You need to know, p.1
You Need to Know, page 1
DEDICATION
For Dad
I miss you so bloody much
EPIGRAPH
‘Do you know who sank the boat?
Was it the little mouse,
the last to get in,
who was lightest of all?
Could it be him?’
— Pamela Allen
If Mimi had been asked if she was capable of taking a life,
she would have said, no. Never.
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
PROLOGUE
Christmas Eve
Mimi
She had learned from a young age that it’s never like it is in the movies. For one thing, there’s no soundtrack. In a film, if something dramatic happens, or something horrific or frightening or desperately sad, the music will tell you how to feel. It will swell or thrum or thump. Violins might pierce your soul. A bass drum might crash around inside your ribcage. But the thing is, it changes the whole feel of it. You start to imagine that a terrible accident could be an exciting event. A chance to step in and save the day.
Whereas the truth of this type of situation is vastly different. When she was small, maybe seven years old, Mimi was at a restaurant with her family when a teenage girl at another table started choking. Most people will have seen somebody choking on television or in a movie, but they might never have seen it in real life. On the screen, it’s often comical. The person might be gesturing wildly, eyes bulging. Someone else doesn’t get what’s going on. A hero swoops in and expertly performs the Heimlich manoeuvre. A piece of chicken flies across the room. People applaud.
In real life, it doesn’t work that way.
The first thing Mimi noticed was the silence. She remembered she was blowing bubbles in her lemonade. The restaurant was noisy, chaotic. There might have been a shriek, or the clatter of a fork being dropped onto a plate, but she dismissed these as a normal part of the chaos. Then the hush fell. And from the silence, two or three panicked voices.
All around her, people seemed to have frozen in place. Her eyes were drawn to the table in the centre. A mother and father standing either side of their daughter. The daughter’s gaping mouth. Someone else, an older brother perhaps, leaping to his feet and his chair crashing to the floor. The noise of it landing made Mimi jump in her seat.
And then the wailing started. Everyone responds to crisis situations in different ways. There are the capable types who calmly assess the situation, step in and help. The people who throw their hands up and back away, and the people who fall apart. The mother was falling apart. She didn’t know how to help her daughter, her daughter who couldn’t breathe and was turning redder by the second. And maybe without even realising it, she’d begun to scream. That scream was the most sickening noise Mimi had ever heard in her entire — albeit short — life. She couldn’t say what it was about it. Was it the anguish she could hear within it? The fear? The rawness? It was strangled and it was animalistic and it was frightening and she wanted it to stop.
In the meantime, other diners had converged on the table. Mimi couldn’t see the teenager’s face anymore. Someone had hoisted her out of her chair and now they were attempting to do the Heimlich manoeuvre. But from the frustrated shouts, it didn’t seem to be working. That’s when Mimi’s mum took her by the hand and led her out of the restaurant. Maybe she saw the look on her face, or maybe she was afraid they weren’t going to be able to save the girl, that she might die right here in the middle of the restaurant and she didn’t want Mimi to witness that. They wandered up and down the footpath outside and her mother chatted to her about different things. She couldn’t remember now what they spoke about, but she could recall that sense of knowing. She’s trying to distract me.
Soon there was the wail of a siren.
Mimi never found out whether that girl was okay, but she did think about it a lot. She replayed the scene in her mind as she fell asleep at night. She heard the sound of the mother’s cries and her skin would crawl and her stomach would churn, and sometimes tears would sting her eyes and she didn’t really understand why.
Thirty years had gone by since that night at the restaurant and tonight, Mimi had found herself thinking of that mother again. It was Christmas Eve, so she shouldn’t be thinking about her. She should be thinking about happy things. Warm, feel-good things. Must remember to hang the stockings tonight when we arrive at the holiday house. Was the turkey I bought too big for that oven up there? I should have double-checked with Jill. Did Pete’s brother, Darren, remember to pick up the prawns this morning? And was he smart enough to pack them in an esky with ice for the drive up?
Did we buy enough gifts for the twins? They’re only babies, I know they won’t remember their first Christmas morning. And there’s very little that they need — what with all the hand-me-downs from Callie and Tara. But still, I don’t want them to miss out.
This is what I should be thinking of.
Mimi loved the lead up to Christmas. She always had. The way the world felt different. Not just festive, that was a given. But magical. She still got a funny little jump in the pit of her stomach when a shopping centre Santa waved at her.
So why was she thinking about that woman right now, instead of about eggnog and candy canes?
It was because of the accident on the freeway.
It was just like when that girl was choking in the restaurant. There was an eerie silence. Then, the sound of someone grunting in pain.
And finally, something else. A woman’s tortured screams. She sounded just like the mother in the restaurant and Mimi was thinking: No. Not this again. No, no, no.
