Nine Days

by Toni Jordan

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I pick up the bread, dust it off and put it back on the shelf.

  ‘It’s cool. Don’t come if you don’t want to.’

  He looks at me then and I see his eyes. His eyes are soft and brown with long lashes, wet, deep Bambi eyes. It’s impossible to look into them without falling. Almost as soon as I met him I started thinking about how those eyelashes would feel brushing my skin, how it would feel to kiss those eyes closed.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I mean, I’d hate to put you out or anything.’

  Take a deep breath, Craig, I think. I send him messages of peace and tranquility. Relax, Craig. Imagine the sun’s light pouring through the top of your head and coming out your chakras in different colours. Think sky-blue thoughts.

  He doesn’t relax. He trudges to the fridge, opens it, stares inside, then closes it again. Then he tramps back to the counter. ‘Last night was important to me, Charlotte. You know that. We’ve been practising our new material.’

  He looks so distressed. If he keeps this up, he’ll get a headache. He needs to sit down. If he sat down, I could rub his shoulders. He likes that. I reach into the bottom cupboard and find the oil burner, then look through the half-opened bottles to find something calming. Maybe Roman Chamomile and Clary Sage? ‘How did it go? The new material?’

  ‘Really well. Good. Fine. Jesus, Charlotte, you might have come.’

  I set the oil burner next to the cash register. Matches. Where are the matches? ‘You don’t need me there every night, surely. I bet the crowd loved you. I bet you were a smash.’

  ‘Jon and Jamie’s girlfriends come. They sit at the bar and get the clapping started. It’s called support.’

  ‘I was tired.’ I light the burner. Soon he’ll start to feel better.

  ‘That clapping. It’s bloody exhausting, isn’t it?’ He claps, slowly, in case I have an incomplete grasp of the concept.

  ‘I didn’t realise they took attendance. It’s just a bar. You play almost every week.’

  ‘Fine.’ He turns back to counting the change. ‘Be like that.’

  I pout and reach up to kiss him. ‘Poor baby. Turn that frown upside down.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘How about a coffee? I’ll open a fresh soy milk and you can tell me all about last night. What did you play first?’

  He ignores me. I shrug. Scorpios. There’s nothing you can do. You can’t control the whole world.

  The sign comes just after my lunch break. Craig needs some space so I make a ginger tea and spend most of the morning in the store room. There are deliveries to be unpacked, invoices to tick off, dates to check. Soon one of the reps will visit and try to sell us the wrong thing: a new pill for younger skin or weight loss, a cream that says ‘fills wrinkles from the inside’ in gold swirly letters on the label. A few times I hear Craig’s voice speaking to a customer and the juicer starts up. I think about wrapping my arms around him and telling him the real reason I didn’t go out last night, even though I’m not certain, even though I’m probably wrong.

  At eleven, he pokes his head around the door. ‘Customer for you,’ he says. He can see I’m busy. He’s good with the customers. He could do this himself.

  But when I come out, I understand. Craig listens to the old ladies talk about the bulbous joints and thready memory, the middle-aged women talk about menopause in forensic detail, even the blushing girls describe their period pain. He has what Sandra calls ‘strong feminine energy’. Sometimes the girls from the convent school drop by for a smoothie, and to giggle and give him sideways glances. He knows what he’s doing, too: he dropped out of naturopathy with only one semester to go. He’s practically a professional. There’s only one kind of customer he’s not so good with.

  In the middle of the centre aisle is a young woman with a stroller, and in the stroller is a sleeping blonde girl, two or three maybe, soft curls on her face under a beanie, dressed in a pre-feminist pink coat with a Disney princess on her stockings. Her cheeks are flushed and there’s a crust of snot around her nostrils. It only takes a second to see the white line across the bridge of her nose.

  The woman smiles. ‘She seems to get colds all the time.’ She brushes the girl’s damp fringe. ‘I was thinking she needs something to build her up. Boost her resistance.’

