How to Be Second Best Read online

  ‘Lola has ballet on Tuesday, gymnastics on Wednesday, swimming Thursday afternoon and karate on Saturday morning. French is now just Thursday morning. We were worried we were over-scheduling her so we cut one class back. That won’t clash with any of Tim’s and Freya’s activities, will it?’ Helen cocks her head to the side, her eyes wide and innocent.

  I gently grip the edges of my chair. ‘No.’

  ‘Still holding firm about under-scheduling them? Good on you. It’s such a natural way to raise kids. I wish I was brave enough to do it but I just worry she won’t have the advantages the other children at school have. I love that you can get past that.’

  There’s no point answering this in an appropriate way, because that would involve upending the teapot on her lap.

  I take a quiet, deep breath and remind myself that I am a strong, resilient, independent woman and she is a ninny named Helen who married a man named Troy and didn’t realise there was anything funny about that. She still doesn’t.

  Besides, she is sort of right. I don’t take Freya to nineteen activities, because she’s only just three and she’d rather be at home pulling seedlings out of their pots and wedging important bits of her brother’s Lego into the gaps between the floorboards.

  Tim is six and I don’t take him to anything except swimming lessons, because he goes to school now.

  He’s in first class, which seems to be academically roughly the equivalent of what the first year of high school was like when I was a kid.

  As far as I recall, for seven years of primary school all we did was learn to read, and recite our times tables as far as six — maybe up to ten if you’d been tapped as gifted and talented — and do quite a lot of projects about bushrangers, presented on wall-sized sheets of cardboard. Being advanced meant figuring out the spacing of your bubble writing before you crashed into the right-hand margin and had to redo your whole heading.

  It’s not like that any more. Tim has homework every day. He has to do projects that involve more engineering knowledge than is required to build an Olympic velodrome.

  Unfortunately, since he is only six, I have to do most of this, while simultaneously trying to make it look like he did the work himself and imparting enough information about what I’m doing that he can convincingly pass himself off as the architect of whatever hovercraft, cantilevered sports stadium or space vessel we’re constructing from toilet paper rolls and plastic milk bottle lids. That means I have to ‘show the working’ as I go, like some sort of Cyrano de Bergerac of craft.

  So no, I don’t spend a lot of time and money taking Tim to soccer and mixed martial arts or African drumming workshops or Lego classes.

  Handily for Helen and Troy, this leaves plenty of time for me to ferry Lola to all her lessons while her parents are out kicking career goals and ticking off achievements on their five-year plans.

  I realise Helen is still talking, and I tune back in to find her explaining something about refined sugar and the inflammation it causes in young cells, which is absolutely nothing compared to the inflammation caused by her talking about this to me in my own kitchen, where I will be feeding her child for the next ten days out of the goodness of my own heart.

  The girls go to the same local preschool, because a year after Troy had vacated our marriage, Helen sold her place and they bought the house three doors down from me. It made things more convenient for them.

  Lots of their friends admire this set-up. We are generally regarded as the model of a high-functioning divorced couple. I know people have used us as an example to their freshly separated friends. ‘Our friends Emma and Troy split up,’ they say. ‘And they co-parent brilliantly.’

  It’s actually an awful set-up, only made bearable by Troy earning lots of money.

  His bottled juice company — Lord of the Juice, you’ll have seen their chartreuse trucks driving around — has done so well in the past few years that he could afford to give our house to me in the divorce settlement and buy another, nearly identical house for him and Helen and Lola to live in.

  I say nearly identical, but his new place is a superior version of mine. They’re matching Federation houses, like our whole street, but his has been renovated.

  I’m glad for Lola that she doesn’t have to live somewhere awful, and I’m pleased our situation works for the kids, because their happiness is The Most Important Thing, as people are fond of telling you when you’ve been dumped.

  My phone buzzes somewhere on the table and I rifle through several colouring books and school newsletters before I find it.

  There’s a text message from my sister, Laura. It has no words, just a martini emoji and a question mark.

