The Mother Fault

by Kate Mildenhall

  Steve claps his hand on Jay’s shoulder. ‘Thanks for that, mate. I’ll drop it back in when I’m done.’

  ‘No worries, no rush,’ Jay says. ‘See you then.’ He nods at Mim as he leaves.

  Steve turns to Mim. ‘See you in the house for dinner in a bit, yeah? Mum’s got it all sorted, bit late for our kids, but Mum wanted us to wait.’

  She watches him head out into the darkness, breathing in the smell of the place and imagining the air pulsing through her blood, connecting back with her marrow. A place can be home, can feel like it’s part of you, and yet you can want to run from it.

  5

  Mum bustles out the door with a tray of potatoes in her mitted hands.

  ‘Come on then,’ she calls to them. ‘Don’t want these getting cold.’

  They traipse across the turned earth to the farmhouse, and Mim feels strange to see it from this new angle.

  ‘You liking the unit, Mum?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she says, ‘so easy to clean!’

  Mim thinks she is lying. How do you go from being the matriarch in the big farmhouse, the one where you’ve raised all your kids, lived out every day of your marriage, to being sent to the granny flat round the back? The one within calling distance in case you’re needed to mind the grandkids. Anger flares in Mim and she swallows it back. This is not what she is here for.

  At the front door, she hesitates. Everything is the same, and yet it is not. The sound of the wood contracting as night settles, the light that emanates from the kitchen at the other end of the hallway, travelling down the spine of the place and spilling through the red and blue stained glass of the door.

  She can hear the baby crying. How can this be her home, the smell, the feel of it knitted into her matter, and yet feel so alien? She wonders if belonging can feel like two opposing forces.

  ‘Go on, then!’ Her mother comes up behind her, the dish of roast potatoes hot between her oven mitts. ‘You don’t have to knock for goodness sake!’

  Mim knocks anyway, uncommitted, sliding her knuckles across the timber as she reaches for the handle. Then she pushes open the door and ushers her mother and the kids ahead of her.

  She hardly recognises the toddler, Hamish, who is freewheeling down the hall towards them. It’s been over a year since she’s seen them. Two years now since Dad’s been gone. They’d all met in the city with the lawyers to finalise the titles and Jill had been neat and glowing with the beginning of her next pregnancy, Hamish content to be jiggled on her knee. They’d been composed, a quiet style about them that Mim had always found elusive. People would look at them and know they were landowners, Mim had thought, and they would be right. And I am not.

  ‘Down here!’ Jill sticks her head around the doorway at the end of the hall, and Mim kisses the boy and leaves the kids there to negotiate playtime with their cousin.

  It was one of the only issues where she found herself agreeing with Steve over Michael. Kids. Michael had always been clear he wouldn’t have children.

  ‘It’s irresponsible,’ he’d told her during one of her visits back here. ‘You of all people should know that.’ He’d been clean for a couple of months then, and she was excited to be introducing him to her new boyfriend. She and Ben were still plump and blushing with the newness of it all, the legitimacy of the visit home, the frisson it added to their sex.

  She’d laughed. ‘Maybe, dear brother, but there’s also something incredibly right about it.’ She’d touched Ben’s thigh on the couch next to her and he’d gently pushed her hand away, laughing, not entirely comfortable in her family home. But later, that night, giggling in her old bedroom, he had nuzzled her neck and run his hands under her t-shirt, quickening to get her clothes off her.

  ‘I want to have babies with you,’ he’d whispered, and the effect had been shockingly physical.

  ‘Why is that such a turn-on?’ she’d whispered back and kissed him, hungry.

  But she shouldn’t have been surprised when Michael had not been impressed with her news years later. He was back on ice, staying with a mate in town. Perhaps there was some part of her that imagined her own life-changing news might change his.

  ‘Overpopulation,’ he’d said down the line, ‘the greatest burden of our times.’

  ‘Are you serious? That’s your congratulations? I’m pregnant, you dickhead, it’s family. You’ll be its uncle.’

  He’d hung up. And she was so angry she didn’t call him again for the rest of her pregnancy, and then, by the time Essie arrived, he was already in BestLife.