  It’s a typical story, this time of year. It’s what people come in for. All around us are bottles, pills and potions, herbs and extracts. It’s not that I disapprove. There’s something soothing about them. They contain all the hopes of the human spirit, all the refusal to quit, to keep believing people can feel better. The herbs are evidence of an understanding of our place in the universe. The minerals and vitamins are a return to the earth, an acknowledgement of the delicate balance in our bodies, the need for things that come from the soil or the sun. The woman in front of me is well dressed with sparkly stones on her fingers. The stroller is the expensive European variety. I could probably sell her anything. I kneel next to the girl and she wakes with an almighty sneeze that I only just manage to dodge.

  ‘Bless you,’ I say.

  Waking to find a stranger peering at you is disconcerting, yet the girl doesn’t make a sound. Her eyes are blue like mine and big as the sea. She purses her bud lips and rubs her nose. A silvery trail remains on the back of her tiny hand.

  The woman pretends not to notice the snot. ‘The lady said “bless you”. What do we say, Charlotte?’

  The girl blinks.

  ‘We say “thank you”.’

  The woman is towering over the child, who says nothing. Seconds tick by. The mother becomes embarrassed. She is torn between adopting a sterner voice to show that she is not to be trifled with, or letting it slide. Either way she risks being seen as a poor mother. An ego standoff. The silence is pressing but the girl doesn’t notice. Willful disobedience always makes me smile.

  ‘Charlotte? That’s a pretty name.’ I force my hand to stay where it is and not touch her. Her hair would feel as soft as a kitten. ‘It’s my name too.’

  ‘Isn’t that funny? I named her after Charlotte Brontë.’

  ‘Really? Which of her books do you like best?’

  ‘Oh.’ The woman pauses and glides her tongue along the front of her teeth. ‘I like them all.’

  She kneels now and fusses with the girl’s coat and beanie, smoothing the ruffles and running her fingers under the stroller straps that hold her in place. The girl wriggles as though she’d forgotten she was restrained until her mother reminded her.

  I didn’t set out to trick that poor woman. I like to see what people are really like. She couldn’t name Jane Eyre. Even if she knew it once, even if she read it while she was pregnant, she has since lost confidence in the things she used to know and the person she once was. Perhaps she is almost certain the book is Jane Eyre, but what if she is wrong? Just in case the right answer is Wuthering Heights, she will say nothing. She is the kind of woman who cannot risk even a shop assistant, who is unlikely to have read Brontë and does not know her and whom she will never meet again, catching her out in a mistake. Wrapped up in I like them all is every bit of her vulnerability. I want more than anything to live in the kind of world where I could give her a hug.

  ‘I was named after my father’s best friend when he was a boy,’ I say instead. ‘Except he wasn’t a Charlotte. He was a Charlie.’

  ‘What do you think about that, Charlotte? The lady was named after a boy!’ Charlotte is nonplussed. ‘Your father’s friend must have been proud.’

  ‘They lost touch well before I was born. Charlie moved to the country or something. Dad says he still thinks about him after all these years.’

  ‘Huh. So do you think she needs a tonic?’

  ‘What she needs is less dairy and wheat. She has an intolerance.’

  We have a long discussion about the antigens in grains, and pesticides, and the lack of nutrients in conventionally grown vegetables. She says, it’s so hard, raising children today. I show her ancient grain c
ereals without cane sugar and preservatives. She says, Charlotte’s such a fussy eater. No vegetables at all. And for lunch, cheese sticks. That’s it. I didn’t know that cheese came in a stick, but I doubt that Charlotte drives to Coles and buys them herself. I show her sheep’s yoghurt, popcorn for snacks, corn chips made from organic corn. We didn’t have food intolerances when I was a girl. I tell her the line across her daughter’s nose is the result of continual itchiness: the child sniffs and pushes the end of her nose up with the back of her hand so often it leaves a white mark because the sun can’t reach it. All she’ll eat for dinner is sausage and chips. And Kentucky Fried. I’m just glad she’s eating something. The white band on the girl’s nose is distinct and distinctive. Like so many things that shape us, it’s the smallest actions that add up to leave the deepest marks.

  The woman takes one of the cereals I hand her and runs her fingers down the ingredient list. ‘Hmmm,’ she says. ‘Is there a toy in the box?’

