Good Little Liars Read online

  ‘Tonight?’ The idea made her feel giddy.

  ‘Of course tonight. It’s a Spanish band. They’re here touring. A kind of mix of flamenco and a bit of rock. I heard them in Hanover once. They’re quite big in Europe.’

  ‘Alright,’ said Emma. She hesitated. ‘Clem – could I see if Marlee wants to come too? She might not be free, but it’s the sort of thing I think she’d like.’ Well, at least it was before she was feeling so sick. Still, Marlee would make her feel safer in Clementine’s company. What if Clementine had expectations?

  ‘Sure. How about I meet you guys at the pub. They’re on at The Emperor. About eight?’

  ‘Okay.’ Emma got off the phone, her heart beating with excitement. When she’d said goodbye to Clementine last time, she’d felt awkward, not knowing what to say when the car had pulled to a stop out the front of the house. But Clementine had been breezy, as if the whole thing at the top of the mountain had never happened. It had been a relief that she’d made it so easy, but inexplicably Emma had also felt an adolescent sense of rejection. She couldn’t stop thinking about the kiss. A couple of times the memory had caught her so unexpectedly, she found herself blushing. It gave her a secret thrill. Did she really do it? Then she would worry – did that mean she was a lesbian? It didn’t make sense. She’d never even looked twice at a woman before that very moment in the car with Clementine. She was completely and utterly straight. Not even slightly bisexual. But why had she liked the kiss so much? Perhaps it was because she hadn’t been kissed for so long. Phillip hardly ever kissed her properly. She remembered how much she used to like kissing boys, then after she met Phillip and they’d been together for a few years, kissing seemed to have fallen away. No, that wasn’t true. Emma had stopped letting Phillip kiss her. His kisses were only ever a signal that he wanted sex and they were so slobbery and insistent. Which left only sex. So primordial. All that grunting and shunting and panting – often it just seemed plain silly. But maybe kissing and sex wouldn’t always be so disappointing. Maybe it was just how it was with Phillip.

  She sighed, looking around at all the work she needed to do to set up the cottage. But the boxes weren’t going anywhere. She picked up the phone and dialled Marlee’s number, but it went to voicemail. She hung up and tapped out a text message, asking Marlee if she wanted to join her and Clementine at the pub.

  Seventeen

  Harriet

  ‘Scarlett’s arriving at three o’clock on Friday,’ said Harriet as she pressed the button on her keys to unlock her car.

  Ben was shoving a bag of garbage down into the bin behind the front fence. It was a small bag. He mustn’t be eating at home. When he didn’t answer, Harriet went on.

  ‘I’ll be in court. You’ll need to pick her up.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Ben. ‘I’ll move a couple of things around. I can’t wait to see her.’

  He looked as if he wanted to say something else. Harriet waited.

  ‘We need to do something about the house, Harriet. What if I organise a couple of real estate agents to come and do a valuation? It’s time we thought about sorting things out.’

  ‘Scarlett hardly needs the family home ripped out from underneath her this week, Ben. She hasn’t even been told that we’re separated! For goodness sake, you’re not thinking straight. She needs somewhere to live when she starts university – the granny flat was supposed to be for her!’ Harriet felt the unfairness of the situation folding in on her.

  This house, and Scarlett in the granny flat, that was what they’d talked about, planned for. It was part of their future life together. Scarlett would study arts/law at University of Tasmania. She’d still be at home, but she’d have the independence of her own place in the granny flat. She could get work experience with Harriet. It was what they’d both imagined their family journey would be, until Ben decided at some indeterminate time that he wanted to travel a different road. One that had diverted from hers when she hadn’t been paying attention. He was pulling all their plans apart over a tiny slip road that wasn’t even signposted.

  ‘Harriet, please.’ He said it calmly, as if he were pacifying a toddler having a tantrum. How dare he look so superior.

