The Last Anniversary

All those times he’d sneered when she tentatively suggested they take a bottle of wine down to Sultana Rocks! All those times when the children were young, when at the last minute he’d say Daddy had to stay behind and do some work in his office because Daddy made the money that paid for the nice food they were taking on the picnic, as if Mummy and Scribbly Gum Island didn’t contribute a bloody cent.

‘I’m OK. If you feel like a picnic?’

‘I don’t feel like a picnic.’

‘Right. You know what I could do today?’

‘What?’

‘I could put that picture up for you. That one with the flowerpot.’

‘Actually, Debbie saw that and she thought it might be nice for Lily’s room, so I gave it to her. About a year ago.’

‘Oh, did you?’

There is silence. Margie gives his forehead a last dab and says, ‘Right. That should do you.’ I think it’s too late, love.

‘So–ah–you had fun last night at that thing? With your friend? With…Ron?’

‘Loved it. Can’t remember the last time I had more fun.’

‘Great! It’s great to have an interest!’

‘Of course, it would have been nice to win first prize, not just runner-up.’

‘Oh yes! Trip to Venice. Wonderful. You always wanted to go to Italy, didn’t you?’

‘You’re thinking of Laura. She was the one who always went on about going to Europe.’

She notices he doesn’t ask what they would have done if they had won first prize, which was a trip for two. Actually, she and Rotund Ron hadn’t ever properly discussed it. Sometimes, their personal trainer, a blonde Amazonian called Suzie, would say, ‘So what happens if you win? Are you two going to run away together to Venice?’ and Ron would waggle his eyebrows suggestively and pretend to speak in an Italian accent and Margie and Suzie would make fun of him, because he sounded Indian, not Italian at all.

Last night Rotund Ron and Margie had been first runners-up in the National ‘Bulges to Biceps’ Beginner Body Building Competition for Couples, sponsored by a low-fat Italian pasta sauce company. Ron had heard about the competition and suggested to Margie that instead of going to their Weight Watchers meetings they hire themselves a personal trainer and enter the competition. ‘We’ll probably lose the same amount of weight,’ he’d said when he presented his proposal over their skim cappuccinos, ‘but we’ll have much more fun!’ He told her that he’d picked her out of all the ladies at Weight Watchers because she looked like someone with a good sense of humour, and Margie, who had never thought of herself as having any sense of humour at all, was ridiculously flattered. To enter the competition they had to take a ‘before’ photo of themselves in their swimming costumes, holding up newspapers to prove just how fat they were on that particular date. Margie came out of the changing room with her robe pulled bashfully around her, ready to display the appropriate shame of a fat person, but Rotund Ron wasn’t having any of that. He came strutting out like he was Mr Universe and soon had Margie quite weak with laughter and even striking Miss Universe poses herself, perhaps because she wanted to prove that she did have a sense of humour. It was as if she’d started to become an entirely different person, a flippant, confident, funny person–the sort of person Rotund Ron believed her to be, and damn it, maybe he was right.

Over the next eight weeks they’d met Suzie three times a week, sweating and puffing and chortling at each other. They shared their ecstasy as their bodies began to change. They tried to out-do each other when they did their sit-ups and push-ups and tricep dips and bicep curls. When it hurt too much they made very rude comments about Suzie under their breaths. They knew each other’s bodies as well as their own. ‘Feel that!’ Ron would say, pointing at his thigh. ‘Nothing but solid muscle, baby.’ After each training session they’d have a protein shake in the park, sitting on a bench, red-faced, dripping with sweat and laughing, always laughing.

Margie had not had an affair with Rotund Ron. They’d never so much as kissed, but in some ways it felt like the whole experience of transforming their bodies had been more intimate, more physical, more sexy, more spiritual than any old affair involving middle-of-the-day sex in horrible sleazy highway motels and…well, whatever else those affairs involved.

On the night of the competition held at the Hilton Hotel, the ‘before’ photos were displayed on a giant screen behind each transformed couple flexing their spray-on-tanned biceps and triceps and quadriceps in a carefully choreographed routine. Rotund Ron and Margie had to avoid eye-contact while doing their routine–to ‘Eye of the Tiger’ – because otherwise they were liable to dissolve into laughter and Suzie said she was going to be furious with them if they ruined her hard work with an attack of the giggles. But on the night they’d both got caught up in the adrenaline-charged atmosphere and got all trembly and competitive before they went on stage. Afterwards they were euphoric with their achievement, even when a ferociously muscular pair of born-again Christians from Baulkham Hills won the first prize. Margie and Ron won a flat-screen TV, which they agreed to donate to a centre for kids with cancer, because Ron’s best friend’s son had died of cancer twenty years earlier.

It was when Rotund Ron, Suzie and Margie were all sharing a celebratory glass of champagne that Margie got the phone call from Ron and learned that he’d got into a violent argument with a taxi driver at Glass Bay who didn’t want him dripping river-water all over his cab and couldn’t care less that Ron was trying to get to the Hilton to drag his wife from a Jacuzzi. Unfortunately the taxi driver happened to have started an introductory course in Tae Kwan Do at the Glass Bay Evening College and after Ron threw his first clumsy punch the taxi driver executed a perfect kick to Ron’s temple. The police were called, and when Ron wouldn’t calm down they decided he was drunk and disorderly and threw him in the back of a paddy wagon which was jam-packed with excited, swaying young men from a drunk and disorderly bucks party. Margie, Rotund Ron and Suzie drove over to the police station to pick up Ron, and all the drunk bucks got to hear them explaining to Ron that no, they weren’t having an affair; they’d been entering a body-building competition and they’d won a flat-screen TV. The glassy-eyed groom, who didn’t seem to Margie to be in any state to get married the next day, became quite emotional, grabbing Ron’s arm and slurring, ‘She wouldn’t cheat on you, mate. She loves you. She made a solemn vow to you. She’s your wife, man! She was just doing a bit of innocent body-building and now you’ve got a flat-screen TV,’ while the rest of the bucks competed to get Suzie’s phone number by offering to arm-wrestle her.