Reluctantly turning down offers to join some colleagues for Friday-night drinks at the bar across the road from the office, I put on my jacket and headed for the bus stop.
This weekend was the beginning of Operation Teach Jack To Eat Something Healthy and a trip to the supermarket was step one.
It had been three weeks since Jack’s arrival and in that time he’d refused anything that wasn’t full of sugar, full of preservatives or laden with oil. Even Patrick had conceded that Jack was probably on his way to developing scurvy.
While I was no child nutritionist, it seemed reasonable to think that putting some vegetables in the fridge would be a good start.
I had decided that food shopping on Saturday morning was the only activity less appealing than food shopping on Friday night, so after picking Jack up from Carla’s we headed to the shops.
Trying not to dwell on how much fun everyone else I knew was having, I endured a torrid shopping experience and was on my way home when my mobile rang. My adrenaline levels surged at the thought that it might be Gordon checking yet again that everything was under control.
‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ I sighed with relief as I heard Patrick’s voice.
‘Um . . . the good news.’ I quickly glanced back at Jack who was blissfully emptying my wallet onto the car floor. I knew there was a ninety per cent probability that I would lose at least one credit card, but I was willing to take the risk.
There was a pause. ‘Well actually, there is no good news.’
‘So, tell me the bad news.’
‘I got fired.’
The silence seemed to stretch forever while I tried to think of something to say.
‘What happened?’
‘You know,’ he continued as if I hadn’t spoken, ‘they actually gave me a cardboard box to take my stuff home in. I felt like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. Do you reckon they buy them in especially?’
‘Where are you now?’ Judging from the background noise and his tone of voice, I guessed he had already found a pub in which to drown his sorrows.
A sudden flash in the rear-vision mirror caught my eye and I looked up to see a motorcycle cop gesturing rather impatiently for me to pull over. Cursing under my breath, I prayed that he hadn’t been there for long.
I threw the phone onto the floor and pulled the car to the side of the road.
The policeman stopped behind me and slowly walked the length of my car, before leaning down and peering at me.
‘Good afternoon, ma’am. My name is Sergeant Barlow.’
I smiled in what I hoped was an innocent manner.
‘Are you aware that talking on a mobile phone while driving a vehicle is an offence?’
I thought about saying that I was Svenka from Sweden and no one had told me this rule but quickly decided I didn’t have the cleavage to pull it off. Instead I nodded guiltily.
‘Was there an emergency, or any reason for the offence?’
I turned for a quick look at Jack. He was entranced by the policeman’s helmet and was waving his arms up and down and laughing at him. Reluctantly I abandoned the next lie that came to mind – that I’d been communicating with a doctor as I rushed a critically ill child to hospital. I shook my head.
‘And are you aware that you were doing seventy-two kilometres per hour in a sixty zone?’
I shook my head again, relieved that I hadn’t used my Svenka from Sweden defence. I was pretty sure speeding was a crime in Sweden as well.
‘May I see your driver’s licence, ma’am?’
I turned in my seat. Jack was still gripping my wallet, with notes, coins and various cards scattered over the back of the car. The policeman followed my gaze and when I turned back around, he was still staring at the chaos.
‘Ah, is it okay if I get out? I’m going to have to open the back door to find my licence.’
‘Do you think that’s a good idea, letting your son play with your wallet like that?’ he asked dubiously.
I had sudden visions of yelling hysterically, Basil Fawlty style, ‘Good idea? Good idea? Of course I don’t think it’s a good idea!’
Thinking that might give him grounds for a ‘driving while insane’ offence, I made a noncommittal noise and opened the door. He stepped away and I opened the back door. I found my licence wedged between Jack and his car seat and brushed off a few squashed sultanas.
As I turned back I noticed that Sergeant Barlow, apparently searching for something more hygienic to look at, had moved closer to the registration sticker on the windscreen. As he did, I remembered that it had expired two months ago and although I’d paid my registration fee, I hadn’t replaced the sticker.
Miraculously he made no comment and instead took my licence and looked at it.
‘Could you tell me your current address, ma’am?’
Without thinking, I told him.
‘And how long have you been living at that address?’
‘Um. A bit over a year.’
‘This licence says that you live in Red Hill.’
I wondered who would look after Jack while I was in jail.
‘Ma’am, are you aware that it is an offence to not change your address on your licence within fourteen days of moving?’
I shook my head. The policeman had obviously decided that if he kept looking, he would find enough traffic violations to arrest me.
‘All right. I have to book you for the speeding and the mobile phone offences, but if you tell me you’ll change the address in the next couple of days, I’ll let that one slide.’
