Big Little Lies

by Liane Moriarty

You hit me, you hit me, now you have to kiss me. Schoolyard chant

Mothers took their mothering so seriously now. Their frantic little faces. Their busy little bottoms strutting into the school in their tight gym gear. Ponytails swinging. Eyes fixed on the mobile phones held in the palms of their hands like compasses. It made Mrs Ponder laugh. Fondly, though.

As she drove the familiar route to the school, she considered her magnificent new age. Forty. She could still feel ‘forty’ the way it felt when she was fifteen. Such a colourless age. Marooned in the middle of your life. Nothing would matter all that much when you were forty. You wouldn’t have real feelings when you were forty, because you’d be safely cushioned by your frumpy forty-ness. ‘Forty-year-old woman found dead.’ Oh, dear. ‘Twenty-year-old woman found dead.’ Tragedy! Sadness! Find that murderer! Madeline always had to do a minor shift in her head when she heard something on the news about a woman dying in her forties. But, wait, that could be me! That would be sad! People would be sad if I was dead! Devastated even. So there, age-obsessed world. I might be forty, but I am cherished.

If the woman had been a toothless, warty-nosed crone she would have continued to feel resentful? The injustice of it. The cruelty of it. She was going to be nicer to this woman because she liked her freckles.)

Everyone wanted to be rich and beautiful but the truly rich and beautiful had to pretend they were just the same as everyone else. Oh, it was a funny old world.

Jane saw that Madeline’s feelings about Jane’s baking were similar to Jane’s feelings about Madeline’s accessories: confused admiration for an exotic sort of behaviour.

It drove her to distraction the way women wanted to bond over self-hatred.

It had never crossed her mind that sending your child to school would be like going back to school yourself.

It wasn’t her dream job, but she did quite enjoy the satisfaction of transforming a messy pile of paperwork into neat rows of figures. She loved calling up her clients, who were now mostly small business people like Pete, and telling them she’d found a new deduction. Best of all, she was proud of the fact that she’d supported herself and Ziggy for the last five years without having to ask her parents for money, even if it had meant that she sometimes worked well into the night while he slept. This was not the career she’d dreamed of as an ambitious seventeen-year-old, but now it was hard to remember ever feeling innocent and audacious enough to dream of a certain type of life, as if you got to choose how things turned out.

She knew that Jane supported herself doing bookkeeping work. Celeste imagined her sitting at a tidy desk in her small, bare apartment. (She hadn’t been there, but she knew the block of plain red-brick apartments on Beaumont Street down by the beach, and she assumed the inside would be unadorned, like Jane. No fuss. No knick knacks.) The simplicity of her life seemed so compelling. Just Jane and Ziggy. One sweet, quiet, dark-haired child (putting aside the strange choking incident, of course). No fights. Life would be calm and uncomplicated.

The grass is always greener on the other side. Even the most perfect seeming lives aren't perfect.

Reading a novel was like returning to a once beloved holiday destination.

It was interesting how you could say things when you were walking that you might not otherwise have said with the pressure of eye contact across a table.

‘He’s very anxious about his father,’ said the psychologist. ‘He thinks he might be a storm trooper, or possibly Jabba the Hutt, or, worst case scenario,’ the psychologist couldn’t hold back a broad smile. ‘Darth Vader.’ ‘You’re not serious,’ said Jane. She was somewhat mortified. It was Madeline’s Fred who had got Ziggy into Star Wars. ‘He’s not serious.’ ‘Children often get caught halfway between reality and fantasy,’ said the psychologist. ‘He’s only five. Anything is possible in a five-year-old’s world. He still believes in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Why shouldn’t Darth Vader be his father? But I think it’s more that he had somehow picked up the idea that his father is someone … frightening and mysterious.’ ‘I thought I’d done a better job than this,’ said Jane. ‘I asked if he’d talked to you much about his father and he said, yes, but he knows it upsets you. He was very firm with me. He didn’t want me upsetting you.’ She looked down at her notes and up again. ‘He said, “Be careful if you’re talking to Mummy about my daddy, because she gets a funny look on her face.” ’

Ziggy is such a perceptive, sensitive and intelligent child.

