by Kris Webb
Maggie nodded. ‘Okay. But give me a call if you change your mind. Tanya’s really worried about you too, but she didn’t want to call in case Jack was sleeping.’
‘Okay. I’ll call her later,’ I promised.
Jack wouldn’t even look at the toys I offered him and seemed less agitated when I wasn’t too near. Trying not to take it personally, I kept as much distance as I could while removing potentially lethal objects from his path as he and Harold explored the house.
Everything was going fine until he tripped over the wire from a speaker and fell onto his knees.
I’d only known Jack for a few hours but I was pretty sure he was crying not because he’d hurt himself but because he was lonely and confused and didn’t know what else to do. Hell, I was thirty years older than him and I hadn’t come up with a better way of dealing with what was going on.
One of my earliest childhood memories was of lying in my grandmother’s lap, sobbing because I’d been stung by a bee. It felt so good being safe and warm, pressed against her soft body, that I’d stayed there long after the pain had faded.
Wanting to give the same comfort to Jack, I sat on the floor and tried to pull him into my lap. Instead of relaxing against me, his whole body tensed and he pushed himself away.
Feeling an utter failure, I could do nothing but watch the pitiful little figure sit on the floor and cry.
Eventually he stopped and stood up again, wiping a mixture of tears and mucus across one cheek.
Despite my grand statement to Maggie about wanting to be by myself, I suddenly wished I’d asked her to stay.
I picked up the phone, figuring I had at least a couple of minutes before the next bout of crying.
‘Hi Tanya, it’s Julia.’
Tanya had been working at the King’s Head when Maggie hired me. One of the downsides of the job was that by the time we finished work, most of our other friends were ready for bed. As a result, the three of us had started going out together. After graduation, Tanya had found a job as a journalist and had been well and truly on the career track until she’d met Greg while she was researching a story on women in the bush. She’d accused him of being a chauvinist; he’d insisted he was a romantic, and somehow, six months later, they were married. To everyone’s great surprise, she’d happily moved to his sheep property in Central Queensland and set about writing a novel.
Greg was tall and sandy-haired. He had worked on the family property since he’d left school and only ventured into town a few times a year. But bizarrely, although they seemed totally unsuited, their differences seemed to make them complement each other. They both loved a good party and Tanya told great stories of the rodeos and musters they travelled for miles to attend. Their wedding was the stuff of legend and had lasted for three days.
For a born and bred city girl, Tanya had adapted well to the isolation and the dramatic change in lifestyle. One part of out-back life Tanya refused to accept, however, was moleskins, maintaining that they accentuated every bulge she owned. She was always trying to drop a dress size, despite Greg’s constant assertions that he loved her exactly as she was. I’d tried to tell her that in my opinion the most important thing was that with her long blonde hair she looked good in an Akubra. The opposite was true for me. I figured that even if a devastatingly handsome farmer proposed to me I would simply have to turn him down or live with a lifetime of hat hair.
‘Julia! I’m so glad you called. How is it?’
I pondered how to answer that question. ‘Not great.’ I pushed my fingers against the bridge of my nose, determined not to cry. ‘Jack’s tired and sad and he just wants Anita. I feel like some terrible apparition he thinks has taken her away.’
‘The poor darling. How are you doing?’
‘Not too well.’ My voice broke and I swallowed before continuing. ‘I swing between feeling terrified and feeling incredibly sad for Jack.’
As I spoke, Jack spotted the stairs which led to Patrick’s room and headed straight for them.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I cried. ‘I’ll give you a call when things get a bit better.’
‘Okay. Julia? We’re thinking of you – I just wish I could help some more.’
Greg was having most of the outhouses on the property rebuilt and there were tradesmen all over the place. Tanya was needed to cook for the masses and wasn’t able to get to town for a couple of weeks.
‘Thanks. I know. Talk to you soon.’
Just as I reached Jack, he put his hand on the wall and launched his little right leg into the air.
‘Down,’ he chanted as his foot miraculously hit the step below.