  ‘Excuse me, Helen,’ I interrupt. ‘This is work. I’ve got to quickly sort something out.’

  ‘I totally understand,’ she says. ‘The small business never sleeps!’

  I give her the double ‘you know it’ finger guns as I back out to the hall. I text the phone emoji to Laura and within ten seconds my phone rings.

  ‘Hello, Emma speaking. Yes, right, of course,’ I tell my imaginary work caller. ‘Tonight? Well, it’ll be a stretch but I can manage, if it’s urgent. I’ll start right now and have it to you by midnight. Tell me the brief.’

  Helen mouths ‘I’ll go’ at me and starts an exaggerated tiptoe out of the room. I give her the thumbs-up and a whispered ‘Sorry!’

  She motions that she’ll call me later and I wave to her as we walk to the front door, picking our way through an abandoned Matchbox car rally and over what seems to be an attempt to bring all the puzzle pieces in the house into one mashed-together jigsaw EU.

  It’s very helpful that Helen doesn’t understand how my job works. I am a freelance book editor, and freelance book editors rarely get calls at eight o’clock at night asking them to do something in the next hour. Editing a book takes many, many days.

  Often the many days it should take are squashed into fewer days than are ideally required, but the industry doesn’t typically operate with the urgency of, say, a hospital trauma unit. It suits me that Helen doesn’t understand this.

  When Laura hears the door close, she says, ‘Has that woman gone? Have you made sure you’ve ordered the right kind of air for Lola to breathe next week?’

  ‘Yes, it’s fair trade air. Cruelty-free.’

  ‘Perfect. Not like that factory-farmed air you give your kids. Am I coming round for a drink?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I tell her. ‘I’m too tired tonight and I have to get up early to finish writing Tim’s speech on ecosystems for his news in class tomorrow.’

  * * *

  Before I go to bed, I clear a safe access path from the front door to the bedrooms. I’m not going to put everything away, because it will all be out again within ten minutes of the kids waking tomorrow, but this is my concession to good housekeeping: to make sure we can get out without breaking our necks if there’s a fire.

  I make another promise to myself to sort this mess out next time I get a weekend without the kids. If I had a dollar for every time I had made such a promise I would use all the dollars as kindling and burn this place to the ground.

  With my feet in ballet’s first position I snowplough the toys along the hall and look into my children’s bedrooms.

  Tim is lying on his back, the sheets tucked neatly around his long straight form. Beside him lies one toy, a long-limbed stuffed mouse called Desmond Tutu. Tim sleeps like a vampire in a coffin, with his hands neatly clasped over his chest. He has done since he was a baby. I’ve always found it funny. He’ll wake up in eight hours’ time in the same position.

  In Freya’s room are matching single beds. Lola used to nap here, and now she sleeps over a fair bit, but tonight her bed stands empty, and Freya sprawls on hers like she has been dropped from a plane, arms and legs splayed. Her rounded little tummy rises and falls and she appears to be chewing something in a dream. She is wearing tiger-print pyjamas, and she’s surrounded by a dozen stuffed tigers of varying sizes and s
tyles. All have names, and I am frequently reproached for confusing the tiger called Jonathan with the tiger called Orange.

  Clutched in Freya’s hand, as always, is her prized possession: a copy of The Tiger Who Came to Tea. I had this book as a child too, but it never captured my heart the way it has Freya’s. Perhaps that was because my mother read the whole thing to me, whereas I have glued the final two pages together. I just think it has the wrong ending.

  The story is of a tiger who comes to a little girl’s house and eats and drinks everything they have. When her dad comes home they get to go out for dinner because the cupboards are bare. The next day the mother takes the little girl shopping to replenish their supplies, and they buy a big tin of tiger food, in case he returns. That, in my opinion, is a lovely ending. It’s hopeful. Everyone is happy and prepared and optimistic about the future.

  Then for reasons I don’t understand, there is another page, which tells you that the tiger never again came to tea. Why? Why shut down the possibility of a repeat of what was a terrific adventure for the little girl? It’s such a downer. My kids have had enough downers in their short lives. So I’ve never read it aloud, I’ve made that page disappear, and we are all just fine with that.