  ‘If Sandra was here, you’d be shot,’ Craig says, when the woman and her daughter leave. ‘A box of cereal. You spent all that time with her and that’s it.’

  ‘That’s all she needed.’

  ‘Ascorbic acid, at the very least. Homoeopathics. Just as well you’re not on commission. You’d be earning less than you do now, if that’s humanly possible.’ He walks to the cereal aisle and moves all the boxes forward one spot to replace the one the woman bought. ‘She won’t use it, you know. She just bought the cheapest one because she didn’t know how to get out of it.’

  ‘She’s worried about her little girl. She’ll use it. She’ll be back for more in a couple of weeks and she’ll get the corn chips too. You’ll see.’

  He leans against the fridge with his arms folded. ‘She’s probably in Coles buying a box of something with extra dairy, wheat, sugar and artificial everything. She was being polite. They’ll both have doughnuts and a soft drink for lunch in the food court. Your box’ll go in the bin as soon as they get home.’

  ‘It won’t. Every mother wants what’s best for her child.’

  ‘You should have sold her a bottle of tablets. People like that only trust tablets.’

  ‘“People like that”? Who are “people like that”?’

  He shakes his head. ‘If you can’t tell the bourgeois when you see them, there’s no hope for you.’

  Craig’s parents live in Brighton. His friends from school sometimes come to hear him play. They drink Crown Lager and by the end of the night they can’t stand up. Last week, one lurched out the front door and vomited on the footpath in the middle of the final set. Craig’s school tie still hangs in his wardrobe. If Craig’s the expert on picking the bourgeois, he’s right. There’s no hope for me.

  ‘It’s not easy, raising children. It’s an enormous commitment. The most important job in the world.’

  He rolls his eyes. ‘It’s not curing smallpox. It means you’ve fucked someone.’

  ‘Don’t you think she was a beautiful little girl?’ I keep my voice casual. ‘Gorgeous, wasn’t she?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘What colour was your hair, when you were little?’

  ‘I have no idea. I was small at the time.’

  ‘Don’t you want children some day?’ I turn my back and move some bottles around on the shelf.

  ‘Get real. The self-centred middle class, desperate to clone themselves to feed their ego. The mess the planet’s in now. You’d have to be a moron.’

  Craig is wrong. It’s almost spring, the traditional time for rebirth. We are near the dawning of a new age, only one decade away from a pristine millennium. Last November, I stood in front of an electrical goods store in Smith Street and watched televisions showing huge crowds standing on the Berlin Wall. Just this February I sobbed at the pictures of Nelson Mandela leaving prison, hand in hand with Winnie. After all these centuries of causing our own pain, we are finally getting it. The planet is righting itself. I can feel it.

  I can’t wait any longer. It has to be done. I tell Craig I’m not feeling well and leave him to mind the shop. He can ring Kylie and see if she’s available at short notice. She always is, when he’s the one to ring. He’ll sulk for a while but he’ll be over it tomorrow.

  At home, Daisy and Jimbo are sitting out the back wrapped in blankets, sharing a spliff. They ask me to join them but instead I go to my room where the traffic noise is hushed. I light a candle and some incense. I take off my clothes and stand in front of the mirror and look at myself, at the miracle of my body. The skin is stippled with cold. It is strong and healthy and does what I tell it. I am blessed. The female body is the source of all life. It is the body of the living Goddess. We should have statues of it on every street corner, of women of all shapes and sizes, instead of dead explorers and hanging judges.

  I open my underwear drawer. At the bottom next to my vibrator is a small inlaid jewellery box. I should wear these things more often but somehow I feel foolish, adorning myself in front of the mirror. I’ve never understood the concept of jewellery; how draping yourself with pretty things like a Christmas tree is supposed to make you look prettier. It makes you look plainer. Regardless of how smooth and even your skin is, it will always look dull next to a precious metal or a gem.

  There is a sparkly brooch from an op shop, a bracelet of amber beads. Nestled in the middle is my mother’s pendant, the one she gave me for my eighteenth. An amethyst pendant on a gold chain. At first, she didn’t want to part with it. A classic problem: one pendant, two daughters. Stanzi said she didn’t mind. She said she’d rather have cash, then used the money for the deposit on her car.

