The Trivia Night

by Ali Lowe

Genres: Domestic Thrillers; Mystery

Synopsis

The events at a school fundraiser night get quickly out of hand, and the fallout leads to devastating results for a group of four couples...

Question: How long does it take to tear someone's life apart?
Answer: Sometimes just one night.

From the outside the parents of the kindergarten class at Darley Heights primary school seem to have it all. Living in the wealthy Sydney suburbs, it's a community where everyone knows each other - and secrets don't stay secret for long.

The big date in the calendar is the school's annual fundraising trivia night, but when the evening gets raucously out of hand, talk turns to partner-swapping. Initially scandalised, it's not long before a group of parents make a reckless one-night-only pact.

But in the harsh light of day, those involved must face the fallout of their behaviour. As they begin to navigate the shady aftermath of their wild night, the truth threatens to rip their perfect lives apart - and revenge turns fatal.

THE TRIVIA NIGHT is a gripping, domestic debut novel full of shocking reveals, perfect for fans of Liane Moriarty and Sally Hepworth.

(P) 2022 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Release date: February 22, 2022

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 368

Sample

Prologue

My dear husband,

I am at the place we used to come to, when we loved one another. Pen and paper on my knees, writing to you like I used to do, back in the day. Out front, waves thump the shore, turfing out early-morning surfers in their deadly roll, like debris being shaken from a rug. Heads bob up, followed by black rubber-clad bodies, invigorated by the cold and the ferocity of the swell. The dawn glitters off the ocean; how quintessentially Australian!

Behind me, the residents of Darley sleep as though drugged. Soon enough, the people we used to mingle with over cocktails and finger food, the creme of Sydney’s beach-lined peninsula, will stir in their linen-covered king beds, inside Balinese-styled homes, hands feeling out for switches to flood the world with artificial light until the sun makes its show. But here on the beach the light is real. A deep, rusty glow that blurs to peach slower than the eye can see (but blink and you’ll miss it), bringing with it a hug of warm air, a taste of the heat we’ve been promised. Summer is here again! The earth has done another circuit around the sun. It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since it happened, isn’t it, my dear?

I can’t help but think back on it all as I sit watching the waves. Isn’t the feeling of cold sand sliding through your toes positively delicious? Each grain the perfect weight and consistency to make it flow like silk – until it is ruined by the weight of water. But everything beautiful is ­ultimately sullied, isn’t it? Like love. Like marriage. Oh, I can still picture it now. Eight adults – eight responsible parents – drunk on vanity and booze, eyes greedy, limbs poised, mouths frothing with innuendo. Eight lives merging for better or worse, like globules of hot wax fusing, irresistibly, inside a lava lamp.

There was something so utterly delicious about the ­predicament they were all in and I honestly believe it would have been remiss of me not to act, especially given what I’d been through. After all, I didn’t make them do what they did. I didn’t force them into anything. They did all of that themselves – I just helped a little afterwards. I just made the situation work for me. And didn’t it work, my darling? It worked a dream!

But I do sometimes wonder how things would have gone if Amanda Blackland had never joined Darley Heights Public School. If the trivia night had been cancelled for some unforeseen reason. If they hadn’t all been so ­selfish. Perhaps there would have been no funeral. No children standing at the foot of a polished mahogany coffin, tears spilling from woeful eyes and collecting sorrowfully at their tiny feet.

I guess we will never know, will we, my dear?

Yours fondly,

Me xoxo

Chapter One Amanda

Ted stood on the pavement and loosened the collar of his white work shirt. It was the hottest January for something like twenty years, and I was still in the passenger seat of the car applying mascara. He had turned off the engine, and the air-con along with it, presumably in a bid to force me out through heat exhaustion. Outside, swarms of ­dishevelled primary-age children trudged up to the school gates, devoid of energy, like last-place marathon runners.

My husband knocked on the window and tapped his watch with an indulgent smile. I held my index finger up, the universal ‘one more minute’ sign, and turned back to the overhead mirror. Not striking, but passable. I flipped up the mirror, and stepped out of the car.