  * * *

  In the dining room, there is a highchair at one end of the long wooden table, and her father’s chair opposite, heading the other end. Mim lays out the plates and remembers Ben here. His hand reaching for hers under the table and squeezing as her father had bristled at her. She can feel a headache coming on. She is suddenly unsure why she has come here. Why would she put herself in a place where she feels so entirely untethered? It was a mistake. She can hear Steve’s voice loud in the kitchen.

  ‘Let’s get them fed.’

  Her mother’s voice, ‘C’mon, kids, up to the table!’

  It’s like a harem, Mim thinks, as they all tumble in around her brother.

  * * *

  Essie is quiet at dinner. Ben’s absence has been made visible at the table and Mim can tell Essie is thrown by it. Sam ploughs on regardless.

  ‘And so it’s going to be released simultaneously around the world, that means at the same time, so like it could be at two o’clock in the morning here!’

  ‘Goodness!’ Her mother listens and serves Steve potatoes next to her. Jill has been relegated to the other end next to the highchair, Charlotte grabbing and babbling beside her. Mim wonders if this is what it is like every night.

  ‘And how’s school for you, love?’ Her mother turns to Essie.

  ‘Okay, I guess.’

  Jill leans back from the highchair, trying to be involved. ‘What’s your favourite subject?’ she asks.

  ‘Sport.’

  ‘You still playing soccer?’

  Essie’s face changes, energy shifts. ‘Yep, Saturdays, next term maybe the Friday night comp, too.’

  Mim tries to catch her in this moment, this normality. ‘Oh, really?’ She smiles.

  ‘Dad said it would be okay.’

  Mim sees the look on her daughter’s face, backtracks fast.

  ‘I’m sure it will be.’

  Essie pushes her fork around her plate, then moves the thin grey slices of lamb to the side.

  ‘Eat up then.’ Steve nods his head towards Essie. ‘Cost us a fortune to get some real meat to serve.’

  Jill frowns. ‘It’s fine, Steve.’

  Mim watches her daughter’s head drop, her shoulders go completely still.

  ‘Sorry,’ Mim says, ‘we’re not used to it. Haven’t eaten meat in ages. Ben’s not into it.’

  Steve scoffs under his breath.

  ‘Really, dear,’ says Mim’s mother, and it is unclear who she is chastising.

  Essie stands up and pushes back from the table. ‘Excuse me,’ she says, and hurries from the room.

  ‘Bit sensitive,’ Steve says.

  Jill shakes her head at him. ‘Honestly,’ she says quietly.

  Inside, Mim seethes. It’s his catchcry. She remembers hearing it behind her as she ran to her mum, arm stinging with a Chinese burn delivered with fervour. Steve saying it with scorn as he stood over a doll he’d run over with his quad bike.

  ‘Eat up, Sam,’ she says as she gets up from the table. ‘Sorry, I need to check on her.’

  She can hear them murmuring as she goes down the hall.

  ‘Ess?’ She pushes the door to the TV room open. ‘You all right?’

  Essie is curled up in the corner of the couch, remote in her hand. The screen is on, but the volume is muted. ‘I’m fine.’

  Mim sits beside her, puts her hand on Essie’s back, who shifts, but lets it lie. Mim goes to say You sure you’re okay or I
know it’s hard or You miss your dad, but she bites them all back.

  ‘Your uncle was always the grumpiest.’

  Essie makes a hmmph noise in the back of her throat.

  ‘When we were little we used to have to stay at the table until we’d eaten everything on our plates, and then we had to wait till all the grown-ups did too.’

  Essie shifts her head slightly towards Mim.

  ‘And if Dad’s mum was over, my nan, gee, she could be fierce. We’d have to say “May I leave the table?” And she’d say “If you’ve had sufficient”, in this plummy voice like she was the queen, and then we’d shuffle out silently and kill ourselves laughing once we got to our room. And sometimes later Dad would pretend to be cross that we’d been so cheeky but he’d have this look on his face like we were secretly on the same side.’

  Mim reaches out and uses her index finger to pull the hair back from Essie’s face and tuck it behind her ear. She can see the blotchy skin under her eyes and she resists crumpling her face in sympathy, even though all she wants to do is pull her daughter into her arms and cuddle her. If only she would let herself be cuddled, soothed. It is fragile, this new ground, eleven years old.

