“How cool!” The waitress grinned. “Hey! You two are the same, right!”

“Five bucks and you can get your photo taken with us,” said Cat.

After their first sips of champagne, their moods became fizzy and frivolous. Lyn suddenly revealed a bizarre phobia about parking lots, at which Cat and Gemma howled with delight. “Thanks for your sensitivity,” she said.

“All parking lots?” asked Cat. “Do they have to be like, I don’t know, twenty-four-hour parking lots to be scary?”

“Actually, I’m sure I’ve got that phobia too,” said Gemma.

“You do not,” said Lyn. “I’m the interesting one.”

“O.K., if we’re doing secrets,” said Cat and revealed that a few months after breaking up with Dan she’d gotten drunk and slept with her boss.

Gemma was genuinely shocked. “But I met him at your office. He was a gray-haired man in a suit and tie! I can’t believe you slept with such a grown-up!”

“I sleep with a forty-year-old every night,” commented Lyn.

“Oh, don’t worry, Michael’s not a grown-up.”

“He’ll be relieved to hear that.”

“So what secrets have you got, Gemma?” asked Cat. “As if we wouldn’t already know them.”

Gemma, her mouth full of bread roll, considered sharing the secret she’d been lugging around for the last twelve years: My dead fiancé was…problematic.

“Look at her! Trying to look mysterious,” giggled Lyn.

She was never going to tell them. It was too complicated and at the same time too simple.

She said, “Once I stole ten dollars from Mum’s purse to buy cigarettes.”

“That was me, you idiot!” said Cat.

“How are we doing? We ready to move on to that second bottle yet?” The waitress had become their good mate, Olivia, who lived at Padstow and was taking a massage course and had a pregnant sister-in-law and had never met triplets, although her best friend in primary school was a twin.

Olivia had clearly decided they were lovable freaks of nature, adorable madcaps. As a result, the three of them were starting to behave like, in Nana Kettle’s words, “real characters!”

A waiter laden with seafood platters struggled by. “Triplets!” called Olivia proudly, pointing downward fingers at their heads. Obligingly, they all beamed and gave quirky waves.

The waiter smiled cautiously.

“Retard,” said Olivia. “By the way, don’t look now, but that man over there—I said don’t look!”

They all turned back to look at her guiltily. “He asked if you could keep the noise down. I’m like, Take a chill pill, wanker! So, I reckon, crank up the volume! He needs to get a life.”

They promised her they’d do their best to be even noisier.

She disappeared. “She’s sort of cool, that Olivia,” said Lyn. “I think I’m going to start being cooler now I’m thirty-four.”

“Cool people, like Olivia, like me, are born cool,” said Cat. “You can’t change your fundamental dorky personality.”

“That’s not true!” cried Lyn. “You can be whoever you want to be!”

“Don’t give me that self-help psychobabble bullshit.”

“No fighting, please,” said Gemma. “It’s bad for the baby.”

With the baby due in just three weeks, she was feeling superior and ladylike in her sobriety, carefully monitoring her first glass of champagne while Lyn and Cat were draining their third.

Cat and Lyn both looked at her stomach.

“Bad for Cat’s baby,” observed Lyn.

“Don’t start,” said Cat dangerously.

“I think I see our mains!” interrupted Gemma, even though she didn’t.

“There’s something I need to say about this,” said Lyn.

“I do see our mains!”

“Just say it, Lyn,” said Cat.

“Oh! I nearly forgot!” Gemma cried. “Guess what I brought tonight!”

She nearly lost her balance reaching down for her bag, which for some reason didn’t want to be picked up.

The woman at the table next to them said something that Gemma couldn’t hear.

“I beg your pardon?”

“She said the strap’s caught around your chair leg. Here. Stand up.”

The woman’s dining companion reached over and dislodged her bag. He was short and broad, like Charlie, except fair, with a sunburned nose and a grin that scrunched his eyes.

“Thank you,” said Gemma. “How does that always happen?”

“A mystery,” agreed the man.

Cat rolled her eyes as the man sat back down. “The mystery is why there’s always a good-hearted bloke around whenever Gemma does her damsel-in-distress thing.”

Gemma pulled three crumpled stained envelopes out of her bag. “Do you remember when Miss Ellis made us write letters to ourselves to read in twenty years’ time?”

Blank looks.

“Religion class. We were fourteen.”

“That’s right,” said Lyn. “She was talking about achieving your dreams. It was a pointless goal-setting exercise! You need to set short-term, medium-term—”

“What? You’ve got all our letters? You managed to keep them for twenty years without losing them?” Cat reached out to grab them. “Let me see!”

“Nope. Not until after we sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ That’s when we officially turn thirty-four.”

The distraction was successful. Lyn and Cat began an impassioned argument about whether Miss Ellis’s pink fluffy cardigans indicated latent lesbian tendencies, while Gemma sat quietly and wondered if the tiny person currently kicking her with such energetic determination was perhaps a boy.

Yesterday, she’d walked by a little boy and his father in the aisle of Woolies. They were buying globes.

“Dad? How does a light globe work?” the little boy asked, frowning with masculine concentration.

As Gemma walked by with her wagon, the father was squatting down, pulling a globe from its cardboard box.

Maybe the baby would be a little boy like that.

One of those sturdy, serious, interested little boys.

Freckles.

Long, curvy eyelashes.

Their three birthday cakes arrived with dozens of wildly crackling sparklers. The lights were dimmed, and Olivia led a choir of waiters and waitresses hollering three over-the-top renditions of “Happy Birthday.” Eventually, the whole restaurant seemed to be singing. The final round of applause was ridiculous, Olivia shouting “Hip, hip!” and the restaurant responding “Hooray!” thumping their feet on the floor, as if they were in a raunchy theater restaurant, not a Good Food Guide recommendation.