“I’ll see you tonight,” she said, leaning over to kiss him.
“Actually, I need to come in to get something from my desk,” said Perry. He opened the car door.
She felt it then. It was like a smell or a change in the electrical charge in the air. It was something to do with the set of his shoulders, the blank, shiny look in his eyes and the dryness in her throat.
He opened the door for her and let her in first, with a courtly gesture.
“Perry,” she said quickly, as she turned around and he closed the door, but then he grabbed her by the hair, twisting it behind her and pulling so hard, so astonishingly hard, that pain radiated through her scalp and her eyes filled with instant, involuntary tears.
“If you ever, ever embarrass me like that again, I will kill you, I will f**king kill you.” He tightened his grip. “How dare you. How dare you.”
He let go.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
But she mustn’t have said it right, because he stepped forward slowly and took her face in his hands the way he did when he was about to tenderly kiss her.
“Not good enough,” he said, and he slammed her head against the wall.
The cold deliberateness of it was as shocking and surreal as the first time he’d hit her. The pain felt intensely personal, like a broken heart.
The world swam as though she were drunk.
She slid to the floor.
She retched once, twice, but she wasn’t sick. She only ever retched. She was never sick.
She heard his footsteps walking away, down the hallway, and she curled up on the floor, her knees near her chest, her hands interlaced over the back of her cruelly throbbing head. She thought of the boys when they hurt themselves, the way they sobbed: It hurts, Mummy, it hurts so much.
“Sit up,” said Perry. “Honey. Sit up.”
He crouched down next to her, pulled her up into a sitting position and gently laid an ice pack wrapped in a tea towel on the back of her head.
As the blessed coldness began to seep through, she turned her head and studied his face through blurry eyes. It was dead white, with purplish crescents under his eyes. His features were dragged downward, as though he were being ravaged by some terrible disease. He sobbed once. A grotesque, despairing sound, like an animal caught in a trap.
She let herself fall forward against his shoulder, and they rocked together on their glossy black walnut floor beneath their soaring cathedral ceiling.
55.
Madeline had often said that living and working in Pirriwee was like living in a country village. Mostly she adored that sense of community—except, of course, on those days when PMS had her in its malicious grip, and she longed to walk through the shopping village without people smiling and waving and being so goddamned nice. Everyone was connected to everyone in Pirriwee, often in multiple ways, through the school or the surf club, the kids’ sporting teams, the gym, the hairdresser and so on.
It meant that when she sat at her desk in her tiny, crammed office in the Pirriwee Theatre and made a quick call to the Pirriwee local paper to see if she could get a last-minute quarter-page ad in next week’s paper (they urgently needed more numbers for the preschoolers’ drama class to help bring in some cash), she wasn’t just calling Lorraine, the advertising representative. She was calling Lorraine, who had a daughter, Petra, in the same year as Abigail, and a son in Year 4 at Pirriwee Public, and was married to Alec, who owned the local bottle shop and played in an over-forty soccer club with Ed.
It wouldn’t be a quick call, because she and Lorraine hadn’t talked for a while. She realized this as the phone was ringing, and nearly hung up and sent an e-mail instead—she had a lot to do today and she was already running late from going to the assembly—but still, just a quick chat with Lorraine would be nice, and she did want to hear what Lorraine had heard about the petition and so on, but then again, Lorraine did go on sometimes, and—
“Lorraine Edgely!”
Too late. “Hi, Lorraine,” said Madeline. “It’s Madeline.”
“Darling!” Lorraine should really work for the theater, not the local paper. She had that flamboyant theater-talk down pat.
“How are you?”
“Oh my God, we should have coffee! We must have coffee! There’s so much to talk about,” said Lorraine. She lowered her voice so much, it became muffled. Lorraine worked in a busy open-plan office. “I have gossip hot off the press. I have sizzling-hot gossip.”
“Give it to me now,” said Madeline happily, settling back and resting her feet. “Right this minute.”
“OK, here’s a hint,” said Lorraine. “Parlez-vous anglais?”
“Yes, I do speak English,” said Madeline.
“That’s all I can say in French,” said Lorraine. “So this is a French matter.”
“A French matter?” said Madeline confusedly.
“Yes, and um, and it relates to our mutual friend Renata.”
“Is this something to do with the petition?” said Madeline. “Because I hope you haven’t signed it, Lorraine. Amabella hasn’t even said that it is Ziggy who has been hurting her, and the school is monitoring the class now every single day.”
“Yeah, I thought a petition was a bit dramatic, although I did hear the child’s mother made Amabella cry and then kicked Harper in the sandpit, so I guess there are two sides to every story—but no, this is nothing to do with the petition, Madeline, I’m talking about a French matter.”
“The nanny,” said Madeline with a flash of inspiration. “Is that who you mean? Juliette? What about her? Apparently, this bullying had been going on for ages and that Juliette didn’t even—”
“Yes, yes, that’s who I mean, but forget the petition! It’s, ah, how can I say this? It’s related to our mutual friend’s husband.”
“And the nanny,” said Madeline.
“Exactly,” said Lorraine.
“I don’t under— No.” Madeline put her feet back on the floor and sat up straight. “You’re not serious? Geoff and the nanny?” It was impossible not to feel a rush of pleasure at the tabloid-type shock of it. Rule-following, righteous, bird-watching, paunchy Geoff and the young French nanny. It was such an appallingly delicious cliché. “They’re having an affair?”