Nine Days

by Toni Jordan

  ‘Stay. Here. Do not go anywhere. Watch some TV. Oh, that’s right. It’s an evil tool of our corporate overlords designed to hypnotise us into buying useless trinkets to mask our deepseated satisfaction with our meaningless lives caused by being out of touch with our spirituality and the energy of the planet. Better not watch TV then. I’m going down to the pharmacy for an actual pregnancy test that’s had double-blind clinical trials, something manufactured by the ill-treated wage-slaves of a corrupt conglomerate. Something that’s been tested on rats.’

  When she’s gone, I sit on her puffy couch but it’s leather so I move to a cushion on the floor and try to meditate but I can’t concentrate on my mantra. There is something growing inside me, a mass of cells splitting and re-splitting every second.

  It’d be different if Stanzi was pregnant. Stanzi’s going places. She has a degree. That dingy little office next to the dentist, that’s temporary. She’s only working as a counsellor until she saves up enough to do her PhD. She’s going to be a psychoanalyst, the philosophical, Freudian type, unpicking people’s fears from the inside. She has a proper career plan.

  I have two casual jobs, no qualifications, no money. She rents a one-bedroom flat of her own. I live in a share house where you’re considered anal retentive if you scrape the mould off last week’s lentil soup before you eat it. She is back in twenty minutes and it seems like three. She hands me a packet.

  ‘Here. Follow the directions. Can you manage that?’

  When I shut the toilet door behind me, I nearly pass out. This is worse than that time I went to Chadstone. There are smells coming from everywhere and for a moment I can’t breathe. The bowl has one smell—maybe bleach—the air itself has another courtesy of the aerosol can on the shelf. Even the toilet paper smells bizarrely of synthetic flowers. There are thousands of microscopic aromatics invading my lungs simultaneously. She’ll get cancer if she keeps this up.

  ‘Hey,’ I yell, through the closed door. ‘Why is the water in your toilet bowl blue?’

  ‘Because orange stripes are so last year,’ she yells back.

  I balance the stick on my leg and almost drop the instructions in the blue bowl. ‘How do I tell when it’s midstream? How can I possibly know in advance how long I’ll pee for?’

  ‘For God’s sake. Make a guess,’ she yells. ‘Did you fail half-arsed at hippy school?’

  Eventually I come out with the stick in my hand.

  ‘Let me see, let me see.’ She takes it from me, holds it gingerly between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Well. The judges give round one to the pendant.’

  ‘I want to see Mum.’ I don’t know why. All at once I feel this overwhelming need to be held by her.

  ‘Are you sure? Charlotte, listen. I’m being serious now. You don’t have to talk about this right away. You can think about it for a while. It can just be between us. You can tell them later.’

  ‘I want to see Mum.’

  ‘They’re not home. She told me on the phone yesterday: they’re at Uncle Frank’s for dinner. It’ll have to wait.’

  ‘No. I need to see her now.’

  She walks to the hall table and picks up her keys. ‘Uncle Frank’s it is then.’ Then she stops. ‘Oh my God.’ She takes a few steps and drops into a chair, face in her hands. ‘Dad.’

  Our father is the most loving man I know. He knows the bitter-sweet of twin-dom; when we were little, he knew when to encourage our independence and when to respect our bonds. He taught us to take life with a light heart and he did this in the most unexpected way. He impressed on us that we would die. That one day would be our last. He told us death is always around the corner.

  This sounds bonkers, I know. Stanzi shakes her head at the memory of it. What a way to speak to kids, she says. If a parent did that today, someone would call community services.

  But I knew what he meant. He meant there was no excuse not to take every day with two hands and wring the juice out of it. He wouldn’t tolerate self-pity from us, or embarrassment, or fear. Ring that boy, or try out for the musical, or ignore that pustulating zit on your chin. Don’t take yourself so damn seriously. Soon you’ll be six feet under and who’ll care about it then? Nobody.

  In my whole life, I’ve only seen him angry once: the time he found Mark Moretti in my room after the year twelve formal and chased him out of the house with a golf club. I wanted to die.

