Nic is woken by a text from Michelle asking how she is, texts back that she’s great, thanks for asking. Your lovely kids have been taking good care of me, she adds, meaning it but also knowing it’ll grate Michelle’s cheese to think of them all together.
They are lovely kids, aren’t they? Michelle writes.
Nic flicks back some love hearts.
But are you doing better?
Thumbs-up.
Thumbs-up returned.
This is as warm an exchange as the two of them have had in years. They’re not estranged, but not not estranged either. Michelle will never forgive Nic for inheriting Mum’s house; Nic will never forgive Michelle for moving to Queensland. But they both love Lena and Lena loves them both and so, for her sake, they attempt civility and occasionally even warmth.
Nic finds it funny that she has so much in common with her workmates who’ve been through bitter divorces. They swap stories of biting their tongues in front of the kids rather than let them know their parent is a piece of shit, of having to make polite enquiries about the health of the person who ruined their lives.
Of course, it’s Michelle who would find Nic’s inclusion in the divorced parents club funniest of all. Michelle is fond of calling Nic an Old Maid; has said, devastatingly, that she’s been one since puberty. To Michelle this is the ultimate burn. She had her first boyfriend at eleven, first pregnancy scare at thirteen, first marriage proposal at sixteen. Nic, meanwhile, drifted through most of her teens happily unaware that boys or sex or babies or marriages might have anything to do with her at all.
There was this teacher, for example, who tried to seduce her when she was fifteen, but she didn’t realise this is what he’d been doing until she was seventeen. She’d thought at the time he was another adult wanting to prove he was a good person by giving special attention to the girl whose dad was in prison. She didn’t know that there were a half-dozen of them at the school with parents locked up, because none of them, including her, would ever talk about it, and so his targeting of her with daily compliments and questions about her weekend and offers to help on assignments that weren’t even for the subject that he taught (PE, for god’s sake) was not, or not only, because of that misfortune. She didn’t know either that adult men weren’t supposed to talk about the smoothness of teenage girls’ legs or notice their painted nails or stroke their hair and tell them how silky it was. Which isn’t to say she enjoyed it—it made her skin crawl, made her spin on her heel and duck into empty classrooms when she saw him coming—but she didn’t see it as meaning anything. It was just what some adults were like.
At some point the teacher stopped. It hadn’t been bad enough that you’d notice it stopping right away. Just after a while she saw him standing too close to Elissa James, who was backed up against the closed door of a classroom and his face had that I’m really listening to you intensity that creeped her out so much and she thought, Ugh, poor Elissa, her dad must have been arrested or her mum OD’d or something, and when Elissa left school soon after Nic assumed that she’d been right, something awful had happened at home. Then she didn’t think about the teacher or Elissa or any of it again until a year or so later when it was all over the news that Elissa was expecting the teacher’s kid. Her parents and his wife wanted him prosecuted but Elissa was eighteen and wouldn’t cooperate in any inquiry about what had happened before that, so there was nothing anyone could do.
‘That coulda been me,’ Nic told Michelle while they were watching the story on 60 Minutes.
‘You wish.’
‘He wished. He tried it on me before her.’
‘Yeah, right. Look how pretty she is.’
‘She’s no prettier than Nicky,’ Mum, who had crept in behind them, said. ‘Quite plain, really. That’s what creeps like him look for, though. Girls who’ll be grateful for the attention.’
Michelle smirked at that, but Nic felt good. She’d not felt a bit of gratitude to the old perve. Not a teensy-tiny bit.
The first time she noticed she was wanted and that she wanted someone else was when she was twenty. Tony. He was a mess of a man—always drunk or high or both, always broke. Often in debt to people who thought nothing of pulling a knife to settle an argument or smashing someone in the back of the head with a rock over a perceived disrespectful look. The latter happened to a friend of Tony’s. The man, whose name she couldn’t remember, lived but was, as they said, not all there after that. The former, well, that actually happened to Tony—he was fine, the knife nicked his breastbone, gave him a proper scar—but it also happened to another man fifteen years earlier and that man died. In that case, the knifeman wasn’t someone Tony owed money to but her own daddy. The two cases had nothing to do with each other except in the murk of Nic’s guts whenever Tony begged money off her to pay someone who might otherwise get nasty.
The begging didn’t bother her so much. She was richer than she ever imagined being, having a job at the local discount department store which paid just okay normally but time and a half on nights and weekends, which was mostly when she worked back then. She was living with Mum still, paying a bit of rent and helping with the bills, but nothing like she would have to pay if she moved out—and why would she when Michelle was gone, already moved in with Joe, and Mum kept to her own self and it was an easy stroll to work and with Tony to pick her up after late shifts.
So if Tony needed fifty bucks here and a hundred there it wasn’t a big deal. But she knew already at twenty that people don’t change, not really. If anything, they become more and more themselves. Eventually he would run up a debt that she couldn’t pay and the knife would not nick his breastbone but sink deep into his heart or guts. Or he would, as he sometimes threatened when he was drunk and trying to prove how big his balls were (as though she didn’t know their exact size, having rolled them in her mouth with great care), use a knife of his own to put a stop to the hounding.
The thing that kept her hanging in there as long as she did was that they loved each other. It was a difficult thing to explain and so she didn’t try. But from the first time he’d caught her eye across the pool table she’d felt it—oh! This!—and that night they’d kissed in the car park, him pushing her against the brick wall and her wanting him to, and her favourite red top which she hand-washed in the sink with shampoo because it was that delicate all snagged in the back from rubbing against those rough bricks and she didn’t even care because it was the night she met her person, the one who made her feel the way she didn’t know a big-hipped, plain-faced daughter of a killer could feel. Like a girl in a movie. Like the girl, the one that you know will be happy ever after because how could anyone not cherish the living hell out of her?
It’s hard to let go of someone who makes you feel that way. Her friend Asha said there’s plenty more fish in the sea and you’re hot you’ll find someone else in a minute and you can do so much better and she knew it was true but also that, in a way, it wasn’t. Because they loved each other and what was better than that? What could be?
But she was nothing if not sensible and self-sufficient and other shit that girls like her had to be even (especially) when someone was making them feel like they were a different kind of girl, the kind who would always be taken care of. She ended it. He begged. Cried. Shouted. Carved her name into his arm with a penknife. This last made it easier to go.
There had been other men she liked and who liked her. A couple who she might have married if they’d asked, but they didn’t, and she wasn’t mad enough about them to push the issue. It was more like, well, if he wants to I can’t see the harm. That was all in her twenties, though. By her thirties she was asked out less often and accepted few of those who did ask. She’d had enough sex to know that at least half the time it wasn’t worth the effort, and when it was it could make you loopy, make you feel like your life wasn’t whole anymore without the sex and the man. How many women, in her own bloody family alone, had let that loopiness become their driving force? How many good women ruined by being unable to let go of a really good fuck?
She has tried to get this through to Lena. Enjoy yourself but don’t get caught up. Be open to romance but don’t chase it. Know you’re worth fifty of almost every man alive, and if you meet the rare bloke who’s your equal don’t you dare be grateful for his attention. At least no more than he is for yours.
She remembers now that Lena had a crush on some rich looker from uni before all this nonsense began. Sends her a quick text: Whatever happened with thigh-boy? Any progress?
Lena doesn’t answer right away, which is fine, but when she does text a few hours later it’s to say she won’t be in today—too much exam prep. Nic takes the silence to mean things didn’t work out with the farm stud. It’s the family way: no answer is the answer. Nothing to talk about, move on.