to swipe the child across the face.

The baby dissolved, as if her feelings had been hurt for the first time ever. One shocked chubby hand went up to the bright red mark on her cheek. Her blue eyes swam with fat tears.

Lyn looked at the rather satisfied expression on her own daughter’s face and died of shame.

There was nothing worse, Lyn and Michael had always agreed, than seeing a parent slap a child in anger. Maddie would not be smacked. There would be no violence in their household.

Violence begets violence.

She believed it absolutely.

And now she grabbed Maddie and smacked her hard. She smacked her very hard and very angrily, and Maddie’s startled cry reverberated around the bookstore like a child abuse victim.

“It’s O.K.,” said the nice woman, picking up her nice child. She had the same round blue eyes as her baby.

“I’m so, so sorry. She’s never done that before.”

And I’ve never done that before, either.

“It’s O.K. Really.” The woman rocked her baby to her shoulder. She had to raise her voice to be heard over Maddie’s ear-splitting wail. “Kids!”

Maddie backed herself up against the bookshelf and doubled over, crying with luxurious, hysterical abandon, only stopping to take a breath of air to help her reach a new level of volume.

People around them were now openly looking, some of them craning their heads over bookshelves to see. They stared blank-faced, their mouths slightly slack, like people in an audience.

“I’ll have to get her out of here. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine,” smiled the woman, jiggling her child on her hip. My God, she was freakishly nice.

Lyn picked up Maddie, who continued to scream relentlessly, arching her body and throwing back her head so it caught Lyn painfully on the chin. With her arms pinned tightly around her daughter’s violently wriggling body, she walked rapidly out of the shop. The mother-with-screaming-child walk of shame.

“Excuse me, madam!” A pounding of footsteps behind her.

“Yes?” Lyn looked up. Maddie’s legs continued to kick.

“Um.” It was a very tall teenager with a “How can I help you?” smiley badge pinned to his blue denim shirt. He looked apologetic about his height, as if he didn’t quite know how he’d got all the way up there. He locked big knuckles awkwardly. “Only, I think maybe you haven’t paid for those books.”

Maddie was still clutching Good Night, Little Bear and Lyn herself was holding a copy of Coping with Miscarriage as well as, humiliatingly, Taming the Toddler: A Survival Guide for Parents.

Well, why not? The sort of woman who hit her children would also do the occasional spot of shoplifting.

She marched back to the cash register, trying to smile ironically and humorously. If she had had someone with her, Michael or one of her sisters, then it would be funny. If she had both her sisters it would be pure slapstick. It would make their day.

But she was on her own and so she could only imagine it being funny.

“Wasn’t that Lyn Kettle?” she heard someone say as she paid for the books, including a second copy of Good Night, Little Bear, and stuffed change into her purse. “You know. The Brekkie Bus woman.”