  I hold the pendant between my hands, I hold it close to my heart, I hold it above the incense burning on my dresser. I close my eyes and say a few words to the universe. I am its child. I know the universe is listening.

  I lie on the floor naked. The boards are cold and rough on my spine and there’s something down here that smells funny. I hold my mother’s pendant tight in my fist above my belly. I centre myself for a few minutes then I drop the pendant down on the length of its chain, hold it directly over my stomach. Hold my breath, still my hand. Soon the pendant will move of its own accord. I wait, and after a few moments it begins to circle, slowly, anti-clockwise. I’m pregnant.

  ‘A rotating pendant,’ Stanzi says. ‘Wow. Stop right there. Let me call the British Medical Journal.’

  It’s my own fault. When the pendant started circling, I was overwhelmed. I couldn’t centre myself. There was only one place I could go: my sister’s. I threw on my clothes and cycled straight here and paced back and forth in front of her building until she drove up. I couldn’t wait. I blurted it out in the stairwell. We are now sitting at her dining table with the heater on full whack. She’s not even wearing a jumper. In front of us are a bottle of white wine from her fridge and two glasses. Wine glasses. With stems. They match. They are not Vegemite jars with remnants of the label showing fingernail scrapes. My glass is nearly full, hers nearly empty. I don’t drink wine, she knows that. We have very different lives. We do not even look the same anymore, although I know under that flesh is a woman the same as me. Right now, she doesn’t seem impressed.

  ‘I can see the story now. Hospitals around the world put their multi-million dollar diagnostic equipment out on the footpath for hard waste pickup and nip over to Tiffany’s, thanks to medical breakthrough by naked shop assistant slash part-time yoga instructor dangling her mother’s pendant over her beaver.’

  ‘It was my uterus. And it wasn’t really Mum’s pendant. I mean, it was, but I was using it as a pendulum. I’d cleared it already. A smoking ceremony.’

  ‘Oh. A smoking ceremony. That’s different.’

  ‘Plus, I’m late. Two weeks. I’m never late. Plus, I’ve gone off coffee. That’s conclusive.’

  ‘Did you pee on the pendant and watch it make little blue lines? Because that’s how it’s done, Charlotte.’

  ‘I’ll do a test if you want. I have nothing against
technology. But I know my body.’

  ‘Right. Is that why I am sitting here talking to someone who allegedly knows her body about her unplanned pregnancy? Body, one. Charlotte, nil.’

  ‘This sarcasm is only hurting you. It’s your cynicism that prevents you being happy.’

  ‘Actually it’s my unhappiness that prevents me being happy, but let’s not talk about me. Just tell me it isn’t that complete moron Craig. Tell me it’s someone else. A guy from that halfway house for the malodorous unkempt you live in. It’s him, isn’t it? Craig.’ She downs her wine then reaches for mine and takes a swig, then rests her arms on the table and buries her head. Her voice is half-muffled by her soft white arms. ‘Who would have thought his sperms had the energy to make it up there?’

  ‘He’s young. He’s a wonderful bass player. Very caring with the customers. He’s got a lot of potential.’

  ‘Every half inch they’d be asking are we there yet?’ She lifts her head and grimaces. ‘They’d get to the cervix and stop for a round of applause and a podium ceremony. Besides, he’s not young. He’s twenty-four, like us.’

  ‘Women mature faster than men.’

  ‘What if it takes after him. Oh. My. God. A hippy groovy baby with Craig’s loser gene. This is a complete disaster.’

  She doesn’t mean to be hurtful. She is worried for me, that’s all. It’s reassuring. It shows how much she cares, and besides, if she really thought I was in terrible trouble, she would be gentler. Her manner is a measure of the trust she places in me. It tells me I am strong. It tells me that she knows everything will be all right.

  When I don’t reply, she hoists herself to her feet. I can see from her face that it hurts. That’s all the meat and grains she eats causing acid production in her joints. Not to mention sugar. Eating sugar is like pouring ground glass in your cartilage. I can’t imagine what shape her intestinal flora must be in. Poor Stanzi. I could write her out a menu plan if only she’d do what she was told.