Kill your husbands, p.4
Kill Your Husbands, page 4
‘It’s the middle of winter,’ Oscar said.
‘Have you packed it, or not?’
He hadn’t, but he nodded, because a nod wasn’t really a lie. He’d duck back into the house and get the sunscreen later, when she wasn’t looking.
She must have noticed he was tense. ‘I was just asking.’ Her throat was hidden by a fluffy scarf. Aviators concealed her thick eyebrows and charcoal eyes. She wore her ponytail pulled through the back of her cap, in a way that Oscar had once found sexy.
He was only wearing a T-shirt under his coat. The cold wind swept up the driveway, slithered into his sleeves and soaked deep down into his bones. The sooner they got out of here, the better.
He dumped the last suitcase into the boot. The three bags were inversely proportional to the weight of their owners. His backpack contained only three changes of clothes and some toiletries. Isla’s bag was twice as big, for reasons that were a mystery to him. Noah’s suitcase was gigantic, crammed with picture books, stuffed animals, changes of pyjamas and a mattress protector.
‘Where are we going?’ Noah asked, for perhaps the eleventh time that morning. He was holding a deck of Pokémon cards instead of the water bottle Oscar had filled up for him.
‘We are going on holiday in the mountains. You are off to stay with Uncle Ken and Uncle Raymond.’ Oscar tried to ruffle Noah’s mop of hair. As usual, the boy shrank away like he expected a beating—even though Oscar had never hit him, not even once, no matter how much the kid deserved it.
‘But why?’ Noah whined.
Isla turned up her collar against the cold. Between that and the sunnies, she looked like a movie star avoiding the paparazzi. She crouched next to Noah. ‘Because Mummy and Daddy don’t go to school anymore, so we hardly ever get to play with our school friends.’
You mean your school friends, Oscar thought.
‘That’s sad,’ said Noah, suddenly a beacon of emotional intelligence.
‘Being an adult is sometimes sad,’ Isla agreed.
‘Being a kid is sometimes sad, too,’ Noah said.
Oscar opened his mouth to say how ridiculous that was. Kids didn’t have to go to work or pay rent. They had endless leisure time. They recovered from injuries and illnesses with incredible speed. They got buried alive in gifts at birthdays and Christmases, and no one ever expected anything in return. Everyone was friendly to them, even strangers.
But Isla got there first. ‘I know, sweetie,’ she said, and wrapped Noah up in a hug.
Oscar just stood next to the car, shivering. He checked his watch; they were going to be late, again.
In their youth, he and Isla had been punctual. When they first met, they’d both been waiting for other people at Chili’s, just off the University of Wollongong campus. Isla had been sipping a Coke, wearing black leggings and a huge purple jumper that revealed nothing of her figure but nevertheless made her hard to ignore. Oscar surprised himself by sitting next to her and ordering a drink; it wasn’t like him. But his eyes kept getting drawn to the side of her face, and he had this feeling that if he didn’t start a conversation, he’d regret it for the rest of his life.
After he introduced himself, it turned out Isla was a politics student, like him. A better one—she spoke confidently about Locke and Rousseau in a way that made him feel ignorant, even though he was two years ahead of her. Whenever her eyes were on him, he felt a glow; whenever he made her laugh, the glow became a fire.
Flowers didn’t seem like a grand enough gesture. Instead he called the manager of The Haters, an indie-rock band from Sydney that Isla said she liked. Posing as a representative of the university, Oscar invited the band to perform at the campus refectory. Then he called the uni, pretending to be the band’s manager requesting permission to perform. He printed posters and stuck them up all over campus. Presumably the ruse was discovered at some point, but by then the gig was already sold out. Oscar had bought the first two tickets, and he offered one to Isla. When she found out what he’d done, she was astonished.
Watching her dance to the frantic drums under the strobe, her face sweaty, her hair flying, he knew she was the one. That night he set up an automated fortnightly transfer into a savings account, so he could someday buy her a ring.
