‘Oh. I haven’t mixed up the ages, have I? Forty. Yes, no, that’s right Enigma. Connie said, we tell them when they’re forty.’

‘Yes, but we don’t tell them we’re going to tell them, do we!’ Enigma is agitated. She gulps at her wine and turns to Sophie.

‘You must excuse Rose, pet,’ she says. ‘She’s so upset about Connie. She’s not herself. She’s talking gibberish, of course.’

‘It’s OK,’ says Sophie. So, they actually know what happened to Alice and Jack?! Wait till she tells her parents! Does Veronika know? Veronika isn’t forty, so presumably not.

Enigma says, ‘I need to ask a favour, dear.’

‘Of course.’

‘I need to ask you not to mention what Rose just said to anybody. It’s all nonsense, of course, but it could upset the family. This is quite serious. Although not at all serious, of course! But still, you need to keep it a secret, dear.’

‘Keep what a secret?’ asks Callum, his arms full of towels.

‘Secret women’s business,’ says Sophie, and she gives Enigma a wink.

Outside, the rain sounds harder, pelleting against the roof, as if someone has increased the volume.

‘That’s hail,’ says Rose. ‘It’s exciting but it flattens the flowers. Connie won’t like that.’

26

Margie is at her Weight Watchers meeting listening to a woman tell the story of her ‘Amazing Weight Loss Journey’. The woman has lost sixty kilos–a whole person! There has been a four-page article about her in the Australian Women’s Weekly. She is in the running for the Weight Watcher of the year. She is an inspiration. A movie star! She was a size twenty-two in a caftan. Now she is a size eight in leather pants. The whole room is mesmerised by those shiny black leather pants.

‘I despised myself when I was fat,’ says the woman, holding toned, skinny arms wide. ‘You should have heard my self-talk. I used to wake up each morning and say to my reflection,

“Good morning, Slovenly Sow!”’

Everyone laughs slightly quivery laughs.

‘Does anyone else do that? Negative self-talk?’

‘I don’t need self-talk,’ contributes a pretty woman who is about the same age as Margie’s daughter Veronika. She has round apple cheeks and hurt eyes. ‘I have husband-talk. He calls me Chubby Chops. He’s not exactly Brad Pitt either.’

‘I’ll bet he isn’t!’ a man cries out angrily at the other end of the aisle, and when everyone turns to look at him he suddenly looks horrified. ‘Oh! I don’t mean that you–I meant that in a good way!’

Oh just leave your husband, darling, thinks Margie. You could marry that nice man and have lots of dear little plump children together.

‘So what I did was change my self-talk!’ says the woman, whirling around to give them a glimpse of her neat leather bu**ocks. ‘Instead of saying, “Good morning, Slovenly Sow” when I looked in the mirror, I changed it to “Good morning, Sexy Goddess!” You know why? I’ll tell you why! Because the body believes the mind.’

The man sitting next to Margie shifts uncomfortably in his chair and lowers his chin. ‘Ms Leather Pants is getting a bit tiresome now, don’t you think?’

The man has a bright red face and layers of chins. Ron would call him a Heart Attack Waiting to Happen.

Margie looks around nervously. She never talked in class at school but she doesn’t want to be rude to this poor man. His heart attack might happen. And it’s nice of him to try and be funny like that.

Daringly, she whispers back, ‘Yes, she is a bit!’

He lowers his chin again and Margie is frantic. That’s enough! We’ll get into trouble! She looks straight ahead with bright attention at the speaker.

The man wheezes into her ear, ‘Would you like to have a skim cappuccino with me after the meeting?’

Good Lord! Surely he isn’t trying to ‘pick her up’, as they say? He’s probably just lonely. Perhaps he wants to sell her some ‘business opportunity’. Or he’s a Christian. Or he might be a dangerous kook!

‘All right,’ she whispers back.

Sophie and her mother are at the Korean Bathhouse in the city. They’ve been coming here for years, since Sophie was a teenager. First they have a full body scrub, followed by a long, languid soak in the baths, then yum cha in Chinatown, shopping, and a cocktail or two at the Opera Bar.

They sit in one of the hot baths, their heads resting against the wall. Naked female forms stroll through the steam, lowering themselves into the water. Everyone covertly checks out everyone else’s bodies through half-lowered eyelashes.

Sophie is telling her mother about how she got Jake to smile for the first time.

‘He’s adorable,’ she says.

‘You sound very clucky.’ Gretel’s hair has gone into corkscrew curls in the heat, and she has hectic pink circles on her cheeks.

‘I guess I am a bit,’ says Sophie, and she’s shocked by a sudden swell of grief. ‘But I’m just going to have to accept it, aren’t I? I’m not going to be a mother. When I think about my fortieth birthday it’s like a big iron door slamming in my face. There just isn’t time to meet somebody and I know that’s just life, but sometimes, Mum, I just ache for a child.’

‘Oh, Sophie.’ Gretel sits upright and agitatedly pats her shoulder. ‘Sweetheart! Of course there’s time! We just have to fix this! I didn’t realise it meant so much to you, darling. I’m so stupid! I thought you were happy being a career girl. Oh, dear, how can we fix this?’ She looks around her frantically, as if a spare baby is likely to go floating by any second and she can quickly scoop it up and hand it over to Sophie.

A woman, a sleek brunette, sitting close to them, leans over confidentially and says, ‘I hope you don’t mind me listening in, but I’ve got a friend who is single and wants a baby and she’s doing it on her own. She just said, bugger it, this is what I want, and off she went to the sperm bank. Picked out a donor. He’s tall with red hair and his interests are scuba diving, Thai cooking and playing the violin. My friend said she always dreamed of having a red-headed baby.’

‘Goodness,’ blinks Gretel.

‘What a pity she couldn’t meet the red-headed sperm donor at a Thai cooking course and fall in love with him,’ says Sophie.