‘Beautiful, my darling!’ Ted smiled. Beads of sweat had collected in rows on his forehead – not in a gross way, but in a sort of orderly, masculine fashion. He held out his hand. ‘Ready?’

I nodded and clipped shut my tan clutch. Perhaps it was a little too much preening for the year 1 assembly, but I could hardly go make-up free for my first Darley Heights Public School event. All the other mums had known each other for the entirety of kindergarten year already, enjoying playdates and school socials and whatnot, while I’d wasted four terms greasing up to the humourless flock at St ­Cecilia’s, the private primary school down the road (and paying top dollar to do it). There was something so terrifying not only about stepping from a small private school ­community into a larger state one, but also in joining a flock that was already well formed. It felt like arriving late to a party where you don’t know anyone except the host – ­although in this instance, without the benefit of a sneaky glass of Prosecco beforehand. But if I was a fifteen out of ten for nerves, my daughter was only a one. Evie may only be seven, but she wasn’t remotely fazed about starting at a brand new school. She had already taken herself off on an exploratory mission. Be more like Evie, I told myself.

Although she had disappeared entirely.

‘Where’s she gone?’ I shrugged.

Ted nodded to the other side of the car park, where the small body of our second-born hung by her hands from the branches of a tree like a monkey, in a green-and-white tartan summer dress.

Evie’s long brown hair swung about her shoulders ­wildly, despite me having detangled it ten minutes ­previously with a brush and brute force, and her brand new, ­seaweed-green school hat lay in the arid dirt below. She was such an active child and so unlike the rest of the family. Sam wouldn’t be caught dead up a tree – mind you, he was at high school now, so that wasn’t exactly a surprise. For him it was all about hoodies, YouTube ­gaming channels, and skateboarding to KFC with his mates. This morning he had sloped out of the house en route to the school bus with his rucksack hanging so low off his ­shoulder that his lunchbox had fallen out.

A young female teacher with sweat patches under the arms of her silk blouse, and legs that were losing the battle to walk quickly within the confines of a too-tight navy pencil skirt, passed the tree and smiled up at Evie.

‘Sorry.’ I shrugged. Sorry my daughter is swinging from a tree. The woman smiled and shook her head. No worries. I’ve seen worse.

How different Darley was to St Cecilia’s! At Saint Cee’s, Evie would have been lynched by the school principal for scarpering up a tree trunk like that, in regulation uniform no less. But then, Margot Walsh had been notoriously strict. It hadn’t been hard to affront her overzealous sense of propriety. It seemed like Darley Heights Public School wasn’t too hot on formality.

‘Careful you don’t rip your new school dress, Evie,’ I called as I watched the cotton of the green tartan scratch roughly against a branch. She ignored me and clambered higher.

‘Evie! Be careful!’ shouted Ted, letting go of my hand and moving underneath the branch that held our ­daughter, to act as a human crash-mat.

‘Honey, she’s fine,’ I told him. I prided myself on being relaxed about these things – too relaxed, my husband said.

Behind Evie, at the base of the hill, the town of Darley stretched out like a grid, one side lined entirely with blue ocean. Houses, mostly with white or dove-grey facades, sat in neat rows in the middle of the bustle, flanked by the green of the golf course and the tree-lined cricket oval on one side, and the tidy, manicured lawns of St Cecilia’s on the other. Half a kilometre away to the left was the sprawling compound of Darley Mall – its red illuminated sign likely visible from space – where teenage girls hung in packs in sweet-smelling, over-lit make-up stores; high-school kids held hands and probably more in the back row of the cinema during the day; and young mothers with small babies and dark circles loaded up on coffee.

From up here, it all looked like perfect coastal bliss. Lush green grass, azure blue water, white picket houses – the kind a child might draw, with triangular roofs, trees in the front garden and pristine, landscaped paths leading up to symmetrical fences. Curtains neatly bunched like the letter ‘R’ in each of the four front windows. I could pick our house out from its position on Mentira Drive, along the edge of the golf course, its aluminium roof sloping down towards the garden, and the oblong, turquoise pool littered with gaudy inflatables. I’d always thought our home, with its slightly darker coat of paint, more charcoal than pigeon-grey, stood out a little more than the others on the street, but from this vantage point, it looked just the same as the others. Nothing notable, nothing special.

