by Toni Jordan
‘If you’re scared of this little thing, how would you ever have had a baby?’ I say.
‘Babies are worse,’ says the old woman. ‘No comparison.’
My fingers are starting to hurt from her squeezing. I look down: our hands are white and so close together, for a moment I lose sight of which fingers are hers and which are mine. The skin is stretched tight over the knuckles and they’re pale and smooth like raw bone and still she won’t let go. On the back of her hand, I can see the web of blue veins like tiny rivers. There’s nothing for it. I can’t stand here all day. I use my other hand to peel off her clinging grip.
There’s no point hanging around at Mrs Ottley’s, nicking back every two minutes to see how things are going, being ignored by those sewing women, pacing uselessly like a man outside a maternity ward. Bedside manner, like the doctors do it. Crueller, kinder. Sometimes these things take hours to pass so I pop home to do the housework: Connie’ll be off her feet for a few days at least and she’ll rest easier if everything’s done. I can’t remember the last time I was in the house alone.
It’s a luxury I’d long forgotten. I doubt I’ve had a minute to myself since I was pregnant with her. That first quickening, you never forget it. The first time you feel it, a cross between a squirming and a kicking, and you realise there’s another whole body enclosed within yours, and it’s made out of your very own flesh. While there’s a child of yours alive in the world, you never really die. They’re a part of your body living on without you. Connie kept me up at night and made me uncomfortable all day with her wriggling. I’d be walking to the shops and boof! A tiny wee knee in the kidney or a heel wedged between two of my ribs. She was my first to term so I thought it was normal. Now I know she was a restless child. The boys were both squeezed in there together and they were lazy as badgers.
Doing housework for yourself is different from doing someone else’s although it’s the same work exactly. The same sweep of the broom, the same scrubbing of the laundry. There’s a pleasure to it, when it’s all your own. A sweetness. When I’m mopping the kitchen floor with the water from the washing I look out the window at the Hustings’; curtains still drawn as though there weren’t a soul alive in there. Losing a son would be worse than a husband, I grant you. Husbands, you expect them to look out for themselves. And if they do something so stupid as to get themselves too drunk to hold on to a moving tram, with no consideration for the lives of their dependents, what could a wife be expected to do? They brought him home, the police that picked him up off the road. They said it was best he lie here though we had no room for it. In the end, the undertaker sent over some men with a pair of trestles and we took the door off the laundry and they set it up in the sitting room and washed his face and changed his clothes before we sent him on his way. If I had my time again, I wouldn’t of let them lay him out here. I’d of made them take him away. He stank of rum and he’d wet himself. It was no way for the children to remember him.
At the Hustings’, there’s no body to lay out. Losing a child. The grief would only be the half of it. It’s your job to look after them, to make sure things go in the natural order: that’s you first, them second. I can see the upstairs windows. There’s movement in the curtain then it settles back as it was. Perhaps it was the wind. Today will be the worst of it. To be in that house, alone, adrift, childless.
Tonight will be busy at our place. Connie will be resting, but all the neighbourhood women will visit to talk about the telegram and what it said and how it happened exactly and where he was and how the Hustings were taking it. It’s not gossip, exactly. It’s keeping tabs, making sure everyone knows what’s what before they knock on the door to pay their respects. I move away from the window and look at the clock. Time to get Connie.
I thought she looked pale before. In the feeble light from Mrs Ottley’s dirty louvres, she is white and light as a cloud. She’s still on the bench and there’s a pile of soiled linen in a corner. The shop is quiet and empty: all the sewing women have gone home. Mrs Ottley and Katie have gone home. Standing in the doorway is the old darning woman whose name I never thought to ask, who let me in when I knocked. She picks up Connie’s shoes from the floor and forces them on her splayed feet, hooks her fingers along the heel to make them sit right. Connie offers no resistance or help.
‘I gived her a belt and a towel. You’ll need to change it.’
I nod.
‘And no lifting anything heavy for a while.’
Connie’s eyes are half open but she looks at me. She can see me.
‘Ma. I want to go home.’