  It wasn’t having Mark in my room that made Dad angry. When he first found us together, he actually grinned a little. He said Oops and went to close the door. Then he turned back and asked if we had a condom. I hated even hearing my father use that word. I looked at Mark. Mark looked at me. We were flushed and sweaty from the dancing and spiked punch. My dress was mauve taffeta, unzipped at the back.

  I’d seen my father every day of my life but never like that. It wasn’t wild and uncontrolled, not fury. He was yelling but his face was ice. ‘Get the fuck out of my house,’ he said to Mark, and he went downstairs to get a golf club from his study and I’ve still never seen anyone move as quickly as Mark that day, bolting out the door in his socks. As for me, I was irresponsible. I was thoughtless and stupid and a disgrace. For three days, I couldn’t look at Dad.

  And now I’m a grown woman, no longer living under their roof, responsible for my own body and my own fertility. I want to see my mother, but that means seeing Dad too. And something tells me nothing’s changed.

  We sit in Stanzi’s car out the front of Uncle Frank’s house in Rowena Parade. The engine is on, for the heater. Neither of us has moved. We haven’t even taken off our seat belts.

  Sometimes I think my parents come here so Dad can visit the house rather than Uncle Frank. This is where they grew up. Rowena Parade runs across the slope of the hill. It’s wide for a Richmond street: cars park on both sides. It’s halfway up the hill. Uncle Frank’s house is a tiny weatherboard cottage with a lane at the side and at the back. It sits under the shadow of a double-storey house, a former shop-front across the side lane, and it’s joined to a row of terraces on the other side. It’s hard to imagine Dad and Uncle Frank as boys here. Two bedrooms, one bathroom attached at the back. Mum says Uncle Frank only had the toilet brought inside ten years ago. Too small even for three people but there were five at one stage. Their sister and my grandfather both died within a few years of each other when Dad and Uncle Frank were teenagers. Then, Richmond was famed for its slums: grown men killed from falling out of trams, healthy twenty-year-old girls dying from the flu. Richmond was another planet.

  This house couldn’t be more different from Mum and Dad’s sprawling Federation triple-fronter in Malvern. There they’ve left our rooms untouched, down to the Duran Duran (me) and Buzzcocks (Stanzi) posters on the wall. The garden is azaleas and magnolias interspersed with irises and jonquils and lilies in the spring. My father planted those bulbs back when Mum was pregnant with Stanzi and me and twenty-five years later they still bloom. Love letters sent through time, from a sweetheart long ago. At Rowena Parade, there’s hardly any garden. Uncle Frank has cemented over everything.

  ‘You don’t have to have it, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘They’ll have finished dinner by now. Hospital hours. They haven’t seen us. We can just drive away and they’d be none the wiser.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘We can go to that styrofoam place on Bridge Road. My treat.’

  By this she means my favourite tofu restaurant. She’s trying. ‘Thanks anyway.’

  I’ve always wanted to go to India. I don’t know why I haven’t. I could get a better yoga qualification, in a proper ashram. Or take a cooking course. I imagine riding a bicycle through back-country lanes, dodging chickens and cows, smiling at the locals with my smattering of broken Hindi. They’d offer a floor to sleep on, near where they pound the rice, and I’d work in the fields with them and keep the same hours, up with the sun, asleep with the moon because kerosene for lamps is expensive. I would find a small shrine and centre myself before it
and after weeks of prayer and thought, I would find my purpose. I would stay, working for a local charity, living among the people, finding peace. There, it would be natural to be vegan. Here I look around and see people smiling while they gnaw the warm flesh of sentient beings and sometimes I think I am trapped on a planet of monsters.

  ‘It’s a short operation. No fuss. Besides, I’m too young and beautiful to be an auntie.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’m being ironic.’

  ‘You are beautiful.’

  ‘I’m not beautiful and I’m not fishing.’

  And there’s Craig. I don’t know whether it’s more wrong to tell him or not. It seems unfair to burden him when the band is just beginning to take off. Yet it’s sexist to assume he wouldn’t want to know. Pandering to the pathetic stereotyping of young men as self-centred and irresponsible. What if he wanted to know his child, doesn’t he have a right? He didn’t choose this, though. With his talent, he has a remarkable life ahead of him. I don’t want to be unfair.

