by Naomi Booth
This confession startles me. If I were back in the city, if Mara were a client, I might be duty-bound to call Child Protection about this. Would I have to register concern, initiate some sort of procedure? Mara looks so relaxed about what she’s just said. Maybe she’s just more honest than other people. Maybe everyone thinks things they shouldn’t, wild things like this. Maybe other people are just more secretive about it, more afraid of their own thoughts.
‘Have you got a name for the baby yet? Is it Margery?’ Mara’s settling herself down to sit in the grass right at the edge of the drop; she bends one knee up, angling herself between me and the mountain. I perch on a rock a little way back.
‘No, we don’t have a name,’ I say. ‘Margery was my mother’s name. She’s not around anymore.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Mara says. She’s staring at me intently again, like she’s trying to work out if I’ve got colic or something more serious. I’ve met other mothers who are intense like this, at pre-natal classes: I guess she might be starved of company, keen to make her ten minutes away from the baby count, wanting to connect with someone who isn’t feeding from her. ‘I know it’s frightening, even more so if your mum’s not around. Mine wasn’t either. Not really.’
I don’t want to talk about my mother, so I don’t say anything. Mara carries on.
‘The thing is,’ Mara says. ‘She didn’t know how to be a mother. No one taught her. She was half-caste, back when all the Welfare shit was happening. So they stole her away from her mum and gave her to a white family.’
‘Shit,’ I say. ‘That’s awful.’
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘My mother gave me up for adoption, too. Thought she wasn’t good enough. Thought I should be with better parents. Gave me away when I was small.’
‘Shit,’ I say again.
‘What about you?’ she says. ‘Pete’s Greek, right? Where are your folks from? I mean, originally.’
‘My mum’s side were Poms,’ I say. ‘She moved out here by herself. She didn’t talk about home much: said the weather was bad and the people were worse. Said it never felt like home to her anyway, and there was no point dwelling on the past. “Home was where you made your future,” she used to say. I never knew her people.’
‘What about your dad?’ she asks. ‘He still around?’
‘Italian. Never met him,’ I say. ‘No idea if he’s still around.’ I can see she wants to hear more. I remember how this works: trading secrets to forge a friendship. It’s been a long time, but I try to remember how to do it. And it feels good to talk, despite myself. ‘Turned out he was married when he was with my mum, family of his own. My mum hardly ever talked about him either. She always said I was a windfall. She used to pretend she’d found me under a mulberry tree. She told me the full story eventually, when I was grown. He was a supermarket manager, one of the places she worked. When she got pregnant, he ended the affair. Didn’t want anything to do with either of us. Didn’t want us disrupting his “family”. Apparently we didn’t count as family.’
‘Shit,’ Mara says. ‘What is up with that?’ She’s outraged on my behalf, as I was on hers. I get a little rush of good-feeling: the feeling that someone’s on my side and I’m on hers.
‘Yeah, well, she always said I could find out more about him if I wanted. I never wanted to. She’d tried her best to forget about him, it seemed out of order to ask questions. Plus, he’d left us, so why should I care? She raised me on her own, worked every hour god sent, never tried to get the law involved when she didn’t get her Child Support. Why would I want to chase him?’
‘Well,’ Mara says, ‘the way I see it, we’ve already fallen lucky.’
‘How do you work that out?’ I say.
‘’Cause we both get to keep our babies, and they get to stay with us and their daddies,’ she says. ‘They get to have a family. Paulie and me, we were both foster kids. I know he seems kind of objectionable. That’s just his defence mechanisms. He hates all the polite, nicey-nicey bullshit. We’ve both met so many softly-spoken, nicely-dressed cunts. You know what I mean? Paulie doesn’t have time for that, wants to tease anything bad out of people from the start. He’s got a good heart, my Paulie, and he loves Iluka. I can see Pete’s going to be the same.’ Mara lies back on the ground, lifts her arms and lays them down in the grass over her head. She closes her eyes. It’s like she’s never heard of brown snakes or redbacks.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Pete will be brilliant.’
