When she came out of the cinema, blinking in the sunlight she felt should be gone by then, Christmas shoppers were thronging the streets and lunchtime partygoers were leaving restaurants, significantly worse for wear. Red-eyed men with their shirts rolled up at the sleeves staggered four abreast along the footpath, and outside one pub a woman stood rubbing mascara tears from her cheeks as three more girls went in, party dresses on, boobs pushed up and heels threatening their ankles with every step. The heat was punishing and everyone wearing any clothes at all was regretting those of their life choices that had resulted in their being in the city and not at the beach.
If only Jack were coming with her to the party. It was ridiculous, really: these people were her old friends. Her university mates. But she hadn’t seen them for ages. They stayed in touch now on social media: everyone was so busy. And since becoming pregnant she probably hadn’t been that much fun to hang out with.
She tried to prepare herself. Lou would have changed: that was a given. It was two years since Molly had last seen her. Lou probably thought Molly was an idiot for getting pregnant, living as she was a life that seemed equal parts Sex and the City and When Harry Met Sally. She was dating enough to provide plenty of fodder for her weekly column on a wildly popular women’s website, and she’d hinted a few times that she was writing a novel.
The streets became more crowded the closer Molly got to Circular Quay. Maybe she should just go home. It was too hot and her back hurt. No, she’d go. Once the baby was born this sort of outing might be hard.
Opera Bar was heaving and it took her two complete circuits to figure out where her friends were.
‘Molly! We’re over here!’ It was Lou who finally spotted her and called out. Molly wondered if the pirate ‘r’ at the end of ‘here’ was for real or faked for the benefit of her parochial friends, stuck here in Sydney.
Locating the direction of the voice, she spied the group: they had taken over an area behind the DJ, next to the harbour wall. It was a prime position. Behind them the Harbour Bridge arched across the sky, and from where they sat the sails of the Opera House loomed over the mass of beautiful people, drinking and flirting in the dark gold sunshine.
Nudging her way through the crowd, Molly climbed a couple of steps to the level where her friends were. Lou broke away from the group she was talking to and leaned in to hug her, but when Molly’s stomach touched hers she reeled back like it was an electric fence.
‘Whoa! Oh my god. There is an actual human in there! Shit, Molly!’
Molly dropped her hands to her sides and made a jokey, baffled expression. ‘I know, right? It is literally the most insane thing.’
‘You still look amazing.’ Lou smiled and Molly wanted to tell her how much she had missed her, how she hadn’t really thought this whole having a baby plan through very well, how she might have done it because she hated working and didn’t know what else to do, and how she was starting to think that possibly wasn’t the best idea. Things you couldn’t say on WhatsApp or even in the DMs on Instagram, which was mostly where they chatted now. But instead she said, ‘Do I? Oh, well, thanks. I mean, I’m massive, but not long to go now.’
‘Can I get you a drink?’ asked Lou.
‘I’d love a mineral water.’
‘Coming right up.’ Lou moved off to dispatch someone’s boyfriend to join the queue at the bar, and she was replaced at once by a girl they’d gone to uni with, India, who teetered on nude patent stilettos and was wearing a dress made from what looked like compression bandages. Her eyes had the unfocussed look of someone who’d had eight glasses of prosecco and only eaten a bowl of olives since breakfast. ‘Molly!’ she squealed. ‘Oh my god! I heard you were pregnant and you are, like, so pregnant! Can I touch it?’
‘My belly? I’d sort of prefer — oh, okay, go ahead.’ India had already discarded her lipstick-smeared Champagne flute and put both hands on Molly’s bump. She crouched slightly and gripped it tightly, as if she were playing Goal Attack in a netball grand final. ‘Argh!’ she screamed. ‘It kicked! I felt it kick! That is the freakiest thing ever. Guys!’ she called back to the others. ‘Guys, come here. Molly’s baby kicks when you squeeze it!’