Three years after she graduated, they were married. Two years after that, they were pregnant. (Oscar had always scoffed at couples who said ‘we are pregnant’, but when it was his turn, it really did feel like something that was happening to both of them.) He turned down a job at a consulting firm in Canberra so they could move back to Isla’s home town of Warrigal, where her parents could help out with the baby. During the birth, Isla had squeezed his hand tightly enough to cause ligament damage.
Oscar didn’t think they’d held hands even once since then.
He’d heard babies were excellent mind-readers. They couldn’t understand words, so they became highly attuned to body language, facial expression and tone of voice, to the point where it was impossible to trick them. That would explain why he’d never been able to settle Noah as a baby. The kid would start wailing at 12, 2 and 4 a.m. Oscar would try to feed him, but Noah refused the bottle: the kid only wanted Isla’s breasts, breasts that used to be Oscar’s property but which he was no longer allowed to touch. He would tuck Noah in and pat his back, and sing that fucking song over and over: ‘Found a peanut, found a peanut, found a peanut just now …’ But Noah would just keep screaming, because he could hear Oscar’s thoughts: I should have worn a condom.
Eventually an exasperated Isla would come into the nursery, and the little shit would fall asleep in her arms immediately, sucking his thumb. She would give Oscar a look that said, Was that so hard? Then Oscar would go to bed alone, unable to sleep because he felt like such a failure.
There weren’t many jobs in Warrigal for a guy with a political science degree, but Oscar managed to find work as a real estate agent. During the day he would stare at pre-approval forms, too tired to turn the information into knowledge. His boss, Rick, wondered aloud why Oscar’s listings weren’t selling, while the other agents shot him pitying looks. None of them had slept either—they’d been at Kingo’s all night—but somehow their brains worked just fine. They never lost the thread of a conversation or mixed up the date of an opening.
Oscar tried the foul energy drink they were always quaffing. It gave him heart palpitations but didn’t make him any more alert. He was forced to conclude it wasn’t caffeine and guarana giving those other agents the edge. They were in their early twenties, still at the making-choices stage of their lives; he was almost thirty, already at the living-with-the-consequences stage.
He once suggested to Isla that her parents could look after Noah over the weekend, just so he and Isla could catch up on some sleep and start the week refreshed. She looked at him like he was insane. ‘Mum and Dad are too old to look after Noah for two whole days.’
Oscar was stunned. If her parents couldn’t do childminding, then why the hell had he given up his career to move to this shitty little town?
He told himself newborns were supposed to be hard. Everyone said so. Things would get better as the kid got older.
Now, though, Noah was five and still didn’t sleep through. Oscar still had to get up three times a night, and change the kid’s sheets every day. The house always smelled of piss and was hard to navigate because there were clothes airers everywhere. No matter how often Oscar swept the floor, there was always a sharp piece of Lego underfoot. Noah screamed at the top of his lungs if it took longer than two seconds to give him what he wanted, but whenever Oscar asked him to do anything—wash your hands, get in the bath—Noah didn’t seem to hear, happily munching on a crayon. He wouldn’t eat the vegetables Oscar steamed for him, but apparently crayons were A-okay. After politely asking the kid fifty or sixty times to brush his teeth, Oscar would finally snap and shout at him. Then Isla would come in, and Noah would turn into an obedient little angel, doing everything she said. And she would give Oscar that look again, like, What the hell is wrong with you? You’re pathetic.
Late last year, Isla said she wanted another child. Oscar was floored. He’d thought they were on the same page: life with a kid was miserable, but it wouldn’t last forever. But she wanted to start the whole process again.
‘Why?’ He kept his voice down, to avoid waking Noah. ‘We can’t even cope with the child we have!’
Isla looked startled. ‘Since when?’
‘Since he was born. We’re drowning. The house is a wreck. We never sleep, we never see our friends—we barely get to talk to each other.’
‘We’re talking right now,’ Isla said coldly, and he could already see he’d been wrong. They weren’t drowning: he was.
Noah started screaming in his room.
Isla squeezed her temples. ‘For fuck’s sake.’
Oscar moved for the door.
‘Don’t.’ She stormed out. Seconds later, Noah was silent.