I nodded enthusiastically.
He wrote out a ticket and handed it to me.
‘Drive carefully, ma’am,’ he said as he turned to leave, looking as though he thought the possibility highly unlikely.
I picked up the phone from where I had thrown it on the floor, hoping desperately that the call from Patrick had been disconnected.
‘Patrick?’
All I could hear on the other end was Patrick’s laughter. ‘And you call yourself a responsible member of society.’
‘It was your call that got me pulled over, thank you very much. And you have cost me –’ I looked at the ticket, ‘one hundred and eighty dollars.’
The mention of money brought Patrick’s temporary good humour to an abrupt end. ‘I’d offer to pay it for you, but now that I don’t have a job, it would take me about a year to get it together,’ he said gloomily.
‘God – I’m so sorry about your job.’
‘Yeah well, I guess it shouldn’t really be a huge shock. It was pretty obvious that Jennifer was going to make life hard for me. I just didn’t know she’d make it this hard.’
‘You still haven’t told me what happened,’ I said.
A roar of revelry from the bar drowned out Patrick’s reply.
‘Look, why don’t you come home for dinner? We can get some takeaway – my shout.’
‘That sounds good. I was considering a bar crawl with my cardboard box, but I’m not really in the mood. I’ll see you soon.’
As I pulled away from the kerb, I wondered how this sudden career dead end would affect Patrick. Although his lack of commitment to his job had always been something of a joke, his shock at suddenly being unemployed was real. I couldn’t imagine it would be easy for him to get another job.
I’d just walked in the door when the telephone rang.
‘Hi – it’s Tanya.’ I could tell from the background noise that she was calling on her mobile.
‘Hi!’ I replied, pleased to hear her voice.
‘How’s your day been?’ she asked.
‘Ah . . . Not too bad.’ That was the best response I could manage. I didn’t want to tell her about my panic-filled day at work, the traffic violations or the supermarket trip from hell.
Most of my shopping had been done while Jack screamed hysterically because I had refused to let him eat a packet of cockroach baits. Walking up and down the aisles, I’d avoided eye contact with anyone and done my best to pretend that the terrible sound wasn’t coming from my trolley. An old woman had stopped in front of us, peered intently at Jack and then walked away muttering something that included the words ‘not in my day’. It had taken all my self-control not to run after her and knock her walking stick out from under her.
‘What about you?’ I asked Tanya, desperate to hear about something fun.
‘Well, since you ask, I’m pissed off and am about twenty minutes away from your place. I caught a flight out this afternoon and then hired a car. Don’t suppose I could cook you and Jack dinner?’
‘Of course – I’d love to see you!’ I wondered briefly how Patrick would feel about Tanya’s arrival and decided that he was so miserable, having someone else around could only be a good thing. And in any case, it seemed forever since I’d seen Tanya.
‘Sure, come on over. Although I have to warn you, dinner might be more of a wake than a party.’ I told her what had happened.
‘I guess that beats my dramas,’ she said. ‘Greg and I had a fight and I told him I wasn’t coming home until he apologised.’
This was a part of Tanya’s new life I was starting to get used to. Occasionally being a country wife became too much for her, she and Greg would have a fight and she’d storm off to the city for a couple of days to blow off some steam.
‘Bloody hell,’ she’d said the first time it happened. ‘Finding a bit of space isn’t exactly a problem, but I’ve got to travel halfway across the state to find someone who isn’t employed by Greg or hasn’t known him since he was born.’
On these occasions she usually stayed with me and we’d spend Saturday mornings checking out the shops. Maggie would join us for coffee and cake at a cafe we’d been going to for years. And after lunch we’d all have a manicure and a facial, even though Tanya maintained that any benefit was gone within about thirty minutes of her being home. We’d head out for dinner and drinks, sleep late and then drive north and spend Sunday afternoon on the beach. By Sunday evening either Tanya or Greg would usually have apologised and she’d head home again.
As I hung up the phone, I wondered again about the wisdom of putting Patrick and Tanya together. At this rate we’d all be sobbing into our wineglasses by nine o’clock.
I looked at Jack and then at the bathroom. Sometimes the effort involved in wrestling him in and out of the bath and then dealing with the flooded bathroom seemed too much. Who would know if I didn’t bath him tonight? I could just put him in his pyjamas before anyone arrived, maybe even sprinkle talcum powder on him if he smelled a bit. Knowing I’d feel guilty if I didn’t, I sighed, picked him up and carried him towards the bathroom.