  ‘Is that why we don’t come here very much?’

  ‘No.’ Mim takes a breath to buy herself time. ‘It’s just a long way.’

  Essie looks at the screen. ‘But, still,’ she says.

  ‘Sometimes it’s hard being back home. For me.’

  ‘Cos you miss Pa?’

  Emotion swells in her. God, how come they know exactly where to get you?

  ‘Yeah.’ She rubs her hand on Essie’s back. ‘Yeah, I do. And Michael, I get sad about my brother, too. Even though it’s been so long.’

  Now Essie turns to her fully. ‘When can we talk to Dad?’

  Mim nods, holds Essie’s gaze, tries to organise her thoughts.

  ‘Soon. Maybe tomorrow, we’ll get through then. If he’s finished with his work.’

  She hears her own voice, the coolness, the absolute certainty of it.

  ‘Can you not get angry at him?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just,’ Essie shifts her head slightly so that her hair hides half her face, ‘just don’t fight about it. Him not being home on time. Or whatever. I hate it.’

  Mim pulls her daughter in. This gigantic girl she grew, who’s got so big and thoughtful and worried. A whole person. Half Ben, half her.

  ‘It’s just what grown-ups do, my love.’ She runs her hand over the back of Essie’s head, smoothing the hair there. ‘We fight sometimes. Even when we love each other. And we do, very much. And you. We love you both. You know that.’ These, she knows, are the words mothers are supposed to say.

  Essie nods against her chest, hugs her back and Mim is relieved, grateful she could say the right words this time, even when they leave a taste, like grit, dirt between her teeth.

  * * *

  Later, with the cousins under a doona in front of the screen and Steve with a screen at the dinner table, the women clean and tidy, following the script of this house. Mim is tired, she can feel the long drive in her joints, her bones. She’s also drunk too much wine. She stops with two empty wineglasses in her hand to look at the photos on the dresser. Jill has left them there. For now. That’s nice of her. There they are, the three of them, Steve and Michael and her, posed against the fence in Nan’s hand-knitted jumpers, the dark of her hair against the blond of her brothers. She’s maybe Essie’s age, her smile the aftermath of a laugh, Michael too, they would have been cracking a joke. Probably at Steve’s expense. He stands over them a little, older and wiser and infinitely more serious. There’s Nan’s eightieth, Steve and Jill’s wedding, Michael’s graduation – that one catches at her, she knows now that it already had its hooks in him by then, not that any of them knew, a first taste of shard at the footy club, the feeling of being more himself than he ever had been, as he later described it to her, appealing to her to understand. A smaller frame of her and Ben at their wedding. They are looking at each other, laughing, exchanging pencils. She’d chosen the photo as a subtle up yours to her dad. It was a geology joke. Diamonds are just rocks yearning to be graphite. Graphite is the more stable substance – the one they laughingly said they aspired to in their vows. It was supposed to mean something about permanence and impermanence and deep time and fusion. It strikes her now as out of place among the other photos. Like they haven’t captured the expected tone. She looks at Ben’s face, younger. God, in her guts, that pull. She misses him. Being here, being home has pushed back the other feelings: the fear, the worry. For this moment she just wants him to be here with her, to be on her side, to get it. It is a physical ache for the familiar.

  She moves to the last photo on the end. The whole family on the beach at Eagles Nest. They are end-of-summer brown, she’s wearing a green one-piece and she is astonished now at the length of her, she must be thirteen, already crossing one arm over her chest, her breasts that summer, all of a sudden, and the way it changed everything, the way people looked at her, how that made her shudder with embarrassment and excitement both. Her dad has his arm around Mum, there is an esky. She wonders who took the picture. Even Steve is smiling. She remembers the hot sand, the salt crunch of fish and chips out of the paper on the pier. Two weeks every summer they went. They had an arrangement with the neighbours, the Turners did their place, then when they came back they did the Turners’ farm for them. Later, when they were older, that first taste of sweet cider in the dunes with the other kids from the caravan park. And the last two years. Someone playing a guitar, the local boys, the smell of pot, hands, that boy – Nick – god, the gut wrench of all those memories.

  ‘So, Mum said you’re doing some work up here?’