  I squeeze my eyes closed and try to imagine him carrying a baby in a sling around his chest, sitting on the floor and playing like my father used to. The image will not come. I imagine us married, living in a Californian bungalow with a trampoline and a dog and a bathroom with four different fragrances fighting each other. Buying wheat and sugar cereal from Coles. The image will not come.

  ‘Your body, your choice.’

  I rub the bridge of my nose.

  ‘That’s what our feminist foremothers fought for.’

  All this time and I’ve done nothing. I’ve achieved nothing. I’ve been running down the years of my life. Teaching yoga, trying to help people all day in the shop, spending nights in pubs listening to music I don’t like, doing a million inconsequential things.

  ‘It’s very common. Lots of women have had them. Millions. No one talks about it because of this ancient gender-loaded taboo, that’s all. Men aren’t judged by the same standards. No one asks a man if a foetus of theirs has been aborted.’

  ‘Stanzi. Shut up.’

  She shuts up. She sits behind the wheel, arms outstretched like she’s in the middle of a long drive, eyes straight ahead, both of us going nowhere. Through the windscreen, the sky is almost dark. I wind down my window and rest my hand against the bottom of my throat and that’s when I feel my mother’s pendant, on its chain around my neck. I must have slipped it on before I rode over to Stanzi’s.

  On the footpath on the other side of the road, an older woman is walking a small white dog. She steps off the footpath as a boy passes on a bicycle. He’s very late, out riding his bike alone. Probably he lives close, probably his parents know where he is. Everyone is going about their lives oblivious to what’s happening to me. I don’t know if I can bear to disappoint my father. And I can’t think about the money it takes to raise a child, money I don’t have. I think of this house, my parents and their home, the age they are now, all they’ve given me. I would have to move back to my old room with a baby. I don’t think I can do that to either of us.

  ‘Right. Shutting up. I thought you’d appreciate some advice. I’m trained, you know. I’m a professional.’

  ‘I do appreciate it.’

  ‘Because I don’t need to do this. I’ve got better things to do than sit in a car outside Uncle Frank’s place.’

  ‘What things, exactly? What have I taken you away from?’

  She bites her bottom lip. ‘Well. Nothing right this second. But I could have had something.’

  ‘I know that, Stanzi. Of course.’

  ‘I have a busy life. I don’t sit home every night waiting for you to come around and tell me you’re pregnant. Next Thursday night I’m going to a seminar. Ergonomic office design. I’m almost sure my chair’s too low.’

  ‘I appreciate that you’re here with me.’

  ‘I’m not out every night bonking some no-talent hippy guitarist, that’s for sure.’

  ‘He’s a bassist.’ I take a deep breath. ‘Right. We’re going in.’

  No one answers when we ring the bell, so Stanzi calls and knocks on the door. Finally we hear Uncle Frank yell coming, coming, then it takes a while for him to look through the peephole and undo all the locks and then the security door.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ He opens the door an inch. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Stanzi gives me a sharp look that says see the trouble you’ve caused? ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

  ‘Kip! Annabel! The girls are here! There must be some emergency!’

  ‘An emergency!’ We hear Dad yell from the lounge room. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘No emergency, Uncle Frank,’ says Stanzi. ‘We thought we’d make it a family affair.’

  When we finally gain admittance through Uncle Frank’s wall of fluster, we follow him down the hall to the lounge. Uncle Frank doesn’t own a couch or a lounge chair. Along one wall facing the TV are four cherry-red recliners that take up the whole space, the kind where the footrest swings up when you pull a lever on the side. Why he has four, I have no idea. Perhaps waiting for a wife and kids who never came. Along another wall he has two purple bean bags in a puddle. Mum and Dad are sitting in a recliner each, still wearing their coats and scarves because Uncle Frank believes heating should be saved for special occasions. Their legs are swung up so they are V-shaped, balancing on their bottoms with the soles of their feet in the air like paripurna navasana. In their angled laps, they each have a teacup. We both bend down to kiss Dad.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ says Mum. She struggles to sit up straighter without spilling her tea. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Can’t we drop around and see Uncle Frank?’ says Stanzi. ‘We’re being good nieces.’