Evie’s dress caught the branch again and the hem strained against her knees.

‘Your dress, Evie!’ I called again, feeling a familiar flare of anxiety. I didn’t want anyone to be looking at us here, to be singled out again for any reason.

‘Kay!’ she yelled back.

‘C’mon kiddo, down please.’ Ted held out his arms. Evie let her body drop, landing with a puff in the dirt beside him, transforming her socks from pristine white to mud grey. Her smart new shoes looked like they’d already done a couple of terms of hard graft in the playground.

‘Fabulous,’ I said. ‘There go the Mary Janes.’

‘Mary Jane who?’ Ted said, confused.

‘They’re a type of shoe, darling.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t worry too much. Look at them all.’ He nodded at the large group of kids ahead who were pushing through the school gates ahead like parents at the Aldi ski sale. ‘Not exactly military about the uniform upkeep here, are they?’

He was right. The students at Darley Heights really were a motley crew – shirts in varying shades of white emblazoned with ink stains in red, white and blue; hats faded from dark green to an insipid olive colour thanks to the sun or the washing machine, or perhaps a combination of both; and trainers in rainbow hues that loudly flouted the ‘black shoes only’ memo we’d received in Evie’s new starter pack a month before.

Ted put his hand on my lower back, as if to guide me up the pathway towards the school. In the old days this smooth manoeuvre was an indicator of chivalry to lead me through doors and the like, but over the years it has developed into a ploy to get me to hurry along. I could tell by the fact the gentle nature of the push had just about doubled in pressure since 2010.

‘True,’ I said. ‘The cars, though . . . look at them, they’re pristine!’ I flicked an eyebrow to the kiss-and-drop zone on our right, where a row of shiny black SUVs with tinted windows and personalised number plates spat children out on to the pavement. The car game was strong – definitely more so than at St Cecilia’s – and that was a private school. Evidently, the thousands of dollars all of these parents were saving on school fees were being heavily invested at Bruce Barclay Motors in the next-door suburb of Coral Plateau.

The school itself was small and neat, if not a little dated. The main building was clad with canary yellow weatherboard, and was surrounded by the lower-school classrooms – portable buildings called demountables, that were raised up from the ground on stilts like large granny flats. Inside the circle was the concrete quad, where we’d been told students lined up in rows after the nine o’clock bell before class, and beyond that, across from the netball courts, canteen and uniform shop, were the upper-school rooms for years 3 to 6, which ran in a spacious semicircle around the sporting oval.

Ted and I had looked around the school eighteen months previously, prior to choosing St Cecilia’s, and on that wet, winter day, with the children in their classes and the quad quiet and neglected, it had seemed so outdated, so dull. But today it was different. The grass was green, flowers bloomed along the pathway that led from the gate to the main buildings, and laughter bounced off the walls as freely as the numerous handballs that were being lobbed across the quad. Kids raced across the oval, teasing one another with boisterous pushes towards the large sprinkler that rained down on the grass, relieving it from the ravages of the summer sun. The entire school hummed with something that was so much more vital than the stiff aura of St Cecilia’s, with its circular water fountain, clipped hedges and eerie, silent halls. The children here seemed so much more content, happier, so much more like kids – even if they were scruffy as all hell.

I scanned the number plates as we walked along. AMY 06Y was nudged in ahead of MOM 079 and MICH 4EL.

‘HAM-5ON,’ I said, reading aloud the number plate of the car we were about to pass.

‘Maybe they’re butchers,’ Ted quipped.

As we levelled with the car, a blonde head shot out of the passenger seat window like a sideways jack-in-the-box, scaring the absolute bejesus out of me. The hair was caramel in colour and messy. It smelled of coconut.