For the first time since before that night in the hotel, when those words had wormed their malevolent way into her head, she looked at herself in the mirror and felt uncomplicated pleasure. In fact she couldn’t stop looking at herself, sheepishly grinning and turning her head from side to side. It was embarrassing just how much genuine happiness she was gaining from something so superficial. But maybe it was natural? Normal even? Maybe it was OK to enjoy her appearance. Maybe she didn’t need to analyse it any further than that, or to think about Saxon Banks and society’s obsession with beauty and youth and thinness and photoshopped models setting unrealistic expectations and how a woman’s self-worth shouldn’t rest on her looks, it was what was on the inside that mattered, and blahdy, blah, blah … enough! Today she had a new haircut and it suited her and that made her happy.

I love this! <3 It's okay to take pleasure in your appearance without tutning it into some complicated social issue. It's normal. That confidence is a good thing. @>-,-'- '-

She looked around her, and saw that his studio apartment was just like an extension of the café – the same polished floorboards and rough white walls, bookshelves filled with second-hand books. The only difference was the surfboard and guitar leaning against the wall, the stack of CDs and stereo. ‘I can’t believe it,’ said Jane. ‘What?’ smiled Tom. ‘You’re into jigsaws,’ she breathed, pointing at a half-finished jigsaw on the table. She looked at the box. It was a proper hardcore (as her brother would have said) two-thousand piece jigsaw featuring a black and white photo of wartime Paris. ‘We jigsaw,’ said Jane. ‘My family. We’re kind of obsessed.’ ‘I like to always have one on the go,’ said Tom. ‘I find them sort of meditative.’ ‘Exactly,’ said Jane. ‘Tell you what,’ said Tom. ‘I’ll give you some clothes, and you can have some pumpkin soup with me and help me jigsaw.’ He pulled some tracksuit pants and a hooded sweatshirt from a chest of drawers and she went into his bathroom and put her soaked clothes, right down to her underwear, into his sink. The clothes he’d given her smelled like Tom and Blue Blues. ‘I feel like Charlie Chaplin,’ she said, with the sleeves hanging below her wrists as she pulled up the waist of the tracksuit pants. ‘Here,’ said Tom, and he neatly folded up the sleeves of the shirt above her wrists. Jane submitted like a child. She felt unaccountably happy. Cherished. She sat down at the table and Tom brought them over bowls of pumpkin soup swirled wi...

This just made me feel all warm and fuzzy. (=

‘Bonnie’s father was violent,’ said Nathan without preamble. ‘Very violent. I don’t think I even know half the stuff he did. Not to Bonnie. To her mum. But Bonnie and her little sister saw it all. They had a very tough childhood.’ ‘I’m not sure I should –’ began Ed. ‘I never met her dad,’ continued Nathan. ‘He died of a heart attack before I met Bonnie. Anyway, Bonnie is, well one psychiatrist diagnosed post-traumatic stress. She’s fine most of the time but she has very bad nightmares and just, um, some difficulties sometimes.’ He looked blankly past Madeline to the wall behind her head. His eyes were blank as he considered all the secrets of what Madeline now realised was a complicated marriage.

Maybe it's okay to be broken and complicated and imperfect. As long as you're surrounded by people who love and understand you. And as long as you're not giving up on yourself.

It was crazy and it made no sense because she did not forgive him, and she chose to never forgive him, and he would drive her to distraction for the rest of her life, and one day he’d walk Abigail down the aisle and Madeline would be grinding her teeth the whole way, but he was still family, he still belonged on her piece of cardboard showing her family tree. How could she possibly explain to Ed that she didn’t particularly like Bonnie, or understand her, but that it turned out she was prepared to lie for her in the same way that she would automatically lie for Ed, her children, her sister. It turned out, as strange and improbable as it seemed, that Bonnie was family too.

Well, life and relationships are just complicated and funny, aren't they?

first kisses didn’t necessarily require darkness and alcohol; they could happen in the open air, with the air cold and the sun warm on your face and everything around you honest and real and true and thank God she hadn’t been chewing gum because she would have to have swallowed it quick-smart and she might have missed the fact that Tom tasted exactly the way she always suspected he’d taste: of cinnamon sugar and coffee and the sea.

I mean... Come on! When I get kissed by a man again, I hope it's exactly like this.