‘Yes, yes. Come on then. I’ve changed your sheets and made the bed. It’s all waiting.’
The old woman takes hold of the back of Connie’s shoulders and sits her up. She swings Connie’s legs around and takes one arm around her neck and I take the other and we get her to the front door. She props Connie against the window while she gets her bag and hat, and then turns off the lights. We all go out together. Connie’s legs down the step one by one while the woman takes her weight.
‘Sweet tea. If she’s still bleeding by the weekend, a hot bath to bring on the rest of it. And no relations for a good two weeks.’
‘The very idea,’ I say.
Out on the street the old woman locks and bolts the door behind us. She adjusts her hat, nods at us, turns and walks the other way, her broad back winding down the street and crossing at the corner. That’s the last I see of her.
It seems hotter than when the sun was straight above and the wind is swirling leaves and papers in circles down the street. It’s the kind of night when young people catch a tram down to St Kilda and sleep on the beach. The paper tomorrow’ll be filled with pictures of them, pillows and all. I need to get Connie home before the boys, have her tucked up in her own bed with a nasty dose of flu so they’ll leave her alone and no nosy questions.
On the street, Connie’s no help at all but somehow she’s not as heavy as this morning. Passersby step around us, heads down, almost colliding with these women walking two abreast, shoulder to shoulder. Sometimes Connie goes over on her ankles and doesn’t fall, she’s that easy to carry. A tram comes along: we’re on it and she slips her hand through the straps and stands suspended. She’s woozy, as you’d expect.
There’s hardly any passengers. The next two trams are easy as well. At our stop I almost lift her down the stairs, no trouble.
Nearly there now. We’re in front of the London Tavern when she doubles up like she’s been kicked in the guts. I can’t keep hold of her, she bends over that fast and wriggles out of my grasp. I lean her against the wall to change my grip, lose hold of her altogether and she slides down until she’s sitting on the ground.
‘Connie.’ It must be close to five. There’s no one around now but it won’t be long. ‘We’ve got to get you up.’
No answer. I sit back on my haunches to think of the best way to move her and my knees ache like something’s going to pop. Then I see a dark stain along the bottom of her dress and think: just my luck for her to choose a puddle to sit down in. I’ll have to soak that as soon as we get home, maybe sponge it with some eucalyptus oil. She’s nothing else to wear to work next week if her good dress is ruined.
I reach for the hem to move it out of the way and find the bluestone underneath is dry. The stain is creeping along the bottom of the dress and spreading upwards. I touch it with my hand and even before I bring my hand to my nose, I can smell it: rich and metallic. A rusty iron roof after rain, baking in the sun.
I move the dress and I see the thin spreading tide of blood as it seeps down between her legs. You’d expect blood but there’s too much here to be right, I know that. I try to lift her again but I can’t manage it. She’s not light anymore. She’s a dead weight in my red hands.
‘Connie. You have to stay here while I get someone to help. Just don’t move.’
She opens one eye and says, ‘We’re moving out west. He’ll like that.’
‘Just sta
y here a minute,’ I say, and I straighten her against the wall and I wish I had my scarf or a coat so I could tuck her up like she was in bed. ‘There’ll be people down on Swan Street. I’ll be back before you know it.’
‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, Ma.’
‘It doesn’t matter now.’
‘I was going to have it,’ she says, clear as a bell, like she was sitting at the kitchen table and we were talking about what we had in the cupboard for the boys’ tea. ‘I decided. I wrote to him. He was going to come back to me and I’d be here and the baby’d be here and we’d both be waiting.’
‘Sshh.’
‘Ma, it’s down the side in a biscuit tin. Him and me.’
‘Wait one minute. I’m off to fetch someone. Someone to help.’
‘It’s all right, Ma,’ she says. ‘I won’t go anywhere.’
