Big Little Lies

“Around the eyes?” said Madeline. “I know. I thought so too.”

There was silence. Celeste stared at the iPad screen. Her fingers drummed on the table. “I like him!” She looked up at Madeline. There was an expression of shame on her face, as though she were feeling somehow responsible. “I’ve always really liked him.”

“Jane did say he was charming,” said Madeline.

“Yes, but . . .” Celeste sat back and pushed the iPad away from her. “I don’t know what to do. I mean, do I have a responsibility now? To, I don’t know, to do something about this? It’s so . . . tricky. If he’d actually raped her, I’d want him charged, but—”

“He sort of raped her,” said Madeline. “It was like a rape. Or an assault. I don’t know. It was something.”

“Yes but—”

“I know,” said Madeline. “I know. You can’t send someone to jail for being vile.”

“We don’t know for sure,” said Celeste after a moment, her eyes on the photo. “She might have misheard his name, or—”

“There might be another Saxon Banks,” said Madeline. “Who doesn’t show up on Google. Not everyone shows up on the Internet.”

“Exactly,” said Celeste with too much enthusiasm. They both knew it was probably him. He ticked all the boxes. What were the chances of there being two men of around the same age named Saxon Banks in property development?

“Is Perry close to him?” asked Madeline.

“We don’t see him so much now we’ve all got children, and he lives interstate,” said Celeste. “But when Perry and Saxon were growing up they were very close. Their mothers are identical twins.”

“That’s where your twins come from, then,” said Madeline.

“Well we always assumed that,” said Celeste vaguely. “But then I found out that’s only for fraternal twins, not identical twins, so my boys were just a random . . .” Her voice lapsed. “Oh, God. What happens when I see Saxon next? There was some talk of there being a big family reunion in Western Australia next year. And should I tell Perry? Is there any point in telling Perry? It would just upset him, right? And there’s nothing we can do about it, is there? There really is nothing we can do.”

“If it were me,” said Madeline, “I’d tell myself that I’d keep it a secret from Ed, and then I’d probably just blurt it out.”

“It might make him angry,” said Celeste. She gave Madeline a strangely furtive, almost childish look.

“With his bastard cousin? I should think so.”

“I meant with me.” Celeste pulled on the cuff of her shirt.

“With you? You mean he might feel defensive on his cousin’s behalf?” said Madeline. She thought, So what? Let him be defensive. “I guess he might be,” she added.

“And it would be . . . very awkward,” said Celeste. “Like when Perry meets Jane at school events, knowing what he’d know.”

“Yes, so maybe you do have to keep it a secret from him, Celeste,” said Madeline solemnly, knowing as she spoke that if it were Ed she’d be yelling at him the moment he walked in the front door. Do you know what your terrible cousin did to my friend!

“And keep it a secret from Jane?” winced Celeste.

“Absolutely,” said Madeline. “I think.” She chewed the inside of her mouth. “Don’t you think so?”

Jane would be hurt and angry if she were ever to find out, but how would it benefit her to know? It wasn’t like she wanted Ziggy to have some sort of relationship with this man.

“Yes, I think so,” said Celeste. “Anyway, the fact is, we don’t know for sure that it’s him.”

“We don’t,” agreed Madeline. It was obviously important to Celeste that this point was reiterated. It was their defense, their excuse.

“I’m terrible at keeping secrets,” confessed Madeline.

“Really?” Celeste gave her a twisted sort of grimace. “I’m quite good at it.”





46.



Celeste drove home from book club thinking about the last time she’d seen Saxon and his wife, Eleni. It was at a wedding in Adelaide just before she got pregnant with the boys, a huge wedding for one of Perry’s multitude of cousins.

By chance, she and Perry had pulled up in the reception center parking lot right next to them. They hadn’t seen one another at the church, and Perry and Saxon had jumped straight from their cars to give each other bear hugs and manly slaps on the back. Both Perry and Saxon were teary. There was real affection between the two of them. Celeste and Eleni were both shivering in sleeveless cocktail dresses, and they were all looking forward to a drink after sitting through the long wedding ceremony in a cold, damp church.

“The food is meant to be excellent here,” Saxon had said, rubbing his hands together, and they’d all been walking up the path into the warmth when Eleni stopped. She’d left her phone sitting on a pew in the church. It was a one-hour return trip.

“You stay. I’ll go,” said Eleni, but Saxon just rolled his eyes and said, “No you won’t, my love.”