No one paid her any attention, to Molly’s immense relief. She tried to change the subject. ‘So, India, what have you been up to?’
India released her grip and stood up again, one hip jutting out to the side. She grabbed a glass from the table. It wasn’t the same glass she’d put down, but she didn’t seem to notice or care. She took a swig of someone’s abandoned red wine. ‘Publicity, freelance. I work for various agencies working on various campaigns for various products and events.’
O . . . kay. ‘What are you working on now?’
‘Have you heard of Jacques Bambino? The singer?’
‘Was he on one of those reality singing shows?’
‘He was! He was runner up on Song and Dance Man, that Channel Seven one, and now he’s going to Eurovision, so we’re doing the PR for that.’
‘My mum was in Eurovision,’ said Molly. ‘A long time ago. Well, she almost was. She wrote a song that was in it.’
‘Oh my god, no? Really? That is so cool. Imagine if she’d actually been in it? Jacques writes and performs his own songs, so he’s really the whole package. That’s more what people are into now, you know, someone who can write a great song and perform it. No offence to your mum.’ Someone yelled India’s name and her head snapped around, tonged ombre curls swinging. She held up the now-empty glass and shouted something back, then turned away from Molly, having apparently forgotten they were in the middle of a conversation. Molly was equal parts offended and relieved. The baby shifted and a pain shot down through her pelvis, like someone was trying to hide a sword in her leg.
When Lou returned with her drink, they joined a group of people Molly theoretically considered friends, despite how rarely she saw them. The music was loud and everyone else was drunk, so she shouted the answers to the same questions repeatedly before each conversation partner moved on to someone more interesting. It felt, she thought, like speed dating with people she already knew, in sessions in which they had three minutes to discover how boring she had become since the last time she saw them. And they really did all ask her the same questions. Did she know what sex the baby was? (No, they wanted a surprise.) Where was Jack? (At his parents’ house. They were doing Christmas with her family so he’d gone down for a quick visit.) Where was she working? (She name-dropped Tien to universally blank looks.) What were her plans for New Year’s Eve? (To that she gave an incredulous look and pointed at her midsection. ‘Attempting to squeeze that out through my vagina.’)
No one asked how she felt. There was no part of the conversation where she could have reasonably mentioned that her grandfather had died two weeks earlier, or that she’d had to move out of her flat because it was riddled with concrete cancer, or that she’d discovered she probably had a secret uncle because that same beloved grandfather wasn’t who he’d pretended to be. What fascinating things would all these people have to say, she wondered, if they could dispense with the small talk?
Instead everyone reported their wedding plans, engagement stories, trips overseas they were taking before they settled down. Molly zoned out. She couldn’t have felt further away from her friends. They were so carefree. The greatest responsibility any of them seemed to have in their lives was for a small dog called Chester, owned by Amelia and Dan, pictures of whom she was shown repeatedly, when Amelia and Dan both called up Chester’s Instagram account on their phones. Amelia and Dan seemed devoted to the dog, yet still they were planning a three-month trip to south-east Asia, during which Chester would stay with ‘his grandparents’.
One girl, Alyssa, slid over on the bench where she was sitting and gestured for Molly to join her. They hadn’t really been friends at school or uni. Alyssa had been an irritating over-achiever, always on the SRC and doing mock trials and debating. But a seat was a seat.
Gratefully, M
olly sank down and swapped the back pain for pelvic pain once again. Late pregnancy was an embarrassment of riches when it came to discomfort. She was torn between wanting it to end and the terror of what lay ahead. It felt like being on a seesaw over a pool filled with what were either sharks or dolphins.
Only a few minutes into their chat, it was clear Alyssa wanted to talk to her only because she had decided she too was ready to ‘get on the baby train’.
‘You don’t want to rush into it,’ Molly said. ‘I mean it’s amazing and I can’t wait, but, still, it’s going to change a few things.’
‘A few things?’ Alyssa said. ‘It’s going to change everything. I mean, right now you are sort of a mum and sort of not a mum, if you know what I mean.’
