Like Being a Wife by Catherine Harris

Author:Catherine Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction/Anthologies (multiple authors)
ISBN: 9781742741048�
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2008-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Too Many People

Jansey filled out her name on the ACT Department of Community & Family ‘Personal Safety and Self-Defence Class for Women’ application form in large, bold capitals (‘JANSEY LONG’), noting for the trillionth time what a stupid name she had, and by extension, what a stupid mother she had (‘MRS DEBORAH SANDS’ née Schimek), so that before she’d even got to line two, the address, she was performing stress-relieving tummy-breaths like Bijou, her physiotherapist, had taught her at neck class (‘from the diaphragm, Jansey, from the diaphragm: inhale, one, exhale, two...’), where she’d been sent by her GP after the ibuprofen failed, to learn to control her cramping rhomboid.

She didn’t even know she had a rhomboid until a month ago when her mother’s fourth marriage disintegrated (Deborah was controlling – surprise – so Graham Sands was spending two lunchbreaks in every five at the Best Western Terrace Motel, on the corner of South Gippsland Highway and Camms Road, where he was discovered in flagrante delicto with Tania, the front office manager at Cranbourne Cement & Roofing), a minor detail Jansey gleaned from an email her mother dispatched, touching on a variety of topics including the weather and how nice it must be up north this time of year; a seemingly trivial observation Jansey rightly interpreted as code for ensuing visit.

In the moments before checking her messages Jansey knew she shouldn’t do it. She was just wasting time between packing, stunned she had managed to incorporate so much stuff into her tiny flat (three years of Vanity Fair and People magazines, a drawer full of cosies for her teapot collection, her teapots), wondering where it would all fit at Brendan’s, if it would fit. This was the real reason for her mother’s visit, she assumed, to eyeball the boyfriend. God, she regretted sending that change-of-address notice. Only ten more minutes for the Diet Coke to metabolise and she would never have had that what-the-heck moment and included the woman on the list. Well, at least not for the standard-issue announcement – a photocopied picture of her and Brendan holding hands beneath a childlike drawing of a house, crowned by a linked thought-bubble spelling out ‘cohabitation’ along with the phone number and address. But then she was beginning to understand life was like that, a random set of apparently insignificant happenings that could all line up and boom, before you know it, totally fuck with your composure (or land you in Sydney for a couple of days to rendezvous with your mother, which for Jansey amounted to one and the same thing).

‘Will there be much yelling?’ she asked as she handed the completed form across the desk. Jansey pictured a room full of awkward women, the too-skinny and the lumpy-thighed, all swaddled in unflattering tracksuit pants and oversized out-of-commission windcheaters, standing around in a circle holding hands shouting ‘No’ in unison at their top of their lungs. She didn’t mind the idea of yelling, she could see the sense of auditioning

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