Five-thirty am Saturday I was woken by magpies cawing and a sharp pain at the base of my spine, as if one of the bedsprings had pierced the mattress and drilled into my back. I pulled off the fitted sheet and ran my hand along the mattress but detected nothing. I felt the hairy nub at my coccyx. It was tender and swollen, and a little bit larger than usual. Maybe it had been bitten or I’d banged it against something? I laid a tissue over it and traced around it with a pen, then measured with a ruler. The nub’s diameter was 1.7 centimetres. Mildly alarming.
After breakfast I went down to the beach for an early, hoping to avoid any of my old friends in the water. Got out an hour later feeling devo that I hadn’t seen them.
Mum was in her studio, the ‘turret’, when I got home. It was a cube at the top of our house with a ribbon of window all the way round. With a sofa bed, bar fridge and ensuite, you could live there independently, which Mum sort of did for the months of in-house separation before Dad finally packed his bags. This morning she was sketching at the drafting table, with Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’ open on the Mac screen beside her.
‘I brought you a cup of tea.’
‘How thoughtful, but I’m on a caffeine detox.’
‘What are you working on?’
‘Just another product launch, but it’s confidential so you mustn’t breathe a word.’
‘Scout’s honour.’ I made a three-finger salute.
‘My client, Sanctus Mineralis, have discovered the Holy Grail of the beauty industry – a secret ingredient that can delay the skin’s ageing process.’
‘That’s original.’
‘I knew you wouldn’t be interested.’
‘No, I am. What is it?’
Mum opened an image file of seaweed. ‘They’ve bioengineered nanoparticles containing kelp spore seven hundred times smaller than a skin pore, which allows them to germinate inside the lower layers of skin and accelerate collagen production to a phenomenal rate. This will be a viable alternative to cosmetic surgery.’
‘How much for a jar?’
‘A seventy-five millilitre vial of the E-Radiata Serum™ will retail for around two-hundred and seventy dollars.’
‘Well within the reach of your average housewife.’
Mum turned to face me with folded arms. ‘Ninety per cent of the women in the trials judged their appearance five to ten years younger post-treatment.’
‘Do you actually believe it?’
‘I believe the cross-platform marketing campaign will make the product fly off the shelves.’
‘Where do you fit in?’
‘Sanctus Mineralis are planning to upstage the opening of Fashion Week with a spectacular marine-themed launch, and they’ve given us the budget to pull it off.’
‘Cue the nude chick in shell.’ I snapped my fingers.
‘Yes, the Venus hero,’ she said, her eyes lighting up. ‘Imagine guests being served oysters and champagne inside a giant inflated pearl beside the harbour, while a choir sings something stirring by Enya.’ She played a YouTube clip of Enya singing ‘Only Time’ while she narrated the proposed action. ‘An enormous shell emerges from the sea and moves towards the shore as if blown by the wind. Ever so slowly it opens to reveal the goddess Venus. Lustrous tresses of golden hair and one hand protecting her modesty, the other holding an over-sized vial of E-Radiata Serum™, illuminated from within. Everybody takes photos.’
‘And then?’
‘A banner unfurls that says, “Who knows? Only time” – which we don’t have the rights to use yet, but Morgan’s working on it. The guests are given goodie bags filled with product samples, a small gift to reward their endorsement on social media. Hashtag perfectly beautiful.’
‘Who’s playing Venus?’
‘Only the most divinely gorgeous creature on the planet right now.’
‘Vienna Voronova?’
‘Penny told you. That girl couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended on it.’
Mum hadn’t always been a cog in the machine relentlessly promoting extravagant consumables. Decades before I was even a concept, she’d been the resident set designer for a radical theatre company. Late in the eighties, the government cut their funding so the company sought corporate sponsorship. She met Dad at one of the meetings. They fell in love and married, then she left the theatre scene to have Venn. When I was eight, Mum returned to work, staging small events for some of Dad’s clients. Four years later she formed her own events company, NOW BE TIGERS! She and Morgan had had a bumpy start, but now they were smashing it.
I hadn’t brought My One Redeeming Affliction with me, but I found Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde on Dad’s bookshelves and spent the rest of the day reading it. Later in bed, nightmares of transforming into the maniacal Mr Hyde, and committing heinous acts, had me tossing and turning. I woke early Sunday morning with my sheet in a ball on the ground, half-believing Nicole Parker had been well within reason for asking me if I was the beast. My nub was tender but I was afraid to measure it again. At the breakfast table Mum noticed that I kept touching myself, and I told her I had a sore back.
After a hearty breakfast of French toast, Mum drove Venn and me to the Zen Gardens to help find a new backyard feature. She was immediately drawn to a granite Buddha, whose expansive stomach was being tickled by reeds. Disregarding the expense of chartering a helicopter to airlift him into our backyard, Mum began recording the Buddha’s dimensions with her FatMax®. Venn and I walked to the Pool of Eternal Bliss, which turned out to be a murky pond teeming with koi and a couple of scary eels. We crossed a stone bridge onto a miniature island, and I threw a pebble into the water.
‘Don’t do that!’ Venn pulled me back. ‘You’ll traumatise them.’
‘Settle down. Fish love me,’ I said, then thought about little Pinky losing his tail in the school’s tank and left the fish alone.
