I Give My Marriage a Year

by Holly Wainwright

  ‘Yes. But you went for a drink with Mick?’

  ‘Yes. To be honest, after everything that happened yesterday, I was pretty wiped out. It was . . . emotional.’

  ‘Hmmmmm.’

  ‘So we just had a couple to wet the baby’s head, as they say.’ He touched Baby’s head with his finger; she stirred and Lou’s stomach clenched. Ouch. ‘And then I went home and crashed out.’

  Lou thought about her night. About the delirium of the seemingly endless stretch of time, of the fear and the worry and the whimpering and the pain and all the instructions she was trying to make sense of while being unable to hold a thought in her head, and the changing faces of the people who were telling her what to do with her baby, and how to hold her, and how not to feed her and how to shush her and how to wrap her. And she realised that her night was still going on, that it would probably still be going for a while yet, because babies, she’d been told, didn’t know night from day and they just needed feeding and changing and patting whenever, always, twenty-four seven.

  Lou took a bite of her muffin. She was ravenous, but it felt like sawdust in her mouth.

  ‘There have to be some perks in all of this,’ and she motioned to herself, from her face to her mid-section. ‘There has to be an upside. And I think it’s naming rights.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Josh said, but he wasn’t really listening, it seemed to her. He was still staring into the cot. What she wondered, through the veil of exhaustion and overwhelm, was whether he would ever focus entirely on her again. ‘That’s how we’re going to do this?’

  ‘Stella Rose,’ she said. ‘It’s my final offer.’

  Josh

  Later that month

  Josh was hiding.

  He was standing outside a pub in Newcastle’s red-brick heart of Hunter Street, wearing his wedding suit and wishing he smoked cigarettes.

  He felt a sharp pang of guilt about the fact Lou was inside, with tiny Stella wrapped close to her body, talking to all these people she’d never met before and probably wouldn’t again while Josh hid in the alleyway.

  Josh had been a dad for two weeks when his father died.

  Just four days ago, the call. He and Lou had just begun to find a groove at home with everything different. Really everything.

  It felt like they’d walked back in the door from the hospital, their three-day-old bundle in a baby capsule – the practical gift they’d requested from Annabelle and Brian – and looked at their lives and thought, Well, that’s not going to work, is it?

  From the size and layout of their unit, where there was nowhere to hide from a crying baby and nowhere for a crying baby to hide from them, to the entirely impractical vintage furniture they’d furnished their place with, which was all but impossible to wipe down or clean up from vomit, poo and tears. To the neighbours, who had always had parties but seemed to ramp up their late-night noise in defiance of having to share a wall with anything as ordinary as a family.

  When his phone rang, Josh was in the middle of hauling a big, beloved, felt-covered armchair to his ute and then the tip.

  Lou had been inside, trying to nap on the bed in the weak afternoon sun as Stella (finally) slept beside her, wrapped so tightly in her little starry cloth she looked for all the world like a chubby little caterpillar busting out of its cocoon.

  As he was lugging the chair, he’d been thinking about that wrap, in a sleep-deprived way, and how Lou had become so good at that so quickly, while he was incapable of replicating the secure folds and twists, and only succeeded in making Stella look like a particularly cute bundle of rags. Was that a gender-specific skill? When his phone rang in his pocket, he put down the chair and reached for it. Seeing Anika’s name, he answered the call.

  ‘Hello, sis,’ he’d said, with as much energy as he could muster. He didn’t need his sister’s pity or concern.

  But her voice had instantly told him she wasn’t calling to check on Stella’s progress.

  ‘It’s Dad.’

  ‘What’s Dad?’ Josh didn’t understand.

  ‘He’s been in an accident.’

  There was a car parked in front of Josh’s ute with one of those big red noses attached to the radiator, making it look like a clown, for charity or whatever. That’s what Josh was looking at, for some reason, when she said, ‘He’s not going to . . . make it.’

  That’s what people said in movies when someone was going to die.

  Why was this car wearing a red nose? Josh wondered. It wasn’t Red Nose Day, was it? When was that, anyway?

  ‘Where is he?’ he thought to ask.