  I read it at least twice a day to Freya, and have done for a year now. She’s somewhat obsessed. The book calms her when she’s upset and she falls asleep holding it most nights.

  This deep sleep, the kind where a loving parent can stand in the same room and breathe without waking the children, is a relatively new development in our home.

  As babies, my kids were nocturnal. With Tim, Troy and I spent hours, days, weeks gently rocking him in our arms, bouncing softly on a fitball or, on the advice of one baby health nurse, rocking the stroller back and forth across a rolled up bath towel, a movement designed to mimic the joins in the pavement.

  Tim seemed to have arrived with a finely tuned internal altimeter, and if I ever lowered him to the cot before he was deeply, deeply asleep, a wailing siren would sound.

  I spend my days longing for bedtime, for the constant self-narration of their lives to pause, but then when I see my children like this — asleep, peaceful, quiet — I miss their awake selves. It can be lonely here at night.

  Back in the kitchen I sweep the detritus from the table and into a plastic tub that I shove into a cupboard. I scrub dried-on Weet-Bix from the table, leaving a fresh canvas for the Weet-Bix to dry on in the morning, lock the back door and turn out the light.

  It’s not even nine o’clock. My children now sleep through the night so I no longer feel the pressure to go to sleep immediately — a fact that still thrills me. Less thrilling are my options at this point in the evening.

  I am now the prisoner of my good sleepers. At least when they used to be dreadful at going to bed I had an excuse to bundle them into the double stroller and walk around the suburb in the dark.

  That was useful. Putting one foot in front of the other was soothing to my shell-shocked brain. Some people do a lot of thinking when they walk. I do a lot of walking when I walk. I find it allows me to not think at all. And for the past few years, I haven’t wanted to think.

  But now, at night, it’s quiet and still in my house. I’ve had to find new ways to not think. Books are okay for this, but television is better.

  I climb into bed and fire up my laptop. According to Helen, who would have got it from someone on Instagram, it’s terrible for your sleep quality to have electronic devices in your bedroom at night, and it’s more or less a slow suicide to let yourself fall asleep with a TV show playing.

  If that’s the case, then start digging my grave, I say. The day I stop falling asleep to an episode of a Scandinavian murder mystery will be my last.

  The one I’m watching now is a Swedish show called The Devil’s Heirs. A young detective inspector, Tilde, is struggling to make sense of a series of brutal murders of middle-aged women in their homes. The victims are all single, well-educated professionals. It’s pleasingly chilling and suspenseful, though I find myself distracted by Tilde’s very neat hair. Her curls are casually tousled, yet never frizzy. There must be very low humidity in Luleå. Within fifteen minutes I fall asleep, wondering both how to get my hair to do that, and whether there’s enough Lego still on the floor to injure an intruder if someone broke in to murder me in my sleep.

  Chapter Two

  The next evening I’m scraping the remains of the spaghetti bolognese into the bin. It’s mostly tiny pieces of carrot, which all three children have meticulously removed from the sauce and left on the side of the plate. They’ll all happily eat carrots raw, but they have taken a mystifying united stand against its inclusion in bolognese sauce.

  Why I persist in putting carrot in the bolognese every time I cook it is unclear to me, and I’m wondering whether these thoughts count as leading an examined life when I hear my sister’s key in the lock.

  ‘In here,’ I call.

  ‘I’ve found you a boyfriend,’ she calls back. Laura has never been one for preamble. She started talking to me as soon as Mum and Dad brought me home from the hospital and has rarely paused for breath since.

  I hear her stop in the living room. ‘Hey, guys. Hi, Lola.’ They mutter something in reply, inaudible over the TV. Laura continues to the kitchen.

  ‘Why’s Lola still here?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m going out — which means you can’t stay for ages, by the way — and when she heard my guys were having a babysitter Lola asked if she could have a sleepover. I couldn’t think of a reason to say no,’ I tell her.