‘I tell you something I do miss,’ she says. ‘Being a responsible mother and all. I miss a smoke.’ She sits up again, glances at me; mischievous, almost coquettish. ‘Obviously I’d never do this around Iluka.’ She’s fishing around in the deep pockets of her dress. ‘And I hardly ever get a chance these days. Never get a moment to myself. I think we all need to kick back, every once in a while. What do you reckon?’ She’s got a small, beaten-up tin in her hands and she uses both thumbs to flip it open. Inside, I recognise the shapes: there’s a small cube of resin – dark brown stuff, the texture of tiffin – some loose tobacco, some Rizlas and a lighter. She starts warming up the resin before I’ve had chance to reply.
‘I do know how you feel,’ she says, crumbling the stuff between her fingers, though I don’t remember saying how I feel. This time she’s going to expand on it, on what she remembers of being pregnant, I can see it. She’s been building up to it, waiting until she thinks I’m ready. And just the action of working the resin seems to relax her, loosening her into deeper confession. ‘I was terrified just before Iluka arrived. You know, Elaine, my foster mum, used to tell me these stories when I was pregnant. I was living with her for a while, before I moved in with Paulie. She told me that there are all kinds of different traditions to mark a birth, you know, in different places in the world? Somewhere, I can’t remember where, the pregnant woman digs herself a grave. Can you bloody imagine that? When she told me, I thought it was so, so dark. I said to her, “Why are you telling me that?” And she said, “You’ll understand when you’ve had the baby.” And I did. I understood it.’ She licks along one side of the Rizla paper, sealing up the little spliff she’s made. She starts sparking the end, drawing on it until it catches. ‘You’ve made something new, and it’s also the end of something old. It is kind of like dying, that’s what she meant, Elaine, my foster mother.’ She holds the spliff towards me. ‘I’m guessing you won’t, but I’ve heard it doesn’t matter what you smoke in the last few weeks,’ she says.
‘No ta,’ I say. We sit quietly for a moment and I watch her enjoying that spliff, really enjoying it. She sips the smoke in and lets it roll out of her nostrils. Then she lies back down in the grass.
‘You know what else I miss?’ she says. ‘I miss flirting with people. You know, when you meet someone at a party, and it’s probably not going to go anywhere, but there’s still that moment of… will it? Where you both think it might happen? Or at least, you just don’t know where the night will take you? Do you know what I mean? You’re a bit pissed, maybe a bit stoned, and… I don’t know, everything feels like it’s alive. All of you, every bit of your body, and everything around you too.’
She looks so guileless, lying there, breathing in the smoke with her eyes closed, her body gently pulsing with pleasure in the grass. So unguarded. I guess she must be a good few years younger than me. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Yeah, I do know what you mean.’ Actually, she might be really young, nineteen even. The pleasures of younger people, they’ve begun to seem sort of innocent to me – even the wildest drinking, and the drugs and the screwing: these kids party with total ferocity, because they’re playing at the edge of the world, and they know it. But older people, my parents’ generation – the thought of their pleasure is distasteful to me, macabre even. They’ve ruined the world: thinking of them sipping wine in their living-rooms is like imagining neon gas spreading silently through your house; the thought of them fucking is like finding out about a secret arms-deal.
‘Oh,’ says Mara, exhaling the sound
. ‘You’ll feel like that again,’ she says. ‘When the baby’s come and you can catch a moment like this.’ She doesn’t open her eyes, but she smiles and reaches out her free hand. ‘Come here,’ she says. ‘Lie down next to me for a minute.’
I hesitate. I don’t want to get close to her smoke or the edge of the ravine; but I don’t want to leave her hanging there, arm outstretched, unanswered. I can at least still remember what it felt like to be that open, to be at that age when the world was new enough to be exciting, yet obscure enough not to be terrifying. Or maybe Mara knows plenty about the world, has seen it all already; perhaps she’s just precociously fearless.
‘Listen,’ I say, ‘if I lie down there I might never get up again. But I’ll come and sit with you.’ I try to angle myself away from her smoke and I sit cross-legged next to her, taking her hand. She grips mine tightly, and then she loosens her hold, working her thumb around my knuckles. They make little cracking sounds as she works at them.