  ‘Newy.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It’s not very clear. But a car. He got hit by a car.’

  Josh stared at the red nose. Well.

  ‘Josh?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We need to get up there.’

  Oh. Josh turned, looked from the red nose back towards his open front door. Just behind that blind in the window was Lou, exhausted, furious Lou, and little Stella. Little Stella sleeping.

  ‘I just saw him,’ he said to Anika. ‘He came to see the baby.’

  ‘I know, mate, he told me.’

  ‘He did?’

  ‘He did.’ Anika’s voice sounded muffled for a moment, like she was wiping her nose and had covered her mouth. ‘He told me Stella was beautiful.’

  ‘She is,’ Josh said automatically.

  ‘Yes, she is, Josh. That’s what I said to him: “What did you expect?”’

  ‘Ha.’ Josh said the word, but he wasn’t laughing.

  To say Josh had been surprised to see his dad at the door the day after they’d brought Stella home would be an understatement. Josh hadn’t seen Len since he’d watched his father walk away down Mick’s street on his wedding day. There had been a few awkward phone calls, and information passed along via Josh’s sisters about how ‘ropeable’ Len remained about what had happened that day, and Josh had decided just to let it lie. Len had never been much of a dad anyway, he told himself. No great loss.

  But he’d found himself calling his dad on that night after Stella was born, home from the pub, full of conflicting emotions. And a few days later, Len had just appeared at the front door of their flat, clutching a pink teddy bear with the price tag still on it in both hands, a battered-looking old Beemer parked behind him in the street.

  It had been surreal for Josh to see Len standing in the middle of his living room, surrounded by baby paraphernalia, wraps draped over chair arms, the portable bassinet on the dining table. A dazed Lou had brought Stella out from the bedroom and passed the tiny baby from her arms to Len’s, and he stood there, this tall, tired-looking man in faded slacks and vinyl trainers, looking down at his granddaughter’s brand-new face.

  ‘You’ve done well,’ he said, after a moment. ‘She’s beautiful.’

  Lou made a cup of tea and Len handed the baby back to Josh and took a look around the flat. ‘You’ll be outgrowing this place soon, hey?’ And he thanked an exhausted Lou for the tea and asked if he could go outside for a smoke, and Josh gave Stella back to Lou and joined his dad out the front.

  ‘Any advice for me, Dad?’ he asked, as they stood out on the pavement. And he was only half joking.

  ‘I made a bit of a mess of all this,’ Len said, pulling on his roll-up, his other hand wrapped around his tea mug. ‘I know that, son.’

  ‘Well . . .’ Josh didn’t know what to say, so he just looked down at his feet.

  ‘But you love your kids,’ said Len, ‘you always do. You know that now. How you feel, it’s how I felt.’

  Felt. Josh, a man in his thirties now, tried not to feel hurt by his dad’s use of the past tense.

  As Len stubbed out his ciggie and handed Josh his empty mug, he said, ‘I’d like to see more of you and Lou and the baby.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Josh. ‘We’d like that too.’

  ‘You realise how much family matters when you’ve got bugger-all else.’

 
‘Is everything okay, Dad?’

  ‘Josh, everything has never been okay, has it?’ Len replied with a dry laugh. ‘But it’s a little bit better now I’ve seen my son with his daughter.’

  Josh looked up at his dad, but Len was on his way to the car. ‘Tell Lou goodbye,’ he said. ‘Babies are hard on women.’

  And Josh called out, ‘I’ll call you, we’ll come up,’ as his dad folded himself into the Beemer. Two tries of the ignition, a quick wave, and the car had pulled out from the kerb, right where Josh was standing at this moment.

  ‘Josh, I’m going to come and get you,’ Anika was saying. ‘Ed can deal with Henry for the night. You need to tell Lou.’

  ‘Anika . . .’

  ‘You have to come, Josh. Go and tell Lou now.’

  ‘And Maya?’

  ‘Our sister’s in fucking Sumatra. I’ve tried, but . . .’ Anika sounded muffled again. ‘I’ll be there in an hour.’

  ‘Anika, I don’t know if I can leave –’

  ‘Josh, we have to. There’s no other option – not one you’re going to want to live with, anyway. I’m coming, go and tell Lou.’