But then she realised. The person who’s screaming is me.
CHAPTER ONE
Tuesday 1 December
Mimi
Mimi lay on her stomach on the rug, her sketchbook and pencils in front of her. A bead of sweat slipped down from her forehead and curved around her cheek. She should hop up and turn on the aircon. Summer had well and truly arrived.
The twins were side by side on their backs, both gazing up at the colourful mobiles hanging from their play gym. She should have been giving them some ‘tummy time’, but they hated being on their stomachs at the moment and she rather preferred happy gurgling twins over anguished screaming ones. Not to mention the fact that Elliot had recently mastered the art of rolling front to back. Now, as soon as Mimi put her on her stomach, she immediately flipped back over anyway. So what was the point? If anything, it would only mean Elliot showing off in front of James. What if that created some sort of rift between the sisters? What if years in the future, James was sitting in a therapist’s office, explaining how her inferiority complex first stemmed from the days when her mother placed her next to her capable rolling twin while she stayed stuck on her stomach and screamed.
Actually, they were probably both going to end up in therapists’ offices, complaining that their parents had wanted boys, not girls, as evidenced by their two very boyish names. Which wouldn’t be fair, really. Mimi was perfectly happy with having girls. It was Pete who’d been hoping for boys. He might have tried to hide it but it was bloody obvious. Whereas Mimi, well, Mimi hadn’t wanted any more children at all.
She put down the pencil she’d been drawing with and gave her hand a small smack. You’re not supposed to have thoughts like that, not consciously. Yes, it was true that Pete had been the one pushing for another child, but it wasn’t his fault they’d ended up with two for the price of one.
That was life. It liked to play funny tricks on you. Sometimes they were small pranks. Like when she stayed up until one in the morning finishing her daughter’s school project — she knew she wasn’t supposed to do the work for her, but she also knew that every other parent was probably up late creating the papier-mâché sculptures of the earth too. She knew because she and the other mums joked about it at school pick-up. ‘How did you go with your homework this week?’ Ha ha, wink, wink. But anyway, the next day when she woke up bleary-eyed, her daughter woke with a bad cough and couldn’t go to school, and Mimi realised she could have watched Netflix and drunk wine and gone to bed at eleven.
But other times, it was an extra funny trick. A real zinger. Twins! When your husband convinced you to have just one more baby. That with three children your family will be complete. That it’ll be so much easier this time, because Callie is sixteen and Tara is eight and they’re self-sufficient and they’re great kids and they’ll help out with the baby.
The problem was, Mimi had felt their family was complete. She’d had such an unexpected path to motherhood. As young
Apparently, the reason why not was Mimi’s uterus, which decided it wasn’t going to be so compliant the second time around. And so, they’d gone through years of heartache trying to fall pregnant. That’s why there was such a huge age gap between their two eldest girls. When Tara had come along, Mimi had felt such a sense of relief. Of contentment. As though for years she’d been trying and failing and trying and failing to do this one simple task: bring Tara into the world. And now that she’d done it she could relax. She could breathe again.
She’d thought she and Pete were on the same page about that. But then she’d understood. He was aching for a son. A bit of an annoying cliché really. What could a son do for him that their daughters couldn’t? It didn’t help that he’d grown up with two brothers and was missing being surrounded by all that bloody testosterone. So, despite knowing she was done, Mimi had given in and they’d started to try again. And for whatever reason, her uterus had decided it was back to being amenable and she’d fallen pregnant with the same speed and ease as she had back in her early twenties. Thanks a lot, uterus.
She licked her upper lip and tasted salt. Sweat. Their house was meant to be ecologically designed for environmentally friendly heating and cooling, but she’d never found it to be as effective as flicking the switch on the aircon. She wished they’d put in a swimming pool last summer when they’d suffered through the heat and begun to discuss the idea. But then everything had changed. The twin pregnancy. And of course, entangled with the news of new life was the news of loss. In the end, a swimming pool was the last thing on their minds. Besides, Pete had pointed out they’d forever be scooping leaves from the water because of the bush behind their house. So, in a minute she’d give in and resort to technology to cool herself down.
If she was honest, today had been a pretty good day. Although she did have a new bar for what was considered a good day now that she had twins. But Callie and Tara had both got ready for school and out the door on time for once this morning — without any arguments. And Callie had even changed one nappy for her. That was a particularly big deal, because soon after the twins were born, Callie had made a family declaration that she was never changing any nappies. In stark contrast, Tara’s response had been to morph into a very capable — if a little short — live-in nanny.