‘The koi symbolises perseverance in times of adversity, because it can swim upstream like salmon,’ Venn said. ‘It’s also a charm for marital bliss.’
‘Maybe we should buy one for Mum and Dad at the gift shop?’
‘Too late. Mum told me she wouldn’t take him back in a million years,’ Venn said, extracting another Jenga block from my wobbly tower of false hope.
‘I thought it was a trial separation.’
‘They used that term to ease everybody into the idea that we’re no longer a family unit.’
The truth hurts in different ways. Sometimes it’s a slap in the face. Today it was an elephant sitting on me and sharting. And still I persisted. ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘That’s the burning question.’
‘He made some mistakes that can’t be fixed.’
‘He didn’t do anything that bad.’
Venn shrugged. ‘That would be from his perspective, and I’m not going to argue against it. You have to live with him.’
‘Why are you acting like fucking Switzerland when it’s so obvious you hate him? You know something I don’t. Tell me what it is. I beg you.’
Venn walked back over the bridge and I followed her to a little bench shaded by a Japanese maple. We sat down. She prefaced what she was about to say with a warning that it would change the way I felt about my father forever. And then she let it all out.
After Mum’s fiftieth, one of the guests, who’d asked to remain anonymous, told Mum that she’d passed Dad’s study on the way to the bathroom and had caught sight of Dad in there with Maëlle. Apparently it looked like they were doing something they shouldn’t have been, but she couldn’t be certain. Mum questioned Dad directly and at first he was affronted but then he laughed, dismissing it by saying that he’d taken Maëlle there to sign a birthday card. His response only made Mum more suspicious, so she asked Maëlle to leave. Venn knew nothing about the reported sighting and took Dad’s side because she was so upset that Mum had evicted her friend for no reason. Maëlle had promised to update Venn on her travels, but the emails were brief and impersonal. The tension between Venn and Mum became close to unbearable for both of them while Venn was studying for the HSC, so Mum told her what the guest had revealed. Venn sent about ten emails to Maëlle asking if the allegations were true. Eventually she responded.
Maëlle confirmed that Dad had taken her to the study to sign the birthday card but then he’d complained of a sore neck from the tension of preparing the party. She offered to give him a massage. He accepted. One thing led to another and they’d shared a kiss. She confessed that she’d been attracted to my father from the moment he picked her up at the airport, and then felt something building between them. But the kiss was an isolated incident – a one-off. A terrible mistake that she wished she could take back and would forever feel remorse for. Maëlle said that she and Dad had made a pact never to tell anybody, and now she’d broken it. She pleaded with Venn to keep the secret. Venn showed Mum the email, and the next day Mum told my father to leave or she would.
Venn showed me Maëlle’s confession on her phone. I wanted to throw it into the Pool of Eternal Bliss. Instead I said, ‘That’s totally fucked up.’ I felt betrayed, to varying degrees, by everybody involved in the drama. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘We wanted to protect you from it.’
‘I’m always the last to know. Don’t tell anybody I do, though. I can’t deal with this right now.’ We walked back to the entrance and found Mum, still examining the Buddha.
‘I need your help,’ she said. ‘I can’t decide between this big guy and the water feature over there.’ She pointed to a stone bowl on a plinth that was overflowing with water pouring down from a spout above it.
‘Water bowl,’ I said.
‘I was leaning towards Buddha. We could have our own little meditation garden out the back.’
‘That thing’s gargantuan.’
‘Darling, he’d be dwarfed by the angophora.’
‘Mr Harris won’t like it,’ Venn said.
‘Then he might stop gawking over the fence.’
Mum ordered the Buddha statue, but I doubted it would bring the serenity she hoped for.
Late in the evening, as we drove from Signal Bay back to the city, I asked Mum if Nana Locke had bought the rescue dog because she was lonely without Pop.
‘I think so,’ she said. ‘Tippi yaps a lot but your nana adores her.’
Travelling through the harbour tunnel, I pondered my own sense of isolation and realised I was stuck in a limbo between Signal Bay and Kings Cross – and neither felt like home. It wasn’t the geographic separation that made me feel lost, so much as the emotional distance between my parents.
Mum asked if I was all right as we approached the flashing Coca-Cola sign.
‘I’m fine,’ I said, distracted by one of its malfunctioning lights.
Mum turned into Kings Cross Road and pulled over. ‘Promise you’ll tell me if anything’s bothering you.’ The driver behind blasted his horn. ‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow – okay?’ She leant over and kissed my cheek. ‘Love you.’
‘Love you too,’ I said as I got out.
Standing on the footpath was an overweight guy with a comb-over, wearing a yellowed singlet and threadbare grey trackies devoid of elastic. He was staring at an illuminated rolling billboard that featured a blonde babe in a blue bikini biting into a Cornetto®, between ads for Vodafone® and home insurance. Each time the beautiful girl rolled away, he waved and his pants dropped to the pavement.
‘Good evening, Master Locke,’ Frank said as I walked into the lobby. ‘How was your weekend?’
‘Okay. Who’s the guy outside?’
‘You mean Leonard? He’s harmless. Been around these parts for yonks. They call him Loose Pants Lenny. He’s had the same pair since I’ve known him.’
‘Why doesn’t he get new ones?’
‘Wouldn’t have anything to keep himself busy.’