When Connie was a wee baby, I used to leave her in the laundry tub sometimes, having her bath. She’d kick her fat legs and try to grab the water in her fingers. Every mother knows the dangers and I don’t know how I trusted her to do as she was told. I’d never of done it with the boys but Connie, she was different. I’d tell her I’m leaving for a bit and be good now and be on your best behaviour and sit up nicely in the water and don’t drown, and I’d hang the washing on the line or go out to check the letterbox and sure enough, she’d be right there where I left her, good as gold, still splashing away.
That’s what I’m thinking about when, in that fading light in the empty street, I leave her alone for just a moment. No one can see us up this street, even if I yelled my lungs out. I’ll walk as far as the corner, maybe fifty feet away, to find someone who could lift her by one arm while I took the other. To get her on her feet, home to her own bed. I tell her I’m leaving, and to be good until I get back. It’s hot but I’m shaking and I run, then I look up and down Swan Street at the people rushing home, hats held down against the blustering wind. I’m only going to be gone for a minute. That’s the only reason I leave her.
CHAPTER 8
Alec
PICTURE THIS: Punt Road at twilight. Leaves blowing along the gutters, bumper shining against bumper, flattened light coating everything in its milky glow. Cars filled with people going home to the bosom of their loving families. The vermillion of glossy paintwork, the emerald of the trees around the oval. Above me the clouds are free, coasting, boasting to the earth of their fluffiness, drifting home with the traffic. Way overhead is a minuscule jet going somewhere better than here. Peace is far away.
Yet here I am. Away from home in a world of strangers. Alone. Forgotten.
I am sitting on the footpath between the pub and the brothel, leaning against a white picket fence. I make a square from my fingers and hold it up to frame a tree, the edge of a building, the train tracks on the bridge. A futile attempt at composition. I have no easel, no sketchbook. Not even my backpack. I left in such a hurry I brought nothing with me. Nothing except the shutter of my eyelids, the nubbed pencil of my memory.
If I had a mobile I could call the guys and find out where they are, but I, of course, do not have a mobile. Charlotte won’t let me, because Charlotte lives in fear of brain-melting death rays and, more to the point, is intent on making me a leper. Lep. Per. For all intensive purposes, I already am. My foot might as well drop off right here in front of the Cricketers’ Arms.
The guys are probably going out to have actual fun, something Charlotte has never heard of and wouldn’t approve of if she had. Maybe they’re at the movies. Or at Tim’s playing Xbox in the garage. Tim, who has a mobile phone of his own that he doesn’t even pay for. Tim, who has a mother who owns a car that she parks on the street especially to leave the garage free for him and his big brother; a garage that contains a ping-pong table under which he hides the beer his brother buys him.
Dude, Tim said, when I told him I couldn’t go out tonight. Bummer.
When I left Rowena Parade this afternoon, Charlotte was all don’t you dare walk out on me Alec don’t you dare. She is ruining my life.
Charlotte, in contrast to Tim’s mother who is cool, walks into my room like it’s her own personal property. No knock, no can I come in, no nothing. She won’t even let me have a lock on the door, not that a lock would keep Charlotte out. An iris scanner might do it. That would be wicked, actually. That would even stop Libby. Maybe I can install one myself; how hard can it be? Maybe they have them at Bunnings or Stewart’s or one of those hardware behemoths.
I look at my watch, the symbolic shackle that marks me as the only person in the universe without a mobile phone— though if I did have one, she’d be on it the whole time telling me to come home and set the table for dinner.
Stanzi, on the other hand, would never call. Stanzi understands that I’m almost seventeen and practically a fully fledged adult. Soon I’ll have my learner’s, then in a couple of years, hello freedom. I’ll be off like a shot, just watch me. It’s not logical, the way Charlotte behaves. In two years I’ll be making all my own decisions anyway: it’s patiently obvious she should let me get some practice. I pass all my subjects and top the class in art. I’m not a cone head. No arrests for shoplifting. It’s not like she’s got anything to worry about.
The sun is going down and part of me wants to keep walking. Head down to Richmond Station and hop a train, see where it leads me, watch the landscape reveal itself. Mountains and rivers and deserts and oceans. This waiting for my life to start, it’s driving me mental. I stand and begin walking up the hill. It’s time to go home.
