“Pardon me?”

She screamed at him, “Stop the car!” and opened the car door to reveal the ground rushing by beneath them. Dan reached over and clenched her upper arm painfully hard. He told the driver, “You’d better pull over!”

The driver swung the steering wheel and slammed on the brakes to an enraged chorus of horns.

“You’re hurting my arm.”

Dan loosened his grip. “Do what you want. I give up.”

Cat climbed out of the car, while Dan looked straight ahead, his arms folded, and the cabdriver watched with wary eyes in the rearview mirror. Gently, precisely, she closed the door behind her.

She wondered if she was going mad.

It felt like a decision she could make. One small step over an invisible line and she could choose lunacy. She could lie down right now in the middle of Sydney and scream and kick and throw her head from side to side like Maddie having a tantrum. Eventually someone would call an ambulance and stick a needle into her and she could sink into a mindless sleep.

The cab pulled away from the curb in a mature, sober fashion so Cat could see just how childishly she’d behaved.

It was like every fight she’d ever had with her sisters. A wave of rage would sweep her up and carry her high and righteous until she did something embarrassingly excessive. Then it would dump her, splat, leaving her stupid and small.

Maxine’s voice sharp in her head: If you don’t learn how to control that temper of yours, Catriona, you’ll pay the price. Not me! You!

No doubt Dan and the cabdriver were chuckling and shaking their heads over the amusing, probably premenstrual hysteria of women. Dan would make up some excuse about her nonappearance at the party, get drunk, and not even spare her a thought until he was unsteadily aiming his key at the front door.

Or of course, he could find some other woman to sleep with. It would be understandable. Not only did his wife not understand him, she was f**king boring too.

An excited babble of Christmas-drinks noise was coming from a bar directly behind her.

“Got any ID, love?” asked a bouncer who seemed to be having trouble balancing the top half of his body. Any minute he would topple forward from the weight of his muscles.

“Yeah, I need ID like you need more steroids,” she told him and walked past him into the bar.

Men. What was the point of them?

Expertly, her elbows vicious, she ducked and wove her way through the crowd to the counter and ordered a bottle of champagne.

“How many glasses?” asked the girl. Her roundly innocent eyes made Cat feel like a wizened old crone.

“One,” she snapped. “Just one.”

With the ice bucket and champagne cradled brazenly under one arm, she walked out of the bar and onto the street. The top-heavy bouncer didn’t try to stop her. He was distracted by some more appreciative thirty-plus patrons who were gigglingly presenting their ID.

She walked down George Street toward the Quay.

“Merry Christmas!” A group of drunken office workers in witty Santa Claus hats danced around her.

She kept walking.

Why did everyone have to be so inanely happy?

She continued on past the Opera House and finally into the Botanical Gardens. Hitching her $200 Collette Dinnigan skirt up to her thighs, she settled down cross-legged on the ground, her back up against a tree. She poured herself a glass of champagne and let it slosh all over her hand and onto her skirt. “Cheers.”

She toasted the harbor and drank thirstily. Boats strung with colorful lights slipped across the water, throbbing with music and the shouts and cries of overexcited party people.

If she drank this whole bottle she’d have a hangover for tomorrow morning’s counseling session. Now that would really add to the whole experience.

Tomorrow they were discussing their childhoods. Their “homework”—Annie’s plump fingers formed exaggerated inverted commas in the air—was to think of a memory from their childhood when they had observed their parents dealing with conflict. “We’re going to look at the role models in your life!” cried Annie.

Cat was looking forward to submitting the famous story of Kettle Cracker Night 1976. There was no material in Dan’s boringly happy childhood that could possibly match it. She would win the battle for most psychological damaging childhood hands down.

Cat, Gemma, and Lyn, six years old, wearing identical blue hooded parkas and brown corduroy pants. Everyone in the street had come to a Cracker Night party in their backyard. There was a towering, noisy bonfire and its crimson glow made everyone’s faces shadowed and mysterious. The kids were waving sparklers that fizzed and crackled white-hot silver stars. Their father, a cigarette held rakishly in the corner of his mouth, kept making all the men laugh, big booming bursts of raucous laughter. Their mother, in a short green dress with big gold buttons down the middle, was handing around a big platter of prunes wrapped in bacon with little toothpicks. Her hair was still long then, a smooth auburn sheet that stopped in a neat straight line just past her bottom.

At last, after endless hours of lobbying the slow-moving parents, it was time for the real fireworks. Beer bottle in hand, their father strolled theatrically to the center of the yard, pulled at his trouser knees, squatted down, and did something mysterious and clever with his cigarette lighter.

“Wait till you see this one, girls!” he said to his daughters. Seconds later—bang! The air exploded in color.

“Oooh!” exclaimed everyone at each new firework. “Aaaaah!”