The funny thing was, when Mimi was pregnant she’d assumed Callie was going to be the one helping out and that maybe Tara might act out a bit because she’d been replaced as the baby of the family. But instead Callie had been more and more withdrawn lately, spending increasing amounts of time locked away in her bedroom, while Tara seemed to have matured five years in the space of a month. Of course it was to be expected that Callie would go through a teenage stage like this, but it was still a shock because right up until this year, Mimi had thought Callie had somehow skipped the scary teen stage. They’d remained close, right through the start of high school and through Callie getting her first period and pimples and awkward growth spurts. Callie had kept confiding in her and joking with her. But now, along with retreating to her room all the time, she’d become snappy and irritable. It was as if she was a different person.
Meanwhile, Tara was so helpful that Mimi needed to be careful she didn’t start to lean on her too much. She was eight, for goodness sake! She still needed to be a kid and have fun and not take on the burden of motherhood. She needed to enjoy being the big sister. Her responsibilities shouldn’t extend beyond keeping her room tidy, doing her homework, helping out with some family chores.
On more than one occasion Mimi had been slow to rouse herself and climb out of bed in the night when the twins had woken for a feed, only to find Tara already in their room, scooping one out of the cot to comfort her, an expert arm reaching in to give the other a tender pat while she waited for her mother.
And the temptation was there for Mimi to accept her help, to allow Tara to hold James while she picked up Elliot and started warming the bottles. But she stopped herself and sent Tara back to bed. The only one helping her should be Pete. Tara was a child; she needed her sleep. Thankfully, on her way back to bed, Tara always snuck into her parents’ bedroom and nudged her dad awake so he’d know Mimi needed the help.
Mimi picked her pencil back up and had another go at the sketch she’d been working on, but she wasn’t feeling inspired. She was meant to be creating a cute little monkey for a jungle scene and the little bugger wouldn’t sit right in the trees for her. She checked the time. Was it too early for a glass of wine? Often just one glass helped her to relax and get her creativity flowing. It wasn’t even midday. Maybe she could have one later with lunch. That was the upside of bottle-feeding — she was allowed alcohol again.
She’d struggled to breastfeed the twins from the beginning. Both Callie and Tara had been good feeders. They’d latched on in the exact way all the breastfeeding literature described. She could remember looking at other mothers in the hospital having trouble feeding and couldn’t understand why it was so hard for them. She was ashamed to admit that a small part of her thought she was somehow superior because her babies could feed.
Now she wanted to go back in time and hit herself over the head with a breast pump. She wanted to reach back and comfort those mothers, shield their eyes from her smug face as she sat and nursed her daughters. Because now she got it. She bloody well got it. Breastfeeding was not the easiest, most natural thing in the world. It was fucking hard. And her success the first two times had nothing to do with some innate ability she possessed as a mother. It was dumb luck.
And so, the twins had been supplemented with more and more formula from the day she came home from hospital until eventually, her abysmal supply of milk dried up. But she hadn’t cried about it. And she hadn’t felt like a failure. She’d celebrated. Because fuck she’d missed wine.
She felt her phone buzzing in the back pocket of her jeans and slipped it out. It was Jill, her mother-in-law. As Mimi slid her thumb across the screen to answer, Elliot opened her mouth and let out a huge wail, as though she’d been waiting for the right moment.
*
Jill
Dear Frank,
Three Hail Marys this morning. Sitting up here in bed. That’s all I could manage for my sins. I suspect if I went to a priest he wouldn’t think that was enough. And I’m supposed to get down on my knees to do it. But I was tired. And cranky. So three was the magic number today. Besides, I know what you would say: ‘Why are you bothering with that, woman? God isn’t sitting around waiting to count your prayers. He’s got better things to do.’
But I don’t know how else I’m supposed to atone.
Love,
Jill
*
Jill folded up the piece of paper and placed it on her bedside table. Later she’d put it in an envelope, seal it up, address, stamp and post it. A waste of time, but she’d still do it. When she first started, the letters were longer. In them, she would beg for forgiveness. She would tell detailed stories about her days, about the boys. Sometimes as she wrote, spots of ink would be smudged with her tears. But that hadn’t happened for some time now.
She smoothed her hands across the floral bedspread on her lap and briefly considered pulling it right back up. Easing herself down flat again. Closing her eyes and praying for sleep. But she knew it wouldn’t come. Sleep never seemed to come when she wanted it anymore.
She always used to start the day with a cup of tea in bed. Frank would bring it to her. Place it on the bedside table right where the letter was sitting. Now if she wanted to start the day with a cup of tea she had to get out of bed and make it herself.
Most days she hated him for leaving her. She hated that with Frank gone, it sometimes felt as though she’d lost all of her best parts along with him. Her sense of humour. Her patience. Her compassion. Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. They weren’t gone, not completely. They were muted.