  She turns towards the table. Steve is still looking at his screen but she can play this game of disinterested conversation, she has played it before.

  ‘That’s the plan.’

  ‘With Heidi Fulton?’

  ‘Yep. You see her around?’

  ‘Sometimes she does the rounds with Bruce. She’s good with the animals.’

  ‘Always has been.’

  Heidi had loved coming out to the farm when they were kids. She wanted to play with the dogs, the chooks, the three sheep they kept in the house paddock. Mim tolerated her obsessions because it was bliss to have her friend there. To be able to spend whole hours under the shade of the peppermint gum. Before the heat forced them inside. Trying out big ideas on each other. Possible futures. Unpacking the social nuances of school. Actually, Heidi had mostly just listened to those bits. She couldn’t really give a stuff about what went on at school. Mim was still trying hard to please.

  When school finished Heidi went to Sydney, Mim to Melbourne. They both said they wanted to end up in the same place, but maybe they didn’t at all. They wanted space to grow into a different version of themselves. By the time she drove up to Sydney on semester break, Heidi had sharpened her edges. She seemed to know exactly who she was now – hanging out with her new tribe, versed in queer politics – while Mim knew only what she wasn’t. Heidi seemed to have sloughed off her former self expertly.

  But not quite completely. She still, thank Christ, had time for her old friend.

  The recent call had lit something up inside Mim.

  ‘Mim Elliot. Hydrogeologist. Aquifers, EPA. You’re the woman I’m looking for.’

  She’d laughed, they’d exchanged the words – It’s been too long. How are the kids? What’s happening? Mim hadn’t been entirely surprised when Heidi said she’d gone back to town. Her mum always let her know the town comings and goings.

  ‘You interested in some work?’

  She’d tried to play it cool, but yes, god yes, she was interested.

  It was a six-month project. Mim would only have to be onsite three or four times, initial inspections, setting up the testing, monitoring results with the student team. There’d be a report at the end, but even the thought of that made Mim salivate
. Work, brain-stretching, grown-up work. She’d said yes before Heidi had even finished giving her the details.

  * * *

  She sits down at the table now, pulls over the bottle of red and pours a small glass. She notices Steve’s mouth flicker, perhaps distaste. She holds the bottle out, raises her eyebrows and he shakes his head.

  ‘Few people not too keen on the idea of the study Heidi’s involved in.’

  ‘No?’ she says and leaves it at that. She won’t help him out. Go on and fucking say it, big brother, she thinks, remind me how badly I fucked it all up.

  ‘Can’t see how it helps anyone. It’s done. In the past. Not going to stop anything now.’

  ‘Who says anyone’s trying to stop anything? It’s just a study, Steve. Her students are just analysing some samples.’

  ‘You can see why I would think that, though, can’t you?’ He slides the screen away.

  ‘Not really.’ It’s dangerous to play this game with him, dangerous and childish. But he always pushes her to it.

  ‘C’mon, Mim. Don’t be a bitch about it.’

  ‘Jesus, Steve, I’m hardly being a bitch.’

  Her mother’s voice from the kitchen. ‘Everything okay? Anyone for a cuppa?’

  ‘Please, Mum, thanks,’ Mim calls back.

  Her brother ignores the question. ‘Just don’t come in and cause problems. We’re all just trying to make a living out here. Trying to look after the family farm.’

  She laughs thinly. ‘Not really the family farm anymore though, is it?’

  ‘Don’t. You didn’t want in.’

  ‘Did I have a choice?’ She can hear the child in her voice now, the blur of tears being held back.

  Steve leans back in his chair. ‘You broke his heart, Mim.’ He shakes his head. ‘It’s no wonder…’

  Mim watches him bite back the words.

  The wine makes her mean. ‘What?’ She leans forward and hisses. ‘Go on, say it. It’s no wonder he got sick? Is that what you want to say? With fuck-ups like me and Michael for kids? Well, it’s lucky he had you to look after everything, isn’t it? Lucky he had reliable Steve. To kick his fucking mother out of the house she’s lived in for forty fucking years.’ Mim stands up, pulsing with fury. Steve’s face is red and she can see his hands clamping into fists on the table. She wants to push him, she wants to make him explode, the way she could when they were kids.