Naomi’s liminal space again, Molly thought. The scales were definitely tipping towards the being a mum side, though. She felt invisible and stressed and responsible.
‘Are you taking the full year of mat leave?’
‘No, just four months, I think.’
‘Wow, that’s quick. Who’s going to look after the baby?’
Molly felt the familiar flash of fury. No one at Jack’s work Christmas drinks would have asked him anything like that. Not a chance. ‘Probably my mum.’ She wanted the conversation to be over.
‘What do you do again? Law, was it?’
‘Um, no. I’m a home organiser at the moment.’
‘Oh!’ Alyssa looked shocked. ‘So, why can’t you take more time off from that? I mean no offence but it’s not like an actual profession, right? More a job you can dip in and out of. Which is perfect for mums. I’ll have to take a serious break when I have a baby. My job’s one of those bloody nightmares that you just have to focus everything on. Kind of wish I’d ended up doing something a bit less intense, to be honest.’
To be honest, I don’t think you’re being honest, Molly wanted to say to her, because the humblebragging was excruciating.
While Alyssa continued to talk in elaborate detail about her job as a film accountant for Nemasco Pictures, Molly slid into a quiet state of meltdown. She was not even thirty but in three weeks her life as she knew it would end. When the baby came, she would stop being the centre of . . . anything. She was kidding herself that she’d be able to start something new with a baby in tow. How had this happened? And what was with that expression Alyssa had used: ‘ended up doing’? They weren’t at the point of their lives where they had ended up doing anything, were they?
Molly wasn’t in her ‘ended up’ job, she was still in one of her ‘starting out’ jobs. Wasn’t everyone? The lawyers and the doctors, sure they were in their ‘ended up’ jobs, but weren’t the rest of them still figuring it out? Or was she supposed to have decided on her ‘ending up’ job before she had a baby so she could return to it afterwards? Was that what people did? Should she have settled on something already? Would it really be too hard to change with a kid in her life?
She tried to take deep breaths, to not let the panic knock her down. It was all right. She could come back from this. It was just a baby. She wasn’t bricking herself into a pyramid. There would be time. What was it Jack was always saying? ‘We’re adding to our life. Not taking anything away.’ He did say that a lot, now she thought about it. Like a mantra you would repeat if you were trying to convince yourself of something.
The sun had begun to set, and as it passed behind a thunderhead that had appeared in the west the light made the sky look like a cover illustration from a Good News Bible. Molly stared at the clouds, watching them spread. They were moving quickly. There was going to be a storm.
Someone ordered bowls of chips, and the smell, strangely, turned her stomach. It was dinnertime, and she hadn’t eaten, but she couldn’t handle the idea of food. There was just no more room for anything in her body or her mind. She hadn’t managed to catch up properly with Lou, but she needed to go home.
The pity everyone would show if she were seen leaving this early would be painful, so Molly asked Alyssa where the toilet was. She grabbed her handbag and headed through the crowd, which was composed entirely of people who refused to move aside. Using her bump like an icebreaker she pushed through, ignoring the looks from people who acted like she was wearing a backpack on a crowded bus.
‘Watch it,’ said one man, as the froth from his beer splashed onto the ground. Tears welled up in her eyes. This is not a choice, she wanted to tell him. This is my body. I can’t make it any smaller right now. Once she was out of sight of the table, she changed direction and headed for the escalators leading up to the boardwalk back to the road. The escalators weren’t moving, so she walked up, the peculiar heaviness of trudging up metal stairs that should have been helping but weren’t compounding the dragging weight in her pelvis. She wanted to lie down.
At the top she knew she was going to be sick and looked around for a bin. But the bins were designed to stop people stuffing explosives into them and so had only a narrow slot for putting rubbish in. It was beyond Molly to vomit sideways through the small gap, so she rushed to the harbour fence and threw up into the water.
Leaning her elbows on the railing, she wiped her mouth.
