Big Little Lies(5)

Her ankle turned. One second it was doing what an ankle was meant to do, and the next it was flipping out at a sickeningly wrong angle. She fell heavily on one side. Oh, calamity.
That was almost certainly the moment the story began.
With the ungainly flip of an ankle.

Chapter 3
3.

Jane pulled up at a red light behind a big shiny SUV with its hazard lights blinking and watched a dark-haired woman hurry along the side of the road back to it. She wore a floaty, blue summer dress and high strappy heels, and she waved apologetically, charmingly at Jane. The morning sun caught one of the woman’s earrings, and it shone as if she’d been touched by something celestial.
A glittery girl. Older than Jane but definitely still glittery. All her life Jane had watched girls like that with scientific interest. Maybe a little awe. Maybe a little envy. They weren’t necessarily the prettiest, but they decorated themselves so affectionately, like Christmas trees, with dangling earrings, jangling bangles and delicate, pointless scarves. They touched your arm a lot when they spoke. Jane’s best friend at school had been a glittery girl. Jane had a weakness for them.
Then the woman fell, as if something had been pulled out from underneath her.
“Ouch,” said Jane, and she looked away fast to save the woman’s dignity.
“Did you hurt yourself, Mummy?” asked Ziggy from the backseat. He was always very worried about her hurting herself.
“No,” said Jane. “That lady over there hurt herself. She tripped.”
She waited for the woman to get up and get back in her car, but she was still on the ground. She’d tipped back her head to the sky, and her face had that compressed look of someone in great pain. The traffic light turned green, and a little blue Mitsubishi that had been in front of the SUV zoomed off with a squeal of tires.
Jane put her signal on to drive around the car. They were on their way to Ziggy’s orientation day at the new school, and she had no idea where she was going. She and Ziggy were both nervous and pretending not to be. She wanted to get there in plenty of time.
“Is the lady OK?” said Ziggy.
Jane felt that strange lurch she sometimes experienced when she got distracted by her life, and then something (it was often Ziggy) made her remember just in time the appropriate way for a nice, ordinary, well-mannered grown-up to behave.
If it weren’t for Ziggy she would have driven off. She would have been so focused on her goal of getting him to his kindergarten orientation that she would have left a woman sitting on the road, writhing in pain.
“I’ll just check on her,” said Jane, as if that were her intention all along. She flicked on her own hazard lights and opened the car door, aware as she did of a selfish sense of resistance. You are an inconvenience, glittery lady!
“Are you all right?” she called.
“I’m fine!” The woman tried to sit up straighter and whimpered, her hand on her ankle. “Ow. Shit. I’ve rolled my ankle, that’s all. I’m such an idiot. I got out of the car to go tell the girl in front of me to stop texting. Serves me right for behaving like a school prefect.”
Jane crouched down next to her. The woman had shoulder-length, well-cut dark hair and the faintest sprinkle of freckles across her nose. There was something aesthetically pleasing about those freckles, like a childhood memory of summer, and they were very nicely complemented by the fine lines around her eyes and the absurd swinging earrings.
Jane’s resistance vanished entirely.
She liked this woman. She wanted to help her.
(Although, what did that say? If the woman had been a toothless, warty-nosed crone she would have continued to feel resentful? The injustice of it. The cruelty of it. She was going to be nicer to this woman because she liked her freckles.)
The woman’s dress had an intricately embroidered cutout pattern of flowers all along the neckline. Jane could see tanned freckly skin through the petals.
“We need to get some ice on it straightaway,” said Jane. She knew about ankle injuries from her netball days and she could see this woman’s ankle was already beginning to swell. “And keep it elevated.” She chewed her lip and looked about hopefully for someone else. She had no idea how to handle the logistics of making this actually happen.
“It’s my birthday,” said the woman sadly. “My fortieth.”
“Happy birthday,” said Jane. It was sort of cute that a woman of forty would even bother to mention that it was her birthday.
She looked at the woman’s strappy shoes. Her toenails were painted a lustrous turquoise. The stiletto heels were as thin as toothpicks and perilously high.
“No wonder you did your ankle,” said Jane. “No one could walk in those shoes!”