Oscar sat down on the bed, lost for words. Noah was awful, so Oscar had done everything he could to protect Isla from him. He’d changed every nappy. He’d driven the kid around in the middle of the night so she could sleep. He’d taken Noah for endless walks during the day so she could read. Apparently this had worked too well. Isla had been living in some parallel universe where Noah was perfect and the problem was with him.
When she finally came back to bed, Oscar pretended to be asleep. The following day, Isla spoke to him in grunts and wouldn’t make eye contact. But she spoke to Noah gushingly, adoringly. All the love she’d once felt for Oscar was going to him, the little vampire.
This continued for four months. It might not have been so bad if Oscar had someone else to confide in. But his university friends had scattered to the winds, and his family was back in Maitland. He had no one.
No wonder he’d fallen in love with Felicity.
It had started at Dom’s party. Dom had been on the high school athletics team with Isla back in the day, and now worked for a finance company in Wagga. He and Isla had dated, but she refused to talk about it, perhaps because she thought Oscar would feel insecure—Dom was handsome, charming, and frequently invited people over to show off some expensive new toy. This time it was a Tesla. A few months earlier it had been a swimming pool. Before that, a stunning 23-year-old wife named Felicity.
Isla didn’t even seem to like Dom, but she’d accepted the invitation because Clementine would be there. Clementine was Isla’s best friend. She and her husband, Cole, had been on the team, too. Both were fair-haired and muscular—Cole owned a gym, and Clementine was some kind of fitness model. They’d been married for years but were constantly touching one another, as if they were still on their honeymoon. It made Oscar sick with jealousy.
‘And how old are you, Noah?’ Felicity asked. ‘Fourteen? Fifteen?’
Noah cackled. ‘No! I’m almost six.’
You’re fucking five and a half, Oscar thought.
Clementine awwed as though that was the cutest thing anyone had ever said. Cole actually teared up and escaped out onto the driveway, choking out something about wanting to hear the sound system in Dom’s car.
Oscar wished he smoked, so he too would have a reason to get away from everyone. Then he decided he was past caring what anyone thought of him, and he just walked out the back door without explanation.
Dom’s backyard was huge, because of course it was. In addition to the pool, it had a neatly mown lawn, fruit trees, a fire pit, a pizza oven, and four vegetable patches growing heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers and watermelons. Little tags gave the tomatoes the improbable name of ‘beefsteak’.
Felicity found Oscar nursing his third beer on one of several bench seats hidden behind the four-car garage. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.
It felt like a long time since he’d been asked that question—even longer since anyone had sounded like they might care about the answer.
‘Living the dream,’ he said.
Felicity had tangled red hair, freckles splashed across her nose, and big green eyes that seemed to miss nothing. Oscar didn’t know her well—he’d met her a couple of times before the wedding but had been a sleep-deprived zombie. At the ceremony he’d been looking after Noah all night and hadn’t spoken to her. Beyond wondering why rich men got young, gorgeous wives when rich women didn’t seem to have young, gorgeous husbands, Oscar hadn’t given Felicity much thought.
She picked up a mallet from the bench and tossed it, with impressive accuracy, into a bucket. Then she sat where it had been, so close to Oscar that the puffy sleeve of her dress brushed against his arm. Static electricity crackled between them. She took the beer from his hand, sipped it and gave it back. The intimacy of the gesture gave him a shock. He played it cool, mostly because the alcohol had dulled his reaction time to the point where he didn’t seem surprised.
‘I love this spot,’ she said. ‘People walk past the fence having all kinds of conversations. You wouldn’t believe the things I overhear.’
‘Like what?’ he asked.
‘Sorry, not telling.’ She crossed her legs. ‘I can keep a secret like nobody’s business—except when I’m on stage.’
Oscar had heard she was a comic. ‘So you won’t tell anyone, but you will tell everyone.’
She grinned. ‘Exactly.’
‘Keeping secrets is a rare skill these days. People put every thought online. They don’t save anything for …’ Oscar realised he was rambling, drunkenly, to a pretty 23-year-old who probably put everything online herself. He sounded so old. He shut his mouth.
