We hope you enjoy this exclusive extract is from Three Wishes (Pan MacMillan Australia), by Liane Moriarty, our October Great Read.
It was a Wednesday night six weeks before Christmas. A nothing sort of night. An unassuming midweek night that should have vanished from their memories by Friday. ‘What did we do Wednesday?’ ‘I don’t know. Watch TV?’
That’s what they were doing. They were eating spaghetti and drinking red wine in front of the television. Cat was sitting cross-legged on the floor, with her back against the sofa, her plate on aher lap. Her husband Dan was sitting on the edge of the sofa, hunched over his dinner on the coffee table. It was the way they always ate dinner.
Dan had cooked the spaghetti, so it was hearty and bland. Cat was the more accomplished cook. Dan’s approach to cooking was somehow too functional. He stirred his ingredients as though he was sitting concrete, one arm wrapped around the bowl, the other stirring the gluggy mix so vigorously you could see his biceps working. ‘So what? Gets the job done.’
That Wednesday night Cat was feeling no specific emotion; not especially happy, not especially sad. It was strange afterwards, remembering how she sat there, shovelling Dan’s pasta into her mouth, so foolishly trusting of her life. She wanted to yell back at herself through time, ‘Concentrate!’
They were watching a show called Med School. It was a soapie about a group of very beautiful young medical students with shiny white teeth and complex love lives. Each episode featured a lot of blood and sex and anguish.
Cat and Dan shared a mild addiction to Med School. Whenever the plot took a new twist, they responded with loud enthusiasm, yelling at the television like children watching a pantomime: ‘Bastard!’ ‘Drop him!’ ‘It’s the wrong medication!’
This week Ellie (blonde, cutesy, cropped T-shirts) was in a state. She didn’t know whether to tell her boyfriend Pete (dark, brooding, abnormal abs) about her drunken infidelity with a guest-starring troublemaker.
‘Tell him, Ellie!’ said Cat to the television. ‘Pete will forgive you. He’ll understand!’
The ad break came on and a manic man in a yellow jacket bounced around a department store pointing an incredulous finger at the Christmas specials.
‘I booked that health and beauty thing today,’ said Cat, using Dan’s knee as a lever to help her reach over him for the pepper. ‘The woman had one of those gooey spiritual voices. I felt like I was getting a massage just making a booking.’
For Christmas she was giving her sisters (and herself) a weekend away at a health retreat in the Blue Mountains. The three of them would share an ‘exquisite experience’ of ‘indulgent pampering.’ They would be wrapped in seaweed, dunked in mud and slathered in vitamin-enriched creams. It would be extremely amusing.
She was pleased with herself for thinking of it. ‘What a clever idea!’ everyone would say on Christmas Day.
A health insurance ad came on television and Dan winced. ‘I hate this ad.’
‘It’s effective. You watch it more closely than any other ad on television.’
He closed his eyes and averted his head. ‘OK. I’m not looking, I’m not looking. Oh God. I can still hear that woman’s grating voice.’
Cat picked up the remote and turned up the volume.
‘Aaagh!’ He opened his eyes and grabbed the remote from her.
He was behaving perfectly normally. She remembered that afterwards and it made it worse, somehow. Every moment he behaved normally was part of the betrayal.
‘Shh. It’s back on.’
Ellie’s betrayed boyfriend Pete appeared on the screen, flexing his freakish abs. Ellie gave the TV audience guilty looks.
‘Tell him,’ Cat told her. ‘I’d want to know. I couldn’t stand not to know the truth. Better to tell him, Ellie.’
“You think so?’ said Dan
‘Yeah. Don’t you?’
‘I don’t know.’
There were no bells jangling a warning in Cat’s head. Not a single chime.
‘Cat,’ said Dan.
‘What?’
‘I need to tell you something.’
She snorted at his ponderous tone. ‘What? Have you done an Ellie? Have you been unfaithful to me?’ ‘Well. Yes.’
He looked as though he was going to be sick, and he wasn’t that great an actor.
Cat put down her fork. ‘This is a joke, right? You’re saying you’ve slept with someone else?’
‘Yes.’ Now his mouth was doing something strange. He looked like a guilty little boy caught doing something disgusting.
She picked up the remote and turned off the television. Her heart was thumping with fear but also a strangely urgent desire, a desire to know. It was the sick feeling of excited resistance at the very top of the rollercoaster – I don’t want to go hurtling over that precipice but I do, I do!
‘When?’ She still didn’t really believe it. She was half laughing. ‘Years ago, do you mean?’ When we first started going out? You don’t mean recently?’
‘About a month ago.’
‘What?’
‘It didn’t mean anything.’
‘Would you just start from the beginning please? When?’
‘One night.’
‘What night? Where was I?’ She fumbled through her mind for events over the last few weeks. ‘What night?’
She asked him questions and he answered them. ‘Where did she live?’ ‘How did you get home?’
He finished his story and Cat stared stupidly at him, waiting for it to hurt. All her muscles were tensed tight in anticipation of pain. It was like giving blood and waiting for the smiling doctor to find her vein.
‘What was her name?’ she said.
His eyes slid away. ‘Angela.’
Finally. An exquisite twist of her heart because this girl actually had a name and Dan knew her name.
‘It was nothing,’ he said. ‘It was just a stupid one-night stand.’
‘Don’t call it that!’
‘OK.’
‘This is all so tacky.’
He looked at her beseechingly.
‘You’ve got food on your face,’ she said savagely. His guilt was inflating her, making her powerful with righteousness.
She said, ‘Why are you telling me this now? Is it just to make you feel better?’
‘I don’t know. I kept changing my mind. And then you said you’d want to know the truth.’
‘I was talking to Ellie! I was watching television! I was eating dinner!’
‘So you didn’t mean it?’
‘For God’s sake. It’s too late now.’
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