I Love the Whole World!

‘She’ll hate it,’ Dennis probably said to Moose when she told him Leslie was going to Las Vegas. ‘Leslie! In Las Vegas! God, she’ll absolutely hate it.’

Leslie imagined his face as he said it: tight, leathered, frustrated by the idea of Leslie going to Las Vegas and hating it there, silently annoyed at Kimberly’s little white dog that was always licking his legs.

‘It’ll be too hot for her. Too loud. Too bright. She doesn’t like places like that, she never has. Everything will be so expensive! And gambling! Your mother’s never taken a risk in her life! She’ll be too nervous for the tables. She’ll be too scared to even leave the hotel room!’

Of course, Leslie had no proof that this conversation ever actually occurred. If Dennis had said it to Moose, she didn’t pass it on. It seemed Moose not passing information on to Leslie was a thing that happened now.

But Leslie knew that even if he didn’t say it aloud, he definitely thought it. Because if there was something Leslie McDonald knew better than anything, it was her ex-husband, Dennis Francis-Pester. His voice had been the voice in her head for twenty-four years. Leslie knew what Dennis Francis-Pester thought of her better than she knew what she thought of herself.

Dennis had been the only man she had ever loved, and was now a person she felt a numbing ambivalence towards. Thinking about Dennis was like going to the dentist to get a filling: a slight pinch, and then nothing.

The divorce was neither a surprise nor not a surprise to Leslie. It was neither expected nor unexpected. It was just a thing that happened to Leslie rather than something she instigated or even really took active part in.

Leslie had felt for some time that life had become a series of things that just happened to her.

Her best friend Jenny, forever positive, told her it was a good thing. ‘You’re only forty-three,’ she said. ‘That’s plenty of time. Forty-three is the new thirty-three!’ was a thing people said to her now.

Plenty of time for what though? Leslie had lost sight of all the things a life could be. She had let her life become so small that she couldn’t see past the tediously flat, grid-like streets of her neighbourhood.

In a roundabout way, that was how she started entering competitions. She saw one in a newspaper where the prize was a trip to Peru. To Peru! She had never even considered that one could go to Peru. How had she not known that going to Peru was a thing that people could do? She had never even thought about Peru, let alone thought about going to Peru. But why couldn’t Leslie go to Peru? Yoohoo! It’s Leslie in Peru!

She filled out the entry form and posted it in, and suddenly she could picture Leslie in Peru.

It was like the world had opened up to her, just a crack, just a peep, and she liked what she saw. She liked the idea of being in Peru despite not knowing anything about Peru, or what happens there or what it looks like – or even really where it is.

Before long, Leslie was entering any competition she could find. She even rang into the radio station a few times! You haven’t known Leslie long, but can you imagine her calling up a radio station?

She entered to win a jet ski, a wheelbarrow filled with gold bullion, a house on the Gold Coast, a new Alfa Romeo Spider. When someone at the radio station finally answered the phone she would say, ‘It’s me, Leslie’, as if they had been expecting her.

She never expected to win any of these competitions, but even the act of entering felt like a first tentative step out into the world. Like a foot in the shallows at the beach in early spring. It felt brave.

So when the phone rang and Leslie answered it and the woman from the potato-chip company asked, ‘Hello, is that Leslie McDonald?’, Leslie said, ‘Yes, this is she.’ And the woman from the chip company said that she had won – she! Leslie! had won! – Leslie felt suddenly as though something was happening to her. Or rather that she! Leslie! had made it happen.

Amanda from the potato-chip company rang on a Thursday evening and told Leslie she had won an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas for two people. Las Vegas in Nevada in the United States of America!

What the hell was Leslie McDonald going to do in the United States of America?

She called Jenny first. She always called Jenny first.

Jenny screamed with delight. She’d been to Las Vegas many times before. She loved Las Vegas.

‘I LOVE Vegas!!’ Jenny whooped. ‘We’re going to Vegas!’

‘Assuming I’m taking you,’ Leslie joked – as if she would take anyone else.

‘Moose?’

‘Can you imagine!’

Leslie had thought about asking Moose but decided she didn’t want to spend a week in Las Vegas with someone who rolled her eyes whenever Leslie said anything. Who listened to very loud, very bad music.

It wasn’t that Leslie didn’t love Moose – of course she did. In a way, they had grown up together. When Leslie became a mother, she had still felt somewhat like a baby herself. But now at twenty-two her daughter was making terrible decisions at a very particular age that felt to Leslie – despite her knowing rationally this wasn’t about her (very little was, after all) – both pointed and deliberately hurtful. For that reason, Leslie did not particularly like Moose right now and would probably struggle to for some time. But of course she could never say that out loud. You weren’t allowed to not like your children, even if just for a short time and for a very specific reason. There were parents of murderers who refused to say a bad word about their children. But Leslie thought mean things about Moose sometimes, and she thought it was okay to just think it. Especially now.

So she and Jenny made a Vegas plan. Jenny bought new outfits and calculated how many days in advance of departure she needed to get her spray tan so it would look its most natural. But then Jenny started bleeding. Non-stop for five weeks. Bleeding through pads, through tampons, through the wedge of toilet paper she put in her underpants to safeguard her clothes when she bled through the tampon. Her bleeding was too powerful for any pills to stop so she bled on her favourite white capri pants and onto her cream leather car seat. She bled onto the white chair at the gynaecologist’s office. ‘That must happen all the time,’ Jenny had said. ‘Less than you would expect,’ the young receptionist sighed, and took another call.

Jenny said by the time she came back out after seeing the doctor, the blood was gone.

Jenny’s hysterectomy was scheduled two weeks out from the date the flights were booked. Leslie sat beside her in the hospital room as Jenny explained medical menopause to her, as she told her about all the things that would start now the bleeding had stopped. Jenny’s husband, Kenneth, wafted in and out, unable to sit still in hospitals, unable to listen to the details of Jenny’s wound (he would go pale at the mention of it – as if he were the one who had just lost enough blood to make him anaemic), Jenny’s pain, what lay in store for Jenny’s body. He’d see for himself soon enough.

The potato-chip company, the one that decided to hold a competition to send two people to Las Vegas, told her the tickets were non-transferable. The names and dates unchangeable. Leslie would have to go alone or not at all.