Perry and Saxon had ended up driving back together to get the phone, while Celeste and Eleni went inside and enjoyed champagne in front of a roaring fire. “Oh dear, I feel just terrible,” Eleni had said cheerfully as she beckoned over a waiter to refill her glass.

No you won’t, my love.

How could a man who reacted with such rueful, chivalrous good humor to a really annoying inconvenience be the same person who treated a nineteen-year-old girl with such cruelty?

But she should know better than anyone that of course that was possible. Perry would have gone back to get the phone for her too.

Did the two men share some sort of genetic mental disorder? Mental illnesses ran in families, and Perry and Saxon were the sons of identical twins. Genetically speaking they weren’t just cousins, they were half brothers.

Or had their mothers somehow broken them? Jean and Eileen were sweet elfin women with identical babyish voices, tinkly laughs and good cheekbones; the sort of women who seemed so femininely submissive and were anything but. The sort of women who attracted the sort of successful men who spent their days telling people what to do, and then went home and did exactly as they were told by their wives.

Perhaps that was the problem. Celeste and Eleni lacked that peculiar combination of sweetness and power. They were just ordinary girls. They couldn’t live up to the maternal role models established by Jean and Eileen for their sons.

And so Saxon and Perry both had developed these unfortunate . . . glitches.

But what Saxon had done to Jane was far, far worse than anything Perry had ever done.

Perry had a bad temper. That was all. He was hotheaded. Volatile. The stress of his job and the exhaustion and upheaval of all that international travel made him snap. It didn’t make it right. Of course not. But it was understandable. It wasn’t malevolent. It wasn’t evil. It was poor Eleni who was unknowingly married to an evil man.

Did she have a responsibility to tell Eleni what her husband had done? Did she have a responsibility to the tipsy, impressionable young girls Saxon might still be picking up in bars?

But they didn’t even know for sure it was him.

Celeste drove her car into her driveway, flicking the switch for the triple-car garage and seeing their lavish panoramic view: the twinkling lights of homes around the bay, the mighty black presence of the ocean. The garage door opened like a curtain revealing a lit-up stage, and her car purred on in without her having to lift her foot off the accelerator.

She turned the key. Silence.

There was no garage in that other pretend life she was planning. There was an underground parking lot for the apartment block, but the spaces looked tiny, with big concrete posts. She’d have to reverse into her spot. She already knew that she’d smash a taillight. She was a terrible parker.

She pulled up the sleeve of her shirt and looked at the bruises on her arm.

Yes, Celeste, stay with a man who does this to you, because of the great parking.

She opened her car door.

At least he wasn’t as bad as his cousin.





47.



What is this petition-writing woman’s name?” said Jane’s father.

“Why? What are we going to do to her, Dad?” said Dane. “Break her knees?”

“I’d bloody like to,” said Jane’s father. He held a tiny jigsaw piece up to the light and squinted at it. “Anyway, what sort of name is Amabella? Silly sort of a name. What’s wrong with Annabella?”

“You have got a grandson called Ziggy,” pointed out Dane.

“Hey,” said Jane to her brother. “It was your idea.”

Jane was at her parents’ place, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea, eating biscuits and doing a jigsaw puzzle. Ziggy was asleep in Jane’s old bedroom. She was going to give him the day off school tomorrow, so they would stay the night and just hang around here in the morning. Renata and her friends would be happy.

Perhaps, thought Jane as she looked at her mother’s 1980s apricot-and-cream kitchen, she would never go back to Pirriwee. This was where she belonged. It had been a kind of madness moving so far away in the first place. Almost a sickness. Her motives had been warped and weird, and this was her punishment.

Here, Jane felt bathed in familiarity: the mugs, the old brown teapot, the tablecloth, the smell of home, and of course, the puzzle. Always the puzzles. Her family had been addicted to jigsaw puzzles for as long as Jane could remember. The kitchen table was never used for eating, only for the latest puzzle. Tonight they were beginning a new one Jane’s father had ordered online. It was a two-thousand-piece puzzle of an Impressionist painting. Lots of hazy swirls of color.

“Maybe I should move back over this way,” she said, seeing how it felt, and as she spoke she thought for some reason of Blue Blues, the smell of coffee, the sapphire-blue shimmer of the sea, and Tom’s wink as he handed over her takeout coffee, as if they were both in on a secret joke. She thought of Madeline holding up the roll of cardboard like a baton as she walked up the stairs of her apartment, and Celeste’s bobbing ponytail as they went on their morning walks around the headland, beneath the towering Norfolk pines.