  She squared her shoulders, straightening her posture. ‘Don’t patronise me, Ben. I am perfectly aware that at some time in the future we will need to consider dividing our joint assets. I assume you don’t want to live here alone, in which case I will buy you out. You can have the beach house – and we can do a reconciliation of the rest. But I’d like to delay that discussion until we have given Scarlett a chance to accept this new… situation.’

  Harriet opened her car door, then paused. She needed to keep things steady, just until she’d had a chance to let Scarlett settle back in. Plus, there was still a small chance that Ben would change his mind when Scarlett came home. Scarlett was like the glue in the family – something they could jointly focus on. A combined project that unified them.

  ‘I imagine it might be nice for Scarlett if we all had dinner together on Friday evening. Is that alright with you? I know Clementine is free,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Of course. What about I book the Lake House for six o’clock? She’s probably missed Tasmanian seafood. Even with jetlag she should still manage to stay awake for that.’

  Harriet felt a blade of sorrow. She stamped it down.

  ‘Fine.’

  She got into the car and slammed the door. The Lake House. The place Ben had taken her when he was trying to convince her that she should keep the pregnancy, nineteen years ago. That the baby would be the making of them. It would change their lives for the better and cement their love for each other. How could he stand there and talk about selling their marital home to end their life together and then pretend he didn’t remember the significance of that place? He must have suggested the Lake House on purpose. Just to spite her. Well, she would not be giving him the satisfaction of showing him that he could hurt her. She was fine. She was always fine. It was just practice. You got better at it the more you were hurt. It started out being quite difficult – when you first encompassed real pain and were shocked at what another human could do to you. When you found out that it was possible to want to rip off your own skin with disgust. But if you held tight and strong and absolutely rigid, if you became like an iron pillar, you could hold it up. And after a while, the weight of it started feeling like a part of you, until most days you didn’t notice it too much. Some days you felt almost normal.

  She backed out of the driveway. Friday was several days away. She would just do one day at a time. Today she was going to the gym then using the weekend quiet of the office to focus on writing a detailed advice for a new brief she’d received last week.

  Harriet’s phone rang. Mary Andrews flashed onto the dashboard screen and Harriet cringed. Her mother had perfect timing, as ever. She put the call on speaker.

  ‘Hello, Mother.’

  ‘Why haven’t you been in to see me, Harriet? I’ve finished all those talking books. It’s torture in this place with nothing to do.’ Her mother’s voice was slow and scratchy, but fundamentally the same – as unhappy and critical as it had ever been. The nursing home was not to her taste. The food was terrible. The staff were horrible. They even had men giving her showers. All of it was completely unacceptable. Harriet found herself in agreement with the last issue – there was something irksome about the idea of having a young man hand her mother the soap as he watched over the naked indignity of her ageing body. As if it wasn’t bad enough that male doctors had spent so many generations dictating how women’s bodies would be poked and prodded and fixed and stitched – now they were getting in their showers too.

  ‘I’m busy, Mother. I have a career. One that you insisted on because you never had the opportunity, remember? I’ll be in next week, as usual.’

  Her mother sniffed. ‘That girl came to see me yesterday. She’s got black hair now. What happened to it?’

  ‘I assume you’re talking about Clementine, Mo
ther. Your granddaughter. She dyed it.’

  ‘Well, it looked better before. What sort of person cuts off nice blond hair like that? Anyway, she showed me some of her art on the iPad. It’s terrible.’

  Harriet wondered which particular works Clementine had been showing off. It probably didn’t matter. Her mother would think all of it was terrible. There were no still-life pears or impressionist landscapes in Clementine’s repertoire.

  ‘That’s not a nice thing to say about your own granddaughter’s work, Mother. She’s very famous these days. People pay a lot of money for her work.’

  ‘Funny sort of work if you ask me. You paid a king’s ransom for her to go to that ghastly school full of social climbers, and now look how she’s repaid you. Painting for a living.’

