‘You have a good day too,’ I tell him.
Daniel
I’m at work but I’m just staring into space. I can’t do anything or think about anything because it’s all got so messed up. Julia is complicated. Claire is complicated. Even my baby girl Mackenzie is complicated, with arrangements every second weekend and every third holiday and every Wednesday night, and phone calls only at particular times, and a whole lot of other rules that Claire’s father’s lawyer sent me before my slippers were even parked under Julia’s bed. I can’t keep track of all the rules, and Claire never tells me in advance what to expect. She’s always making some demand and then referring to the goddamn letter like I’m supposed to have learnt it off by heart or something. And now Julia’s pregnant, and she wants to keep the baby, and nothing will ever be the same. I’m trapped.
I put my head down on my desk.
‘How did I get here?’ I ask myself, but I’m not really asking myself.
I’m asking Claire. But Claire is gone.
Julia
I’m nervous about seeing my mum. And I’m pretty sure Daniel is angry with me – about the baby, about telling Mackenzie’s teacher about us, about his stupid dry-cleaning, about his life. Daniel seems angry a lot of the time, and when I met him, he was always happy.
After that first dinner, it was like Claire and Daniel adopted me. They invited me over for casual braais on the weekend, where Daniel would stand by the fire cooking the meat, and Claire and I would drink white wine and laugh; and for dinners when they needed a ‘spare girl’, or even just for a drink. And I could always make it, because of course my great blossoming romance – the one I’d needed the dress for – came to nothing.
It wasn’t Steve’s fault. It was basically the perfect first date. He took me for drinks at a bar in Newtown with a view across the whole city, and then we moved on to a restaurant in Dunkeld where you usually have to wait three weeks to get a table, but Steve knew the owner. He was attentive and polite and interested in what I had to say. He didn’t order for me, or insist I paid, or ogle the waitress, or tip badly. He smelt good and looked nice. He was interested in a number of different topics, and he didn’t pretend to know about things he didn’t know about. Believe me – I’ve got a long list of things a man can do wrong on a first date. Steve didn’t break any of the rules.
But I was bored.
Suddenly his model-like good looks that I’d been obsessed with the week before seemed a bit dull. He seemed a bit too tall and too muscly, and his eyes were too blue. I found myself thinking that such blue eyes could only result from inbreeding. And though he laughed and joked, his jokes were ordinary. He didn’t have a sense of the ridiculous. He wasn’t at all silly.
At the end of the date, when he leant forward to kiss me, I turned my cheek so the kiss landed awkwardly on the edge of my mouth. He looked at me for a moment, and smiled a bit sadly.
‘Like that?’ he said.
I thought of pretending I didn’t know what he meant. But in the end I just met his (freakishly blue) eyes with my own and said, ‘Yes. I’m sorry.’
Steve nodded. ‘You win some, you lose some,’ he said. ‘I wish you happiness.’
I couldn’t even fault how he handled rejection.
The next day, Saturday, I was so depressed I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t believe the date I’d wanted so badly had gone so wrong. I wanted to tell someone – and I told myself I wanted to talk to Claire.
Maybe I even believed it as I dialled her number that day.
That was the beginning of the time I was Julia, Family Friend. Claire invited me over to lunch with a few other friends of theirs. We drank a lot and laughed and laughed. I tried to picture Steve sitting with me, at Claire and Daniel’s table – but I couldn’t. All I could picture was Daniel. Every time I closed my eyes, all I could see was Daniel.
I told myself it was just a post-Steve reaction. I told myself it wasn’t so much Daniel I wanted, but a Daniel sort of man. It wasn’t Daniel I liked – it was just that I’d realised there was more to a man than good looks. Daniel was about sex appeal and laughter. That, I decided, was what a person should look for in a man. After all, it’s what Claire had chosen, and everybody can see Claire has impeccable taste. Maybe I thought that if I chose what Claire had chosen, I would have what Claire had. At the beginning, maybe it was more about wanting to be Claire than about wanting Daniel.
But the more I got to know Daniel, the more I liked him. And he seemed to like me. He was always so happy to see me, and sometimes when Claire phoned to invite me over, she’d say, ‘Daniel said I should invite you,’ and my palms would heat up and I’d walk with a spring in my step all day.
I’m not walking with a spring in my step now, as I face the visit with my mother.
I almost drag myself through the day, feeling slightly nauseous and tired – but tense and touchy at the same time. I snapped at Gerald when he asked me to show him again how to attach a file to an email, and I snapped at the receptionist for putting calls through