She thought of the summer afternoons earlier in the year when she and Ziggy had walked straight from school to the beach, Ziggy taking off his school shoes and socks on the sand, peeling off his shorts and shirt and running straight into the ocean in his underpants, while she chased him with a tube of sunscreen and he laughed with joy as the white froth of a wave broke around him.

Recently, thanks to Madeline, she’d picked up two new lucrative local clients within walking distance of her flat: Pirriwee Perfect Meats and Tom O’Brien’s Smash Repairs. Their paperwork didn’t smell. (In fact, Tom O’Brien’s receipts smelled of potpourri.)

She realized with a shock that some of the happiest moments of her life had taken place over the last few months.

“But we actually do love living there,” she said. “Ziggy loves school too—well, he normally does.”

She remembered his tears earlier tonight. She couldn’t keep sending him to school with children who told him they weren’t allowed to play with him.

“If you want to stay, you stay,” said her father. “You can’t let that woman bully you into leaving the school. Why doesn’t she leave?”

“I cannot believe that Ziggy would be bullying her daughter,” said Jane’s mother, her eyes on the jigsaw pieces she was sliding rapidly back and forth on the table.

“The point is that she believes it,” said Jane. She tried to slot a piece into the bottom right-hand corner of the puzzle. “And now the other parents believe it too. And, I don’t know, I can’t say for sure that he didn’t do something.”

“That piece doesn’t go there,” said her mother. “Well, I can say for sure that Ziggy hasn’t done anything. He simply hasn’t got it in him. Jane, that piece does not go there, it’s part of the lady’s hat. What was I saying? Oh yes, Ziggy, I mean, my gosh, look at you, for example, you were the shyest little thing in school, wouldn’t say boo to anyone. And of course, Poppy had the sweetest nature—”

“Mum, Poppy’s nature isn’t relevant!” Jane gave up on the puzzle piece and threw it down. Her frustration manifested itself in a sudden burst of anger and irritability that she directed at her poor defenseless mother. “For heaven’s sake, Ziggy is not Poppy reincarnated! Poppy didn’t even believe in reincarnation! And the fact is, we don’t know what personality traits Ziggy might have inherited from his father, because Ziggy’s father was, his father was . . .”

She stopped herself just in time. Idiot.

There was a sudden stillness around the table. Dane looked up from where he’d been reaching across the table to slot in a puzzle piece.

“Darling, what are you saying?” Jane’s mother removed a crumb from the corner of her mouth with her fingernail. “Are you saying he . . . Did he hurt you?”

Jane looked around the table. Dane met her eyes with a question. Her mother tapped two fingers rapidly against her mouth. Her father’s jaw was clenched. There was an expression something like terror in his eyes.

“Of course not,” she said. When someone you loved was depending on your lie, it was perfectly easy. “Sorry! God, no. I didn’t mean that. I just meant that Ziggy’s biological father was basically a stranger. I mean, he seemed perfectly nice, but we don’t know anything about him, and I know that’s shameful—”

“I think we’ve all gotten over the shock of your hussy-like behavior by now, Jane,” said Dane deliberately. He wasn’t falling for the lie, she could tell. He didn’t need to believe it as badly as her parents did.

“We certainly have,” said Jane’s mother. “And I don’t care what sort of personality traits Ziggy’s biological father had, I know my grandson, and he is not and never will be a bully.”

“Absolutely not,” agreed Jane’s father. His shoulders sagged. He took a sip of his tea and picked up another jigsaw piece.

“And just because you don’t believe in reincarnation, missy”—Jane’s mother pointed at her—“doesn’t mean you can’t be reincarnated!”

Jonathan: When I first saw the playground at Pirriwee Public I thought it was amazing. All those secret little hideaways. But now I see that had its downside. All sorts of things were going on at that school out of sight and the teachers were clueless.





48.



Madeline stood in her living room and wondered what to do.

Ed and the kids were asleep, and thanks to Celeste, all the cleaning up after book club was done. She should go to bed, but she didn’t feel tired enough. Tomorrow was Friday, and Friday mornings were hectic because she had to drive Abigail to her math tutor before school, and Fred did chess club and Chloe—

She stopped.

She didn’t need to get Abigail to her math tutor by seven-thirty a.m. That was no longer her responsibility. Nathan or Bonnie would have to take Abigail. She kept forgetting her services as Abigail’s mother were no longer required. Her life was theoretically easier with only two children to get out of the house each day, but each time she remembered a task relating to Abigail that was no longer hers, she felt that sharp sense of loss.

Her whole body jangled with anger she couldn’t release.

