Syringe,
Life here on the pebbles is just grand. One chef sacked for pleasuring a Slovakian slave, another for severing her sisterâs hand in the ham-slicer. Not a good week to be a chef or to be an illegal migrant from Eastern Europe. Iâm just off on a long holiday with the new boyfriend. Following our noses. Here or there. Be in touch.
Merrily, merrily, life is butter dream.
Oceans of love,
Sister Caitlin of the Perpetual Promise.
âMerrily, merrily,â I laugh to myself, remembering the way she always ended the nursery rhyme, âlife is butter dream.â
I lie on the sofa, resolving to be kind to myself. I surprise myself by drifting off to sleep.
The phone is ringing and I wake with a start to darkness, an image of the beating wings of the swan all too fresh from my dream.
âHello,â I say, groggily.
âItâs me,â says a familiar voice at the other end of the line.
âOh, I was sleeping.â
âSleeping?â
âYes, sleeping. Iâve had a day of it.â
âWell, itâs your business when you sleep,â she says sharply. âIâll keep it short. Iâm taking my kids away to Macaroni Wood the week after next and I need you to be around for Lottie. Got it? For the full week. The week after next.â
âThatâs fine,â I say, scribbling a note to myself on the edge of the newspaper on the floor. âIâm not going anywhere. Itâll be great to spend some, what do they say, quality time, with my daughter. Our kid.â
She ignores the emphasis.
âGood, my kids need a break from town. Itâll be a great experience for them.â
âSure,â I say, but my not-yet-ex-wife has already hung up.
Her kids are what really matter to Matilda. Dangerous, moody adolescents from the wrong end of town. Angry kids who have been thrown out of every school around. There are twenty-four places for the meanest, most disruptive boys (and a couple of girls) in East London. The main entry requirements seem to be pimping, stabbing teachers or drug dealing. They are kids everyone else has given up on. The elite of the worst. The joke goes, given the number of these kids in the system, it is harder to get into Matildaâs unit than into Eton. And Matilda is totally dedicated to them. They come before anyone or anything else. I even think they come before our own daughter. The only other person who ever gets a look-in is Christine, her lover, the PhD student, a friend of a friend, who came for the weekend and stayed for life. I had my drinking and my drugs and my work obsessions, and she had her kids and her lover. Never a great recipe for a marriage.
We first met in London when I was on a research fellowship at Imperial College to study the structure of retroviruses. It was in the old Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road. We both reached for the same volume: a new paperback edition of The Wild Palms by William Faulkner. We laughed, talked about the book and its amazing parallel story line. âLike all our livesâ, I remember her saying. We went for a coffee. And that was the beginning. Within six months we were married and Lottie was born the following year. When my fellowship ended four years later Matilda agreed to give it five years in Melbourne, but her heart was never in it. To me it was home; to Matilda it was the moon. Iâm not sure what got her most in the end: the place or me. She couldnât abide the âStepford wivesâ in our tree-lined outer suburb. Any mention of politics, sheâd complain, and their eyes would glaze over; yet talk of renovations (to themselves or their properties) and theyâd be firing on all cylinders. She always said it was because of me that the parents at Lottieâs primary school were unfriendly. It was because of my drunken behaviour that no one asked us to barbeques. The fact she couldnât bear to join in the mothersâ afternoons or working