Free Spinning Around by Catherine Jinks

centre. Not with everything so handy. Oh God, I thought, as a sense of panic began to rise in me again, oh God, what if it really happens? What if this is for real ?
    Then Jonah woke up, and it was time to go to Lisa’s place.
    Lisa lives two streets away from us. She’s another playgroup mother, only a very different one from Mandy. In fact she’s not very nice about Mandy. ‘Oh, don’t for Chrissake let her get you down,’ Lisa once boomed, adjusting her generous bosom through the folds of her capacious sweatshirt. (‘These days my tits are down there in my purse, hunting for the car keys,’ she’ll say philosophically.) ‘The thing about girls like her is, it’s all front. Did she tell you what she used to do for a living? Before she married that dickhead with the overbite? Wait for it. She was a plastic surgeon’s receptionist.’
    â€˜No!’
    â€˜I swear to God. She had her nose done.’
    â€˜That’s not true.’
    â€˜It is. She told me.’
    â€˜Really?’
    â€˜I’d been telling her that I was thinking of getting perkier tits.’ A braying laugh. ‘Like I could afford a new bra , these days. Anyway, she gave me this big lecture about it all—she wouldn’t know a joke if it came labelled, in a package—and told me about her nose. Apparently she has chronic sinus problems. She takes ten garlic pills a day .’
    â€˜God, poor thing. When did she tell you?’
    â€˜Oh, ages ago. I asked her if she ended up suing the plastic surgeon, and she looked at me like I was mad.’ Another laugh. ‘So you see, her life isn’t perfect, no matter how hard she tries to persuade you it is.’ Lisa then went on to expound one of her favourite theories: the fact that a good portion of new mothers who won’t admit to any feelings of rage, despair, frustration or fatigue—who turn a beatific face to the world and assure it that everything’s fine, wonderful, no problems, a breeze—end up drowning their babies in the bathtub. ‘A mother’s got to vent,’ she often declares, before launching into a vicious attack on her father-in-law, her next-door neighbour, the local council or the Taxation Office. She also believes that a mother has to ‘let go’; that is, abandon certain standards that are only attainable when you don’t have children.
    Her own house is a perfect demonstration of this theory. She has ‘let go’ with a vengeance, and only cleans up once a week. Because she has two rambunctious boys and one dog, this means that the floors are always littered with toys and clothes, the barren garden-beds with toys and gardening equipment, the raised surfaces with broken toys, broken crockery, and confiscated tools (or poisons), and the back steps with old shoes and chewed-up tennis balls. The only things that she won’t leave around are dirty plates, cups, bowls or utensils, because her cockroach problem is even worse than my ant problem.
    â€˜If those roaches get any bigger,’ she remarked on one occasion, ‘we’re going to have to start charging rent.’
    Her house is an old one, like mine; it’s a little bigger and a little darker. She earns a bit of cash doing phone polls, these days, though she used to be a psychiatric nurse, and has lots of terrific stories about her time ‘on the wards’. According to her, there are countless lunatics around Sydney leading apparently normal lives—like her next-door neighbour, for instance. She says that her next-door neighbour is a borderline schizophrenic. She says that her husband’s boss is a sociopath, and that the woman across the road, who keeps complaining about the positioning of Lisa’s garbage bin, has an obsessive-compulsive disorder. According to Lisa, it’s easier to understand the world if you realise that most of the people in it are nuts.
    â€˜I’d say that you