‘You’re really tense,’ she says. ‘Are you sure you don’t want a smoke? You know, my mum, my real mum, smoked pot all the way through her pregnancy. Said it helped with her morning sickness. Then again, my mother isn’t the best example to follow.’ She starts to giggle; there’s a short burst, which quickly subsides, then her body ripples up again. She gasps with laughter and I can’t help it, it’s totally contagious, I’m not even stoned and I start to laugh a bit too. She squeezes my hand again.
This is how I used to make friends, when I didn’t see every person and every place as a contagion to be guarded against. It was these moments that used to be so precious that I’d spend all my time looking forward to weekends and trips and parties. And I feel it again, now, just for a moment: the absence of fear. And then it is like I’m stoned: Mara’s hand feels vivid and realer than my own and I close my eyes and I lean back and let my weight go into the ground. Maybe, when the baby comes, maybe there will be more moments like this. Perhaps I’ll remember how to be open again; or me and Mara will become friends and she’ll teach me.
It takes me a while to realise that Mara isn’t laughing any more. I open my eyes and she’s curled on her side, watching me. ‘There,’ she says, ‘I knew you’d relax a bit out here.’ Her pupils are dilated and there are large, dark blooms expanding on the front of her dress. She strokes one side of my face. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she says. ‘I need to feed the baby. You’ve got this joy ahead of you.’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘Give me a minute.’ I get on to all fours and she gives me a hand on to my feet.
‘Better make sure that dog-end is out,’ she says, searching with her foot through the grass and then twisting the sole of her shoe hard against the dead butt. ‘They’re saying the fires are causing it now,’ she says. ‘And that the fires are getting closer. Trying to get us to move out to the camps again because of the outbreak.’
‘What?’ I say. ‘What outbreak?’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘You know. The cutis thing. They’re saying we’re downwind of the fires this year and that might be what’s causing it. Listen,’ she says, ‘you don’t need to worry. It rained yesterday and the fires aren’t getting anywhere near us. They’re just trying to get us to leave again.’ She’s holding my hand and her face is close to mine, and her eyes look massive and beautiful and totally bloody moronic.
* * *
By the time we get back to the yard I can hardly breathe; the whole place is acrid with barbie smoke and skunk, and I’m struggling for air after marching back through the trees. Mara is somewhere behind me: she shouted after me, telling me to calm down, and then I lost her and could only hear her voice mewling in the background. There are more people here now, collecting together in various states of reciprocal intoxication, from the slightly-stoned mumbling groups of men, to reclining couples laid on the lawn coming-up together, to the super-high girls who now sweep around the edges of the party, windmilling their arms. The music is louder too. I weave through the different groups, trying to find Pete. A massive man with cans of beer in both hands blunders into me. ‘Christ,’ he says, eyeing my belly and recoiling. ‘Sorry, I didn’t see you there, darl.’ I push past him. ‘Don’t know how I didn’t see you,’ he shouts after me. ‘Size of a bloody yeti.’ The smoke has a bluish quality, the same colour as the morning mist around the mountains, and I’m wondering now if that pretty haze isn’t only eucalypt oil rising in the air, but the pollution from the fires too. I didn’t notice it before, but perhaps there was ash on the air, just like there is now, blue and toxic, and my eyes are watering in the haze and if I don’t find Pete, I’m just going to leave and drive as far as I can–
‘Alice.’ There’s a hand on my upper arm, gripping me hard. Paulie steps in front of me, takes hold of my other arm. ‘Alice? Mara says you had a total epi out there.’ He lets go of my left arm and puts his hand firmly on my chest, forcing my breasts apart. ‘Christ, babe, I can feel your heart going like the clappers. You need to calm down. You know, this sort of thing isn’t good for you or that baby.’ He stares into my eyes, then moves his head side to side like an optician. ‘Getting all riled up. You and me are going to take a little walk.’ He grips my left arm again and moves me to the edge of the party. ‘And you’re going to breathe with me, you hear me? In breath, out breath, in breath, out breath. You feel this.’ He takes my hand and puts it across his mouth, so that I’m walking with my hand across his muzzle like a face-hugger. ‘You feel me breathing? In and out? You’re going to match it. You’re panicking, you’re having a panic attack, that’s all.’ I can feel his breath, hot and damp, across my palm and fingers. I try to do as he says, I try to steady my breath, just so I can get away from him. In breath, out breath, in breath, out breath. We walk like this for several minutes, and no one seems to bat an eyelid. Maybe they think we’re dancing. ‘That’s it,’ he says. ‘That’s it. Good girl.’ As though I’m a horse. As though I’m a skittish filly that he wants to keep calm before shooting.
