PART ONE
The Birthday
The first Saturday in June
Callie
Outside the great sash windows, party lights snaked around the sycamores beside her bathroom, and even from two floors up, the pulse of party music could be heard.
The neighbours would hate it – the flash Reynolds family showing off again, Callie Reynolds thought with a grimace, standing ready in her dress and shoes, wishing fifty wasn’t a birthday people felt that a person had to celebrate.
She’d have been happy with a small dinner, but no. Jason, who always wanted the biggest and best, had organised this highly expensive, three-ring circus.
‘You deserve it,’ he’d told her earlier that day, as he’d proudly surveyed scurrying waiters and watched the party organiser ticking off cases of expensive wine. ‘We’ve worked hard for this life.’
Callie had leaned into her handsome husband – everyone said they were a stunning couple – and murmured thank you.
Mentally, she was thinking: but what if, after all the hard work, you find you don’t really like this life after all?
Still bathed in the party lights, Callie locked the door of her glamorous cream marble bathroom. Bending down, she reached under the sink right to the back of the bottom of the cupboard to find the small cosmetics bag stuffed behind the spare shower gels and old bottles of fake tan. It was an ancient bag, chosen on purpose because Poppy, her teenage daughter, was unlikely to riffle through it on one of her forays into Callie’s cabinets in search of make-up.
Since Poppy had turned fourteen, she had grown tall, nearly as tall as her mother, and was no longer even vaguely pleased with ordinary cosmetics, wanting instead to use her mother’s wildly expensive Chantecaille stuff, which Callie herself felt guilty about using.
A full make-up bag of Chantecaille could keep a family of four fed for a month and still have enough left over for takeaway pizza.
‘I got you lovely MAC stuff,’ Callie protested the last time she found that Poppy had whipped her foundation, primer and pressed powder and had broken the latter.
Poppy, who had her father’s colouring and his utter self-belief, had flicked her long, dark hair out of her perfectly made-up eyes. ‘Your stuff is nicer and I don’t see why I can’t share it,’ she said with the entitled air that shocked Callie.
Where is my lovely, sweet daughter and what have you done with her? Callie wondered.
In the past six months since the radical conversion from Beloved Child into Daughter-From-Hell, Callie had tried everything in her maternal arsenal: withholding pocket money; loss of phone privileges; and the When I Was Your Age talk.
The When I Was Your Age talk had backfired the most.
‘That was years ago, the seventies,’ said Poppy dismissively, as if the seventies were on a par with the Jurassic period. ‘This is like, now?’
Callie had ground her teeth. Poppy’s generation had no clue what life had been like for Callie growing up, or for Poppy’s father, Jason. Sometimes, when she thought of how having so little had given Jason and herself such drive and determination, Callie went with: ‘if you get too many things too young, Poppy, what values are you learning?’
The prepubescent Poppy, the one who loved animals, seals and sparkly nail varnish, might have teared up or let her bottom lip wobble at having upset her mum. The new, unimproved Poppy just rolled her eyes, went back to her phone and ignored her mother for the rest of the day, which was obviously what she was assiduously learning in school from the handful of other, equally privileged kids she was now palling around with.
Not having a clue how to handle this new, tempestuous child was partly to blame for Callie’s need of the occasional Xanax.
Her oldest friend, Mary Butler, a real pal from her modelling days who’d lived in Canada for years and had three daughters older than Poppy, often said:
‘I know it seems counter-intuitive, but making us want to kill them is a part of teenagers’ growing up. It’s how we let them fly the nest, because there comes a point where you think you might just smother them in their sleep when they’ve accused you of being passive-aggressive four times in one day and then demanded to know if you’ve handwashed their pink sweater.’
Mary was in her late fifties, older and wiser, no longer caught up in the hormonal maelstrom of perimenopause. Mary had three girls in college. She was not, Callie reflected, dealing with a daughter currently behaving like a particularly venal child from Game of Thrones.
From being around people like Mary, Callie had always assumed that when a person hit fifty, all knowledge flowed into them, automatically. But she was wrong. Because today, Callie Reynolds was fifty. Fifty! And she didn’t seem to know anything more than she ever had.
All the books on menopause seemed to say her Inner Goddess would be along soon, bringing wisdom, new sex appeal and the glow of a new life, which was an Inner Goddess guarantee. Ha! That was a cosmic joke, for sure. Staring at herself in the mirror, Callie firmly believed that her blasted Inner Goddess had run off and had left the stand-in, Inner Crone, in her place.
Crone had dry skin, got irritable, cried at the drop of a hat and sometimes sweated so much in bed she wondered when Jason would start asking if he could sleep in the shallow end.
Crone snapped at her husband – not that he was around much these days, possibly because Crone was not experiencing the much-vaunted sexual surge but more of a sexual Saharan drought.
Plus, the anti-Inner Goddess wanted a daughter who appreciated what she had and didn’t order stuff from the internet with Crone’s credit card without asking.
Finally, Inner Crone missed her family and tended to cry when she thought of them. Which was the other reason Callie needed the odd Xanax.
It was ten years since she’d seen her mother, her brother or Aunt Phil. Ten years. They should have been at this party. But they weren’t. Because of Jason, and the row and . . .
Feeling the panic rise, Callie unzipped the little bag and popped a pill out of its packet. She washed down the Xanax with some water and took a deep breath.
The Inner Goddess would probably suggest dealing with the family rift as well as talking to Jason about how they really needed to spend more time together as a couple. She’d advise a book on healing herbs and how to get through the tricky teenage years, and to take up meditation.
But Crone liked chemicals to block out the pain because it was easier.
Callie could hear music throbbing from the party two floors below and knew she had to hurry. Quickly, she took stock of herself in the mirror: golden blonde hair perfect, the charcoal silk shift dress with its modern Jackson Pollock-style pattern on the front caressed collarbones nearly as slender as those of the teenage models on which it had been photographed in the magazines.