She gestured at the house. ‘You’re a real estate agent, right? What do you think we’d get for this place?’
People always thought their house was worth more than it was; Oscar had learnt it was safest to avoid the question. ‘Thinking of selling?’
‘No. I just wanted to distract you from … whatever’s going on up there.’ She reached out and poked his forehead.
He forced a smile. ‘Nothing’s going on.’
‘You sure? I couldn’t help but notice you hiding in my backyard.’
He laughed. ‘You’re funny.’
‘Nope.’ She leaned towards him, like she was sharing something confidential. ‘Just honest. It turns out that if you tell the truth when it would be more polite to lie, people laugh.’
He could smell the beer on her breath—wine, too. Trying not to look down the scooping neckline of her dress, he found himself staring at his drink. She’d put her lips on the rim of the bottle; if he drank from it, that was practically the same as kissing her.
‘Is it the kid?’ Felicity asked. ‘He’s cute—like a little version of you. But he seems like he might be hard work.’
If only Isla would acknowledge that. ‘I don’t think she loves me anymore,’ Oscar heard himself say.
It was the truth, but Felicity didn’t laugh. Her theory of comedy was clearly incomplete. ‘What makes you think that?’ she asked.
‘We haven’t had sex in months,’ Oscar said. The real situation was more complex, but he wasn’t sober enough to explain it all. He was being way too honest now.
‘You poor thing. You must be ready to pop.’
He sipped the beer, kissing her at one remove. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said, and heard his voice crack.
‘You’re a beautiful man.’ Felicity put a hand on his shoulder. ‘If Isla doesn’t want you, she’s insane.’
Oscar leaned forward and kissed her.
Her lips were soft, and sticky with orange-flavoured gloss. She kissed him back—or he told himself she did. But then she pulled away, and said, ‘Oi!’
He scrambled backwards as if burned. ‘I’m sorry,’ he stammered, but Felicity was looking past him. He turned in time to see an old man’s head disappear behind the side fence.
‘I see you, you nosy prick!’ Felicity stood up and patted the back of her dress; Oscar realised the bench seat was dirty. ‘New neighbour,’ she muttered. ‘Always snooping.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Oscar said, but he was only sorry it was over.
The corner of her mouth quirked. ‘See you round, Oscar.’ She slipped away towards the house.
Oscar sat there a while longer. It might be suspicious if they came back in at the same time, particularly if he had a visible erection.
When he eventually re-entered the house, no one looked at him. At first he was terrified that Felicity had told everyone what happened. But soon he realised no one had even noticed he was missing.
That night, Isla rolled over in bed behind him. She traced a fingernail from his throat down to his navel, nibbling the back of his neck. Relief washed over him. Their rough patch was over. She still loved him after all.
And then came the guilt. He’d kissed another woman—a friend’s wife, no less. Forsaking all others, till death do us part. He had given up on those vows after only a few sexless months.
Turning around in bed, he kissed Isla. Hungrily. Desperately. He would make it up to her. He would be the husband of her dreams.
But as he climbed onto her and parted her knees, something stopped him. ‘Are you back on the pill?’
She smiled seductively in the dark. ‘Nope.’
Nothing had changed, Oscar realised. She didn’t love him: she loved the baby, this new baby who didn’t even exist outside her imagination.
The despair was crushing. He couldn’t stay hard, which Isla seemed to take as an insult. He collapsed back into bed and blamed the alcohol.
There were two more months of frosty silences after that.
Now, as they headed up the pebbled driveway towards Ken and Ray’s place, Oscar realised he’d forgotten the sunscreen. Shit. He’d have a quiet word with Cole when they got to the rental, explain the situation. Cole was Mr Organised—he probably had a spare tube.
Ken was Isla’s brother. Oscar had helped him and his husband buy a handsome two-storey brick house that dated back to the nineteenth century, with pomegranate trees out the front and a bull-nose veranda that shielded the windows from the sun. The two men both worked and had no kids, so they could afford a place like this. They kept it scrupulously clean because they were trying to adopt; the agency might send someone to inspect without much notice.
