‘Right, that’s it,’ he says, reading the expression on my face. He gets out of bed and drags the doona clean off me. ‘I’m not moping around in here with you another minute!’
I roll over, face-first, away from him, and put the pillow over my head.
He takes me by the hips. Pulls my body towards the foot of the bed, spins me face up and climbs over the top of me. He takes my hands in his and pins them above my head on the mattress, fingers interlaced, and brings his lips to mine, kissing me like he hasn’t done since we were teenagers. Wildly. Urgently. As if it’s the first and last time we’ll ever do this and someone might catch us, any minute. I wrap myself around him as the kiss slows and stops, leaving me breathless and crazily in love.
‘Remember, Kate,’ he says in a low voice, holding my gaze, and my hands, and my heart. ‘I’m not dead yet.’
A few Fridays later, the three of us head to Black Mountain Peninsula for a barbecue with my colleagues. They say it will be one of the last warm days of autumn – still warm enough for some people to swim in the lake, not that I do.
‘Not enough chlorine or salt in the lake for my wife,’ Cam jokes when Sophie asks if I’m going to take a dip.
Hugh eventually pulls up, late, swings into the nearest dirt car park among shady eucalyptus trees, pops the boot and retrieves a box of alcohol and soft drinks, to a grateful round of applause. He walks over and sets the box down on the concrete barbecue, while one of the accountants, Andi, fires up the plate and runs some paper towel over it before it heats.
I’m standing with Cam and corralling Charlie between my ankles, feeding him bits of avocado from the salad we brought, most of which he’s mashing into my jeans, while I attempt to hold a conversation with our Comms manager, Isobel, about our shared love of true crime podcasts.
Hugh starts passing out craft beer to anyone who wants one, including Cam, who he hadn’t noticed at first.
‘Thanks, mate!’ Cam says, and Hugh realises it’s him and lights up. He comes around the barbecue and they share a firm handshake.
‘Cam, good to meet you! Glad you could come.’
They pat each other on the shoulder, and then Hugh notices Charlie between my legs and crouches down to say hello to him, too.
‘Decorating Mum’s jeans?’ he observes. ‘Wow, you are cute! Yes, I’m talking to you. Hello, Charlie!’
It’s always slightly disconcerting seeing work colleagues in personal settings. My team has had a rapid immersion in the Whittaker Saga, as Grace and I have already come to refer to our various recent misfortunes. It slashed a short-cut through some of the early ‘getting to know you’ period at work.
It’s not long before Cam and Hugh break off and engage in some terribly intellectual-sounding conversation about the future state of university strategy or some other thing nobody wants to get into at a picnic, except those two. Hilariously, they’ve both dressed in linen shorts – Cam in brown, Hugh in grey, and white T-shirts. It’s like they got on the phone beforehand to organise some masculine equivalent of the ‘jeans and a nice top’ dress code. Wherever the conversation moves to next, it’s funny and vibrant and almost enough to trick me into forgetting this Goose and Maverick friendship they’re striking up here is destined to burn out early.
Cam looks incredible. He’s a man in his prime, physically, intellectually, career-wise, as a dad . . . just in every conceivable dimension. Grace had said he was ‘delicious’ and she was right.
Maybe the doctors got it wrong? Surely they did. Cam is nothing like the partners of those people on the carers’ forum. Those poor people lost control, fast. But look at him. Listen to him. He couldn’t possibly be sick.
I get the idea they’re talking about me now. The way Cam looks at me when we’re out socially always makes me feel so connected to him. And makes me feel gorgeous, whether I’m wearing mashed avo or a wedding dress.
‘Ears burning?’ Hugh says as I approach with Charlie on my hip. Cam extends his arm and draws us in.
‘Should they be?’
‘Should what be?’ he asks brightly.
‘My ears,’ I say.
He looks at me, confused. ‘You’ve lost me, Kate.’
No, not yet.
And just like that, the joy of seeing him so vital and engaged with Hugh is wiped and replaced with another piece of evidence that his brain is faltering, despite appearances.
‘I’d better do another round of drinks,’ Hugh suggests tactfully. As he walks past me his eyes meet mine and his lips curve into a half-smile. It doesn’t make me feel beautiful at all, like Cam’s smile does.
It makes me feel seen.
‘I need to duck to the bathroom,’ I tell Cam as I glance around the park for the facilities. Charlie is standing up, holding onto my leg for security, and I prise his little fingers off my jeans and latch him onto Daddy’s leg instead. They look so comical standing together – Cam over six foot tall, Charlie his mini doppelg?nger.
‘Charlie! Look at Mumma!’ I say as I take a photo on my phone of the two of them beaming. My phone has thousands of photos of Cam and Charlie, and almost none of Charlie with me. Cam used to complain that I was incessantly capturing moments instead of just enjoying them, but now thousands of photos don’t seem nearly enough. One day, this will be all Charlie has. Photos to hold onto, instead of Daddy’s leg. And I will zoom in on them, desperate for familiar details – laugh lines around his mouth, the set of his jaw. Nothing will ever be in high enough resolution.
The toilets are a long way through the park, well beyond the playground. In truth, it’s good to have a few moments to myself. I’m still finding ‘normal life’ confronting, while we’re trying to adjust to Cam’s diagnosis and the miscarriage, and working through ways to make the most of our time. At work, only Hugh knows the specifics about the diagnosis. I haven’t reached a point where I can talk about it without going to pieces, so all the others know is I’ve lost the baby and there’s something else going on.
The latest round of tests indicated that things are progressing at the faster end of the prognosis spectrum. The more we learn, the more likely it seems that this won’t be one of those slow-developing cases that takes years. Charlie’s not even eighteen months old. I’m desperate for Cam to stay alive and ‘himself’ long enough for his little boy to be able to pocket some memories of his own. I can’t stand the idea of him having to spend a lifetime cobbling together a representation of the man his father was, entirely from secondary sources.
I run into Sophie in the toilet block, and she takes me aside, eyes alight.
‘Oh my God, Kate. Your husband is fit AF!’
I laugh at her exuberance.
‘And your baby is squishable! I want to eat him! If I end up with even half of what you’ve got, I’ll be a happy woman.’
Half of what I had is exactly what I’ll end up with. And I’ll be miserable.
‘Though, if you saw Tinder, you wouldn’t like my chances . . . How lucky are you never having to go near online dating,’ she says.
‘Lucky’ isn’t a word I’ve applied to myself recently. But as Sophie prattles on, praising my little family, unaware of the festival of faux pas she’s stumbling through, I realise she’s right. I am lucky, in a sense. Some people never get to experience what I have. They never find that great love. Never adore someone with even a portion of the untamed intensity that still exists between Cam and me seventeen years after we met. At my mums’ group, the others sometimes complain about their partners. That they’re not hands-on enough as parents, or they’re hopeless communicators or just lazy or distant. They describe themselves as housemates sharing a roof, but not a life.