Big Little Lies

“I think we’ve already met,” said Jane to Perry.

Nobody heard her except for Madeline. Jane had remained standing while everyone else perched up on their bar stools. She looked tiny in the middle of them, like a child addressing Perry. She had to tip back her head. Her eyes were very big.

She cleared her throat and spoke again. “I think we’ve already met.”

Perry glanced at her. “Really? Are you sure?” He inclined his head charmingly. “I’m sorry. I don’t recall.”

“I’m sure,” said Jane. “Except you said your name was Saxon Banks.”

76.

At first his face was completely neutral: friendly, this-is-of-no-relevance-to-me polite. He didn’t recognize her. I wouldn’t know her from a bar of soap! The cheery phrase popped inappropriately into her head. Something her mum would say.

But when she said “Saxon Banks” there was a flicker, not because he recognized her, he still had no idea, couldn’t even be bothered to go to the effort of dredging up the appropriate memory, but because he understood who she must be, what she represented. She was one of many.

He’d lied about his name. It had never occurred to her that he would do that. As if your name could not be fabricated, even though you could fabricate your personality, fabricate your attention.

“I kept thinking I might run into you,” she said to him.

• • •

Perry?” said Celeste.

Perry turned to her.

His face was naked again, like in the car, as though something had been ripped away. Ever since Madeline had first mentioned Saxon’s name on the night of the book club, there had been something niggling at Celeste, a memory from before the children were born, before Perry hit her for the first time.

That memory slid into place now. Fully intact. As though it had just been waiting for her to retrieve it.

It was Perry’s cousin’s wedding. The one where Saxon and Perry had driven all the way back to the church to collect Eleni’s mobile phone. They were sitting at a round table. White starched tablecloth. Giant bows tied around the chairs. Light hitting the wineglasses. Saxon and Perry were telling stories. Stories of a shared suburban childhood: homemade billy carts and the time Saxon saved Perry from the bullies at school and what about the time when Perry brazenly stole a banana paddle pop from the freezer at the fish and chip shop and the big scary Greek man grabbed him by the scruff of his neck in one big beefy hand and said, “What’s your name?” and Perry said, “Saxon Banks.” The fish and chip shop owner called Saxon’s mother and said, “Your son stole from me,” and Saxon’s mother said, “My son is right here,” and hung up on him.

So funny. So cheeky. How they’d laughed while they drank their champagne.

“It didn’t mean anything,” said Perry to Celeste.

There was a hollow roaring sensation in her ears, as though she were deep underwater.

• • •

Jane watched Perry turn away from her to look at his wife, instantly dismissing her without even bothering to remember or acknowledge her. She’d never really existed to him. She was of no consequence in his life. He was married to a beautiful woman. Jane was  p**n ography. Jane was the adult movie that didn’t appear on his hotel bill. Jane was Internet  p**n , where every fetish can be fulfilled. You have a fetish for humiliating fat girls? Enter your credit card number and click right here.

“That’s why I moved to Pirriwee,” said Jane. “Just in case you were here.”

The glass bubble elevator. The muffled, dimly lit hotel room.

She remembered how she’d looked around the room—casually, pleasurably—for more evidence of the sort of man he was, more evidence of his money and style, more evidence to indicate that this would be a delightfully lavish one-night stand. There wasn’t much to see. A closed laptop. An upright overnight bag standing neatly in the corner. Next to the laptop there was a real estate leaflet. FOR SALE. A picture of an ocean view. LUXURY FAMILY HOME OVERLOOKING THE GLORIOUS PIRRIWEE PENINSULA.

“Are you buying this house?” she’d said.

“Probably,” he answered. He was pouring her champagne.

“Do you have kids?” she asked, recklessly, stupidly. “It seems like a good house for children.” She never asked about a wife. No ring. There was no ring.

“No kids,” he said. “One day, I’d like kids.”

She’d seen something on his face: a sadness, a desperate sort of yearning, and she had thought, in all her idiotic naivety, that she knew exactly what that sadness indicated. He’d just been through a break-up! Of course he had. He was just like her, nursing a broken heart. He was desperate to find the right woman and start a family, and maybe she was even moronic enough to think, as he smiled his devastatingly attractive smile and handed her the champagne glass, that she might turn out to be that woman. Stranger things had happened!

And then stranger things did happen.

Over the years that followed, she reacted viscerally to the words “Pirriwee Peninsula” in conversation or in print. She changed the subject. She turned the page.

Then one day, without warning, she did the exact opposite. She told Ziggy they were going to the beach and they drove to the glorious Pirriwee Peninsula, and all the way there she tried to pretend that she didn’t even remember that real estate leaflet, even as she remembered it, over and over.

They played on the beach and she looked over his shoulder for a man coming out of the surf with a white-toothed smile. She listened for the sound of a wife calling out the name “Saxon.”

What did she want?

Revenge? Recognition? To show him she was skinny now? To hit him, to hurt him, to report him? To say all the things she should have said instead of her bovine “bye”? To somehow let him know that he hadn’t gotten away with it, even though of course he had?

She wanted him to see Ziggy.

She wanted him to marvel at his beautiful, serious, intense little boy.

It made no sense. It was such a stupid, strange, weird and wrong desire, she refused to properly acknowledge it and sometimes she flatly denied it.

Because how would this moment of magical fatherly marveling possibly work? “Oh, hi there! Remember me? I had a son! Here he is! No, no, of course I don’t want a relationship with you, but I do just want you to stand for a moment and marvel over your son. He loves pumpkin. He’s always loved pumpkin! Isn’t that incredible? What kid loves pumpkin? He’s shy and brave and he has excellent balance. So there you go. You’re a bastard and a prick and I hate you, but just look for a moment at your son, because isn’t it the strangest thing? Ten minutes of depravity created something perfect.”