I paused. Maybe he was okay on steps.
As I hesitated, he kicked his leg out again. ‘Down.’
This was a game or a kind of routine he must have gone through with Anita. Suddenly I felt a rush of pleasure, as if I’d been given an extra moment with her.
Slipping beside Jack, I stood on the landing where the staircase doglegged to the left.
‘Come on, Jack,’ I encouraged him with a smile. ‘Down!’
He looked at me for a moment, foot poised above the next step.
‘Nooo!’ he cried, and swayed against the wall as he lost his balance.
My light-hearted feeling vaporised. Reaching out, I picked him up and carried him to the top of the steps.
‘Here, Jack, give Harold a cuddle.’
Knowing I couldn’t help, I handed him the frog and went to find some nappy-changing paraphernalia, figuring I may as well make the awful day even worse.
FIVE
I now had a meeting at nine-thirty on Wednesday and no one to look after Jack. Leaving him with someone even less familiar than me seemed an incredibly unfair thing to do to him. But I just couldn’t see a way around it. Patrick’s job seemed to consist mainly of arranging a venue for Friday night drinks, so with great trepidation I asked if he’d mind taking a morning off work to look after Jack.
‘Yeah, okay,’ he answered slowly. He opened the fridge door, but not before I’d seen the look of terror on his face.
‘I’m really sorry. I just can’t think of anything else to do. Maybe it won’t be as bad as you think,’ I added hopefully.
Patrick raised his eyebrows and I looked away. It was Tuesday morning and I’d only now mustered the courage to raise the topic. Patrick had witnessed enough of the last twenty-four hours to know how little grounds there were for my forced optimism.
Things hadn’t improved when Robert had reappeared late on Monday afternoon. He’d had a sleep at Carla’s and had come back intending to take Jack around to see her. But Jack seemed to have decided that Robert was responsible for the terrible direction his life had taken. Forgetting he’d travelled halfway around the world on Robert’s lap, his face crumpled whenever his uncle came near. I couldn’t console him either, and he cried almost continually until Robert decided to leave and spend the night with Carla.
Even though I knew that food wasn’t the answer, cooking at least made me feel like I was doing something that might help. By evening the kitchen was littered with a variety of different meals, all of which had been noisily rejected. I was close to tears myself a lot of the time, appalled that I couldn’t do anything to help this sad little boy whose world had just collapsed around him.
Finally, at ten o’clock, he’d fallen into an exhausted sleep. I’d briefly considered cleaning up, before deciding I was too tired to do anything but go to bed myself, relieved that, at least for a little while, Jack wasn’t unhappy.
But his distress even penetrated his sleep and if anything the night had been worse than the day, with him waking up crying half-a-dozen times. The first time he woke, I’d tried to gently explain who I was. But that approach had resulted in half an hour of hysterical crying before he fell back asleep, tears coating his face and the sheet. After that I left the room dark and pushed Harold into his arms silently, hoping he’d assume I was Anita. That seemed to work until 4 a.m. when he was so wide awake that it w
as clear that sleep was no longer an option.
By the time Patrick had surfaced, I’d been up for three hours and had held my breath through two toxic nappy changes. Jack’s eyes had dark circles under them and he looked as if he just couldn’t figure out how things had suddenly gone so terribly wrong.
Yesterday’s pattern had started again. He would be fine for a little while, but then some tiny problem would cause him to collapse in floods of tears and my attempts to comfort him were worse than useless. Finally he’d put his head down on the floor and closed his eyes. I’d scooped him up and put him into his cot where he’d mercifully gone straight to sleep.
‘All right,’ I conceded to Patrick. ‘It probably will be as bad as you think, but it will only be for a couple of hours. My meeting is at nine-thirty, so if I leave here at nine, I should be back by eleven-thirty.’
I figured I might as well prepare Patrick for the worst, but I was fervently hoping things would have improved by tomorrow.