When I come through the front door, it’s almost six. Libby is standing near the dining-room table, which is pulled into the middle of the room and extended full length. She’s polishing knives and forks and spoons and placing them upright in chipped metal jugs that Charlotte found scouring op shops the length and breadth of Bridge Road because everything we own has to be secondhand so we can be marked as freaks in front of the whole neighbourhood. Also on the table is a pile of cloth napkins of different colours weighted down with a smooth rock. An actual rock, from near the Yarra at Abbotsford. Charlotte Westaway, eco-warrior.
‘Muuuum,’ yells Libby. ‘He’s baaaack.’
‘World Sucking Champion 2006 strikes again,’ I say. ‘I can see why you’re so popular with the boys.’
She turns a plum colour. ‘You absolute prick,’ she whispers, so Charlotte can’t hear. ‘I’ve been stuck here for hours.’ She holds up her fingers in front of my face. ‘I had to peel two tonnes of potatoes. Two. Tonnes. By. Myself. Look at my cuticles. Look at them.’
‘Cry me a river, Justin friggin’ Timberlake.’ She’s turning puce now. I can see the fires of rage burning behind her eyes. I wave my hand in front of my face. ‘Is that smoke coming out of your ears? Libby? I’ve warned you about trying to think before. Quick someone, call triple zero, her neurons are melting.’
She gnashes her metal teeth. ‘This is so unfair. I would never get away with that. It’s just because you’re a boy.’
What does she expect me to do? Crawl into the feeble position and beg forgiveness? I shrug. ‘That’s just the way the chromosome crumbles, Transformer-mouth.’
Libby gives me her fuck off and die look. I go upstairs to my room and lie on the bed and take out my sketch pad ready for the face of maternal fury which should appear at my door with digital precision. Yup. After exactly three minutes, the door opens.
‘Come in,’ I say.
‘Don’t you ever do that again,’ Charlotte says. ‘Run off while I’m in the middle of talking to you.’
‘Yes, Charlotte.’ I shall stay here forever, waiting for your command, at your beckon call my queen.
‘And don’t call me Charlotte.’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘And why do you have to be so mean to your sister? She’s fourteen years old. She looks up to you. And take your shoes off before you lie on the bed. That doona cover doesn’t wash itself.’
I kick my Converses off and they thud on the floor
. ‘Anything to oblige, guv’nor. But I was back in time for roll call. Did the other inmates miss me?’
She shuts her eyes and then her lips start moving. Silent counting, her latest anger-management technique. Or, actually, Alec-management technique. I do a rough sketch in about eight seconds. I’ve seen that face a zillion times before. I can fill in the details later: the colours, the way the edges of her eyes and nostrils flare, the way her face looks like Stanzi’s and mine and only a bit like Libby’s, who has Ben’s eyes. The ways we are all the same, the ways we are different. When she’s finished counting she opens her eyes.
‘Go downstairs and help your sister set the table. They’ll be here in half an hour.’
‘No thanks. I think I’ll stay up here in my room and play with my Xbox. Oh. That’s right. I don’t own an Xbox. Never mind. I’ll watch TV in my room instead. Oh, that’s right. I’m not allowed a TV up here. Even when I offer to get a job and pay for it myself. On account of I live in Nazi Germany.’
‘I’ll make you a deal. When you’re an adult, you can do whatever you want. You can play computer games twentyfour seven if you like. Shower once a year to celebrate Joss Whedon’s birthday. Pee into a bottle.’
‘Good. I might just do that. But the first thing I’ll do, the second I turn eighteen, is get a tattoo. A big one. Right here.’ I make a fist, roll up my sleeve and trace the outline on my tricep.
‘Yes, that would be smart. Ten years ago you wanted a Dorothy the Dinosaur stuffed toy more than life itself. People change, Alec. A tattoo, that’s for the rest of your life, you understand?’
You understand? Like I don’t, like I’m an idiot. ‘I’m not afraid of making decisions that affect the rest of my life.’ Unlike her, the quintessential woman afraid of commitment. Ipso facto, two children, no boyfriend.