“Oh! The little cutie!”

The noise frightened the baby, and she began to whimper.

Liam’s wife, a short, flowery, feminine woman, the sort who made Cat feel like a giant, said, “Oh, dear, I think she wants her mummy.”

She held up her arms with sweet authority, and Cat handed her back.

After they’d gone to visit another department, Cat sat back at her sterile computer screen and felt bereft.

Barb walked in with a pile of documents for her in-tray.

“Sweet baby,” she commented. “Such a pity she inherited Mummy’s ears,” and she made flapping moves on either side of her head.

Cat smiled. She was becoming rather fond of Barb.

“It’s nearly time for our ‘health and beauty weekend,’” Lyn said one day, pulling out the certificate Cat had given her and Gemma for Christmas.

There was something incongruous to Cat about that piece of paper. It was a cheerful relic of her former existence, like those miraculously unharmed possessions people retrieved from the ashes of their fire-ravaged homes. Even her handwriting looked different: unguarded and confident. “You should organize a trip with the boys for that weekend,” she remembered telling Dan, while she wrote the date on their wall calendar, never thinking that by January, everything would be different.

“You and Gemma go,” said Cat. “I don’t think I will.”

“I think you will, young lady. We’re not going without you.”

It was easier not to argue, and when Lyn pulled into her driveway to pick her up, with Gemma sitting in the front seat wearing Maddie’s Little Princess tiara in her hair, she felt a tiny gleam of happiness.

“Remember when we went away together up the coast after our last HSC exam?” said Gemma, twisting around in her seat to look at her. “How we all stuck our heads out the windows and screamed, even you, and you were driving! You want to do that again?”

“Not especially.” Although she did remember how good it felt, with the air rushing wildly into her lungs.

“Do you want to wear Maddie’s tiara?”

“Not especially.”

“Do you want to play a game where I play the beginning of a song and you guess what it is for a prize?”

“O.K.”

So, as they wound their way around the twisting mountain roads toward Katoomba and the air outside became cooler, Gemma played songs from an ancient mixed tape collection. After the first opening bars, Lyn and Cat shouted out the names of the songs, and Gemma awarded snake lollies as prizes.

“I’m predicting a draw with this one,” she said, and before she’d even pressed play, Cat and Lyn yelled, “Venus!” Bananarama’s “Venus” was their “oh-my-God-I-love-this-song!” from the year they turned eighteen. They used to dance to it on top of their beds, feeling almost unbearably erotic, until their mother came in and spoiled it, just by the expression on her face.

As soon as they walked into the resort and breathed in the heavily scented air, Cat’s sinuses began to twitch, Lyn dropped her bag and said, “Oh dear,” Gemma said, “What is it?” and then all three of them began to sneeze. And sneeze, sneeze, and sneeze.

Wet-haired women in white fluffy robes making their way through reception stopped to stare at the interesting sight of three tall women, sneezing uncontrollably. Tears of mirth streamed down Gemma’s face, Lyn distributed tissues, and Cat walked up to reception and between sneezes said, “We need our money back.”

The weekend was now an adventure, a story to tell. They were ecstatic with themselves when they found a house, perched on the side of a mountain, with four-poster beds in each room, and a truly amazing bathroom! It had a huge spa bath right next to a giant window that revealed the valley tumbling dramatically away beneath them, so that when you sat in the bath, it was like flying on a magic carpet. “That’s what one of our visitors wrote in the guest book,” explained their hostess proudly.

Gemma insisted they share a spa bath immediately, before it got dark and the view disappeared.

“It’s like we’re all back together in the womb!” she said when they were sitting in the bath, their backs up against the sides, legs crisscrossing in the middle, wineglasses in hand. “It was just like this, except without the sauvignon blanc. Or the bubbles.”

“You do not remember being in the womb, Gemma,” said Lyn.

“I do!” said Gemma airily. “We used to float around all day, having fun.”

“Mum thinks we were fighting,” commented Cat. “She read somewhere about twins actually thumping each other in the womb.”

“Oh no,” said Gemma. “I don’t remember any fighting.”

Lyn widened her eyes fractionally at Cat and lifted her hair away from her neck. Gemma held her nose and slowly slid down until her head disappeared beneath the noisily bubbling water.

Cat closed her eyes and felt the childlike, familiar comfort of her sisters’ legs pressed casually against her own.

It might actually be rather nice to return to that shadowy time of preexistence, she thought, when there was nothing particularly pressing to do except the occasional somersault, no thoughts, just interesting sensations of light and sound, and no loneliness, because those other two versions of you, who had been there forever, were right there beside you, not going anywhere.

CHAPTER 18

All her life Cat had never had a problem falling asleep. Now she battled ferocious attacks of insomnia. Each night she lay in bed with her eyes firmly shut, her body carefully positioned for sleep, and felt like a fraud. Her body wasn’t deceived. The mechanics of falling asleep had become mysterious to her.

Eventually she would give up, turn on the lamp, and read, for hours, till three, four o’clock in the morning. She never closed the book. One second she’d be reading a sentence, the next the alarm was beeping insistently and she was groggily opening her eyes, the book still open in her hand, the light from the lamp insipid in the morning sunshine.

One night, in the middle of the night, she was sitting propped up in bed, turning the pages of her novel without taking in a word.

She was thinking about how she and Dan had shared over a decade of events.

They were together, cooking steak at the pub barbecue, when they overheard somebody asking if it was true that Princess Diana had died.

They were part of the crazed crowd in the stadium on Bondi Beach, chanting “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oi, oi, oi!” when the women’s beach volleyball team won Olympic gold.