  He did. He’d hung up the phone and left the big red chair right there on the pavement and went back inside and lay down next to Lou on the bed. He didn’t want to wake her, she looked so exhausted, even when she was sleeping. She was wearing the giant black shirt of his that she’d been wearing non-stop since they came home. She could undo it quickly for feeding, when the feeding was going well, and it had little white smears on it – breast milk? Baby cream? He didn’t really know.

  He was going to have to wake her, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to lie here with his wife sleeping as she should be and his baby girl sleeping as she should be and not have to get into a car with his sister and try not to talk about their dad for the two-and-a-half hours it took to drive north to Newcastle.

  He didn’t imagine Lou would want to hear it, but she smelled beautiful like this, her scent a mixture of baby milk and light sweat and her shampoo from the five minutes she’d found in which to wash her hair with him home this morning. Josh inched a bit closer to her on the bed, breathed her in, and then he whispered in her ear. ‘Wake up, Lou.’

  Her eyes snapped open instantly, and she looked at him as if he’d shoved a knife under her ribs. ‘What . . . are you doing?’ Her voice was a loud whisper, instinctive already. Stella was sleeping and no loud noises were allowed. ‘Why would you . . .’

  ‘It’s my dad.’

  ‘What’s your dad? Why are you waking me up?’

  ‘I have to go,’ and Josh told Lou what Anika had said to him. Lou put a hand out to him, touched his arm, his shoulder.

  ‘Josh, we’ll come with you,’ she said.

  ‘No! No, you can’t come. You’ve got . . .’ and he motioned at the bassinet, where Stella was snuffling.

  ‘We have that,’ Lou said, ‘And we’ll be with you.’

  In Newcastle, only hours later, the hospital was awful. Honestly, he couldn’t bear to think about it.

  It seemed so ridiculous that only two weeks before, Josh had been at a different hospital, watching his daughter being born. Lou had gone early – only by a week, but it had been enough to surprise them, as everyone kept saying that due dates were only a guess and all first babies were late.

  Not Stella. She was in an enormous hurry, and by the time Josh had driven them to the hospital and they were on their way up to the birthing suite in the lift, Lou was doubled over, holding on to his clothes and bellowing, ‘I want to push!’ When the nurse who was with them in the elevator said, ‘No, not yet,’ Lou told her to get fucked.

  Josh thought then that he’d never been so afraid in his life. What was happening to the woman he loved seemed terrible, frankly. Life-threatening. It was like the Lou he knew had been replaced with this roaring, pain-soaked beast. It must be where stories of demonic possession came from, he thought, as, with a new wave of contractions, Lou’s face contorted into a shape he’d never even considered before.

  He’d watched her push Stella out, one gargantuan effort at a time, and he’d still been terrified, but also in awe. How did Lou know how to do that? How did she know she wasn’t going to die from this pain that seemed literally unbearable? After what seemed like a long time, but was in reality only three hours, Stella came tumbling out of his wife, slick and yelling. The midwife told Josh to cut the cord and he did, and then he took the little ball of baby and laid it on Lou’s chest, as if he was presenting her with the prize she deserved for what she had just done. And he was still shaking. Because he had no idea that people could survive that sort of thing, and he really didn’t know if he could have.

  They had both looked at the baby, completely baffled. And then Lou had laughed, and he had too. And then he cried and cried, like so many new fathers do.

  I wonder if Len cried when I was born? Josh thought as he and Anika waited outside the intensive care ward to see their dad.

  He doubted it. In fact, he seemed to remember that Emma told him Len hadn’t been there for any of their births. Maybe in the waiting room for Anika, the first.

  Josh recognised Christine, the woman he’d met on the street on his wedding day, coming out of the ICU. He hadn’t seen her since, and he was embarrassed that he didn’t even know she was still around. When Len had come to visit Stella, only a week before, he hadn’t mentioned her at all. Though Josh hadn’t asked.

  Christine walked straight up to him and Anika, who was standing beside him. ‘They’ve told us he’s going today,’ she said. She looked destroyed, this woman in a pink tracksuit, her face a mask of faded, smudged make-up. ‘I think you two should go in.’