  ‘They’re good nieces, Annabel,’ says Dad. ‘They’re dropping in to say hello.’

  ‘Dropping in unexpected! That’s just like you two. The blokes at Rotary were almost grandfathers by the time you two arrived. I kept saying to your father, no babies yet? And then you two arrived after we’d all given up. Let me look at you both! More beautiful every day. Take after your mother. We’ve eaten. I don’t have any more. I didn’t know you were coming. Where’s my kiss?’

  We both kiss Uncle Frank. He’s fragile with fine, pale skin and he smells of potato peel. ‘We don’t need anything,’ says Stanzi.

  ‘Besides, I cooked a roast lamb. This one won’t eat lamb. Free the cows! Save the whales! I’m kidding. You’re a good girl to care about things like that. Your father must have known you’d be an animal lover, from when you were born.’

  ‘Francis,’ says Dad.

  ‘And she’s beautiful. What a beautiful girl.’ He pinches my cheek, like we’re in a fairy tale.

  ‘She is beautiful,’ says Stanzi.

  ‘And you! So clever. An apprentice headshrinker. Why don’t you girls come around more often? I haven’t seen you since our birthday. I’m too old. I’ll be dead soon. Me, I love a lamb roast. If I have to die, why does some useless sheep get to live? Tell me that. I’d eat steak every day if it didn’t get stuck in my dentures. Free advice. Always look after your teeth. Brush them. Floss them. I have some cream biscuits. That’s it. Take it or leave it.’

  ‘Cream biscuits. Yum,’ says Stanzi.

  ‘Cream biscuit, Annabel? Kip? They’re the expensive ones, I can’t remember the brand.’

  Stanzi gives me a look that says biscuits, of course. Mum says, ‘Biscuits! Lovely,’ and Dad nods. Dad and Uncle Frank won’t eat cake, won’t even have it for their birthday: Mum uses chocolate icing to mortar together layers of shortbread then writes Happy Birthday in Smarties on the top.

  Uncle Frank keeps talking as he shuffles to the kitchen. ‘If you had called this morning I could have got some Kingstons. It’s a waste when it’s just me. Go on, sit, sit.’ He means the beanbags. The recliners are for the grownups. The beanbags are for the kids. That’s us.

  ‘What is it, really?’ whispers Mum.

  Stanzi stares at the floor for a moment.
‘Just drink your tea.’ She lifts up one of the bean bags with two fingers. ‘This looks like a enormous purple scrotum,’ she says.

  She drops the bean bag, folds one knee, then the other. When she reaches the floor she nestles in it with her arms around her knees. She’s still in her work suit. She couldn’t be more uncomfortable if she was in padmasana on a bed of nails.

  ‘Charlotte? How’s Craig?’ says Mum.

  ‘Well, apparently. With more get up and go than I would have imagined,’ says Stanzi.

  ‘Have you two split up? Is that why you’re here, Charlotte? What is it?’

  Stanzi says nothing. Dad says nothing.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I need some fresh air,’ I say.

  I walk back along the hall, undo all the locks and step outside. I know this house. We played here often when we were very small. The front patio is fifties terrazzo, always cold regardless of the weather but quite lairy for Uncle Frank, whose love for concrete is everywhere. I remember thinking terrazzo was the ultimate evidence of the beauty of the natural world, this stone inlaid with sparkling chips of every colour. Stanzi laughed and told me it was man-made and this made me even happier. Humans can make something beautiful and useful from tiny things that would be inconsequential by themselves.

  Mum doesn’t like this house but Dad does. I think Dad would prefer to live near here, closer to where he grew up. Instead he sold his half to Uncle Frank and bought our house for Mum. Family house, family suburb, family man. Stanzi and I had a beautiful childhood. We were at the centre of both their lives. What they must have sacrificed, I am only now realising.

  I hear someone approaching—probably Uncle Frank to rebolt all the doors—so I walk the narrow side path that separates the house from the lane. In the backyard, I look up. The shop across the lane is much bigger, more substantial, brick with a tiled roof. It looms over this little weatherboard house. Someone lives on the upper storey: in one window I can see curtains and a light. I wonder what it would be like to live above your own business, looking down on the little houses nestled in your shadow.