It was as if they had been implanted with a silicone sound-effects chip.
In those far-off days when the boys were toddlers, Nina often found herself, at a mothers’ group, drawn by the gravitational pull of pink fluff to watch the little girls play. They chattered and cooed like a flock of rosy pigeons, plump fingers carefully placing tiny tiaras on dollies, easing flimsy pantyhose over slender plastic legs and negotiating minuscule buttons. Here was a language she did understand. She wished and wished again that she had been given a daughter.
Watching their bent heads, Nina had felt an almost overwhelming urge to take up a hairbrush and draw it through long hair loosed from ribbons and plaits. Hair the pure, burnished colour of childhood—Snow White, Rose Red and Ebony Black. Hair from a fairytale. Of course, she had never dared to be so intimate with another woman’s child.
A screech of pain and a call of ‘Nina, it’s one of yours!’ would jolt her from her Rapunzel fantasy and propel her to the sandpit. She lived in dread that one of her sons would maim a playmate for life. ‘Thwack, swish, aaargh!’
When she was gathering her sons to leave and the last misappropriated vehicle or plastic block had been prised from angry fists, the secret longing would insist upon making itself known and Nina would find herself saying aloud: ‘I wish I’d had a girl.’ She knew that as mothers smoothed and folded tiny pink jumpers against their bosoms, they were congratulating themselves on their own good fortune. Even as they chanted: ‘Count yourself lucky. Girls can be such bitches. Wait till they’re teenagers, you’ll be grateful then. Boys look after their mothers. Girls leave.’
They were hand-me-down mantras from mothers and grandmothers who, generations earlier, had perhaps recognised the particular, exquisite anguish of a woman starved of feminine comfort. But Nina was cursed to live in the New Age, where everything happened for a reason. Every woman created her own destiny. If Nina had given birth only to boys, it was because she had somehow willed it.
Nina slammed the freezer door. She was driving the van to Byron, and that was that. Even if she had to take her sister-in-law Monique instead. Although the thought of Monique packing her crystals, herbal teas, aromatherapy candles and chanting Hindustani goatherder CDs into her straw basket made her shudder. No. There was nothing for it but to get Annie and Meredith to come with her.
She snapped off the kitchen light and then . . . bugger! Nina had lived in this house for ten years and still forgot that if she turned off the light in the kitchen and the boys had gone to bed, she would have to grope her way through the darkened lounge room to the switch at the bottom of the stairs. She felt her way along the edge of the couch with damp fingers and, through the gloom, could just make out the banister.
Twang!
‘Ow, ow, ow! Shit, shit, shit!’ Nina yowled in pain. She’d stubbed her toe on an electric guitar left lying on the carpet. It hurt like hell. She slumped on the stairs and rubbed her foot. The impact had also jarred her bunion, which was now wailing like a back-up singer to her throbbing big toe.
Marko appeared on the landing, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Nina glanced up and thought he looked like an angel standing on the stairway to heaven. She noted he wasn’t wearing his loose cotton pyjama pants. He’d have that rash around his crotch again. Are there mothers in heaven? she wondered. Will they need me then?
Marko picked his sweaty jocks from his bum and grizzled, ‘Mum, can you get me a drink of water? I’m thirsty.’
Four
There was simply no way to appreciate the sheer majesty of the RoadMaster Royale without taking a good few steps back. Two, three, four paces . . . right to the nature strip, from where the truly epic proportions of the vehicle were finally revealed. The gleaming white behemoth looked to be firmly wedged in the carport.
‘Good lord, Nina, this thing is massive! Are you sure you can even get it out of the driveway?’ Meredith retreated further, scraping the heel of her white leather sandal on the bluestone guttering and stumbling onto the street.
‘Of course I can get it out,’ Nina declared. ‘I got it in there in the first place, didn’t I?’
This one was a flat-out lie. In fact it wasn’t Nina who had