‘Sienna, put your hat on now,’ the woman yelled up the hill towards the school gates. She was blonde and tanned, with tiny features. Unquestionably stunning, even with her face contorted in a shout. When she didn’t get a response, she cupped her hand around her mouth, creating a sort of fleshy megaphone, and as she did so, the giant solitaire on her wedding finger sparkled in the morning sun.

‘Sienna! Hat! Now!’ she called, shriller this time. The piercing screech was all wrong coming from such a tiny head, and I must have jumped back a little, because she began to laugh and reached her hand out of her window in an attempt to touch me. Which was a little odd because I was about a metre away.

‘Oh my gosh,’ she cooed, tugging on the little discs of her gold necklace. A henna tattoo snaked up the inside of her wrist. ‘I’m so sorry! I’m such a terrible nag. “Put your hat on!”’ She put hands around her mouth again and mimicked her own screeching. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just I can never get Sienna to wear her hat and it’s ridiculously hot today – or at least it’s going to be. The forecast says thirty-four degrees, can you believe it? Not a day to go hatless, is it? Mind you, I don’t blame her. It’s not the most fashionable headwear.’ She grimaced. A few metres ahead, a pale child who looked about the same age as Evie, with white blonde hair falling down her back, reached in her rucksack and pulled out a faded bucket hat, which she plonked moodily on her head before turning to the car and glaring as if to say, ‘Happy now?’

The woman seemed totally unfazed by her daughter’s rudeness. If it had been me, I might have stuck my hand on my hip and done the old what-did-you-just-say-to-me? routine, but HAM-50N just sat there, her turquoise eyes sparkling with pride and freckles dancing all over her annoyingly pretty face as she smiled. Not a jot of make-up to be seen, which, I’m not going to lie, was a little irksome since I’d just spent the last half an hour preening.

‘Oh, please don’t worry.’ I smiled and took a step forward, giving Evie’s hand a gentle tug.

But she hadn’t finished with us yet. ‘Are you 1S parents too?’ she asked, sticking her head further out of the window. ‘Miss Sawyer’s class?’ Her feet were still in the driver’s seat footwell, but her body stretched across the passenger seat. It didn’t look comfortable in the slightest. The car behind, obviously keen to pull in and drop off its own unkempt offspring, let out an aggressive beep. I looked back at the driver and winced apologetically.

‘We are. I’m Amanda and this is Ted,’ I said, gesturing towards Ted, ‘Amanda and Ted Blackland, that is. And this is Evie.’

‘It’s so lovely to meet you.’ She smiled and turned her head towards Evie, dropping her voice into child speak. ‘Hi Evie. I’m Lara, Sienna’s mum. How are you?’

‘Good thanks,’ Evie mumbled, and kicked the pavement, adding a scuff to her already filthy shoes. I made a mental note to buy them from Kmart next time instead of the extortionate kids’ shoe shop at Darley Mall.

Lara gripped the window frame enthusiastically. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, all salty and sun-kissed, exactly like her daughter’s. She looked like she belonged in an orange combi van in a hippy commune in Byron Bay, not in well-to-do Darley, driving a bullet-proof 4×4 with personalised plates. It was a weird juxtaposition, like turning up to work at a soup kitchen wearing diamonds. I wondered if she was one of those insufferable ­trustafarians – the trust-fund recipients that dress like grungy hippies but rely on Daddy’s dollar to pay their way. She was way too unhassled to work for a living and certainly didn’t seem in a rush to get anywhere.

I realised I was smiling excessively as I silently analysed her, because my cheeks started to hurt. ‘Well, it’s lovely to meet you,’ I said, scolding myself for being so judgemental.

Lara smiled and nodded.

‘Okay, well good to meet you, Lana,’ Ted said. He cast a not-so-subtle look at his watch and placed his hand on my lower back again. ‘Right darling, shall we?’

‘Luke’s meeting me in the hall,’ Lara garbled. ‘My husband. He’s following on in his car because he’s been at work since a sparrow’s fart. I’m sure you’ll meet him in the hall. Anyway, I’ll see you up there. Bye!’ Then she smiled, flicked on her right indicator and pulled out aggressively, narrowly missing a black people carrier passing on her right.

