The Last Anniversary

Grace’s limbs flail in raw, uncontrollable panic. She clutches at her throat and makes guttural sounds. There is a blur of strange, frightened faces around her. And then there is a face leaning close to her and a swinging red pendant on a chain and a voice saying, ‘Hold on, Grace,’ and every molecule of her body is drawn to that familiar cranky voice, because of course she won’t let her die, of course she won’t.

50

The phone has been ringing at intervals for hours, it seems, but Sophie just lies in bed with her pillow held so firmly over her face that she is practically suffocating herself. She takes it away and pulls a face at the ceiling. She stretches out her mouth into an elongated oval. She scrunches her face into wrinkles and bares her teeth. She makes strange ‘Yah, yah!’ sounds, pretending she is insane and wishing she was. She puts the pillow back over her face.

She has a headache, of course. She knew she would have a headache, but actually it’s not even that bad, just a blurry ache behind her eyes. It’s a strange sort of hangover. Her mouth doesn’t feel horrible. It feels quite nice and nutmeg-ish.

It would be better if she had an all-consuming run-of-the-mill hangover that would make her forget the shameful, shrivelling feeling of Callum pushing her away. The revulsion on his face. As if he’d swallowed a fly! As if she was a desperate old tart trying to stick her tongue down his throat.

And then! It was like a nightmare. Seeing Grace’s beautiful face contorting spastically, spit at the corners of her mouth, her eyes rolling into the back of her head like a frightened horse. ‘Shit, I think she’s actually dying,’ somebody said in an awe-filled voice. Callum was on his hands and knees next to her, his fingers digging into the dirt, and Grace’s mother took a plastic tube from her handbag with yellow and black writing, pulled off the lid, and, without pausing for even a second, took a firm hold of Grace’s leg, lifted her arm high in the air and plunged it down, stabbing her, hard, murderously really, and the crowd gasped collectively but quietly, as if they were in church. Grace’s body arched in the middle and then slammed against the ground, and Sophie caught sight of Veronika, also on her hands and knees, bursting into tears, and Sophie had never seen Veronika cry before, and there was Thomas shouting into a mobile phone the words ‘anaphylactic shock’, his face all red, and Sophie had never heard Thomas raise his voice before, and it was all so awful, so truly awful.

Twenty minutes later a police-rescue boat came roaring up the river, but by then everyone knew that it looked like the woman who had the allergic reaction was going to be fine. She was breathing normally, thanks to her quick-thinking mother, and ‘Really, you’d think people with dangerous allergies would be a bit more careful about what they ate!’ The Anniversary Night was suddenly over and people were trooping down towards the wharf to line up for the ferry, with sleeping, face-painted children draped over their shoulders.

Callum and Laura went off in the boat with Grace to the hospital. Veronika recovered her normal frenetic equilibrium and was going on and on about how she didn’t understand how Grace would have eaten a samosa, when Mum had written her a note, and why in the world would you put walnuts in a samosa, they needed to have a good talk to the caterers, and had Sophie heard that the Alice and Jack story was a complete hoax, they never even existed. Aunt Rose had got pregnant with Grandma Enigma when she was sixteen and Connie had come up with this elaborate lie, it was such a betrayal really, and who was going to look after Jake tonight, she hadn’t brought Audrey along to provide free babysitting, and apparently Auntie Laura had seen Dad going off somewhere on his jet-ski, fully dressed and looking quite demented, and you’d think Mum would be home from her Weight Watchers party by now, and if Auntie Laura hadn’t been carrying around the EpiPen in her bag, Grace would be dead by now, no doubt about it, dead.

‘Is she always like this?’ Audrey had asked Sophie. ‘Should I slap her across the face?’

Sophie had wondered vaguely if she should offer to mind Jake for the night, but it didn’t seem appropriate. What if Callum came home and was horrified to find her touching his child and shoved her away again? Besides which, she was drunk, and she thought childminding was probably like driving, something you shouldn’t do when you’re over the limit. Luckily it soon became irrelevant because there was a family squabble over who should take Jake for the night. Aunt Rose said she’d do it, and Grandma Enigma said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you’ve got the Alzheimer’s, you can’t take care of a baby.’ Thomas said he and Debbie were all set up for Lily and they would take Jake home with them, although Debbie wasn’t such a good advertisement for motherhood herself, as she was sitting on the ground next to Lily’s stroller with her head in her hands, shaking her head sadly over her empty glass of mulled wine, while Lily reached over from her stroller and stroked her mother’s hair. Veronika said no, Jake had obviously taken a liking to Audrey, and she and Audrey would take him back to Callum and Grace’s house and stay the night there, and in the end nobody had the energy to argue with her, and it did seem that Jake looked very comfortable with Audrey and she seemed very competent and calm. So everybody went home to bed.

Sophie had walked back to Aunt Connie’s house in a daze. She’d managed to take off only one shoe before hopping into bed in her fairy dress, and obviously she’d had intentions of cleaning her teeth, because when she woke up she was still holding her toothbrush, with a carefully applied line of toothpaste. She has no memory of doing that at all.

The phone rings again. It’s probably her mother, feeling guilty about last night. This time it only rings a few times before it stops abruptly, as if the caller has slammed down the phone. Sophie continues pressing the pillow down into her face and tries to think of something extremely boring and non-emotional. Tax returns. She sets herself a mental test to see if she can remember her Tax File Number. It is a stupid test. She can’t remember one digit of her Tax File Number. All she can remember is how it felt to dance with Callum, and how her lips had tingled with anticipation as he lowered his head…and actually her bottom lip is still tingling quite painfully now.

She takes away the pillow and gingerly puts a finger to her lips. For God’s sake, that’s why her lips were tingling all night–because she was getting a cold sore.

She hasn’t had a cold sore since she was sixteen. She gets out of bed and hobbles to the bathroom, still wearing one shoe, and looks at herself in the mirror. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the ugliest women of them all? There is an extraordinary strawberry-shaped blotch right in the centre of her lip. She’s been branded for kissing another woman’s husband. Her hair is a comical bird’s nest. There are half-moons of mascara under her eyes. She is a hung-over, herpes-ridden old witch. She is so ugly, it’s funny.