‘Where’s Pete?’ I say. ‘Where is he?’
‘Now don’t get yourself upset again, darl.’ Paulie’s words are wet on my fingers. ‘Pete’s over there having a dance. I’ll get him once you’ve calmed down. He’s having a nice time, your old man. First time he’s kicked back in a while, by the sound of it, and might be the last time he can for a while, after this little one comes. So you don’t want to go spoiling it, do you? We’re all having a nice time, aren’t we?’
We’re still walking along the perimeter of the party in this demented fashion: him gripping me hard by the arm, me with my hand held over his face. I cast around for Pete and then I spot him: his back’s turned to me and he’s dancing with his arms in the air. His body has gone all slack and it looks as though he’s being dangled from his hands, like a puppet.
This means he’s totally smashed.
‘What have you given him?’ I say. ‘What have you given Pete?’
‘Listen,’ Paulie says, and now he grabs me hard by both arms and turns me into his body, so his lips are right next to my ear, ‘You come over to my house with a face like a smacked arse, you upset Mara, and now you’re trying to ruin Pete’s night too. You need to chill the fuck out, Alice.’ He lets go of me and I stumble backwards. I turn around and scan for Pete again. I’m not going to make a scene. I am not going to let Paulie think I’m hysterical. But we’re leaving as soon as possible.
When I get to him, Pete has his eyes closed and his head is dangling backwards. His arms are straight up, grabbing at imaginary ropes in time to the music. I get close to him. ‘Pete,’ I say. I have to say his name a few times to get him back to earth.
‘Ali!’ he shouts. ‘Babe! I love this tune! Come dance with me.’ He puts his arm around my shoulders, tries to shuffle me into dancing. I can see that he’s chewing at the inside of his mouth, biting down on his own flesh as he comes-up. Soon his cheeks will be puffed out and he’ll have that weird, juniper smell on his skin; his skin will be wet with sweat and chemicals.
‘Pet
e,’ I say, taking hold of his hands and lowering them. ‘I need to go home. We need to leave.’
‘Nah, babe,’ he says. ‘Everything’s just starting. We don’t want to go now. It’s way early.’ His eyes are big and shiny and he stares at me blissfully, then grins and shakes free, nodding his head, putting his arms up in the air again.
I put both my hands on his shoulders and speak directly into his ear. ‘Pete,’ I say, ‘I need to leave. Look at me. I can’t be partying. This wasn’t part of the deal. If you want to stay then I’ll drive home and you can make your own way back. I’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get out of this place.’
‘What are you saying, Ali? I can’t hear you!’ He’s shaking his head from side to side now, like a dog with a tick in its ear. ‘Babe, speak up.’
‘Pete!’ Someone else is calling now, far louder than me. ‘Pete, mate.’ It’s Mara. She comes up dancing behind Pete, with Iluka on her hip. ‘Pete, Alice isn’t feeling well,’ she shouts. ‘You need to take her home.’
‘Oh!’ Pete shouts back in surprise, nodding at Mara and then turning to me. ‘Why didn’t you say, babe? Poor Alice.’ He takes my face in both of his hands, moves the flesh on my cheeks in circles. ‘Poor baby. Let’s go now. We’ll go home and I’ll take care of poorly Ali.’
Mara nods at me. ‘I’m sorry I upset you,’ she says. ‘Listen, I’ll call in, right? Tomorrow? Make sure you’re doing ok?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Sure. That would be nice.’ But what I’m thinking is: I’ll be gone, I’ll be bloody out of here, I’ll be somewhere safe, far, far away from this.
* * *
As I drive us back towards the house, Pete drums on the dashboard with his fingers and trills a tune between his lips that is totally unrecognisable.