Jack was still asleep later that morning when Robert called around on his way to the airport. He looked as tired as he had the day before and just shook his head when I asked how his night had been.
I knew that being on another long flight and then having to deal with Anita’s funeral would be awful. But even that seemed better than what I was facing and it took all my self-control not to break into tears and beg him not to leave.
Jack woke soon after Robert left, crying miserably, and he didn’t stop when I took him out of bed. He wouldn’t let me hold him and nothing else I could think of seemed to comfort him. Finally he climbed onto the couch, his thumb in his mouth and Harold held tightly under one arm, and the sobs eventually stopped.
The rest of the morning passed slowly and Jack slept again after lunch. With eyelids that felt like sandpaper I lay down too, but found myself unable to sleep until what seemed like moments before he woke again.
Tanya called midway through the afternoon.
‘He’s just so sad,’ I told her. ‘A little boy should just be running around chasing – I don’t know – butterflies or something. Not sitting crying in my lounge room.’
‘You’ve got to take it slowly, Julia – you can’t expect miracles,’ she insisted. ‘He’s lost his mum and he’s jet-lagged to hell. Just hang in there, it’s got to get better.’
The slight uplift in spirits her words gave me disappeared as soon as I hung up the phone. But our conversation had given me an idea.
Ignoring Jack’s protests, I picked him and Harold up and carried them down the steps that led off the deck into the backyard.
‘Sorry about the grass,’ I apologised. Patrick and I usually avoided mowing the small lawn until it was impossible to get to the clothes line. While the grass wasn’t the longest I’d seen it, it still came up over Jack’s knees.
Undeterred, Jack explored the garden, Harold tucked firmly under his arm. I left him to it and leaned against the back gate which opened onto some parkland, enjoying the sun on my face.
A highpitched giggle brought my attention back to Jack. I jogged to where he was standing and followed his gaze towards a snail, which was stretching its slimy head towards him. Crouching down beside him, I tried to summon some enthusiasm about the revolting creature, which was no doubt engaged in destroying what little remained of our garden.
Jack touched my arm with one hand and pointed at the snail with the other. He giggled again and suddenly I laughed too. Of course the owner of the horrible Harold wasn’t going to be interested in ephemeral butterflies.
We admired the snail for what seemed like forever, but eventually Jack tired of it and headed off in another direction. It was only a matter of minutes before he tripped over a branch and dissolved into tears, but the brief glimpse of something beyond this horrible time helped me to get through the afternoon.
By the evening I’d given up any pretence of trying to feed Jack real food and put a stack of fairy bread slices on a plate on the coffee table, figuring he’d eat when he was hungry. A rummage through his suitcase had revealed a bottle and Jack had guzzled the first bottle of milk I handed him. At least he was now getting calcium, I told myself.
Finally he went to sleep just after Patrick arrived home. Even though I’d been counting the hours until my brother walked in the door, I found myself unable to muster the energy to hold a conversation and he marched me to my room and told me to go to bed.
Wednesday started at 4 a.m. Even though I’d been in bed for a long time, Jack’s crying had wrenched me from my sleep so often that I found it hard to concentrate my thoughts long enough to butter his breakfast bread and cover it with the coloured sprinkles.
Eight o’clock felt like midday and I took Jack into the bathroom with me. He made a beeline for the cupboard under the sink and with one lunge gathered a tube of hair remover, a container of jewellery-cleaning liquid and a packet of aspirin. I shoved them all back onto the shelf and tied the two handles together with a scarf, making a mental note to check all of the low cupboards in the house for lethal products.
Thwarted, Jack looked around for his next disaster, his eyes brightening as he spotted the toilet roll. About to remove it, I reconsidered. A ruined toilet roll seemed a small price to pay for a peaceful shower.
I wet and lathered my hair quickly, peering through the shower screen to make sure he was still safely occupied. About half of the paper was curled on the floor and Jack was still delightedly spinning the roll. I relaxed slightly and massaged the conditioner into my scalp, then put my head under the jet of warm water and closed my eyes.