‘I just love small talk.’ Ted grimaced, dodging to avoid two gangly boys barging past him, their schoolbags flapping about haphazardly on their shoulders. ‘Bloody hell, it’s like the charging of the fucking bulls.’

‘Yay!’ Evie punched the air. ‘That’s two dollars for the swear jar, Dad. If you keep on using bad words, I’ll be able to buy another Beanie Boo this weekend!’

I’d just opened my mouth to admonish Ted for swearing (it really was something that irked me to high heaven), when a woman with flaming red hair and carrying a Louis Vuitton shoulder bag barged into my left hip.

‘Fuck,’ I said.

‘Ugh! Sorry,’ she sighed in a manner that suggested she wasn’t sorry in the slightest. ‘Otto! Charlie! Come here now!’ she called behind her.

‘Wow,’ I said, rubbing my hip.

And that’s when the smell hit me. Dior Poison. Sweet and plummy, but also kind of deadly and calculating with all those musky, sandalwood base notes. I stopped dead on the pavement and took in a sharp breath because I was suddenly back there at St Cecilia’s. Back in the playground where glances crossed like swords and tuts clicked like thunder; back in that pristine colonial-style house with the stark white deck and the colourful, single-­knotted ­Moroccan rug, where everything had gone, quite alarmingly, pear-shaped. Where the thing had been done that could never be undone, which had changed the very course of my life, all of our lives, and led us here to Darley Heights Public School for a fresh start. My head swung around instinctively – left to right, behind, in front – but the only familiar face was Alice’s, up ahead. The coast was clear, and I allowed my lungs a relieved exhale.

‘Darling?’ Ted turned back and reached out his hand. ‘All okay?’

I nodded and took his hand, allowing him to gently guide my momentarily paralysed body up the hill.

Inside the hall, the giant ceiling fans only seemed to ­recirculate the sticky late-January air. The main wall to the left of me, painted eggshell blue, was like a giant pin board. One side was decorated with forty or so paintings of native animals – kangaroos nestled side by side with koalas, echidnas and possums. One picture was of a ­father clutching a beer in one hand and a TV remote in the other, with the words, ‘The Native Dad’ at the top (give that child an A+ for thinking outside the box). Some of the paintings were jaw-droppingly artistic, ­others not remotely so, but what these ones lacked in precision, they made up for in charm. Opposite the large patchwork of art, on the right-hand side of the wall, the blue, red and white Australian national flag, dotted with stars, was pinned up on equal footing beside the red, yellow and black Aboriginal ensign, its three vibrant colours representing the people, the sun and the red ochre colour of the native earth. Both flags looked a little like they could do with a wash and an iron, which was sort of ­symptomatic of the entire place and its students – ­charming, but a little unkempt.

We made our way towards the rows of faded orange chairs.

‘So, let me get this straight,’ Ted whispered. ‘Not only are we here this morning, but we’re also back on Saturday for some fundraising event?’

‘Trivia night, you mean.’

‘That’s the one. And what does trivia night entail, exactly?’

‘Fancy dress and quizzes. They do it in most schools, darling. It’s the main annual fundraiser for the school year, but it’s basically a giant piss-up.’

Ted nodded. ‘I don’t remember St Cecilia’s doing it.’

‘No. St Cee’s doesn’t, none of the private schools do. They get enough cash from fees, I suppose.’

‘Bit full-on at the start of the year, isn’t it?’

‘Well I guess most people are ready to let loose at the end of Dry January and that means they’re happy to dress up and get drunk, which ultimately means they donate more in the raffle and auction. Well, that’s what Alice told me, anyway.’

Alice knew everything about everything as the parent-­teacher committee’s events chair, including how to wangle a last-minute spot for the daughter of her oldest friend. She’d certainly pulled some strings for us – it wasn’t an ­exaggeration to say we wouldn’t have been in this hall without her.

‘What do we have to dress up as? Presumably it’s ­acceptable to go as yourself?’

Ted didn’t do fancy dress.