  ‘I’ll bet you a hundred bucks Helen and Troy put her up to it,’ Laura says with contempt. ‘Those two can smell a sleep-in a mile off.’

  I haven’t got a comeback for that so I go back to her earlier announcement. ‘What was that about a boyfriend for me? I’m not looking for a boyfriend, by the way.’

  She drops her bag on the floor by the table, in a spot that almost certainly has at least a sprinkling of parmesan cheese and some sauce, pulls out a chair and sits.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Emma,’ she says. She gives the same look of disappointment she has been giving me since I turned her B-52’s cassette into a pile of mangled brown ribbon in a terrible rewinding accident when I was nine. ‘How remarried-to-someone-else does Troy have to be before you’ll accept that he really, truly doesn’t want to be with you ever again?’

  ‘Thank you for your sensitivity at this difficult time,’ I tell her. ‘I know he’s not coming back. But that doesn’t mean I’m ready for anyone else to get the chance to reject me.’

  ‘Oh, you big idiot,’ she says, more kindly now. ‘It’s time to get back on the horse. It’s been three years. I know it’s only been a few months in your huge dumb head, because you believed him about loving both of you and all that shit. But really, it’s been three years and you can’t stay off the market any longer. It’s like property. You’ve got to buy and sell in the same market, or otherwise all the stock will seem like overpriced crap once you finally do start looking again.’

  Laura’s married to a real estate agent. A local one who sells overpriced crap hand over fist.

  ‘This bloke I’ve found you, he’s your type.’ She takes a long drink. Like most things she does, Laura drinks like there’s a timer on her life and if she doesn’t finish before the buzzer she’ll be sent home and won’t get to compete for the holiday in Fiji.

  ‘A manipulative adulterer?’ I ask. ‘My type is a terrible type. I need to move away from my type.’

  ‘No, he’s a very tall vet. I met him yesterday. Had to take Bled in because he ate another part of a brick.’

  Along with her real estate agent husband, Mark, and their three sons, Laura shares her home with a remarkably stupid dog, a fat black Labrador called Bledisloe.

  That Bledisloe is still alive is against the odds. The whole family could travel to Europe every year for what they spend having random indigestible objects removed from that animal.

  ‘
Emma, are you listening? He’s a vet! Remember the list?’

  She means the list we tried to make about fifteen years ago of professions that we thought only attracted good people. We only ended up with one entry. Vet.

  ‘I remember. Tell me about this very tall vet. How tall are we talking? Jeff Goldblum tall? Andre the Giant?’

  ‘Normal tall. Like, six two or something. He’s divorced, one kid—’

  ‘And I’m going to stop you right there. Too complicated.’

  Laura gives me the busted cassette look again.

  ‘Em, you’re going to need to broaden your horizons, or drop your standards or something. You’re thirty-six. Everyone available is divorced with a kid. You’re divorced with two kids. It’s the second go round. Everyone’s second-hand at this point.’

  This conversation always ends up in the same place. Stuck in the cul-de-sac of my stubborn refusal to consider a relationship with someone else who is divorced with kids.

  Laura thinks I’m being snotty. She thinks this is related to my intense dislike of op shops. There is some truth to that.

  In second-hand clothes shops, the previous owners are still, always, present in some way. You can smell them. Or you can feel them, in the worn areas of the jeans or the way the fabric has stretched.

  I realise this is both irrational and tantamount to being an environmental terrorist, because apparently we all need to save the planet by wearing each other’s horrible tatty old clothes, but I can’t help it.

  The same applies to men. I don’t really want a musty, faded man who still smells like someone else.

  I don’t know when I started feeling like this. Back at university, a boyfriend who had already had a few girlfriends was sought after. You wanted someone with few clicks on the odometer.

  At some point though, experience turned into baggage, probably when I was busy being cheated on by my husband. A relationship with baggage, I can do without.

  ‘What about school?’ Laura isn’t going to let this drop. ‘There must be loads of hot single dads at the school. That’s what you’re going to need. Someone in the same boat as you.’