A minute or so later, my foggy mind registered the fact that the whirring noise of the spinning toilet roll had ceased and in its place was an ominous silence. Wiping steam off the shower screen, I saw Jack teetering on his stomach on the edge of the bathtub. I jumped out of the shower and lunged across the room, grabbing his legs with one hand just before his head hit the bottom of the bath.
With my other hand I pulled him backwards and picked him up. I winced as he began the now familiar wind-up, taking a deep breath and screwing up his face.
‘Jack!’ I exclaimed, desperately trying to distract him.
‘What about the . . .’ I looked around in search of a distraction. ‘Toothpaste!’
I stuck the tube in front of his face, drawing a deep sigh of relief as he exhaled and reached for it. It immediately went in his mouth. After watching him for a moment I concluded that squeezing the tube was beyond him and that the amount he could lick out of the top wouldn’t kill him. Kids needed fluoride anyway, didn’t they?
I deposited him on the floor with the tube, towelling myself dry and combing my hair. Blow-drying was definitely an optional extra today. Reaching for my make-up bag, I applied a quick layer of foundation and was brushing on mascara when Jack lunged at my legs.
I wiped the mascara, which had jolted across my eyebrow, but only ended up with a black smudge. By the time I had repaired the damage, finished my make-up and herded Jack back into the bedroom, it was half-past eight.
Throwing open my cupboard doors, I tried to focus on what I should wear.
A glance ascertained that Jack’s interest in the contents of my bottom drawer was fading and I grabbed a black suit without further prevarication. I pulled on some underwear and then stepped into the last pair of black pantyhose in the drawer. A wide-collared white shirt went on next and then the suit.
Although I occasionally managed to look groovy on weekends, my work wardrobe could only be described as safe. Despite my protestations that I worked for a conservative law firm, Maggie and Tanya had recently taken me shopping, insisting I buy a pair of strappy shoes to loosen up the suits. But today I pulled out my old court shoes, figuring I could save the time it took me to do up the buckles on the new pair.
‘Right,’ I breathed as I slipped on the jacket and looked at my watch. ‘Eight-forty. Mission Get Dressed successfully completed.’
Before I had even carried Jack into the living room, I reali
sed my mistake. He grabbed at my shirt, leaving a smear of toothpaste down the front. That was okay, I decided, trying to be positive – white on white I could live with. Wriggling to be set down, Jack tipped his head into my shoulder and wiped his face on my jacket. I pulled him away and looked down. White on black – not so good.
A few dabs with a wet paper towel resulted in a white smudge embedded with flecks of paper. Suppressing the urge to scream, I looked at my watch and decided there wasn’t time for an outfit change. I’d just have to carry a file over my left breast and then whip the jacket off as soon as we reached the conference room.
Where was Patrick? It occurred to me that maybe he had left the country to avoid this morning’s babysitting duty. But he appeared, a pad of paper and a pen in his hands, as I was pouring milk into a bottle.
Taking the day off hadn’t been a problem as Patrick had spent the last few months conducting a highly charged affair with his married boss. While I’d never met her, our house being dismissed as an insufficiently clandestine rendezvous point, I had regularly been regaled with torrid sex-on-the-boardroom-table type stories. Patrick had declared only last week that it was the best relationship he’d ever had.
‘Great sex, no issues. What more could you ask for?’ he’d gloated. Apparently Jennifer’s husband was a highly intelligent psychology professor and, according to Patrick who had seen a photo, looked like Woody Allen’s long-lost brother.
My theory was that it was the dramatic contrast between her husband’s weedy frame and Patrick’s footballer build that appealed to Jennifer. Although his handyman skills were stretched by a tricky light bulb, Patrick looked like someone who could knock you up a decent shack if the need arose. The fact that Jennifer had recently bought him a designer flannelette shirt only confirmed my suspicions.
‘Hi,’ he managed feebly, looking like he’d rather be anywhere but here. ‘How was your night?’