Free The Last Anniversary by Liane Moriarty Page A

reminds herself. Everybody loves me. I give to charity. I recycle. I buy things I don’t want from door-to-door salesmen. I’ve been a bridesmaid seven bloody times. I’m not the sort of person to manipulate an old lady.
    ‘NOOOOOO!’
    Sophie looks up to see the angelic blond toddler in the middle of a ferocious tantrum, flipping his body back and forth while his mother tries to strap him in his stroller and yells at the other child to ‘STAY STILL, HARRY’. The daddy has escaped, striding back to work, his tie swinging.
    Actually, thinks Sophie, as she stands up and brushes crumbs off her skirt, she’s quite looking forward to her meeting on graduate recruitment strategies.

14
     
    Gublet McDublet was a very naughty little elf.
     
Every day, his mum said to him, ‘Now, Gublet, do you think it’s going to be a Good Gublet day or a Bad Gublet day?’
     
Every day, Gublet answered the same way, ‘A GOOD Gublet day!’
     
But guess what? Every day turned out to be a Bad Gublet day.
     
One day, Gublet said, ‘Oh fuck it, Mum, you’re a boring old hag,’ and he took a knife and lopped off his sweet mummy’s head.
     
     
    Grace looks at the line drawing she has scribbled of a ferociously grinning elf with blood dripping from a butcher’s knife. Oh dear. It isn’t going to be a Good Gublet day for Grace, is it? Next thing she’ll have Gublet raping his best friend, Melly the Music Box Dancer–ripping off Melly’s sparkly tutu and giving it to her right there on the pink satin music-box floor.
    Where are these perverse and strangely bitchy thoughts coming from? They aren’t at all appropriate for a new mother. Her head should be full of lullabies and bunnies, not blood and rape.
    Grace pulls the sheet of paper from her sketchbook and screws it up into a hard ridged ball.
    It is eleven a.m. on her second day at home alone with the baby. He is asleep upstairs, fed and burped and clean and swaddled (‘like wrapping a burrito’ Callum said when the nurse showed them at the hospital) and, most importantly, breathing. She is successfully keeping him alive and so far she hasn’t broken any important rules or made any fatal errors, but still, every move she makes continues to feel fake and forced, like she’s pretending to be this baby’s mother and the real mother will be along soon to look after him properly. She can’t shake a constant, underlying feeling of terror.
    All new mothers are nervous, she tells herself.
    Not like this.
    Yes, of course they are.
    It’s perfectly normal.
    I am perfectly normal. I am a new mother sitting down with a cup of tea.
    She tries again to draw Gublet’s familiar features. He stares back at her with a new cold, bland expression.
    This hasn’t happened to her before. It has always been such a pleasure to work on Gublet. She was never stuck for inspiration; all she needed was time.
    Grace has been working on her Gublet McDublet books for over four years now. He started as a doodle. Whenever she was talking on the phone, a wicked elf character would appear on her notebook. She became fond of him and eventually, just for fun, not really thinking too hard about it, she made up a funny story about Gublet’s first day at school. It was Callum who secretly sent it off to a children’s book publisher he’d picked out of the Yellow Pages and, astonishingly, they agreed to publish it as a hard-bound picture book for three-to five-year-olds. So far she hasn’t made enough money to be able to give up her day job as a graphic designer for a company that specialises in beautiful annual reports. There isn’t that much money in the children’s picture-book market unless you are phenomenally successful, and besides which, so far each of the two Gublet books has taken her over two years to complete. ‘Two years !’ people always say with disbelief and a hint of derision. They seem to think she should be able to knock one off in a couple of weeks, when each illustration is actually