  ‘What . . . happened?’ Josh asked.

  Anika put a hand on his arm as if to warn him against asking that, but Christine didn’t blink.

  ‘He walked in front of a car,’ she said. She just said it like that. ‘Bloody idiot.’

  ‘On . . . purpose?’ Josh couldn’t help it, and he suddenly felt cold.

  ‘Oh, no.’ Christine shook her head. ‘I shouldn’t think so. Showing off. Had a few drinks, we’d had a row, he was trying to prove a point, I think . . .’

  Josh’s dad was in his sixties. Too old to be drunk and messing around on a highway. Too young to die.

  ‘I need to hear . . .’ but Anika pulled him away.

  ‘Thank you, Christine,’ she said. ‘We’ll go and talk to our Dad.’

  ‘He’s not talking, dear,’ Christine said. ‘It will be a one-way conversation.’

  Josh wanted Lou. But she was waiting in a cafe; she couldn’t bring the baby in here, they’d realised when they arrived at the hospital. There was way too much sickness and sorrow.

  He and Anika went in, stood next to the bed and looked at the man who was their dad, in all his disappointing glory. His face on one side was bruised and mangled and his head was bandaged, but the rest of him looked almost normal.

  Anika said, ‘What shall we say to him?’

  Josh didn’t know. It was suddenly too much, this whole thing. Josh’s chest felt tight, his heart racing. ‘I’m going to find Lou,’ he said to his sister. ‘You say your stuff, then come and find us.’ And he went and found his wife and daughter at the cafe.

  ‘How is he?’ Lou asked, and he shook his head at her.

  An hour later, she was standing next to him at his father’s bedside, while Anika wheeled Stella up and down the street outside. Lou held his hand, and he held his father’s hand, and for the second time in a month, he stood by a hospital bed and cried and cried and cried.

  *

  Now he was hiding.

  From Christine, and his mum, and all his dad’s old piss-head mates.

  Josh peered through the pub window. He saw Lou, one hand on Stella’s pram, rolling it forwards and back, forwards and back, talking to Maya, who’d arrived home yesterday.

  He wanted to run away from this ugly place, from this whole ordeal. He’d had to listen to so many people te
lling him what a great bloke his father was. A larrikin, sure, but salt of the earth, would do anything for anyone. A generous person with a big heart, his mates insisted. Was that just what people said about dead people, or was that who Len really was – for everyone but his family? Because Josh was trying really hard to think of anything generous and selfless and kind his version of Len had done for him or for the girls.

  ‘You need to stop being so tortured about this,’ someone said, and it was his mum, Emma, standing next to him in the alleyway.

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘I know you’ve got a lot going on right now,’ Emma said, putting her hand on his suited arm. ‘But if I can forgive him enough to be here today to see him off, you can too.’

  ‘Mum.’ Josh was having trouble saying anything else. If this was a movie, he thought, his mum would recall something his father had done for his children that revealed this other side to him that everyone else spoke of so warmly.

  ‘I didn’t get to talk to him before he died,’ Josh said. ‘I just . . . cried.’

  ‘Well, that’s okay, isn’t it?’

  ‘I wanted to tell him about Stella,’ Josh said, leaning back against the wall.

  ‘I heard he met Stella,’ Emma said. ‘Came all the way down to see her. That surprised me a bit, I must admit.’

  Josh shrugged. ‘Maybe he was in town seeing a man about a dog.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Emma nodded.

  ‘Anyway, I wanted to tell him something else about Stella,’ Josh said. Anika had suggested that he speak at the funeral today, but he had said no, he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to say. But it turned out there was something.

  ‘I wanted to tell him that Stella’s only three weeks old, but I know already that I would never, ever leave her sitting somewhere, waiting for me, and not show up.’ He coughed; something in his throat. ‘I would just never do that. I can’t imagine how you could . . .’

  ‘Stop it, Josh,’ his mum said. ‘You don’t have to say that out loud. Everyone who knows you knows it’s true.’

  ‘It’s changed everything. Stella – she’s changed everything.’

  His mum took his hand. ‘Let’s get back inside,’ she said.