  Harriet was expected to say something that would validate her mother’s disappointment at Clementine’s existence. She was tired of the game. She looked in the rear vision mirror and changed lanes.

  Her mother kept talking. ‘Don’t know how she possibly got so famous with those ugly things she paints. But I saw her on television twice last week. That’s how I knew she was in Tasmania. The ladies here didn’t believe she was my granddaughter, so I sent her a message on the Facebook to tell her to come in. Now they believe me.’ Her mother sniffed again and paused, considering the social coup she’d pulled off. ‘Not that she stayed very long. Said she had to go to a meeting with a man about some big art festival coming up. What was she on about?’

  ‘I assume it’s the Dark Mofo festival in June, Mother,’ sighed Harriet. ‘They put all sorts of subversive artworks around the city and throw in a few pagan rituals and so on.’

  ‘What sort of rituals?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. A nude ocean swim at dawn. That sort of thing.’

  ‘It’s freezing in June. What idiot thought of that?’

  ‘Who knows?’ said Harriet, tiredly. ‘I need to go, Mother.’

  ‘Well I need some more boiled sweets next time you come in. And some good fruit. They only have apples and bananas in the bowls here, and they’re old.’

  ‘Alright.’ Harriet felt a heavy exhaustion suddenly envelope her. And there was something else too – a bewildering mixture of sadness and surprise that her daughter and her mother had finally spent some time together without her having to orchestrate it. Her mother had had as little to do with Clementine as she possibly could since the day she was born. It was surprising that she’d gotten in touch with her at all.

  Mary Andrews blamed Clementine, and her untimely birth, for Harriet’s fall from grace at school. Harriet had been allowed to stay on at Denham House when it became obvious she was pregnant, but it had taken some lobbying. She was going to be close to her due date at graduation, and her mother had written scathing letters to the principal, threatening all sorts of bizarre actions if the school didn’t let her finish. It had been a risky tactic, since Harriet had been the holder of a full scholarship, and her mother was a single and virtually penniless seamstress. And to be fair to the principal, on the face of it, it had been difficult to refute the school’s claim that she had brought their reputation into disrepute by becoming pregnant, thus breaching the terms of her scholarship.

  But Mary had a way with words and Harriet had also had the support of several teachers. It had helped that the headmaster had been a forward-thinking man who understood that in modern times, girls needed education more than ever and that Denham House may eventually benefit, if Harriet would promise to continue on to university and remember where she had been given her start. She was, after all, their brightest student in a decade. A ‘once-in-a-generation’ brain, as her English teacher had put it. In the end, they had let her stay. The headmaster had called her into his office and made her promise that she would continue to study hard and do something extraordinary with the education they had afforded her, so that she might redeem their good name. Harriet had been grateful.

  But her mother had never gotten over the fact that she hadn’t been awarded the dux of the school. The award was rightfully hers, given her near perfect results in all subjects. But having Harriet’s name on the Honour Board for generations to come was one step too far for a school turning out bright young ladies for the next generation. It was 1975 after all, and the powers-that-be still expected purity along with all that shining brightness.

  Harriet’s swollen belly was a rude reminder to the conservative parent body, pockets lined discreetly with old money, that Harriet wasn’t one of them. She was just a girl from the wrong side of the tracks whose education they had generously offered to support through their school endowment fund, and who had squandered a rare privilege. Silly little slut. They would enunciate the word carefully, the ‘t’ as sharp as a pistol shot. It was testament to their good breeding, never mind that they themselves may originally have descended from convicts.

  Still, they said to each other, the situation was only to be expected. There was no father to be seen and the mother was a bra-burning shrew.

  A more objective observer, thought Harriet, might have described her background as one of ‘genteel poverty’. Despite the overgrown garden and the cracked concrete balcony on their tiny, mould-filled bungalow that was constantly threatening to fall away from the house, inside the house the shelves were filled with books of poetry and plays by Shakespeare and classic novels by Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf and Miles Franklin. Her mother may have been bitter and unstable, but she was also fiercely intelligent and insistent that her daughter would receive the university education she herself had always coveted.