‘As a handsome school dad? Unfortunately not. This year’s theme is “back to school”. It’s a big deal, honey. Everyone puts loads of thought into their outfits and there are prizes for best-dressed. Didn’t you see the posters up outside?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ he sighed. ‘I’d do anything for you, my darling, but this sounds truly awful.’

‘Oh come on, Scrooge.’ I squeezed his knee. ‘You’re doing it for Evie, really. Besides, we can’t miss the first event of the school year, can we? It’ll be the perfect opportunity for us to get to know people, to make friends. It’ll be fine. You’ll just have to get into the spirit of it. Pop on a white shirt and grey pants like a schoolboy and it’ll hardly be a costume at all. I’m sure it’ll be hilarious.’

But even as I said it, I knew I wasn’t convinced. I mean, it sounded fun for sure, but for some reason it felt a little like a debutante ball, with me as the new girl. My ­stomach danced – and not in a good way – at the idea of hundreds of cliquey mums huddled in groups, scrutinising the rookie year 1 mum like lions appraising a defenceless gazelle. The dress-up element just made it worse. It’s one thing trying to impress your peers in your own clothes, but quite another in costume. It would, quite literally, be like ­going back to school – and I wasn’t under any illusion that the first time hadn’t been hellish enough. The only saving grace was the fact that, this time, everyone would have ­alcohol to numb the awkwardness.

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ said Ted.

We made our way to the nearest available seats, in the middle of the audience, about eight rows back. Just as I was about to sit down, Evie yanked my hand and pulled me upright again. ‘Mum,’ she said. ‘You have to walk me to the front to my class. Look, they’re all sitting in a line up there. I don’t want to go by myself.’

I looked to the front and saw a row of nervous looking children – Sienna, with her hat sitting haphazardly on her head, a nose full of freckles and delicate, pretty features, like her mother; along with Lottie and Freya, Alice’s twins, who were non-identical but disarmingly similar, more so as they got older. Their dresses were pristine, wrinkle free and a good deal brighter than most in the line-up, and they both had their hair pulled back tightly into French plaits. I hoped to God Evie wouldn’t sit down next to them in her dusty tunic and muddy socks.

‘Okay, okay,’ I told Evie, reversing myself back past six pairs of slender legs, and apologising profusely, like you do in the cinema when you need to get out to go to the loo in the middle of the movie. She pulled me along the aisle and I suddenly felt alarmingly self-conscious, as if I were the one on show, being judged as I walked along and not her. Something about it smacked of the new girl doing a weird lap of honour while the regular spectators awarded silent marks out of ten. And even though I should have felt confident as a perfectly presentable 42-year-old woman dropping her child off at school, and even though I knew deep down I had as much right to be there as any one of these mothers, I did feel different. After all, I hadn’t originally chosen to send my child to Darley Heights, I had ended up here because of the awful thing that had happened. I wondered if some of them knew about it, if they had heard the gossip being bandied around town. Darley was a small place and people did socialise outside of their own school communities, namely on the sidelines at Saturday sport. And even if they didn’t know, maybe they’d assume I was a snob for opting to go private for a year when Darley Heights Public was perfectly good, thank you very much – or that I’d only picked their quaint little school because I’d seen the latest round of national primary school ratings.

These niggling considerations aside, there was also the fact that all of the mothers at Darley were so ­collectively gorgeous. They were all symmetrical, with smooth skin and blow-dried hair pulled up into silky, high ponies. All of them – and not just the few I’d seen in the kiss-and-drop area hanging out of their SUVs – but every single one, was wearing activewear, tight-fitting pants in bright ­colours and floral patterns, flattering their gym-honed physiques. It was like I’d rocked up to a yoga retreat. I almost expected some half-dressed, bangle-wearing guru to pop up on the stage and ask me to get into a downward dog. They all looked so healthy. And that’s when I thought, as I looked down at myself and cursed my choice of Zara sundress and Saltwater sandals, I do hope these people like a drink, otherwise I’m in for an incredibly dull five years.

What was also strange was the overall appearance of the dads. There were only about a dozen or so in a hall full of women, but the ones that had made the effort to sho. . .