She picked up Fred’s toy lightsaber from where he’d conveniently left it on the floor for someone to trip over tomorrow morning. She turned on the switch so it burned red and green and sliced it through the air like Darth Vader, taking down each of her enemies.

Damn you to hell for stealing my daughter, Nathan.

Damn you to hell for helping him, Bonnie.

Damn you to hell, Renata, for that nasty petition.

Damn you to hell, Miss Barnes, for letting poor little Amabella get secretly bullied in the first place.

She felt bad for damning poor dimpled Miss Barnes to hell and quickly moved on with her list.

Damn you to hell, Saxon Banks, for what you did to Jane, you nasty, nasty man. She swung the lightsaber so enthusiastically over her head that it clanged against the hanging light and sent it swinging back and forth.

Madeline dropped the lightsaber on the couch and reached up to hold the light fixture steady.

Right. No more playing with the lightsaber. She could just imagine Ed’s face if she’d broken a light fixture pretending to be Darth Vader.

She went back into the kitchen and picked up the iPad from where she’d left it after showing Celeste the pictures of Saxon Banks. She would play some nice soothing Plants vs. Zombies. It was important to keep her skills up-to-date. She liked hearing Fred say, “Mum, that’s awesome!” when he looked over her shoulder and saw she’d gone up a level and gotten a new fancy weapon for taking on the zombies.

First she’d have another quick look at Abigail’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. When Abigail was living at home Madeline had dutifully checked in every now and then on her daughter’s online presence, just to be a good responsible modern mother. But now she did it addictively. It was like she was stalking her own daughter, pathetically seeking out bits of information about her life.

Abigail had changed her profile picture. It was a full-length photo of her facing the camera, doing a yoga pose, hands folded in prayer, one skinny leg propped on the other knee, her hair falling over one shoulder. She looked beautiful. Happy. Radiant, even.

Only the most selfish of mothers could feel resentful toward Bonnie for introducing her daughter to something that made her so obviously happy.

Madeline must be the most selfish of mothers.

Perhaps Madeline should take up yoga so she and Abigail would have something in common? But every time she tried yoga she found herself silently chanting her own mantra: I’m so boooored, I’m so boooored.

She scrolled down the comments from Abigail’s friends. They were all supportive, but then she stopped on one from Abigail’s friend Freya, who Madeline had never liked all that much. One of those toxic friends. Freya had written: Is this the shot you’re going to use on your “project”? Or not sexy/slutty enough?

“Sexy/slutty”? Madeline’s nostrils flared. What was the little witch Freya talking about? What “project” required Abigail to be sexy/slutty? It sounded like a project that needed to be stopped.

This was the thing with the murky world of the Internet. You swam along through cyberspace, merrily picking up this and that, and next thing you knew you’d stumbled upon something unsavory and ugly. She thought of how she’d felt seeing the face of Saxon Banks on her computer screen. This was what happened when you spied.

Abigail had replied to Freya’s comment: Shhhhhh!!! Top secret!!!!

The reply had been sent five minutes ago. Madeline looked at the time. It was nearly midnight! She always insisted that Abigail had an early night before math tutoring, because otherwise she had to be dragged out of bed and the tutoring money would be wasted if Abigail was too tired to concentrate.

She sent her a private message: Hey! What are you doing up so late? You’ve got tutoring tomorrow! Go to bed! Mum xxx.

She noticed that her heart was beating after she pressed Send. As if she’d broken a rule. But she was Abigail’s mother! She still had the right to tell her to go to bed.

Abigail answered immediately: Dad has canceled the tutor. He’s going to tutor me instead. Go to bed yourself! x

“He what?” said Madeline to the computer screen. “He fucking what?”

Nathan had canceled the math tutor. He’d made a unilateral decision about Abigail’s education. The very same man who had missed school plays and parent-teacher interviews and athletics carnivals and preparing a trembly little five-year-old for show-and-tell every Monday morning and projects on big sheets of cardboard and projects that needed to be submitted for the first time online with log-in instructions that didn’t make any sense and homework forgotten until late the night before and covering books with contact paper and exam nerves and the meeting with that lovely teacher with the crazy jewelry who said all those years ago that Abigail would probably always struggle with math so give her all the support she needs.

How DARE he?

She dialed Nathan’s number without a moment’s thought, trembling with righteous rage. There was no way she could wait till the morning. She needed to yell at him now, right now, before her head exploded.

He answered with slurred, sleepy surprise: “Hello?”

“You canceled Abigail’s math tutor? You just canceled without even checking with me first!?”

There was silence.