  Harriet ended the call to her mother, promising she would bring grapes, kiwi fruit and new audiobooks next week. She had a headache. Her mother’s calls brought one on every time.

  Eighteen

  Marlee

  Marlee read Emma’s text message. She felt the twinge of anxiety in her gut. Or maybe it was the morning sickness again – although inexplicably it seemed more prone to appearing in the afternoon. An evening at the pub with Clementine Andrews and Emma. Did she feel like going? Her brain was thick with exhaustion and having trouble taking hold of the idea. She pictured the idea floating on a lily leaf into the middle of a murky pond, beyond reach. What she really wanted was a drink. A crisp glass of Sauvignon Blanc with a hint of citrus and undertones of a sunny warm day when her life hadn’t been so complicated. Her hand went to her stomach and rested there. Was it possible the baby would be alright? In the last few days she’d allowed herself to feel a tug of excitement every time she passed a person pushing a pram in the street. That could be her at Christmas time.

  The pub, even if she did have to stick to drinking water, might stop her thinking about how she was going to manage to keep the baby and still keep her job working with Ben. He was hardly going to want a baby at his stage of life.

  She picked up the phone and sent a return text.

  The band sounds good. Pick me up?

  As Emma drove them towards the city, Marlee kept putting her hand on her stomach, then taking it away as soon as she realised it was there. It seemed to be an instinctive thing, the hovering hand. She had another appointment with Anna-Beth in a couple of days and needed to make up her mind. She’d been rolling the idea of a termination around in her head. She wasn’t exactly sure of the laws in Tasmania about abortion, but there was always a loophole for doctors to take into account the mother’s mental state, wasn’t there? She was definitely freaked out. There must be a diagnosable condition in there somewhere, however much Emma insisted she was perfect mother material.

  Although, as the days had passed Marlee had started letting herself believe that the tests would come back and show that the baby was healthy. And now, when she looked at her naked reflection in the mirror and imagined her belly expanding, shards of excitement escaped from inside the tightly locked box that housed her heart. But the hope was laced with fear. A proper little human to grow and look after, guide and nurture. What if she turned out to be a hopeless parent? What if the b
aby grew up and did drugs or joined a cult that offered animal sacrifices to the devil? There were plenty of ways your kids could go off the rails if you didn’t pay attention.

  But along with a new baby, she’d need a new job. It wasn’t like Ben had asked for this to happen. She knew it would be a disaster if she tried to work in the same place as the baby’s father, whilst pretending he wasn’t the baby’s father. That was taking devious workplace politics a step too far.

  And it wasn’t fair to thrust fatherhood on him again without giving him a choice. She’d thought about telling him – but she wasn’t convinced she was ready to hear his opinion about it just yet. He did have rights, after all. She wasn’t sure how she felt herself. And it was her body, her life that was on the line. She’d never allowed herself to indulge the idea of having children before – why torture herself with something that she’d thought impossible? Especially because she didn’t think she’d be a very good mother. Emma was much better suited to caring about things like screen-time and vegetables.

  Marlee took her hand away from her stomach and picked up her hand bag as Emma pulled into a shadowy parking lot at the rear of an office building. As they neared the pub, the promising rumble of a good crowd spilled out onto the street. Marlee looked across to the lights of the wharves and noticed the boats bobbing prettily in the light of the full moon. She pulled open the door and they edged their way through the crowd to the bar.

  ‘I don’t know how we’re supposed to find Clementine in this crowd.’ Emma was frowning. ‘I’ll buy us a drink so we don’t look out of place. What do you want?’

  Marlee smiled. Emma looked so sweet and innocent in her mummy outfit of dark blue jeans and ballet flats with a dark green cardigan and tiny pink earrings. With her hair in a ponytail, she looked like she’d just stepped out of an ad for a cupcake packet mix.