‘Gross,’ declared a passer-by. ‘That’s disgusting.’
‘Yeah, thanks for that,’ she replied, and when she stood up the man saw her huge belly and moved on quickly.
She pulled out her phone and ordered an Uber to take her home. It would cost a bomb, but the idea of the bus was more than she could bear. Next she called Jack, but his phone rang out and she didn’t leave a message. It’s all right, she thought. I’ve just overdone it a bit. I need to get home and go to bed. She had a sudden yearning for her mother, and for the first time she was grateful for the sequence of events that had led her to her grandfather’s house that week. ‘I need my mum,’ she whispered to no one. ‘I’m sorry,’ she told her unborn baby. ‘I’m not going to be any good at this.’
Chapter 18
When the Uber pulled up, the driver looked alarmed at the state of her. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, wiping away her tears. ‘Just a bit tired. I need to get home.’
‘Would you like some music?’ he asked.
‘No, if that’s all right, I think just quiet.’
Five minutes later she changed her mind. ‘Excuse me?’ she said. ‘Do you have Spotify?’
‘I do,’ he confirmed.
‘Can you please put on the theme from All Creatures Great and Small?’
‘The old TV show?’
‘Yes. I think if you just put “All Creatures Great and Small” into your phone . . . Here, can you give it to me?’
He handed his phone back to her and within seconds she was bathed in the sound of oboes, piano, violins and trumpets that was so familiar, so comforting and so deep inside her that she couldn’t do anything but lean her head against the window, close her eyes and let the tears flow. She was little again, curled up on Granny and Pa’s sofa next to Naomi and Simon, watching the old program on video on the huge boxy TV. When the music ended, the driver looked at her in the rear-view mirror and pressed repeat.
A crash of thunder sounded and Molly’s eyes flew open, as a storm so quintessentially Sydney rolled in that it might as well have been locking you out of a pub at midnight and charging you twenty-six dollars for average fish and chips. The raindrops were fat and heavy at first, and within minutes the windscreen was awash with a torrent the wipers couldn’t even begin to stem. The driver turned up the volume so Molly could still hear the music over the pounding water on the car roof.
She texted her mum: Are you home?
A baffling two-word reply came straight back: No, Carlos.
What? What did that mean? Who the hell was Carlos?
Sometime during the fourth run-through of the song, Molly felt a strange popping sensation and wetness quickly soaked through her knickers. She opened her eyes in panic. What the fuck? Mortified, she stayed silent as the fluid gently trickled out. This couldn’t b
e happening. Not in an Uber. This would destroy her star rating.
But it was happening. Trying not to attract the kind driver’s attention, she slid her bag under herself. It wasn’t going to do anything much, but what else could she use to try to stem the dripping? She sent a text to Jack: I think my waters have broken.
When the car arrived at Pa’s house, she gingerly climbed out. She vaguely attempted to splash rain onto the little damp patch on the back seat as she did, but she doubted how effective that was. Waving the driver off, she stood at the fence, in the rain, pretending to check the mail until he was out of sight, certain that at any second he would glance into the back seat, see the wetness and come screaming back for vengeance. After a few minutes it was clear he was gone, so she went in. The fluid was coming faster now.
It was hot inside, as though it had been shut up for hours. The temperature outside had dropped about fifteen degrees in five minutes, so she left the front door open to try to cool down the house.
‘Hello?’ she called out.
Silence.
‘Anyone?’ She was louder and more panicky now. ‘Is anyone home?’
There was a thud and Richard V appeared around the doorway from Pa’s study. He curled around her ankles.
‘Richard, where is everyone?’ Something that could only be a contraction slammed into her and took her breath away. That was not how labour was supposed to begin. The midwife had said it would feel like period pain at first, and it would get gradually worse. There was nothing gradual about whatever had just walloped her. She looked at her phone. Jack hadn’t replied so she called his number. It went to voicemail again.
This Has Been Absolutely Lovely Page 16