The Family Way

The fasten seat belt sign pinged on and flight attendants began passing through the cabin, waking the sleepers and making them strap themselves in. The Aussie captain’s calm, reassuring voice began murmuring over the intercom, as soothing as a lullaby.

Kirk closed his eyes and touched the fastened buckle of his seat belt. The plane shuddered, more violently this time, and again seemed to sink through the sky. Now there were cries of mild alarm, and the unspoken paranoia of the modern traveller – what if? Kirk took a deep breath, his eyes shut tight.

It’s just a bit of turbulence, he thought. I am a seasoned world traveller.

But he again touched the buckle of his seat belt, and did what he always did when he felt there was a faint possibility that he could die on a plane within the next few minutes. He tried to remember all the women he had ever slept with.

He had started early, at fourteen, with the family’s babysitter. One. Then there had been a fallow period of a few years until he was seventeen, and started with his first proper girlfriend. Two.

By the time that ended three years later, he was a dive instructor, and every day at the office there were women in swimwear. Three to ten.

Then he spent a summer in the Philippines, and discovered bar girls – eleven to nineteen, or was it twenty? When he got back to Sydney that September, there was an older married woman whose family owned a flower shop. He met her there every Sunday morning between eight and nine o’clock, while her husband and sons slept on upstairs, and he was dressed and gone by the time they got up and started getting ready for church. Twenty or twenty-one.

Then there was a surfer girl he really liked and the sister of a friend…but hadn’t he forgotten someone? He knew there had been the odd brief encounter that sometimes slipped his mind, but faces and bodies and beds seemed to blur and merge, and some names were already lost for ever.

At twenty-five, he was already unsure of the number. He guessed it was somewhere in the high twenties. Not that many really, when you considered that sometimes a period of monogamy had lasted for years, sandwiched between bouts of wild promiscuity.

And now he came to think of it he recalled the days of madness when, as one relationship ended, and another began, and a limited offer suddenly presented itself, he had somehow squeezed in three women in one day. He still didn’t understand how he had done it. It wasn’t the physical demands that took the toll. It was all that travelling.

But for the last two years he had been faithful to his girlfriend back home. Remarkable really, when he remembered that his travels had taken him to bars in Bangkok and clubs in Tokyo and parties in half a dozen European cities, including Warsaw and Stockholm, where there was a beauty on every corner. He had been faithful to the girl back home through all those temptations.

Up until the night he met Megan.

What was it about this one? Why was she special?

Because he was keener than she was. That was a first. She ticked all the boxes – she was hot, funny and smart (although ‘smart’ was a box that Kirk didn’t necessarily need ticked). But the clincher was that she just didn’t care as much as he did, and that had him hooked.

As his plane trembled and shook somewhere over Indonesia, Kirk asked himself all the questions that are the stirrings of love in the male heart.

How can I win her? How many have known her?

And when will I see her again?

Digby walked into Mamma-san with Tamsin on his arm. Cat glanced across at Brigitte drinking with a couple of regulars at the bar and saw her visibly flinch, as if she had been slapped.

Cat glared at Digby, and thought, how could you? But the terrible thing was, she sort of understood. Not how Digby could come here and rub Brigitte’s nose in his new relationship – such casual cruelty was beyond her comprehension – but she could understand how Digby had ended up with Tamsin. Cat had seen Tamsin in Mamma-san back in the days when she was just another party tart hoping to bump into a footballer at the bar, and she could see the appeal.

If Tamsin’s body language could be summarised in two words, it was fuck me. Whereas Brigitte’s natural demeanour – proud, strong, glamorous Brigitte – suggested fuck you.

Cat watched Digby and Tamsin at the lobster tank, choosing their main course. When she looked back at the bar, Brigitte had fled into the kitchen. She decided she wasn’t going to allow anyone to humiliate her friend. Not in this place.

Digby, who Cat thought was good-looking but with charm so oily you could fry noodles in it, had the self-consciously puffed-up look of the older man with the younger woman. Steeling himself for applause, or laughter.

Tamsin also did her bit to fit her sexual stereotype, clinging to his arm as if he were the hot one, not her, as if a black American Express card was superior to gilded youth. She was really that stupid.

Abbreviated skirt. Strangely immobile breasts. Unfeasibly blonde. Digby had dumped Brigitte for this little fuck puppet? It was like choosing an inflatable doll over a real woman.

Cat crossed the restaurant with a friendly smile, knowing that the promise of staying friends was impossible for a man like Digby. It wasn’t enough to break up with a man like that. They had to make sure their ex was unhappy.

‘Digby, how good to see you.’

‘I know the one I want, Cat,’ Digby said.

Tamsin bent over, pressing her snub nose against the fish tank, her skirt rising up her golden thighs. Men at the adjacent tables held their breath, their chopsticks quivering with longing. A gang of lobsters waved their pincers at Tamsin in slow motion.

‘But I thought they was pink,’ she said.

‘Only when boiled,’ Cat said.

‘I like them when they’re fresh,’ Digby said, pressing his fleshy face against the tank, considering the lobsters. ‘I’ll take that one, Cat,’ he added, pointing at the biggest crustacean.

‘I’ll make sure it’s as you like it, Digby.’

After indicating to the chef the lobster they had selected, Cat found them a good table. She took their orders for drinks – white wine for Tamsin and Asahi Super Dry for Digby. Cat watched them whispering their giggly secrets, and Digby slipped his tongue in Tamsin’s ear, giving it a good clean. Then she went into the kitchen to check on Brigitte.

‘Are you all right?’

Brigitte attempted a laugh, but didn’t quite make it. It sounded more like she was clearing her throat. Cat was shocked to see her this undone. The unencumbered life was meant to be pain-free.

‘I bet she fucks his brains out,’ Brigitte said.

‘Didn’t know he had any. Excuse me.’

Cat went off to talk to the chef.

And she made sure that she was standing close by when the lobster, sunburn pink now and peacefully reclining on a bed of shredded horseradish, was served up to Digby and Tamsin on a wooden Japanese platter.

There was an instant when nothing happened – when the diners and their beady-eyed meal seemed almost hypnotised by the sight of each other. Then Cat saw the smiles vanish from their faces as, with considerable effort, the lobster lifted itself from the wooden platter and began crawling from the plate, its claws trailing thin white slivers of horseradish.

Tamsin screamed. Digby snatched up his butter knife, as if to defend himself and his fuck puppet. The lobster slowly toppled from the wooden platter and began its slow march across the table towards Tamsin, who was shrieking with terror now, and her inflatable breasts.

‘Do you want some wasabi on that?’ Cat said.

It was scary to be too unencumbered, she thought later. The whole unencumbered thing could go too far. Cat saw that now. You had to get the balance right.

A person needed to be unencumbered but not cast adrift, free but not lost, and loved but not smothered. But how do you manage all that?

‘We’re going clubbing,’ Brigitte told Cat. ‘It’s DJ Cake versus the Glitter Twins at Zoo Nation. Want to come?’